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Gossamer

Fiction
Ryan Gillam

Gossamer

I got into a fight with my friend Trevor that day. We were eleven. I can’t remember the reason for the fight. I popped him a couple of times in the face pretty good and at one point he had me in a headlock, and he was waling on the top of my head, and when I finally thrashed free I felt my skull throbbing but I was not in pain, and in that moment I thought I had some kind of superpower. We went at it until we were exhausted, no clear winner, and when we were done, we both realized we had to go home. It was late enough that I’d be in trouble soon. From the school my place and his place were roughly the same direction, and so we walked home together. Kids are absolutely nuts.

It was a Friday at the beginning of summer. The sun was just at that angle where it starts to turn deep yellow in the evening, and a few thin clouds were splashed across the sky. The first five minutes or so of the walk home we spent in sobbing silence. Trevor’s eye was red, and I thought maybe he would get in trouble for that and tell his dad what happened and all hell would break loose. My head felt like a giant pulsating pumpkin, but weirdly it still didn’t hurt.

Trevor broke the silence.

“You’re a pretty good fighter, but I think I can teach you some stuff.” His tone hinted that he was still angry at me but ready to make peace.

I was still fuming and kept my gaze down at the sidewalk as we sauntered along. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “Why are you such a spaz? You don’t have to grab around my neck. Look at my sweater. The neck is all wrecked now.”

“It’s not wrecked.”

“It is so! It’s not supposed to droop down like this! My grandma got this sweater for me. It cost like… fifty dollars and you’re going to have to pay for it.” The idea occurred to threaten to sue him for the sweater, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. My friend Caleb threatened to sue me the week before for wrecking his wrestler toy, and I was still waiting for the hammer to drop on that one. Apparently Caleb knew how to sue. It had something to do with going to court. I knew that much. But no use to level an empty threat here against Trevor.

“All you have to do is put it in the dryer. My mom put my sweater just like that one in the dryer and now I can’t even barely fit my head through it. It’s exactly like that one except it’s blue, and the blue one’s more expensive anyways. And besides, legally I don’t have to pay for it because the fight was both our faults.”

I clenched my jaw and kept my gaze fixed on the sidewalk. What was with these guys bringing the law into things all the time? I had no response, and maybe he was right, the bastard, so I went back to being quiet and angry.

We walked by Emma Jefferies’s house and a new worry hit me, that she would see me like this. Pumpkin head. Emma was the second girl I’d ever had feelings for. She was pretty, and my guts would get all twisted up when I was around her. I wish I could still get that feeling. I’d been thinking about her before I went to sleep the last couple of weeks. My strategy with Emma to that point was to avoid her at all costs. So far it was working pretty well. Mr. Jefferies was rummaging through the carport, and that meant she was probably home.

We made it past the Jefferies residence and Trevor piped up again.

“I won’t tell anyone that we got in a fight if you don’t tell anyone.”

“Friends aren’t even supposed to fight each other. You’re supposed to… to like, back each other up if there’s an enemy around. Like Shane. He beat up that kid who was beating me up. Well he wasn’t beating me up, he gave me a cheap shot, then Shane came up to him and threw his toque into the bush and totally just started hammering on him. The kid was crying at the end. Me and

Shane only got in a fight once, and that was when we were like… five.”

That one got him. Trevor was now contemplating the sidewalk. Point scored.

“Friends aren’t supposed to fight when they’re old.”

In truth Shane and I had been in many tussles, and he usually came out on top. I was a mediocre fighter, and he was also bigger than me. But Shane always came by to apologize afterwards. There he would be, standing at my door, saying he was sorry, and our friendship would be back in full gear. All the signs of a man of character appearing at that young age. One time he came by after dinner on a day we’d been in a fight, and he wanted to trade two baseball cards for one of mine that I had doubles of, an unfair trade for him, and I had to take it. Trevor didn’t collect baseball cards.

“You’re right. Only enemies are supposed to fight each other. My brother got in a fight with his friend Sam and now they’re worst enemies. He showed me a knife he has now just in case he has to… I’m not saying he’s gonna have to use it, but they know what happens if they try to mess with him now. It’s the exact same knife from Rambo.”

You never knew what to believe and what not to believe when it came to Trevor. He told me once that he killed a great white shark. When I pressed him on it he walked the story back to say that the shark was beached but still trying to kill him somehow, so he plunged a spear into its eye and got him right in the brain. We lived in a small coastal town in British Columbia, and when I asked him if we could go see the carcass—it should still be there, right?—he explained actually the incident happened in Hawaii and he wasn’t even allowed back there now, and I probably wouldn’t be allowed in there either, due to my association with him. Pretty sure that story was bunk, but this Rambo knife story was intriguing. That Trevor’s older brother Mark had been in a fight with a friend, and was now making threats behind his back, that part was believable. My dad told me to stay away from Mark. He was way older. I think he wasn’t even in high school anymore, and I was pretty sure he did drugs. Trevor had it rough. That much was certain.

We were getting close to the part in our walk when Trevor had to keep walking down the hill (everything was hills in that town) and I had to turn left. My house was at the end of the side street, and the yellowy sun was just to the right of it, out over the harbour. It was warm enough that I shouldn’t have been wearing a sweater. The guy who lived in the green house on the corner was washing his Jeep and blasting music.

We stopped at the corner.

“Enemies fight all the time, and when friends fight, they have to make a decision.” Trevor squinted into the sun, then turned to me.

“So what are we? Worst enemies, or best friends?”

With all ferocity in his wild eyes, and fire in his belly, Trevor answered, “Best friends,” and walked down the hill without looking back.

I kept on toward my house, and I had to pass right by the guy washing his Jeep, and he looked up at me, then reached back into the bucket of suds, and the music broke into this wicked guitar solo, and I found out years later that the song was “More Than a Feeling” by Boston, and as I walked by the guy washing the Jeep and I felt a rush, a flood come over me, and sometimes life really has these profound moments, and you can’t put words to the meaning of it all, but you know it’s something so important that it couldn’t have come to you in any other way, and I thought, this feels like the end of a movie, and I heard the song again on the radio when I was fourteen, and by then Trevor wasn’t really talking to anyone anymore, but for that moment we were gladiators, and his brother had a Rambo knife, and there was a whole coastline to protect against the menace of beached great whites, and I might get in trouble for my wrecked sweater but there was no way I’d tell on him. Bring on the fury.

*  *  *

The next day was my friend Josh’s birthday. Josh was my age, and somehow he was really more of a friend of my little brother Damien, but you end up going to all the same things that your brother goes to when you’re young. Caleb, the guy who was going to sue me, was at the party too. Trevor was not. The whole fight and wrecked sweater thing passed over with no repercussions.

A dozen of us huddled around the living room for presents. Josh’s mom was just yanking the cards off of the presents and saying who the present was from, trying to hurry Josh along, saying, “Okay, this one is from Jason… and this one is from blah blah blah…” and once Josh had the thing opened, she grabbed the present back from him and threw it into the growing pile. Everything was too fast. No need for all this rushing. The worst part was she wasn’t even reading out the birthday cards. When I had a birthday, or my brother did, my dad would make a big ceremony of reading the cards out. He made sure he had the attention of everyone in the room, and start in, “‘Word on the street is it’s your birthday!’ You see the dog detective on the front??” Then he’d bring the attention of the room to the person who gave the present. Your birthday comes once a year, and there was a proper way of doing it. This woman was running roughshod over the whole thing. I wouldn’t have been able to name it then, but this was sacrilege.

Not that any of this phased Josh at all. Nothing phased him. I once saw Josh take a soccer ball square in the face so hard that it knocked him flat on his back, and everyone was worried he was seriously hurt, but he just stood up all red-faced and blinking, and shook it off and was laughing and back in the game a minute later. I think that was why he and my brother got along so well. They were a couple of dynamos.

After the presents and cake, Josh, Caleb, my brother and I, and two other kids were in Josh’s room mingling as kids do after the planned activities are over. Eleven-year-old water-cooler talk. Caleb was sitting on Josh’s bed with his arms crossed as if he owned the place, and started talking  about me like I wasn’t even in the room.

Gabriel. Gabriel looks like he’s like seven or something. Your hair’s not supposed to stay like that, you know? My hair was straight and bright blond when I was a toddler, but it’s supposed to get darker when you get old. Look at it. It’s like… like gossamer on a porcelain doll.”

I clenched my jaw and stared at the floor. He was trying to win over the room, but it wasn’t working this time. Things went from fun to tense in the blink of an eye. My brother looked at me as if to say, “Aren’t you going to do something?”

Josh disappeared and Caleb continued, “You probably don’t even know what gossamer means.”

I heard Josh rummaging around his massive toy closet and he reappeared with toy snake. It was rubber and kind-of realistic looking, but he was holding it by the head like a toy. There was no mistaking it. He threw it into Caleb’s lap and Caleb totally lost it. He yelled and flung his arms around, swatted the snake off, pulled his legs away from the floor where the limp toy lied, and started crying like a girl.

“You can’t do that! I hate snakes!”

I’d never seen someone acting out a real phobia like this before, and if it had been anyone but Caleb, I’d have felt sorry for him.

I was pretty sure I didn’t have any phobias. I’d pick up spiders and bugs all the time to let them out of the house. Mind you, there was this time that our whole class had a field trip to the grocery store, and they had a live octopus in this big tote, and one of his arms was dangling over the side of the tote, and the butcher asked us if anyone wanted to touch it. Shane, my friend that I’d fight and trade baseball cards with, was in my class, and he was the only one who was brave enough to step forward, and he went up to the octopus and poked one of the suckers and it closed around his finger, and he recoiled and laughed, and he told me to go up and do it, but I couldn’t… the thing was too strange and slimy and other-worldly. Afterwards Shane called me a pansy for not stepping up, so there was that, but this thing with the snake was totally different.

That rubber snake broke Caleb down. The thing is, Josh wouldn’t have done that to me or my brother, or Dan the kid who just left, or anyone else, especially if they were afraid of snakes.

He did it to Caleb to knock him down a peg. You weren’t going to win an argument with Caleb. He was weirdly smart, and he loved making you feel stupid for things you didn’t know. But Josh knew how to get to him. He was almost doubled over laughing, and when his mom arrived moments later, he rolled his eyes, knowing how the scene was destined to play out, and his mom yelled at him and told him, “I’m going to throw that damn snake away…” etc. and hugged Caleb and walked him out of the room. They’d been through this with Caleb before, apparently. Josh just took her wrath with a smile.

Josh died the day before his twenty-fifth birthday. Motorcycle accident. Too good for this world? Something like that. Most of the old crowd was at the funeral, including Caleb and his wife and their newborn son. He was in his first year of medical school, and he seemed the most welladjusted of any of us.

*  *  *

The evening after the birthday party I went to see Shane. He was my real best friend. I wondered about the conflicting info—how Trevor just said the day before that I was his best friend. Would I have to clear this up with Shane? As long as they didn’t talk about it behind my back, it should be fine. Shane didn’t like Trevor anyways.

My real best friend’s house was close by, and normally to get there I’d have to walk by Emma’s place, which was out of the question, so I took the long route, and by the time I arrived there they were about to have dinner.

Shane answered the door.

“Thanks for coming by, Gabriel, but yeah we’re almost… we’re eating in like five minutes.”

“Is that Gabriel? Ask him if he wants to join us,” I heard his mom call from past the top of the split-level entry.

All the lampshades and light fixtures in Shane’s house were kind of yellowy, and his mom was always cooking or baking bread or something, so there was always this yellow glow and a nice smell in the air. The food there smelled different than the food at my house. Not better or worse, just different. I didn’t know why. I liked it there.

“You can come in. You wanna eat with us?”

“Nah. I’m just gonna like, walk around.”

“Kay. See you later, Gabriel.”

“See you, Shane.”

He closed the door and the warm world of Shane’s house closed off, and the big cold open world surrounded me again. I was wearing my rain jacket, but it was just overcast and blowing. I’d probably see Shane the next day anyways. I headed down to the trail that went in a big loop around the pond. I’d just have to make sure that I wasn’t hanging out on the trails when it got dark. There was still lots of time.

I used to walk around alone a lot. Thinking about it now, it probably worried my parents, but I was oblivious to all that. The trail down to the pond was sheltered from the wind, and you could hear it blowing like a son of a bitch, and the trees would all be swaying at their tops under the gray clouds moving along like giant cargo ships in the sky, but you couldn’t feel anything down there on the trails. A pretty native girl with makeup on, wearing a Chicago Bulls jacket passed by going the other way and gave me a friendly smile. She was older, and her perfume smelled like cupcakes and it lingered on the trail for a long while after she was gone.

There was a comfort and familiarity in those trails through the alders and cedars and hemlocks, towering over the wet moss and bushes. The skunk cabbage was gone for the year, so that crazy smell wasn’t in the air. I thought about how I couldn’t wait to be older, and how I’d have big arms. I hated my skinny forearms. And I’d be rich too. Rich enough to have a butler. He’d wear a tuxedo, and he’d be too formal all the time, and I’d have to keep telling him to relax. One year he’d tell me about how he missed his relatives in England, and then that Christmas I’d surprise him by buying him a plane ticket for a trip home and give him a big wad of cash to have fun with. He’d cry, then pull himself together quick, but it would still be embarrassing. I’d pick him up at the airport after the trip, and he’d be wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and I’d know he’d finally learned to let loose a bit. “Did you have a good time with your relatives, Roger?” “Quite, sir.”

*  *  *

The next day was Sunday. Every Sunday my dad would take the dogs for a long walk. He walked them every day, but Sunday was their real day of freedom. Usually Damien and I would come along too, but Damien had soccer practice. We had two Great Pyrenees. They intimidated me. They listened to my dad, but when I was around, they barely acknowledge my existence and just barrelled around and kept on wrestling with each other. They stayed in a fenced enclosure that took up part of the back yard, and they had dog houses, and sometimes they slept in the garage. You could tell that they knew it was time for a Sunday walk because they’d get more excited than usual. Taku would spin around in circles on the spot and Nootka would let out this weird howl that you only heard when she knew it was a Sunday walk. They were brother and sister.

The pond was to the east of our house, and the harbour was the other way. Sundays we usually walked the dogs down to this huge open field next to the train tracks, down by the harbour. The tracks were fenced off, and the part where you could walk was probably a mile wide. Older kids would go down there and drink around a pile of burning pallets until someone called the cops.

I was barely big enough to walk those dogs, and as we got closer to the part where we’d let them off the leash, Taku pulled at me hard and whined, and my legs felt like Gumby underneath me trying to keep up.

We finally got to the clearing with the long grass and scraggly bushes and the open gravel spots all around. We let the dogs go and they took off like drag racers up to a little hill covered in small trees. They would always run there, up through the trees and bushes and play there for a few minutes then come tearing down out of the bush with leaves and little spiky thorns in their fur and chase each other in the big open area. It was overcast again, and just a little bit cold. I kind of liked that weather. I liked it when it rained too. But just the really heavy stuff. Not the blowy, thin rain that whipped you in the face.

The dogs disappeared and my dad patted me on the head. His ring knocked against my skull. I didn’t like that feeling, but I’d never tell him that. It was better when he used his other hand. Calvin MacGregor owned a seafood distribution company, and was very loud and outspoken for a business owner. My friends told me that he talked to me and my brother like we were his employees. I wouldn’t have known any different.

Calvin grew up an Anglo in Montréal, played wide receiver in college football, and had a degree in civil engineering. He moved out west for work, and ended up in the seafood distribution business through a partnership with a friend. When his friend and business partner passed on, Calvin moved all the way to the coast and grew the company into a successful full-time venture.

My brother and I believed this crazy story about our father… that there was this secret meeting where they asked him if he wanted to be the Prime Minister of the country and he turned it down because our mother didn’t want a life in politics. We told the story to our friends, with the caveat don’t tell anyone, and we believed it for years. It was actually born out of a partial truth— Calvin had served two terms on city council, and the local membership of the federal party, the right-wing one, floated his name for MP preselection. And, our mother did tell him that he had the choice between a life with her and a life in Ottawa. He turned it down. I think he made the right choice.

He knew everyone in that town, and we couldn’t go to the store without him having five conversations before he got out the door. It all fit into the mystique in my mind.

People would tell stories about him, like my dad’s friend Ross who was out on a fishing trip with him, and a bunch of them were drunk, and my dad had an arm wrestling match with this logger, big burly guy, and the logger was losing and kept hitting him in the face with his free hand, then just as he was about to get pinned, he knocked off Calvin’s glasses. Spectacles on the table, still holding the winning position with his right, Calvin stood half way up, swung a left hook and sent the logger to dreamland. The whole boat party erupted, and they spoke about him like a legend after that. “This pencil pusher punched out the logger!” He was like that. It didn’t surprise me the first time I heard that story. I was a little bit afraid of him too, but it felt good to be on his good side.

“C’mon pups!” my dad yelled, and let out a blisteringly loud whistle. “Let’s go!”

We heard them coming down the hill, then the bushes by the bottom writhed around, then the dogs burst out and came tearing toward us. I braced myself for impact, and Nootka made a tight turn two steps away from me and bumped my hip, almost knocking me over.

We walked the dogs off-leash to the part where you could see the harbour past the tracks. An old blue and gray fishing boat plodded through the chop away from us, passing another on his way in. Two giant rusty black and red cargo ships sat miles out like patients hanging out for days in a doctor’s waiting room. The dotted islands that closed in the harbour were green and gray and obscured by clouds.

I had this recurring dream in those days. Out of nowhere I’d be looking out on the harbour and it was packed with invading war ships. Row upon row of the steel vessels filled with hostile artillery and planes crossing above. It was always nighttime in the dream, and the horizon beyond was flashing with explosions. Somehow we weren’t prepared for this war, but now it was time to fight. No choice. I would always wake up from the dream as I stared out at the oranges and reds and yellows popping off in the dark beyond the islands, the impressive beauty of the enemy on full display, the doom of it all, an unsure outcome looming, enchanted… knowing that I might die, but I’d go down fighting, and if they ended me, it would be like a pit bull that latches on to your leg, and he won’t let go even as he’s being mortally wounded, and even after you shot him, that damn dog is giving his last ounce of life to tearing you apart.

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