The Man Game Read Free Page A

and freezing Silas in his arms. The headlock made it look like a holdup at a nude beach
{see fig. 1.1 }
. Ken started to run backwards and Silas kept apace as they ran faster and faster. It was the kind of prank that ended in skull fractures. To get out of Ken’s grip, Silas swung him over his shoulder, cranking his own neck and hips almost three hundred degrees as Ken flailed and landed on his heels, gambolling furiously to his side of the yard to regain his composure while we, vitalized audience, freaked holus-bolus.

    FIGURE 1.1
The Cherry Tree Clutch

    Calabi’s commentary: Requires the steadiness of a pillar and the flexibility of the longest branch to take the force of the opponent, coming as fast as a boulder down a mountain, and to bend him through twists and turns as if the clod was instead a cat in the clutches of a cherry tree.
    Minna took my arm in her hands and pressed herself against me and I said: What’s behind all this?
    Bad upbringing? Garbage society?
    I’m inclined to agree, but?
    I don’t know, she said. It’s a clown show.
    A decent part of me hadn’t yet accepted what I’d seen. I was simply confused. Was Minna spinning the same bafflement through her head, and if so, why was she smiling so indecently? A new violence, or something invented long ago. I wanted to know.

    A woman named Molly Erwagen. She arrived in Vancouver on June 13, 1886. Travelling in a donkey-drawn carriage underneath a deerhide cabriolet and huddled up together beside a hay-spiked Hudson’s Bay wool blanket. She lay half-asleep next to her husband. She thought she heard pellets of rain. It was so hot and dry today, though. It was in fact ash flicking against the deerhide above them. She and her husband Samuel Erwagen rode towards Vancouver towed by an Indian and his donkey down the New Westminster road. Their heads toggled back and forth as the wagon staggered over rutted and dried mud. They lay together, husband and wife, Samuel wanting nothing more than to sleep, a virtually impossible task.
    The air smelled of salmon. The wind that day gusted over a hundred miles per hour. As they approached Vancouver the gargantuan trees on either side of the road made an uncommon sound as they twisted in the gales. Sammy and Molly and the Indian were shielded from the wind’s full force by the enormityof this forest of spruces, firs, cypresses, innumerable blues and greens, a massively dense coastal forest tolerating immense winds, creaking and cracking for tortuous stretches, groaning, bellyaching as wind passed through their uppermost canopy.
    She faced him so that her lips were right beside his cheek. He lay there on his back, immobilized, feeling her breathe.
    The fire was many miles away but even so ash dropped on occasion to the forest floor nearby. The vibration of the wagon wheels over the road was like a riddle, and Sammy let it rattle around in his head. He tried to ignore all the bumps and stalls. This was a logging road (they all were at the time) and meant hell on the radials. Luckily the Indian carried a fifth cedar wheel on the back; they’d probably have to use it.
    The two had been travelling for so long and were exhausted beyond belief. Molly made clucking sounds. Something she did when she was near a dream. It would wake Sammy, this palatal clucking—it often did—but he wouldn’t do anything about it. Little brief oneiric utterances, he called them.
    How are you? she asked in a yawn. She petted his face and kindly wiped the sleep from the corners of his eyes. Are you doing okay, are you hurting, in pain?
    He awoke. I’m wonderful, he said with a dry smile.
    Oh shush, you liar. She laid her head on his lap. Damn you, she said, and he looked up at the tarp and he didn’t raise a hand to her head to run his fingers through her hair.
    You’d never leave me would you? he asked. He’d asked her the same thing before, probably too many times; one of these times