Jacques Cousteau came to shoot a movie. He was the reason for their grade-school projects. The Calypso sailed right down the middle of the Detroit River and the whole school went down to Dieppe Gardens to watch it go by. Stace stood on the concrete bike path, far back from the railings. The boat seemed old and rickety and wasn’t as big as she expected. His yellow helicopter, stuck on the back, seemed like a toy.
Everyone cheered and clapped as he passed, but Cousteau never came out on deck to wave back. Her teacher said nobody in the world knew more about life underwater than he did. They played a record and showed a film strip in the darkened classroom. Stace had to sit beside the projector and turn the knob to advance the pictures every time she heard a beep.
Beep: Cousteau, standing on the deck, skinny and old with brown teeth, wearing the same red toque all the time. Beep: Cousteau in his gear, the aqualung respirator in his mouth, ready to roll backwards over the side. She thought he seemed too fragile to be down there with the Swordfish and the Killer Whales, the Manta Rays and the Giant Squid. Beep: Cousteau on the Great Barrier Reef. There were colours she had never seen before, real-life creatures that couldn’t be real.
“Everything you can see in this picture is alive,” the teacher said, the shadow of her hand showed on the screen.
“Even the rock is living.”
Beep: Cousteau swimming under an Iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean. He is suspended in a grey void, an astronaut wandering in deep space. His slow voice coming out of the record player. The accent. He says, “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But he has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”
The teacher made them memorize it.
They gave Cousteau a key to the city of Detroit and thousands stood in Hart Plaza to welcome him. But when he gave his speech, he turned furious and angry. His face contorted with rage and he talked about acid rain and illegal dumping, cancerous tumours and contamination of the food chain. Blind fish with confused sex organs. Mutating species.
“Your river, it is sick,” he said.
“When we try to film, it is only dying we see down there.”
There is a living tension, a line running between what can be achieved and what we cannot do. The light, the paleness inside the water, there is no way for her to catch it. He is beyond reach, moving at a pace she cannot match. A sentence from the lifesaving manuaclass="underline" Before all else, the rescuer’s first duty is the preservation of the self. She gives up, surrenders, and turns back to try for the side.
In the middle of the river, the first hint of its approach is more than enough. She feels the throbbing of the engine coming through the water and hears the sound, a massive grinding, like a creature gnawing at the earth’s crust. It is not visible yet, still out there and indistinct, but it is coming and she knows there will be no way around.
A raw terror sears through and demands an equivalent ferocity. She thrashes against the current, driven now by primordial instinct, the need to escape and a raw demand coming from a place she does not know. Her feet and hands pummel the surface. She snarls for breath, moving faster, harder than ever before. She is getting away, maybe, but there is no way to be sure. Every limit is unknown before it is reached. Very soon the prow, two hundred feet high, will emerge from the fog and it will part this water like the gargantuan head of an axe cleaving through. They are the native creatures of this place and the river is their natural habitat. Only the largest pass at night to avoid the complications of smaller boats. The propeller will be the size of a two-story house and the twin off-loading cranes will fold back like the wings of a resting insect. It will be a Leviathan, three football fields long, rusting red hide stuffed with 5,000 tons of salt. The river boils in its wake, a froth even the ocean cannot match. She tries not to hear it, tries to keep it out of her head, but the mechanical roar will not be commanded. It rises out of the dark, advances over the water and swallows everything in its path.
The Loop
The trick to riding a bike in the snow is to stand up on the pedals and push down hard on the front wheel. You need to lean into it and get all your momentum going forward so you can plough through that six or eight inches of slush that piles up on the side of the road. It’s not a skill you can master. No matter how many times you go through and no matter how hard you think about it, it never gets any easier. That skinny little wheel still can’t get a better grip on the ice-covered street. I used to think riding in the snow was the worst part of the Musgrave job, but in the end I had different reasons for quitting.
When you fall, you want to try and go down on the right hand side. As soon as you feel your tire slipping and the whole back end of the Supercycle moving away on its own, that’s when you need to grab the bars tight and swing everything way over to the right, towards the hard line of parked cars. It has to be to the right because if you go down on the left you end up splayed out in the middle of the road, right at the peak of drive-home traffic, and all you can do then is hope those nervous Southern Ontario drivers — the ones who never buy winter tires — still remember how to pump their brakes in just the right way and swerve around you, carving a smooth S curve in the snow just a couple inches from your head.
The one time I went down like that, on the left, the delivery bag ripped open when I hit the ground and everything spilled out onto the street. I got tangled up in the frame and the shoulder strap got wrapped around my elbow and the snow-choked chain came off the big ring and the small ring at the same time. All the little white prescription bags and the brown bottles and the vials with their Musgrave Pharmacy stickers tumbled out. All the other stuff went too: the candy, the tampons, the eight-pack of toilet paper, the denture cream, the jars of medicated ointment and the magazines wrapped in plastic or discreet brown paper. I looked like a soggy hospital piñata that had been walloped into submission. The wet snow kept coming down in fat, lazy flakes and horns were squawking all around me. A steady stream of road-ragers chugged by, each one taking his turn to yell at me about how I better stay on the sidewalk or get the hell out of the way. There was a moment just after I hit the ground, when my head was still down there close to the asphalt and I saw one of those pill vials with the childproof cap rolling away from me, across the yellow line in the middle of the road. I was down right at eye-level and I saw it close-up as this black steel-belted radial came rolling down on it. The plastic tube made a quiet splintery sound and for a half-second I thought I saw a couple of blue and yellow capsules springing up maybe six inches off the ground before they were crushed into the blacktop.
When I finally got myself put together again and made it back to the store, Marlene, one of the nice older ladies who worked at the front counter selling film and batteries and stamps, took me into the tight bathroom on the other side of the dispensary. I remember the way she screwed the cap off a new bottle of rubbing alcohol and how she defiantly ripped open a package of the most expensive antiseptic-treated bandages we sold.
“The bastard,” she muttered to me, as if we were suddenly the same age and we both had been in our jobs too long.
“There’s no place he wouldn’t send you. Nowhere is too far. Just the thought of it. On a day like today. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”
She kind of cooed over me and tried to be as gentle as she could.
“It’s going to hurt, Allan,” she said. “But what can you do?”
She pressed the alcohol swabs into the scraped red lines on my left shoulder and my left elbow. And there was a weird moment when I had to undo the top button of my jeans and pull down my zipper just a bit so I could reach the bad spot where my left hip had come down the hardest. Marlene turned away and closed her eyes. Then she reached back and held out the dripping gauze.