Living with the hawk

  LIVING with the HAWK

  Praise for Robert Currie’s Writing

  “ . . . he has a sense of the particular that constantly surprises, and he makes the dilemmas of his adolescents fresh and specific . . . Robert Currie has created a portrait of a place and the people living in it that is very real.” — Toronto Globe and Mail

  “Currie, who taught in Moose Jaw for 30 years until he retired, brings to Mr. Cutler a feeling of authenticity and a love of teaching that you know is real . . . You care about the teachers and the students, even the bad ones. This is the sign of a true storyteller.” — Regina Leader-Post

  “Teaching Mr. Cutler is [Currie’s} first novel and it’s a dandy . . . Currie is most impressive in showing what goes on in Brad’s English classes. It’s one thing for a teacher to make a lesson exciting for a class of students, but it’s quite another for a writer to make a lesson exciting for a reader, and Currie succeeds admirably.” — Winnipeg Free Press

  “Just like real classrooms, this tale offers moments of crackling tension as well as flashes of high drama and high humour. Currie’s deft touch with dialogue eases the story along as the hapless but dedicated young teacher lurches from crisis to crisis.” — Saskatoon StarPhoenix

  LIVING with the HAWK

  ROBERT CURRIE

  ©Robert Currie, 2013

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118 - 20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Currie, Robert, 1937-

  Living with the Hawk [electronic resource] / Robert Currie.

  Electronic monograph in HTML format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927068-56-4

  I. Title.

  PS8555.U7L59 2013 jC813’.54 C2013-900962-0

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Author photo by Larry Hadwen

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing program.

  LIVING with the HAWK

  This book is dedicated to Gwen — with love.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  When I was in grade nine, two friends and I tried out for the football team. Man, if I had known how that would change everything, I would’ve joined the stupid yearbook club, or volunteered to clean chalk brushes after school, beat the snot out of them day after day. And told everyone I was an only child, an orphan. See how well my brother and my parents managed by themselves.

  So many memories from that fall are bad. And not just bad, horrific. I’d forget them if I could, but I’m afraid they’re always with me, at night especially when I lie in bed, twisting and turning, the dark ceiling above the bed like a screen where the same scenes play themselves out, again and again, whether my eyes are shut or open.

  Memories have a sly way of inserting themselves between the lines of text books, of hiding behind gruelling homework assignments and leaping out when you’ve dropped your guard. They can come at any time, I know, in any order, and maybe what I really need to do is lay them out in the precise sequence that they happened, lay them out and examine them, try to find a way to deal with them, see if it isn’t possible to have whole days go by without those memories stirring.

  The nights, of course, may be another thing.

  ONE

  On the first day at football practice, all the players spread out across the field and slowly walked through the scrubby grass from one end zone to the other, our eyes on the ground before our feet. Every time we spotted a rock, we picked it up and heaved it off the field. After that there were calisthenics and drills, then blocking and tackling. When I was the only grade nine who made the team, I was ecstatic. I liked to think my success was because I was faster than any other kid when we drilled at running backwards, a perfect skill for a defensive back, but there might have been more to it than that.

  What I always remember was Todd Branton, one of the hotshot grade twelves, saying, “Rookie, you are such a lucksack. You made the team because your brother’s the quarterback. And that’s the only reason.” His voice low and sarcastic in the murmur of the locker room, exhausted players on the bench beside him raising their heads to stare at me, wondering what I’d do. And oh no, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

  “Sure, Branton, and you made the team because every time the coaches want to take a dump they know you’re there to wipe their butt.” The other players still stared at me, a few of them grinning, though you could see they didn’t want to.

  “Up yours, dirtbag,” said Branton. “You smile and I’ll rub it off with my jockstrap,” but he was too tired to act. Or so I thought. There’s something about this Branton — I don’t know exactly, but if a fart had a face it’d look just like him.

  The next day, getting ready for practice, I had stripped down to my jockey shorts when they came for me, a bunch of them grabbing me at once, lifting me off the bench, pinning me into a metal chair, my brother standing by, grinning — nervously, I thought. He didn’t make a move to help me. The screech of duct tape unrolling, and they were tying me to the chair, binding my legs to the chair legs, wrapping tape around and around my arms, securing me to the metal frame. Behind me, I heard my brother say, “This must be a new one. Makes one hundred and ninety-two uses for duct tape.”

  “And here’s number one ninety-three,” said Jordan Phelps. He always looked stern — preoccupied, maybe, but he was smiling now. “We can tape his pecker down — so it won’t rise up and stand at attention when he sees all those hot bodies bouncing around the gym.”

  Braying laughter until four of them lifted me and carried me down the hall, opened the door to the gym where the girls’ volleyball games were being played. They set me inside and left me there.

  Some memory that. I used to lie in bed at night, muscles aching, shins and shoulders bruised, remembering how the cheering petered out, fans one by one noticing me, starting to point, snickering at the naked kid covered only by his skimpy gotch. I knew I was blushing, my ears blooming red, the colour spreading like wild rose petals unfurling in a fast-frame nature movie. There was laughter now, guffaws, one fat kid laughing so hard he was hiccupping and gasping for breath. The volleyball players stopped their game to see what was going on, a tall native nudging the girl beside her and pointing at me, the two of them grinning, the referee finally blowing a whistle, trotting into the gym office, returning with a pair of scissors to cut me free.

  When I think about everything that happened, it’s kind of ironic that my brother and I started playing football to please our father, then discovered we liked the game, the physical contact, the sudden bursts of exertion. Our father is Paul Russell, a father in more than the usual way, for he served as the Anglican prie
st at St. David’s Church in Palliser when I was growing up. Still does, in fact. Palliser, of course, lies along the Trans-Canada highway on the Saskatchewan prairie, a city of thirty thousand, too short of industries and too near Regina to ever hope to grow. My father claimed it was a nice city in which to have a parish, a good place to raise a family. At least he used to make that claim.

  My father always wanted his sons to play sports. When I was in elementary school, he put together a softball team from all the boys in the parish. Even then, I knew that he loved taking off his white collar, rolling up his sleeves — his biceps thick and hard — hitting flies for us to shag in the outfield. Once, when my mother had been using the car and came to pick us up from practice, I saw her behind the backstop, watching him toss balls into the air and slam them out to us. I wondered if she was impressed with the way he hit every ball so high and far that we always had to run to make a catch. Later that night, when they were in the living room and I was sitting at the kitchen table, having a bedtime snack of cinnamon toast and milk, I heard her tell him, “You know, Paul, sometimes I swear you’re proud of having hairy arms.”

  He laughed. “Well,” he said, “I’ve never heard you object to being held in these hairy arms.” He must have moved toward her then because I heard the springs squeak in the couch.

  “No. I’m serious,” she said.

  “Well, Barbara, I guess you’ve got a point to make.” I knew at once that something was up; he usually called her Barb. “You going to tell me what it is?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, but when you’re out with the boys like that, playing some game, it’s . . . well, it’s as if you’re showing off.”

  I was surprised when I heard my father’s answer. “Maybe, I am,” he said. “Maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Paul!”

  “Listen, now,” he said. It was what he told Blake and me whenever he wanted to make a point. “About once a week you tell me that being a preacher’s wife is no easy task. People always watching your every move. Okay — maybe once a month, but you know what I mean. Being the preacher isn’t a whole lot better. Oh, I know, most of the women are all right. It’s the men — sometimes they’re the ones who get to me. A man of the cloth, they seem to figure, he’s hardly a man at all.”

  “Now, Paul — ”

  “Oh, they don’t come right out and say it, but they think it all right, some of them, you can bet on that.”

  In the kitchen, washing down the last of my toast with milk, I began to think I was listening to something I shouldn’t be hearing, but I wanted to know where this was leading.

  “Once in a while,” said my father, “I have to remind them I’m not just the fellow who offers them the host on Sunday mornings.”

  “They know that, Paul.”

  “They do, eh? You weren’t there at the start of practice. Roger Phelps comes up to me, wants to know who’s going to coach the kids. I tell him I figure I’ll give it a try, and you know what he says? You sure you can handle this? As if I haven’t played ball all my life.”

  “Roger Phelps is a jerk,” said my mother. “Everybody knows that. The other men wouldn’t think like him.”

  “Oh no? Couple of the fathers came early to pick up their boys. Looked mighty surprised when they saw me hitting flies.”

  I got up then to get a fresh carton of milk from the fridge, but my mother heard me. “Blake?” she called. “Blair? It’s time for bed.”

  “It’s me,” I said. “Just having a shot of milk.” Blake wasn’t even home yet. My mother named both of us, of course. I guess she thought similar names sounded cute or something. Perfect names for preacher’s kids maybe. It’s lucky we weren’t twins. I’d hate to think what she would have called us then. Louie and Dewey, say, or Timmy and Tommy — something sure to get us creamed at school.

  I poured myself half a glass of milk and took a swig. The living room was quiet for a moment; then I heard my father’s voice, gruff and louder than usual. “I was just grumping, Blair. You forget anything we said about Mr. Phelps.”

  “Okay.” I belted down the rest of the milk and put the carton back in the fridge. After I switched off the kitchen light, I stood there in the dark, the fridge humming beside me, the sound like a truck at night on a distant highway, but they were through talking. I went up the stairs to bed.

  That August before I went into grade nine, I was thinking a lot about high school, wondering what it would be like in a three storey building with six hundred students, most of whom I didn’t know. Blake was going into grade twelve, being groomed to quarterback the football team, already a B. M. O. C. according to my father — Big Man On Campus was what he meant — although every time he said it, I thought there was a touch of irony in his voice. He wanted his boys involved in manly sports all right, but he didn’t want us showing any signs of swelled heads. “Christ,” he once said, “could walk on water, but you never heard him boast about it.” I don’t think he understood Blake at all. If Blake was ever swelled up with himself, it was a case of being puffed up with excitement because, after two years of spot duty, coming in late in games that were already won or lost, he’d be playing first string. He wouldn’t be just a preacher’s kid — a PK — but a quarterback, somebody who didn’t have to prove he was one of the guys. My father should have known that.

  Then again, maybe my father did know it. He was probably concerned about keeping Blake on track, worried about the balancing act that he would have to perform, being one of the guys without ever forgetting that he was a PK too — and ought to live like one.

  A balancing act was what it was, no doubt about it. I remember Blake telling me about his first high school dance, the freshie dance when he was in grade nine. The grade twelve student who’d complained all week about being his partner for freshie activities had snuck a bottle into the dance, then in the middle of the crowd back in the darkest corner of the gym he’d brought it out, offering Blake a drink of gin. Blake had stood there, shaking his head, uncertain what to say, the older boy thrusting the bottle at him, telling him it was just a girlie drink, even a preacher’s kid could handle it. When Blake said he didn’t drink, he’d never had a drink in his life, the boy grabbed him by the front of his shirt, pulled him so close, Blake said you could smell his breath, it was sickly sweet, like he’d been drinking some fancy French cologne.

  “You’re gonna have a shot of this, right now,” he told Blake, “or I am going to pound you in the face. That’s your only choice, preacher’s boy.” Then a malicious laugh. “Either that, or you can ask God to rescue you.”

  That’s when someone spoke up from the middle of the crowd around them. “No need for God. He’s got friends.”

  While the older boy was turning to see who had spoken, it was Jordan Phelps who darted in, Jordan who had spoken, Jordan just a freshie himself who now grabbed for the bottle in the boy’s hand and at the same time hacked him on the wrist with a rabbit punch that broke his grip. With gin slopping around him, Jordan bent down and sent the bottle spinning across the dance floor, aiming it towards the far wall where one of the teachers on dance duty was standing. The older boy took a couple of steps after the bottle, thought better of it, turned around, scowling, ready to lash out with his fists, but by then the kids were dispersing, melting into the shadows, all of them getting as far from him and the bottle as they could. The preacher’s boy had gotten away, and Jordan too.

  Football practice started the week before school, but Blake had spent much of August dragging me down Thirteenth Avenue to the green-space where there was room to throw the long bomb. I was expected to run under his passes and get my hands on them even if I seldom caught them. Once, when I was running flat out, stretching so far I was almost tripping, the ball hit me in the hands and I somehow managed to pull it into my chest without falling. I trotted back to Blake and tossed him the ball.

  “That was quite a show,” he said. “You should come out for the team.” He seemed to mean it too.


  “Come on. You’re the guy who says I’ve got hands like bricks.”

  He laughed. “You’re good at knocking the ball out of the air, all right. You could maybe play defence.” There was no danger of getting a swelled head with Blake around, but he went on. “It helps to be on a team, to know some guys. Keeps people off your case. Besides, you make the team, Dad’ll be impressed.”

  “You never played in grade nine.”

  “No, but you could. You might enjoy it.” He wasn’t looking at me but at the ball, which he held balanced in the palm of his hand. He gave it a spin with his fingers, watching it rotate till it began to topple and he grabbed it with both hands. “Go down fifteen yards,” he said, “and cut sharp to the right.”

  The day that Arnie Winkler, Evan Morgan and I — grade nines all — signed out our football equipment for the first serious practice, we were excited and got there early. No, maybe it was more nerves than excitement, but we were the first ones in the equipment room. Shoulder harness, helmets, bucking pads, jerseys, pants, everything was provided by the school — except, of course, for jockstraps and cups, which we had bought ourselves. I remember sitting in the locker room, my jersey pulled over my shoulders, thinking I looked pretty good, too bad that cute girl who sat two seats behind me in English class couldn’t see me with shoulders like this. Arnie and Evan were kind of horsing around, taking turns hammering each other on the pads, just to see how good it felt, my brother and some of his friends arriving with their equipment when Jordan Phelps walked in.

  He didn’t say anything at first. Just looked at Arnie and Evan, until they quit belting one another, their arms suddenly hanging awkward at their sides, both of them uncomfortable, shuffling, starting to blush.

  “You guys,” he said, “what a pair of pussies. Gonna really knock someone down, aren’t you? Long as it’s just each other.”