The Literary Review Issue 9
Fiction Page 22
Wilding
by John Tavares
Nuno asked Scott why he wore a Chicago Blackhawks cap. Scott said he wore the hat after it was given to him by a man who moved out of the apartment building several weeks ago. So Nuno went upstairs and returned with the Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap and jersey, both of which a lovely flight attendant, who had decided to become a pilot, had given him and Nuno had yet to wear. Earlier, Scott said he camped on the Toronto Islands one summer and knew the Toronto Islands like the back of his hand, which was ornamented with grim tattoos, and recommended Nuno visit the place. Now, as Nuno asked him if he would join him on a day trip, a brief touristy excursion, to the Toronto Islands, he declined.
“But you could be my guide,” Nuno said.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable there.”
“Comfortable?”
“The people who live on the island and visit the island—they’re into yachts and big boats—they’re so hip it hurts.”
Whenever he saw him, Nuno usually chatted with Scott and gave him takeout meals, processed snack food and loose change. Scott panhandled and slept beneath the entrance and canopy to his apartment building. Nuno considered panhandling an occupation when he saw how some in Toronto, like Scott, worked hard at panhandling and seemed fully devoted to the trade. Before he journeyed to Centre Island, he paused again in front of Scott, jiggling a Blue Jays baseball cap, filled with change, outside the front twin doors to his apartment building.
“I haven’t seen you in Dundas Square anytime over the past couple of weeks,” Nuno commented.
“What are you doing in Dundas Square?” Scott queried. “Slumming?”
“I have dinner, takeout. I’m still a single dude—divorced actually. I hate the kitchen and cooking.” Nuno dined at restaurants more than he liked to admit, but the dining establishments refused to permit any customers eating inside because of the pandemic restrictions, so he ordered his finger food as takeout. He walked to the square and, an outsider, he ate dinner on a bench at the edger, the borders. The activity in the square, sometimes anarchic, relieved the monotony and somberness of the coronavirus lockdown. “It’s actually kind of neat, cool. The scenery isn’t bad, either.”
“You mean the riffraff,” Scott said.
“It’s lively there.”
“It’s gone wild in the square. Drug dealers and addicts have taken over,” Scott complained. “The safe injection site is just across the street on Ryerson campus and it’s a magnet for the worst. Addicts consume and shoot up in front of security guards.”
“You don’t need to worry; the place should be safe, with police cameras everywhere in the square.” Nuno couldn’t believe he was defending the safety of downtown Toronto to a homeless person who lived on its streets.
“The cops don’t patrol the square. The place has gone wild. In fact, there’s been wildings—thugs, gang members, kids, on a rampage. I even saw a chick literally kick the shit out of her girlfriend the last time I stopped there—literally dropped kicked her in the face. She was bleeding from her nose and mouth, and her teeth were broken.”
Unperturbed, Nuno shrugged. “Drop by, join me, I’ll buy you a coffee and a poutine.”
Usually, Nuno, who still preferred cash over credit cards, gave Scott money, loose change, a handful of loonies and toonies. When Scott wasn’t panhandling during the day, he camped on the boulevard at night, alongside the large black plastic bags of garden and the bins and containers of discarded recyclables. He also slept beneath the canopy and entrance to his apartment building, whose residents seemed enlightened and tolerant of the homeless. Nuno put a few toonies and loonies in his Blue Jays baseball cap. He continued walking along the sidewalk on Gerard Street to the subway station, where he rode the subway to Union Station, before he transferred to the streetcar to the ferry terminals. This excursion to Centre Island would be the first visit to the idyllic rural place just offshore in Lake Ontario. Nuno never landed his passenger jetliner at the island airport because passenger jets weren’t allowed to land on the tarmac and the runway was too short. In any event, he hiked around the island and by late afternoon, on a hot, sweaty day, having strolled from one end of the island to the other, he settled to rest at Hanlan’s Point Beach.
When he went for a swim in Lake Ontario, he noticed he was being trailed by a lifeguard, rowing the lifeguard rowboat. He was astonished because she resembled his daughter. He thought the heat and the bright sun was affecting his vision and perception. As a young woman in a red and white lifeguard uniform jersey and a black bikini bottom rowed towards Nuno, vigilantly performing her duties to protect swimmers from the risks of drowning in cold chilly Lake Ontario, he realized the resemblance was more than uncanny. First, he was amazed to see his daughter working, since she never expressed an interest in working part-time or as a student, even during the summer. Second, he was surprised to observe she worked as a lifeguard. Although she had an athletic physique and strong figure, she embraced an artsy, almost goth style. She dressed only in black, black jeans, black t-shirts and crop tops, black jackets, and her clothes she wore tight, hip hugging, form fitting.
Nuno remained mute; she told him she didn’t want to speak to him, after they argued over tuition fees and rent expenses. As he swam a rudimentary stroke, the dog paddle, in Lake Ontario, along the beach at Hanlan’s Point, she trailed alongside him in a rowboat, as she was required by her duties as a lifeguard.
Nuno waded back to shore. He lay on the warm sand, catching rays from the hot sun to warm up his body shivering and chilled from the cold water of Lake Ontario. In the middle of a nap on the beach, he received a cellphone call. He couldn’t remember the last time he spoke with Celeste’s mother over the telephone.
“Guess who I just saw at the beach—lifeguarding.”
“Yes, your daughter is a lifeguard,” Marion said. “Big news. She works for a living.”
After Marion curtly demanded to know when he was going to sign the divorce papers, he said he signed her legal documents and mailed them in the brown envelope several weeks ago. They separately figured they used the coincidence and call as a pretext to badger each other.
“What are you doing at Woodbine Beach?” Marion asked.
“I’ve never been to the Islands before, so I stopped by Hanlan’s Beach for a break.”
“Since when do you go to Hanlan’s?”
“Since the pandemic shut everything down.”
Dragging on her cigarette, sipping her drink, Marion turned down the volume on the television and asked, “Isn’t Hanlan’s Beach clothing optional?” Nuno looked around the beach and saw a couple of nude mature men, shriveled wrinkled penises jiggling beneath huge hairy bellies, lounging around the shoreline. A pair of topless women strolled along the lakeshore and a large nude woman clutched a flotation device, a massive inflatable pink doughnut. “What is your daughter doing lifeguarding at a clothing optional beach?” Marion asked.
“Why don’t you ask her? She’s not talking to me.”
“You just talk to her.”
“She won’t speak to me,” Nuno said. “I’m not going to incite any arguments.”
“At Hanlan’s?” Marion demanded. “You’re at a nude beach—”
Ready to turn off his smartphone, Nuno said, “I’m not getting into this pointless discussion.” Then Nuno could overhear Marion talking with Roger, the radio journalist forced into retirement because of alcoholism, with whom she was back together, after a hiatus of twenty years. In fact, Nuno heard Roger raging in the background, shouting, “Apparently, there only two legal nude beaches left in the country.”
Roger was the biological father of the young woman Nuno had considered his true daughter, at least until recently. Roger, though, was living with another man in a domestic partnership, so Nuno nurtured the impression his ex-wife was involved in a complicated polyamorous relationship. When Roger, a dual citizenship who voted for Donald Trump, discovered where Celeste was working, his anger emerged, as he drove in a fury across the city to the ferry terminals, before he boarded the ferry to the islands to rescue his lifeguard daughter from the morally corrupt nude beach. When he arrived at Hanlan’s Point Beach, he found his daughter, sunbathing in a black bikini alongside her lifeguard stand, and started arguing with her immoral lifestyle choices, working at the clothing optional beach as a lifeguard.
Nuno watched the spectacle from the unsupervised part of the beach, further along the shoreline, a distance away from the lifeguard stand, savoring the irony. Bemused, he wondered if he should intervene, but he realized Celeste had the situation under control. Anyway, she was surrounded by her co-workers, a few young lifeguards, strong, burly, physically intimidating. Nuno found the scene a bit amusing, but he realized his gratuitous disclosure had inadvertently triggered the confrontation.
The incident confirmed his suspicions he had best steer clear of his previous family. Family life never agreed with him, his career, his wandering pilot lifestyle. Nuno left the beach and resumed his journey around the island, hiking along the pathway that encircled the island. A few kilometers away, Nuno settled down for a few beers from his backpack at the long sandy beach near the changerooms and restaurant and the long pier. He finally embraced the fact he was a pilot, a traveler, and, first and foremost, a loner, happy to embrace his solitary condition and watched the sunset over the beach, near the picnic tables and pier, in splendid desolation.
When he arrived home, in downtown Toronto, that evening, Scott, sitting cross-legged, wearing the Blue Jays baseball cap and jersey, with the airline backpack by his side, was still camped outside his apartment building. Recently, Nuno figured, Scott seemed the only friend he had. As he continued to sleep on the boulevard outside his apartment building, he wondered again if he should lend him his spare bedroom in his rental unit, even though that might cost him an eviction. Initially, he wasn’t certain why he found himself engaging in conversation about the Toronto Blue Jays and Maple Leafs with the homeless man, outside the entrance to Nuno’s apartment building, especially since he lost his enthusiasm for baseball after the strike, which was a long time ago. Scott had an agreeable personality, and their friendship started when he told him, how in a different life, before alcoholism and addiction took over his life, he was a pilot. Scott said he had his commercial pilot’s license, but the transport and aviation agency wouldn’t renew his license when he candidly disclosed he suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. The only reason Nuno had difficulty believing him on that count was he had no filters and didn’t seem interested in talking shop; most pilots Nuno knew would never admit to alcoholism or addiction and enjoyed talking about aircraft and flying. Scott, though, seemed distinctly disinterested and frankly turned off to chatter and talk about aircraft and aviation. Nuno came to think of Scott as essentially the unofficial doorman of the apartment building to whom he gave money for his services. So now he panhandled outside the main door and entrance to his condo building. He had even given him an airline backpack. Anyway, the local 7-11 downtown advertised it was national wings day. Nuno decided to take advantage of the sale on chicken wings. With the close proximity of stores and restaurants, and public transit, he decided to stay in this apartment downtown until his divorce papers came through. He realized, even afterwards, he might have to stay in the same apartment, which really should not be a problem since he didn’t mind living in a bachelor apartment. He didn’t like cooking, either. He preferred to eat out at the restaurant, but the pandemic had disrupted the restaurant trade and dining indoors, so he couldn’t dine inside and had to take out. He also loved the hot summer nights, the heat, the sweltering air, the sweaty humidity. As long as there wasn’t rain and it was not chilly, neither of which had been the case in the past month in a half, he was happy to dine out in Dundas Square, even though the public space was filled with city dwellers, like himself, with no place to go, except home, in lockdown by the pandemic, lonely and yearning at home. In the square, the human resources assistant called him again while he started to eat the barbecue spicy wings with honey mustard dipping sauce. He put his smartphone on speakerphone, as she asked if he had made a decision about coming back to work? As long as it wasn’t a problem with airline management he decided to continue his extended leave, providing flying time to some younger, less experienced pilots.
“Is there a problem with my leave of absence?” Nuno asked.
“No, absolutely not,” Lois replied. “I think they’ll be happy to hear.”
“Hear what? Will I still have a job after the pandemic?”
“The airline will always have a place and plane for Captain Lima.”
Nuno wondered about the truth and conviction of her assertion. Having never received calls from human resources before, he couldn’t help thinking this woman’s interest in him was personal. Certainly, what she promised him was more than a bit of hyperbole. Hadn’t he heard words to the same effect from his wife? If he had learned anything in life so far, the lesson was everything was transient and firm commitments in many forms were made often to languish—unfulfilled.
“They want to make a movie about the glider flight,” Lois said.
“They?” Nuno queried.
“A network, whose name I’m not at liberty to disclose.”
“I’m a lowly pilot. What did management say?”
“They said, no, at least until the Coronavirus pandemic is over, but the producer said they would move ahead with preproduction and scripting and casting. The airline has nothing to say officially, but I think they’re happy—off the record.”
“It’s been twenty years since the glide,” Nuno mused.
“Yes, but it was a remarkable feat of aviation and airmanship. The story still has resonance.”
“But it’s also happened before—at least twice.” Lois’s candour puzzled him; he wondered why she had even bothered to mention these things—film productions about public news events in which he had been involved, he learned from experience, were entirely out of his hands, beyond his control. Nuno noted it was late in the evening; during their last call, he had told her he was a nighthawk. He indicated it was all right to call him late, but the call seemed a bit unusual and out of order, not that it made a difference to him.
“Anyway, I just called to touch base with our esteemed employees. Stay well and stay safe.”
Wilding
by John Tavares
After Nuno thanked her and ended the call, he wondered again what she truly had on her mind, if she had a personal agenda. He supposed he had become cynical, callous, and indifferent to niceties and courtesies and plain friendly people. The made for TV movie about the glider flight, he considered another bit of boring Canadiana, which had even lost its novelty, after the Gimli glider flight and the Air Transat flight. His wide-body passenger jet exhausted its fuel supply over the Atlantic Ocean, after he misread sensors, misinterpreting confusing instrument readings, and transferred fuel from one tank through a leaking fuel line, action which led to two empty fuel tanks as opposed to one and engine failure over the Atlantic Ocean with no airport in sight. But he successfully glided the jetliner a few hundred kilometres to an American air force base in the Azores. After that news came out there were criticism and praise, but his past conviction for smuggling when he was a bush pilot who flew floatplanes, after he was laid off from flying forest fire spotter planes and water bombers, across Northwestern Ontario, was revealed publicly. He could not fly or even visit the United States for a decade afterwards, which interfered with his abilities to perform his duties as an airline pilot, who literally had to fly his plane to avoid American airspace, sometimes costing the airlines thousands of thousands in jet fuel costs and lost flying time. Even then he had to hire a lawyer, with specialized knowledge and experience with aviation law and administration and international credentials. He ended up paying additional exorbitant legal fees. The legal and bureaucratic nightmare, his lawyer said, from his corner office in a high-rise town downtown, in the financial district of Toronto, was the price of the publicity he had to pay for that flying stunt.
“But it wasn’t a stunt. The plane ran out of fuel. I didn’t want to die; I didn’t want any of my passengers to die.”
“I understand, but because of all the press, information on the record with the Federal Aviation Administration–a pilot convicted for drug smuggling–suddenly became publicized widely. Sensible decisions and pragmatic judgements made at the discretion of experienced senior officials, who had done their due diligence, became subject to the harsh glare of uninformed public opinion. It suddenly became politically embarrassing and they revoked your American flying privileges.”
Back then Nuno realized the lawyer was right, but that act of flying, as far as he was concerned, as well as deeds and crimes and misdemeanours, he hoped, would soon be forgotten. Now Nunno was just another faceless individual in a faceless crowd, as he once was and always had been, except he was one of millions during a pandemic. The need to fly had disappeared as the economy shutdown and communities and whole countries went into lockdown and quarantine and curfew and international and even regional travel was banned and borders closed.
Nunno took the takeout box of chicken wings from the 7-11 convenience store and a takeout coffee from Starbucks, which was still open despite the pandemic, but for takeout only. He walked to Dundas Square and sat on the bench. He contemplated the last conversation he had with his wife. When she first met him, she was intrigued at a pilot who had managed to glide a wide-body passenger jet, full of passengers, with dead engines and no power, after a fuel leak, a few hundred kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean, to an American air force base in the Azores. Later, his daughter, his wife declared, was not his biological daughter, but she was the daughter of a radio reporter with whom she earlier initiated an affair. Marion told him this, in a fit of pique, before their daughter was born, but, from the moment she announced she was pregnant, he strongly suspected he was not her biological father. Still, was he now to revoke his right as a father for the biological father, to whose car, she shackled herself with a bike lock?
During the lockdowns and quarantines, in the square, on a bench, Nuno heard the youth and young adults chatting and gossiping on the nearby benches and planters. They talked about scoring pot and meth, and, motioning, discussed procuring harder drugs like cocaine and heroin from dealers lounging a hundred metres away across the cement square. Fisticuffs, an argument, and physical struggles broke out among the groups of youth and young adults congregated in the square. Normally, the youth, drug dealers, and gang members occupied the benches and seats near the north end of the square along Dundas Street. Nobody outside their circle dared approach them, not even the police or the uniformed security guards who monitored the square from a kiosk or patrolled the square on foot or in patrol vehicles. After the mob played loud music, the security guards asked the gangs and milling groups to move, as another fight broke out. So the youth, smoking, drinking, talking, simply moved to a different part of the square. What else could they do while the universities, colleges, and high schools were closed for the coronavirus lockdown, and leisure establishments were shutdown, during a pandemic, when security guards, bylaw enforcement officers, and even the police enforced social distancing.
Nuno ate more spicy barbecue chicken wings, savouring the taste. He realized the wings were not only a bargain, they hit the spot, tasting spicy and delicious. The youth besides him noticed Nuno, a mature man, out of place, dressed like an airline pilot, even off duty. As he sat chewing the chicken wings, licking the sauce and grease from his fingers, Nuno remembered the commotion earlier in the day at the beach between the young woman he had once considered his daughter and her biological father, and he laughed absently. He resumed eating the chicken wings. He realized he could no longer consider himself a vegetarian after eating the wings. He became a vegetarian after his first officer, his co-pilot, suffered a heart attack during a flight and a flight attendant suffered a transient ischemic attack after a transatlantic sleepover, although doctors ruled her mild stroke caused by her contraceptives. Then Celeste challenged him to change his eating habits for ethical reasons, even though she complained he was the most practical minded and pragmatic person she knew.
The youth beside Nuno continued to argue and fight; he possessed no opinion on their antics either way. Then he noticed one of them tugging and pulling at the backpack of a man who appeared homeless. The tallish angular figure looked more than familiar. Then they started striking him, hitting him. A young man tugged back at the backpack, which Nuno recognized bore the logo of his airline, Canadian Atlantic Pacific. Soon a youth was pummeling the tall, lanky man with fists. He recognized the punching bag as Scott, with whom he chatted earlier. When he hurried across the square and told his assailants to stop, and tried to restrain him, the youth turned on Nuno physically and shouted in his face about being dissed and disrespected. The rage and hatred etched in his grimacing face should have warned him to back off and retreat. He thought this blue-eyed kid, whose blonde hair was in cornrows, looked and dressed like some of the colored youth he saw on crime cable television serials. The youth turned on him and lashed out physically, attacking him. He hit Nuno in the face with a fast-flying fist, a blur of flesh that broke his nose, sending a spurt of blood flying. Nuno struck back, and knocked him down.
Soon the whole gang of youth was on top of him, kicking, punching, twisting, grasping, groping, grappling, pulling. The hurt and pain multiplied when the blows and kicks multiplied and occurred in unison, as rap music from DMX, who recently died of a drug overdose, boomed from a nearby parked car. The injuries were multiple, compound, critical, fractured bones, contusions, bruises, hemorrhages.
Nuno never recovered, never regained consciousness. One daily newspaper article, from a Toronto Star columnist, about his death and the incident noted the mother of one of his assailants, involved in the swarming and wilding, showed her a picture from yesteryear of Nuno and her son. In the photograph, at least a decade old, Nuno, in his airline captain’s uniform, having invited the child into the cockpit, showed him the avionics and instrument panel of the jet airliner on the tarmac at Pearson International before he flew the plane across the Atlantic to Portugal, a route he flew often and still flew. She herself was a survivor of the flight to Lisbon, when the fuel lines leaked and the engines failed and Nuno was forced to glide the jet a few hundred kilometres to the American air force base on the Azores.
Lois, the young human resources generalist, remembered her telephone conservation a few hours before the wilding and complained to her boyfriend there was no candlelight vigil, no flowers left in Dundas Square to commemorate his memory and mark the place where he suffered the contusions, bruising, hemorrhaging, and traumatic injuries to which he later succumbed in a hospital. Working overtime duty, grumbling, and overseen by a television news camera crew and a group of police officers and security guards, cleaners from the public works department and firefighters with a pumper truck merely washed the blood away with pressurized hoses and industrial cleaners.