Mario Lowther
Burrard View Park
Johnson enters Burrard View Park by the southwest corner, near the daycare center. Between the daycare and the tennis courts there’s a swath of scrub grass, strewn with dry maple buds and tiny twigs that crunch under Johnson’s black leather boots. The uneven ground rolls like a concealing carpet. This corner of the park is remote, yet the grass is cut, the swath tended. Manicured, but little used, little enjoyed.
Back at their dumpy little post-war home on Oxford Street, Johnson’s wife Annie has almost everything boxed, bagged, taped, strapped, and stacked. She and Johnson are moving, they’re leaving, they’re getting out, they’re free, they’re escaping the city. At last, they’re retiring to their cedar-shake cottage and cedar-post deck on point-six of an acre of tree-filled heaven three hours up the coast, where they intend to live comfortably and carefully on Annie’s modest government pension and whatever Johnson earns from the part-time job he desires at the village hardware outlet.
They say they won’t miss the city; it means they’ll miss the restaurants, there was always someplace to eat. Otherwise, it’s not the city they grew up in, hasn’t been a hometown for years. After one too many international facelift, it’s become a destination in a travel book, a site people scout out, transfer to, buy into, then flip. There was a time you could drive from point a to b and not encounter gridlock. There was a time when every square foot wasn’t taxed, metered or levied. A time the night fell sweetly silent and didn’t rock with gang shootings and serial killings. A time you could seek out your own small space, relax and think, watch time pass, hear the world glide, drink it in, contemplate life. There was a time when things would stay put.
It’s summer in the park; for Johnson it’s eternally autumn. Drawing his pea jacket around him, he wheezes cold air and bulls through a partition in the fence into the tennis court. The court is a skeleton, the netting gone, the lines faded, the asphalt as cracked and unreliable as a warped billiard table. He remembers when it was new, then on second glance it appears much better, and he’s halfway across the playing field when a ball whizzes past and he realizes there’s a game on. Two teenagers. One, snappily dressed in white, looks like he belongs, and has returned the ball expertly to his court mate. The other is some rock star wannabe wearing shades, a black tee-shirt and cut-off jeans, and swings his racket two-handed like a baseball bat, launching the ball over the fence into the alley. The players laugh, and snappy admonishes rock star to stop being a goof.
Johnson smiles sadly to himself and passes through. Exiting by another gap in the far corner of the court, he moves into the playground.
He stops to take in the view, his heart warming. It was a place of joy. Big toys grace a bed of green: to his left the toddler swing set, four worn wood teeter-totters, the monkey bars, and a sandbox, as much sand out as in; to his right, an old stone-and-mortar wading pool with a fountain that hasn’t flowed in years. Down from that, the big swing set; beyond a field, a tetherball pole, a box hockey game, and lawn darts kissing the ground like butterflies. At the end there’s a cottage: the park office, washrooms on one side, the caretaker’s tiny residence on the other, his fence around a few flowers, his Private sign on the gate. Although the flowers change each year, Johnson can’t recall ever seeing the caretaker. Tended by a ghost, he thinks, sighing.
Someone hurries past him, snaring his attention. A tall, long-haired, stick-like White boy, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, faded jeans, and a Dylan tee-shirt, flies toward a well-dressed, petite, pretty Chinese girl.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she declares, throwing her arms open as they meet, her father’s disapproval at her back.
Johnson fairly swoons. Her voice resounds with passion and regret, equal parts fever and storm. Johnson decides that she’s a young woman who has wrestled with logic and lost, that she knows she should run and never look back, yet her heart has compelled a reunion. She may never speak to anyone with such fervor again.
They embrace like survivors, and kiss brazenly in the open air of the park, as if to cue the roses to bloom, cartoon animals cavort, and minstrels play from the ashes of their vanquished love. Johnson stands nearby, admiring them. At last they break, and turn to him smiling.
“Do you wish this moment could last forever?” he asks.
They grin as though to say make us, and laugh. Then the kid hoists the girl into his arms, and steals her away from the playground, running wildly through the trees.
As they recede into the far end of the park, Johnson’s wistfulness fades, and there are children everywhere now. There’s a boy planted like an astronaut into one of the rubber seats of the small swing set, his fragile hands tugging the hanging chains, corkscrewing himself up, round and round to his tiptoes, then letting go to whirl back down. Another boy sits high atop the monkey bars, a king on a throne, arms akimbo, feet dangling. Another sits alone on the teeter-totter. One backhoes sand in the sandbox with his cupped hand, rrrr-ing sounds of heavy machinery. Another stands nearly up to his chest in the center deepest part of the wading pool, splashing back the screaming invaders of his hard-won territory.
You’re a brave one to hold down the deepest part of the pool, Johnson thinks, when the water is practically over your head. He grins at the boy, until the boy notices. Startled, and seemingly pleased to see an expression of approval from an adult, the boy grins back and waves. Johnson nods as if to tell him to keep up the good fight, then he goes to drink from the water fountain that hasn’t worked in years.
The hot summer breeze blows cold. Johnson rubs his hands, drives them into his pockets, and hugs his coat even more tightly around himself. This one thin layer of wool, he thinks, must be my armor. The couple have run off, out of sight around past the old juvenile hall. Worried about their happiness, Johnson follows after them, out of the playground and down a grassy slope to a gravel path lined with junior hawthorns and Japanese cedars, which runs in front of the building.
But it’s not a juvenile hall anymore, it’s a hospice, and the trees are adults. And Annie often jogs this path, Johnson remembers. He, too. Jogging helps keep them fit. Fitter than others their age. The imposing brick edifice of the hall is long gone, battered down, the smaller Tudor-style hospice grown out of it. The hall had a bathroom, Johnson recalls, with the saddest, vilest, most twisted graffiti he’d ever read and which he’d absorbed while his mother, brother and sister grappled in court.
Around back of the hospice, the hall is being demolished. A wall has toppled. A basement office full of desks, chairs, paper and filing cabinets is exposed to the open air. Johnson has never seen an odder sight. Three teenagers ferret amongst the furniture, hunting for things to vandalize. A pimply kid in glasses finds a jug of something, sniffs it, curses and decants the contents. His friend flicks a lighter to see if it’ll catch. It does. Not greatly. But there’s smoke, and paper aflame on a desk, and they’re pleased. Laughing, they call it a tribute to all those who were captive here. Then they freeze at Johnson’s calm stare. The pimply kid has an edgy glare, fearful yet defiant, intelligent yet rash. Johnson doesn’t think he looks very tough. He looks like the kind who can’t resist risk, so will do it again and again until stopped.
“Do you expect this will make your mark?” Johnson asks.
The fire slowly spreads, but there’s nothing to add to it. Even odds says it goes out. Doesn’t matter - the point is that only Johnson has seen them. And it’s not their moment. The pimply kid shrugs at Johnson, a tacit why not? He and his friends clamber out of the rubble and lope off. Johnson stays and watches. The flame dies. The smoke remains. Johnson shrugs. It’s inevitable.
Something shrieks. Great wings in full spread, a bald eagle glides directly overhead, then swoops down across Wall Street into a Douglas fir bordering two houses. Johnson hurries to the edge of the park, eagerly scans the tree, spies two glowing white heads and a bucket-sized nest in the branches. He wonders if they have an egg up there. Like eagles, he and Annie will mate forever, but nature being fickle, they’ll likely tend their nest alone.
Sometimes he wishes things had worked out different. Growing up, he was self-absorbed, too irresponsible to consider fatherhood; that changed with Annie. Pragmatic, patient and loving, she would have made somebody a wonderful child, as she had made him a wonderful husband. It saddens him when she says it no longer bothers her and he jokes that with their busy lifestyle they would’ve wanted the kid to emerge from the womb seventeen and ready to leave home. Better to be eagles and to just keep going, keep trying, keep flying together, come what may.
Speaking of seventeen, Johnson searches this end of the park for the reunited lovers. Doesn’t see her. He does see him, head down like a bull, striding alone in a patch of midnight through a line of towering poplars. He wears a black leather jacket, wields a knife in one hand, a bottle of rum in the other. If he thinks he isn’t asking for trouble, he isn’t avoiding it either. Maybe he hopes to see what he’s really made of. Maybe his footsteps are all he’s sure of.
Concerned, Johnson follows him onto the big grass field. This green mesa is one-third of the park, one block long and half a block wide, sloping down from the playground to Wall Street. Poplars border one side; cedars, London plane and a sky-high oak edge the other. Annie walks their black lab, Polly, here; lets her off her leash to run with the pack of neighborhood dogs. On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Johnson had counted two dozen dogs in packs according to size. Their owners, strangers all, smiled.
The young boy who sat alone on the monkey bars is with a group of neighborhood kids, sliding down the slope to Wall Street on sheets of cardboard cut from boxes. In winter they’ll use trash can lids. He shoots right out into the middle of Wall Street. It’s okay, there’s no traffic coming. His eyes glow with excitement as the kids celebrate; he went farther than anyone else. The younger kids applaud him. The older kids berate him. Stop trying to show off, be careful, if you’d gotten hurt we’d all be in trouble. He grins as though he has amounted to something.
Johnson stands alone on the field, hugging himself against the summer chill, kicking at a twig, in a bit of a sulk. The moment these kids are having, it’s nothing, it’s a thought in passing, a leaf in a hurricane, gone forever before you realize to who knows where. You might as well search the beach for a particular grain of sand. But if it means nothing, what’s the point in living it?
It hurts too much to hear their voices echoing off the sky. Johnson spins away, and sees the boy who defended the center of the swimming pool playing baseball, with what appears to be every kid for ten square miles plugging up the diamond in hope of becoming a hero. There’s the swing and a solid crack of the bat. The boy takes off on furious feet down a well-worn base path. The ball bounds over outstretched hands, evades colliding bodies. The boy rounds first. The ball, with a mind of its own, skips past short into the outfield. The boy rounds second. The ball rolls to Johnson, who stands in the deepest part of the park. He picks up the ball. He intends to toss it back harmlessly to the nearest kid. He sees the boy halfway between second and third, running all-out, but slowing, apparently not a good runner, not much stamina. Something base, latently cruel and coldly logical, kicks in. As the boy rounds third, Johnson squints, takes aim, and fires a missile straight at the catcher, who waits at home plate. It’s a stellar throw; Johnson is proud. But in mid-air, the ball changes flight, sputters with as much as it ever had on it, and dying drops into twenty bobbling arms between short and the mound. The boy lumbers across home plate – breathless, fists raised, to a few cheers, more laughter – ahead of a last-ditch throw from the field that sails over everybody and thuds off the backstop. Home run!
It’s the end of the inning, and the teams change sides. Overjoyed, his smile unquenchable, the boy trots up to Johnson in the outfield.
“Do you think you’ll ever hit one without help?” Johnson asks.
The boy runs right past, without a glance. Another kid his age joins him. There’s a family resemblance; they’re the same wiry build, the same height for now. They make a beeline for a pair of adolescent cypress trees in the corner of the field with ladder-like branches perfect for climbing. Up they clamber, highest they’ve ever been on their own, to the top of their world, where they sit and discuss confrontations at school and on the street, the changes, reported in the news and by parents, coming down from the war and this peace movement thing, and what it all means. They pretend to be in the thick of it, fighter pilots launching tree-to-tree cypress bud bombs, making blow-up noises, counting hits, laughing, and trying not to fall.
They climb down, and Johnson is mistaken, it’s not the young boy from the pool and the baseball diamond with the kid he looks related to, it’s the pimply kid and the lighter kid from the back of the juvenile hall. They wear leather jackets and long unkempt hair. Cigarettes hang from their lips. As they stride past the hall, a fist shatters a top floor window, middle finger raised, and a wild voice bellows fuck you!
They respond with identically raised fingers. Again – now it seems forever – in a patch of midnight, they make for the playground and park themselves side-by-side in the big swing set. All around them the dark neighborhood keeps a wary distance. Only Johnson dares approach, unseen in shadow. There’s a spark and the air turns thick and sweet. Back and forth the spark is passed, along with a bottle of warm rum and Coke. The conversation is highly intelligent, raw emotion: how this felt, that felt; is pure impression: what this meant, that meant. Is profane, defiant, arrogant, sarcastic, sexual, and tuned to the moment. Johnson savors it as the language of raconteurs and rebels, of philosophers, of teenage kings.
Hey, look over there, says lighter to pimples, aiming the spark at the silhouettes of three similarly-dressed males prowling up the street. At the top of his lungs he shouts fuck off. Their heads turn. Nobody gets away with that shit. Inspired, they proceed into the park.
Whattaya doin’? pimply kid growls, nervous. There’s more ’a them than us.
Lighter kid shrugs, passes the spark back. So what? We’ll fight ‘em.
Turns out they know each other; they’re all friends. The tension evaporates, and Johnson is relieved. They pass the spark, pass the bottle. Whattaya doin’? Nuthin’. Whatta you doin’? Fuck all. Goin’ home? Fuck that. Got drugs? Fuckin’ not enough. Know where there’s more. Oh yeah? Yeah. C’mon, let’s get wasted. They leave together, a midnight posse, the night young. Anyone passing on the street will give them space, loath to discover their capabilities.
Johnson knows what they’re capable of. He takes their place in the big swing set. Grasps the chains, slowly pushes off, swings forward, glides back. Feels like floating on air, remembers this breath of freedom. Squints up into a cold summer sun in a hot summer sky, and thinks about putting one foot after the other, reaching a fork in the road, and choosing. So many forks, so many roads, and so many choices, good and bad. But in the end all his paths led him to Annie.
A chain squeaks. Johnson turns, gazes into this midnight at the kid with the leather jacket and the bottle and the knife who sits in the swing seat beside him. The kid has aged a lot in a short time. He wears a grim, thousand-yard stare, that youthful glory stomped out of him. He knocks his bottle back, lights a cigarette, sighs, the sound sad and lonely – the kind of sound someone makes when his girl has gone, his family are idiots, his few friends wouldn’t understand, tomorrow won’t be any better, so perhaps he should go back and try once again to end it all. His steel-toed boots are soaking wet, water dripping from the laces.
Beyond the park, the trees and houses of Wall Street, and the waterfront and its hypnotic omnipresent hum, the choppy waves of Burrard Inlet glisten in the afternoon sun. Two freighters criss-cross like gigantic. rusty busses. A speedboat zips between them. It makes Johnson want to take up boating. He thinks of Annie, back home, wrapped up, ready to go, and waiting for his return. He finds that the older he gets, the more he appreciates survivors. He reaches out, feels the bottle placed in his hand. With a wry smile, he takes a long, satisfying swig of memory, and hands the bottle back. His last thought, as he gets up from the swing seat, is that he wishes someone had taken a picture of the sky-high oak years ago so he could see how far it has grown.
Mario Lowther lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia in a little village half an hour from the nearest traffic light. His literary and genre short fiction has appeared in over a dozen publications, including The Lorelei Signal, Imaginarium, Books 'n Pieces, Corner Bar Magazine, Collideoscope, and confetti, and a weird fiction, pre-apocalyptic, pseudo political novel is undergoing polishing. This, and his ongoing publishing credits, continue to help convince his goodly wife that he's not just upstairs in the attic goofing off.
