Read Online Happiness of Fish by Fred Armstrong - Free Book Online

“That’s been torn down for years.”
    It wasn’t a very sad wake. Driscoll was old and had been sick the last few years. Gerry was re-introduced to the other kids, all of them his age at least. There were two sons with Florida golfers’ tans. They seemed somehow impressed that Gerry could have drunk with their father and still be alive to tell the tale.
    â€œHere’s a man who used to go down to Frankie’s place with Dad.”
    â€œI remember him boasting about you the year you won some big golf tournament, a junior club championship?”
    â€œGod! That must have been what, ’73, ’74?”
    Later, Gerry drove home with the window down for the first time that year. You could tell it was really spring. The dotted lines and arrowson the streets bloomed bright white in the headlights, repainted and vivid after fading to nothing in the winter’s salt. Visibility of street markings is becoming what Gerry has now learned to call “an issue” with him. On wet nights in late winter and early spring, he sometimes wonders what lane he’s driving in. Recalling the brightness of the lines that night, Gerry reflects that now they’re starting to fade again under this year’s December salt.
    â€œTempus certainly does fugit,” he says aloud.

four
DECEMBER 2003
    Gerry is in the mall for his final rush of Christmas shopping. He has a strategy for mall-stalking in the last days before Christmas; catch it while it’s still asleep. He gets up in darkness and drives through the quiet streets where there are only a few luminously striped joggers. The ones he sees are the skinny Spandex variety with the bright glowing V’s that seem to point to the middle of their backsides. Is it supposed to focus attention on the fitness of the bum or give you a central aiming point? Gerry is an inconsistent jogger at best, and, when he does jog, he wears a pair of ancient Zellers sweatpants and an old sweatshirt. The black long-underwear look of this morning’s joggers isn’t for him. If you’re going out in tights you have to hark back to the Tudors, he thinks, although even they needed a sort of post-feudal ferocity to carry it off. Essex or Drake or some of Lady Jane Grey’s tribe could get away with it because they’d thunder into your courtyard and impale you on your own maypole over a slow fire. At the other end of the scale, Malvolio and Osric come down to us as fashion fools.
    â€œA hit, a very palpable hit,” Gerry mutters, mowing down joggers in his imagination.
    The parking lot is almost empty when Gerry pulls in. With no cars, you can appreciate its bald topography, actually rolling over a low rise in the middle so it sheds rain. The ploughs and salt crews have been out and you can see the painted stalls on bare pavement, although the hills all around are ghostly with light new snow on the trees. Gerry parks carefully between the painted lines in the centre of the empty lot. He points the front of the Honda out into the hypothetical traffic lane for a quick getaway in case the shoppers turn nasty.
    â€œS-A-S parking,” Gerry says to himself. Years ago he bought the Special Air Service survival book and learned to avoid snakes like tai pans and bushmasters if they ever slithered into Newfoundland. He read up on how to boil the goldfish and drink the water as you tried to outlive the neighbours after nuclear Armageddon. So far the need hasn’t arisen. However, he parks, nose-out, for a quick getaway.
    In the mall, he finds one coffee shop open earlier than the others. He carries a foam cup with him to the barber shop that is part of this morning’s plan. The barber opens at seven. A haircut and the morning papers will occupy him until Wal-Mart opens in an hour or so.
    The barbershop is a transplant from downtown and is old-fashioned in a modern sort of way. According to framed clippings on the walls, when it started up in the