Free Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe

streets after the pool room shut, on the prowluntil our knees ached, hoping against all previous experience that something exciting would happen and we would be there to witness it. But the only thing that ever happened was that a police cruiser would stop and the officers tell us it was three o’clock in the morning, get the hell home you two.
    Kurt was possessed but he didn’t look the way possessed people ought to, the way Norman Hiller did. Norman fit the bill because he was an exposed wire, sparking, jerking, snapping, hot with current. Kurt was the furthest thing from that. He was big and slow and solid. He walked like a man hip-deep in molasses, wading upstream against the flow of the current. But he was possessed.
    Whenever I shut up long enough to give him an opening, he would jump in with something like, “I think I’ll take up golf.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah. I think I’m suited to golf. All you need is hand-eye coordination and concentration. Concentration is my strong point.”
    “Sure it is.”
    “If I practised real hard I should do good. I got what it takes.”
    “Right.”
    Hopeless.
    For as long as I’d known him, Kurt Meinecke had been in search of his game, the one that would prove what he knew deep down inside – that he was an extraordinary athlete. He was a Meinecke, which meant that he had the bloodlines of a champion. His father and all his uncles had been locally celebrated athletes, renowned hockey players and baseball players and players of every other game that idle, foolish men will play. It was even said that his Uncle Rudy Meinecke would have made the NHL if he hadn’t caught his right hand in a power take-off which chewed four of his fingers off.
    Kurt was a different story. It wasn’t so much that he was bad at sports, only appallingly average. Yet his consistent failure to shine on the fields of glory did nothing to shake his bedrock, imperturbable self-confidence that he was destinedfor greatness. He always spoke of this as a given and obvious. And he tried everything, a hundred schemes to locate and free the springs of his talent. His batting problems would be solved if he switched from batting right-handed to left-handed. They weren’t. He’d be a much better hockey player if he moved from forward to defence. He wasn’t. A typical conversation with Kurt Meinecke might run something like this.
    “It’s too bad we don’t play lacrosse around here. That’d be the game for me, you can get a running start and really pop somebody in lacrosse. That’s my problem at football, from the down position I can’t work up a good head of steam to pop anybody. I’m the kind of guy needs a head of steam to be effective.”
    There were times when this serene absence of self-doubt worked on my nerves terribly, festered until I believed there was no help for it, I was going to tell him. Of course, I never did. Truly sweet and gentle souls never get told what the rest of us do. Kurt Meinecke was so incorrigibly innocent that whenever I rehearsed the cynicism and world-weariness I intended to adopt when I was loosed upon the great cities of the world, he would smile uncomfortably, duck his head, and waddle along just a little bit more quickly in that goofy, toes-turned-out walk he had, as if seeking to put distance between himself and the nasty things being said.
    Norman and Kurt weren’t strangers, our town was too small for that, but they never had much to do with one another. Hiller wasn’t interested in collecting the likes of Meinecke, someone who, on the surface, was as dull as ditch water and twice as murky. But then one afternoon Norman sensed a possibility, leaned over, peered into the ditch and saw all the way down, clear to the bottom. I was there when it happened.
    Kurt and I were planted on a bench in the pool room. Meinecke was droning on and I was pretending to be preoccupied with a couple of senior citizens shooting a game of blue ball so I didn’t have to wax too