Free The Push & the Pull by Darryl Whetter Page A

big fangs,” he said, referring to the tough, sharp metal cleats mounted into the bottoms of their shoes.
    Biking now, roughly one-third of the distance back to Kingston, these memories rise on one knee and are taken away by the other. Bikes with two fangs. Bi-cycle. Bi-cuspid. Some would say he should add
bi-sexual
to the list.

22
    Blinking awake, alone in the Kingston house, Andrew could feel plaster dust on his face. The pounding in his head was actually audible. After two and a half days of renovations and narcotic ups and downs, he wasn’t expecting human speech. He thought the distant “Hello? Hello?” he heard was sobriety or rational thought knocking at his door. That sobriety called with a woman’s voice didn’t surprise him. Wait, shit, it was Betty.
    He tried to scramble out of bed, not recalling that “bed” was just a mattress he’d thrown here on the floor of the freshly painted orange bedroom. Losing his balance before he ever found it, he stumbled into a pile of empty beer bottles. His only possible recovery was a kind of jackknife dive for the stairwell. When the clatter of beer bottles finally subsided above, so, too, did the knocking below. With some noises unwelcome and others fading, and mental and physical balance so precarious, he was halfway down the stairs before he saw and felt that he wasn’t wearing any pants.
    Someone was visible through the front door’s stained-glass window, and she was turning away.
    â€œBetty. Betty.” His black boxer briefs weren’t that revealing. He wouldn’t make her wait any longer. “I’m here.” From now on, he’d be honest.
    The leaded window was divided into panels of stained glass of varied opacity. Half a dozen panels showed the halt, return and pause of her shoulders. Translucent red, yellow and green brought him clarity and relief. He had fallen asleep during the boozy-druggy renos. She had indeed arrived on the Sunday evening train. His lateral move for the lock carried him past a clear column of window glass. The multiple panels of glass simultaneously revealed her climbing eyebrows and a reflection of drool hanging off his chin.
    She was wearing a V-neck sweater, a skirt, tights and boots, wasincredibly clean. She was also laughing. “You’re drooling and have no pants on. Should I take this as a compliment?”
    Fortunately, the arm he raised to his chin wore a long gash of orange paint.
    She touched it. “Hey. Do tell.”
    â€œCome in. Will show.” He gestured to the stairs. “First room on your right.”
    On the climb up, her ass swept everything from his mind. Finally awake and rational again, he prepared a disclaimer, rolled “I needed to paint anyway, so don’t feel obligated to stay” to the tip of his tongue, when he saw a charge surge up from the base of her spine. She turned one way then another in the orange room, checking light and layout, appraising the colours first with her eyes wide open then with them half-shut. Looking at the floor, which he had painted a milky blue, she had every excuse to stare at his legs and the collar of black cotton stretched around each of his muscular thighs.
    Ostensibly he was lifting a lamp off the floor to shed more light when she turned back and made his brightly lit forearm the longest erogenous zone on his body. She scraped two fingers down the outside of his arm so lightly that mostly the fine hairs were touched, not the skin. A small sheet of plaster dust slipped from his arm to hang briefly in the air between them.
    â€œDivorce dust, people call it,” she said, cutting one finger through the dispersing white cloud.
    â€œ
Divorce?
Already? Aren’t we doing things a little backwards?”
    â€œYeah,” she said, lowering to the mattress and turning, “we can do backwards.”

23
    On the bike, any desire is a weight. Twenty-seven postcards. The well-folded map. Even a tiny