Free Knucklehead & Other Stories by W. Mark Giles Page B

Al was happy and sad. Happy that everyone else was still alive. But he had come to look forward to the book during his sales trips. He even toyed with the idea of making up the deaths of imagined characters.
    He began to carry the whole book with him on the road. He would sit in hotel rooms, flipping through the pages. Occasionally, he would edit an entry, re-word a description, perhaps add a postscript. He started using a purple pen for the corrections, so he could keep track of the changes. He tabulated the various causes of deaths. He sorted the entries by name, by gender, by age. He compared the numbers.
    One night at home, after four days on the prairies, he lay in bed with his hands clasped behind his head. “I never knew anyone who drowned,” he announced. Sandra extinguished the light and crawled in beside him. “That’s good,” she said.
    Two weeks later, Al started a new entry:
    Stan Walker
Fell off a boat into Lake Ontario.
    VIII. End
    Al hunched over a table in The Anvil. For last call he ordered a beer, a Bushmills, a coffee, a Coke, and a water. He made notes on a napkin. He had an idea to write something, a movie or a novel maybe, featuring his dead people. It might help justify the existence of his book of the dead.
    Since Stan’s drowning, the liver failure of his father, and then the sudden brain cancer of his health-nut boss, Al had begun to chafe under the burden of maintaining the book. It scared him. As he grew older, the book would grow thicker. He felt like he was in a room where the walls moved closer when he wasn’t looking, and his chest tightened whenever his mind thought of someone still alive who might one day be dead. As if just thinking about it could make it happen. Sandra. His kids. He needed that whisky. If he lived long enough, his would be the only name missing.
    When the waitress brought his round of drinks, he gulped the Bushmills then drained the water. As she cleared the table, she reached to pick up the napkins he was using for notepaper. Al gripped her wrist hard.
    She twisted out of his grasp and gave him a look. “What’s with you anyways, mister?”
    â€œI’m writing,” he said.

Misdirection
    Ice tumbles out of the pitcher and into her glass as the waitress tops up her water. “Are you ready to order, or do you want to wait a few more minutes?” Viola checks her watch: almost an hour. She wonders if her daughter is at another restaurant. It’s not that hard to do, really, she thinks. Like the time Vi got on the wrong bus for the cross-country ski outing. It could have happened to anybody. She saw the bus parked in the shopping centre across from the Jewish Community Centre. A gentleman stood next to it holding a pair of skis. She pulled up and rolled her window down a crack—it was bitterly cold—and asked him, “Is this the bus for the Kananaskis trip?” And the man said, “You bet.” She parked her car, loaded her skis, and got on.
    She wants water with no ice, but the waitress keeps crowding the glass with cubes. The lunch rush is slowing. Men in suits scribble signatures on credit card slips. A trio of bank tellers gathers purses and jackets from the backs of their chairs. The garrulous line-up of those waiting at the door has disappeared. Her daughter Joy is never late, certainly not an hour. “Didn’t you notice that there wasn’t anyone on the bus you knew?” Joy had asked about the ski trip.
    â€œWell, when I got on there were only two or three others. I didn’t pay much attention, I guess.” Vi had put on her headphones, loaded the tape of her talking book—they were doing a Maeve Binchy for her club that month—and took out her knitting. It was only when the bus stopped an hour and a quarter later—not at the William Watson Lodge but at the Delta Hotel—that she really noticed the absence of “my Jewish ladies,” as she calls them. Most