The Path of Most Resistance Read online

  Also by Russell Wangersky

  Walt

  Whirl Away (Stories)

  The Glass Harmonica

  Burning Down the House (Memoir)

  The House of Bad Decisions (Stories)

  The Path of Most Resistance

  Stories

  Russell Wangersky

  Copyright © 2016 Russell Wangersky

  Published in Canada in 2016 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  All of the events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wangersky, Russell, 1962–, author

  The path of most resistance / Russell Wangersky.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4870-0068-4 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-4870-0069-1 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A5333P38 2016 C813’.6 C2016-900848-7

  C2016-900849-5

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover image: Steven Puetzer/Getty Images

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For those who fight the hardest to win the

  smallest of battles. You know who you are.

  CONTENTS

  Rage

  Armenia

  Bide Awhile

  Baggage

  Official Rules for Pool

  Snow

  The Path of Most Resistance

  The Revolution

  Collections

  Darden Place

  Farewell Tour

  Three Days

  Heavy Load

  Rage

  Ian was returning from his doctor’s office when he saw the first angry driver at the corner of Belvedere and Circular Road, where the road takes a flat, shallow curve to the left and Circular Road just gives up and stops.

  The woman was in the front seat of a burgundy SUV, one of those big cars that Ian thought had a way of pushing the driver up behind the wheel, surveying the rabble in front of them. Ian watched her at the stop sign as he drove closer, sure that she was going to dart out in front of him, ignoring the stop. He was good at anticipating the drivers who swerved suddenly without using their turn signals, good at being ready to brake for the ones who slowed enough at stop signs for you to believe they were stopping before they took the foolish chance and darted out into a space in traffic too narrow for their cars to fit.

  Ian was watching her face to see if she’d seen him. He would regularly tell his friends that he thought his car was the colour “invisible” because so many drivers seemed oblivious to him when they turned or stopped or started.

  It was late August by then and all the greens in the city had already gone dusty and flat, except for the ones that had already given up and headed toward brown or yellow. Everything appeared in the kind of colours that intuitively tell you that, no matter how hot it still is, the summer is really over. And it had been a hot one, the kind of summer that people would use as a measuring stick for years to come: “It’s still not as hot as the summer we had four years ago …” There had been very little rain, but the nights were cool, as if the open, cloudless skies at night let the rooftops and the ground simply throw the heat of the day back out into space.

  Ian was thinking about all of that as his car swung into the turn onto Belvedere, just before he glanced over at the woman in the still-stopped car and saw that she was angry. Very angry. She glared at him, clearly mad enough that she wanted him to know and didn’t care what he thought about it.

  Why is she mad at me? That was Ian’s first thought, and he couldn’t help but play back the last few seconds in his memory to see if there was something that he had done. Had he touched the brakes, slowing in the way that suggests to another driver that they’ve been offered some dangerous courtesy? Had his turn signal stayed on after turning onto Belvedere? Was he going too fast? He couldn’t think of anything he’d done that would have put him at fault.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror and was relieved to see the woman turn the other way, even though she hadn’t been signalling a left turn. After seeing her face, Ian hadn’t wanted her to be behind him, didn’t want that anger tucked right up behind his bumper, tight and tailgating and fuming.

  Ian was sure that most accidents happened because of drivers just like her, people who turned their cars around too fast or hugged your bumper too tight, like pressurized containers ready to let loose after the tiniest tap of a rear-ender. Some people, he thought, drive cars like their vehicles are instruments of their emotions, a great steel-and-glass-and-plastic piece of their psyches reaching out onto the road. You can get away with that for a while, Ian thought, then one day you call it too close, trust brakes and traction too much, and everyone’s supposed to treat the inevitable as if it was an accident. Accident — he thought about the word, about how so many people applied it to things that weren’t accidental at all. An accident is supposed to happen by chance, not at the conclusion of a long, but eminently solvable, equation.

  Ian was returning from his annual checkup at the doctor. Dr. Antle had held both of Ian’s arms loosely in his grip, like there was something on them that he didn’t want to touch, even with the protection of gloves.

  Dr. Antle looked at the brown, tanned skin on Ian’s left arm, pointed to three little jagged islands of mole, and said just one word — “melanoma” — and of course Ian knew exactly what that meant. Dr. Antle said “dermatologist” and “prognosis” and “serious,” but Ian had stopped listening after that first heavy word.

  Afterwards, Ian sat in the front seat of his car with the window down and looked at the way his elbow stuck out the window on the driver’s side, like it always did, like it was designed to rest right there. Then he pulled his arm back in the window and held it up close to his eyes so that he could focus his vision in tight on the brown skin, on the fine, long hairs that poked up and fell over, all leaning in the same direction like trees bent by a prevailing and constant wind. Ian looked at the plane of his skin with its thousands of small careful interlocking wrinkles and at the patches that had so concerned Dr. Antle. The three ragged-edged blotches that had been there for as long as he could remember. A little familiar collection of raised spots on his arm, no more frightening than any other bump or mole.

  Ian then rolled the window up, determined to keep his arm away from the sun, but as he pulled into traffic and the car warmed, he almost immediately and absent-mindedly rolled the window down again, and settled his arm back into its usual place.

  As he drove home — the route laid out in his head without even really thinking about it, Belvedere, then Empire, onto the Crosstown, and then into the west end — his mind cleared itself of everything except for the map in his head.

  At the second light on Empire — the one by the all-night drugstore and the housing project — he was the first car in line and all the traffic was stopped, waiting whil
e the green turning arrow flashed.

  Ian looked across at the cars stopped at the light, peering at the drivers in each one, trying to decide if they would turn right on the red or try to jump quickly with the green. In a small car to the left, he saw two people, a young couple. Ian realized that they were angrily and carefully not looking at each other, their faces absolutely rigid. The man had dark hair, and his mouth was clenched tightly enough that the jaw muscle stood out like a sharply defined slab on the side of his face. The woman was pushed over against the door, her body language indicating that she’d push her way right out through the side of the car if she could.

  When the light changed and their car drove by in front of his, the woman caught Ian staring, and, while he wouldn’t have thought it possible a moment earlier, her expression became even darker. Why does everyone seem so angry today, Ian wondered. Everyone was angry except him. Ian couldn’t manage angry, despite Dr. Antle’s news.

  I’ve always been careful about everything, Ian thought. Careful about letting people know too much about me, careful about my heart and exercise and eating well — a hard thing to do when your job is always being on the road — and careful, always careful, while driving.

  Ian had been a pharmaceutical rep for twenty-five years. He had been on the road non-stop with a briefcase of colourful literature and foil-backed bubble-pack samples of new drugs or fancy new formulations of old drugs. He didn’t mind the work — didn’t even really think about the work — not even when he was driving, and more than anything else, the job was about driving.

  He’d already logged thousands of kilometres that summer, long drives that kicked out to the very edge of his territory, buying coffee and the occasional lunch for tired doctors and harried-looking office staff. He was good at his job because he didn’t actually try to sell anything.

  The doctors he visited spent his entire visit waiting for the start of the sales pitch, for the hard sell, for a push to prescribe the latest wonder drug, the expensive one with just a few barely noticeable side effects. Dry mouth, almost always. Headaches. Vivid dreams. “If you notice any of these symptoms … call your doctor.” The doctors waited for his pitch, so there would be a clear spot when they could stop him and tell him they weren’t interested.

  But Ian didn’t sell. He listened while the doctors talked about their workloads, about difficult patients, about the provincial government’s curious intransigence about paying for the services the doctors provided. Ian left samples, answered any questions, and then he got in his car and drove away, leaving the pleased, but mystified, physicians behind. Doctors were the same everywhere, Ian thought, they all had too many patients and too little time, expected to listen to every little thing, and packed tight with everybody else’s problems. Never able to talk about themselves.

  Sometimes he looked at his sales numbers at the end of the month — sales numbers that were remarkably high compared to the other staff in his division — and wondered if some small part of the high totals was a guilty sort of medicinal thank-you, as if the doctors were paying him back for his time, the time he spent quietly listening, silently waiting to get back on the road.

  One June afternoon, a doctor in Burgeo had even asked him to come home for dinner with his family. Ian had gone, following the path of least resistance more than anything else, but he thought about it later and wondered if any other reps had ever experienced the same thing. He asked himself if any other rep would even have considered the invitation. Or if the doctor would even have extended it to a different salesman.

  Dinner was in a small square light blue house up over the ocean. It was just Ian, the doctor, his wife, and a small daughter. Ian noticed that every single time the daughter needed something, it was the doctor’s wife, Anne, who got up from her chair.

  “Rural practice was my idea,” Dr. Burton said. “Giving something back and all that. But give and take seems to be mostly take.”

  There was sun out on the water, flickering in a loose semaphore, the air still, with the noise of chainsaws and car engines seeming to cut through the quiet from great distances. Ian looked at Anne, at the hollows around her eyes, and wondered how long they would stay in the town.

  The phone rang four times during dinner, and in the quiet of the house, Ian listened to Anne murmuring softly, but sternly, into the phone, convincing patients they could wait until morning.

  After dinner, they sat at the table without speaking. Anne took their daughter away to get ready for bed, and Ian felt for a moment as if there was something that Dr. Burton wanted to tell him, as if there was an important fistful of words he wanted to bring up but couldn’t force up his throat. Instead, the doctor told Ian a complicated story about how inshore fishermen had once used tarred twine ropes in their nets and often held the ropes with their teeth when they needed an extra hand, and how there had been regular mouth and lip cancers among fishermen. There wasn’t a definitive link, the doctor said, but the cancers had almost completely disappeared with the arrival of nylon rope.

  Ian was almost certain the story had more to do with Dr. Burton than it had to do with fishermen, but he was too tired to try and work out just what the point was.

  After that, Ian said good night and drove to a bed and breakfast he’d stayed in a dozen times before and slept in the next morning until almost ten, safe in the knowledge that, unlike Dr. Burton, there was not a single phone being dialled that could possibly be looking for him.

  The next morning he set out on the long drive back up the west coast of the province, watching each curving brook and patch of bog that shouldered in against the highway, and he wondered whether Burton and his wife were still talking about their quiet guest.

  Ian had headed north, thinking about a limestone beach on the Northern Peninsula, a beach of solid pale sheets of grey-white limestone, and about the way individual plants — a beach pea here, a swamp iris there — would force their way up through cracks in the rock, barely any soil in sight, and throw their flowers up and open against the sky, a home in a completely inhospitable, hostile spot. Fighting their way through, imposing their own pattern of life. He thought about those plants all the way back to St. John’s, a drive he had made so many times that he could walk through it on the backs of his eyelids with his eyes closed, although, this time, he found he couldn’t remember a single piece of the trip by the next morning.

  It was all chance and bad timing, Dr. Antle had said, sitting safely back behind his desk and looking at Ian over a piled wall of patient files with their multicoloured numbered tabs. The room looked like any one of a thousand other doctors’ offices, Ian thought. Examining table along one side, a paper cover ready to rip off and change for the next patient, and the next. The disposable coverings made him think about disposable patients, even though Dr. Antle hadn’t rushed him at all. It always amazed Ian how many doctors’ offices he could gather up in his memory, and how often they had a low-rent, down-at-the-mouth feeling, like they were a business on their last legs. Except they never really were.

  “Do the same thing a hundred times and nothing happens. Then do it just one more time and a cell changes …” Dr. Antle had a way of letting his sentences drop off at the end, Ian thought, like you were supposed to write your own logical endings to everything he said.

  So it was all just chance. Ian couldn’t stop thinking about that one little crucial starting cell, about how any number of things could have changed along the way. Maybe it could have rained on whatever sunny day it was and that little genetic squiggle might have turned left instead of right.

  Maybe it was something more definite: some cell fighting the good fight, but pushed to the edge of its ability to fight off a looming blip of mutation. Then failing, falling over the edge, putting up the white flag, and surrendering. The cancer cells announcing, “There’s a new sheriff in town …”

  Ian thought about how there was a quick fix for everything. For his nascent cancer, maybe something as abrupt as a car accident, maybe some pa
ssing vehicle on a narrow highway cutting back in too soon on a dangerous yellow-line curve, the side of some stranger’s car pancaking into his and slicing his hanging arm off. That would serve it right, he thought, thinking for a moment about how he would have to pull his belt tight around the stump with only one hand to stop the bleeding, and how useful it would be that his car had an automatic transmission and he’d still have one hand left to drive.

  But Dr. Antle had also said “metastasized.” He said it like there was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but Ian had registered the weight of it anyway. There was paperwork to do, specialist appointments to be made, biopsies and medical hand-offs to be done. Dr. Antle talked about fighting the cancer, but nothing about it seemed like a fight to Ian: just right now, it felt like an indeterminate fall down a suddenly steep hill. So he had listened, taken the referral documents, and headed back for the security of his car.

  A dump truck passed Ian on the inside lane when he was going up Columbus Drive, and he realized he’d been hogging the passing lane when the dump truck driver carefully, and deliberately, gave him the finger. The driver was sitting up high enough that Ian couldn’t really make out his face, just his hand in the window like a picture framed in a truck door.

  There are a lot of new houses over there now, Ian thought, looking to his right. Rows of them. New houses, all put up at once, each one painted from a steady range of colours drawn from one single palette. He imagined what the paint colours might be called: Long Dune and Umber Sedge and Wicker Blue, all the houses built to fit together into some kind of synchronized whole. And there’d be more, he thought, spreading out in a slow-moving homogenous wave, a multicelled, developing organism.

  Something had happened, Ian thought, and not just on his arm, either. Something had happened to time: it was already August, and yet it seemed that, only moments before, it had been May. Time was collapsing in on itself, speeding up every year faster, every season shorter. Maybe if I’d done things differently, Ian thought. Maybe if I’d gotten married, had some kids, but maybe that wouldn’t have changed anything. I don’t know, he thought. But maybe if I had a family, there would at least be someone to tell. Faces to crumple, because they cared.