Goth Girls of Banff by John O'Neill

Author:John O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NeWest Press
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

2 Over Eastern Canada, May, 2008

I’M A WHITE-KNUCKLER, WHEN IT COMES TO FLYING. Never thought about what that phrase meant, white-knuckled, till the first time I flew, crabbed my fingers under the armrests, drilled my heels under my seat, as though I was outside the plane and hanging on. Especially on takeoffs and landings, or in turbulence. I imagine the cabin depressurizing, expanding like a small doomed universe, big mushy skull. Or we’ll explode in a midair horror, a Cessna off course, drifting into our flight path. Anyways, don’t like it. But Dad, sitting next to me, is gloomy but fearless, and I blame him for my fear, my continuous pre- and post-flight nightmare. He’s perpetually bitching about the stupidity of his fellow man, and the cruelty of fate, and the galling unfairness of just about everything.

I read an article once that argued that the young are concerned with justice, the old with mercy. Not Dad. He doesn’t correspond in any remote way with this, seems to have lived his life backwards, more bitter now than when he was younger. I can’t picture him without the question mark of white hair sprouting from his widow’s peak, or his scowl.

Hasn’t hurt his appetite. On the plane, he eats everything. Before I’ve peeled my applesauce cup, he’s polished off his whole tray: the weird salmon shepherd’s pie, stale hockey puck roll, the mini apple cake (where do they make these things, there must be a miniature bakery somewhere, rows of tiny pans and measuring cups and raccoon-like hands furious and fastidious on a shrunken, flour-flecked assembly line). I tell him he looks crazy, fish flakes on his chin. He doesn’t wipe them away, but catches them on his fingers, licks them up.

“Small food,” he complains, so loudly that heads turn. “Not enough for a cat. Should have taken VIA. Too slow though. Once, goin’ to Montreal, train stopped for two hours, wouldn’t tell us what the delay was.”

He opens the little wrapped oatmeal cookie I gave him earlier, takes a niggling bite, drops the crescent moon into his shirt pocket, not wanting to waste anything, and determined—and this is it with my dad, this is the crux of everything, the crux of him, if you like—to get everything that’s coming to him.

“No good way to travel,” I say, trying to calm things by agreeing, also nodding at the young woman across the aisle, who gives us an annoyed glance every time Dad speaks. She has cold blue eyes in a white, doll-like face, eyebrows thread-thin and black, but our eyes meet and she softens. She understands that I’m just as bothered by my father’s complaining.

With irritation reddening his neck and hairs curling against the collar of his red plaid shirt (I’ve told him he needs to get his barber to shave him there, guy he’s been seeing for some thirty years, probably stone blind) he says, as if responding to something I’ve said, “Wrote to Harper. Still haven’t heard back. Sure it’s in some slush pile.

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