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  ANTICIPATED RESULTS

  © 2011 by Dennis E. Bolen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  #101-211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC

  Canada V6A 1Z6

  arsenalpulp.com · dennisbolen.com

  Photograph of the author by Patrik Jandak

  “Kitty” appeared in The Arabesques Review, October 2006

  “I Drove” appeared in The Scrivener, McGill University, December 2006

  “Fractionating” appeared in Front & Centre, Autumn 2007

  “Anger” is anthologized in Body Breakdowns: Tales of Illness and Recovery, Anvil Press, 2007

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Printed and bound in Canada on 100% PCW recycled paper

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bolen, Dennis E. (Dennis Edward), 1953-

  Anticipated results [electronic resource] / Dennis E. Bolen.

  Electronic monograph in PDF format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-417-7

  I. Title.

  PS8553.O4755A78 2011a C813′.54 C2011-900765-7

  In Memory of

  Bruce Serafin

  “This is how things are.”

  Contents

  PART ONE: PROBLEM

  Paul’s Car

  Bip, Bip, Bip ...

  I Drove

  The Pathetics

  A.A./N.A.

  Detox

  PART TWO: PROCESS

  Fractionating

  Wood Mountain

  Circumspection Man

  Kitty

  One of the Winters

  PART THREE: OUTCOME

  Rocks, Ice, and Snow

  Clean or Dirty?

  Anticipated Results

  Qualicum Beach

  Anger

  Liza’s Gig

  Arch Sots and Tosspots

  PART ONE: PROBLEM

  Paul’s Car

  In his sleep he thought to call out.

  When he woke up, as Paul tells it, he still had to fight for comprehension. When you drive 100,000 kilometres a year over the same terrain and in your working life you have worn a dozen hardy vehicles into scrap and you have heard about other people being hit, but never yourself, and don’t take notice of vehicular accidents when they are featured in sanguinous detail on the TV news, it takes time to understand that you yourself have been halted, battered, and nearly slain, deprived of routine and separated from comfort—T-boned actually, and flung into a water-filled ditch—by a truck running a stop sign.

  A mystery truck, it turned out. Damage to its front end did not disable it enough to prevent the driver—Paul never knew if it was a man or woman—fleeing the scene.

  •

  He leaves for the cab-stand every 4:15 a.m., Paul does.

  Drives the Honda to pick up a sublet mid-nineties Caprice Classic with 400,000-plus klicks. His wheel manner on the flat empty roads is automaton, near-doze, eighteen-year taxi-professional.

  Touch the computer screen. The log-in routine.

  On this day, around 4:45, Paul’s readout paid him a trip from somewhere out in the woods.

  Hints of sunrise etched the open areas. He sped along alone, liking the open pavement before him and secret dark of low scrub. In the absence of traffic he kept the cab mid-road, away from the watercourses on either hand.

  A pickup truck with no lights materialized from the trees to his right. He watched sidelong, noting its progress over the culvert, past the stop sign, expanding in size as it came on toward him across the gravelled apron.

  Paul was reluctant to accept that something was about to happen, given the cab/truck/speed/intersection vector. After too long he could only think about moving his brake foot. But brain and thought and movement were a slush of conflicts in this moment of inaction. At point of impact he was astounded at the persistence of his disbelief—denying visible evidence—even as he launched from the seat sideways, the open side of the shoulder belt letting him fly.

  •

  The city is an exploding suburb on a Fraser River delta named Lulu—after a San Francisco dance-hall performer—a vast murk of silt, deep channels of mosquito-rich water, condominium developments, shopping malls, airport, and vast groves of thick alder forest. Relevancies to Paul on an average day would have to do with where in the week it was (Friday), the season (spring), religious holiday if any (when the Sikh or Hindu drivers might be at temple), whether or not the cruise ships were in (meaning a possible 300-dollar day and tips in US funds), the cost of fuel, how efficient was the dispatcher. Et cetera.

  But now within the shock-charge of danger, time was static, lacking value and length. He couldn’t remember anything and he forgot nothing; driving, losing track, waiting out the transition between recall and oblivion. His mind was full of something—he couldn’t tell what—and empty. He stifled a mental chuckle, flying cross-cab alone, at just how much he had of nothing. Nothing was his primary possession. Even the steering wheel lately in his hands was borrowed. The seatbelt now loose enough to let him leave was not of his possession. His life might be accounted for by phantoms, trading in ellipses, haggling over conceptions. Otherwise and essentially, Paul’s life to him now was just a lot of impalpable motoring.

  •

  He was alone when he came to, the cab capsized driver-side in ditchwater. He hung hooked, part-way through the passenger window; arm and shoulder paining him awake, glass in hair, lower body hanging across the length of the front seat. Shoeless feet grappling at the steering wheel.

  Paul tried to ignore the granular glass chewing at his armpit and shifted, but barely, because of pain. He noticed a bothersome clamour about him in the air; whining, slamming, cracking, and grunting. He stopped, disgusted to hear himself struggle so. Weirdly, save for his gasping and despite the discomfort, he could appreciate the calm of the morning. After a moment he could discern the slow ticking of the cab’s dead motor and a malevolent rumble from somewhere mysteriously below.

  Silence.

  Then the rumble again.

  The car, he divined, was slipping downward. Several minutes passed, by his reckoning, before Paul mentally received the significance of this.

  And worse, as he struggled with one good hand to find relief from the aches grinding at him, he did finally disengage from the jagged window and slump coiled into the wet side of the car.

  The cold jolted him. His clothes went chill so rapidly his heart stopped for an instant. He marvelled that he could keep breathing. The side windows were gone. In the gloom he could sense water flow around the upholstery. Noticeable current. Level rising. He turned himself around so that his face was out of the water. Pain became like a separate character, nearly addressable; the shoulder panged its own special torture. There was blood on his good arm where it had brushed his head.

  Paul wondered how long this might go on before he screamed. He spat a mouthful of mouldy water, tried to raise himself by way of a one-armed chin-up on the gear shift. He fell back down. The car shifted again, a deeper stream of ditch water sluiced him. A shiver seized him from anus to scalp and nearly blacked his vision. He came to understand that he might not have much more consciousness in which to arrange survival.

  Then through the deadly ditch quiet the first bars of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” sang to him from
wherever his cell phone had settled. Paul manoeuvred head and arm around, ignoring agony, and could discern it nowhere. He generally kept it in his inside jacket pocket, but it wasn’t there now. If it were, he reasoned, it would not be ringing because it would have been water-shorted.

  But it warbled on, regular and blasé. “Doncha know that I love you …” To shuddering Paul, Iron Butterfly now represented a confounding normalcy, oddly insulting under the circumstances. “Doncha know that I’ll always be true …” But then this strangeness of mood passed and the chime brought him clarity. “Oh woncha come with me, and take my hand?” He belched a laugh-cry and coughed at the pain deep in his chest. This grave tune—“And walk this land …”—he understood, and the simple act of answering it, might well contain his life.

  The phone sang and sang. He could not see it. The song stopped. Exhausted to the marrow, he settled back down. His gaze tracked up toward the subtle morning light-rise, taunting sweetly through the grey hole of the passenger window. The car settled again and the dash lights flickered and dulled.

  Paul saw then where the cell phone was.

  A green glow blinked at him from the hand-well of the passenger door, just below the latch. The missed-call flasher. Paul gazed with welling eyes. He raised his good arm, then let it fall back down, sapped and paralyzed, despairing, ready to swear and sob, straining for an impossible levitation. Cold, he realized, was near killing him. His injuries alone immobilized him. The phone might as well have been on the other side of town.

  Whether or not the phone was his actual salvation is one of those speculative questions we would debate over drinks years into the future. Later that day at the bar Paul confessed that he simply cried, wept effusively for a long time.

  “It wasn’t just my buggered-up arm and hypothermic body that I was grieving about. I was cursing at the down-time it was going to cost …”

  “Somewhat presumptuous of you at that point, no? To assume you’d have time of any kind. Down or otherwise.” Bill diluted his pessimism by taking a drink in mid-interruption. “But okay. What happened next?”

  “I tried a couple of more times to get the phone.”

  “You mean you didn’t?”

  “Hell no. I was bogged in that water with seatbelts tangled in my legs. Freezing. Shoulder hanging off me like a chunk of butchered meat. I couldn’t get near it.”

  “So stop killing us with suspense. What finally happened?”

  “I passed out.” Paul smiled slightly, enjoying—I strongly suspected—the sight of eyes upon him around the table, hands upon pints, breaths held. “Then some guys came along and pulled me out.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yup.”

  “They just happened by and saved your skin?”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “Who were these guys?”

  “Don’t know. Cops say they didn’t leave their names.”

  “And this all happened this morning?”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s why you’re here, like …” Bill checked his watch. “About an hour early?”

  Paul flicked his wrist. “Damn. My Bulova is gone.”

  We all sat a minute.

  Gus signalled for the server to bring us more. “When does all this bandage-work come off?”

  “Damned if I know. They were so busy in there I got up on my own and buggered off.”

  “You just left? Without saying goodbye?”

  “Why not?”

  “You didn’t get an official discharge from the hospital?”

  “I’m gone. They must know that.”

  “Wow, man.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Paperwork. They hate that kind of stuff.”

  “Prob’ly looking all over for you.”

  “Well I was fine. My clothes were dry and hanging off the back of a chair. Wasn’t going to stick around.”

  “Did they pump you fulla dope?”

  “They gave me something but it didn’t do much good.” Paul gulped at his drink. “It still hurts all over.”

  “So anyway, and by the by …” I smiled at Paul as much as I could, but the bandage at his temple fretted me. “You probably shouldn’t be drinking.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be handing out unsolicited advice.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “If you say so.” I took a drink. “How was business before all this happened?”

  “Considering the fact I didn’t even get my first fare of the day, crappy.”

  “Well … nevertheless. I don’t know about you, but I think this goes to show what I’ve always said about your work.”

  Paul grimaced. “Which was what again?”

  “In view of its demonstrated association with sudden death, that driving cab is not irrelevant.”

  Bill plunked his empty glass on the table. “Is that s’posed to be funny?”

  The server put a new one in front of Paul, who smiled up at her. “Driving cab in and of itself is one of life’s most deadening fates, an admission of non-life. Serious as all hell if you think about it.” He frowned at me. “But a life-threatening car accident is the most banal thing in the world. The two together equal nothing. The two together have no relationship in view of the fact that one is slow and one is quick, a person chooses one and blunders into the other.” He took a drink. “Thus, this stuff this morning is just action without meaning, lacking any kind of useful relevance.”

  “Paul, you get relevance by virtue of the story structure you have to offer. Listen to me: The banal beginning. The banal ending here in the bar. The unconscious middle is the fascinating part because it’s what can’t be verified. You let the first and last determine the centre. You write it all out, whatever it is, boring or exciting. Like a story of a janitor in a building; all the mops, brooms, wipes, cleaning products, endless nights looking out the windows of deserted buildings into the empty dark night, stuff like that. When you get to the end of it, all it turns out to mean was … I dunno. Perfect marble floors or something.”

  Paul smirked. “Little khaki badges on your shirt with another guy’s name on it.”

  Bill snorted. “A steam engine when the guy was a little kid.”

  “That’s the idea, boys.” I was buoyed but not particularly optimistic; they were a hard crowd. “We can’t listen to a story like Paul’s without paying the debt to happenstance. To the vacancy between relevance and irrelevance. To the emptiness of question and answer. Content is misleading and deceptive. Not to mention the elegant literary device at play here.”

  “Device?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like what, repetition?”

  “Exaggeration?”

  “Illiteration?”

  “No, I think you’re thinking of alliteration. ‘Illiteration’ is something like what you are, Gus.”

  “So what already?”

  “Elision. The act of leaving out. You suggest the first and last, and the middle fills itself in. Brilliant. The stuff of good literature. I’ve always said you should write, Paul. Haven’t I?”

  “All the time.” Paul grimaced.

  “So you see. When you look at this from a distance I believe you see permanence. The kind that stands alone and declares itself. Despite the irrelevance and insignificance and reputed banality of its content.”

  “I’m alive. That’s important.”

  “Who were those guys? That’s important too.”

  “Which guys?”

  “The guys who pulled you out.”

  “This is all crap.” Bill was miffed nearly for real. “Literature requires intrinsic value. You’re talking about hearsay, Paul’s perspective alone. It’s too perishable. You can’t make a silk novel out of a sow’s newspaper item.”

  “I’d debate you on that.”

  “It’s a useless thing to talk about.”

  “Oh, come on.” I turned to Paul. “I bet there’s a thousand stories you could te
ll about the cab stand.”

  “Only one.” Paul winced and pulled at his sling. “I have to be there every morning no later than five a.m.”

  “That’s a good start.”

  “That’s an early start.”

  “You could write about how the morning chill dampens but does not extinguish your desire to be the best driver on Lulu Island at any given time.”

  Paul was listening but had lost interest. “Or you can just drink your drink.” He looked at the table; we were all around. I sensed no desire in the others to further this discussion. But discussion was about all this crowd had …

  Bill says it all started one afternoon when Paul showed up with a bottle of up-market gin under his arm. Paul counters that it was Bill’s roommates Gus and Nick and some other guys who came over that got things started in dead earnest. They’d first formed a talk crowd halfway through community college. English Lit.

  Whatever the truth, after non-stop six-packs, cases, boxes, jugs, magnums, kegs—many fuzzy days and specious rationalizations later—the group of them decided this was the way to go and pledged to suspend work for as long as possible and sell off their assets one by one to invest in drinks.

  The year was 1976.

  Paul recalls vehicle registration and transfer documents lying around the kitchen. One bright Sunday he awoke and, after a thorough riffling of the fridge and the bedroom closets and the back porch, stared out a window into the brutal morning and thought it prudent to declare: “We’re out of booze.”

  From the living room floor Gus called: “Is my van still there?”

  Paul rubbed his eyes. “The yellow one?”

  “’67 VW.”

  “Yeah, it’s there.”

  “We’ll drink it.”

  “Yo.”

  At times there was intelligent discourse. Members of the coterie drifted in and others wafted away. For a time, they’d get dressed up and go to discos in search of women. Over the years they’d had some soaring involvements—parties’ full—and the inevitable cohabitations. They shared some of the girlfriends. A few had hung around long enough to nearly become one of the guys. Eventually the women were all put off; petrified food-scars on the walls, dents of flying crockery.