Kicking Tomorrow by Daniel Richler

water there’s what looks like a crowd gathering. Some kind of kerfuffle. Vehicles, a dozen peoplemaybe, right in front of EPX. Robbie’s squinting, it’s hard for him to tell from here – in this heat the surface of the lake buzzes and blinds. He clicks the tape off with his toe, standing stock-still to get a better listen, but now his ears are trampled under wind. He shrugs and toes the tape on again.
    In some of those old paintings, usually the ones featuring harems or hell or catastrophes befalling all of mankind, you could eyeball a dozen nudes at one time, the whole batch of them languishing in states of undress, some of them bound and helpless, some being ravished by Romans or devoured by monsters. You’d never find that in a magazine like
Bosom Buddies
. Robbie wonders if, while the paint was still wet and sexy on the canvas, the painters ever got it on with their models. He also wonders what it must have been like to see some of these paintings in a shop window in the days before magazines; if, in the privacy of their homes, people ever tugged off in front of them.
    He bends down to pick up a dead bee, sticks it rudely into a blob of cadmium yellow. Thinks about something Mom has said – that honey bees are particularly sensitive to air pollution, and that when they suffer so does the pollination of plants, seed production, and the fundamental regrowth of vegetation. Right, and everything gives you cancer.
    Oh, here’s Mendoza back at last, and what’s he got in his jaws. A rat? Robbie’s moving in air as heavy as the linseed oil,
cumulo nimbus
weighing heavy on his shoulders. He bends down.
Here, boy. Show me
. Chrissake! A chipmunk. Without any hair.
    He sits down to clear his brain. Becomes aware of his sunburnt cheeks, stretched over the bone. On the opposite shore the crowd has clustered tightly together. Round a particular tree, it looks like. A sound cuts across the water: a chainsaw. Then the crack and crunchy tumble of the tree, booing, chanting, and finally a police siren, swallowed up by the wind. Meanwhile,Mendoza’s licking the ground ferociously. Robbie whacks him. Dumb dog. Mendoza throws up.
    In time, coming down, he rubbed off the pine needles that had pressed into his skin, and took his first square look at his Great Work of Art.
    Then, grimly, he took the canvas and smeared it, face down, across the ground.

4
    LABOUR DAY WEEKEND, AND HE WAS SO HORNY THAT EVEN replays of Nadia Comaneci, performing perfect tens in her white-and-red striped gymnastics outfit, looked to him as concupiscent, as vulval, as Hans Bellmer’s ball-jointed pornographic doll. (A coffee-table book – a post-Freudian museological survey of erotic art that took in voodoo fetishes, African clitoridec-tomies, and the misogyny of Picasso – was the best he could sneak up to his bedroom that night in the absence of a copy of
Bosom Buddies.)
    So the next day, the last Saturday of August, he split. He would have told someone, but at lunch time, when he came downstairs, no one was around to tell. So he just took off.
    He never felt more a part of his nothing generation than when he was alone; alone in a concert crowd, alone at the family dinner table, and especially alone with a beer on a hill by the highway. He walked with his thumb out, standing under overpasses spray-painted with seagulls, symbols of the international hitchhikers’ fraternity: a white one indicated a first-class spot, blue meant OK , red meant you could wait for a ride till the cows came home.
    The cows were, in fact, preparing to come home when he finally scored a ride, as far as Châteauguay, three-quarters of the way. Tramping across the Champlain bridge, his feet aching and his socks crusted with dirt where his sneakers had broken open, he rejoiced to see Montreal’s skyline fencing the mountain, the brown air like bruised sky above it and, as he approached, the great cubes of glass breaking up the myriad reflections of new and old architectures