Joseph O'Neill - The Breezes

Fourteen years ago my mother, whose name was Mary Elizabeth Breeze, was killed by lightning, and you may think that my father’s quota of misfortune would have been used up once and for all on that violent afternoon. If so you are mistaken, because these last days’ events have slapped and hammered and clobbered him around in the way that certain absurd cartoon characters are by their creators. I have particularly in mind the tragedy of the coyote — Wile E. Coyote, he is called — who is doomed perpetually to hunt down a maddening desert bird, a roadrunner, and perpetually to fail in the most painful and disastrous fashion. Every one of Wile E. Coyote’s stunts rebounds on him, and every episode sees him reduced from a healthy animal to a steaming pile of charred, exploded fur at the bottom of a cliff. The terrible thing is that there is nothing the coyote can do to avoid this fate; no matter how faultless his stratagems, he will always be undone by a circumstance beyond his control — the animators’ desire to inflict upon him the maximum of defeat and humiliation. This is how it has felt these last days: my father’s misfortune has been so extreme, so capricious, that he could be the victim of some invisible, all-powerful tormentor. I should say that by misfortune I do not just mean setbacks pure and simple, those ordinary hardships that attach to us all as inevitably as shadows. I mean freakish reverses. I mean those blows that are, above all, bad luck — that are, as the dictionary puts it, evil accidents.

Take, for example, what happened this morning.

It was raining and I was tramping across the graceless heath that unfolds between the western outskirts of this city — the city of Rockport — and the bare hills that loom over it to the west. Crooked white lines on the heath painted out twenty-two bumpy and undersized football pitches, all of which were overcrowded with the slow throngs of footballers. A gale was blowing in fierce gusts, spraying the downpour over the sportsfields in erratic blasts. Goalkeepers froze in the mouths of the orange-netted goals; strikers lingered numbly around the penalty boxes, unresponsive to the shouts of the onlookers. I walked in the direction of the farthest field of all, the one boundaried by the road into the city, and minutes later, burying my chin in my coat and stamping my feet, I joined the spectators on the touchline — nine people and one dog — and began watching the game.

It was not a great match. Two unskilful teams — one in green, one in blue — were chasing after a white football with little success. The big problem was the wind: every time a pass was struck, a swerving gust would swing its phantom boot and propel the ball out on to the road, bringing the traffic screeching to a standstill and forcing yet another delay in play as a sodden figure slowly went to retrieve it.

Then I noticed something else. In their frustration, the players had started to foul each other, exchanging bodychecks and clattering, metallic late tackles; and as the fouls went unpunished, so the violence escalated: now a defender kneed a jumping attacker in the back, now someone retaliated by shoulder-barging the defender to the ground and now, right before my eyes, someone else threw a punch at the barger. This was mayhem. This game was completely out of control.

‘Ref!’ the man next to me shouted. ‘Ref! Get a grip of it, you blind bastard!’

‘Send him off!’ a woman screamed. ‘For Christ’s sake, send him off!’

I looked out for the referee. His face grey with exertion, his tongue a dab of yellow in his open mouth, he was jogging desperately up and down the field, trying to keep up with play — a Sisyphean struggle; each time he caught up with the ball someone would kick it right back to where he had come from.

Just then came a crack and one of the greens was rolling on the turf, hacked down by one of the blues. Puffing thin peeps on his whistle, the referee arrived, panting and struggling for something in his pocket.

‘Look here,’ the referee said, breathing heavily, ‘I–I saw that.’ He took another deep breath and pointed into the distance, at a dressing-room of his imagination. ‘Do that one more time and …’

At that moment the dog ran on to the field. It made straight for the referee and — there is, unfortunately, no more accurate description — began to fuck his left leg. Yes, that is what actually happened: a skinny mongrel sprinted up to the ref, grabbed his thigh tightly between its paws, and started thrusting at his knee with its slippery pink dick out there for all to see. The referee tried to shoo the dog away, but the dog — a terrier of some kind, with tenacity in its pedigree — would not back down. Hopping relentlessly along on its hind legs, it just kept right at it. Trying to shake his leg free, the referee suddenly slipped, landing badly on his behind. Everybody burst out laughing. Spread-eagled in the mud with the dog still writhing on his leg, the derision of the crowd and the players roaring in his ears, anguish and dirt all over his face, the ref blew for time.

That was Pa. The referee was Pa.

I have to say, before I dwell further on this outrage, that there exists a perfectly rational explanation for it. The reason that mutt went for Pa is that he has a dog of his own, a basset hound called Trusty, who is in heat, and clearly some of her love scent had perfumed him. That dog is a minx. After two years of cohabitation, my father is still trying to house-train her. For one thing, she still shits around the home. Although Pa has followed the training manual (The Wolf in Your Home) and chastised her while simultaneously pushing her snout into the dung, Trusty has never quite put two and two together and made the connection between the offence and the punishment; or, if she has, she has not let it bother her, a profound canine instinct informing her, correctly, that my father’s threats are as insubstantial as the breath that transports them. Either way, he still spends a lot of time on his hands and knees, scraping up. The only effect of his remonstrations, as far as I am able to tell, has been to make Trusty more wily in her choice of location. Whereas in the past she used to squat down on the deep-pile carpet in the living-room, now, like a grande dame caught short in the palace of Versailles, she tends to climb up the stairs and do it in rarely visited corners and recesses. If you go round to Pa’s house you have to watch your step. Trusty has toilets everywhere.

But let me return to what happened to Pa at the football. My father’s tumble would under normal circumstances have had some slapstick joke value, because, and let me say this at once, I find downfalls as funny as the next man. If some clown vanishes down a manhole or lands face-first in a cream cake, I’ll slap my thigh along with everybody else. But for once I am not laughing.

Again, I have to think of Wile E. Coyote — more precisely, of his adventure with the tunnel. The coyote, tired of outlandish artifice, comes up with a scheme which is cunning simplicity itself. Using paint, he depicts a road tunnel on the face of a mountain and then hides behind a boulder, lurking. The plan is obvious: the roadrunner will mistake the fake, super-realistic tunnel for an actual one and will crash into the mountain at great speed. As usual, the plan is about 75 per cent successful. Sure enough, along comes the roadrunner in a fast cloud of dirt and, yes, up it storms, straight towards the picture of the cavern; but then, instead of rebounding off the rock, the roadrunner goes through it — through the nonexistent tunnel! For a second or two the prairie wolf gapes at us, crushed and flabbergasted; but then a what-the-hell, ask-questions-later expression animates his crumpled features and, yellow-eyed and ardent, off he races, arms outstretched and hands grabbing, hot on the heels of the bird — and thuds face-first into the mountainside.