The Antagonist by Lynn Coady Page A

for them. After a while, they find something else to do, and you don’t have to worry about them anymore. But you don’t want that. You want your showdown in the parking lot. You want your dogfight.”
    Dogfight . I thought about the handful of standoffs in the parking lot, Gord’s face on the other side of the restaurant window. Safe behind glass, miming punches, cheering me on.
    At that moment, my father seemed to lose interest in the conversation. “Ah — bullshit,” he muttered.
    “Anyway,” said Hamm, standing up. Adams followed him out of the booth as if they were conjoined. A second later Gord and I stood too. “That’s all we wanted to say tonight, Gordon. We wanted to let you know that we’re keeping an eye, and we’re happy to drop in anytime you need us. You just give us a call next time.”
    “Wonderful,” said Gord, shaking Hamm’s extended hand so fast it was like he was wiping his hand on a dishtowel. “My Christ — haven’t we all just accomplished so much.” And with that, he turned away and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me to show the policemen out.
    That’s when Constable Bill Hamm turned to me and said something I never forgot. It was only the second time he’d looked at me, and for the second time in our conversation, the fake-friendly light he’d held in his eye while talking to Gord flickered into nothing.
    “I know you,” he said then. “Understand that, Mr. Rankin. I see exactly where you’re headed, son.”
    I stared back at him for a moment, making no sound because inside my head I was sputtering at the injustice of these words. “What?” I managed to sputter out loud, at last, to the cop. I wasn’t asking him to repeat himself, I didn’t say it like “Pardon?” I spread my hands as if to gesture to everything — the entire world surrounding me. It was my “I just want another hot dog” gesture. I’m only a kid , is what I was trying to transmit to Constable Hamm. It’s not my fault you have to tilt your chin upward to fix me with that null-eyed stare of yours. I’ve only been on this earth for fifteen years. Please don’t say this kind of thing to me.
    “ What ,” repeated Constable Hamm. “You know what. We both know what.”
    He turned his back — no handshake, nothing.
    And that was my second big hint.
    It wasn’t fair, but it was — it turned out — true. That’s what made Bill Hamm a kind of oracle. He wasn’t talking about right or wrong, good or evil, justice or injustice. He was a man plugged into the cosmos, a moustachioed fortune teller, just talking about the way life was — the way it was going to be. He was talking about fate. Fate’s representative stood in the Icy Dream that day like it was the temple at Delphi — and duly he pronounced.
    Not bad for a university dropout, eh? I remember almost nothing from my undergraduate career, but I do remember the stuff you and I talked about, the classes we took together. You were studying English — very unoriginal, Adam — and you’ll recall that I was doing a basic humanities mishmash in the hope of discovering an aptitude for something other than skating at high speed directly into other versions of myself. Is it any surprise the stuff from Classical Lit would stick with me all this time? If you’re going to believe in one or more gods, I remember thinking, the gang from Mount Olympus made a lot more sense than the guy I’d been hearing about most of my life up until that point. Who are you going to believe runs the show if you are a citizen of Planet Earth with any kind of awareness as to what’s going on around you? Are you going to buy into the story about this great guy, who is actually somehow three guys, one-third human, and he loves everybody equally, and all he wants is for everyone to behave themselves? (But, oh yeah, sometimes tsunamis at Christmastime. Sometimes bombs on civilian populations. Sometimes mothers dying horribly.) Or do you believe in this self-absorbed