What I mean to say is he walked on the balls of his feet, his heels light on the ground. He was tall, and thick, and he carried himself like an athlete who might spring in any direction, at any time. His smile as large as the rest of him. Terence was the largest man I have ever seen.
I saw Terrance once; I think he was nineteen, in overalls, walking on the edge of a bridge deck over The Old Man River. In the middle of the spring melt in the mountains and the normally cool, blue, water like chocolate milk spilled in the grass, high and mucky. It was a train-bridge, not more then thirty feet, end to end; not more than 8 feet up.
Terrance walked on his toes, right on the very edge of the steel girder. He moved quickly and calmly for the first half or more of the length of the bridge and then slipped on a bit of dirt on the beam. He dropped his weight and caught himself with his other foot, and finished his crossing. He saw me once he looked up again and started walking, and he said to me, "Joey, the life on the edge is the only life I ever want to live." Then he took off running towards his father's ranch. That was four months before Hitler invaded Poland. Terrance went to WWII and came back a bit different.
In 1955 people started to get a little meaner to veterans from the war that didn't feel they could settle down. And raise a family. All over there were men coming together on motorcycles and forming tribes, rolling hard through mountains and prairies, kicking up dust in small town saloons. Terrance had himself a tribe of these types of men, a few he served with and few that he met back home. He liked to take them on the run from the logging towns on the coast of British Columbia across the mountains and down through the fields of Southern Alberta. They'd cross the border at night like a pack of roaring fireflies.
In Denver on some business about some cattle for a man I worked for I saw him and three of his friends ride by, deftly staying upright with snow on the ground and slush on the roads. I stepped out of the front door of my hotel when I saw him; I couldn't miss the corners of his smile peeking over the edge of the scarf. I saw him and as he passed he turned and he saw me.
He howled and pulled in to the left. He roared his engine and jumped the curb onto the sidewalk, spinning around so he was facing back towards me. Again he opened the throttle and feathered the clutch, lifting his front wheel of the ground and charging up the sidewalk. He knocked over a pile of newspapers with his turn and people were fleeing left and right as he made his way up the sidewalk. He stared right at me as he passed, laughing the whole time.
When he got to the next corner he slowed down, and as the wheel came down it landed on a man, an older man that was looking the other way for a bus, or maybe a cab. The wheel came down, he fell, and Terrance rolled over him off the curb and back onto the street. The man was hurt bad and his blood ran red in the slush of the sidewalk. Terrance stopped and looked down in shock and horror of what he did. Then he looked up at me. He wasn't scared, and there was a coldness that hadn't been there as a boy. I looked at him, his shock disappeared and his grin came back. He howled again and took off on his bike.
The hotel doorman called the police, and I gave a statement. I told them his name, and where he was from, but that I didn't know where he lived. I hadn't seen him in years. I don't know if they caught up to him, or if he got away. It'd be years before I'd see him again. I don't know if the old man made out all right. He was in rough shape when they got him off to the hospital.
It's a funny thing that happens when you see something like that. I spent some time in Korea; I've seen what it's like in war, but I haven't seen anything like this since then, and Terrance just laughed it off. What had he seen? What had he done?
The last time I saw him was in the Calgary Herald, in July of 1960, in the obituaries. He died on his motorcycle, running from the police. His picture was from The War, and he had medals on his chest I'd never seen before. He was smiling so big you could see an entire prairie sunset in his teeth, and all of a sudden I had to put the paper down. I remembered the man on the street in Denver. And I remembered Korea. And I couldn't help but think that there's a price to pay whether you live on the edge, or you don't.