by Ron Thompson
All fine and good, this new found resolution, yet my mindwas churning with thoughts I had avoided for years.
The summer after Grade Eleven, Clinton and I worked at our jobs and hung out, argued, played bitch slap, listened to music. Sometimes we drove around or parked out by the tracks near Ortona Forest to drink and watch trains travelling through Poplar Lake to Somewhere Else. We went to the beach and parties and snuck into the bar with others, but we didn’t really fit in with them.
That was what connected us—we were misfits, outsiders,exiles from the centre of the world. We belonged in cosmopolitan New York, cutting-edge London, bohemian Paris, places where the avant-garde would recognize us as rightful members of a modern-day Lost Generation or Algonquin Round Table. There, we would be embraced and mentored by an Andy Warhol or a Malcolm Maclaren, someone who saw our potential. We would be true and honest and never sell out.
Honestly, I don’t remember why we believed this. Beyond Clinton’s skill with a ball and mine in math, we were nothing special. But to be sixteen or seventeen is to be estranged, to shout bollocks at the way things are. It would be delicious were it not so bitter.
And in truth, we were no longer both social misfits. Clinton was the star of the football team; he had been befriended by the Ice Dogs and was popular with the jock set and its intersecting spheres. He scorned their acceptance; and yet he liked it too. I could tell.
Whatever he truly felt inside, whatever his thoughts, he conveyed a brooding, knowing aloofness. There was an edge of anger and menace to his persona, one that lent him an air of mystery. Even at the centre of things, at a bush party, a house party, in a boisterous crowd, he was inaccessible. He did not seem entirely present. And he never seemed happy.
That fall we entered our final year of high school. We playedfootball again, and again he was brilliant. The Lakers were not as strong as in the previous year, but we went farther because of him. We beat the Martyrs in the final and became league champions.
The Hardass told Clinton he could get him a football scholarship in North Dakota or Minnesota. He had played on scholarship there himself and still had connections. A recruiter from his alma mater had even attended one of our games to see Clinton’s stuff. It was a Division II college, but still.
* * *
Early December, we were drinking rum and eggnog in Clinton’s living room after handball and bitch slap. We were on our fourth drink and sprawled on the carpet listening to John Lennon’s final album. It was a year since his murder, and YokoOno was screeching through a song of her own composition.
“Oh thank God,” I said in the crackling silence when it finally dragged to its end.
John started into “Woman” and we lay in stupefied silence, listening.
“Someone’s banging my mother,” Clinton said.
“What?”
“She’s banging someone. It must be when she’s on the road.”
I could think of nothing to say in response.
“There’s smoke on her clothes when she gets home. She quit smoking a couple years ago.” He fell silent. “You know about what happened last winter.” “No,” I said. “What?”
“I’ll kill Walt if he comes anywhere near us again. After what he did to . . . and I’ll kill the next guy that hurts her, I swear.”
“Don’t say that, man.”
“She’ll get hurt again.”
With the full benefit of Captain Morgan’s wisdom I said “Geez. She’s entitled to her life.”
“Fuck off.”
“Look, it’s not like she’s going to meet Cary Grant in Poplar Lake.”
“Just fuck off. She’s my old lady.”
“You brought it up.”
We lay sprawled in silence while Lennon crooned to Yoko. When the song ended Clinton roused himself slowly and kneewalked to the stereo to change the record. He respected John but was not a great fan. “She cried that morning,” he said. “The day we woke up and heard he was dead.” I watched him select a Dylan album and remove it from its jacket. I sat up to drain my drink while he loaded the turntable and lowered the needle. The speakers crackled expectantly and a brass band launched into “Rainy Day Women.”
My head was spinning slightly as we splashed rum into our glasses and topped them with eggnog. I propped myself against the sofa, he leaned against an easy chair. “Listen, I been thinking . . .” he began.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Yeah, funny. Hah ha. You’re Monty Python.” His nose disappeared as he took a drink. “So I’m thinking I’m going to, um . . . I’m going to ask Tammy Sheptytsky out.”
I felt a jolt, an energy coursing through my veins, and was instantly sober and alert, waiting for a charging mastodon or a marauding caveman to come at me with a club.
He watched my face from across the room. “I just wanted to, um, mention it, you know, because I always thought maybe you liked her or something.”
“Naw. No, no, she’s nice, eh? Real nice. But not really my type, you know?”
His eyes were still on me. “What is your type, bud?”
“Oh, you know. I don’t know if I can, you know, describe it.”
“Try.”
“Nah. I’m too far gone.” A short silence passed as we listened to Dylan.
“’Cause I wouldn’t ask her out if you were going to ask her out.”
“Naw, man! Ask her out. Go ahead. Good luck with that. She’s, she’s all yours. Sweet girl. She’s super. Just super.” I took a gulp of my drink.
“She is. She is. I always thought so. Okay, man. I will. I’ll do it. I need some . . . I need some purity in my life, you know? Some fuckin’ purity. I want to change my life. I get these ideas sometimes.”
“Whaddaya mean, ‘ideas’?”
“I dunno. I dunno what I mean.” He took a pull on his rum and eggnog. “But Merry Christmas, you know? Here’s to 1982.” He reached across the room, leaned forward far with his glass, stretching, and I reached across too and clinked his glass. “May it be a better fuckin’ year.”
“Amen to that,” I said and drained my drink.
* * *
Clinton went out with Tammy before Christmas, and then they were a couple, a beautiful one, and she was good for Clinton. All his sullen resentment and anger vanished when he was with her. He seemed at peace in her presence. If it was purity he needed, Tammy was its manifestation—but I already knew that.
She was always nice to me, kind and solicitous; but she was with Clinton now, and I saw how they looked at each other. She was happy, and more beautiful than ever. Was that what being in love did to a person? Sometimes I would go for a soda with them at Bing’s Hong Kong House. They would sit close together on the bench opposite me, and I would wonder if I could have been wrong, if she might once have harboured feelings for me, or could have if I had followed my heart way back in Grade Ten.
That winter, I saw little of them together, let alone Clinton alone. After school and on Saturdays he worked at Hardcastle Accounting, and I worked at Allan Kindersley’s tackle shop. He went on dates with Tammy, and they went to parties to which I was not invited or chose not to attend. I was mostly on my own and missed Clinton’s company. Some evenings when I saw the lights on at his house I would go over, hoping to spend time with him like we had before. Usually it was just his mother, home from the road, because Clinton was still at work or out with Tammy.
* * *
In early March we had a Chinook, one that will stay in my memory forever. All the snow melted in a couple of days, but it was not like spring, because it was balmy, oppressively so; then when it passed, three late winter blizzards hit in quick succession. Once again snow piled up on the sides of roads and driveways; shovels rang on frozen concrete, and railway ploughs shot geysers of snow off the tracks that ran through town. Then a cold snap settled over Poplar Lake, a mass of arctic
air so cold that beer kegs blew up at the Grizzly Bar when the boiler died one night. Victor said it proved the crap they served as draft was only fizzywater.
During the cold snap Mr Hardcastle drove Clinton into the city one Saturday morning for an evaluation by a college recruiter from Minnesota. It was advertized as a two-day clinic but everyone knew there were scholarships at stake. I saw Clinton after school on Monday at his place. His mother had left that morning on a sales trip, and we had fallen back on old habits, lounging over screwdrivers on the living room rug. “Where’s Tammy? Aren’t you seeing her today?”
“Nah. I don’t feel like it.”
There was an edge to his voice that did not invite discussion, and he was grudging with details of his try-out. It was the only clinic the college would hold in Canada, and players had come from all over the prairies—one even came from B.C. It was held in a high school gym, and it went okay, Clinton said. Just okay. Fuck off with the questions. I don’t want to talk about it. If it happens, it happens.
I let it go and we drank and stared at the wall and listened to the Ramones. After a few minutes he looked at me.
“You smell anything?”
“What?”
“Smoke.” I sat up. “Where? What?” “Not fire. Tobacco.” I grunted.
“Someone’s banging my mother again,” he said evenly. I did not respond, knowing this was a dangerous topic. “She’s hanging around with someone, I can tell. She’s being all evasive, like she’s got a secret. Made up bullshit about what she did all weekend. But her clothes smell of smoke. And when I got back last night, the house smelled of smoke.”
“Maybe it’s her.”
“She quit. She wouldn’t start again. Someone was here, smoking.”
Now I took a deep sniff for his benefit. “I don’t smell it.” “There’s a guy, I can tell, and he was here. Maybe it’s Walt. Why else would she sneak around?”
“Whadaya mean, sneak around? She’s not exactly sneaking around, is she? You were away.” “Why? Did you see something?”
There was fire in his eyes. “I don’t exactly peek out windows,” I said. “Or in them.”
“There was somebody. I know it.”
His stare was scary. “Look,” I said carefully. “What’s wrong with that? She’s an adult woman. The main thing is you don’t want her to get hurt.”
“Don’t tell me what the main thing is and what I want. She’s my old lady, man. Someone’s banging my old lady.”
“She’s not an old lady.”
His glare became a challenge. “So you want to do her now, too?”
I held his eye without blinking.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “Maybe I’m a getting paranoid. I thought there was somebody before. I could’ve been wrong then. But now, I know something’s going on. I know it. If it’s Walt . . . I’ll kick the crap out of that bastard, after what he did to us. I swear.”
“Easy, man. Take it easy.” He grunted.
“I just meant,” I said, to explain myself, “she’s not old. And she deserves some respect.”
“Just fuck off.”
“No, you fuck off.” I drained my glass. “Let’s play handball.” We played handball downstairs, but I could not crack his dour mood or allay his suspicions about his mother. I could see that this was not a healthy situation to be in the middle of.
* * *
I lay on the bed, sleepless, thinking about the spring of 1982. A whistle blared on the outskirts of town. A few moments later a door opened down the hall. I heard my parents’ voices and footsteps descending the stairs. Mom’s voice, Genny’s.
There would be no nap for me. I got up and changed into my trunks.
It was hot at the beach and there were a lot of people swimming or lying on towels. Genny and I swam and towelled off and sat with Mom and Dad on a blanket that was older than me. Once I was warm and dry my fatigue finally caught up with me,and I lay back and closed my eyes. The air was warm, the sun hot on my skin. To the peaceful buzz of a dragonfly, the murmur ofGenny’s and Mom’s voices, the distant splash of swimmers, I fell asleep.
I startled awake to the thud of footfalls approaching. A little boy pounded past chasing a Frisbee. It peaked and arced back on its course, and the boy veered and followed its descent, lunged, and caught it before it hit the ground.
I sat up on my elbows, marvellously refreshed, watching him trot away to his parents’ applause. I looked around, saw people in the water, people on the beach. Dad was gone, although his book was on the blanket. Genny and Mom were chatting merrily. A man and a little girl flew a kite. A kid cannon-balled off the pier. A group of teenagers howled and hooted at a joke. The Frisbee boy, over-confident now, dropped a sure catch—
Wait.
Genny and Mom were chatting merrily.
They were chatting, not awkwardly, but merrily, in contrast to the wooden efforts of the preceding week. I lay back, closed my eyes and considered the situation.
Yes. It was night-and-day from the way it had been. All week I had tried to ignore the tension between them. It had registered, certainly; but I had pretended it away. This was my go-to strategy, my default, because I lacked the capacity for human insight, the synaptic receptors to understand the meaning of what transpired before my very eyes. I had learned to cover for this by going deep undercover, dissembling and donning a deceitful mask and behaving like all was well. How ironic that I hoovered up information and yet so much was lost to me; that I understood so little. I sat up slowly.
“You fell asleep, dear,” Mom said. “Dad went to get ice cream. You’d better put on some more lotion.”
I listened to their conversation while I rubbed on sunscreen.
Mom asked Genny what Dalhousie University was like. Genny asked Mom if she had brothers and sisters.
It must be wonderful to grow up near the ocean, Mom said.
I always thought growing up on a farm must be wonderful, Genny replied.
I saw it then—there was something in my mother’s eyes when she looked at Genny, a look I had seen before. Genny of the Good Intentions, alchemist of human souls, had won her over. She had withstood a fearsome assault; she had persevered and ultimately cracked my mother’s formidable armour. I wondered how she’d done it.
* * *
Back at the house, we went up to change. “You shower first,” I said, as we slipped out of our swim suits.
“Okay.” She reached for the bathrobe as I reached for her. Her skin was damp and cool, almost clammy. We held each other for a moment. Her hair tickled my nose.
“How did you do it?” I asked.
“What did I do?” she replied, but she knew what I was talking about. We stood in each others’ arms, and she twisted her neck to study my face, a serious expression on her own. She inhaled deeply. “Baby,” she said, but never finished the thought,for just then the phone rang below us, and we listened as my mother answered it.
“It’s Victor,” she called up a moment later. “He wants to talk to you.”
I wrapped my towel around me and went downstairs.
“Buster! We’re doing the bar tonight, right?”
“Yeah. Aren’t you coming for supper?”
“I’m working on a deal. That big one. We’re down to short strokes but it’ll get done today. I’m going to be here for a few hours yet. How’s about we meet at nine?” “Okay. Where? The Brownstone?”
“Nah. It’s a dump now. Let’s go to Idaho Jack’s. New place on Main.”
“Okay. Never been.”
“You haven’t lived. What’s London got anyway that you can’t get here in good old Poplar Lake? Hey! I’ll bring Tammy. She said she’d like to see you before you go.”
I heard the toilet flush upstairs. Then the old bath faucetssquealed, the water pipes rumbled; the shower curtain screeched across its railing, and Genny
stepped into the shower.
CHAPTER 21
Idaho Jack’s was on the town’s neon strip, set back from the street in the middle of a parking lot. Inside, the pine booths were accented with wagon wheels and cattle horns, the walls with photos of champion steer wrestlers and broncobusters interspersed with posters plugging the house ale (“Have a Red Indian!”) in banner letters. At one end of the room there was a roped off pit with a mechanical bull and a stage set for a band with a dance floor in front. Off to the side, at the mouth of a corridor leading to the toilets, was a tattered old saddle on a wonky pedestal, an ancient relic in a temple of rodeo.
“Quaint,” Genny murmured, as a hostess in a revealing top led us to where Victor and Tammy were seated. Tammy had just arrived but Victor had been early; he already had a Red in a frosty mug. “I’ll have one of those,” I told a waitress in a lowcut blouse, pointing at Victor’s glass. Genny was undecided. “How about a Red Indian?” I suggested.
She gave me a look and addressed the waitress. “I’d like something that’s not carbonated. What would you suggest?”
The waitress had a nametag identifying her as Jackie Lynn. She went through various options, but Genny had questions about each one. What’s in a Bloody Mary? Oh, salt. Yuk. A Caesar? A Margarita? Oh, no thanks. A Daiquiri? That sounds like a lot of sugar. A Manhattan? Oh! Crushed ice and a maraschino. Those aren’t good for you.
“Sister, look around,” Jackie Lynn said. “This is a bar. Nothing here is good for you.”
Genny finally ordered an Okanagan Pinot Gris that Tammyrecommended and ordered herself.
“How about you, Vic?” Jackie Lynn asked. “What would you like?”
“I’ll nurse this one, Lynn,” Victor said, holding her eye. Victor and Tammy had closed the transaction they had been working on for weeks. It would have a big impact on the town, but they could not say anything about it until the buyer made an announcement.