by Bruce Geddes
“And then a few days later, Tony rang the doorbell and confessed. Didn’t say why he did it, but he gave me the receipt for the repair and said he’d taken care of it at the shop.”
“And then?” I said.
“To be honest, I kind of avoided him after that. He didn’t want us to send Bernard to boarding school, but there was nothing he could do. He wanted to contribute to the cost of tuition and I was going to let him but then he lost his job at Krulls. You sure you don’t want any more?”
“Maybe just a drop. But Krulls didn’t shut down for good until three years ago.”
“Tony got fired before they closed. You didn’t know this?” Drew shrugged. “I never asked him about it. We really don’t talk that much.”
“I thought you pretty much had to kill someone to get fired from Krulls.”
“Uh-huh. And then you’d get six month’s severance and they’d pay all your legal bills.”
“So what happened?”
“I don’t know the details. He just refused to work one day.”
“Refused to work? Why?”
“Who knows? He just sat on a stool for the full eight hours of his shift and when the foremen tried to put someone else in his place, Tony threatened to beat the crap out of them both. The next day, he went back and did the same thing. The line was shut down for two days. You know how those places work. One plant gets shut down, they all do. It’s a chain reaction. That’s a lot of money lost for the company. After that, they had to fire him.”
“Did he ever give a reason?”
“Nothing that I heard. By the time the story got to me, all anyone talked about was that crazy Tony Langlois and his one-man strike.”
“That’s it? You didn’t hear anything else?”
“I’m sorry, Tricky. If I knew it would be important to you after twenty years without hearing from you, I’d have been there, taking notes.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She sipped on her tequila. “Whatever it was, it must have been serious because he never got back into Krulls. Tony was never the swiftest bird in the chimney, but I never thought he’d have been that dumb.”
14
Sometime in the years after Gord was killed and Drew Herringer gave birth to their son Bernard, my cousin Tony began to feel a kind of incompleteness he put down to never having known his own father. It was a natural conclusion, I guess, though not necessarily a safe or accurate one. I always wondered what would have happened if he had come to know the mysterious Danny McKitrick and, in the aftermath, felt even more incomplete?
But Tony didn’t consider this and so, despite working every overtime shift offered him at Krulls, he began a systematic search for the man. Louise made a fulsome offer of help.
“Start with the prisons,” she said. “It’s the most likely place.”
He asked for a photograph, something he could show around, but there were none.
“I celebrated my 20TH birthday by burning them,” Louise said. “I only wish I could do the same with my memories.”
With nothing else to go on, Tony went to the library, making straight for the telephone directories for cities and towns across the country. Lugging three-foot stacks from shelf to table, he used a spiral bound notebook and a chewed ballpoint pen to record every instance of Dan or Daniel or D. McKitrick, the one in Sherbrooke, Quebec and the 128 listed for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Back at the house, he dialled the numbers, politely and articulately explaining who he was and who he was looking for and why. After the first month, Louise clamped a lock on the telephone.
“And it stays on until this bill gets paid,” she said.
Tony sold the Shelby (suffering the ultimate Wanstead indignity of going without a car) to pay the phone bill and lay down a deposit for the following month. But the calls that went out to D. McKitrick’s in other cities and provinces and states south of the border never managed to locate the one he was looking for.
He tried the army, the navy, the air force, the coast guard, waiting months for deflating replies from public relations officers. Acting on his mother’s suspicions, he even contacted Corrections Canada and the provincial equivalents, yielding the same empty results. A friend from high school, in his probationary year with the Wanstead Police, offered to search through the Ministry of Transportation’s files, records that were off-limits to public browsing. Tony paid in full. But the cop proved incompetent. Not only was he unable to find Tony’s father, he also got caught in the attempt and was booted from the force, taking Tony’s bribe with him.
Lamenting his failure with a bottle of Special Old one night, weighing the pros and cons of further investigation, Louise gave him the convincing nudge.
“You’re nearly twenty-one,” she said. “You have a kid of your own. What do you want with that prick anyway?”
Despite advances in information technology, Tony never again went looking for his missing father. It was around that time, I suppose, that Drew started up with Gus. It must have killed my cousin to watch, even from a distance, as that ridiculous man filled in so admirably, providing a life for Bernard that Tony could never hope to duplicate. Especially since the whole notion of fatherhood, what was right and what was wrong within that category, had never been all that clear to him in the first place. And now, with his own father hopelessly absent and his Uncle Gord no longer able to provide his surrogate services, that elusive idea slipped forever out of his reach.
I thanked Drew Herringer for her wine, her tequila, her hospitality, the home tour, and then for the wine again, and kissed her cheek. She cupped her hand on my elbow and squeezed it and, feeling the tips of her finger nails dig through my sweater, I remembered her gifts of perception and knew that after twenty-something years without seeing each other, she was not so deeply offended that I had come to her home to talk mostly about Tony.
Of all the things Drew had told me during our leisurely chat, it was the news of his dismissal from Krulls that I found most troubling. Even with the details yet unclear, I fell into the easy, much preferred conclusion that Tony’s whole hypothesis about Al Forzante killing my father was more about Tony trying to settle a score with the UCF than an actual plot to murder Gord. Maybe it wasn’t the simplest or most obvious answer. And maybe I was ignoring a few other things, too. Like I didn’t know why he got fired, for one. Like that Tony wasn’t the kind of guy to seek revenge through a smear campaign for another. He was a man who preferred direct action and this was too subtle and sneaky for his ways, even if the motives were genuine.
I backed out of Drew Herringer’s driveway, proceeding with caution, conscious of my tequila-wine-messy state. After covering the first two hundred metres without incident, my concentration slipped. At the end of Drew’s street, I obeyed a stop sign and then cycled my hands over the steering wheel to make the turn and pressed the accelerator. The front wheels bounced over the curb and I heard the deflating kur-clunk sound of pliable sheet metal meeting a steel post. I braked and saw that the stop sign had disappeared from the view and was now bent close to the ground at an unusual angle. Out of the car, I looked in every direction and saw no witnesses then walked to the other side to inspect the damage, trying to remember if I had checked the tiny box to accept collision insurance or if my besieged credit card, which would grant me fifty-grand for losing an eye, another seventy-five for an arm, also covered me against side-swiping stop signs in the middle of a bright day.
Now sobered to the fact that I was too drunk to drive, I decided to take a walk, drifting after several minutes from Drew’s affluent pod to more typical Wanstead properties, houses mostly built after the Second World War when returning soldiers took their pensions and their newly unionized salaries and purchased one or two-storey bungalows with two-car garages and a wide picture windows that invited the rest of the street to share intimate moments and family occasions. I remembered busy street parties in a nei
ghbourhood like this: Hot dogs. Macaroni salad. Road hockey. Donkey rides and a rented trampoline. At one, a fireman neighbour had borrowed the pumper from the station to show off to the kids. I was told to leave the party when, after shots of Jägermeister with Tony, I set myself up behind the wheel, turned over the engine and with a sickening lurch, ran the pumper into the back end of an LTD station wagon. That was the summer after Gord was killed.
I quickened my pace, slipping into territory I’d never before explored. With driveways full, spare cars were parked on front lawns, stripped of tires and propped on cinder blocks. There were sagging roofs, crooked stairs, cracked windows, torn screens, rusted, rotten soffits, bed sheets and Mötley Crüe blankets filling in for drapes. Old people sat on their screened-in porches like vigilant furniture. Even when I waved, drunk and insincere, they remained motionless and unamused. In a vacant lot, two kids in dirty t-shirts played on the upturned, rusted hull of a small fishing boat.
A few blocks on, my mouth dry, patches of damp forming on my back and chest, I stepped up to Pat’s Dairy & Convenience. Faded adverts for Eskimo Pies were taped to the inside of a window being held intact with duct tape. When I opened the door, a cloud of cigarette smoke escaped, rushing past me like a flock of caged pigeons. With a waving hand, I swept the grey cloud away to see the source: a droopy old man crouched behind an empty glass display case. Except for his head and shoulders, he was mostly visible through the glass and, for a moment, looked as though he were halfway stuffed into a pickling jar. Without acknowledging me, he stared at a small television set atop an overturned milk crate, its rabbit ears extended. It was tuned to a channel from across the border and the sound was up too high for the little plastic speaker. Every ‘s’ hissed, every ‘p’ crackled, the words mashing into each other.
With a big bottle of water, I approached the counter. An emptied cat food tin overflowed with butts and powdery ash. The chair creaked when Pat shifted and reached to turn down the volume on the television. His hand, thick with arthritis, was also stained with dime-sized liver spots. He dragged on his cigarette. Smoke leaked from a punch-bent nose. He squinted.
“What’s the price on that?”
I turned the bottle over in my hands.
“I don’t see a tag.”
“Well give me two bits for it.”
That didn’t seem right. I dug into my pocket, feeling for a quarter.
“What is it, expired or sum’n?” I said, overshooting my efforts to sound like I came from the neighbourhood. I could almost see the delinquent apostrophe in ‘sum’n’ skidding from my tongue, clipped short by snapping lips. It was like that sometimes, with clients—with others, too—when I was trying to sound disaffected and disempowered, when I was trying to express solidarity through my manners. But usually it only made me seem phonier than ever and no one had ever granted me the temporary inclusiveness I was looking for.
“Twenty-five cents seems low.”
“You think so, do you?”
“I think I usually pay a dollar or a dollar-fifty.”
He laughed. “You’ve been shopping at the wrong places.” And then he put on a pair of glasses. “You look familiar,” he said. “Like someone I knew back when I was working at Krulls.”
I pinched my earlobe. “I had a job at Krulls for a couple of summers.”
The last of them being the summer before Gord was killed. But it was never much of a job. I showed up at Plant B, punched in, picked up a mop and pushed it in an empty bucket along a polished cement floor until I arrived at a corner where they stored crates of door panels. Using the upturned bucket for a boost, I climbed onto a shelving unit and lay down in an empty space that was just long enough to conceal me. My sleep was sometimes interrupted by other high schoolers who, hired under the same plan, brought decks of cards and would deal me into games of euchre and gin-rummy. A few minutes before the end of day whistle, the games would wrap up and the bucket was wheeled back to the janitor’s closet, the strands of its mop still dry.
So I hadn’t really worked there and yet I had collected bi-weekly pay checks, paid dues to the UCF, and worn the steel toes.
“What plant were you in?” Pat asked.
“B.”
“Mmph. I was in D. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else, Pat said. On the television, the early news led with a national piece. Barack Obama, already greying only a few months in office, posed with other world leaders at the G20 summit in London. There was Mrs. Obama and the Queen. Meanwhile, shaven-headed and dreadlocked anarchists spat and protested in front of Westminster.
“What did you say your name was?”
“McKitrick. Richard McKitrick.”
Pat leaned forward and squinted at me. He laughed through the phlegm in his throat and smoke scattered with the blast of air.
“I remember you! From meetings over at the UCF there, standing beside your old man and your mum. They called you Tricky. I knew your old man pretty good. I was a steward for the second shift at Krulls D.”
“How about that?” I said.
“And then he was killed.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother doing these days?”
“She lives down south now.”
“I’d heard she’d moved away. Figures. You moved away too, didn’t you?”
“Toronto.”
“I figured it’d have been a place like that. What are you a lawyer like your old man?”
“I have an immigration practice.”
“Good for you. Better than working for a living.”
“It’s not bad.”
Pat lit another cigarette, put a yellowish finger in his ear and twisted one way, then the other. Holding his hand close to his face, he examined the flaky residue and with a flick, sent it floating to the floor.
“Yeah, it was a damn shame what happened to your dad,” he said. “Good man.”
“I appreciate you saying so.”
“You wonder what would have happened to that union if he’d lived. But I guess I should just keep my mouth shut.”
“No. Please. Continue.”
“It’s none of my business,” he said. “Ancient history.”
“Are you talking my father’s plot to take over the union?”
“So you do know!” he said. “Of course you do. It was tricky business, that. But maybe it would have been for the best.”
“You have it wrong. It’s some story someone made up, a rumour. My father was no traitor.”
“Traitor? Where did you get that from?” he said. He glanced at the television. They’d moved on to a local story, a report on the former mayor’s continuing legal troubles. “Yeah, I guess so. Smoke?”
I waved off his offer of a cigarette. “Look, my father was doing fine where he was.”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“He was like everyone else. Solidarity forever. Without Forzante there wouldn’t have been a UCF.”
“That’s true.”
“Even if Gord had been planning a takeover, where does he get the support?”
“Tricky business, all of that. But I think there’s something in the union’s constitution. A leadership review thing. He needed some delegate support but there were lots of ways to get it. There’s always folks who want something and promises are cheap. Your pop wrote that constitution. He knew his way around it. Nothing Forzante could have done. He’d have been wrecked.”
“But there was never any review!”
“Because that bus hit your dad before he could put it on the agenda at the general meeting. That put an end to it. Seems strange to talk about it now. First time in years. Though you can’t help but wonder.”
“With all respect,” I said. “You’re full of shit.”
“A few of us who knew about it wondered why it never came out in the investigation after the accident. I always d
id find that strange. Nobody brought it up at all.”
I opened the water and took a quick sip, swishing the taste of tobacco smoke from my mouth and considered the implications of what Pat was saying, how it jibed with what Tony told me at Betty’s. It seemed impossible.
And yet, I thought: The kind of diplomatic masonry Pat had described was unquestionably a part of Gord’s character. That subtle deal-making, the cat-quiet manoeuvres, his understanding of the Big Picture, that all fit with my father. Plus, this Pat—this half blind, phlegmatic convenience store owner—he just seemed so certain of so many details.
15
Fearing fatigue after so much drink so early in the day, I chose safety and did not return to Toronto that evening. Instead, I checked into the Ambassador Inn, a low-slung, in-and-out, fluorescent-lit place not far from the on-ramp to the highway. Seated on the edge of the bed in my room, I called the townhouse. The phone rang six times before the answering service picked up. I listened to Sagipa tell callers that no one was available at that moment and then listened to him say the same thing in unsteady Mandarin.
After the beep, I told Inés not to expect me until the next day. “And until I start paying property taxes to Beijing, would you please keep the answering machine in Eng—”
“Hey,” Sagipa said, and I instantly felt my pettiness like a muscle spasm. “You don’t like my message?”
“I’ve had a lousy day,” I said.
“What if I work on the accent?” Sagipa said.
“Sure,” I said. “What’s going on up there?”
“I looked for your Marty Schuller,” Sagipa said.
I sat up on the bed, then bent to rest my elbows on my knees, my free hand tugging on my earlobe. “And?” I said.
“I couldn’t find him,” Sagipa said. “But I’ll keep looking.”
The room at the Ambassador Inn smelled of barber’s talc and even with the lights off, it glowed streetlight yellow. I stretched out on the mattress, trying a number of positions between lumps and the points of wayward springs. Seeking additional support, I slipped a pillow under the small of my back.