A week later, as the summer drew to a close and I hunkered over the kitchen table writing liberal doses of Goya into my grade twelve curriculum, my phone rang. The man’s high-pitched voice sounded tired. He introduced himself as Randal Leineovich’s lawyer and apologized for having taken so long to reach me.
“Randy misses you very much,” he said. “He’s been busy, as you can imagine, fighting all these preposterous allegations, this-this-this conspiracy against a hardworking man from the middle class. But he is clear for visitors now. Will you come?”
The next morning, in the shower, seven days of grit and paint streamed off my body and churned down the drainpipe. I stared into the inky whirlpool, remembered similar sights at the beginning of the summer, after Randy and I worked on the deck and I washed my scuffed and dirty hands in the bathroom sink, rivulets of grime streaming from my palms. I had used red paint to finish the kitchen murals, so the current in the shower was shot through with russets, like Bill Carter’s deck, like the floor of my kitchen when I woke up after my going-away party. I watched the paint funnel down the drain until the water ran clear.
I hurried from the shower to my closet, then out the front door. The Rottweiler across the street growled and barked as I fumbled with the locks. I paused in the driveway to study the porch. It was beautiful, of course, but I could still see the blotch from the dead ladybug above the door. It had chipped and expanded in the couple months since I’d first noticed it, more amorphous and ambiguous. I’d have to sand and paint that spot again. Make it fresh. And then, I’d have to redo the murals inside, because Joy was behind me now, a cute little blemish, just like Jimbo, her truest lover, and all the rest from back home, as well.
An Improved Map of the World
I.
In the weedy school parking lot, while hurrying toward my rusted brown sedan, I stopped to smack the boy across his mouth, very hard. The sound was both new and remembered. It was from my past, my present, and maybe even my future. The boy was poised to hurl a rock through my windshield, but it slid from his fingers and thumped between his feet. His face collapsed into tears, but he did not cover it with his hands. Later, the police came to my house to inform me of the consequences, which included my termination from the school’s geography department. The local paper detailed my transgression. I’ve agreed to see a therapist, and in return the boy’s parents, who understand how difficult he can be, will consider dropping the charges, provided my therapy culminates in a written apology.
II.
I know where the boy lives.
He lives on a crescent street about a twenty-minute walk from the school. His is a simple, one-storey house with a well-maintained lawn and a stone frog on the front porch. It’s evening, and the lights are on in the living room. The family does not see me pass.
At home, with a pencil in my hand, I purse my lips and recreate the street with a long, elegant swoop in the top corner of a large piece of white Bristol board. In the centre, I sketch a light oval, which is the location of the school. Below that, I draw another oval, which demarcates my own modest property. And below that, I scour deep, black lines to represent the forest at the edge of town, where I do not go walking at night.
I wouldn’t be so brazen as to call myself a cartographer, because self-congratulation does not appeal to me. I would say only that I have engaged in amateur map-making since I was a boy, because plotting my father’s trips on a representation of the world seemed to comfort my mother, especially after my grandfather moved in.
III.
My mother found me hard to care for, but not because I was bad. In the summer, we ate breakfast together early in the afternoon. She tried to sit me on her lap, even though I was too big and fat, and the smell of her perfume gave me a headache. I remember the scratch of her prickly legs against my ankles. I remember the way she struggled to balance me on her knees, and the way my bare feet smacked the linoleum floor when she finally gave up. In the silence that followed these small failures, I would wish for the presence of my father, but those were foolish hopes, because his work in international transportation frequently kept him away.
“For now, let’s stick with the topic of your mother,” says my therapist, who is called James but entreats me to call him Jim, as if he and I are old friends. He sits in a distasteful tartan armchair and crosses his legs like a woman. A cellphone pokes out from the breast pocket of his shirt. On the desk behind him is a wedding photo, which should be facing inward, toward his work station, but instead faces outward, at the couch I’m sitting on. I find this boastful, even vulgar, but I don’t want to appear aggressive, so I ignore it and continue with the topic of my mother.
I remember watching her slurp milk from her cereal, holding the bowl with both hands. Once, a piece of sleep-salt fell from the corner of her eye and dissolved in her orange juice. Often, by the end of the week, the dining room table was cluttered with dishes from previous breakfasts, and it was normal for a few to fall to the ground and shatter. I cut my feet many times trying to clean the mess. I bandaged my wounds with Scotch tape and ate potato chips on the living room couch. Crumbs clung wetly to the tips of my fingers, which I nevertheless ran through my sleeping mother’s thin blond hair.
Eventually, my grandfather arrived to assist my mother. A veteran of the Korean War, he dressed in green cardigans that stretched across his wide chest and blue dress pants with straight, severe pleats. His blackly hirsute forearms were thick and veiny from a postwar lifetime of manual labour smashing pickaxes into concrete foundations. His first act in our house was to sweep the week’s dishes off the table, so that they all crashed into filthy shards on the floor, and then scream at my mother to clean it up or he would hit her with his belt, which he held slackly between his two hands like a man who’d just fatally grip-crushed a snake.
IV.
In therapy, I recount a dream, which I have described to James as recent. In the telling, however, I begin to think that perhaps this dream is an old one, that I’ve been experiencing it for years, and it’s due only to my life’s recent upheaval that I’ve come to remember the details.
When I sleep, my grandfather is morbidly obese and lives in a treehouse in our overgrown backyard. His face is visible in the hole that doubles as a door. Blood and entrails smear his lips. He always seems to be chewing. My father is at home, attempting to organize my mother’s funeral. In the backyard, I shriek and point at the treehouse, but all my father sees is a lawn that needs mowing. He shushes me and turns away. Then my grandfather speaks. He tells me to go into the woods and find some children and bring them back so he can devour them. I obey. I push my way through wet foliage and happen upon two boys absorbed in a stash of obscene pornography. I hit them with a club and drag their bodies home. Later, the treehouse looks like an open wound dripping blood, and when I find the boys’ bodies in the tall grass, I discover that each of them looks a little like me, so I stone their corpses to destroy the resemblance. In this way, I appear to survive.
James rests his chin on his knuckles. His face betrays no horror, even though surely his dreams are themed only with phone bills and awkward dates at the town’s only pub. I do not need to wonder what my grandfather would make of James. He is loose and undisciplined. He oozes with his own curious matter, which is inappropriate in this office and everywhere else.
“Let’s get back to your childhood living situation,” he says, recrossing his legs. “What was it like when your grandfather moved in?”
I tell him about the fight, since surely he must already know, and the authorities will only consider my therapy successful if I leak and sputter in the same manner as him.
One night, my mother and grandfather exchanged many allegations. For the record, I believe my mother. She accused my grandfather of striking my grandmother, whom I’d never met because she died before I was born. My mother also said that my grandfather was nice to my father only so that the former could enjoy f
ree accommodations in the home. She said my grandfather should have died in the war, and that surely he would have, had he not done something terrible in order to survive. She did not elaborate, but he slapped her anyway, and she fell down very hard. I witnessed all this from beneath the kitchen table, where I’d been revising one of my world maps.
Both my grandfather and I watched my mother go into convulsions. I crawled toward her. He ran away. I held onto her nightgown while she twitched on the floor in a pool of moonlight. Her jaw clenched and bubbles of spit formed between the cracks of her teeth. Eventually, she lay still. When she didn’t wake up, I went to my grandfather’s room. The door was open and he was curled up on the floor. There were tears on his face and he was audibly grinding his teeth. I went back to the kitchen, surmised that my mother had passed away, and telephoned the police.
My therapist reaches out and squeezes my knee. “Sometimes,” he says, “men become monstrous.”
“Please,” I say, squirming. “I don’t wish to be touched.”
V.
I do not relate to James the many ways my grandfather struggled to redeem himself. My sense is that he would not comprehend how violence can play a constructive role in a boy’s life. James and I are roughly the same age, but his was clearly a liberal upbringing, and if I speak positively of my childhood, I could jeopardize the ostensible success of my therapy.
And yet, the fact remains: after my mother’s death, because my father was just too busy, my grandfather became my primary caretaker. We kept the truth of that evening between us. My mother was the type who might fall and hit her head. No one asked any questions.
He was frequently summoned to my school when I acted out. When he came to pick me up, he would buckle me into the back seat and slap me very hard. Then he would say: “It’s for your own good. It’s to help you.” And sometimes, he would slap me a second time, calmly. Once, his palm whipped across my ear so hard that the ambient sounds of life many of us take for granted grew muffled and distant, and in their place was a shrill and steady whine that brought tears to my eyes and persisted for hours.
But he was not all violence and cruelty. He noticed my interest in geography and encouraged me to draw more maps, and he would hang them in the dining room above the table that my mother and I used to clutter with our cereal bowls and toast crumbs. He kept a box of multi-coloured tacks in the kitchen drawer, and he would recite the capitals of countries that had experienced armed conflicts. Depending on the duration of a conflict, I would mark them with a green, red, or yellow tack. Occasionally, a tack would be removed because of a complicated resolution, but not often. I enjoyed the exercise and many years later I included something similar in my own lesson plans, which, because of my current state of expulsion and disgrace, will likely, and unfortunately, be discontinued.
When I was seventeen, my grandfather died of bone cancer. It came on very quickly, and he withered in his hospital bed. He was shockingly small beneath the drapery of his sheets, but still not so weak as to miss an opportunity to correct my behaviour. During one of my visits, a nurse came in to administer morphine. She brushed against my leg and I, impatient, told her to go around the other side of the bed. My grandfather’s hand cracked across my face before I’d even finished the final syllable.
After the funeral, my father spent a month at home and we ate together quietly every night. Before leaving on his travels again, he knocked on my bedroom door, where I’d been sitting on my bed, my back straight while I cried. Seeing me in that state, my father told me not to mourn my grandfather because, in fact, he would live forever. He told me that cancer cells are immortal, that it’s merely the human host that dies. He told me my grandfather had donated his cells to scientific research and that his DNA would exist in perpetuity, and wasn’t that a comforting thought.
Imagine telling a thing like that to James, a man whose notions of permanence include an outward-facing wedding photo on his desk. Imagine his reaction. Imagine his judgment. There’s simply no way he could understand.
VI.
The boy’s father greets me at the door. He wears a white dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned. His eyebrows are thick and coarse and grey. His breath smells faintly of beer as he stares at me and calls out to the boy, who approaches the door with a self-satisfied demeanor. I understand that for this particular boy, at this particular time, it is too late for change.
Wordlessly, I unfold the map, and from my breast pocket I remove a red tack, which I use to affix the map to the door, even as the boy and his father regard me with suspicion. Their expressions intensify once they realize I’ve driven the tack through the space representing their house.
I move to step off the porch, but the father grabs me by the shoulder, his grip surprisingly firm. He says, “What the fuck is this?” And a droplet of spittle lands on my nose. He shakes me once, twice, and I see the boy standing behind him, wondering whether he should smile.
Then the father lets me go, and I walk calmly toward my car, comfortable in the fact that I’ve been violent with no one, and that my charges are unlikely to be dropped.
Even Still
Roger
They arrive forty-five minutes late in a white pickup with the word Hybrid stenciled across the door in swooping blue letters. Peering through the blinds of his front window, Roger already imagines their justification for the vehicle. He imagines the words coming not from Del but from Cassie, who will breathlessly explain the truck’s quintessential British Columbian qualities — its rugged, off-road posture, perfect for bouncing up steep alpine pitches, for accessing remote cabins, hiking trails, and cliff-side picnic tables — but not to worry, because this model is manufactured with the global future top of mind, and its hybrid engine is just the tip of the environmentally conscious but tragically evaporating iceberg.
Coastal types, Roger thinks, pushing his round-rim glasses up his nose and clearing his throat. Coastal types are so full of shit and dietary supplements.
Nancy comes pattering out of the kitchen and she’s opening the front door before the Willis-Mayburrys even have time to walk up the gravel driveway, their arms loaded with wine. Roger tries hard to follow her cheery lead, even though he knows it’s mostly a put-on. He smooths a few strands of black and grey hair dangling from a sparse patch in the middle of his forehead. He’s wearing a blue-and-red-striped tie, and he digs his fingers into the knot, fumbles with it a moment, straightens it out, and runs his dry palm down his chest. A coil of cigarette ash is caught in a tuft of arm hair. He flicks it away, takes a deep, gurgling breath, and presents himself at the door with a bloodless smile.
He endures twenty minutes of bumbling introductions and awkward body contact, and then he’s outside leaning over the grill, four steaks dripping into a burst of gas-fueled fire, a cigarette fuming in the ashtray beside him, water beading on the bottleneck of his favourite light beer. Del is behind him, coughing lightly into his itty fist, and Roger knows when he turns around the man will be reclined in a lawn chair, his hairless legs crossed effeminately, a glass of red wine in his hand (fancy stuff they order straight from the Okanagan), and a light breeze blowing through his disheveled hair.
What, Roger wonders, was William thinking when he sat at this man’s dinner table? And what was he thinking when he had intercourse with this man’s daughter?
“Trailer looks super, Rog.” Del rubs his thumb along his stubbled chin. “Looks really comfortable. Really homey, you know. Which is what you want in a home. I mean, we both said so as soon as we pulled in the driveway.”
Roger nods ever so slightly. “It’s a double-wide. Easy to renovate when you’ve got the space.” He swallows his beer and puffs his cigarette. He closes the barbeque lid and sits in the chair next to Del. A dog barks from a neighbouring lot. Roger looks out on his patchy backyard, golf tees littered around the patio stones, scattered finishing nails and sawdust caught in the bunchgrass, a battered red punch
ing bag hanging from the branch of a tree, and he realizes he’d be marginally happier if Cassie were out here instead of Del. A car door slams and a baby shrieks through an open window. Roger squishes his smoke into a crack between patio stones and blows twin streams through his nostrils.
At least Cassie has balls. Del hasn’t worked in something like twenty years. And he’s not embarrassed about it either. He volunteers the information, as if playing housewife is something to be envied. And then he always mentions his writing. Always mentions his book. He was raising their daughter — raising Keisha — and then he was writing a book. But when you think about it, Del never actually finished either of those two things. And now he never will. Nor is he likely to finish anything else he starts, unless of course he intends to load the dishwasher. Because Del isn’t a closer. Not like his wife.
“So,” Del says, and he pauses to sip his wine, swish it over his tongue. “So I think I’ll be returning to teaching soon, eh?”
Roger stands up and checks on the steaks. “That right?” He keeps his back to Del. “Probably about time, eh?”
“Yep. Oh yeah. That’s what we think, too. It’s been a year, you know? At some point, you’ve just got to move on. You’ve got to put your grief behind you and just push on with your life.”
Even though he’s been retired for five years, Roger likes to think he’s maintained his sharp, analytical mind. He likes to put it to work, likes to keep it limber, to ward off Alzheimer’s or whatever else might be lurking in the end zone of his senior years. But more than that, it’s a habit. A good police officer has to think in terms of cause and effect, has to take a hard look at the past to better understand the present. And Roger likes to think he was more than a good police officer. Roger likes to think he was grade A.
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 3