Cluck

by Lenore Rowntree

  He sits on one of the hard chairs between the extruder and the cigarette vending machine. No one else is in the laundromat except for the woman with no front teeth who takes in bundles of laundry from the people too lazy to wash for themselves, and a jockish guy who’s trying to wrestle a heap of training shorts and singlets, all of them the same greyish colour, into an orderly pile. While Henry sits watching the pile of grey grow, he fingers the coins in his pocket and realizes he has seven quarters — enough to buy a pack of cigarettes.

  He slips the coins one by one into the vending machine. It feels reassuring when each one hit its mark and registers in the brain of the machine. He pulls the knob under the duMauriers and a red crush-proof pack vaults out of the guts. He runs his fingernail over the customs stamp and pushes the tray of cigarettes up. He removes the silver foil from one side and twelve virgins, all erect and stiff, stare up at him. He runs his fingers over the tips. It makes a seductive fluttering sound enticing him to bend down and smell the tobacco. The virgin in him realizes he is beginning to get a boner from molesting cigarettes. He rubs his hand slightly over the fly of his jeans.

  He doesn’t get very many erections. Or more correctly, he doesn’t get very many he can do anything with. He knows in this he is different from most of his male classmates who spend half their time whacking off, and the other half talking about it.

  And the laundromat is an odd place to have this happen, not all that comfortable to be feeling a stiff urge in front of a toothless hag and a jock with too many grey singlets. But still, since this erection has already lasted longer than usual without hedging back into itself, he decides to go with it and see where it takes him. He tries to think about the blonde girl in the front row of English class, the one with the black eyeliner, above and below her eyes, and the tight sweaters — pink ribbed, red ribbed, white ribbed — all of them taut over giant boobs. He rubs his hand a bit harder over the zipper of his jeans. His right leg jumps out in a two-step motion and he recognizes it as the same movement his mother makes sometimes when she is dancing. Next thing he knows black-eyeliner girl is fading, and all he can see is his mother’s ruby lipstick, her yellowed overlong fingernails, and her gut. Then he is smelling her, her breath, her underarms, and feeling so sad his erection dies. It’s very disappointing, along with the money wasted on cigarettes when he doesn’t even smoke.

  He is sitting in a demoralized heap with barely enough energy to get out of the chair when the woman who runs the place shouts over to him.

  Get out of here. No loitering.

  Sorry. Henry leaps out of his seat.

  And don’t come back, she yells. I saw you.

  He knows what he’s been doing is inappropriate, but he hadn’t meant to cause the woman any trouble. He sort of thought he was in his one-way glass case again, and he’s so used to people not paying him any attention he’s almost surprised she noticed him at all. Outside, his hand trembles as he tries to insert the transistor’s speaker into his ear. He’s having trouble getting it straight, and his hand shakes so much he drops the radio on the sidewalk. The turquoise case shatters. The radio’s contents splay in front of him in a terrible array. He picks up the useless pieces, pockets the battery, and chucks the rest in the garbage can at the corner.

  The next day Henry quits school. He just can’t keep going day after day to that brick and mortar warehouse for teenagers who look like him, who dress like him, but who won’t talk to him — a place where he has no friends, no one even to get an erection over. He is always alone. It feels worse than being bullied. He and his mother are a disgrace, they have no rights, no right even to ask for help.

  When he tells the school secretary he is dropping out, she doesn’t say anything, simply buzzes Mr. Sogland, who sticks his head out of the counselor’s office and motions him in.

  So, are you finding your studies too difficult? Mr. Sogland asks.

  Henry thinks it’s better to say yes than to admit his real problems.

  Which studies are too tough?

  Socials, math. All of them I guess.

  Well it’s not too late to go into trades.

  No, no trades.

  Have you thought about a tutor?

  No.

  Why not? Is it the cost?

  No.

  What then?

  I just don’t think a tutor would do any good. I was wondering . . .

  Mr. Sogland cuts him off to ask, Should I contact your mother, perhaps send a social worker to the house?

  Gosh, no . . . that . . . I think that . . . that would not be good.

  He stops talking. He can see Mr. Sogland is busy looking through the window in his office door at black-eyeliner girl who is sitting in a ribbed sweater in the waiting area. Mr. Sogland’s eyes are completely on the girl.

  No, he continues, no need for a social worker. We have one.

  Mr. Sogland swings his focus back. You do? Who?

  Giselle Martin from Social Services.

  Mr. Sogland makes a note, then looks up and asks, How are things going with her?

  Good. She recommended I take a year out from my studies.

  She did?

  Yes. She thinks I need a break.

  Henry isn’t sure why he is lying, he just knows he needs to get out of Mr. Sogland’s office, get away from the school, and away from people like black-eyeliner girl whom he believes is probably feeling squeamish at the thought of sitting in the same chair as him after he leaves.

  Well, Mr. Sogland says, you’re old enough to make up your own mind about this, so if you really want to withdraw you’re always welcome back next year.

  Okay, Henry says.

  Mr. Sogland’s face lights up with a goofy grin as he motions black-eyeliner girl in.

  Henry feels her veer away from him as their paths cross at the threshold.

  THREE

  Snake Eyes

  A YEAR LATER, HENRY CAN STILL feel that veer. He’s certain he’s a failure. He’s a high-school dropout. He has acne — the blond moustache on his upper lip barely covers any of it — and he has no job. No friends. When the front bell rings and no one is there, he just stands at the door. The lawn badly needs cutting. He doesn’t want to go out because the kids have probably written swear words in black marker on the hood of the car again, or put dog shit under leaves where he or his mother walk. It isn’t until he sees Dave and Patsy’s white cat pounce and come up with a limp snake, its head dangling as if it has been severed, that he moves off the porch. He doesn’t want the cat to hurt itself again from a razor blade stuck in snake meat.

  Scat, he calls. Scat.

  Stamping his foot finally makes the cat drop the snake. When he gets close he can see there is only a dead snake and no blade. What else have the kids done? He avoids the mouth as he picks the snake up — he’s heard snakes have a biting reflex even after death — and he walks it to the curb. A rush of liquid hits the side of his head. His free hand goes to his temple and green algae drips from his fingers. The tip of a super water gun is sticking out over the hood of the car parked across the street.

  I see you, he calls.

  Two early-teen boys and a younger girl laugh as they run down the street.

  The boy carrying the gun yells, Your mother is psycho.

  I know, he says.

  After the kids are out of sight, Henry holds the snake over the sewer grate. He sees the tiny black coal bubble of an eye and the flash of white belly as the body twists and falls.

  Lying on his bed that afternoon, he thinks, Maybe dead things shouldn’t go into the sewer. Maybe it’s better to give them a proper burial. He gets up to turn on his record player and distract himself. He drops the needle randomly without looking at the turntable, and he’s flat out again, too lazy to get back up, when he discovers it’s Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”. He hates the song, mostly because he’s worried he’s that man of means by no means.

  After listening for a time, he gets off the bed and pulls the needle. But once he
’s back down, visions of his mother’s failures start to swim in his head. The nasty words the kids wrote in black magic marker on her car, the ripped and dirty underwear they left on her antenna, her inability to protect herself, her confusion. When one of them threw a stone knocking her sunglasses to the ground, she just stooped to pick them up.

  These thoughts twist in Henry’s mind together with thoughts of his own failures and rejections until they’re a writhing mess, worse than a nest of snakes. A panic starts to rise in his body and swirl around, landing for a time in the pit of his stomach, then settling in his penis. The tip is tingling. He yanks it out of his pants, tries to make it do something, stand on its own, transport him. He thinks about Debi’s bouncy cheeks, about black-eyeliner girl’s tits, even virgin filter tips and grey singlets. But none of it works. The more he yanks and pulls, the more the shaft collapses. Soon he’s limper than the snake he let fall through the hole in the sewer lid. He zips his pants back up, gets off the bed, walks out the front door and across the lawn to Dave’s house. He knocks, and because it’s a Saturday afternoon, Dave is home.

  Are there any jobs at Fisheries? Henry asks. I like animals, and fish too.

  I’ll ask around, Dave answers.

  I worry about animals mostly, Henry says. I’d like to work with animals although fish would be okay, and so would reptiles. He doesn’t know why he is babbling, maybe it’s the dead snake, the white cat, a limp penis, all of them muddled into one giant concern. He takes in a big breath, stifling a nervous snort. He hears Patsy at the back of the house, in the kitchen. She’s washing dishes, making a lot of noise. A pot crashes against the side of the stainless steel sink when she calls out.

  Ask him about the hooligans. Ask why they keep coming here. Why they egg the house?

  It has nothing to do with you guys, Henry says. I’m on it. I’ll take care of it.

  Maybe there’s something in Agriculture, Dave says. But even if there is, it could take a while.

  That’s okay. Thanks for looking.

  Henry walks with resolve down the steps and around the side of his own house toward the garden shed. He moves the garbage cans away from the door. Inside he puts his collection of rosette pine cones out of harm’s way, then takes the push mower off the wall. He presses the mower forward down the sidewalk and out onto the front lawn. In no time the grass is trimmed and looking much better. Once he’s hung the mower back up, he walks into the house and positions himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He picks up the razor and takes the blond moustache off his upper lip. It’s lighter than his hair, but it looks darker in the sink. He stands back. Other than the small trickle of blood from where he nicked his lip, he’s pretty sure he looks better too. His face is regular and balanced, if a bit pale, but there’s less acne under the moustache than he expected.

  You can only do what you can do, he says to his reflection.

  He takes a piece of toilet paper and wipes the whiskers from the rim of the sink. He drops the paper into the pile of junk that has reaccumulated in the hall. Then he opens the front door and shoves all of it onto the porch and down the steps. He uses a rake and shovel to push everything toward the street where he makes a starter pile on top of the sewer lid, another bigger pile beside it. He sets a match to the small pile. The smoke is thick and black, especially when the wax on the milk cartons begins to melt. The trio of kids from down the way are attracted to the smoke and eager to join in, help him tend the fire. They bring the super water gun loaded.

  There, Henry says pointing to the edge of the pile where the flames are threatening to get out of hand.

  The middle boy expertly directs a stream of water to the trouble spot.

  Henry picks up a running shoe that had been his when he was a child and hands it to the girl. He motions with his hand to her to throw it in.

  Cool, she says as they watch the sole of the shoe begin to bubble, then spew like a rubber volcano.

  Cool indeed, Henry says. In a weird way he’s more comfortable with these kids than he is with people his own age. No more egging the houses. Okay?

  Sure, the eldest boy says. The other two nod in solemn agreement.

  After the embers of the fire die down and the kids have left to go home for supper, he hangs the rake and shovel in the shed, and he lines up the rosette cones in descending order of size on the windowsill. He walks into the house and down the hall to his bedroom, where he turns on the Sony desktop radio his mother gave him for Christmas. He likes the new FM station CFOX and he’s standing by the radio thinking how nobody needs to know his only picture of Tom was in that pile of burning junk when he hears the DJ say, Save your Cadbury wrappers for the Cadbury $100 record rush contest . . . Drum roll please, and now the moment you’ve all been waiting for, announcing the first regional winner of the Cadbury wrapper record rush contest, and the winner is . . . are you hanging from the ceiling yet, boys and girls . . . ? and the winner is, wait for it gang . . . more drum roll please . . . and the winner is Henry Parkins in Kitsilano. Henry if you’re listening and can get to the phone in the next five minutes, call us at 685-CFOX and all those records are yours including this new one from the Stones, “Far Away Eyes”.

  While he dials, he hears Mick singing about a girl with far away eyes. The pedal steel and country twang in the song is truly cool.

  FOUR

  Longer Nails

  SIX MONTHS INTO THE JOB at the Burnaby office of Agriculture Canada, Henry sits anxious at his desk sorting mail. It’s a Monday morning and already he’s behind because he’s been too focused on peeping through the slot of a window on the other side of the room. Despite the building being a grey bunker with little natural light, and erratic heating that bangs on when the sun comes out and hisses off when temperatures drop below freezing, he is happy enough working here. He likes that he’s mostly alone in the mailroom and, although people don’t necessarily come around to befriend him, they don’t go out of their way to avoid him either, don’t draw back like they did at the high school. So he really doesn’t want Alice showing up in her dirty yellow boots to ruin everything for him.

  He’s done what he can to be vague about where the office is exactly, and he’s managed to make it sound like he’s out most of the time (which is true at least in aspiration — one day he does hope to become a poultry technician, a job that will take him into the field), but he can’t help getting up every few minutes to check to make sure she’s not outside. She was so agitated over the weekend, at first too loving in her barely hidden sexual way, and then when he told her to back off, raking his face with her fingernails. Her nails have grown so long they are beginning to curl and twist like dirty roots on a radish. The full-on physical attack frightened him and he wanted to tell her so, but at the same time he did not want to hurt her feelings.

  This morning when he was applying some of her pancake makeup to cover the scratches, she sat slumped and depressed at the kitchen table with the phone book open to the Federal government listings. She said she was looking for Agriculture Canada so she could come to work with him. To make her stay at the table and not follow him to the bus stop he promised he’d come home early and they would do something fun. In reality, he’d made her an appointment with Dr. Davis.

  When he gets home, she is not happy to learn they’re going to see her physician. Why? I’m not leaving the house.

  Mom, you are making me scared.

  Really? she says, her eyes wide with hurt or perhaps fear.

  Yes, really. You attacked me. You know I want the best for you. I want to find out if the doctor can help.

  She sags in resignation.

  At the clinic they wait with two pregnant women and a clutch of sniffing children. Across from them, a poster features a chorus of colourful characters washing their hands under the banner: Flummox the Flu. A cartoon bubble above one of the creatures exclaims, Keep nails short! Henry thinks briefly about pointing this out to his mother, but worries she’ll react and frighten the children.


  When the nurse comes to usher Alice into Dr. Davis’ office, she turns to Henry.

  Will you come and listen to what he says this time?

  The doctor doesn’t get up from his desk, and his shoulders seem to drop when he looks at them over his glasses.

  What brings you here today, Alice? he asks.

  Her only response is to slump again, so Henry jumps in.

  She’s been acting kind of erratically, seems a bit out of touch. Show the doctor your fingernails, Mom.

  She holds up her hands, and the doctor’s shoulders drop even further. She’s tried to make things look better with some purple metallic nail polish, but it’s only made it look as if she carries some kind of gangrenous disease.

  What’s this about, Alice? the doctor asks.

  It’s a sin to cut any part of the sacred body, she says.

  How’ve you been feeling? A little more down than usual?

  Yes, she answers.

  Henry feels his neck disappear into his shirt collar as if he were a turtle. When he looks round, they are all slumping in their different ways.

  Then the doctor sighs and swings around in his chair toward Henry. Your mother suffers from depression, he says. Not the ordinary sort of blues, a more serious pathological sort called manic depression.

  He shoves his glasses back up his nose and extends a pamphlet toward Henry. You read about it, he says. It can be hereditary. It’s tragic when these things happen. And there’s not much we can do about it.

  The doctor turns his focus back to the patient, What do you think, Alice — should we up your medication?

  Yes, she says.

  Henry is shocked. He didn’t know she was taking medication or that anyone, let alone a doctor, had known there was something so wrong with her she needed it. There’s silence in the room.

  Any questions? the doctor asks.

  What do you mean hereditary? Henry says.

  Dr. Davis shifts in his chair, pushes back on the swivel seat and asks, How old are you, Henry?