Knucklehead & Other Stories

by W. Mark Giles

  (who was me, drunk, ever-so-sensitive to reality: I had walked into the toilet and saw two guys, one doing up his fly and saying, “Don’t worry about it, kid. That’s just the way he thinks,” and the other standing by the sinks toying with his neck brace. Making sure I didn’t stare or seem to be paying attention, I swaggered to the urinal to the left and quietly unzipped my fly. I focussed on this living vignette, trying to fix an image of the situation from the inadequate sensory information I could glean from my surroundings. On the chrome elbow of the urinal pipe I could make out the funhouse image of two men facing each other. Through the wash of water and muffled bar noise, I heard the breathing of the two men as they mumbled: one hard and even, the other raspy and sick. I heard the soft whisper of a broken comb passing through Brylcreemed hair. My sensitive ears heard all, my sensitive eyes saw all. I turned from the urinal and looked straight into the reflected eyes of a man by the sinks)

  and he said, “I dunno. Maybe I’m paranoid.”

  Knucklehead

  Zelle @ 18 months

  He will build a fence. The highest fence allowed by law. A thick, high, soundproof impenetrable fence. A fence without chinks or cracks between boards. He will allow no knotholes through which to peer, no handholds or footholds on which to hoist oneself. A fence sunk into the ground under which no small dog, no rodent, no child can burrow. A Berlin Wall, a Great Wall of China, a Hadrian’s Wall, a Maginot Line. When he finishes the fence, he will plant a high hedge, a hedge that will grow skyward past the fence, past the height of the house itself. A thick, high hedge.

  He has downloaded the development permit application and all the necessary supporting documents from the city website (the same website where he accessed the Animal Control Bylaw). He spends every tidbit of spare time planning and designing the fence. He uses his laptop and the CADD tools from his work. He knows how much concrete he will need for the foundation and the pillars, how many pallets of cinder blocks, how much sand, how many cubic feet of earth he will need to displace. He knows how much it will cost. He develops a budget and a construction schedule. He refines the design, consults his engineering references, revises and revises again. The fence will be a marvel. The fence will be a neighbourhood landmark. He will name it.

  One morning, Colm lies in bed, staring at the ceiling growing lighter in the dawn’s twilight, visualizing his fence. Beverly is still asleep beside him, curled around a pillow so that her spine presses against his ribs. He listens to the sounds of the house. Zelle in her room: she is awake, playing in her crib, singing to herself, talking in her own language to her teddy and monkey. Doxie’s toenails click on the tile in the kitchen as she moves from her bed by the back door to the dog dish. He can hear her lap water. It is just a few days past the fall equinox, and without looking at a clock, Colm places the time at ten to seven.

  He hears the Harley next door sputter to life. It’s the wrong day, he thinks. Sunday is the day his neighbour starts his bike, not Saturday. And it’s too early in the morning. Anything is possible these days. His dog poisoned, his car stereo stolen, twice. His garbage cans on fire. The phone stopped ringing mysteriously only because he opted for call screening. He has subscribed to a security service that has alarmed the doors and windows of his house and garage. The fence is next. He will break ground in the spring. He needs all winter to save the money.

  The motorcycle next door has been slipped into gear, and he listens as the percussive slap-slap of the engine drives away, then hears it coming around closer again to the front of the house. His curiosity is piqued. In the last year and a half or so, he has never seen it ridden. His neighbour, Ted Cope, just starts it and lets it run. He never rides it anywhere. Colm gets out of bed and peeks between the slats of the blinds. It is not Ted but another man astride the idling bike in front of the house next door. Helmetless, approximately the same size, age, shape and colouring as Ted, but with short hair and a neatly trimmed goatee. Ted is standing on the lawn. He’s wearing work boots and decent jeans, and a lined denim jacket. The bark-less terrier stands on the lawn, tethered to a leash which Ted has secured to his belt loop. As the man shuts off the engine and dismounts, Colm realizes he is wearing a leather vest with the patch of the most feared outlaw motorcycle gang in the world.

  “Oh boy,” Colm mutters.

  Beverly shifts, and rubs her eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll never believe it.”

  Beverly doesn’t answer, she just rises and gets on with her day.

  By eight o’clock, a half-dozen cars and pickup trucks have parked on the street. The Harley has been pulled up on the lawn. A dozen or fifteen men mill about in Ted’s back yard next to Colm and Beverly’s house, drinking coffee and beer. Boxes of Timbits are stacked on a table. Colm peeks out one of the windows and watches a man with a shaved head and a snake tattooed on the back of his neck toss bits of chocolate donut to the terrier and to Ted’s other dog, the rottweiler.

  “What is going on over there,” Colm says.

  “Why don’t you just go ask, for christ’s sake,” Beverly says. She’s wiping the porridge and pancake syrup from the table. Zelle is banging on her xylophone.

  At nine o’clock, a delivery truck from Home Depot arrives. Someone moves the motorcycle again, and the men form a work line to unload the truck. They stack four-by-fours, two-by-fours, sheets of plywood, boards in piles. Beverly pulls her jacket on, grabs her purse. She has her keys and a grocery list in her hand. Zelle runs over to grab her leg. “Mommy, Mommy. Car. Me car.” Beverly picks up Zelle and kisses her. “No, baby Zed. You stay with Dad. Mommy’s going shopping.”

  Zelle starts to cry then pushes away. Colm comes over to take her. He kisses Beverly. “Don’t forget the kiwi.”

  “Got it on the list.”

  “And the coffee beans.”

  “Right.

  “Soy milk.”

  “Mmmm. See you in a couple of hours.”

  “Why don’t you go for a coffee or something too? Spend the morning at Chapters? Zelle and I’ll be fine, won’t we kiddo?” Colm looks to the child in his arms. She’s rubbing her eyes.

  “I might,” Beverly says. She kisses Colm and Zelle again and leaves.

  Colm watches from the window, coaxing Zelle. “Say ‘bye-bye, Mom.’ Bye, Mom.” Zelle isn’t crying, but her bottom lip is curled. She buries her face in Colm’s shoulder. Colm pulls a Kleenex from the pocket of his shirt where he always seems to have one, wipes her nose, then puts it back. A couple of the men look up from their work to check Beverly out. One of them says something and Beverly stops as she opens the car door. She’s smiling and says something back. The men laugh and she does too. She gives a little wave of her hand to them, gets in her car and drives away.

  At ten after nine, Colm glances out the kitchen window. They are pulling down the chain-link fence between his house and Ted’s. Colm scoops Zelle up from where she’s banging her toy train on the floor and heads out the back door, Doxie at his heels.

  “What are you doing?” he demands. “What are you doing to this fence?”

  A man with a pair of wirecutters straightens up. Colm realizes it’s the Hell’s Angel, he’s just not wearing his patch. His T-shirt has a slogan on it: Any Questions, Dickhead? The man smiles. “Hey, you’re just in time to help us out here. I’m Dave.” He holds out his hand to shake.

  “Help?” Colm shifts Zelle to his right side.

  She’s pointing to the tool in the man’s hand, trying to lean over and grab it. “That? That, Daddy?”

  “Help with what?”

  “Building a fence,” another man says from the deck.

  “Tell him I don’t need any help.” Ted’s voice, coming from inside the house through an open kitchen window.

  “You can’t,” Colm says. Zelle is squirming, wanting to get down. Doxie sniffs cautiously at a gap in the fence. Ted’s rottweiler rattles the chain at its neck, but stays where it is under a chair. Colm can’t see the terrier, but hears its strange
soundless bark inside. “You can’t build a fence.”

  “We are,” says the man with the snake on his neck. Ted comes to the back door of his house. “Ask him if he’s going to call the City on us,” he says to Dave.

  The men laugh.

  “You can’t build a fence. I’m going to build a fence,” Colm says.

  Ted shakes his head. “Tell him he’ll be gaining some real estate. Jim figures the property line’s six inches my way.”

  Dave looks at Colm. He smiles again, a big grin that shows off a gold crown and good straight teeth: “You going to help us out here, or just get in the way?”

  Zelle @ 3 weeks

  Colm and Beverly close the deal on their bungalow over a year before Doxie is poisoned, when baby Zelle is less than a month old. Crestview is a blue-collar middle-class neighbourhood—there’s not really a crest, just a slight elevation; and some houses with a second storey have a view of the mountains to the west. Beverly and Colm discover if they stand on their tiptoes at the edge of the deck and look south between the tree branches, they can make out what might be the edge of the town, or at least the green belt of Fish Creek Park. The demographics of Crestview are changing—the families who baby-boomed this suburb in the 1950s hear their own echo in the 1990s. Zelle is the first baby on their block in years.

  After traipsing through dozens of houses, after returning to the bank (twice) to increase the value of their pre-approved mortgage, after endless arguments with Colm’s mother Gaddie about all things house-related, after despairing that they will never find a home that isn’t sitting on a pile of mud in the middle of a field a farmer harvested just last fall, that doesn’t smell like an athletic bag full of hockey equipment, that isn’t too small to rock a baby bye-bye, too expensive to afford mortgage, utilities, furniture and groceries (pick the best three out of four), or too close to a fire hall (Beverly had grown up across the street from one, and hated the constant sirens)—after all this and more, they immediately fall for the bungalow. Their realtor is visibly relieved when they begin to talk about the conditions of the offer to purchase before they even see the basement.

  Their house, and the one next door, stand out from the postwar sameness of the architecture in the rest of the neighbourhood. L-shaped, a little bigger than others nearby, the two houses have arched multi-paned windows and front verandahs flanked by clinker-brick columns. They look like they were built before the First World War, not after the second. Twin brothers from Scotland, Glaswegians and admirers of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, built their twin houses using plans purchased from the back pages of Modern English Cottages. The seller of their house—Nancy, the widow of one of the twins—takes pains to explain the houses are not identical, and neither were the builders. “For one thing, they’re mirror images, the layouts. My Geordie was tall and handsome and fair. Jock was short. I’ve kept up the hardwood, and all the woodwork that the boys worked so hard on. Like an old-country place they used to say. Lydia modernized when Jocko died, in 1982. Wall-to-wall broadloom. Taking the wood out. My husband was a teetotaller, you know, never touched a drop. And our back door and staircase to downstairs are in completely different places. And of course the basements — Lydia lets Ted do whatever down there. My sons have all moved on. Teddy’s still at home with Lydia, and her old mom too. Now that Geordie’s gone, I’ll go to the coast to be near my grandchildren. I’ve got two of them no bigger than little Zola here.”

  Nancy’s home—soon to be Colm and Beverly’s—is well kept. The cotoniaster hedges are trimmed as smartly as a sailor’s haircut. On the spring day that Colm and Beverly tour with the agent, while Zelle bawls in the baby sling, the blossoms on the apple trees rain down sweet petals. Tulips in all colours bloom in flower beds by the front door. In a small, neat rectangle of rich earth in the back, the spinach and lettuce are already leafed out, and the feathery wisps of carrot tops have broken the soil. The near-identical house next door isn’t exactly a dump, but needs new paint, and the shingles on the roof are starting to buckle, and there is a path worn across the front lawn where somebody takes a shortcut to their vehicle—it makes Colm and Beverly’s choice look that much more appealing.

  Colm and Beverly and the realtor and Zelle (quieted only by her mother’s breast) sit in the realtor’s Lincoln and draft the offer then and there. Later that night, after Zelle has been lullabyed into submission, they receive the phone call that their offer has been accepted.

  Zelle @ 14 months

  [The veterinarian describes how the dog lost its bark.]

  The terrier’s name is unknown to me, and is recorded only as the name of its owner, Mr. Edward Cope, also known in our files as Teddy Cope. Mr. Cope submitted said terrier to us at the Noah’s Ark Animal Clinic [the same clinic to which Colm rushed Doxie after finding her under the deck] with instructions to perform such surgical interventions as were necessary to render the dog mute, such being one of the terms and conditions under which the authorities would release the dog to his custody. As the principal partner in this practice [Dr. N. Lambert, the same vet who treated Doxie], I attempted to dissuade Mr. Cope from such a course of action [Dr. Lambert diagnosed Doxie as suffering from poisoning, likely from the accidental ingestion of a pesticide such as Warfarin or even strychnine]. But after discussion with Mr. Cope, who forcefully and with invective inveigled upon me that he was within his rights as a pet owner, that he knew his own mind, and further that God gave dominion over the animals to man, I agreed to comply with his wishes. I performed the procedure to sever the vocal chords myself. Mr. Cope of course was not present with his dog during the operation. [While Colm held Doxie, one of Dr. Lambert’s assistants pumped the dog’s stomach, then administered a dose of charcoal] For at least the past ten or even twenty years, Mr. Cope has conducted his business via telephone, and transports his pets to us in a kennel by animal taxi. Not infrequently, one of our staff will offer to pick up or drop his pets for him. In this particular instance, he arranged the transportation from the Animal Services Confinement Kennel. He never accompanies his animals; he hasn’t since he was a teenager. I believe he rarely, if ever, leaves his house. Mr. Cope paid the bill in the manner in which he always pays his bill, pre-paid in cash which he sends in an envelope inside the kennel with the dog [Colm paid his bill with a Platinum MasterCard, earning points towards his frequent flier program]. Mr. Cope is well-known to me, as over the twenty-eight years of this clinic’s operation, I have had the opportunity to treat any number of animals in his care, including guinea pigs, tropical fish, a pair of lovebirds, a ferret named Festus, with a withered leg, all of which have long since died of old age. [Colm had been to the clinic just a week previously, where Doxie was treated for an ear infection and given a prescription for antibiotics.] Current patients include his ten-year-old rottweiler registered by the name Fred Flintstone, but which he calls F***face, and the said terrier, approximately four years old, who as far as I know has never been named. Postprocedure, I delivered the terrier to Mr. Cope personally and he accepted it without comment, carrying the terrier into his house in such a way as to suggest the dog had a handle grafted to its back. [After settling his account, Colm lingered to consult with Dr. Lambert about how best to detoxify Doxie, what diets to follow, and long-term effects; Colm carried her to the car wrapped in a clean blanket, stroking her head, murmuring in her ear.] Mr. Cope is a difficult, unorthodox sort of personality, but I have no reason to believe his animals are in any way mistreated. I don’t believe in de-barking dogs, or in de-clawing cats for that matter, not that Mr. Cope would ever dream of owning a cat, but a pet owner who wants to do these things is well within the law; in this instance, the law even required it of him. [Dr. Lambert’s voice assumed a didactic and scolding tone when he cautioned Colm on the dangers of leaving rodent poison, insect poison or even herbicides where a dog could get at them. “But I don’t use those products. We’re gardening organically,” Colm replied. Dr. Lambert lowered his glasses and peered at Colm over the tops of the wire fra
mes. “You’d keep that stuff out of reach of children, so why not a dog. The dog found it somewhere, Mr.”—he picked up the credit card receipt and peered at it for a name—“Simpson.” “It’s Sinclair,” Colm said. “Colm Sinclair.”] I’ll do it if they ask me out of a sense of duty to my patient, who is the animal, and to whom I owe a duty of continuity of care.

  Zelle @ less than zero

  Before Colm and Beverly ever met, they each had few possessions. Colm had:

  ☐ His 1969 BSA Lightning motorcycle

  ☐ A trunkful of books

  ☐ A passport

  ☐ A set of professional quality cookware

  ☐ A $25,000 student loan debt in delinquency

  Beverly had:

  ☐ Her Pfaff serger-sewing machine

  ☐ A wicker trunk full of fabric

  ☐ Two rolling racks of favourite clothes, some she had designed herself

  ☐ A passport

  When they met at a hostel in Greece, they each had:

  ☐ A backpack

  ☐ A money belt

  ☐ A sunburn

  All their other things were in storage in opposite sides of Canada. They spent the next several months travelling through the Greek Islands, Turkey, North Africa. They separated for ten weeks in Morocco, where Beverly took a lover in Essaouira, then another in Marrakesh, and Colm lived in a hotel in Tangiers, smoking opium-laced hashish and imagining conversations with Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. They hooked up again and toured Spain, Portugal and Southern France before they returned to Canada. They parted at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, too tired from the overseas flight to attempt sex in a public place. They had fewer possessions now than when they met, having abandoned:

  ☐ Worn-out clothes