I stare at my stump and I tell myself that maybe I’m a better person now, more enlightened or whatever, less afraid. Mostly I feel like that. Maybe not after that fucking dinner, maybe not right now, but mostly I believe that what happened out here was some kind of trade-off. My right hand to know, to absolutely know, what love feels like. So when I’m sitting with Jess in the back seat of her boyfriend’s car and she tells me I’m the most beautiful boy, I understand what she’s really saying, I under—
A door bangs open. Bangs shut—Don’s on the deck, squinting into the yard. I lower my arm and press my body deeper into the grass and will him not to see me. He clomps down the stairs, scoops a leaf out of the pool, slams the barbecue lid shut and, with a grunt, reaches for the black cover lying in a heap on the ground. We are ten feet apart, max. He freezes. Motionless, except for the drunken sway. When his eyes meet mine, he lets out a scream—jerks up and smacks his head on the barbecue, the dull ring of bone against metal.
Jesus H., he pants, grabbing at his skull. He takes a long, raspy breath. You scared the shit out of me. He swears a bit more, then rattles into the shed. I use the time to sit up. When he slides down the wall beside me, he’s clutching a fresh bottle of wine. It’s a screw-top. A twist of his wrist and he’s taking his first glug and his second.
I hear it was cold as a witch’s tit that night. He runs one foot over the flattened grass, the imprint I left on the lawn, a chalk outline in dented green.
Yeah, I say, it was cold.
Eli said it was fuckin’ forty below.
Something like that.
Kids, he says. Stooopid. He catches my eye as he passes me the bottle. I do appreciate your parents not suing.
Guess they can only handle one lawsuit at a time. I take a swig. Dry and tart, but still it’s cold, white, not nearly as bad as the red. It would be okay with some sugar.
Partners. Pain in the ass. Unless it’s family, forget it. Even then, I got no use for partners. If your father had of asked me, I’da told him as much.
Peter started the business.
Peter Fuckin’ Conrad. Any arsehole can see the man’s a greedy son of a bitch. Now Eli’s going with his daughter. The man practically shits whenever she comes here. Thinks we’re a bad influence. How ironic is that? Greedy prick with his long hippie hair and his big place on the river, the cottage up there on Yirkie. Don plucks the bottle from my hand. You ever go to their cottage?
Yup.
Is Yirkie weedy? I heard it’s weedy.
No, Don, it’s not weedy.
Jesus. He takes a long swig, stares out at the pool for a while. I stare along with him at the glowing blue. We’re not cottage people, he says. Too many bugs. Still, he says, she seems like a nice kid. Kinda big, you know, those shoulders—Christ, she could play football—but pretty. Pretty hair. And nice. She seems like a nice kid.
She is.
Good. I’m glad. Glad for Eli. I mean, let’s face it, his brother got Dorothy’s looks, God bless her down there in Costa Rica lovin’ up the pool boy. I mean, who’d blame her, right? Don’s face crumples and his eyes get all watery, and I’m thinking, great, now he’s going to cry, but then he turns and bangs me in the shoulder. And you, he says. You handsome son of a bitch. You’ve got good, good bone structure there. You’ve got a face. Too fuckin’ skinny at the moment, like I said before, but you’ll put on the weight once you’ve stopped growing. How tall’s your old man?
I don’t know. Six, six one.
You’ll be taller, he says, like it’s all decided. Tall is good for business. Handsome is good for business. Still, I’ve done okay. He leans in close, his face right in mine. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t floss. I keep it simple, he says. My place in Costa Rica. My place here. Real estate. Rental properties. Cash flow. Unless you got some inside info, stay away from the fuckin’ markets. Bay Street. Wall Street. Biggest cocksuckers of ’em all. Sucking up everyone else’s cash, sucking it from the bottom to the top and producing fuck all. Fuck all! Don takes a long, quivery breath and a gulp of wine to keep him going. What Peter Arsehole is doing to your dad? Don sweeps the bottle in front of him—there’s not enough left to spill out. Just knocking him out of the way, he says. Like those bastards on Wall Street. Sucking up your dad’s share and knocking him out of the way. Same thing on a different scale. You get it?
Yeah. Listen, I’ve gotta go.
Sit, he says. Sit right there. Look. Pool’s pretty at night. Lit up like that. I like a pool at night.
When I go to get up, Don grabs my arm.
It’s okay what you’re doing there, he says, hiding it in your sleeve like that, but shit, Finn, we all know the hand’s gone. He tightens his grip on my arm. A couple inches up from the end. Just above the knobby wrist bones.
What about one of those fake hands? he says. I saw one on TV the other night. The thing was practically bionic. I’ll get you one of those. As long as your folks don’t sue, I’ll pay for the thing. I turn and stare at the fence, but Don keeps talking to the back of my head. Because I’m gonna be honest here, Finn. That stump? It gives people the heebie-jeebies.
He’s squeezing now, squeezing with his big beefy hand, his fat fingers, squeezing so it hurts. I don’t want to find you out here again, he says, feeling sorry for yourself, fucking away your life. You figure out what you want and you go after it. Don’t let anyone stop you. That’s what I tell my boys.
He stares at the pool and my eyes follow. He’s right, a pool lit up at night is nice.
Don finally lets go of my arm. What are there? he says. Like seven billion people on the planet?
It’s, like, seven and a half, but I don’t tell him that. I just keep staring at the flickering blue.
I read the eight richest guys in the world have more money than the poorest fifty percent. The poorest three and a half billion. And there’s probably a couple more being born right now. Like right—he snaps his fingers—now. He laughs. The idea of childbirth seems to amuse him. The Costa Ricans I know are good people, he says. Hard working. Friendly. And I mean, I like money as much as the next guy but eight to three and a half billion? That, that’s a disease.
He drains the last of the wine and tosses away the bottle. You’ve been a good friend to Eli, he says. He looks up to you. Always has.
Don.
Don’t kid yourself. He does. Don’s face gets all soft again. His hands dangle loose between his knees. You wanna know why Dorothy stayed down south? he says. Come on, take a guess.
The pool boy?
Ha! He clears his throat, gathers phlegm, spits onto the grass, just short of the empty wine bottle, in the place where I lay—living, dying, like every other human being trying to survive love on this planet. There is no fucking pool boy. She’s just had it with the drinking.
—
MICHAEL RETRIEVES A grocery bag of beer from the river. He’d tethered it to a rock earlier, in hopes of cooling it down, although the bottles still feel lukewarm. Regardless, he and Dirk lie on the grassy bank, well up from the overpass, and quickly down one beer and then another. The day was hot; the night feels even hotter. And the kid? Took one, maybe two turns at bat. It was Michael who’d pounded ball after ball into the outfield. Dirk just kept on running, catching, sweeping the field until the duffle bag was bumpy with balls that he plowed straight back into the hopper. The Arm barely had to pause; the kid only stopped to wolf down a handful of nuts he pulled from a pocket of his giant shorts. Michael was slick with sweat when he finally called it quits. He’s slick with sweat now. The tepid beer offers little relief. Still, coming here, smacking balls—after the encounter with Mia in the closet, he had to get out of the house.
“A swim would be sick,” the kid says.
“Current’s too strong. Water’s too weedy.”
“Fuckin’ weeds. Like swimming in snakes.” Lying in the grass beside Michael, an emerald-green bottle of Heineken floating on the flat of his belly, the boy who chased down all those balls without one word of complai
nt? He might not look it, but after a dozen nights together, Michael figures he’s not so bad. He’s just a kid—with a gutter mouth, a questionable lifestyle and a propensity for small acts of violence and vandalism. Still, just a regular kid, replete with healthy snacks.
Michael drains his beer. “I know a place we can swim.” He barely even hesitates. “Close by. Unless you have to get home.”
“I’m good,” the kid says.
“Your parents won’t be worried?” It’s the first time Michael has inquired about a family, which he assumes is deeply fractured, if not totally absent given the way the boy appears red eyed from under the bridge every night regardless of what time Michael shows up.
“Away for the weekend. Some medical conference thing. Besides, they know I’m totally nocturnal.” The kid sits up, takes a last pull of beer, then tosses the bottle toward the water. It lands soundlessly in the tall weeds that fringe the shore.
Christ, who does something like that? Michael has to fight back the urge to tell the kid to go pick it up.
The boy pulls his knees to his chest, rocks back then forward and springs onto his feet. “Let’s do this thang,” he says. “I’m fucking hot.”
Michael slowly pushes himself up off the grass. He doesn’t believe the medical conference bit, but like the beer bottle, the profanity, the dinging of balls off the Arm, he lets it slide.
—
THE KID FOLLOWS Michael down the laneway, a gentle S-curve of tarmac carved through a forest of birch. On either side, trees rise like pillared ghosts and the canopy of leaves blocks out any ambient light. He and the boy shuffle near-blind up the long driveway. Ahead, the house is also dark, unplugged, as Michael thought it would be, and the asphalt pad in front, big enough to park a party of cars, is empty. When he steps into the clearing, the motion light over the garage snaps on. Both he and the boy throw up an arm to shield their eyes, like soldiers saluting the ray. They stand frozen, waiting, their long shadows stretching back, bending up into the trees. The house, its wood stained a cheerless blue-grey, shows no sign of life.
Michael moves quickly to the side of the garage, grabs hold of the window ledge and, toes scrambling for purchase, clumsily chins himself up. The BMW is parked inside, but the Escalade that Peter and Helen always take to the lake is gone. Michael drops down, brushes flecks of paint from his fingers, then follows the path to the rear of the property.
A sloping flagstone walkway, interspersed by six-foot-long stone steps, each weighing over a ton—Michael knows, since he helped Peter manoeuvre them into place with a rented Bobcat a couple of years back—leads to the water. Four greying Muskoka chairs sit horseshoed on the dock that stretches like a long finger into the river, so wide and deep and languid here, it feels more lake than river.
“Sick set-up,” the kid says. “Like a cottage in the city.”
“Weeds get cut back at the beginning of the summer. So it’s good to swim.”
“Sweet.” Without asking whose place it is or whether they have any right to be there—he either lacks curiosity or has learned to hold his questions—the boy jogs to the dock and starts stripping down. Beneath the basketball jersey and the circus-sized jean shorts, he is narrow chested, narrow hipped, rib-thin, hairless. Without his swaddling of hoodlum gear, he looks no more than fourteen or fifteen years old. Michael’s stomach kicks, remembering the beers he handed over without a thought.
The kid leaves his boxers on, and for that Michael is thankful. Following suit, he leaves his own underwear on, a fitted pair of black Jockeys, and joins the kid, standing with his arms crossed at the edge of the dock.
On the water it feels cooler, and the urgency of a swim has left him. The baseball and the beer are no longer buoying him up, they’re all after-effect now, leaving him feeling tired, paunchy, middle-aged. Michael dips his toe into the water. It’s cold and the blackness is unwelcoming, but he’d feel like an idiot backing out now.
“You wanna go on three?”
They count down together, leaning toward the water, but at blast-off neither one jumps.
“Fuck this.” The kid turns to Michael. Takes a couple steps back and settles into a wide-legged wrestling squat, his shoulders hunched, his arms ape-low and reaching forward.
“Gladiator,” he says.
“What?”
“Gladiator.” The kid springs at him, catching him solidly in the chest with his shoulder, his fingers jammed up and under one arm. With his other hand he reaches round and grabs the waistband of Michael’s Jockeys. The boy uses his legs to lift the man—stunned at the skin-to-skin contact, the intimacy of the embrace, how strong the kid is—and propels him to the edge of the dock. Michael is left hanging over the water, windmilling his arms, his body bowed backwards. If the kid gave him a nudge, he’d be gone. Instead Michael regains his balance, and a second later he has the kid, who is a good thirty, forty pounds lighter, in a headlock and is dragging him up the dock. It feels familiar, fun, he’s done it a thousand times before, with Finn, with Frankie, battled them off the dock, squealing and laughing and begging for mercy. But this kid’s scrappy, squirmy, all elbows and fists above the waist, all kicking feet below, he catches Michael hard in the back of the knee, collapsing his leg, and at the same moment wrenches free his head.
So the fight begins. Two Muskoka chairs are toppled, underwear is wedged up asses, both man and boy are scraped and clawed and panting by the time they fall. Head banging head, nose hitting brow bone, they sink in a tangle toward the mucky bottom, the fine hairs on their arms and legs, their chests and heads, aligned by the drag of the current.
—
I PRESS THE button for KHADIJAH. A second later the lock clicks and the buzzer buzzes. I jog up the stairs to the second floor. The door to her apartment’s cracked open and the music’s loud, so I stick the bouquet behind my back and walk right in.
Jess?
Beyoncé fading out. Mel?
I turn the corner. She’s tipped into the hall, her hair hanging down in a long black gleam. I don’t stop moving.
Finn! Her mouth drops open. What are you—?
I walk her backwards into the bathroom. Just like she did to me.
Finn, she says, her hand planted in the middle of my chest, her eyes stretched wide.
What?
She’s got on a tight black dress. Low in the back. I can see it in the mirror. There’s a radio on the counter, a bunch of makeup, a glass with toothbrushes.
Your mom here?
No. And I’m going out.
I can smell her. Citrusy. Fresh out of the shower.
I brought you this. I step back and offer her the bouquet. It looks worse than it did outside. Battered, half-dead, all broken stems and limp petals. Only the daisies look like they might, possibly, survive.
Jess doesn’t take the flowers. She picks up her phone instead. Texts. Mel’s on her way over, she says.
Mel?
Melanie. From my nursing class.
I’ll leave in a minute, I say, and sit down on the edge of the tub, let the rejected bouquet dangle between my knees while Jess unscrews a tube and brushes black stuff onto her lashes.
I guess it was Don’s pep talk that made me come over. To, you know, go after what I want. But it’s hard convincing someone they love you. And I used up all my moves backing her into the bathroom. I should have gone home. Should go home now. Make Greenland smaller and bluer. Flood the Nunavut coast.
I’m sorry things have been hard, I say, finally. Like, with your mom. That stuff you told me in the car. I don’t say anything about the herd of Indonesian goats.
Jess pauses mid-stroke to flash me a look in the mirror. Don’t worry about me, Finn, she says. Or my mother. We’re doing just fine, thanks.
It’s just…I tap the bouquet against the tub. I don’t know what it is. Petals start falling onto the tile between my feet, so I stop abusing the flowers. Blue petals. Brown tile. Countertop, cupboard, floor—all brown, brown must have been on sale when they built the
bathroom—and there’s this weird knitted thing on the toilet seat. My mom should come over. She’d have some ideas on how to fix it up.
You know, Jess says to the mirror, he’ll kill you if he finds out.
Yeah? What about you? Will he kill you, too, Jess? Is Eric the killing kind?
She gets busy screwing the brush back into the tube, extra hard. Then throws it into the sink where it clatters around a bit.
Why does it feel like we’ve been almost fighting all day?
I don’t know, she says. It’s stupid. I’m sorry. I’m just…I don’t know…It’s not easy being around you and them at the same time.
It sucks, I say, and hold up the flowers again. But I risked my life ripping these out of that garden on the corner. You know the one with the huge tree? The guy with that gold James Bond car?
How brave of you, she says. Randolph. He stopped me one day and asked if I knew anyone who might want to clean his house. She reaches out to stroke a daisy petal. Then rewards me by taking my stolen bouquet.
Careful, I tell her. Those big blue ones. I had to pull out, like, ten before I got one that didn’t fall apart.
Hydrangeas, she says, and puts her foot on my knee. Like the rest of her, it is practically perfect. I wrap my fingers around her ankle so we are well attached.
Thank you. She rocks my leg with her foot. The flowers are beautiful.
Liar. I rest my forehead on her knee and stare down at the ugly tile. Are you going to marry him? I mean, seriously. Are you going to marry that fucking guy?
Shhh…She runs her fingers through my hair, lightly, her nails tingling my scalp. Like she used to when I was a kid. Shhh…I moan a bit and she laughs. Slips her hand onto my neck. Her fingertips creep under my shirt. You remember the night I came to the hospital?
I nod, and her leg wobbles. Like I could forget.
You told me when you were lying in Eli’s backyard, it felt like it does when you’re with me. The bouquet spins in her hand, one way, then the other. What did you mean?
We All Love the Beautiful Girls Page 14