Two-Man Tent

by Robert Chafe

THANKFUL

  GRANT was staring at his fingers. They were fat, and he was thinking about the days when you could still smoke in bars. Twenty years. He could think in decades now, he was old enough to do that. His wedding ring used to fit once.

  He had joked with the girl on the door, when he and Nate were on their way in. He handed her his ID, but it embarrassed her, and maybe Nate too. Nate vanished backstage then with his guitar and amp and left Grant with no visible excuse to be there, so he installed himself at the corner of the bar and gave it his all to look comfortable. Folded a paper coaster, traced patterns in the sweat of his water glass. He didn’t order a proper drink, he thought that for the best.

  This little back-alley dive of a place. Nate had booked the gig for his band, and didn’t want to come down alone. Even now it might be the boy still didn’t trust himself. Grant had offered to drive him, had given him a hand with his amp. The two of them walking the gear from the car through the late summer rain, the gold of the street lights sparking to life.

  Without the offset of a distracting alcoholic buzz, the club soda was only making Grant feel bloated. His gut was testing his shirt, an unfair responsibility to put on a few buttons. Brenda, she had told him last winter he was putting on weight. Words of care and affection that eventually got lost and swallowed, spat back out in their last few months together as something else, something angry and mean. Kids were pouring into this place, all here to see his boy play guitar. Grant had an unexpected swell of affection for them. These kids were here, and Brenda was not.

  It was six short months ago Nate had come home wrecked, wobbling under his own weight, unable to hang the car keys on the rack. Grant had stifled Brenda’s judgment then, confined her to their bedroom and sat with the boy. He fed him crackers and water, kept his head up, tried to tease out the story of how he had come to be the way he was. Three o’clock in the morning and Nate had driven the long dark road out to the cove, so drunk or stoned that he parked the car in the wrong driveway. Grant and Brenda had waited for him for hours, eventually saw the familiar headlights jerk into Sherman’s place four doors down. By the time Grant got his boots on and got down there Nate was putting his shoulder to Sherman’s front door, determined to find his way in, but so out of it he was making no real headway.

  “I’m not stupid, you know.”

  “Have some more water, Nate.”

  The two of them sat alone at the kitchen table, the stove clock flashing the oddness of the hour, and the boy seemingly unaware that he had done anything wrong.

  “Drink, please.”

  “You’re gonna make me piss the bed.”

  Nate’s neck reeling wide circles, and his voice too loud, so that at one point Brenda poked her head out of the bedroom. Grant waved her back in, a plea for patience. He handed the boy a box of saltines.

  “I’m not going to throw up, Dad.”

  “No, you’re not. Eat.”

  Grant knew it was best for him to deal with his son in this state. Brenda had developed a short fuse with the boy, but Grant understood fully that this phase of Nate’s couldn’t be about them.

  “Eat, Nate. Please. Come on.”

  There was a punch of light in the sky and the room was starting to change colour. Grant was so tired he was queasy. But his patience was intact, and he knew Nate could feel that too. And so when the boy laughed at him, it was light and girlish, an act of aggression.

  “You fucking eat!”

  The box of crackers went flying, another spit of laughter. Nate toppled the table as he pushed to his feet. Grant slid back on his chair, resigned to where the night was headed now that Brenda’s bedroom door was swinging open.

  The next morning they both called in sick. He and Brenda shuffled their way through those first hours like there’d been a death in the family. When Nate emerged he was soaking in regret. He sat them down in the living room, stood with his hands in pockets, looking unsettled and afraid. A paralyzing silence that Brenda was clearly itching to break, and then Nate told them he had a problem, one he didn’t know how to fix. Grant felt something strange billow up inside and he didn’t know what to do, so he excused himself, and went downstairs, Brenda’s eyes burrowing into his back. In the family room he poured himself a stiff drink, watched the dust dance in the lines of sun clearing the window. He refilled the ice trays and surprised himself then by crying. He hid himself away for a while in embarrassment in the small basement bathroom.

  When he came back upstairs, the redness all but gone from his face, Brenda was seated at the kitchen table, the yellow pages open in front of her, and Nate was on the phone.

  “Weed. Coke. Poppers. Mushrooms…”

  Grant sat at the table. Nate’s long fingers were twirling the back of his hair, his eyes on the ceiling.

  “Ecstasy. Meth. Yeah. Sure, some of that too.”

  A straight-A student. He had been early French immersion, totally bilingual by double digits. Grant had no choice but to consider this new turn of events his fault. The summer Saturdays he was too busy to take the day off, times he could have said the true and heartfelt but instead chose the easy. But he had tried, hadn’t he. How many times he had driven him to those early morning swimming practices. The trumpet and the lessons, and the money, he had always been so free and generous with the money. Last Christmas he had bought the boy a new guitar and amp. He’d paid more than he could afford, but maybe not enough. He started, there at the table, to silently calculate the days until Christmas, a preliminary gift list. This was something he could do, he could be a better father if he tried. Maybe surprise Nate with that drum set he was eyeing last summer.

  “No. No, nothing with needles, fuck that shit.”

  Brenda coughed and forced Grant’s attention, and he was sure she could see his panic forming and breaking. She pushed the telephone book on the table towards him, the page she had folded open for Nate to addictions counselling. Her finger grazed the tiny print until it landed on family counselling.

  Through the shifting heads Grant spotted Nate at the far end of the bar, his one-armed lean on the wall, in his hand a glass of water with a straw. Nate probably shouldn’t be in bars just yet, the thought had occurred to Grant. He was only a few months in, still shaky, not fully himself. The pockets of red eyes in this place, young as they were they were far from innocent. Nate was talking to a pretty thing, a streak of pink in the back of her hair. Nate’s music might be his only respite in his recovery, but Grant wondered if by agreeing to come here with the boy he was making himself complicit in any future downfall. He suspected that Brenda herself would say as much.

  The very thought of her made him feel bigger on his bar stool, and he suddenly wanted a cigarette for the first time in years. He changed his mind and decided to order a proper drink. The place was still filling up, they had begun to crowd him around the bar, all elbows and twenty-dollar bills. One of them ordered a drink Grant had never heard of and when it arrived it looked like a lava lamp. In high school he wouldn’t have shared the air with people like this. Back then he would have had their fear if not their respect. The thought came and went. Bluster, so much bluster. All talk, wasn’t that what Brenda had said about him. He sucked the head off the pint laid in front of him, watched the bubbles inside balloon and burst.

  He had met Brenda the summer he turned twenty. Their first dates were cold and lumbering. His slacker decision to let it roll until something better came along landed him four months into a relationship serious enough to be meeting her parents. A summer barbecue at their cabin down in Salmonier, and Grant was forced to reckon for them all some substantial grounds for their longevity beyond the reasonable sex. And though he arrived close to an hour late, her father took an instant liking to him, gave him the choice cuts of meat. She fought for his eye across the table, to let him know everything was going great, and Grant did his best to look like that mattered. Perhaps that was all Brenda had been looking for: a man who could shut up and play along.

  That night th
ey drove back into town, Grant in his own car, Brenda following behind in her Hyundai. The city orange in the distance ahead and the highway empty behind him except for her headlights. The physical separation was welcome after so much talk and forced conviviality, and Grant was taking stock of the day. The difficult questions came at him like the mosquitoes at the windshield, and he found himself speeding up, pulling away from her in increments of doubt. Previous girlfriends had deemed him afraid of commitment. His parents had called him too picky.

  Grant tipped his pint back and drank until he felt it in his nose, swiped the back of his hand through his beard. He held in a belch and felt his chest buckle and heave with it. Nate was onstage now, guitar in hand, kicking pedals, turning tuning pegs, his black hair hanging flat in front of his face, the shine of the blue stage lights on it. Grant ordered another drink.

  Perhaps they should have had more children. Maybe their mistake with Nate was made too long ago to reckon. Grant remembered little about the night he was born but panic, his own uselessness. Nate was two weeks late, Brenda’s back done in by his size and stubbornness. When she had first told Grant she was pregnant the news had landed like a punchline. He’d never seen himself as a father, he was only twenty-four. But he had surprised even himself with how he’d run with abandon towards the idea of it. How he stood at the nursery and stared, his knees soft with fatigue. The deep red of his baby boy’s skin, cruel layers of glass and plastic between them. His gratitude. His love for Brenda was really only his love for the boy she had given him. That was true wasn’t it. An extrapolation, not entirely real in and of itself. The truth of this may have softened and blurred over the years, lost its punch maybe, but truth was truth.

  He said the word to himself and nodded: truth.

  The girl with the pink stripe in her hair was standing in the violet light at the foot of the stage. She was holding Nate’s glass of water and her own bottle of beer. For the first time she turned to face Grant’s side of the bar, and he caught sight of her flat nose, her heavy eyes. She handed Nate his water, stayed and watched him drink it, staking out her place on the dance floor as the house music faded and the band farted a few chords and drum hits. Nate had somebody in his life now. Grant toasted the idea. He wanted to be happy about it, but he had a mood rising, something triggered by the kids, their age and their fucking elbows. He called the bartender, and when he arrived Grant stuck his arm and finger out, ordered two shots of whatever he was pointing at.

  He had been reticent to speak in counselling. Grant was a private man, and he could see no utility in it. This ring of strangers, everyone looking at them. This circle of pouts.

  “I’m Brenda. This is Grant. Our son, Nate, he’s a recovering addict.”

  The group greeting then, like he’d seen on TV. A parody of itself. Brenda started talking about the morning Nate called the counsellor and willingly flushed the last of his stash. The circle nodded its approval. Brenda finished, the group still with her. She didn’t seem to know quite what to do so she cried. Like an obligatory act of punctuation. Grant couldn’t look at her.

  “Thanks, Brenda. And Grant. Anybody else?”

  A woman seated at the opposite end of the circle introduced herself as Mary and told them her son Albert was fourteen, and a big boy like his absent dad. Mary had come alone. While Brenda and the others had spoken, she had quietly fumbled with a pack of cigarettes she hadn’t bothered to put away between breaks. Mary had caught Albert smoking weed in her car at age nine. By twelve there was cocaine in the house, easily found, as was, on one occasion, a hunting knife under his pillow. He had asked her for some substantial cash one night and when she refused, his temper rolled over him and he pinned her to the wall, the knife in his hand. She called the police but in the moments before they arrived she succumbed to his apologies, and lied to them. Out of necessity Mary had started sleeping with her bedroom door locked. She didn’t bother calling the cops anymore because she knew the limits of her own courage. Now she was medicated for depression and anxiety, her son still unrepentant and dangerous. Mary spoke to all, but stared directly at Grant and Brenda, and as confessional as it was, Grant didn’t have the heart to look away. “You’re so lucky,” she said.

  Grant didn’t feel lucky, and said as much on the car ride home, his foot weighing light on the gas pedal, the drive taking longer than usual. Grant wanted to talk about it all now but Brenda wasn’t speaking. She stared out the front window, lashed her hand with her leather gloves. Something has changed, Grant thought to himself, waking to the fact for the first time and feeling so out of the game because of it. He made the final turn onto their street and Brenda undid her seat belt in anticipation, the dashboard dinging its dismay. He watched her storm off towards the house, wondered who it would be to bear the brunt of her anger.

  Grant was claiming an unfair chunk of the bar, moving his arms further apart now and suddenly not giving a fuck anymore. Onstage, Nate was like a pole, his fingers blurring and the rest of him stiff and straight. Grant had told the boy he needed to get his body into the game, loosen his neck, let his head roll, but like with everything else there was no talking to him. Grant’s shots arrived, both with fruit and a procedure for which he had no patience. He knocked them back, felt the burn below and then a sudden desire to dance.

  That he could go out like this again, it would be viewed by some as freedom. He threw the word around in his head, hoping it would stick to something.

  The girl with the pink stripe was next to him on the dance floor and was doing things with her hips the song didn’t call for. Grant was staring and then moving towards her. In the dancefloor crush, lost in it all and his head spinning so suddenly, he forgot his age and danced like the old school-night binges when he was lean and truly careless. But the girl he was dancing with wasn’t dancing with him. She pushed his hands away, stared into his drunkenness, made Grant for the first time take stock of it too. He apologized to her, in that loud way that said he didn’t mean it, looked up to the stage and saw his son, fingers on fire, staring back at him. The boy was a boy no longer, Grant thought to himself. Black hair the length of his back.

  Brenda became scarce in weeks after that one-and-only group session. Any excuse to be out and away from the house. Blame had begun to flow free. There was a logic at play here that defied Grant. He had stopped smoking three years into their relationship and had never relented. He liked his beer, but no more than Brenda liked her wine. But that look in her eye now, the quality of her breathing when they were alone. She blamed Grant on some level for what was happening to their family, and she wanted him to know it. Their bed barely shared, backs turned.

  “You are hurting him with your own fucking actions, you are making it worse!” She started screaming one day, and then didn’t seem to stop. Grant hated that he was so easily bruised.

  “Your son had the guts to at least ask for help, he didn’t learn that from you!”

  He was surprised to see her subversive joy in each angry word, the celebration in the release of it, hair catching in the wet corners of her mouth.

  “It’s not my family, he didn’t get it from me, my father was never a drinker!”

  “Neither was mine.”

  She’d laughed at that, stared at him with such a complicated look of pity. Brenda had always liked his father, everyone did. He was a generous and good-hearted man. Fuck her.

  It was still haunting Grant the next morning as he crept out of the horrible sleeping silence of the house, drove a wobbled line to work. He drank enough coffee to set his skin cold. He passed the morning in his office pretending to be busy, a headache brewing. Brenda called just before lunch. She told him that Nate was still in bed, that the propane from the stove was smelling and obviously low and in need of refilling, and that she was leaving. It took a moment, and a second charge at her point for it to come clear: “I’m leaving you, Grant.”

  The language got amended in the days that followed: time apart, trial separation. Brenda even took pa
rtial responsibility, but in a way that made Grant feel even worse: said there were aspects of him with which she should have learned to be more patient. He bucked against the decision, but he ultimately found no real traction. Grant doubted her time away from the house would offer her the clarity she had hoped. A leave from work and a month at her parents’ cabin in Salmonier and Brenda had said that she would feel better. The days clicked past July and into August. He’d only been out twice, and she had softened, even said she was happy to see him. She asked about Nate and made Grant something to eat. But he always felt like he’d broken something by crossing the door of the place. And when Brenda had kissed him goodbye there was a finality to it, a tangible intensity to her hands on his face, her lips. “Tell Nate this is not his fault,” she’d said.

  Alone in the house, her closets emptied, Grant was infected by memory, persistent and cruel. No amount of drink could suppress it. Things he thought he knew for sure, twisted and inverted, rolling over and showing their belly. Good times turned bad, and so many bad turned good. That first night he’d driven home from Salmonier, hours after meeting her parents, enveloped in doubt, all but decided on ending it all. He was watching the rearview, and Brenda’s struggle to match his pace, when the side of the road moved too quickly towards him. It was shock enough to force a desperate swerve away from the shoulder onto the centre line and in the last bleed of his car’s headlights he caught the trotting head and neck of a big bull moose, clambering out of the ditch, and tall as it was Grant drove right under its steaming head, its chin grazing the top of the car. The seconds stretching between his safety and Brenda behind him. Eyes locking on to the rearview, no sign of the moose, his heart galloping at the prospect of it landing in her lap. The miracle then of Brenda’s untouched car with its indicator on making for the shoulder. The moose’s blinking eyes glowing in the opposite ditch from the pulse of her brake lights, and running away into darkness. Pulling over too, popping the door and running to her, holding her hard, his breath high in his chest and refusing to sink.