by Matt Cohen
He was holding Lizzie, petting the side of her face, drawing his finger along the soft skin under her chin. She stopped crying, reached up with both her hands to grab at his finger.
“She’s not scared of me.”
Chrissy just shook her head and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she came out and said, “Lunch,” her voice high and chipper, absolutely fake. Lunch. And he’d taken Lizzie into the kitchen and sat at the table eating scrambled eggs and toast while Chrissy fed Lizzie in her rabbit-decal-covered high chair, talking to both of them in her high fake voice as though she were some weird kind of television hostess who had invited them onto her program for a meal.
When Lizzie was born, Fred was the first to send a present; most men wouldn’t even think of such a thing, Chrissy had noted. And every time there was a dance or a party and Fred had a new girlfriend, Chrissy was the first one to get introduced. “Still burns, still yearns,” Ray had said to Carl about Fred, and sometimes Carl would catch Fred giving him the look, as though taking his measure.
By the time Carl had been living at Ray’s long enough to start feeling like his father, Ray told him Fred had ditched his latest cheerleader, the one he’d been parading around all summer, and had moved in with Chrissy in the house on the Second Line.
THREE
THE DAY CARL MCKELVEY RETURNED was the day Ned Richardson went to pay a call at Allnew Building Supplies. He parked under the big maple and slid over to the passenger seat of his truck so he could comb his hair in the visor mirror. Part of the passenger seat was patched with strips of red plastic tape which was the final chapter of another story—the sad tale of Ned Richardson and Lu-Ann Bolger. Once romantically entangled in what he considered an almost-marriage, Ned had lost Lu-Ann over an unfortunate mistake with an axe. He’d had the axe in the truck because he’d been limbing the cedar bush that morning. When he and Lu-Ann drove to town they had such an argument about her cutting her hair that when she slammed out of the truck and marched towards the hairdresser, temper coincided with carelessness: he took the axe from behind the seat and buried it right where she’d been sitting. Even as the axe made a satisfying slice through the simpering beige leatherette, Ned regretted it.
When Lu-Ann returned she saw the stuffing oozing out of the slit like ten inches of last year’s shaving cream. “You expect me to sit on that? What happened?”
“I was going to fix it after you apologized,” Ned said.
“How’d you do that anyway? Take an axe to it?”
“I guess,” Ned replied.
“I’ll say,” Lu-Ann said, slamming the door and walking away, as it turned out, for ever. Ned had waited a few seconds, for his dignity, then went over to the hardware store and bought a roll of red plastic tape—the kind you put on your bicycle or jeans to be visible in the dark. He fixed the seat, then stood in the street waiting for Lu-Ann to come back.
That had been a few weeks ago. Now the only thing he could call his own was this truck. Which wasn’t much for a Richardson, Ned considered, especially given what he’d one day have. But that would be then. This was now. Now he was twenty-three years old and so broke his wallet felt thin in his back pocket. So broke that he was sitting on his taped seat, combing his hair and using his spit to wipe the dirt off his face so he could ask Fred Verghoers for a job.
“Come on, shitface,” Ned encouraged himself, then slid out of his truck and marched towards Allnew. His heart was going like a machine gun. A Richardson walking into Allnew to beg for a job. If Luke could see him. Ned only had to imagine the contempt twisting his father’s lips to keep on.
Fred Verghoers was on a stool behind a large counter. He was wearing the red and gold vest all the employees had, except that Fred’s had a little white strip that read MANAGER sewn onto his pocket.
Fred was looking something up for a customer—Arnie Kincaid, the insurance man. Arnie was about a hundred and twenty years old.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Ned announced. Arnie’s big frog eyes opened up behind his glasses.
“Hello, Ned,” said Arnie. “How are you doing?”
“Pretty good,” Ned said.
“You doing some building out at your uncle’s?”
Why did Arnie Kincaid need to be here? The last thing Ned wanted was Fred to be reminded that he already had a job. Not exactly a job, more like a sentence; because of the various ways he’d disgraced himself at home he’d been exiled to his uncle’s farm to play nursemaid to old Alvin.
Fred was looking at him curiously. It was now or never.
“I came in to see if you were short someone,” Ned said. “Being the summer. I wondered if you’d have room for someone to help out.”
Fred rose to his feet. His big shoulders bulged out of his vest, his broad tanned arms were folded. Since he had declared for reeve, Fred talked as though someone was writing down his pronouncements.
“I don’t know,” Fred said, sounding surprisingly undecided. Ned’s heart jumped with hope. He couldn’t have believed he had that much hope inside him. “I guess not. We’re okay for now.”
Ned flushed. “Billy Boyce told me you were looking for someone.”
Fred turned away but kept talking, his voice again amazingly uncertain. “I might have been looking for someone who could handle the work. Someone reliable.”
“If I’m late, you can fire me.”
Now Fred and Arnie were looking him over as though he were a piece of meat. That’s what a Richardson was. A big rotting piece of meat that everyone wanted to bury. They couldn’t bury Luke because of what he’d do to them if they tried, so that left him. The son. The heir. The lame-duck prince.
“Maybe I’ll think about it,” Fred said. “Why don’t you come back next week?”
Ned turned and walked out. His shirt was soaked through and when he climbed into his truck, his back stuck to the seat. His knees were sore, as though he’d crawled across the asphalt. He wheeled out of the parking lot, stepped on the gas. A few miles and he was driving down the Second Line Road past Fred’s place. His house looked like an advertisement for his own store. Bright new paint. Carefully trimmed shrubs and a circle of flowers. Everything but a pissing angel on the front lawn. What Fred deserved was to have a match put to the whole thing. The way Fred’s eyes had stayed fixed on him while he talked, until he just turned away as though he couldn’t be bothered to watch Ned embarrass himself by begging. “Why don’t you come back next week?” Why don’t you go eff yourself?
He turned off the Second Line and headed back towards town. Ten minutes later he was in the kitchen with his mother.
“I was going to come out to see you today,” she chirped. Amy, everyone called her, short for Amaryllia. She’d just got her hair dyed her usual summer blonde—streaked as always—but her high-fashion hair only emphasized the weary way her skin had begun to fold around her eyes and mouth.
“I asked Fred Verghoers for a job at Allnew today.”
“Your father would be very upset if you worked there.”
Allnew was part of a chain owned by a Toronto consortium that MaryLou Boyce had sold to at the same time she was pretending to work out a deal with Luke. Now Allnew was West Gull’s biggest landlord and biggest employer. Luke had fought against a permit for the expansion of their premises and when they succeeded he announced he was going to get himself elected reeve, just to keep them in check. That was when Fred Verghoers announced his own political intentions.
“I’m not even allowed to live in my own house,” Ned said. “I don’t see why Luke should be telling me where to work.” Luke. That’s what he called his father now, like everyone else.
“You’re better off at Alvin’s.”
“I’d be better off with a real job and my own place. Do what I want when I want.”
“What did Fred say?”
“It looks good. I’ll probably start next week.”
“You want brown toast or white?” The moment he’d come in Amy had led him to the kitchen, started
strips of bacon in the oven for his favourite, a BLT. Now the kitchen smelled of grilled bacon, the odour so sharp it made Amy want a cup of coffee. The boy was raw, the way Luke had been when she met him. But where Luke had been looking to take on the world, this boy had something broken inside. You could see it in his every movement, hear it in his voice; that broken note had been there from the very beginning—as an infant calling for her in the night, from the moment he was born, that first cry, like one of those otherworldly wails you read about in the tabloids that make you think Martians or someone must have planted an alien in your belly except it was just Ned and his weird cracked cry wobbling through the house.
That evening Ned was the one to hear unwanted noises, the faraway rumble of motors, a mumbled conversation he knew must be the wind as it swirled around, the voices of strangers mixed with the clacking of poplar leaves, the branches of the big maple as they rubbed against each other. Even knowing the sounds were nothing but highway, trees and breeze, Ned went outside to look down the drive at his truck to see if someone had come by with a case of beer. Or the hundred dollars Billy Boyce owed him. But his truck was alone in the last shreds of twilight, slowly fading into the darkness.
Feeling restless he turned back inside and went into the kitchen. Alvin was in his room upstairs, installed in front of his television, green plaid blanket spread over his knees. Eventually he would fall asleep and when Ned crept in to turn off the television the old man would be slumped in the leather rocker, clutching his blanket. Meanwhile the night nurse would have arrived. Ned was free to read, watch the downstairs TV, drive into town and get into whatever trouble he could with an empty wallet—as long as he was back by the time his uncle called for breakfast.
Instead Ned wandered into the pantry where the broom closet had been long ago converted into a gun cabinet. The key was in the lock. Ned opened it up, tensing to the odour of powder and gun oil. At the top was a drawer with a handgun, a big German Luger, Alvin’s booty from the war. Having it in his hand made Ned feel as though the gun were holding him and not vice versa, and that by picking it up he had become party to the terrible things this foreign instrument was designed to do. Carrying it with him, he went and sat on the porch while he stared through the wind and the noisy leaves towards the dark blur where the driveway disappeared into the bush.
What would Billy and the others think if they drove up and saw him like that? “Shooting bats,” he’d say while they gawked at the Luger. Using both his hands he held it up in the air with his arms stiff, aiming it into the darkness like a movie detective. He imagined pulling the trigger, the loud explosion that would push him backwards, echo through the yard and the house until his uncle woke up yelling for him.
He went back into the house, locked the gun in its place, then came out, climbed into his truck and started towards town. He was twenty-three years old but somehow being forced to leave home to take care of his uncle had made him feel older. Especially when Lu-Ann moved in. It was like being married, until she left. Now he might as well be a child again: no money, no girlfriend, no nothing—just giving his uncle pills three times a day, then scaring the shit out of himself while he sat alone and listened to the wind.
Driving past the supermarket he saw the Movie Barn was still open. Before she left Lu-Ann had bought a VCR. Instead of walking around the house listening to the sounds of might-be trucks in the driveway, they would watch movies together. Even dirty movies. Sharon would tell Lu-Ann what to get; they would stand in the corner and giggle the way they used to in the halls at the high school.
After Lu-Ann left, Ned had gone in a couple of times alone. He would ask Sharon for recommendations and then she’d give him the cold “get out of here you axe-murderer” look and hand him a cartoon or a children’s movie. But yesterday when he’d seen her in front of the bank, she’d told him she was going to Toronto with her boyfriend. He was taking some kind of computer course and she was going to learn to “do colours.” She’d laughed and promised to do his colours when she got back. Despite what she’d said about the boyfriend, Ned could have almost thought she was coming on to him.
Remembering this conversation he parked in front of the Movie Barn. He was just climbing out of the truck when through the window he saw Carl McKelvey. His heart started flopping in his chest, the way it had five years ago when at hockey practice he’d tripped Carl and sent him flying headfirst into the boards. For a moment Carl lay on the ice, flat on his stomach, face hidden by his gloves and helmet. Ned, terrified, had inched around him, looking for signs of blood. Carl had pulled himself up, dropped his stick and gloves, started skating slowly towards him. That crazed McKelvey look. His mother had been the same. Even from Grade Three he could remember her marching down the aisle, that murdering fire in her eyes, carrying a chalk eraser like she was going to crush his face with it. When he complained to Amy she said Mrs. McKelvey was different: she was a Jew from Kingston. Then he told Amy what he’d done and she shut him up in his room for an hour.
He started the truck again and drove to the new convenience store at the strip plaza on the edge of town where he bought a carton of eggs, a paper, a bag of chips to eat on the way back, a big bottle of diet cola without caffeine. He’d told the doctor how bad he felt some nights and the doctor had said caffeine just made it worse.
“Saw Carl McKelvey,” Ned said to the cashier. Her name was Ellie Dean and she was, as his father liked to say about long-standing West Gull families, “local to here.”
“He’s back in town,” Ellie said. Ever since she’d been laid off in Kingston she’d been working the late shift at the convenience store.
Ned opened the carton and began turning over the eggs one at a time, as though one of them might be broken. “Doesn’t have anywhere to stay any more,” he said.
“Your father rented him the old Balfer place.”
Ned now remembered that a few years ago he’d seen Ellie Dean hanging around with Carl McKelvey. Lu-Ann had once called Ellie Dean a cow because Ellie refused to let her buy on credit. But now, looking at Ellie’s oval and not-cow face with its not-cow china-blue eyes and its shiny not-cow hair pulled back into a ponytail, Ned didn’t care if Ellie had given Lu-Ann a rough time.
“Could have stayed away for all I care,” Ned said.
“I guess so,” Ellie agreed in a noncommittal voice.
Ned looked down at the egg carton. When Carl had started skating towards him, Ned backed up until he was behind the net, nowhere left to go. “It was a mistake, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t trying to start a fight,” he managed as Carl grabbed him by the sweater, lifted him up and slammed him against the glass. High enough that his skates were right off the ice and he was dangling like a little kid.
When he finished inspecting the eggs, he paid and took his groceries out to the truck where he laid them carefully on the front seat. The owners of the store had installed a row of super-bright sodium lamps above it and the gas pumps out front. If you looked directly at the lamps, the light was so white you couldn’t see anything for a few minutes.
All the houses had their lights on, most of the driveways were crowded with cars. A little metal logo, RICHARDSON’S NEW & USED, was glued to many of their trunks. And every one of those logos had started out as a fat cheque in his father’s bank account. Strange to drive around town, thinking about all that money he’d have one day. As he came to Main Street, he slowed by the bank. Even now the manager deferred to him, bobbed his head and called him mister as though he was already sitting in his father’s office, dealing out wads of bills, placing his millions here and there throughout the county, playing the county the way the Richardsons always had—a big monopoly game they always won because they had all the money. Every time someone had to sell the Richardsons bought. Bought the trees to start with. Then the mill, the land and the waterfront. The hotel next. The gravel pit and the bulldozers and the road machines. The car dealership and the garage. A seat in Parliament. Seats in both churches. There was no end to wha
t the Richardsons bought and what they got.
At one time there had been more: two mica mines at the north end of the county; a small chain of cheese factories so almost every farm in the south half of the county was bringing them their milk; a machinery dealership to sell the tractors and attachments needed to plant and harvest the fields to feed the cattle to make the milk to make the cheese to make the money to buy the cars. And if Senator Merriwell Richardson hadn’t run into someone even bigger, meaner, slyer, more cunning, there’d be no saying how rich would be the Richardsons, how high the number to count their blessings.
Still, what was left was meant for him.
Thinking about the day West Gull would be a fat bulge in his back pocket, the day Fred Verghoers would wish he’d given him a job when he’d the chance, Ned parked outside the bank. He walked down past the neon-lit supermarket, the doughnut shop with its open door, the Timberpost, towards the tavern. He stopped in front of the Richardson Real Estate office. Land, buying and selling. That was finished. Everyone knew that. Except for waterfront, land wasn’t worth the taxes any more, wasn’t worth the spindly trees and juniper bushes growing up in the fields once dense with clover and alfalfa and corn. When Luke died Ned was going to get rid of the real-estate business and use the office for a computer store. He looked across the street to the New & Used. That, he’d keep. But he wasn’t going to drive around in a Pontiac or even a Cadillac. Get a Porsche or a Ferrari and a 4 × 4 for the winter.
He turned down to the hotel. His great-great-grandfather had built the Long Gull Lake Inn. There were still pictures of the inn back then, a sprawling log building with wide verandahs looking out on the water. Now you’d hardly recognize it. The name was the same but clapboard had been nailed over the logs, the roof had sagged, the paint jobs had blistered into each other. When Alvin went bankrupt, one of the first things he’d sold was the hotel—it wasn’t worth much and the restaurant was so bad it had been years since they’d gone there for a free meal.