Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “Yes,” I almost yell.

  “Well you don’t need to yell, Larry.”

  “I’m not yelling, Mom. I’m being emphatic.”

  “Well, I don’t know why you need to be so emphatic about a couple of slices of bread.”

  “You’re the one who’s being emphatic about a couple of slices of bread,” I explain. “I’m responding in kind.”

  Mom puts down the bread knife. “Dad,” she calls. “Will you have a piece of bread? I cut some for Larry, but he doesn’t want it now.”

  In trundles my father, wiping slivers of wood from his pants.

  “What’s he got against bread?” Dad wonders aloud to the cosmos.

  I jerk forward and seize two handfuls of biscuits.

  “Look! Biscuits are bread! Look at all this bread I’m having! Clearly I have nothing against bread!”

  “Other people might wanna eat those you know,” Dad remarks as he pulls up a chair.

  “He’s being emphatic,” emphasizes my mother.

  “So that’s what he’s doing,” says Dad.

  “Supper’s in an hour, Larry, you shouldn’t have all those biscuits.” My mother is turned away from me now, facing the stove.

  I place the biscuits back on the plate, as opposed to throwing them at something. I take a moment to arrange them, being a bit prissy about it in order to annoy my Dad.

  He looks at me in disgusted silence until I give in and meet his eyes. “Don’t go putting those back on the plate,” he says slowly. “Jesus Christ, is that what they’re teaching you up there in university?”

  “Yes,” I reply. “They don’t feed me in university. They teach me to grab biscuits. Second-year Biscuit-Grabbing.”

  I never realized how much they resent it. How nervous it makes them.

  At Jim’s, the kitchen mostly smelled like dog. The whole house smelled like dog and wood smoke, so pungent it fogged out even Moira’s cigarettes.

  Moira herself was at the table, smoking and watching a small black and white television with terrible reception.

  “Hi, Moira,” I said.

  “I’m not cooking,” said Moira without turning around. She jabbed her smoke in my direction.

  Jim told her she didn’t have to. “Me ‘n Larry are more than capable,” he said. “Just take that thing upstairs.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about until Moira, expelling a brutalized sigh, leaned forward and turned off the TV. She yanked the plug out of the wall, wrapped the cord around the set and hoisted it under her arm like you see some women carrying their toddlers. In the other hand she balanced her ashtray and smokes.

  “You make sure you keep that fire going then,” she yelled on her way down the hall.

  Jim went to the stove and threw in a couple of chunks of wood. Jim’s wood stove was just like the one at Grandma Lydia’s, before she had electricity installed. As a kid, I got to mess around with the stove a lot because it was my job to dispose of Grandpa Humphries’s used Kleenex. It’s remarkable the crap adults are able to convince kids to do in the guise of having an important duty bestowed upon them. It probably wouldn’t have been so attractive a prospect to me if it hadn’t meant I got to burn stuff up. It was fun, manoeuvring the handle into the slot, then heaving the cast-iron burner aside to peer into the mini-inferno beneath.

  I looked around for an electric stove or microwave, but it seemed the Arsenault kitchen was equipped with neither. Something occurred to me. My Grandpa Campbell’s house was old as well, but a two-storey, unlike the Humphries’s cottage. There were vents in the ceilings so the heat could travel to the upstairs bedrooms. As kids, me and Janet and Wayne would lie on the floor after we had been sent to bed, listening at the vents, hearing every word the grown-ups uttered. Mostly we couldn’t believe how much they cursed when we weren’t around. The vents were not complicated—they were basically holes in the floor with a decorative grille to keep us from sticking our hands or feet down into the kitchen.

  So I craned my neck. Upward. Jim and Moira’s kitchen had the same kind of vents—maybe Moira was even crouched up there listening. It dawned on me then just how old Jim’s place was, as old as Grandma and Grandpa Campbell’s, as old as Lydia’s. I hadn’t recognized this before—that is, I knew his house was old, but, on PEI anyway, every house I’ve been in that was built before electricity is—how do I put this?—kept up, as they say. Jim’s place is cozy, but it hasn’t exactly been kept up. Which seems like a bad idea, with an old house. My father hates them, he says they’re firetraps. Before I was born, and before they took over the Highwayman, my parents had been thinking of buying a big Georgian home on the outskirts of Charlottetown and turning it into an inn, a poor-man’s Crowfeather. But Dad said the thing was a money pit. The cost of rewiring alone would have devoured any possibility of an education savings for me. That’s a strange thing to think. My parents could have had an inn with electricity, or a son with a future. The idea that one equals the other; one cancels the other out.

  “Jim,” I said, “you guys only have the wood stove here?”

  Jim removed a couple of plastic tumblers drying in the dish rack and plunked them on the table. He was moving slowly, answering even slower. Water circles formed.

  “If it’d been up to me,” he finally rumbled, “there wouldn’t even be electricity. But that one upstairs,” he tilted his chin heavenward, Moiraward, “she had to be able to get her stories on TV, otherwise it was no deal.”

  I glanced down at the wainscotting. More vents. “But you guys have a furnace, right?”

  Jim waved a hand as he sat down, and I heard something pop in his back—so loud in the quiet kitchen it made me twitch. “Never use it,” he said.

  “Really?” My voice went high with effort. Even with half a pint of rum into us, the conversation was unspooling with about the same ease experienced by that pregnant cow of my youth, straining to expel head and hooves. “Why not?”

  “Ah,” Jim poured what remained of the rum into the tumblers. “It’s ancient, for one thing. Who knows when the vents were last cleaned. Safer to just leave it be.”

  “Yeah, but it must get freezing in here.”

  Jim wrapped both long hands around his glass for a moment before cocking an eyebrow at me.

  “You cold, Larry?”

  Actually, I was sweltering. The wood stove had probably been going since dawn. That’s the thing about heating a two-storey house with one stove. The only way you can get warmth into every room is to let your kitchen be a sauna.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “Well, there you go.”

  Just to show him I was sincere, I shuffled off my jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Jim watched, dully, before squinting back into his drink. These heavy silences kept occurring, which still the booze was doing nothing to dispel. At one point when we were outside, I realized we had been chucking the ball for Panda at least twenty minutes without saying a word to each other.

  But that makes it sound like I was participating in it, the silence. And I don’t feel I was, exactly. That is, the silences were all Jim’s—they were a Jim thing. I was suffering them, as opposed to participating in them. Jim was the author of the silences; I was his audience. They seemed to spread from his mood, like a dark liquid creeping over a surface, seeping into the ground. I guess I was the surface—I was the ground.

  Panda’s toenails needed cutting. The only noise for a few moments was the sound of the dog clattering and snuffling around somewhere under the table before flopping on top of my feet and starting to snore.

  “You cut all the wood yourself?” I inquired at last. God help me, I thought. We could be talking about metaphysical poetry right now. This was a conversational gambit I might use with Uncle Stan.

  Jim leaned back and, for some reason, unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Slowly, he started rolling them up. The deliberation of this gesture was unnerving. My defence system kicked in, shot some adrenalin into my bloodstream. He’s going to beat
you up now, it told me. I touched my nose—a thing I do whenever I feel threatened. Instinctively, I covered my nose. Thank you Lydia Humphries for that particular quirk.

  The rational part of my brain instructed me to sit tight—Jim would not just haul off and punch me for asking about wood. But his mood, it was so weird. I didn’t know what to expect.

  Jim rolled his sleeves as high as they would possibly go—practically to the shoulder. Then he looked at me, raised his arms, and flexed. His biceps popped out.

  “See?” said Jim.

  “Wow.” His arms were so long and ropey.

  “That’s what keeps me fit. Used to work out at a boxing club in Wethering for a while, but who needs it? You try chopping a cord of wood every day, see who messes with ya.”

  I imagined Jim in his yard, heaving the axe—sweat flying from his black hair—bringing it down on a slab of wood with a satisfying, splintery chunk that echoes through the surrounding woods as if to warn it what’s to come. There was something so primal about the image, so Canadian, so Jim.

  “Let me know if I can ever give you a hand with it sometime,” I offered.

  Jim nodded, upending his tumbler of rum. “Maybe we’ll go out a little later, chop some to bring in.”

  Panda lay heavy on my feet. He groaned and shifted, warming my ankles against his chest. One of my feet began to tingle for lack of circulation, so I moved it, causing Panda to gurgle indignation before jumping up and clattering to the corner of the kitchen where a tartan blanket was laid out for him. He flopped down onto it with an aggrieved huff he may well have learned from Moira.

  Jim had his head cradled in both hands, suspending it above his empty glass. It was a desolate position—childish, too, somehow. Like a kid told to sit there until the broccoli has disappeared from his plate. I could see tiny flecks of dandruff standing out brightly against Jim’s hair, seeming to have landed there like snow.

  After forever, he raised his head to look at me. His eyes, although bloodshot, were precisely as black as his hair. He was like Dracula—Dracula with dandruff. His lips pulled themselves back from his teeth.

  “Larry,” he whispered. I met his eyes and wanted to cover my nose again.

  “A piece of advice. If you’re going to bring booze over here, next time bring more than a pint.”

  Jim looked back down at the pointless glass on the table, long fingers raking his cheeks.

  Minutes of nothing went by. Panda snored. The little hell inside the wood stove crackled away.

  20.

  CHRISTMAS EVE, the yearly trudge out to the car to plow through the snow to Stan and Maud’s for dinner. I wasn’t in the best of moods all day, anticipating it. I can’t understand the point of us going over there every year. Not to mention that all week I’ve been inwardly griping at the necessity of having to buy a present for every last member of the Humphries family. This is a Christmas Eve tradition—we all get together at Stan and Maud’s, stuff ourselves, watch Maud pour my mother one glass of wine too many so she starts giggling in a semi-hysterical way at everything coming out of Lydia’s mouth, and then open our presents to and from one another and marvel inwardly at each other’s bad taste. Truth be told, I have the feeling this whole ritual was initiated on my behalf, to give me the feeling of a big family Christmas seeing as I’m an only child. I’m old now, though, I wanted to tell my parents, I’m almost twenty, I don’t give a shit. I don’t need someone to play dinkies and army men with after dinner. But parents get weird about their traditions, just like they get weird about a couple of pieces of bread, should you turn them down at the wrong time.

  I pled poverty. Ever since September I’ve been explaining to anyone with a potential interest that I have no money for Christmas presents outside the immediate family.

  “Just write everybody one of your nice poems, Larry,” said my mother. “They’d love it. Grammie loves to read, you know—she’s always reading.”

  About that time Dad slipped me his usual silent twenty-dollar bill, but it was December 24 and what exactly was I supposed to buy? I wracked my brain for the purchases of Christmas past. It was ridiculous. I had a short time off school to relax and recharge and here I was in downtown Summerside wracking my brain over what to get my grandmother and personal nemesis for Christmas. Why did we go through this every year with the Humphrieses? Maud and Janet are okay, but Lydia is evil, and Wayne and Uncle Stan are more or less blatant in their estimation of me as a homo.

  I would, I decided, participate in the charade no longer. I went to the bank, broke the twenty into fives, and stuck each one into a Christmas card when I got home.

  So now I’m sitting in front of the fireplace in my good sweater and pants, waiting for it to be time to drive out to Stan and Maud’s. I’ve been diverting myself with two books since I got here, one of which is my decrepit copy of Blinding White. Ever since I got home, I’ve been going over and over the poems, trying to puzzle things out. Fit the stanzas together in such a way that Jim’s personality will suddenly reveal itself to me in all its complex, dazzling clarity. How to decode the mystery of the past few weeks, the way Jim has been? It feels like it’s my duty to figure this out—as the guy who loves Jim’s work the most.

  The other is a year-old issue of Atlantica which I smuggled out of the library because I didn’t have time to go through it before the holidays. Reviewed in this particular issue? Jim Arsenault’s Blinding White, by Dermot Schofield.

  I have spent the entire day doing everything but reading Schofield’s review backward and upside down, and this, as near as I can tell, is the line that exploded the friendship, spurring Jim to retaliate with the foaming rabidity of wasting sickness and mucus-like sheen of mendacity:

  Arsenault strives—occasionally struggles—to achieve just the right balance of humour and pathos.

  It’s not even one line. It’s two words.

  Dad walks in, sighs to himself and wipes something invisible from the crotch of his pants. He sits down and watches me reading for a moment, which I am meant to be aware of. He may as well be smacking his lips and rolling up his sleeves. It starts with one word.

  “Studying?”

  I move the book to the side of my face so I can see him. “No,” I reply—maybe being a bit short, because Dad has seen me with this book lots of times and I’ve already told him what it is. “Reading Jim.”

  “Didn’t bring anything else to read?”

  “Yeah,” I say, picking up Atlantica with my free hand and waving it at him before positioning Blinding White in front of my face again. “I’m just reading Jim right now.”

  “Haven’t been reading much else since you got here.”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve just been carrying this one around with me for times like these.”

  “What times?” interrogates Dad.

  I move the book aside again.

  “You know, like when we’re waiting to go somewhere. Is Mom ready yet?”

  “What about having a conversation with your parents?”

  “We can do that too,” I say—although, judging from his mood, I’m thinking a conversation with Dad is about the last thing I want to pursue right now. Dad, I know, has never been big on Christmas Eve at the Humphrieses’ either. But heaven forbid anyone suggest doing otherwise. It’s like church—you’re not supposed to enjoy it, but you’re not supposed to go around acting like you don’t enjoy it either. And so we repress in the grand familial tradition, letting the rage and frustration emerge at more appropriate times—such as now.

  So Dad goes off. There’s no other way to describe it.

  All year long, my father complains to the cosmos, all he’s been hearing about is this Jim guy. Jim this, Jim that. Doing a reading with Jim. Having dinner over at Jim’s. Heading out to a bar with Jim. A bar, if you please. Not a word about studying.

  Jim is what I’m studying, I try and remind him.

  Balls! rejoins Dad. You know things are about to get serious when Dad starts hollering Balls! He uses i
t as a kind of conversational guillotine, to lop your sentence in half so the first part of your argument plops uselessly to the floor while the rest of it dies in your mouth. Balls lets you know this discussion is not about give and take, there’s no free exchange of ideas about to be enacted. Balls reminds you who, exactly, is in charge.

  I put the book aside, cross my arms, and dig in.

  “Don’t give me that sullen look,” warns Dad.

  “I’m not giving you a sullen look, Dad. I’m just sitting here.”

  “I just want to know what you’ve been doing since September. You show up off the boat half-dead with the hangover, you put off coming home so you can stay and get drunk with ‘Jim’ “—Dad always says “Jim” in quotation marks—he manages to convey them by rearing back his head, widening his eyes and otherwise looking incredulous—”Does the school know about this? That ‘Jim’s’ getting his students drunk and God knows what else?”

  “I didn’t stay to get drunk, Dad. I stayed to help with the reading.”

  “And what’s with all these goddamn ‘readings,’ anyway?”

  “That’s what poets do. They give readings.”

  “Well, here’s what I’m hearing, Larry.” Dad leans forward, therapist-like, for a moment. “I know you like poetry and readings and what all, but on the rare occasions we get you on the phone these days, I’m not hearing about that stuff. I’m hearing you’re off to pick up some bastard at the bus stop, or you’re running around putting posters up across town.”

  “I—”

  “Now maybe I’m just some idiot who didn’t get past grade 9, but it seems to me the whole point of sending a kid to university was so he wouldn’t have to be running around doing chores for some prick. That’s what I was doing when I was your age, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t have any reason to hope I’d amount to much more. I was sweeping up at the rink and working stints on people’s farms and anyone would have called me a fool to think I could do better. Now here’s you with all your scholarships and awards doing the same goddamn thing.”