Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “Because of Lawrence,” he adds. “Campbell got everybody out there, on top of him, so fast.”

  “What about Slaughter, anyway?” I say, pointedly not to Todd. “What happened to Slaughter, has anyone seen him?”

  “He went to the Mariner, afterward,” says Sherrie, leaning her face on her hands. At this moment she looks to me like one of those remote, round-faced women you see in Renaissance paintings—women whose very blankness meant the height of desirability. “Dekker took him home, but he went out again. I heard he went and tried to pick a fight with Scarsdale.”

  “Have you talked to him?” I ask.

  Sherrie keeps herself blank. “Nobody’s talked to him. Nobody’s seen him.”

  “Jesus Christ!” says Todd. “Isn’t Scarsdale some kind of gangster?”

  Above the blackboard, the minute hand moves. We all hear it click into place.

  “It’s a nice day,” Claude remarks. We’ve ended up walking down Bridge Street together. I’m on autopilot for Carl’s—tea and studying. Sherrie’s drifted back to her dorm. Todd didn’t even have it in him to hover very long.

  “Cold though,” I gripe. “It’s going to snow again.”

  “Maybe not,” says Claude.

  We trudge away, the sun in our eyes. The ranks of students downtown have noticeably thinned. Midterms. They’re all in their hovels, panicked over books.

  We stand together at the intersection.

  “You going to Carl’s?” I inquire. Claude has never struck me as the tea and french fries type.

  “There’s a coffee place a few doors down,” he says. “I thought I’d get some to go and walk around for a while. I’m kind of glad about Jim, actually.”

  I jerk like I’ve been bitten or pinched.

  “What do you mean, you’re glad about Jim?”

  The light changes—the only traffic light in town. Claude glances at me, and we make our way to the other corner.

  “I just mean I’m glad there was no class. I know it’s bad news—it’s really bad for Jim. Someone’s bound to complain. I just meant—I’m glad there’s no class, just for today. I feel like getting some air, going for a walk.”

  We trudge. We’re almost at Carl’s.

  “I feel like going for a walk too,” I say.

  We take our coffees down to the marsh, to the paths tucked away behind the flesh-toned church, where I last went with Sherrie.

  “The sunshine is good,” says Claude, strangely chipper for a guy in a black turtleneck. The dead vegetation crunches beneath our shoes.

  “You know,” I say after a while. After pondering how to bring the subject up. “My grandmother punched me in the face once.”

  Claude frowns and sips between his puffed lips, bathing his own face in steam.

  “In the mouth? God. How old was your grandmother?”

  “Oh, who knows, she’s always been around a hundred. She’s ageless, like Satan.” I also take a sip. Coffee is horrible, I learn. It tastes the way it looks—blackness.

  “No, not in the mouth,” I continue, swallowing with effort. “And actually she didn’t really punch me. But she might as well have. My nose had just been broken and she, like, flicked it really hard.”

  “Jesus Christ,” says Claude.

  “Yeah. I was only twelve or something. I’d gotten in fights before,” I say. “That is, I got beaten up, by guys my own age. But this was the most violent thing I’d ever experienced. It was—” I look for a word that won’t make me sound too ridiculous—too much like I’m groping for the right word. “It was shattering.”

  “Because of the betrayal,” says Claude.

  I nod and sip, wincing again at the taste. We crunch our way through the skeleton cattails.

  “Well,” says Claude after a while. He slurps his coffee the same noisy way I slurp my tea. “I can’t say it felt like that with Slaughter. It’s not like we were friends. He just put up with me because of Sherrie—he made that pretty clear.”

  “So you didn’t feel betrayed?” I ask—wondering if that would really make it any better.

  “No,” says Claude with a bored exhale. Although I’m starting to realize that what I always assumed was boredom with Claude is something else altogether. Something closer to fatigue.

  “You know, there’s an upside to betrayal,” he tells me. “If you get to expect it all the time. Eventually it just becomes—experience.”

  “Yes,” I acknowledge after a while. “That’s cheering.”

  We walk for a bit until we come to the same spot I stopped with Sherrie, the place where the trees part and you can see all the way across to the other side of the marsh. The water is blue like the tropics today—you could convince yourself it’s summer if it weren’t for the grasping, naked trees and yellow reeds.

  “Why do you think he did it, really?” I ask after a while. “I mean, come on, man, it must have been kind of surprising at least.”

  Because we eventually pried the information out of Claude that Slaughter came right to his door that Friday. Slaughter made his way to Claude’s residence in the middle of a sunny, warmer afternoon than this, climbed the stairs, ambled down the hall, knocked on the door, greeted, “Hi, faggot,” punching Claude in the mouth. Lightly, actually, said Claude. Meaning not as hard as Slaughter could have, but hard enough.

  My parents call. Lydia has broken her hip, as grandparents will, and now she thinks she’s dying.

  “She’s never been sick a day in her life,” my mother tells me. “She was always so careful. I don’t even remember her ever hurting herself. That’s why she was always so impatient with me and Stannie, whenever we got scrapes, or caught a bug. It was our own fault. We weren’t being careful enough.”

  “She said fuck,” exclaims my Dad before I can comment.

  “No, she didn’t,” negates Mom in an instant.

  “Your mother blocked it out. It’s the damnedest thing. She heard it just as well as I did.”

  “Oh, Dad, I did not.”

  “Your mother’d probably go blind if she saw the old thing naked.”

  “I would not,” maintains my mother.

  “Gramma said fuck?”

  “No,” says Mom. “Your father’s crazy.”

  “We’re having dinner over at Stan and Maud’s. She’s heading to that downstairs bathroom—you know how she is, she wobbles around like she’s riding a goddamn unicycle, but oh no, she never needs any help—”

  “I think her knee gave way—”

  “We all heard it, plain as day, you just ask your uncle Stan when you’re here, son.”

  “Your father laughed.”

  “You laughed, Dad?”

  “Well, I couldn’t believe my own goddamn ears!”

  “An old lady falls and breaks her hip—”

  “Well, I didn’t know she broke her hip. Wayne laughed too, a little.”

  “Oh, he did not.”

  “Your uncle Stan just turned white.”

  “Because she fell! Because he knew she’d hurt herself, he heard the crack!”

  “There wasn’t any crack—”

  “There was so a crack, that’s what you heard.”

  “I did not hear any crack, I know what I damn well heard, Larry.”

  “Don’t you listen to him, Larry.”

  “Anyway, now she thinks she’s dying. The old thing’s in the hospital, probably cursing out the nurses. Talking about her will, gathering her loved ones to her.”

  “Midterms are starting soon,” I say, because I know what’s coming.

  “Well, you can come home for a weekend, can’t you?” my mother demands.

  “I have a break in February,” I stammer, because it’s not usually my mother who does the barking down the phone. “And one on Easter …”

  “Hear that, Mom?” chortles Dad. “He’ll be there to see her rise on the third day.”

  There’s some silence, and then: “You Catholics,” she hisses down the wires at my convert father—shocking us both
.

  Then the heavy, plastic noise of the phone going down.

  “Mom?” I say after a second or two.

  “Ah, Christ,” mutters my father. “Made her mad, Larry.”

  “No kidding.”

  “It’s not funny, I s’pose. Brick shithouse like Lydia. It’s thrown your mum pretty good. Her and Stan both.”

  “I guess it has,” I agree, still rippling with the shock of it. My mother has never hung up on me.

  “Like watching your house burn down or something, I suppose. House you grew up in—never thought it wouldn’t be there.”

  Dad with his fires.

  “Well, your cousin is over, anyhow. She’s been a good help. Saw her at the hospital.”

  My cousin.

  “Janet?” I say. “Janet’s there?”

  “Came back when she heard about Lydia,” Dad tells me. “Came right over. Stan and Maud picked her up.”

  Dad relays this last piece of information with a slight emphasis. What he’s emphasizing is the fact that Stan and Maud didn’t let her take the bus, like they usually do when she comes over alone. Not this time, though, not even with the excuse of Lydia being in the hospital. This time Janet was worth the trip.

  This is interesting to me—I can tell it’s interesting to Dad for the same reason. That slight, thoughtful emphasis he gives. I hear him rolling it around in his mind.

  Now that she has hurt them back. Now that she has made the break. Now she’s welcome home.

  38.

  HERE IS THE STORY of the red morning at Jim’s. Memory delayed doesn’t make memory better. Memories strengthen like cheese, when put aside. That has been my experience this year. That is the biggest of all my discoveries. The longer you wait to open the container, the more the smell will knock you out when you do. Corpse of milk—the smell of the corpse. So here is the story of the red morning at Jim’s.

  I woke up early and had the place to myself for a while, which would have been nice except that I was freezing. I tried to remember the proper way to light a wood stove, casting my mind back to afternoons in the Humphrieses’ cottage. It seemed to me I couldn’t go wrong with kindling and newspaper, which happened to be in a box by my feet, so that was what I used, dumping a couple of logs in on top of it, and finally a match. Then I just dragged a chair over and huddled up beside it like a baby chick against its mother for warmth. I had a quilt Jim had tossed at me from the night before around my shoulders, and had pulled on my jacket, gloves, and boots the moment I woke up.

  There was nothing to do for the next little while but sit and wait to get warm. So this is how Jim lives, I thought. I imagined having a bath—immersing myself in a tub of hot water—but remembered there was no bathtub. Jim was a professor at Westcock University, the most respected undergraduate college east of Ontario. He had a full-time job, an expectation of tenure. Why did he live like a goddamn pioneer?

  Tea, I thought after a while, on early-morning instinct, and then recoiled. The word—the night—the Lions Club mug on its side in the corner. We hadn’t bothered to pick it up and put it away, afterward. Even more remarkably, the thing was still intact. It hadn’t even been chipped.

  I was there because Jim said, Don’t go. Don’t go. I need my friends around me tonight. I need to know who my friends are. Stay the night, Larry. Don’t go.

  “Always,” Moira was reduced to repeating, once she had barked herself out. The sight of him like that at the kitchen table seemed to infuriate her. The defeated slouch. The refusal to go to bed, to let anyone else, to put the booze away.

  “Always-always you get like this. You know you’re going to get like this and I tell you you’re going to get like this, and then you just go and you get like this. I watch you do it.”

  “I’m off to bed,” sang Creighton, his tone an attempt to radiate light. “Now, Jimmy. You mustn’t let yourself get so morose.”

  Jim stared at the table. “Stay up with me, please, Abe.”

  “No, no. Early start tomorrow, you know that, Jimmy.”

  I’d noticed Creighton couldn’t get away from him fast enough once Jim had settled into his funk. Slaughter had long been rousted, calmed to a degree, and stuffed into Dekker’s car before he could wind himself up again. But instead of shrugging and putting the whole thing down to drunken stupidity, as everyone else was more than ready to do, Jim took the incident as some sort of divine negative portent, like a black mark on the sun. He’d stationed himself away from the party, at the kitchen table with his no-longer-secret bottle of rum, for the rest of the night. Any remaining levity had pretty much fizzled from the party after Slaughter. People trickled from the house.

  But to be fair, it wasn’t Slaughter who was responsible for this. A lot of people found the fight kind of exciting, as well they might. The party was shot through with adrenalin at first—I could hardly hear my thoughts or Sherrie’s laments over the keyed-up babble on all sides of us. Slaughter’s attack was the sort of thing you stayed up all night animatedly discussing, marvelling over, dissecting from every angle. So the fight wasn’t the problem—the fight, if anything, should have given the night longevity.

  The drain was Jim. It was Jim who stopped the party cold. Jim sat down at the kitchen table and made himself a vortex.

  Creighton drew himself up and looked around with evident impatience. His light tone and easy gestures couldn’t penetrate the metastasizing gloom, and you could see him feeling his powerlessness—a feeling Creighton clearly didn’t like.

  “James, now. Come on. A kid got drunk and took a swing at you. So what?”

  “A kid I trusted. A kid I asked into my home, and counted as a friend.”

  “Always,” intoned Moira, hoarse by this point. “Always, always.” With that she left the kitchen huffing and puffing like a long-distance runner.

  Soon Creighton gave up. Defeat and disgust throbbed briefly on his face as he looked over at me. “I really must be off to bed,” he insisted to neither Jim nor me in particular. “Train in the morning. You have young Larry here. He’ll keep you company, won’t you, son?”

  And so it was left to me. Me and Jim—the dog and dying stove.

  “There he goes, Larry. One of my oldest and dearest friends. Mentor and confidant. Off he waltzes to his beddy-bye. Can’t haul ass back to Toronto fast enough.”

  I gazed down the hall as if still watching Creighton—who had already disappeared up the stairs—retreat. “Well, he’s got an early day tomorrow.”

  “Early day,” agreed Jim, shoving himself abruptly from the table. This was the first move he’d made in well over an hour. His chair shrieked, and Panda, who had been dozing on his blanket, leapt to his feet as though goosed. He barked once, pathetically, looking around for reassurance.

  “Shut up,” answered Jim, hauling open the fridge. He was looking for more beer.

  “What about some tea, Jim?” I suggested.

  “You like some tea, Larry?”

  “Be a nice way to end the evening.”

  “Ah, but the night’s still young.” Jim placed a Ten-Penny in front of me and, before I could protest, cracked it with an opener he seemed to have produced from mid-air. I looked at the beer with mixed feelings. I’d drunk so much beer, it kind of made me want to vomit. On the other hand, I’d drunk so much beer, it seemed I might as well drink more. It wasn’t logical, but it was nonetheless the case. I took a swig.

  “But I’ll getcha some tea if you want some tea,” Jim said, whirling lopsidedly toward the cupboard. “Tea and beer don’t go too badly together. And by the time it’s steeped you’ll be done anyway.”

  “Have a cup with me, Jim.”

  “You know, Larry,” said Jim in the forced and fakey tone he’d been using since Creighton had creaked his way upstairs. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than one man trying to trick another out of his booze. It’s something a woman would do. Like in that song there. ‘Don’t hide my liquor, try to serve me tea.’ You know that song?”

  I fl
ushed. “Yeah.”

  Jim folded his arms and leaned against the stove. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded a sharp, upward nod like an animal sniffing the wind.

  “You think I’m a drunk, Larry?”

  Fatigue dropped over me like a net. I was responding viscerally to the turn of Jim’s mood, feeling the suddenness of it in my guts like when a car hits a patch of ice and starts to spin.

  I rubbed my face.

  “Because if you think I’m a drunk, you should just come out and tell me. You know, like a man would do.”

  I slapped my hands onto the table and sighed. “I just think it makes you miserable, all right? I don’t like to see you miserable.”

  Jim kind of hooted under his breath. He held his beer up in front of him like a guy in a TV commercial. “This? You think this is the cause of my misery? If anything, this is what makes it bearable.”

  “I think that’s an excuse, Jim.”

  He gazed at me with sudden, fearsome lucidity. This happened at Christmas, I remembered—Jim sharpening up, vitalized by hostility.

  “Oh, you do, eh, Larry? An excuse for what, exactly?”

  This was a good question. I’d said what I said without thinking, it had just arrived on my lips. An excuse for what?

  “An excuse …” I said, “an excuse for …”

  “A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” Jim repeated like a retarded parrot.

  I looked up at him, speechless, in high school, bashed against lockers, tackled from behind.

  “A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” slobbered Jim. “Wonderful point, Larry. Brilliantly executed! By God, you’ll go far in this world.”

  I blinked down at my beer.

  “The red face on him,” Jim remarked after a moment, as if to a cadre of like-minded thugs.

  “That’s so,” I said, trying to keep my breathing even. “That’s so childish. ”

  “I’m the one who’s childish,” declared Jim, gesturing with a ceramic Fredericton Lions Club mug he’d brought down from the cupboard at some point. “I merely ask you to clarify your point in such a way as I can understand it, and all you can do is sit there stuttering and stammering with your face all red.”

  And then Jim did it again, contorted his face, adjusted his voice. “A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,” he drawled. “An excuse for what, Larry? For what? You’ll have to do better than that airy-fairy crap.”