Somehow, he mustered a smidgen of unexpended courage. “My name’s Reinhardt … I mean Reinie – Reinie Ottenbreit. I’m in grade twelve.” A taint of self-importance his father would not have approved of surfaced in the last statement. He waited, hoping she would volunteer similarly pertinent information. None was forthcoming. On the heels of a deep, shuddering breath he made another attempt. “What’s your name?”
“Darcy.”
“Isn’t that a boy’s name?”
“Who’re you to talk, Reinhardt.”
For the next thirty minutes, they sat without speaking, she showing so obvious a pleasure in Reinie’s discomfort that even he was capable of detecting it. At last, the bus drew into the parking lot of Waddell High and began to noisily disembark passengers. Following Darcy into school, Reinie noticed her tights had a long run down the back of one leg. In that rent, a tender, vulnerable offering of white flesh was exposed. Pressing the flimsy Department of Agriculture brochure to his crotch, Reinie did his best to cover up the boner this enticing sight had popped. He might as well have tried to hide a chair leg with a piece of Kleenex.
For the remainder of the day, he shuffled from class to class in a dreamy, drifting daze. His condition only worsened that night. Cradling his transistor to his ear on the pillow, he listened as distant radio stations from America’s heartland softly whispered to him their lovesick lamentations, their hymns to heartbreak. Often as not, the songs erupted in violent explosions of static, or simply crumbled away into a tuneless, echoing void.
The next day, Darcy selected a new seat partner for the bus ride. Jealously, Reinie studied her demeanour and was relieved to note she treated Marvin Gaitskell with the same scorn as she had him. During lunch hour, he wandered the hallways, praying for a chance encounter. Minutes before classes resumed, he spotted her in the gym. Darcy was leaning up against a wall watching a bunch of girls play volleyball. Hesitantly, gingerly, Reinie sidled up to her and rigidly flattened his body to the wall. She seemed in an even more ferocious mood than she had the day before. Her arms were folded under her small, haughty breasts, thrusting them upward in an aggressive fashion.
Peering down at the part in her hair Reinie hoarsely declared, “I got a car. A 57 Chevy Bel Air. Maybe you want to go for a drive tomorrow.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. Reinie felt the floor plummet beneath his feet. Then, mercifully, he heard her add, “That there is the all-time stupidest game I ever saw. And look at them sweat. Like pigs.”
“So, you want to go?”
“I don’t care.”
He didn’t know what she was saying. Interpretation was not his forte. It was why he hated poetry so much. The bell loosed a shrill, strident summons. Darcy heaved herself off the wall, tossing two words over her shoulder as she made for the exit. “What time?”
“Two o’clock. Two o’clock, okay?” he called after her.
“I don’t care.”
Suddenly he realized something. He knew where the bus collected Darcy, but at that location two farmhouses faced each other directly across the road. “Where do you live?” he shouted as the milling throng propelled her through the gym doors.
“Pushko place,” she said.
Learning that Darcy was a Pushko gave Reinie a lot to think about all that long Friday afternoon. The Ottenbreits had no dealings with people of that ilk. Everybody knew the Pushkos’ reputation. Darcy’s father, Eugene Pushko, made frequent appearances in the “Court News” section of the local paper. Minor offences, drunk and disorderly, operating a motor vehicle without a valid driver’s licence, resisting arrest. His five sons, Charles, Lincoln, Delmar, Winston, and Everett were often seen meandering up and down the streets of Waddell, crammed in a rust-ravaged vehicle trailing a haze of oily blue smoke. All five boys were as wide as a doorway across the shoulders, narrow-hipped, and bandy-legged. They had loud, booming voices that carried for blocks. They laughed a good deal but were famous for their violent, quick tempers. Amiably dangerous was an accurate description of the Pushko boys.
Most people found the brothers difficult to distinguish from one another. Charles, Lincoln, Delmar, and Winston looked like refugees from the 1950s with their elaborately sculpted hairstyles. They wore a uniform. White T-shirts, black denim pants, cowboy boots. The only one who didn’t was the youngest of the brothers, Everett. The family rebel, Everett preferred cream denims and paisley shirts. Even more radically, he affected a Prince Valiant haircut that lent him a passing resemblance to Burton Cummings of The Guess Who, or perhaps a female film star of the silent era. He also smoked menthol cigarettes, much to his brothers’ disgust.
None of the Pushkos had gone past grade eight because they found school highly unsatisfactory.
A cold, doughy ball of worry formed in the pit of Reinie’s stomach. His parents would not be pleased by a connection with the Pushko family in any way, shape, or form. His mother and father subscribed to guilt by association.
Saturday morning Reinie was up by five and hard at work. His father left him on his own to pound posts and mend barbed wire because he was heading off to a cattle auction. When the fencing was completed, Reinie washed the Bel Air and vacuumed the interior. For a moment, he paused, hand resting on its fin, reverent before its showroom loveliness. He had bought the car from Mrs. Braun, who had wanted nothing to do with it after her husband, old Mr. Braun, had died behind the Chevy’s wheel. Stricken by a heart attack, Mr. Braun had coasted the Bel Air to safety at the side of the road before expiring. He had been a finicky, fastidious man, even going so far as to have the car’s engine regularly steam-cleaned. The Chevy was immaculate except for one ominous stain on the driver’s seat. In the throes of a coronary, eighty-year-old Mr. Braun had lost control of his bladder.
Reinie just had time to shower, change his clothes, and gobble a baloney sandwich before meeting Darcy at two. His mother discovered him in the kitchen, eating over the sink.
“What’s the hurry, Reinie?”
He looked at her blankly.
“Are you off somewhere?”
“For a drive.”
“Drive where?”
“Around.”
“When can I expect you home?”
He shrugged noncommittally.
“Supper is at six. Your father will be hungry when he gets back, so don’t be late.”
Reinie nodded, snatched the car keys from the table, and dove out the door. His mother, a neat, tidy woman of fifty whose face, lined by the steadfast exertion of willpower, still managed to retain lingering evidence of having once been pretty, stood at the window, hand plucking the cloth of her dress as the Chevy pulled out of the yard.
Another fine day, an autumnal gift. The Bel Air sped down grid roads, unfurling banners of dust that captured mellow sunshine in their shimmering, silty mesh. The poplars lining the roads had begun to turn, their yellow leaves to loosen their grip on branches. On the narrowest lanes, the Chevy’s passing whirled showers of gold from the trees, spilling them in spendthrift fashion.
At five minutes to two he arrived at his destination. An ancient windbreak of dying spruce hid the Pushko house from sight. Reinie turned into the approach, cautiously nosed his car over a potholed trail that twisted among morbid, ghostly trees until the farmyard appeared.
An acre of vehicles of every age, model, and description, cracked windshields coyly glinting sunshine, roofs and hoods rusted to a rich burgundy, first seized his attention. Then the house, an old grey stucco box onto which a series of offhand additions had been tacked. All of them clad in different-coloured siding – pink, green, robin’s egg blue, mustard.
The Pushko men were squatting on the front steps of the house. Their arrangement suggested a formal family portrait, faintly evoked the photograph of Reinie’s christening that his mother kept proudly displayed on the piano in the living room. But the centrepiece of this composition was not an infant but a case of beer, clearly visible between Mr. Pushko’s widespread, sheltering legs. Charles and Li
ncoln were seated on the top step; Mr. Pushko occupied the second step all by his lonesome. Delmar, Winston, and Everett hunkered at the feet of the head of the household. Mr. Pushko’s striped railway engineer’s cap and mirror sunglasses somehow reminded Reinie of the cat in the Dr. Seuss book that had given him nightmares as a child.
The Chevy rolled to a stop. There was no welcome from the Pushkos, who stolidly stared at the car, bottles in their hands. Could this be a barricade mounted at the front door to keep him from Darcy? Seconds ticked by and then, just as he was on the point of backing up the Chevy and fleeing, the screen door burst open, Darcy squirmed her way between her brothers’ shoulders, bumped her father aside with her hip, skipped up to the Chevy, and hopped in.
“Get moving,” she said.
In the rear-view mirror Reinie saw the Pushkos, still locked in place. Then Mr. Pushko lifted his beer to his lips. The boys took their cue from him and did the same, a nicely timed and executed ripple of movement.
Darcy rummaged around in a plastic purse, produced cigarettes and matches, and soon was furiously puffing away. This made Reinie a tad uneasy. If his mother smelled smoke in the car, the questions wouldn’t stop until she knew who was responsible for the telltale stink – him, or somebody with nasty, filthy habits who he ought to know better than to be associating with.
Today, Darcy looked a little rundown, a little worse for wear. Her eyeshadow was smudged, as if she had slept in it. “Take me to the drugstore,” she ordered, slumping down in the seat, propping her feet on the dashboard. She held that nonchalant pose, lighting one cigarette off another, until they drew up in front of the Rexall on Main Street in Waddell. Darcy flung herself from the car and dashed into the pharmacy.
Reinie found her at the cosmetics counter. It was unattended. Darcy was slapping on eyeshadow at breakneck speed. Mrs. Bernhardt, the pharmacist’s wife, suddenly hove into view and accosted her. “Here, what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
“It’s a sample,” said Darcy.
“It’s no sample,” said Mrs. Bernhardt. “I don’t have any samples. Did you go behind that counter?”
“It was on top of the counter and it was opened. Looked like a sample to me,” Darcy said, bristling.
Mrs. Bernhardt snatched the eyeshadow from her hand. “You got some gall,” she said.
Reinie spoke up. “There’s been a mistake, I guess. I’ll pay for it.”
“First, I look in her purse and see what else she helped herself to.”
Darcy flicked the clasp of her handbag, defiantly upended the purse on the countertop. Out tumbled cigarettes, matches, a mound of wadded Kleenex.
Mrs. Bernhardt pursed her lips disapprovingly. “Your age and smoking.”
“Who asked you? Mind your own business,” snapped Darcy, scraping everything back into her purse.
“Get out. And don’t you come back here again. I got enough to do without keeping an eye on the likes of you.”
“Kiss my you-know-what,” Darcy said, whirling around and flouncing off, leaving Mrs. Bernhardt to viciously bang the cash register keys and Reinie to pay. When he handed Darcy the eyeshadow out in the car, she was too gleeful to thank him. “Old bitch. See her face? Did you see her face?” Darcy wriggled forward, thrusting her own face at the rear-view mirror to admire the free touch-up she had helped herself to. As she did, she planted one small hand on Reinie’s thigh, steadying herself. That slight pressure obliterated everything looming in his mind – that Mrs. Bernhardt, like his mother, was a notable Lutheran dragon, and likely to squeal that he had been the wheelman for a shoplifter. The warmth of Darcy’s palm burned him right through the cloth.
For an hour and a half Darcy and Reinie sat in a booth in Wong’s Café, a new experience for Reinie since he had never before had any inclination to waste his time just hanging about the way the other teenagers did. He bought Darcy two hamburgers and two vanilla milkshakes. Each booth had its own individual station for selecting tunes on the jukebox and Darcy kept demanding quarters from him to feed the machine. She sang along softly to each song with a longing look on her face that Reinie found thrilling. When she wasn’t singing or eating, she was chain-smoking. Reinie felt gratified when two girls from his home room, Beverly Steckel and Marjorie Hampton, whispered and shot steely looks in his and Darcy’s direction until she turned to them and said, “What you looking at, scrags? Because I sure ain’t looking at much.”
This time, when Reinie pulled up to the Pushko residence, it was Darcy’s mother who was enthroned on the front step. The Pushko men were nowhere in sight. “I like your car,” said Darcy before she left him, hustled across the sun-blasted patch of couch grass that masqueraded as a lawn, and went bounding up the steps past her mother.
Mrs. Pushko beckoned him, a directive not to be denied. Reinie climbed out of the Chevy and approached her warily.
“I’ll put a extra plate on,” she said. “You better come in and eat with us.”
“Really,” began Reinie, “I got to –”
“Ah, don’t be shy. Nothing here to scare you.”
She got to her feet, laid a powerful hand on his back, propelled him up the steps and into the kitchen. There, all the rest of the Pushkos were sitting around a battered Formica table set with Melmac plates. Mr. Pushko still wore his engineer’s cap and mirror sunglasses indoors. White stubble dusted his face, like a skiff of snow.
“This is Darcy’s friend,” announced Mrs. Pushko. She turned to Reinie. “What do they call you, son?”
“Reinie.”
“Whiney? Whiney?” Mr. Pushko’s deep, resonant bass boomed in the hot, steamy kitchen.
“No –” Reinie started to say, but his correction was stalled by a burst of laughter from the others. Only then did he realize Mr. Pushko had perpetrated a joke.
“Eenie, meenie, Reinie moe!” bellowed Charlie. Another wave of hilarity engulfed Reinie.
“He’s company,” warned Mrs. Pushko, although with a long-suffering, indulgent smile for her brood.
Darcy was less forgiving. She sat, fingers sulkily twisting the ends of her long hair.
“I should phone my mother. To tell her I’ll be late,” explained Reinie.
“No can do,” said Mr. Pushko. “Cocksuckers at the phone company cut me off.” He glared at his sons. “Too much of the long distance, these assholes phoning to every wrecker’s yard in the province looking for car parts.” It astonished Reinie that Mr. Pushko so readily confessed his financial embarrassment without a trace of shame.
“You – Everett, Lincoln – shove over and let Reinie get his feet under the table beside Darcy,” demanded Mrs. Pushko. Her two sons began to playfully jostle each other, thumping their chairs together. It reminded Reinie of bumper cars colliding on the midway. Gradually, a gap inched open into which he self-consciously squeezed himself.
“The boy looks like he could use a beer,” said Mr. Pushko. Dutifully, Charles retrieved a bottle of Pilsner from a case strategically positioned on the floor near the table. Reinie was about to refuse, but before he could get a word out Charles had set the rim of the bottle cap to the edge of the table and smacked it with the heel of his palm. The cap spiralled into the air and landed with a faint clatter on the linoleum. Presented with the foaming bottle, Reinie had no choice but to clamp his lips to it to save the floor from a drenching.
Mrs. Pushko was bustling about with bowls and platters. As soon as one hit the table, somebody snatched it up. “Give over to Reinie now,” she kept urging her children. “Give the boy a chance.” When nobody heeded her, she took charge and served him herself, heaping his plate with thick slices of pork loin roast, perogies, cabbage rolls, cucumbers and cream, buttered carrots and dill, mashed potatoes and gravy. Everybody tucked in, making grunts of delight except for Darcy, who showed little interest in her food after all those hamburgers and milk shakes. She toyed with a single cabbage roll, aimlessly shifting it about on her plate.
Lincoln elbowed Reinie. “Hey, Darcy,” he
said to his sister, “if you don’t eat your supper, you ain’t going to grow any pinfeathers on your chicken. No pinfeathers on the chicken, you ain’t old enough for a boyfriend.”
“Go fuck your hat, moron,” said Darcy. Then she jumped up and stormed out of the kitchen. Once again, everybody howled laughter. Reinie’s eyes flitted from face to face, searching for some sign that somebody disapproved of this vulgar exchange between brother and sister. He found none.
Reinie’s wristwatch showed him it was just shy of six o’clock. He was going to be late getting home. Turning to Mrs. Pushko, who was slamming plates of gingerbread and whipped cream down on the table, he said apologetically, “That was an awful good supper, Mrs. Pushko, but I better be going.”
“Nobody leaves without they have dessert,” Mrs. Pushko declared sternly. “Not in my house.”
Darcy’s family proved impossible to escape – not that Reinie really wished to. Grinning foolishly, he ate two helpings of dessert, drank two more beers. He wasn’t used to the beer. It made him feel silly, giddy, light-headed, and light-hearted. He giggled at almost everything that was said. When Darcy’s brothers asked to see his car, he proudly did the honours. The boys popped the hood, inspected the motor, pored over the interior, all the while murmuring enviously.
This was followed by a guided tour of the Pushko automobile graveyard. The wrecks struck Reinie as falling into two distinct categories: definitely not running and certain never, ever to run. Reinie, who had always stood apart from the common run of humanity, burdened by all the duties and responsibilities that attended being an Ottenbreit, was sure the Pushkos were embracing him, that he was being accepted as family because of Darcy. In his befuddled, tipsy state he could have flung his arms around them, hugged them to demonstrate the vast, oceanic wave of fraternal feeling he was experiencing. His emotions even began to colour his estimation of the value of the junked cars.
Finally, as utter darkness descended, Reinie and Darcy’s brothers stood companionably in the chilly fall night, warmed by the limitless potential the derelict vehicles would reveal some time in the future.
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 8