Footsteps pounded down the hall, soon Reinie felt the mattress sag under his father’s weight, a hand drag him over onto his back. Two bleak, concerned faces hovered above him.
“I’m not going to graduation,” he informed them.
His mother appeared relieved. “Don’t be silly. You’ve just got a case of nerves. Of course you’re going to graduation. Your brother is driving all this way just to see you get your diploma. You can’t back out now.”
“Yes I can.”
“I won’t let you quit on this,” Mabel said, falling back on her reliable, no-nonsense voice. “Not like you did choir and Luther League.”
“Fuck Luther League,” Reinie said in a monotone. “Fuck it right up the ass.”
Mabel recoiled two steps. His father sprang off the bed and shouted, “Enough of that kind of talk in this house, mister!”
Mabel was a strong woman, capable of almost instant recovery in a crisis. “I didn’t hear that,” she said, mouth tight and severe. “Now get up and get dressed – now!”
Flinging back the bedclothes, Reinie swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, picked his blue jeans up from the floor.
Mabel’s voice went shrill with exasperation. “Your suit! Pay attention, Reinie! You need your suit for the photograph!”
It was as if he had gone deaf. Reinie continued to dress himself in the clothing scattered on the floor. Then he walked by his parents as if they were invisible, as if they had melted away into the stale air of his bedroom, and dragged a duffel bag out of his closet, which he began to stuff with jeans, underwear, shirts, and socks.
“What are you doing?” cried his mother. “What do you think you’re up to?”
The last shirt couldn’t be jammed into the overflowing duffel bag. Reinie held it up to his parents’ faces, ferociously tore it in half, and flung the two pieces at their feet. Hoisting the duffel bag over his shoulder, he walked stolidly through the house, his mother and father yapping at him, border collies trying to turn the wayward sheep back into the flock. They did not succeed. Switching tactics out in the yard, they applied sweet reason, cajolery, pleas. Reinie climbed into the Chevy, locked the doors, and started the engine. His mother began to beat on the driver’s window with her palms, begging him to listen, just listen. Karl Ottenbreit planted himself directly in front of the vehicle to block his son’s escape. Reinie simply reversed the Bel Air, rear wheels chewing up lawn, spitting out lumps of sod. Swinging around his distraught parents in a wide arc, he raced off, leaving them stricken under a soft spring sky piled high with bland, woolly cumulus.
All day Reinie drove west, only pausing to stop for gas. As evening drew down he found himself in the midst of the Alberta oil patch, pumpjacks somnolently nodding, refinery flares waving flames against a magenta sky, the smell of sour gas, the sulphurous odour of money everywhere. That night he slept in the Chevy and by noon was employed on an oil rig. The man who hired him stood by farm boys. They were raised around machinery, weren’t afraid of work, and could stand isolation. In his experience, city kids found life intolerable without an A&W or a movie house right around the corner. They were apt to quit on him.
Reinie didn’t disappoint. He worked without stint, didn’t flinch at the prospect of any dirty job. He took all the overtime he could get. What’s more, unlike many oil workers, he didn’t drink, didn’t get thrown in jail, and was the very definition of dependable. Learning the business fast, he got promoted fast. In six years, what with overtime and bonuses, he was making more money per annum than a surgeon, and banking most of it. His only friend was a Mennonite boy with similar habits. In 1975, the two pooled their savings, got a loan from the bank, and started a company that contracted to service oil wells. Three years later they had thirty men on the payroll and were still expanding. By then the Bel Air was a dead article, punch-drunk from the hammering it had taken on primitive roads. Reinie junked it without a second’s thought, or the slightest misgiving.
That year he married Melanie Cooper, a loans officer at the bank he dealt with. By then he had legally changed his name to Randy Bright, junking Reinie Ottenbreit the way he had the Chevy. It was Melanie who talked him into finally contacting his parents and inviting them to the wedding. He was surprised they came, surprised to see how much they had changed during the intervening years of silence. He wasn’t surprised to see how much they approved of Melanie, or how much they still disapproved of him. They took the name change hard.
Melanie resigned from the bank to help him manage the business. Their first child, Tommy, was born two years later, followed by Ryan, and then Brendan, the afterthought.
Randy Bright is in his fifties now, his bushy, toffee-coloured hair thinned to a sandy grey. He is still in the oil business, but now his holdings include three motels, a cattle feed lot, a Toyota dealership, and a tool rental business.
Surfing the Internet two years ago, he discovered a 1957 Chevy Bel Air advertised by a car restorer operating out of San Bernardino, California. Without hesitation, or his usual hard-headed dickering, he paid the asking price, $160,000 American, and had it shipped to him. It’s an improved, updated version of his former vehicle, with features such as a ZZ4 355 horsepower, aluminium head, roller cam engine; weld racing wheels; Positraction; the whole nine yards. It’s even equipped with an analogue-faced digital radio and CD changer.
Randy Bright rarely drives the Chevy; most of the time it simply sits in his four-car garage next to the rest of the Bright family automobiles, all of them Toyotas. When business associates ask him, “How’s it going, Randy?” he always answers the same way, “Can’t complain.” But this isn’t exactly true. He worries day and night over his youngest son, Brendan. Tommy and Ryan are both married, both working in the business, both happy as far as their father can judge, but Brendan is a different story.
Brendan, who is seventeen, is a loner. Not the type of loner his father had been as a boy, but a moody, brooding, withdrawn teenager who spends most of his time in his room on the computer, listening to CDS, reading fantasy novels. His father knows the other kids give him a hard time. When his mother asks Brendan how things are at school, he always answers with a bitter smile and a grudging shrug of his stooped shoulders.
Some nights when he can’t sleep, Randy quietly leaves Melanie dead to the world in their double bed and takes the Chevy Bel Air out for a spin. After a few miles listening to the wind howl by his open window, he finds a secluded spot and parks.
There was not a trace of nostalgia in his purchase of the Chevy. He bought it to confirm to himself that no one can ever again deny him what he wants. But confronted by the stars, he admits that what he most wants now is for Brendan to be a boy like his brothers are, cheerful, outgoing like their mother.
Six months ago, he walked into the garage and found Brendan with a tool in his hand, a power nail gun. It was plugged into the outlet. A look passed between them, the recognition of a fact by two minds. His father had stumbled over, yanked the cord from the wall before the boy could act. Now Brendan is seeing a therapist, who keeps telling his parents that Brendan is improving and that they should think about sending him to a wilderness camp for troubled youths in Utah for the summer. His father is doubtful about the psychologist’s optimistic assessment, sees no evidence of this so-called improvement.
Lately, Randy Bright has caught himself on the point of signing cheques Reinie Ottenbreit. He believes this might be a sign. Changing his name was a mean thing to do. His parents are both dead, and he wonders if he isn’t being punished from beyond the grave for his vindictiveness.
He doesn’t trust wilderness camps in Utah, or therapists. What he would like to do is hand the keys to the 1957 Chevy Bel Air to Brendan in the hope the boy would drive away as fast as he can. On nights when the hard little stars beat against the windshield like brilliant hail and the prairie wind moans its insinuations, he can imagine Brendan speeding down some road, the CD blaring the strange music that thumps night after night from his bedroom,
the wind ruffling his blond hair, each mile bringing him closer to where he needs to be.
In his mind’s eye, Randy Bright hungrily watches his son until a final twist in the highway pavement whips Brendan out of sight, the Chevy Bel Air carrying him on to a waiting refuge, safety, a haven of happiness. He knows it is not going to happen, but he wishes it would, wishes that Brendan could be lucky as he has been. Thirty-five years of contentment is something, even if now the bill for it seems to have come due.
Live Large
BILLY CONSTABLE HADN’T BEEN SLEEPING soundly for weeks, and at four o’clock one June morning he found himself prowling his living room with a cup of coffee clutched in an unsteady hand. His wife, Marva, and their teenaged twin boys, Troy and Jess, had gone up to the cottage so he had no one to disturb when he flung open the drapes, switched the CD player on, and set one track repeating over and over, Richie Havens singing “Here Comes the Sun,” at such thunderous volume that Billy could almost trick himself into believing that the sound waves battering him were responsible for the nagging tremor in his right hand.
The sun finally did come up, flushed by Richie from below the horizon, a burst of extravagant light that torched a strange, bird-shaped cloud, fiery wings uplifted. Somehow it reminded Billy of the cover of a book assigned in his first-year university English course more than thirty years ago. A novel by some famous writer. Stubbornly, he tried to recover the name to forestall thinking about how bad business was. It didn’t work. Worry about Jenkins’s upcoming phone call had raised a tender blister on his brain.
Business was so shitty that even clueless Marva seemed to sense trouble was pressing in. Why else had she suggested they resign from the Fairview Golf and Country Club? Ordinarily, Billy, who adored golf, would have protested, but feeling he deserved this punishment for his sins he acquiesced. With the club’s approval he had sold his membership to Herb Froese, bolstering a cash flow that lately had dwindled to a feeble trickle.
What Marva hadn’t learned yet was that Billy was looking for a buyer for the cottage. The dock, altar of his wife’s tanning sessions, the sleek powerboat with its triumphal roar, the quaint log cabin, all appeared doomed. Even the house he stood in now, his gut slumping forlornly over the waistband of his Jockey shorts, was in jeopardy.
He needed a nicotine jolt. That was something else Marva didn’t know, that hubby was back on the booze and the cigarettes. Two years ago Billy had awakened to an elephant squatting on his chest, a crushing coronary. In the hospital, a teary Marva had begged him to mend his ways and, contritely, he had promised he would. But in the last desperate months he had turned into a sneaky, slinking backslider.
Billy killed the music, put on his tartan housecoat, stepped into the garage, collected a pack of du Mauriers he had cached in the glove compartment of the Lexus, and circled around behind the house. Only by keeping to the great outdoors could he prevent Marva from sniffing out the stale stench of his fall from grace. There the towering blue spruces also provided shelter from the prying eyes of any early rising neighbour. Lately Billy sensed friends and acquaintances were checking him for signs of failure and finding them.
He lit up, greedily tugging smoke into his lungs as he roamed the property. He was a big man of fifty-three, with the fleshy, corroded body of the former athlete, but his bare feet still moved with nimble assurance through the dew-drenched grass. Slanting rays of sunshine strafed the backyard. The evergreens flung spiny swatches of black shadow across the lawn. A mob of sparrows scattered from the birdbath at his approach, flecking the sky with their panicked flight. The jay in the neighbour’s tree jeered at him, mocking his disgrace.
Still, Billy began to take heart. After all, summer was his element, a season as hot-blooded, aggressive, and optimistic as he had always been. Summer fit his nature like a glove. Things were going to be all right. He would survive this. Jenkins had promised to phone by five p.m., and whatever else might be said about the flinty-hearted prick, he was a man of his word. If Billy could land the contract to install plumbing in the condos Jenkins was building, the bank could be held at bay. With mortgage rates at an all-time low, construction was booming and there would be more work to nab if he could make it through this bad patch. He just had to think positive, correct past errors of judgment, and everything would be fine. The trouble was waiting for the goddamn phone call. Jenkins was certain to keep him hanging by his fingernails until the last second. A power trip, as Billy used to say in the misty, faraway days of the 1960s. But, he told himself, maybe this was all to the good. Maybe this situation was a lesson for him, a reminder of where impatience and recklessness could land you. Hugging this comforting thought close, he headed back to the house.
At seven-thirty the phone rang and Billy’s unstable ticker gave an anxious lurch. It couldn’t be Jenkins, not at this hour. Had the boys flipped the powerboat? Wrapped Marva’s Volvo around a power pole? To his relief it was Herb Froese calling. Herb apologized for the early morning call, explaining he had a tee time for eleven-thirty, but one of the original foursome had ducked out. Did Billy want to play? As his guest, he added tactfully. At first Billy was inclined to refuse outright, feeling this invitation to his old haunt was a humiliation, but as he listened to Froese ramble on, he relaxed. Herb was a hacker so apologetic about his game that playing with anyone he didn’t know well gave him fits. On a busy Sunday, there was a chance some hopeful single might attach to the threesome and Froese would run the risk of an afternoon spoiled by some stranger’s scarcely veiled condescension about his laughable play. Once Billy understood he was being asked to do Herb a favour, he graciously accepted. At least now he had something to occupy his mind until five o’clock, something to help turn the dial down on his fretting. Maybe his luck was turning.
Billy arrived at Fairview early. So far this year he had only squeezed in three rounds on public courses: his game was rusty, and hitting a bucket of balls might work the kinks out. As he lugged his bag towards the driving range, he felt his heart soar. It was a beautiful, warm, brilliant day. Fairview looked in great shape: add a flock of woolly lambs to all that rich green pasture and it would be a shepherd’s wet dream. Then something halted Billy dead in his tracks. He spotted Malcolm Forsythe, the King of the Car Dealers, on the driving range, “working on his game.” The evil little turd was always spouting hackneyed golfing clichés that sent Billy around the bend. “Keep it in the short grass,” “It’s not how you drive, it’s how you arrive,” “I don’t have my A-game today.” Everything about the man irked him. That abbreviated, granny backswing mechanically dinking out ball after ball as straight as a plumb line, that stupid tweed cap Forsythe had brought back from a trip to St. Andrews sitting on his head like a dried-out, weathered cow pie.
Billy had a bigger grievance against him. He couldn’t forget how Forsythe’s deliberately implying that he couldn’t afford to buy a luxury car had driven him to lose his head, to throw caution to the wind, to make the big, extravagant gesture and impulsively order a Lexus LS460. He could see now that Forsythe had been egging him on, seeing just how far he could push him. “If a fellow has to tighten his belt, he has to tighten his belt. No shame in that. A Corolla is great value. Very economical. You can’t imagine how many of them I sell to female schoolteachers,” is what Forsythe had said to him and Billy hadn’t been able to swallow that. And then, once he had taken the plunge, he had had to liquidate his measly fund of RRSPS so he could pay cash and avoid the credit check Forsythe would have to run to see if he qualified for dealer financing.
The very sight of the man sent Billy fleeing to the clubhouse. There he received the awful news from Herb Froese and his buddy Skip Jacobs that Forsythe would be part of their foursome.
As usual, Forsythe rudely kept them all waiting until seconds before their start time. On the first tee, the car peddler said, “So, boys, who wants to lay some loose change on the game and make this interesting?” Forsythe, a seven-handicapper, was always trying to milk somebody who was half t
he player he was. Herb Froese had paid for Forsythe’s after-round drinks so many times that he flatly refused, and Skip frugally followed suit. Forsythe turned to Billy. “It’s just you and me, sport. How’s about it? What do you say? Stroke or match play?”
Billy took his time lighting a cigarette. “How about we play skins. Carry the money forward when we tie a hole. Forget the chickenshit stuff.”
“How much a hole?”
“Hundred. That’s a nice round number.” The look on Forsythe’s face, the awed silence that overwhelmed Skip and Herb delighted Billy.
“Jesus,” said Forsythe. “So much for a friendly outing.”
“Money talks, bullshit walks,” said Billy, flamboyantly yanking his driver from the bag. He could sense the shrewd cogs turning in his opponent’s mind. After a bit, Forsythe nodded. Apparently, the calculations had been weighed and been judged favourable. Forsythe had green-lit the project. Billy was gleeful. Now he had returned the favour, backed Forsythe into a corner.
Billy, a big hitter, always found the first hole, a 545-yard par five, extremely tasty. As he addressed the ball with his Big Bertha, he heard Forsythe snidely remark, “That driver looks like a toaster on a stick.”
Billy lifted his head. “It’s legal.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
The exchange gave Billy pause. “Course management” was one of Forsythe’s mantras. Play it safe, weigh risk and reward like a bean counter. If Billy pulled the ball left, he was out of bounds. The story of his life. Five hours ago, he had been telling himself to correct his mistakes. It was time to listen to his own advice. Trading the driver for a three iron, he split the fairway. Forsythe went with a driver, but as their carts rolled down the fairway Billy noted with satisfaction that Forsythe had gained fewer than ten yards on him. This old dog can learn new things, he told himself. Sure he can.
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 10