Probably it was because Carol was imagining that she was peppering Poppy that she fired off nearly all the cartridges in a frenzy before Donny’s insistent pleading to Let him have a go stopped her. Bob pulled the car up at a played-out gravel pit, the sides of which Donny pocked with the last handful of bullets, little puffs of sand and pebbles spraying like dusty blood.
Bob declined to touch the gun.
After Donny had had his fun, the question arose as to what to do with Poppy’s firearm. Carol had finally understood that if she put it back without the bullets, her father would know that she had been meddling with it. Maybe it would be better if the pistol simply disappeared, leading Poppy to believe that it had somehow gone missing during the move.
Bob suggested pitching it in a slough. But Carol had a better idea, one that flushed her face with thoughts of sowing future mischief. “Why not bury it here?” she said. “Somebody finds it years from now, they think it’s a murder weapon maybe. Just imagine that.”
So that’s what they did, scraped out a hole in the gravel, dropped the pistol in, and covered it up. Laid it to rest.
None of this scared Donny, not the dope-foraging expedition, nor Carol’s crazy spree with the pistol. He never got truly frightened until the three of them saw Where the Boys Are. The movie was already old news by them, but almost all of the teenaged fare shown at the drive-in consisted of stale reruns. It didn’t much matter what was up there on the silver screen because most of the action was taking place in the cars anyhow.
Where the Boys Are is a cousin to the beach party movies that Carol delighted mocking, but despite a family resemblance, it is a very queer, misfit relation. The way I remember it, a group of college girls go to Fort Lauderdale for spring break to pursue boys, but unlike Annette Funicello in the beach movies, some of these girls actually contemplate losing their virginity. They have even read The Kinsey Report.
Donny had never heard of The Kinsey Report, and it had never crossed his mind that the co-eds depicted in Where the Boys Are, decent, wholesome girls from good, solid, middle-class American families just like Carol DiPietro’s, could have desires. He had never dreamed Carol might have a similar itch, despite her wildness. He had always thought her smutty talk was just an act, her way of saying, Hey, I’m one of the guys too. We’re all buddies here. Now he began to wonder if her dirty talk wasn’t her way of dropping a hint that she wouldn’t say no to a little action.
Donny has always been a slow boat to China, not that swift on the uptake, but when he seizes on a notion he doesn’t let it go. As Anne once said to me in a moment of disloyal candour, “Donny’s dogged. It’s his best quality and his worst.”
He began to look for signs that he might be right about Carol, and he found them. Not long after they had seen Where the Boys Are, Carol invited Donny and Bob to drop by her house. Her father wouldn’t have stood for entertaining the pond-scum Peels under his roof, but he and his wife were off attending a company barbecue. The boys sat in the living room with its fieldstone fireplace and rich broadloom carpeting while Carol, in a rage, paced back and forth slicing and dicing dear old daddy. Father and daughter had fought that morning and she was out for blood. She said you’d think he didn’t know which country he had been born in, he was so old-fashioned, “such a wop.” In his books, Frank Sinatra was the top actor and singer in the world. Joe DiMaggio the best ball player who had ever lived. Rocky Marciano the greatest heavyweight. For christ’s sake, he even got misty-eyed listening to Connie Francis, and she had taken a white-bread name to hide the fact that she came from a family of macaroni-eaters.
It was at this point that Carol dug up the 45 of “Where the Boys Are” from Poppy’s record collection, set the platter spinning on the hi-fi, and stood in the lush meadow of DiPietro carpet, singing along to it, pretending that she and Connie were performing a sappy duet. Carol’s performance definitely began as tongue-in-cheek. She made Connie’s mating call to the boy waiting somewhere around the corner just for her as ridiculously and romantically dopey as she could, but as she sang that began to change. By the end of the song what she was doing was evident to Donny. He saw she was really serenading Bob, and Bob was lapping it up in his serene, collected way, a slight smile hovering on his lips. Carol DiPietro was announcing that Bob was the boy for her.
Several nights later when Carol pulled up outside the trailer court to drop the Peel boys off, Bob eased himself out of the car, yanked the passenger seat forward, and let Donny exit from the back. But then Bob dipped his lanky frame and slid back in the Beetle. “See you later,” was all he said, not bothering to glance Donny’s way, avoiding his brother’s abject eyes.
Donny watched them drive away. After they were gone, he did what he and Bob had done so many desolate nights in the past; he returned to town to grimly walk the vacant streets. He hoped to cross paths with the Volkswagen, hoped that it would stop, hoped to hear Carol chirp, “What’s the trouble, Bubble? Can’t sleep? Jump in.” But it never happened that night, or any of the nights that followed, which he spent trudging the brotherless hours away. He never once glimpsed Carol’s car. So where were they?
He knew now that he was a third wheel. It wasn’t that Bob and Carol shut him out totally, but the time always rolled around when Carol evicted him from the car as if he were a stowaway. Worse, she started to treat him like a mascot, a good-luck charm. “If you hadn’t jumped at the chance to go to the pictures that day at the driving range, everything might have been different. Because Mr. Shy Guy here would never have made a move, right?” she’d say, giving Bob a knowing, complicit nudge with her elbow.
In August, as summer was winding down, Carol launched her campaign not to go back to Chicago, to enrol in the local high school here. There were no-holds-barred fights with Poppy. “He puts it all on your head,” she reported to Bob. “He says you’re ruining my future.”
And sweet-natured, reasonable Bob said, “Just take it slow. Ease him into the idea.”
“Wake up and smell the coffee, Bob!” she yelled. “School starts in two weeks! There is no time for slow!”
Carol was right. Shortly, she got packed off back to Chicago. The day she left, she clung to Bob, buried her head in his shoulder for a long time before suddenly, fiercely turning on Donny.
“You better keep all the other skirts away from your big brother. He’s mine. You got that? When Christmas rolls around I’ll be back to check what kind of job you’ve done.”
Donny was happy to see her go.
For the next few months letters flew between Bob and Carol. A minimum of one a day, sometimes two. Then in November, a calamity occurred. One of Bob’s letters was returned to him marked Not Here. Address Unknown.
It was the first time Donny had ever seen his brother panic. Bob settled into a phone booth with a fistful of quarters and finally got connected with Sacred Heart Academy in Chicago. The voice on the other end of the line informed him that Carol DiPietro was no longer a student there and that the school could not, under any circumstances, divulge her current address. Bob waited another ten days for Carol to get in touch with him, but no word came.
That’s when he went to John DiPietro’s house and demanded to know where Carol was, stubbornly holding his ground even when Poppy ordered him off the property, threatened to call the cops and have him charged with trespassing and a lot more.
Then Bob sprang the question that had been troubling him ever since he had learned that Carol had left Sacred Heart. Had she been taken out of school because she was pregnant? Because if she was, he would marry her. He would quit school tomorrow, get a job, make a home for Carol and the baby. Please, just tell him where she was.
DiPietro lost it entirely. He raved that he’d rather see his daughter dead, would kill her with his own two hands rather than see her marry some shit-bucket bottom-feeder like Bob Peel.
That was enough for Bob; it convinced him his guess had been correct. He took his father’s car and drove out to the gravel pit. It was Novembe
r and very cold, a light skiff of snow whitened the ground. It took him a long time scrabbling about in the frosty sand and pebbles with his fingernails to recover Poppy’s pistol.
Bob had got it into his head that brandishing a revolver in Mr. DiPietro’s face would scare him into admitting the truth and into telling Bob where Carol was. It didn’t. Poppy was a hard-ass veteran of World War II and he wasn’t going to buckle to somebody who, in his books, was nothing but a cheap, greasy, little punk. While his wife wailed and twisted her hair in her fists, Mr. DiPietro raced down to the basement, came back with the double-barrel he used for trap shooting, jammed it in Bob’s face, and told him that he was going to count to ten and if Bob wasn’t gone by then, he was going to blow his brains all over the wall. Bob calmly laid the revolver on the coffee table, said goodnight, and walked out of the house, Mrs. DiPietro’s screams reverberating in his ears.
Mr. DiPietro didn’t report Bob to the police. Likely when his rage ebbed, he realized that explaining an unlicensed handgun to Canadian cops, a firearm as good as smuggled over the border, might be a tough sell. Mr. DiPietro had a position in the community to maintain.
Bob left town that night in his father’s Pontiac with whatever money he and Donny had stashed under their mattresses. It took him eighteen hours to reach Chicago, driving non-stop, and another two hours of scooting up the wrong exit ramps and surfing big-city traffic to make his way to Sacred Heart. Unlike Mr. DiPietro, the sisters had no hesitation about calling the cops when they saw he didn’t intend to leave until he got answers to his questions. Bob spent three nights and two days in the county jail before he was shipped back to Canada, no wiser about Carol’s whereabouts. Mr. Peel’s Pontiac remained in the Windy City, held in an impound lot.
Bob didn’t return home. He phoned Donny from the Canadian side of the border and told him he was going to catch a bus back to Chicago and renew his search for Carol. Donny begged him not to do it, but Bob’s mind was made up.
It was another year and a half before Donny heard from his brother again. Bob wanted to know whether there had been any messages for him from Carol. Had she visited her family maybe? Donny said there had been no letters and that the DiPietros had gone to Chile, where Poppy had been sent by the company’s head office to solve some sticky problems in a copper mine there, or so he had heard.
It turned out Bob was in Wisconsin shovelling shit on a dairy farm and saving all he could of his measly wages to hire a private investigator to track down his missing girlfriend. When Donny asked him where he had been for the last eighteen months and what he had been up to, Bob was vague. He said, There were some things that some people thought needed taking care of.
Then the subject reverted to the DiPietros’ move to Chile. Bob said, “That’s a good tip, Donny. I’ll have a private investigator look into it, once I get some cash. Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard from Carol. I think her father kidnapped her, made her go to Chile.”
Donny said a person could mail a letter from Chile. They had a postal service there. It wasn’t Antarctica. From the way Bob was talking, he thought his brother might be drunk, especially when he began to ramble on about “finding his family.”
“You don’t need to find us. We’re where we always were. We’re here,” snapped Donny. “Where do you think we got to?”
But by family Bob didn’t mean the Peels. He meant Carol and the baby who most likely didn’t even exist.
Donny said, “If there’s a baby – and I don’t believe there is – it’s been adopted by now. And if Carol wanted to get hold of you, she would have.”
But Bob was sure Carol’s lunatic father was keeping her away from him, and he clung to the bizarre idea that she would never have agreed to let their baby be adopted, that the toddler was waiting in some orphanage for the day when he and Carol would be reunited as a couple and they could take their child home with them.
Donny did his best to persuade him he wasn’t thinking straight, but Bob wouldn’t listen. That was that, he knew.
Another period of silence descended, one that lasted a year. By then Donny had finished school, had got hired at the mine, and had rented a two-bedroom apartment so that when Bob finally returned to our town, his brother could move in with him. Late one night Bob called. He was back in Canada, living in British Columbia, picking fruit for the summer. He admitted that he had never managed to save enough money to hire somebody reliable to investigate Carol’s case. He wanted to know if Donny could lend him what he needed? When Donny asked how much that would be, Bob named a preposterous, astronomical figure. So, playing for time, Donny urged him to come home and get a job at the mine. Then they could pool their money like they had in the old days, for a common cause, and when they had enough to hire a private detective, the search for Carol and the child could well and truly start from a solid foundation.
Before he hung up, Bob said he’d give it some thought.
But Donny never found out what Bob thought. Once again contact between them was broken. It was ages before Bob confessed that his long silences were the result of frequent hospitalizations. An idea had taken hold of Bob, not in the way ideas took hold of Donny, by taking root in his mind, but by invading Bob’s whole being, his brain, his blood, his gut, his nerves, his very sinews. Somewhere out there, Bob was certain, Carol and the child were waiting for him to rescue them. This was a fact as incontestable as the force of gravity. End of discussion.
At first this obsession didn’t interfere very much with Bob’s ability to hold some kind of menial, low-paying job, to get by in the world, but over time he drifted further from reality in the pursuit of his ghostly family. Where once he had had one person to save – Donny – now he had two.
Donny did everything he could to stay in touch with his brother. For several years, he used up all his vacation time paying visits to Bob, trying to talk sense into him, trying to get him some help. But if he pushed too hard on that front, Bob was prone to head for the hills, to vanish.
When Donny married Anne, he was determined that his older brother be there to stand up with him as his best man. That meant driving all the way to Thunder Bay to collect Bob and then driving him halfway across the country after the wedding to get him back to Ontario. Anne accompanied them, although she says it wasn’t her idea of a dream honeymoon.
During the next three decades Bob became an ever more distant and shadowy figure in Anne and Donny’s lives. He neglected to come to either his mother’s or father’s funeral. Only one thing gave Donny hope: Bob had stopped mentioning his lost family to him.
But surely this was because Bob wanted to protect his younger brother, believing it upset Donny too much to be reminded of the tragedy that had befallen him. He knew that despite what Donny said about it all being in his head, deep down his brother recognized the truth of things, understood, and was suffering his terrible loss right along with him.
It was only when Donny’s oldest daughter, Janet, got married that Bob forgot himself and made a slip of the tongue. He was sitting at the head table in the new suit Donny had bought him when he leaned over and whispered to Anne, “I wonder if my little girl’s married now too.” Bob confessed to his sister-in-law that he always thought of his lost child as a girl, and that he always saw her as the spitting image of her mother.
It wasn’t long after that that Bob pulled his last vanishing act. Donny had no idea where he was until Bob was found on that snowy street in Edmonton, a frozen corpse, nothing in his pockets but a wallet that held a carefully printed note identifying Donny as his next of kin.
Donny put his heart and soul into organizing his brother’s memorial service, but you could see how deeply disappointed he was by the sparse turnout. But Donny clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Most of those who once knew Bob have long gone. That’s the nature of a mining town. The price of ore falls and rises. When it goes down, people get laid off and strike out to find work elsewhere. They don’t return. There’s almost no one here who remembers Bob. Those who
came to the funeral came out of respect for Donny.
When I speak about no one coming back here once they’ve left, I’m a contradiction to my own statement, an exception. Fifteen years ago when my father died, I returned to take over his law practice and escape a relationship that had gone terribly wonky and dramatic. I found out that with a minimum of stress you could earn a good living here doing property transfers, wills, the odd divorce and child custody case, this and that. But it was also mind-numbing, tedious work so three years ago I sold Fenton Law. I pass my summers here. The attitude of the town towards men like me isn’t what it once was. I am extended a grudging, cool tolerance. It’s all I can expect, but it’s not quite enough so I spend my winters in Thailand.
Donny himself conducted the memorial service, surrounded by gaudy banks of flowers and old snapshots of Bob that had been blown up so large that they suffered an ominous, disturbing distortion. Believe me, Donny is no public speaker, and it was painful to hear him dully sing his brother’s praises, dab a muddled picture for eyes that had never seen Bob in the flesh, in his splendid prime. Of course, the service ended with Connie Francis singing “Where the Boys Are.” Donny had got Anne, who is far more tech-savvy than he is, to download it for him. It was a ghastly greeting card moment, but I wept, recalling where the boys were, Donny and Bob, so long ago. And me too, I suppose.
Afterwards, Anne and Donny had a few people over to their house for snacks and drinks. When the place cleared, Anne and I sat in the kitchen talking quietly and drinking margaritas. I’m her ear to whisper into. She went on about how traumatic all this had been for Donny, how she feared he might never get over it. “He’s so depressed,” she said. “He loved his brother so much.”
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 13