Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  But she kept on doggedly pursuing the same line of thought. “Nevertheless, your Uncle Ted passed away quite recently.”

  “Six months ago.”

  “Now this is just something for you to think about. No judgment implied. Perhaps you are so attached to your teaching position because you feel it’s the only thing left that you can count on. People depart the scene; they die. Maybe institutions appear more durable and dependable, more lasting, more reliable to you than human beings. Many people your age look forward to and anticipate retirement. Why not you?” She paused. “And retirement would permit you to make a graceful exit.”

  I ignored that. Fucking quisling. Who’s her patient? Who is she supposed to be helping? Me or Drogan?

  “You’ve claimed that you’ve never embellished your accomplishments before. Could it be that your recent losses have made you anxious that, in a manner of speaking, you will lose your students too? In a symbolic sense. Might you feel that you aren’t worthy of their respect and, as a consequence, this leads you to inflate your status, to try to impress them with imaginary exploits, imaginary feats of bravery?” She paused. “Do you never ask yourself why this self-mythologizing started so soon after your Uncle Ted’s death?”

  As I say, a session with Counsellor Sally is like doing a circuit around a racetrack; you always finish just where you started.

  She wouldn’t leave it alone. “Maybe you believe your pupils will eventually reject you just like Uncle Ted rejected you. That they will withdraw their approval just as he did.”

  “He only rejected me after I put him in the hospital. I’d say he had a point.”

  Guess what? I’ve been doing some research on abandoned child syndrome, and The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not recognize it as a condition. My hack therapist is treating me for a mental disorder that does not even officially exist. And I would point that fact out to Counsellor Sally if I didn’t have to make nice-nice and play along with her in the slim hope that I will get a clean bill of health and be reinstated. On her say-so.

  Not too long ago, Counsellor Sally happened to say, “I found your description of you waiting for your Uncle Ted and Aunt Evie’s annual visit to your hometown very moving. The picture of you standing outside your mother’s house all day long, your eyes searching the road for his car to appear, that was very poignant. You must have adored him.”

  Okay, I admit that at that time I thought Uncle Ted was pretty much the kitty’s little pink ass. In my starry eyes he was a big success, unlike all my other loser aunts and uncles who, aside from their stints in the services during the war, had never dared to peek over the horizon past the little town of Connaught. Staying put in a small town where everybody knows everybody else meant that the Aker family’s reputation for being prickly, flighty, pugnacious types with king-sized chips on their shoulders meant nobody in their right minds would hire them for full-time work. The men were condemned to eke out livings as casual labourers and self-employed handymen; the women as housecleaners, washerwomen, and babysitters.

  True, a few of the Akers took a stab at more ambitious entrepreneurship. Like Uncle Bob, who started a short-lived trail-riding business with a string of cadaverous horses that looked like they had been pre-owned by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And Ma herself established that unfortunate Boys and Girls Gymnastic Academy, which she somehow felt she was eminently qualified to run because she had been a physical training instructor in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during the Second World War. That stone dropped to the bottom of the money pit even faster than Uncle Bob’s.

  So who can blame me for gazing longingly up the road on those long-ago summer days? The thing was, I couldn’t wait to lay eyes on what kind of car Uncle Ted would be driving that year, what spiffy automobile he had traded up to: a shiny new Buick, a chrome-encrusted Oldsmobile, a Caddy, once a Mercedes-Benz, a Benz years before they became the standard conveyance for realtors, lawyers, and chartered accountants. Benzes were an uncommon sight back then, so soon after the war. Who wanted to be seen driving a Kraut car? Except Ted, who always loved to stand out, to thumb his nose at the crowd.

  The Benz was my favourite set of wheels of them all. In particular, I loved the straphangers that could be clutched to keep me from ricocheting from one sturdy Teutonic door panel to the other when Teddy rocketed us through the countryside, went tearing around some corner on a dirt road, then slung his marvel of German engineering, tires shrieking and spitting gravel, into the next hairpin turn. And there were also the leisurely tours about town so as to see and be seen, Aunt Evie in her muskrat coat riding shotgun beside Uncle Ted, me in the back seat, fascinated by the weird coincidence of their colour-coordinated gingery heads (they might have been brother and sister), but no, on reflection, Teddy’s hair had more of a cranberry hue, its brightness dampened by a Wildroot Cream-Oil slick. I can see it as if it were yesterday, his big, veiny, virile hands locked on the steering wheel, the right one glinting with a huge signet ring. His shoulders squared in a camel hair car coat. Aunt Evie’s perfume rolling into the back seat, wave upon scented wave.

  And all this glamorous prosperity was a result of Uncle Ted having taken the path less taken by Akers, namely gainful employment. He did dangerous work in unspeakable places where you got paid good money to risk your life sinking mine shafts and blowing big holes in mountains. Ted had defied the dire predictions of all those authority figures, teachers, officers of the law, and justices of the peace who had warned him when he was an adolescent that he was headed for jail. For that, Teddy never forgave them, and he nursed a grudge against each and every one of them until his dying day.

  Speaking of which, one afternoon as Uncle Ted is sedately piloting the Benz through our sleepy streets while the multitasking Aunt Evie smokes a Sweet Caporal and adjusts her blood-red lipstick in the rear-view mirror and little nephew Bert clings to the trusty straphanger just in case Ted decides to goose the juice, who does Uncle Ted spy with his beady little eye? Why none other than his old elementary school principal, P.J. Gillam, out tending the roses in his front yard. And Teddy hits the brakes, cranks down the window, looses a blast on the horn, and calls out, “Is that a fucking teacher I see? A man among boys and a boy among men? Come on over here and box my ears now, Pyjamas Gillam! Try that one on for size now, why don’t you?”

  P.J. scuttles into the house and Aunt Evie starts scolding Ted about holding silly grudges forever and not letting bygones be bygones and scaring old men. Ted doesn’t appreciate this and he warns her to button it, zip it, and stitch it just as the chief of police, Carmen Kostash, arrives on the scene, draws up behind us in his squad car, and carefully, very carefully approaches the driver’s window of the Benz. Carmen Kostash is walking on eggs because he went to school with my uncle and knows that hearing the name Teddy Aker in conjunction with a complaint call is a bit like hearing the words blood in your stool bandied about in the doctor’s office. The chief suggests apologetically that perhaps Ted has said something that was misinterpreted or misheard by P.J., so just as a gesture of goodwill maybe he’d like to ease on down the road to put Mr. Gillam’s fears to rest. You think?

  Uncle Ted doesn’t think. He says this being a public roadway he’ll park here for as long as he pleases. It just so happens he’s a big rose-fancier, and he’s got as much right to sit here and admire Pyjamas’s flowers as anybody else. And Aunt Evie butts in to say that his love of flowers is news to her, but he just ignores this and bores in on Kostash, asks him why the fuck did P.J. plant roses in his front yard if he didn’t want people to look at them?

  Kostash has no answer to that. So he goes and sets his ass down on the principal’s doorstep, probably to persuade Gillam that now that he’s under police protection he shouldn’t demand that the chief make an arrest, which is the last thing Kostash wants to do, to provoke Teddy.

  Meanwhile, Uncle Ted has turned on the radio because he’s decided he’s here for the long haul, no way is Pyjamas going to p
ut the run on him. Patti Page is singing a mouldy oldie, “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?”, and Uncle Ted cranks up the volume as loud as it will go and starts woof-woofing along to the tune. At the top of his lungs. But believe you me, he doesn’t sound like any cute little puppy dog in a pet shop window, but more like some bloodthirsty Rottweiler or killer pit bull ready to sink his teeth into the nut sack of anybody in a uniform.

  Evie starts whining at Uncle Ted in a coaxy little-girl voice: “You better stop that, Teddy Bear snookums, because barking at a policeman is not a good idea. Remember what happened at that border crossing at Detroit when you were a smarty-pants with the American customs officer? You want to spend another night in jail when we’re supposed to be having a nice, relaxing holiday?”

  Which only revs Uncle Teddy up, the memory of that night in the clink, the injustice of it, and he starts to yap and yip even louder, looking every bit as rabidly foaming as Old Yeller in his final hours, and Chief Kostash hurries to his car to call for backup, and in the blink of an eye reinforcements arrive: a scrawny, pimple-blotched constable with his car light flashing and the siren wailing. The sound of which sets Teddy off howling as if the woo-woo of the alarm is too painful for his decibel-sensitive doggie ears.

  Kostash and his right-hand man still don’t dare approach the Benz, choosing instead to confer beside the rose bed on how to handle the animal control problem. Teddy continues with the canine ruckus, snarling, snapping his teeth, etc., all this despite the song on the radio having changed to another lichen-encrusted hit, Doris Day’s “Que Sera Sera.” Kostash is probably running archival film in his mind of times when somebody tried to restrain or interfere with Uncle Teddy when his blood was up and how unpleasant the consequences of that had been.

  So the law decides to let sleeping dogs lie, even if the dog in question isn’t sleeping but is wide awake and flouting the noise bylaw. Kostash and his sidekick just hang back, hoping that Ted’s noisy woofer will poop out, which it eventually does. Teddy’s voice becomes nothing but a gasping, asthmatic snarl. With his vocal cords having betrayed him, Ted throws the Benz in gear, carves a Fuck you, Charlie! doughnut in the street, and peels off, well satisfied that he showed them.

  But Aunt Evie is sulking over her husband’s naughty behaviour, causing Teddy to turn on the charm offensive, to whisper sweet nothings in his new husky, barking-impaired voice, to tell her she’s his kewpie doll, his gunga-poochy-snuggy-bum, but none of this wipes away her pouty face, so he boots her out of the car at Grandpa Aker’s, where they’ve bunked down for their holiday. Teddy tells her she’s giving him grief and she needs some think-about-it time, so she can get her head out of her ass and a smile on her face before he gets home for supper. And then off go Uncle Teddy and his nephew Bert, with Uncle Ted’s super-swell Remington pump-action .22 (which travels with him everywhere in the trunk of his vehicle, even on vacation) on a rat-shooting spree at the Connaught dump to celebrate having given P.J. Gillam a little something he won’t soon forget.

  I think it’s interesting that Counsellor Sally would ask if I ever regarded Uncle Teddy as a father figure. It was just the opposite; it was he who aspired to be a father figure to me. In fact, Teddy wanted to adopt me. I don’t know when he first made this weird proposal to Ma; it may have come shortly after my father deserted us. But the first I heard of it was when Uncle Teddy and Aunt Evie moved back to Connaught. Ted had gotten fed up taking orders from no-nothing foremen and bone-headed contractors who had opinions about how he should go about blowing rocks and other obstacles-to-progress to smithereens. So Aunt Evie and Uncle Ted decided to strike out on their own, become their own bosses. All those years that he had worked in remote camps, Aunt Evie had been a cook for the men on these job sites and, unlike spendthrift Teddy, she had kept her fist clamped tight on every dollar she had ever made. This amounted to a nice nest egg, which they invested in our burg’s motel/café/beer parlour, a notorious, stinking shitbox frequented only by the town’s low-lifes and a few budget-conscious tourists passing through Connaught on their way to the Rockies. Ma said that Evie and Ted had come back home to lord it over everybody else in the family, to pass themselves off as “big business tycoons.” Ma had never quite gotten over the failure of her gymnastic academy.

  Evie was in charge of the café, and Ted all other guest services. Aside from being an enthusiastic, awe-inspiring bouncer who tossed troublemakers through plate-glass doors and sent them tobogganing down the concrete steps of the bar on their bellies, Ted didn’t have the necessary skill set for success in the hospitality industry. Plus an occupation where a ready supply of alcohol was at his elbow did nothing to restrain his lifelong weakness for binge-drinking.

  When Teddy went on a drunken tear, it was the rest of the Akers who usually bore the brunt of it, with Ma and me most often his targets of choice. Like all the Akers, Teddy had a grievance against the world, but his biggest grudge was against Ma because she’d had a child, something Teddy couldn’t do because he had caught a case of the mumps during the North African campaign that had left him, as he so often self-pityingly announced when pissed out of his tiny mind, “shooting blanks.” To Teddy, it was a travesty of justice that Ma, who was a single parent and poor as a church mouse, should be raising a child when he and Evie, who could give a kid so much, didn’t have a chick of their own.

  Back in the days that Ted was lavishing gifts on me (a BB gun, an Alamo set, a Davy Crocket coonskin cap, comic books, hard cash for sugar orgies), I didn’t comprehend that his presents were ham-handed attempts to alienate my affections. And to a certain extent this campaign of seduction worked pretty well until Uncle Ted’s impatience got the better of him. When Ted didn’t get what he wanted, his resentment built and his normally low impulse control dropped to zero, especially when he got into the sauce. It was then that he would drop in unannounced to pay Ma and me a visit.

  Let me illustrate. It’s one o’clock in the morning and Ted is hammering on the door, howling to be let in. Ma is screaming out a window, “Take a hike! Go home to Evie! She’s the one who signed up for the life sentence with you! Not me!” and I’m rolled into a ball on my bed with a pillow mashed down over my head to block out the brouhaha. Then the door-kicking starts and Ma relents because we’re renters, and explaining a splintered door to a landlord who you are already in arrears to is nobody’s idea of a good time.

  Teddy comes lurching into the house, bottle of rye in hand, bouncing off walls, knocking over chairs, roaring, “Where’s my boy? Where’s my boy!”

  Ma says, “He’s got school tomorrow. Let him be. Give us a break.”

  But there’s no deflecting Teddy. I have to haul myself out of bed and stand shivering in my Jockeys in the kitchen as he unspools one of his slobbery rants.

  “You want to know something? Your father was a lazy, useless, stupid bastard who married a lazy, useless, stupid bitch. Look at your underwear. It’s yellow as a Chinaman’s ass. I wouldn’t be caught dead in underwear like that. Hasn’t your mother ever heard of bleach? Evie bleaches my shorts and irons them to boot. She irons the sheets and tea towels. She irons my socks. There’s a woman who knows a thing or two about housekeeping. Your Aunt Evie is a wonderful woman and would have made a wonderful mother. Don’t you wish you had a mother like her, Bert? She puts your mother to shame but good.”

  “So go home to your precious Evie then. Go get your shorts bleached. Preferably with your famous blank-shooting pecker still in them,” Ma tells him.

  But thoughts of dear Evie turn Ted maudlin and sentimental. “Do you know, Bert,” he says, “Evie and me offered to adopt you, to give you a decent home, decent clothes, a regular, normal upbringing. But your dippy mother put the kibosh to that idea. Because she’s a selfish bitch who thinks about nobody but herself. Can you imagine how she broke Evie’s heart? Have you any idea how much your aunt loves you? How much I love you?”

  And then to show me how much he loves me, Ted starts singing the Patsy Cline song, the one about
“I love you so much it hurts me, and there’s nothing I can do.” Teddy crooning, weaving from side to side, making these grandiose, lizardy lounge-singer gestures meant to convey the unspeakable pain that resides in his fond, gooey heart.

  All of a sudden love gets shoved to the back burner and he’s talking about trust. “You and me, Bert, we’re two of a kind. In the whole goddamn Aker family you’re the only one I can trust. I got eight brothers and sisters and there’s not one of them I’d trust as far as I could throw them. Because they’re all jealous of me, that’s why. But you I trust. You want to know how much I trust you? I’d put my life in your hands. Who was that guy who shot the apple off his kid’s head? I’d let you shoot a apple off my head, Bert. Right now I’ll do it. I got the Remington out in the car and I’ll let you shoot a apple off my head. No problem. Right now, out in the dark you can shoot a apple off my head. That’s how much I trust you, Bert.”

  And Ma says, “I’ll shoot an apple off your head if that’s what you’re looking for. I’ve got a bag of Macintoshes. Want me to get one?”

  “Fuck that noise. You’d drill me between the eyes, give you half a chance.”

  “It could happen,” Ma replies. “Seeing how unsteady you are on your feet.”

  “I’ll show you how unsteady I am. Want to bet I can’t kick a cigarette out of Bert’s mouth? I can do it, that’s how steady and solid I am on my feet. Like the fucking Rock of Gibraltar. Put this cigarette in your mouth, Bert. You’re a truster, aren’t you? Me and you are trusters, aren’t we, Bert?”

  “He’s not putting a cigarette in his mouth so you can put a boot under his chin, weld his molars together. That’s not going to happen.”

  “You better shut your hole. I’m not talking to you; I’m talking to my good little buddy Bert. How’s about it, little buddy? Come on, you can trust your Uncle Teddy. Be a truster.” But, as Counsellor Sally knows by now, I’m not a truster. “Smoking’s bad for you,” I say to Uncle Teddy, desperate little weasel that I was. Am.