Finally Parker said, “Seventeen sounds about right to me. You can’t blame him for being relaxed.” She smiled. “If he’d been nervous, you’d be twice as suspicious.”
“Ten bucks says he’s got a BMW or Mercedes parked out front.”
“Daddy’s car.”
“More likely it’s the car Daddy gave him.”
“Maybe,” said Parker. She checked her page and put her book down on the arm of the sofa. “Back in a minute.”
Willows flipped channels in the meantime. When Parker returned, her smile was wicked, “BMW,” she said. “Black, with a sunroof. Tinted windows, a personalized licence plate. Want to know what it says?”
Willows waited. Itchy, but not letting it show. Parker picked up her book, a paperback copy of Alice Munro’s The Progress of Love.
Willows muted the sound on the TV. He sat there, staring blindly at the screen, then pushed himself out of his chair and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Sean slouched against the Formica counter, drinking milk out of the carton. Willows said, “I told you not to do that.”
Sean took the carton away from his mouth. He swiped at his T-shirt. Milk spotted the linoleum. He said, “I forgot.” He took the carton in both hands and shook it rhythmically as he danced around the kitchen. “Relax, Dad. It’s almost empty anyway.”
Willows got the water bottle out of the fridge, a glass from the cupboard. For the past year, Sean had been employed as a clerk at a convenience store a ten-minute walk away.
Willows said, “You working tonight?”
“Midnight to dawn. The ghoul shift. Want a lottery ticket?”
“Not if it’s going to cost me a dollar.” Willows had heard lotteries described as a voluntary tax on the stupid, and tended to agree. Not that he didn’t do something stupid, once in a while, despite odds against of approximately thirteen million to one. But what were the odds of Sean remembering to buy him a ticket, if he’d said he wanted one? Not much better. He said, “There’s cold chicken in the fridge, if you want to make a sandwich.”
“Thanks anyway, but the store’s got a special on Snickers and Pepsi.” Sean rolled his eyes to let Willows know he was kidding.
Willows drank some water. He reminded himself that Sean was basically a really great kid. He was just going through a hard part of his life, that was all. One in four kids who entered high school didn’t graduate. So it wasn’t as if he were all alone out there. Minimum wage was, at least, a wage. Sean had been working steadily for more than a year. A major accomplishment. If he smoked a little dope now and then, at least he didn’t flaunt it.
Sean was looking at him, studying him. Willows thought about giving his son a big hug. But what if he was rejected?
On his way back to the den he took a quick peek into the living room. Annie and Lewis were sprawled out on the carpet, on opposite sides of a Scrabble board. Lewis’ nails flashed in the light as he laid down a vertical line of five wooden squares, cutting through the middle of a nine-letter horizontal. He smiled at Annie with his perfect white teeth and said, “Desire, for eighteen points.”
Willows lurched into the den. He collapsed into his chair. The TV screen was a blur of primary colours. A multitude of alphabets raced through his mind. Words formed and instantly exploded, in a shower of glittering letters.
Hug for a hundred points. Kiss for five hundred points. Foreplay for one thousand points. Fornication for a million points. Pregnant for ten zillion points.
Parker said, “You okay, Jack?”
“Last time I looked.”
“Well, excuse me for asking.”
The front door banged shut. Sean. Willows recognized the slam. It had been years since Sean had bothered to say goodbye. He wondered where in all the wide world his son was going. Was his destination a mall, party, his favourite street corner?
He told Parker about the Scrabble game, the hug and kiss and desire words, but not the fornication word.
Parker put the Alice Munro book back down on the sofa. She went over to the door and quietly shut it. She moved towards Willows, sat down on his lap. “How’s that? Okay?”
“Fine.”
Parker used her fingers to push back a lock of hair that had fallen across Willows’ brow. “May I speak candidly?”
“About what?”
She kissed him lightly on the mouth, a fleeting kiss that came and went in the space of a heartbeat.
“Have you noticed anything odd about Annie, lately?”
“Like what?”
Parker leaned away from him, so she could look him in the eye. “Annie isn’t a little girl any more, Jack.”
“Christ! What’s that supposed to mean? She’s only fifteen!”
Parker kissed him again, lingered for a moment or two. “Lewis isn’t the first guy she’s dated, but the important thing is that he isn’t going to be the last, either, not by a long shot. Maybe it’s got something to do with the divorce rate, but people are marrying later, nowadays, if they marry at all. So you better get used to Annie bringing dates home, because it’ll probably continue until she moves out of the house.”
Willows studied the ceiling.
Parker said, “Tell you what. I’ll have a talk with her. If Lewis is older than seventeen, I’ll try to get her to drop him. Okay?”
“Off a high cliff,” said Willows.
Parker laughed. “Want to know what his licence plate says?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You’re not the least bit interested?” Parker wriggled around on Willows’ lap, making herself a little more comfortable. Or maybe the point was to make him a little more uncomfortable. Between kisses, she ruthlessly teased him about the licence plate. But Willows refused to admit he was interested, and, as Parker continued to kiss him, it became increasingly obvious that he was telling the whole truth and nothing but.
His intransigence drove her crazy. And there was another thing. If he was really all that concerned about Annie’s love life, shouldn’t they lead by example, show a little restraint? Willows’ fingers plucked at the buttons of her blouse. She was, literally, breathless. Pulling back, she took his face in her hands and cooled him down with a single lethal syllable.
Lewis’ personalized tag said, HUNK.
8
Ozzie sat there in the pickup, hunched over the steering wheel, his neck craned so he could look up at Dean’s lighted apartment window. He leaned back. The heel of his right hand thumped the horn and made it blare. It was five past eight. Where was the moron? He backed up, shifted into first and rode the right front tire up over the curb and on to the boulevard, for a better angle. He punched the horn a few more times. A guy walking his poodle gave him a look that, loosely translated, said, Please teach me to mind my own business by breaking my stupid neck. Ozzie was sorely tempted. As his bony fingers closed on the door handle, Dean’s window darkened.
Encouraged, Ozzie resumed banging away on the horn. In less than a minute, the apartment’s glass front door swung open. Dean trotted towards him, jacket in hand. Ozzie continued leaning on the horn until Dean had finished fastening his seatbelt. He backed away from the boulevard, the Chevy rocking on its springs as he came down off the curb. A streetlight fired red streaks of light across the truck’s hood as they got under way. His cold eye on the tachometer, watching the revs, Ozzie said, “You’re late.”
“No shit. Now ask me how to lose weight fast. Take a dump. Now ask me a hard one. Got a hard one, Ozzie?”
Ozzie shifted into second, swung wide on the corner and lifted his foot briefly from the gas pedal as he speed-shifted up into third gear. He stomped it, accelerated all the way down the block and then downshifted into second. The Chevy shuddered from stem to stern. A few loose coins rattled across the dashboard. The exhausts crackled and popped, spat out bright orange sparks and sharp splinters of sound that ricocheted off the hard-edged urban terrain.
Ozzie yanked on the wheel and in the blink of a sphincter they were riding on the two right-side tir
es, the street — or maybe it was the truck — tilted at a terrifyingly unlikely angle. Ozzie stared calmly down at Dean from a considerable height as the truck arm-wrestled gravity, wobbled crazily and then sideslipped with a high-pitched, yowling screech of rubber towards a dinky, hapless Toyota Tercel that appeared to be roughly the size of a postage stamp.
Ozzie held on tight to the useless steering wheel, whooped and howled like a rodeo cowboy. His grin was so wide it looked like his teeth were about to fall out of his mouth. All Dean could think about was the likelihood that he was about to die, become involved in one of those situations he was always reading about in the paper.
But no, they were okay. The Chevy was back on all four tires, the Tercel rocking in their slipstream. Dean turned and peered out through the rear window at ten white knuckles and a stunned white face. The Tercel veered sharply towards the curb, decapitated a parking meter, hit the rear end of a large white car and stopped on a dime. The driver’s face ballooned against the windshield. Dean was left with a hazy impression of eyeballs and teeth, and then the apparition whiplashed back into the darkness, leaving nothing upon the windshield but a freeform scarlet smear. Meanwhile the business end of the parking meter, a ten-pound chunk of steel and plastic and various alloys, rebounded off the sidewalk and shattered a plate-glass window. There was a brightly lit blue-and-white sign above the window. A logo and three words. Bank of Montreal. An alarm shrieked.
Dean said, “Oh man ...”
Ozzie’s manic laughter hissed and fizzled like hard rain on a high-voltage fence. He punched Dean on his bruised shoulder and said, “Worried about the parking meter? Hey, we didn’t kill it, it’d already expired!”
But he was worried, though he didn’t show it. Okay, so he was a little frustrated about waiting for Dean. Was high-risk driving the appropriate method of blowing off excess steam? No way. The flirtation with the Tercel had been a near disaster. Paint on paint, that close. Come the dawn, he’d have to get busy with a tin of wax and a spray can of fire-engine red, do whatever was required to bring his baby back to showroom condition. He had to contain his anger, let it accumulate and bear interest until the time was right to let it all out, release the storm.
He made a slow left on Twelfth Avenue. Now it was a straight shot east across town through gradually thinning traffic to the highway that would carry them, in not much more than three-quarters of an hour, to the border crossing at the sleepy little town of Blaine, in the home of the brave and the land of the discount cheese.
Dean said, “We really gonna do this?”
“Do it right,” replied Ozzie. The oil pressure and temperature gauges were both in the green, the tachometer holding nice and steady.
The highway ran through a valley, across land flatter than Muhammad Opponent’s nose. Every so often, far away in the distance but closing fast, there’d be a lighted intersection or a farmhouse or farmyard that was all lit up. These glimpses of the landscape triggered memories from Dean’s prairie-boy past of drab fields, triple strings of barbed wire, sagging posts, determinedly picturesque barns inside of which small boys and livestock could frolic in a harmless sort of way.
They came upon a herd of a dozen or so black-and-white cows standing quietly in the lee of a spindly copse of trees decorated with hundreds of small white lights. The cows weren’t doing much of anything. Their heads hung low. To Dean, it seemed as if they were doomed, and knew it, and were content somehow to intuitively realize their fate. The cows had positioned themselves so as to avoid any risk of an eye catching an eye. They looked vaguely embarrassed, like a clutch of strangers stranded but safe in an elevator that had foundered at ground level.
Large green signs with reflective lettering warned them that they were getting close to the border. The speed limit dropped catastrophically. There were only two lanes open, no lineup. Lights that alternated green and red informed the traffic when to approach the customs officers bulletproof glass booth. Watched closely by surveillance cameras, the Chevy crawled up to a glass booth. The officer’s grey uniform was wrinkle-free, the creases sharp. His Sam Browne shone brightly. There was no rust on his pistol. He leaned forward, but didn’t rise up off his stool. “Where you going, fellas?”
“Just into Blaine,” lied Ozzie.
“How long you staying?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Both of you Canadian citizens?”
Ozzie nodded. Dean said yes. Headlights filled the truck’s rearview mirror as a car pulled up behind them.
“Carrying any fruits, vegetables ...”
“Nope,” said Ozzie firmly.
“Nice truck.” A fat gold ring glinted as they were waved forward.
Ozzie had visited Blaine many times. The place was all gas stations and asphalt. Here and there lurked a dimly lit restaurant or bar. Ozzie turned onto the 1-5. The Chevy’s steel-belted radials rumbled on concrete. Ozzie stayed just under the speed limit. In Washington State, a speeding ticket was worth a hundred bucks. Credit cards were deemed acceptable, but not cheques. Or rather, checks.
*
Forty-one minutes after they’d successfully negotiated the border, they cruised into the parking lot of the Bellis Fair Mall, a huge retail complex that had depended greatly on foreign consumers until the Canadian dollar had plummeted. There were plenty of cars in the lot, but most had local plates.
Ozzie parked in a handicapped zone. He popped open the glove box and retrieved a plastic tag, a blue wheelchair on a glossy white background.
Dean said, “Where’d you get that?”
Ozzie hung the tag from the rearview mirror. “When you get out of the truck, limp.”
Dean gaped at him. His slack-jaw look, and he had it down pat.
“Just until you get inside the mall,” said Ozzie. “Then you can walk normal again, okay?”
“And what a grand fucking relief that’ll be.”
Ozzie shut his door. He walked briskly towards the lights. Dean waited a moment, leaning against the truck’s fender. Was he really expected to do this, play the cripple? He looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to him. That he noticed. Except Ozzie, of course. He pushed away from the fender, keeping his right leg stiff, not bending it at the knee.
Right away, as they entered the mall, there was the entrance to a multi-screen movie theatre on their left, and to the right a vast open expanse filled with white plastic tables and chairs for several hundred people. Beyond the theatre there were a dozen or more brightly lit fast-food franchises. The starving consumer had his choice of hamburgers, baskets of deep-fried chicken or French fries, pizza by the slice. Or, if you were in a more exotic mood, there was Chinese fare, or Thai or Vietnamese or Greek. It was almost closing time. People were milling around, looking mildly confused, as if they had an urge to spend some more money but didn’t really need anything.
Dean focused on a group of black girls who were drifting with the crowd, moving slowly towards the exit, coming right at him. The girls were about the same age as the swimming-pool twins. But these girls were different. Not so self-conscious, more natural. Dean, twenty-four years old but looking younger in his jeans and T-shirt, fresh-shaved face, wondered if he was too old for them. If he asked one of them did she care to sit down and eat some French fries with him, or maybe let him take her to a movie, how would she react? Would she point at him and laugh, or take him seriously? Dean thought about his wife and kids. The minute she had told him she was pregnant, she’d looked ten years older. Is that what he looked like, to these girls? Some guy who was ten years older than he was supposed to be?
Ozzie reached out, snatched at his sleeve but missed. He said, “Hey! Where you going?”
There was one of them stood out from the rest. A slim girl, her hair shoulder-length and frizzy, kind of wild. She wore a pale-pink shirt with a button-down collar, lemon-coloured cords, brown leather shoes with a bunch of holes punched in them so you could see her lime-green socks. Her metal-framed sunglasses were up there in her hai
r, the lenses reflecting light from the high ceiling. Dean noticed that her lipstick was the exact same shade of pink as her shirt. Now he had something he could talk about, a question to ask her, whether she bought the shirt first, or the other way around ...
He walked straight towards her. She glanced up at him. He said, “I was just wondering ...”
“Fuck off.”
The words, spoken without heat or malice, left Dean reeling. He pressed his forehead against a Radio Shack plate-glass window. Inside, a pyramid of pastel radios were on sale at 50 per cent off list. But when you added up the exchange rate, sales tax and duty ...
Maybe she was a lot younger than she looked. Or maybe he was a lot older than he felt.
He was yanked away from the window, into the solid mass of humanity that moved towards the exit. He turned and looked at the place where he had stood. A fog of condensation lay upon the glass.
Ozzie said, “What’d you say to her?”
“Nothing!”
“You come on to her, say something suggestive?”
Ozzie had a cop’s come-along grip on Dean’s arm. As he frogmarched him past the takeout franchises, the collision of all those exotic smells touched off a flood of saliva, a rumbling in his belly. His dinner had been a bag of salt peanuts at the bar on Marine Drive. It wasn’t enough. Maybe after they’d done their business with Lamonica ...
They stepped outside, and Dean immediately resumed his stiff-legged, sad-ass limp. People were staring at Ozzie, giving him outraged looks. He let go of Dean’s arm. Dean straightened up and went back to walking normally.
Lamonica stepped out from behind a Ford Econoline. He shook Ozzie’s hand in a complicated grip that went this way and that, involved the thumbs and then the little fingers. Ozzie struggled to keep up. Finally Lamonica gave him a big hug. Certain that Ozzie wasn’t wired, he stepped back a pace, and bestowed upon Ozzie a glimmering, gold-toothed smile. Turning on Dean, he poked him in the chest with a bejewelled finger. “I seen you ask my kid sister for a date? Corel? Back there in the mall? You best be stayin’ away from her, man. Corel a sweet chile, but she gots the STDS somethin’ awful.”
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