Anticipated Results

by Dennis E. Bolen

  The notion of stealing money never came into my mind. The silverware was just commonplace junk to me. The thing was, at the age of nine, outside of a bicycle and enough money for comic books, there wasn’t much I was interested in. But I passed through the kitchen and the sight of the bread-box and the humming refrigerator got my blood going. I fixed up a couple of peanut butter-and-jam sandwiches and went back through the house, unlocked the door, and sat on the porch swing, enjoying my food. I started to relax, so jazzed at solving my hunger problem that I forgot all else. I even stopped tensing whenever a car ambled down the road.

  The peace of the summer afternoon, sun coming through the trees, the whisper of the breeze, my full tummy, the comfort of the cushions on the porch swing—these all conspired to make me sleepy. When I woke up there was a big ’48 Mercury pulling onto the gravel drive. From where I sat, the grille and driver’s side front wheel were visible. I heard a car door open and the sound of a foot crunching the ground. I lurched, groggy, stumbled off the porch, and bolted for the woods. I got most of the way across the lawn before the voice caught me, a man’s. It popped like gunfire: “Boy!” It froze me like I was a mime, right there on the grass.

  Why did I stop? Again, it was the times. If you were a kid in the fifties, you listened to adults. All adults. No questions asked. It was a pedophile’s dream, those times; thank goodness that’s more or less over. But it was a culture of strictness. The order of the era was obedience and conformity. There was no debate over adult priority. They were first and children followed; this was the universally accepted doctrine. You were an instant bastard to go against the crowd. You got punished. The other kids would ostracize you. It was like living inside a black-and-white movie.

  Anyway, this man yelled “Boy!”—and I immediately stopped running. The guy didn’t say anything more. I turned slowly around. He was probably middle-aged—all adults looked around forty-five years old in those days—dressed in a dark suit, with a red tie and a brown fedora. He was holding a cigarette between two fingers, the thumb covering the filter and manipulating the hot end downward, casual to the point of contempt. I especially remember the cigarette because my dad smoked and I absolutely loathed the smell of the damned things. Even then. In fact, Dad used to sit in the bathroom smoking and reading the newspaper, stinking away. To this day, I associate cigarettes with the smell of shit. And now that exact reeky pong swept at me on the breeze across the lawn of this man’s house, and he just stood there, looking at me, fingering his smoke, the sunlight on him flickering through the trees, his elbow resting in the open window of the car, one foot resting on the running board.

  The car was olive-green, one of those immense, curved, art-deco beauties they used to drive. I still think of those automobiles as rolling objets d’art. The beauty of it almost took me out of the scene, out of my terror, the image of that car in the soft evening light. But I had to look at the man’s face eventually, and I saw a malevolence I had not expected. I’m sure he could see his front door left ajar and maybe even the jam still on my face. I looked guilty as hell.

  But I was just a kid! This guy didn’t know the whole story. He didn’t know I’d had wire wrapped around my neck. Shouldn’t he have understood that maybe something had happened to make me do what I had done? I was near frantic with indignation.

  But the way he looked at me, full of assumption, full of bile—it was the most bogus prejudice I had ever experienced, and it still burns me. As if I was some kind of willing criminal. I’ve never forgotten. The injustice of it became the start of my darkness, the portal to a black will inside my soul. In that moment, I knew for the rest of my life I would never lack for badness.

  So …

  There’s not much else to tell. Just me and a strange man staring at each other on the back lawn of an old house in the woods forty-odd years ago. After about twenty seconds, I turned and ran. He never moved. I just ran away. I never saw him again.

  There was no stretch in juvie. No probation or community service. There’s never been any resolution to it.

  In those days, they sent you to reform school. When I was a social worker, most of my caseload had had a sojourn in at least one of them. Even though it was only a bottle of milk and a peanut butter sandwich, I feared that something fatal like that could happen to me. I was glad to lope through the woods to the railroad tracks and make a bee-line for home. I never slowed below a trot until I ran right through the doorway of our living room.

  Mom was cleaning up after dinner and Dad was out, I figured, at a volunteer fire department practice. When she saw me, Mom’s face lost some tension and her hands unclenched the dishtowel she was using to wipe a plate. But she didn’t hug me. She didn’t say she was glad I was home. She only said: “Your father’s been laid off.” I stammered for something to say. I spurted out the only thing that came to mind under the circumstances: “I don’t care.”

  Mom put down the plate and sat me at the kitchen table. “I know he was cruel to you,” she said. I can’t remember if I responded. I can’t remember much of the conversation at all. I was still transfixed by the expression on that man’s face, the guy I had left standing by his car in the driveway of the house I had broke-and-entered and stolen from. I fretted for a second that he might have followed me, or might know who I was and was driving over at that very moment. In any case, Mom and I had a little talk and she made me some supper, and then I had a bath and went to bed.

  A few weeks later, we moved away. Dad got a job in a mill on the west coast. He and I never spoke about the incident, my running away. If the guy I stole the milk from ever reported anything, I never heard about it.

  But Dad and I were, of course, more trenchantly estranged than ever. He worked and I went to school. That was it. And from the day of the coat-hanger incident forward, we stopped doing things together. Dad might have tried—I remember him trying to get me to talk, to get me going with him on something. But I resisted every move. I hardened into a gangster whenever he got near. We never went camping, didn’t even speak of it. To this day I loathe the outdoors. In my teens, Dad wanted me to work in the mill, some lumber plant he was in at the time. I didn’t listen. I think I never listened to him again. I’ve essentially never listened to anybody ever since.

  In high school, I got into studying. Against his wishes I went to college, took philosophy, history, psych. I loved English. It bugged him. He considered illegitimate anything that did not involve the cutting of trees and/or the digging of minerals. It was your standard working-class versus academia thing. The stupid thing is, I wasn’t actually an academic. I was just studying and doing things extra-enthusiastically at school because it pissed him off. He especially didn’t like it when I left home to study. Didn’t support that plan at all. Acted like it was some kind of betrayal against him, a rejection of his way of life. And in the meantime, he kept on drifting between various jobs. He was a hard luck case all the way down the line, what can I say? He fell down as a family man, despite having more kids. In his last ten years he charged full-on into derision, bitterness, and alcohol.

  He eventually died without us getting anywhere. I’ve been a grieving wretch ever since. I never got a chance to tell him what I’d learned, what I’d reconsidered. I would have told him something like, “Dad, I’m glad you never got to see how I turned out, mainly because I happen not to be especially proud of everything that’s happened, but I hope you understand now about your own responsibility in the thing. I know you are capable of understanding, you at least taught me to be inquisitive, to read and learn, and I’m thankful to you for that. So I know you are sensitive, and I know you are an open wound to family feelings; your inexplicable sense of bitterness toward me, your general disappointment, which I can understand.

  “The world, we have learned, can be a cold place, particularly for proud and opinionated independents like you and me. Many of the things I rail against these days in the world generally are translatable to the problems you had over the years with yo
ur vocational disappointments. I watched you throughout those years, and it did not do my heart any good to see you suffer and grow bitter. It hurt me deeply, I never told you, but it did. As dumb as that might have been, maybe it would have been a balm for you in those years when you seemed to think your life was a big nothing.

  “But your life was certainly not a big nothing. The world should know that you and people like you had a hard go, dug in, and made it out, didn’t have much left to understand the world you helped make, and got overrun by all the weird stuff that happened. You seemed to have problems; I couldn’t help with that. I didn’t know what I could help with. You were resistant to me before I ever got resistant to you. You seemed to regard me as an aberration, a monster you neither intended to create nor understood once you did.

  “That being the case, I lost legitimacy in our family on matters that I might have had an interest in, particularly those concerning your own behaviour, which was shameful for many years. You were responsible for much pain and unhappiness for Mom and me and the others. You refused to enjoy yourself in our presence; you seemed intent on making sure no one could ever relax. You made demands that could never be met. You were abusive to me, ignored Mom, and grossly misunderstood our feelings. You whined and stagnated and self-inflicted your own depression, developed alcoholism and anger-tyranny as weapons against harmony for us. When your methods succeeded, you sat back and blamed us for the mess.

  “I haven’t even begun to talk about how I feel about Mom’s disappointment and the heartsickness that imposes on me. She had such spirit, such yearning to break out of the boring cycle of her life with you. She wanted to be paid off for all the sacrifices, the years of self-denial. But what did she get? Misery. Alone in the house with you during the alcohol-psycho epoch of your last decade.

  “I wish you’d have found a way to buck up, get momentum, quit your moping. Maybe you could have at least died trying to be a new man, or at least let the good person you were re-emerge and remind us of the lovely years when you were young and maybe didn’t know how harsh things could get. Taken the experience and filed it, ran until you dropped, and then gotten up and grown out of your self-indulgent funk. Been a real person, stretched, and taken deep breaths. Looked to yourself for satisfaction rather than putting it on other people, especially us. Figured out what you wanted to do and then done it.”

  At least, I tell him that in my mind, when I’m trying to figure out how to handle myself.

  But I never got a chance to lay all that stuff on him personally. He grew a tumour in his stomach the year I went away. They were in Campbell River by that time, a four-hour drive from school. I took time away as much as I could, but he faded fast. Then he was dead. But besides frustration at not having been able to talk to him more, I didn’t feel much. I was sorry for Mom, mostly. In my heart, I was almost proud of myself for holding up. I was glad to be hard. The real emotions hit two years later when Mom got sick. I took a year off because the kids weren’t quite old enough to care for themselves and I wanted to spend as much time with Mom as I could. I got to know her the best I’ve ever got to know anybody. She thrilled me with her courage, fading away and yet being strong for me, being up, even being funny. She tried to apologize for Dad, and she nearly succeeded. Then one long night in the hospital, she died, and I could see, in her final hours, how much she missed him and could only remember his goodness and how she grieved the loss of his utter love for her. I saw the relief she embraced when she slipped away, going to him. It made me feel so alone, even with my little sister and brothers there, I felt like I was evaporating. I could have dried up and turned to dust right on the spot.

  I walked out of the hospital doomed. I had lost everything, and I hadn’t seen it coming. Ever since, I’ve been trying to replace what I think I lost, what I think I missed out on, and I’ve only been successful in hurting a lot of people. Women especially, they’re my specialty. I’m practically useless at anything else. The worst part of it is that when my mom died, I began to miss my father, really miss him in all respects. I regretted that I had mostly repressed memories of him, good and bad. I realized far too late that I had wanted him to keep living. Through my studies and school and navel-gazing, I had begun to understand things and thought I could help him.

  We could have grown up together.

  Anger

  During a cold winter some years ago I went to Europe, ducking life. After a couple of weeks, I invited my daughter to see me.

  Her answer: “What’s the matter, lonely over there?”

  •

  Home again, I went to the skin specialist appointment I’d tried to make before I’d left (I hadn’t counted on the doctor’s three-month waiting list). As a long-time eczema sufferer, I felt half-entitled to preferential treatment but never got it. So, better late than excessively late, here I was, half a year later.

  The doctor looked once around my bare body—his eyes raking my neck and back, legs, feet, and belly—then stopped, grim, at my chest. He pointed to a spread-out brown spot below my throat. “When did you notice this?”

  “Uh. I don’t think I did notice it …”

  The thing lay at the nadir of the shirt-moulded “V,” an area scorched bold by fifty years’ sunlight. It was at the place where my friend Paul had warned me not to carry a pen—clasped in the folds just above the topmost-buttoned button—because of its threatening potential as a collector of microwaves, warping the cellular structures beneath, inducing mutation and causing trouble generally.

  I had lunch with a new friend, a woman I’d been introduced to by a mutual acquaintance. She was worldly, tired, formerly ravishing. An expert at relationships, she claimed, having had so many. I instantly liked her. We yakked extensively and of course eventually got around to appraising our children: her two and my one. I mentioned my daughter’s incuriosity. “It’s worrisome. At least to me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, she’s never been anywhere. I wrote her from Europe and offered her a ticket to come hang out. She scoffed at it.”

  “Scoffed?”

  “Said something like, ‘Getting lonely over there?’”

  My friend stiffened. “I don’t like to speculate, especially because I don’t know you that well …”

  •

  The skin doctor peered more closely at the spot. “Can you give me an idea how long it’s been like this?”

  “Well, it started as a mole, if I’m not mistaken. Then it sort of morphed into that spread-out brownish smear that it is right now. It hasn’t been like that for long. It’s not black, so I didn’t give it much mind.”

  He drew an instrument from a drawer—a kind of scope, I could see—then flicked a switch and began scanning my chest with a coloured ray.

  •

  “…‘Lonely’.”

  “Yeah, that’s what she said. In a tough-like way, too. Curt. Testy. It surprised me, I have to say. Because we’ve had a pretty good relationship overall. No big issues other than my numerous marital rearrangements. She seems to have gotten used to them.”

  “I would say this may not be incuriosity, as you fear.” My friend paused, respectful, and, I could see, hesitant. “I think she’s angry.”

  As she spoke I received the knowledge …

  •

  “Humpf. I don’t like it.” My skin doctor is South African so this came out something like, “I doan (rhymes with bone) lie-kit.”

  “You don’t, huh?” I knew before I was finished speaking that my words were superfluous, routine to the doctor; the typical response of a patient on the cusp of receiving important information, whose mental/emotional state defaulted to an overdeveloped ability to cover any dicey situation in a blanket of words.

  “Basal cell carcinoma.” His pronouncement was perfectly timed to shut me up.

  “What’s that?”

  “What you have here, I suspect.” He touched my chest with his scope. The cool of the metal felt strangely reassuring.

  •
<
br />   “Anger. Yes, that would be consistent. Her mother and I split when she was sixteen months old.”

  “That may not necessarily have done it.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ve been expecting retribution ever since.”

  •

  “Lie back.” The skin man gently guided me to prostration upon the paper-covered examination table.

  “What might have caused it?”

  “Many things. Heredity, injury, the sun …” His words trailed as action took over. With nearly alarming deftness he pulled open a drawer, thwacked on a pair of latex gloves and was flicking at a syringe. Before any more conversation could occur the pin was in me, gently worked into the epidermis above my solar-tattooed sternum and feeding anaesthetic to the area of interest. The scalpel was brandished before I thought to expect it, glinting by the scarce light of the closed-slat blinds cloaking the one window of the tiny room.

  •

  “Retribution?” She put down her fork and looked at me. “Hoo-boy, you do have a back-story, don’t you?”

  “Is it that easy to see?”

  “You carry it in your face. I hope you don’t mind my being so blunt. It’s not polite to go around telling people such things. I used to do it a lot. I thought it was a boldness of character and a valiant expression of uncompromised honesty.” She stopped talking, then seemed discomfited by the silence. “But I don’t do it so much now.”

  “You can tell me anything you want.”

  “Think you can take it?”

  “I hope so. If I can’t that’ll indicate something more than if I can, no?”