Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  By the time he reached the Voyageur station, he had missed the first bus of the day; he went to look for a dépanneur, but when he returned the driver wouldn’t let him on with his beers. He sat in the grimy terminal and drank five in the space of an hour; by the time the third bus arrived, he was stupid and drooling. He staggered to the back, sat next to the latrine. The other passengers, their laps loaded with gifts in jolly wrapping, twisted in their seats to stare at him.

  Speeding down the Eastern Townships autoroute now. The snow by the highway fluffed up with earth. The fields lying fallow, and the frost in the furrows. The china-blue dish of sky above. Robbie with the last of the beers between his knees, blasted with all the thoughts of Xmas in Kilborn Bay. How the family will find him changed; how mature, how well balanced, how sharp with knowledge of the real world. Yes, he’s looking forward to home.

  Well. How could it be worse than what he’s leaving behind? It’s as if Montreal had been sprung overnight like some intricate booby-trap. He was stunned by how quickly life could seize up on a person. He saw that Ivy was right when she said people are fools to set themselves at the centre of their own life story; stories have a hero and a purpose and a moral, but in reality, life is a series of ever-worsening enstranglements.

  Scenes from last night, flipping by: weirdly enough, none of the bikers had even mentioned the subject of dope, or told him to empty his pockets. Ivy sez hi, that’s all. Returning home, he had found Dolores and Rosie gone, and his place trashed to pieces; five cards, aces and eights, had been left on the hallway carpet. His couch was slashed, the contents of the beanbags were scattered like a polystyrene snowstorm. The Dead Man’s Hands had ripped open his books, spilled his records from their sleeves, and torn the guts from his stereo speakers. They had pulled the carpet up and left it in waves. The question Robbie asked himself was, had they trashed the place just to drive home their point about Dolores? Or, if they were looking for drugs, had the dummies not thought to look for drugs in a place as obvious as a Cocaine machine? Maybe they weren’t looking. Maybe they didn’t know he had the stuff at all. After what happened in the school fire, only Ivy could have told them – told Olly – how it had come into his possession in the first place. Maybe for once in her life she had kept a secret for him, not from him.

  Anyway, Queenie had waited up. He thought she was holding a present for him, but it was only another care package from Mom, this one marked URGENT. He had rolled his eyes, kicked it in a corner.

  Queenie was quiet and shy. And had the softest body. Well, she had had children, that’s why. She was like tumbling in baby powder. And that morning, as they lay there, she had smelled to him of the heavy process of living; a sweet-and-sour, inside-out odour, laced with dead perfume. And her dog-tooth dentures in a glass by the bed.

  Two old women across the aisle from him are dragging on cigarettes and gabbing. He gives them the Evil Eye. They look so desiccated they can’t just have aged in the regular course of time; the cigarettes they’re sucking on must have dried them out like strips of cod. Their grey hair seems singed to ash, lifting high above their foreheads like smoke on the wind. They’re cooing over a National Examiner:

  NEW EVIDENCE OF REINCARNATION

  – BABY BORN WITH PEG LEG AND JOLLY ROGER TATTOO –

  All the old, smoked women on this bus have short hair. As if, Robbie thinks, they’ve been shorn to announce the shame of growing old. Clothing stiffens around them like a petrified shell. He looks the other way, presses his boiling forehead to the cool glass, and passes out for the duration of the trip…

  At Kilborn Centre, the driver had to carry him off, and dump him on the steps of the station. He had no luggage, just Mom’s unopened package under one arm. Nobody was there to meet him. He hitched the twenty kilometres or so to Kilborn Bay in a farmer’s pickup. The farmer was jovial, but spoke in joual so thick Robbie could barely communicate at all. The day was already falling dark. He looked across the purple snow to a column of silhouetted pines, the bristling guardians of the lake, massed in silence and waiting as he approached.

  He decided he would help in the kitchen this year, if you can believe that. Yes, he could really get into preparing the turkey stuffing with Miriam and Barnabus. He liked the feel of the hot and slimy water full of chestnuts, each one’s shell marked X with a knife, and the way your fingers wizen and unpeel too, wherever you’ve been gnawing at your cuticles. He could already smell the pine in the living, room, the port and marbled Stilton, the aroma of the turkey with pepper and garlic and raisins, of glazed ham with burnt sugar and cloves and bourbon peaches, of roast duck with quince, hot stollen, panettone, and mincemeat tartlets with nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon, bourbon, and rum, crowned with sprigs of pine and holly. The farmer was talking, between swigs from a bottle of Molson he kept snug between his legs, but Robbie was in the ruby dining room that’s upside-down in a glass of wine, the trembling liquid light in that truffle pâté’s aspic jelly, the featherlight texture of those gingersnaps, that dark fruitcake so thick with candied lemon and currants it looked like it’d been cut from an oil painting. And, Jesus Fuck his hand hurts. He remembered how Dad likes to stick bottles of champagne in the snow outside the living-room window and how, when he opened it, the sound of ragtime jazz danced out across the twilit lake, echoing to and fro across the bay, losing its way in the listening, glistening woods, and finally giving up the ghost in the navy blue snow. He thought of Mom, tucking him in tightly and kissing him on his eyelids, her dinner-party jewellery rattling reassuringly above his nose. And, thinking of it, as the moisture of her kiss evaporated in the dark, he felt the way he imagined his soul might feel, if he had one, ascending.

  III

  18

  HE SLEPT LATE, IN THE BEDROOM HE ONCE SHARED WITH Barnabus, overlooking the bay. Lying in this tiny bed, snug as a sardine in its tin, his body was firmly packed in the blankets and sheets and his feet stuck out at the end. He felt too big for this room with the Snoopy poster and the model aircrafts and, by the bed, the patch of fresh wallpaper where once a hide of pick-a-nose had been; and the thought that this single was intended only for sleeping, and that his sleeping and waking had been so chaste, made the morning heat of his body seem rude.

  From the window, he surveyed the glistening confection of pine trees and snow. Under a navy sky, Kilborn Bay cracked and groaned. Somewhere out there lay Mendoza’s iced bones. Robbie thought of his empty grey apartment in town, that chilly hollow whose rent was still unpaid, smelling of gas, graffiti on its cold walls, and his throat felt soaked with sadness to be in the hug of home again. He wondered how Rosie was doing, down in the empty city core; gathering with the girls and the bouncers for some special matinée performances in that horrible club. And for their Xmas meal: a special Santa’s Helper Take-out Chicken Sleigh. Louie Louie meanwhile in Ste. Agathe, snoring the morning away after midnight Mass with his vieux père. And Baimy, watching Yuletide TV with his feet up, indifferent to it all, scheming, pissed, caustic.

  Robbie would be nineteen in two weeks, but he still got an Xmas stocking. He ransacked it greedily with his good hand: a Lovely “punker” safety pin, with a notch permitting you to wear it without piercing your cheek, shoe fresheners, Saturday Night Fever gum, Walter T. Foster’s How To Draw The Nude, gourmet turtle soup.

  He also opened that care package he’d carried all the way from Montreal: food, mostly rich stuff, like sweetmeats and shortbread, and a note:

  Dearest Robbie darling,

  tried to reach you, but phone o-o-o. Sent 3 pkgs begging quick response already. Did U not receive? Time running short. Coming to Bermuda Xmas or not?

  Worried sick,

  M.

  Major bummer. Arriving last night, the house on the hill had been dark. He’d been forced to tear through the mosquito screen – Mendoza’s emergency entrance during lightning storms – dragging snow and mud over the carpet. “Hello-o,” he had called out, “is anybody ho-ome?” There was an artificial Xmas tree, beside it
a menorah with all nine lamps burning, and a heap of gifts, all marked with his name.

  In the living room now, with a stomach full of champagne and chocolate, wild with avarice, still hot with fever. He opened his gifts: sweaters, socks, a bottle-cutter kit, a Stars on ’45 extended mix, a poster-sized all-dressed cheeseburger blueprint, and a book of David Hamilton photographs, which he immediately took upstairs.

  Whoopee. Five minutes later he was down again, feeling pretty sore that no one had given him any money. He roamed the room for anything else that might have been left, then raided the kitchen to make eggnog, grating orange rind and nutmeg into a jug, bitterly disappointed that Xmas was already over, with a full fallow year to wait before he’d be reaping again. The phone rang. It was Miriam on the line.

  “Guess where we are, you big tool!”

  “Arf arf. No need to rub it in.”

  “We’re in a land where Dad says at least you can speak the language of your choice. Here, I’ll give him over.”

  “Hi!” Dad shouted down the line. “Robbie! How’ve you been? We missed you. We thought, perhaps you’d been arrested for speaking English in the street.”

  “No…? I mean, not yet, I’ve escaped –”

  “Just joking, son.”

  A silence followed, and now Mom’s voice. “We were so worried about you, darling! How are you? Actually, we were very worried. We never heard from you, and things have been so unpleasant. Did you read about that barber?”

  “No…”

  “In St. Henri. The one who’s calling the language laws Nazi laws. The thing’s got all out of proportion, don’t you think? Over a little sign.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Robbie said. “I bet I know the one. Says, PLAIN HAIRCUTS – NO NONSENSE, right?”

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re keeping up with the news. Did you see it in the Gazette? What’s the latest?”

  “See-what?”

  “Well, his window was smashed when he wouldn’t take the sign down! And then somebody painted a swastika on his door…”

  “That’d serve him right,” Robbie said, his bandaged fist stabbing his cinnamon stick in the air. “I mean, that would’ve been Ivy’s dad. The anti-Semite hypocrite.”

  “Ivy’s father? Darling! How is Ivy?”

  “How would I know? I’m sick of her,” Robbie snapped. “Uh, we decided to take a rest from each other.”

  “Poor darling, she really broke your heart. I can hear it.”

  “Well, I’ve been handling it pretty well, I think. Both her parents are such straight arrows, y’know, so marriage with me was out of the question. And it was such a long time ago, fuck.”

  “I’m so sorry. Anyway, have a merry Christmas, darling. We do miss you so very much. Will we see you when we get back?”

  “If I see you,” Robbie replied, vacantly. The fumes of whisky and rum were overpowering. Chewing on some grains of nutmeg now, he remembers how he tried snorting some of this one sneaky afternoon last summer, but all he got was a sneezing fit, and a wicked headache.

  He went to bed early, watching the moon over the trees. He made a high-pitched sound as he wept, similar to Mendoza when he used to need to go out. He asked himself how he could possibly have taken Dad’s joke seriously. And not known about Mr. Mills. How could he be so out of touch? First he had missed the election, the biggest thing to happen to the province in over a hundred years, and now this. He was seized with self-loathing. Was he so stupid? Was his life so completely unconnected with any teensy-weensy part of the real world? Was he even alive? Sure, he had been working hard on Hell’s Yells, but that seemed like a pathetically puny and irrelevant concept now. The rest of the time he had just jerked off. When he could have been part of something. It was all Rosie’s fault. Her understanding of politics was even vaguer than his. He heard in his hot head the closest they’d ever had to a discussion about current affairs: “I hate my thighs more than nuclear war,” she’d announced, standing nude, in front of her dressing-room mirror.

  “It’s weird,” he’d said, trying to steer the conversation in a meaningful direction, “the way the word regime is used for military governments and also for diets.”

  “Makes perfect sense to me,” she’d said. See. She was dumb. He needed to spend time with people who were better informed. It was time for a serious change.

  When he returned to town a few nights later, Rosie had not only forgiven him for what she called their little tiff, but she’d moved all her belongings in, as well. She gave him little choice in the matter, as she’d already paid up his rent. Plus she’d cleaned up the entire apartment, filled the fridge with fresh vegetables, and done the laundry, so that was that. She had done a fair job, pinned all his sketches and paintings to the walls, turned his slashed mattress over, drawn the curtains, lit a dozen candles, thickened the air with frankincense, propped his disembowelled stereo on the chest of drawers, and put an Environments record of the Pacific ocean on endless repeat.

  “I’ve been looking into books while you were gone,” she announced. “Since you won’t trust in the STARS, what about the sympto-thermic method? It’s more work than the ovulation method, and there’s more responsibility on the man, but it’s mathematical. First you take my vagina’s temperature… “

  He gratefully crashed. He’d been wrong about her, maybe. He’d try harder with her after all. In stages, just holding hands at first, which is the way it should have been from the start. Plus, it occurred to him that having her here would also put off Queenie Graves; it was awkward that they had slept together, he thought, as the surf rolled up onto the sand; she didn’t seem at all desirable now, just dowdy and fat. Now the rhythm of the waves, chewing on a distant shore, lulled and disoriented him; he awoke believing there was a magnificent storm outside. He pulled the blanket over his head and tried to wriggle back into the warm womb of sleep, only slowly realizing the rumble was made by infinite waves doing bellyflops on some inaccessible stretch of sun-bleached vinyl sand.

  “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life!”

  A Tuesday afternoon in January, and he was watching television from his bed. Rosie had bought him a secondhand TV from the Sally Ann for his nineteenth birthday. They were in the Information Age now, blasting from channel to channel, getting the global picture. Weird thing was, even with eight amazing channels of shit to choose from, Mom’s show wasn’t on in its regular time slot, or any time slot, it seemed. He couldn’t find her at all.

  “That’s right, sinners! Put your hands on the screen, go on. You, yes you! Place your palm against mine and pray hard with me. Out, devils, OUT!”

  Rosie huffed indignantly at that, but Robbie obeyed with his good hand.

  “If the faithful out in Stupid-land think the static on the screen is divine interference,” she said, “then the world is in even worse shape than I imagined.”

  “One day, Hell’s Yells are gonna be the house band on their own twenty-four-hour talk show,” Robbie said.

  “Yeah!” Rosie said. “The Atheist All-Star Revue! With celebrities and comics and just plain ornery people – and hopefully even my favourite weirdo – coming on to testify about how GREAT their life has been since they shrugged off religion!”

  “Hyulk hyulk. And instead of this K-Mart Garden of Eden, with plastic shrubbery, it’ll be a realistic street scene. There’ll be a toll-free number you can call for advice on how to live life in the Here and Now, how to channel your time and energy into Reality.”

  “YES! And instead of blackmailing old ladies with fear of HELLFIRE, anyone who mails in their devotional paraphernalia for the on-air BONFIRE, will actually be sent money in return!” The two of them were getting along like houses on fire, suddenly, and it felt queer. Life was short – he asked himself, was he investing precious time in the right relationship? On the one hand, how could he ever have been so stupid not to appreciate her charms and her smarts; on the other, was he being stupider now to think she was charming or smart at all. He really couldn’t t
ell. He didn’t know. He no longer knew himself – who was he to judge?

  Two Tuesdays after that, or maybe three, a snowstorm was whipping up outside, fringing Eccelucci’s sumptuous lingerie with a lace of frost. Robbie sat up in bed and set his jaw, asking himself what Hell’s Yells could ever realistically accomplish. The rent on the equipment was up in a month. He drew the blanket up to his chin; now Rosie’s hip was bared and she moaned in her sleep. He had to force himself to care, to gently tuck her in; he was disgusted with her now, for one very good reason: without even knowing it, she had left a square of bum-wad in her asshole the night before; this morning her bottom barked, and he saw that it had fallen out amongst the sheets, shaped like a shitty shuttlecock, while she was still sleeping. He drank half a warm beer, felt his eyelids thicken, as the alcohol seeped in and the throbbing in his hand receded. He stared out the window to watch the snow fill the sky. A shred of laundry blew off the clothesline over the back alley like a frostbitten gull, and the window threatened to pop inwards. He watched the chill grey flurries in the alley and thought of Kilborn Bay and how the mist there used to sit like a sweet pillow on the water and linger on the cool sand until as late as breakfast. And, as he heard the first stomps upstairs of children preparing to go to school, it occurred to him that memories like these were a privilege; most of the kids on this street had probably never been out of town, even for a weekend, to see such a thing as a shore with the mist evaporating off it…

  He got up and went to the living room. Idly, he opened the Cocaine machine and stared at the dull red boxes with the dragons biting their tails. Still there, still tempting. He thought of something the Dead Man’s Hands had done to someone who tried to cut in on their drug monopoly (Rosie had told him this for a fact): fed his balls to Bill the Beast’s doberman pinscher. But was that really true? How do these stories get started? He just stood there and stared. Maybe it was better to flush it all down the toilet. What, twenty thousand bones worth? Was he crazy? But what else could he do? He could give it back, he supposed, but after the incident at Arthur’s Hideaway, those animals would slaughter him for having deceived them so long. He was paralyzed, flushed through with anxiety. The boxes sat there; evil things, hibernating.