“Is everything alright?” the waiter asked.
“Oh, it’s delicious,” Kris said. “But.”
“Is something the matter?”
“Well—” She pointed at the eggs Benedict and began to hem and haw, as if she were too polite to complain.
“I’ll talk to the kitchen.”
As he took back the order, Kris’s eyes didn’t lose him.
“You know they’re going to spit on it,” I said.
“Maybe at the places you go to.”
The server was at the open kitchen, talking to a person who looked like an older version of himself in a chef’s hat. I remembered what Sadie’d told me about working here—in order to talk to the cooks the servers had to ask permission.
The chef did not look happy, and I could picture him taking people’s orders into the back and doing something disgusting to them. I laughed.
“I’m glad you’re in such a good mood,” Kris said.
As we were leaving Earl’s, a man called out, “Here’s my number-one competitor.” Michael Daniels rose from one of the tables on the patio. He held out his hand, then seemed to change his mind, and hugged Kris instead. He was in his late forties and had what I guess people called rugged handsomeness.
“How are you?”
“Good,” Kris answered, sounding tense.
“Out for lunch?”
“That’s a nice way of putting it,” she said under her breath.
“And is this?” He glanced back at Kris.
“Yes,” she said, “this is Jack’s son.”
“Excellent,” he said. “I didn’t know your father as a young man. But, boy, is there a resemblance.”
Michael began to talk to Kris about the real estate market; I enjoyed watching her squirm. She envied Michael and always claimed that it was from her that he had stolen his famous slogan, When you’re not just buying a house, but a Home.
The answering machine was flashing. I pressed play. The message from Cam asked me to call him. I dialled the number, thinking that it was futile. But Cam answered.
“Trace—” he shouted.
“Hi. You called?”
“Yeah. How’s it going?” he said, sounding like he was pretending to be relaxed.
“Not bad. I was just out to lunch. How about you?”
“Not bad, not bad. How are you?”
I was still annoyed by how he’d deserted me at the beach. But his jovial tone made me decide to drop the issue. “Pretty good,” I said.
There was long pause before he spoke again. “Do you know where I can get coke from?”
“What?”
“Do you know where I can get coke from?” he said more slowly.
“I assume you don’t mean the kind that comes in a bright red bottle.”
“Don’t be fucking stupid.”
I thought about it. I could probably get it off a girl I knew at university, but I didn’t want to get involved. “I don’t think so.”
“Come on!” said Cam. “You must know someone. How about that girl that liked you last year?”
“Tiffany? I haven’t talked to her in, like, a long time.”
“Can’t you call her?”
“She’s—not here. She’s in Montreal or Toronto, I think.”
“So you don’t know anyone?”
“I don’t know anyone.”
There was a pause, and I sat in the desk chair.
“The girl, the Brazilian, she’s having this party and her friends like to do a bit but they don’t know anyone they can trust—what’s the fucking problem?”
“Is there one?”
A long exasperated sigh came over the line. When he spoke again though, he was amicable. “Anyway, things are good?”
“Can’t complain. You sure you’re alright?”
“Great,” he said.
“So—what happened at the beach?”
“Oh yeah. Sorry. The Brazilian girl came. Her friends were going to this movie so we had to go. Sorr—how about the guy you used to hang out with in Surrey?”
Cam stopped at the house at about ten the next night. I could tell when he came in the door that he was upset about something.
As we played Nine-ball on the pool table in the basement, he told me that he was now certain that the Brazilian girl’s homestay father was going to try to fuck her, that “the bastard” was going to use drugs to do it.
“Why don’t you fuck him up?” I said as a joke.
Cam looked at me seriously: “You mean beat him up in front of the Brazilian girl?”
“You boys still up?” Kris said, coming into the room. I guess with the loudness of Cam’s voice and the Oasis we were listening to, I hadn’t heard her come home. She was wearing a blue kimono and carried a large glass of white wine.
“Why? Why don’t you think it’s a good idea?” Cam said, seemingly oblivious to my aunt’s presence.
“Hello, Cameron,” she said.
“Oh—sorry Mrs. Patterson.” He really mustn’t have noticed her, because he was startled.
Kris brushed off a chair and sat down in it. “That’s okay. How are you?’
“Good,” he said—his tone for the first time that evening sounding amiable.
“I suppose I should apologize for my attire.” She took from the pocket of the housecoat a fresh package of Matinée and began to peal the plastic wrapper off. “But I didn’t think Trace had company.”
“Should I leave?” he said and glanced from her to me.
“No, no, it’s fine,” she said. “It’s actually nice to have company. Steve went to bed. You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”
Neither Cam nor I answered the question.
I’d finished racking the balls and said, “It’s your turn.”
“So Cameron, Trace tells me that you’ve been travelling all over the world.”
“Um, no, just Mexico,” Cam said and leaned down. He took the shot and scratched. “Fuck!” he said, then looking embarrassed, turned to Kris. “Sorry Mrs. Patterson.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. You can’t be married to four different men and not hear a bit of swearing,” she said as if it were a joke.
“Try again,” I said to Cam.
Cameron rolled the cue ball behind the line. His second attempt was successful, the diamond of balls shattering, and the two ball falling in the right centre pocket. He attempted to put the one ball in the left corner pocket; but the angle was wrong, and the ball hit the bumper left of the pocket and rolled to a stop in the centre of the table.
“Where in Mexico did you go?”
“This small resort town south of Mexico City, Cuernavaca. I don’t know if you heard of it.”
I approached the table and tried for the one ball.
“I remember when I used to go cruising, and we went to Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta. Those places were so beautiful.”
“Okay. Your turn.” I’d left the two ball snookered behind the five.
“Yeah. I hear those places are nice.”
Cam tried to bank the ball off the end bumper to hit the two, but missed.
I picked up the cue ball and placed it behind the three ball, tried with a combo shot to sink the nine.
“So did you meet any attractive señoritas?” Kris asked.
I looked to Cam’s face for the reaction.
A wan smile. “No, not really” he said.
“Oh, I can’t believe that,” Kris said her eyes glued on Cam. “You are a very handsome young man. Women must adore you.”
“Your shot,” I said.
“I guess,” Cam said to Kris.
“Cam, your shot.”
We played one more game. Then I said I wasn’t feeling well. I thought I was going to throw up. Cam started to leave, but Kris was
angry; I was being rude, she said. She stood up to stop Cam from leaving, then stumbled and fell.
When Cameron and I helped her to her feet, she looked as if she were about to cry.
Cam had gone home, and I was taking off my boxers when Kris burst into the room.
“What—”
She wasn’t wearing anything except blue panties. The outline of her maxi pad visible between her thighs.
“How do you turn this stupid thing off?” She twisted one dial of my stereo, then another.
“Here. Don’t touch it,” I said, reaching for the volume.
“Don’t shout.”
“I’m not.”
“Turn if off!”
“I am.”
“Don’t shout at me—Is it off?”
“What does it sound like?”
She slapped me.
“What the hell?” I said finally.
“Don’t ever talk to me like that.”
“Why’d you hit me?”
She shoved a note pad in my face. The pad she was holding was one of the ones I’d doodled on: her face marred by two Frankenstein-like scars, a unicorn horn protruding from her forehead.
“Explain.”
My cheek still smarted from the slap.
“Yeah. Not very smart. I’m meeting a client tomorrow morning. Do you have any idea what shit would have happened if I hadn’t looked at this before I put it in my case? If I got there and handed him one?”
I shrugged.
“I suppose you and your retard friend did this when you were drinking.”
“Cam?”
“No.”
“Damien? He’s not retarded.”
“You’re the retarded one. He’s just nuts—And this!” She was holding up a crunched ball of paper. “This is the property assessment, and it looks like you blew your nose in it.”
I remembered that piece of paper.
“Real mature, Trace. Real fucking mature.”
2:04 A.M.
“So you’ve worked at Section 4?”
“I was a technician there.”
“What did you see when you were at Section 4? We’ve had other callers who worked at Section 4 and they reported that the government was holding aliens there.”
There was a burst of noise, like the caller had dropped the phone.
“Hello?” Alan Jacob said. “Are you still with us?”
“I can’t talk any longer,” the caller said, panicking. “They’ll triangulate my position any moment now.”
“Hold on. Hold on. Our listeners need to know this. Other people who worked at Section 4 said that these—these aliens—are not aliens.”
“They are not aliens as we think of as aliens,” gasped the caller. “They—oh my god!—they are not from outer space. They are from another dimension. They are spiritual entities.”
“And is it true they have now taken control of some high ranking members of the C.I.A. and—”
“Oh god! God! No.” A click.
“Hello. Caller, you still there?”
Pause.
“Okay—”
Pause.
“We’ve lost him.”
I didn’t hear from Cam for another week. By the time he called that Friday night I’d already made plans to go drinking with Damien, though I hesitated telling Cam because he got weird when I hung out with Damien. Things had gotten worse with the Brazilian and he really wanted to do something. After he repeated this a fifth time, I told him what I was doing. When he didn’t say anything, I suggested he join us, and to my surprise, he accepted.
A pale green sky spread high above the bridge’s towers. My bangs flapped in the ocean breeze. “Tell me a story, Mr. Patterson,” Cam said as we dropped back down into the causeway. We were in his dad’s new convertible and the top was down. “What’s been going on?”
I’d had another run-in with Kris as I was leaving that night, and it disturbed me more than I’d realized.
“Come on! Tell me something.”
Headlights of the cars coming at us smeared into lines with the taillights ahead. I pictured a pair crossing the median. Imagined the sensations of the crash.
“Tell me something,” Cam shouted.
“Did you know about Trent Peaks?” I said, suddenly remembering gossip from one of Alex’s party.
Cam shook his head.
“You didn’t hear about him?”
“No.”
“He got that scholarship to SFU to play basketball,” I said, “you know that, right?”
Cam nodded.
“Well, he didn’t go right away. His parents said that he could take the year off, relax a bit. So he went up to Whistler—the family I think owns some kind of chalet up there. And Trent goes up and, you know, just hangs around, snowboarding and stuff. And after about a month or so his parents get a call from this girl he’s living with up there. And she says, he’s doing way too many drugs and—”
But I had to stop. Cam was laughing too much; and I started to laugh, too.
When I thought I could continue I tried to finish the story, but had to wait another minute or so before the laughter subsided enough that I could speak: “And when his parents—His Parents—they went to get him, he. He’s—totally gone. They brought him home and. And he lay on the floor in his room all day, curled up. In a little ball and crying.”
After we stopped laughing, Cam and I were pretty much silent. I wondered how he and Damien were going to react to each other. In high school they were better friends with each other than either one had been with me. But near the end of Grade 12, there was a falling out. At first I thought this was because of the car accident; but later I suspected that the accident was an excuse, that the real reason Cam broke off his friendship with Damien was that he saw too much of himself in Damien and that, for him, Damien’s time in the hospital was a premonition.
Damien sat alone in one of the booths at the bar, smoking a cigarette. A half-empty pitcher of brown ale stood in the centre of the table, next to an empty schooner, a pack of Dunhill, and the Zippo lighter.
Cam nodded in greeting and slid into the booth beside him.
The bar’s house band was a CCR cover band, and we listened to the first two verses of “Bad Moon Rising” before Cam mentioned Mike Tyson “chomping” on Evander Holyfield’s ear—he and Damien exploded in conversation. They cut each other off in mid-sentence and their eyes flashed with the same intensity they’d had in high school, a dark, relentless intensity that had frightened others. But side by side across the table, their faces becoming more animated and their voices rising in volume, it was obvious how much they’d changed. They were no longer the two guys who had slightly long hair, who wore black Metallica and G N’ R t-shirts, who wore jean jackets with torn-off sleeves and Led Zeppelin written on the back in Jiffy markers. Damien had gained weight and sported a shaggy beard and his long hair was greasy. Cam, in contrast, was clean-shaven and neat and the new leather jacket he wore made him look like one of the guys he and Damien used to mock in high school for trying too hard to get women.
A waitress asked if anyone would like to order. She was in her early twenties, and had dyed black hair and a ring in her top lip. Cam said that he was fine. Damien and I agreed to share a pitcher of Okanagan Lager.
Damien and Cam resumed talking about Mike Tyson, how the guy was an animal and how he raped that woman; then talked about Guns N’ Roses, Cam saying that they had cleaned up now and were back in the studio to record a new album, and Damien saying that he’d heard that Slash was still using.
And as they said these things I didn’t try to join the conversation. I was content that they were finally talking.
I worked my way through the pitcher and glanced every now and then around the bar. In the corner there was a girl who looked a bit like Alex. Then I
thought of Maria. Since the night in the car I hadn’t spoken to her once. I’d called her house a number of times, but got either Fernando, who always said that she was out, or the family’s answering machine: “The Janzens are in Europe. Call back in September.”
The band took a break. To my ears numb from the ten-minute rendition of “Suzie Q,” the clanking of glasses and the loud, slurred voices seemed almost quiet.
But then “Livin La Vida Loca” exploded from the jukebox.
Cam, excited, told Damien that this was “the most fucking brilliant song ever written.”
Damien’s response: “Fuckin’ piece of shit.”
After that, Cam’s mood changed. Morose, he slouched in the seat, stared at the table, almost glaring.
Damien ordered another pitcher.
Damien laughed.
After two or three minutes of tense silence, Cam stood up. He was going to leave, he announced. He suspected that the Brazilian was at the Avalon and asked if I was coming.
I looked at him. I picked up the coaster and tapped it on the table. I didn’t want him to feel deserted. But I thought of my last time at the Avalon, and I didn’t want to go back there.
“I’ll stay,” I said.
He stalked off. By the door he almost ran over the waitress who cowered against the wall to avoid him.
“Wooo,” said Damien. He took a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaled, “That guy’s way too intense.”
“Why?”
“You saw him.”
Damien set down his cigarette. He leaned on both hands and stared intensely at the table, like he was going to kill it.
I laughed.
Damien raised his cigarette and added, “You’d think he was going through a mid-life crisis or something. He’s only, like, what? Twenty?”
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