The Monkeyface Chronicles

by Richard Scarsbrook

  They huddle together between two parked cars. Graham holds the joint between his yellowed thumb and finger, takes one last pull and then flicks the ember away. His eyes are glassy, his lips twisted into a lopsided smirk.

  His brother Grant’s eyes are like the slits of a serpent, his bottom lip curled up in his trademark predatory sneer, the same expression he wore when he knelt on my thighs on that cold playground in grade eight, slugging me in the stomach and hollering, “EIGHT! NINE! TEN!”

  Outside the Incredible Blues Bar and Grille, my body trembles with adrenaline and hatred as I slide my hand into the front pocket of my jeans and take out my jackknife, flipping out the longest blade. I could rush out of the shadows right now, slash at Grant’s face, send his lips, nose, ears flying from his face, plunge the blade into his heart, twist it, pull it out, chop his throat open, and then turn on Graham before Grant’s body hits the gravel. I’d finish by booting both of them in the ribs.

  A kick for when you’re sick. A punch to eat your lunch.

  Grum and Grunt giggle and wheeze as they weave through the parked cars and out onto Faireville Street. I wait until they are almost beyond the range of my night vision before I start after them. I want to take them by surprise. I want them to feel what Michael felt.

  The bump and wail of Cecil’s blues band recedes into the night. I’m expecting they will head for Jackie Snackie’s, where the druggies traditionally hang out, so I am surprised when they turn at the former Tabernacle of God’s Will and start climbing the hill.

  No music ever poured through the doors of this windowless monolith. No light ever shone out from inside. Probably nobody ever even smiled in there. Only the shadows of the letters remain where the words have been pried from the concrete walls. The doorway has been double-padlocked from the outside, and the video camera removed from its bracket above. The parking lot is overgrown with weeds. The protest trailers have been towed away, replaced with small signs staked into the perimeter which read NO TRESPASSING — PRIVATE PROPERTY.

  “Forgive us our trespasses,” I say.

  The laneway up to the site of my former home is also overgrown with weeds. Spires no longer poke up above the trees at the top of the hill. The Jacob’s Ladder accomplished what the torches of the Tabernacle interlopers could not.

  All that remains of my former home are the stone exterior walls. The roof burned. The turrets collapsed. None of Landon’s paintings survived the fire. His model airplanes burned to ashes. His brass telescopes and Ham radio melted in the inferno. Everything inside rose and fell again as ashes.

  Graham and Grant pull back the sheet of plywood where the front door used to be, and I think of Michael lying on the ice, motionless, gushing blood. I see him in his wheelchair, bloated, immobile, no longer able to do any of the things that made him who he was. Graham and Grant Brush, tonight is the last night of the rest of your lives.

  As I get ready to follow the smell of burning marijuana into the ruins of our little castle, my jackknife held out before me, the moonlight that illuminates the scorched stone walls casts another shadow. “Don’t do it, Philip,” he says.

  I tighten my grip around the handle of my jackknife, hide it behind my back.

  “I think you’ve had too much wine, buddy,” I say.

  “I know who you are, Philip.”

  “Go home, pal. You’re drunk.”

  “I recognized the jackknife at Cecil’s bar,” he says. “Come on, Philip. Give it up. I know it’s you. You were my best friend.”

  I’m stunned. I thought Anthony was merely indifferent to anyone he didn’t outright despise. I never suspected that he thought of anyone as his “best friend.”

  “The jackknife,” he says. “The one you’re holding behind your back right now. You opened the wine with its corkscrew. You’ve been carrying that thing around for as long as I’ve known you. Listen, Philip,” he says, “I know you’re angry. I know you think they’ve got it coming. But I want you to put the knife away and get out of here.”

  The smell of marijuana smoke trickles out from behind the plywood door. I can hear Grum and Grunt giggling inside. The jackknife handle is pressed against my palm.

  “You had better go now, Anthony.”

  “Don’t do it, Philip,” Anthony says. “Just move on. Look at Cecil! Brandon Doggart used to always make fun of him, and Cecil’s hired him to be the cook and bouncer at his place. Just forgive and forget.”

  “Forgive and forget? Graham and Grant didn’t just make fun of me, Anthony. They crippled my brother. They paralyzed him.”

  “Yes, they did. Those two morons wanted so badly to win a ten-dollar hockey trophy that they hit Michael to put him out of the game. I don’t think they intended to hurt him as badly as they did.” Anthony eyes the knife in my hand. “But you do intend to hurt them, don’t you, Philip?”

  I say nothing.

  “See, in the eyes of the law, killing someone with intent is bad. Very bad. But don’t take my word for it — look it up.” He holds up his copy of Martin’s Annual Criminal Code. “And killing two people with intent? Whew.”

  “Are you going to call the police on me?”

  “No,” he says.

  “Then get lost.”

  “I won’t have to call the police. You think Graham and Grant are just going to stand quietly while you slice them up? No matter how stoned they are, they’ll scream and yell and fight back. And all the other morons in this town will come running to watch. And then what are you going to do? Kill all the witnesses, too?”

  “I’ll run.”

  “And you don’t think anyone on the street will notice you? A guy running up Faireville Street with blood on his hands? Sure, no problem. That happens every day here.”

  “Just go, Anthony.”

  “Even if there are no witnesses, the police will find one of your hairs or something, and they’ll match the DNA to you. Even the schlubs on the Faireville Police force can send evidence to a lab.”

  “They got away with it, Anthony. Someone has to make them pay.”

  “They have paid, Philip. They continue to pay. Everyone in the arena that day saw what they did, and everyone knows that their father made some kind of deal to protect them. His ass got ejected from the mayor’s office so fast there was a vapour trail. The Brushes live in constant shame.”

  “They don’t deserve to live at all.”

  “Graham and Grant are drug-addicted, slack-jawed losers, and their father is a distrusted, alcoholic snake. Don’t let them out of their sentence early. Make them serve their time.”

  I turn the jackknife handle over and over in my hand.

  “Listen, Philip. I hate morons and bullies, and I hate the stupid, terrible things they do. I hate them. But, do you know what’s better than getting even with them? Getting ahead.” He takes a step toward me. “Your grandfather likes quotes, right? ‘Live well. It is the greatest revenge.’ It’s from The Talmud.”

  “You’ve read The Talmud?”

  “Philip, I’m in Pre-Law. They make us read everything.” Anthony is face-to-face with me now. “You’ve got a new face. Pretty good, by the way. You’ve got a new voice. And your proNUNciAtion is imPECcable. You can go anywhere from here. Don’t make your next stop a prison cell, okay?”

  You can go anywhere from here. Dr. Rachel Rasfalian-Mapletree said the same words to me when I left the hospital. Adeline said them at the Eaton Centre.

  “Don’t get even,” Anthony says to me. “Get ahead.”

  I kick at the dirt. Something glints in the moonlight at the tip of my toe.

  I drop down and pluck the burnished-gold object from the soil. It is a tiny finder scope from one of Landon’s handmade reflector telescopes. Although the brass is discoloured from the heat of the fire, I can still see through it when I hold it up to my eye.

  Something from Landon’s past did survive. I slip the little scope into my front pocket.

  “Want to share another bottle of wine?” Anthony asks.

/>   “Okay,” I say, and we walk down the hill together, away from the ruins of my old home, past the empty shell of the Tabernacle of God’s Will, and toward the roar of music and excited chatter that echoes from The Incredible Blues Bar.

  “Okay, Anthony,” Cecil says, “you and your new best buddy here are gonna have to take it somewhere else. It’s way past last call. I need to lock up for the night.”

  “Cecil,” Anthony says, “It’s Philip.”

  Cecil takes a closer look at me.

  “It’s me, Cecil,” I say to him. “It looks like we both survived, eh?”

  He bursts into tears. Good Old Cecil.

  The three of are sitting together at the bar, sharing stories from the past two years, as well as another bottle of Anthony’s delicious wine, when Carrie Green rushes into the empty barroom. “Hey, C.B,” she pants, “I left my purse behind when . . . Tobias!”

  “Hi, Carrie,” I say, reverting to my Tobias Fluke voice. I’m shocked by the weirdly strong physical attraction I feel for her right now.

  “Thanks for standing up to Sam,” she says. “I’m glad he didn’t hurt you. He enjoys hurting people.”

  “He didn’t hurt me.”

  She blinks, then pulls my face to hers, kissing my lips slowly and gently.

  “Please!” Anthony yelps, rolling his eyes emphatically. “Get a room!”

  “Want to?” Carrie whispers in my ear.

  Maybe I’ve had too much to drink, but I do want to.

  Carrie closes the door to her apartment above The Goode Faith Gift Shoppe, and lunges at me, smashing her face into mine, her tongue writhing wildly inside my mouth. She gasps for air, says, “I want you, Tobias.”

  She pushes me into the living room, kissing my mouth, my earlobes, my neck.

  “You are so sexy,” she says between kisses, “and the fact that you don’t . . . seem to know it . . . makes you . . . even . . . sexier.”

  Of course, I am aroused beyond description, but still I stutter, “Are . . . are you sure this is . . . ?”

  “I’m not looking for a long-term commitment here, Tobias,” she says, her fingers nimbly unbuttoning my shirt, pushing it from my shoulders. “I just want you. And you want me too, don’t you?”

  She was one of the Little Colour Girls. She used to taunt me and my friends, and right here, right now, in my very drunk, very aroused state, she is correct. I do want her.

  “I haven’t felt this way in soooooo long,” she says, pushing me farther into the room, unbuttoning my city-guy jeans. “Now say my name.”

  “Wait,” I say.

  “Say my name.”

  “Wait, I . . . ”

  “Please,” she moans, causing goosebumps to speckle every inch of my skin, “say my name!” She pushes me toward the sofa.

  I have a flashback of Dennis methodically nailing Desiree the cannonball-breasted prostitute. “Wait,” I say. “Not here. I . . . ”

  She tugs me toward her bedroom.

  “Wait! No! There’s something I want to . . . I need to tell you something.”

  “After,” she says. She wriggles free from her jeans and top, pulls her bra up over her head and tosses it to the floor, then slides her panties down, and I follow her down onto the oriental-patterned rug that I remember once decorated the floor of her mother’s gift shop.

  She pushes me onto my back and slowly rolls a condom onto me, a feeling that is quickly eclipsed by the warm, tight, slippery sensation as she straddles me.

  I breathe in peaches, baby powder, and another new scent, and feel higher than I’ve ever felt. Her long hair brushes my face as she pitches forward.

  “Say my name,” she moans.

  “Carrie,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Carrie!” I cry.

  “Yes!” she cries.

  “Carrie!”

  “Yes!”

  “Carrie!” I am about to explode.

  “Wait! Wait!” she pants. “I’m so close! So close. Wait, wait. . . ”

  My studious re-readings of The New Illustrated Art of Sex are not without reward. Her eyes roll, her back arches, and she screams like she’s releasing a trapped spirit from her body. I burst inside her, and she collapses on my chest. “Ohhhhh,” she sighs. “Wow, Tobias. Wow.”

  A volatile mixture of triumph and guilt bubbles inside me. I have lied about my identity. And I have just had sex for the first time. And I thought my first time would be with Adeline. Although we never made any promises, I feel as if I have been unfaithful somehow.

  After her breathing has slowed, Carrie Green rolls off me.

  There is no deception left inside me. It has been burned away. “Carrie, my name isn’t Tobias,” I tell her. “It’s me. Philip. Philip Skyler.”

  I expect her to scream, to recoil in horror. But she doesn’t.

  “They did a good job fixing you up,” she says. “A really good job.”

  “I expected a stronger reaction than that.”

  “I’m not surprised by much anymore.” She snuggles up beside me, places one small hand in the middle of my chest.

  “Me neither.”

  “I’m glad you’re alive. Philip.”

  “Me too.”

  But I feel more than just alive. I feel as if I’ve just been reborn. And I can go anywhere from here.

  Fourteen Hands

  The first orange light of day is colouring the sky when I finally arrive back at the old mayor’s house. I tiptoe past Artie and Landon, who are asleep beneath a blanket on the living room floor. Dennis is sprawled out and snoring on the Edwardian-style sofa; the old mayor never would have allowed this before. I assume that he and my mother are still asleep in the master bedroom, while Michael and Caitlin slumber in the small second bedroom. I wonder how Michael sleeps at night; another part of me doesn’t want to know.

  I slip quietly into the dining room, being especially careful not to trip or bump into anything. I’m half way between still drunk and hungover.

  The half-eaten Welcome Home Philip cake is still on the table. I sit down on one of the red leather chairs, and rest my forehead on a stack of papers on the table. What a night. I abandoned my family in the middle of my surprise party. I beat the snot out of a bully from my youth, and was moments away from murdering two others. I made love to a woman that I intensely disliked as a girl. The world seems even more tenuous than usual.

  Stack of papers?

  Outside the bungalow, the morning silence is broken by the sound of a big car engine rumbling to life.

  I sit up again. My vision blurs from the sudden motion.

  Insurance documents. One is an auto insurance policy. Another is life insurance. Both policies pay out large amounts of money to the beneficiaries — my mother, Landon, Dennis, Michael and me — in the event of the “Accidental Death or Dismemberment” of the insured. The old mayor’s signature is on the line at the bottom of each policy.

  “There is no insurance in life” he had repeatedly said. “There are no guarantees. You can only do what you have to do, and hope that things go your way.” Why has he purchased insurance now, after all these years? Isn’t it a bit too late for that? He’s already lost everything.

  Beside the stack of insurance documents is a calendar of the current year, with a date circled in red marker.

  This morning’s date?

  Yes.

  And I know what today is. My heart beats faster, my temples throb more intensely.

  It was exactly two years ago today that Michael was paralyzed by Graham and Grant Brush, and the old mayor let the culprits off the hook. It was two years ago that he and Landon toppled the crackling Jacob’s Ladder, and burned our hilltop home to the ground. Two years ago, I climbed onto Landon’s CBX, and left half my face behind on the jagged cliffside. “I have a plan, Philip,” the old mayor said to me in my hospital room in Toronto. “A plan that will require the use of my car. A plan to make everything right again.”

  I open the blinds on the dining
room window, just in time to see the glistening black 1940 Ford Deluxe Sedan roll out onto the street, its flathead V-8 gurgling confidently, with the bespectacled old mayor sitting tall behind the wheel.

  Caitlin is in the driver’s seat of The ‘Bility Bus. She’s the only one who can get the old beast started and keep it running. She throws the column shifter into reverse, and the old transmission engages with a clank. The engine sputters and almost stalls, but the red van finally rolls out onto the street.

  On the duct-taped vinyl bench seat behind her are Landon, Arty, and Dennis. Michael is in the back of the van in his wheelchair. We couldn’t just leave him behind, but jockeying him in and clamping him down has cost us precious minutes. Our mother sits in the attendant’s seat beside him.

  I’m in the front, with Carrie Green on my lap. She showed up just as we were all rushing out to The ’Bility Bus.

  “You left these at my place,” she said to me, holding in her small, warm hands my jackknife, Michael’s pocket watch, Dennis’ 1983 dollar, and the tarnished brass finder scope. I handed each of the items to their respective owners as we all scrambled into the van.

  As The ’Bility Bus sputters and coughs along Faireville Street, Dennis flips his silver dollar over and over in his palm, heads, tails, heads, tails.

  Landon peers though the van’s dusty window, maybe trying to see the future through his little handmade telescope.

  Michael holds the stopwatch between the thumb, index and middle fingers of his right hand, using all the power he’s got to control the only three digits on his body that still function.

  I hold on to Carrie, and I clench the jackknife. Stainless Steel, Philip, Stainless Steel.

  Caitlin steers the van onto Gasberg Road and toward the highway. As the engine warms, the sputtering sounds less like a death rattle, and the speedometer needle gradually struggles farther clockwise.

  As we round a long curve, we finally see my grandfather’s car, so far ahead of us that it is a mere speck on the road. Caitlin stomps the accelerator to the floor. It sounds like at least three of the engine’s eight cylinders are choking to death, but the van does speed up, gaining on the 1940 Ford Deluxe until I can see the silhouette of the old mayor’s head through the round rear windows.