Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  Two-and-a-half years later, with no new leads to go on, the case was officially closed.

  When Chris Eaton’s husband took a bath, the water was left with all sorts of organic detritus: body hair, toe jam, bits of skin he’d pumiced from around his ankles, circling around the edges of his legs like dust in the sunlight. The combination of his allergies and the hot water made his nose run, and he blew the snot out in hot, dirty clumps into his chest hair, a sound she could hear in the other room as she read her pulp novels in bed. When she witnessed it the first time, breaking his phlegmy sanctuary to pee, dropping her pants to the tiled floor and staring hard at the discoloured clots that decorated his chest like hardened cheese ends, she knew it had to be love because it didn’t bother her in the least.

  She wiped herself. Pulled her pants back on. And her smile stretched all the way from his side back to the bedroom.

  A year passed. And then another. Was this what love was? A time machine that sprinted you into the future with each loving caress? She’d always thought of herself as solitary. After her last relationship, she said she’d never fall in love again, and spent the next three years cultivating a distinguished air of celibate spinsterhood, with only occasional carnal lapses, with a hospital intern, a scotch whiskey rep, and a professor of English, with whom she actually broke down and met twice, knowing he was married but saying nothing when he didn’t volunteer the information. She took a trip to East Berlin shortly after The Wall came down, and afraid that if she attempted to remove any of the devalued currency from the former country that they would find some way to detain and torture her, she spent her last dollar on a dozen notebooks, some playing cards, a bottle opener, and several waxy sticks of plasticine in primary colors that transferred almost immediately to the hands of her nieces and nephews. One of the notebooks she used to keep a list of sexual positions she found in books like The Kama Sutra, or just on the online men’s sites: Union of the Cow, Union of the Elephant, The Position of Perfect Alignment. Or The Position of Andromache, the traditional woman on top position, which somehow became connected with the wife of Hector from the Trojan War, perhaps as a joke, as if, after Achilles had killed him and let him lie outside the wall for days, maybe Andromache stood at the wall and dreamed they might make love one last time. Then there were the French positions, like The Varlope, The Pompe, The Brouette and The Jardinier, which appeared to involve the man entering the woman while she rested both hands on the ground, as if she were a wheelbarrow, perhaps even walking around like that. It was often hard to tell from the diagrams if any additional ambulatory movement were involved. She supposed there must be, at least occasionally. The men she took home were unfortunately much less imaginative, mostly trying unsuccessfully to guide her head down to their crotch, a position she called The Game Show Plunger, or just passing out on top of her, which she decided to name The Position of Thanatos after the Greek God of Death.

  Then she met Laurent, who was French but from Canada, so not nearly as prissy. He spoke like a peasant farmer and was covered with hair from head to toe. She’d arrived last on purpose at an improv class she found mostly ridiculous but had attended because of a friend who took four classes a week and dated interesting men who liked to fence, or salsa dance, or pick their own fruit, who occasionally traveled by hopping trains or spontaneously slept on beaches in exotic island countries, like the Martinique, or Greenland, with the latest gadgets or completely off the grid, with waxed moustaches, or pubic hair, or at least claimed such things. Once her friend had even dated a man who balanced furniture as art, fitting a stack of end tables and television remotes between the floor and ceiling of a semi-famous London hotel lobby without a millimetre to spare, until he caught wind of a furniture-balancing guru – indeed, an entire culture – in Tibet, and he was thrown into complete despair.

  He had led such an interesting life, gestating for his first sixteen years in a small Quebecois highway town, with nothing but a hockey rink, strip club, motel and gas station. At sixteen, he was selected to play in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey Association in Chicoutimi, New Brunswick. But then he failed to make the Canadian National team and defected to play for England, where his mother’s father was from, in the C league of international play. Before Laurent arrived, it had been a team comprised mostly of weekend recreationalists. Their star player ran a chip truck in Sheffield and had borrowed his skates from a brother-in-law (whose ankles had become too fat to wear them himself); he was the second line’s left wing, although they had never come across anyone before Laurent who actually shot left, most of them having been raised to play on a pitch, not a rink. In the two years Laurent played for them, the team never managed to win a game, but he did get to see a lot of the world, and faking a knee injury and a concussion after two years of star worship for his occasional goals, it was easy to find a cushy job in London, reading magazines for an agent that represented dozens of paparazzi, searching for unlicensed usage and passing the examples on to the litigation department. From there he got a job watching TV, in a similar capacity to the magazine position, but for a marketing research firm, locked in a room with nine television screens (a number they had arrived at, through further research, that was the most one person could absorb at once without missing anything), scanning for specific trends in news coverage and writing a short précis of each news feature and talk-show theme, from climate change and gas prices to celebrity teen pregnancies, tide levels, the lunar perigee, whale beachings…

  After two years in a low-rise apartment infested with mice, they bought a home infested with ants, with several flights of steps that were either too short or too long and never just right. The back drainpipe had been installed without consideration for how the rain would pool against the side of the building. Similarly, the end drainage on their bathtub wasn’t actually connected to the pipes but just ran into the space between floors and left a browny-orange ring on the ceiling in the living room. The rain gutters surely needed repair. There was a pipe sticking up in the middle of their front lawn, and one day she kicked it and it broke. She had no idea what it was even for, and covered it with a brick for two years before asking anyone.

  The previous owners had transformed the basement into an apartment for an aging poet who had apparently died there, presumably from mould inhalation. Air, musty from water leaking down an unused chimney through the shared wall of the duplex, hung in all the rooms; and sawing a hole through the drywall with a nail file to examine the extent of the damage, she discovered, directly beneath one of the heating vents, the secret deposit of allergy medication and other assorted paraphernalia of loneliness: empty canisters of fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, citalopram and nefazodone; phenelzine, Zoloft and another where the name had faded to illegibility; some utility bills, snug in their elastic cradle; a loonie; several cans of beer, uncrushed; three more, crushed; a toy train; two 1.5 L bottles of cheap rosé; a half-dozen airplane bottles of a Canadian rye whisky called Canadian Club; several chocolate bar wrappers, including a Mounds, Big Turk and Milky Way; and a dead bird. The prescriptions had sometimes been written only days apart. When they discovered the mould, they scooped out handfuls of the sodden pressboard like hunks of diseased lungs, protected by only the thinnest of paper masks, cursing idiocy and laughing in deep gasps. Then they read the articles online about mould toxicity. About immune system abnormalities and brain damage. And about bleeding lung disease, which seemed to be such a threat to youth in Cleveland specifically. The contractors’ estimates ranged anywhere from $600 to $30,000, depending on whether or not they wanted to excavate, which would also involve demolishing and replacing the deck. The estimates were hand-written on the backs of bill envelopes, or on carefully designed checklists, or were drafted on word processing programs by secretaries and then delivered by mail. Chris Eaton and Laurent decided to wait and see what happened, as this option really involved not deciding at all. But it only led to more stress, checking the basement hygrometer twice daily for what they thought would be tel
l-tale indications of something more insidious, something they could not see, something behind other walls. The back-story. They bought a 30-pint capacity dehumidifier, afraid of being ripped off, figuring the 65-pint dehumidifier was more than they would ever need, and then regretted it. That fall, she was down on all fours under the deck, fixing the grading around the foundation with clay she’d stolen from a nearby excavation site, covering it all with construction-grade 3-ft laminated plastic sheeting that the neighborhood cats would puncture in weeks, come the next spring thaw.

  He met Chanté on his first mission to Haiti, a two-week trip he organized for two-dozen Christians to teach the local drug farmers about proper tilling, better irrigation and other potential cash crops their neighbours were cultivating, like coffee, sugar and cocoa. In 1986, after twenty-nine years of dictatorial rule (fourteen by his father and fifteen by himself), Baby Doc Duvalier decided it was as good a time as any to pass the torch, so to speak, before the locals burned him alive in his home, and the US military came in to clean up the mess. The public plan was to re-establish democracy and economic development in the region, to set the stage for elections and be out in two years. But truthfully they were mainly using the island as a foothold for la Service d’Intelligence Nationale (appropriately, S.I.N.), taking on the Colombians in one of the greatest anti-narcotics operations in the history of Central America.

  After witnessing such abject poverty in Panama, Chris Eaton thought this was how he could make a difference. Everyone else in the world had it so much worse than they did, couldn’t even afford to have hopes and dreams, unless you counted hoping for fresh water, or to not get eaten by wild animals, or for love, would never have a nice home or a car, would never taste a prime cut of steak, would never become famous. Of course, he had no idea that the same advice to grow breakfast beverage staples was being given to every developing Third World country, and the sudden abundance of these once-luxury items resulted in a global price collapse. Peasants in most other countries turned back to drugs. But with the new international anti-drug force in place, peasants in Haiti looked to forestry, not for the potentially rich income of endangered lumbers, but as charcoal for their own personal heat and energy. He had also not planned on the airline losing half of their luggage, misplaced during the transfer in Georgia. Most of it never even arrived in Haiti, largely because the airline went out of business three days after their arrival. And he quickly found that most of his time was spent either trying to find people clothes or locating another airline that could take them back to America.

  Thank God for Chanté, who always brought his silverware wrapped in paper napkins and whose Creole French sailed past him more often than he acknowledged. Every night he hid from the others’ complaints in her restaurant, eating fried chicken and rice and what would be the last Haitian plantains before the Dominicans eventually underpriced them out of business. And every night she would astound him with how useless his French lessons had been growing up. He was mesmerized by her. She wore her hair constantly in curlers. She’d never seen a movie. And by the end of the two weeks, forced to wear mu-mus Chanté lent him from her mother, he discovered that no one had anything but good things to say about the experience. Two couples had even fallen in love. The rest had found more self-worth.

  When he went back home, Chanté gave him a sculpture her father had made of a tiny black boat, so crude it was barely recognizable as such, to symbolize the distance that their affection could cross in it. It was made from cocobolo, a wood that smells like roses when cut, and is so dense it will not float on water.

  The business card that came with it had this further description on the back:

  THE COCOBOLO

  What is the cocobolo?

  It’s a very valious especie, it’s used by art men in Haiti, the wood colors are atractive and vary like red, brown, yelow and black, which are alternated to give a beautiful color.

  It’s a tree that lost it leaves.

  To defend it self from the dry season, the bark color is gray, it high is until 20m, with a balky of 80cm small white flowers, its fruits are sheath that contain 4 to 5 seeds.

  The wood.

  What is the wwod?

  The wood is very fine, it’s apreciate for the fabrication of art graft pieces and in the ebanesteria. Eventhough we don’t know exactly why the diferent color variation all tonalities have great demand.

  …which was when he met and fell in love with Jules, and had to think about finally telling his father.

  Her father threw a party. To celebrate his retirement, his new cabin, just to throw a fucking party, Jesus, why don’t you just get down here already, I never get to see you. Her father never used to swear. But one time, when she and her sister were visiting for Christmas, she mistakenly rented a film about reluctant British gangsters – mechanics and other down-to-earth types (like her father, which is why she rented it) who naturally turn to organized crime when they lose their own livelihood – who screw up a job for the biggest boss and have to recruit a bunch of other fuckups to make it right, and when her sister arrived partway through the barrage of obscenities and asked her parents what they thought of it, they said “great fucking movie” and “fucking awesome,” and when she laughed at them, the floodgates were open from then on. That was before her mother died of breast cancer, in her early-fifties, and her father threw himself into planning for his retirement, with a lump of sorrow in his throat so large that it sometimes made it difficult to fit through the massive double doors to his job at Stoic Heran Tool and Die, which despite popular assumptions (which was not helped in the least by the accompanying bird logo), was not merely the result of an overzealous and under-educated sign maker, but was, in fact, more uninterestingly named for its founder, Patric Heran, an Anglo-Norman name derived from the old English heiroun, a word that meant heron but otherwise had nothing to do with the bird at all.

  It was a name that nearly disappeared entirely a century before old man Heran was even born. When Heran’s great-grandfather, James, first arrived at Castle Garden in the New World in the mid-1800s, he was asked his name, occupation and the amount of money he was carrying on him, and since he had neither of the latter two, having never been much good at anything specific in the second category and having lost what he had of the third category playing dice with the Irish thugs on the voyage over, he was not particularly distressed when the overworked state processors mistook him as part of his new group of “friends” and issued him papers under the Irish spelling of Haran, which he promptly altered one more time once he was through by adding an additional O’ to the front. If he’d learned anything on his trip, besides never to gamble again, it was that the Irish were already overrunning the place, representing more than half of US immigration at the time, and had placed themselves in so many supervisory labour positions that finding work in that sector would be easier this way. Besides, he’d come to America in the first place to escape the influence of his own family, so starting all over with a new nationality seemed fitting.

  That was how Jimmy O’Haran started west, or more accurately, for The West, which would keep moving away from him and his descendants each time they drew close, like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, following the sounds of Irish lilts from labour gang to labour gang, hefting a pick and shovel and laying the infrastructure for the nation. He was quiet, mostly to hide his poorly mimicked accent, but this was seen as an asset by most businessmen and contractors, as the country was expanding at such an alarming rate, and there was money to be made, the contractors told them, if for a moment they could all just forget who they were (implying the different nationalities and religions that would have been fighting back in Europe but really meaning the people who would be working and the people who would be making all the money), and put their nose to the grindstone to make the country work. O’Haran bought it, hook, line and sinker. At least he wasn’t working at his father’s pencil factory any more, wasn’t part of that new British nouveau riche. After toiling f
or more than a year on The Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, he was discovered by another man named O’Haran (presumably his actual name) who told him of some work in South Carolina, connecting a railway to Memphis, Tennessee, that would pay near double what he was currently making, where he probably would have stayed were it not for the outbreak of The Civil War.

  ***

  Whatever part Jimmy O’Haran played in the war is uncertain but easy to surmise as he was, like most Southerners, disinclined to discuss it and, like most cowards, disinclined to fight. Likely as not, he faked an injury. Or judging by where he eventually ended up, he put his newly acquired brogue to good use and won the heart of some defenseless widow, a dry-innard woman who snuck meals and other treats to him in her horse barn until the fighting was over. In the spring of 1865, April 9, the very day Lee surrendered to Grant, the city hall in New Orleans contains a record of the marriage of “the widow Hibbard,” whose deceased husband had run a moderately successful business manufacturing blackboard chalk, to one Jimmy O’Hara, which we can presume to not be the result of a typo this time but part of James’s final step in adopting his Irish alter ego.