by Hadley Dyer
I peered into an ornate copper birdcage that had been recently polished and had fresh newspapers lining the bottom. A beautiful blue parakeet was sitting on a perch. “Hello, pretty boy,” I said to him. “Say pretty boy, pretty boy.” The bird remained absolutely still. “Come on, pretty boy.”
I whistled a dandy tune to him. He turned slowly on his perch until his back was to me.
“Wilfred’s a dick,” Rupert said.
The second floor wasn’t much cleaner than the first, but it had less junk. The master bedroom might have even been pretty, with its cheerful blue-and-yellow floral wallpaper, iron bed frame, and lace curtains, were it not for a filthy crib-sized mattress on the floor.
Beside the back stairs was a small, empty room overlooking the blueberry patch—meant for a maid, perhaps, or a baby—and the one next to it was plainly Francis’s. A twin bed with a buttoned headboard of stuffed green vinyl, neatly made with a white coverlet. A few books stacked on the wooden stool that served as a side table. A plain, polished wooden table and chair. No dust, no clutter, no decorations. There was something almost aggressively absent about it, nothing of him in the room, other than that pile of books. On top was a collection of poems by Elizabeth Bishop.
My knees suddenly buckled, as can happen when a pig skull slams into them.
Shaggy tried again to shove past me into the room, but I blocked him with the door. There followed a struggle, with me pulling on the knob and him pushing his head against the wood, squealing in frustration, until he finally huffed and took himself off to Rupert’s room. He flopped onto the mattress on the floor.
This is ridiculous, I thought, making sure I heard the latch click when I closed Francis’s door. I didn’t want to touch anything outside of his room, even to breathe the air in this house. I was already twitchy with imminent pink eye. It wasn’t worth it, just to earn a few extra bucks.
I didn’t want to leave abruptly, but had to get outside. In Abe’s back seat were some pots of asters that I’d picked up for Mum at the nursery on my way to work. She would be annoyed if I came home without them. And then what? She’d send me out for more.
“Hey, Rupert!” I called. “I’ve got something for you, if you can tell me where the shovel is.”
I planted the asters around the front steps. It was such a relief to be out in the fresh air and working with my hands. I was digging a hole for the last of the flowers when the shovel clanked against a hard surface.
Rupert was at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper with the magnifying glass that I’d found inside the fridge earlier. I held up an old Canada Rye whiskey bottle filled with a clear liquid.
“What in the— Where’d you find that?”
“In the ground. By the steps.”
“Well, well! I couldn’t tell you how old that is. Decades probably.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not water.”
“Is it . . . is it moonshine?”
He tried not to smile, but his whole face crinkled.
“You make moonshine?” I don’t know why I was whispering. Wilfred the Electively Mute Parakeet wasn’t going to talk.
“Used to bury it around the house. Used to be drunk when I buried it around the house. Never could remember where I put them all. Tell you what, you can keep that.”
I set the bottle down on the table. “I’m good, thanks.”
“Don’t you tell me that you and your friends don’t have a drink sometimes.”
“Isn’t moonshine supposed to make you go blind?”
“Doesn’t go bad. Maybe if it was off to begin with, but that’s good stuff. Now, you take it and give it to your boyfriend if you don’t want to drink it yourself. I bet you’ll have an easier time getting around the law in your house than I would in mine. Mind you, it’s better than closing up shop and living in a nursing home, like my daughter’s always telling me to do.”
He spat on the floor.
“Rupert!”
“I was demonstrating that I don’t like the idea of dying in one of them places.”
I took a tissue from my pocket and wiped up the gob. The floor was now cleaner in that one spot, the gold pattern of the linoleum coming through. “That’s what you call a spit shine,” Rupert said.
Next thing I knew, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing. Brushes and rags quickly turned soot black and I went again and again to the sink to rinse them in scalding water and vinegar. I couldn’t stop. The spreading gold was addictive.
“Rupert, do you mind if I ask how old you are?” I lifted up each of his feet and scoured the floor underneath.
“Old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.”
“And when did you stop farming?”
“After my heart attack. Ach, don’t look so alarmed. I was home from the hospital that same day. I was glad, even. Yes, glad to know I’ve got a bad ticker. Means the end could come quick. Matter fact, if you ever see me doing this . . .” He clutched his left arm. “You walk away, let nature take its course.”
“Most people want to go in their sleep or surrounded by loved ones. Like in a movie.”
“Now, that’s why I say that if I had less religion, I’d go by my own hand and be done with it. Imagine, people standing around your bed, staring at you, jumping every time they think your soul might have got sucked out of you, wishing it would already because they’ve got better things to do? I don’t want my last vision of this earth to be my daughter going . . .” He leapt to his feet, shaking grit from his shoes onto the clean floor.
“Rupert?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Before you get dramatic again, take off those shoes and let me give them a scrub.”
After I finished the floor, I set Rupert up with what he said was his favorite dinner—beans and wieners—and wandered through the fields and down the ridge toward the lighthouse.
The light was gray-tinged, the wind hurrying clouds across the darkening turquoise above, grass rustling in waves like the surf washing over a beach. And then, out of nowhere: something pure white and set ablaze. It looked like a small hot-air balloon, maybe two feet tall, its fire burning brightly against the dimming sky. Soon there were more, at least a dozen launching from the other side of the lighthouse, it appeared, and floating across the fields and up the mountain like ghosts. They flew higher and higher, spreading out and disappearing beyond the tree line.
It was nearly dark by the time the last balloon had vanished and I turned to go climb back to the farm. Someone was standing on the slope above me. Francis. Was he watching me too? I couldn’t tell. I felt the lake stone in my pocket, the one from Lake Victoria that he’d given me that night at the bar, smooth and warm against my palm.
After what seemed like a long time, he began to walk slowly toward the house, the soft gray of his uniform barely visible in the grass. When I got to my car, he was nowhere in sight.
Fifteen
And so it went for the first week or so, me running off to the farm after school on the days I had less homework, and beating it out of there before Francis got home, sometimes passing him on the driveway as he was turning in.
Until he arrived early one night. When he pulled in, I was outside feeding Shaggy kitchen scraps. I flipped the bucket over so Shaggy could snuffle the remnants out of the dirt, hung it on a peg at the side of the barn without rinsing it, and started for Abe.
“Hang on a sec so I can pay you,” he said, getting out of his car. “Unless you’d rather take Rupert to the bank so he can settle with you directly.”
I held out my hands, and he counted the money into my upturned palms. “Twenty-forty-sixty-touched-your-boob-one-hundred.”
Neither of us spoke, just stared at the small pile of bills. My left boob had a sort of Day-Glo feeling where he’d accidentally grazed it.
Finally, I said, “That’s worth at least another ten.”
“I pay you and then I have to arrest you for solicitation.”
Rupert stuck his head
out the porch door. “Oh, look what the cat dragged in. You going already, George? Stay for dinner, why don’t you?”
“Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” I said.
My stomach chose that moment to sing out like a baby humpback whale that has lost its mother.
“Stay,” Francis said. “I’ll cook. And I”—he lowered his voice—“I won’t assault you again.”
After changing into jeans and a well-worn sweater, Francis poured a jar of yellow powder into a pot with salt and milk, set a pan of water to boil, chopped a bunch of vegetables and herbs, and drizzled oil over them. The quick, confident movements of someone who’d done them many times before. As he worked, I caught myself going over the boob-tag story in my head, as though I were going to tell it to Lisa. One of those habits I was having trouble shaking, like looking over at her in class whenever a teacher said something funny or lame. Except, I realized, that even if we were speaking, I probably wouldn’t tell her that story because it wasn’t the same if you didn’t know that my boob and his hand had a history, and how could I trust her again with a secret like that?
Within twenty minutes we were sitting in front of steaming bowls of yellow porridge he called “polenta” with roasted veg and poached eggs. He grated a hard cheese on top, which turned out to be Parmesan. I’d never seen Parmesan that didn’t shake out of a plastic container.
“Son, if you’d told me a few weeks ago that I’d be satisfied without a piece of meat on my plate, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Rupert said.
“I picked up a few tricks working in kitchens.”
“George, honey, pass me that paper over there,” Rupert said. “You read ‘Tales From the Dispatch’?”
I shook my head. That was the local paper’s weekly account of the more entertaining emergency calls made to the police. I got the highlights at home.
“‘A man loitering on Main Street in a samurai costume was questioned by police in Veinot.’ Obviously waiting for a drive to an early Halloween party.”
“No, sir, he was not,” Francis said.
“Huh. ‘An unattended foil package was found on campus at the University of Noel. It was determined to be a donair.’”
“Six hours,” Francis said. “We had to bring in the bomb disposal unit. And today a woman called because another woman gave her a dirty look at Dairy Queen.”
“Yeah, sorry again about that,” I said.
I’d been pretty quiet, and the sound of my voice seemed to startle Rupert and Francis.
“Oh, George is being funny,” Rupert said. “Very good.”
Francis didn’t smile. “And after that,” he said, twirling his fork on the tabletop, “we had a call about a stolen pickup parked in someone’s driveway. Dispatch said to go up the one-oh-six, get off at Bishops, swing a right down Old Porter Road at the United Church, six miles from there. If you hit the river you’ve gone too far. I retraced my steps again and again, and I couldn’t even find the damn church.”
Rupert and I looked at each other.
“What?”
“That church burnt down,” Rupert said.
“Burnt down when?”
“Going on ten years!” Rupert guffawed so hard he hiccupped. “Come on, now, son. Dispatch probably didn’t think of it.”
“By the time I happened upon the place, the truck and the guy who stole it were long gone.”
“Did you try his mother’s house?” I asked. “It’s just, my dad says you always check the mother’s.”
“Alright, I’ll do that. Any more job advice? Or any sort of advice?” His tone had flipped from grateful to challenging in the space of a second. “Kids grow up so fast around here, you must be a wellspring of flawless decision making.”
“Don’t get me talking,” I said coolly. “I can be quite a handful.”
The faint percussion of Francis’s foot under the table stopped.
Truth is, people had been calling my dad about him. Not that he was doing anything wrong according to the rule of the law, but as far as the unspoken rules of the valley went, he was screwing up regularly.
“Go on, George,” Rupert said.
Shaggy had wandered into the kitchen, and now came over to rest his chin on my lap. I used my napkin to scrub the dust from his snout, which I suspected came from breaking into Wilfred’s birdseed. “Well,” I said, “don’t overdo the parking tickets on Main Street.”
“In your town?” Francis said.
“Any main street. I know it seems like you’re bringing in cash for the municipalities, but the shops complain about business going down. And maybe drop in places sometimes, say hi.”
“I got one,” Rupert said, pleased with himself. “Don’t worry about that sad woman who hangs outside the Pizza Palace in Veinot.”
“Are you telling me she’s not a prostitute?” Francis asked.
“Sure she is, but she has a kid, so they let her be.”
“Okay, free parking for all on Main Street, no hookers with kids, say hello. But I have a question: What the hell is a donair?”
Rupert and I laughed.
“That happens every time I ask, and no one ever gives me an answer. All I know is that it’s food.”
“A pita sandwich,” I said. “The meat is carved from one of those twirling vertical spit jobs and it has sauce made from condensed milk.”
Yes, revolting, and yes, heaven.
“Sounds like a Greek gyro. What type of meat?”
“Nobody knows,” Rupert said. “Nobody asks.”
When I got home, Dad was sitting in his recliner, the TV blaring. His fake foot was on the chesterfield, and he was still wearing a special sock thing with a pin on the bottom that connected his stump to the calf portion of the prosthetic. Nice to see him trying. For a guy who was so married to his job, he hadn’t seemed in a big hurry to get back to it, something I couldn’t square. At least people had stopped phoning the house instead of 911.
“Hey, Dad.”
He didn’t move.
“Dad?” I said a little louder.
“What? Oh. Hi, George.”
“Sorry I’m late.”
“Are you?” He looked at his wrist, but his watch wasn’t there. He felt around his bathrobe pockets, then gave up.
“Not very late,” I said. “I did call Mum to tell her I was staying at the farm for supper.”
He turned back to the TV. Sweat beaded his forehead.
“You look like you hurt.” He also looked like he hadn’t slept properly in a week. His skin was sallow and he had huge pouches under his eyes.
“I just . . . I hit the leg.”
“On what?”
“Uh, the wheelchair.”
The wheelchair was tucked into the corner by the vase filled with old peacock feathers, well away from the recliner and the sofa. “But it’s on the other side of the room.”
“Let it go, George!” He was staring at the seam between the wall and the ceiling, as though anchoring himself to it. “Must have rolled over there when I knocked it.”
No, it was neatly parked, as it would be if he had been walking around on his prosthetic.
“Dad, why don’t you take more painkillers?”
“Don’t want to.”
“Are you worried you’ll get addicted?”
“They make me irregular and stupid. Can’t think clearly.”
“So what? It’s not like you have to drive. You don’t need to think clearly to watch Coronation Street.”
Dad closed his eyes. “George, go get me my cigarettes. And then go to bed.”
Sixteen
Lisa kept the cafeteria, the mall, and basketball games. I kept the front steps of the school, where everyone hung out between classes, the movie theater, and the arena. For a few days Nat and Bill had switched between us like a couple of latchkey kids, but pretty soon Nat was only hanging out with me in the classes we had together, and then not at all. There was no big announcement that she was choosing sides, and thank god for that. Not being direct w
as Nat’s way of being kind.
Our group may have been divided, but by the grace of Bill, some cool people on the fringes, like Doug the stoner, and a few horny and hopeful jocks, I wasn’t so much exiled as hanging out on my own sweet island close to the mainland. The Grunt was still neutral territory, though it didn’t feel like it as I slid into the booth where Bill was plowing through a large basket of french fries. Nat, Lisa, and Keith were perched at the end of a table that was pulled up to another table that was packed with Elevens being Elevens. If I was being honest—and why would I do such a thing?—it still hurt seeing Lisa like that, so close but so far away, especially when she seemed to be making an effort not to see me.
I snuck a fry out of the basket, and Bill gave me a low warning growl.
“What’s with Nat’s eyebrows?” I asked. She had a pair of scorched half-moons where the bottom halves used to be.
“Deforestation with hot wax. Not just north of the border.”
“For Doug?”
“Why? Do you care?”
“I don’t care care.”
“Like with feelings.”
“Exactly.”
“Nah, she decided she doesn’t want to date a druggie.”
“It’s not like he’s messed up.”
“A little messed up. He’s not a bad guy, but if they were going out she’d be spending a lot of time helping him keep it together.”
Which reminded me: I took Bill’s biology binder out of my knapsack. “You left this on the floor in front of your locker.”
“Crap. Thanks.”
I decided it was Lisa’s job to tell him about the stain on the mock turtleneck she’d obviously talked him into.
“So, uh, you know what’s happening on Lisa’s birthday?” Bill said.
“Oh. Right. She must be dragging you out to the Old or Hard Inn for dinner.” I slipped another fry out of the basket.
The Old Orchard Inn. The C in the sign had been burnt-out for years.