Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

“It doesn’t bother me now,” Julie said. “I’ve got used to Dean. He’s not at all conventional, and I used to like that about him. But it’s as though things got divided up completely unfairly. I got the sense of responsibility. He got the charming recklessness. He also got all the talent.”

  I agreed with her that Dean was an extremely talented pianist, and asked why he wasn’t playing concerts somewhere.

  “Because,” she said, “the little shit has no confidence in himself, and no discipline. I have spent all my adult life trying to convince him to put his abilities to use somehow, but he won’t listen to me. Oh, he plays every day, but he plays easy stuff. Music that he knows. The only place that Dean is conventional is in his music, and only because he’s afraid to try anything harder. He’s been told by a hundred professors that he has the gift, and those same professors have told him that he won’t ever find it if he doesn’t take some risks once in a while. Why is it a person can risk everything — his life, his stability, even his relationships — without ever taking the one single risk that will get him exactly what he wants out of the world? Truly. I can’t figure people out.”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said. “I work in a treatment centre, remember. I catalogue irrational behaviour every day and still don’t understand it. I don’t even understand my own.”

  “Maybe,” said Julie, and I could see she was tiring of the conversation. “Tell me about the centre.”

  I told about the piss nights, movie mania, the counsellors, and the position statement on homosexuality and abortion. The religion, the glimpses of crude nobility I sometimes got from guys living on the street for ten years who came in and tried to get clean. I avoided Darrel as a topic, because I owned it and didn’t want to share too much of it, but I did tell her about Iroquois Pete.

  “I can’t imagine,” she said, “being friends with a guy who’s actually killed eleven people.”

  “At first I was nervous,” I said. “I kept wondering when my turn was going to come. But you know, he was just like other people. Maybe a bit smarter than other people. Nicer too. In Pete’s world, getting killed for being an asshole was just par for the course. He used to say he’d killed a lot fewer people than some soldier in a government-sanctioned war, and for a much more legitimate reason. At least he knew the people he killed.”

  Julie shook her head. “That argument doesn’t seem right to me. What would be nobler? Killing someone you didn’t know because your government made you, or killing someone you did because he told on you?”

  “It’s not about nobility,” I said. “It’s about which one is more justified.”

  “Neither of them,” said Julie. “They’re both betrayals of a sort.”

  “Everything is a betrayal,” I said, thinking of The Hand of Judas. “It’s a matter of choosing the thing which betrays the least.”

  It was my turn to get tired of the conversation. Julie didn’t say anything when I dragged a box of Trivial Pursuit questions onto my lap and withdrew one.

  “Entertainment,” I stated, and read, “What was the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega?”

  Julie shook her head and I was about to turn the card over and read the answer when a voice spoke a single word from the back seat. Both Julie and I looked at each other, eyes widening, and I turned to stare at June, who was yawning and awake now. “What did you say, June?” I asked. “Please repeat it.”

  June only smiled widely and shook her head and yawned again. I turned back to Julie. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yup,” Julie said. “I did. Was she right?”

  I turned the card over and read. Both Julie and I were certain that a half-awake June had whispered, “Zorro,” from the back seat in answer to my question, though how she knew that we had no idea. But Zorro it was. Julie shrugged finally. “Maybe she’s seen the movie with Antonio Banderas.”

  “Not unless they’ve made it into a cartoon,” I said. “June doesn’t watch anything but cartoons.”

  “So,” said Julie, “maybe it’s a cartoon.”

  “Maybe.”

  But I wasn’t convinced. June wasn’t smart, but she was touched by God. Nothing happened around June without a reason. June was God’s way of maintaining his anonymity.

  I tried another one, choosing at random. “June,” I said, “where did the first atomic bomb explode?”

  June had no answer for me, and her nose was running. I got her a Kleenex from the glove compartment and reaching back between the seats wiped it for her. I put the Kleenex in my jacket pocket, in case there was more leakage.

  “Oh well,” said Julie. “I don’t think they made a cartoon about Hiroshima. Although they probably should.”

  “It’s not Hiroshima,” I said, reading the card. “It’s Trinity Site, New Mexico. Practice, don’t you know?”

  Julie thought for a few minutes. “Didn’t Dagnia Daley grow up in Sante Fe?” she asked.

  “Yes. I think I read that about her.”

  What were the odds of radiation fallout poisoning causing premature ovarian failure? We didn’t have a chance to contemplate that thought long, however, for June unleashed some large-scale devastation of her own, with plenty of fallout. The Intestinal Symphony had started again, this time in B-flat. With identical wryly souring expressions, Julie and I reached out and rolled down our windows to let the cold rushing air replace the sudden stench.

  “Bloody BIG BAD HAMBURGERS,” I said. “From now on, she’s only getting salads.”

  June sat in the back seat smiling proudly. “I stink, Bubby,” she said. “I stink, don’t I, Bubby?”

  “Yes, June,” I said soothingly. “You stink real bad.”

  CLXXIV

  June fell asleep again and we still had another hour to go. Julie and I were both bored of Trivial Pursuit. Finally Julie said, “So. Are you going to tell me exactly what we’re coming down here for?”

  I knew she would ask. I told her a little more about Darrel and June, as I had got the story from Dawes’s files.

  “Was this guy related to you or something?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “And how well did you know him?”

  “Not well. He was in the centre for a while, and we talked a bit.”

  Julie just drove for a while, saying nothing. Then she said, “So ... this guy’s mother hanged herself in the bedroom closet when he was what ... nine? And then he did the same thing in your utility closet at the Sally Ann?”

  “Yup.”

  “What happened to his father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Julie sighed and shook her head. “Okay,” she said. “The guy had a pretty crappy life, and he hanged himself in your centre. You’re even writing stories about him, but I still don’t see what it all has to do with you. Why couldn’t you just make up the stuff you need? Why did you have to come all the way out here and bring June along?”

  “I don’t know. Christ. Guys have died in the centre before. One guy I knew pretty well snuck out and was shot by the police when he tried to hold up a gas station. But this guy — he haunts me. I can’t help but believe that there’s something here. Something that I should know but I don’t. Something that June should know.”

  Julie looked skeptical. “Like what?”

  I couldn’t tell her.

  “Besides,” she said. “Why should you know anything about this family? What’s it to you?”

  Her tone, her insouciance about the whole thing, was starting to annoy me. I was starting to regret telling her. “Let’s drop it, okay?” I said. “I don’t know why I’m obsessed with this story. I’ve written other stories before and got obsessed. I guess for once I’d like to know the truth instead of making it up. Is that a good enough answer?”

  Julie shrugged. “It’s your story,” she said. “But if you ask me, I don’t think there’s anything original here. The guy’s mother hanged herself. Awful, yes, but it happens. June’s mentally challenged. Sad, but there’s whole hospitals full of them. D
arrel’s father beat him and he turned to drugs to forget his problems. As sad as that is, Cameron, the world is full of people like Darrel. A lot of people have stories like that.”

  “I have a story like that,” I said quietly.

  “You do?” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you mention your own family.”

  “Not a lot to tell. No evidence of a mother, other than the most obvious. A drunken asshole father who held every conversation with his fists.”

  “A lot like Darrel,” said Julie thoughtfully.

  I knew what she was thinking. She was right. Investigating someone else’s life for parallels can be less painful and just as informative as investigating your own. Sometimes I forgot just how smart Julie could be.

  “But no sister,” I said.

  “You have one now,” Julie answered.

  “Not really. She’s Darrel’s sister.”

  Julie shook her head. “She was Darrel’s sister. Darrel’s dead. She’s your sister now. I’ve seen the way you look at her. She might as well be your relation. You love her enough.”

  I lit a cigarette. Julie made me roll down the window again, even though it was cold.

  “Did you bring them?” asked Julie.

  “Bring what?”

  “The stories. The stuff you’re working on.”

  Julie knew that I’d packed them in my briefcase that morning before we left.

  “Read some of it to me,” said Julie. “For something to do while we’re driving.”

  I had a writer’s aversion to premature storytelling. They weren’t finished, I said.

  “So what? I’m not going to hold that against you.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “Fuck, Cameron,” Julie said. “You drag me all the way down here to this shithole. What for? The least you can do is read me the raison d’être for this whole exercise. After all, you were there when I read my story about Dean!”

  She kept at me, relentless as only the Black Widow could be, until finally I reached into the back seat for my briefcase and withdrew a sheaf of pages. After all, what other reason could there have been for bringing them besides reading them aloud to Julie? She drove on and waited while I shuffled through the pages, trying to decide which story I should read. I finally chose one of the earlier ones, something that wouldn’t give too much away too soon.

  CLXXV

  Excerpted from

  The Three Rivers Garment Factory:

  The Three Rivers Stories

  by Cameron Dodds

  “Nice title,” said Julie.

  “Thanks,” I answered, a trifle self-consciously.

  Giddy-up.

  CLXXVI

  Excerpted from

  The Three Rivers Garment Factory:

  The Three Rivers Stories

  by Cameron Dodds

  Every year the high school put on a play about our town’s history. Our town had a long, colourful history. The French ousted the Indians. The British ousted the French. We all ousted each other. When that was all settled we ousted some Europeans, from their own countries no less. We even ousted some red-blooded countrymen, when they refused to fight in one war or another. A lot of people were ousted; because this ousting was so much fun we had to relive it every year in the school play. Elementary students were involved in the play too. We always played the Indians, for some reason. Whether it was the director’s intent to show that Indians were small compared to the great hulking colonizers (played by the oldest of the high-school students) or whether he was getting North American Indians confused with African pygmies was never made clear to us. But no one seemed to mind. Every year a whole tribe of us elementary students dressed up in feathers and blankets and headdresses and moccasins and played the disposable Indians. The less easily disposed of natives, like the three chiefs who in 1763 met with a Dutch arbitrator and negotiated for the right to live on their own land, were played by close to full-sized people — Grade Nine boys on the veritable cusp of puberty. Perhaps in this way the director was showing respect for these three famous natives, by saying that they were almost as big as we whites were. Regardless, according to the ineluctable plot of our school play and our written history, we eventually ousted them too. But not before the Dutch arbitrator swindled most of their land from them. No matter. The Dutch arbitrator was eventually ousted too.

  I remember the rehearsals for these plays as being utter chaos. The play was put on in October, shortly before Thanksgiving. Rehearsals for The Three Rivers Historical Revue took place for a month prior to this, on weekends and after school. The disposable Indians were not asked to appear, however, until the final week, when the director — the Grade Twelve history teacher assisted by the school dramaturge — would tell us where to stand and order us around the stage in the execution of our non-speaking roles. The year that my mother died the history teacher was Mr. Plant, a tall, gangling, jittery man with a permanent nervous rash on his neck and hands. Mr. Plant had no assistant that year, for he was also the school dramaturge. So the elementary principal sent the Grade Three teacher, Ms. Griffin, to help out with all those tiny, unruly Indians. Mr. Plant was nicer than directors before him, though he was more sensitive too; he would often stand in the middle of the stage and run his fingers through his hair and stare wildly around at all of us as if we were capable of attacking him.

  Which we were. Mr. Plant was able to instill no discipline. The older kids ran wild; for them rehearsals were nothing less than a holiday from classes where they could act crazy and make fun of Mr. Plant. They called him various names to his face, all suggested by his unusual surname — Petunia, Belladonna, Gladiola. The boys would chase each other around the school gymnasium, box with each other in the corners, light cigarettes right in front of Mr. Plant, who would say, “Put that out! Don’t you know there’s no smoking in here? What are you thinking, man!”

  The older girls would sit in the back rows and ignore everything the director said. They watched the boys and giggled, re-applied lipstick, and checked themselves in their compact mirrors. Some of them smoked too. Ms. Griffin herded all the elementary kids on to the stage and tried to protect us from this anarchy as best she could. She would throw the occasional disapproving glance at Mr. Plant, and say, “ I don’t think the older boys are setting a very good example for the younger children.”

  “Go ahead,” Mr. Plant would reply distractedly. “Rein them in. I give you my permission.”

  But Ms. Griffin was only a twenty-four-year-old elementary teacher. She was content to rein us in and leave the older kids to Mr. Plant. Apparently his history class was as much of a disaster as drama class and the school play. He would be fired during the summer; my father heard that he had a nervous breakdown the year after and was committed for a period to the psychiatric care unit in Holmstead. Already he was showing signs of someone on the edge. He was having a hell of a time just getting the older students to learn their lines and getting us Indians in our places.

  “Over here,” he would tell us, and we would obediently shuffle over in a group to where he had pointed. Then he would change his mind. “No. That’s not going to work. Over here!” And back again we would go. Mr. Plant’s male lead — a tall, handsome, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, gum-chewing jock named Ted — slouched against the proscenium and made sarcastic comments about everything. Since he had discovered that, as the play’s lead, he always had to be on stage and couldn’t run around on the gym floor with his less talented friends while they waited to speak their one- or two-line parts, he had become resentful and impossible to handle. Once, when Mr. Plant put his hands on Ted’s shoulders and tried to show him the blocking for a scene, he threw the teacher’s hands off and called him a stupid fuckwad.

  “You’re so sensitive,” Mr. Plant said mildly.

  “He’s so vulgar!” cried Ms. Griffin. “Aren’t you going to suspend him?”

  “You can’t suspend the lead in the play a week before opening night,” said Mr. Plant. “He can s
ay whatever he wants until closing.”

  Ted grinned lewdly at Ms. Griffin, and she hid behind some little Indians. The older boys were always talking about how they wanted into Ms. Griffin’s pants. It was the general opinion of the older boys and girls, and a few of the teachers on staff, that Mr. Plant wanted into Ted’s pants, which is why he had cast him as the play’s narrator and lead actor. Ted wasn’t untalented; he was one of those jocks who had mild artistic ambitions which he mostly hid from his jock friends and which would never lead him anywhere special. Yet he had a wry, almost sarcastic, delivery and a handsome face, which made him perfect for the narrator of a high-school play.

  “It is a generally acknowledged fact,” Ted as Narrator began, “that when one thing disappears, another takes it place. And so it was for our town when the meeting between the Indians and the British took place on the banks of the Lahave in 1763.” Action: Ted moves aside. Curtains draw back. Pint-sized Indians shuffle around nervously on stage. Three quart-sized Grade Nines, arms crossed and wearing Navaho blankets, step out from among the elementary school Indians and take centre stage. Gallon-sized arbitrator comes forward and speaks loudly to the three chiefs about surrendering their land, their livelihood, their spirits, and perhaps even their lives if they wanted to push the issue. Blah, blah, blah. Curtain closes.

  “Good enough,” cried Mr. Plant. “Let’s move on to the Three Rivers Garment Factory!”

  Every year when my mother was alive she had come to see the school play. Not only because I was in it, but because her greatgrandfather-in-law, Sherman Greene, who died in the garment factory fire, was always portrayed. My mother’s in-law was represented above the other one hundred employees who had died because he managed to save three women by directing them out a factory window before he himself was engulfed by flames on his way back to save a fourth. Sherman Greene was a hero, and seeing as he was the only hero our family ever produced, my mother always went to see his heroism replayed in the Three Rivers High School gymnasium. From my mother I learned to respect my great-grandfather on my father’s side. From my mother I learned to suspect my own father was a Grade-A son-of-a-bitch. From my mother I learned that life is cheap, when she hanged herself in our bathroom with a pair of nylon panty-hose. Some of these lessons I could have done without.