Things As They Are?

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Mr. Foster smiled. “I would like to be your older friend,” he said. “I’m sure you and I could be great friends. Shall we be friends?”

  I didn’t see what I had to lose. “Okay,” I said.

  On the way back to the car my new friend tried to teach me a song about taking the high road or the low road. It was a Scottish song, he said.

  Uncle Cecil (it was his idea for me to call him that) proved to have the schoolteacher’s habit of wanting to improve you. Some attempts at improvement were interesting and some were not. For instance, I wasn’t too nuts about him pressing his own personal copies of Treasure Island and Kidnapped on me to read. But I did like learning chess, a version of war that suited crafty runts like me. Now when he came to visit, Uncle Cecil brought his chess set and we battled it out on the dining-room table under Grandma’s disapproving eye. She believed she had first call on Mr. Foster and she wanted to play cards, prompting her to make sarcastic comments like: “If chess is supposed to be such a brainy game, how do you expect to teach it to someone who can’t learn to count a cribbage hand?”

  As far as I was concerned, what was really aces about older friends was the money they had. Just let me mention that the glare of the sun gave me a headache – he bought me sunglasses. I got a hula hoop, yo-yo, chocolate bars, comic books, a straw cowboy hat simply by strategically dropping hints. All I needed to do was suggest I was hungry or thirsty and we’d be wheeling up to the nearest cafe for a burger and Coke float. What’s more, I talked him into letting me drive his Buick on deserted stretches of country roads – you wouldn’t have caught my old man doing anything along those lines. just worrying about the insurance would have given him a haemorrhage.

  I felt a little guilty about Uncle Cecil being so nice to me, so generous. I assumed he thought that being peachy to me would get him into Grandma’s good books. Nothing was further from the truth – the more stuff he bought me, the more time he spent with me, the more resentful she got. It was obvious, the old girl was jealous. Somehow Uncle Cecil didn’t seem to realize this. He didn’t get it that maybe it was more important to tell her how wonderful she was than sing my praises to the sky.

  At first I enjoyed it, seeing her nose twisted out of joint. But after three weeks of Cecil’s Be Nice to Charlie Campaign the atmosphere in my grandmother’s house was a little too sour for my taste. The old girl was a wounded grizzly. I would have warned Uncle Cecil that an ill wind was getting ready to blow except for one reason and one reason alone. Before I sat him down and clued him in that being sweet to me was not such a wonderful policy, there was something I wanted to get from him. And this thing I wanted to get was the one thing he hesitated to buy me.

  I wanted a gun.

  Uncle Cecil was not enthusiastic about this idea. “I don’t know, Charlie,” he said doubtfully whenever I dredged up the topic. “I don’t know. What do you want with a gun?”

  “It’s for Grandma’s sake,” I said, hoping that such a claim might sway him. “You know how she’s always complaining about the birds in her garden. If I had a gun I’d be able to put the run on them for her. Believe you me, she’d thank us both.”

  “I’m not sure,” reflected Uncle Cecil. “Maybe the two of us could put up a scarecrow for her. Don’t you think it might be more fun to make a scarecrow and dress it up?”

  No I did not. I was not some half-witted six year old. Blazing away with my own firearm was my idea of fun. In my books, the opportunity to shoot a gun was the only recommendation for life in the country. Give me a gun or give me nothing.

  “And another thing,” I said. “Let’s say some escaped convicts were to come to the farm in the middle of the night. We’re awful isolated, and yelling for help wouldn’t do much good way out there. But if I had a gun I could protect Grandma.” I paused. “In case they tried to rape her or something.”

  That was a mistake, mention of turning a gun on anybody. He looked even more doubtful. “A gun is a great responsibility,” he said. “And you’re very young, Charlie.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said desperately. “But that’s the great thing about a gun. Don’t you see? It’ll teach me responsibility. I’ll get more mature with a gun around. And also – also,” I was flailing around madly in my mind for a clincher. “Also it doesn’t matter that I’m young because I’ve got an older friend to supervise me and everything.”

  “I don’t know very much about guns,” said Uncle Cecil. “In fact, I don’t know anything at all about guns.”

  “No problem,” I assured him. “Just leave all the technical stuff, the loading it with bullets and all that crap to me. I can read up on it.” I gave him a look of great frankness and sincerity. “But how can you learn responsibility and maturity from a book? That’s where an older friend is so important.”

  Uncle Cecil was showing signs of acute discomfort. “But, Charlie,” he blurted out, “I don’t like guns!”

  Right, I almost said. So what? Do I like the world’s most deadly book, that Kidnapped you gave me to read? No, but I’m reading it, aren’t I? I’m ploughing through it a couple of pages a night, all those Scottish words I don’t understand. Muckle this and muckle that.

  But I knew better than to let fly on that topic. When it came to the care and maintenance of grownups, I kind of prided myself on being a first-class operator. The last thing you ever wanted to do was show up an adult in delicate negotiations, or poop on something they thought was top notch. From the time I was six years old and used to plead with my mother to play me her Frank Sinatra records to get on her good side, I knew that much.

  “It’d probably save Grandma’s garden,” I said. “And I’d learn a lot from owning a gun.”

  “Well, let me think about it,” said Uncle Cecil.

  If it would help overcome his hesitation, I was willing to go cheap. “You can get a Cooey single shot bolt action twenty-two for around twenty dollars,” I informed him. “A real bargain.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he promised.

  Uncle Cecil and I were seeing each other every day now. Sometimes we didn’t bother to go on the drives we told Grandma we were going on, we just went to Uncle Cecil’s house and hung out. He had a huge, varnished piano, the surface of which I could watch myself in when I fooled around on it. It was a big hoot to do imitations of the concert pianists I’d seen on CBC, scrunching down so that my face almost touched the keys like Glenn Gould while playing by ear ecstatic renditions of the themes of “Bonanza” and “Have Gun Will Travel.” As I tickled the ivories, Uncle Cecil sat in his easy-chair, sipping scotch, and flashing his finger in the air like he was conducting. Grandma didn’t know about Uncle Cecil and the scotch, whisky was something he tried to keep private the way he did his baldness. He wasn’t a big drinker, never indulged in more than a couple of drinks, but a couple were enough to bring about a sea change; he talked peculiar, he talked to me as if I was an adult. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t that I was learning anything shocking, I’d heard lots more interesting and shocking things just by keeping myself as quiet and still as a mouse in a corner and letting adults forget I was there to eavesdrop. They didn’t know the half of what they had given away to me. But this was different. To be told things straight out like I was grown up broke hallowed conventions, was somehow plain wrong.

  What did he talk about? Mostly friendship. And loneliness. He said he’d never had many friends. It was his one regret. Only when you were older did you realize what you had missed in life – and he had missed out on the joys of friendship. He wondered if perhaps his difficulties weren’t a result of having been a person in authority. It wasn’t easy to be intimate with a member of your teaching staff and still observe professional standards of conduct. Besides, so many elementary teachers were women, and friendships with women were risky because they were so easily misrepresented and misunderstood. Also, it was his belief that women’s friendships lacked the idealism which was such an important element in male relationships. No one could ever imagine a woman
dying for a friend.

  He would tell me how he had always thought of himself as a friend to all the boys and girls in his school, yet doubted if they had seen him in that light. It wrung his heart to know that many students had been actually terrified of him – just because he was a principal. It wasn’t fair. Each year on the first day of school he had made a speech in which he urged all the boys and girls to think of him as their friend, encouraging them to come to him if they needed advice, or a sympathetic and understanding ear. Yet in all his years of teaching no one ever came to him with a problem. There had been days when this distrust was so upsetting that he had closed the door of his office to conceal his tears.

  When he started going on in this vein there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to sidetrack him – for instance, right in the middle of a sentence commence hammering out the theme from “Bonanza” on the piano so hard I thought my fingers would snap. Once, before I could stall him, he said, “You know, Charlie, there was a time when I used to look around me and say, ‘How is it possible? How is it possible that a little town like this, a town with a population of a mere thousand could contain two people fated to love one another? The odds are against it. And yet it happens. All around us people fall in love with people they’ve known since they were children. Time and time again it happens. Except to me.’ ” He hesitated, smiled. “But perhaps my luck is changing.”

  “You mean Grandma?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said coyly.

  Uncle Cecil was hard to figure. One minute he was talking to you like you were on his side of the fence, age-wise, the next minute he was acting as if he was the kid. Sometimes when we were playing chess at his house he’d pretend to slip out to the kitchen for a drink, then sneak back on his squeak-proof schoolteacher shoes while I was absorbed studying the board, clap his hands over my eyes and yell, “Guess who!”

  Such goofball behaviour would have been embarrassing in a ten year old, let alone in someone as mature as Uncle Cecil. Worse, he wouldn’t lay off until I’d said his name. He wanted to hear me say it. Digging in my heels and trying to out-stubborn him didn’t work because I couldn’t stomach the cold, clammy, icky feel of his hands over my eyes. I’d bellow, “I’m warning you, lemme go!” a couple of times at the top of my lungs to scare him off but it never did. Every time I hollered, he just giggled and purred, “Come on, guess who. Guess.” So finally I had no choice but to yell “Uncle Cecil!” When I opened my eyes he’d be grinning like a maniac, running his sticky palms up and down the fronts of his trouser legs, and dancing about on the spot from one foot to another like a little boy needing to go wee.

  Worse than any of this, however, was the time he came out in a kilt and pranced and jigged around the house, showing off his fat, lardy white legs, and asking me did he remind me of anybody? After reading about a quarter of Kidnapped I had some idea of what I was supposed to say. Alan Breck. So I said it. Even though I thought he looked a dead ringer for Little Lulu.

  But he didn’t behave this way often, only when he got a few scotches under his skin. That is, with one exception, which was partly my doing. It happened one day when we were down in his basement playing table tennis, which Uncle Cecil advocated as a way of keeping fit and gently encouraging sluggish circulation. Not that he, with his watermelon shape, was exactly a walking advertisement for its benefits. Still, despite his weight problem and the fifty-five-year age difference between us, Uncle Cecil never failed to wax me at ping pong. It’s true I was not what you would call coordinated, or an athlete, but it was still shaming for a twelve year old to get pulverized by the likes of him. Inevitably, the more I lost to Uncle Cecil the more frustrated and infuriated I got, swinging out wildly to spray the ball into the rafters overhead, or send it ricochetting off the walls, skittering and skipping frantically across the floor. Meanwhile Uncle Cecil filled the other end of the table like the Berlin Wall, intimidating, impassable. If one of my shots did manage to land on the table, Uncle Cecil would deftly flick it back, his feet never shuffling more than an inch or two to the right or left. This imperturbable, unswerving grace under pressure reduced me to frothing at the mouth.

  The day under discussion I was following him up the basement stairs after yet another severe shellacking (eight games to two). Here we were, plodding up the steps, Uncle Cecil droning his maddening, patronizing advice about how I might improve my table-tennis game, while a foot from my face his big fat ass was walloping around in the seat of his pants like two bulldogs fighting in a flannel sack.

  All my life I’ve been prone to weird impulses that unexpectedly take possession of me. Suddenly I realized I hadn’t left my ping-pong paddle on the table, I had it in my hand. And then, before I knew what I was doing, I gave one of the bulldogs a terrific smack with it. Uncle Cecil let out a piercing squeak, clutched his derrière with both hands, and whirled around on the stairs.

  His reaction was not quite what I expected. I saw his face light up like a lantern in the gloom of the stairs. “Spank my bum, will you! Look out now, Master Charlie!” he squealed.

  That was enough for me, I hurtled back down the stairs.

  “We’ll see how you like some of your own medicine! I’m going to warm your sit-upon for you, young man! Warm it but good!” Uncle Cecil cried in a mock-menacing voice, thundering down the steps after me like an avalanche in a canyon. A couple of circuits around the ping-pong table didn’t lose him – with his blood up Uncle Cecil had a surprising turn of speed. Around and around the basement the two of us scampered, Uncle Cecil shrieking playful threats as I hurdled storage boxes, feinted my way out of corners, dodged outstretched arms, veered and deked and doubled my way here, there, everywhere. And still he kept coming, a sound like a handsaw cutting wet wood beginning to whine deep in his chest, crazed, merrily determined eyes shining in a hot, red face.

  Embarrassed and worried described me. Playing tag with a senior citizen was even more humiliating than Uncle Cecil’s other favourite game, Guess Who. Besides, I was starting to get alarmed he was going to have a coronary. Let him catch me. Big deal. I halted dead in my tracks. Uncle Cecil crashed into me.

  The next thing I knew, I was swept up in his arms. Suddenly my nose was mashed into flab and a damp shirt front. I was suffocating. From overhead I heard words trickling down, a slurred, monotonous, sing-song waterfall. “I got you now. I got you now. What are we going to do with you now that I got you now?” All the while his arms, which pinned mine to my ribs, were slowly tightening, slowly squeezing the breath out of me. Panicking, I writhed and twisted, fighting to break his hold. But Uncle Cecil was stronger than I could have imagined and all my struggles only caused him to totter unsteadily back and forth on his feet as if he was rocking an infant. “I got you now. What are we going to do with you now?” he crooned, the breath from his lips ruffling my hair.

  The more I resisted, the deeper I seemed to sink into the soft mattress of his torso. It was like trying to breathe with a hot, steamy towel stuck to your face, a used towel smelling unpleasantly of a stranger’s body. Nerves, the distasteful smell, the lack of air made me feel faint, my ears buzzed, my head whirled, and – more ominous – a hard bud of queasiness popped up at the root of my tongue. I tried to give a last choked warning but it was lost in the mutter, “I got you now. I got you now. What are we going to do with you now?”

  I heaved several times before Uncle Cecil realized hot barf was streaming down his shirt and trousers. He cut me loose then, believe you me, and I staggered off, doubled-up, circling like a crab, upchucking right, left, and centre while Uncle Cecil, horrified, tiptoed after me, crying plaintively, “Oh dear, oh dear, Charlie! Are you all right, my boy? Oh dear!”

  I wasn’t all right. I was wild at having the bejabbers scared out of me, wild with shame at puking up like a baby, wild with the indignity of being handled. At that moment I would gladly have murdered him. But homicide not being an option, I did whatever I could. I refused to speak to him and stomped up the
stairs. Uncle Cecil followed at my heels, anxiously inquiring, “What’s the matter, Charlie? Charlie, don’t be like this. Speak to me. Say something. Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll get my car keys.”

  “I’m walking.” This idea had just presented itself.

  “No, no, Charlie,” he said. “You’re not feeling well. You can’t walk. It’s five miles to the farm.”

  “You think I’d get in a car with you! You fucking tried to strangle me!”

  Uncle Cecil shook his head, clucked: “Nonsense, Charlie. Nonsense. And language. Careful with the language.”

  “Fucking tried to strangle me!” I screeched again.

  “A game, Charlie,” he said nervously, self-consciously.

  “Maybe next time we can play Jack the Ripper.” I jerked open the screen door.

  “I forbid you to walk home!” he shouted at me.

  I didn’t take this assertion of authority seriously. Poised dramatically in the doorway I gave him a hostile, defiant stare. It was only then it struck me his face was white, gone white with deathly fear.

  “You must let me drive you. Your grandmother would never forgive me if I didn’t bring you.…” He let the sentence die.

  “No way.” I turned calculating, clinical. I wanted to test his response to this.

  “Please, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be like this. You mustn’t be like this. Please, you’re not being fair. Please let me drive you. You got over-excited. It wasn’t my fault. Please.”

  He was begging now, lowering his voice, making soothing, coaxing gestures with his hands, patting and stroking the air between us as he talked. “All a misunderstanding,” he kept repeating. “No harm done. Where’s the harm, Charlie? No harm at all. All forgotten, all forgiven?”

  He smiled weakly, waited apprehensively for a reply. All forgotten, all forgiven? It was some time before I answered. I watched him crumble and flake a little more while I remained silent.