I knew what I was supposed to do. Two words—Riel’s words—said it all: Be responsible. Meaning, Go to school. Meaning, Keep track of your stuff, get your assignments in on time, always remember that good enough really isn’t good enough. Reach for the top, Mike, go the extra mile. Platitude, platitude, platitude. Meaning, Don’t dump your dirty socks and underwear on the floor, put them in the hamper where they belong. Meaning, Don’t just get to work on time, get there a few minutes early. Meaning, Don’t just show up expecting supper to be put on the table for you, show up ready and willing and eager to set the table—and then clear it again afterward without being asked and stack everything in the dishwasher. And if the dishwasher is full, don’t leave stuff in the sink, for heaven’s sake, unload the dishwasher. Meaning, Don’t gripe when you have to do your homework at the dining room table where I can see you, you have to earn privileges, Mike—and with my grades, it was going to be a real privilege to have Riel trust me to get my work done on my own in my own room with the door closed.
Riel had way more rules than my mom ever had. For sure he had more rules than Billy. And he had standards. Billy didn’t even know what standards were. So—what choice did I have?—I had reformed. Well, mostly reformed. No one’s perfect, right?
I had a job at a candy store on Danforth. Four to six, Monday through Friday; nine to one on Saturday. Minimum wage and a boss, Mr. Kiros, who freaked out if he smelled spearmint or peppermint or cherry—any candy flavor—on my breath. Mr. Kiros was a big man who ran a small printing business next door to the candy store. He was always watching the place, always worried if there were more than four or five kids in there, afraid they were going to rob him. He kept harping at me to watch the customers, make them turn out their pockets if I had to. I never did. Sure, some of the kids probably pinched candies when I wasn’t looking, but I would have bet my life that most of them didn’t. Besides, a guy who thought all kids were crooks, but who went ahead and opened up a place that sold cheap bulk candy, was probably in the wrong business. Double besides: Mr. Kiros’s oldest son, who was seven, came into the store every day after school and stuffed his pockets with candy. Nobody ever complained about that.
Every night at six Mr. Kiros was supposed to close his printing shop and go home to his apartment above the candy store. Then Mrs. Kiros was supposed to come down and take over in the candy store. She was supposed to keep the place open until nine, while Mr. Kiros watched their three small kids. But Mrs. Kiros was almost always late coming downstairs—fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour. And this was almost always because Mr. Kiros was late closing his printing shop. He’d be out on the sidewalk, smoking a cigar and talking to a customer or a friend. I’d see him there at quarter past six and I’d know I was going to be late getting home again. It goes without saying that I never got paid for the extra fifteen or twenty minutes either, because Mr. Kiros refused to admit he was late going home, and Mrs. Kiros, who was about half the size of her husband and who seemed to be dragging herself around all the time, never contradicted him.
By the time I got home that night, it was almost quarter to seven. I smelled fried onions as I came up the walk. The smell was even stronger when I unlocked the front door and stepped into Riel’s sparsely furnished but immaculate house. Riel had lived in the place for a couple of years. He hadn’t done much in the way of decorating, but he sure kept the place clean. I threw my backpack down in the front hall, looked at it sitting there, then scooped it up and threw it into the hall closet. “It doesn’t take any longer to put things where they belong,” Riel always said.
Riel was perched on a stool at the kitchen counter. He’d made burgers—they were sitting on a broiler pan on top of the stove, ready to go into the oven. He was spinning lettuce while he watched the local news on a small TV that sat on one end of the counter.
“Sorry I’m la—” I began.
Riel held up a hand.
Okay, whatever. I grabbed a glass from the cupboard, opened the fridge and poured myself some juice.
“So far the police have no witnesses,” a female voice was saying. “The investigation continues.”
Riel reached for the remote and shut off the TV.
“Robbie Ducharme?” I asked. I had to bite my tongue to stop from adding, Again?
Riel nodded. He slid off his stool and circled the counter to the stove.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Mr. Kiros was late.”
Riel slid the pan of hamburger patties under the broiler.
“The man wears a watch, right?” he said. I rolled my eyes, but nodded all the same. “And he expects you to show up on time, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe you should make the point that you’re expected to turn up for supper on time,” Riel said. Then, before I could say anything, “Or, if he wants to adjust your hours, that’s okay, but maybe he should also consider adjusting your paycheck.”
“Like that’s ever going to happen.”
“If you don’t stick up for yourself, for sure it won’t,” Riel said. “You want me to have a talk with him?”
“No!” I said. The last thing I needed was Riel getting involved in my work life. He was already way too involved in my school life. “I can handle it myself. Besides, he was only a few minutes late.”
“Twenty, thirty minutes every day, it seems like,” Riel said. “What do you think he’d do to you if you were twenty or thirty minutes late every day?” Then, switching gears, “Set the table, okay?”
Usually at supper Riel asked me about my day. Since he taught at my school he knew my timetable and all of my teachers. He’d ask stuff like, “Doing a unit on the law, huh? So, what do you think, the police obtain evidence without going by the book and that evidence gets thrown out even if everyone knows the guy really did it, you think that’s right?”
A trick question. Testing if I’d been paying attention or if I was just swallowing everything I’d seen on TV—American TV. And I’d have to prove that I had been paying attention. Usually I’d try to get my own licks in.
“Looks like someone was asleep during law lecture at police college,” I’d say. Or something like that.
Tonight, though, Riel was quiet. He worked his way through two burgers, chewing, swallowing, not smiling, not talking. Thinking, I guessed, about Mr. Ducharme and Robbie. No way was I going to start in on that topic.
Ms. Stephenson sighed.
“Act four, scene five,” she said again. “Can anyone tell me what is going on in that scene?”
Four hands shot up. Diane Davis, Shirlene Fletcher, Bryce MacNeil, and Sam Yee. Honor roll, honor roll, honor roll, honor roll. University bound. Keeners.
Ms. Stephenson looked beyond their hands and settled on Nera Singh. I let out a great big silent sigh of relief. If she was looking at Nera, she wasn’t looking at me. Sometimes that was the best you could hope for.
Nera flipped through his copy of the play, the pages shwick-shwick-shwicking softly, until he found act four, scene five. I watched him squint at one page and then another while Ms. Stephenson waited. Nera’s face puckered in concentration. He began to shake his head. He looked up at Ms. Stephenson, his shoulders rolled up around his ears.
“The time to read the play is before you come to class,” Ms. Stephenson said. She turned and nodded at Sam Yee. “Please tell us what’s going on in this scene, Sam.”
“Ophelia’s gone crazy,” Sam said. He was on the student council. Vice president of some dumb thing or other. He was one of the kids who read out school announcements over the PA system in the morning. He couldn’t do it straight, either. No, he was always making lame jokes and trying to sound like whoever was the hottest comic on TV. Vin and Sal and I used to argue about who we thought he was trying to be. We almost never agreed, he was that bad.
“Ophelia’s gone crazy,” Ms. Stephenson repeated, in case anyone had missed Sam’s brilliant answer. “Thank you, Sam.” She peered around the room for her next victim.
“And who would like to tell me what has driven poor Ophelia to madness?”
Many heads ducked to many books. All around me, fingers ran down lines of text in search of an answer. Jeez, I hated Shakespeare. Why couldn’t we read a play in regular English, something you had at least half a chance of being able to skim?
“Mike?” Ms. Stephenson said.
I glanced down at my book, but what was the point? I wasn’t going to be able to come up with the right answer. I shrugged at Ms. Stephenson and tried to look like I was sorry.
Ms. Stephenson sighed again. She also taught drama, so her breath came out like a rush of wind. She looked around again.
“Salvatore?” she said. “You look like someone who can tell us something about the subject of madness. Would you enlighten us all, please?”
Sal had been hunched over his desk, looking like he usually did these days, like a guy who never slept, a guy who was being eaten alive by something.
“Salvatore?” Ms. Stephenson said.
Sal’s head bobbed up. His eyes were red around the edges. He seemed to be making an effort to focus on her.
“Madness,” Ms. Stephenson prompted. “I’m sure you can tell us what has driven Ophelia to madness.”
Sal spasmed to a full upright position, like he’d been jolted with a stun gun. He swept the room with wild eyes. Then he jumped to his feet. He stared at Ms. Stephenson, his mouth open. For a moment it looked like he was going to say something, maybe even shout something. Then he grabbed his backpack from under his desk and bolted from the room. A couple of guys—guys in the back of the room—laughed.
“Talk about madness,” someone said. More people laughed.
I stared at the door. What was with Sal? I didn’t even think about it, I just stood up. Ms. Stephenson gave me a sharp look.
“Sit down,” she said. She crossed to the phone on the wall beside the door. She was going to call the office. Well, let her. I grabbed my backpack and hurried after Sal.
I heard Ms. Stephenson call my name. I knew her next move would be to report Sal and me both to the office, but I didn’t care. I paused in the hall for a moment and listened. I heard footsteps, faint, fading, off to the right. I headed for them and rounded the corner just in time to see a door ease shut at the far end of the hall. Sal was half a block up the street by the time I pushed my way out into the morning sun.
“Sal!” I shouted. “Hey, wait up!”
He didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. I had to really pump it to catch up with him.
“Hey, Sal!”
Sal kept pounding up the hill. He didn’t glance over his shoulder, didn’t give any sign at all that he had heard me. I had to grab his arm to get his attention. He shook me off like he was shaking off a bad smell.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” I said. I was breathing hard now, trying to keep up with Sal as he motored up the hill. “Sal, hey!”
He kept ahead of me, his back to me, still pumping away so that it took a while for me to realize that his shoulders were shaking.
“Jeez, Sal—”
“Leave me alone,” he said.
I picked up my pace and passed in front of him. He turned his head away, but not before I got a good look.
“You been crying?” I said. If I’d thought for half a second, I would have kept my mouth shut and saved him the embarrassment. But I was so surprised. Tear streaks were pretty much the last thing I’d expected to see on his face.
“I told you, leave me alone,” he said. He spun around and shoved me, catching me off guard. He hit me hard on the chest and sent me flying backward so suddenly that I lost my balance.
My hands flew out to try to break my landing. They hit the sidewalk at the same time as my butt. My tail-bone jarred against the concrete. The palms of my hands burned as they slid along the rough surface. I sat on the sidewalk, stunned at how hard he had shoved me, stunned that he had shoved me at all. I held out my hands and looked at them. The skin was scraped right off in places and grit was hammered into the wounds. It stung so bad that my eyes started to water, but there was no way I was going to cry, not with Sal standing right there.
He stared down at me. Then he reached out and took me by one wrist and hauled me to my feet. He didn’t say anything. We walked up the hill side by side and kept going until we hit Danforth. I nodded toward the doughnut shop on the corner.
Sal shook his head. “It’s on Carl’s list.”
Carl was the hall monitor at school. He was a retired firefighter and a nice enough guy if you weren’t cutting class and he wasn’t out checking all the regular places kids went when they were supposed to be sitting at a desk in math or French or history.
“No one’s home at my—” I’d been going to say, at my house. But it wasn’t my house. “At Riel’s.”
Sal nodded. He didn’t say anything on the way and I didn’t push him. When we got there, we didn’t go inside. Instead we circled around the house and sat on the back porch. For five minutes, maybe ten, Sal was quiet. Then he said, “The cops were at my house last night.” His voice sounded funny, kind of high and trembling. “It’s my dad.”
Sal’s dad had been in prison in Guatemala, where Sal’s family is from. Sal said he had never been the same afterward. He’d been a university professor back home, but the only job he’d been able to get in Canada was office cleaner. He worked nights at a downtown office building, emptying other people’s garbage, cleaning other people’s toilets, dusting other people’s desks. Sal said he hated it—it made him depressed.
“He’s been getting worse,” Sal said. He raked his nose with the sleeve of his jacket. He looked down at the floor of the porch, not at me. “He’s been talking to himself a lot lately,” he said. “He was like that when he got out of prison. He never talked about what happened to him in there, but he used to sit in the dark in his study, and he used to mutter to himself. He’s doing it again now. My mother tries to act like everything’s fine, but I can tell she’s scared. My aunt keeps trying to talk him into seeing a shrink, but he won’t.” Sal’s aunt was a doctor.
I didn’t know what to say. I had met Sal’s dad a couple of times. Mr. San Miguel was a small, wiry man who always seemed to be in fidgety motion. Once he had talked to me for a long time in Spanish. The only Spanish I understood was si and gracias and una cerveca, por favor, which I had learned from Billy after he went to Mexico once. Later, when I asked Sal what his dad had said, Sal said it was a poem. Sal’s dad had recited a poem to me in Spanish. Weird.
“Then last night, in the middle of the night, he started shouting that they were coming,” Sal said.
“They?”
“I think he meant the army,” Sal said. “When he was arrested that time, when he was in prison, it was the army. Soldiers came to the house to arrest him. They beat him up right there in the kitchen. My mother tried to stop them and they kicked her in the stomach. They beat him and they dragged him out of the house and we didn’t see him again for three years. My mother never said so, but I’m pretty sure she thought he was dead.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. I knew Sal’s father had been in prison, but Sal had never gone into details. For sure he had never talked about soldiers coming to his house and beating up his father in his own kitchen. He had never talked about his mother getting kicked in the stomach either.
“He started shouting that they were coming and he grabbed the weed whacker and ran out of the house,” Sal said. “This was, I don’t know, two in the morning. He was out there in the yard, in his pajamas, yelling. And then the guy who lives next door came out. That guy never liked my dad. He started yelling for him to shut up, and my dad was yelling that no one was going to take him away again, no one was going to hurt his family again, but it was all in Spanish, you know, and that guy next door, he’s English, he doesn’t know any Spanish. So he’s just yelling at my dad to shut up, it’s two in the morning and normal people are trying to sleep. And he tries to grab my dad and shove him
back into the house. And my dad, I don’t know what he was thinking, but he goes after the guy with the weed whacker. Then the guy’s wife calls the cops, and next thing you know there’s cops and cop cars and people everywhere.”
“Did they arrest him?” I said.
Sal shook his head. “I think they were going to. The guy next door sure wanted them to. But my mother talked to them. She convinced them not to arrest him.” He kept staring at the floor. His voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s pretty bad,” he said. “I think he’s pretty sick, you know?”
Yeah, I knew. I remembered what Sal had said about Mr. Ducharme. He’s crazy, you can see it in his eyes. I wondered what Sal saw in his father’s eyes.
“Hey, Mike?” Sal was looking at me now for the first time since we’d left school. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“No problem,” I said.
“I mean it,” Sal said. “It’s bad enough, what’s going on. But—”
Maybe it was because he hadn’t slept much the night before. Maybe it was because he was worried. Maybe it was those things that made him look so white—Sal, whose skin is normally darker than mine, not brown exactly, but darker. It wasn’t dark now, at least his face wasn’t.
“You promise?”
“Yeah, I promise.”
Truth and Lies Page 3