by Nick Craine
So okay, he thought, what we have here is an existential genealogy chart. And after all, he wasn’t entirely alone in a world that for everyone else was webbed and fibrous with family connection. He wrote in Rennie’s name and let it hover angelically above his own, and in a far corner, giving him a cold shoulder to cry on, he pencilled in Elaine.
He hastened on to the next exercise: “Write a short account of your own life.”
Short? Short he could definitely do. He could sum up his bio in a condensed Reader’s Digest version, as condensed as a spoonful of Moe’s mushroom soup (which she had claimed was homemade, as if he didn’t recognize the commercial staple of his childhood). He could express his whole life in a haiku, his family saga in a mini-miniseries. He’d been born as the sixties were swinging into the seventies, his mother a free spirit. She’d been as visible as a spirit at any rate and certainly free, for she had buggered off mere weeks after his birth, leaving him on the counter of Lloyd’s Burger Stand encased like a pet hamster in a Sorrell boot box. She’d stuck a note to his foot with Elmer’s Glue that read: baby beith. Lower case, which didn’t conclusively point to e.e. cummings as a paternal suspect, although years back the poet had been guilty of spawning a considerable number of literary progeny. Rennie had been in the back of the stand, teetering by her slim waist on the edge of the deep freeze and hacking away at a lump of frozen weiners with an ice pick. She thought she heard a customer at the counter. She had. Him, requiring some maternal service and kicking the shit out of his cardboard bunting. (That box, which later did become a hamster home for Charles I and Charles II, the end of that particular royal line, went a long way in explaining his claustrophobic tendencies, he felt, although it did nothing to account for his several other unacknowledged phobias.) Rennie had instantly whipped off the lid and . . . he saw her for the first time. New mummy! She laughed with surprise, and he would have, too, but he hadn’t learned how to do that yet. His lips had other requirements and were puckered in a suck-suck, come-hither fashion, a yearning, little blueeyed foreigner. Using the tip of the ice pick, she’d delicately lifted the note up and read, baby beith. Was this his name or a Biblical-flavoured declaration of his existence? Or maybe, given the legibility of the script, the faint, maiden pink, lipsticked letters, it was ‘keith,’ not ‘beith.’
“You don’t look like a Keith,” she’d then said. “But you look like mine.”
Such was the astonishingly accurate memory of a newborn. Chellis wrote ‘foundling,’ and left it at that. He took some comfort in the word itself, which was suitably literary and had a long history, even if he did not. Illegitimus. He’d encountered that designation, too, in this book, a term one might expect to find in old parish registers and courthouse records. The term sounded more like something a hoary, warty midwife might hiss the moment a luckless bairn tumbled into the world without the safety net of wedlock to break his fall. Bastard! A curse to knock you on your arse and ensure that you never got up, while the legions of the legitimate stood deeply rooted staring down at you – scrawny weed!
But surely those days were long past. He’d been born at a time when attitudes were enlightening up. Some attitudes about some things in some quarters. Those quarters getting smaller and smaller of late, the small change of liberal sentiment, a much devalued currency. He flung Rooting for Yourself on the coffee table. The freaking thing had gifted him with nothing more than a tension headache. He wasn’t supposed to be looking for himself and his wily, slacker ancestors anyway. Why would he bother? It was his impression that the general populace could care less about their forebears and would be only too happy to be shot of their present family. His birth mother hadn’t wanted him? Fine by him. Rennie had wanted him, and gave him a good home, and a good lax upbringing: he still liked to jump on the bed. No, he didn’t need to go on an ego dig. But he did need to chase down his employer’s whim if he wanted to pay the bills and keep the home that Rennie had given him. Bethea Strange was his sole prey, another vanished woman. What was it with women anyway, couldn’t the slippery creatures stay in place? Always running off, dying, getting snatched and hacked to pieces.
God, he felt as though someone had nailed a spike into his forehead.
His eye fell upon a small metal container that he’d tossed onto the table a couple of weeks ago and had forgotten about. Laney’s newest invention, if you didn’t count the soap, which he wasn’t counting, seeing as the replacement tester bar had migrated to his neighbours’ antique copper mailbox, and, if it was anything like the first one, had likely bonded permanently to the box’s pricey interior. This new product Laney had christened Calm Balm, some guck you rubbed on your temples while listening to ambient music and snorting incense fumes, all in a quest for inner peace. Vaughan had already tested it and had deemed it amazing. Or so she claimed. She had crossed her heart and sworn to the truth of this on his OED and smiled in that way that unbalanced him and made him sway like a palm in a sultry breeze, ready to drop his coconuts. He picked up the balm and unscrewed the lid. A fragrance, no an odour, wafted out that made his nostrils twitch like a rodent’s. The stuff smelled faintly, no strongly, of carbolic, brine, and peat, a smell he found thrilling for some reason. Its consistency resembled a cross between Vaseline and Turkish Delight. All right, nothing ventured, nothing gained . . . a prescriptive that had thus far never bagged him a single thing in his life. He braced himself, dipped his finger into the slimy stuff and rubbed it gingerly on his temples. It eased his tension headache immediately by transferring the pain to the sides of his head. A searing pain. When his temples began to smoke, he not only defeated his lethargic funk, but broke his record for the 10-yard bathroom-dash. Fuckfuckfuck, he snarled, dousing his head with water. That’s it, I’m done with her, finito, no more, she’s lethal, she’s a bloody crank.
Got him moving anyway.
Ready to roll, he double and triple-checked to see that everything was in place. His copy of On the Road was grooving in the seat beside him, his leathery partner, Uncle Bob, was slumped in the back, first aid kit in the glove compartment, the latter in the event that he became the unwitting subject of another experiment or met with the inevitable car accident and had to reattach his arms with Band-Aids. He also brought along his very recently invented Home Psychiatry Kit: marbles, screwdriver, yogurt-dipped nut bar. Ha! Laney wasn’t the only mad genius around. He planned on dropping this off at her place on the way out of town.
He snapped his seatbelt clasp into the buckle, started’er up, and after backing out of his driveway idled for awhile gazing affectionately at the house. Affectionately and achingly because he had a uneasy feeling that he would never see it again. Good thing he hadn’t bothered to mow the lawn. He did have roots dammit, and not just those of the ineradicable crabgrass system that held his front yard in place. His house, Rennie’s house, it contained their whole lives. Home, he had one, why was he leaving it?
He couldn’t stand it. Go, go!
He pressed down on the gas pedal, lightly, as though he were flattening a peeled banana . . . and drove around the block. There it was! His house! He loved it so much. Was that a rat squeezing out of the gap under the porch? Nae problem! He’d recite poetry to it, an old and surefire method of ridding the house of rats. A few lines of Robert Frost and they’d run screaming out the front door. He drove around the block a couple more times, delighted to be arriving home again and again . . . until he noticed that one of his next-door neighbours was watching him, the female half of the equation, adorned in a trim pinkish tweed suit and matching Italian winkle-pickers. She was standing beside her mailbox holding the bar of soap. Was that a glare she was aiming his way, was her precisely cut blonde hair actually bristling, or was that only the wind fooling around, making a nuisance of itself? Chellis didn’t wait for an answer. He hit the gas once again and took off, tires squealing as the hitherto unsuspected ties to his home place, his twining clasping roots, unreeled, snapped, and trailed behind him, fluttering as gaily as tickertape.
9
Accessory
THE FIRST DISASTROUS THING that happened was nothing. Selffulfilling prophesies were usually so reliable, but so far no delivery. No ten ton weights had fallen out of the sky and smucked his “swiftly” moving vehicle. His trusty car swept along, a largely imagined blur of silver, a Gerhard road Richter, but not yet an artful highway smear. Could it be that too much TV exposure had primed him for calamity? No, too much Elaine exposure had done that. He swore to himself that the farther away he got from her the better off he’d be, and to his dismay, he found that this was true. He was actually enjoying his outing, his newfound rustication.
The scenery was pleasant and unthreatening, especially if one didn’t think about the countryside’s pesticide-induced glow. The farms he drove by were well-tended and prosperous, the farmhouses modernized and huge, with triple garages and indoor pools. He was enormously grateful not to have to reside in one. He could see himself wandering from one cavernous room to another, lost in space. Or sitting in one of those up-to-the-minute farm kitchens and over slabs of homemade lemon pie and man-sized mugs of coffee engaging with the informed residents in brain-cracking conversation about the latest Noam Chomsky. (Right-wing, scarlet-necked, Christian Fundamentalists, minds narrowed to a sharp pleat? Mythical beings, surely?) Then he couldn’t see himself . . . he was gone, which was a relief, since he hadn’t quite gotten around to any Chomsky yet. Farmers had earned their renovations at least, the salt-of-the-earth in upscale shakers, and their digs weren’t quite as disheartening as the vinyl-clad developer-barracks that loomed on the edge of Farclas, frightening enclosures with names like Sissinghurst Downs and Wankers Rise. And while he was ruminating about wankers, he reminded himself that the homicidal mover-and-shaker who’d bumped Rennie off and gotten away with it lived out this way in pretentious rural splendour – a monster in a monster home. Chellis sincerely wished the guy apoplexy while reading his energy bill, brain cancer from his cellphone. This accelerating session of ill will and revenge fantasy, about which he felt not the least speck of guilt, kept him amused for some kms.
The fields that stretched away from the road on either side were immense: deep squares of swishing yellow plant matter or chewed greenery, with fat cattle grazing here and there, as blissfully unaware of their final destination as Chellis was of his. Perchance he and these beasts would meet again at The Age Spot and become more intimately acquainted. Lord, his personal sky darkened. I hate humans . . . but it was a fleeting moment of misanthropy, possibly a mental transmission picked up from the one handsome Charolais who had raised her head (Noam on the range) and gazed thoughtfully at him as he cruised by.
In the spirit of public service, the slender aesthetic side of it, he stopped twice to dismantle two roadside memorials, one with a Raggedy Ann doll tied to a mouldering Styrofoam cross. He knew where grief belonged (second rib to the right, and straight on into the dark night of the soul), and he did not believe it should be installed on the side of the road where it could suck up car fumes, flicked butts, clouds of dust, and the appalled looks of strangers. On average there was more than enough grief to go around; no honestly, you didn’t have to share yours with others. He tossed the works into his trunk and continued on. Rennie had not had a kitsch immunity herself, but she would not have wanted to be memorialized by some tacky readymade from death’s arts and crafts bazaar. Quietly borne pain was sheer and dignified.
He then engaged in another selfless act by taking a side trip to Claymore to pick up a couple of bottles of plonk. Who knows, he might have to do some entertaining later. He was a firm believer in the twelve-step program, which is how he got his exercise, walking those twelve steps from the car to the door of the liquor store. Sometimes he ran, even better. Monday afternoon, and Claymore’s confirmed drinkers had all come and gone, including the realtor Hunt had told him about, who drove out here every day for his forty-ouncer of vodka so that word wouldn’t get around Farclas. Words do, though, they have a way.
In the nearly empty LCBO parking lot, he executed a smooth landing, sliding in beside a truck the size of a small house. It so happened that the owner of the truck chose this moment to emerge from the store carrying a case of 24. He gave Chellis a dirty look, which Chellis gave right back. The guy had a wispy grey ponytail, tightly cinched (rural facelift), a grog-blossom (red nose), and what is known in the Hick Lit genre as a slackened jaw – gravity exerting itself on the trans fat packed into his jowls. Surely it wasn’t the burden of too many dental fillings that was making his mouth hang open to that extent? Not that Chellis had expected anything more debonair from a Claymore resident. The one thing he couldn’t fault, however, was the agility with which the guy scaled the truck’s cab and seated himself inside, all without getting a nosebleed. In recognition of this athletic feat, Chellis gave him a friendlier nod, and was himself rewarded with a one finger wave, nor was it the middle finger. If their relationship continued improving at this rate, they’d soon be tearing into that case of beer, but as it was, the guy pulled out of the parking lot and peeled off downtown to the law firm of Dyer Nutt Maroon LLP, where he was a senior partner specializing in litigation.
That’s what the clerk in the store said anyway when asked, and Chellis laughed merrily, always appreciative of a good joke. He got along so well with the clerk, a young man named Suzie, according to his bronze name tag, that Chellis honoured the store with a grander level of his custom and bought two bottles from the vintages section. This being Claymore there were only two bottles in the vintages section, a Côtes du Rhône and a Barolo. (So there Vaughan!)
At the cash, Suzie expressed sympathy for Chellis’s injuries, the ones on his temples that were now concealed beneath two round bandages the size of poker chips.
“Someone shoot ya in the head?”
“Not yet.”
Suzie continued his scrutiny, so Chellis offered, “Shock therapy.”
“Yeah? Awesome.”
It only then occurred to Chellis that his anxieties had diminished considerably since applying the Calm Balm to his beleaguered noggin. He felt more centred, more focused. Downright genial. “You haven’t noticed a silver Lexus in town lately, have you?”
“Sure. Bogus car. Guy stopped here yesterday, bought a bottle of Veuve.”
“Alone?”
“Nah, had some old lady in the car. Know how fast those babies go?”
“Old ladies? Pretty fast. Especially if you’re chasing one with a golf club.”
“Yeah, eh.”
“What did she look like, this old lady?”
“The usual. White hair, I dunno, old. You shoulda seen the hubcaps on her.”
“Whoa, sorry I missed those.” Cars were individuals, whereas women over a certain age were a genre. “Lots of excitement in town lately?”
“I’ll say.” Suzie finally rang up the sale and bagged the wine. “Bin like a movie.”
Such was modern life. “Who did it, do you think?”
“You did.”
“Me?” Calm blue oceans, calm blue oceans.
“Joke.”
Compound joking and from a genuine Claymoronian. “Whew, you had me worried there. Where was I the night of . . .?”
“Like, I know you’re a detective, eh. Can’t fool me. You wanta know what I think?”
“Tell me, Suzie.”
“Suzie?”
“In my professional capacity, I noticed your, umm . . . .”
“This?” He glanced down, acknowledging the name tag, but not the name. “We all wear this. Only tag in the store.”
“How democratic. So, your solution to the crime?”
“Gotta be somebody from Farclas. Bunch of sickos. Did you hear about that guy who tried to kill the bookstore clerk? You gotta be queer anyways to work in a place like that, but really, eh.”
Chellis suddenly found himself at the door. “Must be on my way, no rest for the wicked. Bodies are littering the streets even as we speak. Ciao, Suzie.” Queen-for-a-Day.
>
He almost made it through the door, too, before hearing the deal-concluding curse of the service industry, “Enjoy!”
Enjoy? I don’t think so. Not knowing that Mrs. Havlock was . . . what? What was she doing hanging out with Dick Major, and what did the two of them have to celebrate? Curious choice of beverage, the Widow Cliquot’s intoxicating invention (and why couldn’t Elaine invent something like that?). Chellis motored out of Claymore and back onto the main road, very much in a mulling mood. If the afternoon hadn’t been so far advanced, he might have driven downtown to ogle the crime scene for himself, perhaps even drop in on Dyer Nutt Maroon for a beer and a fix of legal expertise, or to see if the firm even existed. (Mr. Maroon? A dyed-in-the-wool relative of Mr. Pink? Come on.) Fiction filtered so surreptitiously into everyday life that you had to keep your eye on it. But not banish it altogether. That would be too too boring. Besides, it was so useful.
Fact: Elaine’s friend Melissa Thoms had died while out with Dick on the night of a Sadie Hawkins high-school dance. She had invited him.
Fact: She should not have. Although ancillary to the group, Plutonic in the distance of his orbit and non-planetary status, Chellis had caught the roguish wink Dick had aimed at the boys.
The tragedy had been the town’s own Chappaquidick in the view of some, Elaine in particular. In Chellis’s view it was an even greater tragedy to place it in the same context, making it a diminished popular culture knock-off. Driving back in the small hours from a lovers’ lane session on some country road outside of Farclas, Dick’s car had swerved on loose gravel moments before crossing the town bridge. His car spun through the guardrails and flipped into the river. Dick managed to escape, and Mel didn’t.
Fact: Dick’s father was one of the town’s prominent businessmen. No autopsy was deemed necessary for Mel.
Fiction: Dick hadn’t “touched a drop” that night.