UNCLE LUD
By the time Bryan dropped us back on the corner of Fuller and James, the day felt more than half spent. I knew Uncle Lud was waiting. Still I would have given anything to linger away the afternoon with Tessa. Fat chance. She had her own clamorous demands waiting at home, and although Tessa would tease and laugh when we were all together, when we were alone, she shifted away from me, sinking quickly back into an inscrutable girl, the girl who would not be hurt by some boy. And I ceased to be her lifelong friend, instead—owing to an unfortunate incident a year or so ago—morphing into another ham-handed guy with itchy fingers. So Tessa would head toward the railroad tracks alone, while I would turn reluctantly in the opposite direction, always pausing to glance back and watch her in her tight jeans and too-big shirt and ratty red sneakers, her arms swinging and chin high until she reached the last corner and her shoulders slumped, her head began to bow.
Often, I did follow Tessa all the way to her own doorstep, just to make sure she was safe, I told myself. I would watch as her sister’s kids fell upon her, every one of them demanding, demanding, and the old man, her grandfather, began calling out for a glass of wrist-warm tea, a blanket, a hand closing a window. That sister would shriek for Tessa to shut those kids—her own kids—up. Tessa, surrounded, bore it all just as calm as could be, but all the bounce and quiet electricity of our time together had vanished as if that bunch had stolen it outright. I could imagine how a fellow might rush in and push them all aside, grab Tessa’s hand, and run in the opposite direction, away from town, away even from the railroad tracks, that constant symbol of escape, until our feet were beating at air and the mountain itself opened to us.
It’s hard to say, given the troubles visited on us, that Tessa had it the hardest, but still I think we’d all say she had—she did. Her parents had thought they’d discovered ease and good times in drink, and then rebuffed and awakened, they drank even more to blur the trash-filled rooms they found themselves in, those big-eyed children always needing something—a diaper, a shoe, another bowl of cereal. Tessa’s parents’ thirst was legendary and unmatchable, and like most heartbroken people, they were also magnets for trouble, which—it was generously noted—they greeted almost stoically, feigning indifference at the crap that relentlessly came their way through their own doing or not. They didn’t raise much fuss when Social Services came along and collected Tessa, her older sister, and their younger brother and deposited them into a rat’s nest of foster homes in another town altogether, none of them much better than what they’d been rescued from. Tessa and I had been eleven then, and I’d known full-on heartbreak for the first time. A year later, her father had a car accident and died, and the mother sobered up enough so that Tessa and her sister could come home and watch her die too, the grandfather, no gift himself, taking over. The brother was too damaged. He’d been in one raging fight after another and they locked him up in a detention center. Tessa, an ever-laughing girl who’d mastered the hands-on-her-hip look-down in grade four, assessing clueless ten-year-old boys as if they had potential, that high-spirited Tessa came back to her old friends after that two-year absence pinched and quiet with a tough resignation that reminded us of the old grannies. My heart hurt to see her, but the couple of times I’d tried to kiss her, lumbering over her, as we were walking alone together, she’d flown at me in a fury.
“She should see a therapist,” Bryan said when he asked about the scratches on my face. Bryan’s mother wasn’t sick then, and he fancied himself a ladies’ man, taking one girl or another down behind the railroad depot, as if he were working through a list. This was before all his other friends, like that Dean, started becoming fathers and Trevor clamped down. Bryan’s father didn’t mind the drinking Bryan did then, but he was pretty convinced that if Bryan got family-happy, he would be the one who would have to support them all. Kind of curious, given the current conditions. But Bryan didn’t think about all that then. He was always egging me on, which is how I got the courage to try for Tessa in the first place. Bryan was flummoxed by my bad luck, Tessa’s reaction.
“They got those therapists up at the Centre now, pretty much free, Ursie says.”
Both of us had mulled that idea over for a moment before busting out laughing. We couldn’t help but remember Jackie’s comments after her altercation with the local peace officers, who’d suggested, not altogether kindly, that Jackie see one of those counselors herself. They’d suggested one in particular, a butter-handed man with anxious eyes and a bad comb-over. He liked to make house calls, his cheap blue car filthy with dust from the backcountry roads.
“Piss on that,” she told Bryan and me. “You ever notice that if you look close at it, ‘therapist’ is the same as ‘the rapist’? No coincidence there.”
For Jackie, the Bad Man could hide anywhere, even in the middle of a word. Ever after, she would chide anyone she knew who went to see a counselor.
Going off to see the rapist? she’d taunt before following with warnings: Don’t get into his Gremlin, ’kay? Seats got no springs, pedal got no brakes and him neither. Man says he knows hypnosis, then you better run, eh? Bastard’s got a notepad, you bet, every word you say going down in a file. Better stay crazy, fucked up, huh?
Bryan says you know a girl likes you if she gets real loud whenever she sees you, but the only time Tessa yelled around me was when she was chasing me off, so either that meant she has no use for me or . . . oh, hell, I didn’t know. Still, it was Tessa who came to sit with me at lunch at school, handing off her sandwich after ever-hungry, big lout that I am wolfed down my own; Tessa, who even last year stood between me and other girls who would let me fondle them, her fists slightly clenched as if she were claiming territory. And for all her sweet look, that big grin and long fall of streaky hair, she still ignored every other fellow as well, even Bryan’s toasty friend Dean, who hovered around, believing for way too long in the powerful charisma that had seduced every other grade-ten girl. Dean is long gone these days, but I haven’t been one who’s mourned him.
Still there were times when I tried to conjure up Dean’s ways, looking for seduction tips, anything to keep Tessa close to me long enough for me to change her mind and win her. All the way down the logging roads that morning, all along the highway, I had gazed off into the woods, glimpsing a dance of those golden God’s rays flickering between the trees, and I had felt a roiling building within me, a longing for Tessa that made me almost physically sick. The window beside me was open and blasting air as Bryan barreled down the highway. My long hair whipped around so that Tessa began batting it away from her own eyes. On a normal day, I would have shrunk away from her, holding my hair with one hand, desperate not to bother her. The day of Hana Swann, I half-leaned out the window, gulping air, and when Bryan finally downshifted for the turn into town and I was jolted backward against Tessa, the violence cheered me as if it were one clear answer to my yearning, and for a long moment I leaned against Tessa as if daring her to shrug me off.
When, once on the sidewalk with Bryan’s truck rumbling away, Tessa squeezed my arm, I couldn’t believe it. She was half a block away before I truly felt her touch, a compression that reached my heart in stages. Although Tessa had vaulted the half-size cinder-block wall by the railroad tracks and was nearly out of view, I found myself leaping blindly across Fuller to follow her.
I barely made it. I heard the squeal of tires, a promised acceleration, and with instincts well honed from my battles with my mother’s own terrible driving, I flew across Fuller, tossing the gun duffle ahead of me, and grabbed a lamppost as a car pealed by, its hubcaps scraping the curb. I was making a good show of myself, I was sure, as I wobbled in midair, hugging the metal pole. I caught sight of a Nagle brother, the older one, of course, mocking me from the open window of that flash orange car they were driving that week, a middle finger jabbed toward me.
The Nagles again: cripes, what hopes their clueless mother must have had for them. She’d even go
ne and christened them Godfrey and Markus, like they’d be real men one day with permanent postal addresses and government-issued pensions. Markus, given a better model, might have had bullied his way into regular company, causing the usual amount of trouble a big white guy who liked to drink might cause.
Bur Godfrey . . . Godfrey was something else. God-Free, he used to announce himself in grade school, as if declaring his intentions even at that young age. Along the line, he’d transformed into GF, pretending to be like his famous ancestor, the pioneer G. F. MacFlouggle. The current GF was a rager, a criminal to the core. For all anyone knew, G. F. MacFlouggle had been a rager—and a rapist and thief and gambling cheat—as well. The local bands still used “Flouggling,” a curse that Uncle Lud told me covered everything from penny-pinching to pissing in public to stealing a wife. He had a way of showing up when you were most vulnerable, the threat so palpable I still wondered how I’d survived all these years without a real beating, a knife wound, a burning accident. If the devil had Flacker in his pocket, he had GF Nagle on a string and he dangled him continually in our midst.
Bryan had taken over a little dealing for the Nagles after his friend Dean died. In that last note, left down in the basement with him, Dean had suggested as much, even pointing out that Markus was the easier brother to deal with, and a desperate Bryan grasped the opportunity, only much later realizing the trouble he’d invited was the same trouble that had chased his friend Dean to another world. He started keeping guns, cocked and loaded and pointed down, behind the curtains by both the front and back doors.
“If they ever come here,” Bryan had told Ursie, “don’t you hesitate. They won’t.”
Meanwhile, he’d kept on with the Nagles. He had to once he started. No way they’d let any useful association slide, and Bryan was desperate for money, of course. Which is how he’d come to Flacker’s in the first place and seen those Magnuson kids. Me, I would have never gone back. Even as I recognized GF, saw the sneer that came whenever GF was ready to go after a “dirty Indian,” I tried to close my eyes. But here was Hana Swann again, that long neck thrown back in laughter, and God help me, I threw the finger right back at GF Nagle.
Still clinging to the lamppost, I saw the brake lights scream on as if my own chicken heart had finally lit up, and I was wondering how far up that pole I could actually climb as the orange Matador circled back, the door already half open, one fist pushing outward. I hung on tight. GF was going to have to pull me down. And he would have too, I guess, if just then Kenny Dargarh hadn’t driven by in his fire chief’s truck, eyeballing GF and me and the duffle on the sidewalk below me until—and I could see it happen—I changed color before the fire chief’s eyes, shading into a tanned white, and Kenny Dargarh recognized me as Karl and Evie Kreutzer’s son and Lud’s nephew, and then (shading again), more important, he recognized me as the baby cousin of his treasured dispatcher, Trudy Samson, not simply another stoned Indian dangling halfway up a lamppost.
“You’re screwed, asswipe,” GF was saying, even as Kenny pulled a U-turn and drew his official four-by-four up onto the curb behind the orange Matador. GF took off then, folding himself back into the car as nonchalantly as he could, but not before cutting me one last look.
“I don’t forget,” he said. “I’ll see you again.”
As if for good measure, he gave me the finger one more time as the Matador took off with a screech of tires. Kenny Dargarh grimaced. He’d had his own run-ins with the Nagles, who even on these bone-dry days threw lit cigarettes out car windows and trampled fire-zone blockades. Kenny sent me a quick, beleaguered wave and lingered by the curb with his windows open, listening to a garbled radio transmission until that Matador was well away and I’d jumped back to the sidewalk and managed my own awkward nod.
Despite Kenny’s presence, I cast one more look back in the direction in which Tessa had vanished, my heart in tatters, before shouldering the duffle and walking the blocks from Fuller to Lamplight Hill, wishing as always that I had a car of my own. My mother seemed to believe that she was saving me from certain death by keeping me afoot, conveniently putting out of mind the fact that I often cadged rides with drivers like Bryan, whose vehicles had damaged souls of their own, demented by bad roads and worse weather, and were given to startling lapses or lunges that provoked continual near-misses. And if I complained aloud about the boggling inconvenience of not having a car to use, she might make an absurd offer.
“I’ll take you,” she’d say without a hint of sarcasm, as if I’d arrive at a party down some deserted lane with my mum, whose own driving skills could be judged by the three banged-up fenders on our old maroon station wagon. The back door was almost fully staved in too. Only the fourth fender appeared untouched. A still-pristine radiant blue, it had only recently replaced the worst of them, so bent up, my mother couldn’t fully turn the wheel.
Bryan long ago declared he couldn’t let me be such a pussy, and he’d set out to teach me how to drive, but he soon tired of being a passenger in his own lurching truck and he, too, rapidly transformed into an old auntie, chiding me about clutches and gear-grinding until we were both happy to go back to the way it was. In a pinch—meaning if Bryan ever was so blind drunk he couldn’t drive—I could theoretically take over now, or so we told ourselves.
At home, I kicked off my dust-spattered sneakers behind the back door, emptied the duffle and shoved it behind the boots, pushed the guns back up on the high shelf where my father kept them, and nudged a box of pellets back into the holding cupboard’s sticky bottom drawer. For a moment I thought again of that golden light that had pursued us down the logging road and, dazed, I lingered in the utility room. The heated scent of the marten must have rubbed right into my fingertips, because as I pushed back my hair, damp from my long walk up the hill, the spicy scent of fur and blood nearly became visible; it was that sudden and strong. Right in front of me, my father’s chainsaw lay on the middle shelf, a reminder that I needed to sharpen it before he arrived home next month from his work up on the pipeline, and idly, I began to run my finger along the blade’s outside edge, remembering Hana Swann’s lean white forearm balanced against the gun. I was just thinking “sticky” when I noticed the thin ridge of blood on my fingertips and felt the sting. At the same moment, all four dogs began the joyful howls that heralded the arrival of my mother’s station wagon with its rattling muffler onto Lamplight Drive. Except for the oldest, Norbee, the dogs hadn’t roused themselves for me, and even Norbee had given me only the vaguest of old-dog nods. But all the dogs—one half-blind, one three-legged, one so whipped she wouldn’t raise her head, and ancient wobbly Norbee—came out of the shade into the blistering heat to ready themselves for a swarm around my mother, saint to their crippled souls.
While she parked and went through the ritual of greeting the dogs and fussing over their water bowls, I had time to wrap a kitchen towel around my wound—turned out it was only my middle finger that had grazed the blade—glance at Uncle Lud (sleeping, it seemed, in the lounge chair), slip into my room and spread my books over the desk, and turn on the antiquated computer my mother had purchased from the shelter when the town upgraded. By the time I found the Band-Aids and covered my scratch, I could hear her kitchen clatter, followed soon by her always-comical idea of a whisper, a hiss so loud the dogs began to whimper again outside the back door, sure she was summoning them for a treat.
“Leo . . . hss . . . lunch.”
In the kitchen, tomato soup was warming in the pan, despite the heat. A tuna sandwich already cut in half and waiting on a plate for me. The fan in the corner was flinging air around in a tight circle, but my mother’s forehead glistened.
“What page are you on?” she asked as she reached across the counter to pour a long, gliding arc of milk into my glass. The pure swell of it conjured up Hana Swann, and for a moment, I was speechless as if I had no clue what my mother was talking about.
In the fall, I would return to Se
condary for my last year. My father planned for me to continue on to the Mining College, where he had once taken courses, while my mother reminded me daily that I was not responsible for fulfilling my father’s dreams. Apparently, however, I was on the hook for her dreams. Ever since I had won a rash of school awards in grade six—big success story, me—my mother had been mapping out my future university career, making lists of prerequisites for a dozen professional endeavors, then laying each before me the way I imagined tasks were presented to those godforsaken heroes in Uncle Lud’s fairy tales: climb a mountain; kill a golden phoenix; outwit a sorcerer. I would call that unnecessary busywork. My mother calls it preparation for salvation. Really. Salvation. Her greatest fear is that I’ll graduate from childhood an addled drifter, still roaming around town like the Nagle brothers. If I do, I say it will be entirely her fault.
“I could have a breakdown,” I’ve told her. “That happens when a mind is overtaxed.”
Whenever I say this, my mother laughs, and if her cousin, the fire dispatcher, is nearby, Trudy actually snorts and whacks me hard on the shoulder.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain Page 6