by Andrew Pyper
Something in the force of these words lubricates my joints, and I'm launched toward the door. But Randy beats me to it.
"You figure Thiessen's Hardware is still open out on King?" he says. "Because I'm guessing neither of us packed gloves and flashlights."
Randy suggested we wait to go in at midnight. Yet when I pointed out that it got dark at seven this time of year and asked what was to be gained by waiting around another five hours, he had no answer, other than "Isn't this the sort of stuff you do at midnight?"
We're up in Ben's room, passing around a mickey of Lamb's that Randy picked up on the way over. It helps. The rum's warmth lends some humour to the situation. We are nothing more than a pair of grown men contemplating a harmless stunt. The hiring of a stag-party stripper or cocooning the groom's car in toilet paper.
"Did you like it?" Randy asks after a couple swallows. "The whole nightclub business. Was it what you wanted?"
"It was very profitable for a time."
"I'm not asking about that:"
"I know you're not." Randy passes the bottle and I take a swallow. "Okay. This is going to sound ridiculous."
"And what we're doing tonight isn't?"
"I think I worked so hard the past fifteen years to build something I could hide behind," I say. "People think anybody who runs a place like mine is in it for the girls or the dope or having people stop to look as you drive by in your Merc with the personalized Retox plates. But honestly, I didn't really care about any of that."
"Doesn't sound too bad to me."
"It wasn't. It was neither good nor bad, nor anything. It was just this thoughtless, gleaming, perfect skin I could wear."
I hold the Lamb's out to Randy, who takes a glug. And then another.
"It's a funny thing," he says. "But I think I was trying to do the exact opposite."
"How's that?"
"All this time I've been working to take my skin off Show what lies beneath. Which might sound like drama school crap, but I believed it."
"You didn't seem to take it too seriously."
"But I did.," he says, passing the bottle back to me. '"Just act normal.' Remember?"
"Acting was more than just a job for you? That what you're saying?"
"It wasn't a job at all. In fact, it's the job part that I hate."
"Or not getting the job."
"Yes. That sucks too."
I try to screw the cap back onto the bottle, but my fingers aren't cooperating, so I take another drink instead and leave it open.
"I've never understood something about the whole drama thing," I say.
"What?"
"Are actors faking being someone else or opening up what they already are?"
"The lousy ones—the ones like me-—are just making faces and saying lines they memorized. The good ones become."
"Become what?"
"Something new out of something they've always been."
Randy appears reflective, and at first I suspect it is the beginning of a routine, a comic mask of seriousness he's put on to set a mood before delivering the punchline. But when he speaks next, it doesn't sound anything like humour.
"You know what the worst part of getting old is?"
"Old?" I say. "We're only forty, Randy."
"Don't give me that 'only forty' bullshit. Because I know you know what I'm talking about."
"Okay, you got me. What's the worst part?"
"Realizing you haven't done a goddamn thing with your life."
"There's only so many Nobel Prizes to go around."
"It doesn't have to be that big. Nobody else even needs to know about it other than you. It just has to be, I don't know, remarkable."
"There's still time."
"I don't think so," Randy says, and the lost look in his eyes is suddenly real, a joke-repellent sadness. "That's all I've wanted since I left this place. To do one small, remarkable thing. It could have changed everything."
"Changed you, you mean?"
"Everything."
Outside, the wind blows night over the town. A grey sand that settles on the roof shingles and in the crooks of tree limbs. Randy is watching it come when he asks, for the first time out loud, a question I have asked myself a thousand times before.
"Who is he?" he says.
"I don't know."
"What do you think he wants?"
"I've got a theory on that one."
"Shoot."
"More."
"More what?"
"Whatever it is someone might be able to give him. More of themselves."
"The worst part of themselves."
"Exactly."
"It's like he pushes you."
"And he does it by pretending he knows you," I say. "He's almost sympathetic, you know? We're all flawed, all have impure thoughts, no big deal. So let's have some fun. He makes it feel like the two of you are best friends."
"Except he actually hates you," Randy says. "He hates you, and he wants you to rot and hate in there with him."
It's night now. Dinnertime, though it could be any of the long hours between now and the reluctant October dawn. This, and our talk of the boy, has chilled the previous illusion of good humour and left us stone-faced and cold, wishing for homes we haven't known for half a lifetime.
"This was my idea, so I guess I ought to lead the way," I announce finally, working my way to the top of the attic stairs. For the time it takes me to reach the second-floor landing, I can't hear any steps behind me and figure Randy has decided to stay behind. Yet when I look back he is there.
"Night, Mrs. McAuliffe," I call through her closed bedroom door as we pass.
"You boys try to stay out of trouble!"
"In Grimshaw?"
"Oh, you can find trouble just about anywhere if you're looking for it," the old woman says, and from under the door, the light from her bedside lamp retreats into shadow.
Just as we crossed Caledonia Street with the intention of entering the Thurman house when we were sixteen, we don't even try the front door, and instead prowl along the hedgerow to the back. On our way, I measure the side windows that look into the living room, half expecting to still see the fuckt drawn into the dust. But there is no message there at all now except for the streaks of condensation that have left lines over the glass like tear stains.
The backyard is the same as I remember it, if smaller. The rusted swing set and see-saw built for dwarves, the fence around the lot that looks like even I could heave myself over it if I came at it with a little speed.
And then we look up at the back of the house, and it seems to have grown over the second we took our eyes off it. The brick arse of the place looming over where we stand, the windows unshuttered and lightless. The headless rooster weather vane spinning left, then right, then back again, as though trying to decide which way offers the best route for escape.
"It's just the same as every other place along this street," Randy whispers. "So why is it the only one that's so friggin' ugly?"
"Because it's not the same as every other place," I answer, and start toward the back door.
Start, then stop. Wait for Randy to take my arm for a few steps when my legs refuse to carry me any closer.
"You okay?" he asks, and with my nod, he goes in.
Which leaves me on my own. And I'm turning around. Ready to get as far from the bad smell that exhales from the open doorway as my feet are prepared to take me.
Hold on, Trev, the boy says. You don't want Handy Randy to see the show without you, do you?
No. I want to see the show too.
From the kitchen, Randy asks where I've got to. Then I'm in too. The sound of Randy's steps pacing over the curled linoleum. Along with the internal cold that signals the arrival of a virus. A sensation located more in the mind than the body. A degradation. The unshakeable idea that, in merely being here, I have shamed myself.
"How do you want to do this?" Randy asks once I feel my way to where he is.
I don't know. But let's
stay together, I want to say, but instead say, "I'll take the cellar. You look around on this floor and upstairs."
"Better you than me."
Then he's gone.
It could be courage that has me shuffle over to the cellar door and push it open, staring down into the dark, but it doesn't feel like it. It is merely a surrender to the next moment.
What's suddenly clear is that it wasn't Tracey Flanagan who brought me here. I am here because the house was lonely for me. And in a way I can't possibly explain, I am lonely for it too.
I turn on the flashlight, and an orb of yellow plays over the stairwell's plaster walls.
But there is nothing to see. I'll have to go down there to find whatever might be found. And it's not something I am able to do without someone else going down first. Or being pushed.
Pushed. The last time I stood here I'd wondered the same thing. Wondered if Carl, who stood behind me, was someone else entirely. Someone wearing a convincing Carl suit.
But it was Carl, only changed in the way all of us had been changed.
"It's different," he had said at the time, and I hadn't known what he'd meant. Though I do now.
I'm three steps down when I hear Randy's voice. Speaking my name from the other end of the hall. Careful not to shout, as though trying not to disturb another's sleep.
I backstep up the cellar stairs and scuff to the hall. Randy is standing against the front door, so that at first I think he's trying to prevent it from opening. But as I get closer I see that his back isn't touching the door at all.
"Up there," he whispers.
Now the two of us stand at the bottom of the stairs. Nervous suitors waiting for our prom dates to come down.
But when someone appears at the top of the stairs it's not a girl in a chiffon dress. It isn't Tracey Flanagan, and it isn't the boy. It's one of us, unshaven and hunched. Alive but with all the years of regret and negligence written over him like a useless map.
This is what frightens Randy and me, what we can see clearly for the first time:
There is the unreal.
And then there is the real, which can sometimes be the more surprising of the two.
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 13
I didn't ask Ben how the coach had managed to get untied and take the gun from him. We walked out the back door together without talking of the boy, or the scene the blue light of the passing snowplow had revealed to me upstairs. Ben just crossed Caledonia Street and shuffled up the front steps of his house, kicked his boots against the wall to knock off the snow and slipped inside. I looked back at the Thurman house, half expecting some new display in one of its windows, but each pane of glass was a hollow iris, taking in me, the street, the slumbering homes of Grimshaw, giving nothing in return.
I don't remember speaking to my parents when I came in (my father captaining the remote, my mother asleep sitting up on the sofa, a basket of half-folded laundry at her feet—their usual evening positions). It was strange how, after all that had happened in the house that night, I walked out and didn't speak a word to anyone until the next morning, when I called Carl and, before he could say hello, blurted out "It's over" as if we'd been dating.
"I know."
"We have to let him go, Carl."
"I know."
"And last night, Ben and I were with him, and—"
"Not on the phone."
"You don't understand."
"Fuck you I don't."
"I saw something. There was—"
He hung up.
Ten minutes later we were walking over to the Thurman house together.
Why had I called Carl and only Carl? There was no choice, really. It could only have been him puffing steam out his nose, telling me to shut up every time I tried to explain what happened the night before, his eyes darting between the houses on either side of us, alert to witnessing stares.
It was early enough that there was little traffic on the streets. Still, we approached the house by way of the back lane and slipped through the break in the fence.
As soon as we were through, we both stopped. The house looked different somehow, though it took a moment to figure out how.
"Did you leave the door open last night?" Carl said.
"No."
"Did Ben?"
"I was the last one out."
Carl started toward the back door. His gait— rolling shoulders and old warrior's limp—suggested the weariness of a man charged with completing a serious task, but been thwarted at every turn by his forced partnership with children.
I followed him in. By the time my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, Carl was already heading down the cellar stairs. Neither of us had brought flashlights, thinking (if we thought of it at all) that the morning's sunlight would be sufficient. But there were only two half-buried windows in the cellar. It was barely enough for me to see Carl standing just a few feet from where I had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
"Oh fuck," he said.
I went forward to put my shoulder against his, peered into the near darkness beyond.
Emptiness. No, not that. Not only that. The cords we'd used to tie the coach to the post now a loose coil on the ground.
"We'll find him," I said.
"He's probably at the cop shop right now."
"No. They would have come for us already."
"You think he just went home and asked his wife to fry him some eggs and not to worry about where he's been the last three days?"
"I don't think he ever planned to go home after this."
"Right, right," Carl said, his thoughts so rushed it seemed to be causing him pain. "So why bother looking for him? We were going to let him go anyway."
"We need to make sure he's okay."
"Why wouldn't he be?"
"Because he was in here alone."
Carl shuffled closer to the post. Bent to inspect the cords.
"These haven't been cut."
"I tied him."
"You sure?"
"I was here, Carl. You weren't."
"Maybe I should have been."
He stood. Put his hands in his pockets, took them out again.
I said, "I'm not arguing with you right now."
"Is there something you want to argue about?"
"I'm saying we should get out of here. Look for the coach. If we can find him, maybe we can—"
"How are we going to find him, Trev? Put up posters? 'LOST—Half-Starved English Teacher. Contents of Teenager's Piggy Bank Offered in Reward'?"
"At least I'm trying."
"You fucking should."
"What's that mean?"
"Just that the last time I was down here, the coach was tied to that post and my gun was in the workbench drawer."
Our brains were running at the same speed. They must have been, because it took both of us the same one second to turn to see the workbench drawer upside down on the earth floor.
We both went for it. Carl got there first. Kicked the drawer instead of turning it over with his hand, either to prevent leaving his fingerprints or because he needed to kick something if not me.
The revolver was gone.
"Shit," Carl said. "This is some seriously shitty shit."
"He wasn't even supposed to know it was there."
"Unless somebody showed him."
"You're blaming me for this too?"
"I said 'somebody.'"
"Who? Why would one of us do that?"
"Maybe it wasn't one of us."
Carl faced me. What I could read in the lips, suddenly gulping for his next mouthful of air, made it clear. He had seen something too.
Laughter. Coming from upstairs. The coach's, along with at least one other. Whinnying and cruel.
I can't remember if Carl started up the cellar stairs first or if I did. But we were both running, clutching handfuls of the house's cold air and throwing it behind us.
The laughter was now impossibly loud, a chorus of false
joy shrieking out from the cracks in the walls. Sound so dense it thickened the space we moved through, slowing us to the floating leaps of astronauts.
Carl rounded through the kitchen and down the main hall. The nylon of his parka squeaking through my fingers as I followed a half-stride behind him. And then, in the next second, he was pulling away. Because I made the mistake of glancing into the living room on the way past.
There was the boy. Standing behind a naked Heather Langham, his pants a coil of denim around his ankles.
The two of them framed by the tall side window, the fuckt still there, Heather's fingers cutting lines around the letters. The boy slapping himself against her, oblivious to anything but his grip on her waist.
Then he spun his head around to face me. Except it wasn't the boy's face. It was mine.
"Trevor!"
Carl was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me quizzically, knowing I'd seen something.
I could have run past him, opened the front door (if it could be opened) and left Carl on his own to find out what the boy and the coach found so funny. There was no one left to save, after all. Whatever we'd done, and the reasons we'd first done it, didn't mean anything anymore.
Yet when Carl started up the stairs, I was right behind him. When I got to the landing, he was already halfway down the hall, led by the laughter that was coming from the one partly open door. The same doorway through which I'd seen the boy standing over a facedown female body on the bed.
Carl slowed. It wasn't cowardice that held me there, watching, but a command.
Carl's turn first.
He booted the door open.
Then a cowardly thought did enter my mind: I didn't need to know what Carl now knew. A second-hand report would be enough. And judging by the stricken look on Carl's face, what was to be seen belonged to a different level of awfulness altogether. It was the party the boy had invited us to.
But instead of doing what I meant to—turn around and start back down the stairs—I made my way along the hallway to where Carl stood outside the boy's childhood bedroom.
Because that's what it was, wasn't it? A room that, in its past, had been caught in the uncomfortable in-between of small-town sixteen, of the age and place I was myself.
"Carl?" My voice girlish in the empty hallway.