by Daniel Perry
NOBODY LOOKS
THAT YOUNG HERE
ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 147
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NOBODY LOOKS
THAT YOUNG HERE
DANIEL PERRY
TORONTO • BUFFALO • LANCASTER (U.K.)
2018
Copyright © 2018, Daniel Perry and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Michael Mirolla, editor
David Moratto, interior and cover design
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017960392
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Perry, Daniel, 1982-
[Short stories. Selections]
Nobody looks that young here / Daniel Perry.
(Essential prose series ; 147)
Short stories.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-251-9 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-252-6 (EPUB).
-- ISBN 978-1-77183-253-3 (Kindle)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 147
PS8631.E77933A6 2018C813’.6C2017-907295-1C2017-907296-X
For my parents, with love
L’adolescence ne laisse un bon souvenir qu’aux adultes ayant mauvaise mémoire.
— François Truffaut
Contents
Projections
Territory
Five Stages of Sorry
Respect
Big Man
Bondo
Tabaco Babies
Eyesore
Hyperbolic
Mercy
Young Buck
Swept Up
The Expiry Dates
Precision
Comets
Ode
Nobody Looks That Young Here
Afterword
About the Author
Projections
YOU’VE ALWAYS PRESUMED there’s a Highway 402, but as it’s nowhere near Toronto you were never sure. No loss. It’s not a lifeline like 401 or even 403 — it’s just four empty lanes over a hundred flat kilometres, London to the border at Sarnia. It closes off a triangle on the map with its thick blue strip and Old 40, Sarnia to Chatham, and the 401 from Chatham to London, a shape with no more lines inside it. The old roads are still there, but now maintenance is up to the counties. The counties have let the asphalt crumble.
Currie — Your Town, you call it — is dead centre of the triangle, Exit 60 off 402. The sign still reads Population 20,000, but these days I doubt it’s five. In the windows of the yellow brick movie theatre, bed sheets sag and reveal the lobby floor littered with cheap toys that belong to the new owner’s kids. Behind the black double doors at the back, the forty red seats sit as empty as they did when they were mine.
IN CURRIE, IF you don’t work at the Ritter Pulley plant or teach school you’re likely unemployed. You might commute one way or the other on 402, or you might have retired here for the quaint small-town life you now know is a myth. This place is nothing like Muskoka or where you skied in Vermont: no beaches, no mountains, and an hour’s drive from one not-so-Great Lake or the other. There isn’t even a weathered copy of the Currie Township Seed-Tribune to flutter down the empty street, template headline THANK YOU [BUSINESS NAME] FOR [NUMBER OF YEARS], because last year, 2008, the Seed-Tribune was that business.
Teenagers are all that drifts through town now. They work briefly at Canada’s smallest Canadian Tire or the Giant Tiger store, the Tim Hortons or McDonalds rest stops on the highway, and either blow all their money on movies at the Forest City Eightplex in London or save it to get the hell out of here.
MY OLDER BROTHER SCOTT had it figured, I think. He was nearly eighteen when he bought the rusty VW bus from Herm Mueller’s scrapyard and agreed to pay in labour. I was fourteen then, and stupid, so I believed him when he told me that if I covered his shifts the days he couldn’t work I’d get to drive it too, once I had my licence. We spent months fixing it up, and the day it finally turned over was pretty much the last I saw of Scott. He left one night and didn’t call until three days later, from the roadside in Tennessee with Claire Burford, who I’d call his girlfriend except that officially, as a cop’s kid, she was off-limits. They were trying to get to California but had mistaken the route. Scott said, “It was all Claire’s idea,” and not much else — that I should tell Mom and Dad he was okay, but not where he was.
THREE YEARS PASSED before we heard from him again. I’d stayed on at Mueller’s to pay off Scott’s van, and had also come into a grumbly Thunderbird that drank gas like a rubby. For a while Claire’s old man stopped by daily, asking when that asshole brother of mine was bringing her home, but otherwise I just tinkered every day, pulling pieces off wrecks and dropping cash into the toolbox Herm paid me from. My share went through my carburetor and the Eightplex wicket, which were stupid ways to use it as Ryerson had accepted my what-the-heck application to their brand-new economics program. It was late summer and I was packing when Scott called from Calgary, where he had settled.
“Toronto?” he said. “That’s where Claire is — in The Beaches. She married that doctor and had kids. You should look her up.”
In my mind, like everyone from Currie still does, Claire looked exactly as she did the day she finished high school — never mind what might have happened since she’d run off on Scott in New Mexico with some med student in a convertible, I imagined her standing near water and gazing into the din of the city. Her orange sundress billowed in the lake breeze. Her long chestnut hair ruffled.
“You still talk?” I said.
“Yeah, sometimes. We send emails.”
“You’re not mad at her?”
“Are you kidding? She got me out of Currie Township.”
In the background I heard a woman’s voice, but not what she was saying.
“Got to go, Dave. When do you leave again?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t ever go back,” he said.
When the call disconnected I felt like Duane from Last Picture Show. Leaving Currie for Toronto and a degree didn’t seem so different than leaving Anarene for the war, but I didn’t say I was staying away forever; it was openended, like all the best goodbye scenes. I did make myself one promise, though: if I returned, I would never lord my education over people. Currie already had one Phil Purvis, at the bank, and he was good at drowning family farms and closing small shops by rejecting loan applications.
Had I really intended to come home, I’d have studied history or English — something I could teac
h. But after what happened with Jeanie Winter, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be back.
THE WIZARD CINEMA in Currie shut down for the first time just after Scott left, when I had been old enough to go to movies alone for two years. It changed the meaning of old enough to driver’s licence overnight. I filled the next two summers with baseball and a winter and a half with hockey before replacing them with drinking and smoking, as everyone did eventually. To do anything —go bowling, see a band, eat something other than pizza or Wang’s Chinese — the first step was to get away from this town and the fading For Sale sign in the theatre window. But as it was 1976, I was stuck in ninth grade science class with a sickening crush on the studious blonde at the desk in front of mine. We capped the school year with a kiss in the gym as we slow-danced to “Free Bird”.
You’re laughing, but that’s all right. Jeanie would be, too. My parents put no stock in the relationship and neither did hers; we’d have probably wound up married, but we were just kids. Who’s to say how it would’ve gone? I have a picture in a shoebox somewhere, but I don’t look at it every night and miss her, no matter the sentimental bullshit you’ll hear in Currie Township — and for someone gone as long as I’ve been, enough crops up.
It’s like this: her death was my fault. I spent a few months afterward wandering room to room in my parents’ house — not grieving anymore, just feeling guilty — and I honour her memory with a donation to the charity the obituary suggests every time the London Free Press website runs the familiar headline: Currie teen killed in crash.
It’s always late summer, always around twilight, rock radio spilling out open windows and more kids than seatbelts in the car. In a dark grove of pines just before London, your highway swallows ours on a small hill and traffic bottlenecks. Everyone wants off 402. And once a year, a teenager fresh from the road test ploughs into the last car in line. I sign my donation, With sympathy and understanding, Dave McLaren, because in 1978, I was the one driving. I braked fast enough to minimize the impact and in the backseat, Claire’s sister Susan, Ray Tarkington and Hank Mueller were fine. So was I, and so was Garth Callaghan, who was belted shotgun. Jeanie, by then my girlfriend of two years, was unsecured on his lap. She died instantly when she was launched through the windshield, out of Currie Township head first.
IT TURNED OUT that, after its first closure, the Wizard hadn’t sat empty all those years: the owner, Abe Clark, had been living inside. He was the same age as my grandparents, who remembered his opening after the War in the forties and the cars streaming in from the township, the farm families in Sunday best. Abe was all smiles then, my Grandma Mary told me, and she and Grandpa Marvin would take Mom and her brothers every Saturday. Mom says, though, that by the time she was going alone, Abe had put his still-original staff out front to tear tickets while he hid at the concession booth and gruffly filled popcorn bags.
Mom says it didn’t matter what was playing, or what was new — only that there were movies. I’m sure I didn’t mind Bambi replays when I was little, and later, I saw 2001 way too many times in a Wizard empty save for me and Garth and of course, old Abe. His face was wizened and angular by then, and he had lost all his hair except for the long white ring behind his ears that frayed as he sniffed and grunted, now back to taking tickets. Taxi Driver was the last movie I saw there, and popcorn was on the honour system: self-serve, put a dollar in the jar. It didn’t start on time because Abe was the only person working there and we had to wait for him to lock the booth and lumber up the stairs to the projector room.
THE FALL AFTER my accident, Currie High School’s Welcome Back Assembly was a safe driving presentation as it has been every year since. That November I bought a used Chevette and took a job delivering pizzas. People picked up their orders themselves in town, so I did all my driving in the country with steaming boxes stacked on the front seat as I searched dark gravel roads for houses hundreds of yards back, pale in their barn lights. I preferred scouring the countryside to the lonely trips back to town, though, where every time I glanced sideways I’d see only the empty seat.
With this job, I saved, and when I had enough for the summer’s rent in Toronto I sold the car and bought a train ticket. People might have talked less the longer I stayed, but only because there’d have been no one left who hadn’t heard I was the guy who killed poor Jeanie Winter. In time, every secret gets dug up from Currie Township’s black clay.
AFTER GRADUATING I took the first offer I got, crunching numbers for TD in a tower on Bay Street. I’d worked there three months when my mother’s call came. Abe’s body had been found in the theatre. Apparently, some kids had heard the projector was still inside and they broke in one Friday night to steal it. The story goes that when they opened the doors the smell made them throw up. No one knows how long he’d been dead.
With my shiny new degree, Mom thought I’d be perfect to resurrect the Wizard. Post-secondary might be expected in Toronto, but it’s an oddity where I come from, so Purvis would lend money to anyone who had graduated — no matter the major. On top of this, Mom had already talked to him, and the Seed-Tribune’s only reporter, too. They all seemed to agree that a movie theatre would keep the kids off the streets, which to them wasn’t just an expression — Mom claimed eleven-to-sixteen-yearolds were roaming Main Street in packs, and sometimes spending whole afternoons just sitting on a curb. Someone had to do something, she said. I said I’d think about it — even then, businesses didn’t open in Currie, they closed one-by-one. The last new independent was Magnum Video; the pizza joint had changed names and owners so often it called itself The Pizza Joint. There were otherwise just five occupied storefronts: Wang’s, Brewskie’s Bar, Price-Mart Grocery, Darla’s Flowers and the coffee shop where the farmers still eat in dwindling numbers on weekends, Don’s Breakfast. A walk down Main Street meant remembering old signs above the rest of the store windows, all papered-over, and dresses or sporting goods or musical instruments inside.
Main Street wasn’t the road I was worried about, though.
IT TOOK A month to get out of my lease and make my way home, where I found the marquee that used to read REOPENING SOON down to three letters, re-arranged by the thief to R-I-P. The Wizard now belonged to Abe’s son, Neil, who muttered something about a bulldozer when he handed me the keys. (That’s how people talk in Currie: everything’s an aside.) Abe’s body had been removed and buried, but no one had been back to clean. The stench was the first clue I should have run.
Instead, over the next eight weeks, I called in exterminators and cleaners and contractors to make the Wizard into a fresh two-screen split-level with new movies upstairs and rep stuff in the basement. I hired six teenagers to work weekends — selling snacks, tearing tickets, running projectors — and put money in their pockets while reducing their leisure time and ability to spend. My professors had called this “opportunity cost”. We filled every seat on opening night, a Friday, and for a while six sets of parents slept easier.
HAD I KNOWN, I wouldn’t have made plans. I wouldn’t have let the model-making economist loose inside me, or accepted his reassurances that it’s normal to lose money the first two years. I wouldn’t have bought a house, or lost my shirt selling it just a year later. I wouldn’t have closed the basement screen after only six months, when the jampacked Christmas screening of It’s a Wonderful Life was already a distant memory, and I wouldn’t have eventually marked its door PRIVATE and lived behind it for the theatre’s final weeks. I wouldn’t have slept past noon every day, or eaten junk at Don’s instead of healthy meals, or come back after two coffees and a fried egg sandwich just to not run the matinées no one came to.
But maybe it wasn’t all my fault. Maybe it was VHS. Magnum Video opened January 1, 1985, and last time I was home, the sun-bleached WE HAVE VCR’S! sign was still in its window. In the end, it didn’t keep teenagers in Currie any more than the new Wizard did, and already I was playing B-runs to cut costs. The kids had resumed racing to the city every weekend, their murky forms st
umbling late into the Eightplex desperate for the world at the end of the light and the answer to “What’s new?” —because where they were from, nothing was.
The sense that failure was inevitable sunk in on a chilly March afternoon, when I found a copy of the petition to foreclose that I had ignored duct-taped to the front doors and the handles cinched with a chain and padlock. I waited till five-to-five when the sheriff showed and I went in to retrieve what I might sell: two projectors and a popcorn maker. I didn’t own a car, and I never will again, so I loaded the hardware into two shopping carts from the Price-Mart and pushed them to my parents’ house, where I would have to live now. Dad bought me small For Sale ads in the Seed-Tribune and Free Press, but no one answered.
I RETURNED TO Toronto a Travis Bickle, alone after the war but with a job, at least — TD took me back, which no bank would do today for a guy with credit like mine. The city was booming at the time, and still seems to be: I’ve got enough work that most nights I could stay till ten, and sometimes I do before taking a long walk to the late show at Bloor Cinema. I get the subway after —west from Bathurst, last of the night — and often while I wait a work train will pass smelling of grease and hot metal and dirt. I nod to the men in coveralls and picture them at eighteen; I see myself leaving Mueller’s Garage to meet Jeanie, or Scott washing up for a date with Claire, Claire who might still be in this city somewhere.
It’s said that the first side of the Viaduct you live on is the one you’ll stay on forever. Thirty years, more, and I haven’t looked for her. I’ve hardly been to The Beach —the area’s new name now that condos are shoving out the sparse strip — and it’s too late to start going, too late to find her. I imagine the orange dress instead, the chestnut hair in the lake breeze. It’s the only way I know to feel at home.