by Daniel Perry
Mom shoulders open her door and yells “John!” Dad jumps. It surprises me that the gun doesn’t go off. Dad turns to look at her, adjusting his ball cap. Behind his safety glasses his brown eyes grow wide. His mouth forms a straight line, corners edging south in a pre-emptive frown. He’s been caught; we know The Look well.
“What are you doing?” Mom calls.
Dad points the muzzle at the ground and steps toward us.
“I’m just doin’ Ralph a favour.” He uses Grandpa’s first name now that they’re friends. “I called work,” he says. “They know I’m comin’ late.”
“John,” Mom repeats. “What. Are. You. Doing?”
I kneel beside Lucy’s house and unclasp the chain from her collar. She takes off running, fast for a dog this old, past Dad and toward the bush. He sees me for the first time and abandons The Look.
“Mike,” he says. “What are you doin’ here?”
“Mom asked you first,” I say.
Dad shrugs.
“Ralph can’t keep the thing.” He turns his back to us and swiftly lifts the rifle. “Same treatment at the pound.” I cover my ears and close my eyes as Dad aims into the distance. I wait. No bang. I open again to see Dad’s lips muttering as he lowers the gun. He stalks off toward the shed. I take my hands off my ears and listen to him removing the bullets from the rifle and clunking the steel cabinet locked. He stomps outside and launches the sliding door shut, fuming toward the Cutlass. He gets in and slams, growling the muscle car to life, peeling out at the end of the laneway and turning toward Currie. Mom looks at the tire marks on the cement and shakes her head. “Your grandfather will be thrilled with that,” she says, and we walk back from the shed to Lucy’s doghouse. I take one side, Mom the other, and we lift the creaky structure into the Buick’s trunk. As I tie the lid closed fur brushes the backs of my legs. Lucy sniffs me with her dry nose; Ralph had left her water empty, no point in filling it. She jumps on the upholstery when I open the back door. I sit beside her and dodge as she tries to lick my face. Her breath smells like a long-dead fish, dug up from where the pond used to be.
Hyperbolic
DEAR PARENT(S)/GUARDIAN(S),
This note is to inform you of your child/ward’s introductory session with his/her guidance counsellor. This session is mandatory. Please sign and return the form below confirming your child/ward’s appointment time.
Mr. D. Rummel
M-ZMrs. L. Kulich
On: Tuesday, February 15, 1:30pm
Parent/Guardian signature: Susan Carrion
MRS. KULICH HAS TAUGHT math to everyone in Currie Township, most of us for the first time in our Grade Nine homeroom. She’s semi-retired now and works in the guidance office, still wearing the red-framed glasses under the increasingly frizzy grey bob, and she teaches just one class, Grade Twelve advanced. She’s a good teacher, but I’ll never take that course; English is my best mark. This year is my last in compulsory math and then it’s on to what I really want to do, which is ... which is what I’m in the guidance office to find out. I wait on a worn tweed couch with wooden arms, and under me every spring feels ready to shoot through the fabric like weeds. The bottom drawer of a dark green file cabinet across the room reads U.S. Scholarships and I wonder what it would take to spring-load a basketball in it. I had the same thought last year, waiting for Mr. Brent, who was a real guidance counsellor for twenty-five years before he retired and was replaced by a gym teacher, Mr. Rummel, who’s fifty-something and saggily overweight, a cross country coach because Currie High School can’t afford football insurance. In a congested voice he calls, “Michael?” and it’s still weird. Shouldn’t he be healthier? He looks up from my file and studies me as though we’ve never met. Maybe he just put C beside every name. Maybe I didn’t care a shit for gym.
“Hi, Coach,” I say.
He frowns as he opens his varnished door. “Mr. Rummel will do, now.” In his office he flops into the back support on his leather desk chair. I sit on one of the two green-padded steel ones facing him. He discards my file and takes off his glasses, folding them into his shirt pocket with some distress. He looks uncomfortable in anything with buttons. His cheeks droop below the bags under his eyes.
“So — do you know why you’re here?” he asks.
“It’s mandatory.”
He eyes me, scowling a little.
“To talk about my future,” I say. “Or something.”
“That’s right,” he says, and there’s relief in his exhale. He doesn’t want to be here any more than I do. He picks up my thin record. “Just a check-in,” he mumbles, leafing through the paper. “Grades are good ... except for phys. ed.”
“No one looks at gym marks.”
I’ve been saving that all week.
“Nah, you’re right,” he says. He closes the file again and flatly asks, “So what do you want to do with your life?”
I look at the taupe walls and the tack holes Mr. Brent’s posters left. The Star Trek one was completely ridiculous, but it probably helped the kids he saw most, the kids who got beat up a lot.
“I don’t really know,” I finally say. “But I want to go to university.”
“That’s great,” Rummel says, smiling. “Just great — but where?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I went to a talk in London about Quebec schools. Concordia Journalism looks good.”
“Mont-ray-all,” he says. “Groovy.”
Groovy?
“It’s expensive,” he says.
“Their tuition’s like two-thousand a year cheaper.”
“Sure. But where are you going to live?”
“A dorm.”
“Seven grand a year,” he says. “The same no matter where you go.”
“Oh.”
Were the walls always this close? Was the office always this small?
“So add that to your tuition,” he says, taking a pen and a pad of yellow Post-Its from his desk. “Can you count on any help from your parents?”
“My parents?”
“What do they do for a living?”
It’s Currie Township. As if he doesn’t know.
“My mom works at Vaughan’s Bakery,” I say. “And my dad’s at Ritter Pulley.”
He taps the pen on the notepad.
“So how much do they make in a year?”
“I don’t know. Mom makes minimum, and Dad’s — ”
“Well, let’s say that you need four-thou for tuition,” he says. “More in Ontario, but leave that for a minute. Multiply by four years, that’s sixteen. Add seven for your first year, in residence, which makes twenty-three ... and your books every year, so twenty-five thousand ...”
A lump rises in my throat. I’ve heard these numbers on game shows, but Rummel is no Alex Trebek.
“... plus you’re going to need rent, food and utilities for three more years ...”
He scribbles furiously.
“... let’s say five more per, so fifteen, which gives us a total of ...”
He peels off the Post-It and hands it to me.
I pinch the note and stare at his sums. I don’t look up. I won’t let him know he’s gotten to me.
“I’ll live at home and drive to Western,” I say slowly. “If I have to. And I have a job.” I’ve worked a year already at Russ Bevan’s egg farm — walking distance down the road, and under the table — and I’ll be sixteen in the summer. I’m already looking at student factory jobs around London: GM Diesel, Diamond Aircraft, Sterling Trucks. They’re almost an hour’s drive, but they pay double what anything out here does.
“How much you got in the bank?”
“Some,” I mutter.
None of your fucking business.
He smirks and asks, “What were you saving for?” making sure to hang on the auxiliary verb.
“A car.”
Rummel laughs. He shakes his head.
“Maybe you don’t need the car.”
“How will I get to work?”
“Y
ou got a bicycle?” he asks.
I stare through him.
“So you want to have a car and go to university?” He laughs again. “When did you strike it rich?”
I look at the floor and say nothing.
“And what about expenses? You got any now?”
“No,” I say. “Not really.” I can’t admit to still buying hockey cards, or the if-he-gets-to-fifty-bucks-he’ll-do-it collections taken up in the caf to get some twelfth-grader to jump into the Waubnakee River after school, or the thirty bucks my friends and I take turns overpaying [name withheld] for the beer we drink on weekends at [name also withheld]’s place. Rummel pulls his chair closer to me and looks over his puffy cheeks and a nose I now realize is too red. I can smell it on him. He’s drunk.
“That’s good,” he says, “but you need more money. What are you going to do?”
I grit my teeth and try to look out a window. There aren’t any. I look back and his eyes pin me to the chair.
“You said my marks are good. I could go for scholarships.”
He fans the pages in my folder and scoffs.
“They’d have to be very good.”
“What about student loans?”
“They’re a rip-off. The interest makes you poorer in the long run.”
Is he serious?
He leans in. He is.
“So,” he says. “What makes you think you can go to university?”
I slump in my chair, ducking under his gaze. He’s waiting for me to break.
“I work hard,” I say. “You don’t know. And I’ll get another job, and still do all my homework, and I never skip class, and — ”
“You know what I think?” he says. “I think you should join the army.”
I close my eyes and lower my head.
“It’s the only way you can afford it,” he says. He stands and steps out from behind the desk, coming around to sit in the other chair, beside me. The girls I know say he’s a creep; the guys don’t say anything. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “Trust me.”
I brush it off, spitting a “Don’t touch me” as I stand up.
He switches back to his smile.
“Okay, champ — back to class. Glad we had this little talk.”
He holds his door open and I walk through, scuffling past Mrs. Kulich and the frosted glass windows to the hall. I head straight for the boys’ room, which is empty when I step in. I lock a stall door behind me and I sit atop the toilet tank, resting my feet on the black seat. I scream from the bottom of my chest and I drop my head into my hands. I sniffle. I wipe my eyes and notice a scribbled conversation on the wall.
In rusty orange there are more words, engraved in the yellow paint above the toilet roll.
CURRIE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION DIPLOMAS
This author must have stolen a punch set from metal shop. I take some paper and blow my nose before leaving the stall, then I stare into the mirror until I’ve promised myself I’ll never tell anyone what just happened.
I LAST UNTIL dinner at our hand-me-down table.
“Mike, don’t you want more potatoes?” Mom asks.
“No, thanks,” I say. “I’m not very hungry.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mom says. “We’re already through two bags of milk this week. You’re growing. You’re always hungry.”
“I had a big lunch.”
“That’s never stopped you before,” Dad says. “What’s the matter? Some girl think she’s too good for you?”
“That’s not — ”
“She’s not so great,” he says. “She still shits brown.”
“Dad, that’s not it!”
“John, really?” Mom says, frowning. “Language.” Nancy giggles. Mom turns to her and says, “Eat your dinner.” Nancy resumes forking potatoes.
“Oh,” Mom says, and it flashes in her eyes. She remembers. “How was your guidance appointment?”
“Fine,” I mumble.
Shit.
“Really?”
I shake my head. My lip quivers.
“What?” Mom asks. She looks helplessly at Dad. He shrugs his shoulders. Nancy doesn’t look up from her plate.
“Mr. Rummel — ” I say, but then I start to cry.
“Rummel?” Dad says. “Rummel? He’s a guidance counsellor now?” He scoops in another mouthful of potatoes and grunts. “That stupid old drunk couldn’t guide his arms through his shirtsleeves.” We wait while he chews silently, watching his scowl deepen. “How do teachers get to be guidance counsellors, anyway? Does the principal just pick one and say, ‘It’s your turn now’?”
I don’t reply.
“You’re letting that asshole get to you?” he says, raising his voice. “I thought we taught you better than that.” He clatters his fork down on his plate.
“John,” Mom says.
“Don’t say it, Susan,” Dad snaps. “Don’t fucking say it. Don’t coddle the boy.”
Mom breathes out a defeated, “Stop swearing at my table.”
He rises from his chair and gathers up his plate. “I’ll eat at a different goddamn table, then,” he says, making his way down the hall toward the door to the garage.
I look down at my plate and a tear falls in my last bite of potatoes.
Mom asks, “What happened?”
I raise my head and see Nancy’s blue eyes off her plate, awaiting my answer. She’s scared and still too young to really know we’re poor. I blurt, “Can I be excused?” and I don’t wait for an answer. In the mudroom I throw my coat over my shoulders and plant my feet in my boots without tying them. The door of our house slams behind me — the only house east of the tracks in Waubnakee. The town had grown with the railroad until sometime in the thirties, and on our acre lot was once the Reese Hotel, where rail workers lodged between shifts. The librarian at school says other people stayed nights, too: people just passing through, who got off the train to see the town.
Tourists.
Here.
But the black-and-white Waubnakee Seed photos in the school’s microfiche prove it, chronicling guests up to the last three, the masked men who lit the Reese Hotel Fire. Articles alongside say the Reese had been a bootlegging front and a score had been settled. The hotel had been the first sign of an east side of town, but after the fire nothing was built beyond the tracks until sometime in the sixties, when our house finally replaced the burned-out ruin.
Waubnakee has since shrunk to two hundred people, and most of them floor their gas pedals at the stop sign and charge up County Road 17 — Main Street — then vault the level crossing and rocket out of town, launching empty beer bottles onto our lawn as they do.
Past the tracks I wander the town’s seven other streets for an hour, until my treads clog with wet snow and my every step teeters.
WHEN I GET home, Nancy is in bed and Mom and Dad are winding down; Mom has tomorrow off, but Dad will be up at five for work. When I come in the door they meet me, and Mom warms the kettle for tea, a small peace. I tell them about the meeting and they listen on the couch. I don’t know how Mom talked Dad into sitting through this. His eyes keep closing, and Mom keeps swatting his shoulder, softly at first and then hard enough to bruise. He sits up with a sharp shout.
At the story’s end, Mom asks, “So what did you do?”
“Nothing,” I say. I hang my head. “I didn’t do a damned thing.”
She sighs.
“Language,” she says.
IN THE MORNING Mom calls the school from the kitchen. She motions to me to pick up her bedroom extension, and when I get there and put it to my ear she’s on hold. I turn the mouthpiece up away from my lips and cover it with my hand before the principal, Mr. Johanssen, answers “Hello,” exasperated like it’s already his last call of the day.
“My son saw Mr. Rummel yesterday — the so-called guidance counsellor,” Mom says. “Tell me: how, exactly, did a gym teacher end up doing this job?”
Mr. Johanssen sighs. “Mr. Rummel is qualified,” he says wit
hout emotion. “What’s your concern, I’ll discuss it with him.”
“Oh, no,” Mom replies. “You put him on the phone this instant. I will discuss this with him.”
“You want to do my job?” he says. “Fine with me.”
The line goes dead, and after two hold beeps we hear the stuffy voice.
“Coach Rummel — I mean, Art Rummel speaking — I mean, hello, this is Mr. Rummel?”
“How dare you,” Mom says, not bothering to explain.
“I’m sorry?”
“How dare you talk to my son like that!”
“Who is this?” he asks.
“It’s Susan Carrion. You saw my son yesterday.”
Silence.
“And who’s your son?”
“Michael! God, you don’t even know which lives you’re ruining! My son is Michael Carrion, you idiot!”
“And when did I see him? Yesterday?”
“Yes! You saw him yesterday! You harangued him about money, and you told him he should run off and join the army! Ring a bell?”
I haven’t heard Mom shout like this ... well, ever.
“Oh, yeah,” Rummel says. “Standard Grade Ten Boy Speech. Exaggerate to scare the hell out of the kid — makes him go through with whatever he plans to do, just so he can come home and rub it in my face one day.” He wheezes and mutters, “Not like that’s worth coming home for, though. Stupid kids.”
“Stupid kids?” Mom yells. “Stupid kids? This is a school! You could fix that! But no, you’d just rather — ”
“If they’re not so stupid,” Rummel says, “they’ll figure it out.”