Sundowner Ubuntu

by Anthony Bidulka

  Having figured out he couldn’t gain access to the house or “Matthew” without first dealing with the dogs, Robin must have waited until Alex let Barbra and Brutus out into the yard (a fairly regular occurrence), then took care of them and waited for Alex to come out to investigate why the dogs weren’t returning. When he did, they had some sort of struggle in the snow, which ended up with Alex being shot. He then dragged Alex into the privacy of the house to carry out whatever his endgame was, probably beginning with a browbeating and interrogation.

  “Can I take the gag off of him?” I asked.

  “Shut up, or I’ll put one on you too. Now get down on the floor!” Robin ordered again.

  Of course, Alex would have denied being Matthew Ridge, which would only have served to fuel Robin’s fury further. Robin would have known he had very little time before I eventually figured things out and returned home, so he tied Alex up, gagged him, and waited in ambush for me somewhere in the backyard.

  And now here we all were.

  Matthew stepped toward me, his eyes never leaving mine. It must have confused him that the guy with the gun was calling the guy on the floor by his name, but I could see that he was beginning to figure things out as well.

  With deliberate movements, his hands raised, palms facing out in submission, Matthew slowly twisted around to face Robin Haywood.

  Suddenly I knew what he was about to do.

  “No!” I warned him off his intent.

  I was too late.

  “I’m Matthew Ridge,” he said to Robin, the two of them now face to face. “Not him.” He bobbed his head in Alex’s direction. “I don’t know who this other guy is, but it’s me you want, not him. Let these guys go,” he added. A truly selfless, heroic gesture.

  Beneath his tangle of dark hair, Robin’s eyes moved ever so slowly from Matthew’s face to Alex’s bound body then back to Matthew. Dawning recognition filled them, and I was nervous about what that would mean for the real Matthew. In that instant he recognized his arch-enemy, and knew that Matthew was telling him the truth.

  “Sit down, I told you!” Robin spat out at me. Then at the real Matthew: “Not you. Stay where you are.”

  I lowered myself onto the floor next to Alex, and we exchanged wordless glances that said a lot. With his rigid back to us, Matthew kept his stance still and straight, standing halfway between us and Robin, and facing the gun that was now pointed at his heaving chest.

  “Let these guys go,” he said again. “Or better yet, why don’t you and I go somewhere. We can talk this out. Just the two of us.”

  “It is you,” Robin half-whispered as if he hadn’t heard Matthew’s request, mesmerized, his eyes covering every inch of the other man.

  After a moment, the spell was broken and an ugly sneer crept onto his face. “This other guy kept telling me he wasn’t you, and I didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t admit what he did to me. I thought once I had Quant here, and threatened to kill him, he would own up to what he did, but….” He stared at Matthew, “…but it’s you.”

  Matthew’s head moved up and down. “Yes, Robin. It’s me.”

  Their voices were surprisingly calm and measured, as if they’d been waiting for this meeting all their lives and were well-prepared for it. The only outward sign of Matthew’s true state was a slight quiver in his raised hands.

  I began searching the room with my eyes, looking for a means to end this thing with as little bloodshed as possible. Alex, with his hands bound and mouth gagged, suffering from gunshot wounds, would be of little assistance. Matthew was directly threatened by Robin’s gun. My own firearm was too far away for me to reach without putting both Alex and Matthew in danger of being shot before I got to it. There were no other obvious weapons nearby. Okay, Quant, that’s the list of bad news items. What about good news?

  I couldn’t come up with any.

  “Do you remember it?” Robin asked Matthew, his voice growing more intense now. “Do you remember what you did to me?”

  Matthew nodded.

  “Do you remember it every day? In vivid, blood-red detail? Do you?”

  “I do,” Matthew answered penitently.

  “You don’t! You don’t! You don’t!” Robin screamed. “You have no idea what it felt like! You can’t. You weren’t the one being kicked and punched and spit on! Have you ever been spit on, Matthew? Have you ever had someone else’s spit, mixed with your own blood, running down your face, into your eyes, into your nose and mouth, tasting it? Have you? Have you ever been lying on the ground, defenseless, being hit, being kicked, being called names, being called a fag over and over again?”

  He took a menacing step closer to Matthew, his face contorting into vile loathing. He shrieked, “Fag! Fag! You big fag!” He released a snort of laughter that was painfully sad, and added bitterly, “And I’m not even gay, for chrissakes!”

  “Robin, I di—”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up! I’m talking now. I give the orders now. This is my time!”

  “Okay, okay, just settle down, will you?”

  “Do you know what that did to me? What you did to me? Sure they fixed my cuts and scrapes, got everything all nice and clean, covered it with bandages and ointment…. What a joke; no one ever talked about what really happened to me, or why. Not the doctors, or my parents. I had no friends. No one ever wanted to know if I was okay in here!” He pointed to his temple with the nose of the gun. “They were all so desperate to forget about it, put it behind them, pretend like it never happened; no one wanted to deal with it. I felt like…I felt…it was like…it was like they thought maybe it was partly my fault…maybe I’d asked for it somehow. In the end, they just wanted to go back to life the way it was before.” Another snort. “Yeah, like that could ever happen.”

  As I listened to Robin’s anguished telling of his story, I couldn’t help but feel compassion. And empathy. I could picture his poor, child’s body, wrecked and bleeding and left all alone outdoors, in that dark place in the park. And then, shockingly, with everything else that was happening around me at that moment, another unbidden picture filled my brain.

  Another body, lying unprotected, battered, bloodied, nearly naked, all alone, outside in the dark.

  It was my body. Only months ago. Attacked by a madman who’d wanted to rape me. Almost did.

  I heard Robin’s words:

  “…desperate to forget it, put it behind them, pretend like it never happened….” Yes. That was me.

  I shook my head to rid it of the memory. Now wasn’t the time. But I knew I would have to make time for it, someday.

  “By the time I got out of the hospital,” Robin continued with his harrowing tale, “everyone had it swept under the carpet like dirt they never wanted to see again. They acted like I’d gone in for an operation, had whatever it was that was bothering me removed, and now everything was fine. The ugliness had been excised, and now I was all better. It was over.”

  From my spot on the floor I could see only one side of Matthew Moxley’s face, but that was enough for me to know that he was feeling the story as deeply as Robin.

  “You’d been sent away to some reform school or something,” Robin spewed. “For them, that was enough. Out of sight, out of mind. You’d been dealt with. Dealt with! Dealt with! Dealt with! Can you believe it?” he directed this last to Alex and me. “That’s all it takes to deal with someone who almost beats you to death and then leaves you in a lake of your own blood and piss and shit and vomit. Is that enough punishment? Do you think so? Do you?”

  We decided not to answer.

  “But for me, it had only just begun,” Robin kept on, the tortured planes of his face moving in and out of shadow. “Because then came the nightmares.”

  “I have them too,” Matthew whispered.

  This stopped Robin. He gave the other man a guarded, questioning look. “You do?”

  “Every night,” Matthew said, his own face showing the strains of repressed memories, bubbling to the surface, as unpleasant
as raw sewage. “I know I can’t feel your pain, Robin, but the pain of remembering what I did to you, remembering each…and… every…time I hit you and called you a name.” He stopped for a moment, to swallow a lump in his throat. “I know exactly how many times I kicked you—fourteen—how many times I punched you in the back—twice—punched you in the gut—six times—how many times I hit you in the head—twelve—how many times I spit on you—four times, Robin—how many times I called you a fuckin’ faggot—eleven times. I know each time by heart. I relive them in my dreams every night. And I know….” And here he hesitated, momentarily overcome with a choking remorse. “I know how many times you yelled out for me to stop. Stop!” He cried it out as if it were him calling out for help. “Fifteen times. Fifteen! Fifteen times you pleaded with me to stop!” Then his voice became quiet. “I hear it every night. That sound. Those words. They haunt me to this day. Stop! Stop, Matthew! Stop! Stop.”

  “But you didn’t,” Robin said, implacable, his words stone hard.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I….” Matthew could go on no longer. He lowered his head to his chest, and he began to cry. Fat tears spouted from his eyes, like droplets of water through a crack in a glass, so big that I could see them from where I sat on the floor, sliding over the hump of his cheek toward his trembling chin.

  After a moment, he kept on. “I didn’t stop because I wanted you dead. I wanted you dead because I wanted to be dead. I wanted to be dead because I knew I was gay, and I didn’t want to be. Every time I hit you I was imagining hitting myself, the faggy boy I saw in the mirror every day. I was trying to…trying to…trying to beat the gay out of me.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill yourself?” Robin asked in an ugly tone. “Why did you have to do this to me? To me!”

  Matthew’s head came up to face Robin, and he gave the simple, honest, difficult answer: “It was easier. I was angry. I was a coward.”

  The silence that followed this admission was long, and hard to sit through, for countless reasons.

  I was nowhere nearer to finding a way to disarm Robin, to bring this to an end, but suddenly I had hope that perhaps, just maybe, he would do it himself. Robin Haywood had needed to confront Matthew, the boy who had changed his life with an act of atrocious violence. Was this exchange between the two, twenty years after the fact, going to be enough to dissolve the animosity Robin had been cultivating and nurturing for all those years? Would this bring Matthew some semblance of inner peace, the absolution he’d denied himself for so long? Could this end well for either of these men? Could the grace of ubuntu exist between them? Save them?

  “I’ve never been with a woman,” Robin said flatly.

  Matthew could only nod.

  “Not because I’m gay,” he said. “I’ve never been able to form a normal sexual relationship with anyone. Never. Can you comprehend that? Never. No one wants to be in bed with someone who wakes up screaming from nightmares. No one wants to be with someone who can’t stand to be touched because he fears that every stroke or rub or simple kiss of affection might be followed by a fist in the gut. If anyone tries to touch me, I recoil. I’m always afraid. Always alone. And I’ll always be this way, Matthew. Because of you.”

  Another nod.

  “Because of you,” he repeated the conviction.

  “I’m sorry, Robin,” Matthew responded. “I’ve never said it, and I need to. I am so sorry for what I did to you, Robin. If I could take it all back, I would. If I could change places with you, I would. If I can do anything to help you now, I will. Let me help you.”

  They stared at one another for a long time. Finally it was Robin who broke the silent communion. “I know how you can help me,” he said.

  “Tell me,” Matthew replied quickly. “Anything,”

  “You can die.”

  Aw shit.

  Robin lifted his gun so that it was in line with Matthew’s heart. This was it. Do or die.

  I could not let this happen. I knew there was no easy way out of this, but this was my job. My job was to save Matthew Ridge. I braced myself against the floor, steeled my muscles, and prepared to spring up.

  Instead I saw a dark form flying through the air, like some giant bat, aiming for Robin Haywood’s back, and with it came the most ferocious sound I had ever heard: a snarl of undiluted hatred. I could not believe my ears…or eyes.

  It was Barbra.

  As my beloved schnauzer landed on Robin’s shoulders, I leapt across the distance between me and Matthew and knocked him off his feet and to the ground. Robin let out a blood-curdling scream as Barbra snapped and bit at his face, his neck and ears, sounding like a dinosaur eating ribs and gravy. With horror I saw that the gun was still in Robin’s hand, and he was waving it about wildly.

  A shot rang out.

  I heard a grunt.

  God, no.

  Alex! He’d been shot by Robin a third time.

  I let out a flood of expletives that included many I’d only heard in gangster movies and never used out loud before, and I meant every one of them. I jumped to my feet. Barbra and Robin were still struggling. I pounded my heel down on Robin’s exposed gun wrist, so hard it might have gone through the floor if it hadn’t been covered with slate tile. Robin let out an agonized shriek, and the gun popped from his grasp like bread from a toaster. I grabbed it.

  I let Barbra stay on top of him while I rushed to Alex’s side to see how bad he’d been hurt. As far as I could tell, the bullet had grazed his shin but never entered his body. I yanked the gag off his mouth and looked into his eyes, which were beginning to glaze over. He was going into shock.

  I looked back at Barbra, who was declining assistance from Matthew. She must have sensed my gaping stare, and the fact that the blubbering man beneath her was no longer much of a threat, because she stopped her nipping and growling and looked up at me with a slobbering, lopsided grin. I had no idea how she’d risen from the dead, but at that moment I didn’t care.

  “I love you, Barbra. I love you, girl.”

  I’m sure she winked at me with a “back at ya” look covering her beautiful face.

  Constable Darren Kirsch stood near the French doors of my bedroom, looking uncomfortable as he gazed out at the sunny, spring-like day in my backyard. I wasn’t exactly sure why he was there. We’d gone over everything several times at the hospital during the course of Alex’s treatment for his gunshot wounds and again later in his office at the police station.

  Robin Haywood admitted to using the fake Clara Ridge to hire me to find Matthew. Robin hadn’t hired me himself because the mother angle seemed to be the most plausible scenario to present to a detective, and he wisely wanted no connection made to him after he carried out his intended deed: killing Matthew Ridge.

  At first I was unclear about the reason for the elaborate story of Clara Ridge having all that money, but it was the only way Robin could come up with to explain how a poor widow could suddenly afford to hire a detective and spare no expense in finding her son. Robin, in spite of his physical and emotional injuries, had done quite well for himself in business and had decided to dedicate some of his considerable wealth to finding the boy/man who’d ruined his life at the age of sixteen.

  After failing to find Matthew himself, Robin had decided his best bet was to hire a professional to do the legwork. His plan was to follow the detective around and, when the opportunity presented itself, carry out his revenge. With both Ethan Ash and the Chikosis, Robin jumped the gun and erroneously thought I’d found the missing link that would lead him to Matthew. He thought he’d cut out the expense of the middleman—me—and at the same time release pent-up rage by beating Matthew’s whereabouts out of them.

  In the case of Ethan, the arrival of oldster Frank had sent him scurrying away before he could learn anything of use. A blinding punch had taken Ethan down before he could identify his assailant. In Khayelitsha, his assault had had more dire results—not only for the Chikosis, but for me. The pe
ople in the township who knew and loved Matthew assumed the worst. They did not believe my arrival to look for Matthew and the attack on the Chikosis was a coincidence. And, in retrospect, I suppose I couldn’t blame them. They set in motion the power of ubuntu, from South Africa to Zambia and Botswana, to protect Matthew from me.

  Now, two decades after the horrible event that first started this, I could only hope things were finally being set right. Robin Haywood would get the psychological help he needed, and Matthew Ridge/Moxley would reunite with his mother.

  Indeed Matthew was en route to Airdrie, Alberta, for his first visit in twenty years with his mother. I could hardly guess what that would be like or how it would turn out. They had a lot of ground to cover, but if anyone had the right attitude for contrition and understanding, it was Matthew. My hopes were high.

  I felt Alex squeeze my hand and gave him a smile.

  “How ya doing?” I asked him.

  He smiled back. “Good.”

  He was like a king being feted by his subjects, lying on my bed amongst fluffy pillows and cozy comforters, Barbra and Brutus like furry brackets on either side of him. On the bedside table was a tray of his favourite food (sent over from Colourful Mary’s by Marushka and Mary), and there were get-well cards and gag gifts at his feet.

  Sereena was perched beautifully on the opposite side of the bed from me. She was wearing a satiny lounging outfit, sipping at a champagne cocktail and soundly ignoring my mother, who stood nearby in case Alex opened his mouth wide enough for her to drop another morsel of food into it (her own home baking, not the much less smachneh—according to her—provisions from Colourful Mary’s). Mom was dressed in a faded pink housedress under an orange- and-blue-striped apron, her black and steel grey hair freshly set into tight curls. She was awkwardly nursing her own champagne cocktail, which Sereena’d pressed into her hands knowing full well she’d barely drink it.