by Lee Gowan
The sound of the shower and the singing have stopped. Shouldn’t be too long. I pick up a National Geographic—the March 1975 issue—from the coffee table and start leafing through, only then noticing that, revealed beneath where the National Geographic was lying, is a more up-to-date Penthouse magazine, some busty blonde leering at me from the cover.
Footsteps.
I jerk my head up, feeling absurdly embarrassed that I might be caught looking into those lecherous eyes, in time to see my host enter the room stark naked.
He doesn’t so much as glance at me, allowing me to take in his progress to the fridge before I recover myself enough to look at the floor.
“Beer?”
“No, thank you,” I say, carefully studying the photos in the National Geographic.
Still humming his mournful song, he paces back past me and down the tunnelled hallway to his bedroom. I put down the magazine.
I should run. Away, I mean. Either direction, to the bedroom or down the road, has been laid down in offering, and I am inclined to make it away. Not that I can’t be adventurous, but there is something lacking in the courtship and the timing that all at once makes me a little afraid. I get to my feet and actually take two steps towards the door before I realize there might be a third option. The skulls tell me with their toothy grins. Perhaps it was only a conceit, but there was something so absurdly natural in his pirouette down the runway of his trailer that I realize he may want me to picture him—will certainly allow me to see him—as an animal roaming innocently in its habitat, with no other intent but its beer.
Slowly, reassuring myself, I sit back down and pick up the National Geographic.
Sure enough, he returns fully dressed in more traditional cowboy garb—a shirt with a yoke and pearl buttons and a pair of clean denim jeans—carrying a large shoebox and making no reference to his earlier appearance. I feel as though I’ve passed some sort of test.
“Can we stop and take Sam’s jacket to him on our way?” he asks, taking it off the hook by the door. Sam left the jacket lying in the yard, and I picked it up and brought it in the trailer.
“Sure. I guess.”
“Good. Might as well take this over to him at the same time.”
He opens the shoebox—actually a boot box: a picture of the cowboy boots it once contained is printed on the top—to reveal a large gun. “Grandpa’s. Colt .45. It’s a serious gun. Make a hole in you the size of a basketball.”
“It’s … big,” I say.
“Yeah, they always look bigger in life than they do on television. Or in the movies. Beautiful, isn’t it? Means a good deal to me, this gun. It’s the only thing of Grandpa’s I have. But I get the feelin’ Sam wants it, so I figure we’d better take it over to him.”
He puts the gun back in the box, lays it down on the kitchen counter, takes out his fixings from his breast pocket and starts to roll himself a cigarette.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I finally ask.
“Smokin’? They say it’ll kill ya.”
“What does Sam want a gun for? He’s a bit … unstable right now, don’t you think?”
He licks the rolling paper. “You’re not sayin’ you think Sam might shoot somebody?”
“Why do you think he mentioned the gun?”
“Who would he shoot?”
“I don’t know. Himself.”
He puts the cigarette in his mouth, moistening it, and draws it out a little too slowly, his eyes on mine the entire time. “Are you serious? Sam? But he’s got so much to live for. Nah. If he meant he was gonna shoot anybody, it was Gwen’s man friend.”
He smiles provocatively.
“Maybe.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it? Maybe that’s what he should do.” He lights his cigarette, shakes out the match.
“Pardon?”
“Well, why not? If there’s anyone the world wouldn’t miss, it’s that fellow.” He’s not smiling.
“I’m … not sure I understand.”
“What’s to understand? I know him. He’d be nobody’s loss.”
“Is that so?”
“Sam didn’t tell you anything about him?”
“No. No. No.”
He taps his cigarette ash onto his floor. Avoiding his eyes, I watch the ash flutter to the dirty linoleum.
“Just as well. It’s a sordid story. That’s what they call it, don’t they? Sordid. Anyway, it’s not mine to tell, so we should get going.”
He picks up the box from the counter.
“I don’t think we should take that to him.”
“Oh, don’t you worry about it. I’m only stringin’ you along. I don’t think shootin’ anybody has ever entered Sam’s head. He’s more attracted to monetary solutions. It was Grandpa’s gun, and your dream of the cliff reminded him of Grandpa, and it was supposed to be left to Sam and I ended up with it, and he’s in a bit of a state right now so he’s got a little sentimental about such things. He’s got Grandpa’s name, you see, so he’s the rightful inheritor. We’ll take it over to him.”
And he opens the door and steps outside. There’s nothing I can do but follow. Nothing else occurs to me, at any rate.
“My dream reminded him of your grandpa?”
“Yeah. I believe my grandpa killed a person or two with this gun,” he says as we walk towards the car.
“Why do you say that?”
“I can’t say for sure. He just … said things. About how maybe sometime in his life he’d done some things that maybe he shouldn’t have done, but that he could never take ’em back and so there was no point goin’ through life worryin’ and regrettin’, ’cause you just had to go on with livin’ or go crazy. You want me to drive?”
“No. I don’t think we should take that to Sam.”
“Why not?” He slouches against the car, waiting for my excuses, and I feel like a child. I take his picture, and he doesn’t object.
“We should leave them alone for a while. They’ll be talking. I need to get to that cliff. I need to get back to Toronto.”
The cowboy shrugs. “It’ll only take a second. What’s the big deal?”
I shrug and take another picture.
“Don’t you worry,” he says. “You’ll be at your cliff inside the hour. You want me to drive?”
“I’ll drive,” I say.
“If you insist,” he says, and gets into the car.
JUNE 29th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
GWEN WAS in the kitchen, sitting at the table, wearing her sweatpants and the “World’s Best Mom” yellow T-shirt that Michael had given her for Christmas two years before, a mug of steaming something in front of her. Maybe it was true. Maybe she really had come straight home and picked up the kids from Vern’s and put Ben to bed and cleaned the bathroom. Sam stood in the doorway, and they glared at each other for a moment before she broke the silence.
“What do you want?”
He walked to the counter and lifted his perfect teapot, but it was empty. What was she drinking from her favourite mug? Coffee at this time of the day kept her awake. A hot toddy in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the summer? She did that sometimes lately, with the intention of calming her mind, apparently, though alcohol generally made her even more anxious. She didn’t have the constitution of a drinker—of a Vern—though that’s probably where she’d recently learned to trust in her hot toddies. Not that hot toddies were Vern’s drink. He preferred whiskey. But, when in Rome, eat pizza, even if you insist on ordering it with bacon. Sam sat down across the oak table from her. He’d had it built especially for this room, big enough to sit the entire extended family at Christmas.
“What happened to you?” she said, gesturing at his shirt with a single accusing finger.
“Just had a chat with Vern.”
The corner of her mouth curled slightly, and she sipped from her mug, blowing at it first to cool it. “I’m sure he looks much worse.”
“I think you’re wrong. I
don’t think he’s in love with you. I don’t think he’d know what love was if it …” He fished for some absurd embodiment of love, then gave it up and let the sentence die. Her eyes burned blue. She flicked her hair behind her ear.
“You mean he’s not interested in replacing you? No. I’m not interested in having anyone replace you. Why would I want to go through this hell again?” She waved her hands in a melodramatic flourish, as though she meant this kitchen were hell. His perfect kitchen, with its stainless steel appliances, with its black ceramic floor that shone so gloriously you could see the future in the tiles.
“Who the hell are you trying to kid? You know what a fraud he is. I have sat here at this very table and listened to you ridicule him. You forget that I know you too well. I remember the first time you met him. Remember? That night at the party out at Paradise? Remember? Hate at first sight. You said he was so phony and manipulative it made you want to puke. Remember? You actually told me that my big brother Vern made you want to puke. That was the word you used. Puke. That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. Did you know that?”
“He treats me like a queen.”
“Oh. He does. And is that what you think you are? A queen?”
She did not respond.
Sam crossed his arms and continued, “I just talked to Michael too.”
“My, isn’t that a novelty.”
“He had something he needed to tell me. Something that really upset him.”
At first, he could see he had touched her, pierced her armour, scratched a fingernail down her soul, but she took another sip and raised her nose defiantly. It was a nose of almost perfect dimensions.
“He told me too. We had a long talk. I told him there was nothing to be upset about. It’s all very natural. What did you say to him? I hope you didn’t make it out to be something sordid.”
“No,” Sam said. “Love is a beautiful thing.”
“What would you know about love?”
Sam reached out and picked up her mug and, with a casual flick of his wrist, tossed it on the floor. It bounced but, miraculously, didn’t break.
“I said, love is a beautiful thing.”
She rose from her chair, picked up the cup, put it in the dishwasher, fetched the dishcloth and began to wipe up the floor.
“I hate you,” she said.
And she did. He could see that she did.
“You hate yourself,” Sam said.
She stopped wiping to look him in the eye. “Maybe. Maybe that’s it. You made me hate myself, and I want to learn to love myself again. He’s teaching me.”
“Well, I guess he’d know, ’cause he’s never been in love with anyone but himself.”
She wrung out the cloth in the sink and draped it over the faucet.
“Get out of my house.”
She said it calmly, almost as though it were a request, but her hands, clutching one another, said it wasn’t.
“Your house?”
“My house.”
He looked at the ceramic tile, the stainless steel fridge. “What about the boys?”
“Oh? You are aware we have children? I wasn’t sure. The way things are going, you can bet they’ll grow up to hate you just like you hate your father, just like he hated his father.”
“I don’t hate my father,” Sam said.
In the silence that followed this pronouncement, Sam became all too aware of the sound of the kitchen sink dripping in a rough half-beat to his heart. She’d asked him to change the washer about fifty times, and he’d told her that it worked fine if you applied a little muscle. She’d said that when he applied muscle she couldn’t turn on the tap. He’d told her to call a plumber. She’d said she’d ask Vern.
Sam marched to the sink, brushing past her, and torqued the cold tap, closing off the drip.
“You’re right. It’s all my fault. Everything’s my fault. The death of love. The dissolution of the family. The desecration of the planet. Your father’s bankruptcy. It’s all my fault. I’m just glad I can bear up to the responsibility.”
Wearily, she walked to the table and sat down. “Please don’t bring my father into this ugliness,” she said. “It has nothing to do with my father.”
She flicked that lock of hair behind her ear. He shook his head. “How can you say that? For eight years you’ve blamed me for his failure, and now you’re sleeping with my brother, and you want a divorce, but it has nothing to do with your father?”
“No,” she said, looking at her fingernails. “I don’t blame you for … what happened to him. I mean, I do. You let them do it. It was his whole life, and you did nothing …”
“Don’t!”
She stared at the table, silenced. “I’m sorry. I know there was nothing you could have done. I know it was beyond you. But you could have walked away.”
Sam swallowed. “I could have walked away.”
“You could have. But that’s not what this is about. It’s too easy for you to hang our hopeless marriage on my father. It’s handy. But it’s not his fault. It’s not my father’s fault.”
“I never said it was his fault.”
“Oh, but that’s what you implied. That’s what you’re telling yourself.”
“I am, am I? And whose fault is it?”
She sighed and shrugged. “I suppose it’s mine. I’ve got the scarlet A on my forehead to prove it, don’t I? But it’s yours too, Sam. You just go blindly along, never paying any attention to the damage you’re doing. You excuse yourself from any responsibility because you’ve gotta keep your eyes on the numbers. On the dollars and cents. That’s all that’s really important, isn’t it?”
“Someone has to pay attention to the dollars and cents. It is important.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not important at all. It’s just a fantasy that the big bad world made up to make it okay for people like you not to pay attention to anything that’s really important.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, it is so.”
“Well, I guess it’s not surprising that someone who’s never had to worry about a dollar or a cent her entire life would think that way.”
She stretched her arms out on the table so that she could study the freckles on the backs of her hands. “You’re not a safe place to be, Sam. Please, leave me alone.”
He turned from her and watched the tap as a drop slowly bloomed. “I’m not a safe—and he is? And being a single mother is? We need to talk about this.”
“I tried to talk, and you didn’t want to. Now I don’t want to talk anymore. I want a separation. I want a divorce. What else needs to be said?”
He strangled the drop to nothing. “You said you’d called a lawyer?”
The words had not even left his lips when the doorbell rang. For a moment Sam imagined him there at the door—the lawyer, with his black briefcase hanging by his side. Gwen listened too, and it rang again, and together they followed the higher note of the ding down the scale to the lower dong, her eyes meeting his, and there was a moment’s connection as they both wondered who had come to interrupt their terrible ballet.
“Who’s that?” Gwen said.
Sam shook his head. “I have no idea.”
He pictured Irene.
Ai.
Whatever her name was.
“I’ll get it,” Gwen said, and off she went.
“Just leave it,” Sam said. “The blinds are closed. They don’t know we’re home.”
“Michael’s in the yard.”
Sam watched her going, her step firm on the hardwood. She was his wife. They had a visitor, and she was answering the door. He ran his fingers through his hair and took one last look around him.
JUNE 29th, 2000: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
HOW DID I miss this place when I passed it with Sam? It’s dug into the side of the valley, so it’s partly hidden when you’re coming the other direction: down the hill and into the valley. The house is Palm Springs modern, and it looks perfect here, the flat roof matching th
e horizon, but for some reason the prairie wasn’t good enough for the landscaping. It’s English country garden. Perhaps the house is Sam’s and the garden is his wife’s? A swing slowly pendulums, some ghost dangling there, regretting some sorrow.
“I’ll take … the things to the door,” I tell the cowboy, and he lifts his bushy eyebrows.
“No. I’d better do it.”
He strides along a path of paving stones, the jacket draped over his shoulder and the shoebox under his arm like a dozen roses. At first, I think I’ll stay in the car, but I can’t resist getting a few shots, so I step out into that incredibly bright sunlight. I take a photograph, and another, purposely overexposing this one, and another. The cowboy has paused on the doorstep, as if he’s actually unsure about something. At last, he reaches for the handle, hesitates for an instant, lifts his hand to knock, thinks better of his fist and presses the bell.
“Avon calling,” he says, glancing back at me.
No one comes. He taps his boot on the paving stone, presses the button again. At last, the door opens, revealing a woman in sweatpants and a dirty yellow T-shirt that declares her the best Mom in the world. I remember her from high school. I know her from work. She’s a little younger than I am, and prettier. She’s blonde and blue-eyed.
“Oh, hello, Gwen. Is Sam around?”
She ponders the cowboy’s presence there before her, ponders the box under his arm, and eventually notices me standing here with my camera half-raised, as if in salute. “Who’s she?” she says, and I am about to stammer something, when I realize I have forgotten the answer.
The cowboy grins a bit awkwardly. “Oh, I’m sorry. Gwen. This is Ai, a friend of Sam’s.”
She studies me, waiting for a confirmation or confession, and flicks a lock of her hair behind her ear. My mouth is open. I close it to speak. “I gave Sam a ride.”
The stare continues, but she offers no notion of response, and so I feel forced to go on with my explanation. “I’m looking for a location for a film. I’m in the film industry. We’re making a western.”
The cowboy nods to verify this statement.
Sam appears behind the woman and looks out at his brother, then at me.