Look for Rochester on your map and it’s an inch straight up, an aberrant speck of chronic self-deception on the north shore of Lake Ontario, toward the western tip of the Bay of Quinte. Pronounced kwin-tee, the inlet is as perfect a Z as God has carved. Left to me, it would’ve been the Bay of Zorro.
The Trent River splits the town up the middle. Three bridges now span the gap, one for rail, two for road traffic. Prior to 1990, drivers and pedestrians relied mostly on the swing bridge on Dundas Street, the main street. Close by, upriver, there was also a footbridge attached to a railroad bridge. But you only took it on dares or if inclined to suicide. Walking under it wasn’t a great idea, either, as its 1964 collapse would show.
Trenton is the gateway to the Trent–Severn Waterway. It is popular with boaters, fishermen, and the British Royal Family. Queen Elizabeth has turned up a bunch of times over the years. As a kid, I stood by the roadside and waved to her with the rest of the town and she waved back, though her hand never moved much, like she had a backscratcher up her sleeve.
You might have heard of the town. In 2010, Trenton had a serial killer. The commander of the nearby Air Force base, no less. A colonel. I’m not kidding. The guy had even piloted the Queen’s plane a few times. The Prime Minister’s, too. Again, I’m not kidding. You can look it up.
The serial killer didn’t surprise me. I only wondered what took so long. I have wondered the same about a lot thereabouts—from the dark shit that has come to pass to the dark shit that will.
These days, the Killer Colonel pretty much sums up what most people know about Trenton and this includes the people who live there. I do not hold it against them. Nobody knew much in my day, either. And those who did weren’t big on talking. I don’t blame any of them. Anymore. Look how long it’s taken me to open up.
Every town has its history. Every town has its secrets. Trenton’s secret is its history.
Three
Annie was the girl who believed in things
From the beginning of me I sensed the town would be the end of me, as if my designated bogeyman had vacated his lair beneath my bed, preferring to lie in wait in less patent territory. I saw neither streets nor avenues, only dead ends and dead endings. While other kids made do with stamps and coins and baseball cards, I collected fears. The biggest was that my mother would die and leave me on my own. Not that orphanhood wasn’t entirely without appeal. Rusty on Rin Tin Tin. Corky on Circus Boy. Cuffy on Captain Gallant. That mopey kid from A Dog of Flanders. Joey on Fury. Bomba, the Jungle Boy. Orphanhood was the best thing to have happened to them. I just didn’t have it in me to commit. Maybe if I’d had a dog or a horse. A baby elephant.
“Do you ever feel it?” I once asked Annie Barker. It was third grade and I shared my creepy worries with no other. I weighed the pros and cons of everything. I could carry some stuff inside of me for years, the larger part of this story a case in point. “You know, like something is going to get you, except you don’t know how bad or how soon?”
Annie was the girl who believed in things. Me, among them, I suppose.
She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so we filled each other’s voids. (She filled mine, at least.) She lived with her mom and dad up in The Heights, the new development near Trenton High. I’d never been invited over; we were strictly school friends, like every friend I’d ever had. But I knew her house—127 Pheasant Crescent—and had bicycled by a bunch of times, my focus on the asphalt as I pedalled crazy fast, praying she’d see me, relieved she never did.
“I’m not sure I understand,” Annie said. I trusted Annie as much as I did my mother. Maybe more. There are some fears a kid can’t confide to a parent. The closer the relationship, the riskier it gets. Had I shared with Mom the terror brewing inside of me, she would have used it against me, upped my cod liver oil, confiscated my jackknife, checked me for worms, banned the scary movies and TV—The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents—and put me on a 24/7 death watch.
Annie coaxed me forward in that gentle way of hers. “What do you think is going to get you? Who could possibly want to—”
“I don’t know. I just feel it. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Not anything anybody can do. Like whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.”
She gaped, suspicious of my motives, like I was out to destroy everything she believed in. “My goodness, no. I do not feel it. No. Not at all. Never. And neither should you.” She softened, shook her head with the same forbearance and pity she had reserved for me since first day of first grade. I was and would forever be her special project. “Life is a gift. A wonderful gift. Why waste it with silly thoughts? You can’t think like that. You just can’t. Please.”
I could deal with Annie’s anger. Her disappointment was the struggle.
“Oh, my Gloomy Gus. Don’t you see how lucky we are to live here? There are children in Europe who would give their eye teeth to be in our shoes.” Annie was into her Sandra Dee phase then. Sunshine, positivity, and dimples. The Deborah Walley, Hayley Mills, and Patty Duke phases would come later. Whatever. I would not have traded Annie for any of them. (Okay, Tuesday Weld, maybe. Connie Stevens, some days.) “Do you never go to church?”
My church was the Odeon. At home, I prayed at the altar of RCA.
“Does your mother never take you? Have you never read Bible stories—Daniel in the Lion’s Den? It will do you a world of good. I promise. Have faith.”
“I know it.” Alan Young, Wilbur Post on Mr. Ed, was in the movie. “He pulls the thorn from the lion’s paw and later on the lion doesn’t eat him.”
“Are you joking? That’s Androcles and the Lion. Daniel is where the angel saves him by locking the jaws of the lions.”
“Jeez, Annie. You have any idea how many lions stories are out there? Anyone could mix them up. Tarzan has lions coming out of his ears.”
“You drive me crazy, you really really do. Tarzan is not in the Bible, Gus. Who doesn’t know their Bible stories? Especially with your name.”
“What?”
“If anybody would be a lion expert, it should be you. It’s your real name, isn’t it? Leo. Leo the lion?”
“That’s like saying you should be a barking expert. And are you? Are you, Annie Barker?”
“I’m sorry.”
“And don’t call me Leo. I’m Gus. Only Gus.”
“You don’t have to get so mad. I was only trying to help. You get these thoughts . . .”
“I know the story. I forgot, okay? In the end, God feeds Daniel’s enemies to the lions and everybody is happy.”
“See. That’s what I mean. I knew you knew. But you had to act like—I don’t know what. Can’t you ever be serious?”
“I was serious. I was. You didn’t like what I had to say, so I stopped.”
“I don’t want you thinking bad things. You scare me sometimes. I worry about you, Gus.”
“I worry about you, too.”
“Me? Why? I go to church. I’m fine.”
“I just do.”
“Well, don’t. Okay?”
“Jeez, okay. I won’t.”
“You need more friends. That’s your problem.”
“I got friends.”
“Besides me? Who? I never see you with anyone.”
“You don’t know them. They don’t go to our school.”
“Well, I hope they’re not the ones putting those bad thoughts in your head.”
I carried on as before, resigned, the burden of impending doom mine alone. When the time came, I’d save Annie in spite of herself. But everyone else, they’d be on their own. No way I’d become the Invasion of the Body Snatchers guy, wailing and flailing as he raced headlong into traffic, warning the unsuspecting masses as they heaped him with abuse. Screw them. Stupid ingrates. Let them learn the hard way. Not that I was anywhere near clear as to what I’d be warning anybody about.
I remain unclear. Yet here I am, on page nineteen of whatever this turns out to be, racing headlong into traffic. And I
am wailing. And I am flailing. At twenty-four frames per second.
Four
The obligatory taxidermy
I asked my mother why we didn’t go to church. She was gardening, a smudge of dirt on her cheek, Buffalo’s WKBW on the radio in the window. “If you went to church, you would know why,” she said.
I met Annie first day of first grade.
Dufferin Street School was a demure Georgian beauty, two stories of quarried stone and priory windows, a mother hen of a building that promised to wrap us up in its wings and keep us safe.
Ask Marion Crane about first impressions, that nice boy Norman Bates.
Oak cabinets flanked Dufferin’s every corridor and wall, the best and brightest of Canada’s wildlife entombed within. The thriving, threatened, and long gone. Buffed beaks and snouts snuffling up to glass. Eyes glazed, soulless, and unnervingly alert. Gallery upon gallery of feather, fur, claws, and cunning, neither death nor stuffing sufficient impediments to the buffet of grade-school baby fat spread before them. I got the message damn quick. Study hard. Work hard. Or you’re dead meat. Running would get me nowhere.
Miss Proctor’s take was less dramatic. “This way, children,” she said. “Let me tell you, you’re in for quite the treat.” And thus our first grade teacher commenced with our indoctrination. As if my reservoir of fears required topping up.
Eagles, hawks, and falcons. Loons and ducks. A great auk. A passenger pigeon. A cougar. Raccoons, weasels, and ferrets. And overseeing the gutted lot, perched in covens, cabals, and parliaments, the owls. Their bloodless hearts pounded in cahoots and in my ears, the verdict against me unanimous, my complicity in their demise rendered beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In contrast, Miss Proctor was Cinderella preparing for the ball. Chirpy birds and merry mice is all she saw. “Do we have any budding taxidermists among us today? What about other hobbies? Needlepoint, anyone? Wood-burning? You know what they say, idle hands play the Devil’s piano. This way, children.”
The more messed up the display, the more exuberant our teacher’s commentary.
An owl sucking rat. An owl slurping frog.
“Do you know what I enjoy best about being a teacher here, boys and girls? Every day is a walk in the woods and I needn’t step an inch outside to enjoy it.”
A wolf eviscerating Bambi. A lynx regurgitating Thumper.
Miss Proctor paused, swept her attentive audience with a widescreen wink. She clasped her hands, lowered her voice, divulged the secret. “I can’t say if it’s true for certain, but I have heard on excellent authority that Mother Nature herself went to Dufferin School when she was little.”
Man, the crock she unloaded on us would’ve made Pinocchio an also-ran.
An hour and three floors later, basement level and its bear cubs the easy winner, we gathered by the cabinet at our classroom door. “So now you see, boys and girls, how fortunate we are to have a zoological repository of this immensity in our very own midst. Never forget how lucky you are to live in this wonderful community and to attend this wonderful school. What did I say? What kind of a walk can we enjoy every day, rain or shine, sleet or snow?”
The halls reverberated with my classmates’ joy. “A walk in the woods, Miss Proctor.” I lip-synced my part, a fresh dose of dread shooting through my skull. Was she kidding? Were these dopes blind? School was no refuge. The place was a dirt bag shy of graveyard. Had these people never seen a movie? Taxidermy never leads to anything good.
“The red fox, he’s beautiful, isn’t he?”
“What?” I turned to the honey-haired girl at my side, took in her brown eyes, the crinkling at the corners. Till then, I’d thought plucky only happened in movies and TV.
“Him.” She tapped the glass of the display case. “The fox. He’s so beautiful.”
“He’s dead,” I said.
Her smile stalled incomplete, a younger, cuter Mona Lisa. She couldn’t decide what to make of the grumpy lump of asbestos standing before her. Abruptly, she held out her hand how grown-ups do. “I’m Annie Barker,” she said. “It’s really nice to meet you, Mister . . . uh . . . Gloomy Gus?”
I corrected her. “It’s Leo. Leo Berry.”
“Like the fruit?”
“That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”
“Oh, you are a Gus. Definitely. A Gloomy Gus.”
“Did Daddy go to church?” I asked my mother.
“The life we are given is complicated enough, dear, without the added strain of preparing for the next.”
Five
The story behind the absent ‘n’ of Glen Miller Road
Annie’s father was the owner of Barker & Sons Lumber out on Glen Miller Road. His dad, the founding Barker, was dead, while the Battle of Britain and the Korean War finished off his older brothers. Mr. Barker shows up later to save my life, among other things. Even so, he’s a supporting player and most of what he does occurs off page. I mention him now only because of Glen Miller Road.
You’d think it’d be named in honour of the famous composer and bandleader, seeing as how the town’s Royal Canadian Air Force base had been a transport hub in World War II and Miller disappeared in a plane over the English Channel in 1944 on his way to France to serenade the troops, many of whom had bivouacked in Trenton. But anyone who knows the local mindset knows better.
Glen Miller Road honours a mill that used to operate in the glen, and not Glenn Miller, his trombone, or his service. The mundane prevails. Always has.
I could extend the benefit of the doubt, of course, assume all the extra Ns the switch to proper signage would have entailed might have bankrupted the county. I could. I won’t.
Outside of active politicians kissing up to former politicians, Trenton has never been big on remembering the memorable.
Glen Miller Road is the least of it. You’ll see.
Six
I was the boy who wanted things
Jack found the message in the bottle in the sand at Presqu’ile beach in late summer of 1959, the first Sunday after school had begun. “The neck was sticking out,” he told the Record. “Anybody could have seen it.”
The message had come from a crew member of the James B. Colgate, a steamer that had gone down in Lake Erie forty-three years earlier.
jbc 20 Oc 1916
high wind Wave
good By my Gitte
Harald Nordahl
Here, the photo of Jack, the bottle balanced with care upon his palm, two fingers at the neck, made you wonder if poor Harald Nordahl hadn’t passed it directly to him, entrusting the Levin boy above all others. Like the dying soldiers of “In Flanders Fields,” the poem teachers hammered into us each November. For the longest while, I thought the point of Remembrance Day was to remind us to memorize poems.
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
More than ever, I wanted to be Jack. I wanted to be a finder, too. We’d be The Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe. We’d find stuff together. Solve mysteries. Salvage valuable relics. Rescue cute girls from slavering fiends in derelict mansions. Annie would be our Iola Morton.
I could have told him outright. I saw him around school plenty, walking home, and whatnot. But I was also aware of the risks. One ordinary kid declaring fandom to another is a bad idea any way you slice it. It is going to come off as weird. I would be branded for life. Smart kids nip the inclination in the bud, and I counted myself among them; my mother promoted my genius daily.
Not until the following spring did it cross my mind to stalk him. Serendipity is what it was, and the bell for morning recess. Right time, right place.
We streamed from our classrooms, same as always, and into The Halls of the Living Dead. It’s what I called them by then. Annie had picked up on it, too, passed it on to her friends. Susan Burgess. Diana Klieg. Bonnie Priddy. They thought I was hilarious, nicknamed me Igor for a couple of weeks. I pretended I saw the humour, too.
I’d survived first and second grade by looking
the other way, keeping the mammalian and avian zombies at bay. Lapses had been few. Still, the images lodged in my brain, projected onto my ceiling at bedtime. But with April drawing to a close and summer vacation pending, my discipline went out the window. This great horned owl, a feathered demon with tiger-stripe wings flapped into my sightline and pulled me in, her yellow eyes as large as lemons, and who did I see reflected back?—none but Jack, skipping down the stairs from the floor above.
Annie would have gone overboard, had I told her, declared divine intervention. “Oh, Gus! Oh, Gus! Don’t you see, the owl was the angel of the Lord. It’s like Fatima. The Miracle of Our Lady of Trenton.”
The owl spoke to me: Jack would never be my friend unless I nudged him into it.
I anticipated his course, positioned myself so we’d bump shoulders. There’d be no way around it. I’d apologize and he’d apologize and then we’d laugh and become great friends. Problem was, he didn’t see me. I stood smack in front of him and Jack didn’t see me. Walked right by. Or was it through? No bump. No nothing. Like I wasn’t there. I lifted my hands, warily examined each for symptoms of sudden onset transparency. There’d been morning fog. I would not be the first to be genetically reconfigured by a radioactive cloud. The king-sized spiders in World Without End. The king-sized ants in Them! Little Joe Cartwright in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The colonel in The Amazing Colossal Man. But far as I could tell, my hands were as intact as the rest of me. There had to be another explanation. Could I be invisible only to Jack?
We passed fifty times a day and yet he’d never said a word in three years. He found everything else, didn’t he? But he couldn’t find me? C’mon, eh! I was no pipsqueak, either, way easier to spot than some rock from outer space, a bottle in the muck. We needed to be friends, Jack and me. Best friends. But how, if I was invisible to him? Sure, I could slap him on the back, make my presence known. He’d see me then—or feel me, hear me, anyhow. “Hey, Jack, it’s me—The Invisible Boy. Yeah, yeah. Over here. No, not there, here. Here. Hey, how’d you like to be friends?” Anybody try that on me and I’d vamoose damn quick.
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