Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels

by Michael Libling

  “Jesus, no,” I said, under my breath, both swearing and praying.

  “We have decided to send Charles to private school in Port Hope,” Mr. Dahl-Packer said. (Or was he plain Mr. Packer?) He parted his hair in the middle. His eyeglasses were thick with a tinge of pink. He sat on a wood-beaded seat cover. “My wife tells me you are the boy responsible for Charles’s spate of difficulties. You have made his life utterly wretched, it would seem. Are you proud of yourself, young man?”

  “I’m just getting over a real bad case of the mumps,” I said.

  Mrs. Dahl-Packer grabbed my ear and twisted till I faced her. Cripes! How’d she pull that off? I hadn’t seen her get out of the car. As before, she hoisted me up till we were nose to breast. “I know your mother. I know her type, the frivolous small-town flirt who married the handsome ne’er-do-well—the local Billy Bigelow. . . .”

  “Alexander. His name was Alexander.”

  “. . . and, tragically, discarded by the wayside to raise his misbegotten progeny. The apple does not fall far from the tree, I am afraid.” She smelled of orange juice and spearmint. “You and your mother share a sickness that festers in the mind till it manifests in the physical. Serious illness is inevitable. It is written all over you.” She released my ears, placed her hands on my shoulders. “But I want you to know, Leo Berry, my husband and I will be waiting. We will do everything in our power to ensure that you and your dear mother receive the exact dose and type of medicine you both so richly deserve.”

  “My mother didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “Evidently. Your breeding and belligerence attest to the fact.”

  On Friday, after lunch, Janet Barstool interrupted our class to give Mrs. Crawford a note. (Janet was the office monitor of the week, a privilege never before extended to a first grader.) My teacher popped three fingers over a truant whoop, and happily zeroed in on me. “Leo! Mr. Malbasic wants to see you. Right this minute, dear.” Any more joy and you would’ve sworn she’d just won a Whirlpool washer on Queen for a Day. She was under the impression untold delights awaited me down the hall. I was, after all, the lovely boy whose courageous mother had saved the life of the revered Mr. Malbasic.

  Mrs. Miller, the school secretary, and Janet Barstool applauded me when I came into the office. Mrs. Miller also said, “Splendid.”

  Mr. Malbasic guided me to his office, his arm a cobra on my shoulder. He shut the door behind him, steered me past his desk and into the storage room attached. He shut this door, too.

  His tongue darted. Clearly, I’d jumped the gun on the bump on his head and the loss of his tic.

  “Do you have any idea why you are here, Mr. Berry?”

  I searched the space, the shelves of stationery supplies, the mimeograph machine. “To count pens, sir?” I said, holding out hope mindless tasks were in store.

  He chuckled. “My goodness, you are a card. Unfortunately, I was remiss during your previous visit. I neglected to give you your due. Silly me.” He pulled the strap out of thin air, a sleight of hand I could have done without. “Today, we are going to make up for my oversight. Your hands, please, Mr. Berry. How many is it I owe you? Ah, yes, allowing for the one from our previous session, that would be seven on each for a grand total of eight on each.”

  “I’m just getting over a deadly case of the mumps, sir.”

  “Left or right, first?”

  I held out my left and the strap flew down. This wasn’t going to be easy. He was putting way more behind it than he had before. I began to offer up my right but he grabbed my wrist, held the left in position. “Not yet, you don’t.” And he hit the hand a second time.

  “I see confusion,” he said. “Let me explain. Since my mishap, I have suffered the occasional bout of what doctors call diplopia. Double vision, perhaps? More familiar? The good news is, it comes and goes. The bad news is, it has come at this inopportune moment. So, in order to be certain, it’s best I strike twice—the hand I see and the hand I imagine I see.”

  “But you didn’t miss, sir. Look. It’s red. You hit me square on. Both times.”

  “Oh, yes, another thing. While this room is quite soundproof, I would be most appreciative, nonetheless, if you would refrain from excessive drama. Undue howling, screeching, bellyaching, or similar incivilities. The others, Mrs. Miller and Miss Barstool, you wouldn’t want to let them down, now, would you? Or Mrs. Crawford? Indeed, the entire school has been led to believe you’re quite the peach—that your mother saved my life. I can’t imagine where they got that idea. Can you?”

  I did a quick calculation: 7 x 2 x 2 = 28.

  Twenty-eight, Jesus.

  Who’d ever survived twenty-eight?

  12:00 3 THE KENTUCKIAN—Western

  Walter Matthau bullwhips the hell out of Burt Lancaster for four senseless minutes, but does Burt give up? Uh-uh.

  I would not cry. I would be Burt. On my feet and fighting back. Okay, maybe not fighting back. Going at it with your school principal was a one-way ticket to Boys Farm. But I would be on my feet, at least.

  By the fourth (or eighth, depending), I was Jell-O in a loose caboose, my legs no sturdier than Twizzlers. And that peculiar noise ricocheting off my teeth and cheeks, it was not crying. I can’t say what I was doing, but I was not crying.

  By the sixth (or twelfth, depending), tears filled my eyes. Rolled down my cheeks. Salted my lips. It might have looked like crying. Might’ve felt like crying. It wasn’t crying. I was not crying.

  By the ninth (or eighteenth, depending), my hands were dead. But not the rest of me. And I was not crying.

  By the fourteenth (or twenty-eighth), I promised myself, first chance I got, I’d kill the bastard. And sobbing, by the way, is not crying. Sobbing is mourning. Because you take fourteen on each, you know by instinct some part of you has died, your hands the least of it.

  “There, there. That wasn’t so bad, now, was it? No worse for wear. Now clean yourself up. Dry your eyes. Attend to the swelling. And I’ll return when you’ve regained your composure.” He handed me a box of Kleenex and a bottle of witch hazel. He exited the storage room, shutting off the light, closing the door.

  I shrivelled to the floor, the cold metal of the cabinet against my back. Splashed witch hazel over my hands. Splashed witch hazel over everything. And waited in the dark. Waited. A couple of hours, easy. Until the bell to end the school day had rung. And then some. Before Principal Malbasic checked back in, removed me from solitary.

  He sat me at his desk. I would have grabbed the brass owl paperweight and pulped his head, had I been capable of grabbing, and pulping. He’d beat Pecker’s hands to lobster claws. Mine were plump red pillows.

  “Do you know what this is?” He cleared a space and placed a sheet on the desk before me. “This is your school record. It will follow you for the rest of your empty life. Go ahead. Read it. Take your time.”

  I didn’t read it. Didn’t need to. The words he wanted me to see popped from the page like neon on a dark road.

  troublemaker

  remorseless

  malcontent

  slow deficient

  reckless

  unpredictable

  violent unfit

  “I am not an unreasonable man, Mr. Berry. I want only the best for all my students. Yes, you included. If anything, I have been assured I am an excessively fair-minded individual. It is why I am, again, requesting you take a note home to your mother. I would like nothing more than for her to reconsider working with me, so that we may expunge the most grievous offences from your record and successfully foster your scholarship and tenuous humanity.”

  Heck, how many bad people did this town have? And why were all of them out to get me?

  I knew the type. (Mrs. Dahl-Packer was another.) The villain who blabbed too much. Bandied about fifty-dollar words, sentences engineered from the nuts and bolts of an Erector Set. Jack was long-winded, too, but he used his powers for good. Malbasic was long-winded with malice. Malbasic. Dahl-Packer. They coul
d saw you in half with their smiles.

  He came around to my side of the desk, motioned me to my feet. He bypassed my useless hands and slid the envelope into my hip pocket. He patted my butt, winked. “Fear not. It will all come out in the wash.”

  I’d kill him. I’d get a gun and kill him. I’d kill them all. Dahl-Packer, she’d get hers. Double Al and Mickey Mental. The Waynes. Even if they weren’t long-winded, I’d kill them, too.

  Do not feel sorry for me. Sympathy is pity with an extra syllable. Above all, do not start liking me.

  I am not a good person.

  I could have been.

  I wanted to be.

  But I am not.

  Sixteen

  The woman who went fishing from Dam 1 on the Trent–Severn

  I didn’t read Malbasic’s note. It was blackmail, I knew, my future the trade-off. I ripped it up, double-flushed the pieces.

  I hid my crippled hands from Mom. I would not give her cause to go anywhere near the school. I sat on them. Pocketed them. Crossed my arms and buried them in my armpits. Practised the military at ease, wrists stitched to backside. And when I had no option, I willed them to function. To grip a glass. To twist a fork. To turn the TV dials. Even so, Mom would have noticed the swelling and redness soon enough had Dottie’s death not offered up distraction.

  Dottie Swartz, formerly Lange, drowned on the Saturday morning after my Friday drubbing. My mother got the news late in the afternoon. I was upstairs in my room, reading, when the phone rang.

  She cried out. The same heartbroken shriek I’d heard when I was three, the policeman at our door with news of Dad. She fell to her knees for Dottie, too, her forehead pressed to the rug in the living room.

  Dottie took a header off Dam 1 into the Trent–Severn and was swept downriver. She’d bounced off a concrete buttress as she tumbled and, according to husband Helmut, “Went out like a light before she hit the river. Swallowed up like a Raggedy-Ann.”

  She and Helmut had been fishing from the dam. They’d been married two months to the day. Her wedding was the first I’d been to. My mother was her best man, or so she and Dottie joked.

  Dottie had given up on love and marriage, when Helmut came wooing. He’d relocated from Kitchener, Ontario, to take a job at Central Bridge. She’d met him on a Tuesday evening at Arthur Murray Dance Studio, where Helmut taught the cha-cha. But you knew most of this, already, if you’ve been paying attention.

  The wedding was fun. Pigs in blankets. Chicken livers in bacon. Deviled eggs. Party sandwiches—tuna, salmon. Spam with pineapple. Rainbow Jell-O molds with tangerine. Vanilla wedding cake with buttercream frosting.

  Dottie and Helmut danced up a storm. Mom and Dottie badgered me to dance, too, wouldn’t leave me alone, but I’d have none of it or them. Three dumbest things on Earth: Neckties, earrings, and dancing.

  The day after Dottie drowned, I told Jack I’d be his front, claim I found the cards in Hanna Park.

  Mom was deep in the dumps and sliding deeper. I wasn’t sure she’d ever climb out. But I had to give it a shot. Seeing me in the paper. A hero. Gus the Finder. Okay, okay—Leo the Finder. That’d put a smile on her face. And Mom and me, we’d be sticking it to Malbasic, too. He’d hate to see any good come from us.

  “Once we show Mr. McGrath . . . You’ve got to promise you won’t tell him or anybody it was me. I’m warning you, not ever.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  “Swear to God.”

  “I swear to God.”

  “Swear on your mother’s life, Gus.”

  “C’mon, Jack. What’s the big—”

  “Forget it, then.”

  “No. Wait. Stop. I swear.” I mumbled a wobbly, “On my mother’s life.”

  “Don’t you forget.”

  I nodded with vigour. Proving myself a worthy sidekick could be exhausting. A never-ending audition.

  Third Reel

  One

  1988 and I was at a Texaco in Oshawa

  to confront the sink that killed my dad

  A 1988 Ford Tempo does not turn on a dime. But it came close as I swerved into the Texaco on the other side of the highway.

  I couldn’t say definitively it was my father’s fatal Texaco, though the cranky pumps and peeling paint gave me cause to believe it could be. I surveyed the grounds, saw no wreaths, decaying bouquets, or point-of-interest marker:

  Alexander Berry,

  Husband of Emily, Father of Leo (aka Gus),

  Cracked Open His Skull On This Spot in December 1954

  I checked out the restroom for old times’ sake, unzipped at the urinal, contemplated the sink. “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star . . .”

  Standing there, soaping up, I concluded it was more likely the toilet that killed Dad, the cops figuring death by sink a softer blow for Mom and me.

  Night comes early in January. Darker and dirtier, too. It was cold, though nowhere near as dark, dirty, and cold as Winnipeg. Trust me, I’d have found a way out of the city if I didn’t hate it so much, if I didn’t believe we deserved each other.

  Jack perked up as we entered Port Hope, an hour east of Toronto in good weather and light traffic. “This is where Pecker’s parents sent him to school after you punched him out.”

  This wasn’t news.

  “Trinity College School. Founded 1865.”

  Snow was falling.

  “Peter Jennings went to Trinity. Think Pecker met him?”

  I switched the wipers from low to medium.

  “He anchors the evening news on ABC.”

  Like I didn’t know.

  “And Joseph Scriven, he writes What a Friend We Have In Jesus. No shit, right here in Port Hope, he writes it. And then up and drowns himself.”

  It wasn’t a blizzard, not yet, only the makings of one.

  “But why not, eh? Back in Ireland, the guy’s bride-to-be drowns, so he runs away to here. And what happens? His next bride-to-be croaks, too. I mean, you got to figure, Jesus wasn’t all that good a friend.”

  On that 1977 visit, clearing out my mother’s house, I came across seventeen drug prescriptions in her name. Seventeen. I couldn’t tell you what half were for, only where they’d been filled. Packer Family Pharmacy. I put them in a bag, got in the car, and headed straight over. I didn’t stop to think. Pushed right up to the pharmacy counter.

  “Yes?” Pecker said. He wore a white coat. The prick was a fucking pharmacist.

  “You killed my mother,” I said.

  “Pardon me? Who are you?”

  The contents of my bag clattered across the countertop.

  He caught a plastic bottle on the rebound and read the label. “Mother,” he said with urgency. “Mother.” The pills rattled in his hand. “Mother, I need you now.”

  Mrs. Dahl-Packer poked her head from the dispensary, sidled serenely up to Pecker. She wore a white coat, too. “Yes?” She looked to her son, then to me, and blinked. Pecker handed her the bottle. She read the label. “Oh, it’s you,” she said.

  “You poisoned her.”

  Her smile took its cruel sweet time to cover the distance, left corner of her wizened mouth to right. “So sorry for your loss.”

  Two

  Unicorns in stables

  The best lies are unplanned. My forte was the throwaway. The one-liner no one would question, but allowed for backpedalling when someone did. “What did I say? No, of course not. What I meant was . . .” The doubt set in only after Jack signed me up to his scheme. “You’ll be dealing with a newspaperman, Gus, not some feeb on the playground. And not your mom, either. Mr. McGrath suspects for one second you’re pulling the wool over his eyes and he’ll strangle you with it. I’m telling you, he can smell bullshit before the bull farts.”

  Jack put me through the paces, drilled me backwards and forwards on his story. I was sold on it, too, almost believed I was the finder, until the Friday we turned on to Quinte Street. “Let’s say we found them together, okay?”

  “C’mon, Gus, not
now. You can do this. It’s going to be a cakewalk.”

  The Trent Record was no Daily Planet and, his horn-rimmed glasses aside, Bryan McGrath was no Clark Kent.

  Hatrack tall and coat-hanger thin, the senior reporter looked nothing like the headshot that ran with his hunting and fishing column; he was a good twenty years older, his hair greyer, eyebrows wilder, mouth meaner. He wasn’t anybody I’d ever want to go hunting or fishing with. Or, I suppose, it could’ve been my recent interactions with local villains had me anticipating the worst from everyone. He came across friendly enough, slapped Jack on the back and glad-handed me short of paralysis. “So, Jack tells me you’re a finder, too. Gus, is it?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and with a nod to my mother, relented: “Leo, actually, sir. Leo Berry. Gus is what my friends call me.”

  “Well then, I’ll call you Gus, too. How’s that? Jack here tells me you’ve got something special. I’m eager to see.”

  He led us from the reception area and into the fog of the newsroom. Clouds of smoke veiled the fluorescents overhead. Cigar stink masked cigarette stink. Three rows of desks, nine desks in total. The clack-clack and ding of Remingtons and Underwoods. Reporters. Those who weren’t smoking were chewing. On pens, pencils, toothpicks. Men typing. Men on phones. Men with their feet up. A woman fiddling with her typewriter ribbon. They waved or winked at Jack as we passed.

  The woman said, “What’s cookin’, handsome?”

  “Hi, Miss Bridgeman,” Jack said. Mary Bridgeman was the society columnist. I hadn’t recognized her without the dead fox on her neck.

  An old guy covered the mouthpiece of his phone and said, “What’d you dig up this time, son? The Holy Grail or the Lost Dutchman’s gold?”

  “Neither, sir. But my friend here has a doozy.”

  “I sure doozy,” I said, feeling at ease with my imminent celebrity. I felt so good, in fact, I didn’t feel like me.