Born Weird

by Andrew Kaufman

  “But …” Richard said. Then he fell silent. The propane lantern hissed. He turned his back to his sisters. He looked at the ocean. His shoulders were hunched up. They stayed this way for several moments. Then they relaxed and he turned around and pushed the shovel through the grass and he began to dig.

  Angie stood for as long as she could. Then she sat on the grass, which was wet. She watched Richard dig. The bigger the pile of dirt got, the less of him she could see. Only the top of his head remained visible when the shovel hit something solid. Richard reached up, Lucy passed him the crowbar and Angie looked at her hands. She counted the blades of grass that were stuck to her fingers as she heard the wood splinter. Then no one said anything, which made her look back up.

  Abba was on her knees at the foot of the grave. “Thank God,” Abba said, quietly, and then she began to sob.

  Nobody helped Richard climb out of the grave. There was dirt on his face and under his fingernails. The crowbar was still in his hand as he walked towards Angie. He tossed the crowbar. It landed at her feet.

  “At least we know where one father figure is,” Richard said.

  He walked to the cemetery gates and through them. Lucy began shovelling dirt back into the hole. Abba silently wept. Angie put her hands on her stomach and she did not look away. She didn’t join them either.

  A LARGE PORTION OF THE departures area of the Upliffta International Airport was roped off because a truck-sized chunk of concrete had fallen from the ceiling. Inside the perimeter two men worked a jackhammer. They were attempting to break the large chunk into smaller pieces and succeeding in creating a lot of dust and noise.

  Covering their mouths, Angie, Lucy, Richard and Abba walked around the mess. They were almost at the other side when Angie saw the man who was waiting for them. Or at least for her. He held a bouquet of the purple roadside flowers. His suit was well tailored but rumpled. As Angie’s siblings rushed ahead, he ran up to her.

  “Angie!” he called, loudly. The jackhammering continued as he got down on one knee and extended the flowers. “I’ve been so worried about you.”

  Angie neither looked down nor stopped. She walked around him and joined her siblings at a special ticket counter that had been opened for the queen and her family. She continued ignoring him, even when he appeared at her side.

  “HEY! JUST TALK TO ME!” he screamed. The jackhammer fell silent and his raised voice echoed off the concrete roof. At the front of the line Richard turned around. He looked at the guy and then he looked at Angie. Dropping his suitcase Richard stepped between his sister and the man she was pretending not to know.

  “This guy bugging you?” Richard asked.

  “I don’t even know who you’re talking about,” Angie said. She wished that the men operating the jackhammer would get back to work.

  “This guy. This guy right here.”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  “Right here! The one with the flowers.”

  “Ah, Richard, sometimes you can be so thick!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Who is this guy?” Lucy asked, having wandered back from her place in line.

  “Who are you?” Abba demanded, having followed Lucy.

  “I’m her husband!”

  “You are not my husband!”

  “Well, you can’t deny I’m the father of your unborn child!” he said. He looked at her siblings who had all gathered around. “Who the hell are you people?”

  Angie’s undeniable compulsion to instantly forgive everybody made love very difficult for her. Her heart had been broken over and over again. The men she fell in love with tended to take advantage of her forgiving nature. Eventually they lost respect for her, thinking that she had no respect for herself.

  Angie had become afraid of love. Her solution was Paul. He was, in fact, her husband as well as the father of her unborn child. She definitely was in love with him. But he was also someone she could keep at an emotional arm’s length. Or to put it another way, treat like shit and be assured that he would never leave her.

  At the time, Angie thought Paul let her treat him like this because he had low self-esteem. She had no idea it was because he loved her more than anyone ever had, or ever would.

  Angie walked past her husband, stepped up to the counter and checked her luggage. The rest of the Weirds did the same. Leaving Paul behind, they proceeded to security. Angie presented her boarding pass to the uniformed official. She did not look over her shoulder as she put her keys and change into a plastic tray. She took off her running shoes. The metal detector didn’t beep as she passed through it, but the baby gave her stomach a good kick. Then another one, which turned into a series of kicks, each one slightly harder than the last.

  “Okay,” Angie said, looking down at her stomach. “Okay, okay, okay,” she repeated. She looked through the metal detector. Richard and Lucy hadn’t walked through it yet.

  “Really?” Angie called towards them. She held her shoes with her hands. The laces flapped around as she spoke. “Not one of you is going to do this for me?”

  “Do what?” Richard called.

  “Really?” Angie continued. “Really?”

  “What?” Lucy said.

  “I’m really going to have to say it? I’m going to have to ask?”

  “What are you talking about, Angie?”

  “Jesus!”

  “What? What aren’t we doing?”

  “Just go get him! Will you not just go get him?”

  “The guy with the flowers?”

  “Who wasn’t your husband?”

  “Yes. That guy. Please go and get him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s my husband,” Angie said. “He’s the love of my life.”

  Neither Lucy nor Richard said another word. They nodded their heads. They put their shoes back on. Stepping out of line, they walked back towards the front of the airport. “His name is Paul. You’ll probably have to buy him a ticket,” Angie called after them.

  KENT WEIRD PUSHED A SHOPPING CART dangerously overloaded with empty beer and wine bottles up the middle of Palmerston Boulevard. His clothes were dirty. His beard was long and unkempt. The cart bounced over every crack in the road. The bottles rattled. He steadied the empties with his left hand and he steered with his right hand. Yet the majority of his attention was given over to finding an imaginative way to kill himself.

  He knew the method had to be unique and original and unlike anything that anyone had ever done before. It had to be everything that Kent felt he wasn’t and wished he were. His current favourite plan involved placing eight running chainsaws at the bottom of a tall building. Then Kent would swan dive from the top and land on the chainsaws. Another idea was to stand at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas as four garbage trucks, each one travelling at a great speed and from a different direction, crashed into him at exactly the same time. Kent also imagined freezing himself inside a block of ice and setting it beside the Henry Moore sculpture in Nathan Phillips Square. He’d do this in January. His thawing in April would be a materialization of the false promise of spring renewal.

  Kent loved all these ideas, but there were problems. He couldn’t figure out how to set up and secure the running chainsaws. He didn’t have the money to hire four garbage trucks and their drivers. The technical knowledge needed to install a tub of water in front of city hall was beyond him. Kent’s problem wasn’t creativity, but cash and expertise. He needed something simple.

  Kent’s mind was so preoccupied that he failed to notice the large pothole directly in his path. The front right wheel of his shopping cart fell into the hole. It tipped to the right. Kent looked down just as his empties began hitting the pavement. The sound was enormous. Quickly, Kent uprighted the cart but he used too much force and it fell to the left. The remaining bottles flew out and smashed on the road.

  “Fuck,” Kent said. He jumped up and down. The thick soles of his workboots broke the glass into smaller pieces. “Fuck, fuck, fucking fuck
!”

  One bottle remained unbroken. Kent picked it up. He smashed it against the side of his overturned shopping cart. Then he walked back to his house, which was less than half a block away. In the coach house Kent got a broom, although he could not find a dustpan. He walked around to the front door and he went inside.

  Having removed his workboots Kent continued looking for a dustpan. He was searching the third floor when he happened to look out the window and see that his siblings were standing in the front yard.

  This did not make him happy.

  RICHARD, LUCY, ABBA, ANGIE and Paul stood in the grassless front yard of 465 Palmerston Boulevard. They stared at the house. They could not believe what they saw. Most of the windows were covered with cardboard. The stained glass above the doorway, which used to show the house number, had been replaced with a roughly nailed piece of plywood. Large patches of the roof were without shingles. Numerous bricks were missing from the facade and the porch leaned dangerously to the left.

  “It’s like it’s been abandoned,” Richard said.

  “It’s like it’s been abused,” Lucy said.

  “It didn’t used to look like this,” Angie said. She turned to her left and held out her arm. Paul took a step closer to her. “Honestly. This was a beautiful house.”

  “Like that one,” Richard said. He pointed to the house on the right, which was well kept and recently painted. All the other houses on Palmerston Boulevard were. Theirs was the only one that wasn’t.

  “The neighbours must just hate him,” Abba said. Then she walked up the steps and onto the porch. The boards sagged under her feet. She twisted the antique doorbell. It fell into her hand. She dropped it onto the porch and the bell quietly rang.

  “You don’t think he still lives here?” Lucy asked.

  “Oh he’s in there,” Richard said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Where else would he go?”

  “There’s no way he’s still living here.”

  “Come on, Abba! Let’s just go!”

  “We’re going in!” Abba yelled. The screen door hung on an angle. Abba pulled it open. The main door wasn’t closed.

  “Will you come with me?” Angie asked Paul.

  “Sure,” Paul said. Together they climbed the steps and went through the doorway. Abba continued to hold open the screen door. Several moments passed.

  “Now!” Abba said. Lucy and Richard climbed the steps and went inside and Abba followed them in.

  An even layer of grime covered everything. The chesterfield wasn’t the one they remembered and this one had the legs sawn off of it. The bulbs in the chandelier had been replaced with candles. Black soot stained the wall above the fireplace. But much more disturbing were the things that hadn’t changed. Angie saw her winter coat hanging in the front hall closet. Her basketball was on the shelf above it. Their family portrait still hung on the wall. The room had the feel of a shipwreck, one that had sunk quickly, without warning.

  They were still in the hallway when Kent came down the stairs. His hair and his beard were long. His feet were bare. His toenails were yellow. He looked like a mountain man and he reeked of stale booze. Six or seven steps from the bottom, Kent stopped. His eyes became wide and he gripped the banister tightly.

  “Kent?” Abba said. “It’s me. It’s us!”

  “You … fuckers!” Kent screamed. They took a step back. Kent remained on the stairs. He kicked the wall with his bare foot. Large pieces of plaster fell onto the steps.

  “You fucking fuckers. You fucking think you can come back? Just like this? You can just return? Fuck you! You fucking fuckers!”

  Even Abba turned and ran. No one looked back until they had safely reassembled in the grassless front yard. They listened to the sound of Kent breaking things and occasionally screaming the word fuck.

  “What do you think he could be breaking?”

  “It didn’t look like there was that much stuff to break.”

  “Maybe he’s re-breaking things,” Angie said. She stepped closer to Paul and then she leaned into his shoulder and he put his arm around her. For a moment it was quiet inside the house. Then a series of objects—a baseball glove, a comic book and several dresses—were thrown from the top left window on the second floor.

  “That’s my room,” Angie said. She pointed to a window that several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were flying out of. The books landed on the sloped roof of the porch and slowly slid down. Angie took Paul’s hand and put it on top of her stomach. A board game sailed through the window. The fake money scattered into the air and then it rained down on top of them, like confetti.

  BOOK TWO:

  Triple Terror

  THREE HOURS AFTER THEY’D learned of their father’s accident Richard was left in charge while their mother accompanied the police to the station. It seemed there were some questions. Why the Shark chose to go with her, and not stay with them, they did not know. They didn’t even think to ask. They sat in the living room in a state of shock, not knowing what to do. Richard looked at his watch. He waited for ten minutes to pass and then he looked at it again. Only one minute had.

  “I have no idea what we should be doing,” Richard said.

  Kent was the only one who sat on the floor. He had been given the game ball, which he threw up into the air and caught. “We should unpack Rainytown,” he said.

  “That feels very wrong to me,” Abba said.

  “No,” Richard said, “it’s perfect.”

  The cottage had been sold a year and a half earlier and Rainytown had been flattened and stored in the attic. Richard led the way. The rest of them followed him up. It did not take them long to reassemble it. They didn’t try to make it sturdy. Instead they focused on putting everything back in the right place, making all of it like it used to be.

  In twenty minutes it was done. They all stood in front of it. And then Richard turned around and faced them.

  “I propose,” he said, “that Rainytown needs a cemetery.”

  “I think it should go right there,” Lucy said and she pointed to the Greet Your Meat Stockyards.

  “I agree,” Angie said. Kent was already heading downstairs for supplies, but Abba blocked his way.

  “I won’t have anything to do with this,” Abba said.

  Kent pushed past her. He returned with glue and paper and scissors and pencil crayons. The four of them got to work. Several sheets of green construction paper became the grass. The tombstone was cut from a black shoebox. With a white pencil crayon Richard began to write on it.

  “Wait,” Abba called. She’d been so quiet that they’d forgotten she was there. “At least use a question mark.”

  “I think I’d kinda like that,” Angie said.

  Richard looked at Kent and Lucy. They didn’t disagree. It was an idea that, at the time, presented a small measure of relief. Richard handed the pencil crayon to Abba and in thick block capitals she wrote:

  BESNARD RICHARD WEIRD

  JANUARY 22ND, 1960–?

  Abba set the tombstone inside the Rainytown Bone Orchard. It was the only one. They didn’t make any more. Not then, not ever. Lucy crafted tiny paper flowers and put them on the grave. They had a moment of silence. Then they all breathed out at once. They felt strong enough to go back downstairs and wait for their mother to come home.

  No one made dinner. Nine o’clock came and their mother wasn’t home. Then it was ten and she still wasn’t there. Just before midnight Richard turned on the television.

  “Triple Terror,” he said.

  Every fourth Friday Cable 57 aired a show called Triple Terror. Starting at midnight they’d play three monster movies back to back to back. Under normal conditions the Weird children would wait until their mom and dad were sound asleep and then they’d all creep downstairs. They’d sit close to the TV and keep the volume low. They’d watch all three movies. Anyone falling asleep would be punched awake. They loved it if the movie was black and white. They loved it even more wh
en you could see the strings on the flying saucers. But the ones they loved the most were the movies where the monster was obviously a man in a costume.

  The night of their father’s accident they watched all three movies. None of them fell asleep. After the monster movies they watched an infomercial and then the national anthem played and then the station began to broadcast a test pattern. They muted the television but they did not turn it off. They fell asleep, together, on the couches.

  When they woke up the next morning, their mother and grandmother still weren’t home.

  RICHARD, LUCY, ABBA, ANGIE and Paul stood on the lawn, looking up. After the board games came dishware. Then record albums. Then dress shoes. Once the siblings and Paul retreated to the sidewalk objects ceased being chucked from Angie’s former bedroom window. They all stood at the end of the driveway, staring at the dilapidated house.

  They had failed to anticipate that both the house and Kent would have slipped into such disrepair.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” Angie asked.

  “Can’t we get a hotel?” Paul said.

  “That’s so New York, Sir Spendalot,” Lucy said.

  “Hey,” Angie said to Paul. “They’re treating you like family!”

  “If we leave the property, so will Kent,” Richard said.

  “And we’ll never see him again,” Abba said.

  “Then maybe Paul and I can go?” Angie asked.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Agreed.”

  “If one of us has to stay, we all have to stay.”

  “But I’m pregnant!”

  “That is really getting old, Angie.”

  “What about the camping stuff?” Abba asked.

  “Do you think it’s still there?” Angie asked.

  “Maybe Kent sold it,” Lucy said.

  “Or gave it away,” Abba said.

  “It’s a pretty safe bet that Kent hasn’t used it,” Richard said.

  In the mid-nineties Besnard had impulsively purchased camping equipment with the hopes of making them a tighter family unit. The gear had never been used. After several weeks of sitting in the front hallway, the equipment had been stored in the attic of the coach house. Which is exactly where they found it, perfectly preserved. There was a Coleman stove, a large cooler and three tents. Lucy and Abba shared one. Paul and Angie were given the second and Richard got one to himself.