Cluck

by Lenore Rowntree

  No.

  Well I guess you had to have a closed casket. Too bad.

  How so?

  It would have been nice to see her again. I hope she went quickly.

  Yes.

  Well, did she?

  I don’t know.

  He is grateful when Chas comes up behind Mrs. Krumpskey and takes her by the arm to lead her away. As they pass out the door, he hears Chas say, You know, Alice looked as beautiful as I’ve ever seen, so peaceful and natural.

  They’re alone in the chapel when the man approaches.

  Orville Johnson, he says.

  Henry Parkins, but I guess you know that.

  That’s right, I do. You don’t remember me, do you?

  Henry nods his head no. His chest is pounding. Is this man some kind of relation? Is a piece of history going to reveal itself? What God takes away he gives back tenfold, isn’t that what the chaplain just said at the service?

  I used to live up the street from you and your mom. In the house that burnt down. Remember?

  Oh yes, Mr. Johnson. Nice to see you again.

  I was sort of a friend of your mother’s until . . . look, I’m very sorry . . .

  Mr. Johnson stops talking, looks at the hat in his hands. His fingernails are dirty, the skin around his knuckles rough. Henry has no idea how this man wants to finish his sentence. Very sorry about your mother’s death seems too obvious to be causing such difficulty. Maybe he’s choked with emotion, but why? Could it be there was more than just a friendship? Henry remembers way back he sometimes would wake in the night and call to his mother. She wouldn’t answer, yet he could hear her making soft mewing noises like a kitten, and then there would be harsher deeper sounds, sounds that could have come from a man, could have come from Orville Johnson. Very sorry . . . I don’t know how to tell you, but I’m your father seems far-flung. But there it is in his head. He is thinking it, and just as he thinks it, he starts actually to want to hear it, is waiting to hear it, preparing himself to put his arms around this man and hug him, welcome him into the fold of the family nest, invite him back to the house, maybe let him stay in his mother’s room, a room where he belongs. He watches Orville prepare to speak again, and his arms almost begin to twitch with the desire to throw that big hug around him.

  I’m sorry your mother was such a nut, Orville says.

  Henry doesn’t know what to say. He thinks about mumbling, Oh that’s okay. But it isn’t okay. It’s so very disappointing. He wants Orville to leave. Not to be standing there anymore. Wants very much to be out of this moment and far away.

  What a thing to say, he blurts.

  She was a nutter and you know it! Orville claps his hat on his head and remains uncomfortably motionless for a moment before leaving.

  Henry stands in stunned silence and waits for Chas and Jim to collect him, but after a time he realizes they’ve left, and he rides the Number 7 alone west along Broadway.

  He barely feels the heat as he walks the sidewalk down Macdonald toward home. He passes the Kitsilano Branch Library where there’s a sign out front inviting people to browse the What’s New & Hot shelf. Someone has chalked arrows pointing to the door, where inside coloured footprints are taped to the floor. He steps onto the footprints that lead him to the shelf and picks up a slim book written by a strange-looking man named Stephen Hawking. The newly plasticized A Brief History of Time slips from his hands, falls to the floor. The librarian looks up to make a disapproving cluck with her tongue. He stoops to retrieve the book and sweat drips from his brow onto the floor. He feels like flipping her the bird, but doesn’t have the energy.

  SEVEN

  Kluk Transmission

  HENRY SITS AT HIS MOTHER’S vanity. It’s been nearly a year since she died and nothing in the room has changed, except for the grime settled on everything. He tried dusting once, but after a half-hour of flicking at the tubes of lipstick, the bottles of nail polish, and the vials of perfume, he started to feel too much of a presence. As if she was going to jump out of the closet to yell at him, but just as likely to smother him in kisses and ask for help in choosing a lipstick. He is almost thirty and still a virgin. The situation is not good.

  He knows it’s time he stopped being an ill-informed ten-year-old boy huddled in a man’s body. But he has no clue how to move beyond. He bends and picks up the empty cardboard box at his feet and puts it in his lap. He stares at the array before him. The nail polishes are colour blocked — the reds in front, the pinks clumped in the middle, and the strange colours, the greens, the blues, the turquoises lined up at the back. Tacked to the wall is a chart pulled from a magazine: Perfect Nail Colour and What It Reveals About You. His mother has circled Grape — you are outgoing and vivacious, popular and talented, but prone to exaggeration — she’s ticked the words vivacious and popular, and crossed out exaggeration to handwrite liar above it. It’s as if she believed she could pick and choose personality attributes as easily as she could nail colours. Maybe she was on to something.

  He continues to stare at the collection on the vanity and eventually the Shalimar perfume with its elegant blue fluted cap practically struts forward like a preening bird. He squirts some into the air. A fine spray of velvety lemon descends. The scent takes him back to a walk in Stanley Park perhaps three years before she died. It was her birthday and all she’d wanted from him was a walk in the park. Shalimar. She often wore too much, but the amount was right that day, little puffs of it coming in his direction every few steps. A golden retriever zigzagged along the seawall between them, head low to the ground, sniffing its own scents, or perhaps the trail back to the lost owner or a coyote that had preceded them.

  She was trying to tell him about her childhood, a topic that should have commanded all of his attention, but at first was nothing but a bunch of meaningless words, occasionally an oblique slice from their current life. She was lamenting the shame of it all, asking why things couldn’t have stayed the same, and he was aware of a rising level of emotion in her voice; the more the timbre rose the more he focused on the dog, reaching down to pet it, talking to the golden retriever instead of to her. Near the Second Beach concession, she demanded, Look at me, I’m talking to you.

  He and the dog both looked at her. Shalimar radiated and for a second cleansed everything.

  And then Henry did see. Her full face, her eyes, the clarity in them at that moment. Eyes in which he’d become so used to seeing confusion and fear, he’d stopped looking.

  Sit down, Henry, she said.

  They sat at one of the cement picnic tables near the concession, drinking tea and sharing a bag of potato chips. The retriever sat with them, under the table, between their feet. She continued on about her childhood, but this time in a more rooted way. She told him she’d been a happy kid who grew scarlet runner beans up the back of the house, planted at the same spot where Chas and Jim made their garden patio, how she’d had a warm bed that she shared with her sister Esther, and how the two of them had their differences but no more than other kids, until her dad had died. He watched her face crowd in on itself as she disgorged the details of her father dying when she was twelve. His breathing, she said, sounded like a horse slopping in water. And then Mother got so very sick. I watched her run down the street, her dress half undone, yelling at the neighbourhood kids, banging on neighbours’ doors, shouting and screaming.

  Surely she saw the parallels, Henry thought. She too ran down the street, battered neighbours’ cars, inappropriately begged people to come home for supper. And part of her must have known he’d endured the mirth of his entire school every time she appeared below the classroom window in her yellow boots and dirty trench coat. And then he saw that she did understand. He watched the connections start to form in clusters across her face. When enough of them had fused to form an insight, she grasped his hand.

  I’m sorry, Henry, she said. It’s all very disappointing. I didn’t mean for it to be so difficult.

  Her voice drifted at the end and she slumped
back. He could see the colour of disappointment in her face. The hollows below her cheekbones as blue as a dispirited jay, an inky infinity in her eyes. She was exhausted from trying to drown a thousand crazy beasts in her stormy mind. He thought then he should hug her, should cheer her, somehow encourage her, or at least smile at her, but he felt rooted to the cold concrete they were sitting on, unable to move even the tiniest muscle in his face.

  I love you, Henry, she said.

  I know, Mom. I know. I . . . I . . .

  He wasn’t able to say it. He was pretty certain he loved her, in a way, but he was also mad and disappointed in who she was, in who he had become because of her. It was impossible to put any order to his emotions, his mind was simply numb. Still, even then, he knew it was the most important thing he could ever have said to her, to tell her he loved her. But he couldn’t. YOU CANNOT DO THIS! his mind screamed. His hand had reached down under the table hoping to gain strength or at least a short reprieve by patting the soft fur of the golden retriever . . . but the dog was gone.

  He waves his hand around under the vanity as if searching for that dog now. The scent of Shalimar floats up. His hand, which is now possessed by something outside himself, begins to swipe at the lipsticks in front of him.

  Fuck, he wails. You jerk — three words, how hard could it be to say them?

  He hears his voice bounce off the wall and then, as if it’s coming from inside the wall, he can hear Alice’s sensical/ nonsensical response. Henry, watch your language! Use Daffy Duck if you must. His arm swats at the lipsticks, some clatter into the carton, some crash onto the floor, others roll under the bed. When there are none left to bat, he turns his attention to the lotions. He knocks a few off before he comes to the pot of cold cream. He unscrews the lid, takes a whiff, sticks in his index finger to daub some on his chin and makes streaks at his temples. He smiles. It’s Henry the warrior smiling back. Henry the strong guy. Henry the invincible. He jams his whole hand in to take a gob of cream and wipe it across his face. Henry the invisible. Henry wiping out the loser. He moves his face up close to the mirror, his breath a cloud of moisture. Tiny blobs of cold cream blink at the ends of his lashes. He reaches down into the carton and pulls out a tube of lipstick. The top of the stick slants in the characteristic shape his mother used to make. He draws a red smile covering his face from cheek to cheek, then takes his forefinger and sketches a frown of cold cream over top. The frown bleeds red into pink across his mouth.

  He throws himself on his mother’s bed and drowns in her scent. He breathes in small gasps as he draws the quilt around himself. He buries himself in the sheets and sniffs up the length of the bed. He is the golden retriever sucking up clues. He breathes hungrily. He’s become a specialist — a specialist in disappointment. Disappointment is who he is. Disappointment feeds him.

  When he stands and walks to the mirror, the cream is mostly off his face except for one bit under his lower lip where it protrudes like the small beard some of the musicians wear. He remembers reading in the liner notes on the back of one of his albums — Tom Waits or Hank Williams Jr. — that this is what they call a soul patch. He leaves it on his chin while he addresses his reflection.

  I LOVE YOU MOM!

  He makes the declaration because he thinks he owes it to his mother, needs to make it equal between them somehow, massage the purple bruises from her life. Yet even as the word love falls out of his mouth, he’s not sure what it means. The idea of it seems so hopelessly complex. If he really loves her, is he supposed to have so many uncertainties? The soul patch helps him decide a specialist in disappointment can feel things both good and bad. With this in mind, he finishes clearing the vanity.

  When he’s done he closes the carton, folding in the corners one by one, doing it in the wrong order only once, before the lid is tight. He stares at the empty space where the cosmetics were. He turns the lights on around the vanity and surveys his profile. He is Henry the survivor going on down the road.

  Two weeks later, on a Saturday, Henry walks toward the curb where his new Subaru station wagon is parked. He’s fingering the soul patch, which he’s grown in for real and doesn’t look like a smudge on his chin anymore. He’s excited to be looking good and able to drive himself wherever he wants in his chariot. His mind seems to be firing in a corner he’s never felt before. Halfway down the walk, he remembers he meant to deliver the box of his mother’s cosmetics to Chas. Chas likes to dress up on weekends, use a little makeup now and again. He turns and runs back into the house. When he re-emerges he’s carrying the carton and he walks it around to the suite. As he waits at the door, a shadow moves inside. He hopes it’s Chas, then knows by the size it’s Jim.

  What do you want? Jim asks.

  Just thought I’d drop this off. There are some creams and things in here that Chas might use.

  Smells pretty girly to me, but I’ll let him know.

  It’s a good collection, Henry says, seems a shame to waste, that’s all. He smiles at the closing door.

  Even cold-shoulder-Jim can’t take the grin from Henry’s face. Every time he looks at his Subaru, he feels proud. He handled himself well at the BowMac dealership. He went there the day after his promotion to poultry technician because he needed a car to drive out to the farms. He chose a sturdy 4-wheel drive wagon because he knew some of the roads he’d be driving on would be rutted in winter. He was shocked at the price all-in after the features were added, but kept his cool. His mother’s estate had been smaller than he’d hoped, so the last thing he wanted to do was give money away needlessly to a car dealer. Especially one he didn’t particularly like. One who was sort of vulgar.

  They’d been out for a test drive when Henry, making idle talk, said, I like the new-car smell.

  The dealer without missing a beat said, Only one smell better — snatch.

  Henry wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly. But he kept smiling, and after a bit he even started to feel a little good about what the guy had said. He was after all being treated like a man’s man, the sort who would dig that kind of comment, would know the smell exactly because he was getting himself some every night. But it hurt too, reminded him the only snatch he had any clue about, the only one he’d ever had a whiff of, was that eggy smell of his mother’s. In an effort to be nonchalant, he stuck his arm out the window and tried to drive with only a couple of fingers, but that hurt too. Triggered a pain in his shoulder, so he had to bring his left hand back in and use both. That’s when the dealer told him about the little indents on the steering wheel so he could properly position his hands.

  Your fingers will start to go there by memory, the dealer said. The last road trip the wife and I took down through the Midwest was so relaxing because of those things, I can’t tell you.

  Where in the Midwest did you go? Henry asked.

  Idaho, the dealer said.

  Really? What took you there?

  No reason.

  Thoughts of snatch and Idaho mulled in Henry’s mind for a bit before he got back to cars — a topic he knew slightly more about after Chas’ briefing.

  So this is the last of the ’90s models, he said. The ’91s have been in for a while. Yeah?

  Yup, said the dealer. Are you interested in one of those?

  No, but I am thinking you should be practically giving away these old guys. Maybe some free rustproofing?

  Maybe.

  By the time they were driving back along Broadway, Henry had struck a deal for himself — $1000 off the price because he’d agreed to buy a manager’s car instead of the one he was test-driving.

  And it’s got one heavy-duty radio in it, the dealer said.

  How so? Henry asked.

  Well, the manager who had her detailed is a real audio nut. Likes to listen to all kinds of exotic stations.

  This suited Henry just fine, and he was only slightly disappointed when he saw that the car he’d agreed to buy had been painted a vibrant neon yellow as part of a promotion.

  Won’t miss her in th
e parking lot, the dealer said.

  That’s for sure, Henry agreed.

  For some reason, he thinks about that conversation now as he eases himself into the front seat and looks ahead over the hood. He’s getting used to the colour, realizes he finds it sort of cheery. He places his fingers in the steering wheel’s memory holes and heads the Subaru downtown, not going anywhere in particular, just driving around enjoying the day. At a stoplight on Georgia Street, he decides to test out the radio. He switches it on and fiddles with the tuner until he gets CBC FM coming in crystal clear. Jurgen Gothe or James Barber, or some other robust food lover, is going on about the delights of Spanish chocolate. Flamenco music plays between remembrances of Barcelona and stews with hints of mole. The word mole is new to Henry. He gathers it’s some kind of chocolate chili sauce, and the way the guy is pronouncing the words, like he’s a Spaniard, is interesting. But after a while the sound of Barthelona and mo-lay coming out his speakers irritates, so with a push of a button, the car switches to CBC AM.

  He’s on the Lions Gate Bridge when some freak of the sky begins to beam in a faraway-sounding radio station. He’s annoyed that country music is budging in on the bandwidth, but amused by how easily CBC is knocked down by a station called KLUK 680 AM. He doesn’t want to fool with the knobs while he’s driving the bridge, and by the time he’s exiting, KLUK is playing one of his country favourites — “Turn It Loose” by the Judds — so he follows the rogue station off the bridge and into the trailer court on the West Vancouver side. He drives around under the bridge through the doublewides, until he finds a spot where the signal comes in pretty well.

  The announcer lives up to his name, Goodtimes Charley. He sounds like he’s having a great time, and Henry likes how he says he’s there for all the country fans in Silverton. He’s never heard of Silverton and wonders where it is. Charley ends the show with a plug for his favourite announcer, Jamie Lee Savitch — she’s the prettiest gal in all of radioland bringing you the best in country radio every Monday to Friday at seven o’clock sharp in the afterwork time! Charley plays a snippet of Jamie Lee fooling around in the studio. She’s a livewire, laughing and talking, and so friendly, with a voice as smooth as milk and honey. The clip ends with, Tune in to me, Jamie Lee, where we have more fun than a chicken in the bread pan kickin’ out the dough.