“And?”
“And then I wouldn’t have anyone to help me.”
“Is there no one else?”
“I can’t imagine there would be. Could you?”
“How did you know I wouldn’t tell someone?” I said.
She was looking right at me now. She waited a moment. “Because I know what you’re like. Because enough is enough.”
The phone rang.
“Do you want to get that?”
But she didn’t answer. She had retreated into herself, and I suddenly had the feeling she was thinking about her son, Kyle. But I didn’t want to bring him up. Not tonight. She seemed to read my thoughts, though, and taking a deep, involuntary breath as one does before beginning a task that has been done before but needs to be done again, she began. “About six months after my accident, I got a letter from my ex-husband, Bruce. Chloe and I had moved back to the house in San Miguel. I was in a wheelchair, but managing.”
The phone stopped ringing.
“It was a disturbing but not a surprising letter, something I had expected for some time. Kyle, who was seventeen, had gotten himself into trouble. Teenage trouble. But from the lugubrious and self-satisfied tones of his father’s letter, you’d have thought it was murder. None of which would have happened, it implied, if I hadn’t whored off to Mexico.”
“Did he use that expression?”
“No.” Pause. “That’s mine.”
“Go on.”
“Kyle and a couple of his goony friends from the neighbourhood got drunk one night at some girl’s house—her parents were away—and broke into their own school. Their own school. They wandered around the halls, trashed a few lockers, pissed in the water fountain, smashed a mirror in the girls’ washroom and then drifted downstairs into the basement. There, at the far end of the school, they found themselves in the music room. The door was unlocked. Inside, they came across five electric guitars that had been rented for an upcoming student performance. Somebody said, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ So they stole the guitars, slipping out the tradesmen’s entrance.
“Bruce was out of town, working with a highway crew up near Lake Athabasca, so they took their loot back to his house. Kyle was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid, and when he woke up hungover the next morning, he realized that he was in real trouble, that he had to do something to fix it.
“His friends had stayed overnight, but they were morons—Kyle’s friends generally were—and when he asked them for help, they sat with their fingers up their asses and then buggered off. So there was Kyle, with five stolen guitars heating up his bedroom like a hothouse.
“What do you do? He came up with an idea. He found the vice-principal’s number in the phone book and called him at home. He claimed that a buddy of his—he couldn’t name him—had gotten drunk, broken into the school and stolen some stuff. Now, in a fit of remorse, he wanted to return them, with Kyle as the intermediary. Could this be arranged discreetly?
“The VP said sure. But when Kyle arrived in a taxi half an hour later, the five guitars stacked like corpses in the back seat, he found two plainclothes detectives waiting for him on the front steps of the school. They took him downstairs into the music room and grilled him. No windows, just the two cops, the vice-principal, and Kyle reeking of gin. A cop with a shiny, fleshy face started things off. It was pretty obvious, he said, that Kyle was a prankster who’d gone on a toot. He could smell it from here. But there was no way that his so-called ‘buddy’ had got these guitars out the door, up an embankment, across a playing field all on his own. Not unless he was ‘a fucking octopus.’
“So he must have had some help. Kyle’s help. So why didn’t Kyle just come clean and help everyone ‘straighten this out’ so they could close the book on it. No harm done. Just kids being kids.
“But Kyle, having already been lied to once that day by the vice-principal, wasn’t buying. He stuck to his story. He didn’t know what happened, didn’t know how they got the guitars out of the school, he was just there doing a favour.
“Consulting a notebook, the fleshy cop said, ‘It says here a Hammond organ was stolen as well.’
“‘There was no organ,’ Kyle said.
“‘Are you sure?’
“Kyle didn’t see the trap. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’
“‘Well,’ the cop said, ‘if you weren’t there, how would you know that an organ wasn’t stolen too?’
“His partner stepped in. ‘Listen, fuckweed, if I don’t have the name of the thief on this piece of paper in thirty seconds, I will charge you with grand theft, possession of stolen property, intent to traffic, and you will, I promise, go to jail.’ He gave him a good poke in the chest with his finger just to show he meant business.
“‘Arrest me, then,’ Kyle said. ‘Arrest me and fuck you.’”
“He said that?”
“That’s what he said he said.”
“Ballsy little guy.”
“The police must have thought so too, because they let him go. For the moment. The fleshy cop said, ‘I’m going to give you twenty-four hours, Kyle. Then I’m going to come to your house, and I’m going to arrest you in front of your parents and your neighbours. I’m going to put you in handcuffs, and I’m going to take you to jail.’
“His partner said, ‘You ever hear of grand theft, you little fuck? That’s theft over a thousand dollars. You’re in the big leagues now. You can thank your buddies for letting you take it in the ass for them. Because that’s where you’re headed. You know how long a kid like you will last in jail?’”
I’d forgotten what a skilful mimic Sally could be. She didn’t do it very often; it wasn’t her style, too attention-getting a number for her. But as a child, those times I saw her do it, saw her cut loose some night and “do” a neighbour talking to herself while gardening or our soused uncle saying good night but not leaving, I’d find myself staring at her as if I were watching a chair levitate.
She went on. “Kyle went home. He didn’t tell his father, nor did he sleep that night, not a wink, just a tumble of awful imaginings. Exactly twenty-four hours later, he sat by the front door with his night kit packed—pyjamas, hairbrush, toothpaste, toothbrush—and waited to be taken to what he imagined was some kind of Russian gulag.
“The appointed hour arrived. Five o’clock. Then five-fifteen. Then six o’clock. Kyle walked down to the sidewalk and peered up and down the street. Nothing. No one. They never came.
“But after, he refused to go back to school. To any school. That’s what Bruce’s letter was about. He suggested that Kyle come down to Mexico and live with me. Asked me to take some time to think about it. I didn’t need time. But I pretended to, pretended that I had reservations: the wheelchair, not being up on crutches yet and so on. In fact, what I didn’t want was for Bruce to realize how thrilled I was to have both my children down there with me. I thought if he even smelt it, something would go tight in his chest and he’d snatch it away. But I don’t know. Maybe I was doing him a disservice. Now that he’s gone, he seems like less of an asshole and more a product of growing up in a small town.
“A few weeks later, Kyle arrived on the afternoon bus. It was spring now, the days very hot. Freddie Steigman and Chloe went down to the depot to pick him up. On the way home, Freddie read him the riot act. He said, ‘You have no idea what trouble is like until you’ve been on the inside of a Mexican jail.’
“It must have been three or four nights later when Kyle and an American kid went into a cantina and drank a half-dozen rounds of mescal. Around midnight, they dropped in on a girl they’d met that morning. But the girl’s father answered the door and, seeing that they were drunk, sent them packing. Here the story gets fuzzy. Kyle always claimed his friend did it, his friend said Kyle did it, but somebody threw a brick through the girl’s window. The police were called. They picked up the two boys in a cantina down the street. At four
o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door. There was Kyle. They’d roughed him up a bit. He had a black eye and a loose front tooth. Luckily, he had mentioned Freddie Steigman’s name.
“The next day, I made my decision, and I’ve been living with the consequences of it since then. I packed up his little suitcase and put him on a bus back to the airport. I’ve often thought about it—maybe I should have kept him. But I was too vulnerable, too weak to deal with a six-foot-tall teenager crashing around town and getting in trouble and maybe, just maybe, getting us all thrown out of the country. Was I a coward? Was I using the wheelchair as an excuse to not deal with a troubled—and more to the point, troublesome—teenager? Did I abandon my son? Was I playing the ostrich when I sent him back to his father? Am I responsible for what happened afterwards?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“It doesn’t change anything anyway. Things went the way they went.”
“And how was that?”
“You know the answer to that,” she said flatly.
“Yes, but how did they get there?”
“Kyle got a job in Toronto looking after senior citizens in a Jewish retirement home. He’d take them out for walks, wheel them around the block in their wheelchairs, talk to them on the bench in front of the home and read their granddaughters’ letters aloud to them.
“He was a prince, everyone loved him—until they discovered he was stealing their medication. Librium, Valium, Seconal, Mandrax, Dilaudid, even cough medicine—anything he could find. They were seniors. Have you ever seen the medicine cabinet of a senior?”
“Yes, I have, in fact.”
“Then you know. The pickings are good.
“The police were called in. They installed a hidden camera in the bathroom of one of the most frequently hit rooms, and waited. Sure enough, while Mrs. Cornblum was downstairs enjoying Shabbat dinner with her son and her grandchildren, Kyle was systematically going through the prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet. All on film. The police turned up at his house with a search warrant. They found jewellery, a necklace, even a silver pocket watch, very old and valuable, which had been stolen that same morning. A few pills, but not many. Kyle had taken them or sold them.
“The judge was a softie and handed down a conditional discharge. Kyle walked out of the courthouse with a slap on the wrist. Bruce threw him out. He flopped here and there, always with these losers. Kyle had a knack for attracting dumb-guy groupies. A string of arrests followed: shoplifting, breaking into cars, selling phony prescription pads, phone scams. One time he even got caught for stealing purses from cars in a cemetery parking lot while their occupants were paying graveside respects.”
“A perfect little scumball.”
Sally frowned; it hurt her to hear that. You can say bad things about your own child, but you don’t want someone else doing it.
“Sally, I apologize. I was just getting into the spirit of things.”
She went on. “He landed in the hospital a few times. A furniture mover caught him breaking into his rig, this big-bellied, thick-armed ape who made his living driving to Mississippi and back on three hundred cigarettes and a handful of Dexedrine. Wrong guy to rob. Wrong guy to get caught robbing. He found Kyle sitting behind the wheel trying to snap off his ham radio. Kyle got so frightened he threw himself over a ramp. But it was a drop of two storeys. He broke his arm in four places. The truck driver took his time getting down to him, then gave him a couple of boots, one in the kidneys, one in the face, and left him lying in the street.”
“Nice life.”
“That February, he had a Methedrine overdose, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. All this got back to me in Mexico. I was torn: stay or go home. But go home and do what? Hobbling around on crutches. Shouting from the sidelines. At some point, you’re reduced to being an impotent cheerleader for your children’s lives. Or is that just more bullshit? I don’t know. I still don’t.
“I began to prepare myself for his death. I began to imagine how the phone would ring one night, or maybe Bruce’s hangdog face would appear at my door in Mexico. I knew it was coming. It was the Jerry Malloy business that brought me home.”
“You haven’t mentioned him.”
“Jerry Malloy? That was the clincher.” She leaned her elbow on the chair arm; it slipped off; she settled it back again, using her other hand to hold it. She began. “One night around midnight, Kyle turned up at Marek Grunbaum’s house. Remember him? The Polish guy—”
“—with the beautiful pink handkerchief.”
“Kyle looked like a zombie: ragged clothes, grey skin, yellow eyeballs. He smelt, too. His feet were rotting from some untreated infection. Marek made him take his clothes off in the hallway, all of them, and then led him naked upstairs to the shower, disinfecting his footsteps with an aerosol can of Lysol as he went. His three kids peeking from their bedrooms. ‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ A few days later, he drove him to a rehab centre downtown. On the way there, Kyle asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. A birthday present for his father. He had a con man’s charm, Kyle did. He looked Marek in the eyes and said, ‘You got to let me make this up to my dad.’
“He disappeared into the mid-afternoon traffic with the twenty dollars. Nearly half an hour later, after Marek had circled the block twice and gotten a ticket, he spotted Kyle on the sidewalk. He got back into the car, claiming he couldn’t find anything nice. But could he keep the money? Within a day or two, he’d be allowed out for half-hour walks in the neighbourhood—he’d buy a present then.
“By now, Marek just wanted him out of the car. So he agreed. He pulled up in front of the clinic, a big white house on a leafy street. He waited to make sure Kyle went in. Kyle skipped up the main stairs, made a theatrical production of pushing the buzzer, and, just as he went in, spun around and gave Marek a grin and a big wave, as if this was all a screech, just too much fun for words.
“They lodged Kyle with a boy named Jerry Malloy. Jerry had grown up in one of those small northern towns where teenage boys sit in front of the pizza parlour at midnight on a Saturday night, daydreaming about the life they’ve read about in heavy metal magazines. You know those kids?”
“I sure do.”
“You see them in all small towns. You can smell the boredom coming off them. They usually get arrested for breaking into somebody’s cottage, knock up the girl at the grocery store, put on forty pounds, spend their lives working at the marina or the planing mill. I have a great deal of compassion for those children.” Sally looked toward the window, and in a moment continued. “But not Jerry. Jerry saw himself as a cut above the rest. No marina for him. He quit school in grade ten and moved to Toronto, where he got a job making broom handles in a factory.
“It wasn’t long before big-city life just dazzled the wits right out of him. Especially the drugs, of course, first pot, then Methedrine—”
“Nasty business, that Methedrine.”
“—then whatever he could get his big farm-boy fingers around. It was all good, all part of an adventure that put another square on the checkerboard between him and the boys in front of the pizza parlour back home.
“Whacked on sleeping pills one day, he stole a car that had been double-parked with the engine running. He drove it the wrong way down a one-way street, spotted a police van (which was empty, by the way), panicked and smacked into a fire hydrant. Totalled the car. Knocked himself out cold. Chipped his front teeth on the driver’s wheel.
“The judge, realizing he was dealing with a moron, gave Jerry a choice: jail or rehab. To his misfortune, Jerry Malloy, the boy who made broomsticks, chose rehab. And to punish him for his crimes, they put him in with my son.
“Kyle was everything that Jerry imagined a city boy would be: slick and quick with a put-down, always on the hustle. He was smitten. For his part, Kyle knew he had fallen on a live one and treated Jerry like a goofy sheep
dog. Had him doing his chores, cleaning the toilet, making the beds—the things you do in rehab to reacquaint yourself with regular life. Kyle wasn’t interested in regular life.
“Three or four weeks in, I got a call from Bruce. It turned out that Kyle had smuggled two grams of Lebanese hash into the centre. He’d bought them on the street with Marek’s twenty dollars. Smuggled them past security in the loose portion of his shoe sole, grinning and joking with the guard. It must have been the excitement of it all, making a fool of everybody, that explained Kyle’s wild wave to Marek as he went in.
“And then one night, after everyone had gone to sleep on his floor, he stole out of bed, recovered the hashish and offered a drag to Jerry. Within three hours, they were caught breaking into the meat fridge in the basement, but not before Kyle had turned on a young amphetamine addict from Stratford and a sixty-eight-year-old alcoholic. Within the space of a few hours, Kyle had undone months and months of rehabilitation.
“It was an act of such egregious irresponsibility that the centre gave up on him. You can fix an addict, but you can’t fix an asshole. Both of them got kicked out, Kyle and Jerry. Then, poof, they vanished. For a couple of weeks, no one heard from them. Maybe they went to Jerry’s hometown. I don’t know. No one heard from Kyle—not his father, not his friends, not me, no one. So how what happened next happened isn’t entirely clear. But you can guess the broad strokes: Kyle had found a mark and wrung him like a washcloth for everything he could get.
“Before too long, probably at Kyle’s suggestion, Jerry stole his uncle’s pickup truck. He must have figured he was in a movie, two bandits on the run. They turned up at a local dog pound, adopted a mongrel and began to wind their way across Canada. They were heading to Vancouver. Somebody had told them it was like Florida there, warm temperatures, pretty girls—they’d get a job on a fishing boat and sail to China. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“They went up around the Great Lakes into Manitoba. Stealing gas when they needed it. Shoplifting here and there, mostly smash-and-grab. A farm family reported that a couple of young guys, one with chipped front teeth, stayed with them for several days, stole their grandson’s coin collection and moved on. The people who were kind to Kyle were people, he figured, who had targets on their backs, suckers who were saying, ‘Here, fuck me, I’m stupid.’
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