by Diana Wieler
Daniel wasn’t looking at us. Head down, brim hiding his face, he was watching the fingers of his left hand fly over the frets. My mind leapt back to Mickey’s pawn shop. One shit-hot guitar man. He deserved that Fender.
Climbing the scale, dropping, then climbing again, dancing on it, until suddenly it was over. There was a moment of stunned silence, then the feeling came up through my chest, a rush of awe. I started to clap. The room abruptly joined in, and Daniel looked up shyly. His bare sixteen-year-old face was a shock to me. I’d forgotten this was my brother. But he was surprised, too, as if he couldn’t believe it was me out there, clapping so hard.
The whole night wasn’t like that, but it set the tone. It was a good thing. Daniel was a brilliant guitarist, but he had utterly no talent with an audience. He was playing only instrumentals and he hid behind his hat. People asked me for requests. One man, drinking fast, desperately wanted to hear the Animals’ classic, House of the Rising Sun. When I passed it on, Daniel rolled his eyes as if I’d just asked him to spend the morning in kindergarten. I had to go back later and lay it out plainly for him.
“This guy has three nephews and he’ll buy a tape for each of them if you just play the damn song. But if you don’t do it soon, he’s going to be too pissed to get his wallet out.”
That did it. Daniel started off snarky, too fast, but he got lost in the beauty of that old song, the haunting melody of a ruined life. For a second time the room seemed to stop, transfixed. Daniel wasn’t singing but it didn’t matter. The fast drinker knew the words and he was mouthing them or singing softly, the rims of his eyes suddenly bright. Everyone from Starling seemed to understand whose song this was and why.
On the very last quavering note, Uncle Jake the birthday man walked in, and the room leapt to its feet in a standing ovation – for him, for the fast drinker, for Daniel. My brother rolled into Happy Birthday, full of electric riffs, and the applause went on and on. The old man had to sit down; he kept touching his hand to his temple. He might have been expecting something but not quite this: music and streamers and a roomful of people drunk with gratitude and love.
“Jens, buy me a beer.”
Daniel was taking a break, resting up for the second set. I was touching base, hovering like a coach. I wanted him to loosen up and talk to the audience.
“I’ll get you a pop,” I said.
“No, I want to sing. I need a beer.”
“We’ll get kicked out…” I argued.
“By who? They love me here.”
I saw my mother’s worried face, but it seemed long ago and far away. And Daniel was right. They did love him, and they loved me, too. I was rushing on a salesman’s high, the thrill of people glad to see me, wanting what I had to offer. The money was growing thicker in my wallet and nudging me from behind. I knew I was nearing my magic number, and I didn’t want it to stop.
“Just one,” I told him. I bought a beer and got a glass, and shielded behind him I filled it slowly and at an angle, so it wouldn’t foam. “If anybody asks, you say it’s ginger ale,” I said.
He took down a third of it in a single swallow, and I felt a dim pulse of concern. “I mean it, I’m not buying another,” I said.
“Don’t worry.” He opened the case to the acoustic. I waded out into what was now a packed, smoky hothouse, determined to pick up the trail of money again.
There is magic in an acoustic guitar. Maybe it’s the campfire memories or maybe it’s just friendlier than an electric. Whatever the reason, once Daniel started singing, the room seemed to draw closer to him, wrap around him. People stopped asking me for songs, and started asking him.
I wasn’t really listening. The music seemed to take place at the edge of my hearing. One song caught me, though, maybe because it was softer and slower, as pretty as a ballad. I was certain it was a request – my brother didn’t write love songs. I think it was called Chantel.
I was too busy to listen long. Occasionally I’d look over and I was mystified. Daniel kept drinking but his glass never seemed to empty. Then I saw the snooker player in the white shirt sidle up to him, making a request. My brother smiled and touched his glass. The man smiled back and left his own full one on the table.
The little sneak! I felt an angry flare before reason took over. Give him hell tomorrow, I told myself. Tonight he’s what they want.
Not since my days of chocolate almonds had I been on such a roll. I couldn’t fold up the bills fast enough. But it wasn’t just about money. I was hungry to talk to people, glad to listen to any life that wasn’t my own. The stories and hushed secrets wrapped around me like an arm: the wife who gambled away the house; the daughter who ran off with her teacher. The memory of yesterday morning was easing away, and I needed it to. I needed somebody to trust me.
“This song is from my debut. I only sing it when I’m pissed.”
Daniel’s slurred voice leapt out at me across the smoky buzz. At the back of the room I stood up, straining to see him. He was sitting now, vest gone, sweat staining dark circles on the denim shirt. He was hugging the guitar, hat pushed back, his bleary face naked to the audience.
He wasn’t just high, he was smashed.
Alarm shot through my body. Pack it up, get him out now.
“It’s about the worst night of life,” Daniel continued, and he grinned stupidly, bravely. “It’s for my brother.”
I was rooted to the floor. He struck the first chords and dimly I realized this was a ballad, too, but it was no love song.
All I ever did was walk behind you
Try to learn how to be
I guess you never asked for
A shadow who looked like me
You were there first
So I guess its your right
To throw me out
Chew me up
Cut me down
But did you ever think… that was my room too?
You had lots of friends, I had only you
You had the whole world, I had that room
But, hey, it’s your right
There was a sketching of applause. Some people glanced at me but it was late and many were too drunk to care.
I was sober. I sat down heavily, the room spinning, my guts churning.
TEN
It happened at the end of April in my grade nine year. I’d been fifteen for a week and I liked it. I was five-feet-eleven – not the tallest guy in my year, but the only one who could take down our gym teacher Mr. Flett in wrestling, take him down and keep him there, make him grunt and struggle, then finally laugh. He said he was glad I’d be going to Rosetown Senior High the next year.
“Yeah, Jens, that’s how I keep my job,” Mr. Flett teased. “Keep the boys home and send the men on to Rosetown.”
I was feeling so close. I’d had my learner’s permit for three months and I was doing really well – terrific, Mom said. That day in April she’d promised I could drive us to Winnipeg for dinner out; Dad was working late. Daniel could ride up front with me, and she’d sit in the back.
“I’ll read a book,” she said. “I won’t say a word.”
Daniel and I were revved about it. It was almost like being out on our own.
“Let’s go to Gooey’s for pizza subs,” he said cheerfully. “She hates that place!”
“When I’ve got my license, you and me will go there all the time,” I promised.
I had lots of plans for when I got my license.
In a small town, everybody dates everybody else eventually, although “date” is probably too complicated a word. The people I knew just hung around together. There were some basement parties, some school dances, some moments along the dark north wall of the rec center. But until you could drive there was hardly any way to be alone with someone you liked.
I liked Mona Perenthaler and I was pretty sure she liked me. In a group, we always wound up standing next to each other. Maybe I was kind of goofy and loud sometimes, but she laughed at my jokes. And when she talked, I shut up. I had experi
ence with shy people; I knew you had to listen.
Part of me seemed to be listening to her all the time. I could lose my train of thought standing next to her, swept up by the nearness of her high, heavy breasts and long back, her curving buttocks that strained against the pockets of her jeans, exactly the same height as where my hands would be, if she was against me.
Mona was taller than many of the other girls but still she managed to look up at me, cheeks flushing pink, biting her lip in a way that made me want to bite it, too. Even in a crowd, I could almost hear her heart beat.
That afternoon in April I was excited by my life, barely able to squeeze my shoulders down the aisle of the bus that was taking us out for the Rosetown Introductory Field Trip.
R.I.F.T. was a tradition, and a joke. Because all the kids from the smaller towns went to Rosetown Senior, one day each spring they’d bring in the new groups for a tour – as if our families didn’t shop in that town every week. But the real joke was the acronym. The open house probably did more to stir up rivalries than anything else they could have done. A small place like Floret might only have two or three students starting at a time. That year from Ile-des-Sapins we had twenty-two.
On the bus we seemed like more.
“For Pete’s sake, tone it down!” Mr. Wiebe called back at us, time after time. But we were on our way into new territory. We needed to be bigger than we were; we needed to be more. And Mona Perenthaler was on that bus. I couldn’t tone it down.
If Rosetown had any sense, they would have given their own school the day off for this, but they didn’t. And so as we were led around – the gym, the labs, the classrooms – there were moments when every high-school kid in the province seemed wedged into the same hallway.
By three o’clock we’d been in our coats too long. I was overheated and bored, the skin under my shirt itchy with sweat. Just as Mr. Wiebe was trying to lead our group out, the final bell rang. Doors burst open and the hallway flooded. “Stay together, people. Stay together!” Mr. Wiebe shouted, but I was shuffled back by the surge from all directions. All I wanted was to get out into the cold air, but I was trapped, waiting for an opening.
“Another Ile-des-Sapins bastard.”
I turned to see Chris Butler. Big, brooding, pig-eyed, he was six feet tall in grade nine, the cousin of a friend of a friend, and he was from Floret. We’d played a pick-up game of football together last fall, on the same team. He couldn’t run worth a damn, wouldn’t even try, and I’d told him so.
I was in a bad mood, but I wasn’t going to play his game today. I ignored him and tried to move ahead.
“Hey, Friesen. Ever ask your mom why she married your dad?”
The strange question caught me, made me look back against my will.
“Because Mennonites are so fucking stupid they believe babies take five months.”
My face was suddenly burning. I took a step toward him, the school and my group fading away.
“I don’t think I heard you right. In fact, I know I didn’t.”
I was big in that hallway. The walls seemed to be squeezing the breath out of me, but Chris was bigger and he held his ground.
“Then I’ll keep it simple – French slut.”
I hit him, exploded at him in a furious charge. We might have crashed into people on the way down but I didn’t notice. If Chris landed me a few times, I didn’t feel it.
It took three male teachers to drag us apart. The bus back to Ile-des-Sapins didn’t wait for me. Before he left, Mr. Wiebe made sure I knew I had the rest of the week off – a suspension.
“I just can’t believe this, not from you, Jens,” he kept saying, mad and hurt at the same time. He didn’t understand: there were things you didn’t do to my family.
They tried to make us say how it started.
Sitting straight in my chair, fingers locked on my lap, I said I didn’t remember.
“And what about you, Chris?”
He looked at me. My jacket was torn and the left side of my face had begun to sting with a scrape where he’d cuffed me good. But I wasn’t afraid of him and I let him see it.
“I don’t remember,” Chris muttered.
While we were in the office, they phoned our homes for someone to come get us.
Please not Dad, I prayed. Self-control. I’d really blown it this time.
It was Mom who came, her pale skin even whiter than usual, dark hair pulled back, her delicate features looking sharp and awake. But she didn’t make a fuss over my cut and she didn’t cry. We got in the car and pulled onto the highway home.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” I said, and I was. Not that I’d hit Chris, because I still felt he deserved it, but that I’d probably embarrassed her, made her come get me, given people something to gossip over.
“I want to know what that was about,” Mom said.
I felt myself flush. There were things you never said to your mother, words you never used in front of her. But this was even worse than that.
“It was stupid,” I said hurriedly. “It was nothing.”
“People don’t fight about nothing – or you don’t.”
“I don’t want to talk about it, all right?!” I was getting mad. I was just trying to protect her.
My mother swung over onto the gravel shoulder, thrust the shift into park and put on the blinking hazard lights.
“Then we’ll sit here until you do,” she said simply.
For minutes we waited, engine idling. I shifted in the front seat, feeling huge and awkward. Why did she have to know? Why couldn’t I just be punished? Underneath, it was more than that. I was fifteen. I thought about sex a lot. I talked about it a lot with my friends. But there’s this mental circuit that keeps you from thinking about sex and your parents at the same time. It just seems so impossible.
And yet they were both in the car with me. The heat was on and my skin was curdling. I was trying to think of the least painful way out of this.
“Was it about you?” Mom said finally.
I shook my head.
“Was it about Daniel?”
“It was about Dad,” I blurted. “Chris said that maybe he isn’t…you know, my real dad.” I grinned sheepishly and shrugged. “I know, it’s so stupid. People will say anything to bug you. I don’t usually pay attention to garbage but…he caught me by surprise. Pissed me off.”
There was no sound except the engine, and the rush of a passing car. I was waiting for her to say something but she was looking at her hands.
“I’m really sorry,” I finished. “It won’t happen again.”
“But you might hear it again,” she said softly. “From other people.” She looked at me, dark eyes clear and careful. “Jens, I had another… boyfriend. I had a few boyfriends, all at the same time,” she started.
She talked about growing up in the town of Antelier with her sisters, four Catholic girls living with their silent mother, all under the watchful, possessive eye of their father, Gerard. Jewels in his crown, he called his daughters. He was so strict, so old-fashioned that people talked about it; even the priest told Gerard to lighten up.
There was no money for university, so each of the girls got a job right out of high school. But they still lived at home; their father wouldn’t hear of anything else. The sisters took every opportunity to get out of the house. My mother said she wanted to be liked.
She got pregnant. Not a big deal for a twenty-year-old girl living anywhere else. My mother came home from work one day to find her clothes scattered over the front lawn. Gerard wouldn’t give her a suitcase. He wouldn’t even open the door. She had to ask a neighbor for plastic garbage bags to gather her things in.
“There was my winter coat, everything,” Mom said. “It was too heavy to carry. I had to drag the bags down the street. I was so embarrassed I thought I was going to die.”
She didn’t know what else to do, so she took her things to the home of the kindest man she had dated, and told him the truth. She moved in and two mont
hs later they got married and moved to Ile-des-Sapins. Gerard never spoke to her again.
I was sick, the images swirling in front of me the way they do at a cliff edge. It must have been awful for her; it was awful for me now. I felt as if my whole life was falling back in a sudden, dizzying slide. I scrambled desperately after it, trying to grab the most important thing.
“Is he my father or isn’t he?” I broke in.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“How couldn’t you? Women know these things! You’re the ones who tell us.”
“Jens, you’re upset…”
“There’s tests,” I said. “It’s just blood, right? Dad and I could go to the doctor today…”
“He won’t do it.”
“Why not, for Christ’s sake?!”
She grabbed my arm. “Listen! Listen to me. He loves you. This is his way of showing it, proving that it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.” I threw myself against the door and stumbled out, almost slid down into the snow-filled ditch. But I pulled myself up and started to walk.
The prairie spring wind blasted my coat open, traced icy fingers over my sweaty body. I marched on anyway. I felt like someone else, or some big animal lumbering forward, the rage and hurt gathering in my chest, rising up my throat into the two words I knew I shouldn’t say.
But Chris Butler had been right. About everything.
“Jens! You are not walking home. Get in the car.”
The passenger window was open. She was driving slowly along beside me, one hand on the wheel but leaning toward me, worried.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet.”
The danger must have been in my face. She drew back just a bit. “All right. I’ll meet you up ahead. But do up your coat. You’re going to get sick.”
It was too late, but I zipped my jacket obediently. She watched me for a moment, then pulled onto the road again. She drove to a sign about half a kilometer ahead and stopped, waiting. My gaze fastened on the distant taillights beaming back at me like two red eyes.
