Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  Jim didn’t know. He wasn’t sure, at first. To read untested material in front of strangers?

  Your audience would be mostly strangers no matter where you were, Dekker reasoned. Imagine if you were reading in Toronto or somewhere.

  But would they be respectful, wondered Jim. Would they understand that this was a literary reading? Would they stand around talking about shovelling their driveways and property taxes and what all while Jim was trying to read?

  Dekker assured him they would not. Everyone in town had heard of Jim, was aware of his reputation. They would recognize the occasion for the honour it was.

  But, balked Jim, a more formal environment might be—

  Jim, said Dekker. You hate formality. Remember?

  And so it was agreed. I told Dekker I’d help in any way I could. I was so grateful to him for taking over. I would have gotten down on all fours and been the coffee table if Dekker had asked me to.

  Slaughter would not be around, which was probably just as well. Slaughter had already returned to wherever he was from in Ontario. One of the innumerable, indistinguishable communities that circle Toronto like the gaseous rings of Saturn. Markham or Scarborough or Barrie or somewhere. Slaughter once told me he came to Westcock to study only because his dad had, and his dad’s dad before him. They had all played football. They were that sort of family, the kind you see in movies. Man-families, with cabinets crammed full of trophies, actual cabinets—a mere mantelpiece would never hold. Edging out the mother’s crystal and china.

  I only knew Slaughter was gone from talking to Sherrie. He hadn’t bothered to say goodbye to anyone else.

  Then came the phone call to inform my parents of the changes to my travel plans, the inevitable reproach in the form of my mother’s emotional devastation that the trip would be delayed a mere day, the hustling to get off the phone before my father could pick up and commence outraged cross-examination, and finally the phone call to Janet to let her know of the change as well.

  “So if you want to grab Friday’s ferry without me, no problem,” I told her.

  Janet said that was fine, but a few minutes later called me back.

  “I was just talking to Mom and Dad,” she said. “They say I might as well just wait the extra day and come back with you and your folks. No point in making two trips.”

  “No,” I said, “I guess not.” I was in a hurry and didn’t know what else to say. I hung up without inviting her to the reading.

  Then I settled in at the typewriter and tapped out my last paper of the semester with extra care, redoing entire pages as opposed to my usual method of X’ing out the more minor typos. I am forever short of correction tape due to my impractical habit of composing poems on the typewriter. The profs don’t seem to mind the occasional X. Most of them are just impressed I can do my own typing.

  I handed the paper in on Tuesday, and the rest of the week was set aside for luxuriating in free time and solitude. It pleased me to think I had reached a point in my life where free time and solitude were luxuries instead of the primary conditions of my existence. It had been a busy semester, I reflected. It had been a good semester, for all my outrage and anguish over what the department was doing to Jim. I went from having no friends and no life outside of school and poetry to having something that actually resembled a social circle—even if I don’t actually like Todd and Claude that much, and live in vacillating mortal fear of Charles Slaughter. Still, they were people I knew and saw and talked to every day, and together we had accomplished something. I had a community, what’s more, a community of more or less like-minded souls. Something I used to dream about back in Summerside reading about Gertrude Stein’s salons in Paris, the Bloomsbury group, and so forth.

  And not to put too fine a point on it, but in the space of four months, I had established myself as drinking buddy and confidant of the one person who mattered most.

  So: it had been a good semester. I was glad it was over. I needed a break. I needed a few days of Big Blue and leisure reading in Timperly, and then I needed someone to roast a turkey for me while I drowsed in front of my parents’ fireplace in PEI with a candy cane half-hanging out of my mouth.

  Ring, ring. Wednesday morning. Eleven A.M. You know who it was?

  “Hi,” she said, when I answered the phone.

  “Hi,” I said back, waiting.

  “It’s me,” she said impatiently.

  “Is it?” I replied, stalling for time. A crazy part of my imagination was thinking it could only be Brenda L. from Carl’s. We had talked from time to time, she had the poster from Schofield’s reading, she could have asked around, looked me up in the student directory. The voice definitely had Brenda’s dodgy New Brunswick twang to it—a kind of terse-syllabled edge.

  But she just sat there breathing on the phone, waiting some more, like it would be an insult to have to identify herself.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, giving in, “I don’t—”

  “Jim Arsenault’s wife!”

  She could have said Yoko Ono. Liza Minelli. I wouldn’t have been more surprised.

  “Moira?”

  “Yes!”

  “Hi,” I said.

  She replied with a puff of static breath, as if blowing dust out of the receiver. Some baffled silence from me. Then: “So whaterya up to?”

  “What am I up to?”

  “Whaterya doing today?”

  “What am I doing today?”

  “Yeah. Whaterya up to?”

  “I’m just, uh—” Panic thought: What if Moira wanted to have an affair with me? I couldn’t think of any other possible reason for the call. You heard about such things with artists. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy. The pre-Raphaelites—Rossetti and those guys. They were supposed to have swapped girlfriends like hockey cards. And what if Jim approved, had even proposed it? You heard about that sort of thing too. “I’m just, uh,” I said.

  “I’m just uh I’m just uh,” Moira repeated in dunce-tones, reminding me of a few select assholes from high school.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m just getting some reading done,” I told her. This, I’ve found, is a powerful thing to say when you’re a university student. People immediately respond with deference, imagining you in your cold-water garret thumbing through mountainous tomes, squinting by candlelight.

  It didn’t work with Moira. She blew into the phone some more. She was sighing—she punctuated everything she said with sighs, I recalled now. I remembered our discussion on the couch in October. Tree died, sigh. Dragon blade, sigh. It was a kind of oral signpost, meant to assist the listener in gauging the depth of Moira’s hardship, the torment of her existence out there on Rock Point.

  Sigh. “Sitting on your arse, areya?” said Moira.

  “Well,” I said. “Technically, I guess.”

  “Technically,” repeated Moira. Again with the dunce-voice.

  Then I remembered a trick of my father’s. A thing that he does when on the phone with someone he doesn’t want to be. He straightens. He kind of tucks the phone beneath his double chin so he can fold his arms. Then he looks at my mother (for some reason) with impatience. He says, “So what can I do for you today?”

  “So, Moira,” I said, placing a hand on my hip instead of folding my arms—lacking my Dad’s excess chin to hold the receiver in place—”what can I do for you today?”

  Another hard-done-by burst of static. “Jesus, you sound like an accountant or something.”

  I waited.

  “Well,” she said in her abrupt accent. It sounded like welp. “The old fella’s wondering why you don’t come up to visit.”

  From our evening in October, I knew “the old fella” was her pet name for Jim. The only other thing I’d heard her call him all evening was “that one,” or else, “that one there.” And then she’d point across the room with her cigarette.

  I let my hand fall off my hip and carried the phone over to the couch.

  “Really? He wants me to come up there?”

&
nbsp; “Welp, he said you two were supposed to talk about a play or some such thing.”

  “Oedipus Rex?” I said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Oedipus Rex, was that the play?”

  “I don’t know what in hell play it was. He just said you were supposed to come up. So I said, well, why in Christ’s name don’t you call him and tell him to come up, but now he’s all in a sulk.”

  “He’s in a sulk?” I repeated.

  “Yes, he’s in a big goddamn sulk and won’t call you, so I said to hell with it, I’ll call him myself.”

  I thought about this. “Is he angry?”

  Another blast of breath in my ear.

  “I don’t know,” sang Moira, making her voice extra aggrieved and long-suffering, just in case the series of sighs weren’t doing the trick. “He just gets like this,” she said. “He just needs someone to talk to—he can’t talk to me.”

  “He can’t?” I repeated, curious enough about their relationship to inquire further, to be willing to prolong this otherwise maddening conversation. “Why can’t he talk to you?” I wanted to know.

  “Because I am so fed up with this bullshit, I’ll fuckin’ drive him through the wall, that’s why,” explained Moira.

  19.

  I ASKED FRIENDLY to stop at the liquor store on the way out to Rock Point because it seemed wise to bring an offering of some kind. But the ride out there took so long, I twice almost popped the cap and started passing the pint back and forth across the seat between Friendly and myself. What the hell, I thought—exams were over and it was practically Christmas. Plus, I was now a far more experienced drinker than I had been at the beginning of the semester. I hardly ever threw up anymore.

  “Nah, nah, nah,” exclaimed Friendly when I suggested it to him. “The wife’s rippin’ at me as it is, I come home stinkin’ of rum and that’ll be the end of ‘er.”

  “Wouldn’t go over so well, eh?”

  “Nope, but I’ll tell you my magic formula,” said Friendly, lowering his voice as he turned off onto the dirt road leading in to Jim’s. “I’ll be making a stop myself at the liquor store on the way home today. I get a six pack for me, a bottle a’ goof for the old gal, and everything’s right as rain for the rest a’ the night.”

  “She likes the goof, does she?” I smiled, wondering what goof was, peering down the road at the farmhouse. Something had possessed Jim to paint the place black after he bought it—although it’s since faded into a darkish, bilious green—with satanic red trim. I could just make him out, standing open-jacketed in front of the chopping block, Panda running in circles at his feet.

  “Well, it makes her romantic,” said Friendly, craning around in his seat to favour me with a confidential wink and a ribald clack of his dentures. But Friendly’s tone grew subdued as we rumbled along the plowed road, drawing closer to the house. Jim stopped whatever he was doing to watch the car approach, the way people who live in the middle of nowhere will. Panda’s mad barks penetrated the closed car windows. The dog leapt around Jim like an oversized jackrabbit or a capering demon.

  Jim was holding a thing in each hand. Both things were black.

  “What in Christ’s name has this one been up to?” Friendly murmured, re-adjusting his plate.

  One of the things was a gun, a rifle. The other thing I couldn’t make out. Its shape was indefinable, merely a mark, some kind of violent black blotch, like a jagged hole torn into the bright winter reality, exhibiting the nothing that lay beyond. And leaving blood. Leaving blood. There was blood on the snow in front of him.

  I paid Friendly for the cab ride slowly. I thanked him slowly. I got out of the car slowly.

  Jim has a complicated relationship with the crows, it turned out. He had just finished shooting one out of the sky, on behalf of his dog. They “teased” Panda, he told me. Because crows, he said, are smart. They are cruel and cunning and they know dogs are stupid, so they tease them. Crows, he told me, have a particularly malicious sense of humour. Dogs don’t have a sense of humour, Jim went on to explain, that’s what makes them vulnerable. Dogs are like young children—open and trusting. Crows are like slightly older children—jaded, knowing, a bit drunk on the power of this.

  “Now don’t get me wrong,” said Jim. “I like crows, for the most part. I admire them.”

  “You admire them?” I said, watching him wind twine around the mangled bird’s reptilian feet.

  “Well, they’re tough,” said Jim. “They’re sneaky. They’re no aristocrats, mind you—there’s nothing majestic about them, but they’ve got their own sort of splendour, their own code. They’re the Artful Dodgers of the avian world.”

  Jim hung the mess of crow from a tree, giving it a jaunty poke in order to make it swing. Blood sprinkled itself around. He told me the other crows would take this for a warning and keep their distance. It seemed to me he was talking out of fairy tales. Panda was going insane at our feet. The dog seemed to have been convinced that Jim would at some point hand over the crow for Panda to devour. Seeing it suspended out of reach—swinging and sprinkling away—added insult to injury.

  “Shut up,” Jim said to Panda. Seeing he had Jim’s attention, Panda barked louder, crazier. “Shut up!” Jim yelled. Panda gurgled in frustration and staggered around in a couple of desperate circles. It was clear he would start up again at any moment.

  “Go get the ball,” suggested Jim, and the dog took off.

  We stood outside throwing the ball to Panda for about an hour. I was not really dressed for it and kept having to wipe my nose on the sleeve of my jacket for lack of anything else. I felt dazed, numb. It was a lot of things—the cold, the way Jim’s black house loomed behind us, the dangling crow, the red slashes in the snow like a crime scene. But also it was Jim. There was something about Jim’s mood that infected me, made my thoughts feel dull and muted, hypnotized by the dog rushing back and forth; the endless imperative to keep hucking the tennis ball. Panda did not get tired of it. Neither did Jim. It was something to do with Jim’s mood—indifference. Resigned to the hellish boundlessness of Panda’s single demand.

  I couldn’t stand it after a while. My feet were in sneakers, and therefore numb. So were my hands—red, bare, and caked with half-frozen dog slobber. I remembered the rum.

  “Jim,” I said, pulling the pint from my jacket. Before he could even respond, I had the cap off and was downing a shot.

  “Well, look at him go,” remarked Jim with a smile. The kind of smile you might give across a casket, at someone’s wake.

  See, this is what I hate. The minute we’re in the door, Mom puts on the tea. The first thing my nose and ears detect is a pork roast crackling away in the oven, producing a smell of such comfort and joy my eyes almost roll back inside my head. But here’s what’s astounding: at no time in my life can I remember my parents ever leaving the house when there was something in the oven. Dad is what you might call a reverse firebug. He’s obsessive on the subject of fire prevention, perhaps owing to an incident with Jack Daniel’s and lighter fluid during a summer’s camping trip we took when I was a kid. One minute he was kicking the barbecue into the lake and the next the cuffs of his polyester pants were alight—they went up with a synthetic gasp and melted against his calves.

  So Dad, to put it mildly, is vigilant these days when it comes to fires. The idea that he risked home and business to make sure the number one son got pork for supper takes the edge off my appetite somewhat.

  My mother bustles back and forth, banging the biscuit tin against the cookie tin, taking down plates, making a big deal of me, home, in the kitchen. Dad heads to the living room to wrangle with the fireplace. None of that is what I hate exactly, although it kind of is in a way. But mostly it’s the noise coming out of my mother. This weird sing-song she keeps chanting, a sort of mantra, as the Eastern-religion types call it.

  “Tea for Larry, Larry loves his tea, God only knows—don’t you, Larry? You’ll have some biscuits with that, won’t you? Larry ca
n eat biscuits, that’s for sure. A bit of cheese maybe, or—oh, I have some nice raspberry preserves from the bushes out back, Larry loves raspberry—don’t you Larry?”

  What is she doing? She’s asking me questions and talking to herself at the same time. It’s the strangest thing—she isn’t even looking at me as she digs around, mumbling as though senile into the cupboards. We go through this every time I come home, and this, I realize—this thing that’s happening right here and now, this ritual of ours—is precisely what I hate. Because I’ve finally figured out what she’s doing. My mother is reassuring herself that I’m here, and—most importantly—that nothing has changed.

  It never used to bother me before, in fact it felt natural and good. Me plunking my malnourished ass into the vinyl chair, my mother swirling around, clattering plates down in front of me, extolling me to let the tea “have a good steep” before reaching to pour myself a mug, Dad messing around in the next room with the fire, getting things nice and toasty in there for whenever I’m ready to come in and “have a good sit.”

  It annoys the hell out of me all of a sudden.

  “Mom,” I say, “sit down.”

  “Just let me cut you a couple of slices of bread. Nice fresh bread today.”

  “I’ve got a ton of biscuits here, Mom, it’s almost suppertime.”

  “But you love the fresh bread,” insists my mother, sawing away at a new loaf. “Just one or two slices.”

  “I know where it is if I want it.” I make my voice firm. I don’t think I’ve done it with her before. My deeper, question-mark-free, in-class voice.

  My mother stops and looks up at me.

  “Are you sure?” she says. As if I’ve just told her her bread tastes like shit. As if I’ve sprouted wings and am flitting around the light fixture above us.