Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “First, I’d like you all to know,” says Jim, eyes dancing around the room, “that in response to everyone’s efforts and support, the administration has agreed to reconsider my application for tenure. Second, I’d like everyone present to come to my home and drink themselves silly tonight in celebration.”

  Squeaks, gasps. And then a huge communal roar and it’s nothing but clapped backs, pumped hands, even a hug or two. One of the hugs, authored by Todd, is received by me. He practically leaps across the tray of cheese the moment the announcement is made. Doubly stunned, I do nothing in return. Todd draws back so fast I’m not sure it happened for a moment. It’s like in Superman comics, when Superman saves you with super speed. One moment you’re in the path of an oncoming bus, you blink, and you’re on the sidewalk.

  I stare at him with a cube of de-toothpicked cheese crushed to putty in my right hand. Todd smiles and shakes his head in a gesture of disbelieving glee.

  “All right!” he exclaims. “Far out! Can you believe it, man?”

  And in his need to make a celebratory gesture, in his struggle to negate the uncool display of a second ago, Todd instigates a ritual I would never have expected from him. He extends his hand palm up for me to slap.

  I place my cheese in it and wander away.

  It’s funny. I should be dancing. I should have smacked Todd’s grubby white palm with gusto. I should have hugged him back, at least, bashed him between the shoulder blades the way guys do. Instead, I’m moving through the crowd as if inside a sturdily shimmering bubble. Maybe the news just hasn’t registered yet. This is good news, yes? This is great news. Jim Arsenault is at Westcock to stay.

  I float into the presence of Slaughter and Sherrie.

  Sherrie is saying, “I’m not your mother, you know—I’m not available to you around the clock—whenever you just decide you want to hang out.”

  “I know you’re not my fucking mother,” answers Chuck. He’s got a vague, angry look on his face as though annoyed to be not exactly sure where he is.

  “I know—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” Sherrie says quickly. “Anyway, this is Jim’s night. Lawrence!” She catches sight of me in my bubble and I get another hug—a visceral reminder—warmth in the middle of the frozen marsh.

  “It’s so great about Jim! Oh my God, what a relief!”

  She pulls away, revealing Slaughter’s face to me from behind her nimbus of hair. His face has changed a little now that I’m here. His eyes have focused in—narrowed, even—whatever that means. It’s something I’ve always read in books—depictions of people’s eyes narrowing, but I could never picture what it meant. Now I have a picture. Slaughter’s muddy brown ones turning sharp, honing in.

  “Chuck,” I say. “Are you all right?”

  “He’s on something—he won’t tell me what it is.” Sherrie twists her mouth.

  “I’m all right,” Slaughter barks. Very much at me. I decide it would be prudent to resume my drift through the crowd at this point.

  Next I arrive at Bryant Dekker, in his own little bubble, standing against a wall a few feet away from where Creighton and Jim are holding court over a congratulatory clutch of departing grannies. They congratulate Jim, whom they don’t know but whom they assure they are very happy for, and thank Creighton for his enlightening performance.

  “You know, I usually don’t even care for poetry,” I hear one of the women confide in a marvelling tone.

  “Lawrence,” greets Dekker, pumping my hand. “What do you say?”

  “Great news,” is what I say.

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” he grins. “It’s all paid off—everyone’s faith and hard work. Gives a person renewed hope in the entire system.”

  Together we watch Creighton and Jim smile and press frail hands.

  “Is the system that hopeless?” I ask after a moment or two.

  Dekker turns to look at me. “You mean the university? Well. I shouldn’t be cynical. I was a bit idealistic about the whole thing when I started, I suppose. Those old illusions die hard.”

  I nod. We watch Jim and Creighton some more. Jim catches my eye. The famous wink.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with idealism,” amends Dekker, sipping from a plastic glass of wine. “That’s what gets you there in the first place.”

  “If,” I say, “it’s where you truly want to be.”

  Dekker nods and scratches a bristled cheek. This seems like the last thing we should be talking about, with people celebrating all around us.

  “Did you always want to be a professor?” I ask.

  “Oh God.” Dekker smiles and drains his wine convulsively. “I don’t know if anyone starts out wanting to be a professor. I wanted education, and everything that represented. I wanted to read great works and sit at the feet of masters and just—soak everything up. You have to understand my background. Maybe certain temperaments just fixate on having the one thing they’re told over and over again is impossible for them. Maybe if people had told me over and over again I could never be a farmer, I’d be in South Africa right now, turning soil.”

  Dekker smiles some more. He’s reminding me of someone right now. The self-conscious wriggling around, the confessional, apologetic demeanour. Dermot Schofield discussing the love of his life.

  Over by the book table, Jim beckons to me, saying something in Creighton’s ear. Creighton glances over with interest, peppered eyebrows at full mast. Jim gestures again, waving a copy of True North, Creighton’s prizewinning claptrap. I smile, hold up a finger, and turn back to Dekker.

  “I was told all my life I could have it,” I tell him. “That it was a really rare and special thing, but I could have it because I was rare and special too.”

  “Then you were very fortunate, Lawrence,” says Dekker, drawing himself in a bit.

  I think about it. My parents giving up their stately Georgian inn for the hicky Highwayman. Just to get me somewhere like Westcock.

  “So you didn’t know what you wanted to do?” I ask Dekker. “You just went into it—education—as an end in itself?”

  “Well, I was probably a bit more single-minded than most.” He bows his head meditatively. “It would never have happened,” he tells me, “if it weren’t for the bank. None of it—I wouldn’t be here. Our farm was doing poorly and the bank kept sending my father these official letters. Written in English, which nobody in my family could read. So I got sent to school to learn to read and write English because I was the youngest. Well, from the first day I realized that the moment everything was worked out with the bank was the moment I’d be pulled out of school and put back to work. I was told as much.”

  I didn’t think it was possible for Dekker to come from what was clearly a bigger pile of sticks than where I’m from. Imagine a place where even sending a kid to school is seen as big-feeling—as putting on airs.

  “So what did you do?” I ask, striving to sound less fascinated than I am.

  “I started writing the bank, in secret,” he tells me. “I wrote them every month—sometimes more—under my father’s name, which happened to be the same as mine. I asked them inane questions—whatever I could think up. Pretty soon I struck up a correspondence with the head teller—he became a kind of pen pal. His letters would arrive on bank stationery and I’d tell my father it was just details about his loan, financial gobbledegook, nothing too worrisome, but a little bit worrisome, or so I would hint because I didn’t want my father getting too comfortable. Really, my teller friend would be responding to my last letter, telling me about his day, what his wife cooked him for dinner, and so forth.”

  “How long?” I demand in amazement. “How long did you have to write this guy?”

  “I wrote him every month, right up until the month I graduated from high school,” shrugs Dekker, a coolness coming through in his tone. “And then I got out of there. I never wrote to him again.”

  He looks at me and smiles, blinking like a baby who’s just woken up.

  “So
your dad is named Bryant too?” I ask.

  The smile disappears but not the vagueness. He seems to have no idea what I’m talking about.

  “My father? Oh!” Dekker laughs. “No. My father’s name was Obed. Bryant was—is—the name I chose for myself.”

  He looks away, embarrassment descending again.

  “That’s interesting,” I say. I don’t ask him why he changed his name from his father’s because I can guess that one. “Why did you call yourself Bryant?”

  Dekker sighs and rolls his eyes at himself. “Oh—I suppose I thought it sounded sophisticated. I was—Well, I’ll be honest with you, Lawrence.” He seems to make a decision and hunches toward me.

  “I couldn’t bring myself to change my name to Byron,” he tells me, voice low—smile small and wry. “Which is what I really wanted to do. I thought Bryant sounded close to Byron.”

  I blink at him. “You liked Byron?”

  “Liked?” repeats Dekker, cringing at the memory of his young self—himself at more or less my age, it occurs to me now. “Worshipped is more like it. Byron—” Dekker shakes his head. “Ah, well, say what you will about Byron. With his skull, and his turban. But he’s what got me out of there. I told myself: Byron existed, so that way of being had to exist as well—which meant there must be lots of ways of being. That’s what I needed to believe. My father used to say to me, You really think it’s any different anywhere else? You really think you can go somewhere and be any different, be any better than you are here?”

  Dekker pauses to smirk at the memory and I realize our faces are just inches from one another. Over the noise of the crowd I’ve drawn closer and closer to hear him. I can see the follicles like an angry rash across his jawline, red and brutalized from hasty shaving.

  “Byron was my proof,” he tells me. “He was the most flamboyant refutation of my father that I knew of.” Dekker glances at me, not quite able to keep his distancing smirk in place. We meet eyes and it feels for a moment like I’ve been grabbed by the shoulders.

  And then: I am grabbed. I’m in a headlock.

  34.

  JIM, CORRALLING EVERYBODY for the next phase of celebration, which will take place at his house out at Rock Point. But first he finds it necessary to drag me by the head over to Abelard Creighton for proper introductions.

  “Whaddya think yer doin’?” Jim demands on the way, sporting his full-on backwoods twang. “Can’t even be bothered to tell a fella congratulations?”

  “Congratulations,” I call up from beneath his arm, laughing and choking.

  “That’s better.”

  And I’m released before Creighton, who stands in his white shirt and Texas tie, looking for all the world like Colonel Sanders.

  “Here he is,” announces Jim. Creighton extends a big warm hand.

  “It’s nice to meet you, son. Jim tells me you’re his star protégé.”

  “Really?” I ask, grinning like a fool.

  My bubble’s been punctured and now I can feel the craziness in the air. Jim leans against me and I keep having to shift around on my feet in order to bear his weight. All around us, people seem to be shrieking laughter.

  “Yes, indeed,” Creighton affirms.

  “I told him,” Jim yells in my ear, “I said, this is your man right here, Abe—this is what you’ve been talking about all along. If anyone is gonna save Canadian poetry, it’s Larry Campbell.”

  All I can do is laugh breathlessly at this.

  A wine bottle gets knocked off the table and clunks noisily, emptily onto the polished floor. Jim is yelling around at everyone to get their coats.

  It’s hard not to watch the way Ruth watches Moira. She sits on the couch beside Dekker, draped in a shawl the colour of dried blood over a burgundy velvet dress. She looks like mulled wine. She is the best-dressed person in the room.

  “Can I help you with anything?” she said to Moira upon our arrival.

  Moira, in a pair of floppy-assed jeans, seemed physically unable to look upon Ruth. Her eyes kept darting toward and then bouncing away from her.

  “I don’t plan on doing a goddamn thing,” she huffed. “Beer’s in the fridge, food and wine’s on the table. If anyone needs anything else they can talk to that one there.” And jabbed her cigarette at Jim, crouched by his record player. “I been cutting fuckin’ vegetables all afternoon.” She held up her hands to show us where she had nicked herself in the process.

  “Well, it’s very nice to meet you,” said Ruth after a glance at Dekker.

  The comment met with Moira’s back.

  “Don’t tease that dog,” she was yelling, hustling her assless way across the room.

  “She’s so thin,“ murmured Ruth.

  After a while, Panda gets shoved into the kitchen and guests are instructed to enter cautiously when they have to pass through to use the washroom or get a beer. By no means should they look Panda in the eye, or respond in any way to his ball-nudgings. So every time I go into the kitchen, I’m reminded of my dream. Panda crouched in the corner, gnawing, mad-eyed.

  At some point, Jim has passed me my very own copy of True North. He bought it for me and got Creighton to inscribe it as a way of saying thanks, he told me. For all I’ve done throughout the year, all my friendship and support. I smiled up at him, thinking how much I would have preferred a signed copy of Blinding White since pages were starting to fall out of mine. Anyway, I smiled, thanked, and Jim hugged me for what felt like a good minute. He’s been going around hugging everyone all night long, leaving sweetish wafts of rum-smell in his wake.

  “Ah, kiddo,” I heard him say. I could hear him speaking through his shoulder, which my ear was pressed against. The words seemed to vibrate their way directly from his vocal cords into my brain. “It’s all been worth it, kid. The hordes have retreated—for the time being, anyway.”

  It struck me as funny that Jim thought of stodgy, traditionalist Westcock as the rampaging horde, himself as the desolate fortress under attack. You’d think it would be the other way around—Jim, the barbarian at the gate. It’s like with all the old French forts perched on their wind-blasted hills up and down the coast—signifying either victory or defeat, depending on how you look at it.

  Sherrie and Todd and a few others from class are being smart and taking advantage of Creighton’s presence among us. That is to say, they are gathered more or less at his feet as he rocks in Jim’s rocker pronouncing on God knows what while Jim calls merrily to him from time to time, to consult on matters such as what records to play and what he would like next to drink.

  Slaughter looms against a nearby wall, having resumed his bouncer’s posture. Or maybe it’s that of a bodyguard. Even as I’m talking to him, his eyes stay on Sherrie, flickering at the every flick of her hand.

  “How you doing, Chuck?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You seem kind of out of it tonight.”

  “I’m a bit fucked up,” Slaughter admits. “I took something.”

  “Not another one of those capsules?”

  “Nah. Something. I just fuckin’ got it from a guy down at the Mariner. Put me in a bad mood.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah, it’s a real fuckin’ bummer if you wanna know the truth, Campbell.”

  Slaughter speaks like he’s reading off a cue card. We stand in a not particularly friendly silence.

  “Mitts keeps hassling me about it,” he mutters a moment later.

  “About what?”

  “About taking stuff all the time. Like,” Chuck unfolds his arms suddenly and becomes animated, grimacing and gesturing, “she doesn’t get that guys are different than chicks. She’s this tiny little person and I’m this great big person. She can’t drink a couple of beer without getting shitfaced. I can handle whatever I take, she doesn’t get that. It’s drugs though, mostly. She thinks dope is dangerous.”

  “Hm.” I’m trying to sound noncommittal.

  “I go to her, look at Campbell. He’s half as big a
s me, and it didn’t hurt Campbell.”

  I gaze at Creighton as he leans toward Sherrie to impart some particularly savoury morsel of insight.

  “Chuck?” I say after a moment or two. “What didn’t hurt me? When we did the mushrooms at the Mariner that time?”

  “The other night,” says Chuck, resuming his surveillance of Sherrie. He refolds his arms. “Whatever it was we had at Quackers. Might be the same thing I’m on now.”

  I stare some more at Creighton and his crowd, mouth open.

  My father: every single thing he warned me about the summer before I went off to Westcock—regarded by me at the time as nothing so much as an island bumpkin’s rantings against the “big city”—is being replayed in my head.

  Now, don’t you go touching that wacky tabaccy, because people will tell you it’s fine but it’s not. You lose control and you can find yourself jumping out a window, or out in front of a car or some such thing—you saw those goddamn armpit sniffers on the news, they didn’t know where the hell they were rolling around in the mud up there at that show in New York.

  Dad—it’s New Brunswick. It’s a ferry ride away.

  They send the drug dealers into all the university towns—they come up from the States. Sometimes it’s the goddamn draft-dodging professors who do the deals, the way I hear it.

  Dad—Westcock professors aren’t drug dealers.

  Well, you don’t know, now, do ya? You’ve never been there now, have ya? This is my point—you don’t even know what it is you’re walking into. You go in there thinking, oh yah, this is just great, everybody’s my friend and all that, and then some bastard you think is your friend sticks a needle in your ass, or slips something in your drink at a party and then what happens?

  Dad—nobody is going to

  I have to go to the kitchen and drink a beer. I have to sit on the floor and pet Panda for a while. To calm myself, work through my rage. I can’t yet tell if I’m more angry about Slaughter dosing me or about the fact that my father’s been proven right about something other than lawnmowers or different kinds of paint. How dare Slaughter side with my father in this way. How dare he exemplify every boneheaded, fear-mongering stereotype about our generation. How dare he make us look so bad, so foolish. So naive—above everything else.