by Bill Gaston
Street lights cast a sheen of safety over these fine McRae Street homes, which sit as a portrait of the Canadian dream, a dream quieter, more modest than its louder cousin to the south. What we want is comfort, not wealth. Contentment, not fame. These houses do suggest contentment and comfort — he believes this is suburban architecture’s unstated purpose — but he knows it is rarely the case inside.
The real dream — he will tell the McGonnigals — is to keep the child from chaos. The nightmare is to see the child enter chaos and be spun off into agony. To wake in horror is to know the child has been pushed there by your loving hands.
More than once in his walks he has come upon a new construction site and gone in. He has ripped good clothes on fences, but when the mood overtakes him nothing matters less than fences or clothes. The smell of turned earth, mud, and cold stone is so raw he can taste as well as smell it. The wood of the forms is sometimes pitchy, sometimes barely scented when it is old and battered from reuse. On the older forms the grey of cement coats the wood.
Sometimes it’s night, but if it’s day and there’s a wall he’ll get behind it and lie full out on the dirt, wet or not. He’ll lie there and breathe. He feels the contour of the ground and the cold of it. He smells the sour richness of the raw, heaved earth. He opens his eyes to the dirt an inch away, notes the grit and particulate swirl and the surprising array of colour, ranging from yellow to black, and all the shades of brown in between. These are certainly some of the things Andy knew only too well during his last days, and at times it is overwhelmingly important that he knows these things too.
The McGonnigal house is one of the nicer ones. Emerging from the brick, white colonial half-pillars pretend to hold up a portico. He will stand out on the sidewalk a while and stare at it, into it. Sometimes he can read the quality of the light in the windows. Too often a TV’s erratic blue pulse dominates, but sometimes in kitchens and other rooms there’s light from which he can sense an emptiness and anger, or a desperate hope. Sometimes there’s a peculiar creamy light that speaks of friendliness and ignorance.
They got the call the tenth day Andy had been gone. The police knew instantly whose body it was. He and his wife had been phoning incessantly for updates, and for leads from other cities. The search for the fourteen-year-old male — small for his age, blond, white sneakers, jeans, jean jacket with Redbone in leather stitches on the back — was national. But Andy never left the immediate area, never left the site of the future Glendale Apartments. The police explained that a worker pulling forms had discovered the body and — He interrupted to ask what “forms” meant. He learned that forms are plywood walls, built side by side a foot apart (in this case), into which cement is poured. A mould, really. He came to learn more about forms. After a week, when the cement has hardened, the forms are pried off, “pulled.” Apparently it’s a rough job, where men use pry bars and brute force and jump out of the way of falling sheets of cement-sodden plywood. Fingers get broken, faces are scraped, and hard hats fly. In winter, underground in a future parking garage, it’s dark and bleakly cold.
One worker’s job was made all the more bleak when he pulled a sheet of form away and there near the bottom, at the height of the worker’s knees, instead of smooth new cement was fabric and flesh. Enough of Andy’s face was showing that his father was asked to come and identify him while Andy was still in the wall. His mother didn’t — couldn’t — come.
He won’t — he never does — go into much detail here, not even in his memory. Nor will he burden the McGonnigals with what they might construe to be scare tactics. He’ll describe his son’s pounded face simply by saying that his gut reaction at seeing it was relief that his son had obviously died quickly. He had arrived at the site already knowing his son was dead, and now he was learning that he hadn’t suffered. So there was something positive to take from even this frigid cement underground.
In these later years, when something like humour finds its way to him, he can admit that the image of Andy’s body set part in, part out of concrete resembled some art installations he’s since seen — modern art often uses that same clash of textures. Soft skin and denim and cement do not go.
No one could say why Andy was there before the cement got poured, wedged between plywood forms a foot apart. The autopsy showed he wasn’t drunk. Nor had he been killed first and dumped there. The word suicide was never ventured, for an odd suicide it would’ve been, Andy jumping in even as he saw the truck coming.
To this day he has no clue. As the cement began to fall, Andy was either unconscious, or conscious, and either possibility leads down ten unlit roads. He no longer belabours possibilities because the point tonight and all nights is that his son left home and needn’t have, and here he is at the McGonnigals’ door.
They are appropriately cautious. He gains entry because of his standard shirt and tie and their assumption that he’s here officially when he mentions their daughter. Now it’s up to him. They lead him to the living room, Mrs. McGonnigal holding his coat. They are so young. He expected Mrs. McGonnigal to be bigger, but he’s learned that people with steel principles aren’t always physically strong themselves. Her eyes tell him that she feels most at home in a church. She wears a sweater of lemon and rose, quenching fruit colours that deny this wintry night. Big and smooth and mulish, Mr. McGonnigal wears a fixed, mindless smile, and a two-piece Nike track suit though his hair is in no way mussed. This will be hard.
Everybody takes a seat. He sits in the easy chair that matches their couch, where the McGonnigals perch side by side. Mr. McGonnigal points the remote at the TV but pauses a moment before turning off a nature show, a cheetah gazing into the vista from a rock outcrop, the odd feline’s body lithe and bony and in these ways resembling the antelope it is built to catch.
He asks them, “Might Rebecca be included in this?”
“No, that’s fine,” Mrs. McGonnigal says, not bothering to ask what it is her daughter won’t be included in. Her husband sits very still, eyeing him and not blinking.
He doesn’t know how long they will let him stay. They wait, watching him with judgement and anger and hope conjoined, and in their eyes he sees how their week has gone and how their life is laid out.
“You have a beautiful, very precious daughter,” he begins, and from the way they nod in clear-eyed agreement, so certain that what he’s just said is true, he wonders again why he doesn’t just stand and leave, exactly now.
Beneficent
THE BEAST WATERS HIS GARDEN OF A SUMMER’S EVE
Hello?
Okay, I know it’s really early but —
Rich?
—I really have to talk.
Jesus
Sorry, I waited as long as I could.
Time is it?
I think it’s maybe —
Jesus, it’s six-thirty. What’s —
Forgot, sorry, it’s seven-thirty here. I waited all I could wait. Man, I really blew it, I pulled an unbelievable stupid one and I need you to do something for me. I’ve been up all night.
What happened?
I still can’t believe what I did.
What did you do, Rich? You get fired again?
Vice-presidents don’t get fired. I don’t get fired. When I didn’t make partner, I left. You’ve never under —
Okay, right, right.
Well you never have.
You and Carol okay? You didn’t, ah . . .
No, I didn’t. We —
Well, that’s good.
Violence just isn’t in me any more.
That’s good.
I mean we’re okay and we’re not okay, it’s nothing like that, not of that realm, just — Somehow it’s bigger. It’s really, really strange. Odd. Wide as the sky. Getting wider even as we speak.
What’s happened?
Okay,
you know how we might be Jewish?
I thought it turned out we weren’t.
No, we’re Jewish. We’re a quarter Jewish. Mom’s half Jewish.
Well, no, it turned out the guy came from France.
No, our great-grandfather came from Alsace, which was in Germany at the time, and he had a German name.
Jesus, Rich, what did you do? It’s six in the morning.
His name was Michel, pronounced My-kell, that throat-clearing Hebrew thing, which can only mean Jewish in that part of the world —
Okay, we’ll be Jewish.
Well no we really are — a quarter Jewish — and anyway I’ve been telling the kids that.
Okay. So?
So it’s sort of been a neat joke lately, all of us being part Jewish, because it’s kind of cool, kind of a —
You like the genius thing, I know.
Well, the persecution thing too, all of it. But, yeah, the genius thing, the artistic thing, just the general —
Jerry Lewis thing.
Fine.
So anyway?
In fact just last week at this party here these friends of Carol’s sort of gave me a bar mitzvah. They planned it. The woman, Wendy, is hard-core Jewish and knows all these Yiddish songs and sat me in a chair in the centre of the room and was dancing around me, singing, while she made me wear this fake yarmelke with these sideburn curls hanging from it, and bob my head while I pretended to read this fake book. Stuff like that, it was a hoot.
So?
Anyway I’ve been up all night, haven’t slept. I’m babbling a bit but —
You still with that therapist? You said looks like —
Marilyn Monroe’s sister. No.
Is it about any —
This is nothing like that. It’s not the compulsive thing, which is controlled, which is very much under control. She was a fraud by the way and I’m suing her —I know how I raved about her for a while there. But she was good at drugs and now I take a little beige pill every morning and it works and even if I miss a day I don’t even notice. So I’m better. It’s not that. I’m not a nut. This is real, and it is very unfortunate. I’m worried about my kids, my house, my career. So don’t make psychiatric jokes, all right?
I just needed some context. You have a history. I have to ask questions. I’ve never thought you were a nut. I’ve always just thought —Well, we’ve talked about this.
No, what? What have you always thought?
You know, that you’re always, I don’t know, playing roles. That. Not being yourself. Not being straightforward.
Well, touché, sure. Though I don’t agree.
Not “touché,” I’m not trying to win anything here. I’m just saying what I think. It’s not a competition.
Okay. You’re right. But —
Just a sec, my water’s whistling.
—calling someone for help at seven in the morning, I don’t know how much more “straightforward” you can get. I’ve never been more direct. What could be more direct. So whatever you say . . . Anyway even though it started this mess, it’s been fun lately, the Jewish thing. I’ve been using words like “mensch” and “schlong” around the kids and stuff like that and —
I’m back. Coffee.
—I talk in a loud Jewish accent sometimes, like: “YOU CALL THIS A BAD STEAK? IT’S GOOD. GOOD.”
Sounds like a loud New York accent.
Well, whatever. They were good steaks.
Rich.
What.
What did you do?
Okay, we’re just back from the beach, right?
Okay.
Qualicum, right? Where we go? We were there two weeks, and, the thing is, I didn’t shave the whole time. The whole time.
Jesus, Rich —
It’s part of the deal here, it’s the, it’s the heart of the story.
Okay.
Okay, well, yesterday I shaved. I had quite a beard going, really thick, it surprised me. I had to go out and buy a razor and foam. The gel. Haven’t done that in years. But my electric couldn’t hack through it.
Rich. What did you do?
I shaved, but in the middle of shaving I did this little joke, this little thing where I left a Hitler moustache on, right?
You have a Hitler moustache?
For a while I did, yes. I had a Hitler moustache and I walked around the house, you know, pretending nothing was different, just walking around — Carol’s in there cooking dinner and on the phone, and Richard’s there on the computer, and Jennifer’s down watching the tube — right?
Okay.
So I just wandered around kind of leaning my head into their, you know, various activities, let them catch on to my joke at random and be delighted and outraged, etcetera, by “Well, here’s Dad with a Hitler moustache.”
Did they think it was funny?
Do you think it’s funny?
I thought it was funny when John Cleese did it.
Touché.
Actually he just had his finger curled there, his knuckle. It was mostly his goose step that was great.
I’m the first to admit I force things. Which was exactly the case. But, you know, I’m playful. You’d think that seeing their lawyer vice-president father fooling around with a Hitler moustache, their Jewish vice-president father, you’d figure they’d, you know, I don’t know . . . “laugh.”
You can’t predict these things.
You really can’t.
So, Rich?
Yeah.
That’s not your problem, is it? That they didn’t laugh?
Not exactly.
It’s really not a six-in-the-morning problem.
It gets bigger.
Good. I mean —
No, that’s fine. And here it comes. But them not reacting to my little moustache caused the whole thing, right? It was the catalyst. It was why —
They didn’t laugh at all? It’s actually pretty funny that you’d do that. I like it that your little things are getting weirder. I would have laughed. I’m laughing now.
Well, how funny it was is now moot.
What’d they do? Just stare?
They all had their different thing. Carol’s, I think, was the worst one, was the one that made me go and — But she came last. First, Jennifer just said, “Eeeeeuuu.” That’s it. And turned back to her TV show. I basically had to stick my face in the way of her TV show so she’d see it at all. But that was it: “Eeeeuuu.” Then back to Canadian Idol. Entranced. White people from Richmond Hill singing scat. Jennifer is enraptured, like it’s her own future, her own stardom, tied up in this show. I think she thinks she can sing.
Well, she can sing. Have you ever —
She’s not even blinking at these showy creeps, and for me it’s: “Eeeeuuu.” Also, I don’t know, I actually think it’s . . .
What.
I think it’s the only thing Jennifer has said to me in a week or two, but that’s a different issue altogether.
She’s fifteen now right?
Fifteen.
There you go. It’s really not you.
I suppose not.
So Carol made you do something?
Well, first there was Richard.
Right. Richard’s at the computer.
At the computer, where he always is. Playing his six-things-at-once: you know, some on-line blasting game, plus talking to his friends a mile a minute, plus downloading songs, probably some porn going on in there somewhere, it just boggles me why —
Robbie’s pretty much the same way, I know the deal.
Exactly. And how they type so fast, faster than secretaries, it’s ten fingers at once, it sounds like “scrabble,” and when you read it you see there’s no spelling, no capitals, no punctuation, hardly even words. I mean it’s initials, acronyms, it’s meaningless.
Well, to us.
No it’s meaningless. What are they talking about? “Hey Ray, it’s Richard, what are you doing?” When obviously Ray is sitting on his ass typing like s
ecretaries, just like Richard. “Whacha doin’ later, Ray?” When what they’re doing later is what they’re doing now. It pisses me off, it really does. Everything either rocks or it sucks and it’s all infinitesimal crap, I’m sorry.
You want them to be discussing world politics. Well, me too.
