The Abandoned

by Kyp Harness

  Someone bought the house and put it on a trailer and towed it away somewhere else, and trucks and cranes and backhoes came, and far into the future there was only a highway, and the gravel sideroad that had led to our house only came to a dead end with room to turn your car around and head back, and there was no creek and no pond and no bush with the trillium in it, and there was no Andrew, there was only the highway and everything else existed only in your mind if you could even still remember it.

  2. Diddler

  The new school was closer to the city and near a mall and a Kentucky Fried Chicken where the kids would go sometimes at lunch and get the box lunch, and there were older kids who walked around the back field at lunch and I saw some of them smoking and I told my dad and he said I should follow them and get some of the cigarette butts and bring them home after they were done so he could look at them because they could be smoking bad things. When I asked what kind of bad things he said, “Dope,” and he said some of those guys who hang around his barbershop did dope, and he said to one of those guys when he was shaving him, if he ever heard of him selling either of his boys dope the next time the guy came into his barbershop to get a shave Dad would use his straight razor to cut his throat, wouldn’t even say a word, the guy would just be dead.

  I never did gather up any butts to show him but I often did hang around with the older kids when I first started because I didn’t know anyone and they seemed to like me when I did my falls and acted stupid, for that was my favourite thing to do. I would clown around and pretend to fall with my legs going up in the air like I saw old comedians do on TV, and the kids would laugh, and oftentimes when I diddled I would imagine that I was the star of my own TV show, and pictured myself dressed in a grey jacket and hat like Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies and I would picture the image of me with my family, me making a goofy face while above the picture it would say The Tim Hendricks Show and below it would say will be back soon… like shows did before they went to a commercial, and when I diddled I thought of how I would be the star of my own comedy show, and it was so obvious to me how great a thing it would be when I grew up that I couldn’t help but think all other kids felt the same way and I feared the competition there would be when we all grew up and wanted our own TV shows. I’d imagine the show and the storylines and the gags, and it was almost like the show was already happening, that I was creating the show and broadcasting it as I diddled on the bus home and in my chair in the living room after school.

  On the bus was an older boy named Tom Such, who didn’t mind me diddling beside him on the bus, just like Andrew didn’t mind, he just sat there and looked out the window, but he didn’t have water on his mouth like Andrew, he had thick glasses and the kind of skin where he had round patches of pink on each of his cheeks and he had no trouble talking and didn’t have to go to special classes at school like Andrew did, and I would sit beside him and diddle and imagine I was broadcasting my comedy show to my audience, sometimes even explaining to them what happened in the last episode.

  Dad didn’t like me doing the comedy. When he saw me doing it in front of my cousins at a family gathering, he said it was “acting stupid” and his angry face told me that “people should laugh with you not at you,” which I didn’t understand because he made people laugh at his jokes all the time in his barbershop, and I thought what was the difference, and I know the men would laugh with genuineness at his jokes and the look of happy surprise before their laughter actually started. Then it would come out with heavy dark sounds from their stomachs, but still my dad’s laugh would ring out as loud and longer like a string of tin cans rattling out after his joke, and he would gaze around at all the men laughing with his comb in one hand and his scissors in the other. I thought: they are laughing at his joke but also maybe laughing at him laughing, made to laugh even more by his laughing, and if so are they laughing at him rather than laughing with him?

  Some of the clowning around I did for the older kids at the school was just to get their attention, like when they asked me to kiss the bottoms of their shoes and I did it, until one time I met a big, fat boy named Pete Sanders and he asked me why I kissed the bottoms of their shoes and he said that was a silly thing to do and he became my friend like Andrew was, though he didn’t have water on his mouth like Andrew did, though Pete didn’t do well at school either, which he didn’t care about because he was going to be a trucker like his dad, and I hung with Pete and a squat girl named Kim Hoswell. The older kids we spent our recesses with out at the wooden steps by the fence would laugh and say she was my girlfriend, and say we should kiss in front of them, and sometimes we did, and I’d recoil and do a funny fall on the ground, and sometimes they asked me to put my arm around her and touch her, and they’d laugh, but I wondered what a girlfriend meant, was it a girl who was a friend, or something else, and did it have something to do with the way my dad and the other men would look at each other and make a noise when girls would walk past the front window of his barbershop?

  It was even better for my diddling on the school bus when my mom, who was worried about me now having to cross a busy paved road that was almost like a highway in front of our house when the school bus dropped me off, asked if possibly the bus could drop me off when it was coming the other way, so that I wouldn’t have to cross the road to get to our house. In order to do that I had to travel and wait till all the other kids on the route were dropped off, and then the empty bus turned around and went back to the city so I was the only one on the bus for a long time, and I could sit and diddle, and then I would creep up the bus to the front where the driver Mrs. Harrington sat and talk with her as the only passenger she was driving, and she’d ask me questions about my day, and I looked out at the winter snowscape as the sun was going down and told her the clouds looked like mashed potatoes, and one time I told her I hated the national anthem and she said, “You can’t hate the national anthem!” and I said I did because at night when my dad fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV I was always awakened by the national anthem playing louder than anything else that came on and it scared me, blaring out marching and warlike, and I would leap out of bed and run down the hall to where the national anthem blared as images of fighter jets streaking through the sky filled the bright screen.

  I’d race across the carpet in my bare feet to the TV, panic rising in me, because as much as I was horrified by the booming noise of the national anthem, and the images of fighter jets and marching soldiers that accompanied it, even worse was afterwards when the images would disappear and the screen would break apart into chaotic white roiling insanity, the imageless video storm and the accompanying crackling, cackling hiss and ripping sound of interference and white noise opening a hollow, whistling void at the centre of me. I was always too late it seemed to shut it off before the anthem ended and the witless static madness began, the crumbling busy devastation that sounded like a thousand angry hornets’ nests—and a voice signalled the end of another day of broadcasting, which seemed to me to also signal the end of the world and all creation. “No,” said Mrs. Harrington. “You can’t hate the national anthem, you have to be proud of your country,” and she said the one that began, “O say can you see…” was the American anthem anyway, and I agreed, while in truth I hated the Canadian one too, which came on exactly after the American one, and was the one I was always racing to stop before the end of the world.

  Mrs. Harrington dropped me off at my house, the sky now darkening because the longer ride made me get home so much later, and I walked up the shorter lane to the house my mom and dad had to do so much work on, and it was Monday, my dad’s day off, so they were both at home painting the kitchen because the house needed a lot of work, and it was by a farmer’s field on the outskirts of the city, across a field from where the train tracks were, and you could see the stacks of oil and chemical refineries on the other side of the tracks, and on some days you could smell an acrid fart odour from the refineries, and at night you could hear the trains as they
crashed and uncoupled in the railyard, and at night you could also see an orange glow from the stacks, particularly from one that had an angry flame burning from the top of it all the time, and some of the others looked almost pretty, like the gathering of several of them that seemed to glow with purple light through a mist that I could see from my bedroom window that I fantasized looked like the castle at Walt Disney World.

  Dad had to work hard at the house, fixing it up after he got off work at the barbershop, and for a while we ate every night at a picnic table in the kitchen while the walls were being stripped down and then painted, and it was on Mrs. Harrington’s bus that I saw, scratched into the metal back of one of the seats, the words eat my meat, which I thought to be the most hilarious sentence I had ever read. The idea of someone offering another person the meat off their bones to eat was one of the most delightfully, insanely ghoulish concepts that was possible to be thought of, and I went into hysterical laughter each time I thought of it, the rhyming of the phrase making it seem almost casual and therefore all the more bizarre, and I repeated it over and over again, and I even made a little song that went, “You can eat the fruit that grows on my tree, you can eat the meat that grows on me!” and I sang it to my friends and to the older kids at school who were always trying to get me and Kim Hoswell to kiss, and I would sing it to our babysitter and then Mom told me it wasn’t a nice thing to sing, and I didn’t understand. Nobody was upset about the idea of eating the meat of an animal, not even the meat of a pig at a pig roast where the pig was on a pole and you could see where they were cutting your meat off the pig’s body, so why was it so offensive to laugh about the idea of eating human meat, which was so ridiculous that it was funny?

  It was like when I heard the older kids at school say cocksucker, which seemed to me the funniest thing I’d heard because I knew that cock meant penis and the idea that anyone could or would suck on your penis was the most ridiculous thing I’d heard, the image of one guy sucking on another guy’s penis was so silly that I started calling my brother a cocksucker and he started calling me it back. One morning when we were supposed to be getting ready for school and we were wrestling on the floor, my mom told us not to use that word and we asked why, and she said our dad would tell us when he got home that night. That night after school and work Dad sat down at the dinner table and told us that sucking on another’s penis was something a woman could do to a man but it was a private thing between them and rude to talk about. We asked why and he said because it was private. We asked did it being private make it bad and he said no, but we still didn’t understand, so he said cock was a bad word. So we asked if we could say penis sucker and he said no in a way that made us not ask anymore questions.

  Sometimes I stayed home from school when I was sick though I wasn’t really sick. It seemed to happen every couple months that I woke up in the morning and knew I couldn’t go to school that day. In general, I didn’t like school. The only happiness I got was from making the kids laugh at recess and the rest of the time it was boring and then also kids would pick on me which I would try to defuse by clowning around, even to the point of letting them hit me, and reacting in a clownish way so that they’d hopefully stop hitting me. When I played sick I always had to remember to put in a little acting as the day went on, so that when 3:30 rolled around my dad wouldn’t say, “You don’t seem so sick now!” because when my brother or I stayed home from school we had to get taken to work by either my mom or my dad.

  This one time I got taken to work by my dad, so I sat at the back of the barbershop drawing pictures. At the back of the shop there was a room that my dad rented out but he was re-modelling, so I would also sometimes go back and play with the tools. At one point my dad was in the bathroom for a while and a bunch of men were waiting for their haircut so I went in the backroom and got a saw in order to entertain them. I got up in a barber chair and made like I was playing it, bending back the blade and acting like it was hitting me in the face, and I thought some of them thought that was funny, so then I went out on the street in front of the big front window and did an act in which I pulled down my pants and tripped on them, falling over onto the street. When Dad came out of the washroom and saw me, he went straight through the barbershop, picked me up from the sidewalk under his arm with my pants still down around my ankles, strode back through the shop to the back room, pulled down my underwear and slap-spanked me across my bum till I cried. Then he went out to motion to the man next in line to come to the barber chair and started cutting his hair.

  I stayed in the back room the rest of the day, or at least until the men who were there when I was spanked left. My bum felt like it was burning but just as much or maybe more so there was a burning inside of me that made me cry, something that was both burning and broken that made hot tears flood my eyes as I tried to distract myself by playing with some nuts and washers and bolts on a table in the back room, my mouth straining as I tried to hide both the sound of my sobbing and the compulsion or need to sob, as I looked down at the blurry nuts and washers.

  But as bad as it was, it was better than those times that my dad got mad at me, or my brother and me, and we didn’t know whether he was going to spank us or not, and the anticipation and dread of the spanking was just as bad as the spanking itself, if the spanking happened. We did something wrong and we could see it first in his eyes, in the way he looked at us, and we both knew. It was an anger that flashed in his eyes then turned dead, like there was death in his eyes, like burning molten steel poured into a form that then dries and solidifies into something harder than can be imagined, and sometimes his hand would even go up to his belt at his waist for a particularly hair-raising supplement to the dread he had sparked in us, and then in a hard voice he would ask a baffling and unanswerable question like “You want a lickin’?” or “You want a lickin’ eh?” which further frightened and confused me because it seemed to me these questions were riddles, that they were trick questions that had no right answers, and the air gathered round and pressured me till I felt I couldn’t breathe, as though I couldn’t get the air into my lungs to float the answer out on, and in a way there was no right answer since it seemed it would all end in a lickin’ anyway, but still maybe if I had the right answer there was the tiniest chance the lickin’ could be evaded so my mind raced in a confused frenzy which of course made it more impossible to come up with any kind of answer, for what was the answer to “You want a lickin’?” but to say “No”?

  But that was so obvious there had to be a trick somewhere. For a while my confusion about the meanings of yes and no extended into other areas, not really sure what to answer if someone asked if I wanted some lemonade. If you said you didn’t want a lickin’ and got it anyway, what did the question mean? Obviously you did want a lickin’ if you acted in a way you knew would make your dad give you a lickin’—even if the real truth was that you’d hoped to act that way undetected. “Tim knows, he can see it in my eyes,” I heard him say to his friends. “He knows—he knows when there’s a lickin’ comin’.” And it was true: if there came a time when my brother and I got in trouble, I would immediately start pleading. I would go down on my knees at his feet and start crying and begging him not to give us a lickin’—while my brother Jason just stood there. Sometimes we would hear the dreaded question, another unanswerable puzzle, as he would ask us right out of the gate, “Alright—who wants it first?”

  Who wants it first? Was it better to get it over with and run from the room, or was it better to wait until maybe his hand would get tired from spanking the one who went first, or maybe the sight and sound of the first spanking only served to increase the panic and dread of being spanked, and sometimes you let your brother say he would go first just to put off your spanking, on maybe the slightest sliver of a chance that something might happen that would cancel your lickin’, but really, you were just looking to stall it, to have just a few more moments unlicked, knowing it was coming anyway, knowing that the panic and dread of watching your brothe
r get a lickin’ was almost as bad as getting the lickin’ yourself, if not worse, but not caring, because whatever the dread and panic, getting a lickin’ was getting a lickin’ and not getting a lickin’ was not getting a lickin’, and not getting a lickin’ was better than getting a lickin’, however many milliseconds the reprieve was before you got the lickin’.

  It seemed always to me that my brother got it worse anyway, as when he and I were wrestling and yelling and making a lot of noise in our room and our dad came in and without saying a word to either of us lifted Jason by his arm and tossed him across the room, plopping him against the sliding door of our closet which caused it to clatter in its runner. Jason slid down to the floor and just lay there crying softly for a while unbeknownst to my dad as he’d turned and left the room right after the tossing. Or the other time when after school my brother and I got a bunch of grocery-store brand cans of ginger ale from the cupboard at the back of house and we shook them up and sprayed them at each other and all over the place, then seeing the mess, tried hurriedly to mop it all up, but the shining glaze of the drying ginger ale on the wooden cupboards and on the floor and on the ceiling escaped our notice, and Dad came home later, not after work, but later than that, and he had the look in his eyes which was made worse by what I was gradually identifying as different mannerisms he would have when he came home from a day of curling or golfing on a Sunday afternoon, which seemed to happen more often since we’d been in the new house, and he’d come in walking slower with a swagger that made him angle with one shoulder after another into a room, and his mouth would be downturned, and his right eye squinted up like he was looking through a telescope with the other one, and he talked in a low, sarcastic, mean-sounding grunt, carefully saying his words with a strange emphasis, like he was talking around some piece of food that was hot on his tongue, and he came up to us and said, “Did you guys spray that ginger ale all over the laundry room?”