by Kris Bertin
Ours is a difference of philosophy. Your belief that the role of art is “not to portray the world as it should be, but to portray it exactly as it is” is what I take umbrage at. The role of art is to inspire, and to promote values, and teach important moral lessons. Anything less is taking away from the reader, and taking away from the world. This kind of “art” does nothing more than feed on the sorrow of this material plane and spit it back up as pure, unfiltered and meaningless salaciousness.
I reject this notion thoroughly.
Sincerely,
Conrad B. Cooke
Warden, Eglinton-Sussex Detention Centre
PS: I have purchased TIN ROOF’s “Fall Harvest” contest issue and Eric’s story is conspicuously absent. In its place is a story about a young homosexual coming to terms with the way his immigrant grandparents regard his lifestyle choice. The story has no climax, several surreal and nonsensical scenes, and ends on a question instead of an answer. Though I am happy Eric’s “story” has not been disseminated in a national publication, I think his work would have been right at home amidst this calibre of fiction.
Cowan was beautiful.
I wouldn’t have admitted it back then, but he was. Had a face like Gregory Peck at a time when the rest of us we were still working off our puppy fat. Hair the colour of those aerial wheat field shots you see on TV once election season rolls around. Even his body was tighter and more muscular than any of ours, and all of us noticed. He was better than us.
I saw him recently while visiting my father, who had been shuffled back into the job that brought Cowan and me together in the first place. It was pretty unbearable to be there with my father, so I was making up lots of tasks and chores throughout the week—going to industrial parks and garages, and to a Sunday flea market at a shopping plaza. I spotted Cowan right away, perusing tables of knick-knacks, picking up items and putting them back, smelling banana loaves, and tenderly squeezing baked goods in their plastic wrapping. He was with a woman who had a child in a sarong, and I was impressed by the fact that he seemed wholly intact, like nothing bad had ever happened to him or to me or between us. I had a scar around my mouth and chin and one through my eyebrow that was pretty obvious. But we smiled at each other. He must’ve had scars too.
I first met him when we moved into the subdivision. He came over wearing a blue velvet track suit and white sneakers, all of it (and him) immaculately clean. He smiled and pointed out how close his great big house was to our great big house. Said that we could be friends if I wanted. I remember being put off by that.
My father was too.
He was having a cigarette and watching the movers take everything out of the truck. Took his eyes off his property long enough to turn and make a face at Cowan. The one when he sees somebody and decides they didn’t work hard enough to get where they are. The same face he’d make if a fruity guy was vamping around on TV. The same face he’d given my mother, moments earlier, for pointing out a minor flaw in the house’s design. It didn’t seem like something my father could help.
I think Cowan could’ve had a lot of friends if he wasn’t always trying so hard. He had all the necessary components, but there was something a little too desperate about him, a lack of stability that turned all his virtues into faults. Something small, way down inside him, pleading:
Please like me.
My father—who spent his life with men in warehouses and shipyards and later in hyper-macho boardrooms—could hear it coming from Cowan, loud and clear. But I wasn’t yet aware that friendship was a choice, that you didn’t just have to go along when someone expressed interest in you. I hadn’t yet learned what to do with the different feelings people gave me, what they meant or what it said about me that I was feeling them.
So when I’d spend time with Cowan, I was embarrassed for him. Embarrassed that he’d say things like It’s nice to spend time with you, man and give me a look like he really meant it. Embarrassed that he’d admit to being scared of all kinds of things—people and places and what might be out in the woods. Embarrassed that he’d speak the truth about any powerful feeling he had. We could be having a perfectly ordinary time, and then all at once he’d take it too far. Want too much out of me or else give me too much of himself, and say it within earshot of my father.
I wish our lives were like how a movie is, with wonderful things happening all the time?
That first day, we walked around the neighbourhood and he showed me the wasteland where the subdivision ended, where a smashed-up excavator was left amongst craters and dirt and blasted rock, all inside a valley of wrecked trees. The subdivision was less than a decade old—the wilderness carved up and developed by a contractor over a matter of weeks to make our houses—and that place was where they just stopped building and called it a day. Cowan stood at the edge of it and talked about how he hated it there, said it felt like something scared all the workers away. He said it was like that same something was waiting for him back there. And he was probably right. With no one watching and with him making me feel that way, there was no telling what I might’ve done to him out there.
Cowan had two guys he called his friends, Holbrook and Rosenbaum.
They’d known each other since they were little kids, and all kind of had the same way about them, like guilty dogs slinking along a wall. I first saw them in pictures at Cowan’s house, photos from every one of his birthdays for maybe the last six years. Over the years, they developed shoulders and awkward smiles and discomfort with themselves and each other until they were standing as far apart as you possibly could to have your photograph taken.
Rosenbaum was one of those people who regularly vocalize any horrible thought that occurrs to them, about anyone and to anyone. People sometimes thought of him as funny, but even they knew better than to think of him as a friend. He held positions on various student councils, but didn’t seem to represent anyone or anything beyond himself and his need for attention, his right to speak and be heard.
Holbrook was an adopted kid who was sickly. He had one of those deformed arms like a baked potato pushing out of his shoulder, something that everyone was too polite to ever make fun of him for. He had in him a desperation to please others, a need to make you like him, all of which made him into a pest and a joker and a mimic. I’d sometimes see him in other circles, and I was impressed by the way he could integrate himself, adopt mannerisms and postures and demeanours. Rosenbaum wanted the same but also to be admired and feared.
I was just as bad, or worse.
The first time I hung out with the three of them, they just stood around the playground at the bottom of the street and said shit about Cowan. His breath, his clothes, his personality. Cowan got this dumb look on that pretty face and just shuffled around. Climbed on this or that. Chucked a rock every now and then, waiting for the conversation to move to something else. He’d look around a lot, and I always imagined he was keeping an eye out for his real friends, like they were waiting for him out in the wilderness or on the horizon, because that’s how I felt. It was like my adult self and the way things ought to be were looming, tangible forces—ready to swoop in and replace everything—though what exactly I’d get to become was mostly unknown. My father moved us around too often for me to ever really have friends or to learn much about myself, and so I carried with me only a vague idea of the life that was owed to me, though I still thought it existed.
I remember wondering if maybe this life was the one. If this was happiness, and this was friendship. If the four of us had gotten what we deserved with each other and our fathers and their jobs and this square kingdom, seated in forest and dirt. The question turned, over time, onto its side, where it came to rest as something I believed without any consideration.
Cowan had a sister.
At school, he’d go over and hang out with her even though she was younger and nobody really did that. They seemed to get along. When he was with her, we’d
wait, off to the side, stealing glances. He seemed okay when he was with her.
They were both the offspring of the same kind of trophy wife as my mother, and so she was like Cowan. Beautiful. Big Farrah Fawcett hair, huge blue eyes like a cartoon animal. Perpetually in tennis outfits, often or seemingly bra-less. Unreasonably long legs.
Holbrook and Rosenbaum would say she was a whore, that she’d slept with all of us. That she literally was a hooker who went out on the 401 to flag down truckers and blow them at rest stops. That she fucked our fathers in a nearby tree house. One time Rosenbaum told Cowan he’d raped and killed her. She was face down in a landfill, out past Trenton.
Holbrook even held up a piece of yellow nylon rope he’d found and said it was a lock of her hair.
The first time I met her, I was in the passenger seat of Cowan’s car. She was walking on the sidewalk in a one-piece romper that I remember because it was low-cut and revealing and rode up but made her look weirdly childlike at the same time. Cowan put my window down and talked to her over me.
I had never been that close to a woman, let alone her, and I was immediately intoxicated. That mane of hair was hanging inside the car. Her mouth was inches away from mine. And I could smell her. Her shampoo and her deodorant, but also her breath and sweat. I remember staring straight ahead, terrified, but wanting to look at her, wanting to take control of her body and make her turn her head and look at me. I felt trapped inside my own body but also lost in the space between our two bodies, in the gulf created by my inability to do anything.
When Cowan and her were done talking about borrowing the family car and going to some party, she waved to all of us and said, “Bye, guys.” All of us smiled and said goodbye in unison like a classroom directed to say so long to a special guest. One of the stages my father said I was in at the time was The Little Shit Stage, where I wanted everyone to notice me but I did nothing to earn it. I remember the fast-acting fury that filled up inside me when I heard the sound of my own weak voice echoing after her.
Of course, all of us were cowards who couldn’t even communicate with her. Rosenbaum was the only one who talked to women, and he didn’t have the skills for anything past cruel teasing. We were fuck-ups and nervous wrecks, but these were flaws never vocalized, never mentioned to each other in any way. Our attention was focused on Cowan.
Holbrook liked to whip him with this old dog chain he kept in his pocket for when Cowan said something dumb. Right across the back of his legs or his ass. You could do that kind of thing and everyone would laugh. You could leave serious marks or welts and even he’d laugh.
So I went along with it.
I’d berate him and do exactly what I’d wanted to do when I first met him. I’d flick his hat off his head or push him down. Tell him mid-sentence to shut the fuck up. I’d ask to see his notes from school and tear them up in his face. One time I burned him with a lighter right through the back of his shirt, and a bit of that golden hair even went up in the process and stunk up his father’s Audi.
The day I met his sister, after we’d pulled away, I finally joined in.
I hit him.
It was the first time I’d hit him, or anybody. Right away, when my hand came off the side of his head—with a sound like a salesman at the door—I could feel vitality pouring into me from somewhere. I was addicted.
Then I did it again, and the others helped without needing to be asked, Rosenbaum wrapping an arm around his neck from behind and Holbrook bellowing in his ear as loud as he could.
I put his four-ways on and hit him again. One more time after that and his ear was red and burning hot.
I told him to watch where he was fucking going.
It was sunny, and there was a nice breeze coming in through the window, and everyone was laughing—even Cowan, whose high spirits, in that moment, seemed unshakable.
I knew I was getting carried away.
I spent a lot of my time in those pits Cowan showed me, and if I wasn’t there, I was in the forest that ran through all of our backyards. It was important to me, especially then, to be alone.
Today, the subdivision has far fewer trees, but after the sun goes down it looks the same as it ever did. A few televisions glowing, a few pale porch lights, and a sea of blackness. The township has the most break-ins and home invasions in the province, and my father’s subdivision leads the pack—and this is why. After dark, five steps into that band of trees and you were invisible to the houses, though you could see everything going on inside.
I spent hours watching whatever I could see in their windows—families around televisions, fathers smoking on balconies, men with drinks around billiard tables, mothers baking in kitchens and talking on phones, the odd person in their bedroom with the lights on—and I’d do my best to stand motionless.
I was at an age where I was old enough to know better, but not strong enough to keep myself from doing it. If I had lived there even one year earlier, I would have been unable to stay my hand at the sight of a woman in a window, but that had passed and I never saw anything exciting enough to make me hard anyway. I didn’t know most of the people I was watching, but that wasn’t exactly why I was there, either. It was simpler than that. I just wanted to see what kinds of people were in the other houses. Wanted to see the things they were doing. When I’d watch the Cowan household, I’d try my best to spot what it was that made him so weak. Squinting and staring, judging it against my own home.
Back then, my father would make me stand up when he spoke to me. And though he paced around and raised and lowered his voice, asking questions, I wasn’t to look him in the eye. It started as something he did when I was in trouble, but when we moved to the subdivision he did it all the time. He would just ask me ordinary questions like a father might ask at the dinner table, about my day and my chores, but he’d do it circling me like I was a mannequin in a department store. Sometimes the questions would get strange. I remember thinking more than once that he was losing his mind.
One time he asked if I was just a man in a suit—or what?
The whole block was full of men like him. Men who worked all the time and got lots of calls from the office and seemed very important, though I knew from my voyeurism that no one else had to go through anything like this. Standing and listening to the story of how my father became his own man, and how he grew up—him and five brothers—in a shed. How they’d have three meals a week. Not a day. Three meals a week.
Do you understand what that means?
He had a glass stir-stick with a flag on the end that he put in every one of his drinks, and he’d brandish it at me, at vulnerable places like my neck and temple or near my eyes. I’d be so furious and powerless and sick with myself that my arms and legs would feel so terribly weak, like all the blood had risen out of me and gone someplace else. I had to stand and listen to him talk about what “stages” I was going through, and what was wrong with them (and me). Listen to him talk about how I wasn’t doing my part, and how I was a coward who had everything and had earned none of it.
And he was right.
My father did this even crazier thing with Mom, where he’d get her to dance for him.
He’d say Let’s have a dance and even with me sitting right there in the living room, she’d have to do this cha-cha dance in her slippers with this horrible look on her face. Stop whatever she was doing, get up, and dance. I didn’t need any directions to keep from making eye contact with her. I felt so bad for her I could barely stand to sit near her on the couch. Sometimes she’d have to make him a drink first, and then he’d sit there, holding it tight like it was going to get away while she stood before him. The worst was when he’d tell her to go get ready, and she’d have to go up to their bedroom while he finished his drink. One time I watched her go get ready from my hiding spot, and saw her in her red pantsuit, sitting at the edge of the bed, staring forward with her hands on her knees, waiting for what was c
oming.
From everything I could see, we were different from the others in that we were living in the past.
The company my father worked for was the same one that employed everyone on our street and was the entire reason for the subdivision’s existence. My father, I knew, was the highest-ranking person on the block, and maybe even in the county, so my biggest fear was that there was someone else like me—someone who wanted to see what was going inside the boss’s house—who might see how fucked up we were. I’d stand in my room sometimes, staring out the window, down at the black woods, trying hard to see if anyone was watching us.
But even when I was out there, I never saw anyone else.
If you stood in the shadows and watched my father’s house now, there wouldn’t be much to see. You’d see a small man drink beer and smoke in the living room, getting up to piss every now and then. If I were there, you’d see us communicate without looking at each other, him asking short questions and me giving short answers, both of us facing forward, neither of us smiling. You’d see him go to sleep, eventually, in an empty room by himself for a few hours, then drive to work in a Korean-made company car.
If you went inside the house after he’d gone, you’d think, at first, that he was midway through the process of moving in. You’d find a couple three-hundred-pound televisions on wooden stands, an empty fridge, seven empty rooms, and not one family photo, decoration, or piece of memorabilia anywhere. You’d find no sign that a woman had even been in the building. If you tried to get into the garage, you’d maybe figure it out. You’d be able to open the door just enough to push a beer bottle in, where it could be dropped onto a pile that must number in the hundreds. You’d try to think of an explanation, and the best you could do was imagine something in the rich, dark dirt of his past that might make him like this.
