Allison shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah.”
Because it was lunch and we weren’t stuck in our seats, Dale and Sarah were holding hands, class time the only time they seemed not to be limb-entwined. Allison scratched her bare left thigh and we watched them walk out of the classroom together. You could tell summer vacation was coming because girls would sometimes wear skirts or flowery shorts to school, but Allison wore her shiny red nylon running shorts as soon as the snow was off the ground. If red hadn’t been our school colour and she hadn’t been our best female athlete, she probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it. But it didn’t seem like she was wearing tight red shorts because she wanted anyone to notice her; it just seemed like she really liked wearing them.
“Well, you know those two won’t be showing up,” she said.
“Nope.” Dale and Sarah’s fathers’ law firm was representing the developers. If it wasn’t a good idea for us to attend the Save Harrison Hall meeting, it wasn’t a good idea for Dale and Sarah to even think about it. Not that they would have been. They were both too busy thinking about each other.
“It’s not fair, you know,” Allison said. “Mr. Brown is just trying to make sure that there’s still a town left when we get to be his age. He doesn’t have to be doing all this Harrison Hall stuff. We’ve got cross-country practice every day after school and he never gets somebody else to fill in for him, he’s always right there running with us every day.”
“Yeah.” I knew he did, because I didn’t get a ride with him anymore and had to take the bus home. I wished Allison would scratch her leg again.
“Well, I’m going to go,” she said. “For Mr. Brown. He deserves it.”
“Yeah…”
“My dad talks as if everyone doesn’t do exactly what those stupid mall people tell them to, we’re all going to end up in the poorhouse.”
“My dad too.” It was funny—I didn’t think my dad even knew Allison’s dad, but they sounded like the same person.
“I’m going to talk to everybody on the cross-country team. I bet I can get at least four or five more to come.”
I nodded and looked inside my Adidas bag. Not only had I already recorded everything in my lunch bag and was therefore responsible for eating it, I was hungry.
“What about you, Tom? You want to help Mr. Brown, don’t you?”
It was also my turn at bat. If I didn’t hurry up and eat and get out to the diamond, I’d lose my spot.
“Sure,” I said. “I want to help Mr. Brown. I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you later.”
Leading Chatham Lawyer Says the World Is What it Is; Nothing More, Nothing Less
“With the Right Legal Representation, However, it Can be Made to Resemble What You Want it to Be”
GENERATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY. Architectural integrity. Historical appreciation. All fine phrases, yes, except that none of them is the point. That’s precisely what people like the Save Harrison Hall crowd don’t understand—there is no point. At least not of the histrionic type they imagine exists from watching black-and-white Gary Cooper defending the good and innocent white ones from the bad and guilty black ones. That is the point. If the world ran on reason and righteousness, if life were suffused with sanity and sense, it wouldn’t need the law and lawyers. Right and wrong don’t exist, therefore the firm of Smith, Dalzell, and Russell does. Someone has to decide what is true and false, ergo here we are, and conveniently located in downtown Chatham, Ontario, where there’s always plenty of free parking.
Only a fool goes to law school believing he’s going to graduate and set the record straight, liberate the truth from the lies, separate the wheat from the chaff. Life is dark and lawyers shine a little light. The world isn’t illuminated—the world is as murky as a lake is wet—but, for an agreed upon fee, enough temporary brightness can be provided to get you from X to Y and to get things done. Ask anything more and you’re buying the lies the fool world tells itself so it can sleep at night. Lies are for children and those who think they should be able to see in the dark. An adult doesn’t use the word should.
Socrates called the sophists “those who make the weaker argument appear the stronger.” (Think a lawyer only knows torts and precedents and golf? Think again.) A lawyer makes other people understand why his arguments in favour of his client are the strongest. And because whoever’s arguments are accepted best tends to get what he worldly wants, a lawyer is compensated by his client very worldly well, thank you very much, he couldn’t say he didn’t deserve every last penny. Go back, go way back, and whoever bow-and-arrowed the most animals during the day had the most meat to eat at night. No one begrudged the guy in the bearskin with the best aim because he and his family ate well and were warm in the winter and dressed in the best animal furs.
He had a beautiful wife five years younger than he was and a thirteen-year-old daughter who, mercifully, looked like her mother; he had a three-story house on leafy Victoria Avenue and a winterized cottage right on lapping Lake Erie; he owned a sensible Saab for sensible family driving and a gleaming Maserati just for the hell of it, just for him; and he wasn’t done yet. His daughter Sarah was going to attend either UofT or McGill and study whatever she wanted, he’d help make sure she was successful at whatever she did. By the time he was fifty and the firm could afford it, he and his wife were going to spend two months every winter at their own Florida beach house. He knew nothing about boats, but promised himself he would learn. He liked the idea of captaining his own ship.
Shakespeare was another one—said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” The same guy who used words—words, mind you, nothing but words—to make people see what he saw, to think what he wanted them to think, to feel what he wanted them to feel. His biggest concern, once he’d finished his last play and set down his quill for good, was to get an official family crest and a big, comfortable house in Stratford and enjoy being a bona fide gentleman. We know all this because he needed a lawyer to help secure the crest and purchase the house. Lawyers tend to keep good records.
~
Who showed up; who said what; who sat where: who really cared? Mr. Brown said that in addition to aiding the Save Harrison Hall cause, we’d also gain valuable insight into the democratic process. I didn’t know about the democratic process, but I did learn that I never wanted to attend another town hall meeting. The people who wanted to knock Old City Hall down cheered when someone from their side made a speech and the people who wanted it to stay cheered when someone from their side made a speech and no one, as far as I could tell, left the meeting thinking anything other than what they thought when they arrived. The same people on both sides of the argument did most of the talking, and when someone else had the floor you could tell that all they were thinking about was what they were going to say when it was their turn again. I wished I’d brought my notebook. I hadn’t had time to record that night’s supper before slipping out to the meeting, and no one would have known that I was writing down meat loaf (two pieces) and not something somebody had shouted at somebody else.
After I did the dishes I told Dad I was going over to Dale’s house to watch TV and that I’d be home by ten. Dad didn’t go to things like town hall meetings. I was glad of that, because it meant I could go and support Mr. Brown and not have to worry about Dad seeing me there, but I didn’t understood why, if he was so concerned about what was going to happen, he didn’t want to be part of the democratic process. Now I did. The democratic process was a pain in the ass.
Not to Mr. Brown, though. Apparently he wasn’t one of those ordained by the Save Harrison Hall group to do any of the speaking—mostly it was their lawyers talking at the other side’s lawyers—which seemed like a waste since he was so smart and cared so much and we were so used to him talking over every aspect of the whole thing in class. But if he minded being a back-row cheerleader he hid it well, was beaming when it was
all over two hours later and he invited Allison and James Dawkins and me, the sole members of our class who’d made it out, to join him at the Satellite for fries and Cokes, his treat. James’ dad was the Reverend Dawkins, the minister of Saint Andrew’s United Church, who would have been there himself to support the SAVE side except he was in Toronto for a meeting, this one about the church’s stand on homosexuality. Everyone knew that being a lawyer or a minister was better than being a tattoo artist or a factory worker, but people with important jobs spent a lot of time going to meetings. Sometimes Dad’s neck and upper back would get so sore from working in the same position for hours on a difficult tattoo that he’d have to spend the entire evening with the heating pad wrapped around his neck like an electric scarf, but at least he didn’t have to go to any meetings.
“Well, gang, what did you think?” Mr. Brown said. We were sitting in one of the Satellite’s red vinyl booths, James and I on one side, Mr. Brown and Allison on the other. “I think we came out looking pretty good, wouldn’t you say?” Mr. Brown looked at each of us in turn. The waitress hadn’t brought us our order yet, so there was nothing to occupy our mouths, someone had to say something. Someone had to say something. Someone had to say something.
“It was interesting,” James said.
James was only there because his dad was on the committee with Mr. Brown and it wouldn’t have looked right if the Reverend’s only child stayed home, where he would have undoubtedly preferred to be. James was chubby and wore thick glasses that were always smudged and was president of the Dungeons and Dragons club. Even though he was invariably chosen last for sports, no one picked on him because he didn’t appear to care that he was fat, near-sighted, and a nerd. (Contentedly wore a shrunken white T-shirt during gym class, for instance, that prominently displayed his premature pot belly.) As long as he had his chocolate milk and peanut butter and jam sandwiches with the crusts cut off at lunch and could surreptitiously play with his purple Crown Royal bag of marbles under his desk during class he was happy.
Mr. Brown rested his elbow on the table, cradled his chin in his hand. “Interesting how, James?
Man, this is like class, I thought. It’s nine o’clock at night and this is like class. I liked Mr. Brown—I’d shown up, hadn’t I?—but school was for in school. And now I had to not only record what I’d eaten for supper, but whatever I ended up eating tonight, and I didn’t even have my notebook with me.
“Just, I don’t know, interesting. Like the issues and stuff.”
Allison rolled her eyes at me, the waitress arrived with our french fries and Cokes, and thankfully James was spared being asked to please expand upon his concept of “issues and stuff.” We ate and drank and got around to talking about what we were all going to do this summer and thanked Mr. Brown for paying for everything and walked out into the warm spring night. Being out after dark on a school night felt funny, like you were seeing a part of the city you knew existed but had only heard about.
“Smell you later,” James said as soon as we stepped outside, Allison and I going east, James waddling west. Allison’s family lived downtown as well, but in a house near the high school. All of her older brothers and sisters had gone to Indian Creek, so she made the trek across town to go to school there, too.
Once we were alone, “He’s weird,” Allison said.
“Who? James? He’s okay.”
“What’s okay about him?”
“I don’t know. I just know he doesn’t bother me.”
“That makes him okay?”
“That makes him different, anyway.”
Every shop we passed was closed and there wasn’t anyone else on King Street. The Capitol Theatre was still open, but the late movie hadn’t let out yet. You could hear the buzz of the street lamps and the occasional moth bumping against them. One of the lawyers said at the meeting that downtown Chatham would be transformed once the mall was built, that it would be rendered unrecognizable from all the “residual foot traffic” that would result from increased business activity. I supposed that was a good thing.
“Do you know where Sarah and Dale were tonight?” Allison said.
“No.”
“At the movies.”
“Which one?” Ads for Alien had been playing on the Detroit TV stations for months and Dale and I had been talking about going to see it once it came to town for just as long. Then Sarah had asked him to the fair and they started going out and we didn’t talk about it anymore even though now it was finally here.
“I don’t know which one,” Allison said.
“You can bet it’s not The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, I know that much.” Now I’d have to go see Alien alone. Getting frightened by yourself wasn’t nearly as much fun as with someone else.
“Who cares?” Allison said. “The point is that their fathers were both there tonight and those two couldn’t be bothered to show up, and yet we showed up even though our dads would have flipped out if they’d seen us sitting with Mr. Brown and his anti-mall group.”
“I guess. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” I stopped at the red light even though there wasn’t any traffic. Allison kept walking. I looked both ways and caught up.
“God,” she said, “they’re both so selfish, it’s unbelievable.”
“I know. It’s not like they couldn’t have seen it some other time. Unless tonight’s its last night. Which I seriously doubt.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The movie—Alien—if it’s not done showing tonight—and I don’t think it is, it’s a big hit and supposedly awesome, so there’s no way it would be gone after, like, five days—they could have seen it some other time. That way they could have come to the meeting. The meeting tonight, I mean.” We stopped at the Cenotaph, which was near the bridge that took you through Tecumseh Park to CCI and Allison’s neighbourhood.
“I’m talking about our supposed best friends turning into total a-holes since they started playing kissy face and you’re going on about—what?—a monster movie?”
“I think it’s more like a supernatural space story,” I said. “I mean, I’ve only seen the ads on TV, but I think it’s more like an evil life force than an actual, specific monster.”
“I’m going home now, Tom.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I was noticing how I could hear my feet on the sidewalk, how it was only when there was no else around that you realized you were really, actually there.
“Tom?” Allison said, calling my name from the bridge.
“Yeah?”
“You’re weird.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I listened to the sound of me all the way home.
Chapter Seven
Allison liked to jog in the cemetery. During cross country season she and the rest of the team ran around and around the track at school or in and out of the enveloping maze of indistinguishable suburban streets, but now that the school year was over the cemetery was where she did most of her training.
“Why are you still running?” I’d asked one day not long after summer vacation started and I was delivering her family’s newspaper. She was in the driveway on her ten speed and wearing a blue track suit. There was a white plastic water bottle attached to the underside of the bike. She shrugged, made sure the bicycle clip on her right pant leg was fastened properly.
“Why should I stop?” she said.
I put the newspaper in the mailbox. “Are you going to the school?”
She shook her head. “The cemetery.”
“Why do you want to jog there? It’s creepy.”
“People say that, but it’s not, that’s just something people say because everyone else says it. There are lots of trees and a big creek. And it’s quiet, no one bothers you.”
I remembered a joke I’d heard on Big Chuck and Hool
ihan the week before. “Do you know why they put fences around graveyards?”
Allison zipped up her track suit jacket. “Not really.”
“Because people are dying to get in.”
Allison rolled her eyes. “See you later,” she said, standing up on her pedals as she bicycled away.
Dale and I used to watch Big Chuck and Hoolihan on Friday night and The Ghoul on Saturday at midnight together, making fun of the scary movies that weren’t scary and memorizing the hosts’ jokes that made up for not being very funny by our not having heard them before. But even though Sarah couldn’t sleep over at Dale’s house like I used to do, that didn’t stop her from spending nearly every night with him, either going to the movies or the roller rink or watching ON TV on his family’s big television. ON TV was something new, a cable service out of Detroit that, for a monthly fee, allowed you to watch on your own television in your own house big Hollywood movies that had just come out as well as Red Wings hockey games and Pistons basketball games and concerts by comedians who were actually funny, like Richard Pryor and George Carlin. If you weren’t a subscriber, the station was just noisy fuzz, so they could show whatever they wanted, and the movies and concerts were full of nudity, violence, and lots of swearing. Really late on the weekends, like at two o’clock in the morning, they even showed blue movies that were better than the ones that played on the French station, and not just because the actors spoke English, but because they didn’t speak much at all, were too busy being nude and doing it. I’d never actually seen one myself—Dale’s family only became subscribers around the time he and Sarah started going out—so I only knew what Dale told me.
When I delivered Allison’s family’s newspaper the next day, I looked for Allison but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there the next day either, so the day after that I changed my route so I’d be at her house half an hour earlier than usual. She was wearing her track suit again and getting her bike out of the garage.
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