1979

by Ray Robertson

  “My grandfather is buried pretty close to here, I think,” Allison said. Having completed her customary fifty post-jog sit-ups, she was watching as the late-afternoon sun created long vertical shadows on the trees that looked like someone had spray-painted them black. “We used to come here all the time and look after the plot and the flowers. It’s been awhile now though.” It was still August, but the shadows came out earlier every day. “My Grandpa had a big place near Charing Cross that used to be a small farm with lots and lots of land. He used to take me with him on his big riding lawnmower when he cut the grass. My parents were always all, ‘Dad, no, she’s too small, she might get hurt” and he would ask me, ‘Allison, do you want to help Grandpa cut the grass today?’ and I’d say yes, and he’d scoop me up and we’d ride around all afternoon. And when we were done he’d let me have a sip of his beer.” Her palms were flat on the cooling earth behind her, her tan, muscled legs extended in front of her. “I still can’t believe he’s really gone, you know?”

  “I guess.”

  “I mean, I know he’s dead, but it’s like—how can someone you know and love just be gone one day, gone forever? It’s just… weird.” Weird was Allison’s favourite word.

  “I know what you mean, but in a way, it’s weirder that he was ever here at all. That any of us were ever here at all.”

  A breeze came up that was less summertime-refreshing than surprisingly chilly, and Allison tried to rub the goosebumps out of her thighs. “You don’t know what I mean,” she said. “You have to have lost somebody who was really important to you to know what I’m talking about, somebody who’s been there your entire life.”

  “Don’t you remember science class last year? How Mr. Bennett said that it takes a billion sperm to make one zygote?”

  “So?”

  “So, remember how he said that if there was one life preserver thrown into the ocean and there was only one turtle in the ocean, the odds of that one turtle sticking its head out of the water at the exact instant that the life preserver was thrown and its ending up around the turtle’s head would be about the same odds as anybody being born as who they actually are.”

  Allison looked as if she were going to say something, but turned her head and studied the shadow-splattered trees instead. By the time I got home and showered and ate dinner and did the dishes it would almost be dark. The sun felt good on your skin and in your bones, but it was still going to die and everyone and everything with it. But if you talked about something else you could avoid thinking about it for awhile.

  “Do you want to see if we can find it?” I said.

  Allison paused before answering. “Find what?”

  “Your grandfather’s grave.”

  Allison looked at the trees. I’d said what I’d said so that she’d feel better, so she wouldn’t be mad at me for talking about sperm and zygotes and life preservers and turtles instead of her grandpa. Now it seemed as if I’d made her even more upset, that she couldn’t even look at me for fear of screaming or worse. In a quiet, calm voice, though: “So when you got lost in the sewer when you were a kid and everybody thought you might be dead but then you were all right after all—is that what made you think about things like that?”

  “Things like what?”

  She laid back and shut her eyes. “Like… I don’t know, like things that are just… weird.”

  I thought Allison might have been the one. Someone I didn’t have to lie to. It would have been nice just once not to have to tell someone what they wanted to hear—to be able to just say what had happened—that nothing had happened—but everyone, it seemed, needed me to tell them their truth. I plucked another blade of grass and stuck it in my mouth and pretended to see something in the distance that wasn’t there.

  “I was really young,” I said, “so not all of it makes sense, not even to me.” Allison’s eyes were still closed, but she nodded. “But the main thing I remember is missing my mom. Not exactly missing her—I mean, I’d only been down there for half a day or so, so it wasn’t as if I’d never been away from her for that long before—but it felt like… like it wasn’t real, like what was happening couldn’t be happening to me, and if my mom had been there with me it would have been… not okay, but normal, kind of.”

  “I can understand that.” Her eyes were open now, she was looking at the sky.

  “Really?”

  “Sure. That makes complete sense. People you care about are almost… supposed to be there.”

  “Right, that’s right.”

  She rolled onto her side and looked at me, head resting in her hand. “That’s why you can talk about the odds of a life preserver landing around the head of a turtle and all the rest of it, but some people you can’t imagine not being there.”

  “Even when they’re not.”

  “Even when they’re not.”

  I picked up my bike. “We better get going,” I said. “We don’t want to be riding home in the dark.”

  We used to have a car like everybody else, but that was when we lived on Vanderpark Drive, when we still lived with Mom. When Dad sold the house, he decided to sell the station wagon too, said that, between everything but my school now being within walking distance and the gas shortage meaning that filling the tank meant spending a small fortune, there wasn’t any point paying for a car we’d have very little reason to use. He eventually bought a second-hand orange moped for when it was necessary to get somewhere too far away to reach on two feet, so it wasn’t as if our automobile-less lives were all that much different than before. But it was different, was one more way Dad could make sure we weren’t the same as we’d been when we were four instead of three.

  Dad didn’t use the moped much, but one day when I was at home by myself he called and said he’d run out of gas near the Wheels Inn and didn’t have any money with him and that I needed to go downstairs and ask Mr. Coleman to fill a can with gas and drive it over. For some reason Mr. Coleman didn’t have a telephone.

  “What if he’s got customers and he can’t come?” I said.

  “Just go,” he said. “And tell him to hurry.”

  Mr. Coleman’s shop was predictably empty except for him polishing a green bottle with a tiny white cloth no bigger than the size of a matchbox. When I told him what had happened and what Dad wanted him to do, he put down the bottle and cloth and picked up the cigar burning in an ashtray on the countertop. He puffed and blew a stream of blue smoke and chuckled. “So your old man’s putt-putt went kaput on him, did it?”

  “His moped, yeah.”

  He chewed his cigar and chuckled again. “Maybe he should switch to a ten-speed, they’re even better on gas, I hear.”

  I didn’t like it that Mr. Coleman called the moped a putt-putt. And what was wrong with trying to save money on fuel? Dad said that every time somebody filled up their gas guzzler they put money in the pockets of the kind of people who were burning American flags in Iran. Mr. Coleman was a jerk. What kind of person had a shop with nothing in it but old bottles? No wonder he never had any customers.

  “Dad said to try not to take too long.”

  “Oh, well, we better get going then,” Mr. Coleman said. “Let me slip the Back Soon sign in the door and grab my hat.”

  We didn’t talk much in the car, neither on the way to Esso to fill up the red gas can he had in the trunk nor on the way to the Wheels Inn parking lot, where Dad had pushed the moped and was waiting for us. Mr. Coleman chewed on his cigar the entire way, a dog gumming an old sock. He drove with both hands on the wheel and sat so far forward on his seat that his nose nearly touched the window. When we’d had a car and it was only Dad and me, sometimes he’d steer with just a pinky finger. When we’d stop at a red light he’d wait, wait, wait, then snap his fingers and point at the light which would always change to green.

  Dad was sitting on the curb with his helmet resting on the ground between his leg
s, his knees almost touching his chin. It was warm out and he’d taken off his jean shirt and tied it around his waist. With his tattoos and long hair tied back, he looked like an overgrown adolescent who’d been reprimanded for riding his bicycle too fast. We pulled into the parking space next to him and got out of the car. I wanted Mr. Coleman to open his trunk and get out the gas so we could just fill up the moped’s tank and get going. Still chewing on his cigar, he walked around the front of the car to where Dad was sitting.

  “Thanks for coming, Jack,” Dad said, standing up.

  “Not a problem.”

  They shook hands and looked at the moped standing upright on its kickstand. The sun was shining directly on it. It looked like it’d been painted with orange marmalade.

  “I feel like a damn idiot,” Dad said. “Never once ran out of gas in my entire life, not once.”

  Mr. Coleman lit up his cigar and peered at the moped. “That thing got a gas gauge?” he said.

  “Not really. Full and empty, basically.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “Yeah, but I should’ve known.”

  Mr. Coleman inhaled, exhaled, gave the cigar a good long suck while admiring the trail of smoke he produced. Some guy walked by whistling. People who whistled when they were alone seemed like they were showing off, like they were trying to convince everyone how happy they were.

  “Not like you ride it every day, is it?” Mr. Coleman said.

  “Hardly ever. That’s what pisses me off. I finally do, look what happens.”

  “That’s probably why you couldn’t tell it was empty. Not used to it.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “No maybe about it.”

  Dad hadn’t said anything to me yet even though I was the one who’d answered the phone and went downstairs and told Mr. Coleman. If I hadn’t been home he would have still been sitting there on the curb.

  “Well, let me get that gas,” Mr. Coleman said.

  “Give Tom the key and let him get it. I want you to look at the brake light for a second.”

  “I don’t know anything about these… putt-putts,” he said, laughing.

  Here it comes, I thought. Look out now.

  Dad laughed too. “A brake light’s a brake light. C’mon, just have a look.”

  Don’t beg him, I thought. Why are you begging him?

  Mr. Coleman took the keys out of his pocket and handed them to me. “The long silver one,” he said.

  I unlocked the trunk and got the gas and stood there in the parking lot waiting while they talked about the brake light.

  Some Guy Who Was Sick, Happy Just to Not Be Sick Anymore

  “It’s Too Bad You Only Feel Fortunate to be Healthy Once You Haven’t Been, If You Know What I Mean”

  HE WAS SICK and then he wasn’t and Oh my God. Praise Jesus, praise Allah, give the Buddha’s belly a vigorous rub while you’re at it. He didn’t believe in any of them, but somebody or something needed to be thanked. When you’re sick or hurt there’s no such thing as young and old, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, fat and thin, there’s only you and every other lucky bastard who isn’t. Six-foot-one, broad shoulders brain tumour. Cute as a bug seven years old she’ll never walk again. Monogrammed his and hers this and that who gives a shit when your fucking back is killing you.

  A rare form of leukemia, an excruciating spinal fissure, a really bad head cold: forget it, put away the how-to-be-happy manuals and all the rest of that mind-over-matter mumbo jumbo because aching bones and runny noses know what you really need. Healthy equals happy—even when you don’t know it, even when it takes being not healthy to know how happy you actually are. Which, admittedly, is sad. In spite of what certain poets and other professional phonies will try to tell you, however, better sadness than an impacted molar or rheumatoid arthritis.

  He whistled while he walked just because he felt like it.

  ~

  The public library was a good place. The library at school was good too, but not only was it not open in the summertime, it was much smaller than the one downtown. Although I hadn’t actually read every one of its books, as I got ready to begin grade eight it sure felt as if I had. Mrs. Wilson, the school librarian, wouldn’t actually say anything discouraging when I’d sign out Stan and Shirley Fischler’s Encyclopedia of Hockey again and again, but I could tell that she wasn’t impressed by the way she looked at me as she stamped the return date on the card at the back of the book, not like she would act when, say, Sarah brought a copy of Charlotte’s Web to the checkout desk. Charlotte’s Web was one of those books we were “encouraged” to read (Mrs. Wilson had posted a long list of “Reading Suggestions” in black Magic Marker on white Bristol board), and when someone decided to take out one of them she’d smile and say something like, “Oh, this is a wonderful choice, Sarah, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it,” as if it had been the student’s idea all along. When I’d bring up my hockey book or UFO book or shark book, I knew the only thing Mrs. Wilson would say was, “Due back in two weeks.”

  I didn’t know the names of any of the librarians at the Chatham Public Library, but you weren’t supposed to; that was one of the things that was good about it: you picked out whatever you wanted and all anyone cared about was whether you had your library card. We’d learned about the Dewey Decimal system at school, so you could also use the card catalogue to find things out. The year before, on my birthday, after I’d gotten off the phone with Mom, I’d gone to the library and looked up hydrogen sulfide gas. Twelve, I decided, was old enough to know what had really happened to me in the sewer. But books could only tell you facts. If there’s a high enough concentration of gas, it said, it could be fatal. If if if: I already knew that. Facts couldn’t tell you the truth. Only you could do that.

  Most of the time, though, I spent in the sports section or where the supernatural titles were kept, but sometimes I’d come home with a book I’d never known existed until I chanced upon it looking for something else. Things I’d never known existed. Tracking down the Dewey Decimal System number that would lead me to the UFO cover-up book that I read about in another UFO cover-up book, I came across Hell on Earth: 20th Century Atrocities. This looks promising, I thought, pulling the oversized book from the shelf. It looked like a coffee table book, but instead of pictures of cats or muscle cars, presumably there would be photos of cool stuff inside. I flipped its pages while standing in the aisle.

  But World War One soldiers without noses, just a pulpy crater in the middle of their faces like burned out candles, weren’t cool. Neither were photographs of abused children chained to basement pipes or police shots of entire families lying slaughtered in their homes or skeletal concentration-camp survivors with eyes as big as their faces. I thought of Mrs. Wakowski and felt like I was going to puke. I stuck the book back in place and headed straight for the sports section. I left the library with Ken Dryden’s Let’s Play Hockey and a biography of Gordie Howe, but also with Hell on Earth: 20th Century Atrocities. I didn’t want to; I had to. Not because it seemed as if I was doing the right thing, but because it seemed like if I didn’t take it home and read it I’d be doing something wrong.

  Books weren’t the only thing you could find at the Chatham Public Library. There was also Chatham’s youngest hobo, although Dale had told me that his mom, who was on a committee to raise money to help Chatham’s poor people, told him that’s not what they were called anymore, that they were supposed to be referred to as “street people.” Except that you never saw Chatham’s youngest hobo on the street—on a bench in Tecumseh Park when the weather was nice, or, if the weather was cold or it was raining, slumped in a chair with a book in the periodical section at the library. His head was shaved and he wore a long, thick black overcoat year-round, even when it was hot and everybody else was in shorts. He wasn’t really that young—probably Mr. Brown’s age—but compared to some of the grey-bearded old men you saw
pushing rickety shopping carts down back alleys looking for pieces of discarded copper or going through people’s garbage searching for returnable pop or beer bottles, it felt like he was.

  Aside from how he smelled—a cross between pee and Kentucky Fried Chicken still hot in the bag—he seemed like he was doing okay. He didn’t have a cart, didn’t bother collecting things that could be sold, seemed to spend most of his time just sitting in the park watching squirrels burying their nuts or sitting in the library reading a book. I wondered what kind of books he read, or if he was reading at all (they were always thick hardcovers, but that was, I reasoned, because he never wanted to give the librarian a reason to say he was just hanging around). Once, when I saw him put his book down on the floor bedside his chair and go outside for a cigarette, I drifted over to the periodicals and, by standing and pretending to leaf through Sports Illustrated, managed to sneak a peek. All I could make out was the title: Does God Exist?

  What would a hobo want with a big book about God? I put the magazine back and decided that it was probably part of his plan, that he was a pretty crafty hobo after all. Not only would any suspicious librarian clearly see that he was reading and not just taking up a seat and resting his feet, how could you kick someone out of the library when they were reading a religious book? If he was reading about God—even if he was Chatham’s youngest hobo—he had to be a good person.