1979

by Ray Robertson

  “First ask your sister and father if they want any more, Tom.”

  I looked from one to the other and they both laughed. “Go ahead,” Julie said.

  I poured what was left onto my plate and ripped the top off another packet of ketchup. Then it was quiet again, like it had been through most of dinner, but after Julie and Dad’s laughter it didn’t feel right anymore. Dad must have felt the same way.

  “How’s Bob?” he said.

  Julie and I met each other’s eyes. How’s Bob?

  “Bob is just fine,” Mom said. “Busy. We’re both busy. Too busy, it feels like sometimes. We’ve expanded our service to Etobicoke and Scarborough and Pickering and have two full-time employees now, if you can believe it. Of course we’ve been at it for, how long has it been now—six years? But as Bob always says, ‘He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.’”

  Dad nodded a couple of quick times in what seemed like obvious approval of Mom’s growing courier empire then returned his attention to the last of the meat on his chicken leg. Mom smiled one last time before returning to her cup of tea. Unbelievable: Jesus was a wild dog who’d torn a bloody hole in our lives that would never heal; who, it turned out, grew up to be a puppy that—and this was the worst you could say about him—occasionally jumped up and got saliva on you when he tried to give you a kiss. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. If this was what our life would have been like seven years later with God riding co-pilot, why weren’t we still a family?

  “So,” I said. “Bob. He’s not a Reverend anymore?”

  Dad set down his drumstick. “Tom, let’s—”

  “It’s fine, Bill, it’s fine,” Mom said, putting her hand, the one with her wedding ring on it, on Dad’s hand. “He’s just curious.”

  Dad gave me a long look that said I’m watching you. “He’s just something, anyway.”

  “When I married Bob he was a practicing minister, yes, but for the last several years we’ve devoted our lives to the courier business, as you know. This is how God has decided we are to serve Him best.”

  “God wants you to deliver packages,” I said. “This is what He decided your purpose in life is supposed to be.”

  “Knock it off, Tom,” Julie said before Dad had a chance. For the first time since she’d been home she sounded like my big sister.

  “I’m just surprised to find out she had to abandon her husband and children all because Jesus wanted to give UPS some competition.”

  “All right,” Dad said, “that’s enough.”

  “Why are you defending her?” I said. “She left you too, you know. She left all of us.”

  I got up from the table, the screech of my chair’s thin metal legs shoved backward across the linoleum floor and the stomp of my feet up the stairs and the slam of my bedroom door letting everyone know exactly how I felt. I put on an album, but not Glenn Gould. I wanted something loud, and The Ramones Leave Home, which I’d borrowed from Julie when she was in Toronto, was perfect. It was loud all right. There was no way anyone was going to hear me cry.

  Julie was grounded, but it could have been—should have been—worse. For deceiving Dad and going to Toronto and getting so drunk at the house of some friend of Angie her very first night there that Angie and her friends had to take her to the hospital emergency room because she wouldn’t stop throwing up and had started to shake really bad and say crazy things no one could understand (and compelling the nurse to call Mom because she was the only adult Julie knew in Toronto), Julie wasn’t allowed to go anywhere but school or work for a month. There were still a couple weeks left of Christmas vacation, so it wasn’t even a full month. Even if it were, it wouldn’t have been enough, and I knew why. Sort of. Somehow, Mom bringing her home and being there that first night softened Dad’s anger, made him want to put the whole thing in the past as quickly and painlessly as possible. He and Julie had a talk in the kitchen to discuss what had happened and what her punishment was—I knew, because I was in the living room with the TV on trying to listen—but it didn’t last very long and he never raised his voice.

  It wasn’t as if Mom and Dad had some big heart-to-heart and sorted out what had gone wrong between them. Mom wasn’t even staying with us, had taken a room at The Wheels Inn. She was going back to Toronto the next day, Sunday, because she didn’t want to leave Bob shorthanded come the Monday morning rush. She did say that, in spite of the circumstances, it was so good to see Julie and me again and it was ridiculous it had taken this long for it to happen and that she wasn’t going to let it be this long until her next visit. Maybe, she said, some day we could even come and visit her in Toronto.

  She also said she wanted to spend some time with Julie and me before she left, but when she came by Sunday and found out that Julie was at work—someone had called in sick and she was just glad to get out of the house—she asked me if I wanted to come along with her to the Dairy Queen so she could at least say goodbye in person. I was still mad at her, if a little less clear the next day as to exactly why, but I said yes. I was embarrassed that I’d cried after dinner the night before and I wanted to prove, if only to myself, that I was stronger than that, that whatever it was that had made me so upset wasn’t going to get to me again.

  Mom’s car was an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, big and long and new. I’d never been inside a brand new car before. It looked and smelled like we should have been looking at it in a car dealership instead of actually driving in it. I hoped my boots wouldn’t get the new floor mats too wet.

  The car stopped at a red light near the mall construction site, “Things are certainly changing around here,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I was there not to cry, I wasn’t there to make chit-chat.

  “When is it supposed to be done, do you know?”

  “Next year sometime, I think,” I said. I couldn’t ignore a direct question. The light turned green.

  “It’s hard to believe it’s going to be 1980 soon,” she said. “A new decade.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It sounds so strange, doesn’t it? ‘1980.’ Like the title of a science fiction movie.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “A little.”

  Driving past Harrison Hall, there was a cheap temporary fence all the way around it like it had done something wrong. “What’s going on with old city hall, I wonder,” she said.

  “They’re going to tear it down too. I saw them use the wrecking ball a few times already. It was kind of cool. Man, was it loud.”

  Now it was Mom’s turn not to say anything, and I felt stupid. I suppose I’d meant to sound like I’d seen something really special, like I was some kind of man of the world, but I just came off like a dumb kid excited to see something big get knocked over.

  “My history teacher, Mr. Brown, him and a bunch of other people tried to stop the mall people from tearing it down,” I said. “They wrote letters to the newspaper and got people to sign petitions and stuff.”

  “But it didn’t matter,” Mom said. She didn’t say it in a way that was making fun of how useless it all had been, but how sad it was that it hadn’t made any difference.

  “Mr. Brown says it’s important that people do their best to preserve all the old buildings,” I said. “That they’re kind of a part of who we are. He says that people need jobs, but that they need something else in their lives too or else they won’t be very happy.”

  “Mr. Brown sounds like a smart teacher. Do you like him?”

  “He’s okay,” I said. “He’s a good teacher, I guess. I get rides to and from school from him sometimes.”

  “Really? He must like you too to do that.”

  I shrugged. “Dad knew him way back when he was at Ontario Steel and Mr. Brown was a university student working a summer shift there.”

  “Still, if he didn’t think you were a nice boy and a good student he wouldn’t bother
driving you back and forth every day.”

  “It’s not every day, but, yeah, I guess.” I hadn’t thought of it like that before. It made me feel good.

  Mom pulled her car into the empty parking lot of the post office. “I just have to stop in here for a second, dear.” She removed several envelopes from her purse.

  “You use regular mail?”

  Mom smiled. “These aren’t for work, they’re just some bills I got caught up on last night. Running a small business, they accumulate very fast. I’m afraid some of them should have been mailed off by now. Most of them are going to Toronto addresses, so I know it’s silly, but I know if I don’t drop them in the post before I leave town I’ll be sure to forget by the time I get home.”

  “Give them to me, I’ll do it.”

  “Would you, dear?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I peeked at the addresses on the envelopes, but none of them were interesting: Ontario Hydro, Dickey Office Supplies, the water company. I dropped them all through the big slot in the side of the building so that whoever was working first thing Monday morning would get them started right away on where they were supposed to go. I got back in the car and we were off again.

  “Thank you, Tom.”

  “No problem.” I flicked on the radio, but when I heard Up to 15,000 more Soviet troops can be expected to enter Afghanistan should a potential coup take place in that country I snapped it back off. “I deliver the newspaper to somebody who works at the post office,” I said.

  “Really, who?”

  “Just an old man, Mr. Smith. He was in the war. He’s got war stuff hanging everywhere in his house.”

  “You must see a lot of interesting things on your route.”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  We were almost at the Dairy Queen when I realized I wanted to tell her something. Part of me said I should use the time left to ask a question like why Dad and she couldn’t have worked out their problems like other people do, but that wasn’t what I asked.

  “Mom, remember when I was a kid and I got lost in the sewer?”

  “Of course I do. I never prayed so much in my life.”

  “Right. Well, I don’t remember much. I mean, I remember going down there looking for my ball and realizing I was lost, but that’s about it.”

  “You were just a child, of course you wouldn’t remember much.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean, nothing happened to me. Not really. All that happened was I got lost. And then I got found.”

  We pulled into the Dairy Queen parking lot. “That was a long time ago, Tom,” she said, smiling at me, “and the Good Lord was watching over you and everything turned out fine.” That wasn’t what I meant either, but I just smiled back. She turned off the ignition and pulled me to her for a hug.

  Letting me go, “Now let’s go surprise your sister,” she said.

  Decorated Ww Ii Veteran Celebrates Thirty Years Service at Chatham Post Office

  “Selling A Book of Ten Domestic Stamps Isn’t the Same as the Voice of Destiny Softly Speaking Your Name”

  NATURALLY, IT WAS nice not having someone trying to kill you. Nice, too, being able to sleep in your own warm bed with your wife and not in a cold, leaky tent with twenty smelly, farting, snoring men. And of course there were the silly rules and the sillier men who cared about them above everything else, and sometimes there was fear and nearly always there was tedium and which one was really worse? And it was true, you did sometimes—not as often as the movies led you to believe, but sometimes—see things that most people will never see because people shouldn’t see them, so good for them but bad for you.

  Selling insurance or used cars or working in the post office after you’ve helped save the free world is a different kind of war, however—not hell, certainly, but definitely not anyone’s idea of heaven, either. Not much danger of being blown up by people in different-coloured uniforms or watching a new friend from Manitoba choke to death on his own blood, but, instead, the familiar feeling of It has to be nearly noon, I swear, this fucking day has to be nearly half over, doesn’t it? This necktie a daily noose. This $39.95 (plus tax) suit a walking polyester coffin. He got it: he wasn’t a kid with his comic books: you can’t be a ninth-inning, two-out-one-on-down-one-run hero all of the time. But it would be nice to know what the score was. To understand all the rules. To know exactly what one was playing for. If anybody wins.

  He joined up and chose the RCAF because at least he’d learn how to fly. He did—flew a Hawker Tempest that was good as a ground-attack fighter bomber, but also an excellent interceptor of V-1 flying bombs intended for England. He did what he did, what a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot was supposed to do. It wasn’t so much that he was proud, he just did what he had to do. He did his job. And it’s only 10:21 a.m. Five hours and thirty-nine minutes more. I’m going to drop dead from terminal boredom in this godamn post office, I swear.

  Once, somewhere way up there, returning from a successful mission over France, not lost but admittedly not as sure where he was as he should have been, out of the confusion of clouds: a German Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe twin-engine fighter so all-of-a-sudden there he wondered if he wasn’t imagining it for a moment, so close that he could see the face of its German pilot. If it weren’t for the logos painted on the sides of their crafts they could have been teammates competing in the new Olympic sport of synchronized aviation.

  The German pilot had a moustache and wore black leather gloves like he did. With his free hand he repeatedly gestured slowly but with purpose—pointed directly behind him. What’s this crazy Kraut up to, he thought. Then he realized where he was and knew what the other man was trying to tell him: he was flying in the wrong direction. Not toward England and base, but Germany and death. The German pilot was directing him home. He waved and turned the plane around. He didn’t tell anyone what happened for two entire days. Thirty-five years later, he could still remember the German pilot’s moustache.

  ~

  Julie was surprised to see us—you can tell when someone isn’t faking and really is surprised—and managed to take her fifteen-minute break right away. Mom said she was buying, and everyone got whatever they wanted. I got a cheeseburger, fries, a root beer, and, for dessert, a Dilly Bar. There were no big goodbyes, everyone was too busy eating and drinking, and after Julie’s break was over Mom drove me home and we hugged again. When I came inside, Dad was in the living room in his recliner watching football.

  “Is your mother gone?” he said.

  “Yeah, she left.”

  “She’ll make it home before dark if she left now.”

  “We went and saw Julie at work and she bought us lunch.”

  “How was that?” A Dallas Cowboy receiver ran in for a touchdown and Dad leaned forward in his chair to watch the replay.

  “It was okay,” I said. “I’m going to my room.”

  “All right. Don’t play your music too loud.”

  “I won’t.”

  I put Glenn Gould on the turntable and was trying to decide what to read when I remembered that I had to write down what I’d eaten at Dairy Queen. I opened the middle drawer of my desk to get my Journal of Consumption, but spotted my collection book and took it out instead so I wouldn’t forget to bring it with me on my route the next day. Because of everything that had happened yesterday, I’d missed collecting, would have to do it Monday.

  I shut the drawer and picked up the book Angie had encouraged me to buy when I’d run into her at Coles, the one about the people who lived in the small town who talk about their secret lives, which I hadn’t read even a word of yet. I’d actually forgotten about it. But that was one of the best things about books and movies and records. They were always there when you needed them. Unlike people who sometimes went away, unlike stars which blew up and disappeared.

  Lying down, adjusting the p
illows behind my head, I realized that because I had to both collect and deliver the newspaper, Monday was going to be a longer day than usual. I opened the book and flipped to page one. Before I started reading, though, It’s not anybody’s fault, I thought. It’s just the way it is. And it was my job, after all. I was the paper boy.

  RAY ROBERTSON is the author of eight novels and three works of non- ction. His work has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.