Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  “Don’t threaten me,” Arvel had said.

  “I’m not threatening you.”

  “What the hell are you doing, then?”

  “I was stating a fact: I will not be married to a drunk.”

  “What do you mean, ‘You won’t be married …’ You’re married to me, and whatever the hell I am, that’s what you’re married to.”

  “A drunk is not the only thing I won’t be married to. But don’t worry. I’ll always let you know what you’re turning into.”

  He emptied the teapot into the cup and went to the window. The apartment was on the second floor, and because the building was positioned at the top of a hill, he could see out over the weed-ridden field, and could take in almost the whole Red Row at a glance. The sky was overcast, tingeing everything with a chill greyness. Grey branches of leafless elms and poplars and maples stuck up from between houses in a tangled mesh that hung in the lifeless air like a haze. Smoke rose in columns from the chimneys of the houses that used wood heat. For a moment, he could not bear to turn around and look at the shabby, half-furnished apartment he was living in. When he was younger, he never dreamed he’d look at a Red Row house and envy the people who lived in it. He’d always assumed he was headed right out of there and into something better.

  The building they lived in was a converted school. When he had been growing up, it had been empty for several years, since the first phase of the new elementary school had been built. People his age had called the building the Catholic School, and the wide pathway, actually an old street that had never been paved and had been closed off to traffic, they called the Catholic School Path. Both school and path hearkened back to the days of parochial education in Nova Scotia. His parents, for some reason, had gone to the Catholic schools in Lourdes, at the other end of the Red Row, and people of their generation called this building St. Bridget’s.

  There was a sense in which living in St. Bridget’s was an improvement over living in a Red Row house. Since the building had been completely renovated less than ten years ago, the walls were of convenient drywall, instead of the brittle, old crack-prone plaster of the Red Row houses. Walls and floors and corners were all square and true, making wallpaper easy and hanging pictures a snap.

  Hasty workmanship to begin with and years of settling onto stone foundations had left the floors of the old houses wowed and bent, the walls all out of plumb. To make a picture look straight on a wall, you had to hang it exactly as crooked as the nearest adjacent corner, a tricky procedure that might take the better part of an afternoon to get right.

  The house Arvel had grown up in was small and stuffed with a clutter of accumulated furniture and objects. There were moments when he looked upon the scarcity in his new apartment as something desirable. But mostly he saw it as another sign of squalor in his squalid life.

  The previous spring, more than a year and a half ago, Arvel had graduated from Pictou Regional Vocational School with a certificate in electrical construction. He’d done well in the course, both in the theoretical and practical assignments. His teachers had praised his flair for understanding and designing circuitry, and had written him glowing reference letters. But 1981 had been a bad year. And 1982 had turned out to be worse. Everyone was saying it. You could see it in the headlines, you could hear people talking about it every night on the news. Unemployment was at its highest level since the thirties. Just last night Arvel had watched an hour-long TV special comparing the eighties to the thirties. The conclusion the show reached was that people in the eighties were materially better-off. Clothing was cheaper than it had been in the thirties, food was more readily available, the social safety net kept people from crashing as hard as they once had. But morally and psychologically, the thirties had been an easier time to get by. Families had not yet disintegrated, human relationships had been closer in a society that was still largely based on agriculture. Part of the show featured a panel discussion on youth unemployment in which a group of young unemployed people discussed the difficulties they were facing. When it came time to field questions from the audience, one of the first to speak was a short, white-haired man with little deep-set eyes and a white moustache. His face turned red as he spoke. His voice trembled with emotion.

  “If you ask me, you’re all just a bunch of crybabies,” he said. “Why I remember the hungry thirties. My mother had to make do once with a loaf of bread and a few home-grown radishes. For a whole week, that’s what she fed five hungry kids. You people know nothing of real hardship! Just look at your shoes!” The camera panned down and across the well-shod feet of the panellists. “When we were kids, we had to go to the junkyard and cut the treads off of old rubber tires to make our own shoes!”

  Arvel’s fingers clutched the arms of the chair he was sitting in. His breath choked with pent-up rage at what the man was saying. He got so upset that he had to turn his back on the television for a few moments, go into the kitchen, and drink a glass of cold water.

  A person certified in electrical construction was directly qualified for a range of jobs, including wiring new building sites, upgrading existing systems, and troubleshooting in small and large appliances and electrical equipment. Arvel had tried everything since his graduation. He’d filled out applications for work from Canso to Halifax. He’d gone through the North Eastern and Halifax phone books, both Yellow and White Pages, and called the number of any company with a name that sounded like it might have something to do with wiring or running electrical equipment. In his English course at the vocational school, he’d had to write his resumé and cover letters and practise job-interviewing skills, but in the year and a half since he’d graduated, he had not been called in for an interview, or even heard back with any acknowledgment that his applications had been received.

  Arvel turned away from the window and faced into the apartment. There was a whole list of things he should be doing today, none of which he’d even started yet. There was a stack of dirty dishes piled on the counter by the sink. A corner of the bedroom was heaped with dirty laundry. The carpets needed hoovering, and he wanted to look through the classifieds in the Chronicle-Herald.

  The baby had been silent for a long time, so he went into the bedroom to check on her.

  The apartment faced north, and with the curtains drawn on the tiny window in the bedroom, it was like night in there. Arvel drew back one side of the curtain. The white rails of the crib glowed in the room like a religious relic. It was the only new piece of furniture in the apartment, the only piece of furniture he would not have tossed directly into the garbage without giving it a second thought. Inside the crib, curled up on her side in a tangle of receiving blankets, lay Kate, his three-month-old daughter. She’d been born with a full head of dark hair, but it had gradually thinned out so that now she was all but bald. And what little hair she had was a reddish-blond fuzz above her ears and at the top of her neck.

  He looked at her now and hoped she would not awaken. He hated the innocence of her wide-open eyes upon him.

  The toxic buzz of the building intercom shot through the apartment. The baby stirred at the sound of it. Arvel tightened up and cringed. He knew who it would be. He considered the possibility of not answering it, but Alec Morrison would not take no answer for an answer. He knew Arvel would be in here – where else would he be? – and repeated ringing of the buzzer would wake the baby for sure.

  Arvel closed the bedroom door and rushed to the intercom before Morrison rang it again.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s me,” Morrison said. Arvel pressed the button to unlock the door. In the minute or so it would take Morrison to climb the stairs and come down the hall to the apartment, Arvel frantically looked about the room, as though he’d be able to hide when Morrison got there.

  The first thing Arvel saw when he opened the door was a red, white, and blue Pepsi Jeux Canada Games knapsack that Alec had over one shoulder. He shook his head at Alec in disbelief. “What is it this time?” Arvel said.

  T
he pack meant Alec had run away from home. He had done the same thing before, several times. He’d stayed at Arvel’s house for a few days once when Arvel was in Grade 9. He’d taken off by train to an aunt’s house in Cape Breton before, and he’d even camped out for three days, with no food and only a wool blanket to keep him warm at night, in the woods on the banks of the East River.

  Alec was really Ziv’s friend, but since Ziv had gone off to university more than three months ago, Alec had been showing up at Arvel’s door almost daily. Alec was seventeen, younger even than Ziv, but getting a little old to be running away from home. He’d repeated twice in junior high and now found himself, in what should have been his graduating year, entering Grade 10.

  Just about everyone Arvel knew had a father who drank too much. There were binge drinkers and problem drinkers, weekend alcoholics and just plain drunks. But Alec’s father was different. He was what most people called a bad alcoholic. A bad alcoholic was one who had entered the advanced stages of the disease. Many weekend beer drinkers, like Arvel’s father, had big beer guts. But bad alcoholics were almost always skinny. Alec’s old man was bone-thin, and because he’d clogged a couple of major organs with booze, his complexion had a waxy yellow look to it, like a boiled garden bean.

  He was a heavy-duty mechanic by trade, and he made good money at it. He and his wife had been born and raised in the Red Row, but had migrated as far south as one of the less desirable streets of Valley Woods. Their split-entrance bungalow, with spanking new furniture and two new cars in the drive every two years, was the envy of every kid from the Red Row who ever visited the place. But the economic rise of the Morrisons masked a physical and spiritual decline. Ziv had been in their house plenty of times over the years, and he’d told Arvel he’d never heard anyone talking in there. Never. The father stayed in the kitchen or the TV room. The two kids were both holed up in their separate rooms. They did not eat meals together or even watch TV together.

  There wasn’t much to like about Alec Morrison. He was so starved for attention that from the time he’d been in elementary school he was loud, pushy, and obnoxious. Ziv had started hanging around with him in junior high, mostly out of sympathy, Arvel had always suspected. By the time Alec was in Grade 7, almost no one would have anything to do with him. Alec had a diamond-sharp wit and a great deal of surface charm and energy that attracted people initially, but when he sensed people getting close, he did his best to drive them away with annoying pranks. The only exception seemed to be how he treated Ziv. Maybe Ziv just had thicker skin than most people, but Arvel noticed that Alec was not as bent on pissing Ziv off.

  Arvel hadn’t realized how desperate Alec must be for friends until Alec had started seeking out Arvel’s company after Ziv left. Arvel had never expressed any interest or particular liking for Alec Morrison in the better than ten years they’d known each other. In fact, he could recall several incidents when Alec had so enraged him that he’d lashed out.

  Once, two days after Arvel’s birthday, Arvel had come home from school to find Alec in the kitchen. There was only one piece of the birthday cake left, and everyone in the family understood that it was Arvel’s. Alec was sitting at the kitchen table, with the opened serving tray in front of him like a plate. He had a half-drunk glass of milk beside the tray and had already forked down a couple of good-sized pieces of cake.

  “Where’s Ziv?” Arvel said, ready to blame his brother for what his guest had done.

  “Not home from school yet,” Alec gave a big smirk and began breaking off another morsel of cake with the edge of his fork.

  “Who gave you that cake?”

  Alec continued smirking. He shrugged. “It was sitting there,” he said. “I took it.”

  “That was my birthday cake,” Arvel said, his voice rising.

  “Oh,” said Alec. “Is it your birthday? Happy birthday!”

  Arvel picked the remainder of the piece of cake from the tray and squeezed it in both hands. The icing oozed out from between his fingers as he compressed the whole thing into a golf-ball-sized pellet. Alec remained seated with a blank expression. When Arvel clamped him hard in a headlock, Alec opened his mouth to protest. The cake ball fit perfectly into the open jaws, muffling any words Alec might have said.

  “How’s that taste?” Arvel asked after he’d released Alec. Alec did not seem put out in the least. He chewed the lump of cake slowly, savouring the rage he’d sparked in Arvel as much as the cake. When he had part of the cake pellet swallowed, he said: “Tastes pretty good. Does your mother put coffee in the frosting?”

  Still standing in the doorway of Arvel’s apartment, Alec shifted from one foot to the other. “Are you going to let me in, or what?” he said. Arvel moved out of the way and Alec entered the living room. He sat down on the couch, his navy parka rising around his ears like a shell. He zipped open his knapsack and dug around inside for a moment.

  “Here,” he said, more to himself than to Arvel. He pulled out a quart bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

  “Put that away!” Arvel said without hesitation.

  “Just relax, man,” Alec said. “It’s only a bottle.”

  “I said put that away, and I meant it. You either put that back in that bag or I’ll dump the whole fucking thing down the toilet.”

  “Jesus Christ! That’d be a good one. Arvel Burrows is going to throw away booze!”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve coming into a guy’s house and talking to him like that. Most people would kick you right the fuck out on your arse.”

  “Most people wouldn’t have let me in in the first place. It ain’t my fault you haven’t wised up enough to figure that one out on your own.”

  “You’re some fucking piece of work, Morrison. Why don’t you just sit there and see if you can keep your mouth shut for half an hour. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my mind, I don’t want to have to deal with your foolishness. And put that bottle away.”

  Morrison hesitated with his hand on the neck of the bottle for a moment, then put it back into the bag. He did not zip the bag closed, and the neck of the bottle protruded from the sack near his ankle.

  “You’ve got stuff on your mind, all right,” he said. “What do you do, get your secretary to hold your calls while you change a shitty diaper?”

  “Last warning,” Arvel said. He pointed directly in Alec’s face, his finger inches from Alec’s nose. Alec opened his mouth. Arvel’s index finger was as thick as two of Alec’s fingers. Arvel’s arm was bigger at the biceps than the thickest part of Alec’s legs. Arvel towered over him, a big hill of bone and flesh and muscle.

  Alec closed his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Arvel said, turning his back. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to see you or talk to you right now.” He opened the bedroom door, stepped in, and closed it. The crib lit up briefly, then disappeared in the black. He crawled into his bed and pulled the covers over his head. The caffeine from all the tea he’d drunk was burning through his limbs. He felt like walking out to the living room and pounding on Morrison until his tongue fell out. He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists against the sheets, and stared open-eyed into the mattress.

  The Highland Square Mall in New Glasgow had been open for less than two years and the early signs of decline were already setting in. When it had opened, the chrome, the retro-neon lights, the mirror-covered walls, had transported Pictou County shoppers. “It’s just like Halifax,” people said when they were describing it to a friend who hadn’t been there yet. “Just like something you’d see in Halifax.” By now, in 1982, everyone had been there, yet everyone had not been enough people to keep some of the expensive specialty shops open. There were empty shop stalls, their windows papered over with For Lease signs or the Coming Soon signs belonging to the next, lower-end business that would set up shop. A couple of the trendier, higher-priced women’s clothing stores had gone under almost right away. There was a Dollar Deals store in the mall now, an ultra-low-end department store dealing only
in items that cost exactly a dollar.

  Jackie worked at Exception Elle, an expensive clothing shop that had opened with the mall and prospered. Part of the reason Exception Elle did so well was Jackie herself. She had a flair for communication; she could tell women exactly how they looked when they tried something on. She had a sharp eye for fabric and colours, and how well they suited a particular woman’s hair and skin and eyes. She was attuned to different body shapes, and knew what fashions suited women with small or large busts, women with thick waists, what cut of dress hung most flatteringly over thick thighs.

  She got paid a commission on top of an hourly minimum, and the longer she worked there, the more money she was able to make. Women trusted her and came back. Middle-aged women with lots of money seemed pleased when she was talking about how they looked, and they sent their friends. Jackie’s boss had known very early on that she was drawing customers into the store, and Jackie had already managed to negotiate an increase in her commission.

  Jackie’s old high-school friend, Colleen Chisolm, had moved to Halifax a few months earlier and was working at Gregor’s, a fancy clothing store in a downtown area called Historic Properties.

  The day Colleen had got her first paycheque, she’d called Jackie and started listing the virtues of Halifax, trying to convince Jackie to bring Arvel and the kids to live there.

  “If I can make this much here, just imagine what you could make,” Colleen said on the phone. Jackie could tell that in celebration of her first paycheque, Colleen had already had a few drinks. “Things would be easier here for Arvel, jobwise.”

  “I’m doing pretty well here,” Jackie said. “We’re doing fine.”

  “I’ve already mentioned you to my manager.”

  “You what! I did not say you could do that!”