Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  Ennis had left school at the end of Grade 8, back in the mid-forties. So the notion of university and what Ziv was doing there was vague and alien to him. All the same, he had an idea that Ziv was reading. He’d always been an avid reader himself: non-fiction books, pocket novels, magazines, and newspapers. He was so familiar with the literature of the labour movement that the younger people in the movement referred to him as a walking encyclopedia of labour history and law.

  Secretly, all fall, for the first time in his life, Ennis began to keep a scrapbook. He’d bought a cheap one at Stedman’s on Foord Street with a picture of a covered bridge on the front that looked like a photo for a jigsaw puzzle. He’d filled that with newspaper and magazine clippings.

  He read the New Glasgow Evening News, the Chronicle-Herald, and the Globe and Mail almost every day. On the weekends, he picked up the Cape Breton Post. He read Canadian Forum magazine, This Magazine, Atlantic Insight, Maclean’s, and New Maritimes.

  Anything he thought might have held interest and deserved a second look, he clipped. He bought a Swiss Army knife, one with a little pair of scissors, at the House of Knives in the Highland Square Mall, and hooked this to his key ring. When he read something he thought was of particular interest, he snipped out the whole article and Scotch-taped it into the scrapbook. After he’d filled the first, cheap scrapbook, he went back to reread the articles so he could brush up on the issues in them. He quickly realized that the thin newsprint paper and glue binding of the scrapbook was not very durable, so for his next book he went to the art-supply section of Hobby World and got an artist’s sketchbook with a spiral binding. Using a glue stick, he discovered, was faster, cheaper, better-looking, and gave a more reliable bond than Scotch Tape. By mid-October, he had the first scrapbook and two sketchbooks stuffed and bulging with clipped articles. Every individual piece he read at least twice, and soon he’d started a special scrapbook in which he put all the material he’d deemed worthy of a third look.

  At first he thought he was collecting random bits of unrelated information, so the first few books had no organizing principle. But on rereading the material he collected, he noticed that there were certain ideas he was drawn to collect over and over again. Eventually he began to notice that almost everything he clipped fit under one of four headings: Labour Issues, Nuclear Issues, Nova Scotia Heritage, and Futurism. There were also articles on the Tylenol murders that had shaken up the U.S. that fall. These did not belong neatly in any particular category.

  Under the heading of Labour Issues, there were articles on unemployment, workplace automation, two-tier contracts, and the massive wave of layoffs washing over every industry.

  He hadn’t shown anyone the books of clippings. And though Dunya knew he was doing something that he wasn’t telling anyone about, she never asked what it could be. Wasn’t that typical of her?

  He took the longer way to Albion Mines from the bus station: up Provost Street, East River Road, and through Blue Acres, the whole time his tongue and brain working furiously. Ziv sat silently beside him and did not say a word. Why did the U.S. refuse to ratify SALT II? Where was the Canadian government going to store the long-term waste from the Point Lepreaux reactor, set to start production soon? Why was the Canadian government kowtowing to the American military by allowing cruise-missile tests in Canadian airspace? Management was squeezing union members hard, pressuring members with seniority to sell out those at the bottom of the scale. The media and politicians were such hypocrites that they could cry real tears over union leader Lech Wałęsa when the economic establishment he was up against was a communist one, while at the same time being so obviously biased against the union movement here at home. Researchers in artificial intelligence were creating new life, silicon-based life as opposed to the carbon-based life that evolved on Earth by itself. Soon the silicon-based life would be in direct competition with humans for control of the planet. All of these advances were put in perspective by the failing health of Barney Clark, recipient of the first artificial heart.

  By the time Ennis had pulled the car into the yard, he’d worked himself into a lather.

  “I’ve got something I want to show you, Ziv,” Ennis said once they were inside the unheated porch. He was huffing and puffing. His blood pressure was up.

  “Don’t get yourself so worked up,” Ziv said. “You’re red as a beet.”

  “Come on upstairs, I’ve got something I want to show you.”

  “Geez, Dad. Can’t it wait? I’m tired and hungry.”

  “Ziv!” his mother said when he entered the kitchen. “Look at you! Son, you look terrible. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m exhausted. I just finished my exams this morning. I was up half the night. My head is swimming.”

  Ennis grabbed Ziv by the elbow and pulled him in the direction of the stairs. “He don’t have time for this right now. I got something upstairs I want him to see.”

  Ziv was blinking away his bewilderment as his father almost dragged him through the two rooms and up the stairs at the front of the house.

  “I’ve been using your desk,” Ennis said. “I knew you wouldn’t mind.” They entered Ziv’s bedroom. Ziv plunked down on the bed and sprawled back onto the mattress. “Ah,” he said. He closed his eyes and looked to be drifting off to sleep.

  “Look at this,” Ennis said, slapping Ziv’s leg lightly with the back of his hand. “Jesus, don’t sleep. It’s the middle of the day. Look at this.”

  Ennis had placed a cardboard box on a shelf of the brown cabinet that had been in this room when he had bought the house. He unfolded the flaps of the box now as though he were expecting the package to explode. He took scrapbooks one at a time from the box and set them on the desktop nearby.

  Astonishment was the only thing Ziv felt as he looked through the scrapbooks his father had put together. The books had been thumbed through so many times that they looked aged. The covers were crinkled, the corners dog-eared. After the weeks of writing exams and four months of stuffing his head full of information that, just last August, he had not even been aware existed, Ziv had no room in his brain for any of this. His eyes passed over the headlines and photographs. Labour relations, he thought. Nuclear waste. Some of the articles were labelled as to their sources: the Chronicle-Herald, the Globe and Mail, the Cape Breton Post, and the New Glasgow Evening News. Time was represented in the pages his father had collected. Maclean’s. There were several magazines he was unfamiliar with.

  “I don’t have time to read this stuff now, Dad,” he tried to sound apologetic. His father was waiting for him to do something; Ziv was trying to imagine what.

  “I don’t want you to read it,” Ennis said. His voice was tender; the unfamiliar tone of it frightened Ziv. Ziv’s tongue was dry. He could taste the metallic flavour of the roof of his mouth. He set the book he was holding to one side and picked up one he had not yet seen.

  “I … I don’t really understand,” he said. He looked out his bedroom window at the lamp out on Hudson Street and the circle of dun earth it illuminated. It had grown dark in the short time since the bus had arrived. A tremor set up in his chest. A hollow feeling. An awareness of the importance of whatever words he’d be able to summon.

  “It’s a scrapbook,” Ennis said, his face slowly darkening. “I collected this stuff.”

  “Why? I don’t get it.” It was all Ziv could think to say.

  “I knew it,” Ennis said. “I knew I shouldn’t have shown these things to you.” He began angrily repacking the cardboard box, throwing scrapbook upon scrapbook, then folding the flaps back over the top.

  “Dad, Dad, look,” Ziv said. He got up and followed his father into the hallway and down the stairs.

  “It’s my mistake,” said Ennis. “Everything’s my goddamn mistake. I never should have tried to show you nothing.”

  “Dad, I’m tired. You don’t know what I’ve just been through.”

  “No, I don’t know. Of course I don’t. I don’t know nothing.”
r />   “Let’s look at this stuff tomorrow. You can tell me what you’ve been thinking about.”

  “Like hell,” Ennis said. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “What are you two fighting over already?” Dunya said when she caught sight of her husband and son.

  Ennis set the box down on the floor of the porch and put on his coat and boots.

  “Dad, for God’s sake,” Ziv said. “Let’s look at that stuff. We’ll look at it now. For God’s sake.”

  When Ennis left the house he took the box of scrapbooks with him. Ziv went to the living-room window and watched his father putting the box into the trunk. Anyone watching from another house, or from the sidewalk on the way past, would have thought merely: there is a man putting a box into the trunk of his car. Ziv had been part of the scene leading up to this, but he understood little more. He knew what was inside the box, and he knew that wherever the man was going, when he returned, the trunk of the car would be empty.

  The Christmas holiday was almost a month long, and Ziv decided he was going to spend most of it reading for pleasure. He’d done as much reading in the first term of university as he’d done in all the years of high school combined. One of the first things he’d learned at university was what a poor reader he was. He’d spent three hours in the first week of classes, reading and rereading the first two paragraphs of his Sociology textbook, unable to grasp a single concept or understand fully a single sentence. So to help build his reading skills and in order to reduce the length of the list of important books he’d never read, he’d stacked a pile of novels beside his bed when he got home. Some were his father’s. Ziv had culled them from the backs of bookshelves where no one had looked for years. Some were his own, bought at Back Pages, a used bookshop in Halifax. Two or three were ones he’d borrowed from the university library.

  At university, some people seemed able to balance watching TV with studying. But Ziv found that the moment classes had begun early in September he’d completely lost interest in TV. He never went near it. The early supper crowd, those who went to the meal-hall at four thirty, were almost all doing so in order to finish the meal and get back to their residences to watch General Hospital at five. He heard people discussing The Thornbirds, a mini-series that, from what he’d heard in discussions, seemed like little more than a soap opera. Even The Waltons, which came on in syndicated reruns nightly at eleven o’clock, had a cult following. If he was awake at midnight on a weekday he could hear the sardonic calls of “Goodnight John-boy” echoing down the halls as people responded to what was being said on the screen.

  Nothing about TV could attract Ziv. He had his nose in textbooks. He explored the library. He got involved with the student newspaper. Early on Saturday mornings, he assisted Mike Davidovic, who lived down the hall from him, with his jazz show on the student radio station.

  But in the first few days of his holiday, the television was a narcotic. After four months of overtaxing his brain, Ziv found the TV was a welcome release from thought and meaning.

  He sat half-reclined in a La-Z-boy, his mother across from him on the couch. Barely a word passed between them during the day. His father was not speaking to him since the terrible incident with the scrapbooks, but in the evenings after he got off work, he would come into the room, flip through the channels two or three times, mumbling responses to what was being said or criticisms of what was being done. Then he’d get up and go into the front room, sit in the big plush armchair beneath the photo of himself with his arm around Tommy Douglas. Once settled in, he’d stay there for hours, wrestling the newspaper back on itself and swearing into the pages of the National section.

  On the Friday before Christmas, the phone rang at three thirty in the afternoon. It was Alec Morrison. Ziv had not heard from Alec since the end of the summer, but his mother had told him that Alec and Arvel had been hanging around together and that in the fall, the two of them had got drunk while Jackie was at work, and Jackie had kicked the both of them out of the apartment.

  “Ziv,” Alec said. “What’s going on, Buddy?”

  “Not too much. Hanging around. Resting up.”

  “How’s university going?”

  “It’s … it’s hard to describe. I feel like I’ve been through so much since summer. Like I’ve lived a whole lifetime in four months.”

  “You getting any smarter from what they’re teaching you there?”

  “I don’t know if I’m getting any smarter or not, but I understand one thing clearly that I did not understand in September.”

  “Four months seems like a long time to learn one thing.”

  “It seems like a lifetime.”

  “So what have you learned?”

  “I’ve learned that I don’t know anything. Nothing. I’m ignorant. I learned that I’ve got a fuck of a lot to learn.”

  “Shit. That’s heavy.”

  “Well, it feels heavy. But it’s also a good feeling. There’s something positive about realizing your own ignorance. It’s like … finding a starting place.”

  “Oh man, I just called to see if you wanted to go to a party in the Heights tonight. I didn’t know I’d be getting into an egghead conversation. Maybe you’re too educated to get drunk.”

  “Ha, ha. Fuck that. Who’s having a party?”

  The Heights at one time had been the name of a few rows of postwar bungalows built on the side of a hill at the south end of Albion Mines. Now it was less a neighbourhood than a collection of two or three areas that included the original bungalows, plus the several blocks of sixties and seventies bungalows to the south of them. The Heights even included Valley Woods, the subdivision of new, modern, upscale homes on large, landscaped lots that occupied the extreme southern section of town. If it were not for the public-education system that brought the kids from Valley Woods downhill to the same elementary school, junior high, and high school that kids from the Red Row went uphill to, the north and south sections of Albion Mines would never meet. They were divided by a downtown that either side had to get to, but neither had to cross, and the histories of the ends of town, and the status and backgrounds of the people who lived there, could not have been more different. In a city, a person from the Red Row would never meet or get to know someone from the Heights, or especially Valley Woods. But they were all stuffed into this little town of six thousand. They went to the same schools, played on the same sports teams, shopped in the same grocery stores, and bought double-double Tim Horton’s coffee from the same doughnut shop.

  The party was in a big square two-and-a-half-storey house on Weir Avenue, right at the edge of Valley Woods. Ziv wouldn’t drink rum, so he and Alec bought a quart of vodka and a two-litre bottle of Sussex orange pop for a chaser. Neither of them was old enough to be legally served at the liquor commission, but Alec was wearing a cheesy-looking moustache that he kept smoothing with this thumb and calling his ID. Ziv waited outside on Foord Street and Alec came out with the vodka several minutes later.

  By the time they got to the party, the place was already packed. The young woman whose parents owned the house was several years older than Ziv. She’d just got her B.A. degree and was one term into law school. Her parents were in the States somewhere for the holidays, visiting relatives.

  Weir Avenue was a steep incline, and cars belonging to people who’d gone into the party lined both sides of the street. A floodlight over the driveway lit up five or six more cars parked on the asphalt there. Ziv and Alec entered through the back door and took a tour through the downstairs: four big rooms plus a kitchen, stuffed with people whose age ranged from twenty-five down to sixteen. Every room was wall-to-wall. Conversations were going on, people were passing cigarettes and joints. In the doorways and the two halls, party-goers shouldered past each other in a tight squeeze on the way to the bathroom or the front porch or the fridge. First-year university students wore grey sweatshirts with PROPERTY OF and the name of their school. You could see circles gathered around those who’d gone out of pro
vince, especially to Ontario: everyone dying to know what things were like there.

  Ziv recognized several people he hadn’t seen in a while, but there was so much going on that he didn’t know who to begin speaking to. Having come full circle through the downstairs, Ziv and Alec stopped in the kitchen and set their bottles on an empty corner at the end of the enormous bottle-lined counter.

  They didn’t bother with ice or glasses or with trying to chill anything. They had warm vodka and warm pop. They took a drink of one straight from the bottle and followed that up with a drink of the other, taken the same way.

  As midnight approached, the house got fuller. Someone had rigged up the stereo so that there was a speaker blaring in every room downstairs. The volume kept edging louder, and along with it the voices of drunk people shouting at each other over the din of music.

  Ziv and Alec stood side by side at the counter, passing their two bottles back and forth. Ziv could tell by the way he was guzzling the vodka that there was something eating Alec, but there almost always was. Alec tapped his foot impatiently between drinks.

  Someone Ziv recognized as having played hockey against Arvel – was he from New Glasgow? – staggered up to him.

  “You’re Arvel … Arvel fucking something,” the guy said. He was drunk enough and his tone was mild enough to be innocuous. He had a stain down the sleeve of his sweatshirt that might have shown where he’d washed away some vomit.

  “That’s my brother,” Ziv said.

  “You bruised my fucking pelvis at that tournament in Thorburn, you bastard.”

  “I’ve got a brother that looks something like me,” Ziv said.

  “Put me in the fucking hospital.” The young man’s eyes were rolling around in their sockets.

  “Ya, sure, buddy,” Ziv said. “Get some fucking padding next time.”

  The young man paused for a woozy instant, looking from Ziv to Alec, then opened the cupboard door between them. The door brushed a few inches from Alec’s nose, and Alec shoved the man with both hands, sending him and the empty glass he’d had half a grip on to the floor. His head smacked a table leg, but he was too drunk to feel a thing. He had a dopey grin on his face and probably had no idea what had sent him to the floor. The glass bounced once on its butt end before smashing against the wall. All noise but the pounding of the stereo stopped. One side of Get the Knack was on its fourth or fifth straight playthrough. The bass line of “My Sharona” pounded against the walls.