by Leo McKay
The young woman whose house it was was standing in the doorway to her dining room. Ziv went to her swiftly.
“Look,” he said, consciously straightening the face he knew was twisted with drunkenness. “It was my friend’s fault. I’d like to take him right out of here without any trouble. Could you sweep up that glass? I’d do it, but that would only slow down getting my friend out of here.” He could tell she appreciated his eagerness to avoid more trouble.
“I’ll get the glass,” she said. “You get him the hell out of here.”
Outside it was mild for late December, though their breath billowed out before them in thick clouds. The floodlights on the side of the house and on the two-car garage nearby lit up a large area around the driveway.
Someone had thrown up on the landing of the step directly outside the door. Ziv saw it in time and instructed Alec to step over it. Several people stood around outside, smoking and taking drinks from beer bottles. It was a little cold for party overflow to be spilling onto the lawn, but bundled up and a bit drunk, it was possible to hold a conversation outdoors. Now and again people beat themselves on the chest with their arms, to get the blood going. They stamped their feet into the paved driveway.
There was nowhere else to go, so Ziv and Alec settled in at the far corner of the pavement on the driveway, near the front bumper of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. With the racket of the party and the music gone, for the first time they were able to talk.
“What’s going on in Albion Mines?” Ziv said. “I heard you got Arvel kicked out of his house.”
“That fucking guy! Blames everything on me. She took him back, anyway. If you ask me, she’ll fucking regret it.”
“What were you doing leaving home in the first place? You’ve got nowhere else to go. You don’t have a job, and with things looking the way they do right now, you’re not going to get a job. Don’t you think further ahead than one day?”
“No.”
They passed the vodka and chaser back and forth, though they were drunk enough now that they didn’t need chaser. They drank the orange pop absent-mindedly, sometimes taking a sip minutes after a drink of vodka.
They heard a car passing slowly out on the dark street. It was the one cruiser of the Albion Mines Police Department.
“Go back into the house with the liquor,” the metallic voice of the police PA system said. “Go back into the house with the liquor.” A spotlight suddenly glared from the passenger seat. It passed over the people standing in the driveway. No one moved.
“Go back into the house with the liquor,” the voice said once more. The spotlight dimmed and the police cruiser drove away.
A cold wind set up, and along with it came a light spray of ice-cold rain.
“Shit,” Ziv said. “Let’s see if one of these cars is open.” He tried the driver’s door on the vw Beetle and it was unlocked. He climbed into the driver’s side and leaned over to pull the latch handle on the passenger’s door, which was not locked either. Alec sat down in the passenger seat and shut the door behind him.
Rain drizzled onto the car. The tiny droplets on the windshield caught the light of the floodlights on the house and shimmered in a way that made them look like they were breathing.
Ziv rested his forehead on the cold steering wheel. The interior of the Beetle was not designed for someone of Ziv’s size. His knees and the tops of his legs were cramped by the steering wheel. The back of the seat was barely wide enough for his torso. Little spits of rain ticked against the roof. When the wind picked up, it whooshed over the car and rocked the vehicle on its suspension.
“I thought I’d drink myself to death,” Alec said out of nowhere. Ziv wondered if he’d missed something Alec had said previously. “But that’s too slow. The old man is proving that. And who’d want to end up like him, anyway? A fucking scarecrow with liver damage. And his brain don’t work any more either. I think it took over for his liver when that quit.”
“Your old man will get himself straightened around,” Ziv said weakly.
“Fucking MacQuarrie’s Funeral Home are the only ones going to straighten him out.”
“My old man’s going to need two more caskets than he can get. They’ll have to cut him up. Put him into three different boxes,” Ziv said.
Neither of them laughed.
“I’m going to kill myself,” Alec said.
“Fuck off,” Ziv replied. His heart began to pound.
“I’ve had enough,” Alec said. “There’s nothing here for me. Everything just fucks up.”
“Fuck off, man. Don’t talk like that. Things’ll pick up. Things’ll change. It’s attitude. You’ve got to change your attitude. Look, there’s this thing I learned about in Psychology class. It’s called learned helplessness. It’s a depression. It’s what happens when you think that no matter what you do, it doesn’t make any difference.”
“That’s not psychology, that’s my fucking life.”
“That’s what I mean. You’ve got to make something work for yourself. Do something positive. Start small. When you get up in the morning, say, Today my goal is to not miss a single class in school. Never mind anything else. Never mind what you do or don’t do there. Just get yourself to all of your classes. And at the end of the day when you’ve made it to those classes, you’ve accomplished everything you set out to do that day. You’ve had a one-hundred-per-cent successful day. You’ve got to see that whatever occurs in your life, it was your actions that caused it.”
“Getting to every class in a day! What are the chances of that?”
“That’s the point! You make it happen.”
A commotion started up in the house behind them. Through the walls of the house and the closed windows of the Beetle the only sound that made it to them was a big wooden knock. They turned around to look. There was an unusual amount of movement inside, but from the small squares of light they could see through the windows, they couldn’t tell what was going on.
“Somebody scrapping,” Alec said.
Ziv shrugged and they both turned back around.
Alec and Ziv sat in the Beetle until the vodka was gone. And when it was gone, they decided to walk. They circled Valley Woods, went up and down Cambey and Belmont avenues. They walked through the shortcut and down Acadia Avenue to Foord Street, where they turned south back up to Weir and passed again in front of the house where the party had been, looked in at the driveway, empty except for the yellow vw they’d sat it.
Anyone who’d been of legal drinking age had taken taxis over to Stumpy’s bar in New Glasgow once they’d got drunk for cheap at the party. Some of those who were underage, the ones who were able to get past the bouncer without getting IDed, would be in Stumpy’s, too. The rest had wandered somewhere into the night: to another party, a friend’s house, home.
At one point they found themselves on the part of Foord Street that formed the downtown area of Albion Mines, what people in the Red Row called upstreet. They were sitting on the steps of Peerless Paints, across the street from the movie theatre. When the second show let out, a group of preppy-looking younger teenagers had walked past. One of them was Ken Morrison, Alec’s brother. Ken stopped momentarily on the sidewalk in front of Peerless Paints and looked up at his drunken brother slouched against the sandblasted bricks of the building. The pack of his friends continued up the street and only got a short distance ahead of him when he shook his head disdainfully at the sight of Alec and caught up quickly with his friends. The brothers had not exchanged a word.
Ziv looked at Alec for a response to what had just happened, but if Alec had even noticed Ken, he did not let on.
A few hours later, Ziv and Alec split up on the sidewalk in front of the town hall and went in opposite directions. A few stars managed to beam their pinprick lights past the yellowish glare of the street lamps. The leafless maples along Foord Street etched ragged patterns against the black beyond them. By the time Ziv got home, he was weary-drunk and his legs felt hollowed-out and shaky from
drinking and walking. He looked through the window of his living room. The light was on, and he was peering through an almost non-existent crack between the curtains, trying to see if his father was still sitting up on the La-Z-Boy.
His father would know he was drunk, and Ziv did not want the humiliation of having his father see him that way. One staggered step in front of the old man, one word slurred when he spoke, would be enough ammunition for his father to berate and harass him for what would seem like forever. Even when he went back to university in a few weeks, his father would save up the abuse until summer.
From the driveway, Ziv looked at the light-suffused curtain in the living-room window and felt the full weight of his exhaustion. The evening had started out mild, but the temperature had dropped steadily all night, and now the cold started to bite into him. It came in through the soles of his feet and travelled up the bones in his legs. It crept into his neck and pecked away at his wrists where the winter coat stopped protecting him. He couldn’t wait here for the light to go out, he’d freeze. He walked to the end of the driveway and turned left onto Foster Avenue. He began walking, walking nowhere in particular as he waited for that light in the living room to go out, cursing his father and the scrapbooks he’d made. Cursing himself for not having learned by now how to deal with his father, how to at least understand him. Cursing himself, too, for being drunk and for acting exactly as though he’d never been away to university, as though he had not learned a thing.
The next morning, Ziv was pressed into his bed like a footprint in mud, a hangover clanging like a fire alarm in his head.
Arvel entered Ziv’s room and opened the curtains, raised the blind. “Man, this room stinks,” he said.
“Well, get out of it! Nobody asked you to come in here,” Ziv’s throat tightened around each word as it left his mouth. His stomach convulsed once, but nothing came up.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, man?”
“I’m hung the fuck over. Leave me alone.”
“You’ve been home a week and I’ve barely seen you. What have I got, the plague?”
“I don’t know what you’ve got, Arvel. But I’ll tell you one thing, you’re about to get a foot stuck halfway up your arse if you don’t get out of here right now.”
Arvel sat in the chair by the desk and swivelled it around to face the bed. He looked at the stack of books on the floor near where Ziv’s head was. He began to read some titles. “Surfacing. The Metamorphosis. Man Descending. You have to read all this stuff over Christmas?”
Ziv lifted his head to see what his brother was talking about. When he saw the pile of books, he said, “That pile of books is called a symbol,” he put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes. “Those books represent how I thought I was going to spend my Christmas holidays. This hangover is how I’m really spending it.”
“There was this thing on TV about hangovers. Apparently, it’s best just not to get them.”
“Really now. Isn’t that cutting-edge advice.”
“But there’s three things you can do to help once you’ve got one. You drink as much water as you can. You keep drinking water until you’re just about ready to puke.”
“That shouldn’t take long.”
“You’ve got to get a bath or a shower. There’s something about alcohol that clogs up your skin.”
“Maybe it’s the poison in it.”
“But if you take a bath first thing, you unclog the pores and your skin can breathe. The last thing is vitamin B. You have to have it. Alcohol washes it out of you. You take pills, vitamin pills, or you eat foods rich in vitamin B. Don’t ask me what.”
“Did this show say anything about smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarettes and scarfing up a big, greasy plate of Polish sausage?”
“No.”
“So much for common sense, then, eh?” Ziv rolled onto his stomach and pulled the pillow over the top of his head. He turned his head sideways so his brother could hear. “Well, it’s thanks to people like you, who have dedicated their lives to science, that people like me, who have dedicated their lives to debauchery, can get up in the morning and get the garbage to the curb on time.”
Later, Arvel and Ziv made their way to the Tim Horton’s on the west side of New Glasgow. The front of the doughnut shop looked out at the strip of road that had been a main highway before the Trans-Canada had gone through. Twenty years ago, some local businessmen had taken risks, opening Chinese and pizza takeouts along here just as the takeout craze was beginning to build. There were a few of these old business left, but they were being pushed out by big convenience stores, the food chains, the coffee-and-doughnut places, and a few car dealerships that had begun to cluster here.
Ziv and Arvel sat in a steel-framed solarium with a glass roof and looked out over the lip of a steep hill, down to the woodsy backyards of a neighbourhood of older two-storey houses. Ziv had taken Arvel’s advice on water and a bath, but the only vitamins he could find had been a ten-year-old bottle of Flintstones chewables with two orange Barneys and a purple Dino, faded and chalky, in the bottom. So in lieu of pills, he’d carefully chewed and swallowed two pieces of dry white bread, and when he felt them settle on his stomach, he took a jar of Guest raspberry jam from his parents’ fridge and ate a spoonful of it straight from the jar.
He told Arvel to order him a black coffee, since he was afraid cream might set his stomach off. He sat under the glass of the solarium and felt the strange way his sick feeling quieted him. Another grey day outside. He leaned back and looked up through the glass ceiling at the high overcast. A light powder of snow began to fall, so fine it was barely visible.
A balding man at the next table finished the last of his coffee and brought the cup down hard on the tabletop. The sound echoed off the insides of Ziv’s skull, and he closed his eyes as though that would keep unwanted noises out of his head. The coffee smell in the restaurant was thick as mustard gas. And beneath the coffee was a trace of the cleaner they’d used on the floor.
“I want to talk about the old man,” Arvel said when he sat down. He placed Ziv’s coffee within reach of his hand. Beside Ziv’s coffee, he put a glazed chocolate doughnut. He’d bought tea for himself and he swished the bag about in the hot water, watched the liquid darken.
“What you really want to talk about is yourself,” Ziv said matter-of-factly.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s a theory I have,” Ziv said. “Anything anyone says is about themselves. It’s related to Jung’s ideas about dreams.”
“You can have all the theories you want, smart-arse,” Arvel said, his face becoming redder with every word. “If I tell you I’m talking about the old man, I’m talking about the old man.”
“That may be your intention,” Ziv said.
“Will you just shut your over-educated mouth for about one minute? I want to talk to you. Since you came home, the old man has gone on one of his sulks.”
As Arvel spoke, Ziv brought the coffee cup slowly to his lips and sipped a first sip. He held it in both hands, like a chalice. Let your spirit come upon this caffeine.
“The only thing worse than that guy shooting off his mouth is when he keeps it shut and makes everyone else suffer,” Arvel went on. “I came down yesterday. You were already gone. But the old man wouldn’t talk to me. He wasn’t talking to Mum, either, apparently.”
“Ya,” Ziv said. “I don’t know what happened, exactly. He got his nose out of joint over some crazy scrapbook.”
“Scrapbook?”
“Well, ya. There was more than one. There were several, a few. I don’t know. There were clippings in them. News clippings. Something about labour laws and nuclear disarmament.”
Arvel squinted and shook his head.
“He tried to get me to read them all at once. I mean, there was enough reading there for a week. He shoved it on me right after I got off the bus. I’d just written my last exam. I told him, Look, can this wait till tomorrow?”
“You think this is what set him off?”
“I don’t know. It could be an ingrown toenail. Who are we talking about here? You know as well as I do. It could have been anything.”
Snow had started up for real outside. People in the coffee shop were commenting on it.
“I heard Jackie booted you out a while back,” Ziv said.
For an instant, Ziv saw fear and sorrow cross his brother’s face. Arvel sat up straight and folded his hands protectively across his chest and Ziv watched as he squeezed all of his emotions into anger.
“Booted me out?” he said. “Do you think it’s funny, what happened to me?”
“Funny? Jesus, no.”
“Well, don’t talk about it like it’s some fucking joke.” Arvel clenched and unclenched his fists. “It was your friend that caused that whole mess, anyway.”
“Alec.”
“The bastard brings a bottle of rum to my house in the middle of the afternoon.”
“I was out with him last night. Did you hear about that party on Weir Avenue? That’s where I picked up this attractive hangover,” he pressed his fists into his temples silently for a moment. “So Alec came over with rum and you just had to drink it.”
“What am I telling you about making jokes? Getting asked to leave my own apartment just doesn’t feel that funny to me.”
“All right. Sorry. Okay. I’m honestly trying to show some concern here. It’s just all coming out wrong. How are things going now? With Jackie, I mean.”
“No good. Now she wants to move to Halifax. She thinks I don’t know about it, but she’s got a job waiting for her up there.”
