Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

  “She’s started applying for jobs in Halifax?”

  “Her friend Colleen can get her on where she works. Same kind of store she’s at now, but even more money. Nothing guaranteed, I don’t think. It’s mostly commission in that business.”

  “Well, good for her. In this economy, to have another job if she wants it.”

  “She’s good at what she does there. The sales. The ladies’ wear. Fashions, or some goddamned thing. You wouldn’t catch her calling it ladies’ wear.”

  “So why don’t you guys move?”

  “I don’t know what the hell I’d do in Halifax.”

  “More jobs in Halifax than there are in Pictou County. You’d have a much better chance of finding work there.”

  “There’s a big difference between a job and a chance at a job.”

  “But you need that chance at a job before you can find one.”

  “Jackie had a job come and find her.”

  “Jackie married you without a job. You think she’d dump you for not having one?”

  “Jackie married me because she was pregnant.”

  Ziv’s coffee cup froze before his lips. He looked straight into his brother’s eyes. Much of the anger that had been there moments ago had softened back into something else. Sadness. Bewilderment. “Wait a minute,” he said.

  “She had a miscarriage right after the wedding,” Arvel said. “Remember when she went into the hospital that time?”

  Ziv could not think of what to say.

  “You don’t remember. You never pay attention to anything that goes on in my life.”

  Ziv wanted to argue about that statement, but decided to let his brother talk. He clamped his lips tightly together and forced himself to be quiet.

  “The thing that pisses me off is that I’ve got a trade. I finished high school, I did a two-year trade. The old man. Look at him. He didn’t have shit when he started. What’s he got? Grade eight? Did he even finish Grade eight? He starts on at the Car Works at sixteen. He’s still there! He’s harping on me for not doing stuff right. But I did right. I followed all the steps, but nothing happened. Him: he fucked up, dropped out, and the world put a forty-year job right in his lap.”

  “He was laid off plenty.”

  “Boo hoo hoo. They always took him back. Nowadays, when people get laid off, their job is gone. Laid off used to mean laid off. Now it means fired.”

  “You’re right. He was pretty lucky. He worked hard, but there’s plenty of people worked just as hard who have shit. People willing to work as hard who never get the chance.”

  “Fucking right,” Arvel said.

  “I heard these two old guys talking one day,” Ziv went on. “I can’t remember where, standing in line some place. Maybe here.” He looked around the room for a detail that would bring the memory back to him. “They were talking about making people work for welfare. One guy says, ‘They should have to work for it. Give them a job cleaning up the streets or the beaches. Just until something better comes along.’ I felt like saying ‘This is the eighties, you shitheads, not the forties. Something better is not coming along. Something worse is coming along.’ ” His voice had gotten steadily louder as he spoke. People in the coffee shop were turning their heads to look at him.

  “Keep your voice down, man,” Arvel said.

  Suddenly Meta appeared, walking toward them from where she’d been ordering coffee to go, at the counter. “I might have known if someone is going to be screaming his head off at Tim Horton’s who it would be.” She wore her purple-and-black knit coat. Ziv had been with her when she’d bought it for two dollars at Frenchy’s. The big brass buttons were from an old coat of her great-grandfather’s. She’d sewn them on herself.

  “You wore that coat because you knew I was hungover, didn’t you,” Ziv said. He was smiling and pretending to cover his eyes from the glare of the coat. Both brothers calmed in Meta’s presence. There was something about her. She wasn’t pretty in any conventional sense. Her cheekbones were prominent to the point of almost erasing the rest of her face. There were marks on her forehead and at the outer edges of her cheeks where she’d fought off acne in her early teenage years. But there was an aura about her of calmness and power, which made her beautiful.

  “Have a seat, will you,” Ziv said. “That coat is distracting people. It’s causing a disturbance.”

  “The guy who is yelling and swearing in Tim Horton’s is telling me I’m causing a disturbance.” Meta sat at the table. Both brothers flushed in her presence.

  “You two horny gorillas,” Meta said. “If you could see the looks on your faces. Can’t you even talk to a woman without getting a boner?”

  Arvel went pale. He was shocked that she’d understood exactly what was going on. He was about to deny that’s what was happening when Ziv said, “It’s that coat. Some men get horny just seeing it. That’s the direct hornification factor. The indirect hornification factor is when a man sees it and hates it so much all he can think of is taking it off you, then he gets horny at the thought of undressing you.”

  Arvel stood up. “You and your fucking jokes,” he said. “Some people have serious shit going on in their lives, you know. Some people have families and responsibilities and don’t appreciate arseholes who do nothing but fucking laugh at everything.”

  Meta squirmed back in her seat, lengthening the distance between herself and both brothers. “What did I get myself into,” she said. The whole restaurant had gone silent, everyone looking at them.

  Once Arvel was on his feet, Ziv knew it was pointless to argue or try to make amends. Arvel had made the decision to leave, and the less that got in his way, the better.

  “I’m sorry,” was all Ziv said. He raised his open hands in a gesture showing he meant to pose no threat, then lowered his head in disgust at himself and his brother.

  When he looked up again, the rage had gone out of Arvel, who was standing now, awkward and self-conscious beside the table, as though wishing he could sit back down, but knowing that once he’d had an outburst like the one he’d just had, the only thing left for him to do was leave.

  “Arvel,” Meta said, but he did not answer. He walked to the door, slumped like a crestfallen child. When he was gone, Meta said, “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Ziv said. He felt suddenly exhausted, the last spark of life gone from his body. It had been Arvel who’d wanted to talk. There’d been something he was trying to say about their father. And Ziv had driven him away. “Just another example of my incredible sensitivity,” he said.

  Meta put a hand on the back of his head and let it rest there softly, without movement.

  Alec was a good enough goalie to play for the county AAA midget team. He’d tried out for the team his first year of eligibility and made the final cut, but had quit after only a couple of regular-season games. The coach had tried to coax him back, offered to pay for new pads, get sponsors to keep him supplied in sticks. Alec wouldn’t bite. During any given game, he’d get excited about the level of play in the AAA league. He could feel himself rising to the challenge, quickening to the increased pace compared with the B-leagues he was used to playing in. It was not the hockey itself he disliked about the league. It was all the other things that went along with AAA: the pressure some players were under to get scouted for university and major junior teams, the vain hopes so many players held out for the NHL.

  At almost eighteen, he would be too old for midget play soon, anyway, and if anything, the competition at the junior level would only be worse. He played a game a week in a pickup league which mainly comprised people too old for junior and not ambitious enough for senior play. They all put money toward ice time, and whatever was left over from that went into the after-game beer budget.

  Late Saturday afternoon, the day after the party on Weir Avenue, Alec slung his gear bag over his shoulder and trudged the whole way to the Albion Mines Memorial Rink. Though he’d spent his whole life in the south end of town, walking in this
direction to the rink felt wrong to him. He felt like an impostor living in Valley Woods. Who were his parents trying to kid? They were Red Rowers. They had never fit in in Valley Woods, and Alec had never felt like he belonged at this end of town, either. He always felt stiff and awkward in Valley Woods, as if he were being watched. Behind the gauze curtains of blank windows that gazed without expression at the street, he imagined critical stares. He could almost hear the emotionless voices of adults in well-appointed breakfast nooks, questioning his right to be in his own neighbourhood. Who is that kid? Does he belong here?

  It had snowed that afternoon, and in some places, where he’d cut across backyards or clearings, he was the first person to make tracks in the snow. Outside the house where the party had been the night before, the vw Beetle that he and Ziv had sat in was blanketed in white. In places, clumps had stuck together and rolled off the roof, leaving trails where yellow showed through.

  By the time he entered the dressing room he was late, especially for a goalie, who had more and bulkier gear to put on. Some guys were already fully dressed and waiting at the gate to the ice surface for the rink manager to give them the signal to go on.

  Alec dropped his bag in a corner of the room and silently went about putting on the gear.

  He was quieter than usual, not so full of wisecracks, comments, and complaints. Some of his teammates remarked on this.

  “What did you do, leave your tongue at home?” someone said during the warm-up.

  His team only had three defencemen, so after the first period of play they were tired, and a lot of shots from the point were being deflected by forwards the defence did not have the energy to shove out of the slot.

  When the game was over, he stayed and drank one beer with the guys in the dressing room before strapping his gear over his shoulders and marching all the way back to Valley Woods. Everyone was home at his house, but the place was silent. His mother, his father, his brother, all were in separate places in the house, all doing whatever they did there on their own. He carried his gear into the basement and unzipped the bag in the furnace room. A smell of sweaty canvas and mould rose up into his nostrils. He carefully laid out each piece on the concrete floor to dry. The chest protector he hung on a line that went across the room at eye level. Beside this he hung his jersey and socks, and the underwear he always wore beneath the gear. The oil burner hummed to life, and in a moment, the circulation fan started up.

  He left the furnace room and went into the basement TV room. He lay down on the worn couch that had been moved down here from the living room, and turned on the TV. He flipped through several channels before stopping at a James Bond movie. It was one of the ones featuring the gigantic villain with steel teeth. Just past ten thirty, he called Alice’s Pizza and ordered a small combo. When it came at eleven, he was waiting for it at the front door so the delivery man would not ring the bell and disturb the others in the house.

  “Hey, Alec,” the delivery guy said as he rummaged in the front pocket of his jeans for the change.

  “Hey,” Alec said. The guy’s name had slipped his mind. When he got his change, he handed back a dollar tip and went back downstairs to the TV room, the smell of pepperoni and yeast twingeing in his nostrils, his palm warming under the heat from the corrugated paper box.

  When he’d eaten the last of the pizza, he folded the box and stuffed it into the wastebasket in the basement bathroom. He washed his hands and face and dried them on the towel over the sink. He sat on an arm of the couch and picked up the basement extension of the phone. He held it against his ear a moment and dialled Ziv’s number. The line went clear a moment, then clicked through to the number he’d dialled. Before it rang on the other end, he hung up and headed for the stairs.

  He crept up the stairs quietly, and at the top step opened the door to the garage. Behind him, he heard the hockey game playing on the TV in the kitchen. He flipped on the garage light and quietly closed the door behind him. He began to shake a little in the cold of the uninsulated garage. His father’s sky-blue ’72 Chevy Nova dominated the room. The rear end was jacked up and blocked. One of the mags was off, lying on its side by the jack.

  Amanda Morrison sat at the dressing table in her bedroom. She was forty-two years old, but had been told by men who knew that her husband was a drunk and probably did not pay enough attention to her that she could pass for thirty. Amanda looked at the face in the mirror. Behind her the fifteen-inch TV, which sat atop one of the night tables at the side of the bed, silently flashed pictures from the news. She knew that no one would mistake this haggard face for thirty, and she knew what the men who told her otherwise were hoping for. Yet at least she was desirable enough to be lied to, and this held a sickly sort of pleasure.

  She came to this table to practise her faces. With the makeup laid out before her as carefully as surgical instruments, she would dab and smear and trace, sending her cheeks receding into her skull, bringing the ridges of the cheek bones out to shadow over them. When she invented a face that pleased her, something that usually happened once by the end of an evening spent this way, she’d take a long look at her new self, then walk to the ensuite bathroom and scrub off all the makeup.

  She had plucked out all the hairs of her eyebrows, one by one, and she sent the metal ends of the tweezers probing along the bare skin where the brows had been, searching for the first signs of a new hair coming through. She’d bought two new eyebrow pencils, in two shades of brown, and she applied them now, one over each eye. The light brown she applied in an arc of arousal or intrigue over the left eye. The darker brown she pressed into a stern straight line over her right. With a hand mirror, she studied the effect of each in its profile.

  She had a new Revlon lipstick in a shade of dark red called Black Cherry. Her bottom lip was half-covered when a flash at the bedroom window distracted her. She pulled back the sheer and looked to the street. The little yellow-green station wagon that was parked at the end of the driveway was familiar to her: Alice’s Pizza delivery.

  She went back to the table and continued applying the lipstick.

  In the garage, Alec rooted in a wooden box in the corner opposite the door to the house, moving aside end-cut sticks of wood, lidless pickling jars, and greasy rags until he found a blue coil of vinyl-sheathed clothesline wire. He set up the stepladder so he could easily reach the crossbeams of the rafter trusses, and climbed up. He wrapped the end of the wire three times around the two-by-six crossbeam, and twisted the short end into a tight knot around the part of the wire that hung down. He got down from the ladder, reached up the wire on his tiptoes as high as he could, and twisted a loop of wire back onto itself. He put a slip knot at the end of the loop, and inserting his wrist into the noose, jerked it downward to make sure the wire tightened around his flesh. He opened the top drawer of his father’s toolbox and took out a pair of wire snips. He cut the extra wire from where it dangled on the slip knot and replaced the wire cutters in the drawer.

  In Ken’s room, there was a TV that took up half of the top of the dresser, but he kept it shut off until the two hours he’d set aside for homework were over. It was the Christmas holiday, and there was no homework to be done, but he’d disciplined himself all of first term to set this time aside, and he wanted to keep himself used to the pattern. He’d taken his history and biology texts home and decided to read ahead in them.

  Scheduling Saturday night as a homework night was a compromise. He’d prefer to do it on Friday, so that it would not hang over his head for the whole weekend. But Friday was the night that people went to movies or had parties in their basements or went cruising through the countryside with the first of their friends to have a license. Doing homework on Saturday meant that he could go out and do something with his friends on Friday and not have homework looming when he got out of bed on Sunday.

  He was more conscious of doing homework this year, his Grade 10 year, as a way of distancing himself from his brother. Ken had been in the same grade as Alec last year,
so he was used to the idea that his idiot brother, who was supposed to be two years ahead of him, was in the same grade. But this year they’d got put in the same homeroom, so Ken had to face the embarrassment every day, the constant association with a fool. Every time Alec shot off his big mouth to a teacher, Ken had to endure the uncontrollable impulse of the teacher to look at him for an explanation of his brother’s behaviour. Every time Alec skipped class, which happened almost every day, Ken had to endure a pause before his own name was called, as the teacher waited in vain for him to explain his brother’s absence.

  Doing well was his only defence, his only way of separating himself, of making sure that there was no mistaking him for his brother. And sacrificing a couple of Saturday nights over the Christmas break was a small price to pay to keep his self-respect.

  He was reading a shaded insert from the history text in the section on the fall of Rome when he heard a noise from the basement. His brother was down in the furnace room, setting his hockey gear out to dry. He heard the buzz of the oil burner coming to life, then the sound of the furnace room door swinging shut with a bang. He went back to the insert, about Flavius Maximus, “The Delayer,” and how he put off potential invaders by paying them not to attack the city.

  There was a James Bond movie on TV tonight. The theme music seeped up through the floor as his brother settled in downstairs. Ken turned to look at the dark screen of the set on his dresser, then went back again to Flavius Maximus.

  In the garage, Alec gripped the wire above the noose and yanked it hard, testing the knot that held it to the cross-beam. He moved the ladder directly beneath the wire and climbed up to the fourth rung. He noticed a drop of red paint stuck to the stamped aluminum of the top rung and scratched at it with his thumbnail. There was nothing painted red in the house, and he wondered momentarily where that paint had come from.

  When the noose was snug around his neck he lowered his gaze to the concrete floor of the garage. After undoing the noose, he stepped off the ladder and stood back from where the wire hung. He looked up at the knot on the rafter, down at the concrete floor. Now directly below the wire, he reached over his head to where the noose hung. At the top of the ladder again, he twisted the whole apparatus twice more around the two-by-six, so that it swung a foot higher than it had before.