Savage

by Nathaniel G. Moore

  *

  The distribution of anxiety in our house had a four-pronged filtering system; occasionally we all suffered at the exact same time. The emotional magnetic fields twitched like a polygraph test needle—tarnishing a once-clean parchment, ledgering the erratic levels.

  The cellar’s stairwell cupboard swelled pregnant with two cases of beer, and sometimes four bottles were withdrawn in a night; Dad luxuriating in his post-meatloaf appetite, a little supply and demand in the works. Regardless of inventory, I grew accustomed to the chain-like clanking of empties stacked on the stairs, trophies of disgrace hugging the top step, each brown bottle an ugly tooth in wait. Why couldn’t he put the empties back in the case? Why? I blasted each bottle with my eyes—at odds with their ugly brown presence.

  Placing my school bag on the bed, I scanned my bedroom, noticing subtle changes in the décor. I powered up my stereo, the turntable instantly starting its laborious whirl.

  The phone rang.

  "So, you’re coming to the cottage this weekend? YES or NO? I need to know now...we’re leaving at 4:30 tomorrow."

  I paused, aware how Andrew’s voice was lowering, mine still squeaked a bit. "Um..."

  I saw a scrap of paper: Mom had written, "ANDREW COTTAGE?" Taking this as a positive indication, I shouted, "Oh yeah!"

  "Cool."

  "You guys pickin’ me up?"

  "No, you gotta come here." Andrew said, adding with a chuckle, "Bring money this time, and pack a swimsuit..."

  As Andrew continued to laugh, I thought of his house. It was just the way my mind worked, visually branding each person I know with solid shape, like the way an animal or baby becomes familiar with objects; the chocolate-stained banisters and the tiles of kitchen with the cartoon water-blue mesmerized me, the regal authenticity compared to the weak tones my house was done up in: lazy soft pink, pale scuffed mustard, boring off-white.

  "I’ll do a wash tonight." I said, returning to the conversation.

  "Egg-wash!" Andrew blurted out with reverb into my ear. "Ha-Ha-Ha!"

  "I hate that, I don’t know what it means but I hate it."

  "Whatcha-gonna-do about it?" Andrew said.

  "I’m gonna take it to the max, yeah! You’re goin’ straight to the danger zone, dig it?!" I said in my lamest, strained, tonsil-dragged voice. I had let the phone cord twirl around my leg and was now trying to kick myself free.

  "Get over it. We’re not wrestling. Besides, you know who’d win." Andrew said.

  "Well, are we going go-karting?"

  "Yeah, probably. We can go out on the water too, on Saturday."

  "That sounds cool," I said. I was about to ask Andrew about how much the go-karts cost when I heard a faucet running upstairs.

  The alarm clock on my dresser glowered in green digital numbers. I heard three footsteps, the refrigerator opening...more noises.

  It was Thursday afternoon; nothing special about Thursday afternoon registered. A lawnmower cut out.

  "Hold on," I said. "I gotta go. There’s a burglar in the house."

  "What?" Andrew said.

  "And they’re hungry," I whispered, adding, "Someone’s in the kitchen. I’ll call you back later," and put the receiver down. The stereo was still record-spinning.

  I guess normally I wouldn’t have been concerned, but this interruption was undeniably eerie, even with the sunlight creeping in all warm through my window in thick tributaries.

  Stricken with a slight fear, I slid my door open with one toe, catching the door in my hand so it wouldn’t hit the bookshelf and make a sound. I prowled delicately until I reached the first step and planted a light left foot.

  Breaths barely there, I pulled myself up, three steps at a time, having to take one step back at the very top. Who was in the house with me?

  This was it: I clutched the doorframe and pulled myself into the kitchen, voice clasped—I tripped over a small pumpkin—my awkwardness in full bloom for my assailant to witness.

  I threw my head back, locking eyes on the intruder.

  "Are you OK?"

  "Well, that all depends," I said, smiling at Elizabeth. I took a deep breath as sort of a reality checkpoint.

  "So, what’s new?" Elizabeth said, taking a big gulp of water.

  I balked. "Why are you here?" I asked, wearing a nervous smirk, trying to look as though I didn’t care, as if I could control who came and went in the house.

  "Well..." Elizabeth began, pausing, refilling her cup with something from the refrigerator.

  I wanted her to move in. "Your sister and I have plans."

  Everything about Elizabeth drew me into a frenzy I couldn’t comprehend. She was a wilderness I prowled near and paced in; my shadow was an animal stretching out and howling beside me.

  Underlying her cottony curves was a deliberate love of scented lip gloss. Moving her tongue around in her mouth, behind her teeth, I saw her calculating gestures, pursing her lips, a brief grinding of teeth, her jaw adjusting.

  "Your sister and I have plans, you see, and she lives here," Elizabeth said with a chuckle.

  I could smell her hair, maybe shampoo and sweat and perfume. A definite alchemic taboo filled the kitchen in a swell funk.

  The electronic beats from the basement ricocheted around us.

  "Cool song," Elizabeth said, slowly moving her hips back and forth. "You like New Order?"

  "Yeah."

  Elizabeth leaned to one side, listening. My index finger crept up over my lip. I looked at her, then the door, then back.

  Like a select handful of tight denim-clad high school girls, Elizabeth now rivalled all my hand-me-down porno magazines, especially when she wore tight jeans (or what I’d type into my Commodore 64 about the variety of grade nine girls I’d survey throughout my horny week: "Jen Steede wore the tightest jeans I’ve ever seen today...or Selene Wilkinson, my god, the fade on her back pockets!"

  Seeing Elizabeth drinking tap water in the kitchen startled me. I counted down from five in my head...I got to three—

  I repeated the count to myself, watching her refilling a glass of water.

  "What are you doing here? Is my sister even home?" That was good, I thought. Or did I already say that? Was it a question or a statement?

  Her lip balm filled the air between us.

  "I guess I’m early. The front door was open. We’re supposed to carve pumpkins together."

  "Oh." I didn’t know what to say, how to breathe, hold my arms, circulate blood. "You like Leaside?"

  "I guess so," I could feel myself becoming hot, heated, my head filling with concern and doubt that perhaps I would become physically brittle at any second. I was swooning.

  "You OK?"

  "OK, yeah, well, continue pouring water or whatever you’re doing." I was slow to turn back, to head down to the dungeon, knowing this was a mistake in any rough draft of a romantic battle plan.

  The sticky, wet afternoon in my throat and the light, cool September air through the side screen door; even though I was just experiencing it, my memory was tonguing away at each spongy sulcus for the most atomized trace of the older blonde sipping from a cup I’d used a thousand times.

  I left the kitchen in a flush, heart racing, and found myself back in my basement lair, wondering how I had left things. Did I say goodbye to her? No time to wonder. Calm down and breathe. Put on some more music? I moved the needle back to the beginning of New Order’s Substance, side A.

  The percussion of each step from upstairs hiccupped through my low bedroom ceiling. She was getting closer; I could feel it. I turned around and saw my bedroom door open and felt my stomach producing premature butterflies, and soon, swooning.

  Now she was here, in my room, staring intently in my direction, part of a pulse that connected us, tethered her to my desire.

  "Hey," she said. "What are you doing?" My plastic cup was hovering near her lips.

  "Nothing."

  The television hissed as I connected my VCR. "I’m just trying to..."

&nbs
p; I glanced at my guerrilla VCR and TV set up. My clothing was piled over my homemade wrestling ring and other assorted regression tools.

  She was scanning my bedroom with her wolfish green eyes.

  "What?" Elizabeth said, raking her hair from the left and twisting it, putting the massive blonde wave into a makeshift ponytail. The scent of my room and its heating plastics, solvents and paints mincing with her general teen odour was something. I did my part by fastening the model glue lid and putting the lids on the small glass paint containers.

  "Your room is really full of, um, objects," she said.

  "Yeah, well, I built it from a kit."

  A casual scan of the room would reveal to Elizabeth that I surrounded myself with lonely sports heroes, zeros, TV Guide covers that featured the latest teen prime-time drama stars, a Jawa jigsaw puzzle mounted on a piece of plywood and three long, nearly empty shelves, painted navy blue to match my bedroom walls.

  "Can you keep me company?"

  "OK." I wanted to keep her.

  She cut through the air dust, past the bookcase, her sneakers grazing a pile of my underwear.

  The model bits blurred under the fluorescent lighting, the glue burning my senses, my windows shut. I felt on pause.

  Elizabeth picked up a jam jar from my shelf filled with oil and dyed-blue water, an ornament I’d made from watching a science show on television. (The host told you to choose any food colouring you wanted to mix with the water. It was supposed to be educational: floating history of oil and water to impress onlookers.) She threw me a quizzical look.

  "Your room is cool," she said.

  I worried I’d left a drawer open or that an inviting closet door would unfurl a crisp porno stash with celluloid faces smiling and folded into one another, giving me imagined hugs, their pulpy, perfumed lips running up and down my body. I could feel the room getting smaller.

  "Thanks. The kit was real easy to assemble. It was practically inflatable."

  "Ha-ha, you’re crazy."

  She stood beside my cozy one-seater, facing my bed. I moved a hockey jersey from the seat. "What movie are you gonna watch?"

  "Lethal Weapon."

  "Haven’t seen it," Elizabeth said, looking directly at me, comically bugging her eyes. I was pacing, twirling on my heel, staggering in front of my Mom-made bed.

  "Sit down," Elizabeth said, accelerating my willingness to comply. "Come on, I know you can."

  Catching her gaze, I felt a vacuum dry out my innards as my eyes brushed the contours of glossy-faced celebrities pinned up on my wall.

  She laughed Momentarily, and then stopped full-throttle.

  I wanted to say something funny but balked.

  "Why are you guys even carving pumpkins? Isn’t that something two-year-olds do?"

  "Well, goof, it’s for a party we’re going to tomorrow. Early Halloween."

  I twiddled with some plastic bits from a model set. I tightened the glue cap, which appeared haphazardly askew, leaking slowly.

  I wiped the residue off on my pants. I couldn’t look directly at her face. I had to shake out my eyes, adjust on the fly, her likeness flush against my callow retinas, and I began to choke, needing to throw my eyes at the little bit of sky that came in through the basement window.

  I wondered when my sister would get home, if my mom would help me with the laundry I needed to do before the cottage tomorrow night and if she would bother me about my homework and how I really wanted to go for a bike ride but my chain was busted and how it wouldn’t be worth fixing right now anyway as I was going to be gone all weekend and plus, I might be able to fix it with pliers; Andrew knows how. Each breath I now took contained traces of Elizabeth. I was parched and wanted some of her drink.

  A pulse rippled through my temples, soft electrodes in my head. Elizabeth sat in my chair.

  "Come on," she said, and patted a small patch of chair cushion beside her. "I’ll make room."

  The scent of model glue was humming in my nose. I could see my bottle-cap collection mounted on a piece of wood amongst my minutia. Dad had told me how to do it, how to mount it, with tacks, carpet tacks. Was I telling Elizabeth this? Bottle caps culled from a thousand bike rides, park excursions with Andrew and convenience store trash surveillance.

  The glue’s waft was strong, daubs of it hardening on my desk next to plastic bits. I lowered myself down beside her on the chair.

  She half-kissed me, somewhere on my face, whispering in my left ear, "Good boy."

  Some nights the light got in, a bit of joy crawled underneath the broadloom and I captured the stowaway vignettes of simple cracker-and-cheese bliss with clenched eyes and calm-breathing techniques; I reconstructed harmless domestic scenes of comfort and healing inside my plastic mind. A swirl of original sensations succeeded one another—herbal tea, the thoughtful crunch of toast, followed by the slow crackle of a fireplace on an autumn evening, sometime soon.

  3 )

  True Faith

  Friday, September 30th, 1988

  By 10th period, everyone was talking about Ben Johnson3. Some were doing imitations, complete with his accent: "I didn’t take no stereos!"

  3. The newspapers that appeared throughout the week had exhausted us with the words “steroids” and “gold medal” ad nauseam as the summer of 1988 officially dried up and vanished into a colossal anxiety chamber. They gave me the wake-up call to grave realism. The bold shame that catapulted Johnson into the media reverberated through lockers, gym class and stairwell. The iconic image of national failure and disappointment was etched immortal. For all intents and purposes, my run “on top” was over. My alleged heroes, with whom I had secret and sycophantic ties, were also winding down. George Michael’s Faith album had run its bubblegum course. “Kissing A Fool” peaked at #5 in the US as the last single from the Faith album.

  Yesterday, on the back of a 4" x 6" white index card, blue with an ink drawing of the letters "M" and "P," I had scrawled "First week of school is almost done...I’m waiting for the stupid class to end so I can get home and then sleep, because tomorrow is the countdown, tomorrow it all starts because ooohhhhhh yeeeaaahhhhhhhhh! We are going to the cottage, one more time, because SummerSlam was just the beginning oooohhhhhhh yeeeeaahhhhhhh! Nothing will stop the Mega Powers. We’ll go on and on and on. It’s ah, real emotional type situation yeah! Andrew and I are the Mega Powers, just like Savage and Hogan, nothing’s gonna stop the Mega Powers—yeah!"

  Now, with a mouthful of hot sun, and some in the eyes, I headed east on Eglinton Avenue. I heard a rustling behind me, whirled around. It was Andrew, who had caught up with me.

  "Hey," Andrew said with his familiar cocky, raised-head tilt.

  School had released us both, and the last embers of warm weather were a bounty to relish. Walking home together, I saw our shadows morphing into each other. It resembled a crude city skyline drawn by over-juiced preschoolers: tall and bulky (Andrew) and me (short and scrawny), our outlines crisp and fearless on the asphalt.

  "We should grab a magazine before we go up."

  "You mean like a porno?"

  "Yeah," Andrew said in a huff, looking straight ahead, whistling a few notes of an indiscernible song.

  "Sure." I said, a piston of excitement now chugging in my system. I adjusted the straps on my backpack.

  "That store?" Andrew said, pointing to Laird Convenience, smack in between the floor shop and the bank on the corner.

  "Yeah."

  "OK. But wait, how?" Andrew asked. "I’m not buying it."

  "Why not? They’ll think you’re eighteen."

  "Naw, they’ll ask for ID," Andrew said. "Tried it a while ago."

  I could sense where Andrew was going with this: we were going to steal the magazine. I knew the store well, a good choice: lots of dark spots, bad lighting, slow, elderly clerk. I began to envision the ruse.

  I imitated the gesture with manic hand twists and poses, drawing out the plan in the air before us.

  "So you go to the back, pull out t
he chocolate milk but hold it so it’s not visible, whether it’s like a half-litre or whatever, ’kay?"

  "Then what?"

  I took Andrew through the Moment, demonstrating with acuity everyone’s role.

  "Then he’ll ask you what size it is. And you say, ‘I don’t know; where does it say the size?’ OK?" I explained.

  "OK."

  "Then I’ll snatch the mag when he’s helping you, you pay for the milk, I wait beside you, we leave and bang—"

  In the crusty convenience store, it all went down just how I planned: Andrew walked to the back of the store, opening the milk fridge. The clerk moved his attention to Andrew, who proceeded in asking the price a couple of times. "How much?"

  I moved rapidly with the magazine, placing it halfway down my pants, heart beating large in my chest. I turned around and sidled up to Andrew, who was now buying the milk.

  The experiment was a success. We left the store with the pornography and milk and headed home.

  "See you in a bit. Don’t forget your swimming suit."

  "Yup," I said, touching the contours of the pocket-size copy of Variations I had under my shirt, down my pants.

  I was excited at the thought I’d be away for the weekend.

  *

  Andrew sat shotgun. Me in the backseat. Andrew’s older brother Philip (age nineteen) drove. Also in the car, Sandra, a short blonde phys-ed kind of girl Philip was dating (also nineteen). We drove the 131.5 kilometres, for two hours, with a planned arrival just after six in the evening with pit stops.

  "Turn on the radio or something," Andrew said, looking at his brother.

  "Shut up," Philip said, putting a mix tape into the car stereo. "Don’t give me no lip, boy!" he said in his best slave-trader voice.

  The tape contained the infamous "Monkey" remix, a joke Andrew had played on me months earlier, when he had fooled me into thinking he and Philip had remixed George Michael’s summer hit song "Monkey." To me, the remix was incredible; it sounded totally different from the LP version, with added beats, repetition of words and a ton of realistic monkey noises.