Quite often he thought about the famous writer. One of his novels had been taught in class, they’d had to read it chapter by chapter, talk about it, analyse what he meant. The author’s picture was on the back of the teacher’s copy, so there was no doubt about it. Spencer kept quiet about having met him. In fact he kept quiet altogether. He could not manage any startling insights or neat observations. He just heard the writer’s voice and saw his fierce eyes and his mad grin, and knew, well, of course, that’s exactly how he would write.
The novel told the story of a man who couldn’t handle happiness. The teacher referred them to a quotation from an Irish playwright called Wilde: ‘For each man kills the thing he loves’. The man in the book didn’t exactly kill the thing he loved, he killed the love itself so that he could move on. It managed not to be dull and depressing because it was full of action: the hero – if you could call him that – was an adventurer, always hungry for new experiences and horizons. The most important strand in the book was a romantic love story which made most of the boys squirm and snigger, but Spencer found it thrilling and faintly sinister. Was this about Lottie? The novel (he checked) was first published in 1920, so it was quite possible. But the woman in the story, a married woman whom the hero couldn’t have and so continued contrarily to love, wasn’t young, wild or pretty. Only smart.
The summer that he turned fourteen time meandered along like an amiable drunk, stumbling now and again, seeming occasionally to stop altogether or bend back on itself, pointless and unfocused. The pleasing balance of school, chores, the store and free time had gone; these things now formed a clunking chain that dragged him unwillingly through the days and weeks. In some ways free time was the worst. It lay there, inert, with boredom buzzing over it like a cloud of midges. And out of the boredom there occasionally grew the terrifyingly pleasurable sensations which made him still more wary of girls.
Spencer’s dullness affected Mack and his mother as well. There were no fights, he didn’t rebel against them, but they’d have had to be superhuman to remain unaffected by his state of mind. He knew they were no longer comfortable with him – he wasn’t even comfortable with himself so how could they be? He intuited that it was Mack who got rattled and Caroline who stood up for him. There were many occasions when he was aware of Mack buttoning his lip, so there was bound to be some sort of explosion, if only because of the pressure-cooker effect of the summer heat, and the tension, and the Mercantile not doing so well.
He was sitting by the back door at about three o’clock one afternoon, reading a comic – well, looking at the pictures. His mother was behind the counter in the store. Mack was stripping down the minister’s wife’s bicycle. Kite lay on the ground between them and at right angles, like the hand of a clock, nose on paws, slightly inclined towards Mack. Spencer wanted to move and was thinking of doing so, but he sensed a mood in his stepfather and had a kind of animal sense that it would be better not to attract attention. So like Kite he stayed put and bided his time.
After a while Mack stood up and said, still looking down at the bike, ‘You want to give me a hand?’
The answer was no, but such a simple refusal was unthinkable.
‘I was going over to Joel’s.’
‘Looks to me like you were sitting reading the funnies.’
For Mack to venture anything like a joke, let alone a sarcastic one, was sufficiently unusual to warn Spencer that he was on thin ice.
He got up slowly, like someone who was going to do so anyway. ‘He had to straighten his room. He reckoned he’d be through by three.’
Spencer hadn’t wanted to look at his watch and give himself away, so this was a guess. It was a good one, but not good enough.
‘It’s half-past three,’ said Mack, without looking at his watch either. This was also ominous, it meant he’d been keeping a check on how long Spencer had been sitting there.
‘Better go then.’
He turned. The comic was rolled up so tight in his hand it felt like a stick.
‘Hey.’
He looked over his shoulder. Mack was standing with his fists on his hips.
‘Over here.’ He motioned with his head.
‘But I gotta go.’
‘No, you don’t. He’ll still be there when you’re done helping me with this inner tube.’
‘But—’
‘Hey!’ Another jerk of the head.
Seething, Spencer dropped the comic and trailed over, with as much visible resentment as he dared show.
Mack was a gentle man, getting tough for what he believed were good reasons. The moment Spencer complied he was modified, but Spencer could have been forgiven for not knowing this as he was handed the inner tube.
‘Go get a pad of water and check for punctures.’
Spencer took the tube and started back towards the house still boiling with the injustice of it. Even so all might have been well had not Kite, who was still lying there like a hairy arrow, growled at him.
It was only a small growl. It might have been something to do with the swinging inner tube, or with the tone of the exchange, or it might even have been because she was getting old and had a bellyache, but whatever the reason growl she did, and that caught Spencer on the raw.
Without thinking he raised the inner tube like a weapon and made a feint at Kite.
‘Get out of it, damn’ mutt!’
Kite never moved, apart from pulling her lips back in a long red and black snarl, revealing teeth gappy with age but still terrifyingly sharp.
It was Mack who was on to Spencer, gripping his upraised wrist and pulling it down hard, behind his back. Spencer’s eyes watered with fear. There was no pain right now, but the tiniest movement would cause it. He was humiliatingly helpless.
Mack’s voice, when it came, was completely normal. ‘Listen to me, son. Don’t you ever – ever – do a thing like that. Not to the dog, not to anyone. You understand?’
Spencer nodded.
‘I want to hear you.’
‘I won’t,’ muttered Spencer, and was released. Humbled and mortified he was prompted to add: ‘And don’t call me son.’
Mack had returned to the bicycle, maddeningly unperturbed. ‘You are my son.’
‘I am not. You’re not my father.’
There was the tiniest pause: ‘I been a father to you.’
‘I’m not your son.’
Mack got on with replacing the chain. ‘Maybe. And you look like him. I’m no movie star but you’ll do better to take after me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father . . .’ Mack angled his head, intent on his task ‘. . . he was a man used to get his own way with his fists. When I see you act like that—’ he jerked his head in Spencer’s direction without looking ‘—I see him.’
Spencer was dumbstruck. These few short sentences were the most mention there had been of Jack Royle in fourteen years and they’d blown everything apart.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’
‘Right enough. He was a bad apple. Drank, beat your mother—’
‘No!’
‘—your mother and anyone else he didn’t like the look of. Got run down blind drunk in the street, and good riddance.’ Mack did look at him now. ‘You love your mother?’
Spencer nodded, speechless with shock.
‘Don’t go being like him. I done you a favour. Now go and check that tyre.’
Spencer went into the house, dropped the tube on the kitchen table and went upstairs to his room. His mother was serving someone and as he passed the shop entrance he felt her look at him, but he didn’t stop. He closed the bedroom door and lay down on the bed on his side, his arms crossed over his chest.
So there it was. No bold dashing adventurer, heroic horseman or army officer. Certainly no brilliant, famous writer. Just a violent drunk who hit a woman and who got run over in the street. A man whose tainted blood ran in his own veins and whom he must strive at all times not to resemble.
He didn’t
cry, but he wished he could have done. The agonising disappointment of it mocked his earlier boredom. For as long as he could remember there had been in the corner of his mind’s eye this distant, brilliant light – his father – a reminder that life could be more exciting. And now that was snuffed out. Not only snuffed out but removed altogether and replaced with something dark and shameful.
The door opened a chink. His mother asked: ‘Spencer, may I come in?’
‘I guess so ...’
She entered and closed the door after her softly, discreetly, with two hands, showing him how private this was to be. Then she sat on the edge of the bed.
‘I’ve been with Mack. He shouldn’t have told you.’
Spencer shrugged.
‘He didn’t like to see you going to hit Kite. I know you wouldn’t have done, but it bothered him to see you do that. It wasn’t for him to tell you those things, but he did it because he thinks the world of you.’
‘Sure,’ muttered Spencer bitterly.
‘He does.’ Caroline touched his cheek with the back of her hand like she did when she was checking for fever, and then she stroked his hair and went on: ‘Of course he does. Perhaps I should tell you something too.’
He didn’t reply, and she withdrew her hand and sat leaning forward with her arms resting on her knees, gazing in the same direction as Spencer, as though Jack were standing on the far side of the room and they were both looking at him.
‘He made a bad end, but when we fell in love, in England, he rescued me. He was so handsome and he spoiled me – I’d never been spoiled before. I was never so happy in my life, before or since. I’ve been more content, safer, calmer – we both owe our whole lives to Mack, though he’d never say so and he doesn’t see it that way – but your father and I had joy, can you understand?’
Spencer couldn’t really, and so remained silent.
‘Joy is another thing altogether,’ she continued. ‘Your father wasn’t wicked, he didn’t mean to bring me out here and then treat me badly, but he was disappointed. That doesn’t excuse what he did, but it was the reason. When he died I thought I’d never stop crying because it was so sad, the waste, the suffering . . . but I had to get on because you were on the way.’
Picturing the accident, so different from the one he’d always imagined. Spencer found his voice.
‘What happened to him?’
‘He’d had too much to drink, he fell over in the street. There were scarcely any cars around then, but some people had them. He fell under the wheels but it probably wasn’t that that killed him. He broke his neck.’
Spencer closed his eyes, tight, and asked: ‘Does everyone know?’
His mother made a little sibilant sound that might have been laughter or crying. ‘A few. People were understanding, they didn’t judge. They let me mourn the man I fell in love with . . .’ She touched his hand. ‘And we must let you do that too.’
‘That’s stupid,’ said Spencer. ‘I hate him.’
‘You do now, but all these years he’s meant a lot to you, I’ve seen it. And it’s right that he should. He had big ideas and when they didn’t work out it crushed him and he crushed other people to get even. But that doesn’t mean that big ideas aren’t good.’ She tapped his nose with her finger. ‘You hang on to them. That’s a good way to be like your father.’
She stood up and he opened his eyes.
‘Is Mack mad at me?’ he asked.
‘No. He’s mad at himself, and sorry about the whole thing.’
‘Me too.’
‘He said you were going round to Joel’s and he stopped you.’
It seemed only right to Spencer to repay this magnanimity with some of his own. ‘I only thought of it when he asked me.’ ‘Well then, why don’t you finish the job, and then go?’ ‘I will,’ he said, ‘in a minute.’ ‘Spencer . . .’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘You two are the people I love most in the world. I really need you to be friends.’
She left the room, closing the door in the same careful way. Five minutes later he went downstairs, filled a bucket of water and took that and the inner tube out to the side lot. Mack had turned the bike right way up again and was straightening the front mudguard. Kite watched Spencer as he put the bucket down and crouched next to it.
A reflective silence reigned as they worked. The dog relaxed, and slept.
Not long after that, in mid-July, it was the annual rodeo in Salutation. The three of them went, as they used to do but hadn’t in the last couple of years. Though nobody said so it was a kind of ritual, an affirmation of their having weathered the storm.
Salutation was a hundred miles to the north, on the edge of the Sioux reservation. The drive took them across the reservation at one point and Mack would comment grumpily on the unkempt farms with their stripped-down motors and poorly managed land. But every so often they’d pass one painted in bright colours – orange, aquamarine, cobalt and yellow – with tepee poles standing against the side wall, and a couple of paint ponies in the paddock, and Spencer would experience a thrill of recognition. Indians.
Salutation City, Population 2000 as the sign proclaimed, was heaving. Because of the nearby coal mines it had a sassy, self-assured feel, and when the rodeo came to town it got all gussied up and laid out the welcome mat. The rodeo lasted three days, but they always went on the first, to take in the parade and also because that was when the most people and animals were there. There was plenty to see even away from the main arenas.
Spencer had always loved the rodeo, but this time it lacked something. Or he did. The rough, tough glamour, the brassy music, the edgy crowds, and most of all the competitors, filled him with melancholy. This band of swaggering mercenaries, who risked life and limb for money the length and breadth of the country, epitomised what he could never be. He felt himself to be a dull, bloodless creature next to them.
The heat was intense, and the air was a stew of smells – sweat and leather and liquor, and cheap perfume and hot dogs and horse shit. Once, he’d found the smells intoxicating, but today they made his gorge rise. The reddened grinning faces offended him. As they stood in the crush watching the parade go by he wondered if the famous writer was out there somewhere. This was the kind of event he liked, and he’d even tried some bronco-busting in his time if his book jacket was to be believed. But it must have been one of his less successful adventures if he could come off a dude-ranch pony ...
‘Penny for them,’ said his mother into his ear.
‘Nothing,’ Spencer mouthed back. She gave his hand a squeeze which he hoped everyone round them didn’t see.
After the parade they made their way to the edge of town to the main site. Mack was a systematic spectator – he liked to get into his seat and watch the events through the day, following form and swapping opinions with the people round him. He was at his most animated in such circumstances – this, the ball game, fights on the radio – as though the emotions he was careful not to show most of the time were permitted safe expression when it came to sporting events.
But the thought of joining his parents on the hard benches in the central arena didn’t appeal to Spencer. Even if their attention was elsewhere he couldn’t think his gloomy thoughts properly when he was beside them. He flattered himself that the thoughts were worth a great deal more than Caroline’s English penny, and even she wouldn’t understand.
They were almost at the ticket booth when he said: ‘I’m not going in.’
‘Sure you are,’ said Mack, ‘come on.’
‘No – I want to take a look around.’
‘Do you feel all right?’ asked his mother.
‘Fine. I just want to take a look.’
Mack shrugged. ‘We’ll get you a seat, give you the ticket.’
‘All right.’
While Mack bought the tickets Caroline gazed thoughtfully at Spencer. ‘You will come and join us, won’t you?’
He promised he would, pocketed his ticket and escaped. Guiltily, he realised that his spirits lifted and
he walked taller the instant he was away from them. He looked older than fourteen, and no one here knew who he was. He had a couple of dollars of his own money on him and, greatly daring, bought a beer. Just holding the bottle was as intoxicating as drinking the stuff. At least now he seemed part of the crowd, even if he was a sham.
Cleaned out by the beer, he couldn’t spend on any of the other attractions, and there were plenty. He watched strutting local pretenders at the rifle range and the bell-hammer, shrieking girls on the spider-ride, couples cosying up as they waited to have their fortunes read by Moonwater, the Red Indian mystic . . .
With about half the beer gone, he fetched up next to the stock paddocks a bit queasy and light-headed. Nonchalantly he threw the bottle in a trash can, hoping no one would see it wasn’t empty.
A whole collection of rough corrals, stabling and pens were erected each year by the city fathers of Salutation, an investment in the financial milch-cow that was the rodeo. Spencer liked this part of the site because it was like an armoury or a munitions dump, full of the rodeo’s potentially lethal raw material. Alongside the stock paddocks was the competitors’ camp, a sprawl of trailers and tents for the old troupers, young pretenders and no-hopers who didn’t qualify for star treatment in the town’s hotels. Even if they weren’t top of the bill Spencer still thought they were great, the embodiment of laconic toughness, untroubled by the small domestic stuff of other people’s lives. Their days were taken up with travelling, waiting, husbanding their energies for those explosive seconds of tumultuous calculated risk, the slug of neat danger that could mean big bucks, broken bones – even death. These god-like beings smoked cigarettes they rolled themselves, and drank strong liquor and had eye-popping women in tow: it was hard to imagine them doing anything as mundane as eating, or going to the bathroom, or posting a letter.
He walked self-consciously past the encampment, unaware that his painful desire not to attract attention was the most obvious thing about him. At the stock enclosures he moved swiftly past the young steers brought in for the roping competition all jostling and honking like a traffic jam, their panicky white-rimmed eyes rolling in the haze of dust; then there were the bulls, huge and weirdly shaped – a bull didn’t move quite as fast as a horse, but its frame was packed with so much muscle power it was like riding a rubber Buick, so Judy Phelan’s brother said, whose friend’s uncle had once tried it.
The Grass Memorial Page 9
