“The gun, Uncle Cecil,” I said. “I better get that fucking gun.”
I took the ride and I took the gun. Grandma Bradley being present when he handed it over, I mimicked utter surprise and amazement at the unexpected gift. The .22 was a beauty, a pump action Remington that surpassed my greediest dreams. Grandma was clearly not enthusiastic about the idea of me armed, but the only thing she said was, “If he blows his brains out with that thing – or anybody else’s – I’m not the one who’ll be responsible. I want to go on record that I don’t approve.”
Once I got my hands on the rifle my interest in chess, car rides, and Glenn Gould impersonations evaporated. To my twelve-year-old nose nothing smelled as sweet as gun oil, although I was careful to make sure that Grandma Bradley didn’t find out I slept with the Remington lying beside my bed, loaded, within sniffing distance. I developed a nightly ritual, easing myself down on my mattress, shaking out my arms, closing my eyes. Of course, this was only a ruse to draw the Night Stalker into showing his hand. When Stalker made his play and burst through my door, I rolled to the right, snatched my gun from the floor, and blasted him back to the very doorstep of Hell. This move and variations on it was practised dozens of times until I could settle down to sleep in full confidence that despite having a weak chin and being a shrimp for my age, I was still a damn dangerous hombre.
Daylight hours were spent expending real ammunition. Nothing on the farm was off limits or out of season except Grandma and her chickens. Hour after hour I tramped the property dazed by blood-lust and heat, blazing away at rats in the tumble-down barn, discharging salvos into the bird-infested windbreak, and lying in wait in the brome grass at the edge of the garden for the sparrows to flutter to earth. Strange, novel sensations linked to the gun kept me prowling from sunup to sundown. Only a silhouette of Grandma in the matte grey of late dusk bellowing, “Charlie, get in here now! And I mean right now, goddamn it!” could override these feelings.
She wasn’t the only one calling me. So was Uncle Cecil. The very day after he conferred the Remington upon me I watched him park his car and laboriously mount the steps to the house. Five minutes later he was in the yard again, shading his eyes and turning on his heels slowly and deliberately through the four points of the compass. Noting that, I hastily retreated to the barn and scrambled into the hayloft from where I watched him clamber over fences, poke his head into abandoned sheds, peek around the fenders of junked automobiles, all the while mournfully imploring “Charlieeee! Oh, Charlieee!” at the top of his lungs. Finally after forty-five minutes of searching he gave up with a sad, resigned shrug of the shoulders, got into his car, and drove off.
But he was back the next day and the day after that and the day after that and every day following for a week and a half. And each day I hid. I found his confusion comical; it was a laugh to see him fuss-budgeting around the property, clumsily snagging his trousers on barbed wire, desperately squinting into collapsing sheds and derelict autos, cupping his hands to his mouth to halloo dramatically like a sea captain hallooing into the fog for a man lost overboard, smiling to the windbreak, the outbuildings, on the remote chance I might be lured out of them by his shit-eating, apologetic grin. Looking down at Uncle Cecil from the height of the hayloft gave me a feeling of control similar to the one I got with a gun in my hand. I did my best to persuade myself he had this coming to him for the way he had behaved in the basement. Maybe this would teach him to forget the stupid kids’ games and act his age. Yet another voice quietly argued that loneliness, too, has its claims.
This behaviour of Uncle Cecil’s definitely put him in Grandma Bradley’s bad books. It didn’t sit well with her that he should spend an hour each day sweating after me and then refuse to stop in her parlour for a cup of tea, or a game of rummy. At night when I dragged my gun and exhausted self into the house I could be sure to get a sprinkling of her spleen. “Charlie Bradley’s social secretary reporting. Mr. Cecil Foster requests – as he did yesterday and the day before yesterday – that you phone him this evening. I believe it’s urgent boy business, a date for a ride in the country.”
I walked past her without acknowledging the message.
“Well, are you going to phone him or not?” she snarled at my back.
“No, I’m not,” I said. I had a couple of more weeks of rural purgatory before my sentence expired. Given Uncle Cecil’s present low standing with Grandma, any friendliness directed towards him might see me promoted to hell.
My shunning Uncle Cecil may have cheered Grandma but it didn’t really satisfy. I was left with the strong impression that she really wanted his head decorating a stake. Grandma began to ask lots of questions and ask them in an untypically affable way. I had no idea what she was after but I did know that the less I said the better.
“Did Mr. Foster and you have some kind of a fight?”
“No.”
“Then why are you hiding from him?”
“I don’t want to do what he wants to do.”
“So what is it that Mr. Foster wants to do that you don’t want to do?”
I seemed to have painted myself into a corner on that one. I shrugged.
Grandma rolled her cigarette around between her thumb and index finger and bored in like a drill bit. “What is it that Mr. Foster wants to do that you don’t like to do?”
Evasive action was clearly in order. I didn’t quite answer the question posed. “I want to hunt,” I said. “Mr. Foster doesn’t like hunting.”
Grandma pursed her lips, looked as if she might restate the original question, then decided against it. “Why would Mr. Foster buy you such an expensive gun, Charlie? What’s in it for him?”
Had she surmised Uncle Cecil was a victim of a shakedown? I turned nervous. Extremely so. I didn’t answer.
“Uh-huh, so that’s how it is,” said Grandma, slowly nodding her head. She lit a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last. “Keeping secrets from our old grandma, are we? You ask Grandma, something smells in Denmark.”
My experience of a year ago with my grandmother had taught me that you didn’t cross swords with her unless you wanted a blade through the gizzard. What surprised me was that she hadn’t put the run on Uncle Cecil, was still allowing him to show up every day and mooch around the property, and, as far as I could make out from my distant perch, she remained polite and pleasant to him. But there was something else I noticed. Now she was spying on him too, watching from a second-storey window as he shuffled up the lane, probed the underbrush of the windbreak with a stick, got down on all fours in the dust of the road to peer under the branches of the spruce trees and rise, disconsolate, to wipe his palms on his pant legs and carry on his fruitless search.
Uncle Cecil didn’t overlook the barn. Below me I would hear shrill bird cries, the flutter of disturbed air, the shock of silence following flight. Then the slow scrape of shoes on the remains of the frost-heaved and pitted concrete floor, the muted bumps and knocks of a large soft body colliding with things in the dark. Once he tried to climb the rotten ladder which led to the loft. There was a sudden crack, the squeal of a rusty nail pulling loose, the sound of splintering wood. The bottom rung had given way under his weight. On subsequent visits he just snooped half-heartedly in corners, stalls, and mangers before leaving. Another time, standing in the dark below, he addressed a few quiet words to the possibility I was there. He said, “I am sorry. Please come out.” When I didn’t, he left.
Grandma Bradley’s inquisition resumed a day later.
“What do you like doing best with Mr. Cecil Foster?”
What I liked doing best was driving the car. But there was no way I was going to say that. I tried to think of the most blameless activity I had engaged in with Uncle Cecil. Piano playing. What was more innocent and commendable than piano playing?
“Playing the piano.”
Big mistake.
“Where were you playing a piano?”
Where did she think I was playing a piano? Carnegie Hall?
<
br /> “At his house.”
Her eyebrows arched spectacularly “You were in the great man’s house? Well, well, isn’t that something. How is that, I wonder? Here I’ve known Mr. Cecil Foster much longer than you have and yet never once has he invited me to his house. Yet in no time at all you get free run of the place, messing around on his piano and getting into God knows what else. How is that, Charlie?”
I mumbled I didn’t know how that was. We just went there sometimes when we were tired of driving around.
“If you were tired of driving around, why didn’t you come home?” she snapped.
I knew better than to state the obvious so I kept quiet.
“What else did the two of you get up to in his house when you weren’t playing the piano? Anything else you’d like to tell Grandma about?”
“We talked.”
“Oh yes,” said Grandma Bradley, “talking’s nice. What did you talk about?”
“Friendship.”
“Friendship?” said Grandma. “Hoity-toity. My, my, but the two of you were having a high old time of it, weren’t you? Friendship, eh. Sounds like a topic for a C.G.I.T. Discussion. So, as concerning friendship, what did you two masterminds conclude?”
Before I got my own back, I wanted to establish some distance between me and the sentiments I was about to express. “I didn’t conclude nothing,” I said innocently. “But Mr. Foster did. He said that friendship with women wasn’t as good as friendship with men. Women were always too busy looking out for themselves.” Although a loose rendering of Uncle Cecil’s position, I didn’t think I had mangled it. At any rate, it produced the results I was looking for. Grandma’s face coloured a deep red while her thin lips blanched white.
“Well,” she said, “maybe Mr. Fancy Foster didn’t think of something. Maybe he didn’t think women are busy looking out for themselves because they have to.” She paused. “And maybe not just themselves but other people as well. Ever think of that?”
I had pinched raw hamburger from Grandma’s fridge. Raw hamburger was great bait for magpies. All you had to do was put a little of it on top of a fence post, hide yourself behind an abandoned watering trough or piece of broken-down machinery and wait for the scavengers to land. Then you let them have it.
So here I was whistling to myself, making up eensie-ween-sie hamburger patties and dabbing them down on a line of fence posts, one after another, when what should I do but look up and see Grandma Bradley a couple of hundred yards off, head thrust forward, arms pumping wildly, bearing down on me hell bent for leather across an expanse of wolf willow, buck brush, weeds, and knee-high couch grass that had reclaimed what was once a field. As soon as I saw her high-stepping it along in her men’s sneakers, house dress flapping and tucking itself between her legs in the wind, I figured that she had discovered ground meat gone missing, and nothing but divine intervention could stand between me and an unspeakable death. In despair, I began frantically pulling up bunches of grass to wipe the grease and bits of meat from my hands, hoping like hell Grandma wouldn’t spot the magpie hors-d’oeuvres pasted to the tops of the poplar pickets.
The closer she got, the more dire the situation looked for me. There was a blood-curdling gleam in her eye and the determined set of her mouth reminded me of the jaws of a trap locked down on the leg of a cute, furry animal. And then Grandma Bradley was on me, all six feet and 180 pounds of her there, blocking out the horizon and the majority of the sky, invading my private space with her big powerful hips and mountainous bosom and flushed angry face and fiery auburn hair. A book was suddenly thrust under my nose, making my eyes cross as I attempted to focus on it.
“I got my evidence now,” she said, slapping the cover of the book with her big chapped hand. “In black and white. In print.”
What the hell was she raving about now? Evidently not missing hamburger.
“What I want to know,” she said, squinting her eyes menacingly, “is which one of you is responsible for underlining in this book. You, or Fancy Foster?”
This was the last thing I expected, Grandma Bradley livid because somebody had marked up a book. “What underlining?” I chirped brightly, a picture of guiltlessness. And guiltless I was. I had no idea what she was fuming about.
“This!” she exclaimed, flipping open the book. Finally, I recognized it. Grandma Bradley had been going through my personal effects; it was Uncle Cecil’s copy of Kidnapped. There, underlined in a watery ink, faded with time, I read: He came up to me with open arms. “Come to my arms!” he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheeks. “David,” said he, “I love you like a brother. And O, man,” he cried in a kind of ecstasy, “am I no a bonny fighter? “At the end of this passage, in the same ink, someone had added several exclamation marks. I hadn’t seen this before for the simple reason I hadn’t got this far in the book. Whatever significance it had for Grandma was lost on me. The words and expressions were just weird, the way a lot of old books were weird. I looked up at her puzzled.
“Was it you?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Then it was him,” she said, clearly pleased that Uncle Cecil was the vandal.
“Well, it’s his book,” I pointed out. “I guess he can write in it if he wants.”
“Imagine,” said Grandma, “giving a book like that to a boy your age.”
Directly Grandma went on the march. Uncle Cecil’s appearances at the farm ceased. I was instructed to keep indoors and told I must never, under any circumstances, speak to him again. The telephone rang six and seven times a day but I was ordered not to answer it. While it jangled in the kitchen, the two of us sat staring off into space, Grandma mumbling under her breath. When I whined about being kept indoors, arguing it was unhealthy for a growing boy like me to be deprived of fresh air and sunshine, she gave me a cold look and said, “As long as I don’t know what’s lurking in the bushes outside, you can do without fresh air and sunshine.”
I wanted to be hunting. House arrest was driving me crazy. I couldn’t see why I had to suffer because Grandma Bradley was on the outs with her gentleman friend. We’d be sitting watching television and out of the blue she’d say, “I’m no Marilyn Monroe, but I’m not a bad-looking woman for my age. I always wondered why he was backward in that respect. Now I know.” Or, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” After a couple of days her mood grew darker and became fixated on revenge. More and more often I heard things like, “Stringing up from a lamp post is too good for the likes of him.”
Quite frankly I didn’t care how she fixed Uncle Cecil’s wagon as long as it got done soon, allowing things to return to normal and me to go hunting again. I changed my tune when I learned what she had in mind.
“I called Mr. Fancy Foster after you went to bed last night,” she volunteered.
“So?” I said.
“I told him that you wanted to see him.”
This was news to me.
“He seemed real pleased,” mused Grandma. “Real pleased. He’s coming by tomorrow afternoon three o’clock.” She indulged in a suspense-building pause.
“And?” I said irritably.
“And when he comes three o’clock tomorrow you’re going to give him back that gun.”
“Not likely!” It popped out before I even knew it.
“Likely,” said Grandma. “And then you’re going to tell Mr. Fancy Foster exactly what you think of him and his tricks.”
“Not the gun, Grandma,” I pleaded. “Not the gun!”
“The gun,” she said definitely. “Believe you me, you’ll thank me for it in years to come. When you’re older you won’t want any souvenirs and keepsakes of him hanging around, reminding you of anybody’s bad behaviour. Trust me, clean break is always the best.”
I knew it was a lost cause, but I begged and bargained. Anything she wanted. I’d turn myself into the model grandchild. But don’t make me surrender the gun. Grandma was unyielding. At one point, I even faked hysterical tears.
>
“What’s this now?” she snapped.
“You’re giving me a case of nerves,” I accused, swabbing my eyes with a shirt cuff.
“Nonsense. Children don’t have nerves. Nobody has nerves until they’re twenty-one. Pull yourself together and quit angling for sympathy,” she said.
It was one of those fresh, late summer mornings when the air has an autumn-like snap to it and the sun is a flood of pure, chill light that lends everything an air of stark, arrested tranquillity. I was sitting in a chair by my open bedroom window and Grandma Bradley was in the garden below, picking corn for dinner. I watched her for several minutes before I picked up my .22 and slid the barrel over the window sash. Each time she reached up to break off an ear of corn her skirt lifted in back and sank again when she dropped the corn in the bucket beside her feet. I sighted in on the backs of her knees where the hem went up and down like a curtain on a theatre stage. I fantasized squeezing off a shot just as the curtain went up, dropping the old buffalo in the dirt. I continued sighting in on Grandma’s rickety knee joints until she worked herself far enough down the row so that only her shoulders and head of hair showed. I drew a bead on the nape of her neck. I was toying with her, the way she toyed with me. I slipped my finger inside the trigger guard and laid it lightly on the trigger. The gun was loaded. I always kept it loaded.
Neither Grandma Bradley nor I really believed there was a chance that Uncle Cecil would fail to arrive that afternoon, yet as three o’clock approached we sat in the living room on tenterhooks. Every few minutes or so Grandma would grunt her bulk off the chesterfield to part the curtains and stare up the approach for a glimpse of Uncle Cecil’s automobile, spider waiting for the fly. I, on the other hand, sat with crossed fingers tucked under my thighs, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t show and fate would decree I keep the gun.
Things As They Are? Page 19
