I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  “I use The Club. You’d never get away with it.” Rachel Turnbal has her car keys in one hand and an empty white coffee mug dangling from a pair of ring-less fingers in the other, a bulging bag—not a purse—hanging over her shoulder.

  “I was … I was walking and I ended up here.” Which isn’t as pathetic as it sounds. Probably.

  “Uh huh.” Rachel unlocks the driver side door and gets in, immediately starts the car. The passenger-side window slides down just enough for me to hear, “Now that you’re here, are you staying or are you going?”

  I get in.

  “You don’t teach here, do you?”

  “Public school. Four, five, and six.” We blast out of the parking lot and I wait for the sound of spitting gravel that never arrives. “Would it be so surprising if I did?”

  “No.” Yes. Rachel was a CCI anomaly—offspring of parents with money who was neither beautiful nor brainy. Until now, apparently.

  “Where to today?”

  “Home, I suppose.”

  “You mean your parents’ house?”

  “Right. My parents’ house.”

  The surrounding houses and the Chatham Cultural Centre and the lone variety store where we used to shoplift during lunch period: nothing has changed. Unlike at home—real home, Toronto—where sometimes you’ll be in a part of the city you haven’t visited for only a few months and an entire building will have vanished, the steel skeleton of another one already spearing the sky.

  “And that would be where, exactly?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Where do you want me to take you—where exactly do your parents live?”

  “Right. Sorry.” Particularly when drunk-slumped in the backseat of a cab, everyone is secretly disappointed that the driver needs directions. How pleasant to believe that it’s someone else’s job for a change to know where you’re supposed to be going.

  “Do you know where Tecumseh High School was? It’s a new subdivision near there.”

  “Buttercup Village?” Rachel registers my surprise. “I teach at Tecumseh Public School.”

  “Is that what the high school is now?” Rachel spares me a nod while concentrating on executing a perilous pass of an idling garbage truck.

  “I don’t know why,” I say, “but I thought it was a daycare centre.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Rachel says, garbage truck behind us and the Beemer back up to speed. “Sometimes that’s what it feels like to me too. And I work there.”

  Rachel always was witty. Back in high school, though, I was too young to know that the funnier a person is, the more intelligent they’re likely to be. Novels, human beings, films: it’s easy to forget that cosmic is just comic with a single extra letter. Fêted appearances to the phony contrary, a solemn book is a shallow book. Ditto pompous people and pretentious movies. Tragedy without comedy is like a brain without a heart.

  “So you must have been leaving school the time before, when you picked me up last time.”

  “What’s wrong? Don’t you believe in fate?”

  Instead of squirming, I smile, a squirmy smile; Rachel laughs.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “I don’t either.” And just to emphasize her point—either that, or to contradict it—she pats my thigh a couple of quick times.

  Both hands back on the steering wheel, “I heard about your wife,” Rachel says. “I can’t imagine what that must have felt like. What it feels like.”

  I look out the window. Duplex after duplex so similar in size, shape, and colour, if there weren’t black metal numbers hanging over the front doors, their occupants likely wouldn’t be able to tell which one was theirs. “Thanks,” I say.

  “For what?”

  “For not saying you’re sorry.”

  Everyone says they’re sorry—sorry to hear it, sorry for your loss, sorry for you. The griever can’t use sorry. And to say that you’re sorry says that you know what their hurt feels like, thereby making that hurt seem just a little a bit less theirs. The only thing the griever gets in return for his pain is the privilege of it being his pain and no one else’s. It hurts—it burns—but it’s his.

  Rachel doesn’t reply—the perfect reply—and we’re turning in at the gates of Buttercup Village. I feel like if I just sit here, just let her keep driving, she’ll pull right up into my parents’ driveway without another word from me. Because I don’t want to find out I’m wrong, “It’s right here, near the little park at the end, number two.”

  Buttercup Village wasn’t built for high-powered automobiles operated by exceptionally self-assured drivers with an inclination toward going much, much too fast, and I like the idea of every set of curtains and blinds along Dahlia Avenue blowing in the reverberating breeze in spite of every frozen-shut window, every irate home owner punching in the last desperate digit of 911.

  “Okay, good to see you—again—and take care of yourself, okay?” No awkward goodbye, no pretend promise to stay in touch, no final farewell pat on the thigh. Excellent. Just the way I want it: easy and honest. Excellent. Not even one friendly tap. Not one.

  I’m on the front step when I turn around at the roar coming down the street—Rachel, in reverse, travelling just as fast backward as when she left.

  “There’s a meeting tomorrow night at CCI about the closing. It’s going to be pretty important. From seven until about nine. Some of us usually go for a drink afterward. You should come.”

  And then she’s gone again.

  * * *

  I call Uncle Donny without telling him what I know and decide to wait for him on the front porch. In part, because I don’t want to waste any time interrogating him; in part, because the freezing breeze might help cool off my baking brain. Just then a fat man in a white snowsuit and black wrap-around sunglasses too small for his flabby, wind-burnt face zips by the house, on a tiny, child-sized motorbike, the screech of the bike’s buzz saw motor polluting the air almost as much as the clouds of smoke trailing behind. He looks like a circus midget who’s lost his costume and make-up privileges and turned to steroids and corndogs in consolation. I almost don’t believe he was there until, once around the block, he passes me again, joylessly staring straight ahead down the empty street.

  “Spring can’t be far off now. The goggly-eyed, two-wheeled thunder bum has made his glorious return.”

  The girl from the park, in the park—I hadn’t noticed. Probably because it’s the first time I’ve seen her in the daylight. “School holiday?” I call from my porch.

  “I’m taking a mental health day.”

  The phone and iPod are laid out beside her on the bench, an unlit joint between her lips. “I can see that,” I say.

  “You know what they say: ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”

  “Right.”

  Its apparent uselessness to me as a conversation starter and sustainer aside, weed is no different from any other drug, whether it’s the government-taxed, over-the-counter variety or the kind you can only get from a guy named Bubba who lives in his mother’s basement: booze or drugs or any combination thereof are for when the day is done, the shade of a cooling consciousness best enjoyed only after first overheating one’s head in the busy glare of the day. Shade without light is invisible, isn’t anything. Beware of not anything. But what the hell, I’ve got enough problems keeping my own train on the track. Choo choo to you, then, my teenage friend, and here’s hoping you eventually make it to the station safe and on time and with the majority of your brain cells intact.

  The fat man on the mini-bike chugs past us again, his knees nearly at his chin; it takes a moment for one’s ears to adjust to the after-assault quiet. Once they do, “So was that your wife or something?” the girl says.

  “My wife?”

  “The BMW that dropped you off. Was that her driving?” The joint is out of her mouth now and in her hand, still unlit.


  “No, that was”—yes, that was what, exactly?—“a friend,” I decide. Deciding even that somehow sounds salacious, “She’s involved in the campaign to keep CCI open. You should be thankful that people like her are working so hard to help keep your school from closing.”

  “It’s not my school.”

  “You go there, don’t you?”

  “For, like, five more months.”

  “Well, without people like her there won’t be many more months for anyone.”

  “Whatever.” The girl picks up her phone and looks at it as if she’s expecting it to ring. It doesn’t. “Does your wife know about your friend? Your wife—she’s back in Toronto, right?”

  “My wife is dead,” I say.

  The girl looks up from her phone. “Oh.”

  I don’t say anything else, let her smutty smear hang in the air between us like a bad smell no one wants to own up to. She puts down the phone and lights up the joint.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  Here we go again, that word, that same worthless word. “Don’t be. It wasn’t your car that killed her.”

  “I mean I’m sorry for implying that you … you know. I mean, I saw your wedding ring, so I just … ” The girl stubs out the just-lit joint on the bench with a quick, single stab and grabs her phone and iPod. She keeps her eyes on her running shoes all the way across the park.

  “My name’s Sam,” I say.

  The girl slows down, but doesn’t stop her retreat home. By the time she gets to the street, though, the fat man is blasting past again, keeping her on the curb. She waves away a swirl of black exhaust but can’t help coughing, a half-and-half mix of hacking and laughing eventually taking its place. I can’t help laughing too.

  “Samantha,” the girl manages, again without looking my way.

  “Hello, Samantha,” I say.

  “Hello, Sam.”

  * * *

  No one visiting room #131 is self-conscious about talking to themselves. That’s one of the best things about dad sharing a room with three other residents. At first, I was opposed—nothing too good for my father, only the priciest private room will do—but once we actually got him moved into Thames View I was reminded once again how what is normal and nice is what is happening to you right now. We all talk to ourselves in room #131. We all pretend to varying degrees that our loved one is listening and is interested and is happy that we’re here. Make believe is so much easier when everyone else is doing it too. Alzheimer’s is lonely enough; a silent, solitary room isn’t what the Alzheimer sufferer needs. Isn’t what his family needs, either.

  And so what if it isn’t true? I didn’t say it was true—I said it was nice. And everyone in room #131 can use all of the nice they can get. I can use all of the nice I can get. Particularly after the conversation I finally had with Uncle Donny.

  “You thought that the government would pay for it.”

  “I told you, just until I could win back what I lost.”

  “Win back fifteen thousand dollars. Which means that you lost fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “Give or take.”

  “Give or take? You’re a seventy-four year old retired factory worker from International Harvester on a fixed income and all of a sudden it’s ‘fifteen thousand dollars, give or take.’ Since when did you become the Cincinnati Kid? ”

  “I don’t know how it happened. I really don’t. After I retired, I guess I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. And at first it wasn’t that much—just Pro-Line mostly, usually no more than fifty bucks a week, a hundred at most—but then it got out of hand. I guess I got in over my head.”

  “Believe me, you were in over your head before you placed your first bet. Way over.”

  “You’ve got to understand, I didn’t mean to get anyone else involved in this. I thought that the government would help us out until I could get back what I lost.”

  “You thought that until you won back fifteen thousand dollars in gambling debts the government was going to step in and pay Dad’s bills.”

  “Now you’re not even listening, now you’re just repeating what I’m saying.”

  “No, I’m just trying to understand how you could be so goddamn stupid.”

  “A man works as hard as your father did his whole life, paying into the system his whole life, you’d think there might be a little something somewhere to help a guy out when he needs a helping hand.”

  “There is. They’re called pensions. You know: those things of his that you stole.”

  “You keep calling it that doesn’t make it true, you know.”

  “What would you call signing his cheques and cashing them in and pissing them away on gambling debts?”

  “Not just that. Not just that. I got my roof fixed too.”

  “Sorry, my mistake. Gambling debts and home renovations.”

  “So now you’re saying I don’t deserve to have a roof over my head that doesn’t leak.”

  “This isn’t about you. That’s the part of this you don’t seem to understand. This is about my father.”

  “He’s not just your dad, you know. He’s my brother.”

  “Your brother that you robbed blind.”

  “That’s not right, that’s not right for you to say that.”

  “Well, don’t worry, I won’t be saying it again. Just like you’re not going to be visiting him again.”

  “It’s a free country. You can’t stop me from visiting my own brother.”

  “It won’t be free for you for very much longer if I tell the police what you managed to pull off. I don’t want you even coming near Thames View. And if I find out that you have, you’re going to be placing all future bets from behind bars.”

  “What I’ve got—it’s a disease, you know.”

  “How is it that whenever somebody screws somebody else around it’s always because they have a disease, but the entire time they were busy doing it, it was nobody else’s business but their own?”

  “I’m getting help with my addiction at Chatham Mental Health now. I haven’t played Pro-Line or placed a bet over the phone in two days. I even got rid of my cell phone.”

  “Two days. Congratulations. Maybe Dad’s cheques will be safe until the end of the month.”

  “Damn it, I told you, that’s all over now.”

  “Well, you got that part right, anyway.”

  “Which part?”

  “The part about it being all over.”

  Chapter Six

  I can walk from the nursing home to the bar.

  The bar, the Montreal House, was here when my dad was a young man; the nursing home—under its older name and function—as well. Before the developers and their bullying bulldozers ate up the farm land and shat back the shiny piles of surrounding suburbs in their place, Chatham existed for the human beings who erected it. People once-upon-a-time really did walk to the store on the corner and ran to the neighbourhood baseball field and meandered to the school just on the other side of the bridge. I walk across the ice-glazed parking lots of a carpet wholesaler, a hot-tub installer, and a lube and oil-change garage, careful not to step onto the road, a lone pedestrian just an overgrown squirrel too goddamn stupid to own a car.

  Of course, if the world ran on reason—and if sane social planning was as common as greed, stupidity, and sloth—no double-digit-an-hour-paying factory would have hired my grade-nine-dropout father to help quench the country’s car lust and I would probably be—at best—a second-generation custodian whose only notable life experience outside Chatham city limits would probably have been something akin to an endlessly-recalled weekend in my early-twenties spent attending Wrestlemania at the Pontiac Silverdome in Detroit in the late-eighties, that long ago golden age when the name Hulk Hogan still meant something and Bon Jovi owned the airwaves. This is called irony. Employed in
literature, it is quite often illuminating, if not for the characters, then at least for the reader. Unfortunately, this is freezing night-time February in Chatham, Ontario. The implication is obvious.

  Inside the Montreal House there’s no sign of Steady Eddie, who I’d agreed to meet here, but it’s one more Friday night and everyone is drunk and intent upon getting much, much drunker, and that’s all right because it’s Friday night, the lie that keeps the entire working world spinning on its bone-weary axis. Give us this day our weekly whoop-up and let us forgive ourselves for wasting our lives, as we forgive those who have wasted our lives against us. And lead us not into the drunk tank tonight, but deliver us from the evil of Monday morning, forever and ever Monday morning, all men.

  “Sammy!”

  Steady Eddie is the only person who calls me Sammy, and then only when he’s pissed. I push my way to the rear of the bar, toward where the washroom is. The Men’s washroom. The Women’s is located in the other room, in what was once the ladies’ section of the Montreal House, at one time thoughtfully outfitted with not only its very own restroom facilities but a separate entrance as well, bygone hallmarks of a kinder, simpler, even more ignorant age. Besides the usual work-week-done revelers, tonight the place is crowded with men’s rec-league hockey teams guzzling pitchers of beer and telling bad jokes, but come springtime there’ll be just as many softball-playing women doing their own post-game imbibing while repeating many of these very same ha-ha’s. No one ever said progress had to be pretty.

  “Get your butt over here,” Eddie says, dragging a chair from a nearby table by its back legs. Once we’re both settled he grabs one of the three plastic pitchers and pours a glass foamy full, pushes it in front of me.

  “You know Dougie Unger and Kevin Wright and Billy Rankin, don’t you?” Eddie knows everyone in Chatham—even in high-school we used to call him “The Mayor”—but the guys he works with and plays weekend hockey with aren’t even names without faces for me, the days of my being friends with His Honour Steady Eddie meaning that all the world was my friend, too, long gone the same day I graduated to university, Eddie to the assembly line.