by Grant Buday
Cyril and Paul watched their mother hurry in and take the glass and return a minute later with a fresh one.
“So what do you think, Paul? Pharmacy?”
Cyril braced himself for a two-on-one attack.
“I don’t know if that’s quite where Cyril’s strengths lie,” Paul said, suddenly judicious.
“Is that right?” Darrel was disappointed at not finding an instant ally, but intrigued as well.
Cyril was interested—and fearful—of learning where, in Paul’s opinion, his strengths lay. He could hear the laughter if he told them he was intending to go to art school. Both Darrel and Paul were looking at him. To his own surprise he stated: “Maybe I’ll join the navy.”
“The navy?” Cyril’s mother had been listening from the kitchen.
“Why not?” he asked, suddenly liking the sound of it. Maybe it would involve travel to tropical ports. Hadn’t Gauguin gone to Tahiti? If Connie could run off why not him?
“Well, you get seasick for one thing,” his mother said.
Paul was laughing. “He threw up on the ferry to Victoria.”
Cyril was scalded. They’d boarded the boat in the downtown harbour and halfway across the strait he was vomiting.
Darrel liked what he was hearing. The troops were back in order. “Maybe the army, eh bub. Keep your feet on the ground.”
“Ginger’s good for motion sickness,” offered Della.
They were on dessert when his mother asked if he’d heard from Connie, as if she was only off on a bit of a jaunt. He considered lying then just shook his head.
“No big movie contracts?” enquired Darrel.
His mother had blabbed. He felt invaded and betrayed, and for the rest of the meal stayed silent.
“She’s waiting for the right role,” said Paul. “The Queen of Kowloon.”
“Sounds like a ship,” said Darrel.
“Yeah, a laundry boat.”
“Maybe her ship will come in,” said the ever optimistic Della. They all looked at her, not sure if she was witty or naive. Cyril wondered why she’d married Paul.
Later that evening, when Darrel was gone, Paul directed Cyril downstairs into the basement for a few words. They leaned against the old workbench, arms crossed, under the bare bulb.
“I’ve been doing a little research on Mr Darrel Stavrik,” said Paul. “Looked through the Edmonton directory then made a few calls.” His smile would have terrified Cyril in any other circumstances, but now he leaned forward eager to hear what he’d dug up. “Bugger has a wife and five kids.”
“Five?”
“Five.”
Being married was bad enough, having a kid was bad enough, but five of them? “The bastard.”
“I’d love to see him get audited,” said Paul, who looked almost dreamy at the thought of Darrel sweating before an Inquisition of Accountants. Cyril could see Paul seated at a high bench in black robes and a ruffled collar glowering ominously as he aimed an accusing finer. “Could be time to dial a few numbers.”
At that moment Cyril admired his older brother. Rare were the times they were on the same side but this was one and he was proud.
“Still, mom likes him,” admitted Paul, sobering.
“She’s changing,” said Cyril. “It’s like she’s not even her anymore.”
“Maybe she’s glad not to be her anymore,” said Della, coming down the steps. She had a long face and long teeth, a thin nose between big eyes, and straight brown hair through which her ears poked, though for all this she was not unattractive. She looked to Cyril like some sort of doll fashioned from sticks and straw.
“Do you like him?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “Your mother does and that’s what counts.”
Cyril genuinely liked Della, yet her relentless reasonableness was too much. “He’s pushy.”
Della leaned to look at Cyril’s sketch of Connie. She was gazing forthrightly out from the paper as if committing Cyril to memory, as if Connie was doing the portrait, not Cyril. “Forget the Navy,” said Della. “Go to art school.” Before this became a general topic of discussion—and inevitably ridicule—she turned to Paul and reminded him she had the early shift tomorrow.
When Paul and Della were gone Cyril’s mother asked him to sit down.
He knew what was coming.
“Darrel’s only trying to help.”
“I don’t want his help.”
“You’ll be moving out some day and I’ll be on my own. I’m thinking of the future. My future.”
His heart clenched and for the first time he saw her as she saw herself: a forty-four-year-old widow about to be abandoned. Widow. What a desolate word. Yet he could not accept Darrel living here in the house Cyril had lived all his life, where his memories resided. Darrel, King of the Manor. No. It was wrong.
The following Sunday, Cyril waited for Paul to drop the bomb and announce the news of Darrel’s other family. They went through the roast beef and the apple pie then the coffee and he still hadn’t raised the subject. Cyril caught Paul’s eye and saw that he was playing innocent. Cyril suspected that Della had put a gag order on him. Cyril dove in, “So, Darrel, how’s the family? In Edmonton.”
“They’re doing just fine,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”
“Your wife?” repeated Cyril.
“Fine as far as I know.”
Their mother was smiling, perfectly at ease dating a married man with five children.
“You don’t have to like him,” she said later.
“He’s always calling me bub.”
“Is just his way.”
“I don’t like his way.”
“He’s willing to put you through university.”
“Who said I’m going to university?”
“Then trade school.”
“Why him?”
“I should sit home alone?”
“He’s married.”
“She left him.”
“He’s got kids.”
“So do I.”
Why could he never win an argument with her? It was as if he was forever five years old. The row of Virgin Marys on the mantel seemed to be smirking. He risked the question he feared the most: “Are you going to marry him?”
He saw lament and anger and exhaustion on her face; worst of all he saw that he was boring her.
All that week Cyril practised aiming Gilbert’s pistol, one eye closed, right hand supported by his left, breath smooth and slow and even. “Firm the shoulder and exhale when you squeeze the trigger.” His dad had taught him these basics using Cyril’s six-shooter cap gun. He and his dad had often played guns in the basement, ducking in and around the furnace and the stacked boxes. His dad never lasted long in the game, saying that the snap-snap-snap of the caps gave him a headache, and it was only years later that Cyril realized it was more than the mere noise that caused him to shut his eyes and rub his temples and withdraw to the bedroom and shut the door.
Darrel was surprised but genial the Saturday Cyril showed up at his apartment. He got him a stubby of Black Label, half of which Cyril drank in one chug, Darrel nodding as if impressed by such drinking bravado. The place smelled of coffee and cigarettes. On the wall above the couch hung a landscape of horses running away over hills.
“So what’s up, bub?”
Cyril belched and said, “Leave my mother alone,” then belched again.
Darrel relaxed on the couch and lit up a smoke. “Sit down.”
Cyril shook his head.
Darrel puffed reflectively. “You really hate me, huh?”
The quiet wonder in Darrel’s voice made Cyril reflect. Paul hated him, or often resented his youth and health with a hate-like intensity, and now he couldn’t help feeling a little bad at hurting Darrel’s feelings. “I just want you to leave her alone.”
“I don’t think she wants me to leave her alone. Have you considered that?”
Cyril gulped the rest of the beer and reached down and carefully set the bottle o
n the coffee table. As a matter of fact he had considered that—he just refused to accept it.
“You want another one of those?”
“No.” He’d gulped too fast and some of the beer was rising back up his nose. He fought not to cough.
“Your mother wants to forget it all. The old country, the war, the past, the whole shootin’ match.” Darrel gestured dismissively. “Time to move on. And definitely time to move out of that house with the front row seat of the graveyard.”
So that was it. Erase his past, erase his father and take his mother and sell the house. Cyril pulled out the gun.
Darrel began to chuckle. He stretched out his short legs and crossed his ankles and got comfortable. Darrel was always getting comfy. “We could get along, you know. Ever consider that?”
He and Darrel, pals? Maybe catch a Lions game? Darrel might have connections and Cyril could meet the players, shake hands with Joe Kapp and Willie Fleming. Yet this too he couldn’t accept. Cyril aimed the pistol.
“You’re starting to bug me, kid.” Darrel flicked his cigarette hitting Cyril in the chest. He flinched but kept the pistol pointed and could see the butt smouldering on the hardwood. Unable to restrain himself he crushed it out with his toe.
Darrel sighed. He stood and tugged up his trousers. He was big-bellied but broad-shouldered and had burly forearms, an old, short, bald athlete. “Now you can hit the road and we’ll say no more about this or I can kick your can around the block.”
Cyril fought the impulse to obey, knowing that if he backed down now Darrel would be top dog forever. He kept the pistol steady.
“I’m getting bored, bub.”
“Don’t call me bub.”
“You’re bub until you start acting like an adult. Now swing your arse around and hop it on out the door before I tell mommy what you’ve been up to with your cap gun.”
Cyril exhaled and squeezed the trigger slowly. The bullet blasted the floor between Darrel’s stocking feet. Darrel went straight up, squeaking like a shot rat. A small giggle escaped Cyril’s mouth, then another burp.
“You dumb little fuck!” Darrel shrank back behind his Danish modern couch.
“Bang,” said Cyril, “you’re dead.” And blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.
Days passed while Cyril waited for the cops to show. They didn’t. His mother didn’t see Darrel that Friday, nor did Darrel show on Sunday. She didn’t say anything about it. Was she secretly relieved? Did she realize it was for the best? Cyril hadn’t told anyone what he’d done; he could scarcely believe it himself. When he’d returned the pistol Gilbert had noted the missing bullet and Cyril said he’d fired at a crow in the cemetery.
Another week passed. If Darrel had said anything to Cyril’s mother she was doing a good job of keeping it to herself. He watched for clues but she was unreadable; apparently she had interior rooms opening onto ever deeper rooms, where memories resided like refugees in a labyrinth. When Paul and Della took Cyril aside and asked what had become of Darrel he tried not looking shifty and said who knew, ask mom, and when Paul did just that she looked out the window at the cemetery and after a moment of silence, during which Cyril tensed in fear, she said, “He’s gone, like everyone else.”
Growing cocky with relief, Cyril resumed turning the tins of Chef Boyardee at the IGA so that entire rows looked to the right, or half the row looked to the right and half to the left, or he alternated stacking them upside down and right side up, prompting Norm to ask if he was a retard. Cyril crossed his eyes and said yes. Norm got Barnes, the manager, who regarded Cyril’s handiwork and after a moment’s cogitation asked if Cyril liked his job.
“Not really.” Dizzy at his own brazenness, he asked Barnes, “Do you like your job?”
Barnes had a crewcut, a belly that strained his white shirt, a five o’clock shadow that looked like iron filings, and yet was not unintelligent or utterly without a measure of charm. Cyril had often seen him joshing with customers, especially the ladies, who seemed to find him curiously engaging despite his pallor. Barnes barked a laugh and shook his head and said, “No one likes their job, kid. Except maybe Hughie Hefner. Stack ’em straight or quit.”
Barnes was perfectly at ease with his station in life, an ease which Cyril envied. That was the thing about adults, or most of them; even the dumbest seemed to have dealt with the issues of women and money and career. Produce Manager Norm spent his day spritzing lettuce and celery and yet he also had a wife and a kid and a house and—even Cyril had to admit—a sort of a life.
FIVE
CYRIL GRADUATED WITH a 2.5 Grade Point Average, his A+ in Art and his A in Phys. Ed. compensating for the C minuses in Math and Chemistry. His mother urged him to go for a plumbing apprenticeship but he didn’t like the idea of putting his arm down toilets or up pipes. She suggested electrician but the very thought of watts and volts and amps agitated his nerves. As for welding it was haunted. Carpentry, she said, and he shrugged meaning maybe, and then devoted the summer to a series of drawings for his art school application: eight postage stamps, two feet by three, of Stalin. In one Stalin was dancing like a dervish, arms out, head tilted, eyes shut, the cancellation mark functioning like lines of motion accentuating the sense of spinning, a detail about which he was rather proud even though it had been a lucky accident. In another he was sitting with his legs straight out, wearing a diaper, a gigantic infant biting the head off a man clenched like a lollipop in his fist. Some of the pictures were pencil and some were coloured chalk. He liked the dry quality of chalk because Stalin was a creature of sand and grit and dust, his soul smoke. The last drawing, as yet unfinished, was still on the easel. It showed a laughing Stalin on a swing, wearing baby shoes, kicking out his pudgy bare legs, bonnet on his head. It echoed a memory of being on a swing with his father pushing, one of the few times Cyril recalled his dad laughing loudly and without restraint.
That summer he went to see Moulin Rouge starring Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, fascinated by the crippled artist and his suicidal capacity for absinthe. He saw The Moon and Sixpence on TV and admired the expat painter Charles Strickland’s brazen drunk indifference to everything, including the man who wanted to buy his work. What confidence, what clarity, what perverse defiance. Then there was a film on Van Gogh in which he eats a tube of paint. Cyril had no desire to eat paint, but he envied those three men their focus and energy, their drive and direction; they knew who they were and where they were going and nothing was getting in their way. They did not merely accept their calling, they pursued it, ran it down like wolves. He found an autobiography by Salvador Dali, a man who was as eccentric as surrealism itself. In it Dali pours honey down his chest so he can study the flies that come to feed. One morning after his mother left for work and Cyril had a few hours before his shift at the IGA, he got the honey from the cupboard ready to do his own Salvador Dali. Unfortunately, it was creamed honey, solid. He carved some from the jar with a knife and smoothed it over his chest and lay back in bed with the window open. He heard lawn mowers and the opening and closing of hearse doors in the cemetery. Finally one fly came bumbling in and landed on him and got stuck, one wing whirring pathetically. Eventually another fly circled and got stuck, then a bee, then two more flies. Cyril watched them buzz and struggle. Now what? Was this Existential? He took a shower, still not quite sure what the crazy Spaniard was on about, and wondering if this lack of understanding was a lack of artistic vision.
With just a week to go before the art school entrance interview, Cyril came home from his shift at the IGA one evening and discovered all eight drawings missing. He found his mother watching TV.
“ . . . My drawings . . . ”
“They’re gone,” she said.
“I kind of noticed that. Where have they gone to?”
She shrugged and kept her eyes on Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. Cyril watched her watch, then abruptly started searching. The fireplace was clean. The pail under the sink was empty. He went out and looked in the garbage
can: nothing.
“Draw flowers or fruit,” she said when he came back in. “People like flowers and fruit. They put them on their walls. Do some nice sunflowers and I’ll buy them.”
Cyril searched the closets, the attic, behind the furnace. From downstairs he shouted up through the main floor. “I worked hard on those, ma!” He pounded back up the steps and into the living room.
On the TV screen the wooden dummy’s jaw clacked mockingly up and down. “Why do you have to keep him alive?” she asked.
“I’m going to miss the application deadline.”
“You know what he did.”
“Are pictures that powerful?”
“He starved us.”
Cyril was stymied. “I worked hard on them . . .” He heard how hollow his words sounded.
“Three million.”
“They were mine.”
She was wearing a black cardigan and smoking a cigarette—a habit she’d maintained after Darrel left—feet in their hen-feather slippers on the grey Formica coffee table next to the Province and a stack of Reader’s Digests. She turned back to the TV. “Better you get trade.”
“You hate me.”
“You are my son.”
“You still hate me.”
She turned her head slowly like a tank turret and aimed her gaze at him, her eyes wet but tearless, her voice steady. “I love you.”
“It’s revenge. You’re getting back at me.”
She swivelled her gaze back to the TV.
“I’ll draw them again.”
“Draw, don’t draw. Just don’t let me see.”
The interviewer frowned at the picture Cyril had drawn that very morning, torn from his sketchbook and mounted on poster board. The man took up another of the same subject, a be-robed owl whirling dervish-wise, wings out, head tipped, eyes closed. There was a copy of the giddy Stalin on a child’s swing, wearing a bonnet, a soother in his mouth. He’d intended to redo his entire Stalin series but was afraid his mother would destroy them again. He’d got onto owls for no other reason than that Gilbert had bought a stuffed one from the St. Vincent de Paul as a joke and named it Elvis.
