The Ambassador of What

by Adrian Michael Kelly

  I nearly told him Napanee, but pushed my luck.

  Belleville.

  Like heavy metal?

  I said, Fuckin eh.

  He cranked up Ride the Lightning. H-A-T-E, his right-hand knuckles said. I looked for a seat belt. He yelled, It’s broke, and stomped the gas. At ninety clicks, the Pony shook. He went woo-woo like Indians, and when he laughed, I saw his gums, the pits and ulcerations.

  What’s your name?

  I told him one.

  He whapped his chest.

  Wade.

  A black knight with a battle-axe was vivid on his bicep.

  I said, Frank Frazetta?

  He said, Fuckin rights, and we shook like bikers.

  Smoke?

  I said, Sure.

  They were Export ‘A.’ The Greens. It was like inhaling a shotgun blast.

  He said, You all right?

  Yeah.

  I watched a blur of 401 between my aching legs. He jerked his thumb toward the back.

  I got chicken. Have some.

  The bag was behind his seat. It was Mary Brown’s.

  He said, Take the breast.

  Sure?

  Yeah. I like the leg.

  The box was warm in my hands, and it came with taters. He turned off the stereo.

  You sure you’re all right?

  I said my dad was pretty sick.

  Shoulda fuckin told me. This cunt’ll do one-forty.

  ~

  I think he would have driven me the whole way if I asked. But amputated feet, my windshield-shredded face—I kept on seeing these—and wreckage, jaws of life. A friend is meeting me, I said. At the Quinte Mall. He wished me luck with my old man.

  I watched him pull a U-ey, then turned and started humping it up Highway 62. A dead cat lay on its side in the ditch. Toward it hopped a crow.

  I ran another hundred yards. Here came an eighteen-wheeler. I made plenty of room for it, but the driver grinned and signalled me.

  Where you go?

  Glanisburgh.

  This is luck. I go there.

  He was a small and pointy man with bristly ginger hair. In his close-together eyes, happy devils danced.

  Thanks for this, I said.

  Is no problem for me.

  He got the big truck rolling and pointed at a gym bag on the seat between us.

  Towel, he said.

  Sorry.

  What can you do? Shitty day.

  I dried my hair and face and neck. The cab was warm and very clean.

  He said, You live Glanisburgh?

  Grew up there. Kingston now.

  I deliver IGA.

  In Glanisburgh? There isn’t one.

  MacMillan Family IGA.

  Since when?

  I don’t know. For me, always.

  They used to be independent. Back when I worked there.

  Now you are the student?

  I said, Supposed to be.

  Mathematic? Physic?

  No, I said. English.

  Shakespeare, Milton, Hardy.

  Yeah, all of that.

  Who is your prefer?

  I don’t know. It changes. I guess Samuel Beckett.

  En Attendant Godot! he said. Do you speak the French?

  A bit.

  Moi, je m’appelle Zibby.

  That short for Zbigniew?

  Your pronounce is good.

  Where are you from?

  Poland.

  I mean which part.

  Krakow.

  Beautiful, I said.

  Yes. You go there?

  No. I’ve seen pictures.

  He nodded and didn’t speak again until we passed Oak Hills. Then he asked if I like Bach. The only Bach I had ever heard was in a film about Glenn Gould, but I told him yes. He pushed a cassette into the slot, and turned it up.

  Cello?

  My instrument, he said.

  You can play this?

  He looked along the road, and shrugged.

  Poland, I am cello. Canada, drive truck.

  Adrenaline, cortisol, tension in the neck: getting close to Glanisburgh always threw my panic switch, but the music calmed me some, and we shared his Thermos, a berry-flavoured tea.

  ~

  Pelting past St. Andrew’s church I pitched and fell in slush. Got up dripping rage. Every time I left this town, I swore it was my last. Tight-lipped, pale, pinched people. The pool hall. Giant Tiger. My father had left Scotland for its dull, dull-witted mimicry.

  He lived in an addition on the back of a two-storey red-brick house. White vinyl siding. A semi-covered stoop. The yellow-orange bowl was there. It brimmed with dirty melt, which I flung beneath the spruce. For a while, I stared at the chewed-through lead, still dangling from the clothesline, and swallowed a wad of clog in my throat. He may as well have starved the thing. Huskies need to run. I took a breath and squared myself. The heart in me was thumping. At the least I could wash and dry my clothes. If his electric wasn’t cut off. A decent bite to eat.

  He was never one to lock the door. I wrenched and shoved, knocked and called. Checked beneath his mat. Then in his glutted mailbox. He still subscribed to Runner’s World. Bills said Final Notice. Round the back I made slush balls, splatted his bedroom window. A crowbar in the back of his van, but it was shut up tight. Out front, I banged on his landlady’s door. Rang the bell. A curtain twitched. I think it twitched. Anyone looking out would have seen a soggy, frantic, lanky man yelling Hello and Help me and, finally, You fuck. I looked up and down the empty street. An impotence of wet-black trees. Drab hills in the distance. It put a grim resolve in me. A slablike sense of duty.

  Back at his stoop, I used a stone to brace the screen wide open and then stepped back ten feet or so. In Cyprus, he and his section had raided suspect homes. His job was the door, and on many a rum-stoked night, he described how. Get a running start. Lean into the kick. You want your weight behind it. Plant the heel of your boot as close to the lock as possible. Think through the door.

  Wood and metal pieces flew, hit the fridge, and fell. I gaped at my achievement—the busted hinge, the splintered jamb—and for a moment I was proud, felt the height and weight of me. Then I looked around.

  A stack of Molson Ex in twelves climbed the side of his grungy stove. Forties of amber rum, all but one of them empty, stood amidst a slew of mail on the kitchen table. Squished tea bags and spare-rib bones brimmed his stinking garbage bin. A slaw of vomit glistened on a white spaghetti strainer in the piled, bristling sink. Standing there, I called to him. Enormous silence answered. I checked the living room. Over in the corner, aged grey turds crumbled on the shag.

  At the foot of the stairs, I called again and willed him to appear, shaved and dressed, suitcase in hand, berating the filthy state of me. He did not appear, and I went up one stair at a time, calling him still, feebly. His bedroom door was shut. I stood before it shaking. Graphic scenes assailed me. Belt. Or borrowed sawed-off. His finely stropped straight razor. One more time I called him, and went in like I used to, as though it were Sunday morning, and I had made him his cup of tea. The room was dark. I felt for a switch.

  Amidst a thrown-off twist of sheets, he lay naked on his back, head leaning slightly this way, bottom dentures jutting. He was ashen, and his eyes had shut. Residue glazed his chin. He knew all the docs in town. To get a scrip would be easy.

  I honestly thought to thump him. Thick, dull thump of stiff dead flesh. Instead, I blubbered and knelt at his feet, held them, and rubbed his calluses. Breath crackled in his throat. I recoiled and smacked my head against the windowsill. Dad, I said. His eyelid twitched. Scrambling up, I found his pulse. Dad, can you hear me? Both his eyelids fluttered. I slapped his stubbled face. He made a small and strangled sound. Give us your teeth, I said, working
them out and setting them by Glencoe on his nightstand. Have you taken something? Dad, it’s me. Listen. His eyes opened, blankly stared, then consciousness filtered into them, and he worked his shrunken mouth. Son. I got hold of a wrist and pulled. Up he came. Can you sit? He nodded, but barely, and tugged at the sheet, covering his groin, breathing shallow, fitful breaths, his greasy, grizzled hair deranged. Hard men once had feared him. He managed a look at me.

  What is it you’re doin home?

  You called me. Twice. Do you not remember?

  I watched his rum-sluggish circuitry work.

  Mum, was all he said.

  I’m sorry, Dad. I am.

  We sat for a while.

  Time is it?

  Don’t know, I said. Afternoon.

  Monday.

  No Dad. Tuesday.

  I watched the wobbly up-and-down of his knobby Adam’s apple.

  Do you need to be sick?

  No.

  He turned his head away.

  I said, Can you manage tea?

  His voice cracked. Good idea.

  I made room in the wretched sink and got the kettle on. A stain on his sofa smelt of piss. I sat on the floor at this end of the coffee table strewn with old photographs, most of me and the dog, a few of Dad and Nana. I hadn’t known her well, and my American Poetry midterm was at nine tomorrow. I needed to be fresh and have exact quotations at my fingertips. Upstairs, the toilet seat slapped against the tank, and Dad fell to his knees. He would not be having tea. I unplugged the kettle and got stuck in on clean-up, reciting lines from Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Dog shit powdered in my grasp.

  Private Function

  In her cramped Alberta kitchen, Janice said, “Serviettes,” said it flatly, to herself, opening a cupboard. I watched her from a La-Z-Boy in the sitting room. She had taken up swimming, and was thinking of a mini-tri in B.C. in the spring. To me, she looked less fit than wiry and bleached. Most of the colour in her face had been brush applied. Greenish hues iridesced in her split and frizzy highlights. I un-reclined the chair and said, “Tell me what to do.” She answered in the same flat voice. “You could hit my husband.”

  Over on the chesterfield, Tim in mesomorphic ease turned a page of Water Ski. “Barefoot boom,” was all he said, then his semivacant gaze drifted back to the bigscreen Sony, where the puzzle was a phrase, and Vanna turned an M. Beth, meanwhile, my youngest niece, eight years old next month, sat amidst the Hoover marks, making Ken and Barbie dolls coo in French immersion. I looked at the VCR—7:23. A bilge of lasagna and boxed cab sauv shifted in my belly. Janice said, “Dessert forks,” and nine-year-old Glenny, bigger than most kids her age, lolloped down the hall. Clapping the cordless back in its base, she solved the Wheel of Fortune puzzle, “‘X MARKS THE SPOT’!” at a single glance, then told Tim, “Go help Mom.” He thumbed the remote, hard. Beth poked POWER on the set, and mimed retardation.

  “Change the thtoopid battery.”

  “Why don’t you be nice?”

  “Told you a thousand times.”

  Further fracas happened, and Janice bared her teeth. “COULD we please PRETEND?”

  I fucked off to the big front room. It was hardly ever used, though they put the tree there, and I took some Wish Book solace in its lovely, blinking glow. Maybe an easeful minute passed. I forgot my troubled stomach. Then behind me Beth said, “Boo,” and ran to the picture window, where she whacked the hanging blinds apart.

  Janice called, “Them?”

  Beth said, “Yep,” and grinned at me in headlight glare.

  I said, “Go away.”

  She sneered at me. “My house.”

  I tried again. “Please.”

  On her way by, she made a fist and thumped my upper leg, but I was alone again and peered between the blinds. A new-looking Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency Brougham had come to a stop by the snow-covered curb. Mum went round to the driver side and helped him out, steadied him. I couldn’t really see his face (he wore a winter trilby, and his head was down) but he walked like what he was: an old and brittle man. Also my next stepdad. His name was Jack DeWitt.

  ~

  Back in the sitting room, Tim knelt at the fireplace and lit an artificial log. Cold air had wafted in from the vestibule, where Janice and the girls were greeting Mum and Jack. I stayed out of sight, listening to their voices.

  “New coat, Mum?”

  “Marks and Sparks. How are my little loves?”

  “Fine, Grandma. You look nice.”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  “JACK,” said Janice. “How are YOU?”

  “Minus twenty-eight.”

  “She’s asking how you ARE,” said Mum.

  Jack said, “Oldsmobile.”

  Tim saw me grimace. “Told you so,” he said.

  Clutching a double handful each of Devon butter toffees, Beth and Glenny scampered up the set of stairs from the vestibule, and gleamed with canny schadenfreude as soon as they saw my fallen face. I feigned nonchalance, an adult self-sufficiency, but wanted to wound the little shits. Giggle, giggle, giggle. “Girls, cool it,” Tim said, spooning Suisse Mocha mix into Christmas mugs. The kettle had just boiled. I said, “Bailey’s—lots in mine,” and Mum made her entrance, smelling of Chanel.

  I had seen her four times in sixteen years and often lived as though she were dead. Now here she was, incontrovertible, opening her arms. Maybe she felt the normal things. Filial love, all that. Maybe I did too. Anyway, I kissed her cheek and told her she looked smashing. That much was true. Mum’s thing for kitsch—slasher films, bingo halls, Foody Goody, Vegas—did not extend to fashion. She had on a matching black jacket and skirt, and the latest do was high-glam, short and dyed a brassy blond.

  “You’ve put on weight,” she said.

  Tim gripped my bicep. “All that iron he’s been pumpin. Special coffee, Viv?”

  “Love one, thanks. I’m frozen.”

  “What about your man?”

  “A glass of tepid water, Tim.” She turned toward the vestibule “JACK? Are you coming?”

  Like a cheery physiotherapist, Janice said, “Almost there!”

  I looked at Beth and Glenny, their eyes alight with feral glee, and then he eked into the room, thin as ethnic cleansing. Three stairs had walloped him. He stood sag-mouthed and wheezing. Snot glazed the middle of his grizzled little mustache. His gunky eyes bulged at me.

  Mum said, “Darling, this is my SON.”

  His bony hand still had some grip, and he said, “It’s an HONOUR,” as though I were an earl, or some kind of dignitary, a top hat on whose behalf he had sailed to far-flung tropics, returning a ravaged wreck of a man, still somehow in thrall to dank codes of honour. It baffled me, but I felt myself adopting the same bizarre solemnity, the same shrinking deference.

  “Sir,” I said, hand on heart, “the honour is all MINE.”

  Janice gaped at this exchange. Desperately, I looked to her. She said in her having-visitors voice, “Who’s having cake?”

  ~

  Though I sat as far away from Jack as the room allowed, up at the end of the chesterfield, closest to the hall, I couldn’t help but look at him, like carnage on a highway. Throughout ice-breaking chit-chat, he sat there barely breathing, hand trembling to and fro between his blazer pocket and his bony, jutting knee. Glenny and Beth, cross-legged on the floor a few feet in front of me, nudged each other, loving this. Janice gave them a cutting look, then asked Mum if she and Jack had found a mobile home yet.

  “We have,” said Mum. “A double-wide.” She looked at Jack. “Our lot as well.”

  He said, “Eh?”

  “Our lovely LOT.”

  He grunted something like a yes and dragged a hanky from his pants.

  Janice leaned toward him. “Will you miss the LODGE?”

  He gave his snoot a long we
t honk, nodded, and said, “Good people.”

  “Loves his euchre,” Mum said, opening her purse.

  Jack came to sudden life, producing as if by magic a silver-plated Zippo. After lighting Mum’s Dunhill, he took from his shirt pocket a pack of Export ‘A’—Green. I had smoked a Green once. It almost made me puke, but Jack puffed away like a bogman Bond, and Mum said to me, “How is school, dear?”

  “Between bad and awful.”

  She tutted and turned to Jack. “He won a scholarship.”

  “What’s that?”

  “SCHOLARSHIP.”

  “Mum.”

  “Well, you did.”

  Looking at me, Jack said, “Not much into fiction.”

  “You’d fit right in at grad school.”

  “Like the Westerns, though. Louis L’Amour, ever read him?”

  By way of a little bridge-building, I said, “Sure,” and really ought to have left it there, but I was prone in those days to nervous logorrhea, and it overtook me now. I knew dick about Louis L’Amour, but started in on how he was an underrated master, a poet of the cowboy code. I quoted Waldo Emerson and Frederick Jackson Turner. Tim was getting sleepy. I gassed on anyway: symbology of the horse, desert mythopoeia. My armpits were swampy. My hairline itched, my whole hot face. When at last I stopped, no one said a thing. I could hear the Duraflame log hissing in its sheath of burn and thought I might barf, or shit my pants, maybe both at once.

  Rigid with false aplomb, I fled to the washroom, and cringed on the can. All I produced was a fetid fart. This undigested mess in me. I needed Tums or Rolaids, maybe an Alka-Seltzer, and quietly ransacked drawers. In the last one I tried, to the left of the sink, a bottle of prescription pills rolled from the back and clicked against the hairdryer, its label facing up.

  I had seen the word Prozac only once, on the cover of Time or Newsweek, and if someone said depression, I still thought first of Roosevelt, but knew what people meant. Apparently, Janice had it. The prescription was for her.

  I picked up the bottle and rattled it and peered through its side. Then I popped the safety cap and shook a blue-green capsule into my clammy palm.

  When I rejoined the others in the sitting room, conversation carried on as though I hadn’t made an ass of myself, and the pill progressed abrasively down my cloggy throat.