Kicking Tomorrow (40 page)

Major
bummer. Arriving last night, the house on the hill had been dark. He’d been forced to tear through the mosquito screen – Mendoza’s emergency entrance during lightning storms – dragging snow and mud over the carpet. “Hello-o,” he had called out, “is anybody ho-ome?” There was an artificial Xmas tree, beside it a menorah with all nine lamps burning, and a heap of gifts, all marked with his name.

In the living room now, with a stomach full of champagne and chocolate, wild with avarice, still hot with fever. He opened his gifts: sweaters, socks, a bottle-cutter kit, a
Stars on
’45 extended mix, a poster-sized all-dressed cheeseburger blueprint, and a book of David Hamilton photographs, which he immediately took upstairs.

Whoopee. Five minutes later he was down again, feeling pretty sore that no one had given him any
money
. He roamed the
room for anything else that might have been left, then raided the kitchen to make eggnog, grating orange rind and nutmeg into a jug, bitterly disappointed that Xmas was already over, with a full fallow year to wait before he’d be reaping again. The phone rang. It was Miriam on the line.

“Guess where
we
are, you big tool!”

“Arf arf. No need to rub it in.”

“We’re in a land where Dad says at least you can speak the language of your choice. Here, I’ll give him over.”

“Hi!”
Dad shouted down the line. “Robbie! How’ve you been? We missed you. We thought, perhaps you’d been arrested for speaking English in the street.”

“No…? I mean, not yet, I’ve escaped –”

“Just joking
, son.”

A silence followed, and now Mom’s voice. “We were so worried about you, darling! How
are
you? Actually, we were very worried. We never heard from you, and things have been so unpleasant. Did you read about that barber?”

“No…”

“In St. Henri. The one who’s calling the language laws
Nazi
laws. The thing’s got all out of proportion, don’t you think? Over a little sign.”

“Oh,
yeah,”
Robbie said. “I bet I know the one. Says,
PLAIN HAIRCUTS – NO NONSENSE
, right?”

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re keeping up with the news. Did you see it in the
Gazette?
What’s the latest?”

“See-what?”

“Well, his window was smashed when he wouldn’t take the sign down! And then somebody painted a swastika on his door…”

“That’d serve him right,” Robbie said, his bandaged fist stabbing his cinnamon stick in the air. “I mean, that would’ve been Ivy’s dad. The anti-Semite hypocrite.”

“Ivy’s
father? Darling! How
is
Ivy?”

“How would I know? I’m
sick
of her,” Robbie snapped. “Uh, we decided to take a rest from each other.”

“Poor darling, she really broke your heart. I can hear it.”

“Well, I’ve been handling it pretty well, I think. Both her parents are such straight arrows, y’know, so marriage with me was out of the question. And it was such a long time ago, fuck.”

“I’m so sorry. Anyway, have a merry Christmas, darling. We do miss you so very much. Will we see you when we get back?”

“If I see you,” Robbie replied, vacantly. The fumes of whisky and rum were overpowering. Chewing on some grains of nutmeg now, he remembers how he tried snorting some of this one sneaky afternoon last summer, but all he got was a sneezing fit, and a wicked headache.

He went to bed early, watching the moon over the trees. He made a high-pitched sound as he wept, similar to Mendoza when he used to need to go out. He asked himself how he could possibly have taken Dad’s joke seriously. And not known about Mr. Mills. How could he be so out of touch? First he had missed the election, the biggest thing to happen to the province in over a hundred years, and now this. He was seized with self-loathing. Was he
so
stupid? Was his life so completely unconnected with any teensy-weensy part of the real world? Was he even alive? Sure, he had been working hard on Hell’s Yells, but that seemed like a pathetically puny and irrelevant concept now. The rest of the time he had just jerked off. When he could have been part of something. It was all Rosie’s fault. Her understanding of politics was even vaguer than his. He heard in his hot head the closest they’d ever had to a discussion about current affairs: “I hate my thighs more than nuclear war,” she’d announced, standing nude, in front of her dressing-room mirror.

“It’s weird,” he’d said, trying to steer the conversation in a meaningful direction, “the way the word
regime
is used for military governments and also for diets.”

“Makes perfect sense to me,” she’d said. See. She was dumb. He needed to spend time with people who were better informed. It was time for a serious change.

When he returned to town a few nights later, Rosie had not only forgiven him for what she called their little tiff, but she’d moved all her belongings in, as well. She gave him little choice in the matter, as she’d already paid up his rent. Plus she’d cleaned up the entire apartment, filled the fridge with fresh vegetables, and done the laundry, so that was that. She had done a fair job, pinned all his sketches and paintings to the walls, turned his slashed mattress over, drawn the curtains, lit a dozen candles, thickened the air with frankincense, propped his disembowelled stereo on the chest of drawers, and put an Environments record of the Pacific ocean on endless repeat.

“I’ve been looking into
books
while you were gone,” she announced. “Since you won’t trust in the STARS, what about the
sympto-thermic
method? It’s more work than the ovulation method, and there’s more responsibility on the man, but it’s
mathematical
. First you take my vagina’s temperature… “

He gratefully crashed. He’d been wrong about her, maybe. He’d try harder with her after all. In stages, just holding hands at first, which is the way it should have been from the start. Plus, it occurred to him that having her here would also put off Queenie Graves; it was awkward that they had slept together, he thought, as the surf rolled up onto the sand; she didn’t seem at all desirable now, just dowdy and fat. Now the rhythm of the waves,
chewing on a distant shore, lulled and disoriented him; he awoke believing there was a magnificent storm outside. He pulled the blanket over his head and tried to wriggle back into the warm womb of sleep, only slowly realizing the rumble was made by infinite waves doing bellyflops on some inaccessible stretch of sun-bleached vinyl sand.

“Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goalposts of life!”

A Tuesday afternoon in January, and he was watching television from his bed. Rosie had bought him a secondhand
TV
from the Sally Ann for his nineteenth birthday. They were in the Information Age now, blasting from channel to channel, getting the global picture. Weird thing was, even with eight amazing channels of shit to choose from, Mom’s show wasn’t on in its regular time slot, or any time slot, it seemed. He couldn’t find her at all.

“That’s right, sinners! Put your hands on the screen, go on. You, yes you! Place your palm against mine and pray hard with me. Out, devils,
OUT!”

Rosie huffed indignantly at that, but Robbie obeyed with his good hand.

“If the faithful out in
Stupid-land
think the
static
on the screen is divine interference,” she said, “then the world is in even worse shape than I
imagined.”

“One day, Hell’s Yells are gonna be the house band on their own twenty-four-hour talk show,” Robbie said.

“Yeah!” Rosie said.
“The Atheist All-Star Revue!
With celebrities and comics and just plain ornery people – and hopefully even my favourite
weirdo –
coming on to testify about how
GREAT
their life has been since they shrugged off religion!”

“Hyulk hyulk
. And instead of this K-Mart Garden of Eden, with plastic shrubbery, it’ll be a realistic street scene. There’ll
be a toll-free number you can call for advice on how to live life in the Here and Now, how to channel your time and energy into Reality.”

“YES
! And instead of blackmailing old ladies with fear of
HELLFIRE
, anyone who mails in their devotional paraphernalia for the on-air
BONFIRE
, will actually be sent money in
return!”
The two of them were getting along like houses on fire, suddenly, and it felt queer. Life was short – he asked himself, was he investing precious time in the right relationship? On the one hand, how could he ever have been so stupid not to appreciate her charms and her smarts; on the other, was he being stupider now to think she was charming or smart at all. He really couldn’t tell. He didn’t know. He no longer knew himself – who was he to judge?

Two Tuesdays after that, or maybe three, a snowstorm was whipping up outside, fringing Eccelucci’s sumptuous lingerie with a lace of frost. Robbie sat up in bed and set his jaw, asking himself what Hell’s Yells could ever realistically accomplish. The rent on the equipment was up in a month. He drew the blanket up to his chin; now Rosie’s hip was bared and she moaned in her sleep. He had to force himself to care, to gently tuck her in; he was disgusted with her now, for one very good reason: without even knowing it, she had left a square of bum-wad in her asshole the night before; this morning her bottom barked, and he saw that it had fallen out amongst the sheets, shaped like a shitty shuttlecock, while she was still sleeping. He drank half a warm beer, felt his eyelids thicken, as the alcohol seeped in and the throbbing in his hand receded. He stared out the window to watch the snow fill the sky. A shred of laundry blew off the clothesline over the back alley like a frostbitten gull, and the window threatened to pop inwards. He watched the chill grey flurries in the alley and
thought of Kilborn Bay and how the mist there used to sit like a sweet pillow on the water and linger on the cool sand until as late as breakfast. And, as he heard the first stomps upstairs of children preparing to go to school, it occurred to him that memories like these were a privilege; most of the kids on this street had probably never been out of town, even for a weekend, to see such a thing as a shore with the mist evaporating off it…

He got up and went to the living room. Idly, he opened the
Cocaine
machine and stared at the dull red boxes with the dragons biting their tails. Still there, still tempting. He thought of something the Dead Man’s Hands had done to someone who tried to cut in on their drug monopoly (Rosie had told him this for a fact): fed his balls to Bill the Beast’s doberman pinscher. But was that really true? How do these stories get started? He just stood there and stared. Maybe it was better to flush it all down the toilet.
What
, twenty thousand bones worth? Was he crazy? But what else could he do? He could give it back, he supposed, but after the incident at Arthur’s Hideaway, those animals would slaughter him for having deceived them so long. He was paralyzed, flushed through with anxiety. The boxes sat there; evil things, hibernating.

“Where are you, Bob?” Rosie called out from the bedroom. She did that, all the time. If he so much as went to pee. He flinched with irritation. Though he also had to admit to a secret twinge of pleasure – of knowing he was wanted so. But that secret twinge irritated him, too – it might oblige him to love her back. And he didn’t like anyone telling him how to feel. He locked the door of the
Cocaine
machine and slumped back to bed.

Rosie worked mostly nights, and spent the days in bed beside him sleeping, waking, demanding neck rubs back rubs foot rubs calf rubs scalp rubs, and reading. She read just about anything; in his view, she had a myopic imagination; not discerning but stumbling
over whatever random interests lay in her path – Aspasia of Miletus, Colette,
The Female Eunuch
, poetry of Sappho, Madame Blavatsky,
Our Bodies Our Selves
. The books piled up by the bed, and he resented her for being able to read so fast. Could she really be absorbing anything? It wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t insist on underlining as she read, but as he lay trying to watch The Price Is Right in peace, she sat there underlining with her pencil, underlining, underlining, underlining, underlining. And it wouldn’t have been so bad if she were more selective, but she was maniacal. He seethed as he sat there, listening to the pencil stroke the pages.

“Rosie,” he finally said. “Have you thought of only underlining the things that
don’t
interest you? You’d save on pencils.”

He hated himself for saying that. He had promised himself he’d make efforts to be nice, but it was tougher than he’d anticipated:
nice
felt unpleasantly supersensitive, like a layer of his skin had been peeled off, while
not nice
felt good and warm, heavy blood moving sluggish beneath his thickened hide. It occurred to him that he was
addicted
to being not nice, because it was true – he could actually feel his glands responding contentedly, relievedly, to his nastiness.