Knucklehead & Other Stories (22 page)

He hates dogs. He owns one dog in his life, when he is a boy. A black-and-tan Heinz 57, with mismatched floppy ears and shaggy hair that collects dags. Shane. Shane knows tricks. It delights Hamish and his younger brother Kevin to call “Shane! Come back! Shane!” The dog comes running home. “Porch!” sends Shane to the nearest doorway. One day, Shane is mating with a neighbour's standard-bred poodle. Kevin commands “Sit!” Shane sits, still stuck to the other dog. Kevin commands “Porch!” The dog hauls his partner across the yard to the back door. Kevin laughs like a hyena but Hamish cries as both dogs yelp in pain. He is dreading that Kevin would call the most clever of Shane's tricks: “Flip!”

Shane likes to fetch and swim. He fetches and swims to death. Springtime, Hamish tosses a stick into the river. “Fetch!” The dog dives in. The stick moves swiftly into the flow of the spring run-off. Shane chases it into fast and deep waters. Fear strikes Hamish. He calls, “Shane! Come back! Shane!” The dog turns, heads upstream into the current. He pumps his legs faster and faster, but still the river carries him away. “Shane! Come back! Shane!” Swells swamp the dog as he bounces from rock to rock. The fast water swallows him, Shane disappears from sight. That was the last time Hamish ever called to a dog. Now they call to him.

He uses the garage door opener strapped to the handlebars beside the headlight to lift the overhead door. There is no room to park a car. Power tools are mounted on workbenches made from old doors and two-by-four trestles. Shelves against the walls and as high as the rafters hold labelled boxes, hand tools, small appliance parts, lumber, electronics, paint, bottles. Garden tools, sports equipment, yard furniture are all stored in a shed outside. In one corner, next to a small water closet and shower behind a folding door, a desk has been outfitted with a computer. Paper reaches up from a box on the floor into a track-feed printer. An ergonomic office chair is tucked under. A framed university diploma hangs above the desk, certifying that Hamish Hamilton has been granted the degree of Bachelor of Science, Honours Geology. Dated 1963, twenty-nine years ago. A row of polished hubcaps decorates one wall. A clothesline stretches across the space, hung with BurgerWorld uniforms.

He sets the kickstand, closes the garage door. The sound of barking fades. He hangs his windbreaker, helmet and cycling gloves on the handlebars, then strips out of his uniform. He tries to convince his brother that he doesn't need the uniform. Kevin is firm: “I own the franchises. But BurgerWorld owns the policies. That's how it's supposed to work. That's what makes me rich, Hammy. Don't fuck with success.” Kevin owns a dozen or so BW franchises, all over North America. Just a fraction of the hundreds out there. He's parlayed profits from drug trafficking and the short-order cooking skills learned in prison into a fast food fortune. Clean and sober now. Huge house in Denver. Trophy wife. Concorde to Europe for skiing vacations in the Swiss Alps. Stops for AA meetings in Paris. Met a screenwriter his last time to the Betty Ford, invested in an action-adventure movie that's into its third sequel, he's got some points on the back end.

As he does after every shift, almost every night, Hamish peels out of the clothes, drops them into an old washing machine beside a workbench. He adds some soap, sets the dial, starts it. Helen won't let him in the house with his work clothes. Rancid, she says. He smells rancid. Money, he says, the smell of money. Kimmy gags when she sees and smells his uniform. Loves animals. Vegetarian. Borderline anorexic, he suspects. He wants to ask her if she ever thinks about the horses' hooves melted down for the glue that holds her cello together. About scraping horsehair over sheepguts to make music. About the beetles boiled up to make the shellac that gives it its shine.

Naked, he takes his keys and unlocks a file cabinet. He flips through a stack of magazines with creased covers pulling away from the staple stitch and hidden under an old phone book.
Biker Chix, Rocker Girls, Tattoo Tasties.
He chooses one:
Babes Who Rock'n'Roll.
Feathered hair, little leather vests, wide belts. Straddling Telecaster and Gibson Flying Vee guitars. Bending over Marshall amplifiers. He turns the pages quickly, not lingering until he nears the end. His hand speeds up, he leans over to peer at the small pictures beside the phone sex teasers and dildo ads at the back of the book. He comes with a single grunt, cupping his other palm to catch it, wipes off with a cloth tucked in a box under the bench.

He showers in four minutes, rubs calamine lotion on his brow, his hands, his feet. He pulls on a pair of track pants. A faded sweatshirt, peeling rubberized letters spelling
GEOLOGY ALUMNI
encircling a university crest.

It's almost one in the morning, but the house is lit up as he crosses the lawn to the back door. Some nights he likes to stand in the yard, watch his house. Following the comings and goings of his family as they move from room to room. Putting lights off and on, pausing at windows where he can tell by their shadow who it is. Tonight the neighbour's dog barks, and he goes right to the back door. Helen sits at the kitchen table, doing paperwork. “I thought that was you,” she says when he enters, “I heard Mrs. Klemmer's dog.” She fills out an order sheet, makes a note in her accounts book. She sells lingerie at house parties.

“Good night?” Hamish asks.

“Not bad,” Helen says. “Mostly nurses, mostly married.”

“Where's Kimmy?”

“Downstairs. She got home from rehearsal before me and went to bed hours ago. Robbie was sick tonight, blood sugar's way out. I think he's sneaking food again.”

“Was he home alone?”

“Alan was here. Mike's staying over at what's-his-name's.”

“On a school night?”

“It's not a school night. Tomorrow's professional development day for teachers. He's going to that basketball camp with Sedge-Serge-Sadji however-you-pronounce-it.”

“This family's going to hell in a handbasket.” Hamish leafs through the mail in a basket on the counter, then tosses the birth control pills onto the table. Helen doesn't show she notices. She enters some numbers in the calculator, then tears off the tape, staples it in the ledger. She stacks the sheets in a pile. “Where'd you get that?” she asks.

“They're Kimberley's.”

“Not what I asked. How'd you get them?” She keeps working.

“You know about this?”

“Of course I knew.” She drinks from a half-finished glass. Cuba Libre. Two lime wedges float like dead bugs in the rum and Coke.

“You don't care? You don't tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That our daughter's having sex?” Hamish leans against the wall, folds his arms. “Lord, Helen.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.” Helen closes her books and puts things away in a bulging accordion file. “Sometimes I wonder just how much you do know.”

“She's on the Pill, Helen. That means sex. Nookie. Hanky panky. Poosie-dooking.”

Helen picks up the order sheets she's done. She drains her drink then goes to the kitchen counter. A fax machine nestles between a canister of sugar and the yellow sharps container for Robbie's used insulin syringes. “Did nearly five-hundred tonight. One woman bought four bras and a corset.” She lays the sheets face down, presses a speed dial button.

“Do you know who it is?” Hamish asks. He fiddles with the electric can opener bolted to the wall, presses the lever to rev it a couple of times.

“Mrs. Baxter, Joan, I think her name was.”

“Kim's beau.” A smoky grey cat appears, lured by the sound that promises open cans. It sniffs his socks, then meows, rubs against his shins.

“She doesn't have one. Where did you get those? Were you looking through her things?” The fax whistles and buzzes as it makes its connection. The first sheet begins its stutter through the machine.

“What if I was. I'm her father. This is still my house.”

“If you like snooping around other people's things,” Helen says.

Alan walks in from the front room where the sounds of the Second World War blast from the television. Dreadlocks hang in his face. A long-sleeved black
T
-shirt with an
SNFU
logo on the front and
FUCK YOU
printed on the back. Army fatigues with the crotch bagging at the knees. “Are you guys arguing? Can I stay and watch?” Alan says. He doesn't look at either of them, walks between to open the fridge door. “No juice.”

“There's some crystals downstairs,” Helen says. She pulls a sheet from the fax as it finishes. The next one loads.

Hamish picks up the cat, scratches her ears. “Don't you ever wash your hair?” Hamish says to Alan.

“Ah, the familiar refrain,” Alan says. “Dad tells me to get a haircut. Mom, you're supposed to chime in now that I look like a pickaninny.” Alan takes a carton of milk, drinks from the spout, burps.

“Get a job and buy your own milk. When I was your age I was going to school full-time, owned my home, kept two jobs.”

“Look where that gets you. This is such a cliché. Is this is all we can talk about, haircuts and jobs? What about environmental degradation? What about the politics of the Gulf War?”

“You wouldn't last ten minutes at
BW
.”

“Who'd want to? Besides, I've got a job.”

“Planting trees. Watching
TV
for the other six months of the year and collecting pogey isn't work.”

Alan makes a motion with his hand as if to say talk talk talk. He carries the milk to the living room, clicking his tongue stud on his teeth. A voice drones on about the winter of 1941 on the Eastern Front.

“The great communicator,” Helen says.

“Who, him or me?”

“Whatever.” Helen fixes herself another drink. She pushes her glass into the ice dispenser on the fridge. Rum from the cupboard, Coke from the fridge. She slices a wedge of lime, squeezes the juice into her drink. Drops the wedge in to make three. “You don't get it, do you.”

“What is there to get?”

“Kimmy's world-class. She's losing ground here, you know what Maestro Czerny says. He can't teach her anything more.”

“Hmph. Czerny. What's that washed-up Polack got to do with Kimmy having sex? It better not be him or I'll tear his smarmy heart out.”

Helen looks at her husband for a long moment. She chews an ice cube from her drink. “She should have gone to New York two years ago,” she says finally. The fax machine clicks off. She gathers the last of the orders, riffles them in her hand. “They wanted her.” She gulps more liquor. “I am so fucking bored with this conversation. You're deliberately not listening. What kind of career will she have if she gets pregnant by accident.”

“Career. Career career career, that's all you go on about. Pregnancy's not an accident. She's sixteen.”

“If you mention one word of this.” Helen picks up the pills from the table. “Don't fuck this up, Hamish. I swear, I won't let you ruin her life.”

“What?”

“You figure it out.” She goes down the hall to the bedroom. Hamish finds an open tin of food in the fridge and gives some to the cat.

The job interview. The twentieth since Bloody Tuesday at HydroCarbons International (Canada) Inc. more than two years ago. The untruths on the résumé grow bigger: a field geologist, with completions experience. He never worked a day in the field in his twenty-five-plus years at HydroCarb. Fourteen-and-a-half of those years managing inventory and warehousing. He has the best-organized collection of core samples in the Canadian oilpatch, maybe the world. His greatest achievement: writing the specs for the automated logistics and data retrieval system that makes his job expendable. Twenty times he steels himself for the interview. Twenty times he looks in the mirror. Practises his smile. Twenty times he rolls his antiperspirant stick under his arms, over his chest, down his arms, on his neck, his throat. Twenty times he takes antihistamines two days in advance to ward off the itching. Twenty times he sits in the lumpy chair in the reception lobby, reading a two-year-old
Canadian Business.
Twenty times he goes into a stuffy conference room to defend his record at HydroCarb. Twenty times he tries to convince Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones or Mr. Hassan why he is a better candidate than the two hundred or five hundred or two thousand out-of-work professional geologists around town.

Today it's SynerPlus Explorations. Junior oil and gas that has hit on a couple of plays where others gave up. Hamish reads the
Daily Oil Gazette
and
Petroleum Week
: they're an up-and-comer. Looking for field guys. He sits in the lumpy chair. Browses a magazine called
Entrepreneur Success.
He starts to sweat at his collar. His upper lip gleams. The receptionist shows him into the stuffy conference room. A woman enters, hair piled high, drenched in perfume. Her green pantsuit is by a designer Helen could name if she were here. “Mr. Hamilton, I'm Ms. Antonuk. I believe we spoke on the phone.”