Knucklehead & Other Stories (25 page)

“Well—”

“No.” Kimmy says, almost whispering. “No. You can't. I won't let you.”

“Yes,” Mike says, punching the air with his fist. “Say good-bye to Mr. Mozart, hello, Mr. Horton.”

“No.” Kimmy says. She raises her voice, but still speaks without shouting, enunciating every word. “You loser fuck—”

Helen stops her. “It's okay. It's okay, Kay-Kay. I told you I won't let him.”

Alan gets up from his chair smiling, shakes his head. “Oh man. Dad, I knew you were twisted, but this—man, this is out there.” He goes to Kimmy, whispers something in his sister's ear. She snorts, laughing through the tears she's not letting out. Alan walks away into the living room.

Mike crams the last half piece of toast in his mouth, bolts his orange juice. “Hey, it's been a slice, but I gotta run. Don't think I'll be getting that ride after all.” He puts his headphones on, cranks the music, scoops up the notebooks. Out the door in fifteen seconds, coat in hand, shoes flapping, bag on back.

“You will not do this,” Helen says.

“We need to. We need to thrive. Money doesn't grow on trees. You need to work for it. Sacrifice. Take risks. Build something.”

“I hate you.” Kimmy turns to confront him. Her nostrils flare with contained anger. “I hate you. Mom's right, you're just jealous. You're a pathetic failure and you want everyone else to be too. You're all just jealous.” She pushes Helen's hand away, goes to the basement. The sound of her bedroom door slamming crashes up the stairs.

“You couldn't think to talk about this. I've seen this coming for weeks. You couldn't bear to ask me about this because you knew I'd say no. Is that all you see when you watch her play? Dollar signs? Is that all it means to you?”

Hamish is silent. The cat sits on his lap. When did she jump up? There she is, sitting in his lap, looking up at him. Music filters from the stereo in Kimmy's room. Beethoven. Even Hamish recognizes that. Television sounds drift in from the living room. A voice-over describes the American carpet-bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Hamish's nose throbs. He wants to pound it with his fists.

“Talk about future and change, you go ahead. Talk all you want.” Helen shakes her finger, it trembles. “Be prepared. Because I can talk too.” She clears the dishes from the table, clatters them together. Stomps on the treadle to make the trash can lid pop open. She scrapes uneaten food into the garbage, loads the dishwasher, banging the cutlery and glassware. She empties the dregs of the coffee into the sink, rinses the pot. The fax beeps to tell her she's received something. She tears the thermal paper out of the machine. Scans the fax, crumples it into a ball and puts it in her pocket. She goes to the top of the stairs, turns to Hamish. “I'll show you a fucking future, you prick.” Helen goes to her daughter.

Hamish and Robbie are left at the table. “I'll work in the donut shop, Dad.”

“Thanks, Robbie. Thank you.”

“I gotta get ready for school.”

“Sure, ready for school. Don't forget your insulin.”

“I won't.” Robbie goes to the fridge, takes a bottle of insulin from the door. He gets his test kit and a syringe from the cupboard.

“Do you need any help?”

“No, I can do it, Dad.” Robbie goes down the hall to the bathroom, shuts the door.

Hamish sits alone, strokes the cat. She stretches her legs up onto his chest. Her purring vibrates against his belly, her claws prick him as she kneads his shirt. He imagines speaking to the cat. It's all mine, he imagines saying. My house, my kitchen, my fridge, my table. He imagines he goes into the living room, throws Alan into the street. My couch, my television, my remote control. He imagines he sits beside Mike on the yellow school bus, strips off the headphones. My Walkman. He imagines he walks downstairs into Kimmy's room. My cello. He imagines he takes the cello into the garage. My garage. He imagines them all banging at the windows and the doors, begging him to come out, to give up. He imagines his tools. My hammer, my sixteen-ounce Stanley framing hammer. He imagines he pounds the cello to pieces. He imagines he feeds the splinters into his Franklin stove, the two-hundred-year-old varnish cracking and popping, the dry wood burning to a white-hot ash. He imagines he holds his face and hands close to the fire. He imagines the heat soothes his itch. “Imagine that,” he says to the cat. My cat.

Wrestlemania

The numbers wouldn't add up. “They made a mistake on my
T
-4 slip,” Colm said.

Beverly stood by the kitchen door, coat on, purse over arm. “I doubt it,” she said. The television on the counter flickered with the images of two bulky men colliding with each other and falling down. The sound was off.

“You misplaced one of my pay stubs,” Colm said. He sorted through the neat stacks of paper on the table. “I'm missing February fifteenth to twenty-ninth. Last year was a leap year.” He punched numbers into the adding machine and carefully examined the results that printed on the narrow tape. “This calculator is malfunctioning,” he said.

“I'm going to pick up the kids,” Beverly said.

“Who?”

“The kids. The two small people who live here. Your son and daughter. You declare them as dependants on page three.”

“Not any more,” Colm said.

“What?” Beverly said.

“You don't declare children any more. They changed the rules years ago. You get a child tax credit. But it's all wrong.” Colm watched a bald man rant on the television. He ran a hand over his own balding head and remembered the formula for a sphere. “You're leaving me. You go to pick up the children and you don't come back.” He licked his pencil and entered a number on the form.

“I think sometimes that's what you want.”

“I wouldn't blame you,” Colm said. He licked his pencil again.

“Why do you do that,” Beverly said. “Lick your pencil. I'm going to Gaddie's to pick up Zelle and Will.”

“You'll smoke in the car,” Colm said.

Bent over, her head stuck in the closet as she rummaged in the shoes, Beverly replied, “I don't smoke, Colm. It's you who used to sneak cigarettes in the car. Have you seen my rubber boots?”

“You'll be gone two hours. Enough time to see another man.” He broke the lead off the pencil, watched the end skitter away onto the linoleum floor. He put the pencil into a sharpener shaped like a small globe of the world. On
TV
, an obese Asian man costumed like a Sumo wrestler sat on a man wearing sequined lavender tights. Colm examined the map on the sharpener and said: “They put Japan in the wrong place.” He tested the new point on the arborite tabletop, pressing down harder and harder until the lead broke off again.

Beverly walked in her boots across the kitchen and took a package from the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. “Can you pick up the table when you're done?” she said.

“It's tax time,” Colm said. “Do you love me still?”

“Yes, Colm,” Beverly said, and opened the door into the rain. “Still.” She closed the door after her.

“Still,” Colm repeated. “Come back,” he said to the closed door. He picked up the remote control and increased the volume. The crowd screamed and the canvas thudded drum-like as wrestlers fell. “Wrestling is fixed,” Colm said.

Towards a
Semiosis of Two-
headed Dog

Box

A plain wooden box. Pine. Not a coffin. Bigger than a breadbox. Footlocker. Address stencilled. Customs clearance affixed. Contains:

Square black bag
Surgical implements: bone saw, rib spreaders,
   suture needles
Trumpet
Jewellery box with mother-of-pearl cufflinks
Waterman fountain pen with gold nib
Wire-rimmed spectacles
Military cap with oak leaf
Freemason apron
Hand-tinted photo of baby, naked on white fur rug
Snapshot: mother, wife and daughter under magnolia tree
Baseball glove (old fashioned with no pocket)
Gas mask
Fleece-lined slippers worn through the sole
Jazz records. Bill Evans. MJQ. Two dozen Miles.
   Ornette Coleman. Bix and Louis on 78s, Dizzy, Duke,
   the Count. Ella, Django Reinhardt. Trane. Bird.
The Harvard Medical Library, Volume III of the Recorded
   Lecture Series, 1952; includes interview “Experimental
   Transplant Surgery in the Soviet Union”

Imagine This

Soviet scientists, circa 1951, transplant the head of one dog onto the body of another. You learn this from a long-playing record found among your father's possessions, right beside
Sketches of Spain.
You sit rocking in your favourite chair watching the record go around, stylus unwinding the two-language groove, Russian interpreted by BBC English. Sandy, faithful Sandy, curls at your feet, sleeping through his species' holocaust historiography.

Head Graft

“We grafted the head of an Alsatian to the neck of another, attaching it just above the shoulders near the second vertebra. Naturally there was no neurological response in the second head, but we did ensure the circulation of blood … Both heads remained alive for almost forty-eight hours, at which time we performed autopsies …

“We also conducted heart and lung transplants and liver transplants on dogs and pigs. The subjects were maintained in a vital state for up to seventy hours … The potential for kidney transplants excites us. Subject pigs with functioning kidney transplants are alive to this day.”

Photos

He looks so soft in the baby photo. Hair—even then he had thick black hair—slicked back in the same style he would wear for the next seventy-four years. The hand-tinting lends his flesh a bright rosy colour, unnatural, but somehow more healthy than the swarthy jaundiced yellow he had as a father. The smile. Did he ever smile?

And the snapshot: Mother, wife and daughter, three generations of women beneath a magnolia. They are like aliens. Mother has grown smaller, has let her hair go white and plain. Wife is the same, eyes smouldering, hand planted provocatively on hip. Daughter almost an adult, she'll be starting college next year, too beautiful, looks away from the camera, stares upwards at something over her head exposing the long slope of her throat. The Georgia sunshine falls on them, broken by the leaves above. The photo is recent: on the back, written in his hand grown spidery with age but still recognizable, is a date from just over a year ago. It unsettles me to think that there, a half a continent away, he took this picture that now even a year later shows them new to me.

Favourite dogs

A note written with a quick flowing hand. The purple run of faded ink from a fountain pen. The paper: the backs of two pages ripped from a desk calendar dated March 27 and 28, 1962. Found inside the sleeve of the Harvard Medical Lectures:

Two favourite dogs in literature from the Odyssey and Olaf Stapledon. Odysseus's dog what was his name? Waits 20 yrs for master to return. Sick among houseful of conniving suitors he recognizes O. tho dressed as beggar. Raises head 1 last time, sniffs hand then dies as only Homer makes death. How much better a dog than 3 headed hell hound! Olaf's dog—can't remember if named Cerberus or Sirius—from '30s sci-fi, read it as a boy. Dog with human brain transplant. Very funny, touching. No one understands him. Eventually kills master and runs with wolves. (Argus = O.'s dog.)

To M, to W, to D

to walk with you in the bright of noon, in our parents' dark, in the uneven break of dawn, to walk along the water's edge, the cold black water of night running a river, we walk so close I can smell your skin beneath the waves of wind, first you then I move ahead fall behind out of step, the flowing river sucking at the shore, a glance, a glancing brush of forearms, goosefleshed breeze along the river, we walk and the river flows and we walk and the river flows and the river flows, and we walk and our hands, put your hand, you put mine, we put hands, and the river flows and our hands held, not clasped, fingers not interlocking, and the river flows and your hand paper-dry holding mine, your hand warm and fleshy fitting tight, your hand light and soft flitting on my palm and a dog, a yellow dog, a golden retriever named Sandy, our dogs always yellow, always golden retrievers named Sandy, swims in the current to catch a stick and scrambles up the bank, shaking off from tail to head, splashing, and the river …

Understanding father

He developed chemical weapons at the Suffield Military Weapons Range during World War II. He ran away from there, to Atlanta. I ran back, to Alberta.

I take a deep sniff from his army cap, trying to smell something—there is only the camphor stink of mothballs. I finger the Freemason apron. Close my eyes, listening for cryptic messages. I spread all the things from the box on the carpet before me.

When I blow the trumpet only a harsh blat issues forth—one of the spit valves is missing. The twisted brass is like a gleaming intestine, and I think of his last hours as the peritonitis festered in the ulcers in his bowel. I lay the horn down on the Freemason apron, mouthpiece at the top, bell down. One by one I pick up the pieces of his life and arrange them, constructing a father. I position the cap, floating it above a head-spaced emptiness. For his right arm, the two photos, placed askew to approximate an elbow. The right hand the baseball glove. I place the canister of the gas mask at his left shoulder, the hose trails as his arm, the mask at the end serves as his left hand. The surgical instruments and black bag become the bones of his legs, the slippers his feet. The pen and cufflinks are penis and testicles.

I put a stack of Miles on the turntable. First to cue is Live in Paris with Tadd Dameron, 1949. I remove the black vinyl disc of the Harvard Medical Lectures and place it as the head of my father, then spread the wire-rim spectacles across where the bridge of his nose would be.

Then I lie down at an angle, so that my head touches his, just above the shoulder. I watch the ceiling. I can hear Sandy barking in the back yard, almost in time to be-bop.