Knucklehead & Other Stories (8 page)

“It's done,” she says. “One mermaid costume ready for fitting. Except for the seaweed.” Colm passes his hand slowly over her stomach, caresses her breast, then glides it across the valley of her waist and up the generous swale of her hip. “That feels nice,” Beverly murmurs. His thumb brushes against her pubis. “Mmmm,” Beverly responds. He tries to move his fingers between her thighs, gently, but she keeps her knees together. “No,” Beverly mumbles. “It's late.”

Colm shifts his body, lifts a leg over hers. He nibbles behind her ear. His thumb and forefinger tug at her nipple.

“No Colm. What are you doing.”

He lifts himself a little higher, kisses her shoulder. “Please let me in,” Colm says. “Please let me in,” he says again, his voice now inflected with an Irish lilt. “I'm cold and I'm wet and I'm hungry. I'm just a poor gardener from Limerick who needs a wee bit of comfort.”

Beverly tenses. “Stop it, Colm. That's not funny.” She grabs his hand and tries to roll away. He begins to kiss her madly on her back as she wriggles. His words are muffled: “Oh, please missus. I'm just a poor man of the soil what needs some warmth and a little solace.”

“It's not funny.” Beverly pulls away, but Colm tickles her under the ribcage. “Stop. Stop it now.” Colm wraps her in a bear hug. She tosses from side to side, jerks back suddenly, catching him in the forehead with her occiput.

“Frisky lass,” Colm says, accent now firmly Scots. He presses some of his weight against her. His penis is stiff.

“Shhhh,” Beverly whispers, and she stops resisting. “Mmmm,” Colm says, but she hushes him again. “No, Colm. I mean it. Listen. Do you hear that?”

“What?”

They lie still. Beverly turns her head and raises it slightly from the pillow. Colm holds her tightly, but quiets. Finally, after a dozen heartbeats, he says, “I don't hear—”

“Shhh,” Beverly cuts him off. “There it was again.” She pushes his leg away and sits up. “That.”

“What?” They both hold their breath.

“That.” They both say it at once. Colm sits upright. “Sounded like it was in the kitchen,” Beverly whispers. Colm bolts from the bed and scoots in a crouch towards the door. He pulls on a pair of pants he finds on the floor and grabs a stout wooden hanger from the closet. “You stay here,” he says, and moves commando-like out of the room.

On the stairs, he looks over his shoulder. Beverly is right behind him. She has slipped on one of his shirts, which covers her almost to her knees. She holds a high-heeled shoe by the toe. “I'm not staying by myself,” she says in a whisper. Colm nods.

They make their way down through the levels of the condo to the kitchen, stopping like spooked deer to listen, turning on every light as they go, looking in the bedrooms, the other bathroom, the living and dining areas. The kitchen is empty. Beverly stands where she did at noon, two steps up, clutching her shoe. Colm walks to the sink and puts the hanger down on the counter. “It's just noises. Expansion and contraction of the joists,” Colm says. He pours a glass of water from the sink and drinks it off in a draught. Then he looks to where Beverly's work is still scattered.

He goes into the family room to the blinds, and picks up a long wooden dowel that is lying on the carpet. It is usually placed in the door track to block the door closed, to prevent it from being forced open. “Did you take this out?” Colm says.

Beverly stares at the piece of wood. “Wasn't it in the door?” she says. “I haven't been out that door since Gaddie left.” Colm pulls the blind back and tries to peer into the night through the reflections on the glass. He checks the latch. “It's locked,” he says. He pulls at the door and rocks it, trying to lift it out of the lock.

“That's it,” Beverly says. “That's the sound. I heard it. That's the sound.”

“It's all right,” Colm says. He rocks the door again. “It won't budge. I can't get it open. It's secure.” He sets the stick into the channel of the sliding door.

“You can't, but what if he can?”

“Who?” Colm says.

“The man. It was him. I know it. He called her Gladys, not Gaddie. He was pretending.” Beverly's voice is quiet. “He's trying to get in. What if he did get in? He left the lock open when he took the stick out. And now he's in and he locks the door behind him. He's in here, now, waiting. I know it.” She sits down on the stair and twists the shoe in her hands. “Colm?” she says, looking at her husband.

An hour later, they are in bed again. At Colm's suggestion and to Beverly's relief, they have searched the condo from top to bottom, they have looked in every closet and cupboard, under every bed, behind every curtain. They have peered into crawlspaces, climbed in the attic, searched the garage. They have shone flashlights into every dark corner. They are alone. Colm lies on his back with his hands interlocked behind his head, staring at the skylight. The phone is beside his pillow. Beverly is pressed against him. They listen to the ticks and creaks, a gust of wind in the rafters, a squall of rain beating against the windows. Appliances click and hum, turning off and on in their duty cycles. Beverly rubs her tummy. She asks, “When will the baby move?”

Al's Book of the
Dead

I. Writer

Al sold stereos. Lots of stereos. He was Regional Senior Sales Manager, Western Canada. Al was married, had a son, a daughter, a Labrador retriever, a Mercury Sable station wagon. Al sniffed cocaine, drank whisky, watched strippers in taverns. But that's not important.

Al was alive. That was the important thing. Because Al was writing a book. What separated Al from the people he wrote about was this: They were dead. He was alive.

Al's book was a kind of a list. It contained the names of all the people he ever knew who had died. The first entry went:

Diane Adams
I first heard Diane used a razorblade to scrape the empty baggie from an ounce of coke and shot that, and the plastic from the bag got into her brain, then Stan W. told me no, she
OD
'ed on bad speed or
MDA
.

I liked Diane ever since I came on to her when we were about fifteen and she just laughed and laid a hit of acid on me. She went to New York to be an actress or a model or something for a while. She came back though.

II. Style

Al didn't know much about writing books. He didn't read, except for trade magazines and business reports, the occasional in-flight magazine,
Golf Digest.
He didn't know about plotting or character development or theme or conflict resolution or foreshadowing. He didn't know that even non-fiction books about dead people used narrative structures.

Al didn't know the kind of book he started to write had a tradition. He had never heard of William S. Burroughs or James Carroll or
Howl!
or Charles Bukowski or Crad Kilodney. He didn't know that someone born white and middle class in Jasper Place wasn't supposed to write a book about dope addicts and criminals and alcoholics and just plain ordinary people who happen to die.

So he wrote:

Kelly Shopstuk
Shopsy shot himself twice in the face. He was using a cheap 22 and the first one didn't even go through his cheekbone so he went through his eye socket and blew his brains out.

He was up in Peace River living in a motel room with two of his cousins. He was up there trying to stay out of trouble but I heard from Val he was drinking bad after he got laid off.

P.S
. Shopsy's brother I forget his name I didn't really know him died in that accident on Groat Road where that car fell off the overpass.

III. Manuscript

Since he was on the road at least ten days a month, Al found plenty of time to work on his book. He wrote in longhand, using a
PILOT
pen with either green or blue ink. He never wrote at home.

His handwriting was poor, but not illegible. He scrunched the pen between his index and middle fingers and overlapped it tightly with his thumb. The lowercase letters were cramped together on uneven lines. His capital letters were always printed, neat and square. Solid blotches of ink marked the spots where he crossed out a word or phrase. He sometimes tore through the paper.

He wrote the book on stationery from the hotels and motels of his sales trips. He collected the pages of his book in a large three-ring binder with a pale yellow plastic cover. The logo of an out-of-business stereo manufacturer decorated the spine. He kept it among similar binders of parts catalogues and product brochures on a bookshelf in his Vancouver office.

When he returned from a sales trip, he inserted any new writing into the proper place in the book. With a single exception, he wrote one obituary per page and filed them alphabetically by last name.

The exception read:

The Agostini Family
This is the only family I knew where everyone died.

Marc Agostini
: Marco was found one morning in his car. They never knew whether it was on purpose or whether he just came home drunk and passed out with the motor running.

Marco was my age and we went to school and stuff starting about grade three. His house was a hangout when we were teenagers because Mrs. Agostini was never home and we could do anything in the basement. Also, Marco's oldest brother Rick had a Marantz stereo and a bunch of records. Slade, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Status Quo. We were really into that English shit. I always knew Marco had a tough time with his family but I never figured him for suicide. He bought a real expensive lamp made out of stained glass with his first paycheque after high school.

Mrs. Agostini
: Mrs. Agostini burned herself up. It was Christmastime and I was visiting the folks. The couch she set on fire with her cigarette was left out in the front yard for a couple of days.

I never knew Mr. Agostini. He never came around. When Mrs. A died she was living alone in the house. Somebody tore it down and built a house like a big cottage on the lot.

Ricardo Agostini
: I heard from Sheila R. that Rick died in a mining accident in Ontario. Rick was older by four or five years. We all figured Rick would turn out to be some big success.

Roberto Agostini (“Pee Wee”)
: Bobby died last year. He had arthritis or diabetes or something.

Bobby was a grade ahead, but was always really scrawny. He was a pretty good soccer player though. We used to get him to go tapping at the liquor store he was so pathetic looking. One time there was a bunch of us tripping on acid and Bobby couldn't remember how to tie his shoelaces and he freaked out and ran home in the snow without shoes. We went to call on him, ten or twelve of us wired out of our minds, and Mrs. A came to the door and told us Bobby didn't feel good and to go away. That kind of worried us so later Stan W. and Stevie Q. snuck back and talked him down through his bedroom window. He hated it when we called him Pee Wee, which was his nickname.

IV. Theme

This is how Al's book got started. He was in a Victoria nightclub called The Anvil, drinking with some clients. Low ceiling, loud music. Twenty-five years ago, he lived for nights in bars like this, pounding back double paralyzers, scarfing drugs by the handful, chasing after high school girls with fake
ID
.

The band in the club was doing a tribute set to Deep Purple, and halfway through the prolonged solo in “Highway Star,” Al recognized the guitarist. It was Larry Murphy. Murph and Al had gone to Sunday school together, played on the same soccer team, had even shared a paper route for a while. Murph had been playing in bands since about grade eight. Al hadn't seen him in years.

During a break, Al bought Murph a drink. Sitting at a tiny table they made a peculiar pair. Murph was tall, skinny, all hair and pale skin and tattoos and bony shoulders sticking out of his black sleeveless shirt. Al was short, stocky, intense, with a golf-course tan; he was still in his suit and white shirt, his tie loosened. They talked for twenty minutes, telling tales about the old neighbourhood, catching each other up on their lives.

“Hey, you ever bump into Diane?” Murph asked at one point.

“Died,” Al said.

“Wow. She's good people. She get sick or something?”

“
OD
.”

“Bummer. That's just fucked. She was a cool chick.” Murph lit a smoke and had a swallow of beer. Al noticed he still held his bottle in that weird way of his, gripping the long neck around his fingers like it was a cigar and tipping it up with his knuckles. “You hear about Shopsy?” Murph asked.

“No.”

Murph made his finger into a gun and pointed it at his head.

“Fuck. When was this.”

“I dunno. Last year. The year before. After Eddie. You knew about Eddie, right?”

“I was at his funeral.”

“Hey, I was there. I don't remember connecting with you there, man.”

“I didn't stay long,” Al said.

That night, before he slept, Al wrote a list of names on the Strand Hotel stationery. It was his outline.

Many months later, in Winnipeg, Al had lunch with a client who specialized in heavy-duty sound equipment for concerts. He was a mutual friend of Murph and Al.

Larry Murphy
Murph caught double pneumonia. Phil T. from Winnipeg thinks it was
AIDS
. I only saw Larry once in the last ten or twelve years, just a little while ago. I remember he didn't look so good. Skinnier than ever. He was probably sick then, knew he was a goner. Maybe that's why he kept talking about all those dead people. The original rock'n'roll headbanger. I guess I owe this whole damn thing to him.

V. Reader

Al kept his book a secret for a long time. He had no reason for doing so, other than a vague sense of embarrassment at the thought of being a writer. And then too, he had no good reason to show it to anyone.

Sandra, he was sure, would not like it. She would think it morbid. She would worry, tell him that the past was not important when he had so much future to look forward to. She would sulk. She would argue. She would convince him to drop it. She would probably be right.