Knucklehead & Other Stories (9 page)

His family would find it disturbing. His wild youth, his drugs and drinking, his unsavoury friends. His mother and father were retired, they lived a quiet life. They wouldn't want to remember. His sister was a holy-roller now, she'd want to save him.

None of his current friends or business acquaintances would get it. The sharks at head office would see it as a sign of weakness.

Al finally showed it to his friend Stan Walker. Stan was a filmmaker, teaching at an art school in Toronto. He and Al still managed to hook up a few times every year. In the middle of the night during one of Stan's trips to Vancouver, Al took Stan to his office. On the drive there, he couldn't talk about his book. Al sat in the shadows as Stan read the book by the light of a desk lamp. At first, Al was nervous. He had never watched anyone read his work. As the minutes passed, his nervousness faded. He dozed off.

It was getting light when Stan finished reading all of the eighty-three pages. He embraced Al in a big bear hug and wouldn't let go. His voice a hoarse whisper, Stan said, “Most of us don't know shit about.”

It was a line from the book:

Eddie van Dyk
Eddie went on a bender and never came back. Alcohol poisoning complicated by downers. He was dry for almost a year before that.

Everybody loved Eddie. I saw him the Thursday before he died when I was in Edmonton on a trip. Just dropped by his mom's place as I was driving by, and there was Eddie on the couch, watching the soaps and playing with his dog. I could write a whole book about Eddie. Once we had the same dream on the same night, about shooting stars and rocket ships in a 7-Eleven parking lot. One afternoon, I got Eddie out of bed to deal me a chunk of hash, and he said, “Some day I'm gonna die of a hangover.” He was on and off the wagon a lot. He wasn't real good in school, but he was deep and took a lot of stuff seriously. He fought with demons most of us don't know shit about.

VI. Character

Unlike many of the people in his book, Al had never been busted by the cops. He had never been rushed to hospital with an overdose. He had never been suicidal. He had spent the better part of ten years in a lifestyle that killed and injured the weak and the strong alike, but Al survived. He liked to think it was because he was neither weak nor strong, just average.

His first impulse had been to document the most sensational deaths: all those suicides, overdoses and car wrecks. Even a guy he knew who was murdered. But as the book grew, he added entries that were ordinary by comparison. The cancers, heart attacks and strokes were no less deadly, just as random. That line between the here-and-now and the there-and-then was arbitrary.

The earliest death experience he could remember was this:

Sally Boychuk
Sally died the summer between grade seven and eight. She had a virus in her heart or something like that.

Sally was the most popular girl in our class. I had a crush on her most of grade seven. I even got to kiss her once in the shacks behind the hockey rink. She played the violin and went away to summer school all the time, except that last one. If it happened today they'd give her a heart transplant.

VII. Climax

A year and one hundred and thirty-one obituaries later, Al ran out of dead people.

After two months without an addition, Al was happy and sad. Happy that everyone else was still alive. But he had come to look forward to the book during his sales trips. He even toyed with the idea of making up the deaths of imagined characters.

He began to carry the whole book with him on the road. He would sit in hotel rooms, flipping through the pages. Occasionally, he would edit an entry, re-word a description, perhaps add a postscript. He started using a purple pen for the corrections, so he could keep track of the changes. He tabulated the various causes of deaths. He sorted the entries by name, by gender, by age. He compared the numbers.

One night at home, after four days on the prairies, he lay in bed with his hands clasped behind his head. “I never knew anyone who drowned,” he announced. Sandra extinguished the light and crawled in beside him. “That's good,” she said.

Two weeks later, Al started a new entry:

Stan Walker
Fell off a boat into Lake Ontario.

VIII. End

Al hunched over a table in The Anvil. For last call he ordered a beer, a Bushmills, a coffee, a Coke, and a water. He made notes on a napkin. He had an idea to write something, a movie or a novel maybe, featuring his dead people. It might help justify the existence of his book of the dead.

Since Stan's drowning, the liver failure of his father, and then the sudden brain cancer of his health-nut boss, Al had begun to chafe under the burden of maintaining the book. It scared him. As he grew older, the book would grow thicker. He felt like he was in a room where the walls moved closer when he wasn't looking, and his chest tightened whenever his mind thought of someone still alive who might one day be dead. As if just thinking about it could make it happen. Sandra. His kids. He needed that whisky. If he lived long enough, his would be the only name missing.

When the waitress brought his round of drinks, he gulped the Bushmills then drained the water. As she cleared the table, she reached to pick up the napkins he was using for notepaper. Al gripped her wrist hard.

She twisted out of his grasp and gave him a look. “What's with you anyways, mister?”

“I'm writing,” he said.

Misdirection

Ice tumbles out of the pitcher and into her glass as the waitress tops up her water. “Are you ready to order, or do you want to wait a few more minutes?” Viola checks her watch: almost an hour. She wonders if her daughter is at another restaurant. It's not that hard to do, really, she thinks. Like the time Vi got on the wrong bus for the cross-country ski outing. It could have happened to anybody. She saw the bus parked in the shopping centre across from the Jewish Community Centre. A gentleman stood next to it holding a pair of skis. She pulled up and rolled her window down a crack—it was bitterly cold—and asked him, “Is this the bus for the Kananaskis trip?” And the man said, “You bet.” She parked her car, loaded her skis, and got on.

She wants water with no ice, but the waitress keeps crowding the glass with cubes. The lunch rush is slowing. Men in suits scribble signatures on credit card slips. A trio of bank tellers gathers purses and jackets from the backs of their chairs. The garrulous line-up of those waiting at the door has disappeared. Her daughter Joy is never late, certainly not an hour. “Didn't you notice that there wasn't anyone on the bus you knew?” Joy had asked about the ski trip.

“Well, when I got on there were only two or three others. I didn't pay much attention, I guess.” Vi had put on her headphones, loaded the tape of her talking book—they were doing a Maeve Binchy for her club that month—and took out her knitting. It was only when the bus stopped an hour and a quarter later—not at the William Watson Lodge but at the Delta Hotel—that she really noticed the absence of “my Jewish ladies,” as she calls them. Most of the day-trippers were men. She discovered they were from the Shell Oil Retirement Club. “They treated me marvellously. They insisted I join them for the lunch they put on at the hotel after.” She saved the sandwiches she had packed in waxed paper for supper that night.

She asks the waitress: “Can you please tell me what the specials are again?” It's a fishy something, Vi can't remember, she never cooks fish, it smells up the home so. Maybe tuna or salmon from a can occasionally, fish sticks when the children were still home. But the waitress has turned her head and banters goodbyes with a group of regulars. Vi looks at her water glass. Even her membership in the Jewish Centre was an accident. Her neighbour had told her about the daily drop-in aquasize classes at the Southland Leisure Centre, where seniors qualified for a fifty percent discount on a ten-visit pass. “Where was that?” she had asked; “Oh just down the road, you know the one.”

The next time she was heading down 90th Avenue she stopped in. The customer service rep informed her, no, they didn't have a drop-in aquasize, they had a program for members only, no extra fee but pre-registration required, three times a week, not every day. Seniors did qualify for a thirty percent membership discount, but there were no ten-ticket passes. “I was told you do. I'm sure you've made a mistake,” Vi said. By the time she left, the manager had agreed to sell her a full membership at a half-price discount. Two weeks later she realized the Southland Leisure Centre was the facility on Southland Drive, the other way from the house.

“You do this all the time,” Joy said.

“Nonsense,” Vi said. “Besides, how else would I have got to know my Jewish ladies?”

The waitress turns back to Vi, settling onto one hip, holding the water jug loosely at her side. “Did you want to order?” she says.

“The special,” Vi repeats. “Could you tell me again what it was, please?” She half-listens to the list of radicchio salad in a vodka-berry dressing, Chilean sea bass with fennel and some sort of herb reduction, pilaf. Out of habit she lifts the flap on her handbag on the table to make sure her keys are there. One time she couldn't find them after a shopping trip to the Hudson's Bay store in Chinook Centre (she still calls it that, never The Bay, just as she calls the store at the other end of the mall Simpson's Sears). That was the trip where she bought the loveseat for the family room, the one she returned on the 89th day of the 90-day trial period. She was certain she had locked the keys in the trunk, phoned the Alberta Motor Association for the locksmith. She led him to a red Accord in the lot, watched while he slipped a thin piece of metal into the window frame and jimmied the latch. It was only when he popped the lock that she said, “But this isn't my car. Look, there's a baby seat in the back.”

“You don't pay attention,” Joy said.

“Pardon me?”

“You smile and nod, but you're somewhere else.”

“That's a fine thing to say about your mother.”

“I'm just not sure,” Vi says to the waitress. She pulls her little phone book from her bag. She's not wearing her trifocals, so she raises her glasses off the bridge of her nose and peers under the rims. She checks under the J's for Joy, even though she knows she has never bothered to write down her daughter's cellular phone number.

She looks up and asks, “Do you have another location in the city somewhere?”

“Another location?” the waitress repeats. She doesn't look at Vi, her eyes are scanning the room, checking the hot line for any orders up.

“I thought perhaps this might be part of a chain,” Vi offers. “Perhaps my daughter has gone to a different one.” Years ago, before George left her for that other woman—they're both dead now,
bon débarras
as Grandma Mich used to say—she and George were to go to a Christmas party. A very classy affair, George in his dinner jacket, Vi in the dress that she had purchased for her sister's second wedding. From Chez LeMarchand, hundreds of dollars, a Parisian designer gown, two fittings. At the last moment, George phoned to say he was tied up in a conference with a client. “Meet me there,” he said, “You'll know lots of people.” She'd sent his evening clothes to the office by taxi. She didn't write down the address, she thought she knew the house, an old sandstone mansion in Mount Royal. Who knew there would be so many? They all looked the same in the dark as she drove up and down the streets. A limousine pulled into a long drive and a liveried footman stepped forward to open its rear door.

She parked—there was no street parking for nearly a full block. Wishing she had worn winter boots and carried her dress shoes in a bag, she picked her way up the drive, over the ice and ruts, thankful for the sand spread on the slope. As she neared the door, the footman came to meet her, umbrella held high to ward off nonexistent snow. “Good evening, ma'am,” he said. “Welcome.” He ushered her into a foyer that was open to the second floor, as big as the lobby of a grand old hotel. He helped her out of her coat and hung it in a cloakroom off to the side. She was greatly fond of that coat, a simple long cut made from good grey wool, but she saw it looked drab next to the furs on the rolling racks. A woman in a dress identical to hers, but accessorized with pearls and diamonds and platinum jewellery, broke off from a group and came to meet her. “I'm so glad you could come,” the woman said. Their eyes swept each other, searching for recognition.

“Your dress,” Vi said, and she laughed, a nervous giggle that never failed to mortify her. It rang so hollow. “Oops.”

The other woman beamed a smile and took Vi's arm. “We have exquisite taste, you and I. Just wait until I talk to Georges.”

“Pardon me?” Vi said. “Is he here?”

The woman lifted her eyebrow, what was left of it. “I'm sorry? Is who here?”

“George. Did you say George?”

The woman's smile slipped ever so slightly, then she went on: “Georges. Georges LeMarchand? Is
he
here? Heavens no. But you must have got your dress from his shop, n'est-ce pas?”

Vi giggled again, covering her mouth with her hand. She was aware that her only jewellery was a simple gold wedding band. She wondered if she should have worn gloves. “I thought you said George. My husband's name is George. Is he here yet? He was stuck at the office.” The woman was looking over Vi's shoulder now. “Oh, I'm sure if he's not here, he will be soon.” She disengaged from Vi to greet two couples coming through the door. “Clarisse, Joan. Hello. Andrew, Zachary.” As she moved away she gave Vi a squeeze on her arm—a gentle caress just above the elbow, for which Vi was thankful.

Vi drifted from room to room, group to group, standing at the fringes of conversation, admiring the paintings on the walls, the books on the shelves, the statues in corners. The house was the biggest she had ever been in that wasn't preserved as a museum. People actually lived here. Vi wasn't even sure what to call the half-dozen rooms, plus hallways and foyers, where the ten-dozen or more guests circulated. The big one was the living room, she supposed, though its scale suggested a ballroom. And a library. A dining room, with the table pushed to one side and piled high with smoked salmon canapés and dishes of caviar flanked by rounds of rye toast and rows of tiny ivory spoons. Two more rooms she couldn't put names to. Dens? Parlours? Everywhere Persian carpets over polished dark hardwood. Mahogany? Ceilings at least twelve feet high, old-fashioned baseboards nearly up to her knee, flocked wallpaper, immaculate antique furniture. She tried to remember whose house it was — one of the new partners at George's firm? A client? A half-hour later, after sampling the caviar (surprisingly salty but clearly habit-forming) and dashing off two flutes of champagne proffered by silent waiters in long-tailed jackets, she found herself hovering near the front door, hoping for George. It was after nine o'clock.