The Boy (2 page)

The Boy

July 1994

Since the night they met in the bar, Louise and Jake had been to four movies, drunk countless cups of coffee together, and driven out into the country to Jake's hometown of Valmer for a quick look-see, as he put it, at a couple of houses he was interested in.

On their third date, Jake told Louise that Daniel had been caught shoplifting a
Playboy
magazine the day before. Before she could respond, Jake launched into a monologue on how the city was a bad influence on Daniel, and if he and Brenda had stayed in the small town where they both grew up, the boy would have been fine. Everyone knew him there and came to Jake and Brenda if there was a problem instead of running to the principal or the police. If that sort of thing had happened in Valmer, Jake said, the store owner would have sent Danny away with a stern warning, then phoned Brenda to tell her about the mischief so they could deal with it at home. But in Edmonton, the manager of the drugstore called the police, claiming this was the third time he'd been suspicious of Daniel's activities, and although it was the first time he'd caught him in the act, he'd bet money there had been previous thefts. No charges were laid, but they would be the next time.

Even though Louise still hasn't met the boy, she knows from teaching at least a half dozen other “Dannys” that it's only a matter of time until he's in trouble again. She has enough problem children to deal with at school. Should she let another one of these little con artists into her personal life because he's convinced his father that the world is to blame for his mischief? But there is the gentleness with which Jake treats her, the pleasure of being out in public with what her mother would call “a fine figure of a man,” and the fact that for the first time in her adult life, Louise is tempted to believe that she's pretty. Jake told her so.

Still, a whole month into their relationship, Louise is making excuses for postponing her meeting with Danny. Jake's hours at the car showroom run to evenings and weekends, and Louise takes advantage of her summer vacation to spend three mornings a week visiting her mom at the nursing home and two mornings dropping in on her dad at the house.

Jake was impressed when she told him about her dutiful daughter routine. “Not many people are that committed to their folks. They're lucky to have you!”

Well, no. She's always felt she was the lucky one. An only child, a surprise in her mother's mid-forties after years of assuming they'd never have a child, her parents doted on her. She grew up in a household so calm that it's taken her years to stop flinching every time she hears voices raised in disagreement. Even loud friendly dissent makes her uncomfortable. Her parents enrolled her in piano, ballet, art lessons, figure skating, anything in which she expressed even a ripple of interest, and there was never a hint of disappointment shown when she gave up and moved on to something else. Louise responded to that gentle nurturing in the same way she now basks in Jake's attention—gratefully, and with a fierce desire to be worthy of his interest.

Jake's interest in her, though, except for a few gentle caresses of her hair or her cheek, a hand cupped around her elbow when she gets in and out of the car, chaste, tight-lipped, good night kisses, seems so brotherly that Louise is expecting to be dumped. One of her best friends at school, a gay teacher who started the same year as Louise, has told her many times that she needs to learn how to flirt. That she gives off no erotic signals at all. Has he considered, she's asked him, that her lack of enthusiasm might be the
result
of being repeatedly rejected rather than the
cause
?

“Oh honey,” he said, “you just keep on trying; don't turn into everybody's big sister.”

Then Jake phones and says he really wants her to meet Daniel. That if they are going to get serious—oh yes, she wants to shout, please let's get serious—she should be willing to fit into his life; and his son is a big part of that life.

“Okay,” she says. “Why don't the two of you come to my house for dinner?”

“No, let's make it my place. Danny's better at home. He can say hi, visit for a few minutes and take off to his room if he wants to. I'll cook.”

She agrees, but after she hangs up the phone she's tempted to call back. Tell Jake she has a strong sense that she's making a mistake, and she's going to save them both whatever it is she fears. But she also fears hurting this kind man who's told her she's the first woman he's called more than once since he started going out again. And she's decided that if he's going to dump her, or she has to dump him, she's going to bed with him at least once before that happens. She's thirty-six years old and has yet to have a relationship that's gone beyond a few dates and some sweaty tussling that is not what she's ever imagined as love-making.

Danny looks like his dad, short for his age, probably able to pass for ten rather than twelve, but Louise doesn't see anything like the naïve immaturity Jake has described. There is a slyness to those green eyes, the way they dart away as soon as Louise makes contact with them, then flick back to check if she's given up or is still watching him. He has the same square jaw as his dad, same heavy blond hair that refuses to lie flat in spite of the goop he uses to slick it down. Jake's solution is a brush cut, but Dan looks as though he hasn't been in a barber's chair since his mother died.

Louise has brought a gift. A skater's magazine, because Jake told her a skateboard is at the top of Danny's wish list for his birthday. He will be twelve in another week. He takes the package enthusiastically enough, but frowns when he pulls the magazine out of the paper. His nose needs wiping. Something Louise can't abide in her grade threes, never mind a boy this size. Jake has told her Danny has allergies.

“I have this one. Why did you buy me a skateboarding magazine?” He throws the book on the coffee table.

What did he think it was?
Playboy?

“Daniel.” Jake's voice is quiet, but loaded with warning.

“Thanks,” Danny mutters.

“You're welcome. Your dad told me you were interested in skateboarding. Give it to one of your friends,” Louise says. She pulls her wallet out of her bag.

“Louise, no.” Jake puts a hand on her arm. “You don't have to do that.”

“I want to,” she says, pulling out a ten dollar bill. “Here. Buy something else.” Cheap for a birthday present? She doesn't know the kid. This is meant to be a peace offering of sorts. She and Jake and Daniel all stand looking at the bill in her outstretched hand. Finally Danny shrugs and takes it from her.

“Thanks,” he says again, this time without the scowl. He looks at her quizzically for a minute. “Hey, I thought my dad liked pretty girls.”

Louise wants the beige carpet under her feet to open and swallow her. Or better yet, to swallow the boy.

“Daniel!” Jake clamps a hand on his son's shoulder. “Don't pay any attention to him,” he says, turning toward Louise. “It's a joke. A very stale joke he made up a while back and as of tonight, it's retired.” He goes nose-to-nose with Danny. “For good. Get it?”

“Got it,” Danny says, wrenching himself away from his dad. Then he turns and stomps out of the room.

Danny doesn't come back until Jake calls him for dinner, and he eats his plate of spaghetti in silence. Someone has obviously taken time to teach him to keep his elbows off the table, to manage pasta without wearing it on his chin. No slurping, or burping and when he's done, he carries his plate to the sink, rinses it, stacks it in the dishwasher.

He comes back to the table and stands beside Jake's chair. “So can I?”

“Okay. But only half an hour. That joke cost you.” Jake stands up. “Excuse me a minute, Louise. I'm going to get the Nintendo out of lock-up. We decided when it came into the house that it was going to be a privilege, not a right.”

We? Louise knows Daniel wasn't party to this decision. She feels as though his mother, Jake's dead wife has joined them. Louise is in another woman's house.

Danny lags behind. As he passes Louise, the words slip out of the corner of his mouth. “All the other ones thought the joke was funny.”

“I'll just bet they did,” she says quietly. “Enjoy your game, Daniel.”

He slouches out of the room. Not surprising that Jake Peters has never had more than two dates with anyone before her. Oh no, she is not giving up. She has a reputation for never having been bested by a student, and damned if she's going to let this miserable little tick burrow into her skin so easily.

When Jake comes back, she clears the table while he makes coffee. “He has good table manners, your son,” she says. Like the parent teacher interviews at school when the only positive thing she can say about a struggling child is that he's polite.

“When he wants to,” Jake says. He takes the stack of plates from her hands and puts his arms around her. “He behaved like a little jerk. But you know what?” She tilts her head to look up at him. “I think he likes you.”

“Oh really, Jake.”

“No, honestly. He says he's sorry he made that stupid wisecrack.”

“I'll bet he is,” she says, “because this time it fit.”

“Oh come now. You're fishing for a compliment, because you can't possibly be that insecure.” He pulls her so tight she can feel his heart thumping against her breasts. Such a good strong heart. She's glad he can't see her face, the blush over how pathetic she must have sounded. “Have your coffee,” he says. “I'm going next door to ask my neighbour to keep an eye out for Dan for a couple of hours. We are going back to your place.”

As they're leaving, a woman who looks older, more frail than many of the people who are resident at the nursing home where Louise's mother lives, is making her cautious way up the front walk.

“Alice!” Jake takes her arm. “You don't have to sit over here. Just so long as he knows you have an eye on the house he'll behave.”

Now that she's standing straight, shoulders back in almost military posture, the woman looks a little less like she's the one in need of care. She pushes her glasses up onto her nose, tilts her head and stares at Louise, blinking like an owl. “Well you don't look scary at all,” she says. “Daniel told me he was awfully nervous about his dad bringing home a teacher.” She shrugs free of Jake's hold, and pats him on the arm. “I know I don't have to sit here, but I happen to like the boy's company. He's a sweetie, isn't he?” She looks so stern that Louise can only nod in agreement. “Actually, I came over so he can tell me what he thinks of you.”

Louise forces a smile. Wouldn't she love to stay around and eavesdrop on that one? No, not in the least.

“Looks like Danny has a friend in Alice,” she says when they're in the car and driving toward her apartment, the direction she's been hoping the evening would take. She wonders if Jake told Alice where they were going. Or Danny. No, she does not want to be in any imagining of Danny's.

“Ah, she's a snoopy old bat,” he says, “but she has a kind heart and I don't know what I'd have done without her help with Brenda in the end.”

“She was Brenda's friend too?”

“I wouldn't say that. Brenda found Alice a bit much, kind of rude, but Alice and Danny have been pals since we moved in when he was a little guy. Just so you know, she's been telling me for months that I need to find someone.”

They're stopped at a red light, and when he drums his fingers on the steering wheel, Louise reminds herself that he's probably been more nervous about tonight than either she or Danny.

She lays her hand over his to still the jumpy fingers. “Don't worry, Jake. I'm sure Danny and I will get used to each other.” But there is no way, she thinks, even though she has decided that she is going to marry Jake, that she will ever really be Daniel's mother.

As for a move from the city being the answer to Danny's problems, Louise hopes she won't have to see Jake's romantic notion kicked down the main street of some Alberta town.

Valmer? Does it by any chance bear a striking resemblance to that town with the broken-down garage?

No. Wrong landscape. I'm thinking more central Alberta.

Stettler region?

Close.

Roads Back

I didn't go to Stettler immediately after dredging up the information about the Cook murders. I was tempted, but without a clear mission, without the remotest idea of what I intended to do with any of this horrific story, there seemed little point. Instead, I found myself returning in memory to the towns where I'd grown up. The summer of 1959, the summer of Robert Raymond Cook, returned with the memory of a girl who'd been one of my best friends in the year after we moved to Camrose from the much smaller town of New Sarepta thirty miles away. I had no recollection of how long that friendship lasted. No memory of Rose beyond elementary school, but I was as sure as I could be that it was Rose who told me about the Cook murders. I could hear her slight lisp, see wide brown eyes, high cheek bones, long brown hair.

Rose lived three blocks away. It impressed me so, at ten, to be living in a place that was measured in blocks, to have an address instead of a post office box. New Sarepta had no more than half a dozen streets when we lived there; a creamery, post office, service station, general store, church, school, and hotel. And a coffee shop, owned and operated by my parents. We had living quarters in the back, and my mom cooked and served meals, while my dad drove away early every morning to check well sites for Edmonton Pipeline. Oil pump jacks in farm fields were as much a part of the landscape as barns and fields of barley. The year before I was born, oil well Leduc Number #1, just twenty miles away from New Sarepta, “blew” and there were good paying jobs to be had for every able-bodied man around. And for men from away as well. Our small town had an unusual number of strangers passing through, and many of them passed through our door.

I was so shy about this business of feeding strangers that went on in our home, that I lurked at the side of the house rather than out front or inside where men's dark green work shirts hunched like turtles over coffee mugs thick as bathroom sink porcelain. Their big bums spread on the red shiny stools where, after the coffee shop closed, a child could twirl until she was falling-down-dizzy.

Saturday night after closing, Mom would be on hands and knees doing a “proper” scrubbing, the pail of water emptied again and again. I can still evoke the smell of Johnson's paste wax that clumped in our throats late into the evening, hear the rustle of sheets of newspaper spread over the thick wax until it dried. On Sunday night, my sister and I in thick grey socks skated under the blue fluorescent light until every dull patch was swirled to a high shine.

When I slipped through the front door into the shop with its long stretch of counter, I would see my mother's permed head in the pass-through to the kitchen, apron straps crisscrossing the back of her dress, one elbow crooked over the pan of onions. When the special of the day was hot hamburger sandwiches, our house, clear to the bedrooms at the back, reeked of onions and grease.

We only moved thirty miles when we left New Sarepta and the coffee shop, but at ten, it was a world away to me, and a welcome one. No more strange men in our house, no more muddy streets.

Camrose had paved streets with numbers, parks, a movie theatre, library, and a social structure. Here my mother seemed to tag each of my friends with the occupation of the father. The banker's daughter, the funeral director's son, the school principal's kids, the optometrist's boy. But those like us, the working class, went untagged. When we moved to Camrose my mother worked as a seamstress at a dress shop, my dad still driving out to the oilfields. I never knew the occupation of Rose's dad. She was the girl from the family of ten kids. That description eclipsed all else, even though large families were common then. The small, crowded house was the reason my mother gave for refusing permission for me to sleep over at Rose's. She saw no reason for children to spend the night anywhere but in their own beds. My mother couldn't imagine how all those children fit into a small bungalow, and she certainly wasn't inflicting another on Rose's beleaguered mother.

It wasn't a slumber party Rose had on her mind when she pounded into our yard that day, Monday, June 30 when the news of the Cook murders broke. It was likely the last day of school. No early exits in those days. I imagine that Rose and I had hauled our bags of end-of-the-year grade five books and papers to our respective houses, that she reappeared just before suppertime, which at our house was the early hour of five o'clock, as soon as my dad walked through the door.

Memory tells me I was outside, sitting on the back step, pouting. Because my mother had refused another sleepover? Because I was prone to pouting and it was the surest way to irk my mother? In my memory, too, there is the smell of meat frying, my mother busy in the kitchen but keeping an eye on me through the open window, ready to come out and tell me that if I was sulking and bored already, she'd find some work to keep me busy. Boredom irked her even more than pouting.

Then Rose, wide-eyed, breathless, hair dangling around her ears from the ponytail that never lasted the day, racing along the cotoneaster hedge that separated our yard from the alley. Bringing the news. Dead bodies in a hole in the floor in a garage. Bodies of little children. This is the news I remember.

Rose would have heard it from one of her brothers. But her brothers were forever trying to scare her with creepy stories about graveyards and people buried alive and rats climbing into babies' cribs and gnawing off their fingers and toes. We didn't even have rats in Alberta and yet she believed them. So why would I believe a story about a pit full of bodies?

Because it was on the radio, she said, and Rose's oldest brother knew the person who they said had done the awful
killing. Robert Raymond Cook. I can hear Rose pronouncing his name like she was broadcasting the news herself. All summer long we would hear him formally named.

No, I insisted, this couldn't be true. Especially when she told me that he was the son, the brother of the dead children. I didn't have brothers, just one older sister, but I did have a sense of what brothers would or wouldn't do. Tease, torment, bully, but not murder. It must have been a stranger. If Stettler was anything like the small town we'd left behind, then a stranger was the answer.

My mother verified Rose's story when she came outside to find out what we were quarrelling about. She had heard the news from Stettler, and if she had heard, it had to be true. It was not the sort of information she deemed suitable for eleven-year-old girls, though, and she sent Rose home. The radio that usually played during supper so my dad could hear the weather report was turned off. The
Edmonton Journal
disappeared the next evening as quickly as the paperboy dropped it on the front step. But Rose was my pipeline, and eventually we got the story in its ghastly entirety. The children had been “bludgeoned” to death. I got out the
Miriam Webster
for that one, and for “stench” which I heard my dad quietly ponder to my mother. My dad didn't share my mom's strict prohibitions on what we were allowed to hear. If my mom was out, or distracted, he would let us sneak into the living room and watch
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. My mother was sure Hitchcock would plant the seeds of nightmare.
Lassie, Ozzie and Harriet
, those were shows suitable for children. If I could find my dad out in the garage, or in the basement, away from her keen ears, he would give me at least a censored version of the Cook story. Rose could be counted on to fill in the gore.

So, there were seven bodies, five children, the eldest a year younger than me. The son was a jailbird, just out of “the clink” my dad would have said, a few days before the killings. And if I asked how Robert Raymond Cook was captured, Rose might have described a car chase, with her brother in the lead, heading Cook off at the junction service station. My dad would probably have told me that they didn't have to catch Cook. He was parked outside the coffee shop in downtown Stettler, showing off his new car.

It turned out Rose's brother didn't really know Robert Raymond Cook, except that he'd been at a party Cook crashed a year or two before. But what seemed to be accepted by everyone as truth from the moment the news hit the front page, was that Robert Raymond Cook “did it.”

Cook was sent to Ponoka, to the provincial mental hospital, for psychiatric examination before his trial. That was the second chapter in the story I had stored in my memory. For anybody growing up in Alberta, Ponoka was synonymous with craziness. It still is. Yesterday, from the window of this room, I heard my neighbour saying goodbye to a visitor. “I should be in Ponoka by now!” the woman said. Laughed and drove away, leaving me to wonder what was driving her mad.

If Cook was sent to Ponoka then, in my eleven-year-old mind, he was as crazy as could be. And guilty. Much of my memory of that summer is set on the three block stretch between my house and Rose's. We must have trudged back and forth, whispering about murder, about brothers and boys. Though the Cook murders had dislodged it from our minds temporarily, another murder earlier in June had been centre stage. A girl in Ontario, exactly our age, out riding her bike, had never come home. Her body had been found in a field two days later, strangled, sexually assaulted. I didn't need
Miriam Webster
for those words. At eleven, Rose and I were better informed about sex than we were about violence. A fourteen-year-old boy, Stephen Truscott, had already been charged with the murder of Lynne Harper when the Cook family was murdered.

It was officially summer, two lazy months during which Rose and I would have ventured out on the gravel roads around town, Cheez Whiz sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and milk bottles full of Kool-Aid in the baskets on the front of our bikes. So long as we were back by suppertime, no one would have worried. But on July 10, Robert Raymond Cook broke out of Ponoka, and our wandering came to a quick halt. My mother didn't need to place restrictions. Rose and I imagined a murderer, one with particular interest in children, hiding behind every tree, and even if we'd been allowed, we weren't likely to wander farther than the playground within shouting distance of my house.

Even though he was captured three days later, the final chapter in my memory of Robert Raymond Cook, it seemed as though our summer-time freedom was irrevocably lost.

So this is your story now?

No. That's as far as we need to go with my story.

Well you're ignoring mine. And what about the Cooks?

What about them? They've been dead for forty-six years.

What happened to them?

I am not writing a story about bludgeoning and hanging.

Not that part. What happened before. Why did he kill them?

Why does it matter?

That's the question, isn't it? I knew you weren't finished with them yet.