The Journey Prize Stories 24 (19 page)

My parents’ conversation continued over the next few hours, sometimes softly in almost inaudible murmurs, other times erupting into strident tones of outright drunken hostility. By this time I was lying in my bed, sleepless, restless with every wrongful twist of my bed sheets, staring at my ceiling.
The lights in the street created a familiar overglow in my room and I stared as tiny dots of winking dimness generated patterns on my paint-cracked ceiling, patterns I often collected into recognizable images – the man with the nose, the happy cow, the mud-splattered ogre – the last of which I was having trouble looking at more than once. As I heard my parents make their way up the front stairs, I closed my eyes and prayed to God they wouldn’t get divorced again.

“Stewart, would you mind not being such a –”

“Mumsy? I don’t want to hear another word of this.”

“– prig. They’re just trying to do good in the world. Their life isn’t only about making money.”

“Sure, sure, Mumsy. Relax. Relax, kid.”

“I hate it when you get like this.”

“Here we go. Here it is. It’s all coming now. I’ll take the rest of that wine, thank you very much.”

“You want to lose your hand? Just tell me something. Why don’t you try something new for once in your life – like in the last forty years? That’s the problem between me and you. You don’t care two shits about the environment. And I do.”

“The environment? How in the
hell
are we talking about the environment?”

There were a few thudding and bumping noises – which I guessed to be my mother’s foot slipping off a step and her subsequent stumble into the creaking banister. “Well,” she said. “I hope
I
never ridicule what is wise and good. That’s a quote. You can look it up.”

“Yes, Mackie. Beautiful performance. Exit stage left with a bear.”

“It’s exit pursued by a bear. Get it right, for Christ’s sake. For
once in your crumb-bum life, would you get something
right
?”

This exchange was followed by the closing of their bedroom door, a brief lull, a night shriek, and the smashing of a bottle. My parents began as actors – they met in college in a play – so we kids were used to these kinds of theatrics. But tonight seemed a return to the drear uncertainty of five years ago and as I tried again to fall asleep I began to wonder if what I wanted for myself was really relevant at all.

Uncle Lorne was an archivist, a tinkerer, a published poet. The year he came to live with us, when he was twelve, he was seized upon by the middle school English teacher, Mr. Jones, who chose three of Uncle Lorne’s poems for the literary section of
The Grammarian
, the school yearbook. Two were about Third Empire Rome (“Roma Aeterna”) and a third, and for me most vivid, was titled “Wild Dogs.” It moved with the pace of a Blake lyric and started with the line, “Perturbed eyes and carious teeth …” What was this word –
perturbed
? or
carious
? or
gelignite
? In what furnace burned these words? Where had he gleaned such lore and stuff? The poems were signed “Lorne Anthony Wheeler,” one of the few times I saw my uncle’s full name in print. When he was in Montreal, living in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, Dompa had given him a rubber stamp with his full name and address on it (a very Dompa gift), and this blue, inky imprimatur appeared on the cover of many of my uncle’s earliest collected comics – before he realized making such a mark might devalue the artifact. Uncle Lorne left Montreal just before Expo 67 and, though he seldom talked about it, I could feel, from how he once pinned to our cork-board postcards of the geodesic dome and the Habitat 67
housing complex (communiqués from Benoit Charbonneau and Thompson Oldring – precious friends I’d never meet), that Nova Scotia must have seemed for him a far and distant outpost of the empire, and Halifax, vis-à-vis Montreal, a city much reduced in circumstance. I decided it was to cosmopolitan Montreal that he owed his strange intelligence. My uncle and his abilities I regarded mostly with reverent awe, though I knew he was somewhat eccentric – as if his clockwork required further assembly. Because while Uncle Lorne was made up of a lot of quick parts, not all of them worked, and some were changing colours, and still others awaited their final function. His vocabularies, his silences, his keen intrigues and esoteric associations were all clues, as I sensed them, to the inverted kingdom of his imagination. “My brother’s mind certainly works weird,” my mother would say. “No, Lorne’s brilliant, he is, but he’s not always exactly
here
, you know. In the real world.” I sometimes wondered if I would ever understand him. And I wanted to – I wanted the fellowship and solidarity and stability such an understanding would supply. My sisters had no idea how Uncle Lorne thought and had mostly stopped trying. “You know,” said Carolyn when the gelignite comment reached her desk. “That’s just Uncle Lorne humour.” Bonnie agreed. She tended to speak about Uncle Lorne in a respectful but detectably marginalizing manner – and sneaking into her tone lately was the implication that Uncle Lorne was increasingly out-of-touch and peculiar – as if, for her, he was already beyond the point of no return. At the end of June she said to me, “You know the Abbots are atheists, right?”

“So?”

“So Faith asked Uncle Lorne what atheists were and you know what he said? That atheists were families that drown their own pets. Is that supposed to be funny? Like a Chris Cody joke?”

“Faith knows what atheists are.”

“But what if Uncle Lorne tells Katie that? She’s young and she’ll believe him.” There was no attempt at a tolerant smile here – Bonnie was offended by Uncle Lorne’s deliberate subversion of a religious matter and she would attribute this wayward attitude to the growing influence of the other paper boy, Chris Cody. Christopher Cody was a giggly, bushy-haired teenager who would arrive at our backdoor door ostensibly to watch
Kung Fu
with Uncle Lorne. Later, he might be found shambling around our furnace room in tinted aviator glasses, eating Munchos Chips, and listening on headphones to Grand Funk Railroad or Badfinger or Santana – albums whose psychedelic cover art used to frighten and confuse me as a small child. To my uncle, Chris was Commander Cody, a name always spoken in a hoarse, back-of-the-throat style, as if Uncle Lorne’s voice were suddenly parched with fatigue or thirst. This voice was used in all manner of Chris Cody settings, often with purposefully sinister implication, and recently even in non–Chris Cody situations, when a bored Uncle Lorne might seek to surprise you by creeping into the TV room to whisper into your ear, “Boris the Spider!” which was the name by which this diversion came to be known – as Uncle Lorne’s Boris the Spider trick.

I was wary of Commander Cody. On a winter Wednesday at the newspaper drop-off, he once chased me into a snow bank and put snow down my back. In May I was kicked out of the
TV room so he and Uncle Lorne could watch a Clint Eastwood movie. And lately, now that both had grown greebly moustaches, Chris Cody had taken to commandeering my uncle on missions into the musty Halifax nightlife, to places with names like The Hollis Street Tavern, The Ladies Beverage Room, The Green Dory, and some bar called Angie’s. On Dominion Day Sunday, stepping out our back door to walk to St. Matthew’s United Church, my younger sisters and I happened upon Chris Cody’s recent vomit, some of which had fallen through the porch slats, but most of which was still intact, congealed in a kind of fractal dispersion pattern, swirls and streaks emanating from a wet epicentre not far from an unfortunately situated Malibu Skipper doll. Chris Cody was found in his clothes in our basement bathtub, Uncle Lorne in the wicker armchair, and our family’s station wagon on a sidewalk on Barrington Street, the passenger’s side of the vehicle wrapped around a utility pole. My father, not known for his severity, grounded Uncle Lorne for the rest of the summer and grimly recommended to him that he seek out a better class of companion than Christopher Cody, who had been driving the car.

“Commander Cody has crash-landed,” my uncle said afterwards in his Boris the Spider voice. “He will be flying with his Lost Planet Airmen no more. He has been marooned on the Red Planet. Commander Cody, over and out.”

My sister Bonnie was blunt in her relief. “Thank God – that guy was such a gook.”

“A
gook
?” Uncle Lorne said. “Bitsy, do you even know what a
gook
is?”

Bonnie used the term as she and Carolyn always did – to
mean an awkward or unseemly person. “Chris Cody’s a gook,” said Bonnie, flatly.

“No, Bitsy,” said my uncle, with some impatience. “A
gook
’s a Viet Cong. As in Victor Charlie. As in they
were
blown up with gelignite. Why don’t you get that straight?”

That Wednesday there was no race home after the paper route. Uncle Lorne’s mood precluded it. He chain-smoked all the way back to Tower Road, preoccupied and changed. In the last few years, I had noticed divagations. For most of my youth, Uncle Lorne was the lilting fall of the Byrds’ high harmony line in “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He was the kid staring with steady excitement at the movie poster for
Endless Summer
. He was that brief half-second when he bent his face forward before clearing his bangs from his eyes with a flick of the head. But now – now he was no longer the sort of candid, open-air kid you might approach on your first day in the Scout Troop or at the soccer skills camp. He was no longer a kid. In one moment he was my colleague and pal, ironing the creases out of a comic book, constructing a lunar-docking station, and the next he was bringing home a fluorescent black light to place above a felt poster, or watching Bruce Lee movie marathons in cut-off jeans, his dark bangs so swoopy and shaggy they barely allowed for a sight line. By June of that year Uncle Lorne had become a long-haired freaky person, a hippie in an untucked T-shirt, a fringed leather jacket, and bell-bottoms fraying beneath the soft heels of his red suede Adidas sneakers. He was reedy, stretched, finishing a growth spurt that would top him out over six feet, taller by far than Dompa or my father. He was still proudly himself, equal to any context, unsurprised by developments
great and small, but he was losing interest. Just as I was beginning to really read and appreciate and care for
The Justice League of America
, Uncle Lorne couldn’t care less. For a while his curiosity was stayed by the Marvell Comics universe, specifically the metaphysics and Kirby dots of
The Silver Surfer
, a loner adrift in the cosmos, as well as the Kirby titles started at DC,
The New Gods
and
Mister Miracle
, but his previous fascination was no longer evident. It was an effort for him to dream the superheroes when before they had dreamed him. His thoughts entered their mythology only when my presence reminded him. “This place, Grub,” he said to me on that walk home, dropping a last cigarette on the sidewalk and scuffing it out with his suede sneaker. “This burg …” He sighed as if unable to delay a judgment that had become screamingly obvious. “It’s like living in the Bottle City of Kandor. It’s so cut off, it’s bogus. It’s beyond bogus. It’s so bogus, it’s
rogus
. It’s an embarrassment of rogusness. And everywhere fossified. Fwa!”

Arriving at our house, we saw my mother had left a note taped to the door, “Dinner at the Abbots! love Mom.” There had been considerable interplay between the two households since the solstice. My sisters Faith and Katie were turning seven and five that summer, and September Dawn and Jessamine were turning six and four – and so best-friendships were made fast and fixed. It worked for my mother not only because she was in
Midsummer
every evening but because she was rehearsing a new play during the afternoon – something called
Godspell –
so she was at the theatre day by day by day, from eleven in the morning to eleven at night. When he wasn’t in New Brunswick
volunteering at a summer camp, Mr. Abbot was building sets for
Godspell
, so Mrs. Abbot became the de facto guardian for both families – a responsibility she met with deliberate composure. Of the two, it was Mrs. Abbot who seemed to me saintly. Vivien Abbot was the calm of a Peter, Paul and Mary song. She was slimness and silence and ovals. She wore her hair long and unstyled and parted in the middle, shaping her face in the oval of a cameo brooch. Soft on her nose were the side-lying ovals of her granny glasses. From her neck, a pendant swayed in elliptical arcs as she stirred a vegan stew made from backyard zucchinis. Beside her, leaning against the kitchen wall, were two twin-arched gothic windows rescued from a falling-apart farmhouse, and, as she looked at us kids with calm, impassive eyes, supplying us with a very patient, open-ended expectancy, it was as if, in all her self-effacing ovals,
she
were somehow transparent – as if she were merely a frame through which to view the world. She was, on the contrary, at least to us kids, highly palpable, for she conveyed in an instant her respect for the aims underlying a child’s inarticulacy, mystification, and helplessness. Vivien Abbot was one of those vigilant, soft-talking mothers who never had to raise her voice because children, sensing her intrinsic decency, never wanted to disappoint her. She went about braless in paint-flecked peasant smocks and overalls, sometimes the side-swell of a breast plumping into open sunlight. But Mrs. Abbot, and the Abbot family in general, acted as if nakedness wasn’t anything to particularly panic about – a principle rather new to our street. For some reason she had a reputation as a free-thinker and radical – censures I tried not to hold in mind as I was worried they would lead to restrictions on our visits. Earlier
in the summer she let September-and-Jessamine and Faith-and-Katie paint the kitchen furniture any way they wanted – I was sitting on a chair splashed with many colours – and I decided these kinds of experiments explained her reputation for licentiousness.