The Second Son (25 page)

“What about that other idea you had, Ed?” my mother joined in. “You know, that maybe you could go into partnership with him, if he’s expanding the business?”

He seemed to shrink, then, like some of the air went out of him. “Yeah, we talked about that. He said he’d think about it. You know, if I was to come up with a chunk of cash, and the timing was right.” The smile didn’t return.

“That’s wonderful, dear. In the meantime we’ll have a steady income again. And if I can get on full-time at the post office, when Elsie Wallace retires? Well, that would be another hundred a month. We’d be doing pretty well, don’t you think?”

I could see my old man wouldn’t be having that fat roll of bills in his pocket again, not anytime soon. The only saving grace was that they were both too preoccupied to notice my new haircut. We were halfway through supper when Andrew looked up and said, “Hey, Mike, what happened to your hair?”

“Nothin’,” I muttered.

“Michel Landry,” my mother cried, “what did you do?”

“Nothing, I just got a haircut.”

“Not at Dickey’s barber shop,” my father growled.

“Naw, he always cuts it too short. None of the kids go there anymore. They all go to Mr. Lalonde’s.” By that time I was thanking God for the big job offer, because neither one of them was yelling at me.

My father finally asked, “What the hell kind of haircut is that?”

“I dunno, it’s like Elvis, that’s all. Some people call it a ducktail.”

“Turn your head, let me see.” When I complied he started to laugh. “You’re right, it looks like a duck’s ass. Is that what you want to look like, a duck’s ass?”

“Yeah,” I muttered, “a duck’s ass. That’s me.”

“Dear, it’s all the style now,” my mother interceded. “It doesn’t look that bad. Although I can’t say I like that name.” My mother, obviously trying to salvage the good mood, gave me an idea.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s the Elvis look. They say he’s going to be a millionaire by the time he’s thirty. Heck, maybe he is already.”

My father squinted a little and seemed to be thinking about how to take that. Finally he sighed and said, “Well, you can keep it for now. But if I think you’re turning into a smart-ass, with that haircut, I’ll take you down to Dickey’s myself and get you a brushcut. Like the army. You understand?”

“Uh, huh,” I managed, afraid to give away my exaltation at getting away with it. My luck must be changing, too, I told myself.

I WASN
’
T SO SURE ANYBODY
’
S LUCK
was changing that first night my father came home from his new job. We had already started supper when we heard him coming up the front steps. He opened the door and stuck his blackened face inside. “Lorna, can you get some newspapers and lay them out by the back door?” He meant in the TV room behind the kitchen that led into the backyard.

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? I’m covered with soot, for Chrissakes.”

She shook her head as she rose from the table. “And you want newspapers?”

“Yes,” he directed, “spread them out so I can take these clothes off.”

“Inside?”

“Yes, dammit, inside. You think I’m going to get undressed in the backyard?”

“Okay! There’s no need to swear.” She rushed around, finding some papers and getting them laid out for him, while we went back to see what he was talking about.

He looked like an old man that night, coming up from deep in a coal mine. He was covered in soot, hacking and coughing and spitting into a blackened handkerchief. “Jesus H. Christ,” he was muttering to my mother as he tried to peel off his clothes without shaking the soot loose. “Now I know why he wanted a helper. He’s got me doing the dirty work in more ways than one.”

“What on earth were you doing?” My mother didn’t know much about furnaces, I guess.

“What the hell do you think I was doing? Tearing out an old furnace. I told you what the job was.”

“All right, all right. You can quit swearing at me, anytime you want.”

“Well . . . it was the old coal furnace at Tom McDougall’s place. We had to tear out a lot of the old pipes. It’s a goddamn octopus, been there over sixty years. Damn soot came pouring out like water from a tap.”

He was down to his underwear by now and even that was grey. “Get me my slippers, Andrew. I’ll go up and take a bath.”

My mother was carefully wrapping the paper around the clothes. “What’ll I do with these things? Do you think it will wash out?”

“Jesus Christ, I don’t know. How would I know?”

“Quit swearing at — ”

“Okay, sorry. I don’t know what to do. I’ll go tomorrow and buy some coveralls, maybe, and some boots. Jesus, I never guessed it would be this dirty. I had to leave the car at Barry’s. I walked all the way down Main Street like this.”

He came home like that every night for a week, although the coveralls he bought did save his clothes from the worst of it. Even I felt sorry for him when he came down from the bath around seven to have his warmed-over supper. My mother would be up there for another half hour, trying to get the black out of the bathtub. I wondered how he could stand it, breaking off pieces of white bread with those blackened fingernails and soot-stained hands. He had always been a sharp dresser, proud of his appearance. It got a little better. They weren’t replacing furnaces or cleaning chimneys all the time, but when he started delivering fuel oil he came home stinking of that. And just like the soot, it seeped into his skin, especially during the cold weather when his hands got all red and cracked and sorelooking. I couldn’t help looking at my own hands and feeling guilty about that night in the store.

The old man talked tough, telling everybody about the furnaces they were putting in, trying to make it sound all complicated and technical, like it was some important job. That was bullshit. I know because he started hauling out that damn old box of bills again, on Saturday nights, sitting there with my mother and talking about what they could say in a letter to get people to finally pay. Once, she came up with the idea of putting a list up in the post office, to try and shame them into paying. I was downright gleeful at that prospect, until he put the kibosh to it. “I can’t do that,” he said. “The whole town will hate me.” He had to keep hoping, I suppose, that the town loved him back.

He remained desperate to raise some cash to get back into business for himself. For a couple of weeks he was all hot to buy some jeezly big machine to sandblast old brick buildings. Some guy over in Cornwall had one for sale and we drove down there to check it out. The guy said he would sell it on payments and the old man got all excited. For better or worse, my mother talked him out of it. She went out with the car the next day and drove around town, counting the brick buildings that needed cleaning. Then she showed him how he’d have to start moving from town to town at the end of the first three months, even if everybody in town with a brick house hired him. “And that would have to be in cash,” she reminded him.

I guess the part about the cash convinced him. Eventually he took his box of bills to a lawyer and paid him fifty dollars to find out it would cost him more than he was owed to take all those people to court. He probably knew that before he went. He just needed to find out the hard way, before he’d finally accept that he was screwed. I remember that night he came back from the lawyer’s. It was the first time I ever heard him use the words “goddamn” and “Alexandria” in the same sentence. And he did it more than once.

Andrew heard it, too, and it upset him. Like I said, Andrew loved Alexandria. I don’t know if he started moping around that spring because of what was happening to the old man, or because of Gail MacDonald dumping him. Likely it was both. I noticed he stopped going over there so often, sometime after Christmas. He did get a part-time job at Lavoie’s butcher shop, in February, and started taking Gail to shows and stuff again. Sometime in March, though, she began making excuses. Then she turned him down for the St. Patrick’s Day dance at the high school. I never found out why exactly she dumped him. When I tried to worm it out of her, she laughed and said, “I’m not telling
you
. You want to know too badly.” I guess she had me pegged.

But if it was jealousy that did me in, it was shame that ruined Andrew. He couldn’t accept that she wouldn’t want to go out with him anymore. Maybe he had been counting on her to prove the Landrys were just as important as ever, what with her being the mayor’s daughter and all. He kept going over there, the same as always, knocking on the door and just walking in. One day near the end of March she blew up at him, told him he was being ignorant. He must have been some surprised. Hell, in our neighbourhood kids did that all the time, if it was your friend’s house. You didn’t make their mother come to the door every time you came by, just to let a kid in. You knocked and stepped inside, and asked after the kid you were looking for.

Andrew came home pretty embarrassed that day, slamming the door behind him. My mother let him stew for a while, then asked him what happened. I was listening from the TV room, in back.

“What exactly did she say, dear?”

“She said I was an ignoramus, that polite people waited for someone to come to the door.”

“Was her mother there? Did they have company?”

“No. I wouldn’t have walked in if they had company. I was just over there, an hour ago. She was supposed to be doing her homework. She told me.”

“Well, you are getting older, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re not children anymore. Suppose Gail’s mother was altering a dress for her, or something. What if she was standing there in her underwear? How would you feel, then?”

I almost laughed out loud when I heard that. If she had asked me, I would have told her — lucky, that’s how I would’ve felt. I guess that’s why she never would have talked to me like that, now that I think of it. Not Andrew. She could rely on him to give her the right answer on that stuff. I know because I used to ask him all kinds of questions when he came home from taking Gail to a show.

“So, what happened?” I would ask.

“What do you mean, what happened? We saw the show.” He knew damn well what I meant.

“Where did you sit?”

“None of your business.”

“Well, did you get to first base, at least?” I knew he wouldn’t tell me.

“Keep your filthy trap shut. She’s not like that.”

“You idiot. Aren’t you even trying?”

He would get red in the face and try to ignore me but I’d keep at him. “Did you kiss her at least?”

“Mind your own darn business.”

I used to wonder what it would take to make him say damn. “Did you at least feel her boob? Did you try, even?”

“That’s a sin, you know. Even talking like that is a sin. You’ll have to go to confession on Friday.”

I hated that religion talk. The nuns marched us over to the church for confession every week and I was still cowed enough to go into the confessional and mumble some sins to the priest, hopefully Father Phelan who was almost deaf. But I resented the hell out of it and Andrew knew it. As soon as he started talking sin and confession I’d let up on him. The dumb thing was, he was probably there twice a week confessing his sins with Gail. It must have driven him crazy, wanting her so much and feeling so guilty all the time for what they were doing. Me, I was going to sleep every night with my arms and legs wrapped around a pillow called Gail. I don’t think Andrew did that, hug his pillow every night. Might be a sin. I think the nuns had him afraid to even think about his body and the feelings it aroused.

I got a glimpse of that the summer before, when we’d been hanging around one afternoon with Paddy Dolan, under the cement bridge on the McKrimmon side road. Andrew and I had been out on our bikes when we ran into Paddy. I never chummed with Paddy that much. I always thought he was a little weird. That day, though, he had a pack of cigarettes, and my usual supply had been cut off. So there we were, having a few smokes and throwing rocks at the frogs. At least Paddy and I were smoking. Saint Andrew wasn’t.

At one point I moved farther under the bridge to take a leak. I had just hauled out my dick when Paddy came up behind me and said, “I’m not afraid to put that in my mouth, you know.”

“Huh?” I managed to get out. I was almost thirteen by then, but had no idea what this guy was talking about. Jesus, did I have a lot to learn. Now that I look back, I wonder who the son of a bitch was that got him into that stuff. Anyway, that was the first I ever heard of someone putting a penis in their mouth. I thought it was some kind of joke he was making up.

That’s why I blurted out, “Waddaya mean? Are ya nuts?” I looked over at Andrew and he was staring at us with his eyes bugging out of his head.

“I mean it, I’ll put it in my mouth,” Paddy insisted.

“You’re nuts, Dolan.”

“What’s the matter? Are ya chicken?”

“Let’s go, Michel. Let’s get out of here.” That was Andrew. When he wanted to boss me around he started calling me Michel, like my mother.

I might have left then, only I really had to take a leak and it wasn’t coming out easy because my penis had stiffened up from the pressure on my bladder. Then a grin started working its way up my face and a sneaky idea came with it. I turned back to Paddy and wagged my dick at him, “You mean you’d really put it in your mouth?”

“I said I would, didn’t I?” Paddy narrowed his eyes at me. He must have really wanted to do it, because I could see he didn’t trust me.

“Michel, don’t you dare. We’re going.” I really hated it when Andrew tried to tell me what to do.

“Okay, come on.” I stood there and waited for Paddy to kneel down and put his mouth around my penis. As soon as he did I squeezed my stomach muscles as hard as I could and pissed in his mouth.

He jerked away, spitting and cursing at the same time, “You bastard . . . ppthppth . . . you prick . . . ppthppth . . . you dirty cunt!” He kept alternating curse names between spitting sessions. That last one, I had never heard before.

It was a good thing he was too busy spitting and cursing to jump me. By that time I was half-paralyzed from laughing so hard. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen, some asshole stupid enough to let me put my dick in his mouth and piss. The tears were rolling down my face and I had a hard time talking. “What . . . are you . . . so m-mad about, m-man,” I finally managed. “You told me you weren’t afraid, you stupid shmuck. What did you think I was gonna do?”