Things as They Are (13 page)

“What about the train and the cards and all that?” she said. “You can’t seriously suggest there was anything the least normal about that.” He wasn’t sure what his young wife meant. He had told Pam the anecdote intending to amuse her, but she had taken it all wrong.

Ray’s story concerned the year he was ten. It was 1961 and his father was building a rec room in the basement. Just then rec rooms were all the rage, everybody on the block had one, or was building one, and his father didn’t want to be left behind. That was the kind of man Ray’s father was, always worried that somebody was stealing a march on him. Every night he came home from the mine where he was a shift captain underground, ate his supper hurriedly, without a hint of relish or appreciation, and then plunged downstairs into the basement to continue with his improvements. Only many years later did it strike Ray that his father had seen scarcely more than a few minutes of sun all that autumn. If he wasn’t deep beneath the earth ripping out potash, he was down in his basement playing handyman in the artificial glare of a naked light bulb.

Most evenings Ray crept down the stairs after his Dad and put himself quietly in an out of the way corner to watch him renovate, an awkward boy with embarrassingly heavy thighs, plump behind, and a mild, trusting face that led his teachers to smile at his infrequent, small misdemeanours and always think the best of him. Ray resembled his mother but it was his father he admired. In particular he admired the way his father looked, strong, lean, and rangy like the cowboys on his favourite television shows. Like those cowboys, his father seldom spoke and was inclined to stare away questions rather than answer them. Ray didn’t ever ask him much, although by nature he was a curious boy. He would have liked to have been let in on the secrets of construction, to have understood how his father commanded and directed water and electricity to do his bidding, but he knew better than to make himself a bother and risk getting sent upstairs. Usually his father neglected to notice that Ray was even in the room with him, although once or twice in the course of an evening he would summon him to perform some simple task, to hold the end of a tape measure, to pass nails, to sweep sawdust. These rare occasions justified Ray’s announcing to the kids on his street: “Me and my Dad are building a rec room. We want to get it done by Christmas, for the parties. It’s an awful lot of work.”

Ray was agog with excitement over the anticipated Christmas parties. His family had not been in this particular town long, had never been in any town long because the nature of his father’s profession kept them moving. An ore body played out, the bottom dropped out of a metal market, his father wrangled with a foreman, and the family pulled up stakes and moved on. For young Ray, the building of a rec room promised changes, the introduction of gaiety and permanence in their lives.

In the past Ray had heard his mother speak of a time when she and his father had “entertained.” Whenever she talked about this his father stared at her, unblinking, until she stopped. If there ever had been such a time it went back far
beyond Ray’s recollection, back perhaps to when his brother Kenny was still alive. Ray understood, without resentment, that he was some sort of replacement for this dead brother. When he was six he overheard his mother say to a neighbour lady, “We just had to have another baby as soon as possible. It’s the only way Ted could have got over it.” And then she added, as an afterthought, “I felt the same way, of course.” It always gave Ray a queer, unsettled feeling to think that he, too, might die one day and his place be usurped by a shadowy, unimaginable brother waiting patiently for his chance, in the wings.

By the end of October work on the rec room neared completion. Unlike anyone else who renovated, Ray’s father had refused to invite the neighbour men over to drink beer and help. He said most of them couldn’t be trusted to do the simplest job properly. He knew that much from watching them operate at the mine. Let them waste the company’s time, not his.

Ted Matthews was a perfectionist, it was the word his wife relied on to describe him to strangers. The walls of imitation walnut panelling lining the recreation room were seamlessly fitted. There was tile laid on the cement floor and carpeting on top of the tile so that the cold wouldn’t rise up in the winter and numb the soles of your feet like it did in so many other houses where people didn’t care to do things right. At the end of the long, narrow room his father installed a wet bar and a second-hand fridge to keep beer and soft drinks cold. The refrigerator was the only item second hand. The chesterfield, the half-dozen wicker chairs, the pole lamp bought at the Saan Store mightn’t be of the highest quality but they were new and not the junk and cast-offs which other people tried to pass off as furniture, stuff you looked twice at before you sat down on.

The only thing left to be done was run track for the railway. The railway was the crowning touch to the rec room, a bit of
ingenious engineering that would allow Ray’s father to speed drinks directly to his guests without ever having to step from behind the bar. It ran the length of the room, supported on brackets screwed into the wall panelling.

“What’ll they think of that?” Ted kept demanding of his wife and son.

Ray was convinced his dad had to be just about the smartest dad in the world to come up with such a plan. Yet there was something about the railway he didn’t completely understand. Several years before, Ray had been rooting around in his parents’ closet and he had discovered track, a selection of railway cars, and a wonderful black locomotive packed away in a cardboard box. But when his father found him playing with it, Ray got the worst licking of his life, with an extension cord. His mother, trying to explain why to him later, said that because the train set had been Kenny’s favourite toy his father couldn’t bear the thought of it getting broken. “He wants to keep it just as your brother left it,” she said. “That’s why it must never be played with.” Ray had accepted that, the way he accepted everything concerning his father. But now he was bewildered. What had changed, making it all right to use the train set?

The approach of the Christmas party not only got Ray excited, it got his mother all a-flutter too. Packing one-gallon ice-cream containers with homemade Nuts ’N Bolts to be frozen for the party one afternoon, she began to happily reminisce about his brother. “Kenny was such a people person,” she said. “Your brother just loved people. When we entertained I used to put him to bed early but there was no way of keeping him there. Out he’d come in his pyjamas and start passing around the peanuts or whatever to the guests. He was so polite and cute. Everybody loved to see him playing the little host. He was definitely a people person, your brother Kenny.”

The last week of November arrived and Ray’s mother asked his father for a guest list. He said he was thinking on it.
During the first week of December she warned him that it was getting late, he’d better make up his mind soon. He said he’d make up his mind when he was good and goddamn ready to make it up and not before. Anyway it was a christly hoax, Christmas and the whole chiselling season.

“Now why do you say things like that?” Ray’s mother asked. “Don’t you remember how you used to enjoy Christmas? The parties we used to have?”

“Shut up about the parties we used to have!” his father cried.

One evening in mid-December his parents had a fight at the supper table. Ray’s mother said, “If you don’t want to have a party just say so. If that’s the case I won’t bother knocking myself out getting all the stuff ready for something that isn’t going to happen, the food, the decorations, the rest of it.” Ray had never seen her look as she did then, wild, barely in control of herself.

His father didn’t trouble to answer her. He just stared at her across the table.

“Don’t you give me that look of yours,” she said. “Give me an answer. Are we having the party? Yes or no?”

“No,” he said. “We aren’t.”

“And why not?” she cried. “After all these years, why not? What would be wrong with a party? What harm would there be in it?”

“It wouldn’t be right,” his father said. “That’s all.”

Then his mother did something Ray would never have dreamed she would do. She got up from the table and put on her coat and scarf, leaving the scattered dirty dishes, the leftover pork roast just as they were.

“Where do you think you’re going?” his father demanded.

“Out. To a movie,” she said.

“Well you aren’t taking the car,” he said. “It’s blizzarding out there and I’ve got no intention of paying for a tow truck to pull you out when you get yourself stuck.”

“I’ll walk,” she said, slamming the door behind her.

His father sat without twitching a muscle and Ray did likewise. Neither looked at the other. Then his father slowly pushed back his chair from the table, stood, and walked out of the kitchen. Ray heard feet on the stairs and knew that his father was going down to the rec room.

Ray wasn’t sure how to behave. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The unusual sight of food abandoned on the table frightened him, as did the sound of the wind, suddenly loud in the quiet kitchen. He got up and tiptoed after his father.

Ray found his dad sitting on one of the wicker Saan Store chairs. His father lifted his eyes from the floor and arrested Ray in the doorway with his gaze, held him there for several seconds, then nodded permission to enter. Ray ducked into the room and scurried to a chair across from his father.

“I guess you and me are bachelor boys for the night,” his father said.

“I guess,” said Ray.

“I don’t forget how it used to be. I don’t forget as easy as all that,” said his father. “Piss on parties and piss on people who have to have them.”

“Yeah,” agreed Ray.

His father lit a cigarette, flourished the dead match at him. “There’s ashtrays behind the bar,” he said to Ray. “Be a good boy and fetch me one.”

No sooner had Ray gained the bar than his father came up with a better idea. “Hey,” he called, “ship it down on the train. And while you’re at it, put a rye and coke on the freight.” He paused to glance at his wristwatch. “Put a rye and Coke on the 7:17 and we’ll baptize the son of a bitch. We’ll make a wet run.”

Ray could scarcely credit the honour being done him, his rare good fortune. He wedged the ashtray securely in a coal car, balanced the tumbler of whisky on a flat car, and sent the train swaying cautiously down the line. When his father offloaded the freight, Engineer Ray backed up the train to the
station at the bar. A dime lay on the flat car which had borne the whisky. His father saluted him with glass lifted high. “A lesson for later life,” he shouted from down the room. “Always tip the bartender and you’ll get what you want, when you want it. Remember that, Ray. Now mix me a vodka and orange juice, plenty of ice.”

To be privileged to run his brother’s train and serve his father was all Ray could ask for. Because Ted Matthews sat in the farthest corner of the room, isolated in the light of the pole lamp, it appeared, by a trick of perspective, that the train had to traverse a great distance to reach him. For an hour the locomotive crossed and recrossed this daunting span without mishap or incident, exchanging drinks for pocket change and empty glasses.

With four or five belts in him, Ted grew increasingly talkative and noisy, addressing Ray in an unusually loud voice. “You’re all right, Ray,” he said. “You may look like your mother but you think like me. So you can’t be all bad, you goddamn little fifty-per-center, can you? I still had something left over after making Kenny, didn’t I?”

“Sure,” said Ray, laughing at the funny things his father said. He was settling the next drink, vodka and tomato juice, on the train with great care. His father hadn’t requested the same drink twice.

“You’ve got a good heart, Ray,” his father said. He attempted to pluck the Bloody Mary from the train before it came to a full stop and slopped a little of it on his wrist. “But you’re not all that likeable. If I had one bit of advice to give you, it’s this – work on your personality. Being good doesn’t take you very far in this world.”

Ray nervously bobbed his head.

“And always look both ways, twice, before crossing the road, and up, once, in case anything’s falling out of the sky.”

Ray laughed at this but his father sternly said, “Be serious. I’m giving you serious advice here.”

So Ray composed a serious face and listened closely to all
the advice his father started to expound. He must never marry a woman who dyed her hair and he must make sure to keep insurance policies in a safety deposit box. If he ever needed a lawyer, hire a Jew. Last of all, avoid leukaemia. “That was your brother’s biggest mistake,” he said. “He caught leukaemia and it killed him, the dumb little fuck.”

Having emptied himself of advice, his father relapsed into his customary stony silence. When Ray persisted in trying to talk to him, his father curtly ordered him to scare up some cards. Drunk as he was, he cleaned Ray out of his tips. When Ray had no more money to play, that was the finish of blackjack. “Money talks and bullshit walks,” was all his father would say. Ray was disappointed – not over the money – but because losing the money brought an end to this momentous evening. His father abruptly got to his feet, stumbled up the stairs, and fell into bed drunk.

The next day his mother cleared the supper dishes and did not go out to a movie as Ray hoped she would. His father offered him no more advice. The railway disappeared mysteriously from the rec room, although the screw holes were there in the wall for Ray, a doubting Thomas, to touch with his fingers.

Years later, Ray was convinced that the best explanation of himself he could ever give his new wife was hidden in the events of that evening. Yet when he attempted to relate the story he could not find the words to express how rich, how moving that strange memory was for him. Losing his nerve, he offered a trivial version which he struggled to make hilarious. A small boy milked his father for pocket money by running drinks to him on a preposterous toy train and then got his comeuppance by losing it all in a card game.