Things as They Are (2 page)

“Those days are long gone now, aren’t they, King? All the good times in the past,” said Albert with a mournful last-day-of-summer sound to his voice.

If there’s one thing that King never could stand, it was a pisser and a moaner. So naturally he contradicted him on principle. “I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well,” said Albert, “your one-legged dancing days are a thing of the past. I know that much.”

“Ha!” said King.

“You couldn’t even
stand
on one leg,” said Albert. “Remember, you’re seventy-six years old.”

Seventy-six or not, King got up and showed him. He wobbled some but he stood.

“Maybe you can stand,” allowed Albert, “but you sure as hell can’t dance.”

Red flag to the bull. King scrambled to his feet, bellowing at auctioneer Rudy to get a goddamn polka on the goddamn turntable. Rudy said that wouldn’t do, the ladies found the polka too energetic for their time of life. Pardon his English, but ladies be damned! roared my brother. King Walsh was going to dance all around the hall – and do it on one leg. For that, a polka was required.

Soon all the biddies had him surrounded and were clucking against rashness, but I could tell from the brightness of their eyes they truly hoped King would not be persuaded. He wasn’t. Give credit where credit is due though. None of those women agreed to dance with him; they knew better than to risk life and limb in the arms of a madman. She was a sight for sore eyes, that horse’s ass in the middle of the floor up on one leg like one of those pink flamingoes, his arms held out just as if they were cradling a woman.

Rudy dropped the needle on “The Beer Barrel Polka,” King
took his first hop, and the sidelines erupted in wild applause. And kept it up. The harder those old girls clapped and hooted, the bigger the head of steam King built, jerking and jigging and bouncing along with his tongue hanging out like a three-legged dog. Halfway around the dance floor he negotiated his first fancy turn and the crowd went berserk. “Give ’er, King! Give ’er, you old son of a bitch!” Rudy shouted in his auctioneer’s voice.

King gave her. Let me say he was never shy of being the centre of attention. His bearings were starting to smoke and he was leaking oil, but he cranked her up three more notches and gave a ki-yi every turn he twisted out. Around and around he went, the widows clapping, and the old bucks hooting and stamping their feet until the dust started to lift from between the floorboards. King was showing them one hell of a good time, just like he had his whole life long.

It was different with me. There, right in the midst of the hullabaloo, something peculiar happened. I never felt the like, before or since. Those fifty-five years that lay between a summer night in Kinbrae School and where I stood now, all that time folded in on me. Yesterday, today, even tomorrow, all of it went crooked and confused in my mind, I couldn’t separate one from the other. That woman King had tucked in his arms – that invisible woman – was Elsie the way she was that night many long years ago, slim and fair. Or maybe as she would have been if she hadn’t died in 1967 – old and tired like King and me. It was a lovely and terrible feeling both, the ends of life drawing in on you like that without warning.

Then King’s hip bone snapped like a piece of chalk and down he dropped in a heap.

The doctor ambulanced him to the city to have the hip replacement, they can’t do nothing that complicated in our hospital here in Advance. To cut a long story short, they operate, King catches pneumonia, almost dies, and then, soon as he can lift his head from the pillow, he starts agitating for release. They
manage to hold him there for a time but in the end he gets an early discharge, on condition he promises not to live alone while he heals. This means moving in with his only child Sonny and precious daughter-in-law Myra.

Myra is Sonny’s second wife and has a tight little mouth that looks like a cigarette burn on a plastic car seat cover. Lucy, the wife King liked, divorced Sonny about eight years ago. King’s never forgot the day she drove herself out from the city to tell him she was going to ditch his boy and brought along a bottle of Crown Royal to do it with. As soon as King saw the whisky he started in speculating what could be behind it. It came into his head maybe Lucy was in the family way. That’s the only news King could think of that went with a bottle of quality whisky. But, no, after she poured out a couple of shots at the kitchen table Lucy delivered her announcement. “King,” she said, “I’m here to tell you I’m leaving Sonny.”

Now this was a bigger blow than you might think it was, because King was struck on Lucy. By this I don’t mean to say that he was cutting Sonny’s grass or even eager to – although with King and women a person can never be certain of anything. What I mean is that I think King may have loved his daughter-in-law the way he had loved his dead wife Elsie, for the things she was and he wasn’t.

An even bigger surprise came when he asked her how Sonny was taking it and Lucy said, “I haven’t told Sonny. I left this morning with the car packed. As far as Sonny’s concerned, I’m tail-lights.”

King asked her what the hell she was up to, treating Sonny so inconsiderate.

Lucy looked him straight in the eye and said, “If I thought anybody would understand, I believed it would be you, King. Admit it. You can’t stand being more than an hour in the same room with Sonny.”

King denied this, even though what Lucy said is true. He just kept repeating that this was one shit of a way for Lucy to behave.

“Don’t get holier than thou with me,” Lucy told him.
“From what Sonny says, you skipped out on him twice yourself.”

“It wasn’t Sonny I walked out on,” King said. “It was his mother. And I’ll tell you something else, Lucy. I never made two bigger mistakes in my life.”

“Let me tell you something, King,” Lucy said. “I never got much out of seven years of marriage to Sonny, but I did learn something from seven years of watching you.”

King asked what that might be.

“To take a chance on any number of mistakes as long as you make them running after life. I always had a soft spot for you, King,” she said. “So let’s make this goodbye a friendly one. And let’s drink to life.”

You can be sure that King never refused a drink to life. Which is how it came about that he was the one who said goodbye to his son’s wife and toasted his son’s divorce before Sonny even heard about it.

King surely hated the hospital. Not for any normal reason, but mostly because the doctors and nurses insisted on calling him Mr. Walsh. He wouldn’t shut his mouth on the topic. I heard about it every time I visited.

“I can’t get them to call me King,” he said. “Nothing but Mr. Walsh.”

“Maybe it’s a rule,” I suggested, “calling patients mister.” I didn’t suggest maybe he’d turned them stubborn, bullying them to have his way.

“They ought to call a person by their name,” he said.

“Well, come to that, King isn’t your birth certificate name,” I reminded him. “You aren’t really King.” It was our Auntie Vi that gave him the name when he was three years old and strutting around my mother’s parlour bold as brass. She said, “Now look at that one. Don’t he act like he thinks he’s a future King of England.” And King he’s been for seventy-five years since. Nobody ever said it didn’t suit him.

King’s got mad at me a time or two in his life, but never as mad as he was the day I told him his name wasn’t really King. “I’ve never been nothing but King and by the Jesus nobody’s going to change that now! Why do you think they want to mister everybody? I’ll tell you why! It’s easier to stack you here and stack you there if everybody’s the same size, size mister! Call me King!” he shouted out the door and down the hospital corridor. “Give me my name back, goddamn it!”

Once King escaped City Hospital I knew he was never going back. It had put the fear of the Almighty God into him. If he hadn’t been scared, none of what Sonny said would have had any effect on him. King would have done what he originally intended – gone back to his house in Advance.

But Sonny kept picking away at him. “You want to land up in hospital again, Dad? What if you fall in that house with nobody to help you? Don’t be silly. Come live with us, Dad.”

Of course, nobody knew that Sonny was promoting this charitable idea because the bank was threatening to take the house he was inviting his father to come live in. This was a result of Sonny overselling his financial situation to Myra when they were dating. Naturally when they marry, Myra has expectations, so Sonny buys her a house big enough and expensive enough to match the lies he’s been telling her. For a while he just manages to carry the mortgage and then the recession hits, his commissions go in the crapper, he misses a few payments, and the bank starts clearing its throat. Still, for shame, Sonny won’t come clean with Myra. He’d rather go to work on King. “Come live with us, Dad. We got the suite in the basement standing empty, your own bathroom, fridge, stove. Sell the house in Advance.”

The really important part of this pitch is the part about selling the house, because it’s the only way Sonny can get a sizeable sum of cash into King’s hands where it can be pried loose. Finally, King caves in and sells. No sooner is the cheque deposited than Sonny comes out with his sorry tale of woe. He’s in temporary difficulties because of the economy, the
GST
.
The goddamn government is a vampire, it’s drinking his blood. The bank is a vulture picking his bones clean. But if the money from the sale of the house in Advance was used as a lump payment to reduce his mortgage to a manageable size, he could breathe again. Don’t misunderstand him, Sonny says. If he only had himself to think about, the bankers could take it, flinty-hearted cocksuckers. But Myra, it’s her dream home, she loves it, the air-conditioning, central vacuum, Jenn-Air grill, the underground sprinkler system, the chandelier in the dining room – he can’t imagine what the shock of losing it would do to her.

When King tells Sonny he’ll think about it, Sonny starts to cry. He’s King’s fucking son, he says. Look what he’s offering in return for a few measly bucks: a home rent-free for life, utilities paid, people willing to look out for him. The whole package, tied up with a ribbon of love.

This information comes to me via King’s late-night, longdistance phone calls. They’re coming fast and furious now that he’s getting the heavy-duty pressure over Putt ’N’ Fun.

Sure, he says, room and board with his son is probably not the smartest thing he’s ever done. But imagine what it’s like to sit and watch a forty-eight-year-old man, your own flesh and blood, bawling the way he did when he was in short pants. What else could he do but write the cheque, fifty-five thousand dollars? It’s only money, after all.

So here’s my brother, seventy-eight, no money, no house, nothing signed, no paper trail to prove what he did for Sonny. What makes it worse is that Myra has no idea about the fifty-five thousand because Sonny made King swear he’d never tell her. And he won’t. King’s always been a stickler when it comes to his word. That’s why I get the phone calls. Sonny forgot to specify me in the promise.

Now spring’s here and another season of mini-golf has started up, King and Sonny and Myra aren’t exactly seeing eye to eye.
The other day Sonny told King that playing mini-golf is ridiculous and undignified for a man his age. Myra added, “And let’s not forget the spot of trouble you got in last year. Next, we’ll be facing accusations of you know what.”

King wanted to know what “you know what” was.

“Dad, it looks bad an old man hanging around where kids congregate,” Sonny says. “You watch the
TV
, you know what we’re talking about. Myra doesn’t think you should go there any more, and I agree.”

King goes to great pains explaining to me over the telephone how nobody’s going to mistake him for a child molester. Why, the facts all contradict it. For one thing, he only went to Putt ’N’ Fun when the kids were supposed to be in school. Ask the owner, ask Lila, if that isn’t the case. Last year’s spot of trouble would never have happened if those delinquents hadn’t been playing hookey ten o’clock of a Monday morning.

It’s early morning that King prefers for Putt ’N’ Fun, he likes the course deserted and all to himself. Nobody but him in the streets of Putt ’N’ Fun Town, everything quiet and still, the sun shining on the gingerbread house, the little brown church in the vale, the old mill with the water wheel, Mother Hubbard’s shoe, the red schoolhouse. King says you got to see the whole layout to appreciate it. A work of art. Lila’s husband made the new buildings winters when Putt ’N’ Fun Town closed down for the season. It took him years and years. According to Lila, her hubby was a perfectionist, and there’s not many mini-golf courses of such detail, such high-class construction and calibre anywhere else in the world. Take the church in the vale. It even has a tiny bell in the steeple. The kids are always ringing it despite the big
DO NOT RING THE BELL
sign, and the noise plays on her nerves. Every time she hears the bell tolling it makes her think of her husband who’ll be dead five years this coming January. She’s thinking of having it removed and put in storage.

King says, “It’s so nice there that sometimes I forget my game and just start roaming the streets. I leave my ball rest in a
hole and wander. She sees this, Lila hollers from the booth, ‘Penny for your thoughts! Penny for your thoughts!’ But I don’t take no pennies for no thoughts. I just give Lila a wave over the roofs.”

King claims Lila was surprised to hear he was a barber for fifty years. “People think of a barber they think bow-tie, Hush Puppies maybe. They think neat and skinny,” said King.

King did his level best to never look an ordinary barber. He wore cowboy boots to work and knocked off a hundred pushups before he unlocked the door in the morning and another hundred before he locked the door at night. He built himself big arms to match a big swagger.

King was an unusual barber. He’d call kids from Social Assistance families in off the street and give them no-charge haircuts and tell them it was on the house because he needed the practice. Any old man he knew was hard-up, King never took a cent from. “Can’t make change for that today. Next time. Next time,” he’d say, waving payment off.