Things as They Are (25 page)

Right off I identified Mr. Cecil Foster as a disguiser. Buying his clothes too small for his full-figure frame and opting for the camouflage-do – hair swept from a part just above his right ear and plastered in a Brylcreem-soggy grey wing across the steppes of his bald scalp – were proof of that.

Mr. Foster shook my hand, squeezing it between thumb, index and middle fingers like he was testing a peach for ripeness. “So tell me, Charlie,” he asked, sending a gale of Sen Sen into my face, “what’s your favourite subject in school?”

I sized him up, trying to determine the right answer. The right answer being whatever subject Mr. Foster had himself taught. His pucker-lipped, precise manner of
pro
-nunciating and
e
-nunciating smelled of English teacher. I confessed that English was number one in my books.

This delighted him. “Oh, I’m so glad!” he exclaimed. “And what do you like best – literature or composition?”

I admitted to preferring literature.

“So many boys I’ve encountered over the years won’t admit to an interest in literature – they think it’s unmanly to like poetry and stories.” He smiled at me. “Always follow your heart, Charlie. It’s the first rule of life. If you like poetry – well just like it, despite whatever your friends might say!” He turned to my grandmother. “I believe we have an imaginative young man here. Very imaginative.”

“That’s the word for him,” drawled my grandmother.

It never dawned on me until the tail end of his visit what he was doing at my grandmother’s house – you’d have had to have the imagination of an Edgar Allan Poe to even suspect such a thing. So for two boring hours, in ignorance I drooped around the hot living room, pushing dead flies into piles on the
window sashes and trying to ignite them into funeral pyres with a book of Grandma’s matches. Nothing would burn but the wings. When I got tired of that I’d wander over to where the senior citizens were playing rummy for twenty-five cents a game and Mr. Cecil Foster was riding a winning streak. Every time I paid a visit he’d point to his growing stack of quarters and give me the conspiratorial wink. Grandmother, touchy loser that she was, just kept ordering me in a short-tempered voice to push off.

It was only after Grandma had retired the deck of cards in disgust that the grotesque, unexpected part happened. As he was preparing to leave, Mr. Foster gathered Grandma’s hands between his palms and began to stroke them with the tips of his chubby fingers. She offered her cheek for him to smooch, which he did, loudly and wetly.

He was her
boyfriend
. I was gripped by the willies.

My grandmother referred to him as her “gentleman friend,” with more stress on the word gentleman than friend. Grandma Bradley, like Mr. Cecil Foster, was an unsuccessful disguiser too. She made a big show of not being taken in by him, but I could see that all six feet and 180 pounds of her was tickled pink by his attentions, despite frequent disclaimers. “The problem with these old bachelors is that when they get to a certain age they start to worry about their health. What’s going to happen to me if I get sick? they ask. Who’s going to look after me? Remind me to take my medicine, drive me to the doctor? Cook those special diabetes and high blood pressure meals? Men are such big babies. Nothing scares them half as much as the idea of croaking alone. All of a sudden they figure a wife is not such an inconvenience.”

“So what’s in it for you?” I asked.

“What’s in it for me? You think I want to spend what’s left of my life watching this dump collapse around my ears?” Grandma Bradley struck a match and sucked the flame into the end of her cigarette, drizzled smoke from her nostrils. “Mr. Foster owns a three-bedroom house, wall-to-wall carpeting
throughout, fireplace, developed basement. Hallelujah. Sure, he’s not the man your Grandfather was – and thank God for that.” Her eyes narrowed. “He’s got potential,” she said. “Be nice to him. Or else.”

Several days later Mr. Foster appeared at the farm and offered to take me on a drive, an outing. Grandma Bradley was overjoyed to get rid of me and my complaints about the quality of the one available television channel, lima beans, and flannel sheets in July. “Don’t be in a hurry to get him back,” she said, “take your time.”

Under normal circumstances I would have considered going for a drive with a man like Mr. Foster a horrible ordeal. But things being relative, it beat the hell out of another afternoon spent watching a cooking show and “Take Thirty” on
CBC
.

Mr. Foster’s car had air-conditioning – a definite plus – and he kept tinkering with the controls until I conceded I was “comfy.” What’s more, he allowed me to tune the radio to my favourite station and crank it up full bore, something that would have got my wrists broken if I tried it in my grandmother’s DeSoto. Nor did he object when I began singing along to the radio to test the limits of his tolerance. In fact, he joined Patti Page and me in a rendition of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” giggling and woof-woofing his way through the song like a maniac. I concluded he was nutty as a fruitcake, but fun.

Radio blaring, we rolled along. Fields, herds of red cattle, clumps of poplars with their leaves blinking green to silver, silver to green in the breeze, sped by. The sky was banked high with mountains of cumulous.

Mr. Foster confided there was something he just had to show me. For the next half hour we jolted over a succession of deteriorating roads, climaxing in a bumpy rutted track that wound its way across the brown face of a vacant pasture.
When the track finally ran itself out amid skimpy grass, sand, and cactus, we got out of the car and walked on until the plateau suddenly dissolved in a dizzying rush of sky and wind and left us hanging perched on a lip of eroding earth, the wind pummelling us and tugging at our clothes like dozens of pairs of children’s hands. More interesting, the wind also popped Mr. Foster’s hair up and down at his side part like the lid on a jack-in-the-box. I was studying this intriguing phenomenon with close attention when my companion suddenly made a lofty sweep of the arm and cried, “Isn’t it grand!”

The quick movement, the abrupt exclamation startled me. A small avalanche of dirt trickled out from under my sneakers and spilled down the sheer slope.

“Do you know what this reminds me of?” he asked, putting his hand on my shoulder, steadying me.

It reminded me of a valley. Far below my feet was a sleepy river winking a semaphore of sun, a concrete bridge which looked like part of a model railroad set, a yellow road that switchbacked up blue and distant hills, a red Tinker Toy tractor raising smoky dust in a black field.

I told Mr. Foster I had no idea what this reminded him of.

“Scotland,” said Mr. Foster.

As far as I was concerned this was stretching it. What I was looking at didn’t resemble any pictures of Scotland I’d seen. When I asked him why what we were looking at was like Scotland, he ignored me. Likewise, when I asked him if he’d ever been there.

“Oh Scotland!” he murmured. “When I was your age, Charlie, how I was in love with Scotland!” He turned to me eagerly. “Have you read Robert Louis Stevenson?”

I shook my head.

“Long John Silver and Jim,” he said. “The man wrote the most beautiful books.
Kidnapped
. I adored that book. When I was a boy there was nothing I wanted more than a friend like Alan Breck, someone older to look up to. I thought David Balfour the luckiest boy in the world because he had Alan Breck
to share his adventures with. Have you ever wanted an older friend the way I did, Charlie?”

I shrugged. I hadn’t thought much about it. But on consideration I wouldn’t have minded having Ernie Tastin for a best buddy. Nobody would fuck with me then. Ernie was in grade nine and older than a lot of high-school seniors. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said.

Mr. Foster smiled. “I would like to be your older friend,” he said. “I’m sure you and I could be great friends. Shall we be friends?”

I didn’t see what I had to lose. “Okay,” I said.

On the way back to the car my new friend tried to teach me a song about taking the high road or the low road. It was a Scottish song, he said.

Uncle Cecil (it was his idea for me to call him that) proved to have the schoolteacher’s habit of wanting to improve you. Some attempts at improvement were interesting and some were not. For instance, I wasn’t too nuts about him pressing his own personal copies of
Treasure Island
and
Kidnapped
on me to read. But I did like learning chess, a version of war that suited crafty runts like me. Now when he came to visit, Uncle Cecil brought his chess set and we battled it out on the dining-room table under Grandma’s disapproving eye. She believed she had first call on Mr. Foster and
she
wanted to play cards, prompting her to make sarcastic comments like: “If chess is supposed to be such a brainy game, how do you expect to teach it to someone who can’t learn to count a cribbage hand?”

As far as I was concerned, what was really aces about older friends was the money they had. Just let me mention that the glare of the sun gave me a headache – he bought me sunglasses. I got a hula hoop, yo-yo, chocolate bars, comic books,
a straw cowboy hat simply by strategically dropping hints. All I needed to do was suggest I was hungry or thirsty and we’d be wheeling up to the nearest cafe for a burger and Coke float. What’s more, I talked him into letting me drive his Buick on deserted stretches of country roads – you wouldn’t have caught my old man doing anything along those lines. just worrying about the insurance would have given him a haemorrhage.

I felt a little guilty about Uncle Cecil being so nice to me, so generous. I assumed he thought that being peachy to me would get him into Grandma’s good books. Nothing was further from the truth – the more stuff he bought me, the more time he spent with me, the more resentful she got. It was obvious, the old girl was jealous. Somehow Uncle Cecil didn’t seem to realize this. He didn’t get it that maybe it was more important to tell her how wonderful she was than sing my praises to the sky.

At first I enjoyed it, seeing her nose twisted out of joint. But after three weeks of Cecil’s Be Nice to Charlie Campaign the atmosphere in my grandmother’s house was a little too sour for my taste. The old girl was a wounded grizzly. I would have warned Uncle Cecil that an ill wind was getting ready to blow except for one reason and one reason alone. Before I sat him down and clued him in that being sweet to me was not such a wonderful policy, there was something I wanted to get from him. And this thing I wanted to get was the one thing he hesitated to buy me.

I wanted a gun.

Uncle Cecil was not enthusiastic about this idea. “I don’t know, Charlie,” he said doubtfully whenever I dredged up the topic. “I don’t know. What do you want with a gun?”

“It’s for Grandma’s sake,” I said, hoping that such a claim might sway him. “You know how she’s always complaining about the birds in her garden. If I had a gun I’d be able to put the run on them for her. Believe you me, she’d thank us both.”

“I’m not sure,” reflected Uncle Cecil. “Maybe the two of us
could put up a scarecrow for her. Don’t you think it might be more fun to make a scarecrow and dress it up?”

No I did not. I was not some half-witted six year old. Blazing away with my own firearm was my idea of fun. In my books, the opportunity to shoot a gun was the only recommendation for life in the country. Give me a gun or give me nothing.

“And another thing,” I said. “Let’s say some escaped convicts were to come to the farm in the middle of the night. We’re awful isolated, and yelling for help wouldn’t do much good way out there. But if I had a gun I could protect Grandma.” I paused. “In case they tried to rape her or something.”

That was a mistake, mention of turning a gun on anybody. He looked even more doubtful. “A gun is a great responsibility,” he said. “And you’re very young, Charlie.”

“Yeah, right,” I said desperately. “But that’s the great thing about a gun. Don’t you see? It’ll teach me responsibility. I’ll get more mature with a gun around. And also – also,” I was flailing around madly in my mind for a clincher. “Also it doesn’t matter that I’m young because I’ve got an older friend to supervise me and everything.”

“I don’t know very much about guns,” said Uncle Cecil. “In fact, I don’t know anything at all about guns.”

“No problem,” I assured him. “Just leave all the
technical
stuff, the loading it with bullets and all that crap to me. I can read up on it.” I gave him a look of great frankness and sincerity. “But how can you learn responsibility and maturity from a book? That’s where an older friend is so important.”

Uncle Cecil was showing signs of acute discomfort. “But, Charlie,” he blurted out, “I don’t
like
guns!”

Right, I almost said. So what? Do I
like
the world’s most deadly book, that
Kidnapped
you gave me to read? No, but I’m reading it, aren’t I? I’m ploughing through it a couple of pages a night, all those Scottish words I don’t understand. Muckle this and muckle that.

But I knew better than to let fly on that topic. When it came
to the care and maintenance of grownups, I kind of prided myself on being a first-class operator. The last thing you ever wanted to do was show up an adult in delicate negotiations, or poop on something they thought was top notch. From the time I was six years old and used to plead with my mother to play me her Frank Sinatra records to get on her good side, I knew that much.

“It’d probably save Grandma’s garden,” I said. “And I’d learn a lot from owning a gun.”

“Well, let me think about it,” said Uncle Cecil.

If it would help overcome his hesitation, I was willing to go cheap. “You can get a Cooey single shot bolt action twenty-two for around twenty dollars,” I informed him. “A real bargain.”

“I’ll think about it,” he promised.

Uncle Cecil and I were seeing each other every day now. Sometimes we didn’t bother to go on the drives we told Grandma we were going on, we just went to Uncle Cecil’s house and hung out. He had a huge, varnished piano, the surface of which I could watch myself in when I fooled around on it. It was a big hoot to do imitations of the concert pianists I’d seen on
CBC
, scrunching down so that my face almost touched the keys like Glenn Gould while playing by ear ecstatic renditions of the themes of “Bonanza” and “Have Gun Will Travel.” As I tickled the ivories, Uncle Cecil sat in his easy-chair, sipping scotch, and flashing his finger in the air like he was conducting. Grandma didn’t know about Uncle Cecil and the scotch, whisky was something he tried to keep private the way he did his baldness. He wasn’t a big drinker, never indulged in more than a couple of drinks, but a couple were enough to bring about a sea change; he talked peculiar, he talked to me as if I was an adult. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t that I was learning anything shocking, I’d heard lots more interesting and shocking things just by keeping myself as quiet and still as a mouse in a
corner and letting adults forget I was there to eavesdrop. They didn’t know the half of what they had given away to me. But this was different. To be told things straight out like I was grown up broke hallowed conventions, was somehow plain wrong.