Things as They Are (26 page)

What did he talk about? Mostly friendship. And loneliness. He said he’d never had many friends. It was his one regret. Only when you were older did you realize what you had missed in life – and he had missed out on the joys of friendship. He wondered if perhaps his difficulties weren’t a result of having been a person in authority. It wasn’t easy to be intimate with a member of your teaching staff and still observe professional standards of conduct. Besides, so many elementary teachers were women, and friendships with women were risky because they were so easily misrepresented and misunderstood. Also, it was his belief that women’s friendships lacked the idealism which was such an important element in male relationships. No one could ever imagine a woman dying for a friend.

He would tell me how he had always thought of himself as a friend to all the boys and girls in his school, yet doubted if they had seen him in that light. It wrung his heart to know that many students had been actually terrified of him – just because he was a principal. It wasn’t fair. Each year on the first day of school he had made a speech in which he urged all the boys and girls to think of him as their friend, encouraging them to come to him if they needed advice, or a sympathetic and understanding ear. Yet in all his years of teaching no one ever came to him with a problem. There had been days when this distrust was so upsetting that he had closed the door of his office to conceal his tears.

When he started going on in this vein there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to sidetrack him – for instance, right in the middle of a sentence commence hammering out the theme from “Bonanza” on the piano so hard I thought my fingers would snap. Once, before I could stall him, he said, “You
know, Charlie, there was a time when I used to look around me and say, ‘How is it possible? How is it possible that a little town like this, a town with a population of a mere thousand could contain two people fated to love one another? The odds are against it. And yet it happens. All around us people fall in love with people they’ve known since they were children. Time and time again it happens. Except to me.’ ” He hesitated, smiled. “But perhaps my luck is changing.”

“You mean Grandma?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said coyly.

Uncle Cecil was hard to figure. One minute he was talking to you like you were on his side of the fence, age-wise, the next minute he was acting as if he was the kid. Sometimes when we were playing chess at his house he’d pretend to slip out to the kitchen for a drink, then sneak back on his squeak-proof schoolteacher shoes while I was absorbed studying the board, clap his hands over my eyes and yell, “Guess who!”

Such goofball behaviour would have been embarrassing in a ten year old, let alone in someone as mature as Uncle Cecil. Worse, he wouldn’t lay off until I’d said his name. He wanted to hear me
say
it. Digging in my heels and trying to out-stubborn him didn’t work because I couldn’t stomach the cold, clammy, icky feel of his hands over my eyes. I’d bellow, “I’m warning you, lemme go!” a couple of times at the top of my lungs to scare him off but it never did. Every time I hollered, he just giggled and purred, “Come on, guess who. Guess.” So finally I had no choice but to yell “Uncle Cecil!” When I opened my eyes he’d be grinning like a maniac, running his sticky palms up and down the fronts of his trouser legs, and dancing about on the spot from one foot to another like a little boy needing to go wee.

Worse than any of this, however, was the time he came out in a kilt and pranced and jigged around the house, showing off his fat, lardy white legs, and asking me did he remind me of anybody? After reading about a quarter of
Kidnapped
I had some idea of what I was supposed to say. Alan Breck. So I said
it. Even though I thought he looked a dead ringer for Little Lulu.

But he didn’t behave this way often, only when he got a few scotches under his skin. That is, with one exception, which was partly my doing. It happened one day when we were down in his basement playing table tennis, which Uncle Cecil advocated as a way of keeping fit and gently encouraging sluggish circulation. Not that he, with his watermelon shape, was exactly a walking advertisement for its benefits. Still, despite his weight problem and the fifty-five-year age difference between us, Uncle Cecil never failed to wax me at ping pong. It’s true I was not what you would call coordinated, or an athlete, but it was still shaming for a twelve year old to get pulverized by the likes of him. Inevitably, the more I lost to Uncle Cecil the more frustrated and infuriated I got, swinging out wildly to spray the ball into the rafters overhead, or send it ricochetting off the walls, skittering and skipping frantically across the floor. Meanwhile Uncle Cecil filled the other end of the table like the Berlin Wall, intimidating, impassable. If one of my shots did manage to land on the table, Uncle Cecil would deftly flick it back, his feet never shuffling more than an inch or two to the right or left. This imperturbable, unswerving grace under pressure reduced me to frothing at the mouth.

The day under discussion I was following him up the basement stairs after yet another severe shellacking (eight games to two). Here we were, plodding up the steps, Uncle Cecil droning his maddening, patronizing advice about how I might improve my table-tennis game, while a foot from my face his big fat ass was walloping around in the seat of his pants like two bulldogs fighting in a flannel sack.

All my life I’ve been prone to weird impulses that unexpectedly take possession of me. Suddenly I realized I hadn’t left my ping-pong paddle on the table, I had it in my hand. And then, before I knew what I was doing, I gave one of the bulldogs a terrific smack with it. Uncle Cecil let out a piercing squeak, clutched his derrière with both hands, and whirled around on the stairs.

His reaction was not quite what I expected. I saw his face light up like a lantern in the gloom of the stairs. “Spank my bum, will you! Look out now, Master Charlie!” he squealed.

That was enough for me, I hurtled back down the stairs.

“We’ll see how you like some of your own medicine! I’m going to warm your sit-upon for you, young man! Warm it but good!” Uncle Cecil cried in a mock-menacing voice, thundering down the steps after me like an avalanche in a canyon. A couple of circuits around the ping-pong table didn’t lose him – with his blood up Uncle Cecil had a surprising turn of speed. Around and around the basement the two of us scampered, Uncle Cecil shrieking playful threats as I hurdled storage boxes, feinted my way out of corners, dodged outstretched arms, veered and deked and doubled my way here, there, everywhere. And still he kept coming, a sound like a handsaw cutting wet wood beginning to whine deep in his chest, crazed, merrily determined eyes shining in a hot, red face.

Embarrassed and worried described me. Playing tag with a senior citizen was even more humiliating than Uncle Cecil’s other favourite game, Guess Who. Besides, I was starting to get alarmed he was going to have a coronary. Let him catch me. Big deal. I halted dead in my tracks. Uncle Cecil crashed into me.

The next thing I knew, I was swept up in his arms. Suddenly my nose was mashed into flab and a damp shirt front. I was suffocating. From overhead I heard words trickling down, a slurred, monotonous, sing-song waterfall. “I got you now. I got you now. What are we going to do with you now that I got you now?” All the while his arms, which pinned mine to my ribs, were slowly tightening, slowly squeezing the breath out of me. Panicking, I writhed and twisted, fighting to break his hold. But Uncle Cecil was stronger than I could have imagined and all my struggles only caused him to totter unsteadily back and forth on his feet as if he was rocking an infant. “I got you now. What are we going to do with you now?” he crooned, the breath from his lips ruffling my hair.

The more I resisted, the deeper I seemed to sink into the soft
mattress of his torso. It was like trying to breathe with a hot, steamy towel stuck to your face, a used towel smelling unpleasantly of a stranger’s body. Nerves, the distasteful smell, the lack of air made me feel faint, my ears buzzed, my head whirled, and – more ominous – a hard bud of queasiness popped up at the root of my tongue. I tried to give a last choked warning but it was lost in the mutter, “I got you now. I got you now. What are we going to do with you now?”

I heaved several times before Uncle Cecil realized hot barf was streaming down his shirt and trousers. He cut me loose then, believe you me, and I staggered off, doubled-up, circling like a crab, upchucking right, left, and centre while Uncle Cecil, horrified, tiptoed after me, crying plaintively, “Oh dear, oh dear, Charlie! Are you all right, my boy? Oh dear!”

I wasn’t all right. I was wild at having the bejabbers scared out of me, wild with shame at puking up like a baby, wild with the indignity of being
handled
. At that moment I would gladly have murdered him. But homicide not being an option, I did whatever I could. I refused to speak to him and stomped up the stairs. Uncle Cecil followed at my heels, anxiously inquiring, “What’s the matter, Charlie? Charlie, don’t be like this. Speak to me. Say something. Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll get my car keys.”

“I’m walking.” This idea had just presented itself.

“No, no, Charlie,” he said. “You’re not feeling well. You can’t walk. It’s five miles to the farm.”

“You think I’d get in a car with you! You fucking tried to strangle me!”

Uncle Cecil shook his head, clucked: “Nonsense, Charlie. Nonsense. And language. Careful with the language.”

“Fucking tried to strangle me!”
I screeched again.

“A game, Charlie,” he said nervously, self-consciously.

“Maybe next time we can play Jack the Ripper.” I jerked open the screen door.

“I forbid you to walk home!” he shouted at me.

I didn’t take this assertion of authority seriously. Poised dramatically in the doorway I gave him a hostile, defiant stare. It was only then it struck me his face was white, gone white with deathly fear.

“You must let me drive you. Your grandmother would never forgive me if I didn’t bring you.…” He let the sentence die.

“No way.” I turned calculating, clinical. I wanted to test his response to this.

“Please, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t be like this. You mustn’t be like this. Please, you’re not being fair. Please let me drive you. You got over-excited. It wasn’t my fault. Please.”

He was begging now, lowering his voice, making soothing, coaxing gestures with his hands, patting and stroking the air between us as he talked. “All a misunderstanding,” he kept repeating. “No harm done. Where’s the harm, Charlie? No harm at all. All forgotten, all forgiven?”

He smiled weakly, waited apprehensively for a reply. All forgotten, all forgiven? It was some time before I answered. I watched him crumble and flake a little more while I remained silent.

“The gun, Uncle Cecil,” I said. “I better get that fucking gun.”

I took the ride and I took the gun. Grandma Bradley being present when he handed it over, I mimicked utter surprise and amazement at the unexpected gift. The .22 was a beauty, a pump action Remington that surpassed my greediest dreams. Grandma was clearly not enthusiastic about the idea of me armed, but the only thing she said was, “If he blows his brains out with that thing – or anybody else’s – I’m not the one who’ll be responsible. I want to go on record that I don’t approve.”

Once I got my hands on the rifle my interest in chess, car rides, and Glenn Gould impersonations evaporated. To my twelve-year-old nose nothing smelled as sweet as gun oil,
although I was careful to make sure that Grandma Bradley didn’t find out I slept with the Remington lying beside my bed, loaded, within sniffing distance. I developed a nightly ritual, easing myself down on my mattress, shaking out my arms, closing my eyes. Of course, this was only a ruse to draw the Night Stalker into showing his hand. When Stalker made his play and burst through my door, I rolled to the right, snatched my gun from the floor, and blasted him back to the very doorstep of Hell. This move and variations on it was practised dozens of times until I could settle down to sleep in full confidence that despite having a weak chin and being a shrimp for my age, I was still a damn dangerous hombre.

Daylight hours were spent expending real ammunition. Nothing on the farm was off limits or out of season except Grandma and her chickens. Hour after hour I tramped the property dazed by blood-lust and heat, blazing away at rats in the tumble-down barn, discharging salvos into the bird-infested windbreak, and lying in wait in the brome grass at the edge of the garden for the sparrows to flutter to earth. Strange, novel sensations linked to the gun kept me prowling from sunup to sundown. Only a silhouette of Grandma in the matte grey of late dusk bellowing, “Charlie, get in here now! And I mean right now, goddamn it!” could override these feelings.

She wasn’t the only one calling me. So was Uncle Cecil. The very day after he conferred the Remington upon me I watched him park his car and laboriously mount the steps to the house. Five minutes later he was in the yard again, shading his eyes and turning on his heels slowly and deliberately through the four points of the compass. Noting that, I hastily retreated to the barn and scrambled into the hayloft from where I watched him clamber over fences, poke his head into abandoned sheds, peek around the fenders of junked automobiles, all the while mournfully imploring “Charlieeee! Oh, Charlieee!” at the top of his lungs. Finally after forty-five minutes of searching he gave up with a sad, resigned shrug of the shoulders, got into his car, and drove off.

But he was back the next day and the day after that and the day after that and every day following for a week and a half. And each day I hid. I found his confusion comical; it was a laugh to see him fuss-budgeting around the property, clumsily snagging his trousers on barbed wire, desperately squinting into collapsing sheds and derelict autos, cupping his hands to his mouth to halloo dramatically like a sea captain hallooing into the fog for a man lost overboard, smiling to the windbreak, the outbuildings, on the remote chance I might be lured out of them by his shit-eating, apologetic grin. Looking down at Uncle Cecil from the height of the hayloft gave me a feeling of control similar to the one I got with a gun in my hand. I did my best to persuade myself he had this coming to him for the way he had behaved in the basement. Maybe this would teach him to forget the stupid kids’ games and act his age. Yet another voice quietly argued that loneliness, too, has its claims.