I SUPPOSE it was having a bad chest that turned me into an observer, a watcher, at an early age.
“Charlie has my chest,” my mother often informed friends. “A real weakness there,” she would add significantly, thumping her own wishbone soundly.
I suppose I had. Family lore had me narrowly escaping death from pneumonia at the age of four. It seems I spent an entire Sunday in delirium, soaking the sheets. Dr. Carlyle was off at the reservoir rowing in his little skiff and couldn’t be reached – something for which my mother illogically refused to forgive him. She was a woman who nursed and tenaciously held dark grudges. Forever after that incident the doctor was slightingly and coldly dismissed in conversation as a “man who betrayed the public’s trust.”
Following that spell of pneumonia, I regularly suffered from bouts of bronchitis, which often landed me in hospital in Fortune, forty miles away. Compared with the oxygen tent and the whacking great needles that were buried in my skinny rump there, being invalided at home was a piece of cake. Coughing and hacking, I would leaf through catalogues and read comic books until my head swam with print-fatigue. My diet was largely of my own whimsical choosing – hot chocolate and graham wafers were supplemented by sticky sweet coughdrops, which I downed one after another until my stomach could take no more, revolted, and tossed up the whole mess.
With the first signs of improvement in my condition my mother moved her baby to the living-room chesterfield, where she and the radio could keep me company. The electric kettle followed me and was soon burbling in the corner, jetting steam into the air to keep my lungs moist and pliable. Because I was neither quite sick nor quite well, these were the best days of my illnesses. My stay at home hadn’t yet made me bored and restless, my chest no longer hurt when I breathed, and that loose pocket of rattling phlegm meant I didn’t have to worry about going back to school just yet. So I luxuriated in this steamy equatorial climate, tended by a doting mother as if I were a rare tropical orchid.
My parents didn’t own a television and so my curiosity and attention were focused on my surroundings during my illnesses. I tried to squeeze every bit of juice out of them. Sooner than most children I learned that if you kept quiet and still, and didn’t insist on drawing attention to yourself as many kids did, adults were inclined to regard you as being one with the furniture, as significant and sentient as a hassock. By keeping mum I was treated to illuminating glances into an adult world of conventional miseries and scandals.
I wasn’t sure at the age of six what a miscarriage was, but I knew that Ida Thompson had had one and that now her plumbing was buggered. And watching old lady Kuznetzky hang her washing, through a living-room window trickling with condensed kettle steam, I was able to confirm for myself the rumour that the old girl eschewed panties. As she bent over to rummage in her laundry basket I caught a brief glimpse of huge, white buttocks that shimmered in the pale spring sunshine.
I also soon knew (how I don’t remember exactly) that Norma Ruggs had business with the Liquor Board Store when she shuffled by our window every day at exactly 10:50 a.m. She was always at the store door at 11:00 when they unlocked and opened up for business. At 11:15 she trudged home again, a pint of ice cream in one hand, a brown paper bag disguising a bottle of fortified wine in the other, and her blotchy complexion painted a high colour of shame.
“Poor old girl,” my mother would say whenever she caught sight of Norma passing by in her shabby coat and sloppy man’s overshoes. They had been in high school together, and Norma had been class brain and valedictorian. She had been an obliging, dutiful girl and still was. For the wine wasn’t Norma’s – the ice cream was her only vice. The booze was her husband’s, a vet who had come back from the war badly crippled.
All this careful study of adults may have made me old before my time. In any case it seemed to mark me in some recognizable way as being “different” or “queer for a kid.” When I went to live with my grandmother in July of 1959 she spotted it right away. Of course, she was only stating the obvious when she declared me skinny and delicate, but she also noted in her vinegary voice that my eyes had a bad habit of never letting her go, and that I was the worst case of little pitchers having big ears that she had ever come across.
I ended up at my grandmother’s because in May of that year my mother’s bad chest finally caught up with her, much to her and everyone else’s surprise. It had been pretty generally agreed by all her acquaintances that Mabel Bradley’s defects in that regard were largely imagined. Not so. A government-sponsored X-ray program discovered tuberculosis, and she was packed off, pale and drawn with worry, for a stay in the sanatorium at Fort Qu’Appelle.
For roughly a month, until the school year ended, my father took charge of me and the house. He was a desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man who had married late in life but nevertheless had been easily domesticated. I didn’t like him much.
My father was badly wrenched by my mother’s sickness and absence. He scrawled her long, untidy letters with a stub of gnawed pencil, and once he got shut of me, visited her every weekend. He was a soft and sentimental man whose eyes ran to water at the drop of a hat, or more accurately, death of a cat. Unlike his mother, my Grandma Bradley, he hadn’t a scrap of flint or hard-headed common sense in him.
But then neither had any of his many brothers and sisters. It was as if the old girl had unflinchingly withheld the genetic code for responsibility and practicality from her pin-headed offspring. Life for her children was a series of thundering defeats, whirlwind calamities, or, at best, hurried strategic retreats. Businesses crashed and marriages failed, for they had – my father excepted – a taste for the unstable in partners marital and fiscal.
My mother saw no redeeming qualities in any of them. By and large they drank too much, talked too loudly, and raised ill-mannered children – monsters of depravity whose rudeness provided my mother with endless illustrations of what she feared I might become. “You’re eating just like a pig,” she would say, “exactly like your cousin Elvin.” Or to my father, “You’re neglecting the belt. He’s starting to get as lippy as that little snot Muriel.”
And in the midst, in the very eye of this familial cyclone of mishap and discontent, stood Grandma Bradley, as firm as a rock. Troubles of all kinds were laid on her doorstep. When my cousin Criselda suddenly turned big-tummied at sixteen and it proved difficult to ascertain with any exactitude the father, or even point a finger of general blame in the direction of a putative sire, she was shipped off to Grandma Bradley until she delivered. Uncle Ernie dried out on Grandma’s farm and Uncle Ed hid there from several people he had sold prefab, assemble-yourself, crop-duster airplanes to.
So it was only family tradition that I should be deposited there. When domestic duties finally overwhelmed him, and I complained too loudly about fried-egg sandwiches for dinner again, my father left the bacon rinds hardening and curling grotesquely on unwashed plates, the slut’s wool eddying along the floor in the currents of a draft, and drove the one hundred and fifty miles to the farm, right then and there.
My father, a dangerous man behind the wheel, took any extended trip seriously, believing the highways to be narrow, unnavigable ribbons of carnage. This trip loomed so dangerously in his mind that, rather than tear a hand from the wheel, or an eye from the road, he had me, chronic sufferer of lung disorders, light his cigarettes and place them carefully in his dry lips. My mother would have killed him.
“You’ll love it at Grandma’s,” he kept saying unconvincingly, “you’ll have a real boy’s summer on the farm. It’ll build you up, the chores and all that. And good fun too. You don’t know it now, but you are living the best days of your life right now. What I wouldn’t give to be a kid again. You’ll love it there. There’s chickens and everything.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie. There were chickens. But the everything - as broad and overwhelming and suggestive of possibilities as my father tried to make it sound – didn’t cover much. It certainly didn’t comprehend a pony or a dog as I had hoped, chickens being the only livestock on the place.
It turned out that my grandmother, although she had spent most of her life on that particular piece of ground and eventually died there, didn’t care much for the farm and was entirely out of sympathy with most varieties of animal life. She did keep chickens for the eggs, although she admitted that her spirits lifted considerably in the fall when it came time to butcher the hens.
Her flock was a garrulous, scraggly crew that spent their days having dust baths in the front yard, hiding their eggs, and, fleet and ferocious as hunting cheetahs, running down scuttling lizards which they trampled and pecked to death while their shiny, expressionless eyes shifted dizzily in their stupid heads. The only one of these birds I felt any compassion for was Stanley the rooster, a bedraggled male who spent his days tethered to a stake by a piece of baler twine looped around his leg. Poor Stanley crowed heart-rendingly in his captivity; his comb drooped pathetically, and he was utterly crestfallen as he lecherously eyed his bantam beauties daintily scavenging. Grandma kept him in this unnatural bondage to prevent him fertilizing the eggs and producing blood spots in the yolks. Being a finicky eater I approved this policy, but nevertheless felt some guilt over Stanley.
No, the old Bradley homestead, all that encompassed by my father’s everything, wasn’t very impressive. The two-storey house, though big and solid, needed paint and shingles. A track had been worn in the kitchen linoleum clean through to the floorboards and a long rent in the screen door had been stitched shut with waxed thread. The yard was little more than a tangle of thigh-high ragweed and sowthistle to which the chickens repaired for shade. A windbreak of spruce on the north side of the house was dying from lack of water and the competition from Scotch thistle. The evergreens were no longer green; their sere needles fell away from the branches at the touch of a hand.
The abandoned barn out back was flanked by two mountainous rotted piles of manure which I remember sprouting button mushrooms after every warm soaker of a rain. That pile of shit was the only useful thing in a yard full of junk: wrecked cars, old wagon wheels, collapsing sheds. The barn itself was mightily decayed. The paint had been stripped from its planks by rain, hail, and dry, blistering winds, and the roof sagged like a tired nag’s back. For a small boy it was an ominous place on a summer day. The air was still and dark and heavy with heat. At the sound of footsteps rats squeaked and scrabbled in the empty mangers, and the sparrows which had spattered the rafters white with their dung whirred about and fluted ghostly cries.
In 1959 Grandma Bradley would have been sixty-nine, which made her a child of the gay nineties – although the supposed gaiety of that age didn’t seem to have made much impress upon the development of her character. Physically she was an imposing woman. Easily six feet tall, she carried a hundred and eighty pounds on her generous frame without prompting speculation as to what she had against girdles. She could touch the floor effortlessly with the flat of her palms and pack an eighty-pound sack of chicken feed on her shoulder. She dyed her hair auburn in defiance of local mores, and never went to town to play bridge, whist, or canasta without wearing a hat and getting dressed to the teeth. Grandma loved card games of all varieties and considered anyone who didn’t a mental defective.
A cigarette always smouldered in her trap. She smoked sixty a day and rolled them as thin as knitting needles in an effort at economy. These cigarettes were so wispy and delicate they tended to get lost between her swollen fingers.
And above all she believed in plain speaking. She let me know that as my father’s maroon Meteor pulled out of the yard while we stood waving goodbye on the front steps.
“Let’s get things straight from the beginning,” she said without taking her eyes off the car as it bumped toward the grid road. “I don’t chew my words twice. If you’re like any of the rest of them I’ve had here, you’ve been raised as wild as a goddamn Indian. Not one of my grandchildren have been brought up to mind. Well, you’ll mind around here. I don’t jaw and blow hot air to jaw and blow hot air. I belted your father when he needed it, and make no mistake I’ll belt you. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” I said with a sinking feeling as I watched my father’s car disappear down the road, swaying from side to side as its suspension was buffeted by potholes.
“These bloody bugs are eating me alive,” she said, slapping her arm. “I’m going in.”
I trailed after her as she slopped back into the house in a pair of badly mauled, laceless sneakers. The house was filled with a half-light that changed its texture with every room. The venetian blinds were drawn in the parlour and some flies carved Immelmanns in the dark air that smelled of cellar damp. Others battered their bullet bodies tip-tap, tip-tap against the window panes.
In the kitchen my grandmother put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea. After she had lit one of her matchstick smokes, she inquired through a blue haze if I was hungry.
“People aren’t supposed to smoke around me,” I informed her. “Because of my chest. Dad can’t even smoke in our house.”
“That so?” she said genially. Her cheeks collapsed as she drew on her butt. I had a hint there, if I’d only known it, of how she’d look in her coffin. “You won’t like it here then,” she said. “I smoke all the time.”
I tried a few unconvincing coughs. I was ignored. She didn’t respond to the same signals as my mother.
“My mother has a bad chest, too,” I said. “She’s in a T.B. sanatorium.”
“So I heard,” my grandmother said, getting up to fetch the whistling kettle. “Oh, I suspect she’ll be right as rain in no time with a little rest. T.B. isn’t what it used to be. Not with all these new drugs.” She considered. “That’s not to say though that your father’ll ever hear the end of it. Mabel was always a silly little shit that way.”
I almost fell off my chair. I had never thought I’d live to hear the day my mother was called a silly little shit.
“Drink tea?” asked Grandma Bradley, pouring boiling water into a brown teapot.
I shook my head.
“How old are you anyway?” she asked.
“Eleven.”
“You’re old enough then,” she said, taking down a cup from the shelf. “Tea gets the kidneys moving and carries off the poisons in the blood. That’s why all the Chinese live to be so old. They all live to be a hundred.”
“I don’t know if my mother would like it,” I said. “Me drinking tea.”
“You worry a lot for a kid,” she said, “don’t you?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. It wasn’t a question I had ever considered. I tried to shift the conversation.
“What’s there for a kid to do around here?” I said in an unnaturally inquisitive voice.
“Well, we could play cribbage,” she said.
“I don’t know how to play cribbage.”
She was genuinely shocked. “What!” she exclaimed. “Why, you’re eleven years old! Your father could count a cribbage hand when he was five. I taught all my kids to.”
“I never learned how,” I said. “We don’t even have a deck of cards at our house. My father hates cards. Says he had too much of them as a boy.”
At this my grandmother arched her eyebrows. “Is that a fact? Well, hoity-toity.”
“So, since I don’t play cards,” I continued in a strained manner I imagined was polite, “what could I do – I mean, for fun?”
“Make your own fun,” she said. “I never considered fun such a problem. Use your imagination. Take a broomstick and make like Nimrod.”
“Who’s Nimrod?” I asked.
“Pig ignorant,” she said under her breath, and then louder, directly to me, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Drink your tea.”
And that, for the time being, was that.
It’s all very well to tell someone to make their own fun. It’s the making of it that is the problem. In a short time I was a very bored kid. There was no one to play with, no horses to ride, no gun to shoot gophers, no dog for company. There was nothing to read except the Country Guide and Western Producer. There was nothing or nobody interesting to watch. I went through my grandmother’s drawers but found nothing as surprising there as I had discovered in my parents’.
Most days it was so hot that the very idea of fun boiled out of me and evaporated. I moped and dragged myself listlessly around the house in the loose-jointed, water-boned way kids have when they can’t stand anything, not even their precious selves.
On my better days I tried to take up with Stanley the rooster. Scant chance of that. Tremors of panic ran through his body at my approach. He tugged desperately on the twine until he jerked his free leg out from under himself and collapsed in the dust, his heart bumping the tiny crimson scallops of his breast feathers, the black pellets of his eyes glistening, all the while shitting copiously. Finally, in the last extremes of chicken terror, he would allow me to stroke his yellow beak and finger his comb.
I felt sorry for the captive Stanley and several times tried to take him for a walk, to give him a chance to take the air and broaden his limited horizons. But this prospect alarmed him so much that I was always forced to return him to his stake in disgust while he fluttered, squawked and flopped.
So fun was a commodity in short supply. That is, until something interesting turned up during the first week of August. Grandma Bradley was dredging little watering canals with a hoe among the corn stalks on a bright blue Monday morning, and I was shelling peas into a colander on the front stoop, when a black car nosed diffidently up the road and into the yard. Then it stopped a good twenty yards short of the house as if its occupants weren’t sure of their welcome. After some time, the doors opened and a man and woman got carefully out.
The woman wore turquoise-blue pedal-pushers, a sloppy black turtleneck sweater, and a gash of scarlet lipstick swiped across her white, vivid face. This was my father’s youngest sister, Aunt Evelyn.
The man took her gently and courteously by the elbow and balanced her as she edged up the front yard in her high heels, careful to avoid turning an ankle on a loose stone, or in an old tire track.
The thing which immediately struck me about the man was his beard – the first I had ever seen. Beards weren’t popular in 1959 – not in our part of the world. His was a randy, jutting, little goat’s-beard that would have looked wicked on any other face but his. He was very tall and his considerable height was accented by a lack of corresponding breadth to his body. He appeared to have been racked and stretched against his will into an exceptional and unnatural anatomy. As he walked and talked animatedly, his free hand fluttered in front of my aunt. It sailed, twirled and gambolled on the air. Like a butterfly enticing a child, it seemed to lead her hypnotized across a yard fraught with perils for city-shod feet.
My grandmother laid down her hoe and called sharply to her daughter.
“Evvie!” she called. “Over here, Evvie!”
At the sound of her mother’s voice my aunt’s head snapped around and she began to wave jerkily and stiffly, striving to maintain a tottering balance on her high-heeled shoes. It wasn’t hard to see that there was something not quite right with her. By the time my grandmother and I reached the pair, Aunt Evelyn was in tears, sobbing hollowly and jamming the heel of her palm into her front teeth.
The man was speaking calmly to her. “Control. Control. Deep, steady breaths. Think sea. Control. Control. Control. Think sea, Evelyn. Deep. Deep. Deep,” he muttered.
“What the hell is the matter, Evelyn?” my grandmother asked sharply. “And who is he?”
“Evelyn is a little upset,” the man said, keeping his attention focused on my aunt. “She’s having one of her anxiety attacks. If you’d just give us a moment we’ll clear this up. She’s got to learn to handle stressful situations.” He inclined his head in a priestly manner and said, “Be with the sea, Evelyn. Deep. Deep. Sink in the sea.”
“It’s her damn nerves again,” said my grandmother.
“Yes,” the man said benignly, with a smile of blinding condescension. “Sort of.”
“She’s been as nervous as a cut cat all her life,” said my grandmother, mostly to herself.
“Momma,” said Evelyn, weeping. “Momma.”
“Slide beneath the waves, Evelyn. Down, down, down to the beautiful pearls,” the man chanted softly. This was really something.
My grandmother took Aunt Evelyn by her free elbow, shook it, and said sharply, “Evelyn, shut up!” Then she began to drag her briskly towards the house. For a moment the man looked as if he had it in mind to protest, but in the end he meekly acted as a flanking escort for Aunt Evelyn as she was marched into the house. When I tried to follow, my grandmother gave me one of her looks and said definitely, “You find something to do out here.”
I did. I waited a few minutes and then duck-walked my way under the parlour window. There I squatted with my knobby shoulder blades pressed against the siding and the sun beating into my face.
My grandmother obviously hadn’t wasted any time with the social niceties. They were fairly into it.
“Lovers?” said my grandmother. “Is that what it’s called now? Shack-up, you mean.”
“Oh, Momma,” said Evelyn, and she was crying, “it’s all right. We’re going to get married.”
“You believe that?” said my grandmother. “You believe that geek is going to marry you?”
“Thompson,” said the geek, “my name is Thompson, Robert Thompson, and we’ll marry as soon as I get my divorce. Although Lord only knows when that’ll be.”
“That’s right,” said my grandmother, “Lord only knows.” Then to her daughter, “You got another one. A real prize off the midway, didn’t you? Evelyn, you’re a certifiable lunatic.”
“I didn’t expect this,” said Thompson. “We came here because Evelyn has had a bad time of it recently. She hasn’t been eating or sleeping properly and consequently she’s got herself run down. She finds it difficult to control her emotions, don’t you, darling?”
I thought I heard a mild yes.
“So,” said Thompson, continuing, “we decided Evelyn needs some peace and quiet before I go back to school in September.”
“School,” said my grandmother. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of teacher?” She seemed stunned by the very idea.
“No,” said Aunt Evelyn, and there was a tremor of pride in her voice that testified to her amazement that she had been capable of landing such a rare and remarkable fish. “Not a teacher. Robert’s a graduate student of American Literature at the University of British Columbia.”
“Hoity-toity,” said Grandmother. “A graduate student. A graduate student of American Literature.”
“Doctoral program,” said Robert.
“And did you ever ask yourself, Evelyn, what the hell this genius is doing with you? Or is it just the same old problem with you – elevator panties? Some guy comes along and pushes the button. Up, down. Up, down.”
The image this created in my mind made me squeeze my knees together deliciously and stifle a giggle.
“Mother,” said Evelyn, continuing to bawl.
“Guys like this don’t marry barmaids,” said my grandmother.
“Cocktail hostess,” corrected Evelyn. “I’m a cocktail hostess.”
“You don’t have to make any excuses, dear,” said Thompson pompously. “Remember what I told you. You’re past the age of being judged.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” said my grandmother. “And by the way, don’t start handing out orders in my house. You won’t be around long enough to make them stick.”
“That remains to be seen,” said Thompson.
“Let’s go, Robert,” said Evelyn, nervously.
“Go on upstairs, Evelyn, I want to talk to your mother.”
“You don’t have to go anywhere,” said my grandmother. “You can stay put.”
“Evelyn, go upstairs.” There was a pause and then I heard the sound of a chair creaking, then footsteps.
“Well,” said my grandmother at last, “round one. Now for round two – get the hell out of my house.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s very difficult to explain,” he said.
“Try.”
“As you can see for yourself, Evelyn isn’t well. She is very highly strung at the moment. I believe she is on the verge of a profound personality adjustment, a breakthrough.” He paused dramatically. “Or breakdown.”
“It’s times like this that I wished I had a dog on the place to run off undesirables.”
“The way I read it,” said Thompson, unperturbed, “is that at the moment two people bulk very large in Evelyn’s life. You and me. She needs the support and love of us both. You’re not doing your share.”
“I ought to slap your face.”
“She has come home to try and get a hold of herself. We have to bury our dislikes for the moment. She needs to be handled very carefully.”
“You make her sound like a trained bear. Handled. What that girl needs is a good talking to, and I am perfectly capable of giving her that.”
“No, Mrs. Bradley,” Thompson said firmly in that maddeningly self-assured tone of his. “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think that’s part of her problem. It’s important now for you to just let Evelyn be.”
“Get out of my house,” said my grandmother, at the end of her tether.
“I know it’s difficult for you to understand,” he said smoothly, “but if you understood the psychology of this you would see it’s impossible for me to go; or for that matter, for Evelyn to go. If I leave she’ll feel I’ve abandoned her. It can’t be done. We’re faced with a real psychological balancing act here.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” said my grandmother. “Are you telling me you’d have the gall to move into a house where you’re not wanted and just… just stay there?”
“Yes,” said Thompson. “And I think you’ll find me quite stubborn on this particular point.”
“My God,” said my grandmother. I could tell by her tone of voice that she had never come across anyone like Mr. Thompson before. At a loss for a suitable reply, she simply reiterated. “My God.”
“I’m going upstairs now,” said Thompson. “Maybe you could get the boy to bring in our bags while I see how Evelyn is doing. The car isn’t locked.” The second time he spoke his voice came from further away; I imagined him paused in the doorway. “Mrs. Bradley, please let’s make this stay pleasant for Evelyn’s sake.”
She didn’t bother answering him.
When I barged into the house some time later with conspicuous noisiness, I found my grandmother standing at the bottom of the stairs staring up the steps. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said under her breath. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Goddamn freak.” She even repeated it several times under her breath. “Goddamn freak. Goddamn freak.”
Who could blame me if, after a boring summer, I felt my chest tighten with anticipation? Adults could be immensely interesting and entertaining if you knew what to watch for.
At first things were disappointingly quiet. Aunt Evelyn seldom set forth outside the door of the room she and her man inhabited by squatters’ right. There was an argument, short and sharp, between Thompson and Grandmother over this. The professor claimed no one had any business prying into what Evelyn did up there. She was an adult and had the right to her privacy and her own thoughts. My grandmother claimed she had a right to know what was going on up there, even if nobody else thought she did.
I could have satisfied her curiosity on that point. Not much was going on up there. Several squints through the keyhole had revealed Aunt Evelyn lolling about the bedspread in a blue housecoat, eating soda crackers and sardines, and reading a stack of movie magazines she had had me lug out of the trunk of the car.
Food, you see, was beginning to become something of a problem for our young lovers. Grandma rather pointedly set only three places for meals, and Evelyn, out of loyalty to her boyfriend, couldn’t very well sit down and break bread with us. Not that Thompson didn’t take such things in his stride. He sauntered casually and conspicuously about the house as if he owned it, even going so far as to poke his head in the fridge and rummage in it like some pale, hairless bear. At times like that my grandmother was capable of looking through him as if he didn’t exist.
On the second day of his stay Thompson took up with me, which was all right as far as I was concerned. I had no objection. Why he decided to do this I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps he was looking for some kind of an ally, no matter how weak. Most likely he wanted to get under the old lady’s skin. Or maybe he just couldn’t bear not having anyone to tell how wonderful he was. Thompson was that kind of a guy.
I was certainly let in on the secret. He was a remarkable fellow. He dwelt at great length on those things which made him such an extraordinary human being. I may have gotten the order of precedence all wrong, but if I remember correctly there were three things which made Thompson very special and different from all the other people I would ever meet, no matter how long or hard I lived.
First, he was going to write a book about a poet called Allen Ginsberg which was going to knock the socks off everybody who counted. It turned out he had actually met this Ginsberg the summer before in San Francisco and asked him if he could write a book about him and Ginsberg had said, Sure, why the hell not? The way Thompson described what it would be like when he published this book left me with the impression that he was going to spend most of the rest of his life riding around on people’s shoulders and being cheered by a multitude of admirers.
Second, he confessed to knowing a tremendous amount about what made other people tick and how to adjust their mainsprings when they went kaflooey. He knew all this because at one time his own mainspring had gotten a little out of sorts. But now he was a fully integrated personality with a highly creative mind and a strong intuitive sense. That’s why he was so much help to Aunt Evelyn in her time of troubles.
Third, he was a Buddhist.
The only one of these things which impressed me at the time was the bit about being a Buddhist. However, I was confused, because in the Picture Book of the World’s Great Religions which we had at home, all the Buddhists were bald, and Thompson had a hell of a lot of hair, more than I had ever seen on a man. But even though he wasn’t bald, he had an idol. A little bronze statue with the whimsical smile and slightly crossed eyes which he identified as Padma-sambhava. He told me that it was a Tibetan antique he had bought in San Francisco as an object of veneration and an aid to his meditations. I asked him what a meditation was and he offered to teach me one. So I learned to recite with great seriousness and flexible intonation one of his Tibetan meditations, while my grandmother glared across her quintessentially Western parlour with unbelieving eyes.
I could soon deliver, “A king must go when his time has come. His wealth, his friends and his relatives cannot go with him. Wherever men go, wherever they stay, the effect of their past acts follows them like a shadow. Those who are in the grip of desire, the grip of existence, the grip of ignorance, move helplessly round through the spheres of life, as men or gods or as wretches in the lower regions.”
Not that an eleven-year-old could make much of any of that.
Which is not to say that even an eleven-year-old could be fooled by Robert Thompson. In his stubbornness, egoism and blindness he was transparently un-Buddhalike. To watch him and my grandmother snarl and snap their teeth over that poor, dry bone, Evelyn, was evidence enough of how firmly bound we all are to the wretched wheel of life and its stumbling desires.
No, even his most effective weapon, his cool benevolence, that patina of patience and forbearance which Thompson displayed to Grandmother, could crack.
One windy day when he had coaxed Aunt Evelyn out for a walk I followed them at a distance. They passed the windbreak of spruce, and at the sagging barbed-wire fence he gallantly manipulated the wires while my aunt floundered over them in an impractical dress and crinoline. It was the kind of dippy thing she would decide to wear on a hike.
Thompson strode along through the rippling grass like a wading heron, his baggy pant-legs flapping and billowing in the wind. My aunt moved along gingerly behind him, one hand modestly pinning down her wind-teased dress in the front, the other hand plastering the back of it to her behind.
It was only when they stopped and faced each other that I realized that all the time they had been traversing the field they had been arguing. A certain vaguely communicated agitation in the attitude of her figure, the way his arm stabbed at the featureless wash of sky, implied a dispute. She turned toward the house and he caught her by the arm and jerked it. In a fifties calendar fantasy her dress lifted in the wind, exposing her panties. I sank in the grass until their seed tassels trembled against my chin. I wasn’t going to miss watching this for the world.
She snapped and twisted on the end of his arm like a fish on a line. Her head was flung back in an exaggerated, antique display of despair; her head rolled grotesquely from side to side as if her neck were broken.
Suddenly Thompson began striking awkwardly at her exposed buttocks and thighs with the flat of his hand. The long, gangly arm slashed like a flail as she scampered around him, the radius of her escape limited by the distance of their linked arms.
From where I knelt in the grass I could hear nothing. I was too far off. As far as I was concerned there were no cries and no pleading. The whole scene, as I remember it, was shorn of any of the personal idiosyncrasies which manifest themselves in violence. It appeared a simple case of retribution.
That night, for the first time, my aunt came down to supper and claimed her place at the table with queenly graciousness. She wore shorts, too, for the first time, and gave a fine display of mottled, discoloured thighs which reminded me of bruised fruit. She made sure, almost as if by accident, that my grandmother had a good hard look at them.
Right out of the blue my grandmother said, “I don’t want you hanging around that man any more. You stay away from him.”
“Why?” I asked rather sulkily. He was the only company I had. Since my aunt’s arrival Grandmother had paid no attention to me whatsoever.
It was late afternoon and we were sitting on the porch watching Evelyn squeal as she swung in the tire swing Thompson had rigged up for me in the barn. He had thrown a length of stray rope over the runner for the sliding door and hung a tire from it. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I was too old for tire swings.
Aunt Evelyn seemed to be enjoying it though. She was screaming and girlishly kicking up her legs. Thompson couldn’t be seen. He was deep in the settled darkness of the barn, pushing her back and forth. She disappeared and reappeared according to the arc which she travelled through. Into the barn, out in the sun. Light, darkness. Light, darkness.
Grandma ignored my question. “Goddamn freak,” she said, scratching a match on the porch rail and lighting one of her rollies. “Wait and see, he’ll get his wagon fixed.”
“Aunt Evelyn likes him,” I noted pleasantly, just to stir things up a bit.
“Your Aunt Evelyn’s screws are loose,” she said sourly. “And he’s the son of a bitch who owns the screwdriver that loosened them.”
“He must be an awful smart fellow to be studying to be a professor at a university,” I commented. It was the last dig I could chance.
“One thing I know for sure,” snapped my grandmother. “He isn’t smart enough to lift the toilet seat when he pees. There’s evidence enough for that.”
After hearing that, I took to leaving a few conspicuous droplets of my own as a matter of course on each visit. Every little bit might help things along.
I stood in his doorway and watched Thompson meditate. And don’t think that, drenched in satori as he was, he didn’t know it. He put on quite a performance sitting on the floor in his underpants. When he came out of his trance he pretended to be surprised to see me. While he dressed we struck up a conversation.
“You know, Charlie,” he said while he put on his sandals (I’d never seen a grown man wear sandals in my entire life), “you remind me of my little Padma-sambhava,” he said, nodding to the idol squatting on his dresser. “For a while, you know, I thought it was the smile, but it isn’t. It’s the eyes.”
“Its eyes are crossed,” I said, none too flattered at the comparison.
“No they’re not,” he said good-naturedly. He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants. “The artist, the maker of that image, set them fairly close together to suggest – aesthetically speaking – the intensity of inner vision, its concentration.” He picked up the idol and, looking at it, said, “These are very watchful eyes, very knowing eyes. Your eyes are something like that. From your eyes I could tell you’re an intelligent boy.” He paused, set Padma-sambhava back on the dresser, and asked, “Are you?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t be afraid to say it if you are,” he said. “False modesty can be as corrupting as vanity. It took me twenty-five years to learn that.”
“I usually get all A’s on my report card,” I volunteered.
“Well, that’s something,” he said, looking around the room for his belt. He picked a sweater off a chair and peered under it. “Then you see what’s going on around here, don’t you?” he asked. “You see what your grandmother is mistakenly trying to do?”
I nodded.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a smart boy.” He sat down on the bed. “Come here.”
I went over to him. He took hold of me by the arms and looked into my eyes with all the sincerity he could muster. “You know, being intelligent means responsibilities. It means doing something worth while with your life. For instance, have you given any thought as to what you would like to be when you grow up?”
“A spy,” I said.
The silly bugger laughed.
It was the persistent, rhythmic thud that first woke me, and once wakened, I picked up the undercurrent of muted clamour, of stifled struggle. The noise seeped through the beaverboard wall of the adjoining bedroom into my own, a storm of hectic urgency and violence. The floorboards of the old house squeaked; I heard what sounded like a strangled curse and moan, then a fleshy, meaty concussion which I took to be a slap. Was he killing her at last? Choking her with the silent, poisonous care necessary to escape detection?
I remembered Thompson’s arm flashing frenziedly in the sunlight. My aunt’s discoloured thighs. My heart creaked in my chest with fear. And after killing her? Would the madman stop? Or would he do us all in, one by one?
I got out of bed on unsteady legs. The muffled commotion was growing louder, more distinct. I padded into the hallway. The door to their bedroom was partially open, and a light showed. Terror made me feel hollow; the pit of my stomach ached.
They were both naked, something which I hadn’t expected, and which came as quite a shock. What was perhaps even more shocking was the fact that they seemed not only oblivious of me, but of each other as well. She was slung around so that her head was propped on a pillow resting on the footboard of the bed. One smooth leg was draped over the edge of the bed and her heel was beating time on the floorboards (the thud which woke me) as accompaniment to Thompson’s plunging body and the soft, liquid grunts of expelled air which he made with every lunge. One of her hands gripped the footboard and her knuckles were white with strain.
I watched until the critical moment, right through the growing frenzy and ardour. They groaned and panted and heaved and shuddered and didn’t know themselves. At the very last he lifted his bony, hatchet face with the jutting beard to the ceiling and closed his eyes; for a moment I thought he was praying as his lips moved soundlessly. But then he began to whimper and his mouth fell open and he looked stupider and weaker than any human being I had ever seen before in my life.
“Like pigs at the trough,” my grandmother said at breakfast. “With the boy up there too.”
My aunt turned a deep red, and then flushed again so violently that her thin lips appeared to turn blue.
I kept my head down and went on shovelling porridge. Thompson still wasn’t invited to the table. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his bony legs crossed at the ankles, eating an apple he had helped himself to.
“He didn’t hear anything,” my aunt said uncertainly. She whispered conspiratorially across the table to Grandmother. “Not at that hour. He’d been asleep for hours.”
I thought it wise, even though it meant drawing attention to myself, to establish my ignorance. “Hear what?” I inquired innocently.
“It wouldn’t do any harm if he had,” said Thompson, calmly biting and chewing the temptress’s fruit.
“You wouldn’t see it, would you?” said Grandma Bradley. “It wouldn’t matter to you what he heard? You’d think that was manly.”
“Manly has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t enter into it,” said Thompson in that cool way he had. “It’s a fact of life, something he’ll have to find out about sooner or later.”
Aunt Evelyn began to cry. “Nobody is ever pleased with me,” she spluttered. “I’m going crazy trying to please you both. I can’t do it.” She began to pull nervously at her hair. “He made me,” she said finally in a confessional, humble tone to her mother.
“Evelyn,” said my grandmother, “you have a place here. I would never send you away. I want you here. But he has to go. I want him to go. If he is going to rub my nose in it that way he has to go. I won’t have that man under my roof.”
“Evelyn isn’t apologizing for anything,” Thompson said. “And she isn’t running away either. You can’t force her to choose. It isn’t healthy or fair.”
“There have been other ones before you,” said Grandma. “This isn’t anything new for Evelyn.”
“Momma!”
“I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly, and his face vibrated with the effort to smile. “Provincial mores have never held much water with me. I like to think I’m above all that.”
Suddenly my grandmother spotted me. “What are you gawking at!” she shouted. “Get on out of here!”
I didn’t budge an inch.
“Leave him alone,” said Thompson.
“You’ll be out of here within a week,” said Grandmother, “I swear.”
“No,” he said smiling. “When I’m ready.”
“You’ll go home and go with your tail between your legs. Last night was the last straw,” she said. And by God you could tell she meant it.
Thompson gave her his beatific Buddha-grin and shook his head from side to side, very, very slowly.
A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the bridge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.
Like my aunt and Thompson, all the chickens had gone to roost to wait for rain. The desertion of his harem had thrown the rooster into a flap. Stanley trotted neurotically around his tethering post, stopping every few circuits to beat his bedraggled pinions and crow lustily in masculine outrage. I watched him for a bit without much curiosity, and then climbed off the step and walked toward him, listlessly dragging my stick in my trail.
“Here Stanley, Stanley,” I called, not entirely sure how to summon a rooster, or instil in him confidence and friendliness.
I did neither. My approach only further unhinged Stanley. His stride lengthened, the tempo of his pace increased, and his head began to dart abruptly from side to side in furtive despair. Finally, in a last desperate attempt to escape, Stanley upset himself trying to fly. He landed in a heap of disarranged, stiff, glistening feathers. I put my foot on his string and pinned him to the ground.
“Nice pretty, pretty Stanley,” I said coaxingly, adopting the tone that a neighbour used with her budgie, since I wasn’t sure how one talked to a bird. I slowly extended my thumb to stroke his bright-red neck feathers. Darting angrily, he struck the ball of my thumb with a snappish peck and simultaneously hit my wrist with his heel spur. He didn’t hurt me, but he did startle me badly. So badly I gave a little yelp. Which made me feel foolish and more than a little cowardly.
“You son of a bitch,” I said, reaching down slowly and staring into one unblinking glassy eye in which I could see my fate looming larger and larger. I caught the rooster’s legs and held them firmly together. Stanley crowed defiantly and showed me his wicked little tongue.
“Now, Stanley,” I said, “relax, I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to stroke you. I’m just going to pet Stanley.”
No deal. He struck furiously again with a snake-like agility, and bounded in my hand, wings beating his poultry smell into my face. A real fighting cock at last. Maybe it was the weather. Perhaps his rooster pride and patience would suffer no more indignities.
The heat, the sultry menace of the gathering storm, made me feel prickly, edgy. I flicked my middle finger smartly against his tiny chicken skull, hard enough to rattle his pea-sized brain. “You like that, buster?” I asked, and snapped him another one for good measure. He struck back again, his comb red, crested, and rubbery with fury.
I was angry myself. I turned him upside down and left him dangling, his wings drumming against the legs of my jeans. Then I righted him abruptly; he looked dishevelled, seedy and dazed.
“Okay, Stanley,” I said, feeling the intoxication of power. “I’m boss here, and you behave.” There was a gleeful edge to my voice, which surprised me a little. I realized I was hoping this confrontation would escalate. Wishing that he would provoke me into something.
Strange images came into my head: the bruises on my aunt’s legs; Thompson’s face drained of life, lifted like an empty receptacle toward the ceiling, waiting to be filled, the tendons of his neck stark and rigid with anticipation.
I was filled with anxiety, the heat seemed to stretch me, to tug at my nerves and my skin. Two drops of sweat, as large and perfectly formed as tears, rolled out of my hairline and splashed onto the rubber toes of my runners.
“Easy, Stanley,” I breathed to him, “easy,” and my hand crept deliberately towards him. This time he pecked me in such a way, directly on the knuckle, that it actually hurt. I took up my stick and rapped him on the beak curtly, the prim admonishment of a schoolmarm. I didn’t hit him very hard, but it was hard enough to split the length of his beak with a narrow crack. The beak fissured like the nib of a fountain pen. Stanley squawked, opened and closed his beak spasmodically, bewildered by the pain. A bright jewel of blood bubbled out of the split and gathered to a trembling bead.
“There,” I said excitedly, “now you’ve done it. How are you going to eat with a broken beak? You can’t eat anything with a broken beak. You’ll starve, you stupid goddamn chicken.”
A wind that smelled of rain had sprung up. It ruffled his feathers until they moved with a barely discernible crackle.
“Poor Stanley,” I said, and at last, numbed by the pain, he allowed me to stroke the gloss of his lacquer feathers.
I wasn’t strong enough or practised enough to do a clean and efficient job of wringing his neck, but I succeeded in finishing him off after two clumsy attempts. Then, because I wanted to leave the impression that a skunk had made off with him, I punched a couple of holes in his breast with my jack knife and tried to dribble some blood on the ground. Poor Stanley produced only a few meagre spots; this corpse refused to bleed in the presence of its murderer. I scattered a handful of his feathers on the ground and buried him in the larger of the two manure piles beside the barn.
“I don’t think any skunk got that rooster,” my grandmother said suspiciously, nudging at a feather with the toe of her boot until, finally disturbed, it was wafted away by the breeze.
Something squeezed my heart. How did she know?
“Skunks hunt at night,” she said. “Must have been somebody’s barn cat.”
“You come along with me,” my grandmother said. She was standing in front of the full-length hall mirror, settling on her hat, a deadly-looking hat pin poised above her skull. “We’ll go into town and you can buy a comic book at the drugstore.”
It was Friday and Friday was shopping day. But Grandma didn’t wheel her battered De Soto to the curb in front of the Brite Spot Grocery, she parked it in front of Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Grandma was fumbling nervously with her purse. Smalltown people don’t like to be seen going to the lawyer’s. “Come along with me. Hurry up.”
“Why do I have to come?”
“Because I don’t want you making a spectacle of yourself for the half-wits and loungers to gawk at,” she said. “Let’s not give them too much to wonder about.”
Maynard & Pritchard, Barristers and Solicitors, smelled of wax and varnish and probity. My grandmother was shown into an office with a frosted pane of glass in the door and neat gilt lettering that announced it was occupied by D.F. Maynard, Q.C. I was ordered to occupy a hard chair, which I did, battering my heels on the rungs briskly enough to annoy the secretary into telling me to stop it.
My grandmother wasn’t closeted long with her Queen’s Counsel before the door opened and he glided after her into the passageway. Lawyer Maynard was the neatest man I had ever seen in my life. His suit fit him like a glove.
“The best I can do,” he said, “is send him a registered letter telling him to remove himself from the premises, but it all comes to the same thing. If that doesn’t scare him off, you’ll have to have recourse to the police. That’s all there is to it. I told you that yesterday and you haven’t told me anything new today, Edith, that would make me change my mind. Just let him know you won’t put up with him any more.”
“No police,” she said. “I don’t want the police digging in my family’s business and Evelyn giving one of her grand performances for some baby-skinned constable straight out of the depot. All I need is to get her away from him for a little while, then I could tune her in. I could get through to her in no time at all.”
“Well,” said Maynard, shrugging, “we could try the letter, but I don’t think it would do any good. He has the status of a guest in your home; just tell him to go.”
My grandmother was showing signs of exasperation. “But he doesn’t go. That’s the point. I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t.”
“Mrs. Bradley,” said the lawyer emphatically, “Edith, as a friend, don’t waste your time. The police.”
“I’m through wasting my time,” she said.
Pulling away from the lawyer’s office, my grandmother began a spirited conversation with herself. A wisp of hair had escaped from under her hat, and the dye winked a metallic red light as it jiggled up and down in the hot sunshine.
“I’ve told him and told him. But he won’t listen. The goddamn freak thinks we’re involved in a christly debating society. He thinks I don’t mean business. But I mean business. I do. There’s more than one way to skin a cat or scratch a dog’s ass. We’ll take the wheels off his little red wagon and see how she pulls.”
“What about my comic book?” I said, as we drove past the Rexall.
“Shut up.”
Grandma drove the De Soto to the edge of town and stopped it at the Ogdens’ place. It was a service station, or rather had been until the B.A. company had taken out their pumps and yanked the franchise, or whatever you call it, on the two brothers. Since then everything had gone steadily downhill. Cracks in the windowpanes had been taped with masking tape, and the roof had been patched with flattened tin cans and old licence plates. The building itself was surrounded by an acre of wrecks, sulking hulks rotten with rust, the guts of their upholstery spilled and gnawed by rats and mice.
But the Ogden brothers still carried on a business after a fashion. They stripped their wrecks for parts and were reputed to be decent enough mechanics whenever they were sober enough to turn a wrench or thread a bolt. People brought work to them whenever they couldn’t avoid it, and the rest of the year gave them a wide berth.
The Ogdens were famous for two things: their meanness and their profligacy as breeders. The place was always as warm with kids who never seemed to wear pants except in the most severe weather, and tottered about the premises, their legs smeared with grease, shit, or various combinations of both.
“Wait here,” my grandmother said, slamming the car door loudly enough to bring the two brothers out of their shop. Through the open door I saw a motor suspended on an intricate system of chains and pulleys.
The Ogdens stood with their hands in the pockets of their bib overalls while my grandmother talked to them. They were quite a sight. They didn’t have a dozen teeth in their heads between them, even though the oldest brother couldn’t have been more than forty. They just stood there, one sucking on a cigarette, the other on a Coke. Neither one moved or changed his expression, except once, when a tow-headed youngster piddled too close to Grandma. He was lazily and casually slapped on the side of the head by the nearest brother and ran away screaming, his stream cavorting wildly in front of him.
At last, their business concluded, the boys walked my grandmother back to the car.
“You’ll get to that soon?” she said, sliding behind the wheel.
“Tomorrow all right?” said one. His words sounded all slack and chewed, issuing from his shrunken, old man’s mouth.
“The sooner the better. I want that seen to, Bert.”
“What seen to?” I asked.
“Bert and his brother Elwood are going to fix that rattle that’s been plaguing me.”
“Sure thing,” said Elwood. “Nothing but clear sailing.”
“What rattle?” I said.
“What rattle? What rattle? The one in the glove compartment,” she said, banging it with the heel of her hand. “That rattle. You hear it?”
Thompson could get very edgy some days. “I should be working on my dissertation,” he said, coiled in the big chair. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time in this shit-hole. I should be working!”
“So why aren’t you?” said Evelyn. She was spool knitting. That and reading movie magazines were the only things she ever did.
“How the christ do I work without a library? You see a goddamn library within a hundred miles of this place?”
“Why do you need a library?” she said calmly. “Can’t you write?”
“Write,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Write, she says. What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you know about it?”
“I can’t see why you can’t write.”
“Before you write, you research. That’s what you do, you research.”
“So bite my head off. It wasn’t my idea to come here.”
“It wasn’t me that lost my goddamn job. How the hell were we supposed to pay the rent?”
“You could have got a job.”
“I’m a student. Anyway, I told you, if I get a job my wife gets her hooks into me for support. I’ll starve to death before I support that bitch.”
“We could go back.”
“How many times does it have to be explained to you? I don’t get my scholarship cheque until the first of September. We happen to be broke. Absolutely. In fact, you’re going to have to hit the old lady up for gas and eating money to get back to the coast. We’re stuck here. Get that into your empty fucking head. The Lord Buddha might have been able to subsist on a single bean a day; I can’t.”
My grandmother came into the room. The conversation stopped.
“Do you think,” she said to Thompson, “I could ask you to do me a favour?”
“Why, Mrs. Bradley,” he said, smiling, “whatever do you mean?”
“I was wondering whether you could take my car into town to Ogdens’ to get it fixed.”
“Oh,” said Thompson. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t think I’m your man.”
“Ask anyone where it is. They can tell you. It isn’t hard to find.”
“Why would you ask me to do you a favour, Mrs. Bradley?” inquired Thompson complacently. Hearing his voice was like listening to someone drag their nails down a blackboard.
“Well, you can be goddamn sure I wouldn’t,” said Grandma, trying to keep a hold on herself, “except that I’m right in the middle of doing my pickling and canning. I thought you might be willing to move your lazy carcass to do something around here. Every time I turn around I seem to be falling over those legs of yours.” She looked at the limbs in question as if she would like to dock them somewhere in the vicinity of the knee.
“No, I don’t think I can,” said Thompson easily, stroking his goat beard.
“And why the hell can’t you?”
“Oh, let’s just say I don’t trust you, Mrs. Bradley. I don’t like to leave you alone with Evelyn. Lord knows what ideas you might put in her head.”
“Or take out.”
“That’s right. Or take out,” said Thompson with satisfaction. “You can’t imagine the trouble it took me to get them in there.” He turned to Evelyn. “She can’t imagine the trouble, can she, dear?”
Evelyn threw her spool knitting on the floor and walked out of the room.
“Evelyn’s mad and I’m glad,” shouted Thompson at her back. “And I know how to tease her!”
“Charlie, come here,” said Grandma. I went over to her. She took me firmly by the shoulder. “From now on,” said my grandma, “my family is off limits to you. I don’t want to see you talking to Charlie here, or to come within sniffing distance of Evelyn.”
“What do you think of that idea, Charlie?” said Thompson. “Are you still my friend or what?”
I gave him a wink my grandma couldn’t see. He thought that was great; he laughed like a madman. “Superb,” he said. “Superb. There’s no flies on Charlie. What a diplomat.”
“What the hell is the matter with you, Mr. Beatnik?” asked Grandma, annoyed beyond bearing. “What’s so goddamn funny?”
“Ha ha!” roared Thompson. “What a charming notion! Me a beatnik!”
Grandma Bradley held the mouthpiece of the phone very close to her lips as she spoke into it. “No, it can’t be brought in. You’ll have to come out here to do the job.”
She listened with an intent expression on her face. Spotting me pretending to look in the fridge, she waved me out of the kitchen with her hand. I dragged myself out and stood quietly in the hallway.
“This is a party line,” she said, “remember that.”
Another pause while she listened.
“Okay,” she said and hung up.
I spent some of my happiest hours squatting in the corn patch. I was completely hidden there; even when I stood, the maturing stalks reached a foot or more above my head. It was a good place. On the hottest days it was relatively cool in that thicket of green where the shade was dark and deep and the leaves rustled and scraped and sawed dryly overhead.
Nobody ever thought to look for me there. They could bellow their bloody lungs out for me and I could just sit and watch them getting uglier and uglier about it all. There was some satisfaction in that. I’d just reach up and pluck myself a cob. I loved raw corn. The newly formed kernels were tiny, pale pearls of sweetness that gushed juice. I’d munch and munch and smile and smile and think, why don’t you drop dead?
It was my secret place, my sanctuary, where I couldn’t be found or touched by them. But all the same, if I didn’t let them intrude on me – that didn’t mean I didn’t want to keep tabs on things.
At the time I was watching Thompson stealing peas at the other end of the garden. He was like some primitive man who lived in a gathering culture. My grandma kept him so hungry he was constantly prowling for food: digging in cupboards, rifling the refrigerator, scrounging in the garden.
Clad only in Bermuda shorts he was a sorry sight. His bones threatened to rupture his skin and jut out every which way. He sported a scrub-board chest with two old pennies for nipples, and a wispy garland of hair decorated his sunken breastbone. His legs looked particularly rackety; all gristle, knobs and sinew.
We both heard the truck at the same time. It came bucking up the approach, spurting gravel behind it. Thompson turned around, shaded his eyes and peered at it. He wasn’t much interested. He couldn’t get very curious about the natives.
The truck stopped and a man stepped out on to the runningboard of the ’51 IHC. He gazed around him, obviously looking for something or someone. This character had a blue handkerchief sprinkled with white polka dots tied in a triangle over his face. Exactly like an outlaw in an Audie Murphy western. A genuine goddamn Jesse James.
He soon spotted Thompson standing half-naked in the garden, staring stupidly at this strange sight, his mouth bulging with peas. The outlaw ducked his head back into the cab of the truck, said something to the driver, and pointed. The driver then stepped out on to his runningboard and, standing on tippy-toe, peered over the roof of the cab at Thompson. He too wore a handkerchief tied over his mug, but his was red.
Then they both got down from the truck and began to walk very quickly towards Thompson with long, menacing strides.
“Fellows?” said Thompson.
At the sound of his voice the two men broke into a stiff-legged trot, and the one with the red handkerchief, while still moving, stooped down smoothly and snatched up the hoe that lay at the edge of the garden.
“What the hell is going on here, boys?” said Thompson, his voice pitched high with concern.
The man with the blue mask reached Thompson first. One long arm, a dirty clutch of fingers on its end, snaked out and caught him by the hair and jerked his head down. Then he kicked him in the pit of the stomach with his work boots.
“Okay, fucker,” he shouted, “too fucking smart to take a fucking hint?” and he punched him on the side of the face with several short, snapping blows that actually tore Thompson’s head out of his grip. Thompson toppled over clumsily and fell in the dirt. “Get fucking lost,” Blue Mask said more quietly.
“Evelyn!” yelled Thompson to the house. “Jesus Christ, Evelyn!”
I crouched lower in the corn patch and began to tremble. I was certain they were going to kill him.
“Shut up,” said the man with the hoe. He glanced at the blade for a second, considered, then rotated the handle in his hands and hit Thompson a quick chop on the head with the blunt side. “Shut your fucking yap,” he repeated.
“Evelyn! Evelyn! Oh God!” hollered Thompson, “I’m being murdered! For God’s sake, somebody help me!” The side of his face was slick with blood.
“I told you shut up, cock sucker,” said Red Mask, and kicked him in the ribs several times. Thompson groaned and hugged himself in the dust.
“Now you get lost, fucker,” said the one with the hoe, “because if you don’t stop bothering nice people we’ll drive a spike in your skull.”
“Somebody help me!” Thompson yelled at the house.
“Nobody there is going to help you,” Blue Mask said. “You’re all on your own, smart arse.”
“You bastards,” said Thompson, and spat ineffectually in their direction.
For his defiance he got struck a couple of chopping blows with the hoe. The last one skittered off his collar-bone with a sickening crunch.
“That’s enough,” said Red Mask, catching the handle of the hoe. “Come on.”
The two sauntered back towards the truck, laughing. They weren’t in any hurry to get out of there. Thompson lay on his side staring at their retreating backs. His face was wet with tears and blood.
The man with the red mask looked back over his shoulder and wiggled his ass at Thompson in an implausible imitation of effeminacy. “Was it worth it, tiger?” he shouted. “Getting your ashes hauled don’t come cheap, do it?”
This set them off again. Passing me they pulled off their masks and stuffed them in their pockets. They didn’t have to worry about Thompson when they had their backs to him: he couldn’t see their faces. But I could. No surprise. They were the Ogden boys.
When the truck pulled out of the yard, its gears grinding, I burst out of my hiding place and ran to Thompson, who had got to his knees and was trying to stop the flow of blood from his scalp with his fingers. He was crying. Another first for Thompson. He was the first man I’d seen cry. It made me uncomfortable.
“The sons of bitches broke my ribs,” he said, panting with shallow breaths. “God, I hope they didn’t puncture a lung.”
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“Don’t think I don’t know who’s behind this,” he said, getting carefully to his feet. His face was white. “You saw them,” he said. “You saw their faces from the corn patch. We got the bastards.”
He leaned a little on me as we made our way to the house. The front door was locked. We knocked. No answer. “Let me in, you old bitch!” shouted Thompson.
“Evelyn, open the goddamn door!” Silence. I couldn’t hear a thing move in the house. It was as if they were all dead in there. It frightened me.
He started to kick the door. A panel splintered. “Open this door! Let me in, you old slut, or I’ll kill you!”
Nothing.
“You better go,” I said nervously. I didn’t like this one little bit. “Those guys might come back and kill you.”
“Evelyn!” he bellowed. “Evelyn!”
He kept it up for a good five minutes, alternately hammering and kicking the door, pleading with and threatening the occupants. By the end of that time he was sweating with exertion and pain. He went slowly down the steps, sobbing, beaten. “You saw them,” he said, “we have the bastards dead to rights.”
He winced when he eased his bare flesh onto the hot seatcovers of the car.
“I’ll be back,” he said, starting the motor of the car. “This isn’t the end of this.”
When Grandma was sure he had gone, the front door was unlocked and I was let in. I noticed my grandmother’s hands trembled a touch when she lit her cigarette.
“You can’t stay away from him, can you?” she said testily.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “He was hurt. You ought to have let him in.”
“I ought to have poisoned him a week ago. And don’t talk about things you don’t know anything about.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “all of you get on my nerves.”
“Kids don’t have nerves. Adults have nerves. They’re the only ones entitled to them. And don’t think I care a plugged nickel what does, or doesn’t, get on your nerves.”
“Where’s Aunt Evelyn?”
“Your Aunt Evelyn is taken care of,” she replied.
“Why wouldn’t she come to the door?”
“She had her own road to Damascus. She has seen the light. Everything has been straightened out,” she said. “Everything is back to normal.”
He looked foolish huddled in the back of the police car later that evening. When the sun began to dip, the temperature dropped rapidly, and he was obviously cold dressed only in his Bermuda shorts. Thompson sat all hunched up to relieve the strain on his ribs, his hands pressed between his knees, shivering.
My grandmother and the constable spoke quietly by the car for some time; occasionally Thompson poked his head out the car window and said something. By the look on the constable’s face when he spoke to Thompson, it was obvious he didn’t care for him too much. Thompson had that kind of effect on people. Several times during the course of the discussion the constable glanced my way.
I edged a little closer so I could hear what they were saying.
“He’s mad as a hatter,” said my grandmother. “I don’t know anything about any two men. If you ask me, all this had something to do with drugs. My daughter says that this man takes drugs. He’s some kind of beatnik.”
“Christ,” said Thompson, drawing his knees up as if to scrunch himself into a smaller, less noticeable package, “the woman is insane.”
“One thing at a time, Mrs. Bradley,” said the RCMP constable.
“My daughter is finished with him,” she said. “He beats her, you know. I want him kept off my property.”
“I want to speak to Evelyn,” Thompson said. He looked bedraggled and frightened. “Evelyn and I will leave this minute if this woman wants. But I’ve got to talk to Evelyn.”
“My daughter doesn’t want to see you, mister. She’s finished with you,” said Grandma Bradley, shifting her weight from side to side. She turned her attention to the constable. “He beats her,” she said, “bruises all over her. Can you imagine?”
“The boy knows,” said Thompson desperately. “He saw them. How many times do I have to tell you?” He piped his voice to me. “Didn’t you, Charlie? You saw them, didn’t you?”
“Charlie?” said my Grandmother. This was news to her.
I stood very still.
“Come here, son,” said the constable.
I walked slowly over to them.
“Did you see the faces of the men?” the constable asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Do you know the men? Are they from around here?”
“How would he know?” said my grandmother. “He’s a stranger.”
“He knows them. At least he saw them,” said Thompson. “My little Padma-sambhava never misses a trick,” he said, trying to jolly me. “You see everything, don’t you, Charlie? You remember everything, don’t you?”
I looked at my grandmother, who stood so calmly and commandingly, waiting.
“Hey, don’t look to her for the answers,” said Thompson nervously. “Don’t be afraid of her. You remember everything, don’t you?”
He had no business begging me. I had watched their game from the sidelines long enough to know the rules. At one time he had imagined himself a winner. And now he was asking me to save him, to take a risk, when I was more completely in her clutches than he would ever be. He forgot I was a child. I depended on her.
Thompson, I saw, was powerless. He couldn’t protect me. God, I remembered more than he dreamed. I remembered how his lips had moved soundlessly, his face pleading with the ceiling, his face blotted of everything but abject urgency. Praying to a simpering, cross-eyed idol. His arm flashing as he struck my aunt’s bare legs. Crawling in the dirt, covered with blood.
He had taught me that “Those who are in the grip of desire, the grip of existence, the grip of ignorance, move helplessly round through the spheres of life, as men or gods or as wretches in the lower regions.” Well, he was helpless now. But he insisted on fighting back and hurting the rest of us. The weak ones like Evelyn and me.
I thought of Stanley the rooster and how it had felt when the tendons separated, the gristle parted and the bones crunched under my twisting hands.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” I said to the constable softly. “I didn’t see anybody.”
“Clear out,” said my grandmother triumphantly. “Beat it.”
“You dirty little son of a bitch,” he said to me. “You mean little bugger.”
He didn’t understand much. He had forced me into the game, and now that I was a player and no longer a watcher he didn’t like it. The thing was that I was good at the game. But he, being a loser, couldn’t appreciate that.
Then suddenly he said, “Evelyn.” He pointed to the upstairs window of the house and tried to get out of the back seat of the police car. But of course he couldn’t. They take the handles off the back doors. Nobody can get out unless they are let out.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted. “Let me out! She’s waving to me! She wants me!”
I admit that the figure was hard to make out at that distance. But any damn fool could see she was only waving goodbye.