I Was There the Night He Died (18 page)

“Asshole.”

“That's not how to look at it,” I say. “The way to look at it is she needed help—more help than she was getting. That's the point.”

“Not
her
, you asshole,” Samantha says, standing up from the swing. “What an asshole
you
.”

I stand up as well; point at myself just to make sure there's no further confusion as to who she's referring to. “Me?”

“Is this what you wanted to see?” she says, ripping off her coat and slamming it over her shoulder to the ground like an overmatched wrestling opponent.

I pat down the air with open palms. “Let's try to keep it down, okay?”

Next to go is her perennial blue hoodie, but this time not south, but at me, the zipper catching me in the right eye. Both of my eyes shut tight of their own volition, and the right one begins to water.

“Look at me.”

“Jesus Christ, I can't look at you, you've fucking blinded me.”

“I said look at me. This is what you wanted to see, so look at me.”

The injured eye won't cooperate—is too busy sending salty water down the right side of my face—but the left one is game. What it sees is Samantha in her white sports bra with both arms extended in front of me for inspection, old flesh-coloured scars alternating with fresh red welts up and down each forearm. Lucky there are so many stars out tonight or I wouldn't be able to see them so well. Lucky.

“I just wanted to help,” I say, trying not to stare at the mess of her flesh. “I
do
want to help.”

“With your bullshit stories with their stupid moral lessons? You really think a
story
is going to make me stop cutting myself? My God, you are
so
vain. You come across like you're so laid back and above all the bullshit, but you're just as full of yourself as everyone else. Is that what you've been doing every time you told me about someone who died? God, I can't believe I sat there like some kind of little groupie and listened to you.”

“No, no, that wasn't what happened at all. Before, it was just us talking, I swear. Because I liked talking to you. I
do
like talking to you. Tonight was the first time I … Look, I was little drunk, maybe I came across a little … pedagogical, but the point is still … ”

Samantha gathers up her clothes from the frozen ground and walks away without bothering to put them back on. Her naked shoulder blades look like amputated wings. You'd think she would hurry home—me still standing there, the cold air, someone who might see her—but if you did, you would be wrong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Twelve

 

 

 

I'm eighteen again, and time
travel isn't all it's cracked up to be.

It's almost midnight on Friday night and Steady Eddie is behind the wheel and the radio is on and we've each got a can of beer between our thighs and there's nowhere we have to be, we're just driving around, but it's a single Coors Light Tall Boy each because drinking and driving drunk is a grown-up no-no and the radio is one long commercial only occasionally interrupted by songs we've heard a million and twelve times before and never need to hear again and we're not in Eddie's dad's 1980 Chrysler Le Baron coupe but in the Steady One's brand new GMC Sierra HD with a 360 horsepower Vortec Six Litre V8, six-speed automatic transmission, and towing and payload capacity far superior to his last truck, features and luxuries he neither needs nor can afford. But he just got the good news that he's staying on at the factory, at least through the spring and the summer, so what better way to celebrate being able to scrape by for a few more months than by adding a truck payment to his already fat stack of monthly bills? Money is for spending, after all, life is for living, you know, you only go around once, don't forget.

“Remember the Capitol Theatre?” Eddie says, hand on the wheel, pointing with his pinkie.

“Sure.” Someone's parents would drop you off, someone else's would pick everyone up out front, two dollars to get in and a dollar for popcorn or a chocolate bar and a pop and teenage ushers with flashlights and “O Canada” before the movie. I'm sure I wasn't the only Chatham adolescent to see his first pair of female breasts after bluffing his way into
Porky's
at the Capitol.

“The city bought it and are turning it into a real theatre—you know, for plays and stuff.” Both the Capitol and the Centre closed down in the early nineties, near-century-­old monuments to Chatham's downtown, boarded up and forgotten in favour of a conveniently located cement box that can show eight Tinsel Town chimeras at once.

“That's good,” I say. “That's good for the city.” Which it is, I suppose, even if an abandoned and darkened three-story Edwardian building has more tragic dignity than a refurbished community playhouse specializing in local productions of
Oklahoma!
and the inevitable Christmas
Nutcracker
. But the desolately sublime doesn't pay anybody's bills. And Sara, who grew up in Toronto, said her parents took her to the Nutcracker every year and she hated it until the year they didn't go, when she missed it so much she made them attend the following year and every year after that until she left home. So, good for the Capitol Theatre. Good for Chatham.

We've reached the end of King Street; Eddie flicks on his blinker. “Let's check out the old school,” I say.

“You got it,” Eddie says, just glad to have somewhere else to show off his gleaming new monster mobile. What's the point of having something if you can't use it to make other people jealous?

We take turns ducking our heads dash-level to take a sip from our beer, a pair of sensible rebels. “Hey how's that place, that Thames View, taking care of your old man? Pretty good, I bet. Mum's got an aunt in there and Mum says she's never been busier or had more friends.”

“It's good,” I say. “They take good care of him. But my dad, he's not … he's in a different part of the building. He's in the Alzheimer's ward, so … ”

“Right, right.” Eddie lowers his head and takes another sip, sorry, I can tell, for raising the topic. “Your uncle, he's got to be a big help over there, though. I mean, when you're in T.O., your dad has family there. That's important.”

“My uncle's a prick,” I say. “Don't ask me why, but he is.”

Eddie raises a steady hand—international sign language for
Your family and the shit it gets up to is off limits, I understand
—and concentrates on the road. He's not only trying to be nice, he's also—goddamn it—right: my dad
does
need someone other than a paid professional to keep him company, even if he doesn't know whose company he's actually in. I realize at this very moment, sitting four feet off the ground in Eddie's truck, that I'm going to have to forgive Uncle Donny. Not forget—you don't have a choice about that—but forgive, at least enough to trust him again to be my point man in Chatham when I'm three hours away in Toronto. I'm pissed off, but also relieved. And surprised—astounded, actually—at how easy it is to change your mind about something you couldn't imagine changing your mind about.

“How's the sale of the house going, anyway? Anybody sniffing around yet?”

“Not many,” I say. “One, actually.”

“That's rough. Just wait, though, somebody'll make an offer, you'll see.”

“Somebody already did.”

“Oh yeah?”

“But it was under what I'm asking.”

“Low-balling you, eh?”

“By ten thousand.”

“Just ten?”

Eddie pulls the truck in front of CCI and puts it in park, lets it idle. I don't answer him, both because it's obvious what he thinks—thinks the same thing as my real-estate agent, that I should accept the offer—and because it's only twenty-two more days until the vampires at Visa are due their next currency feeding.

“Want to go for a walk?” I say.

“Where?” Even if you don't have a new thirty-five thousand dollar vehicle, walking in Chatham is what you do when you can't afford to drive.

“I don't know. Is the football field still there?”

“I guess so. My neighbour's kid is going out for Junior this spring, so they've still got a team.”

“For now.”

“For now.”

We get out of the truck and walk past the school—dark and empty and somehow the same building we filled with our voices and footsteps and nervous daydreams as teenagers—on the way to the football field behind it. The stars and the moon are all the light we need to get us there.

“I hear you're dating Rachel Turnbal,” Eddie says.

“Who told you that?”

“I don't know. I don't remember. Somebody.”

It's a town of less than 40,000, Eddie has lived in it his entire life, as has nearly everyone else who calls it home: I believe him. “We're not dating,” I say. “We're just spending some time together.”

“Why aren't you?”

“Why aren't we what?”

“Dating.”

“Look,” I say. “The shed.”

The shed was where all of the practice equipment was kept—the orange pylons for running agility drills, the shields for blocking practice, the sled for the linemen to work on their pushing and pulling. Junior football was in the spring, senior football in the fall. The offence and the defence took turns getting out the equipment, and in the first week of September, if you were the one with the key to the padlock, it was like opening the door to a wooden kiln. Tonight there are icicles hanging from the doorframe.

“She sure got hot all of a sudden,” Eddie says.

“Who? Rachel, you mean?”

“Hell yes, Rachel. Like you didn't notice.”

“I noticed. But she's still the same person she was in high-school.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. She's nice. She's a nice person.”

“Is that why she's not your girlfriend?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because she's nice?”

Today was mild most of the day, and the melted snow has changed forms, has attached itself to the gravel on the track around the football field like sparkly glaze on a dirt and pebble crumble cake. Without saying anything, Eddie and I start around the track. Every practice would begin with a sprint around both goalposts. It hardly seemed worth it, it was so easy and over with so quick. Eddie unzips his fly and waters one of the goalposts. I look around to see if it's clear and join him. Little boys can't help sneaking a peek at the wee-wee whizzing next to them; middle age men can't resist sizing up the gut—Bigger? Smaller? The same?—of the guy standing closest. Forty-four years later and still fretting over a couple of inches.

“Let's jog the rest of the way,” I say.

“Are you nuts?”

“Come on. For old time's sake.”

“Screw old time's sake. My running days are over.”

I run on my own the rest of the way around the posts, stand panting in place back where I started. Eddie's laughing when he finally gets there.

“Man, you need a beer,” he says. “You look like you just ran a marathon.”

 

* * *

 

Dad has a fever and some
liquid in his lungs and abnormally high blood pressure. Nothing to worry about too much at the moment, the doctor says, but definitely something worth keeping an eye on. Alzheimer's patients don't die of Alzheimer's—the body eventually just packs it in after being beaten and battered so hard for so long. Stroke and pneumonia are two of the most common causes of death among patients in advanced stages. Stages don't get any more advanced than Dad's.

Uncle Donny was at Thames View when I got there, had gotten the same phone call that I had. The first thing I noticed wasn't Dad, who, fever and liquid in his lungs and raised blood pressure or not, looked the soporific same, but Uncle Donny, specifically the cell phone hanging in its cheap black plastic case from his belt. He saw me see it too, said, “After they called me about the fever, I picked it up at the 7-Eleven on the way over here. I don't want to be somewhere and then have them call me and me not know what's going on.” He was holding ice chips to my father's lower lip to help ease the fever. I believed him.

When Dad's temperature dropped and visiting hours were over, we walked in silence to the parking lot without Uncle Donny offering to drive me home or me asking him to, but him doing just that anyway. I slipped one of his Rat Pack CDs into the car's disc player so that neither of us would have to say anything. Dean Martin serenaded us home with “That's Amore.”

Once inside the house I decide to phone Rachel, to tell her we need to talk, but when I get her voicemail I say I'm just checking in, no big deal, no need to call back. There's nothing left to pack or to throw out or to donate—what little that's left is what I need to get by while I'm here—and I finished the second to last chapter of
Lives of the Poets (with Guitars)
last night, sound compositional practice dictating that I wait at least a couple of head-clearing days before beginning what will be the end of the first draft. What I want to do is what I'm afraid won't happen. If I take my usual spot on the park bench and Samantha doesn't show up, I feel as if I won't ever see her again.

I stand on the front porch, neither here nor there, pretending that's where I want to be. The night is starless and windy, but late-March almost-mild, you can smell the earth beneath the neighbourhood lawns beginning to wake up. I'm wearing gloves, but I don't need them, drop them to the porch and stick my hands inside my coat pockets. Samantha's front door opens and closes and I hear her crossing her lawn.

Except he isn't she. He is her father. Crossing my lawn at a steady clip and not, for a change, wobbling; walking straight and standing tall, in fact. And talking to me.

“I want you to stay away from my daughter.”

“Pardon?” I say, although I understand him just fine, at least the words that he's using.

“You heard me. You're lucky I don't call the cops. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

You're not alone in holding that opinion, but would you mind being a little more specific? “Look, I don't know what—”

Samantha's father raises his right forefinger; is standing on my parents' front lawn less than five feet away from me. His face is very white and his nose very red and his eyes an unfortunate coupling of both. “Save it, buddy. I'm a lawyer. I know how the legal system works, all right? Supplying drugs to an eighteen year-old girl is not something that the criminal system looks kindly upon, believe me, even if it is just pot.”

Now it's my turn to instruct and enlighten with my finger. “You don't know what you're talking about,” I say, pointing right back. “Your daughter, she's … ” He's dropped his hand now and is listening, I can tell. “Your daughter, Samantha … ”

“I know very well who my daughter is. My daughter Samantha what?”

“She's a good kid,” I say.

Samantha's father peers at me like he's inspecting a bowl of soup for a hair. Satisfied it's particle-free, “Then stay away from her. It's hard enough for kids these days to do the right thing without having a frigging drug dealer living across the street.”

“I'm not … ” I sputter, before I can stop myself.

“You're not what? Don't lie to me. We both know what you are.”

I pick my gloves up off the porch and slide them back on. “I'm not going to be around here much longer,” I say, pointing at the For Sale planted in the middle of the yard.

“Good,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

And because that, apparently, is that, Samantha's father goes back the way he came and I go back inside the house. Where Buttercup Village's very own, home-grown dope dealer pours himself a big glass of red wine. I should be insulted, upset—irked, at least—but I'm not. That guy, he may not be much, he may be exactly who he seems like, but that guy, he's Samantha's father.

 

* * *

 

They have Starbucks on mountain
tops in Tibet, but not in Chatham. Theoretically, this is a good thing—anti-multi-national mumble mumble, locally-owned business et cetera. Practically, this only means that corporate head office definitely knows what it's doing, a four dollar cup of coffee as suspect to most Chathamites as paying for a book when you can get it for free from the library, or some pinko kook who doesn't support our troops (whatever it is they're doing over there, wherever
there
is). This also means that I'm waiting for Rachel at Coffee Time, the Tim Hortons down the street simply not appropriate for the sort of mid-afternoon
t
ê
te-
à
-t
ê
te
I have in mind. Location, location, location, even when you're just gently but firmly letting someone know it's not them, it's you.