Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (15 page)

But Forsythe did make it, a downhill, snaky, twenty-five footer. Snatching his ball from the hole with a flourish and pretending to sheathe his putter like a rapier, à la Chi Chi Rodriguez in his cocky prime, he strode past Billy chirping, “Drive for show, putt for dough.”

The standoff continued until the eighteenth, nine hundred bucks on the line at the final hole. Billy had belted down two more beers and found another one lodged under the seat of Froese’s cart, God alone knew how it had got where it was,
or how long it had been there. It was warm as piss but he swigged it greedily, Herb watching him out of the corner of his eye, forehead disapprovingly furrowed. All that brew was catching up with him, but luckily there was a toilet nearby, so Billy trotted over to take a slash. When he flicked the light switch in the privy nothing happened, some electrical malfunction or the bulb had burned out. So he left the door open, fishing his unit out just as a cart bounced up, one with women on it. Startled, he kicked the door shut and was cast into what would have been utter darkness except for the wan glow of his wristwatch. Looking down he read the numbers 5:05.

The heat stored in the still, confined space seemed to suddenly increase, popping sweat out all over his body. He felt dizzy and short of breath, had to brace himself on one arm above the urinal. An ominous red light was blinking in the swarming blackness, a trick of his light-deprived eyes. It rooted him to the spot while a cruel, indifferent hand squeezed his heart in time with the pulsing light, filling him with superstitious dread. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh fuck.”

When Billy reached the tee box, everybody was annoyed with him. Forsythe said, “We got tired of waiting for you. We all went ahead and hit.”

“I needed to siphon the python.”

“Little wonder, the way you’ve been knocking back the beer,” said Forsythe.

Billy put what he imagined was a contemplative, philosophical look on his face. “Ever think what a great game
golf is? The only one where you can smoke and drink while you exercise.” He lit his last cigarette, crumpled the package, and tossed it in the trash. “Just for my information, you didn’t happen to hit it in the bush, did you, Forsythe?”

“Dead solid perfect. Just past the dogleg. Too bad for you.”

“The plot thickens then, doesn’t it?” Billy sat down on Herb’s cart and began removing his golf shoes and socks. Skip Jacobs, who had scarcely said a word to him all day, squawked, “Jesus, what now? You got a stone in your shoe?”

Billy didn’t answer, simply strolled to the tee box in his bare feet, coolly swishing his driver back and forth in one hand.

“Showboat,” said Forsythe. His voice was nasty, contemptuous.

Right now, there was nothing Forsythe could say to Billy that could touch him. He was in the
zone
. He could
feel
it. “Sam Snead used to say when he needed to find his swing, he’d hit balls in his bare feet. He wanted that connection with the earth. Me too,” Billy calmly said.

“Shit.”

Billy was remembering when the twins were small and just learning to walk, how he had pulled off their shoes and socks and put them down on the newly sodded lawn of their first house. He and Marva had roared with laughter as the boys capered about in a high-stepping chicken gait, squealing with delight as the soft shoots of grass tickled the soles of their feet. Billy looked down at his own feet, wiggled his toes ecstatically, then looked up and peered down the long channel of fairway bounded by trees on either side, directing his gaze to a spot on the right where a peninsula of spruce extended into the fairway, pinching it even tighter at
the two-hundred-yard mark. He was doing what the great ones did, visualizing the shot.

Toughest hole on the course and Billy Constable meant to bring it to its knees by hitting a high cut that would turn the corner of the dogleg and land the ball neatly on the fairway beyond. If he couldn’t shape the shot, if the ball didn’t curve exactly as he wanted, it would all be over. Tits up. Billy smiled, waggled the head of the driver, and took a mighty cut.

The ball soared upward like a jet rising in a steep climb off the tarmac. Billy leaned forward, held his breath, saw it bank right on cue, a slow swoop to the right, all systems go, pilot firmly at the controls, guiding it on the correct flight path, curling it around the trees. The pressure shot of a lifetime.

Forsythe looked like somebody had put his nuts in a vise grip. “Horseshit luck,” he spat out.

“Drive for dough, putt for show,” said Billy, jerking his pitching wedge from his bag. He had played Fairview so often he knew exactly where his ball would lie. Striking the down slope of the fairway it would have run hot, maybe as much as three hundred yards. Without hesitation, he started off walking. Moments later he heard the whine of an electric motor. Herb pulled alongside. “Hey, Billy,” he said, “hell of a shot. Hop on.”

Billy shook his head. “I’m walking this one. For the pleasure of it.”

“You don’t look so hot,” said Herb. “Kind of pale. You all right?”

Waving him on, Billy announced, “Couldn’t be better.” Herb zoomed off, looking back over his shoulder with a perplexed expression.

He didn’t need to see Forsythe frenziedly thrashing the ground with his club after he duffed his second shot to know that the dough was as good as in his wallet. Billy had known it was a done deal on the tee box, just as he had known, leaning against the wall of the hot, reeking toilet, that the other deal with Jenkins was done, but done in a different way, cooked like a goose. That tiny red light blinking malignly at him was a sign, a warning to him that there was a message waiting for him at home, and that the message light blinking on his phone was not an announcement of glad tidings, far from it. That evil little red eye on his answering machine was giving him a mocking wink: Your last hope is gone.

For weeks he had been ducking the obvious truth. Sure Jenkins had politely listened to his sales pitches, but only out of pity. Even that famously hardhearted bastard hadn’t been able to bring himself to smother Billy’s optimism in the cradle. At least not face to face with the victim. But then by choosing to golf this afternoon he had gone and provided Jenkins with an easy out. Given him the chance to administer a short, quick knife thrust between the ribs, a dry, matter-of-fact communication committed to tape. Thanks but no thanks.

Billy paused and looked around him. An aeration fountain on a nearby pond was fluttering a rainbow-coloured fan in the sunshine. Massive billows of cumulus rode above the clubhouse. On the terrace, blue and white parasols beckoned with the promise of shade and ice-cold drinks. His mind opened, and he saw again the bird-like cloud on this morning’s horizon, when everything seemed salvageable. The word for it was
phoenix
. The emblem claimed for himself by that English writer with sex on the brain. The professor said it
was mythical, an imaginary bird that rose from its own ashes. The only bit of information that ever claimed Billy’s attention in the entire boring class. Well, he was toast now. Burned to a crisp and nothing left for his creditors to do but sift through the blackened crumbs of him. There was no rising from these ashes. Not with overdue goods and services taxes owing to the government, unpaid suppliers, bills and more bills.

He started for his ball, tramping right through a fairway bunker, a terrible breach of etiquette, but he was never coming back to Fairview anyway. The powdery white sand seared his feet and then he felt the lush, cool grass caress and soothe his soles.

It was only June, but Billy Constable figured he had less than twenty minutes of summer left to him. He intended to make the most of it.

WHY THE PEEL BROTHERS?
Let’s say I’m a retiree who likes to reconstruct, to restore things. While whatever I write here concerns
them
, Donny and Bob Peel, supply and demand is always part of the story. Memory is an old whore eager to turn tricks with the body of the past to satisfy the customer. Think of me as the customer. Which means I’m always right. I need to see it this way.

Not all of this is speculation, my years of being the confidant and friend of Donny’s wife, Anne, has given me a chance to hear a lot of Peel family history. But some of it I witnessed for myself, as a somewhat distant but extremely interested observer. Of course, there are many gaps in the story, but where’s the pleasure in reconstruction if you can’t tart things up a bit? The vintage car boys put a little extra car wax on those 1950s fins to bring the shine out.

A little background first. Donny was three years younger than Bob, who was both father and mother to him. That
doesn’t mean their parents were actually dead, just that they were dead from the neck up; two mean, stupid drunks. It was Bob who kept Donny’s nose above water in the early years, towing him through the choppy waters of his youth until Donny’s toes scrabbled bottom, took hold, and he was able to wade ashore under his own power, into life.

Which he eventually did. Donny has been on solid, happy ground with Anne for thirty-five years now. Most couples of their acquaintance envy them because all the Peels’ disagreements are fondly trivial, minor. I know, for example, that whether or not to answer the phone when they are otherwise occupied ranks as a Big Issue in their marriage. Donny frequently reminds his wife that dodging annoying phone calls is one of the reasons he pays for voicemail. But if the telephone rings, Anne can’t help herself. Her mouth gets twitchy, her eyes turn skittish and desperate, and she has to rush to answer it, just the way she once had to rush to her toddlers whenever she heard their squawks and cries.

This is how I picture it. Not too long ago, as they are settling down to eat dinner, the phone begins to peal. On the third ring Anne spooks up out of her chair and flies out of the room, Donny bellowing after her, “It’s a goddamn telemarketer! And if it’s somebody looking for me, just remember, I’m not home!”

But his wife’s hushed voice, the tense intervals of silence radiating ominously from the kitchen, prompt Donny to lay down his fork and strain his ears. After a few minutes, Anne returns to the dining room white-faced, trembling, and announces, “It’s about Bob. Oh, honey, it’s bad.”

It was bad, although hardly unexpected. Donny had been
waiting for that call for twenty years. A voice caressed him with official sympathy and informed him that an
individual
had been found frozen to death in an alley in Edmonton. In this individual’s wallet, a piece of paper had been discovered, contact information for one Donald Peel. Was he the gentleman in question, was he Robert Peel’s next of kin? And when Donny confirmed that he was, the caller asked if he would be prepared to come to Edmonton to identify the body. And Donny said, “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Early next morning Donny drove off, alone. Anne wanted to accompany him but her husband said no, a long, quiet drive would give him a chance to wrap his head around this. Besides, an autopsy would need to be performed, arrangements would have to be made for dealing with the body. Everything concerning death is a long, tedious affair tricked out in streamers of government red tape, and Donny saw no reason that both he and his wife should have to endure all that paper signing and shuffling. It would be better if Anne stayed put while he settled matters.

Three days later, Donny was back home, a brass urn full of Bob’s ashes cradled to his chest. Placing all that was left of his brother on the kitchen table, Donny collapsed in a chair, dropped his head in his hands, shoulders shaken by an earthquake of grief. Anne confessed to me she had never seen her husband in such a state. Donny had always locked his sorrows in a vise of self-control that verged on the unnatural. When their little boy, precursor to the two girls, had arrived
blue and lifeless at birth, Donny had never shed a tear, had walked through that terrible time granite-faced.

“But now, Mr. Fenton …” Anne said to me, her voice fading away to nothing. Referring to me as Mr. Fenton is one of Anne’s “tells,” a signal to me that she’s feeling very blue. Otherwise, she just calls me Joey. Sometimes Pal Joey.

Everyone who heard Anne compare Donny’s reaction to the death of their baby to the death of his brother, something she repeated often to friends, detected a thread of resentment running through it that I must say is not the least bit typical of her.

I find it strange that Anne isn’t able to realize that Donny’s guilt and grief have reached such a pitch because he feels he failed his brother. After all, Bob had never failed
him
. It was Bob who made Donny’s boyhood bearable, made him his school lunches, who brushed his mop of unruly hair into submission each morning, who let him crawl into his bed whenever his little brother woke howling in the grip of yet another nightmare. Donny had no one else to lean on. His useless mother spent mornings in front of a blaring
TV
, a bottle of beer in her lap, graduating to gin in the afternoons. Her husband was nearly as feckless. True, he managed to stay sober during his eight-hour shift at the mine, but when he got home he made up ground fast; after an hour or two of hard, committed drinking he was as stupefied and blotto as his wife.

The Peel family lived in a forlorn trailer court sprawled on the edge of town, their mobile home little more than a tin shoebox that banged and teetered even in the mildest wind. Mr. Peel’s wages would have been sufficient to support a
family, but most of his paycheque was spent on booze, although occasionally Bob succeeded in shaming a few dollars out of him to buy Donny shoes or a winter coat.

By the time Bob was ten he was delivering newspapers to earn a little cash. Because Donny couldn’t bear to let his security blanket out of sight, he tagged along with Bob while he made his rounds. In those days, it seemed to the town that the Peel boys lived on the streets; if they weren’t lugging newspapers up and down them, they were aimlessly, endlessly tramping them. When it got nasty at home, when their parents began to shriek and shout accusations at each other, Donny would start to unravel. Then it fell to Bob to take steps, to shove his brother out the door, to walk away his tears by wandering the dark, echoing streets. On the hottest nights of summer, they sometimes bunked down under the caragana bushes that lined the perimeters of our one park, hidden from the sight of police patrol cars.