Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (16 page)

This was how the Peel boys grew up. Within a few years, Donny had inherited Bob’s paper route and Bob had moved on to other jobs, mowing lawns, digging gardens, shovelling walks, painting fences. By the time the boys were teenagers they had become self-sufficient, pooling their cash to buy clothes, school supplies, even groceries. The summer the girl from Chicago strolled into their lives, Bob was working as a groundskeeper at the local golf course and Donny, fifteen, had been hired to man the concession stand at the town’s swimming pool.

Close as they were, the brothers were very different. Donny was a boy bristling with grievances; without Bob’s calm, steadying influence he might easily have gone badly
wrong. But whenever he was near his brother, Donny’s manner changed; his usual bleak, sulky face glowed, suffused by the heat of a transfiguring love. He was far from being a good-looking boy; his mouth was too full-lipped; his nose was big and beaky. And he was small for his age, a scrawny runt, tautly wired in an unsettling, high-voltage way. But when he was in Bob’s presence, you scarcely noticed any of that.

Bob, on the other hand, was a tall, lithe, honey-blond boy, the sort of Ricky Nelsonish dreamboat who made teenaged girls swoon. He was a
vessel of grace
. Donny would certainly be displeased to hear Bob spoken of in that way, but Donny is a blunt bulldozer of a man who is incapable of recognizing that
vessel of grace
captures exactly how he thought of Bob, that these words describe precisely the awe his brother’s presence inspired in him.

Bob, unlike Donny, was completely comfortable in his own skin, an example of that rare bird whose self-possession is not even distantly related to arrogance. Bob Peel never wanted or asked to be admired; it just happened, like any natural phenomenon, like the weather. It was hopeless for people to believe that flattering him would win them a chance to stake some sort of claim on him. Only Donny ever had that right – except, of course, until the girl from Chicago came along.

There were plenty of people who believed they were entitled to a piece of Bob. All the local sports teams thought he had an obligation to play for them. The manager of the senior men’s baseball team, who had once played Triple-A ball, declared Bob a
natural
, said that he had a bushel of talent, with a little coaching who knew how far he might go? To see young Bob Peel throw, catch, or hit a ball gave you the feeling
that he hadn’t
acted
on it but that he had
flowed
into it and
with
it. A thing of beauty. But Bob couldn’t be persuaded to join the team, he declined every appeal to do so with a humble, polite no. Because how could he hold down a job, go to school, play baseball, and still have time to spend with Donny?

The girls had their eye on Bob too. But their flirtatious advances were always stymied, just like the overtures of the beer-bellied, rock-jawed old jocks; except Bob let the young ladies down to earth so gently on a silk parachute of shy courtesy that it was impossible for them to feel that they had been snubbed or had suffered a humiliation.

Nobody could help but adore Bob, except, of course, Mr. DiPietro, the father of the girl from Chicago. Somehow the recently installed mine manager thought
that boy
wasn’t good enough for his daughter. An absolutely preposterous notion since Bob Peel was such a one-of-a-kind, deliciously
sweet
boy.

The first time Donny and Bob encountered Carol DiPietro was at the golf club’s driving range. Bob had found a dog-eared copy of
Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf
kicking around the clubhouse, and over his lunch break he had taken to hitting balls. Bob had never played a game of golf in his life and probably never would, but he found learning golf fundamentals from Hogan’s tips a pleasant way to pass his noon hours.

In my mind’s eye I can see Donny sitting on the grass, eating a peanut butter sandwich, admiring his brother’s
smooth swing, the crisp, clean click of the balls leaving the club face, the way they rise, seem to kick into another gear, effortlessly soar into the cloudless, heat-shimmering sky. A car door slams in the parking lot, turning Donny’s head. The vehicle is one he has never seen before, a Volkswagen Beetle plastered with flower-power decals, and he doesn’t recognize the girl getting out of it either.

A few minutes later she walks to the driving range, toting a bucket of balls, an obviously new set of shiny golf clubs slung over her shoulder. Bob, completely focused on what he’s doing, isn’t even aware she’s there. When she spots Bob, the girl softly sets down her golf bag, sets it down almost reverently. She is exotically pretty, olive-skinned, sloe-eyed, and sleepy-lidded. Her hair is cut in a stylish wedge bob, and she wears knee-length Madras plaid shorts, leather sandals, and a freshly pressed white cotton blouse. Donny stares at her staring at Bob until she glances his way, winks one of her sleepy eyes, and says, “My old man wants me to learn to play golf. I need lessons. Is your friend available?”

“He isn’t my friend. He’s my brother.”

“So is your brother available?”

Bob had heard them talking and is now leaning on a three-iron like it was a cane, like he needs support. “Hey,” the girl says, walking towards him, “I’m Carol DiPietro from Chicago.” She sticks her hand out; Bob takes it, gives it a few pumps, says nothing.

“You got a name? That’s the point of introductions, exchanging names. I say I’m Carol DiPietro and you say, ‘I’m …’ ”

“Bob Peel.” Pointing, Bob adds, “He’s my brother, Donny.”

She gives two quick nods, brisk acknowledgements that
they exist. “I’m new here,” she declares. “I need to find someone who knows what’s doing. You know what’s doing, Bob?”

“Know what’s doing how?”

“You got your finger on the pulse? I just finished the two-minute tour of the town. Left me breathless. Where does a person locate the excitement? Everybody make their own homemade fun here? That it?”

“I guess,” says Bob.

Carol grins at Donny, a flash of perfect enamel except for one front tooth, a tad darker than its partner, endearingly so. “Just like that he’s got an answer. What about you, man about town? Any suggestions?”

Donny begins to rip up handfuls of grass. They fairly fly, a green shower. “I don’t know. There’s a drive-in theatre.”

“Okay, there’s a start. You boys game? Want to see a picture tonight?”

After a brief hesitation, Donny answers, sounding a bit belligerent. “Sure, we’re game.”

“So I’ll pick you up. How do I find your house?”

“No. Not there.” Donny tears grass even more furiously and aggressively.

“Okay, not there. So what’s the plan? Where then? When then?”

Donny looks over at Bob. His brother is gazing off to the horizon as if he expects a possible solution lurking just below the earth’s rim to rise up like a trial balloon and float into view. “In front of the post office,” Bob says at last. “Nine-thirty.”

“We have a date then. Double date,” Carol quickly qualifies. “Double your pleasure, double your fun, two brothers are better than one.”

Bob glances down at his watch. “I got to get back to work,” he says.

Donny heaves himself off the ground. “Me too.”

“You do your little things, boys,” she replies, yanking a club from her bag. “Just don’t stand me up now. Carol won’t stand for standing up.”

They leave her flailing away, whacking dirt with great determination.

As darkness gathered, Carol DiPietro pulled up in her floral-spattered Volkswagen Bug and hit the horn, blasting the Peels off the post office steps. Donny wedged himself into the back of the car; Bob folded himself into the seat beside Carol with his usual, fluid, careless grace.

“Punctual,” she said. “Who doesn’t appreciate punctual?”

The drive-in was located three miles out of town, the last mile a washboard, gravel nightmare that Carol took at top speed, the Beetle bucking, fishtailing, making heart-stopping feints towards ditches and telephone poles, the headlights of the car sparring with the darkness. “Here we are,” she muttered through clenched teeth, wrestling the wheel, “having the time of our lives in Dogpatch, Canada.”

Once they had paid admission and parked, Carol sprang the glove compartment and dug out half a bottle of rum she said she had pinched from her father’s liquor cabinet. They cut the booze with Cokes from the drive-in’s concession stand, settled in to watch a triple bill: two horror flicks and a beach party movie. At two o’clock in the morning, mid-point
in Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon’s sticky romantic complications, Carol abruptly unhooked the speaker from the car window and heaved it as hard as she could, as if she had discovered a bomb somebody had planted in her car.

“They call this
Muscle Beach Party?
No sign of Frankie’s love muscle in those trunks. Dee Dee must have taken it and bronzed it for her high school art project.” She flipped the car keys to Bob. “I’m buzzed and tired. Home, James.”

All the way back to town, Carol sat slumped in her seat, picking at a ragged cuticle and yawning. Outside the DiPietro’s ranch-style, Bob handed her the keys, and the three of them climbed out of the vehicle. In turn, Carol kissed both Peel boys on the cheek. “You’re sweet guys,” she said, weaving from side to side, dazed by rum and fatigue. “What say we hook up again tomorrow night. Same time, same place?”

The Peels bobbed their heads, watched her enter the house, then set off for the golf course. Bob had a key to the clubhouse. Sometimes the boys crashed there when things were too awkward at home.

I imagine them turning restlessly on the sofas that face the clubhouse’s big picture window, which offers a panoramic view of the snug little valley that contains the golf course, its fairways grey under a canopy of rapidly paling stars.

There’s licence taken here, embellishments perpetrated. There will be more. But it’s clear that something like that must have happened because soon the Peel boys and Carol were
inseparable, causing her father a sleepless night or two because she was hanging out with low-life trailer trash.

Carol hadn’t come with her parents when they had made the move to our town from the States. She had been left behind in the Windy City to attend a boarding school run by nuns. Carol was only a temporary visitor for the summer vacation. I suppose that no matter how much Mr. DiPietro hated her spending time with the likes of the Peels, he assumed that his daughter’s returning to Chicago would put a stop to that nonsense.

In those days most of the upper echelon of the mine was American, and many of their teenaged sons and daughters went to private schools in the U.S.A. Their parents were parents who thought ahead, who calculated. A transcript from an American school would carry more weight than one from Canada, ease admission into good colleges stateside. Every summer their offspring migrated north, birds of a startlingly different feather from the native species, the boys in particular. Many of them were enrolled in military academies, had savagely shorn heads, square-shouldered parade square gaits, and addressed anyone over the age of thirty as ma’am or sir. A far cry from the cigarette-smoking, spitting, slouching town boys.

The girls too seemed a breed apart. They went to private schools that prepared them to be ladies who would be suitable wives for the crewcut, manly, preternaturally polite boys. Unlike our local low-rent femmes fatales, the American girls did not go out in public in hair curlers, or in skin-tight stretch pants that made their asses look like they had been vacuum-sealed for freshness. Even in skimpy two pieces at
the pool, the girls from the U.S. remained unimpeachably demure, even when they were slathering their lovely limbs with cocoa butter.

All but Carol DiPietro. She was far from demure. She was foul-mouthed. She dabbled in danger. One weekend she talked the Peel boys into driving into the city with her to try to score some grass; if they were lucky maybe even a couple of tabs of acid. Dope of any kind hadn’t yet made its way to Dogpatch, but she had high hopes it would be available in a more worldly centre. She, Donny, and Bob spent an afternoon trawling suburban strip malls and accosting likely looking teenagers who went tight-lipped when Carol asked them to hook her up. Back then, weed could land you in serious trouble with the law, and kids were wary around strangers trying to pump dealer information out of them. The trio returned home empty-handed except for a bottle of vodka that Carol had paid a rummy outside a liquor store to buy for them and that they drank rocketing down the highway in Carol’s Bug.

Then there was the incident with her father’s pistol, which had travelled to Canada hidden away amid the household goods in the back of a United Van Lines truck. After six months, Mr. DiPietro hadn’t yet gotten around to unpacking the revolver. Carol discovered it, along with a supply of ammunition, when she was rummaging through storage boxes in search of her collection of
Seventeen
magazines. Not long after that, as she and the Peel boys sat outside the
A&W
in her Volkswagen, she dramatically popped the clasp on her purse and triumphantly waved the pistol in their faces. “Check this out,” she said with a dangerous grin.

Bob said coolly, “Put that away. Somebody might see.” Nothing much ever ruffled him.

Donny was vibrating with excitement. “Where the hell did you get that? Is it real?”

“Yeah, it’s real. It’s Poppy’s. It’s what he calls nigger-protection insurance,” Carol said. “He hasn’t needed it here because there’s a shortage of them in Dogpatch. I thought we’d warm it up a little. Let it know it’s still loved.”

And warm it up they did, on a stretch of deserted country road, Bob the wheel man while Carol hung out the passenger window, doing a Bonnie Parker, snapping off volley after volley into the wall of brush flashing by, screaming death and destruction at the top of her lungs. Carol saw no irony in discharging a firearm from a flower-power vehicle since the gun belonged to her father and she was not at peace with Poppy. Poppy she detested.

By then the Peels and Carol had exchanged a certain amount of information about their respective families. Donny, who has never been a subtle fellow, once suggested to Carol she didn’t have it so bad. After all, her father had bought her a car.