Extraordinary (6 page)

“You haven't mentioned him.”

“Jerry Malloy? That was the clincher.” She leaned her elbow on the chair arm; it slipped off; she settled it back again, using her other hand to hold it. She began. “One night around midnight, Kyle turned up at Marek Grunbaum's house. Remember him? The Polish guy—”

“—with the beautiful pink handkerchief.”

“Kyle looked like a zombie: ragged clothes, grey skin, yellow eyeballs. He smelt, too. His feet were rotting from some untreated infection. Marek made him take his clothes off in the hallway, all of them, and then led him naked upstairs to the shower, disinfecting his footsteps with an aerosol can of Lysol as he went. His three kids peeking from their bedrooms. ‘Who's
that,
Daddy?' A few days later, he drove him to a rehab centre downtown. On the way there, Kyle asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. A birthday present for his father. He had a con man's charm, Kyle did. He looked Marek in the eyes and said, ‘You got to let me make this up to my dad.'

“He disappeared into the mid-afternoon traffic with the twenty dollars. Nearly half an hour later, after Marek had circled the block twice and gotten a ticket, he spotted Kyle on the sidewalk. He got back into the car, claiming he couldn't find anything nice. But could he keep the money? Within a day or two, he'd be allowed out for half-hour walks in the neighbourhood—he'd buy a present then.

“By now, Marek just wanted him out of the car. So he agreed. He pulled up in front of the clinic, a big white house on a leafy street. He waited to make sure Kyle went in. Kyle skipped up the main stairs, made a theatrical production of pushing the buzzer, and, just as he went in, spun around and gave Marek a grin and a big wave, as if this was all a screech, just too much fun for words.

“They lodged Kyle with a boy named Jerry Malloy. Jerry had grown up in one of those small northern towns where teenage boys sit in front of the pizza parlour at midnight on a Saturday night, daydreaming about the life they've read about in heavy metal magazines. You know those kids?”

“I sure do.”

“You see them in all small towns. You can smell the boredom coming off them. They usually get arrested for breaking into somebody's cottage, knock up the girl at the grocery store, put on forty pounds, spend their lives working at the marina or the planing mill. I have a great deal of compassion for those children.” Sally looked toward the window, and in a moment continued. “But not Jerry. Jerry saw himself as a cut above the rest. No marina for him. He quit school in grade ten and moved to Toronto, where he got a job making broom handles in a factory.

“It wasn't long before big-city life just dazzled the wits right out of him. Especially the drugs, of course, first pot, then Methedrine—”

“Nasty business, that Methedrine.”

“—then whatever he could get his big farm-boy fingers around. It was all good, all part of an adventure that put another square on the checkerboard between him and the boys in front of the pizza parlour back home.

“Whacked on sleeping pills one day, he stole a car that had been double-parked with the engine running. He drove it the wrong way down a one-way street, spotted a police van (which was empty, by the way), panicked and smacked into a fire hydrant. Totalled the car. Knocked himself out cold. Chipped his front teeth on the driver's wheel.

“The judge, realizing he was dealing with a moron, gave Jerry a choice: jail or rehab. To his misfortune, Jerry Malloy, the boy who made broomsticks, chose rehab. And to punish him for his crimes, they put him in with my son.

“Kyle was everything that Jerry imagined a city boy would be: slick and quick with a put-down, always on the hustle. He was smitten. For his part, Kyle knew he had fallen on a live one and treated Jerry like a goofy sheepdog. Had him doing his chores, cleaning the toilet, making the beds—the things you do in rehab to reacquaint yourself with regular life. Kyle wasn't interested in regular life.

“Three or four weeks in, I got a call from Bruce. It turned out that Kyle had smuggled two grams of Lebanese hash into the centre. He'd bought them on the street with Marek's twenty dollars. Smuggled them past security in the loose portion of his shoe sole, grinning and joking with the guard. It must have been the excitement of it all, making a fool of everybody, that explained Kyle's wild wave to Marek as he went in.

“And then one night, after everyone had gone to sleep on his floor, he stole out of bed, recovered the hashish and offered a drag to Jerry. Within three hours, they were caught breaking into the meat fridge in the basement, but not before Kyle had turned on a young amphetamine addict from Stratford and a sixty-eight-year-old alcoholic. Within the space of a few hours, Kyle had undone months and months of rehabilitation.

“It was an act of such egregious irresponsibility that the centre gave up on him. You can fix an addict, but you can't fix an asshole. Both of them got kicked out, Kyle and Jerry. Then, poof, they vanished. For a couple of weeks, no one heard from them. Maybe they went to Jerry's hometown. I don't know. No one heard from Kyle—not his father, not his friends, not me, no one. So how what happened next happened isn't entirely clear. But you can guess the broad strokes: Kyle had found a mark and wrung him like a washcloth for everything he could get.

“Before too long, probably at Kyle's suggestion, Jerry stole his uncle's pickup truck. He must have figured he was in a movie, two bandits on the run. They turned up at a local dog pound, adopted a mongrel and began to wind their way across Canada. They were heading to Vancouver. Somebody had told them it was like Florida there, warm temperatures, pretty girls—they'd get a job on a fishing boat and sail to China. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“They went up around the Great Lakes into Manitoba. Stealing gas when they needed it. Shoplifting here and there, mostly smash-and-grab. A farm family reported that a couple of young guys, one with chipped front teeth, stayed with them for several days, stole their grandson's coin collection and moved on. The people who were kind to Kyle were people, he figured, who had targets on their backs, suckers who were saying, ‘Here, fuck me, I'm stupid.'

“Jerry turned a trick in a truck stop outside Winnipeg, let some guy blow him in the back of his rig, and that got them another seventy-five dollars. They made it as far as the outskirts of a town just across the Alberta border. They were driving at night. Kyle was. He fell asleep, the truck left the road, rolled down an embankment, turned over three or four times, killed Jerry and killed the dog. The police picked up Kyle half a mile away, hitchhiking.”

Here Sally cocked her head as if she were trying to recall something, a gesture I remembered from my childhood. “Chloe and I gave up the house in San Miguel a little while after. The town was haunted for me, like a before-and-after photograph. And when Freddie died (his cleaning lady found him on his bed in a blue linen jacket: he must have lain down for a moment to catch his breath and never gotten up again, dear Freddie), there was nothing to keep me there.

“I rented an apartment at the edge of Forest Hill Village. The poor part. Still, it was comforting to be neighbours to so many Mercedes and pretty gardens. It was an old-style brick building in slight disrepair, with lead windows. Remember those? Kyle was back in Toronto too. He wanted to move in with us. At first, I said no. Absolutely not.

“There were tears, of course, then accusations. I'd deserted him in Mexico, left him with a harsh father. Had loved Chloe more than him. While he was talking, I had, for the first time ever, a sensation in my body that I was dealing with a pathological liar. A liar whose charm and intelligence had become a sort of lubricant for getting whatever he was trying to get. Do you understand what I'm saying? I'm saying for the first time it occurred to me that for my beloved son Kyle, language, the words that you actually
use,
was simply a kind of camouflage that allowed him to be a predator without seeming to
be
a predator. Even his tears seemed self-serving. As though he was lying, knew he was lying, but didn't care. Was only concerned with the success of the performance.”

“But you loved him.”

“Yes. Everything just flew out the window in his presence, and I'd think, He's so fabulous. I kept thinking, This is circumstantial. But then I'd overhear him on the phone and I'd think, Who is this? Is this a mask? Where is the little boy who was scared of ghost stories, and who was so shy at summer camp that he was scared to ask where the toilets were?”

“Did it occur to you that he was crazy or an addict?”

“It occurred to me he was a little pig with his nose in the trough. A shameless, self-gratifying bag of appetites. And that once he understood this—that that was how the world was coming to see him—his vanity would stop him.”

“Makes sense.”

“Only on paper.
Only on paper.
I took him out to dinner. Taxis, crutches, the whole business. I wanted to be somewhere fresh with him, somewhere that didn't smell like my apartment. I asked him when was the last time he was happy. He lied at first, gave me some fiction he thought I wanted to hear. I stopped him. I said, ‘Stop lying to me. It's killing me. It's killing
us.
'

“So he said with this goofy grin, ‘Breaking into a car, I suppose. Well, not exactly breaking in, but that moment when you look in the window, see something you like, look up and down the street, the coast is clear, and then you
do
it.'

“I asked if he was saying that to shock me. It wasn't the criminality of it that was so distressing, it was the vulgarity, the sheer vulgarity of it, and the strange gleam of pleasure that he got in his eyes when he said it. He looked . . .
feral.
I said, ‘Was
that
really the last time you were happy?'

“He thought for a moment and he said, ‘Yeah, it really was, Mom.'

“‘Don't you want to change your life?' I said. ‘No, not really.' I asked him if he thought he was going to live to be an old man. He said he didn't think about it much. I said, ‘What
do
you think about, Kyle, when you wake up at four o'clock in the morning and you're in some dirty little rooming house with needles on the table and bloodstains on the wall?'

“He seemed perplexed by the question, and I realized that something had shut down in him. That his fine intelligence had dimmed, and, I suspected, dimmed irretrievably. It was hard to admit it, but I wasn't sitting in a restaurant with a skeletal young man whose wit used to make even the police do a double take. I was having dinner instead with a common, dull-witted television watcher. A
chronic
television watcher. Getting high, watching television, breaking into cars, getting high, watching television. That was it. That was his whole life.”

“You must have grown to loathe him.”

“No, no, I never did. Not for long, anyway. I couldn't help feeling that there was a magic key out there, that if I could just find it and put it in the lock, the door would open and everything would change.”

“And?”

“Mothers are fools for their sons. I let him move in. I couldn't leave him wandering the streets—I was afraid he'd get killed. He had known intuitively which nerves to pluck, especially that business about sending him home from Mexico. He camped out on my couch, making up his bed in the morning. For a while it worked. Chloe went to school; I took a Spanish course. I was hoping one day maybe I could go back to Mexico—somewhere else, though. Puerto Vallarta, maybe. Gay towns are always the safest towns in foreign countries. I'd spent most of my money, so I was living on a disability pension.”

“Why didn't you go back to making your wall hangings?”

She looked at the winking whale, at the red seagulls drifting over the lagoon. “I tried, but somehow the air had just gone out of it. I couldn't do the drawing or the cutting. I'd have had to hire someone to do it, and that seemed like paying someone to collect stamps for you. But we were making out fine.”

She went on. “It was a temporary arrangement with Kyle, but it gave me something for which I was hungry: it gave me
him,
his company. He had been such a bright, perceptive little boy, so clever about his friends, his parents, even himself. How to put it? It was so sad. He belonged to that group, that maddening group of people who are capable of unsparing self-analysis but incapable of controlling the same impulses they talk so brilliantly about. But I loved him, and I kept waiting for him to happen on the right key for the right lock. And for a while, it looked like he just might.”

“And?”

“He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Got a terrific sponsor—a middle-aged businessman who phoned him every night. He got a job in a warehouse. Marek got it for him. He did it for me, yes, but he believed in the magic key too. Except his was a bit different. His was the brutality of hard work. That Eastern European thing. And for a long time, maybe six months,it worked.

“Kyle got himself another girlfriend. Japanese this time. Women always liked him. It was a blessing and a curse. They always wanted to save him. Including his mother. All of us believing in the magic key. One month went by; three months; six months. I could feel a belt loosening around my chest. And then, one summer morning on the way to work, he walked by a neighbourhood bar—I even remember the name, the Moonstone—and he went in.

“He must have walked by that bar, God, I don't know, a hundred times? But that day he went in. They were just setting up. He put money down on the bar and asked for a beer. The bartender asked him what he wanted. Kyle said, ‘You choose something.' Unusual request. That's why later, when the guy talked to the police, he remembered Kyle.”

A door opened just down the corridor from Sally's apartment. Music briefly issued onto the flowered carpet. “Come on,” a young woman's voice said, “this was
your
idea, now come
on.
” A dog collar rattled by the door, followed by an excited bark. “Shhh.”