Gargoyles (23 page)

Sometimes both the Gooks would be out in their new yard raking and pruning. They looked almost normal, in fact more
boring than normal, though oddness was there if you looked for it, which we did. She had the dumbness and square body of a peasant in
National Geographic
. He was too thin and moved too quickly with his shears. Hair black and full, a bushy moustache, and yet a very wrinkled face. I guessed he'd been sick, though I didn't say so. His clothes suited neither these suburbs nor an office. I could think of no other word to describe his clothes than “communist.”

With his shears and fast loamy hands, Mr. Gook was the gardener, while Mrs. Gook, with her apt body, her hoes and baskets, was the labourer. And as the spring climbed to summer their garden became a remarkable thing. Flowers, roses, blooms of all colours grew against each wall of the house and out into the yard. These blooms were not only a childish and gaudy ramble, it all clashed against the chemical green.

My parents had been calling them “the immigrants,” and now they took to calling their house “that toy box.”

Walking to the park one evening (to sample some Valium from the Kerry's medicine chest), we witnessed the Gooks hosting a barbecue party in their front yard. None of us had ever seen a barbecue in a front yard, exposed like that to the street. Passing not twenty feet from what looked like huge sausage sizzling on a brand-new grill, we were so embarrassed at this show of uncool we had to put our heads down. But worse was the party itself. We'd been raised on a version of barbecue where same-looking couples, summer dressed, held drinks and chatted. Sometimes kids were included, maybe a few captive teenagers like us. The host might wear the latest funny apron. The women's drinks would be light-coloured and tinkle with ice; the men's darker in the glass, or a bottle of
beer. The host would shout, all would gather to eat, and that would be that.

The Gooks' party was an assortment of freaks, wonderful eye-food. Men in greasy T-shirts, big straight-haired silent women wearing starched bags. An old man in a wheelchair, smoking a massive curling pipe. Two fat old ladies — we couldn't believe this bounteous fuel for scorn-out — dressed head to toe in black, sitting away from the rest and not speaking. The few kids our age, one of whom waved to us but got nothing back, seemed of another world as well, their haircuts and clothes reminding us of a corny Ol' Yeller pack of hicks. The one who waved wore a jean jacket proclaiming Sgt. Pepper on the back, but without the jeans and sneakers required of it his hickness was all the more glaring. All the guests guzzled from great wicker jugs of red wine, or from a bottle of clear booze that looked homemade too. A man my dad's age was weeping openly and thrashing his arms around. Others tried to calm him but ended up thrashing their arms too. All this in a front yard.

Hours later, when too much lethargy pushed us from the park, we happened upon a dead squirrel. Dave MacIver toed it onto its back and said, “
I
know.” We got excited again for a few minutes, though no one moved very quickly. The plan was to put it on the Gooks' barbecue. We carried it with a forked stick and stood at the Gooks' gate. All was dark and quiet.

“But they might think it just fell dead of the roof,” I said, always the thinker.

Al Cody snuck between two houses and came back with a toy boat, a bulbous red plastic tug with a smiling face comprising the deck and smokestack.

“Still not enough,” Bobby Kerry said, digging in his pocket. Out came a dollar bill. A sacrifice at our age, but the perfect touch.

We crept down the walk to the Green House and then quickly back, stifling giggles. A squirrel, a happy-boat, and a dollar bill sat on the grill, waiting for the Gooks in the morning.

We weren't bad kids. Except for Dave McIver we were decent students, and athletic to boot. But though it's true that for a time our actions were fouled by the darker humours of adolescence, I did and still do blame Dave MacIver for much of what happened that Green House summer. He'd failed a grade or two and was older than us. At fifteen MacIver looked like a mature pug. His head was too large, his nose too small. A front tooth stayed chipped for years. It did occur to me that, of us friends, his family most resembled the Gooks — they were the poorest in Deep Cove, his parents had accents, his father shouted and drank, and their small house stayed unpainted for as long as Dave's tooth stayed chipped — but I never put two and two together. Why we put up with him and even followed his lead I'm not sure. Likely because he was bigger and tougher, glamour for fourteen-year-old boys being identical to glamour for animals.

All the same, I didn't talk to Dave MacIver much after the summer. And when it came to naming names, his jumped off my tongue easily and without any guilt at all.

The week after our barbecue joke, the Gooks had that haunted look. Bobby Kerry, who'd just seen a movie, said they looked like Italians who got a dead fish in the mail. MacIver didn't get Bobby's joke and just butted in and hissed out his latest plan. Yes, we'd all noticed those wine jugs in their carport.

We began by making leisurely crank calls on weekend nights to see if they were out. It was the usual embarrassingly bad kid
stuff: Hello, is your refrigerator running? etc. Al Cody put on a passable German accent and deep voice, pretending to be a government official who wanted to see their papers. When I took my turn I heard a raspy female voice say, “Vot?” and then a babble at someone away from the receiver. Clearly, they hadn't been understanding one silly word. Only MacIver took a different tack. Tense at the phone, his lips pulled back from his teeth, he'd yell at the top of his voice, “
Fuck off faggot freaks
.”

The next Saturday night they didn't answer so we wandered over. There in the empty carport sat the jugs, five of them, all in a neat squat row. We looked around, hopped the fence, and hustled in. One of the jugs had a thermometer thing, lively with bubbles, stuck in its top. This MacIver plucked and broke casually under his foot. For the first time I had inklings. The look on his face scared me.

We ignored the fizzing jug and those of us who could manage it took turns pissing into a nearly empty one. We lugged the other three out and over to the park, two of us leading and trailing as lookouts. Bobby Kerry dropped and broke one. I suspected even then that he did it on purpose, for he'd been the most squeamish about this prank, and when we sat to drink the wine he had a candy-ass excuse for heading home.

But drink it we did. Most of it, in fact, between five of us, until later when three older guys shouldered in and hogged the rest. We sat around like calm professional drinkers and bragged about the deed, and as we got into it we took turns trying to come up with the face that best showed the Gooks tasting our piss, which had us falling off our logs and almost pissing ourselves. In a quieter moment I found myself remembering what I'd seen through the Gooks' kitchen window while we were in the carport. I wasn't sure what had struck me about
the inside of the house. Lit by the streetlight, the pots and pans were somehow a little different. It all looked very clean. The one odd thing was a picture I could barely make out on the dining-room wall. It was of a giant human hand, very lifelike with the wrinkles and nails and the rest, but shooting out of the hand were these wonderful curling flames, some pink, others green. It was like a photograph but with great special effects. Otherwise there was an odd calm to the house, a stillness I found very likeable. Maybe it was what all empty houses had, I didn't know. Maybe it was my thief's adrenalin. But the peculiar stillness of that house felt welcoming. It made me like the Gooks. Naturally I said nothing about this to my friends, either in the carport or at the drunken bonfire. They, and especially MacIver, didn't go in for details.

The wine hit us hard. We were soon screaming and laughing, and before too long puking. I twisted an ankle badly, and the next morning had no idea how. All of us felt hellish for a day. Except for MacIver it was our first major hangover. And in that ragged, godless, nauseated state we found ourselves blaming the Gooks and saying things like, Stupid house. Shit wine. Dumb bastards.

School was over now. Trying out an old skateboard, I was coasting empty-headed down the slight slope toward the Green House, and could see Mr. Gook sitting in his front yard in a chair. My feelings about them had levelled off: it wasn't their wine but our own gulpings that had made us sick; since seeing into their house I felt I knew them a little; in general I felt sorry for their foreignness enough to want to let them be. In fact I hadn't even taken part in MacIver's latest prank, though it was one of my favourites, the dog shit on the doorstep
thing. The idea was to collect fresh doggy-do in a paper bag, lay it at their door, ring the bell, light the bag on fire and run. With any luck you get to see a guy stamp a fire out and get shit on his slippers in the process. In any case, I heard it didn't go well at the Gooks' — the top of the bag had burned away and gone out by the time Mr. Gook came to the door. He just stooped and looked into the bag, scanned the area for faces, then slammed the door.

Skateboard noise made Mr. Gook look my way as I rolled up. I saw he'd been scribbling notes onto a bunch of papers and charts on his lap. Again, the backyard would have been the place for this sort of thing. But what the hell, I thought, and waved to him. He was looking right at me after all, and I felt magnanimous. He answered with a lifting of a couple of fingers. Clearly a case of an adult dismissing a child.

This response made me angry. I don't know what I'd expected. Some kind of kowtowing. Something goofy or overly friendly. He was an immigrant and this was my neighbourhood. That he was allowed to live here because of my tolerance, my permission, was an absurd thought, but that was exactly how I felt, how we all felt.

He studied my skateboard as if he'd never seen one before. Then he looked up to my face again. He studied that too. His eyes were remarkable things, the kind of silver-blue colour that seems deep and empty and tries to pull you in. The eyes made the rest of his wrinkled face secondary. His gaze was matter-of-fact, one eyebrow up a little. You could tell he gazed at things like this, at anything I had to offer, a thousand times a day. My anger fell to embarrassment, for his eyes made clear that he was not only an adult but an adult way smarter than me.

Maybe they'd learned something because they held the next barbecue in the back. This part of the property was surrounded by a fence plus lots of bushes and trees, so we hardly had to hide as we watched them.

It was a smaller gathering. The old man with the weird pipe sat across from one of the black widows. There was one couple the Gooks' age (it was the weeping man, sober this time) and the kid with the jean jacket. He wore sneakers, but the same hick-brown pants. For the most part they sat around in chairs, sipped and talked in their dog-language. A whole chicken had been plopped spread-eagle on the grill. We knew there was no way they were going to get that chicken done without an electric spit. Mrs. Gook got up from time to time to turn the bird, but it kept rolling back onto one of its flat spots.

In a minute we were bored, so Al Cody started things off, flicking a small pine cone into the yard. After a strategic delay one of us would toss another, each cone more daring, landing closer and closer. I flicked a high wild one that arced and hung deliciously. We ducked when it ticked off the old man's shoulder. He turned and regarded some branches that weren't exactly overhead but close enough to satisfy him. Next MacIver tossed a deliberate shot that fell into the barbecue. We hunched and hissed, “Oh shit,” while all heads turned to look. Some scanned the sky for passing birds. Mr. Gook was staring expressionless in our direction. But he didn't move, and soon they were talking again.

“Fuck it,” Cody whispered. “Spray and run.” We each gathered a handful of cones and climbed carefully to our haunches. We checked to see if everyone was ready. Cody signalled with a quick dip of head and then we were all grunting, throwing, and leaping away. I'd seen MacIver scoop up the rock and now I
heard the
crack
off a head and looking back saw Mrs. Gook go down on one knee. “
Ass
hole,” I hissed as I sprinted. If anyone chased, they were no match for young men who knew, like rats know sewers, the secret veins of their neighbourhood.

I never told anyone, but several times over the following weeks I went by the Green House at night to stare in their carport window while they were asleep. Streetlight got in just enough to show me that festive interior, and in particular the flaming hand picture on the far wall. I always got that good feeling. I thought of the word “haven.” The Gooks had made themselves a haven here.

I avoided the Green House for a while after the coning, but I couldn't help passing it one day when Mr. Gook was out in his front yard. I meant to speed by, but couldn't resist watching him, bent and scribbling over his papers like that. Coming closer, I saw he marked a chart with coloured pencils. A photo album lay open on the lawn at his feet and he'd lean out to study it before marking his chart. What sort of work? Maybe he researched his relatives, his family tree. Squinting harder at the album I made out only abstract shapes and swirls of colour.

I'd slowed almost to a stop. Maybe it was the sight he made: under a perfect bright day, under a noble shade tree, this wise-looking man examined colourful things. We had just heard about the Greeks in school, and I had an image of Socrates teaching in a place like this.

I waved. He had to have seen it. And I said hi, not loud but loud enough. He made no sign. So I hurried on, embarrassed. How dare a Green House Gook be a snob. Ready to dismiss him as a dumb shit, I considered options. Deafness, for one. Or his scholarly concentration blinded him to all else. Or perhaps
he suspected me to be one of the tormenting hoodlums, and was doing me a kindness by turning the other cheek. I chose this last one.