I Was There the Night He Died (16 page)

The only thing that got in the way of getting done what had to get done today was when, taking a break an hour or so in—popping a fresh can of Mountain Dew, kneading the small of my back while staring out the front window—I felt a sudden, unexpected sensation of excitement I couldn't account for. The same thing happens sometimes when a feeling of anxiety or anger invades your mind but you can't remember what you're supposed to be so upset about. That kind of amnesia is to be encouraged. This time, though, I took a sip and concentrated but still couldn't recollect what I was apparently supposed to be so pleased about; until, sitting back down at the kitchen table and my computer, it came to me: I was going to see Samantha tonight. I was going to see her after my work was done and I was going to tell her who died tonight, who I'd been writing about. I was also somehow going to get her to talk about those marks on her arms. It took me fifteen minutes online—during which I bid successfully on a rare promotional copy of David Bromberg's eponymous debut album—before my mind was back on Willie P. Bennett and why his music mattered and what both it and his life had to tell us. Later on, when my cell phone rang and Rachel's name came up on the caller I.D., I let it go to voice mail.

The pockmarked moon blushing high and bright and white and the doors of Buttercup Village locked and double-locked tight for the night are my cues to occupy the park bench and for Samantha to see me sitting there and to take her spot on the swing set. So I don't. Samantha's no Lolita and I'm definitely not some horny Humbert—which would be disgusting, but at least explicable—so what do I want with an eighteen year-old self-mutilating pothead? And I've got a girlfriend—sort of; a woman who I can spend time with, anyway, if spending time with a woman is what I want.

I manage half-an-hour's worth of garbage-bagging my mother's clothes for drop-off at the Salvation Army before the aroma of her favourite perfume, Downy fabric softener, spooks me out of my parents' bedroom. Leading to nearly forty-five minutes of filling cardboard box after cardboard box with my father's tools, each thump and clank an indifferent affront to every meticulously cleaned and carefully stowed object. Resulting in finally listening to Rachel's phone message, the gist of it being that if I wasn't doing anything tonight and didn't want to just sit around my parents' house feeling lonely, why didn't I call her back and she could pick me up and we could go to her place and have a drink and talk and just, well, whatever. I erase the message and open a bottle of red and grab my coat.

I sit and slug from the bottle and avoid looking at Samantha's house, not sure if it's because I do or don't want to see her come out of it. When I hear the familiar creak of her front door, however, I'm relieved, no confusion there. Which in itself is confusing enough. Thankfully I possess the necessary resources to blot my bewilderment, take a good long gulp of wine. She passes me in the dark and sits on a swing and strikes a match.

In the time it takes her to take her first toke, “So. Who died tonight?” she says.

First things first, duty before pleasure. “What did your guidance counsellor say when you told him you wanted to apply to U of T?”

“Didn't anyone ever tell you that it's considered rude to answer a question with another question?”

“You forget: I was born here. Rudeness is my birthright.”

When I don't add anything else, appear content to tip my tipple and enjoy the free light show the stars in conjunction with the dark sky are putting on tonight, “I didn't tell him,” she says. I knew she wouldn't lie to me; it would be easier for both of us if she did, but I knew she wouldn't.

“Why not? Time's running out. Maybe it already has.”

I don't have to turn around to know she's shrugging her shoulders.

“Why not?” I repeat.

“I am,” she says.

“‘I am' what?”

“I am going to tell him.”

“Okay. So why—”

“Just let me finish, all right?”

I pull from the bottle. “All right.” As a gesture of good faith, I take an extra pull.

“I think I might want to go,” she says. “I mean, if I go anywhere, I think that might be one of the places I want to go to. If you've got some sort of commission deal going with the U of T recruiting office, I'm sure your cheque is in the mail.”

“But?”

“But”—she puffs, she ponders, “but I need to deal with something else first.”

I know what
something else
is just as much as she knows that I know, but if we're going to talk about it, I can't be the one to bring it up, she'll have to be the one to raise the subject. I play dumb, not a particularly difficult role for me to pull off. “What, like your transcript or something like that? That's what he's there for. You worry about your grades, let him worry about that stuff.”

“It's not my transcript.”

“What is it then?”

“Something else.”

“Yeah, I get that part. What is it?”

“Something.”

“Something what?”

“Something personal, all right?”

I raise the bottle to my mouth; keep it there so I don't have to say anything. I stand up from the bench. “Hey, I not only got a nice eBay shipment of new vinyl in the mail today, I found a record player and a receiver and a pair of cheap speakers at a pawnshop that actually work. The needle's not great, but it does the job. What do you say we move this party inside?”

“Okay.” She said it, but she doesn't get up.

“Sometime tonight, or—”

“I said okay,” she says, finally rising.

She ends up a few steps ahead of me at my parents' front door. “It's not locked,” I say.

Arms crossed, head down, “It's not my house. I don't go where I'm not invited.”

“Christ, you really aren't from Chatham, are you?”

Inside, I don't look at her while she gets settled on the couch, don't want her to feel any more self-conscious than she already is. I stand at the kitchen table and sort through that morning's eBay delivery as if I'm alone. We're both waiting for her to say what we both know she's going to say.

“Who died tonight?” she says.

Without looking up from the stack of records, “Willie P. Bennett. Willie P. Bennett died tonight.”

“I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by now that I haven't heard of him.”

“Especially him. He wasn't only brilliant, he was Canadian. You can't get much more obscure than that.”

I give her time to take out her joint and light it and pull off her hood, if not her coat. I spray a light mist of water and rubbing alcohol over side one of Karen Dalton's
In My Own Time
; begin to gently wipe it down counter-clockwise.

“Willie P. Bennett sang about coming down from Thessalon, how Toronto was not his home, but Toronto was where I saw him play for the first time, at the Free Times Café when I was in first year university, thirty people—tops—jammed into a room no bigger than this one, all of them knowing what they were in for except for me. All I knew about country-folk was through my Neil Young albums, and believe me, even that puny war was dearly paid for, no girl at CCI willing to find out if side two of
On the Beach
—the slow side, the one with just the title track, ‘Motion Pictures,' and ‘Ambulance Blues'—was a turn-it-up turn-on, no radio station out of Detroit disposed to extending their idea of heavy metal to a steel guitar bar.”

“What's a steel guitar bar?”

“It's what you play a steel guitar with.”

“But of course.”

“Shall I continue or not?”

“I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

“Just keep going.”

I pause before resuming, pretending as if I actually have a choice. “One of the things I wanted to do when I left for university and Toronto was to go to an actual folk club and see an actual folk singer. I looked in
Now
magazine under the listing for Folk and picked the Free Times Café because it was near Spadina and College, two streets I at least knew the names of. I forget who I went with—it doesn't matter who I went with—I forget who I went with because what I do remember is that when I walked home that night back to my room in residence I had a song-buzzing brain and a self-financed, homemade cassette tape that Willie P. sold for ten dollars at the end of the show from a yellow cloth bag slung over his shoulder. It was self-financed and homemade because, I later learned, the three albums he recorded in the seventies were put out by a small Canadian label that no longer existed, and by the late-eighties, the darkest of the dark ages of popular music, anything un-synthesized and non-digitalized was sonically suspect, an age when otherwise intelligent people routinely referred to Madonna and Prince as geniuses and
Born in the USA
was considered roots music.”

“Did this guy die too?”

“You do recall that every chapter of the book I'm writing begins with ‘I was there the night he died.'”

“I know, but … this one was in Toronto, you must have known him, right? Sort of?”

“People you know can die just as easily as those you don't.”

“I've known people who've died.”

“It's nothing to brag about.”

“I know. But I have. I'm just saying.”

I wait until she's relit her joint and I've finished removing any dust, smudges or human hair particles from side one of the Dalton album before flipping it over and starting all over again.

“Anyone who I thought deserved him, I dragged them off to see him—girlfriends and friends became ex-girlfriends and strangers, but the years couldn't touch the music, even Time, the biggest bully there is, can never touch the music. Good music, I mean. And even though a hundred dollar cut of the door was considered a very good night's take and it was usually only other musicians and freaks like me, who'd hunted down all of the out-of-print albums and traded bootlegs of folk festival shows, who knew who he was and what his music meant, songs like ‘White Line' and ‘Storm Clouds' and ‘Down to the Water' and ‘Lace and Pretty Flowers' are as good as any of the best stuff John Prine or Guy Clark or even Townes Van Zandt were writing back then. And just because no one knows it doesn't mean it's not true.”

“I suppose all of those people are dead too.”

I'm in the home stretch now, so don't answer, lift my bottle of wine instead.

“So here's what happens—here's what always happens—yet I'm always surprised and affronted and enraged each and every time it does, so who's really the real fool?” I answer my own question by taking another drink. “Two months after Willie P. Bennett died of a heart attack, age much-much-too-soon, some arts organization I thankfully can't remember the name of but whose members, no doubt, considered it a day of national mourning when the Royal Canadian Air Farce went off the air and who believe that an honest man in the White House is a sure cure for all that ails America, announced the inauguration of a new “Heritage Award” meant to honour an unjustly neglected album of Canadian roots music. And the winner is?
Lightfoot!
by Gordon Lightfoot.” I raise my bottle—too quickly—and crack its lip against my two front teeth. “The man has a star on the sidewalk in front of Honest Fucking Ed's Seafood Restaurant, for Christ's sake.”

Samantha offers me the joint and a tight-lipped, still-born smile intended to keep her smoke from getting out and me from getting any more upset. I want neither mind-muddying pot nor gentle consolation, however; desire, instead, metaphysical justice and posthumous glory for Willie P. Bennett and every other songwriter or barber or bus driver who ever gave a shit only to discover that the world isn't particularly interested. Or, failing that, a couple fat lines of pharmaceutical quality cocaine and side one of
Trying to Start Out Clean
played just as loud as my crappy new second-hand stereo will allow. “Stay where you are,” I say, placing Willie P.'s first album on the turntable and the needle in the groove to the first track while managing to sit back down on the couch just as the opening banjo lick that announces “Driftin' Snow” blows out of the speakers.

And blow it does, song one to song six—bluegrass torch songs impeccably strummed and sung without ever once losing that inspired looseness that's a necessary component of any art form aspiring to avoid the aesthetic sin of being goddamn arty. In the pause between ‘Don't You Blame Your Blues On Me' and ‘Country Squall,' “Complimentary novel-writing advice,” I say. “Literariness is the enemy of literature.”

“Do you expect me to write that down or something?”

The song's starting—there's no time to slap back her sarcasm with my own. “Just listen to ‘Country Squall,'” I say. “It's only a little over two minutes long. Before you know it, it's over.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Ten

 

 

 

Rachel has made me promise
to get everyone I know to sign the latest petition, both online and on paper—which, now that apparently everyone who has the power to do something about it has signed off on CCI's closing, might be the last petition, this one a last-gasper going directly to the Provincial Minister of Education—so I'm at Steady Eddie's house, not counting Uncle Donny and a handful of others, the only other person left in Chatham I've known longer than the last four weeks. I want his signature, but what I need is his steadiness, that uniquely Eddie way of making the next laugh, the next beer, the next Red Wings game all that really matters, everything else just a little less important if not downright irrelevant. I could use some downright irrelevance.

“They weren't skating,” I say. “And nobody was going to the net, not even Datsyuk. You can get away with that against a team like Columbus, but they better get their act together pretty soon, the playoffs are only a month away.”

Eddie is less than his usual steady self tonight for some reason—reluctant snorts instead of real laughter, sipping at his beer as if he's actually tasting it—so I'm attempting to prime the pump, get him going flowing being Steady Eddie so I can be myself and not have to do anything but sit here on his riding lawnmower and listen and laugh.

“I don't know,” he says. “I didn't see the game. I was working nights last week.”

Not that that has anything to do with it. When you're shooting the shit in Eddie's garage, the less you know about a given subject, the more you simply act as if you do. Eddie sips and I gulp and we both look around the garage in spite of there being a hockey game on the TV, even if it's only the Maple Leafs. The house is where Eddie and his family live—the decapitated dolls lying abandoned on the stairs, the white plastic laundry basket marooned in the middle of the kitchen floor, the workout machine in the basement that, like the one in my parents' basement, has sprouted coats and hats since its premature retirement—but the garage is Eddie's. It's the clubhouse he never had as a kid and it's Saturday night and we're supposed to be giddying it up, not acting like a couple of forty-something men with forty thousand things on our minds.

I point with my bottle at the television. “The Leafs manage to pull this one out, that'll be two in a row, they'll be planning the Stanley Cup parade down Yonge Street next week.” It's an old joke, and making fun of the Leafs is about as fair as rearranging a blind man's furniture, but Eddie, like my father and me, gets almost as much pleasure out of the Leafs' unending ineptitude as he does the Wings' continued excellence. Everyone needs to hate something, and we hate the Leafs. Anyway, anything to get him talking, laughing, anything other than nothing.

Eddie manages a snort and a sip, stares up at the TV, shakes his head in apology. “Sorry, man,” he says. “I had to yell at my kid this morning and I've felt like crap all day.”

“One of your girls?” I know he's got two young daughters, but how young and what their names are is beyond our bi-yearly visits.

He smiles, the first time tonight. “My little princesses? I know everybody thinks their kids are perfect, man, but Charlotte and Josie, they've never given me a moment's worry, believe me, either one of them.” Which I don't believe, but even if it is true, how much heartbreak can a four-year-old really generate? It's got to be his oldest son, new-daddy Gavin.

“Gavin, goddamnit, he's a good kid, he really is, you know that.”

Having met him maybe three times in my life, I don't know any such thing, but I nod anyway. “Sure he is.”

“But sometimes he just doesn't think. I mean, I
know
he knows what's right and wrong, but sometimes it's like he's working against himself, you know what I mean? And it makes me so mad because, like you said, he's a good kid, he
knows
what he should be doing.”

“Well, kids make mistakes. We both did and we turned out all right.”

Eddie finally lifts his bottle and swallows. “But now he's a kid with his own kid. And the mistakes he makes now don't just screw up his own life.”

I don't have a comforting cliché for that one, so I do the only thing that has a chance of helping, go to the beer fridge and get two more Blue. Eddie takes his beer although he's only half done the one he's holding. We both lift our eyes to the television mounted on the garage wall. If Ottawa gets one more goal, they'll be right back in it, a third period Maple Leafs collapse a very real possibility. You find your hope wherever you find it.

During a commercial break for a clinic that not only performs laser hair removal surgery for men but also breast reductions—“It's called Gynecomastia, guys,” the woman in the ad says, “and it's
not
your fault”—the door that connects the house to the garage slams open and one of Eddie's tiny pig-tailed daughters wails her way right past me and right into her father's arms. Eddie picks her up and asks her what's wrong, and whether or not he understands what “SheandthatwaysaidnottoMummysaidso” means more than I do, he nonetheless manages to immediately transform her relentless crying into a persistent sniffle and rubs away her tears with the sleeve of his shirt and even manages to tease a flickering smile at the corner of her mouth with some gibberish that makes about as much sense to me as his daughter's. Then Eddie grabs her by the feet and hangs her upside down and the little girl laughs just as loudly as she was crying three minutes before.

I smile, want them to know I'm fine with this father­-daughter moment, to take as long as they need, but I don't need to worry: neither one of them even knows I'm there.

 

* * *

 

The stars have managed to show
up again, if a little on the late side. Each day stays a little bit lighter a little bit longer. Such seasonal subtleties are lost on my neighbour directly across the street, however, who's switched on his powerful front porch light and shows no sign of doing anything but letting it blaze away right through until morning. The park is out of the question, obviously—the spotlight from across the street guarantees that—so I decide to get a load of laundry done while hauling Salvation Army-bound boxes upstairs.

I put a load of clothes in the washer and begin to fill the spare bedroom with boxes. Each time, before I return downstairs for more of Dad's tools and Mum's scented candles and my old track and field trophies, I go to the living room window to see if the lighthouse keeper at 5 Dahlia Avenue has finally packed it in for the night, only to be greeted by a blast of 200-watt sacrilege. Even a new-fangled subdivision can seem inscrutably alive if the night is dark enough, but I can see everything from my front window that's really there and everything else that isn't. I transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer and wish I had some speed. When not enough is happening, making it happen quicker is the most effective way of fooling yourself that there is.

I've run out of boxes, so I lug this and that up the stairs. The large fan we used BCAC (Before Central Air-Conditioning) that would follow the family around from the dinner table to the living room and that I would crawl up close to and speak directly into to hear my voice magically transformed sci-fi spooky; my mother's
Sounds of Nature
CD, the closest she ever got to allowing the great big mess that is the great outdoors into our lives; my pair of fifteen pound dumbbells, ten biceps-plumping reps with which were a before-school necessity: all of it pushed into the corner of the spare bedroom to wait for the truck from the Salvation Army to haul them away.

The clothes are dry so I dump them into the laundry basket. Sara was always cold—the thermostat was never high enough in the winter, it was never hot enough for her in the summer—and it used to piss me off, that I'd be melting in August when she would always ask me before our evening dog walk if it was cold outside, did I think she needed a sweater.

I'm carrying the basket upstairs when the waft of gentle warmth that is the just-dried clothes nearly knocks me to my knees. If Sara was in the bedroom when I'd return from the basement with the laundry from the dryer, I'd dump the entire steaming basket on her, a hot mud slide of freshly clean clothes. She'd roll around on the bed underneath the warm laundry like Barney would on his back on the couch after a particularly satisfying dinner.

Before I put the clothes away I go to the front window. That sonofabitch. When is he going to shut that goddamn light off? Doesn't he know that the night belongs to everyone?

 

* * *

 

“How about a movie?” Rachel says.

“They're all terrible.”

“You don't even know what's playing.”

“I don't need to,” I say. “They're either light romantic comedies or Us versus Them action movies or sub-Tolkien teenage escape-fests, with a token Highbrow Harlequin thrown in to make the dentists' wives and all of the other local intellectuals feel superior to everyone else in town because they go to see
films
and not mere
movies
.”

“Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No—what?”

“Let's rent a DVD then,” Rachel says. “You can pick it out and make sure we don't watch the wrong thing and damn our souls for eternity.”

“No thanks. There's only Blockbuster, and they just offer take-home versions of the same crap as what the theatres serve up.”

We've had dinner, we've had sex, we're sitting side-by-side on the couch in Rachel's small living room. What I really want to do is go home and pound down a Mountain Dew or two and get properly jittery and get back to work on my book.

Don't misunderstand: I'm not disciplined, I just like to write. Sara used to call me the world's laziest workaholic. Just contemplating cutting the grass or talking to a neighbour about how long the sidewalk construction is taking overwhelms me with actual somatic weariness, a heaviness of head and heart that's as certain to result as a loss of light is when a cloud passes across the sun. But three or four hours of applying carefully considered black squiggles to an enemy white page has the entirely opposite effect—simultaneously repositions both feet on the earth and pushes my spirit to places it can't get to when, say, you're trying to figure out how to hang the new blind in the kitchen.

“Okay,” Rachel says, standing up and clapping her hands once, loudly. “What if I open a bottle of wine and you help me with the letter I've got to get to the government by next week? I should have thought of this before. Who better to argue for CCI's continuing relevance than one of its most famous alumni?”

“I'm not famous.”

“Compared to most everyone else you went to school with you are.”

“That doesn't make me famous. That just means I'm not anonymous.”

We both look at the TV, which is never not on at Rachel's. Over footage of several red mini-skirted dancing bears performing before thousands of happily applauding children and their circus-going parents, a sombre British voice explains exactly how bears are taught to “dance:” how music is played while the metal floor underneath them is heated enough to burn their feet, compelling them to hop from foot to foot, thereby guaranteeing that when the same music is played again later they instinctively hop about, hoping to avoid the remembered pain.

“My God, that's terrible,” Rachel says, sitting back down. “I had no idea.”

“I've got to write this down,” I say, pulling the pen and notepad out of my pocket.

“Why would you want to write something like that down?”

“So I won't forget it.”

“It's terrible. It's worse than terrible.”

“I know. And it's a terribly powerful metaphor, too.”

“A metaphor for what?”

“I don't know yet. I'll know when I find it. And when I do, I don't want to forget.”

Rachel looks back at the TV and I scribble in my notepad. She gets up again, but this time without clapping her hands.

“Where are you going?” I say.

“I'm getting my keys. I'm going to drive you home.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“No,” she says, going into the bedroom.

And I don't think she is, either.

 

* * *

 

Finally, some good news.
Great news. News so great I wish I had someone to tell it to.

The couple who came by last week have made an offer on the house—less than what we're asking for, but more than enough money to make me credit card debt-free again and to lay a nice fat nest egg in Dad's bank account. I consider calling Rachel—pick up the phone and enter the first three numbers, in fact—but how can I be yakky happy when Samantha is on the other side of the street so obviously sullen sad? I'm not my teenage neighbour's keeper, but as soon as the house is sold it'll be time to start thinking about going home. It's not the same now, it'll never be the same, but Toronto is home, at least I have a home to go back to. Samantha needs a home. Even if it's just for four forgettable undergraduate years. A home for now, anyway, a home along the way.

I know she'll show up if I do, but what I'll say once she does I'm a lot less sure of. Half a bottle of red wine later, I'm two for two: here she comes, and what the hell am I supposed to say to her? Whether because of the wine or the news of the offer on the house or because I'm simply tired of waiting for her to make the first confessional move, I hear myself ask, “So why do you see a psychiatrist?”

“So who died tonight?”

“You go first.”

I can hear her slowly rocking on the swing set behind me, the dry grinding creak of the freezing chains every time she sways forward then backward. “I told you. It's my parents' idea.”