The Amazing Absorbing Boy (31 page)

I believe his sleepy mood remained with him because when we got home and he spotted my father before the television he yawned and asked, “I thought you was back in Mayaro already, boy.” My father smiled sheepishly. I wished they would chat about my father’s time in Mayaro and bring up small lumps of information I had no idea about but Uncle Boysie said, “This travelling does make you real sleepy. I could use the bedroom, Sammy?”

A few minutes later my father asked me, “So allyou meet anybody in particular?”

“No. We was just travelling. Uncle Boysie was thinking about importing the abandoned carriages to use as vendor stalls in Trinidad.”

A couple months earlier he might have mentioned something about “oompa loompa” or “assness” but all he said was, “He have the money. He could afford it.” I tried to gauge from his voice if there was any bitterness or sarcasm but it seemed just a plain statement. I wondered if I was losing the ability to read him.

“Uncle Boysie was telling me about your teeth business in Trinidad.”

“Yeah? What he say?”

“That you couldn’t get the right adhesive so you had to use
laglee
. The sap from
chataigne
tree.”

“People don’t eat properly in Mayaro. Eat mostly with their front teeth. Like rodents.” It was a criticism but still the
funniest thing he had ever said. In the television MacGyver was slowly mixing some ingredients to blow a hole in a concrete wall. A worried woman was watching a ticking bomb. “Time running out,” my father said, his eyes fixed on the screen. A few minutes later he unrolled the blanket at his side and wrapped himself, tucking the ends around his shoulders. I switched off the lights, spread the foam and fell asleep to the woman’s increasingly hysterical voice.

During the following days I took Uncle Boysie to the Exhibition Place, and the St. Lawrence Market, and the Skydome, and Harbourfront where he sat on a bench facing the lake and ate four hot dogs, one after the other. Each day, though, he got quieter and I didn’t know if it was the temperature, or sadness that his vacation was coming to an end. He inquired over and over about my college and my finances and whether I could manage here all by myself. He even asked if I might be more comfortable in Mayaro. I didn’t want to mention my loneliness of a week earlier so I told him that there were far more opportunities in Canada. He seemed relieved. Later at an art gallery I felt that my occasional sadness really stemmed from a series of disconnected pictures—the Julie mango tree in full bloom, fishermen pulling their seine in the mornings, my mother by the sewing machine watching my approach from school, the Amazing Absorbing Boy hidden in the swamp—that were like panels from different comic books.

In any case I didn’t want to think of Mayaro at this time. Uncle Boysie had done so much for me and I wanted him to enjoy the couple days remaining. Two days before his
departure I asked him if there was some place he would like to visit before he left. I even offered a hint. Pussyah. Even though he glanced at me suspiciously, we landed that night at the Pink Pussycat place once more. The dancers came on and did their routines but Uncle Boysie didn’t shout encouragement as before. We left in less than an hour. In the streetcar he told me, “All this excitement not right for a man my age.” From his voice I guessed something specific was on his mind so I waited for some kind of explanation. “This week pass fast, boy. I only have one day again. I leaving on Sunday, you know.” He looked at me and I nodded. “But I will be lying if I tell you that I not worried.”

“You shouldn’t worry about—”

He held up a hand. “Let me finish. You might think this is just a old man talking
chupidness
but I always consider you like a son.” He took a deep breath and drew his coat more tightly around him. “This place cold no ass, boy. I don’t know how you does manage here. With the coldness and you job and you big time studies. And with you father. You know how he surviving here?” I didn’t know what he was referring to so I shook my head. “He does get a little cheque every month from some kinda workman compensation for a breakdown a couple years aback.”

“What sort of breakdown?”

“Nerves.”

“Nerves?”

“I don’t know how to describe it. I used to hear about a couple people in Trinidad with the same problem. Is like a
situation halfway between normal and mad and season up with plenty acting. Remember one of them place we pass on the train? With-me or something.”

“Whitby?”

“Yeah. He was in a hospital there for people with nerves. People who”—he hesitated—“couldn’t cope.”

He got quiet.

“Trap. Trap. Oompa loompa.”

“What you say, Sammy?”

“Nothing uncle.”

We got off from the streetcar and walked towards the apartment. “I tell you father that he have to fix up this sponsorship business before he leave.”

“Leave Regent Park?” I was still thinking of my father at some psychiatric place in Whitby.

“Canada.”

“He leaving?”

“Take it easy, take it easy.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “You remember that envelope I give him the first night? Well, you know it was the deed to the property in Mayaro. I can’t tell you how it
hut
me heart to give him that but it was you mother wish. She say that he never return when she was living but he might come back when she dead. The property in both of allyou name.” I felt this conversation between my father and uncle had taken place on the day I saw my father crying. I had seen Uncle Boysie deal with a couple of his workers and I knew how rough he could be. I wondered at the threats he had made to my father.

When we got to the apartment I hoped that my father would be home but Uncle Boysie said, “The lagahoo gone again. God might punish me for this but I hope he have a hard time in Mayaro. Every time he spot you mother sewing machine or she decorations or the flowers she plant all over the place. You does think about she?”

Nearly every day. But I told him, “Not directly.”

I really didn’t want to talk about my mother, not even with Uncle Boysie, who was closer to her than anyone else. In the days after her funeral when I was in Uncle Boysie’s place I had this feeling that she was still in the small house tending her bougainvillea and crotons and hibiscus; I pretended that I was on an extended holiday, no different from the occasional weekends I sometimes spent at my uncle’s place. She had died during my term exams, and on the day of my final subject, chemistry, I passed by the house.

The bougainvillea had grown taller—and briefly I had this picture that they were straining to look for her—and wispy silvery vines had invaded the clump of crotons, but apart from this, the house seemed the same. I had stood at the front entrance for maybe ten minutes, trying to convince myself that my mother was gone and at the same time nourishing the tiny dust of hope that it was all a dream.

I had heard many times that the spirit of dead people never wanted to leave in a hurry and I wondered what I would do if I saw the machine pedalling by itself. One of the windows was partially open and when I went to shut it, a pigeon flapped out from the outside ledge. That window was where
I sometimes saw her on my way from school. I looked at the coconut trees and listened to the faint sound of the sea, carried by the breeze in little gasps. It sounded like a distant moaning. I remained there, on her chair, until I saw the shadows loosened and thrown across the trees like a big black bag. I wondered what may have been going through her mind as she sat there, evening after evening. That night, while I was walking to my uncle’s place, I felt that there were these tiny pieces of me that had turned to ice and others that were hot and burning up. Like the Composite Superman, except that my powers were of Iceman and the Human Torch.

Other fantasies, other super hero powers, like that of the unfeeling android, Vision, and the Silver Surfer, who had no home and was forced to roam the universe, danced in my head during the nine months I stayed by Uncle Boysie’s place; until the day of my flight to Canada, when I imagined that I was flying over solid blocks of ice to my Fortress of Solitude. My own little sanctuary, away from all the problems in the world.

As I sat by the kitchen table with Uncle Boysie, I thought of my friend, Loykie, the Amazing Absorbing Boy, with whom I would swap all these superhero fantasies. He was the only other boy who knew all the comic book heroes. He lived twenty minutes away and had no other friend. “So what happened to Loykie?”

“Who?”

“Loykie,” I told Uncle Boysie. “The boy who came with his mother to Mayaro a good few years ago. They used to live
in the swamp. They came out a couple times with Loykie covered with a sugar bag.”

“The boy with the skin disease?”

“Yes, him.”

“He drown a couple month ago.”

“He drown? Loykie? You sure?”

“Yeah. They never find his body.”

The evening before his departure, I took my uncle to Sears and Honest Ed’s and the dollar stores, where he picked up all sort of cheap useless items like bird feeders and laser pointers and plastic dog bones. At the end of our shopping trip, Uncle Boysie looked like a big
mash-up
flower with his colourful shopping bags spread out on all sides. When we stopped at a Tim Hortons his bags took up an entire table. I ordered two coffees and Uncle Boysie told me that my father had signed and submitted my sponsorship forms. “Finally he do something for you. But I had to push him.” He said the problem with my father was that he never got out from his make-believe world and so he could never change. Although I knew where my uncle was coming from, all his talk of change just got me thinking once again of the Amazing Absorbing Boy, who would pretend that he could transform himself into the same material of whatever he touched, and for a moment I pretended he was sitting at the corner table, all by himself and touching the cup and the table and the wall and turning into paper and wood and concrete.

I
missed Uncle Boysie more than I had anticipated. He had never taken me to a hotel as he promised and I had never explained to him what a typical Canadian might be. Nevertheless, I felt he had achieved what he came for, which was getting my father to sponsor me. He said that my father’s agreement was really part of a bargain into which he had been pushed but I pretended he had intended to sponsor me all along. Maybe because of my fabrication I began to see little broken up pieces of friendliness pushed by him my way. Mainly small murmurings about the demolition going on in Regent Park. But it could be that Uncle Boysie had changed him from being a cold and faraway stranger into someone who wore fancy gloves in Trinidad and who suffered from nerves and who spent time at a psychiatric place. I couldn’t forgive him but I knew him better. Most evenings when I returned from Queen Bee I would see him smoking in the balcony and surveying the demolition.

Every week some new section of Regent Park was torn down. There were bulldozers and backhoes and excavators and small Bobcats ripping down walls and tearing up sidewalks and piling mounds of rubble all over the place. When I was a boy, long before I discovered the DC and Marvel worlds and the thick
Classics Illustrated;
even before my interest in sharks and dinosaurs, I used to be fascinated with all these machines that seemed like iron monsters with huge arms and jaws. Together with the other Mayaro boys, I had fashioned clumsy trucks and vans with empty sardine cans as trays and bobbins for wheels. Sometimes I imagined that I was driving one of the forklifts at the coconut-husking factory near to the Amazing Absorbing Boy’s swamp.

I don’t think the other Regent Park residents were as thrilled with the machines because every other day I saw some new notice on our door mentioning another meeting to protest the “forced relocation to market value condominiums,” and the “unwarranted attack on poor people,” and even one about police brutality. Important officials came and had their pictures taken with some of the petitioners and promised this and that but the machines continued their tramping and levelling. Immigrant focus groups and advisory committees were formed and the members also had their pictures in the
Star
and the
Sun
, appearing mad and worried and determined. Once the Creole woman knocked on our door and asked for my father. I told her truthfully that I had not seen him for the last two days, and because she remained by the door just shaking her head I added that he planned to return soon to Trinidad.

It seemed as if she was just waiting to hear this because she gave me a long speech about how Canada was a perfect place until you bounced up your first hurdle. “Is then and only then you realize that you don’t have a neighbour you could call from across the road to help fix your car. Or a third cousin to check out that loose wiring or fix the leak below the sink. Is you and you alone and with every passing minute the place start getting colder and the ice slipperier and the smiles more frozen and the pace of everybody faster. You hear me, Samuel? Like if they running away from you. This place perfect if you have money and if you luck hold out but if that is not the case then
crapo
smoke you pipe. Ah Lord Lord Lord.” She had a Caribbean accent but it was difficult to determine if it was Trinidadian.