The Clear-Out (4 page)

To drown out his thoughts, Duncan turned on the car radio. He tried to find a station that would come in clearly, but all he got was static.

“Must be a storm somewhere,” he said.

Finally, he got an oldies station. He sat back to enjoy songs that were new when he was young.

And then the music stopped.

And Duncan heard the words.

They were almost whispered, but he heard them loud and clear.

What happens?

And Duncan drove straight into a telephone pole.

As he sat there, his right fender crunched up, strangers rushed over to see if he was all right. Police sirens came closer and closer. Duncan wished he had just stayed in bed.

“Come back, Tess,” he said. “I want to go home.”

Duncan had never been to the skateboard park.

The town had built the park last year, and Duncan was angry that it had been paid for with tax money. He had written a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. “Why do kids need to skateboard?” he had written. “Walking is free. If their parents want them to have a skateboard park, then let their parents pay for it.”

And now, there he was, at the very same park.

He sat on a bench, and Kevin sat in his chair. They drank Tim Hortons coffee and watched kids on skateboards roll up and over cement cliffs.

“What in the world would make someone want to do that?” Duncan asked.

“You must have done some crazy things in your life,” Kevin said. “Everyone has. Or if you didn’t do crazy things, you wanted to.”

“I worked,” Duncan said. “I paid my bills. I played a lot of golf.”

“Not much to write on your gravestone, is it?”

“Will the writing on yours be any better?”

“I’m a proud gay man. That in itself is a sign of success.”

Duncan couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said nothing.

“There he is,” Kevin said, spotting the kid they were looking for. “Hey, Fly King! Over here!”

“Fly King?” Duncan asked.

“That’s his skate name.”

“Do I have to call him that?”

“He’s doing you a favour,” Kevin reminded him. “Would it kill you to be nice?”

Fly King took his time coming over. He skated up and down the valleys, going around and doing jumps off the ramps. Duncan had to admit that the kid was good. Not that he was any judge of skateboarders.

Fly King skated right up to them, stopped, and picked up his board in one smooth motion. He did not seem surprised to see them.

“She wants to know what happens,” Fly King said.

“She wants to know what happens to what? To me? Is she worried about me?”

The kid laughed.

“The book, man,” the kid said. “She wants to know what happens in the book.”

“What book?”

“The book she was reading when she kicked it.”

Duncan came close to hitting the kid.

“What book?”

“How should I know?” Fly King replied. “Don’t you know? You were there, man.”

“Ask her,” Duncan demanded.

“Doesn’t work that way.” Fly King put his skateboard back on the ground. “I don’t talk to them. They talk to me. And only when they feel like it. They’re dead. They do what they want.”

“What am I supposed to do now?” Duncan asked. He didn’t feel any closer to knowing what was going on.

“Read the book, bro. Tell her what happens.”

In the next moment, the kid was gone, dropping down into a cement valley.

“There were so many books,” Duncan said. “I don’t know what she was reading at the end.”

“How can you not know that?” Kevin said. “Didn’t you ask her?”

“She was always reading,” Duncan said. “I asked her all the time, ‘What are you reading?’ ”

The full question he had asked was,
What are you reading that for?

As if he could hear Duncan’s thoughts, Kevin asked, “Did you ever listen to her answer?”

Duncan didn’t reply. Of course he hadn’t listened to her answer. In the beginning, she would tell him what she was reading, thinking he might be truly interested. But his eyes would gloss over and his ears would shut. He had not asked her so that he could learn something. He had asked her only to make her talk to him.

Duncan looked at the books on the thrift shop shelves. “All these books,” he said. “I’m going to
have to go through all these books. And what about the ones you sold already? What if it’s one of them? Finding the one she didn’t finish is impossible.”

“Now, hang on a minute,” Kevin said. “Don’t give up. Let’s think. What do you remember about that day?”

“I remember Tess dying. What do you think I remember?”

“You must remember something about the book. Think. Did it have a hard cover or was it a paperback? Did the cover have a picture on it? Was it a big thick book or a little skinny book?”

Duncan thought back to that terrible day. He could see his wife, his Tess, tiny on the bed. Her arm reached out to hold on to the book he was taking away. It was not a good picture.

“She was weak,” he said. “The book would not have been heavy.”

“So, small and skinny. Good. We can pass by a lot of these, then.”

Duncan picked up some of the paperback books. He held them in his hand to try to remember.

“These don’t feel right,” he said. “Something about the weight or the shape. And the cover was shiny. Smooth.”

The book had slid right out of her fingers. Even so, he had felt her slight grip, trying to hold on to it.

“Good,” Kevin said. “We are probably looking for a small, skinny book with a shiny paper cover on it.” He started going through the shelves, pulling books out that might look like that.

Duncan kept thinking. He started to get angry.

“All I did for her,” he said. “She had a good life. She never had anything to complain about. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t run around with other women. I provided a good home for her and our son. Such a good home that Bobby didn’t want to leave it. And she wanted to read more than she wanted to talk with me.”

He threw the books in his hand down on the floor.

“Let her haunt me,” he said. “At least now she has to talk to me.”

And he stomped out of the store.

Duncan did not believe in looking inside himself.

He saw no point in sitting around, thinking about how things could have been. There was what happened, and there was today, and there was tomorrow. The only way to get on in life was to deal with the world that was right in front of you. Anything else was . . . well, nothing good would come of living in the past.

When he got home from the shop, there was a message on the answering machine from his son. Bobby was coming for a visit.

Duncan looked around. The house could use tidying up. He had let things slip a bit. He didn’t want Bobby to think he couldn’t manage.

“To heck with it,” he said. “Let the kid do the cleaning. I’ve spent plenty of time picking up after him.”

Besides, he needed to sell the place. Duncan called a real estate agent. The agent could come over right away.

“This is a very nice property, Mr. Brown,” the agent said. He walked from room to room with a pen clipped to a clipboard and a phone clipped to his ear. “What are you hoping to get for it?”

“I bought the house twenty years ago,” he said. “I’m expecting to get a lot more than I paid for it.”

“You have taken care of it very well,” the agent said. “But there are a few things you could do to update it. A bit of paint here. Maybe replace the counter top in the kitchen. Now, about this dining room. No one uses dining rooms anymore. Families do not have the time to eat together. People will not know what to do with this space. Have you thought of giving it a different use—turning it into something else?”

The agent turned and looked Duncan right in the eye. Suddenly, the man seemed to be wearing a different face. “Have you thought about maybe turning it into . . . a library?” he asked.

Something about the way the agent spoke, something about his voice or his rude smile scared Duncan. Or something about the words themselves. A chill ran from the tips of Duncan’s toes to the brush-cut hairs on the top of his head.

“Get out!” he yelled. “Go! Get out, right now!”

Anger replaced the strange look on the real estate agent’s face. “You can’t treat me like that!” he said. “I’m going to report you to the real estate board. No one will help you. You’ll be stuck with this house forever!”

“Get out!” Duncan kept screaming.

The agent ran out to his car and backed down the driveway. He almost hit one of the skateboard boys who were circling around yet again.

“What happens?” the skateboard boys yelled at Duncan.

Duncan slammed the door on all of them.

“I’ll sell the house myself,” he said. All he needed was a sign. He had an old election sign in his basement. Tess had put this sign on the lawn because she wanted people to vote for some foolish young man. Duncan had pulled the stupid sign out of the lawn and hidden it.

He would paint over that old election sign and have it on the lawn when his son arrived. That would give Bobby the message, loud and clear. He, Duncan, was about to lead his own life for once.

The basement stairs led directly into the rec room. Duncan had put up the wood panelling himself. For way too long, the room had been his son’s home. Now it held a treadmill and some weights and other gym equipment. Duncan hadn’t used any of it since Tess died.

He crossed the rec room and opened the door into the workshop.

There was paint everywhere.

All over the back room of the basement, on the floor, on the walls. Even on the water heater, on the washer and dryer.

All colours of leftover paint. Paint collected over years of painting bedrooms, the living room, and the trim on the outside of the house. Pretty colours. Colours that looked good in the store but ugly on the walls. Fresh colours and stale colours. Bright colours and sad colours.

In big letters and small, all over the room— those words again:

What happens?

Duncan slammed the door.

All I can do these days is slam doors, he thought. That’s all I can control.

His wife would
not
have the last word! He would walk to the hardware store and buy House for Sale signs. And he would hire someone to paint over all that mess in the basement. This was
his
house. This was
his
life, and
he
was in charge!

Duncan opened his front door. Fly King stood right on his porch, holding his skateboard.

“R. A. Dick,” said the kid.

“What did you say to me?”

“R. A. Dick.”

Duncan felt his hand curl into a fist.

“I’ve never hit a kid,” Duncan said. “But if you or your crowd ever comes back here again, I will beat you senseless.”

“Dude, I didn’t say, ‘You are a dick.’ I said ‘R. A. Dick.’ You’re awfully touchy for a rich old man with nothing to complain about.”

“I’m not rich,” Duncan said. The comment had caught him off-guard.

The kid looked at Duncan’s house, then back to Duncan. “Dude,” was all he said.

For some reason, that remark prompted Duncan to really look at the kid. His clothes looked like rags. Of course, ragged clothes could be the fashion, but still . . .

“Where are your parents?” Duncan asked.

“Oh, so now you’re interested in other people?”

Fly King put his skateboard on the ground and got on it. “R. A. Dick,” he said over his shoulder as he and his pack skated away.

Duncan locked the door behind him and headed out. He would get that House for Sale sign. And then he would track down this R. A. Dick.

If his wife had had an affair with this Dick guy, he, Duncan, would beat his brains out.

Duncan found forty-seven Dicks in the phone book. None were R. A. Some were R. and some were A. He saw a Ronald and a Robert and a Rhonda, and an Albert and an Anita and an Abernathy.

Duncan decided to call them all.

Calling up strangers. Asking them if they had slept with his wife. This was not something he would usually do in the course of a day. But he was feeling more than a little crazy by this point. He did not care what people thought.

He sat with the phone by the front window, looking at the big bright House for Sale sign on the lawn. While he called people, he’d keep an eye out for anyone stopping to look at his house. He called right down the list of people named “Dick.” Many hung up on him. One lady invited him to come
over for supper. Two of the people had died, and one phone had been disconnected. He left seven messages on answering machines. Thinking of all the trouble he was causing made him laugh.

“I’ve gone around the bend,” he said. And he took another drink.

But he was no closer to solving the problem.

And his son’s car was pulling into the driveway.

Duncan thought of turning off the lights and pretending not to be home. But he was too late. His son was coming in the front door.

“Mom’s library is gone,” was the first thing Bobby said.

“It’s the middle of the week,” Duncan said. “Did you get the day off work?”

“She loved that library,” Bobby said. “She wrote me letters about it. You’re selling the house?”

Duncan walked past Bobby and went into the kitchen. His son, of course, would want lunch.

Several days’ worth of dishes sat in the sink.

“Wow, Dad. Mom would never leave dirty dishes lying around.”

“You should know,” Duncan replied. “You dirtied enough of them. What are you doing here in the middle of the week?”

Bobby put some of the dishes on the counter so he could put the stopper into the sink drain. He added dish soap and turned on the tap.

Duncan turned the water off.

“Leave the damn dishes. I asked you a question.”

Instead of replying, Bobby opened the fridge door.

“Where’s all the food?” he asked. “Mom always kept lots of food.”

“Yeah, well, your mother is dead,” Duncan said. His words sounded mean even to him, but he was a little drunk and didn’t care.

“You need someone to take care of things around here,” Bobby said. “Run the house. Do the laundry.”