The Journey Prize Stories 24 (16 page)

“Pretty much.”

“I don’t know why,” he said, “but I always think that babies have those things that birds have. Now, what are those things called?”

The hippy mother didn’t know.

“You know. It’s that thing that birds have where they do a combination of pooing and peeing so you can’t tell what the hell it is that’s coming out. It’s called something, what they have. It’s like ‘The Cloister,’ only it’s not. It’s right there.” He shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, trying to force the word to the surface.

“Fuck,” he said, popping open his eyes. “It’s frustrating,
huh? When you can’t think of a word you know. It’s like having one of those sneezes where you can’t sneeze. Do you ever get those?”

The hippy mother did get those. She was smiling still, but it was a smile that didn’t mean anything, like when a car in front of him would leave a turn signal on.

“Do you mind if I just leave this here?” she asked, and anyway bent down and set the soiled bundle on the bottom step of his porch.

“Just so long as you don’t set it on fire,” he said, and laughed.

“Right. I promise not to,” she said. “But thank you. And, again, I’m sorry. She already … And I was just going to … Anyway, I’m sorry and thank you.”

She turned and walked back across the lawn, picking leaves out of her hair.

“Don’t forget your baby,” he called from the porch. He took another sip from his mug and made a surprised, sour baby face, expecting it to actually be coffee, forgetting about the Canadian Club. The only club he’d ever belonged to, his wife used to say. She had thought she was just a riot, that woman. Now, there was someone he’d like to cram into a booth. But not a booth with money. Maybe a booth full of razor blades or something. How easily could those become airborne?

“Got her, thanks,” the mother said, gathering up her squirming girl.

He watched her put the kid into one of those hippy slings that he was starting to see regular people use now, too, and he watched her go, watched her bum as she went.

“Cloaca,” he said.

“Cloaca!” he yelled. “It was the cloaca!” he yelled at her. Down the sidewalk, the hippy mother turned to look at him, then turned away and moved off a bit more swiftly.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling good, feeling like he had sneezed that sneeze out, or like he had suffered water in his ear all day from a swim or something and finally it was trickling out now, all hot and amazing.

“Cloaca,” he said.

He had come out for the paper when he saw the shitty baby on his lawn. Now he squatted and sorted through the rolls that had built up by his door and found the one with the most recent date. All these people had died somewhere because of something, he read.

He picked out the business section, shook it out as he stepped down the steps of his porch, fluffed the paper, and then spread it next to the bundle the hippy mother had left him. With his bare toe, he nudged the wad of cloth onto the paper and wrapped it up.

He breathed in. There was the sweet and pungent smell, the complicated scent of baby shit. Any smell you miss, even if it’s a bad one, is a good one.

Wadding the newspaper and the cloth full of shit into a ball the size of a softball, he walked to the end of the driveway, and then he threw it. The wad landed with a light heaviness onto his neighbour across the street’s roof.

Opening his nostrils and opening his lungs, he hoped for that autumn smell, but still it was baby stench. He smelt his hands, but it was not his hands. It was all over the air now, that baby smell.

Another whirl of wind came and tossed the salad of dead
leaves on his lawn. The leaves flirted around him, and he began to grab at them. He snatched all he could out of the air, stuffing them into the pockets of his bathrobe, and then into his robe so they scratched his bare chest.

The wind died and he stood there with the heap at his feet, his pockets full and his chest bulky. A leaf had landed in his mug. He could drink around that.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling pretty okay about himself.

I
n 1976, when I was twelve years old, and my father was still desperate to please my mom, we moved into a new house on Wallace Road. Our part of town was called The Mission, named by Father Pandosy, an Oblate priest who established the first white settlement in the Okanagan Valley in 1859. Wallace Road was lined with identical three-bedroom, bi-level homes. Each house had a dining room which led to an elevated sundeck that served dual purpose as a carport, under which my father parked his 1972 Chevy Nomad station wagon. Our car was beige and embarrassing.

We didn’t live on the kind of street where people are fond of their neighbours and share summer cookouts and winter hockey tournaments. For instance, we didn’t talk to the German family who ate the rabbits they kept in the backyard, and we barely smiled at – although we weren’t openly hostile toward – the RCMP constable who lived next door.

“What a racket,” my mother said at breakfast shortly after
we moved in. “I heard them going half the night. I’m telling you, Eddie, he hit her. More than once.”

“Do you want me to go talk to him?” Dad asked.

“For God’s sake, no!” Mom pressed her forehead into her fingers. “The man has a gun!”

Dad gave Mom a long-suffering look. “Elaine, I don’t know why you told me this story.”

“Because, Ed, I have a goddamn headache. And you could sleep through the second coming of Christ.”

After we had been in the house for three years, my older brother escaped my parents’ distaste for one another by finding work on an oilrig near Slave Lake. Six months later, he returned as the protégé of a fanatical Pentecostal minister who had chosen him a sixteen-year-old bride. He was eighteen years old. David didn’t even meet his bride until two weeks before the nuptials, to which none of us were invited. One year later, in the spring of 1980, David and his pregnant wife, Charity, moved to a Christian commune near Lumby.

“I give up on the men in this family,” my mother said. She lit a smoke and poured a shot of Kaluha into her coffee. “What on earth is he thinking?”

I shrugged. My brother had never been strong on thinking. David failed grade two, and shortly after our move to Wallace Road he was tagging along with Clinton Pelletier, a deranged product of the foster-care system who was a year older than David and brimming with venom.

Clint liked to grab me and stick his tongue in my mouth or push me down on to the floor and grind his crotch into mine, saying, “How do you like that, baby? You want some more?”
David would turn into a mute idiot and just stand there watching. The guy had no will. I knew that, but my mother had her own way of seeing things.

My mother was frantically trying to come up with some alternative names for Grandma, like we’d actually venture out to the sticks to see David and Charity, who wouldn’t eat at the same table with us because they believed we were going to hell. “How about Ellie?” she asked during the six o’clock news. We were watching the channel from Spokane, waiting to hear, along with the rest of the Pacific Northwest, what was going on with Mount St. Helen’s.

“Crazy old bastard,” my father said. Ever since the governor of Washington declared a state of emergency, my dad obsessed over the growing activity around the volcano. And he was fixated on Harry Truman, the old man who refused to leave the mountain.

“Ed! Are you even listening to me?”

“What’s that?” he asked.

Mom shook her head. “I might just as well be talking to a wall.”

“Make your folks a couple of bourbon-and-cokes, would you, Jeannie?” My dad had recently purchased a twenty-sixer of bourbon in honour of old Mr. Truman, who wasn’t just famous for refusing to leave the volcano, but also for his love of bourbon and cats.

“Not for me.” My mother’s lips were a thin line. “Lisa and I are going to ceramics.” There was one neighbour we liked, a nurse named Lisa. On Monday nights, she and Mom went to a basement on Raymer Road and painted mother-of-pearl
Madonnas and speckled frogs with open mouths to hold pot scrubbers. On Mondays, Lisa’s son slept at his dad’s apartment, so after their ceramics class Mom and Lisa would sit in Lisa’s living room, smoking cigarettes and drinking five-dollar bottles of wine. On Tuesday mornings, my dad and I tiptoed around the kitchen and made our way quickly out of the house.

“Well, then,” Dad winked at Mom, “make mine a double.” He was a well-liked guy, my dad. He made a point of sounding happy, which is probably what made him a successful salesman. For the past two years, he’d been selling time on the local radio station, and he’d found his niche among flamboyant radio personalities, with their laissez-faire approach to boozing and extra-marital sex. Not that my dad was a philanderer, but it was easy enough for him to ignore the sexual revolution with all the good drinking that could be done among those fellows.

My mother snorted and left the room. Dad, who was prone on the couch, turned back toward the television. “Now that’s what I call love.” He raised himself up on his elbows. “He says he’d die if he weren’t on that mountain. His wife is buried there. Now who wouldn’t want to feel like that about someone?”

Sometimes my dad went on about the weirdest things. “Do you really want a double?” I asked.

“May as well. Your mother’s not home anyway.”

When I brought him the drink, he said, “How about we go for a lesson after the news?” A few weeks earlier, on April 16, I qualified for my learners and my dad was teaching me how to drive.

Dad relaxed into the passenger seat and popped the cap off his beer bottle with a Bic lighter. “Do up your seatbelt,” he said,
although he made no move to fasten his own. I drove carefully out toward the east side of town through the winding hills populated by apple orchards and vineyards. “ ‘Atta girl.” My dad had a habit of offering commentary when none was necessary.

The sun was close to setting; tall spruce trees cast long shadows across the windshield. The world was lit in a pink glow, making the trees, grass, and gravel shoulders seem antique. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to turn on the headlights,” he said, “just so they know you’re coming, not going. I don’t think your mother would appreciate a car accident on her ceramics night.”

It didn’t seem like a statement that required a response, and I was focused on the Bronco heading toward us on the narrow road. “What d’ya say, Jean? Is ceramics class worth all the planning?”

“I don’t know.”

I had been to one ceramics class with my mom and Lisa, but it was embarrassing. The ladies sat around painting planters and talking about how their kids each seemed to have a marvellous talent. Finally, my mother piped up, sounding so chipper you would have thought she was doing a laundry detergent commercial, “Well, I’m perfectly happy with my thoroughly average daughter. Aren’t I, Jeannie?”

“I guess so,” I had said. Mom couldn’t believe it when I said I didn’t want to go back the next week.

“Well, your mother remains a mystery to me. Hang a right here.” He tapped on his window. “Of course, mystery is what keeps a marriage fresh.” He stifled a small burp. “Let’s get in some parking practise before we lose the light.”

We were on a street of front driveways that safely stored cars for the night; only one turquoise sedan remained on the
road in front of a faded yellow-and-white, ranch-style house. “Just pull up beside it and park.”

When I stopped the car, he took the last swig of his beer and stepped out of the car. “Hang on.” He took several giant steps away from the car and then set his beer bottle down on the shoulder. He placed a big rock beside the bottle and ran back to the car. For a second I saw what kind of kid my dad had been.

When he climbed back into the car he was old again. He grabbed another beer from under the seat and popped the cap. “Now, I’m going to get you to do like you’re parallel parking, only instead of another car, it’s a beer bottle.”

“It’s kind of hard to see in this light.”

“Welcome to my world, sweetheart.” He swallowed the beer in large gulps. “What you really want to do is to get a feel for backing into a spot. And you have to move slowly. Don’t let other cars get you all excited. Parallel parking is an art. It demands assurance and attention, like most things worth doing.

“Now, when you pull up beside the car you’re parking behind, you want to give it a little space. If you get too close, there’s bound to be a collision; if you’re too far away, you’re just going to lose the whole damn thing. You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“So you line up your steering wheel with the car beside you – just pull up a little. And you want to be about three feet away.”

I aligned the car.

“Good. Now back up. Slowly. And crank it.”

I started to turn the wheel.

“But not too soon. Wait until you can see her bumper through the passenger window. And then you want to get about a forty-five-degree angle to work your way in. She’s all about how you approach her. Nice and easy does it.”

I worked my way into the imaginary space cut off by the empty bottle of Pilsner. I straightened the wheels and backed into the curb, which was also imaginary – the properties on the east side were separated from the road by gravel and shallow ditches. I heard glass crackling under tires and stopped the car. Dad scratched his ear. “Well, that can’t be good.”

He stepped out to assess the damage. “Pull forward,” he called. I inched the car ahead. Through the rearview mirror I saw him bend over and then stand up again and kick at the gravel, sending the pieces of brown glass into the ditch. Then he turned the bottle he was drinking from upside down, letting the last few sips dribble onto the road. He dropped the empty bottle into the ditch, opened the door, and slid back into his seat. “It doesn’t look like there’s any damage to the tire, but let’s get a move on; I don’t suppose the folks around here are going to appreciate us littering on their turf.”

I drove back down toward the centre of town while Dad nursed his third beer. He didn’t like to bring mixed drinks into the car; they spilled too easily. I cranked up the radio but he didn’t complain. I guess he had nothing to say. The sun had set and the sky was darkening; I saw my father’s face reflected in the glass. I was trying to picture him as a teenager, combing Brylcreem through his hair and chasing after my mom. It was kind of creepy, actually, to think of my parents as young teeny-boppers, before she was cranky and he was a salesman.