The Journey Prize Stories 24 (17 page)

“He’s got twelve cats,” Dad said.

“What?”

“Old Harry Truman. He’s got twelve cats. How do you get twelve cats off a mountain like that?”

“You could probably use cages.”

“Well, sure. But cats are funny. They don’t like change.”

“It’s better than dying.”

“No one knows for sure what’s going to happen on that mountain. Harry’s guess is as good as anybody’s. Turn left at Lakeshore.” He emptied the beer bottle and let it drop to the floor. “He’s quite the guy.”

“Do you remember our old cat?” he asked.

“Funny you should ask,” I said.

“How so?”

“I just did a sketch of her in art class.” I didn’t really remember much about her, except her name and that she was black with a white belly. I drew Sugar as I imagined she’d be now, old and sleeping on the end of my bed. A cat’s a nice thing to have around; they’re quiet and warm and never pretend to be anything but what they are.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

I drove us home, past the elementary school, past the grazing cows, hung a right, and pulled into the carport. The German’s squeaky white dog threw himself against their front window, yapping away. “Somebody should put that dog out of its misery,” Dad muttered as we made our way to the front door.

“I’m going to bed,” I told him.

“Isn’t it early?”

“I’m tired. And I have to finish reading
Macbeth
for tomorrow.”

“Now Macbeth is a guy who could’ve learned a thing or two about loyalty.” We both made our way into the kitchen, Dad to make another bourbon and coke, me to grab a stack of crackers and a glass of milk to take to my room. “Well, I’ll be on the deck,” he said. I watched him walk onto the deck in his shirtsleeves with a cigarette burning in one hand and a drink in the other. He pushed a lawn chair against the outside wall of the house and sat down. He didn’t turn on a light; he just sat in the dark, knocking the ice around in his glass. When I grabbed a glass of water a few hours later, he was still on the deck in the dark with a drink in his hand, watching Lisa’s house.

The next morning, Dad barely spoke a word as we made our way out of the house. I chalked it up to a hangover, but in the evening he continued to be silent; he ate dinner, he watched the news for the reports about Mount St. Helens, he drank another bourbon and coke, or three, but the only time he spoke was to thank my mother for the tuna casserole. Mom, on the other hand, chatted endlessly about nothing. His silence perked her right up. At dinner she asked me about my day at school. She clucked her tongue over the news and said, “Can you imagine? An active volcano this far north?” She didn’t wait for either of us to answer before she launched into a commentary about that crazy old man with a death wish and how it was going to end up costing good money to get him out, just you wait and see. Dad stood up and left the room, so she suggested we go to Orchard Park Mall to get new summer clothes on the weekend.

My father stayed quiet for the rest of the week. Mom responded with uncharacteristic chattiness – like they had switched bodies in some kind of supernatural mishap. I stuck to my room, which neither of them seemed to notice. And each
night, after the evening news and the reports about the mountain, Dad would knock on my door with a box of beer under his arm and we would head out for a driving lesson. He would crack the first beer as we began and make his way through half the case during a lesson, carrying on conversation like there was nothing unusual going on except the geological surprise of Mount St. Helen’s waking up.

When we returned home, Mom would be sitting on the front steps with Lisa, smoking and laughing. My dad would snort and head right to the basement, and my mom and Lisa would be all over me, commenting so loudly that I was forced to hurry inside.

They liked to exclaim, “Oooh, there’s a sexy young driver!” Or, “There’s no controlling her once she’s driving, Eddie!” As if he ever tried to control me. I can’t even begin to guess why they thought they were funny.

On Saturday, my dad and I made a long drive through the valley. Mount St. Helen’s had stopped spewing steam and smoke and Dad was pretty dejected about the whole thing. “Well, it’s good for Harry, but I was hoping for more of a show. How about we go to Vernon for lunch? I could stand a drink.” He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. “Maybe she decided to settle down.”

“Who?”

“The volcano. Maybe she’s calming down for the old man.”

“Oh,” I said. Not that he was making any sense.

“I love this time of year.” He unrolled the window to release the smoke. “Before everything heats up.”

“Whatever happened to Sugar?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Our cat.”

“Your mother was allergic.”

“She was?”

“Well, she had no time for cats. She said she had her hands full with you and your brother.”

“I thought Sugar ran away. Or died.”

“Probably.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and then let the smoke out in a sigh. “I loved that little bugger.”

“What happened to her?”

“Oh, I don’t know, honey.” He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable I guess. “Your mother took her for a drive.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know, desperate times take desperate measures.”

“We were desperate?”

“Your mother was.”

“Jesus, Dad.”

“No one’s happy if Mommy’s not happy.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

He looked at me, surprised, and then began to sing, “I’ll be with you in apple blossom time. I’ll be with you to change your name to mine. One day in May I’ll come to say happy surprise that the sun shines on today.”

So Mom got rid of our cat. I wanted to ask how, but Dad was tripping out to old music and generally weirder than usual, and the drive to Vernon is scary and twisty, so I turned my attention to the road and left him to his song and the blooming fruit trees.

When we got home, Mom was gone. She’d left a package of wieners and a can of beans on the counter. “Jesus. Bloody wieners and beans?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m going out to meet up with Tina and Shelley anyway.” We had plans to drop in on a party of grade twelvers that Tina’s brother had told her about.

“I want you in by 11:30.” He seemed mad.

“Okay.”

“I’m going out for a drink.”

When I left at seven, neither of my parents was home. I poured a third of my dad’s bourbon and a third of his vodka into a jar, topped it off with coke, and headed out to meet the girls. When I got home at 12:15, the house was still empty. Not that I cared; I was drunk enough to want to get right into bed. This gorgeous guy named Paolo had flirted with me all night. I know he wanted me because he gave me one of his Colt cigars. I’d never heard of a guy named Paolo before; he was from the west side but came with his cousin Rick, who went to my school and who was nothing to shake a stick at, either. Anyway, my parents didn’t know I broke curfew and I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

I woke a few hours later to my mother yelling, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, Ed!” I rolled onto my back and tried to see my ceiling through the dark. I could hear my dad crying.

I wished I’d gotten drunker at the party.

There was some more muffled talking and crying and then I heard my mom again, “There’s nothing you can do. I love her.”

I hated it when they fought over me.

“And I was happy for you,” my dad’s voice rose sharply, “because you finally found a friend.”

It took a few minutes for that to sink in. My mom was in love with Lisa? And then my dad was crying like a baby again.

“Are you ready?” Lisa must have come in through the back.

“Go to hell!” he cried. “The both of you.” Then I heard the back door close and my dad pacing the kitchen, clapping his hands, I think. I wasn’t going to touch that with a ten-foot pole, so I turned my face toward the wall and willed sleep to come through my dad’s blubbering and the totally embarrassing idea of my mom making out with Lisa. Knowing my mom, she was going to make a spectacle of it, turn it into some kind of show for the cop and the Germans, and the next thing you know, it would be all over the school.

I guess I fell asleep around the time the sun was coming up, because when I opened my eyes it was 12:30 in the afternoon. My dad way lying on the couch, watching the television. “Old Harry’s dead,” he told me.

“What?”

“The mountain blew to smithereens. There’s no way he made it out. Not him, not the cats.”

“Oh.”

“And your mother moved out.”

“I heard.”

“Well, I guess that saves me trying to explain it.”

“I guess so.”

“Not that I understand it.” He squeezed his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Not that I understand it at all.”

“Can you drive me to Tina’s?”

I probably should have stayed home with my dad, but I felt sick to my stomach from the liquor, or the cigar, or my mom, and if I stayed in that house I think I would have screamed my head off. That night I figured it would be best if I slept at Tina’s, I don’t know, in case they wanted to fight it out a little more. It was too weird to sleep at our place.

Monday morning I woke to a thin dusting of ash over cars and a hazy sky. Our biology teacher, Miss Franklin, was breathless with excitement over the size of the blast as we mapped the progress of destruction. How everyone could see the explosion coming but how no one really guessed it would be so huge.

After school, I slowly made my way home, not sure what I’d find, but there was my dad, sitting in Mom’s favourite chair with a grey tabby kitten in his lap. “I’ve named her Truman,” he said as he passed the kitten to me.

“She’s cute.”

“Well,” he stood up, “I need a drink. There’s some sweet and sour chicken balls in the oven, if you’re hungry.”

“Thanks.” I stuck my face into the cat’s baby sweetness.

“I’m sorry.” He put his hand on the top of my head.

I kept my face buried in Truman’s back like I didn’t hear him.

I
was four years old when Uncle Lorne came to live with us. He was my mother’s younger brother by twenty-two winters, a mistake of uncertain paternity according to my sisters, and he joined our household when his own was in freefall. “Nanny and Dompa are drunk all the time is why,” explained my sister Bonnie. “That’s why he’s like that.” Nanny and Dompa, living in Montreal, were moving into some marital hurly-burly during this time, so it was decided, mostly by my father, that twelve-year-old Uncle Lorne would benefit from the relatively steadier environment of our house in Halifax. I was eager to have such company for in my house I was surrounded by women – my significant mother as well as two sisters above and two below. Uncle Lorne was a singular, decidedly non-feminine addition to our house. He arrived with hobbies fully formed, with habits and rules and secret disciplines. He made models of Iroquois helicopters, completed abstract jigsaw puzzles, and, in an amazing display of homemade engineering, constructed a lunar docking station for our
Major Matt Mason action figures from the parts of a rotary phone, a discarded bicycle tube, and a Fram oil filter. He showed me how to draw propellers and Gatling guns and Batman’s cowl – an image I am still known to improvise on unopened letters from Revenue Canada. Uncle Lorne owned more than a thousand comic books, which he kept in boxes under his bed. Each purchase was thoughtfully registered by title and number and condition on blue graph paper inside a mauve Duo-Tang folder. Though he followed many comics, he was closing in on complete runs of
The Justice League of America
and
The Brave and the Bold
, back issues of which he acquired from a mail-order concern in Passaic, New Jersey. This endeavour, among others, was funded by delivering
The Mail-Star
, the city’s afternoon broadsheet. Uncle Lorne had a route of 163 newspapers, an ambitious amalgam of three existing smaller routes, and on Wednesdays, when the paper swelled with advertising flyers from Sobeys and the IGA (“Try new Beef Noodle Hamburger Helper!” “Two-for-one 1-2-3 Jell-O!”) I was pressed into service as sidekick and all-purpose lackey. The dropped-off newspapers came in bales held together by blue twine. In winter they were fearsome cuboid chunks of frozen newsprint. But the day I’m remembering was not winter. The day I’m remembering was one day away from true summer, a Wednesday in late June, one of the longest of the year. I was now ten, Uncle Lorne was eighteen, and the city was strangely warm, daylight endless, dragonflies soft-lifted on an incoming ocean wind. We were far afield. From the Wellington Street drop-off we had ranged to The Nova Scotian Hotel, back through the Dalhousie University campus, and were now tramping westerly on Jubilee Road. We were covering another
boy’s paper route – Chris Cody, one of Uncle Lorne’s intimates – and this added fifty-two papers to our travels. But even four hours into our overland explorations, I didn’t mind. This afternoon alone I had been shown a live seal in the Life Sciences aquatic tank at the university. I had been taught a new climbing technique called “chimneying.” And here at the bottom of Jubilee Road I saw that the street literally sank beneath the sea, the Northwest Arm flooding up the slope of a concrete boat ramp, the setting sun a thousand times refracted in its waves. Though I could hear my uncle calling for me above, I took a moment to imagine Aquaman under water beyond this boat ramp, spinning away from the shallows to some murky substratum of the North Atlantic, perhaps rising buoyant through sun-filtered depths, bursting to the surface to rendezvous with the Batboat, the two superheroes racing toward a far horizon. A few weeks before I had read a
Justice League
two-parter about a zombie called Solomon Grundy, a story that featured in a heroic role the grown-up Robin of Earth-Two, and in my mind I decided to place this fully formed Robin in the Batboat. I admired his blended costume, his motorcycle, and how he had assumed the mantle of crime-fighting when the Batman of his world had begun to dodder – because, to be honest, recently I’d been wondering if events might force me in a similar direction. Solomon Grundy had required a team-up between the Justice League of Earth-One and the Justice Society of Earth-Two, and the series had become my favourite team-up story ever. I keenly anticipated the next interworld issues, numbers 107 and 108, copies of which had been ordered from New Jersey for both Uncle Lorne and me. My copies would be considered paid in full if I did eight more Wednesdays on the paper route.