The Journey Prize Stories 24 (18 page)

Uncle Lorne called for me again and this time I straggled up Jubilee Road where he was smoking a cigarette. He allowed himself one cigarette after the papers had been delivered. He put out the cigarette on an old and furrowed telephone pole, leaving the filter inside a vertical crevice, and exhaled, his chin bobbing in time to some percussion heard in his head. Uncle Lorne had many internal rhythms whose patterns would remain somewhat mysterious to me, just as he seemed someone whose personality might remain fundamentally unknowable. “Kink-man,” he said, using a family nickname. “Ready to race?”

A note of personal history: seventeen months before I had been cut out of hip-to-toe casts, discharged from the Children’s Hospital, and told that I could walk again. So I had spent a few years of my childhood either in a wheelchair or on crutches and was only now, at the age of ten, recovering full motion and strength in my left hip, a joint distorted by something called Legg-Perthes disease. Naturally this conflicted with my desires to be the World’s Best Athlete because my limp and shortened left leg gave to my walk a crooked, hop-along quality – an extraneous feature, I liked to imagine, that disappeared in the madness of an open sprint. Although I found it tiring to sustain longer efforts, Uncle Lorne had devised a system whereby the distance we ran was increased each Wednesday by twenty sidewalk squares. We had started close – South Street and Tower Road in February – and were now advanced almost to Robie and Jubilee. I was given a head start of sixty resting heartbeats – Uncle Lorne holding two fingers to his throat to count the pulses – then he would spring after me.

Taking off my shirt and tying the sleeves around my waist, as I had seen some older boys do on the Dalhousie campus, I said I was ready. Uncle Lorne inspected the winter pallor of my stomach. “Whew,” he said. “
Fish belly!
Fish belly on the old grub.” He spoke as if this were a joke already established between us. “Fish Belly Grub. Grub-a-dub-dub. Race with the Grub.” It was one of his recreations to explore the associations of words – which he sometimes pronounced in confusing and menacing variations. But I took his meaning as only teasing, tightened my laces, and crashed off, propelling myself down the sidewalk beside the Camp Hill cemetery. I took the corner on South Street at top speed, losing my balance and dispersing my wild centripetal motion by straying into the street itself. As I sped past the Children’s Hospital, I heard a commotion somewhere behind me – a rush of sound that was my uncle closing the gap between us. Slinging myself around a stop sign for extra momentum, I met Tower Road with out-of-control, berserker ferocity. I knew, like the grown-up Robin of Earth-Two, that there were do-or-die moments when you simply had to prove yourself. Seeing our house, and sensing a win for the first time, I flashed a giddy look behind me – only to allow Uncle Lorne, on the other side, to dash up the steps of the front porch and, as he always did, touch the door latch, signalling the end of our contest and his victory. I protested if only I
hadn’t
looked over my shoulder, losing precious split-seconds, this time I could have won, would’ve won,
should’ve
won. Uncle Lorne bobbed his head again, noncommittal, and mentioned that he thought I had run my best race so far. He pushed opened our front door and paused in the evening air. I was just noticing a viral spread of pimples on his chin when he
said quietly, “Run your own race, Grub. Run your own race.” With that semicryptic koan, he vanished inside to his basement bunker, and I wandered happily into the kitchen. This was a time before microwaves, when the warm-up of a dinner was achieved through the sorcery of a double boiler – which meant leaving a plate of dinner (in this case, a pork chop, mashed potatoes, and carrots sliced with a serrated cutter) on a pot of simmering water. There were two plates tonight, and I saw it as a sign of my rapidly advancing maturity that I had been so singled out. As I touched the dinner plate with the tip of a quilted oven mitt, a song began on the kitchen clock radio that Mom used to check her approaching rehearsal times. I didn’t really know what radio songs were, or that playlists turned over, that the song you heard one summer might be gone the next. But “Band on the Run” was around that year, in the way a new neighbourhood kid might be, or in the way you might notice a surplus of ladybugs on a bathroom window one afternoon. I had heard the song before but it perplexed me because the opening was filled with so many different progressions, each sounding like a different song, that I often confused it with other offerings on the radio. But as I identified it for the first time, my continued contact with the warmed plate touched off a number of attendant details in and out of the kitchen. The windows were beginning to lose their evening light. The floaty purple fragrance of lilac blossoms was unmistakable in the backyard. The kitchen cupboards, painted turquoise, showed signs of blue where the turquoise paint had been chipped – and so my response to the song seemed turquoise-blue with an after-sense of lilac, and when a crescendo of horns faded to allow for the strumming of an acoustic guitar, alternating
between the chords of C and F-major 7, the song seemed finally to become itself. In a moment of autistic dreaminess, I stood unmoving at the stove, fixed between these two chords, and it was only when the singer sang about rain exploding with a mighty crash was I released from my abstraction – and a multitude of synesthesial meaning exploded for me, moments at once emotional, sensory, and intuitive, and as they shimmered and gathered and burst again I realized it was the happiest I’ve been without knowing particularly why I was happy, and this song seemed to be a part of it, and not just accompanying it, but activating it, coordinating the mood and circumstance and manifold instant. “Band on the Run” on June 20 was a strangely overwhelming solace for me and it has been ever after linked with the events of that summer, and the possibilities of that year, and though many of the proceedings turned out horribly, I am still grateful to the song for what it engendered in my imagination – for it conveyed a sense of precarious possibilities gorgeously arranged and met and fulfilled.

Uncle Lorne’s door was closed when I went into the basement – an obsolete coal room had been done over as his bedroom – so I continued into the rec room, a recently drywalled creation beside the furnace room and home to rainbow-coloured wall-to-wall carpet, a folded-up Ping-Pong table, Nanny and Dompa’s deteriorating wicker cottage furniture, and a Sony Trinitron television on a rickety stand. I turned on the TV and stood spinning the channel selector, alert to the probable appearance of
The Six Million Dollar Man
. As I noticed a familiar and quite above-average episode of
Bewitched –
the story where Cousin Serena forces a song on Tommy Boyce and
Bobby Hart – I became aware of some indications I was not the first to set foot in the room. On the carpet, beside a wicker armchair, was an unopened can of Fresca, a bag of Lik-m-aid Fun Dip, and an SX-70 Polaroid camera, a recent Christmas present to my oldest sister, Carolyn. Not that it would be Carolyn who would leave such a gift unattended in the basement – it was, of course, Bonnie, my older, contiguous sister and long-standing nemesis within the family. With the arrival in the house of this gizmo, Bonnie had taken to photographing assorted personalities off the television screen at extremely inopportune moments. Where these photographs were idiotically hoarded I wasn’t sure – but lately a number of blurry, underexposed Polaroids of Björn Borg, The Partridge Family, and Tony DeFranco had been found behind the radiator in the upstairs bathroom. I have successfully kept my sisters’ specifics out of these narratives but a few words might be appropriate here. Bonnie, two years’ my senior, was principally in a lifelong, unwinnable competition with Carolyn, the first-born, who was and has been the perfect child – perfect manners, perfect marks, perfect hair – and thoughtful, serious, responsible, over-achieving. Bonnie, when she was alive, was domineering, tactical, and ultraimpulsive – a girl never slowed by an unexpressed thought. She stood now in the doorway of the basement rec room, holding a CorningWare bowl full of homemade popcorn, her head tilted to one side, looking at me with the smile that Tolerance gives to the Misguided. “Uh, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Watching
The Six Million Dollar Man
.”

“Uh, no, you’re not. Because did you say ‘reserve?’ Were you sitting down and did you say ‘reserve?’ ” Bonnie quickly
touched her tailbone to the wall, repeated this code word, and straightened up again. “Because if you weren’t and you didn’t then we’re watching what we want to watch. Plus I was here first and you’re out-voted, so tough titty.”

My two younger sisters now materialized in the area behind Bonnie. They were clad in worn and matching flannelette nighties and each held in her hands a cereal bowl of popcorn – the effect was rather like two novice members of the junior choir advancing with opened hymnaries.

“What’re you guys watching?” I asked, stalling, not prepared to walk away from the television.

Bonnie explained they had been planning all week to watch a movie called
The Parent Trap
. I had not heard of this plan. I was offended by this plan. And I refused to believe I’d been consulted about this plan. What was this movie even about?

Uncle Lorne came out of his room to investigate the crowd in the newly boisterous rec room. “What is
what
movie about?” he asked.

“
The Parent Trap
.”

Uncle Lorne looked to the ceiling, as if to properly assemble his thoughts. “It’s about these kids.” He glanced at Bonnie for verification. “Twin sisters, right? And one night they’re waiting for their parents to come home and then – Grub, do you know what gelignite bullets are?”

I said I didn’t.

“Plastic explosives used primarily in automatic weapons where –”

“That’s
not
the movie, Uncle Lorne,” said Bonnie with maximum indifference. She was now pointing at her stash of junk food, ready to launch into a further defense of her viewing
rights, when from upstairs we heard Mom and Dad come in the front door, their shoe-steps resounding over our heads. All of us, through acquired habit, wordlessly decoded the noises above for signals of disposition, humour, inclination.

“Mom’s drunk, you guys,” concluded Katie, my youngest sister, with casual nonchalance, nibbling a single piece of popcorn. “Bet you any money.”

Our mother, as it would turn out, was not yet drunk. She and our father had been at a party celebrating the opening night of a play,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the gathering held across the street in the rented rooms of some new friends, Mr. and Mrs. Abbot – although my sister Bonnie maintained these two were not formally married. When first informed on this point, I wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Abbot were perhaps a gypsy duo who assumed diverse identities and travelled the countryside, defrauding townspeople out of their children. But the Abbots, it turned out, were not gypsies or con-men. They were something else altogether as exotic: they were draft-dodgers, expatriate Americans from Wheeling, West Virginia, who had driven to Nova Scotia on a Honda 450 motorcycle in the summer of 1968. They lived first in an unheated commune in the Annapolis Valley, on the other side of West Paradise, but came to Halifax two years later when their two daughters reached school age. These two daughters, September Dawn and Jessamine, were fourteen months apart in age and inexplicably identical to me. Both wore tie-dyed shirts and homemade pants with no pockets. Both had blonde hair down to their waists. Their hair was sometimes held back in pinched thickets by glass-baubled elastics, but September Dawn, and especially Jessamine, did not care for these elastics and often the
girls ran around with hair loose and unfastened – so encountering them in a neighbourhood game of hide-and-go-seek was like coming face-to-face with a feral child who had been lost some months in the black mountain hills of Dakota. The Abbot household had a somewhat lax philosophy toward personal upkeep, and one or the other girl was always scratching a sty out of an eyelash or separating a scab from a kneecap. Since arriving in Halifax, Mr. Abbot had secured a situation as the stage carpenter for Neptune Theatre. Mrs. Abbot had some undefined connection with a new organization called the Ecology Action Centre. She was also a folk artist of some commitment. She worked mostly in macramé, collage, and silkscreen. Because my father had done some pro bono legal work for the Abbots regarding their immigration, our family had been the recipient of two silk-screened prints – and, as we kids trooped up the stairs from the basement, I saw my father was now in possession of a third, a sort of lacquered beige silhouette of three ponies in a salt marsh.

“Jesus, Mackie,” he said to my mother, shaking his head. “Where are we going to
put
this goddamn thing?”

My mother, who this evening was wearing a lime-and-purple-print dress – what my sister Carolyn called the Jo Anne Worley dress – pulled open the refrigerator and reached for a bottle of Blue Nun wine before saying, “Your father made us leave the party early. Like anything’s new.”

My father put the silk-screen print down on the kitchen table and made a slight tip of his head, his eyebrows contracting in bemused concentration. It was a familiar gesture which meant he was wondering whether or not he should imply his real reaction – which was, in this case, that he considered the
party overrun with dubious people and dubious practices – or simply forgo any response at all.

“Because,” continued my mother. “This one couple was passing around a marijuana cigarette. As soon as your father saw that, we were out of there.”

“Well,” said my father. “How’s that going to look? It happens to be against the law.”

“Loosen up. Their friends were very nice. When in Rome –”

“Okay, Titania. That’s plenty, thank you. Time to get these kiddles to bed.” He pointed at my youngest sister. “You? Bed. Now. And I mean it, Ditsy.”

My mother grabbed a plastic juice glass from the dishwasher and poured herself four fingers of white wine. “They’re anti-war, you know, these people. Flower children. They think anything’s possible. The wife’s a women’s libber. Vivien. But very sweet. Him? I’m not so sure. Wes is the saintly type. Wants to do good. Like build a barn for mentally retarded kids in New Brunswick.” She tossed back half the wine. “Sure, why not? But what are they going to do with a
barn –
shear sheep? Honest to God. Be careful of these so-called saints, children. Believe me, people who act like saints – a lot of so-called saints are trouble. They’re living in a dream world. Telling people what they don’t want to hear in the first place. And the more Wes is doing good for some retarded kid, the more he’s neglecting his own family, you watch.”