The Monkeyface Chronicles (29 page)

I follow my body back into the house and in through the smashed front door, which swings gently on one unbroken hinge. The firemen have their backs to me as they re-soak all the scorched surfaces with water. I slip behind them, through the haze-filled living room, and climb the stairs to Michael's bedroom. My hands pull open the top drawer of his dresser and remove the watch our grandfather gave him for his thirteenth birthday. The watch slips into the front pocket of my jeans with the jackknife I was given on the same day.

As I descend the stairs, it no longer feels like my feet are carrying me, it's more like the steps are bringing themselves to my feet. The basement steps do the same thing.

The table that displayed my father's model airplanes has been knocked over, and it's like the aftermath of an airfield bombing. The huge, four-engined balsa wood 747 that Michael and I were supposed to fly on our tenth birthday has been crippled. Its five-foot wings are snapped off, its long, cylindrical body trampled into wood chips.

The battering ram used by the Tabernacle men lies on the floor, in front of what used to be the wall of my father's secret laboratory. Only the thick metal door and the far edges of the wall remain standing; the rest has been reduced to a pile of half-width cinder blocks and concrete dust. The barrier between my father's secret work and the outside world was not as strong as I'd believed it to be.

How to make sense of what I see behind the toppled wall? It is so different from what I
expected
to see. Other than a computer on a small desk in one corner, there is not one piece of scientific equipment anywhere. There are no machines with wires or dials or tubing, no jars neatly labeled with the multi-syllabic names of chemicals, no chalkboards scribbled over with complicated formulae and equations. There is not a single Petri dish, nor a Bunsen burner nor a flask nor a test tube in sight.

My mind is drifting far away now, tethered to my body by only the slightest thread. My senses send everything up, and I just stand here, stupefied, until my airborne mind finally sends this back:
Your father is not a scientist.

In the corner opposite the computer desk is a richly upholstered backless sofa, and a large, Persian-style rug. There are a few umbrella lights similar to the ones I saw at Dennis' place in Toronto. The rest of the space is filled with the tools of an artist: easels, palettes, tubes of oil paint, charcoal sticks, and canvases, some clean and new, some lightly sketched with charcoal outlines, some partially finished paintings, and a few colourful completed works.

Your father is not a scientist. He's an artist. A painter.

Thanks, brain.

I think of the noxious fumes emitted by the ventilation grids outside the lab, how I had always assumed that the smell was from some nefarious combination of chemical compounds. Now I know it was the scent of oil paints, of
Charcoal Black
, of
Burnt Ochre
.

And something else. While the colour, composition, and style varies from painting to painting, every canvas depicts a naked adult male.

That time Dennis and I hid away in the basement when our father brought downstairs one of his “Scientific colleagues,” the man had called our father “Lanny.” Nobody calls our father “Lanny.” He had pointed to the old painting hanging near the water heater, which had won my father a prize in high school.
“The Centurion.” “From a long time ago,”
Dad said.
“I'm on to
bigger and better things now.”

“
Let's go talk about those bigger and better things.”

All this stimuli is transmitted, but my circuits are on the verge of overload now. Mind sends back a simple message:
Get
out of here. Get out. Go. Go now.

I run from the house, away from the flashing red lights, down the hill, past the parked police car with Candace Brown locked in the back, past the Tabernacle of God's Will, onto Faireville Street and straight ahead. My mind flies high above me, hurtling through space, refusing to think about any of it.

It's quiet outside Faireville General Hospital, and the Emergency Room doors make a whooshing sound as they slide open. In the brightly lit, antiseptic-smelling space, I look left and right for my mother and grandfather. The nurse in the robin's-egg blue uniform sits behind the admitting desk. “Came back to get those knuckles looked at, eh?” she says.

The signals are scrambled, the images blurred and fuzzy, the sounds garbled. I'm stopped in the middle of the Emergency Room waiting area. Someone has hold of me. Her face is buried in my chest, her arms wrapped around me tightly. “Philip!” she cries, looking up at me, “they won't let me see him!” She pushes her red hair out of her face, which is wet and cobwebbed with black mascara streaks. Her green eyes are bloodshot and glassy. “Why won't anyone tell me anything?”

It's Caitlin Black. She feels small and brittle between my hands, about to crumble.

“He's going to be okay, Caitlin,” I lie to her. “Everything is going to be all right.”

She pushes her face against my chest and sobs. I put one arm around her shoulders, and stroke her hair. My hand resembles the site of a fresh volcanic eruption, fluid red tributaries between the cracks in the purple scabs. I try not to get blood in Caitlin's hair.

“I love him so much,” she cries, “I love him so much.”

“He loves you, too, Caitlin,” I tell her, “more than anything.” I hope that this isn't also a lie, but I really don't know.

“I love him so much,” she sings to herself, like a lullaby, “I love him so much.”

Whatever has happened in the past, I cannot make myself hate her any more. Caitlin really does love Michael. The front of my shirt is soaked with her tears.

The nurse from the admitting desk is now standing beside me. The plastic tag on her uniform tells me her name is Jenny. She wraps a yellow blanket around Caitlin's shoulders. “You need to rest, sweetie.” And walks her over to a waiting room chair.

I ask the nurse, “Do you know where my mother and grandfather are?”

“Your mother went to St. Thaddeus' to pray for your brother,” she tells me. “Your grandfather was disturbing everyone in the waiting room bickering with this other guy, so I sent them to the Men's Room to settle it there.”

“Other guy?”

“Some overfed blowhard in a three-piece suit,” Nurse Jenny says.

I hear myself telling Caitlin that I'll be right back. I follow my body through the Men's Room door, where I find my grandfather standing face-to-face with His Worship Clarence Brush, mayor of Faireville. My body rushes at my former elementary school principal, fists raised, but my grandfather grabs my wrists, holds me back.

“See what I mean, Vernon?” Mayor Brush says to my grandfather. “In court, your family would be finished.”

“Mayor Brush has offered us a deal,” my grandfather says. “If we will agree not to charge his sons for the . . . ” he pauses to clear his throat, “ . . . injuries sustained by Michael, he will refrain from pressing charges against
you
.”

“Charges against
me
?”

Mayor Brush leans toward me, squints into my face, and says, “My boys, Graham and Grant, have already given statements to the police — voluntarily, I might add. They only wanted to give your brother a slap on the back for his timely goal. They didn't realize that Michael had been hurt.”

“Bullshit! They hit him from behind!”

“Oh, no, no, no, no, no,” Mr. Brush says, shaking his fat head fiercely, “They did no such thing. Are you blind or crazy? Both my boys were mortified to discover that Michael had been hurt. They're at home right now, praying for his full and speedy recovery.”

“They'd better be praying for their own safety,” I say.

“Is that a
threat
, you fucking freak?” Brush snarls, poking me hard in the chest. “Your grandfather likes making
threats
, too. When I came into the hospital a few moments ago to check on the condition of your poor brother, your grandfather publicly accused my boys of intentionally hurting your brother, and threatened to file criminal charges. Well, you Skylers should think twice before threatening any of us Brushes.” He reaches up and loosens his striped necktie. “The injuries to your brother, sad as they are, were quite accidental, and it was quite obvious to everyone in the arena that your subsequent attack on my sons was premeditated and malicious. You broke Graham's nose. Grant's missing three teeth. And, if we were to pull your elementary school records, we would find documentation showing that you engaged in a previous unprovoked attack on my boys.”

“What?” I hear myself shout. I can't free my hands to punch the smug son of a bitch, so I spit in his face.

Mr. Brush pulls a tissue from the breast pocket of his pinstriped suit and wipes the gob from the end of his bulbous nose. “Vernon,” he says, glowering, “I've got to do something now, and if you try to stop me, the deal is off. You understand?”

My grandfather says nothing, but tightens his grip around my wrists. The honourable mayor pulls back his fist and punches me in the face, right in the middle of my cleft lip.

“Gawd!” Brush cheers, shaking his fist loosely in the air. “I've been wanting to do
that
for a long time now, you monster-faced little fucker!”

The bitter taste of blood fills my mouth. I turn and spit into the nearest sink.

“I'm sorry I had to do that, Philip,” Brush says, slipping back into his dignified Public Official persona, “but if you spit in the face of a Brush, you're gonna get a fist back in your face. We're a family of fighters. We're a family of winners.”

Mayor Brush shakes his jowly face, then wanders over to the bank of urinals. He unzips his fly and sprays the porcelain.

“Luckily for you and your family,” he says, “I am a fair and reasonable man. To keep the good names of my sons unsullied, I have agreed not to press charges against you, in exchange for your grandfather's assurance that my sons will not be pestered, legally or otherwise.”

He shakes himself off, zips the fly of his pinstriped suit pants, and his shiny black shoes clip-clop across the floor tiles as he heads for the door. He says to my grandfather, “A pleasure working with you again, Vernon.”

I struggle to free myself, but my grandfather maintains his hold on me.

“Y'know,” Mayor Brush says, “the other kids were being
kind
when they called you Monkeyface — I've never seen a monkey as ugly as you.”

“That's enough, Clarence,” my grandfather snaps.

“I'll decide when it's enough,” Mr. Brush says. And, with that, he walks out of the washroom and my grandfather finally lets go of my wrists.

“Good deal,
Grandpa
!” I say, in the same sarcastic way that Dennis would. “Well negotiated, sir! You'll be running this town again before you know it.”

“Philip,” he pleads, his palms turned upward like a beggar, “it was the only choice! It was the lesser of two evils.”

“Here's one for you, Captain Quote:
‘Constantly choosing
the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.'
”

“Philip,” he says. “There was nothing else I could do. There is too much at stake. Please listen . . . ”

But I can't listen anymore. I'm too far out of range to comprehend or believe anything. I can't think, I can't rationalize, I can't justify. My nerve endings register the pain as I stuff my shredded knuckles into the front pocket of my jeans, but I'm too far away to receive much of the signal. I drop Michael's pocket watch and my jackknife into my grandfather's open hands and turn and walk into the Emergency Room waiting area.

Caitlin Black is huddled in a corner on a plastic chair. She stands up, and the yellow hospital blanket falls from her shoulders. “Your lip,” she says. “What happened?'

“I'm a bit out of it. It doesn't hurt too much.”

Caitlin pulls a Kleenex from her purse, and reaches to dab the blood away.

“I'm going to go pray for Michael with my mother,” I tell her. “You can come with me if you want to.”

“I want to,” she says.

The sliding door closes behind us, and Caitlin gently takes my throbbing, torn hand in hers, carefully to placing her fingers where the skin is unbroken.

“Michael will be okay, Philip,” she beautifully lies, “everything will be better soon.”

“Hey,” Nurse Jenny calls out to me from behind the admitting desk as we walk through the exit doors, “you still need to get those hands looked at. They'll get infected. And what happened to your face?”

“Born this way,” I say.