The Second Son (18 page)

“Huh?” I almost choked on my Popsicle stick. I had this picture in my mind of Elvis’s head on top of her father’s big round body. I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew her father was her big hero. She was always talking about how busy he was, what with running the town and all those businesses he had. But I wasn’t about to ask her if she wanted to marry someone who talked loud all the time and was always hacking and coughing from those cigars he smoked. “So,” I finally risked, “I guess you’ll want him to be a lot older than you?”

“Oh yes, older men are so much more mature, don’t you think?”

“I guess so.” I still cringe when I think how ready I was to humiliate myself. I should have walked away when she started talking like that, instead of pretending it made sense.

Her next question was a knife to my heart. “Your brother is really mature for his age, don’t you think?”

“Huh? Andrew?” I tried to look blank, as though I hadn’t heard about Andrew’s maturity a thousand times over.

“Of course, dummy. You’ve only got one brother, don’t you?”

“I told ya, don’t call me that.”

“Sorry,” she said, with enough sincerity to make me feel guilty for snapping at her.

“Anyway, Andrew’s only a year older than me.”

She smiled. “I know, only he
seems
older. I mean, he works at the store all the time, doesn’t he?”

It suddenly struck me how often we’d stopped at my dad’s store to buy gum or something on our daily walk back from swimming lessons. I winced at my stupidity. I had actually felt flattered when Dory winked at me and teased me for being with a girl. I tried to recover. “It’s no big deal. He only has to work ’cause business is so bad.” I immediately regretted spilling the beans about my father’s problems. I needn’t have worried.

“Oh, I know about that. My father says your father is mad at him for backing my Uncle George. You know, to open up the Allied store.”

“Huh?” This was news to me. I knew George McPhee was her uncle, and had pissed my father off by bringing Allied into town, but this stuff about her father was more than I wanted to know. I wondered for a brief second if that made me a traitor to the Landrys, then quickly forgot the question. Gail MacDonald in a bathing suit was welcome to my soul, any time she wanted it.

She didn’t seem to notice my consternation. “My dad says Allied’s lower prices are giving my uncle an advantage over all the other grocery stores in Glengarry, and there’s a recession, too. Do you know what a recession is?”

“Of course I do,” I answered, glad for a change of subject. “It just means nobody’s got any money. And the stores aren’t busy.”

She wasn’t really listening. “Everybody thinks Andrew is grown up for his age. And he’s cute, too.” Then she must have put her brain in gear because she let out with a little gasp and added, “You can’t tell him I said that.”

“Maybe I will,” I snapped back. If she had given me five seconds of serious thought she would have realized I wouldn’t have told Andrew that if my life depended on it.

She fell for my bluff and punched me on the arm again. Like a fool I took solace in that excuse for a touch. “Don’t you dare!” she exclaimed. “I’ll kill you. No guff.”

God, if only life could have stayed so simple. How many of those silly conversations did we have that first summer? How many silly, meaningless conversations does it take to paper over the gaping hole in your soul, that longing for someone of your own, someone to see only you? I’ve always wondered how much thought she really gave me. Was it obvious to her that I had a crush, or was she oblivious to my feelings? Was she teasing me with her questions about Andrew, or was she revealing, even then, a careless heart? I just know that I was drawn to her that summer, and all the days that followed. And I’m sure my feelings were there to be picked up, like any other vibration that nature produces.

Maybe that’s why those summer afternoons come back to me like they happened yesterday, the sensations burned in my brain by the hot afternoon sun — bones baking, skin tightening, the smell of goopy white Noxzema melting into brown young bodies, dry sand rasping over bare legs, scents of french fries and vinegar drifting by, gulls screeching over scraps, kids screaming in the water. And those change rooms back from the beach, with that musty odour of wet bathing suits and damp wooden benches, where I can hear my heart pounding at the thought of that ripening luscious other, just half an inch of plywood away, peeling off her bathing suit, bent naked in a cubicle on the girls’ side of the change room.

Every afternoon I would visualize her, shivering as she wiped herself dry with that big white towel her mother had given her, while I tried to work up the nerve to climb the rafters and find that peephole the older boys claimed to have drilled in the ceiling. I never did get up the nerve to try it. And I worried sometimes as I waited outside, that one look at my face would reveal my highly confessionable thoughts. Or maybe I was hoping she would slap my face and stomp away mad, because if she did guess at how smitten I was, she never let on.

Perhaps she sensed it was really just kid stuff. Although I longed to be close to her, I wouldn’t have known what to do if she had let me, not yet. Andrew would have. Hell, he already had hair on his groin. I wonder now if Gail knew, too, just what she wanted to do with a boy when she caught one. Just as I wonder if she knew exactly what she wanted from me, maybe revelling in the idea of getting to choose between two brothers, one of whom was older, more mature. Of course she couldn’t have known she was trifling with dynamite. Whatever thought she put into it, she made her choice pretty clear when we started back to school that fall.

All our lives Andrew and I had gone to school together. No matter what fights we had, what grudges we were nursing, they got interrupted for the walk to and from school. And in those days we walked home every day for lunch. I say walked, but by that time we were on bicycles, at least until the snow came. Then Gail moved in across the street. Like I said, Mrs. MacDonald had her own car, so she often gave Gail a ride. Picked her up for lunch, too. In other circumstances we might have hitched a ride with her, except the first time we told our parents she had offered us a lift they looked at each other kind of funny. Then my father told us, “The Landrys don’t need any favours from Don MacDonald.”

“But it’s Gail’s mom who — ”

“Never mind, Michel,” my mother interrupted, “your father’s got his reasons. Just say no thank you, nicely. Besides, you need the exercise.”

I knew she was serious. By that time she usually called me Mike, like everybody else, unless she was mad at me or something. Andrew didn’t catch on, though. He never noticed things like that. He was too busy figuring out some smart answer. “What about the winter?” he piped up. “It’ll be all right then, won’t it? I mean, if she asks, we can’t —”

“Goddammit,” my father slapped his hand down on the table, “didn’t you hear what I said?”

I was so busy enjoying the fact that Andrew was getting this rare taste of my father’s temper that I didn’t really pick up on the resentment of the MacDonalds. If I had paid more attention, I might have thought to listen at the grate that night and hear him talking with Mom about his beef with Don MacDonald. Apparently he had learned my father’s business was in trouble and offered to buy him out. It seems that’s how he ended up with his finger in so many pies in Glengarry. He had the money to buy up businesses like my father’s at bargain basement prices, then sell them later at a profit when times got better and people started spending again. It was a couple of years before I had reason to learn that, but the message from our parents was clear. We would not be taking charity from the MacDonalds.

The funny thing was, just a week later Gail started walking home with us after school. It took me a few days to figure out why. At first I thought it was pretty dumb, her walking and us on our bicycles, halfriding, half-walking, going a little ways, circling back, waiting for her, talking about all those useless things you can find to talk about when you’ve got a crush on someone. For two days I did most of the talking. Andrew just looked on, with that bemused grin he’d get when he had a secret I didn’t have a clue about. I thought he was waiting for us because Gail had thrown her binder in his basket when she met us outside after class. On Wednesday Andrew made the next move. He dumped her binder on the ground and said, “Carry your own books, MacDonald. You’re not a cripple.”

I jumped to pick them up, exalted that Andrew was taking himself out of the triangle. “I’ll take them,” I said, balancing the binder on my handlebars. “
I’m
not a jerk.” That’s how stupid I was. Then I noticed he didn’t ride on ahead like I thought he would. In fact, he walked his bike most of the way home, even talking to Gail about how much harder the work was in Grade 8 compared to what us little kids were doing in Grade 7. Like we didn’t know, sitting in the same room. The two of them kept talking to each other right up to the big hill on Dominion Street, where I got so fed up I decided to get her attention by racing down at full speed.

I don’t believe in fate, but some force was at work that afternoon in September. Halfway down the hill, with me leaning full tilt over my handlebars and the wind blowing my eyes wide open, the front wheel of my bike jumped out of the fork and took off on its own. When the empty fork hit the road I went straight over the top, through the air for about six feet, and slid another ten feet on the gravel. I lay there moaning and groaning, but alert enough to tell myself I would finally have Gail’s sympathy. I imagined her ministering to my many wounds, which were already starting to scream for attention. Then I heard them chattering away as they approached. At least my brother was concerned. “Holy Cow!” he called out. “What did you do, Mike?” That was the closest thing to affection I ever got from him.

Gail’s reaction was easier to read. “Jeez, Mike, my mother’ll kill me if that binder is wrecked.” She was more worried about her damn binder than the bloodied remains of my hands and knees.

Andrew noticed, though. “What a mess. You’re lucky you didn’t land on your face, lad.”

“Lad,” he called me. Lad! He was in Grade 8 and had a girl chasing after him and I was just a kid in Grade 7. I didn’t listen to much more of that crap. The pain was taking over and it was all I could do not to cry. I remember Andrew sent Gail to get my mother and she came and helped me limp home. Andrew went back and got my bike. And I guess Gail told her mother about my big accident because she came over and helped my mother pick the gravel and tar out of my skin and plaster me with some kind of special ointment she had. I was pretty sore the next day and got to miss school for the rest of the week.

Come Monday, my worst fears were realized. After school she threw her books in Andrew’s basket and he left them there. There were three of us on the walk home now, only there weren’t really three of us, if you know what I mean. I knew that for sure the next time I offered her one of my licorice twists. She had her hand out to take it when Andrew butted in with, “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you. He hardly ever washes his hands.”

She wrinkled her nose and drew her hand back. “Oooh, sorry,” she mumbled as she turned to catch up with Andrew. I think that was the first time I got that picture in my head, the one where I was standing off in the distance, looking with longing at someone that seemed separated from me by some invisible wall. It could be Gail in the frozen circle, it could be my mother, it could be the both of them, with Andrew. My position never changed. They were on the inside and I was on the outs, as they used to say in Glengarry.

Some people say every teenager has to develop a picture in his head of where he fits in the world. Well, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts my brother never pictured himself on the outside of any circle. If he was anywhere, he was inside, at the centre. And I’m pretty sure Gail started replacing my mother that fall, in the picture Andrew had in his head. I’m pretty sure he took for granted that she would put him first, just like his mother did. And that her love would come easy to him, just like his mother’s did. And it never dawned on me for a moment that this easy love of his might not be such a privilege after all. I was too busy being jealous.

It’s not that I think they got physical right off. It was just that they started acting like a couple — everything he said was so smart and everything I said was so dumb. Everything he wanted to do was so interesting and everything I wanted to do was so boring. It got so bad by October, when we had to start going to Benediction every night, that Andrew didn’t even bother taking his bicycle. It was like they had a damn date every night for Benediction. I tried to assert my existence by tagging along and being a general nuisance, but it didn’t matter. If they did notice me, it was only to confirm that I was being a pest.

By the middle of October I had given up, accepting my role as the second brother, firmly on the outside. I even started skipping Benediction and hanging out in front of the Hub, down by the mill square. In those days it was the best place to watch the comings and goings of Alexandria. I loved being out there with the older guys — yakking it up, telling jokes, bumming cigarettes. I had finally found something mature to do, something that Andrew would be too chicken to try: smoking. It was nice, having a place to go, away from the troubles that had come into our lives, the troubles that I learned were behind my father’s outburst about taking charity from Mr. MacDonald.

My mother and father started arguing that summer and never stopped, at least not until I was gone from there. It started with my father’s new habit of stopping by the hotel after he closed the store. The normal summer bump in business must not have come, because by August he started sending Andrew home on the bike with a message that he’d be late for supper. Pretty soon there weren’t even any messages.

At first my mother held supper for him. After a week or so she got fed up and sent us out to look for his truck. Of the three hotels in town, my father’s favourite was the Atlantic, just across from the train station and only two blocks from our house. He had to take the back streets to get there, else my mother would have seen him go by. Anyway, we traipsed over there and sure enough his truck was parked out front. When we reported back, she got on the phone and called the hotel, asking to speak to him. There was a short conversation on the phone. After she hung up she went very still, and stayed looking out the window for a long time. When she turned around her face was set like stone. “Sit down and eat,” she finally told us. “Your father won’t be home for supper.”