Believing Cedric (24 page)

Nathan and Richard could be heard several houses away, walking along the slow-arcing street of Leaside's Sutherland Drive. The noise they were producing had people in their yards wandering to the sidewalk to stare at the teens as they approached. This was, after all, one of Toronto's neighbourhoods that prided itself on its quietude, on its elegantly bricked homes, its streets that were maple-shaded, lower-speed-limited, hopping-black-squirrel-abundant. The boys had just finished a bout of beatboxing, Richard working the throaty bass and snare portion while Nathan provided the clicks, cowbells, and hi-hats to the piece. But it was an oeuvre they'd been playing with for a few blocks now, and one they seemed to have exhausted, both of them breaking off after a minimalist closing, then wiping a slow hand across their mouths. (Regardless of skill or discipline, beatboxing had the tendency to produce a not-exactly-negligible amount of salivary spray.)

“Too good,” chuckled Nathan, jumping up at a broken and dangling branch, swiping at it. He missed. “Too good” was a phrase oft exchanged between the two, and was more or less considered their trademark. Though in their minds it was something they used sparingly, reserved for only the most authentically funky, genuinely quirky, or wildly original things.

And in the spirit of using it sparingly, Richard didn't agree or echo Nathan's assessment. Instead he started into a jazzy walking bassline, the deep pluck of a contrabass resounding from his esophagus. Nathan waited, nodding to get the rhythm, then clamped his lips into a Miles Davis clench, eased open the far corner of his mouth, and broke in with something that sounded like a melange between a trumpet and an alto sax. They continued on this riff for another two blocks, until they arrived at Melissa's house, where the party became louder as they strutted up the walkway.

They stepped onto the landing and Richard rang the doorbell while Nathan plucked a small purple flower from one of the planters beside the doorway, inserting it into Richard's hair. Richard lowered his chin and blinked at him in a gesture of bashful femininity.

The door burst open. “Ricardo! Nater!
Entrez
, gentlemen,
entrez
. And dude. Like the flower.” It was Travis, a twelfth-grader who went to Leaside High School with them, and he was here, strangely, at a party of grade-eleveners. He was a nice-enough guy, even if he was only capable of rehashing the apparent hilarity of
Saturday Night Live
skits. And seeing as it was July, and summer was the season of reruns, it left him open to the previous season's gags in its entirety. “Hey, juguys see that one with Jim Carrey and the like, Roxbury Guys, pickin' up those geezers, noddin' their heads in the car like . . . boom, boom, boom . . .”

Neither of them answered as someone else had responded, bobbing his head in time to Travis's. They all passed through the hall together, two bobbing their heads, two not, and stepped into the living room, where the air was awash with music and captions of conversation overlapping one another.

“. . . and the guy's like, screw that, I'm outta here . . .”

“. . . we started doing tequila shooters and . . .”

“. . . no way. Buffy is
so
lame. I mean, look at . . .”

“. . . hey've you signed my cast yet? Cuz I, like, got this . . .”

The
CD
in the stereo was Weezer's
Blue Album
. A good choice as far as Nathan was concerned. He produced a mickey of vodka from the back pocket of his baggy cords (which were bought at a second-hand store, of course, like the rest of his wardrobe, with the exception of underwear—who bought second-hand underwear?) and he took a shallow swig, grimaced. He would have offered the next sip to Richard, but someone had already handed him a beer and was busy commenting on his flower.

“Thanks. Can't take the credit for the actual
innovation
, though, as it was the brainchild of this man here.” Richard pointed at Nathan, who moved in closer to elucidate.

“My dearest Richard, I'm so very happy that you used the word ‘brainchild' there, for the purple-flower-in-the-hair-of-naturally-curly-to-borderline-poodle-haired-young-men such as yourself came to me as an epiphany, as a cerebral-
birth
, okay? And it is undoubtedly set to be
all
the rage this year, on catwalks in Paris, London, New York, I tell you, la totalité du monde de la mode. The look has sparked several other creations, notably the main accessory to the flower thing, also sure to take the runways by storm in the coming months, which is the slightly protruding solar plexus muscle group as seen here.” Nathan was arching his back and running his mickeyless hand over a belly that was indeed protruding. “To the uninitiated fashion eye this could be mistaken as mere fat, likened to that of a common sea mammal, whereas it is in fact the overdeveloped six-pack. Dude, this is washboard muscle that has, as yet a mystery to science, become so overworked, so strained, that it's begun to retain water. Fat? No. What this is, gentlemen, is cutting-edge-stylish water retention. It is now, it is hip, it is the very concept of sveltness—only
enhanced
.”

Travis, who was in earshot, laughed.

Richard was smiling and gave Nathan a slow nod. “Nice.”

“Thank you, dear sir.”

“Hey.” Someone else had noticed the two of them and was sidestepping through the crowd to come closer. “Hey! Thought you guys were in Nova Scotia still. Wasn't that right? You both went down there?
How'd'goi'dere'by!
”

“Aye laddie, 'tis true, 'tis true. Just got back the other day,” affirmed Richard, who had gone there with the expectation of returning with at least a
hint
of a Maritimes accent. He'd also been waiting throughout the two weeks to hear himself referred to as a “
yung by
” or simply “
by
,” but the cliché never managed to surface. Not that he was disappointed. The experience was priceless, enthralling. He'd never said “too good” so much in his life.

Nathan had enticed him to come along by relating a few of the idiosyncrasies of the tiny community where his grandfather was based, on the banks of the LaHave River on the South Shore, near Bridgewater. And though Nathan had spent anywhere from two weeks to two months every summer of his life in the area, he was seeing its quaint peculiarities as if for the first time, through the eyes of his neophyte counterpart, Richard. The two young men saw themselves as amateur documentary filmmakers, only without the cameras, essentially setting out to interview people, encouraging storytelling from anyone who had something to say, and boldly inviting themselves along with Nathan's grandfather on routine errands and the sorting out of everyday problems.

Nathan and Richard now had the unofficial attention of a small corner of the room, which had Richard taking the opportunity to recap some of the highlights of their trip. “Okay. So, full disclosure here: I am of the opinion that the place rocks. You should see, his grandpa took us to this, like, ‘sawdoctor'—literally—cuz his saw was busted, and the place was this garage-cum-junkyard thing with, like, all this metal carnage and these amateur welding projects all over the place, these freakish birds and animals with nut-bolt eyes and shovel-blade beaks, all spray-painted in these, like, bright Moto-Master colours. Wicked. And then inside there were these five guys in stained undershirts with these little thin moustaches, and, like, this
AM
radio with a blown speaker crackling out seventies rock. Oh! And one day we pulled over to the side of the road, to this dock that was also this kind of impromptu end-of-the-day fish market thingy, and we walk up to this guy, who had a car door slammed onto his head when he was a kid or something—and crushed his voice box—and Nathan's grandpa taps his foot against one of the guy's plastic pails with all these mussels inside 'em, and asks the guy what he's selling them for today, and—no joke—the guy replies in this voice higher than Minnie Mouse's—on like helium—and wheezes out: ‘Money.'”

Nathan laughed with everyone else and listened to Richard excitedly ramble on. He was on a roll, and not to be stopped, even if Nathan was pretty sure he wasn't quite doing the place justice. His grandfather, to Nathan anyway, was an epically cool, over-the-top man, who was to be unequivocally revered. He was a man who had immense hands, so thickly callused they were cigarette-stained yellow on the pads, and when Nathan imagined his life, he had always visualized it through the work that had gradually misshapen those hands. On the handles of his oars, heaving back, then lifting the shafts out of the water and placing them in his tiny dory, careful not to bash the wooden blades, standing up to tug at a longline, trawling for cod, hand over hand, deftly flipping the fish from the hook and into the boat, his dorymate re-baiting the line as it slipped into the water again on the other side, the fish utterly lifeless from the bends, being pulled up from so deep, some of their bladders protruding from their mouths, cleaning them back at the schooner, heads and gurry flung overboard, slime and bright blood stringing between his fingertips; or in the off-season when he would jump a train, gripping on to a rusted metal bar between two colossal railcars, pivoting noisily with the twists of the track, jumping off in the Annapolis Valley, rolling through a weed-choked ditch, standing up to dust off his overalls, cracked and stunted fingernails tweezing thorns out of his ring finger, then climbing the rungs of a ladder, reaching through scratching leaves and branchlets to a lime-green apple, freckled, blistered with raindrops, plucking it from the stem and into his wicker basket; then at the helm of an oil tanker in the Merchant Navy, thumb in a crook of the chrome wheel, spinning it to starboard to steer clear of surfacing U-boats, corvettes carving into sight to gun the submarines down; then disembarking after the war, his palm squeaking along the gangplank rail and into the pub of another country, a cigar between his cigar-thick fingers in Cuba, raising a glass of stout in England, ouzo in Greece, kir in France, sake in Japan.

Nathan listened as the exaggeration in Richard's stories shifted into the direction of hyperbole. Which was fine. Made them all the more entertaining really. It was just that he felt Richard was missing a key point: that Nathan's grandfather was clearly made of stuff that they were not. Harder, firmer, truer stuff. And as the gaggle around Richard and his storytelling grew in density, Nathan decided to slip away, decided it was time that he found Melissa. When it came to Melissa, Nathan thought he could do with a bit of the stuff his grandfather was made of.

Nathan walked into another room, where he found mostly girls of his grade, along with a handful of the punks and “radicals” of the school, people who called themselves anarchists, eschewing the nutritious dinners their upper-middle-class parents placed in front of them at 6:00
PM
, kids who left the table to spend the rest of their evening holed up inside their pastel-painted bedrooms, listening to Sonic Youth and tack-holing the walls with posters of Engels, Marx, and propaganda from the Libertarian Communist Committee of the Spanish Civil War. One of them, Chris, walked over and tried to greet Nathan with a fancy handshake: a series of grips, different fingers interlocking at different angles, fists connecting, one on top of the other, then frontal, palms sliding, slapping, perhaps some snapping added in for flare. It was a handshake that Nathan completely botched.

“Gee, I seem to have completely botched that handshake. I am really, really rather sorry. I suck. I suck and I'm embarrassed, mortified, worthless. And how about you, Chris? How are you? Keeping well?”

“Quite. Yeah. Thanks.”

Nathan noticed the conversation being a little more elevated than in the front room. Current affairs mostly: the Olympics opening that day, Dolly the sheep, human cloning around the corner, the nonstop stream of recent plane crashes (“Who would fly these days? I mean, seriously . . .”), along with a peppering of the same subject matter that was prevalent in other parts of the house, recent episodes of
The Simpsons
, the most annoying
VJ
s on MuchMusic, and O.J. flagrantly getting away with murder.

“Hey, man,” Chris said out of the blue. “You're from Ottawa, right? Might be goin' there in a couple weeks. There's this, uhm, well, it's a protest, I think, that a buddy and I were thinking of joining. But it might not get off the ground. Anyway. Cool place?”

“Uhm. Yeah I guess. For protests.”

It was true. Having grown up in Ottawa, Nathan had seen his fair share of picketers and lobbyists, from both sides of abortion laws and gay marriage to acid rain and public service strikes. He'd even seen breast-baring women march from Parliament Hill to the Byward Market for the right to be topless in public. In Ottawa, protests were just another part of the cityscape. Did that make it an alluring and exciting city in Nathan's opinion? Not really.

Nathan Amundsen had grown up in the Glebe, a charming area cradled into a “J” of the Rideau Canal, tight streets with semi-detached houses, specialty shops, quiet restaurants, and cafés garnishing many of its street corners. As a boy, he'd found it an excellent place for playing Dungeons & Dragons, usually in friends' basements, afterwards walking to hang out near Dow's Lake, thoughts of casting spells and goblins still fresh in his mind, settling onto his knees on the grass there, fidgeting, clicking his teeth to an unheard rhythm, distracted out of the conversation by every man, woman, child, dog, frisbee, bee, and scavenging crow that happened to pass into his line of sight. He was by nature a nervous child, which was something he'd never really grown out of. In his adolescence this became an attribute that, when coupled with his general love of punks, freaks, activists, and any other personality perceived to be “on the societal fringe,” meant that he spent a good portion of his leisure time feeling apprehensive. (Though he did discover that beatboxing helped him cope.) Thankfully, this uneasiness was a private one for the most part, something he managed to keep concealed from his compatriots. Even if there were times that it escalated into an outright panic attack.