Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (10 page)

The bus stuttered to a halt, bucking Reinie’s eyes up from the pamphlet and his happy absorption in modern tillage practices. He squinted out at a lovely fall day. Harvest had been early that year; most crops were safely stowed away in granaries. Wheat stubble bristled on nearby fields, a blond brush cut sweeping over a knobby cranium. A deep, unfathomable blue sky was wiped with a few smears of high, thin cirrus cloud.

The bus doors flapped open, turning Reinie’s gaze to a girl making her way up the aisle, a girl he had never seen before. Barely five feet tall, she wore the briefest of black corduroy mini-dresses, black tights, a pink sweater. The last bit of wave had been ironed out of long chestnut hair that fell from a precise part to frame a heart-shaped face.

When he realized the strange girl was going to park herself beside him, panic bobbed in Reinie’s throat. Without a word, she plopped down next to him. The impact of her bottom on the seat jolted a gust of perfume from her body. It swirled up Reinie’s nostrils, jerking his head back to the window. While the bus rumbled away, gathering speed, he desperately counted cows. Then he counted grain bins.

She had to come from a rural one-room elementary school. Each year such schools passed on a handful of students to Waddell High. Fresh faces that brought an element of the unknown, of new possibilities to a student body so sunk in tedium that it felt eternal. Reinie stole a furtive glance at her. Seen up close, she was even more exotic than viewed at a
distance. There was an odd feline cast to her eyes, a provoking lift to their corners. She wore an awful lot of green eyeshadow and pale, frosted lipstick. A solemn consideration arose in Reinie’s mind. His mother wouldn’t approve of this much face paint on a grown woman, let alone on a girl who couldn’t be more than fourteen.

She was pointedly ignoring him, looking directly ahead, her face ingeniously managing to register both profound boredom and profound disgruntlement. Turning over the sticky tumblers of his mind, a burglar coaxing a combination from a safe, Reinie struggled to marshal words, string them together in arresting phrases, even interesting sentences. He was labouring to be
smooth
. The problem was he hadn’t had much practice at it. Reinie Ottenbreit had always had better things to do than chat up girls.

“I haven’t seen you before,” he said at last.

The girl swung her head towards him, eyes slits of contempt, triangular chin tilted imperiously. He saw that the colour of her irises exactly matched the eyeshadow. Both were a dark, haunted green.

Blindly, he attempted to grope through the fog of her withering silence. “I mean, today is Thursday. School started Monday. I would’ve thought I’d have seen you before now. Riding the bus, I mean.” His voice ebbed away.

The pale, frosted lips wrinkled, baring tiny, hostile teeth. “I don’t want to go to your puking school. They made me.” Her eyes slid off his face. Reinie was left to ponder who
they
were. Her parents? The school board?

Somehow, he mustered a smidgen of unexpended courage. “My name’s Reinhardt … I mean Reinie – Reinie Ottenbreit.
I’m in grade twelve.” A taint of self-importance his father would not have approved of surfaced in the last statement. He waited, hoping she would volunteer similarly pertinent information. None was forthcoming. On the heels of a deep, shuddering breath he made another attempt. “What’s your name?”

“Darcy.”

“Isn’t that a boy’s name?”

“Who’re you to talk,
Reinhardt
.”

For the next thirty minutes, they sat without speaking, she showing so obvious a pleasure in Reinie’s discomfort that even he was capable of detecting it. At last, the bus drew into the parking lot of Waddell High and began to noisily disembark passengers. Following Darcy into school, Reinie noticed her tights had a long run down the back of one leg. In that rent, a tender, vulnerable offering of white flesh was exposed. Pressing the flimsy Department of Agriculture brochure to his crotch, Reinie did his best to cover up the boner this enticing sight had popped. He might as well have tried to hide a chair leg with a piece of Kleenex.

For the remainder of the day, he shuffled from class to class in a dreamy, drifting daze. His condition only worsened that night. Cradling his transistor to his ear on the pillow, he listened as distant radio stations from America’s heartland softly whispered to him their lovesick lamentations, their hymns to heartbreak. Often as not, the songs erupted in violent explosions of static, or simply crumbled away into a tuneless, echoing void.

The next day, Darcy selected a new seat partner for the bus ride. Jealously, Reinie studied her demeanour and was relieved to note she treated Marvin Gaitskell with the same scorn as she had him. During lunch hour, he wandered the hallways, praying for a chance encounter. Minutes before classes resumed, he spotted her in the gym. Darcy was leaning up against a wall watching a bunch of girls play volleyball. Hesitantly, gingerly, Reinie sidled up to her and rigidly flattened his body to the wall. She seemed in an even more ferocious mood than she had the day before. Her arms were folded under her small, haughty breasts, thrusting them upward in an aggressive fashion.

Peering down at the part in her hair Reinie hoarsely declared, “I got a car. A 57 Chevy Bel Air. Maybe you want to go for a drive tomorrow.”

“That’s stupid,” she said. Reinie felt the floor plummet beneath his feet. Then, mercifully, he heard her add, “That there is the all-time stupidest game I ever saw. And look at them
sweat
. Like pigs.”

“So, you want to go?”

“I don’t care.”

He didn’t know what she was saying. Interpretation was not his forte. It was why he hated poetry so much. The bell loosed a shrill, strident summons. Darcy heaved herself off the wall, tossing two words over her shoulder as she made for the exit. “What time?”

“Two o’clock. Two o’clock, okay?” he called after her.

“I don’t care.”

Suddenly he realized something. He knew where the bus collected Darcy, but at that location two farmhouses faced
each other directly across the road. “Where do you live?” he shouted as the milling throng propelled her through the gym doors.

“Pushko place,” she said.

Learning that Darcy was a Pushko gave Reinie a lot to think about all that long Friday afternoon. The Ottenbreits had no dealings with people of that ilk. Everybody knew the Pushkos’ reputation. Darcy’s father, Eugene Pushko, made frequent appearances in the “Court News” section of the local paper. Minor offences, drunk and disorderly, operating a motor vehicle without a valid driver’s licence, resisting arrest. His five sons, Charles, Lincoln, Delmar, Winston, and Everett were often seen meandering up and down the streets of Waddell, crammed in a rust-ravaged vehicle trailing a haze of oily blue smoke. All five boys were as wide as a doorway across the shoulders, narrow-hipped, and bandy-legged. They had loud, booming voices that carried for blocks. They laughed a good deal but were famous for their violent, quick tempers. Amiably dangerous was an accurate description of the Pushko boys.

Most people found the brothers difficult to distinguish from one another. Charles, Lincoln, Delmar, and Winston looked like refugees from the 1950s with their elaborately sculpted hairstyles. They wore a uniform. White T-shirts, black denim pants, cowboy boots. The only one who didn’t was the youngest of the brothers, Everett. The family rebel, Everett preferred cream denims and paisley shirts. Even more
radically, he affected a Prince Valiant haircut that lent him a passing resemblance to Burton Cummings of The Guess Who, or perhaps a female film star of the silent era. He also smoked menthol cigarettes, much to his brothers’ disgust.

None of the Pushkos had gone past grade eight because they found school highly unsatisfactory.

A cold, doughy ball of worry formed in the pit of Reinie’s stomach. His parents would not be pleased by a connection with the Pushko family in any way, shape, or form. His mother and father subscribed to guilt by association.

Saturday morning Reinie was up by five and hard at work. His father left him on his own to pound posts and mend barbed wire because he was heading off to a cattle auction. When the fencing was completed, Reinie washed the Bel Air and vacuumed the interior. For a moment, he paused, hand resting on its fin, reverent before its showroom loveliness. He had bought the car from Mrs. Braun, who had wanted nothing to do with it after her husband, old Mr. Braun, had died behind the Chevy’s wheel. Stricken by a heart attack, Mr. Braun had coasted the Bel Air to safety at the side of the road before expiring. He had been a finicky, fastidious man, even going so far as to have the car’s engine regularly steam-cleaned. The Chevy was immaculate except for one ominous stain on the driver’s seat. In the throes of a coronary, eighty-year-old Mr. Braun had lost control of his bladder.

Reinie just had time to shower, change his clothes, and gobble a baloney sandwich before meeting Darcy at two. His
mother discovered him in the kitchen, eating over the sink.

“What’s the hurry, Reinie?”

He looked at her blankly.

“Are you off somewhere?”

“For a drive.”

“Drive where?”

“Around.”

“When can I expect you home?”

He shrugged noncommittally.

“Supper is at six. Your father will be hungry when he gets back, so don’t be late.”

Reinie nodded, snatched the car keys from the table, and dove out the door. His mother, a neat, tidy woman of fifty whose face, lined by the steadfast exertion of willpower, still managed to retain lingering evidence of having once been pretty, stood at the window, hand plucking the cloth of her dress as the Chevy pulled out of the yard.

Another fine day, an autumnal gift. The Bel Air sped down grid roads, unfurling banners of dust that captured mellow sunshine in their shimmering, silty mesh. The poplars lining the roads had begun to turn, their yellow leaves to loosen their grip on branches. On the narrowest lanes, the Chevy’s passing whirled showers of gold from the trees, spilling them in spendthrift fashion.

At five minutes to two he arrived at his destination. An ancient windbreak of dying spruce hid the Pushko house from sight. Reinie turned into the approach, cautiously nosed
his car over a potholed trail that twisted among morbid, ghostly trees until the farmyard appeared.

An acre of vehicles of every age, model, and description, cracked windshields coyly glinting sunshine, roofs and hoods rusted to a rich burgundy, first seized his attention. Then the house, an old grey stucco box onto which a series of offhand additions had been tacked. All of them clad in different-coloured siding – pink, green, robin’s egg blue, mustard.

The Pushko men were squatting on the front steps of the house. Their arrangement suggested a formal family portrait, faintly evoked the photograph of Reinie’s christening that his mother kept proudly displayed on the piano in the living room. But the centrepiece of this composition was not an infant but a case of beer, clearly visible between Mr. Pushko’s widespread, sheltering legs. Charles and Lincoln were seated on the top step; Mr. Pushko occupied the second step all by his lonesome. Delmar, Winston, and Everett hunkered at the feet of the head of the household. Mr. Pushko’s striped railway engineer’s cap and mirror sunglasses somehow reminded Reinie of the cat in the Dr. Seuss book that had given him nightmares as a child.

The Chevy rolled to a stop. There was no welcome from the Pushkos, who stolidly stared at the car, bottles in their hands. Could this be a barricade mounted at the front door to keep him from Darcy? Seconds ticked by and then, just as he was on the point of backing up the Chevy and fleeing, the screen door burst open, Darcy squirmed her way between her brothers’ shoulders, bumped her father aside with her hip, skipped up to the Chevy, and hopped in.

“Get moving,” she said.

In the rear-view mirror Reinie saw the Pushkos, still locked in place. Then Mr. Pushko lifted his beer to his lips. The boys took their cue from him and did the same, a nicely timed and executed ripple of movement.

Darcy rummaged around in a plastic purse, produced cigarettes and matches, and soon was furiously puffing away. This made Reinie a tad uneasy. If his mother smelled smoke in the car, the questions wouldn’t stop until she knew who was responsible for the telltale stink – him, or somebody with nasty, filthy habits who he ought to know better than to be associating with.

Today, Darcy looked a little rundown, a little worse for wear. Her eyeshadow was smudged, as if she had slept in it. “Take me to the drugstore,” she ordered, slumping down in the seat, propping her feet on the dashboard. She held that nonchalant pose, lighting one cigarette off another, until they drew up in front of the Rexall on Main Street in Waddell. Darcy flung herself from the car and dashed into the pharmacy.

Reinie found her at the cosmetics counter. It was unattended. Darcy was slapping on eyeshadow at breakneck speed. Mrs. Bernhardt, the pharmacist’s wife, suddenly hove into view and accosted her. “Here, what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

“It’s a sample,” said Darcy.