Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (22 page)

In the kitchen, he walked into a wall of stench so thick somebody could be excused for thinking it was solid. It was as if Death Himself had taken a shit in there. The sickening smell was invading the cottage through the window he had just opened. Tony rushed over, slammed it shut.

Standing there he identified the source of the disgusting odour.

He rang up Bits Bodnarski. Furious, he yelled, “Tony Japp here. That deer is still laying out in my yard. Stinking to high heaven. Why the fuck didn’t you haul it to the dump!”

“I come by,” said Bits. “Nobody was there.”

“I thought we had an understanding.”

“My understanding is cash on the barrelhead. I don’t see cash upfront, I don’t do the job. I been stiffed often enough by you summer people. All of a sudden you’ve packed up and gone. Money owing.”

“Well, come and do it now,” said Tony. “I’ll have a cheque for you.”

“That carcass will be falling apart by now. I try and load it in my half-ton, it’ll fall apart. Besides, I’m not having my truck reeking to high heaven for the rest of the summer. I ain’t breathing that every day. That deer’ll have to go in the ground, but I ain’t burying it. I got a buddy who’s got a Bobcat, maybe he might do it. I know his number if you want to try him.”

Tony took the number. He was in luck. Bits’s friend said he had just finished a trenching job. He could come by some time that afternoon.

The man with the Bobcat showed up a little after lunch and went to work digging a pit for the deer. Tony stood at the kitchen window watching the machine roar and buck and chew earth like a thing possessed. Its frenzy, its urgency swept into him.

Just as the operator began to scrape the remains of the deer into the hole, Tony burst out of the house, his arms full of clothes, yelling frantically at the operator to stop. The man halted, stared in disbelief as Tony flung everything he had bought in Saskatoon down onto the bloated, maggot-seething deer: the Italian shoes, the top coat, the
homburg, the suit, the shirts, even the cufflinks. All that committed to the grave, he turned and went back into the cottage.

Tony was lucky, he got through to his agent without delay. In fact, Probert answered the phone himself. Tony didn’t beat around the bush; he said he was ready to go back to work.

“Jesus, Tony,” Probert said, “I’d hate for you to go to all the trouble and expense of moving back to Toronto without some firm offers on the table.” Tony hadn’t heard that cautious, guarded tone from Probert before. Was that reluctance?

“Then get me some firm offers.”

“Easier said than done. For one thing, when it comes to movies it’s all blockbusters now. The Americans aren’t coming up here to shoot those small indie films so much anymore. Which was your bread and butter. And theatre – half of next season is musicals.”

“Okay, I know at sixty it won’t be easy. But don’t forget, I’ve got a record in television. And I’m the right age for certain bit parts. A judge. A coroner. Somebody’s father. A chief of police. Five or six lines, I don’t care. I’ve always been a character actor. So now maybe the characters I have to play are smaller than they used to be. I can accept that.”

“Tony, Tony …”

“Listen to me,” said Tony, voice teetering. “The layoff has been good for me. I’m rejuvenated. I feel I’m at the top of my game. I
know
I’m at the top of my game. The juices are flowing, Probert. Haven’t I always been able to play anything?
You know it. Everybody knows it. It’s my calling card. My door opener. I’ve proved it time and time again. Let me repeat. I can do it. You have to believe in me, Probert. I’m the man who can play anything.”

The roar of the Bobcat going past his window, exiting the scene, made it impossible for him to hear Probert’s response.

“Anything,” he reiterated in a whisper, voice bled white of conviction. “Believe me. Tony’s the man who can play
anything
.”

NEVER ONCE, NOT ONCE
, did Ma ever talk about her brother, Ted, without sticking a little yellow Post-it note to her anecdote, without adding, “That man
is a holy terror
.” And that bewildered the living beejeebers out of me when I was a little kid because what could I make of that?
Holy
terror? How could terror be holy? And Uncle Teddy? Was he a
terror
? Not in my books. Back when I was six, seven, eight, nine years old, I thought he was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Live and learn.

My shiny new therapist, Counsellor Sally, is very big on living and learning. According to her, my present behaviour is a response to what happened to me in my childhood. Sorry,
conditioned responses
. And since your perceptions of things when you are a child are frequently unreliable, I must learn to get
past all that
.

I have been ordered to see Counsellor Sally because I got
caught telling certain little white lies to my high school students. A busybody father who looked into my claim to have been an Associated Press war photographer in Vietnam reported this harmless fib of mine to Principal Drogan after his son brought the news home to his war-crazy dad that his history teacher, Mr. Molson, had been in the midst of the fray during the Battle of Hue. It seems that the guy who squealed on me is one of those military history buffs, a nut who had recently bought some encyclopedic book on the subject of AP photographers in Vietnam. Finding no reference there to yours truly, he undertook further research on the Internet, which yielded no record of a Bert Molson snapping carnage in Southeast Asia. So in a fit of outrage he hightailed it to Mr. Drogan with this news, and because Drogan hates my guts he proceeded to accuse me of being a pathological liar and immediately initiated proceedings to have me arm-twisted into retirement. No, let me get the sequence correct. It was only
after
Drogan found out that I had once told the kids in my class that in his youth their principal had been lead singer in a punk rock band called Pitchforking Dead Babies that steps to have me unceremoniously ushered out the door commenced.

But a compromise has been worked out between the Teachers’ Federation and the administration, one of the conditions of which is that I have to take a six-month medical leave of absence and undergo psychological treatment, and then, well, it seems,
we’ll see
.

Now Counsellor Sally, who has oodles of compassion but not much imagination, refuses to accept my explanation that I told a few untruths simply to make history live for my
students. She believes my claims to having had combat experience have something to do with Uncle Ted, who, she points out, was a veteran of the Second World War. Haven’t I mentioned that several times? And that my refusal to contemplate retirement is rooted in my abandonment issues.

Yadda, yadda. Everything circles back to how my father walking out on Ma and me when I was an infant naturally has had repercussions on my psychological health. But how can you feel abandoned by someone you never knew? That makes no sense. And second, I don’t blame my never-laid-eyes-on Pops for making tracks, given that living with Ma would have meant a lifetime shackled to her family, that whole tribe of feckless screwballs. Because Ma would never have dreamed of
abandoning
them, even if my father had happened to invite us to tag along with him when he headed for the hills. You can take that to the bank.

Counsellor Sally actually said, “Have you never considered that your stubborn attempt to hang on to your teaching job might be related to feeling abandoned, all alone in the world now that most of your family is dead?”

“Not really. Not so much,” I told her. “Ma’s still kicking.”

But she kept on doggedly pursuing the same line of thought. “Nevertheless, your Uncle Ted passed away quite recently.”

“Six months ago.”

“Now this is just something for you to think about. No judgment implied. Perhaps you are so attached to your teaching position because you feel it’s the only thing left that you can count on. People depart the scene; they die. Maybe institutions appear more durable and dependable, more lasting, more reliable to you than human beings. Many people your
age look forward to and anticipate retirement. Why not you?” She paused. “And retirement would permit you to make a graceful exit.”

I ignored that. Fucking quisling. Who’s her patient? Who is she supposed to be helping? Me or Drogan?

“You’ve claimed that you’ve never embellished your accomplishments before. Could it be that your recent losses have made you anxious that, in a manner of speaking, you will lose your students too? In a symbolic sense. Might you feel that you aren’t
worthy
of their respect and, as a consequence, this leads you to inflate your status, to try to impress them with imaginary exploits, imaginary feats of bravery?” She paused. “Do you never ask yourself why this self-mythologizing started so soon after your Uncle Ted’s death?”

As I say, a session with Counsellor Sally is like doing a circuit around a racetrack; you always finish just where you started.

She wouldn’t leave it alone. “Maybe you believe your pupils will eventually reject you just like Uncle Ted rejected you. That they will withdraw their approval just as he did.”

“He only rejected me after I put him in the hospital. I’d say he had a point.”

Guess what? I’ve been doing some research on abandoned child syndrome, and
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
does not recognize it as a condition. My hack therapist is treating me for a mental disorder that does
not even
officially exist
. And I would point that fact out to Counsellor Sally if I didn’t have to make nice-nice and play along with her in the slim hope that I will get a clean bill of health and be reinstated. On her say-so.

Not too long ago, Counsellor Sally happened to say, “I found your description of you waiting for your Uncle Ted and Aunt Evie’s annual visit to your hometown very moving. The picture of you standing outside your mother’s house all day long, your eyes searching the road for his car to appear, that was very poignant. You must have adored him.”

Okay, I admit that at
that
time I thought Uncle Ted was pretty much the kitty’s little pink ass. In my starry eyes he was a big success, unlike all my other loser aunts and uncles who, aside from their stints in the services during the war, had never dared to peek over the horizon past the little town of Connaught. Staying put in a small town where everybody knows everybody else meant that the Aker family’s reputation for being prickly, flighty, pugnacious types with king-sized chips on their shoulders meant nobody in their right minds would hire them for full-time work. The men were condemned to eke out livings as casual labourers and self-employed handymen; the women as housecleaners, washerwomen, and babysitters.

True, a few of the Akers took a stab at more ambitious entrepreneurship. Like Uncle Bob, who started a short-lived trail-riding business with a string of cadaverous horses that looked like they had been pre-owned by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And Ma herself established that unfortunate Boys and Girls Gymnastic Academy, which she somehow felt she was eminently qualified to run because she had
been a physical training instructor in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during the Second World War. That stone dropped to the bottom of the money pit even faster than Uncle Bob’s.

So who can blame me for gazing longingly up the road on those long-ago summer days? The thing was, I couldn’t wait to lay eyes on what kind of car Uncle Ted would be driving that year, what spiffy automobile he had traded up to: a shiny new Buick, a chrome-encrusted Oldsmobile, a Caddy, once a Mercedes-Benz, a Benz years before they became the standard conveyance for realtors, lawyers, and chartered accountants. Benzes were an uncommon sight back then, so soon after the war. Who wanted to be seen driving a Kraut car? Except Ted, who always loved to stand out, to thumb his nose at the crowd.

The Benz was my favourite set of wheels of them all. In particular, I loved the straphangers that could be clutched to keep me from ricocheting from one sturdy Teutonic door panel to the other when Teddy rocketed us through the countryside, went tearing around some corner on a dirt road, then slung his marvel of German engineering, tires shrieking and spitting gravel, into the next hairpin turn. And there were also the leisurely tours about town so as to see and be seen, Aunt Evie in her muskrat coat riding shotgun beside Uncle Ted, me in the back seat, fascinated by the weird coincidence of their colour-coordinated gingery heads (they might have been brother and sister), but no, on reflection, Teddy’s hair had more of a
cranberry hue
, its brightness dampened by a Wildroot Cream-Oil slick. I can see it as if it were yesterday, his big, veiny, virile hands locked on the steering wheel, the
right one glinting with a huge signet ring. His shoulders squared in a camel hair car coat. Aunt Evie’s perfume rolling into the back seat, wave upon scented wave.

And all this glamorous prosperity was a result of Uncle Ted having taken the path less taken by Akers, namely gainful employment. He did dangerous work in unspeakable places where you got paid good money to risk your life sinking mine shafts and blowing big holes in mountains. Ted had defied the dire predictions of all those authority figures, teachers, officers of the law, and justices of the peace who had warned him when he was an adolescent that he was headed for jail. For that, Teddy never forgave them, and he nursed a grudge against each and every one of them until his dying day.

Speaking of which, one afternoon as Uncle Ted is sedately piloting the Benz through our sleepy streets while the multitasking Aunt Evie smokes a Sweet Caporal and adjusts her blood-red lipstick in the rear-view mirror and little nephew Bert clings to the trusty straphanger just in case Ted decides to
goose the juice
, who does Uncle Ted spy with his beady little eye? Why none other than his old elementary school principal, P.J. Gillam, out tending the roses in his front yard. And Teddy hits the brakes, cranks down the window, looses a blast on the horn, and calls out, “Is that a fucking teacher I see? A man among boys and a boy among men? Come on over here and box my ears now, Pyjamas Gillam! Try that one on for size now, why don’t you?”