Death Benefits (7 page)

Mom doesn't say anything right away. She gets up and starts loading the dishwasher. Her face is flushed and she is chewing her bottom lip, a sure sign she's upset. “He never talked about his childhood,” she finally says. “I knew that his parents were born-again Christians, real Bible-thumpers, and that he grew up in a little town in Alberta, but that's about it.” Her voice is flat, and I wonder if she's hurt that he confided in me and not her.

“I think the head-shaving triggered his memory,” I say, as if that will somehow make her feel better. “His father used to shave Arthur's head in the summer. He didn't tell me much more. Just that his sister died of diphtheria; his brother died of rabies.”

“I had no idea,” she says. She sounds sad and tired and discouraged. Maybe the tattoos will have to wait.

Seven

T
he next morning, Arthur is still exhausted. I make him his
café au lait
as soon as I get there, but it sits in front of him, untouched, as he dozes in his high-back chair. When he wakes up, he is disoriented for a minute, and I can see the fear in his eyes. I don't think he knows who I am, but he knows he's at my mercy. I could do anything: Tie him up. Rob him. Kill him, even. The laptop alone must be worth some decent coin. Ditto the car. People have killed for less. The moment passes and he picks up the cup of coffee, takes a sip and roars, “Scum!”

For a second I think he's referring to me, and then I realize that the milky coffee has formed a scum while he slept. I'm with Arthur on that one. Scum is revolting. I move to take the cup away from him, but he hurls it on the floor before I can stop him.

“For fuck's sake, Arthur,” I yelp as I jump out of the way. “I can make you a fresh one.”

For a split second, he looks ashamed of himself, but then he rallies.

“Clean up the mess, boy, before it makes a stain. Do you know what this carpet is worth? Pure wool. Got it at an auction in 1960. Made by Persian toddlers. They sign them, you know. See, right down there in the corner. Little initials made by little fingers. Probably got paid ten cents for the whole damn thing.”

I get a rag and a pail of warm water and get to work on the coffee stain. He's right about the initials. They're tiny, and next to them is what looks like a little bird. My eyes sting when I think of some poor little kid going blind making carpets for rich people. It's bad enough to be cleaning one.

“I bought my first cello at an auction,” Arthur says as I scrub. “I was twelve. Never even heard a cello, let alone seen one. The only music I ever heard was the church choir.”

He pauses to take a breath and then he sings, in a clear strong voice that sounds much younger than his usual rasp:

“
I sing because I'm happy,

I sing because I'm free,

For His eye is on the sparrow,

And I know He watches me.
”

He stops singing, as suddenly as he started, and I wonder if he's forgotten the words or that he was telling me a story. His memory is selective, to say the least. I'm about to prompt him when he continues in his normal voice.

“At any rate, there was a country auction in our town—someone had died, I think, and the family was getting rid of a houseful of stuff. My father bought a pump organ for my mother. She played quite well. Learned when she was a girl in Ontario. I remember there was a crank gramophone, a baby carriage, a rifle and a cello. For some reason, I took the three dollars I had saved up from my chores and bid on the cello.”

“Why the cello?” I ask from the floor, still scrubbing.

“Something about it appealed to me—the shape probably.” He chortles. “Reminded me of my best friend's older sister. What I really wanted was the rifle, but Bobby outbid me. He died before he had a chance to use it though.”

“How'd you learn to play?”

“I didn't touch it for a while. Just put it in my room in the corner. After Bobby died, I hauled it out to the backyard, took Bobby's shotgun and tried to add some holes to the cello.” Arthur chortles. “I was a terrible shot. Maybe because I always closed my eyes at the last minute. So I dragged it back inside and tried to figure out how to play it. Drove my parents crazy, but pretty soon they were ordering me sheet music from Edmonton. Didn't have a proper lesson until I was fourteen. Then I spent a year un-learning all my bad habits.”

I finish scrubbing and look up to see that Arthur is staring at his hands with tears streaming down his face. When he sees me watching him, he says, “What are you looking at, boy?” But his heart isn't in it. I push the box of tissues closer to him and take the pail of water into the kitchen. By the time I come back he has turned on the
TV
, and he doesn't even glance at me. I sweep the pile of snotty Kleenex into the wastebasket and head downstairs.

The first thing I do is check the car. Not that I think it will have gone anywhere. I just want to sit in it for a minute and stroke the steering wheel and inhale the vinyl smell. (Arthur told me that in 1956, vinyl was totally cutting edge. Way better than leather. Very space-age. Too bad if it made your ass sweat.) I wonder what it would be like to just open the garage door and drive away. I could be on the mainland in less than four hours, and the drive to Nova Scotia wouldn't take more than a week—maybe less if the weather was good all the way. I probably already have enough money to get across the country if I sleep in the car and eat at McDonald's. It's totally doable. Except for one thing: Mom. She doesn't deserve any of this. An ancient demanding father. An ungrateful runaway son. But then I didn't deserve to be wrenched away from my home and my friends either.

I get out of the car. The great escape will have to wait. I don't even have a change of clothes with me, let alone my iPod. In the absence of anything better to do, I decide to search for Arthur's cello. I figure it must be around somewhere. Not the one he bought when he was twelve, although that would be cool, but the one Mom has told me about. The insanely expensive one-of-a-kind instrument handmade by an Italian dude in the 1600s. Only the best for the great Arthur Jenkins.

Cellos are pretty big, and I figure this one will be in a hard case, which is about the size of your average nine-year-old. It doesn't take me long to search the downstairs. No luck. It's not hiding in a closet, or lying in wait under a bed or lurking behind a door. I continue my search upstairs, but the cello isn't wrapped up in one of Arthur's coats in the front hall closet. Nor is it sporting a rakish beret and smoking a Gauloise in the pantry off the kitchen. I grin at the idea of Arthur's cello chatting up a cute violin. When I get to Arthur's bedroom I have second thoughts about searching his room. It's an invasion of what little privacy he has left, and why am I trying to find the cello anyway? It's not like either of us can play it. But for some reason finding the cello seems important, so I persevere, even though the room smells really bad. While I'm in there, I strip the bed and throw the sheets by the door in case he wonders what I'm doing in his room.

I'm about to give up and go fix lunch when I spot something shoved in the back of his closet behind a box of old shoes. I get down on my hands and knees and move the box aside. There it is: a few hundred thousand dollars' worth of old wood. As I drag the cello case out into the light, Arthur rings the bell and yells for me. I consider shoving the cello back into the closet, but then I think, What the hell? and pick it up by its handle and head to the living room.

“Where's my lunch?” Arthur growls.

“Look what I found,” I say.

I'm sure if Arthur was able to, he'd deck me, but he has to make do with turning purple and screaming, “Put that away! You have no right! I'll have the law on you!” Then he calls me a lot of names—miscreant, delinquent, bandit. He even calls me a dwarfish thief, which I happen to know is from
Macbeth
. It makes me laugh—being called dwarfish—which sets him off again. He pounds the desk until I start to worry that he's going to break the glass. Or have a heart attack.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “I get it. You're upset. I'll put it back. Sorry for taking an interest.” I turn to go back to his room and something hits me in the back. It hurts.

“Hey,” I yell. “What are you doin', man?” His electric razor is lying on the floor beside me, and he is wheezing, not with rage but with laughter. Talk about mood swings.

“You should see your face, boy,” he gasps. “What do they say in those ads? Priceless.”

“Jesus, Arthur. That hurt.”

“Pansy.”

“Whatever,” I say. “I'm going to put this away and then I'll make your lunch.”

“Let me see it,” he says.

“What?”

“Open it up.”

“You sure?”

He nods.

I carry the case closer to him and stand it up where he can reach it. His hands are too stiff to undo the catches, and when I open the case, he makes no move to touch the instrument inside. He just stares at it, sighs and looks away.

I don't know what to say. It doesn't look much different from any other cello, but I know it is.

He reaches into the drawer of his desk, pulls out a flashlight and hands it to me.

“Take a look,” he says.

“At what?”

“The signature.”

“Uh, okay.” I turn on the flashlight and wave the beam at the cello. I have no idea where someone would sign a cello.

“In there.” He points at one of the F-shaped holes. “At the top.”

I get down on my hands and knees and shine the light into the body of the cello. I can see what looks like spidery handwriting on a small, faded paper label— letters and numbers. I can't make out what it says, but I don't have to.

“
Francesco Ruggieri detto
,” he says, “
il Per, Cremona,
1673
.”

I don't know how to speak Italian, but I can figure out what it means: Ruggieri made the cello in Cremona, Italy in 1673. “Cool,” I say, even though the name doesn't mean anything to me. I've never seen anything that old though. “So, Frankie,” I ask the cello, “what brings you to these parts?”

Arthur snorts. “Frankie.”

I'm on a roll, so I continue the game.

“What's that you say, Frankie? You're a bit chilly? I can fix that.”

I close the case and run to the hall closet. When I come back, I place one of Arthur's navy-blue berets on Frankie's hard head, and I wrap a long red scarf around his neck. I wish I had a Gauloise for him, but I guess smoking and three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood don't really go together.

“Maybe you could come for a ride with us sometime,” I say to Frankie. “Arthur's car is awesome.” I turn to Arthur. “Whaddaya say, Arthur? Should we show Frankie the town? Take him out for dinner? Go to a movie?”

“He's already seen Prague, New York, London, Berlin, Tokyo and Paris. What would he want with this rinky-dink place? Crumpets and tea?” Arthur swivels away from Frankie and grunts. “Is it lunchtime yet?”

“Sorry, Frankie. Duty calls,” I say as I stand him up next to the piano and pretend to introduce them. “This is Wilhelmina Bosendorfer. You can call her Billy. She's a lot younger than you, so if you're anything like your owner, you should hit it off.” I lift the cover off the piano's keys and run my fingers over the white keys. “Nice
glissando
, huh, Frankie?” I say with a leer. I don't play the piano, but you can't live with a piano teacher without picking up a few things.

“You should hear Frankie's
portamento
,” Arthur says.

“What's a
portamento
?” I ask. “Sounds like a cross between a portmanteau and a pimento.”

Arthur grunts. “You probably don't even know what a portmanteau is.”

“Tanzania,” I reply.

“Tanzania?”

“Tanganyika and Zanzibar. It's a portmanteau— you know—when two words blend to make a new word. Like brunch. Or Brangelina. Or mimsy. I'm not a complete dolt, you know.”

“Mimsy?” Arthur says.

“You know, miserable and flimsy, as in ‘All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.' That's Lewis Carroll. Mom used to read it to me.”

“I know who Lewis Carroll is, boy.
Alice in Wonderland.
Through the Looking-Glass
. First books I ever read outside the Bible, my schoolbooks and the Eaton's catalogue in the outhouse. I went to school in Edmonton when I was fourteen, and someone had left a copy of
Alice
in my room at the boardinghouse. I read it from cover to cover the first week I was there. That was before anyone knew old Lewis was a bit of a pervert. Guess who my favorite character is.”

I stare at him and try to remember the details of a book I haven't read in ten years. There are a lot of characters to choose from, and a lot of them are pretty wacky, as I recall. That old song comes into my head:
One pill makes you larger and one pill makes you small
and I remember my mom telling me that people used to think that Lewis was a bit of a stoner, the evidence being the hookah-smoking Caterpillar who advises Alice to eat the mushroom he's sitting on. I have no idea if Lewis was a perv or a stoner or both, but I'm pretty sure Arthur's favorite character isn't Alice or Humpty Dumpty or even the Mock Turtle. Then I've got it—the Red Queen. She and Arthur have a lot in common. Bad temper, paranoia, delusions of grandeur.

“Off with his head!” I yell, but he just frowns and shakes his head.

“Try again.”

He's nuts, so I suggest the Mad Hatter.

He shakes his head again.

“The Cheshire Cat? Tweedle-dum? Tweedle-dee? The White Rabbit?”

He cackles after every suggestion and finally says, “Give up?”

I nod and he starts to recite “You Are Old, Father William,” which has at least eight verses. He remembers every word, ending with a resounding “
Be off, or I' ll kick
you downstairs
.” This from a man who couldn't tell you what he had for breakfast.