I Was There the Night He Died (12 page)

He from the end of his sidewalk and I from my living room both see the same thing—a white minivan turning the corner onto Dahlia Avenue. But what I know is just the man next door returning home from his shift at Biddel Tires, Samantha's dad is sure it's his taxi come to take him to the liquor store at the Thames Lee Mall, his tottering steps into the street when he sees my next-door neighbour stopping and backing into his driveway testament to his frustration with this obviously confused cabbie. When he teeters into the middle of the road he stops and wearily waves the reversing minivan his way. When my oblivious neighbor finishes backing all the way in, Samantha's father has had enough, has indulged this fool for as long as he can, puts his hands on his hips and shouts what I can hear through the window, “No, no, no, you're here for me. Do you hear me? Hello? I'm the one who called the cab. Hello? Hello?”

Retreating to the bathroom before this scene plays itself out is a crime against literature, I know, my naturally voyeuristic nose for such an incipient disaster nosed out, however, by the realization that this isn't just some drunk I might be able to utilize for comedic purposes in one of my novels, this is Samantha's father, this is the shit she daily has to live with.

I get back down on my knees and take my mother's hand mirror out of the box intended for Goodwill. Who knows? Maybe I'll end up needing it someday.

 

* * *

 

“And here's one more, just one more
. This one is of Francine and Constance, who you've both already seen, but in this one they're with their cousin Priscilla, my brother's daughter. You remember my little brother Tyler, don't you?”

Not really, no, I barely remember you, in fact. “Tyler, right, of course. Your little brother. What was he—one, two years behind us?”

“Hold on a second.” Barry Hamilton pleads for my continued patience with a raised forefinger while playing with his phone until he locates the shot he's looking for. Finding it, he pushes the phone six inches from my face. “Not so little now, is he?”

No, he certainly is not. Even if I could recall what Tyler Hamilton looked like twenty-five years ago, I likely wouldn't be able to make the connection between him and the short, rotund, balding, bearded man in the digital photograph that Barry is sticking up my nose.

“The little SOB is down in Toledo in the front office of the biggest safety consulting firm in all of Ohio. They're the number one single supplier of qualified personnel to the Department of Homeland Security in the entire Ohio-Michigan area. The little SOB has got a half-a-million dollar house and a Porsche Carrera GT. Can you believe that?”

Rachel spots me halfway across the gymnasium and manages to say hello without speaking or using her hands, and I tell Barry I'll be right back while giving him a duplicate of the forefinger he'd used to invoke my patience instead of the one I'd much prefer to supply him with, and meet her by the refreshment table.

“You and Barry all caught up now?” she says.

“The only thing more boring than other people's photographs are other people's dreams.”

“Oh, I don't know. I've had some dreams recently you might not find so boring.”

Common courtesy almost compels me to ask what they are until Rachel's dirty smirk informs me that they're not the sort of dreams one discusses at an information dispensing session in a well-lit high-school gym. I repeatedly dip a tea bag in my Styrofoam cup, but even this seems too forward, as if, in lieu of suggestive hand puppets, I'm doing my best to flirt right back with the limited foodstuffs available. I drop the tea bag in the garbage pail.

“So your community spirit got the best of you after all,” Rachel says, swishing a wooden stir stick in her own Styrofoam cup.

“That, and I got tired of cleaning up my parents' house.”

“Laura Mackenzie's your real estate agent, I hear.”

“I guess I have you to thank for that.”

“Or blame.”

“She seems okay. Better than when we were all here, anyway.”

“A bitch yesterday is a bitch today.”

“She wasn't
that
bad.” I look over my shoulder to make sure she's not standing behind us.

“Maybe not to you.”

A hum of a microphone followed by, “Can we please have everyone take their seats now please?” and everyone does just that, fills the ten or so rows of nicked and dented grey metal folding chairs that we used for school assemblies two decades ago. Instead of
déjà vu
, however, I feel the same thing I felt twenty-five years in reverse, like sneaking out before the boredom begins and there's no chance to get away unnoticed. The woman at the podium thanks us all for coming and someone else for supplying the cookies and someone else for the muffins and by the time she's going over some of the questions that were raised at the last meeting, I'm knee-over-knee, chin-in-hand pretending to pay attention to what she's saying while really studying my fellow Cougar alumni, who are interspersed in the audience with the concerned parents of present CCI students.

It's not who's here that's so absorbing—all of my old teachers are either retired or dead, and most of the people I was closest to back then didn't stick around town too long after graduation—but what happened to the ones that are here: somehow they got old. The men who were boys when I knew them have nearly all capitulated to the twin taunts of thinning hair and receding hairlines and have shaved their heads to varying degrees of bristly clean, so much the better to view their fleshy faces and bushy eyebrows. The girls turned women look like nothing so much as their mothers: short hair, flat shoes, flabby arms. All of which means that I must be old now, too. Forty-four
is
old, I know, but knowing isn't feeling, and feeling, as everyone knows, is how we really come to know something. Seeing silver in all-star point guard and
Reach for the Top
team captain Tommy Anderson's hair—barrister Tommy Anderson, LLB—makes me
feel
old. Discovering that several of my former classmates have children of their own at the very same high school that we attended makes me
feel
old. Learning that Richard Stokowski died of leukemia three years ago makes me
feel
old.

Rachel doesn't make me feel old. Sitting beside me in her Jimmy Choo heels and sleek black skirt and dangling Prada handbag, Rachel makes me—me, in my Levis and Blundstones and short-sleeve western shirt—feel like a lucky lumberjack who's stumbled into the wrong seat but who has yet to be ushered out. But that's in my head—in my nostrils, it's 1980-something and eleven o'clock on Saturday night at someone's house party way out in the country, and it's spring, finally spring, spilt beer and wood smoke and a warm breeze carrying the faintest, surprisingly not unpleasant stink of skunk spray. I uncross then recross my legs, forcing Rachel to do the same.

“Try to stay awake and I'll buy you a Budweiser after this is over,” Rachel whispers in my ear. I can't identify her perfume—it's different from Sara's, the only perfume I've nosed first-hand for a long, long time—but it's nice, floral fresh, but not too sweetly chemically strong.

“Make it a Heineken and I'll even sign the petition,” I whisper back.

“I thought you were a Bud man.”

“Maybe when I used to shoot hoops in here during second period,” I say, pointing to the basketball net suspended above us like a low brow mistletoe. Budweiser was just another irresistible US import that, like McDonalds and Hershey chocolate bars, was never as good as it seemed like it would be on the American TV commercials you'd seen for years, even though you couldn't get it in Canada.

“C'mon, where's the fun in having good taste when you're back in your hometown?”

“Fair enough. Tonight, I'm a Bud man.”

Rachel pats me on the knee. “Good boy. And not only are you going to sign the petition, you're going to give me a donation by the end of the night too.”

In that case, I want to say, it's a good thing you're buying the beer, because at the moment I'm the biggest charity case in this gym. I wonder if Uncle Donny bet on basketball games? Somehow it would be easier to take knowing he lost his brother's shirt betting on a sport he at least knew something about. But that doesn't make any sense. Uncle Donny has been a Maple Leafs fan for fifty-plus years—obviously he doesn't know anything about hockey either.

I listen to the speaker still talking at the podium, and what I hear—annually decreasing enrollment, board of education cost-efficiency, general public apathy—isn't encouraging, although not surprising. The world needs door-to-door canvassers to raise money for the needy and community newspapers to expose scheming local politicians and internet shut-ins to blather honestly about big business shenanigans, and I thank you—the world thanks you—for busying yourself so busily. But my parents never went to church and I never belonged to Boy Scouts and no one ever taught me that city hall could be beaten. It might have been Epictetus who wrote that “Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire,” but it was my mother who always said, “Oh well, what are you going to do?” Greek stoicism and Chatham working-class indifference aren't all that different, the disparity in the number of undergraduate philosophy courses dedicated to each notwithstanding. I hope a way is found to keep CCI open—it's a good thing, and good things are as desirable as they are uncommon—but I'm not hopeful.

When the podium is empty and the leftover cookies and muffins are packed away and people are putting on their coats and pulling on their gloves and scarves, I stand and slip on my jacket and am aware that I'm waiting for Rachel, who's talking to the presenter and a couple of other people. Am I on a date? No, of course I'm not on a date. I'm just going to the Montreal House with Rachel Turnbal for a beer.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, after Rachel
dropped me off at home, I get the bucket and rag and Pine-Sol back out and returned to the bathroom to finish what I'd started. I sniffed last night's stale souvenirs of sweat and latex and women's perfume and decided I'd better clean myself before I finished the bathroom.

I knew I hadn't done anything wrong—Sara wouldn't have expected me to take a vow of celibacy—but after I showered and changed and got back down on my knees on the bathroom floor I tugged off my wedding ring and slipped it into my pocket. It wasn't symbolic, I wasn't trying to tell myself something, I didn't feel a sudden release, a dizzying freedom, the bitter sweet beginning of a brand new chapter in my life.

It was time to scour the tub and I was going to use Comet and I didn't want to get my ring dirty or worse. And when I was done and decided to leave it on the table beside the bed—where I'd placed our wedding picture, which I'd transferred from the living room—it was only because I had a lot of cleaning to do before the house was sold and everything I was going to keep was packed away and it made sense to wait until there was nothing left to do before I put it back on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Eight

 

 

 

Now that someone might see
me in them, I realize I need new underwear. Underwear and socks. Sometimes life is just that simple.

There are places other than the downtown mall to get what I need, but I knew I'd end up here. It's the same reason I don't choose to buy Heinz Ketchup or Kraft Peanut Butter or Sunlight Dish Soap but always come home with them from the grocery store anyway. My mother bought all of my back-to-school clothes from Sears—first from the catalogue, then in person when the mall opened up around the time I started high school—so that's where I shop, even in Toronto, for all of existence's most essential items. When it was time to replace our fridge or a piece of furniture, Sara would attempt to convince me to at least have a look around the sort of glassy and gleamy Toronto shops that always have a complimentary cappuccino bar and several model-worthy salespersons, but I remained adamant about Sears' sound return policy and reasonable prices. Plus, Sears is where I had my first part-time job, made the money I spent on records and junk food and gas money, my earliest adult purchases. We're loyal to what made us, whether we take an oath or not.

“Sam.”

I'm out of the cold and inside the mall and on my way to Sears—near the lottery booth, just past Bed, Bath, and Beyond—when I'm actually relieved that I'm hearing voices. Because I guess I'm just one of those people who isn't made to be mellow, it's time to admit that my attempt to brain-tame myself with weed has been a failure, and who likes to fail at anything? All other arguments against it aside, even if marijuana does seem to encourage metaphysical mellowness and cosmic contemplativeness and the not-unpleasant sensation of not really giving a damn, imagining someone calling out your name in the middle of the afternoon does seem a rather high price to pay in return.

“Sam. Over here.”

Except that now it appears as if I'm
not
hearing things—a not-so-young, not-so-old (my age, if I think about it) couple loaded down with assorted shopping bags like two overworked mules hear what I hear too, look where I'm looking also. Except that the voice calling out my name is emanating from a very large, very furry squirrel handing out leaflets in front of the Bank of Montreal. Either the couple has been smoking the same weed as I have or that's a squirrel costume with someone inside it who knows my name. I don't have time to consider which proposition is the more frightening.

“Sam, it's me, Scott.” The squirrel points a paw at himself. I come closer, but without managing to crack the rodent code. With both paws gesturing toward himself now, including the one holding the leaflets, “Me, Scott Frampton.”

Scott “Frampton Comes Alive” Frampton.

There's always the slightly older guy who isn't good at sports and isn't good at school and isn't, truth be told, the sharpest knife in the drawer, but who makes up for it all by possessing that most coveted of items—a car—and Scott was him when I was at CCI. It was his mother's car, actually—a blue 1977 Monte Carlo—and being friends with Scott meant that on Friday or Saturday night you'd look for his headlights flashing through the sheer curtains in the living room or listen for the crunch of stone underneath his tires in the driveway. Your coat would be on and your wallet was in your back pocket and you'd already promised your parents you'd be home by one o'clock, and when Scott pulled into the driveway you could breathe normally again and hurry to the door and then coolly walk to the Monte Carlo, hoping to ride shotgun but happy to just have a seat. Just because he said he'd pick you up didn't mean he was going to actually show, the agony of watching eight
pm
become 8:15 (he's just late), then 8:30 (call his house but he's already left), then 8:45 (coat off, but not put away in the closet yet), then 9:10 and moping in front of the TV and your dad asking if you wanted a ride and you answering no, because it wasn't about anywhere in particular you were supposed to be, it was all about going.

“Hey, Scott,” I say, instinctively offering him five fingers before realizing that squirrels don't shake hands. Scott bumps his paw against my fist.

“What the fuck are you doing back here in Chatham, you fucker?” he says without pausing from his labours, which seem to consist in handing out flyers detailing the bank's assorted saving accounts, all of which guarantee interest rates so attractively high, you'll be able to save your hard-earned money like the world's most frugal—and largest—squirrel.

“Just visiting. You know.”

“Hey, I heard you're a writer or something. Mum says she sees you in the
Globe and Mail
sometimes.”

“Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes when I write something for them.” Which is so tautologically obvious it makes very little sense, although it suffices for Scott, who nods his massive squirrel head several times in understanding. Out of respect for the many times he did show up as promised in the Monte Carlo and saved me from a Friday night watching
Fantasy Island
followed by an episode of
Hart to Hart
with my mum, I don't ask Scott what he's been up to for the last couple of decades.

“Well, I better get going, but it's good to see you again, Scott.”

“Fuck, yes, Sam. We should get a fucking brew sometime. Get caught up.”

“Absolutely.”

“I'm in the book.”

“Right.”

“The phone book.”

“Right.”

“So don't be a fucking stranger and call me.”

“Okay. I will.”

“And don't work too hard. You fucker, you.”

“Right. You too.”

While getting what I need from the menswear section at Sears I remember why Scott dropped out of CCI and why we lost touch. Airplane glue
is
substantially cheaper and easier to acquire on a Saturday night at eleven than a twelve pack of Canadian, but it does come with side-effects slightly more debilitating than the premature development of a belt-high Molson muscle. After I get my underwear and socks I give in to the mall's somnolent flow, eventually find myself at Coles, where I learn that Chatham's only bookstore doesn't carry any of my books, but does have an ample supply of Nora Roberts and Tom Robbins novels.

I'm on my way out of the store when I almost don't recognize Samantha, so used to always seeing her packed into her winter jacket. She's sitting by herself at a table for two in the food court eating a piled-high plate of poutine while listening to her iPod and reading what looks like a fat textbook. I stay where I am, just inside the entrance to the bookstore, until I realize that someone could easily misconstrue what I'm doing as watching her. When she looks up from her book to brush a long strand of hair out of her face and behind her right ear, she recognizes me, seems as surprised to see me here as I am her. I return
The History of the Electric Guitar
back to the shelf and walk over. She thumbs something on her iPod but doesn't remove her ear buds. I motion with my chin toward the book.

“How can you concentrate in here?”

She shrugs. “I'm usually listening to music.”

“How can you concentrate with music on?”

She shrugs again. They should call her generation
Generation Shrug
. “It's just physics.”

“And what kind of music goes best with physics?”

“At the moment, Jim Bryson.” She can tell I have no idea who that is. “He's sort of neo-folk. Sort of a post modern singer-songwriter. Don't feel bad—even if you did occasionally listen to people who were actually still alive, you probably wouldn't know his stuff. He's pretty underground.”

“Do you know who Jim Osterberg is?”

“No.”

“As it is written, a Jim for Jim. I guess we're even then.”

She pulls out her right ear bud and offers it to me. “Do you want to check out what my Jim sounds like?”

“Pass,” I say, picking up her textbook instead. The cover is different from the copy I had in high school, but inside is familiarly incomprehensible. “I dropped physics,” I say, thumb-flipping through to the end. You forget sometimes—there
are
compensations for growing old. Like not having to understand how the universe works.

“Why did you drop it?”

Closing the book and putting it back on the table, “I was failing.”

“Really.” She seems genuinely surprised that anyone could be so dim; curious even, like a psychologist might wonder at a child who has difficulty fitting round blocks into round holes.

“Let's just say my strengths were elsewhere,” I say.

“What, like phys-ed?”

“No, like … ” I stop before I threaten to march home and get my grade thirteen report card.

Samantha drinks from her can of Diet Coke through a straw. “What's in the bag?”

“Just towels,” I say, swinging the Sears bag behind my back. Not that shopping for underwear and socks is anything to be embarrassed about. “I ran out of towels.”

“I meant to ask you. If your hot water heater isn't hooked up, how do you get water to take a shower?”

“Actually, I just got it turned back on. Before that, I took baths. I just dumped a few kettles worth of boiling water in with the cold water.”

“It might have been easier to have just gotten the gas turned on when you got here.”

“I didn't think I was going to be here long enough for it to be worth it.”

“And you do now?”

“I guess. Maybe not. I don't know.” Wanting to both change the subject and have someone listen to me gripe, “I asked the kid working in menswear if they had any blue jeans that didn't fall apart like these”—I point to three separate dime-sized holes that have sprouted in the expensive pair of jeans I bought in Toronto less than six months ago—“and he asked me how often I washed them. ‘Whenever they're dirty,' I said, and he said, ‘Oh, you can't do that with good blue jeans. Only wash them, like, every two months, max.'” When I don't see the head-shaking confirmation of the absurdity of teenage sales staffers/modern manufacturing values I was looking for, I deliver the cuckoo
coup de grace
: “So I asked him, ‘If I don't wash them, what do I do when they start to smell?' You know what he said to me?”

“Put them in the freezer?” Samantha says.

I give up, shake my own head. This is why we have friends our own age. So we can complain and commiserate about people younger than us.

Samantha pokes her white plastic fork into the swamp of brown crud covering her Styrofoam plate. Before I can get too Thou Shalt Not, though, I remember that I used to sit where she's sitting now, used to take my lunch break at this very food court when I worked at Sears. Mr. Pong's was my preferred half-hour destination, what the three chicken balls that came with the Number Two Lunch Special lacked in chicken they more than made up for with plenty of deep-fried dough and sweet orange sauce. And compared to kids today, who can't even remember a time before recycling, my teenage carbon footprint is probably deeper than hers and all of her classmates combined.

“This is lunch,” she says. “I've got class in twenty minutes.”

“Go ahead.”

Lifting her fork, “You said you don't eat meat anyway, right?”

“Even if I still did, I wouldn't be eating that.” Yes I would. Christ, since when did I start sounding like my mother?

On the way to her mouth an overloaded forkful of poutine plops onto her left forearm; in the process of grabbing for her napkin, she knocks over the can of Diet Coke which soaks the same shirt sleeve.

“See?” I say. “Karma.”

“Do you believe in karma?”

“No. But I do believe you're going to need some more napkins.”

When I return from the A&W counter Samantha has pulled up her shirt sleeve and is doing her best to wring it dry. There are sharp red welts travelling all the way down from her elbow to just above her wrist.

“You didn't get those from spilling poutine,” I say, offering her the napkins but still staring at the scars on her forearm.

“Asshole,” she says, yanking down her shirt sleeve. “Asshole stalker spy.”

“Hey, c'mon,” I say, looking around to see if anyone heard her. I'm still holding out the napkins, although she's busy yanking on her coat and grabbing her books. “Sorry,” I say, although for what, I'm not sure.

I follow her through the food court and down the escalator and onto King Street, but without calling out her name or imitating her half-jog. Even asshole stalker spies have their dignity. I decide not to trail her all the way to CCI, as forty-four year-old pursuant men on high-school property are never a good combination, regardless of their appeasing intentions. She crosses against traffic—narrowly avoiding a honking pick-up truck—and I watch her go.

 

* * *

 

Ding dong and hello hello
, and is this the original roof and are the fridge and stove included and what are your hydro and gas bills like in the wintertime and
how old is the roof and what type of foundation is it and does the house have insulation in the walls and attic and what are the schools around here like and how much are the property taxes and how long has the house been on the market and
how do you find your neighbours?

By walking out the front door, I want to say. Real estate etiquette dictates that ordinarily I wouldn't even be here while Laura was showing the house, but apparently the prospective owners requested that I be present so that they could get a horse's mouth yea or neigh regarding the child-friendly nature of the neighbourhood.

“Like I said, it's my parents' house and I didn't grow up here, but from what I can tell, the neighbours are very quiet, I haven't heard a peep from anyone since I've been around. And there's the park next door which would be great for kids.” When no one's using it to guzzle wine or smoke pot, anyway.