Idea in Stone (6 page)

“Ready?” Delonia asked the young man standing next to her in a tone too childish for a modern pre-teen. She reached down, ruffled his blond hair, and smiled.

“I’m ready,” he said, “just don’t sing flat this time.”

Delonia’s eyes flared. Her mouth opened and closed, showing her large teeth as she struggled for something to say. She looked around the stage at her peers, then put a hand to her face and walked quickly off the set. Stefan was surprised: in her heyday Delonia would have barked the boy off the stage, or simply upstaged him to the point that he vanished in the light of her talent. But tonight her defences were down, and the boy had struck her to the quick.

Stefan leaned down to the young entertainer’s height. “You know what, little man? In a year, two tops, your voice is going to change. And then you’re fucked. Then when you want to make a comeback, you’re going to have to grovel for all you’re worth. But people have long memories around here, and you’ll be lucky to get a gig as a backup choir member for someone as talented and gracious as that woman. She’s been around for a long time, and that’s with good reason. You’ll be lucky if you ever see this place again.” He started after his mother, but turned back to the boy. “Oh, and another thing. You’re gay.” Then he ran from the soundstage. “Mom?” he asked, opening the dressing room door. He found her waving a smoking bundle of sticks in the air. He coughed. “What the hell is that?”

“Sage. It clears the energy in the room.”

“And probably trips the sprinklers,” he said, grabbing it and taking it to the dressing room’s little washroom, where he dropped it into the toilet. He sat Delonia down and took a seat opposite her. “What’s the matter? Normally you would have snapped that little pre-teen bitch in two.”

“I’m not sure,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve been touchy the last couple of days. I think it’s what you said about Cerise. I’ve been wondering if maybe you were right.”

“No, Mom, I’ve been thinking about that, too. I shouldn’t have said it. What do I know, eh? If you’re happy, then that’s the truth, that’s all that matters.”

“Oh I’m so glad you feel that way. Because last night she asked me to marry her.”

“But—but Mom, you’re married to Dad.”

“Stefan, your father’s been dead for over twenty years.”

“Mom, you said ‘Till death do us part’.”

“Yes, and he’s dead.”

Stefan stood, shaking his head.

“Stefan, please, we want you to be part of this. Cerise thinks that this could be a very important event. What if it were televised? And you and someone special were there at the altar to give me away? That would mean so much to both of us. And imagine what that would mean for our society, to see me and you embracing our true natures and each other that way. Maybe you and Jason might get back together, and we could all live together in our house.”

“Look, that’s never going to happen. I think you’re a crazy woman,” said Stefan, “and I have to get out of here.”

“But you’re here to drive me home.”

“Oh. Right.”

“I’m ready to go back in there now,” said Delonia. “I won’t be long.” She gathered herself and left.

Stefan looked around the dressing room. Posters for old shows were dry-mounted on the wall, including one featuring his parents which had faded into tones of rusty brown. A dress in a stereotypically North American Indian pattern hung from Delonia’s frame. She had one leg stepped forward through a slit in the dress and her hair was pulled back from her heavily made-up face by a beaded headband. Stefan winced at the idea of his mother as sex symbol. His father wore a leisure suit and a warm, completely guileless smile beamed from his beard. Stefan touched the smile. From nowhere, a word popped into his head:
Edinburgh.

He knew what the letters on his bedside table were trying to spell, and he knew where he had to go.

Four

Nearest Exit

“Mom, what are you doing?” asked Stefan.

Delonia looked up from the small towel she held. “I’m doing your laundry,” she replied.

“I didn’t ask you to do that. I don’t want you to do that. Could you please get out of my room?”

Delonia smiled. “What’s this?” she asked, holding up the towel, which seemed to hold its crumpled shape against gravity. “Somebody’s been hiding something. Is there someone I should know about? A guest you’ve been sneaking in? Hmm? What’s this?” She shook the petrified thing.

“I can’t believe this,” said Stefan, banging his head on the doorframe. He threw the mail he’d carried in with him down on the bed. “Mom, it’s semen. There, is that what you wanted to hear? And it’s mine, just mine. Alright? Now that I’m completely bereft of any dignity, could you please get the hell out of here?”

“Oh,” She dropped the towel into the laundry basket, “well at least I know you’re human. You know, you don’t give many outward signs.”

“What? I’m living my life. So what if I’m not in a relationship or having real sex? What do I need those for? Why do you keep pushing this? Relationships are just people’s way of avoiding their mortality. As long as they’re caught up in all the romance of it and busying themselves with paying attention to this other personality, they can hide out from the fact that one day they’re going to die. It’s the ultimate denial of the responsibility each of us has for figuring out what life is for.”

Delonia raised her eyebrows. “Ooh, listen to you! That’s a bit cynical, don’t you think?”

“Is it? Think about it: people sit in office buildings pacified by gushy love songs on the radio all week, then come Friday night we’re out on the town trying to have those experiences ourselves, perfectly distracted from the plight of our fellow man or the vicious activities of our government. Then on Saturday we go to the cinema to watch scripts we’re supposed to aspire to living out. You
sing
those songs! Do you really think they describe actual experience, or are they really about what we
wished
we felt like?”

“Stefan,” said Delonia, taking his hands and sitting down with him on his bed, “I have to say that you don’t know what you’re talking about. And that makes me sad.”

“Oh, right, because if only I knew true love I would join you and all those people on a hillside singing happy love songs, right?”

Delonia smiled and touched Stefan’s arm. She closed her eyes, then opened them, looking at the centre of Stefan’s chest. She pointed a single finger there and tapped him hard. “Unfold,” she said, addressing the spot.

Stefan rolled his eyes.

It wasn’t precisely fair, he knew, but he still felt the anger of exposure from her intrusion, so he pulled out the big guns: “There’s a bunch of birthday cards here for you,” he said, handing her the mail he’d grabbed on the way downstairs. “I think one of them is from Grandpa.” He watched her face fall as he gave her the envelopes.

She looked at them, feigning nonchalance, but pulled out the one yellow envelope with her father’s large, scrawled writing on its front and stared at it. Without a word, she left the room. His gambit had the intended result, and he hated himself for using it.

Stefan didn’t even know what the rift was between his mother and her father, but it was something he’d seen her levelled by again and again. The effect didn’t lessen with time.

Stefan looked at the tiny newsprint slips on his bedside table arranged into the word ‘Edinburgh’. (They’d stopped appearing since Monday when he’d formed them into that name.) He was happy his mother hadn’t disturbed them or asked about them. She was the last person he’d want to talk to about all this.

Just as Delonia’s father was the last person she would want to speak to.

Stefan felt a sudden compulsion to visit the man.

~

Stefan drove through the streets of the reservation, self-conscious of the car’s tiny size and sporty lines in the midst of all the pickup trucks and muscle cars. The bungalows all had muddy yards, some with dogs tied up in them. Driving here had taken two days, but last night’s quiet evening on his own in a roadside motel had a rejuvenating effect on him. Stefan liked being on the move, and enjoyed the idea that no one knew where he was. Shifting his recording schedule had been easy, too. The only disconcerting thing was this destination.

Of all the parts of his makeup Stefan was uncomfortable about, this one—the “Indian” connection—was the most awkward. His opinions about the First Nations, the Indians, the Native Canadians, or whatever he was supposed to call them, whatever some fraction of him was supposed to be, were all received ones. His mother benefited from the association, as it added something exotic and quintessentially Canadian to her image. But the truth was that she left home in her teens to pursue her career and left behind everything about this world. She was only one-quarter Métis to begin with, hardly much of a claim. Stefan’s connection was even more tenuous.

He’d heard too many one-sided, self-assured conversations about free tuition, gun running, tax exemption, cigarette smuggling, land claims, casinos, and suicide to want to have anything to do with it. It certainly had nothing to do with him.

Yet here he was, Stefan J. Mackechnie, pulling up to the house of Thomas Jackrabbit, source of Stefan’s never-divulged middle name. The one-story house stood next to the school where Thomas taught until his retirement.

Stefan pulled up the parking brake and got out of the car. An old German Shepherd made its way to him, its back haunches lowered by degenerated hips. It sniffed at him, then nuzzled its head familiarly under Stefan’s hand. Surely it didn’t remember him, he thought. They’d only visited twice, and those visits were a long time ago.
Perhaps dogs don’t forget these things
. His grandfather, though, was another matter, peering out between the living room curtains suspiciously. Stefan waved, but his grandfather clearly didn’t know who he was.

Stefan went to the front door and rang the bell, an awkward formality, given that they both knew the other was there.

“Yes?” asked Thomas, opening the inner door but not the screen door.

“Hello,” said Stefan.

Clearly Stefan wasn’t a government person, wearing such casual clothes and driving such a sporty car. But he was big city, certainly not from any of the towns nearby. Thomas was at a loss.

“Grandpa, it’s me.”

The man looked him up and down. Thomas’s mouth formed the name:
Robert
? The surprise passed to Stefan: he hadn’t considered that he might look like his father.

“Yeah, he was my dad. We visited you years ago. I’m Stefan.”

Thomas’s face brightened. “Stefan! Come on in!” He opened both doors wide and put an arm around Stefan, leading him into the living room. The air smelled tired, rebreathed many times over. The space was a mix of eras—a battered, soft, and shapeless old orange couch sat next to a lamp with a handmade shade like a stretched scrapbook; then, opposite them, a giant television and a video game console. Thomas saw Stefan looking at this incredulously. “Oh, that. No, I’m no good at all those games. I keep getting my ass kicked. They’re for the kids.”

“Kids?” asked Stefan.

“Sit,” said Thomas. He walked with some difficulty, like an overstuffed pillow on spindly legs. His grey and black hair was neatly pulled back. His face was weathered and wrinkled, the kind of face, Stefan thought with some discomfort, you usually see in a casket. But the expression was all comfort and ease here at home. “Not my kids. My kids are all grown. I mean the children who come by after school. I teach them some extra French, and I try to cover things I think they should know but don’t get in the standard curriculum. In exchange, I get to learn from them about new things in the world I wouldn’t hear about otherwise, and I let them use that video thing. I tell them to show respect for their elders, but they’re forever blowing my head off.”

Stefan laughed. He liked the man.

“Would you like anything?” asked Thomas. “I’ve got any kind of fruit juice you could imagine. I don’t keep liquor or beer, and pop is terrible for the kids. Won’t give it to them. Makes them wrangy as all hell and then I can’t deal with them.”

“An orange juice would be good.”

“What? Nothing more interesting, like pineapple or mango or passionfruit?”

“Oh. Okay, then,” said Stefan with a smirk, “I’ll take pineapple.”

Thomas came back from the kitchen a few minutes later with tall glasses filled with ice and juice. Thomas’s was some other kind, something reddish-purple. “So,” said Thomas, lowering himself with difficulty into a favourite old chair, looking straight at Stefan with a piercing intensity, “what’re you doing here?”

Stefan looked at the floor. “I’m not sure. I was hoping you might help me.”

“What do you need? I don’t have much. I thought your mother was doing pretty well for herself.”

“No, not that kind of help. It’s more like advice I’m looking for.”

“Ah, I see,” said the man, his face collapsing around a frown.

“What?” asked Stefan.

“So you figured you’d go talk to an old Indian, right?”

“No, it’s not that—” Stefan’s stomach wobbled and his face burned. “I wasn’t consciously thinking that, anyway.”

“That I’m old,” said Thomas, “doesn’t necessarily mean I know anything. It just means I’m likely to be opinionated. And being from the First Nations, that doesn’t make me wise. Give me a break. We don’t have any more of a claim on wisdom than anyone else. I mean, look around this reservation. You don’t think these people are just as lost? The trucks, the gadgets—just shiny objects for crows.”