Liberty Street (30 page)

In seventh grade, he failed five subjects. He got 13 percent in science, and when his grandfather saw that on his report card he said, “Thirteen percent . . . you've learned nothing,” and Dooley said, “Technically, thirteen percent isn't nothing,” and his grandfather called him disrespectful. He was held back that year. That's what they called it, “held
back,” like you were trying, wanting to go somewhere, even though Dooley wasn't. Dooley's grandfather called it failing. He called it a great humiliation that a Sullivan and the grandson of a former principal would fail a grade. He told Dooley about the hedge schools in Ireland and the lengths people went to in order to make sure their children were educated, even when the rich English tried to prevent it. “You're lucky,” he told Dooley. “Privileged. You've had every advantage.”

Every advantage. That's not how Dooley saw it. And where were his parents, he wondered, if he was so privileged? Why was he living with his grandfather, who didn't even seem to like him much? And if his grandfather thought living with a teacher was an advantage, he had that wrong.

He failed grade seven again.

By the time he finally got to grade eight he was both the tallest and dumbest boy in the class. He didn't like being the dumbest, not really, but he just couldn't seem to figure how to put any effort into school, and anyway, if he did make an effort, that would mean he cared. He skipped regularly, even though there was some enjoyment in keeping the other students on the edges of paying attention to the teacher, keeping them constantly aware of him, the way you are aware of a wild animal—a sly coyote, say—lurking, up to something. The eighth-grade teacher called him disruptive, which meant that he could make the others laugh pretty much anytime he wanted. Like the day he swung his legs out the open second-storey classroom window while the teacher had her back turned to write something on the blackboard, and he silently polled the other students as he sat in the window, mimed, “Should I? Should I?” raising his hands to ask the question while the teacher wrote with chalk in her
neat hand, pleased with her ability to keep the lines straight, ignorant of what was going on behind her.

Dooley wasn't really planning to jump, but he was enjoying that all the other students were nodding their heads and trying not to giggle. He milked it—
Should I? Should I
?—until he noticed one girl frowning at him, and he knew, just knew, she was about to tell. He could see her hand shooting up, hear the words “Teacher, teacher, Dooley's in the window,” and so he impulsively jumped. Without really thinking how far it was to the ground. He heard the collective roar of laughter behind him as he went hurtling into space, trying to figure out how to roll when he landed, past that little girl in the window, Basie Moon's daughter, with her curly hair framing her face, and he landed all wrong and broke his ankle and a rib, and that wasn't actually funny. There was a big fuss when Elliot's only ambulance came and he gave the thumbs-up from the stretcher to all the kids sneaking peeks from the various classroom windows, even though they were now closed. The little girl with the curly hair was still there, leaning out of an open window. She waved at him and ducked back inside, and then they'd hauled him away in the ambulance. When he ventured out a few days later and hobbled around town with his taped ribs and his cast and crutches, he got lots of “Hey, Dooley, good one!” This coming from high school boys wanting to sign his cast. Girls, lots of girls, saying, “Let me sign, Dooley.” Just to be a smart aleck, he asked his grandfather if he wanted to sign, but of course he didn't. Surprisingly, his teacher did. “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley,” she said as she wrote her name in blue ballpoint, “what is the world going to do with you?” For some reason that question unsettled him—the way she used the word “world” instead of asking, “What are
we
going to do with you?”

When Dooley passed grade eight—barely—his grandfather bribed him to keep him from dropping out of school. A car, he said, to be confiscated if he quit. Dooley negotiated. He wanted a truck. Not a new one, but one he could work on himself. They had a shop in the high school. He could take motor mechanics and auto body and work on his own truck. His grandfather didn't want him to take shop classes. That was for boys who weren't academically inclined, he said. Dooley thought,
Are you losing your mind, old man? What have I ever done to give you even an ounce of hope
? He didn't say this out loud, but he drew a line. The truck and motor mechanics, or he was quitting. He was sixteen now, so no one could stop him. His grandfather argued, but Dooley won. He didn't think for a minute that he would stay in school long enough to get his graduation certificate, but he got his truck, a 1952 Chevy short bed with a lot of miles on it and a rusty body crying out for restoration. He pictured himself cruising around town. Red. He would paint the truck red.

That fall, he started drinking in earnest. He hung around with farm kids who'd been driving since they were twelve or thirteen, and with older town kids who had their parents' sedans or their own beaters, and every weekend they hit the roads and found new places to party—in an old barn or grain bin if it was cold, outside on nice summer nights, in a stand of trees in someone's pasture, at the gravel pit, where it was sheltered and you could have a fire and no one would notice. He'd get so drunk he would have no recollection the next day of what he'd done, but whatever it was, it must have been entertaining because wherever he went he'd hear, “Hey, Dooley! Epic, man!”

There were girls at the parties, and Dooley liked them—chicklets, he called them. He liked to hang out with their little cadres and cliques and tease them and make them giggle, but he was not obliging with the girls who wanted too much of his attention, and he developed the reputation of being a
difficult catch
, which made some of the girls want to be with him all the more. He pushed them away. He'd have sex with them, yes—in a stand of trees, on the beach, in the back seat of someone's car—but only once, and if one of them got drunk and cried at the next party because he'd moved on, he'd turn his back. He didn't want to hurt anyone, but he didn't want a girlfriend. Brushing a girl off was better than breaking her heart.

In June, after he turned seventeen, he finally got to drive the truck out of the shop and park it in the driveway of his grandfather's house for all to see. Gleaming, shimmering candy apple red, specially ordered for custom paint jobs. He was proud of the truck as he'd been proud of nothing before in his life. He managed to pass grade nine thanks to the applied arts classes he was now taking and the work he'd put into the truck. His grandfather came around and grew hopeful that there was at least some kind of graduation certificate within Dooley's reach. Dooley let his grandfather think he now cared about school. He was not unhappy about going back in the fall. He had plans to put a new motor in the truck.

Then Basie Moon went through Elliot's only stop sign and ran smack into him. When Dooley saw the other truck coming at him, felt the smack, heard the sound of steel buckling, saw all his work going for shit in a few careless seconds, he wanted to go crazy, scream, hit someone, beat the living crap out of Basie Moon right there in the street.
But then he saw the girl staring at him wide-eyed, and he remembered—the girl in the window—and he held back, although he couldn't stop himself from calling Basie Moon an idiot. He could have said a lot worse. He could have
done
a lot worse. And then the cop who showed up accused Dooley of drinking—“Have you been drinking again, Dooley?”—when he hadn't had a single drop, not yet, and everyone in town knew that Basie Moon was blind as a bat and shouldn't be driving. He looked at his truck with the buckled hood and the hanging bumper—all that work for nothing, he should have known—and he felt a surge that he didn't recognize, something he'd never felt before, an all-consuming contempt for everybody snaking from his feet up through his body.

Everybody except the girl. Frances Mary Moon, watching, sitting on the bench in front of the bank with her curly hair like Little Orphan Annie, staring at him with her eyes wide, looking at him as though she were about to speak, ask him a question, invite him to sit down beside her, and it was she who stopped him from going off completely. She sat by herself while Basie Moon inspected the vehicles, or pretended to, and when her father sat down beside her, they whispered something to each other, and she reached over and touched her father's hand, as though to make him feel better, comfort him, and Dooley thought, Why? Why don't I have a father instead of that impossible old man? He tried to think back to a time before his grandfather, but there was nothing there. Why did he have to get stuck with an old man who liked to hang stainless steel pots in his kitchen so everyone could see them, and have stupid dinner parties—international cooking parties, he called them—and cook egg foo yong and chop suey, pretending that he, Dooley, didn't exist
whenever the house was full of teachers and the town doctor and the couple who owned the hardware store, all of them dressed up the way you don't have to dress up in a town like Elliot, and laughing and trying to eat with chopsticks. Why did he have to be the one that happened to? Dooley watched the curly-haired girl and tried to imagine what she was whispering to her father, and he couldn't. She was talking a foreign language. He'd never cried about being deserted by his mother. He wanted to cry now. He had to work harder than he'd ever worked to keep from crying, to keep Basie Moon and the girl and the cop and the others who were now standing around from seeing him—Dooley Sullivan, who had a reputation to uphold—break down in tears.

The cop told him to calm down—“Dooley,” he said, “Dooley, calm down and tell me what happened or I'll have to put you in the back of the car, and you know you don't like it back there”—and he took their statements, and then Moon and the little girl drove off. The cop
let
Basie Moon drive off with his daughter, which was outrageous, criminal. If he ever had a child, Dooley thought, he would not put that child in harm's way. And then he thought that he was already putting people in harm's way because he drove as drunk as a sailor half the time, and so he resolved to quit drinking, to make something of himself so he could have a family someday, a real one.

Only he didn't quit drinking. He quit school instead. He tried to make a new start on the truck, but he was too angry. He was angry all the time now, and hating school and all the teachers, even the grade eight teacher, who still said “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley” whenever she saw him, and he understood this to be a sign of affection of some kind or another, and
that just made it worse, that his former teacher was the most affectionate person in his life and all she could say to him was “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley” as she walked by, not even stopping to say it, but saying it in passing as though he was hopeless, no point in stopping.

He quit school before September was even over. He took the truck away from the shop without fixing it, just banged the dents out as best he could, and he left his grandfather's house and moved in with a couple of guys who were older than him and worked in the bush. He tried that too, working in the bush, only he wasn't very good at it. The work was too hard and the men too rough, and Dooley was tall and skinny, not muscular, and they didn't like him, and he didn't get called to work very often. So he spent what money he had on booze, and he spent the fall of that year driving the mangled red truck in a blur of inebriation until the night he'd hit a deer and sent it flying through the air like a football, and then he'd hit the bridge, drove his truck right into it, thinking he and the truck would fly together like the deer, only that hadn't happened. The truck had slammed into the bridge and stopped without flying anywhere, bursting into flames right after some good Samaritan dragged him from the cab. The tow truck had only a burned-out shell to haul away.

He remembered almost nothing as he lay in a hospital bed, first in Yellowhead and then back in Elliot, the room in darkness because the light bothered his eyes, but he could still see the deer lit by the headlights, its four legs flying end over end and disappearing into the night, and then—
smack
!—there it was again, four legs flying, over and over, endlessly.

Until his grandfather accused him of hitting that man on the highway, the Indian who worked at the lumberyard. He didn't remember a man; he remembered the deer. He wanted to explain, tried to talk, one last chance to prevent people from believing the worst of him, but then his grandfather leaned over him in his hospital bed and said, “Don't you say a word, Dooley. Not one word about that man. It will ruin your life completely, if it's not ruined already. And I'm sick and tired of trying to bail you out of trouble. What's done is done. Not one word.” And Dooley had thought,
You miserable old prick
, and he quit trying to explain.

When the police came, he said he didn't remember, which was mostly true.

He clung to the image of the flying deer being swallowed by darkness, but then one day it disappeared entirely and didn't return, and the deer was replaced by the image of a man. Struck by the bumper of his truck. A man going end over end into the snow. He began to see the man whenever he closed his eyes.

When he was well enough—“He'll never be completely well,” the doctors said—they sent him back to the hospital in Elliot, and Basie Moon's daughter, the red-haired girl, delivered a get well card, the only one he received from anyone. Eventually, he limped away from the hospital with one steel plate holding his leg together and another in his head, and he moved to the city, cut off all ties with Elliot, and didn't go back until three years later, after he heard his grandfather had died. He'd been doing not all that badly in the city, working as a carpenter's helper, keeping his drinking under control—perhaps because he'd discovered cannabis, which made him feel almost normal. He didn't know why he was
drawn back to Elliot after his grandfather's death, but he was, and then it all went wrong again, and he almost incinerated himself in his grandfather's house and ended up in jail, and then Basie Moon, the same one who'd run into his truck, offered him money to go away again, and he took it. He divided his money in two, left one half in a bank and tucked the other half into a false bottom that he crafted in his backpack, and he decided to really go away, first to Alberta, then to Vancouver. He tried to find work there on a fishing boat, but no one would have him because he had no experience. Eventually he went to California to see what that was all about—beaches and surfers and Hollywood—and that's when he thought about joining the Marines as a way of turning his life around, but only for about five minutes because he had no interest in getting killed in Vietnam, and anyway, the Marines wouldn't want a recruit with metal plates holding him together.