Man Descending (12 page)

At first I don’t know what to say when she looks at me like that, her face all white except for two hot spots on her cheekbones. Zipper is going nuts upstairs. He’s hot tonight. It almost sounds like something recognizable. “Don’t pay Gene any attention,” I say, “he’s a goof.”

“It’s awful, this dress.”

She isn’t that dumb. But a person needs a reason for why things go wrong. I’m not telling her she’s just a way to win ten dollars and prove a point.

“Maybe it’s because I wouldn’t drink that whiskey? Is that it?”

“Well, kind of. That’s part of it. He’s just a jerk. Take it from me, I know. Forget it.”

“I never even thought he knew I was alive. Never guessed. And here I was, crazy about him. Just crazy. I’d watch him in the hallway, you know? I traded lockers with Susan Braithwaite just to get closer to his. I went to all the hockey games to see him play. I worshipped him.”

The way she says that, well, it was too personal. Somebody oughtn’t to say that kind of a thing to a practical stranger. It was worse than if she’d climbed out of her clothes. It made me embarrassed.

“And funny thing is, all that time he really did think I was cute. He told me on the phone. But he never once thought to ask me out because I’m a Baptist. He was sure I couldn’t go. Because I’m a Baptist he thought I couldn’t go. But he thought I was cute all along.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And now,” she says, “look at this. I begged and begged Dad to let me come. I practically got down on my hands and knees. And all those dancing lessons and everything and the band doesn’t show. Imagine.”

“Gene wouldn’t have danced with you anyway. He doesn’t dance.”

Nancy smiled at me. As if I was mental. She didn’t half believe me.

“Hey,” I says, just like that, you never know what’s going to get into you, “Nancy, you want to dance?”

“Now?”

“Now. Sure. Come on. We got the one-man band, Zipper, upstairs. Why not?”

“What’ll Gene say?”

“To hell with Gene. Make him jealous.”

She was human at least. She liked the idea of Gene jealous. “Okay.”

And here I got a confession to make. I go on all the time about Gene not being able to dance. Well, me neither. But I figured what the fuck. You just hop around and hope to hell you don’t look too much like you’re having a convulsion.

Neither of us knew how to get started. We just stood gawking at one another. Upstairs Zipper was going out of his tree. It sounded like there was four of him. As musical as a bag of hammers he is.

“The natives are restless tonight, Giles,” I says. I was not uncomfortable. Let me tell you another one.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. It was just dumb.”

Nancy starts to sway from side to side, shuffling her feet. I figure that’s the signal. I hop or whatever. So does she. We’re out of the gates, off and running.

To be perfectly honest, Nancy Williams can’t dance for shit. She gets this intense look on her face like she’s counting off in her head, and starts to jerk. Which gets some pretty interesting action out of the notorious matched set but otherwise is pretty shoddy. And me? Well, I’m none too coordinated myself, so don’t go getting no mental picture of Fred Astaire or whoever.

In the end what you had was two people who can’t dance, dancing to the beat of a guy who can’t drum. Still, Zipper didn’t know no better and at the time neither did we. We were just what you’d call mad dancing fools. We danced and danced and Zipper drummed and drummed and we were all together and didn’t know it. Son of a bitch, the harder we danced the hotter and happier Nancy Williams’ face got. It just smoothed the unhappiness right out of it. Mine too, I guess.

That is, until all of a sudden it hit her. She stops dead in her tracks and asks, “Where’s Doreen and Gene?”

Good question. They’d buggered off in my old man’s car. Zipper didn’t know where.

The rest of the evening was kind of a horror story. It took me a fair while to convince Nancy they hadn’t gone for Cokes or something and would be right back. In the end she took it like a trooper. The only thing she’d say was, “That Doreen.
That Doreen,”
and shake her head. Of course she said it about a thousand times. I was wishing she’d shut up or maybe give us a little variety like
“That Gene
.” No way.

I had a problem. How to get Cinderella home before twelve-thirty, seeing as Gene had the family chariot. I tried Harvey’s Taxi but no luck. Harvey’s Taxi is one car and Harvey, and both were out driving lunches to a crew doing overtime at the mine.

Finally, at exactly twelve-thirty, we struck out on foot in this blizzard. Jesus, was it snowing. There was slush and ice water and every kind of shit and corruption all over the road. Every time some hunyak roared by us we got splattered by a sheet of cold slop. The snow melted in our hair and run down our necks and faces. By the time we went six blocks we were soaked. Nancy was the worst off because she wasn’t dressed too good with nylons and the famous dress and such. I seen I had to be a gentleman so I stopped and give her my gloves, and my scarf to tie around her head. The two of us looked like those German soldiers I seen on
TV
making this death march out of Russia, on that series
Canada at War
. That was a very educational series. It made you think of man’s inhumanity to man quite often.

“I could just die,” she kept saying. “Dad is going to kill me. This is my last dance ever. I could just die. I could just die.
That Doreen
. Honestly!”

When we stumbled up her street, all black because of the lack of street-lights, I could see that her house was all lit up. Bad news. I stopped her on the corner. Just then it quits snowing. That’s typical.

She stares at the house. “Dad’s waiting.”

“I guess I better go no further.”

Nancy Williams bends down and feels her dress where it sticks out from under her coat. “It’s soaked. I don’t know how much it cost a yard. I could just die.”

“Well,” I says, repeating myself like an idiot, “I guess I better go no further.” Then I try and kiss her. She sort of straight-arms me. I get the palm of my own glove in the face.

“What’re you doing?” She sounds mad.

“Well, you know –”

“I’m not
your
date,” she says, real offended. “I’m your brother’s date.”

“Maybe we could go out some time?”

“I won’t be going anywhere for a long time. Look at me. He’s going to kill me.”

“Well, when you do? I’m in no hurry.”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? Daddy will never let me go out with anybody named Simpson again. Ever. Not after tonight.”

“Ever?”

“I can’t imagine what you’d have to do to redeem yourself after this mess. That’s how Daddy puts it – you’ve got to redeem yourself. I don’t even know how
I’m
going to do it. And none of it’s my fault.”

“Yeah,” I says, “he’ll remember me. I’m the one he took the picture of.”

She didn’t seem too upset at not having me calling. “Everything is ruined,” she says. “If you only knew.”

Nancy Williams turns away from me then and goes up that dark, dark street where there’s nobody awake except at her house. Wearing my hat and gloves.

Nancy Williams sits third pew from the front, left-hand side. I sit behind her, on the other side so’s I can watch her real close. Second Sunday I was there she wore her Christmas Dance dress.

Funny thing, everything changes. At first I thought I’d start going and maybe that would
redeem
myself with her old man. Didn’t work. He just looks straight through me.

You ought to see her face when she sings those Baptist hymns. It gets all hot and happy-looking, exactly like it did when we were dancing together and Zipper was pounding away there up above us, where we never even saw him. When her face gets like that there’s no trouble in it, by no means.

It’s like she’s dancing then, I swear. But to what I don’t know. I try to hear it. I try and try. I listen and listen to catch it. Christ, somebody tell me. What’s she dancing to? Who’s the drummer?

Cages

H
ERE IT IS
, 1967, the Big Birthday. Centennial Year they call it. The whole country is giving itself a pat on the back. Holy shit, boys, we made it.

I made it too for seventeen years, a spotless life, as they say, and for presents I get, in my senior year of high school, my graduating year for chrissakes, a six-month suspended sentence for obstructing a police officer, and my very own personal social worker.

The thing is I don’t need this social worker woman. She can’t tell me anything I haven’t already figured out for myself. Take last Wednesday. Miss Krawchuk, who looks like the old widow chicken on the Bugs Bunny show, the one who’s hot to trot for Foghorn Leghorn, says to me: “You know, Billy, your father loves you just as much as he does Gene. He doesn’t have a favourite.”

Now I can get bullshit at the poolroom any time I want it – and without having to keep an appointment. Maybe Pop
loves
me as much as he does Gene, but Gene is still his favourite kid. Everybody has a favourite kid. I knew that much already when I was only eight and Gene was nine. I figured it out right after Gene almost blinded me.

Picture this. There the two of us were in the basement. It was Christmas holidays and the old man had kicked us downstairs to chuck darts at this board he’d give us for a present. Somehow, I must’ve had horseshoes up my ass. I’d beat Gene six games straight. And was he pissed off! He never loses to me at nothing ever. And me being in such a real unique situation, I was giving him the needle-rooney.

“What’s that now?” I said. “Is that six or seven what I won?”

“Luck,” Gene said, and he sounded like somebody was slowly strangling him. “Luck. Luck. Luck.” He could hardly get it out.

And that’s when I put the capper on it. I tossed a bull’s-eye. “Read’er and weep,” I told him. That’s what the old man says whenever he goes out at rummy. It’s his needle-rooney. “Read’er and weep.”

That did it. The straw what broke the frigging camel’s back. All I saw was his arm blur when he let fly at me. I didn’t even have time to
think
about ducking. Bingo. Dead centre in the forehead, right in the middle of the old noggin he drills me with a dart. And there it stuck. Until it loosened a bit. Then it sagged down real slow between my eyes, hung for a second, slid off of my nose, and dropped at my feet. I hollered bloody blue murder, you better believe it.

For once, Pop didn’t show that little bastard any mercy. He took after him from room to room whaling him with this extension cord across the ass, the back of the legs, the shoulders. Really hard. Gene, naturally, was screaming and blubbering and carrying on like it was a goddamn axe murder or something. He’d try to get under a bed, or behind a dresser or something, and get stuck halfway. Then old Gene would really catch it. He didn’t know whether to plough forward, back up, shit, or go blind. And all the time the old man was lacing him left and right and saying in this sad, tired voice: “You’re the oldest. Don’t you know no better? You could of took his eye out, you crazy little bugger.”

But that was only justice. He wasn’t all that mad at Gene. Me he was mad at. If that makes any sense. Although I have to admit he didn’t lay a hand on me. But yell? Christ, can that man yell. Especially at me. Somehow I’m the one that drives him squirrelly.

“Don’t you
never, never
tease him again!” he bellowed and his neck started to swell. When the old man gets mad you can see it swell, honest. “You know he can’t keep a hold of himself. One day you’ll drive him so goddamn goofy with that yap of yours he’ll do something terrible! Something he’ll regret for the rest of his life. And it’ll all be your fault!” The old man had to stop there and slow down or a vein would’ve exploded in his brain, or his arsehole popped inside out, or something. “So smarten up,” he said, a little quieter, finally, “or you’ll be the death of me and all my loved ones.”

So there you are. I never pretended the world was fair, and I never bitched because it wasn’t. But I do resent the hell out of being forced to listen to some dried-up old broad who gets paid by the government to tell me it is. Fuck her. She never lived in the Simpson household with my old man waiting around for Gene to do that
terrible thing
. It spoils the atmosphere. Makes a person edgy, you know?

Of course, Gene has done a fair number of
bad things
while everybody was waiting around for him to do the one great big
terrible thing
; and he’s done them in a fair number of places. That’s because the old man is a miner, and for a while there he was always telling some foreman to go piss up a rope. So we moved around a lot. That’s why the Simpson household has a real history. But Gene’s is the best of all. In Elliot Lake he failed grade three; in Bombertown he got picked up for shoplifting; in Flin Flon he broke some snotty kid’s nose and got sent home from school. And every grade he goes higher, it gets a little worse. Last year, when we were both in grade eleven, I’m sure the old man was positive Gene was finally going to pull off the
terrible thing
he’s been worrying about as long as I can remember.

It’s crazy. Lots of times when I think about it, I figure I don’t get on with the old man because I treat him nice. That I try too hard to make him like me. I’m not the way Gene is, I respect Pop. He slogs it out, shift after shift, on a shitty job he hates. Really hates. In fact, he told me once he would have liked to been a farmer. Which only goes to show you how crazy going down that hole day after day makes you. Since we moved to Saskatchewan I’ve seen lots of farmers, and if you ask me, being one doesn’t have much to recommend it.

But getting back to that business of being nice to Dad. Last year I started waiting up for him to come home from the afternoon shift. The one that runs from four p.m. in the afternoon until midnight. It wasn’t half bad. Most nights I’d fall asleep on the chesterfield with the
TV
playing after Mom went to bed. Though lots of times I’d do my best to make it past the national news to wait for Earl Cameron and his collection of screwballs. Those guys kill me. They’re always yapping off because somebody or something rattled their chain. Most of those characters with all the answers couldn’t pour piss out of a rubber boot if they read the instructions printed on the sole. They remind me of Gene; he’s got all the answers too. But still, quite a few of them are what you’d call witty. Which Gene is in his own way too.

But most times, as I say, I’d doze off. Let me give you a sample evening. About twelve-thirty the lights of his half-ton would come shooting into the living-room, bouncing off the walls, scooting along the ceiling when he wheeled into the driveway like a madman. It was the lights flashing in my eyes that woke me up most nights, and if that didn’t do it there was always his grand entrance. When the old man comes into the house, from the sound of it you’d think he never heard of door knobs. I swear sometimes I’m sure he’s taking a battering-ram to the back door. Then he thunks his lunch bucket on the kitchen counter and bowls his hard hat into the landing. This is because he always comes home from work mad. Never once in his life has a shift ever gone right for that man. Never. They could pack his pockets with diamonds and send him home two hours early and he’d still bitch. So every night was pretty much the same. He had a mad on. Like in my sample night.

He flicked on the living-room light and tramped over to his orange recliner with the bottle of Boh. “If you want to ruin your eyes, do it on school-books, not on watching
TV
in the goddamn dark. It’s up to somebody in this outfit to make something of themselves.”

“I was sleeping.”

“You ought to sleep in bed.”
Keerash!
He weighs two hundred and forty-four pounds and he never sits down in a chair. He falls into it. “Who’s that? Gary Cooper?” he asked. He figures any movie star on the late show taller than Mickey Rooney is Cooper. He doesn’t half believe you when you tell him they aren’t.

“Cary Grant.”

“What?”

“Cary Grant. Not Gary Cooper. Cary Grant.”

“Oh.” There he sat in his recliner, big meaty shoulders sagging, belly propped up on his belt buckle like a pregnant pup’s. Eyes red and sore, hair all mussed up, the top of his beer bottle peeking out of his fist like a little brown nipple. He has cuts all over those hands of his, barked knuckles and raspberries that never heal because the salt in the potash ore keeps them open, eats right down to the bone sometimes.

“How’d it go tonight?”

“Usual shit. We had a breakdown.” He paused. “Where’s your brother? In bed?”

“Out.”

“Out? Out?
Out?
What kind of goddamn answer is that? Out where?”

I shrugged.

“Has he got his homework done?” That’s the kind of question I get asked.
Has your brother got his homework done?

“How the hell would I know?”

“I don’t know why you don’t help him with his schoolwork,” the old man said, peeved as usual.

“You mean do it for him.”

“Did I say that? Huh? I said help him. Didn’t I say that?” he griped, getting his shit in a knot.

He thinks it’s that easy. Just screw the top off old Gene and pour it in. No problem. Like an oil change.

“He’s got to be around to help,” I said.

That reminded him. He jumped out of the chair and gawked up and down the deserted street. “It’s almost one o’clock. On a school night. I’ll kick his ass.” He sat down and watched the screen for a while and sucked on his barley sandwich.

Finally, he made a stab at acting civilized. “So how’s baseball going?”

“What?”

“Baseball. For chrissakes clean out your ears. How’s it going?”

“I quit last year. Remember?”

“Oh yeah.” He didn’t say nothing at first. Then he said: “You shouldn’t have. You wasn’t a bad catcher.”

“The worst. No bat and no arm – just a flipper. They stole me blind.”

“But you had the head,” said the old man. And the way he said it made him sound like he was pissed at me for mean-mouthing myself. That surprised me. I felt kind of good about that. “You had the head,” he repeated, shaking his own. “I never told you but Al came up to me at work and said you were smart back there behind the plate. He said he wished Gene had your head.”

I can’t say that surprised me. Gene is one of those cases of a million-dollar body carrying around a ten-cent head. He’s a natural. Flop out his glove and, smack, the ball sticks. He’s like Mickey Mantle. You know those stop-action photos where they caught Mickey with his eyes glommed onto the bat, watching the ball jump off the lumber? That’s Gene. And he runs like a Negro, steals bases like Maury Wills for chrissake.

But stupid and conceited? You wouldn’t believe the half of it. Give him the sign to bunt to move a runner and he acts as if you’re asking him to bare his ass in public. Not him. He’s a big shot. He swings for the fence. Nothing less. And old Gene is always in the game, if you know what I mean? I don’t know what happens when he gets on base, maybe he starts thinking of the hair pie in the stands admiring him or something, but he always dozes off at the wheel. Once he even started to comb his hair at first base. Here it is, a 3 and 2 count with two men out, and my brother forgets to run on the pitch because he’s combing his hair. I could have died. Really I could have. The guy is such an embarrassment sometimes.

“He can have my head,” I said to Pop. “If I get his girls.”

That made the old man wince. He’s sure that Gene is going to knock up one of those seat-covers he takes out and make him a premature grandpa.

“You pay attention to school. There’s plenty of time later for girls.” And up he jumped again and stuck his nose against the window looking for Gene again. Mom has to wash the picture window once a week; he spots it all up with nose grease looking for Gene.

“I don’t know why your mother lets him out of the house,” he said. “Doesn’t she have any control over that boy?”

That’s what he does, blames everybody but himself. Oh hell, maybe nobody’s to blame. Maybe Gene is just Gene, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

“I don’t know what she’s supposed to do. You couldn’t keep him in if you parked a tank in the driveway and strung barbed wire around the lot.”

Of course that was the wrong thing to say. I usually say it.

“Go to bed!” he yelled at me. “You’re no better than your brother. I don’t see you in bed neither. What’d I do, raise alley cats or kids? Why can’t you two keep hours like human beings!”

And then the door banged and we knew the happy wanderer was home. Gene makes almost as much noise as the old man does when he comes in. It’s beneath his dignity to sneak in like me.

Dad hoisted himself out of the chair and steamed off for the kitchen. He can move pretty quick for a big guy when he wants to. Me, I was in hot pursuit. I don’t like to miss much.

Old Gene was hammered, and grinning from ass-hole to earlobes. The boy’s got a great smile. Even when he grins at old ladies my mother’s age you can tell they like it.

“Come here and blow in my face,” said my father.

“Go on with you,” said Gene. All of a sudden the smile was gone and he was irritated. He pushed past Pop, took the milk out of the fridge and started to drink out of the container.

“Use a glass.”

Gene burped. He’s a slob.

“You stink of beer,” said the old man. “Who buys beer for a kid your age?”

“I ain’t drunk,” said Gene.

“Not much. Your eyes look like two piss-holes in the snow.”

“Sure, sure,” said Gene. He lounged, he swivelled over to me and lifted my Players out of my shirt pocket. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” he said, taking out a smoke. I heard that one before.

“I don’t want to lose my temper,” said Dad, being patient with him as usual, “so don’t push your luck, sunshine.” The two of them eyeballed it, hard. Finally Gene backed down, looked away and fiddled with his matches. “I don’t ride that son of a bitch of a cage up and down for my health. I do it for you two,” Dad said. “But I swear to God, Gene, if you blow this year of school there’ll be a pair of new work boots for you on the back step, come July 1. Both of you know my rules. Go to school, work, or pack up. I’m not having bums put their feet under my table.”