Mean Boy (44 page)

Creighton, meanwhile, is bashing an ice tray against the counter, undertaking his own non-stop line of patter, with which he occasionally responds to Jim.

“Ice water is the thing, I always keep a tall glass of ice water at my side these days, keeps the senses sharp, the sufferings of the morning after at bay—oh good Lord, Jimmy, don’t offer him those, surely you have real food to put before the young man …”

I remember this from being a kid. Bee stings, the ball in the face. This is what men do when boys cry. They talk and talk loud until it’s over.

It’s odd, because Slaughter’s face hasn’t changed. It hasn’t crumpled, or otherwise contorted. It’s exactly the same as when I spoke to him earlier. Closed, impenetrable, like a building boarded up. The only thing is the tears, the bloodshot eyes.

“It’s just the drugs,” I hear Slaughter say.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Chuck, that’s what you goddamn well deserve if you’re gonna take that crap,” complains Jim.

“What’d you take?” inquires Todd.

“I don’t fucking know,” says Slaughter.

“That’s right responsible now, isn’t it,” says Jim.

“There now!” Creighton places a plastic tumbler of water, clunking and brimming with ice cubes, in front of Chuck. “Sip that slowly, young man. Bracing.”

Slaughter scoops a chunk of ice from the cup and places it in his mouth. I watch him, wincing because Chuck is chewing the ice too slowly. I can feel my teeth start to ache from the roots.

All the while, Jim grinds tiny circles into Chuck’s shoulders with his thumbs. Slaughter doesn’t appear to notice, just keeps staring straight ahead.

“How’s that?” Jim keeps asking. “How’s that now? Ya want anything else?”

“I’m all right,” says Chuck, chomping away. He scoops a couple more ice cubes from the cup. Creighton, I notice, is also watching the ice-chewing performance with some discomfort crinkling his face.

“Drink, boy,” he commands. “Take a nice long sip of that, now.”

“Where’s Sherrie?” says Chuck, not looking around. “Mittens?”

“I’m right here, Charles,” says Sherrie.

“Where’s Claude?” says Slaughter.

Jim looks over at Sherrie and me, and Sherrie and I look at each other.

“I called him when we got here,” Sherrie tells Chuck. “He wasn’t around.”

Slaughter closes his eyes, picks up the tumbler, and drinks the whole thing down—much to Creighton’s crinkle-eyed delight.

“There you go now, son!” he exhorts as Slaughter’s doorknob of an Adam’s apple bobs away. “Refreshing, isn’t it? Now you just keep that filled up for the rest of the night.”

Jim’s thumb-circles have meanwhile evolved into a full-on pummelling of the muscles beneath his hands. “That’s it, you listen to Crotch, this old bastard’s learned more than a few tricks over the years when it comes to drinking—taught me a few good ones back in the day, haven’t ya, Abe?”

I feel impatient watching the two of them grin and wink across the kitchen at each other. I want to tell them this has nothing to do with getting drunk in Toronto ten years ago. It doesn’t have anything to do with them. It doesn’t even have anything to do with poetry, for a change. It’s all just Slaughter and the world of his weirdness, which I’m starting to think none of us have a clue about.

Slaughter returns the emptied tumbler to the table—he places it precisely within the water ring it made when he picked it up.

“Ahhh,” he says, and I can tell it’s an insincere Ahh, an Ahh performed for our benefit.

“How ‘bout a beer?” Slaughter requests with an abashed smirk, and the two poets clap hands and clap shoulders in a display of muted jubilance, like their team has scored a point.

That’s when I have my epiphany. Concerning, of all people, Sparrow. I didn’t realize Sparrow had been fluttering in the back of my mind this whole time, but the moment the epiphany descends, it’s clear he has. The question of Sparrow. The mystery of Sparrow, his blank looks, his Oxford chimera—chewing away at my subconscious all evening long.

And here it is. That maybe Sparrow isn’t malicious. Maybe Sparrow isn’t dense. Maybe Sparrow hasn’t been deliberately screwing with my hopes and dreams and expectations all this time after all.

Maybe people just live their lives hearing whatever they want to hear and thinking whatever they want to think. Maybe it’s as simple and as stupid as that.

Sherrie has gone, so I decide to go find her.

And I’m drunk. The door separating the kitchen from the living room takes me from relatively sober to all-of-a-sudden drunk, like some kind of mystic portal. Like the rabbit hole to Wonderland. I stand on the other side of the door, surveying the party, trying to keep myself from weaving. Moira and Ruth are side by side on the couch. Moira is talking, twisting her knuckly hands around in front of her like she’s making incantations. I intuit she’s describing her brother’s Dragon Blade again, demonstrating how perfectly balanced it is. Ruth nods and smiles from her crimson depths. The two of them make a striking pair—Moira’s deep-socketed eyes, Ruth’s harsh-angled jaw. The weird sisters minus one.

Sherrie is a few feet away from them, huddled over the telephone with a finger shoved into her free ear. I make my way over, balancing like a tightrope walker.

“You,” Moira calls to me, interrupting her monologue. “Some help you are. Some goddamn help.”

“What?” I say.

“You’re supposed to be his friend,” snipes Moira, jabbing at me with the heat-bright tip of her cigarette. “You’re supposed to be so
decent
. You’re just like the rest of those assholes.”

“I am not,” I assure her, “just like the rest of those assholes.”

“The bunch of you,” Moira complains, “just treat him like King Shit. I don’t know what in hell is wrong with you. Your husband, too,” Moira turns abruptly on Ruth, who doesn’t even flinch, who actually smiles a little.

“For Christ’s sake, that one could be—he could take a
crap
on your kitchen floor,” Moira sputters, turning toward me again. “He could be hitting himself on the head with a hammer saying, how do you like that, now, boys? Whaddya think about that little trick? And what would you bastards say?”

At this point Moira actually pauses as if I’m going to answer her.

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

She folds her arms. They remind me of two tree roots woven together above the earth.

“You don’t know,” says Moira, turning to Ruth. “He doesn’t
know
.”

“Perhaps they would say,” offers Ruth in her strange accent, “yes, King Shit. Very good, King Shit.”

For the first time since I’ve met her, Moira laughs. She laughs worse than Ruth. She coughs as she laughs, a smoker’s cough, harsh, wet, and red-sounding. Gravel scrapes her windpipe. It makes me want to shrivel up and die.

“Very good, King Shit,”
caws Moira, smacking Ruth across a velvet thigh. Aren’t they just getting along like a house on fire.

Ruth smiles some more, rubbing where Moira smacked.

“So what am I supposed to do?” I hear myself saying. It’s like I’m suddenly in one of my dreams somehow. I have a lot of dreams where I’m being accused of something, and furiously defending myself. “What am I supposed to do?” I repeat. “I’m supposed to tell Jim not to drink?”

“Oh, heaven forbid,” says Moira, rolling her eyes like a bad actor. “Heaven forbid you ever did that. World would end. Sky’d come falling down.”

I continue my high-wire act across the room toward Sherrie, fuming somewhat. Moira has to be kidding.
Jim, your wife would really prefer it if you didn’t drink. As some nineteen-year-old idiot, I feel it’s my place to tell you this
. Besides, haven’t I already told him? I told him at Christmas. And look what it got me.
A confection, ultimately
. Exile—from which I’ve only just managed to claw my way back.

“Everybody’s here, though!” Sherrie is hollering into the phone, finger still jammed into her ear to block out the party noises. It’s practically buried up to the second knuckle.

“Where have you been all night?
Why?
Really? But why?”

“Is that Claude?” I say.

“But come on! Everyone’s having a really good time!”

“It’s a crazy party!” I yell to be helpful.

“That’s Lawrence!” says Sherrie. “He wants to talk to you!”

The phone is in my hand, against my head.

“No, I have to go, I don’t want to talk to him,” Claude is calling.

“Hi!” I say.

“Hey, Lawrence,” says Claude.

“What’s the matter, you studying or something?”

“Yeah, I’m studying,” answers Claude in a strange, slurred voice.

“You don’t sound like you’re studying.”

Claude sighs something in French.

“Pardon?”
I say in French back at him.
“Donne moi le poulet.”

Claude snickers. “You’re in a good mood.”

“I’m just really drunk,” I tell him. “You hear the good news?”

“I heard,” says Claude. “Congratulate Jim for me.”

“I think the idea is for you to come and do that yourself.”

“I’m not feeling so good,” says Claude.

I look up at Sherrie. “He says he’s not feeling good.”

She takes the phone back from me.

“Why aren’t you feeling good?” Sherrie demands, turning away.

I just stand there while Sherrie harangues, watching her shoulder blades moving beneath her sweater. I can’t quite muster the will to turn back to the party as yet, although I hear it, swelling, behind me. I hear Moira hack as though her previous
laughing fit has shaken something loose, and Ruth’s low, gleeful croak in reply. I can hear that Crotch is back out among us now, holding forth on the Black Mountain poetry movement and the TISH Group, and, if I’m hearing this correctly, trying to convince someone that the word TISH is
shit
spelled backward. Those are the voices that drift above the crowd—the high notes. Below them, it’s just a garbled chorus.

And now my consciousness seems to be getting snagged on moments, like when I was in the kitchen with Jim. Time drops away and I’m drifting, dreaming awake in the eternity of right now with the party behind me, Sherrie’s back in front of me, her shoulder blades jerking. Next month I will turn twenty, and more years will follow that, supposedly. I can’t imagine them, just as I can’t imagine Slaughter’s mother dying—what it would be like. The future is theoretical, thank God. How will I be? I won’t be—I can’t imagine it. I just am. I’ll always am. I’ll stay in this moment forever, this hinge of time. Secrets need not be revealed, the trauma of knowledge and experience can be forgone. There won’t be any more of those shattering, heartbreaking moments that hit you like a ball in the face and cause your personality to grow at warped and unexplored trajectories. Nothing left to learn, nothing from which to recover. I’ll just stay here, drunk and out of sync. Turned away, and turned away from. En-bubbled in this moment.

“Well, something is very wrong there,” says Sherrie, blue headlights shining in my eyes like a cop’s flashlight.

“Your eyes are so beautiful,” someone above me says.

Sherrie’s face squeezes itself up with mirth and pain. “Oh God, Lawrence, snap out of it.”

I do, but can’t help resenting her for starting time up again.

“I’m hammered,” I tell her quickly. “Sorry. I mean they
are
, you—you probably know that. I’m not hitting on you, honest to God.”

“I know, Lawrence, stop babbling.”

“I like fat girls,” I babble.

This arrests Sherrie’s attention completely. Everything about her stops except for the flap-flap of her eyelashes.

Both my hands have at some point jammed themselves against my mouth. I remove them to amend: “I mean, not fat, exactly. You know, bigger girls. Just girls with … more meat on their bones.” That sounds disgusting—like I want to slap them on the barbecue.

Blink, blink, blink, goes Sherrie, like a tentative, big-eyed bird hopping toward somebody’s picnic.

“Please don’t tell anyone.” Though my back’s still turned to the party, I imagine every face burning into me like the tip of Moira’s smoke. The talk has become more focused, scandalized, intent. Soon the voices will gather together as one to condemn and pronounce, like in a Greek tragedy.

And then my vision is washed in gold, my nose invaded with the unearthly smell of Head and Shoulders shampoo.

“I would never tell
anyone
,” Sherrie promises, releasing me. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Lawrence, I think it’s
lovely
.”

“It’s not
lovely
, Sherrie.”

“Well it’s
fine
, then.”

“Okay,” I tell her. “I just wanted—this whole conversation—I came over here wanting to tell you I’m sorry for what I said about Chuck—that’s all. That night in the marsh.”

Sherrie waves her hands to make me stop talking. She looks down at the floor.

“I was just being an asshole because—” I stop and glance around, not so drunk it doesn’t occur to me to lower my voice. “The whole thing with Jim. I really wanted you to tell me what was going on, uh … with you guys. And you wouldn’t. It was none of my business but—it pissed me off.”

There was more to it, of course, but that seems to be the only aspect I’m able to articulate.