The Emperor of Any Place (2 page)

Evan leans back in his father’s swivel chair, lets the letter fall to his lap.

Griff has not replied to any of our inquiries.

That would be the infamous Griff, all right: his father’s father.

We cannot proceed without his approval.

Evan wonders who “we” is — a we that includes lawyers. Proceed to do what? A creepy feeling comes over him. He leans forward. Thinks hard. As if he has some inkling of what this is about. Something his father said. Something was on his father’s mind that last day. What was it?

Evan gets sidetracked. Happens a lot, lately. It’s that word “last.” He thinks how weird it is that you can suddenly pin that adjective to something. At the time, it didn’t feel like the last day — the last anything. It was just Thursday, July third. No big deal. A sunny early summer’s day that drifted into a soft evening, a warm night. Evan wasn’t going to be starting his job at Hardboiled Inc. until July fifteenth. It was going to be very cool: printing T-shirts, which was a change from flipping hamburgers as far as summer jobs go. But for the time being, it was pure holiday time. He’d been at Rollo’s with the guys all that afternoon.

Just Thursday. The evening before the morning when . . .

There were no big plans for the summer except for the job and, before it started, a little road trip with his dad. Now it wouldn’t happen. It would never happen. There were these things to unlearn; a whole lot of Never to get used to.

He goes limp. The letter slips from his lap and flutters to the floor. He stares at it. Then his eyes drift back to the book, lying in his shadow. If he leans away, the cover blinds him with sun glare.

There is a bookmark lying on the desktop. Another Christmas present from Big Spender Evan. It’s a slip of glossy cardboard with a 3-D pair of feet in socks and Top-Siders hanging off the bottom end, so that when the marker is in a book, it looks as if there were a person in there who has been squashed. Except the bookmark is on the desk.
What does that mean, Sherlock?

Well, Watson, it suggests Clifford had finished the book.
Finished it and then died. Evan thinks back to that Thursday, two weeks ago. His father had been obsessing. Obsessing about
his
father. Evan leans back in the chair, which squawks in protest.

He understands grandfathers only as a concept. He’s never met Griff, but he is going to very shortly and the irony is kind of astounding. If his father had not been so preoccupied with Griff the day before he died, Evan isn’t even sure he would have remembered whether the old man was still alive. So when concerned friends began to say he should contact his grandfather, he did it, obediently, in a kind of a trance. That was another part of grief: the kind of stupor he found himself in a whole lot. Days of daze. Good to have a relative around to pick up the slack, even if it’s one you’ve never met and your father hated. Hmm. There was a gap in the logic there, somewhere, but . . . well, logic had not been trending in his life lately.

And so Griff is coming. And now Evan can’t help wondering if he has made some very big-ass mistake.

Evan walked along Plateau Crescent pulling a Radio Flyer Big Red Classic. It was dusk. The wheels on the Flyer went round and round, the only sound on the block but for the hiss of the lawn sprinklers, the odd bark of a dog, and the sound of
Jeopardy!
on someone’s TV set. A neighbor bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Rogers chatted over his fence to a neighbor also bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Rogers. Neighbots.

Behind them the traffic hummed in C-flat major on the Don Valley Expressway. Don Mills, an island of calm, the most ordinary place in the world.

There was a Fender Mini guitar amp loaded on the wagon, a guitar case strapped to Evan’s back. With Scott leaving for the summer, they had figured it was time to put the band in cold storage.

“Cold Storage would be a better name for us,” Scott said.

“Except that people might confuse us with Coldplay,” said Rollo. Ha-ha. It was often like this at practice. They came up with way more names for the band than actual songs: Resin, Omar Kayak, Boys without Handlebars, The Frenzied Gnomes, Cold Storage.

He stopped outside 123 Any Place, waved at Lexie Jane Reidinger mowing the lawn next door. The Reidingers on the right, the Guptas on the left, and the Griffins in the middle. Three pretty-well-identical houses with three different-colored doors. Lexie waves back. Everybody in Any Place waves back. The lights were on in his house although it was only dusk. Dad was framed in the dining-room window sitting at the table, looking as if he was ready to launch a new ship. Evan walked up the driveway, peered in the window — a Peeping Evan. His father didn’t look up.

Sometimes his dad brought all his model-making stuff out of the Dockyard and worked while he ate his dinner. A change of scenery. The bare bulbs of the candelabrum above the table shone down on his balding head. The camera of Evan’s eye zoomed in, slowly. There should have been some seafaring music as background to this nautical scene. “Yo, Heave-Ho, Dad.”

It struck him how odd it was that you could live with someone, day in, day out, and then suddenly see them like this, so clearly. Dad was wearing his ancient
Axis: Bold as Love
T-shirt: Jimi Hendrix and the boys in Day-Glo orange, blue, and pink printed over gold foil. The tee was stretched taut, the logo cracked and faded over his expanded belly. Not much gold left. It was hard to think of Clifford as lean, sporting John Lennon glasses, paisley bell-bottoms, a strip of linen wrapped around his forehead with a peace sign on it. It was hard to think of him with hair.

Evan parked the Radio Flyer by the crumbling back step in the carport and hefted the amp through the screen door and into the kitchen.

“That you, Ev?”

“Got it in one, Dad.”

His father was not only wearing
Axis
— he was listening to it. “Little Wing” was playing.
My dad,
he thought,
hopelessly trapped in the sixties.
Evan left the amp by the door with the flip-flops and his father’s mud-stained gardening clogs. He stripped the guitar from his back and leaned it against the amp. There was stir-fry on the stove: chicken, broccoli, mushrooms — all shining and glutinous. He scooped a bowlful and threw it in the microwave.

“There’s stir-fry,” said Dad.

Evan smiled. Clifford E. Griffin III, always just that one beat behind.

“What’s this one?” asked Evan. He stood, bowl in hand, across the dining-room table looking at the tiny boat his father has inserted into the neck of a dimpled scotch bottle.

“A frigate,” said Dad.

“Frigate,” said Evan. He said it again a couple of times.

“Sounds like you’ve got a frog in your throat,” said Dad, without looking up.

Evan took a seat, examined the miniature ship. “Looks a lot like the last one,” he said.

“It won’t,” said Dad, bending in close to do some tricky maneuvering with tweezers. “They all look pretty much the same until you get the masts up and the sails unfurled.”

“Is that a valuable life lesson, Dad?”

“It is. Glad you noticed.”

“You’re very dependable that way, Dad.”

“I am. When do I ever miss an opportunity to impart the wisdom of the ages to my impressionable son?”

Evan worried the meat off a piece of gristle, then spit it out onto the table. Dad frowned but he didn’t protest.
It’s just us boys,
thought Evan — and, anyway, the table was covered with newspaper, littered with tiny tools, a tube of glue, saucers of paint. And an unfinished bowl of stir-fry left to harden.

“The
Cutty Sark
was a clipper. This is going to be the USS
Constitution.
”

“Frigate,” said Evan.

“Correct,” said Dad.

“You Got Me Floatin’” ended and “Castles Made of Sand” came on, psychedelic guitar warped and weaving through a phase shifter. Evan watched as his father pulled a thread and the masts rose steadily inside the bottle, like some kind of strange butterfly unfurling its wings. A tiny contained ship that wasn’t going anywhere.
Just like my dad,
thought Evan fondly.

His father stopped what he was doing, looked up. “I learned something interesting today,” he said.

“Something even more interesting than a frigate?”

“Way more,” said his father. “It’s about Griff.”

It took Evan a moment. “Your father?”

“The infamous Griff.”

“Right,” says Evan. “The infamous Griff. He was a general or something, right?”

“A sergeant major. And you do not make mistakes like that around Griff.”

Evan stopped eating. “You mean he’s coming here?”

“Hell, no!” His father looked up as if Evan had just announced an alien invasion. “What made you say that?”

“You sounded like you were warning me, like I should be prepared.”

“If he were coming, I’d be sandbagging the place and planting land mines.”

“Cool,” said Evan. “Fort Any Place.” He picked through the stir-fry for chicken. He’d eaten all the good bits. He put the bowl down. “But it’s kind of too bad. I thought maybe he’d phoned and said he was homeless and we were going to have to put him up.”

“I’d take poison first.”

His father tied off the lines. The sails were raised.

“So?” said Evan.

“Huh?”

“Your father. You learned something?”

“Oh, right. Well, not much to my surprise, it turns out the man is a murderer.”

Evan nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said. “What else?”

“Murder isn’t enough?”

Evan had heard all this before, and anyway his mind was wandering. “It would be kind of cool if he showed up, wouldn’t it. Like the premise for a really bad sitcom.”

His father laughed, but it was not the kind of laugh you got from a studio audience. “You obviously weren’t listening closely to what I said.”

“He’s a murderer. Boring.”

“It’s true.”

“I
know,
Dad. He was in the army, right?”

“No, the marines. A leatherneck.”

“Yeah, so killing people sort of comes with the territory.”

His father’s eyes gleamed. “In a war, yes. But when the war is over? What kind of a guy goes on killing when the fight is officially over?”

Evan rolled his eyes. “Keep on trucking, Dad, like it’s nineteen sixty-seven.”

His father acknowledged the reproach with a grin. “Okay, I hear you. I’m ranting. But this is different. This is actually murder.” The smile on his father’s face was a little maniacal.

“This is what you learned today?”

“This is what I learned today.”

“Like, it was on CNN, or something?”

“Not yet. But that’s not a bad idea.”

“Dad, stop being mysterious.”

His father chuckled. He shook his head, returned his attention to the brand-new ship in a bottle. The deranged smile turned into a grimace — indigestion, judging from the stir-fry. He rubbed his chest. Some of the decrepit Day-Glo rubbed off on the heel of his hand. Jimi was fading away to nothing.

“So are you going to tell me or what?” said Evan.

His father frowned for a moment, shook his head. “Sometime, maybe.” Then the frown lifted and he smiled radiantly at Evan as if he’d only just seen him and the boy was a miracle. He looked down, gazing, kind of sadly, at the ship in the bottle. He seemed flushed.

“Dad, are you okay?”

Clifford shook his head.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Clifford shook his head a second time. “It’s this murder thing. I mean, on one hand, why would I be surprised, right? But, on the other . . . it’s as if, for some reason, I don’t believe it. There’s something wrong with the picture.”

Evan watched and waited. What picture? But with one last shake of the head, his father seemed to dismiss whatever it was he was thinking about.

“So,” he said, finding a stash of smiles somewhere and trying one on. But the “so” didn’t lead anywhere. The room was silent. There was just Evan, Clifford,
Axis: Bold as Love,
and the newly reconstituted USS
Constitution.

Evan came up from the rec room. He was in his sweats and a sopping T-shirt. He’d been working out on the rowing machine, listening to “Angry Workout Mix,” not getting anywhere. That was the thing about rowing machines.