The Ravine (20 page)

He smiled in a beatific manner.

Jay’s Halloween costumes, when he was a boy, also tended to have a religious flavour. I don’t know why, because he otherwise evinced no interest in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (I didn’t know then that he was slipping over to the Valleyway United Church to pound away on the keyboards there.) But every October 31, Jay would appear as, oh, a shepherd or one of the Magi. One explanation might be the simplicity of these outfits—you put on a sheet, sash it with a piece of rope and carry around a big stick. There was one Halloween when he wanted to go out wearing only a diaper rendered somehow out of two knotted pillowcases and a crown made out of intertwined rose branches. And he wanted to lug over his shoulder a cross (two fence-boards nailed together). But my mother stopped him at the front door, and disallowed this costume on the grounds that he would be too cold.

“That’s right,” said Jay now. “I’m supposed to be a priest. So I can hear your confession.”

“Ergh.” That was a sound of both annoyance and fear. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“Last known address.”

“What?”

“So you talked to Ronnie, huh?” said Jay, avoiding the question. “How did she seem?”

“She seemed, um, the word for how she seemed would be
livid.”

“Because of van der Glick?”

“Well, yes, I mean, that certainly brought the, um, lividity to the surface. But, hey, it’s always there.”

“I see, my son.”

“It made me think, though.”

“Good. Share your thoughts.”

“Well … it’s just that she was
so
mad, you know,
so
jealous. It made me think that she must still have feelings for me.”

“It’s possible. People are plenty weird. Even Ronnie.”

“You don’t think Ronnie’s weird?”

“I just said she was.”

“Yeah, but …”

“Let me ask you something, my son.”

“Quit calling me that.”

“Do you love Rainie?”

“Uh …”

“The reason I ask is, she loves you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, my son. We in the Church are currently giving much serious thought to adding a commandment. Which would make it number, um—”

“Eleven.”

“Quite so. And the eleventh commandment would be,
Thou shalt pay fucking attention.”

We moved into a peculiar section of the downtown area. Toronto doesn’t really have any slums—none that you can get to on foot, anyway, although horrific high-rise tenements circle the city like moons—but it certainly has its seedy sections. We came upon row houses, identical and hunched, dwarf dwellings that long ago were the quarters of the men who laboured for the nearby soap factory. It was very apparent that this wasn’t the best part of town, because the hordes of fairies had disappeared. There were one or two lumbering trick-or-treaters, well over six feet in height, their feet enormous, balaclavas and nylons obscuring their features. These boys would leap onto the stoop, pound on the door, wrench open their pillowcases and emit a small but emphatic grunt.

Jay stopped to light a cigarette. He struck a match and held it in cupped hands. He dipped the smoke into the flame, and then began to puff with industry. When he did remove the cigarette, he held it hoodlum-style. I saw that we were taking a smoke-break, so I lit up a little cigar and wondered why. I got the sense that the evening was orchestrated, so this little respite was obviously planned.

The answer, I suspected, lay in the building behind Jay, which was squat and strangled by ivy. It was a church, recognizable because of its two stained-glass windows, although all of the coloured panes had been replaced by dark, smoky ones. There was no light coming from them.

“First of all,” said Jay, “I think you should have mentioned that I had
all
the badges.”

“What?”

“I had every badge that a Wolf Cub could get. And that includes knot-tying.”

“So?”

“So, you weren’t the
only
accomplished knot-tier in the troop.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, my son.”

“And what’s your point?”

“Ah, that’s the point, isn’t it?
What’s the point
is what’s my point.”

“All right, maybe you were good with knots too; the thing is, I’ve fictionalized to a certain degree.”

“What you’ve fictionalized is your
life.”

I thought about that and came to the same conclusion I’d come to many times before, i.e., my brother is just a little bit nuts. “What are we doing here, Jay?”

He nodded his enormous head so emphatically that I spun around to look in the direction indicated. “Last known address,” said Jay. He tossed his butt away and crossed the street.

One of the houses had a porch light burning. (The others all were dark, I guessed because the inhabitants were pretending not to be home, not wishing their rye-consumption to be disturbed by the menacing Halloweeners.) Once we achieved proximity to the little home, all hell broke loose, in the form of feline commotion and ado. Some of the pussies squawked and scattered, others yowled and raised themselves to piddy-paws, pleading for affectionate scritching. Jay nodded at the cats, offered a friendly “Meow.” Then he pressed a broken plastic button that rested in a setting of rust, and from within the house we heard an ominous
bong.
Jay folded his hands together and held them chest-level.

There was no immediate reaction to the doorbell, and then no eventual one. Jay rang again, looked at me and said quietly, “Don’t worry, she’s home.”

“Who’s
home?”

“You’ll see.”

I did see, after the third ringing, when a woman shouldered open the wooden door and shouted, “I don’t have any candy!” The sentence
I just composed makes it sound as though I recognized this human being as female when she first appeared, but that’s not really the case. The first impression was indeed of masculinity, because she was bald, for the most part, although long strands of faded golden hair clung to her skull. The voice was also no clear indicator, as it was smoke-choked and gravelly. But there was jewellery, a dress and a bizarre attempt at makeup, and although I am sophisticated enough not to be taken in by cross-dressing, there was such a cold absence of sexuality that I concluded that these trappings were adopted as a default position. It was a woman, then, a theory proven by Jay when he said, “Good evening, Mrs. Kitchen.”

Suspicion clouded her features. “Yesssss?”

“I’m Jay McQuigge. I called you.”

It took a moment or two for Mrs. Kitchen to summon forth the memory. “Yessss,” she nodded, then she jerked a thumb at me. “Isss thisss Phil?”

“That’s him,” Jay agreed.

“Nice.” (She elongated that “s” sound as well, but I couldn’t figure out how to transcribe that stylographically.)

A cat was trying to sneak into the house, pressing against the wall and folding its body around the jamb. Mrs. Kitchen hooked a foot under its belly and propelled it off the porch and onto the small square of earth that served as a front lawn. “Damn catssss,” she said. The speech impediment was caused by the fact that she lacked a number of teeth. Her mouth was peppered with gaps, and after making certain sounds her thick tongue would briefly get trapped in one of them. “Okay, boysss,” she said, “come on in.”

“She lived in this really weird little house,” I said, “full of newspapers. It was like she’d never thrown a newspaper away in her life, and they were stacked up everywhere. The pages had turned yellow, you know,
and some were so old that the paper was brown and brittle, and if you grabbed a corner of it, it just kind of snapped off and turned to dust.”

My audience had various reactions. Well, let me be clear—everyone was ignoring me, but in different manners and, I suppose, for different reasons. Currer and Ellis were ignoring me because they were busy bartering, trading Halloween foodstuffs.

“Do you like these fizzy pop rocks?” asked Currer.

“Yeah,” Ellis responded.

“Okay, then, I’ll give you three packs of pop rocks and seven Halloween kisses if you give me those two chocolate bars.”

If I hadn’t been concentrating on relating the tale of my visit to Mrs. Kitchen, I might have advised Ellis to run screaming from any deal that involved Halloween kisses. This is a mysterious confection that appears once a year, a tiny block of tasteless gluten wrapped in wax paper adorned with images of batwings and broomsticks. I can’t believe they’re still around. When I was a lad (and maybe still today) Halloween kisses seemed somehow to be tokens of social standing. Popular children might find one or two settled at the bottom of their loot bags. Rankers seemed to find nothing
but
Halloween kisses.

Anyway, Ellis wouldn’t do it, being considerably craftier than her older sister. “No Halloween kisses,” she stated. “Three packs of pop rocks for one chocolate bar.
This
one.”

“The other one.”

“This one.”

The bickering carried on until Ellis finally caved, although I believe in the end she gave up precisely the chocolate bar she wanted to give up.

So this was why my children were ignoring me. Veronica Lear, on the other hand, was busy straightening up the house. Her attitude, which I intuited from body language and a kind of icy aura that engulfed her, was this:
The house is a bit messy, besides, you are an
aberration, a resident of the Twilight Zone, a base and worthless creature that somehow has acquired the ability to speak, although it would be impossible for you to have anything of import to say, so I’ll spend this time tidying.

“She was of the impression,” I went on, “that Norman and I were best friends. Not good friends, but
best
friends. You know what I mean? That we’d exchanged blood and made the declaration.”

No reaction from any quarter. Oh, well. It really wasn’t much of a story, anyway. I thought perhaps I could hook the kids on the spookiness of the house, I thought maybe Ronnie might—actually, I don’t know what I thought vis-à-vis Ronnie. The truth of the matter is, I just wanted to be with them. I had never missed a Halloween before, not one out of the previous eleven. If you’re calculating, yes, that means I took Currer trick-or-treating when she was one year old. I wrapped her in some fuzzy material and, on the neighbours’ stoops, held her forward like an offering to the gods. I accepted candy on her behalf, even though she had only one tooth.

I pressed on with my story, about how Mrs. Kitchen thought I’d been Norman’s best friend, how she’d wondered why we’d never met (should have been a tipoff), the problems she’d had raising little Norman, he of the beautiful hair. (The hair thing came up quite a bit. From time to time Mrs. Kitchen’s face would acquire a soft, out-of-focus aspect. “Norman had,” she’d whisper, “such beautiful hair.”)

“What sort of problems?” asked Jay. He was still in priest mode, to the extent that he’d declined the offer of a drink. I’d accepted, of course, and was given something in a coffee mug. I’m fairly certain it was cooking sherry.

“Well, he got into trouble a few times. With other boys.” That was all Mrs. Kitchen had to say on the subject.
Trouble with other boys.
Jay pressed and subtly cajoled (“We all get into trouble at some point in our lives,”) but Mrs. Kitchen was not forthcoming.

“Where,” asked Jay finally, “does Norman live?”

“He’s travelled around quite a bit,” admitted his mother. “Never seemed to stay in one place too long. Mind you, they’d send him various places…”

“They
would?”

“The superiors.”

“Where does he live now?” Jay asked.

“Norman lives in Thunder Bay,” she answered.

“Would you happen to have an address for him?”

Mrs. Kitchen went to locate the items she needed: her address book, a pencil and a piece of paper. Despite the quantity of newsprint in the household, this last item proved the hardest to find. She was gone from the kitchen for quite a few moments, a few moments during which Jay and I exchanged no words except for the following.

He glanced at me and flipped his eyebrows high on his massive forehead. “Road trip,” said he.

WE—MISS LEAR AND I—HAD BEEN A COUPLE (A BREEZY, CAREFREE
couple) for about a year and a half when Veronica discovered she was pregnant. I was all right with this—I saw my life unrolling as a life will. In retrospect, I would have to concede that I was not wildly enthusiastic, and enthusiasm is probably what Ronnie wanted of me. I don’t know how many times previously I had failed to be what Ronnie wanted me to be, but it didn’t really matter, did it? We were simply two people who ate at restaurants, watched movies, made love, smoked cigarettes as we leafed leisurely through the Sunday papers. All that changed when the paper turned blue. After that, all of my little failures were thrown into a pile and became a cairn of bones, bleached by the sun and cleaned by maggots. Man, there’s a metaphor.

I could fail on a lot of counts, too. I could fail to be attentive, romantic, empathetic, forthcoming—that was a big one, that failure to be forthcoming. You’ve probably sensed something of it yourself, you’ve probably fallen into some deep holes in this narrative and wondered where the hell you were.
Phil is not being forthcoming.

And there were financial repercussions to the pregnancy. Ronnie and I had kept our separate residences during the year and a half, although I spent most of my time at her place. My own place was
largely dedicated to my mess; I kept my mess over there, paid visits occasionally to make sure my mess was thriving. Veronica was quite clear on the fact that she wanted nothing to do with my mess. I believe she would have been happier living as some particularly ascetic Buddhist monk, reducing her surroundings to the barest of necessities. A bed, certainly, a table, a chair. When Ronnie became pregnant, we decided to move in together. We rented a place in Toronto’s Riverdale, the upper two floors of an old house that sat across the street from Doggy Park. I reduced my mess as best I could, but Ronnie’s eyes hardened as the van pulled up and began spewing fishing rods, press benches, bicycles, banjo cases (yes, I had duplicates of everything), record albums, books, books, books. And more books. Ronnie picked one out of a box and noted the title.