The Republic of Nothing (23 page)

I think the word “victim” popped into my head just then. No matter how inarticulate and uncertain I felt about myself in those days, about my ability to catch up with the worldly mainlanders at school or to keep up with Gwen whose beauty and intellect left me grounded on the mundane, I knew this thing, this big difference between Burnet and me. I was the master of my own fate. Ben had convinced me of that when we had travelled to hell and retrieved a lost soul and made the as-cent back to the cold and immaculate island here in the north. My mother had taught me this all my life, and Ben had reinforced it. And as the master of my own fate, I was learning how to alter the lives of others, even someone as brutalized as the oversize monster child who sat beside me on the backseat of the bus.

So I shared my lunch right down to the jagged wedge of bitter chocolate, and we became friends. And if it hadn't turned out to be such a grand mistake, such a dreadful error, I might say that I had returned to this life from a previous one as a saint. But the corollary to all the above is that selflessness creates a vacuum at its core, a vacuum that victims can find shelter in, a place to style out a plan for revenge against all the previous deeds. For in the crazy algebra of living, it seems that victims must create victims of friend or foe. Pain must make pain and even then nothing cancels out to zero.

The world changed yet again during the second half of the 1960s. Even on Whalebone Island, even in the republic of Nothing At All. Everything changed beyond repair, beyond reason. It is wrong to suggest that things do not change during other half-decades, but there was something intrinsically different during those five years. Had I known what it would all come to, I would have kidnapped my own father from the legislature in Halifax, pulled him back to the island, blown up the bridge myself and fended off all intruders. And, presumably, lived happily ever after.

But it didn't work out that way. In 1965, I was fourteen; in
1969, I was eighteen. Between those four critical years, I was forged and hammered into something other than a boy. I would be hard pressed to show you a single physical scar although I am sure there must be something. And on the surface of things, that untrustworthy monitor of reality, I probably did not appear to suffer or seethe with change. I grew — my bones stretched, my body evolved and that was all as normal as could be.

Maybe other kids experienced the same despair I felt, but for me it seemed unique. So often it boiled down to something within me that doubted my own abilities. I did not know who I was, where I was going or how I could shape my destiny. In other words, I'd gone a long way downhill since 1965.

My mother blamed it on television. TV had invaded our remote island home in the 1960s. The grey and white glass eye presented a world so distant, so alien to our own that it was a shock to all of us. Then, on rare occasions, my father would appear on a local news clip with the commentator saying something about “new directions” for Nova Scotia, something about economic development or social reform, something about Nova Scotia's role in Canada and “the world community.” And he spoke so eloquently, so clearly and precisely and convincingly that I was shocked to my roots to realize that he had become part of the television world and left us far behind. Inside my growing bones, a hollow ringing echoed through me at those minutes and I would try not to look at my mother or at Casey as my mother would try to butter over the crisis by simply saying something like, “Your father looks good this week, “ or “He looks a little pale. Maybe it's just the lighting.”

He came to see us sometimes once a week, and sometimes to stay for a whole month when duty did not call him to his Halifax office. Other times he would disappear like a ghost from our lives for as much as a fortnight, only to reappear on television, surrounded by reporters asking him about a rumoured scandal concerning free government driveway gravel
in a riding far from his own, a scandal he of course knew nothing about. He appeared very skilful at sluffing off the reports and shifting to more good news about foreign nations who were interested in Nova Scotia as a place to invest.

It was inconceivable to me how my father had become some sort of international economic whiz kid who could wheel and deal with foreign nations for setting up trade agreements or luring them to build a factory in Nova Scotia. I guess it had something to do with his grand scheme of world unity although I confess it seemed a distant run from pure anarchy and a republic of nothing. My father's mind had intricate turns and weavings and wonderful, wizard-like machinations of plans and possibilities.

One week he was trying to sell spruce lumber to the Norwegians, another he was trying to sell coal to France. The Dutch, he reported, wanted to root around for oil off our coast, and some American corporation was thinking that Nova Scotia might make a good place to produce the railway cars of the future. Jobs were the answer and creative thinking was the name of the game to get them and give us all more money, more growth and more happiness. Or so the story went.

Lambert and Eager were the first of those on our tiny island to directly cash in on my old man's great ideas about world commerce. One day my father arrived unannounced in the old Buick. We all got a hug and a kiss and a bundle of city gifts, and after the preliminaries he held aloft what he called “his latest discovery.” “The Spickerton blue-eye clam,” he called it, “although the Japanese have a more exotic name for it.” I'd seen one like it before, hauled up by accident in a fish net, but always either an empty shell or something we'd toss back. “I'm going to use Lambert and Eager as a test case,” he continued. “This is top secret. I found out from a visiting Japanese fish entrepreneur, a chap named Yasuhira, that these little critters sell for a buck fifty or more a pound in Japan. Supposed to make you live longer. Only problem is the
Japanese don't have too many left. They scraped ‘em all off the bottom.”

My father scooped the Spickerton blue-eye out of the shell and swallowed it, dribbling Spickerton blue-eye juice down the front of his tie. “Nourishment from the fountain of youth,” he said, and smiling like he had truly just discovered the miracle elixir, waltzed over to my mother, wrapped his arms around her and danced her into the house and into the bedroom from which they did not emerge for another hour while Casey and I studied the presents he had brought us from town in the back seat of the car.

The Spickerton blue-eye beds were not hard to find off Whalebone. My old man spent a couple of days helping Lambert and Eager adapt some quahog dragging equipment to wrench the Spickertons from their happy homes. The first shipment of a hundred pounds went out from Halifax airport and off to the other side of the world within days, and word came back that Yasuhira would buy from Lambert and Eager all they could provide. Within months Lambert and Eager were rolling in dough, buying a new boat and bringing in loose women for parties at their old shack and as happy as the proverbial muscle-tongue creature they were harvesting.

Lambert took to relative wealth with a certain degree of grace. He spoke of hiring a fancy Toronto ghost writer to write down the story of his varied and intriguing career at sea. Maybe there would be a film starring Sean Connery. Eager stopped complaining for nearly a month until he discovered that, “Money ain't necessarily the equivalent of happiness. Money has a back yard full of problems just waiting like bear traps to trip you up.”

So the two men clammed and crammed the money in the bank or spent it like clam piss on anyone who came along. If they weren't up at the cracklight of dawn dragging the sea for Spickerton blue-eye gold, they were on the phone to their Japanese broker, Yasuhira, who every once in a while would
send them some exotic present by mail or by truck — a set of silk kimonos or a giant straw mat or a beautiful ten-yard long banner from a Japanese New Year's parade. “Success,” Lambert would say, “was always right there just beyond my finger tips waiting for me to go after it. All it took was for your father to help me get a grip on it.”

However, when I went to work with the two old geezers m the summer, they'd pay me minimum wage and expect me to bleed from the knuckles to prove I was working up to their expectations. “You're young,” Lambert would say while he was pissing over the side of the boat. “The important thing is for you to build character and have that character in place for when you are old and successful.”

But I certainly didn't feel like I was building character. I still didn't know who I was. Everything was so damned con-fused. If I could only have been able to continue the heart-to-heart talks I had once had with Ben or my grandmother or even Hants. But I'd developed what some might call an inferiority complex. The role model of my father was too grand. Even my previous New York courage had diminished, drained off somewhere into a blind gulley.

Burnet Jr., through a quirky twist of fate, had become a handsome young man sought after by the girls. He had also turned out to be not nearly as stupid as all of us had expected. At least he had developed an ability to get by with the brains that his father had passed down to him, and he had learned to hide his inherent cruelty far better as he grew. I was privy, however, to his secrets. He was, alas,
my friend.
I knew that he broke into the hardware store and stole sixty bucks of cash and a chain saw. I knew that he had a .22 rifle and that he would sit on his back step and shoot squirrels and blue jays. And I knew that he had gone down to Sheet Harbour and had sex with a woman there for money. Maybe these are all forgivable in the light of him being a teenager. What was wrong was the false exterior he had created for himself? He had gone from
being a snot-dripping bully with an untucked shirt and a fat gut to a clean-cut, high school jock with a manly physique and a politeness about him that charmed the women, young and old.

Meanwhile, I was still a skinny stripling of a kid, a wind-ravaged, TV-addicted, scrawny, scared boy, incomplete in every way. I guess I should give the guy some credit because, despite all my shortcomings, Burnet remained my friend. Our friendship had begun in a genuine enough fashion, fuelled by the shared sandwiches after saving his old man from the fallen car, but it had degenerated into something else. I was the foil. I made Burnet look good. Over that fateful half-decade, while the world wandered toward the brink of nuclear war, while men vaulted into space, while American cities burned, while Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot dead, while the Soviets drove tanks in Czechoslovakia, while bigger and better bombs were bursting in the ribs of the planet beneath me, a terrible trade took place.

In the early years of our friendship, Burnet had studied me, I am sure. He'd seen how I succeeded in school, watched how I had “fit in” in a way that was not his own. He learned how to be a civilized human being, something his father could never have taught him. The more he began to fit in and to succeed, the more I began to find myself falling towards the edges. I had to fight to keep my grades up, working long hours into the night to keep my head above water where once it had all been so easy. I had to cause trouble of some sort if I wanted the attention of my teachers where before I was able to command their respect with the limited but quirky sum of knowledge I had accumulated from my father and Hants Buckler and Mrs. Bernie Todd.

While other girls had dazzled me briefly with a flash of eye or a funny little sensual look, I had remained in love with Gwen. The plight of the silent lover is the deepest and darkest of graves, the most tortuous of traps. My guess is that she did not know how deeply I felt for her. I had attempted to write
these feelings down and tell her the shocking truth of my passions, but like so many young men before me, I was scared, scared to my roots, that she would think I was making a joke.

And worst of all, Gwen and I had become “friends.” We shared so much, had so much common ground and common experience that there were no surprises left. Gwen had grown into a beauty — long light brown hair styled like the sexiest of the American TV girls. In fact, Gwen had in some mysterious inner way left the island behind her. She still lived there, but the place no longer had the magic for her, the magic that we had shared when she first arrived and we were young. She, too, had been transformed by TV and what TV had done for her was to turn her back into an American. And although Burnet had clearly been born here, TV had also helped trans-form him. Concurrently I watched my two “friends,” Gwen and Burnet, become less like kids from the Shore and more like the polished, slick, sophisticated worldly kids I saw on TV.

And maybe that was why it was inevitable that Gwen and Burnet became girlfriend and boyfriend. I had seen it coming for months. It was almost as if they were two beautiful jungle animals who had stalked each other, circling warily but enticing each other day after day. I was caught in the middle and hated every moment of it. And, in the end, it was me who had brought them together. A cycle of circumstances made this inevitable and there was not a damn thing I could do about it. If I thought that it was good for Gwen, I believe I could have accepted it. I could have been selfless and wished them happiness. But I knew better than that. I knew the dark depths of Burnet, and I knew he had not changed as much as the world believed.