Ray and I never really succumbed to that type of extreme. He built his hutch and I listened to Zeppelin. Inside, probably, our internal organs were chipping off and turning grey. But we never screamed. The big day finally came when Ray unveiled his hutch and dragged it down to the curb on my old Radio Flyer wagon. The next morning we got up really early to watch the garbagemen remove the cans from the hutch. We knew they’d marvel at it. Ray had painted it a kind of mauvey purple and had even laid a piece of Astroturf on the bottom. It had a board across it that kept the cans securely tucked in, and the board was painted a deep red, left over from some school project of his. Right on, Dad, I told him. That’s a stellar hutch. He told me that Trudie had always wanted him to make a hutch to keep the dogs and cats from tearing open the bags and spreading crap all over our yard. It would be nice, he’d quoted her as saying, to become the owner of a solid, simple hutch sometime before my throat wattles. We laughed. I’d told him it was a deluxe hutch, state-of-the-art. I knew he was trying really hard not to cry. Turns out the garbagemen thought the hutch was garbage, a colourful mess of boards and nails and outdoor carpeting, and threw the whole thing into the back of their truck. Ray wouldn’t let me run outside to tell them they were making a big mistake. He put his hand on my shoulder and said no, no. Don’t. He smiled and shook his head. And then he went into his bedroom and quietly shut the door. And I put on “All My Love” and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all of your love but do you have any more?
I’ve been experimenting with some vegetarian meals, something called Survival Casserole. A couple of days ago Ray came in and stood in the kitchen and assessed the stuff I had simmering in a pan on the stove. We’ve been eating an awful lot of vegetables lately, he said. I shrugged. Do you mean horribly many, I asked. Yes, he said, that’s what I mean. I found a streak of blood in an egg yesterday, I said. They’re very good, though, vegetables, he added. In what way, I asked. Well, he said. Well was his trademark answer to all of life’s questions. They’ll make you live longer, anyway, I told him. He tilted his head and frowned. Or does it just seem that way, he said. That’s quite funny, Dad. He resented vegetables for prolonging his life. I told him we could have pear nectar for supper. It was thick, like a meal. Cooking’s not your forte, is it, he asked. I put my wooden spoon on the counter. Do you want meat, I asked. I can’t make meat. That’s fine, he said. That’s A-OK. He likes saying things like A-OK. Things like legal beagle and bean counter and shutterbug. One time I asked him if he had some kind of aversion to saying the real words. What’s wrong with lawyer, accountant, photographer, I asked him. Nothing’s wrong with them, he said. But he looked sad when he said it like he was a kid playing in a puddle and I’d told him to stop fooling around.
Trudie hadn’t seemed to mind his word thing but it’s always made me crazy. I should try to be more indifferent to it. I know I would be if I wasn’t so wild with the knowledge that he’s doing it to seem jivey and laid-back for my sake. He refers to me and my friend Lydia Voth as Tom and Huck. What are Tom and Huck up to? What adventures do Tom and Huck have planned for today? You mean besides rafting down the Mississippi with a huge man called Injun Joe?
I think Ray might have wanted a son. One night when I was seven or eight I announced to my family that I wanted to play hockey with the boys on Friday nights and Ray became just a little too eager. Okay! he shouted. All right! We have to get you a stick! We have to get tape! I’ll be waiting in the car!
These days Tom and Huck don’t have much planned because Tom, or is she Huck, is in the hospital with an illness that has not been diagnosed. Nobody seems to know what’s wrong with Lydia. Parts of her body keep breaking down. Yesterday when I popped in to see her she told me she was feeling more and more like less and less and then she laughed her head off for a while until it became too painful. She can’t stand the way her socks clutch at her ankles or the way things like lights sometimes hum in her head. She looks like she’s lit up from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern. Her cheeks glow red and her eyes are bright, bright electric blue, and her hair is no longer blonde, it’s yellow, like penicillin. I lay down beside her in the bed and read to her from one of her old Black Stallion books. She’s the same age as me but she likes those books. She doesn’t care.
She asked me if it was really hot outside, and I said yeah, killer. It’s shimmering. She nodded.
How’s the job? she asked. I had a part-time job washing cars at Dyck Dodge but I hadn’t been there for a while because I hated the way the tops of my rubber boots chafed at my calves. I showed Lids the raw skin on my legs and she frowned. Basically, I could go in whenever I wanted to and get paid under the table by the guy in the showroom, whose fascination was held by girls who wear short shorts and wield hoses. It’s a loose arrangement that surely will not prepare me for a rigid schedule of killing at the plant.
Have you and Travis done it yet, she asked. No, no, no, no, no, God, I said. I waved my arms around like a ref saying no basket. She nodded again.
I will probably, she gasped, never know the pleasure, gasp, of a man. She closed her eyes and smiled.
Lydia was straight-edge but completely, disarmingly, nonjudgmental. We had nothing in common. I just liked her weird evanescence and the way she did the most unbelievably nerdy things without knowing it or if she did know it she didn’t care at all.
One time she came with me to a Halloween party at the pits and every girl was dressed up like a hooker except for Lydia who was a brown paper package tied up with string, from The Sound of Music. In the summer she wore knee socks and orthopedic shoes and a lime-green windbreaker. Sometimes her ears couldn’t take loud noises and her eyes couldn’t take small print and she’d tell me she couldn’t talk but would I talk because if I spoke quietly she would listen to me and she would be thinking about what I was saying. And it’s true, she did think about what I said. Sometimes I’d say stuff one day and the next time I saw her she’d refer to it and ask me if I was still feeling the same way or if things had changed. Nobody our age did that. We talked about the stuff that was going on, the things we did, not the way we felt. But Lids had no real action in her life, only feelings and thoughts. She lived in her head and that’s why it glowed.