Not much in the past ten months. His final report card had a D, 5 C’s, 2 B’s, an A. But that’s not the worst. Having him brought home in a patrol car took the cake. Suspected of smashing headlights on parked cars, although they couldn’t prove it. Finding the stuff hidden in our storage bin in the basement of the building, stuff he hadn’t the money to buy. Pocketbooks, a hunting knife, batteries, gloves, aftershave. I knew it was stolen. Why this crap? What use to him was it, aside from the pocketbooks and maybe the knife? Boys always want to own a knife. But batteries? Gloves? Aftershave?
You can’t tolerate a thief, nor a liar. No, none of it was his. He was keeping it for a friend. He lied to my face, a barefaced lie.
What friend? Who? Lyle Gardiner?
No, not Lyle. Lost where he was going for a second. Tom. Tom Perkins.
Liar. Sneaky little bastard. No such person.
I acted mad, played mad, although I was really cold with fear. Once they start going to ruin on you, who’s to predict where it’ll come to an end? Police at twelve. What’s next? Especially in a city, with so many invitations and opportunities to do wrong. Get him away, was all I could think.
Connaught was what I thought, thought it because I had no other place to think. The old man assuring me he’ll find me a job, find us a place to live, everything will be set, no worries. And in a small town you can keep better track of a kid, watch him.
There’s no denying this isn’t what we called damage control in the Army. Extinguish the fire. Man the pumps. Damage control stinks of defeat. I’m not a salvager by nature. Unless you’ve let things go wrong, there’s no need for salvage. And I’d no business letting things go wrong.
There’s a world of difference between the going back home and the leaving. The leaving was a kid’s run headlong down a steep hill. Legs going faster and faster, flopping looser and crazier in your hips and you not heeding because it’s not your legs, or even your windmilling arms you trust for balance. It’s the freedom and wildness, the scream of delight, the risk of it, the I don’t give a shit for skinned knees of it, which keeps you from falling and harm.
The going home is nothing but a long hard climb up a hill to no surprises, to I told you so, to him and his boring little town. But that I can take, and gladly, if it puts Daniel straight again.
Vera consulted her watch. In an hour they would be arriving in Connaught. Now, so close to her birthplace, she searched the landscape for anything familiar, anything she recognized. Barbed wire fences strung on peeled poplar poles, summerfallow fields stained white with alkali where the sloughs had already dried despite it being only early July, all went by. The grain crops were stunted. On the rises where hot winds first draw the ground moisture, the wheat was faintly streaked with yellow and even shorter in the stalk than elsewhere. The heat pressing down out of the cloudless sky had ironed all movement from the fields, not a breath of wind wrinkled the crops. There was only an illusion of movement where, in the distance, the farmhouse, a granary, a shelter belt wobbled in the distortions wreaked by the burning air.
That junk in storage could easily have belonged to Pooch’s Lyle, she thought. Right off the bat I knew that one was no good. If circumstances had been different I’d have forbidden Daniel from having anything to do with him. But what with Pooch working with me and the two of us living in the same building I didn’t have the guts to say I didn’t want her boy associating with mine. Especially since Pooch helped me get my suite in the building by putting in a word with the super.
Yet there’s no denying Lyle Gardiner is a little weasel and the worst case of smart-too-soon I’ve every encountered. Of course, Pooch is responsible for that. No respect for herself when it comes to men. Never even makes a pretence of hiding from Lyle what she’s up to. She laughed when she told me that Lyle charges her retired fireman boyfriend fifty cents for every hour he keeps away from the apartment when the fireman drops in to put the fire out. Discusses everything in front of the kid, even her period. I’d sooner hang myself in a closet than let Daniel in on any of that. Lonely single women shouldn’t talk personal things over with their sons as if they were husbands. Pooch does. That’s what’s made Lyle so unnaturally old. A creepy, smirky fourteen year old going on forty-five. Used to stare at my tits when he talked to me. Didn’t look me in the face, just stared point-blank at my tits. Called me Vera, instead of Mrs. Miller.
I can just imagine the stories that Lyle filled Daniel’s head with. Stories of what men and women get up to together. Sickening ones is my guess.
Daniel’s never seen any of that. With the exception of Stanley, I haven’t had much luck with men in my life. Still, with the way Daniel’s been carrying on lately I’ve got to wonder if this Male Influence business I read about in all the women’s magazines isn’t a factor. Could be reading those articles in Redbook and McCall’s and Chatelaine and Good Housekeeping is like eating candy that makes you feel sick, but I can’t help it. All those psychologists writing on the break-up of the family, divorce and what-not, keep emphasizing a boy needs a strong Male Influence in his life to ensure healthy, normal development. There’s times I believe it and times I don’t. Lately, mostly I do. They say it needn’t be his natural father. All he needs is an older man to look up to. Could be an uncle, a family friend, an older brother.
Not having one of those kicking around the place is another reason I suppose for going back to Connaught. I don’t mean Dad. He couldn’t be trusted to raise a cat. Look how he terrorized the life out of poor Earl with his shenanigans. I wonder about this Mr. Stutz. During the war Earl thought a lot of him; I could read it between the lines in the letters he wrote me. Brother seemed to worship the very ground this Mr. Stutz walked on. So he must be something special because Earl wasn’t one to take to people. Too shy and too timid. I think Earl was afraid of most people. What was it once that Mother said to me about Earl? That he ought to have been born a girl so he could marry and be taken care of for the rest of his life. He was an odd duck, Earl. Which makes me think that if Mr. Stutz could make a favourable impression on a wary one like him, it’s possible he could be a Male Influence for Daniel.
Daniel was waking. He yawned, scrubbed his face with his hands, rolled his shoulders. He was a slim, fine-boned boy with the promise of extraordinary height if the rest of him caught up with a pair of long, skinny legs. His narrow, foxy face appeared slightly sullen despite being sprinkled with cinnamon freckles. Or maybe it was his hair that suggested sullenness; a twelve year old patterned on James Dean. He combed it now, using the window as a mirror, raking it with a rat-tail comb until every tooth mark stood out in his thick, lank reddish hair darkened with Brylcreem to the colour of an oily old penny. When he had finished, he stuffed his hands in his pockets, lowered his neck into the collar of his jacket, planted the soles of his shoes on the chair back in front of him, and jiggled his legs so fiercely that his trousers shimmied up his calves, revealing his sagging white socks. Not once during all this did he allow his mother to catch his eye.
Look at him sitting sassy. Trying so hard, so soon to get old. Now everything’s an occasion for him to try and put distance between us. Even his socks, that jacket. The jacket’s casual but decent – not cheap either. But if I like a thing, he won’t.
“I’m not wearing a golf jacket,” was what he said. “Have I ever seen a golf course? Who do you think I am? Arnold Palmer?”
I tuned him in on what he should and shouldn’t wear but that doesn’t mean I won. He’s got the jacket on, but look at it. Cuffs turned back to the elbows and collar turned up to the ears. To provoke me.