“The grip on him. Be a ballplayer.”
“He’s a she.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Clive wrestles a stone flowerpot into the centre of the courtyard. Windows brighten about us. I angle a roman candle east over the golf course.
“We need matches.”
“How about it, Mr. L?” says Clive. “You got some matches for the little lady?”
“Skunk. You rotten skunk.”
“I smoke,” Lonnigan says after Clive’s gone inside for some. He cups his neck while he talks, as if to keep in fingertip contact with his heartbeat. “Cherrywood briar. Got the tobacco but they won’t let me lay my hands on matches. My doc’s a wet-behind-the-ears little sonofabitch shaver. Bastard still wears dental braces. Taking my marching orders from a, a, a — a brace-face. Pipe but no matches. Like to give a man a gun but no bullets. Don’t grow old, is my advice to you.” He gives this same warning to Jane in a high baby voice: “Don’t… grow… old.”
Clive returns with a Zippo. Coloured balls of fire arc over telephone poles at the courtyard’s edge. Lonnigan’s eyes close. Eyelids thin as tissue paper wormed with red capillaries.
“When we were kids,” he says, “we’d find bullets in the fields. Battles had been fought there, you see. We’d take our spades”—he clarifies—“I mean spades as in shovels. Not that we had slaves the colour of Clive here who did our digging.”
“I’m sure Patience appreciates your meaning, Mister L.”
“… took our spades and dug up whatever the “… took our spades and dug up whatever the 30 slugs. We’d pry the slug-heads off, tap the powder onto a slip of parchment, twist it into a sachet and light the bugger. That was our fireworks.”
Screaming Devil, Volcano, Hearts of Fire. Residents occur on their balconies. Me, an old man, Clive, a child whose life I’d first saved and now stolen. If it isn’t quite the picture I’d framed in my head… had there ever been that picture?
“Fire hazard,” calls a fear-stricken voice from one of the surrounding balconies. “Fire hazard!”
“Calm down, missus Horvath,” says Clive. “Nothing but fireworks, and see? Landing on the golf course.”
“Fire haaaaaaaaaaazard!”
“Large Marge. She’s big as a barge.” When I ask Lonnigan if that’s who had voiced her concern, he chuckles. “No. That’s the other Marge yelling.”
Clive lights the Burning Schoolhouse. Cathartic for some. I never hated school. The baby’s weight against me. Exhale of her lungs.
Close my eyes. Against the canvas of my lids the schoolhouse burns on. Fresh trajectories and possibilities. Each one of my own summoning.
BLACK BOX
THE ORGANIST
You might configure my existence as a string of air disasters. Commercial jetliners scud-missiled to smithereens in foreign airspace. Botched water landings where the exits crimp shut: eels and sharks dart past the porthole windows like an inside-out aquarium until pressure cracks Plexiglas and the sea rushes in. Lover, husband, father. All ruinous, all fatal. Except I survive. My life a pile of flaming wrecks I somehow stride clear of.
A black box is recovered from each crash site. My own voice catalogues events, idiotic and selfish, principal to each fiasco. It isn’t the voice of a man nearing his own excruciating death, face torn up in flames with shards of a shattered instrument panel deep-driven into it. It’s the penitent voice of a man addressing his God.
The houseboat’s an Orca Weekender. Its sixty horsepower Evinrude belches lung-blackening smoke. I stripped linens off every bed and piled them in a sultan-like mound on the one where I sleep. Compass, marine radio, microwave, TV: baby’s tricked out. Whatever wasn’t clamped down I threw overboard. Yawing near shore I blasted every emergency flare at the trees in hopes dead leaves might catch fire. That was yesterday morning when lint-like fog hung over the silvered water until the sun chased it upshore to linger between the trees like low-lying smoke. Rawbeautied county, this far north.
I stole the boat from a hairy-fisted rental agent who overused the word “doggone.” As in: “This is the best doggone houseboat in my doggone fleet.” As in: “Talk about your doggone fine houseboating weather!” After the umpteenth “doggone” I said to myself: I’m stealing this fucking spaz’s doggone property. Handles like a bear. Aim it like a ballistic missile—precise—and hold that course or else you’re doomed.
What jackass steals a houseboat? A jackass such as myself, evidently. Idiotic as hotwiring a car to drive at speeds not exceeding four knots down the same unending stretch of road. Inlets crook like arthritic thumbs and riverside towns sporadically carve themselves out of the barrens but I am locked upon this waterway.
It’s the second vehicle I’ve stolen. The first was a minivan left running outside a Big Bee store in the city of my birth. Freakishly clean. CDs alphabetized. Bright yellow hockey tape wrapped at ‘10’ and ‘2’ positions on the wheel. So enervated did I become within its confines that I stopped at a ramshackle fried chicken shack hours past Toronto. Manning its counter the ungainliest teenager I’d ever clapped eyes on. This shocked expression you’d find on a man kicked awake in his sleep. On his head sat a paper chicken hat so saturated with sweat and grease its head drooped to peck the gawky sonofabitch in his forehead.
“Welcome to the Chubby Chicken.”
The kid blew at his hat same way you’d blow a lock of hair out your eyes. The chicken head popped up, came down, pecked the kid in his head. Ah, Jesus, I thought drinking in his dreadful spectre. This is too fucking sad. I have been overly sensitive lately, granted, but this cow-eyed cupcake in his soggy chicken hat in the airless middle of Buttfuck Nowhere summoned within me that breed of quasiabstract sadness where spiritual malaise digs in roots. I mean, not to make too big a deal.
I purchased a family bucket and paid with my credit card. Gave the mopey bastard a hundred dollar tip. Hey, big spender! Such largesse from a man who scant months ago pawed through a box of old birthday cards hoping an overlooked sawbuck might fall out.
I ate the entire bucket. Pure gluttony. Choking down the seventh drumstick the realization dawned that these were modes of behaviour a man would adopt upon the discovery he has a week to live. Once it ceased to matter whether he overate, drank his face off, snorted Borax. Healthy living is an undertaking only men with futures bother with.
Full disclosure: I always wanted a boy.
Shall I put on display the greasy-crawly scraps of my psyche? You won’t like me. I don’t really give a damn. I want to be understood within the parameters of what I am: a hardcore bastard. A rotten piece of work.
So, honest goods: a boy. Ask a hundred expectant first-time fathers: boy or girl? Ninety-nine will tell you boy. The one who doesn’t is giving you the breeze. The imprint of one Fletcher Burger would chalk itself more clearly upon the slate of a boy’s mind so I wished for one. But as wishes are fickle, any even-minded wisher should be satisfied with half measures. Which I got: a ten-fingered, ten-toed baby girl.
My marriage was in shambles by then. My wife caught me sniffing the seat of my jeans to see whether they were clean enough to wear again and refused to kiss me for a week. She’d buy too many bananas and when they blackened throw them in the freezer to bake banana bread that never materialized. “Is it me,” I’d go, “or is our freezer full of frozen gorilla fingers?” She stockpiled my foibles in a mental armoury and frequently launched tactical strikes. Blind-siding me with how I begrudged buying my own daughter baby gifts. “She’s happiest playing with a crumpled ball of newsprint!” Arguments often ended with her saying: “I never worry about Fletcher Burger’s happiness. Someone’s always watching out for Fletcher Burger’s happiness.” Pointing a finger at me. It did anger and disgrace me — I recall weeping over it in a Dollar Store, the most dispiriting and pitiful of retail outlets — that I couldn’t love my wife in the manner that, as a husband, I likely should have. The way she probably deserved. Weeping while picking through 99¢ canisters of discontinued, highly flammable silly string. Two of which I bought as stocking stuffers.