“Mask.”
Cyril found a gauze mask smelling of vanilla extract. The furious sawing resumed. Half an hour ago he’d been in bed and now it seemed he was robbing a grave. Cyril knew he should go home, just slip away quietly, but the lure of Gilbert had always been the lure of the unexpected, the mildly larcenous or outright criminal, and it overrode any qualms regarding sacrilege or fear of punishment, divine or otherwise.
Gilbert crawled out of the hole with a small wooden box. He saw Cyril's horrified expression.
“It’s not robbery. She was my grandmother. It’s family property.” They covered the hole with boards and sod. Tools clanking, they retreated to Cyril’s basement where Gilbert gave the enigmatic wooden box a shake: whatever was inside was padded. Now Gilbert took needle-nose pliers from the sack and with one twist cranked off the lock, splintering the wood in the process. He lifted the lid revealing a velvet cloth of royal blue with gold trim then, like a groom about to raise his bride’s veil, he lifted the edge of the cloth: a pistol. Old, perhaps army issue, it had a grooved Vulcanite hand grip. Gilbert opened the cylinder and discovered four bullets. He and Cyril looked at each other in exhilarated terror. An empty gun was hardware; a loaded gun was a weapon. Each turn of the cylinder caused a rich steely click. Gilbert weighed the gun’s lethal heft and his eyes gleamed at the range of dark possibilities now open before him. Yet one realization dominated the rest. He looked at Cyril and in a voice of quiet wonder said, “This is the gun my grandfather killed himself with. It has to be. Why else would what’s her nuts have kept it?”
Cyril had no idea why else. But a different thought hit him. “Hey, now you can kill yourself.”
“Yeah,” Gilbert drawled. “Could do.”
“Temple or mouth?”
Gilbert blew air. “Probably doesn’t make all that much diff. Temple I guess. Don’t much like the idea of sucking on a pistol barrel. Might do it in the cemetery on a full moon.” Then he grew philosophical as he gazed at the gun. “Of course, I would like to lose my virginity first. Maybe I’ll meet her when I’m standing there with the gun to my temple,” said Gilbert—her being the girl who finally took pity on him and gave him sex— “And her heart goes out to me because she recognizes the depth of my soul and sees that I’m noble, that I’ve got potential, that I’m a fucking genius, and she talks me out of it. And she’s like the daughter of some shipping magnate who hates me at first and threatens to disown her, but I show him what I’m made of, that we’re similar him and me, and I’ll be his protégé, and he’ll take me on and I’ll inherit everything.”
It was an impressively impassioned monologue. Maybe Gilbert should have tried acting, though he might have connected with Connie. The only thing worse than losing Connie would have been losing her to Gilbert. Cyril thought of Gilbert calling Connie up and trying to steal her away from him. Cyril had never said anything, though he didn’t forget. “Then you won’t need the gun and you can lend it to me.”
Knowing how heartbroken Cyril had been, he said, “Maybe if you only maim yourself and Connie hears about it she’ll come back.”
“Actually, I was thinking of shooting Darrel.”
Darrel was Cyril’s mother’s boyfriend. They’d met at a Christmas party at the Ukrainian Hall and for reasons Cyril was having difficulty understanding his mother had been seeing him for three months. On Fridays Darrel took her to the Legion and on Sundays he came to dinner, with the result that Cyril had come to dread Sundays. That she should be having sex constituted the deepest imaginable betrayal of his father, even if he had been dead ten years. Cyril understood that she was lonely, but he did not understand that she should do anything about it, certainly not with a guy like Darrel.
“Hey, bub.”
“Hey.”
Darrel was stretched out full-length on their couch, one of his mother’s embroidered pillows under his head, shoes off exposing his red and blue diamond-check socks, ankles crossed. He was vice principal and Guidance Counsellor at some high school. Short and portly, with male pattern baldness, Darrel favoured western wear: string ties, cowboy boots, and shirts embroidered with lariat motifs. No one resembled a cowboy less than Darrel, yet not only had he grown up on a ranch, he was a war hero, having won a Distinguished Service Medal, and for two years he’d been a kicker for the Edmonton Eskimos. The first time they met, Darrel had demonstrated his kicking prowess by setting up Cyril’s football in a convenient knothole on the back porch then sailing it out across the alley and into the cemetery. It was January, and he’d made the kick in his socks. He’d stepped back three paces, given his arms a shake, then darted forward with the precision of the expert and kicked. Darrel already had a Players out of his pack and fired up when the ball binged off a gravestone fifty yards away then rolled another thirty down the slope. “Not half-bad for a fat old fart, eh?” Cyril was stuck with the chore of retrieving the ball. When he got back he found Darrel and his mother necking. His mother—necking. In English class they were reading Heart of Darkness, and two words came to mind: the horror. Cyril stashed the ball in the basement, determined that Darrel would never touch it again. If only he could dispose of Darrel as simply.
Darrel said, “Got you some info here.” With his chin he indicated a stack of catalogues on the coffee table.
Cyril picked one up. The University of Toronto. There was also one for Dalhousie, for the University of British Columbia, and for Simon Fraser University, a new school right here in the Lower Mainland due to open in the fall. Cyril had no intention of going to any of these places. “Great. Thanks.”
“You’re most very welcome indeed young sir.”
Cyril’s mother had squeezed herself onto the end of the couch and positioned Darrel’s feet on her thighs. The gallant Darrel gave her the cigarette from his mouth and lit another for himself. She’d never smoked before; now she puffed away like a pro, wrist cocked in a burlesque of elegance.
Darrel was indicating the catalogues again. “How about pharmacy? I’d go in for pharmacy if I was your age. No sticking your fingers in unsavoury places like doctors and veterinarians, if you get my meaning. But you’ll need to work on your math and your chemistry,” he warned. “I hear you’re not exactly an academic. Not that that’s an insurmountable hurdle. Wasn’t for me, and I was a lousy student. Ds and Cs all the way. Most everyone had me pegged for a broom jockey. But when I finally got a direction—” He nodded slowly as if to say look out, a bull was on the charge. “I worked hard. Direction. That’s the key.”
Cyril tried to look enthralled by this gripping saga.
“All you need is drive; drive and direction. They go together. I know it’s tough. Seems uphill all the way. But you don’t want to end up in Fraser Mills the rest of your life. You don’t want to end up on the green chain.”
The green chain was the quicksand of jobs—put your toe in and it sucked you down and you never escaped. And it was easy to fall in because of that union wage: one, two, three, you had a car and a wife and a mortgage and it was bye-bye dreams, see you in forty years when you retired, unless, that is, the job killed you first, or took off your arm, and left you like a war vet in the legion watching the bubbles in your beer, boring everyone with your tale of woe.
“I can recommend a tutor,” said Darrel. “Ooh…”
Cyril’s mother had begun massaging Darrel’s feet and was now cracking his toes, working her way from the smallest to the biggest. She’d never rubbed his dad’s feet.