Mean Boy (11 page)

When I came out, the dog was sitting in the same spot, with the filthy ball in its mouth. It placed the ball on the floor the moment I stepped across the threshold, then lifted its beady eyes to meet mine—aglint with psychotic readiness.

Of course Jim was gone from the chesterfield by the time I manoeuvred my way out of the kitchen, replaced by Moira, who sat alone viciously biting her nails.

God, stop that
, I wanted to say when I sat down beside her. She was chewing away at the cuticle of her thumb with a sick, desperate fervour—the way you imagine wolves in leg traps would gnaw at their own ensnared limbs.

After Moira explained to me one final time that I must never play ball with the dog, as it “only gets him riled up,” I sat down and asked, needing to change the subject, so how did you and Jim meet? She hasn’t stopped talking since.

At this point I don’t even remember what her original answer was. Jim is huddled by the record player arguing with Charles Slaughter about the finer points of bluegrass music. Todd is talking beseechingly of Robert Service to Professor Dekker.

Moira is saying:

“Well, my brother’s in jail now, but I’m keeping his things for him whenever he gets out, but we don’t know when he’s getting out because he got himself in quite a bit of trouble and he never told us what. Like, million-dollar trouble, he said. So he’s in jail down in the States and there’s nothing we can do about it—don’t know why he’s there or what he did. But anyway, he sends me all his things, so God knows what all’s in there, but I write him and I tell him I’m gonna sell half this crap because we’re dead broke and if you’re in million-dollar trouble, why don’t you send us some? But he’s in jail, right, so he can’t do nothing one way or the other. And he’s just: whatever you do, don’t sell my dragon blade. And I would never, ever do that because I know how much that thing means to him. It’s like this blade that you throw, he got it from Thailand, like ancient Thailand fighters used it or something and—you should see this thing. I don’t know what the hell it’s made of but it’s perfectly balanced. It just
feels, like, powerful in your hand—you can feel the power coming off it. I threw it into an oak tree once, this huge, thousand-year-old oak, and you know what? Tree died. Dead. So this thing, you know, if I were to sell it we’d probably be set for life, but I’d never do that to him, it’s all he’s got left.”

Chew, chew, gnaw, masticate—the whole time her fist is practically in her mouth, she’s got some kind of oral fixation—I wish she’d have a smoke. I stare at her and slurp at my wine and try to feel some kind of attraction, but Moira is nothing like I imagined. She doesn’t have the welcoming cushiness of Brenda L. to her. She’s all edges and angles—pointy shoulders, jutting collarbone—with epic circles under her eyes. Jim describes her in his poems as having a face like the Madonna, a moonface, radiating bliss and wisdom like you see in paintings. Similarly, I seem to recall, he describes her as silent. That’s also how the virgin is depicted—smiling, close-mouthed like the Mona Lisa. Soft and round.

The other thing is, Moira’s talk is crazy talk.
Tree died. Dragon blade
. Or perhaps there is some kind of secret profundity behind it all that I am too drunk to detect. What did Jim call it?
The muse’s antique lying language
.

I’m sitting on the floor trying to tell Jim two things. One, that I read and enjoyed his review of Dermot Schofield’s chapbook in
Atlantica
. Two, that I am sorry not to have brought the bottle of wine I purchased specifically for this evening, and I would have to bring it to him at a later date.

“Don’t worry about it, Larry, we’re not hurting for booze around here.”

“—left it sitting on my kitchen table—don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Ah, you can have it yourself when you get home.”

“Can I have a glass of water?” I say, but my question gets lost in the conversation. Jim has brought out a bottle of whisky, handed out glasses, and plunked it into the centre of the room along with the basket of uneaten buns from dinner. I’m finding the whisky strong, but it isn’t so bad if I take a bite of bun with every sip. All of us are sitting on the floor except Slaughter and Moira. She’s still up on the chesterfield, and Slaughter hasn’t left his throne.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do with that cocksucker when he gets here,” Jim is saying to Dekker.

“Just go through the motions,” Dekker replies. “Let him do his reading, put him up for the night.”

“I’ll be damned if I’m putting him up here.”

“I doubt the department will spring for a hotel room.”

“I’ll pay out of my own pocket if I have to.”

I figure out they’re talking about Schofield. When I babbled his name earlier, Jim went off on a bit of a tangent, and now, I realize, he’s still on it.

“Schofield’s coming here?” I ask.

Jim twists his mouth. “I invited him. Back before I knew what he was capable of.”

“What was he capable of?”

Dekker starts to answer with a grin, but Jim gets there first, reaching toward the centre of the room for the whisky bottle. “Bad faith. Bad poetry.”

“Come on now, Jim,” says Dekker.

“You come on, Bryant.”

“Your review of
Malignant Cove
was great,” I say, because it seems as if Jim needs cheering all of a sudden. “Did I tell you that already?”

He whirls on me. “My review was
honest
—that was my purpose in writing it. It was a reaction precisely against the mincing, rubber-spined pabulum someone like Schofield is spewing from his professor’s chair at York or wherever the hell he is.”

Todd, whose chin has been bobbing around on his chest for the past half hour or so, manages to hoist his head upright at this.

“Malignant Cove is in Nova Scotia,” he slobbers, the slack of his mouth kind of reminding me of Janet, ten years old and immersed in her Barbie pornography. “Is he from Nova Scotia?”

“It doesn’t matter where he’s from anymore,” instructs Jim. “He’s cast his lot with the cynics and whores of Upper Canada.”

“He sounds like an asshole!” I enthuse. This wins me a grim nod from Jim.

“Malignant Cove is a real place?” says Dekker, leaning toward Todd.

“Yeah—a place. It’s about like it sounds,” Todd slurs into his chest.

Dekker shakes his head again. He’s been doing that a lot this evening. “This is a fascinating part of the country,” he says, leaning back in Jim’s rocking chair with a tight, pleased smile on his black-stubbled face. I wonder where the hell he’s from anyway.

I’m happy to note that every time Todd or Dekker disappears into the kitchen on his way to the bathroom, a round of frenzied barking ensues. It wasn’t something about me personally that maddened Jim’s dog. Chuck Slaughter would seem to be lacking a bladder—he hasn’t budged all night. Maybe all the piss has been steadily trickling out of him throughout the evening, soaking Jim’s armchair. My grandfather Humphries was like that near the end. Maybe that’s why Slaughter never stands up.

The dog’s name, I’ve determined from Moira’s kitchen-ward shouts of reproach and instruction, is Panda. Jim
named it Pan originally, but Moira tells me she thought it was stupid.

Now we are packed in Jim’s car heading downtown to steal the flag with the misplaced quotation marks from Rory Scarsdale Holdings—
“Ask For Rory!”
I can’t remember how this got decided, but I must have started it. I told them about “Ham Dinner” at the Legion back home, giving the lawn a “trim.” We are all convulsed, laughing and making quotation marks in the air with our fingers every time one of us says something. Only Slaughter is oblivious to the hilarity. Slaughter is driving and foaming at the mouth over Scarsdale. From Chuck I have recently learned that Scarsdale also runs the Mariner—a bar at the bottom of town by the railway station, where all the locals go. Slaughter says he got kicked out of it once, by Scarsdale himself and his “goons.”

“Buncha fuckin’ townie rubes figured they’d kick the shit outta me, Scarsdale doesn’t lift a goddamn finger.”

Chuck is bubbling away on the topic of Scarsdale like an overcooked stew. We’re laughing because he hasn’t ceased his litany since we left Jim’s place. It’s remarkable. After seven hours of warming Jim’s armchair, drinking beer and only occasionally complaining about how dull an evening he was having, Slaughter suddenly came alive. He leapt from the chair at the name of Scarsdale, seized up Jim’s telephone, and started maniacally dialing numbers with his cigar-sized fingers. He was calling Rory Scarsdale, we eventually deciphered from the stream of obscenities—calling him right then and there—although God only knew how Chuck could have had his number memorized, he might have been calling his parents for all we knew.

Conversation stopped as Slaughter stood panting, dominating the centre of Jim’s sitting room. It was no wonder he’d
scarcely stood up all night, I realized, looking up at him from the floor with a bun hanging out of my mouth—the place was too small for him. He listened for a moment, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end of the line. I was wondering what time it was again when I heard Slaughter furiously suck in a breath—
Hup!
—in order to scream into the phone,
“Fuck you Scarsdale you flabby piece of shit I wouldn’t set foot in your goddamn rat-infested shithouse if somebody set it on fire and stuck my own mother in there I’d just let her burn up ‘n be caught dead in that fucking little pisshole you with your goddamn flag don’t even know how to use fucking quotation marks you illiterate ignorant inbred why don’t you go screw your sister some more, asshole? Then who you gonna throw outta your fag-hole fuckin’ bar?”

Charles slammed down the receiver and threw his fists into the air, shuffling his feet back and forth like Muhammad Ali. We applauded out of fear and wonder. Somehow from this emerged the consensus that we had to go and get the flag outside Scarsdale Holdings. It was an obscenity, we determined—a flapping and dangling insult to literate men everywhere. Moira said she was going to bed.

Jim is in the front seat. I am all cuddled up in the back between Dekker and Todd, my legs bunched because of the hump in the centre. Todd should really be sitting here, because he is the shortest, but he told me he gets sick sitting in the middle, which I assumed to be a load of shit. But before I could argue, Slaughter told us to get the fuck in the car.

“Time to stand up against irresponsible punctuation!” Jim is shouting in the front seat.

“Time to stand up against assholes in general!” yells Slaughter, bashing his fist against the horn four times in a row. The road is completely deserted and I think this is a good thing. “We’ll grab that flag and we’ll head down to the
Mariner and we’ll fucking make him eat it,” Slaughter jabbers. I’m staring at the back of Chuck’s head, but I can see drops of spittle landing on the windshield in front of him. I look at Dekker, who has his head in his hands, but he’s laughing.

“Not the best idea,” Jim advises Chuck. It’s like they’ve forgotten about the three of us back here. “You ever been to that place?”

“I told you, man, I got dragged out of it by a bunch of his fat fuckin’ cronies.”

“This is what I’m saying,” says Jim. “Guy’s got cronies. Actual goons. He’s like the Godfather.”

“Slow down,” whispers Todd beside me.

“The Godfather of Timperly?” titters Dekker.

“Don’t laugh,” advises Jim, raising his voice so we all can hear. “You’d be lucky to get out of the Mariner with your nuts on straight, Bryant.”

“I’ll puke,” says Todd.

We’re roaring through downtown and there is not a soul to be seen anywhere—there’s scarcely even any cars parked nearby. All of Timperly must be tucked in its collective beddy-bye. We own the town, it feels like—we
are
the town at night. And it’s snowing, whirly white flakes, the first I’ve seen all year. The streetlights turn the black sky a dim orange and the white flakes yellow, like bright, airborne flames. Scarsdale’s flag waves at our approach, quoting some cheery, unknown personage who exhorts us to “Ask For Rory!” We hear it snap in the strengthening wind once we’ve all piled out of the car. Slaughter whoops a whoop of ownership, a kind of Viking whoop of claim-laying which bounces off the stone buildings and the streets. Smiley whoops a whoop of vomiting by the car’s back tire. Jim skips like a schoolgirl across the street and leaps like a dancer to try and reach the flag, gorilla arms extended to their full simian length. He
snags it, dangles for a moment above the sidewalk, then lets go, shoes slamming against concrete. I walk toward him, raising my face to the glowing sky, leaving fresh-snow footsteps like I did in the flour on Jim’s kitchen floor. It’s so quiet and empty and the snow is so new it’s like everything’s just sitting here waiting for us to take over. Big flakes brush against my face, melting as they go.

A POT OF TEA
can usually sustain me through an entire poem—two or three if they’re short. It has to be a big pot, though, enough for four or five cups. My parents furnished me with a small Brown Betty to see me through my first year at school, but the thing infuriated me. I wouldn’t even be through the first draft and I’d have to get up and boil more hot water, having run out after only one mugful. It shattered my concentration, so I gave the Brown Betty away to Luc, who used it to steep magic mushrooms, and headed to the Co-op seeking something with a little more heft.