Mean Boy (47 page)

“You like some tea, Larry?”

“Be a nice way to end the evening.”

“Ah, but the night’s still young.” Jim placed a Ten-Penny in front of me and, before I could protest, cracked it with an
opener he seemed to have produced from mid-air. I looked at the beer with mixed feelings. I’d drunk so much beer, it kind of made me want to vomit. On the other hand, I’d drunk so much beer, it seemed I might as well drink more. It wasn’t logical, but it was nonetheless the case. I took a swig.

“But I’ll getcha some tea if you want some tea,” Jim said, whirling lopsidedly toward the cupboard. “Tea and beer don’t go too badly together. And by the time it’s steeped you’ll be done anyway.”

“Have a cup with me, Jim.”

“You know, Larry,” said Jim in the forced and fakey tone he’d been using since Creighton had creaked his way upstairs. “There’s nothing more embarrassing than one man trying to trick another out of his booze. It’s something a woman would do. Like in that song there. ‘Don’t hide my liquor, try to serve me tea.’ You know that song?”

I flushed. “Yeah.”

Jim folded his arms and leaned against the stove. He stared at me for a moment, then nodded a sharp, upward nod like an animal sniffing the wind.

“You think I’m a drunk, Larry?”

Fatigue dropped over me like a net. I was responding viscerally to the turn of Jim’s mood, feeling the suddenness of it in my guts like when a car hits a patch of ice and starts to spin.

I rubbed my face.

“Because if you think I’m a drunk, you should just come out and tell me. You know, like a man would do.”

I slapped my hands onto the table and sighed. “I just think it makes you miserable, all right? I don’t like to see you miserable.”

Jim kind of hooted under his breath. He held his beer up in front of him like a guy in a TV commercial. “This? You think this is the cause of my misery? If anything, this is what makes it bearable.”

“I think that’s an excuse, Jim.”

He gazed at me with sudden, fearsome lucidity. This happened at Christmas, I remembered—Jim sharpening up, vitalized by hostility.

“Oh, you do, eh, Larry? An excuse for what, exactly?”

This was a good question. I’d said what I said without thinking, it had just arrived on my lips. An excuse for what?

“An excuse …” I said, “an excuse for …”

“A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,”
Jim repeated like a retarded parrot.

I looked up at him, speechless, in high school, bashed against lockers, tackled from behind.

“A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,”
slobbered Jim. “Wonderful point, Larry. Brilliantly executed! By God, you’ll go far in this world.”

I blinked down at my beer.

“The red face on him,” Jim remarked after a moment, as if to a cadre of like-minded thugs.

“That’s so,” I said, trying to keep my breathing even. “That’s so
childish
. ”

“I’m the one who’s childish,” declared Jim, gesturing with a ceramic Fredericton Lions Club mug he’d brought down from the cupboard at some point. “I merely ask you to clarify your point in such a way as I can understand it, and all you can do is sit there stuttering and stammering with your face all red.”

And then Jim did it again, contorted his face, adjusted his voice.
“A-an excuse, an excuse-fer,”
he drawled. “An excuse for what, Larry? For what? You’ll have to do better than that airy-fairy crap.”

I looked up, and I think I was about to tell him. I think I really was for a minute. But then I noticed something. The way Jim’s eyes were dancing, how he kept wetting his lips, swinging the Lions mug around, pushing his face at me. This
was Jim making himself feel better. This was why Jim needed me around.

“You hear me, Larry? I have to say, now, you’re losing some esteem in my eyes. You’re usually so goddamn articulate. An excuse for what? For what? Come on. Pretend you’re in the classroom. Pretend that A average of yours is at stake—that oughta snap ya to attention. An excuse for what?”

He wasn’t fake-goading me, he really wanted to hear it, whatever it was. The worse, the better. He was hoping I would say something irrevocable. He wanted me to pull the house down on our heads.

He wanted it, because he wanted the
attention
.

“Let’s have tea,” I said, gripping my beer with both hands.

“Sure!” declared Jim, waving the mug with a sarcastic flourish, whirling away from me, toward the stove. He’d had his fingers curled loosely around the mug’s handle, and maybe as a result of the sarcastic flourish, maybe the whirl, the Lions mug flew from his fingers, across the room, catching Panda—who had settled into his blanket again—on the head.

It made this sound.

Panda leapt again to his feet, assuming a weary, yet defiant sort of dog-stance, as if to announce he had finally had enough. He took a gurgling step forward, all business, and then his knees gave out.

I’d never seen a dog fall in quite this way. A kind of slow sinking.

“Oh,”
gasped Jim. He wrapped his endless arms about his torso like a panicked child.

Gradually, I came to grasp how early it was. My skull and bones had a throbbing, hollow feeling, which I now had enough experience to recognize as the precursor to a pretty serious hangover. I hadn’t woken naturally, I realized—I’d woken from the booze and assumed it must be time to get up. But it wasn’t anywhere near time to get up. Nobody else would be up for hours. Maybe Creighton, although it seemed obvious he’d been exaggerating about his early-morning train—he’d just wanted to get some sleep, to get away.

Likely, there wouldn’t be anyone stirring until noon at least considering the time we went to bed. Which would have been only about three hours ago. As I was comprehending this, the light coming into the kitchen went from grey to red—as if bombs had exploded outside. I could hear winter birds going crazy at the sudden, violent dawn. Red sky in the morning is a shepherd’s warning. That’s one of the first poems I ever learned.

But maybe Jim wouldn’t be getting up at all today. I had a feeling. There was not just the exhaustion of the late night to take into account, but the hour of futile digging out by the chopping block. Hacking and stabbing at the frozen earth until finally we agreed to simply drag the thing into the woods and leave it there. The awful white gash of the moon overhead, Jim’s white face luminescent and pleading.

Don’t tell her. Don’t leave me. Don’t Larry let anyone leave me
.

My own hands throbbed, and I pulled off my gloves for a moment to look at them. The pads below my fingers glowed as red as the room.

I left the gloves off long enough to lace my boots and zip my jacket up to my neck. I put two more logs on the fire even though there wasn’t quite enough room for them in the stove, leaving the cast-iron burner balanced where the edge of the log poked slightly out. I figured the wood would burn
down fast enough. They’d be all day waiting for the house to heat up otherwise.

I pulled my gloves on again and just stood there looking at Jim’s squat black stove for a while, listening to the famished licking of the flames inside. Smoke billowed through the crack.

I stood there so long that the red of the kitchen had started to mellow and shift—give way to something more gingery—and finally sat back down in the chair, thinking I’d better wait for the logs to burn down at least enough so I could close the stove properly. It was bad enough to be leaving a fire unattended while people slept. I tried not to think of what my father would say.

Thanks be to:

Charles Barbour
Denise Bukowski
The Canada Council for the Arts
for faith, hope, and charity.

Peter Badenhorst and family, Patrick Toner, Joy James, Mark and Sheila Balgrave,
for some invaluable incidentals.

James and Phyllis Coady
for advisories on roadside motels, and the proper firearms for rousting crows and teenagers.

Especial thanks to my editor, Maya Mavjee.

L
YNN
C
OADY
was nominated for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for her first novel,
Strange Heaven
. She received the Canadian Author’s Association/Air Canada Award for the best writer under thirty and the Dartmouth Book and Writing Award for fiction. Her second book,
Play the Monster Blind
, was a national bestseller and a Best Book of 2000 for
The Globe and Mail; Saints of Big Harbour
, also a bestseller, was a
Globe and Mail
Best Book in 2002. Her articles and reviews have appeared in several publications including
Saturday Night, This
magazine, and
Chatelaine
. Lynn Coady lives in Edmonton.