Monstrous Affections (20 page)

Vincent.

Always got the Friday fish and chips. Wispy moustache over
baby-smooth chin. That and the belly fat and the greasy black hair
not quite straight inoculated him against the attention of the big-haired girls — Sue, Maryann, Sue’s friend . . . who? . . . the big-haired
girls who followed us set to set, tried to keep up, talk about the way
the music moved, finally reduced to regurgitating tag-lines from
Creem critiques and just nodding, kneeling on the floor while Dave
told them how truly full of shit they were, showed them what he
meant on air guitar.

“I don’t know what I want.”

Dave, who’d stopped being such an asshole long back.

Steve cracked a beer. “Sure you do. You want the music. Always
have.”

Dave thought he should tell the rest of us how full of shit
we
were
on that count. But we looked at him that way we did. He nodded.

Rain like applause on the roof. Water splashed in the washroom.
We all sat quiet, not wanting to upset the fish any more than it
was. Figuring the storm would send
him
back inside soon anyhow,
rainwater dribbling a line from spit valve back to the kitchen chair
he’d occupied all day, before the door chimed.

“Speaking of the fish.”

“Trout.”

“Trout. You’re sure he thinks we’re too loud?”

“Asked us to keep it down.”

“Asked
you
to keep it down. Not like
we
heard anything.”

“You saying I made it up, Vince?”

“Not saying that at all. But I got to wonder: that fish tell you to
keep it down the same way you knew to stop at the mall before we
left town?”

“You see what he’s saying?”

“What we’re getting at?”

What we were getting at was this: perhaps Steve had heard
directions from Vincent’s house to the south entrance of the mall as
a faint whisper in his ear, in a language that he had not heard since
the womb, or even prior that.

“I see.” Steve stepped into the washroom. Shut the door. Set his
beer down on the sink. Looked down at the trout, which hung near
the drain, still as death.

Steve, alone in the washroom. Sucked a deep breath. Looked
at his hands, thicker now than then, white little lines along the
creases . . . Thought about how they once held one of the big-hair
girls — Sue’s friend, the one with the red hair and the freckles on
her shoulders. Her name wouldn’t come to him. But her face — wide
mouth, cheekbones sharp . . . eyes that looked at him, seemed to
see
him . . .

Not the one he’d married.

That one now: she never saw us — playing, we mean. Steve could
barely summon her face; when he did, it was obliterated by hot
lights, the smell of old beer and cigarettes. Steve took a long breath.
Blinked. Thought:

I used to be . . .

Steve regarded the trout, lowered his finger to touch the surface
of the water. Trout twitched its tail, swung suddenly around to back
of tub. And she came to him.

Her.

A day ago, standing in the driveway, left foot jittering in its flip-flop, arms crossed, as Steve hitched the trailer to the back of the van.
Hot summer wind blew piss-yellow air from the highway, coloured
by the afternoon rush. Her brow creased; not angry, not exactly.

“We have to get on the road.”

Might have said more; but too much had been said already. And
he knew it. She thought he smoked too much; thought this was a bad
time to go off.

Night before: she boiled it down for him as they lay together.

“You’re disappearing.”

“Stare into the abyss,” he said softly, staring that night at the
square of silver the street lamp made on the ceiling. Staring.

Listening.

Humming along.

“Don’t go,” she said. Fingers fluttered at his chest.

That day: She shook her head, threw up her hands. Went back
inside.

This day: Trout splashed. Agitated, in clean bathwater.

Dying.

Rain hit on the roof. Wind blew across the open window like it was
the top of a beer bottle. That was it: we kept ourselves quiet. “Dazed
and Confused” was long done. Steve took a breath. Swallowed his
beer in two big gulps.

There was a wide plastic bucket under the sink. Steve took the
bucket, lowered it into the tub so it filled with water. Trout swam
into it. Steve lifted it out with both arms.

“Trout didn’t mean be quiet.” Steve, on his way to the front door.
“Meant what it said.”

Vincent: “Keep it down?”

“Keep what down?” Dave.

“Same thing trombonist asked
you
about. Not the music, either.
More.” Steve, outside now. “But it’s too fuckin’ late.”

The rain soaked us fast under storm-black sky. Squinting, hand
sheltering eyes, it was hard to see where the lake started.

We made for the dock, empty now. Walked out to the end of it.
Dave had been right: should have taken fish back to the lake right
away. Claw-footed bathtub was no place for a six-pound lake trout.
Dave helped Steve lower the bucket to the water, dip it below the
surface. Splashed. Trout jumped out, scales breaking surface in a
broad arch. Lightning flashed, dazzlingly close. Trout corkscrewed
deep into the black.

“Be free!” Vincent, arms up in the air. Steve, lowering himself
to sit on the soaking dock. Dave, standing, half-finished beer in
his right hand, held shoulder height; left hand, absently noodling
the strings of his invisible axe; head bobbing to the rhythm of an
inaudible drummer.

The rain was cold and hard but not unpleasant. Not on any of us.
Vincent reminded us of the St. Patrick’s Day set, back at the Rook,
that year. Dave wrapped tight in blue spandex culled from the ladies’
section of the Goodwill. Wailing out “Misty Mountain Hop” like we
owned it. Steve smiled, blinked away the water running down his
forehead, pasting thinning hair into his eyes. Looked out at the
water, black stipple frosted with misted rain. He flipped over the
bucket, started tapping. Vincent, pointing back at the house. Door
wide open. Light spilling out. Three gentle strums across the worn
strings on Dave’s acoustic, warming up for a run on “Black Mountain
Side.”

“The tape?”

Dave shook his head. “Missed that bridge last time. Off my game.
Listen.”

A shadow moved across the door. “Black Mountain Side” took
shape. “He’s in there.” Vincent. Started back.

Not just him. Another lightning flash. Close — thunder right
away. There was Dave, hunched over the guitar. Fingers in their
intricate dance. Head bobbing. Behind him: Steve. Tap-tapping
on the wood block. Head bobbing in time with Dave. Vincent was
there too. But hard to see him through the door. Didn’t matter: the
noodling acoustic of “Black Mountain Side” doesn’t have much to do
for a bass player. Less still for a trombonist.

He stepped outside. Just a step. Onto the stoop. Palm cupped
outward to catch some rain, horn resting on his shoulder so the slide
caught even more, making little round jewels on the golden finish,
running tributaries ’round the bell, feeding the torrent running off
the bottom to the trombonist’s toe.

“I was wrong,” said Steve, and Vincent frowned and thought and
said, “Yeah,” in slow drawl, and Dave asked Steve, “What?”

And he shrugged horn from shoulder, set mouthpiece to lip, and
he blew that long, sad note, and Dave saw what we were talking
about:

Black plywood stage underfoot, lights hot as noon, air humid
with beer-fume and lung-smoke. Us.

“You were wrong about the Rook.”

“Yeah.”

And we looked at each other through the thick air of the Rook on
that night, and Dave turned to the microphone, and swung fingers
over string, barely touching, and that note — that same long note —
it rose up behind him, behind everything, and Steve thought:
Stare
into the abyss. The abyss stares back.

Sing to it. It might just join in
.

Rain came harder again. No end to the lake now. No start, either.
And trombone fell from lips. But the song remained.

And so we slipped through it, a flash of scale in the deepening
dark, while Steve and Dave and even Vincent finished the Side, and
the deep and incongruous moan of the trombone carried us back.

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of
Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimetre camera that wound
up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate.
Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly
lightweight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like
it weighed a tonne. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it;
the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good
working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing — flapping
his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long,
beakish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin,
middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his
neck. Grandfather’s apparent foolishness was compounded by the
face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the
scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved,
and Michael was gone —

And so was Grandfather.

The view shook and jostled for an instant, and the family garden
became a chaos of flowers and greenery. Finally, Uncle Evan settled
on the pale blue equanimity of the early-autumn sky. A black dot
careered across the screen, from the left to the right and top to the
bottom. Then there was a momentary black, as Uncle Evan turned
the lenses from wide-angle to telephoto. The screen filled with the
briefest glimpse — for the film was about to run out — of grandfather’s
slender figure, his white shirt-tails flapping behind him, all of him
held high above the ground by nothing more substantial than the
slow beating of his arms; the formidable strength of his will against
the Earth.

Michael groaned and lifted his hand from the cool plastic covering
of the armchair. He reached over and flipped the switch on the old
projector. The end of the film slapped against the projector frame
and the light in the box dimmed. The slapping stopped and the
screen went black, and the ember at the tip of his grandmother’s
cigarette was the only light source in the basement rec room.

“I remember that day.” Michael’s voice sounded choked and
emotional, near to tears, and it surprised him. He wasn’t an
emotional man as a rule, and he hadn’t cried since . . . since who
knew when? Maybe the day that film was made. It also dismayed
him — sentiment was a bond, and he couldn’t afford more bonds.
Not if he wanted to follow Grandfather.

“Do you?” said Grandmother. Her voice was deepened by smoke,
surprisingly mannish in the dark. “You were very young.”

“It was a formative moment,” he said. “It’s not every day one
sees one’s grandfather fly,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I should
think no one would forget such an event.”

In the dark, Grandmother coughed, and coughed again. It took
Michael a moment to realize she wasn’t coughing at all; she was
laughing. “What is it?” he said irritably.

“Your formality,” she said, and paused. The end of her cigarette
glowed furiously as she inhaled. “I’m sorry, dear — I don’t mean to
laugh at you. You come to visit me here, and I’d hate you to think I’m
not grateful for your company, after all these years without so much
as a phone call. But I can see how you’d like to find him.”

“Can you?”

Michael felt a cloud of smoke envelop him and he choked again —
this time, he thought, with more legitimacy. Grandmother was
a rancid old creature, stale and fouled with her age; he’d be glad,
finally, to be rid of her along with everyone else when he finally took
to the sky.

“Yes,” she said. “The two of you are of a kind — you look alike, you
walk alike, you speak alike. You, though, are a better man.” There
was a creaking in her chair, and Michael flinched as her hand fell on
his thigh, and gave him a vigorous pinch. “A better husband, yes?”

Michael flinched — he hadn’t told her about the separation
yet, about the necessity of untying himself from the web that was
Suzanne, and the things Suzanne had said to him on the doorstep; he
hadn’t told anyone in the family in point of fact, because they were
part of the web as much as Suzanne was. He patted Grandmother’s
hand.

“Where’s Grandfather now?” he asked.

Grandmother sighed. “You must know, hmm, dear? No one else
has his address?”

Michael didn’t answer. She knew no one else had his address; how
many places, how many other family members he’d checked with,
before coming here. It was Uncle Evan who’d finally sent him, told
him the only one to talk to about Grandfather was Grandmother.

Your Grandmother has all the facts
, said Evan, as they sat in the
sunroom at his lakefront condominium.
Gave her the notebook, the
film, oh, years ago. She’s the family keeper, you know. She’s the one to
talk to
.

“All right,” she finally said. “Turn on the light and help me up —
I’ll fetch the address while you wind the film.”

“If you tell me where it is — ”

“I’ll get it dear.” Her tone left no room for argument.

Michael leaned over to the floor lamp, groped up its narrow brass
stem and pulled the chain. The room filled with a light yellowed by
the dusty lampshade, and that light struck Michael’s Grandmother
in profile. It did not flatter her.

When she was younger, Grandmother was reputed to have been
something of a beauty, but from the time Michael could remember
she had fattened to an ugly obesity. Some of that weight had fallen
off over the past ten years, but it had not improved her. Gravity had
left Grandmother a drying fruit, flesh hanging loose over the absent
girth. It had also left her with diabetes and high blood pressure,
dizzy spells and swelling feet. But for all that, she still wouldn’t let
her grandson climb the stairs to the kitchen for her. Michael allowed
himself a smile — he obviously wasn’t the only one “of a kind” with
Grandfather in this family.