Lost Between Houses (4 page)

I sort of daydreamed that he’d stay in the Clinic all summer, which I know is a bad thing to admit, but at least nobody’d have to be nervous around him. No more walking around like you’re in a minefield, wondering what’s going to set him off, a wet towel on the bed, borrowing a comb and not putting it back. I mean get this, one morning I get up for school, I’m twelve years old and I can’t find my comb. So I go into his bedroom and I pick up his off the night table and I wander around the house,
combing my hair, looking here and there, in this mirror, that mirror, I don’t know, I’m twelve remember, and next thing I know he comes charging into my bedroom, fit to be tied, and he wants to know where his comb is. So I say I don’t know. He asks me if I borrowed it and stupidly I tell him the truth, I say, yeah I did. Well that just sets him off. He just about has a fucking stroke right there in his business suit. I can smell the Old Spice when he comes close to me. I can also feel my behind contracting violently.

“The next time you take my comb,” he says, just shaking, “I’m going to give you a beating!”

And the thing is, he meant it. He really did.

Anyway. Enough about him.

Point is, after awhile, you wish people like that would just stay away.

Anyway, we’re driving north. We get to Huntsville, we go through town real slow, I’m looking this way, that way, for my summer pals, Greg with the bad teeth, and his sexy sister. I see Mr Jewel who owns the shoe store; Chip Peterson who’s good at golf; we go by the hardware store and cross over the bridge, it rings like a big hollow drum under the car, there’s Blackburn’s Marina where we gas up the boat, Loblaw’s, the Tastee Queen where we go after the dance at Teen Town. It’s all there, just the same as last summer. I see Sandy Hunter on the side of the road, she must be coming home from school, her hair all long and blonde. We pick up speed. Seven point three miles to go. I know all the houses, the barns, the hilltops from here on in. I undo the window and I can feel the air blow on my face. Smells completely different than it does in the city.

We turn off the road and go down the lane. Trees on both sides, you can hear the branches scrape the side of the car. You
can hear our little stream, which runs through the ravine. There’s our mailbox, all rusted from the winter. Pebbles crunching under the car wheels. We come around a corner and there it is, a big field and our house at the far end. Rambling, a white clapboard house with a double garage and green shutters. There’s my room, top right-hand side, overlooking the garage. I’m so impatient to get going I can hardly breathe. I get out of the car. I want to do everything in my summer vacation all in the next hour. But I have to help bring the stuff into the house, groceries and suitcases and pillow slips stuffed with fresh bedding, all kinds of stuff, records, even a plant. Then I run upstairs to my room. I love the way it smells, all unused and empty, there’s a sort of exciting mothbally tang. The cowboys on the wallpaper from when I was a little squirt, the old clothes in the drawer that don’t fit me any more, a skindiving magazine, an old
Field and Stream.
A book on graphology. I flip it open. All my notes in the margin. Jesus, remember that? Man, I really worked at it. Last chapter is called “How to Recognize a Murderer.”

From my window I can see all the way down to the lake. All the leaves aren’t grown in. It’s not really summer up here yet. The water is too cold for swimming; it’s sort of colourless and foreign this time of year. But it’s going to warm up just fine and in a month it’ll be like soup. That’s what my mother always says when she slips off the dock into the water, a towel around her head. “My God, boys,” she says, “it’s like soup.”

And then I set off, I zip all over the house, into the bathroom, the empty bedroom at the end of the hall, the old man’s room, I check the cupboards in the downstairs hallway, I love the way they smell, too. Then I go into the basement. That’s where I set up my drums. Well I don’t have a set of drums, they’re too noisy I’m told, so I set up a whole lot of books, just like a
drum kit. Plus I’ve got an old cymbal with a chunk missing, a plastic garbage can lid for a high hat and an old record player. I mounted the whole works on a platform, to give it a sense of occasion, as they say. Man, the daydreams I’ve had down there. I won’t even go into it. But you know what I mean.

Cha-la-la-la-la
,

It’s not the way you smile

That breaks my heart

Cha-la-la-la-la.

There’s all sorts of old stuff down there, pots covered in spider webs, old photograph albums, a bait box, a workbench, a wonky ping-pong table. Sometimes I feel sort of sorry for the basement, it’s like a person nobody ever visits. I feel like I’m its only protector, the only one in the house that shows any interest in it. If it weren’t for me nobody would care for that place at all. But it also spooks me sometimes, particularly at night. There’s a light bulb down there that you have to turn off before you can go up the stairs. You’ve got to do that last little bit completely in the dark. And sometimes when I’m about half up the stairs, I can feel the hair rise on the back of my neck, I have a feeling that somebody is going to come out from behind the furnace and grab me by the ankles. I don’t know how many times I’ve come blasting into the kitchen like I’ve been shot out of a cannon.

Anyway, I’m down there for awhile, fooling around, when I hear Harper at the top of the stairs.

“Let’s go down to the dock,” he says, which means that his bad mood has lifted. And I say sure and we head out.

Must have been a couple of weeks later. I was in my mother’s bedroom one afternoon, listening to a Latin zither record. She went to town once a week and cleaned out the local record
store, I mean she bought everything, Pete Fountain and his clarinet, Elvis Presley’s Golden Hits, Dave Brubeck, soundtracks from Italian movies, the works. It was corny stuff, this Latin zither, but romantic and it made me sentimental, sad about stuff that had never even happened. My mother had this great big picture window in her bedroom, it was huge, you could spread out your arms and not even touch the sides. You could see everything, the field going down to the marsh, the lake all blue and sparkly, a country road way, way off in the distance, and sometimes when the sun was setting, there was a gold light that covered everything. You couldn’t believe anything could be so pretty.

I heard the phone ring at the other end of the house. It rang a couple of times and then it stopped. I waited. I heard footsteps coming toward me.

“Simon, it’s for you.”

I figured it was Greg, the guy with the bad teeth. We were going to Teen Town that night. He looked okay in there, you could hardly notice his teeth. I picked up the phone.

“Do you remember me?” It was a sort of boyish voice but it was a girl.

“Scarlet?”

“Boy, you got a good memory.”

“I recognized your voice.”

“A lot of people do. I got your number from a friend of yours.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A guy at your party.”

“Who was it?”

“I can’t remember his name. Not really my type. I hope you don’t mind me calling you.”

“No, not at all.”

“I mean there’s not very much you could say about it, is there?”

There was a pause.

“Listen, do you remember that guy I was with?” she said.

“Mitch?”

“Yeah.”

“He dumped me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he never really struck me as your type. If you know what I mean.” I sort of jumped into this sentence without thinking about it, and now I was stuck inside it.

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, he just didn’t seem like the kind of person you are.

“What kind of person is that?”

“Sort of…” I waited for the word to come, “complicated.”

“You’re complicated, too,” she said. “I could tell.”

“Oh yeah? How?”

“Just by the stuff you said. Not having a girlfriend and not caring if anybody knew.”

“Well, I’ve had a girlfriend before.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t mean anything, just
having
one. Just for the sake of it.”

“Exactly. You don’t want to brag or anything.”

That stumped her. “

What do you mean?”

“Well, there are some things you don’t want to get caught doing and tooting your own horn is definitely one of them.”

“What are the other things?”

“What?”

“The other things you don’t want to get caught doing?”

“Well, never mind about that.”

“Tell me.”

“We don’t really know each other well enough to get into that stuff.”

“So you’ve had a girlfriend before?”

“A couple.”

“Do you have one now?”

“Not at this very moment.”

“Yeah, but is there somebody out there thinking they’re your girlfriend?”

“Not unless they’re mentally ill.”

“Listen,” she said, “when are you coming back down to the city?”

I went outside looking for Harper. He was driving golf balls into the ravine.

“Don’t you think the old man is going to notice he’s missing a few balls?”

“Nah,” he said. “He won’t notice fuck-all.”

Harper brought down the club and whacked one into the blue sky; it hung there for a moment and then crackled as it fell through the trees.

“That’s a beauty,” I said. He teed up another ball.

“This chick just called me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“The chick from my party.”

“It wasn’t Evelyn Massey, was it?”

“No, she didn’t come, remember? It was somebody else.”

“God, I’d really like to go down on her.”

“Yeah, you told me. No, this was somebody else. You remember that chick in the sparkly dress.”

“The good-looking one?”

“Scarlet.”

“That her name?”

“Yep.”

“That’s a fucked-up name.”

“Anyway.”

For an older brother, Harper was sort of weirdly sensitive, and he could see I’d come out there to talk to him about the girl.

“So she called you?” he said.

“Yeah. Out of the blue.”

“What’d she want?”

“She just broke up with her boyfriend.”

“Really?”

“Who broke up with who?”

I hesitated a second.

“It was kind of mutual.”

“That’s a good one.”

“What do you mean?”

“If he broke up with her and she’s on the blower in two seconds to another guy, you don’t have to be a fucking genius to figure that one out.”

“Like she’s getting even?”

“Or making him jealous or some such bullshit.”

“You figure?”

“People fall in love, they break up, they do all sorts of shitty things to each other. Remember that cunt Judy Strickland.”

I didn’t want to talk about Judy Strickland just now.

“She was a cunt, that girl. Somebody should’ve taken her out behind the woodshed and put her down. Right at birth.”

“Anyway, Scarlet wanted to know when I was coming down to the city.”

“Yeah, well don’t bet the farm on it.”

He teed up another ball.

“Judy Strickland. Proof positive that all human beings are
not
created equal,” he said and whacked a ball into the valley.

“You can tell by the click,” he said. “When the club makes that kind of a click, you know it’s a beauty.”

Just then the side door opened and the old lady came out through the garage. She had her shirt tied at her waist, like Harry Belafonte. She must have seen us gabbing from the kitchen window and she wanted to know what was cooking. I started to tell her. Harper went inside right in the middle of it, he’d already heard the story and I was sort of sorry to see him go, it was like it wasn’t interesting enough to hear a second time but once he was gone for awhile I was glad because I didn’t have to be hip about how I described it to my mother.

A couple of days later, she went off to visit Aunt Marnie in Algonquin Park. They were old pals from high school. Must have been sometime in the ‘30s. Long time ago, anyway. Aunt Marnie wasn’t really my aunt, I just called her that; she was sort of a dumpy woman with funny black glasses and this wild cackle. She used to make my mother laugh so hard she’d like fear for her safety, all bent over in the kitchen, red face, begging Aunt Marnie to lay off, she was killing her. Like I remember once them going on about Bobodiolous, this city somewhere in Africa, the two of them in the kitchen just crippled about it. “I think I might stop off in Bobodiolous for a week or two,” my mother would say. Or, “I don’t know. That sounds like a Bobodiolousian accent to me,” and then they’d like collapse, both of
them, and it would just start up, that wild cackle, just the sound of it making my mother laugh even harder. God, they were demento those women, when they got together. Just demento.

Anyway, she went off to see Aunt Marnie and she left Harper and me in charge of the house.

“Don’t burn the place to the ground,” she said and got in her big grey Pontiac and we watched it bomb up the driveway, a big cloud of dust rising up behind it and then she whizzed around the corner and she was gone.

That night Harper and me were going to a dance over at Hidden Valley. They were the best dances around and people used to come all the way from Barrie and Bracebridge and Parry Sound, all these kids coming to this one chalet for the dance. They brought in big bands, some from Toronto, but sometimes as far away as England. I saw the Hollies there once. They did that song, “Bus Stop.” Very weird to hear it like that, not on the radio, but right there in front of you.

The dance was right across the bay so we took the boat. We cut the engine halfway across and just drifted. It was so quiet out there in the lake, the water black, just like ink. Nothing moving.

“Put your hand in,” Harper said. “It’s like soup.”

“We should go swimming.”

“I just got my hair right,” he said.

“Right. Me too.”

“It’ll wash all the deodorant off.”

“You need it in that place.”

We were silent for awhile, the boat just hanging there in space. Across the water you could hear a girl’s voice; then a screen door slammed.