deemed this “thoughtful.”) The patio table was laden with platters of raw meat, the variety defying categorization, but our host was all too willing to lead a tutorial. There were slabs of porterhouse steaks, rib-eyes, short ribs, spareribs, pork loin chops, lamb shoulder chops, and lamb leg steaks. He eschewed terms like “well-marbled” in favour of “nice and fatty” and smacked his palm down soundly on cuts he deemed particularly “bodacious.” We hardly need point out that there wasn’t a rub or a marinade in sight.
REO Speedwagon blasted from what looked like car speakers attached to the balustrade of his deck. He later came strolling through the sliding doors with a guitar, yodelling “Ring of Fire” as a prelude to dishing up his Voodoo Chili, a recipe he had evidently learned in a squat on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. He promised us his chili would fire up visions of Erzulie Dantor, the Haitian goddess of sex. She would make love to us in our dreams. His way of putting it of course involved more colourful terminology, in a dialect Patel, our own Henry Higgins, recalls as “Thunder Bay, 1977.”
We will admit to the record that he was an attentive host that evening, exuding a kind of ruffian charm in his own milieu. He even kept his talk of body mounts and adjustable shocks to a minimum. It also bears mentioning that this was the closest we ever came to being chummy. At one point he and Trevor engaged in a tete-a-tete about the ultimate burger. (Trevor swears by a knob of frozen blue cheese encased in the centre of 275 grams of hand-chopped Kobe sirloin.) “No shit,” he kept saying, sounding genuinely impressed as Trevor pulled out his BlackBerry to do some quick temperature conversions (our host not having mastered the move from imperial to metric back in grade school). “No shit.”
It turned out that among his many adventures he’d spent some time in the Australian outback. “Kangaroo,” he told us, “is a beautiful protein.” Patel’s wife, who is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, said she found that poetic. (A less generous person might have said, “She wouldn’t know poetry if it bit her on the ass,” but Patel wasn’t that kind of guy.)
Other things we learned that night: Chicken isn’t meat. Medium-rare is for chumps. Boys who can burp the Lord’s Prayer at age eight retain the ability, like a vestigial limb flaring to life, well into their thirties.
The night was alive with smoke and fire. Insects were held at bay. Blood pooled on his plate. Stefan’s wife leaned forward and dragged a finger through it and then exaggeratedly sucked. At the time, we erroneously believed she was mocking
For a while after that, things were good. Almost too good. Kim’s wife turned to him in bed the night of the barbecue and said, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” He told us her overbite had glinted in the bedside light like the teeth of something feral. We all knew what he meant. Even Marcus’s wife, who has a no- nonsense air about her and is an avid golfer, started running her fingers through her cropped hair in a manner some of us found disconcertingly attractive. (During those brief, heady days, more than one child walked in on a mid- afternoon scene in a rec room or kitchen that elicited hysterical giggles or cries of “Gross!”)
We found it impossible not to notice that by the third week of July the hair on our neighbour’s chest and shoulders looked thicker, more pelt-like than the springy bed of curls that had so freely dripped sweat the afternoon he moved in. Throughout the first half of the summer it seemed he was out there every day tinkering with the truck and later with the Ford Ranchero pickup that joined it on its own blocks on his front lawn. From time to time he’d wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. “Now that he’s discovered fire,” Stefan quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel’s Mini Cooper with those of us who didn’t telecommute or weren’t on paternity leave, “maybe he’s trying to reinvent the wheel.”
His property became a magnet for the kids. They played in the trucks, roughhoused with Gido, abandoned their tennis racquets and unicycles and junior geologist kits in favour of slingshots and handmade blow-dart guns. (“This is how they kill in the Amazon!” Trevor’s five-year-old informed us, adding that all they now needed were poison arrow frogs to toast over a fire like marshmallows, the venom oozing to the surface like a toxic froth.) They showed waning interest in the computer-animation camps, father-son mini-triathlons, and Urbane Kids Cook! classes we’d pre-enrolled them in months back. We feared they’d soon be running wild in Lynn Canyon, engaging in some kind of
Were we neglectful fathers? Were we secretly relieved to find more time on our hands after work and on weekends than we’d ever thought possible post-fatherhood? There was something in the still-childless Kim’s eyes that made the rest of us feel guilty, but he never levelled any accusations. Kim was always the quiet one, the exemplar of those still waters they say run deep. Our wives assured us that unstructured time was what childhood summers used to be all about, but we couldn’t help suspecting that their uncharacteristic nostalgia hinted at a buried desire to revert further into an idealized past.
Chas, as we’ve taken to affectionately calling Darwin, was understandably discomfited by the natives of Tierra del Fuego. In lean times, he was told, they would devour their grandmothers while sparing their dogs. He was apparently misled by a young trickster, as later reports dismiss the notion that the Fuegians were cannibals.
But why even think of this now? There are still grandmothers in the world and there are still dogs and there are places on earth where the former are abused and the latter venerated. And vice versa.
By early August the trucks stood neglected in his front yard and the Camaro seldom left the driveway. He now took his Harley Low-Rider everywhere-the deadening percussion of the altered muffler competing with the stench from the rendering plant for most-obnoxious-emission status. His favourite T-shirt-or at least the most frequently sported-read
Plants better suited to the bogs of the Carolinas (“Or the late Cenozoic period,” Stefan noted) began to spread across his property. Waxy-leafed vines twisted around the trucks, even creeping out through the exhaust pipes, their ropy tendons like the neck muscles of dehydrated bodybuilders. Moss bearded fenders and chrome grilles. Cobra plants and monkey cups and other flesh-eaters proliferated. Even dragonflies became ensnared, their death rattle unnerving. (“Like ice in a blender,” Marcus observed, swirling the dregs of a kiwi-and-peppercorn daiquiri.) Giant hogweed (“
Trevor, who had gone into the backyard on the pretext of retrieving an errant Frisbee-golf disc, reported that it was almost swampy, as if the groundwater were rising. A crudely framed smokehouse hung with small carcasses was set up where gnomes had previously stood guard by the delphiniums. And behind the smokehouse, what could only be described as a midden of bones.
What our summer had been reduced to: endless speculation. Spying on a neighbour. (Karlheinz, in fact, had begun to compile
And from his backyard the continual haze of smoke rising.
Whenever we complained, about the noise, the smoke, the smell, the sheer onslaught of it all, our wives absent-mindedly stroked our hair (or, in Marcus’s case, his aggressively shaved dome) as if petting cats, their thoughts, we assumed, on the demands their careers were making on their time. Our holiday plans were falling through, one after the other, collapsing due to inertia on our part and the fact that an unseasonable crunch time appeared to have hit the medical, legal, architectural, geological, and IT professions almost simultaneously. We’re still not in complete agreement about whether we were twenty-first-century men for not questioning our wives’ work commitments or whether we were dupes. (Trevor, ever self-flagellating, prefers the dupe theory. He is also the one who misses Kim the most.)
Our wives no longer arched close while we watched HBO late in the evenings, angling for a deep-tissue massage or core realignment. It transpired that more than one of them had faked orgasms on multiple occasions. Patel told us his wife had called the tantric sex workshop we’d all taken in the early spring “a joke.” Marcus’s wife declared that cunnilingus was meant only for lesbians and cats.
Our neighbour had taken to pulling the “Q” out onto his driveway in the early evening, dispensing goodies as if he were a hot dog vendor at the corner of Hornby and Robson. We could forbid the children from playing over there, but we certainly couldn’t forbid our wives, who drifted over to sample his wares. Karlheinz actually witnessed him
