ensign draped limply around the police flagpole. Mr. Stutz had been eager to tell him all about the police headquarters, had acted as if it had something directly to do with him. Daniel knew there were two cells in the basement, one of which had actually held a wife-murderer for several days before he was transferred to jail in Regina. He knew that every other month up on the second floor a judge tried minor offences, meted out fines and punishments. Whenever court was in session Mr. Stutz took a day off work and occupied a folding chair in the makeshift courtroom with its picture of the Queen on the wall and the simple desk which saw duty as a judge’s bench. Mr. Stutz had told Daniel that, if he cared to, he could accompany him to court next sitting.
One of the things that Daniel tried to figure as he walked was what he and his mother were doing in Connaught. There had been no warning of a move. All of a sudden she announced they were going, the furniture was sold to a second-hand dealer, and they loaded themselves onto a bus. Why? Maybe the fight with Pooch over the toenail polish had something to do with it, although he couldn’t be sure. His mother had never provided a reason. Reasons were not things he expected from her. “Because I said so” was about the best you got.
He hadn’t wanted to go. His mother said, “You’ll make new friends. Better ones than you could here. Kids in small towns are so much friendlier.” Which wasn’t true. He knew he wasn’t the sort to make new friends. Maybe because she had never let him get any practice at it, learn the knack of it, keeping him locked up in a dumpy apartment waiting for her to come home from work. How was he supposed to get the trick of it? Deep down maybe he was a loner like James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
Now he was passing the little shacky houses where the old foreign ladies lived, the ladies with the peach-pit faces and the kerchiefs (babushkas, Stutz called them) knotted under their chins on even the hottest days. According to Mr. Stutz, a lot of these old women could scarcely speak more than a few words of English. English had been for their husbands. But now the husbands were dead and they had no men to interpret for them, no men to trail along after in kerchiefs, brown stockings, black dresses printed all over with tiny, dusky-red flowers. They seemed to spend all their time in their gardens. Front yards were planted with sunflowers and poppies. Back yards were full of onions, beets, dill, cabbages, cucumbers, potatoes, and the rusty tin cans they screwed into the earth to protect bedding plants. Because of the cans the back yards seemed to Daniel to be a cross between a vegetable patch and a dump.
During afternoons, if the old foreign ladies happened to be pecking in the dirt with their hoes and Daniel went by, they all straightened up and stared at him suspiciously and narrowly as if he were an alien from outer space. Which he may as well have been, his mother said sarcastically, Daniel not being native-born to Connaught.
But at present there is no sign of the foreign ladies as he passes. They are indoors, eating soup and sausage, thinking their thoughts, and remembering in some language other than English. Still, despite their strangeness, Daniel is certain that none of them could feel any more a stranger than he does himself.
The way people acted here. He couldn’t get the hang of it. So different from the city. Take the other day when that man had stopped him in the street and asked, “You the one that’s Alec Monkman’s grandson? Vera’s boy?” Asked him point-blank, right out of the blue. When he answered, Yes, that was him, the man said, “I went to school with your mother. Name’s Mel Jessup.” And that was all there was to it, nothing more. It seemed the man just wanted to pass on that bit of information.
It doesn’t end on the street either. Two nights ago he wakes up at three in the morning in a strange bed and a strange room he isn’t quite used to and gets the shock and fright of his life. This
What’s he up to, standing there watching him sleep?
It’s a job to be able to suck enough spit up in his mouth to frame the question. “What do you want?”
The way the old boy jumps, he can tell he’s returned the scare he got.
“Jesus, I thought you were asleep.”
“What do you want? Is something the matter?”
No reply straight away. Finally, “I wondered if you weren’t cold and needed some more covers.”
That’s likely. It’s only about a hundred degrees here, directly under the pitch of the roof. He’s cooking under a single thin cotton sheet. Sure he wants more blankets. Invent another one. But he’s polite. “No,” he says, “I’m fine.”
The old boy knows he hasn’t made a lick of sense. He fumbles to lay hands on an excuse. “It cools off worse than you think, nights. It does. You don’t want to catch a cold. Summer colds are the worst.” And with that he slides off, drifts out of the door, floating white in the moonlight like a sheet hung in the dark.
What a half-ass explanation that was. Of course, nobody thinks he’s owed an explanation. You can do with him pretty much as you like. Drag him clear across the country, sneak into his room like some demented axe murderer or something, that’s hunky-dory, that’s acceptable. He doesn’t need to know the why of anything.
Still, it’s hard to stay mad at him. Daniel likes the old fart even though he knows he’s not supposed to. His mother’s not in favour of it. There’s another thing for him to figure. Why’d she drag him here, on purpose, to live with somebody he’s not supposed to like? Where’s the sense in that? It’s like some crazy test. Which he isn’t passing.
Why shouldn’t he like him? The old man is teaching him to drive the truck. The old man pays him to work in the garden. The old man argues baseball with him during the “Game of the Week.” Not that he’s all sweetness and light by a long shot, the old man. Maybe he doesn’t come at you the way she does, full-bore, pointing out that this is wrong with you and that is wrong with you and when are you ever going to learn? That’s not his style. He sort of crumbles up the ground under your feet and leaves you standing in thin air.
Take the other day. He’s standing combing his hair in the mirror and the old man happens along, stops, hangs on the door, watches. Never said a word. It was his smile. It made him feel ridiculous, that smile. What’s he laughing at? What’s so funny? Then Daniel sees himself start to change in the mirror, before his own eyes. It isn’t a pretty sight. He stops looking like James Dean and starts looking like a scrawny twelve year old with too much hair for his puny body with the matchstick arms that aren’t big enough to lay a tattoo down on, unless it was a tattoo of a sparrow instead of an eagle. Another thing. He can’t grow sideburns. So who’s he kidding? What he is, is some left out in the rain, shrunken-up excuse of a James Dean.
The worst was Daniel couldn’t give ground. Not while the old man was operating on him with that smile. It was like an eye-balling contest. You better not look away because that means you haven’t got the nerve. So he acted like the old man was a bad smell that ought to blow away. But it was tough watching your ears turn red in the mirror and this sort of pitiful sneer edging on and off your lips because you couldn’t hold it. So in the end he did lose his nerve because he couldn’t take any more of that smile.
“You waiting for this mirror or something?” he asked.
“Well, I had it in mind to shave,” said the old man. “But you just carry on. Beauty before age for this one time only. Besides, I never had a chance to see one of those complicated hairdos get built before.”
His mother had been after him for over a year to lose the greaser look but she hadn’t been able to get him to budge. Now he’s considering a scalping, a brushcut, just so the old man doesn’t ever google him like this again.
In this house there’s no fooling yourself that being different could be like it is in the movies. In the movies, no matter what kind of shit you’re taking from people up on the screen, there’s always the audience that knows the truth about you, is hoping for you, even admires you. There’s no audience in this house. In this house it’s too hard to be a rebel.
It can be an interesting place to live, though, Daniel has to give it that. The people who are always dropping by make it so. Mostly they come to play cards and borrow money. Except for Huff Driesen, the old diabetic who can’t bring himself to give himself a needle. His daughter usually does it for him but when he goes off on a toot he doesn’t dare go to his daughter’s because she’ll read him the riot act and spoil his fun by going on about how a sick man like him shouldn’t be drinking. So whenever he’s been hitting the sauce he brings his needle over and Daniel’s grandfather gives it to him. Daniel has seen it, right in the kitchen. Huff with his shirt pulled up, his eyes screwed tight so he doesn’t see what’s going to happen to him, and his mouth squinched so tight he appears to be trying to swallow his own face. And the old man taking aim at his big white belly like he’s getting ready to fling a
