on.
“Don’t tickle! Don’t tickle!” It was enough to make your stomach turn. I’d never have believed it of Daniel, scooting a peek. I could hardly believe it of Lyle, who a moment before I’d have said couldn’t have fallen any lower in my estimation and now had. What boy with a shred of decency in him would laugh and think it funny to have his friend look at that?
“What do they think of us?” I caught myself saying aloud. “It can’t be this, can it?”
I better leave all that now. Dragging it up only makes my head hurt worse. Two aspirins every two hours for two days and not a bit of improvement. I swear these temples of mine are a pair of blacksmith’s anvils.
Here comes the medical student up the aisle. Even doctors have to pee, although they never look it. No harm in a friendly smile to establish there’s another human on this godforsaken contraption.
The young man returned Vera’s smile. He even hesitated by her seat. He looked as if he wished to begin a conversation but didn’t dare.
Now that’s a nice smile. Not brassy. A nice smile like that comes from taking proper care of your teeth. But he’s shy. You can tell that.
“Buses. What a way to fly,” Vera said.
The young man kept smiling, picked at his tie clasp with the nail of his index finger. “You don’t like buses?” he asked diffidently.
“Do I look like I’d like buses?”
He did not reply. Only stood swaying in the aisle, watching her.
Vera waited for him to speak. When he didn’t, she finally inquired, “Going far?”
“Oh, not very.”
Another moment of silent awkwardness. “Well, I won’t keep you,” said Vera, a little disappointed. “Have a nice trip.”
“Thank you. You, too.”
Yet on the way back from his visit to the toilet the young man paused by her seat. He had steeled himself to speak. “Ma’am,” he began hesitantly. “Ma’am, I couldn’t help noticing when you spoke… well, I thought maybe you had a problem. I think I have something that might help.”
“Why yes,” said Vera, surprised, “as a matter of fact I do. I have this terrible…” But already the young man was gone, headed back to his seat.
Imagine him spotting that. That I had a headache. Of course, they’re trained to spot symptoms. Now he’s off to get some new painkiller out of his bag, a sample probably. The drug company salesmen are always pushing samples on them.
He was back and clearly excited now, shyness evaporated. “I knew it. I had a feeling. I could tell.” He thrust something at Vera. A pamphlet. She took it. Stared at a bold type headline. TIRED? SICK? BROKE? JESUS IS THE ONE FAIL-PROOF REMEDY.
“You know,” said the young man eagerly, “I never thought the Lord would make use of me to proclaim Him so soon, this being my first field mission. But, ma’am, if you would allow me to sit beside you and if you would join me in an earnest prayer of appeal, I know your burden would be relieved. Would you do that now, ma’am? Would you join me?”
Suddenly Daniel was at his elbow. “Hey, you,” he said, jostling the young man rudely to one side, “this is my mother and my seat. I’d like to sit down if you don’t mind.”
3
Alec Monkman sat at his kitchen table wearing a straw fedora with a striped hatband of grey and burgundy. The hat was clean and neat and obviously new; he had purchased it in honour of Vera’s coming a week before at Kleimer’s Men’s Wear, one of the stores he didn’t own. Strangers might have assumed that Monkman didn’t own it because of its name – Kleimer’s – but they did not know that names did not signify much in Connaught. When Monkman had bought a business he had never bothered to change its name. His garage, of which he had been proprietor for fourteen years, was still Collier’s Auto; his hotel was still known as Simpson’s Hotel. Whatever vanity he possessed did not assert itself in a wish to see his name painted on a sign board, or even more luxuriantly spelled out in gaudy neon light. Alec Monkman seemed immune to the desire to commemorate his success. The house he lived in, shabby and cramped, with long hair-like fractures creeping and fingering their way across the plaster walls of all the rooms, was the same house his daughter Vera had walked away from seventeen years before and today was returning to. It was just as it had been then, with this exception. Two years before, the room off the kitchen that had always been the baby’s room, the place where they had put the youngest child’s cot because it was warm there near the old, black, nickel-plated stove, had been turned into an indoor bathroom.
He wondered what Vera would think of that. Perhaps it was an odd thing to wonder, since he had not seen his daughter in seventeen years, or ever seen the grandson she was bringing home with her. But he was an old man now, seventy-three, and of all the alterations in his circumstances and surroundings he had made in nearly twenty years, it was the most recent he was likely to recall and seize upon. There had been a misunderstanding with the plumber and he had come home to find himself the owner of a pink toilet. He had let it pass. He had even found it funny, laughed about it with Mr. Stutz, inviting him to step in and try on the new facility for size. Now he was worried Vera might think him gone foolish in the head with a pink toilet.
Mr. Stutz was at the STC stop at present, waiting for Vera’s bus. He could imagine Stutz, slow, solid, patient under the tin sign emblazoned with a bounding antelope which was the symbol of the bus company. The sign was fastened to the wall of his, Alec Monkman’s, hotel. In the last year he had earned the government contract to peddle bus tickets and sell coffee and sandwiches to travellers. Won it, he supposed, on the strength of clean washrooms. He had Mr. Stutz to thank for that, the cleanliness of the public washrooms in his hotel.
Well, they were both waiting, he and Mr. Stutz. Mr. Stutz there and he in his kitchen. He had resolved not to go to them, but instead have them brought to him. He was making a point. It might be a good idea, too, if he wasn’t discovered in the kitchen hovering by the window when they were brought to the door, but in his bedroom, so relaxed and easy that it was possible for him to snooze minutes before their arrival. Showing eagerness over her return would not be wise. If Vera ever felt she had the upper hand she would not hesitate to use it. He’d seen her operate before.
So for the time being he sat by the window in a many times painted captain’s chair whose every scratch and chip, depending on the depth of the wound, revealed a different layer of colour, green or yellow or blue, which, like the rings of a tree, offered testimony to the chair’s age. He was occupying himself with solitaire, laying out the cards on a welter of overlapping coffee rings and a scattering of toast crumbs, playing every one with an old man’s maddening deliberation, each card held poised and quivering in sympathy with the slight current of tremor in his hands, his lips pursed judiciously and his attention divided between the game and the dirt street that ran past his house.
It was July and early afternoon. Already the sun had driven lawyer McDougal’s spaniel underneath his master’s caragana hedge, a hedge badly in need of a trimming. The sight of the caraganas stretching up to touch the eaves of the lawyer’s house, ragged and wild and infested with sparrows, always irritated Monkman. Several weeks before, when he had met McDougal on the steps of the post office, he had said, “You ever get it in mind to cut that hedge of yours, Bob, you’ll have to get the loan of the fire brigade ladder truck.” McDougal hadn’t liked that. But then McDougal wasn’t obliged to. No more than he, Monkman, had to like that flock of shitting sparrows which roosted there and crossed over from McDougal’s property to settle in his garden every afternoon and peck among his vegetables.
He stared at the dog lying there in the shade. His eyes were still sharp, no trouble there, thank God. From clear across the street he could make out the slight flutter of the spaniel’s flanks as it panted in the heat. Nothing else moved. The dusty leaves of the wilting elm in Monkman’s front yard hung limp and still, white in the hard glare of the sun.
There was no doubt that the day would be a scorcher. The garden would need water by tomorrow. He would have to take the truck and tank out to the creek, fire up the five horsepower Briggs & Stratton gas engine he
