A Complicated Kindness (15 page)

Oh…no, he said. He waved off the idea.

Yeah, c’mon, I said. I picked up the little boot.

Where to? I asked.

Oh, really, he said. He tried to act dismissive.

No, c’mon, I said. Where should it go? He stared at me for a few seconds and smiled.

Fine, he said. I’ll indulge you by allowing myself to be indulged. He took the boot and we walked about a hundred yards to a different section of the dump that included broken wagons, Hula Hoops, bent and rusted-out pogo sticks, cracked-up Footsies, headless dolls and some other assorted brightly coloured broken plastic stuff. Ray put the little boot in the middle of it and said, good. We walked back to where we’d been. The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.

twenty

W
e got home to find a bullet hole in the middle of our picture window. Who would shoot our house, I asked Ray. He stood in the grass staring at the hole and shaking his head.

The cop came and said it was going around—kids, BB guns…summer holidays around the corner. Any enemies? he asked Ray who shook his head yet again and then said well, there’s a boy I’m keeping back next year. The cop nodded and said there you go, could be.

Ray thanked him and we went inside and sat on the couch.

Who’re you keeping back? I asked him.

The cop’s kid, he said. I read the paper while he stared at the hole in the window through his large square glasses. After a while I got up and made him a TV dinner and he said mmmm…my compliments to the chef in the type of upbeat manner that made me simultaneously want to curl up in his lap and cuff him in the head.

When negative experiences such as having one’s house shot at occur in my dad’s life he tends to come alive. His confusion lifts. Pieces of life’s puzzle fuse into meaning, like the continents before that colossal rift. It’s entirely logical to him that his house has been shot at and when he’s able to spend a
minute or two in a world that makes sense he appears almost happy. And when he gets happy he does decisive things like this time he went over to the bulletin board in the kitchen and took down the city bus arrival schedule that we’ve had up there since Tash left and before the bus depot itself closed down. He put it in the garbage can under the sink. Phew. Done. Goodbye past.

But then I imagined him on a day when shitty things weren’t happening and he’d be feeling his usual mystified self and go to the dump and there he would see that little piece of paper with the schedule on it and it would bring him to his knees. Just destroy him for a minute or two, and he’d probably pick it up and wipe whatever seagull crap there was on it and straighten it out with the side of his hand and bring it back to the kitchen bulletin board and
arrange
it on there so you’d know it was the centrepiece of his life.

But for now, he was tripping ’cause our house had been shot at and things were as they should be, as he had suspected they had been all along, so he could relax and get rid of stuff that was keeping him down. He kept on saying corny things even while bits of glass dropped onto the living-room carpet and I glared at him stupidly. I don’t know why. It’s an act. It’s a thing we do when something strange has happened and we don’t know what to say about it. It’s like we play these conventional roles of idiot dad and rebellious teenager even though we’re way beyond that—we’re more like two mental patients just getting through another day. It’s like he’s trying to dynamite his way through a mountain of so-called teenage contempt by saying goofy things knowingly in the hope that I’ll grant him mercy for identifying his own shortcomings before I can. It’s just an old sitcom script we fall back on. We have no idea how to act.

Bye, I said.

Have fun, he said. Be good.

Gotta make up your mind, I answered back, because he expected me to.

After Tash left, my mom’s church singing got quieter and my dad’s got a little louder. I developed insomnia. Nightmares of Tash screaming while she burned, a hand reaching out for help, my name on her lips, her face melting while the screaming echoed on and on and on. I’d wake up at night to find Ray gone, out on one of his nocturnal missions, so named by Tash before she took off, and my mom lying on the couch in the living room, reading.

She’d make room for me beside her and I’d talk to her about Tash and how I was so afraid she was going to go to hell. Isn’t she? I’d ask my mom. There were pauses. I don’t know what I wanted her to say. Either one, yes or no, was problematic. Isn’t she? I’d ask.

My mom said: That’s not for us to say, Nomi.

But isn’t she? I’d ask.

Well, said my mom. It won’t come to that, I’m sure.

But it could come to that, right? I asked her. That Tash would go to hell? That she’d be right there in the middle of hell, all alone and burning to death forever while Satan laughed and God cried and we were in heaven together without her?

Well, said my mom. I really don’t—and I’d usually cut her off with wild demands like: Tell me the truth! Until she’d say what she always said: The truth is I don’t know, Nomi. Which left me with nothing. And that it was a bad thing. At least I felt that way at the time.

Oh, the shit was coming down. Things were falling apart. Our family was on the skids, and the truth was
I don’t know.
My mom started getting twitchy around the house. Slamming things and asking me if I was okay, when all I’d be doing was
sitting there and peeling a banana or something. She quit her job at the library, but kept going to church.

Then she got this other job cleaning the leg wound of Sheridan Klippenstein’s grandma, a very old woman who lived alone and refused to move into the Rest Haven. Sometimes, if there was nothing else to do, I’d go with her. She changed the dressings on Mrs. Klippenstein’s leg and I sat on the couch and watched.

Mrs. Klippenstein’s left leg was a thing of dark beauty. Large and shiny purple, with scales. She had an open sore, just below the knee, that would never heal. It oozed night and day, like Vesuvius, and her life revolved around its maintenance. My mom liked to help and really seemed to enjoy working with gauze and tape.

Sometimes I stood beside her and held things for her while she dressed Mrs. Klippenstein’s sore. I would stare at the top of Mrs. Klippenstein’s head, intrigued by a milky swirl of white scalp where her hair had fallen out. I could see tiny follicles that looked like goosebumps.

Her English wasn’t very good. One time I told her she was lucky she didn’t have to go to school (we’d been discussing my assignments) and she grabbed my arm and said I’ll eat your heart out. She said things like slice me open a bun and throw me down the stairs a face cloth.

Trudie and I would try not to laugh.

Mrs. Klippenstein would force me to eat Scotch Mints and then tell me stories about her childhood in Russia, the golden dream of home. She told me her father owned three hundred chickens and that they had one hundred and eighty-six trees on their property. They also had an eagle that her father had bought one day from the black market. The eagle had a wingspan of eleven and a half feet. It would fight with dogs and men and they kept it tethered to a post in the yard.

Never marry a man out of pity, Nomi, she told me. Her husband had been excommunicated for something and afterwards, like a lot of the ghost people, had lived in a little shack next to the main house while Mrs. Klippenstein took care of the children and the farm. He became The Swearing Man.

I vaguely remembered him from when I was a little kid. He rode his bike around town, in a suit and tie, and swore. Eventually, he died. When he was a young man he had been kind and just. He taught his children to stand on each other’s shoulders and form a human pyramid. He had a wonderful singing voice, was quick to laugh, especially at his own foibles, and never took offence. Those are all Mrs. Klippenstein’s words. I loved the way she described him.

She told me that every night she lay down next to him and whispered in his ear: You are almost perfect.

I can’t remember why he was excommunicated and I never asked. Maybe he took the fall for someone in his family. That happens. My mom did other things for Mrs. Klippenstein too, sometimes. Errands, housework, a load of laundry now and again. She spent a lot of time there. I guess it was distracting.

During that time, The Mouth came by to pray with us, and my dad began to spend his evenings sitting in the yellow lawn chair and staring at the highway, or down in the basement with his isotope material, finding comfort in the stability that’s created from decay.

What we have feared has come to pass, said The Mouth.

What? What? I’d ask my mom, after he left. What are we fearing? What has happened?

One day my mother told me that Tash had become an atheist. My mom had known about it long before Tash had actually left town. Apparently they’d talked about it at
length. The Mouth had only recently heard about it—through the grapevine.

Oh my God, I whispered. My mom said Nomi, you don’t know what an atheist is. She told me Tash had stopped believing in God. No, I whispered. Yes, said my mom. I couldn’t fathom it. I didn’t get it. That fucking library card, man. Almost every night I’d crawl into bed with my mother even though I was already thirteen years old and she’d whisper to my dad: Nomi’s here, honey, go sleep in Tash’s room. And he’d get up and lumber out of the room, leaving a nice warm hole in the bed for me to curl up in. We didn’t have to talk about it any more. There was nothing to talk about.

I might move to Montreal, said Travis. I asked him what he meant by that. We were sitting on Abe’s Hill staring at the city lights.

Nothing, he said. Just that I might move to Montreal.

But why? I asked. When?

In the fall, he said, if I can make enough money.

Well, have fun, I said. Write. He said I could come with him but he didn’t know what he was talking about. Right? he said, poking me in the side with his guitar.

No, I said, wrong.

C’mon, he said, why not? Montreal’s cool. I’ll play for money in the metro and you can pose naked for art classes and stuff and we’ll find a really cheap flat, eat bread and cheese.

Did you say flat? I asked him. He nodded. Just for that I’m not going with you, I said. I got up and walked down the hill except halfway down I tripped and fell and just for the hell of it rolled all the way down to the gravelly bottom and lay there in a clump while Travis sat on the top going Nomi? Don’t be that way!

When I got home my dad was in his goddamn lawn chair in front of the bullet hole doing some kind of watercolour painting. Is that all you’re gonna do? I asked him. Sit in the dark and paint?

Where’s Travis? he asked.

Who cares, I said.

Should we go for an ice cream? was all I heard before I slammed the door and walked into the kitchen for a couple of my sister’s expired Valium.

I noticed that the dining-room table was missing. I went back outside to ask my dad where it was.

I sold it, he said. We never used it anyway. I also sold the freezer in the garage. While I was emptying the contents I found that stray cat of Tash’s and thought you and I could bury it in the backyard.

Blackula? I asked.

Yeah, he said, wrapped up in some kind of cape. A red velvet cape. Kind of shocking, he said.

She was gonna bury it when the ground thawed, I told him.

Well, said my dad, she must have forgotten about it. We should do it tonight probably before it starts to decompose.

The evening was getting better and better. My dad dug a hole and I tried to make a stupid wooden cross but I was so strung out I could barely understand what I was doing. It was like my hands were moving around with wood in them like I was a drummer or something and a hammer lay on the ground next to me and next to the hammer was a little jam jar of nails but other than that I didn’t have a clue. Eventually I just gave up and lay in the grass watching my dad dig.

I’ll put a concrete slab on top of it so animals don’t get at him, he said.

Yeah, I said, but more like yeeeaaaaahhhhh.

Or maybe we should cremate him first? asked my dad and I said naaaaahhhhhh. I was trying to pull myself up with a branch that was about fifty feet in the air. Finally I gave up and lay there, spreadeagled like a wheel. It was really dark outside and I thought how white my dad’s shirt was. He’d tucked his tie in between the buttons.

Tired? he asked.

No, just lazy, I said. Travis had taught me the importance of denying fatigue. He was always telling me not to yawn. My dad suggested that my phosphates might need replenishing. Phosphates, I thought to myself. Phosphates.

Dad, I said, why aren’t trains allowed here again?

What? he said.

No trains here? I said.

Neither one of us knew what I was talking about. But then after a minute or two my dad said: Oh, the train. Yes. The elders thought it would bring with it worldly influences.

With it worldly influences? I asked.

My dad looked up from his digging and said: It would make it easier to come and go. Especially go.

Oooooohhhhhh, I said. Don’t let me die out here, dude, I said, and my dad went: No, no. He smiled at me. I could make his teeth out in the dark. I wanted to lie there forever.

I said: I want to lie here forever and my dad said no, no, that’s Blackula’s job now, heh, heh.

Everything felt really, really nice. The grass, the dark sky and stars and my dad smiling and wearing his white, white shirt and cracking awful jokes that weren’t even jokes, and the smell of the fresh dirt and some faraway stubble fire.

What are the
blue
fields again? I asked him.

Blue? he said. That would be alfalfa.

Yeaaaahhhhh, I said. Affafa, alfffa, alfafafa.

Alfalfa! said my dad.

Okaaaaaayyyy, I said.

And still the night wasn’t over. My dad left me lying in the grass next to Blackula and told me I needed to work on my rest, an idea I kept repeating over and over in my mind because I thought it was interesting, anachronistically.

I watched the sky turn purple and listened to the late-night sound of doors closing. Fluffy white things were floating around and I spent a long time trying to catch one in my hand. I felt the bumps on my head. I examined the various plates of my skull. I need a razor for my bangs, I thought. I crawled slowly through the grass towards the back door. Its brown sections reminded me of a Jersey Milk bar.

Travis liked straight bangs but Travis was going to Montreal. I liked the way my bangs looked razored. I put on Tash’s Thelonius Monk record quietly and stared at myself in the mirror. I could hear my dad snoring. I turned down the volume and waited for him to stop breathing.

I’d forgotten how to count. I remembered my grandpa telling me he was so old they didn’t have numbers when he was a kid.