Aloha, Candy Hearts (19 page)

I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was my Back to the Future poster. I’d loved movies as a kid. Still do. They’re like comfort food to me. Living where we did, I didn’t get to see a lot of movies growing up, usually only when they finally ended up on TV. By the time I saw the first Star Wars movie, and thought it was the greatest thing since Nutella, the whole world had long ago seen it and moved on.

Under my schoolboy desk I spied Tim. Tim was a stuffed bear I’d won in one of those fishing pole games at a local school bazaar.

It’s where you pay a quarter or fifty cents, throw a mock fishing line over a bed sheet, and someone on the other side attaches a prize to your line. I remember being a little more excited than I DD6AA2AB8

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should have been to win a bear at my age. But I’d never won anything before that. I leaned over and pulled Tim into my lap. I petted his brown head, and thought: it’s good to be home, far away from airport murderers and knife wielding maniacs. I felt safe.

A little googly from the rye, my eyes bobbed around the room, taking in all my stuff. Was it really my stuff anymore, I wondered?

Or did it belong to a boy who no longer existed? I remembered many nights sitting on that same bed, thinking, trying to figure out who I was. Those were the days before every kid’s room had a phone, a TV, a computer, all the things contrary to introspection.

Even as a youngster, I knew very well that I was different from other boys. Or, at least, different from what TV and movies and books and school teachers and even my parents and siblings told me boys should be. Yet, I wasn’t particularly worried about it. I found it curious, and spent many hours thinking about what “it”

was and what it would mean for me and my future life. But somehow, I was confident everything would turn out okay in the end.

Naïve? You bet. But isn’t that what kids are supposed to be?

Pushing thoughts of childhood aside, I shtumped across the floor until I was sitting next to the shelf displaying my collection of Star Wars action figures. I pulled my duffle bag into my lap and dug out the notebook I’d found at The Roxy. This was my first opportunity to uncover the treasure I’d worked so hard to find. I hopped onto the bed, propping my Dynasty pillow (featuring Krystle and Alexis) behind me. As I pulled off the elastic band that bound the journal, I felt a mounting excitement. Inside was the buried treasure Walter Angel had more than likely died for. Now I had it. Now I was going to be in on the big secret.

I opened the notebook to the first page. My breath caught when I saw the name.

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Simon Durhuaghe—pronounced Dur-hay-hee—was someone almost everyone would claim to have heard of, especially in Canada, and most especially in Saskatchewan. He was, undeniably, the most prolific and famed author of literary fiction to come out of Saskatoon. He’d written twenty-nine novels, seven antholo-gies, countless other short stories, and even one Juno-nominated song, and the count was still on. He had to be seventy, but his star was still on the ascent. His most recent novel, Down this Rutted Road, had been released to great fanfare this past fall.

To say I was astonished to find that the treasure I’d uncovered was a Durhuaghe original, was an understatement. At least I presumed the work I held in my hands had never been published. The first line of the notebook read, in beautiful, loopy penmanship: The Journal of Simon Durhuaghe – July 17, 1979 to January 3, 1985.

Before reading any further, I did a quick scan of the notebook.

Several pieces of loose-leaf and other miscellaneous papers were stuck between various pages. The journal entries themselves were DD6AA2AB84

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in the same lovely handwriting as the heading, and varied in length from single cryptic sentences like: “Just as I expected” or

“Only time will tell,” to longer sections that went on for several paragraphs. Sometimes his notations appeared every day, then there’d be nothing for weeks, even months.

I decided I needed something stronger than a glass of water if I intended to get through the whole thing before morning. So I slipped out of my room and made my way back to the basement kitchen, the centre of the universe in Mom’s farmhouse. Anything you wanted, there it would be. And, not surprisingly, there too was Mom, still awake, at the stove, patiently stirring something in a simmering pot.

“Sonsyou,” she greeted me. “You’re not sleeping yet? How come, den? Are you hungry, mebbe? I feex you someting goot.”

“Oh no, I’m still thinking I might explode from supper.”

“Oh, don’t say dat. You deedn’t like? How come?”

“No, no, of course I liked it. I just ate too much of it. I’m not used to eating so much.” Bit of a lie there. “And I’m kinda supposed to be dieting.” That part was always true.

“Vhat for you diet? You’re too skeenny. You seet, I feex some pie.”

I held up my hands in a defensive gesture. I’d have to tuck and roll to get out of there without some kind of foodstuff shoved into my mouth. “I just have some reading to do and wanted some caf-feine to help stay awake. I’ll put on a pot of coffee. Or do you have diet Coke or something?”

And that’s how I ended up with yet another rye and coke.

On my way back to my room, passing by the “good” upstairs living room I don’t remember ever being in as a child, I heard a croak. It was Joanne, curled up in a recliner chair, under a blanket.

Without air conditioning, the house was stifling hot, and I wondered how she could survive under there. Although the room was dark, I could still make out a half-empty bottle of Crown Royal on the coffee table next to the chair.

“Good night, Joanne,” I quickly said, hoping to make a speedy getaway.

“C’mere, Russ.”

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Anthony Bidulka

Foiled. I entered the room and stood over her. I could just see the top of her head. Her hair was greasy and lay in dead strands across her skull. Alcohol oozed out of her pores. And not just from what she’d drunk today.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I drink too much.” She rasped. “Guess you know that though, huh?”

I settled into a nearby chair and watched as two eyes appeared from below the edge of the quilt. Tired eyes. Glassy. Haunted. I didn’t want to know what they’d seen.

“You’re just like him, you know.” Her words were only slightly slurred.

“What? Who? I’m just like who?”

“Dad.”

“What do you mean?” Our dad died more than ten years ago.

He was a big-boned, black-haired, blue-eyed Irishman with ruddy cheeks and a proper brogue. And as far as I remembered, in looks and every other way, we were not alike at all.

“Because at forty years old, you’re all alone.”

I sputtered a bit, then, “I’m thirty-eight! And what makes you think I’m alone? And what does that have to do with Dad? He wasn’t alone. He had Mom and all of us.”

“Oh grow up, Russ. You didn’t even know Dad. You don’t know what he was like.”

Was that the first bottle of rye she’d drunk tonight? Couldn’t be, because she was making no sense. “Of course I do. He was my dad.” I knew I hadn’t spent tons of time with him or anything. Our interests were different. He loved being in the fields and fixing machines. I did not. “He was a pretty good guy,” I said. “He was around and stuff.”

Joanne snorted and reached for a cigarillo.

“You can’t smoke that in here.”

She threw it on the rug and instead shakily poured herself another glass of rye. No mix. “You and I had different fathers. You didn’t know him when he was your age now. I did.”

That much was true. When Joanne was born, Mom was only eighteen, and Dad twenty-eight. Bill and I didn’t come along for DD6AA2AB8

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over a decade.

“What was so different then?”

Another derisive laugh. Another gulp of booze. “He was like you. Couldn’t commit. Couldn’t settle down. Mom could tell you.

But she won’t. I only know because I saw it. He barely noticed I was around, but I was smarter than he gave me credit for.”

My face turned crimson. I did not want to hear what my ears were forcing into my head. “What are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you, brother dear, that our daddy screwed around all the time. Went hand in hand with his boozing. He’d be good for a month or so, then all of a sudden he’d come in from doing chores or whatever, and he’d be as soused as a sailor. He hid bottles in the machine shop. Mom would go looking for them, but he was pretty clever with his hiding spots.

“He’d drink up a storm, do some ranting and raving about bad crops, his inconsiderate wife, the lousy supper on the table, or whatever else he could think of to lay blame on, then he’d get in the half-ton and drive to town to drink some more at the beer par-lour. It always amazed me that he never once ended up in a ditch or arrested for DUI. He had horseshoes up his ass, and I guess there weren’t many cops patrolling the highway between the Quant farm and Howell in those days.”

All I could do was shake my hurting head.

Joanne kept on. “I’d see Mom sit by the window waiting for him. She’d pretend to be shelling peas or reading her recipe books, but I knew better. While she was hoping and praying for his headlights to turn off the highway into the yard, I was wishing he’d never come home. I used to wish, Russ, that one day he’d drive off and we’d never have to see him again.

“The worst was when he wouldn’t come home until morning.

And the asshole would actually have the balls to yell at her, as if it were her fault that he got pissed and spent the night with some town whore.”

It was too much. “Stop, Joanne, just stop,” I said, getting up.

“You’re the one who’s been drinking too much.” There were so many thoughts in my head, but none were ready to come out. I pulled back, intending to walk away.

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Anthony Bidulka

“At least I try to have relationships,” she yapped on. “I know none of them have worked out all that well, but I try.” For a fleet-ing second, I saw the pain of a hundred bad relationships flit across her face. I winced at the harshness of the sight. “I try hard.

I get my heart broken, but I pick up the pieces and try again. Look at Bill. He got married as soon as he could, and he holds on to that woman so tight she is never getting away. But you, Russ, you just can’t settle down. You can’t pick one. You just pick and choose and have little tastes, as if people are nothing more than appetizers.”

I was frozen in my spot, but the heat of my fuming soon thawed me out. What I couldn’t decide was if I was mad at her or mad at myself.

Mad at her was easier. I whipped about and, feeling my tongue sharpen, began my verbal assault. “You don’t know me. You don’t know the first thing about me. And I don’t know you. You left home before I was old enough to figure out what a sister was. Ever since then, all you do is parachute in whenever you feel like it, make your proclamations, tell your stories, drink our booze, then bugger off again, disappearing into a life you’ve never invited us into. And because of that, you don’t have the right to sit there and judge me!”

She looked at me calmly through filmy eyes. She was unrattled, a woman used to confrontation. “Oh Russ, I’m not judging.

I’m the last person alive to judge anyone. And I have tried, a little, to find out about what’s going on with you. I’ve asked Mom about who you’re seeing. But she never seems to know exactly what’s going on. She mentioned you’d been seeing someone for the past couple of years, but he doesn’t seem to be around much and you don’t talk about him. Russ, you don’t share much of your private life either.”

“That’s not true,” I shot back. “Did you ever think that maybe Mom doesn’t know about my private life because she’s not interested, because she doesn’t get involved in my life the way she does in yours?” This was a lie. And the truth of that struck me like a plank against the side of my head.

Over the last several years—especially since that first Christmas she spent with me in my home—Mom had changed.

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She’d become a much bigger part of my life, and my life as a gay man. Hell, she’d even cooked for Alex when he was recovering from a gunshot wound. Was Joanne right? Had I been shutting Mom out of my relationship with Alex? Why would I do that? It wasn’t right. I suddenly felt very guilty, and very sorry for Alex.

He deserved much better than that. I vowed to make a change.

“All I’m doing is telling it like it is,” Joanne said, her words becoming more obscured by the alcohol.

I wasn’t quite ready to play nice. “According to you.”

She chuckled. “Yup, according to me. You can believe me if you want. Or don’t. Up to you. I only told you to help you. Maybe you can learn from the old man’s mistakes. By the time you came around and were old enough to wipe your own snotty nose, the old guy had changed. Or maybe he just got too old to tomcat around. Or maybe Mom gave him an ultimatum finally, I dunno.

By the time he was your father, he was different. I don’t know if he was any better as a husband, but I think he at least paid some attention to you and Bill. That’s all I’m saying.”

Suddenly, from the room next door, we heard sounds of someone making enough noise to let us know she was there. Mom. Oh God, what had she heard?

“Sonsyou, Donya, vhat are you doing up for?” she said as she toddled into the room.

I looked at her and gave her the fakest smile known to mankind. She returned it, proving she was either the consummate actress, or hard of hearing.