Country of Cold (8 page)

Before dinner was served and while the shrill graduates were all milling about, Lester sat with me on the front steps of the community hall. Dinner was Chicken Kiev, inevitably. His date, Charlene, was talking to her friends around the big round table they had annexed. Lester had thought that they would sit with me and some of the rest of the power mechanic guys, but that had been impossibly naive and he had settled for making the first excuse he could think of and joining me outside. I was close to drunk already and sipping on the mickey of rum in my pocket. Datelessness wasn’t all that bad, we agreed.

People were still arriving. Shiny older brothers’ convertibles with Kleenex flowers, a limousine—oh yeah, son-of-the-dentist Dennis. Jerk. Falling out of the back, loud and enormously entertained by himself. Yeah, yeah, hi Dennis. Carol. Can you get by? Dennis played goalie for the town junior A hockey team, the Fishermen. The guys on the Fishermen all had had their jersey numbers tattooed on their earlobes the weekend before. Jesus God. And they all had dates, needless to say.

“I saw your brother inside,” Lester said.

“Yeah.”

“He’s some drunk, him and his girlfriend.”

“They were drinking together this afternoon already, out behind the toolshed. They’ve just kept going.”

“They’re having fun, anyway.”

“Great.”

And then another car pulled up, driven by a friendly fat man I recognized to be Daphne Hainscotter’s father. Daphne got out, leaned inside the car for maybe half a second, and shut the door. Lester and I split apart on the steps like a train was about to roar down between us. She glided into the hall without a glance or word to either side. Lester looked over at me, eyebrows raised, and handed me the mickey of rum.

Albert sat down between us. “Hi, Albert,” Lester said. “Having fun?”

“Oh yeah,” Albert said, breathing out a cloud of red wine vapour.

“Hi, Albert.” Me, looking into the night, drinking from the mickey.

Albert: “This is gonna be some night.” Lifting a bottle of red wine to his lips. Must have swiped it from our parents.

Lester, with detachment: “No doubt thirty years from now it’ll seem to have been a pretty big deal.”

“Won’t take thirty years.”

I turned to look at Albert. Something up. Lester talking about how his parents paint a picture of well-scrubbed optimism and hope but when he looks at their class pictures he knows half the people there, still in Dunsmuir, various versions of disappointed ambition and unacknowledged alcoholism, and Lester wonders why the night doesn’t seem a little sadder to them.

“What won’t take thirty years, Albert?”

“You really have no idea,” he asked, stated. He started to rock back and forth. I looked at him. Then, with an effort, he climbed to his feet and stumbled back inside. Lester and I watched him go.

“We should maybe keep an eye on him,” Lester said.

When Albert and I were four years old we both came down with strep throat. It seemed to have been clearing up, my mother says, when she noticed that I was looking sicker again, and then sicker yet, and then she saw I was peeing blood and she took me to the doctor and he said I had some inflammation of the kidneys, a complication of the strep throat, and that I would have to go into hospital. I did, my mother says, and I took it all well until I learned that Albert wouldn’t be staying with me and then I just howled. It was the first time we were ever more than twenty feet from one another. My mother tells this story more and more often these days, now that we hardly see each other, and keep tabs on one another mostly through her. This tortures her, that we are no longer close, and she imagines that it is even more painful for her than it is for the two of us.

It was a big problem that I was so agitated, as my blood pressure was already dangerously high, from the kidney trouble. My mother stayed with me initially, and I tantrummed all night long that first night, and the next night my father stayed with me and I was even worse. It came almost as a relief to us all when Albert developed
the same complication and peed blood too. We were put in the same room, and slept in the same bed, the night he was admitted. The rest of the month that we were in the hospital, we were angels together, my mother says. She always tears up at this point.

The meal took less than a coughing, dropped forked and napkinned hour. There were the speeches, by the class president, the chairperson of the grad committe, the principal, and all that. The speeches were chewy, the chicken impenetrable. For dessert, pineapple upside-down cake. I looked across the room to Albert and Cora, who were finding one another enormously entertaining, in that drunken way, the teachers at their table clucking their tongues, they couldn’t even be quiet for the principal, much less the pineapple upside-down cake.

And Lester and Charlene looked like end-of-Lent gourmands, so desperately did they fill the time with chewing and swallowing and drinking their water and adjusting and rearranging the cutlery.

Daphne sat at a table with the other unaccompanied girls, carefully sawing at her Chicken Kiev in her serious and cautious way. I looked over at her often but each time her gaze was fixed upon her porcelain and if she looked up at all during the course of her meal, I didn’t see it.

And after dessert, the dancing: Cora and Albert, careening around the dance floor. Lester and Charlene
dancing—Lester twitching with the grace and enthusiasm of a man in the electric chair, Charlene trying to melt into the crowd around him, mortified, contemplating escape.

I drifted from corner to corner on the periphery of the jerking mass, talking to classmates that I had liked or admired, Daphne always seeming to be in the opposite corner; all the auto mechanic guys talked to me, and most of the teachers, too. And then someone seizing my arm and flinging me into the twitching tux-clad young men and their appalled companions; my heart leaped at the prospect of some last-minute confession of ardour and then bodies attached to the seizing arm swing into view and Albert and Cora grinning in my face. And I nodded and smiled and began jerking in sympathy with the ruffle-neck-shirted ones around me.

“Hi!” Cora yelled at me.

“Whoopee!” Albert yelled.

“Having fun?”

They nodded. “I’m gay!” Albert yelled at me.

“I said, having fun?”

“I mean I’m a fag!” Albert.

I smiled stupidly.

“What?”

“I’m a fag, I like to kiss men!”

“Oh,” I said, nodding my head like a pendulum running down.

I looked over at Cora. She had her eyes shut, was gyrating to the strains of “Born in the USA.” “Why are you telling me this now?”

But his answer was drowned out by some girl shrieking as she was held aloft, a grinning young man below her, she sitting on his shoulders, his head and torso obscured by yards and yards of taffeta.

And I danced the heck out of there.

I wound up over by the bar, leaning against the wall looking at but not watching the crowd, feeling faintly nauseous. We had dated the Smithson sisters in grade ten. For about a week, but still. “I like kissing men,” he had said. I pictured it. In living colour. Which ones, I wondered.

Lester’s favourite song that year was playing, a John Cougar Mellencamp number with fiddles and a deep-seated feeling for the land, and Lester was whirling and twirling and flailing like an overwound wind-up toy. He had hung his tux jacket on the back of his chair and sweat stains sagged from his armpits nearly to his belt. Charlene was dancing with several of the other girls, in the same room, anyway. And Albert and Cora, just on the other side of them, bumping and grinding.

Buying a bottle of Pepsi at the drinks table in front of me was Daphne, reserved and detached. She looked at me. I looked away for a flash. I looked back, she was still looking at me. I gave her a tight-lipped smile, she didn’t smile back, I looked away. I looked back and she was standing right in front of me. “Hi, Bob,” she said.

“How are you, Daphne.”

“Fine, thank you. What are you doing in the fall?”

“Finding work here, I hope, doing a heavy equipment mechanic’s apprenticeship.”

“And your brother?”

“He’s going to university. Chemistry. You?”

“I’m going to Montreal to study English.”

“Great. Seems like I’m the only one here who’ll still be here next winter.”

“Seems that way.”

“So you’re quitting the DQ.”

“Last week.”

“Think you’ll miss it? Were you close to the other people there?”

“We pretended to be but weren’t really. I don’t think we’ll keep in touch.”

I nodded. This much proximate observation was starting to overwhelm me. Daphne had for so long been the feminine ideal, her splayed feet, square bony shoulders, body by Lego, all right angles and perfectly erect neck, I was starting to choke and spit in the ambrosial waters, drowning in the idyll.

There was something up on the dance floor, probably some drunken hockey players starting to fight. Nothing to do with me. “Um,” I said, glancing between her and the fuss. She waited for me to say whatever it was I was having so much trouble with. “Um …” Lester touched my elbow.

“You’d better do something about your brother before he gets himself killed,” he said.

“What?” I said, irritated, with a can’t-you-see-who-I’m-talking-to-here look. He pointed.

“ ’Scuse me,” I said, again and again, wending my way between the compacted and slippery dancers. “ ’Scuse me, ’scuse me.” And then I was beside Cora, who was laughing drunkenly, shrilly, at Albert, who was walking with exaggerated finger-to-shushed-lips steps among the crowd. And Mitchell Garson, a left-winger destined for the Quebec Nordiques, was stamping through the crowd, bull-necked and snorting, and I looked back at Albert just in time to see him lean over and plant a kiss on the lips of son-of-the-dentist Dennis, who looked around initially with a self-congratulatory smile and then eyes open wide and wiping his face and lunging after Albert, who ran behind a knot of bare-stockinged girls dancing in a circle, Albert yelling, “Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo,” Cora squealing with delight, Albert running over to us—and right into Mitchell Garson’s cantaloupe-sized fist, Albert falling. I closed my eyes for a long second.

The strobe light was flashing away now to “Ballroom Blitz,” Mitchell Garson was shading his eyes with a hand and still snorting and searching in syncopated, staccato movements. Albert appeared beside me, staggering and holding his nose, blood running down the side of his
face in an interrupted, mechanical progression. Albert not saying anything.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Whatsamatter,” he protested, holding his nose, as I guided him to the door.

“Time to lie down, Albert,” I said.

“Whyyy?”

“Because.” Sympathetic onlookers, who had perhaps not seen his dance-floor antics, smiled at me. Every year there’s always a few.

Daphne was standing beside the door as I guided him out.

“Anything the matter?” she asked.

“Just doing some baby-sitting,” I said. She nodded, disapproving.

We made our way out into the night. It was just after solstice and, even at midnight, there were still a few orange clouds in the west. Albert stumbled and staggered and it was all I could do to guide him over to the hedgerow that bordered Saunders’s pasture. Some instinct for self-preservation must have endured the soaking with wine, because he stumbled without much protest to the elm I selected and laid his head down on a root.

And within a minute he was snoring and sputtering and as motionless as Dunsmuir on a Sunday afternoon.

Climbing the steps back into the community hall, the last few dances crooning down that stairway to
heaven, I am seized by the shoulders and slammed nostril-first into the side of the stairway, I smell ammonia and I am spun around and just manage to get my arms in front of my face and they’re squished up against my nose and eyes and all I can see and taste and smell is the insides of my elbows, slammed into my face by five or six swings of what feels like a large shovel. “I’m not
him,”
I yell through my arms but it comes out stuttering and weak like the sound a won’t-start lawn mower makes. And then one arm and then the other is peeled off me and he winds back. “Fuck you!” I yell at him. “Open your eyes!” And he stops.

“It’s not him, Mitch,” somebody says. Mitch snorts and spins on his heel and jumps down the steps and I lose sight of him in the night. I listen for Albert but all I hear is Mitch breathing hard. His coterie of the outraged troops down the steps to resume their pursuit. Mary Lou Waters leaning into my face—“He mighta given Dennis
AIDS!”
—drawing out that last like it had four syllables, Dennis turning white, Mary Lou comforting him. I slip around them and into the hall. Cora sitting in the corner drinking from a bottle of amber Pepsi and talking to herself. Daphne not in sight, gone home I guess, story of my life. Lester and Charlene rubbing their uvulas on the dance floor.

Cora smiling as I sit down beside her. She hands me her Pepsi bottle. No words between us. Lester sits down beside us, wiping his mouth.

“Howd-y pard-ner,” Cora says, giggling madly to herself.

Lester’s hand pauses above the bottle, asking permission. I nod. “Is your brother okay?” he asks as he takes a long swallow.

Cora puts her head down on the table and giggles. “Right as rain,” she says. Lester looks at me. Half-smile.

“He’s just taking a nap now.”

Lester nods.

“Poor thing’s probably just overtired,” Cora says to the table. Lester rolling his eyes. Me leaning back in the chair.

And then Daphne: “Mind if I sit down? How’s your brother doing?”

“Cheerful as a chicken,” Cora says from the table, laughing.

Me: “He’s just fine.”

Daphne furrowing her brows at Cora for an instant, then turning to me. Lester looking around to see where Charlene got to. Oh well.

Daphne: “Is someone taking care of him?”

Me: “He’ll be okay, he’s sleeping it off. In the morning he probably won’t remember any of this.”

Cora’s laughing made a bubbling sound, in the spilled drinks on the table. Lester looked at her and then at us and laughed a little too. Daphne just looked at me. And I looked at Albert, staring in at us from the
night-shiny window, motionless, hands on glass, neither smiling nor frowning, just looking. From across the lawn behind him, you could see Mitchell Garson running.