Gargoyles

GARGOYLES

BILL GASTON

Copyright © 2006 by Bill Gaston

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in hardcover in 2006 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

This edition published in 2007 by
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11 10 09 08 07  1 2 3 4 5

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Gaston, Bill, 1953–
           Gargoyles : stories / Bill Gaston.

ISBN
-13: 978-0-88784-749-3 (bound). —
ISBN
-10: 0-88784-749-8 (bound).
ISBN
-13: 978-0-88784-776-9 (pbk.) —
ISBN
-10: 0-88784-776-5 (pbk.)

1. Gargoyles — Fiction.  
I
. Title.

PS
8563.
A
76
G
37 2006               
C
813'.54               
C
2006-902827-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927970

Cover design: Bill Douglas at The Bang
Text design and typesetting: Sari Naworynski
Author photograph: Clownbog Studios

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Printed and bound in Canada

For Dede Crane

I. Wrathful

The Night Window

Gargoyles

The Kite Trick

Forms in Winter

II. Beneficent

The Beast Waters His Garden of a Summer's Eve

Freedom

A Work-in-Progress

Honouring Honey

III. Mercurial

Point No Point

The Walk

The Green House

The Gods Take Off Their Shirts

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Tyler's librarian mother has brought home two for him. He hefts them, drops them onto his bed. One is on fly fishing. The second is
Crime and Punishment
. Tyler suspects Dostoevsky is a writer he will read only if made to — for instance, if it's the only book he brings on this camping trip.

Tyler knows that what he is actually weighing here is his degree of insubordination. Yesterday his mother's boyfriend — Kim — went through all their gear, inspecting wool sweaters and cans of food. Peering into Tyler's hardware store plastic bag he shook his head and pointed in at the new reading-light with its giant dry cell battery.

“It's a natural-light camping trip,” he said, unpointing his finger to waggle it, naughty-naughty, in Tyler's face. Tyler saw how he could fall to an easy hate of his mother's boyfriend, except that Kim was just always trying to be funny. His mother had explained this early on.

“Umm . . . no lights?” his mother began, half-coming to Tyler's defence. “If I have to pee in the middle of the night? Kim, you want some
on
you?”

It was this kind of statement (which had Kim laughing over-loud) that made Tyler turn away blank-faced, that made him not want to go camping, and let his mother go wherever she wanted without him. It must be exactly this sort of statement that offends her co-workers at the library; it's the reason she fits nowhere, and dates someone like Kim Lynch.

Natural light. Why, he thinks, plucking up the Dostoevsky, should he take orders from Kim Lynch anyway? Kim has red hair and see-through skin, is short and muscular — even his round face acts like a muscle. Tyler's mother is at least an inch taller, and so thin that Tyler knows he will be thin for life too. And: “Kim.” His mother should reconsider on grounds of name alone. Tyler secretly agrees with him on this business of natural light, how its spirit probably goes with the quiet of fly-fishing. But Tyler doesn't want to take orders. If there's one thing he's learned about his mother it's that no one that age — no one — knows what's going on and everything is up for grabs. At first this depressed him, then not. Like in the animal world, it's a big jungle-mix of hunger and wits and power. Accepting this is the difference between turning adult and remaining a child, which is how he explained it to his mother a month ago. She listened attentively, relishing his braininess and such, then rose from her kitchen chair, patted his shoulder, said, “I have been released from my duties as a mother,” and left the room. His mother tries to be funny much of the time too.

Tyler tries to read Dostoevsky during the drive, which is three hours north then an hour west on gravel to a lake. Kim's SUV is
not as roomy as one is led to believe from the street, where its design suggests shoulders and size. Tyler is forced to listen to Kim being forced to listen to his mother's harangue about SUVs polluting twice as much as transportation needs to and how their owners never drive them up impossible mountains like they do in every ad on TV. Kim is sweetly pleased for he gets to say, “The word is ‘off-road.' That is what we're doing — we're
going
‘off-road.'” But Tyler mostly agrees with her. It's wrong to contaminate fly-fishing with an SUV. Fly-fishers should walk.

In any case reading is difficult three feet from his mother and her new sexual partner. He has seen Kim, even while driving, glance down at her breasts. This morning, loading the car, when they thought Tyler wasn't looking they performed a quick leering pantomime of zipping two sleeping bags together. Even their discussions of which gas station or favourite chocolate bar or how much sugar in the diet or is beer the same kind of sugar or are the Republicans trying to take over the world or blindly receiving it by default — here in the SUV all of his mother's lilts of voice sound to Tyler like minor variations on one basic sexual position. All this veiled eagerness makes him want to be home alone.

Why is he here? Mothers don't go camping with relatively new boyfriends and ask the sixteen-year-old son along. Tyler sees that she doesn't love Kim all that much, not in the way he's seen her with other boyfriends, she as obvious as a puppy panting over doggy-dish dreams of a nice nuclear family. He has seen her want some men that badly, where eventually she takes the deep hopeful breath and offers Tyler up as part of the package, hauling him out like an extra 130-pound arm she's been hiding behind her back. It isn't like that with Kim, though. So what is this about? Why is he along?

It seems that his mother has decided to be his friend. And that she sees this trip to be exactly this: Three friends, going camping. Tyler wonders if anything could be more naive.

“Tyler? Here it is. It's right around this long bend.”

“Here what is?” Tyler takes his face out of the book. She's talking to him and he's finally been pulled in by Dostoevsky, whom he has decided is basically an entertaining neurotic. Taken a step further it would be paranoid comedy.

“The giant elf! The twenty-foot face! The one that really freaks me out!”

They round a bend and Tyler keeps his head out of Russian neuroses long enough to see that whatever it is his mother wants him to see is gone. She pretends to wail like a child. Kim knew of the statue too and recalls now that it was removed because of cars slowing to look at it and causing accidents.

His mother turns to Tyler. “He had this giant pointy hat. One arm pointed right at you, there in your car, and the other pointed at their driveway. It was a go-cart place or something. But the thing was forty feet tall! It was totally unnecessary and really, really ugly. I mean it was all face! It was like —”

“It was really stupid-looking,” Kim affirms.

“— It was like some kid made it out of papier mâché. It used to really freak me out.” She gives Kim a look. “When I was Tyler's age, it used to
really
freak me out.”

His mother means drugs. Kim gives her a sly smile back, as though he
really
understands. Tyler can tell he
really
doesn't.

It's maybe the main thing he hates about his mother, how everyone she meets has to be informed what an extreme hippy she was. Tyler has several times been with his mother and one of her old friends and they'll see some rainbow-clad extrovert
skip past in bare feet with bubbles drifting from her dreadlocks or something, and Tyler will snort, and the friend will say, Well, you should have seen your
mother
back then. At this his mother laughs and revels as if the sun is on her face.

His mother doesn't have many friends left from “back then.” Tyler thinks they avoid her. He's told her about it, how “back then” looks like the only thing that was ever important to her and she can't shut up about it. Even the
way
she can't shut up about it. Sometimes she says “back in the daze,” pronouncing it with a grimace so the spelling is understood and implies how much she used to get stoned. And Tyler will watch the friend answer with that first nervous stoned-memory smile and then it's all smiling one-upmanship, competing little stories about seeing personality in foliage, etc.