Hey Nostradamus! (10 page)

As I headed toward Exit 2, it also struck me that I would have to pass Exit 5 on the way to Barb's house. I rounded the corner, and there was my father, kneeling on the roadside in a wrinkled (I noticed even at seventy miles an hour) sinless black suit. My father: born of a Fraser Valley Mennonite family of daffodil farmers who apparently weren't strict enough for him, so he forged his own religious path, marching purse-lipped through the 1970s, so lonely and screwed up he probably nearly gave himself cancer from stress. He met my mother, who worked in a Nuffy's Donuts franchise in the same minimall as the insurance firm that employed him, calculating the likelihood and time of death of strangers. Mom was a suburban child from the flats of Richmond, now Vancouver's motherland of Tudor condominium units. Her shift at the donut shop overlapped Dad's by three hours. I know that at first she found Dad's passion and apparent clarity attractive-Mother Nature is cruel indeed-and I imagine my father found my mother a blank canvas onto which he could spew his gunk.

I pulled over to watch him pray. This was about as
interested as I'd been in praying since 1988. I could barely see my father's white Taurus parked back from the highway, on a street in the adjoining suburb, beside a small stand of Scotch broom. The absence of any other car on the highway made his presence seem like that of a soul in pilgrimage. That poor dumb bastard. He'd scared or insulted away or betrayed all the people who otherwise ought to have been in his life. He's a lonely, bitter, prideful crank, and I really have to laugh when I consider the irony that I've become, of course, the exact same thing. Memo to Mother Nature:
Thanks
.

 

 

From the high school's parking lot I was driven home sitting on a tarp in the police cruiser's rear seat, no sirens. When I walked in the door off the kitchen, my mother shrieked. I could see a Kahlúa a bottle by the cheese grater, so I knew she was already looped; I'm sure the cops knew right away, too.

Mom hadn't been watching TV or listening to the radio, so my appearance at the kitchen door, laminated with a deep maroon muck, had to have been a shock. I just wanted to get the stuff off me, so I kissed her, said I was fine and allowed the cops to bring her up-to-date. In the slipstream of the sedative injection I'd been given back in the parking lot I felt clear-minded and calm. Far too calm. As I was changing out of my bloodied clothes, what passed through my mind was-of all things-curiosity as to how my mother filled her days. I had no idea. She had no job and was stranded amid the mountainside's suburban Japanese weeping maples and mossy roofs. Greater minds have gone mad from the level of boredom she endured. By the time I was seventeen, her once communicative Reg conversed solely with a God so
demanding that of all the people on Earth, only he-and possibly Kent-had any chance of making heaven. Just a few years ago my mother said to me during a lunch, “Just
imagine
how it must feel to know that your family won't be going to heaven with you-I mean, truly
believing
that. We're ghosts to him. We might as well be dead.”

As I disrobed for the shower, flecks of blood flittered onto the bathroom's gold linoleum. I bundled up my clothes and tossed them out the window onto the back patio, where, I learned later, raccoons pilfered them in the night. I showered, and my thoughts were almost totally focused on how cool and sensible the medic's injection had made me. I could have piloted and landed a 747 on that stuff. And with a newly minted junkie's bloodless logic, I was already trying to figure out how soon I could locate more, and at least I had something else to focus on besides Cheryl's death.

When I walked back into the living room, the TV was on. Mom was transfixed, and the RCMP officers were on walkie-talkies, the phone-you name it. Mom grabbed my hand and wouldn't let me go, and I saw for the first time the helicopter and news service images that trail me to this day, images I have yet to fully digest. My mother's grip was so hard that I noticed my fingers turning white. I still wonder how things might have gone without that delicious injection.

“We need to ask your son some questions, ma'am.”

Reg walked in from the carport door just then. “Son?”

“I'm okay, Dad.”

He looked at me, and his face seemed-for reasons that will become evident soon enough-annoyed. “Well then. Good. Mrs. Elliot at the school said you'd been taken away unhurt.”

An officer said, “We have to question your son, sir.”

Mom wailed, “Cheryl's dead…”

“Why do you need to question Jason?”

“Procedure, sir.”

“Jason, why are they questioning you?”

“You tell me.”

Mom said, “Didn't you hear me?”

Dad ignored Mom, and by extension, Cheryl. “What does my son have to do with any of this?”

“He was right there in the cafeteria,” said one cop. “If he hadn't thrown that rock, who knows how many more fatalities there might have been.” “Rock?”

“Yes. Your son's quick thinking-”

The other cop cut in, “That boulder killed the main gunman.”

“Gun
man
? He was fifteen, tops.”

Dad turned to me. “You killed a boy today?”

A cop said, “He's a hero, sir.”

“Jason, did you kill a boy today?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you intend to kill him?”

“Yeah, I did. Would you rather have had him shoot me?”

“That's not what I asked you. I asked if you intended to kill him.”

“Mr. Klaasen,” the first cop said. “Perhaps you don't understand, your son's actions saved the lives of dozens of students.”

Reg looked at him. “What I understand is that my son experienced murder in his heart and chose not to rise above that impulse. I understand that my son is a murderer.”

While he was saying this, the TV screen was displaying the death and injury statistics. The cops didn't know how to respond to Reg's-my
father's
-alien logic. I looked over at my mother, who was by no means a slight woman. I saw her grab one of a pair of massive lava rock lamps, shockingly ugly and astoundingly heavy. Mom picked up the lamp by its tapered top, and with all her force whapped it sidelong into Reg's right kneecap, shattering it into twenty-nine fragments that required a marathon eighteen-hour surgery and seven titanium pins to rectify-and here's the good part: the dumb bastard had to wait two days for his operation because all the orthopedic surgeons were busy fixing massacre victims.
Ha!

My mom, bless her, kicked into full operatic mode: “
Crawl
to your God, you arrogant bastard. See if your God doesn't look at the slime trail you leave behind you and throw you to the buzzards. You heartless, sad little man. You don't even have a soul. You killed it years ago. I want you to die. You got that? I want you to
die
.”

An ambulance was summoned to squire my screaming father to emergency. The police never officially reported the incident, nor did Reg. But in that one little window of time, many lasting decisions were made. First, any love for my father that might have remained either in my mother's heart or my own-vaporized. Second, we knew for sure that Dad was unfixably nuts. Third, upon discharge a few weeks later, he was coolly shipped off to his sister's daffodil ranch in the most extreme eastern agricultural reaches of the city, in Agassiz, a soggy and spooky chunk of property surrounded by straggly alders, blackberry brambles, dense firs, pit bulls, Hell's Angels drug labs and an untold number of bodies buried in unmarked graves.

But my parents never got divorced. Dad always paid support and…who knows what ever really goes on inside a relationship. Dad probably felt guilty for wrecking Mom's life. No. that would imply feeling on his part.

 

 

I arrived at Barb's house a bit on the late side. The attendees were mostly Kent's friends-friends who'd seemed old to me in high school and who always will. Folding wooden chairs were arranged on the back lawn, none of them level; the forest, after decades of lying in wait, was silently sucking the old ranch house and the moss-clogged lawn back into the planet. The twins (that would be
you,
my nephews) and a few other babies were in the TV room, being as quiet and gentle as their pious parents, as they were serenaded by a tape of soothing nature sounds: waves lapping a Cozumel beach; birds of the Guyana rain forest; rain falling in an Alaskan fjord.

Kent's friends had all been hardcore
Youth Alive!
ers who'd never strayed, who became dentists and accountants and moved to Lynn Valley along with most of the city's Kents. I'd seen none of them in the year since Kent's funeral. I knew they'd all enjoy a righteous tingle from any confirmation of my life's downwardly sloping line. My slapped-together ensemble delivered the goods.

“Hey, Barb.”

“Finally, somebody from your family shows up.”

“Mom can't make it. One guess why. Reg is praying up by Exit 5. I imagine he'll creak his way here soon enough.”

“Lovely.”

I poured myself a glass of red wine; piety mercifully ended at the bar with this crowd.

Barb was never involved with
Youth Alive!
, and because of this, had always felt like an outsider in the Kent set. As I looked out at all the healthy teeth and hair on the patio, I realized how sad and insufficient any memorial service would be. I missed Kent. Badly. “Was the service your idea, Barb?”

“Yes, but not this big Hollywood production. They're trying to set me up with some guy in the group. It's so clinical and mechanical.” She looked out onto the lawn. “They're pretty efficient. I have to hand that to them. All I had to do was open the door and look wounded.”

“Charitable.”

“Stick a potato in it. Your job, by the way, is to continue being the doomed loser brother. It shouldn't be a stretch.”

“And your job?”

“Stoic widow who at least has two kids as a souvenir.”

I went out to the car and brought in a canvas duffel bag filled with some presents for the two of you, but your mother got mad at me for spoiling you, a battle that will never stop, because I'll never stop spoiling you. I went in to see you in your cribs-chubby, a bit of curly hair, Kent's smile, which is actually my mother's smile. I gave you each some animal puppets and entertained you with them for a while.

Out on the patio, I shook a few hands and tried not to look like a doomed loser. Kent's friends were using the technically friendly
Youth Alive!
conversation strategy with me. Example: “That's
great,
Jason, Gina and I were thinking of redoing the guest bathroom,
weren't we,
Gina?”

“Oh yeah. We really
were
. We ought to take down your phone number.”

“We'll get it from you after the service.”

“
Great
.”

After a few minutes of this, Gary, Kent's best friend, tinkled his glass and the group sat down. On easels up front were color photocopy enlargements of Kent's life: Kent white-water rafting; Kent at a cigar party; Kent playing Frisbee golf; Kent and Barb lunching in a Cabo San Lucas patio bistro; Kent at his stag party, pretending to drink a yard-long glass of beer. Each of these photos emphasized the absence of similar photos in my own life.

Gary began giving a speech, which I tuned out, and when it felt as if it was nearing the end, I heard a click behind me: Reg trying to open the latch on the living room's sliding doors. Barb got up, offered a terse hello, brought him down onto the lawn and gave him a chair. We all remembered Kent for a silent minute, which was hard for me. Kent's death meant that there were more Jasons in the world than there were Kents, an imbalance I don't like. I'm not sure whether I'm any good for the world.

I sprang up when the minute of silence ended, and dashed to the bar in the kitchen. There was nothing hard there, just wine; chugging was in order, so I poured most of a bottle of white into a twenty-ounce
Aladdin
souvenir plastic drinking cup, then downed it like Gatorade after a soccer game. Barb saw me do this and spoke in a sarcastic Dick and Jane tone: “Gosh, Jason-you must be very thirsty.”