Hold Fast (5 page)

I have to say I thought it was sorta nice when I seen it first. But before long I had a change of mind. I mean, it sounds dumb to say that a place is too nice, but that's what it was. There wasn't not one thing outa place, not one thing anywhere but where it was marked for. A newspaper
left on the coffee table was like someone had committed a crime. Either someone had to be reading it, or it had to be in the newspaper rack. If you so much as mentioned the word dust, I daresay you'd get sucked up into the Electrolux feet first.

The kitchen was just as bad. The snazziest-looking cupboards you ever seen. The floor then just like the mirror. You practically had to hold your breath so's you wouldn't dull the shine. I knows it wouldn't be the place now for Dad to a been picking a few turrs or cutting the guts outa some fish. I knows Aunt Ellen wouldn't a had a fit. I can fair see it now.

They put me in the same room with Curtis, their own son. For what reason I don't know because they had another bedroom there with no one in it. Perhaps they wanted to save that one for visitors, or maybe Aunt Ellen didn't want the extra dirt to have to clean up. Maybe, too, they figured I needed the company.

Well, that kind of company, the way he was first, I could a done without. Some guys you could call quiet. But this fellow! My lord, he hardly opened his mouth except when he had to yawn. I didn't know first if he was stuck-up or just too shy to say anything. Some guys gets like that.

If books was anything to go by, then I knew from the first time I went in the room that he was some kinda real brain. He's got more books than any fellow I ever knew. Across one shelf he's got every Hardy Boy book that was ever put out, all in order, right tight to each other. And below them, there is about ten times as many other books. Science fiction, a lot of it. See, I wouldn't be able to spend
my time at that. Not science fiction. And neither do I go much on Joe and Frank and the boys. Hand me over some books that got to do with animals or cars, or clues me in on something else I wants to find out, then I'm okay. But not any of those dumb detective books. I'd hardly be able to crack the cover to get to the first page.

He does have one set of books that caught my eye. There's a set there on the mammals in North America. Now that was more along my line.

I was in there firking around through his books to see all what he had, when in he came that first time and seen me.

“Got either copy of Playboy?” I said to him for a laugh.

He didn't answer me. All he done was put on his little smile.

“None under your mattress?” I was only trying to be friendly. I only said it for something to say.

“No,” he said, like he didn't take it for a joke atall. He sat down at his desk and this time never so much as looked at me.

Well, I thought, this is something now. A fine way to start off. It wasn't as if we'd never seen each other before. This was the first time we'd been together in the room we was sposed to be sharing, that was all. And if a fellow can't look at a pile of someone else's books, what the hell can he do.

I sat down on the bed that Aunt Ellen said was mine. He never even turned his head away from his book. Talk about your friendly relations. It was bugging me, that was. It was just as well to get to the bottom of it right away.

“I can't do much about it,” I told him. “This is where your mother put me. You want me to go and ask her if I can move somewhere else? Is that what you wants? If it is, then I'll do it right now and get it over with.”

“No, you haven't got to do that,” he said.

That surprised me — how quick the answer came outa him. Made me think he was almost afraid of what might happen if I did.

I left it at that. I took my suitcase, opened it up on the bed, and started rooting around. Then for the first time without being asked, he said something. That idea of going to his mother must a done something to loosen him up.

“You can put your clothes over there. That bureau is empty. And there's plenty of room in the closet for anything you want to hang up.”

It was something, but it really wasn't much of a change. What he did say after that was pretty much forced outa him. Whether he was shy or mad at me being there, or whatever it was that made him not want to talk, all of it was a real pain in the neck. The first couple of days was enough to drive anyone foolish. You should a seen us. It's a laugh when I thinks back on it now. He might a said ten words about his stupid stamp collection and I'd say “yeah” and try to show I was interested. Then maybe I'd go on for ten minutes about the .22 I got last Christmas and at the end of it all he might nod his head. If I was lucky. By the second night I'm sure we was both wishing there was a six-foot brick wall up between us.

See, part of it was we hardly had a darn thing in common. Most of the stuff he grew up interested in, I couldn't
a cared less about. And the other way around. I just couldn't figure it out how we was ever going to stick it living in the same room together.

Finally what did make matters better between me and Curtis was school. See, what I figured too was that he thought I was dumb. That because I didn't know much about any of the stuff he was interested in, and him being something of a brain in school, then he thought there wasn't much more than sawdust between my ears. After I got his little mind straightened out on that one, then we got along a hundred percent better.

Before I made the move to St. Albert, I'd gone to the same school all my life. There was just the one school for Marten and the couple of other places near to it. The school was split up into two parts — kindergarten to grade six on one side and the high school on the other, with a gym and resource center between them. But it was all under the one roof. There was maybe three hundred students altogether.

When I moved I was ready to start grade nine. For the first few days in the new school I was in pretty slack shape about knowing where to go. Cripes, you could a fitted the school I went to before into what this place had for a gym. There was way more of everything you could name — students, teachers, equipment, secretaries, everything. It was like the Confederation Building compared to what I was used to. And it only had three grades in it. Only students in seven, eight, and nine. It took a bit of catching on for me to get myself organized.

The first thing I got thrown at me was a placement
test. That was sposed to tell them what class they was going to put me in — A, B, C, D or E. Where I came from, grade nine was grade nine, no more to it than that. Now I was going to be crowned with a letter too. All depending, of course, on how smart or how stupid the test showed I was.

I had one thing going for me. I wasn't nervous about writing the test. Mr. Graham, the guidance counselor, had me there in a booth in his office, but I wasn't either bit on edge. That's one thing about me. I don't get nervous writing tests. Some fellows'll tense right up, like they've been hauled up before a firing squad. Me, I writes what I can as best I can, and that's it. I stops there.

There was a few things on the test I never had much of a clue about. I skipped over them. I guess that's what put me in the B class for most of the subjects I was going to take. They had me down for math and science out with the A crowd. I was always good at them. Math I could whip off no sweat. I never seen much use for a lot of it, but there was no sweat getting it done. And science. I guess they looked pretty hard at what I had down on the science part of the paper. One question said, “Name five classes of vertebrates and write a description of each one.” I filled out four pages. That must a made someone's eyes pop open.

That's how me and Curtis got together in school — for those two subjects. Of course, he was in the A class all the way.

School is a funny thing. Sometimes I got the best kinda interest in it. More times I wish I could chuck it all up and not see the sight of a school book no more. I
always did get pretty good marks. Not because I studied a real lot, but mainly because I paid attention in class and always got my homework done on time. When I looks back to when I ever made a balls of it on a test, it was usually in some subject where I was bored to death with the teacher.

Science was always my best subject. For science, me and Curtis had this Mr. Marshall. He was half decent, I spose. But the best part of it was the science lab we had the classes in. The whole back of one wall had shelves full of biology material. That was the first place I headed for when I went in through the door. They must a had twenty-five or more different animal skeletons mounted and put on the shelves. I've seen parts of skeletons in the woods lots of time, or when someone throwed away the carcass of a mink or something they skinned and it rotted, but I never did see them cleaned and mounted like they had them there. And live rabbits and guinea pigs and mice. They even had a snake crawling around in a glass cage. That was the first one I ever seen alive, because there aren't any wild in Newfoundland. Not even any grass snakes.

Our class was new to Mr. Marshall, so he didn't know any more about any one of us than he did about the others. I was glad of that. That first day, after he marked the attendance sheet and stuff, we got into talking about what we would be doing during the year. We had a textbook we would be using a lot. But he said he was “open to suggestions” for other topics.

“The female body,” says one wise guy. Then some girl, not going to be outdone, snaps back with “the male
body.” Marshall cuts them off right there. And after a coupla minutes when nobody suggests anything he calls reasonable, I comes up with something I've had in mind all along — “animal life in the Atlantic.” That gets a better reaction from him.

“For any particular reason?” he asks.

And so I tells him that since we're living on an island and surrounded by all that salt water and since fishing has always been so important to us, why not spend time learning something more about that, instead of talking about a lot of other stuff we've never even seen. He sorta picked up from there, and we got to discussing all kinds of different animals in the oceans. Well, it turned out I knew a lot more than anybody else in the class about the animal species in the North Atlantic. The different species of fish, the whales and the seals, all that. A good bit of it I'd seen for myself, like when I've been out jigging cod and come across porpoises jumping around. I didn't want to start off the year like I was a real brain or something, so I shut up then and didn't say no more.

I think that little discussion I had with Marshall set Curtis back a few notches. There was a lot more in my head than he thought. Everything people knows don't come from books, like he figured. I picked up a lot of that just from living near the salt water all my life and listening to Grandfather and some others, and those who've been out to the seal hunts.

Curtis started to look at me different after that and we got on a whole lot better. There was still a good many things about him that I didn't have much use for, and probably if we had never been forced together, we would
never even got to know each other atall. But when he found out that I wasn't a dumb jerk like he had in his mind first, then we started in at least talking sensible to each other. That was a big improvement right there.

Iwasn't smart enough to see it at the time, but my first few days at their house must a been real torture for not only Curtis, but for everybody there. The only difference was, the others done a better job of covering it up. Uncle Ted and Aunt Ellen did spend a lot of their time trying to be nice to me, and it looked first like they really meant it. But now I can see that it was something they done only because they figured they had to. Really they didn't too much like the idea that they was being forced to make someone else a part of their life. They had their ways of doing things and I had mine. I certainly didn't expect them to change to suit me, for the same reason that they couldn't expect me to suddenly be someone I wasn't all along.

I didn't know a hell of a lot about them before I came. That was one of the problems. Dad never got along very good with them, I knew that, although Mom would never let him talk to us about why. I guess that should a told me something right there. Then, as the days went by, I started to find out more and more of the reasons for it. A good many more than I ever expected.

There's four in their family altogether. The other one is Marie, Curtis's older sister. Marie has all the interesting parts that goes together to make up a sixteen-year-old female. Only problem is — she's got too much of most of them. A nice kind word would a been overweight. Curtis called her flabby. She wouldn't give him so much as the time of day. Me either, for that matter. She dumped me right away into the category of boys who are interested in girls but who are not old enough yet to be of any interest to her. I let it stay like that.

I never really seen that much of her anyway. Although I heard enough, that was one thing for sure. She was a telephone freak if there ever was one. I wouldn't doubt but she had a red ring around her ear, she used it that much. The only times her eardrums ever got a rest must a been when she was asleep.

I spose after the first while of having me in the house, all of them started to ease off a bit on the front they had rigged up. Their true selves started to show through. After all the novelty of me being there rubbed off, they started to get back to the way they must a been before I came.

I mean, I'm no stranger to arguments. Me and Mom and Dad had our fights the same as people in any family. Sometimes they was only in fun. Other times, I'd get vicious about something and slam a few doors. But whoever was right, it was all forgot about afterwards.

The only reason the first argument I heard in the house between Uncle Ted and Marie got me upset was because of the way he yelled at her. See, I wasn't sposed to have heard it. It was in the middle of the second week I
was there, about ten-thirty in the night and I was sposed to be gone to bed like Curtis. But I wasn't. I was in the kitchen getting something to drink. Uncle Ted figured we was both in the room with the door closed.