Just Beneath My Skin (3 page)

I HAVEN'T BEEN AWAY LONG
enough to piss Johnny off, so when he and Charlie ask me to lend them some money I say no problem. Charlie runs inside to get a bottle of Great White, and then Johnny insists I drink it with 'em. We could have stayed in the car, but Johnny has a feud going with old man Douglas. Apparently Douglas tried to tell him he couldn't hang out under the awning of his store, so Johnny wants to go and drink the wine there, just to get up Douglas's nose. I don't want to, but again, with Johnny, you choose your refusals carefully. It starts raining and Nathan comes along. It pisses me off no end that Carla makes him go all the way downtown to pick up a carton of milk and doesn't even bother to make sure he wears the right clothes. I call him over.

“Hiyya Jake.”

“Heyya squirt.”

Nathan and I shoot the shit for a while, and then Johnny wants more wine and I have to leave. I can see the kid wants more from me — Christ, it's been six months since he's seen me — but I still have to put some time in with Johnny before he'll let me off the hook. So I tell Nathan to go home and I'll see him tonight. Poor kid. I look back at him once, standing there in the middle of the street, shivering in the rain, without a jacket, holding on to the carton of milk for dear life. I feel such a wrench for him in my gut I feel like crying. Johnny's looking at me, like he knows what I'm thinking and despises me for it, and so, to block him, and to think of something else, I whisper under my breath:
the river flows only one way, the river flows only one way, the river flows only one way.

OUR HOUSE IS THE FIRST
one
on Harmony Lake Road next to Irene Lang's. It's a little house. Mom rents it from Sam Weare who owns the Esso up the road on Highway #7. Sometimes she don't pay the rent on time and Sam comes down and lectures to her in the kitchen. But he don't hardly ever get mad. Mom sweettalks him, and he lets us stay. Everyone on our road, except for Irene whose husband works at the mill driving a Pettibone, is on welfare. I know 'cause the welfare worker comes out once a month to see how we're doing and to see if Mom's been applying for jobs. Then she goes to everyone else's house on the road and asks them the same thing. Once when she was new she walked into Irene's house and just sat down and asked her how she was getting along. Irene told Mom the story that same afternoon when I was listening.

“Oh fine,” said Irene. “Fine. And you?”

“I'm perfectly fine,” said the worker. “It's just the monthly checkup.”

“I know,” said Irene, who thought the welfare woman just stopped in to be friendly while checking up on everyone else. But when the worker started asking Irene all kinds of questions about money and jobs and working and stuff, Irene threw a fit.

“Imagine!” she said to Mom. “She didn't even look at her books or check my name. She just assumed. I sent her out of the house on the toe of my shoe, I can tell you, and not without a call to her manager at the services in town, either.”

That night over dinner Mom told the story to Jake. “Serves Irene right,” she said. “She thinks she's high and mightier than the rest. Maybe now she knows how it feels not to be, even if it were a mistake.”

Mom hates North River. She was born in Oldsport, but she met a guy and “followed him like a dummy.” She's been here ever since. Sometimes Jake used to bug her about moving back to Oldsport if she wanted it so bad. She'd just wave him off. “Who's got the money for that? You? Me? Social Services? Uh-uh. Might as well be poor and beholden here as poor and beholden anywhere else, now mightn't I?”

In all the years we've lived in North River I've only been to Oldsport twice. Once was when Jake took me to a car show when I was six, and once was when our school went to the Wool and Carding Museum on Main Street. The car show was the best. Mom was supposed to go, but she got the flu. Jake and I spent the day looking under the hoods of hot rods and eating popcorn. Jake drove me out along the shore in his Pinto to Tyler's Cape afterward. We looked at the fishing boats moored at the government wharf and I found a whole sand dollar on the beach. We had cheeseburgers and french fries for supper at the Dairy Treat and got home later than we were supposed to. Mom was real mad. She screamed at Jake for an hour, though she was still sick. She said Jake was trying to steal me from her and threatened to kick him out. That was no big deal. She was always threatening to kick Jake out.

I WAS FIFTEEN WHEN JOHNNY
Lang convinced me to steal my grandfather's rum from his barn one Friday afternoon when he wanted something to drink. My grandfather wasn't religious, at least not like Nana McNeil and Dad, who were always running back and forth to church or talking about the Bible and saying God done this and God done that. My grandfather rarely went to church, unless he went to hear my father preach on Christmas Eve and other holidays. Most Sundays he stayed home. In summer he would go fishing for rainbow trout and salmon in the Memragouche. If he went after church he sometimes took me with him to his favourite hole, which was a deep eddy near the banks not far from the farm where two identical elm trees leaned with crooked boles out over the water. We'd sit our lunch boxes and thermoses in the shadow of the trees to keep 'em cool and bait our lines with the worms he dug from the dung heap behind the barn that morning.

In the winter we would mess around together in the yard, him chopping wood and me stacking it or him tinkering with his International Harvester tractor and me handing him tools. He loved that tractor. He'd had it since
1963
and he told me nothing in the world lasted as long and served you so well as a Harvester International.

“Not even people,” he said.

Only I knew my granddad kept a pint bottle of Captain Morgan black rum shoved deep in the barley bin inside the barn. When we were in there together, milking cows or pitching hay, he would stop and wipe a hand across his brow and grin at me.

“Time for a nipper,” he'd say, and roll up his sleeve and drive his hand into the sticky barley to the forearm and fish about. Eventually he would bring forth the bottle, wipe it off and take a swig, then bury it again.

“Don't you say nothin' to no one,” Granddad McNeil told me. “Your nana is a teetotaller, and wouldn't recommend a drink to a dying man to kill the pain, for fearin' it would be a sin.”

“What about Dad?” I asked him.

“Don't tell him either,” he spat.

When Johnny was after me I snuck into the barn after dusk and dug around in the barley bin, just like I'd seen my grandfather do all those times. My hand eventually came upon something solid, and I grabbed the bottle and pulled it out. It was nearly full, with barely a drink taken out of it, and I slipped it in my pants and took off out of the barn and down the road as fast as I could go. I don't know what I was thinking. I was the only one my grandfather ever trusted enough to show where he kept his rum.

Sure enough, the next time my father took me out to the farm I went out in the barn to see Granddad McNeil, who was mucking out a stall. He looked at me, nodded and continued cleaning. I got a rake and started helping him. He talked to me all afternoon as usual — joking and making fun and asking me if I was getting any tail and laughing, like he usually did now that I was older. But when we were done, he did not make right for the barley bin. Instead he took a drink from the dipper from the bucket of well water on the low shelf next to the side door.

“Aren't you gonna have a drink of rum, Granddad?” I asked him. He turned, dipper halfway to his lips, and stared straight at me, as if to tell me he knew, but also that he wasn't going to mention it. “No,” he said. “I think I'll just have water for today, Jake. You're welcome to some, if you want it.”

My grandfather never took another drink of rum in front of me after that. I checked the barley bin once when I was alone in the barn, but there was no rum in it. I tried a few of the other bins as well, but there was nothing buried there either. Wherever he hid it I never found it, and he never told me. Up until the day he died, nothing changed between us except that. He laughed and joked with me, and got me alone in the barn and asked me about girls and complained about Nana and Dad to me. We were still friends. But I couldn't help feel bad about stealing his rum that time. It wasn't just that I'd taken from him — that was bad enough — but I'd broken something between us that was never fixed. Even after he died it was never fixed. To this day I wish I'd never listened to Johnny Lang and stole that pint of rum out the barley bin.

I‘VE NEVER BEEN TO HALIFAX
. Jake talked about it some before he left. “It's big,” he told me. “And there's lots of lights and buildings. There's traffic running up and down the street at all hours of the night. I don't know how I'm gonna get used to sleeping with all that noise, but I suppose I'll manage.”

“Can we come and visit?” I asked him.

“'Course you can, squirt,” he told me. “I'll bring you and your mother in as soon as I get settled.”

After Jake left I waited to hear from him. We didn't have a phone, but Irene Lang next door did. Jake could have called us on that and Irene would come over and get us. But he didn't call or come and get us for a visit like he said he would. Mom said she knew it all along. “That man ain't good for shit,” she said. Mom did get a letter from him twice a month. She wouldn't tell me what it said. Once, when she wasn't looking, I snuck into her purse when she left it on the counter and looked in the envelope. It was a cheque for fifty dollars and a note in Jake's handwriting that said a few words to Mom about boring stuff and then at the bottom, “Tell Nathan hello for me.”

I shoved the note back into the purse quick, 'cause Mom came out of the bathroom and nearly caught me. She made me get ready and go with her down to the bank to cash Jake's cheque. She didn't mention she was supposed to say hello. Instead she cursed him the entire two miles we walked into town. “Goddamned good-for-nothing lazy bastard,” she said. “What good's fifty dollars gonna do? I gotta get you ready for school, and we gotta eat, and I need things for the house. There he is in the city making good money and sending us peanuts and expecting me to be goddamned grateful. Well, I got news for him. I've half a mind to —”

She never finished so I never knew what she had a half mind to do. I knew better than to ask. But I was happy Jake was thinking of me and hadn't forgotten me, even if he didn't come and get me like he promised. At night I dreamed of the tall glass towers of Halifax, just like Jake described them. I imagined Jake and I walking under them together and sleeping in his apartment at night and getting up and having breakfast together in the morning. I imagined living with Jake, and going to school and meeting new kids and wearing nice clothes and not handme-downs from the Salvation Army and the
VON
.

I think about of all these things again as I do the dishes and Mom runs about the house. I wonder what he has to tell Mom. In my heart there is always the hope Jake has come to get me, to take me with him back to Halifax for good, and I will never see North River and Johnny Lang ever again. But then I hear Mom's voice in my head cursing Jake and saying maybe that's too much to hope for after all, now, isn't it?

JOHNNY'S FATHER BUILT THE CABIN
on River Road before he got sent up to Dorchester Penitentiary for aggravated assault in
1967
when Johnny was eleven. Johnny doesn't talk about his father, but Irene Lang told me plenty when I was living beside her at Carla and Nathan's. “He was an awful man,” she said to me once. “Scared the living daylights out of me just to be around him. You felt he was looking right through you, like you weren't even there, or didn't matter one whit in his books.”

What happened between Johnny and his father is well known in North River. I only heard Johnny mention it once, late one Saturday night in August when everyone had left and I was staying over at his place because Carla and I were fighting and she kicked me out again. Johnny and I were both drunk, and stoned, and finishing off the beer and the last of the Columbian Red in his living room before we went to bed. Out of nowhere Johnny says, “I meant to kill him, you know.”

“To kill who?” I thought Johnny meant the guy from Oldsport who almost got the chainsaw enema, but Johnny, sunk deep in his armchair with the last bottle of Alexander Keith's India Pale Ale wedged firmly against his crotch, drunkenly shook his head, as if he knew what I was thinking.

“Him,” he said. “
Him
. I meant to do it. I
wanted
to do it.” Johnny passed out then, and never said another word about it, but I knew then he'd been talking about his father.

The story goes that Johnny's father was released from prison when Johnny was thirteen, and came right back to North River from New Brunswick. Johnny's mother was dying of cancer. I don't remember which kind, but does it matter? My own mother had cancer of the bowel around the same time, and was shitting into a colostomy bag and weighed no more than eighty pounds fully dressed and soaking wet before she died.

By the time Johnny's father came back his mother was endstage and bedridden and Johnny had been taking care of things for almost a year. His aunt Irene came over and helped out when she could, but Johnny did most of it. And then his father comes in, starts ordering Johnny around, taking what money they had and getting drunk and lying around the cabin all day and night in a stupor. He started taking after Johnny almost right away, just like he done before he left. One night he picked him up and hurled him into the fireplace and nearly broke his back. Luckily it was summer and there wasn't any fire, but Irene figured it wouldn't have mattered if there had been — John Senior would have thrown Johnny Junior in anyway.

But the last straw was the night John Senior — Little John, as everyone called him — took after Johnny's mother. Drunk, he decided in the middle of the night he wanted some food, and instead of getting Johnny up he tried to get his sick wife out of bed. He half-dragged her onto the floor and when she still wouldn't get up — she was too drugged and delirious to know what was happening — he went out back, got a pail of cold water from the well, brought it in and dumped it over her where she lay on the floor in her nightdress.

Johnny watched all this from the doorway to his mother's room. When his father gave up and went back to drinking in the living room, Johnny helped her back into bed and dried her off with a towel. Then he waited until his father passed out in his chair in front of the television, took one of the twelve gauge shotguns down from the rack in his parents' bedroom and loaded it. He went back into the living room, aimed the gun close range at his father's head and pulled the trigger. Then he called his aunt and told her what he had done.

The story was in all the papers, and for a while Johnny Lang was famous. So was Johnny's mother, who died during her son's trial in juvenile court in Oldsport. Irene Lang made the news when she told a reporter from Halifax the only sin about what happened was that they sent a boy to do a man's job. One of the investigating
RCMP
officers, who'd had his fair share of runins with John Lang Senior over the years, said publicly John Junior deserved a medal for what he did. The trial judge sentenced Johnny to six months in juvenile detention in Spring Hill, and said in his summation that the rule of law forced him to pass a minimum sentence, though if it were up to him Johnny wouldn't spend a half day in jail or a minute more than he had to in his courtroom. Johnny ended up serving the full six months, because he got in a lot of fights at the detention centre, and afterwards was sent home to live with his aunt Irene. He moved back into the cabin when he was seventeen, the year he quit school and got a job at the mill. Irene said she was glad to see him go. She was scared of him, she said. Especially when he was drinking, which he started to do right after reform school.

“Like father, like son,” she said. “You'd think going through something like what Johnny had been through would make him a better person, not a worse one.”

I know what Johnny would say to that if I told him, and he was willing to talk about it. “This ain't no fuckin' television program, McNeil. What in the fuck do you think seeing your own father's brains scattered all over your living room floor would make you, knowing you pulled the trigger? Mother goddamned fucking Teresa?”