Just Beneath My Skin (4 page)

JAKE'S MY FATHER. EVERYONE KNOWS
it, but Mom doesn't like for me to say it or call him anything but Jake, so I don't. She met him here, in North River, not long after the guy she followed out from Oldsport left her and went to Cavendish to live with his sister.

Sometimes Mom tells people he was my father. Sometimes she tells them it was some man from the States who had a cottage and lots of money. Only once, when she was drunk, did she say to me who my real father was, though by then I already knew.

“You're just like him,” she said, sitting at the kitchen table. She was holding a pint of beer in her lap and nodding her head slowly up and down, as if someone only she could hear was talking to her. I was on the linoleum floor in front of the fridge playing dinky cars. Whenever Mom is drinking she likes to have me around to talk to if there's no one else, though sometimes she forgets I'm there.

“Your father,” she said, and waved a hand at the front door, like he was standing outside. “Him! That … that … you know who I mean!”

“Yes Mom,” I said.

She shook her head hard from side to side as if I'd said
something wrong, or she was trying to clear it of something. She stopped and for a while she didn't say anything else. She hung her head over her beer. I went back to my cars. I liked dinky cars. Mom sometimes got me some for my birthday and one year Jake bought me a whole box of Hotrods for Christmas. I still keep them in the box they came in, all twenty cars stuck sideways in their styrofoam slots. The front of the box has twenty clear plastic windows so you can see each one. My favourite is the souped-up yellow Dodge Charger. It has a breather, lightning decals, mags and a
450
Hemi engine under the hood. I ask Jake how he knows the Charger has a Hemi engine 'cause its hood doesn't open.

“Well it should have one,” Jake says, “if it's gonna be any damn good.”

Jake used to play dinky cars with me if Mom wasn't around or she was in a good mood, and he would take the Charger and race me with it. He has a beat-up
1972
purple Pinto. Someday he wants to own the souped-up Charger.

“That … that one!” my mother crowed suddenly, making me jump. “Him! Your father. That good-for-nothing, low-down, dirty
bastard
of a man.” She struggled to her feet, somehow still managing to hold on to the beer. She just stood there, but now she was looking down at me and I felt scared. Her eyes were red, and hard as marbles. The skin around them was puffed up like it got when she was too drunk. She looked at me like an earwig if it got into the kitchen and she wanted to crush it underfoot.

“You're just like him,” she said. “Him and you with your secrets together, and whispering. Don't think I don't hear what you say when you think I'm not listening. I hear. I listen. The two of you making plans against me. Don't think I don't hear it, Mr. Man. Don't think I'm not on to the two of you.”

I can't remember what happened next. Maybe she went to bed and fell asleep and snored the rest of the night. But at least she told me finally, though she would tell me different the next morning. The thing about Mom is, no matter how drunk she gets, she never forgets anything that happens. “About what I said last night,” she told me, her eyes still red and puffed, but softer and more tired now. “I was just foolin' ya. Jake isn't really your father, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “I was just talking.”

“I know,” I said again.

Jake was my father. That much I was sure of, though he never said as much and my mother denied it like Peter denied Jesus before he was nailed to the cross, like Irene Lang told me. Sometimes just by watching Jake I could see me, like I was buried there just underneath his skin, a few inches deep, trying to claw my way out. And sometimes it was just the way Jake looked at me, though in a way his look made me feel worse than Mom's when she got drunk. I'd catch him at it when he thought I wasn't looking — at the table, say, or when we were watching
The Dukes of Hazzard
on Friday night and Mom went out to bingo at the Masonic Lodge with Irene Lang.

I'd look beside me on the couch and Jake would be staring right at me like I done something. Or like he hadn't seen me in a long while. Or like he might not see me ever again.

“What's wrong, Jake?” I'd ask. He'd shake his head and say, “Nothing,” and turn back to the
TV
. But I could tell it was something. I knew. It wasn't just me Jake was looking at like that, like I caught him by surprise by even being there and being alive. It was himself he was looking at, buried in me just like I was buried in him.

Even Mom has to admit she sees that much about us.

TWICE JOHNNY SENDS ME AND
Charlie back to the liquor store for more White Shark and by three o'clock they are so pie-eyed they can barely see three feet in front of them. And yet, every time I make noises about going, Johnny tells me to sit the fuck still. “What's your hurry, McNeil? You got a dinner party to go to?”

Sometimes Johnny gets in these moods and there isn't any point arguing with him. You have to wait him out. If I play along long enough, he'll see I've had enough and let me go. So I sit and wait. He doesn't seem to notice I'm not drinking much.

Or maybe he noticed and doesn't mind — all the more for him if I don't. Johnny is flat broke. He quit working at the mill years ago. He is on welfare, and sells enough hash and weed and the occasional sheet of acid to keep him drunk and high most of the time. But the dope business hasn't been so good lately. The
RCMP
seized a big shipment of Columbian coming in off the coast of Oldsport and Johnny's supply has dried up.

He has some, though, 'cause he keeps pulling out a baggie and rolling joints. I take it each time it comes to me, take a few half-hearted puffs and pass it on. When Johnny pulls out three tabs of purple microdot and tells Charlie and I to each take one, I refuse.

“Sorry, man,” I say. “I gotta go see the old man and Carla tonight. I can't be too fucked up, ya know?”

Johnny doesn't say nothing. Charlie pops one tab and Johnny pops the last two. Then he leans back in his chair and squints at me. I feel uncomfortable, but there is nothing I can do. I'll never get out of here if I take that stuff and, besides, I never really liked it. I feel too out-of-control on acid. I remember one time freaking out on it and running into the woods behind Johnny's house in the middle of the night. I stayed in there five hours and hallucinated all kinds of crazy shit. I saw an old hag dressed in rags with long stringy grey hair scramble up a tree and look down and cackle at me. I saw a deer with eyes as big as saucers. I found a place to curl up and close my eyes and wait for the acid to wear off. I came out at dawn to find Johnny and Charlie and a bunch of others sitting up in Johnny's house still tripping. They took one look at me, with pine needles stuck to my clothes and in my hair, and started laughing their asses off.

Johnny don't look none too happy, but he doesn't force me to do the acid. Charlie's chin drops to his chest as he sits there mumbling to himself. He isn't asleep, just so drunk he can't hold his head up. Charlie gets this way at a certain point in the day, though at any moment he can snap out of it and start talking and drinking like he was before. Johnny seems to get more comfortable in his chair and is staring off at the wall at a point just above my head. We sit that way for what seems like close to a half hour with nobody saying nothing. The clock above the sink says it's five o'clock. I tell Johnny I have to go.

His eyes slide down from whatever he is staring at to crawl across my face. “Sure, man,” he says. “Just hold on second.”

I can tell the acid is working in Johnny when he has trouble getting out of his chair. It isn't the kind of trouble you have when you're drunk. It's like he thinks the chair is gonna float away on him if he isn't careful. He gets out of it gingerly, and says, “I'll be right back.”

He disappears into the bedroom.

I think about splitting right then. I might make it to the car before Johnny wises up, and he doesn't have any wheels to follow me. I'd have to be careful whenever I came back into North River but at least I'd be free of him.

In the end, I don't have the guts to move outta my chair.

MY MIDDLE NAME IS ALEXANDER
. Mom says Jake gave it to me. He wanted it to be my first name, “after some dumb Greek he read about somewhere,” but Mom wouldn't let him. “Alexander's too damn long,” she said, “and Alex is a girl's name.” Mom told me this once when she was in a good mood, when she forgot, I guess, Jake wasn't supposed to be my father.

“He was just around at the time,” she said when she caught herself. “I let him help with the naming.”

When Mom told me this last year I looked up the dumb Greek in an encyclopedia at school. The only Greek guy in there was Alexander the Great and it turns out he wasn't really Greek at all but from a place called Macedonia that the Greeks didn't like because they thought everyone who lived there was stupid, kind of like the way Nova Scotians feel about people from Newfoundland. I wondered at the time if the Greeks made up Macedonian jokes, like how many Macedonians did it take to screw in a light bulb, until I remembered light bulbs weren't invented then. We learned all about Thomas Edison that year in school. His father was from Nova Scotia, but I was sure I remembered he was from New York. I didn't know how close New York was to Macedonia but I had no one to ask. Mom would get mad if I asked her, and Jake was off in the woods that winter cutting trees with a crew. It was still neat knowing Jake gave me that name.

It said in the book that Alexander the Great beat up almost all of the world and took it all over — though he never made it as far as Canada because he didn't know where it was on the map. It said he was a great warrior, the greatest ever, and after he beat all those people up and killed the soldiers and raped the wives and took over the land he was kind and just and a good king.

Whenever I think of my middle name I feel good about it somehow. I whisper it to myself sometimes when no one's around:
Alexander.
It's like Jake has buried something special right inside me somehow by naming me that, like there's this great warrior caught between my first name and my last, waiting to come out.

Whenever things go bad I try to think of him and what a great fighter like him would do in my place.

WHEN I WAS FIVE I
fell in my grandfather's barn. I liked to go into the loft because I liked the smell of the hay. He stored it in stacked bales ten high and when he needed some he and I would climb up and he'd let me help throw the bales down to the floor of the barn and watch them break open then pull them into rows to pitch to the cows. But sometimes I would go up alone and climb the bales and sit at the top and breathe in the smell of the fresh-cut hay and watch the hay dust drift into the shafts of light cutting in from the barn windows. My grandnan didn't like me in there. She was afraid I would fall, but Grandad didn't mind as long as I was careful. But one time climbing the tallest stack of hay in the loft I lost my footing, grabbed hold of a bale to keep from falling, and the whole stack came down. I landed on my back and the bales tumbled down in a pile on top of me.

Later everyone said it was lucky I didn't break a bone, or my back. Granddad said there must have been ten bales or more on top of me when he found me. But I wasn't hurt. I lay there smelling the warm hay, feeling its weight on top of me, wondering about the darkness because the bales had sealed me off from the world and the light. I wasn't scared. It was the first time I remember thinking it was strange how the world could go from one way to another in a minute, from one simple misstep. From light and air to darkness and heaviness and the smell of hay so close around me it pressed in like a blanket. I've thought of that many times since. I didn't fight my way out from under the hay. I lay there for what seemed like hours, until my granddad came up to check on me and found me under the hay and lifted it all off and set me free.

“You gave us half a scare, boy,” he said later. “Thought you were dead for a minute.”

I never told my granddad I could have made my own way out from underneath the hay any time I wanted. That I didn't because I liked the darkness, and the smell, and I knew things under the hay I couldn't have known at any other time. I was only five.

WHEN I WAS FIVE I
almost died.

Mom said it was something called a “summer complaint.” I got all filled up and couldn't breathe and they took me to the Oldsport hospital. A whole bunch of doctors and nurses put needles in my arms and took my temperature.

I was really scared. Jake and Mom weren't allowed to see me, because the doctors thought they might get it too. The doctors and nurses who came into my room had to wear masks. The nurses were really nice, but I still wanted to go home. I couldn't sleep at night. There was too much light, and the nurses kept coming in and waking me up. Once during the day I fell asleep and when I woke up Jake was sitting beside my bed with a white mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like he was crying.

“What's wrong, Jake?” I asked.

“Nothing, squirt,” he said. “How you feeling?”

“I want to go home, Jake,” I said.

“Soon, squirt,” he said. “Soon.”

I was in the hospital for almost a whole week and when I went home I didn't have to go to school in September when it started. I was home for almost two months. The principal wanted to keep
me back because I missed too much but Mom fought with him and they let me in. My first day back everyone talked about how I was almost dead.

“Hey shithead!” one of the older kids said to me on the playground at recess. “Heard you almost kicked the bucket!”

I didn't know what “kicked the bucket” meant. Jake had to explain it to me. For a while everyone was really nice. Even Mom. But then she got tired of having me under her feet and made me get dressed in my snowsuit one afternoon and go outside and play with the other kids. Mom always said I should go out and play with the other kids though there was no one else to play with on our road. Jake got mad and said I was still too sick to be outside in the snow. Mom told him I was her son and not his and she could do whatever she wanted. Jake and her started screaming and Jake got so mad he left and didn't come home for three days. That was no big deal. Jake was always taking off for two or three days after he and Mom got in one of their fights. Each time it happened I worried he wouldn't come back. When Jake wasn't around things were too quiet in our house. But Jake always did come back. He'd show up like normal one morning. I'd get outta bed and go to the kitchen and there Jake would be, sitting with Mom at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking coffee.

“Heyya squirt,” he'd say as if he hadn't been anywhere at all. He and Mom would be talking quietly about anything except their fight and the fact we hadn't seen Jake for days. For a while things would be okay between them. I liked these times. I could sit between my mother and Jake at the table and eat my Frosted Flakes and not worry one of them was going to get mad and start yelling. Sometimes Jake reached out and mussed my hair. Mom didn't say anything, though normally she didn't like Jake to touch me. I loved it when Jake touched me. It made me feel all good inside, like I was sitting next to a wood stove and outside it was storming real bad, but inside I was warm and safe. That's how having Jake touch me made me feel.