Just Beneath My Skin (5 page)

THE LATE AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT BREAKS
through the clouds and filters duskily down through the trees and in through the patio doors at the front of the cabin. The fire crackles and sparks in the hearth. Outside I can hear the river gushing moodily over the falls. Suddenly I see Nathan's face in my mind's eye, as clear as day. He is smiling at me the way he does sometimes when we're alone, his head turned a little to one side like his mother does when she wants something. Only Nathan doesn't want anything. Except for the one thing I want too, the thing we don't mention or speak about or even dream could happen.

If I can get away from Johnny and the hell out of North River for good, maybe I can give it to him.

JAKE'S MY ONLY FRIEND. I
used to have one in Grade Two named Tommy, but he moved to Trenton when his mom and dad got a divorce. Jake and Mom never got a divorce.

I asked Jake about this once. He said people only get a divorce if they're married, and Jake and Mom didn't get married. In school once we did a report on our parents. Everyone got up in front of the class and told about their mother and father. When they were born. When they met. When they were married and stuff like that. I didn't know what to do. I could have written about Jake but I was worried Mom would find out and take after me. I worried and worried about that report. I didn't know what to write. In the end I just wrote about Mom and not about Jake. When I finished, my teacher, Mrs. Burns, asked me to go ahead and do my father. I was really embarrassed. I didn't know what to say. All the other kids laughed and Mrs. Burns told them to be quiet. She told me I could sit down. After that kids started saying I didn't have any father. They said a seagull jerked off on a rock and the sun hatched me. I didn't know what jerked off was so I asked Jake.

“Where did you hear that?” he said.

I told him about the report, and what happened. I was worried I would hurt Jake's feelings when he found out I didn't write about him. But he just smiled. “I wouldn't worry about those assholes in your class,” Jake said. “You know who your father is, don't you?”

“Yes Jake,” I said.

“That's all that matters then,” Jake said.

That was the closest Jake and I ever came to talking about it.

UP NORTH ON THE LOGGING
crew I was a marker. I would walk around the woods all day with a green knapsack on my back stuffed with rolls of neon orange surveyor's tape and tie lengths of it around the trunks of trees, marking them for the rest of the crew to cut down. Some days I would mark two hundred trees or more — birch and oak and tamarack and spruce and pine and poplar and maple and anything else big enough to feel the bite of the saw. In the distance I could hear the shouts of the crew and the snarl of their power saws, the idling of the boom trucks as they were loaded to haul the logs back to North River. Other times I went so deep into the woods I couldn't hear anything. The snow was deep, and I wore rubber boots and hip waders to keep myself dry. At lunch I stopped and ate sandwiches from my knapsack and washed them down with hot coffee laced with cream and sugar from a thermos. It got so that I felt a part of the woods. Deer would pick their way delicately through the deep snow and barely stop to look at me. Once, in the early part of the year, a black bear lumbered by, in its last full days before it crawled into a cave to sleep until spring. Squirrels scampered along lengths of branches above me and scolded as I passed. Ravens cawed from the tops of Scotch pines. Porcupines and rabbits sat back on their haunches and stared curiously at me from the ground.

I thought a lot.

It was funny how much I thought. My mother used to say I was a boy who liked my own company, and that was as true then as it ever was. I imagined all kinds of things — normal things, like being famous, or rich, or getting a blow job from a blonde with huge tits I once saw in Oldsport, the kind of girl who did not exist in North River and, it seemed, never would. Not normal things, like living in a world without trees where everything was flat and tan and green, or travelling in a oneman, glass-sided spaceship past Pluto, the small blue ice planet I learned about in science class in Grade Nine and somehow never forgot. I thought about my mother, and Jerry Rowter, a boy from my class who died in a car accident in Grade Eleven. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a bear, and get fat and sleep for seven months out of the year in a cave, or be a squirrel, and collect nuts and live in the trunk of a tree. And of course I thought about Nathan.

I wrote him letters in my head.

Dear Nathan. I am your father.

Dear Nathan. I wish the two of us could travel in a glass ship together to the edges of space.

Stupid stuff. Stuff I would never tell anyone about, except maybe the blonde.

At the end of the day I would come back to the camp, as tired from my thoughts as from fighting through all that snow and reaching around the trunks of trees to tie tape all day. I would have dinner with the crew, who would tease me and call me Grizzly Adams 'cause I was growing a beard, and ask me what I did out there by myself in the woods all day and didn't I think I might go blind from it? I laughed with them, 'cause they were good men, and didn't mean no harm. After supper we drank rum and played whist in front of the stove, and crawled in our bunks around the same time and shot the shit in the darkness for an hour or so before falling off to sleep. That was the only time I ever remember belonging and feeling right about things my whole life, probably because I had all that time in the day to be by myself and think about things.

MY FATHER WAS BORN IN
1957
.

His birthday is November
14
th.

He drives a purple Pinto. He says the Pinto is a piece of shit. He would rather have a Dodge Charger.

My father has light brown hair and brown eyes. His hair is always hanging in his eyes.

He wears a black leather jacket.

He used to work at the mill in North River.

He used to work in the woods on a logging crew.

Now he works at the Dockyards in Halifax.

I'm not supposed to tell anyone he is my father.

I would like to be like him when I grow up.

AFTER I GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL
I went to university in Halifax for one year. It was my father's idea. It cost a lot of money to go. My grades were good but not good enough to get a scholarship. I got a student loan. My old man said he wanted me to get a decent job and not end up at the mill like every other guy my age in North River.

“What's wrong with the mill?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said, “if you want to blister your hands and strain your back and work for minimum wage for the rest of your life.”

So I went. I didn't know what to take. I always read a lot — my favourite writer was Stephen King — so my old man suggested I study English. I sent off an application to the University of King's College in Halifax, where my father knew someone. It was an Anglican school, and though my old man was Baptist, he thought it would be a good idea if I went to a school where there was an outside chance I would go to church once in a while, no matter whose church it was.

I hated college from the first minute I got there. All the other students were from rich families, and drove nice cars, and a lot of them went to private schools and had their own credit cards. I didn't even have my own bank account. I took the Foundation Year Program where they assigned all these authors I'd never heard of — Sophocles and St. Augustine and Thomas Hobbes. They bored me to tears. I wore a leather jacket and my hair was long. Everyone else had nice coats and polo shirts and cut their hair short. Most of the time I wandered around in a daze, wondering how the hell I had gone from reading
The Shining
to
The Confessions
in such a short time.

Some of the guys in my dorm saw I was struggling. They tried to help me through it. They came into my room and asked me how it was going and offered to read over my papers and told me to take it slow and not get caught up in not having a Jaguar.

It didn't work. By December I was flunking, and when I went home for Christmas I told my father I wasn't going back.

“Why?” my father asked me.

“Because,” I told him. “It's not for me. The work's too hard, and the people are not my kind of people.”

“What is your kind of people, Jake?” my dad said. “Johnny Lang? Charlie Whynot?”

“At least,” I said, “they don't put on airs.”

“What you call airs,” my father said, “I call being educated. You're never going to get anywhere with this attitude.”

We fought about it, and for Christmas that year my father gave me a yellow hard hat and a pair of work gloves. He meant it as an insult, but I didn't give him the satisfaction.

“Thanks,” I said. “These will come in handy.”

That was the year I met Carla, and she got pregnant with Nathan. I moved in with her and out of my father's house. He still talked about college sometimes, saying I messed up a great opportunity and that my mother would be disappointed if she was alive. I didn't bother to argue with him about it. I did go to work at the mill that March, and my father was right. It was hard labour, and sometimes I came home so bone-tired I could barely find the strength to eat.

My job was a poler. I would stand on a raft in the middle of the log pond and peavey-pole logs onto the chain, where they would get carried up to the first saw before they went to the re-saw further inside the mill. I had a lot to think about, standing there and herding logs onto the chain all day. I thought about some of the books we read in college, and the only one I liked, which was this play by an Italian guy named Pirandello called
Six Characters in Search of an Author
. It was about these characters in a play who were lost on stage, and one of their kids gets killed. The sad part of the story was once the play was over you realized all these characters were doomed to repeat this same story over and over again, with the same tragedy, because they had yet to be written.

Sometimes that's the way I felt in North River. Like we were all living the same lives over and over again, with no way out, with no one to write us. I had my chance, I suppose, but I blew it when I quit university.

That's why I went to Halifax the second time.

To be written.

I'M SCARED OF MY SCHOOL.

Sometimes the older boys catch me on school grounds when the teacher isn't looking and give me noogies and Indian rope burns. They call me names. They say my mother is a whore and we don't own a pot to piss in. They all have nice houses on Cobb's Ridge. Cobb's Ridge is where all the rich kids live.

Once Jake went to the principal of our school when I told him what was happening at recess and asked him what he was going to do about it. The principal's name was Mr. Sheppard.

“Do about what?” Mr. Sheppard said.

I had a black eye that day. I told Jake one of the boys in school gave it to me.

“This,” Jake said, pushing me towards Mr. Sheppard. “This has got to stop. The kids beat up on him.”

Mr. Sheppard looked at me then back at Jake. “I'm afraid, Jake,” he said, “that Nathan came to school with that particular bruise on Monday morning. I assure you he did not get it on school grounds.”

Jake looked at me, and then at Mr. Sheppard. He looked like he didn't know what to say.

“It's not the first time he's come to school with marks on him,” Mr. Sheppard said.

Jake sent me out of the office. He and Mr. Sheppard stayed in there a long time talking. After a while Jake came out again. He barely spoke on the way home. But before we turned onto Harmony Lake Road, Jake asked me why I told him the kids in school gave me the black eye.

“They did give it to me,” I said.

Jake didn't say anything. That night he and Mom fought. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. Jake threatened to take me away. He said he wouldn't go to work on the treecutting crew anymore because Mom couldn't be trusted when he was gone. But the next morning when I woke up Jake had left again to go up north. He wouldn't be back for a whole week.

“Where's Jake?” I asked my mom.

“Never mind,” she said. “Eat your breakfast.”

Except there wasn't any breakfast. I had to make it myself.

I REGRET STAYING THE MINUTE
Johnny comes back out the bedroom with a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands. Is it the same gun he killed his father with? I decide it isn't. The police would have confiscated that one, wouldn't they? Johnny is smiling and looking straight at me as he sits down in the chair with the gun laid across his lap. Its barrel is pointing directly at Charlie, who is still on the nod and mumbling away to himself, oblivious.

“It's loaded,” he says. “In case you think I'm foolin' ya and didn't put a shell in it. Do you think I'm foolin' ya?”

His blue eyes look a little wild, the pupils dilated. The two hits of purple microdot are working in him good. I slowly shake my head to Johnny's question.

“Good,” he says. “Now, if you say one more word about havin' to leave before I tell you it's okay to leave, or you try and take off when you think I'm not looking, I'm gonna blow a hole in you the size of an oil barrel cover. You got it?”

I nod, and again say nothing. My mouth is too dry
to
say anything. I'm scared but I'm not surprised. It is as if I'd always known our relationship would come to this.

Johnny lights up a smoke and offers me one. I quit over a year ago, but something tells me it wouldn't be wise to refuse. Also, under the circumstances, I need one. I take the smoke and Johnny, leaning over the gun in his lap, holds the Bic up for me so I can light it. It tastes awfully good, like when I was a kid and first learned how to smoke without getting sick. For something to say, I tell him this.

“Yeah,” he says. It's like the gun's not even there, we're acting so calm and normal. “Every once in a while you have one like that. It tastes so goddamned good it reminds you of the first cigarette you ever smoked.”

I nod, except the first cigarette I ever smoked didn't taste so good. I was eleven and it was with my friend Eugene, who moved away a few years after. I inhaled the whole thing and was so dizzy and sick I had to lie down by the side of the road 'til it went away. I swore right then I would never smoke again, though, of course, it didn't stick. Promises made like that never do.

I ask Johnny about the first cigarette he ever smoked. It makes sense to me to keep him talking, to keep things even between us and not act too scared. Maybe then he will put the gun up and let me go. Johnny scowls. “It was with the ol' man. I was eight or so, and we was huntin' and he gave me one. I didn't want it, but he made me. He called me a goddamned pussy and bugged me 'til I lit up. Right from the first, though, I liked it, and I used to steal 'em from his pack when he wasn't lookin'. I used to think it served the bastard right for makin' me have one when I didn't want to.”

Charlie wakes up. He shouts something we can't make out, and Johnny and I both jump. It's lucky Johnny's finger isn't on the trigger, 'cause the bore is pointing at Charlie. Charlie lifts his head, opens his eyes, and looks at us blearily. He reaches out for the pack of smokes on the coffee table, though he can't be seeing well, 'cause he keeps missing them.

“Light one for 'im, will ya?” Johnny says to me.

I do, and hand it to Charlie. He takes it in the hand without the glove and shivers like he's cold, though Johnny has a fire going in the fireplace, and it's hot as Hades in there.

Johnny picks up the gun, puts it to his shoulder, and aims at Charlie's head. “What do you think, McNeil? Put ol' Charlie here out of his misery?”

Charlie doesn't even notice. He keeps one arm wrapped around his waist, leaning forward and staring at the table and sucking away on his cigarette. I figure it's best not to say anything while Johnny sights up Charlie's head in the bead.

“Blam!” says Johnny, and lowers the gun. He reaches over and tousles Charlie's hair. “He's a good boy, ol' Charlie.”

Charlie keeps staring at the one spot on the table, shivering and acting as if he hasn't heard.

Maybe he hasn't. I figure he's seeing and hearing shit from the acid. Just then Johnny decides he has to go take a piss. “But what am I gonna do with you?” he says. He turns to Charlie, looks as if he is considering giving the gun to him, and then changes his mind. Charlie's so out of it he won't be able to see to keep a bead on me. He turns back to me. “Remember that little window in the bathroom?” he says. “The one looks out onto the driveway?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Well, you try to leave, and think of me, leaning over the toilet taking a piss with the barrel of this gun hanging out that window and my finger on the trigger. You won't make it to your car.”

“Jesus, Johnny,” I say, feeling more scared suddenly than I had been. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because,” Johnny answers. “You ain't the same, McNeil. The city's changed you, and I figure it's my job to change you back, or have you die trying.” Johnny laughs at his own joke, and hoists the shotgun up over his shoulder, soldier-style. “Remember that little window,” he says, “and think of me if you try to leave.”