Lost Between Houses (5 page)

“God, it’s eerie how you can hear everything.” We listened for a few moments.

“I wish I had a girl here,” Harper said. “I might try to take Annie Kincaid home in the boat tonight. Can you get a ride if I do?”

“Who would I get a ride from?”

“Just do me a favour, will you, if I give you the signal? Don’t come up and ask me when we’re going home.”

“Hardly,” I said.

“And don’t tell the old lady.”

I won’t.

A boat puttered by us, its bow light all green and holy.

“I’m looking forward to Christmas,” I said,

“Christmas?” he said, “Where the fuck did that come from? Was it that light on the bow?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I like it when it’s all cold and snowy. I sort of miss it.”

“What time is it?” Harper asked after awhile.

“Time you got a watch.”

“No, really, we don’t want to get there too early. Look like a pair of fucking losers.”

“We should dress like twins. You know, matching cardigans.”

“Right. A pair
of real
assholes.”

I heard him laugh in the dark.

“Never could figure out why those guys do that. Dress the same. Even when they’re grown up. It’s completely fucked up.”

“Exactly.”

“So what time is it?”

“It’s ten o’clock.”

“Better sit out here a bit longer.”

He spread himself out on the seat, putting his feet up on the side of the boat. Arms behind his head. I lay back on the other
seat and the two of us just floated out onto the black lake, staring up at the stars and saying fuck-all.

I saw Sandy Hunter in the line-up but I pretended not to see her. She was a local girl, went to high school up here. I met her at a dance last summer where she was wearing this white shirt (you could see she had real tits underneath, the way the shirt was pushed out), and when Greg introduced me to her, I was so nervous I could hardly talk. I don’t think I even looked at her. Anyway, must have been a few nights later, I looked up her number in the phone book and with my heart thumping like a fucking rabbit, I gave her a call. I even made a list of stuff to talk about, so I didn’t run out. Anyway, it went all right. But it was the damndest thing, soon as she started to like me, she stopped seeming so good-looking. I grew distinctly cool toward her and then one day when one of her friends told me that she told her that I’d kissed her, I pretended it was big betrayal, you know, the sort of thing she shouldn’t have told anybody about and I used it as an excuse to dump her. She called me up a few times after that, sort of bawling, which made me like her even less, but I felt guilty, like somebody who’s run over a dog: you just want to back up the car and finish them off.

Finally she cooled it and stopped calling me, the rest of the summer went by. I didn’t get another girlfriend and one night I saw Sandy again at the Teen Town dance. She was wearing a black turtleneck sweater, with those little tits standing out, and I was pretty cocky and confident, I mean I was pretty sure she liked me more than the guy she was with, she was just with him because she couldn’t be with me, and this song came on, “Sherry,” it was, and I clapped my hands together and I hollered something like, “I just love this song,” and then I started to
dance, sort of, and she gave me this real cold look, I mean not in the spirit of things at all, and said, “You’re so obnoxious.”

It went right through me. I felt as if somebody had caught me singing to the mirror or something, I mean I felt like a complete asshole. So ever since then I’ve sort of stayed away from Sandy Hunter because it’s no fun to be around somebody who used to like you a lot and doesn’t any more.

I just about had a bird waiting in the line-up to get into the dance. It took like forever. The guy at the door was a disc jockey at the Huntsville radio station, and he was carrying on like a big fucking celebrity and making everybody wait while he flirted with all the chicks. You could hear the band start up and that just made me homicidal with impatience.

“Take it easy,” Harper said. But I couldn’t, I kept sticking my head over the top of the crowd like a giraffe, giving the guy dirty looks. Finally I got to the door.

“About time,” I said, but the guy just ignored me. He was talking about his wife, telling some kid he should’ve waited to get married. Too much temptation. “Sure you look,” he said, “it’s natural.” Like I give a shit, right?

I tore myself away from these two Einsteins and went in. I got a stamp on my hand that glowed when you put it under a purple lamp. Whenever I saw that neon purple at the door to a dance it made me feel like I was entering an exotic kingdom.

I went over and stood by the band. They were a Toronto group, Tommy Graham and the Big Town Boys. I’d seen them on TV a lot, and they seemed kind of corny to me, in their matching striped shirts and white jeans, all of them exactly the same, the kind of rock band that grownups tap their foot out of time to. But I’ll tell you, in person they were something else. I mean they could really play, even Tommy who’d always seemed
like a bit of a gearbox to me, mincing around with his little white guitar and skinny legs. I used to think to myself, boy, only in Canada would a bunch of gearboxes like these guys get on the air. I mean in England they got the Beatles and the Stones and in the States they got Bob Dylan but up here we get Tommy Graham and the Big Town Boys. But they had a great drummer. He had a set of black Rogers drums, a double tom and a double bass. That’s a lot of artillery. I stood by the side of the stage watching him play and I felt just the worst kind of envy. I mean I would have died to do something like that, but he was older than I was, maybe four, five years, so I figured I still had time.

I looked around the room. I didn’t want to move or somebody would take my place. I saw Sandy Hunter; she was talking to a tall, sportsy-looking guy with a brushcut. Terry somebody. I think he was captain of the lacrosse team, a real bonehead but you don’t want to fool around with a guy like that. He kept giving me looks so I figured she was talking about me, telling him what an asshole I was and he was just dying for the chance for me to do something stupid so he could take me outside into the parking lot and kick the shit out of me. So I made sure I didn’t catch his eye.

Greg came up to me but he was pissed. He did that all the time at dances, I mean you’d figure with those teeth he might behave himself, but forget it. Him and a couple of guys had gone drinking in the truck before the dance and he was all big and blustery in a way that made me nervous. Grabbing people and hugging them and all that shit. It was kind of a look-at-how-drunk-I-am number, real noisy, and frankly I didn’t want anybody to think he was a friend of mine. Nice eh? Well, there you go. I guess if you’re going to get drunk and behave like an asshole, you got to expect people to duck you.

I saw those two sisters from Quebec. Man, they were good-looking, one with light hair, one with black hair; sharp little chins and black eyes. Like a pair of dolls. Sex dolls. They were out of my league, I knew that, I mean there was no point in even trying, although one of them, I have to say, smiled at me sometimes. I think she either felt sorry for me or she thought I was real interesting because I never talked to her. Who knows? Maybe she was just nice. I turned back to watch the band. He could do some pretty fancy footwork, that drummer, he knew I was watching him and every so often he’d look over and give me a nod. With these little round sunglasses and cowboy boots, he was just about the coolest looking guy you’ve ever seen. I mean he had it all. But I didn’t want him to think he had to perform for me all night long, so after awhile I moved across the floor and went upstairs.

From up there I could watch the girls dancing. There’s nothing like a girl who can really dance. It’s like watching God. Up there you could watch and watch and watch and nobody knew you were staring, or what you were thinking about. The smell of those dancing bodies floated up through the heat and the smoke and the coloured lights. I wondered what those girls did with their sweaty shirts and underwear when they got home. Did they leave them all lying on the bed, did they hang them up in the washroom? I sort of wished I could take their sweaty clothes home, just have them to myself in my bedroom for a little bit. Just thinking like that gave me the most awful kind of plunging sensation. I had to step back and take a deep breath. Otherwise I’d have gone over the balcony.

I saw one of the French Canadian girls, the dark-haired one, standing by the railing and I gave her a sort of formal hello. And when she didn’t call the cops on me, I stopped for a second and
asked her how she was. Pretty good, she said, bending her head down and taking a sip of her coke. It made me sort of ill, just how good-looking she was. She asked me how it was going and I started to tell her, I mean I started to say that everything was okay, but it didn’t sound very interesting, I was afraid she was going to bugger off, so I said I had a little problem, my parents had gone away for the weekend and I’d thrown a great big party and now the house was a mess, there were stains on the carpet and I was sort of in trouble.

“What sort of stains?” she asked.

“Oh, you know,” I said, all mysterious, implying, I guess, that there’d been some great big fucking orgy and there were like shot spots all over the house. I couldn’t shut up. And the funny thing is, she sort of listened and made suggestions, you know how to get the carpet clean, add some, I forget what, something and cold water and a sponge, but really, while I was talking, I had this sensation, it was just hanging over me like a cloud of dread, that maybe I was coming across like a big fat creep, or just the biggest fucking liar in the history of mankind.

“I think one of them might have had her period as well,” I said, going completely into orbit.

“You mean there was more than one?”

“Just the first night,” I said.

Even after that she didn’t leave. The band came back on, and we kept talking, you know, how to get my house clean, and it was getting bigger and more complicated. Finally a slow song came on. I looked over the railing and I said, get this, “Nice song.”

Great eh?

And she said, “Yeah.”

And I said, “It’s nice to dance to this stuff.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“But I don’t like asking people to dance.”

I mean obvious or what.

She gave her drink a final little slurp and put it on the floor against the railing.

“I’ll dance with you,” she said. So we went down the stairs and out onto the floor, everybody sees me with this great-looking chick, and she put her hand up on my shoulder and I put my hand on her back, I could feel the sweat coming through her shirt, and I could smell her perfume, it didn’t smell like great perfume, sort of like the cheap stuff, as my mother would say, but I liked it just fine.

And at the end of the dance she kind of stepped back, like she was going to tell me she should go find her sister, you know the number, but I didn’t want it to end like that, me leaving the dance figuring she’d got to know me a bit and then split. So real quick, before she could say anything, I said, “Thanks for the dance,” and then I spun around and walked off. I mean maybe I looked like a madman but I didn’t want to end up feeling like a loser. Not when everything was going so well. Let her wonder a bit, I thought. It’s always the guys who do the wondering. Besides, that way when she saw me next Saturday, she’d know I was all right, it was cool to say hi to me, I wasn’t going to latch onto her like a fucking lamprey for the rest of the night.

I beetled on out of there. Harper was hanging around outside on the patio.

“Let’s split,” I said.

And he said, “Well, not yet.”

We stayed out there for awhile, bitching about stuff. I made sure not to go back inside. It’d been a pretty good goodbye, I didn’t want to water it down with another one.

After awhile, Harper looked around and sort of sucked his lips and said, “Well, maybe we should like
oubliez-la,”
which was his way of saying, let’s go.

It was around eleven-thirty when we got back to our dock and tied up the boat, Harper sort of laughing about what a shitty night it had turned out to be and me saying, well, what the hell, and then the two of us heading up from the boathouse. We walked up through the swamp, the moon yellow and round, and came out under the stars in the open field and started towards the house. The lights were on in the living room, we could see them from the bottom field, and it made the place look all cosy. Just to freak myself out, I imagined I was a stranger, that I didn’t know the people in the house, I’d just been sort of
clonked
there, in the middle of nowhere. You know, what would I do? Would I knock on somebody’s door, would I make my way into town? I got so absorbed in thinking about how lonely it’d be out there that I just about jumped out of my pants when Harper spoke to me.

“Did you notice the old lady hid all the guns?” he said, sticking a blade of grass in his mouth.

I caught up to him.

“What?”

“She hid all the guns in the basement.”

“What for?”

“The doctor told her to.”

“Whose doctor?”

“The old man’s doctor.”

“Jesus.”

“Great eh?”

“Where’d she hide them?”

“Under the stairs, the little place at the back with all the mouse
droppings in it. You’re not supposed to know, by the way. It’s a secret.”

“What’d he say?”

“Said he was going to shoot himself.”

“Really?”

“He was pissed, I think.”

“The doctor was pissed?”

“No,
he
was pissed when he told Mother and
she
told the doctor. Christ, Simon, can’t you follow anything?”

“Do you think he’d really do it?”

“No way. You got to have a real pair to stick a gun in your mouth.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Well like don’t sound so disappointed, Simon. He’s your father you know.”

“So you don’t figure we should leave the basement door open? Leave a round in the chamber just so he doesn’t have to make another trip downstairs.”