The Adjustment League (33 page)

As an Island shimmers into view…

“Good peaches. Juicy. Do you always peel them?”

“I don't like the skins. The little fuzzy hairs.”

“They can be chewy sometimes. But they don't come off easily. I tug at corners with a paring knife, but chunks come off. You end up with a plum-sized peach.”

“You scald them first. Two minutes in boiling water. The skin slides right off, sometimes in one piece.”

§

“Tell me something, will you? What did Sandor do when he found out the truth?”

She exhales noisily. “You're going to believe what you want to—”

“I mean
any
truth. One even. Maude's, let's say. Father shuts his wife away so he can bang young immigrants without a depressive cramping his style. Pays number one son to handle the bills so not even an invoice distracts him. Number one son visits occasionally at first—probably to make sure costs are in line—then not at all. Father's consistent from the start. Away's away.”

“It's childish to believe in monsters, isn't it? Ultimately, we're all people.”

“I am a child.”

She looks so long at something out the window, to the side of my face, that I turn to see what's there. A line of green hedge, virid in the sun. A walkway I can't quite see down to the street. She answers me without taking her eyes from the view.

“Well, he just about went crazy. Or did go crazy for a while. You read the book. He thought he was living inside a dream, a nightmare. He said he knew he was an alcoholic, but he was afraid of what he might see if he got sober. He thought that if he could just…”

“What did he
do
?” I say again, quietly.

Her eyes come back to me: flat, hard buttons. Her lips set in a thin bitter line. Is there any good way to get older?

“Lynette, there are two types of people in a crisis. Lots of types in other situations, but just two in a crisis. One rolls up his sleeves and gets to work. Gets whoever he can to safety, calls for help, and so forth. The other type doesn't.

“One of the things that mars Sandor's writing—that keeps his book from being the book it could be—is his constant need to tell himself he's the first kind of person when he's really the second. That's why he doesn't put the blame where it belongs. Because if he did, some of it would have to fall on him.”

That new—to me—capacity for cruelty, and taste for it, spreads over her face like an ash cloud—

“Which would qualify you to complete the book, I guess.”

—and lands me smack dab in the nook again, snug in searing light and space.

“I could do some heavy editing. No question.”

Post-mirage, deserts are hotter. Dryer and more lifeless. Nothing burns like the memory of hope.

She isn't surprised or flustered when I ask for Sandor's address. She refuses politely, citing her promise to help protect his privacy. What surprises her is that I don't press.

I stand up to go. “It's a small neighbourhood. I'll poke around.”

Awkwardness at the door, on both sides. Lynette breaks the silence.

“Well, maybe now that we've met… Met again, I mean.”

With that girlish blush.
Teen to crone to angel on a tombstone
.

I look down the street at the maple where I stood a few nights ago, watching her draw the line with her ex. The tree's almost bare. A few red-orange leaves cling to it like flares. Like the tips of milkweed stalks set on fire with Bics stolen from foster parents, just catching or just sputtering out.

I turn back to her. “Lynette. You come into Sandor's book fairly often. He always calls you ‘L.' But an ‘L' also framed the butterfly wing. The ‘one wing.' I can't see you working as a framer anytime recently.”

“That was Lois,” she says, wincing a little. But it aches rather than stabs, like a thump on an old bruise. “She worked at Loomis for a while. The art store at Yonge and Eg?”
Back where we met. And the one place on earth I'd never have looked
. “We talked a bit, not much. Enough to establish we both knew you.”

“And my daughter? Megan?”

“We never talked about kids. I'm sorry. It was quite a while, maybe ten years ago, and she left not long after. She did ask if you were well.”

“And?”

“I said I really didn't know.”

Silence behind me as I'm heading toward the street. Then quick steps. She runs after me, grabs my wrist when I'm almost at the sidewalk.

“Don't hurt him. If you do find him, I mean. He doesn't know any better. Nobody's taught him how. He's damaged and doesn't know how badly. Or how to heal himself.”

I look at Lynette. Sniffling girl, sniffling old woman. Identity gone spiralling in the sun.

“Past a certain age, past childhood, that's not an excuse. It's an accusation.”

20

Sandor. Within a
few blocks, I know, from following them the other night. But the neighbourhood bristling with Castles and Shields. A local job, but Forest Hill.
Steep, dark woods
.

A few doors down Roselawn, on the north side, a guy standing on the sidewalk with a metal box in his hand. Thirty-something, glasses, buzzcut. Fleshy arms and calves coming out of his T-shirt and cutoffs. An ex-soldier or an office wannabe, cadets in high school. His right hand on a lever on the box, making small movements with it while he stares into space. I stop a few feet from him, look where he's looking. Finally see a small helicopter hovering over his lawn. Neat as a dragonfly, maybe triple the size. “Excuse me,” I say. He doesn't move his hand from the box or take his eyes off the copter. “Excuse me?” No reaction.

“Happy toggles, gearbox.”

A little farther on the same side, an old man mowing his lawn. His steps a bit tottery, even with the mower supporting him. He seems to be using it as a kind of walker—but with electric, whirring blades? I stand where he can see me on his next turn. He shuts off the machine.

“Excuse me, sir. A friend of mine, Sandor Wyvern? I guess you know his family trouble. Everybody does by now. And he called me to come over and talk a bit. But—it's stupid—I can't remember his house number since the last time I visited. I guess the news has really got me rattled,” I say, shaking my head with it.

The old man's neck lengthens under his Blue Jays cap, like a turtle's extending from its shell.

“It
is
stupid,” he says. “Someone who doesn't know where you live, yet you call him in your hour of need.”

“Look, sir. I'm not with the media. Does this look like a face for television?”

The neck lengthens further. Wily old snapper, well-fed in the mud.

“Don't need much of a face for radio. Don't need any face. Or for newspapers or the Internet either.”

“All right, old man. Have a nice day.”

Across the street from the grass-cutter, two houses over, a flash of white in the backyard. Go closer, Daisy with her nose pressed against the mesh fence.

Ah, Lynette. Stand by your man
.

§

No answer at the front door. None expected. Go round back and get over the fence. Daisy walks at me, growling. I raise the hammer to her and she slinks off. Curls near a bush, licking herself.

I approach the house. Behind the sliding door, Sandor is sitting at a round wooden table, drinking. I have to cup my hands around my eyes to see him clearly. Lots of cans in front of him. He's got his head down, not looking my way. I try the door. Locked. At the sound, he lifts his head. Peers blearily in my direction, raises his middle finger. I raise the hammer, cock it at the glass. Slowly, pushing off the table with his hands, he gets up, can in hand, and lets me in.

“Back at work, I see. Busy on the grieving process.”

Bare feet, jeans. Untucked plaid shirt falling to his thighs. Days of black stubble, eyes sunk in whiskers and greasy curls. A rank smell. He speaks with his back to me, returning to his corner seat. “Come in, get lost, sit down, stand up. Have a drink, don't, I don't
give
a shit.”

“I know you don't, Sandor. That's what we're here to discuss.”

“My tête-a-tête with the avenging angel. The perfect end to the perfect week. I wonder what I ever did to deserve you. It must've been something horrible.”

He drains the can he's on, head way back to catch it all. “Have a beer if you want. But I've got nothing to say to you now. I never did really. And I don't think you've got anything more to say to me.”

“There's where you're wrong. But I'll take that beer.”

He reaches into the nest of cans, knocks a couple of empties over, and pulls out a full one for himself.

A weird assortment of beers, hectic. Maybe a dozen brands among the twenty or so cans on the table—Budweiser, Canadian, Heineken, Tuborg, Blue, Coors, Grolsch, Kronenbourg… It would fit a bunch of kids learning to drink, mixing and puking. Or someone in desperate straits and searching confusedly for the right drug, the one that might work. Even so, I can't make this grab bag fit a long-time drinker, who knows his brand as well as all the others.

I select a Coors Lite, thinking to start cautiously, but at the first sip my thoughts reel, as if a socket wrench has been fitted over my brain and torqued violently. As if I'm on my fifth can, not my first. Stone:
Last call
.

Judy hitting his head with the hammer. The head shifting a little, hand and hammer bouncing back
. That picture more sickening, somehow, than her carving of the Sunday roast.

The Wyverns swept clean. Or nearly so—Sandor could be the janitor left behind to close up the building. Five of them at the start. Or six, with Vivian. Eight, counting her vanished sisters? Who knows how many the hive contained finally, swallowing up adjacent colonies, carrying back captive strays? Now, one dead of natural causes. One dispatched by the daughter he abused. Three in lock-up: one for a short time, I hope, before she rejoins her life in homes for the mad, back behind the pharmaceutical bars she knows. The other two for years and years. For forever, I hope. And the last, bloated in front of me, deluged by the family problems, bailing the flooded ship as best he can. Bailing its bilge back into himself. The women not of Wyvern blood knocked down too. Vivian, used and using, talking as fast as she can in a little room to cut a deal. Gwen, popping Tums like never before, gnawing her nails between calls to her lawyer. Lynette—well, who knows about Lynette? The only thing you can say about a lifelong depressive is that, whatever's happening, she's probably depressed and anxious about it.

So sick of all of them.

Sick enough that the questions I had about them, mysteries that assailed and whipped me on, seem pointless now. I feel them falling out of my head, grains from a smashed hourglass. Did Maude know about her husband's secret life? How deep a hell
was
her marriage? Deep enough that she welcomed—a part of her did—the oblivion of Alzheimer's? Keeping Christmas Music when she was put away, shoving it down under old nylons—an attempt at leverage? A trump to hold over the old prick? Lost when she didn't use it in time.
Which means you've been working for her on this adjustment all along
. Pleasant thought. The dead make the best clients, the only truly satisfying ones. The most exacting, and the most in need.

Or someone else buried it there? Hid it to find?

No, you're done with them. Done with this
.

“Ten minutes ago, I thought it was crucial to find you. Now that I have, I've got no idea why I'm sitting here, drinking your beer at eleven in the morning.”

“That makes two of us.”

“A last-ditch effort, I thought, to get you to take care of Judy. To try being her brother. To start. You've got the power and the money, or you will have. What would it take? But that's the one thing I've never been able to get from any of you Wyverns. Looking after Judy in even the most basic fashion. It's a deal-breaker, as they say. I don't think I could force you with a blow torch and pliers.”

“She's mentally ill.”

“Unlike you and me.”

He gives me a sickly, plastered smile. Idiot leer the bare truth summons—sniffing a con, utterly unable to take you at face value. Count on one hand the people who've asked me, Really? You think everyone's batshit crazy? And never got as far as defending it as the most humane assumption, true or not. Assuming universal insanity helps you deal with people properly. The ones with dangerous conditions you avoid or handle with wary ruthlessness, as you would vipers or scorpions. The harmlessly batty you treat with compassion. The rest you approach alertly and with an open mind, ready for anything.
Ward world
. Locked and unlocked, teeming.

“Just kidding, of course. There's a puppeteer works my face. A ventriloquist says odd things through my lips.”

“No secret there,” he says. “Hard to miss when they're standing right behind you.”

And so we find ourselves back on familiar ground.
What we've found together. All we could find
. Bantering in a pub. Challenging to escape challenge.
Candour a flag truth hides behind. Whip and chair to back it into its cage
. Saying anything, since saying has no price.

“The last time we met, you were a fan seeking an autograph.”

“I was a reader. One of the few. And a devoted one. Though the theme of the martyred caregiver got a bit thick.”

“Which tells me you've never done much of it.”

“You're addicted to the idea of yourself as a gentle giant. But there's no such thing. Not in a crisis anyway. Then you're either a giant, wielding a giant's might… or else a cruel dwarf.”

“And that's how you see yourself?”

“Which?”

“A gentle giant?”

“No. Not gentle. And definitely not a giant.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I seldom do. Strangely enough, it keeps me listening.”

The room is oddly unfurnished. Undecided maybe. The table we're sitting at, and the chairs around it, seem to belong in a kitchen, but the kitchen's over there, across a large space. The appliances gleaming new, the counters covered with dirty dishes and glasses, takeout cartons and bags, liquor bottles and beer cans. Empty alcove at the end of it where this table should go. Instead, it's pulled over into this corner by the sliding door, sitting on rust-coloured shag. Most of the large, L-shaped room beyond us is empty. A gas fireplace in the brick wall at the other end. Large-screen TV, a black rectangle, mounted on the wall beside it. A little way out from the TV, a U-shaped sectional couch in pale leather, like a sand spit with more cans and cartons, clothes and a quilt, washed up on and bobbing around it. No lamps, no overhead I can see. From this brightness by the door the room recedes into dim, the couch a shadowy whale rolling at dusk, then brightens again at the short end of the L, presumably from windows at the front. It looks like an animal's den. Except for all the evidence of feedings, and the absence of boxes, it could be the lair of someone just moving in or just moving out—or, more likely, the debris field of a bad divorce, with the remaining partner failing utterly to pick himself up and regroup.

“You're too late,” he says thickly, the can resting on his bottom lip tilting up as soon as the words are out. He's hard to see, a bulk with pale gleams. He's got himself tucked into the corner by the drapes, out of the direct light which falls on me, but it's also the grains in my eyes, swirling more thickly now, enveloping him in sooty smoke. “For whatever you were after. Which none of us were ever sure of. Opinions varied. Judy's friend was all we knew for sure.”

Which us? What opinions?
Lynette, most likely. The other members of the writing group perhaps. They saw you in the Queen's Arms, would have talked it up. You always assumed Sandor was outside Max and Vivian's thing, the old man's thing when he surfaced—on the outside of everything, planetoid orbiting the rim of the family solar system, assigned the lowliest jobs of caring for the deranged. Such a man knows very little, as little as needed. It still seems true.
But question it
.
No disguise like that of the total fuck-up.
Hard, though, with the window closed or closing fast, each sip of Coors like a full can chugged.

“It's hard to explain what drives me,” I hear my voice saying. And see a neighbour man, a long way back, I was helping clear his eaves of wasp nests. Him up on a stepladder, rearing back fearfully as he sprayed Raid into the opening of the cone, the yellow bodies falling out covered with poison foam, me stamping on them as they wriggled on the ground, impressing him with my zeal. He doused the largest one with barbecue starter and lit it up, a blackly smoking torch, me standing by with the hose in case the house caught. But when I pressed to hunt for more, he got a strange look in his eyes and sent me home.
Go on, now. You were a big help, but it's time you got on home
.

“I came over here to get the truth of your involvement in this, and to get a promise from you that Judy would be cared for, but you're too far gone to work with. Your trouble is you always take the easy way out. Even when you think you're being hard on yourself, you're really going easy. You spoil yourself rotten.”

“Involvement in what?” he says, sounding several degrees more sober. And there it is again: the weird sense I've had with him, from first meeting on, that we have portholes into each other's heads. But I don't know—and it's an effort to remember this—what Sandor knows and has done, just as he doesn't know the same about me. Couldn't imagine that I spent his father's last moments with him, our knees almost touching. Or what those moments were. Or how merciful they were compared to the prison cell and public zero-ing he had coming to him.

“I read the papers,” I say, hoping that enough of
Sex Crimes Investigation
has been aired.

“Do you?” he says, with a hard look that reaches me out of his murk. Not his Toogood Pond thing surfacing, it's permanently up and wallowing, his eyes black gleams off its back. “I was beginning to wonder. I thought you might just be an avenging angel that swoops day and night around the skies, touching down where you're needed.” As a picture of the adjustment life, it comes close to accurate, if way too exalted. But self-pity comes to the rescue, as it does so often when human conversations threaten to become acute. He uncaps another can, takes half of it down, and hangs his bushy head. “
Fuck. It.
I lost my entire family in the last two weeks. Mom first. Then the rest of them in the last three days.”