The Checkout Girl (8 page)

When Kathy's father died, Mrs. White sent Connie, Kathy and Shelly a lovely card that Connie kept on the windowsill above the kitchen sink for about three years. No doves or lilies or bleeding hands or burning hearts of Jesus, but a peaceful blue-green lake beneath a mountain and a bright sapphire sky, which eventually became covered with dried white potato spritz and warped with rain drops when the window didn't get closed fast enough during a storm. Or with tears every time Connie took it from the windowsill to reread it. (Kathy always felt it was very Californian to send a non-religious sympathy card.)

Inside, in neat feminine script, the card said
: I'm so sorry, Connie. I understand. It will take time, but you will stop hurting. Though not just yet, and not for a while. Call me if you want to talk. Love, Lizzy.
Then she printed her name, Elizabeth (White) Burkhardt, and her phone number in brackets at the bottom. It was the first they'd heard she'd married Basil.

Kathy drives down Maple Avenue. There's hardly any traffic, but there is an odour — faint tonight — of wieners. There's always some smell in Varnum, some worse than others. Rendered and processed meat of J.M. Schneider, Burns Foods, Hoffman Meats, Varnum Packers, Norstern Meat Packers. Hops from Labbatt's. Alcohol mash from Seagram's. Rubber from Uniroyal and BF Goodrich. Incinerators. Electroplating, metal product chemicals — General Springs, Budd Automotive, Kuntz Electric, Globe Stamping. Bread from Weston's. Cookies from Dares. Tanning chemicals from Robson-Lang. On any given day the city air exudes industry, is saturated with it, the smell of money going into some already-rich person's pocket. And these days that rich person likely lives in the States and not Canada. That's what the union folks are saying.

Charlie worked at Budd. A union man, he worked a press. He came home smelling of metal and grease and the no-water hand cleaner all the men used before they drove home after their shifts. He loved his job, loved being in the company of hard-working men. Believed in unions and their cause: fair play and fair pay for labour. He loved all things that had to do with cars, so was proud to be part of their manufacture, even from a distance.

“Your father loved to drive,” Connie once told Kathy.

So it was a shock, but maybe not a surprise, that her father died in a car accident. On the stretch of 401 across from where Oakdale College now stands. Fell asleep at the wheel after a shift at the plant, the police report said, though what he was doing on the 401 heading west, no one knew. Not Connie, not his buddies, and certainly not the semi driver who saw him coming — tried to brake — but couldn't stop fast enough.

Charles (Charlie) Michael Rausch, born 1925, drove from his side of the road straight across the pretty wildflower-covered median, gaining speed as he went, dipping down into the culvert, rising up, tires churning the grass until they gained purchase on the blacktop again, accelerating full tilt right into the front end of the transport truck.

Kathy pulls into the Lehmans' driveway. Penny's left for work, her tire tracks in the snow, the house dark except for Pete's room in the attic.

“Come up and see Teach,” Pete shouts down as Kathy takes her boots off in the hallway.

Pete calls his part-time work maintaining the labs at Regent University supplemental income; his real money comes from drug-dealing. By working at the university, he maintains the appearance of a legitimate income. That's what he says, at least. Teach is a professor, and one of the research scientists Pete works for. Teach also buys lots of Pete's dope.

Harold Patrick Markham, Markham with an “h,” Teach tells everyone when he first meets them. Who gives a flying fuck how it's spelled? Kathy wants to say. But she never does. Teach intimidates her. Most educated people intimidate her. And not only the people, but the broad manicured lawn in front of the university campus intimidates her. The Campus Centre, where kids her own age and probably no smarter than her hang out, intimidates her. Well, maybe they're smarter ambition-wise, but maybe not. Maybe they just perform better for their parents. Maybe they're obedient. Or maybe they have no imaginations. (Kathy doesn't want to probe that too deeply, because her imagination regarding her future in skating, or any future beyond checking out groceries, for that matter, isn't exactly working overtime.) The very word degree, as in university degree, is intimidating, because if you're talking degrees, there's got to be a scale with something higher and something lower.

And when it comes to degrees, Kathy feels lower these days, because no degree has to be lowest of all. It's the kind of stuff she and Donny talk about for hours when they smoke some dope. Semantics, my dear, they say in fake snooty voices, and they sniff and push up the ends of their noses with their fingertips. Then they laugh, because it makes them feel better to laugh. And because when you're stoned, laughing is what you do. Laughing and listening to music and eating and talking endlessly about nothing, and the degrees of nothing.

Marijuana's the best drug — the highest degree — for having sex, they've decided. Personal research proves it. Though they've preserved their virgin friendship, they have conducted marijuana and sex experiments with others. Grass is better than MDA because MDA is feel-good in the head. With grass, or hashish, especially if you eat it in brownies, every single inch of skin is a g-spot. The entire body anticipates touch, tingles with erotic sensation. No wonder it's illegal, they tell each other, because if it was legal, everybody'd buy it, and everybody'd be so busy making love they'd have no time for anything else, including getting degrees.

The only place Kathy doesn't feel intimidated around educated people is at the Rue, the bar where university kids drink alongside factory workers, people who collect pogey or deal drugs, people who hang Gyproc and work in grocery stores. Where Walton Emerson, a university English professor, sits at a corner table in a green suede jacket with fringed sleeves, a red or blue bandana around his thinning shoulder-length hair, and holds court with students and anyone else who'll listen to him talk while he gets pissed out of his tree on ten-cents-a-glass draft. He gives working-class kids — the proletariat, he calls them — ten-dollar bills. Or he tears the bills in half and uses them to roll joints that flare and taste like shit, but no one complains because the dope's free. Sometimes, if he's really drunk, he snorts a line of cocaine through a ten-dollar tube and hands the bill, still covered in powder, to some awed young woman, saying,
Wanna lick?

Kathy feels fine at the Rue, thank you very much. She understands pubs and beer. Beer is a great leveler. Anyone can get a degree in beer drinking. Most of the people she grew up with and the ones who work at her store have advanced degrees in drinking beer, just like Walton Emerson and his students.

Teach is married but he practically lives at Pete and Penny's. Pete says he's never met Teach's wife, jokes there probably isn't one, that Teach made her up because he's actually a homo sexual. That's how Pete says it, as if it's two words. He says it in front of Teach, who doesn't say anything. Kathy thinks Pete's right; she thinks Teach is in love with Pete.

Teach wears his pants high at the waist and tight across the groin. He wears berets, or old green and khaki chapeaux — that's what Teach calls hats, my chapeau, he says — from army surplus stores. Crumpled things that look like camp hats for children. Throughout the winter, Pete and Teach smoke huge amounts of marijuana and drink brandy warmed over a candle flame from snifters the size of goldfish bowls. They play war games they've set up in the attic. In summer, they drink LSD-laced gin and tonic and play croquet tournaments in Pete's backyard. In between there are various drugs — a bit of speed, some MDA or mescaline, heroin once or twice, and reds when they can get them — to enhance the games of Monopoly and Risk, and the rounds of tiddlywinks and pick-up sticks they endlessly play.

“He's in love with you,” Pete whispers as he greets Kathy on the landing. He's close to her. She smells the marijuana and brandy on his breath. She looks in his eyes as he speaks, but he's too close and her eyes cross. She looks down. He brushes her hand with his fingertips then leans away from her against the door jamb.

When Pete's near her, Kathy's both alert and relaxed. She never worries about what he thinks of her, yet she's entirely aware he watches her, and that he
does
think about her. His regard is sensual, but it doesn't feel sexual. Or that's what Kathy tells herself. It's as if he's a monk, conscious of everything about her — her soul and her body, her sexuality included — but he's above it all, just an observer.

Pete says Teach is in love with her to embarrass Kathy. He does that, gets people off balance, plays mind-fuck games, then sits back to see what happens.

“He likes your shimmering locks,” he says.

Pete lifts her hair in his hand then lets it fall, strand by strand. Kathy's hair swishes into place, shines fluid gold even in the dim stairway light.

Pete and Teach play war games in the attic,
The Games Room
, pressed into a brass plate on the door, an old-fashioned skeleton-key lock above the brass handle. The lock is against Rhettbutler. True to his namesake, and much like his father, he thrives on chaos and excels at making messes that others have to clean up.

“Where's Rhettbutler?” Kathy asks as she moves through the doorway. The room reeks of marijuana.

“Chained to his bed,” Pete says.

He might be. Pete enjoys telling stories on himself, about things he and Penny did to Rhettbutler when he was little. Embarrassing stories, because, Pete says, he likes to see Penny's blush, which starts in her ample cleavage and rises in irregular, scarlet blotches up her chest, into her face, and right on through to the part in the middle of her hair. When Rhettbutler was a baby, and Penny and Pete were new parents and very green, they masking-taped Rhettbutler's soother in his mouth so he couldn't spit it out. They put him in a harness attached to a pulley on the clothesline, and let him run back and forth to wear him out before his afternoon nap. Pete can go on and on about what they did to Rhettbutler when he was a little.

“Ah, lovely Kathy,” Teach says. “My favourite Breck girl. Come kiss me.”

Teach started kissing women on both cheeks after he came home from a conference, Animals in Laboratory Research, in Strasbourg. Friends kiss in Europe, he said the first time her tried to kiss Kathy. Kiss-kiss-kiss all the time, that's why he loved Europe, he said. He told Kathy he'd given a paper on how to de-scent skunks. It was an operation he'd performed on Fi-Fi, a baby skunk Pete had caught in his headlights, tiny and frightened, dancing a baby-skunk dance on the side of a dark back road. Its wildly smelly mother and four siblings were dead, run over by a car. Pete and Penny kept Fi-Fi as a pet until she became mean and bit Rhettbutler, around the time she was a year old.

It was sex that turned her mean, Teach said. All females become mean when they discover sex, he said. When Teach had de-scented her, he hadn't bothered to neuter her. After she bit Rhettbutler, Penny said enough's enough and asked Teach to put Fi-Fi down. They had a funeral and buried the skunk in the backyard. Her marker, a small limestone slab, like the old-fashioned cemetery markers used for dead babies, said
Our Beloved
Fi-Fi,
1968-1969
.

“We're just about to commence battle,” Pete says. He opens a box of cigars and offers one to Teach. Pete lights his, holds the match for Teach, sets his cigar in an ashtray and lights a joint, one of many in the cigar box. They pass it back and forth, offering some to Kathy, who takes one hit — for sleeping, she says — then shakes her head no when it's her turn again.

“Work tomorrow,” she says as she lets out her breath.

Teach pours glasses of brandy, a tradition at the beginning of their battles. They're children, Kathy thinks, playing games. Happier doing the set-up, which has taken them over two weeks, and before that, months of painting soldiers and tanks and other artillery, than they are fighting the battle. Because they know how it is going to end; they know all the moves beforehand, have studied them while they prepared for the battle. It's like the dances you learn from books, with little feet and arrows. Move one step forward, quick-quick, slide, everything choreographed.

“Now this is a real battle, my spectacular Kathy,” Teach says. He grins and waves his arm across the fake battlefield. Tonight Teach is wearing combat boots, khakis with many buttons and pockets and a safari shirt with a navy-blue ascot peeking out of one pocket and a rolled-up camp hat out of the other. His beige hair, wispy and fine, stands on end in the furnace-dried air. He looks as though he should wear glasses; he isn't, and he doesn't. But if anyone asked Kathy, she'd have to think, and then she'd likely say, yes, Teach wears glasses.

Teach has an ordinary forehead and nose, forgettable eyes, and pale grey lips as thin and wrinkled as used tinsel. Sometimes Kathy can't take her eyes off Teach's lips. She watches them now.

“Yes, real combat, not one of those impossible wars,” Teach continues, still grinning, “like Vietnam, all jungle and guerilla action, and the bombing and total destruction of towns and villages full of civilians, and nobody knows who's good and who's bad so everybody has to die, civilian and soldier.

“Look, we have cannons. And rifles and horses and men in uniform who respect their uniform. We have rules of battle, rules for each engagement; we have honour and codes of conduct. Men will walk in a line directly into the bullets and cannon fire because their commanders tell them to. The first in line will get blown up and fall, and the men behind them will do the same. An egalitarian battle.

“There are no rules in Vietnam. There's chaos and carnage and dishonour. There's My Lai. Soldiers killing innocent people, sodomizing women, raping children, destroying everything in their sight, burning, mutilating, shooting bullets into the grass and into the trees just to kill, kill, kill.”

Teach is spitting the words now, his grey lips pulled tight in a Tin Man smile. He holds an imaginary rifle; he shoots it. As he goes on and on, Kathy thinks of the boys who sit and drink coffee at the Ground Inn. Boys who have deserted active service, who have dodged the US draft, who come in off the streets because they've heard that the coffee house is a friendly place and someone will direct them to a church or an agency that will help them find a new life, in exile forever, in Canada.

Kathy remembers leaving Varnum for Vancouver, excited and happy, not sure if she'd return, hoping she wouldn't. But she could return if she wanted. Imagine if she'd left knowing she'd never be able to visit her mother or Shelly again, never see her friends. She wonders if she had to go to Vietnam — if she didn't choose to dodge the draft or desert — if she could say no to killing civilians. No to the men she trusted with her life, to her commanders, to the country she was fighting for. And she sees her potential for cowardice, and she's ashamed.

But here in this room, two stoned, cigar-smoking men drinking brandy from fishbowls are about to commence battle; they are about to play at war and she can take the high road.

“I'm going to bed,” Kathy says.

“Can I join you?” asks Teach.

“Sorry, it's just me and the snake tonight,” Kathy says, but she's not sorry at all.