The Monkeyface Chronicles (16 page)

On the ice, where Michael makes scoring goals look easy with his natural athleticism, I find the back of the net by practicing constantly and playing aggressively. At school, I achieve by studying hard and doing homework when Michael is out at parties. Girls practically swoon over Michael's sky-blue eyes, wavy dark hair, and chiseled-marble features, but, all things considered, I would rather spend time with Adeline than with any giggling, eyelash-batting Socialite girl.

“Well?” Michael repeats, annoyed that I haven't answered him immediately, “are you going to practice tonight or not? The bus leaves in ten minutes.”

“Coach said it's an
optional
practice, right?” I ask.

“Is
winning
optional to you, Philip?” Michael says coolly.

“Aren't you going to walk home with me, Philip?” Adeline says, “We've got that new book to look at.”

“Come on, Phil!” Michael protests. “The playoffs are just around the corner. What's more important to you — helping your team win the championship, or reading a friggin'
book
— with
her
?”

“Since it's an
optional
practice,” I say, “I think I'll
opt
to walk home with Adeline today. If that's okay with you.”

“Fine by me,” he says, closing his locker door with a metallic bang and snapping the lock closed. “I only need six goals to beat you for the scoring trophy. Grant only needs three.”

“It doesn't matter to me if I win,” I tell him. And it doesn't. It only matters to me that it matters to
him
. And to Grant Brush.

Michael huffs, steps around Adeline, and walks away.

“Bye, Michael!”
Adeline chirps, mimicking the voice of one of his fan-girls.

And there it is: faced with the choice between hockey practice and a girl, Michael will choose hockey practice. Maybe it's because he's got girls throwing themselves at him all the time. Maybe it's because he sees hockey as some kind of career, whereas I play it mostly for fun. Maybe it pisses him off that his ugly, waste-material twin brother is poised to win a trophy for something he thought belonged to him by birthright.

“Ready to go, Philip?” Adeline says with a smile.

I will always choose the girl.

Day of Reckoning

A
deline and I walk home from school along the highway toward Faireville. Buds have sprouted on the tree branches, birds chirp, and the sun shines. Flowers bloom in the baskets hanging from the gas-well street lights, perfuming the entire town. Water from melted snow rushes through the roadside ditches, and my heart beats a little faster. Spring has arrived.

We spend the afternoon wandering around the cemetery, looking at the old gravestones. The dead don't tell tales or pass judgment. As a sort of gesture against Old Wellers in general, Adeline salutes the unknown soul beneath Grave 69, and then pats the imposing statue of Jeremiah Faire on its rotund bottom. After a while we head for home.

“I've heard from my dad,” she says, “and I've been accepted at U of T. I wanted you to be the first to know.”

“Adeline, that's great!” Unbeknownst to her mother, Adeline has done some searching on the internet, and has located her long-lost father, with whom she has been communicating regularly in recent months. He is now a well-to-do businessman, and has agreed to fund Adeline's university education. One weekend, about a month ago, while her mother was away on a Tabernacle-sponsored “Spiritual Retreat,” I gave Adeline the money for a train ticket, and she snuck away to Toronto to visit him. He's offered her a room in his condo if she decides to attend the University of Toronto in September, and he's got his lawyers on standby if Adeline's mother decides to make a fuss about it. Adeline is waiting for the right strategic moment to drop these cluster bombs on her mother.

“Let's pick up the pace a bit,” Adeline says as we approach the Tabernacle of God's Will. “I don't want them to see me. It's too nice a day to get shunned.”

The Tabernacle parking lot is so jammed full of cars that some are lined up along the shoulders of the highway. There are even a few beside the laneway that leads to my home at the top of the hill.

“Hey,” I ask Adeline, “how come members of your church have to wear old-fashioned clothes and shun entertainment and technology, but you're still allowed to drive cars?”

“Don't call it
my
church,” Adeline says. “It's
not
my church.”

“Sorry. But seriously, why cars? Why not horses and buggies?”

“According to the Elders, cars don't offend God if we remove all the chrome and emblems from them,” Adeline says. “Besides, they don't want to prevent all those city people from getting here, right? The collection baskets wouldn't be as full then.”

“Why all the cars today?” I wonder. “What's going on?”

“Pastor Vangelis called an emergency meeting,” Adeline says. “Mom's there. It's supposed to go on into the evening.”

“Are they deciding what to set on fire next?” I wonder.

“Don't laugh,” Adeline says.

I'm not laughing. Over the past few months, the Tabernacle of God's Will has succeeded in attracting attention to Faireville in a way that the Town Council never could. In December, the Tabernacle's founder, Pastor Patrick, died suddenly while choking on a chunk of filet mignon in his private dining room in the Tabernacle's underground chambers. The Tabernacle Elders, after much deliberation, chose Bob Miller, Bradley's dad, as the successor to the throne. Apparently Bob Miller didn't think that “Pastor Bob” had enough of an evangelistic ring to it, so he renamed himself Pastor
Vangelis
.

His first act as the new leader of the Tabernacle of God's Will was to rent a truck to have their anti-homosexuality trailer towed to Ottawa, where, after years of collecting signatures in the Tabernacle parking lot, it finally reached its intended destination: the front lawn of the Parliament Buildings. When a tow truck arrived on the scene to remove the trailer, Pastor Vangelis instructed the Tabernacle volunteers to set the trailer on fire. As the police arrested those holding the gas cans and torches, the man formerly known as Bob Miller screamed into a bullhorn about the Constitutional Freedoms of Speech and Religion. All of this made the national news that evening.

Since none of the arsonists would implicate Pastor Vangelis in the Ottawa trailer fire incident, he was free to rally the Tabernacle faithful to escalate their activism even further. It was no longer enough merely to protest the perceived evils of modern society by handing out pamphlets at the Faireville Arena and chanting in front of the condom display at the local drugstore; Sinners and Blasphemers needed to be rooted out individually and forced to face up to their sins.

When three Tabernacle members were arrested for setting fire to the condom display at Anderson's Hometown Apothecary, Adeline told me that Pastor Vangelis referred to them in a sermon as “Martyrs to the Cause,” even though they hadn't actually died. Mr. Anderson has since stopped selling condoms altogether, since the sales weren't worth the increase in his fire insurance premiums, nor the time and effort it took to scrub away the smell of scorched latex.

Other businesses in Faireville have been eager to avoid being next on the Sinners and Blasphemers Hit List. The soft-core porn videos have disappeared from the back room of Faireville Video Rental. Even the miniature replica figurines of Renaissance nudes have vanished from the window display at The Goode Faith Gift Shoppe.

For every Tabernacle member that goes to jail, five new members join the congregation. The parking lot is always full; national television exposure seems to have attracted every vengeful outsider within a two-hundred-mile radius of Faireville. The paint on the
new
anti-homosexual trailer is barely dry, and already it has more signatures than the original did. A fleet of other trailers now surround the Tabernacle fortress like circled pioneer wagons. One is painted with the slogan,
Sex for pleasure equals HELL for ETERNITY!
another,
Movies, music, and sports: THE DEVIL'S DISTRACTIONS
, and another,
Science LIES, God's WORD is TRUTH!
Perhaps the most alarming slogan is on the fifth trailer:
One Will — GOD's
WILL! One church — The TABERNACLE of GOD's WILL!
Pretenders and Idolaters will SUFFER
! “Hey, Philip,” Adeline says, “want to do something different today?”

Usually, we sneak past the Tabernacle and go to my house. Mom makes a pot of coffee, and we sit at the kitchen table and make small talk for a while. Mom likes Adeline, because unlike Michael's succession of Socialite girlfriends, Adeline will actually give her the time of day. Since my father spends all of his time locked inside his lab or away riding his motorcycle, my mother doesn't really have anyone else to talk to.

Adeline uses my bedroom to change from her jeans into her Tabernacle uniform to avoid a confrontation with her own mother when she gets home. I say
my
bedroom, because Michael and I no longer share a room. I think Michael's feelings were hurt somewhat when I moved into Dennis' abandoned quarters, but he got over it soon enough when he realized it was easier for him to slip in late at night (and to slip into the occasional Socialite girl) without me in the next bed.

Dennis vacated his room after making a small fortune selling satellite television systems to people around Faireville. All he'd had to do was plug in the Jacob's Ladder at the right moments: during the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and the season finales of several popular TV series. Eventually, somebody at the Cable Television company in Gasberg noticed all the satellite dishes appearing on rooftops around the county, and decided that they should also
Ca$h in on the $atellite
Revolution
. To eliminate Dennis as a competitor, they bought his fledgling company for a grossly inflated price. Dennis took the money and ran off to Toronto, where he has set up some kind of internet-based business. He left me his old computer and most of his teen rebel wardrobe, and he keeps inviting me to go visit him at his downtown apartment. Some day I will take him up on the offer.

“Why don't we go to my place today,” Adeline suggests as we reach the laneway to my house. “My mother won't be home until later, and I suppose you should see the inside of my house at least once before we both leave Faireville.”

It's true. I've never been inside Adeline's house. We have both been too afraid of what might happen if her mother were ever to catch us alone together. Candace Brown is, after all, a devoted member of an organization that believes it's a sin for a man to look upon a woman's
ankles
.

“Why don't we just go to my place, like we always do,” I say. At my house, although she makes me look away when she changes into her Tabernacle outfit, I sometimes catch a glimpse of her, distorted and naked, in the glass of the computer monitor. She's lost the thickness around her midriff, but she's kept her hips and breasts. Michael isn't the only one who's glad he's got his own bedroom.“I thought maybe the two of us could take a look at the book I gave you,” she says, “but, if you'd rather read
The Art of Sex
at the kitchen table with your mother . . . ”

“No, no,” I say, “let's go to your place. Are you
sure
your mother won't be home?”

“Not until she's consumed her share of hellfire and brimstone,” Adeline says.

Adeline pulls up a couple of blinds, and light diffuses into the Spartan home she shares with her mother. The only furniture is a plain wooden table with a couple of tortuous-looking straight-backed chairs. The walls are ghostly bare, the only adornments being the crucifixes hanging above each doorway, and a couple of 1970s-era portraits of Jesus, in which He looks more like a stoned, lily-white hippie than a Middle Eastern carpenter's son.

“Your house looks like a castle in comparison, doesn't it?” she says. “Oh, wait . . . your house
is
a castle.”

“A
small, fake
castle,” I amend.

The once-white walls of Adeline's home are stained brownish-yellow from the smoke from the cast-iron stove and the kerosene-fuelled lanterns. The electrical sockets have been crudely plastered over, and the light bulbs removed from all the remaining fixtures. There is no television, radio, or telephone.

“So,” I marvel, “you
can
have a car, but you
can't
have a telephone or electricity?”

“The Tabernacle's rules aren't very consistent,” she says. “I feel like I've been living in the Dark Ages.”

“You won't have to put up with it much longer,” I say. “Just a couple more months until we graduate.”

“I don't know if I can last that long,” she sighs. “Maybe I can get myself shunned in the meantime.” She looks at me seductively. “Maybe if I commit a carnal act outside the sanctity of marriage . . . ?”