Jericho (15 page)

[In my memory, he went back to reading the paper.]

“They say it’s going to get colder than a gravedigger’s ass out there today,” Lonnie said.

“Your family was no jewel either, you know.”

“I wasn’t talking about your family.”

“And he wasn’t a gravedigger, he was a mortician.”

“He was a sharpie.”

“Don’t you talk about my father like that. Accuse yourself if you want to call somebody that. You and your friends.”

[Then it would be her turn to go on for a while. I found the language fascinating.]

“He wasn’t any dummy, I’ll tell you that. He built up a business. He warned me against you too, didn’t he? He told me you’d never amount to anything and he was right, God rest his soul.”

“You were the one that gave up.”

“I didn’t give up anything.”

“You passed out.”

“You bored me to sleep, you bastard. The same goddam round robin all the time, it never stops. How many years has it been, I forget, and you know why? Because they’re all the same.”

[This I remember because the phone rang in the middle of it. The phone, one of those old black jobs with the big clear plastic dial on the front, rang all the time.]

“Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s all right. We can talk. It’s all set, then, right? What time is he coming in? Okey-dokey. Well, the thing gives me the willies, but don’t worry about me. Nothing can go wrong, eh? He says he’s probably good for the jake. The jake—the cash. Yeah, that’s right. Okay, I’ll see you down there. That’s right. I’ll be there. Yessir. So long.”

“I bet I know who that was,” my grandmother said.

“He’s okay. He’s a good egg. Fact is, he’s a great man. And he’s always been better to you than you have to him.”

[At that point Lonnie stood up on a chair in the middle of the kitchen and felt for some hiding place in the wall. He took down an object wrapped in old cloth and uncovered it. I knew what it would be. It was a very old handgun. He got his coat, stuffed the gun inside and hid the wrappings, which looked like a shroud after the grave robber’s left.]

“I’m going now.” [There was no answer from the other room.] “I don’t know when I’ll be through.”

[He took me with him but I had to stay in the car.]

You see, I didn’t quite appreciate it at the time but thinking back on it later I see that Lonnie talked to me in a different language from what he used talking to people his own age. Makes sense, I guess. With me, he was the historian, passing along his stories. With them, he was the carpenter
who was either happy-go-lucky—one of his favourite ways of describing someone—or anyway willing to please all the time. I suppose he was clinically depressed most of his life, but we didn’t think in those terms back where I came from, not in those days at least. (God—that sounded like his ghost was speaking through me.) Even the simplest conversation could be in a kind of code without ever getting to be more than simple talk. Even before I went to live with him and Paulette, he used to read the weekend funnies to me from the Toronto
Star Weekly
(I should have added that to the list of his favourite reading materials—they had the best funny papers). When I was living in their place, he used to let me follow him around, be his helper on jobs, buy me Cokes when he went to have a drink. He tried to do his own drinking away from Paulette. I used to think this was because he was afraid of having another fight with her, but now I see he was trying not to encourage her any more than he had to, not that she needed much encouragement. Lonnie even took me to his old barbershop where men got shaves with hot towels and the works. That’s illegal now in Ontario cause everybody’s afraid of getting blood all over himself. I’m sort of glad he didn’t live to see this part of downtown culture get outlawed too. So much already destroyed. I’m not sure he could have stood it.

“How you doin, gents?” he’d say when we went in.

“What do you know, Lonnie?” someone would ask back.

“Can’t complain, can’t complain. What’s the use of it, eh? How’s the missus?”

“Not bad. Yours?”

This was like the catechism of the barbershop. Everybody knew the answers and the questions.

He’d laugh a sad laugh, happy-go-lucky, at the last bit. “Well, she’s a real piece of machinery, let me tell you. One minute everything’s hunky-dory …”

I’m not kidding. This is how these people talked.

A customer to the barber: “Remember to give me high up over the ears, will you?”

Lonnie to the barber: “How’s business been?”

Barber answers back: “It hasn’t. Not so you’d notice. Nobody wants a haircut any more. They want their hair
styled.”
Everybody would laugh. “It’s like that old joke. ‘What’s the difference between a haircut and a hair style? About five bucks.’”

This was a real thigh-slapper, another of Lonnie’s pet expressions preserved from his young days.

“You know,” the barber was saying, “I was hoping to give the shop to my son one day. You know my boy, eh? Yeah, well, he wants no part of it. He’s still going to school. Says he’s going to get a degree in philosophy. I tell him, ‘What are you going to do, open a philosophy shop?’ He’d be better at this, you know what I mean? Customers are all young kids now anyway.”

Everyone seemed to be looking at me.

“That’s because the rest of us are going bald,” Lonnie said. “Them combs get sharper and sharper.”

The barber ignored him. “They want to go to some other young kid with tight pants and his shirt open down to here to get their hair styled. You understand what I’m saying? They even got girls cutting their hair now.”

“Well, you’re keeping busy,” Lonnie would say. “That’s the main thing.”

“I wish I was.”

The guy in the chair said, “Every time I come in here, you’re sitting in the chair reading the paper or something.”

“Except on Saturday,” the barber said. “Saturday’s still not too bad.”

“Well, you got your health,” Lonnie said, still all happy-go-lucky. “That’s the important thing. If you got your health, you’ve got everything. Don’t matter how much money you have if you don’t have your health.”

“You could be E.P. Bloody Taylor.”

“Yeah, you got your health,” Lonnie said. “I only wish I could say the same.”

“You feeling a bit under the weather there, sport?”

“I got this problem, see. Had it all my life, I guess, but I never knew anything about it until they made me take this checkup. I’ve got some pills for it. And the tests! I take so many tests it feels like I’m back in school.”

“You were never very good in school,” said the guy in the chair. Then to the barber: “Him and me were the dumbest kids in the place.”

“We did our share of horsing around, though, didn’t we?”

The guy getting his haircut laughed. “You remember Old Man Ridgeway? He was this big hulk of a man, see. Had a jaw like a sack of sugar. He used to say, ‘Lad, I’ll drive you so far into the deck it’ll take two Mack trucks to pull you out again.’”

“Course, he had to be tough. That was a tough bunch back in those days.”

“Sure was. You remember the Eyetalian named Smith. What was his name?”

“They called him Cappy.” Lonnie volunteered the information but I could tell he was being careful about what else he might say.

“Christ, I haven’t thought of him in years. Jesus, Ridgeway used to get on his back and he’d just give as good as he got.”

“Remember he went around with his hand all wrapped up for so long?” Lonnie held up one paw like it was injured.

“His hand?”

“Cappy and his girlfriend—I think it must have been the Calder girl …”

“Helen Calder,” the customer explained to the barber. “She was this real fast number. They say she did more things than a penknife.”

Lonnie became the historian once more. “Cappy and her were walking up Woodward one Saturday night by the Loew’s. A guy was up on a ladder, changing the words on the marquee. You know them big glass letters they used to have? Well, the guy’s taking down letters that say Clark Gable and putting up ones that say Gary Cooper or something. Cappy and the girl walk by underneath and stop to smooch. The guy on the ladder hollers at them to get the hell away and Cap begins hollering back at him. ‘Get away from here, you little bastard,’ the guy on the ladder says. And Cappy just tips the ladder over. The guy comes crashing down, glass letters breaking all around them. Made one hell of a crash. Cappy got cut up pretty bad. That’s why he went around with his mitt all bandaged.”

The others were listening very carefully, so he added a punchline, softly. “Wasn’t his gun hand, though.”

The guy in the chair wanted to know what happened to the fellow on the ladder.

“Oh, I think he was hurt pretty bad.”

“Did Cappy get in trouble with the cops for that one?” The barber addressing the historian.

“For a little while, until he got into the real money.”

“When you’re rich you can get away with anything.”

“In this burg, you have to be
able
to get away with anything to
get
rich.”

This made all the heads nod up and down.

Then all these guys would sort of wander away from the point they’d all agreed on, and Lonnie would lose the chair as historian.

“What you do think about the Leafs?” the barber might ask.

“They say Mahovlich is still on his streak, but I don’t know. I hope so.”

“I put my money on Little Davey Keon. He’s small but you never seen a kid skate like that.”

“That’s what they say, that’s what they say all right.”

“Course, they’re not the Leafs of the old days. Remember them? The Kid Line. Charlie Conacher, right wing, Busher Jackson, left wing, Joe what’s his name at centre.”

“Primeau. Joe Primeau.”

Lonnie said that from behind the newspaper he’d picked up. All this talk was getting close to treason in a Red Wings town. “Says here that the city has said go ahead on that plaza they want to build. Says it’s a great deal for the community. What a bunch of malarkey. Politicians trying to buffalo everybody while lining their own pockets as usual. They’re as crooked as a dog’s hind leg.” There was a pause. “What’s a plaza going to do to your business here, do you think?”

“I’ll tell you it isn’t going to help any, that’s for sure. A
thing like that just drives people away from the street. I’ve seen it happen.”

The guy was almost finished getting his haircut.

The barber said, “Lonnie, do you remember when me and you used to get higher than a kite on a couple of bottles of beer? You can do that when you’re young. We used to paint the town red, the two of us, didn’t we?”

“We’d wake up in the morning in Snaketown sick as a dog. I was saying this to the wife just this morning: horseplay is one thing but, Jesus, sooner or later you got to, well, take responsibility. You know what I mean, of course.”

“What’s all that about?”

“We’re all getting older.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

“It hit me again all of a sudden just a minute ago when we were talking: I know somebody who’s been dead more than thirty years.”

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody.”

But Lonnie was one of the last people to see him alive.

“The doctor will see you now.”

By this time Lonnie was in such a hurry to get all decrepit that he got me to come with him. I was supposed to ask the doctor what the patient forgot to ask. That was my job. I had to make sure the doctor explained in English that the patient and me could understand. I was the witness. The job of historian had been passed to me.

“Mr. Bischoff, is it?”

“That’s right.”

“You were Dr. White’s patient?”

“I was. At least I was until he moved to the States. I guess you people do a lot better down there, eh? That’s what I read.”

“Dr. White has given up his practice here, yes. I have his records but they seem to be incomplete.”

Lonnie looked over at an almost life-size plastic skeleton hanging in the corner. “I guess he didn’t make it, eh, Doc?” There was what you could call a clammy silence. “Must be left over from Dr. White.”

“Now about your childhood …”

“I was a kid during the Depression, you see. Funny in a way. My old man came over from Germany because it was pretty rough over there.”

“Childhood diseases, Mr. Bischoff. Have you ever had the mumps …?”

“At my stage of life, does that really matter?” But he could read the doctor’s face and figured out that it did. He understood, one history buff to another. “Nope.”

“Chicken pox?”

“Nope.”

“Scarlet fever?”

“Naw.”

“Rheumatic fever?”

“Is that like rheumatism?”

“No, rheumatic fever. It’s a disease in children and adolescents that weakens the heart.”

“No, not that.”

“But you do suffer from rheumatism?”

“No.”

“What profession are you in, Mr. Bischoff? Do you work a lot out of doors?”

Lonnie tried to hide his hands, hide how rough-looking they were. “When I worked, I worked inside mostly. I’m a finishing carpenter and general handyman, but I’m pretty much retired now. That is, I’m self-employed but I’m not getting much work any longer. You know how it is.”

Apparently the doctor did not in fact know how it is. Big surprise.

“I guess I talk too much,” Lonnie said.

“Well, Mr. Bischoff, talk is mainly what we’re here for today. I’m trying to see all of Dr. White’s patients who are on continuing medication. How are you finding the nitroglycerine spray?”

“It works great, I guess.”

“You’re not finding your normal activities too strenuous? And you’re taking the Pravacal as prescribed?”

“You bet.”

“How about at home? You’re not experiencing any side effects or any difficulties at night?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re following the diet Dr. White suggested for you?”

“To tell the truth, I have fallen down a bit there. It’s kind of hard in my—situation—to stick to the rules all the time. But I do the best I can.”

“You really should try to follow the diet to the letter, Mr. Bischoff. Avoid fried foods, prepared foods of all kinds and red meats and of course monitor your cholesterol and fat intakes very closely. Are you getting proper rest?”