Lost Between Houses (9 page)

I could smell him too.

“Hello there, young fellow.”

I looked over.

“Oh hello,” I said in this real shitty formal voice.

“Can I join you?”

“I’m sorry, you can’t. I’m waiting for my mother. She’s with the police force.”

Well, that last part may have been a bit unnecessary but I threw it in anyway. I knew if I let the guy sit down, he’d be yapping all the way to kingdom come and while normally I don’t care who I talk to, tonight was sort of special. Tonight I just wanted to sit in the train and think about all the stuff that happened with Scarlet.

Anyway he split. He was very nice though, which made me feel a bit shitty. He wandered off down the train where no doubt somebody else was going to tell him to fuck off. I wondered if he had any kids. Like could he phone them up and say, “I’m tired of being a drunk. Can I come over?” I sat there daydreaming about this guy going home to his kids, everybody being nice to him, giving him a bath and fluffy towels, the mirror all steamed up; and then him sitting in the living room in a brown dressing gown, having a cup of tea. Little old grizzled face all happy.

Finally we started up, the train lurching out of the station, ugly stuff on both sides, brick and barbed wire. But after awhile we cleared the city limits and picked up speed. It was sort of cool rattling through the countryside, everything all black outside, those little towns going by, thinking about Scarlet, about how yummy her face smelt when it was all wet. Or how she smelt when she was a little bit sweaty and leaned over to grab something. Wow. There was one time when she reached up to bat a spider web off the chandelier and her shirt came out of her jeans and I could see her tummy. I had this overwhelming desire to lean over and lick it like an ice cream cone. She probably would have called the cops on me, thought I was a big pervert, but that’s what I wanted to do. It’s an amazing thing, when you come right down to it, that girls aren’t grossed out by guys, all the disgusting things we want to do to them.

I got into the Hunstville train station near midnight; not much there, just a little shack on the edge of town, down by the planing mill, and a guy in a taxi with the lights off. I went over and he wound down the window.

“You going out to Grassmere?” the guy said.

“Yeah.”

“Charge it to your father?”

“Yeah,” I said sort of amazed. “How’d you know?”

“Taken you boys out there a hundred times before. Don’t you recognize me?”

“Oh yeah. Now I do.”

I’m very superstitious and this seemed like a good omen. I hopped in the car. It was like being a foreign prince returning home. Everybody knew me.

Everything was shut up in town, the lights in the movie theatre marquee off. We crossed over the bridge, the wheels making that funny sound on the grid underneath and headed out into the countryside.

“Do you think I could have a cigarette?” I said to the guy. It looked so good him smoking one, it smelt so warm and cosy in the car.

“You don’t smoke, do you?”

“Not usually,” I said. “But I’m sort of celebrating. I’ve been away for awhile.”

“Oh yeah? Long time?”

“Well, not really. But it seems like a long time. I was in Toronto. Seeing my girlfriend.”

“Really?”

“She’s a model.”

“No kidding. She must be good-looking.”

“She is,” I said. And then, so it didn’t look like I was trying
to hog all the glory, I said, “Do you know Toronto?”

“I took my aunt down to the hospital a few years ago. Couldn’t get out of there fast enough. If you don’t mind me saying.”

“I love it.” I said. “I’m just made for the place. Like I can’t imagine how anybody lives up here.”

Once I get talking, Christ only knows what’s going to come out of my mouth. “I mean maybe it’s an acquired taste,” I added. “Maybe I haven’t lived up here long enough.”

“Well the winters sure are long. That’s for sure. Ran Whipper Billy Watson out to his place the other day.”

“The wrestler? What’s he doing up here?”

“Lives here. Ever since he retired. He grew up around here.”

“And he came back?”

“Where would you want him to go?”

“I don’t know. I just would have thought being famous and all, he could live anywhere. New York. France, something like that.”

“Nope. Told me all he wanted was to get back home.”

“Son of a gun,” I said. “Whipper Billy Watson. Up here. What’s he like?”

“You couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. Down to earth. Just like you and me.”

“No kidding.”

“Like I’m talking to you now.”

“Well, I’ll be. Whipper Billy Watson.”

The lighter popped on the dashboard. I love the smell of a cigarette right after you light it from one of those things. The smoke all blue and moody. You can feel it go right to your head, like a balloon sailing up and bouncing gently off the ceiling, the
guy pointing stuff out as we drive, who owns this, who used to own that, who went broke over the winter on account of his drinking, the two of us just shooting the breeze all the way out to the house. It was cool. The whole thing.

You don’t want to start behaving like a goof the minute you get a new girlfriend. Nothing drives them away faster than calling them up all the time, putting your mitts all over them, carrying on like a leech. It’s like that Sandy Hunter thing. Everything was cool till she turned those lovey-dovey eyes on me, and then I just wanted to jump out the window.

Which is a long way of saying I didn’t call Scarlet when I got back to the cottage. I thought about her a lot though, and sometimes in the next couple of days, I really, really wanted to call her, especially at night when I’d been in bed for twenty minutes and started thinking about her sitting in front of the mirror. That was some picture, I’ll tell you. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.

But psychology is everything, that’s my theory. So I didn’t call.

One night, when I was gabbing with my mother in the kitchen, the phone rang.

“So how come you didn’t call me?” she asked.

“I didn’t want to bug you,” I said.

“How would that bug me?”

“You know. Being too available.”

“What are you saying? You’re not available?”

“Sure I’m available. I just don’t want to be a bore about it.”

“There’s nothing boring about somebody liking you.”

“Yes there is,” I said.

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”

“I am, sort of.”

“Yeah, well there’s a difference between being hard to get and being a prick,” she said.

“Mostly a question of degree,” I said and then laughed, this being an excellent joke.

“You think you’re so funny. You’re never serious about anything. You should be an actor.”

“I don’t have the looks for it.”

“You don’t have to be good-looking to be an actor.”

“That’s pretty nice, Scarlet.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yes it is.”

“It is not. I mean you got to be good-looking to be a movie star. That’s not the same thing as being an actor.”

“Whatever.”

“Let’s not get mad at each other, all right? It’s just a big waste of time. We’ll just end up making up anyway. So let’s not do it.”

I sat there sort of stunned. She was smarter than I thought.

“So you call
me
next time, all right? I don’t want to look like a loser either,” she said.

Man, that was a great summer. Harper and me just pissing around, lying on the dock all day getting a tan and then staggering back up to the house, all whacked out from the sun, seeing moons.

On really hot days, when you could hear the leaves rubbing their hands together over your head, we’d take the boat into town, bouncing like crazy over the whitecaps. When you took the engine cover off it sounded like a speedboat.

I always loved that part just before town when you’re coming in off the lake, the water’s getting shallow, you can see the
weeds whizzing by underneath; you go into that channel with the dark, dead logs on the side and the snapping turtles and the wake washing against the river wall and some guy’s fishing down there and he pulls his feet up to get away from the rising water.

We’d park the boat at the marina and get her gassed up.

“Charge that to Mr J. P. Albright,” we’d say.

Charlie Blackburn, who owned the joint, was a beer-bellied, hard-working guy, and he figured us for spoilt little twerps, driving around in our daddy’s boat, not having a job. In fact sometimes I sort of expected him to say no, fuck you. Pay for it yourself, you little prick. But he didn’t. Besides, we gave him a lot of business: he fixed up the engine every time we fucked it up. Come to think of it, Charlie was a pretty decent guy. One time, a couple of summers ago, we roared out of the dock with one of the back ropes still tied on, we got about ten yards and boom, everything came to a big stop, we just about went over the bow, miracle the dock didn’t come apart. But when things cooled down, the engine sounded sick as a dog, and we took it in to Charlie Blackburn. He took one look at it and said, “What in
hell
did you guys do this time?”

The old man was super steamed when he got wind of it and a week later, when we picked up the boat, he asked Charlie, right in front of us, whose fault it was. Charlie waited a second, he didn’t look at us but you could definitely smell the wood burning, and he said, “Just natural wear.” I could have kissed the son of a bitch right on the spot. I mean you just never know in this life who’s going to surprise you and who’s going to fuck you. I mean like never.

We never did much in town, just go up and down the main street about a dozen times; sit on the Town Hall stairs and watch all the people go sweating by; all those girls from summer camp
coming through town. Sometimes they’d carry their paddles down the street, just to let you know they were campers out on a long trip. Their bodies all long and brown and their hair a mess. And the local girls, hanging out over by the main dock, smoking cigarettes and wearing make-up in the middle of the day.

Then we’d head back to the marina and hightail it home. Sometimes when I was in that boat, racing over the water, I’d think about Scarlet or a dance that night, and it’d be such a gas, just looking forward to it, knowing it was there, that I’d want to stand up in the boat and shake the steering wheel I was so happy.

But sometimes when I actually
went
to the dance, I’d notice after awhile that nobody was paying any attention to me, the girls looking through me like I was Casper the ghost. It’s strange but, even though I had a girlfriend, I found myself wandering around those dances like some kind of orphan, feeling sorry for myself.

Remember the French Canadian girl I told all those whoppers to? The dark-haired one? I ran into her again at Hidden Valley and she asked me to come swimming at her place. She lived in town all year ‘round with her sister and her mom. Down by the canal. So I hitchhiked in the next day and when I was going over the bridge, I found myself daydreaming that maybe when I was in the bathroom, changing into my bathing suit, she’d come in the room and start kissing me.

Suddenly I had the unmistakable sensation that I was doing something bad. Exactly like that time in the train station, when I saw the little deer girl. Hoping she’d talk to me. I imagined for a second Scarlet seeing me hurrying over to this other girl’s house and really it made me kind of queasy with shame. I sat down on a log. It was still sunny but everything seemed a bit too bright. I looked down beside the log and there was a skinbook there,
somebody must have brought it down by the river to jack off. Nice neighbourhood eh? Anyway it was spread open to a picture of this snow-white blond chick with a real rack on her, sort of sitting on a stool in a pair of baby-dolls, but you could see right through them and this rack, just hanging there like something you’d find on a cow. I mean I’d seen girlie pictures before, but this stuff, in view of all the shit I was thinking about, it made the whole world look extremely creepy. Like sex was on everybody’s mind and everybody was worth exactly a dollar ninety-eight, including me.

So I started back towards town, like I was a half-decent person, resisting temptation and everything, but then I started thinking about that French Canadian girl coming into the bathroom, me with just a towel around my waist and damn it if I didn’t turn around and head back over to her place. God, I was a mess.

Needless to say, it didn’t go like my daydream. There were other kids there. And one of them, this local guy, was touching her all the time and not exactly going out of his way to be friendly to me. He was really built, like a weightlifter or something, and he kept jumping off the dock and strutting around with his big muscles and this thing like a fist in his bathing suit. I’m a little self-conscious about my chicken chest and being skinny so I didn’t get changed at all. I just sat in the shade with all my clothes on talking to her mother. Hard to believe an old crow like that could have such beautiful daughters, but there you go. Point is, after watching everybody else running around, I found myself feeling sort of shitty, seeing the dark-haired girl and her sister in their bathing suits and thinking I’d never be able to get girls like that. It was like I’d gone in a big circle and ended up back at square one.

So after awhile I got up and left, but as I made my way back along the canal, the depression sort of lifted, it was a nice day again, there were boats puttering along the canal, somebody waved at me from an inboard, I waved back and by the time I got back to the main street I felt fine, thank you very much, just fine.

When I got home I immediately called up Scarlet. She wasn’t in so I figured she must be out with some guy. I stewed about it the whole evening, called her like a dozen times until I finally got her old man. He sounded drunk. I figured he wasn’t too trustworthy, those boozers can’t remember anything, but I left a message anyway for her to call me. It was important. He didn’t even know where she was, which pissed me off. Like a great parent or what.

She phoned just before dinner. Soon as I heard her voice I could feel my whole body relax. Still I couldn’t help myself.