Mean Boy (15 page)

The fact is, I have not studied for Dekker’s exam at all. But I’ve read all the plays, for God’s sake, written my A papers about Lear’s madness, Hamlet’s tragic flaw, Iago’s inscrutable motives. I’m good on Shakespeare. I’ve got Shakespeare down. I’ve got a couple more days to cram for the rest. Plus there is my science credit to think about. Diligently—for I am nothing if not diligent—I mentally dissect the human immune system as I weave my way through the white sheets to the bus station to pick up Schofield. The wind wobbles Jim’s car like a boat every time I come to a stop sign. It happens that the bus stops at a massively inconvenient location—a decrepit ‘50s diner halfway between Wethering and
Timperly. Just sitting there on the border between the two provinces with its spacy ‘50s architecture and non-existent paint job. The consensus is that Spanky’s is not necessarily a theme restaurant, but merely a restaurant built in the ‘50s which didn’t have the money or inclination to update its aesthetic as the decades rolled by. So now it’s attained “retro” status, simply by waiting out the years. There is absolutely nothing retro or interesting about the food. You can get hamburgers, soggy french fries that any self-respecting Carl’s patron would turn their noses up at, and egg salad sandwiches. Milkshakes—but you can get those anywhere. There isn’t even a jukebox playing Elvis or Buddy Holly.

So anyway, this is all to lead up to the image of Dermot Schofield balancing his considerable bulk on a stool at the counter, sucking up a strawberry milkshake as if having wandered into a particularly dismal edition of Archie comics. There is no mistaking Schofield. He is the only person in the restaurant, aside from the cook and the cashier. The cook clatters invisibly in the kitchen as the cashier natters into the phone. I am able to glean that she is talking to her boss. She wants to close the place and go home before we all get snowed in together.

“No—there’s no one,” I hear her snap before I can approach Schofield. “Just me and some asshole off the bus.”

“Dermot Schofield?” I say, squaring my shoulders, extending my arm in preparation for a firm and uncompromising handclasp.

The guy on the stool adjusts his glasses, peers through them at me. Here’s what he’s like: as if a shaved grizzly bear put on a tie, parka, and thick pair of Henry Kissinger glasses and decided one horrible winter’s day to come out of hibernation just for a Spanky’s shake. You’d think his ass would swallow the tiny stool supporting it. Then he stands and I am about three inches tall.

“Hello.” He engulfs my hand in what feels like a catcher’s mitt. I’m flummoxed.

“I’m Larry,” I say, forgetting how I’m Lawrence off-island.

“Hello, Larry,” says Schofield in a surprisingly reedy voice.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Not at all.”

“The bus got here an hour and a half ago,” says the waitress, who has come over—after hanging up on the boss—to see what all the excitement is at this end of the counter.

“Oh my God,” I say.

“Maybe you got last year’s schedule or something,” offers the waitress. Schofield is already shaking his head and smiling.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he reeds at me.

“I’m so sorry, I had three-thirty written down!” I stammer, quick not to say
Jim told me three-thirty
. Because Jim is speaking loud and clear in my mind, at this moment.
He’ll just be looking for something, Larry. Any little chink in the armour—anything at all—he’ll just be waiting for me to fuck up
.

“It’s all my fault,” I tell Schofield in a firm, forbidding tone. I almost am glowering up at the man, daring him to doubt my incompetence.

Schofield smiles down, a thin crease between bulbous cheeks, beneath inscrutably thick glasses.

“Absolutely no problem whatsoever, Larry, please,” he murmurs.

We drive about ten feet before coming to a whiteout.

“My gosh,” remarks Schofield, looking around him, out at the impenetrable white. I wonder if he is fighting back the same subdued panic I happen to be struggling with. It’s like being lost in the dark—only it’s light. You tell yourself the
same sort of things. There’s nothing to be afraid of, everything’s fine, the world hasn’t actually dropped away even if that’s how it looks and feels, even if that’s precisely the evidence of your eyes.

“It’s no big deal,” I say. “We’ll creep. We’ll just creep.”

Of course, those things you tell yourself in the dark—
there’s nothing to be afraid of, everything’s fine
—they don’t actually work in this case, do they? Because we are on a major highway between the two provinces. There are eighteen-wheelers barrelling along this corridor on a regular basis.

“Perhaps we should pull over for a while,” suggests Schofield.

“We’ll
creep,”
I insist, figuring the eighteen-wheelers will be just as apt to hit us if we’re parked on the side of the road. The yellow line has disappeared, and they’ll be all drugged up—”crazy on the speed, and the acid and
tokes
and what have you,” like my father used to assure me the potato truckers who came across on the ferry always were. So the eighteen-wheelers—their drivers out of their minds on drugs and lacking even a yellow line to orient them—won’t know where they are on the road. They’ll hit us if we’re moving, they’ll hit us if we’re standing still. They’d probably hit us if we were sitting out in the middle of a field. Right now it feels as though we could be upside down and flying ten feet off the ground and I’d have no way of knowing it. For all I know we’re plowing through a snowbank—actually
under
ten feet or so of snow. There’s no way to tell. It’s white.
How was your drive? It was white
. So why not creep? At least we’ll be moving when they smash into us. Nobody will be able to say we were sitting around wasting time when we got smucked.
They were creeping, by God, creeping right along there in the snow like regular troopers. There was no stopping them
. Plucky young poet Lawrence Campbell and his precious three hundred pounds of Canlit cargo.

“Perhaps you’d like me to drive,” suggests Schofield, his reedy voice subdued.

“Oh, no,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“It’s disorienting, isn’t it?”

“It’s a little bit disorienting,” I agree.

“Claustrophobic,” remarks Schofield.

Headlights in our face. A roar filling our ears.

“Jesus cocksucking Christ!”
I ululate.

“—just the snowplow,” says Schofield. I pull over to what I imagine and hope to be the side of the road. I yank the emergency break and stare straight ahead. I don’t put my head in my hands.

“I’m happy to drive,” says Schofield after a moment.

“Maybe we should just wait it out a little bit.”

He looks at his watch. I can’t believe the guy is looking at his watch with us sitting here surrounded by the bleached void. It’s like tumbling through space and wondering what the temperature is outside your spacesuit.

“Lots of time to the reading,” he pronounces, leaning back as if into an armchair in front of a fireplace. It’s a thing with burly men—they look cozy, no matter where they are. The only time they appear to be uncomfortable is standing up, having to sustain all that mass on their own.

I lean back as well, gazing out the window, which is dumb, because there’s nothing to gaze at. I’m play-acting for Schofield, like,
dum-de-dum, why, look at all the stuff that’s going on out there
. He must think I’m a fool. I lurch forward to turn on the radio.

It’s imperative to stay off the roads this evening
, scolds the announcer in a Lorne Green baritone.

And then tinkling piano.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
. I swallow, sigh. Another snowplow rumbles past like some kind of leftover ice-age leviathan.

“Are the headlights on?” asks Schofield.

“Um,” I check. “No.”

“Maybe we should keep them on. High beams.”

I have this conviction that I should contradict Schofield. That it’s important he understands who is in charge here. Not to let him see me sweat, as it were. No chinks in said armour. Thinking this, I nod and flick on the high beams.

Then my right leg is heavier than my left. The catcher’s mitt is resting on it. Oh no. Oh no. This man equals five of me.

“Larry,” says Schofield.

I stare straight ahead. I make a nose like
eeyore
.

Schofield pats me. On the leg. Once. “Listen,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. All right?”

I look down at my leg. Nothing but worn-in Woolworth’s jeans adorning it now. I deflate, and make myself look Schofield in the glasses. Smile. “All right.”

“Okay,” says Schofield smiling back in a grandfatherly sort of way. “We still have quite a bit of time.”

“You must be hungry,” I say. This occurs to me because in fact I am hungry myself.

“The milkshake will hold me.”

I wish I smoked or something. We’d have something friendly to do to pass the time.

“Do you smoke?” I ask the poet.

Schofield shakes his head. “Afraid not. You?”

“No.”

“Hm,” says Schofield.

We stare out the window. The white is darkening, turning bluish. Getting late. Seconds roar past.

“The thing is,” I say without really knowing it’s coming, “I’m not a very experienced driver.”

Schofield purses his lips and nods.

“I got my licence a couple of years ago, but, you know. All I ever did was drive around the back roads. I never even went into Charlottetown.”

“I see,” says Schofield. “You’re from PEI?”

“Yes!” I’m happy about this turn in the conversation. It feels like this is going somewhere.

“I love PEI,” the poet tells me. “We spent some summers there when I was a boy.”

“I’m from near Summerside,” I say. “Have you ever been to Summerside?”

“I love Summerside,” Schofield rejoins. “It’s beautiful.”

“It
is
beautiful,” I enthuse. I think about Summerside. The very name of the place. You can scarcely imagine it buried in a snowstorm. I wish I were there right now.

I glance over at Schofield. There’s silence again. It seems we have both fallen into melancholy thinking of Summerside.

“So anyway,” I continue—and realize as I do that Schofield had interrupted as a means of excusing me from continuing. “I guess this kind of driving is pretty new to me.”

Schofield’s pursing and nodding again.

“And—ah—” I add, “I’m sorry.”

Jim would smack me if he were here. Or, no. He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t have to. He looks at you. He folds his arms. He manoeuvres his eyebrows in just such a way as to make you feel impaled.
You are showing weakness, Larry. You are letting him see you sweat. You’re nothing but a big chink-riddled suit of armour
.

“I’ve got an idea,” says Schofield. His voice is reedy again. Jocular.

I look at him. “You do?”

The catcher’s mitt dabs at my leg a second time. “Why don’t I try driving for a bit?” He smiles. “You can tell me where to go.”

I look away from him, mirroring Schofield’s signature gesture—the nodding, the pursing. It’s a good gesture, I realize as I perform it. Respectful, while not giving anything away. A face-saving gesture, which I have need of right now.
Unspoken: We’ll just pretend like he didn’t make the same suggestion five minutes ago. I open my door. The wind wrenches it out of my hand.

“But we’ll just
creep,”
I hear Schofield call from somewhere behind me. “We’ll creep like you said before.”

I stagger to the other side of the car, blasted by ice-white and freezing nothing.

The Crowfeather Inn has no record of a reservation for a Dermot Schofield.

“Really?” I keep saying, over and over again.
“Really
?”

“I’m so sorry,” says the man behind the desk.

“Surely you have a room available?” prods Schofield.

Let me handle this, Dermot, I want to say. I’ve grown up in the motel business. I know how to deal with these people. But actually I’m intimidated, because the Crowfeather is nothing like my parents’ place, called the Highwayman. (“We rob ya blind!” my father will joke counterintuitively to tourists.)

The Crowfeather does that turn-of-the-century thing with its decor, like the English Department but without all the dust and burnt coffee smell. Plush chairs, velvet drapes, gilded wallpaper, sumptuous tones, whereas the Highwayman has buoys and driftwood hanging on the walls of the lobby. Nobody I know likes the Crowfeather in particular. Apparently a couple of American hippies emerged from the woods one day where they had been living in a commune since the mid-sixties. Most of the hippies left after a couple of years, rumour has it, because they were developing scurvy during the winters. The current proprietors of the Crowfeather stuck it out, however, hitchhiking back and forth into town for vitamin supplements and other sundries—back and forth, back and forth—until finally they realized they were spending more time in town
than at the commune. So then they sold the commune and bought an ostentatious yet shambling Victorian home on the edge of town whose ancient owner—a Grayson, no surprise—had freshly died. It was revealed at that point that the two American hippies were rich—had more money than they knew what to do with. The commune had been like a hobby to them, and now starting up the Crowfeather was their hobby. This annoyed locals, who were further annoyed to see how well the inn did. People made fun of it initially, just as they had made fun of the commune. But the hippies took out ads in
Harper’s
magazine and
The New Yorker
. They made Timperly, New Brunswick, a summer holiday destination—something no home-grown entrepreneur had ever accomplished. Still, locals disdain the place, say that it is “big-feeling.” They feel obliquely ripped off by the Crowfeather Inn somehow. It’s the Westcock crowd that keeps the place going—sucking up the antiques, the opulence. It’s the only fancy place to eat in town. The dining room is every student’s first choice whenever their parents come to take them out. It’s constantly booked for graduation dinners and small, tasteful wedding parties, and to entertain visiting dignitaries like Dermot Schofield.