Twenty-Six (17 page)

The Christmas holiday was almost a month long, and Ziv decided he was going to spend most of it reading for pleasure. He’d done as much reading in the first term of university as he’d done in all the years of high school combined. One of the first things he’d learned at university was what a poor reader he was. He’d spent three hours in the first week of classes, reading and rereading the first two paragraphs of his Sociology textbook, unable to grasp a single concept or understand fully a single sentence. So to help build his reading skills and in order to reduce the length of the list of important books he’d never read, he’d stacked a pile of novels beside his bed when he got home. Some were his father’s. Ziv had culled them from the backs of bookshelves where no one had looked for years. Some were his own, bought at Back Pages, a used bookshop in Halifax. Two or three were ones he’d borrowed from the university library.

At university, some people seemed able to balance watching
TV
with studying. But Ziv found that the moment classes had begun early in September he’d completely lost interest in
TV
. He never went near it. The early supper crowd, those who went to the meal-hall at four thirty, were almost all doing so in order to finish the meal and get back to their residences to watch
General Hospital
at five. He heard people discussing
The Thornbirds
, a mini-series that, from what he’d heard in discussions, seemed like little
more than a soap opera. Even
The Waltons
, which came on in syndicated reruns nightly at eleven o’clock, had a cult following. If he was awake at midnight on a weekday he could hear the sardonic calls of “Goodnight John-boy” echoing down the halls as people responded to what was being said on the screen.

Nothing about
TV
could attract Ziv. He had his nose in textbooks. He explored the library. He got involved with the student newspaper. Early on Saturday mornings, he assisted Mike Davidovic, who lived down the hall from him, with his jazz show on the student radio station.

But in the first few days of his holiday, the television was a narcotic. After four months of overtaxing his brain, Ziv found the
TV
was a welcome release from thought and meaning.

He sat half-reclined in a La-Z-boy, his mother across from him on the couch. Barely a word passed between them during the day. His father was not speaking to him since the terrible incident with the scrapbooks, but in the evenings after he got off work, he would come into the room, flip through the channels two or three times, mumbling responses to what was being said or criticisms of what was being done. Then he’d get up and go into the front room, sit in the big plush armchair beneath the photo of himself with his arm around Tommy Douglas. Once settled in, he’d stay there for hours, wrestling the newspaper back on itself and swearing into the pages of the National section.

On the Friday before Christmas, the phone rang at three thirty in the afternoon. It was Alec Morrison. Ziv had not heard from Alec since the end of the summer, but his mother had told him that Alec and Arvel had been hanging around together and that in the fall, the two of them had got drunk while Jackie was at work, and Jackie had kicked the both of them out of the apartment.

“Ziv,” Alec said. “What’s going on, Buddy?”

“Not too much. Hanging around. Resting up.”

“How’s university going?”

“It’s … it’s hard to describe. I feel like I’ve been through so much since summer. Like I’ve lived a whole lifetime in four months.”

“You getting any smarter from what they’re teaching you there?”

“I don’t know if I’m getting any smarter or not, but I understand one thing clearly that I did not understand in September.”

“Four months seems like a long time to learn one thing.”

“It seems like a lifetime.”

“So what have you learned?”

“I’ve learned that I don’t know anything. Nothing. I’m ignorant. I learned that I’ve got a fuck of a lot to learn.”

“Shit. That’s heavy.”

“Well, it feels heavy. But it’s also a good feeling. There’s something positive about realizing your own ignorance. It’s like … finding a starting place.”

“Oh man, I just called to see if you wanted to go to a party in the Heights tonight. I didn’t know I’d be getting into an egghead conversation. Maybe you’re too educated to get drunk.”

“Ha, ha. Fuck that. Who’s having a party?”

The Heights at one time had been the name of a few rows of postwar bungalows built on the side of a hill at the south end of Albion Mines. Now it was less a neighbourhood than a collection of two or three areas that included the original bungalows, plus the several blocks of sixties and seventies bungalows to the south of them. The Heights even included Valley Woods, the
subdivision of new, modern, upscale homes on large, landscaped lots that occupied the extreme southern section of town. If it were not for the public-education system that brought the kids from Valley Woods downhill to the same elementary school, junior high, and high school that kids from the Red Row went uphill to, the north and south sections of Albion Mines would never meet. They were divided by a downtown that either side had to get to, but neither had to cross, and the histories of the ends of town, and the status and backgrounds of the people who lived there, could not have been more different. In a city, a person from the Red Row would never meet or get to know someone from the Heights, or especially Valley Woods. But they were all stuffed into this little town of six thousand. They went to the same schools, played on the same sports teams, shopped in the same grocery stores, and bought double-double Tim Horton’s coffee from the same doughnut shop.

The party was in a big square two-and-a-half-storey house on Weir Avenue, right at the edge of Valley Woods. Ziv wouldn’t drink rum, so he and Alec bought a quart of vodka and a two-litre bottle of Sussex orange pop for a chaser. Neither of them was old enough to be legally served at the liquor commission, but Alec was wearing a cheesy-looking moustache that he kept smoothing with this thumb and calling his
ID
. Ziv waited outside on Foord Street and Alec came out with the vodka several minutes later.

By the time they got to the party, the place was already packed. The young woman whose parents owned the house was several years older than Ziv. She’d just got her B.A. degree and was one term into law school. Her parents were in the States somewhere for the holidays, visiting relatives.

Weir Avenue was a steep incline, and cars belonging to people who’d gone into the party lined both sides of the street. A floodlight over the driveway lit up five or six more cars parked on the asphalt there. Ziv and Alec entered through the back door and took a tour through the downstairs: four big rooms plus a kitchen, stuffed with people whose age ranged from twenty-five down to sixteen. Every room was wall-to-wall. Conversations were going on, people were passing cigarettes and joints. In the doorways and the two halls, party-goers shouldered past each other in a tight squeeze on the way to the bathroom or the front porch or the fridge. First-year university students wore grey sweatshirts with
PROPERTY OF
and the name of their school. You could see circles gathered around those who’d gone out of province, especially to Ontario: everyone dying to know what things were like there.

Ziv recognized several people he hadn’t seen in a while, but there was so much going on that he didn’t know who to begin speaking to. Having come full circle through the downstairs, Ziv and Alec stopped in the kitchen and set their bottles on an empty corner at the end of the enormous bottle-lined counter.

They didn’t bother with ice or glasses or with trying to chill anything. They had warm vodka and warm pop. They took a drink of one straight from the bottle and followed that up with a drink of the other, taken the same way.

As midnight approached, the house got fuller. Someone had rigged up the stereo so that there was a speaker blaring in every room downstairs. The volume kept edging louder, and along with it the voices of drunk people shouting at each other over the din of music.

Ziv and Alec stood side by side at the counter, passing their two bottles back and forth. Ziv could tell by the way he was guzzling the vodka that there was something eating Alec, but there almost always was. Alec tapped his foot impatiently between drinks.

Someone Ziv recognized as having played hockey against Arvel – was he from New Glasgow? – staggered up to him.

“You’re Arvel … Arvel fucking something,” the guy said. He was drunk enough and his tone was mild enough to be innocuous. He had a stain down the sleeve of his sweatshirt that might have shown where he’d washed away some vomit.

“That’s my brother,” Ziv said.

“You bruised my fucking pelvis at that tournament in Thorburn, you bastard.”

“I’ve got a brother that looks something like me,” Ziv said.

“Put me in the fucking hospital.” The young man’s eyes were rolling around in their sockets.

“Ya, sure, buddy,” Ziv said. “Get some fucking padding next time.”

The young man paused for a woozy instant, looking from Ziv to Alec, then opened the cupboard door between them. The door brushed a few inches from Alec’s nose, and Alec shoved the man with both hands, sending him and the empty glass he’d had half a grip on to the floor. His head smacked a table leg, but he was too drunk to feel a thing. He had a dopey grin on his face and probably had no idea what had sent him to the floor. The glass bounced once on its butt end before smashing against the wall. All noise but the pounding of the stereo stopped. One side of
Get the Knack
was on its fourth or fifth straight playthrough. The bass line of “My Sharona” pounded against the walls.

The young woman whose house it was was standing in the doorway to her dining room. Ziv went to her swiftly.

“Look,” he said, consciously straightening the face he knew was twisted with drunkenness. “It was my friend’s fault. I’d like to take him right out of here without any trouble. Could you sweep up that glass? I’d do it, but that would only slow down getting my friend out of here.” He could tell she appreciated his eagerness to avoid more trouble.

“I’ll get the glass,” she said. “You get him the hell out of here.”

Outside it was mild for late December, though their breath billowed out before them in thick clouds. The floodlights on the side of the house and on the two-car garage nearby lit up a large area around the driveway.

Someone had thrown up on the landing of the step directly outside the door. Ziv saw it in time and instructed Alec to step over it. Several people stood around outside, smoking and taking drinks from beer bottles. It was a little cold for party overflow to be spilling onto the lawn, but bundled up and a bit drunk, it was possible to hold a conversation outdoors. Now and again people beat themselves on the chest with their arms, to get the blood going. They stamped their feet into the paved driveway.

There was nowhere else to go, so Ziv and Alec settled in at the far corner of the pavement on the driveway, near the front bumper of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. With the racket of the party and the music gone, for the first time they were able to talk.

“What’s going on in Albion Mines?” Ziv said. “I heard you got Arvel kicked out of his house.”

“That fucking guy! Blames everything on me. She took him back, anyway. If you ask me, she’ll fucking regret it.”

“What were you doing leaving home in the first place? You’ve got nowhere else to go. You don’t have a job, and with things looking the way they do right now, you’re not going to get a job. Don’t you think further ahead than one day?”

“No.”

They passed the vodka and chaser back and forth, though they were drunk enough now that they didn’t need chaser. They drank the orange pop absent-mindedly, sometimes taking a sip minutes after a drink of vodka.

They heard a car passing slowly out on the dark street. It was the one cruiser of the Albion Mines Police Department.

“Go back into the house with the liquor,” the metallic voice of the police
PA
system said. “Go back into the house with the liquor.” A spotlight suddenly glared from the passenger seat. It passed over the people standing in the driveway. No one moved.

“Go back into the house with the liquor,” the voice said once more. The spotlight dimmed and the police cruiser drove away.

A cold wind set up, and along with it came a light spray of ice-cold rain.

“Shit,” Ziv said. “Let’s see if one of these cars is open.” He tried the driver’s door on the vw Beetle and it was unlocked. He climbed into the driver’s side and leaned over to pull the latch handle on the passenger’s door, which was not locked either. Alec sat down in the passenger seat and shut the door behind him.

Rain drizzled onto the car. The tiny droplets on the windshield caught the light of the floodlights on the house and shimmered in a way that made them look like they were breathing.

Ziv rested his forehead on the cold steering wheel. The interior of the Beetle was not designed for someone of Ziv’s size. His knees and the tops of his legs were cramped by the steering wheel.
The back of the seat was barely wide enough for his torso. Little spits of rain ticked against the roof. When the wind picked up, it whooshed over the car and rocked the vehicle on its suspension.