Twenty-Six (2 page)

His own job was barely even a real job. Zellers classified him as
extra
, a category that all but a handful of the people who worked at the store fit into. He received no benefits, contributed to no pension, had no reliable schedule. About all he got from Zellers was enough money to pay his keep and to get drunk a couple of times a week.

He’d been working earlier this evening, and had gone directly from his Zellers shift to the bar called Stumpy’s.

He still wore the shirt and tie that were part of the Zellers dress code. When he’d started coming here, more than three years ago now, after he’d decided not to go back to university, he’d bothered to bring a change of clothes with him to work so he would not look so out-of-place. But now he didn’t care what he looked like, and Stumpy’s was so overcrowded that no one could step back far enough from you to notice what you were wearing anyway. The dance floor tonight had throbbed with writhing bodies. The music had pounded into Ziv’s skull like nails. He had taken the letter from his pocket and unfolded it
against the surface of the bar. Anyone who’d cared enough to notice might have thought him strange for that letter. He had it with him every time he came. Sometimes, when he was sober, he pictured what he must have looked like, night after night, unfolding that piece of paper against the surface of the bar. It was too dark to read, so he’d stare at the surface of the paper, where he could just see that there was writing on it.

He always put twenty dollars in his shirt pocket when he went into Stumpy’s, and he’d stand at the bar, gagging on cigarette smoke, staring at a letter he was too drunk to read, going deaf to the music and to everything else, until he reached one final time into the shirt pocket and found it empty.

Halfway down Hudson Street he stopped and leaned over the sidewalk. He took a mitten off his right hand and jammed two fingers down his throat to try to get rid of the alcohol that was in him like a demon. Spasms pinched his guts and he dry-retched several times before ejecting a reddish-green jelly onto the brownish snow.

The snow chirped beneath his boots, a crisp high sound that meant it was minus fifteen or colder. The hard, frozen branches of trees clacked and rattled against each other in the breeze. Unnamed things around him went
snap
as something inside them froze and broke. Only the odd light in the odd window shone out onto the snow. The crystal air was so clear and empty that even up at this end of the neighbourhood, trucks on the Trans-Canada in Lourdes made a roar that echoed down the streets and between the houses.

As he walked through the Red Row, he saw his whole life twisted around itself like a dog staring at its own tail, running in circles, too stupid to know it was chasing itself. He walked
because he was too drunk to face his father. How many times had he walked this same pathetic route for the same pathetic reason? How many times had he been in this same position: too drunk to show his face to anyone who was supposed to care? He was drunk and sick and useless. And tired. Tired into the marrow. This walking, this pointless circling of the neighbourhood, had gone on for years. If he had any brains, he’d be walking the loop through New Glasgow. It was 8 K and would take almost two hours. He’d be sober by the time he got back to his parents’ place. But his hollow legs, aching from the ankles up, had already taken him from Stumpy’s, a forty-minute walk. What if he started out around the New Glasgow loop, got as far as downtown New Glasgow, then passed out on Provost Street? He could picture himself face-down on the dirty snow of the sidewalk in front of Goodman Place, too exhausted to stand and too drunk to roll over. So he hovered around home, restlessly circling. He traced and retraced his steps, stopping in his parents’ driveway, peeking in at the living room – watching the light from the television flicking against the curtains – then circling again. Cursing and spitting, hating his father for waiting up for him. Hating himself for doing the worst of what the old man expected. Hating his father for being drunker than he was, no doubt, but having the power not to have to answer to anyone for it. Would he have thought, at fifteen, the first time he got too drunk to go home, the first time he traced this useless trail, would he have guessed he’d be twenty-three and still doing it? Twenty-three and working at Zellers. Twenty-three and living at home. There were guys twenty-three years old making seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year playing hockey in the
NHL
.

In the side of a bank near the corner of Scott Avenue he kicked a ledge out of the snow and sat on it, pulling the bottom of his down-filled coat so the cold wouldn’t soak in.

He took off his left mitt and searched with the bare hand under his parka. He retrieved the letter from his pants pocket and turned the envelope over in the light of the street lamp. He looked at the blue-and-silver foreign stamp: some sort of stylized bird with a long beak. A stork? The envelope was wrinkled and creased, soiled from being examined and re-examined in his big, clumsy hands.

Without finishing the letter, he folded it up, put it back into its envelope, and slipped it into the front pocket of his parka. From the other big pocket on the coat’s front, he pulled out a creased copy of
The Educated Imagination
. He’d bought it at the university bookstore while he’d still been a student. In the small hours of the morning on a night of drinking, the time he’d wasted on that particular night became a ragged patch of colour on the giant collage of his wasted life. At these times he always decided he had to read. He knew reading was something he did not do enough of, and he always carried some book or other in his parka pocket, intending to read it but never setting aside a specific time. He looked at the book and blinked at the glare reflecting up from the cover. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried a second look. He turned to the table of contents and
looked at the letters that made up the words of the chapter names. “The Motive for Metaphor” was the first chapter. He’d read that one already, months ago. He blinked and looked away, up into the glare of the street light that blotted out the black-and-grey sky behind it. His breath rose above him, a white ghost disappearing. When he looked back at the book, he tried to read the title of the next chapter, but he was too tired to make sense of it. “The Singing School,” the next chapter was called. He turned to page 12, where that chapter started. The bookmark that held the page was a laminated column of newspaper print, an obituary from several years ago. The edge of the lamination was serrated, cut with pinking shears to give a fancier appearance. The obituary, before it had been encased in clear plastic, had been backed by a yellowish length of ribbon with “A Prayer for the Living and the Dead” printed on it. Ziv read the name on the obituary: James Alexander Morrison, then quickly tucked the bookmark inside the back cover. On page 12 he read a paragraph that talked about being shipwrecked, about imagination and identity, and about associative language. All the words were familiar, but he could not decipher how they related to one another.

He put the book back into his pocket, slowly raised himself onto his feet, and continued his circuit through the neighbourhood.

The light was still on in the living room when he got back around to his parents’ place. He crept up to the big new window in the west wall of the living room and tried to peek in again. Maybe the bastard had fallen asleep in front of the
TV
. There was a narrow space at the right where the blind did not completely cover the window. He could see the far edge of the
TV
set. It was
turned on. The pole lamp was still on as well, and he could see an arm of the La-Z-Boy, but he was seeing it from behind. His old man could be in it and he would not be able to see.

He heard the light crunch of a footstep a split second before the voice: “Hey!” It jolted him. He straightened up so fast he lost his footing and landed on his back in the driveway. His drunkenness, the snow, and his heavy clothing cushioned him, but he lay on the ground for a moment, his limbs twitching with adrenaline.

“Jesus Christ! It’s you, Arvel!” a vaguely familiar voice said, someone mistaking Ziv for his brother, who was two years older. Ziv had not managed to make it to his feet, but craned his neck around to see who was there. The short face, ruddy-brown hair that curled out from beneath a toque, and the heavy eyebrows were familiar.

“Jesus, Bundy, you scared me shitless.” It was Bundy Burgess, who lived on Rutherford Street, and whom Ziv had not seen in years. Before they’d been old enough for school, Bundy and Ziv had played together, and they’d chummed around through elementary school. But Bundy had failed a few times in junior high, and Ziv had gone right through. When he reached an age when he was allowed to go by himself outside of the Red Row, Ziv had started hanging around with the boys in his grade. By the time he was in high school, there weren’t many Red Rowers left in school, so Ziv had grown out-of-touch with most of his old friends from the neighbourhood. He looked at the thick, curly mutton chops on Bundy’s face and realized that the last time he’d spoken to him, neither of them had even begun to shave.

“It’s Ziv,” Bundy said, having got a closer look at Ziv’s face. “You two guys look so much alike now.”

“I’ve heard that before,” Ziv said. He made his way woozily to his feet, spreading his arms out at his sides to maintain balance.

Bundy was a tough, raw-boned, sinewy man. But even with Ziv stooped over drunk, Bundy only came up to Ziv’s chin. In a heavy winter coat, Bundy’s narrow shoulders and torso were a fraction the size of Ziv’s.

“You’re drunk as ten barls of shit,” Bundy said.

“Two hours ago I was drunk as twelve,” Ziv said. “Right now I’m down to about seven, I figure.”

“I didn’t think college boys got drunk,” Bundy said.

“Then you’ve never been to college.” As drunk as he was, Ziv knew that this was a mistake. Bundy hadn’t finished high school, and even though Ziv had meant the remark as a swipe at university students, there was no way for Bundy to take it except as a swipe at him.

“Some of the biggest piss tanks I’ve ever seen are at university,” Ziv continued, trying to erase what he’d just said with what he was saying. “I knew a guy stopped going to classes in January, never left the residence building in January or February. Put in a big order at the liquor store whenever somebody was going. Got people to smuggle him food from the cafeteria. Stayed drunk night and day for two and a half months. Every couple of weeks his roommate would do some laundry for him and force him to shower.”

“What in Jesus’ name are you doing snooping around your own house in the middle of the night?” Bundy said.

Ziv was starting to worry about someone inside hearing their conversation. He grabbed the sleeve of Bundy’s coat and led him out to the end of the driveway. “Aw, I don’t want the old man to see me this tanked up,” he said.

“The old man! Jesus! How old are you?”

“Still the same age as you.”

“It’s freezing out here.” Ziv shrugged.

“Come away down to my place, if you want. You can sleep on the couch. It’s better than your mother finding you stiff as a board on the back step in the morning.”

Ziv sniffled in the cold. He knew his feet and hands needed warming. His face was beginning to become numb, and he’d either have to keep walking all night or go indoors at some time.

“Well, I don’t need a place to sleep,” Ziv said. “But if I could just warm up a bit. The old man is guaranteed to go to bed in the next half-hour or so.”

Bundy’s house was just on the far side of Ziv’s backyard. In a couple of minutes, they had walked around the corner on Rutherford Street and into Bundy’s driveway. The Burgess house had had no major upgrades, except for a reshingled roof, which Ziv could remember seeing Bundy pounding away at a few summers back, and a fresh coat of paint that had left the house, which had been a pale rusty red, a brooding shade of blue. The front step was crumbling and lopsided and the two-by-four pillars that elevated the roof over the rear porch showed signs of advancing rot.

For Ziv, entering Bundy’s kitchen was like walking back into his childhood. The chrome kitchen set with cracked vinyl padding. The varnished plywood cupboards. Even the worn pattern of the linoleum on the floor, and the smell of boiled carrots, which Bundy’s mother used to press through a strainer and serve
mashed, like potatoes. Nothing had changed since he and Bundy had played together with Lego and Hot Wheels under the table.

“Should I make some coffee or tea or something?” Bundy said and moved to fill the kettle.