Читать книгу Planet Reese - Cordelia Strube - Страница 12

He did not intend to go drinking with Robert Vinkle, who has insisted that he call him Bob. But the prospect of returning to the basement apartment or loitering in a twenty-four-hour doughnut joint — avoiding headlines about ecological disaster — depressed him. Although, even at Vinkle’s — the bar owned by Bob — his eye is caught by “Drug Taint in Canadian Water” and by the man with long fingernails and greasy hair parted in the middle on the other side of the paper. He notices Reese glancing at the headline and taps it. “Whatever happens to the frogs happens to us,” he warns. “Boys getting born with no balls.”

“Mutations nothing,” Mrs. Ranty interjects. “We’re talking altered DNA!”

“We’re talkeeng freakss breeding freakss!” Scout Leader Igor adds.

The long-fingernailed man taps a photo of a twenty-two-month-old girl with breasts. Reese looks away, at the television on which a middle-aged Boston couple describe the Cabbage Patch doll they’ve raised as a son for nineteen years. He has his own playroom and a red Corvette. They plan to send him to university. “He makes friends easily,” Joe, the slope-headed father, says. “He’s great to know.” The mother, Bonny, gripping the edges of her track suit, adds, “He does a lot of things with his dad. He’s like most boys.” Their real-life daughter, Vicky, an associate at Wal-Mart, says, “He got a dog. I never got a dog.”

Bob has made it clear that Reese’s drinks are on the house. Not that Reese wants more drinks, but he’s hoping that several will provide an anaesthetic effect. After pouring them beers, Bob leads Reese to a table in the corner. In the banquet hall, Reese mentioned his trial separation, to which Bob responded, “I’m there, brother.” In the truck on the way to Vinkle’s, Bob told Reese that he’d gotten “a good hit” off him, which “doesn’t happen too often.” Reese senses that Bob needs to talk, that varicose veins are the least of his concerns.

“She was jiggin’ her assistant,” Bob says. “While I was out busting my ass. I heard it from one of the waitresses, she said it’d been going on for months, even before Alicia told me to move out. You know what she said? She said, ‘We never see you, Bob, you’re always at the bar. I want somebody who can be around.’ The whole time she was going at it with her assistant.”

“I’m sorry,” Reese says.

“So I go over there after work, it’s like two in the morning or something, and I start pounding on the door. She won’t open it so I break it down. She’s in her bathrobe and I say, ‘Where is he?’ and she says, ‘What are you talking about?’, that kind of shite, so I push her out of the way and start heading upstairs and she starts grabbing at me and saying ‘He’s in the closet, leave him alone, we all know you’re the big man.’ I just about clubbed her.” Bob drinks more beer and pushes a dish of peanuts towards Reese. “So, like, at this point I know I can kill him and that this might not be the way to go, so I shout, ‘Don’t come down here or I’ll kill you.’ Meanwhile she’s gone and called 911.”

The beer tastes sour and Reese’s eyes are burning from the grease-laden vapour emanating from the kitchen. A waitress with a lip ring and scarlet hair navigates the greasy pathways in the broadloom, stopping before Bob. “Can I have Friday off? I got to take my kid to the dentist.”

He winces. “You need all day to take your kid to the dentist?”

“It’s at the dental school. It’s not like you provide me with health insurance so I can go to a decent dentist where they have actual appointments.”

“Whatever,” Bob says, waving his hand, looking back at Reese. “So the cops charge me with uttering death threats and breaking and entering. They shove me in a cruiser and tell me they know three cops in jail for the exact same reason I’m going to be wearing the orange jumpsuit. They came home late and found some guy in bed with the wife.” Sitting beside a “My Goodness, My Guinness” mirror, Reese shakes his head to suggest disbelief, catching a glimpse of himself that is not cheering. He seems to have aged ten years, and his haircut, done by Corrado the barber for eight bucks, does not flatter him.

“Four days I was in there,” Bob says. “Had to share a cell with a guy who shot somebody in the head and slugged me if I flushed the toilet too early.”

Around them sit couples in various states of courtship. Reese can’t imagine being one of them, can’t imagine having the stamina for getting-to-know-you conversations and gropings in the dark.

“So now I’m under house arrest for six weeks,” Bob says. “I’m allowed to go to work, that’s it.”

“But you went to Golf Day,” Reese says.

“Do me a favour, don’t advertise it.”

“Sorry.”

“So, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Who this person is you hooked up with.” Bob eats another peanut. “It makes you wonder.”

“It does.”

“My mother never liked her.”

“My mother doesn’t like mine either.”

“Is that right? Well, it just goes to show.”

“What?”

“Mother knows best.”

Reese stares at a Smithwicks Ale mirror. In its reflection he sees a couple leaning into one another over a plate of chicken fingers. Their attentive looks suggest that they have yet to fornicate, that they’re in the process of imagining that the earth will move.

“Is your wife zoomin’ anybody?” Bob asks.

“It’s a possibility, yet to be confirmed.”

“Go over and confirm it.”

“I don’t think so.” He would, in fact, like to break down the door to the house that was once his and utter death threats to the art student and Roberta, but he senses that this would not position him well for a child custody battle. And anyway, he still has keys. He gave Roberta his while he snuck the spare set. “Are there children?” he asks.

“One,” Bob mutters. “She’s only two, she’ll forget about me. She’ll be calling that jerk-off ‘Daddy’ in no time.” Reese hadn’t considered that a new man in Roberta’s life — even an art student — might be called Daddy.

“So she gets two chances to show up in court,” Bob says, “before they drop the charges.”

“Is there a chance she won’t show up?”

“I’m hoping she’ll come to her senses.”

Only now does it occur to Reese that Robert Vinkle might be unbalanced. Only the unbalanced would suggest that his wife needs to come to her senses when he is the one who has broken down a door and uttered death threats. Reese’s native bird book has taught him that crows torment owls during the daytime when owls require sleep. With their vision diminished in daylight, the owls are defenceless and have no choice but to endure the jabbing and cawing. Perhaps Robert Vinkle is a crow.

“My dad dropped out of the picture when I was three,” Bob says. “My mom married a doofus I was ordered to call ‘Dad.’ When the doofus used to play with my little brothers, his kids, kiss them and throw them up in the air and that, I’d ask my mom if my dad ever did that to me.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she couldn’t remember.” Not a crow then, just an abandoned boy.

The thought that Clara and Derek might be watching the fathers of other children kissing and throwing them up in the air, and wondering why their father is no longer doing this, agitates the pooling malt in Reese’s gut. Even though they explained the separation to the children, Reese knew it was inexplicable. He said little because he himself didn’t understand how Roberta had come to loathe him so. Roberta’s “Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore” clearly perplexed Clara, who thought that loving someone was forever, like in the storybooks. Derek shrugged, said he’d figured they were going to split up, then stayed in his room, deeply engrossed in cyberspace.

On Reese’s last night in the house, on the futon in the basement, Clara asked him if he would stop loving her when he moved away. Reese said that he could never, ever, stop loving her. “How can you know that for sure?” she asked.

“I just know.”

“Did you know you’d stop loving Mummy?”

“I’m not sure that I have stopped loving Mummy.”

“Then why’re you going away?”

“Because Mummy’s stopped loving me.”

Clara was twirling a lock of her hair in her fingers, a nervous habit she’d only recently developed. “She didn’t think she’d stop loving you when you got married.”

“No.”

“So then you could think you’ll love me forever but you could be wrong.”

“I’m not wrong. I will love you forever.” He knew these words sounded overwrought, that there was nothing he could say that would lessen the betrayal that divorce would bring. He left to prevent war. He is in one anyway. His children are hostages.

The waitress with the lip ring and scarlet hair is poking his shoulder. “Aren’t you that guy who saved the plane?”

“What plane?” Bob asks.

“That plane that had a terrorist on it. That’s the guy who killed the terrorist.”

“Shite, are you kidding me?”

“He’s, like, a total hero.” She alerts the entire bar, including the man with the greasy hair parted in the middle and long fingernails who leans towards Reese for a better look.

“Why did you kill him?” he asks.

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“Tell that to his corpse.”

“Shite,” Bob says, “that is so cool. A frickin’ hero in my bar.”

Soon everyone, even the couples yet to fornicate, are congratulating Reese, slapping him on the shoulder, jostling his exposed nerves. Women press their bodies against him. He feels covered in soot; a body of lies. He considers making a run for it but the mirrors have confused him, as has the beer. He hasn’t felt so devoid of soul since his little sister died. The little sister he forgets to remember, whom he neglected, tormented, and whom he watched as she lost consciousness, her chest heaving as she struggled towards death. For forty-five minutes, she twitched and grasped, until there was a rattling in her chest and an explosive jerk of her body. Her chest arched, the muscles of her neck fluttered. Already her skin was turning to ash. He still didn’t like her, felt only pity, and guilt for not liking her. Betsy sobbed without pause, Bernie stood stiff with grief. The doctor had suggested that they might prefer not to watch the agonal phase. “I’m not leaving my baby!” Betsy had cried. Born seven years after him, Chelsea got all the love in Reese’s opinion. Even now, although Betsy rarely mentions her, Chelsea is the favoured child. Her photos decorate the walls of his mother’s house. She is the child who could have been anything — prime minister, neurosurgeon, movie star, Nobel Prize winner. Reese is the good boy, on call to fix toilets.

Bob pours more beer. Red faces leer and sing, “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” The long-fingernailed man tells Reese about genetically modified foods, specifically peanuts. “They’re changing the microbes in our stomachs. You change the microbes, you change the organs. You change the organs you get mutants.” He eats a peanut.

“Speech, speech,” Bob shouts.

“No speech,” Reese says.

“How many people were on that plane?”

“I don’t know.”

“Brother, you must sleep well knowing you saved lives.”

“Way to go, dog,” a bald man with no eyebrows tells Reese. “Fucking desert people.”

“Black gold,” the long-fingernailed man says, “will be our ruin.” He’s still holding a newspaper and Reese observes an ad for a pillow sale, feather or fibre, any size, one price. He will need pillows, once he decides on a bed. The scarlet-haired waitress is staring at him, fondling the lip ring with her tongue and sucking on it. Reese has heard that lip rings provide extra stimulation during fellatio. He feels embarrassed with her standing there, a mother of a child in need of dental work, exposing her tongue. He drinks more beer.

There is something wrong with his television. It has begun to bleed red. He watches it anyway because it offers relief from the humming transformer and random thoughts of death and destruction. A documentary on spinal cord injury shows Christopher Reeves bleeding red while being suspended in what looks like an adult Jolly Jumper. Bleeding physiotherapists move his arms and legs. Superman insists that he’s making progress, that a cure for spinal cord injuries will be found within his lifetime. Although Reese pities the Man of Steel, particularly now that he’s dead, he can’t help thinking about the money involved in trying to mend a severed spinal cord. Money that could be sent to seventeen-month-old babies in North Korea or Iraq or Afghanistan, or to Rwanda where rebels are cutting off the hands of thirteen-year-old girls.

Furniture moving begins upstairs then the stereo blares a song Reese hasn’t heard for years, by a band whose name he can’t remember. The song, about red wine and staying close to you and not being able to forget, is a song he danced to with Elena. They would cling to each other in nightclubs, absorbing each other through their clothes. I’m still here listening and you’ve gone away somewhere! It’s not fair that he has been left behind. She is free in his mind. He wants her beside him, to talk about the things they never talked about. He wants the inexplicable explained. The red wine song ends and he is once again completely without her. A less melodious song thumps through the floor and he begins to howl, softly at first but as his lungs, accustomed to bicycling, expand and take in more oxygen, the howls become louder. He pictures a moon because he can’t see one through his window facing the underside of the deck. But in his heart there is a moon, full of displaced passion and woe, and he howls to it. Howls and howls.

Pounding at the door stops him. He considers not answering but the pounding continues and he fears that someone is dead, dying, OD-ing on anti-depressants. He opens it a crack. She’s out there, the witless, arrogant entertainer with the dragon on her thigh.

“What are you doing?” she inquires.

“Howling.”

“Do you think that’s appropriate?”

“For what?”

“For four o’clock in the morning?”

“Do you think it’s appropriate to bump and grind and play loud music and wear cleated shoes at four in the morning?”

She puts her hand on her hip where the skin bulges between her tight jeans and tank top. “What are you talking about?”

“Every night. Noise.”

“You can hear it?” She actually looks surprised, even slightly embarrassed. Without makeup she looks less trashy, verging on innocent.

“Yes,” he says.

“I’m just unwinding. I work in a bar.”

“I don’t care, it’s too loud. You make noise, I howl.” He can’t believe he’s struck upon this powerful negotiating tool.

“Are you nuts?”

“I’m in mourning.”

“You’re what?’

“I’m in mourning. Grief-stricken.”

“Oh.” She adjusts a bra strap. “I’m sorry, like I said I just use it to unwind.”

“Never more, or I howl.” He waits for her big-shouldered partner in furniture moving to come down and cause blunt-force trauma to his head.

She stares at him. “You are nuts.”

“I live in the basement.”

She climbs back up the stairs, watching him over her shoulder.

“Sleep tight,” he says. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

Why has his sister entered his thoughts now, along with these other women? Why has he always had women around him, never a proper male buddy to play with? He did try racquetball once but had difficulty with the concept of chasing balls. Perhaps he can become buddies with Robert Vinkle. Certainly Bob made it clear that Reese is welcome at the bar anytime. Perhaps Vinkle’s can become a home away from the basement apartment where Reese will meet straight shooters and talkers who will offer tips on how to win child custody cases. He used to creep into Chelsea’s room in the middle of the night, holding his hand over a flashlight, creating a shadow of a huge hand on the ceiling. “Mummy!” Chelsea would scream. Reese would dart back to his room. He repeated this offence nightly. Betsy grew tired of the disturbance and stopped answering her calls. His little sister had no choice but to cry herself to sleep while he sat in the dark slowly bringing his hand closer to the flashlight, making the shadow bigger and more terrifying. A crow, devoid of soul.

He eats a handful of Doritos and studies the chemical ingredients listed on the packet, soothed by the knowledge that a long shelf life means a short human life, and that “colouring” involves red dye, which stimulates cancer cells. He eats another Dorito while listening for noises from above; just minor shuffling. He takes out the picture of Elena and tries to gaze into the eyes that stare at the parakeet. The hum resonates through his body of lies. He dials the number that was once his, knowing that Roberta doesn’t have call display on the bedroom phone, hoping but fearing that the art student will pick up, his voice husky with sex. “Who’s this?” Reese will demand with such force that the art student will have no choice but to give his full name and address.

“Hello?” Roberta says, sounding annoyed, tired, stressed.

Reese can’t speak. He manages to make some guttural noises.

“Don’t phone here, Reese,” she says and hangs up.

The dial tone drones. He stares at the linoleum floor, which is getting dirtier daily. He must wash it, buy a mop and bucket. He must do that tomorrow. His neck hurts. And he must buy a pillow. Where was that pillow sale — feather or fibre, any size, one price? It upsets him beyond measure that he can’t remember. He put a pillow over Chelsea’s face once, watched while her legs thrashed. He threatened to do it again if she told on him. He can see the legs now, as slight as Clara’s, pathetic in their futility. He knew that if he continued to press down the thrashing would stop and he would lose his mother’s love forever. Instead he read “Spiderman” while Chelsea whimpered quietly. “I hate you,” she whispered.

They are in here, in the basement, the women.