Читать книгу Flam Grub - Dan Dowhal - Страница 5

Chapter 1

If Flam Grub had been able to regress beyond conscious memory and go back to the very beginning, it would not have surprised him to learn the pain caused by his name had started while he was still floating in the womb. There, the briny serenity had been disturbed by regular shouting and sporadic violence between his parents, with the words “Flam Grub” serving as a soundtrack to the upheavals, transmitted to the fetal Flam through his mother’s belly.

Flam’s parents had met at work. His mother, Mary Flam, was the office manager for the modest-sized trucking firm of Wheeler Cartage. Barely in her twenties, Mary was a tall, fair-skinned, red-headed beauty, with a nebula of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and green, otherworldly cat eyes that had a penetrating effect on anyone who fell into their orbit. Although she tried to hide it beneath a wardrobe of modest, almost dowdy dresses, her firm, lithe body would attract the attention of men wherever she went.

In the year and a half that she had been working for Wheeler, Mary had never given any of the truckers or dock workers a second glance, although she was fully aware of the lustful stares that tracked her like radar each time her heels were heard clicking on the stairs leading up to the office.

Mary had always been grateful her boss preferred to deal with the men directly, which allowed her to minimize her contact with the rough and greasy hirelings. That left her free to concentrate on the only man she was really interested in. Despite her relatively young age, Mary was expecting to become engaged shortly to Gerald Strait, a pharmacist she knew through her devotions at St. Ernest’s Church, in whose flock Mary was one of the most pious of lambs.

A decade older than Mary, Gerald had an established business and a sober disposition on which a girl’s future could be safely built. It had taken Mary months to orchestrate enough casual and seemingly chance encounters for Gerald to grow comfortable in her presence, and an even longer period of subtle encouragement to stoke his ardour to a potentially matrimonial temperature. As far as her own inner coolness went, Mary presumed that passion was something meant for the saints, and it was better to take care of her daily bread first.

Everything changed the day Mary’s eyes fell on Steve Grub, newly hired by Wheeler to help with a large new delivery contract. Steve was dark-haired and handsome, with soft, seductive brown eyes and a square-jawed, flawless face. He had a mouthful of straight, glimmering white teeth, which he flashed often, for he was a glib, smooth talker, with a seemingly endless repertoire of bon mots and amusing stories. But it was Steve’s body that cemented Mary’s downfall. The sinewy splendour that rippled from beneath a permanently unbuttoned shirt was a living incarnation of Jesus’ own lean physique, which Mary had guiltily contemplated over the years on crucifixes, statues, and icons with a fervour that sometimes strayed beyond religious.

She simply couldn’t keep her eyes off Steve. Even without admitting it to herself, Mary started fabricating excuses to interact with him. The first time their fingers touched across a rush delivery order, she felt like a high-voltage jolt had passed through her entire body, before finally settling as a permanent electrical charge in her loins. They flirted over paycheques, courted over waybills, snatched their first kiss in the bathroom, and first groped each other in the rear of Steve’s truck. Finally, on the Friday night of a Labour Day weekend, when everyone else had rushed off to start their holiday and Wheeler had left her to lock up, they consummated their lust in a secluded corner of the warehouse.

And so Flam was conceived, on a pallet of flattened cardboard, quickly stained by semen and virginal blood, with Mary profaning the names of her beloved saints as her long legs repeatedly pulled Steve’s dimpled buttocks down onto herself.

The fighting started soon thereafter. They fought about the news of Mary’s pregnancy, and whose fault it was. They fought about Steve’s suggestion that they abort the fetus. They fought about Mary’s demand that they should be married. They fought about the abysmal state of Steve’s finances, and the gambling, drinking, and womanizing that had dragged him into indebtedness. They fought about the tiny, grimy flat, located above an old bookstore in the seedier part of town, which was all they could afford.

The biggest fight of all, as it turned out, was over Mary changing her surname. An only child, she was determined to keep the family name alive. Throughout Mary’s whole life, she had been steeped in the family history and mythology of the Flams, a small clan of poor but stubbornly proud Irish peasants. For centuries, Mary’s ancestors had steadfastly clung to the Flam name, despite being mocked for it, along with a tiny impoverished parcel of County Sligo soil.

Eventually, like so many others, the family was forced to emigrate by the Great Potato Famine. However, the displaced Flams never fully tore themselves free from their ancient roots, like ghosts unable to accept the fact of their own deaths. A century and a half later, they had failed to prosper in the New World, as some calamity after another managed to keep them pegged down in working-class purgatory. Still, no matter what other failures sucked their spirit or amputated their meagre fortune, the ancestral pride and family lore were fiercely instilled in each subsequent generation of New World Flams. So they had found their way to Mary, the sole offspring of a luckless cab driver and his bankrupt widow, and the last vestige of the Flam name. She could live with her latest misfortune, no matter what dreams she may have harboured, for it somehow seemed the familial fate, but she was horrified at the thought of being the final extinguisher of the Flam name. She prayed for guidance on the matter, interpreting God’s silence as assent of her desire, and was grateful that Steve, who was not big on details or discussion anyway, never brought up the subject of names.

A few days after their hastily arranged wedding, which was attended mostly by Steve’s cronies in hopes of a free drunk-up afterwards, and conducted out of shame in a parish where no one knew her, Mary dropped the dinner dishes in the sink and turned to face her husband.

“I’m keeping my name,” she announced.

Steve, who had quietly been working on his fifth beer, almost fell off his chair.

“Like hell you are!” he shouted as he leapt to his feet. “You’re my wife now, and you’ll damned well take my name!”

Mary went on like she hadn’t heard him. “What’s more, my child will be christened a Flam too,” she told him, her emerald gaze piercing his own dark-eyed disbelief.

“You goddamned ball-cutting bitch! You’re the one who wanted to get married,” he screamed. “Now you won’t even take my name! Do you want people to think the kid’s not mine? Are you trying to make a fool of me in front of my friends?”

“Ha! Like I care one bit about those drunken losers you call friends. The Flam name’s a good name . . . a proud name . . . and that’s what I’m keeping for me and my children.” Here she played a trump by picking on Steve, who had been abandoned at birth and raised in institutional foster homes: “I can trace my family back a dozen generations. You . . . you don’t even know who your father is.”

Steve erupted in a barrage of curses and threats, but Mary stood firm. The argument went on for days. Sheer lungpower and verbal venom would not shake Mary’s resolve, however, just as they had not in the previous battles, so Steve finally resorted to escalating force, shaking, and then striking her. Still, Mary resisted gamely, fighting him off with any blunt object she could grab, usually giving as good as she got.

Inside Mary’s womb, the violence rocked the fetus’ world along with its fragile psyche, while the phonemes of its future name, screamed regularly by both combatants at the top of their lungs, assaulted its sensitive ears.

Finally, during one exchange, Steve ducked beneath the swing of a skillet and tackled Mary forcefully, sending her flying backwards onto the faded, mismatched tiles of the kitchen floor. As he pounced on her like some predator bringing its prey down for the kill, hands reaching for her throat, Mary glimpsed for the first time the true depths of his dangerous, violent nature. Instinctively fearing for both her own life and that of the fetus within, she finally capitulated, and agreed to take the Grub name.

The next day Mary took the afternoon off work and, like a martyr, dutifully performed the legal rites to exorcise her family’s surname. With her new documents stuffed into her purse, she sat empty and silent in the park across from City Hall as she contemplated her betrayal of the Flam heritage. There, on a bench in the Indian Summer sun, a plan worked its way into Mary’s brooding thoughts, as bright and warming as the dappled autumnal light beams piercing their way through the red and orange leaves of the overhead maples and oaks.

Flam was born just before midnight on a Saturday, and christened the following Wednesday. It was during the blessed event, which was attended mostly by Steve’s cronies in hopes of a free drunk-up afterwards, that Steve first learned Mary had surreptitiously reassigned the lost Flam surname as the newborn child’s first name. He said nothing to his pals, but when the couple returned home afterwards with tiny Flam, Steve immediately questioned his wife’s choice.

“Flam? Flam! What kind of name is that for a kid? It’s totally stupid.”

Mary put the baby down in its cradle, and then picked up a steam iron, waving it in front of Steve’s face to show she meant business.

“Don’t you dare say that. It’s better than Grub.” She spat out the last syllable, tightened her grip on the iron, and waited for the combat to begin. Steve, however, knew full well the strength of Mary’s resistance, and did not have the stomach for another prolonged fight.

“Whatever. I don’t really give a shit. Have it your way,” he conceded, and headed to the refrigerator for a beer.

Flam’s parents, having irrevocably lost any glimmer of affection as a result of their continuous combat, fell back and dug into a sort of long-term psychological trench warfare, with Flam an innocent victim caught in the middle of No Man’s Land.

Despite her son’s first name, Mary found she was wary of the dark-haired, brown-eyed boy child, believing its gender and genetics gave it a natural affinity to her husband. She returned with fervour to her former religious devotions, regarding Flam as evidence in the flesh of her fall from grace, and lavished her love on the baby Jesus instead. Nevertheless, like the dutiful Christian she was, she faithfully exercised the responsibilities of motherhood. As Flam grew, she seldom struck him, though she found herself constantly criticizing and rebuking him, despite the boy’s quiet, bright, and undemanding nature.

Steve, for his part, could not bring himself to show love for the child who bore his wife’s hated name, and who had cost him his freedom, casting him down into the pit of a loveless marriage to a Bible-brandishing harpy. The angry, resentful father soon took to long-haul trucking in order to be away from the fun-killing fetters of home as much as possible. On those occasions when he was at home, Steve found he could barely stand to look at the boy. He could see that his pathetic son tried his best to stay out of view, but when the child wandered into his sight, Steve couldn’t resist punishing the boy—even if it was only for the crime of being himself. And although Steve’s disciplinary encounters with his son were far fewer than were Mary’s, they were much more vicious, especially when Steve had been drinking, with any petty excuse sufficing for violence to suddenly be unleashed upon the boy.

Lashings with a leather belt were routine, as were whacks to the head, punches to the stomach, and twisting of the arm. Steve never showed any sign of remorse following these beatings, for inwardly he considered it proof of his parental devotion that the blows he delivered onto the child lacked the expert viciousness or intent to maim Steve would habitually employ when brawling in speakeasies or truck stops.

Still, there were times when Steve’s brutality bottomed out into sheer evil. On one occasion, Flam, barely seven years old, accidentally dropped his dinner plate to the ground while licking up the last of his gravy.

Steve leapt from his chair and whipped off his belt. To show he meant business, he turned it around, and lashed Flam across the shoulders with the buckle end.

“You little piece of shit! I’m going to teach you a lesson once and for all,” Steve bellowed. His second blow caught Flam across the back of the head, opening up a cut. The boy whelped and dove under the dining room table, leaving a trail of blood droplets on the parquet floor.

Steve, enraged by the escape, bent over and began flailing away in an attempt to reach Flam in the hiding spot. “Get back out here! I’m not done with you,” he screamed, but Flam’s small size and the proximity of the table legs allowed him to stay out of range of the belt.

Steve went to overturn the table, but Mary pressed her palms down on the tabletop and bared her teeth. “Don’t you dare break my table or smash any more of my dishes,” she screamed. “I paid for all of these, not you.” So, Steve yanked away the chairs and crawled under the table to chase the boy. Flam, however, nimbly scurried out back into the open, then immediately dove back under cover when his father staggered out and stood up to try to renew the assault.

This dance repeated itself a couple of times, and the entire time Mary stood leaning on the table with her eyes squeezed shut, praying fervently, although exactly on whose behalf she was petitioning the Lord was unclear. Finally it became obvious the situation had become a stalemate. Out of frustration, Steve resorted to mercilessly flailing a doorjamb for a while, until he ultimately stormed out of the flat in search of a liquid tonic for his anger.

Mary bent down to pick up the pieces of the plate Flam had broken. “It’s okay, Flam, he’s gone. You can come out now,” she urged her son, but Flam refused to leave his hiding place. He sat with his knees up to his chin, whining softly through clenched teeth and rocking back and forth. Mary tried several more times to coax the boy out, but he stayed put.

“Fine, then. Have it your way,” she finally shouted, more exasperated than angry. “Sleep there on the floor if you want. I don’t care,” And so Flam did, curled up on the faded, scratched hardwood.

Within the cramped one-bedroom flat that constituted the Grub family home, Flam had never had an anointed space of his own, other than a small camp cot shoved permanently in a corner, and unfolded at bedtime for him to sleep on. Thereafter, the space under the dining room table became the boy’s private refuge, and neither parent chose to forbid it. Steve actually preferred that Flam stay out of sight, and Mary secretly considered it a better use of the table than serving meals to her brutish husband. It soon became a moot point, as sit-down family dinners grew progressively rarer. Before long, the sight of Flam ensconced cross-legged and out of the way under the table became so common no one gave it a second thought.