Daniel had a route he followed on his figuring walks. Down his grandfather’s street and past the RCMP detachment he went, the sun settling at his back, his shadow long and spidery-legged. In the evening calm the red ensign draped limply around the police flagpole. Mr. Stutz had been eager to tell him all about the police headquarters, had acted as if it had something directly to do with him. Daniel knew there were two cells in the basement, one of which had actually held a wife-murderer for several days before he was transferred to jail in Regina. He knew that every other month up on the second floor a judge tried minor offences, meted out fines and punishments. Whenever court was in session Mr. Stutz took a day off work and occupied a folding chair in the makeshift courtroom with its picture of the Queen on the wall and the simple desk which saw duty as a judge’s bench. Mr. Stutz had told Daniel that, if he cared to, he could accompany him to court next sitting.
One of the things that Daniel tried to figure as he walked was what he and his mother were doing in Connaught. There had been no warning of a move. All of a sudden she announced they were going, the furniture was sold to a second-hand dealer, and they loaded themselves onto a bus. Why? Maybe the fight with Pooch over the toenail polish had something to do with it, although he couldn’t be sure. His mother had never provided a reason. Reasons were not things he expected from her. “Because I said so” was about the best you got.
He hadn’t wanted to go. His mother said, “You’ll make new friends. Better ones than you could here. Kids in small towns are so much friendlier.” Which wasn’t true. He knew he wasn’t the sort to make new friends. Maybe because she had never let him get any practice at it, learn the knack of it, keeping him locked up in a dumpy apartment waiting for her to come home from work. How was he supposed to get the trick of it? Deep down maybe he was a loner like James Dean and Montgomery Clift.
Now he was passing the little shacky houses where the old foreign ladies lived, the ladies with the peach-pit faces and the kerchiefs (babushkas, Stutz called them) knotted under their chins on even the hottest days. According to Mr. Stutz, a lot of these old women could scarcely speak more than a few words of English. English had been for their husbands. But now the husbands were dead and they had no men to interpret for them, no men to trail along after in kerchiefs, brown stockings, black dresses printed all over with tiny, dusky-red flowers. They seemed to spend all their time in their gardens. Front yards were planted with sunflowers and poppies. Back yards were full of onions, beets, dill, cabbages, cucumbers, potatoes, and the rusty tin cans they screwed into the earth to protect bedding plants. Because of the cans the back yards seemed to Daniel to be a cross between a vegetable patch and a dump.
During afternoons, if the old foreign ladies happened to be pecking in the dirt with their hoes and Daniel went by, they all straightened up and stared at him suspiciously and narrowly as if he were an alien from outer space. Which he may as well have been, his mother said sarcastically, Daniel not being native-born to Connaught.
But at present there is no sign of the foreign ladies as he passes. They are indoors, eating soup and sausage, thinking their thoughts, and remembering in some language other than English. Still, despite their strangeness, Daniel is certain that none of them could feel any more a stranger than he does himself.
The way people acted here. He couldn’t get the hang of it. So different from the city. Take the other day when that man had stopped him in the street and asked, “You the one that’s Alec Monkman’s grandson? Vera’s boy?” Asked him point-blank, right out of the blue. When he answered, Yes, that was him, the man said, “I went to school with your mother. Name’s Mel Jessup.” And that was all there was to it, nothing more. It seemed the man just wanted to pass on that bit of information.
It doesn’t end on the street either. Two nights ago he wakes up at three in the morning in a strange bed and a strange room he isn’t quite used to and gets the shock and fright of his life. This thing is standing in his bedroom door, watching him. He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. It’s worse than the worst horror movie he’s ever seen and he’s seen plenty. Everything else helps to put the chill in his blood. A moon is shining cold light through his window and the curtains are blowing around, whipping the wall with shadows. He can’t move, he can’t breathe. Then the thing shifts itself in the doorway enough to catch a little moonlight. He sees it’s his grandfather in his gotch, hard old belly pushing out, and the thick white hair all down his chest shining in the light of the moon like frost on dead grass.
What’s he up to, standing there watching him sleep?
It’s a job to be able to suck enough spit up in his mouth to frame the question. “What do you want?”
The way the old boy jumps, he can tell he’s returned the scare he got.
“Jesus, I thought you were asleep.”
“What do you want? Is something the matter?”
No reply straight away. Finally, “I wondered if you weren’t cold and needed some more covers.”
That’s likely. It’s only about a hundred degrees here, directly under the pitch of the roof. He’s cooking under a single thin cotton sheet. Sure he wants more blankets. Invent another one. But he’s polite. “No,” he says, “I’m fine.”
The old boy knows he hasn’t made a lick of sense. He fumbles to lay hands on an excuse. “It cools off worse than you think, nights. It does. You don’t want to catch a cold. Summer colds are the worst.” And with that he slides off, drifts out of the door, floating white in the moonlight like a sheet hung in the dark.
What a half-ass explanation that was. Of course, nobody thinks he’s owed an explanation. You can do with him pretty much as you like. Drag him clear across the country, sneak into his room like some demented axe murderer or something, that’s hunky-dory, that’s acceptable. He doesn’t need to know the why of anything.
Still, it’s hard to stay mad at him. Daniel likes the old fart even though he knows he’s not supposed to. His mother’s not in favour of it. There’s another thing for him to figure. Why’d she drag him here, on purpose, to live with somebody he’s not supposed to like? Where’s the sense in that? It’s like some crazy test. Which he isn’t passing.
Why shouldn’t he like him? The old man is teaching him to drive the truck. The old man pays him to work in the garden. The old man argues baseball with him during the “Game of the Week.” Not that he’s all sweetness and light by a long shot, the old man. Maybe he doesn’t come at you the way she does, full-bore, pointing out that this is wrong with you and that is wrong with you and when are you ever going to learn? That’s not his style. He sort of crumbles up the ground under your feet and leaves you standing in thin air.
Take the other day. He’s standing combing his hair in the mirror and the old man happens along, stops, hangs on the door, watches. Never said a word. It was his smile. It made him feel ridiculous, that smile. What’s he laughing at? What’s so funny? Then Daniel sees himself start to change in the mirror, before his own eyes. It isn’t a pretty sight. He stops looking like James Dean and starts looking like a scrawny twelve year old with too much hair for his puny body with the matchstick arms that aren’t big enough to lay a tattoo down on, unless it was a tattoo of a sparrow instead of an eagle. Another thing. He can’t grow sideburns. So who’s he kidding? What he is, is some left out in the rain, shrunken-up excuse of a James Dean.