Darrel was surprised but genial the Saturday Cyril showed up at his apartment. He got him a stubby of Black Label, half of which Cyril drank in one chug, Darrel nodding as if impressed by such drinking bravado. The place smelled of coffee and cigarettes. On the wall above the couch hung a landscape of horses running away over hills.
“So what’s up, bub?”
Cyril belched and said, “Leave my mother alone,” then belched again.
Darrel relaxed on the couch and lit up a smoke. “Sit down.”
Cyril shook his head.
Darrel puffed reflectively. “You really hate me, huh?”
The quiet wonder in Darrel’s voice made Cyril reflect. Paul hated him, or often resented his youth and health with a hate-like intensity, and now he couldn’t help feeling a little bad at hurting Darrel’s feelings. “I just want you to leave her alone.”
“I don’t think she wants me to leave her alone. Have you considered that?”
Cyril gulped the rest of the beer and reached down and carefully set the bottle on the coffee table. As a matter of fact he had considered that—he just refused to accept it.
“You want another one of those?”
“No.” He’d gulped too fast and some of the beer was rising back up his nose. He fought not to cough.
“Your mother wants to forget it all. The old country, the war, the past, the whole shootin’ match.” Darrel gestured dismissively. “Time to move on. And definitely time to move out of that house with the front row seat of the graveyard.”
So that was it. Erase his past, erase his father and take his mother and sell the house. Cyril pulled out the gun.
Darrel began to chuckle. He stretched out his short legs and crossed his ankles and got comfortable. Darrel was always getting comfy. “We could get along, you know. Ever consider that?”
He and Darrel, pals? Maybe catch a Lions game? Darrel might have connections and Cyril could meet the players, shake hands with Joe Kapp and Willie Fleming. Yet this too he couldn’t accept. Cyril aimed the pistol.
“You’re starting to bug me, kid.” Darrel flicked his cigarette hitting Cyril in the chest. He flinched but kept the pistol pointed and could see the butt smouldering on the hardwood. Unable to restrain himself he crushed it out with his toe.
Darrel sighed. He stood and tugged up his trousers. He was big-bellied but broad-shouldered and had burly forearms, an old, short, bald athlete. “Now you can hit the road and we’ll say no more about this or I can kick your can around the block.”
Cyril fought the impulse to obey, knowing that if he backed down now Darrel would be top dog forever. He kept the pistol steady.
“I’m getting bored, bub.”
“Don’t call me bub.”
“You’re bub until you start acting like an adult. Now swing your arse around and hop it on out the door before I tell mommy what you’ve been up to with your cap gun.”
Cyril exhaled and squeezed the trigger slowly. The bullet blasted the floor between Darrel’s stocking feet. Darrel went straight up, squeaking like a shot rat. A small giggle escaped Cyril’s mouth, then another burp.
“You dumb little fuck!” Darrel shrank back behind his Danish modern couch.
“Bang,” said Cyril, “you’re dead.” And blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.
Days passed while Cyril waited for the cops to show. They didn’t. His mother didn’t see Darrel that Friday, nor did Darrel show on Sunday. She didn’t say anything about it. Was she secretly relieved? Did she realize it was for the best? Cyril hadn’t told anyone what he’d done; he could scarcely believe it himself. When he’d returned the pistol Gilbert had noted the missing bullet and Cyril said he’d fired at a crow in the cemetery.
Another week passed. If Darrel had said anything to Cyril’s mother she was doing a good job of keeping it to herself. He watched for clues but she was unreadable; apparently she had interior rooms opening onto ever deeper rooms, where memories resided like refugees in a labyrinth. When Paul and Della took Cyril aside and asked what had become of Darrel he tried not looking shifty and said who knew, ask mom, and when Paul did just that she looked out the window at the cemetery and after a moment of silence, during which Cyril tensed in fear, she said, “He’s gone, like everyone else.”
Growing cocky with relief, Cyril resumed turning the tins of Chef Boyardee at the IGA so that entire rows looked to the right, or half the row looked to the right and half to the left, or he alternated stacking them upside down and right side up, prompting Norm to ask if he was a retard. Cyril crossed his eyes and said yes. Norm got Barnes, the manager, who regarded Cyril’s handiwork and after a moment’s cogitation asked if Cyril liked his job.
“Not really.” Dizzy at his own brazenness, he asked Barnes, “Do you like your job?”
Barnes had a crewcut, a belly that strained his white shirt, a five o’clock shadow that looked like iron filings, and yet was not unintelligent or utterly without a measure of charm. Cyril had often seen him joshing with customers, especially the ladies, who seemed to find him curiously engaging despite his pallor. Barnes barked a laugh and shook his head and said, “No one likes their job, kid. Except maybe Hughie Hefner. Stack ’em straight or quit.”
Barnes was perfectly at ease with his station in life, an ease which Cyril envied. That was the thing about adults, or most of them; even the dumbest seemed to have dealt with the issues of women and money and career. Produce Manager Norm spent his day spritzing lettuce and celery and yet he also had a wife and a kid and a house and—even Cyril had to admit—a sort of a life.
FIVE
CYRIL GRADUATED WITH a 2.5 Grade Point Average, his A+ in Art and his A in Phys. Ed. compensating for the C minuses in Math and Chemistry. His mother urged him to go for a plumbing apprenticeship but he didn’t like the idea of putting his arm down toilets or up pipes. She suggested electrician but the very thought of watts and volts and amps agitated his nerves. As for welding it was haunted. Carpentry, she said, and he shrugged meaning maybe, and then devoted the summer to a series of drawings for his art school application: eight postage stamps, two feet by three, of Stalin. In one Stalin was dancing like a dervish, arms out, head tilted, eyes shut, the cancellation mark functioning like lines of motion accentuating the sense of spinning, a detail about which he was rather proud even though it had been a lucky accident. In another he was sitting with his legs straight out, wearing a diaper, a gigantic infant biting the head off a man clenched like a lollipop in his fist. Some of the pictures were pencil and some were coloured chalk. He liked the dry quality of chalk because Stalin was a creature of sand and grit and dust, his soul smoke. The last drawing, as yet unfinished, was still on the easel. It showed a laughing Stalin on a swing, wearing baby shoes, kicking out his pudgy bare legs, bonnet on his head. It echoed a memory of being on a swing with his father pushing, one of the few times Cyril recalled his dad laughing loudly and without restraint.
That summer he went to see Moulin Rouge starring Jose Ferrer as Toulouse Lautrec, fascinated by the crippled artist and his suicidal capacity for absinthe. He saw The Moon and Sixpence on TV and admired the expat painter Charles Strickland’s brazen drunk indifference to everything, including the man who wanted to buy his work. What confidence, what clarity, what perverse defiance. Then there was a film on Van Gogh in which he eats a tube of paint. Cyril had no desire to eat paint, but he envied those three men their focus and energy, their drive and direction; they knew who they were and where they were going and nothing was getting in their way. They did not merely accept their calling, they pursued it, ran it down like wolves. He found an autobiography by Salvador Dali, a man who was as eccentric as surrealism itself. In it Dali pours honey down his chest so he can study the flies that come to feed. One morning after his mother left for work and Cyril had a few hours before his shift at the IGA, he got the honey from the cupboard ready to do his own Salvador Dali. Unfortunately, it was creamed honey, solid. He carved some from the jar with a knife and smoothed it over his chest and lay back in bed with the window open. He heard lawn mowers and the opening and closing of hearse doors in the cemetery. Finally one fly came bumbling in and landed on him and got stuck, one wing whirring pathetically. Eventually another fly circled and got stuck, then a bee, then two more flies. Cyril watched them buzz and struggle. Now what? Was this Existential? He took a shower, still not quite sure what the crazy Spaniard was on about, and wondering if this lack of understanding was a lack of artistic vision.