It’s almost seven in the morning, and Jack’s late leaving for Iris’s. At this rate she’ll be in and out of bed with Byron Colton before Jack gets there. But as Jack is sidling for the door, his father places a hand on his shoulder and says, “Son, we need to have a talk.”
The talk happens at the kitchen table. “I guess these end-of-summer days are perfect little units for you,” it begins. “Snow-globes of time.”
Jack has no idea what this means.
“Unlike mine,” his father adds, without bitterness. He indicates his coffee. “One a day I drink, no more, no less. Every time I turn around I’m pouring another cup. Of course, I’m working.” He stares into his cup then looks at Jack. “Jack, two things can get a fifteen-year-old up at six a.m. in August: a paper route and a woman. If it’s a paper route, don’t let me keep you. If it’s a woman, you won’t know yet what’s hit you.”
Jack blinks.
“If Romeo and Juliet had had jobs,” his father continues, “none of that crap would have happened. People can be too conscious. When I was your age I didn’t have time to be conscious.”
“How about afraid?”
This question is more amazing to Jack than to his father. “If I was afraid,” his father replies, “I didn’t know it. You need to be conscious to be afraid. If you can’t afford to be afraid, you can’t afford to be conscious. Necessity’s the mother of the here and now. In twenty years you’ll know fear. Sooner if there’s a war. Inside five if there’s a war.”
At least a war would give Jack good reasons to be afraid. None of this starting back in alarm at the pattern of the grain in the rec room panelling, because nothing he’s learned about growth rings has told him why this particular pattern in this particular panel. But if he can’t even know this, what can he know?
His father has stopped talking, and at the periphery of Jack’s awareness his head is angled queryingly, as if he expects a response. This is unlike him, but then so is this talk. Jack hesitates to meet his eyes, but when his father’s head remains in that position long enough to suggest conscious intent, he braces himself and turns to face him.
His father’s head is angled that way to make out Jack’s watchface. When he realizes Jack is looking at him, he shoots him an anxious glance. “I need to get a move on, here,” he says. “Anyway, you know what I’m saying. Stay off the women.”
When his father leaves for work, Jack looks at his watch without seeing the time. I’d be a fool to go to Iris’s this late, he thinks. And then he thinks, I can’t stay away.
Iris Buckerfield is too intelligent and beautiful to need an English birth, but she’s got it. She now lives with her father Morris on the other side of the valley in a split-level walkout, which Morris leaves for work at seven a.m., five days a week. In the Old Country, Morris was a master craftsman. In Canada he has what Jack’s mother, who elides to show respect or let you know you should, calls a goodjob, as foreman of a furniture factory. His back garden, into which Jack has emerged, like a snake pushing a bicycle, from out of the river valley every weekday morning this summer, is entirely blue. Jack has never seen anything like it. Nor has he seen a gardener with the dedication of Morris Buckerfield. Once Morris dug out a beautiful but invasive plant and made a gift of it to the woman next door, who immediately replanted it on her side of the fence, not two feet away.
“Now I hope it dies,” Morris told Jack, and Jack gave him his heart.
The Buckerfield house is twenty-three minutes by bike. If Jack arrives at the Buckerfield back door too long after Morris has left for work, which is to say
when he can no longer smell the exhaust from
Morris’s Mini Cooper, he scans the cedar hedge along the west property line, steeling himself either for the torment of Byron Colton’s bike leaning against the hedge or for the blessing of the entire length of the hedge devoid of Byron Colton’s bike. The reason Jack must steel himself for a blessing is that half the time, in the very next instant, it’s undone by the torment of Byron Colton’s bike there after all, only farther up, closer to the driveway, farther beyond the rear corner of the house than Jack can bring himself at first to look.
On this morning, the torment caused by the sight of Byron Colton’s bike is unrelieved by the fact that Jack’s extreme lateness has as good as guaranteed it.
The Buckerfield back door opens into the rec room. From there the stairs to the main floor issue into the kitchen, where the lights are off. One dark November day almost two years ago, Jack came up these stairs to find himself face to face with Iris’s mother Dora in the light of the open fridge. Dora, dressed in a black negligee, was biting into a pear. While Jack was unable to tear his eyes away, Dora froze with astonishment at his sudden appearance in her kitchen. The two stood transfixed, the sight of Dora Buckerfield fridgelit in a black negligee with the lower half of her face sunk in a pear imprinting itself more and more indelibly upon Jack’s brain until she snatched away the pear and cried, “Morris! My robe! I’m on fucking view here—!”
Now Jack’s moving like a cat burglar down the hallway to Iris’s bedroom, which is at the end on the right, directly across from Dora’s. Both doors are closed. Jack stands at Iris’s for a long time, not hearing anything, reluctant to knock. Then he steps away and enters Dora’s. The blinds are closed, he can’t see anything. He feels for the light switch. Now the room looks the way it always did, except the bed is empty.
The very first time Jack laid eyes on Dora Buckerfield, she was asleep in his own house. This was ten years ago, the summer the Buckerfields moved to Canada. Jack’s memory of the incident is vivid, though it could be a holographic by-product of shifting versions of his mother’s stories—which would explain why he remembers it from her point of view.
Early one Saturday he appeared by his mother’s bed to ask if he could go downstairs and watch tv.
“I guess—” she said. “Are you ok?”
“I’m fine. I’m just awake. I’ll keep it low.”
Jack, who was five, had never done anything like this before, so after twenty minutes she went down to see if he was all right. She found him in the living room watching tv—though not, as usual, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the chesterfield with his blanket but pressed against the far end with his elbow high up on the arm of it, because most of the space was occupied by a sleeping woman.
“Jack,” his mother whispered, “who is this woman?”
“I don’t know,” Jack replied, not taking his eyes off the screen.
The woman was Dora Buckerfield. She had got the wrong house.
Years later Jack said to his mother, “I know you told me Dora left a party, but whose house did she think she was in if she’d sleep on the couch?”
“Her sister’s.”
“Her sister moved here too?”
“England.”
In Jack’s view, Iris’s wildness this summer (though if it’s only him and Byron with their pants on, then wildness may not quite be the word) is her way of grieving. He wishes there was something he could say. But whenever he tries, Iris silences him with a look that tells him only someone as out of it as he is would think the death of her mother meant anything to her at all.
When Jack’s grandmother Marlene was dying in the spare room at home, his mother used to go in with a mop and find that all the dust had gathered in drifts around the bed. “Dust to dust,” was how she put it.
“The bunnies pay their respects,” Jack suggested.
“That’s cute,” she murmured absently.
In Dora’s room Jack finds no inequality of dust. He finds no dust. Morris must have been through. The pictures on Dora’s dresser are immaculate. Jack examines an old one of Iris from grade school and remembers the January afternoon in Grade 7 when they were walking home from school and Iris slipped on the ice. At first she seemed to pitch forward, but her arms whipped up, out, and back, like a wingstroke, and when he moved to break her fall, she suddenly wasn’t there but higher up, more horizontal, somehow, tilting backward, compacted as by levitation. Wheeling, he saw, in a slow vision, her body in a state of composure, reclined in air, the spine adjusted for landing, the arms swung behind and under.
Iris did, eventually, go down. But before Jack could say anything, or help her to her feet, she’d sprung up, shakily laughing off the pain and shock while brushing away at the seat of her slacks. And Jack, his eyes welling with tears, reached for her, but once again he was too late.
In those days, Jack was known as The Fall Guy. The previous summer, playing guns, he’d mastered a topple-and-slide down a twenty-foot bluff that had kids travelling in from the farms to see. By that time, The Fall Guy’s They got me had evolved to an elaborate, neck-risking depiction of a body at the mercy of up to five bullets, then gravity. Give yourself to it was The Fall Guy’s cryptic advice to aspiring fallers. But home that night after watching Iris’s body arrange itself in air above the ice, The Fall Guy hung up his guns for good.
Enough. He lets himself out of Dora’s room and stands at Iris’s door. “Hey, you guys, it’s me!”
“About time,” says Iris, not unkindly, as if she’s been lying there the whole time, patiently waiting.
“Hey Jack,” says Byron, more muffled.
For a while the day goes as Jack expects. Iris is nicer to Byron because he’s arrived first. On any given morning, Jack—being more obsessed and organized and not as often as Byron waylaid by capricious parental demands—is more likely to arrive first. But Jack’s the one who’s spent more hours this summer being humiliated by Iris, because when it’s Jack’s bike leaning against the hedge, Byron usually turns his around and goes back home. Not Jack, who when it comes to Iris has no pride or shame and only the briefest glimpses of the bigger picture, and yet how many times has he been passing a playground, overheard little kids sniping among themselves, and thought, You—yes, you in the blue jumper. Don’t you see they’re a gang now, and it’s too late to win on points? Better get out while you can and start fresh tomorrow, or next thing you know they’ll be kicking you to death behind the swings. With Iris and Byron when Jack’s got there second, he’s the little girl in the blue jumper.
Today, however, three unprecedented things happen, in rapid succession.
First, at a point when the bickering’s as nasty as it gets, with Jack on the verge of bursting into tears from the unremitting abuse, suddenly and mysteriously the tide turns, Iris’s guns swing
around and lock on Byron, the discouraging word hick is heard, a line is crossed, and Byron, who has pride, leaves. Lifts his bike away from the hedge and rides off. Though sometimes he does this, never before has he done it on a day he’s got to Iris’s first. All Jack can think is that, even with himself there to bring out her natural cruelty, a quick girl like Iris can muster only so much patience in one day for a Byron Colton, and Jack’s inordinately late arrival this morning has resulted in an early depletion of today’s supply.
Second, not fifteen minutes after Byron leaves, one moment Jack and Iris are playing ping-pong in the Buckerfield rec room, the next they’re grappling on the floor, when a stricken intensity comes over Iris, a grim, bodily intention. Her eyes refocus a foot beyond the back of Jack’s head—at first he thinks she’s trying to read the name of the manufacturer stamped on the underside of the ping-pong table—and then her face twists away to the side, unavailable. This has happened before, or something like it. For Jack it’s like a hose you casually pick up suddenly starting to buck in your hands. Your first impulse is to throw it down and take off, soaking everybody, but you don’t, and you don’t let go either, though maybe you should, because you’re not ready for this. Instead you grip tight and hope for the best. And as Iris’s body presses itself more insistently against him, evidently out of her control and all but out of his, with Jack thinking, Something unbelievable is happening to Iris’s body, and by her kindness and good nature to mine! Either this is the key to the pattern of the grain in the panelling of every rec room in the universe or none of that matters now!—the third unprecedented thing happens.
Upstairs, the front door opens. Jack and Iris assume it’s Byron, who’s always forgetting something, but the voice that calls out “Is anyone here?” is Morris’s, and Jack and Iris leap apart like insect skaters on a summer pond. Iris tosses Jack a ping-pong paddle, which he catches, and follows through by hitting him a ball, which he misses. He turns from retrieving it from behind the TV to see Morris with his yellow cigarette hand on the banister, squinting through the curling smoke, looking at him.
Jack keeps his trunks tied to the handlebars of his bike, so there’s no problem there. The three of them are in the Cooper, Iris in the front seat with Morris, Jack in the back. This is a first, and Jack’s brain is awash with the luminous out-of-timeness of a déjà vu. As he gazes at the backs of Iris’s and Morris’s heads, he experiences so much love for these two people he could weep.
Iris’s eyes flick to the rearview. “Why is he crying?”
“I’m not—!”
“He’s not crying,” Iris tells her father, deadpan.
“Pay her no mind, Jack.”
Their destination is Medjack Recreation Area, where a low dam on the Medjack River has created a small brown body of water. On its north bank, several truckloads of gravellish sand have been dumped to simulate a beach. Today the place is a restless sea of heat-stoked flesh, but Morris doesn’t mind at all. He strips to enormous blue boxer trunks and betakes his pallid form to the water. There, among jocks horsing around with beachballs and Frisbees; mothers holding half-submerged, dazed-looking babies; and girls in up to their knees squealing and posing, he throws himself into a churning crawl.
Straightening on tiptoe in her white bikini, Iris spots a gang of kids she knows, playing volleyball on the grass. “Come on—!” she cries.
“Naw, I don’t feel like it—”
“Oh, don’t be such a suck—” and she’s gone.
Gingerly, Jack undresses to his trunks. He eases back on a Buckerfield towel and closes his eyes. When he hears Morris above him, vigorously towelling, he opens them.
“That wasn’t refreshing in the least,” Morris declares. He spreads his towel next to Jack’s and reaches for his cigarettes. “A man should not sweat when he swims. Bloody water’s a glorified open sewer.”
“The Medjack brown trout,” Jack offers, “is not a fish.”
“Hah!” Morris cries, and strikes a match. After a few minutes, he says, “Abandoned you, our Iris?”
Jack nods.
“Misses her mother.”
“More than she can say.”
These words are out of Jack’s mouth like shit—as his father would say—off a shovel. But whereas his father seemed to take in stride Jack’s similarly unexpected How about afraid? this morning, the look on Morris suggests he’s as struck by what Jack has just said as Jack is. More than she can say. Maybe Morris is surprised that Jack would recognize such a fact about his daughter, or maybe he doesn’t think Jack has a right to pronounce. Though really he has no idea what Morris is making of what he’s just said, Jack marvels that the pat little formula should have slipped out so easily. It’s not as if an awkward silence was holding a gun to his head. It must have been the draw of finishing Morris’s thought. But as Jack goes on turning the words in his mind, they continue to mean exactly what he intended, and even now he can’t think how he’d put it any better himself. But the thing is, More than she can say is not him, it’s from somewhere he doesn’t know and has never been, and he has to wonder what the hell kind of place this is he’s coming into, here.
“Want a piece of advice from an old man?” Morris says.
Jack looks at him.
“Neither do I.”
Jack laughs.
“That’s the lad.” Morris takes a long drag, and with droll complacency that could mean anything at all he adds, “You’ll be fine.
Greg Hollingshead is the winner of the 2004 Alberta Views short story contest.
____________________________________________
