Greedy Little Eyes (2 page)

Gord looked down, his head wobbling a little with each breath. “Lydia thinks it might be a new start. We might get to be a better … couple. I wouldn’t be distracted and my boys and me would
bond
. Christ, another couple years and those boys’ll be gone faster than you can …” His voice drifted off. “Swing a dead cat. Your dad says if I don’t give it my all, I’ll regret it.” He looked
over at me for a few drawn-out seconds. “He would, wouldn’t he? I bet he wants me gone.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Stupid. They’re both pussies. He’s afraid … and she’s afraid to do anything about it.”

I looked at him. “You’re kinda looped there, Dotter.”

“
You
know. Damn well. Elephant in the room, eh? You know.”

I smirked as though I did know.

“Hey.” He shrugged, ducked his chin into his neck like a blasé Frenchman. “Peg’s beautiful. He knows it most of all. It’s old hat. She knows it. She should’ve kicked him in the balls like I taught you, but here she is. That’s who’s
stupid.
”

Heat rushed into my neck. I watched him another second. “Kicked him in the balls?”

“Lack of dedication. He forfeits. And she kicked
me
in the balls instead. I’m not impotent. This whole thing—” He raised his hands to his surroundings. “Mine. In a different plane: that’s mine, this is mine, you’re mine.”

Suddenly the room felt tight and heavy. As though, even in Calgary, Gord would be too loud and too close.

We still saw him two or three times a year but he seemed more distant each time, as though less and less of him were actually in the room. Then two years almost to the day that he had moved, Gord up and left Aunt Lydia and my cousins in Calgary. He was at work,
in the middle of a board meeting with all the mucky-mucks of Gibraltar Insurance, when the feeling hit him. Apparently they were discussing different strategies to increase profit margins, batting around ideas of how they might feasibly make cuts to existing coverage without alienating the clientele. Someone had raised the issue of prescriptions: if PharmaCare could refuse to cover certain prescriptions, then why couldn’t they, as a secondary insurance provider, do likewise? In fact they should only cover what the government agencies would cover.

Gord’s rebuttal shot down the length of the table. “If we’re only going to cover what’s already covered then we’re providing fuck-all!”

When Gord told the story later, it took on biblical proportions. The men around him leaned in as they haggled, their gold rings and watches grazing the surface, teeth sharp, eyes craving. Gord slammed a fist down in the middle of the argument, and then rose from his chair and said, “From the days of John the Baptist until now, every time there’s something good or true or right, assholes like you gotta take it away.” Then he turned and left the building. He walked into the street, flagged a cab and headed to the airport.

He called my father once from Toronto and then there wasn’t another word until six months later, when he showed up for Sunday dinner with a girl named Ruth on his arm. She wasn’t much older than me; her hair was the same colour and texture as mine but it was centre-parted and hung down to her bum. She was an
artist—an
artisan
, she corrected me from where she sat on the floor in our living room, leaning against the couch and Gord’s legs. Reaching into a tasselled suede purse, she pulled out two small white boxes, and passed one to Mom and one to me. Each contained a pair of earrings that she had made.

Sitting rigidly in her wingback chair, my mother held up a teardrop of silver wire threaded through three blue wood beads. Her eyes, though, were on Ruth’s smooth blank face. No eyeliner, no lipstick. Ruth’s thick hair draped to her lap.

“These are
awesome
,” I said. Seated on the ottoman near my father’s chair, I suddenly scooted onto the floor too, as though Ruth might look like less of an interloper if I were down there with her. “I
love
these.” Holding it by the shepherd’s hook, I dangled a slim slice of smooth wood, shark’s fin shaped and caged in silver wire.

“Right on,” she said. “They’re guitar picks. My old boyfriend loved wood picks. Most of them are plastic, eh.”

Earring still in hand, my mother appraised Ruth as if a one-way mirror separated them.

My father cleared his throat. “So how long are you two in town?”

“Just tonight and tomorrow,” Gord told him.

Mom put the earring back into its box but she didn’t take her gaze from Gord’s girlfriend. “You just look so much like my daughter. If your hair wasn’t so …”

“So damn long?” Ruth loosed a horse laugh on the room. “Me and my crazy-ass hair. Actually you and Amy, man,
you
two could be sisters.”

A rueful gurgle in my mother’s throat, then she looked down finally and set the box on the arm of her chair. “But for a few
decades
… Thank you, Ruth. I’ll enjoy these.”

“We’re heading to the wilds of Vancouver Island,” Gord interjected. “We’ve had it with
stuff.
No more
stuff.
We want to live the good life: all natural, no artificial preservatives.”

Ruth smiled as she hugged her knees.

I looked at Gord but he didn’t look back. He had hardly addressed a word to me all evening. Itchy and restless, I chewed at the inside of my lip.

“People,” he announced later at the dinner table, “are getting brain cancer from telephones, you know.” He paused with the last of his pork chop on the end of his fork.

“You mean cellphones?” I asked him.

“Cellphones, cordless phones, all of it. And Christ knows what havoc the computers are wreaking on us.”

“Come on, babe,” Ruth coaxed him and then winked as she chewed.

Gord winked back and shut up.

My father’s eyebrows flicked from Gord to Ruth. He glanced at his empty plate, and then at my mother. He took a long drink of water, his Adam’s apple cranking up and down. As he set down his glass, I searched his eyes for signs of envy.

Three or four months later, Gord phoned us from a gas station about a forty-minute walk from his new place, wondering if the three of us could join him and Ruth for dinner.

My mother would not go. “He deserted his family and he’s running around with some underage hippie. He’s a pervert and jackass and I won’t support it.”

My father cajoled her. “You might have a point,
but
he left her the house, two cars … and all the phones and computers she could ever want.”

She peered at him. “Is that funny to you?”

Dad and I took the ferry to Nanaimo and, from there, drove an hour through the rain into the middle of nowhere. A muddy dirt road with a skunk stripe of green down the middle took us the last fifteen minutes to Gord and Ruth’s place.

It was quaint, I guess: a beat-up log cabin right in the thick of old-growth forest. Smoke floated out of the chimney through the drizzle.

The front door opened and Ruth flounced onto the porch in a heavy, ankle-length skirt. She wore a woolly cardigan and her arms were folded against the cold. “Right on! You made it!”

“You weren’t kiddin’ about moving to the wilds,” my father said to her as he got out of the car.

She beamed. “It’s a hump, huh?”

Banging out the screen door, Gord bellowed, “Come in, you’re out!”

My father and I skittered up the wet steps, ditched our muddy shoes at the door.

A fire burned in the stove—an actual wood-burning stove—and the place smelled warm and savoury. I turned around and took it all in, feeling as if I were in an ad for country living though with a bit of a Haight-Ashbury feel: there were paisley curtains, dozens of candles, lighted oil lamps, God’s-eyes in the windows and, in the centre of the room, a multicoloured rag rug.

“Nice job, Ruth. You did this all yourself?”

She smiled. “My old man chipped in a little.”

“Chipped shmipped!” He squeezed her from behind. “Such a little bugger you are.” He glanced at me and then kissed Ruth’s cheek before blowing a raspberry into her neck.

I looked away.

“See those cupboards?” Gord said, releasing Ruth. “These babies are all mine!”

My father went to inspect Gord’s carpentry while Ruth walked me up the wood ladder to the loft that was their feathered nest of a bedroom.

No bathroom, no running water. They used an outhouse and well water.

Dinner was wild rabbit. Gord had shot it and Ruth had cleaned and cooked it.

“No hormones or dye or preservatives, just good food,” Gord reported from over his plate. He said there was no electricity out here to screw up your brains. He lectured us on the ill effects of power lines.

“Babe,” Ruth cut him off. “Mellow.”

“No. I won’t
mellow
.” His voice was sharp. “This is a
dangerous world and when you know something you got to talk about it.”

“There goes Gordie, spreadin’ the gospel,” Dad teased. “How’re you living these days?”

“Look around! I’m living
great
!”

Ruth winked at me. The tight smile I gave her reminded me of my mother’s and so I mentioned again how good the rabbit tasted.

My father kept at him. “Gordie! What are you living
on
?”

“Don’t worry about us, brother. We got it covered. Ruth makes her jewellery; she takes in sewing once in a while—these are
her
curtains, you know. I do a little carpentry, that sort of thing. See this,
this
”
—
he waved his fork around—“is what the government does not want. They don’t want people living off the
grid
: killing and cooking their own food. They don’t like this one bit—no phone lines to tap, no cookies in the computer.”

“
Cookies
now, Gordie?” Coming from me,
Gordie
had a snide sound to it. The tines of my fork mewled against the plate.

“That’s right, Dotter
.
”

He hadn’t called me that in a while. Ruth glanced at my father.

“A little cookie attaches itself to your browser with every stop you make on the Web. Same goes for your television. Don’t kid yourself, that’s how they getcha. Here in the woods, the infrared is screwed. Can’t track you any more because of the warmth of the trees; the
energy keeps the boys from being able to tell what’s tree, what’s deer, what’s man.”

My father stared.

I looked at my uncle. “What do they care what
you’re
doing?”

Gord looked at me with a kind of pained disgust, as though the shared dot between our toes surely must be fading.

Ruth glanced from me to Gord. “Speaking of cookies, guess what’s for dessert.” She added, “The way this is going I should’ve put a little weed into them.”

We didn’t hear from them again for another few months. Between starting a new job and moving into my first apartment, I didn’t have time to give Gord and Ruth much thought. My name was in the phone book for the first time.

Staring at my number on the grey-white page, I was in the midst of noting whose names sandwiched my own when the phone rang. It was Ruth. Calling from the gas station. She had tried calling me at my parents’ and they’d given her my number.