Harmless (4 page)

He watched as a man in jeans, plaid shirt, and ball cap jumped down from the blue pickup, a practised sight-gag not as funny as Mike’s laugh made it out to be. Joseph took a step toward the truck but was halted when Alex ordered him to wait. A teenage girl emerged from the passenger side, her armour of boredom marking her as the driver’s daughter. She was either a little older than Rebecca and Franny, or more willing to display her body, which was barely wrapped in a belly shirt and cotton shorts.

“
Ruby
,” Alex said, his voice hissing like a dynamite fuse in an old cartoon as Rebecca and Franny swooped onto the driveway to greet the new arrival, Franny hanging back at the last second to pat the cell phone in her back pocket as if it were an emergency store of medicine. The girls formed a triangle and complimented each other’s clothing, continuing this almost-courtly ritual as they walked back to wherever Franny and Rebecca had been hanging out.

Alex’s expression seemed to slip loose as he watched the girls, leaving him slack-faced, his eyes strangely animated. He gripped Joseph’s arm, the sudden intimacy like an unexpected kiss, then waved him toward the back deck with precise hand gestures. Joseph followed Alex’s crouching figure as they crept past the deck, feeling caught up in a kid’s war game until Alex stopped beside a withered bush at the corner of the house and crouched further down.

What the hell were they doing?

The bush gave them a clear view of a narrow, grassy corridor running between the side of the house and a chain-link fence marking the southern property line. Joseph leaned forward but couldn’t see anything until Alex pointed
at an old apple tree on the other side of the fence, where the three girls stood beneath the gnarled, ash-grey branches and towering blue sky like figures on an old prog-rock album cover. The sight of Franny pinching her unblemished face around a joint brought a frightening stillness to Joseph’s mind, cutting off the background noise. His little girl, two weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday, smoking a joint with the casualness of an office worker on her second cup of coffee. He remembered her at age eight, filling a notebook with elaborate floor plans for castles and dungeons, street maps of medieval towns, ladies with crayon-coloured dresses, and suits of armour for the knights. Had that girl just disintegrated like a cloud with a pleasing shape when he wasn’t paying attention? Was the girl under the tree any more solid?

Franny passed the joint to Rebecca, and Joseph was washed with relief when Rebecca handled it with the same proficiency. Jane and Liz came through their druggy stage intact. He had to keep perspective.

Ruby was catching the girls up on a recent triumph at a talent competition. “I
brought
it,” she said. “I mean, you have to.”

Rebecca nodded, clearly impressed. Franny texted highlights to distant friends, her powers of attention fully evolved for amphibious habitation of earth and digital ether.

“The nationals are
soon
, trust me,” Ruby said, falling into the hypnotic rhythm of blasé cool and breathless disclosure perfected by celebrity clip-show hosts. “I’m going to the city next weekend to cut an audition tape. That’s how Jeremy works.”

Jeremy? Joseph guessed a casting agent or Svengali-esque producer.

“When he wants you to do something you just go. It’s
such
an opportunity.”

“What about your dad?” Rebecca was primed for scandal. “I
meeannn
 …”

“He
got
me the gig. Dad knows everyone there. It’s like … Knock knock.”

Joseph felt his heart stumble as Franny mouthed the first syllable of
Who’s there?
before stopping herself in time, turning her head sharply left, as if a girl beside her had said something ridiculously uncool. The bush he was hiding behind seemed to contract, stealing the air from his lungs. Alex was watching him.
Pay attention
, his eyes said.
It gets worse
.

“
Sooo
,” Ruby said, nodding at Rebecca, “Dave been stalking you lately?”

Alex’s breath hit a wall—he didn’t know about Dave.

“You’re over Dave. I can
so
tell.”

Rebecca made a vague hand motion, as though refusing a second helping of vegetables. “He’s lurking my Facebook page.”

“I should charge my lurkers admission.”

Franny rolled her eyes at this typical male behaviour. And why shouldn’t she? Joseph himself had peeked at her page a few times, studying the campy glamour poses with friends and solo portraits of scantily clad introspection, the backlighting rendering the setting as anonymous as a porno shoot. In one picture he thought he saw a face at the bedroom window, the deep eye sockets too big for the head.

“So … 
Dave …
you’re not super excited about him,” Ruby said. “You can’t force these things—
trust
me.”

“To be perfectly honest, I’m not excited.” Rebecca closed her eyes, twin eyeliner smears taking on emblematic significance in the clear country air. Poor Alex—why was his little girl wearing makeup on a Saturday afternoon? Who was it
for
?

“Just tell him, ‘I
like
you, you’re a
great
guy. It’s just timing. I’m not ready.’ ”

“He’s going to freak.”

“That’s what guys
do
.”

Alex clenched his fists. Over the past fifteen years, those same hands had forged a loving relationship with Rebecca, building it with science projects, plants and stones gathered on nature walks, fishing trips, games of catch, and digging in the garden. Was he supposed to store those hands in the closet while she went off the rails and fucked up her life?

“What about you, girl?” Ruby asked Franny. “Any boys chasing you in the city?”

“Are you kidding? I have to beat them off with a stick,” Franny said, cracking a smile.

“Kinky!”

Joseph knew it was an illusion brought on by his non-blinking stare, but his mind no longer recognized Franny and her friends. The girls were gone, replaced by three strangers whose fat-free bodies made the objects of his own adolescent crushes look Rubenesque. They exuded self-denial and a sensual receptivity focused at the mouth, neck, and belly, their backs as rigid as aristocrats’ wives in seventeenth-century portraiture. Time rushed forward
and he saw each girl at eighteen, her body a map of tattooed Celtic knotwork, Chinese calligraphy, and Native American icons, a map for lovers, with piercings marking the erogenous zones.

Why couldn’t he have had a son?

Joseph squeezed his eyes shut. Did he really just think that? A
son
? Alex was getting to him, willing him to see something worse than three girls experimenting with what passed for rebellion these days.

He nudged Alex, and the two men crept back behind the house. A response was being demanded of Joseph, and by the scowl on Alex’s face, he was ready to pull out his own eyes and pop them into Joseph’s sockets to get what he wanted. Had he always been such a bully?

“What is it going to take?” Alex said.

“For what?”

“Do you want me to say it?” He lurched closer, his lips flecked with spittle, his shoulders seeming to flare up like an angry cat’s back.

Joseph stepped back, his nerves humming with a cold, dizzying fury. “You don’t think I have my own Father’s Worst Nightmares scrapbook?” Of course he did. Fifteen-year-old boys so addicted to porn they couldn’t cum without pulling out and exploding in their best gal’s face. The gang-bang, rape, beat-down, and drunken-fuck videos initiating kids into the global Race to the Bottom. His favourite: the “rainbow” parties, where lipsticked girls displayed their fellatio skills on the cocks of shark-eyed morons whose fantasies of self-actualization amounted to an eternal ride in a limo packed with strippers. He’d seen the girls, the way
they used the full range of digital technology to police each other for microscopic status violations, and he’d seen the boys, so verbally inarticulate you expected them to greet each other with a brisk exchange of ass sniffing.

Joseph reined himself in. “Every generation sees youth culture as some monstrous Saturn trying to devour their children.”

“Quoting your own column again?”

“Someone has to.”

“Living the dream, eh?”

“It pays the bills. Not all of us are lucky enough to inherit enough from their grandparents to start over again in the country.” He’d gone too far, but the words had leapt over the more acceptable retorts before he could slam the door.

Alex’s expression was triumphant, as if he’d deliberately driven Joseph to hit him below the belt. He gestured toward where they’d been crouching. “When we used to take the girls to the playground, is this really what you saw in Franny’s future?”

“I don’t know what I saw.” Maybe Alex remembered—he’d supplied Joseph with the necessary optimism and idealism for those first years of fatherhood. Joseph wiped the sweat from his face. He was so tired. “That Ruby looks like a wild one,” he conceded.

“Not wild—
feral
. But you’d know all about that.”

Alex had a point, but he always did. There was an aphorism about knowing the difference between facts and the truth, but Joseph couldn’t remember the wording. He was terrible with details. Vitamin B12 was supposed to help. He’d buy some in the city.

J
oseph recognized Ruby’s father from a couple of Hardwar shows and a terrible cop drama he’d watched one insomniac night. It must have showed in his face, because after greeting Alex with half-mocking gravitas, Derek Hermann narrated Joseph’s approach with winning stage patter: “White male, six feet tall, brown hair, and judging from the outfit, just up from the city.” He laughed—a barking, consonant-heavy sound that evoked cottage weekends, the men at their drunken, cordial best. “Don’t tell me your name,” he said as they shook hands. “I’ve seen you before. You might be famous.” Having been recognized, Derek knew no greater gift than to return the compliment. “And no, that’s not cow shit on my hands. Grease from a yuppie’s car I fixed this morning. You need a fucking
IT
guy to tune an engine these days.”

The joke was an oldie but Joseph appreciated the effort. He was a sucker for men like Derek, born bullshitters and chancers.

“Liz scouting you a property?” A fresh sunburn gave Derek’s face the uniformity of a mask. “You a New Pioneer?” He nodded at Alex, the expression’s obvious source, earning a wince that might have been from the sharp sun.

“I’m an innocent bystander,” Joseph said. “Here for the weekend.”

“I came for the global warming.” Derek winked as he leaned against the cab. The truck was almost all front end, the automotive equivalent of a pit bull, with massive grille and fenders dwarfing a distended flatbed that future models would shed like an unnecessary tail. “Warming’s the best thing to happen to the local economy in decades—does wonders for the growing season.” He glanced at Alex, whose eyes pushed back hard, as if he were trying to rewind the conversation and start again, but Derek didn’t take offence.

Joseph, long scratched from Alex’s list of confidants, couldn’t read the subtext. He stepped back to take in the green fields pulsing in the sunlight, the rolling green sea broken by islands of trees and stacked rocks, the distant farmhouses as iconic as children’s toys. The bright landscape seemed to rush at him in warm, obliterating waves, and in the stillness he felt what must have been that same protectiveness for the land Alex and Derek were each trying to define.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “It really is.”

“I love it!” Derek took off his cap, as though Joseph had just spoken the most honest words heard in these parts since Pioneer times. “Give me a shout next time you’re up. I’ll show you the scenery—it’s the only thing still bringing in any money, eh Alex?”

“For now,” Alex conceded.

“Exactly!
For now
. We’ve got pristine lakes, forests, fishing, hunting, little picturesque villages and towns.”

Liz had driven them through one that morning—a village with a main street lined with century-old trees and tan brick houses peaked by Victorian gables, a boxy limestone post office and library with a miniature classical portico, and a general store with a canoe out front. There were a few antique stores and discreet restaurants, and an old traveller’s hotel converted into a B & B, the street culminating in a willow-draped creek where a restored mill housed a combination art gallery–café. Take away the cars and you had the setting for a tasteful period drama, but in real life the final effect was too uniformly of a bygone era to convince—ten feet past the mill Joseph expected to see a film crew planning the next shot. When he told Liz the place looked like a theme park, “Ye Olde-Time Colonial Town,” she said that’s what the tourists and buyers wanted—history, heritage, the willing away of the inauthentic present.

“And we’ve got crusty locals like you and Alex,” Mike said.

“Alex is a
neo
-local,” Derek said. “He understands what this place could be better than the inbreds on the town council do.”

“Really?” Joseph said, heading off Alex’s intervention.

“When Alex opened his shop the locals pegged him for a tree-hugger. They didn’t want to hear about the economic forces that have been gutting this area for decades. Then, two years ago, he predicted the banking crash
to the month
. That got their attention.”

Derek leaned a little closer toward Alex, his body presenting an alternative model of masculinity—weight-room bulk with a light slathering of beer fat. Alex caught Joseph scrutinizing them, and his broad shoulders, as if slipping past a distracted guard, made a show of solidarity by shifting in Derek’s direction. An energy of attraction and repulsion, as unnerving as hearing a radio picking up two stations simultaneously, connected the two men. Joseph felt a little envious of Derek, an outdated, misdirected emotion he could not completely suppress.

“Now a bunch of us meet at Alex’s store on Friday nights,” Derek said, beaming pride at his ideological mentor. “Farmers, teachers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, a few of the local rainmakers—we even got a sexy librarian! We’re getting on top of what’s happening to this community before it gets on top of us.”