The Dells (9 page)

“Joey? I'd be very surprised.”

She picked up a strip of bacon in her fingers, delicately bit off a piece and crunched it between her teeth. “So you haven't seen him or spoken to him since … ” She hesitated.

“No,” Shoe said. She lifted a forkful of egg, dripping yellow yolk, to her mouth. “Have you?” he asked.

Swallowing, she said, “No. His mother died two years ago. I took Mum and Dad to her funeral. Joey wasn't there. His father died eight or nine years ago. According to his sister, he wasn't at his father's funeral either.”

Shoe watched her swab the last of the grease and yolk from her plate with the edge of her thumb. She then stuck her thumb in her mouth, sucking noisily. Wiping her thumb off with a paper serviette, she grinned sheepishly at him.

“Pretty disgusting, eh?” Their parents had tried for years to break her of the habit of cleaning her plate with her thumb, obviously without success. “Can I ask you something?” she said. He waited. “What happened between you and Joey? Did you fight over Janey?”

Shoe hid his surprise behind his coffee mug. Janey Hallam had had nothing to do with his falling out with Joey. At least, not directly. He supposed, though, to an eleven-year-old Rachel, it might have appeared that way.

“We didn't fight over Janey,” he said.

“What then? For ten years you and Joey were
practically joined at the hip. What happened? You don't have to answer if you don't want to.” she added.

“Good,” he said.

Her disappointment was evident, but she said, “Okay.”

“You're all right with that?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. But if you don't want to talk about it, I understand.”

“Do you remember when he was in the hospital for a week? It was in early May of our last year of junior high school.”

“I think so,” Rachel said. “He had an accident on his bike, didn't he?”

Shoe shook his head. “He was cutting through the Dells on his way to a chess club meeting at the junior high school when he was jumped by three boys, beaten up, stripped, and left naked and unconscious in the woods. Some kids found him and ran home to tell their parents, who called the police. Joey was hospitalized for a week with a concussion, a ruptured spleen, and a broken bone in his right hand. He never told the police who'd attacked him. Boys he didn't know, he said.”

“Jesus, did he tell you?”

“No, but I knew.”

“Who?”

“Dougie Hallam … ”

“Of course,” Rachel said contemptuously.

“Ricky Marshall … ”

“Dougie's little toady.”

“And Hal.”

Her eyes widened with astonishment. “You're kidding. Hal didn't like Joey much, but that doesn't seem like him at all. What did you do?” The expression on his face must have been answer enough. “You beat him up, didn't you?”

“Yes,” Shoe said.

Hal had been avoiding Shoe since Joey's attack, and when Shoe confronted him about it, he admitted he'd participated — reluctantly, he claimed. Although Hal was four years older than Shoe, and heavier, Shoe was slightly taller. He was also stronger, quicker, and in better condition. In a fair fight, Hal might have held his own, but Shoe had no intention of fighting fair. He sucker-punched Hal in the gut, growing soft even then, then proceeded to beat the stuffing out of him. He didn't beat him half as badly as Joey had been beaten, drawing only a little blood and breaking no bones; Hal was his brother, after all.

“Did you beat up Dougie Hallam too?” Rachel asked.

“Yes,” Shoe said again.

Dougie Hallam had been the neighbourhood bully for as long as Shoe could remember. According to gossip, his father and stepmother, Freddy and Nancy, were just trailer trash who'd made good. No one was quite sure how, but the general consensus was that it hadn't been legal, a suspicion later strengthened by their ganglandstyle murders shortly before Shoe joined the police. Mrs. Hallam was a normally meek and mousy woman, but when she got a couple of drinks in her she became strident and sluttish. Freddy had beaten up more than one man who had become the unwilling focus of her attention. Rumour had it he beat her up regularly too. He was also virulently anti-Semitic.

Dougie Hallam was proof that apples seldom fall far from the trees; he was as loutish and bigoted as his father. At nineteen he was taller than Shoe was at fifteen, and more heavily muscled, with a reputation as a dirty fighter. On Sunday morning, the week after Joey's attack, as Dougie was washing his customized '57 Ford Fairlane convertible in the driveway of his parents' house, Shoe walked up to him and, without a word of warning, punched him in the nose, breaking it and spraying blood
across the white vinyl convertible top of the car. Dougie tried to fight back, but he was blinded by blood and pain and anger and didn't have a chance. By the time his parents realized what was going on and came to the rescue, Dougie lay unconscious on the drive, a minor concussion to go with the broken nose, two missing teeth, and cracked rib.

“You didn't beat up Ricky Marshall too, did you?” Rachel asked. “He wasn't much bigger than Joey.”

“No, but I scared him pretty badly.”

After leaving Dougie bloodied on the driveway of his parents' house, Shoe rode his bike to the drive-in restaurant where Ricky Marshall worked. Ricky saw him coming and ran. Shoe caught him at the edge of the parking lot. He was so frightened, he soiled himself. Shoe left him there, huddled in a miserable heap, and rode home to wait for the police. The police never came, but a week later Shoe's father received a bill for Dougie's dental work. He paid it, and Shoe reimbursed him out of the earnings from his weekend job at Dutton's Hardware and Building Supplies.

“I take it Joey wasn't grateful,” Rachel said.

“Far from it,” Shoe said. “When I told him what I'd done, he called me a muscle-headed moron and told me to ‘fuck the hell off' and mind my own business.” Rachel's eyes widened, unaccustomed to his use of profanity. “I was hurt and confused. I'd done what I thought was the right thing, but eventually I realized I'd only compounded his humiliation. By then it was too late.”

The following winter, two weeks after his sixteenth birthday, Joey dropped out of high school and got a job pumping gas at the Canadian Tire gas bar. Five months later he bought an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle and took to the road. He hadn't said goodbye.

“Well, you know what they say about good deeds, Joe,” Rachel said. “They rarely go unpunished.”

“I have to go into the office,” Hal said.

Maureen did not look up from the Home and Garden section of the Saturday paper. “Fine,” she said coldly.

It was the first word she'd spoken to him since they'd got home the night before. He tried to swallow his anger, but it stuck in his throat like a fish bone. “I'll try to get away by lunchtime,” he said.

“Fine,” she said again. She turned the page of the newspaper, snapped it straight, then picked up her coffee mug and took a sip.

“But I can't promise,” Hal said.

She banged the mug down and glared at him. “Oh, for Christ's sake, Hal, will you just shut the fuck up.”

“Well, I'm sorry,” he said. Even after twenty-five years of marriage, her language shocked him. “I still have to go to the office.”

“No, you don't,” she said. “You're just looking for an excuse to avoid going to the homecoming. I'm not sure why. Until a couple of weeks ago, you seemed to be
looking forward to it. Or is it that you just don't want to spend the day with me?”

“That's not it. There are just some things I need to do to get ready for the quarterly performance evaluations.”

“For god's sake, Hal. You'd think, after all these years, you'd've figured out I can always tell when you're lying. The rims of your nostrils turn red. The only time you can get away with lying to me is when you've got a cold or your allergies are acting up. The rims of your nostrils are always red then, so just to be on the safe side, when you've got a cold, I don't believe anything you tell me.”

“What's with you this morning?” he said, as if he didn't know. “Look, I told you I was sorry about last night. I've got a lot on my mind these days.”

“So you said. That doesn't excuse your behaviour.” She made a dismissive shrugging motion. “Go to the office, Hal. No one's going to miss you. Certainly not me.” She went back to her newspaper.

On the drive to the train station, he tried not to think about Maureen and his brother spending the day together. He almost turned back, figuring that maybe it would be better to go with Maureen to the homecoming after all. At least he'd be able to keep an eye on them. He didn't, though, but continued to the Clarkson GO Station, where he parked the Lexus in the huge, mostly empty lot, and trudged through the tunnel to the platform. He found an unoccupied bench and sat down to wait for the next train to Union Station, then remembered he'd forgotten to have his ticket stamped in one of the proof-of-payment machines. For most of the year he purchased a monthly pass, but he usually took vacation during July and August and it was more economical to buy ten-ride tickets that had to be cancelled for each ride. Wearily, he got up, inserted the ticket into a nearby machine, then slumped onto the bench again.

Maureen was right. No one would miss him. Sure, they might wonder where he was, why he wasn't there, click their tongues and comment on how all work and no play made Hal a dull boy, but that was it. They wouldn't give him another thought. Maureen. Joe. Rachel. That pompous old fart Wiseman. His parents, even though he'd promised to take them to the concert later that evening. The truth of the matter was, he was about as interesting and exciting as an old sofa.

And, he thought, looking down at his protruding gut, he was built a bit like an old sofa too. No wonder Maureen got all gooey-eyed over Joe. He didn't look as though he'd gained an ounce in thirty years. In fact, he seemed even trimmer than he'd been when he'd quit the police and gone out west. Hal had never been exactly skinny, even as a teenager, but he'd started gaining weight in his second year of university and had continued to gain until he'd topped out at his current weight five or six years ago. When was the last time he'd been able to see his own dick without a mirror? he wondered glumly. Not for some time, even erect. Good thing he could find it by feel, he thought with bitter humour.

The train came and he climbed aboard with the other Saturday morning commuters and shoppers. He trudged up the stairs to the upper level of the car because it was usually less crowded. The only other occupants were a foursome of teenaged girls who fell momentarily silent, staring at him as though he were an alien just arrived from Mars, then dismissed him utterly, as though he'd suddenly ceased to exist. Or had never existed at all.

He found a seat and tried to ignore the girls as thoroughly as they were ignoring him, but he couldn't keep his eyes off them. Try as he might to focus on his newspaper, his gaze was drawn back to them as inexorably as a compass needle is drawn to magnetic north. None of them was especially pretty, but they all wore skin-tight
jeans that rode below their hipbones, and skimpy tops that revealed their midriffs and the shoulder straps of their brassieres, those wearing them. One girl, a chunky Chinese with shining black eyes and orange-striped hair, obviously wasn't, and the nipples of her plump, immature breasts were like dark pebbles below the surface of the sand. None of them had tattoos, that he could see, or obvious body piercings. With a shudder of revulsion, he wondered if any of them had pierced genitals. Surely they were too young for that sort of thing. On the other hand, they were too young to be dressed so provocatively. Didn't they realize the kind of message they were sending?

One of the girls became aware of his attention and whispered conspiratorially to her companions. They all looked in his direction and giggled. The Chinese girl glanced around the compartment, then locked eyes with him. His pulse raced. She plucked at the hem of her top, raising it higher on her midriff, as though she were going to reveal her breasts. Hal stared, mouth dry, perspiration pooling in his armpits and running down his sides, simultaneously fascinated and horrified. Then, laughing, the girl pulled the hem of her top back down. Her friends roared with laughter. Face flaming, Hal struggled to his feet and staggered down the stairs to the lower level, the girls' laughter chasing him like the taunts of Yonge Street whores.

Marty Elias had teased him like that once, he recalled, as he sagged into a seat on the lower level. One day, when he got home from playing softball, he found her sprawled on the sofa in the basement recreation room of his parents' house — she was Rachel's best friend and always hanging about — wearing shorts and a stretchy pink tube top.

“What're you doing here?” he said to her.

She looked at him. “Waiting for Rachel.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Where is she?”

Marty shrugged. Beneath the fabric of her top, her breasts were the size of half golf balls and shaped like foreshortened ice cream cones.

“How old are you now?” Hal asked, although he knew perfectly well how old she was.

“Same as Rachel,” she said. “Eleven.”

“You look, um, older,” he said.

“Yeah? Really?” She sat up a little straighter, thrusting out her chest. “My boobies are bigger than hers,” she said proudly.

“A little, I guess,” Hal said, face hot.

A sly expression crossed her small face. “I bet you've never seen a girl's boobies before.”

“What? Sure, of course I have,” he lied. He had, but only in magazines.

“Gimme a dollar and I'll show you mine.”

He swallowed dryly. He was certain she was teasing, but he dug into his jeans pocket anyway, feeling his erection as he fished out some change and a crumpled dollar bill. “I'll give you fifty cents,” he said.