David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

In the kitchen, the conversation escalated — at least on Mark Hollins’ side. He slammed his bottle down on the table, not hard enough to shatter, but enough to send a gout of booze up through the neck and splash on his white-knuckled fist.

“Give me the Goddamn money!” Hollins stood up, and put his arms under the table. Dad lifted his beer and the bag, and swung back as the table fell over onto its side, empty beer bottles and Shelly’s old pop can scattering across the linoleum floor. “I risked my fuckin ’ neck tonight!”

Dad got up from his chair and stood with his arms crossed — beer in one fist, bag in the other — and he chuckled, shaking his head.

Shelly pinched her nose as the smell of tar grew stronger — it seemed like she could actually see the fumes, coming out of the half-open door to the basement in a thin grey cloud. Blaine didn’t cover his nose — he probably smelled enough tar his nose wouldn’t even tell it — but his hands were up over his ears, and his eyes were shut.

In the kitchen, Hollins reached around to his hip pocket, and he pulled something out that flashed metal in the kitchen light. Dad stopped chuckling as Mark Hollins held it in front of him, and even Shelly could see what it was: an X-Acto knife.

“That’s it, you fucker,” said Mark Hollins. “You’re right we’re not splitting this money. You’re going to give it all to me — isn’t that right?”

Dad looked straight at his old buddy Mark Hollins, and shook his head. “Get out of here,” he said, “if you know what’s good for you.”

And that set him off. Hollins shouted something Shelly couldn’t hear properly, and he lunged with the X-Acto blade—

—straight at Dad, he must have thought—

—but in fact, straight through the door to the basement.

Mark Hollins made a painful-sounding clatter as he tumbled over the first few steps, but the falling-down sounds ended quickly. There was nothing afterwards but a series of shouts — first surprised, then angry and finally just frightened. Dad walked over to the doorway and leaned over, both arms outstretched against the door frame. He laughed like he laughed when Mom got it earlier on. “What were you saying, Mark?” Dad stopped to cough — the tar-fumes were pretty thick — and went on: “You want all the money? Truck too? You want this house, Mark?”

Mark shouted something back, and now Shelly was sure it wasn’t just bad hearing on her part — he was making no sound anyone could understand.

“I’ll leave you to figure your way out of that one,” said Dad. “Then we can talk about how to divide things up, from now on.”

He pushed himself off the door, and swung it shut, then looked to the living room.

“Blaine?” he said.

“Y-yes, sir?” Blaine stuck his head up from behind the chair.

“Get on upstairs like I told you to. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Yes, sir,” said Blaine. He got up and went to the stairs. Shelly followed, but Dad told her to wait behind a minute. He had some things, he said, to say to her.

Shelly went to her Dad. He picked up the table and set it right, and pulled the chairs back in place.

“You’re in pretty good shape tonight, little girl,” he said. “Didn’t feel the need to hit the tar baby?”

“No,” she said.

Dad nodded. “That’s good. Not everyone needs to learn from their own mistakes. What did you learn tonight?”

Shelly opened her mouth, and closed it again. There was a noise from behind the basement door — like a big cushion hitting against the stairs. She had been about to say team work , but that sound stopped her.

“Little girl?”

“It’s…” She looked down at her relatively clean hands. “… it’s gotten bigger,” she said. “There’s tar everywhere now.”

Dad nodded. “That’s what Mr. Baldwin said might happen. His tar baby got pretty big in its time, although it didn’t stay that way forever. Just while it soaked it up… all that anger… aggression…” Dad’s face went sour “… misplaced authority.”

“What does misplaced authority mean?” asked Shelly.

Dad patted her back. “Something you’ll never have to find out about,” he said. “Let’s just say, the other prisoners aren’t the only ones a fellow has to fear in jail. There’s also the damn guards…”

The thumping from below stopped — but there was another sound now: distant sirens, wafting across the scrub from the direction of the highway. Shelly looked out the window at the red truck Dad had driven home from his walk, and at the brown paper bag Mark Hollins had wanted so badly he’d pulled out a knife and knocked over a table.

“Go upstairs now,” Dad said. “Tell your brother I’ll just be another minute.”

Shelly did as she was told — but she stopped on the stairs, and peered over the banister to the kitchen.

Dad sat slouched back a bit in the chair, as peaceful and quiet as ever, as the sirens grew louder, and Shelly marvelled: she still couldn’t imagine her Dad taking a gun and pointing it at a grocery store man, and saying he’d kill him if he didn’t give over some cash. Any more than she could imagine him breaking the window of a shiny red pickup truck that belonged to someone else, and taking it for himself.

Mom was wrong, so wrong: Dad wasn’t a bad man at all. In spite of what everyone thought about him. As Shelly continued up the stairs, she hoped the police who were running that siren could see the goodness in Dad too; she hoped they wouldn’t be too mad about everything that had happened tonight.

The basement, after all, was only so big.

“The trouble with places like this,” said my sister Lenore, “is other people’s kids.”

Nick, Lenore’s third boyfriend ever and the coolest one yet, took a long sip of his coffee. “Other people’s kids?” he said mildly. “As opposed to your own?”

“I don’t have any kids right now, thank God.” Lenore sat down at the picnic table next to Nick. “But I had the worst time in the line. There were two little boys — must have been twins — who were playing this game of SCREAM, which is exactly what it sounds like. Their mom didn’t even notice.” She set down her cinnamon pretzel and jammed a straw into the top of her diet root beer. “On my way back, I saw a kid running around with his poopy diaper. I know it was a ‘he’ because he was holding the diaper over his head and yelling, ‘LOOKIT MY POOPY DIAPER!’”

“More SCREAM,” I said.

“With poop.” Nick smiled. He was so cool. “Kids are wacky,” he said.

Lenore shook her head. “Terrible. Look around! Other people’s kids are terrible!”

We looked around. The picnic common of Natch’s Highway Grill and Fun-Park was full of kids, other people’s kids, I guess, and yeah, they were all pretty terrible.

But why shouldn’t they be? Natch’s was located on the highway, exactly halfway between Carlingsburg and the Elbow Lakes tourist region, and today was exactly halfway through Labour Day Monday. So of course that meant that about a half of all the kids in Carlingsburg were on their way home from their family cottages. It was their last day of summer vacation, and each and every one of them knew that when they woke up in the morning they would be looking at just over three months before Christmas and their next scheduled good time. I myself had been facing this grim reality, along with the prospect of starting Grade Nine all but friendless in a high school whose main problem was too many cliques. So if these kids were a little hopped up on sugar and grouchy enough to fall down in the grass, kicking their legs in the air and screaming like the three-year-olds they were…