Michael Rowe - Enter, Night

Lake Hepburn was one of the thousands of ubiquitous northern hockey towns where boys became drinking, fighting, hockey-playing men by their mid-teens, if not earlier. Men for whom two options existed: working down the mine, or joining the army. Neither appealed to Jordan. He had the bruises to show for it-those you could see and those you couldn’t. Towns like Lake Hepburn tended to scar their sons in the same way the mines scarred their fathers, a cycle of mutual exploitation that had gone unquestioned, generation after generation.

Jordan had always beenhis mother’s favourite. She’d bought him a secondhand guitar when he was fourteen and would listen to him practise for hours. She encouraged his dreams and told him he sounded like Jim Croce. Jordan loved her the way he loved no one else. His father called it beatnik crap. Jordan was a mystery to his father, a man with neither the time nor the inclination for mysteries, especially under his own roof.

Late at night, Jordan sometimes heard his parents arguing through the wall of his bedroom. His father’s voice would rise and Jordan would catch words like normal and wrong and dreamer and other boys in between his father’s raw profanity. Those were the times he knew they were discussing him. His mother’s voice would rise in answer. Jordan heard words like be someone and out of this town and success . And dreams, which sounded like a completely different word when his mother said it. Then the furniture would crash. Things would break.

One night when he was twelve, during one of their increasingly frequent arguments, Jordan heard the brutal smack of flesh meeting flesh. He’d jumped out of bed and opened his parents’ bedroom door to find his mother bleeding from the mouth and his father standing over her, trying to pull her to her feet. Jordan smelled the liquor from the doorway. His father stank of it. It seemed to be coming out of his pores.

“She’s fine,” his father was muttering. “She fell. It’s all right. Go to bed. Go on, get out of here.” His mother was trembling. Her eyes were wide open and she shook her head imperceptibly, silently imploring him to do what his father asked.

“Mom? Mom, are you OK? What’s happening? What happened?”

“I’m fine, Jordie. Your Dad and I were just talking and I tripped on the carpet and fell. I’m all right. I just bumped myself. It’s OK. Go to bed, Jordan. Don’t make a fuss.”

Jordan hadn’t moved. He’d looked his father full in the face, holding his gaze for a long, defiant moment, refusing to drop his eyes. His father’s flat, open hand began to rise, but it stopped in mid-air. That one time he thought better of it and lowered it to his side. As he looked down at his bleeding wife, Jordan could have sworn he saw a flicker of shame.

It would be the last time his father exercised that restraint, however. Jordan never saw shame again. It was as though seeing his own brutality reflected in Jordan’s eyes extracted too high a cost, one his father bitterly resented having to pay.

The beatings began a week later. They began as random slaps across the back of Jordan’s head for clumsiness or for “acting smart.” They evolved into whippings with a leather belt for chores not done to specification, or any other occasion when Jordan failed to live up to his father’s variegated standards of acceptable behaviour.

Jordan learned to stay out of his father’s way as much as possible, which, in a small house, wasn’t much at all. He learned to dress in layers, so the bruises wouldn’t show; not that he was likely to get much more than pro forma sympathy from the adults around him. In Lake Hepburn, the disciplining of children, especially boys, was a family matter and one best dealt with inside the family. There was one consolation: when his father’s belt came down across his body, raising welts and cuts on his ass and legs, he knew that his mother was being spared.

“Why don’t you ever fight back, you fucking little pissant?” his father had asked once during one of the beatings. He’d even managed to make the question sound reasonable. “Why don’t you try to take me? Why don’t you try to make me stop?”

But Jordan never fought back. He sensed on some primal level that he was paying for his mother’s safety by acting as the object of his father’s rage. Unfortunately, Jordan’s capacity to endure pain was remarkable. The beatings lasted from the time Jordan was twelve until he was seventeen.

The last time his father beat him was the night before got on the bus to Toronto three months ago. His father had come home drunk from the Legion Hall and tripped over a kitchen chair on his way to the fridge. He’d stormed up the stairs and woken Jordan with slaps and punches, screaming about his irresponsibility. The belt had come out remarkably quickly considering how drunk his father was. Jordan got the worst of it across his naked back and shoulders before his father, exhausted from his exertions, stumbled to his own bedroom and passed out.

Jordan’s one regret, that pre-dawn morning when he’d snuck out of the house with his rucksack and guitar and hitchhiked to the next town over, was that his mother would be frantic. He’d left a note in her sewing basket telling her he was going to be all right and that she shouldn’t worry. He had two hundred dollars he’d been saving for two years, plus fifty he’d taken from his father’s wallet.

When he’d arrived in Toronto late that first night, Jordan had checked into a dirt-cheap hotel on Jarvis Street frequented by hookers and their johns that stank of industrial cleaner and cockroach spray, and underneath that, pussy and dried semen. After a week in the hotel, his chest and legs were covered with bedbug bites. He’d found a “roommates wanted” notice tacked on the bulletin board of a bookstore on Spadina, not far from the university. Two men in their early twenties shared the apartment with a girl who was pregnant by one of them, though she was unsure of which one. None of the three seemed to find anything unusual in the arrangement.

“It’s all beautiful,” she said. “We’re all, like, one, you know?”

At that first meeting, the older of the two men, Mack, had been pleasant enough towards Jordan. The younger, Don, had regarded him with distrust. The girl, who said her name was Fleur, seemed entirely ambivalent, if friendly enough. After she’d introduced herself, she went into the kitchen and made herbal tea. She’d asked Jordan if he wanted some. He politely told her no. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her he had no idea what herbal tea was.

Mack told him, “There’s a mat on the floor near the kitchen. It ain’t much, but it’s clean. First and last month’s rent would be great if you have it. First is OK, I guess, if you don’t. You got a sleeping bag?”

“No, afraid not,” Jordan had said. “But I can buy one, I guess. Still cheaper than a bed.”

“No problem,” Mack said. He’d gestured towards the closet. “Brian left one, I think. He OD’d. Bad trip. He don’t live here no more. You can have it if you want it.”

Don, who was sitting on the floor stroking Fleur’s hair, suddenly looked up. He glared at Jordan. Then he turned to Mack. “Why don’t you just give the place away for free, for fuck’s sake?”

“What’s your problem?” Mack said mildly. “He don’t got a sleeping bag. We got an extra one. What’s the issue?” Fleur leaned her head back on Don’s chest. She closed her eyes and sighed as though this were a conversation she’d heard before, and it bored her.

Don said, “How old is this fucking kid?” He pivoted his head and glared at Jordan. “Seriously how old are you?