Tony Burgess - Pontypool Changes Everything

This is the theatre of Les Reardon. The sculpture, now being dragged to the back door of the church by one of the Labs, is the skeletal form of a stage prop that was to have been central in his first production, The Harrowing of Hell. Les had spent many afternoons sitting on a stump here, blowing cigarette smoke at the bugs in his face — a new habit — picturing the children of Pontypool emerging through hinged jaws to climb up onto a sunlit bed of moss and lie spent and ancient at the feet of their proud parents. The Harrowing of Hell was not to be. The drama coach of Pontypool, Les Reardon suffered a massive relapse of a painful mental illness. He was treated; however, that treatment forced him to eventually stagger off home from school, under the draining influence of strong medication. His wife, Helen, and their son, Ernie, spent the last couple of months walking as light as prayer around Les as he lay on the couch under an orange throw. He clutched the remote in two fingers that he poked through the loose crochet of the blanket. The medication eventually worked, and the drama of his psychosis quieted; still, he was so weighted with the drug’s wisdom that he was unable to coach, unable to lead the children from hell to their parents’ feet.

The priest who had donated an area around the cemetery to the teacher’s project took pity on the man who lost his mind in the woods behind his church. When Les returned some weeks later, altered but less wild, to wander with stiff limbs across his stage, the priest offered him a job. The job that the holy man concocted for Les already existed in larger city parishes. He applied for the funding and was immediately granted the means to hire the first rural Custodian of Dogs. Les managed to walk and feed the dogs for one week only — the brief spell after his energy rose from under the medication and before that energy was wasted against a chaotic range of depressions. As his desire to live met with the life he would have to live, Les slipped on his own weight, down a rope that dropped him under a crocheted blanket on the couch, where he sits, once again, with two fingers poking through the loose weave to direct a remote control. This summer, Ernie experiences his first vacation from school as an adolescent. The priest, who still needed an employee, gave the son the father’s job and Ernie inherited the title Custodian of Dogs.

Ernie spent July wandering in disgust among the ruins of his father’s life: the destroyed bits of forest, the hiding places under plastic. And the job: waiting for dogs to shit — a wait his father was now unable to endure. In the evening he couldn’t bear to be in the same house as the man, so he’d invent things he had to do at the church and then drive off in the car his father could barely understand. His nightly request for the keys was met with an uncomprehending stare and lips so dry that Ernie winced when they touched to speak.

Tonight, Helen will answer the phone and learn that someone has stolen one hundred and forty-six dollars from the church’s petty cash. In three days the police will call to tell her that they have apprehended Ernie Reardon. She spends these days comforting a poor husband who has long retreated into an uncaring silence. In the coming months, as his depression sinks into a lifelong organization, Les will never miss an opportunity to appear misunderstood and wounded. He feels himself domineering, emerging in his family for the first time, and he will twist forever in a kind of happiness that will never abandon him.

As they pull through Myrtle Station an OPP car passes them and slows. Les looks at the baby drowsing peacefully on the seat, its small feet pressed against the barrel of a handgun and the bulk jar of Dilaudid sitting on the floor mat. The arrangement makes Les think of pieces gathered at the start square of a board game. He moves the handgun onto the floor and slides it with his foot under the seat. The lights on the OPP cruiser fire off and Les pulls his stolen car onto the shoulder. The cop steps out onto the pavement of the highway and, before approaching Les’s vehicle, takes in the spot: the six cows gathered near the muddy back of a barn, the twenty odd birds strung like pointy teeth on a hydro wire. He calculates something, reading the fresh spring with a local’s discerning eye, and moves his hat forward to accept a message given. He stops halfway between the two cars and realizes that he’s approaching a stolen vehicle. He drops to a squat, withdraws his sidearm and, with his hands joined and fingers pointing along with the barrel, shouts from his elbows. Les lays his hand on the spot that has grown so comforting to him, his son’s warm belly, and decides, while there’s time, barely perhaps, to imagine yet another life for him and little Ern.

“Did Ernie take the Boy or the Girl for lunch?”

Helen hasn’t sat down all morning. She hovers over the kitchen sink: above it stretches a narrow shelf littered with Mommy’s drug things. A spoon with a soggy bit of filter; a lighter; three origami packets lined in some priority to the left; a thin razor blade. Helen pushes a long fingernail into the enveloped opening at the top of one of the packets.

“Les, honey.”

Les is seated at the kitchen table. A light sweat has broken out on his forehead.

“No, thank you dear.”

Helen stops twirling the plunger of a syringe in her spoon and looks over her shoulder at her husband.

“No? I mean, no. What do you mean? I didn’t get that.”

Les scratches his shoulders with crossed arms.

“I mean no, darling, I’m OK. I did some of the Girl after I did the Boy, so I’m alright — you just make yourself right, there, don’t worry about me.”

“OK, OK. I’m glad that you did the Girl already, that’s what I’m fixing here, but I asked whether Ernie went off with the Boy and the Girl. He never forgets the Boy, he thinks that’s all he needs, but he misses half his lessons, so I tell him if he takes some of the Girl, not too much y’know, but a little wake up, and he’ll do better at school. Makes the Boy a nice after-school wind down. So I was asking, did Ernie take the Girl with him to school this morning?”

Les is doing his morning reading, an interview with Liv Tyler in Details; beside his right hand is a thawing cup of wheat grass juice.

“Oh honey, I don’t know. He left early.”

Helen walks across the kitchen floor with a syringe dangling and clinging to the crook of her arm. She stands in front of a large television. A Breakfast Television celebrity is watching a small man drag a comb through brown paint to create a fake wood grain. Helen observes the process, mindless of the unadministered drug laying like a broken branch from her arm. As the segment concludes, opening a replay box over the audience and a scroll of the next segment beneath them, Helen lifts the syringe away from her forearm and works it slowly, playing in her arm with its searching tip. She is obviously enjoying herself as she parries with the moment of injection. The moment comes and goes and Helen returns to the kitchen sink. She turns her back to it and leans long enough to push herself into a walk through the kitchen again. Her walking, not quite a pace, and not without some meaningful gestures, is what she concentrates on, experimenting with the pleasure of appearing not so crazy.

“I think… I think… Lester, I think Ernie is doing really well at school.”

Les is reading the advertisement for a hair-loss treatment on the page opposite the Liv Tyler interview. The interview continues seventy-five pages later, but Les thinks he may never return to this particular point in the magazine again, so he’s taking his time before moving on. Helen has left the kitchen again, and she exits down the hallway. But she returns too soon to have actually left for any other reason than the opportunity to come back to the kitchen.