Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“I could just die,” she kept saying. “Dad is going to kill me. This is my last dance ever. I could just die. I could just die. That Doreen . Honestly!”

When we stumbled up her street, all black because of the lack of street-lights, I could see that her house was all lit up. Bad news. I stopped her on the corner. Just then it quits snowing. That’s typical.

She stares at the house. “Dad’s waiting.”

“I guess I better go no further.”

Nancy Williams bends down and feels her dress where it sticks out from under her coat. “It’s soaked. I don’t know how much it cost a yard. I could just die.”

“Well,” I says, repeating myself like an idiot, “I guess I better go no further.” Then I try and kiss her. She sort of straight-arms me. I get the palm of my own glove in the face.

“What’re you doing?” She sounds mad.

“Well, you know -”

“I’m not your date,” she says, real offended. “I’m your brother’s date.”

“Maybe we could go out some time?”

“I won’t be going anywhere for a long time. Look at me. He’s going to kill me.”

“Well, when you do? I’m in no hurry.”

“Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand? Daddy will never let me go out with anybody named Simpson again. Ever. Not after tonight.”

“Ever?”

“I can’t imagine what you’d have to do to redeem yourself after this mess. That’s how Daddy puts it – you’ve got to redeem yourself. I don’t even know how I’m going to do it. And none of it’s my fault.”

“Yeah,” I says, “he’ll remember me. I’m the one he took the picture of.”

She didn’t seem too upset at not having me calling. “Everything is ruined,” she says. “If you only knew.”

Nancy Williams turns away from me then and goes up that dark, dark street where there’s nobody awake except at her house. Wearing my hat and gloves.

Nancy Williams sits third pew from the front, left-hand side. I sit behind her, on the other side so’s I can watch her real close. Second Sunday I was there she wore her Christmas Dance dress.

Funny thing, everything changes. At first I thought I’d start going and maybe that would redeem myself with her old man. Didn’t work. He just looks straight through me.

You ought to see her face when she sings those Baptist hymns. It gets all hot and happy-looking, exactly like it did when we were dancing together and Zipper was pounding away there up above us, where we never even saw him. When her face gets like that there’s no trouble in it, by no means.

It’s like she’s dancing then, I swear. But to what I don’t know. I try to hear it. I try and try. I listen and listen to catch it. Christ, somebody tell me. What’s she dancing to? Who’s the drummer?

HERE IT IS, 1967, the Big Birthday. Centennial Year they call it. The whole country is giving itself a pat on the back. Holy shit, boys, we made it.

I made it too for seventeen years, a spotless life, as they say, and for presents I get, in my senior year of high school, my graduating year for chrissakes, a six-month suspended sentence for obstructing a police officer, and my very own personal social worker.

The thing is I don’t need this social worker woman. She can’t tell me anything I haven’t already figured out for myself. Take last Wednesday. Miss Krawchuk, who looks like the old widow chicken on the Bugs Bunny show, the one who’s hot to trot for Foghorn Leghorn, says to me: “You know, Billy, your father loves you just as much as he does Gene. He doesn’t have a favourite.”

Now I can get bullshit at the poolroom any time I want it – and without having to keep an appointment. Maybe Pop loves me as much as he does Gene, but Gene is still his favourite kid. Everybody has a favourite kid. I knew that much already when I was only eight and Gene was nine. I figured it out right after Gene almost blinded me.

Picture this. There the two of us were in the basement. It was Christmas holidays and the old man had kicked us downstairs to chuck darts at this board he’d give us for a present. Somehow, I must’ve had horseshoes up my ass. I’d beat Gene six games straight. And was he pissed off! He never loses to me at nothing ever. And me being in such a real unique situation, I was giving him the needle-rooney.

“What’s that now?” I said. “Is that six or seven what I won?”

“Luck,” Gene said, and he sounded like somebody was slowly strangling him. “Luck. Luck. Luck.” He could hardly get it out.

And that’s when I put the capper on it. I tossed a bull’s-eye. “Read’er and weep,” I told him. That’s what the old man says whenever he goes out at rummy. It’s his needle-rooney. “Read’er and weep.”

That did it. The straw what broke the frigging camel’s back. All I saw was his arm blur when he let fly at me. I didn’t even have time to think about ducking. Bingo. Dead centre in the forehead, right in the middle of the old noggin he drills me with a dart. And there it stuck. Until it loosened a bit. Then it sagged down real slow between my eyes, hung for a second, slid off of my nose, and dropped at my feet. I hollered bloody blue murder, you better believe it.

For once, Pop didn’t show that little bastard any mercy. He took after him from room to room whaling him with this extension cord across the ass, the back of the legs, the shoulders. Really hard. Gene, naturally, was screaming and blubbering and carrying on like it was a goddamn axe murder or something. He’d try to get under a bed, or behind a dresser or something, and get stuck halfway. Then old Gene would really catch it. He didn’t know whether to plough forward, back up, shit, or go blind. And all the time the old man was lacing him left and right and saying in this sad, tired voice: “You’re the oldest. Don’t you know no better? You could of took his eye out, you crazy little bugger.”

But that was only justice. He wasn’t all that mad at Gene. Me he was mad at. If that makes any sense. Although I have to admit he didn’t lay a hand on me. But yell? Christ, can that man yell. Especially at me. Somehow I’m the one that drives him squirrelly.

“Don’t you never, never tease him again!” he bellowed and his neck started to swell. When the old man gets mad you can see it swell, honest. “You know he can’t keep a hold of himself. One day you’ll drive him so goddamn goofy with that yap of yours he’ll do something terrible! Something he’ll regret for the rest of his life. And it’ll all be your fault!” The old man had to stop there and slow down or a vein would’ve exploded in his brain, or his arsehole popped inside out, or something. “So smarten up,” he said, a little quieter, finally, “or you’ll be the death of me and all my loved ones.”

So there you are. I never pretended the world was fair, and I never bitched because it wasn’t. But I do resent the hell out of being forced to listen to some dried-up old broad who gets paid by the government to tell me it is. Fuck her. She never lived in the Simpson household with my old man waiting around for Gene to do that terrible thing . It spoils the atmosphere. Makes a person edgy, you know?

Of course, Gene has done a fair number of bad things while everybody was waiting around for him to do the one great big terrible thing ; and he’s done them in a fair number of places. That’s because the old man is a miner, and for a while there he was always telling some foreman to go piss up a rope. So we moved around a lot. That’s why the Simpson household has a real history. But Gene’s is the best of all. In Elliot Lake he failed grade three; in Bombertown he got picked up for shoplifting; in Flin Flon he broke some snotty kid’s nose and got sent home from school. And every grade he goes higher, it gets a little worse. Last year, when we were both in grade eleven, I’m sure the old man was positive Gene was finally going to pull off the terrible thing he’s been worrying about as long as I can remember.