Gargoyles (2 page)

One thing in particular that his mother says sickens him. If someone asks her where she came from, her answer, “I came in through the bathroom window,” Tyler knows was in a Beatles song. It makes him shrink and wince. He's heard her say it at least twice. It sums up what's worst in her, how she makes like there's this huge mystery to her when it's clear to him and everyone else that there's no mystery at all. None. Where she's really from is Vancouver. She pronounces it Van
kew
ver.

What Tyler figures is that she never really was a hippy. Real hippies were too damaged to read. She went to university, she's a librarian with staff under her. Now, when people see her coming, with that old-fashioned smile on her face, they see a librarian who's still trying to be someone she never was.

After Campbell River they leave the highway to drive smaller and smaller logging roads, then reach a clearing beside a lake. A homemade picnic table marks it as a place to camp. They set
up two tents about ten feet apart, and throw sleeping bags into each. When they're done, Tyler's mother points and says, “Hey, not fair. Tyler has a tent all to himself,” and Kim gamely smiles and pretends to be annoyed at this too.

Leaving his mother to sort through the food, Kim takes Tyler off to fly-fish. Tyler has spincast for trout before and he's fair at it. Though he lacks biceps he has strength when needed. Kim leads him along a path for maybe a hundred yards, saying nothing except the curious, “Not a lot of birds, eh?”

They emerge into another clearing at a small gravel beach. Tyler is disappointed to see another picnic table. This isn't quite the wilderness spot he assumed. Searching the ground he notes the telltale curls of old line and the faded neon cardboard of fishing lure packs. Kim places the gear on the table and begins assembling the rods.

“These are cane,” he explains. “They're the real thing.”

“Great,” Tyler says.

“We'll try a nymph replica on yours, and I'll start with a . . . with an alien express.”

“Sounds good.” He hears what he thinks is an owl, but knows it might be a dove, and doesn't want to ask.

“So this is your first time, right?”

“Yes.”

“There's no such thing as an ‘alien express.' Made that one up.”

“Ah. Right.”

Kim laughs, possibly because Tyler doesn't.

“I should have caught that,” Tyler says. “Didn't sound much like a fly.”

“Gotta watch me, Tyler, I'm fast.”

“I'll try.”

Kim pulls off his long-sleeved shirt and they take their rods and wade into the lake on a finger of gravel. It's extremely cold, but since Kim seems not to notice, Tyler is careful to step bravely. Kim begins to cast, describing the basic movements. The wrist, he explains, stays stiff. When he first learned, he says, he let his wrist “get into the game too much,” and it made the line whip and the fly snapped right off. “It landed right beside my leg.”

Tyler doesn't like the sight of his mother's boyfriend's body. It's compact, what you'd almost call little except that he has overt muscles and he wears a tight sleeveless shirt — well, a tank top — to show it all off. Plus on one shoulder a tattoo that reads “Digger.” Plus he has no grace. Casting, his arms look too short and his neck stiffens and he lurches like he's throwing boulders at something he's mad at. Reddish hairs drift out from under the muscle-shirt straps on his back.

Tyler tries a few casts. He can see he would improve if he ever spent the time. The breeze, though, stymies him while it doesn't appear to affect Kim's casts at all. But this breeze means no mosquitoes. All in all it's a beautiful day. Tyler can see one snow-capped peak to the west.

“What's ‘digger' refer to?”

“Old friend.” Kim's tone is the badly acted tragic one that says, I don't want to talk about it. But he adds, “We were in the military.”

“You were in the military?”

“I grew up in the Maritimes, gimme a break,” Kim says, and then laughs loudly.

And now Kim has hooked a trout. His face deadens and he is serious. It's the first time Tyler has seen him like this, all business. You would swear he's angry.

Over the next hour or so, Kim catches three more rainbows, which he deposits in the nest of ferns in his creel. Finally Tyler hooks one. It's fun to play; it's almost shocking on this thin rod. The fish looks maybe a foot long, exactly the same size as Kim's, and as it splashes around Tyler's knees Kim suggests they release it.

“Why?” asks Tyler. He's horrified Kim will claim that this one's too small, which would reveal far too much about the man his mother likes.

“Well, we have enough. Your mom brought that chili for tonight. All we need's a little side dish.”

Tyler watches Kim gently unhook the trout with the needle-nose pliers he wears Velcroed to his leg, his motions so expert that Tyler understands that of course Kim would know exactly how much trout everyone would want with chili. But Tyler sort of wanted to keep his trout and Kim should have asked him. Also, he doesn't like to discover that, already having enough fish to eat, they'd simply been casting until Tyler caught one. He hates it that Kim has been waiting patiently for the unlucky dim-wit.

At the campsite his mother exclaims about the trout, which Kim has laid out on some fresher ferns. All agree how plump and bright and perfect they look.

“He got a few and I got a few,” Kim lies with no prompting and without looking at Tyler, as if he's committing some kind of golden self-sacrifice.

“He got four and I got one,” says Tyler.

“We had a good time,” Kim offers.

Tyler's mother murmurs something about their wide open eyes, about their expressions not changing even when you kill them.

“Can you have a beer, there, Tyler?” Kim asks him in a stage voice, even cupping his hand to one side of his mouth. Winking as if to say,
You can have a beer no matter what your mother says
, he pops the rings of two cans and places them on the table. Then he removes a fish-knife from a sheath on his belt along with a sharpening stone from its own little case also on the belt.

Tyler is still angry with Kim but has said nothing, preferring instead simply not to speak to him at all. On the path back to camp Kim had shouted “Cougar!” and scared the hell out of him. It was such an easy juvenile prank that it wasn't funny at all, despite Kim's minute of laughter and pointing. Tyler is dreading tonight. How long can you sit around a campfire with your mother and a man named Kim Lynch?

“He can have one beer,” his mother says, just as overloud, though she is serious.

Something in him wishes she had said no to the beer. But mostly Tyler wonders if anyone besides him is aware of the absurdity of this discussion at all, how since he turned fifteen his mother, convinced of his social awkwardness, encouraged him to “have a couple and relax” at any of the infrequent parties he went to, whether there would be alcohol there or not. In any case he has had his share of beer; once he had two plus a shot of rum.

“I don't want one,” Tyler says. He has turned his back on the opened beer can and is about to add that beer doesn't seem to go with the art of fly-fishing, but then Kim would have to respond to this, and Tyler doesn't want him to talk.

It's by far the worst thing his mother has ever said. They are sitting around the picnic table, finished with chili and trout,
which was excellent together, and they are quite jolly. Tyler has silently gone to the cooler himself, twice, and he is finishing his second beer. His mother and Kim have had more than that. They have been trading repulsive romantic glances and such for a few minutes now, and then she says it.

“Time for you to take a little walk, Tyler.”

His mother looks at him like a buddy. She might as well have thrown him a shitty wink. Tyler is so tight in the stomach that he can't talk.

He goes to his tent for a few deep breaths and a sweater. Maybe socks and runners instead of these sandals. No. Maybe the Dostoevsky. No. With a foot he kicks his pillow and is surprised by what is under it. He stoops. Still in the hardware store bag, his forbidden reading light. His mother has smuggled it along and hidden it here for him.

Emerging from his tent, deliberately not doing up the bug zipper, he sees Kim at the picnic table, red-faced, stiffly repositioning the clean dishes, his pinched and painful smile.

Tyler hates only his mother who, not looking at him, hums a tuneless song. Tyler walks past her, close, hitting her hair with his elbow. He bends at the cooler and grabs three cans of beer. Two he stuffs in his pockets and the other he pops open.

“Tyler could go fishing,” Kim says helpfully to the dishes.

Tyler tilts the beer can back as he walks away. He doesn't know why he does it, but he pats Kim's SUV on what would have been its fat ass.

Aside from the one to the fishing spot there are no real paths, so Tyler strikes out along the vehicle track that will eventually reach the logging road. This narrow track is only two ruts for tires, with stiff grass and shrubs growing two feet high in the
middle, which, as they drove in, loudly brushed the underbelly of the SUV, making Kim close his eyes and hiss, “Yes, there!
Ohh
yes!” and so on, wriggling in his seat as if this was where all the scratching was taking place.

Walking, sipping beer, Tyler decides that slapping the SUV is exactly something his father would have done. He has never met his father, and hardly thinks of him — well, how can he? — except when he does something slightly surprising. Grabbing these beer was the father-in-him too. When Tyler used to bring up the subject of his father, his mother wouldn't speak of him except in the vaguest generalities — he was unstable, he was too serious, he was very thin. It was this suspicious lack of detail plus a certain stricken look in her eye that told him his mother possibly wasn't sure who his father was. So Tyler stopped asking. In fact, not asking is exactly how his father would have handled it. Sometimes, when Tyler is this angry at his mother, like now, he imagines this is how his father felt about her too and is why he didn't stay.

The forest is dense and the sunset's light is more dark than dappled. The road is narrow and not ditched and the trees are close — if he walks like an arms-out Jesus, Jesus with a beer can in each hand, Tyler can almost touch leaves on either side. He likes the idea, the threat, of a predator. A predator keeps you alert. The lack of man-eating predators in England is partly what's wrong with the overall character of the English, a favourite author of his wrote. Getting attacked is less likely than getting hit by lightning, but truly there are bears and cougars here, perhaps twenty feet away, watching him walk. As far as cougars go, he knows not to make quick or skittery movements. In other words, don't act like prey. In the same way that, sleeping in a new bedroom in another artsy old
house they've rented, he sometimes dreads yet wants to see a ghost, he now half-wills a mountain lion to make itself known to him. He would love to see its calm face.

Tyler reaches another logging road and turns left, which is uphill and not the way they had come. He wants to see what lies beyond. He walks and walks. He thinks of nothing he's left behind him. For a while, he visualizes himself very tall, which changes the road's gravel to huge boulders, and he is a Tree Ent, his strides huge and ungainly, his style of walking not just mind over matter but wisdom over matter. As another beer can empties, he places it upright in full view at the side of the road.

He hasn't cried and he won't. He knows he's really all she has in her life. He has just realized that she truly doesn't know what will hurt him. That's how naive and trusting she is — she thinks he is that mature, that above it all. That's how stupid she is — she thinks he is that smart.

He's a few miles from Kim's ass-tickling road when he turns another corner and there, with a driveway of sorts leading to it, is a log cabin. The cabin's roof is so thick with moss that at first Tyler sees it as thatch, the quaintly rounded English kind. Behind the house a shed of equal size looks ready to collapse in on itself. The wood of both buildings is unpainted, perhaps never-painted. There is no car. No lights are on. Tyler sees no electric wires leading to the house, then remembers he has been walking for miles without seeing power poles at all.

Tyler looks around him, sees only trees and hears only the wind in trees higher up the slope. No cars passed him all evening. He really is very alone here. He is in no danger whatsoever so there is no reason to be afraid of anything at all. He has had five cans of beer. He doesn't bother to walk quietly as
he approaches the cabin. Why should he? He walks up, cups his hands over his eyes, leans against the glass to look.

On open shelves sit colourful rows of canned goods, and boxes of herbal tea and tins of this and that. A good, or at least big, stereo system sits in the corner. He sees electric light fixtures. Maybe there's a generator in the shed. Tyler wonders if there's indoor plumbing. He will look in other windows. Passing the door he puts his hand on the knob and it turns. Why not? His father would look around too. He is one step inside when he hears . . . The black pickup is new and quiet enough to have been muffled by wind in the treetops and by Tyler's criminal excitement. It rolls up and turns into the head of the driveway before Tyler can move. He can hear shouts inside the truck even before the passenger door opens and a second later, though the truck is still moving, the driver's side opens too.

Tyler is running. No decision, he is instantly behind the house and into the trees. Maybe one of them looked a little fat. Maybe he saw tattoos, maybe he didn't, but they are the type. One shouts a single
Hey
, that's all, and he wishes they were shouting at him from a distance but God he can hear the crunching twigs and the grunts not far behind him.