Gargoyles (9 page)

On McRae Street the houses are noticeably more well-to-do and they appear somehow alien. But he decides that's him, and he's uncomfortable straying this far from Glendale Apartments. He feels it in his abdomen and he thinks it has to do with being on foot and drawing steadily away from where it is Andy hid and clung to those last days.

They used to live in a nice bungalow several blocks from where Glendale Apartments is now. He can see the attraction the building site had for Andy. For one, it was close to home
should he decide to return. At the time, they were building the underground parking level, and the roofless pit of tall wooden wall-forms would keep him hidden at night. Apparently Andrew built at least one fire in there. Otherwise it's difficult to know what those long days and nights had been like for his son. He has never been able to find out if Andrew was alone or with others. A single muddy blue sleeping bag was found. He doesn't know if Andrew partied, or sat hugging his knees to think, or perhaps cry. He doesn't know if Andrew got stoned, or walked the streets in a steady, health-seeking way. He does know his son was angry because what his parents had done to him made no sense. But he likes to think that Andrew felt warmer staying close to home. It was January.

It began on January 1. Actually, December 31. Andrew had broken his New Year's Eve curfew, which was eleven o'clock. Though he's tried, he cannot remember if this particular time was his or his wife's idea, but the point is they hadn't told Andrew that one reason — the main reason? Wasn't it
the main reason
? — they chose eleven was to have him back to celebrate midnight with them. They had never given in, never negotiated matters of curfew, and he remembers Andrew's sullen shrug of agreement when they informed him. He thinks he suspected even then that Andrew was going to break it, that Andrew had already decided to break it, even while slouching out of the kitchen. He remembers Andrew's hair still wet, and tightly combed. And the slight smell of a hopeful cologne. He remembers too how small Andrew looked, and how young, and how it was still odd for them and somehow difficult to hear his newly deepened voice. He believes now that Andrew being small for his age made it easier for them to impose curfews that may have been more suited to someone a year or two
younger. It's a mistake he's been admitting for many years. But he didn't admit it that night, when Andrew came in quiet as a mouse at two a.m. smelling of beer, guessing wrong that they'd be asleep. They grounded him indefinitely, banning all visits from friends. The more he fought against it, the more they dug in. They were conventional parents, and felt it vital to win this fight, if only to set the correct precedent. In the ensuing battle he and his wife had each other to bolster sagging spirits, assuage doubts. Andrew had no one. It's easy to see this now. In any case, two days later, Andrew left home. “Ran away.” Their decent little Andrew. Or, Andy. Only since his death has he called him Andrew. It might be that, in the cement, his face stressed like that, he looked older. Maybe he's simply projecting an adult life onto the face, seeing an “Andrew” at a university. Though he'd have been long finished university by now.

Street lights cast a sheen of safety over these fine McRae Street homes, which sit as a portrait of the Canadian dream, a dream quieter, more modest than its louder cousin to the south. What we want is comfort, not wealth. Contentment, not fame. These houses do suggest contentment and comfort — he believes this is suburban architecture's unstated purpose — but he knows it is rarely the case inside.

The real dream — he will tell the McGonnigals — is to keep the child from chaos. The nightmare is to see the child enter chaos and be spun off into agony. To wake in horror is to know the child has been pushed there by your loving hands.

More than once in his walks he has come upon a new construction site and gone in. He has ripped good clothes on fences, but when the mood overtakes him nothing matters less
than fences or clothes. The smell of turned earth, mud, and cold stone is so raw he can taste as well as smell it. The wood of the forms is sometimes pitchy, sometimes barely scented when it is old and battered from reuse. On the older forms the grey of cement coats the wood.

Sometimes it's night, but if it's day and there's a wall he'll get behind it and lie full out on the dirt, wet or not. He'll lie there and breathe. He feels the contour of the ground and the cold of it. He smells the sour richness of the raw, heaved earth. He opens his eyes to the dirt an inch away, notes the grit and particulate swirl and the surprising array of colour, ranging from yellow to black, and all the shades of brown in between. These are certainly some of the things Andy knew only too well during his last days, and at times it is overwhelmingly important that he knows these things too.

The McGonnigal house is one of the nicer ones. Emerging from the brick, white colonial half-pillars pretend to hold up a portico. He will stand out on the sidewalk a while and stare at it, into it. Sometimes he can read the quality of the light in the windows. Too often a TV's erratic blue pulse dominates, but sometimes in kitchens and other rooms there's light from which he can sense an emptiness and anger, or a desperate hope. Sometimes there's a peculiar creamy light that speaks of friendliness and ignorance.

They got the call the tenth day Andy had been gone. The police knew instantly whose body it was. He and his wife had been phoning incessantly for updates, and for leads from other cities. The search for the fourteen-year-old male — small for his age, blond, white sneakers, jeans, jean jacket with Redbone
in leather stitches on the back — was national. But Andy never left the immediate area, never left the site of the future Glendale Apartments. The police explained that a worker pulling forms had discovered the body and — He interrupted to ask what “forms” meant. He learned that forms are plywood walls, built side by side a foot apart (in this case), into which cement is poured. A mould, really. He came to learn more about forms. After a week, when the cement has hardened, the forms are pried off, “pulled.” Apparently it's a rough job, where men use pry bars and brute force and jump out of the way of falling sheets of cement-sodden plywood. Fingers get broken, faces are scraped, and hard hats fly. In winter, underground in a future parking garage, it's dark and bleakly cold.

One worker's job was made all the more bleak when he pulled a sheet of form away and there near the bottom, at the height of the worker's knees, instead of smooth new cement was fabric and flesh. Enough of Andy's face was showing that his father was asked to come and identify him while Andy was still in the wall. His mother didn't — couldn't — come.

He won't — he never does — go into much detail here, not even in his memory. Nor will he burden the McGonnigals with what they might construe to be scare tactics. He'll describe his son's pounded face simply by saying that his gut reaction at seeing it was relief that his son had obviously died quickly. He had arrived at the site already knowing his son was dead, and now he was learning that he hadn't suffered. So there was something positive to take from even this frigid cement underground.

In these later years, when something like humour finds its way to him, he can admit that the image of Andy's body set part in, part out of concrete resembled some art installations
he's since seen — modern art often uses that same clash of textures. Soft skin and denim and cement do not go.

No one could say why Andy was there before the cement got poured, wedged between plywood forms a foot apart. The autopsy showed he wasn't drunk. Nor had he been killed first and dumped there. The word
suicide
was never ventured, for an odd suicide it would've been, Andy jumping in even as he saw the truck coming.

To this day he has no clue. As the cement began to fall, Andy was either unconscious, or conscious, and either possibility leads down ten unlit roads. He no longer belabours possibilities because the point tonight and all nights is that his son left home and needn't have, and here he is at the McGonnigals' door.

They are appropriately cautious. He gains entry because of his standard shirt and tie and their assumption that he's here officially when he mentions their daughter. Now it's up to him. They lead him to the living room, Mrs. McGonnigal holding his coat. They are so young. He expected Mrs. McGonnigal to be bigger, but he's learned that people with steel principles aren't always physically strong themselves. Her eyes tell him that she feels most at home in a church. She wears a sweater of lemon and rose, quenching fruit colours that deny this wintry night. Big and smooth and mulish, Mr. McGonnigal wears a fixed, mindless smile, and a two-piece Nike track suit though his hair is in no way mussed. This will be hard.

Everybody takes a seat. He sits in the easy chair that matches their couch, where the McGonnigals perch side by side. Mr. McGonnigal points the remote at the TV but pauses a moment before turning off a nature show, a cheetah gazing into the vista from a rock outcrop, the odd feline's body lithe and bony and in these ways resembling the antelope it is built to catch.

He asks them, “Might Rebecca be included in this?”

“No, that's fine,” Mrs. McGonnigal says, not bothering to ask what it is her daughter won't be included in. Her husband sits very still, eyeing him and not blinking.

He doesn't know how long they will let him stay. They wait, watching him with judgement and anger and hope conjoined, and in their eyes he sees how their week has gone and how their life is laid out.

“You have a beautiful, very precious daughter,” he begins, and from the way they nod in clear-eyed agreement, so certain that what he's just said is true, he wonders again why he doesn't just stand and leave, exactly now.

Hello?

Okay, I know it's really early but —

Rich?

—I really have to talk.

Jesus

Christ.

Sorry, I waited as long as I could.

Time is it?

I think it's maybe —

Jesus, it's six-thirty. What's —

Forgot, sorry, it's seven-thirty here. I waited all I could wait. Man, I really blew it, I pulled an unbelievable stupid one and I need you to do something for me. I've been up all night.

What happened?

I still can't believe what I did.

What did you do, Rich? You get fired again?

Vice-presidents don't get fired. I don't get fired. When I didn't make partner, I left. You've
never
under —

Okay, right, right.

Well you never have.

You and Carol okay? You didn't, ah . . .

No, I didn't. We —

Well, that's good.

Violence just isn't in me any more.

That's good.

I mean we're okay and we're not okay, it's nothing like that, not of that realm, just — Somehow it's bigger. It's really, really strange. Odd. Wide as the sky. Getting wider even as we speak.

What's happened?

Okay, you know how we might be Jewish?

I thought it turned out we weren't.

No, we're Jewish. We're a quarter Jewish. Mom's half Jewish.

Well, no, it turned out the guy came from France.

No, our great-grandfather came from Alsace, which was in Germany at the time, and he had a German name.

Jesus, Rich, what did you do? It's six in the morning.

His name was Michel, pronounced
My
-kell, that throat-clearing Hebrew thing, which can only mean Jewish in that part of the world —

Okay, we'll be Jewish.

Well no we really are — a quarter Jewish — and anyway I've been telling the kids that.

Okay. So?

So it's sort of been a neat joke lately, all of us being part Jewish, because it's kind of cool, kind of a —

You like the genius thing, I know.

Well, the persecution thing too, all of it. But, yeah, the
genius
thing, the
artistic
thing, just the general —

Jerry
Lewis
thing.

Fine.

So anyway?

In fact just last week at this party here these friends of Carol's sort of gave me a bar mitzvah. They planned it. The woman, Wendy, is hard-core Jewish and knows all these Yiddish songs and sat me in a chair in the centre of the room and was dancing around me, singing, while she made me wear this fake yarmelke with these sideburn curls hanging from it, and bob my head while I pretended to read this fake book. Stuff like that, it was a hoot.

So?

Anyway I've been up all night, haven't slept. I'm babbling a bit but —

You still with that therapist? You said looks like —

Marilyn Monroe's sister. No.

Is it about any —

This is nothing like that. It's not the compulsive thing, which is controlled, which is very much under control. She was a fraud by the way and I'm suing her —I know how I raved about her for a while there. But she
was
good at drugs and now I take a little beige pill every morning and it works and even if I miss a day I don't even notice. So I'm better. It's not that. I'm not a nut. This is real, and it is very unfortunate. I'm worried about my kids, my house, my
career
. So don't make psychiatric jokes, all right?

I just needed some context. You have a history. I have to ask questions. I've never thought you were a nut. I've always just thought —Well, we've talked about this.

No, what? What have you always thought?

You know, that you're always, I don't know, playing roles. That. Not being yourself. Not being straightforward.