if I couldn’t be a jock I would damn well prove myself a scholar — Tee hee! tinkled the celestial laughter.
And that’s when they hit me with it — the punch line to the elaborate practical joke the gods had set into motion that evening in the parking lot of Icy Dream. Do you remember that board game from the seventies, Mouse Trap? I got it for my birthday one year and it never worked, but in the realm of the metaphorical it functions as a pretty apt parallel for the course of my life from that moment in the parking lot to that moment in the library, bookended as it was by those seven words. The game features a series of random plastic doodads — a bathtub and a boot and a bucket, for example — all set up to interact with one another in frankly stupid and unlikely ways (the boot kicks the bucket, out of which falls the ball, which rolls down a ramp), and at the end of this rickety and dubious process, down comes the mouse trap.
So there they were glaring up from the page, Croft’s famous last words, emanating wave after wave of uncanny terror at me. Not to mention the creepshow pertinence of the lines that followed, as if someone — some malignant entity — had affixed a kind of psychic spigot directly into my past and let it drip, one word at a time, into the book. The patient etherized on the table, the night spread out against the sky, the tedious argument of insidious intent. The muttering retreats.
From your lips to God’s ear, Mickster.
It was like — well. You know what it was like, Adam? It was like a certain goose had walked over my grave.
That was the same day, by the way. That was the day I shoved my books into my bag, headed over to the house, announced my dismissal from the hockey team, ransacked Wade’s room for hash, dragged you out to the liquor store with me, came back with a great many beer and a few forties in tow, wondered where the hell Kyle had gotten to, drank and drank and drank, slowly began to peel from myself one bloody hank of flesh after another, carefully fed them to you like a mother bird feeding a chick, groaned like I was about to give birth to something, sweated and drank, watched your eyebrows rise and then descend, switched position, leaned forward, gave confession, found your hand against my head, went silent, lost words — rested.
“Let us go then, you and I,” said Croft.
I punched him in the head, and he went down.
Part Two
10
07/04/09, 1:15 p.m.
IT DIDN'T HELP MY CASE that once he regained consciousness all Croft could do was sit around blubbering. It didn’t help me to have this sweet-faced boy quietly bawling his eyes out in front of the judge throughout the entire proceedings. And I mean the entire proceedings — non-stop. It was a brain-injury thing, my lawyer assured me and Gord and Sylvie — Sylvie whose own eyes filled immediately at the sight and sound of Croft. But it wasn’t that he was actually sad, the lawyer murmured to us kindly — it was just that he was brain-damaged. That was all, just a little brain damage. Either way, it didn’t help my case.
There was no jury because it was juvenile court and thank god because there’s the sweet-faced bawling boy fresh out of a coma, and in this corner here’s the hairy, hulking six-foot-four monster accused of aggravated assault. Oh, and here’s the hulking monster’s father, by the way, who can’t keep his mouth shut, who keeps jumping up and calling the Crown attorney “dickface,” to the delight of the gathered townsfolk who are taking such keen advantage of the proceedings being (and whose bright idea was this?) open to the public. Rankin Sr., keeping things entertaining as always, having more than once referred to the lawyer defending said monster as a “this dumb bitch here,” who had to be very nearly forcibly restrained from delivering similar epithets in the judge’s direction. I kept wondering if there was any way I could casually lean over and put a headlock on my father without tarnishing my image even further in the eyes of the court.
Meanwhile, there is Sylvie and there is Croft; the two of them drenching their respective sides of the courtroom.
“You’re just making it worse!” Gord would holler at her during recess.