One morning they actually found one sleeping and shivering, curled up outside the back door. This was late October. Kyle had not even come home that night. Wade had given her a cup of instant Maxwell House, which she blubbered into. When do you expect him back? she asked, once she’d regained the power of speech. I have his scarf. And there’s this book he said he wanted to borrow. I brought it for him. She held it up. Anne of Green Gables.
You could not feel more sorry for a person, yet they’d all laughed once she was gone and teased Kyle about it forever.
But of course Kyle loved to be teased about this sort of thing.
It seemed to Rank, which he did not say or even give any indication of to Adam as they walked back from the liquor store, that Kyle was a bad influence. It sounded very 1950s, but he remembered laughing at and with Kyle about the girl in the doorway, and it made him angry at himself. He was not that sort of guy. You don’t laugh at a woman shivering in a doorway, no matter how deluded she might be.
You don’t stop your conversation, look at your friends, then look away, moments after you hear the sound of someone getting smacked coming from your buddy’s bedroom in the middle of the night. A smack, followed by a groan. Or grunt. A human sound, in any event, of pain. Almost certainly of pain. That is something else you do not do.
But Kyle Jarvis is, after all, a magic man. This has been established. Kyle somehow worked his mojo and kept them in their seats.
So by the time Kyle gets back to the Temple after his late class, his buddy Rank — who has been making innocuous if feverish conversation with Adam for the last three hours and given no indication of his mood whatsoever — is more or less ready to kill him.
17
08/04/09, 4:25 p.m.
BRIEF INTERMISSION HERE TO relay what I have to contend with now that Gord’s ankle is healing and he knows what I am up to in the back bedroom.
Crutch-bash! A nice solid whack that vibrates one entire wall of my room. He has to be standing directly outside my door.
“How’s it going in there son?”
“Well you just scared the shit out of me and I spilled my coffee everywhere, but otherwise it’s fine, Gord, thanks.”
“You need any help?”
“You can put on more coffee if you’re up to it.”
“No, I mean with your book stupidarse. “
A befuddled pause. This is the first time he’s even acknowledged what I’m doing since he learned I wasn’t in here compulsively masturbating. Since the revelation that provoked his attack on Sylvie’s teapot.
“Help?” I say. “With my book?”
“Like when you called me that time. I got a good memory for details. Thought you might need help.”
“No, I — not right now. I’ll let you know, Gord, okay?”
“Don’t forget to tell them about that nice letter Owen wrote the judge.”
I’m sitting there in front of the laptop holding the dirty T-shirt I’ve been using to sop up the spilled coffee. The stench of it co-mingling with my sweat fills the room. Gord is talking about my release at age sixteen, after Owen wrote a letter to the judge to help get me out of the Youth Centre early so I wouldn’t have to start the school year midway through. It was, according to the judge, a “glowing” letter.
“Yeah,” I say. “Wow. I forgot about that letter.”
“This is why you need me. I still have it somewhere.”
“How the hell did you get a copy?”
“I asked him for one. You want me to dig it up?”
“No, Gord. That’s okay. I gotta get back to this.”
Silence. I chuck the T-shirt into the closet, read over where I was, am just about to hit a key, and then:
“Make sure you tell them about your hockey scholarship! And that you went to university.”
I have to smile at Gord’s “them.” Who is them? Who does Gord think I’m in here appealing to?
“Yeah. I will,” I say. “I’ll tell them, Gord.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, son.”
“No — I won’t.”
“I dug out some more old pictures for ya. You gonna use pictures?”
I drop my poised hands into my lap, collapse backward in my chair.
“I didn’t plan on it, no.”
“You should. I hate a book without pictures. Most people don’t even bother if there’s no pictures.”