Jack loved wood.”
We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.
“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”
“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise: Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to thedoor and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.
After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner. Chemical Nightmare could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.
SIX
The drive up to Secord University was one I always liked. It took me over the course my father used when he taught me how to drive. The curves of road leading up the escarpment were recorded in my elbows and feet like they’d been programmed. The escarpment was heavily wooded, but the trees were beginning to lose their leaves. There were still plenty of maples strutting their stuff in reds and gold. The sumachs were scarlet at the edge of the quarry, where I caught a glimpse through the trees of the shack where Garth Gardenia and I’d spent a teenage afternoon with a Mrs. Stagg. Mrs. Stagg lived alone with a collection of photograph albums full of turn-of-thecentury showgirl beauties. She might have been in the theatre herself, but we never asked. We’d heard that one of her legs was wooden, but it was hard to tell under her long skirts. During the spring and summer, her cabin is invisible from the road. Maybe that’s why I never think of her except when I drive up the escarpment in the autumn and winter.
I’d phoned Eric Miller, an old friend of mine, who’d once been a cut-up in grade ten science with Miss Red Scott at the helm. Now he was a lecturer in botany. Iwonder whether Red Scott ever knew that Eric used to circulate drawings of flowers showing the reproductive parts in unmistakable human forms. And I remember a verse that accompanied one of them, something with the rhyme “saturnalia” and “genitalia” in it.
I found Eric by following a colour-coded strip painted along the corridors. All of the departments were colourcoded for the illiterate. History was dark blue, biology was green. Eric’s office was a large, dim room on the tenth floor.
“Benny! How are you?” Eric’s grin took me right back to Red Scott’s lab tables. “You son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in five years. What have you been doing with yourself that you can say in a room that may be bugged by the Mounties?”
“I keep seeing your name in the papers, Eric. Didn’t you get some honour a few months back? I’m sorry, I should keep up on these things.”
“Yeah, I agreed to
We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.
“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”
“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise: Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to thedoor and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.
After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner. Chemical Nightmare could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.
SIX
The drive up to Secord University was one I always liked. It took me over the course my father used when he taught me how to drive. The curves of road leading up the escarpment were recorded in my elbows and feet like they’d been programmed. The escarpment was heavily wooded, but the trees were beginning to lose their leaves. There were still plenty of maples strutting their stuff in reds and gold. The sumachs were scarlet at the edge of the quarry, where I caught a glimpse through the trees of the shack where Garth Gardenia and I’d spent a teenage afternoon with a Mrs. Stagg. Mrs. Stagg lived alone with a collection of photograph albums full of turn-of-thecentury showgirl beauties. She might have been in the theatre herself, but we never asked. We’d heard that one of her legs was wooden, but it was hard to tell under her long skirts. During the spring and summer, her cabin is invisible from the road. Maybe that’s why I never think of her except when I drive up the escarpment in the autumn and winter.
I’d phoned Eric Miller, an old friend of mine, who’d once been a cut-up in grade ten science with Miss Red Scott at the helm. Now he was a lecturer in botany. Iwonder whether Red Scott ever knew that Eric used to circulate drawings of flowers showing the reproductive parts in unmistakable human forms. And I remember a verse that accompanied one of them, something with the rhyme “saturnalia” and “genitalia” in it.
I found Eric by following a colour-coded strip painted along the corridors. All of the departments were colourcoded for the illiterate. History was dark blue, biology was green. Eric’s office was a large, dim room on the tenth floor.
“Benny! How are you?” Eric’s grin took me right back to Red Scott’s lab tables. “You son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in five years. What have you been doing with yourself that you can say in a room that may be bugged by the Mounties?”
“I keep seeing your name in the papers, Eric. Didn’t you get some honour a few months back? I’m sorry, I should keep up on these things.”
“Yeah, I agreed to
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