Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Read online

  Books by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  FICTION

  Man Descending (1982)

  The Trouble with Heroes (1983)

  My Present Age (1984)

  Homesick (1989)

  Things As They Are (1992)

  The Englishman’s Boy (1996)

  The Last Crossing (2002)

  A Good Man (2011)

  Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (2015)

  PLAYS

  I Had a Job I Liked. Once. (1991)

  Dancock’s Dance (1995)

  Copyright © 2015 by G & M Vanderhaeghe Productions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-9914-4

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-7710-9915-1

  Cover image: © Image Source / Corbis

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  To Sylvia

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience

  Tick Tock

  Koenig & Company

  1957 Chevy Bel Air

  Live Large

  Where the Boys Were

  Anything

  Counsellor Sally Brings Me to the Tunnel

  Daddy Lenin

  Acknowledgements

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience

  IT’S THE SUMMER OF 1970 and I’ve got one lovely ambition. I want to have been born in Seattle, to be black, to be Jimi Hendrix. I want a burst of Afro ablaze in a bank of stage lights, to own a corona of genius. I ache in bed listening to “Purple Haze” over and over again on my record player; the next night it’s “All Along the Watchtower.” I’m fourteen and I want to be one of the chosen, one of the possessed. To soak a guitar in lighter fluid, burn baby burn, to smash it to bits to the howl of thousands. I want to be a crazy man like Jimi Hendrix.

  What I didn’t know then is that before my man Jimi flamed his guitar at Monterey, he warned the cameraman to be sure to load plenty of film. This I learned much later, after he’s dead.

  It’s not a good time for me. After school finishes in June my father moves us to a new city; all I have is Jimi Hendrix, Conrad, and Finty. I don’t know what I’m doing with these last two, except that with school out for the summer I lack opportunities to widen my circle of acquaintances. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  Finty I meet outside a convenience store. He introduces me to Conrad. There’s not much wrong with Finty; born into a normal family he’d have had a chance. Conrad is an entirely different story. Finty proudly informs me that Conrad’s been known to set fire to garbage cans and heave them up onto garage roofs, to prowl a car lot and do ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage in the wink of an eye. He’s a sniffer of model airplane glue, gasoline. That stuff I don’t touch. It’s impossible to imagine the great Jimi Hendrix with his snout stuffed in a plastic bag. Occasionally, I’ll pinch a little grass from my big sister Corinne’s stash in her panty drawer, have my own private Woodstock while Jimi looks down approvingly from the poster on my bedroom wall. I tell myself this is who I am. Finty and Conrad are just temporary way stations on the big journey.

  Conrad scares me. His long hair isn’t a statement, just a poverty shag. His broken knuckles weep from hitting walls; he’s an accident willing itself to happen. The only person who comes close to scaring me as much is my father, a janitor who works the graveyard shift in a deadly office complex downtown, midnight to eight in the morning. A vampire who sleeps while the sun is up, sinks his teeth into my neck at the supper table, goes off to work with a satisfied, bloody grey smile on his lips. So far as he’s concerned there’s only one lesson I need to learn – don’t be dumb when it comes to life. I hear it every night, complete with examples and illustrations.

  I’m not dumb. It’s my brilliant idea to entertain ourselves by annoying people because that’s less dangerous than anything Conrad is likely to suggest. The same principle as substituting methadone for heroin.

  The three of us go around knocking on people’s doors. I tell whoever answers we’ve come about the Jimi Hendrix album.

  “What?”

  “The Jimi Hendrix album you advertised for sale in the classifieds in the newspaper.”

  “I didn’t advertise nothing of any description in any newspaper.”

  “Isn’t this 1102 Maitland Crescent?”

  “What does it look like? What does the number on my house say?”

  “Well, we must have the right place then. Maybe it was your wife. Did your wife advertise a Jimi Hendrix album?”

  “Nobody advertised nothing. There is no wife anymore. I live alone.”

  After my warm-up act, Finty jumps in all pathetic with misery and disappointment like I’ve coached him. “This isn’t too funny, you ask me. Changing your mind at the last minute. I promised my sister I’d buy your album for her birthday. A buck is all I got to buy her a lousy second-hand birthday present and then you go and do this. We had to transfer twice on the bus just to get here.”

  “His sister has cerebral palsy, mister.” I hang my head like I can’t believe what he’s doing to the poor girl.

  Conrad says to Finty, “I got fifty cents. It’s yours. Offer him a buck and a half. He’ll take a buck and a half.”

  “I ain’t going to take anything because I don’t have no Jimmy Henson record. I don’t even own a record player.”

  “I’ve got thirty-five cents,” I tell the man. “That makes a buck eighty-five. He needs the album for his sister. Music is all she has in life.”

  “She can’t go out on dates or nothing,” Finty says, voice cracking. “It’s the wheelchair.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about your sister, kid. But I’m swearing to you – on a stack of Bibles I’m swearing to you – I don’t have this record.”

  “Maybe you’ve forgotten you have it,” I say. “Does this ring a bell? Sound familiar?” And I start cranking air guitar, doing “Purple Haze,” no way the poor wiener can stop me until I’m done screaming hard enough to make his ears bleed.

  One afternoon we’re cruising the suburbs, courtesy of three bikes we helped ourselves to from a rack outside a city swimming pool. You can feel the heat coming off the asphalt into your face when you lean over the handlebars and pump the pedals. Conrad’s been sniffing and the toasty weather is steaming the glue in his skull and producing dangerous vapours. Already he’s yelled some nasty, rude remarks at a woman pushing a baby carriage; now he’s lighting matches and flicking them at a yappy Pekingese on somebody’s lawn, driving the dog out of its tiny mind. The lady of the house is watching him out her front window, and I know that when she closes those drapes, it’ll be to call the cops.

  Conrad is badly in need of structure, a sense of purpose at this particular moment, so I point to a bungalow down the street, a bungalow where every shrub in the yard has been trimmed to look like something else. For instance, a rooster. I definitely recall a rooster. It’s easy to guess what sort of a person lives in a house like that. Prime territory for the Jimi Hendrix routine.

  Finty and Conrad take off with me in a flash
, no explanation needed. We pull up on our bikes, leave them on the lawn. There’s a sign on the front door, red crayon on cardboard: ENTRANCE ALARMED. PLEASE ENTER AT REAR. The old man who comes to the door is dressed like a bank manager on his day off. White shirt, striped tie, bright yellow alpaca cardigan. He’s a very tall, spruce old guy with a glamour tan, and he’s just wet-combed his white hair. You can see the tooth marks of the comb in it.

  “We have come to inquire about the album,” I say.

  “Yes, yes. Come in. Come in. I’ve been expecting you,” he says, eyes fixed on something over my head. But when I turn to see what’s caught his interest, there’s nothing there.

  “This way, this way,” he urges us, eyes blinking up into a cloudless sky. For a second I wonder if he might be blind, but then he begins herding us through the porch, through the kitchen, into the living room, his hands flapping down around his knees like he’s shooing chickens. Finty and Conrad are giggling and snorting. “Too rich,” I hear Conrad say.

  The old man points and mutters, “Have a seat. Have a seat,” before disappearing off into the back of the bungalow. Conrad and Finty start horsing around, scuffling over ownership of a recliner, but it’s already a done deal who’s going to claim it. Like the big dog with the puppy, Conrad lets Finty nip a bit before he shoots him the stare, little red eyes like glazed maraschino cherries left in the jar too long and starting to go bad. Finty settles for the chesterfield. Big dog flops in the recliner, pops the footrest, grins at me over the toes of his runners. “Right on,” he says.

  I don’t like it when Conrad says things like “Right on.” He’s not entitled. He and Finty aren’t on the same wavelength as people like me and Jimi Hendrix. Conrad would be asking people for Elvis Presley albums if I hadn’t explained that the types whose doorbells we ring are likely to own them.

  Finty is into a bowl of peanuts on the end table. He starts flicking them at Conrad. Conrad snaps at them like a dog trying to catch flies, snaps so hard you can hear his teeth clear across the room. The ones he misses rattle off the wall, skitter and spin on the hardwood floor.

  I’m wondering where the old guy’s gone. My ear is cocked in case he might be on the phone to the police. I don’t appreciate the unexpected turn this has taken, the welcome mat he spread for us. I’m trying to figure out what’s going on here, but there’s this strange odour in the house that is creeping up into my nostrils and interfering with my thoughts. When I caught the first whiff of it, I thought it was the glue on Conrad’s breath, but now I’m not so sure. A strange, gloomy smell. Like somebody’s popped the door on a long-abandoned, derelict fridge, and dead oxygen and stale chemical coolant are fogging my brain.

  I’m thinking all this weird stuff when Finty suddenly freezes on the chesterfield with a peanut between his thumb and middle finger, cocked to fire. His lips give a nervous, rabbity nibble to the air. I scoot a look over my shoulder and there’s the old man blocking the entrance to the living room. With a rifle clutched across his chest.

  Conrad’s heels do a little dance of joy on the footrest.

  The old gentleman pops the rifle over his head like he’s fording a stream, takes a couple of long, lurching strides into the room, crisply snaps the gun back down on a diagonal across his shirt front, and announces, “My son carried a Lee-Enfield like this clear across Holland in the last war. He’s no longer with us. I thought you boys would like to see a piece of history.” He smiles and the Lee-Enfield starts moving like it has a mind of its own, the muzzle sliding slowly over to Finty on the chesterfield. One of the old guy’s eyes is puckered shut; the other stares down the barrel straight into Finty’s chest. “JFK,” he says. Then the barrel makes a lazy sweep over to Conrad in the recliner. “Bobby. Bobby Kennedy.”

  Some nights I turn on the TV at four in the morning when all the stations have signed off the air. I like how the television fizzles in my ears, how my brain drifts over with electric blue and grey snow, how the phantom sparkles of light are blips on a radar screen tracking spaceships from distant planets. Similar things are happening in my head right now, but they feel bad instead of good.

  “Get that out of my face,” Conrad orders him.

  The old man doesn’t budge. “I could feel John and Bobby giving off copper right through the television screen. Lee Harvey Oswald could feel it and Sirhan Sirhan could feel it. I think, as far as North America goes, we were the only three.”

  Conrad squints suspiciously. “What kind of bullshit are you talking?”

  “And you,” says the old man, voice rising, “you give off copper and so does your friend by the peanut bowl. Chemistry is destiny. Too much copper in the human system attracts the lightning bolt. Don’t blame me. I’m not responsible.”

  There’s a long silence. Conrad’s heels jitter angrily up and down on the footrest.

  “Do you understand?” the old man demands. “Am I making myself clear?”

  The question is for Conrad, but I’m the one who answers. I feel the old man requires something quick. “Sure. Right. We get it.”

  He sends me a thoughtful nod as he lays the gun down at his feet. A second later he’s rummaging in his pockets, tearing out handfuls of change, spilling it down on the coffee table like metal hail, talking fast. “Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule. Me, for one. I’m immune to the thunderbolt. I could walk clear through a mob of assassins with a pound of copper in my belly and no harm, no harm. Untouchable.” His fingers jerk through the coins, shoving the pennies to one side. Suddenly his neck goes rigid; a grey, furry tongue slowly, very slowly pushes out from between his lips. The old man picks up a penny and shows it to each of us in turn, like a magician getting ready to perform a trick. Presses the penny carefully down on his tongue like he’s sticking a stamp on an envelope. Squeezes his eyes tightly shut. Draws the penny slowly back into his mouth and swallows. We watch him standing there, swaying back and forth, a pulse beating in his eyelids.

  Conrad has had enough of this. “Hey, you!” he shouts. “Hey, you, I’m talking to you!”

  The old man’s eyes flutter open. It’s like watching a baby wake up.

  “We don’t give a shit how many pennies you can swallow,” Conrad says. “We’re here about the album. The famous album.”

  “Right, the album. Of course,” says the old man, springing to an ottoman, flipping up the lid.

  “And another thing,” Conrad warns him, winking at me. “Don’t try and pass any golden oldies off on us. Troy here is a hippie. He’s got standards. You know what a hippie is?”

  “Yeah,” says Finty, taking heart from Conrad. “You know what a hippie is?”

  The old man drags a bulging photograph album out of the ottoman, drops it on the coffee table, sinks to his knees on the hardwood beside it. You’d think it was story time at Pooh Corner in the children’s room at the library the way he turns the pages for us.

  The pictures are black and white, each one a snapshot of a road under construction. All of them taken just as the sun was rising or setting, the camera aimed straight down the highway to where it disappears into a haze of pale light riding the horizon. There are no people in any of the pictures, only occasional pieces of old-fashioned earth-moving equipment parked in the ditches, looking like they were abandoned when everybody fled from the aliens, from the plague, or whatever.

  Conrad grunts, “What the hell is this?”

  “An example of the law of diminishing returns,” the old man replies, dreamily turning the pages. “In a former life I was a highway builder. Unrecognized for my excellence.”

  “How come there’s nobody in these pictures?” Conrad wants to know. “Pictures without people in them are a fucking waste of film.”

  “Oh, but there is a person,” the old man corrects him. “Identify him. I think it’s evident who he is, although there has been argument. If you would confirm his identity, it would certainly be very much appreciated.”

  Conrad and Finty peer down hard at the snapshots, as i
f there really might be a human being lurking in them. After about thirty seconds, Conrad gives up, irritably declares, “There’s nobody in any picture here.”

  “He fades in and fades out. Sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not. But he’s very definitely there now. You’ll recognize him,” the old man assures us.

  By now Conrad suspects the old man is pulling a fast one, some senior citizen variation on the Jimi Hendrix experience. “Oh yeah, I see him now. Jimi Hendrix peeking around that big machine in the ditch. That’s him, isn’t it, Finty? Old Jimi Jimbo.” He jabs Finty in the ribs with his elbow, hard enough to make him squeak.

  “Wrong. The person in question is definitely in the middle of the road. Walking towards us. Look again.”

  This only pisses Conrad off. “Right. I ain’t stupid. Don’t try and pull this crap on me.”

  “Please describe him,” the old man says calmly, patiently.

  “Here’s a description for you. An empty road. Get a pair of fucking glasses, you blind old prick.”

  “So that’s your line.” The old man’s voice has started to tremble; it sounds a little like Finty’s when he talks about his sister in the wheelchair, only genuine. “Just a road. Just a road, the boy says.” He stabs his finger down on the photograph so hard it crinkles, turns to Finty. “You, young man. Describe him.”

  “Huh?” Finty glances over to Conrad for help.

  “Knock, knock. Who’s there?” The old man’s finger taps the photograph urgently, bounces with blinding speed. “Who’s there? Who’s there? Knock, knock. Knock, knock!”

  Conrad juts his jaw at Finty, a warning. “Don’t you say nothing. Don’t you give him nothing.”

  The old man slaps his knee, face alive with joy. “Not thinking, were you?” he shouts. “Telling him not to give me anything, why that’s an admission there’s something to give away. What a slip! Cat out of the bag!”

  He snatches up the album, shoves it into my hands. Tiny points of sweat break out on his forehead. Somehow I think of them as icy. They put me in mind of liquefying Freon, or whatever gas they pump into refrigerators to keep them cold. The chemical smell is industrial-strength. It’s coming from him.