the hell was Douglas?
A month ago he had been brought home by Mr. Steedman, a soft-spoken church-going man who lived with his wife and two small sons three doors down. Mr. Steedman had had to prop Douglas up in the doorway to make sure he didn’t fall while he rang the bell.
“Just about made it home, Mrs. MacNeil. Found him asleep in his car at the end of the block. I thought for a moment he might be hurt, but, well, looks like he’ll be fine.” Mr. Steedman smiled. He had a wide, handsome face, clean and honest. He looked sorry to be embarrassing her this way.
“You’re very kind to bring him home.” Margaret threw Douglas’s arm around her shoulder and began to wrestle him through the door.
“Hello, there,” Douglas had slurred. “It’s the little lady. Ain’t she pretty? Prettiest girl . . .”
“I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is.”
“No need to say anything,” Mr. Steedman said. “I’ve been known to tie one on myself. Do you need any help? I could help you get him to bed.”
“Thank you, you’ve done enough. I can handle it from here. Thank you.” She closed the door.
“You idiot! Out there for all the neighbours to see. You’re a disgrace.” She had plopped him in a chair and left him. The next morning he woke with a neck so stiff he could barely lift his throbbing head.
“Serves you right,” she said, and she hid his car keys.
She had wanted him to ask about the keys, wanted him to beg her forgiveness. But he only said, “Margaret, have you seen my keys? I have to get the car.”
“I’ll be getting the car, Douglas. And keeping it until you can prove you’re fit to drive it.”
“Suit yourself,” he’d said. “Gas is too expensive anyway.”
A week later he brought a man home after work. Douglas sold their Ford to him for $200. Walked into the kitchen smug as a feudal lord, riffling the money in the air like a fan. What he had done with the money she had no idea. She certainly never saw a penny.
If he was out squandering what little money they had left, she’d bash his brains in with the marble pastry pin. They’d never again brought up the subject of the credit he was giving out. She thought her silence might have pried some words from him, but there had been none.
She climbed the stairs and went into her daughter’s bedroom. A path of light fell across Irene’s sleeping form. Margaret reached into the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out her tin of cigarettes and her silver lighter. She lit one, and then snapped the Zippo shut. Irene didn’t stir at the sound.
“Sleeping, baby?”
Irene did not respond.
Margaret was about to sit down on the edge of the bed when she heard footsteps on the porch. She whirled toward the sound and rushed from the room.
As soon as Irene heard her mother’s footsteps clattering down the stairs, she opened her eyes, just peeking through half-closed lids at first and then opening fully, staring fixedly at the point where her mother had been.
Douglas climbed the porch steps slowly. His feet felt encased in shoes of cement. He had spent the past several hours in a cell at the police station on College Street. It was a malodorous concrete space, crowded with men. Some smoked cigarettes and two played cards. One of these card players was a red-skinned Indian man. He was huge, at least 300 pounds, with jet black hair cut so close to his head that Douglas could see the multitude of scars on his scalp. He played some game that Douglas didn’t understand and every time he snapped a card down on the pile in front of him, yelled “Shoot the dog!” and his partner laughed. Others hunkered against the wall, their eyes as flat as tin plates, giving away nothing. One man, the front of his pants stained dark with what Douglas’s nose told him was urine, slept in a corner, his snores phlegm-filled.
Douglas sat primly on the edge of a bench near the bars where the air, he imagined, was slightly fresher. He remained very still, careful not to draw attention to himself, for who knew what these men would do if they knew just how little he belonged to their tribe. Only the conviction that they could turn on him at any moment, like hyenas tearing at the stomach of a weakened pack-mate, stopped tears from lining his cheeks. He willed himself not to pull the hem of his jacket away from the man beside him and thereby betray the intensity of his disgust. He sat still and silent and hoped this passed for assured self-containment.
He wanted to tell the police that it was a mistake, that he was not a Communist, but no one seemed to care. When he had been brought into the station, herded up to the desk and told to empty his pockets, he had tried to explain but was told to shut up and do as he was instructed. A hand had grabbed him roughly by the upper arm, and Douglas had been shamed by how scrawny his own arm must feel under such strong fingers. It made him aware of how weak he was and how vulnerable and he then became afraid not only of the men with whom he was arrested but also of the police themselves.
After they had clanged shut the heavy, barred cell door, the police brought in McEwen and began to taunt him, telling him they would take care of his kind. That they knew what he was up to. That he should go back to where he came from. McEwen said he was born right here in Canada and had a right to his beliefs. That he was a member of a legally recognized political party and that the police had no right!
A policeman had silenced him with a punch to the stomach. Douglas watched, horrified, as they beat him to a bloody pulp. McEwen kept his hands over his ears, his elbows shielding his face, until he became unconscious. Douglas thought they would stop the beating then, but they did not. They kept right on kicking him in the ribs and the back and the legs. What shocked Douglas almost as much as the beating was the fact that the police did not even try to hide what they were doing.
All the muttering, all the shouting, even the snoring in the cell had stopped.
When they were finished, they threw McEwen, nothing more now than a sack of sharp bones and lumpy, multicoloured flesh, into the cell.
And now he had to face his wife. He wondered which would be worse, but then shivered this thought away, because to joke about it, even to himself, was a betrayal to McEwen, a man he didn’t know, didn’t want to know, but to whom he felt he owed something.
Douglas drew a deep breath, ran his hand along the top of his shiny head and opened the door to his house.
“Where have you been?” Margaret was disgusted at the sight of him. “You’ve been drinking!”
Douglas moved past her, not quite pushing her but coming close enough to give her a heart-hiccupping start. She opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it again when she found no words ready. Douglas hauled himself up the stairs and disappeared into the bathroom. Margaret heard water running.
As she approached the bathroom door she made her hands into claws. She’d go right through the door if she had to.
Inside the clean space of the bathroom, Douglas looked at himself in the mirror over the sink, his face framed within the ivy pattern of the wallpaper. Behold the conquering hero, he scoffed at himself. Shock provided a window of weird objectivity, and it was through this portal that the sagging lines and pouches and rabbity eyes told the truth of who he was. Before this night he had believed himself to be no more or less brave
