Part 6 (1/2)

Barb said, ”I'll pour Drano on your grave, you sick b.a.s.t.a.r.d.”

Reg took the hint. Some of the wives (not a girlfriend in the bunch) accompanied my father to his car.

I sat with your mother while the Alive! crew scoured the house of memorial residue. I said, ”Barb, you never believed me about Reg, about how evil he is. Now you know.”

”It's one thing to hear about it, Jason. And another to see it in operation.”

”Barb, the thing about Dad is that he'll always betray you in the end. Even if you think you've gotten close to him, earned your way into his bosom the way Kent did, in the end he'll always sell you out to his religion. He's actually a pagan that way - he has to make sacrifices, so he sacrificed his family one by one. Tonight he offered the twins to his G.o.d. If he were a dog, I'd shoot him.”

And so I picked up Joyce at Mom's where the TV station had kicked into late-night infomercials.

She was sleeping it off on the couch. I drove home and I'm going to bed soon.

I arrived at Ambleside Beach a few minutes ago, and something unusual happened. I was sitting in the truck's cab removing a burr from Joyce's flank, while looking at my stack of pink invoice papers, when this pleasant-enough woman in a purple fleece coat, holding a baby in her arms, comes up to the window and says, ”Homework?”

Now, if I met you last week, I'll never remember your name, but if we went through kindergarten together, you're still in my brain for good: ”Demi Harshawe!” Demi is the ma.s.sacre victim I'd last seen on October 4, 1988, having a silver spike jabbed into her unclothed heart.

”How are you doing, Jason?”

”No surprises. You?” Joyce trampled over my lap to lick Demi's face.

”Pretty average, I guess. I got married two summers ago. My last name is Minotti now. This here's Logan.” Joyce dragged her tongue right across Logan's face.

”Sorry.”

”It's okay. We're a dog family. See - Logan didn't mind it one bit.”

”It's so great to see you.”

We were both six again, and I felt so innocent and genuinely free, like we'd just quit jobs we hated. After maybe five minutes I asked Demi about her health - she'd been one of the kids shot over by the vending machines, and she'd lost a foot.

”I don't even notice it anymore. I do Pilates three times a week and coach softball with my sister.

To be honest, wearing braces back in elementary school was way harder to deal with. How about you?”

Demi knew, in the way everyone knows, about how things went wrong for me in the weeks after the ma.s.sacre. We're both ten years older, too, so I could describe things to her in non-candy- coated terms. ”You know what? I never got over Cheryl. Not ever. I doubt I will. I try really hard to join the real world, but it never seems to work, and lately I think I've stopped trying, which scares me more than anything. I do house renovations on a by-the-hour basis and all my friends are barflies.”

She thought this over for a second. ”I stopped trusting people, too, after the shootings, and until I met my husband, Andreas, I didn't think I'd ever trust people again. And for what it's worth, I think you're one of the few people I could trust, now that I believe in trust again.”

”Thanks.”

”No, thank you. After all the junk you had to go through.” Demi paused for a second. ”I was in the hospital for two weeks after the ma.s.sacre. I missed all those hand-holding ceremonies and flowers and services and teddy bears et cetera. I really regret that, because maybe it would have made me a better person - or at least maybe I wouldn't go around looking at everybody as evil instead of good.”

”I doubt it.”

Demi sighed. ”When I talk like this, Andreas thinks I'm coldhearted. But then he wasn't there. We were. And if you weren't, you weren't.”

We'd hit on something irreducible here, and talking much beyond this point would have felt like a betrayal of our shared memories. We made our quick good-byes, and Demi and Logan headed down to the water, and here I am now in my truck's cab, the scribbler of Ambleside Beach.

It's an hour later and I'm still sitting in the truck.

I wish I could be as innocent as I was at six, the way I felt just briefly while talking with Demi, but that's childish. I wish humans were better than we are, but we're not. I wish I knew how bad I could become. I wish I could get a printout that showed me exactly how susceptible I was to a long list of sins. Gluttony: 23 percent susceptible. Envy: 68 percent susceptible. l.u.s.t: 94 percent susceptible. That kind of thing.

Oh G.o.d, it's religion all over again; it's my father's corrosive bile percolating through my soil and tickling my taproot. Be as pious as you want, people are slime, or, as my father might say, we're all slime in the eyes of G.o.d. It's the same thing. And even if you decided to fight the evil, to attain goodness or religious ecstasy, not much really changes. You're still stuck being you, and you was pretty much decided long before you started asking these questions.

Maybe clones are the way out of all of this. If Reg is against them, that means they're probably a good idea. And as a clone, you pop off the a.s.sembly line with an owner's manual written by the previous you - a manual as helpful as the one that accompanies a 1999 VW Jetta. Imagine all the c.r.a.p this would save you - the wasted time, the hopeless dreams. I'm going to really think about this: an owner's manual for me.

It's midnight. I cut short my evening with my barfly construction buddies. We shot a few buckets of b.a.l.l.s at the Park Royal driving range, then had a few beers, but I just couldn't bring myself to continue. Writing this doc.u.ment has taken a firm grip of me.

Here's an overview of what happened after the Delbrook Ma.s.sacre.

The fact that I'd never met the three gun wielders didn't seem to matter. In published transcripts of interviews with the police, on the morning of the event I was ”agitated.” I walked ”cavalierly”

out of chem cla.s.s without so much as a nod to the teacher. I was seen having an ”emotional confrontation” with Cheryl. I ”a.s.saulted, drew blood from, and gave a concussion to” Matt Gursky from Youth Alive! I also a.s.saulted Mr. Kroger ”with seeming forethought,” and I ”seemingly knew to enter the cafeteria just after Cheryl Anway had been shot.”

I think the public was desperate for cause and effect. At first glance, I suppose I'd probably be suspicious of me, too, and I'm pretty sure it was my father's bizarre reaction to the news that got police to thinking about me - from a hero to a suspect. Whatever the cause, the morning after the shootings I saw my yearbook photo on the front of the paper with the headline MASTERMIND?

The only thing missing was motive. The three nutcases with guns were screwed-up geeks lost in a stew of paranoia, role-playing games, military dreams and s.e.xual rejection. They were a slam- dunk. With me, the case seemed to revolve around my relations.h.i.+p with Cheryl, about the fight we had that morning and reasons why I might want her dead. The best police minds couldn't engineer a reason no matter how soap-operatic their thinking.

On my side, I refused to make my life with Cheryl anybody's business but my own. I didn't mention our marriage because it was sacred; I wasn't going to let the ma.s.sacre make it profane. I refused to let it be used as some kind of plot twist in the final five minutes of an episode of Perry Mason. So I said nothing, only that Cheryl wanted to talk about feelings, and I didn't. As simple as that. Which is basically what it was.Okay, I'm not lying here, but I'm not disclosing everything. Truth is, Cheryl had just found out she was pregnant. That was what we'd been discussing at her locker. I was so taken aback by the news that I said something stupid, I forget what, and then I told her I had to prepare equipment for a Junior A team. Me - a father - and all I can say is ”I have to get stuff ready for the Junior A team.”

Even the idea of the baby got lost in the ordeal of the first two weeks. It wasn't until a month later, while I was waiting for a bus in New Brunswick, the temperature well below zero, that the baby caught up to me. I had to go behind a cedar hedge to cry. My nose began to bleed from the dry air, and the blood brought even more . . . Well, you get the picture.

As a result of the baby, I began doing what I used to do, wondering which woman was going to be my wife - except that now I looked at every child I saw and wondered if he or she was supposed to be mine. And then for a while I couldn't be near kids at all, and I got jobs up the coast in logging camps, construction and surveying.

And now? And now I guess I'll continue writing about the aftermath of the ma.s.sacre. My many friends from Youth Alive! set the tone, gleefully providing police with a McCarthy-era dossier on Cheryl and me - a diary of the time we spent together after we returned from Las Vegas. The entries describe everything but the s.e.x: where the cars were parked; what rooms were used and which lights went on and off at what time; the state of our clothing and hair before and after; the expressions on our faces - most often variations on the theme of ”satisfied.”

News that the police had taken me away from the parking lot caused rumors to quickly spread.

By evening our house had been egged and paint-bombed. The police had cordoned it off, and advised us that it would probably be easier and safer if I spent the night at the station and Mom found a hotel or motel room.

Kent flew in from Edmonton. He was in his second year at the University of Alberta, working toward a CPA degree. Having Dad in the hospital was a blessing, as I at least didn't have to worry about him selling me further down the river. He and Mom, in their last act of married unity, synchronized their stories about the fractured knee, and then called it quits. I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that little chat.

My main memories of those two weeks when I was under suspicion are of moving from one spartanly furnished room to another - a cell, a motel room or an interrogation room. I was what you'd now call a person of interest, living in a legal netherworld, neither free nor in custody. I remember eating mostly takeout Chinese or pizza, and having to hide in the bathroom when it was delivered. I remember always having to dial 9 before phone calls to my lawyer, and there was this chestnut-colored kiss-curl wig given to me by a woman from the RCMP. I was to wear it when we drove from place to place, but no matter how many times we rinsed it, it smelled like a thrift store. Potential angry mobs or not, it was stupid and I chucked it in the trash. There was this one interrogation room that smelled like cherry cola, and everywhere, the same yearbook photos being endlessly recycled on TV and in the papers.

I remember coming back from a questioning session one morning to find my mother opening the motel door with a large vodka stain shaped like Argentina on her blouse. And I wondered if I'd need to take a death certificate to Nevada to become officially unmarried. Is there even a name for this -”widowered” sounds wrong.

I ate chocolate bars from the Texaco for breakfast. Kent and I drove once to the cemetery where Cheryl had been buried, but there were TV vans, so we didn't go in. All over the embankment beside the police station I saw magic mushrooms sprouting, which seemed funny to me. And I remember Kent returning from the house where he'd gone to clean up the eggs and paint, and how he refused to discuss it.

One thing Kent did during this time was, as ever, not take sides. He never said it in so many words, but he spent hours on the phone with Alive!ers and could only have been placating them.

”They think I organized it, don't they?”

”They're curious and angry like everybody else.”

”But they do.”

”They're just confused. Let it go. You'll be cleared soon enough.”