The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [50]
From as far back as he could remember, from the day he hit a basesloaded triple to win a Little League championship (though some said the ball was foul), everything had been happy for JJ. There had been happiness with his father, collecting novelty gags and formula jokes, building great bonfires of leaves and found furniture, bowling at Quilles Bec every Thursday night while describing his plans to make a fortune as an inventor. There had been happiness with his mother, who taught him how to make Chinese box kites and waxed leaf scrapbooks and French-silk pie, who introduced him to Mille Bornes and nonsense verse and stiltwalking, and who reminded him daily what a cute little boy he was. In Grade 3 there’d been happiness because Mademoiselle Proulx had liked him. He hadn’t applied himself, he hadn’t got good grades, and he’d once painted a picture of bare-naked women bowling, but still Mademoiselle Proulx liked him. Un bon petit garçon, she had written on his report card.
JJ grew into a lubberly bear of a man, retaining the freckled face, orangey-red hair and teapot cheeks of his youth. As an adult, most of his time was spent trying to make money from his inventions and hobbies— herbs and magical potions, “fun” gadgets and commercial writing—via the Internet. For his dot.com company he bought a half-dozen earlynineties computers at a bankruptcy auction, which he repaired himself and which he continued to repair as they crashed one by one.
Inside the once-opulent gatehouse, which had previously housed a gardener and his family, things tended to accrue: advertising leaflets he’d written himself, pieces of salvaged furniture and stereo equipment, stacks of natural therapy magazines, sacks of fertilizer, shoe and cereal boxes containing “special products,” and a kitchen midden that was rising daily.
On the gravel path leading to the house, where crabgrass and dandelions accumulated in the summer and unploughed snow in the winter, his 1984 Dodge Aries (his birth sign) was parked. He had bought the car “for peanuts” from a New Brunswick firm called MUMMY’S YUMMY CHICKEN. On its sides, to cover up the logo and lettering, JJ spray-painted rustcoloured undercoating and affixed decals from places he had visited in the Maritime provinces and New England. To the car’s roof he attached large patches of canvas and blue plastic, held down with yards of rope and bungee cord, which made it look like he was transporting something of very irregular shape. Some speculated it was a kind of travelling puptent or rooftop bed, which JJ with an inscrutable smile would not deny. When he crossed the border into the States he was usually asked to remove the canvas and plastic sheets, which took a good quarter hour. What the border guards eventually found was a large red-and-yellow metal chicken, which had been welded to the roof.
Although now an adult, JJ was bubbling with childlike glee on the day of his party. He had sent out fifty invitations. Where would he put them all? There were four kitchen chairs, a sagging sofa with urinous scent (a legacy from a family pet, an incontinent poodle), a winged armchair whose springs were gone (a legacy from his mother, who was plenteous), and five tip-up seats (a legacy from the Rialto cinema, uprooted by vandals). That should seat about, what, a baker’s dozen? Of course, there’s always the floor … He examined the floor and seemed surprised at what he saw: soiled industrial carpeting that made