Tilt - Alan Cumyn [28]
Was Stan really recalling this properly? He remembered the word associate, and then his father was gone — disappeared somewhere into the neighborhood across the park.
The bobber bobbed and the minutes slowed. Two rods but one fisherman. A man was painting fence posts near the road — not the red fence itself but the posts, which were white and thick and high.
Stan reeled in slowly, then recast. He was getting better at hitting the spot. The bass must have wondered about so many rubber worms splashing overhead with red and white bobbers attached to them. The fence was red and white. So were the bobbers, so was the fishing box.
Stan didn’t have a watch. Where was the sun? He couldn’t remember where it had been when he started. But the fence posts were slow work. Maybe fifteen minutes a post? And the man had done two and a half already.
More than half an hour.
When the man had finished eleven and a half posts, when the fence was almost finished, Stan felt a huge tug on the line and he dropped the rod, then nearly kicked it into the water in panic. When he recovered, the line felt heavy, as if he might be pulling some monster from the deep.
A black waterlogged branch floated reluctantly to the surface. But half the rubber worm was gone, bitten off by something exciting, Stan thought. If you looked closely at the remaining portion of the rubber worm, you could see the teeth marks of the vicious fish.
At thirteen posts the fence was done. Stan climbed a willow tree, sat in the shade over the water and held his stomach where he was getting hungry.
The van was still there. But maybe the associate was a murderer? Maybe his father’s body was in the basement of one of those houses by the park by the river. Maybe . . .
Maybe if he just waited a little longer, everything was going to be all right.
12
Saturday morning was for chores. It was a routine established by Stan’s father long ago, one of the few things that had survived the separation catastrophe.
Stan tidied, dusted and vacuumed the living room, the front hallway, the kitchen, the stairs, landing and his own bedroom. His mother handled both bathrooms, the laundry and her room. Lily dawdled and played in the den and in her own room, turned on the vacuum for some seconds and, when yelled at, straightened up a few things, then collapsed in exhaustion while Stan wiped a layer of dust from the television and straightened the pictures on top of the piano that no one played.
Stan had taken precisely two lessons, at gunpoint practically, and then was not forced to continue after Other Events intervened.
Stan remembered his mother pulling down the curtains for some reason — lurching in a screaming rage and pulling them off the rod. What was that about? They were white with wavy stripes, and she had sent Ron out to get them and he’d taken all day. So he must have been with Kelly-Ann, and that must have been the day his mother found out and that was why she was pulling the curtains down and shrieking like a wounded animal.
Where did these memories hide year after year? Why were they spooling out now?
Stan gathered up the week’s mostly unread newspapers and took them downstairs to the recycle box.
Maybe his mother should have sold the house when Ron moved out. They should have started fresh somewhere. Because everything here had a memory still tied to the catastrophe.
There was his father’s workbench, where he used to putter for hours in the gloom away from everybody. What did he do down here? He sanded things, and hammered and cut other things, and arranged his tools on their special hooks. How could he be so quiet and patient working on his own projects and turn into such a swearing wreck out in the light of day? Stan remembered him fighting with the downspout when it came loose from the side of the house after some rainstorm. He was trying to fit a new piece, but the jagged edges of the aluminum cut at his hands like an