the wheel trying to snap off his ham radio. Kyle got so frightened he threw himself over a ramp. But it was a drop of two storeys. He broke his arm in four places. The truck driver took his time getting down to him, then gave him a couple of boots, one in the kidneys, one in the face, and left him lying in the street.â
âNice life.â
âThat February, he had a Methedrine overdose, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. All this got back to me in Mexico. I was torn: stay or go home. But go home and do what? Hobbling around on crutches. Shouting from the sidelines. At some point, youâre reduced to being an impotent cheerleader for your childrenâs lives. Or is that just more bullshit? I donât know. I still donât.
âI began to prepare myself for his death. I began to imagine how the phone would ring one night, or maybe Bruceâs hangdog face would appear at my door in Mexico. I knew it was coming. It was the Jerry Malloy business that brought me home.â
âYou havenât mentioned him.â
âJerry Malloy? That was the clincher.â She leaned her elbow on the chair arm; it slipped off; she settled it back again, using her other hand to hold it. She began. âOne night around midnight, Kyle turned up at Marek Grunbaumâs house. Remember him? The Polish guyââ
ââwith the beautiful pink handkerchief.â
âKyle looked like a zombie: ragged clothes, grey skin, yellow eyeballs. He smelt, too. His feet were rotting from some untreated infection. Marek made him take his clothes off in the hallway, all of them, and then led him naked upstairs to the shower, disinfecting his footsteps with an aerosol can of Lysol as he went. His three kids peeking from their bedrooms. âWhoâs
that,
Daddy?â A few days later, he drove him to a rehab centre downtown. On the way there, Kyle asked if he could borrow twenty dollars. A birthday present for his father. He had a con manâs charm, Kyle did. He looked Marek in the eyes and said, âYou got to let me make this up to my dad.â
âHe disappeared into the mid-afternoon traffic with the twenty dollars. Nearly half an hour later, after Marek had circled the block twice and gotten a ticket, he spotted Kyle on the sidewalk. He got back into the car, claiming he couldnât find anything nice. But could he keep the money? Within a day or two, heâd be allowed out for half-hour walks in the neighbourhoodâheâd buy a present then.
âBy now, Marek just wanted him out of the car. So he agreed. He pulled up in front of the clinic, a big white house on a leafy street. He waited to make sure Kyle went in. Kyle skipped up the main stairs, made a theatrical production of pushing the buzzer, and, just as he went in, spun around and gave Marek a grin and a big wave, as if this was all a screech, just too much fun for words.
âThey lodged Kyle with a boy named Jerry Malloy. Jerry had grown up in one of those small northern towns where teenage boys sit in front of the pizza parlour at midnight on a Saturday night, daydreaming about the life theyâve read about in heavy metal magazines. You know those kids?â
âI sure do.â
âYou see them in all small towns. You can smell the boredom coming off them. They usually get arrested for breaking into somebodyâs cottage, knock up the girl at the grocery store, put on forty pounds, spend their lives working at the marina or the planing mill. I have a great deal of compassion for those children.â Sally looked toward the window, and in a moment continued. âBut not Jerry. Jerry saw himself as a cut above the rest. No marina for him. He quit school in grade ten and moved to Toronto, where he got a job making broom handles in a factory.
âIt wasnât long before big-city life just dazzled the wits right out of him. Especially the drugs, of course, first pot, then
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