Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  Dad reached down into the big side pocket of his recliner and rummaged for our new remote control, restoring the volume.

  “Welcome back to NTV News,” the macho male anchor with perfect hair announced with grandeur and an up-and-down rhythm that could make you seasick.

  “Some tense moments (ha, ha) during the height of the storm this morning.

  “Rescuers were called to a home on Holbrook Avenue, in the west end of the city, but were unable to reach the residence by road because it had . . . not . . . been . . . plowed,” he stated with unethical emphasis.

  “NTV News has obtained the audio recording of an Open Line call from a woman, identified only as Loretta, who described the scene from her front window.”

  They put up the standard graphic for a phone call when they had no video or pictures for the story: the receiver, detached from an old rotary dial set, dangling in mid-air as they played the edited recording with text underneath.

  Woman: “. . . we got an ambulance stuck halfway down our road. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”

  Host: “Is it trying to get somewhere with the lights and sirens . . . ?”

  Woman: “That’s right. And I can see some men down there now trying to shovel out from under where she bottomed out sideways, by the looks of it. And there’s police here now, too, but they can’t get down either.”

  Back to the anchor, who was shaking his head in more editorialized disgust, breaking all the rules of media impartiality.

  “Newfoundland Constabulary officers were able to get a paramedic to the house, who provided medical assistance to the victim. But they had to borrow two snowmobiles from security at the Waterford Hospital to get there, through the field that Holbrook Avenue backs onto.

  “By that time a city plow was able to make a cut in the road, and the person, believed to be male, was taken to St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital for treatment.

  “A police spokeswoman would only say that person is in serious condition tonight and that no foul play is suspected.”

  That last part was cop-speak for move along, nothing to see here. It also served to inform media that they could stand down, that the injuries were either self-inflicted or the result of some medical condition.

  Most times you could get some kind of off-the-record confirmation of that before you wasted time scrambling a reporter and photographer to get there. None of that was necessary to confirm what happened to Rodney, since my father had just been at the scene himself.

  He declined to share any of the graphic details with me. But I had already made an assumption based on a previous experience in the Carter household.

  To put it bluntly, I was sure Rodney had shot himself, and probably with the same small pistol he’d aimed at me a couple of months earlier.

  “Ever heard of Russian roulette?” he’d asked one afternoon in between slapshots at my head with a rubber puck in his carpeted rec room.

  His wide-eyed excitement was a vast departure from the angry, gritted-teeth threats I had become accustomed to.

  “Yeah,” I lied, providing the answer I hoped would please my PB.

  “Cool. C’mon. No one’s home.”

  It seemed no one was ever home when I was over. Still, PB and I tiptoed upstairs and into his mother’s bedroom.

  “Lemme know if anyone’s coming,” he instructed, motioning me to the window overlooking the driveway.

  “Anyone” would be his mother or father, since Rodney was an only child.

  I could hear him rifling through the drawers of the tall dresser while I scanned the street in both directions. Then I heard a sound that I’d only ever heard on TV—the three clicks of a gun being cocked.

  “Do you feel lucky, punk?” he asked in an uncanny Clint Eastwood twang.

  Instinctively, and at my peril, I turned to find him pointing an antique-looking revolver at my face from about five feet away. At least it wasn’t a .45 Magnum.

  “Jesus. Please don’t do that,” I said.

  “What? It’s not like it’s loaded or anything. Pussy.”

  I knew him well enough to know that I couldn’t believe a word he said, which made the situation all the more frightening and unpredictable.

  He stayed locked on me with both hands for about ten of the longest seconds ever, then suddenly pointed toward the ceiling.

  “Look. See?”

  He flicked open the chamber and a single bullet fell onto the uneven hardwood floor. He stomped on it before it could roll under the bed.

  He looked at me and smirked.

  “Oops. Forgot that was in there.”

  He picked it up and pushed it back into one of the six slots, slapped the chamber shut, and gave it a spin.

  “Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows!”

  Sitting there in the gloom of our dark, lamplit den the night after a hard winter storm, I was pretty sure I knew.

  7

  Mother Nature seemed to have this habit of apologizing for snowstorms with gleaming sunny days that sent a behavioural positivity throughout our house.

  Most houses, actually.

  And the next morning was no exception.

  I woke to the sounds of siblings exchanging pleases, thank yous, and excuse mes like they actually meant them.

  My mother bounded into my room like Julie Andrews on the mountaintop and headed straight for the window that faced my bed, all the while announcing the forecast as if she were auditioning for the gig on TV.

  “. . . and over here on the east coast, it’ll be mostly sunny all day with a few clouds, light winds, and temperatures that could reach ten degrees Celsius!”

  She timed “Celsius” to coincide with the action of whipping apart my curtains and admitting an atomic-like flash of light that left me squint-eyed through breakfast.

  “Jesus!” I blurted inadvertently.

  My mother spun fast with a muted glare as I quickly added, “. . . Mary and Joseph.”

  She relaxed with a sigh of fruitless indifference that suggested nothing was going to get her goat today.

  “Time you got up now, Wish. It’s a gorgeous day out. No school again either, ’cause they haven’t got all the roads and parking lots cleared yet. I know you’re disappointed.”

  That was enough to get me moving, albeit slowly, to the edge of my bed. I was just having trouble rationalizing her jovial mood with the tragedy I assumed had transpired the day before across the way.

  Sensing my confusion, she bounced down next to me and softened her tone.

  “Rodney’s going to be just fine,” she said, stroking the cowlick at the back of my head in a futile attempt to flatten it out. “They think he took too much of some medicine, but he’s going to be fine.”

  It was a monumental relief, but it instantly conjured a recent warning about the perils of making assumptions.

  “When you assume something, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’,” Cap’n Mike had advised me over an instructional game of 9-ball on the fire hall’s pool table. Great gambling game, I would later discover.

  The good captain didn’t have to do any of that stuff for me, I reminded myself: welcome me in, let me hang out, share slang-chat without reprimand. Yet I still hadn’t come clean about that damn fire.

  In any event, I had certainly assumed—wrongly—that my PB was a goner.

  Word that he would be okay activated springs in my legs that propelled me from bed to dresser in search of appropriate attire for a second snow day in a row.

  “Remember, it’s almost ten degrees Celsius outside,” Mom repeated as she exited my room.

  Metric had just arrived on the scene, and Mom and Dad had been using every opportunity to drill it into us. And it was starting to take—enough for me to know that ten Celsius was the same as fifty Fahre
nsomething.

  I resisted the temptation to ask how much snow had fallen, since there was a risk it would lead to a lengthy refresher on centimetres versus inches and eat into valuable time in however much had accumulated down in the Mental Field.

  It was—not unofficially—the gathering place where we decided what we’d get up to, of which there was lots.

  Our parents just wanted us out of the house for their own sanity; one snow day had been a cool and cuddly bonding affair for the entire family, but two in a row had the potential to “see us all checked in to the big red building next door.” So went the infamous Mooney household refrain in times of strife. There may even have been some comfort in the knowledge that professional help, should we really need it, was just a field away.

  I sensed a relaxed level of hustle and bustle as my siblings tended to their self-assigned missions for the day: brothers battling over the best shovel to tackle the driveway, sisters holed up in their rooms again, doing whatever they did in there.

  Dad had been picked up hours ago in the morning darkness by someone in a loud company truck, since there would still be a newspaper today, though it probably wouldn’t hit the now slushy streets till mid-afternoon.

  “Hey, Wish, do you know where all your snow stuff is to?” middle brother asked shit-disturbingly at the kitchen table, his eyes shifting from Mother to Father. I completely ignored the swipe and headed downstairs to suit up for a rendezvous with my own posse of shit disturbers who would’ve been assembling down in the field by now.

  The big brown furnace shut down on cue as I entered the outside basement, only to be greeted by a spray of snow blowing in through the open door that revealed our driveway. I immediately assumed—still against Cap’n Mike’s advice—that the patients were at it again.

  It could’ve easily been our fault, given the difficulty we had getting that door shut all the way through winter. I chipped and scraped until I got it closed, though.

  “Aloysius?” came the call from the top of the stairs.

  “Coming! Just had to clear away all the snow from the door,” I explained as I stamped my way up the stairs with exaggerated huffs and puffs.

  I was anticipating no acknowledgement, as usual, of how’d I’d just laboured to keep our family safe and warm and save on the heat bill.

  I was about to quote my favourite Latter Day Saints commercial when . . .

  “You got all your stuff and took care of the basement door—thank you, Wish,” said Mom.

  “Oh. Ah, you’re welcome.”

  Amazing how the sun kept the unexpected pleasantries coming, I thought.

  Wrapped up and ready to go, I set off for the field of schemes.

  Strangely, there seemed to be no one down there as I broke through the crest of a sun-softened snowdrift that ringed the big dogberry tree in our backyard. Tiny red specks littered the surface of the snow along with several broken branches, including the one that almost decapitated Dad.

  The terra firma was anything but as I repeatedly sank to my knees with every trudge. As hard as it was to slog through, all I could think was how perfectly sticky it was for snowballs.

  I grabbed a brittle branch to keep my balance as I rounded the tree and emerged into a clearing that gave me an unimpeded view of the entire field—one white blanket of landscape backdropped by the rusty red brick of the Mental.

  Sure enough, not a soul in sight.

  What to do.

  I pondered packing it in and heading back to the house. Or I could forge on, a la Hilary/Norgay, relishing the solitude and challenge of a trek across the vast tundra with hopes of reaching Bowring Park and finding friends on the other side. It was an easy call when one considered the complete lack of solitude that awaited back at the homestead.

  I carried on, managing to create a little momentum that would be interrupted by the occasional loss of a boot in the deep holes they were making.

  It took me almost twenty minutes to make it halfway across the field—territory that I normally covered in three. The romanticism and glory of an Everest-like conquest was quickly wearing thin.

  Those primitive old snowshoes forever stowed in our basement rafters would come in handy about now, I thought.

  And then, as if a greater power had decided to reward me for my effort, the next best thing appeared about ten feet ahead: snowmobile tracks, likely from the previous night, leading to the lower end of the field, the road, and the park. I could only hope they were still pressed firm enough to hold me.

  I pulled my legs out of the deep snow once more and crawled onto the narrow track as if it were a life-saving ice pan. A cloud of CO2 burst from my mouth straight up into the still air as I flopped onto my back. It had cooled off considerably as more clouds crowded the sky.

  I lay there for a while blowing “smoke,” mimicking my late grandmother as she would stylishly clasp her Benson and Hedges menthol cigarette made even longer by its sterling silver holder.

  Far beyond my little breath clouds, real ones rushed by at an artificially fast pace against the blue ceiling, almost like time-lapse.

  There was only one thing to do at a time like this: snow angels!

  I was about to fall backward and create my fifth imprint when I was hit square in the back by a big snowball, the impact instead knocking me forward to my knees.

  “Oh-ho-ho, what a shot!” middle brother shouted from about thirty feet away as I embellished my collapse with a face-plant.

  I stayed down, holding my breath for as long as I could to feign death. It bought me time to decide whether to writhe in pain and tell Mom or stick with the positivity theme and simply credit bro with a pretty deadly shot.

  Fact is, it hadn’t hurt at all, since the padding of my winter coat had absorbed most of the impact.

  Almost two full minutes passed before I could finally hear my brother approaching, his own boots compacting the snow as he bore down on his kill.

  When I thought he was close enough to startle, I flipped over and emitted a sharp: “Boo!”

  An intense rush of fear flooded my chest and head as I looked up at the completely unstartled figure towering over me, who was not my brother at all.

  8

  I can’t say my entire life flashed before my eyes at that moment, but all the highlights—and lowlights—flipped by as he raised a long stick in his hand like a javelin and stabbed it down into the snow a few feet left of my head.

  For just the second time in my life (excluding diapers) I peed in my pants—the first time being just the result of a child’s innocent procrastination.

  What the fuck?!

  That’s what I wished I’d said.

  “Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me,” I stammered instead, snow flying as extremities flailed in vain to escape in reverse.

  “Now, what makes you think I am going to hurt you?” he responded with perfect diction and a chilling calm that I assumed all psychopaths exuded before they finished off their victims.

  That was until we snuck in to see the new Halloween movie at the single, big theatre in the mall. He always walked, she always ran, yet he always caught up to her.

  I never slept for a month after that flick.

  Okay, a week. But the recurring nightmares got so bad that I had to come clean as to their genesis after one particularly realistic, cold-sweat-inducing episode that jarred the whole family awake.

  “It was just a movie,” my mother consoled at bedside. “One that you shouldn’t have been anywhere near, I might add.”

  “That stuff’s not real, Wish,” chimed sister #2.

  “Yeah, it’s not like we live right next to a mental hospital where some lunatic could just walk into our house and massacre everyone,” added my less-than-helpful middle brother.

  “Oh wait!” he added with an apparent ep
iphany. “Yes we do!”

  Cruel, but true.

  And somewhat prophetic, given the helpless situation I’d suddenly found myself in, on my back in the field. That untenable complacency had finally come home to roost.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” asked the big man standing over me.

  Easily six foot, I thought the vision of his multicoloured stocking cap and matching cable-wool sweater would be the last thing I ever saw.

  “I said, what . . . makes . . . you . . . think . . . I . . . am . . . going . . . to . . . hurt . . . you?” he repeated in robotic monotone.

  Oh, gee, I dunno. How about your sneak attack out of nowhere with a spear that you almost drove through my head?

  That’s what I wished I’d said.

  “I just live right there, ya know,” I cowardly replied, praying the proximity of my family might in some way postpone the imminent bludgeoning that would see my lone, carved-up carcass tossed aside like a gutted and skinned seal somewhere off Twillingate.

  “Oh, I know where you live,” he responded again, this time with disturbing giddiness.

  It wasn’t until that moment that the fog of fear lifted and familiarity kicked in.

  Of course he knew where I lived. I knew this man. I’d watched him circumnavigate the Mental Field pretty much every day for as long as I could remember, yet never said “boo” to.

  Until now, funnily enough.

  No question, I was scared pee-less as the famous “Flag Fag” stood over me.

  But at the same time I suddenly had this bizarre sense of being starstruck, that feeling of seeing in person someone you’d only ever seen on TV, or hundreds of times from afar. It was an odd congruence of emotions that still made we wanna run for the hills—but ask for his autograph first.

  He was still right there in my earliest memory, with the body, and the river, and the police and the ambulance . . . and the flag.