The place was derelict, which didn’t surprise Peter in the least. Missing strips of siding, cracked windows, sagging gutters. He avoided crumbling potholes as he pulled into the drive. At least there was a nice maple out front.
“What do you think of that tree, partner? I bet you can’t wait to climb it.”
“Does this place have furniture, or do we have to sleep on the floor again?”
Peter loved his son with all his heart, but Christ could he be a guilt monger. He supposed all kids were, to some degree. Practice for when they grew up. Max was referring to their last rental, which had been falsely advertised as fully furnished. They had lived like squatters there for a few months.
“Of course it does,” Peter said, pointing at the back of a rose-coloured couch visible through the front window. “Why you gotta be like that, bud?”
He was hoping the inside would be more promising. No such luck. Old water marks pocked the ceiling. The linoleum floors were badly torn. The appliances were rusty, the furniture stained. Someone had tried to clean, leaving the place smelling like Lysol and must.
“The bedroom is full of junk,” Max said, sounding genuinely alarmed. “Where are we gonna sleep?”
Peter, who had been examining a suspect water stain on the floor, said: “Just relax. The landlord told me he’s using that room for storage for the next few weeks. He said there’s a hide-a-bed. Check the couch.”
Max threw the couch cushions aside and pulled the strap. A bed of sorts slopped forward. The mattress looked worn but clean.
“Can I try the TV?”
“You can. Don’t get your hopes up, though.”
The huge cabinet television set sat hunched in the corner, a line of desiccated plants in small terracotta pots decorating its dusty topside. Max pressed the power button (no remote in sight), but it showed no signs of life.
Peter wanted to give his son a more stable existence. He was trying his best. Max’s mom had just up and disappeared after the divorce, certainly shittier than anything he’d done. Or was it? Maybe dragging Max from town to town like this was worse. Maybe if Peter had thrown in the towel as well, Max would be living with a better family by now.
The sun was fading, so Peter flipped a light switch. Nothing happened.
“Guess they haven’t hooked the power up. Let’s just go to sleep.”
“I guess.”
Outside, Peter rummaged through the back of their rusty Datsun for the bedding while Max stood with his hands shoved in his pockets. Their breath formed foggy speech bubbles in the brisk October air, as if the two were carrying on a subliminal conversation in silence.
“I’m hungry,” Max said.
Peter closed his eyes. Max was ten — old enough, he thought, to appreciate that they had no food and only fifty dollars to their name. Besides, it was almost eleven o’clock. In a small Saskatchewan town, everything was closed by ten.
“Gotta wait ‘til morning, bud.”
Digging by the glow of a small flashlight, Peter found the bedding. He handed it to Max. Before climbing out, he lifted the floor flap. There, beside the spare tire, was a black plastic container roughly the size of a lunch box. Inside were a Glock 47 and some bullets that he’d purchased back in his old life. Marla had wanted him to get rid of it, but now he was glad he hadn’t. He wasn’t sure how crazy things would get for him and Max, he only knew that the thought of not being able to protect his son terrified him. Max didn’t know about the gun, and Peter planned to keep it that way for as long as possible. They wouldn’t need it tonight, at any rate. Not here.
They went in and settled for the night. It was cozy enough; nothing wrong with the furnace.
Before falling asleep, Max asked: “Does Mom know we’re here?”
Peter closed his eyes again. He’d told Max that he gave Marla their address whenever they moved, just in case she wanted to visit or send correspondence. Fat chance of that, though, since he had no clue where she was.
“Of course she does,” he said, before rolling over and closing his eyes.
Peter started awake to a dull beat on the side of the house, grabbed his flashlight, shone it on the wall clock. Nearly three. He slipped his pants on, peered out the window.
A young boy stood under the big maple, his bicycle against the trunk. He looked to be about Max’s age only bigger, bordering on obese. He picked a baseball off the ground and chucked it at the side of the house. Bang.
“Stop that!” Peter shouted. When the kid turned, Peter saw a small nose, a thin line of a mouth, close-set eyes like raisins floating in oatmeal.
“What?”
“Stop hitting the house!”
“Who are you?”
“Never mind who I am. I live here now. Just moved in.”
“Well, my dad owns this place.”
The kid threw the ball again. Bang.
From behind him, Max asked, “What’s happening, Dad?”
“Stay put,” Peter said, and headed downstairs.
Out on the lawn, he said: “Listen, I don’t care that you’re the owner’s son. I’m renting here and I’m trying to sleep. Why aren’t you at home? It’s the middle of the night.”
“You need to come with me,” the kid said, his belly fat wobbling under a shirt sporting an image of Popeye the Sailor Man gobbling a can of spinach.
“I’m not going anywhere. First off, I have my son with me.”
“He can’t come. Just you.”
Astonished, Peter chuckled. “Kid, I’m not going anywhere with you.”
The kid studied the house’s front window, stepped closer to Peter, and pulled something dark out of his back pocket.
Peter felt like he might faint. It was a gun. Impossibly, it was his gun; he knew this from the scratches on the side of the stock.
Now it was his turn to scan the front window. Max stood there staring out. Peter was pretty sure he couldn’t see the gun.
“Deal with your son,” the kid said. “Then let’s go.”
They’d known he was going to lose his job. He’d already started looking for something else by the time it happened, and he’d even gotten a few offers. In an alternate universe, where he wasn’t such a fuck-up, everything might have worked out fine.
Dale had always been an asshole. One day he quietly dropped a pink slip into Peter’s lap in the middle of the crowded lunchroom. Peter could have taken it in stride. He could have said a little something before walking out, just to make himself feel better. Instead, he had knocked Dale to the ground and pummeled his face.
All doors slammed shut after that — job leads evaporated, Dale sued for assault and won the entirety of his and Marla’s life savings, and a few months later Marla disappeared with a mystery man she’d met online. The courts awarded Peter full custody of Max in her absence.
These unsettling old memories wandered through Peter’s mind as he followed the bobbing circle of the pudgy kid’s flashlight through the dark.
“To the left there,” the kid said, forcing his bike through the knee-deep grass, keeping the bobbing gun pointed in Peter’s general direction.
They climbed a short fence into an overgrown yard with a rusty swing set in one corner. They went through a screen door into a dilapidated kitchen. Clearly there wasn’t any electricity here either, because the place was lit by a Coleman lantern sitting on a counter, which gave the room an eerie glow.
A middle-aged man – clearly the kid’s biological father — sat at the table. He was thick, though not as chubby as his son. He wore a grey business suit. Given the hour and the location, he couldn’t have looked more out of place if he were dressed as a clown.
“Where is Marla?” Peter asked. He’d already concluded Marla was behind all this. Nothing else made sense. Nobody else knew about the Datsun’s broken hatch lock. Nobody else knew where he kept his gun case or the combination to open it.
Marla walked into the room dressed in jeans and a brown fall jacket that Peter recognized. She stepped behind the man at the table, laid her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes gleamed. She was afraid, Peter thought. Of what, he wasn’t sure.
“Introductions are in order,” the man said. “I’m Ronald, and this is my son Price,” He pointed at the chubby kid now leaning against the wall to Peter’s right.
“I’m going to have you all arrested for assault,” Peter said.
Ronald laughed. “I don’t think so. I own this town. That may sound cliché, but it’s true. You’re in one of my rental houses right now, and your son is in another. I also own the lumber yard you’ve come here to work for.”
“What do you want?”
“Not what I want. What Marla wants. Marla wants custody of Max. She’s willing to give you supervised visits.”
“Are you insane? She disappeared over a year and a half ago. She doesn’t deserve custody. And you send your son to threaten me with a gun? Why in God’s name would you do that? Why not just take me to court?”
“Because Marla thinks you might hurt Max if we don’t handle this quickly and discretely.”
A cold rage eclipsed Peter. He wanted to hurt Marla and her boyfriend badly, maim them, permanently scar them for thinking for one second they were better than him. He wasn’t the bad guy here. He had taken care of Max all this time. Had he hit his son? Sure, a few times. Always with an open hand, always justified, never out of control. He’d hit Marla too, but she had deserved it every time; she could be a manipulating bitch. She had paid him back a thousand-fold by abandoning him.
“Marla,” he said slowly. “Max is safe with me. You have to know that.”
“I’m sorry,” Marla said. Her voice was like a small pebble breaching the surface of a pond.
“I have someone picking Max up right now,” Ronald said. “Walk away and the job is still yours, as is the house. Marla will be very generous with visits.”
“And what if I don’t agree?”
Ronald lifted his hands from his lap. In his right hand he held a pistol with a long silencer on the end. A definitive answer.
“How would you explain my disappearance to Max?”
“We would tell him you left. That you thought it was for the best.”
Dammit, that might work. Max was his mother’s child, always had been. If Marla hadn’t disappeared, Max would have fought with everything he had to stay with her.
“Marla,” Peter said. “Is Ronald here a good guy? Will he look after Max?”
She still looked troubled in a way he didn’t trust, but she nodded, so he threw himself into Price, bouncing the kid hard off the wall. Price grunted and dropped the gun. Peter swept it up and aimed it at Ronald before the man had time to turn in his chair.
He pulled the trigger.
“Go with Price, honey,” Marla said. She ran a hand through her son’s hair. “He’s been going to school here since kindergarten. He can introduce you to everyone.”
They were on the sidewalk. Ronald sat in the driver’s seat of the Land Rover, sunglasses obscuring his face. Price was on the school steps with his friends. The bell sounded, and Price bounded over and threw an arm around Max.
“Let’s go, buddy,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”
Max started to follow. He turned.
“Dad really said he would be back?”
“Yes, sweetie.”
“Alright.” He gave her a quick hug and headed into the school with Price.
Marla climbed into the Rover. Like a shocked bystander, her mind wouldn’t stop obsessing, picking over the facts. Peter’s gun had been empty. Ronald had told her he was only going to scare Peter but his gun had been loaded. She had argued with Ronald about sending Price. Ronald’s plan hadn’t surprised her, as outrageous as it was. He thought like a child, like he was some sort of movie hero, and he projected as much on his son. That dangerous abandon had driven the attraction at first, before she knew how deep it went.
Why wasn’t Price more shaken up about what happened? What sort of kid was so relaxed the day after witnessing a murder? Was she wrong to leave Max with him? What choice did she have?
“You have to trust me,” Ronald said in a gentle voice. He placed a hand on her thigh. “Max is going to be fine, you’ll see. But he can’t ever know what really happened.”
She wanted to scream. But she’d committed to this, hadn’t she? Yes, she had. Happily. And now she was a cog in this enormous and terrible machine, and if anything slipped they would all be torn apart.
Ronald took her by the chin and forced her to look at him.
“I’m never going to say anything, and neither is Price. I need you to convince me that you won’t either, and that you won’t ever tell Max.”
“You give Max a stable home,” she said, “and I won’t say anything. I won’t tell him. But if you ever hurt him I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
Ronald nodded thoughtfully. He was a natural negotiator.
“Agreed,” he said. He let her go and pulled the Rover away from the curb.
Max found a seat beside Price in home room. They were going to live together, at least for now, so he would have to get used to him. Price held one chubby fist in the air and Max bumped it.
The teacher walked in. She was thin and pretty, with shiny black hair that fell to her waist. “Settle, everyone,” she said, but nobody listened, so she stood stoically at the front until the class calmed down.
“I’m told we have someone new in class,” she said. She smiled at Max. “I’m Mrs. Hanover. Would you like to stand up and introduce yourself?”
Max stood. “Hi everyone. I’m Max Tremblay.”
“Where are you from, Max?”
“Calgary. I came here with my dad…”
“He’s a Gauthier now,” Price said abruptly, popping to his feet. “We’re step-brothers now.”
Mrs. Hanover smiled and said, “Price, please sit down.” She turned back to Max. “Welcome to Longdale, Max. We’re all looking forward to getting to know you better. You may sit down.” Max sat.
Mrs. Hanover retrieved a textbook from her desk. “Okay, everyone, let’s go over yesterday’s homework assignment.”
While the class reviewed their homework, Max daydreamed. He’d been terrified the night before when Dad left. Two strangers had shown up, knocked, and when Max had refused to answer, they’d pushed a letter under the door. It was from Mom, in her handwriting. It said that Dad had left him with her. That he couldn’t be the father he wanted to be, and maybe that would change in time, but for now this was for the best. It said he should go with the men at the door.
Max had always kept his emotions tucked away like clothes in a drawer, but he’d cried when he’d seen Mom, clung to her as if she were an anchor preventing him from drifting away. She lived in a mansion now, surrounded by a perfect lawn and an enormous wrap-around garden that looked like a fresh haircut. Price had given him the grand tour: indoor swimming pool; outdoor basketball court; Price’s room, which they now shared, filled with a rainbow of ultra-expensive toys. It had overwhelmed him. He’d felt vaguely embarrassed that hours earlier he’d been trying to work an ancient television set in a decrepit shack.
“Max,” Mrs. Hanover said, startling him. “You can open your books now. We’re starting on the new material.”
He opened his coil binder.
His mother had never abandoned him. She had merely gone exploring, discovered a new world, and come back for him. She didn’t love Ronald, that much he could tell from the way she looked at him, how she stood apart from him. She was going to leave Ronald and get back with Dad, it was only a matter of time. Then the three of them would have a better life because Mom would put a stop to broken-down houses with dripping ceilings and moldy-smelling furniture.
“Max?” Mrs. Hanover was staring at him expectantly. Had she asked him something?
“Sorry,” he said lamely. The class laughed. Mrs. Hanover shot him a strict look mixed with a smile.
“You’re new, so I’ll cut you some slack, Max. But after today I need you to pay attention, alright?”
“Yes, Mrs. Hanover.”
The bell rang. As kids streamed out of the room, Price called Max over to meet some of his friends. They were three boys, obviously eager to meet any friend of Price’s. One of them invited Max to his birthday party that Saturday. Another one told him how funny it was that he wasn’t listening to Mrs. Hanover.
Max nodded and smiled. None of it mattered. He wasn’t going to be there long.
THE END