Homesick by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Author:Guy Vanderhaeghe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781551995670
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Published: 1989-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

The station had signed off the air and now the empty, flickering screen was bleeding a numb stain of blue light into the darkness of the living room. The sound of rain on the roof, the gurgle of drain pipes discharging water from their throats masked the faint electrical buzz of the television set but did not disturb the two sleepers in the room.

Tonight was professional wrestling, scheduled after the late-night roundup of local news, sports, and weather. Daniel and his grandfather never missed it. The old man egged on the villains in their treachery and pretended to dismiss any possibility of fakery, or the fix. “You can’t tell me that one of those flying leaps off a turnbuckle down onto a man lying defenceless doesn’t do damage,” he would argue.

Daniel, still blind to instances of his grandfather’s irony, would attempt to reason with him. The old man got a kick out of seeing him so serious. “But that’s exactly my point. Don’t you see what I’m getting at? If it wasn’t fixed, if it wasn’t acting, somebody would get killed.”

“Maybe an ordinary man would. But we’re not dealing with ordinary men here. We’re talking blond negroes. Now a blond negro has already defied one law of nature. No reason he can’t do it a second time and survive somebody leaping down on him off a turnbuckle.”

It was really only the sport of arguing that kept them awake, not the wrestling, and after what had happened earlier that evening neither of them had had their hearts in arguing. So they had fallen asleep. Stretched out on the chesterfield Daniel lay closest to the source of light emitted by the television screen. The wavering blue light gave him the face of a boy sunk senseless in six feet of water. Across the room his grandfather slumped in an armchair, dressed incongruously in striped grey flannel pyjamas, plaid carpet slippers, and his straw fedora.

Because he had worn the hat to the supper table there had been a dust-up with Vera. She had understood it as a provocation. That was the word she had used. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had simply forgot. He was still forgetting the hat even with them living in the house.

She had got on her high-horse, as only Vera could, and spoke of deliberate rudeness, his lack of consideration. He hadn’t had the slightest clue of what she was talking about when she started in on him. “All I ask is that we eat in a semi-civilized manner. You wear that goddamn dirty hat to the table as a provocation, don’t you? Admit it.”

“I don’t have nothing to admit.”

That had started the donnybrook. Hot-tempered as she’d always been, Vera flew off the handle after a couple of exchanges and made a snatch for the offending article, tried to pull off his hat. He had thrown up his arm and knocked her hand away. It was instinct.

“Keep your hands to yourself, girl,” he had warned her, with an old man’s angry dignity.

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