Jones by Neil Smith

Author:Neil Smith [Smith, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2022-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

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His throat is parched. Eli didn’t get his glass of juice before having to flee the Godfather’s flat. He can’t go to a Perrette’s since, at four in the morning, they’re all closed. Under a lamppost, in front of the Chez Andrée beauty salon on Wellington, he reaches into the pocket of his white jeans to double-check that he’s brought along the spare key to Nanny’s flat. He feels a scrap of paper and fishes it out: the address and phone number Three Dollar tucked into his pocket. The address isn’t too far away. If he goes to that flat and gives Three Dollar a blowjob, will he hate himself even more? Maybe it can be an act of revenge against all the Joneses: Pal, Joy, the Godfather, Caroline, even Abi. See what you’ve turned me into. See how repulsive I’ve become.

Instead of Three Dollar’s flat, he heads through the night to Nanny’s. On the way, he glimpses a few ragged homeless men lying on flattened cardboard boxes in the doorways of shops. Yet another Jones, he thinks each time, using Abi’s name for all street people. He also thinks, with such nostalgia that his eyes well up, about the cardboard Manhattan.

When he arrives in front of Nanny’s building, he spots a dark figure coming down Riverview from the opposite direction. A figure doing a marionette walk. Eli waits in a fuzzy oval of light cast by a lamppost till Pal gets close enough on the sidewalk to recognize him.

“Boy! I’m so glad to see you.”

He doesn’t ask why his son is out in the street at such an ungodly hour.

Three sheets, Eli gauges. If he wanted to kill his father, this would be the perfect time. No witnesses. Pal too drunk to put up a fight. Too bad Eli doesn’t have a gun, a brick, a stocking to strangle him with.

But the fight has gone out of Eli too. “Need help getting upstairs?” he asks.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Pal says playfully. He tries lifting a foot to the first step but stumbles.

Eli grabs him, holds him up. His father and he are now the same height, six feet tall, though Pal probably weighs a good twenty pounds more. Pal drapes an arm around Eli’s shoulder, and Eli swings an arm around his father’s waist. Soldiers in Korea, Eli thinks. One soldier helping a wounded buddy off the battlefield.

Out of Pal’s pores wafts a stench of booze. Eli takes shallow breaths. Together, they hobble up the steps to the porch. Eli recalls the time when he was five and Pal carried him around at bedtime to say goodnight to the Formica table, the La-Z-Boy recliner, the hi-fi console.

On the porch, Pal leans heavily against the downstairs neighbor’s front door while Eli digs his hands into his pocket and gets out the key to Nanny’s flat. Luckily, Joy has left the outdoor light on and he can see the keyhole. After he swings Nanny’s door open, he turns to his father.

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