Rafael has pretty eyes, p.1
Rafael Has Pretty Eyes, page 1
“This new collection of stories by Elaine McCluskey showcases her ferocious talent. No other writer in Canada is as funny, rigorously original, or as sharply observant about what makes people, particularly marginal people, tick. Whether she’s writing from the perspective of a comfort dog or a has-been radio host, McCluskey manages to shock the reader into an awareness of just how precarious our hold on respectability and security is.” — Susan Juby, author of Republic of Dirt
“These stories kill me! They are so good, so funny, so raw, so tender, so bittersweet, so devastating, so complicated and beautiful. I’m dead. Dead with writer envy.” — Morgan Murray, author of Dirty Birds
“Elaine McCluskey’s characters leap to life, rendered in the kind of rich, vivid detail that makes you certain you’ve met them somewhere before. Rafael Has Pretty Eyes invites readers to revel in the stories of these artfully crafted characters and to feel every flash of sudden wonder or quiet sorrow. Once you’ve been drawn into McCluskey’s ever-alluring world of words, you won’t want to leave.” — Amy Spurway, author of Crow
Also by ELAINE McCLUSKEY
The Most Heartless Town in Canada
Hello, Sweetheart
Valery the Great
Going Fast
The Watermelon Social
Rafael has
pretty eyes
ELAINE McCLUSKEY
Goose Lane Editions
Copyright © 2022 by Elaine McCluskey.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Bethany Gibson.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover image: ‘imaged-fervour’ O, copyright © 2017, by Julie Whitenect, mixed media silkscreen on paper, 9 × 12 in., juliewhitenect.com
Printed in Canada by Friesens.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Rafael has pretty eyes / Elaine McCluskey.
Names: McCluskey, Elaine, 1955- author.
Description: Short stories.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210288698 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210288736 | ISBN 9781773101637 (softcover) | ISBN 9781773101644 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8625.C59 R34 2022 | DDC C813/.6—dc23
Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
gooselane.com
To the front-line workers who took care of us.
“Life is just one extended series of anecdotes strung together until they kill you.”
Contents
It’s Never What You Think It Will Be
It’s Your Money
Hope
Let It Go
Little Green Men
Skunk Boy
Is That All You Got?
What’s It Like?
The Gates of Heaven
Rafael Has Pretty Eyes
We Were Lucky
The Rakin Bus
It Will Happen
Dirty Little Lair
Would You Recommend Us?
Remember
Gábor
It’s Never What You Think It Will Be
I am at a Toast ’n’ Roast for my mother’s fourth husband, Wayne. Wayne, of course, is a dud. Who else do you get on the fourth attempt: Idris Elba? I brought my roommate, Cedric, because I like having backup when dealing with my mother, the master of the emotional ambush. You never know when you arrive at a sushi bar for your thirtieth birthday if your new stepfather will be there holding a foil balloon. You never know if his name will be Scuffy or Dwayne.
The roast is at a Lions Club hall with shaky ceiling tiles and twenty tables dressed up like they are going someplace special. On the tables are programs, each with a photo of Wayne wearing the smug face of a reality TV polygamist. Outside it is winter in Canada and cold as hell.
“Imagine you lived someplace hot,” says Cedric as we locate our table: unlucky #17. “Say, Mérida. And every day you could just get up, put on a T-shirt and live.”
“Sounds sick,” I admit, buying in.
“Is that what makes a Canadian,” Cedric asks, “the ever-present fear of perishing?” He gives me that look, the one that tells me we are leaving the here and now. We are strapping on our what-if wings, and we could, if we tried hard enough, be MMA fighters or berserkers. We could be heroes. “Is that why we high-five each other when one of us defies those fears, when one of us does something batshit crazy like the dude in Alberta who decided to fight a cougar bare-handed to save his dog?”
“A cougar.” I am impressed.
“Outside a Tims.”
“I guess I’ll just put down my double double and fight a two-hundred-pound wildcat known to kill animals four times its size. A predator that can jump twenty feet. I’ll just fight him.”
“Because I love my dog.”
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”
“I had a girl and I thought she loved me but she didn’t,” says Cedric.
“How’d you know?”
“She slept with my brother.”
“I had a girlfriend who only dated me because I owned a Newfoundland dog.”
And then we both stare at the head table and I get that feeling — the one that convinces me that life is one inside joke after another and that people fall into two categories: the people who believe Trailer Park Boys is real and the ones who don’t, and I no longer know where I fit because last night I saw Bubbles driving a Maserati Quattroporte with smoked windows on the Waverley Road in Dartmouth and it seemed quite normal to me. It seemed as normal as anything I am doing on this particular fucked-up day.
How bad can it be? I think. This day? A day roughly one-third through my expected life — a life that has been both shitty and amazing. How bad can it be?
The Lions hall seems harmless enough. Located in a modest area of squat vinyl houses and small businesses. Massage therapists and barbers. Marquee signs with changeable letters arranged into pithy messages: Getting You Where It Hurts and PHD on Duty: Professional Hair Dresser.
It took us twenty minutes to get here. Driving from downtown Dartmouth, where Cedric and I rent a three-bedroom flat in a two-storey house near a lake and a duck pond. It’s a quiet enough area. Two blocks away is a group home for troubled youths — we call it The Escape Room. Some of the kids are okay and some are messed up on hard shit like heroin, and every couple of weeks we see cop cars and a group-home supervisor pointing up the sidewalk. Someone has escaped.
Our apartment is sweet, though, with a huge back deck and a BBQ. Trees all around us. Cedric calls it our Enchanted Forest. An older woman named Vera, who does eyelash extensions, lives downstairs. The tenants before us moved after twenty years when the outside stairs became too much.
When my Newfoundland dog turned three, he developed hip dysplasia, and I had to carry him up twenty-eight steps, a one-hundred-and-forty-pound dog that slobbered. I’ve done worse things in my life. At the time, I had a girlfriend named Lexi and she decorated the steps with white lights from Costco, and we drank craft beer until the stars came out. And none of it was real.
For a week I’ve been hearing squirrels in the attic, but Cedric says they aren’t real either. It has become a thing between us: what is real and what isn’t. I say, “We should do something about it,” and Cedric says, “It’s your imagination,” and I say, “Squirrels will chew up your wiring,” and he says, “That’s an urban myth.”
Two worn-out guitarists are providing background noise before the speeches start — Musical Entertainment by Road Weary, according to the program. One is wearing a fringed brown leather vest and an Oasis hairdo. Strumming “Take It Easy.” They are the kind of guys who get murdered in a boarding house. The parties were known to each other. I admire their tenacity; I admire the fact that they are both half-cut and will, by the end of the night, be hammered.
“Hi, Michael. Hi, Cedric.”
“Hi, Mom.”
You told me that my sister would be here, but she isn’t.
“Hello, Mrs. Sparling.”
“It’s Spinney, Cedric. Spinney.”
My mother had taken the long route from the head table, to the very back where Cedric and I are seated with six strangers. It took her a while to find us. Table 17 is next to the washroom door, which keeps opening and closing. Old men keep coming out, still wiping their hands.
My mother is smiling but not looking at me or Cedric. She is scanning the room, seeing who might have noticed her in a sharp black dress, her hair just so. My mother sells real estate. In the summer she wears those sporty skirts with sleeveless golf shirts, a hat to keep the sun off her face.
I am here only as proof that my mother is not a failure, that four marriages were not a bad thing because “look how Michael turned out. He is an accountant, and that’s his friend Cedric” — she glances at Cedric to make sure he is dressed “appropriately.” He is, in a blue sports jacket and mustard-coloured straight-legged pants. I’m in a smar
“Isn’t it nice,” she asks, “for Wayne?”
Ever since my mother married Wayne, she has been trying to convince me what an upgrade he is from Dwayne. Five-foot-four Dwayne was a plumbing contractor who drove a black behemoth decked out with chrome. Number Two, Blaine, was a retired helicopter pilot who had worked in Saudi Arabia and had hired five sex workers for his fiftieth birthday. I know all of this because my mother told me.
My mother has returned to the head table with Wayne, who wears a red boutonniere on his lapel. Wayne owns a cottage on the ocean, a party boat. He used to be in politics. The roast is supposed to be honouring him, but that, we have discovered, is a front. It is really a fundraiser for the elected Member of Parliament and his name is on the posters above Wayne’s, thereby affiliating me and Cedric with a party we did not choose to be affiliated with.
The MP wears a one-way smile. He is that that guy. The guy who goes to funerals to be admired, who takes his son to dinner on his birthday and abandons him to work the room.
“Maybe we should go to Mexico,” says Cedric.
“What about the book?” I ask.
“It will get done,” he says in a tone I recognize. “It’s under control.”
Sure.
Cedric is a ridiculously talented artist. He is also bipolar. Sometimes Cedric decides to do sick things and I go along with him, thinking I am being a good friend. And then — after a $600 flight to LA to watch the turtle races at Brennan’s Pub — he becomes depressed. The turtles, he decides, were boring. What we really should have done, he says, was to have saved our money and gone to Tokyo to see Doglegs, an outlaw pro-wrestling league, where the disabled fight the able-bodied because they aren’t afraid of getting hurt — they have passed that point in life and are fighting in another dimension, and there is no reality, there is no script. That’s what we should have done.
Cedric is supposed to be illustrating a children’s book about a boy named Abdul, but he is painting watercolours of waves. When the editor calls, he tells her, “I am at my easel as we speak.” After weeks of urgent emails, he agreed to meet her at Starbucks and deliver the Abdul art. He talked about waves. She told him she had bad luck with men. She was wearing a cute T-shirt that said Be the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are. They both laughed, and she left empty-handed.
The speeches have started and one of the roasters is telling jokes about Wayne’s recent marriage.
“Why do men die before their wives?”
“Because they want to.”
My mother should be embarrassed but she isn’t.
There is a theory by a scientist named Dunbar who studied monkeys and it goes like this. Humans can really only have one hundred and fifty friends. Within that circle are ascending circles of intimacy: fifty people you could call “close,” fifteen you could turn to for sympathy, and only five, just five, who are there no matter what, and some of those are family. How wrong can a theory based on monkeys be?
Most of the people in the room are what they euphemistically call “party workers.” Smiling, glad-handing, jockeying for an appointment or a job. The vibe is so peculiar, so forced, that you feel like it is a cover and something shady is happening in the back room, and if you opened a door, you’d find a Breaking Bad meth lab or someone being baptized against their will.
These are the people who dress in party colours at conventions and jostle to have their picture taken with The Leader. They come in wheelchairs and straw hats. They bring the most frightening teenagers you will ever meet: Young Liberals, Young Conservatives, Young Henchmen and Data Miners of Tomorrow. This is them.
The family seated at table 1 exists only as proof that nobody gets everything in life — they are all doctors and lawyers, but they are profoundly unattractive, with huge brainiac heads shaped like marshmallows and W.C. Fields noses, mouths that flap open, exposing teeth covered with spittle.
The bar is the only thing real here, the only thing I like. It looks like any Lions Club bar on a Saturday night, with a man named Billy pouring five-dollar beers into brittle plastic glasses. Billy is wearing a white shirt he slept in. He has a wine glass for tips. He drives a 2002 Mercury Grand Marquis. He owns an aluminum boat for duck hunting.
“Do you think it can snow any more this year?” asks Cedric.
“It can always snow.”
I don’t mind the winters as much as Cedric. I’m a winter surfer, which is why I live in Dartmouth, a hop to Lawrencetown Beach near where I am going to build a house someday. I am used to strapping on stuff — a wetsuit and booties — in sub-zero temperatures, changing outside my car while my nuts freeze off. If I had my wits about me, I’d be home right now, looking at house plans. Five minutes after I agreed to this, I knew that it was one of those decisions that you impulsively, magnanimously make, telling yourself that you have been paranoid, too suspicious, in the past. And then it blows up in your face.
“Number 17,” I tell Cedric. “You know what that means?”
“Bad luck if you are Italian?”
“It basically means, ‘your life is over,’ which could be true, or ‘you are screwed,’ which could also be true.”
Cedric shrugs. “Story of my life.”
The meal is a rip-off for the one hundred dollars they are charging — frozen supermarket chicken cordon bleu with a scoop of lukewarm potatoes and beat-to-death carrots. Would it have killed them to have sprung for a little gravy? I am actually embarrassed for the server, a friendly woman in her eighties.
There is one free glass of wine and I get Cedric’s because he doesn’t drink. When his meds aren’t working right, he gets confused. Yesterday he convinced himself that he had left half a pizza in the fridge and the next morning it was gone. That and a litre of Coke. “Do you think the squirrels ate it?” I joked, but it wasn’t a good joke, it wasn’t a funny joke because he was confused.
Tonight Cedric has brought his Fujifilm X100F, which is small and sneaky as a squirrel. He is slyly shooting everything from a low angle, with close-ups of people throwing back their heads and garishly laughing. Wild cutaways to Road Weary, a tragicomedic duo. Cedric does that eye-lock thing with me that he does, that please-just-go-along-with-this look, equal parts conspiracy and begging.
Go ahead, I think. Why would I care?
Cedric collects scenes from all over the place and later decides what to do with them. Sometimes they end up in surreal shorts he posts online. One day Cedric came home with a guy he had filmed outside a bar: a weird old dude in full disco garb. A big disco hat, shiny platform bedazzled shoes, and LED light-up thingies on his fingers. On the video, the Disco Dude was staring into the camera and talking politics.
“Have you ever actually met a fascist?” asked Disco Dude. “I did, thirty years ago in Sydney Mines, and he was not what you would imagine. Yes, he was a fanatic, but he had the loveliest singing voice you have ever heard. He could — with three notes — make you cry.”
The next roaster is a former politician.
Ten years ago, he was charged with sexual assault. He was acquitted after the party went to the victim’s house with a cheque or a threat, depends on who you talk to. The rapist has a slide show: Wayne in a sombrero. Wayne being hit on the rear with a broom. Wayne dressed like Minnie Pearl. I can feel the smarm creeping into the room — a low-hanging fog that becomes progressively denser until all of our clothes are soaked with something that is neither rain nor snow.
Cedric and I went to a wax museum in California. We posed with Mike Tyson and it was uncanny valley. The figures were all so lifelike, so close to human, that they creeped us out, they made us think of death and question what it takes to be real. It’s the same eerie feeling here — the roasters almost seem human.
Oh shit. One of the men at our table is choking on a piece of chicken gristle; he has covered his mouth with his napkin and his eyes are getting wider and wider.… Now his face is red. Oh nooooo. I am almost ready to get up and help him, when June, our octogenarian server, punches him crazy hard in the throat. Thank you, June.
