KEVIN: It may be safe to stand aside and let the tough ones take the ride / but if you watch and don’t join in, how can you ever hope to win?
-The Glass Flute, Scene v
Just because a guy has been accused of putting dog collars on his grandchildren and chaining them to the ground, it doesn’t mean that he goes directly to jail without passing Go. Yes, the kids were “taken into care,” as they say, that night, after the CAS worker got a look at the living conditions in Home Sweet Hell. They found the kids sleeping in cardboard boxes upstairs in the attic room, and Grandpa had of course denied everything. In spite of what Morrison had told me, no CAS worker had had a chance to visit the home since the “kidnapping” incident. The duty worker was swamped that day, Morrison told me later.
After George had made his statement, the police had picked up the social worker and taken her with them, out to the shack. The dwelling did not, apparently, score very high on the grading system provided in the new government book on Things You Can’t Do To Your Kids. The children, Tyler and Wade, were removed and placed somewhere safe, where presumably a qualified person would try to get a statement from them about the dog collar incident and anything else that might be relevant.
Grandpa, on the other hand, was not apprehended. The cops told us that we should get in touch with them the moment we heard the parents had returned. So now we had a solitary, very annoyed, evil neighbour living close by, probably carrying a pretty hefty grudge. I just hoped that the charges looming over his head would be enough to keep him from sneaking up on George and trying to exact some sort of revenge.
“I am not worried,” George said, but I don’t think he was telling the truth. He had aged drastically in the last couple of days and moved like an old man.
Grandpa next door was down to one dog. The Humane Society had been called in after they found the bodies of three dogs on a midden heap next to the outhouse. They had all been shot. For some reason, they had only taken three of the remaining four away. It seemed like a pretty miserable sentence for the one that was left, but the Humane Society works in mysterious ways. Anyway, that cut down on the noise considerably.
“I shall sleep well tonight, anyway,” George said. “Do you want to stay here? The bed in the little room has clean sheets.” I had gone up to the cabin earlier to get Luggy. I’d left him chained that morning, which I absolutely hate to do, but the dog situation next door made it the only option other than leaving him indoors. I planned on taking him to rehearsal with me from then on. George’s casual offer of a bed for the night was unusual. The only other time he had offered was in the fall, when a murderer had been on the loose in Cedar Falls, and he had been concerned for my safety. This time, I suspected, he was a tad concerned about his own well-being. I said I would stay, but I was due at Ruth’s place to help write Brad’s new song. George’s face took on an abandoned goat-kid look.
“Of course, she might like to come over here,” I said. “She hasn’t visited for a while.”
“I would like that,” George said.
“I’ll call her.”
On the phone with Ruth, I sketched out the situation as briefly as I could, and she said she was on her way. The best thing for George right then, we agreed, would be a bit of distraction. I could only imagine the nasty images that were floating around in his head. Some goofy music was just the thing. Ruth said she’d bring her portable keyboard.
The rest of the evening passed pleasantly. George didn’t contribute much to the song-writing process, but he sat contentedly in his chair, listening, with Poe perched on his shoulder and Luggy at his feet with his head on George’s knee. Often, when a human is in distress, animals know to move in and do the comforting thing. From time to time, Luggy licked George’s hand and Poe nibbled his ear. He fell asleep there.
“What do you think makes people pull that kind of shit on a kid?” Ruth said, quietly, after George had dozed off. We were working on the chorus of “Axe Me No Questions.”
“I think maybe the person who treats a child badly was treated that way themselves,” I said. “It’s the only way they know to make a child ‘behave’.”
“Slap it around and tie it up?”
“Well, this guy controls his dogs by doing that. Maybe for some people, dogs and children are similar creatures. And if they’ve had rough handling as a child themselves, they sometimes see it retrospectively as an effective method. You know, ‘My old man used to beat me to keep me in line, and it didn’t do me no harm,’ type of thing. It’s like the whole spanking issue.”
“Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Ruth said in a fire-and-brimstone voice.
“That’s it, although Pastor Garnet once told me that the word ‘rod’ in that quote was referring to a shepherd’s staff, used to guide the sheep in the right direction only, not beat them. A shepherd would never, ever clobber a lamb, he said. It would make it fear him.”
“Another Bible misquote, co-opted by the dinks,” Ruth said.
“Yup.”
“So, this song. What have we got so far?”
Ruth played a tinkling, ballad-like introduction on her keyboard, then launched into it.
A woodsman’s worth is measured
by the sharpness of his axe,
Without it, he’s a slacker,
just a hacker to the max,
but when your tools are handy
for the job there is to do,
You’re ready to work steady cutting wood
the whole day through.
I joined in the chorus.
My axe and I are friends who work together,
Through rain and snow and any kind of weather,
I keep his blade all shiny,
coz it sometimes gets all piney,
and I sharpen him because I know it’s wise.
Axe me no questions,
don’t need no suggestions,
Axe me no questions
and I’ll tell you no lies.
We still had a couple of verses to go, but the tune was catchy, and Ruth had added a wood-block percussion to the chorus that was perfect.
She left a little before ten. As George was snoring, I patted his shoulder softly to nudge him awake.
“Kaarina?” he mumbled in a frightened, child-like voice. That was the name of his long-departed wife. Mention of her was extremely rare. I would have given anything in that moment to have been able to whisper something reassuring in his ear in the Finnish language to ease his waking.
“It’s me, Polly,” I said. “You might as well go to bed, George. I’ll do the barn.” He thanked me gruffly and stumbled off to his room.
It didn’t take long to do the last chores of the day. The goats get milked and fed at seven in the evening, and though we were late getting back from the cop-shop, George had gone down immediately to deal with them. All I had to do was freshen their hay and water and dole out the evening treat, which was carrot bits and broccoli stems left over from our dinner preparations.
Luggy came with me and we both stopped for a wonderful moment on the path, gazing upwards. It was a crystal-clear night, the moon was nearly full and the peepers were beginning to compose tentative love songs. An owl hooted and passed overhead, searching for unwary mice. It was quiet enough to hear the air whistle through its wings, and the absence of barking was blissful.
I had tried to feel some empathy for the people next door. I had done my best, but I was kidding myself. The bad karma that I’d personally pumped out into the atmosphere about these folks was probably gathering like a storm cloud, ready to whack me in the behind sometime in my future. To be truthful, I was absolutely delighted about the shattering of whatever it was they called their household. I was glad of the peace and quiet.
The goats moaned their thanks for the treats and nosed them politely, but it was kind of late and they weren’t all that interested. I took a moment to pick up and cuddle the new kids, who were warm and sleepy and amenable to hugs, which they tend to struggle out of when they’re more alert.
After I got back to the house, I was wide awake. I poured a finger of George’s Glen-unpronounceable scotch and, borrowing his phone-jack, the way I’d been taught, plugged the laptop into the Internet.
“Look out, Web, I’m coming aboard,” I muttered and started looking for a chatline.
After about an hour, I understood how marriages could be destroyed by web-addiction. It was like walking into a huge masquerade party full of excited, uninhibited people. It wasn’t that the conversations online were interesting—most of them were deadly dull, but the potential for finding somebody fun to talk to was limitless. A typical chat room conversation goes like this:
HOTDOG: so where you from layla?
STUD MUFFIN:hey witch wanna whisper
LAYLA: Dayton, Ohio. You?
WEBWITCH: sure talk to me dirty big boy
POISON PEN HAS ENTERED THE CONVERSATION
HOTDOG: Hi Poison Pen
STUD MUFFIN:Hey PP
LAYLA: Hi poisons
POISON PEN: hi folks
(Webwitch and Stud Muffin have gone into private session, which can be engineered by clicking on a whisper icon on the screen. Nobody can see what they’re talking about. Nobody would want to, of course.)
HOTDOG: I’m from Australia.
POISON PEN: Anybody seen HARRY?
LAYLA HAS LEFT THE CONVERSATION
HOTDOG: bitch.
Not all of them are this bad, but most of them are. In spite of the subject or interest listed for each room, the form stays the same. You may be in a “book” chat room or a “pet lovers’ ” chat room, but a version of Stud Muffin, Webwitch and Hotdog will be in all of them, greeting each other inanely and brokering to talk dirty. Perhaps one of the reasons people spend so much time in chat rooms is that they are desperate to find a conversation that isn’t like all the others. It rarely happens.
After a couple of hours, I’d had enough. I’d used the predictable nickname Goatgirl and I’d exchanged greetings with Beer Baron from Florida, Beauty Queen from somewhere in Germany, and a masher from Vancouver calling him(her?)self Spyhole, with whom I whispered for a line or two, receiving some of the most improper suggestions I’ve ever heard in my life.
GOATGIRL (As they say) HAS LEFT THE CONVERSATION.
I had never been a TV person, and I’m not the type to spend long hours at a typewriter or word processor. What’s weird about the concept of sitting for a long time in front of a screen is that the real world completely disappears. As I left chat-room-land, I felt my mind shake itself like a wet dog and re-orient to the room I was in, physically. Lug-nut was lying at my feet, looking at me in a perplexed kind of way. Certainly, when I work on a puppet, I’m absorbed in what I’m doing, but I like to think I remain aware of sounds and vibrations (squirrels in the rafters, the state of the fire in the woodstove and so on). I realized that, while I was online, the Neighbour from Hell could have come in and set a fire in the kitchen and I wouldn’t have noticed a thing. (Well, Luggy would probably have commented, but you know what I mean.) Cyberspace takes you far, far away. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, but it might go some way towards explaining why people get hopelessly hooked on it. As a means of escape, it beats any drug I’ve ever tried.
Before logging off, I practised checking my e-mail, just as Sam had taught me. To my surprise, there were two messages. The first was from Juliet.
To: pdeacon@kuskawa.com
From: steamboat@kuskawa.com
Subject: Internet use
Dear Polly;
Congratulations on your inaugural visit to the world of e-mail. By now, you will have tried out the chatlines and perhaps surfed the Internet. I only hope that you were using a Bell-line telephone connection and not your cell-phone. Be warned: I pay for every minute of airtime that you spend on the cell. If you access the Net via your cell-phone, it’s more than a dollar a minute and it had better be for business purposes, or it comes out of your paycheque. I suggest you keep a log of your Internet use.
Juliet.
Considering that she gave me the infernal technology to begin with, I didn’t think her tone was quite fair. However, I was glad of the warning. My stomach felt quite queasy at the thought that, if I hadn’t been at George’s, I would have used the cell-connection without thinking, and I’d owe Juliet close to two hundred bucks for the privilege of being propositioned by Spyhole in Vancouver.
The next message was from Becker, of all people.
To: pdeacon@kuskawa.com
From: oppbeck@kuskawa.com
Subject: welcome to the real world
Dear Ms. Deacon;
My colleague tells me you’re online, so I got your address from your boss. Welcome to the real world. It’s about time you took advantage of modern technology instead of running away from it the way you do.
If anything comes up about Jason McMaster and you can’t get me by phone, you can leave a message for me at the above e-mail address. The investigation into his disappearance continues.
Sincerely,
Detective Constable Mark Becker, Laingford OPP
For three years I had been totally unreachable—no phone, no datebook, no commitments, no cash. Then, when employment struck like a ripe melon in the side of the head, I got wired so fast it felt like they’d implanted a microchip in my brain. Too much vulnerability, too quickly.
After Becker’s stupid dead body trick that morning, I had been planning to ignore him completely for the foreseeable future. I had given him courtesy at the Laingford cop-shop over the George/Hell Neighbour affair, but nothing more. Now, for some reason, he was sending me e-mail, and my gut reaction was, annoyingly, to be very pleased.
I have heard that e-mail communication has prompted a renaissance in letter writing. What I discovered during my affair with a laptop was that e-mailing is not letter-writing at all. It’s e-mailing. Letters require a legible hand, more than thirty seconds of thought, and the act of licking a stamp. E-mail is only one step away from blithering on the chat-lines. There is an inherent pressure, when the machine is humming and the online time’s a ticking, to answer quickly. I discovered that what you type in an e-mail message can be sent without sober second thought. All it takes is the momentary downward pressure of one finger.
I drafted a couple of replies to Becker’s e-mail, therefore, on a piece of paper before I typed and sent one.
To: oppbeck@kuskawa.com
From: pdeacon@kuskawa.com
Subject: You’re welcome to the real world
Dear Detective Constable Becker;
Thanks for your note. This computer was thrust upon me for work-reasons, and while it would give me no greater pleasure than to establish an e-mail correspondence with you, I can’t afford to pay for it. Perhaps, as my employer was kind enough to give you my e-mail address, she might also be approachable about the matter of remuneration for the time online.
I have made some progress in my investigation into the disappearance of Jason McMaster, but it’s all flaky, Luddite stuff that you wouldn’t think was important. Let me know when you find his body.
Cordially,
Polly Deacon.