Mean Boy by Lynn Coady Page B

him. Back before I knew what he was capable of.”
    “What was he capable of?”
    Dekker starts to answer with a grin, but Jim gets there first, reaching toward the centre of the room for the whisky bottle. “Bad faith. Bad poetry.”
    “Come on now, Jim,” says Dekker.
    “You come on, Bryant.”
    “Your review of
Malignant Cove
was great,” I say, because it seems as if Jim needs cheering all of a sudden. “Did I tell you that already?”
    He whirls on me. “My review was
honest
—that was my purpose in writing it. It was a reaction precisely against the mincing, rubber-spined pabulum someone like Schofield is spewing from his professor’s chair at York or wherever the hell he is.”
    Todd, whose chin has been bobbing around on his chest for the past half hour or so, manages to hoist his head upright at this.
    “Malignant Cove is in Nova Scotia,” he slobbers, the slack of his mouth kind of reminding me of Janet, ten years old and immersed in her Barbie pornography. “Is he from Nova Scotia?”
    “It doesn’t matter where he’s from anymore,” instructs Jim. “He’s cast his lot with the cynics and whores of Upper Canada.”
    “He sounds like an asshole!” I enthuse. This wins me a grim nod from Jim.
    “Malignant Cove is a real place?” says Dekker, leaning toward Todd.
    “Yeah—a place. It’s about like it sounds,” Todd slurs into his chest.
    Dekker shakes his head again. He’s been doing that a lot this evening. “This is a fascinating part of the country,” he says, leaning back in Jim’s rocking chair with a tight, pleased smile on his black-stubbled face. I wonder where the hell he’s from anyway.
    I’m happy to note that every time Todd or Dekker disappears into the kitchen on his way to the bathroom, a round of frenzied barking ensues. It wasn’t something about me personally that maddened Jim’s dog. Chuck Slaughter would seem to be lacking a bladder—he hasn’t budged all night. Maybe all the piss has been steadily trickling out of him throughout the evening, soaking Jim’s armchair. My grandfather Humphries was like that near the end. Maybe that’s why Slaughter never stands up.
    The dog’s name, I’ve determined from Moira’s kitchen-ward shouts of reproach and instruction, is Panda. Jimnamed it Pan originally, but Moira tells me she thought it was stupid.
    Now we are packed in Jim’s car heading downtown to steal the flag with the misplaced quotation marks from Rory Scarsdale Holdings—
“Ask For Rory!”
I can’t remember how this got decided, but I must have started it. I told them about “Ham Dinner” at the Legion back home, giving the lawn a “trim.” We are all convulsed, laughing and making quotation marks in the air with our fingers every time one of us says something. Only Slaughter is oblivious to the hilarity. Slaughter is driving and foaming at the mouth over Scarsdale. From Chuck I have recently learned that Scarsdale also runs the Mariner—a bar at the bottom of town by the railway station, where all the locals go. Slaughter says he got kicked out of it once, by Scarsdale himself and his “goons.”
    “Buncha fuckin’ townie rubes figured they’d kick the shit outta me, Scarsdale doesn’t lift a goddamn finger.”
    Chuck is bubbling away on the topic of Scarsdale like an overcooked stew. We’re laughing because he hasn’t ceased his litany since we left Jim’s place. It’s remarkable. After seven hours of warming Jim’s armchair, drinking beer and only occasionally complaining about how dull an evening he was having, Slaughter suddenly came alive. He leapt from the chair at the name of Scarsdale, seized up Jim’s telephone, and started maniacally dialing numbers with his cigar-sized fingers. He was calling Rory Scarsdale, we eventually deciphered from the stream of obscenities—calling him right then and there—although God only knew how Chuck could have had his number memorized, he might have been calling his parents for all we