Something different today: a couple of excerpts from a short story in a new collection I’m working on, from a story called “Larry, Destroyer of Worlds”. Hope you like it.
Larry.
He was Laurence to the letter carrier, Mr. Drover to most of the neighbours in Caswell Hill.
And Larry to the dead. That’s the way he thought about it. Larry to the dead. Oh, and “Lar” to the very best of them, to Gary who had died at 68, Larry’s best friend for more than 30 years.
Gary’s yard had been practically pristine from the moment the dirty browns of Saskatoon spring greened up to the last of the falling elm leaves in October. No matter how dry it got, Gary would nudge the rotary sprinkler around the front yard with a tines-upwards rock rake, making sure every inch of the yard had a good stretch of time soaking up its share of city water, while also making sure he didn’t ever get wet. Gary, who abided no weeds and definitely no fallen and curled dried leaves. Gary cut his grass every four days, and it stayed a rich green while lawns up and down the street faltered and failed in Saskatoon’s regular summer drought. Gary didn’t say anything about any of the other yards: he didn’t have to. His statement, tidily cut, meticulously weeded, edges trimmed, had already been made.
Larry was lucky. He had the big Norway spruce in the front yard, shading much of the front of the house and dropping its heavy scaly cones on the roof and yard with reckless abandon. That tree absolved him of having to compete over the state of their respective yards: the shade meant Larry’s yard grew almost nothing, and the acidity and near-total ground cover of the blankets of fallen spruce needles took care of the rest. When Larry occasionally went out and raked up the worst of the heavy carpet of needles, all that was left was the hardpacked drum of bare dusty ground.
They’d be smoking in Gary’s garage, smoking long after they’d promised their wives that they’d stopped completely. Gary always had an emergency pack of smokes in his fishing tackle box, a dark-green box so old and dented that it had become virtually invisible on its shelf. The tackle box trade-named and labelled “Old Pal” on the bottom front corner, and that seemed apt, too. Gary making the same joke every time every time he popped open the silver-coloured clasp and pulled out the flattened pack, “What have we caught today?” a joke that had passed through all three seasons of the lame joke, from somewhat funny to mildly irritating to finally becoming its own mantra, like saying “drive safe” when your teenager borrows the car.
Larry suspected that their wives knew about the smoking — how couldn’t they, with the lingering stale smell of smoke in the confined space of the garage? — but he figured they ignored it, thinking that turning a blind eye at least served to cut the rate of consumption.
The occasional pleasure made those single cigarettes special: Larry hadn’t been much of a smoker, but Gary had been, for years, and when Gary was in the process of lighting his single cigarette, Larry always had the feeling that he was watching his friend undergo something close to a quasi-religious experience.
Gary would take out one of the stale cigarettes — they were always stale, an open pack left in the tackle box and smoked over a span of months — and hold it for a moment, looking at it as if staring at a familiar friend. Larry would take short puffs: Gary took long, lingering lungfuls, sometimes holding the smoke in for ages, before saying, “What we really need now is just a little drop of rum.”
They didn’t have any rum in the garage: it was just what Gary always said. The car was parked out on the street because the garage was so full: old doors and pieces of trim, Gary’s yard tools, the long workbench that took up the back wall all the way to the door into the yard, the scraps and pieces and brackets and pieces of window glass that Gary was absolutely sure would be useful some day. Gary’s wife Cherie didn’t even come into the garage anymore: it was a place that had filled with Gary’s stuff to the point that she just didn’t fit in there in any reasonable way any longer. It wasn’t that there wasn’t enough actual physical space: it was more that Gary’s random collections, all exclusively his things, managed to quietly but firmly exclude her. He had simply absorbed the garage as his own.
Which meant Gary and Larry could sit in the old vinyl-latticed lawn chairs that were too ratty to be allowed out in the yard any more, their seats poised in the middle of the concrete floor, with old Coke crate tipped on end between them as a sort of side table. The view was just the garage bay door, with its three oval windows coated with dust and spiderwebs to the point that the light could barely get in.
Not much of a vista to stare at, but the two men liked it just fine, their eyes not looking at the door or its windows as much as they were always set on a more distant and ethereal horizon.