Home Run Read online

“Yeah, really. Besides, my girlfriend and my sister, Pug, both want to meet you.”

  I raised my eyebrows at that. It was hard to imagine any woman wanting to meet me in my…condition. Anyhow, I told Kirk I’d consider the offer.

  When I stopped to think about it, two weeks with my parents seemed like a very long time indeed. They had already talked to me about visiting Aunt Linda’s family Christmas weekend, a plan that might be interesting if playing with five-year-old twin cousins was your idea of a good time. Maggie was going skiing, so she wouldn’t be around, and my other friends were busy making plans that might or might not bring them back home. I might be spending most of the two-week vacation alone, with nothing to do and think about my…condition. Maybe a little time in Alberta wouldn’t be a bad thing. A ranch might be interesting. Maybe they’d teach me to ride a horse or wrangle a steer or whatever people do on ranches. Surely John Keats wouldn’t have turned down the chance to take a ranching vacation, if there were such things two hundred years ago. “By the way, Kirk, how late does that clinic stay open?”

  12

  Nobody Messes With Pug

  I DON’T THINK that medical professionals should be allowed to laugh at patients. After all, it’s tough enough to go into a doctor’s cubicle, knowing that anybody could be listening in, and have to whisper that you have ED. A doctor should take something like that seriously, and not just laugh at your condition.

  What’s worse was that the doctor only asked me a couple of questions, took a quick look down below and then said there was nothing wrong with me! What did he know? He didn’t give me a referral to a specialist or a prescription for Viagra. Instead, he ignored my whole problem. “I have a hunch your penis will work just fine next time,” the doctor said. Was that supposed to be encouraging? As far as I was concerned, there might never be a next time.

  So I was not particularly cheerful on the brief, early-morning flight to Calgary. While I was considering a malpractice suit, Kirk was busy reading an airline magazine. I had two weeks off from studying and papers, so I should have been cheerful and relaxed. But I kept dwelling on my…problem. I had never before realized that I was a guy who got hung up on just one thing. Monomania—that’s the word. Like Ahab with his whale in Moby Dick, I was Alan with my own miniature whale. Oh, even the metaphor was enough to make me cringe.

  We got down to the luggage carousel and were met by Kirk’s family. His father, Mr. Chamberlain, was a tall, distinguished-looking man who, strangely, was wearing a cowboy hat. I took this as a local custom. His mother, Mrs. Chamberlain (“Call me Jan”) was a short woman dressed in denim with sequins sewn on for some sparkle. Finally, there was Kirk’s sister, Pug.

  “Why Pug?” I had asked him on the plane.

  “Don’t know,” he replied. “She’s always been Pug. Something about the fact that she’s short and her nose is too small. A pug nose, you know?”

  “Does she have a real name?”

  “Who cares,” Kirk said curtly.

  It looked as if brother-sister relations were no better in born-again families than in most others.

  “You must be Alan,” said Mrs. Chamberlain, smiling brightly.

  “Nice to meet you,” added Mr. Chamberlain, giving my hand one of those killer handshakes. Kirk should have warned me about that.

  “Hi,” added Pug, looking at me shyly.

  “You must be Pug,” I said.

  “Patti,” she said, smiling. “I’m trying to get over the Pug thing.”

  I stood corrected. In fact, Pug was not that short nor was her nose that tiny. From what I could see, she was a pretty decent-looking teenager, a miniature version of her handsome brother. Like her mother, Patti wore jeans and cowboy boots. More than that I couldn’t tell from the heavy ski jacket she wore to ward off the winter. In Alberta, the temperature can reach minus forty, the only place on the thermometer where Celsius and Fahrenheit equal the same bitter cold.

  “Where’s Kathy?” Kirk asked.

  “At the church, dear,” said Mrs. Chamberlain. “They’re getting ready for the Christmas pageant. She’ll meet us at the house.”

  Kirk frowned, obviously not too pleased with this. I guess in a born-again relationship the church always came first.

  We left the airport in one of the family vehicles, this one a Cadillac Escalade. That should have been my first clue. For some reason, I had assumed Kirk was a poor kid from one of those struggling farm families you always hear about on the news. I’d assumed that Kirk’s family had no more money than mine did. But when we reached the Chamberlain ranch, I realized my assumptions were dead wrong.

  His dad pulled up to an elaborate entrance gate, pressed a button on the dash, and the wrought-iron slowly pulled back so we could enter the grounds. Then we drove and drove, for another ten minutes, until I could spot a house sitting on a gentle rise in the land. In fact, it was far more than a house—it was a complex. The house was just the most prominent building in the group. Trailing behind it were barns and garages and equipment sheds and other outbuildings; the whole complex would fill two city blocks.

  “Here’s the spread,” announced Kirk’s dad.

  “Welcome to the ranch, Alan,” echoed Kirk’s mom.

  I looked out at land stretching in all directions as far as my eyes could see. “Just how big is the spread?” I whispered to Kirk.

  “Just under thirty thousand acres,” he replied nonchalantly. “Dad transferred some to Uncle John.”

  I don’t know much about farms and ranches, but it seemed to me that thirty thousand acres was in the category of “real big.” The house was a rambling, three-storey, fake-French chateau. There were, I learned later, six bedrooms, eight bathrooms, and various special-purpose rooms—the video room, the wine cellar, the cigar room, the memorabilia room, and more.

  My awe at the house extended to the girl who greeted us—the much anticipated Kathy.

  Kirk’s girlfriend resembled a supermodel. She had lustrous dark hair, big brown eyes, perfect eyebrows, perfect teeth, perfect complexion, and perfect breasts of a size that would rival Gloria’s. She could have been strutting on a catwalk, modelling fashions in Milan, but instead was finishing up at the Christian high school in the nearest town. She was, in that old-fashioned word, breathtaking.

  “Oh my!” I said when I saw her. The words just fell out of my mouth. Of all the girls with whom one might take the pledge, Kathy certainly had to be the most magnificent. I tried to imagine “waiting,” but the pain was enough to make me wince.

  At that moment, Kirk did not wait. He ran forward to kiss this goddess, hold her tight, and then swing her right off her feet.

  “All right, you two, that’s enough,” Mr. Chamberlain said sternly.

  Kirk and Kathy split apart, and for a second I looked at them both, as a couple. They were a perfect match: hair, teeth, complexion, bodies, sex appeal. If ever there were a match made in heaven, this was it.

  “Kath, this is my roommate, Alan,” Kirk said.

  I was speechless. I put out my hand and got a handshake almost as muscular as that delivered by Kirk’s dad. Perhaps Alberta is a province of hearty handshakes.

  We spent the afternoon touring the ranch. I suspect this was an excuse for Kirk and Kathy to spend some time with each other, but I kept my mouth shut. Instead, I did a walkabout with Mr. Chamberlain and Patti. Mr. Chamberlain would give me some straight information, then Patti would give me a little twist on what he said.

  Mr. Chamberlain: “We’ve got about ten thousand head here. Good mid-size operation.”

  Patti: “The place stinks from all the steer crap. But you get used to it.”

  Mr. Chamberlain: “This here’s the computer room. The boys here keep track of all the animals, all the feed, all the farming. Everything’s run through this server with a backup over here, and I don’t understand a damn thing about it. A man can’t run his own farm anymore.”

  Patti: “Dad can’t handle computers. If a thing doesn’t go moo, he’s afra
id of it.”

  Mr. Chamberlain had every reason to be proud of his ranch, which was probably enormous even by Alberta standards. Patti, of course, didn’t take seriously either her family’s ranch or their obvious wealth. She was, I hate to say, your basic snotty rich kid: lots of attitude and not much appreciation.

  That night we sat down for dinner. Before meeting the Chamberlains, I would have expected some overcooked meat and bland potatoes. Now I wasn’t surprised by the gourmet extravaganza that arrived in front of me: vichyssoise (that’s creamy potato soup, I found out), Châteaubriand (a thick cut of beef tenderloin), and even a glass of wine (an Italian red called Montalcino) for those of us who were of drinking age. There was exactly one glass of wine per person since the Chamberlains had a whole set of ethics about alcohol. In fact, the Chamberlain family had a pretty comprehensive set of ethics, vaguely based on their fundamentalist religious beliefs, which I learned about through the evening.

  The family also had its habits. One of them was this: after dinner, the men would “withdraw” to the billiards room while the “ladies” helped the housekeeper with cleanup. This routine struck me as pretty archaic, but I was in no position to question.

  So we three men headed down to the basement-level billiards room, one so large it had both a billiards table and a pool table. Since billiards is a bit complicated for beginners, Mr. Chamberlain suggested a game of pool. Kirk went over to rack the balls while his father opened a little cabinet in the wall. Mr. Chamberlain then filled three glasses with single-malt Scotch and pulled three cigars from a large humidor.

  “Can’t play pool without a cigar,” said Mr. Chamberlain, handing me a cigar and a glass.

  “I…uh, don’t smoke,” I said. As far as I knew, neither did Kirk.

  “Cigars aren’t smoking,” Mr. Chamberlain explained. “Smoking is a sign of weakness, a sign of sinfulness. A good cigar…well, that’s one of God’s gifts to man.”

  I nodded my head. While I have considerable knowledge of weakness, I’ve always been a bit fuzzy on the concept of sin. Of cigars I knew nothing at all. In the black-and-white films of the 1940s, only bad guys smoked cigars. Now they seemed to be a popular habit.

  Before the pool game began, we went through various cigar rituals: a toast with the Scotch, the cutting of the cigar, the lighting, the smoking.

  “No, no, don’t suck on it,” Mr. Chamberlain said.

  His words came too late. A plume of acrid smoke entered my mouth and literally took over my nose. I coughed. My nose stung. I coughed again. If I had impressed anyone with my level of sophistication over dinner, that impression had now gone up in smoke.

  “Just pull with your cheeks,” Kirk told me. “You just want a little bit of the smoke.”

  I took another drink of the Scotch, which didn’t seem nearly as bitter as my first taste of the stuff at Gloria’s. Then I tried a gentle pull on the cigar, and managed to hold in the smoke without dissolving into a coughing fit.

  “You’ll get the hang of it, boy,” Mr. Chamberlain said, clapping me on the back. The force was almost enough to make me swallow my cigar.

  We played pool for a good half hour. I was no match for either of the Chamberlains, but I was also hobbled by the awkward cigar in my mouth and the effects of the drink. Kirk and his father seemed quite at home with this; indeed, they were at home. I felt I had entered into the inner sanctum of the family.

  Our talk over the pool game was mostly guy: sports, cars, politics. Mr. Chamberlain only occasionally lapsed into talk of sin and wickedness, then would pull back so as not to offend his heathen guest. It was at the end of our pool game, when the cigars were “ashed,” that the talk moved elsewhere.

  “You ever shoot a gun, there, Alan?”

  “No, sir,” I replied. In truth, I had never even touched a gun.

  “That’s a shame,” said Mr. Chamberlain. “A man’s got to be able to hold his liquor, smoke a cigar, and shoot a gun. That’s what my father told me and what I tell Kirk, here, though I’m not sure he’s always paying attention.”

  “As much attention as it’s worth,” Kirk mumbled.

  “Anyhow, let me show you my collection before we go up and join the women.”

  Kirk sighed. “The arsenal.”

  Mr. Chamberlain ignored his son. He went over to an indentation in the wall, then punched some numbers into a touchpad. Silently, the wall opened into another small room—about the size of my bedroom at home—but this one was lined entirely with guns.

  “My dad was a collector,” Mr. Chamberlain began as we entered the room. “Of course, in those days a man had to actually use a gun. Used to have lots of problems out here with coyotes and bears, and you want to use the right gun for the right critter. Sometimes you might want a .303, like this one here.” He handed me a gun that weighed a good twenty pounds. “Or this .22, probably from the mid-1860s; doesn’t shoot that straight, but look at the tooling. Now up there I’ve got a couple old blunderbusses, and over there a few more modern rifles…”

  The historical arms tour went on. I had never seen so many working guns in my entire life—there must have been two-or three-hundred of them. They ranged from beautiful historical rifles to modern automatics, from handguns to almost machine guns. They were, Mr. Chamberlain pointed out, all legally registered, all safely locked up in the “arsenal.”

  “But they’re here, just in case…” he concluded.

  “In case of what?” I asked.

  Mr. Chamberlain gave me a look of disbelief. “Well, in case they’re needed. We still have animals to deal with here, and you can’t stop every intruder at the gate, and there’s always the chance of rebellion.”

  “Right,” Kirk said, “we’ve had so much rebellion lately.”

  His father ignored the remark. “A man’s got a right, a duty, to protect his property and his loved ones,” he said, laying the extra emphasis on duty. “I mean, I don’t worry about Kirk, here, because he can look after himself. But if I ever catch a boy messing around with my little Pug, well…” Mr. Chamberlain looked over the rows of neatly stored guns, perhaps trying to pick out the most lethal weapon.

  Kirk filled the awkward moment of silence. “Dad, isn’t it time to go upstairs?”

  “Right,” his father agreed. “Up we go.”

  Kirk and I exchanged a look, largely of sympathy. I think everyone our age knows that aspects of our parents are a little off, a little eccentric, perhaps a little crazy. This gunroom was Mr. Chamberlain’s madness, and his son’s embarrassment.

  We rejoined the three women, who were busy watching some home remodelling show on television.

  “Did he take you to the arsenal?” Patti whispered. We were in the kitchen on a mission to get seconds of dessert.

  I nodded.

  “Tell you about the possible rebellion?”

  I nodded again.

  “Did he give you the line about protecting me–‘nobody messes with my Pug?’”

  She did a good imitation of her dad’s voice. I smiled.

  Patti shook her head. “Sometimes I think he’s mental.”

  I tried to be noncommittal on that. Mr. Chamberlain seemed very much in his right mind when he was talking about his guns and what he might do with them. Besides, I make it a habit not to argue with older people, even my father, even if they are seriously deluded. What’s the point? After the age of forty, older people can’t change that much—they’re fossilized.

  The family finished the decorating show, watched some program on VisionTV, and then Mrs. Chamberlain declared it was time for bed. Tomorrow was the day before Christmas and there was so much to do.

  Kathy pulled herself away from Kirk, then got in her car and headed for home. The rest of us headed up to our bedrooms on the second floor. Each bedroom had a label on the door naming it after an English county. My room was the Dorset, actually a small suite that had a bedroom, a sitting room, and its own bathroom. The sitting room even had a small library, mostly filled with Reader’s
Digest condensed books and religious texts. But there was a hardbound book called The Great Romantic Poets with a copyright date of 1915.

  That’s the book I was reading, sitting up in the bed, when I heard a little tap on my door. A second later, before I could say anything, the knob turned and Pug stepped into the bedroom.

  “Alan, can I ask you a question?” she whispered.

  “Well, I guess,” I replied.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?”

  13

  One Problem Resolved

  I HAVE NOT RECEIVED much wisdom from my father over the years, but I have learned one thing: when my mother says, “Do I look alright, dear?” the correct answer is always, “Yes, you look lovely.” To offer any qualifications on this blanket approval is a mistake. To suggest that a lock of hair is out of place or the makeup is a little bit too heavy is to encourage, at best, many minutes of bathroom primping or, at worst, emotional meltdown.

  So in answer to the question, I might have told Pug that she was cute, or that her pink bathrobe was adorable, or that her smile was dynamite—since all those things were true—but to change the adjective might lead to problems. So I remembered the lesson from my father.

  “I think you are very pretty,” I said.

  “You’re not just saying that?” she said.

  “No, I mean it,” I told her.

  And actually I did mean it. Pug was not beautiful, like Kathy; she was not sensuous, like Gloria; but she was definitely pretty. She had a cute nose, pretty blue eyes, and short dark hair with blonde tints. She reminded me a little of Reese Witherspoon.

  “Guys tell me I have a real nice bod,” Pug said, untying her bathrobe. In a second, the robe was on the floor and Pug stood in front of me dressed in a thin white T-shirt. The fabric was see-through, so much so that I could tell Pug was wearing nothing underneath.

  I gulped. “Yes, yes, you do,” I agreed.

  She came over to the bed and sat down right beside me. Pug was on top of the covers, I was down beneath a sheet, a blanket, and a duvet, so there were still several layers of cloth between us. My eyes, however, were not fully under my control. I kept telling them to focus on Pug’s face, to pay attention to her eyes or her hair, but they kept on working their way down. She really was quite perfect, in her own cute way.