Wilby fic: Points In Common, Part 2, by kuonji (PG-13)
Title: Points In Common, Part 2
Series: Points In Common
Author: kuonji
Fandom: Wilby Wonderful
Characters: Duck MacDonald, Buddy French, Stan Lastman, various
Pairings: Duck/OMC mentioned
Category: character study, angst, drama, pre-movie
Rating: PG-13
Words: ~3830
Summary: Duck's dad starts suffering more and more from arthritis, and in '91, he asks Duck to come home.
Points In Common
by kuonji
PART TWO
With an attitude like that, it's probably not surprising that Buddy becomes a police officer.
Duck finishes high school with barely passing marks. He's just not interested in the stuff they're trying to teach him. Tommy goes to school in Vancouver, and after a year helping out his dad, Duck decides to take off for the mainland, too. He bums around for a while. His dad's taught him enough about fixing things and working with his hands so that he can get by doing various pick-up jobs and the occasional temp work.
He gets in some trouble, gets back out. Raises some hell, catches some. He meets a lot of people, and he meets a few people, too. In the end, he winds up with a contract painter by the name of Erik Shinsky in Markham, Ontario. They get along great at first. He's funny in a brash way, a little hot-headed like Duck is, likes to be right. He teaches Duck his trade -- among other things.
Duck learns to talk dirty. He learns to take it slow. He learns to cook, and to take out the trash, and to kiss in the laundry room. He learns to be held in public just because it feels good. He learns to sit around bare-chested with their friends, showing off marks only a few hours old to people who roll their eyes or crack jokes about it.
Duck's dad starts suffering more and more from arthritis, and in '91, he asks Duck to come home. By that time, Duck doesn't go around shirtless anymore, not even in summer, and the laundry room is strictly for washing clothes. It's a relief, really, to get away from Erik by that point, so Duck packs up and returns to Wilby with intent to stay for a while.
He's at City Hall filing the documents for registering his new business when he sees Buddy walk by in uniform with another cop. He might not have said anything, except that Buddy comes toward them, leans up against the clerk's desk, and says to her, with a decidedly flirtatious smile, "I'm looking forward to the pie. Six o' clock, right?"
Duck watches with interest as Denise blushes and exchanges a few more words with the handsome officer.
From his now more mature point of view, Duck recognizes the reasons for his mixed feelings back when he'd run into Buddy at South Cape. He also realizes, looking at Buddy with far more experience than a sexually frustrated teenage boy had, that Buddy's not really his type. That's a relief, since he's likely to be crossing paths with a certain Officer French in town for the forseeable future.
Before Buddy leaves the desk, he glances at Duck again, then frowns slightly and lingers. His eyes go a bit hazy, as if he's trying to remember... Grinning wryly, Duck decides to help him out.
"Duck MacDonald," he prompts. While Buddy looks virtually the same as he had at nineteen, Duck's grown and filled out a lot. He's finally figured out what to do with his hair, too. It's no wonder Buddy has trouble recognizing him. "We went to school together. I was one year under yours."
"Duck!" Buddy repeats with that relieved, extra heartiness that people put on when they're pretending to recognize someone they'd completely forgotten. He smiles in what looks like genuine welcome, though. "I haven't seen you in years. How have you been?"
Duck gives him the edited brief of his life since high school. Buddy makes the appropriate listening noises and replies with his own report:
Buddy commuted to college on the mainland, which Duck knew about. He studied criminology, which Duck did not know about but is not surprised to learn. He played lacrosse for a year before he figured out that while he liked the game, he hated the travel and the inevitable politics that came up. He joined the police academy instead, and came home to Wilby as soon as a spot opened up for him.
"Best decision of my life, Duck. It's been eight years and I still love it."
His type or not, Duck's not immune to a man smiling at him like that, like the world's just one happy playground specially tailored for Buddy's enjoyment. In the same way that Duck's matured from seeing the world a bit and stretching his abilities, Buddy now evinces a more solid and dependable version of his high school earnestness. It looks good on him. Scratch that. It looks fantastic on him.
Duck's learned a lot about tact and perspective (and safety) since he was a kid, though. So he only smiles and nods like any agreeable person might -- even if, in the back of his mind, he can't help comparing Buddy's easy ways to Erik's demanding, needy ones.
"So you'll be staying in Wilby for good, then?" Buddy asks him.
"He's just registered a new business," Denise pipes up. She's probably been dying to get a word in edge-wise. "MacDonald's Quality Painting."
Buddy flashes Denise a heartstopping smile before turning back to Duck. "Painting, huh? After Mr. Milligan left, your dad's just about the only one around who does handyman work. I should say, the only islander who does. It'd be good if you could take over. People would trust you."
Duck shrugs casually, but the idea of regular work is an irrefutable draw. He can't be guaranteed jobs on the mainland, being the new man in town anywhere he settles. No matter what the songs say, a steady cash flow is the basis for everything. That had been a lesson learned early, even before he'd left the Island. "I might," he answers.
Truth is, he's still not sure what he's going to do. Before he'd left, Wilby had been just another place -- a tiny pinpoint on the map of Canada. The last few weeks, after so much time away, he's started really feeling like it's home. There's something about Wilby -- the people, the town, the island itself -- that feels right to him.
But he's thirty-one years old, and despite Erik, there's a part of him still hoping for someone to love. He's not sure he knows how he can stay here and do that, both.
So he says again, "I'll think about it," and leaves it at that.
***
Buddy's partner, Stan Lastman, is nice in a bumbling kind of way. He's still a rookie, but he and Buddy obviously get along well, and that's probably what's more important. In a small town like Wilby, keeping the peace means more about talking nice to people and maintaining a united official presence than it is about running down crooks.
Duck doesn't know Stan real well. Stan's a third generation islander born and bred, but he's two years younger than Duck. That doesn't matter now but it was a big gap back in school, which is where Duck knows most of the people he does from. So Duck's a little surprised when one day he answers the door and the man's standing there, looking a little diffident and hopeful. "Hi, Stan. Looking for my dad?"
Stan frowns worriedly. "Maybe. My wife and I need part of our patio cover repaired. I know Mr. MacDonald can't handle that kind of thing anymore, but Brenda, she doesn't trust that mainlander outfit that's been doing all the jobs around here." He leans in, in a conspiratorial way. "I don't trust them either, actually. John Rourke was just telling me how they used inferior materials for the work they done in his rec room last spring."
Duck considers this. It's clear what Stan's asking. If Duck takes this job, though, word would get around quick. The painting's not such a big deal. There's another guy -- another islander -- who does reasonably good paint jobs. Taking on this, though. It'd be like announcing that he's staying in Wilby for good.
He's been going to the mainland almost every weekend for the last three months, scouting for a place where he can relax. People don't think it's strange. He's young enough, they correctly figure that he's out for the kind of fun that Wilby can't provide -- if unclear about the specifics of it. And he's been away long enough that it's reasonable for him to go alone, perhaps even reasonable for him to have more friends on the other side of the water than on this one. So far. If he's going to settle down here, though, it would start to matter.
He's thought about moving to the mainland. If his dad ever needed him, he could be here in a couple of hours on the outside. The housing prices are much more expensive there, though, especially on the coast where he would have to live. He doesn't think he can afford it, unless his dad is willing to relocate with him and sell the house here, like Tommy's parents did. But he knows his dad would never budge on that.
"Come on, Duck. It would really help us out a lot."
Stan's round face is pleading. Duck's always been susceptible to that.
"How about I follow you in the truck and price it when I get there," he says. If he establishes a good client base and has regular need for work supplies, he'd have an even better excuse to visit the mainland more often, he tells himself. Plus, it's an extra source of income. Maybe he could even save up enough to move. "If we have the right materials on hand, I can do it today."
Stan looks relieved and grateful. Duck tells himself that has nothing to do with his decision to take the job. He's only being practical.
***
After Stan, comes Mrs. Conroy ("Call me Aunt Hetty."), Pastor Corkum ("You look just like your father."), Nancy Bolt ("Remember working together that summer at Iggy's?"), and others. Then Richard Polanski, the other islander painter, gets married to a mainlander and moves to Newfoundland.
Before he knows it, Duck's days are completely filled with his work, and he's become ingrained in the rhythm and pulse of the Island.
Stan and Brenda hire him to help them renovate their guest room when their older daughter turns twelve. Betty Pearce, née Conroy, offers him a cookie with blue frosting when he's over, working on her mother's roof, and she tells him it's going to be a boy. While bringing him some juice in the middle of repainting the Corkums' living room, Mrs. Corkum worries to him about how she thinks her granddaughter is dating someone 'disreputable'. Nancy invites him to the wedding when she gets engaged to Bradley Weiner, the guy who helps Duck transport lumber.
Duck has a new truck and a thriving business, a comfortable place to live, smiles from almost everyone in town -- and also a growing sense of dissatisfaction that he can't seem to get rid of no matter how hard he tries.
***
At first, it's just winding down from work at the Loyalist with all the other guys. He pretends that he's there because he wants to play a little pool, shoot some darts. More and more, though, he just huddles at the bar.
One or two drinks turns into three or four. Or five. Or more. When he's down deep with the world turning fluid around him, he wonders why everyone else can breathe when he's drowning. Sometimes he's so caught up in this thought that he forgets to go home until Patrick calls him a cab. His dad's vision is going from bad to worse, and Ms. Neil doesn't drive at night.
His dad also has heart trouble now, and a failing liver. He refuses any but the most basic treatment, however. He's determined to die in the saddle, as he says. Conversations between the two of them are shorter and less meaningful with each passing week. There's no possible way Duck could leave him now, but it's getting more and more impossible, it seems, to stay. He feels stifled, helpless -- trapped in a hole that he's furiously digging himself into just because he can't stand still.
He goes to the Watch a few times, just to blow off steam in the dark. A little more often, he takes a trip to the mainland that's longer than necessary for supplies. But it's transitory and unsatisfying, like going to a buffet and doing nothing but smell the food. With his dad to think of, and his job, which relies on the goodwill of his clients, some part of him always knows that he can't afford to gain a 'reputation'.
So he works on gaining a different one instead.
It gets so that six days out of seven, he's pouring himself into bed. He can see his dad's stony disapproval, but he's realized by now that his dad is powerless over him. The other residents of Wilby don't like it either, but they shake their heads and look the other way. Being a drunk is something that they can tolerate.
Occasionally, he wonders with malicious humor what his dad would say if he knew what exactly his son had gotten up to on the mainland all those years away.
He thinks of Erik more and more, the bastard.
On his fortieth birthday, he has a discussion with a bottle of brandy, and the two of them decide that he needs to celebrate, big-time. He cancels all his jobs for the day and hops a ferry to the mainland, where he lets the blackness suck him away for twelve hours that he will never be able to recall.
His dad was the one who'd always said it: "You live the way you live, son. If somebody don't like it -- fuck 'em."
On the ferry home, he slumps himself into a seat on the second floor after an attendant hustles him out of his truck where he would have been happy to stay. Across from him, a couple of tipsy-looking middle-aged men are chatting about Island gossip. They have the look of islanders, but Duck doesn't think he knows them.
They must not have recognized him either, because one of them starts recounting the story of how 'old man MacDonald' had met his 'whore'.
"A nurse, my bloody arse! Where'd she get her nursing degree, I'd like to know? A crackerjack box?"
"In Halifax, more like."
"Naw, I hear she's a classy bitch. Betcha she went to school overseas -- Amsterdam."
Another thing that Duck has realized now that he's older is that those mouthy kids in grade school had it more right than they knew when they called Ms. Niel a slut. Although she and his dad still skirt the subject with Duck of how they met, Duck has the feeling that it might have been on one of those weekends when Mrs. Kaufmann took him in while his dad went to the mainland to 'grieve'.
Still, though, the words burrow into his brain like hornets and make him see red.
Maybe it's because all of a sudden, he's not hearing slut (queer), or bitch (freak), or whore (fairy), but something else.
In a heartbeat, he's out of his seat. Both of the guys are big, and far less incapacitated than he, but Duck's learned all sorts of things over the years.
Duck is still a scrawny guy -- and he still knows how to fight.
He has to be pulled bodily off of whomever it is he's whaling on at the moment by several pairs of strong arms. He goes limp only when he realizes that there are flashing red and blue lights in his vision, and then he stands stock-still and stares around in shocked confusion.
"It's MacDonald's boy," he hears someone say in a voice that sounds tired and pitying. "We'll have to take him in this time. Olsen, get his car."
Numbly, he hands over his keys to a young officer, and he's urged by another into a car with leather seats. Fearfully, he touches the grill between him and the front. Then he touches his face. Something's bleeding.
The jail cell has a pair of bunk beds on one side, a commode on the other, and a sink in between. It's clean and quiet. The blankets smell faintly of detergent. If it weren't for the fact that Duck feels so miserably ashamed of being here, it wouldn't be too bad a place to spend the night. A stern-faced, elderly nurse cleans and patches him up, all the time chiding him for becoming influenced by 'nasty mainlander ways'. After she leaves him alone, he buries his face in the white, unmarred pillow and wills himself to fall unconscious. Eventually, he does.
It's Buddy French who comes to get him at some indeterminate time during the night that he will later know is just past two in the morning.
Amid his haze, he finds himself chagrined at the state he must be in. Mumbling thick-tongued apologies, he fingercombs his hair and tries to flatten out the stained wrinkles in his shirt.
Buddy doesn't seem to notice. He simply unlocks the cell door and tells him, "You're free to go."
That confuses him. He knows he's still drunk. He knows he hurt some people. Possibly badly. "That's it? You don't need to, uh, detain me for a day or something? Charge me a fine?"
Buddy bites his bottom lip in that curiously childish gesture he has, and then he straightens himself to look directly into Duck's face. "Your father's in hospital, Duck. He had a stroke."
***
Buddy drives him there in his patrol car. Duck remembers every agonizingly long second of that ride, adrenaline searing him sober in a rush.
He doesn't remember getting out of the car, running to the elevator, charging up two flights of stairs when the elevator doesn't come fast enough, wheeling first left, then right, toward and then into room 302, where Ms. Neil is sobbing into a handkerchief beside a hospital bed.
He does have a sharp memory of looking back as he hears Buddy pounding up behind him. He remembers the way the creases of Buddy's hands whiten briefly as he catches himself in the doorway. He remembers watching Buddy slow his breaths deliberately, all the time staring into Duck's eyes as if willing him to do the same. He remembers the expression on Buddy's face just before he gestures gently with his chin toward the head of the bed.
He remembers seeing his father in that bed. The sheets are pulled up to just above his waist. His arms are exposed, an IV in the crook of his left arm. Where the hospital gown doesn't cover him, his skin seems thin and brittle like peeling paint. Lines snake out of his chest, which barely moves, though the monitor beside him shows that he is breathing. His heartbeat is merely an electronic flash and sound.
Paul Nicholas MacDonald never wakes up. He passes away ten days later at 4:53 A.M.
***
Duck stands on the porch of his father's house, now his. It's a Monday afternoon in early July, and the breeze today is quiet, the air warm. July was always the month that showed Wilby off at its finest.
He hears the sound of the door closing and locking, and Ms. Neil comes up to stand beside him. She's holding only her purse and a carpetbag. Most of her things have already been shipped to her sister's place in Toronto, including the few items that Duck's father left her.
Duck offers his left arm and reaches out with the right to take her luggage. She smiles and allows herself to be led down the porch steps to the car. After she's settled herself in the high seat of the truck, he passes the carpetbag back to her, and as it exchanges hands, Duck notices that she is wearing the ring. The ring that had belonged to Mina MacDonald. Paul MacDonald had bequeathed it to her in an unspoken promise that came too late -- if it had ever been meant to be made on this side of death.
It's such a waste, Duck thinks viciously. Why hadn't his dad taken the chance? Why couldn't he have let go of the past and grasped a future that could have been his? His and Ms. Neil's. They could have had a life together as full husband and wife. No, he might never have loved the second Mrs. MacDonald as much as the first, but it had been unfair to deny the both of them the chance to try.
For all his professions of independence, his dad had not been a risk-taker. When in doubt, he had planted himself down and forced the world to flow around him. He had decided that he was going to live exactly the way he always had, simply because that was what he knew. Not because that was best.
Duck allows himself a quick sting of tears as he rounds the back of the truck, away from Ms. Neil's sight.
Forty years old, and he's just now realizing that he'll never know what it's like to have a mother. He'll never know what it's like to have that piece of normality that all of his schoolmates had taken for granted.
And he'll never know now if his father would have been able to accept him, maybe even... be proud of him.
"Will you stay here in Wilby?" Ms. Neil asks once they're on their way toward the west ferry landing. Her voice is calm and quiet. It's the voice that had soothed him when he was younger, called him to meals, asked him how his day was. But it's not a voice that has ever spoken to him with any sense of obligation or expectation. She hadn't asked him if he wanted to go with her to Toronto.
Duck looks out at the scenery that they are driving past. The leaves are bursting with the green of summer, and the air from their rolled-down windows tastes of salt and heat. The roads are clean. The people they pass look up and wave, making him think of Nancy, who wrinkled his new black shirt with a hug; Stan, who brought over casseroles Brenda made; Pastor Corkum, whose eyes were moist as he delivered the service.
Though he can't see the ferry yet, a pair of seagulls call as they wing over the sparkling blanket of the seacoast on their righthand side, and he knows the docks are just ahead. He can picture the bustle of children, cars, dogs. Battered wooden dinghies would be out on the water alongside aluminum speedboats and sailing vessels.
It's peaceful here. It's home. Wilby Island is beautiful, and he loves it.
He thinks about what his father had always said.
"Yeah," he answers softly. The rumbling of the engine almost hides his words. "I'm going to stay."
END Part 2.
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