Their father was so angry that he quaked
and caved in Billy (Bob, Brad, Benny)'s room, crushing all his tools and
all his trophies.
But a lot of time had gone by and the brothers weren't kids
anymore. Alan was nineteen, ready to move to Toronto and start scouting
for real estate. Only Doug still looked like a little boy, albeit a
stumpy and desiccated one. He hollered and stamped until his fingerbones
rattled on the floor and his tongue flew across the room and cracked on
the wall. When his anger was spent, he crawled atop their mother and let
her rock him into a long, long slumber.
Alan had left his father and his family the next morning, carrying a
rucksack heavy with gold from under the mountain and walked down to the
town, taking the same trail he'd walked every school day since he was
five. He waved to the people that drove past him on the highway as he
waited at the bus stop. He was the first son to leave home under his own
power, and he'd been full of butterflies, but he had a half-dozen good
books that he'd checked out of the Kapuskasing branch library to keep
him occupied on the 14-hour journey, and before he knew it, the bus was
pulling off the Gardiner Expressway by the SkyDome and into the midnight
streets of Toronto, where the buildings stretched to the sky, where the
blinking lights of the Yonge Street sleaze-strip receded into the
distance like a landing strip for a horny UFO.
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