The Best of the Love

Carl Becker lived about three hundred yards, two hundred and seventy-four meters, back from the water at Malignant Cove. He had a clear view of the water across the grasses. There was nothing particularly secretive about it. He had neighbors to the left of him and to the right of him, just down the road. But he had never invited anybody out there that wasn’t family or a boyhood friend. Mystique is often nothing more than a stubborn refusal to share the details. The house and property weren’t even his. It belonged to his oldest brother who lived in Yellowknife. He took care of it and paid the utility bills, and his brother paid the taxes. His brother asked him to buy it. Becker refused. Public documents in his name were kept at a minimum. They went against his grain. He liked to live off the grid. A look at his high school yearbook would find his picture missing. It just said, between Lisa Barrows and Andrew Bowman, Carl Martel Becker. His two sisters lived in Halifax. They still called him Marty. Martel was his mother’s maiden name. She died from a placenta abruption giving birth to him. No one in his family blamed him, not his father, or his brother, or his sisters. It was just one of those things. He first came to know of it when he overheard his uncle, his mother’s brother Walter, talking to his Dad about it. He was five, but he remembered. “Ah, the poor little fella, eh, livin’ with killin’ your motha.” His uncle’s diction and dialect made it worse. As Becker grew older, the cause of her death became known to his classmates. The school yard, grade school bullies were not above using it against him. He became a fighter and a good one too. This silenced all comers by the time he reached the sixth grade. But his ability to contend became his contentiousness. He started to become a bully himself. Kids he didn’t like knew it. They started to hate him for it. They devised another way to get back at him. Graffiti showed up one day in a bathroom stall, scratched with a knife onto the door: mommy killer. The word mommy made it all the more devastating. He punished likely culprits with some well-placed fists. That only made things worse. A little doodle, in black magic marker, showed up on the inside of his desk, and then in the pages of magazines in the school library. The doodle, along with his moniker, was of a little baby lying on its back with its feet and hands up in the air and a little umbilical cord coming out of its belly. His response to this was his own little reign of terror: hockey sticks broken; skates cut up; bikes smashed against brick walls; schoolbooks ripped to shreds… When they went too far and spray painted it on the pavement of the school’s quadrangle it was denounced by administrators in a very public assembly. Their denouncement, concerned more about the defacement of school property than Becker’s wellbeing, gave him his first real lesson in hypocrisy. Becker was called into the principal’s office. His father was sitting there, waiting for him. The Principal and the Guidance counselor led the charge. The pained look on his father’s face crushed him. The doodles didn’t stop. They just went further underground. They became more cryptic and clever in their placement. Outside the school now rather than in, on telephone poles and stop signs: even etched like an epitaph on the side of his mother’s gravestone. Mommy killer became just a little mk and the drawing of the baby a few representational lines. They were small enough to go unnoticed. But Becker knew what they were, and they knew he knew what they were. In high school his older tormentors started to drive. A signature beep was heard as they drove past his house: beep-beep, beep-beep-beep-beep. Mommy, mommy killer. This slight, this judgment, became just a part of his social environment. What at first caused his overreaction became now his guarded secret. He wasn’t sure if his brother and sisters knew, or his father. It was never spoken of. He only wished to bury the shame and pain of it. The burdens of childhood become the things we carry. How we carry them can be surprising even to ourselves. Becker’s intelligence allowed him to turn a world that was against him into a world that he himself was against. People, those who knew nothing of his early life, saw this weakness as a strength. And what was his weakness? To build a wall between where he lived and where he frequented. The stash wasn’t a place; it was a disposition. Becker picked up the drug trade not for the money it made him but to keep the world at bay. At first, he found his customers among the locals. Then he branched out to adjoining towns and settlements. His cautious disposition made his sources comfortable and his customers discreet. The business gained a reputation larger than its reality, because his reticence suggested enterprise. Money gave him freedom and freedom gave him leisure. He used his time to further educate himself. He began to read more and acquire books. As he acquired books, he built up a different kind of self around him. Literacy gained in private has little sense of its public worth. When he came to understand the marketplace that was the university he was unsure in his approaches. Students intimidated him. Social skills are rarely acquired from books. They are more often learned from community. Becker’s fears came from a misplaced notion of his relative intelligence. University students weren’t smarter than he was. They were just more comfortable living with and among each other.