Wheat Kings and Pretty Things Read online

  Wheat Kings and Pretty Things

  By G.S. Wiley

  As soon as he graduated high school, Paul Thompson fled the tiny, heavily Ukrainian town of Liddon, Saskatchewan, for bigger and better things. Now in his late thirties, Paul owns a struggling art gallery in Toronto. His grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday is approaching, and Paul will return to place where he grew up for the first time since he left.

  The town—and the province—don’t match Paul’s memories. Have they changed? Or has he? He reconnects with Dylan Shevchenko, an old friend who now teaches phys. ed. in Regina. When Paul learns his grandmother had an Aboriginal son he never knew about, he wonders what else he missed while he was away. Did he make the right choice all those years ago? He receives the rare opportunity to start over when he discovers a gallery for sale in Regina. He’s faced with a choice between his youthful dreams in the big city and making a life with Dylan in a place that somehow finally feels like home.

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  THE ENTIRE Liddon High School graduating class of 1997 could fit into the back of a large pickup truck.

  They knew this because, after the graduation party at the Legion Hall wrapped up, all eleven of them climbed into the back of Dylan Shevchenko’s dad’s truck. Paul didn’t want to go. His flight to Toronto was already booked, scheduled to leave at ten o’clock the next morning. Even though he wasn’t scheduled to start university for nearly four months, he couldn’t wait any longer to get out of there. But he was jostled along, dragged into the back of the truck before he could turn down the people with whom he’d spent every school day for the past thirteen years.

  Dylan drove them out of town, into the bush. The truck was old and woefully in need of new shocks. Paul felt every stone on the dirt road as they jounced along. Daisy McLaughlin’s slippery silk dress rubbed against his arm on one side, while on the other, the stench of Connor Boyko’s overpowering cologne hung like a fug, threatening to asphyxiate them all. Just a few hours, Paul assured himself. A few more hours, and I’m free of all this, forever.

  Dylan wasn’t the world’s greatest driver under the best of circumstances. Under these circumstances, in the dead of a dark, rural Saskatchewan night on a road that likely hadn’t been maintained for decades, he was appalling. Paul clung to the side of the truck, his knuckles white and his heart hammering. It would be just my luck, he thought, to die now, so close to freedom.

  After what seemed like hours, Dylan pulled off the dirt road onto another, even worse one. This time, it was barely a track, a narrow path with corn growing on each side. The headlights bounced up and down, illuminating the field around them.

  “Spooky,” Daisy said.

  “Boo!” Connor reached across Paul to jab her in the ribs. Daisy squealed, and Paul sighed.

  When they reached a little house, Dylan stopped. Connor and another boy, Jake, opened the back of the truck, and they all poured out onto the grass.

  “This is my uncle’s place,” Dylan announced. “So don’t fuck anything up.”

  Paul wasn’t sure how that would be possible. The shack looked like something out of a horror movie. Even by the light of the stars, Paul could tell the paint, where it existed, was peeling badly. The door hung awkwardly on its hinges, and large holes in the bug screens meant they would be useless to keep out any sort of insects, or, for that matter, small mammals. Paul felt like he could catch half-a-dozen illnesses just looking at the place.

  “There’s beer in the fridge,” Dylan continued. To a group of post-grad teenagers, that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. They rampaged into the shack, squeezing through the narrow door like clowns. Connor and Jake even got stuck, for a moment, straining against one another and the doorframe until they popped through to the inside. Paul was surprised he didn’t hear a comical sound effect, like a bottle uncorking.

  Paul and Dylan were the only ones left outside. “Nice place,” Paul lied, because he had been brought up that way.

  “It’s a shit hole,” Dylan admitted. Paul was glad. They’d known each other for over a decade. While they weren’t exactly friends, Paul had never thought of Dylan as a delusional idiot, although that was precisely how he viewed many of their classmates. “But if we’re all together, then I know nobody’s out doing something fucking stupid.”

  Paul blinked in surprise. “That’s… really nice of you.”

  Dylan grinned, his teeth glinting in the light. He was taller than Paul by a couple of inches, but much broader. If they’d lived somewhere else, like Regina or Saskatoon, he would have played football, but it was hard to make up a team at Liddon High School, where grades nine to twelve only counted forty students, total.

  “I’m not a complete asshole.”

  “Right.” Paul shifted, feeling awkward. “No. No, I never thought you were.”

  “Really? Not even when I called you a queer in front of the entire school?”

  Paul cleared his throat. “It… it was only the high school. So, like, forty people. And to be fair, most of them knew anyway.” Everyone knew. Paul didn’t think of himself as particularly camp, but he did have a taste for fashion, which made him stand out in the world of Roughriders jerseys, sweatpants, and ball caps they called a school. After saving up his allowance and his birthday money for more than two years, he’d mail-ordered a Burberry cape and worn it to school the first cold day of grade eleven. He’d expected a reaction. If he was honest, he’d wanted a reaction.

  Dylan’s smile faded, gradually disappearing from his handsome face. “Yeah. But it was shitty of me. I shouldn’t have done it.” He looked up, staring at the thousands of bright stars that surrounded them. “You won’t get a sky like that in Toronto, I bet.”

  “No. I guess not.” Paul hadn’t considered that before. It was a fair trade, he supposed. He wasn’t sure what else to say. He was wondering whether he should go into the shack with the others when Dylan suddenly stepped forward, into Paul’s personal space.

  For a moment, a brief flash of an instant, Paul thought Dylan meant to hit him. He tensed up, ready to absorb the blow—even instinctively, he knew he had no hope of fighting back or fleeing—but instead of a fist to the stomach, Dylan kissed him.

  It was quick, a peck on the corner of Paul’s mouth. Close enough to qualify as a kiss on the lips, technically, although it was very far from any kind of display of passion, and from anything Paul had spent the last few years imagining himself doing with Brad Pitt and Antonio Banderas and nameless handsome urbane men in Toronto. He’d never pictured doing it with Dylan. Or with anyone he knew.

  “Sorry,” Dylan said, as soon as he pulled away. It was too dark to tell if he was blushing, but he looked down at the scuffed Nike running shoes he wore everywhere, including, apparently, to his high school graduation. “Sorry,” he said again. He turned around and went inside, leaving Paul alone.

  “HE’S AN up-and-coming young artist.” Cleo Wu leaned over Paul’s shoulder as they sat in the office above the gallery on Yonge Street. “He made a splash in Poland, and now he’s hoping to break into the North American market.”

  “I don’t know.” Paul scrolled through the high-res images on the screen of his Macbook Pro. They were of collages, mostly, each a mishmash of images representing war, death, and love. “There’s nothing particularly original about his work.”

  “Can I remind you what happened with the last ‘particularly original’ exhibition we m
ounted?”

  She didn’t have to. They had been panned by everyone from the Globe and Mail to the National Post to the Sun, which Paul hadn’t even thought went to art exhibitions. At least not ones that didn’t involve naked women gyrating for dollar coins.

  “It could put us on the map, Paul. Or back on it, I should say. We haven’t had a real smash since, what, 2014? It’s starting to show.” She was right. The gallery wasn’t making money like it once had; they’d even had to lay off a junior assistant. As always, Cleo knew what she was talking about. She’d been his partner since university, in all ways but sexually, and normally, Paul would accept her judgment without second-guessing her. But now….

  “I’m sorry. I’m just not sure.” Paul sighed irritably. He picked up his Starbucks cup, but it was sadly light. Optimistically, he tried to sip from it anyway. Empty. He tossed it across the office to the recycling bin and felt some small satisfaction when it bounced off the rim and into the bin. “Maybe I’ve just got too much on my mind.”

  “Sure,” Cleo said easily. Although Sergiusz Przybyszewski was her figurative baby, she didn’t sound put out or even annoyed. “I get it. Who wouldn’t be distracted? You’re going home for the first time in… what….”

  “Twenty years.” And he wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t his grandmother’s one hundredth birthday.

  “So why don’t we take a look at this when you get back?”

  “Okay.” He’d only be gone Friday night to Sunday night. It was the least amount of time he could physically manage. If he could go to Saskatchewan and back in a day, he would.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” Cleo offered.

  “To small-town Saskatchewan?” Paul grinned at the thought. Cleo was… well, he would say striking, but that wasn’t really the word. There was no perfect word to describe her. Dark purple hair, jewel-bedecked cat’s-eye glasses, and a taste for stiletto heels and extravagant nail art, she would turn every head in Liddon. Probably in the whole province. “I wouldn’t subject you to it, darling.”

  “I’m tougher than I look, darling.” She smiled. “And I’ll have you know, I can be an excellent fake wife. Karsten says so all the time. He says, ‘Darlink,’”—she slipped into a German accent, remarkably like that of her longtime boyfriend, a German artist named Karsten Jülinger—“you are such an excellent fake wife, I do not ever sink I vill have to diworce my real one.’” She grinned, her bright red lips stretching into a wide smile, but there was a flicker of something else in her eyes. She joked, but he knew it was a sore point with her. They were inseparable when he was in Canada, but Karsten still spent half his time back in Stuttgart with his wife and children.

  “I’ll bring you a souvenir,” Paul told her. “A stalk of wheat, maybe. Or a cowpat.”

  “Great,” she replied. “I’ll clear a space on my knickknack shelf.”

  PAUL’S SISTER Kim was the one to send the invitation to the party, and then to follow up by phone when he ignored it. “It’s Nana’s hundredth birthday,” she said, as if he hadn’t read that in the Comic Sans monstrosity that had come through on his email. “And she says she’s got some sort of surprise to share with us.”

  “Surprise? The mind boggles. Do you think she might be pregnant?”

  “Shut up, Paul.”

  He’d agreed to go, reluctantly and with conditions. He would stay at a hotel in Regina, about an hour’s drive outside of Liddon, and come in only for the party. There was nowhere to stay in Liddon itself anyway, and he wasn’t going to burden Kim with his presence. It was bad enough that Regina was burdening him with its.

  Paul had never liked Regina. It was a provincial city with delusions of grandeur, although the grandeur stopped at a Sears outlet store—now closed, he noticed—and a legislative building that was perfectly admirable, until you’d seen Queen’s Park in Toronto or, of course, Parliament in Ottawa. As the Uber driver took him past the building, Paul remembered a grade ten field trip. Paul’s father, the Liddon town RCMP officer, had chaperoned, and he’d caught Daisy McLaughlin and Gord Hawryluk making out in the back of the bus when they were supposed to be dining at a Pizza Hut. The sound of his father yelling, “Get a room!” at two of his classmates had spurred a soul-deep embarrassment that clung to Paul for years.

  As they passed the legislative building, Paul’s eye caught on a ground-floor storefront a block or so down the street. “Actually,” he said to the middle-aged driver, picking up his bag, “I think I’ll get out here.”

  It was an art gallery. Smaller than the one he had in Toronto, although not by much. Paul didn’t want to even think about how much less they probably paid in rent. The gallery was closed now, but Paul stood outside, looking in the window. The window display was of uniquely Aboriginal art—colorful, blocky paintings of stylized eagles and bears. The centerpiece was a large carving, nearly two feet tall, in deep green soapstone. An Inuit hunter speared a fish, the weapon intricately carved from a spindle of dark wood and placed in his stone hand with care. It was beautiful. Paul’s own gallery hadn’t dealt in Aboriginal art in a decade or more. They’d focused on the immigrant experience for a long time now, but maybe this was an avenue worth exploring.

  He took out his phone and clicked a picture to show to Cleo. As he was about to take another, a voice said, “Paul Thompson?” He glanced over his shoulder. There, on the nearly deserted street, stood Dylan Shevchenko.

  Even after twenty years, Paul knew him at once. He was still big, still wide, still good-looking. Like Paul, he’d managed to keep his hair, although, also like Paul, it was beginning to show more than a little gray. It was a September evening, and the air was beginning to cool, but Dylan wore a green Roughriders T-shirt and shorts, along with what looked like, but couldn’t possibly be, the same beat-up Nikes he’d worn all through high school.

  “Paul?” Dylan repeated.

  For a fraction of a second, Paul considered denying it. He couldn’t even say why. But then Dylan smiled, the same brilliant grin he’d had in high school, and Paul said, “Hello, Dylan.”

  Paul wasn’t sure how he expected Dylan to react, but he certainly didn’t expect to be swept up into a hug and lifted from the ground while Dylan did his best to squeeze the life out of him. He was actually short of breath by the time Dylan put him down.

  Trying not to pant, he swallowed and attempted to suavely regain his breath as Dylan said, “You’re here for your grandma’s birthday, hey?”

  “You know about it?” Paul said, but that was evidence of his twenty years in Toronto. Of course Dylan knew about it. The entire town would.

  “Everyone does,” he confirmed. “All of Liddon is going to the party. I’m taking my parents.”

  “Right. Of course.” Paul smiled. “Are you… I mean, do you live here in Regina now?”

  “Yeah, for about ten years.”

  Paul restrained himself from offering his condolences.

  “I just couldn’t get the work out there, once they closed the school,” Dylan said. “Did you hear about that?”

  “Possibly.” It sounded like the kind of thing Kim, or his mother, would have let him know about, although he couldn’t remember it specifically.

  “It’s really too bad. That was a great school.”

  Paul wasn’t sure he’d go quite that far, but he’d survived it, if nothing else.

  “There just aren’t enough families living out there anymore. Not like there were when we were kids.” Dylan shook his head. Then, in an instant, his expression swung from downcast to thrilled. “But I hear you’re a big shot artist in Toronto. Way to go, man.”

  “Well, I have a gallery.” Paul’s own art career had been of extremely short duration.

  He’d mourned it, for a while, but as Cleo philosophically said, “Don’t chase what doesn’t belong to you. Also, you’ll make way more selling this shit than creating it.”

  “I found that I was better as a salesman than an artist.”

  “I’d love t
o hear about it. You got time?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yeah. Emma’s getting a haircut. It always takes forever. Want to grab a bite to eat?”

  “Okay,” Paul said resignedly. Now that he was back, he would have to “catch up” with people. There was no avoiding it. He might as well start here.

  “Awesome.” Dylan touched him again, this time slinging his arm over Paul’s shoulder and leaving it there, a hot, warm weight Paul could feel straight through his Gucci jacket. “You like sushi?”

  The last time Paul was in Regina, a “good” meal would have been goopy Chinese from the place near the RCMP training depot, or maybe semiauthentic Italian with sticky spaghetti and heartburn-inducing tomato sauce. Now, Dylan parked his car—over the last two decades, he’d replaced his parents’ truck with a Kia, of all things, but his driving hadn’t improved much—in front of a little place near the Cornwall Center with stylized chopsticks on the sign and a long black sushi bar inside.

  A hostess showed them to a booth in the corner, with a dark cherrywood table and leather banquettes. As he slid in across from Dylan, Paul remembered, with surprising clarity, their first day of grade one.

  The kindergarten classroom had its own toilet stall, but in grade one, they were expected to use the communal bathroom at the end of the main hallway. Although the school was barely bigger than a large house, the trip seemed daunting to Paul, on the scale of a voyage to the moon. He spent the morning crossing his legs until he went home at lunch, where he apparently drank too much apple juice, because by midafternoon, he was dying to go again.

  “What’s the matter?” Dylan had said, looking over to him. They were coloring pictures of farmyard animals, Paul remembered. He had a lamb. He’d colored the nose pink and the hooves black and was ready to call it a day.

  “I have to go,” Paul whispered back, shame coursing through him.

  “Okay.” Confidently, Dylan raised his hand. “Miss Peterson! Miss Peterson! Can I take Paul to the bathroom?”