Crow

by Amy Spurway

  My eyes were, in fact, closed as I described this daydream, the vision of my own end, to Allie. Now, I glance over at her. Her eyes are ringed in smudged mascara. She’s sitting up straighter, her body frozen, her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. My sick, ornery eyes promptly rebel against the new demands of light and shape, and add their own layer of blackness and blur to the details of her face and the space around her. I blink fast, trying to wipe away the sooty smudges in my vision, suddenly fumbling for something to say. But Allie beats me to it.

  “Bitch, I told you this mascara wasn’t waterproof.”

  I laugh, expecting Allie to do the same but she doesn’t. She starts the car, cranks up the heat to clear the fogged windshield, and flips the wipers to hyper-speed, even though it’s not raining all that hard. Before I can apologize, Allie jacks up the stereo and begins to wail along to some brooding Emo-pop boy band I’ve never heard before. She doesn’t stop singing the whole drive. When she drops me off back at Mama’s, I lean in to give her a hug and am surprised at how swift and stilted her end of the embrace feels with the tranqs and the pot worn off, and her patience for misery and company worn out, too.

  “Sorry for messing your makeup,” I say. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I’m fine. Go hug your mother.”

  But Mama’s not home. I expect to find hot tea on the stove, a pan of her famous broc-o-glop casserole in the oven, and a note to say that she’s gone to help Murdena Squires get a bird out of her chimney, or Shirl Short get her head out of her own arse. Instead, Peggy and my uncle Mossy are planted at the kitchen table.

  Mossy was born smack dab in the middle of Lucy Fortune’s brood. This was the pregnancy that Black Bernie nearly beat out of her because she was going through the coal too fast for his liking that winter. Mossy was born half deaf, blind in one eye, and roundly diagnosed by the nuns in the Catholic school and everyone in Town as “retarded.” But to hear Mama tell it, Mossy’s the closest thing the Fortune family has to a genius, a borderline criminal mastermind. With a tilt of his head and a pleasant, vacant face, Mossy Fortune could get away with pretty much anything. That face is why Mama and Peggy bore the brunt of an alder switch on their arses when Nanny didn’t believe them that Mossy was the one who tied their starchy, uncomfortable second-hand Sunday school dresses to a tree and lit a grass fire around the trunk. And why the cops would arrest Snooker Burns and Billy Sockets but just drive Mossy home when the three of them got caught stealing.

  Unlike the rest of the Fortunes, Mossy doesn’t talk and he doesn’t drink, although he used to do both. There’s a sad story there, about a slow, quiet girl named Ruby Tooth, who Mossy supposedly knocked up. Mossy asked Ruby’s father for her hand in marriage, but the old man said no. Called him a no-good drunken devil-spawned retard, and spit in his face. So Mossy hit the old man with a two-by-four, said he loved Ruby and would marry her anyway. But Ruby Tooth went missing. They found her body on the rocks off Greener’s Cliff a few days later. Her father swore up and down it was a suicide. That she was driven to it by that no-good drunken devil-spawned retard Mossy Fortune. That was thirty years ago. Mossy hasn’t said much, nor touched a drop of liquor, ever since.

  “Where’s Mama, and what are you two doing here?”

  Peggy doesn’t look up, just keeps languidly flipping through the photo album I left on the table. Mossy’s eyes widen with a weird, youthful bemusement as a sympathetic frown deepens the lines in his faintly misshapen face.

  “Effie’s just down the road giving old Flossie Baker a hand, what with Flossie’s hip being so bad. We found this rig here hitchhiking on the highway,” Peggy says, with a quick nod toward Mossy. “So don’t get your panties in a knot. We’re not staying long.”

  She stops turning photo album pages, and looks to me with her mouth and nose pulled into a po-faced pucker. “What’s that smell?”

  Considering Allie and I were hotboxing a rental car in a graveyard less than an hour ago, I know that I reek of weed. But I’m an adult now, goddammit, and I’ll walk in this door smelling any bloody way I want, Peggy.

  “New perfume,” I say. “It’s called Eau d’Coping With Crisis. Hope you like it. It’ll be my signature scent for the next while. And all my friends will be wearing it at my funeral.”

  “Got a hole for yourself good and dug already, do you?” she says, as she goes back to studying the photos in front of her.

  “Oh, fuck no,” I say, glaring at her with a woozy, button-pushing glee. “Getting buried in the dirt is for plebes. I want something a little flashier.”

  “Who’s gonna pay for that, now?” Peggy pushes back. “Your mother on her hotel maid’s pay? Maybe that fella you had in Toronto? Or that drug dealer you used to sleep around with, whassisname, Willy Gimp?”

  “None of your business,” I grunt, shuffling to the stove to find Mama’s tea kettle cold and empty, then to the fridge, where there’s nothing but a half-eaten egg sandwich and a jar of somebody’s homemade green tomato pickle slime. An audible huff escapes my throat as I thump the fridge door shut.

  Mossy is still gawking at me with an air of feeble sadness. Peggy keeps right on staring at Mama’s photo album, her thick finger tracing the ridges and edges of a particular page.

  “Maybe you should hit up the Spensers to pay for whatever fancy memorial you think you deserve, Crow,” Peggy chimes. “God knows those people made a bomb on the backs of the rest of us plebes.”

  I start down the hall to my room, to get out of this relic of a funeral dress and into something more comfortable. Like solitude. And silence. There’s a loud tapping of Peggy’s never-worked-a-day-in-her-life manicured nail on the plastic veneer that holds in place the photos before her, meant to draw my attention but I just keep going.

  “Funny, I never noticed how much Crow looks like the Spensers, don’t she Mossy?” He, of course, doesn’t answer.

  “Except for that hair. That’s the Old Man on the spot, isn’t it?” Peggy’s voice booms, her fingernail taps harder and louder on the album page. Then her loud, guttural laugh echoes down the hallway. “Black Bernie Fortune and that silver-tongued Spenser fella will never die as long as Crow’s alive.”

  4 IF YOU CAN’T TAKE THE HEAT, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN PARTY

  From the kitchen window, all I can see is the suffocating snarl of Mama’s rambling rose bush, a yellowing sea of overgrown grass, and the skeletons of spruce trees that have seen better days. It didn’t used to be like this. This land used to feel spacious and green and alive. But just like the inside of the trailer, the outside has morphed into a jumbled mess of things that should have been pruned, pulled, and purged a long time ago. Part of me feels compelled to feng shui the fuck out of this grubby little shack and start planning a landscaping makeover that I’ll probably never get to enjoy, but that Mama will appreciate. Instead, I’m going to slash a path through the overgrown grass, find the old bonfire pit, and start burning stuff. Tree branches. Newspapers. Memories. She’s all going up in flames tonight.

  It takes me three hours, six minor injuries, and four hundred and fifty-eight curse words, but I do it. I find the old bonfire pit and yank away the tired, tangled vegetation that had swallowed the circle of hefty beach rocks. I lug a dead tree from a corner of the backwoods, and set it beside a pile of newspaper lugged from the corners of the living room. I tuck a wad of ancient dryer lint and yellowed grass inside a little stick teepee in the centre of the stone circle. Spray it with twenty-year-old hairspray, just for fun. I gently cradle Mama’s Zippo lighter in the palm of my hand. With the sun just beginning to set and Mama working the night shift, I’ll have myself a merry little bonfire here. The first one since the summer I left. No s’mores and weenie roasting, but I’ve got a 1995 Shiraz that I bought at the snotty Toronto sommelier thing one of my Tinder conquests dragged me to, just days before Tumourpocalypse. I’m sure it will taste deliciously ironic when I slug it straight from the bottle in front of my Cape Bre
ton backwoods junk fire.

  I flick the Zippo and stoop, holding the flame to the lint ball until it ignites, then coax it along with a gentle stream of breath until a car comes barrelling up the driveway. A tinted-windowed Mustang blasting some schlock rock song, probably in an attempt to drown out the car’s multiple rumbles of age and failure. It’s Peggy, driving one of “The Twins,” which is what she proudly calls the couple of crappy “classic” cars she took from Skroink in their divorce.

  Except it’s not Peggy.

  The woman emerging from the driver’s side is skeletally thin. Or at least, most of her is. Other parts seem to be out­landishly large. Her tiny, deeply bronzed frame is tightly wrapped in a lime-green sarong, which can’t contain her wildly gigantic boobs. Big, round, leopard print–framed sunglasses crouch precariously on the tip of her elfin nose. Her twig-thin wrists and neck are weighted with layer upon layer of enormous red, yellow, and blue wooden beads, while on her head, dozens of thick platinum dreadlocks spring from beneath a zebra-print scarf.

  Tendrils of blue smoke curl from the outrageously large blunt she sparks as she ambles across the yard toward me. I almost don’t notice a spell of the squirrelly vision coming on. At first, I mistake the mirage of lights and colours for shades of sunset in the sky. Mama and I used to play a game at sunset and sunrise, where we’d each have to pick a colour from the ones we saw arching and flaring along the horizon. My eyes always found the patches where the cool blue of the ether met the warm glow of the sun, creating streaks of baby blue and bright pink tinged with wisps of an otherworldly violet. My brain has now plucked from my memory and conjured around this woman the impossibly real shade of sky-blue pink, which moves with her like a peacock’s trippy plumage as she prances toward me on stupidly high platform sandals.

  “F’eyed known there was a bomb fire, ida brung some bleedin’ marchmellows.”

  It’s Char.

  Behind the giant glasses, beneath the platinum blonde dreadlocks and oversized bangles, and through a very bizarre and very fake quasi-British accent, it is Char. Because nobody else calls them bomb fires. Or marchmellows. The grammar though, that’s Mr. Hillier’s fault. He taught a whole generation of kids from Down North that it was “bring, brang, and brung.”

  “Bollocks! Hang on!” Char shrieks in my ear just as her twiggy arms coil around me in a hug. Mashing out the cherry of her mega-joint on the heel of her clunky shoe and stuffing the remainder into a fold of the zebra scarf, she boings back to the car, jettisons the driver’s seat forward and wriggles into the back. When she emerges moments later, she’s got one tit hanging out the top of her shrink-wrap sarong. Latched on to that tit is a tiny, squirming, naked baby. A tiny, squirming, naked, deep-brown-skinned baby with a giant orange afro.

  She sashays back over to the firepit and smoothly drops into a cross-legged seat on the grass without even jostling the now still and peacefully feeding baby boy.

  “Char, where’d the . . . is that your . . . you had a baby?”

  “Got him down the Congo.” She shrugs. “Those African tribeswomen, they don’t care. They’ve got more babies than they know what to do with. Better me snatching the little fart than a bloody tiger, or him dying of ammonia.”

  “The Congo . . . you just took him? And came home?” I blink, still attempting to process.

  Char’s oddly coiffed head pivots back on her pencil thin neck and she howls with laughter. The baby doesn’t flinch. A tiny trickle of bluish breast milk dribbles from the corner of his soft mouth.

  “Jesus, Crow, ya dumb ass! Of course he’s mine. How else would I get these giant milk-bag knockers he’s slurpin’ on? Usually, I tell people I stole him first and then whip out the tit, just to see the looks on their faces, but the little bugger was starving. God, you’re some gall-able.”

  She barely slows down enough to breathe as she speaks. The phoney British accent has dissolved into a nasally Town brogue. Because even though Char grew up Down North, her mother was from The Mines, so she’s Cape Breton bilingual. Those accents die hard. Or not at all.

  “So, brain tumours, eh? That’s the shits.”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “I overheard.”

  “Overheard? Overheard where?”

  “I dunno. Some old broad in the line at Shoppers. Or Needs. Somewhere, I was buying arse ointment. Word’s out that you’re home and you’ve got brain tumours.”

  “They sell arse ointment at Needs?” I say, staring at her in wonderment at how that part ended up sounding like the most salient piece of information.

  “Depends on what you use for arse ointment, now don’t it?” Char smirks. “So, what have you been up to since you got home?”

  “Nothing. Writing. Remembering. Feeling like shit. Waiting.”

  “So, how bad are we talkin’? With the tumours.”

  “They can’t cut them out without leaving me blind, partially paralyzed, and shitting myself every time I blink, kinda bad. Symptoms don’t respond much to treatments, and they think it’s a type that grows and changes and can get really bad in a hurry. Need a biopsy to confirm.”

  “Oh, man.”

  We instinctively avoid looking at each other while we let that sink in. I twirl another wad of dryer lint into a ball, while Char twirls a section of her baby’s hair into a tighter coil.

  “So, when are you gonna shave your head?” She is sud­denly beaming.

  “They only shave a little patch for the biopsy. I can hide it.” I crumple up a piece of ancient newspaper and tuck it under a piece of wood to bolster the burgeoning fire. “And I’m not sold on the radiation and chemo thing.”

  “That’s not why you have to do it.” Char laughs. “It’s one of those things. You always said ‘I’m gonna shave my head one of these days.’ But now you’re staring the ultimate day-stealer right in the face. Shave your fucking head, girl! It says freedom. Fearlessness. Hair is deeply symbaltic, ya know.”

  Every time I went through a breakup, or had a crazy screw-the-world feminist/activist/anarchist spell, or when my roots got bad, my split ends got crunchy, and my bangs got straggly but I was too broke to get my hair done properly, I’d boldly proclaim, “That’s it, I’m shaving my head!” Even just a few months ago, I stood in front of the mirror, ponytail in hand and scissors poised. But I always backed off, because head shaving was for women with nothing to actually lose. “One of these days,” I’d say, “when I’m older. Wiser. Braver.” Put it on the Fuck It Bucket List.

  “I have cordless clippers in the car,” Char says.

  “I don’t want to know why.”

  “Right you don’t. But if it makes ya feel better, I clean them really, really good.”

  She plucks her nipple from the sleeping babe’s mouth and stuffs the boob back into her sarong. With one hand, she unravels the zebra scarf from her head, sending a mess of Javexed dreadlocks splashing down her back, and deftly fashions it into a snug-fitting sling. She tucks the baby inside, and tells me the real story of her four-month-old son.

  His name is Daktari Christ MacIsaac. His father was the twenty-year-old Congolese diamond smuggler. When he found out she was pregnant, he smacked her around a bit. But nobody smacks Char MacIsaac around and gets away with it. They found his body in a dumpster in Kinshasa. Of course, the guy was a serious criminal in an extraordinarily high-stakes, cutthroat, throat-cutting underground industry. He had enemies and rivals and friends ready to kill him at the drop of a hat. So, in all probability, Char had nothing to do with the fact that this dude wound up in a pile of napkins, goat scraps, and rotten cassava mush out behind the Sultani Hotel. Without a mark on his body. Poisoned, it seems.

  By the time they found him, Char was in Halifax, where she gave birth to sweet little brown-skinned, orange-haired Daktari Christ MacIsaac before meandering back home to Cape Breton to live with her folks. Wasn’t long before they kicked her out, for reasons Char claims not to know, and now she’s renting a room in her mother’s ex-best friend’s bas
ement, and borrowing her mother’s ex-best friend’s prized divorce-settlement car — that ex-best friend being Peggy.

  Char MacIsaac has always been a blurrer of lines. Daring or dangerous? Intrepid or insane? Fact or fiction? I still can’t tell. It is part of her crazy charm. I never bother to dig too deep for the truth with her. It’s more fun to do a little vicarious living through her wild, worldly stories while still feeling like I’ve got my shit together. Even though my shit is clearly falling apart now, and even though her wild, worldly stories seem more made up by the minute.

  “Anyway. Nobody smacks me around and gets away with it.” She flips off her monstrous sunglasses and winks an exaggerated wink with her makeup-laden eye. “Hey, got any good food? Havin’ this little parasite on my tit does a number on my apple-tite.”

  “Suppose Mama’ d boot my arse if you came to visit and I didn’t feed ya. She was up making broc-o-glop at six o’clock this morning. Only food I haven’t puked up yet. C’mon.”

  Broc-o-glop is Mama’s finest culinary masterpiece. And the horrible name is intentional. A ruse. You bring it to a pot-luck, and people say, “What’s that?” and you scrunch your nose in disgust and drawl, “Broc-o-glop.” They won’t touch it no matter how good it smells. And boom! More broc-o-glop for me. I’m not sure exactly what’s in it, but I tried to make it for Dave once and it turned out a slimy, salty, broccoli mess. I begged Mama to tell me the broc-o-glop secret, but she laughed. Said Dave didn’t deserve it, and refused to tell me. She won’t tell anyone.

  She’s funny like that, just like she used to be funny about not letting anybody leave our house without being fed, whether they wanted to be or not. Whether money was tight or not. “Sit down,” she’d say. “You look ready to eat a horse and chase the driver! I’ll put another can of water on the beans.” Which I always thought was weird because the people who came to our house never looked all that hungry to me, and we never ate canned beans. She even fed Weasel Tobin dinner the day she caught us screwing in the woods. He thought she was trying to poison him. I figured out that she was up to something even more devious: trying to make me think that she liked him, banking on the hope that I’d break up with him the second I thought he had her seal of approval. Mama’s funny like that, too.