Bonechiller

by Graham McNamee

  Me and Dad don’t do Christmas anymore. A few presents on the day, okay. But unwrapped, no cards.

  Now I shake my head. If Dad’s not touching this sad little tree, I’m not either.

  “Hey, I need you to give me a hand in the morning,” he says, eyes on the game. “Before school. I have to tow a couple huts out onto the ice. Got tourists coming to try out the fishing. I’ll give you ten bucks for an hour’s work.”

  “That’s like minimum wage. You running an arctic sweatshop here?”

  “Can you have an arctic sweatshop?” He peers into the bottom of a newly emptied empty.

  I shrug. “Sure. Bunch of Eskimos making Gucci knockoffs.”

  He smiles and sets the bottle down with the others.

  “Shouldn’t call them Eskimos, you know. It’s like calling a black guy colored. Eskimo is what white people always called them, because they thought the name meant ‘raw-meat eater.’ Doesn’t even really mean that, but that’s what everybody thought. You want to be called ‘raw-meat eater’?”

  “Guess not. Wouldn’t get many dates.”

  Dad’s showing his Irish side. I grew up on stories of how the Irish were treated like dirt back in the old country. Dad had this postcard framed on the wall when I was little, of a sign you used to see outside English pubs that said NO DOGS. NO BLACKS. NO IRISH. They were the lowest of the low. So he’s always sticking up for other screwed-over minorities.

  “They call themselves Inuit,” he says. “Just means ‘the People.’ ”

  I yawn. On TV, the Leafs are losing. Again! And the curse goes on.

  “Yeah? Well, this people is hitting the sack. Gotta be up at dawn. The old man’s a slavedriver.”

  I go down the hall to my room.

  “ ’Night, Danny Boy.”

  He calls me that when he’s tired, a little sad or a little drunk. It’s from some old Irish song where a mother calls out for her son, who’s wandered far away, to come home. Her Danny Boy. Dad wouldn’t be calling me that if he wasn’t three beers into a buzz. See, Mom’s the one who named me. The one who used to sing the song to me when I was little. It kills me when he calls me that.

  My room is one of the guest bedrooms the owner of the marina rents out to tourists in the summer. It was decorated by someone with a serious fish fetish. Framed photos, yellowing behind the glass, show prizewinning catches from years past. Guys in angling gear holding up trout, bass and carp. For me, fish come frozen and battered, in stick form.

  Above the bed there’s a historical photo of ice cutters out on the frozen lake. That’s going back a century, when Lake Simcoe Ice was big business. Before people had fridges, the only way to get ice was from nature. Ice from the lake was tested as 100 percent pure and was shipped by train halfway across the country. The photo shows a team of horses out on the frozen lake, pulling a long scraper to smooth the surface for cutting into blocks. The ice harvest is what gave the cove its name.

  I toss Frankenstein on the little desk by the window. My cell phone sits there beside the lamp. I’ve gone over those shots I took of the tracks a dozen times now. And I’m still clueless. I thought about just e-mailing them to Howie, with a little note saying Look what I found, what do you think made these?

  Howie’s a walking encyclopedia. His room is like a museum. He’s got a library bigger than the school’s, and all kinds of animal bones, bird feathers, rocks, shells and jars of “specimens” collected from around the cove.

  A mad scientist in training.

  But I hold back from sending them. That whole twisted scene down in the ditch is still broken up in jagged little pieces in my mind. Still unbelievable. God, I wish I’d never found those tracks. Then I could write it all off as some hallucination caused by a concussion.

  Finding the tracks was bad enough. But when I show them to Howie, that’ll make everything real.

  Tomorrow, I tell myself. I’ll show Howie.

  I kill the light and crawl into bed.

  Seems like as soon as I get used to a new bed, we’re on the move again. This one’s got a sprung spring on the left that pokes me in the ribs all night. So I huddle on the right and beat my pillow into submission before resting my head. The radiator makes muffled whispering sounds as air moves through the pipes.

  I remember my old bed, where nobody had ever slept but me. Back in Toronto, another life ago. Mom always used to tuck me in, even when I was way too old for it. I’d fake sleep, feeling her pull the covers up to my shoulders and making sure my feet didn’t stick out. Don’t want your feet to catch cold, she’d say when I was little. Then they’ll start sneezing all over the place. And she’d give them a tickle before turning out the light. Some nights, near the end, I’d fake sleep for a different reason. To hide from her. I could feel when she came to sit on the edge of my bed, late at night. Feel her weight settling there. Hear her breathing. Her crying sometimes.

  Just as I’m drifting off now, the whispers from the radiator seem to be almost forming words. The pipes breathing, talking to themselves.

  The flash of light is so sudden and intense it hurts. Makes me gasp.

  What’s going on? What’s that?

  I wake to a blinding whiteness and try to shut my eyes. Only, they won’t shut.

  Where am I?

  Wherever I am, it’s cold. A deep, stabbing cold. I turn my head to look around—

  I try to turn my head—

  I can’t move my head! Wait. I can’t move at all!

  Can’t even blink.

  Only my eyes can move. From the corners of my eyes, I see white on white on white. Pure and harsh, it jabs at the back of my sockets. My head is slightly raised, not on a pillow, but on something that feels like steel. Icy against the back of my neck.

  The bed, the room, the house are all gone. Leaving nothing but white.

  I’d shiver if I could. But even that movement is impossible.

  Peering out of the bottom of my eyes, I can see my bare chest going up and down, slow and steady despite my panic. My breath steams in the frosty air.

  Hey! Anybody there? I try to call out. Can’t even whisper.

  Between breaths clouding my view, I see something wrong with my chest. It’s been cut. Beginning at my shoulders, two straight lines are sliced into my skin, meeting in the middle right above my stomach. No blood. The edges of the cuts look almost blue, and my skin is snow-pale. Where the two lines meet, they turn into one, a single line aimed down at my groin.

  With a rising panic, I recognize that cut from TV cop shows. It’s called a Y incision. They make it to open you up for autopsy.

  Get a grip! This is a dream. I’m dreaming. Dreaming a seriously twisted nightmare. But that’s all.

  It can’t hurt me! There’s no pain in dreams, right? Nothing physical anyway.

  Stop looking at the cut! You can’t close your eyes, so just lose yourself in the white.

  I stare snow-blind into the bright nothing.

  I’m still in bed, in my room. Safe. Nothing to be afraid—

  Then something touches the top of my head. A hand? Brushing over my hair? Fingers? Are those fingers?

  Who’s there? I ask silently.

  Straining my eyes up, I can’t see back far enough.

  There’s a sudden buzzing sound by my ear, shockingly loud in the absolute silence of this place. Then cold metal presses against my temple. I feel a tugging on my scalp, of tiny steel teeth combing through my hair. A tuft of cut hair falls against my left ear. The electric hum moves back and forth, like a circling mosquito, as my scalp is buzzed bald.

  I don’t like this. I really don’t like this.

  Time to wake up. Now! Please.

  I try. Nothing happens. I’m trapped.

  The buzzing stops, followed by a deafening quiet. My eyes roll back and forth, trying desperately to pick out anything—a glimpse, a shadow, a tiny sign of what that thing is behind me.

  Then I feel it. On the bared flesh of my skull. A hand, but not a hand. Rough and spiky, p
ricking lightly over my scalp. Like it’s searching, probing.

  Whatever I did, I’m sorry, I yell without a voice, hysterical. I swear. Just let me go.

  The hand that’s not a hand goes away. Maybe it heard me. Maybe it’ll let me go now. Let me wake up.

  Then a sharp metallic noise rips through the silence. The electric whine jabs my eardrums. Sounds like something from Dad’s workshop.

  Like an electric saw.

  Wake up—now! Please! Please! Please!

  I can see just past the blur of my brows. I make out the silver glint from the spinning edge of a circular blade as it lowers to bite into my forehead.

  My scream is mute.

  But there’s no pain. Only the sensation of my skin separating, and underneath that the indescribable feeling of bone being violated, cut through smoothly, like a knife through butter.

  I go blank then, my consciousness retreating, hiding as far back inside my head as it can go.

  An eternity passes until the whine of the saw stops.

  I lie numb, inside and out, waiting for this to end.

  It’s gotta end, right?

  But not yet.

  I feel the stragest tugging sensation on the top of my head. I get a memory flash of some TV show with a baby being born and the doctors using this suction cup thing on the head to pull the newborn out.

  Not happening. This is not happening. I’m in my bed, in my room. Alone.

  I hear something that makes my eardrums tremble. A growl, so low and deep my bones ache as it rumbles through me.

  Then a gust of air like a frozen breath caresses the exposed surface of my brain. Paralyzed, I can’t even shiver at the touch.

  With the breath, I hear a whisper. Not through my ears, but spoken directly into my mind.

  Danny Boy, it says. My Danny Boy.

  Wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP!

  I come out of it with a strangled shriek. Struggling out of the straitjacket tangle of my sheets, I stumble out of bed and crash into the wall, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of the room.

  I shove my hand up under my shirt and feel the smooth, unmutilated surface of my chest. With both hands, I frantically check my head. Still intact. Hair and all.

  My heart’s beating so fast it’s making me dizzy. I’m shivering like crazy. I must look like I’m having a seizure as I make my way over to the shadow of the desk and turn on the lamp.

  The room is empty. Just me. Alone. Nobody else.

  I tell myself that, as I lean against the desk and force my lungs to breathe slower. I try to wake all the way up. Make sure I’m out of reach of that nightmare.

  Where did that come from?

  It’s that stupid Frankenstein, mixed with the wild weirdness last night, and memories of Mom buried in my brain. Topped off with Dad calling me Danny Boy. Splice it all together for one warped slasher dream.

  After a while, I go from panicked to pissed off. Pissed at everything. At Dad, and our life as drifters. At this pit of a town. At Mom, for dying and leaving me alone.

  And that book! I grab Frankenstein off the desk and tear it in half, then in quarters. I don’t stop till it’s shredded into confetti.

  Shivering, I lean my palms on the flat top of the radiator, trying to suck all the heat out of it. I notice that tiny blue dot on the back of my hand. I try to rub it off with my thumb, only it won’t rub away. But really, it looks like nothing. Maybe it’s been there for a while and I just never noticed. Like a freckle—who remembers all their freckles? It’s probably some old pen jab that broke the skin and got tattooed into me. I quit trying to erase it.

  Muffled hissing sounds and gurgles rise from the radiator pipes. Sounds that could be mistaken for voices in other rooms. Or whispers from outside.

  Pressing my thighs up against the radiator, I look out the window. But all I can see is my reflection in the night-black glass.

  Just after dawn, I hear Dad heading out to drill the fishing holes.

  Couldn’t get back to sleep for more than a couple minutes at a time. I’ve been lying here, listening to the night sounds of the house, paranoid about what’s waiting for me in my dreams.

  Outside, the snowmobile starts up. Dad revs the engine as he speeds onto the lake. It’ll take him about an hour to drill the holes in the ice.

  I get up and squeeze in a shower before he returns. Letting the water run till the furnace wakes up and gives me some heat, I hop in and try to melt away the nightmare.

  By the time Dad gets back, I’ve got the coffee ready.

  “Cold as a witch’s kiss out there,” he tells me, tossing his gloves on the table and gripping the steaming mug I give him with both hands. “But drilling holes warms you up. The ice is a good ten inches thick.”

  I went ice fishing once. Not my idea of a wild time.

  After a couple mugs of coffee, I’m wired enough to brave the witch’s kiss.

  The door opens on a wind that stings my eyes and sucks my nostrils in tight. I scan the snow-whipped stretch of shore and ice.

  What are we doing here? I ask myself for the millionth time. Dad’s answer to that would be “You gotta go where the work is.”

  Like there were no jobs back in Toronto? I’ve been in three schools in two years. I barely find out where the cafeteria is before we’re packing up. What’s next? A nice little shack at the North Pole? How far do we have to go?

  We’re on the run. Running from a ghost, a memory. But you can’t give your memories a “no forwarding address.” Just like you can’t lose your shadow—it knows where you live. We’ve got to face what happened to Mom sometime. We’re out of places to run. Harvest Cove is the end of the world. But when I try to tell Dad this, he shrugs it off.

  “Hold on tight,” he yells to me now over the snowmobile’s motor. I climb on behind him. We pull out, with the sun slanting a white glare off the ice. The stinging wind wakes me all the way up.

  The huts are wooden shacks on sleds the marina rents out. Me and Dad tow them a couple hundred yards from shore, teaming up to shove and shift them into place over the holes he’s made. Then he anchors them in the ice with drilled spikes.

  When we’re done, we hop back on the snowmobile. Dad revs the motor, making the thing quiver under us like a horse ready to run.

  “What do you say we set her loose?” he calls over his shoulder. “See what she’s got?”

  “Let’s do it!” I squint against the blowing snow.

  “Grab on tight, now.”

  I lock my arms around him.

  “Unleash hell!” I tell him, quoting our favorite movie, Gladiator.

  Then we launch.

  With me hanging on for my life, we fly across the ice. I’m laughing, breathless, my cheek pressed against Dad’s back.

  We speed into the blinding white of the rising sun, outracing the wind and the cold—and for a while, even the past.

  EIGHT

  I wince in sympathy as the middleweight’s head bounces off the mat. I know what that feels like. He pushes himself to his knees, but that’s as far as he gets. The ref waves him out, and the winner pumps his gloved fist in the air.

  It’s Friday night, and the Molson Center in Barrie is packed for the regionals of the Canadian Juniors bouts. It’s like a greenhouse in here, warm and humid from the press of the crowd and the battles in the ring.

  “Ash is up next.” Howie leans forward.

  Me, him and Pike are sitting two rows back.

  “See that blonde sitting ringside?” Pike mumbles around a mouthful of hot dog. “She’s checking me out.”

  The blonde is looking at Pike in shock. Probably because he eats like a starving hyena. Except instead of a blood-covered muzzle, he’s got ketchup smeared all over his face.

  “She’s just stunned at how many dogs you can cram down.”

  “Here comes Ash!” Howie says.

  I stand up to see over the crowd.

  Ash strides toward the ring, her spiky black hair springing out the top of her headgear. Sh
e’s followed by her father. He’s a foot taller than her and twice as wide. A full-blooded Ojibwa with a weathered face and an intense black heat in his eyes. He’s Ash’s trainer. I’ve seen him at the gym out at Borden, running drills with her, working on punching combinations. They call him Nick, because his real name is Indian and hard on the tongue—something like Nishkahdze. It means “angry one.” Ash says he got it because he was born screaming and throwing punches in the air. He’s got one of those faces you can’t read. You never know if he’s pissed or just laughing at you.

  Ash has the same heat in her stare now as she passes us to climb the steps to the ring. She doesn’t see us or seem to notice the crowd at all—she’s psyching herself up.

  Her dad follows her into the ring. Ash shrugs her shoulders and rolls her head, shaking out her arms to loosen up. Nick rubs the back of her neck, talking in her ear.

  Ash has on a knee-length crimson boxing robe. On the back there’s this Indian design with a pissed-off-looking bird of prey. Ash looks wild and dangerous. I can’t take my eyes off her. If I touched her right now, it would be like kissing lightning.

  The other girl climbs into the ring.

  “Somebody beat that girl with the ugly stick,” Pike says.

  Harsh, but true. The pale redhead’s nose is a lump, squashed down where it’s been broken before. And her eyes are too close together.

  Nick takes off Ash’s robe and puts it over his shoulder. She’s all in red, trunks and top, with crimson-tasseled boxing shoes.

  The announcer moves to the center of the ring.

  “Our next match is a four-round girls’ lightweight. In the black trunks, from Muskoka, with a record of six wins, two losses—Jennifer Mankowski.”

  There are scattered cheers for her, and boos from the three of us.

  “And in the red trunks, from Harvest Cove, with a record of five wins, no losses—Ashley Animkee.”

  A roar from the crowd, with a bunch of people from the base who showed up to cheer Ash and the other army brats boxing tonight.

  The trainers leave the ring. Ash’s dad comes over to us and tosses her robe into my lap. “Hold that. And let’s hear you make some noise, boys.”