Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  “You’re just jealous ’cause you’re too old for the U-shot.”

  “Change the subject,” she said. “Better yet, don’t talk at all. We should be saving our breath to find help for Dad.”

  For the first time, it dawned on me that Linda was worried about him. That we actually should be finding someone to rescue him. That he was in trouble and so were we. It hadn’t occurred to me to be afraid for him, or Linda, or even myself. Nothing bad had ever happened to us before.

  We had reached the cracked pavement of Zurich Street — or Z Street, as we liked to call it. End of the alphabet, end of the line. Wedged between the railway tracks and the canal, it was a neighbourhood of cottage-sized houses crammed haphazardly between grease-pit garages, butchers with skinned raccoon carcasses hanging in the windows and sad-looking groceterias with half-empty shelves. No trees, gardens or front yards. The houses squatted hard against the sidewalk, so that anyone passing by could look inside if the curtains weren’t shut.

  Dad told me once that the tiny homes had been thrown up on swampy ground as temporary shelters for troops of ShipCo workers during the ’50s. After they moved on to bigger houses in the suburbs, poorer families moved in, insulating the walls with cardboard and sawdust and, if they had the cash, covering the wood frame exteriors with cheap aluminum siding.

  Nothing was built to code on Z Street. If the city ever bothered to send in a fire inspector, most of the neighbourhood’s houses would be condemned. Luckily for the Z Streeters, the city couldn’t be bothered. There were even rumours that some of ShipCo’s waste was buried deep under the basements of certain houses.

  Linda and I held our noses to block the stench of urine as we walked past leftovers from the night before: broken beer bottles, cigarette butts, a discarded bra, a few wrinkled plastic sleeves that looked like transparent leeches. It was just past sunrise.

  In the distance, the dignified whitewashed facade of an old church marked the part of Z Street where Shipman’s Corners’ oldest families lived: the Sandersons, Kendals, Smiths and Bells, all of them descended from escaped slaves who’d come from the U.S. on the Underground Railroad, guided by Harriet Tubman herself. Shipman’s Corners prided itself on kindly taking in these refugees from the slave-owning Americans, then immediately pushing them to the edges of town.

  Here, at last, we saw signs of intelligent life: a boy, sitting on the front stoop of a green-doored cottage, built in the narrow space between the big white church and a tiny wreck of a house, the front steps caved in as if karate-chopped by a giant.

  The boy was reading a book, his head in one hand. As we clomped along the pavement, he looked up. That’s when I recognized him: Bea Kendal’s son, John. He came along with her when she visited our house once a week to sell Mom cleaning products and chicken soup base. Mrs. Kendal was a tall thin black woman who wore a plain grey dress with a little badge pinned to one shoulder and a matching hat that looked like a man’s fedora. She always arrived with a hefty sample case lugged around by fourteen-year-old John. I had the feeling that John Kendal noticed everything, although when Mrs. Kendal was taking Mom’s order over a cup of tea, he sat quietly at the kitchen table reading books that looked suspiciously like the Sunday colour comics.

  “You girls are up early,” he said.

  Linda paused in front of the stoop to push her damp hair off her forehead. Now that the sun had fully risen, the day was getting steamy.

  “Could your mom give us a lift, Kendal? Dad got a flat on a back road.”

  Kendal shook his head. “She left at five this morning to pick up her orders. Want me to ride out on my bike to help your dad? I’ve had lots of practice changing flats on my mom’s car.”

  I could see Linda struggling with how much to say. She didn’t want to admit to what we had been doing or where. One of Dad’s rules was that nothing he did on the job was discussed with anyone but family.

  “That’s very sweet, but Dad can handle the tire himself — he just wants Debbie and me to get home safely. Would you mind if I use your phone to call our mom?”

  John Kendal shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  As he showed Linda into the house, I picked up the book he’d been reading: Tintin and the Shooting Star. I flipped pages full of flat, bright primary colours. Red, yellow, green. On one page a boy in short pants and his white dog were dancing around, singing, “Hooray! Hooray! The end of the world has been postponed!”

  For someone born and brought up in Shipman’s Corners, John Kendal was unusual in a number of ways. First of all, he was black. And unlike most boys, he liked to read. Third, most people called him by his last name — Kendal, not John. And maybe most important of all, his father was dead. I only knew that last fact because Dad was summoned to the plant the night that Mr. Kendal fell asleep on the job and was pulled into a press by his shirtsleeve. He bled to death before they were able to get him out of the machine.

  Dad talked about it afterwards at the dinner table, shaking his head and saying what a shame it was that safety mechanisms would slow down production. He pointed out that guys like Mr. Kendal, who were willing to work double shifts, often got sleepy and sloppy, and the next thing you knew, boom. They were minus an arm or hand. He said Mr. Kendal was a smart guy — maybe too smart for his own good, rabble-rousing among the other men, talking about banding together to start a union. He should have known better. Ever since then, Mrs. Kendal came around to our house once a week to sell bleaches and detergent and a powder made from chickens that had had all the water sucked out of their bodies.

  While Linda called Mom, Kendal and I sat together on the stoop.

  “Where were you with your dad at the crack of dawn, anyway?” he asked.

  I was a notoriously bad keeper of secrets. “The Z-Lands,” I said, flipping through the Tintin book. “Ever been there?”

  “Sure. I go there all the time,” said Kendal. “It’s one of the few places around here with enough space for football. Last week Bum Bum went for a pass and almost fell in the canal.”

  “You trespass?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not hard. The ground around there is like sand. We tunnelled under the fence.”

  “I saw a trespasser in the canal, standing on a bus. Just before Dad’s Geiger counter went off,” I told him. “He must’ve gone in through your hole.”

  Kendal frowned. “The Geiger counter went off? You mean, it’s still radioactive out there? I thought it’d been cleaned up.”

  Violating Dad’s rule again, I nodded. “Yeah, Dad was surprised, too. That’s why we left in a hurry. He was driving so fast, he blew a tire.”

  “I’ll bet the Trespasser had something to do with it,” suggested Kendal. “In comic books, it’s always visitors from some other dimension that cause gamma rays and solar flares and mutations and stuff. Maybe he ripped a hole in the time-space continuum and let in a blast of radioactive dust. Did he say anything?”

  “He told me I’m ‘it.’ Like in a game of tag.”

  Kendal thought this over. “Maybe you’ve been picked for something. Like he has a mission for you. I wonder if you’ll meet again.”

  I shook my head. “Negatory. He’s dead. Melted away before my very eyes like the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  “So you think,” said Kendal.

  I put my head in my hands. “I shouldn’t have told you about the Geiger counter. I’m not supposed to talk about Dad’s job.”

  Kendal leaned close to me. “It’s okay. You’re a kid. You shouldn’t be trusted with grown-up secrets.”

  Linda was back, shaking her head. “No answer. Maybe Mom’s already gone to Plutonium Park to help set up for the company picnic.”

  I looked at Kendal. “You going?”

  “Natch. The ShipCo brass invite me and Mom every year. We get free hot dogs and everything.”

  “That’s nice, Kendal,” said Linda. “I mean,
after what happened to your dad.”

  Kendal’s smile faded. “I wish they’d shove their hot dogs up their fat asses and give me back my dad.”

  Linda’s face turned pink. Kendal picked up his book, pretending not to notice her embarrassment.

  “Look, how about I ride the two of you home on my bike?”

  Linda and I nodded, relieved we’d both worn skorts that morning. Kendal told us to wait out front while he grabbed some water to carry with us. Before he went inside, he squinted at me. “Want something for those cuts on your head, Debbie? Iodine, maybe?”

  I shook my head. “I just got the U-shot. I’m invulnerable.”

  “Delusional, more like it,” said Linda.

  “Watch out for Red Kryptonite,” said Kendal. “It won’t kill you, but it’ll sure confuse you.”

  “I think she’s already been exposed,” said Linda, circling her finger next to her ear.

  Kendal grabbed a rusty CCM bike from the alley between his house and the church. With Linda in the saddle, me on the handlebars and Kendal standing up on the pedals, we started to wobble toward home just as a boy came out onto the smashed-up stoop next door to Kendal’s. I recognized him as one of the no-hopers who were bussed to my school out of a sense of Catholic duty: Pasquale Pesce, the bookie’s son, better known as Bum Bum because when he was a little kid, his mom dragged him from house to house, trying to use his skinny little body and pathetic starving-baby face to help her bum cash and food off the neighbours. Still deceptively baby-faced at fourteen, he had the sketchy reputation of a kid who spent a lot of time on the street and the lingering body odour of someone living in a house without a bathtub, Mr. Pesce having gambled away everything except the four walls around them. Bum Bum had come barefoot onto the stoop that morning with what I guessed was his breakfast: a slice of bread, a can of Neutron Coke and the end of a cigarette.

  Bum Bum scratched under one armpit, squinting at us as we wobbled past. “Want I should take one of them girls on my bike?”

  “We’re okay, BB. I just got us balanced,” said Kendal.

  “Maybe I should ride shotgun?”

  “Roger that,” agreed Kendal.

  I swivelled my head to see Bum Bum toss his cigarette butt into the gutter and run to grab a child-sized one-speed from behind an overflowing garbage can beside what could generously be called his house. He quickly caught up with us, his knees pumping crazily on the too-small bike. He hadn’t bothered with a shirt and was wearing a pair of hot pink capris with a side zipper. Probably his mom’s.

  The rest of Z Street was waking up, too. Curtains twitched aside. Blank faces stared at us from windows and stoops. An empty bottle flew over our heads, smashing on the road ahead of us.

  “Watch out, someone’s trying to hit you, Kendal,” said Linda.

  “Not Kendal they’re aiming for,” pointed out Bum Bum, who stood up on his pedals and shouted a string of swear words in our wake. A few more bottles exploded around us like grenades. I put one arm over my head, almost losing my balance. Kendal pulled my hand firmly back down onto the handlebar.

  “Sons of bitches don’t know when to give up on a grudge,” he muttered.

  “Probably just the fuckin’ special forces retirees carpet-bombing to scare the chicks,” said Bum Bum, glancing backwards. “Or one of them Twistie assholes. Don’t know friend from foe anymore.”

  “Watch your language, gentlemen, please,” suggested Linda primly. “Can you go any faster, Kendal?”

  With a grunt, Kendal pedalled harder, picking up enough speed to edge past Bum Bum.

  “Eat my dust!” shouted Bum Bum, overtaking Kendal. The ride began to feel like a race.

  At the end of Zurich Street, we sped around a corner onto Tesla Road, passing a graffiti-spattered billboard with the shadow of an ad for a cereal that hadn’t existed since the ’50s, the words SHIPCO KILLS a ghostly scrawl under a thin coat of whitewash.

  We rode past an orchard where a woman and a man stood on ladders, filling quart baskets with plums. The couple looked as weathered and twisted as the branches around them. Grey faces, grey hair, grey clothing. They could have been man and wife, brother and sister, even mother and son. The woman said something to the man in a language I didn’t understand. The man nodded and spat on the ground. Their way of letting us know Linda and I didn’t belong there, tear-assing down their road with a couple of Z Streeters.

  Shipman’s Corners was an old U.E.L. town — U.E.L. standing for United Empire Loyalists, New England settlers who stayed loyal to Mad King George and made their way to British North America after the American Revolution. We were in what was known as the ethnic quarter: giusta-comes, wops, Polacks, Lithuanians, Yugoslavians, Ukrainians, Displaced Persons (sneeringly known as DPs), what have you. Whoever washed up in Shipman’s Corners after the war, looking for work, ended up living in this end of town.

  People tended to live with others who came from the same place. Italians, like my grandparents, settled on Fermi Road. The Ukrainians, Poles and other Eastern Europeans ended up on Tesla. Z Street took whoever didn’t fit in anywhere else.

  Only one thing united the neighbourhoods: we were all outsiders, isolated on the far side of the shipping canal from downtown Shipman’s Corners. ShipCo believed in a certain order to its company towns. We were living examples of how their experiment was panning out.

  Just beyond the plum orchard, we rode toward a dirty beige stucco bungalow with a scrap of a front yard covered by the roots of a giant peach tree. In the shadow of the branches, at a card table spread with bottles of various colours and sizes, a man with black slicked-back hair and a wide strong face sat in a white undershirt sipping clear liquid from a water glass — Mr. Holub, referred to as Mr. Capitalismo for his get-rich-quick schemes, the latest being a portable bomb shelter that looked suspiciously like an old-fashioned deep-sea diving suit with a Geiger counter stuck to it. Dad knew him from ShipCo. Nice enough guy, but a bit of a kook, he said.

  As we braked to a stop, Mr. Holub ambled into the street, carrying his glass. I could smell something funny on his breath. Like onions mixed with rubbing alcohol.

  “What you girls doin’ way out here this early in the morning?” His voice sounded mushy.

  Linda slid off the back of Kendal’s bike and told our story in a rush — at least the part about Dad’s flat tire out in the Z-Lands. She skipped around what we were doing exactly, no mention of the Geiger counter or why our sudden need to leave.

  I stood next to Kendal, who was holding his bike uncertainly while Bum Bum popped wheelies on the road, killing time while we sorted things out. With Mr. Holub taking charge, I was worried that Kendal would feel forgotten, until I realized that he was staring at the Holubs’ front door. A girl holding a broom was looking out at us through the screen, her long thick rope of black hair covered by a kerchief. I knew her from school: Sandy Holub, Mr. Capitalismo’s only child. Even though she was a year older than me, she was sent to our class because of her accent. Her real name was Oleksandra, but she changed it to Sandy because someone joked that her name sounded like a cat horking up a hairball.

  Sandy and I got to know each other crouching side by side in the hallway during a surprise air-raid drill. As I faced the wall with my arms around my head, I sniffed a sudden bathroom smell and realized that she had peed herself.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not for real,” I whispered, trying to reassure her.

  When she turned to look at me, the fear in her pale blue eyes nicked me like a knife. As suddenly as it had started, the siren stopped, leaving a ghostly echo. “All clear,” our teacher called out, followed by rustling and laughter as kids readjusted to being among the living again.

  “See?” I said.

  We were officially friends after that. Not the kind who go to each other’s houses, but ones who stick together at recess and pick each other as partners for double dutch.<
br />
  * * *

  As Kendal stared up at Sandy, and Sandy stared back at him, I realized it wasn’t Kendal who had been forgotten. It was me.

  Mr. Holub broke the spell by offering Kendal his hand to shake. “Thanks for the help, boy, I take the girls from here.” I could see Kendal wince at that word. Boy.

  “See you around at the picnic, I guess,” he said to me, then glanced up at Sandy one more time before signalling to Bum Bum that it was time to pedal back to Z Street. I watched the two of them bike past the grey orchard, a dog in pursuit, while Mr. Holub backed his car out of his parking spot behind the house. He said he would drop us off at home, then drive back to the Z-Lands to help Dad. I could tell Linda was relieved to have everything in grown-up hands again, but I was disappointed not to be riding home on Kendal’s handlebars.

  Sandy Holub stayed half-hidden behind the screen door. As the car pulled away from the curb, she lifted her hand to me in a wave, then turned away, vanishing into the darkness of the house with her broom.

  two

  Glow-in-the-Dark Pat Boone Lie Detector Test

  I stood naked in the bathroom, my clothes already sealed for incineration and the tub filling with hot water and a capful of Doc Von Braun’s Ultraviolet Bubble Bath for Kids™ while Mom tugged at the jagged ends of my hair where the ponytail had been ripped away.

  “I sure hope Claudia can do something with this mess,” she said, sighing.

  “I like it this way.”

  “When the other kids start making fun of the way you look, you won’t like it at all, cara.”

  I climbed into the deep purple bath, held my breath and sank below the surface, letting the bubbles mop up all those nasty alpha and beta particles with “a zesty candy fruit scent kids love,” according to the label. I soaked for a full fifteen minutes, until my skin stopped tingling, just like it said on the bottle, then dried off with a ShipKids® Exfoliation Towel. Mom dusted me down with AntiRad Atomic Girl Talcum Powder, just to be on the safe side.