by Ivan Coyote
We had all arrived in Nanaimo via a four-day Greyhound bus ride, fueled by wax-paper-wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches and warm juice boxes and lots of I spy with my naked eye games and sweaty crayons and supermarket colouring books and sporadic bouts of sleeping that left us whining about kinks in our necks. “Get off the bus then, and run around for a bit. Stretch your legs,” Gran told us in Fort Nelson and Fort St. John and Prince George and Cache Creek, and the pine trees grew fatter and taller and the air more humid as we bumped our dusty way south.
My gran had sent all of her furniture and dishes and belongings down the Alaska Highway via a Ryder moving truck, scheduling it all so the truck was supposed to arrive the day after we did. But that truck had jackknifed while braking to avoid a bull moose somewhere just north of Dawson Creek and tipped onto its side, scattering boxes and smashing enough of her stuff that delivery was delayed for several weeks while the moving company sorted through everything and decided what the damages were going to be worth.
It must have been hellish for her, rattling around her empty house with four kids and without so much as a spoon or a bowl or her infamous cast-iron pans, but I remember that time as being kind of an extended adventure, like we were camping out on the carpet in the living room for three weeks. She instructed us to stuff all of our long pants and sweaters into pillowcases she bought us at the Sally Ann to devise makeshift pillows, and to spread our sleeping bags out like mattresses and sleep sprawled in a row under just a second-hand sheet. My sheet had Smokey the Bear on it and I loved it. It had “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” printed all over it, and Smokey was wearing overalls and had a shovel in one paw and a robin perched on one shoulder. We got it from the hospital thrift store for a quarter.
My gran let us do things during this camping-in-the-house period that she never would have let us do if we had furniture and dishes, such as eat cereal out of those individual tiny boxes with the perforated lines where you opened them up like little square cardboard bowls. She said it was highway robbery, what they charged her for them, and we would fight over who got the Sugar Corn Pops or the Froot Loops and who had to eat the Raisin Bran. We would sit cross-legged in a circle where she planned to put her kitchen table when it finally arrived, and wolf down hot dogs and canned beans with plastic cutlery she told us to grab from the 7-Eleven when she bought us all Coke Slurpees. We listened to classic rock on my transistor radio and danced the jitterbug in the kitchen like our moms did when the Beatles first came here and she never once complained about having to buy new batteries for it.
I remember feeling a sad little tug in my chest when the moving truck finally arrived and the sweating men carried the furniture and television and boxes up the stairs and into the living room and kitchen, my grandmother hovering around them saying what went where and telling them to mind the new paint and wipe their boots. Sure, we had real pillows and bunk beds now. But it was Raisin Bran for everyone, and we weren’t allowed to read with our flashlights under the covers anymore like we were camping. Plus I had to vacuum now that we had a vacuum again and we all had to be quiet when my gran’s shows or the news came on the television.
It was all over the news that summer, about the missing kids in Vancouver. Eleven of them, by the time we got the furniture at the end of July and started watching the news again. Sometimes Gran would scoot my sister and cousins out of the living room and make them go play Memory or Battleship or Operation in the bedroom while we watched the six o’clock news alone.
She would cluck her tongue and cross herself. “You can never be too careful out there,” she would tell me over and over. “You’re the oldest. You’re responsible. Don’t you ever let them out of your sight for a minute, d’you hear me?” She would point her index finger at me, which was curled into a comma by her arthritis already, and shake her head at the state of the world. “Because God forbid anything should happen to any of yous while I’m responsible. Your poor mothers. I’d never forgive meself. I just wouldn’t.”
I took this responsibility as seriously as I could, considering I was almost twelve and only sixteen months older than my little sister Carrie and she would never do anything I told her to, nearly ever, and Christopher and Dan were like two little monkeys, climbing over each other and everything and eating plants we didn’t know the names for just to see what they tasted like, and falling out of trees and off of fences on the regular.
I tried telling them one morning when we were hanging the laundry and watering the freshly seeded vegetable garden that they had to listen to me more, that we had to stick together because there was a killer on the loose and kids were disappearing and if anything happened, well, think of our poor mothers, God forbid, right? But Carrie rolled her eyes at me and Christopher picked at a scab on his knee and Dan licked the dry snot under his nostril. It was no use. They were too little. It was up to me to make sure that killer never got one of us.
We spent the better part of any day that wasn’t pouring rain outside picking apples and plums and cherries and pears that were not quite ripe yet, with northern kid amazement at the bounty all around us, and eating them until we felt sick, and walking miles every day along the shoulder of the road to the reservoir so we could swim and laze around on threadbare beach towels on the patchy grass next to the water. We would search the bulrushes and long grass in the ditch next to the road for discarded pop and beer bottles that we could trade in at the corner store for money to buy gumballs and Lik-M-Aid sticks and popsicles with.
We walked nearly everywhere. There and back, to the mall for groceries, to the garden store, to the food co-op for cases of canned tomato soup and bags of rice. If it was just us kids, I would go first, then my sister, then the two boys, straggling along behind us like filthy ducklings. If Gran was with us it was more of a forced march, usually her up front holding Carrie’s hand, and me right behind towing Chris and Dan. She had little tolerance for what she called dilly-dallying.
But that warm July night, the crickets were singing and a cool breeze was rippling in the long grass next to the road, and lawn sprinklers were thrumming on front lawns and my gran said she could smell the lavender blooming and it reminded her of England when she and some girls from the factory where she used to work got to visit the countryside that one summer before the war.
So we slowed down.
I dropped each of the boys’ sweaty little paws and we meandered, smelling flowers and pulling stems of grass so we could eat the pale sweet shoots, and, as always, keeping our eyes peeled for the nickel-each gleam of discarded bottles in the ditches and culverts.
I took my eyes off of the boys, and I forgot to keep up with my gran and my sister too. A truck drove by a little too close to the shoulder of the road, startling me, and I jumped back and instinctively held my arms wide to herd my cousins further off the road. I looked up to see if my grandmother had witnessed this close call, but she and my little sister were gone. They had turned off the main road somewhere, and I had not been paying close enough attention and had failed to follow them. I jogged back to the last intersection, looked both ways. Couldn’t see them anywhere. Jogged back to where my cousins were standing, scratching their bug bites and kicking the dirt.
My heart started to pound in my throat a little. I grabbed one of each of the boys’ hands again.
“I didn’t see where Gran and Carrie turned off. Did you guys?” I asked, trying not to let any fear seep into my voice.
They shook their heads in perfect tandem. Christopher needed a haircut and Danny had an orangeish Slurpee stain all the way around his mouth. They suddenly looked younger than they had a minute ago, long lashes brushing across big wet eyes.
“Nobody needs to freak out, okay, we aren’t that lost. We just need to walk around a bit, until we see something that looks familiar.”
But nothing looked familiar. We had been walking home from looking at a used bedroom set that my gran had found for sale in the newspaper in a part of the neighbourhood we had never been to
before, and the older man who was selling the furniture had told my grandmother about a shorter way to walk home than the route we had taken there. He had sketched her a little map on a scrap of paper, but I hadn’t been paying attention because the house next door had a cardboard box of newborn kittens in the garage and the neighbours had let all four of us file in and watch them sleeping, curled up into their mother’s belly. I had no idea where we were, and only a vague idea of which way home was.
I knew we lived at number 10 Rosamond Street, but I didn’t know where Rosamond Street was. We didn’t have a phone hooked up yet, mostly because the phone itself had just arrived with the rest of the furniture a couple of days ago. I sat down on a large rock parked next to a stop sign to think it over.
I needed to find a gas station or a little old lady out weeding or watering her lawn and ask for directions. Those were my two safest options, the way I figured it. Little old ladies might be most likely to give you a lecture about walking on their grass or did our mothers know where we were, but I had never heard of one abducting and murdering children. And gas station guys were used to giving directions, and at least I knew the guy had a decent job.
We wandered around for about half an hour, the sun starting to dip dangerously close to dusk in the sky, and none of the streets or houses looked friendly or familiar. No gas stations. No corner stores. We slunk past an elementary school, the windows shuttered like eyelids and the playground abandoned, the chains on the swing set creaking when the wind gusted up.
Everything started feeling scary in that quiet orange evening light. A shirtless man was watering the shrubs next to his driveway with a green hose, but he had full, dark, hooded eyebrows and a bleeding tattoo of a skull on his shoulder, so I hurried my cousins past his house without making eye contact. I didn’t know what a child murderer looked like, but I wasn’t about to take any chances.
The road splintered off to the left into the mouth of a well-tended trailer park, and the second trailer in had a Block Parent sign scotch-taped into the front bay window. The trailer had a fresh coat of pale yellow paint on it, and flower boxes dripping with lobelia and baby’s breath hung from the railing on the deck. The little lawn was freshly mowed.
I remembered the whole Block Parent thing from an assembly we had in the school gymnasium when I was in grade four. Block Parent signs were supposed to mark houses where you could go if you got lost or were in danger. The people inside might be strangers, but they were supposed to be of the safe variety. I had been unconvinced that day in the school gymnasium, and I was still skeptical now.
The way I figured it was, if I were the type of person who was into stealing children, then I would put a Block Parent sign in my window. What could be easier, and who would ever think to look in the house with the Block Parent sign in the window? You wouldn’t even have to go to all the trouble of going out and finding a child to snatch, you could just sit around on the couch and watch TV and wait for a lost kid to come knocking.
I turned to Christopher and put my hands on both of his shoulders. Made him look me right in the eye.
“You see that trailer, right there? Number eleven? I’m going to go and knock on the door and see if I can get some directions on how to get us home, okay?”
He nodded solemnly.
“But I don’t know the people inside, so I’m taking your brother with me, but I want you to stay right here. Don’t move, okay? And if we don’t come out in like, five minutes, I need you to go and find an adult and call the police, okay? Tell them we were last seen going into trailer number eleven and he has probably got us.”
“Who is he?”
I took a deep breath, looked right, looked left. “You don’t need to know. You’re still too little. Which trailer?”
“Trailer number eleven.”
“Don’t move. Stay right here. You got me?”
He nodded.
I walked up the four stairs and rapped on the door, dragging Danny with me.
A woman in a fading flowered housedress opened the inside door and squinted through the screen door at us. I cleared my throat, stood up straighter.
“Uh … sorry to bother you, ma’am, but I saw the Block Parent sign and we just moved here and I don’t know my way around so good yet, and I was supposed to be paying attention but I guess I looked down for too long and I lost my gran and my sister and I know we live on Rosamond Street but I don’t know where that street is, and our phone isn’t hooked up yet so I can’t call and there’s no gas stations around here that I can find and I am the oldest and I should have been …”
She let out a crusty little chuckle and held up one hand to signal that I could stop talking. So I did.
“You poor little things. Rosamond Street, you say? You’re not too far from there. Let me rouse old Reggie off of the couch and he can drive you both home. Your poor grandmother. I bet she’s beside herself.”
She swung the screen door open with a loose-skinned arm and motioned for us to come in. Danny followed her pointed finger and stepped into the kitchen. It smelled like boiling corn on the cob in there.
“Thank you very much. I just have to go get my other cousin. I left him on the road outside just in case you were …”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Um … not home.” I looked down so she could not see my lie so easily, and turned on one heel to scurry back across the deck and down the stairs.
But Christopher was gone. I could see for at least a block in either direction, and there was no flash of red and yellow striped t-shirt, no brown corduroy shorts, no filthy running shoes or scrawny scabby little legs pumping. No cousin. Gone.
The lady told us her name was Annie, and this was her husband Reggie. She told me not to panic and to drink this glass of water. She gave Danny a chocolate-covered digestive cookie and told Reggie to start the car. She was going to get on the horn she said, and get the phone tree happening. We would have him home in no time, she promised, we all just needed to keep our heads.
Reggie let me ride up front, and Danny pouted from the back seat. I felt annoyed with him that he would even care about something like who got to sit where when his own brother was missing when there was a murderer on the loose and anything could happen.
It was nearly dark when Reggie’s headlights scrolled across the cedar hedge in front of number ten Rosamond Street. I could see the shape of my grandmother in our house from the driveway, her one hand held like a brim over her eyes so she could peer through the living room window at us. She paced back and forth, and then the silhouette of her appeared behind the pebbled glass window in the front door. She opened it wide just as Reggie was reaching for the doorbell. He dropped his hand back to his side.
“Looks like these two got a little turned around.” He placed a wide hard palm on my shoulder. “Your oldest here, she saw we were Block Parents and knocked to ask for directions. Smart kid. Your other boy was waiting on the street and must have got spooked and run off. My wife is at home rustling up a bunch of folks from our temple to get a search party together. We’ll track him down, don’t you worry now. He can’t have got too far. Oh, and my name is Reggie. Reggie Cluff. I should mention that.”
My gran grabbed me by one hand and dragged me into the front hallway. She pulled Danny by the neck of his t-shirt, and he wrapped both of his chubby arms around her one thigh.
“I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Cluff. I’m just worried sick. I was about to go next door and call the police. We just moved here and they haven’t come to hook the phone up yet. And where is Christopher?” Her eyes on me like two laser beams. “What am I always telling you about dilly-dallying around? You see? You see what happens? You better pray he gets home safe and sound, you.”
“We should all pray,” Reggie said, and my grandmother immediately made the sign of the cross in the air in front of her, and I followed. Reggie did not. He crossed his arms and bowed his head. Danny started to cry, and my gran didn’t tell him to stop.
My grand
mother was a proud woman, never one to ask for or accept help from anyone, ever. But in the next fifteen minutes or so, about thirty strangers arrived and parked their trucks and cars all up and down our little gravel street and gathered on our lawn, flashlights bobbing in the long summer dusk.
A map was spread out on the ticking hood of a Toyota pick-up truck and search areas were assigned. A police cruiser arrived too, and two officers got out and stretched their backs, wrote things down in their books, spoke into their squawking radios. Neighbours started to trickle out onto front stoops to see what was going on. My grandmother hovered on the perimeter, her cheeks flushed and her skin stretched tight over the bones in her face. I was in big trouble, I could tell. The kind of trouble so big it would have to wait for later.
The men gathered in a circle like a football huddle and said a quick prayer. “In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.” Reggie finished up and they all headed to their vehicles.
“These people are all Mormons,” my grandmother hissed at me like this was somehow all my fault too.
They brought Christopher home in the back of a squad car, wrapped in a grey flannel blanket, nearly two hours later. A man named Eric had spotted him bolting along the shoulder of the road several miles from Annie and Reggie’s trailer park, his fists and knees pumping in a terrified race to nowhere at all. One leg of his shorts was ripped into three ribbons and his face and arms and legs were bleeding from a hundred different bramble scratches. Christopher had refused to stop running when Eric had slowed the car down next to him, just kept straight on, full speed, eyes fixed on the horizon. Eric had been forced to pull over, jump out, and tackle the terrified little boy to the ground to get him to stop.
“That is right about when he peed his pants, poor little guy.” Eric recounted the story to the folks standing in a circle in our driveway, and everyone laughed. Everyone but my grandmother and me.
