Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  Gail sat beside me on the sidewalk. She was short, blonde, always crossed her arms over her large breasts. I saw her in a shopping mall recently, so terribly middle-aged and sagging at every point that I was shocked and saddened. Do you see that woman, I asked my daughter, the one standing at the checkout? We used to be in the same grade at school, I said. God, she said, shocked, and then looked at me with new eyes, appraising, and then reluctant admiration. No kidding, she said. God.

  Gail nudged me. “Look who’s coming.” She always spoke as though everything was a secret, drawing attention with a flick of her head and speaking from one corner of her mouth. “Jeez,” she said, “what do you think?”

  Herman Schultz, or Torch, we’d named him, walked towards us bent forward at the waist as though he trudged uphill. Hands plunged deep into the pockets of his made-over pants, he muttered to himself, a frown half-hidden in the clump of damp curls at his forehead. When he saw us he stopped suddenly and reared up like a prairie dog giving warning.

  Wayne held Scott fast in an armlock. “Torchy, baby,” he said, his face red with exertion. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Wait up,” Torch said and began to run towards us.

  “Do we look like we’re going someplace?” Wayne asked.

  “Aw, come on,” Scott pleaded and Wayne released him. Scott was tall and thin and looked as though he’d been chipped from wood with a fine chisel.

  Herman shook his finger at us, and his eyes, the colour of cracked blue pottery, shone with suppressed rage. “Okay. Okay. What did you go and do with him this time?” he asked.

  Scott straightened slowly, massaging his shoulder. “I give up. What did we do with who this time?”

  Frustration gleamed in Torch’s eyes. “You know damned well. My dog.” On his pale doughy cheeks was the faint glint of red whiskers, but his voice never changed from its soft feminine tone. It would always have pleading at its base. He carried food around in his pants pockets to lure stray dogs home to the two-room, brick-siding house where he lived with his mother, a tall, tired-looking, prematurely white-haired woman who saw all dogs as being wild dogs, and the men who sat on the Post Office steps during the day as being wild men. She worried about Torch being kidnapped. So she waited for early evening to send Herman downtown to fetch what replies she received from the dictated letters she sent, urgent enquiries into the whereabouts of her German soldier husband missing in Russia during the war.

  “Search me,” Scott said. “You tell me. Why can’t we leave your mutt alone?”

  Wayne stepped forward. He raised his arms above his head. “Tell you what, honky jerk. Any animal you can find, you can have.”

  “Here’s your big chance,” Gail said. “He wants you to feel him up. Grab it.”

  “There’s nothing to grab,” I said, falling for it, allowing myself to be drawn into the “let’s degrade Wayne” routine.

  But Wayne was a deviate. He knew he didn’t belong with us. Why had he chosen us, the fallen, instead of the “in crowd,” those who left the first of every July to go to the lakes? The ones who fornicated on sandy beaches while their parents played bridge and drank gin slush out on their patios. They arrived back the Labour Day weekend, reputations intact, while ours had been bandied about, imagined. My sins under the microscope, blown up out of proportion. Wayne hadn’t been born in Agassiz. He’d come five years ago. His father had a position of importance in the town. He knew he could do better.

  “Aw bug off. All of you cocksuckers,” Herman said. When his mother reached out and touched his golden head, he said, aw, bug off. When he soared like a bird from a fourth-floor balcony, breaking his back, he said, leave me alone. I read about it in the newspaper. A party. Drinking. None of us had been trained to drink and so we drank excessively and I imagined Torch had as well, pushing them back, feeling the release and the words to express himself. I saw him lying on his back on the pavement below, looking up through his cracked-blue pottery eyes at the ring of legs around him. Leave me alone. Bug off.

  Unlike the others, I’d met Herman’s strange mother, who used to do housework once a week for my mother and who would tie her white hair up into a kerchief because she was afraid of getting spiders caught in it. She told stories about the war. About fleeing a burning city with Herman on her back and how she worried and worried, her bony fingers arranging and rearranging the doilies on table tops, about his being affected by the bombs, the concussion of air slamming about his fragile ears. For behold, she said, the Lord came forth out of his place and came down and trod upon the high places of the earth and his shoes were flames of fire. It didn’t matter where you ran, she said. There was the fire and the noise and Herman never cried. Never cried. Herman had in his staring eyes the smoke and the fire, she’d said. Somewhere, his father is. Somewhere he will hear about us. And that will be that.

  Mrs. Schultz made Herman a birthday party once. My mother forced me to go because she wanted to know, what was this strange woman’s house like? Was it true, did she only have one bed in the house? There were none of the usual birthday games, but one that Mrs. Schultz in an attempt at gaiety earnestly showed us, a kind of 7-up game with an orange which she released quickly and let run down her arm and then flicked up into the air with a jerk of her biceps, saying, hup, hup, each time she did it. But the effort had been lost on most at the party. They giggled behind hands. Herman was downcast. He kicked at the leg of the table. “What is it, my wonderful child?” she asked.

  “Bug off,” Herman said and Mrs. Schultz covered her face in her hands.

  I stayed behind when the others left quickly and silently. I scraped sticky un-cooked cake from plates into a paper bag. Outside, Herman played hide and seek with two dogs that had followed him home. I saw his checkered shirt flash past a window. He circled the house silently, outwitting the animals who ducked and sniffed at the ground, seeking him out. I heard his laughter, an hysterical, high-pitched staccato as the dogs leapt and licked and bounded around him. Mrs. Schultz sat on a wooden bench in the kitchen beside the woodstove, her hands at her face. “My wonderful child,” she said and rocked. Then she began to pull at her white hair, at her long thin nose. Our eyes met. She sighed and folded her hands across her knees. “I tried to make a party for him so he would feel like other children,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

  “It was a nice party. The cake it — it was a delicious cake. I liked the icing.”

  “But they didn’t eat.” She raised her hands, palms up, towards the table.

  I continued to clear away the rubble. How had it come to be my accepted responsibility, this cleaning up after people? Putting salve on hurt feelings. “It was too soon after dinner,” I said. “They weren’t hungry yet.” I remember my mother standing over my sickbed after the doctor had left. She had scrubbed and rearranged the room before she’d called for him. Stripped the bed and put on the best linen. Well? she asked, her voice sharp in my fever-racked head. Did he notice the pillow slips? Through the eyes of my sickness she appeared before me wavery and translucent. He asked me who did the wonderful needlework, I heard myself say, the words sluggish on my thick tongue. He liked the roses on the border.

  Mrs. Schultz knelt suddenly, knee joints snapping loudly as her floral crepe dress cascaded down from her bony rump in graceful folds against the splintered floorboards. The muscles in her arm tightened as she drew a record player out from beneath the bench. It was the type of player we had in school, a brown net front, one speaker, a handle beneath the hinged lid. Where had she got it? Had it been payment from someone for the housework she’d done? Then, I imagined her carrying it, trudging through bombed-out streets with Herman on her back, the record player thumping and banging against her legs. The turntable rasped softly. Dishes rattled in the cupboard as Herman crashed into the side of the house, careening beneath the raw energy of the dogs. She gasped and pressed her knuckles against her teeth. “They will bite him,” she said. She stared at the window.

  “They won’t b
ite him,” I said and continued to clean away the mess of the failed party. The cake was not cooked, I’d tell my mother. It was awful. The pink icing was sticky and gooey and I wouldn’t be surprised if we all got sick.

  The turntable spun around and around. Mrs. Schultz sighed deeply as she placed the arm on the record, sat down, leaned against the wall, and reached for a basket on the floor. She shook free a large doily and began to crochet. I expected to hear the twangy strains of a gospel quartette and steeled myself against it. “The heaven is his throne, the earth his footstool and where is the place of my rest?” she said to no one as the speakers crackled loudly.

  From the disc came thin, clear notes, a piano being stroked, sure and precise. The melody began to unfold. I listened, my mouth suddenly stiff and shaking. The music was not a lullaby, but something else that made me stand still, my breasts leaning into it. My fingers began moving on their own across the tabletop, tracing the graceful cadences, the rising and falling of it. I sat down, slid, I should say because my knees had given way, to the floor. I leaned against the kitchen wall. “Ahh,” Mrs. Schultz said, as her nimble fingers ducked and jerked white threads into lacy scallops. The melody flowered and rose and with it the feeling of a door opening up inside me, sunlight and dew. I closed my eyes until the last note faded and the grinding, dull sound of the turntable and the rasp of Mrs. Schultz’s weeping circled the room. Outside, the dogs yelped and exclaimed their joy. She has two beds, I would tell my mother, who had sent me on this mission. A lie.

  “Make like the birds and flock off,” Wayne said to Torch that night, strutting towards him, flapping his arms up and down.

  “You’re full of bird shit,” Torch said, his frustration breaking loose and rolling down his cheeks into his red whiskers.

  — hahahahaha

  — may the bird of paradise fly up your nose

  — we care, right?

  — right

  “Okay. Okay for you then,” Herman said and wrung his hands.

  “Aw, come on.” Scott slung a bony arm around Herman’s neck. He fished into his pocket and brought out a packet of matches. “Here, it’s on me. Have a ball. It’s Saturday night.”

  Herman shook loose. “You’re all crazy,” he said. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away, head down, muttering loudly.

  “He’ll find the dog,” Wayne said. “Eventually.”

  Gail sighed. I knew what she was feeling. All summer we’d gone in circles, one foot on centre for luck, for safety, and then veering off, we ripped aimlessly through the cemeteries already growing in our minds. Above the telephone booth, in the glow of the streetlight, tiny wings thrummed and bodies pinged against the hot glass. The ache in my chest had grown sharper and I stood up to stretch and draw more air into my lungs.

  The beer parlour door opened and Wayne’s father stepped outside. With him came a blast of hot air, an explosion of hoarse babble. He seemed stunned for a moment and then, seeing us, came over to where we sat. I had never known anyone’s father to be so old. He was shorter than Wayne, stooped at the shoulders, and his complexion as grey as his hair.

  “And so, what are you young people up to tonight?” he asked and smiled but his smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  — hello, Mr. Thompson

  — hi

  — greetings and hallucinations

  “How’s that?”

  — just kidding, sir

  “Nothing much,” Wayne said. “As usual.”

  The man leaned against a car to steady himself and took out his wallet. “You young people should be doing something,” he said. “Not just driving around.” He held out twenty dollars. “Here, it’s my treat. Why don’t you go to Winnipeg, take in a movie or something?” His hands shook.

  — wow

  — gee, thanks

  “The prick,” Wayne said as he backed the car from the curb. “The old lady’s away at the lake. I’ll bet the bugger’s on his way to St. Jean to saw off a hunk.”

  We didn’t talk for several minutes. Scott’s father had taken off one day, leaving behind a short dark woman with immense sad eyes and two children. Gail’s mother was in a mental institution. We had an unspoken agreement never to talk about our homes.

  “Where we going?” Scott asked, breaking the silence.

  “To the cemetery,” I said. “To untie Torch’s dog.”

  “Aw, come on,” Wayne said. “It’ll give Torch something to do.”

  We entered the cemetery travelling down a narrow gravel pathway to the very back. I asked my grandparents to forgive our trespassing. Earlier, the ants had done their task of removing the sticky seal from the hard, round peony knobs and the bushes had flowered hugely and now the petals, like flecks of rust, spotted the ground all around. The muggy air held the scent of pine and the spent flowers.

  We got out of the car and walked to the far corner. My stomach caved in at the sight of Torch’s small spotted dog hanging from the fence, tongue lolling grotesquely. It had jumped over the iron railing that enclosed the grave, seeking freedom.

  Frank lies on his back, staring at the ceiling. The light from the streetlamp divides his face in two, light and shadow. Touch me. I would take him inside me and stop thinking, only we both know we would get started and every slight noise, a car passing, a footstep on the pavement outside, would leave us rigid and tense, listening. Twice during the night, I heard a telephone ringing, pulling me up out of my dreams and I have stood in the middle of the living room clutching at my nightgown, facing a silent telephone. Mom, I’m not coming home. Thought I would let you know. His words slurred or too quiet. Don’t ask me where I am. I listen intensely for background noise, for clues, but always, only the hollow sound of his voice. I hate the cars, his drinking, but I prefer it to his solitary wandering through a dream world. The glowing red digital numbers on the bedside table illuminate the thick dark hairs on Frank’s arm. He has never told me that I worry too much.

  “Did I know that was going to happen?” Wayne asked.

  “The dog was retarded,” Scott said. “Just like Torch. Forget it.” He turned the car radio up full volume. The voice of Buddy Holly singing, “That’ll be the day,” enveloped us. I gathered myself up into the corner of the back seat and felt the thump of tires in my spine, the sweet smell of evergreen car deodorizer, and thought, oh, oh. Turn it off. Because it seemed that every time something bad happened to me, that song was playing. Like the time we fishtailed off an icy highway and rolled into the ditch. After the sounds of metal tearing and glass shattering and the tools left lying on the floor of the car had ceased their clanging and bouncing and the choking dust had settled, I pulled myself out from beneath the dash to the thin jerky melody of “Oh, that’ll be the day.” We counted the cost to the beat of the music, Gail’s missing nose, one shattered leg, a crescent scar on my shin from a tire wrench.

  “We should have buried it or something,” Gail said. “Then he wouldn’t find out. He’d think it ran away and would forget about it.” She was morose and quiet. We’d been drinking for an hour, speeding down the highway, directionless, the purpose to keep moving because a parked car drew attention. The alcohol hadn’t worked for me the way it usually did, giving me a rush of exhilaration, elastic vocal cords so that I could imitate Brenda Lee or Johnny Cash and go off screaming or singing at the moon until they had to chase me down, sit on me and drag me home. We’d driven for several hours, going south from Grande Pointe towards the border and then west and were heading back towards Agassiz, about a mile out when we rounded a curve in the road. Ahead, the heavy clouds reflected the flickering glow of a fire. As we drew closer, the fire became many fires dotting a field.

  “Jeez,” Gail leaned forward and grabbed Wayne by the shoulder. The dancing light of the flames cast her eyes into deep shadows. When they’d grafted skin onto her nose, they took it from some hairy part of her body and so the tip of it was covered in fuzz like a peach. “Stop the car,” she said. “That’s my old man’s hay.”
>
  “I’ve always wanted to do this,” Wayne said and turned down a road choked with weeds. Thick, acrid smoke rolled up from the stubble. We moved slowly through the thick smoke and felt the press of heat against the windows. Gail rolled down her window and the car filled with smoke, stinging our eyes and throats.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Wayne complained.

  “Look.” She pointed. Among the dotted fires a fire, held high, zigzagged across the field. I knew who it was even before Wayne turned the wheel sharply and the headlights caught Herman’s white face. He turned and ran from us, still carrying the torch, his too-large pants flapping around his ankles, slowing him down.

  “Stupid bugger,” Gail said as Torch ran towards a small shed. “There’s gas in there.”

  Wayne and Scott leapt from the car and began chasing him. Herman saw them coming, flung the torch aside and veered off into the smoke.

  “Stupid bugger,” Gail said once again as Wayne and Scott came back to the car. “Wait until I tell my dad about this.”

  “Shutup,” Scott said. “And drink your beer.”

  Later that night, we gathered together in the basement of Wayne’s house where his father had built a damp and airless rumpus room. We didn’t talk about Torch or his dog. Earlier the sky had opened and a great rushing downpour had flooded the streets of Agassiz, making driving impossible. We could still hear water running in the tiles beneath the concrete floor. Four people sat in the centre of the room in various stages of nudity, their bodies slick with perspiration. The only light came from two candles where the four sat, playing strip poker. There were ten of us altogether. When we’d come back into Agassiz, we’d come upon a carload of kids from Grande Pointe, who had spent the night drinking in a tavern in South Dakota and were sitting out the cloud-burst in the Hotel cafe. The windows in the basement were closed tight and the air contained the smell of our bodies, of damp hair, sex, of smoke and beer. I sat on a plastic couch and watched the players through an alcoholic haze. I saw Herman’s white face, the terror, the despair. I sang, “Oh, that’ll be the day.” It seemed to me that the card-players’ heads had become disconnected from their bodies and floated loosely above their shoulders.