“Our boy owes us nothing. No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that’s just the way it goes.”
Afterwards my mother knocked on my bedroom door and sat on the bed beside me. “You’re grounded for two days.” Her weary exhalation said that while the punishment might be silly, rules were rules. She kissed me on the forehead and again on the lips.
“I only want you to be happy, Jake. But first I want you to be safe.”
I pictured Mrs. Yellowbird speaking those same words to Dove, sitting on her daughter’s bed. I didn’t know it then, but I’d speak those same words to my own son one day.
“Okay, Mom.”
“I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
And I did. Just not quite as much as she loved me.
5.
THE HOUSE ON THE HILL
Exactly twenty-three years after Dove hopped on the Greyhound, my son was born at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the west end of Toronto. He was delivered on Civic Day, via emergency C-section. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his belly, trapping him inside my wife’s womb like a dog on a leash. His heartbeat began to fail, but I had no idea. The monitors were so different from the ones in my own surgical theatre. The duty nurses confabbed, and next thing I knew, a pair of orderlies were spiriting my wife from the room, rolling her bed away—“What’s happening?” I kept asking, but nobody seemed interested in telling me.
My wife called out to me as the orderlies wheeled her from the room. I pursued her down the hall to the OR, where her obstetrician stopped me with a literal stiff arm to the chest.
“Wait out here,” she said.
“I’m a surgeon, too. Brains. Over to St. Mike’s,” I said, replacing at with to in true Cataract City fashion—when flustered, I found myself resorting to old verbal tics.
“And I’m sure you’re a dab hand at brains.”
She rucked up her sleeves and squirted carbolic soap onto her hands, working it into a lather at the washbasin. It smelled the same as the stuff at St. Mike’s—cherry, like the sticks of brittle gum that came inside old packs of baseball cards. Like Dove’s chewing tobacco.
“Wait here,” she said. “The nurse will come get you.”
“Just…do no harm, okay?”
“No need to quote the scripture at me, doctor.”
I paced the hallway like a caged bear. The day before, everything had been normal—boring, even. It’s hard to comprehend how fantastic normality can be until…a nurse came out. She handed me a hairnet and a pair of sterile booties to slip over my shoes.
Past the swinging doors, the obstetrician’s eyes were the colour of shaved ice above her face mask. I sat in a chair near my wife’s head. A sheet hung vertically to shield her stomach. The obstetrician worked behind it. My wife’s eyes were huge and round, the pupils blown out from the meds. I didn’t know where to look—it was so much easier to wield the blade.
At some point our son started to cough, then scream. It was the best sound I’d ever heard. When the nurse handed him to me, I felt disoriented—my son had a banana-head, back-sloped and elongated, an infant as dreamt by H.R. Giger. I reminded myself that this was normal: the plates of a baby’s skull are extremely flexible to aid their passage through the birth canal. Within days my son’s head would look as it should.
They gave our son to me—not to my wife, who had carried and nourished him. Because of the method of delivery, she couldn’t be the first to touch him, so I kissed her and told her how sorry I was for that.
The nurse wrapped our son in a towel and ushered me into the hallway. My boy’s pupils were massive, his irises delineated by the thinnest band of blue. His mouth kept opening and closing. His lips made a wet pok. There was something disturbingly mindless to this sight. Eyes that didn’t appear to chart anything, the mouth opening and closing like a fish as it suffocated on the deck of a trawler. It reminded me, too, of the look of a patient whose brain had “coned.” Before those patients pass on, a look overtakes their faces. It doesn’t matter how heavily they may be sedated, the look is the same. Was my minutes-old son giving me that look?
A new breed of fear crept into my heart, different from anything I’d ever felt. Maybe this was just how freshly born humans behaved. I knew brains, not babies. But maybe…had he been inside my wife too long? Had he opened his mouth to take his first real breath and inhaled amniotic fluid? Had his brain—his fragile, still-quickening brain—no. No. It couldn’t be. I said this to myself even though I knew by then that, oh my, yes, unfair things did happen. All the time they happened, every minute of every day, to people good and bad alike.
In the hallway of a hospital two hundred miles from my childhood home, I stood cradling the most precious object I would ever hold—a child I already loved more than he would ever be capable of loving me back—as scared as I’d ever been. It wasn’t the fear I’d known as a boy: that onrushing smash-cut terror of a monster leaping from a closet. This was the gnawing fear of possibility, the creeping fear of consequence.
Don’t do this. I remember this plea, though I cannot say who or what I was sending it out to. Not to our baby boy. Do it to me. Hurt me, wreck me, take everything from me.
And all the time, I knew the world is resistant to bargains of that nature.
i
Three days after hopping a bus to parts unknown, Dove showed up at my house after dinner to ask if I wanted to light off fireworks at the scrapyard.
Billy was with her. I hadn’t seen either of them since that afternoon with Dove at the bus station, though both acted as if that was only a matter of our schedules failing to line up. It felt as though the events at the Greyhound depot could forever exist in a sour bubble between us—and so long as none of us pierced its membrane, the Yellowbirds seemed content to pretend it had never happened.
Years later, Billy would tell me that his sister had taken that Greyhound to Windsor. She arrived in the evening and paid two bucks for a ticket to an all-ages punk show a half-block from the bus terminal. When the show let out in the wee hours, she walked to the 24-hour Coffee Time with some of the musicians and hangers-on. She rebuffed the bass player’s invitation to head back to his place. When the others left, she bought a bag of day-old donuts. She had eaten six by the time Billy and his mother found her. As soon as the Greyhound agent had confirmed he’d sold a ticket to a girl matching Dove’s description, the two of them had hit the road.
The drive home unfolded in stressed silences, broken by Dove offering her day-olds. Try the cruller, Mom. You love crullers. Billy confessed that the most painful part for him was hearing his mother addressing his sister in a tone of defeated bewilderment.
I can’t live under your skin, Dove, baby. Can’t make you stop doing these things.
That evening, she and Billy came over on their bikes. A plastic bag hung from Dove’s handlebars. She showed me its contents with a conspiratorial wink. “They’ll all go bang, Jake.”
There were packs of Black Cats with braided fuses, Screaming Devils like sugar cones wrapped in shiny paper, a half-dozen Roman candles bundled like sticks of dynamite and some others, bright red and waxy with Chinese lettering.
“How’d you get them?”
Dove shrugged, as if to say I know people.
I hesitated. I wanted to tell her and Billy that, yes, I’d go with them, but I still felt weird—as if there ought to be some kind of resolution to what had gone down at the bus station.
“More for us, then,” said Dove, interpreting my silence and looping the bag back over her handlebars.
“No, wait. I—I’ll talk to my mom. Wait down the block, okay?”
“Why, you embarrassed to be seen with us?”
“We’ll wait past the street sign,” Billy said. “Come on, Dove.”
I ducked inside to ask my mother if I could go bike-riding with Billy. She agreed, as long as I promised to come home in a couple of hours, before it got too dark. I met Billy and
Dove at the top of the street. Fleer hockey cards were clothespinned between their bicycle spokes and as the three of us rode into the ashen evening, those cards made a Tommy-gun drone.
The Marine Salvage and Metals scrapyard was a mile west of the rail yards, nestled between towering stands of fir. The trees shadowed a yard filled with junked cars, boats and home appliances. On weekends, folks were free to pick down the rows—a “tourist pass” cost fifty cents, payable to Chester Broomfield, the head scrap man. Everything was for sale: engines, fenders, hubcaps, antennas, even the contents of gloveboxes. All items were assessed by Chester, who assigned an ambiguous value (“Saaaaaaay, two bucks?”), opening the door to haggling. But Chester’s prices were so rock-bottom that people rarely bothered to barter.
Chester also operated the auto-crusher. Called either Cube-A-Saurus Rex or the Squashinator by local kids, the pneumatic brute was capable of reducing two tons of Detroit rolling iron to the size of a packing box. According to Uncle C, the corpses of Cataract City’s underbelly-dwellers sometimes wound up in those cars before being sent to the smelter.
The perfect disposal, my uncle claimed. Although tossing them over the falls is another fail-safe: a human body gets so waterlogged, pounded by a million tons of water, that the flesh becomes soggy as wet newspaper and flakes away for the fish to eat.
After losing his right leg to diabetes, Chester had lapsed into a state of semi-retirement. He was still around on the weekends to dicker with anyone who’d consent to it, but on weekdays he was gone and his replacement, the charmless Doug Rowe—brother of Stanley—worked light hours.
In Chester’s absence, the scrapyard had become a kid’s paradise. Children spent their days behind the wheels of cars playing cops and robbers, or captaining the old catamarans and motorboats propped up on cinder blocks. And this was where the Playboy lifestyle had gone to die. Drive the FUTURE—straight to the junkyard!
We propped our bikes against a stack of rotting rail ties and found a spot in the fence where the chain-link had been snipped. Billy peeled back a flap so we could squirm through into the yard. Wind scraped over the hulks of old DeSotos and Pintos, filling my nose with the tang of rust. Some kids might have been hiding in the outlying slag heaps or playing tag over by Cube-A-Saurus Rex, but to us, the place felt deserted.
We walked down a row of flattened cars piled atop one another like playing cards. Their flattened carcasses rose fifteen feet up, and squeaks emanated from within: the cars made great shelter for animals—and with the scrapyard being so close to the train yards, it wasn’t unusual for rail bums to crash here, too.
The Salvage was set up like the spokes on a wheel: every row funnelled to the central hub where Chester’s shack had once sat. Now there was only a bare circle of earth dotted with snatches of duckweed and knots of purple flowers that seemed tragically out of place.
When we reached the hub, Dove dropped the sack of fireworks and produced a tarnished Zippo from the pocket of her cut-offs. She spun the flywheel until a spark caught the wick.
“Ignition, check,” she said, snapping the lighter shut with a deft flick of her wrist.
We sat on the buckled hood of an ancient Jeep Willy as the sky paled above the treetops. The quality of light in our part of the world was such that, just before night fell, the horizon lit up with an almost otherworldly glow. I never discovered why that was…probably the final rays of sunlight reflecting off the river basin caused this fleeting incandescence. But as a kid I thought it must be because the sun itself—that unfeeling ball of gas—didn’t want to leave, and so it lingered, clawing up the ragged hub of the earth in order to shed the last of its light over us.
Billy drummed his kneecaps with two Roman Candles: dappa-dappa-dap-dap-da-dap. We didn’t speak much. It was good to be out, the three of us, on a late-summer night.
“Yessir,” came a voice, “if I was a kid lookin’ to stir up some shit, this is just the spot I’d mosey to.”
The owner of that voice unfolded himself from the front seat of a crumpled Dodge thirty feet away. The gathering shadows clung to his body as his limbs unfurled from the wreck with spidery grace.
“Firecrackers, uh? Goddamn, you’ll have yourselves a time.”
The man was tall—taller than Uncle C, even—and much thicker than my uncle. His hair was twisted into ropes, and a steel-wool beard draped his face. He wore track pants, a sleeveless coat smeared with grease, and engineer’s boots with metal winking at the toes. The track pants were most disturbing: my gym teacher, Mr. O’Meara, wore the same ones—but his were always clean, whereas this guy’s were streaked with slashes of what might be dark paint.
He advanced towards us with a darting stride. From his looks, I had expected him to shamble, but the guy could motor. Billy slid off the Jeep’s hood.
“We’ll go someplace else,” Dove said.
“No, no. Stay. Let’s light them puppies up.”
When the man smiled, it did something to his face, sharpened the angles.
“You don’t figure I’ll call the cops on you, do ya?” he said. “Me ’n’ the pigs have seen enough of each other to last a hundred lifetimes.”
The man shoved his hands into his pockets. They moved around under the fabric. It reminded me of a kid in my class, Brodie Gregg, who stood by the monkey bars at recess doing the same thing while staring moony-eyed into space. The girls nicknamed Brodie “Pocket Pool.”
Dove shifted to her left—and the man shifted with her, shadowing her. It was a little thing, but a lot seemed to hang on that sidling movement. The man’s smile persisted but there was definitely something hostile to it now. Dove spat a stream of tobacco juice into the weeds and watched him.
“You’re a dipper, huh?” the guy said.
Dove was smiling a little now, too. “You want some?”
She flipped him the puck.
The man yanked his hands out of his pockets quick enough to catch it. He pinched a big wad and packed it behind his chalky, cracked lips. Shreds of tobacco bristled above his lip like hair sprouting from a lounge lizard’s shirt collar. He tucked the puck into his pocket as if it was his now.
“I’ll get you back in trade,” he told Dove. “I insist.”
I became aware of how the scrapyard floated in a cocoon of isolation, well past the main roads. You could scream until your lungs ruptured and the sound might not touch a single pair of human ears. I cut a glance at the Yellowbirds. A vein pulsed softly in Dove’s throat, while Billy’s face held a pale intensity. Their bodies were near-motionless, like twin icebergs at sea.
“Light them up,” the man said, gesturing again at the firecrackers. “Or is there some other game you’d rather play?”
A languid, blissed-out look spread across his face. The machinery of society, with its laws and lawmen, was grinding away elsewhere—and he was crouched in its blind spot.
“Where do you come from?” Billy asked.
“Why do you want to know, son?”
“Haven’t seen you around.”
The man’s hands balled into fists. They were remarkably clean and unscarred considering their owner slept in junked cars. I noticed his face bore no scars, either—beneath his patchy beard lurked a fussy, boarding-school softness.
When it seemed like the man was gathering himself to make a move at Billy, Dove said, “You like to play games?”
Her hand slipped up under her shirt, pulling up the hem to give a flash of bare flat tummy. The man’s hands returned to his pockets. He rocked from side to side as if he had to urinate.
“You’re a tiger, aren’t ya? Look at that, now…”
His eyes were riveted on that slash of bare stomach. He unzipped his jacket and rubbed his own stomach through his dirty T-shirt. Dove smiled, but it was an empty grin, as if an essential part of her had retreated into a sheltered spot in her subconscious, while a strange girl had stepped in to take her place. Whatever game she and the guy were playing, it occurred at some dog-whistle frequency I was unable to
comprehend.
She flicked the Zippo, spun the flywheel. The flame popped alight.
The man said, “The little girl who liked to play with fire.”
He approached her with a peculiar motion. I couldn’t see his feet moving and yet he drew nearer without seeming to, like a snake slithering.
Dove held out one hand, her index finger ticking like a metronome. Uh-uh, no you don’t.
The man gave a sickly smile, pausing to enjoy the show. Dove’s other hand, the one holding the lit Zippo, flirted down one leg of her cut-offs and up the other. The man’s gaze followed the flame as it tracked over Dove’s body. Its fire scorched the frayed threads at the bottom of her shorts, raising plumes of smoke. She tossed the still-lit Zippo on the ground a few feet from me, and near Billy’s sneakers. The man’s eyes darted to it before returning to Dove, riveted on her tick-ticking finger, the hypnotic sway of her hips.
Maybe he failed to see the Roman candle in Billy’s hand, or maybe he didn’t care. Did he even hear the fizzle as Billy touched its wick to the flame? To judge from his shocked look when Billy brought the firework up and pointed it squarely at his face, he had not.
“The hell?”
For a nerve-shattering instant I thought the firework was a dud. The man would slap it out of Billy’s hand and set about whatever viciousness he’d been casually delaying….
Then a flaming ball shot from the paper tube and hit the man in his face.
The bloodied light bloomed before the man’s eyes and he reeled backwards, clawing at his face. The firework had struck above his lips. The phosphorus singed a great deal of his beard off and left a soot mark on his nose, which looked black as a rotted potato. He went down on his ass, jerking backwards like a fiddler crab. Pressing his palms to his eye sockets, he screeched: “I’m blind! Oh, Jesus Christ Jesus mercy—!”
Dove grabbed the firework as another ball leapt from the tube and struck the man’s chest. She took a darting step forward and crammed the Roman candle down the guy’s shirt. The next ball—bright blue—shot straight down. His shirt blew outwards like the wind filling a boat sail. I could see the shape of his body lit in electric blue, like an X-ray.
The Saturday Night Ghost Club Page 11
