“Fish,” Marcel told Mom and me, “maybe half a dozen of them. Big bottom feeders—carp or suckers. Maybe even sturgeon—”
I pictured shadowy blades hovering above the bicycle, facing into the slow current, mouths sucking up food.
“But the river's drying up,” Mom said as Marcel oiled the chain of my BMX. “The water's so shallow—” she looked at the river, one hand in a salute against the sunset. “How are they supposed to get out?”
“They aren't,” Marcel said. “That's the whole idea. It's nature's way.”
The metis kids climbed up out of the river and crossed the park to ride my bike. They couldn't do it any better than me though. I guess they'd never had a bike before either. They wobbled up and down the street in front of the Alamo, weaving in and out of traffic until my mom put her foot down. She hated them and made me understand we weren't like them, we weren't.
————
A few nights later I was entertaining myself by tightrope walking the rim of the fence that separated the Alamo from the chrome-and-glass condo next door when Mom clicked up the sidewalk in her high-heeled shoes. She brushed off the seat of a kitchen chair and sat down next to Marcel.
“You'll be pleased to know, Sean, that I begin work tomorrow at Beauty City—”
“Congratulations, Anita,” Marcel said. “That calls for a toast.” He hoisted his beer bottle into the air.
“Thank you, Mister Gebege.” Mom took out a cigarette and Marcel held his lighter under it. “I see you are still supporting the breweries.”
Marcel squinted: “Listen, I drink for to get free.”
“No doubt,” Mom laughed, adding that she had spent too many years working in the bar industry not to recognize a man living his life out of a bottle when she saw one.
Marcel looked wounded.
“I'm teasing,” Mom said, smiling, blowing smoke out of her nostrils. I could tell she was feeling high, excited about the future. “Thank you again,” she said, “for Sean's bike.”
It was chained to the fence. In the dark it looked like a pair of sunglasses. I wasn't allowed to ride at night, but after school I loved to pedal through the streets above the Alamo. Some of the richest old homes in town were up there—pillared porches, yards full of big trees. As I sped by them it seemed likely that Mom and me would end up in one of those places. Good luck was just around the corner. At dusk I would ride home, following the gravel alley that descended steeply to the river. The yards on top had green swimming pools, but these quickly gave way to overgrown vegetation and broken-down cars. The yards near the bottom were hidden behind rickety unpainted fences, and big dogs threw themselves into the boards, barking loudly as I passed.
Marcel offered Mom a beer and this time she took it. “What the heck?” she said, and held it out as if toasting the river. “To new beginnings,” though it was the same old beginning, same old snowball starting to roll.
“Don't look at me like that, Sean, I'm just celebrating. Can't I do that?”
“Your mother is allowed to have some fun too, isn't she, big guy?” Marcel punched me lightly on the shoulder and Mom giggled.
Somehow at that moment I knew I was in for another uncle. Which meant I would be losing both my mother and only friend in one fell swoop, but at least we'd have a phone.
I looked away, up at the flat purple streak above the river. I had patches on the knees of my pants and oversized Sally Ann runners on my feet. I started to feel sorry for myself, but then I thought of my bike, and my spirits soared a bit.
————
Every day a different river. The water kept dropping until parts of it shrunk to a thin trickle like an overflowing sink. The skiers and kids moved upriver where the current still gouged the channel deep. In front of the Alamo, sandbars started to sprout grass.
A couple of days after Mom started making me call Marcel “Uncle Marcel,” Ralph came to the door, slapping the fat end of a baseball bat into the palm of his hand. Rhonda wouldn't press charges, so he was on the street again.
“Where's Marcel, and no bullshit, OK? I got nothing against you, man, but I know your old lady's got a key to his place, and if you don't let me into it I'm going to have to club you.” Even though I was only eight, he waved the bat in my face. I doubt he would have done anything to me, but I let him into Marcel's anyway. For a lot of reasons it seemed like the right thing to do.
Marcel wasn't in his apartment so Ralph commenced to smash things up. Caved in the aquarium so water gushed onto the carpet, then ground his heels on the little fish that flipped around on the floor. Punched a few holes in the gyprock. Brought the bat down over the top of the TV so the tube exploded across the carpet. He placed a few long-distance calls on the telephone, then hung up and splintered it with the bat. Then he tucked Marcel's toaster oven under his arm and left.
Marcel was sitting on our couch shaking when I got back upstairs.
“Did he at least leave me one beer?”
“You're lucky he didn't find you. He wanted to break your knees.”
“Fuck him if he can't take a joke,” Marcel said, grinning. Then he shook his head in amazement. “But you're right, I'm lucky. I just keep pulling up aces.”
————
One of the metis kids drowned in the river, went down as if a weight was attached to his ankles.
A friend dove and dove for him, surfacing to fill his lungs, shaking his head. A grainy photo in the newspaper had the spray from his hair making a white flower on the water.
The mounties launched a small boat, dragged a grappling hook back and forth across the river. The water-skiers spiraled the area in their boat and a boy not much older than me sat on the prow, stabbing a paddle into the water.
The drowned boy's friends collapsed on shore, crying in disbelief. They had been swimming to the sandbar where the skiers partied, but they didn't make it. Their hands clutched the sand, their feet were in the river.
————
A few mornings later I went downstairs to go to school and found my BMX missing. I couldn't believe it. I thought I must have left it somewhere, but I knew I hadn't, and my next thought was, those fucking half-breeds had stolen it. Mom was right about them. All day in school I steamed. I pictured them climbing out of the water like mutant swamp monsters, taking what was mine. I almost totally forgot about the drowning. How could those hooky-playing sonofabitches steal my bike after I let them use it?
When I got home Uncle Marcel was sitting on one of the chairs. By now the grass was so long it draped over his lap like a luau skirt. He was pickled out of his mind.
“I have to show you something,” he said.
“What?” I looked around excited, thinking he'd found my bike.
Marcel said, “Right there in front of you. The car.” An old, bald-tired clunker was parked at the curb. “A friend owed me a favor so I got this off him for fifty bucks. What a steal, hey, Sean?”
A whistling started in my ears and I backed away. “You stole my bike,” I said. “Didn't you?” The idea just flashed in my mind.
“Hey, you hold on! I didn't steal anything.”
I glared at him. That bike was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was more than transportation, it transported me, changed the way I saw myself. When I was on it, skimming the streets, everything was possible. And now Marcel had taken it back.
“I didn't steal anything. It was my bike,” Marcel said. “I found it and I let you use it and then I took it back. Actually I found the original owner and returned it to him.”
“Liar!” I cried. I couldn't help it. Huge, wracking sobs shook my lungs and I thought I was going to drown from lack of air.
When Mom came home, she stormed into my room. “I told you to keep that damn bike locked!” Her breath smelled of booze. “If you don't look after your things you don't deserve them!”
“I did lock it! Marcel stole it!”
“Shut your dirty lying mouth!” my mom screamed at me, bringing her hand back
to slap.
————
Though it wasn't mentioned in so many words, I'm sure it was partly due to the bike episode, to smooth things over, that we went to the fair. Also, Marcel hadn't taken the clunker anywhere yet and wanted to feel the road beneath him. For my part I'd never seen a circus, zoo, marine world, or wax museum, much less a fair, and though I hated the idea of being bribed into being nice and civil again, I really wanted to go.
As we were pulling away, Rhonda Bighead and Ralph were reeling through the park on the way home from the Shamrock. Rhonda's gashes had healed nicely and she was holding a bouquet of white flowers Ralph had torn from a bed in the park. When they came to a patch of red flowers, he bent like a hero and ripped out a whole plant. Rhonda hugged it to her, roots dripping dirt. Then she lost her balance, staggered a few steps, and pitched over. Ralph tried to help her up, but toppled onto her, at which point she started yelling, slapping him on the head.
Marcel spewed some beer out of his nostrils, and Mom eyed him. She didn't mind him drinking, but drinking and driving didn't mix.
Marcel tooted the horn as we passed and Rhonda turned, cursing us, hurling flowers.
The clunker had a shot transmission, so we had to stop about every thirty miles for Marcel to add fluid. This was synchronized perfectly with his need to stop and water the ditch. It got dark and the pavement glistened like ice on a frozen river. For miles, it seemed, I could see the yellow Ferris wheel lights shining in the sky, and despite everything I got so excited I thought I could smell foot longs, corn dogs, and candy apples over the cigarette smoke in the car.
It was a bottom-of-the-barrel fair. Workers all tattooed up like a bad face; rides greasy, probably suffering from metal fatigue. The foot longs were about the length of your thumb and cost two bucks each. But so what? It was a fair! And the night was swept along in a blur of light and color, odor, sound.
Mom and Marcel rode the Death Trap, a bench chained to a giant arm that whirled around in the air like a propeller. Me, I flopped a rubber frog onto a lily pad with a huge tongue depressor and won a fly in a cube of clear plastic. Marcel limboed under a wooden rod set on bowling pins—passed through like he was kneeling on air—and won a stuffed snake he gave to Mom. Mom won a plaster sea gull for stumping the Guesser on what exactly she did at Beauty City.
“Hey boy,” the Guesser said to me as we were leaving his booth, “I bet I know what you want to be when you grow up.” A crowd of people had gathered to watch him perform, but nobody was investing in his act, so he was using me to drum up business. “Most kids want to be the same as their dad,” he said. “It's genetic.”
The crowd chuckled.
“Are you proud of your old dad?” The Guesser answered himself. “I bet you are.” All the time his eyes were hunting the crowd for my father, a clue to my future. “Is your dad here with you?” he said finally.
I never knew my real father, but had no reason to suspect he would be any different from Marcel, so that's who I pointed at. The crowd turned to him and the smile dropped off Marcel's face. He looked down at his feet. For the first time I saw the guilt and shame that was probably always there, under the surface of the stories and drunken sprees. Marcel was King of the Alamo Apartments, but in the world of upright citizens he was just a drunken bum. That's what the murmuring crowd saw and I didn't blame them. How else could you judge the bulbous red nose, the gaps in his teeth, the creased map of his face?
Even the Guesser momentarily lost his composure, but he quickly regained it. “Kids like their teachers,” he said, winking at me. “I bet you want to be a schoolteacher.” This surprised me. I expected doctor or fireman. “But,” the Guesser added, taking a plaster ornament off his shelf, “I'm not always a hundred percent right on, so here—” He offered me the ornament.
I glanced at Marcel who was still looking down. “No,” I said, “you're right, I do want to be a teacher.”
I refused the ornament, but the Guesser forced me to take it anyway, as though he didn't believe me. It was a figurine of a pointy-headed troll.
When we got away from there Marcel put one arm over my shoulder, the other over Mom's and said, “A teacher? Well why the hell not?” We all laughed.
————
Who knows what anybody is going to become? Maybe at one time Marcel envisioned something different for himself, but now life was just a river he was being swept down, and he was happy. My mother believed we could alter the course of our lives if we were strong and lucky enough, and if we had faith. One out of three isn't bad. In a way I think they were both right: nobody gets what they deserve, but in the end we all become who we want to be, deep down. I don't know.
At about midnight Marcel took me onto the Zipper.
It was a mesh cage that spun and orbited around a greasy hub like a planet around a star. There were broken bolts and nuts in the popcorn and cigarette butts scattered around the base, but we didn't care. “We're here for a good time, not a long time,” Marcel laughed. And as he said this our cage jerked, lifted us into the night sky, and we spun upside down, and Marcel's change flew out of his pockets, whizzed past our ears like shrapnel. My heart tore free of my chest and I felt it in my mouth. We dove toward the ground, but at the last minute were scooped up, swirling through the blackness, me and Marcel, screaming at the stars between our shoes.
1991
HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Elizabeth Graver
Willa stood in the patch of light from the open freezer door and watched as the mist climbed in tendrils, swirled and rose. The milk carton in her hands was heavy, its surface smeared with yellowish cream—her mother had made more potato soup. Already the two tall freezers in the basement housed cartons and cartons of soup, enough to last them almost forever—carrot and broccoli soup, soup made of summer and acorn squash, rows of green and yellow frozen rectangles inside the cartons that had once held milk. And on the outsides of the cartons, rows of children—frozen too, their features stiff, their faces etched with frost. Have You Seen Me? Do You Know Where I Am? Each time Willa put the cartons in the freezers, she set up the children in pairs so they could have staring contests when she shut the door.
Go on, she thought to Kimberly Rachelle and David Michael, to Kristy-Ann and Tyrone. Stare each other down. She put them boy girl, boy girl, catalogued them by age. Some of the missing children were babies, and these she put on the shelf closest to the bottom. The ones who were eleven, her age, she gave special treatment, tracing their names in the wax coating of the milk cartons with her finger, dusting the frost from their eyes. She could recite their DOBs, their SEXs, HTs, WTs, and EYES, the color of their hair. Willa's mother didn't know about Willa's ordering of the cartons; she was upstairs cooking or painting child after child lined up like soldiers, serious kids in uniforms carrying weapons or naked, puzzled kids looking up at the sky.
Willa's mother expected the end of the world. She donated her paintings to three friends in the town twenty miles down the highway, and they turned them into posters which they hung in the public library and in the windows of the real estate agency that doubled as an art gallery. “You Can't Hug Your Child,” they printed in fake child scrawl, “With Nuclear Arms.”
Willa thought everyone was overreacting. Sure, there might be silos under the ground and blinking lights that could go off, and escape systems that would lead to nowhere, and broccoli and cauliflower that would grow big as trees afterwards, like in the paintings her mother made. There might be all that, but still what did they know about the end, for she was sure something would survive, making it really not the end at all—maybe only an insect or two, a shiny blind beetle or an ant like the ones in the ant farm her father had given her—some sort of creature, hard, black and shelled, rolling from the rubble like a bead.
She would not go with her mother to the rallies in Chicago and St. Louis, would not wear the buttons and T-shirts or lend her handwriting to the posters. In her room she hung photographs of animals instead of her mother
's art work—slow sea turtles and emus with backs like the school janitor's dirty, wide broom. They came from the Bronx Zoo in New York City, the animals on the postcards. Willa's father sent them now and then.
Once a girl in one of her mother's paintings had looked just like Willa, small and dark and suspicious, with the same mess of curly hair. Then Willa had screamed and kicked.
“Take me out of your fucking painting, who said you could paint me? Just take me out!”
“Okay, now stop!” her mother had said, catching Willa by the shoulders. “Just stop screaming and don't go crazy on me. Listen to yourself—listen to yourself, would you just calm down?”
And she had squeezed a big wad of beige paint onto her palette, speared it with a paintbrush, and spread it over the painted Willa's face.
“It wasn't even you,” she had said, but Willa had known it was, that her mother had put her there in that lineup of children with puzzled looks, had painted her empty-handed, naked, and puzzled next to an orange boy with wide shoulders and a bow and arrow in his hand.
“Just because I say ‘fucking’ doesn't mean you should,” her mother had told her, but then she had kissed Willa's forehead and taken her far down the highway to McDonald's, where Willa ate two hamburgers and drank a thick chocolate shake while her mother drank water and tried not to look at the food.
Underneath their farmhouse was dirt, and underneath the dirt—if not directly underneath, then near enough, her mother seemed sure of it—were silos which were not really silos at all, but this was not Willa's problem. In a movie she saw once, a man drowned in the wheat of a silo, was smothered as the golden grain poured over him like sand, filling up his nostrils and his mouth. She told her mother about it afterwards, the danger of this silo filled with wheat. With wheat, Willa had said, which was what silos were supposed to hold.
“Actually silage,” her mother had answered. “They're supposed to hold silage—fodder for cows and horses. It must have been a grain elevator.”
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