by Karen Foxlee
“We should run away,” I said.
A silence.
“Where to?”
“Alaska,” I said. I knew it would entice him.
An even longer silence. I could tell he was excited.
August 14, 1975
Burrell’s Publishing Company Ltd
7001 West Washington Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46241
OUR GIFT TO YOU IS THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE
Dear Mrs. Spink,
Our records indicate you recently won a subscription to the magnificent Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. We hope you are enjoying your prize so far. We wanted to inform you that you can increase your knowledge for only $2.99 per week and receive three issues instead of two. Your encyclopedia set will then be ready at the end of twenty-four months. We have generously provided you with the first two stunning volume covers free of charge. To receive more please subscribe to the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set today.
Yours sincerely,
Martha Brent
General Sales Manager
* * *
“It’s a ransom note,” said Mother. “That’s exactly what it is. It’s a ransom note.”
She had her tin-whistle voice on. She slammed down our dinner on the table.
“There is no way on this good earth I’m going to send them money,” said Mother. “I won that prize fair and square.”
It was trickery. It was treachery.
I held up the olive green volume cover.
“I wouldn’t exactly call it stunning,” I said.
“Stunning or not, I’m not paying a cent for it!”
She wrote Martha Brent a letter in her good blue fountain pen, in her high school handwriting.
* * *
August 15, 1975
Apartment 15, 762 Second Street
Grayford, Ohio 44002
Dear Martha Brent,
Thank you for your recent correspondence dated August 14th. I am writing to remind you that I won a competition. The prize was a complete subscription to the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. I will not pay a cent to get this set faster nor will I pay for the covers. If it is a build-it-at-home set why then you must give me the tools to build it with. There will be no further discussion on this matter. Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Cynthia Spink
* * *
She licked the stamp and slapped it onto the envelope.
“That’ll teach them,” she said.
C:
Canada
4’ 9”
LATE SUMMER 1975
No volume covers arrived but the C issues did and they contained countless curiosities. The colour plate of cabbage varieties, undersea cables, the cackling goose. Cairo, calculating machines, cameras, and California. The history of chewing gum, clothing (ten colour plates), and clocks. The glorious entry on clouds.
On long summer days, we walked to the park. Mrs. Gaspar pretended to be anxious. She said, “Lenora, you do not let this boy out of your sight, not even for one second.” It would be difficult to lose sight of Davey; all four feet and nine inches of six-year-old him. I knew that no one, despite what Mrs. Gaspar said, would want to steal him.
And I knew she was secretly glad to see us go. She needed to sit quietly without us and smoke her cigarettes and read her magazines. She needed to draw glasses on Jackie Onassis and a moustache on Elvis. She needed to close her eyes and think of Jesus and Hungary.
We passed Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store on the way and Mother came out to see us. She gave us a change to buy an ice-cream. She gave me all the same warnings that Mrs. Gaspar had. Don’t turn your back on Davey. Hold his hand when crossing the street. He’s only six, you know. Mr. King smiled from the back of the shop. “Give them an orange each,” he shouted. “It’s a beautiful day for an orange.”
“No thank you, Mr. King,” said Mother. “They’re just fine.”
I took my eye off Davey on the way just to see if he’d vanish. He didn’t. He loped along beside me, hands in his pockets, his imaginary golden eagle Timothy on his shoulder. I knew the eagle was on his shoulder because Davey kept looking there and smiling. It made me prickly.
“Timothy is a stupid name for an eagle anyway,” I said.
“No, it’s not,” he said.
“It is,” I said. “The stupidest name ever invented.”
“Len-neeeeeee,” he said. “It’s a great name for a golden eagle. Say it is.”
I ignored him altogether while I searched for beetles.
I searched like a real-life coleopterist. I lifted up stones and twigs and overturned leaves. I prised bark loose. I examined the pond water for ripples. I found a tiny black water beetle and a pond skater near the fountain. I found a leaf beetle that was perfect but it leapt away before I had it.
It was a ladybug on a rose that I caught in the end. “Are you going to tell?” I asked when I had it in my matchbox. I snapped off a rosebud covered in aphids, because I knew that was exactly what ladybugs ate.
“No,” he said. “I’d never tell.”
I knew he still felt bad about the confiscated beetle issue.
“You know I wouldn’t,” he said.
On the way home, we stopped to see Mother again and she was unpacking bananas from a box. Mr. King said, “Well hello, the wanderers have returned safely!”
Wherever Mother was in the shop, there was Mr. King. He was always supervising the unpacking of bananas or the packaging of cherries. He was always watching her work with the raspberries.
“They certainly have,” said Mother and she seemed flustered and nervous.
“Have an orange, kiddos,” he said.
“No, they’re just fine,” said Mother because she didn’t like to take any kind of gifts or charity.
All the same, I smiled at her brazenly with the matchbox in my pocket. I could feel Davey’s conscience groaning under the weight of this secret, but he didn’t tell. At home, I fashioned a bug house out of a glass jar. I punctured tiny holes in the plastic wrap lid and then carried out the dangerous procedure of relocating the ladybug into its new abode. Davey watched all of this. He watched it as though he was witnessing the crime of the century. He was an accessory after the fact. He grimaced and made uncomfortable noises.
“She took the beetles issue, Davey,” I said.
“I know, Lenny,” he said.
“Are you going to tell?” I asked again.
“You know I wouldn’t.”
That night Mother said, “So what did you do in the park?”
I could tell he wanted to say. I burned him into submission with my death stare.
“We just played,” I said.
C contained Canada. I traced my finger over the US border into Saskatchewan and Davey lay down on his stomach beside me. We traced a line up into the Northwest Territories.
“This is where we should go,” I whispered, pointing to a patch of water.
“Great Bear Lake,” he whispered back. Alaska was immediately forgotten.
I drew my finger around Great Bear Lake and shivered. Davey felt it too. The Keith Arm, the Smith Arm, Grizzly Bear Mountain. Canada was airiness and wildness. We would have to walk for weeks and weeks through trees but we’d have air in our lungs and fish in our bellies. We’d make a fire each night and above us the Milky Way would blaze.
“Now what are you two looking at?” asked Mother.
“Canada,” I said.
“‘O Canada’,” sang Mother as she went into the bathroom.
I threaded my finger back down the page, over the border, off the page.
“Where are we?” Davey whispered.
“Far away,” I said. “We’d have to hike for months and months.”
“We could catch a bus,” he said quietly and raised his eyebrows in a way that made me giggle.
“A bus?” said Mother. “Where are we going?”
“No bus,” I said.
I named my ladyb
ug Lady and I examined her with a magnifying glass. I examined her glossy black pronotum and her hard-spotted shell. I turned her on her back and examined how perfectly her six legs curled inwards. I knew from the confiscated beetle issue that she could smell through both her antennae and her feet.
I kept Lady in her jar behind the curtain on the windowsill, but if Mother was in a tidying mood, I hid her in my underpants drawer. I needed to find a fresh supply of aphids each day and I thought she was happy. Each night Davey sat on my bed and said goodnight to the pigeons. Good night, Roger. Good night, Martin. Good night, Frank. We could hear their soft cooing.
He sat on my bed in his striped pyjamas and said, “I don’t think I can sleep.”
“You haven’t even tried.”
“Lenny,” he pleaded. “Len–neeeeeee.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Canada,” he said. No hesitation. He meant imagine it for me. I was the chief imaginer.
“Okay, picture this,” I said in the dark, and I could hear Davey’s breathing shorten in anticipation. “We go to the train station and we stow away on a train. We take some food and some clothes.”
“What about the books?” asked Davey.
“We can’t take them with us,” I said. “That’s just ridiculous. You can’t run away and take encyclopedias with you.”
“I only mean the one with the African civets and maybe birds,” he said. “We should take Canada.”
Basically, it was every volume we owned so far.
“Okay, I’ll think about it,” I said.
“And I’ll have Timothy,” said Davey.
I bit my lip in the dark. Davey hadn’t told Mother about Lady, so I tried not to make fun of his imaginary golden eagle.
“We could take a balloon,” he said.
“You mean fly in a balloon?” I tried to keep the scorn from my voice.
“Yes,” he whispered.
But then I pictured it. Davey and I clambering into a balloon basket, unhitching the anchor, the sudden uplift, rushing us into the golden morning sky, the city flushed pink below us growing small.
“Where would we find a balloon?” I asked. I was the practical one. The sensible one in our running-away stories.
“Maybe they are somewhere,” said Davey. “They have to be. People have to park their balloons somewhere.”
We took a balloon that night. In the darkness of our room.
I said, “So we find this balloon and we climb into it and off we go. Feel it lift? Up, up, up we go, higher and higher and higher, over the fields and the towns and the cities, all day. And we have our sandwiches and our juice at midday and keep on flying until we reached Great Bear Lake.”
“We’d have to come down sometimes,” said Davey. “For more food. Or for the bathroom. You always need the bathroom, Lenny.”
“Hush,” I said. “Don’t ruin it.”
“Has Mother found us gone yet?”
That jolted the story. We imagined her piecing it together. The sandwich-making crumbs, the missing adventure-type clothes. A to Ampersand clearly vanished from the shelf. Amphibians to Aztecs. The bird issue gone. The balloon faltered in the golden morning sun. Great Bear Lake gleamed far away as perfect as a postcard photo but our balloon snagged itself on a power line. Davey never wore a fur hat. He never strode through the forest with his golden eagle on his shoulder.
It was all talk, but that’s how things start.
On the first day of school it was my job to brush Davey’s hair. He had to sit on the living room floor and I had to sit on the sofa with the hair cream. It was an operation that took concentration. I’d get one half down and the other half would be starting to spring up again. “You need to learn to brush your own hair,” I whispered.
“Can you believe I’ve got Miss Schweitzer?” he whispered back. “What’s she like really?”
“You better have a clean ironed handkerchief in your pocket,” I said.
Then I felt bad because I could tell he was scared. I knew my brother. I knew his jiggling leg. I knew his breathing. I knew when he talked too much about Timothy, his imaginary pet eagle.
“Whatever you do,” I said to him on the walk to school, “do not tell people about your eagle. Do not tell Miss Schweitzer about your eagle.”
He looked crestfallen. His shoulders slumped. He looked to make sure Timothy hadn’t slid off.
“Davey,” I shouted at him.
“Stop your shouting at him,” shouted Mother, who was walking with us.
We walked slowly, delaying the inevitable; even Mother was delaying the inevitable. She kept saying, “Look at you, Davey, you look so good with that backpack.” “Stop for a minute so I can look at you.” “Look how handsome you look.” “I wish I had a photograph of you.” “Stand up tall, Davey.” “That’s my boy.”
So much talking. Too much talking.
Summer had released its hold on the city. The green grass was withering. There was a cold wind blowing brown leaves and rattling tin cans. Everything was grey. We were a small nervous cloud drifting through the streets.
“He grows and he grows,” shouted one Brother Trapani after us as we went.
“Shut up and leave him alone,” shouted Miss Finny.
We nodded and smiled but we crossed the road to get away from them.
“Tell me about the bombardier beetles again,” Davey said.
So I did. So we would both calm down. We felt skittish, coltish, like we might bolt. Mother or not, if we saw a parked balloon, we’d be out of there. Bombardier beetles squeezed hot fart juice out of their bottoms to harm their enemies. It was a fact I remembered from the confiscated issue, and the fact that it was still confiscated made me prickly right there on the street.
“If I had a superpower that would be my superpower,” said Davey. “I already have the farting part, I just need the juice.”
“Hush now,” said Mother. “Don’t you talk like that at school.”
We were nearly at the gate. There were kids everywhere. There’ll be staring, Mother had said, but I just wasn’t prepared for how much staring. All the staring made me even spikier. It made me want to spit and curse. I wanted to shout at everyone, What you all staring at, you big lot of rubber-neckers? But I kept all the cursing inside of me. My mother raised her chin. She held Davey’s hand. She looked calm, serene even, in her pink Golden Living Retirement Home uniform. She left all the spikiness to me.
I felt as if I was walking to the gallows. That’s what it felt like. And I was an innocent. We were all innocents. Well, maybe not my mother, because it was her idea to make Davey go to school. To make him go to first grade when he was bigger than a fourth grader. It was a great injustice. Especially now that Miss Schweitzer had moved down to first grade. That was some extra evil in the horror of it all. We took him to his classroom. I tried not to look at the staring faces. Davey said, “Hi,” to a couple of people as we went.
At his classroom door, Mother said, “Run along now, Lenny, he’ll be okay.”
But I lingered. Davey looked at me, pleadingly and made the squelching noise of a bombardier-beetle fart.
“Can I eat lunch with you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
Miss Schweitzer had seen him. Miss Schweitzer, who didn’t like anything dirty or snotty, who liked order, who liked neat rows of first graders with ironed handkerchiefs. There would be four neat lines of first graders and then Davey. There would be Davey poking out at the back of the class like a weed, Davey with his hair that sprang up from his Brylcreem, Davey who talked loudly and laughed loudly and walked loudly and leaned into people and breathed his hot breath on them.
I looked at Miss Schweitzer looking at Davey. My mother hovered beside me at the door like a nervous bee. Miss Schweitzer looked at me like there might be something I could do to help. But there wasn’t. I just left him there squelching like a bombardier beetle.
What could I do? What could I say? He can read pretty well. He’s great a
t counting. He likes to talk a lot about eagles. He’s really smart, just very big. He’s just really big for his age. I’d be pleading by then. Don’t be too hard on him.
I knew it would go badly.
“Are you okay, Lenny?” asked CJ when I got to my classroom.
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s just you’re all red,” she said.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“Y-y-y-y-y-y … yes you-you are,” said Matthew Milford.
“Shut up, Matthew,” I said.
And he looked genuinely hurt.
“So,” asked Mother, “how was it?”
“Great,” said Davey.
“Miss Schweitzer okay?”
“She’s so beautiful,” said Davey and his eyes misted over behind his thick dark lashes.
When I’d picked him up in the afternoon at the coat rack outside of his classroom, everything was not as I expected. Davey was standing beside Miss Schweitzer’s desk and he had the blackboard eraser in his hand.
THE HALLOWED ERASER.
Davey and the eraser and the clean blackboard. He’d obviously just cleaned it. It was almost too much to bear. When he saw me, he smiled. Miss Schweitzer waved pleasantly. No one got to do erasing unless you were Miss Schweitzer’s absolute favourite. Tara Albright had been Queen of the Blackboard Eraser. Perfect Tara, sweet and shiny as a candied apple, whose handkerchiefs had a perfect crease.
“Well, I am so glad to hear it,” said Mother and she put her arms around his neck at the dinner table and gave him another serving of pie.
I was still speechless over the eraser affair.
“And it was so funny,” said Davey. “There was this kid named Fletcher and he wet his pants.”
