I stood at the window, trembling. Then I went into Jimmy’s room and saw him sprawled over his bed. I pinched myself to make sure I was awake. I understood I had just had a vision, but I was afraid to think about what it meant. I went downstairs and waited until Jimmy woke an hour later. I followed him onto the porch as he took a bag of stale bread out to feed the crows for good luck. The crows fluttered around his feet. He seemed puzzled that I was watching him do what he’d done for years. I asked him if he’d been up earlier and he said no. I touched him, to make sure he was the real Jimmy, and he smacked my hand away, then asked if I was feeling okay.
“Are you?” I said. “Do you feel all right? Do you have a cold? Is anything sore?”
“I’m fine.”
“Have you had a checkup lately? We should make an appointment with the doctor—”
“What is wrong with you?”
I spent the morning in a state of anxiety. Something bad was going to happen to Jimmy. If I stayed with him, I might be able to stop it. I checked his breakfast cereal for anything he might choke on. I followed him up to his room, behind him, in case he slipped on the steps. I waited outside his room, ear pressed against the door, trying to hear if he was crying out for help.
“Stop it,” he said when I followed him to his swim practice. He drew the line at the change rooms. “Just stop it. This is embarrassing.”
I stood over him and shook my head. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Dad—”
“Humour her,” Dad said, grabbing my arm and towing me away to the bleachers. As we sat waiting for Jimmy to come out, I scanned the pool. There were so many ways he could be hurt.
“Don’t run!” I screamed at him when he finally jogged out of the change room. His jerked to a stop, glowered at me and was elbowed by his teammates.
When he went into the water, I had never felt so helpless. If he drowned, I couldn’t save him. I could barely dog-paddle. Dad put an arm around my shoulder and I jumped.
“Easy,” he said. “He’s okay.” The butterfly stroke, Dad explained, is the last to be learned, because it requires a high degree of mobility, strength and coordination. “See how he does it? He’s a natural,” Dad said with quiet pride. Although the reaction of the arms and legs produces some undulations, the general line of the body is horizontal. The legs move upward and downward, simultaneously and continuously. The propulsive pathway of the arms resembles that of the front crawl, with a recovery requiring a sideways and forward “fling” over the water surface. Usually, there are two beats of the legs to one complete cycle of the arms. “The first time he tried it, he just flew. His coach said he never saw anything like it.”
All I saw was Jimmy putting his face in and out of the water.
He managed to elude me at school. I had to go to my classes, but I was so spacey, the teacher asked if I wanted to see the school nurse. At recess, I ran around and around the schoolyard looking, but I couldn’t find him. I sat down on the front steps and burst into tears.
Frank, Pooch and Cheese came up to me.
“What’s wrong?” Frank said, sitting beside me. I couldn’t stop crying. “Is it Big Lou? Is it Erica?”
I shook my head.
“Did someone beat you up?”
“J-J-J-Jimmy …”
“Jimmy beat you up?”
“No. No.” I tried to catch my breath to speak. “He’s. Going. To. Die. Jimmy.” They watched me uneasily.
Frank touched my shoulder. “Does he have cancer or something?”
I started giggling. It was weird stupid giggling, and the more I tried to stop, the louder and weirder it became. Pooch lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I nodded thanks and went through three before I stopped shaking. “You’re not going to believe me. No one’s going to believe me.”
“Try us,” Frank said.
I gulped, sucking in deep breaths. “I have these dreams. This man comes. He’s a little man. Bad things happen. After he comes. I saw him. Before Uncle Mick died. He came to me. I didn’t listen. I should have gone. To check the net. I should have been there. I could have stopped. It. I. Wasn’t. There.” I looked up, and they were listening, but didn’t seem to think I was crazy yet. “I saw the man. This morning. I saw Jimmy. In my dream. He thinks. I’m nuts. I don’t know what to do.”
After a lengthy silence, Frank said, “Well, he’s got three more bodyguards now.”
Frank caught Jimmy at lunch. He cornered him in one of the undercover areas and kept him there until we found him. Jimmy was trying to push Frank away, but he had a solid hold on my brother’s arm.
“Get lost,” I said to some boys Jimmy had been playing with.
“We’re telling,” one of them said.
“You do and tomorrow you won’t have any front teeth,” Pooch said, coming up behind me.
“I think you’d look real pretty without teeth,” Frank added, flashing a nasty smile.
“Lisa,” Jimmy said as his friends slunk away. “What are you doing?”
“Think of it as baby-sitting,” Pooch said.
“I don’t have any money, if that’s what you want,” Jimmy said uneasily. “I didn’t do anything to you. Did I? Just tell me what I did.”
“You hungry? Let’s eat,” Frank said.
Cheese joined us as we sat in a circle around Jimmy at the front steps.
After school, Jimmy was supposed to go to his friend’s house to study, but I said he’d have to cancel.
“But Dad’s picking me up,” he said.
I made him call Dad and tell him he had a ride home. Pooch thought we should hang out at the arcade until the late bus came. Nothing, he said, could happen to us there. I nixed that, imagining fights. We ended up catching the bus home and dragging Jimmy with us to the pumphouse by the river. We sat at a picnic table. He took out his homework. Pooch brought out some smokes and handed me one. Jimmy gave me a look, but didn’t say anything. He bent his head down and stared firmly at his papers. I hadn’t spent this much time with him since we were little. I knew as soon as we got home, he would complain to Mom and Dad.
“How long are we supposed to watch him?” Frank said.
I sighed. “I don’t know.”
Pooch and Cheese got into an armpit-farting contest. Pooch’s were louder, but Cheese could make his last longer and do tunes. We threw pine cones at him when he started playing Van Halen.
“Hey, Frankie!” a girl yelled.
We all turned to see Frank’s cousins Adelaine and Ronny strolling toward us. Adelaine waved, swinging her waist-length hair behind her. Since the first time I’d seen her at the docks, I’d wished my hair would grow like hers, smooth and shiny and black. Erica still glowered whenever Adelaine walked by, and I wished she went to the same school as us, but even though she had switched schools as many times as Frank, she never came to ours. Ronny followed her wherever she went and usually wore the same clothes. Everyone called them Double Trouble. Today, they both had on ripped sweatshirts over miniskirts, and leggings, frilled socks and Peter Pan boots. Adelaine made it look sexy, and I had a moment of height-envy. Ronny, on the other hand, looked like she’d just graduated from kindergarten.
“My name is Frank, and don’t you forget it, Adelaine!”
“I’m shaking,” Adelaine said. The style these days was spiral perms and big hair, but I couldn’t imagine her in it. Ronny snapped her Hubba Bubba, then chewed it furiously as she asked, “Hey, Frankie, you got any stuff?”
Frank pulled himself straight. “You got me mixed up with Bib.”
“Sor-ry. Doesn’t he give you free stuff?”
“If he did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“Ex-cuse me for living.”
“Knock it off,” Adelaine said. She hopped up on the picnic table beside Jimmy, who’d put his homework away when I wasn’t watching. Adelaine looked him over. “You’re that swimming guy.”
“Yowtz,” he said, deepening his voice.
She tilted her head. “What’s your
name, Mr. Fish?”
“Jim.”
“So?” Ronny said. “Are we going to find Bib or what?”
Adelaine grinned at Frank. “Does he rise before the sun sets?”
They laughed. She turned to Frank. “I read somewhere that holding your farts in is dangerous. They did this, like, study, and rectal cancer rates were higher in office workers because they always hold them in.”
We all stared at her, then everybody howled except Jimmy. He watched her with so much awe, you’d think she was announcing the second coming of Christ.
“Where the hell did you read that?” Frank said.
“It’s true,” Adelaine insisted.
“It’s the toxic waste products from digestion,” Jimmy said. “They probably cause cell mutations.”
“Hey, Cheese,” I said. “You won’t have to worry about that, will you?”
“Eat shit and die,” he said.
“Don’t fart and mutate,” I said.
We hung out until the streetlights flickered on, then Adelaine and Ronny left. Frank escorted me and Jimmy home while Pooch and Cheese headed up to the rec centre to see if anything was happening.
“You okay now?” Frank said.
“I think so,” I said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” He slugged Jimmy in the shoulder and told him to do everything I said. Jimmy and I stood in the driveway and watched him leave.
“You’re acting really weird,” he said. “Even for you. Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” I said.
“What the hell is going on then?”
I gave him a quick, awkward hug and said we should go inside.
He didn’t say anything to Mom and Dad. He finished his homework and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I snuck over to his room to see if he was smothering to death or something. He lay on his side, frowning, curled around a pillow. When I was sure he was still breathing, I tiptoed away.
By the end of three days, Jimmy was reduced to throwing foot-stomping temper tantrums to get me to leave him alone. The next week I learned that the friend he was supposed to study with had come down with the mumps. His little sister had brought home a friend and she’d given it to half the swim team. The sick swimmers had to miss a meet, and there Jimmy caught the eye of a coach from Vancouver who said he’d be glad to have Jimmy train with him at a summer camp. But I was disgusted. All that fuss and I’d saved my brother from the mumps. The little man, I thought, was losing his touch.
I was watching TV with Dad when a sense of wrongness struck me. Something was missing. I checked around the couch, but couldn’t put my finger on the source of my unease. Dad handed me the remote and said that if I was bored of “Wild America,” I could change the channel. It hit me then.
“Have you seen Alexis?” I said.
He paused. “Come to think of it, no. Not for a while.”
She didn’t come home that night or the next. I made posters and put them up all over the village. Dad and I checked the pound. I offered a reward in the newspaper. I walked around the village every night calling her name. As a last resort, Pooch brought his Ouija board over to Cheese’s house and we all sat on the rug near his bed. I felt kind of silly as we sat across from each other and put our fingers lightly on the heart-shaped pointer. One person would ask a question. A spirit would work to answer your questions by moving the pointer to the letters or to the numbers or to the “yes” or the “no” which were printed on the Ouija board. Cheese said we were wasting our time. Frank took a drag from his cigarette then told him to shut up.
“Ouija board,” Pooch said in a loud ringing voice, “are you listening to me?”
The pointer moved to “No.”
“Very funny,” Pooch said, looking at Cheese, then Frank.
“I didn’t move it,” Cheese said.
“Me neither,” Frank said.
“Who’s there? Who’s with us?” Pooch said.
The pointer didn’t move for a long time. Someone touched my shoulder. When I looked up, no one was there. Pooch repeated the question four times before the board spelled out G-u-e-s-s.
Cheese started laughing.
“Stop screwing around!” Pooch yelled at him.
“It’s not me!” he said, trying to be serious, but spoiling the effect by snickering.
“Spirit,” Pooch said, “who are you?”
“D-e-a-d.”
Pooch punched Cheese in the arm. “Stop it.”
Cheese took his hand off the pointer. “Go ahead. Try it. It’s not me!”
Pooch looked exasperated. “Name yourself, spirit. I demand that you reveal your true name!”
Oh, brother, I thought. I’d seen this on one of The Exorcist rip-off B-movies on the late show about a week earlier. Cheese rolled his eyes. Frank narrowed his eyes and mouthed something at him and Cheese put his hands back on.
The pointer started to move, and Pooch loudly sucked in his breath.
“J-o-s-h.”
“What?” he said, jerking her fingers off the board.
I felt the pointer quiver and stop.
We all looked at each other. Frank dropped his cigarette and hopped up to brush it off when it landed on his pants.
“Josh?” Pooch said, putting her hands back on. “He took her cat?”
The pointer went to “No.”
“He killed her cat?”
“No.”
“What about Josh?” Frank said. “B-e-d.”
“This is fucked,” Cheese said, taking his fingers off the pointer again. He stood beside Frank. Pooch looked confused.
I stared at the board. “Do you know where Alexis is?” I touched the pointer and it moved to the W, O. I thought it was going to stop again, but it moved back to the R, then M.
“ ‘Worm?’ What are you trying to say?”
The pointer didn’t move for so long that I thought the spirit had left. Then it trembled and spelled out, “Meat.”
The room was still. I watched the pointer, mesmerized. As long as I kept my hands on the pointer, it spelled out “M-e-a-t” over and over again. In the distance, I could hear kids shrieking. I lifted my hands and the pointer squeaked to a stop.
Sunlight hit the windows, lighting up the room like spotlights.
“That’s the problem with the dead,” Pooch said. “They have such a fucked-up sense of humour.”
On Valentine’s Day, I got three cards. One from the teacher, one from this white girl who gave cards to everyone, and another one that wasn’t signed, but had written on the back, “To Lisa, the girl who don’t take shit from no one.”
Frank’s handwriting was unmistakable. No one else had his big, loopy scrawl. I stared at the card. I wanted to stare at Frank, but couldn’t bring my eyes up. I could feel him watching me. I put the card with the others then tucked them in my lunch box.
Mom had made me buy a box of chirpy Valentine cards but I’d tossed them in the garbage: I hadn’t thought Frank or Cheese or Pooch would take a Valentine the right way. The best way to deal with this, I decided, was to ignore it completely. After all, if Frank had sent it, then he would have signed it. But I couldn’t imagine who else would write that note—if I had a secret admirer, he was doing a damn good job of hiding it. I glanced around the room. Erica sniggered when I looked in her direction. Another possibility was that the card was a joke, purposefully sent to make me think Frank liked me so I’d do something lame and embarrassing. This made sense. I felt a profound sense of relief at having the world settle around me again.
The first real sign of my impending womanhood was that the hair on my legs became thicker. It was so gross, I had to shave it. I snuck one of Dad’s razors and hid in my bedroom. I was enthusiastic at first, but dry shaving burnt like heck and the nicks stung worse than paper cuts. I asked Mom how she could stand it, and she clucked over my bandaged legs and gave me quick shaving instructions. Hair appeared a few weeks later in more sensitive spots that I wasn’t letting a razor anywhere near.
Most of the girls my age already had their periods. It got them out of gym, especially swimming. Sometimes they even got the day off and just stayed home. I felt cheated that mine was so late, and that I was missing out on skipping school.
Frank became quiet for a while when his voice changed over because Cheese and Pooch would kid him about sounding like Michael Jackson when his voice cracked. He’d nod or shake his head in response and use short sentences. He was immensely proud of his emerging mustache though, and I’d catch him staring at it in window reflections and mirrors. If he saw me watching him, he’d look sheepish. A girl named Julie, who blinked too much and giggled at anything, began to hang around us at the playground, watching Frank with wide, earnest eyes. He ignored her.
I didn’t understand the games the girls played with boys. Watching them disappear behind bushes or chase each other and pretend to give hickeys, or spin bottles at birthdays just didn’t make sense. I liked smoking. I liked hanging out and goofing around. The rest of it seemed a waste of time.
Early in the morning, the little man woke me by touching my shoulder. It was just a tiny shock, the kind of thing you get from rubbing your feet across a carpet, but it was a nasty way to wake up. When I stopped swearing, the little man hopped onto my dresser and grinned at me. He hadn’t changed, still wore his hair like a troll, sticking up in jagged red tufts. When he did his jig, the bells on his shirt jingled. I threw my pillow at him and screamed, “Get out! Get out of here, you goddamned little bastard!” and kept on screaming until Dad burst into the room holding a bat. By the time he flipped on the light, the little man was gone—blink. Dad was still bleary-eyed from being jolted out of his sleep, and Mom followed, with one of Dad’s golf clubs. They were annoyed to no end when I told them it was just a nightmare. But Mom came and patted my knee, then kissed me good night. I lay in bed, afraid to sleep, waiting for disasters.
Monkey Beach Page 19
