Suitable Precautions

by Laura Boudreau

  “What?”

  “Her. It’s a girl. The dog.”

  “A bitch,” Shel said.

  Luke crossed his arms. His father said he needed to stand up for himself. Shel was nothing more than a bag of hot air who needed a haircut.

  “She found Martin Cowley,” Shel said as he hacked at the step with the heel of his boot.

  Luke knew that Martin drove around town in an old Honda, one elbow hanging out the window even in the dead of winter, but that was about it. Martin had played Joseph in the Christmas pageant the year that Luke was a talking sheep, back when Luke’s mother still insisted they all go to church, at least around Christmas. His parents sat with the Cowleys, close enough for Luke to see Maryanne Cowley mouth Martin’s lines along with him. The only thing Luke had ever said to him was, “Behold the Christmas star.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She found him. Dog yapped her bloody face off and wouldn’t come back from the woods,” Shel said. He hurled a piece of wood into the water. “When Sam went to get her, there was Martin, stretching his neck, if you follow.” Shel mimed wrapping a rope around his neck, putting one arm in the air and pretending to dangle from it, his tongue out and waggling at Cynthia who gave him the finger.

  Luke shrugged. “I’m going to be late for school,” he said. Shel made stuff up all the time.

  “You an idiot? Don’t you get it?”

  He didn’t. That was the kind of thing you saw in R-rated movies about people living in New York or Los Angeles. People didn’t do it in real life. Besides, Martin had had a solo in the pageant, the line in “Away in a Manger” about loving Jesus forever and staying by his side. Shel was the idiot.

  “You’re lying.”

  “The fuck I am.”

  “I’m going to be late,” Luke said again. All he had to do was go to class and ask Mrs. Solomon about it. He knew what she was going to say: No, Luke, and you can’t believe everything you see on TV, either. When his mom found out she might have half a mind to go over and tell Jeanette just what kind of foul things came out of her boy’s dirt mouth, but his dad would say, C’mon Ferne, and put an end to that. It was all fine. This was just Shel being Shel. A bad egg, his mother said.

  “You piss yourself when you get strangled, you know.” Shel wiped a hand over his mouth. “Your tongue turns purple and your eyes break all their blood vessels while you struggle, but there’s nothing you can do about it once you jump.” He put his hands around his own throat and made choking noises, and Luke remembered the time he’d cut himself with his mother’s very sharp kitchen knife. The damage done before the quick blossoming of blood. The second before the pain.

  “Dog got a hold of his foot and wouldn’t let go, taste a death and all that,” Shel went on. “Paul Cowley eventually had to beat the bitch off with a broom handle and she wound up losing her puppies. Sam Purdin should sue for loss a property.”

  “You don’t know shit.” Cynthia stood and hiked up her jeans, hugging herself against the cold.

  “I know that Martin’s going to get buried at the crossroads way back the road so his soul can never find its way,” Shel said. “They’ll bury him standing upside-down and they’ll put a stake in his heart on account of his being a suicide.”

  Cynthia rolled her eyes and brushed the bangs off her face.

  “And I heard that he did it because he’s a faggot.” Shel kicked the posts of the bridge. “Was a faggot, I mean. Fucking disgusting.”

  “Not everyone’s a fag, you know,” Cynthia said as she pulled at the cuffs of her jacket.

  “Take Luko, over there. A faggot if I ever saw one.”

  Luke stood there feeling small and stupid as Shel and Cynthia both looked him over.

  “Did your mommy make you wear that hat, Luke?” Shel said. “Do you suck your daddy’s dick?”

  “Grow up, Shel,” Cynthia said, picking up her backpack. “I’m going to school.”

  “Bitch.” Shel turned back to Luke as Cynthia started over the bridge. “Hey faggot, you checking me out?”

  All Luke had to do was run. What was Shel going to do, belt him in the face as he ran by? Shel was just going to laugh and call Luke a pussy and throw an ice ball at his head, and Cynthia was still there, not that far ahead.

  “You gonna stand there and whack off to me?”

  Luke was fast. And small. These were good things. He just had to do it. Stand up for himself.

  Shel grabbed his crotch. “I got something you want, faggot?”

  Luke’s forehead caught Shel in the chest. There was no sound except for the hollow thud of body hitting body, the salty wool of Shel’s jacket crashing into Luke’s open mouth. Shel with one heel dug into the bridge, then Shel floating over the water, a magic boy, a look on his face like he wanted to say something, that he was sorry, maybe, before the water filled his lungs and bathed his eyes, still open, turning him into something cold and new, a picture on a piece of newsprint on the fridge door, curling and fading from the heat of the stove.

  It hadn’t mattered that Luke heard Shel clawing his way out of the pond, slapping his sopping jacket on the ground and yelling that Luke was going to fucking die when he got his fucking hands on him, fucking die. Luke had run, the weight of his own soul slowing him down in the deep, wet snow. He knew what had happened, the thought repeating in his mind: You killed Shel, you killed Shel. The taste of the unsaid words a lot like blood.

  After that it had been a relief to go to the cemetery and see the hole, the tracks from the backhoe in the newly softened ground. Luke thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t asked anyone, not even Doris, about burying Martin upside-down at the crossroads, even though he still almost wished he had seen the body in the coffin, just so he could be sure of things before he threw his own handful of earth on the empty-sounding lid. Wharton’s funeral home had kept the casket closed the whole time. They put a giant picture of Martin on an easel, which his mother said was a small mercy, although Luke wasn’t sure why. Father Richard had prayed over the coffin before it was lowered into the ground, but that didn’t mean that the thing about Martin’s soul couldn’t still be true. Shel lied, but not about everything. Luke had sat between his parents during the service, conscious of the fact that he had no brothers and sisters. If Shel killed him, his parents were going to be alone in the world. If his parents died, the same was true for him.

  Martin had a brother. John worked for a gas company and was exploring somewhere near Baffin Island. Although they hadn’t been able to reach him yet, the company planned on doing everything they could for the Cowley family during this trying time, including transferring John back home for a month or two, if need be. It was hard to guess how Mr. and Mrs. Cowley felt about that—if it was more of a comfort to have a son not there, not in a box, a son who spent his time scaling mountains and drilling into the ground and being alive, or if it was a strange torture to have their only other boy out in God knows where with nothing between him and Martin but miles and time and luck and a length of sturdy, splintered rope. Luke sipped his Coke and understood a bit better why his own mother had insisted on holding his hand while Father Richard talked about ashes to ashes, her fingernails digging into his skin.

  Luke walked over to the window, keeping an eye out for Shel. Luke’s father was smoking on the porch with Uncle Joseph and Paul Cowley. They stood in a silent triangle and Luke watched the air float out of their mouths and fill the dark between them with gauzy, hot smoke. His father looked tall and strong, his space in the night brightened by a single glowing spark, fuelled by his own hazy breath.

  If Luke got his mother her coat, maybe she would take him home; he wasn’t allowed to walk alone at night, which was fine by Luke. The dark made him nervous. She was more than likely fixing coffee with Doris in the kitchen, trying to get the pot off before people started searching for their jackets and jingling their keys, slurring things about it being late and needing to get back. There was always the chance his father might come too if
he was finished with his cigarette, or if his mother kissed him on the cheek and said, It’s getting on, Jim. His parents loved each other like that. He had seen the photo his mother hid in the kitchen cupboard, the one where her hair was long and wavy as she looked over her shoulder and the small strap of her nightgown slid down her arm, his father taking the picture.

  The coats were heaped on a bed upstairs. John’s old bedroom, not Martin’s, Luke hoped as he came up to the door with the hand-lettered sign that said, Keep Out, That Means You Mom. Luke couldn’t find the light switch but it didn’t matter. He knew the feel of his mother’s jacket, the collar a gift from Uncle Maurice, the smell of her in the fur now. But there was another smell in the room. Something punky, like an apple left on a radiator.

  “Shut the door.”

  Luke’s heart beat in his ears and eyes and brain, and the thought of running downstairs and calling for his mother, his father, Doris, even, was stopped by the hammering of blood. There was nothing to be done. He had been stupid and now he was going to pay for it.

  “Come over here.” Shel was sitting on the floor at the end of the bed, his head on his knees. The triangle of yellow light from the bulb in the hallway showed Luke the back of Shel’s neck, pale and shiny. “You got cigarettes?” Shel asked.

  “No,” Luke said.

  “Course you don’t.” Shel slugged a nearly empty wine bottle to his lips.

  Luke saw the piles of sick on the floor. There was some on the edge of the ruffled bed skirt and some in a puddle between Shel’s knees where he sat horking, his spit making a thwacking noise when it hit the mess.

  “You sick or something?” Luke breathed through his mouth as he came closer. “Shel?”

  “I told her I would pay for it,” Shel said into the floor. “I can get the money. You think I can’t get the money? Bitch.” He spat again. “Fucking bitch.”

  Luke jumped as Shel gave a spastic hiccup. Shel wretched between his legs and then sipped from the bottle, choking down the wine until he heaved again, his fist pounding the carpet with each rush of his insides. Luke didn’t know what to think, only that he wished Shel would just snap out of it and tell him that he was going to punch his lights out. Instead he swayed back and forth on the carpet like a Boy Scout at a make-believe campfire.

  “She said I’m going to hell because a this. Her too.” Shel’s tongue sounded fat in his mouth.

  “We should go.” Luke’s eyes were adjusting to the dark and he saw that Shel’s lips were stained and chewed up, his teeth working at a small flap of skin in the corner that was starting to bleed. He could imagine what Mrs. Cowley was going to say about blood on the carpet and the piles of puke. “This might be Martin’s room.”

  Shel wiped a hand over his mouth, smearing some blood onto his cheek. He crawled onto his knees, grinding the vomit into the floor as he steadied himself. “Are you disrespecting the dead?” Shel dragged out the d-sounds, running his free hand over the lump of jackets on the bed, then stamping the bottle on his palm as he wobbled closer. He breathed heavily and squinted at Luke until his eyes were nothing more than sticky slivers.

  There was music playing downstairs and people laughing as Shel stared at Luke and thumped the bottle in his hand.

  “I’m sorry about the bridge, Shel,” Luke said. He didn’t know why, only that he meant it.

  “You don’t fucking know from sorry.” Shel’s eyes were nearly swollen shut. “They’re not even going to bury it, you know.” He pawed the bottle at Luke. “She told me they’re just going to scrape it out and put it in a bag and then burn it like garbage, like it didn’t even have a soul.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fucking garbage.”

  Shel swung the bottle in a wild and lazy arc that caught the corner post of Martin’s bed. He fell hard onto his knees like they weren’t his anymore, like he had deflated from the inside out and was now just the skin and bone outline of a dead boy. It was over, whatever had happened, and Luke was safe, absolved, only a witness to the strange and secret ritual that had Shel hunched over and curled around the bottle, begging for forgiveness. This was suffering, Luke knew. This was grace. Then the room flared up. Paul Cowley. He was in the doorway, hand on the light switch. Luke stood there, blinking, his elbows locked and his fists sweaty.

  Mr. Cowley took a step into the room and when he saw Shel in a ball and the stains on the carpet, he rubbed at one eye and the white of it went bloodshot.

  “Shel?”

  Shel’s head lolled back and his eyes rolled around, seeing everything and nothing.

  “You clean your mess,” Mr. Cowley said. “Then you get yourself gone.”

  Shel burped. Paul Cowley rubbed at his eye again and made to leave, half turning to look at Luke.

  “Your parents are staying for a bit. Your dad said you can walk home if you want.”

  Luke watched him leave the room before he found his coat and zipped it up, tying his scarf tight as Shel moaned and covered his eyes with his arm. Luke promised himself he wasn’t going to be afraid. He was just going to have to be careful. It wasn’t that far home.

  The VOSMAK GENEALOGY

  MY MOTHER HAD NO IMAGINATION. She said her condition was an unusual form of brain damage caused by an accident that happened at her parents’ annual First Day of Spring Party in March, 1956.

  Though my mother’s parents had been born in Toronto, as had their parents before them, both my grandmother and grandfather claimed to have a memory of the seasons of their homeland, the location of which they disputed. My grandfather was adamant that the family came from Koryakia, while my grandmother swore they were actually from Magadan. The possibility that my grandmother and grandfather might come from different places was never raised. For my grandparents, marriage fused histories in the same way it joined destinies.

  “Your grandfather wouldn’t know his homeland if it sat down and had a drink with him,” my grandmother said in Russian, leading me around by the wrist while we shopped for kovbasa at Mike’s Meats. Likewise, my grandfather, rolling cigarettes at the kitchen table, said my grandmother couldn’t be trusted on this matter. “Sure,” he said in English. “That woman couldn’t find Russia on a map of Russia.” To my knowledge, neither of them ever went any farther east than Montreal, and only then to a lung specialist who told my grandfather that there was nothing to be done about his dying. When it came to their origins, the one thing my grandparents could agree on was the issue of weather. The weather there, in Koryakia or Magadan, was tediously the same, different across the year only in the sense that one month might be slightly less cold than the month before, or the sun a little longer in the sky. The weather in Canada, and Toronto in particular, was a wondrous variety—vibrant budding, heat so flat it made you sleepy, storms that turned sky the black of rotten fruit. Though they were not literary or philosophical people, my grandparents understood Toronto weather as a metaphor for life. It was the inevitability of change they enjoyed. It gave them comfort, I think. They were not religious but they believed in celebrating their blessings, and this meant that every equinox and solstice, or the closest Sunday after, they packed up the family and headed to Grenadier Pond for a picnic.

  At the winter parties my mother and her siblings, two sickly twin sisters and one fat little brother, skated until their cheeks burned, and my grandmother made them hot chocolate over a small fire, counting out marshmallows according to their ages, one for each year. In the summer there was lemonade, lawn chairs, the roasting of hot dogs that blistered and split, falling into the coals. Even in the fall the children had fun, collecting bouquets of brightly coloured leaves that they presented to their mother, shyly, as though she were a visiting dignitary or magistrate. Their father smoked cigarettes, offering his wife a drag now and again. The spring parties, however, were always miserable.

  Usually there was still snow on the ground, and my grandmother’s new spring hat, something with a gauzy half veil and artificial flowers, seemed sad agains
t the slush of the parking lot, garish against the white of the shoreline as she marched back and forth, trying to keep warm. While she was out of earshot, my mother’s sisters, Eva and Marlene, huddled together and bugged Larry, the spoiled brat, to make a fuss about leaving. But my grandmother insisted that they weren’t leaving until they enjoyed their spring picnic, and they should be happy that they were born in the wonderful weather of Toronto and not back in Magadan where it was a thousand times colder and the sun never shone and things were still hard, unbearably hard, because of the war.

  “Koryakia,” my grandfather said.

  On the day of her accident, my mother helped my grandmother spread out rubber tarps and cover them with knit afghans. They smoothed out the linen placemats, arranging them in a circle. They folded the cloth napkins into clams. My grandmother unleashed steam from each insulated foil package. She dished out cabbage rolls and kovbasa, potatoes and squash. “Hurry,” she said to my grandfather as he passed her the plates. “You like cold sausage?” There was chicken soup from a thermos, chocolate pudding for dessert. There was even a cupcake for Larry, who was picky and despised pudding. My grandmother cajoled everyone into eating, and for a while it seemed as though the picnic might be the only successful First Day of Spring Party in the history of the Vosmak family.

  My mother asked to go play. “Yes, of course, be careful,” my grandmother said. My grandparents sipped their coffees, my grandfather convincing my grandmother to let him splash a little brandy into her cup. It was not often that they had this kind of tranquility, and certainly a rarity to have it at a First Day of Spring Party. My grandmother worked at Campbell’s during tomato season, Christie’s the rest of the year. My grandfather worked at Continental Can, the highest-paying factory in North America at the time. Their children all had new shoes, but my grandfather and grandmother were thin and tired. They understood the keen pleasure of a cup of coffee at a picnic, and they were hungry for that pleasure when it presented itself. They sat there thinking about what a beautiful spring day it was, despite the cold. They did not pay much attention to their second youngest, who, at six years old, was very well-behaved. There was simply no reason for them to watch her as she walked up the hill to play with her doll. I don’t think you can blame them.