I caught up with Vin at Gerrard Square. He was perched on the fence that ran along the west side of the parking lot. There was a girl with him. Cat—short for Catherine, which she thought was cool. So did Vin. When I saw her, I hesitated. But, hey, she was just a girl, and Vin was my best friend. Was. Lately I wasn’t sure what was past tense and what was present.
Cat spotted me first and nodded in my direction. Vin turned. His face split with a smile.
“Hey, Mikey!”
Those two words and that big Vin smile made me feel warm all over. Everything was okay. A best friend is a best friend, right? Some things never change.
I walked over to Vin. He was still smiling, but Cat’s expression was cool, like one of those fashion models you see on billboards or in bus shelter ads. Distant. Thinking about something—you didn’t know what it was, but you knew it was more important than what was for supper and what was due for homework the next day. Her eyes—were they really golden or did they just look that way in the sun?—focused hard on me. On my eyes, then on my hands. Vin noticed and grinned.
“What’ve you been up to, Mike?” he asked. “Not getting yourself into trouble, I hope.”
I couldn’t help it, I felt my cheeks get warm. I shrugged and jammed my fists into the pockets of my jacket.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“Sure,” Vin said. I could tell he didn’t believe me, but for some reason he decided not to push it.
“I gotta go,” Cat said, just like that. She leaned forward and planted a kiss and some bright red lipstick on Vin’s cheek. Vin looked pleased—Check it out, Mikey. He glanced at me, maybe wanting to see if I looked jealous, and kept on grinning as Cat twirled and danced away from him, heading up the walkway over the railroad tracks. Vin stayed on the fence, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips, watching her go.
“She’s something, eh?” he said.
Cat was on the top of the walkway now, a thin girl with spiky hair, four studs in one ear, five in the other, an eyebrow ring, pale face, blood-red lips. Yeah, she was something.
“You hear about that kid, Ducharme?” I said.
Vin nodded. His head was still tilted up at the walkway. Cat was almost down the other side now. In a minute she would disappear from sight.
“What do you think happened?” I said.
“Huh?” He tore his eyes away from Cat and looked at me, surprised by the question. “What’d you say?”
“Robbie Ducharme. What do you think happened?”
Vin shrugged. “I guess someone didn’t like him,” he said. He took the unlit cigarette from his mouth and flicked it onto the road. “I gotta quit this,” he said.
“You don’t smoke, remember?” I said. Vin was allergic to cigarette smoke, but he walked around with an unlit cigarette in his mouth because he thought it made him look cool. The line he used was, “I’m trying to quit.” A lot of girls think it’s even cooler when you’re trying to quit smoking, he had told me.
“What I mean is, I gotta quit trying to quit,” Vin said. “These things aren’t cheap, you know.”
“In other words,” I said, “Cat doesn’t smoke.”
Vin grinned.
“Correct,” he said. “Doesn’t smoke. Doesn’t think smoking is cool. Her granny died of lung cancer. Her whole life is a smoke-free zone.” He checked his watch, and then jumped down from the fence. “Hey, gotta go,” he said.
“Wait.” I knew I was going to sound like a real bone-head for asking this, but I had to. “You got my history book, by any chance?”
Vin at least had the decency to look embarrassed. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that. I forgot mine at home, and you know what Cop Boy is like when you show up in his class without a book.”
Cop Boy. It’s what Vin called Riel. “Can I have it back?”
Vin shrugged out of his backpack and rummaged through it. He handed me the book. I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination or if the book really was more dog-eared than I remembered.
“Hey, Mike, I really do have to take off.”
“A. J.?” I said and, I couldn’t help it, I guess I sounded sort of ticked. A. J. Siropolous was a guy in twelfth grade. He was also the guy Vin had been spending time with. A. J. had a car and a lot of friends and always a line on a party. Vin was always saying, “Come on, Mikey, come with me. You’ll have a great time, guaranteed.” But Riel was always saying, “Done your homework yet?” And if the answer was yes, “Then show me.” Riel took foster parenthood more seriously than Billy had taken guardianship. But then, what had I expected? I knew from the start that Riel was a serious guy. And if I had done my homework and if I could produce it and if the homework met Riel’s expectations, which it didn’t always, then the next question was, “What about your job? How’s that going lately?” The job was something else Riel insisted on: a) that I have one; b) that I take it seriously; and c) that I put three-quarters of what I earned into a savings account.
“You’re on your own, Mike,” he’d say, not to be mean, although it always made me remember that Billy was gone now and that my mother was gone too, and had been for a lot longer. “You have to learn to look after yourself.”
It turned out that looking after yourself was a very big deal with Riel. It turned out that his father had been killed in a work accident when Riel was just a kid, and his mother had died of breast cancer just as he was graduating high school. Riel had a younger sister, Beth. He’d looked after her for a few years, just like Billy had looked after me. Beth lived in Australia now, with a surfer. Riel never said so, but I could tell that he didn’t approve by the look on his face and the tone of his voice when he mentioned the guy Beth lived with—a guy he always called the surfer, like he didn’t have a name.
“A. J.’s got it together,” Vin said. “If Cop Boy would let you off your leash for five minutes, you’d see. You’d like him.” He shook his head. “I gotta tell you, Mike, you really picked the wrong guy!”
My belly started to tighten. For a moment I felt like I was going to throw up. I felt that way whenever I got really mad, which was a lot lately. Mad at Riel for being so serious all the time. Mad at Vin for riding Riel. Mad at Billy for leaving me in this situation in the first place.
“What was I supposed to do?” I said.
“There are lots of foster parents that are way more relaxed,” Vin said.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. You know Gord Spinelli?”
A guy who hung around with A. J. sometimes. Maybe another of Vin’s new best friends.
“He’s in a foster home,” Vin said. “Two foster parents—a couple. The guy works at the Ford plant in Oakville.” Vin’s dad worked there too. “The woman’s a full-time mom. Looks after four foster kids, including Gord. She doesn’t ride them about homework and go get a job and how about going out for every sport there is while you’re at it.”
Riel was as big on sports as he was on after-school jobs. He said sports kept kids out of trouble.
“The kids show up for school, they show up for supper, they show up for bed and do a few chores and she’s cool,” Vin said. “Relaxed. Not like Cop Boy.”
“Stop calling him that,” I said. “He’s not a cop anymore.”
“Okay.” Vin looked at me like he was noticing all kinds of things about me he’d never noticed before, a halo maybe, and even some wings. “You’re getting as straight as he is, Mikey. You know that?” He glanced at his watch. “Catch you later, okay? I gotta go.” And off he went, up the incline of the walkway, over the tracks, down the other side. He didn’t look back even once.
As soon as I opened the front door Riel shouted to me from the kitchen. I found him at the counter, slicing tomatoes for a salad. He waved me onto one of the stools opposite him and set his knife aside. Then he put both hands on the counter and leaned across to peer at me. “Tell me again about last night,” he said.
I blinked. What was going on?
“What about last night?”
&n
bsp; “You were here, right?” Riel said.
Jeez, I’d said I was, hadn’t I? “Yeah, I was here.”
“All night,” he said, only it came out as another question.
“You saw me go up to my room,” I said. I kept my hands out of sight, below the counter, just in case.
“I also heard you walking around in the middle of the night,” he said.
“I was here.” I looked Riel in the eyes. I knew him. I knew he was watching for that. He had a reputation at school. If you didn’t look straight at him when he asked why your homework wasn’t done, he’d ask again and he’d say, Look at me this time. Cops. They like to believe they can tell a lie from the truth. They like to think the job has taught them that. So, okay, I locked eyes with Riel, mustered a little indignation, and said, “I already told you. I came down to get something to drink.”
Riel peered into me, like he could read my soul.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Is something the matter?”
“There were kids in the park last night,” Riel said. “In the park where they found Robbie Ducharme. People who live around there said they heard kids.”
“There’s always kids in that park,” I said. “I used to—” I stopped abruptly.
“You used to what?”
There was no point in denying it.
“I used to hang around there myself.” The three of us, me and Vin and Sal, we used to hang around the park all the time, at the far end, near the railroad tracks, away from all the houses. “Do they know what kids were there?”
Riel shook his head. “Just kids,” he said. “Nobody that anyone could identify. And no kids have come forward.”
I waited and watched as Riel picked up his knife. He started slicing tomatoes again, slowly, deliberately, paper-thin.
“There were kids in the park where the Ducharme kid was killed,” Riel said. “And so far no one has come forward to say they saw anything. That make sense to you?”
CHAPTER TWO
“Hey,” Sal said. He fell back against the brick wall and slid down it until he was squatting next to me. The roughness of the brick probably chewed up the back of his jacket, but he didn’t seem to care.
“Hey,” I said.
Silence. I glanced over at Sal. He was looking down at the ground.
“You okay?” I said.
Nothing for a moment. Then, “So, where’s Vin at?”
As if I had any idea. I looked out across the schoolyard to see if I could spot him, but no. There were knots of girls here and there, clusters of guys under the basketball hoops, and Riel, in a black T-shirt and black jeans, supervising a softball practice. He was a first-class coach, the way some guys talked.
“You and him had a fight?” Sal asked.
“What, me and Vin?” I shook my head. It would have been easier if that’s what it was. I would have understood it—Vin isn’t around because he’s mad at me. But that wasn’t it. “It’s that girl he’s seeing,” I said. “Cat.” A girl who liked a certain kind of guy, the kind of guy that Vin was all of a sudden interested in being.
“No!” someone yelled.
I turned and looked. It was pure reflex.
Over by one of the entrances to the school I saw two girls—Lisa and Voula. They were trying to back away from some man. Voula was having more success. The man grabbed Lisa by the arm and was holding tight.
“Let me go,” Lisa said. She said it the way some girls say it to guys who are trying stuff, except she sounded scared.
“But you know him,” the man said.
Lisa squirmed. Voula looked around, her eyes panicky. She seemed to be searching for a teacher or someone—anyone—who could help Lisa. She was kind of cute, but that wasn’t what got my interest. The main thing about Voula was that she was an old friend of Jen’s. I’d asked her once for Jen’s cell phone number, but she hadn’t given it to me. Maybe …
I nudged Sal. Then I stood up and yanked him to his feet.
“Just tell me you know him,” the man said to Lisa.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. She had stopped struggling, but she was watching the man intently. She was so still that I guessed she was trying to fake the man out so he’d loosen his hold a little and she could break free. Then there it was, the jerk of her arm backward. The man lost his grip on her and Lisa started to move back. Then, “Hey!” she said as the man’s hand caught her again and clamped around her wrist. “Hey, let go of me!”
I stepped in close to the guy. “Let her go,” I said. The man blinked at me, which is when Lisa seized her opportunity. She wrenched her arm free again. Then she and Voula took off. They ran to a door to the school and yanked it open. They hadn’t paused long enough to say thank you, let alone to give me time to ask for a favor. Maybe I could catch up with Voula later. In the meantime, I thought, problem solved.
Then a hand closed around my upper arm and I felt myself being spun around.
“You know him,” the man said.
I peered at him. He hadn’t shaved in a while. His chin and jaw were covered with stubble. He hadn’t combed his hair either, or changed his clothes in a day or two, judging from the look of his shirt and his pants.
“Hey, let go of me,” I said. I sounded just like Lisa. I looked to Sal for support.
Sal stared at the guy. He shook his head, swallowed hard and stepped in close to me. “He’s crazy,” he whispered. “You can tell by his eyes.”
I looked at the man again. It was true. His eyes were wild and watery, like Billy’s eyes used to be when he’d had too much to drink. But there was no sour beer smell coming off this guy.
“You know him?” the man said again, only this time it came out like a question.
“Who?” I said. Sal backed off a pace and then another.
“My Robert,” the man said. He pronounced it Row-bear.
I wanted to look at Sal, to check out where he was and what he was doing, but I didn’t dare. The man’s watery eyes were focused on me. He scared me a little.
“Robert?” I said. My arm was tingling. The man had a grip that could crush a boulder. “I don’t know any Robert.”
Wrong answer.
“You know him,” the man insisted. “Everyone says they don’t know him, but they do. I know they do. I know they know him. He goes to school here.”
“Look, Mister—”
“My Robert,” the man said. With his free hand he groped in his jacket pocket. My stomach did a flip. Now what?
The man pulled out his wallet, flipped it open and thrust it in my face. I was looking at a photo that had been tucked into a clear plastic holder in the wallet. It was a school picture. A kid with hair hanging in his eyes, a goofy grin on his face and a pimple on his chin. He was posed against the blue-gray background on the big screen they make you sit in front of while some loser photographer makes stupid cracks. Things like, Hey, show the girls what you’re made of, melt their hearts with your smile, Romeo, saying the same thing over and over but—you have to give him credit—he tries to sound like he means it. It was the same picture they’d printed in the newspaper. Robbie Ducharme. The kid who had been kicked to death in the park.
“Mr. Ducharme?” said a voice somewhere behind me. Riel’s voice. “You remember me? John Riel.”
Mr. Ducharme didn’t answer. He thrust his wallet at Riel.
“You know him,” he said. A statement this time, not a question.
Riel stepped forward, took the wallet from the man and studied the photo. “Sure, I knew him,” he said. Knew, not know. “He was a nice boy.”
“He was a good boy,” Mr. Ducharme said.
Riel touched Mr. Ducharme’s arm, the one that was gripping me like a cop restraining a perp. Mr. Ducharme loosened his hold. Riel nodded at me. I pulled free and retreated a couple of steps.
“I’m sorry about what happened to Robbie,” Riel said. He handed the wallet back to Mr. Ducharme. Mr. Ducharme ran a finger over the surface of the photograph. “He wanted to be an engine
er,” he said.
“He was doing so well in school.” Riel said nothing.
“All he did was study,” Mr. Ducharme said. “Study and play on his computer. He liked to design things, you know? He never hurt anyone. You know?”
“I know,” Riel said.
“His watch was missing. Did you know that?”
Riel didn’t say anything, didn’t nod or shake his head.
“A watch his grandfather gave him. Whoever … hurt my Robert—” Hurt, like being dead was something they could cure. “They took his watch. His grandfather gave it to him for his thirteenth birthday.” The man looked baffled. “You don’t think they did it for the watch, do you?” he said to Riel. “You don’t think that was what it was all about, do you?”
A bell rang, loud enough for everyone outside, even at the farthest edges of the yard, to hear. Riel glanced at me and nodded toward the school.
“Did you walk over here, Mr. Ducharme, or did you drive?” he said. He laid an arm on Mr. Ducharme’s shoulder and steered him away from the school. When I finally went back into the building, Riel was on the sidewalk, still talking to Mr. Ducharme.
There’s knowing what you’re supposed to do, and then there’s doing it. My Uncle Billy had always known what you were supposed to do, although that was never how he put it. What Billy always said was, “what the monkeys do.” Monkey see, monkey do, Billy always said. People who worked at Walmart or Zellers or Canadian Tire—monkeys. Gas jockeys, grocery packers, auto assembly-line workers, bank tellers—monkeys, monkeys, monkeys, monkeys. Doing what they were doing because that’s what they saw everyone else doing. Working at boring, soul-sucking, go-nowhere jobs day in and day out. Billy himself had been a mechanic in a garage, what some people called a grease monkey, only you didn’t dare say that to Billy.
Billy was like a ghost that way—he could look in a mirror and never see himself reflected back. Doing things just because someone somewhere said you were supposed to was what monkeys did, Billy said. People—what Billy called free and independent human beings—exercised the right to choose. They did things because they wanted to, not because they had to. They answered to no one and played by their own rules, which was why Billy had gone through so many jobs. He kept getting fired for missing too many days and insisting on two rules of his own: never explain, never apologize. To be fair, though, although there were plenty of things Billy had messed up on, the bills always got paid eventually, and Billy made sure I went to school regularly and was careful to do enough things right so that the child welfare people wouldn’t come around and threaten to take me away from him. But you can do all the little things right and it doesn’t matter, not if you turn around and do one colossal, humongous, gargantuan thing wrong, like Billy did.
Truth and Lies Page 2
