Blood Sports

by Eden Robinson

He could feel a hot flush burning up from his neck and knew his face was going bright red.

  Jeremy grinned. “Did Tommy miss his mommy?”

  “Shut up.”

  “She ditched you, huh?”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Grab yourself some dignity!” Jeremy yelled cheerfully after him. “You don’t have to go running after her like some dumb dog.”

  With September coming up fast, Tom found a school six blocks from the condo. Even better, they had self-paced classes where he could come and go as he pleased. He took assessment tests and passed Grade Ten in a matter of weeks. Grade Eleven was more of the same. He discovered that when he was in school or studying, he dropped off Jer’s radar. Ironically, now that he had the freedom to skip as many classes as he wanted and blow off homework any time, his attendance and grades had never been better.

  The self-paced classes were held in a maze of portables, exiled from the nearby main high school. The tables inside looked like they’d been filched from church basements, and the plastic chairs were duct-taped where they’d cracked. The computers were a mish-mash of donations, some of them as new as last year, some of them still using punch cards.

  From his corner table, he would watch the other self-paced students. The only thing he missed about his old school was goofing around with Mike – endless hours of playing Doom or Quake or Streetfighter, getting stoned, watching dumb movies, and discussing why they were dumb. Complaining about school. Avoiding Mike’s aunt, Patricia, and Tom’s mom.

  But he’d decided on no civilians. No more Willy Bakers. Mike might want to help and end up steamrolled if Jeremy blew his top.

  Which was all good and noble, but when he admitted it to himself, he didn’t want anyone to know how agonizingly strange his life had become. It was one thing to live it, and another thing to deal with people knowing about it.

  As the months passed, no matter how drunk his mother was, no matter how high Jeremy got, they wouldn’t get tanked together. They would feel free to drink or snort in front of him, but they could never bring themselves to do it in front of each other. Sometimes, they would cross paths in the living room or in the kitchen, and they would play sober. Both of them would be swaying and eyeball-rolling high, seriously discussing the weather or the outrageous price of winter produce.

  Paulie stomped back from anger management. She broke out the cleaning supplies without saying hello. She slammed the pail into the sink and filled it and dropped it so it sloshed. She scoured the floor, frowning.

  “You okay?” Tom said.

  “Perfect,” Paulie said.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Tom said. “Your floor’s pretty spotless.”

  Paulie ignored him. When she was finished, she closed her eyes and breathed deeply three times.

  “You want to get something to eat?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  They caught the bus to the Granville Island Market and ate a late lunch on the dock. Tom threw crusts from his sandwich to the seagulls hovering hopefully around their bench. Paulie laughed when two fat seagulls bumped heads going for the same crust.

  “Kits Beach has a great view of the fireworks,” Tom said.

  Paulie rolled her eyes.

  “It’s free,” Tom said.

  Paulie turned shy when he held her hand, and they didn’t talk as they strolled out of Granville Market and followed the sidewalk past the marina, past the bridge to Kitsilano Beach. A group of seniors in matching T-shirts rested on the benches. Little kids screamed away from the waves and then ran back into the water for more. Sailboats tilted away from the wind. The beach volleyball courts were noisy with the shouting from the bronzed bikini-and-Speedo crowd while the basketball courts were all teenage boys with their baseball caps backward, skinny kids in satin shorts.

  Tom bought a Rainbow Rocket Pop for himself and a Creamsicle Dream for Paulie from a shirtless bicycle vendor wearing a white sombrero trimmed with fuzzy red balls. Paulie’s tongue went radioactive orange. He asked what colour his was and then stuck his tongue out.

  “Could you grow up, please?” Paulie said, her face screwing up in annoyance. “This is why I don’t want to be seen in public with you.”

  “Hey, Paulie,” Tom said. “Guess what?”

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  Paulie glared at him. “Sometimes I want to strangle you.”

  Tom laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I want you to take me serious.”

  “I do,” Tom said.

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not,” Tom said.

  She punched his arm, hard, but she didn’t let go of his hand.

  As Tom brushed his teeth, one of Jeremy’s friends opened the bathroom door and stared at him. The man was pale with eyes so pinned you couldn’t tell he had pupils. He swayed out of rhythm to the music. Tom hated being sober when everyone else was tripping.

  “There’s another bathroom beside the kitchen,” Tom said. He rinsed and spat, wiped the toothpaste from the corner of his mouth with his T-shirt.

  “Are you a narc?” Pinned said.

  Tom laughed.

  The man’s eyes went big. “Are you wired? Are you recording this?”

  “I’m Jeremy’s cousin. Jeremy. Your host. I live here.”

  Tom pushed past him and started down the hallway. The man followed close behind.

  “I know you’re following me,” Pinned said.

  “No one’s following you, you freak.” Tom didn’t see Jeremy, and everyone else ignored him and Pinned. Jeremy had a rotating series of friends in their mid- to late-twenties who had sprung from another species altogether, one with no sags or bumps or wrinkles or inappropriate body or facial hair. Unless they were going for the Goth or Betty Paige look, they were glowingly tanned, like someone had taken oil and a rag and buffed them to a high gloss. Tonight, Jeremy sat on the couch surrounded by people. The coffee table in front of him was littered with pizza boxes, empty beer bottles, and hand mirrors dusted with coke and snot-covered straws and rolled-up bills. The party was too loud and crowded to fight through. Tom decided to retreat to the Insomniac.

  His bedroom was technically off-limits for Jeremy’s friends. But Tom wasn’t surprised to find a man and two women in his bed. The man was naked and bent over, a striped, orange McDonald’s straw sticking out of his anus. One of the women was literally blowing coke up his ass and the other was hysterical about the whole thing.

  “Do you mind?” the guy said as Tom walked in and grabbed his knapsack.

  “It’s my room,” Tom said, slinging his knapsack across his shoulder. “You’re on my bed.”

  “Get us a refill, luvvie,” said the blow-woman, holding up a bowl.

  Things to do tomorrow: buy better lock for door, burn sheets and mattress, Tom thought, turning and leaving.

  Kids screamed instructions or trash talk at each other as they played on-line games, the espresso maker hissed, and the skull-pounding Industrial CD thudded in the background at The Raging Insomniac. Teenagers coming off the party circuit screamed with delight as they savoured details of their latest outing. The staff argued about who was going to clean the bathrooms and then about who was going to change the toner in the copy machine by the door.

  Tom sat at one of the computers in the back, surfing the Internet for anything he could find on Rusty Letourneau. There were a lot of Letourneaus, and it took him a few tries to find the man he’d killed. Rusty’s real first name was Robert. His face, smooth and unbroken, stared back at him from a mug shot. He had wavy, black hair and a receding forehead that had formed a deep V. His eyes were not as blue in the mug shot as they were in Tom’s dreams. His nose bulged at the tip. He had missed an arraignment hearing. He had a failure to appear charge on top of assault with a weapon and attempted robbery. Crime Stoppers offered two thousand dollars for information leading to an arrest. Letourneau was born in June and would have been twenty-four. He’d b
eaten a gas attendant with a crowbar when he found out the till only had eight dollars. Stills from the gas-station security cameras showed Letourneau bent over the counter, wailing on a clerk. Tom printed the mug shot.

  He found pictures of Robert’s father, Jack Letourneau, on www.gangwars.com. Sunglasses covered Jack’s eyes as he bent his head over a casket, hands clasped in front of him. Tom wrote down the name of his chapter and then hunted until he found an address. He couldn’t find the name of Robert’s mother.

  The condo was quiet when he woke. Tom heard footsteps coming close to the laundry room. He stiffened. The door swung open and light from the hallway made him squint. Jeremy waited.

  “It’s getting to the point where I’m afraid to start the dishwasher without checking if you’re sleeping there,” Jeremy said.

  Tom swallowed, trying to breathe as quietly as he could.

  Jeremy opened the dryer. “I know you’re in here,” Jeremy crossed the room and opened the closet. “I heard you shouting.”

  Tom cringed as Jeremy’s feet approached the wheeled laundry hampers. Jer shoved them aside and lifted off the sheets Tom had covered himself in. Tom stood sheepishly.

  “There was a guy in my room,” Tom said. “And some girls.”

  “You never sleep in your bed. You’re under it, you’re under a table, you’re in a cupboard. And you just keep getting weirder.” Jeremy pulled a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his back pocket. He unfolded it and held it in front of Tom’s face.

  Tom had hidden the mug shot under his mattress. He snatched it back.

  Jeremy grabbed Tom in a headlock. “What are we going to do with you, hey?” Jeremy noogied him. “You suicidal retard. What were you planning to do? Confess?”

  “I wouldn’t say who I was,” Tom said.

  “You didn’t bump his fender, Tom. You can’t leave a note on his windshield saying hi, there! Sorry I killed your kid.”

  “Let go.” Tom yanked at Jeremy’s arms and Jeremy tightened his grip.

  “You’re wasting your God-given talent for guilt on Rusty.”

  “Jeremy, let go.” Tom tried pulling out of the headlock and kicking.

  “Let’s be logical. Did you go out and hunt Rusty down and plan to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “What was he doing in your apartment?”

  Tom stopped fighting.

  “Did he come to sell you Girl Guide cookies? Was he holding a Bible and asking you if you found God?”

  “Jeremy. If my kid was missing –”

  “You dumb-ass,” Jeremy said. “They don’t think he’s missing. They think he jumped bail.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “No, the point is if you tell Daddy Letourneau anything, he is going to kill you. Slowly. Painfully.”

  “I want to do something.”

  “Saint Tommy, martyr of the freaks,” Jeremy said. He let him go, and Tom tried to walk away. Jeremy shoved him into the wall. He stood in front of Tom with his arms crossed. “I’m serious. Drop this.”

  Tom stared at his shoes.

  Jer gripped Tom’s arm above the elbow and led him down the hallway to the kitchen. A tall, muscle-bound man with hair shaved down to his scalp poured himself a coffee. He was wearing navy sweats, a navy rain jacket, and so-white-they-must-be-new sneakers.

  “Hiding in the fucking laundry room,” Jer said. “It’s embarrassing to be related to you, Tom. What do you think I should do with him, Firebug?”

  “You’re wasting your time trying to impress those whiny freeloaders,” Firebug said, turning around. “You could get three houses for what you paid for this.”

  “You have no vision,” Jeremy said. “Branch out, my friend. I can cut you in on some sweet deals.”

  “Counting is your responsibility. Yours,” Firebug said. “Not some drooling, snot-nosed fuck-for-brains.”

  “He means you,” Jer said.

  Tom wished Jer would let go of his arm.

  “Tommy-boy knows how to keep his mouth shut,” Jer said.

  “It’s your funeral,” Firebug said.

  “Come on,” Jer said, leading him up the stairs to his bedroom. He picked up a duffle from the floor and zipped it open. “Every once in a while, some moron pays us with party packs.” He dumped the contents onto the bed. A riot of five, ten, and twenty-dollar bills swirled and fluttered as Jer shook them loose. Change spilled on the sheets, on the carpet, over their shoes. “I think they had a bake sale to pay this guy’s debt.”

  Tom stared at the money pile. Jer’s watch beeped.

  “Make yourself useful. Separate and stack the bills into their denominations. I don’t want to deal with the coins. Keep that. We’ll call it your count fee.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” Tom said.

  “Want to know where it came from?” Jer said.

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Smart boy.”

  “Don’t try tackling the whole quadratic equation at once, Tom,” Dude said, his tone the aggressively patient one people used when they were talking to morons. “Work in sections. All you’re working with are binomials. You can handle binomials, can’t you?”

  Tom fingered the edges of his red-marked practice mid-term. Dude was a volunteer tutor in his mid-twenties with a shoulder-length shaggy haircut and some kind of facial smudge in the shape of a teardrop under his lip and a line of hair framing his jaw.

  “Tom?” Dude said.

  “I’m listening,” Tom said.

  The tutor didn’t sigh, but he wore a stoic expression, as if he was a friend who was going to give you a ride home after a party even though he was really tired. Dude repeated the lesson slowly. Dude had a funny name, something vegetable-y, rutabaga or radicchio-sounding. Tom had taken to calling him Dude at first because he could never remember Dude’s name, and then because it pushed Dude’s buttons. Dude was supposed to be helping him prep, but Tom loathed the practice exercises.

  “Maybe this would work better if you could tell me what part you’re having trouble with?” Dude said.

  Busted. Dude had been talking, but all it sounded like was wacka, wacka, wacka, carry the two, wacka, wacka. “Maybe it would.”

  Dude went squinty as a no-name cowboy in a dusty, lawless town at high noon.

  “Try,” Dude said, “to focus. All righty?”

  “Did you just say ‘all righty’?”

  Dude lost his patient smile. “Maybe we should call it a day.”

  When Dude walked away, Tom rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palm. He felt heavy, sluggish, and unsure of what to do with the rest of the day. The clouds were low and dull, the rain steady as a pulse.

  Tom was wearing his headphones, the Walkman turned up loud and all the lights in his room turned on. He rummaged through the opened books on his bed, sending paper drifting down to the floor. He caught movement and froze as Jeremy opened the door. Tom put his headphones around his neck.

  “I said knock, knock,” Jeremy said. He hesitated.

  Behind him stood a tall, slender woman in a blue dress that looked like the hem had been caught in a blender and shredded. She put one hand on her hip as she strolled in behind Jeremy, and Tom half-expected her to do a catwalk swivel. Typical of Jer’s women, she was flawlessly lovely. But they usually had less attitude and were much younger. Sometimes they lasted a week, the longest had lasted a month.

  “This is Lilia,” Jeremy said.

  “Hi,” Tom said, not getting up.

  Lilia didn’t bother to look over. She picked up a snow globe his mother had given him for Christmas, examined it, and put it down, wiping her fingers on her thigh.

  Charming, Tom thought.

  “Does he live here?” Lilia said.

  “Yes,” Tom said. “I do.”

  “Lilia’s going to help me cheer you up.”

  “This room is hideous,” Lilia said.

  “Then be glad it’s not yours,” Tom said. “And get out.”

  “I refuse to work in he
re,” Lilia said.

  “We’ll go into the living room,” Jeremy said, yanking Tom up. “Come on, upsy-daisy. Let’s get you laid.”

  When her face came close, Lilia went slightly cross-eyed, not a woman who closed her eyes when she kissed. Her mouth tasted like cinnamon gum. Tom couldn’t stop glancing at Jer, at the big-screen TV that showed him and Lilia together on the couch.

  “Don’t look at the camera,” Jer said.

  Lilia had a Hitler moustache over her clitoris; a black rectangular thatch, red goosebumps on the curve of her pubis, the skin swollen and angry. She had four scars running across her stomach, long and shiny smooth. She grabbed his wrist when he tried to touch them.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Tom saw his hand on the screen, saw the camera focus in tight on Lilia’s scars. Jer leaned forward, his face obscured by the camera’s light.

  “Let him touch you,” Jer said.

  Lilia paused for a coke break and Jer said nothing, waiting. The camera never left her scars, traced them lovingly as she breathed.

  Under the fluorescent gas-station lighting, Paulie glowed in tiny cut-offs and a sloppy tank with an old grease stain above the left boob. Tom kissed the hollow of her collarbone, an unexpected sweet spot that she liked touched. She smelled musky with sweat and talcum-y with melting perfumed deodorant, something flowery and old-fashioned, tea roses. She pushed his head away.

  “Focus,” she said.

  Tom unfolded the black and yellow rubber dinghy they’d found in a second-hand store. The connector was worn so Tom had to hold the air hose to it. The dinghy inflated resentfully, the bow drooped and the sides sagged. A few feet away, a pasty man in Bermuda shorts tapped his fingers on the flat inner tube he was holding. Bermuda Man glared at them like they were the cause of all his miseries.

  Paulie carried two mismatched oars. Tom flipped the dinghy up and wore it like a hat, balancing it on his head and holding the frayed ropes that lined its sides. The people streaming to the beach flowed around them. All of the good viewing spots had been staked out earlier that day. Twilight brought out the mosquitoes, and Tom wished he’d brought repellent. He followed Paulie, who carefully picked her way through the people sitting on the sand. All the radios were tuned to the same station.