Blood Sports

by Eden Robinson

  “Are you a relative?” one of the nurses said.

  “Yes. Can I see him?”

  “Not right now. Please sit down. Please take a seat, and someone will come out and talk to you.”

  “But everyone’s been saying that and no one’s done it.”

  “Have you contacted Mr. Rieger’s family?” she said. “The phone is right over there.”

  He phoned Paulie first, explained why he wouldn’t be home that night. The phone line crackled as he waited for her to speak. He thought she’d yell. She sighed.

  “I can’t believe you saved him,” she said, and then hung up.

  When he phoned Aunt Faith, he did not give details. He picked up the phone in the Emergency room and called her collect.

  “It’s late,” she said, and then, joking, “It must be bad news.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said. “It is.”

  “Is it Christa?” she said, her voice shrill with hope or alarm. He preferred to think alarm.

  “I’m afraid it’s Jeremy.”

  The ICU rooms were clustered around the central nurses’ station. Jeremy’s room was divided in two sections by a glass wall. The outer room had charts, signs, tables, equipment. Tom stood stupidly by the bed, waiting for Jeremy to wake up, until a nurse booted him out to do tests. Tom went back to the waiting room.

  In the morning, his cousin was awake and deep in conversation with a man in a suit, so Tom thought things couldn’t be that bad if Jer was already talking to a lawyer. But Jeremy stared so long when Tom walked in the room that he thought maybe Jeremy wasn’t actually seeing him.

  “Get out,” Jeremy said.

  When Tom didn’t move, Jeremy picked up a bedpan and threw it at him.

  “Get out! Get the fuck out! Are you deaf? Get out!”

  “Well, what did you expect?” Paulie said. “A parade?”

  “No,” Tom said.

  Paulie opened the oven door and lifted the cake pan out. The chocolate cake peaked at the centre like a volcanic mountain, cracked and burnt.

  “Damn. Martha made it look easy.” She turned the cake onto the cooling rack, and it broke apart to reveal oozing, uncooked insides. “We’ll call it your I-saved-Jeremy’s-worthless-ass cake.”

  Tom laughed. “That’s about the size of it.”

  “He’s going to blame you,” Paulie said. “That’s the way his little brain works. If Tom hadn’t called the fucking ambulance, he’s going to tell himself, I wouldn’t be up on possession charges.”

  “He was dying, Paulie. He did die.”

  “Is he thanking you? Is he showering you with gratitude for helping him when everyone else buggered off?”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Well, this’ll learn you,” she said, poking at the cooling cake. “Did you get the tapes?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said. “They’re in the rental car.”

  “I’m glad something went right. Hand me the garbage, will you, hon? I don’t want to look at this stupid cake any more. Martha I ain’t.”

  9 JULY 1998

  Mel rolled her old-fashioned baby walker close to the bars. Her mouth was smeared with yellow icing from her Big Bird cookie, the walker and the cookie distractions provided by Firebug. She bounced in the canvas seat that held her upright and banged her free fist against the pink plastic tray that formed an O around her waist. The rusty metal legs holding up the tray were attached to wheels that squeaked as Mel manoeuvred, her bare feet paddling the painted concrete floor like Fred Flintstone in his caveman car. She paused, looking back over her shoulder, eyebrows rising hopefully. She wanted to be chased.

  “No can do, babe,” Tom said, raising his cuffed hands. The duct tape had left a sticky residue that clicked as he talked. “I’ll watch you though.”

  Mel gnawed off Big Bird’s shoulders. She paddled over to Paulie, who stood with her arms crossed, talking to Firebug and Leo like she was talking to a neighbour through the fence. Mel bumped into Paulie’s leg, and Paulie absently reached down and patted Mel’s head. Mel buzzed around the room, laughing her hiccuping gurgle as she rammed her walker into the bed, the sink, the toilet.

  Firebug knelt and dropped Tom on the bed. The basement had no windows, just recessed fluorescent tubes in mesh cages above them. Paulie stayed near the bars, hip jutting out to hold Mel. Leo stood against the far wall, aiming his revolver at them. Mel screamed her outrage, reaching for the walker that Leo was holding.

  “Neil will be watching you on the monitors,” Firebug said as he stood. “Behave.”

  He slammed the cell door behind him. Leo went up first and Firebug followed. Neither of them looked back. The trap door shut. Firebug would come back and deal with them if there was nothing on the tapes. That was their only hope of getting out of the basement.

  Paulie made soup in the microwave by the sink. Instant noodles, shrimp flavour. He could tell by the spices. Mel cried by the mattress. She had a juicy diaper. Tom lifted her onto the bed.

  “Don’t,” Paulie said. “I’ll change her.”

  “I’ve got her,” Tom said. His voice was hoarse from screaming. It sounded scratchy and thin, like he’d been drinking whiskey straight and chain-smoking. “Shh, baby, shh. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Tom rubbed her stomach until she calmed down. He felt as raw-eyed as he had the first sleepless week she was home from the hospital. The pain was still distant but the patch seemed to be wearing off. Tom automatically changed her diaper, shushing her. Mel crawled off the bed.

  Paulie placed the cup of noodles on the nightstand, pushing aside the baby wipes. She dropped the soiled diaper in a trashcan.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything.”

  She sighed. “If we start saying sorry for everything, we’ll be going all day.”

  “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

  She looked him up and down. “What did he do?”

  Tom shrugged. Paulie didn’t push. She walked over to the sink. She ran one of the washcloths under the tap. She came back and sat beside him, carefully cleaning the dried blood off his chest.

  Mel pulled herself up on the bars and she took a few wobbly steps. She tumbled forward, smacking her face on the concrete. She paused, stunned, and then wailed, holding her arms up for Paulie to come get her. Paulie crossed the room in leaping steps, scooped up Mel and checked her teeth, making soothing noises as she brought her to the bed.

  Tom pulled the blanket over his lap and ate some of the soup. Mel noticed food and came bumming, opening her mouth whenever he lifted the spoon. Paulie went to make another cup. Mel caught a slippery noodle in her fist, squished it to mush, and then sucked it off her palm.

  Afterward, she crawled into his lap and he crooned as he rocked her. Paulie stood in the yellow glow of the microwave light. Their eyes met. He hoped he was hiding his fear better than she was.

  Mel lifted his eyelids, tilting her head.

  “I’m awake,” Tom said. He couldn’t remember falling asleep.

  She let his eyelids go, snap. He leaked. He forced himself up onto his elbows as he felt blood rolling down his side and soaking beneath them.

  “I’m bleeding on the sheets.”

  “Use one of Mel’s diapers,” Paulie said.

  Tom reached over and grabbed a clean diaper off the nightstand. He mopped himself up. He limped to the toilet. He sat down, holding the diaper to his left tit. He could feel something grating, deep down. He suspected a piece of needle had broken off and was floating through his muscle.

  Mel scooted over to him and pulled herself up on his legs. She let go for a second, balanced, showing off, waiting for him to notice.

  “You’re doing good, babe,” he said.

  “Huh,” she said as she grabbed his thigh and pulled herself along, cruising the walls and the furniture. Paulie ran the sheets under the faucet. Tom yawned, fighting the urge to keel over and lie on the floor.

  He came up behind Paulie. She stepped aside to let him wash his hands.
He kissed her forehead. She lifted the hand he was keeping over the diaper.

  “I’m okay,” he lied.

  “You just had a seizure,” Paulie said.

  “Oh.”

  “When was the last time you had your meds?”

  It felt like years. “Three days ago, I think.”

  She used her nails to scrub the blood. “No one’s come to check on us. Neil usually comes to take the diapers at lunch and supper. I think they all left.”

  Her expression was more annoyed than anything. He loved her for that. Faced with being abandoned in a locked basement bunker with a weaning baby and an epileptic having rebound seizures, she still scrubbed the sheets clean and wrung them out in the sink and hung them over the microwave to dry.

  Tom tested each of the bars. None were loose. The bars were thick, solid and painted the same colour as the floor, pastel green, a colour beloved of old hospitals and mental wards. Tom wrapped his feet in dirty wash rags and kicked the lock until his legs went rubbery. It didn’t do any good, but he felt better and it amused Mel.

  Tom stood on tiptoe on the toilet. He experimentally punched the ceiling to see if it would give. It was solid concrete. After cradling his fist against his stomach for a few minutes, he wrapped his hands in an old baby shirt and shook the wire mesh around the fluorescent tubes, hoping for a loose screw. Mel got into the spirit of things and banged the walls. Paulie made them tea.

  On one side of the room, the cell had a metal sink, a metal toilet, and a microwave on top of a cocktail fridge. On the other side, it had a queen-sized foam mattress on the floor, a set of sheets, a wool blanket, two plastic milk crates with a pillowcase thrown over for a nightstand, a garbage pail, and a metal enamel wash basin.

  Firebug had also left a file box filled with baby clothes, a box of diapers, a case of baby food, three cans of liquid baby formula. Their grub was a short list of eight eggs, four bananas, ten packages of instant noodles, a box of sugar cubes, and a tin of Red Rose tea. The cutlery was plastic. They had three Styrofoam cups. Paulie gave him the bathrobe.

  “We need MacGyver,” Tom said.

  “Told you,” Paulie said. “I’ve tried all that.”

  “Yeah, well.” Tom sighed.

  “Mmm,” Paulie said, trying to tempt Mel to drink the formula out of a baby jar she’d cleaned. “Tasty milk.”

  Mel shoved her face in the mattress and turned it away.

  “I think this used to be a daycare or something,” Paulie said, eyeballing the mural with its happy bunnies.

  “Yeah,” Tom said.

  “The baby clothes smell pretty musty and the walker must be twenty years old.”

  Tom considered the water rings dried varying shades of brown on the floor’s light green paint near the bars. “Maybe a play room.”

  Paulie stroked Mel’s hair. “That makes more sense.”

  “Jazz phoned,” Tom said. “She said she’d check up on us if you didn’t call her back. She’d be worried.”

  “Firebug brought Mel down here. I watched her on the security monitor. He said he’d shut off the lights and leave her in the dark unless I did what he said. So he gave me a cell phone. And I called Jazz. And told her you’d gone paranoid. Ripped up the apartment. That I was hiding from you.”

  They were sunk. If no one realized they were missing, no one was looking for them.

  “Leo’s on the security camera at work,” Tom said. “They screwed up there. That might help.”

  Paulie’s silence said she didn’t think so, but didn’t want to say it out loud.

  Just before dinner, he had his second seizure. When he woke up from it, he curled up beside the toilet, retching and shaking. He didn’t know what drugs he’d been given, but on top of the pain and the lack of sleep and the sudden absence of his regular epilepsy meds, it felt like he was just getting off a three-week bender.

  Paulie made noodles and eggs for supper. Tom stuck to plain tea. She mopped his forehead with a rag still pink from wiping the dried blood from his chest.

  “It gets better,” Paulie said.

  “It gets better,” Tom repeated, willing himself to believe it.

  The lights flickered. Trembling and miserable and too nauseous to lie down, Tom sat beside the mattress, holding Paulie’s hand. Mel fisted her hand in Paulie’s hair. The basement went dark for three or four heartbeats and then lit up again. Paulie shifted. She had been waking on and off since she lay down with Mel. He squeezed her hand and she went still again. Tom let go of the breath he had been holding.

  When the power went, they would still have water. But they would run out of food in less than a week. Tom wondered if Firebug had paid the electric bill. If they had a few weeks or a few days or a few hours before the basement went permanently dark.

  10 JULY 1998

  They hung off the light’s protective wire mesh, kicking and tugging. The screws were rusted to the metal frame so they were hoping to pull them loose from the concrete. Tom’s end squeaked. He slipped first, dizzy. Paulie swung her legs up and tried to get her toes hooked in the mesh. She slipped, landed on him, and they both lay on the floor, winded. Mel shook the empty ice-cream bucket Paulie had filled with the lids from the empty baby food jars.

  “One more time,” Paulie said.

  The first screw came loose on their eighteenth try. It was six inches long and as fat as Mel’s thumb. They paused. Tom couldn’t tell if he was having an aura or an anxiety attack, and was relieved it was only a precursor. He woke to find Paulie playing patty-cake with Mel.

  The next screw came loose on their twenty-fourth try. Their fingers went red and puffy. When the third screw came loose, a row of screws popped and the mesh bent toward the floor until they rested their feet on the ground. Paulie stood on the toilet. Tom carefully broke one of the baby jars in the sink and handed Paulie the strongest, sharpest-looking edge. Paulie scraped the concrete behind the lights where the wires went up through the floor. A splatter of bits rained on the floor.

  “It’s soft,” she said.

  Tom whooped. Paulie sat on the toilet and rocked, hugging herself. Mel got scared and wailed. Tom and Paulie laughed. Tom picked Mel up and swung her around. Mel bawled until he gave her to Paulie.

  Paulie cooked the eggs before they unplugged the cocktail fridge. Tom lifted the microwave off the top of the fridge and put it on the floor near the wall. He pushed the fridge under their chosen dig site. Paulie held the fridge still while Tom climbed onto it. He’d wrapped his hands to protect him from the heat of the light and the glass. The falling concrete made him sneeze. He used a broken baby jar to dig about six inches deep before he had to stop and lie down. Paulie jumped on the fridge and attacked the concrete. He picked up Mel, rolled in the bed with her, kissing her face until she covered it with her hands.

  They took a break when they hit hardwood. Paulie wolfed down three eggs and two packages of soup. Tom couldn’t manage anything except the broth. Mel ate his noodles and demolished two jars of apple sauce. Tom pushed his eggs toward Mel. She wasn’t interested in them either.

  “If we widen the hole,” Paulie said, “we can stand on the fridge and punch through with the microwave. If we take out the glass and the door, it should still be heavy enough.”

  “My lady of destruction,” Tom said, leaning in to kiss her.

  Mel rolled her empty jar across the floor, studying it.

  Paulie looked up, thoughtful. “If you stand on my shoulders, you’d probably fit through the hole better.”

  Tom said nothing, sipping his broth.

  “Because of my big, nursing boobs,” Paulie amended. “Not because you’re, um … you know.”

  “You’re going up first,” Tom said.

  Tom pushed her butt up. Paulie’s legs scissored as she grunted and squirmed her way through the hole in the ceiling. Mel screamed. She bobbed furiously. Her face went dark, dark red. When Paulie finally pulled herself through, Tom jumped down and scooped Mel up.

  “Yay, Mommy, yay!�
� Tom said.

  Mel cried harder. Tom braced his feet on the slippery top of the fridge and hoped Mel wouldn’t move too much.

  “What’s the matter?” Tom said.

  “Just a minute!” Paulie shouted back. She came back to the hole, out of breath. She reached her arms down as Tom lifted Mel. Mel squealed, excitedly giving frog kicks.

  Tom passed Paulie the bucket filled with unopened formula tins and baby food jars and the packages of noodles and the eggs. He handed her two packages of diapers and the wipes.

  “Mel, honey, stay close,” Paulie said.

  They linked forearms and Paulie leaned back. He caught the edge of the hardwood and wormed his way through, with Paulie grabbing him under the pits and hauling. One of the straps on her sundress flapped loose. Her hair was dusty and wild.

  Near the bathroom door, a pair of sneaker-clad feet stuck out from under a sheet. Where the outline of the head was, the sheet was soaked red. Mel scooted toward the baby walker that had been abandoned beside the body.

  “It’s Neil,” Paulie said. “Single shot to the back of the head.”

  “Damn,” Tom said, shivering.

  “Sharing didn’t seem to be one of Leo’s strong points,” Paulie said. “And half sounds way better than a third.”

  “Let’s go,” Tom said.

  “Check for a phone first,” Paulie said. “Food. Weapons. Where the fuck are we anyway?”

  Paulie picked up Mel and they went back to the master bedroom and turned on the security monitors. The blue truck and the black Land Rover were gone. It was still daylight, but the sun was slipping down the sky to the mountains. Early evening. The logging road was empty, as were the front and back yards. Tom pointed to the road.

  “Firebug drove us in from this direction,” he said.

  “Me and Mel are going to the kitchen to hunt for weapons and food,” Paulie said. “Pat Neil down for keys, his piece, a cell phone, anything. Take his clothes and his shoes.”