by Anne Degrace
“I remember my father drove me through the Southeast, once,” Jo offers. “So I’d be grateful for what I had, I guess. My mother was furious with him when we got back.” Jo’s not even sure what city he’s talking about, but the scene is clear in front of her. There had been a garbage strike at the time. What she most remembers was the smell, which served to underline the inescapability of the situation for the residents of the street.
Carson nods, but carries on as if ignoring a non sequitur. “I sat on a bench in a scrubby patch of park the size of a postage stamp and watched those two girls offer desserts, still on their paper doilies, to each person on the street. They did it with such—kindness. And humour, with this little flourish, like they were all at the Chancery Bay. But not like they were any better than the people on the receiving end, you understand. They’d just open the box and people would choose one—just one—and then take the box and offer it to the other people around them before handing it back to the girls. So polite. It’s not that polite in the boardroom.” He looks at Jo, and his eyes are full of wonder. Like a small boy, she thinks. “I’d forgotten that people could actually look after one another.”
Jo refills Carson’s coffee again, and he nods gratefully.
“One old man was very close to where I sat. He was curled up against a wall, eyes closed, and when I noticed him at first, I didn’t know if he was just resting, or dead. I actually thought he might be dead. Beside him was a grocery cart full of odd items, cans and bottles. He opened his eyes when he heard people stirring around him. He had the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen. Then he looked at the dessert that Angie was holding out to him, picked it up, and took a bite. As with any good éclair, the Bavarian cream squirted out the sides. He laughed—and so did I.
“The girls were having a pretty good time with it all. The desserts were gone, so they flattened the boxes and put them beside the overflowing garbage can. I’d been pretty quiet up until then. I asked Susan why they did it.”
Jo is leaning on the counter, chin in her hands. “What did she say?”
“She said: ‘Everyone should get to have dessert.’”
Jo sends him on his way with a bag of Cass’s cookies. She leans in the doorway in the afternoon light and watches the man in the dress pants, Italian leather shoes, and Pink Floyd t-shirt carrying a brown paper bag who smiles thinly as he gets into his car.
Before he left, he’d sheepishly told her his name was now Free.
“Does that sound silly?”
“It sounds—liberating,” she told him. “It sounds like something someone would want to be.”
“That’s what I thought.”
Now, as the Jaguar turns tentatively from the lot, Bob’s cruiser pulls in. There’s a lurch, and then the Jag is on the highway and picking up speed.
Jo
“Higher class of business you’re getting here these days,” comments Bob as he walks in, screen door banging behind him.
“Yeah,” I say. “No thanks to Cass’s influence.”
Bob nods towards the trailer. “What, she left you to yourself all day?”
“Guess she figures I can handle it.”
“Of course you can.”
“Anyway, I don’t think there’s been two people in here at the same time all day,” I tell him, but he’s looking at the highway, where Carson’s car had turned.
“There was something that came in this morning. Asking for our cooperation. I should call it in, that might have been the car.”
Should I say anything? That guy certainly looked nervous, but he never said anything specific. If he’s done something, it’ll probably catch up with him without any help from me.
“Cass has fresh cookies,” I tell Bob.
When I was small, my dad taught me about taking responsibility for your actions. It was after I got caught taking money that had been left for the paperboy. I guess I was ten or so, and Todd, who delivered the Herald, was twelve. I never liked Todd; he lived on Farnham and curled his lip when he talked. A couple of years before, when I was eight and he was ten, I was walking home from Nick’s corner store with a Donald Duck comic book. He was coming the other way on his bicycle and as we passed on the sidewalk he skidded to a stop, almost knocking me down. He snatched my comic, crumpling it, and looked at it, sneering. Then he tossed it back. “Oh. Donald Duck. Kid’s stuff,” he said, and dropped it for me to pick up while he rode away. When I got home, “What did you buy with your allowance?” my mother asked, and I was too embarrassed to tell her, suddenly, that I’d bought a Donald Duck comic book, which I had smoothed out and then rolled into a tight cylinder that I held against my side. It was a terrible thing, I suddenly realized, to be a kid who still read Donald Duck. What had I been thinking? Later, in my room, I unrolled the comic book, but I couldn’t enjoy it anymore.
My mother would put the money for the month’s newspaper delivery in an envelope and thumbtack it to the door. Inside would be the charge, plus a fifty-cent tip. What I began doing was taking one of the two quarters meant for Todd, who didn’t deserve them both, in my opinion. Then I would go to Nick’s and buy a Ripley’s Believe It or Not, having moved up from Donald Duck.
I’m not sure how my mother caught me. I was too embarrassed to ask, the temperature in the room suddenly rising, a noise in my ears like a big truck passing on the freeway. But she turned me over to my father, the look between them saying how deeply disappointed they were in me. At least, that’s how I read it.
My father told me a story about his own childhood. Until then, it hadn’t occurred to me he had a childhood. He and his friend Jerry had been playing with fire, he told me, in back of a neighbour’s barn. They started with little piles of brush. They had a contest— a dare—to see how big they could let it get and still stamp it out. I can see them, killing themselves laughing while they melted the soles of their boots. When the brush fire got too big and ignited the mouldy bale of hay leaning against the barn wall, and that, in turn, went up in sheets of flame, both boys took off. They hid out until dinnertime, watching from the woods as the fire brigade arrived, in awe, I guess, of what they’d done, but fascinated, too. Then they went to their homes pretending they’d spent the day hunting crows with their slingshots.
When questioned, my dad told me, he made his eyes go wide and pretended to know nothing about the fire—his first mistake, he said, because you’d have to have been a hundred miles away or unconscious to have missed the plume of smoke and the sirens. That, and the fact that his shoes smelled like burnt rubber and the bottoms of his pants were black and caked in ash, were dead giveaways.
Dad and Jerry had to work for the fellow who owned the old barn for the entire summer. Even though the barn was really worthless, nothing stored in it anymore, and ready to be torn down. His dad—my grandfather—told him that even though the barn wasn’t long for this world, it belonged to someone else. That you have to take responsibility for your actions, and that it was up to the barn’s owner to set the price.
I told him I didn’t think it was fair to have to work a whole summer—every day for two whole months— for a falling-down barn. “Fair? Fair is a place where pigs get ribbons, Jo-girl,” he told me, sitting on the end of the bed in my room while I leaned against the headboard, hugging a pillow. “You do something bad, you don’t get to set the penalty. You just lost all your rights.”
I had to pay Todd back every quarter I’d stolen, in person, in front of his mother, and apologize. It was horrible, because Todd’s lip never stopped curling the whole time, and I knew he would tell his friends at school, which he did. Much later, when I liked Terry Mitchell and it must have shown as I hung around in his general proximity in the cafeteria, I heard Todd tell him: “That little thief has the hots for you,” sending me scurrying to the girls’ washroom to cry in the stall.
Because I had spent the money, I had to borrow it from my dad and pay him back, and that meant a variety of jobs that, in turn, kept me away from my circle of friends who gathered
at one house or another on the weekends, so that when I finally returned to the group, debts paid, new alliances had formed and I was now the odd person out. Worse, I didn’t want to tell them the truth about why I hadn’t been around, so I told them I had to do chores. “Your parents are really cruel,” Patty said, the others nodding and, hoping to be readmitted into the fold, I agreed, feeling guilty for this new betrayal. So it was, then, the beginning of my future of being a loner, a chain reaction I never could have predicted when all I wanted was a Ripley’s Believe It or Not comic book.
Dad told me, that day in my room, that taking responsibility for your actions also means showing you’ve learned your lesson. At the time, I just wanted him to go away. I just wanted everyone to go away. It took me a long time to pull the lesson from the punishment. Now, I’d give just about anything to be a kid again, with Dad sitting at the end of my bed giving me some boring father/daughter lecture.
If I could talk to my father now, what would I say?
It’s not like I think Bob was really going to run out and arrest the guy in the Jaguar. Bob doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to run out and arrest anybody, cop or not. And I don’t even know if there’s something to arrest the guy for, except that he looked like someone on the run shooting for—freedom, I guess. I figure if there’s anything to catch up with him, it will eventually. He might as well have time to eat the cookies.
Everyone should get to have dessert.
Cass
Every so often I’ve got to take a lazy day, and I suppose this is the one. Jo knows to call me if it gets busy, but you can just tell when it’s not going to. Some days, everyone comes in a clump, other days, it’s one by one by one. Jesus, day’s almost over now I come to look at it. Well, she never did call me, and that’s a blessing. Because right now, Dirk is about to make off with Sofia, herself married to Brad who is for sure a good-for-nothing, although I’m not at all sure that Dirk is a better choice. I could tell Sofia a thing of two about men, but from the look of her she’d not likely listen to me.
I like the soaps. I like the way you can see good and evil so clearly. Even the music changes when the sleazy guy starts putting one over on the innocent girl, lying to his wife, that type of thing. You know who to like and who to hate. It’s not always so easy in real life.
I’ve managed to stay free of a man, pretty much, my whole life. That is, free of a man telling me what to do. Bob says that makes me one of those feminists, but I don’t count myself in with the bra-burners. I’m just not about to compromise anything for some man, that’s all. I’m thinking of my own mother, here. Forget it. And Archie? Archie’s a buddy, and a good one. That’s all. Otherwise, he keeps his nose out, mostly.
When I was a little younger than Jo is now—still in high school, in fact, so maybe too young to know better—I met Bruno Scarpelli. Dressed nice. Talked smooth. Had a way of touching my face, just along my jawline—I had a jawline back then—that sent shivers right down to my toes. He had chest hair when none of the boys I knew had chest hair, and combed and greased his black hair into a ducktail. Mum hated him, but what did she know? After all, she’d married Dad, and where was he? Bruno said that when I finished high school, we’d travel. See the world.
Three o’clock in the morning one night there’s a tap at my bedroom window. By now we’d moved to the main floor apartment of a house downtown, and we got to use the basement for storage, but I had made myself a little room down there so I could get away from my sisters, get some privacy. I’ve always loved my privacy.
So anyway, Bruno taps on my basement window and wakes me up out of a deep sleep, annoying, but it’s thrilling, too. No way he could come in without waking everyone up, and no way he could fit that bulk of his through the casement window, but I was skinnier then. I threw on some clothes, stood on my dresser and wiggled through, crawled out onto the grass and then flipped over onto my back, looking up at the big black shape that was Bruno, the night stars all around him. He pulled me to my feet and gave me a deep, long kiss that just about melted my kneecaps. Then he told me he needed my help.
I’d have done anything he asked. Anything.
There were two guys I’d never met in the Chev idling on the street. The dome light was busted—you could see the wires dangling—so I couldn’t see them very well. Bruno drove, and I sat beside him up front, feeling special, like I really was his girl. Bruno’s girl. The guys in the back made a couple of cracks but Bruno told them to shut up. I felt protected, then. I was Bruno’s girl, and he was looking after me.
We drove up to the back of a pawn shop. Bruno told me the guy had ripped him off, took his watch and sold it and now wouldn’t give him the money for it, even though he had the chit. He told me it was his dad’s watch, God rest his soul he said, and that he just wanted to take what was his due, nothing more. That he had been planning to use the money from the watch to help out his mother, who was sick. To buy her medicine. The guys in the back saying, yeah, this pawn guy has ripped off other guys. He was a bad character, they said.
Bruno had been teaching me to drive in empty parking lots, around and around, using the row of streetlights down the middle like traffic cones on a test course, weaving in and out. He said he’d give me a car for graduation, had a buddy who worked at a wrecker, could fix one up for me nobody wanted anymore. So I knew how to drive well enough, I guess.
I was behind the wheel when the alarm sounded. I saw Bruno run towards the car, his buddies right behind, then saw the tall one fling something back into the open door. The blast was like a furnace, heat and noise, and I was down under the dash, Bruno beside me, hauling me up by my hair and yelling DRIVE! I stepped on the gas, the back door swinging where one of the guys had opened it then fell and rolled when the car lurched off, I could see him on the ground in the rearview, but I couldn’t see the other guy at all, just a lot of smoke. We must’ve driven right by a sleeping cruiser coming out of the alley at eighty, and he was on our tail in no time, me shaking and crying, Bruno yelling FASTER! We came around a corner and ducked down another alley and Bruno yelled SLOW DOWN and I hit the brakes and he was out and running down a gap between buildings. When the cops pulled up it was just me in the car, the passenger door open, car all pitted up with whatever it was that exploded from the back of the pawn shop—glass and metal and wood and stuff—and stolen, to boot. And on the floor of the passenger seat the duffle bag with a bunch of jewellery and stuff from the smashed display case the cops found in the wreckage, but not of any great value because all the good stuff was in the safe with the money.
I got three months in juvie as an accomplice. I was supposed to finish my high school there, but I never. I met some girls who scared the pants off me, and encountered some stuff I’d rather not relate. I did learn to look after myself, and expect nobody to look after me. Mum about wrote me off; when Dad left me the diner, that was the final straw, because she never figured I deserved it after all the shame and trouble I’d caused, never mind how he came by it in the first place. “Serves you right for listening to some good-for-nothing hoodlum,” she told me when she got to the police station, and that much I listened to even if I ignored the rest of her ranting and raving.
So when Archie brings me a stray now and then, I know a thing or two about mistakes, I figure. Enough so that when Cantha was screwing up, I could see it clear as day just as if there was that music like in the soaps, you know? Telling you what’s going to happen by getting all spooky. Could see the good and the bad in Cantha like I wrote the script myself, except I’d never have written a little kid like Donnie into a show like that. Not ever. Now she’s grown up herself, gotta wonder if she learned how to be, or how not to be. Wonder if I’ll ever know.
Wind shift
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
— Nursery rhyme
I’m on my way back to Cass’s. Screw-up with the load I’m scheduled to pick up from the mill and Cass is closest, always say take the path of least resistance, right? On the
way up the hill I see that hippie on the side of the road, waiting for a ride in the other direction. Laugh to myself, because he’s gone just about nowhere all day with that crazy rule he’s following, but he’s determined, I’ll give him that much. And sure enough, wind’s blowing the way he’s trying to go. So I give him a wave as I pass and he raises his hand in return. Crazy kids.
I’m rounding the bluff where the rock face goes straight up on one side and the other side is cliff all the way down to the lake way below, when I see this guy waving me down. The highway’s full of freaks these days, and that’s a fact, but the truth is, I don’t mind them much. They kind of add a bit of colour. I pull the rig over and leave my door and the two windows open when I get out, hope to cool off the interior some with the wind blowing through. Been sticking to the vinyl all afternoon.
Well, the fellow tells me he’s got a bus with an overheated radiator down a side road, and his wife’s pregnant, and could I help them out. I got a can of water and a little time and it’s not anything I wouldn’t want someone to do for me, though I admit there’s a moment when we’re walking down that road and there’s no vehicle in sight and I’m wondering if there aren’t maybe six of them waiting in the bushes to jump me, and wishing I’d closed up the rig at least. Then I see this painted-up school bus, all—what do they call it?—psychedelic. Big yellow daisies and hearts, looks like a kid painted some of it. Across the front it says, where the route would have been posted, Magic Bouncing Baby Bus. It’s got its hood up, steam all over the place.
