by Lori McNulty
Mrs. B. is waiting for Gus in the doorway, knowing better than to make him talk. She escorts him to his room and settles him on the bed, where he lies back, burying his hands under his armpits. His eyes are bloodshot.
“Trouble comes,” she says, patting his leg then pulling her arm around his waist when he sits up again. “Blame genes or blame Jesus, just don’t let it get you down.”
She rises, offering to call the nurse down the block just to check in.
Gus shakes his fast inflating head.
“Donny’s got you in with Dr. Lee on Monday. You like her. You’ll be feeling much better in a couple of days.”
Gus sits back on his bed, keeping his spine straight, while he watches the floor beams split, a floodlight fall over the room, shattering him into a thousand pieces.
Two heel-clicks, three stomps down the hall before they hear Mrs. B. call up, “Lights out.”
When Joe knocks on his door, Gus doesn’t answer. He swallows two white pills, letting the night swarm slowly under his chin. Metal flies and bounces from the top of his skull. Knife-prick fingertips until his hands finally go numb.
By three a.m., his buzzing head won’t quiet. Gus decides to slip downstairs to the kitchen to grab his apple-green cereal bowl from the cupboard. On the way, he notices Mrs. B. lying on the living-room couch, a wet facecloth pressed to her forehead. Gus fills his bowl with Cheerios, adds milk, and tucks the box under his arm. Creeping past Mrs. B., he sees her left hand jerk on her belly. He bends over her, kisses her lightly on the lips. Her eyelids flutter but she barely moves. He pads up to the third floor, to the end of the hall, closing the bathroom door behind him.
From the back of the toilet tank, he removes the pills he’s been collecting. He drains the last of the Cheerios box, watches the blue turtles and o’s tumble together, the candies sink and toss in their oat sea. He shakes a few more pills into the bowl and with the restaurant spoon from his khaki’s pocket, stirs the mess before shovelling it all into his mouth, craving a long, cement-headed sleep.
Mrs. B. is clutching the cordless when Donny arrives. The ambulance attendants are balancing Gus on the stretcher as they descend the stairs, Joe yelling at them to hurry.
Donny orders them to put his brother down in the living room. Reluctantly, the men set their burden down, the sheet fallen, draped diagonally across Gus’ chin. With all his force, Donny lifts his brother’s torso from the stretcher, works his way down the arms, stomach, feels for the broken soul bones.
Sirens silent, the paramedics pull away from the house. At the living-room window, Donny stands next to Marlee, who is digging her freshly painted nails into her skin as the ambulance rolls away toward the intersection.
Donny motions to Mrs. B. that he’ll be right back, needs to get the cell from his truck to call his wife. He closes the front door, making sure he hears the solid click. In the truck, he steers straight for an after-hours bar. Then, head swimming in booze, he drives all night until he remembers.
On his way home from his buddy Cheevie’s house, he’s pie-stuffed and pleased with himself after winning drunken Pong on Nintendo. Light on in his sister’s room above the garage when he drifts through the front door. When the acrid stench reaches him downstairs in the hallway, he begins to mount the stairs two by two, tumbling knees first on the landing. He rises, stumbles toward Emma’s room.
From the doorway, Donny can see Emma is standing by her bed, her hair locked in a curling iron set flat against her skull. Smoke and sparks jump from the brittle strands of Emma’s hair. The metal rod is singeing her skin. He can smell burning meat. His mother is shaking the girl, yelling at her to stop moving. Everyone is screaming. Gus is on all fours next to the bed, struggling to stand, his right hand closed around a pair of scissors to set Emma free.
Head swimming with Cheevie’s dad’s cheap rye, Donny blinks but his legs won’t move.
Soundless cries, Emma coughs twice.
His mother shrieks, giving Emma the old fingernecklace from behind, her hands locked around his sister’s fragile windpipe. Donny touches his own throat. So drunk he can hardly stand.
He watches Emma punch out weakly with her left arm.
Gus is back on his knees, too hoarse to scream.
It won’t stop.
Not when Emma falls forward, her right cheek and forehead clipping the nightstand.
Not when his mother tears the curling iron electric cord from the wall, knocking the ceramic lamp to the floor.
Parked on the demolition site, Donny sucks in a chestful of diesel. The smell comforts him, in a quiet way, as dawn breaks between glass and steel, bathing Yonge Street in fractured yellow hues. He bends to tighten his bootlaces, then rising, deliberately smashes his unshaven face against the side-view mirror.
Gus and Mom and he and Gus and Pinky and Joe and the sharp, bottomless world tuck a rusty hook in his mouth, hoisting him over the city twenty storeys. His swooning face a wrecking ball, Donny cracks a bloody fat-lipped grin, the momentum in him growing, knowing now he’ll never be able to avoid the crash.
If on a Winter’s Night a Badger
I’m not the kid you picture when you think prodigy. Call me the last luminous presence at Middle of the Road High School situated at the end of Suburban Sprawl Lane, right next to a wood-chip playground and two crumbling plots of green artificial turf. And though some of my achievements have been noted, I do have my detractors. Last week, without provocation, Ronnie and his rugby thugs dumped two full plates of spicy beef enchiladas in my lap at the school caf. They keep threatening carnage.
Big sis protects me, because she’s ravenous, rash, and heavy set. She’s in her room right now rereading her favourite soppy romance novel about a lovestruck hog badger who stalks his own predators and shreds them ear to ear until the right female sow soothes his lonely heart. I need to tell her Ronnie hauled me naked from the gym locker room today until I begged for my stinking sweats. She’ll hiss, she’ll snort. But Badger will take care of business.
Badger calls me Alexia though I am boy with boy parts and she is girl with badger parts, like sharp forefoot claws and a musky growl. She’s woods-bound most nights, but there’s a sliver of light under her door now. I peek in. Sis is too absorbed in her book to listen, her eyes turning nut brown while she reads. Mom says it’s like a spell she’s under, this tail end transition from pup to full-blown badger-hood.
“Your sister needs space right now, Alex,” Mom advised, daubing two drops of oil on my cage-door hinge this aft.
So why am I the one she’s locked up, sometimes from dawn to dinner, to avoid our petty sibling fights? Mom calls me impulsive. Misguided. Alienated. Ha! More like masterful. Last night I shot up Captain Dung and three alien universes on level eight. Take that Nerdromancer6 high score!
So the cage. It’s comfortable enough in here. A six-by-eight basement model with a stainless steel sliding door and discrete sanitary tray. I’ve got a mini bar loaded with Snickers, the supermodel channel on TiVo, and time to pen thoughts in my leather-bound man-memoir, so I’m pretty much set.
My curfew’s at ten p.m. That’s when our nocturnal Badger roams free — the woods, the school caf, anywhere she can binge on food scraps or brawl with a twitchy squirrel. Think I’m bad-tempered? Badger is flat out unpredictable. Mom’s worried we’ll claw each other’s throats out one of these days. With all the crap we’ve been through this year, she’s probably right.
Like last night, we’re sitting around the dinner table, Mom and I are chomping on a veggie pot pie while Badger scarfs back a pocket gopher. No seconds? Sis lets out this epic wail, begins clawing through the tabletop polish to the wood grain below. Glasses shattered. Plates flew. These days, everything sets her off.
I tiptoe. I tolerate. But with Mom, it’s always: “Turn that dreadful Dengue Fever music down, Badger needs her rest.” “Hide the Hattley’s dog and open a window, your sister’s secreting.”
Notice what she doesn’t say? How was your day, Alex? Your
sister’s a handful with her horrid moods, way to hang in there, champ. When Badger trapped a northern brown snake, she sucked out all the venom and deliberately stuffed the leftover skin sack under my pillow. The skin was wrapped up in my favourite red Dengue Fever concert T-shirt. Animal! Mom doesn’t say a thing. Badger is this godlike presence here, while I go unnoticed — the singular third person in my own epic adventure.
And I’m not the only one who’s pissed. Yesterday, Mrs. Drudd from next door angled her wobbly cart in the grocery store, trapping Mom and me in frozen foods. She blew up over Badger.
“They’re just snuff holes,” Mom explained. “Badger likes to dig.”
Drudd started a red-faced rant about falling property values. No more field mice on the stoop, no oozing backyard carrion, or the city will drive us out for good.
We’ve had two compliance notices already. The third and final notice will force an imminent eviction.
“Keep that nasty Badger indoors,” Drudd ordered, “or good luck finding another transit-accessible middle-class neighbourhood to ravage.” Then Drudd added that if Mom had a man around, maybe her problem child would learn some discipline.
Mom went Richter from the waist up. “Keep your mouth shut in front of my children,” she said and pulled me behind her like I was a child.
Finger-poking Drudd’s discount pork, she added, “Remember that thick stew I brought over last week? After a bloody feeding, Badger always leaves me the entrails. Surprise. No filler!”
Drudd combusts. “Your teen’s a terror. Keep that thing inside or you’ll be on the streets so fast it will make her tail spin.”
When Mom is finally asleep, I pick my cage lock and slip upstairs to see if Badger has received my book bait.
Quietly, I push on her door. Sis has dug herself in behind a barricade of my mother’s old tote bags and cardboard boxes and is propped up on her bed by two firm pillows. Next to her on the nightstand is a big bowl of rippled chips. Between her paws, she is holding my gift: her favourite Hog Badger romance novel tucked inside a powder-blue gift bag. My perfect bound, hardcover forgery — high-end laser printed and glued to the spine of the updated edition I found — means Badger won’t realize until the last few pages it’s not quite the happy ending she remembers.
Badger pokes her snout inside the bag. Yeah, go ahead. Give it a good sniff, sis. Smell that? It’s our burning bond. Badger needs a new story-shaped bridge over the yawning void of her lonesome, mooning, pudgy existence. Change the story, change your life, am I right? I’ve seen my sis in action. My tragic version will stir up such sadness and injustice, she’ll fall into a consuming rage. Sis will go postal. And I’ll channel those killer instincts toward Ronnie.
Sis sharpens her claws on Mom’s emery board, filing each tip to a razor point. Crouched low, I see her slide out my apology note. Sorry for the tail snipping incident. Got this special edition at the store for you. Friends?
Greedily, sis pins back the title page, opens to page 1, and begins reading about how her hero Hog Badger is leaving surprises for the local posse.
Pointing his flashlight beam along the snowy forest trail behind the school, the posse leader halts. His armed troupe gathers around him. Caught in his spotlight is a six-foot, gutted beast, draped and lifeless across a blood-speckled snow pile.
“Wolves?” a man in a “Go Leafs” ball cap says, poking at the furry mound with his snowmobile boot.
“Too big. Look at all that gut flab,” the leader replies.
“Cougars?” says another, tucking his shotgun barrel under his chin.
Who would do this? thinks Go Leafs. They’ve seen tragedy in their hills before — a group of three-legged racers downed by a toxic batch of pot-luck coleslaw at a family picnic — but nothing like this: a squat, flesh-coloured, woolly-looking mammal lies face down.
The leader boot-kicks the mound over, finds its huge belly is shredded.
“Damned Nocturnals,” the posse leader shouts as he slides out the suspect’s calling card: a mangled mouse tail tucked inside the envelope.
“Starts with rodents and roadkill, then they wipe out our whole family,” a posse member says, staggering backward.
“Be trouble back in town if we don’t waste one,” Go Leafs agrees.
Hearing a rustling above them, a cluster of glassy-eyed posse stop. Cocking their rifles, they raise their barrels and take unsteady aim into the treetops.
Breathing hard above the treeline, Hog Badger raises his pig-like snout, smelling sweat and booze wafting up from below. He can’t believe it. He’s not the only small game in town. There are greedy, nastyass omnivores all over these woods. Why are they coming after him? Sliding along the slope edge, he escapes, burrowing under a snowbank, his nubby white ears vanishing into winter’s night.
Badger lays her book down with a chisel-toothed grin, marvelling at the updated story. I watch as, with her tiny tail tucked underneath her, big sis begins to coo. It’s February, after all. Love month for badgers. She knows things will be heating up soon for her hero. In the next chapter, Hog Badger meets a sweet honey, makes cute badger babies. Hot, hot, hot!
Not.
Just wait for my exquisite plot shifts, I think. Badger’s mood will plummet, her delicate hormones will dip in despair, and my mind-melding authorial control will begin. Shock and awe, baby. It’ll be off the hook. She’ll be so sad and vulnerable, I’ll guide her into destroying Ronnie. Believe me, I’ll be more powerful than any Sectoid Commander.
“Lights out,” Mom calls out in a thin voice from her bedroom. She’s been working two jobs, looking as broken-down and pale as Dad did before he died.
Badger pricks a rippled chip from the bowl. Squeezing her belly chub, sis lets out a low moan. She’s put on a ton since summer. Curves in awkward places, extra tufts between her ears, always Daddy’s little princess. Why bother to compete? Me, a thirteen-and-a-half-year-old male with advanced intellect, chicken-fed but scrawny. Badger, sixteen pounds of low-slung carnivore with a darling white head stripe. No contest.
“No one’s gonna love me like this,” Badger bawls, then buries her snout under the pillow. I feel a stab of pain in my chest, until she spikes another rippled chip from the bowl. Fatty.
Good. Now that her curiosity is piqued, and her sappy expectations are high, it’s time to collect my thoughts in my man-memoir.
That’s right. The narrative of a conquering hero. He’s the one who understands the cruel order of the universe and finds a way to put himself first.
Vexed: The Journal of Alex P. Jones, a Major Minor
Time to explore life’s synchronicities, O Reader. We’re bond-building now. I’m going to give it to you straight. Think life doesn’t play favourites? You and I know that’s a steaming crap taco with shit-flavoured salsa on top. I hauled garbage and cut lawns while Badger rototilled the backyard. I mastered Newton polynomials, while Badger bombarded the house with her butt juice and bad breath. Soon sis will be heartsore and mooning over her soppy book, while Ronnie’s enemy line keeps on advancing. Lonely Street is the road we travel, O Reader. So try and keep up. The only journey for us is forward. Settle in, and sit up straight. We’re on track to destroy Ronnie, with a little help from a pissy Badger.
At school on Thursday, Mr. Trask parks himself in front of my desk that is covered with glass beakers and a Bunsen burner, about to offer his dumbed-down science demo. I stand and watch. Amateur hour, as usual.
“Go ahead and light it, Alex,” Trask urges me. Better known as Mr. Junk Science and rugby coach to Ronnie and his thugs.
All eyes are on me and the unlit Bunsen burner. Drawing the rusty old flint lighter, I squeeze. Piff. Again. Piff. Another flame-out. Insults and mockery erupt from the class.
“If you’re too afraid to light it, Mr. Jones…” Trask snorts, making a big show of pulling out his personal spark lighter. Man’s been gunning for me since I stumped him about compound melting points during the intermolecular-bonding-in-solids module presentation I ma
de.
Vwoosh. The blue flame climbs, hot, luminous, like Suzie Brett and me at lunch. Atomic intensity. Now all of that’s cooled, since Trask’s rumoured “hands-on” experiments with Suzie. He offered her extra credit to help him set up for this Friday evening’s science fair soirée. The subphylum sleaze.
When Trask moves on to his canned talk about combustion, Ronnie steps in front of me, and swings his arm back, smacking my crotch with his three-ring. I double over but manage to grab my steel ruler like a sword. The rugby lugs grab the ruler and gut me with their elbows. So when Trask looks away, I unscrew the liquid-filled baby-food jar I grab from my backpack. Trask glances over at me, snatches the jar away, giving it a sniff. Without a word, he confiscates my backpack, the jar, and orders me to the office.
You may have science, Trask, but I have nature. And she’s about to get evil all over your ass.
Badger’s in a mood when I get home. Irritable bowels. Cramps. I don’t know; I don’t care. She stinks. Mom instructs me to go straight to my cage after dinner. Now that Drudd has turned Badger into a shut-in, she needs more room to move. Fine, fine, I tell Mom, then crack the cage combo once she leaves for work.
I knock. Badger hisses. I barge in anyway, tell her to forget Ronnie for now and focus on Trask, who needs a good savaging in the school parking lot on Friday night. Use the full inch-and-a-half canines, I say. Go seriously subcutaneous on his ass.
Badger slumps against the radiator.
“Come on, sis. It’s time to take out the Trask!” I nudge her with my foot. “Think of Mom. Trask has got me in trouble at school. Mom doesn’t need any more grief. And think of all that fatty meat afterward.”
Resting a paw on her chubby belly, she emits a foul smell so putrid it should be flammable. With one swipe, her curved claw leaves a trail of beaded blood across my wrist.
Like it’s my fault she’s tubbing up, forcing Mom to work overtime to keep us in groceries. Truth is, Badger’s entering a state of torpor soon, Mom says, her body processes slowing down so she’ll be able to survive on her own fat. I poke at Badger’s belly chub with a pencil. She’s going to slow down. We’ve got to act. I tell her if she bats Trask around for me on Friday evening after the school science fair soirée, she’ll probably shed a pound or two. Badger bares her razor teeth, growling. I retreat to the doorway, where I watch as she cracks open my tragic Hog Badger tale.
