Milk Chicken Bomb

by Andrew Wedderburn

  Earl Barrie got hit by a side of beef just before three o’clock, Soltzhenitsyn says.

  What?

  A frozen side of beef. Took a wrong swing and hit him in the head. Luckily, his hard hat –

  And he’s …

  Jarvis and I drove him to the High River hospital. Had to clear all the empty egg cartons out of the cab and lay him across our laps. His head in Jarvis’s lap and his feet sticking out the window. To keep his head steady. He got conscious every now and then, went on and on about spanking his wife. Lord, just let me spank my wife again, he’d say. Jarvis had to put the talk-radio station on.

  Earl hates talk radio.

  Right. Kept him awake. So he went off about how much he hates talk radio, and how he wants to spank his wife, all the way to High River.

  Why does Earl Barrie want to spank his wife? asks Mullen.

  His dad glares at Solly. I don’t know, Mullen. He must have taken quite a bump. Pretty delirious.

  Days I can’t find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There’s this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it. Or I like to walk over to the football field and watch them building houses in the new subdivision. Some of them wearing hard hats, with stickers: Safety First, and 1,000 Consecutive Hours. They’ve got heavy belts and hammers. If Mullen and I had hammers and tools like that, we could build all sorts of stuff. We could get shovels and dig out the back wall Underground. Dig tunnels and other rooms: a library for our comics and a workshop for all the building we’d do. We could build shelves, put down a plywood floor. We could put down roofing felt so we could take off our shoes and not get slivers. We could build a wall, like the fur-trading forts in social studies class, with sharpened logs, and a drawbridge. Then we could just stay down there and do whatever we wanted. Grown-ups from the school could come by and hammer on the log walls and we’d just ignore them from inside our underground fort. They’d fall into the sharpened logs underneath our drawbridge and we’d laugh and laugh.

  After recess, all the Dead Kids stop what they’re doing: hanging up coats or unlacing boots or popping open the rings of their new binders. They start to point and then realize what they’re doing, and stand there, looking awkward. A few binders pop, like grasshoppers jumping.

  Jenny Tierney walks to her coat hook. Hangs up her black leather purse. Takes off her black jean jacket. She looks around the hallway and all the kids have to pretend like they weren’t staring at her, get back to taking off their boots or getting their textbooks off the shelf.

  Jenny Tierney is the only kid who gets sent up more than me and Mullen. But me and Mullen get sent up for dumb stuff, like wallpaper paste and soap flakes and racing toilet-paper rolls down the staircase. Jenny Tierney told a kid to stick scissors into an electric socket, and he did. Jenny Tierney is twelve years old and still in the fifth grade, like us. She’s two inches taller than me and four inches taller than Mullen. Jenny Tierney hit a kid in the face with her math textbook so hard he has to wear glasses now. They didn’t even send her up for that, at least not like we get sent up, cleaning chalkboards or washing the windows on the school buses. She had to sit in the office for hours, and her parents had to come and sign forms. I remember her math book sitting on Mr. Weissman’s desk, the brown paper cover with a dark red splotch. Some people say that every time Jenny Tierney hits a kid with her math book, she peels off the brown paper and puts it in a scrapbook. She’s got pages and pages of other kids’ bloody noses, beat into brown paper.

  We all rush off to class with Jenny Tierney watching us. She waits until we’re all on the way off to class before she follows, her hard-heeled boots ringing on the tiled floor.

  In the morning we sell lemonade. I stir in sugar, the wooden spoon tight in my mitt. You can’t just pour in the sugar and stir, or it all settles at the bottom. You have to do it slow-like: a little water, a little sugar, a little more. Mullen doesn’t like to stir ’cause he says it takes too long, but I don’t mind. Who’s in a rush? Some water drips off the spoon into the sugar, makes little grey clumps. I try to pick them out and sugar gets all stuck in my mitt, bits of mitten fuzz stick in the sugar. I take off my mitt and drop a fuzzy sugar clump onto my tongue.

  The trick is making sure you don’t get any seeds in the pitcher. I pull off my mitts and squeeze the wedges into my palm. The slimy little seeds squirt into my hand. They try to slip through my fingers. They want to get into the lemonade. Lemon seeds are tricky like that, they know that everybody hates them, so they try to sneak up on people. Because if no one wants you, you might as well ruin it for everybody. If they get in there they’ll hide behind the ice cubes and wait, then sneak into your mouth and spread slime all over your tongue, make you gag and choke, and they’ll laugh and laugh, jump down your throat, right into your stomach, and who knows what they’ll get up to down there. I squeeze the juice into the pitcher and throw the slimy seeds out on the road. That’ll teach them.

  Deke pulls up in his rumbly car. Deke drives a silver El Camino, the only one in town. Everybody always stops and points when Deke drives by, slow-like, window rolled down and elbow sticking out. He leans out the window with an unlit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip.

  What are you kids doing?

  Well, Deke, we’re making lemonade. Figure we’ll sell some and then go to school.

  You should come for breakfast with me, says Deke. Thought I’d get some breakfast. He bats at the cardboard air freshener, knocks it up against the windshield. You sell any lemonade today?

  Nah, I say.

  That’s ’cause it’s too cold, Mullen says.

  It’s because people are chumps, I say. They don’t appreciate the value of our product.

  We sold a glass to Constable Stullus yesterday, I say. He was measuring between people’s cars and the curb with a tape measure.

  That son of a bitch gave me a ticket, says Deke. Next time put vinegar in his lemonade. Or bleach. That’ll teach him.

  What do you want, Howitz?

  Deke bats the air freshener. Just seeing how the boys are doing.

  Mullen’s dad lifts the top of the mailbox with his index finger, peeks inside. They have to be at school, Howitz. Don’t have time to go running around. Yeah, sure thing, says Deke. Mullen’s dad goes back inside.

  Let’s get some breakfast, says Deke. The cigarette still hanging off his lip. Hey, Mullen, you want some breakfast?

  Mullen whistles. Well, the thing is, Deke, my dad doesn’t like you very much.

  No, Deke says, I guess he doesn’t.

  So I ought to just stay home and go to school.

  Think you’ll sell any more lemonade? I ask Mullen.

  He snorts. Nobody’s going to buy any damn lemonade.

  Well, I guess not. See you at school.

  Yeah, says Mullen, school.

  So I was at the post office, getting my mail, Deke says, driving down Main Street. He takes a black plastic comb out of his jacket, starts combing his hair, one hand on the wheel. From the P.O. box? I ask. Yeah, from the P.O. box, says Deke. The Davis Howe Oceanography office. And you know the building across the street from the post office? That empty building with the papered-over windows? They aren’t papered over anymore, I say. Deke puts his comb back into his pocket. Chews on his cigarette filter. That’s right, he says.

  There was some woman in there a few weeks ago, I say. She had a measuring tape. Measured everything. Is that right? Deke says. Yeah, measured the walls and the doorways and the spaces between the electrical outlets. You ever seen her before? No, Deke, I never saw her before. No, Deke says, neither had I.

  The car stalls at a stop sign. Aw fer Christ, Deke says. He grinds the engine a few times. When the car finally starts, it coughs like an old woman at the drugstore, like a good throatful of snot. Maybe we should let her warm up a bit first, Deke says.

  I yawn. Yawn so wide it makes my head ring. I hold a hand up in front of my mouth.

  Holy, kid, sa
ys Deke. Need a little shut-eye there?

  I guess so, Deke, I say. Yawn a little more.

  What are you doing getting up so early anyway? Looks like you need some more sleep. What good’s it do, getting up hours before you need to go to school?

  Sometimes you’re just up, Deke. It’s not like I don’t want to be sleeping.

  I know I’d be in bed if I could be. Hey, you want to see my vacation pictures? They’re in the glovebox.

  Deke’s glovebox is full of maps: Lake Athabasca Region, the Columbia Ice Fields. There’s a packet of photos from a drugstore in Calgary.

  Pine trees and mountains. Deke holding the camera out in front of him, in front of a waterfall. Where’s this, Deke? That’s just outside of Dawson City, he says. In the Yukon. I flip through the pictures. A moose on the highway. Other cars all stopped around it, people standing around taking pictures. Doesn’t get much more beautiful than the Yukon, says Deke.

  I like driving in Deke’s car ’cause the seats are wide and scoopy, with leather padding. Deke’s car smells like Deke: cigarettes and chocolate bars and cardboard air fresheners shaped like pine trees. His Banff park passes take up a quarter of his windshield: 1973 through 1986.

  We stop at the truck stop in Aldersyde. Just leave your lunch box in the car, he tells me. All the guys at the truck stop know Deke. They punch him in the shoulder and tell him jokes – they must be pretty funny I guess, ’cause everybody laughs. We sit down in the coffee shop. I try to get a look back behind the counter but I don’t see Hoyle the waitress anywhere. Everything else is pretty much the same, though. Deke scratches his cheek and they bring him a cup of coffee. Scratches the bridge of his nose. They bring me hot chocolate, with little marshmallows.

  That guy’s got a real chip on his shoulder, Deke says, blowing the steam off the top of his coffee. You know that, kid? A real chip. You have to watch people with attitudes like that.

  Mullen’s dad used to be a geologist, I tell Deke, in Winnipeg. He used to know where oil was. You ought to see all his books – shelves and shelves of them, the hardcovered kind, without jackets. With the names stamped onto the sides.

  Deke sniffs and sips his coffee. Guys like that, he says, where do they get off? It’s not like I don’t work damn hard. What was he doing living in Winnipeg if he was a geologist?

  I dunno, Deke. My hot chocolate is still too hot. I pick a marshmallow out with my spoon and slurp it up.

  Mullen get teased a lot at school?

  Kids tease Mullen but Mullen doesn’t care, I say. They tease him a lot ’cause he’s short and lives down the hill.

  So they don’t tease you, then?

  Well, I say, I guess so. I’m his best friend. But things have been different lately. We got Roland Carlyle, this sixth-grader, sent up for mail fraud. Kids aren’t so likely to tease Mullen now.

  Mail fraud?

  Yeah, I say, Roland Carlyle said that Mullen’s dad worked at a shit house. So we spent a week stealing all the mail from the houses on Pine Street. Then we stuck a week’s worth of mail into his gym locker the day we knew Mr. Weissman would be in to watch us clean them out. Nobody believed Roland when he said he didn’t do it, ’cause everybody knows he’s always stealing cigarettes from the IGA.

  Pine Street’s all the way across town, says Deke. Why did you steal their mail?

  Come on, Deke. You’ve got to cover your tracks. Get away from the scene of the crime and all that. Besides, we’d have felt bad stealing mail from people we know.

  When I was a kid, Deke says, drinking his coffee and scratching his cheeks, in the second grade, there was this kid, Link Ashcroft. How old was I in the second grade? He looks at his fingers. Eight?

  Seven, I tell him. You’d have been seven.

  Right, seven, says Deke. Well, Link liked to kiss girls. All the rest of us played street hockey and shot marbles and Link would just run around the playground, looking for girls to kiss. But not other second-graders. Link liked to kiss girls in the sixth grade. What grade are you in?

  The fifth, Deke, the fifth.

  Right, says Deke. Link liked to kiss eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, and they went along with it, ’cause they thought it was funny I guess, this seven-year-old kid. Girls would sneak off at recess in twos and threes, he’d meet them behind the gym. He’d set his little lunch pail on the ground and stand on top of it to reach the mouths of the girls he was kissing. And Link didn’t just peck these girls on the cheek – why else do you think they were so excited about him? They’d hold him up, on his lunch box, and he’d put his little tongue in their mouths and go to work.

  Pretty soon, girls were coming over from the junior high school, hearing about this seven-year-old who liked to make out. They’d stand behind the big blue dumpster, smoking cigarettes, waiting for Link to get out of class. Link, he didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’d take his hand and put it up their shirts, kiss the kid all over. He’d come into class all covered with teenage lip gloss, smelling like menthol Matinée Slims, this big dumb grin all over his face.

  You ever see that woman before, in the window?

  I never had, Deke.

  He dips the tip of his finger in his coffee, draws a damp line down the middle of the green table. Looked like she was from the city, he says. Sophisticated-like.

  Deke sips some coffee. He tears open a few more sugar packets and stirs them in. Taps the cup with his spoon.

  You know what they’re doing pretty soon, kid? They’re knocking down the grain elevator.

  Why are they doing that?

  Say it’s obsolete. Say they’re going to build a new community centre there, for the Rotarians.

  The green elevator, I ask, or the orange one?

  I don’t know. Maybe both. You want to go see that? I was there when they knocked down an elevator in Okotoks, two or three years ago. A couple of guys in Bobcats, they just drove into the walls. Fell down like it was made of dry toast. You’d think that a grain elevator would be sturdier. That the walls would be thicker.

  You can smell the meat-packing plant here in Aldersyde. Smells like burning, and the outhouses at summer camp. Like the elephant building at the ZOO. The gas jockeys sit around outside by the propane tank. Two of them play rock paper scissors. The same guy always loses, has to go lean on the windows of the cars when they pull up. Props the gas nozzle in the sides of the cars. Cleans the windshields.

  Hey, Mullen, where’s your dad going? I dunno, Mullen says. Hey, Dad, where’re you going? Mullen’s dad throws his jean jacket into his truck.

  I want you to sweep the porch. Mullen sticks his fists into his pockets, hits the back of his heel on the sidewalk. Come on, Dad. Come on. Sweep the porch and the sidewalk, Mullen’s dad says, get all those leaves and twigs. Come on, Dad, it’s winter. It’ll snow any minute. See all those clouds? Mullen’s dad pats his back pockets, takes his wallet out, looks in it. And don’t just sweep everything into the gutter, he says, or the neighbours’ yard. Get the dustpan. Tell you what, Dad, Mullen says. When the snow melts in March, I’ll sweep the porch. Sweep it real good. Like, put it all in garbage bags. I’ll put the bags on the curb, in March. Real good-like. Mullen’s dad pats the front of his grey jeans, feels the pockets of his jean jacket. Your keys are inside on the desk, by the mail, Mullen says. Mullen’s dad takes a pencil out of his pocket, the flat kind they sell at the hardware store, sticks it between his teeth. Put the bags in the alley, he says. And don’t pick up anything sharp, like broken glass. Leave that for me. He goes into the house. Comes back out spinning his keys around on his index finger. Stops to look in the mailbox.

  Mullen’s dad hunches down on one knee. Show me your shoulder, he says. My shoulder’s fine, says Mullen. Come on, show me. Mullen pulls his sweater up around his neck. Mmblfr, he says through his sweater. The white bandage is taped in a wide square to his pink skin with white tape. Whenever I cut myself, on the side of an open can of peaches, or in the teeth of the gate in a backyard, I always get a pink bandag
e, just a little sticky strip, brown and fuzzy. Mullen’s bandage is white and plastic and puffy, like a jacket, and has to be held on with tape. His dad has a look at it but doesn’t peel back the tape to look underneath. Don’t pick at it, he says, and don’t poke at it. Mmblnfrmnr, says Mullen. His dad pulls the sweater back down, careful to tug it well clear of the bandage. Mullen coughs while his dad smooths out his sweater.

  It’s hot, says Mullen.

  You got burned, says his dad. I’ll bet it’s hot.

  You going to be home in time for dinner? asks Mullen.

  We’re eating at the Russians’ tonight, says his dad. If I’m not back just go over there. Take that bottle of wine, I said we’d bring one. The red one, in the rack. He pats Mullen on the head, gets into his truck. Plays with the rear-view mirror a bit. See you at dinner. Yeah, Dad, at dinner.

  Where’s your dad going, Mullen? Mullen climbs up on the porch railing. It creaks. I dunno, he says. Hey, you know what I found down by the river? A bucket of paint. They don’t put paint in buckets, I tell Mullen, they put it in pails. Mullen reaches up, tries to grab the lip of the roof. Yessir, a whole bucket of paint, just sitting there under some leaves, by a stump. You know down by the river where we dug that hole that one time? Somebody must have dropped off a bunch of trash there.

  We wander around the back of the house. Mullen’s dad has a tire hung off the only tree. In summertime during storms you can hear it, banging on the tree, into the side of the fence. On the back porch there’s a little table, some beer bottles neatly stacked in their cardboard boxes underneath.

  We climb the fence. I hang on the edge for a second, like I always do, one leg swinging on the other side. The alley behind the yard is overgrown with old poplar trees and rose bushes; there’s a chain-link fence and the big hill on the other side. Mullen pushes a piece of plywood off the fence; behind it we’ve got a pretty good hole cut in the chain. We get on our hands and knees and crawl through the fence, into the scrub.