Milk Chicken Bomb

by Andrew Wedderburn

  I eat some sandwiches. The bread soggy, the crust stale. When Dwayne Klatz’s mom makes a sandwich, it just seems to stay good all day. I sure can’t make a sandwich that good. Now my mouth is sticky, peanut–buttered. I smack my lips. I run my tongue over my teeth for clumps of bread.

  I try not to think about rats, their teeth. Centipedes, their little feet. Mould, flatworms, rotten fruit, leeches in ponds.

  Once you get used to the cracks and seams of light, you can make out lots. I set a chair under a pretty good sunbeam by the wall, where the wood above the foundation is thin and splintered. I flip through the brittle pages of magazines: old–time magazines with fancy cars, women in long skirts, ironing boards, canned ham. Some of the magazines in French. I look at National Geographics: rainforests, Arctic sled trips, Hawaiian volcanoes.

  I find pictures. Curling at the corners, the colours all faded to brown and yellow. None of them in albums or frames, just jumbled in a box, jumbled and dusty. There’s a little town, on the side of a harbour, with sailboat masts in the background. On all the poles and stop signs a flag, three bars like a French flag, only with a yellow star at the one end. And there’s a table in the middle of a long room, white light bulbs, a tablecloth. People sit all around, the women in dresses, the men in high collars, their hands down. The colours all real old, like on the CBC dramas. At the end of the table a large man in a grey jacket, a thick beard, arms out.

  There’s a little girl at a piano in a velvet dress, all serious–like. Straight hair tied back in a schoolteacher bun, fingers just above the keys. Looking black and white at the camera, eyes very hard.

  Old men. An old man with a thick beard and cowboy hat. The other, a skinny face and a moustache like the villain in a black–and–white movie. And there she is. Only younger, a lot younger. A black leather jacket, a skinny black tie. In between the two of them. Around a table in a bar, all smoking, with whisky glasses.

  I look at the little girl at the piano. At the woman with the skinny tie.

  I snooze for a bit.

  What I really need is some water. I smack my sticky mouth, my fuzzy tongue. I shine the flashlight around the uncovered ceiling, on the ducts and wires, stapled to the floorboards. I follow copper pipes with the beam but they disappear, down the hall, to Over There. I try to keep myself busy. I snooze, sometimes, when I run out of stuff to do.

  I wake up and her face leans down over me. I holler and try to crawl out of the way and she puts her hands on my shoulders and I yell and flail my arms and she grabs my wrists and pushes my hands down and then she lets me go.

  I crawl up on hands and knees and scuttle away, but the washboards and buckets, the meat grinders missing cranks, the lantern frames and Christmas ornaments and thick yellow dust are everywhere. I stop and turn around. Hélène sits where she was, sits back on her calves, her palms flat on top of her thighs. She looks around the basement. Looks at me. She looks at her hands, smeared with the white dust. White smudges, handprints on her black pants. I look at myself: I’m covered in dirt, dust, my hands black and smudged, my clothes grey, like I’ve rolled in dirty flour. I open my mouth and it’s sticky and I just smack my lips a few times and watch her, palms flat on top of her thighs. She doesn’t stand up.

  After a while, she asks, Is anyone going to look for you? Her French accent making every word sound careful in the quiet basement.

  I think about it. Somebody will, I say. Probably.

  She nods.

  Is it warm enough?

  It’s not too bad.

  She nods. She stands up and goes to the ladder. On the floor there’s a jug of water and a plate of sandwiches. Tomatoes and white cheese. I wait for her legs, calves, feet to vanish up the ladder.

  Her shoes clatter from one room to another. She stops, a soft plunk, then barefoot, soft steps. Something scrapes. A chair? A bench? I try to be as quiet as I can. Nothing but the buzz from down the hall.

  Sometimes she plays soft, just barely music. Sometimes she hammers on the keys, shrill chords over and over and over and so many times and so long, I can’t believe anybody could do the same thing for that long. Sometimes she plays the sad, dramatic – I guess you call it classical music, what the composers wrote. She drifts in and out. Sometimes I hear her walk across the floor and stop, there’s a pause, then she hurries over to the piano and plinks out a few notes, maybe a little trill or run.

  I don’t know much about music. At school, when Mr. Hyslop plays the piano it’s one chord at a time. One chord with his left hand and then the melody you’re supposed to sing with the right, his back straight, his elbows high. Slow and careful. She doesn’t play the piano like that at all.

  Sometimes, just the tap tap tap of her foot, keeping time to something I can’t hear.

  Sometimes I hear digging. Pick pick picking, ringing on the rocks. He’s out there somewhere. Digging away. Deeper and deeper and further and further away.

  It’s tough to sleep in the basement. My backpack isn’t much of a pillow. My jacket isn’t much of a blanket. I listen to the digging. The clank and scrape of metal on rock. My knees are sore. My back is stiff. I stand up and reach my arms up toward the ceiling, feel my stiff back tug and roll over.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been down here. I thought someone would have come looking for me by now. Maybe I finally hid too well.

  The house is quiet for a long time. Then I hear the floorboards shift. The light out of one vent, the cracks around it, smothers out. Her voice comes down the vent.

  How did you know about the ringing? she asks. Her voice really close to the vent. It gets all echoey and funny–sounding, coming out of the duct. How did you know about the ringing in my ears?

  Well, sometimes you grab your head, I say, like it hurts.

  No, she says, you were very specific. You asked about the ringing in my ears. Because you know about my grandfather.

  They were talking about him at the hardware store, I say. They said he came here to make the ringing go away.

  The hardware store, she says.

  Fleer has a thermostat, I say. McClaghan told him not to give it to you.

  Of course he did.

  So your ears ring just like your grandpa’s did?

  Some cigarette smoke puffs down the vent. The floor creaks while she stretches out. It can’t be comfortable, lying on the floor, talking into a vent.

  In Halifax we had a weekly engagement, she says. Three one–hour sets in a cocktail bar, down a long flight of stairs. Red lights and black granite and thin, languid people with long, strong drinks.

  Marcel would come in an hour before the set started, while the staff was still sitting at the bar, polishing the silverware with vinegar, rolling it up in paper napkins. He’d set up his drums; he had all this little jazz hardware which the pieces of his kit were too big for: this deep, awful–sounding snare,one floor–tom – no rack – and these cracked, appalling cymbals. And he’d hit them a few times and make no effort to tune them. Then he’d start to play.

  This thumping starts on the floor; she’s drumming on the floor with her hands. I try to imagine Mr. Hyslop counting along to it – one two one two one two one two – the second beat always right on the heel and harder than the first. She drums along on the floor like that for a while and my head starts to bob up and down along to it.

  And he’d just play that, she says. Kick snare and a rasp on the hi-hat for each quarter, never opening it up, and he never touched the floor–tom and he never touched those other cracked cymbals.

  And people started to show up, coming down the stairs, unwinding their scarves, pushing themselves into their favourite booths, and Marcel would still be playing, nothing changing, one two one two, and sometimes the waiter would bring a drink by and hold it there for him to sip at with a straw. Then I would show up and play the piano. Luis would play the guitar.

  I put a microphone into the top of the upright piano they kept in that bar. I ran it through a tubed pa head. Two four–by–ten guitar c
abinets.

  What does that mean? I ask.

  That means we were loud, she says. We billed ourselves as the loudest act in the Maritimes. We played one-chord songs to Marcel’s beat, as long as we could manage. Over and over. Luis would hold his guitar upside down with the headstock planted against the head of his amplifier making white noise and I just played that one chord, over and over, to that one beat. We never found out if Marcel knew another beat. People would sit there drinking their drinks as long as they could stand it. They’d get up and their knees would buckle, because it was so loud that it changed the pressure in your ears. Luis would stand there with his guitar feeding back and the

  pitches changing as people moved through the bar. As they changed the angles of reflection. People would walk around the bar with their hands over their ears, changing the pitch of the guitar feedback with their bodies, and I’d change the piano chords to accompany the new tones. That’s how loud we were.

  We played on Sunday nights and my ears would ring all day Monday. And after a while they would start to ring later in the week. Later, after we got fired, and I was living in Montreal, I was sitting at a bus bench. And my ears started ringing. Much, much louder than they ever had before. I sat there holding the sides of my head and the bus drove up, and the door opened, people got out, the door closed, it drove away, and I couldn’t move. I remember sitting there holding the sides of my head, unable to move. And my whole life I’d known that it was coming, but at least now it might have been my own fault.

  You wanted the ringing in your ears to be your own fault?

  I couldn’t let him have all the bad things, she says. He had too many already, my grandfather. Too many bad things.

  Worse things than your ears ringing? I ask.

  Much, much worse.

  I think about it for a while.

  You sure have lived in a lot of places, I say.

  She’s quiet for quite a while. When you leave early, she says, you have more time.

  Why would anybody move to Marvin? I ask. Sitting on the dirt floor with my arms around my knees. Her feet stop moving. I start to breathe fast and heavy. Why would anybody move to Marvin? I shout, as loud as I can.

  I wait a while. The floor doesn’t creak right away. Her voice comes out of the vent.

  You can’t stay in my basement, she says. You have to go home.

  Go home, I say. I don’t think loudly enough for her to hear. I sit there with my arms wrapped around my knees, staring into the dark. The dark in the corners of the basement pulses and breathes. I’m lucky ’cause it’s asleep. Eventually the dark is going to wake up and find me, though.

  You have to go home.

  And what good will that do? My face is all hot. Huh? I say. What then? If I just go home again. Without – without making them do anything about it. Again.

  Again? she asks.

  Yeah, I say, and it’s hard to be loud this time because my voice isn’t really sounding the way I want. I want it to sound all tough but it sure doesn’t sound that way. ’Cause if it just happens that way again, I say, I don’t know how I’m ever going to make them do anything about it.

  Again.

  Right.

  She doesn’t say anything. The floor gives a big creak, I guess she’s standing up, and I hear her walk away out of the room. Somewhere water starts to move through the pipes; a few of them start to shake in their brackets, up there in the beams. A rushing sound and a high-pitched whistling sound. I hear some splashing and clanking, sounds like dishes getting stacked. In the corners the dark just breathes and doesn’t do anything. What if it’s already awake, and just waiting? What if it’s just waiting, watching me, taking its time deciding what to do? I sit there and hug my knees and want to get the flashlight out of my backpack and run around shining it in all the corners. But I don’t. I sit there hugging my knees and wait.

  I start to smell cigarette smoke, down from the ceiling. The boards creak when she shifts on the floor. She must be lying out straight, smoking.

  Is it cold out? I ask.

  There’s, how do you call it, the strong wind, and the clouds make an arch above the mountains.

  A chinook, I say.

  Windy but not terribly cold, she says. It gives me a headache.

  I stand in the boiler room, watching the red pulse of the space-heater coils. They make a really quiet sound, too quiet to be a buzz. Almost a sizzle. I hitch up my backpack, stuffed full again with all the used sandwich wrappers.

  I guess I had always thought that a boiler would be huge: pipes and hoses, bellows and valves. Hélène’s boiler just sits there, sits there in the middle of that knot of pipes, thin copper pipes and thick black plastic pipes with heavy joints. Sits there, quiet, all red–rimmed from the space heaters. Up ahead the old blanket stretches across the tunnel. Behind it that heavy tunnel darkness waits. I guess I’ve gotten away from it long enough. There’s thin window–grey dark and space–heater red dark, and then there’s tunnel dark, and tunnel dark sure is dark. It’s cold. My heart beats real fast and I want to pee. I really want to pee. I should turn around, back into the basement, run up the stairs, pound on Hélène’s door. She’ll open the door and pick me up, carry me up the stairs to where she lives. Carry me up there and fix everything.

  The damp, soggy dark blows out of the tunnel, soaks my clothes, makes me heavy, sticks me to the floor.

  I take a step and trip on the space–heater cord. I pitch forward and drag the heater with me and the cord pulls out of the socket, and I hit the ground in the dark.

  That’s when I just disappear altogether. I knew it would happen someday. I take a deep breath and let it out, and it just goes, that breath, and I feel my lungs and insides just puff away, like ice on a stovetop. Everything inside me just steams and blows away down in the dark boiler room, and there’s this cold feeling as the rest of me follows along in that long, cold breath, until everything blows away and I’m gone. And I guess what I mean is, I’m cold and I’m lonely and I’m scared.

  Some light comes into the room. I lie there and watch the light move around, parts of the boiler room appearing, cords and nails and drywall, rough hardpacked dirt. Making the room out of nothing as it pans across.

  The light gets close and shines right in my eyes, just blinds them right out, like truck headlights in the night. I squeeze my eyes shut. I open them slowly when the hot light moves away.

  Mullen sits beside me, cross-legged. His hard hat turned to the side, so that the miner’s light in front doesn’t shine right into my face. He sits beside me and I lie there on the ground and try to breathe more slowly, try not to gasp and pant so much.

  You’re crying, says Mullen.

  Yeah, I’m crying.

  Why are you crying?

  I think about it for a while.

  I really like the sandwiches Dwayne Klatz’s mom makes, I say. It was tough, at the end of school there, when he had to stay home sick, from eating all that dirt. I couldn’t trade sandwiches with him. That was a pretty lousy week.

  Most kids would love to have a pizza sub from the store every day. Those things sure taste great.

  Most kids don’t know much, I say.

  Yeah, says Mullen. Yeah, most kids don’t know much.

  I sit up. I crawl across the floor, feeling in the dark with my hands. Mullen looks over with his light, across the cold floor, to the cord, lying a few feet from the socket. I plug the heater back into the wall. We watch the dark coil slowly turn red. Mullen’s light twitches around the room, never stays on anything long enough to get a good look. I guess that’s how things look to Mullen all the time: jumping around like the boiler room, twitchy and brief.

  We hear it, off somewhere underground: the clanking. We both sit and listen: clank clank clank, all muffled and ringing, coming through the ground, through the walls, through the dark hole behind the old curtain. It rings for a while and then fades away, and after a while we can’t tell if it’s even there anymore.

  What�
�s behind that curtain? asks Mullen.

  It’s a tunnel.

  Mullen’s eyes get real big. No kidding, he says. Really a tunnel? All dug down into the ground? No way.

  Have a look, I say. It’s pretty dark.

  Mullen pushes the old curtain away. He whistles, the hard–hat light passing around on rough dirt, old beams. They hold the ceiling right up, he says. Look how old the wood is. This must have been down here forever.

  Why did you come and find me? I ask.

  They must have dug this years and years ago. Braced, that’s what they call it, all this wood. It’s like a mine shaft. My dad has all sorts of books with pictures of mines, they’ve got these wood beams. He leans into the tunnel. I can’t even see … He stops. More ringing. Maybe even someone talking, or shouting – it’s tough to tell, like hearing a quiet radio in another room. You can tell there’s sound, but not what it is.

  Mullen runs his hand up the beam. Grey old splinters bend out into the fabric of his mitt. I bet he could use a hand, he says. We could help him carry dirt; he’s got to carry the dirt back up somewhere. How much do you think he’s dug? How close do you think he is?

  He doesn’t want anybody to find him, Mullen.

  What do you mean, he doesn’t want any–

  I know about wanting to be found. He doesn’t.

  Mullen keeps looking at me. I have to squint in the white light. It leaves blue circles scratched everywhere I look. He looks down the tunnel, down the rough dirt walls, the greenstained wood beams, everything dusty and old and dark.

  My dad told me you were down here, says Mullen. Go find your friend, he said. He’s in the junk–shop basement. I asked him how he knew and he wouldn’t say. It’s time he came out of there, he said, time he came back up. Wouldn’t say how he knew. The light wavers out of Mullen’s hard hat. He reaches up and fiddles with the bulb, it flickers and goes out for a second, leaves us a flash of dark, then the beam comes back, a little dimmer maybe. We stare down the tunnel, listen to the clanging, far away.