Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  In my lowest moment, I fill the applications out for him and send them out myself. When a guy from Staples calls and leaves a message and Chris doesn’t bother to call him back, I slip back into an older version of myself. One that I thought was gone from me. I find myself standing over him, saying—shouting—the things I thought I could keep inside. Nothing that he needs to hear, and nothing he doesn’t know.

  It drives him back into his room, which at least gives me the opportunity to really clean the living room and pluck that grey Nintendo cartridge marked CASTLEVANIA from the machine and smash it with a hammer in the backyard.

  When I ask him later, quietly, what this is all about, he just shakes his head. He’s dissecting a fly or a spider with a pencil on his windowsill. Tells me to close the door. Once it’s closed, he speaks a slow sentence and doesn’t say anything more when I ask him to explain it. He says:

  It’s about different levels.

  The phone rings in the middle of the night and he picks it up before I can even think about it. It’s then that I cement what I already know: that she isn’t dead, but dead to him. Or more likely, it’s him that’s dead to her. In a better place—and there with some other guy. I realize it when he hangs up and I ask him who it was and he says nobody. And then adds, after a minute of that long, late-night silence, fucking nobody.

  Andrew wants to help.

  It’s like when we first got together, him surprising me at the bank with lunch, him bringing me movies and records I like, except he’s always talking about Chris. What to do with him, how he can help, what my approach should be. His eyebrows rise and fall when he’s giving out advice, like he can’t decide if what he’s saying makes sense or not.

  He says that a job is the answer, but mentions other things too. Says that Chris just needs to meet the right girl, get something going with a pretty young thing. Another time he says he just needs to do some hard work and make some money. I think, but don’t say, that as far as I can tell these are the exact things that brought him to where he is now.

  It’s about accomplishing something, Andrew says, feeding treats to his fat brown dog.

  He tells me he can talk to Chris if I want. He’s never had kids and I get the idea the talk wouldn’t be so much for Chris as for Andrew himself. I can feel all the ways it could bother me, but there’s something sweet in it, too. I haven’t filled him in on the whole story and don’t really want to, don’t want him to know everything yet and definitely don’t want them to get together, so I kiss his hand and tell him not to worry.

  I tell him Chris has been doing odd jobs. It’s a lie, of course. He hasn’t been out of the house except to buy Colt 45 beer or lounge on the front steps and smoke. But just a couple days after I say he’s been working it becomes true.

  Mrs. Delong next door gets him to kill a skunk that’s been waltzing around her property for days. I imagine she does this half because she actually needs his help and knows he has a rifle, and half because she wants to bring him over, have a look at him, and get the scoop on what’s wrong with Ms. Rose’s kid these days.

  It seemed like a terrible idea to me, calling him instead of Animal Control when the thing is perched on a stump and acting nuts, but it does something for Chris. He smiles when he tells me it was spinning in circles in broad daylight, and actually laughs when he explains it was still spinning when he shot it.

  It didn’t even spray, he says.

  I work hard to focus on the fact that he got up and put on clean pants and actually did something. Work hard to ignore the fact that he carried around the rifle for the rest of the day and focus on that smile, the big, goofy one he used to have; the one he first showed up with. Work hard—work very, very hard—to look past the skunk in the deep freeze, all wrapped in plastic. Ignore the other half of the skunk—the pelvis, legs, and tail, crudely sawed, or maybe chopped off with an axe—sitting in the trashcan beside the house and producing a smell so pungent it’s like a hard blow to the stomach when I first open the lid. There was a book on the coffee table, Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit, which appeared one day and disappeared the next. I try to justify the state of our skunk corpse with the presence of this book, but it isn’t an easy thing to do.

  I tell him I’m proud of him, but proud isn’t the right word at all. It’s more like less-worried-but-

  not-by-much.

  Andrew decides he can’t wait anymore and shows up after supper, unannounced, on my day off. Chris is on the step, smoking cigarettes and making a mean face. He’s wearing clean clothes, but has his bathrobe overtop like a mental patient, big black sunglasses. Andrew is introducing himself, talking about himself, nodding and smiling way too much.

  I immediately see all the specific, different ways this could go badly for each of them. I get terrified, furious.

  But Chris is just ignoring him, his eyes on the street, smoking. He draws phlegm up his throat, spits, and watches it splatter.

  When Andrew quits talking, I feel a fight sprout up between us that I know will carry on for weeks. I nearly tell Andrew it’s over then and there, but I manage to keep it together, manage to keep my eyes on my son instead. Chris hacks and gurgles, spits, hacks some more. It’s almost the same sound he’d make as a boy when his action figures would punch each other, or when he’d pretend something was being exploded.

  When Andrew is gone, Chris starts a fire in the backyard. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever smelled—even worse than what was in the trash can—but he’s standing right in front of the flames, still wearing those sunglasses even though it’s night-time.

  That was the skunk, he says.

  It’s here that I don’t really have a hard time deciding if it’s normal behaviour or not.

  Just the lower half, he clarifies. We have to keep the top.

  Chris helps another neighbour with a piano, gets it down her stairs and out of her house for her, and does it all on his own. Walks up there on his own accord, without any Post-It notes or snacks or encouragement. When I come home, he actually speaks up and tells me about it without me having to ask, the first time since Andrew’s visit. I haven’t seen much of Andrew, and except for short phone calls and a single visit to his house to get my jacket, we haven’t spoken either.

  It was her ex-husband’s piano, Chris says, but she kept yelling at me like I was him. Like I left the thing there.

  Did she pay you at least?

  Yeah.

  That’s good, I tell him.

  He draws something on the window (and wipes it away before I can figure out what). It’s raining.

  Do you like doing this kind of thing? I ask. Helping out and that?

  People think they need people, he says.

  He draws another picture on the kitchen window with his finger. A face with big eyes. It might be no one, but it might be her. Or maybe just the lady with the piano. Or me. Or Andrew, bright-eyed with his long hair, like in his college pictures. This time he doesn’t wipe it away and the lines thicken on their own, bleed into fat shapes.

  I ask him:

  Maybe you could make a living out of this sort of thing?

  He mutters something that ends with the word alone or unknown. I don’t know which, and I don’t care. I just nod and smile, and the next day I take out an ad in the Guardian, a listing in the yellow pages, and print cards up. I pick the name almost at random: EXTRA HANDS.

  Do you need an extra set of hands? Help with odd jobs? Moving? Yard work? Chores? Call Chris at (902) 566-2880. He takes pride in helping others.

  Andrew said odd jobs would be a good way to scare him back into school, that if you move enough fridges it puts your life into perspective fast. And he would’ve been right if all he did was dig up weeds and make lumber piles, but everyone wants him to use the skill set he’d displayed with Mrs. Delong. Everyone wants him to kill. He reads about killing bugs in his spare time, learns how to kill a
nts with hand soap, bees with a half-pint of mouthwash, and caterpillars with chili powder (though that’ll kill most anything, Chris tells me).

  He gets hired to kill rats, to shoot birds, to haul away an old carpet filled with silverfish and burn it. He does a lot of burning, on his customer’s property or mine, and seems to get way too close to the flames once they get going, staring into it with those sunglasses on.

  But he’s talking again. Tells me about his jobs if he does things I’m not around for, and starts to get me involved when I am. Me with a bag on a stick, standing ready to catch the hornet’s nest as big as a balloon while he saws it off a branch, dressed in a snowsuit with a snorkel and goggles on his head.

  They only get you because of your breath, he says. So hold your breath when it comes down. Ever notice how they swarm your face?

  No.

  They swarm your face.

  He cuts it down and it goes in the bag and I close it up and we’re both laughing like crazy. The bag is alive with them, and there’s a hum and a vibration like there’s a power tool someone forgot to turn off in there.

  Do you want to help burn them?

  I decide then that this is maybe enough for me. After all, it was enough for a very long time. Maybe I don’t need another grown-up to hold me and tell me he loves me. Maybe I just need to drive my son to old farmhouses and trailer parks and cook him dinners and just get by on that. Maybe I just need the few times he smiles and really means it—when his face lights up and you can see past his greasy hair and scrubby beard—and he looks like himself again. Maybe I don’t need any of the things I thought I did.

  I do it on the phone with the cord stretched all the way up the stairs and into my bedroom and Andrew tells me there’s no need for any of this, that we can just take a break for a while if it’s about Chris. And even though he sounds pathetic and condescending at the same time, I can feel our two years together really pushing against me, so I tell him quietly: okay.

  Chris stops talking to me again. He still goes out and does jobs, but walks to them or else takes the bus. When I ask if he needs a lift he says no, and when I ask him what did I do he shrugs or says nothing, walks away. I imagine it’s the same mental process as looking at the phone and not answering when I would call him before he moved back. The same thing as staring at the receiver or reading at my name on Caller ID and doing nothing about it. Same as throwing out the birthday cards that I mailed to what everyone told me was the worst neighbourhood in Montreal.

  He takes to staying out really late, then sneaking back inside to sleep for a few hours only to slip out again before I get up for work. The signs that he’d even set foot in the house are small; more of those jumbo beers come or gone from the fridge, or a soaked patch of mud and grime by the hose where he sprayed his work boots off.

  Money begins to appear on the coffee table where his magazines and pizza used to be. Seven hundred and fifty dollars, a sum he must’ve decided was fair for rent and food and putting up with this bullshit.

  I find him one night while driving around, acting like I’m not looking for him. He’s at the ballpark near the house, shooting his bow and arrow, firing it straight up into the air. I honk and flash my lights, but he doesn’t get in.

  What are you doing? I shout.

  I’m killing bats, he says.

  And then I can see them, up in the air near a patch of moon, flapping in a crazy cloud. I watch his arrow sail into them and keep going.

  Is someone paying you?

  No.

  Do you want a thermos?

  I have two. His old Garfield one, filled with beer. And the new one, filled with coffee.

  No, he says. I’m fine.

  It’s the most he’s said to me in maybe two weeks and the first time in two weeks I get to see him for an extended period of time. So I stay and drink the rancid beer out of that orange cup and watch. He gets three, then lets me take him home. He’s driven his bats onto one arrow like a shish kebab. He keeps whirling it around in his hands. Their dead wings clap for us, or maybe just for him.

  Eventually I end up at Andrew’s. He gets me off twice and says after that he’s missed me, and that he’s sorry. I say for what and he just looks at me, sweating and breathing heavy. I kiss him, and press myself against him. Look up at his face and try to see if I’m right or wrong—if it feels good to be with him or if it just feels good to not be alone.

  Later, he drives me home, and I let him come inside. We still have our coats on when the two of us listen to a message on the machine from Grodd River Golf Course. They say that something’s wrong with Chris, that I should call them as soon as possible.

  Right away Andrew speaks: I’m coming with you.

  Holding my arm: You can’t expect me to not care about your child.

  And then, arms at his sides, his head low: I care about you.

  I don’t respond to any of it because I can’t. I wait with the door open for him to leave. Then I go there on my own, everything fast and blurry and running together like the pace of things in a dream. I can see what’s coming—know just what it’s going be like, the position his body will be in—and exactly what I’ll do when I see it.

  At the golf course, the guy drives me across the green and tells me what happened—how Chris went out to set up traps for their gophers after they were closed and didn’t come back. He explains that he had to go find Chris before he could lock up, and found him lying on the ground. And he wouldn’t get into the cart. Chris said he was listening for gophers and refused to get up or do anything the guy asked him to.

  Just laying there. Who does that?

  I don’t know, I tell him.

  He keeps saying it—who does that—like it’s just some wacky, inconsiderate thing Chris is doing for a laugh. The cart has no lights, so he’s given me a giant flashlight to guide us through the dark, but I don’t know where we’re going and have trouble keeping the white beam straight and steady. When we’re between the lit patches of golf course, the grass looks like desert, and the sand traps look like lakes. The actual lakes look like tar, like something that could swallow up a body and keep it intact for thousands of years.

  I’m expecting Chris to be catatonic or screaming or just plain crazy. Or motionless with a belly full of pills, or half his head missing. I expect there to be something so big and life-changing and horrible waiting for me that I almost want to get out and just lie down myself. I feel a weakness in my arms and legs, my throat beginning to close over like a poisoned insect.

  At the eighteenth hole, I’m only half inside my body.

  But when I shine my light across the hills, across the water hazard and down the final slope, he isn’t there. We pull up to where he’s supposed to be, and there’s just a messy square-ish hole right there in the green, with cigarette butts all around it, and a perfect square of green grass and earth next to it. And three brown lumps.

  Groundhogs, all in a row.

  They’re dead, and I can’t immediately see how. When I shine the beam on them, there appears to be no blood whatsoever, like he was just able to somehow stop their hearts from beating.

  Oh, the golf course guy says. He got them.

  He did, I say.

  He moves one of them with his foot.

  I thought he was just fucking around, he says.

  I nearly tell him me too.

  He drives me back to the gate, and even though I know Andrew’s going to be waiting for me in the parking lot, I watch the treeline. I try to imagine what it must be like to walk out there, through the forest, onto the road and down the highway. To walk forward and into a place you don’t know, by yourself, and make your way across all that distance, in the dark.

  He’s home when I get there, up in his room.

  I don’t know the last time I saw inside, but he’s left the door open, so I go in. It’s dark, but I can tell it�
��s different. There are no more comic books or pizza boxes, no more bowls of cereal stacked in stinking towers. He put down a rug, and there’s a bookshelf and a filing cabinet that wasn’t there before. There’s a table pushed against a wall with electronics on it. Printers or scanners or a fax machine, their buttons glowing green and red. Another dull lemon glow coming from an outlet. An air freshener. Things have been moved into place while I wasn’t looking.

  He’s at his desk, his lenses lit up by his computer screen. I watch him flip through pictures of ants and gas canisters, going back and forth between them and some kind of flyer or newsletter. Watch him paste a dead mouse onto an empty field, give it a thick red outline with another click.

  You break up with that guy, he asks.

  Probably because he’s been (and still is) smoking, his voice is rough and dry, like an old man’s.

  Yes I did, I tell him.

  Because of me.

  Yes.

  That’s stupid, he says. Then he flips between some windows and brings up a yellow box with green letters. Tells me to look at it.

  It reads:

  YOUR #1 KILLER

  of pests and small animals

  CALL

  ‘REMORSELESS’ CHRIS ROSE

  (902) 566-2980

  I changed the company name, he said.

  I see that.

  I’m gonna stick this guy in that blank space here. He flips to another window and shows me the mouse again, magnifies its face so I can see the tiniest pricks of blood coming out of its nose and mouth, its eyes bulging out of their sockets.

  Great.

  You shouldn’t break up with some guy just because of me, he says. He turns his cursor into a black brush and makes the droplets disappear, one by one.

  Then he turns around.

  His hair is getting long and curly and his beard has absorbed all the missing patches so that his face is one big scribble—his smooth cheekbones and wide lips hidden away.

  You deserve to be with somebody.

  And what about you? I ask. And I expect one of his answers. One of those half-jokes that burns right through me.