Crow

by Amy Spurway

  After a few too many wayward pokes in the back exit that were starting to feel intentional, I told him to get the fuck off me, right the fuck now. He was livid, grumbling about blue balls and cock teases as he pulled up his pants, got out of the car, and stormed away. I put my clothes back on. The new-fangled “lock-up” jeans that had been such a nuisance when I needed to pee in the woods felt like a godsend all of a sudden. I locked the car doors, locked my pants, wrapped myself up in my hoodie, and slept until Duke came knocking on the window at sunrise, sneering, “Get your slutty ass outta my car, Crow.”

  Had that been the end of it, it might have been okay. But it wasn’t.

  A week later, on the night of the Safe Grad fundraising dance at the rink, where — surprise — everybody got hammered, Allie and I were outside having a smoke when Char came ripping around the corner of the rink, brandishing a crinkled sheet of loose-leaf. A copy of the hockey team’s infamous “Dirty Dozen” scorecard. Ratings and comments beside every girl’s name. The challenge laid out before the Loch Bhreagh Marauders was to have sex with and rate a different girl every month. To nail the Dirty Dozen. They all kicked in some money, and anybody who completed the challenge would get a cut. The only guy who pulled it off was Duke. The slimy little prick was five hundred bucks richer, and this was his list.

  “I’m a two! He called me a freak and gave me a fucking two!” Char howled. “I’m gonna rip his floppy excuse for a penis off and stuff it up his right nostril with the toe of my fucking boot. That copsucker.”

  Char had a way with words. And threats. She was also half deaf in one ear, so she often heard — and repeated — things wrong. The first time she said “copsucker” in junior high, she was met with a chorus of jibes. She stubbornly argued that it was more offensive to suggest that someone sucked cops than cocks. Copsucker became our preferred insult.

  Allie grabbed the piece of paper from Char’s rage-rattled hand and carefully read down the list to see her name. Rated a four. Duke’s comment? Weird nipples and old lady moaning.

  I hovered over her shoulder, scanning for my name, praying I wasn’t one of the Dirty Dozen, knowing full well that I was.

  “Little Miss Perfect Ten,” Char snorted at me. “Never would have pegged you as wanting it up the ass though, Crow.”

  As we started to make our way behind the rink to quell our collective rage and shame with a toke and a swill of cheap booze, Duke came outside. Char marched right for him, swearing and seething. He laughed as she launched into her tell-off. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty dollar bill, and rammed it down the front of her shirt. Her cut for helping him win the bet, he said. He turned to walk away, but paused, turning back to face the three of us.

  “Oh, and the numbers?” he smirked. “Not your skills, ladies. That’s the Grudge Fuck Scale. You should be proud, Char. We like your snatch. Allie, you’re in the middle. Bit of a pain in the ass, but not bad. Crow, though? You’re the kinda stuck up little skank we all just wanted to slam the hell out of. Bang that bitchy grin right off your face. But you’re all sluts.”

  “Get him!” I hissed in Char’s pointy little attack dog ear. She leapt at him, swinging. He blocked the punch and knocked her to the ground. He spat on her, called her a ditch pig, and started back toward the rink doors. Char scrambled to her feet and darted after him. She jumped on his back and clawed the bejesus out of his face with her long scarlet talons. Just when everyone started flooding out of the rink after the last song, Duke went ghost-white at the sight of his own blood and started puking all over his preppy penny loafers.

  As Allie and I dragged Char away from the scene, I yelled loud enough for everyone to hear, “Right on, Duke the Puke!” By Monday, his scratches had scabbed over, but the name Duke the Puke had stuck like shit to a woollen rag. In my fondest revenge fantasies, people still call him that. To his face. When he’s in uniform. That would be a deeply satisfying piece of my legacy, at least.

  I hustle up on to the wharf and into my clothes as quick as my soaked, exhausted, uncooperative body will allow, wincing as I pull my pants over the burning streaks of red where the jellyfish stinger got me. Duke stands there in silence. Grinning. Gawking. Finally, he speaks.

  “Shirl said she saw you come down here twice today, but you know Shirl. Can’t believe two words that come out of her mouth. Had to see for myself.” He puffs out his chest and lets out a disgusting porn groan-sigh-mmmm sound. “Lookin’ good, girl.”

  Every fibre of my being screams at me to walk over and smack the bastard. Instead, I pull out the best verbal smack I have at my disposal, the make-it-awkward card.

  “I’ve got brain tumours. I’m home to die.” I add a hiss of rage to the unvarnished explanation.

  “Yeah, Shirl said that, too.” His lumpy potato chin dips into an exaggerated frown. “Too bad. Always thought you had a halfways decent shot at a normal life. For a Fortune.”

  “Nope. Guess not.”

  “I shoulda taken the boys up on that bet that you’d be back someday,” he says, clearly amused as he slides his sunglasses back on, hooks his thumbs into his belt loops and leans back so that his crotch juts out in a pervy power stance. “Even after the . . . you know.”

  Of course. How could I forget? He got me back for the nickname. And I had to get the hell out of this place after that.

  Turned out that Duke was a disease bag of the sexually transmitted variety. I started pissing fire not long after prom night, and the test confirmed I had chlamydia. A course of antibiotics and everything would be fine, Dr. Gill said. But that’s only because he didn’t know what Duke the Puke was about to pull.

  The highlight of the Loch Bhreagh graduation ceremony was always the yearbook committee’s slideshow. The crowd of graduates, families, and local somebodies roared at the picture of Duke and his hockey buddies wearing dresses and wigs and gargantuan balloon boobs on Halloween. They groaned at Char posing with a half-dissected fetal pig in biology. They applauded Becky Chickenshit organizing university brochures in the guidance office. But the grand finale was a close-up of a white piece of paper with sharp black type on Dr. Gill’s letterhead. My name, and the words test positive for chlamydia, circled in bright yellow. After what felt like forever, it faded to a picture of me in English class, giving a double thumbs up with my eyes crossed and popped, my mouth twisted into a lopsided grin, and my head cocked to the side. With the caption “Let’s all ‘CLAP’ for Crow Fortune!” Nobody clapped. And nobody stood up to correct the glaring error, the thing I found myself screaming inside, as if it were the most salient detail: gonorrhea is the clap, not chlamydia, you idiots!

  Everyone sat in stunned silence, then the murmurs began. The principal took the mic, blathered out a perplexed apology to my forty-nine fellow graduates, their families, their friends, all our teachers, the local MLA, three members of town council, and our special guest speaker, a writer for the newspaper. But the damage was done. I was done. I fiddled nervously with the tassel on my grad cap. My hands went cold and clammy. My face reacted with a flush of humiliated heat, and my eyes began to water, the tears unable to extinguish my burning cheeks. I looked around, suddenly grateful that I didn’t have any family in the crowd that night. Everyone was staring at me. But the only face I could see through the blur of tears was Duke’s, grinning from ear to ear.

  I rose slowly and calmly, turned slowly and calmly, and walked slowly and calmly to the side of the stage, where I removed my burgundy graduation gown, folded it neatly and set it down. Then I turned to the crowd, smiled, bowed, threw my grad cap in the air with a thrust of mock triumph, and let out a long, loud, “Caaaaaaaaw.” Slowly and calmly, I smiled and waved at the crowd as some arsehole in the back hooted and hollered and clapped, and then I walked out the gym doors and straight to the car I’d borrowed from Peggy. I got in. I lit a cigarette. I pushed my Meat Loaf tape into the deck, and I cranked up “Bat Out of Hell.” I rewound and played it over and over again on the drive home, singing along at the top of
my lungs, beyond certain that I had to get the fuck out of this place ASAP. And I thanked God, or Kurt Cobain, or whatever other sky-dwelling sadist might be up there, for the one tiny bit of grace afforded to me that night: that Mama was not there to see it. She was off at some thing. An emergency. Somebody needed her more than I did, apparently. Whatever. It ended up being for the best. And the whole humiliating graduation shitshow was the kick in the arse I needed to leave and never come back.

  Except, here I am. Back. Face-to-smirking-face with the source of my long-buried shame and humiliation. Quick, what would Stacey Fortune do? Cry, probably. Stacey Fortune is out of her element here.

  “Oh well, at least you get to have a little Three Amigos reunion before . . . whatever.” Duke’s voice yanks me back from memories of trauma past and into the freshly traumatic present.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear? Allie’s old doll died. And Char’s back, too.”

  “Is she now?” There will be no reunion with Char and Allie. Those two haven’t been amigos for a long, long time. I can’t even mention one’s name to the other without triggering a tirade.

  “Still crazier than a shithouse rat, Char is.” Duke chuckles. “Anyway, tell your loser pal Gimp no smoking drugs in public, okay? I got better things to do than chase potheads in the boonies. And maybe think twice before nude beachin’ it up in the middle of the day. Or at least give the ol’ bush a Brazilian first. I won’t fine you because your tits aren’t too saggy. But this is a warning.”

  I stare blankly at him. Copsucker.

  “Want a ride home? I’ll let you have shotgun.” A greasy delight oozes across his face.

  “No. Thank. You.” I say in a sharp, cold, stabbing tone. By now, I am seeing red. Literally. My wayward brain conjures up a colourful haze that seems to swallow Duke whole. Swaths of deep scarlet mingle with a brownish pinkish purplish mist. Puce. That colour is puce.

  “All right. See ya around. If you’re lucky.” He struts back to his car, taking his red and puce cloud with him.

  Lucky? Me? If it weren’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any.

  3 THE WEIGHT OF THE EARTH

  Mama’s house looks like a pack rat hurricane bomb went off in it, and contrary to what she’s claimed from the day I was born, the mess of this place is not my fault. There’s twenty-one years of hoarding in here that is one hundred percent Effie Fortune, and she’s got her reasons for it all. There’s a cardboard box full of empty milk jugs in the corner of the kitchen where my ghetto blaster used to be. Mama’s saving those jugs for the kids down at the elementary school for seed planting in the spring. The big bag of dryer lint and egg cartons that I have to hoist off the top of the deep freeze every time I go looking for frozen casseroles and ice chips is for Peggy’s handy little fire starters. A godsend when the kindling is damp, Mama insists. And the piles of newspaper in every corner of the cramped living room? Well, there are good stories in them. History.

  Then there’s my bedroom. Stuffed animals jammed in the corner of the lumpy old bed, right where I left them. Axl Rose’s, Kurt Cobain’s, and Jim Morrison’s sun-bleached faces still cling to the walls with rusty old tacks. My precious closet is now a time capsule that I can crawl inside whenever I need to wrap myself in a simpler reality. Mama could have turned my room into a den. Or a still. A storage space for the milk jugs, dryer lint, egg cartons, and newspapers. Instead, she left it all exactly as it was. No doubt she’s got her reasons.

  I’ve spent the last three days rummaging through the contents of the trailer while Mama’s at work, ignoring the phone when it rings, much to the consternation of the pack of local nosy-holes who’ve taken it upon themselves to check up on me. The giddy lightness I felt when I pawned, sold, and chucked pretty much every piece of my Toronto life has been replaced by a heaviness. As my hands glide across the pages of the dust-caked photo albums I found in a milk crate, or tug on the seams of old pants to see if they hold, or even poke around in the clutter and mess that isn’t mine, I feel more grounded in the gravitas. Surely to God the meaning of my life is buried in here, somewhere. But the weight of it all is a little more suffocating than I expected. Especially today. I have to go to a funeral.

  “Ma, you could have cleaned out my room you know.” As I walk into the kitchen where Mama’s dribbling a dose of gin into her afternoon tea, I try to make those words sound like a simple statement. A permission, long overdue. She could have stuffed everything in garbage bags long ago, and I’d have had no right to piss and moan.

  “Too goddamn busy cleaning up after people at the Gale to muck around in that pit of yours.” Judging by Mama’s response, I’ve failed to scrub that comfortably chronic teenage petulance from my tone.

  Her hands are planted on her hips, and her steely grey eyes drill a hole through me. Her bottom jaw juts out, teeth bared in a cross underbite, just like Peg’s mean German shepherd, Deeohgee, used to have. This is the face and posture my mother puts on if you happen to say the wrong thing when she’s already in a bit of a mood. It’s hard to tell what precipitated this particular one. It might be that she’s getting too old and arthritic to be crouching over toilets and slinging piles of fluffy bath towels, day in and day out. It might also be that I’m making her come to Reenie Walker’s funeral with me, and Peggy just called to announce that she’s tagging along, too. Then again, it might be the photo album I left on the table this morning that turned her so sour so fast. It’s still open to the one and only page that makes her spit sparks and slam the damn thing shut every time. The page I always jokingly referred to as the Hall of Shame, though Mama never laughed.

  There are only two old photos on that page. One is of the Spenser family at a quaint little cottage on the Mira River, my father and his older sister — Saint Sarah as Mama always called her — flanking their parents, John Alexander and Rosalind. Their comfortable life as the Island’s entrepreneurial upper crust is neatly rendered in tight smiles, tamed hair, and the saturated colour and gloss of a 1960s Polaroid. The other photo is a tattered black-and-white of Bernie and Lucy Fortune on their wedding day in 1951. My nanny is dressed in white and glowing like she doesn’t know that she’s already three months pregnant, clueless that that child will be the first of eleven, each doomed to the their own brand of pain and chaos. She’s smiling like she couldn’t imagine the man standing beside her ever grabbing her hair and driving her face into a plate full of dinner because it was too salty. Meanwhile, Black Bernie is rumpled and scowling, his hands and cheeks marred by the indelible shadows of grease and grime from the coal pit. Anyone can see that those narrowed eyes hold flashes of the smacks and squalor to come, and his dark hair storms from the top of his head in a wild mess of defiance. Everything about him is grim and unsettling, especially next to his bride’s delicate beauty.

  I park myself at the table and stare down at the photos on that page, looking for a trace of myself in the faces of family, when it dawns on me. Mama’s reason. Why she never got rid of my stuff, and why she’s hoarding dryer lint and newspaper and milk jugs. It’s the same reason she keeps pictures of people who evoke in her either scorching rage or frigid indifference. Mama doesn’t let go of anything. Not even things that cause her some measure of grief.

  “Go get dressed if we’re going to that funeral,” she says, shuffling to the table and thumping the photo album shut. “And for Christ’s sake, do something about that ungodly mop of yours.”

  […]

  Allie insisted that I didn’t need to be at her mother’s funeral, but I know I do. Not for her, but for myself. I need to see grieving in action, and put some thought into how my grand farewell will go down. I haven’t been to a funeral since I left here. The healthy, wealthy Viva Rica chuggers and pushers I hung out with in Toronto don’t just up and die the way people do here. Or as people in my family, particularly, tend to do. The last funeral I went to was for my cousin Mitch, who hung himself my last year of high school. That one ended with Mama breaking up a drunken family
brawl, after my aunt Audrey’s arsehole husband, Jeff, got loaded and told Mitch’s father, Gordie, that they should have buried Mitch in a nice dress because everybody in Town knew Mitch was “a cross-dressing poufter.”

  Arsehole choice of words and timing aside, Jeff had a point. Everybody knew that Mitch wore dresses and makeup, and wanted to be a woman. That’s why they all called him Mitch the Bitch. I even gave him eyeliner lessons and loaned him slutty clothes. But there were doctors in Montreal who felt he was too “mentally unstable” to have the hormones and the surgery, so Mitch gussied himself up one night, sashayed out into the woods on the Old Trunk Road, and hung himself from a sturdy oak tree. Peggy called Mama when she heard about it on the scanner. Heard a cop snicker about the “tranny in the tree” as they cut my cousin’s body down. Peggy knew all the gory details, long before Uncle Gordie. She didn’t spare us any of them.

  “Phew! Smells like a French whorehouse in here.” Peggy wheezes as she squashes herself into the back seat of Mama’s car. “Cheap perfume. Always reminds me of Gordie’s Mitch.”

  In fact, I am wearing the same black dress to Reenie’s funeral that I wore to Mitch’s. I found it in my closet, nestled beneath a near empty bottle of CK Eternity, which I’ll have you know, Peggy Fortune, was not by any means cheap perfume in its day.

  “Sure, everyone thought Mitch offed himself because of the cross-dressing transsexual thing, but I don’t buy that,” Peggy goes on. “Betcha he was hearing the voices, like Janice did. Woman voices. Telling them to do foolish things.”

  “Nothing we can do about that now, is there,” Mama says curtly, eyes fixed to the road as she navigates the sharp bend onto the bridge and toward the foot of Ceilidh Mountain.

  I turn around to remind Peggy how rude it is to speak ill of the dead, to remind her that I will haunt the fuck out of her if she talks about me like that when I’m gone. Then I notice the gaudy piece of jewellery pinned to her best funeral blouse. A glittering peacock brooch. From the Bargain Store. The one I tried to pocket when I was five and a half. The one I eventually saved up enough money to buy. It was supposed to be a present for my nanny, who loved shiny things even more than I did but never seemed to have anything beautiful of her own.