Crow

by Amy Spurway

  Allie was the only one sober enough to drive when Peggy called me. We got there just in time. Char had the sleeping baby in his sling, dangling from a branch, as she loudly, insanely sang “Rock-a-bye Baby.” The first responders tried to appeal to her sense of reason. To rationality. To the risk. Things Char never gave a shit about at the best of times.

  Gimp had a better idea. He told her that he was the maker of baby Icarus’s wings, and that he’d made a mistake. The wings weren’t ready. If baby Icarus tried to use them, he’d perish. Char appreciated this critical information. She let Gimp climb up a ladder to where she sat perched. She placed the baby in his waiting spastic arm, watched him climb down the ladder with her child, then climbed down herself. Gimp spoke to her slowly, gently, followed her into Crazytown, took her by the hand, and led her into the back of the waiting ambulance. Meanwhile, I was useless as tits on a bull, standing there trying not to pass out or puke at the thought of witnessing a baby killed by his mad mother. Allie stayed in the car until it was all over.

  That night, after the crowd of emergency personnel and nosy neighbours had dispersed, after Daktari Christ MacIsaac was snuggled in his crib with Peg to watch over him, and after Char was sedated and en route to the lockdown psych ward at the Regional Hospital, me and Willy Gimp did the only thing we could think of to ease our rattled souls. The only thing that made any sense to burn off the jangled energy of circumvented tragedy. We went down to The Wharf, smoked a monstrous gagger of a joint, made up foolish new constellation names, and fucked in the bed of his grubby old pick-up truck while the stars of The Big Dicker twinkled overhead.

  After that, everything went to hell in a handbasket.

  Despite all the old dolls at the church down the road praying for me every Sunday, and the handful of pills I wash down with a bucket of sludge tea every morning, I’m getting sicker. There are days when I can’t get out of bed, or see or walk or think straight. Days when all I can stomach is six Ritz crackers and a mouthful of applesauce. Char is locked up in the looney bin. Allie can barely eke out a coherent rejection when I call to see if she wants to come hang out with my sick, sorry ass. Willy has a fresh excuse every time I ask if he wants to go out for coffee. And he knows that coffee isn’t what I’m really after. Mama is cranky, and still miffed that I have invaded her space and burned her papers. The best I get from her is a prolonged pat on the head, and orders to stop sooking.

  Meanwhile, Peggy has become Mother Superior, beaming a warm, serene smile as she totes Daktari Christ MacIsaac everywhere she goes, espousing a steady stream of motherly wisdom she has no business pretending to have. A whole bunch of high school people also saw me at the reunion, heard about what happened with Char, heard that I’m sick, and think I’m seeing Willy. So now they’ve all found me on Facebook and I can’t ignore their friend requests because I’m trying not to be an arsehole, in case one of them finds me half-dead in a ditch someday. The trees are naked, the water is angry, and it’s cold as a witch’s tit. Winter will clobber us soon. Mama says she can feel it in her bones.

  Plus, somehow the student loan and credit card company bastards have found me. I’ve always had a knack for spending money. Paying it back, not so much. That was Dave’s job, and when we split I may have neglected a thing or two. Over the summer, I also may have racked up some new bills and overlooked some old ones. The credit card guy on the phone was none too pleased with my financial delinquency and wasn’t interested in my sob story. I told the student loans people that I was dying. They didn’t seem to care. Only a Form 37T filled out by a doctor, with triplicate signed copies faxed to their offices, allowing eight to twelve weeks for processing, can stop their now daily collections calls.

  And Dave just texted to wish me a happy fortieth birthday. It’s thirty-nine, Fucker. Happy World Toilet Day to me.

  What the Jesus is wrong with you guys, I say every morning. You need me. Without me, you’re nothing. If you just laid low and didn’t try to upgrade and make me so sick and shitty all the time, we’d all have a lot more fun. But Parry, Ziggy, and Fuzzy do not listen. Tumours don’t care that their shenanigans are cramping my farewell-tour style. They don’t care that Dr. Divyaratna is talking about sticking laser blades in my brain, carpet bombing them with radiation, or soaking them in a chemo bubble bath. They don’t care that it’s my birthday. Probably my last. Maybe my worst.

  I’ve had craptastic birthdays aplenty. On my fourth birthday, we invited a handful of kids from up the road. Mama made a chocolate cake and a Kraft mix weenie-topped ­pizza. There was pop. Cheezies. Balloons. I had a bubble bath and put on my birthday present from Nanny — my Elly May dress. It was a flouncy, frilly white number with blue satin trim and a sash. Like something worn by Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. It was reserved for the most special occasions, starting with my party. So, there I was all day — dolled up, waiting for my little friends to arrive with smiles and presents — when it started to snow. An hour before the party, a voice on the radio interrupted me and Dolly Parton singing the hell out of “Jolene” to say that the roads were a mess and the blizzard was big. Nobody wanted to be out in this weather. Wiener pizza, pop, Cheezies, and chocolate cake are not meant to be eaten alone, nor with a side of hysterical four-year-old tears.

  “Stacey dear,” Mama said plainly, “you’ll have worse than that before you’re twice married.”

  But I did get to wear the Elly May dress again, on the day of my Nanny’s funeral a year and a bit later. The one I wasn’t allowed to go to. Everybody else got all dressed up on that day, but the dummies wore black. Nanny hated black. She loved my Elly May dress. So I wore it for her, even though only the babysitter saw it.

  There were other shitty birthdays, too. My seventeenth was spent in the trunk of Allie’s car, hiding from Duke the Puke’s psycho girlfriend because she heard I flirted with Duke in chemistry class, although Duke inflicting tit twisters on me was hardly my idea of flirting. On my twenty-first, I passed out on the bathroom floor of some guy’s apartment, and woke up covered in puke that wasn’t my own. Then there was my thirty-fifth, when I caught Dave kissing some skank at a restaurant. But at least I got diamond earrings out of that.

  I’ll call this one a win if I can get through it without a snow­storm, puke, or infidelity.

  I go for a birthday walk down to The Wharf. Opening the windows to air the stench of Javex and boiled eggs out of the trailer just isn’t cutting it. A rude wind shoves its way down from where the mouth of the lake yawns at the Atlantic Ocean. The bare trees on the mountain just stand there, rooted in dry apathy, waiting for winter. White-toothed waves bite at the shore, and there’s no sun to soften and shimmer up the edges of their agitation. Banks of elephantine cloud lumber along, never leaving enough time and space for a crack of sky to appear between them. A half-dozen shit hawks scream overhead. And some jackass left a pile of puke and a used condom on the picnic table, even though there is a goddamn garbage can right there. Even so, this place still makes me feel better.

  I caress the cool edge of the concrete edifice, legs dan­g­ling above the choppy waters, face lifted to the obstinate elephants above. I fill my lungs with the cool tang of salt air, and try my best to empty some bitterness from my soul. But all I can hear is the chorus of a song looping in my head. The song Peggy and Mama serenaded me with in the wake of my ninth birthday party, when I got a little melodramatic over the lack of Black Forest cake, and not being allowed to keep a loot bag for myself or have the first crack at the creepy Cabbage Patch Kid piñata. Except Mama and Peg took Lesley Gore’s pouty party song to the next level, with flailing arms and stomping feet and fake boo-hoos. It takes me a minute to realize that “It’s My Party” isn’t simply looping with hyperrealism in my head. It’s playing in my pocket. I wonder which smartass changed the ringtone to that.

  On the other end is Willy Gimp, chatting me up. Like nothing ever happened. Like we didn’t share in the trauma of Becky Chickenshit step-dancing at the reunion and Char dan
gling her baby from a tree. Like we didn’t exorcise that trauma with orgasms under the stars. Like he didn’t drop off the face of the Earth for five weeks. Casual as ol’ hell, he wishes me happy birthday. And then asks me out on a date. A real one, that doesn’t involve shotgunning enough liquor to choke a squid, or quickies in the woods. Tonight.

  “What makes you think I don’t already have plans?” I say, not too nicely. Because if there is one thing I learned from years of devouring Cosmo, it is how to play hard to get.

  “Well, do ya?”

  “Maybe. I’ll let you know in an hour. Or two.” I stuff my phone back in my pocket, and hustle my arse back to the trailer to shower off the eau de loser I’ve been wallowing in, and de-fuzz five weeks’ worth of leg and pit hair. Then I call Gimp back.

  “Fine,” I say, “you can take me out tonight. But I’m warning you, I’m wearing the sluttiest dress I owned in high school, and no drawers.” Because if there is another thing I learned from years of devouring Cosmo, it’s how to play easy.

  “God love your trampy little heart.” Gimp laughs. “I’ll pick you up at four thirty.”

  […]

  “You cleans up good,” he marvels as I slide into the truck. Eyes traced in perfect almonds of smoky black, lips painted scarlet, big honkin’ birthday infidelity diamond earrings to offset the inch and a half Monchhichi monkey doll hair that’s glued down with green apple–scented gel I found in my closet. What is the worst thing that could happen from using twenty-year-old hair product? I live on the edge of danger.

  “The b’ys at the Burger King are gonna be gawkin’,” Gimp says. I note his dirty ripped jeans, plaid shirt, and grubby fleece jacket that says Northside Sharp Shooters Dart League on the breast.

  “Where are we going, seriously?” I am afraid to ask, but do. Because I live on the edge of danger.

  “Burger King,” he says, straight as a pin. “The nice one. Out in Town, Town. Just a couple of quick stops first.”

  I flip down the sun visor and begin examining my fancy face in the mirror. I blot some lipstick onto the back of my hand and carefully dab away at the thick rim of eyeliner with the pad of my thumb. I fidget with the sky-high hem of my dress, and suddenly wish I’d worn cheaper earrings. And jeans. And a bra with a little less oomph. Maybe some drawers.

  The first stop is Willy’s garage. He goes in looking like a dart-chucking greaser and comes out fifteen minutes later looking like a guy who is not, in fact, dragging a whored-up fuck buddy to the Burger King for her birthday. His white button-up shirt is crisp and clean, and ever so slightly clinging to the sharply cut peaks and valleys of his chest and arms. His shaggy hair has been smoothed and swept to the side. He ambles back out to the truck, his awkward gait looking almost like a swagger. I stop lamenting my lack of underwear.

  “Christ, Gimp, are those cufflinks?”

  “One hundred per cent genuine cubic zirconia,” he says, hoisting his wrists up onto the steering wheel. “There. We go together a bit better now, eh?”

  “Parts of us anyway.” I stroke his leg and nip my mascara-laden eye into a playful, seductive wink.

  “You’re a bad winker,” he says, as if that’s just an obvious fact. “Looks like you’re taking a seizure. Or try’na let one rip.”

  “Shut up. Maybe I am.”

  “Stick to crotch grabs and kissy faces.” He pats my leg, as I do my best to ignore the little orange sparks and electric blue squiggles exploding around his head. “One more surprise stop. Then, dinner.”

  “What’s the stop?”

  “To see Char. Nobody’s visited her yet.”

  My face flushes with shame. She called me a few days after she went into the hospital and started regaling me with paranoid rants about whispering widows in spruce trees and gods in her instant mashed potatoes. After ten minutes of that, I told myself that the call dropped. But it didn’t. After that, I dodged her daily dozen calls for a week, until I finally called the hospital and told them to tell her my phone was broken so she’d stop.

  “It’s your birthday and all, but I think we should give that poor soul a dose of love, wha?” Gimp smiles.

  The lockdown psych ward at the Regional is probably better than the old Butterscotch Palace, but not by much. The narrow mint-green corridors begin and end with hulking doors that require three different security codes before they heave open with a shrill alarm. The soundscape arches from claustrophobic silence to haunted howls to unbridled laughter of the unsettlingly maniacal variety, as bodies are shuffled in and out of sight. It smells like Band-Aids and feels like limbo. Not quite hell, but you can see it from here.

  It’s the tail end of visiting hours. The orderly ushers us down the hall as a chaotic parade passes by. A young man goose steps along, yelling at the water fountain. An older woman tells me that she loves my hair, asks if I have a razor. The hospital PA crackles to life in the name of a code yellow, and a half-dozen newly electrified staff dart to the nearest grey leviathan door.

  In the corner of the common room, Char is belting out an off-key version of “Hotel California” to a six-foot-tall ficus plant. She thinks it talks back to her and tells her to keep singing, which is certainly further proof of madness. Any plant in its right rhizome can tell that she’s as tone-deaf as a telephone pole.

  Despite being jacked full of every psychosis-busting drug known to modern psychopharmacology for a solid month, Char is still out of her mind. But she’s elated to see us. I feel like I’m going to be sick, as a dizzying burst of blue-violet ribbons spring from her ears, bookending the alternating flashes of olive green and lemon pie–yellow emanating from the top of her head.

  Gimp sees that I’m wobbly and white. He wraps his arm around my waist, and I relax a little, knowing that he’ll catch me with his good arm if I drop.

  “My saviours!” Char gasps as she dashes toward us with open arms. “I knew you guys would come. See that one?” she says, pointing to the nurse in the locked Plexiglas vestibule. “She has the papers you need to sign. I’m not sure who has the papers to get Horatio out. The janitor, maybe.”

  Horatio is the ficus plant. He, too, is being held against his will. The ignorant “sheeple” here only think he is a plant, but he is not. He is a philosopher king, and once he is exposed to fresh air, mankind will have a great “epissamee.”

  I smile and nod, lost as how to deal with her in this mess of delusion. I wince as she grabs me by the shoulders, staring at me with insane intensity. “Oh, Crow,” she cackles, “Horatio said you’d be stumped!”

  But there’s Gimp to the rescue again. He tells her, with all the sincerity in the world, that King Horatio needs her to stay here and sing to him until the time is right. He tells her that she should only listen to the whispers that are helpful and beautiful and kind and wise. He tells her that we all love her. She hugs us both, telling Willy that she’ll take good care of King Horatio if we take good care of each other. Then, in the middle of her green and yellow madness, a clear violet-blue flare forms. Stable, calm, and real. Like a flash of lucidity, born of my own tumour-induced delusion.

  “Give my baby a kiss for me,” Char says. “And tell Peggy thank you for doing her best.”

  Then, the lucid flare disappears and Char jumps headlong into an animated series of generic lunacy: illuminati are running the entertainment industry, 9/11 was a conspiracy, capitalist devils are poisoning us, and corporations are wrecking the planet. Crazy talk.

  She shuts up all of a sudden, smiles, twirls, and dances away from us with a dismissive wave. But just before the nurse lets us out, she charges back down the hall toward us, stopping short at a hollering distance.

  “Crow! Good news, bad news!” Char’s arms and dreadlocks flail around like the limbs of a psychotic octopus as she rushes toward me. “There’s a brand new misfortune a-brewing,” she says in an ominous almost chant. “With your cortex on a caper, you can carpe diem, rainbow warrior.” A broad smile suddenly splits across her face, and I jump when her clammy h
ands grip my cheeks as she yells “Seeeees the day!” before she plants a rough, sloppy kiss on my lips and twirls away. Then, she turns back, the smile replaced by an earnestness that I’ve never seen on Char’s face before. “Oh, and tell Allie to watch what she eats over Christmas. Sharp daisies can’t release the past. Love flows better than blood. So tell her I’m sorry, too.” Then she vanishes behind a giant tattooed bald man. And we disappear back out into the real world, where it’s snowing like a bastard.

  This isn’t pretty snow. This is tiny little pills pelting down, stinging, bouncing, accumulating quickly. The grey-white immovable bully of a sky fires a bazillion tight little spit balls at us, and the sidekick wind roars in taunting laughter, driving them even more sideways. Still, Gimp manages to get a joint lit before we reach the truck, making the walk through the hospital parking lot more amusing than Char’s cryptic craziness and this asshole weather stunt, combined.

  […]

  Behind the derelict old bank building looks like a place where bad things happen. The windows are boarded up. The cornerstone, eroded and crumbling. Ample evidence that artistically inclined chaps like “Sk8r H8r,” “Dickwad,” and “FCKTHAPOLICE” come straight here after they lift a can of spray paint from the hardware store. And bad things do happen here. At least they did the last time I was here with Weasel Tobin.

  We came to this parking lot on a “date” in the car he stole from his grandmother. While we were in the back seat fooling around, we heard yelling and screaming. Then we saw this big greasy old guy drag his big greasy old girlfriend into the alley, beat the piss out of her, and try to light her straggly bleached blonde hair on fire with a Zippo. The cops showed up, cuffed ’em, and chucked ’em in the paddy wagon. Just when we thought the coast was clear, an officer tapped on the window of Weasel’s grandmother’s car, told us to get dressed and come out for a chat. He asked what we saw. Not much, we said. The cop laughed, giving Weasel a wink and an elbow as he said, “Right on, brother!” and recommended a few alternative places to go parking before he left. Moments later, Weasel informed me that it was a good thing they didn’t search the car, what with two pounds of hash and five hundred hits of acid in the trunk. The guy who beat up his girlfriend was Moose Matheson, who Weasel was supposed to meet at Pott’s Coffee in an hour to make a delivery on behalf of Paco Landry. Willy chuckles when I tell him the story. I’m too stoned and too old to know if it’s funny or sad. Or both.