Lost Boys

by Darci Bysouth

  “I tell you the one about the bucker split his head open in a kickback accident?”

  He had, but we stayed quiet.

  “Found him sitting on a stump trying to hold his face together. Chrissakes, what a mess. Blood all over hell’s half acre and he’s mumbling, ‘Hey Vera, don’t you worry none, Vera, it’s all gonna come out in the wash.’ We couldn’t do nothing for him and the poor guy bled out on the way to town. So. We get this replacement bucker. Guy’s half Blackfoot, don’t say much but got that look about him, like he knows a helluva lot more than he’s telling. So he quits after a week and we ask him, hey chief, what’s the story? You know what he says?”

  We did, but we kept our mouths shut.

  “He says, he says he can’t stand that guy with his head in his hands and his ass parked on a stump. Doesn’t do a lick of work and never shuts up about Vera.”

  A long silence. Then Dad would burst out laughing and we would echo him, our faces mushed to his chest. Head in his hands, ass on a stump. Vera. But we knew not to laugh about kickback; that wasn’t funny.

  Dad would shift position and we would wait, perfectly still, listening to his breath rumbling in and out.

  “And the faller, out there in the middle of a cut block? You hear that one?”

  I’d glance across at my brother, who’d have his eyes half-closed and a thumb in his mouth.

  “So it’s first thing in the morning and no one around and the faller’s looking at the stand, planning his approach or maybe just scratching his balls, yah, who knows with fallers. Next thing he knows he’s waking up in hospital, with a helluva headache and missing every day of that week ending with ‘y’. They show him his hard hat, it’s been split in two. He can’t remember nothing. So I check out the cut block. And what do I find? Nothing. Nothing there, nothing that coulda done that, no deadfall, no unstable slope. Nothing.”

  We knew our lines.

  “Sasquatch!”

  “Meteorite!”

  “Meteorite? Chrissakes.”

  My dad would grunt at my brother, then cuff him gently on the head and pull us in closer for the next story.

  “This one’s mine. This one happened to me.”

  We’d quiet down. It had happened to him. This was something; this was the truth.

  “So I’m end of a shift cutting swamp. It’s end of the day and end of the week and I just want to come home to your mom. Swamp can do a number on you, yah? Nothing there but black spruce, and that black spruce is all the same. Bunched and poking up like fingers. Nothing but shadow underneath. You can lose time in the swamp. You can lose your way. And it’s getting dark. But I want to get the job done so I keep going. Finally I cut my saw, and when the echo fades there’s this silence. No birds, no bush noise, not even the wind. But I get a feeling of something there. Moose, I’m thinking, grizzly maybe. Something standing dead still, checking me out. The rifle’s in the truck and the truck’s across the swamp, and there’s a couple hundred feet between me and it. I haul ass. I think I got time, if what’s coming is far enough away. But the truck isn’t where I left it. I do a full 360, then again, eyes going tick tick tick, passing along the treeline like hands on a clock. No truck. Even worse, I can’t see the road I came in on. Damn swamp spruce looks all the same. It’s getting dark; it feels like hours since I finished up. I start walking. I walked outta worse. I know you gotta keep moving. I stop after ten minutes, fifteen maybe, and I’m no farther out of the swamp. By now I’m spooked. I feel like turning on my chainsaw just for the company, you know? It’s so damn quiet. So that’s when I see him. He’s standing on a log with his head hanging. Light’s gone now, but I can tell he’s old by the way he holds himself . . . shoulders sunk in, hands picking at nothing. Too old to be out there. I call out “Hi howya!” and he don’t say nothing back. And I’m thinking maybe he’s deaf . . . maybe he’s an old prospector or a bush elder, and he’s wandered off and got himself lost. Could be somebody’s looking for him right now. So I’m about to holler again when I notice something else. Something about the way he’s standing. He don’t have any boots on. His feet are bone white and bare, and he’s got his toes curled over the log like he swooped in and landed there. Like he’s got reason to be in the middle of that damn swamp with the dark closing in. And I’m thinking what if he’s not lost? What if he’s just waiting? Then he raises his head and I know he’s gonna look at me and I don’t even stop to think, I pull the cord on the chainsaw. Next thing I know, I’m standing by the truck. Chainsaw still going.”

  “Did you kill him?” My brother asked once.

  “Chrissakes. You think I could?” My dad stared at my brother but it was me he was talking to.

  We grew older and Dad stopped tucking us in for the night. We forgot the story of the old man, and the Sasquatch and the kickback. Dad’s back slipped a few notches, and he left the black spruce for a lumberyard where he sold lengths of wood laced together with strapping tape and stories. We got jobs and we got married, and by the time my brother’s oldest and my youngest were in university, Dad was repeating the plots of sitcoms like they’d happened to him. The neighbour found him in the driveway one morning, hip cracked on the concrete. He’d been up the ladder after a wasp’s nest. The damn things were getting into the house and buzzing around his head, keeping him up half the night and ‘scaring the hell outta Donna.’ It was November and mom had been dead since the spring.

  The nursing home is nice one. They have a real tree for Christmas and daffodils in purple vases for Easter. They keep pods of air freshener plugged into the sockets so you can’t smell anything over the scent of pine. My dad parks his wheelchair in the lounge and sits in it with his big hands worrying his cuffs and his belly like a flat tire. He keeps kicking off his foam slippers and his long toes curl over his footrest. The nurses say he isn’t any trouble.

  Sometimes my brother phones to ask if I want to visit Dad. I tell my wife I need tiles for the roof or gas for the lawnmower or a walk to clear my head. I don’t know what my brother tells his family. We find Dad in the lounge and I pull up a chair. My brother parks himself on the sofa arm and jiggles his knee. We wait for Dad to begin.

  Sometimes he talks of his logging days, pranks and grudges, the big equipment and the bad accidents. Kickback and cut blocks. The old stories. Most days he says nothing. A few weeks back he hadn’t greeted us, hadn’t seemed to know us. He’d stared out the window, his eyes watery and his fingers plucking. Bewildered.

  “Seen the old man last night. Just standing there. Why don’t he talk to me, say something?”

  We’d told him we were here, we would talk to him.

  His hand had slapped his paper cup of apple juice and the liquid had hit the floor like a puddle of pee. We’d called the nurse and left, not looking at each other.

  “You remember that story?” my brother had asked in the elevator.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think he saw?”

  I’d stayed quiet. I couldn’t give him the answer he wanted.

  Today Dad is calm. The nurses say he’s had a good night, he’s on new meds. His hands are still now and his fingers curl over the padded armrests. His gaze passes over me and my brother, over the muted television to the rubber tree to the darkened window.

  “Old man. Just standing there, don’t say a damn thing.”

  His eyes tick across the wall to the door, making a full sweep of the room until they come back to the window.

  “Says nothing, but he sees me. He sees me. That’s something, yah?”

  THE HITCHHIKER

  WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES, I see the moon. I see the moon with its bruised skin glowing and its mouth fallen in, with its eyes pitted and sightless as a potato. I see its high distant sheen and the darkness lying beneath. On nights like these, I go driving.

  The moon is full, or it is not there at all, or it is impossible to tell behind a scud of night clouds. Sometimes the air sticks to my skin, other times the cold scrapes at my nostrils and throa
t. The pavement is slicked with rain or dull with heat, scattered with brittle leaves or sticky with small deaths. She would have mourned them, these clumps of dumb scales and unlucky fur. She was the kind of girl who’d bury a cricket found behind the radiator in spring, who’d swear she’d heard it chirp its death song in November.

  I drive out of our suburbs with the streetlights ticking by as steady as a metronome, past the buffer zone of parks and factory outlets, and into the industrial estates. Here there are chain link fences and shadows, the occasional camera mounted high up on a steel pike. One of those cameras took her last portrait. The moon was extraordinarily bright that night; it gleamed off her bare legs under denim shorts and caught on the sparkly bag over her shoulder. She wasn’t dressed for the April weather and they didn’t think that she’d planned to be gone long. The last message on her phone was to her best friend. Don’t find love, it said. Let love find you. Her screensaver was a sunset, overlaid with words looped in some ornate script. Everything affects everything. They’d found the phone in a vacant lot next to the sewage treatment plant.

  The shadows mesh together under the moon, the parking lights, the lit up factories. Here a criss-cross of chain link, there a smudge of an elm still standing. I look for movement and see the glimmer of a crushed chip wrapper or a tattered plastic bag waving from the dead brush. I drive and I look for the rolling walk, the flash of pale skin.

  Sometimes when the moon is bright and the light is right, I see her.

  I coast to a stop and pop the passenger door. I wait.

  There’s the sigh of air, the soft weight of her settling next to me. Sometimes she laughs, more often there’s a crinkle of foil and a snick of her lighter as she sparks up a cigarette. She’s not supposed to smoke but we are past pretending now.

  I know better than to look at her.

  I turn the ignition and roll back onto the road. I focus on the white centre line until the shadows blur, until the periphery is a dark tunnel, and I am the one who is still while the world moves through me.

  I can smell her shower gel, the one she’d used that evening, under the cigarette smoke. Vanilla Bliss. Fruity shampoo and a hint of cherry lip gloss; the scent of her bedroom when I’d dump her laundry on the bed. “Fold your own damn clothes,” I’d say. “I’m not your mother.”

  “I know that,” she’d say, and smile, and ask me to make lasagne for dinner, or drive her to the pool, or lend her a twenty for the school dance. Not fooled by the gruff daddy act.

  I drive, and I wait for her to talk.

  I wait, because I’ve learned after that first time. The moonlight, the gleam of sequins and the flash of her long white legs, and how I’d lurched to a stop, how I’d called after her until my voice cawed like a crow, until the dark closed in on nothing. The second time was different. I’d sworn to keep going, to get through it, but my heart had been pulled like water down a drain and I’d had to stop, throw open the door and let the night air fill my lungs. When I’d shifted back onto the road her hand closed over my wrist and I nearly swerved into the ditch. How she’d laughed.

  And I’d talked, then. My words unspooled like barbed wire, tearing chunks of throat and gibbets of tongue in between the tears and snot.

  What were you thinking, what were you doing out there alone?

  Who, I’d asked. Who was it? Some rat ass boy? A man? Was it a man?

  Was it your mother? Was it something she did, something she said?

  Was it me?

  Why did you leave me?

  Why did you?

  Why?

  And when I’d finished talking, the seat was empty. I pulled over to make sure, to check the back and put my hand on the leather. Cold. Nothing but the old blood stink of my grief in the car.

  So now I drive and stay silent.

  There’s the exhale of her cigarette. A waft of vanilla. I sense her smiling in the dark.

  I write down what she says when I get home. I have quite the collection.

  My thumbs, daddy. The world is decided by my thumbs on a 6 by 3 screen, oh those instant likes and casual cuts, you don’t know. What it’s like.

  I like my skin to look airbrushed and my hair glossed. I want to be as smooth as those girls in the magazines. I suck in my stomach until it’s concave and I shadow my eyes to show their want.

  What I want? I want what everyone wants. I want to be loved to be known to be understood.

  Just kidding. I want ice cream, I want to eat ice cream until my brain grows stalactites and my gut freezes fast, but I still want to be skinny. I want to dance crazy-like in the living room and try on all your ties and scream with the weather, I want to do all this without my Adderall being upped. I want to plug in my music and drown out your voices, I want to do this without anyone bitching about depression.

  My music, daddy. My music comes from girls with flowers in their hair and tigers at their feet, who sing of a pretty death.

  My art, daddy? My art is the dirty words we scrawl on crumbling brick of the bridge.

  My art is the razor notches on my thighs, oh God, daddy how I love those little mouths chafing against my jeans.

  My art is denial.

  But daddy, don’t worry. I’m fine. I’m good.

  I was never a problem, was I?

  Tonight my daughter is quiet. She reaches forward to tap her cigarette into the empty Starbucks mug I’ve left in the cup holder. I think I see a flash of white wrist but I don’t look too hard. I drive past the furniture warehouse and I concentrate on the white line, on stilling my breathing. We haven’t got much time left.

  Do you ever go into my room? she says.

  Sometimes.

  Did you find the weed?

  It doesn’t matter. I’m trying to keep my voice steady.

  Bet you smoked it. She laughs. You dork.

  Something scurries across the road, pauses, wings back the other way.

  Sometimes when I was stoned? I used to think I heard the waves coming in, going out. Do you remember when you and mom took us to Tofino? When we were all still together? That was the best. The waves, they were so big they sucked the sand out from under our feet and we couldn’t tell what was moving, us or the water. You kept screaming at us to come in. Jason got that rash, sand fleas or something, but mom thought it was measles and totally freaked, and you went to get ice cream. Like that was going to help.

  She laughs, exhales. But it was better. When we were all together.

  I know.

  Your girlfriend’s stupid. She smells like Juicy Fruit and thinks ‘inneresting’ is a word.

  I know.

  But whatever. If she makes you happy.

  Was it that, I want to ask. Did you go because of her?

  The lights of the sewage treatment plant are coming up, their grid work of lights faint stars in the haze.

  It wasn’t her. That night. She wasn’t even there, remember? My daughter can sometimes read me, hang the answers on the hooks I leave in the night. If I stay silent. You remember what you said to me? That night?

  No.

  I can feel her fading, floating free with every turn of the tires.

  Tell me.

  Please.

  But she’s gone. I pull over so I can lean my head on the steering wheel, so I can remember the sound of her voice, so I can replay her words until they’ve worn a groove through my brain.

  I’m in no hurry to be home, to turn out the lights and lock in the night, to dream. To dream of her sauntering away from me, plugged in and heedless of the road falling away ahead, deaf to the crashing waves from some place impossibly far below. I open my mouth to scream a warning and the sand tumbles out. Sometimes I dream of silence. A scatter of bones in a ditch, bindweed knotting through the slats of a ribcage.

  I will do this drive again. Some night when the moon is full or slivered or not there at all, a black hole hung in its place. I will stop under the high hazy glare of the industrial lights, and lean across the seat to pop open the door. I will wait.<
br />
  She’ll get in with a rush of shampoo and vanilla. Maybe she’ll be smoking, maybe she won’t.

  Do you remember? she’ll ask. What you said, that night?

  No, I’ll say. Tell me.

  She’ll laugh. You were in a crappy mood. On your third beer.

  Tell me.

  Love. You said love is nothing. You said love fades along with everything else. That the idea of love sours and the flesh falls off it. That love is an invention of the young, something to sugarcoat the shit to come.

  I’ll concentrate on my driving. On the white line leading into the darkness.

  Oh daddy, she’ll laugh. Love is everything.

  And I’ll drive, I’ll drive until her laughter dissolves in the dark and the white line blurs and floats upward, until the moon appears or does not. Until I am not sure whether it is me moving or the night passing through.

  WEIGHTING DOWN THE DARK

  SACRIFICE

  THE OTHERS HAD FELT IT coming. Afterwards, they would each describe a sudden pull towards their children, an urge to call someone, a kind of thrum along the spider silk that connected them to their families. Each knew it to be a warning, but would not mention it out loud, because. Because such warnings came a dime a dozen to mothers. Because they saw these things on the news daily. Because to say it out loud could draw it here, could make it happen to them and their children. Afterwards, each would be able to pinpoint the thing they did differently that day, the subtle adjustment they made so that their families remained intact. But Rachel had felt nothing.

  Rachel remembers this: it’s a day early in spring, the kind of day that delights in contradicting itself. Here and there a tuft of virgin grass sprouts while drifts of old snow cling in the shade, and the stench of spongy lawns and thawing dog turds mingles with an almost Mediterranean scent of box hedges. Not that Rachel would know what the Mediterranean smells like, but she imagines it to be a cross between dried rosemary and the Song of Santorini bath oil she uses on a Tuesday night because this is their night, the night he is most likely to call. Or it was. Before. But now the robins have returned home; they’re bunched together in the greening branches, rusty-voiced and querulous before pairing for the nesting season. The weather is mild enough to walk to work, and she is doing so with a case of cupcakes clenched in one hand, careful not to jostle them because the icing is still soft and likely to smear. The children carol from the playground, unzipped and bareheaded, for there’s some heat to the sun. A clattering skateboard startles her and the cupcakes slam against her thigh. A boy in baggy shorts calls something over his shoulder . . . cruise by? so fly? . . . and rattle-thumps from the sidewalk to the street, and she thinks he could have been hers if she had gone through with it, if things had turned out differently. Oh but you’re so gentle, so calm! the women at the office say, why didn’t you have babies? That low confiding tone, that stabbing sympathy. Rachel always laughs and blames a surfeit of steadfast men, or casts her eyes down and hints at biological disappointment. But what could she have done given the circumstances? She holds her clutch of cupcakes tight and thinks it’s just as well she’s nestled sugar eggs in the pastel icing. Today is the first day of spring break and there may be children visiting the office.