Even at the best of times, Richard resents these performances. George is a show-off. Just like he’s always been. From grade school to university. In the gyms and on the fields. A show-off. Stealing Richard’s ideas, following in his path while loudly proclaiming himself the leader. The whole thing hit its crazy peak when George actually wormed his way into the same international volunteer program as Richard, breaking the news via email: Looks like we’ll be sparring in Accra, old buddy. Better train up, eh?
So Richard fishes his keychain out of his pocket and clenches it in his right fist. No one notices him as he strides mightily across the gym and leaps into the ring, ducking the ropes and tearing off his shirt, gripping the legs of his snap-pants and ripping them clean off his body, watching as they float down to the floor, like leaves.
“George,” he says quietly, and the whole place is suddenly silent and calm.
“Dude,” George says. “What’re you doing?”
“Let’s go one round.”
George Ericson obliges. He skips over to the ring, his fists up all cocky and his unpunched mouth too full of that stupid laugh. Richard doesn’t have gloves or headgear. He doesn’t have a mouthguard, and he isn’t wearing his jock. But it doesn’t matter. He slides his front-door key between his clenched fingers. He waits in his corner, shifting from one foot to the other.
Way Down the Mercy Hole
I.
Someone abandoned a wicker basket on the crumbling step behind the parish, and a few of the kittens survived the night, their tangled laments floating throughout the misty woods behind the churchyard. In the morning, Ramona listened from the skeletal treeline, her bright pink rubber boots balanced on an imaginary tightrope taut between aspens, fog swirling on either side. The cats took shape in her mind, doomed and pathetic, and she knew she’d be the one to save them, even if it meant skipping Bible Study. This, after all, was a question of mercy, of creatures big and small. In His own mysterious way, God was testing her.
But she also knew she’d be caught, because Ms. Bacon taught Bible Study, and she was Ramona’s godmother. She’d been best friends with Ramona’s mom, who was dead now, gone, and she helped take care of Ramona, helped make sure she went to church and school. Right that very second, she was probably sitting at her desk, her crow’s feet expanding beneath a patina of yellow chalk. She was probably fluffing her wispy blond hair and hiding her boyish figure, and in her tired eyes the world could see her broken-down hatchback, cluttered apartment, and kneeling devotions. Even before the last of the students squeezed into their desks, Ms. Bacon would know Ramona had skipped, and she’d stop by her grandma’s house that afternoon, spitting accusations: Just like your mother when we were girls. But in the next breath she’d take habitual note of Ramona’s kindness, which she’d call enchanting, her mother’s living legacy, and there’d be no major punishment, not this time. The following week, however, Ramona would have to come in early and wash the blackboards.
Which was typical. Ramona always left early on Sundays, for a bunch of reasons, but mainly so she wouldn’t have to ride shotgun with Ernie, her grandma’s male nurse, ever grumbling and frustrated, his fingers on the steering wheel and coarse black hairs bursting from his nostrils and earlobes, from his throat and the backs of his hands, like he’d been frozen in the middle of an explosion. Anyway, her grandma couldn’t tell one way or the other if Ramona was in the car or in the woods or floating in the sky like a cloud. Her grandma didn’t even know enough to ask Ramona where to find the bathroom; she just pissed her diapers while staring at the back of her hands. Basically, her grandma was crazy. She was toys in the attic, like the guy in the Pink Floyd song, like the Aerosmith album crammed under the cellar steps with the rest of her mother’s bequeathed records.
These were all good reasons to walk to Bible Study, just like she did to normal school, and Ramona would remember them while getting dressed in her bedroom, which was in a dark corner of the house, where all the walls were cracked and worn, like Ernie’s leathery body.
She didn’t like to say it out loud, but Rodney was another reason she left early. Rodney Reynolds, whose parents were pig farmers along one of those gravel roads circling town like a bad haircut. Ramona always came to church from the woods behind, but Rodney’s parents dropped him off in the parking lot up front, which she could see from the slight, rocky hill where the trees thinned out. Even this time of year, he rode in the back of the family pickup, brown hair blown across his face, a plaid shirt tucked into his boot-fit jeans. His father, visible through the window with a baseball cap jammed over his square head, never said bye, just put the truck in gear and drove off the minute Rodney’s sneakers crunched the gravel.
Grub. Grubber. Grubby. No one ever called Rodney Reynolds by his Christian name. And if normal school for him was a torment, then Bible Study was only marginally less so. Rodney sat in his desk like a scarecrow, dirt and straw bursting out of his clothes, and the older kids hissed insults at him between prayers.
Ramona sat next to him over the summer, and she tried to lighten things up, suggesting that people call him R and R instead, for rest and relaxation, because wasn’t he always so still during Ms. Bacon’s Bible stories, the one about the angel who trumpets a bottomless pit into the Earth and all the locusts boil out, stinging like scorpions? Wasn’t he a young man in quiet repose? She thought she’d won him over, gained his confidence so she could approach him on these quiet mornings before class, when he paced the parking lot with his palms stuffed in his back pockets. But he jolted, showed her his dirty palms, and said, “Do these look like hands at fuckin’ rest, bitch?” She stared at her colour-by-numbers picture of Jesus curing the blind, and whispered, like wind to a meadow, “I didn’t mean it that way.”
Those were the reasons Ramona walked to church on Sundays, and they became the reasons she found the kittens. If she’d been in the car beside Ernie, she would’ve gotten to church at the same time as everyone else, and worse, she would’ve used the front door, not the back, and so all those abandoned animals would’ve been discovered by someone else — possibly Rodney, who though she didn’t want to believe him capable, might’ve drowned them for kicks in the church toilets. Either that or the shivering damp morning could’ve killed them all at once.
As it was, only a few of them were moving when Ramona peeked inside the basket, vapour rising from the corner of her mouth as she huffed. The others looked stiff, legs jammed out like autumn hedge branches, and bodies, when she poked their ribs, like moss on a cereal box. She covered the basket with the bright purple scarf her grandma had knitted while she was still sane. The kittens wriggled and mewed as she thumped home through the bare, black woods, her pigtails scratching against the hood of her raincoat.
At the house, she took the dead ones and left their bodies in the long, wet grass covering the backyard. There were four, and she made sure to leave them by the chain-link fence, where the ground sloped away, so Ernie wouldn’t step on one when he went out for his cigarettes. Two survived. One was very small with fur the colour of light smoke. The other was bigger, black with white patches, and it wrapped its body around the small one, blinked at Ramona and hissed as she removed their dead siblings.
The steps to the cellar were steep, almost vertical. Ramona had been terrified of the basement all her life because of the cold smell of concrete and pungent earth, the vague shadows and drifting cobwebs. But after Ernie became a fixture in the home, she learned to cherish it. When she hid down there, he couldn’t see her through the creaking floorboards. He couldn’t corner her in the confined kitchen, show her the scars on his bare abdomen. “Knife wounds,” he’d say, with a serious nod of his narrow face, slash scars from when he was a nightshift medic in the city. “The world is an ugly ball of shit, Ramona. You just can’t be too gentle out there, can you?” And all around those long, sloping scars were blotchy ones, from cigarette burns, which were so much whiter than the rest of his f
lesh, whiter and deader.
Ernie’s aggression felt different from Rodney’s. Ernie’s was all offence, a subterranean force ploughing to the surface. He always knew where Ramona was. He’d even open the cellar door and shout her name. But he never came down the dusty wooden steps, no matter how mad he got.
The big kitten was not afraid of the cellar like Ernie, but the little one was. Ramona hefted their basket under the stairs, placed it among her mom’s record collection, and got the cats two bowls of milk. The bigger one leapt out, purring and threading its body between her legs as it circled the dish, then started to drink. The little one was slower, clumsier, pining to be sheltered by the other one and ignoring the milk until it was. Watching them, her chin in her palm and elbow on the cement floor, Ramona lost track of time.
When the front door slammed, the kittens stiffened and scrambled back into the basket, the big one covering the little. Flecks of dust fell from the cellar’s rotting rafters. Her grandma was cursing — cocksucker! cocksucker! — and Ernie’s heavy feet scrambled behind her. Ramona imagined it clearly: He was simultaneously trying to close the door and stop her grandma from walking into furniture or into the wall, or heading for the kitchen to brandish knives.
Then she heard Ms. Bacon shouting her name, shrill, like a woman storming a crime scene: “Ramona! Ramona! Why weren’t you at Bible Study?”
Ramona reached into the basket to pet the cats, but the big one hissed again, so she snapped her hand away and tried to reassure them by nudging the milk closer to the basket. They burrowed under the scarf, ignoring her overture. “I’ll be back,” she whispered, her voice like telepathy.
The wooden stairs shuddered under her feet. The cellar door opened onto the kitchen, and Ernie was there, his white Sunday dress shirt half tucked into a pair of brown corduroy pants. He stood like a football tackle, bowlegged, arms cranked out from his sides, shoulders broad and poised. His stiff fingers were stained with nicotine, clenching and unclenching as he circled.
“Watch me in action, Ramona.” He flipped his chin at her grandma, who was in a nimble mood, swaying around the kitchen, long grey hair like smoke billowing from a fire. Her fists were shaking, and Ramona could smell the hardboiled eggs oozing through her fingers. “Just bathed her this morning. Won’t have this mess.” Ernie moved toward her, gingerly at first, trying to get a visual lock on her hovering wrists, the squished egg whites sliding to the linoleum — and then he lunged, grunting before he even closed his grip.
Her grandma screeched and pissed as she spun. “Cocksucker!”
Later, after Ernie changed her grandma’s diaper and managed to get her into bed, while he was in the bathroom washing squished eggs off his face, Ms. Bacon sat with Ramona in the living room, the two of them studying the mantle full of her grandpa’s fishing trophies and a framed and faded picture of her mother, pregnant and smiling.
“You miss your mom?” Ms. Bacon had a slight smile on her face, as if the egg-squishing episode had pushed her anger away. “I mean, you can know someone from the inside like that, you know. Because you’re still you, even when you’re only that tiny. That’s what your mom said when you were all wrapped up. She said, my little girl, look how tiny. So you can miss her, even if you don’t remember.”
Beneath the floorboards, under the stairs, curled up in a basket and covered with a scarf, the kittens were mewing.
Upstairs, Ms. Bacon was blabbering. “You help Ernie with your grandma, right? Because I know your mom would like it if you did. I mean, Ernie’s real good and everything else, and we’re lucky to have my insurance settlement. Because how else would we pay the man? I saved it for a family crisis and your mom would adore Ernie, just like we do, but she’d want you to help, even if sometimes it’s a little tough.”
The bathroom faucet fell silent and they both listened to Ernie thrashing the hand towel hung on the metal ring by the door. His feet landed heavily on the floor in the hallway. He stuck his head in the living room, said he was going for his break and he’d be back for supper.
Ms. Bacon smiled at him, her cheeks blushing. She stopped talking and they both listened as his car door slammed in the driveway. The engine shrieked and surged and the suspension bounced as he backed into the road.
“I should get going now, honey,” Ms. Bacon said. “You know where the number is, right? Same place as always. Right there on the fridge. You can always come home with me if you need to, right? Your mother would understand if that’s the way it’s got to be. But you need to be sure. You need to honour your mother.”
She paused in the foyer, cocked her head at Ramona’s rubber boots and pressed her index finger to her lips. “You know, maybe a twelve-year-old girl shouldn’t be wearing silly boots like these anymore. You’re almost a woman. Right?”
II.
Ramona named the little cat Poof and the big one Bruises. She found a TV box behind the grocery store and filled it with gravel from the parking lot — homemade kitty litter — and she slid it into the far end of the cellar, under metal shelves warped from the weight of her grandpa’s forgotten tools. Bruises staked out all the shadowy corners, sliding in and out of the clammy gloom. He climbed the shelves, patrolled the rafters. He flattened himself in the webby nooks and drifted into catnaps.
At first, Poof stayed in the basket. She peered over the edge, ears up, head tracking Bruises as he slunk around the cellar, and whenever she lost sight of him she mewed. Ramona brought tins of tuna downstairs and Bruises padded out of the shadows, purring. He devoured the fish, bringing only scraps to Poof.
By midweek, Poof ventured out of the basket, trailing behind Bruises until he slipped into the shadows; then she skidded back to the scarf. When Ramona brought the tuna down, Poof tried to shove her way to the rim of the tin, but Bruises swatted her off. She hunkered under the scarf, jilted, and waited her turn.
By the end of the week, with a stiffening of the Earth, autumn relented to winter. Damp leaves froze to forest floors. The house creaked and shifted in the bitter nights and frost spread through the long grass in the yard. Ramona bundled blankets in her arms and brought them to the cat basket. Already Bruises was bored of the cellar. He waited by the door, trying to skirt past her when she opened it every morning, and the smell of tuna was the only thing that lured him back downstairs.
Saturday morning, Ernie took Ramona for a drive, leaving her grandma in a pharmaceutical coma. He wore a knitted black toque so that his clean-shaven face glowed white against a backdrop of frazzled threads and thick, curling hair. He told her he’d found a good deal on winter tires for Ms. Bacon’s hatchback, that he would need her to help load them into the car, and together they set out along the bumpy roads outside town. Ernie drove a boat-sized sedan, and it clattered over the frozen potholes. He listened to classic rock on the stereo, full volume, nodding his head and tapping his fingers on the gearshift.
Along the way, they passed the Reynolds’ farmhouse, a shoddy home scraped out of the black, icy muck that surrounded it for miles. Strewn about like bomb debris were sheets of rusted metal, bundles of razor wire, chunks of cinderblock, scraps of wood. On the edge of the property, dressed only in a T-shirt, Rodney laboured with a shovel, huge clouds of vapour rising from his lips as he pounded the frozen ground, apparently trying to dig postholes. He heard the car coming and looked up from his work. His hands must’ve been sweaty, because they were steaming in the cold. Ramona offered a tiny wave as they drove past. He spat, flipping his middle finger.
“Look at that poor, ugly fucker,” Ernie said. He smiled, teeth shellacked with nicotine. “Imagine living way the hell out here? Bad enough in town. Guy selling these tires probably looks like some cracker from Deliverance.”
The guy turned out to be Mr. Winslow, a dairy farmer who drove his jersey cows into town every year for the county fair. He stood in his driveway as they pulled in, hands in the pockets of his coveralls, rubber boots up to his knees.
His face and neck were furrowed with deep, vertical lines, and Ramona imagined him bursting into ribbons, like those cheese string snacks her grandma used to pack for her lunch.
“Winter’s here again,” Mr. Winslow said, turning his head to the vague, grey sky. He nodded at Ernie, extended his rough palm between them. “Everything dies till spring. Brutal, you want to know what I think.”
Ernie lit a cigarette, exhaled a jet of smoke above Mr. Winslow’s head, and roughly shook his hand. “Let’s see these tires. And I’ll be choosy about the treads. There’s such a thing as too used, you get me?”
“Not out here, sir.” Mr. Winslow stuffed his hands into the pockets of his overalls. “Everything’s got its place, especially an honest buck between neighbours.”
Ernie snorted. A straggling thread of smoke vanished back up his nostril. “Let’s see them.”
The tires were under a blue tarp in Mr. Winslow’s barn. Ernie crouched down, ran his fingers over the treads, and Ramona averted her eyes from the patch of hairy skin that emerged from his beltline. Mr. Winslow kept his hands in his pockets, hummed softly and tilted his head from side to side.
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “Yeah, they’re good. Roll them to the car, Ramona. Should be able to fit all four in the back seat.”
The rubber was cold and hard. She struggled to get one on its side, resenting Ernie for standing there, watching, cigarette between his lips and his fingers counting out money from a billfold. He handed over a wad of cash, plucked the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it into the corner of the barn. Mr. Winslow raised an eyebrow, covered the distance in a few strides, and ground the butt beneath his boot.
“So you work for the family, then?”
A Plea for Constant Motion Page 18