by Nora Decter
Matt climbed the tree in long, practiced motions, grabbing on to knots he’d held countless times before. Soon he was high above us, calling down, “Where do you want it?”
Maggie and Char egged him into climbing higher, and he did, ascending to where the branches began to bend deeply under his weight. We stood silent, heads craned back as he moved out along a branch, grasping the ghost by its neck like he was its captor. He tested his weight one foot at a time, going beyond where he reasonably needed to, like he was trying to prove something.
“That’s good enough!” I said, but not loudly enough for him to hear. I held my breath the whole time it took for Matt to tie the ghost up tight and inch back down, moving confidently again when he reached the solid lower branches.
We cheered when his feet hit the ground. Up and down the street, people turned. It did look great, the stark white of the sheet standing out against the trees above us, the ghost dancing this way and that in the wind.
“I knew it’d look good up there,” said Maggie, puffing on a smoke.
“Your mom’s got a good eye,” Char said. A vampire and a gorilla hauling pillowcases of loot raced up our path, shouting, “Trick or treat!” with unchecked glee.
“Sorry, kids, no candy,” Maggie said.
“You didn’t get candy?” Matt asked.
“Go to that yellow house down the street!” Char said, snapping her gum. “They’re giving out full-size bags of Hickory Sticks.” She turned to Maggie. “Jarvis stole ’em off the back of the delivery truck.” They roared with laughter.
Matt and I went out to buy some candy. By the time we got back, the trick-or-treating had slowed, so we sat on the front steps and ate ourselves sick on Rockets and Tootsie Rolls as the ghost swung back and forth above us.
The next day it snowed, and it was too dangerous for Matt to climb up and cut the ghost down. By springtime my brother was gone. So it stayed, our funny front-yard ghost, because I couldn’t climb that high even if I tried.
SIX
It must be hereditary, the low-life gene, because as soon as I start thinking about how to make some money, my mind goes to pawning and pushing. Matt would kill me. He’s not here, though, so I run through a list of things I could hawk in my head. The guitars, but that’s not an option. I could sell some of my books, my vinyl, but at two bucks here, three bucks there, it’s not worth the trouble. I could beg Cory to give me an ounce of weed on credit, but being a drug dealer requires people skills I sure as shit don’t have.
Four hundred bucks. A lot of money for someone who has none. And I don’t just need to pay off the phone bill. When I leave I’m going to need a chunk of change. A pretty serious chunk.
Who am I kidding? I’m not a criminal. I lack the self-confidence required to break laws. But I’m able-bodied and hardworking. I can get a new job.
Even though they haven’t called me in the last six months, I swing by the frozen-yogurt stand anyway. Rhonda, the manager, is behind the counter, flipping through a gossip magazine. She keeps a stack of them beside the till. She squeals when she sees me.
“Jolene! How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Yeah? School’s good? Family doing all right?”
“Yup, stuff’s good.” Rhonda knows Maggie and has a tabloid-like fascination with my mother’s messiness. She’s always fishing for a new Maggie story. “I was wondering, do you think you’ll have any shifts for me coming up?”
“Shit, sweetheart. That’s a no-go, I’m afraid. We’d love to have you back in July, but things are slow as molasses right now. It’s colder here than it is on Mars, you know.”
“I heard. Well, thanks anyway.”
“How’s your mom doing?”
“Fine.”
“Ya sure?”
“Pretty sure, Rhonda.”
She force-feeds me a cup of piña colada and reads aloud a story about the anorexia pandemic among young Hollywood starlets. “Look how skinny that one is,” she sighs.
After that I go to the library to print out a copy of my sad résumé. I actually got an A on this piece of shit for school. In order to compensate for a lack of any actual work experience, we were told to emphasize our skills. It’s all lies. Am I a reliable person? Maybe. Do I have strong communication skills? Ha. Am I a team player? As a rule I do not join teams or clubs. Do I qualify as a self-starter? Perhaps, but that depends on what you need started. And when you need it started. And why. And whether I’m reading a particularly good book that day.
I walk through the mall but can’t bring myself to hand out any résumés. I do try—I sit in the food court, filling out an application for the bagel place, until a security guard approaches to tell me I’ve exceeded the thirty-minute loitering allowance and could I please move on. They’ve been cracking down on food court drug deals. I leave. Didn’t want a career in bagels anyway.
Outside, the streets are almost empty. Three guys huddle together in a bus shelter, passing around a bottle of Listerine, choice poison in these parts. The wind’s real bad, but I pull my scarf over my face bandit style and bear it.
The professor in that class the other day said weather can be a character unto itself in literature. It moves the plot forward. It echoes what’s going on in characters’ lives. It interferes.
I slip, pause, and just when I get my grip on the ground, I’m sliding again. I wonder what this weather says about the novel of my life. The unsteady rhythm of my boots on the ground says nothing good, nothing good.
The familiar logo of the company sign catches my eye as I walk by, even though I’ve got my eyes on the ground, trying not to fall. I peer through the fence next to a sign that reads Caution! Men Working Overhead and don’t see Jim, but I do see Gord, one of my uncles.
“Hey, Gord!” He’s smoking and looking at a clipboard while some of his guys load debris into the back of a truck. “Gord!”
He looks up, yells, “Who’s that?”
I stick my face up to the fence. “It’s Jo. My dad around?”
“Oh, hey, Jo. He’s over on the McDermot side. You want me to get him?”
“No, that’s okay. I’ll go find him.”
“There’s an entrance around the corner.” He points.
“Cool. Thanks.” I start in that direction.
“And put on a hard hat, you hear?”
“I will!”
It’s a big job. A whole square block around an old warehouse has been fenced off. I haven’t seen Jim in a couple of weeks. Last I checked, they were gutting a video store. I find the gap in the fence and go in. There’s a trailer nearby, so I head there first. Jim’s not in it, but I do find myself a hard hat. They had a workplace death a few years ago and since then have to be way serious about that stuff. Even Jim, who is neither safe nor serious.
I think I see him over by a truck and wave, and then I yell, “Hey, Dad!” because I realize that with the hard hat on, in my usual utilitarian winter garb, I don’t look all that different from the rest of his crew. They don’t call him Dad though.
“Jo! What are you doing here?”
He comes over and gives me a hug, thumping me on the back for too long.
“I was just walking by and thought I’d say hi.”
“Amazing!” he practically shouts. “What a great surprise!”
We go into the trailer to get out of the cold, and he makes us hot chocolate and beams at me. “So,” he says, “what’s new, Champ?”
Jim is a bit tricky. I have to come up with something to tell him so he’ll keep beaming, but it has to be the right thing. I can’t tell him how I’ve slowly stopped going to school, at first because everybody looked at me and now because they don’t look at me at all and it turns out maybe it’s worse that way. It’s what I wanted, but it’s worse. I can’t tell him that sometimes when I come over and we hang out, it’s been a day or two since I’ve said much out loud, and my voice sounds strange to my ears. I can’t tell him how I much I want to leave or how I’m afraid I migh
t someday, like tomorrow or the day after that. And how I’m afraid leaving might be like other things I thought I wanted and then, after I got them, it turned out I didn’t. I don’t tell him how afraid I am. Of everything. How I see danger everywhere. How sometimes when I try to sleep at night I see a roof collapsing on him at work, or the floor caving in, or I see him falling. How I see Maggie plowing the car into a tree or the river or something else that seems harmless until it’s not. I don’t tell him how sometimes I think I’m right when I’m wrong. Really right when I’m really, really wrong. And so it’s not just that I don’t trust other people. I don’t trust myself.
I don’t tell him these things so that he won’t say they’re amazing. Because Jim thinks everything is amazing. And everything is not.
“Well, I like my English class, I guess. The teacher’s pretty all right.” I stop talking as a dude comes into the trailer, nods at us and begins to root around in the corner for something.
“Amazing! Hey, Bryan, this is my kid! She’s way smarter than all of you doobs. Way too good for you too. Stop looking at her.” Bryan nods and leaves, nonplussed. I think the crew is used to Jim.
I ramble on. “I’ve been working on some songs? I dunno if they’re any good though. They’re sort of different. I can’t play like Matt yet, but…”
Fuck.
He takes his hat off. Puts it back on. Drains his hot-chocolate cup, but it’s already empty, so he throws it at the garbage can. Misses. Swears. Goes to pick it up. Opens the trailer door and looks out. Yells at someone. I fucked up and talked about Matt. I’m not supposed to. But it’s hard. When all Jim wants me to do is tell him about my life, and I don’t have one. I always say something wrong, some kind of reminder. Because really, almost everything can be traced back to Matt.
I get sad, and Jim notices. That usually helps. If I get sadder than him. That tips the scales. “All right, come on, kiddo. We need some of your expertise upstairs.”
“Yeah?”
“Grab that sledgehammer over there and follow me. Are those boots steel-toed?”
They’re not, but close enough. I nod and follow him into the building, which has already been stripped and readied for demolition. He shows me how to check that the wall isn’t load bearing, that there are no plumbing or electrical lines in the way, even though I know they’ve checked already. Jim only ever lets me smash nice clean walls.
“What do ya think, Champ?”
I appraise the wall, searching for the sweet spot. “Right there?” I point.
He nods. I swing. The sledgehammer lodges in the wall with a satisfying thunk, and when I yank it out the drywall splits right up the middle. I hit it again.
When we’re done, the wall’s been reduced to a pile of rubbish on the floor. I’m out of breath, and he looks pleased. “You’re pretty good at that!”
I get an idea. “Do you think I could work for you sometimes?”
He blinks. “Like, doing demo?”
“Yeah. I’ll do anything though. I could use the cash.”
He’s already reaching for his wallet and giving me forty bucks. “What do you need cash for? You should focus on your studies, Jo. You’re so smart. You just buckle down and get into a good university. Maybe get some scholarships. You don’t want to work with these chumps.” He points out a couple of them and whispers, “They’re all fresh out of Stony anyway.”
This is the prison north of the city.
“It’s one thing to come by and get some ya-yas out, but I don’t want you working with these losers.” A couple of these losers are near enough to hear him and look over. “What are you looking at? Get back to work! Can’t you see we’re having father-daughter time over here?” He presses the twenties into my hand. “Is that enough?” he asks. “You need bus fare? New clothes? How about a new guitar? I can take you to Long & McQuade after work. I’ve been meaning to take my bass in anyways. What do ya say?”
It’s not the first time he’s tried to take me to the music store and get me a new guitar. “It’s okay, Dad. That’s enough. Thank you.”
Jim is Dad to his face and Jim behind his back. He’s less vain and more sentimental than Maggie, who is always Maggie, never Mom. I don’t have the heart to tell him I need four hundred bucks to pay off Maggie for my making phone calls he wouldn’t have the heart to hear about. And I don’t have the heart to tell him I need to amass a nest egg big enough to get me far away from this city and set me up somewhere that doesn’t resemble here at all, not even a little bit. I don’t have the heart for anything, so I just pick up the sledgehammer and knock down another wall.
The schedule for my movements between parental homes has unraveled. I go to Jim’s when I can’t stand Maggie. I go to Maggie’s when I can’t stand Jim. I’d ricochet more often between the two, but for Howl’s sake I mostly stay at Maggie’s. Howl is happier there, and in terms of creature comforts, so am I. Like I said, the basement is my refuge. I’d hide out down there reading and listening to records and practicing guitar all the time if it weren’t for the wrath of Maggie, not to mention the risk of vitamin D deficiency and the fact there isn’t a bathroom.
There’s also the fact that my uncle Gord moved into Jim’s place last summer when his wife left him. I think the idea was that they’d help each other out of their respective ruts, but from what I can see they’ve only gotten more comfortable. They live in the house Jim bought just south of the city after he and Maggie split when I was eight. Jim’s place was new when he bought it, but that was a long time ago now, and in the last year especially it’s gotten a bit gross—neither of them are big on housework, and Jim started fostering cats a while back. I used to try to clean up, but it’s hard to know where to start. When you do start and you get something clean—say, you do all the dishes—then it just illuminates the mess everywhere else. So the trick is not to try.
We stop by the house when Jim’s done for the day. He goes into his bedroom, and I hear the gurgle of his bong and then coughing. Two cats emerge from behind furniture and circle me curiously. I recognize the tabby, but there’s a black one with white patches I’ve never seen. Gord stomps in the back door, slams it.
“Heya, Jo. How you been?” He sinks into the couch, puts his feet on the table, reaches without looking into the mini fridge, finds a beer and cracks it. Their interior designer must have been a teenage boy—the place is set up for the sole purpose of easy access to weed, beer and video games. I plunk down on the armchair, the only other available seating.
“Oh, you know.” I shift a little in my seat, find a bowl wedged between some cushions and put it on the floor. The black cat sidles up to investigate. “Who’s this?”
“That’s Willie,” he says. “And you remember Hank.”
“I do.”
“So,” says Gord. “Got any of those swim meets coming up?”
“I quit the team, Uncle Gord. I don’t swim anymore.”
“Right,” he says. “Good.”
Jim returns red-eyed, relaxed. I’m supposed to pretend not to know he smokes pot.
“Long & McQuade and then Chinese? How’s that sound?”
“Sure,” I say, watching as he picks up his bass from a stand in the corner and packs it into a case. “What’s wrong with your bass?”
“Nothing wrong really.” He points at the table, which is so covered in junk it takes a minute for me to spot it—an orange flyer announcing that the Bootstraps are playing the Pyramid next month.
“You’re playing a show?”
“Yeah,” he says, swinging the bass case over his shoulder. “Fundraiser for Danny’s sister. One of her kids is sick, and we’re raising money so she can take time off work to be at the hospital.”
“I thought the Bootstraps were retired.”
“The Bootstraps retired?” Gord asks.
The Bootstraps is Jim’s old band. They were locally famous before I was born. That’s how he met Maggie. She would go to all their shows. By the time I came along, they were just playing
a few times a year, wedding socials and fundraisers and fortieth-birthday parties. And then a while back they stopped completely.
“I changed my mind,” he says, putting his jacket on. “Missed it. Besides, it’s for a good cause. I’ve been meaning to take my bass in and get it set up. It’s wonky from not being played for so long. Plus, we need to get you a new guitar. Something that screams Jo!”
The thought of anything screaming Jo! is disturbing, but I follow him out to the truck anyway.
Jim’s buddy Zack works at Long & McQuade. He says he’ll set the bass up while we wait. I’m ordered to look around and find a guitar. Really I want to watch to see what Zack is doing at his workbench, but Jim insists, so I just listen to them talk about fret wear and whammy bars and how bowed the neck of the bass is while I find the cheapest guitars and try them out.
Maggie always says never date a bass player. “Only twisted individuals play bass, Jolene,” she’ll tell me when she’s had too much gin, the only time she ever talks about Jim. She’s against guitarists too. “Egomaniacs—they just love ya and leave ya. What you want to do is get yourself a drummer. Drummers may not be smart, but you can depend on them.”
I think I can depend on Jim, so long as I don’t expect him to attend parent-teacher conferences or help me with my homework or model responsible adult behavior. Empty praise from one’s stoner dad only goes so far, but it’s nice to know there’s someone I can’t let down.
It occurs to me I could pick a guitar so expensive Jim can’t afford to buy it for me, so I broaden my search.
“That one’s a beaut,” Zack calls across the store when I reach for a flashy red Stratocaster.