Your Constant Star

by Brenda Hasiuk

  This morning, the woman walked right by, so close I could hear the smooth ride of the stroller. I could hear the baby too, in the little bucket thing wedged on top, mewling like the ditch kittens out at Betty’s. Nathan used to call them that because farm cats have their litters in the tall grass on the side of the highway. He used to have all kinds of weird-ass lingo for life in the sticks.

  Even though there’s not a cloud in the sky, birds singing their fricking hearts out, I don’t even get a peek because the bucket has a domed hood. What’s the point of bringing the kid out if you’re going to keep him covered up like those Arab women who sit in the park, roasting in their black ghost costumes? I say let the boy feel the sun on his face.

  She walked right by, looked right at me, gave a little good-morning smile. She’s not young—I can tell by the skin on her knees—but not bad-looking. My madre once said that a woman’s upper arms, knees and heels are sure giveaways of her age. When she was in the mood, she spent a lot of time dolling herself up and talking to me like she forgot I was a guy. “When we met, Eduardo said it was love at first sight for him because he’d never seen anyone so at home in her beauty.” It sounded good, but I don’t think my ma ever felt at home anywhere.

  Helen. Will and Helen. Just like that, I remember the names from the form. That happens these days—just when I think the weed has fried me beyond repair, something comes to me, just like that. Helen had on big white-framed sunglasses, so I couldn’t really see her face, but there was something about her that reminded me of my grade-eight history teacher. Ms. Something—it started with a D—who talked to us like we weren’t punks. She didn’t even wear lipstick, but she was hot, like maybe she used to be a beach volleyball player or something. She took some of us under her wing, tried to get us to go to this place called Art City, where we could express ourselves through graffiti and pottery and stuff, but she only lasted one year.

  I can make out Helen standing in front of the half-open blinds, talking on the phone, staring straight out at me. I say let her.

  My first day parked here, it was kind of misty, like when the water used to leave tiny silvery beads on the low leaves out at Keeseekoowenin. Around lunchtime, Helen brought out the baby in the bucket, lugging it with both hands and carrying her keys between her teeth. It seemed to take a long time to get the thing in the backseat. She kept bending down and struggling with the straps or something, her trim little ass nice and tight in blue yoga pants, then straightening and staring up into the drizzle. Her hair was curly like Ms. D-Something’s, and kind of damp, like she’d just worked up a good sweat or stepped out of the shower. After a minute or two, she finally slammed the back door and drove away.

  I called Bev’s cell over and over, but she wouldn’t pick up, and I had no choice but to call Ray’s number. I got the machine, and his voice made me want to drive Betty’s beater straight into the mud-bottom river. “Hey, kids. We’re out. Hear the beep, send us some love.”

  I called Faye. “I saw him.”

  I got nothing and wondered if she was still there.

  “Olivier?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “I didn’t really see him. She carries him around in this bucket.”

  “It’s a car seat,” Faye said.

  “Yeah. I think she needs a lesson on how to use it.”

  “Did you talk to them?”

  “I’m taking my time,” I said.

  After about forty-five minutes, Helen came back and unloaded a bunch of groceries in mismatched cloth bags. It took a long time, since she had to carry each load into the porch so they didn’t get wet. Then she disappeared inside the front door for so long that I wondered if she’d forgotten about the bucket, but then she came rushing out, tripping in her flip-flops, nearly taking a header. Still, she got the bucket out in about half the time it took to get it in.

  The second day was clear, and the damp lawns smelled good enough to eat. Betty used to say that, in the morning before the dew had dried in the poplars. Nathan never got up before lunch, but sometimes I’d wake up with Betty and we’d go pick saskatoons right off the bush, and she’d sing a little, maybe Elvis or Roy Orbison, just to let the bears know we were there. Then when Nathan woke up, I’d help him make fun of her croaky voice and bad taste in music.

  Just as I was cracking my hard-boiled egg on the steering wheel, Helen came out, lugging the fold-up stroller down the steps like it was going to open up any second and eat her alive. As soon as she dropped it onto the driveway, though, it opened easy as pie, smooth as a German engine. No question, someone put a lot of thought into designing the thing, unlike the beater, whose coffee-cup holder is too narrow for a large-size cup.

  She got the bucket from inside, rested it on top of the stroller and started angling the thing from side to side, like she was trying to recork a bottle, talking to herself the whole time. Her black tank top showed off her thin, slightly veined arms, and for a second she looked up, as if she could feel my eyes on her, watching her struggle with such perfect German engineering. But she plowed on—as Betty used to say, “You just gotta plow, Mannie”—and then took off down the street without a glance back, her slim hips swinging just a bit, her shoulders straight and smooth above her braless back. For all I knew, the bucket could’ve been full of tomato-soup cans.

  I lit up and inhaled like it was the last joint on earth. She wasn’t my type—too bony—but not bad at all in many ways. My ma was always skinny—or slim, as she liked to say—and that was about the only thing you could count on. Everything else about her was like a roulette wheel—you never knew where you were going to land. When I was a kid, sometimes Ma and me would be our own party of two for days straight, eating Rocky Road from the tub until I puked on her new secondhand rug, staying up late to watch action movies until the school called and complained that I was sleeping in class. Then one morning she wouldn’t get up. She would tell me I was old enough to make my own peanut-butter sandwich, that she was a terrible mother, that I was better off without her getting in the way of my development. Back then, it was the not knowing that got me. Those moods would sneak up and bite me on the ass when I least suspected it.

  “Don’t talk to me about mothers,” Bev said one morning when I tried to tell her why Eduardo got the hell out of there when he could. “Lara is the fricking Queen of Moodyville.”

  I guess we had this in common, it drew us together, but sometimes I don’t think she really got it, because Bev talked like she couldn’t stand Lara, like she couldn’t believe she, of all people, had such a stupid whiner for a mother. But me, I didn’t hate my ma. I was just scared shitless of her because I knew I was like her. I could feel it—like the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree. There were times when I couldn’t stop myself. I was going to explode into a million pieces if I didn’t find a way to release the pressure. Then other times, it was like I was made of lead, heavy and gray and poisonous in large doses. I didn’t tell Bev this, of course, because I didn’t want to scare her too, or make her think I was more of a pussy than she already did. She thought she understood what it was like with my ma, but she didn’t.

  Betty thought she understood too, and she did in a way. She’d had some bad shit in her life. Her parents came from a band with some pretty juicy property, full of fox and elk and beaver, but the government wanted to set up a national park there and so one day waited until most of the men were out hunting and then drove in a convoy of school buses. They loaded up all the women and kids and drove them to their new home, some swampy backwater sandwiched between farms. When the men got back, they had no choice but to leave if they wanted to see their families again. But it didn’t really matter anyway, because Betty was shipped off to a residential school right after that, where they cut her braids and told her that everything her parents did was stupid-ass and nasty.

  Betty was the calmest person I’d ever met, but she sounded funny, like she had too much spit in her mouth and needed to hork, whene
ver she talked about losing her long black hair. When Nathan was nabbed vandalizing some statues of old white politicians, she stayed cool as a cucumber, told him busting things up in the dark was for pussies. When she was in the hospital, covered in blueberry bruises from the cancer, she joked that the morphine made us all better-looking, like watching those announcers on TV through a frosted lens. But when she talked about her parents, she got that spit in her voice. They died when she was young, but she said they talked to her whenever we went back to Keeseekoowenin, back to the land that was finally returned to its rightful owners. She heard them in the poplar leaves, round as coins and whispering in the slightest breeze. She heard them when the loon’s call bounced off the water, high and hollow. And she heard them when the coals let out a loud, angry crack, sparks rising up orange and bright until they disappeared into the stars. She got like this after a few drinks, and Nathan would want to take off, before she got started on the legends. But it made me wish my madre was dead too, even though this made me one really shitty son.

  When Helen finally came back, a brunette with fat calves was with her. She had a stroller too, a red number with three wheels and a bucket. They both unloaded their cargo, looked at me like they were checking a clock on the wall and went inside.

  The third day was fricking hot. I slept through most of it because there was nothing else to do and because Warren had woken me up early with a hoof to the kidneys. He’d told me I was going to have to start earning my keep, even if that meant turning tricks behind the laundromat. I didn’t care. I still had enough weed to take the edge off for another week, and the dull ache in my back wasn’t all bad. At least I knew I was alive, and that I wasn’t dreaming, because I was beginning to wonder if everything was a dream now.

  All day, I drifted in and out of weird daydreams: Bev handing me a bundled-up blanket that turned out to be a small orange tabby, eyes still shut tight, rough pink tongue reaching for my salty thumb; Faye sitting beside me in Betty’s beater, telling me Bev saw a fortune-teller when they were young who said she would marry a short dark man with quick hands. I even missed Helen and the bucket getting into the car, didn’t notice until they were already back, but in my daydream, I saw a downed crow flailing on the lawn. It was choking on something and sounded so awful that I wanted to put it out of its misery. But I woke up instead, because I’ve always been a pussy about stuff like that, and that’s when I saw them, Helen rushing up the steps, talking to the screaming bucket that sounded just like the crow. Before she closed the door, she gave me a quick look, almost too quick to notice, but I knew I was awake because it felt like someone had reached inside and thrown my kidney against the curb and then stuck it back in my body.

  It’s been four days now, and I think she might be starting to freak out. The sun is right in the middle of the sky, blasting through the windshield like it hates me and wants to show me who’s boss. It’s lunchtime and I’m hungry, but the thought of warm boiled eggs makes me want to hurl. I watch the guy pull up in his German car, watch him walk over like he wants to invite me to a barbecue. It’s out of my hands now.

  “You got to take life by the horns,” Betty liked to say. “Don’t wait for somebody to save your ass, Mannie.” She made it sound so easy, like any retard could do it, but I bet Betty never felt her whole skin, every fricking inch of it, turn itchy and electric, never felt like she’d turned to lead.

  He comes up to the window with his hands in his pockets. He’s so tall, he has to bend almost in half. “Hey. We can’t help but notice you’ve been here awhile. Can we help you with anything?”

  Four days of waiting, and I’ve got nothing. Bev would tell me that to succeed in life, you need to be two steps ahead of your competition, because she’s brainwashed and that’s what Ray would say. Betty would tell me to pull myself together, to say my piece and be a man. But what if you’re a man made out of lead?

  The guy tries to look friendly and ignore the smell. The car must reek of weed, and I haven’t showered in maybe five days. “There’s no law against sitting,” I say.

  He nods, still bent in half. He’s probably the same age as Eduardo but still has a full head of wavy blond hair. He looks like the guys who used to come into Ray’s after work, the kind who always had a foreign beer or two and talked about sports they played, not sports they watched.

  “No, there’s not,” he says. “It’s just we’re kind of curious, the neighbors too, since it’s been awhile. You’ve been here a few days.”

  He laughs, still Mr. Nice Guy. I think Bev would’ve called him Mr. Numb-Nuts-Square-Pants or something bitchy—but then I remember she’s already met him, already chosen him.

  “You can’t blame us, can you?” he asks.

  “My kid’s in there,” I say.

  He swats a mosquito on the back of his neck too late, and we both check out the thin streak of blood across his fingers. His blond eyebrows knit together, and the lines between his eyes get really deep. “What’s that?”

  “My kid is in your house,” I say.

  He stares at me. His back must be getting sore. “Olivier?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Are you Mannie?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Emmanuel. It means ‘gift from God.’”

  He stands up, then bends down again. “Emmanuel, okay.” He scratches his cheek, takes it away, looks at his own blood. If I were a real man, I’d say something, throw him a bone. I would save him from his misery.

  “Listen,” he says. “Can you stay right here? I’m going to go in and see what’s the best thing to do here. Okay? Don’t go. Can you wait?”

  I’ve been here for four days—where the hell does he think I have to go? I guess he has no idea that I can hardly move, that all I can do is peel my thighs off the beat-up vinyl, one by one. I can reach in the glove compartment for the matches, light ’er up, close my eyes, sweat. Mr. Lead Man is good at waiting. He can wait for his ma to come back from the mall for hours that turn into days. He can wait for Bev to come to her senses and walk out of Ray’s condo prison. He can wait for Mr. Nice to tell him if he can see his own kid. He can wait for things to come to him because there is no way he’s going anywhere. I wait. I sweat. I wait and sweat some more.

  Ms. De Luca, I think. That was the friendly, stressedout history teacher.

  When he comes back, I am imagining Ms. De Luca’s hand on my leg. Her nails are unpolished and mannish, nothing like Bev’s, and when she squeezes the meaty part of my thigh, I can’t decide if I want to start crying like a baby or jump her bones.

  “Emmanuel?”

  I don’t bother opening my eyes. “You can call me Mannie.”

  “We talked to the worker, Mannie. There’s no visitation in the agreement. But if you want to see him, we’re open to it.”

  I’m awake. My kidney tells me so. “When?”

  “We can arrange something, but maybe not here, at the house. Maybe in the park or something.”

  Even with my eyes closed, I can tell he’s not bent over now. His voice comes from above. “You got somewhere we can reach you at?”

  I tell him my number and he writes it on a little white pad, the kind doctors use to hand out meds. “Okay then.”

  Time goes by, but he doesn’t leave. He’s breathing hard and loud, really hard and loud for a guy who looks so fit. “You okay?” he asks.

  I nod. For some reason, I feel like if I look him in the eye, the heat will finally be too much and I will melt into a teeming mass of silvery sludge sliding down the burning seat, oozing over the floor mat, pooling beneath the brake and gas pedals.

  “Mannie,” he says, bent over again. “Can you get home?”

  Will, I think. Their names are Will and Helen. “No sweat,” I say.

  He straightens up and stands there, breathing like a fat guy. I open my eyes, start the truck, almost run over his toes as I pull away.

  All afternoon, Warren’s number keeps showing up on call display, so I stay clear of the apartment. Once, he th
rows me off and calls from another number.

  “Hey, little faggot. I can find you, you know.”

  I think of how Warren called Bev a slumming slut who got all her money from daddy and how Bev called him Mr. Doughboy Mobster.

  I don’t check my messages. I spend the night on Oak Street, not far from where I picked up Faye. It feels strange and familiar at the same time, like I’m spying on the past, on Bev as a kid, trying to find out something she hasn’t told me, some clue that will help me get her back.

  She never mentioned that she’d lived here when she came with me the time we lucked into a Fiat convertible on Montrose. She almost wanted to pass it up because the keys were right in the fricking ignition.

  “I want to see you do it, you know, with just your hands and stuff.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “Get in.” And she did, just before the dumb bastard inside the house made it down the front steps. We took it straight down Taylor and flew west down the Parkway until we hit gravel. The road was in rough shape, potholes with puddles the size of kiddie pools, and she started screaming like a kid on a roller coaster, arms in the air, until we ended up in the ditch. I kept going, slough water sloshing up and over the doors, until the engine died, but her arms stayed in the air, her tank top wet in all the right places. It wasn’t completely dark yet, that weird blue time between day and night, and the half-built brick mansions stuck in the middle of the empty fields looked like haunted-house row on Halloween. Her cheeks were all pink and sweaty, and her shorts were so short that the softest part of her thigh bulged, delicious and smooth. Her legs made a lopsided V on the seat, and I suddenly felt the urge to bite into her, to taste what it’s like to be so perfect.

  Somewhere a dog howled, even though there wasn’t any moon. She laughed like it was the funniest thing she’d ever heard and climbed on top of me. “That was amazing.”