Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Kendal sailed through the red light — I shouted “Watch out!” as a driver swerved to miss him, giving Kendal the finger and a long blast on the horn. Kendal was still trying to gain on the Cutlass when the black Mustang sped past, veering into the curb lane and cutting him off. Kendal slammed into the Mustang’s back bumper, his bike collapsing beneath him like a losing move in KerPlunk. The Mustang paused for a second, engine idling, then tore off, leaving Kendal lying in the street on top of the junk pile that had been his bike. I stood straddling my crossbar, hands over my mouth. The last glimpse I had of the hit-and-runner was a license plate ending in XXX. Kendal was draped over his broken bike like a rag.

  “Debbie!” called a voice. I turned to see Sandy standing outside the Royal Bank of Canusa in a miniskirt, high heels and a shiny polyester blouse, her dark hair frosted with blonde streaks and her face made up like a fashion model. She would have been sixteen but looked about twenty, as gorgeous as the breeding-stock girls in The Communist Menace. Beside her, her father, Mr. Holub, aka Mr. Capitalismo, was clutching a sheaf of papers and staring at the scene of the accident.

  “We help?” he asked.

  The three of us ran down the street to where Kendal was starting to pick himself out of a pretzel of steel, aluminum and rubber.

  four

  Collateral Damage

  “Mom’s going to kill me,” Kendal said, a cold can of pop pressed to the bridge of his bloody nose.

  “You lucky boy. Very lucky.” Mr. Holub pounded the steering wheel with his fist for emphasis. “This country, they drive like crazy men. Woman drivers even worse, like this one who try run you over.”

  Sandy, her slim arm draped elegantly across the seat, turned to look at Kendal. “When your mom hears what happened, she’ll just be happy you’re not seriously hurt.”

  “She’ll be happy, right up until she kills me. No bike, no paper route, no money.”

  “Strawberry harvest starts in a week,” Sandy said.

  Kendal groaned. “That’s not a job. That’s slavery.”

  He was not wrong. Fruit picking was scraping the bottom of the barrel, but girls in Shipman’s Corners couldn’t find anything better. Most boys got better-paying summer jobs on a construction crew or on an assembly line at ShipCo, but they had to have family connections. Without a father, and with one weak hand, Kendal was left with the same poorly paid jobs as the girls.

  I started to reach for Kendal’s good hand, but drew back when I realized that under the pop can, his gaze was on Sandy.

  “Why are you so dressed up, Sandy?” I asked her, trying not to let an edge of jealousy creep into my voice.

  “I was helping Dad talk to the bank about a business loan. Translating, between him and the bank manager.”

  “Never heard of a bank open on a Saturday,” said Kendal.

  Sandy flipped her long hair in a maddeningly fetching manner. “A friend of my mom’s works as a teller. She talked the manager into seeing Dad on the weekend ’cause he’s working nights. Not that it did him any good. They wanted him to have something called ‘collateral.’”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Money. Also known as ‘capital,’” supplied Kendal. “As in, Das Kapital.”

  “They want you to have money before they’ll lend you money?” I said. “That’s nuts.”

  Now Sandy turned to look at me. “How did your dad get the capital for the winery, Debbie?”

  Kendal snorted from under the pop can. “Read the label, Sandy. Sparkling Sparrow Estates Wines is a division of ShipCo. They’re the ones who bankrolled Mr. Biondi.”

  That’s when I finally understood that Dad wasn’t a field hand for Sparkling Sparrow Estate Wines. He ran it. No wonder we could afford a Maytag dishwasher. Pretty much everyone in town drank Sparkling Sparrow’s sweet plonk; it was cheap and, because of its high sugar content, staggeringly potent. Even the non-alcoholic grape drink was intoxicating. From what I’d seen so far, plonk in all its forms had grown in popularity over the past year and a half.

  “Sorry, Sandy, I don’t know anything about Dad’s business,” I said, thinking how ironic it was that Mr. Capitalismo couldn’t get capital.

  “Sandy, your dad must be doing okay, selling his anti-radiation suits,” Kendal said. “The way the SALT talks are going, looks like we might need them soon.”

  Sandy shook her head. “He sold the rights to them a long time ago for a lot less than they’re worth. Now he has a new idea: a Ukrainian fast food restaurant. Like McDonald’s, but with perogies and borscht.”

  Mr. Holub drove us all the way to Z Street. Kendal’s house was still in better shape than most of the other places in the neighbourhood. The shack next door looked abandoned, its broken windows boarded over. It was clear that Bum Bum didn’t live there anymore.

  As Kendal unlocked his front door, I remembered the last time I’d been there, that morning Dad’s tire blew and the Trespasser had appeared in the Z-Lands. I’d never gone farther than the front stoop. I wondered if I’d been here since then.

  I stepped into a room with pale grey walls and a carpet of many colours. A Persian rug — I’d only ever seen one in the movies. The walls were covered with art: real oil paintings, the brushstrokes thick and angry-looking. Except for a school trip to a museum in Toronto, I’d never seen so many paintings in one room before. A few were boring old flower arrangements and bowls of fruit, but there was one of a horse standing under a tree, scrotum dangling, that beat anything in the Walter Foster How to Draw books. Another was a rusty old saltie tied up at a bollard. The biggest, and best, were two portraits: one of Dr. Martin Luther King in the prison uniform he was wearing when he was assassinated in his jail cell, waving his Words, Not War manifesto over his head. The other was the face of a boy — Kendal, as a kid. His large, serious eyes stared at me in a way I found unsettling, especially with Kendal himself standing right beside me.

  Along with all the paintings, a handmade abstract crucifix hung on the wall. Instead of an emaciated half-naked body, Christ was suggested by a twisted chunk of dark wood. It was the only crucifix in Kendal’s house — unlike mine, where Christ, writhing in agony and crowned in thorns, was nailed up in every room.

  On a coffee table stood a cluster of framed black-and-white photographs — in one, a smiling man in a ShipCo enlistee cap. I thought it was Kendal, until I realized it had to be his dead father, Dave Kendal.

  “Have a seat. Want something to drink? Pop? Juice?” asked Kendal.

  “Got any Sparkling Sparrow Grape Drink?” I asked.

  Kendal grinned at me. “No offence, but we still don’t buy any of your dad’s stuff. Mom wants me to keep a clear head.”

  “Okay, then. Whatever you’ve got.”

  I dropped into the soft blue corduroy couch and watched Kendal disappear into the kitchen. I liked this peaceful little house. Everything was out in the open. I couldn’t imagine anyone keeping secrets here.

  “What do you think of the new one?” called Kendal from the kitchen.

  I looked around me: new what? It had to be one of the paintings. If so, which one? Was I supposed to love it or hate it? Since they all looked pretty good to me, I yelled back. “I love it.”

  “Me too — I told Mom it’s one of her best.”

  That answered one question: the artist was Mrs. Kendal. Trying to pretend I knew what was going on all the time was like trying to fit together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

  We sat side by side on the sofa. Kendal popped open the Fanta with his damaged hand. His thumb and index finger were intact; the stumps of his other fingers gripped the can like a claw. I wanted to touch the thick scar tissue over his knuckles. I wondered if Debbie-of-1971 had ever done that.

  “Why do you keep staring at my paw?” he asked.

  That’s what he called it — his paw. I shrugged and lifted
a Bugle to my mouth, the cheese flavouring staining my fingers orange.

  “I was just thinking how well you use that hand,” I said.

  “Angie said I use ’em both pretty well,” said Kendal, pouring the soda.

  Angie again. I tried to think of a way to find out what had happened with her.

  “Must have been hard, breaking up with her,” I hinted.

  Kendal shrugged indifferently. “Yeah, I guess. Not that it was really my decision.” He slumped back into the sofa cushions, not meeting my eyes. “Some big shot at ShipCo made her an offer. Senior Snugglegirl. I said no way was I sharing her. I said it’s ShipCo or me. She picked ShipCo. Now she’s the number one fuckpuppy for the top ShipCo brass. No one lower than the lieutenant-management level. Plus, the trips, clothes, parties, good drugs. And all the plonk she can guzzle.”

  I laid my hand on top of Kendal’s bad one. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you’re not. Neither am I. Angie and I should’ve been finished with each other a long time ago. We want different things. With her, it’s always about money.”

  “What about you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

  Kendal lifted his hands as if trying to pull an answer out of the air.

  “It’ll sound stupid.”

  “Try me.”

  Kendal stood and turned on the TV. He gave me a look — as if he was about to share a secret — then changed the channel to a football game, turning up the volume so high that the house shook. Dropping back onto the couch beside me, he put his elbows on his knees and looked into my face. I practically had to read his lips to tell what he was saying over the roar of the crowd.

  “I want to finish what my father was trying to start when he died,” he said. “Changing things for folks in the Z-Lands. Everyone in this neighbourhood is sick, or poor, or a plonkhead. The surplus girls think their only way out is to fuck an executive. The surplus boys get sent on a one-way trip to the moon. The surplus Twisties get rounded up for drug trials — ShipCo Pharma pays them a few bucks to let them try out new heart meds before the managers take them. And they’re always telling us the world is going to blow up, without even trying to make peace with the enemy. It’s as if they like being at constant war. Someone has to change all that, or the planet won’t survive. I feel like I could be the guy. Somebody’s got to wake people up.”

  Kendal lowered the TV to its normal volume. We sat silently, side by side, watching the Green Bay quarterback get sacked. It struck me how much Kendal sounded like Billy.

  “Kendal, are you telling me that you were mixed up with the Yammers?”

  He looked up at me in alarm and shook his head, pointing to what I’d thought was a transistor radio on the side table — a SHIPCO GUARDIAN ANGEL, according to the brand name on its face, along with the words, What have you got to hide? The Guardian Angel was a reverse radio.

  Someone was eavesdropping on us. I had the same sick, scared feeling I had when I was strapped into the Glow-in-the-Dark Pat Boone Lie Detector.

  “The Yammers are a myth,” Kendal said loudly. “Everyone knows that.”

  As he said this, he took a scratch pad and pencil from under the ShipCo Guardian Angel and wrote:

  I’LL SWITCH THE SUBJECT TO COMICS.

  DRIVES THEM CRAZY!

  He draped his arm on the seat behind me. “I have something special to show you. A banned comic that Cressie misfiled. It was too hot for the Comics Code so they had to stop the print run, but a few got through.”

  I laughed. “Cressie misfiled something? That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s pretty sexy stuff, and anything to do with real chicks makes Cressie uncomfortable,” said Kendal, looking at the floor. I was starting to think real chicks made Kendal a little uncomfortable, too. “Let me get it — the girl in it kind of reminds me of you.”

  He pushed open a folding door, leading to his bedroom. Despite what I thought about the lack of secrets in Kendal’s house, he had done a great job of hiding the September 1967 issue of Agents of V.E.N.G.E.A.N.C.E., featuring Captain Kyle Crusher and the luscious European bombshell, Contessina Doloria di Largo: it was stashed under a floorboard inside his closet. Kendal brought the comic into the living room and sat beside me on the couch, turning the pages on our knees.

  The Contessina was a raven-haired, blue-eyed aristocrat-turned-crime fighter, dressed in something that looked like a cross between a ballet leotard and a bikini. The outfit was so form-fitting, it was as if she’d been drawn naked, with splashes of colour strategically added to suggest clothing. Under the clingy material, the high, proud fishbowls of her braless breasts defied gravity, her nipples protruding like gun muzzles. Her waist tapered to the slender stem of a wineglass, flaring into rounded hips and athletic thighs. I wondered how she managed to keep such a tiny waist while the rest of her body looked so pumped up. Strong. The kind of body you had to have to save the world.

  “I look like her?” I said in amazement.

  “Yeah,” said Kendal. “Her face, anyway.”

  Her face, yeah, of course, I thought sadly. I could never have a body like hers. In one panel, the Contessina executed a breathtaking kick to one bad guy’s groin with a stiletto-heeled boot and a right cross to another’s jaw. A few pages later, she was alone with Kyle Crusher in his secret-agent bachelor pad.

  Panel 1: a close-up of Crusher taking the phone off the hook — the universal sign of Do Not Disturb — while in the deep background, the Contessina teeters on a barstool, unzipping a boot.

  Panel 2: the Contessina’s naked back, shown from behind. She is kneeling in front of Crusher, who towers over her, fists clenched. Crusher’s thought bubble: My God she’s beautiful . . . not sure I can control myself.

  “This is where it starts getting dirty,” warned Kendal.

  Impatient wings fluttered inside my stomach. But before he had a chance to turn the page, the front door opened. Mrs. Kendal stood before us in the entranceway, her arms full of A&P bags. Her mouth opened slightly when she saw me, but I couldn’t see the look in her eyes because she was wearing sunglasses.

  “Mom,” said Kendal flatly, as if stating a fact.

  “Hello there, Mrs. Kendal,” I said, trying to sound innocent, but she wasn’t falling for it. She took off her sunglasses and fixed me with a What are you doing to my son? look.

  “Debbie Biondi. What are you doing here?” When she caught sight of Kendal’s face, she almost dropped her grocery bags. “John, what happened to you? Have you been in a fight?”

  “Fell off my bike. It’s not as bad as it looks,” he muttered, taking the bags out of her arms.

  Kendal glanced at me, then his mother, as he carried the groceries into the kitchen, leaving the two of us to stare at one another. I tried to smile, but the muscles in my face kept jumping around. I had never seen Mrs. Kendal in anything but the grey suit and hat she worked in or a church dress. That day she was wearing a pair of trousers — jeans, actually — a crisp white shirt and a pair of leather sandals. She looked a million years younger than my mom, although they were probably the same age.

  “I like your new painting, Mrs. Kendal,” I said.

  “Thank you.” Still no smile.

  My face flushed and I dropped my eyes, pretending to examine my shoelaces. What did Mrs. Kendal think we’d been doing? Rolling all over her pretty blue couch, feeling each other up? Not that I would have minded. Catching her get-the-hell-out-now vibe, I mumbled my goodbyes.

  Out in the alleyway, Kendal rolled my bike from behind the garbage cans. I straddled the crossbar and held out the comic book.

  He shook his head. “Keep it.”

  “I’m sorry your mom doesn’t like me,” I said.

  “She just worries that I’m going to get into trouble again,” he said. “It was the same thing with Angie.”

  Leaning over my handlebars,
in the gloom of the passageway, with his disapproving mom on one side of the thin wall, and the towering home church of Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad, on the other, Kendal kissed me. His mouth tasted enticingly of artificial orange flavouring and Bugles. Kyle Crusher and the Contessina fell out of my hands.

  I touched Kendal’s face. He picked up the comic and placed it in my bike carrier. Resting his forehead against mine, he said, “How about I borrow a bike and drop by your house tomorrow? Would your folks be okay with that?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t care if they are or they aren’t. Just come.”

  We stood together, our tongues exploring the sprinklings of artificial cheese in each other’s mouth. Eventually, we untangled ourselves from one another and I headed home.

  I passed the billboard at the corner of Z Street and Fermi Road that used to be graffitied with the words SHIPCO KILLS but was now papered over with an ad for Sparkling Sparrow Rosé Wine: Pink, Plonk, Party Time!

  As I cycled past the giant face of a girl in pink sunglasses puckering up for a kiss, I imagined the unspeakable things the Contessina and Kyle Crusher were doing to one another in my bike carrier. Thinking about their entwined crime fighter bodies distracted me so much that I didn’t notice the hum of a well-tuned car engine. As the car sped up to pass me, I recognized the Mustang that had hit Kendal. Black paint job, spoiler, New York plates. In the dashboard glow, I caught a glimpse of the driver’s blonde hair under a white nurse’s cap. She didn’t even turn her head.

  I almost steered into the drainage ditch as the car accelerated. In the distance, the Mustang’s taillights signalled a turn, just before it vanished into the night.

  five