“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked.
“I brought it.”
I hadn’t seen it in the car. I felt I should help poor Donovan before he broke down completely. “That’s enough, eh?” I said to Danny.
“One more shot.”
“No!” Donovan shouted.
“Tomorrow, Danny,” I said.
“Piss off, all-star,” he cursed, yanking the gun away from my reach.
The others were all on the dock. It listed badly, the water washing over our shoes at times. Danny ignored us all. He aimed at the floating Javex bottle where the pump intake went up to the cottage, shot and the bottle vanished in a spray of water.
“Those shots’ll carry,” I said, attempting reason.
“Big deal.”
“I’ll call the police myself,” Donovan threatened. It was a mistake. Danny always operates precisely the opposite of what one hopes. I reached and caught the barrel of the gun and twisted it partly free. Danny held on. I twisted again, knowing it was hurting his wrists.
“You big prick,” Danny swore.
I thought I might ease the tension with something we could all laugh at. I grasped the first funny thought that came into my head.
“That’s what Maureen called me.”
Some of the others laughed immediately, glad for the moment. I felt stupid saying it; I knew I was reaching; but it might work. Danny turned and I thought he was going to let go of the gun. At least he was smiling.
“You know better than that,” he said. “You never even got near her. She wouldn’t have anything to do with you, you ugly asshole.”
A simple act. I twisted the gun and booted, catching Danny square in the gut. He folded easily into my shoe, the air leaving him as if just gutted by a fishknife. There was another splash, a hole, and sputtering, Danny rose to fill it. I simply turned and walked off, carrying the gun. No more laughs tonight.
I awoke to a loon call. Not from the lake but the kitchen. Danny came in in his his underwear, grinning ear to ear with a pan full of brown scrambled eggs.
“How’s my old buddy this morning?”
“Screw off.”
“You want your eggs right away?”
I sat up and smelled them. Something wasn’t quite right.
“They’re fried in rye,” Danny offered encouragingly. “Try ’em.”
I shook my head and spun out of bed, thinking for a moment I might lose whatever argument was going on in my stomach. I winced and held it.
“Eat,” Danny ordered. “You’ll feel better.”
I did and I did. Danny poured a beer and a half orange juice into a huge glass for me and I got that down too. By the time the rest were up and eating, the party had officially entered its second phase. It seemed the gun and the night before were to be forgotten. Danny was back to his usual charming enthusiasm, planning an afternoon fishing trip on Sabine Creek using his old man’s twelve-foot cartop and Lacha’s canoe. All we had to do was pick up some more booze and get going.
“Me ’n’ Bats’ll pick up some two-fours and meet you at his place, okay?”
I turned, mouthing the question, but Danny beat me with the answer.
“We’ll need bait.”
I nodded. Lacha would be driving, probably, the half-ton I’d seen when we parked.
“Don’t honk when you pull in,” I warned him.
He looked at me like I was crazy. I couldn’t explain. Danny was already packing up with not so much as a thank-you to poor Donovan for the use and near-destruction of his parents’ cottage. Donovan didn’t seem to care. All he wanted was Danny’s friendship, and he’d sacrifice anything for it.
All three vehicles raced up past the reservation and the marina and the camps to the flatland drag strip. First one would lead, then the other two would pass, seeing who could come closest to touching. Again, I had shudders about disaster, the career finished before it had even begun, the young star demolished against a thick beech on the far side of the road. When Palowski bore his old Indian out and went past the Fargo with his finger raised, laughing, Lacha threw a beer bottle at him, which whipped across in front of Danny and me in a half-circle, smashing onto the pavement just as we turned into the bootlegger’s.
Danny showed no more concern for protecting the booze than he did for his body. We roared toward Batterinski Road as if he thought he could actually catch Lacha, loon-calling out the window and yelling where I could shove my protests. We fishtailed off the pavement onto the gravel and could see the trace of Lacha’s wild turn before us, his rear wheels slamming against the footings of the telephone pole. I whistled. Danny laughed, drifting through the turn, down past the rink we once played in, out over the tracks, down along the cattails’ flat, up over the bluff and into the turn just before Sabine Creek, Danny slamming the binders so hard that the Chevy turned sideways and stopped barely a door opening from the OPP cruiser sitting idling with the red flashers on.
No one was in the cruiser. As the dust from Danny’s spin settled we got out. An officer was walking toward us from up ahead, his hand raised. A second cruiser, also with bubblegums spinning, was blocking the road. He had to cross over deep ruts in the road, snake twists through the hard gravel, where something huge had lost control, bitten into the soft shoulder and sailed over the side into the gully.
I knew without asking that it was Lacha’s Fargo.
“There’s been an accident, boys,” the officer said “I’ll have to ask you to —”
Danny cut him off. “The truck?”
“Yes. You’ll have to —”
Danny paid him no attention. He ran to the side, staring over.
“Oh, Lord Jesus Christ!” he shouted before pitching down the bank sideways, breaking his slide, jumping again.
I brushed by the cop and looked myself. I heard another siren coming down the road. Not cops, an ambulance.
Two provincials were down below, one putting blankets around one of Danny’s nameless pals who was sitting on a stump shaking and crying. The other pal was standing with Lacha, holding his arm at a funny angle and also crying. Lacha was staring down at the ground, smoking a cigarette and nodding at something the second cop was saying. The cop scribbled in his notepad.
I went down the same way Danny did, almost losing my footing and falling onto the undercarriage of the inverted Fargo. The box had snapped right off, clean, against a tree, leaving the cedar skinned and naked by the impact. Steam was rising from the manifold. Both doors were sprung, the cab crushed. The second cop stared up at me.
“Stay away, son! There’s nothing you can do.”
Nothing I can do? I looked at him and then up ahead at Danny, who was standing beside a fourth figure I hadn’t yet seen. But Danny wasn’t looking at whoever it was. He was looking at me, waiting.
I ignored the cop and stepped forward. Danny moved as if to say something, but couldn’t. At his feet was a lumpy grey blanket completely covering a body. All but the boots, small work boots worn black. At the head of the blanket was a small tin bucket splattered with red pulp. I thought it was blood but it wasn’t.
Raspberries!
I looked back at the boots, up at Danny, and suddenly my knees buckled and I was down on them, spinning.
Ig.
The provincial police told Poppa the details. The rest he must have picked up in town when he went in to make the arrangements, because when he returned and walked slowly past my bedroom I could tell from his eyes that he knew I was somehow involved. He stopped and never even tried to speak. Just looked at me and then walked off in his stooped, tired manner. He seemed to have decided there was no point in saying anything.
Lacha had been charged with dangerous driving, I heard that much from overhearing Uncle Jan’s and Poppa’s talk in the kitchen. Criminal negligence, Jan added, and for carrying open alcohol in the truck and for drinking underage and for no insurance coverage as well. The charges could have gone on forever and they would never equal out. I imagined this moment in Lac
ha’s house, him upstairs feeling sorry for himself, while his old man — I knew the bastard, too, the highway grader who’d probably built up that soft shoulder in the first place — he’d be downstairs comforting his wife by saying it wasn’t as if the victim had been a real person, if you know what I mean.
Maybe not, but it was Ig. I pulled the pillow tighter to quieten the sobs. Christ, I hoped he never saw it coming. I prayed Lacha had swept around that corner and picked Ig off the side of the road before he even heard the truck. But I kept seeing him standing there with his shirt off the side of the road before he even heard the truck. But I kept seeing him standing there with his shirt off and his pot full of raspberries, his simple little damaged brain trying to figure out what he had done wrong that someone would be so eager to hurt him this way. Ig’s natural assumption would be that it was his fault.
I wondered if he saw them through the windshield, laughing as they drifted through the first part of the turn, their eyes suddenly seeing him standing there with his raspberries, smiling. Him, with a surprise for Batcha. Them, a surprise for Ig.
Oh God, if it hurt him and he had to lie there before he died and wonder what had gone wrong, I will kill Lacha. Please, Lord, tell me, please.
Dear Lord, let Ig have died instantly, unaware, please. The field mouse and the silent owl.
I wondered: would Jaja be waiting for him? Poor Ig, always going on about Jaja being up in the clouds watching over us. So damned simple for him. Ig’s heaven was just another floor over this one, something up past my bedroom, somewhere he’d never been, some indescribable paradise where Jaja would hold him in his arms and rock him like he used to when they were both still alive. Where the Nestlé’s Quik can would be forever full.
How can that be? Father Kulas and now Father Schula with their promises of heaven, St. Martin’s with its gawdy sculptures of the angels dancing above the skull, the hell-dwellers screaming frantically in the fires below. How? Tell me that.
How would Ig recognize Jaja if Jaja is really just some idea floating around up there? Ig wouldn’t know what an idea was, for fuck’s sake.
… because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to spue thee out of my mouth …
Am I one of Father Schula’s Laodiceans? If so, I don’t care. I’ll spit right back.
Poppa had been working on the window, loosening the sashes and head jambs. The window had not been moved since Jaja died, nine years and four months before. He worked slowly, too slowly, and I realized he had been crying while he worked, for he wiped his sleeves across his face several times before standing. I looked down and shut my eyes as if praying; but I could not pray. One prays for answers, Father Schula had taught us in communion class. What could answer this?
That night was to be the lykewake, pusta noc. And I remember it clearer even than yesterday. Sophia and Batcha sat all afternoon talking in small voices, and I listened in only as long as I could take it. Batcha claimed she saw smjerc, the white woman of death, standing just outside the shed door on Sunday. Sophia moaned, almost with pleasure. I remember I felt like shouting “Bullshit!” at them and storming from the room. Batcha also claimed the chickens refused to eat yesterday. Probably she forgot to feed them. I had seen her in the morning out in the coop yard talking to them. No doubt she had been telling them about Ig; no doubt, too, telling the lilac and the raspberry and the goddamn leek garden. I wanted to ask her if she’d told the minnows, because he sold them, or the leeches, because he had captured them. Would they say a prayer for him?
Batcha made Jan open all the windows in the house except for my room. She wouldn’t enter it, thank God, and I guess she hadn’t the nerve to ask him. All the mirrors were covered with cloth. The calendars she turned backwards and all the pictures, too, even poor old Paderewski, who was a special invite at Jaja’s funeral. She had been at work on poor Ig, too. He had a rosary clutched in one hand and a candle in the other — to find his way to heaven, of course — and one of her silly poplar crosses was there as well, I was positive, though hidden from Poppa. And I’m sure she had put a coin in, perhaps so he could work the bubblegum machiness. And something special of Ig’s as well. Batcha would have opted for his prayer book, which of course, he couldn’t read. I would have suggested his cap, or maybe a spoonful of Quik.
I couldn’t bear it. I bolted for my room and sobbed to sleep, and when I awoke it was already dark and I could tell from the smell of fresh rolls and coffee and beer coming up through the register that pusta noc had begun. Poppa came up once and asked me if I’d be down. I said maybe I would later; I told him that I didn’t feel good, but both of us knew I wouldn’t be coming. Down below, their eyes would wrap around me like barbed wire.
I awoke later, at least I thought I was awake, but my eyes wouldn’t work right. I had a sense of them being open with my body still locked in sleep. The room seemed blue with new light, and breathing, and then I realized that the room was not breathing but something was moving about in the room. I tried to turn my head to see but couldn’t. Then the light changed and something bent down, directly over me, and made the sign of the cross.
Batcha.
She seemed younger somehow, moving freely without her usual sighs dragging. She seemed to float about the room, black and nearly indistinguishable—like an indoor photograph where the flash has failed—except for the eyes. When she leaned over me they came down like a drill press, ripping.
I could hear a faint murmur, and though it didn’t sound like Batcha’s voice, it was her. Polish. Chanting. I tried to hear, to understand.
“Bjôj v imje tego, co njebo a zemje stvorził, a nje chodz rechle nazôd, jak vczora!”
I could make out only a part of it: “Go away in the name of Him ... do not return....”
And another word. “Vjeszczi!” Calling me “monster” again.
I tried to move, to speak, but couldn’t. I tried to wake out of the dream, but couldn’t. I tried to hold my breath, to force something to happen, but couldn’t. I was helpless and, suddenly, she was gone.
I awoke and the bedclothes were all on the floor. The sheet was completely soaked and my pajamas as well. I smelled it before I realized precisely what had happened.
I had peed the bed.
I waited until the day after the funeral. Jan and Sophia and their brat had gone back to Renfrew and Poppa was back in the shed sharpening his chainsaw. Batcha lay on her bed with the door open. I passed by once, turned and forced myself back. I hadn’t been in her room since I was a child. She stared, expressionless, and I tried to smile and find something for my hands to do. I let them rise and play off the door frame, hanging with my fingers as if I were about to skin the cat the way I used to over Ig’s door. I felt foolish, but I had to know.
“Batcha?”
The wolf eyes rose like white flames.
I hurried. “Why were you in my room the other night?”
She blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.
“I saw you,” I said.
She shook her head slowly from her lying position. No.
“Yes, Batcha.” I let my right hand drop to my rear pants pocket, almost as if reaching for a comb. I had the poplar cross there. I held it out the way Father Schula once held my water gun.
“How did this get there then?”
She blinked again, then closed her eyes; I thought she said something. I stepped in, seeing the electric lamp of Jesus on the cross Jan had brought her last Christmas. She kept her eyes closed though she had to know I was inside the room.
“Pardon me?” I said.
“Vjeszczi!” she hissed. The eyes opened and fixed me, stopping me dead. Her eyes seemed to widen and fall, shifting almost imperceptibly, like water in bucket.
“What?” I said, stuttering with surprise.
“Vjeszczi!” She almost shouted it this time. I stared down, unable to deal with her eyes.
Vjeszczi. I did not understand.
Vjeszczi? Me, a monster?
I found P
oppa throwing out dead crayfish. He had the galvanized tub tipped and partially drained, and the crayfish were tangled in a writhing scramble along the bottom, legs lightly scraping the sides, tails buzzing in what little water was left. He scooped with his right hand, oblivious to their claws, letting the live ones fall free on their own, leaving the dead to be tossed toward the ash heap.
“They’re going soft,” he said as I came walking up.
“Maybe they’re just molting,” I said.
Poppa shook his head. “Water’s too warm. Too many in here. Shouldn’t bother with crabs.”
“The Americans are crazy about them for bass,” I argued. “We’ve done as well by them as worms.”
Poppa wasn’t interested. He tossed another handful. “Shells are soft,” he said.
“Poppa, what does vjeszczi mean to you?”
He put the tub down and looked up, startled.
“Vjeszczi? Children’s tales, I suppose.”
I knew he was hiding from the point. “But what does it really mean?”
“Where did you hear it?” Poppa looked at me earnestly, as if afraid to hear.
“Batcha.”
Poppa shook off a small crayfish that had gripped him. It struck hard on the side of the tub and fell down onto its back, its tail bucking.
“What did she say?” Poppa asked.
“She called me one.”
Poppa looked up. “You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
I could see his cheek muscles working. He turned, picked up the bucket of fresh water from the creek and dumped it into the tub. “I’ll need more,” he said, and walked from the shed toward the milk house. I followed.
“Well, what did she mean?”
Poppa seemed more intent on the water than on me. “She’s just an old lady,” he said.
“I know she’s an old lady. Why did she call me that?”
“I don’t know. She’s upset about Ig, you know that. We all are.”
“I’ve heard her say it before. Before Ig. Before Ig died. When I was little.”
The Last Season Page 18