Nothing but Life

by Brent van Staalduinen

  “But I could never get the mask to work,” Gal says. “Not many could. It is an American design. Useless.”

  Jesse said the same thing. He said that older NCOs — non-commissioned officers — would talk about them. Practising in gas huts with CS gas, which is like tear gas. Failing because the rubber was too grabby for the straw and they’d give up and breathe and end up on the ground outside, their eyes fused shut, gagging and vomiting from the exposure. Training for NBC warfare, Jesse said. Nuclear. Biological. Chemical. Training for the unthinkable. Bunny suits and booties and gloves and seam tape and decontamination powder. All against poisons and pathogens that you can’t see or smell and will probably kill you anyway.

  Gal flips the little flap closed. Click. The sound makes him chuckle, his eyes crinkling, lines bursting outward. Like a glimpse of sun between storm clouds. But he grows serious almost right away. His scars don’t wrinkle the way the rest of his skin does. They have to feel different. An ever-present reminder keeping him from laughing too long.

  He hands the canteen back to me and moves back into the pew. He kneels on the kneeler, crosses himself again, and sits back in his former position. This time he closes his eyes. Folds his hands on the back of the pew in front of him. Serious. Mouthing words of some kind.

  EXILED

  I can’t eat lunch at home today. I walk across the park toward Mia’s hedge — that’s what I’m calling it now — with a plastic shopping bag dangling by my legs. I don’t know if she’ll be there, but sitting and eating by myself is better than dealing with the storm brewing at my house.

  Mom and Aunt Viv are in a sour mood, arguing about every little thing. Gramma Jan is coming home either today or tomorrow, which you’d think would be good news. But the sisters are jumpy about it. Bickering about who should drive her home. What to prepare for her first meal back. That kind of thing. They tried to bring me into it, but I told them I didn’t want to play referee. And could they get over it so Gramma Jan didn’t have to deal with their shit when she got home and could concentrate on getting better?

  Me dropping the S-word got a half-hearted rebuke from Mom and silenced them for a bit. But by the time I’d assembled a couple of PBJ sandwiches and grabbed an apple and cookies and a few more granola bars, they were at it again. They didn’t say goodbye when I left.

  Every family argues, right? A good argument is like a pressure valve for all that unconditional love. Mom doesn’t talk about it much, but Aunt Viv is happy to share the details of their most extreme shouting matches. A passionate family. Except for Grampa Vern. Mom says he was the calm one in the family. The rain to dampen Gramma Jan’s perpetual grass fires. When he died, there was no one to balance Gramma Jan out, so she raised Mom and Viv by her own methods. It was a house where no opinion went unchallenged, no infraction unpunished. Mom says it’s why she tries so hard to be gentle with me. Counterpoint to her upbringing. “Building new legacies” was how Jesse put it. “Your mom is changing the game.”

  But she can still argue. I grew up listening to their flare-ups, which always seemed inevitable. Mom, Jesse, and I would visit Hamilton every now and again. Not very often — Gramma Jan never warmed to Jesse, so the visits were always tense. No one in this family likes to be the first to give in. Gramma Jan and Aunt Viv are different generations of the same person. Mom is calmer but still strong-willed. The three of them feeding off each other is something to watch. Jesse had to take me out of the house a lot when the family would get together.

  So the arguments aren’t new. There are fewer blowups these days, but when they do happen, what comes out is multiplied. Hotter. Like the fury’s been stored up. And though no one says his name anymore, Jesse is the cause of all of it. Gramma Jan and Aunt Viv wrestling not only with the horror of the shooting but also with the fact that the shooter is family. Mom fighting against what he did, trying to help me cope, and grieving the loss of their relationship all at once.

  This one happened one night a few weeks after we moved to Hamilton, when they thought I was asleep:

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Gramma Jan said.

  “Mom, we need to set some ground rules.”

  “Victoria Sims, this is my house and I’ll decide the rules. You take care of your own.”

  “I do. He’s downstairs and sleeping. That’s why I’m bringing this up. He’s who we should be worried about.”

  “Feel free to thank you-know-who for that.”

  “You’re blaming me?”

  “I didn’t bring him into the family!” Gramma Jan said. Like she was spitting. “And I won’t say his name one more time. No one will. Not in this space. Ever.”

  Mom fell silent, hurt and raging all at once. Bearing all of it. Blame. Guilt. Grief. Heartbreak.

  You probably can’t know what it takes to banish a name from a home. How painful it is, even though it should be easy, given what happened. We were already tiptoeing around it, but anger pushes things. I’d just had one of my first run-ins with Pat at school. He’d pushed my face into the drinking fountain and I’d shoved him back against the opposite row of lockers. Witnessed by a teacher and every student in the hall. A quick phone call and an uncomfortable meeting in the principal’s office. Mom took me home. She was calm and reassuring. Gramma Jan was not. Aunt Viv tried to be the referee. They carried the argument into the night. I couldn’t sleep and sat on the steps to hear what was being said about me.

  “Jesus, Mom. You can’t police what we say,” Aunt Viv said.

  “Watch me. That goes for Dills, too.”

  “He answers to me,” Mom said, although her voice was small against my grandmother’s anger.

  “He’s not answering to anyone right now, is he?”

  “Mom —”

  “What’s Vicky supposed to do with that?” Aunt Viv asked. “The kid’s traumatized, for crying out loud.”

  “He needs structure. Discipline.”

  “No, he needs time,” Mom said. “And love and lots of space. He saw his best friend killed, for —”

  Her voice broke, and all three women went quiet. Something reaching all of them at the same time. And of course I was thrown back to that library. Ethan’s body. In full HD. I clenched my stomach tight against what could burst out of me.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Gramma Jan said, her voice softer but still full of acid. “He did that to Wendell. That fucking monster.”

  “No!” That was me. On my feet and storming into the kitchen. Seeing the emerging horror on three faces, the realization that I’d been listening the whole time. My anger blazing its own supernova. “Stop talking about him that way!”

  Gramma Jan stood. “We’re just —”

  “You think you know why! Everyone thinks they know why! But no one knows anything. Not you, not me. Maybe not even Jesse.”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is he took everything away, and he —”

  “Jesse, Gramma. Say his name.”

  “No, Wendell. I won’t.”

  And the supernova surged so white I couldn’t see anything. I had to burn through. Scream. “You’re the fucking monster!”

  I turned and rushed out of the kitchen and back down to my room, stomping a thousand pounds on every stair. Thinking about the fact that Mom hadn’t spoken at all after I burst into the kitchen. Hadn’t defended me. I wanted her to, though there wasn’t much she could have said. I screamed into my pillow and made my throat sore. I stared at the little strip of light that cut under my bedroom door. I lay awake for a long time, my anger simmering. Mom never came down, like she always does when we fight. I fell asleep, and of course the dreams came back. I would’ve preferred to stay awake with the anger.

  Today, as I walk toward Mia’s hedge, my irritation with Mom and Aunt Viv fades. Like it did after that early argument about Jesse’s name. There’s something about anger. I find that it can’t stay around long, and at some point you’re back to normal. It’s like the heat of a disagreement seizes up
the family engine for a little while but can’t hold the tension as the machinery cools. Next thing, you’re laughing. Back to the everyday movement of a family. Defending a gramma who sometimes says indefensible things.

  A thin layer of cloud has covered the afternoon sky and the air has gone perfectly still. Capturing the humidity, it feels like. The mosquitoes, usually trapped in shadow and waiting for sunset, love this weather. Without the sun to dry them out, they travel far and wide to bite me. Halfway across the park I’m tempted to turn back to grab my insect repellent, a greasy organic concoction cooked up in some herbal kitchen somewhere. Smells like cough syrup and mint and oregano. I don’t go back, though. I’m too excited to see if Mia is at the hedge.

  She isn’t. Pat is. He looks up from the crumpled magazine he’s reading.

  “Found your spot, Baby,” he says with a sneer.

  “It’s not mine.”

  “I really like it.”

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I say.

  “Why not? It’s a public park.”

  He’s not wrong. But I don’t respond.

  He sniffs. “That’s what I thought. Too weak to give a shit. Now fuck off and don’t come back.”

  His eyes go back to the magazine. Porn. What a shocker. There’s a woman on the front. Jean shorts and a bikini top. Huge breasts. What Pat would call tits, I’m sure. Tats. Jugs. Funbags. Words my mom would crucify me for if she ever heard me using them. Still, whatever you might call them, it’s hard to pry my eyes away.

  Pat sees me looking. “Oh, you like this?”

  Turns the magazine around and flops it open to the centre. An extra page flips open. Like my jaw. The dimensions of her. Such a volume of pink, pink flesh. I feel an uncomfortable warmth down below and my shorts are suddenly smaller. A distant part of me feels guilty for responding. Porn’s wrong. No one wins. Objectification of women’s bodies. All that.

  But Pat laughs and closes the magazine, rolling it into a tight tube. Points it at my face. “Nope. Not for you. You’re gay as fuck. You and your butch friend.”

  Now, I don’t care if Pat calls me gay. For him, it’s an insult of the worst kind, but for me, whatever. I’m not gay, but Jesse and Mom always made it clear that I’m allowed to feel whatever I need to feel. I shouldn’t care if he calls Mia butch, because it’s the same empty nothingness he threw at me. But I do. It’s the casualness of how he does it. As though his messed-up opinions are unbreakable by their certainty. I clench my fists and take a step toward him, like someone else has taken control of my body. He sees it. Drops the magazine and gets up. Those dumb, narrow eyes. I take another step.

  I’m here. Come see me.

  This time the words aren’t spoken, but whispered. Almost hissed. Like a warning. Close enough that my ear seems to itch from Jesse’s breath. The discomfort of it, the urgency, knocks me into myself again. I feel this suggestion of imminent shame, like I could disappoint everyone who loves me by stepping wrong. I shake my head and drop my hands and turn away.

  Pat doesn’t know what to do with the change. As I leave Mia’s hedge, I hear him calling me back, huffing and puffing, a comic-book dragon at a loss. Before my next step takes me out of the shadows and onto the park grass once again, my right foot clips against my left and I fall. A classic tripping move. Impossible to recover at speed. I land in the long, uncut grass at the park’s fringe, right on my chest, my hands not having time to break my momentum. Lunch bag and watch and granola bars and canteen go everywhere. My breath knocked somewhere into the grey, grey sky.

  I get onto my hands and knees, trying to breathe. It’s all I can think about as Pat stands next to me, his stupid knees in my peripheral vision. Worst feeling in the world, maybe, to get the wind knocked out of you. Pat is yelling something. I don’t hear. I’ve been sucked into a soundproof tube.

  But I feel it when he kicks me in the side, his shoe digging deep into the space between my hip bone and ribcage. There’s no breath to drive out, so there’s only the pain. The helplessness as I flop over on my back. Half a second in motion but a forever moment on the ground. I close my eyes to concentrate on getting that one elusive breath back. Focus, Dills, I think. Breathe.

  The first sound that reaches me is the scratch of Pat’s button and fly. Then he’s pissing on me. Still shouting. His urine is warm and yellow and it soaks through my clothes so quickly. Another brief eternity to endure. My lungs finally fill as he finishes. The thick stink of his dehydration is sharp in my nostrils. I open my eyes to see him zip up, almost expecting him to spit on me. The perfect finishing touch to the perfect insult.

  Pat sees the canteen. Picks it up, unscrews it, and sniffs the contents. Shakes his head. Holds the canteen over me. A thin stream of water, still cool from the faucet at home, arcs out and lands on me, soaking into my shirt. I hear him mocking me, “Baby playing army” and whatnot, but I’m distracted by his need to sniff the canteen. What did he expect to find? Tea? Vodka?

  “Stop,” I gasp.

  He’s surprised enough at the sound of my voice that he does. “Why?”

  “You should have it.”

  “Have what?”

  “The rest of the water.”

  He snorts. “Like I’d drink —”

  “You’re obviously dehydrated. Your piss stinks.”

  “Fuck you, Baby.”

  Pat raises the canteen and pours the rest out all over me. Mixing with his urine. I don’t know where his piss begins and the water ends, or vice versa. I’m simply wet. He looks at the canteen for an instant and slings it over his shoulder, thanking me for it, telling me how awesome it is, telling me I should take better care of my things.

  “Hey!”

  Pat turns toward the voice. It’s Gal, striding across the field in his unique sidelong way, hand up and pointing. Pat doesn’t know what to do with it. His confusion would be satisfying if I couldn’t still smell his piss, now cooling. Reminding me of the humiliation that has put me down here.

  “Get away from him!”

  Pat’s sneer returns. He is emboldened, no doubt by the unusual appearance of the reclusive park manager. He sees a non-threat there. A disabled opponent. But then Pat’s face changes. Gal’s face is dark, his scars pale against his anger, his body tense. I’ve been distracted by the scars and the weed and his surly manner and have ignored the compact power he still holds. It’s fearsome. Pat glances at me on the ground, then back at Gal, and runs away after giving me one final, calculating look. This isn’t finished, the look says. The canteen bounces against his back as he runs. That’s suddenly all I can see.

  Gal stands next to me. “Get up now. Go home.”

  He reaches out a hand to help me up, then draws it back as I reach out my own. Like one of those cruel playground jokes. Psych!

  “What?”

  He frowns. “It is better for me not to touch you.”

  I exhale through my nostrils, mad at the world for bringing fear into adult-and-kid relationships. Imagining Gal feeling a last-second tug of hesitation about touching the pissed-on kid on the ground. Appropriate boundaries. Bodily fluids. And so on. But then I see him looking all around me. My eyes follow.

  “Aw, come on,” I groan.

  I’ve landed in a patch of poison ivy. “PI,” Jesse called it. “Leaves of three, let ’em be.” The memory of Jesse whispering and pointing at foliage as we stalked the bush on our hunting trip. How it all looked the same to me. So much of the forest undergrowth having three-leaf bunches. I didn’t take the lesson seriously. Now I do. These low, greasy little plants are defiantly obvious.

  “You must wash. With soap. Now.”

  I stand, my eyes scanning every centimetre of exposed skin. Already feeling the itch, though the reaction is a ways away. Gal’s nose wrinkles as the air I disturbed reaches him. Shame drapes me in a blanket soaked in urine. I actually feel like crying. But there’s more shame at the idea that I might. I don’t cry. Won’t. Not anymore. I left my last tears in the triage hallway of a Windsor ho
spital.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” I say.

  Gal doesn’t respond. Maybe he doesn’t know the proper next steps. His role in all of this, whether he bears any responsibility. Finally, he looks me in the eye. “You have problems with this boy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is this the one Mia called Pat?”

  I nod. “His full name is Patrick, but we call him Pat to bug him. He hates it.”

  Gal makes a face and a sucking noise behind his teeth. “I would also.”

  Gal making the connection is worrisome. This can’t get back to Sean, who’d obviously have to report it. Or not. Maybe Pat assaulting me isn’t his problem. But I wonder about the follow-up. What if it’s bigger than him and me? Pat pissed on me, after all. What if the police have to be brought in? I can’t imagine the courts ignoring this.

  And I think of the box cutter. The one I used to cut Pat. I still have it. I lied to everyone when I said it must have gotten lost afterwards. The principal and the police officer pressed a bit, but not much. Laws and rules about interrogating kids, I guess. But it wouldn’t be hard to find. It’s in my room, yellow and clicky and stainless and wicked sharp, in a white shopping bag in the bottom drawer of my desk. No blood on it or anything, but still. It could get found and make things worse for me. Any remaining compassion would evaporate faster than the first raindrops on a hot day.

  “This is not something he should get away with,” Gal says.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” I say again.

  A long pause, thoughtful. A nod. “Go home. And clean yourself.”

  I pick up my things and walk away, leaving the bag and my lunch on the ground. I’ll come back later and use the spike to pick it up and dispose of it all properly. But it bothers me to leave it there. On top of everything, I’ve made more work for myself. And I’ll have to see it again when I come back.

  I walk back across the park, taking the shortest possible route home. My worry about poison ivy and the school’s knife growing exponentially by the second. I can smell Pat’s piss the whole way.