I remembered what I’d heard on Radio Peace and Love, too, as I’d disinfected the hearse, earlier in the day. It had not occurred to me at the time that far from being pregnant, Say Muh had had, beneath her jilbab, enough explosives strapped to her body to blow us all out of the ocean.
When their offspring didn’t return, even after an announcement that the ship’s cafeteria was closing, Rainy and Frenchy and I left the cabin to look for them. The HE fought hard when Frenchy dragged him out from under a table where she found him going glock-glock-glock, preparing to detonate. In our cabin he locked himself in the bathroom, making machine-gun imitations until Frenchy became convinced he was going to flush himself down the toilet.
Say Muh had disappeared. Rainy thought she might have gone back to the car deck to keep her twin company, and said she’d look there next if I would check the outer deck — she didn’t want to go outside and have a hair wreck. We left Frenchy, her lips at a crack in the bathroom door, listing off large calibre sniper rifles, and went in opposite directions: Rainy took the elevator to the car deck and I climbed more steps to the solarium where families who hadn’t reserved cabins were staking out little nests. An old man, naked except for a pair of happy face boxer shorts, called out as I passed, “there’ll be a high tide tonight.” I nodded to him and carried on past two blonde twins cross-dressing their Barbies, a man in a T-shirt that said “Will Work for Beer” munching his way through a bald head of lettuce, and a gang of teenagers on their way to a Marilyn Manson concert in Vancouver. But nowhere did I see a ghost in white robes embroidered with, I Have Special Permission to Enter Heaven.
As I searched for Say Muh I thought of the sign outside the Clínica Desaguadero, the bronze statue of a slave, his naked legs and arms breaking free of his chains. No tenemos que pedir permiso para ser libres. We do not need to ask permission to be free. I remembered, too, the attempt I had made to free myself, permanently, by taking my own life, when I was sixteen and my parents had refused to let me travel to Vancouver to see the Beatles in concert. My father found me before the pills took effect. Because of him I had missed my chance to become a teen suicide.
Since that time my body had stubbornly pre-empted every attempt I’d made to shortcut my journey from birth to death. Some, like Frenchy, would argue that the most valuable thing you could do with your life was to end it. But suicide required that you not only wished to die, but that you wished to kill, and be killed, also. While I had often wished for two out of three, I’d never had homicidal inclinations, despite what Vernal maintained, that those who do not wish to kill anyone often wished they were able.
I searched the outside deck but found no trace of Say Muh, and was on my way back to our cabin when I heard a familiar yelp. Toop leapt out from under a seat where he had been lying in ambush. He wrapped his front legs around me and covered my face with dog drool. “He remembers you,” Hooker said.
I stooped to pat the dog, who had slithered back under the chair, the familiar ‘W’ creasing his forehead. “I told him if he didn’t lay low he’d get himself busted and sentenced to a night on the car deck,” Hooker said. He reached down and rubbed his dog’s ears. Our hands touched, and I drew mine back, as if I’d been shocked. Hooker had that effect on me. I couldn’t hide my pleasure in seeing him again, even though that pleasure was now tainted by fear — about what he might have done to Al and the role I had played in helping him dispose of the body.
Grace lay stretched out across three chairs, clutching the headless body of Baby-Think-It-Over and the Moses basket she’d woven for her baby, stuffed to overflowing with baby clothes. She still wore, I saw, the pouch containing the ultra-sound photo, around her neck. She opened her eyes for a moment, then rolled them up into her head the way Frenchy did when it got too bright in my room. For a moment I thought she was going into labour, but she looked so frail now I wondered if that would even be possible. Grace seemed almost transparent, as if at any moment she might dissolve, leaving a baby in her place.
“She hasn’t been doing so good lately,” Hooker said. “I’m taking her off-island to get her away for a while.”
I said I was sorry, and asked if I could help in any way. Grace opened her eyes again at the sound of my voice, hoisted herself up from her bed of chairs, and clutching Baby-Think-It-Over, headed in the direction of the washroom.
“If they would let her keep her kid . . . that might help,” Hooker said, reiterating what Agnes had told me, once Grace was out of earshot. Social Services still insisted she had to give him up, but they would have to drug her and cut him out of her if they wanted to take him away. “If they think she’s going to let him go without some kind of a fight, they don’t know Gracie.”
I told Hooker I had a cabin, and if Grace would be more comfortable there, she could have the bottom bunk. He didn’t speak again until she reappeared making a bed for Baby-Think-It-Over in the Moses basket amongst the baby clothes. “You look sick,” he said.
“Then don’t look at me,” she snapped. Her red hair hung over her face in greasy ropes; her pupils, black, unfocussed, had sucked up all the beauty from her eyes, making them look as if she’d left behind whatever happiness she’d known, on Kliminawhit.
Hooker told her I’d offered her a bed. “It hurts when I move,” she said. “You take the bed. I’ll be okay, I’ll sleep here with Toop.” She spread herself out over the three seats, resting her head next to the Moses basket.
Hooker covered her with his jacket and touched her cheek with the back of his palm. He told Toop to stay; Toop put his head down between his paws, his eyes full of that “I promise you I’m not going to do anything I shouldn’t do” look.
“There’ll be a high tide tonight,” the old man, still in his boxer shorts, proclaimed, as we made our way back through the rows of sleeping passengers.
“Thanks for the head’s up, captain,” Hooker said.
When I opened our cabin door I saw Frenchy dangling Rainy by her ankles over the edge of the upper bunk. She dropped her when I switched on the overhead light, and Rainy landed, laughing, on top of Say Muh, who transformed herself back into a fine red mist. Rainy said she had found Say Muh in the children’s play area, helping decorate a tree with snake’s mirrors, her name for tinsel.
Hooker made himself at home; he hung up his jacket then sat down on the bottom bunk and took off his shirt. He pulled off his cowboy boots and let them drop to the floor, and got under the covers, still wearing his socks and his jeans.
Yo! Pistola! Rainy said, picking herself off Say Muh. She scuttled back up onto the top bunk where she lay on her belly, watching him. He be a watermelon I eat him, seeds and all. I wouldn’t spit him out.
Frenchy peered over the edge of the upper berth, too, as the HE emerged from the bathroom, going gack gack gack trying to blow out the bullet that had lodged itself above his nose. Rainy said his hairball-vomiting noises hurt her headache.
He miss his boo, Frenchy said, defensively.
Boo hoo, Rainy said.
I took off my coat and hung it over the top of Hooker’s jacket. Rainy grabbed my hand and held on to it. Her cold hand, at such times, squeezed my heart; she pulled me up onto the top bunk and I tried to get comfortable between the two of them. I didn’t sleep, but went into a dreamy kind of meditation that involved carrying my baby in a sling, just high enough that he could see out above the line of my shoulders where he swivelled his head, like an owlet. Rainy nudged me fully awake and I heard, over the loud speaker outside our cabin door, “Attention passengers. Would the owner of a dog please come to the cafeteria. Would the owner come to the cafeteria immediately.”
“That would be Toop,” Hooker sighed. “Looking for a handout, no doubt.”
“I’ll get him,” I said. I climbed out of the bunk and threw my clothes back on.
“I owe you one,” Hooker said. “Tell Toop I’m keeping the bed warm for him.”
In the cafeteria I found Hooker’s dog, who had made friends with the cleaner, scarfi
ng a chicken salad sandwich. I apologized, saying he must have escaped from the car, I’d make sure he was locked up for the night, and the cleaner looked at Toop, sympathetically.
Toop stayed close until we were out of the cleaner’s sight, and then ran all the way back to the solarium where he hid under Grace’s chair. I didn’t have the heart to make him stay in the hearse with a python and a rat, so I took him with me to the cabin. When I opened the door he leapt into bed with Hooker, put his head on the pillow, and squeezed his eyes shut.
I told Hooker what had happened, and he laughed. “Toop’s a sneaky Indian,” he said. “He knows how to get out of the kitchen if there’s too much heat.”
As soon as the HE smelled Toop, he lost control of his body and began smashing his face against the door. Frenchy said the smell brought back memories — he woke up ready to kill dogs — as she slipped to the floor and tried calming him by repeating the names of sniper rifles: AI Arctic Warfare .50, Truvelo .50, Mechem NTW-20, Barrett.
I struggled onto the top bunk and tried to sleep. Beneath me I could hear Toop grinding his teeth.
“Let me know if it gets lonely up there without me,” I heard Hooker say, before I drifted into sleep.
Neither Rainy nor Frenchy nor I had slept well, and when I woke early the next morning to an announcement that the ship was about to dock, Hooker and Toop were gone. Say Muh knelt on the bottom bunk blowing down the front of her blouse, trying to warm up her heart. The HE sat in the middle of the floor, jabbing his finger in the stripes of light where it came through the vents in the door.
When we’d made our way down to the car deck I found Hooker — holding Toop with one arm and supporting Gracie with the other — leaning against our ride, waiting. Rainy said Grace, even with a baby getting ready to pop out of her, still looked too skinny, like a body-of-Christ wafer. She be like the Holy Uterus, Rainy said.
Hooker apologized for leaving without waking me, but he had started worrying about Grace in the middle of the night. He asked if the three of them could bum a lift into town.
I said yes, of course, wherever they had to go. I left it vague, remembering that Hooker didn’t like being pinned down: when you make plans you interfere with the way things ought to turn out on their own. Hooker thought Grace would be best off lying down so I unlatched the back doors of the hearse and made a bed for her out of the pillows. Grace went limp in Hooker’s arms when she saw the wicker coffin. Riding in a hearse with a coffin, she said, pressing Baby-Think-It-Over to her breast, was what dead people do.
“Nobody’s going to die,” Hooker said. When he glanced at me I could see the questions in his eyes: why was I travelling with an empty coffin, in the very place we had laid Al’s body?
I said Grace could ride in the front with us, if she felt well enough to sit up. “I’m sick,” she said, but accepted my offer. Toop jumped in and curled up in the Moses basket I placed at Grace’s feet.
Rainy forced Say Muh into the back, though she refused to share the coffin with the HE, who couldn’t find his rat. I could feel every terrorist cell of his skin revolting against his loss, as if he wished his skin could wriggle free of itself, the way a snake’s could, and escape from being dead. He threw himself on the ground, behind the rear wheels of the hearse, and began smashing his face off on the fender. Frenchy searched the hearse and came up with two whiskers and a small section of tail. She figured that Say Muh’s twin, in her python-manifestation, had eaten the rat. When I looked I saw the python had a rodent-shaped bulge in its belly. The snake flicked out its forked tongue, as if taking the emotional temperature of the air, then slithered its way up between Rainy’s legs.
I slipped in behind the wheel, waiting for Frenchy to get control of her boy. She kissed his bloodied face and whispered the word he loved most, the one she used when all others failed — Kalashnikov — like a mantra, or magical charm, in the hole where one of his ears had been. Gradually the HE stopped his smashing, his vacant eyes coming into focus as he let Frenchy lift him into the back.
“We ready to roll?” Hooker said. I got out and closed the back doors, but when the HE smelled Toop he began spitting and rolling his eyes and banging his broken head again. Rainy helped Frenchy wrestle him into the coffin; Frenchy closed the lid and sat down on it saying he could stay in there until he learned how to behave.
I eased ahead down the steeply sloping ramp. Rainy worried that I was going to put us all in the ocean, as I watched in the rear-view mirror the python crawl out from between her legs, undulate up her body and coil itself around her neck. Rainy unzipped her bongolock and the snake disappeared back into its nest of hair. A moment later Say Muh’s no-name twin manifested herself back into her kamikaze form, and sat leaning against the coffin, stroking the bulge in her stomach.
We crept past the ferry terminal parking lot. It was still dark and raining, and the visibility was poor. Gulls flew in and out of the fog, their wings illuminated by the fluorescent dock lights.
Rainy, who had let down her hair and was nibbling at the ends, tried to squeeze in between Hooker and Grace on the front seat. Front seat get to go everywhere first, she complained, when I signalled for her to stay back. Toop opened one eye, growled and covered his flop ears with his paws.
“Now what’s bugging him?” Hooker said. “We got lumaloos riding with us again, or what?”
I watched the ferry-terminal world recede through the side mirror, and had to pump the brakes hard and swerve to the left to avoid rear-ending a white stretch limousine that had come to an abrupt stop in front of us. A sign in the rear window read, “Ride in style — at no extra cost.”
“I was supposed to get a brake job,” I said. Hooker shook his head and said, “thanks for the warning.”
I glanced over at Grace, who had green strings of mucous dripping from her nose. Her body was trembling and she was drenched in sweat.
“Been there, done that,” Hooker said. “When you quit, cold turkey, you get life with its skin torn away.”
I had never been addicted to heroin, but I knew what quitting everything but heroin was like, “everything but” being the cocktail of drugs I’d become a slave to on Tranquilandia. Even now I could start to shake and feel nauseated, thinking about that time. I crept up on the limo, and had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid hitting it when it stopped, again, unexpectedly.
What they mean, ride in style for no extra cost? asked Frenchy, who’d been thrown forward into the front seat by my inattention to the road. You pay for a limo you want people to think you rich and important.
Grace moaned and began scratching at herself, digging her chewed fingernails deep into her skin. She couldn’t stop shivering, even though I had the heat turned on high.
“Maybe we ought to do Grace a favour and drop her at Mercy first?” Hooker was saying. “Then I’ll stop over at my cousin’s, I guess.” He had an address on the eastside of Vancouver, but figured he should call to invite himself first.
“A favour?” Grace cried. She felt too sick to go to any hospital, she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She said Mercy was for hardcore addicts who went there to die, not to dry out and have babies. She remembered a hotel, the Outer Planet, on the downtown eastside. “Not five diamonds or anything, but nice.” Hooker reminded her that the last time they’d stayed there a man had been stabbed in the foyer, the couple in the next room had died of an overdose and they hadn’t slept all night because someone kept banging on their door demanding that “Fuckface open up.”
“I was just saying,” Grace said. Her voice could have sucked the breath out of sorrow.
Morning had broken through the fog, a fog so dense I could see the suggestion of trees, but not their branches, as I pulled off the highway and drew up at a Petro-Can station. Hooker said, “back in a minute,” and vanished into the gloom.
Grace, who hadn’t stopped scratching, gradually nodded off. Frenchy figured Gracie was about to give birth in the dead-wagon; moaning and shivering were early warning sig
nals. I said the baby wasn’t due until Christmas, two weeks away. That be Son Jesus’ birthday, said Rainy, blowing down the back of Gracie’s neck. Holy Uterus’ boy be Come Back Jesus, best believe.
Grace woke up, complaining about a draft. Hooker returned saying the telephone booth had been stolen. It took two more attempts — the Shell service station had got rid of its pay phone because too many drug deals were being made, and the Esso’s had been vandalized so many times they had given up trying to fix it. When Hooker finally found a phone that worked, at a Mohawk station, his cousin’s number was no longer in service. He remembered her telling him she was moving to the Interior to grow dope with her boyfriend last April, but he’d thought she was just trying to impress him.
They crib with us, Rainy whispered. What else they gon do, bail? She was right: what could I do but offer to take them home.
“You could stay at our place — there’s plenty of room,” I heard myself say. I said we would take turns watching Grace until she got through withdrawal. That way she wouldn’t have to be hospitalized until she went into labour.
Hooker was quiet for a long time. “That’s not a bad idea,” he said, when he finally spoke — his way, I knew, of being grateful.
Welcome to Astoria
“Your Gateway to Another Life”
Just past the sign we came up on a low, grey cement melancholy of a building shrouded in fog and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The words on the reader board under Astoria Collegiate had been edited, and now read, “End of Term Titeracy Fest Today 1:30 in the jism”. Frenchy said all she’d ever wanted was for her boy to have the same opportunities as other boys his age.
What that be, chance to shoot off his gatt in a school cafeteria? Rainy said. She had pulled out a handful of hair and swallowed it without chewing it first. You plan on shooting up any muhfo school, include me out, she added, cutting Frenchy a look.
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