I-5 called it “hitching up the reindeer.” Outside I could hear the wind getting up as if it had decided to come inside, where the party was, and join us. On the wind’s heels a light snow drifted in through an open window and melted around my head in a cloud of breath.
You never understand the nature of the drug, you only understand the sorrow. Somewhere deep in my old brain there must have been a memory stored from the first time I ever did a line and cocaine had become my fate, my sweet annihilating angel.
I didn’t get to bed that night because after we had cooked up and smoked what was left in the flap, I-5 went to his stash in the basement and came back with more.
Vernal had always said I had a sensible streak, but there is nothing sensible about cocaine. I only used what I needed which was, of course, an immeasurable amount. That is to say, if there was any in the room I couldn’t let it go unused, but the minute I’d done a line I wanted to be straight again, and then I’d do another line, and another, until it was all gone and I found some sort of peace in coming down. Meanwhile every line I snorted, every base toke I took, helped obliterate my life.
When I opened my eyes late the next day, got out of bed and stumbled up to Vernal’s office, full of remorse, I found Frenchy where I could count on finding her, at the computer. Rainy sat on the floor with Say Muh’s head in her lap, going through her hair with the fine-toothed flea comb I-5 used on the Bomb, looking for lice. Ever since the twins had removed their veils they’d been scratching at themselves, she said. I told her it might help if she tried washing their hair once in a while.
Frenchy said shhhhhh because she couldn’t concentrate with us distracting her, conversationally. Frenchy had reached the Twelfth Step: “Having reached a state of spiritual exhaustion as the result of all the other steps we’ve taken, we were ready to carry our message to others who were newly dead and looking for a way to live well in the afterlife.”
So many steps, only two feet, Rainy said, sulkily. What you gon do now, you finish settin your wreckful life right?
Frenchy looked up at her, and shook her head. Shoot bullets through me, why don’t you?
Rainy shrieked — she knew this always got Frenchy’s attention — hitting a pitch that caused the computer screen to crack, from one side to the other. Rainy took hold of the twins by their hair and went back downstairs.
She be high as a nigga pie, Frenchy said, confirming my worst fears.
I went down to join Rainy who was watching the noon news. I had missed the beginning of the story but caught, “ . . . believed the child’s mother, who may have had outside help, kidnapped the premature baby who was being kept in a Natal Intensive Care Unit and left the hospital early this morning. A hospital spokesperson said, ‘We have checked the area thoroughly and there is nothing to indicate that the child is actually lost, other than the fact that he is missing.’” The reporter said the baby had been under the protection of Human Resources and was in the process of being adopted, that the infant’s birth mother was an intravenous drug user who was being held under observation at Mercy, and that the missing baby was now the centre of a city-wide hunt.
Rainy sniffed, pressing her nose flat with her forefinger the way she used to do in the Facility to show she was not pleased with the world. You jack what belong to you, they still call it stealin?
I said most people would see it that way. Grace was one of those about whom others say, “she should never have been a mother.”
I heard the phone ring, got up and went into the kitchen, just as I-5 was hanging up. “We got a situation,” he said. “Let’s go. Right now. Fast.”
The twins wanted to watch TV, so Rainy said they could stay behind again. The HE had changed into a clean, white robe, covered his head with his black and white checkered scarf, and put on the green bandana with the Arabic lettering. His eyes, for once, looked beatific, as though his soul resided, already, in another place.
As we piled into the hearse, Toop came around the corner of the house, the dirt-encrusted body of the headless Baby-Think-It-Over in his mouth. Rainy wrenched it from him, and clutched it to her own damaged body.
I-5 kept giving me directions, even though I knew where to go. Frenchy tried to restrain the HE as he flew from one side of the hearse to the other, gulping down the fast-paced downtown air, as if he had been starved for chaos.
When we reached the centre of the city nearly every parking lot had been cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape in the aftermath of the Marilyn Manson concert. I no longer recognized where I was. The neighbourhood had changed since the days the legal crowd had frequented the restaurants and I had joined Vernal at the Hung Jury Inn, with prosecutors and other defence lawyers, for long boozy lunches. Now the local businesses had more bars on their windows than your average Death Row facility.
I-5 pointed to a vacant spot in front of the Salvation Army. I parked, and he went to open the passenger door, but a woman on crutches, wearing fire-engine red boots up to her crotch blocked his way, and made a sign for him to roll down his window. Her skin was a urinous yellow, her nose brimming with doper’s drip. She asked if he had a cigarette, or five dollars for bus fare, and he shook his head. “Not for you I don’t, sweetheart.”
“What about crutches, you need crutches?” she asked, ignoring him and turning her attention to me. “I can get a good pair, cheap. I give you a deal.”
“Does she look like she needs crutches, she’s driving, ain’t she?” I-5 opened his door and the woman stepped backwards, mumbling “fuck you very much,” then crumpled to the sidewalk as if her bones had been pulled out from inside her legs.
I put the “On Appointment” sign on display in the window, got out and locked the doors. I glanced at a plaque: Salvation Army was invented to save souls, to grow saints, and to serve suffering humanity. It was hard to imagine any kind of saint growing or thriving in a neighbourhood such as this one. Look like everyone fall out of an ugly tree and get broke by branches on they way to the ground, Rainy said.
The smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. We had to run the half block to keep up with I-5, who disappeared inside a McDonald’s whose golden arches had long ago fallen. A sign on the temporary plywood door read, “Sorry For Our Appearance. We are Undergoing a Face Lift”.
A girl, presumably a server, leaned on the counter, twitching. A man with the top of his head wrapped in bleeding newspaper sat at a corner table collecting his spit in a wide-mouthed Mason jar. A woman stood over him, pulling his ear, saying, “Dave, I thought you loved me? Dave?”
At that moment the HE, who had come in after Frenchy, twisting at a piece of shrapnel under his skin, started going glock-glock-glock clutching at his throat. He made the same coughing-up-a-massive-hairball sound I was accustomed to hearing, accompanied now by an even more heroic clearing of lungs, a gurgling sound, like the death rattle issuing from the throat of a dying man. But this time, as he blew his nose over and over again into his kaffiyeh, a projectile that had struck him between his eyes and lodged itself above his nose all those years ago, flew out and landed at Frenchy’s feet. The HE slapped his head hard, only once, with his open hand, and then stopped, opened his eyes, and stared at his mother as if seeing her for the first time.
Frenchy fell to her knees on the floor before her son, telling him she had never given up hope that he would find his way back to her. Even though the HE had regained his sight, he couldn’t hear her. He just went on smiling down at Frenchy with that half-embarrassed smile the dead get, as if they’re sorry to be a burden on you, for the grief you’re going to get.
You go ahead, girl, Frenchy said to Rainy. I catch up widju later.
I-5 headed straight through the building to the door leading into the alley behind the restaurant. Rainy hustled me outside in time to see I-5 reach into a dumpster and pull out a green garbage bag. He opened it, looked inside, then told me to have a peep: I saw a baby, wrapped in crime-scene tape like a tiny mummy, with his head poking out, sucking a pacifier th
at had been fixed in place with duct tape so he couldn’t cry and draw attention to himself.
The baby looked up at me. He had Angel’s caramel eyes — eyes that at first just looked warm, but which, like little windows in furnace doors, only gave a glimpse of the heat inside.
I-5 made kissing noises as he lifted the baby out of the bag. I unzipped my jacket, tore open my shirt, and loosened the yellow tape from around his body. When his arms were free, he balled his hands into fists and began pummelling the air, like Angel used to do.
I removed the duct tape and took the pacifier from his mouth, then tucked him inside my shirt, and held him against my bare chest like a piece of my mother’s bone china, one with a hairline crack that might break all the way if you looked at it too long, or too hard. I felt peaceful, suddenly, and whole again, having him there, as though a part of me that had gone missing had been temporarily restored.
“Youngster could have starved to death,” I-5 said, giving the baby a proprietary look. He turned the bag upside down and a plastic baby-bottle, a jar of Coffee-Mate, and a note saying, “Feed me, pleas,” fell out. I recognized the scrawl.
This be Son Jesus come back early for his birthday, Rainy cried, as she danced around me, swinging Baby-Think-It-Over high over her head, reciting snippets of nursery rhymes because she was too excited to remember any of them all the way through: Rock-a-bye Jesus, Be hip-hoppin up da hill, Son he felt down, An busted he ass, the whole muhfo crib rock on.
The baby fixed Rainy with an open-mouthed stare. When his eyes shifted their focus onto the headless doll, his face, for a moment, became pinched — he seemed to be trying to make up his mind whether he should be afraid or amused — his eyes darting from the doll’s severed neck to the centre of its gutted body. His decision made, a frown pulled down the corners of his mouth, his bottom lip began to quiver, and he began to wail. There was no consoling him. He continued to scream until Rainy stuffed Baby-Think-It-Over in the garbage bag, and tossed it in the dumpster. It was as if he had sensed, in that headless, emptied out body, what could have been his fate.
Rainy asked if it was safe to touch him, and when I said “go ahead” she reached inside my jacket to rub his shiny head. She said he looked hungry, that we should stop and pick up a pizza on our way back to the house.
“Babies don’t eat pizza,” I said. “You have to have teeth.”
Even the ghost of a dog got teeth. Babies don’t eat pizza, what they do eat? Rainy stared at me as if the baby might be better off scavenging in a dumpster than having me as a mother. I thought of my own son, how I had watched him sicken, grow thin, his eyes as big as mouths, his heart all hunger. I didn’t know anything about taking care of babies, then. I could hardly take care of myself, let alone a hapless child who needed me.
“Milk,” I said. “Babies need milk.”
With the child snug against my chest, I walked back inside the restaurant, with Rainy and I-5 right behind. The place had emptied, and Frenchy stood frozen by the front entrance where the HE was going glock-glock-glock, his eyes as fixed on Frenchy as the eyes of a newly dead person. Even by his own standards the HE didn’t appear normal.
As I watched, he began to peel off layers of his clothing. I realized then what Frenchy’s boy was about to do.
Beneath his robes he wore a vest that covered his entire upper body, a vest lined with cylinders of explosive. He started counting backwards from ten, at the same time fingering the on-off switch on the belt.
The height of bliss comes with the end of countdown then boom! You sense yourself floating to another life.
Bounce! Now! Out of his way, Frenchy screamed, the words cutting through me like a blade of cold wind. I broke open the doors, dragging Rainy after me.
We hit the pavement and rolled into the street, just as I heard the dry ker-boom of the detonation. The echo of the blast continued to hang in the air for a moment before everything became so quiet it seemed as if the explosion had blown away all other sound with it. I turned and saw clouds of dust rising from the site where the fast food outlet had stood, and the remains of the fluorescent sign saying, “Billions and Billions Served”.
Neither Rainy nor I spoke as we drove. Frenchy, I assumed, was dead all over again, and I-5 hadn’t made it out, either. All I could think of was getting away. Whenever we came to a red light I reached over and slid my little finger into the baby’s tiny grasping hand.
I could hear sirens. Rainy held the baby in one arm as fiercely as she had held Baby-Think-It-Over. He was still loosely wrapped in crime-scene tape, but he had kicked free his skinny little legs, and wriggled with life, as if he could swim through the air. I saw no fear in his eyes, just a question, but then I looked at him again and thought, wasn’t he too new to be capable of forming a question? One lazy eyelid fluttered like the heartbeat of a baby bird and his tiny mouth stretched into a lopsided O, so much like Angel, my heart did a double flip.
Rainy’s mind, I could tell, was on Frenchy. When I went to touch her hand, she put her free arm around my shoulders. Way I see it, Frenchy catch up wid us later, just like she say. Best believe.
I didn’t answer, kept my eyes trained on the road.
I look at you, don’t see no waterworks, Rainy said. You see me cryin tears?
I wanted to tell her, sometimes we cry with everything except tears, but I kept quiet.
Frenchy be dead again, we both be spoutin, Rainy continued, studying the baby’s wrinkled face.
She said this as we came upon a billboard, plain, white, with 1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4 Given in red. I remember Grace saying her baby was a gift, a hard gift to accept but one she’d forgiven the rapist for bestowing upon her. Staring up at that billboard then, I knew what her baby’s name was going to be.
There was no convincing Rainy that Coffee-Mate wasn’t a reasonable substitute for mother’s milk. “Babies drink milk,” I told her over and over again, until we reached the mall where I stopped to buy formula and diapers. Formula, I tried to explain, was what you used when you couldn’t produce your own milk.
When we got back to the house, and the twins saw Given, they abandoned The Simpsons and took turns holding him, as if they had finally discovered something more interactive than bombs or TV. When they hugged him, Given squeaked. The Bomb must have figured that Given was a life-size toy; he got so excited when he saw the baby he wagged his whole body and put his tail out of joint. Toop lowered his eyes and looked away, like a boy with a crush on his first grade teacher.
Rainy drew Given a bath, singing Way Down in Bath-I-Am, while I fixed a bottle and made a sling out of a towel. “I’ve got something else for you,” I whispered, as he gulped down the warm milk. I reached into my jacket pocket for the shoe, saw Given curling his toes the same way Angel always did whenever I tried to slip his foot into one of his little boots.
The shoe fit beautifully, as if it had been hand-tooled for his foot alone. Rainy spun around and disappeared upstairs, returning with a parcel she had been keeping for me, she said, underneath the bed. She insisted I open it now, even undid the tape for me, being careful not to tear the motivational gift wrap depicting a deserted beach and a lyrical sunset.
The beach looked like the one Hooker had taken me to on Kliminawhit. I peeled back the paper and began lifting the lid of the box, cautiously, as if something might be waiting to jump out at me. Rainy couldn’t contain herself. She grabbed the box from my hands, tore off the lid, and held up the shoe, identical to the one I had found that day in the sand. I wiggled Given’s foot into it — the perfect match to the smallest running shoe ever made.
Rainy, I could tell, was pleased with her gift. She’d found it in an odd-size bin at the Athlete’s Feet and Frenchy had had no problem pocketing it. She beamed as she went through the Moses basket for baby clothes, then helped me unwrap the remainder of the crime-scene tape from Given’s body. I showed her how to test the bathwater, with her elbow, to make sure it was the right temperature before lowering him in.
I remembered the first time I’d given Angel a bath, how hard I’d fought to keep hold of his skinny arms and legs, slippery as cooked spaghetti. Then I’d taken him into bed with me — something I’d been afraid to do lest I rolled over on top of him in my sleep — and felt so — glad. Such a small thing, but you don’t always know what will make you glad when you think back on it. Or what you will wish you had done differently.
Back then I thought my choices would always be in front of me. Now it felt like the important events of my life had already happened, and when I conjured up Angel I pictured a little ghost, weighing less than a puff of wind. Most of the catastrophes I had suffered in my life had never happened but losing my child was one catastrophe that did, and I had been willing to forfeit my life for him. I’d wanted to die so badly at one time because then I could have joined him in that black, unappeasable earth under the guaiac tree, the Tree of Life.
Toop barked once; it startled Given enough to make him open his eyes wide, and look at me to see if either of us were in any danger, as if he wanted the world to continue a while longer just so we could be together. The Bomb sat poised at the bathroom door, ready to leap into the water and rescue him, if I gave the word.
Given’s tiny body seemed dwarfed by the ocean of the bathtub; I held on to him so tightly he must have felt my fear. I cupped his head in one hand, to keep it out of the water, and squeezed a sponge over him with the other, then plucked him from the bath, dried him off, and balanced him on the palm of my hand, where he quivered like a soap bubble. It felt so fine — to be able to hold all that mattered to you in the palm of one hand.
Vancouver’s first suicide bombing was all over the six o’clock news. Rescue crews had recovered a green bandana with Allah Akhbar on it. This meant, “Our God is better than your God,” the reporter explained with the breathlessness of a sports announcer caught in the spirit of competition. A police officer was interviewed saying, “There is no way to stop ‘these people’ once they make up their minds. What are we supposed to do? Threaten to shoot if he blows himself up? We’re dead if we do, dead if we don’t,” as if suicide bombing had become a feature in our lives. The camera panned to workers at the Sally Ann covering their windows with bombing net, and a dumpster filled to the brim with broken glass.
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