Inukshuk

by Gregory Spatz

  “God no. They have no idea. They have come to their own conclusion that you’re an abomination and a menace to the school.”

  “Me!”

  “Part of why Jeremy wants to save your poor son, I suspect.”

  “From me.”

  “Good-bye, John.”

  “I’ll call.”

  He flipped his phone shut. Breathed once in and out. Gathered himself and pushed up from the too-small desk chair, thinking, Moira, Moira—what am I doing? And realized too late as he stood, the back pocket of his chinos refusing momentarily to detach from the seat plastic, that he’d done it again. Sat in some kid’s bubble gum. Not pranked this time, just blind and dumb enough with infatuation to sit right in it.

  HE WAS EXHAUSTED, but not in the ordinary way—more like someone had taken out his central power source. Downed all major power lines, leaving only trickles of energy where random portions of the grid remained intact or an emergency generator had kicked to life. Residual strength here and there in places it had lain untapped. What an excruciating process to bend and raise legs, lift feet, repeat, repeat, repeat, press on against the wind, bits of blown ice and snow burning his cheeks like glass. Exhaustion in the corners of his eyes making the lids scratch, as if he’d rubbed them with dirty fingers. Poked them. So tired, he thought. Why so tired? And his hand—not that it hurt really, but he couldn’t put it out of mind, either—numb and prickling with weird edges of feelings that didn’t belong in a hand. Once, years ago, he’d been afflicted with something like this, accompanying a high fever: hallucinations that had caused his senses to invert, especially hearing and touch, so certain sounds became unearthly harsh and magnified, while others faded in a wash of static, and his fingertips, numb on the outside, had felt bloated with the prickly weight of his circulation and the narrow pressure of bones inside skin.

  They’d been harassing him all day, running up from behind and blurting cryptic hockey slang—face wash; deke the pylon; butt-ended ya, ha-ha; catch you in the rink, mo-fo—alternately poking him, waving things in his face, knocking books from his hands. Nothing as forceful as the first attack following math class, so either they’d decided, en masse, to lighten up, be more polite, or he’d gotten better at anticipating them, bracing himself and continually checking over a shoulder to see what was coming. Consequently, her light taps to his head and shoulder as she ran by, jumped a snowbank, and swung around in his path, facing him, didn’t startle him half as much as her presence there in front of him, so incongruous and with that incongruous blue-purple stain creeping out to her cheek and vanishing into the fringe of her hood. Almost before he could stop himself, he was winding up to swing at her.

  “Thomas!”

  “Oh. Hey. It’s you.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You looked like . . . Never mind, weirdo.” She turned and they started walking. “Fun at school today? Any more fights?”

  He attempted a sputtering noise of dismissive contempt and scorn, but the breath caught in his throat more like a sob, surprising him and requiring more. “Not exactly. Today was the day of random hip checks and other surprise moronic hockey moves. Someone’s going to have to pay.”

  “Scuse me?”

  “There’s this scene I’m thinking of, like probably one of the first real cannibalism scenes, maybe close to the end of act one—somewhere around there anyway—hacking up one of the frozen corpses for stew.” He slid his eyes at her and noted how she walked like a kid still—shoulders hunched and swinging, hands deep in her coat pockets. Or maybe it was the way she flung her feet out. Reckless, kiddish. “Anyway, Hoar realizes it’s this one sailor he’s hated all along, this guy who’s just bugged the snot out of him and pranked him on dog watches, stolen stuff, you know, so you think he’d be glad seeing him chopped up for dinner, right? But instead, he wishes he were alive still, because that would be better than watching everyone die. Better, too, because of Franklin’s teachings . . . you know, he figures he’s lost the opportunity for grace by forgiving his worst enemy? Anyway, sometimes . . .” He trailed off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just trying to sort it all out. Sometimes it’s not so bad having your worst enemies around. I mean, it beats a lot of other things, especially if your enemies are just a bunch of dumb jocks and morons.”

  They trudged on against the wind, neither of them saying anything further, Thomas realizing that in her company he’d almost quit feeling bad and had miraculously regained all or most of his energy. What was that about? All it took was a girl to make you feel better? Even if she was only, what, thirteen? She had tits, though, and from things she’d mentioned to him, he was pretty sure she’d started having her period. He was no cradle-robber. The mailboxes went by in his peripheral vision—the tree and the walkway up to his own house—almost before he could fully consider what he was doing or what it signified, as well as the danger averted (because surely there would be a letter from her today, and surely it would mention things he didn’t wish to hear about from her—Devon’s visit north, the inevitability of divorce). Mom, the voice in his head said—I have no mom—then it was gone. Easy as that. Single-file, they marched up the walk to her house, Thomas holding the door open for her as she fumbled with keys and then stood just inside the door, entering the alarm code. Stomped in, unzipping coats fast for the inside air, shivering and stripping away hats, gloves, kicking off boots. Unlike at his house, the thermostat here seemed permanently set to full blast, the air so warm and saturated with smells of plug-in potpourri freshener and cinnamon-raisin bread baking in the automatic bread machine, he wondered (as always) if he would be able to breathe at all—alien life-form visiting inhospitable biosphere. He drew a cottony lungful and then another. All well. Lifted and pulled out the bottom of his T-shirt for the warmer air, remembering as he did that he had not showered or changed most of his clothes since the previous day. New underwear and socks. “So . . .” he said, rubbing fingers into his hair to unmat it.

  She stood over the heat vent beside the kitchen door, bent at the waist, with her head down, hair catching the current of warm air. “Want hot chocolate?” she asked, inverted still, wiggling her fingers at the heat. “OK, I admit it. Today I miss the Chinooks.”

  “Told you.”

  Abruptly, she swung upright, hair floating down around her but still lofted and blown-looking, so she appeared older and radiant, bigger anyway. She went to the enormous fish tank beside the front picture window and sprinkled in a pinch of flaked food. “Look at them go!”

  “Indeed.” He couldn’t have cared less about fish and had never understood why people kept them as pets. Trapping creatures from the wrong parts of the world and putting them on display in a tank in your living room, for what? Pathetic. Maybe they were supposed to be sexy, with their exotic multicolored armor and trailing fins. Pacifying?

  “Today’s Mom’s late day at work.”

  He almost missed her meaning. “Oh. And your dad?”

  “Same, duh. They carpool. It’s Thursday, right?”

  He nodded. Didn’t trust himself to come up with words that wouldn’t give away a too-eager tone. “Last I checked, yes.”

  “So Thursday’s the late carpool day. They won’t be home until, like, six.”

  “Sweet.”

  Together, they went to the kitchen. He hopped onto a counter and watched her slide around the linoleum in her socks, humming to herself, pouring milk into mugs with Hershey’s chocolate, stirring, then carrying the mugs to the microwave. “What do you think,” she asked, “three minutes? Four? I can never remember. Let’s go with . . .” She punched in numbers, hit START, and spun again. “Apple?” she asked, and almost too late he remembered: real milk. Raw, pasteurized, deaerated, didn’t matter—it almost always contained some C. Well, no big deal. Low potency. He’d sip a little and leave the rest. Be polite.

  “No. No apples, thanks. But hey, don’t you guys have any of the powdered mix stuff th
at goes with water—like Swiss Miss or whatever?”

  She made a face at him, chewing. Had another bite of her apple and wiped spray from her cheeks. “Disgusting. You’d rather have that?”

  “Sure. Maybe. Just asking. It’s actually better for you.”

  She chewed and swallowed. “You and I would so totally never be a good couple.”

  “Who said anything about that? You’re way too young for me.”

  “And you’re way too stupid. And weird. This is vile.” She turned and stuffed her apple down the drain, ran water, and hit the switch for the disposal. Went back to the refrigerator and leaned in, searching. “OK, let’s see. Turkey meat, salad, something icky that looks like I don’t know—oh, that’s Dad’s beets—spaghetti leftovers, cottage cheese . . . more cottage cheese . . . What do you want?”

  Though their houses were mostly alike, the sliding glass doors here led onto a spacious elevated back deck, icy with new snow, in the far corner of which a covered barbecue grill hunched like a short man standing watch. Thomas’s eyes were drawn from that to her reflection in the glass and back out again, past the hunched sentinel to the late-afternoon light streaking up through the trees at the far edge of the yard. He was not supposed to be here now. He was supposed to be home, poking around in boxes of his father’s junk for the old Mom movies. Earlier today, this had seemed to him like such a perfect idea and definitely the next step, the plan for the rest of the afternoon: locate and study his old Mom footage to see if any of it was worth a damn and maybe lay in a course for how to film her up north, or at least how to propose it to her to sell her on the idea. But here he was with Jill.

  “Thomas? What do you want? Anything?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  She slapped the refrigerator shut and spun toward him. “You . . .” she began.

  “What do I have in my pocket?” he asked, because for a second he didn’t actually remember what it was prodding the side of his wrist and pressing into his thigh.

  “How should I know? Freak.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows. Hissed, “Nasty hobbitses. Wants to know what he has in his pocketses? Prec-c-c-ciouss-s-s.” A perfectly good series of books ruined by a movie that missed no opportunity to sensationalize and Disneyfy without irony. So said his teachers. Personally, he’d mostly felt cheated and sold out by Peter Jackson—as if his own personal fantasy world had suddenly been raided and made much too accessible to the rest of the world.

  “Puh-lease.” She was smiling in spite of herself.

  “But seriously.” He hopped down from the counter. “Check this out.” With his good hand, he worked an edge of Griffin’s pill bottle up from his pants pocket to where he could see it and grab hold, shaking it so it made a dim rattly noise like a miniature can of spray paint. “Buddy of mine gave this to me in history class. Some kind of magic painkiller pills. We should try them.”

  “Stupid, and weird, and now you’re a druggie?”

  “You gotta live a little. For reals. You grind them up, like with a whatchamacallit—the mortar and pestle thing—and then get a straw or something and snort it. For maximum effect.”

  “You are a druggie! Thomas, you have to leave now. My dad would so kill me.”

  “How’s he going to find out?”

  “Because I’ll tell him, and then he’ll call the cops!”

  “Why would you do that?”

  Her mouth opened, but no words came. Behind her, the microwave dinged, and Thomas observed, looking through the radiation-proof glass of the oven door, that both of their hot chocolates were silently boiling over, foam steadily streaming down the sides of the mugs, though the oven had switched itself off. “Jill . . .” he began. She was closer suddenly, eyes lowered, reaching for his hand. He shoved the pills into a back pocket and reached to draw her in, opening his arms, but she dodged him. Sidestepped and took hold of his hand.

  “Thomas! What happened to your hand?”

  “Practicing hockey moves, like I said. It’s nothing. Sometimes you get a little carried away. People get hurt.”

  “That’s not nothing.”

  “You should see the other guy.”

  “Shut up.”

  He nodded. “I tell myself that all the time. Half the time, my every other waking thought is that I should just shut up, or go jump off a bridge. Doesn’t seem to work. I—”

  “Would you please be quiet for one second? I’ve got to think what to do.”

  “Nothing at all. You don’t have to do a thing.”

  “Give me those pills.”

  “No.”

  “Give them to me now.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I said! I need to see . . .”

  This time she didn’t resist or sidestep him, though for a moment she continued the pretext of trying to get at the pill bottle. There was the usual sweet smell of her shampoo and lip gloss, lotion or whatever else she wore, and the faint hot-cold pressure of her breath against his neck, then her arms going around his waist and the familiar insistent weight of her against him. He closed his eyes not to see it—not to notice up close the same light fuzz that covered the rest of her face, but stiffer-seeming, blanched and stranded against the alien purple skin. Felt her lips on his chin, teeth grazing the corner of his mouth and then right against his mouth, lips pursed, lightly sucking, tongue probing the fronts of his teeth. By habit, he turned so that if his eyes did happen to open, he’d be looking at the other cheek, the good one; spun with her once and again, but she wouldn’t let him have the angle he wanted. She pushed back and kept pushing until he was against the kitchen counter again. OK, he thought, fine, and slid his hands in under the bottom of her shirt, inching from her hips to her rib cage, then higher, until he touched the lower straps of her bra, at which point, as always, her arms clamped down, blocking access. The pain bridging from the back of his bruised hand up his arm was a good thing, he told himself: a warranted rebuke and good contrasting physical sensation by which to distance himself and keep control. Down beast! Tame the monster! as Devon would say.

  She tipped back, staring right at him. “Look at it,” she said, nodding. “Touch it.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what I’m saying! Get your hands out of my shirt and quit pretending. Touch it.”

  “Your . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts, Thomas.”

  He’d been about to point out that he’d touched her birthmark plenty of times before and that she’d always been the one to make him stop, when it dawned on him that without her explicit invitation or instructions to do so, it was almost like it had never actually happened. This was different. A lead opening onto a fresh inlet going who knew where.

  He held his palm flat to her cheek and neck. “OK,” he said. “Then the pills?” He noted as he had before that there was really nothing discernibly different to the touch. Just skin. A slight puffiness or serration at the edges of the birthmark. Nothing else.

  “You and your pills.”

  “Pills for Jills.” He kept his palm flat against her. “See? I’m not pretending.” He smiled and said nothing further because he knew (he had no idea how) that any remark or observation or attempt to relate what he actually experienced touching her would offend her. If he said it was nothing, something, the same, different, special, made her beautiful, didn’t make her beautiful, anything, he would be understood as insulting and his words turned against him.

  She closed her eyes. “You have no idea how strange this feels.”

  “No,” he said. “Maybe.”

  “It’s like my head is buzzing.”

  “That sounds OK.”

  “And hot.”

  “Better.”

  She placed her hand over his and after a moment, searching his eyes, he understood that she meant to direct him further. “There’s more,” she said, and with that she pushed his hand into the front of her shirt. Reached around to release her bra strap
. “But first ... since you’ve been so insistent. Go ahead.” He kept his eyes on hers. Didn’t look down or question her. He stared until he felt he might be seeing her face whole for once, not as if a corner of it had been bitten or peeled to the side: a whole shape, though partially darkened. The waxing moon on a clear night. “Have you ever . . .” she began.

  He shook his head. Knew better than to lie. “First. And you?”

  She nodded. “What do you think?”

  Again, he knew he couldn’t or shouldn’t try to describe all of what he actually thought: weird, pillowy-soft excess of flesh, not like anything he’d ever felt before, the skin on top so smooth and delicate, it hardly seemed real or human, actually, more like the inside of a balloon or the way he’d imagine a baby bird might feel, and yet for whatever reason all of it so perfectly, exactly matched to what he most craved about her and about girls generally. “Nice,” he said. “It’s really, really nice.” And then weirder still, the skin was changing, poking up into the palm of his hand. “Should I stop?”

  She shook her head. “If you want.” Closed her eyes. “No.”

  “So, that’s good?”

  She nodded. Eyes still closed. “It must be. Sure.”

  He wasn’t certain if there was more he was supposed to do. Feeling up a girl had always seemed to him, by its name alone, to indicate something more active on the boy’s part, like squeezing or rubbing, but he couldn’t connect anything like that with a genuine desire on his part. Pinch her nipples till she pees herself, Devon had said once, but he was pretty sure he was only kidding, or else deliberately passing on bad intelligence. He didn’t feel like squeezing and pinching; Jill was so alien and fragile-seeming, his only real impulse was to be sure he didn’t hurt her—didn’t do something inadvertent to screw it all up. Far easier, he thought, to lie on the basement floor with her, knowing where he was and wasn’t allowed to go, canoodling, and not worrying about all this strangeness.