Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “This place is a treasure trove,” she said. “At my house the parents say there shouldn’t be books, we’d only wreck them.” She ran her fingers along a row of books like she was searching for a secret button to push, and stopped at Nadja, just one title of hundreds there that Robbie had always found easier to dismiss as boring, than pull out and try. “André Breton,” she said. “This book’s incredible. Your parents have good taste. The architect of Surrealism. In one bit they’re driving in the country, he’s at the wheel and she covers his eyes. Whew! The motto is, Beauty will be convulsive, or not at all. Isn’t that incredible?”

  “Uh, sure,” Robbie said, pushing his lips out to help him figure it. “You bet.”

  After that they necked and rolled about on the floor, and just as they were getting hot and heavy, Ivy said she wanted another drink. They swigged mouthfuls of raw anise straight from a bottle in the parents’ liquor cabinet, and when their gums were numb, Robbie went to the kitchen to top it up again with water.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Ivy said, “That’ll make it go yellow.”

  Down in the den he showed off his sketches – first the nudes copied from the classics, then his own surreal bestiary, a bunch of stuff he feared was way too crude to show; a mean-spirited collection all right, unkindly conceived, rudely rendered, about as appealing as spit on the street.

  “It’s just stuff, for fun only,” he said, his cheeks blooming hot. “I did them years ago.”

  Ivy smoked, and examined them for a long time. There were scrums of figures, bullock-headed, all muddy blots of ink and furious scribbles, the lines scratched deep into the surface of the paper; there were smeary, thrashing blurs with gills, and shark’s fins slicing through the backs of jackets; there were other figures laid down blobbily, smudged and scuffed, some rubbed with ash from Dad’s cigarettes, some with spittle and snot to wrinkle the paper, some bled on, some torn up and messily glued back together; there was a likeness of himself as a sperm whale flipping, another with a storm of charcoal for a facial expression, another with his head dripping, exhausted, from a toothpaste tube, and several others repeatedly sketched and rubbed out and sketched over again to give an uncertain, woozy, dazed effect. Ivy gingerly turned the pages by the corners, careful not to smudge them, and whistled appreciatively.

  “God,” she said. “You must know more about art than me.”

  “It’s not my best, of course,” Robbie said.

  They played a game, taking turns to lick each other’s tongues and kiss the crooks of their arms, and Robbie’s face was wet and cool from Ivy’s saliva. He insinuated his palm against the startling flatness of her loins. When she pulled his jeans off, he felt buoyantly naked, his bottom foolish – the bottom that had only ever been presented in public before for a spanking. His penis felt pumped up with air. When she pulled off her Osh Kosh B’Goshes he was surprised by her skinniness, by the bones in her knees, the tendons in her thighs, and the traces of hair there. With their shirts still on, they hugged and pressed their hipbones together. He smelled the tart exclamation of her vagina, and when he pressed the tip of his penis against her, he was astonished at how resistant a mat of hair he was being asked to penetrate. He had always imagined, when he had dared to imagine it in such detail at all, that this would be a soft and accommodating entrance, but it turned out to be a surprisingly resilient, compact anatomy of flesh and bone and pubic hair. After years of gazing at peach-fuzzed photographs, all gauze and satin and cinnamon colours, it was all surprisingly, well, physical. His ears filled with the din of breath and skin. Then the front door slammed upstairs. It was Mom home from her vacation at Three Mile Island.

  After that, he figured they were seeing each other. If you could call it that. She was such a strange stray cat – she never called, she wouldn’t give him her phone number or let him walk her home, she never waited for him outside school, she rarely spoke her mind, and she had no friends to keep him informed of her latest mood swing.

  When they did meet – in the caf, at the bus stop, at Pendeli’s Pizza near the school – it was by accident. She’d look up from books by writers like Jean Rhys or Colette or someone equally obscure to Robbie, and pull a reluctant, wide smile across her face and then look down again, always to finish her sentence before saying hello. He’d have to stand there with his heart thumping, and the distinct impression he was interrupting not just her reading, but her whole life. Still, she always ended up taking his hand and holding onto it outdoors, until he thought he’d lose the circulation in his fingers.

  At night, after she hadn’t phoned, he’d lie in bed like an eel in a hot pie of sheets, and astral travel over the city to her bedroom. It wasn’t to peep; just to be beside her when she awoke. He’d lie on his back and weave together a flying carpet with gossamer fibres spun from sleepydust. He’d waft over snow-topped chimneys and late-night streets, and materialize in her bed like a body’s warm sleeping odours. He’d just lie there beside her, full of the purest intentions, picturing her body without emphasis on the sexual parts, like a Barbie. Maybe they’d press their hips and thighs together, and maybe he’d caress her nippleless breasts, but never more.

  Because French Canadians were in a belligerent, secessionist mood at the time, the back of Robbie’s head was made the frequent target of snowballs packed with grit. But, a month before he met Ivy, he had made peace with some of the more apolitical guys in the school, by virtue of his good nose where killer-weed was concerned. This he had established by fluently razzing Gaston Goupil for trying to fob off some bum hay on the boys.

  The clouds overhead like quick dark knives scraping snow from the icy sky this Monday afternoon; six of them gathered in an alley, making a huddled flapping circle, and passing a sample joint around, pulling their fingers out of their mitts only long enough to pinch the diminishing roach, press it against their chapped lips, and fumble it on. The burning smoke, the rasping naked throat. They waited, stamping their feet. After a few minutes everyone shook their heads and peered suspiciously at Gaston from behind their curtains of hair. “Ayoi,” Robbie said. “C’est le big bullshit, ça. C’est le Colombien ben cheap, pas le super stuff. Rien que les seeds et twigs. Fuck moi. Quel rip-off, hostie.” He demanded a second joint. And then another, just to be sure…

  … after the fourth the stone’s coming on at last. Robbie’s body feels like a frosted fungus, the air thickening around him and moving sluggishly, and it becomes suddenly inexplicably hilarious to him that in Québécois the word for being stoned is gelé, which means frozen. He’s also chuckling at the fact that he picks up more of the language out here than he does in class, although he knows it’s not the sort of education his parents think they’re paying so dearly for. The older furry freaks are checking him out, uncomprehending, and Gaston’s looking fierce, but when Robbie looks up to see their scraggly hair and baffled expressions he thinks of One Million Years B.C., and laughs even harder. These fucken doorknobs. Well, it’s not long before they’re all laughing for no good reason and returning to class, and Robbie feels he has pacified the tribe and no more will they try to push his tongue against a frozen drainpipe for being a maudit bloke, which means damn English-speaking Canadian, or a sale juif, which means dirty Jew. At the very least, if anyone whips a gritball at him in this condition, he won’t feel a thing before he thaws out.

  “Remember I suggested once that you steer clear of Gaston Goupil –” Ivy asked him the next morning. Robbie had staked out Pendeli’s Pizza way before school began and intercepted her when she came in for a coffee and a smoke. “– now I’m telling you.”

  “Why? He’s just a low-life. A scam artist.”

  She leaned forward. “God. Do I have to explain everything?”

  He leaned forward, too, to kiss her nose. How sweet of her to be concerned for his safety. Her face bore a thick skin of white pancake, the crude boundary visible under her chin up to her ears, and Robbie imagined her undressed, like a cabaret performer with a luminous head. And how he
loved her voice, so soft, like a sweet-smelling ghost, never rising above a whisper! She sat back abruptly, tugged at the sleeves of her cardigan, pulling them over her wrists.

  “Look,” she said. “If I have to explain, then you don’t deserve to know. Maybe we shouldn’t be together. I wish I was somewhere else.”

  “But–”

  They sat in silence. She opened a book, pressing it flat on the table to read, absent-mindedly rolling cigarettes between nicotine-stained fingers. When the butts became too small to hold, she squeezed the pinches of remaining tobacco back into a plastic pouch. Then she poured a capful of brandy into her coffee cup, and one into Robbie’s. He watched the operation, admiring her fingers, thinking how lovely they were, a little plump, a little yellow, but lovely still, with the cuticles bitten to the quick, with little red blotches, little pinpricks, in the soft flesh between her thumbs and index fingers, but all the more tender for that.

  Finally she looked up and sighed heavily. “OK, SO. Look over there. Who do you think that is, by the playground fence? By the exit.”

  Robbie lowered his head to peer under the ALL-DRESSED SPECIAL painted meatily on the inside of the window. He stuck out his lower lip and tapped it with exaggerated thoughtfulness.

  “Well, well, speak of the devil. I can tell ’cause his hands are hanging lower than his knees.”

  Ivy rolled her eyes impatiently. She yanked at her hair. “Yes, but can’t you see who he’s with?”

  A school bus pulled up beside the schoolyard and disgorged a zooful of primary schoolers, all in puffy snowsuits like Michelin men, yelping and tripping and making each other eat yellow snow, followed by one straggler whose coat had been turned backwards like a straitjacket, and bound with the idiot strings on his mitts. Gaston and his companion turned their backs and walked away, slowly, with their heads close together. Gaston, Robbie could see, was wearing his prerequisite pepsi outfit – platform boots with big round toecaps, flares flapping above his ankles, plaid shirt, red-and-black lumberjacket – but the other guy was more menacing; he wore oily jeans, a belt made from bullet shells with a bunch of keys as fat as a fist dangling from it, and a leather jacket with a sleeveless jean vest on top.

  Just before they turned the corner, the menacing guy’s heap of greasy hair was whipped upwards by a gust of frozen wind. It took off like a caveful of bats, and Robbie caught a quick but unmistakable glimpse of the design on the back of his jacket: a hand of bullet-holed playing cards, pairs of black aces and eights with a skull-faced joker in-between, and in Gothic lettering the words

  DEAD MAN’S HAND.

  “Chrissake,” Robbie said. “Do you know those guys?”

  “God. If I have to explain – “

  “No, really.” He was fascinated, drawn to the violence of bikers with the same nervous intoxication, the same thickening of the blood that Bosom Buddies magazine aroused in him; whenever that stuff reared up, stretching the surface of safe and decent routines like a sudden boil or an unexpected erection, he couldn’t help himself. “Really,” he repeated. “I mean, the Dead Man’s Hands is the gang that killed a Hell’s Angel a while back, right? They stabbed him thirty-seven times, and shot him twice in the head, and injected his veins with battery acid. And then, like, he crawled to a hospital and lived and eventually ratted on everybody ’cause even he was scared shitless. He’s a police-protected witness now, right, with a luxury jail cell and a twenty-five-dollar weekly allowance just for cigarettes. All the Dead Man’s Hands have F.D.W. tattoos on their penises which stretch into Fuck De World, right? Oh, and they wear aces and eights because that’s the poker hand Wild Bill Hickok had when he was shot in the back. That it?”

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said. “But I guess you have all the facts.…”

  7

  ON THE BUS BACK TO TOWN FROM KILBORN BAY, ROSIE commiserated with him. “Hopefully things will work out for you as they did for me, Bob. After I got caught accidentally on purpose sawing the heels off of my daddy’s girlfriend’s fancy shoes, I thought we’d never talk again. Isn’t it hilarious how you ’n me are such losers! Maybe you could stay at my place.”

  “Yeah. Hilarious,” Robbie said despondently. Besides some leftover matzoh and maror he’d wolfed from the fridge before fleeing the cottage (to remind him of the sadness of the Jews in exile), he’d barely eaten all day.

  “Or I have friends at the club who could put you up. Same ones who helped me when I was kicked out.”

  “What? Like that guy in that cult? In Paspebiac? The one that’s waiting for the end of the world? Don’t be idiotic.”

  “Pierre ‘Moses’ Thibeault you mean. Stop being funny. It wasn’t a cult.”

  “It’s called The First Doomsday Cult.”

  “Well, it’s not a cult per se. Although I did get bored waiting for the end of the world with them. Did I ever tell you they sat on the floor and played Monopoly for sex? For days. After a while I had the distinct impression he was cheating. Hey, I tell you what. To cheer you up, after my shift this aft, I’ll buy you a ticket for the Strolling Bones.”

  Robbie had never had the slightest intention of going to see the Bones. He’d taken Rosie to the country specifically to avoid them. That’s what he was ruefully thinking to himself as he waited for her in the Alexis Nihon Plaza that evening. Frankly he hated the Bones with all his might; he despised Keef Richards’ guts, and he didn’t give a damn about their Absolutely Very Final That’s All Folks! Tour of Triumphant Return. He used to be their world’s biggest fan, bar only Ivy, but he had grown up a lot since those days. If Keef had an assassination complex just because a crazed fan had once hid in his hotel bathtub and bit at one of his testicles as he stepped in to take a shower, nearly severing it, Robbie could really give him good reason now. That’s what he told Rosie when she joined him. “It’s like Dad always said, the guy looks like a Neanderthal and he can’t play for beans.”

  “Oh, you’re just saying that ’cause of what happened with you and him and Little Miss Sunshine,” Rosie said, and linked her arm with his. She swept the hair back from his face and kissed him on the end of his nose, called him her seeing-eye dog, and left him with a smudge of black-and-blue lipstick there.

  The plaza was packed. The noise level had soared to obliterate the Muzak. The air was charged. On a regular day a kid could get cautioned by a pig just for loitering here, but an hour or two before a concert, forget it. Kids ruled, OK? They perched in rows on the staircases so that shoppers loaded down with bags had to step over them; they took up all the stools around the Pogo and Orange Julep counters so you had nowhere to sit if you had been on your feet all day; they scoured the aisles of the supermarkets and department stores like locusts, making the cashiers and floor managers wild with suspicion; they crammed into the automatic photo-booths, piling six laps high, so there was no point in even waiting for your turn; they leaned and slouched and loitered as much as they pleased along the balustrades, like crows on telephone wires, like ragged jackdaws with an eye for shiny things, until it was time.

  Robbie and Rosie had met on Sub-Level 2, by the Prairie Buffalo T-Shirt Emporium and Head Shoppe. They checked out the posters and the pins and the bandannas and the toker accessories in the window. They were just standing there at the window, not being a menace to society or nothing, when Officer Gaunt loomed up smiling, with another, bigger pig behind him, dressed in plainclothes. As conspicuous as Norbert the Nark.

  “Hey, quit hassling me, man,” Robbie said in a hushed, urgent voice. “You’re making people paranoid.”

  It was true. People were speaking out of the corners of their mouths and watching beadily. Robbie knew exactly how they felt; he had often seen kids get hauled off in a half-nelson, wearing the only expression you can in the face of such obvious social injustice: stunned disbelief that it’s happened to you and not someone else equally guilty. Robbie knew they were watching now with a mixture of raw dislike for the pigs and amused condescension for him for being so dumb as to get caught.<
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  Gaunt crooked a finger at Rosie. “Would you mind terribly if we just had a private word,” he said, ushering her away by the elbow. She tugged her arm out of his grasp, and stood there blinking ten paces off, out of earshot.

  Gaunt returned, crossed his eyes at Robbie and grinned. “My mother always said they’d stick if I persisted in doing that,” he said, “but sometimes I think it’s the only way to see eye to eye with little pricks like you.”

  “Wassat supposed to mean.”

  “It means you lied to me when we last had our little chat.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mother of Jesus,” Gaunt sighed, and then winked salaciously. “Lead-pencil drawings on piled-up sheets of paper do leave lovely clear evidence after a fire. We reconstituted some of the carbon remains. I have to say, you’re quite the artist.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Robbie said, genuinely proud, but regretting that he had been so proud to actually sign them.

  “So you did spend time in the attic. And you must know how the fire got started.”

  “Fucked’f I do.”

  “Were you or were you not there?”

  “No, man, I told you – I was definitely in class when the alarm went.” Robbie leaning with one hand against the window of the Head Shoppe. The sales clerk looked pointedly at him through the glass, and when Robbie peeled his vermin fingers off, there was a row of oily fingerprints left behind, like a nervous run of eighth notes on a staff.

  “You see,” Gaunt said, “it’s quite strange, really. After the fire the key was still in the attic lock, welded fast.”