Kicking Tomorrow

by Daniel Richler

  “I twenty… B two… B thirt-teen…”

  The Knights of Columbus officer read the numbers from the stage in a monotone that Robbie found unendurable after a couple of hours. He was stunned by the listlessness of the game. He remembered how once on a childhood cruise to Europe with the family, in the brass-railed lounge of the Empress of Canada, he had giggled at the caller’s delivery: Under the B – men from the ministry – number 11… under the N – pregnant ladies – number 33… under the B – the day of God’s rest – number 7…. The Knights of Columbus version was as bland as corn chips and an afternoon soap. In fact, watching TV was a lively exercise compared to this; there was a surge of electricity in the air as boards filled up, but when someone won, no applause – just the collective sigh of envy, and the massive swish of tokens being swept up. The woman across from him had her own deluxe wire-meshed tokens, which she swept up by means of a magnetic plastic wand, and tapped into her own personal plastic pouch.

  “Been playing long?” Robbie asked, but he was told to shush again. Planet of the Zombies, he thought. They could beam us all up and put us in forced labour camps on Mars to irrigate the canals and no one would bat an eyelid. Just so long as we got our Bingo.

  “N thirty-eight… G fifty…”

  Robbie mechanically laying his tokens down now; banishing all thoughts so he could concentrate on the task.

  “G forty-seven… I twenty…”

  Hearing the buzz of excitement all around and the women across from him saying, accusingly, “You’re close.”

  “Yeah. So I am.”

  “G sixty…”

  “Chrissake, BINGO!”

  Hey, all he’d won was twenty-five bones, and it’s not as if he whipped it directly from out of their purses, but when he stood up and walked down the aisle to collect his winnings, the room had stopped and stared at him like he was Oliver Twist asking for more. Feeling faint for lack of blood, he had shrugged at the whole ballooning room and fired a blunderbuss into his nailed head. He flew out into the evening like a bat, and blew close to the whole wad on beer at a dépanneur, plus shrooms from a dealer he met in the street.

  He was making his way back to the Roxy, wondering if he should swallow the entire stash in one session, when a car pulled up slowly beside him, and it was Husker and Gaunt.

  “Not a bit cold, eh?” Gaunt said.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit,” Husker said. “Climb in, boy. Just to get warm, nothing else.” Robbie got in, gratefully.

  “Oh hey, want to see some dirty pictures?”

  “Nah,” Robbie said. He blew into his red hands. He felt as if the liquid in his ear canals had frozen and sound was skating hard on it, now. “Not into that stuff, thanx.”

  “Just look,” Gaunt said, and passed an envelope over the seat. “Might be someone you know.”

  Kiki Van? No such luck. When Husker said dirty, he was speaking literally: swollen bodies dragged up from the bed of the St. Lawrence, vomiting mud. Four or five of them, each half-wrapped in sleeping bags, chains, and cinder blocks. Robbie flipped through them over and over. One of their bellies had bloated up so enormously it was clear the coroner wouldn’t be able to close the coffin lid. The face had just about loosened off the skull; it was eyeless and toothless, like a rubber King Kong mask. Robbie hadn’t recognized him the first flip through, but then he saw the studs on the boots: BILL on one, BEAST on the other. He looked another time, and another. The air buzzing with flies. The grotesque figures flopped on the shore, in river-gorged poses like dancers in some foul ballet. One had a batik scarf around his neck – you could just make out the peacocks and kala masks. He was wearing a KEEF LIVES T-shirt too, and his mouth was open and his tongue was sucked back, plugging his throat.

  “Chrissake,” Robbie said. “I knew these people. Olly. And Ivy’s other brother, John. He wasn’t pretty to begin with. How come you’re showing me these disgusting things? Makes me wanna puke.”

  Neither Husker nor Gaunt turned around. Husker was sipping coffee. Gaunt was peeling a triangle from the plastic lid of his cup. The back of Husker’s neck looked like a stack of damp baloney, Gaunt’s was red and dry-blistered as a carnatzel.

  “You know,” Husker said, at last, “the other day, we received a funny shipment down at the station. Forwarded it was, by the old school’s broker, to us. On account of who it was intended for.”

  “Hey, man, don’t start on me.”

  “No, no, we was just wondering. You wouldn’t know anything at all about that, now would you?”

  “Course not. What shipment?”

  “Good, good. Just wondering, you know. We’ll take care of it ourselves from here on in, OK? The whole affair’s over anyway, so far as the Dead Man’s Hands are concerned. Unless you’re planning to pick up the franchise.”

  “Pull the other one,” Robbie said vehemently. “I’ve had it with those psychos.”

  “Good,” Gaunt said. “Wise decision. So give me the pictures back and fuck off, all right. See if you can’t go out and make some nice friends, for once.”

  Robbie fucked off. He circled the block and hung out in Girouard Park for five minutes to make sure he hadn’t been followed, then hauled the fire escape down and slipped into the cinema. Woodstock was playing to a packed house. He would have loved to stay and watch it – in reverse, from his perspective – but he had a more urgent agenda. He foraged for Ivy’s satchel, slung it over his shoulder, and bussed down to Nun’s Island, where the damaged St. Lawrence froths up yellowish on the shore like clotting fibrinogen. He filled the satchel with rocks, buckled the leather straps tight, and hurled the package out with all his might. He was giving the stuff back, a little late perhaps, but with the best of intentions. It wasn’t his thing. It splashed, floated for a moment on a heavy eddy, coursed swiftly down river, and then sank, gobbled down by the dark water.

  By the time he returned, the cinema had emptied out. He dangled his heels over the lip of the stage, the great screen above him, chewed his shrooms, and systematically wasted himself. He thought of the Indians who roamed the land long before we fucked it around, and of how young prospects would fast alone in the woods, eating roots and magic mushrooms and hallucinate, waiting for the spirit wisdom to visit. Plus Rosie had said once how Christ and his disciples were enlightened by A. muscaria mushrooms. And Viking berserkers were emboldened by it. And it’s what made Santa’s reindeer fly.…

  He starts by yelling at the empty seats of the cinema. Hoping his anger will at least flush out the uselessness in him, he yells till he gargles with blood. Nothing happens. He finds he’s the same Robbie at the end of it, just hoarser.

  Tries again, pounding the floor now. Knocks his head with his fists, spits phlegm back in the faces of all the people responsible for ruining him. Sees his parents’ faces at the end of the lineup, shocked, close to tears and wet with his spittle, unable to comprehend this venom of his, this grotesque breach of reason. Then, with terrible regret, he sucks the spittle back.

  The Roxy small as a fishtank now. Robbie curls up like a luminous mollusc, curling tighter to suck his own cock, tighter till he snaps his own spine. Sees himself spatter the cinema screen with his own gore and slash the giant canvas with his teeth and nails. He lies in the dark and listens to his breathing. Beginning to feel himself unravel…

  … the images are projected on the screen above him: under a sky of whipped black clouds, the banks of the St. Lawrence, and bodies being dragged out of the freezing mud. The image is like old newsreel. Buzzing flies. Camera closes in, who is it in this soaked KEEF LIVES T-shirt, whose face has thickened and fallen off the skull? His own, of course. The stupid flippant FUCK. Night of the Living Dead. Braiins. He’s watching himself, sickened, vertiginous, as time’s wheel slips off its pin and rumbles round deafeningly like a great granite coin in accelerating, ever-diminishing spirals. Down the sink, into the sewers of the city. Here’s Joe Smolij, naked but for his sprawling, brambled beard, his hands flopping in his wrinkled
lap like old moths in a jar, the way they always did while he waited for you to move. Robbie goes nose to nose with him and looks into his face. Joe’s eyes are white, like a baked trout’s. There’s a tattoo on his left wrist, little numbers in blue ink: QP5-KP6XR=CHECK. Robbie looks around, and everyone’s here: Kiki Van Garterbelt grinning like a gargoyle stewardess. Ivy naked bone-white and skinny disgusting, with two rows of teats like a bitch stoat, offering her white slippery wrists for him to grasp. He grabs, then deliberately releases his grip looking around instead for Rosie. Where’s Rosie where’s Rosie he howls he never meant to hurt her he’s so sad he’s done such wrong he’s choking on his own swollen Adam’s apple. No. It’s cool, he’s in control of this thing, he can’t feel at all, his heels are exhaust pipes, shooting sparks behind him. He’s a knight on a smoking field, playing dead and struggling to unhitch his own iron coffin as villagers pick their way through the corpses, harvesting for jewellery with knives. The great granite wheel grinds, he’s up in the filthy clouds, up and over with a heave in his stomach, plunging with terminal abandon the way he always wanted to, rising again as a jealous devil just like Ivy always said he was; in a mediaeval play, licking the powdered cheeks of petticoated whores, he holds his horn-shaped cock in his skeletal fingers, pricks it with his own fingernails and has them catch the blood on their lips like molten rubies. Over again, heave ho. He’s barely aware of it but he’s vomiting now. Back through time. He’s a Viking, drunk on mead and enjoying a good rape, propped up on his palms, slipping in his own puke. Now he’s a sorcerer’s apprentice battling brooms, an Australopithecus crouching in a cave and sharpening sticks for the hunt, something more primitive than that, something grunting, barely on two feet, with claw-things for arms, and meatbreath, and bloodpoo. His fur peels back to display his nerves and muscles like the Visible Man kit, his body is jelly, heaving and veined on the exterior, opening and throbbing like bloody porridge. His mind peeling away before his eyes, layers of a multicoloured crystal onion. His very DNA unravelling. Light-splinters slice out of the darkness. Great writhing vaults open up to him supported on walls of ribbed black rubber or is it flesh swelling and bursting open with kala masks and supit urang. Bill the Beast and mud-fat Olly. All the wriggling souls of the creatures he’s ever eaten are gathered round him for the vengeful feast. Passing through his own digestive system, his spine arching overhead like the ceiling of a sinister cathedral. On and on, down the drain, till the din of voices recedes. He passes through a constricted canal, whimpering aloud now, struggling to breathe. Plopped out onto a warm, sandy plain, a primordial beast. Eohippus? A dog. Woof. He barks, like that. On his hands and knees, on the Roxy’s stage. Woof. Snarling too, should anyone be hiding among the seats. The air is brittle, snapping, tiny sparks, synaptic explosions in front of his eyes. He curls up right there, panting, naked. With no desire but to sleep, dreamlessly, and to wake refreshed as someone new.

  … he sees a shadow-dappled park, up on the screen. He walks into it, ducks golden clouds of aphids. It’s a Mediterranean scene, a De Chirico, suffused with sandy light: ochre piazza, olive groves and fields of chalk, a duck-egg blue sky. A small town at high noon, the melancholy and mystery of her streets, dusty and quiet, shadows falling like the very stuff of silence, the clock tower arrested in time, a steam train pulling noiselessly away. He squints at the sky. Gulls are suspended over the coast, over roof of his own little house. He’s sitting there now, with a simple but adequate meal of apples and cheese and wine. On a rough-hewn table he’s laid out a canvas, and on it he’s painting a simple still life. He has nothing to prove; it doesn’t matter if this has been done before by anyone else. He’s doing it only for his own pleasure. And Rosie is there, painting too, contentedly…

  21

  OVER KILBORN BAY, WOBBLY ARROWS OF GEESE WERE ALREADY bowing back, this way north. As he watched from his tiny bed, clouds passed rapidly overhead, their shadows gurgling up the trunks of the maples and along their branches like blood through arteries.

  “Wow,” Barnabus said. “Where’d you get that tattoo?”

  Tattoo? He’d forgotten all about it. He looked down and there it was on the cusp of his right deltoid; a large, articulated spider in black and blueberry ink.

  “Oh, yeah,” he stammered. “It’s fake, like, what you get in boxes of Sugar Krunchies and stuff. Fun, huh?”

  “How come there’s a scab, then,” Barnabus said, gripping Robbie’s arm and peering closely. “Looks real to me. I saw a show on TV.” Indeed, the skin was still raw and raised where the blood had come up. And Robbie’s appalling realization was that, in the context of home, a tattoo suddenly seemed like the most meaningless, inexplicable thing on earth. He felt sick to think that it was embedded in his flesh for good.

  That was the first time anyone had discussed Robbie’s appearance since he’d joined them for Spring Break a week earlier, though he looked like a wild animal in captivity: dog collar, torn net T-shirt, spiked glove, skull earring, rabid haircut, missing tooth, black-and-yellow bruises under both eyes. It should have been a relief to him all this time, but instead he was on tenterhooks, waiting like a sprung trap for the first snide remark or joke from anyone. He’d been skulking around the cottage, looking out of windows. It was weird being home, feeling like a kid again, all paranoid of the parents; just doing normal things like flushing a toilet or making a sandwich, but expecting a harsh reprimand. Passing Dad on the stairs, he’d pull a little contrite smile, for no good reason, as if he were on his way up to steal something, or who knows what. The whole cottage seemed to resonate with a lifetime’s history of scolding.

  His rueful revelation: out on the street he feels scary, looks scary – a nasty piece of society’s work, a nail pulled bent from the burnt plank of experience – but here he’s just one of the family again, a babykins, going through a harmless phase. He’s almost a joke, an out-of-season Hallowe’en treat, Junior-gone-wild, that’s all, and he feels deflated for not being able to impress on them that he’s certifiably dangerous.

  By the window, the drainpipes were clogged with thawed leaves. Down below, the terrace was cracked where the ice had worked at the stones like a crowbar. The lawn had sunk where moles had busied themselves, and the rose-trellis was bent after the weight of snowfalls. He heard the scratching of a rake over stone; Mom out there already, cracking the whip at Nature. He rose and went out to help.

  The spring earth, marbled with loam, flecked with root and fern, was still hard and unyielding. Robbie hacked, Mom pressed bulbs in the holes he made. He pictured the two of them from an aerial POV as unremarkable scratches in a great grey landscape, investing so much hope in these stupid little things. Mom stood up to stretch her neck and grip the small of her back. Robbie looked out. The lake was luminous in this light, and jumping. One curious thing about lakes with too much acid in them, they develop an electric clarity; you can see right to the bottom, and in the summer they’re exquisitely blue. That’s because all the environment has gone out of them.

  The clouds were a helter-skelter fox hunt now, hounds scrambling out over the lake with their tails streaking behind them, mud flying from their paws. Robbie, in tuque, big boots, and ski jacket, said he looked like the village idiot; Mom, in her fingerless gloves and frayed straw hat, laughed and said she felt like a mad bag lady.

  “Life in the post-nukular world,” he joked. “At least we’d be self-sufficient.”

  According to the Farmer’s Almanac he’d consulted, there’s invariably a day halfway through March that’s warm and sunny. It’s a dirty trick, however, because at least three more snowfalls are in store, and there’s a good month before the hills switch on green and the lilac and apple blossoms light up. Right on cue, the following Monday was so toasty Robbie had his shirt off. All around the land was alive with the thaw, the house’s eaves dripping snow water into barrels, the smelt brook rushing over exposed rocks. The ice had already melted off the lake, although Owl’s Head’s peak was still white, and Robbie pictured babe
s skiing in bikinis. He crouched down by the brook and scooped up two handfuls of chilly melting mud, rich as chocolate. He held it to his nose, pressed it to his lips.

  He was really getting into this nature business.

  He was basking on the terrace, half-snoozing beneath the weight of The Thirty-Nine Steps, “a novel of mind-numbing suspense.” Miriam was stretched out on a deck chair beside him. Sonny Daze and Sandi Beaches. She was wearing makeup, he noted out of the corner of his eye, almost as much as him. He sniffed the air, frowned, snorted phlegm. A smell of burnt toast or rubber. Some farmer must have a wet bonfire going.

  “Hey, Miriam,” he said, absently scratching a rash on his chest. The roof of his mouth itched unpleasantly. “Did you know, if a wet leaf leaves a blue stain on a windowpane, that means it’s been soaked in acid rain. That’s Nature’s litmus test. See those patches of brown pine needles? That’s because they’ve been sitting under acid snow all winter.”

  “No guff,” Miriam said.

  “Death to the sugar bush, Mom says. Drag, or what?”

  Miriam shrugged. “Whatever turns your crank, man,” she said, without even turning her head. “Hey, Rob, I got high with Pinch at a party the other night. We made out, it was ama-a-azing. Roman hands, Russian fingers, and more arms than Israel.”

  “Miriam, Chrissake.”

  Robbie’s enjoyed some scenes in his time, but teenage girls getting banged senseless by grizzly acidheads is not one of his fond memories. He opened his mouth to give Miriam hell, but bit his tongue.

  “Whatcha doing, Rob?” Miriam said. “Catching flies?” And did the air ever smell bad. He could actually taste it.

  That night, not long after Robbie had hit the sack, Barnabus began to cough in his sleep. The cough had been irritating Robbie all day, every day, since his arrival in Kilborn. Now he lay awake. There was a knock; Mom’s soft knock, and then her head in the door. Robbie leaned up. She put a finger to her lips, and went over to Barnabus’ bed. She sat him up gently, holding him in the crook of one arm. Robbie saw for the first time how frail he had become. His body was drawing rapid, shallow breaths. In the moonlight his ribs seemed bare, white, and dry, like naked bones. He watched Mom apply some tube gadget to his mouth, and squeeze. Puff. Barnabus coughed in his sleep, sucked gratefully on the tube. Mom dabbed his lips with the collar of his pyjamas, and allowed him to sink back into the sheets.