The Dirt Chronicles

by Kristyn Dunnion

  She grunts with effort and mutters while she works. “Can’t take you upstairs like this. Turn their stomachs, you will.” Twice more she heaves herself back onto the bottom step to holler up to him, the King, the man she calls Earl.

  Creak, creak. Yell, yell.

  “Not like you can go anyplace, state you’re in. Might as well let you rot.”

  I hover above my lump of a body. I fly around, see dust float in the air, see the mouse turds trailed along the floorboards, spiders spinning. I see myself—a bloated, bruised monster.

  If only I’d been arrested with the others. If only I was in jail. If only I was with Oreo.

  I see Oreo’s face, the King’s stick landing on her temple, her eyes twitching shut, her body slumping to the ground, me crawling and fighting my way through the mob to get to her, too late. None of this would’ve happened if I’d been right by her side, like I wanted to be. If we hadn’t had the stupid party. Since the first night I met Oreo, nothing truly bad had happened to me, nobody had messed around with me. Not until the King.

  “Locked your Indian butch up tight. She’s a fighter,” he’d said the night he picked me up, and his deep laugh had filled the cop car.

  The old woman grabs hold of my dreadlocks and yanks me back to reality. Here and now, the cellar. “Probably got the bugs. Dirty.” She clucks her tongue.

  Shame warms my cheeks. I see a glint of silver in her hand and gasp.

  “Quiet.” She pulls a few dreads, then saws at them, down near my scalp.

  She’s cutting my hair!

  I squeal. I lean away but she pulls harder, making my eyes water. She’s strong for an old broad.

  “What kind of hair is this, anyway? Blue!” She drops a handful onto the floor. It looks like a small dead animal. She grabs a new section and pulls, working the scissors near the roots. “Them others was pretty, not you.” More dreads fall. “Them others got us good money. You’re nothing but a punch bag whore.”

  I cry. It hurts so much to know this horrible woman is cutting the punk right out of me, taking the very last bit of me away from myself.

  “What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”

  I hiccup.

  She shakes her gnarled hands about my head, sends the loose hairs fluttering. My ears are naked. The back of my neck itches.

  “Now you’re more like a boy. Hmmph.” She stands back to look at her work. Her flat, Chinatown slippers trample the pile of my hair.

  I hate you, I want to hiss.

  She shakes her head, shuffles to the stairs again, and shuffles back with a pile of clothes. She drops them beside the dreads. “I ain’t dressing you. The clothes is here, so put ’em on. You won’t sell, bare like that. Too skinny. Likely wait a day or two. Get your bruise up. So they know what to do with you.” She exhales when she bends to pick up the basin. She grunts when she stands back up. Dumping the last of the water down the drain, the old woman slams the basin onto the cement floor, tosses the sponge inside it.

  I don’t move.

  “You ain’t broke all your bones. Get dressed! I want those towels.”

  I still don’t move. I wish I were dead.

  “Suit yourself, mule. Sleep with the rags, all I care. Sleep without your soup, too.” She stomps heavily up the old stairs, one arthritic step at a time. “Earl, take me home,” she hollers. “I had enough of this place.”

  Creak, creak. Creak, creak. Slam. Click. Bolt.

  There’s thunder again from above. The King sounds drunk and sloppy and something else. Why doesn’t he come back down? The voices are ugly loud, his low rumbling and her higher screech, call and response, like some warped hymn from the church orphanage when I was a kid. I think I hear an engine outside, a car starting up. After that it’s quiet for a long time. No floorboards squeak, no voices rumble. I drift in and out, not sleeping, not awake.

  A door slams someplace above me. I open my eyes. It feels later, but I can’t say for sure. The light bulbs glare just as they did when I was first hauled into this dank cell, when the King carried me in blindfolded and dropped me on the floor.

  I remember the hood lifting, the heavy fabric being pulled off roughly, some of my dreads caught with it. I was sitting, broken, staring at his shiny cop boots on the grey cement, not saying a word. He was impatient. “Should’ve got rid of you by now.” I looked him in the eyes, in those flat soulless pits, and silently dared him. He had a strange look on his face—not sure what. But he left, locking and bolting the metal door behind him.

  Other noises gradually start up—distant footsteps, doors, the thrum of electrical systems, power being generated. Vibrations tremble their way through the wood and steel and glass. A thumping bass shakes the rafters; muffled dance music. Sometimes I hear car engines, motors revving faintly outside. Sometimes the floorboards creak above, but nobody comes when I scream. Mostly there’s just the rhythmic throb of dance hits shaking the foundations of the building. It might be Britney.

  So they want to sell me off. That means the King can’t beat me anymore, not if they want to make any money. Will he rape me again? Would he still want the same pile of half-broken bones? If he’s human, even partly, he won’t come back down. He won’t want to see what he’s done to me.

  Unless he means to kill me.

  I blink.

  I slowly stretch out, flat on my back. My bones clack into place. I breathe as deeply as I can. My mouth tilts to one side to let the spit pool out. I start at my toes and move them slowly, identifying the hurts, the stiffness. I work my way up my body doing a pain inventory while the bass lines thump above me. That’s AC/DC, I think. And Nine Inch Nails. My thighs are hot with bruises, my hips feel torn. I try not to think about my crotch. It is swollen, mashed beyond recognition. Like it belongs to someone else. It burns inside, like that pig branded my soft pink tissue. Like he pounded his name into me, scarring me, taking that pretty place of mine away from me forever.

  A sob burns right up from my belly. If I let myself remember the weight of him crushing me, the stink of his breath on my face, the sick pull and slap, the animal mechanics of it, then I will only ever want to die.

  I skip up higher on my body, away from those throbbing, mutilated parts. I touch my ribs lightly with one hand. Probably cracked, they’re so tender; even when I breathe, it hurts. I can still feel his large hands on my neck, just like how he wrapped them around Oreo’s throat that day in the Junction. It’s swollen, probably will be marked for days, just like hers. The inside part, my throat, is screamed raw. Not that anyone heard, not in the deserted parking lot where they drove me, him and his blond schizoid partner. It was an old routine they’d worked out long ago, like some married couple going to Sunday dinner.

  “Cherry Beach?” asked the blond.

  “Naw, Rogers Road,” said the King. “I’ll drop you home on my way to the club.”

  The horror settled into my bones when they turned off the ignition in that industrial wasteland, that ghost-filled decrepit lot.

  I exhale and try to lift the lower part of my aching jaw so it’ll click back into place. I feel little pops under my fingertips when I open my mouth wider and close it gently. The King forced it open. He nearly killed me then, stuffing my throat, choking me from the inside and out. I gag thinking about it. My eyes and nose run. I cover my face with sore hands, bruised from fighting back, from blocking their hits, from trying to cover myself. The blond didn’t rape me—not because he’s nicer, he just couldn’t get it up. Not even when the King laughed at him.

  “Not my fault she’s too ugly.”

  I begged him to help me, to end it, but he just turned away. That blond stood lookout while I was pulverized into nothing.

  Above me, beyond the floorboards, I hear the tell-tale drum line, the insistent retro guitar riffs, the hair-shaking, head-banging chorus: “Pour some sugar on me!” I catch myself singing along. I’d know Def Leppard anywhere, even as a battered hostage locked in a dirty cellar.

  That’s what I get for hidin
g a radio under my pillow every night of my pre-teen life, earphones tangled in my regulation long hair. Radio rock lulled me to sleep, American commercials filled my dreams. Until Sister Anne, the mean one with the hairy face mole, discovered my secret and confiscated the goods. My lemon-yellow radio, my only friend, gone forever!

  I curl onto my side, fetal. I gently touch my head. Hair tufts unevenly. I’m cold without my dreads. There they sit, painted the colours of the ocean: purples and blues with murky green tips, my beautiful hair staring back at me from that hateful pile. It’s right next to the clothes she brought, which I refuse to consider. I roll away and stare at the opposite grey wall.

  “That’s the King.”

  The kid, a pretty hustler boy, nodded his chin slightly when the cop car cruised past our spot at the Spadina-Lake Shore underpass for the third time that morning. No dirty fingers pointing, no rude gestures, no swearing. The kid kept his head down. He stayed in the middle of our group. When he paced in tiny circles, his baggy pants dragged through the long grass of the island that separates east- and west-bound traffic. Each time cops drove by, we had to hide our buckets and squeegees; the City had passed some bylaw about traffic interference. Some days, pigs would be cracking down all over Toronto; other days they didn’t give a shit. On that particular morning I didn’t know what the cop wanted. That kid did, though, and he fretted. I remember his voice, the one who first warned us. What was his name? I had thought he was a girl for the longest time, with that mussy hair and delicate skin. Pretty.

  He’d said, “Yep, that’s the King. And if he wants you, he’ll take you to market.”

  It was the first I’d heard of the King, although I’d seen him in his car circling like a shark.

  Jake. His name was Jake.

  About a year before I met Oreo and moved into the Factory, I used to camp down at that underpass with some other kids, like red-headed Darcy. We cleaned windshields at the lights and made pretty good money some days. Jake had been there a while before me but not long after. He just disappeared. Someone said he went back home, back to that small town that puked him up in the first place. Someone else said, “No way, man. He’d never go back there.”

  That was also the summer I met Cricket. He was out of high school, graduated, though nobody knew it. He was slumming downtown with the punks, pretending to be homeless. As it turns out, he would sneak home to Rosedale some nights, living his double life. Cricket was bummed when Jake went missing. He thought Jake had revolutionary potential. I think Cricket just wanted to do it with him. Cricket wanted to start a squat like Andy Warhol’s Factory. He tried to convince Jake to join his arts collective, but Jake was more interested in smoking crack and flirting Cricket’s money out of his wallet. Cricket never got more than a grope or two, maybe some kisses, but he funded one hell of a habit for the boy. Back then, Cricket was always rattling on about the Paris Commune and Bolsheviks and crap like that. Jake said he’d been to Paris and never seen any commies. “Paris, France?” asked Cricket and Jake had blushed, “No—Paris, Ontario.”

  Next we heard Jake got trapped and rescued by some hard-nosed social workers, fostered out to some suburban family. He was cute, sure, and not old enough to get his own welfare and apartment, but nobody really believed that story. I figured he’d turn up sometime, but no.

  That day at the underpass, the last time any of us ever saw Jake, Cricket was shaking his squeegee in the burning noon sun, cursing “the bougie pigs.” He was ranting about our rights, trying to get us agitated and organized. Jake shrank back from the curb, chewed his nails and flitted nervously; he was bugging people for money, but he already owed most of us and we were totally broke, so that went nowhere. Jake was freaking out. He grabbed my arm—it was a cold, hard grip in spite of the hot day. “He’ll take you to market,” he’d said again to me, in a panicked voice.

  I thought, this kid is tweaked, and shook him off.

  I called the next set of lights, ran up with my dripping squeegee. I smiled and cleaned the glass. It was a dad driving a frowning wife and some kids who were trapped in the back, looking miserable. The dad gave me a toonie and stared at my tits. Ugh. When I hopped back onto the curb, Jake was already gone, who knows where.

  To market. Although I never thought he meant it literally.

  My stomach growls: I’m hungry. I’d forgotten all about food, being in this cellar. In that parking lot, that car. On the street for a couple days before that. I hadn’t eaten much then, either.

  And I’m something else: angry.

  Darcy’s skittish face comes to me—sketched out at the party. Right before the raid. And again at Ray-Ray’s place, right before the King busted down the door. Darcy, phony as fuck and just as high, tripping like some delusional princess. He couldn’t even look at me, the traitor.

  Darcy, I think, did you know what they would do to me? Did you know I’d rather die than be torn apart by those pigs?

  I lick my swollen lip. So thirsty. My muscles seize up in the damp cellar, my joints stiffen on the cold floor. I sit up slowly. My jaw clicks when I move my mouth, but it hurts less. I can swallow. I can spit. I’m not dead yet. And I do not want to be touched, not ever again.

  Upstairs music pumps away, loud as ever. It must be a bar or a dance club. That means there are people up there, lots of them, probably, and that’s a good thing.

  I look at what she left me to wear: white spandex shorts, long striped socks, a baby doll cotton dress, white pinafore, and shiny black buckled shoes. Raggedy Porno Ann. I have nothing else to put on, so what the hell. It takes a long time to fit my limbs into the proper holes. It hurts most to raise my left arm—those ribs must be cracked. When I pull the shorts on, I don’t even look down. Don’t want to see my battered girl parts. I’d give anything for an ice pack to press down there. The shoes are a full size too big, slightly scuffed. Who wore them before me?

  Next, I check the metal door. It’s definitely bolted. I jiggle the doorknob, slam against the door with all my weight. Nothing but the rattle of the heavy bolt. I remember the sound of it sliding into place, just like the one at the top of the stairs. Oreo could charm this open with her tools and her steady hand and her way with things. My throat burns when I think of her, my insides ache all the more. Shh, shh, I tell myself. The cold metal feels good against my swollen face.

  I limp to the stairs and sit on the bottom step. The music sounds louder here. Creak. I lean against the second step. Crack. An old board breaks loose—the wood comes free when I tug hard at one end. Nice. Now I have a weapon: a spider-infested two-by-four with rusty nails at either end. I rinse the thing off in the sink, wash the sticky white nests down the drain. I notice daddy longlegs crawling up the underside of the board, elaborate webs trailing from the wood. I chuck it. Fuck. Silky tendrils cling to me. I grunt, swiping at myself frantically. Panic bubbles up and I gasp.

  Like a spider can hurt me now.

  Oreo would laugh. She would cup her big hands around one of them and let it creep over her fingers or hang from a fine thread or hold one dangling from a twitching leg. She would croon, call it grandmother.

  But Oreo is not here.

  I drink from the tap. I rinse my face with cold water. I go get the piece of wood. The last little monster makes a getaway across the grey floor, a mangled leg hanging uselessly, trailing behind. Poor thing. She looks like me. Using the basin, I tap three long, rusty nails out of the board. I put them in my pinafore pocket. The last nail is already bent pretty good. It’s too hard to remove. I hit it a few more times to make sure it’ll stay at a ninety-degree angle. It’s my rusty basement bayonet, and I practice waving it around with my good arm. I crawl up the stairs and press my ear against that door. The music is loudest here. The techno bass line vibrates the whole door. The knob shines at me. I turn the deadbolt handle, and the whole door gives slightly. I exhale for what feels like the first time since climbing the stairs. The King locked this door with his key from the outside, and I’ve undone it. But there’
s still a bolt on the other side, maybe even a second lock.

  I jiggle the handle, bang against the door. I scream. I slam that door with the full weight of my body. I slam my aching shoulder into it over and over. My voice goes hoarse. My shoulder throbs. I slide down to sit on the top step and breathe heavily. Sweat trickles along my hairline, down my back. Blood thumps in my chest, my ears roar. I lick my sore lips. I’m dizzy and have to grab the wall so I don’t fall down the stairs.

  Hannah fucking Montana? Unbelievable. This shit music might kill me before the cops can! When I get out of here, Oreo will find this part of the story so funny. I can hear her laughing, see those gorgeous teeth shining between full lips, her long braid swinging. You slay me, Ferret. If I try hard enough, I can imagine the smell of her skin.

  I never had that kind of thing before—love. Suddenly there was Oreo, standing right beside me, protecting me. Making everything come to life, like magic. I was so scared to believe it. What if she freaked and took off? Cricket always said, “Lesbians are delusional and co-dependent. Ferret, you’re a blind monogamist!” But I didn’t care. I only wanted to be with her, safe and happy, and not afraid of the whole world anymore.

  I feel vibrations through the flooring under my butt before I hear the heavy footsteps approaching on the other side of the door. I leap up and bang into the wood, my voice too hoarse to make sounds.

  The steps stop right on the other side. I rattle the handle.

  There’s a knock on the door. “Earl? That you?” A low voice, a man out there.

  He thinks I’m the King.

  I rattle the doorknob again and knock back.

  “You fucking lock yourself in there again? Christ.” I hear the faint jingle of keys. The voice is nattering on.

  I brace myself against the far wall and hold the wooden board up high. The bolt slides across. Music blares through the tiny crack in the door.