We stopped in all the cool spots to collect money, eat ice cream and French fries, and listen to street performers. The men we stopped to talk to, though, were terrified, just like my cousins. I’d see the look of relief on their faces in the side mirror as we pulled away. I’d heard that my dad and Ron were in business together years ago and wondered if it was delivering flowers.
Uncle Ron also introduced me to other guys, his friends, as “Sonny’s boy,” and they all looked like Uncle Ron, muscle-bound and tough, and all of them were super excited to meet me. They had scars and tattoos and toothpicks, and they talked about my dad like he was a legend. The stories washed over me. Not one person had a bad word to say about him—not like Grandpa. It was nice to hear. I’d never been proud to be my father’s son before.
On our way out of one of the shops on Yonge Street, we came across a guy bumming change in front of Sam the Record Man. He was thin and looked much older than Uncle Ron, with long, greasy hair and a matted grey-and-brown beard. In front of him were a woollen blanket, a few plastic bags, and a paper coffee cup. Not many people ventured near him, veering close to the storefronts instead and turning their heads. I was compelled to do the same.
Uncle Ron, though, walked right up to him and put a twenty in his cup. The man smiled a toothy smile and said thank you, but Uncle Ron just stared at him. The man looked at him, then over at me. I could tell he was trying to assess what was going on, but then Uncle Ron said, “Don’t mention it, brother.” Before we rounded the corner to where we were parked, Uncle Ron turned back, but the homeless man was gone.
“I always think,” he said, “that it could be Sonny.”
BIRDSONG
MRS. R., THE FRENCH TEACHER, walked up to my desk and handed back my report card with its proof of signature. She peered over her glasses at the report card and me, and said, “We need to talk after class.”
I could have sworn a black cloud hung low around her calf muscles and knee-length skirt as she turned and walked back to the front of the class. She was stern, powerful, and in control, and the clomp of her high heels thundered through my brain.
Whispers from my classmates came from all directions. My friend Renee, who’d sometimes help me when I didn’t understand things, turned around and mouthed, “You’re dead meat, Thistle.”
I gulped. Mrs. R. wasn’t to be trifled with—she screamed in our faces if we did something wrong. In the worst cases, she’d get so mad that she’d cry-yell and make you do consecutive detention for a couple of weeks.
I glanced down at my grade: 35 percent—a big fat F. Worse than F, more like K. The comment beside it read: “Jesse is frequently unprepared for class. A more consistent effort is required.” Brutal and bleak. I was two-thirds of the way through the year and sure to fail at this rate.
Aside from taking away our hard-won Nintendo and go-cart and grounding me, I knew Grandpa would whip me so hard I wouldn’t be able to sit straight. Like the way he lashed Josh with the red rod—an unbreakable half-inch fiberglass golf flagpole—when Josh had thrown that rock in the park and it ricocheted off the fence and broke that Sikh man’s window. It wasn’t Josh’s fault. I was there—the rock simply bounced, redirected itself off the fence post, then smash! But that didn’t matter. A window was shattered, it cost Grandpa $200 to fix it, and Josh had to be punished. The strips Grandpa tore off his backside were purple and puffy, and Josh had to lie on his side while they healed but they still left stripe-like welts. He looked like a zebra.
Grandpa’s anger that day wasn’t usual—it was the same rage I saw when he warned me about doing drugs after he told me about Dad’s disappearance—and it scared me so much that I bawled in my room as Josh received the beating of his life. I lay on my bed and covered my ears with my pillow to hide from the sound of the rod thrashing through the air. In my head, I begged for Josh to cry out, but he kept it together somehow. I knew it was to show he was a man the way Grandpa liked, but that only made things worse. After what sounded like thirty more blows, Josh finally bellowed out in agony. It was a sound so sad it penetrated right to where I was hiding, right through the concrete foundation of our house.
Grandma once told me that Grandpa was that “way” with discipline because his pappy was that “way” with him, and that he got it worse than us. Grandpa was only five when his father died from a heart attack in 1938, and he had to move two hundred kilometres, out to the sticks of Cape Breton, to live with Pappy. There, he’d worked hauling wood, picking rocks, and fishing on the dory like a grown man—he never got to have a childhood like us. I always wondered if that was why Grandpa took us in, because he knew what it was like to have no one, to lose his family.
Whatever the reasons for the way Grandpa was, the scream Josh let out that day sounded like he was being killed, and I questioned how Grandpa’s childhood beatings could have been worse.
Mrs. R. rapped the blackboard with her pointer and trained her eyes on me. “Some students”—she cleared her throat—“didn’t come with their report card proofs signed by their parents. I’ve already spoken with most of you, but I’ll see those of you who didn’t after class.”
After class!
I started to chew my thumbnail. I spit a bit out and it landed in the hair of the girl who sat ahead of me, but she didn’t notice. The clock hands seemed to beat forward with incredible speed, and each tick sounded like an explosion.
Tick!
I only had four minutes until the bell rang, and I’d have to answer for what I’d done.
Tick!
I stared at the French vocabulary signs that adorned the room, searching for a way out. The stupid French toad with the à bientôt word bubble above its head; the picture of that annoying little girl waving au revoir to nobody; the huge picture of those bright, obnoxious yellow daffodils that screamed le printemps. I imagined them all piled on a bonfire with Mrs. R.’s head roasting on a stick.
TICK!
The minute hand surged forward—two minutes left—reminding me that I was trapped.
Shit!
I knew why Mrs. R. had singled me out. It was in the way she’d looked at me after she’d peered down at my grandmother’s signature and handed me back my report card. The edges of my grandma’s name were shaky and didn’t flow right.
When I’d received my grades before the Christmas break and saw my F, I panicked. I couldn’t let my grandparents see how poorly I was doing. It didn’t take much to set Grandpa off these days. I didn’t want to end up like Josh. I told Leeroy on our walk home, and he told me about a guy in one of his classes who’d forged his parent’s signature on a report card and gotten away with it.
The idea sounded plausible—genius even—so I went home and traced over an existing signature Grandma had written on a permission slip for a field trip I’d taken in another class. The practice signatures all looked great. But then I messed up. I only had one report card, one shot, and I failed miserably. When I handed the report card in, I’d done it quickly, tossing it on Mrs. R.’s desk underneath everyone else’s report cards, hoping she’d be lazy and would just hand them in that way. But she didn’t. She’d checked each one and discovered my crime, and now I had to pay for it.
Ring, ring, ring! The bell went off.
What the hell happened to the time?
As I lurched toward Mrs. R., I straightened my cardigan and kept my eyes down. I somehow thought that if I didn’t look at her, I could still hide and maybe everything would be okay. She ushered the class out and paused before shutting the door and asking me to sit in the seat adjacent to her desk. It was known as the hot seat.
“I taught your brothers,” she said. “They were good students, Josh especially.” She took the forged document from my hands and fingered my sloppy fraud. “I’ve seen a lot of faked signatures over the years, but this one has to be the worst.” Her words were like weights dragging me to the bottom of the ocean.
“You know I have to report you to the principal. He’ll contact your grandparents
.”
I expected her to yell like she always did—cry-yell even—but she didn’t. She just kept looking at me. I started squirming.
“This is a very poor start to life. Fraud is a real crime,” she continued. “Why did you do this?”
I thought of Josh and the punishments we got. I couldn’t breathe.
“You don’t know how it is,” I said. “You don’t know how it is for me.” I began to sob.
“How what is?”
I rocked in my chair.
“I can’t go home with a report card like this. You don’t know what will happen,” I couldn’t feel my face but I was crying. “It’s not his fault. He was raised that way.”
Mrs. R. didn’t say anything, just sat there, rubbing my back.
I couldn’t hear the clock anymore, just Mrs. R.’s soft breath and the sound of a robin singing outside.
JACK HIM
“FUCK FAMILY TIES,” I GROWLED and changed the channel. I couldn’t stand to see Michael J. Fox get hugged by his stupid-looking, bearded father after he’d apologized for taking speed and redeemed himself. If I got caught with even a cigarette I’d be practically tarred, feathered, beaten, and grounded for a year.
“Dude,” Leeroy cried. “Now we’ll never know what happened. Put it back on!”
“It’s bullshit. Bloody Alex P. Keaton.” I flicked through a few stations then launched the remote across the room. Bits of brown and green plastic exploded all over the concrete floor. Leeroy let out a goonish laugh, the kind of sound we made when either of us started shit.
I didn’t care that my grandparents would be upset. Fuck them, too, I thought. I’ll just blame it on Jerry. Putting it on my brother was a diversion strategy that worked most times. He was a horrible liar; so bad, in fact, that when other people did stuff—stuff he was totally innocent of—and he tried explaining to my grandparents what had happened, he looked guilty just talking. The poor bastard had taken so many of my thrashings I’d lost count.
“We could drink some beer?” I half asked, half offered. I walked over and opened the fridge but saw tumbleweeds. Leeroy searched the empties; nothing there, either. Black-and-white static on the TV rolled and buzzed like a hive of angry bees. The set was stuck on channel 81, the late-Saturday-night porn station, and even if we could hear what was going on, we’d be lucky to see a nipple. It made it difficult to masturbate, chasing phantom nipples. I pulled out my pocket knife, stuck it in the broken rotary dial on the left of the screen, and jiggled it. The vise grips we usually used were gone, taken by Josh no doubt in one of his fits of backyard engineering, and my little Swiss Army knife wasn’t strong enough. I pulled the plug on the TV with a grunt.
“I think I’m going home,” Leeroy said, rubbing his stomach beneath his Maple Leafs jersey. It was hours past dinnertime and we both hadn’t eaten. Grandma made fish cakes earlier, but neither of us liked them, so we passed on her offer. It was the only meal I could say no to. I hated the huge raw onions packed into the patties. When I was around five my grandparents caught me one night after I’d stuffed my cheeks until I looked like Dizzy Gillespie and excused myself from the dinner table repeatedly. I was spitting my cargo in the toilet. Grandpa thought it was clever of me—his little puking chipmunk. Grandma wasn’t as impressed. They tried to force me to eat them over the years, but I never did.
“Okay, I’ll walk you over.” I put on my shoes. The smell of fish and oil spilled onto the street as we left. The night air was cool for September. Street lights flickered in the park, surrounded by a blanket of blackness. I kicked a pop can and it rolled over a storm grate and stood motionless at the base of the curb. Leeroy kicked it, sending it up across the boulevard and onto the sidewalk.
As we rounded the corner, we saw Ivan, a blond Polish kid about four years younger than us who lived ten houses down from Leeroy, playing on his front lawn. I thought it was strange that he’d be out at this hour all by himself. To us, he was spoiled beyond belief. He had toys galore, and I often saw him at the convenience store with his dad buying chips and gum and whatever else his little heart desired. His dad usually gave him the leftover change, and sometimes he’d share with me if I was hanging around with my friends. It was hard to see him with his dad, all happy and eating candy, holding hands, and playing hockey together out in front of his house every Saturday. Grandpa never did anything like that with me.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked as I turned to Leeroy.
“What? No!” The expression on Leeroy’s face told me he knew exactly what I was thinking. “That’s too much, even for us.”
I stopped in the middle of the street and grabbed his arm. “The kid is loaded. We can jack his money and run away. It’s dark. He won’t know what hit him.” My Swiss Army knife burned in my back pocket, begging me to take control of the situation, to follow through so for once I’d have some goddamned lunch money and could buy my own goddamned fries.
“Don’t be crazy.” Leeroy ripped his arm away. “I live right down the street; I can’t.” He stood his ground. He wasn’t going to cross the line, not now, not tonight, not on his street. Just then Ivan stood up at the end of his lawn and waved over to us.
Leeroy is right, I would get caught, somehow, like everyone gets caught on all the police shows. No one gets away.
“See,” Leeroy said with a look of relief, knowing I was backing down. “That’s the Jesse I know. Just chill.” He smiled at Ivan.
We’d gotten in lots of trouble before, and Leeroy had never put his foot down about anything, but here he was chickening out and telling me what to do. I was humiliated. My knife weighed down the back pocket of my jeans, and I put my hand over it to hide its imprint from the night sky. Leeroy walked backward toward his house and told me he’d see me in the morning on our walk to school. Then he went inside.
I was out there alone with Ivan and my knife.
Without a thought, I walked over to him, thrust my knife in his face, and robbed him. He cried for his dad, then ran into his house when I let him go. I fled into the dark, holding the change I’d ripped from his pockets. I was shocked at what I’d done. I wondered if my grandfather would forgive me like fathers did with their sons on TV.
A NEW FAMILY
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE, Grandma surprised us.
“Your mother moved from Saskatoon to Ottawa,” she said. “She’s coming to see you tomorrow.”
Grandpa grunted and slammed back his chicken and potatoes, barely looking at anyone. Josh, Jerry, and I excused ourselves from the dinner table and retreated to our rooms; it was the first time we’d all left food on our plates before.
I wondered if Mom would still look as beautiful as she did the last time we’d seen her, and I couldn’t sleep that night waiting for her. I stared out my window looking at the stars, trying to think of the right words to say, but they all jumbled together. I pictured her laughing face on the surface of the moon, the light of it dimming with each passing cloud. My throat closed as I tried to swallow.
I finally got up and pulled my best Chip & Pepper T-shirt, my nicest black slacks, and my penny loafers out of my closet. I laid all of them on the floor in front of my bed, methodically picked lint off both garments, then applied shoe polish to the loafers until they shined like mirrors. I tried to figure out how I’d comb my hair—down the middle, spiked up, or off to the side. I couldn’t decide. I wanted to look good, to show Mom how much I’d grown.
From across the hall the deep rumbles of my grandfather’s snores were followed by the squeaky squirrel noises Grandma made to wake him up and keep him from suffocating to death from the sleep apnea he had. They weren’t conferencing about me for once, and that made me happy. Often at night, I could hear them talking about me, even though their voices were hushed—as though I was in a different kind of trouble than usual.
Perhaps they know about the things I’ve done, I’d worry. Perhaps they’re going to take me to the Children’s Aid Society after all.
Fin
ally, morning hit, and Yorkie’s bark announced Mom’s arrival. I ran downstairs as fast as I could, hair gelled to one side, and flung the door open so hard the door handle punched a hole in the wood paneling. Yorkie was running around in circles behind me.
“Hi, Jesse!” Mom shouted with a huge, beaming smile, her arms stretched out.
She was wearing the Russian hat from my picture tilted to the side. The cold December air froze puffs of breath around her head so they looked like smoke caught amongst the fox fur. Her hair was shorter and browner now, not the black flowy locks I remembered, but she still looked the same to me. Beside her were two gym bags and a little coal-haired boy, around six years old. Mom looked toward a man rummaging in a grey car across the street, who waved over to us, then she turned back to me, waiting for her hug. I had a sudden urge to go and hide in the boot box. The little boy tugged at Mom’s leg.
“Hug her, you idiot,” I could hear Josh say from behind me. His words snapped me out of my daze. He pushed me aside and embraced Mom. I fell against the wall, my hand finding purchase in the newly created hole. Deep growls of joy emanated from Josh and Mom, warming me somewhat. Josh rubbed the boy’s head and introduced himself. The boy said his name was Daniel.
“He’s your little brother,” Mom said.
A surge of jealousy ran cold up my spine.
Jerry trailed along the hallway leading to the door. Each step was strained and reminded me of when Grandma forced him to walk the dog on Sunday mornings. He had a sneer across his face, and his arms were crossed.
“I can’t find my wallet,” the man from the car hollered over to Mom. “I think I left it at the gas station near Kingston.”
“I have it here in my purse, George,” Mom said. “Now get over here and meet my boys!” The man nodded and made his way to us, a small skip in his step. Daniel stuck his hand out to shake mine, but I batted it away and stuck my tongue out at him. Mom didn’t see. She was focused on George.
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