A bird on every tree

by Carol Bruneau

  You could go there for Christmas. They’d like to see you.

  Right. No fucking way.

  What a beast, the van. The best present ever, thanks Mum. What a ride—not that she was going anywhere. On garbage day, up the road in the subdivision, they put out some sick stuff. A chrome chair. Some wood she made shelves out of, for her books and what clothes she didn’t keep on.

  In the middle of the dash she displayed her bobble-headed Jesus, and over the windows, posters from shows out west, bands from her “formative years,” as Mum called them—and still tons of room left over for her own shit. The drawings she did of buildings that, once the rich scum that lived in them got kicked out, and the glass smashed out of the windows, would become things of beauty, things to value.

  You need to find a job, Mum was always texting.

  It made her think how it wasn’t what you did but where you lived, your home maybe as much as your clothes that defined you. Gave you your identity.

  Since she had time, and since it was the holidays—five days to Christmas, the festering season like that Earl dude said—she cut down a tree with her Swiss Army knife. Just thick enough to stick in the middle of the cable spool a jogger helped her wrestle aboard. An excellent table, it took up more space than was maybe ideal, with the shelves and the air mattress moved in. But what the fuck.

  The subdivision people had a thing for decorating the trees in their yards with red, gold, blue, and silver balls. When it got dark she went up there and pinched some. A little big for her tree, but WTF. She picked twigs with dried-up red berries and arranged them around her dashboard Jesus. Right in the spirit, folks like Earl and his lame-ass wife would’ve said. The spirit being an instant downer.

  It was crazy, and it sucked having to ask, but she couldn’t help it.

  Can you come out? she texted Mum.

  Faster than she’d have thought, Mum texted back.

  Oh Shannon, honey. You know your father hates airports this time of year.

  He’s not my father, she pinged right back. I want you to see my place, she started to type, against all better judgment. She could hear it already: What’s wrong with a nice warm apartment? Roommates? Working, or going to school? But Mum’s ping butted in.

  We’ll send you a ticket.

  Landlords sucked. Roommates sucked. Working sucked. School sucked.

  U no I hate flying, she thumbed. U no it like totally brings on my panic attax.

  There was silence for a while, the screen as dim as the parking lot before the floodlights came on. And then another text:

  Why don’t you phone Susie? She and Don and the kids would love to have you. They’ve got that nice place, I saw it on TV.

  So now it was about property, it always came down to that—private property, the hierarchy of ownership, and people who just wanted to rub it in. All the same, she felt tingly-eyed and crampy, like she had a twist in her gut. The van, sweet as it was, a nod to some kind of economic imperialism if not colonialism, and for sure a threat to the environment IF she drove it. The problem was, owning your own place and not having anyone to answer to freed you up to share your luck, your good fortune, your karma.

  There was this girl she’d met at a show, a girl with awesome ink, like, all over her; in the bathroom she’d pulled off her clothes to show her. Tomorrow night was the solstice, she remembered: a decent time to invite this girl over. They could do a bonfire, listen for coyotes.

  Hey, come & chk out my place, she texted, and sent the bus number and directions. She didn’t offer to pick her up. The truth was, much as she’d wanted no fixed address, a home free of the hassles of renting, the van had barely made it back to the city, eating a whole tank of gas getting here. Plus, it seemed like a bad idea to give up the parking spot.

  The friend didn’t text back; maybe her phone had died or something?

  She clapped her hands together. Two pairs of mitts, long johns, two hoodies, a jacket, and jeans barely kept out the cold. It was a drag how metal was a conductor, which she’d learned, like, in grade two. But she could handle the cold, and to warm up she walked past the subdivision to the grocery store, paid for granola bars and veggie dogs with Earl’s ten-dollar bill. There was a bank machine, and she took some money out, left from the chunk Mum had sent. The good thing about bank machines was they gave out twenties, so you didn’t look like a spoiled rich-bitch consumer pig buying a chocolate bar (the thing with fifties that sucked).

  It was cold but she could handle it. It was light she missed, light that would’ve made things better—fuck the festive season, light was all anyone with half a brain wanted—the only good thing about all the fuss, the commercialism, the consumerism, the churchy crap with the kid in a manger and the we-three-wise-ass-kings: it was all just people looking for light.

  On the way home she scored just the thing: some solar-powered lights, which she swiped off someone’s lawn. They were shaped like snowflakes as big as your ass, and looked pretty sweet stuck in the gravel around the van. How did the sun morph into twinkly reds-greens-blues, in that sequence? Some things you didn’t want to know, because right now some poor loser in China was likely eating rat-shit soup just so the western world could rot in peace-love-and-joy.

  The big-as-your-ass snowflakes sparkled and flashed against the black woods, even with the floodlights making everything a weak, grungy yellow. She stuck the grocery bag under the tree for snow, the tree with its ginormous balls, and thought of taking a picture so Mum could see, see that it was mostly possible to live without selling your soul.

  She checked for messages. Nothing. No R u ok? No Hope ur nt alone. No Hope ur wrm.

  It was probably best that Mum hadn’t come. She ate two veggie dogs from the package; they’d have been nicer hot.

  “I wish you weren’t so far away,” Mum would’ve said if she’d been here. “I wish you’d get a job, get a place, get a—”

  “Life?” she’d have finished for her. “I have a life.”

  If Mum were here she’d just be looking her over to see if she still had tits or if her hair was still brown or green or blue, like the last time they’d seen each other.

  She wolfed down three granola bars.

  Happy shortest day of the year, she texted her mother.

  There was a ping, very faint, because the phone needed charging. No worries, with the adapter she could plug it in to the cigarette lighter; that was the quality of buying vintage.

  The message was from Mum. I’ve been looking into flights. If you still want me to come. Christmas n all.

  It’s OK, she texted back. I’m peaced out. Gotta bounce. The last bit got eaten, the phone dying.

  To keep from draining the van’s battery, she stuck the key in, kicked the gas pedal, pushed it to the floor, turned the key, turned it, held it, just like Earl had said.

  There was a funny little pause, just like someone under the hood trying to choose: will I stay or won’t I? Before she could imagine an answer there was a CHCHCHCRRRRRKKKK!!! Like a million glass jars being stomped on all at once, so sudden and sharp the jolt jumped from the wheel through her fingers, and the Econoline jerked forwards. There was a bobbling, bouncing sound as balls rolled under the seat, and a sour-ass stink like paperwhites, those flowers that looked so pretty but smelled bad, those flowers in Earl Joudrey’s hallway. The reek filled the van, and maybe some smoke, and she got out.

  She got out, fuck, and stood there watching the snowflakes blink and glow blue. Sick, they really were, and blue as the world—as the pond and the parking lot and even the cul-de-sac in Calgary, if Mum and her dick husband had the hearts to wrap their heads around things, around her—like, the all-of-it seen from the fucking space shuttle or something.

  The snowflakes lit wisps of smoke twisting up from the van’s hood. She’s fried, dear, fried. In her head that creepy old dude’s voice—the guy she’d bought it off—oozed
and slimed the dark, or tried to.

  But the blue drowned it out, spreading and deepening before her eyes, the woods and sky popping with it. It was beautiful, all right. Even if it was cold out. At least she had matches. And there were sticks around, lots of sticks, from the dogs that walked and crapped here. No problem at all gathering up enough. Not a Tim’s cup to be seen, though—there never was when one might be useful—and no paper besides her posters, drawings, and books.

  She had to dig under a few layers to find it, but there it was—sweet—crammed into her pocket along with a Needs receipt for chips.

  She lit a match, held it up to the little blue slip—the one with Earl Joudrey’s name, and hers: Received, $1500, in good faith. For a full second the flame lit a halo around her hands, a nice warm glow, a blast of light, just before the sticks caught.

  The sticks went up, no problem. They made an awesome bonfire. Mum and Susie and her crappy kids and Earl Joudrey and that fem with all the ink would’ve shit themselves. Really. You could have seen it from a plane, brighter than the flash of the world’s biggest, tallest cell tower. Even Mum’s dickwad husband would’ve noticed.

  It burned so brightly, looking up, she could just barely, barely, make out the stars.

  Crotch Rockets

  The last, the very last he’d seen of Roz McIlween—the last she’d been within spitting distance of him—was her sliding off the back of his 750 Kow. Twenty-six years and three months ago, to be exact—before there was digital anything, before anyone had even mentioned “the information highway.” Barely a blip in his memory, Roz, when her email popped up. She’d stumbled across his website, she wrote. Figgered it had to be u, who else would be hawking bike parts on eBay?

  This was just the warm-up. She was coming back east for a conference, yes, a conference, in the university town just a couple hundred miles down the road from Torporville, as she called their hometown. Would he like to meet up? Not “hook up,” as they said online. It wasn’t so much her coming out of the woodwork as the thought of Roz, Roz McIlween, doing a conference that hit like a dart. Poor old Rannie, he gave himself a shake, feeling like some soused old dude standing in front of the board’s bull’s eye at the tavern.

  I’ll pick u up there, he typed, after nursing a couple of cups of tea. He needed that long to think about it. The screen glared back from the dining room table as Ma settled in for her show, a CSI rerun. “Who’re you writing now?” she wanted to know, peering up from her chair in the front room. Now he had the business up and running, she’d taken an interest in the computer, instead of being on his back to find a better spot for it.

  “No one—” He took a long, last swallow. “Roz. You remember Roz?” Who he might well have got sucked into marrying, all those years back, when he was an idjit—a kid holding down a shit-boring job three thousand miles away in a place he hated. When life was like Niagara Falls all the same: a rush, and no shortage of girls, him just not knowing it.

  “Oh. Her. The little one from out Brook Street way.”

  “The little one,” he snorted, dribbling tea, wiping his chin on his sleeve. “That’s right.” Meek and mild little Roz, who’d always known exactly what she wanted. Good for her, they said, still said, around town. Ma too, now that he thought of it:

  “I always liked that girl.”

  Ma’d never known the half of it; Roz had been a piece of work. All these years later he sure remembered, remembered this and the hope chest she’d had shipped out west once she had her own place. Her granny’s Royal Doulton figurines set on top of it, and the time she’d lit into him for setting down his beer glass there.

  The drinking Roz had tolerated, not his cigarettes though, stinking up the apartment—their apartment, after a month or two of him camping out on her sofa, when he’d gone out there for her. Then he’d got the job. Then the old man had died and home he’d come for the funeral—just for that—but seeing Ma so all alone, he’d stayed. Pretty simple, really. Only logical, like quitting smoking, which he’d done. By then, though, they were fighting all the time, him and Roz. Roz, for all her plump-girl good nature, was the type who measured and broke spaghetti so each piece was the same. Once she’d winged a beer can at him for setting his helmet beside her Balloon Lady, or was it Marie Antoinette?

  “The type who’d make you a fine wife, Rannie Jessome,” Ma had called Roz back in the day—though she hadn’t objected to his staying home, her Rannie; and after a year or two his going back to Alberta fell off the tachometer, as he liked to think of it. “I can hardly leave you, can I?” he said, careful, always careful, not to sound resentful or lay blame.

  Though, yes, Roz McIlween would’ve made a very fine wife, he knew when he ran into friends of hers who hadn’t left—one or two of them, full of stories: Roz, Roz, this-n-that. How she’d married, got her nursing degree, and was making money hand over fist like everyone else out there, house to die for, nice car, blah blah blah. All of it flashed back at him like the cursor, black against white in the dimness made jumpy by Ma’s TV. But it hadn’t been so bad helping out Ma around the house—a fair shake—in exchange for sharing her pension cheques. “A fellow gets by,” he’d say when asked. Who knows how things would’ve gone if he’d returned to McMurray?

  Roz’s reply boomeranged back: Fantastic!!!!!!!!! Oh yes, and he’d heard about her divorce too, though none of its gory details, from her friend who worked at the No Frills. Quite the lard-arse, that one, would kill the shocks on a 1650, climbing on back. God forbid Roz had let herself go too—but it seemed a little off to ask for a photo. Great, he tapped back quickly, because some customers—would-be customers—had also emailed, one wanting a fairing for a Gold Wing, another a crankshaft for an antique Indian: nothing he had in the basement, that’s for damn sure. Out of stock, he typed back queasily, as it fully hit him—the dart’s target square in the middle of his gut: Roz wanted to see him.

  “Rannie? Where you off to?” Ma’s voice drifted after him when he stole downstairs. He needed a drink. Frig, he breathed, can’t a fellow have a bit of space? Under its single swaying bulb the basement came alive. If anywhere was home, if there was anyplace he loved, this was it: his man cave—his father’s rusty tools piled on the cement floor, heaps of bike parts arranged according to their function and not necessarily by model or make. Filling half a wall was the hulk of a hog he’d bought off a guy in the Devil’s Pets, a gang two towns over. The goddamn thing had never run. Next to it was the bike he’d driven back from Alberta, the blue Kawasaki he’d been raiding for parts, propped on its kickstand, a picked carcass. Enough to make him weep, the mildew on its seat was like mould sprouting on bread. The tank had been dulled by spilt gas, its paint the lifeless shade of the ocean on days when he wondered, truly, why the fuck he’d come back.

  Happily adrift in this paradise, this basement oasis, was Ma’s new washer-dryer combo, like two shiny icebergs. They needed good appliances if he was doing the laundry. It was hard enough doing business without her demands: “Did you remember my nightie? My housecoat? Now don’t be washing with hot!” You’ll be in hot water, washing your own damn clothes, he’d think, then beat himself up for it, trying to fill orders. One from South Dakota once, a guy seeking parts for an ancient BSA chopper. He’d scoured the internet then given up. A chopper, is that a kind of plane? some cyber-bimbo had emailed back. If it couldn’t be scalped from the Harley or the Kow or the heaps on the floor, it didn’t exist.

  Taking a healthy swig of rum—Lamb’s 100 proof, the old man’s favourite—he wondered what Roz would think of his business plan. Probably not much. Overhead, Ma tapped her cane—code: two taps, get me more tea; three, come turn off the tube, wouldja?—meaning she wanted to be helped upstairs to bed. Grabbing a grease rag, he mopped his brow. Its smell was half medicinal, and it too reminded him of the old man, who’d done a stint fixing cars before biting it. So—he took a deep breath: inhaled fossil fuel, imagined it cooking between
layers of rock, prehistoric compost, a heavenly black ooze—Roz was coming, and he’d see her, yes, okay, he would, if he had nothing better to do and nothing came up—an appointment to cab Ma to, or a swim at the Point, or a ride on the 350 he kept outside: a crotch rocket, but all the speed you needed to get to the No Frills and back. He could always ask that one what her friend Roz was like these days, dig around on Facebook, at least find out what size she was. Not exactly fat, she hadn’t exactly been a toothpick either.

  A nurse, though, a nurse would take care of herself, right? Not let herself go the way women this age seemed to—strange, really, that she’d never come back. People from here always did, at least for the summers; sometimes in the last stages of cancer, just to prove they could. How long ya been home? they asked, like asking how long since you’d passed your driver’s test, or the pearly gates. Anyway. This conference or whatever the hell she was coming for didn’t happen for a week; plenty of time to back out.

  A night or two later, not long after Ma went to bed, the phone rang. He expected it to be the criminal, the little ball of hate who ran the salvage yard a few streets over—one of the only businesses left in town, besides the funeral home and grocery store. A guy who’d cut out your eyes before letting anything go cheap. Watching the highways for crashes, he dealt more in car parts, his shop an automotive catacomb. If being a vulture was what it took to be successful, I’ll stick to working online, thanks very much, Rannie regularly told himself; once the hog and Kow were picked clean, he’d retire?

  “Is it you, Rannie?” Her voice caught him off guard. It was deeper, throatier, than he remembered, and a lot more patient. Its effect was like wiping out while cornering. She could’ve been just next door. Picturing a person with that kind of voice throwing things made it hard to speak.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t the lone stranger.” He let his eyes cruise the ceiling, hoping Ma didn’t hear. “Got your email,” he said helplessly.