by Patrick Lane
But there was no other place. Eddy would tell her to let him in, but Mother wouldn’t open the door. Tom heard himself making small noises. Mother said it was the sound a pig makes. She said through the secret door: You’re nothing but a pig.
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy had roast beef,
This little piggy had none,
And this little piggy went Wee Wee Wee
All the way home.
He felt the quiet for a brief moment and then he heard Father’s boots crossing the kitchen below, the rasp of his rough hand on the stair rail, and Father going clump clump clump on the stairs. Tom’s throat pushed a smell into his nose. It rested there in a ball that held like wet fat he couldn’t swallow. He rocked harder and harder and then he was back in the hall, a couple of strangers beside him, one of them grunting, the other in a moan.
There are things happening to me, Tom said to them, but they didn’t look like they wanted to know. He felt his hands, the sweat on them cold and slippery, and he rubbed them together as he leaned back against the wall. Eddy had told him so many times not to remember, but there was no stopping any of it.
6
the door to the spare bedroom across from Eddy’s was partly open and Tom glanced in. Wayne was down on his knees in front of the girl he’d fallen over in the yard. He was trying hard to get her underpants off. He had his two hands hooked on the elastic at her hips, but she wasn’t moving for him, her pale legs crossed tight. Her sweater was still on and her stained white bobby sox were rolled down, faded parrots flying inside out in a circle round her ankle bones. She had her hands in her hair and wasn’t saying anything to him, just staring into the clenched cross of her legs as if what she saw there was all the world she had.
Get the hell out of here, Tom said. This’s private up here.
Wayne tried to twist away from Tom. I’m sorry, Tom, he whined as he was pushed out the door. I didn’t know.
The hell you didn’t, Tom said.
Wayne fled down the steps, and the girl, her face fish-belly white, fixed her clothes and ambled after him, saying childishly to Tom as if in apology: I mostly just want to go home.
Tom turned and knocked on Eddy’s door, the sound of “Jambalaya” coming loud through the thin wood. He opened the door and went in.
Sally-Ann, makeup spilled in black pools under her eyes, was dancing naked on the thin mattress of the iron army cot, Eddy in his pants sprawled back barefoot and sparrow-chested on his sprung armchair with a glass of whiskey in his hand and a cigarette stuck between his lips. Her lipstick was worn away. Tom looked at the needle tracks, the bruises on her arms and on her thighs, the swell of her breasts and the smudge of hair at her groin. It had only taken a month or two for Eddy to help her into a habit. Tom wondered at how his brother could stand apart from people, yet at the same time draw them to him. Men and women seemed to fall under his spell, only to be crippled by their closeness. Confusion followed Eddy everywhere, yet Tom knew there was a bond between him and his brother that couldn’t be broken. It was a presence of brother hood which Tom tried to keep clear of impediment, even as Eddy cluttered it.
Sitting on a crate, the bullet-lamp gave off a dim light, its red bulb a faint glow in the corner. Harry was perched on the edge of the kitchen chair Eddy had spirited from downstairs years ago. Mother had never missed it. After Father died she noticed little of such things as chairs or dishes, tables, forks, or mirrors. Harry had tucked himself back in the shadows, Eddy’s only friend, a part-time carpenter when he wasn’t stealing, a pool-hall hustler dealing amphetamines. His belly filled him out. He looked to Tom like a white grub hunched there. Under the bell of fat was Harry’s belt cinched tight around his hips holding what shone below, the Harley-Davidson buckle he’d taken off a biker he and Eddy put the boots to a year ago on the road past Lumby. They’d followed him in their car and ridden the biker into the ditch after the guy cursed them in the bar. For Harry the buckle was a souvenir much like the ears soldiers brought back from the Pacific after the war. Tom had seen them hanging like dried apricot halves speared on wire in the basement room of a vet crazed on cooking wine, him shaking the copper circle of ears, the whispers as they touched each other, the skin a soft leather slip as on the inside wrist of a child.
Tom didn’t wonder why Harry was there. The only thing Harry cared about was Eddy. They were always together and had been since they were small. They’d shared their petty crimes when they were boys, the shoplifting, the bullying of others, the liquor and money they stole from cars and trucks, the homes they plundered. Their crimes came to a head that night they broke into the bar at the Legion Hall and Eddy had been arrested. He never held it against Harry that he’d been the one caught. Harry had once told Tom he wished that he’d had the chance to go to Boyco with Eddy, the two of them criminals together. Eddy had returned from Vancouver to Harry’s petty cunning, Harry relying on his selling of drugs, occasional robberies, and the abuse of girls too young to know what they were getting into, thrilled to be given all they could drink and a few paltry pills in exchange for their bodies.
Harry worshipped Eddy as Joe looked up to Billy, wanting to have the same kind of power. Joe felt he had been thwarted by his birth. He was coldly vengeful for the wrongs, real and imagined, that had dogged his days ever since his childhood, but there was no such bitterness in Harry, who would have been bewildered had anyone told him he wreaked havoc on things. He’d survived growing up with a Baptist father and a slavish, back-country mother who loved her son and who Harry disdained for her humility, and especially her submission to a man who spouted prophecy and doom, his father, a labourer at the soda pop distributors who hand-trucked bottles of Coke and Orange Crush all day. Harry was embarrassed by the people who’d brought him into the world. He took what opportunity presented itself, a wallet left lying on a counter, a door unlocked, a young girl come from some village in the Cariboo, shivering in an empty luggage stall behind the bus depot. Eddy felt nothing when he came back from Boyco, and Harry spent his days and nights trying to feel the same.
When Eddy was a kid, he looked at Billy and saw what he could be. Tom had always known Billy saw himself in Eddy, the same cruelty and toughness. The two of them had been born to loss and visited that birthright on everyone they met. It was their coldness that drew people to them, Harry to Eddy, Joe to Billy, and others in the tribe too, each one loving the fear they felt when they got that close to emptiness. Tom had looked into his brother’s eyes, Billy’s too. He knew what wasn’t there.
Doesn’t she dance like hell, Tom? Eddy said.
Tom sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Sally-Ann. She was Eddy’s latest girl, a waitress at the Venice Café. Flirting with Eddy had carried her into a place she’d never dreamed. Tom could’ve told her it would happen when she first went riding in the Studebaker, but he knew she wouldn’t have listened. People didn’t listen to him. He could see in Eddy’s eyes that he had begun the rise from his last spike. The junk had tempered in him, and he was soft at the edges as he floated up out of the laze of his nod, a lax grin on his face. His works were on the side table, beside them a paper of heroin. Tom knew it wouldn’t be his brother’s whole stash, but he knew it was all he’d told Sally-Ann there was.
Sally-Ann was still dancing, her movements ragged and jerky, “Jambalaya” over, the needle doing its repetitive grind in the last grooves of the record. The sound was turned up loud on the .45 record player Eddy had stolen somewhere, and Tom wondered again why any girl would put up with what Eddy asked. He knew it wasn’t just her need for junk that made her dance. She did it because Eddy had told her to. Sally-Ann hung in for the heroin and the love she’d confused with it. He knew Sally-Ann could pick up her clothes and walk out of the room and Eddy wouldn’t hold her back.
Sally-Ann had been hanging around Eddy for months in the hopes she’d get her chance to go out with him. Now her days and nights we
re measured out by needles in the bind of her arm. She was the latest in a long line of wreckage. She stayed half the time with her mother out by Coldstream Creek, in an old house on an abandoned farm. Tom knew Elvie Madden. He’d seen her at the Okanagan Hotel where she worked. Sally-Ann’s father had taken off years ago. He’d never brought home a nickel to his family, just himself, and that only when he was broke or hurting.
Sally-Ann had loved Eddy from afar. She’d been serving him free coffee all spring and summer, not charging him for breakfast, and generally doing anything she could to get him to ask her out. Eddy was a prize in her eyes. Like most women she thought she could change him. Women thought that given tenderness and love Eddy could be healed and made back into a man. Tom knew women were mostly wrong about men, and always wrong about Eddy. Sally-Ann had got her chance and there she was dancing for him while Harry stroked himself, his bent cock poking out from his unbuttoned fly.
Tom rubbed his cheek and felt the stubble growing there. Things have got out of hand downstairs, he said.
Eddy smiled, his face loose with dope. C’mon, Tom. Look at Sally-Ann dance. Isn’t she something else?
Norman’s gone to the hospital, Tom said. Billy did some damage with that hoe.
Eddy lifted his arm, the hand languid, seeming to hang from the barbed-wire tattoo wound around his wrist. He wove his fingers through the still air. He’ll be okay, he said.
He’s a fucking mess is what he is, said Tom.
Sally-Ann stopped dancing then and began to cry, her arms crossed over her face. Tom got up and grabbed the Indian blanket hanging off the foot of the bed. He draped its folds over her shoulders, calming her enough to get her down from the bed. He found some of her clothes on the floor, tucked them under his arm, and pushed her gently toward the door with his hand between the sharp blades of her shoulders.
She stopped crying then. Fuck it, Eddy said, as Tom eased Sally-Ann out the door, closing it behind him. He handed the clothes to her, and she began putting them on.
Why’s he like that? Why’s your brother like that? Sally-Ann asked as she did up two of the three remaining buttons on her blouse with trembling fingers, but there was no answer other than to tell her Eddy didn’t have limits and she should have known going in he was a mine shaft, not a mountain.
I don’t want anyone to see me like this, she said. My purse and everything’s still in there. She looked at her bare feet. I don’t even have my shoes.
You can get your stuff later, he said. He took her downstairs, Sally-Ann protesting a little. He needed to put her somewhere and the only quiet place he could think of was Mother’s room. He led her down the hall, knocked at the door, and when Mother finally shot back the bolt, he nudged Sally-Ann in and told Mother to keep an eye on her.
Eddy, she said.
It wasn’t a question.
Tom said: Yes.
Light from Mother’s dancing-girl lamp glanced off her paring knife. She pushed the blade out the cracked door past the shadows. Just so you know, she said.
What does that mean? Tom asked, some threat coming from nowhere he could see.
Mother didn’t answer, and he turned away as she closed the door.
Tom walked down the hall and turned into the crib room, expecting someone to be using it for something, but there was no one there. The old ironing board leaned against the west wall with a kicked-in wicker hamper beside it filled with old clothing. The iron crib where the girls had died was across from it, the mattress still covered with a rubber sheet, brittle, cracked by the years. The pink bars of the crib and the blue walls behind them were streaked and stained. The sun striking the floor over time had worked hard at further ruin. By the closet door was the old high chair and Tom could see himself as a little boy sitting there, his legs tied down with flour-sack diapers so he couldn’t climb out and fall, the white cloth twisted at his back, knotted tight where he couldn’t reach.
He had sat in it every morning, his fingers making their slick slitch porridge noise in the bowl as he watched Eddy on Mother’s lap. How old was Eddy then, three, four? She’d opened her dress and Eddy suckled on her breast, cupping the blue-veined flesh in his freckled hands. Mother would tell Eddy to move from one breast to another, Eddy pretending to be the baby he wasn’t any more. She’d lift her dark nipple between two fingers and place it in his mouth. Mother held his head to her tightly as she hummed softly to him, “Blue Canadian Rockies.” Each morning she’d tie Tom into the chair. No wonder he hardly ever talked. No wonder he didn’t want to. Except to Eddy. He’d talk to Eddy, but only when Mother and Father weren’t there.
Whenever Eddy asked where Father was, the answer was always the same. He’s gone to work in the bush. In the bush, in the bush, in the bush. Tom would listen as she went down the hall, Eddy following as she murmured: My baby boy, my darling. Tied to the chair in the kitchen, Tom could hear Mother close her bedroom door. It wasn’t hopelessness he’d felt when he was tied there. Nothing had happened yet in his life to tell him different. He simply waited out the hours, knowing that somehow, sometime, Eddy would come back and release him.
Then Eddy would come to untie him and help him down. Because Eddy loved him. Eddy loved him even after Boyco, though things had changed. How could they not have? After Eddy was taken away, Mother drove Tom from the house with her granite face. Every time I see you I think of Eddy, she’d say over the months. Why are you here?
Tom wandered the hills with his rifle. Some Saturday after noons he’d walk the two miles to town and drift down the back alleys, picking through the green garbage bins behind the stores in search of plunder. If he got hungry he would go to the New Dawn Café where Winning Chow’s wife would always give him food. He’d take the rice and vegetables to the Cenotaph Park where he’d sit with the old men and listen to their stories while they played checkers. A First World War vet once told him about a soldier in France who seemed to be lost in no-man’s-land between the Canadian and German lines. He said they’d see him under the star-shells in the shadows, moving among the craters and concertina wire and they’d call out to him in the hope of finding out what man he was, one of theirs or one of the Boche. When Tom asked if they ever found out who the soldier was, the old vet just looked away and shuffled off in search of a bottle to share or just to be alone. The last thing he’d said to Tom was that the world was built on bones.
Tom would come back to the house in the evening and peer through the windows until he was sure it was safe, his cold supper on a plate on the counter, Mother in her room and Father gone in the truck. Tom would eat quietly and then slip up to his room and kneel on the bed to stare out at Ranch Road and the far lights of the town. How Eddy would make it back from the coast was a mystery to him. Vancouver was an impossible city, a metropolis far away through the mountains and down the Fraser Canyon to the delta lands where the river emptied out into the sea. Eddy was there locked away and Tom wished him home each night, sure that with Eddy back, Mother would be content again, her anger toward him abated by Eddy’s calming presence.
Tom pulled the curtains over the dusty glass. He didn’t want anyone to see into the room. He looked around. Blankets and soiled sheets had been tossed in a heap in the corner by the hamper. Clothes no one had worn for years were mixed in with Father’s things, torn shirts and pants, underwear and jackets, like bits of skin Father had sloughed off. Father’s boots and shoes were piled on the floor, a confusion of worn soles and bruised leather.
Tom touched the crib and saw the scars where he and Eddy had gnawed at the bars in their time. He fingered the scratches and tiny crevices in the paint and he remembered his sisters. Little Rose hadn’t lived long enough to stand and wear out her mouth against the iron and Alice had just lain there, staring through the bars, her world a cage. Every day for the six months she lived, Tom had knelt on the floor and sung songs to his tiny sister, nursery rhymes, cowboy tunes, “Mother Goose,” “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “My Old Kentucky Home.” After supper, when no one w
as watching, he’d creep downstairs and sit by the crib, each breath he took an echo of his sister’s.
He could see his father coming up from the creek and throwing the shovel into the truck box, that clang of metal, and then driving away, his tail lights dwindling. He remembered the times later, on nights when Eddy was gone into town, and he’d walked out to the orchard alone, the smell of sage and willow lifting from the creek wallow. Alice’s blue stone lay shouldered from the earth, and he’d kneel down and brush away the dry leaves and bits of rock as he thought of her small body. Once Tom had imagined freeing her from the earth, lifting out the small bundle, untying the knots and folding back the canvas Father bound her in. He’d sit there, the thin blue shift unveiled, the fragile bones, the fontanel spread like a tiny, lipless mouth, baby teeth floating in the cup of the skull.
Alice.
Tom looked around him now. The room seemed to get larger, and the things lying in the corners and on the floor grew as he looked at them. He was getting smaller and smaller and he knew if he stayed there he’d be a baby again, standing in the crib, gnawing on the bars with his teeth. He backed out, closed the door, and went down the hall into the kitchen.
The usual people were there, most of them he knew, but strangers too, standing around fishing bottles out of the sink, drinking and talking about the fight in the yard as they looked on at a poker game in progress. Someone had pulled the table out from the wall and sitting around it now were Lester Coombs on an apple crate with his back to the door and Billy across from him in a kitchen chair, shuffling a deck of cards. Against the windows next to Lester was a quiet guy from the mill, Gregor, his face pitted with chicken-pox scars, Rafe Gillespie beside him with his greasy hair and black-rimmed glasses. He drove one of the town’s dump trucks. Across from Gregor and Rafe were Don Stupich and Andy Kimball. Don he’d known for a long time. He’d graduated from apprentice to full-time mechanic’s job at Caterpillar Tractor two years ago. Andy was Eddy’s age, a pool player from Falkland. He worked the money table every Saturday afternoon down at White’s Pool Hall. Eight ball was his game, but he was a deadly snooker player as well. As Tom looked on with the others, Billy stopped shuffling and started dealing out a hand of five-card stud, one card down and the first of four cards up. Lester looked at his hole card and matched the five-dollar bet Gregor put down, Rafe beside him folding his hand and tossing his cards back at Billy, a smug smile on his face. Tucked behind Lester’s shoulder was Nancy, tunelessly humming a song. The crowd around the sink and strung along the wall were like the lights on an old Christmas string, one bulb going out would crash the rest of them into the dark.