We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

by Joel Thomas Hynes

  I dont.

  I do.

  Remember.

  Too fucken much I remembers. That look she gave me, headed up over the hill with the blood spilling down her forehead. Madonna. Youre so fucked Johnny. Yeah I know girl, I knows that. Aint we all? And I knows that no matter what went down or how it happened, what kind of spin you put on it all, you just needed a way out. Cause where was any of it going? Feeding off each other’s misery. I knows what that look meant. It meant Goodbye Johnny, this is my ticket out. And I cant hardly blame you. We’re all lookin for a change of scenery, at the very least. We’re all lookin for our ticket. Who’s not lookin to claw their way out from under what they’re tangled up in? Who’s not, underneath it all, desperate to let go of what they’re hangin on to? And what’s really worth hanging on to anymore?

  Fuck you, that’s all I have to say.

  We’re all gonna fucken starve anyhow.

  Mass starvation, so says the man.

  What do I remember? From the moment I first opened my eyes, being looked at like I was the spawn of some fucken evil happening. And not allowed to question it. Not allowed to talk about it. Not allowed to feel a bit bad for yourself, lest someone accuse you of dwelling on the pity pot. Try hauling yourself out from under that. Try letting go when there’s nothing you can do to alter the hate, curb the revulsion.

  Until you become.

  I remember reaching for a lock of hair, my hand too weak, fingers too pudgy and stubby.

  I remember a smell, sweet and heady, a mucky texture smeared across rungs, all up and down my arms, streaked along my thighs, grainy film pasted across my teeth. The horror-struck wails and moans of that old bat shit cunt, calling for someone named Tanya.

  Tanya??? Tanya??? Come clean this up. I draws the line at shit-eaters!

  I do recall being rushed, rushed out the front door, one of my boots barely half on, a thick callused hand on the back of my neck. Move it, move it. My toe hooking in the battered canvas curled near the doorframe and then tumbling face first over the step, my head cracking on a big white rock shaped like the island outside the harbour. Blood streaming into my eyes, head forced under the scalding flow of the bathroom taps, the water pink and steamin, swirling into the drain, then cold, the shock of the cold, me forehead with the fast ice-cream feeling. That hand on the back of me neck the whole while. Not a word spoken.

  Walking into Mikey’s house, calling out, finding no one home. A bowl of five-point apples on the kitchen table. Starved. Insatiable. Tossing the stumps, one after the other, into the culvert at the top of the lane. The case of the missing apples.

  Dump trucks and graders and steamrollers.

  The first of the longliners moored off at the wharf.

  Monstrous fish from the no-go zone, 3NO, with tongues weighing half a pound, three quarters.

  Chasing Lizzy O’Neill down across the track and cornering her in an old abandoned twine shed, she after cracking me in the face with a rock.

  Thousands of gulls stalkin Pius’s little grey skiff, sunk to the gunnels, puttering in to the wharf like the homecoming of some king. Me and Mikey and a few lads waiting at the wharf, me with my hand held out to catch Pius’s line. Pius cursing me out for missing it, red-faced and spitting: Are ya fucken stupid or what? Are ya stupid?

  Guts and gurry and the shit-rot stench of rubber boots in the porch.

  Mikey, all out of breath, delighted to announce: Dad says we’re actually second cousins or something, not first . . .

  Johnny rummaging beneath the seat of Austin’s truck and finding a half-full bottle of liquor with a plastic sheriff’s badge stuck above the label. The case of the missing whisky.

  You suck mine first. It’s okay.

  Tell anyone this and I’ll burn you in your fucken bed.

  She’s not really your sister Johnny! You were adopted! Johnny was adopted!

  Youre dead . . .

  Christ. What else is even worth fucken mentioning, worth dredging up?

  I tried to tell Madonna, what happened. I wanted to. I tried to tell her. About the fire. About what happened. That night. But I never got to. The bandages and the eyebrows and the shaved head and all that. Me, chock full of raw codeine. Needing her to nurse me in the middle of the worst of our times. Fucken garbage. I never got a chance to tell her. I clung to that new status, the one good thing I ever heard the world sayin about me. A big announcement about it in the papers sayin how I saved people’s lives, an old couple. How lucky it was that I was passing by when I was. And I wanted to tell her, Madonna. Fuck, man. I thought . . . I thought it’d maybe bring us back to where we were, some scam to share and laugh about. Us against the fucken the works of em. I wanted to tell her. How I was already in the house. How I was casing the place for over a week. Watchin the old couple come and go. The two of em in bed by nine-thirty and lights out by ten. How I knew the old feller got up like clockwork every night at two o’clock to have himself a piss and thereafter he was too hard to predict, up every hour, half hour. So, the four hours between bedtime and the first piss. Timers on the lights, one in the downstairs hallway and one in the living room. Johnny staggerin up the street at midnight, swaying and lurching, rambling, tellin sweet nothings to himself, singin a Pogues song. Just another harmless downtown drunk blubbering home. All an act though, not a drink in him, not a sup. Ducking up the alley around the back of the house and tapping out a small cube of glass in the back door, hearing the shards thunk onto the mat inside. Waiting, watchin the windows of the neighbouring houses. Inside then, keeping to the edges of the stairs, avoiding the middle, where the squeaks are. Bathroom first, to the medicine cabinet. Bottle of expired Demerol. Bottle of them speedy blood thinners. Bottle of anti-inflammatory meds. Fuck all else. Into the bedroom, straight for the jewellery box, tucked that up under the arm. Then the old feller’s wallet. Canadian Tire credit card. Forty bucks in cash. Just about to slip me hands in under the very mattress they were sleeping on when I caught that smell, this bitter electrical thickness in the air. Then the smoke alarm, shrill and deafening. Johnny frozen at the head of the stairs, black smoke billowing through the open living room doorway. Johnny down the stairs and out onto the back step. The needling scream of the smoke alarm in the background. Stashing the jewellery box, the wallet. Breathing, breathing. Wanting to run. Then inside again, the fire licking up the stairway now, snaking down the hallway towards the kitchen. A calendar with a picture of a map of Fogo Island raging into flames next to his head. The nauseous odour of burning hair. Back to the bedroom and shakin the old man and woman from their drooling slumber. A lot of good, that smoke alarm. Clapping his hands, shouting, screaming finally: Get up! Get the fuck up!!!

  The two of em terror-stricken, horrified, to see this crazed hoodlum looming above their bed in the middle of the night, half his hair gone, one of his eyebrows.

  Your house is burning!

  What??? Who . . . ?

  The house is on fire!

  Hauling the old girl out of the bed, lifting her gently over his shoulder. Trying not to shove the old boy tumbling head first down the stairs to his pajama-clad death. The old doll moaning for Charlie. Smell of mothballs and fruity perfume wafting off her nightdress. Nothing to her, maybe ninety pounds. Standin out on the street, lights coming on in the house next door. The fire blasting out through the living room window like some demon belching. The gust of sudden madness. Tears rolling down the old boy’s face, his mouth gawped open, reaching out for his wife in the firelight. Sirens. Johnny back inside shouting for Charlie. The street all a-buzzing with onlookers, folks wrapping blankets around the old two. Shouts and cheers and clapping when Johnny stumbles back out over the doorstep.

  Our John-John, fucken hero.

  Lucky for everyone, that he was happening by.

  What else? What else can you remember. A doctor no older than Johnny. The here and the now, hospital bed somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Flat, incessant nothingness, I remembers. Never-ending waves of dead grass, f
ields trodden and trampled. Roads with no bend, no rise, no fall for miles and miles. Stumbling into some scuffy little prairie town. Gas station. Fat litre bottle of Labatt 50 with the last of the cash. Drinking that. Drank the rest too. How quick the money turned on me. Days, a lifetime away from the Frontenac Jail, away from that bastard. Ran down through the woods, back to the old Ford to snatch up the bag of weed. Waited there and watched the road. Watched to see if any cops pulled in through the gates of the jail. Nothing. Who gave a sweet fuck that Stevie Puddester was splayed out on the floor with his head busted open? No one.

  On down the highway with the urn and the weed. Pissing the last of the money away. Sudbury. Thunder fucken Bay. Coffee shops, gas stations. Lookin for real dope, cottonballs, Percocet, anything . . . Trading weed, big packed handful of it, for a forty of rum outside a hotel in a place called Richer. The Richer Inn Motor Hotel. Johnny tryna make it with the girl at the desk. Her scoffin, tellin Johnny to move along away from the truck stop, for your own good. Sluggin back the rum on the side of the road, tryna remember the words to that old Skid Row album. Singing at the top of his lungs, diving into the bushes when he spies the approaching headlights of a new-model Charger. Not even the cops, not even a Charger. Losing it Johnny. Drunk and running the mouth off, flashing the weed at these suit-and-tie boys. Man in a pale-blue sweater busting out of a townhouse to ask Johnny if he needed help with something. But not really asking, more like can I help you with something fucker? Johnny like some sorta creep standin transfixed on the sidewalk, staring in through the man’s kitchen window, watchin his young family eat and squabble and laugh and pass around plates and bowls.

  Hey! Can I help you with something?

  Sitting on a sidewalk at the edge of someone’s lawn in a cul-de-sac, watchin the light change, the new day breaking. Dry-heaves. Throat raw and sore like youd swallowed a pack of thumbtacks, too fucked to even raise your head, desperate to lie down. Passing a greasy bottle back and forth with a bunch of Natives who kept tellin Newfie jokes, Johnny laughing at em all for some strange reason. Sometimes they’re just funny. Waking up on the cold concrete floor of a gazebo somewhere on the outskirts of Winnipeg. Throwing up all over the back wheel of some girl’s bicycle, a fucken fine-lookin woman. Trying to apologize, hating himself. How quick she mounted up and took off, not even bothering to try and get the sick off her wheel. Bug-eyed and horrified like some snared creature. Wouldnt know but Johnny was in any state to make a play on her. Force himself on her. Make a rape baby, hey Johnny? Carry on tradition. Fucken hell, everything turned upside down, in the old noggin. Everything you thought you were. Going around for years spewing off about how Stevie Puddester was wrongly convicted. One fucken look at him though, one look and Johnny knew he done it, that Stevie killed that poor girl. You just knows that kinda shit. Everything you thought you were. Johnny Keough, rape baby. And now, sure, when you think about it, no wonder they looked at you like that, reared you up like that. What a fucken offering Johnny. Fifteen years between you and your sister. And what choice did she have? Tanya. Just as much of a choice as Johnny. No wonder she stuffs her face. Two of us shackled to Pius’s house. Beholden to him. Not just Johnny. But what in Christ’s name would she hang around as long as she did for? For me? For young John-John? That time she jumped in front of Pius’s belt when it was cracking hard across the back of Johnny’s head over something to do with grass stains on a pair of Mikey’s fucken hand-me-down jeans. Times Pius had her by the throat up against the wall or had her by the hair pressing her face into the kitchen counter and slappin her around the ears screamin that she was a whore. And Johnny the blood of a whore. Big oily clumps of hair all around the sink. Tanya sobbing in front of the TV, watchin Three’s Company with a tub of chocolate ice cream in her lap. And who else musta known? All over town. The whole Shore. Everybody, fucken everybody knew it. Except Johnny. Even Mikey musta known. She’s not even your sister Johnny! And think about it, Pius booting in the door of that hotel room in Town, dragging the two of us back up the Shore like slaves. Keep us around to remind us of how much of a burden he carries. Why not toss the two of us out on our holes and let us fend for ourselves? Cause we all needs some creature to lord over, that’s why. You often wonder about prison guards too. What the fuck is up with a man, or a woman, who chooses to make a career, a life, out of keeping other humans? Cause there’s something missing there, some crushing absence of control over people in the real world. Shortfalls and failures. The urge to rule, dominate. All stemming from weakness, fear. But here, take this job and take this big-dog uniform with all the trimmings and here’s a couple of hundred men under your command and you can fuck em around and bully em and mock em all you wants to cause no one gives a fuck about em anyhow, not even their own mothers. And watch how good it feels when you punches out at the end of your shift and you gets to lumber on home to the free world and fuck your wife. What a goddamn power trip. Johnny, from the time he was fifteen, placing himself in the hands of fuckers like Pius? That McGregor bastard. How vulnerable we are, to who we are, to what we’re born into. And when youre that age who are you aside from what they tells you you are? Liar. Thief. He’ll steal anything you dont tie down. Not to be trusted. Bastard. Abomination. Bound for the boys’ home. No reference point, nothing to measure it against except the way other kids have it. Kids with bowls of five-point apples on their kitchen counter. Kids with their trips to fucken Florida? Johnny trudging off to school in fucken Mikey’s jacket and jeans, stuff Mikey hadnt even outgrown yet. And what did you do, when you measured your lot against his Johnny? Lash out and destroy. Blacken the eyes and bloody the nose.

  Well there you have it then, lots to dwell on Johnny. Lots more shit to go gettin yourself in a drunken jail-bound mess over. But what odds now? Any of it. Not like you can change any of it, or control any of it. And what does it change anyhow? What does it change? Nothing. Changes fuck all. Nothing is any different is it? If anything, things are clearer now, aint they? At least there’s an explanation for the way things were in that house. So what do you do? You take what you got, you start again right where you are and you carry on, move on, sally forth with your eye on the prize. And some fucken prize it is, hey Johnny?

  Grade eight, this is what I remembers, cold, dreary day in early April, this is what jumps into me head front and centre when I sees that gaggle of young girls out back of the gas station in that ragged prairie town. I thinks on Mikey, on the ground, his remote control helicopter smashed. Coming back from Florida after Easter holidays with his bright tee-shirts and talkin Disney this and Disney that. Beaches with golden sand and women in bikinis and some with their tits showing. Swimming pools. Fishing for strange colourful fish that dont swim around our wharves. Who wants to hear about that shit in fucken April? Alright for some.

  Johnny rallying the troops, some fellas who aint seen an orange or an apple since Christmas morning, goading Mikey about his father’s money, fucken sook making a big deal out of Disney World. Disney World is for fucken youngsters! Look at ya, showing off your fancy fucken toys. Gimme a turn, gimme a turn. Mikey shoving at Tim Coady. Tim shouldering Mikey towards Johnny. Johnny sidestepping, his leg extended, catching Mikey in the shins, slamming him and his helicopter to the ground. Mikey scrambling to collect the propeller, two halves of the windshield, his eyes brimming with panic and rage. Johnny kicking the remote out of Mikey’s reach. Mikey swinging blindly at the gang, catching Johnny in the shoulder. Johnny standin back to let the other lads move in. All hands shouldering Mikey back and forth, slappin his cheeks, the back of his head. The neck tore out of his new Miami Dolphins jersey. Someone slams a handful of muck into Mikey’s eyes. Johnny standin back and watchin, waitin, then swoopin in to the rescue as soon as the first real clout connects with Mikey’s cheek. Johnny stepping in then, breaking it up, shoulder to shoulder with Mikey, ready to take em all on. Cousin Johnny to the rescue. Tellin Mikey’s mother that evening how it all got out of hand, the lads teasing, how Johnny jumped in and broke
it up before it went bad. I never touched him, I only broke it up.

  Johnny told to get home out of it.

  Mikey not allowed to go to the dance that weekend and then not showing up at school on Monday. No sign of him anywhere for a couple of weeks. A bit much, all over a little scuffle in the meadow. Johnny over knocking on the door, tapping on the windows. Mikey’s father, Uncle Austin, sitting on a couch in the living room in plain view, reading his paper, and not even lookin up from it. Then one evening, twenty-fourth weekend, trouting season just opened, Mikey shows up on Johnny’s doorstep with his rod and reel. Down to the Gut Bridge after sea trout, fuck it, no questions asked. Mikey’s not sayin much, pretty quiet. I starts tryna get a laugh out of him with them old MacLean and MacLean songs but he’s not really into it so I gives it up. After about ten minutes Mikey’s line snaps taut and the rod nearly buckles in half. Something big on there. But Mikey makes no move to try and land it, just stands there staring out over the harbour, kinda dazed, like he’s seeing something or lookin at something I cant see.

  Reel it in Mikey for fuck sakes! Hey! You got something on the hook! Mikey!

  Mikey dont budge, dont move a muscle. Finally I grabs his rod and starts fighting with whatever kinda beast he’s after hooking. Never know what youre gonna hook into down around the Gut where the fresh water runs under the bridge into the harbour. Dinny Walsh caught a little shark last fall. I hauls and reels and wrassles with whatever it is but Mikey is still standin there. He dont move, he dont watch, dont bat an eye, nothing.

  What the fuck is wrong with you? Hey! Mikey?

  I gives another tug and as quick as that the line goes slack. Gone, whatever the fuck it was. I turns and gives Mikey a good hard plick on the ear to try and roust him out of his trance but I still dont get a reaction out of him.

  Mikey? What’s . . . what’s on the go man?