Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  He watched the tiny stone rolling around in his palm. “But that’s just not gonna happen.” Then he closed his fingers around it, bouncing it up and down in the dark of his hand. “Nope. We’re a strong people.” Brandy and Hilda ventured a snicker, but he didn’t seem to mind, his expression unchanged and serious, until, tossing the pebble at a clump of grass between the two cars, he turned to look at their faces, smiling with them now. “And we’re not goin’ anywhere.”

  It was a sentiment Brandy didn’t feel particularly confident about at the moment. Even if, that morning, she and Hilda had woken up safe and stable in their grounded, regular lives, at their grandmother’s house on the reserve. Just before noon, their grandmother had asked them to walk to a neighbours’ place to check on things, as the neighbours had gone to the States for a few weeks. The girls reasoned that, seeing as it was only another mile farther on, they would pay another neighbour a visit as well, while they were out. Which meant they wouldn’t be expected back until later in the evening.

  After the hour it took to walk to the first neighbour, they dutifully sauntered around the perimeter of the house without seeing any broken windows or other signs of damage, and so were crossing the yard to leave, on their way to the next house. They passed between a few old cars that were parked near a shed, the grass growing high around them, their dashboards sun-faded and cracking like dried mud. Hilda noticed that there were keys dangling from the ignition in one of them, and they jumped inside to see if the radio worked. It didn’t, but when Hilda turned the ignition farther than she’d meant to, the car suddenly coughed into life, idling roughly but with assurance, getting smoother with every second. They looked at each other, faces lighting up. Instant co-conspirators.

  They crept down the lonely road away from the house, talking about what they should do. “We could drive to Cardston,” Hilda offered, “get some candy or somethin’.” They searched their pockets for money and, to their surprise, each of them had a five-dollar bill and some change.

  “I don’t know, if we’re gonna risk goin’ all the way to Cardston, might as well go to Standoff . . . or Fort Macleod even!” Brandy was getting excited.

  They stopped at a T-intersection to one of the main gravel roads in the area, Hilda giving the gas gauge a long assessment before a new look spread across her face. “No. We’re goin’ all the way to Lethbridge,” and she turned onto the road and gradually sped up, the ashen-brown dust filling the rear-view mirrors until it was useless to look back.

  Up until now, Brandy had liked driving in cars. After having to walk everywhere, your eyes got so used to the slow lag of the grass under your feet, the landscape changing in such measured degrees, that when you started accelerating in a car it felt impossibly fast, like you were a rocket rumbling just above the blurry ground. She rolled her window down and leaned into the flapping air, and there, again, was a different kind of wind, a different voice, one that was heavy in your ears and somehow both musty and dry at the same time. The shadow of the car sped along in the ditch beside them, jumping up toward her with every approach they passed and plunging down on the other side of it, trembling over the grass that was mottled with pieces of paper and coloured plastic.

  The adventure of the road combined with the mischief of “borrowing” a car was delicious, and she could see that Hilda felt the same. Her face kept breaking into a smile, and as one of her hands lifted to cover her mouth, the other would be tapping at the steering wheel with some internal rhythm that was fast and elated.

  Once, as they were nearing a bridge on the highway and the edge of the prairie fell away, opening onto the folds of a river valley below, she shouted above the engine and the pulsing gusts of air from the windows, delivering the same joke her brother had told over and over again: “You know what we called this land, before the white man came?” She gestured out in front of her, a hand sweeping the windshield.

  Brandy smiled, holding her breath, knowing what was coming and getting ready to laugh, the car tipping down the slope and their stomachs lightening with the drop.

  “Ours.”

  They burst at the same time, convulsing with laughter until well beyond the bridge and up the other side of the coulee.

  As they drove under the first traffic lights, they talked about what they were going to do in town. It was then that Hilda raised the notion of alcohol, and to Brandy, who had last been drunk at an epic Christmas party where she’d had to stumble outside and vomit in the snow, thought the experience was finally far enough in the past to consider it again. The plan then was to go downtown and find someone to bootleg for them, drink while wandering the streets, looking into shop windows, and make their way to the movie theatre, where they would see if they still had enough money for a ticket.

  They left the car in a store parking lot and soon found an outlet of the Alberta Liquor Control Board (a name, Brandy had heard, created at a time when anyone of Indian blood reported drunk was fined, imprisoned, or both, and their informer given half of the funds collected). Hilda, looking confident, stopped a man at the door before he went in. He’d been grinning to himself, his weekend having just begun, and was wearing blue overalls that were speckled with paint and blotches of mortar. He stood in front of them, listening, and looked them over carefully before taking their money and nodding at the short list of things they wanted. But just as he walked through the door with hesitation, he came out with conviction, handing them back their five-dollar bills and saying, “Actually, I . . . this isn’t really something I wanna encourage.” He looked around, then waved a hand toward an old and withered Indian man hunched over on a cement parking block across the street. “Get him to do it for you. Sure he wouldn’t mind.”

  As he walked away a woman passed by and gave them a piercing look, a look that was pitying and resentful, a look that brought Brandy back to the first time she caught a bus in Lethbridge. She had been with her brothers, and after they’d dropped their coins into the glass tube and were monkey-barring down the aisle, the bus canting and shifting gears, she could feel everyone’s gaze stabbing them. And when the other passengers looked away, it was only to watch them out of the corners of their eyes instead. Brandy had sat down by herself and was trying hard to ignore it. Then she saw the woman sitting across from her remove her purse from the seat and sling it around her shoulder, on the side farthest from Brandy.

  Hilda looked disappointed, offended. “Encourage? Who does he . . . ?” She looked across the street at the only other non-white human being they’d seen since entering the city limits, who was slumping to the side now, as if he were about to fall over. “Come on,” she said, taking Brandy by the arm. “Better’en nothin’.”

  But it was the worst idea they could have come up with. The old man could barely walk, and by the time they had helped him across the street and prodded him through the door, watching him disappear down one of the aisles, he’d become the heaviest burden they could have asked for, the critical flaw in their plan, their day. He collapsed just out of sight, grabbing for something to steady himself before hitting the ground and clutching on to the most expensive bottle of Scotch on the shelf, which broke on the floor beside him. They saw the woman at the till make a phone call but didn’t realize she was talking to the police until a cruiser rolled up beside them a few minutes later. The girls made a break for it and ran four blocks before jumping into their car. Hilda eased out of the parking lot like a model driver, but by the second set of lights they heard the short bleat of a siren signalling them to pull over. She did, and turned off the car, the sound of the engine being replaced with the traffic humming by, neither of them saying a word.

  The officer radioed in their licence plate before sticking his head through the driver’s side window, forearms resting on the chapped ledge of rubber-lipped seals. He just had a few questions for them, that was all; like their names, where they lived, and whether or not they knew anything about two minors attempting to buy alcohol, who seemed to fit their description perfectl
y. No? Hmm. Well, could he see their papers then. A quick look exchanged between the girls. Silence. Papers, please, he repeated. They shuffled madly through the glovebox, the pouches in the door panel, under the seats, their pockets. Nothing. Let me get this straight, he conferred, you have no licence, no registration, and no insurance? More silence. Cars purring past. Could you both step out of the car, please.

  Which would have been more than enough trouble for one day. But then, for some reason, Hilda had the great idea to improvise a new story. She’d said that this was really their uncle’s car, and that he had given them permission to take it. Honest, you can ask him. Which would be easy enough, seeing as he lived close by—on the north side—and she proceeded to lead him through a labyrinth of streets before deciding on an anonymous house where anyone’s uncle could have lived, including the policeman’s.

  Now, before he returned from a fruitless search for a family member in the back of this random house, Hilda was soliciting the help of a cruel neighbourhood boy to make their predicament even worse. Or at least more humiliating. Cedric was still staring at them, his face pushed up against the window, Hilda’s face close on the other side, the safety glass compressed between them. She was eagerly pointing down at where she imagined the handle to be. “Come on, open it,” she urged.

  The blue of Cedric’s eyes suddenly flared with an idea, and he stepped back from the cruiser to address the boys farther down the street. “Hey, Dave!” he yelled.

  They all stopped and turned, one of them answering impatiently, “What?”

  “You were in my grade three class, right, with Mrs. O’Donnell?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay, remember when she lost it on that kid—like really lost it. You remember that?”

  The other boy looked up into a tree as if consulting it. “Uh, yeah, I think so. Why?”

  “Do you remember me saying something to her—about what she’d said—and then getting kicked out of class for it?”

  The other boy gave him an incredulous look. “No. You mean—you, saying something to her ? No.”

  Cedric took an enormous amount of air into his lungs, letting it out with the slow sinking of his posture. He was thinking again, working out some private complication that seemed to have nothing to do with any of them.

  Hilda knocked on the glass as if to wake him. The policeman’s radio crackled, a woman’s voice doling out numbers in a monotone. Brandy watched Cedric as he wavered, sure that he was about to make the girls the brunt of a joke, again. But she was wrong.

  Cedric straightened, again stepped up to the door, let his hand rest on the latch for one thoughtful moment, smiled, and opened it.

  Brandy and Hilda exchanged a quickened look while shouts from the group of boys filled the street.

  “What are you, an idiot?”

  “Close it!”

  “What are you doing!”

  But Cedric had made a decision, and was standing straight, holding the door wide like a chauffeur, even gesturing like one, rolling his wrist elegantly toward the sidewalk.

  Hilda grabbed onto Brandy’s arm and the two of them fumbled out of the car and started running, quickly ducking between two houses, crouching down amid a mess of salvaged lumber, bald tires, and rusting bicycle frames. Brandy positioned herself so that she could just, just see the police cruiser. They had made it without a second to spare because the policeman soon appeared from behind the house, suspecting nothing, his hat off, scratching at his hair again.

  He looked up to see Cedric, with his hand still on the open door of the sedan, and threw his cap back on, tugging it tight. “Hey!” he called out, then repeated himself, his surprise amplified threefold, “Hey !”

  He darted out onto the sidewalk, looking around for the girls and finding nothing but a cluster of boys milling about, analyzing the asphalt.

  He chose the wrong direction to start off in pursuit. As he passed Cedric, he pointed a rigid finger into his face. “You’re in serious trouble, kid. You don’t move an inch—hear?”

  As the man jumped to his toes, breaking into a jog, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Cedric had understood the gravity of his words. But, by the looks of it, that was unlikely. The boy was beaming, slowly lifting his arm out toward the officer, raising his middle finger. The policeman slowed to a standstill, his mouth open.

  “Nope,” said Cedric, “I think you’ll find I’m in no trouble at all.”

  The officer nodded gravely, “You just stay right there. You hear me? Right there.” Then he turned and ran in chase of the girls. Completely flustered, he soon disappeared between two houses on the other side of the street, probably having heard someone working in their backyard.

  The girls didn’t wait to see what happened next. They erupted from their place of hiding and began running toward the alley, still between the two houses. Brandy felt like she was floating, like she was wind. Hilda was laughing out loud. Though, with her arms out, hands running along the wall and fence, steadying her as she clambered through the salvage heap, she couldn’t cover her teeth the way she normally did. Instead they were bare, sun-emblazoned, and wildly free.

  ( iv )

  It was nothing like the movies

  no hard-won courtship or balcony ballads

  no moaning promises

  lips muffled against flesh

  Instead it was the dusted symmetry

  of four desk rows

  ruler-straight and name-tagged

  so we were close enough to whisper

  Over the years she would tug me

  to walls, to lockers, and point out

  the graffiti etchings of our names

  inside oblong hearts

  as grey as pencil lead

  We lost our virginity before prom

  in my father’s Rambler

  the fumbling of hands

  groping over bodies

  as if feeling for a light switch

  Until somehow

  the kinship became habit

  comfortable

  like a gift sweater that fits well

  and has a nice-enough colour

  though you wouldn’t

  have chosen it

  yourself

  Melissa switched on the tape deck, turning it up a bit, rolled her window down farther, and went back to watching the fields as they moved past, fields strewn with hay bales now, like course-haired creatures, she fancied, hunched over and sleeping, oblivious to that exceptionally wide-open sky and the elephantine clouds that padded along the prairie with their shadows.

  They’d driven past most of the exits to Lethbridge and were cutting between the coulees, crossing a broad river valley where Melissa watched an extensive railroad bridge as it ran parallel to the highway, towering pylons as black as the coal it was built to transport. It struck her as one of those industrial eyesores that had since become quite funky, in that chic-urban-steampunk kind of way. She was about to comment on it but didn’t. They drove up the other side of the coulee where the highway opened onto a yawning skyline and a road-gridded carpet of prairie that unrolled all the way out to the Rockies. They found a cheap-enough campground just as the peaks started to rise and shoulder into the wide panorama that their eyes had become used to. It was near the site of a devastating landslide that had buried part of a town in 1903, the sprawling boulderfield so barren it could have happened yesterday. They clambered to the top of one of the larger rocks and ate submarine sandwiches for dinner, talking disjointedly about all the houses that had never been excavated in the wake of the disaster, the homes that were buried beneath them.

  April 18, 1969

  The college band had found a disco ball in someone’s garage and had proudly hung it from the ceiling with a thick and unlikely rope (the kind one might see hanging from the rafters in a barn). The disco ball was the only light on the dance floor now, a projected net of blue dots circling the massive space of the gymnasium, gliding over the wood strips on the floor and the painted sideli
nes, between the churning bodies where it climbed the fabric of dresses and descended the broad shoulders of suit jackets.

  Denise Colwell leaned back against the wall, her hands behind her, a palm flat on the white painted brick. She had been scanning the faces for several minutes now, looking for Cedric Johnson. Earlier that day she’d overheard his friends talking in the hall, and knew that he was supposed to be there; that and the fact that he wouldn’t have his mousy girlfriend in tow. His friends, incidentally, had almost used those very words while they loitered in front of their lockers shell-shocked and vacant, having written the last of their final exams, their conversations shifting from “forgetting” to study, to completely blanking out when the test papers slapped down in front of them, to the end-of-semester dance that evening—who would be there and who wouldn’t. It was then that one of them mentioned how Cedric’s girlfriend, Julie, was away in Red Deer, and that “of course” he would still be coming to the dance. This was, after all, Cedric they were talking about.

  She’d already decided exactly what she was going to do when she saw him tonight. She was going to walk right up to his back, tap him on the shoulder, and say something that, only a week ago, she would never have imagined herself saying. Because it was now or never, and because the swirling pattern of light was making the dark of this college sports hall something feral and primitive, something turbulent; but mostly because of the way Cedric had looked at her every time they passed in the hall, or leaned over a table in the fluorescent quiet of the library, talking in a low, suggestive voice about absolutely nothing.

  During the past week, Denise had been thinking a lot about her life, and had come to the realization that the only thing that was really exceptional about it was how ceaselessly ordinary it had been, how the years had managed to stream by without so much as a single drama, or grief, adventure, yearning. Nothing. She just was. That was the only way she could think to put it. She was. Of course she had had her bruised knees and birthday cakes, favourite toys, been on sports teams, and had learned shorthand and how to type one hundred and twenty words a minute. And yes, yes she’d had her romances too, which even seemed to be relatively sweeping at the time, though they soon fizzled out into an oblivion so insipid it was almost difficult to remember their names.