by Tony Burgess
OTHER BOOKS BY TONY BURGESS
Pontypool Changes Everything
Caesarea
The Hellmouths of Bewdley
Fiction for Lovers
Copyright © 2010 by Tony Burgess
Anvil Press Publishers Inc.
P.O. Box 3008, Main Post Office
Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 CANADA
www.anvilpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages in reviews. Any request for photocopying or other reprographic copying of any part of this book must be directed in writing to ACCESS: The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available.
ISBN: 978-1-897535-32-5
Printed and bound in Canada
Cover design by Mutasis Creative
Interior design by HeimatHouse
Represented in Canada by the Literary Press Group
Distributed by the University of Toronto Press
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the B.C. Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
FOR
DEREK MCCORMACK
Main Street
Captain Crunch is sitting at the Golden Orchard. The waitress watches him, her only customer, sitting in the orange wooden booth. She is waiting for him to finish his draft. Outside, snow is driving the pickup trucks back. Through the front window of the Golden Orchard, beyond the flash-fire of the waitress’s face, two colours streak through the snow—blue and red. Blue is the background and red is the letters. L maybe, and the Empire consonant. Small o and, even smaller, a one-legged a. The snow falls here every day. The Lite-Brite wall that hangs over the edge of the bay sprays snow and ice from November to April, even when the sky is blue. The people in town grow accustomed to it, being heavy, being blind in unexpected places—near Coolz Own Video store, their arms and legs as comfortable as giant wheels, rolling and seizing in the act of giving way.
Captain Crunch has his own tractor with a back-mounted blower. When he’s finished his drink he’ll head back out and resume removing snow. From Main Street, along the south side, past the hexagonal United Church and up to the retirement condos, behind the used computer store with sails of paper print in the window, hundreds of huge numbers consisting of thousands of tiny ones, then three antique stores in a row, tea cups and mousetraps, some full of tea, some full of mice, and the chocolatier with candy as big as big babies, and the pizzeria, a bald man at an oven. All the things on Main Street you expect, with alleyways and brown standards and a few people who ignore things as they grow snow parts and walk in a flitting grey light.
Captain Crunch lines up his tractor so the blower’s teeth are pressed into a wall of new snow beside the church. He brings a purple hand up to his cleft upper lip and pulls cold spit away from the imperfect seal of his closed mouth. He breathes in hard from his nose, hoping to vacuum out the base of his throat. He throws the switch that starts the blower. Coins blur in a tin lid tilted back against plexiglas.
Barb watches Captain Crunch from across the street. She is placing a Christmas cone by the ankle of a wool dog. She has trouble seeing because she has decorated the inside of her clothing store with spray-on snow. She watches the blue light on Captain Crunch’s tractor.
“It’s a Rottie.”
“What?”
Barb pulls herself out carefully to keep her tall hair away from the rigid fingers of the mannequin and looks back over her shoulder.
“Rottie. There’s too many big dogs loose in this town.”
The little man who just spoke lays socks on glass, then touches his neat white hair once with two fingers.
“It’s eating a banana frozen to the grate.”
Barb sighs and returns to the mannequin. Naked. The front of the church, if she could see it, would sit below the upward curve of the breast. Captain Crunch’s blue light would have lit for a moment where the nipple should be. The blue light is gone.
“Harry Croce is going to back out of that alley and get run over by a truck.”
She strikes a pose not unlike the mannequins. Hands free of the body with the head swung up over the left shoulder. Both bodies graceful and alert.
The little man marks down the socks by fifty per cent.
“He is so.”
The blower is shredding the alley.
19 Pine Street
Leo’s mother Gloria is watching TV. The living room, a dust world of shiny glass beads, is in disarray. The only couch cushion still in the couch is wrapping Glorias hips and the rest, the couch cushions, the chair cushions, the pillows and throws are all arranged, as if pulled by the draw of something draining down through the floor, in a circular wall around Leo, who is curled up and sleeping. He’s only been asleep for two hours. The night was long and terrible. Leo bucking his legs and twisting backward, covered in the light grease of a child’s high fever. Crying out through sequined lips and shivering in rocket-ship pyjamas. He has been sick like this, on and off, for weeks. Gloria doesn’t like this phrase, he’s been sick for weeks. She has heard it and used it herself so often recently. She remembers when it was he’s been like this for days and now she fears she will have to say he’s been sick for months. So she practises, braces herself for when it becomes true by saying it seems like he’s been sick for months. After that, he will probably always have been sick.
Will the illness push back time? she wonders. Will it soon include her own queasy first weeks of pregnancy? Maybe it is an unlimited thing. Maybe she herself, the mother stopping ahead to protect faces from furniture, is nothing more than a condition, a term of disease, a sleeping shape, like a bowling pin, or a night owl, sitting behind the shadow of a door or on the thin tip of a tree, so narrow and sharp, always meant to do this, to enter the child who was supposed to leave her easily. A child on the floor. Gloria leans over Leo and sniffs the air above him. He smells like a man does. Composting children smell like men. Leo coughs. His hand comes up and touches his eyelids.
That’s right. He was a hockey player. This was the same gesture he used to wipe sweat from his face on the rink. A muscled blond boy with emerald eyes. Fast as a spider. He always stole the other mothers’ hearts.
Leo coughs and sits up in his blue tea cup.
“How you feelin’?”
Leo doesn’t answer. He’s pulling his jaw down to open his face.
“Want some juice?”
Leo blinks and looks at the TV. An airplane is shot down over the Ukraine.
Gloria stands up, turns and plumps her lone couch cushion. She walks over to the window and draws back the blinds. A large horrible ship of sunlight capsizes against the back wall. Dead shadows are pushed into the carpet by the new dead who burn in bright pain.
Leo, her first-born son, a broken egg on the floor, has fallen back asleep.
“Hi. Brenda.”
Gloria pops another Nicorette.
“Yeah. I’ve been chewing these things for fuckin’ five years.”
The light cuts into Leo’s shoulder. It pulls at the bristles on Gloria’s shin.
“You know what I think, B. I think he’s got … I don’t know really, but, I saw this thing about West Nile virus and …”
Gloria shelters her eyes. She listens and feels her whole mind wet with the act of speculation.
“Well, I’m just trying to think outside. Doctors, you know what I realize about doctors?”
Leo’s back is rising into the light. A turtle boy with a margarine she
ll. He slips back down, cold and gone.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Leo sits up. Gloria leans off her cushion and combs her orange nails into his stiff white hair. Then she presses the cool wattle under his chin.
“This show says that they didn’t know, but West Nile does all kinds of things. One woman was in a wheelchair. Another guy, his whole chest was covered in these weepy sores. Jesus, I thought. Leo went to that hockey camp last summer and they don’t care if kids get bit up there. Those damn things are everywhere. How can you prevent that?”
Leo is standing now. The sun scratching at his hands, his face.
“Mom …”
“They say that probably we’re all gonna get it sooner or later.”
Leo steps out of his nest and watches something through the window. He puts his hands on his small hips under his pyjamas.
“Mom?”
“Anyway, that’s all fine and good, but we don’t know what that’s going to do to the population. Zebra mussels. Those little spiky fish. They say that zebra mussels clean pollution so I guess you can’t say that everything’s bad.”
“Mom?” Leo has taken a step back from the window.
“What?” Gloria lowers the phone.
Leo suddenly squats and puts his arms up in the air.
The lower part of the window tips inward in a single piece that slides to the floor off a man’s dark leg. His gloved hand punches through the upper half. He enters the room like a Slinky, feet land pulling the torso in all the way. He reaches back to a long shotgun being held out by a woman’s smaller arms. He takes it from her and points it at Gloria. The blast has a concussive effect on the room, punching the TV sound away, and bouncing the dust off the floor. Gloria’s left upper chest is mostly air for a second, until flesh and blood suck closed the thin tunnels pulled open by glowing shot.
The man drops the point of the gun down and he’s so close to Leo that the tip sits on the crown of his head. The blast drives a blood bed downward and, yes, enough skull bone fans into brain to kill him instantly. The boy’s body pops and twitches in the daylight as the gunman hands his gun back through the shattered window.
21 Pine Street
Carrots, one would have to say, are frozen and then thawed in a cycle that seems to continue forever. The sun sets and the carrot tightens, all the trees in its soft heart spider and brittle, then the sun rises and awful gases escape from the bugs buried in the carrot’s head. They breathe, these short orange lungs in the pile, as they slowly and painlessly pass through the bowels of a black microbial wall.
This is part of the elaborate imaginings of Paul, an unemployed sign painter lying on the couch in his unfinished house.
The room is a tall sketch in drywall covered with boot prints and Paul watches these boot prints trailing up the wall, following each path with his eyes. His eyes do this all morning, while his mind lives, as it has for most of the month, in the compost pile he started in a bin last August. The two arenas satisfy him. The perfect collection of life and movement on the interior and the glorious bottomless hope burning in a humble plastic barrel near the sun. He starts at the top of the pile, at a six-inch stalk of broccoli. Its brown tree tops and leathery belly lie innocently, not properly part of the ground but within reach of it. A half Spanish onion becomes a gelid eye, tired and leaning further in than the broccoli. Vermicelli, its whips pooling and forming spatulate arms at rest, tired and dying, in the black heat of four avocado shells. Avocado pits, corn cobs, brown slices of bread, the molten lust of a banana splitting its purple back. Other things up here, Paul thinks, staying up for as long as he can. An eggshell; now what makes an eggshell? Ovoid. Not quite. We love that about eggs. The shattered edge, like the face of an exploded embassy, balconies and elevator shafts held by rebars in mid-drift down to the ground. The egg is still white. Paul presses his thoughts up from the egg, out into the yard, a lone Manitoba maple; there are no eaves, just the flat black of ice and water sheathing, the drip catching edges. Unfinished roof. Paul feels a hurt in his shoulders. He has wandered to uncomfortable thoughts.
There is a boot print that seems to dominate, a long boot with a sharp and separate heel. These prints are everywhere, darker and harder than the other trails of lighter wider prints. Whenever the light ones gather, repeating themselves in the same area, the long ones circle, then intrude. Paul knows the story he watches is probably men walking, and even then, only across four-by-eight areas, which are then pulled up out of context and hung together, big flat misquotes, a puzzle solved by a monkey or an artist. John Freethy. He wore the big boots. Paul is suddenly aware of the phone, and he rolls from his back to his side in a single flip. The footprints help, at the base of the wall he now faces. They don’t tell the story of these men, don’t conjure names and ringing phones. Instead they look like fish. Trout as seen from a bridge. In April they run up the river by the thousands and from the bridge you can see them shuffling and hovering in the current. They are rainbow trout and when caught or when they leap they are silver and pink, but viewed from the bridge, they are grey and hollowed out by light.
Paul clips a silver-and-lime Cleo onto a leader. His head and shoulders are reflected on the water and within this some of the solid silvers come back to the fishes bodies. Paul’s head is large for his small, strong body. Not quite abnormal, but differently proportioned than most people. There is a puppety look to me, he knows. It makes him presume that everyone is covering up a shameful deformity. It’s a universal condition. He is an unpleasant man. He treats you like you’ve just said something stupid. He is vaguely aware that with each cast he’s counting backwards. That’s a sign he will have to go home soon.
He is already home.
The light in the room has shifted, the sun is going down. The top of the compost pile will know this, but further down, there may be no evidence of nightfall whatsoever. Here things are combined, here the microbial night is the same march of heat as the day. Heat generated by the mouths of billions of things and their bright haunches bearing down to fecalize a thick, wet, bottomless world. A world as vast and airless inside as it is across its face and even out from itself, everything, lightless and touching, a solid contiguity of inside and outside, of trace and deep heart. Purple beets are at home here. Heavy smoldering soups. Lettuce fans and frilly raspberries are now rude water and hot snot mines. A magic tinsel interior. Lungs in the chest that might as well swell up and float over our heads. Sticky legs and pudding feet driving downward through other sticky legs and pudding feet.
Paul wants more thought like this, but it’s too late to go back up. The inside has become known, its process begun. More. More. Tomato. Cucumber. Rice. Watermelon rind. A hard blue syrup on the tongues of things feeding shoulder to shoulder in a world that is completely composed of them, of these things whose eating and shitting passes through us all, a liminal hell arriving as the total insides of everything outside. A rich march of cows and wolves, who knows for sure, are they the sweep of a cape or broom? The massive eye on a single hair that bends to the ground sees it, how infinitely small is the potato, the parsley frond, the whole resistant barge of vegetable ice.
Paul gets off the couch and goes to his back yard. He wonders if there is any singing going on inside the bin. He listens. Dusk comes slowly and he has nowhere to go, nothing else to consider so he looks into this question with his new developing powers. A dog barks. Another. It’s Barry Little’s Blueticks. I’m outside. He puts his hands on the bin. The smell of rot moves around his face. He gives the bin a rock and the broccoli jiggles.
“Hey, Paul, your phone’s disconnected.”
Paul watches the carrot rapidly turn into soil then looks up.
“Oh yeah?”
It’s Joseph George, the by-law officer.
“Hey, Paul, got a couple things we need to discuss.”
Paul leans over the top of the bin, breathing in.
“Yeah, well. You keep me busy.”
; “That’s good.”
“I wish it was. Can we go inside?”
Paul turns and leans the small of his back against the bin. Joseph’s grimacing at the smell.
“Just tell me, Joe.”
Joseph sighs and pulls out a small notebook. There’s a picture of a small blond boy taped to the inside cover. Paul clicks his eyelids and looks away. Payment due.
“Yeah, all your neighbours got something to say about you these days.”
“Who?”
“Not important.”
“Who?”
Joseph drops the notebook to his side and leans in to get closer to Paul’s face.
“Everybody.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Okay.”
“Um. You can’t have a broken-down car sitting on your lawn. You can’t have a fridge sitting out here either. In fact, you can’t have three … There another one back there?”
Joseph points to the corner of the house. Paul turns, drives his hands into his pockets.
“I got four.”
“Okay. Four, that’s one. Make that all one violation. Also, there’s some shit against the fence, looks like tiles, big pile of it. That’s gotta be disposed of. I’m gonna give you this with the codes. Let’s see, what else?”
“Dogs.”
“Huh? You got dogs, Paul?”
“No, but Little over there, he …”
“Okay, Paul, if you want to lodge another noise complaint against …”
“No … I think there’s a criminal charge.”
Joseph scratches the back of his head. The smell from the compost is harsh and sweet. He feels his stomach move near his throat.
“Okay, Paul. What?”
“You can’t raise ‘coon hounds.”
“Oh, no?”
“No. It’s illegal to hunt ‘coons with hounds.”
“I think he goes down to Virginia, places like that to hunt. I don’t think it’s illegal, Paul.”
“You can’t raise—”