by Tony Burgess
“Paul.”
“Hounds, like that, for hunting—”
“Paul.”
“Fuckin’ ‘coons. What? What? Are you listening to me?”
Joseph puts a guiding hand behind Paul’s elbow and steers him to the air conditioner sitting on a fresh concrete block at the base of the wall.
“Can we get clear of this wreck? You putting meat in that?”
“No. It’s a little wet right now.”
“Put leaves in it. That’s what I do.”
“I don’t rake leaves.”
“Just grab a few handfuls every once in while. Boost the carbon. You got too much nitrogen.”
“Yeah, yeah … maybe. I gotta get some accelerant.”
“So. What else I got? Your compost is okay. But I had four calls last week about burning.”
“I was makin’ hot dogs.”
Paul sits on the edge of the air conditioner. Joseph rolls his eyes. It is a much-circulated fact that controlled burns are legal if they’re for cooking food, so everybody sets out in the spring with a pile of leaves and branches two storeys high and a package of red hots.
“Okay. Forget the burn. There’s lotsa stuff to worry about back here, Paul.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Just tell me you’ll clear it out. Everything. Get that car outta here, for Christ sakes.”
Paul pulls a nostril with his finger.
“Looks like a small plane crashed back here.”
Joseph walks over to a small pile of bundled shingles.
“How come you haven’t started finishing this place, Paul?”
Joseph steps to a window and shades his eyes as he looks in.
“This’d be a nice house.”
Paul pushes himself up off the air conditioner.
“Forced air? That hooked up?”
“Nope.”
Joseph presses his forehead back to the glass.
“Nope. That’s your answer.”
Paul can tell that his own brain is a partially eaten strawberry, and in his chest, beating rapidly, a hard bean suspended in yogurt. Knowing what’s there is pointless now; the insides are all contiguous with the earth, hard and heavy and falling down.
“Okay. If this isn’t done in a week, Paul, we have to think about fines.”
Paul lays his head off at an angle.
“Perfect.”
The sound of four car doors slamming shut in rapid succession. Near the front of the house.
Paul stands taller. Joseph looks vexed.
“You expecting somebody, Paul?”
“No. Probably nobody.”
Joseph sees that Paul has no intention of announcing himself to these visitors. He wants to just stand here beside the house ‘til they go away.
Glass breaking. A crashing sound. Joseph ducks then jumps up, but Paul grabs his arm.
“Shhh.”
“What the hell was that?”
“Somebody’s breakin’ into my house, I think.”
Paul feels thrilled.
“Well, come on. Let’s get the police.”
Paul steps quickly in Joseph’s way.
“What are you doin’?”
Paul suddenly pushes Joseph up against the wall. He drives his elbow hard under Joseph’s chin, causing his head to bounce hard off the brick. Paul steps back as Joseph goes down on one knee. There is blood in his hair. Paul steps back and picks up a shovel beside the compost. He raises it over his head as Joseph totters to his feet. A dark shape in the window, like Batman in an alley. Paul watches the figure. Is that a gun?
The window behind Joseph explodes and a chunk of his head flips up and down onto the lawn. Joseph takes one step forward then wallops the ground with his full body.
Paul can see now, that, yes, a man has fired a rifle into Joseph trough the study window.
Paul hears himself laugh. He raises his hands.
“Okay. Okay. That’s fine. I was gonna do that anyway.”
A bullet touches the tip of Paul’s nose, driving the skin along the underside of his brain, then out across the yard into the tree beside the compost.
23 Pine Street
The browns in here all push out, like fat men’s tongues, over the edge and lay on the lip. Brown broadloom badly laid over boards and rising at the walls. Big meaty throws piled on the brown arms of a couch lying—half-hiding, really—against the sandy wall. Tom enters in from the cold, he is almost taller than the room so has to be seen from below. He presses a beetle of a cell phone into his fat chest pocket. Then he rubs his white chin with the back of his red oyster hand. A tear lands in a ladybug he imagines crawling between his knuckles. He looks for a second at the tear. It runs a crease and disappears. Big man’s tear. Big man crying. Tom holds his chin as he cries. He pushes back on his teeth whenever emotion bucks them forward. He puts out his other hand to feel where he’ll sit if he has to. A car door. Tom breathes with his mouth wide open, then holds the air in.
The door behind him opens with a shake. Tom releases the breath through his nose, trying to reclaim his chest from involuntary movement and the pig-like racket of crying.
Hedy is standing on the mat behind him.
“Wipers are acting up.”
She kicks the bottom stair to knock snow off her soft black boots.
She looks at her husband’s back. Man’s big as a field.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Tom moves forward into the room turning his head to his shoulder. He’s too big to pretend to be doing anything.
“Need winter wipers. I told you.”
Hedy lays her soft gloves on the radiator.
“Yeah, well.”
Tom and Hedy’s son’s wife went missing ten days ago. She had been canoeing in the lake and never returned. She is presumed dead. Tom fishes for rainbow trout from the shore in the fall and spring. He fears two things. That he will hook her body one day. That he will eat a fish that ate her. He loved her very much. Her voice made him happy.
She wears a long coat of red suckers. Long and living backs up and down her body.
“You okay?”
Tom sits down on the couch. “No. I don’t think I …” A part of his lung breaks like a girl. He puts his hands to his face. Red cheeks billow like elephant ears.
The heavy jig pulls the roe bag down from the light. Past a pale canopy of tiny orange ferns and suspended silt, the dark hook drives to the bottom. Her arm is green and red. In a smooth sac of ice. The hook disappears in her hair. She will be brought home this way, pulled by a rusted point stuck in her crown.
Hedy sighs and touches his heavy coat on the shoulder.
“You want a coffee?”
“No.”
“You didn’t act like this when your sister died.”
Hedy stares for a moment. He is motionless. He has stopped crying and just sits there. Enormous hands on monster knees. He thinks that she thinks that in him there is a useless sadness. He raises the end of his scarf off his arm and turns it in the air so it comes off the back of his neck.
“Okay. Well. She’s dead. I don’t need to say anything about that today.”
The light is fading in the long window over the couch. It looks like nightfall, but it’s only one o’clock in the afternoon. A false night. A streamer coming off the bay.
“Don’t look at me. I don’t like anybody to die.”
Tom bangs the side of his nose with his thumb and watches his wife. She pulls a small box off the top of a shelf. She pushes a button on a CD player. The music of Clay Aiken. She sits in her own chair and opens the small box and pulls out a miniature silver Rolls Royce. She carefully slips a neatly folded piece of paper from beneath the molded felt bed that held the car.
Tom leans to one side and pulls out his left arm, then repeats this action for the right. He lifts a TV remote from an iron sleigh sitting on the glass table.
“Can we turn that shit off?”
Hedy looks over the tops of her glass
es at him. Big crying Tom. Shameless man. We can’t all be carefree dead girls. She touches something at her side and the music stops.
She returns to the piece of paper. It is folded into sixteenths and when open is a cubelike cootie catcher, a page of dents.
On the TV, the weather. The squalls are set up for the afternoon and will continue into the evening, giving local accumulations of up to thirty centimetres.
The piece of paper is a certificate of authenticity. The Rolls Royce is a limited edition replica made of silver plate by the artisan Geoffrey Haterfiledes.
“They said it was gonna be sunny. They don’t know nothing.”
Tom changes the channel. A bass fishing derby. The fish doesn’t want to get weighed.
Hedy looks up. “Getting paid to fish. That’s not a job. How do you pronounce this H-A-T-E-R-F-I-L-E-D-E-S?”
Tom looks over as he changes the channel.
He looks at this woman who studies the provenance of a ten-dollar piece of junk but can’t credit a meteorologist.
The window smashes and Tom hunches forward. Hedy drops the Rolls. Glass falls in pie pieces, landing and turning off the sill. A rude looking rock sits on the carpet.
“What the fuckin’…?”
The door is kicked in.
“What the hell’s going on?”
The man steps forward and swings a fireman’s axe down. It hits Tom on the shoulder, driving his body deep in the chair. He draws the handle down hard and Tom’s heaviness unfolds across the floor.
Hedy looks on. Clearly this is the first time in her life that something big is happening that absolutely cannot be happening. The axe head comes up and she sees the red meat of her husband. Tom bellows and pushes himself onto his back. The man brings the axe down again, this time hitting Tom square on the face with the blunt end. Hedy watches as the left side of her husband’s face presses against the right’s side then disappears under the dense gore of an iron head.
She feels panic flipping into her hair then leaving. Everything is slowed down by cliché.
The axe head has one third of the contents of her husband’s left eye swinging off a corner. This third is merely fluid and a small section of the eye bag itself. The pupil and nerve stem are in the dark hole of his head. When the axe head reaches an apex it stops completely. It will be turned so that the blade faces Hedy in the chair. While it is stopped Hedy looks at the man. His face is straining in the effort to change the direction he is swinging the axe. No other expression, just strain.
Inside he’s saying, “I have to get this axe turned around so that the blade goes into that lady.” He’s not saying anything else to himself.
Hedy watches the axe completely turn. The edge of the blade looks like a closed eye that suddenly opens and flashes down. It hits on the corner of her head, breaking her skull before falling down like a cow to its knees onto her shoulder, crashing through and exploding the side of her heart. Hedy is still looking, still seeing, though she will die in a moment or two.
Tom is hanging on a bit longer. Surprising because some of his teeth are imbedded in his spinal cord.
The girl is floating like a red candy moon in a pink milk sky. She is stiff and cold and covered with a soft film. The stars watch her. The lake is calm and black. Soon the ice will harden again and she will stop. If we could stand on her we could see the fires burning in Collingwood.
28 Pine Street
Around the room on sills and rims and hoops and borders stand the millions of things and, here, selectively, are some of them: Little blue men with umbrellas, a dog facing Jesus, a bracelet on ceramic bonsai, four slender race cars sharing a bean, a yellow park bench the size of a mouse, paper doilies, yellow shag carpet specked with tiny blue dots slung over a radiator. The TV looks like an airport gypsy leaning against a locker. It winks and flashes a single gold tooth; there are several game shows rolled into one. The couch is buried under filthy throws beneath a painting of a wolf crying under a watery moonscape. Rose’s fat white feet are up off the floor. She holds a small dirty dog against her warm front. A bird on her shoulder punches her big ear with its face. Smaller and more like the other things in the room is Mike. He appears to be a smoke-damaged doll, brown and sore and thin. He rocks slightly, occasionally giving the TV his assent: “Yep. Yep. Yep.”
“Well, I think you should just smoke. My dad smoked and he was ninety-two when he died.”
Mike looks over, stricken deeply by these remarks, though as he blinks, near tears, they are still seconds from being understood.
“Smoke. Smoke.”
Mike shrugs, knowing now that it’s better to dismiss this.
“Chelsea, there’s glue on them.”
A little girl, Chelsea, sits on the floor and links tiny tires in her long red hair. She drops her pale hands from her hair. Sticky black tires hang in orange leopard spots. She tips her head to feel the tires touch her cheeks.
“Don’t listen, then.” Rose reaches up to her shoulder and bumps her hand against the bird’s back. “Why did he prescribe you an antidepressant?”
Mike’s hands jump from oddly effeminate poses around his face to the arms on his chair.
“Junior’s not good. He told me to give her Dimetapp. That’s not gonna help allergies.”
A sharp cry from the floor. Chelsea holds up a plastic tire tangled in her hair.
“You should go to the emerge on Sundays, when Green’s there.”
Mike agrees suddenly with his right hand, then disagrees abruptly with his mouth. Rose stares at him for a moment.
“I can’t believe gambling is a side effect.”
Mike affirms this with a bristled chin scratching into his shoulder.
Rose tilts on her round thighs and delicately delivers the bird from the back of her fat hand through the open door of a tall white cage.
“Gary Taylor’s eldest girl was given the same as you for compulsive spending. How can one pill stop a teenager from buyin’ clothes and then send a alcoholic to the casino like a madman?”
The phone rings. Rose clips the cage door closed before scooping up the phone.
“Hello.”
She takes small pride in what she does next. She grunts and hangs up. Rose likes it when her world knows her so well that she doesn’t have to use a lot of words, even though does, and will, because it’s awful quiet around here sometimes.
“Yer mom’s here.”
Chelsea is trying to hang tires in front of her eyes. She tilts her head back and regards the door haughtily.
The door opens and a stocky woman with yellow hair enters.
“It’s awful quiet out there.”
Mike sits up and tries to look past the woman. Rose pulls her ankles further under her rear.
“Mike spent eighty dollars on Nevada.”
Chelsea’s mom has dark eyes, pretty but hard. She laughs, then looks at her daughter. “What’s this one doin’?”
“I told her to get them outta her hair. She’ll like it when I hafta pull ‘em out.”
Gretch reaches down and draws Chelsea up to stand.
“You have such pretty hair. Why you wanna do that?”
Chelsea lowers her eyes and pretends to sob. Mike, Rose and Gretch stare at her, until Gretch turns away and points out the window.
“There’s nobody around out there.”
“So you say.”
“It’s weird.”
A small tick sound as a hole appears in the glass. Rose and Gretch look at the hole and lean up to look into the yard.
Mike stares straight ahead. At the same moment as the tick sound, a bullet entered Chelsea’s forehead and she has dropped dead in the middle of the floor. Mike makes a horrible low gurgle. Gretch turns to say something and sees her daughter folded over on the carpet.
Rose screams.
25 Pine Street
The bedroom is a girl’s. Dora the Explorer with her massive head and eyes the size of pies hangs by a loop off the edge of a mirror. A pony with a cream-colo
ured saddle, blue diapers made out of sky, a ladle stolen from a cardboard box, a plastic house. A little grey space heater sits three feet from the side of her bed. An egg glowing in a goalie’s mask. She should have been asleep hours ago, but she is scared. Not of the dark, not of a monster, not about whether mommy and daddy can stay friends. No, what little Heather, with her funny pale face framed by red, red ringlets is scared of is Osama Ben Lawdy. His name keeps coming up, in whispered ways sometimes. In caves near Ravenna.
Heather hears her parents yelling below, then gunshots. She listens and hears nothing. The front door slams. It was Osama Ben Lawdy and now he’s gone.
Heather finally sleeps.
18 Pine Street
Ed is lying on his side. Near his thigh a bag of chips, under his head a thick pillow. He drags chip crumb knuckles through his chest, laying hairs down with light oil.
The television he watches is in a stand-up Pac-Man game console. On the screen is a B4-4 video. Beside it a teddy bear-themed pinball machine. Ed’s phone number is displayed where the high score should be. A vintage black rotary dial phone on the floor. It rings.
Ed crushes chips under his steamroller thigh to reach the phone.
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me.”
Me is Glenda. She’s calling from Sault Ste. Marie. She met Ed on the internet three weeks ago.
“Oh, hi.”
“Hi.”
“…”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’.”
“…”
“Are you busy?”
“No.”
“Are you mad?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
The B4-4 video ends with a surprising reveal that the video “chick” is a lesbian. Ed tries to imagine what this means to people younger than him.
“Are you there?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay.”
“…”
“…”
“Are you in a bad mood?”
Ed sighs and rubs the prickles on his cheek.
“You’re in a bad mood a lot.”
Ed makes a sound into the phone, nearly an explaining sound.