Orphan Love

by Nadia Bozak

  “She’s mine to raise. I’ll keep her as she is.”

  “Someone in town is going to tell her.”

  “Except she don’t talk to anyone, and no one to her. She’s alone like that. Not like my sister was, talking to any bastard who’d listen.”

  “And those brothers, what if they get a hold of her?”

  Bellyache stood up then, knocking his chair over and hitting his head on the lamp so that for a second or two he wore it like a hat. He balled up the letter, strode over to the door and tossed it out into the night. Slamming it shut again, he paused there, hand on the knob, stink eyes on his only friend, sitting there beneath the swinging lamp.

  Pickles got up. With his hand he steadied the light.

  That’s when I turned and went back to my room, Kraft Dinner pot in my hand. Heard Pickles’s voice just as I was shutting the door.

  “What you’re doing is wrong, Belly.”

  It would still be out there, he’d only tossed it, couldn’t have gone far. Slid open the window, stuck my legs through one at a time and lowered myself down to the ground. My boots were in the trailer by the front door, so the snow felt soft and not yet cold through my thick wool socks. No coat either, but I’d be fast—had to be before a wind came and blew away that letter.

  Stole around to the front, ducking low so the men inside would not see me. But I could see them, and I heard them worse. Bellyache was shouting now. Crazy, nasty, going on about drunken Indians. Pickles, meanwhile, had moved into the nook we had for a kitchen. He’d cleared the table and was washing up the dishes, cigarette hanging from his mouth, hair tied back in a ponytail so it did not get in the dirt and grease of the water.

  Had no light out there but what little came from the half moon above and also the orange shadows that were cast down from the trailer’s few lit windows. One eye on the men inside, one eye on the ground, I scoured the night for that letter, a ball of white dissolving into the piles of snow.

  Shrunk up with freezing, arms crossed over my chest to keep the warmth inside me, I covered the trailer’s surrounding property, leaving behind me patterns of small human footprints. Socks wet now, the toes and heels and side arches showed up sharply, frozen in the snow. On the stoop and under it, in front of snow piles and behind them, kicking through snowdrifts, there was no ball of paper for me to rescue. Wanted only to stare for a minute at some stranger’s script, and try to find in it even the smallest hint about what it meant to be me.

  All along Bellyache’s voice came wrecking through the night, hurrying me, making my eyes move fast, my feet faster, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. The bush beyond was dark and unforgiving, and so I turned back, thinking maybe I’d missed it when I’d looked around the front stoop. Hopping along on tiptoes now, hot water in my eyes burying my vision, I approached the trailer. Kicking around the snowdrifts on the stoop, through the front door window I saw Bellyache standing above Pickles. Seated at the table, his friend had his coat on and was bent over, lacing up his boots. Bellyache was shouting at him, spit falling from his lips, but Pickles was calm and steady. As if he were blind and deaf or Bellyache was a ghost and only I could see him and hear his wicked voice.

  Frustrated by that calm spine, Bellyache grabbed Pickles by the ponytail and started tugging and yanking. Pickles’s head snapped back and his hands shot up, gripped the claws lashing his head around by that rope of hair. Elbows in the air, eyes shut, he got hold of Bellyache’s fingers, fore and middle on the left hand, and he bent them part way back. But the drunken goat my uncle was just wouldn’t let the hair out of his fist. So the fingers were forced to bend even further, and I saw Pickles straining for strength and it came in a burst, and then Bellyache’s face turned into pure howl when his sore, worn-out bones finally broke. On the stoop, out there, I heard that, the pop and crack, and following that was a hollow echo.

  Pickles and Bellyache, all they’d had was each other for friends. Drank together, sure, but they also told stories and watched TV, went hunting, fished, had memories of working together in the bush. Named each other too, they made themselves a pair that way. Best friends until Bellyache turned on the one person in the universe who saw some bit of softness in those racked eyes, that black mouth.

  It was over then, when those bones snapped. Pickles would come no more.

  When the door opened, I stepped back. Pickles stood before me, and me out there on the front stoop, caught in the light spilling out from the trailer. Shivering, wincing from what I’d just seen, Pickles stared at me, my sock feet, and put together what crazy thing I was doing.

  Behind him my uncle was slumped up at the table, his back mostly to the door. With his good hand he poured a drink, shot it back, and then he had another, injured hand was squeezed between his knees. Pickles stepped outside, shut the door behind him, no last words exchanged between them.

  Grabbing my shoulders, he pulled me toward him. “Stand up,” Pickles whispered. “On my boots.”

  All crouched up with shivering, I lifted one club of a foot then another out of the bone-freezing snow so that I was stepping instead on Pickles’s big old boots, my heels to his toes. For balance, my arms went around his waist, my face buried in his shallow stomach and wool coat, and I found myself being hugged by him. Strong and tight, and for the first time in the whole time of me, my life.

  “Go back the way you came,” he said. “Don’t let him see you.”

  “The letter,” I said, my words muffled up in his coat.

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s always been dead to you.”

  Pickles squeezed me a little closer. Smoke and eggs, wet wool and dried leather, and I felt his hair on my face. “You’ll be old enough soon and then you can leave here.”

  “And I will,” I said. “Maybe even before then.”

  “In the meantime, take care of him,” he said. “I can’t anymore.”

  So Pickles patted me on the head and I pulled away, stepped back into the snow.

  Watched Pickles going, heard the crunch of snow. His big boot prints cutting across my small scurried ones. He went north, cutting along the bush trail that would take him out to Long Dash Road and from there to Black Dew Seat. When I couldn’t stand the cold burning into the bottoms of my feet, I tiptoed down the steps and back around the trailer. TV in my bed shadowing my window blue, I hopped up and crawled inside my bedroom.

  All alone with Bellyache now, the last two Bozaks on earth. And I was lonely sure, felt that for real and maybe for the first time. Only it was not for a mom anymore, but for someone else that night I’d lost.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In Pickles’s boots I woke and in the wolfish light of early morning, he was there, right there, before me and above me and staring down at me from across the old, cold fire pit. Hair on me prickled, my scalp froze, toes in his boots and in my boots, they curled in shame. His skin was painted glossy now, more orange than brown and plenty of red from blood dripping down the cheeks. A hat, cowboy style, was pulled down real low so it hid his eyes and made it so I could not tell if he was mad at me or just tired and dead. Thumb stuck out for a ride, he stood on the side of a hot and empty highway. Off to New York, Toronto, Chicago, all those places he never quite got to.

  Me, I stayed still, stared back. Could not speak, did not know how to say sorry. For something like that, for what I did. So I looked hard, held him with my eyes, like it had been when I was just a kid. And the harder I looked the more I saw it was not Pickles so much as it was Dave and it was not Dave so much as it was Pelado and what I was looking at was not a man or a ghost but a goddamn movie poster.

  When Dave came crawling out from under the canoe and saw that Wig of Blood poster stapled to a tree—likely with his very own gun since he’d left it out—his body just froze, was as still as that of his Pelado. At the foot of the tree his pack was dumped out like what a raccoon would do to a garbage can.

&nbs
p; We sat there, neither of us knowing what to do. Scratched and sniffled, smoked to steady ourselves. Choked down our hearts.

  Dave said later he’d had that poster hung up above his bed. Wasn’t ripped at the edges then. And it didn’t have wrinkles from lake water and rain, and neither was it creased from being folded into fours. Said to me how it had hurt him to have to leave it. The poster was a prize and a dream.

  Then Dave tore it down. He ripped it up and in the fire pit he burned it.

  Me, I sat quiet and watched the poster shrivel up and die. Beside me Dave was crouched.

  “He trucked it all the way out here, Dave? Just to screw with you?”

  Dave’s black eyes were flat. Face looked old, ripped, and racked, and he wore it for a mask of depression. “No, but I did.”

  Shook my head that I didn’t understand.

  “Was in my pack,” he said quietly. “Down at the bottom. Folded up.”

  “He was looking for it specially?”

  “Looking for something. Found that instead.”

  “For what?”

  “Nothing,” Dave answered, just barely.

  Looked around the bush. The morning still had plenty of wolf in it. Cold and unpredictable, lonely. No colour, just grey. “So how come I never heard him?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, standing over the flames.

  “Some kind of a ghost,” I said. “Plenty of them around.”

  Me, I broke camp while Dave crouched by the fire pit, holding his face in his hands. “I hate this,” he kept saying. To me, to the bush, the goddamn universe, “I just fucking hate it. Want this country to be over with.”

  Skin got cold when he said that. Wished to be alone again, safe in emptiness, away from ghosts and men.

  * * *

  We finished that goddamn lake just as the sky was filling up with storm. Portaged through raw spring bush. Though too early for real hunting, legal hunting, we heard the crack of a rifle in the distance, up ahead. Dave’s neck shrunk up into his shoulders and me, I felt my knees buckle and my bowels lurch. Dave glanced back and then we broke into a trot. Beneath the weight of boat and paddles and gear, trying to outrun weather and man and beast combined, the going was only as fast as that thick, razor-sharp bush would allow and that was pretty goddamn slow. Another shot rang out, but deeper in the distance. Slipped and tripped and damned the forest and the land and each other, and then we came out on the stone shore of a wide and rugged lake. Sky was lighter now, but still it bore the coming of cold, hard rain. Had a rest and a smoke, drank lake water. Wondered if we should wait it out or go on. When the sun came squeezing through the thickness above us, Dave said for us to chance it and go.

  Some quarter mile from shore, the cloud sucked the sun back up again. Still we went on. Dave was paddling like crazy, a slave to the desperation of getting the boat away from his dad and also through that territory, bordering on an Indian reserve as it did. Wind came ripping from the west, and felt like ice on our eyes. Tasted that way too. And then thunder, pumping through that sorry part of the universe, and with it was a darkness that could have passed for night and after that, the rain. Pounding fists of it, thick as shit. A minute was all it took for the boat to fill up with water. It was such a rain that goddamn canoe might not have had a bottom, having instead dissolved right into the hard wash of freezing lake. And the shipped water got heavy and the boat got weighed down, and because we were sinking, I started bailing with a dumb tin cup while Dave did his best to get us pointed in the direction of the eastern shore. Gave up on that useless, helpless job, so I tossed down the cup and just worked the paddle, following Dave’s lead as well as I could through the daytime night and the blindfold of rain and sticky hair I was wearing.

  To ease up on the weight and maybe stop us from sinking, Dave jumped out of the canoe and I kept steering from the stern while he swam along, one fist gripping onto the starboard side.

  He screamed how fucking cold the water was. “Keep paddling,” Dave yelled at me through the pummel of rain and the slow Armageddon of thunder floating up there above us.

  And hail was falling, piercing the wet, freeze-burnt skin on our hands and faces, and it turned the surface of the lake into an exploding field, a war zone, pockmarked with craters. When the water was at Dave’s waist, I got up on my haunches and then I half jumped and half fell into the lake, lower body instantly amputated within the deep-freeze of that goddamn lake. We thrashed the boat to shore. Gear floating in maybe a half-foot of water, we flipped the canoe and grabbed packs and tarps and the rest and ran back into the dark bushes, which jutted right up the water’s edge, dumped our loads, and went back for the boat.

  Worked in silence, turning tarps and rope and tree trunks into a shelter. And under it, in mud and shit, I fell down, soaking up its refuge. Could not move my fingers, toes were scarred with cold, and my body was shrunk up into a bout of violent shivering. Dave, though, he got up his axe in his purple fist and went off to cut us some wood.

  Took forever to build just a small, smoky fire.

  “Least we’re cleaned up now,” I said. Rolling off my mitts, softened scabs stuck in the wool and came away. Where those had been, the wounds of my tortured fingertips looked spongy and newborn, peeled alive.

  Shivering so bad, Dave made me get up and move around. “Else you’ll stiffen up and get sick.”

  Though it hurt, shitty fingers frozen into red claws and all that hard scab gone, I started to wring out our clothes and sleeping bags. Dave worked at the fire, doing his best with the few waterproof matches that were left. Somehow he managed.

  “Good thing for us you’re a pyromaniac,” I told him.

  We had to huddle up close beside each other and closer still to the fire. Our sleeping bags hung up near the flames, we used a scrappy piece of tarp for a blanket. Tobacco and rolling papers we dried out in a tin pan held over glowing embers. Papers stuck together, they came out like a goddamn accordion, so we ripped them apart and the smokes we rolled were held together with a bit of Dave’s glue and lots of spit. Drank the inch of whisky I had left. Beside Dave I sat stiff, less he think I was getting anything from him but body heat. Like feeling safe, soothed, comfort, the warmth that comes from the heart or, worse, the goddamn hormones. Because that’s what I got a surge of, like something hot had gone and licked my heart, leaving it moist and warm and clean. Bony boy beside me, gristled and raw and smelling of flesh and sweat even through all that rain. Kept my eyes straight ahead so he would not see my face and its fucked-up parts too much up close.

  Started falling asleep and Dave slipped out from the tarp. In the light of the fire I watched as he unclasped his souped-up cassette carrier. Inside, each tape, maybe 200 in total, was sealed in a double-layered freezer bag. He got his Walkman out and carefully removed and then played each tape, for a minute at most, testing them for water damage. My eyes on him, I kept them low, and then they shut on their own. Woke for a minute when he took up his place beside me again, close enough I gave in and leaned my head on his shoulder. To the beating of his Walkman’s metal heart I fell asleep beside Dave Bashed-up-Boat.

  * * *

  Woke and the morning was ripe from the rain. Sky was clear and fearless. Dave worked on the boat, patching and sealing and stapling it back together. He tested it out too, just to see it would not leak. As he was out there paddling it around, a canoe appeared on the horizon, cutting toward us from the southeast. Dave paused to look, and then came back to shore where I was trying to shake some of the water from the cheap polyester of our sleeping bags.

  The boat was dark green and in it a lone rider. It came toward us at a bold pace, and soon enough we saw that inside it was an Indian. Breaking his stroke for a second, he held up his paddle and waved. Called out something that got lost in the distance between us and him.

  “We can ask him for food,” I said. “More matches.”

  “I’ll
get our shit together. You can do the talking.”

  Dave went back into the bush. Me, I stayed on the shore watching the Indian come riding in. The lake was smooth as ice, and he took it down fast, making it look pretty goddamn easy. Waved him on and then held up my hand when he came up close enough to see his face was young and healthy and the make of his canvas canoe was a good one.

  Kneeling down, I helped pull his boat up to the rocky shore. When he passed me the bowline, I tied it to a nearby tree. Took off his cap and wiped the shiny wetness from his forehead. Young, but older than me and Dave. His hair was almost shaved. A wedding ring on his hand, he wore an orange life jacket over his windbreaker. Booted in mountaineering lace-ups, his work socks were pulled high. Was in army shorts, though it was way too goddamn cold. Had the purple knees to proved it. Stepping up next to me, he left the boat to bob against the pulse of the lake water knocking against the rock.

  “Saw you guys get caught in that storm yesterday. Wanted to check you were okay.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Would have come sooner, but that was some rain.”

  “Was,” I said.

  “Looked like your boat was giving you trouble.” He glanced over at Dave’s canoe. “No wonder, that’s a piece of shit you’re in. Not safe at all.”

  Hoped Dave hadn’t heard that. Me, I knew I had to be nice to this guy no matter what he said about the shitty state of me and Dave’s getaway, needing food and matches like we did.

  “No life preservers?”

  “No way.”

  “Dumb.” He looked me up and down, shaking his head. “Where’s your friend?”

  “Back there,” I said. “Hey, you seen anyone else around the area?”

  The Indian had gone over for a closer look at Dave’s canoe. “Anyone like who?”

  “Oh, just a White guy. Not too tall. Small feet and a ball cap.”

  “In a canoe?”

  “Think so, maybe. Sometimes.”