Orphan Love

by Nadia Bozak

  The night is cold. Jacket is zippered, hood pulled up. There are stars in the sky and white breath in the black air. Quiet. It could be a night in the North.

  The stranger returns with cartons of milk, white and chocolate, bottles of fruit juice, a hot hamburger, a warm coffee. Checks the kid—lids are open, eyeballs showing wet. Its chest rises and falls. The stranger gathers it up, cradles it close, bottle-feeds it chocolate milk, figuring the kid deserves a treat after all it’s been through. Sitting on the edge of the bed, rocking back and forth with the baby tucked inside the leather jacket’s warmth, next to a scared and nervous chest. The baby can’t die. This spontaneous rescue mission will accomplish more than to prolong its death.

  Nothing in the room now but the motion of back and forth, broken here and there with a hoarse whisper. Either the kid’s learned to be mute or has forgotten how to cry.

  “Chocolate milk for your chocolate bones.”

  The baby’s face is red and sticky from where the stranger pulled away the duct tape muzzle. And a faint ring, coloured with Coke and whisky and nicotine, shows the shape assumed by the stranger’s lips as they’d clamped around the baby’s nose and mouth, forcing breath into its lungs and chest, head and heart.

  A tiny fist pushes the brown bottle away. It’s had enough.

  In the bathroom the stranger washes the baby’s bottom in the sink, changes its diaper. The baby is then put back to bed, laid out on its belly, a towel folded under its head. The light in the room is warm and red. A movie is on the TV. The sound of old black and white voices soothes.

  Eats the hamburger, drinks the coffee, the carton of white milk, has a smoke. Fills out a postcard. A whisky shot to get to sleep. Then another, and soon a third. Looks at the road map. Watches the baby to make sure it’s still breathing. Sitting there in a chair, wearing only a T-shirt, boots, and underwear, it’s already late when the stranger, after two days without so doing, goes to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Towns now,” Dave said. “Leave those butt-fuck trappers behind us.”

  And now that we had that rod, we weren’t going to starve and neither would we have to risk our hides and swallow our pride by begging. We were getting south now. Dave said with towns come nosy goddamn people, cops, and questions.

  We were camped, early morning, eating our food. But taking it slow this time, rationing it out as it had to keep us going for a week at least. The world outside was buggy and damp, so we had a big fire going.

  “It was you he meant,” I said to Dave. “That psycho Indian.” A little less desperado, and it might have seemed funny. “Bet some goddamn trapper saw us paddling by and went and reported it.”

  “Me? You think it’s me?”

  Shrugged, said what did I know except it was better to hide out. “I’d report it if I saw us out here. A couple of runaway strays in this fucked-up canoe, all goddamn dirty. Or your dad, Dave. Maybe it was him?”

  “No,” said Dave. “And you know why. He’s White, first. Second is he doesn’t get seen unless he wants to.”

  Said to Dave how he hadn’t been around for a little while now. “Maybe he gave up on you.”

  “I doubt it,” Dave said. “He’s always found me before. The worse time was when I was hitching and I got into a car and he was the driver.”

  “Didn’t you see it was his car?”

  Dave rolled his eyes. “It was a rental, kid. Plus he was wearing a wig and glasses.”

  Me, I shuddered hearing that. “A goddamn wig?”

  “When I saw it was him, I just died. He didn’t say anything. Just turned the car around and drove away. We stopped only once in ten hours and he kept me locked in the car.”

  “I’d have pissed myself.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Dave. “No way. But the point is, he just shows up. You lose the feel of him, where he is, and then he’s there and you’re not ready.”

  “So you just go on.”

  “All you can do.”

  Looked away then because I didn’t want to see all the fear I knew would be pooled in his eyes.

  “You think you can fight him, Dave? I mean, you know all that karate stuff too.”

  “We’ll see, kid. It’s hard to fight someone so crazy. That accounts for a lot of strength, right. Fuelled by goddamn insanity.”

  “But you’re good too. I’ve seen you. Christ, felt it too.”

  Dave sniffed. Looked up at the day above us. “Maybe I am.”

  “So why’d he teach it to you? Just so he’d have someone to fight with?”

  Dave thought for a minute. Waited, listened to the loons out there. Then listened to nothing but night, feeling the sway of the water. “Because he cared about me, I guess. Had a real bad time at school when I was small, see. Being an Indian with all the fucking White kids was a shit deal. Plus there were plenty of Indian kids coming into town, and they dished it out worst of them all.”

  “Indian like an apple, I heard about that.”

  “Red on the out, white on the in.”

  “You had to fight back, so he taught you how.”

  “Was part of it. And then when I got the pussy bred out of me and I got toughened up, the kids left me the fuck alone—”

  “Like really alone, no friends, right?”

  “Yeah, except girls. Never short on them.” Dave trailed off for a minute, thinking about the perky tits and sweet twats of his hometown girls, or so it seemed.

  “Anyway, in high school we got bused into another town, a bigger place, and things got better. No one knew my fucking dad, so I made a few friends.”

  “And your dad?”

  “Well, he got worse. Unemployed a lot, see. So he took it out on me. Was a burden to him, but one he wanted—it made him feel better to make me feel worse.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I know that deal.” Then I said, “You leave a girlfriend behind, Dave?”

  “Sure, but not one special one. More like a fine selection to choose from.” Dave smiled at that.

  Me, I nodded, shifted, felt my face burning up. If Dave ever heard what was said in Bellyache’s final whisper, he’d never think of me like that, as a girlfriend and not the stupid sister or kid brother he thought I was.

  * * *

  We woke late, waited until the sun set and went on through the night, stopping at dawn. We bedded down when the sun was a wink of light punched into the grey and when we woke, it was an eye above, coloured white. Our sleeping bags were sweaty and soaked with the humidity and the Muskol we used to keep the clouds of hungry newborn bugs away. We ate a bit, broke camp, and moved on just as the sun was over the meridian.

  Went on. Late in the day we were out on a shoreline, just emerged from a buggy goddamn portage and we saw prints, the freshest we’d seen in a while.

  Dave, he said, “Christ, he’s been here already.”

  “Your dad, Dave? How can you know for certain? I mean, could be someone else.”

  Dave looked at me so cold it made me look away from him.

  “They’re too small for a man. Could be almost girls’ feet.” And I put my foot next to one of those bootprints just to prove they were practically the same length and width.

  The bowels were full of fear at being hunted down like that—stalked, watched. More than the paddling, it was Dave’s dad who left us beat up with exhaustion. Sleeping light and little, shoulders always tense, rickety necks from turning around to see if he was coming. All around us was an empty stillness, and somewhere in it was a White and angry man, a shafted dad, bereaved of the son who he thought made him into something of an Indian, and a warrior therefore. Those bootprints, I saw then, were not small so much as they were quick, almost invisible, him knowing where we’d be before we even got there. His tracks were left behind like an animal’s scat. A big old fuck you, an asshole in the eye, to the suckers coming up behind.


  Watched as Dave got together sticks and wood and made a fire and just left it there to burn away at those bootprints. And though we were tired, we went on. And that smell of burning, ripe with bastard breath, stuck with us though we were long gone down the water and the wind should have washed our nostrils clean by then.

  Awake, through waves, by way of the water’s lay, the moon out there was milk, was mould, was white as cold. We went through midnights, keeping an easy pace. Night paddling was where it was at, cool and slow, the world all shut up and gone to sleep without us. We two had no need to run very fast out there on the back roads of such a big blank of blackness. There was no gravity, no horizon, treeline, riverbank.

  Followed on along behind those dirty boots stapled down to the bow deck. The ghosts of them, leading us and following us and maybe guiding us too, through the bottomless, topless, timeless stall of the northern bloody bush.

  And then that night we got onto Temiscaming and onto Bellyache’s map at long last. Beyond Temiscaming was the Ottawa, then the Richelieu, across the border to Lake Champlain, then onto the Hudson River. Temiscaming meant the worst was over and we were halfway there. Small-town country now, and Dave said we’d really have to be sharp and watch our backs. This land breeds meanness, he told me, like no place else.

  Dead centre of that flat-ironed lake. No wind, no rain, just all-out vacant.

  And we kept talking. Bursts and bits of the lives we had left behind us, scraps and scrapes of the secrets we were carrying along for the ride. The shit of our lives, the enclosed kind of freedom that comes with being goddamn orphans, which is what we were. At least that’s what we decided we were, though no one before had ever said it.

  Had the salmon rod going, and Dave was smoking in the bow, turned backwards so he faced me. We were as still and breathless as the night that held us.

  Out on the water Dave’s nerves cooled off. It was his safe place, and mine too. Midnights in the middle of a black lake. Sealed womb. Locked room. Eyeless, mute, and touchless too.

  “So what about your dad?” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “What happened this time? To make you leave, I mean. Why’s he so fucking stubborn coming after you like this?”

  Silence for a bit and then Dave looked up at me and kind of smiled like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Cast out, reeled in. A breeze was going, but the night was not cold enough to keep us paddling just to feel warm.

  “Learned to fight from him. Meant for it to help, then he started to hurt me with it.”

  Dave was looking away from me, my eyes.

  “But he was so hard on me I got good. And the last time I saw him, he was there on the kitchen floor, a bleeding goddamn mess. He beat me up my whole life, but it was always in fun, like he’d pick a fight with me and then I’d have to fight back, testing my strength, trying to teach me. There was always blood, bruises, broken ribs often enough. But then I got older and I got bigger. He was just a short fucker, stocky, though, and tough.”

  “Small little feet.”

  “Yeah. Make him quick. Sometimes I think he cut them down, like with some fucked-up surgery. Make him more Chinese or whatever.”

  “Thought he wanted to be Indian.”

  “Sure, that too. Any kind of warrior. Anything but a shitty, fucking WASP.”

  “And it was only the two of you.”

  “Yeah, he had a wife and it was her that took me. She was this hippie woman came up to teach where I was born, and one day my parents never picked me up from the daycare she was running.”

  “They just left you? Took off?”

  “Don’t know what happened, and she didn’t stick around to find out. She took me home, stole me, just like that. Waited for someone to track her down, but that never happened so she just kept me. Then she married this old boyfriend, my fucking dad, and she got sick and died maybe a year later, leaving me with this asshole. He kept me because of her. She was so goddamn fond of me, he said. He said she was always a bit crazy and real sad, but after bringing me back from that reserve, she never cried. Never cried, just died. He said that.”

  “You remember your real parents, Dave?”

  Dave shook his head. “Tried. Can’t.”

  “And her? This lady?”

  “Not a lot. Just that she was really small, like him.”

  “Small enough for a little kid to notice.”

  “I was always tall, see, even as a little kid,” Dave said. “And also she had curly hair and the clothes she had always smelled like our food.”

  “What kind of food?” I wanted to know, wanting to remember different kinds of dishes and meals, and what it felt like to eat a bag of chips or a goddamn apple just because you felt like it.

  “Fresh bread. She made homemade everything. All goddamn natural, see.”

  “Sure. I get it. Just like him now.”

  “Yeah, but she was really nice, everyone told me. She sure was in love with you, they always said. But lucky me, I get stuck with her husband, a redneck goddamn hippie. Can you believe that? The two worst human beings all rolled into one.”

  “The worst, sure.”

  “So,” Dave went on, “he taught me to fight the other kids. Then when I got big enough, we just fought together and he always kicked my ass. No one ever said anything about it at school, about how I was always beat up, because he said I was in training—that he was my master. What a bunch of fucking losers up there.”

  “So he took over as bully for you.”

  “Something like that. He just was losing his mind, started to think his was a real kind of martial arts. Even wore this dumb headband.”

  “Christ.”

  “But then he went back to the ball cap ’cause the mill guys called him a pussy for it, so he just wore it around the house with a white sweatsuit.”

  When I laughed at that, Dave shook his head and said it was serious. “He was a scary fucker. Bet he could kill a guy if he was mad enough.”

  “And is he that mad at you?”

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “Don’t know. But the point is that he made my life a real hell.”

  Wanted to tell Dave how I knew all about what he was saying. The only difference was that he got too much attention and I got none. Looked out at the moon-white water, up at the star-freckled sky, and waited for Dave to go on.

  “Like no one ever could come to our house because it was all full of weapons, antique guns, and big knives, shit he’d send away for. Plus the place was full of pot plants. We grew our own.”

  “Nice,” I said. “And were there posters of Stallone everywhere?”

  “No, kid. There was nothing on the walls. Just bare.”

  “You sit on the floor? Or did you have furniture?”

  “Furniture, sure. Like the kind you get from the insides of cars.”

  “Sounds familiar,” I said. “I know that goddamn style.”

  Dave paused, smoked, remembered.

  Passed Dave the rod to hold while I found the whisky. We began passing that between us, warming us by the wide open of the lake.

  “And then I had like half a term left of high school and I was waiting for that, so I could get the fuck out of there and go to the States, hitchhike around like Pelado, and be anyplace not Canada—someplace far and I’d make it somehow. Just be a normal guy, right. It didn’t happen like that, though. Look.”

  Dave handed back the rod. He started going through the inside pocket of his jacket, scrounging for something to show me. And then he held out his open palm, and in the light of the white trash moon I saw that what I had always imagined to be a lucky stone or a pearl of bone was really a human tooth.

  “Jesus, Dave,” I said. Picked it up with my scabby old fingers, Dave taking the rod from me so I could have a good close look. A front tooth, a big one, flat on the front and
curved on the back.

  “That’s from the last time I ever saw him. We fought, right, but I was tripping on acid so I came out on top for the first time. Left him bleeding there on the kitchen floor. Enough blood from his nose and his mouth, it was like a can of paint had spilled. It shone out at me in the light, through all that blood, so I took it, knew I had to. And I pledged I’d always have it just to remind me of the shit I wouldn’t put up with, not anymore.”

  Passed the tooth back to Dave. “Should make it into a necklace maybe.”

  “Better than that,” Dave said. “I’m gonna use it for a guitar pick.”

  “Well, it’s big enough almost. I mean, looks like he had buck teeth or something.”

  “I’ll play with it for all the kids with assholes for dads, and they’ll know that what I say is true. Just because someone’s your dad doesn’t mean you have to love him or even like him. But you gotta go then, you gotta get away.”

  Dave had his hood up and his gloves off, and he had breath spilling out that was frosted white. He sort of smiled at me then, big enough I saw his crooked nicotine teeth.

  He paused to roll a cigarette, then said, “So I got this tooth of his, kid, and, well, he wants it back.”

  “So he’s after you for it?”

  Dave smiled.

  “Worse than the times before. Maybe otherwise he’d just finally let you go on.”

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “But he’s weak without this thing, right. And I like that. Me having his tooth is the plain old proof that I’m strong and he’s weak, that I got to be bigger and better than him.”

  “So you two are out here just fucking toying with each other. Both of you got your pride, right? I know about that too.”

  “Pride, sure. And not a long goodbye, but a long fuck you.”