Orphan Love

by Nadia Bozak

  “Maybe we should just keep it,” I said. “But drive really, really fast to get over the border.”

  “And then what? No money for gas, no licences, the car’s stolen, by now reported, we’re both juvenile delinquents, and plus you stabbed a guy, not to mention the manslaughter shit you’re running from.”

  “You’re way too fucking sensible,” I said. “Maybe too your dad’ll lose our scent if we’re in a car and not on the water.”

  “Not likely. But right now I’m more worried about the cops than the old man.”

  So we decided we’d go on through past Montreal, maybe down to the border, and then hit the water and paddle on.

  Dave was looking at the aeronautical chart, saying how after Montreal it didn’t seem that far anymore, getting down to New York, we just had to more or less go with the flow: the Richelieu, Lake Champlain, then the Hudson all the way down. The window was open and the cold air was blasting him full on in the face. He had his dad’s tooth out and his fingers, they were shining it up, rubbing away at the enamel. Went at it like a nervous tick.

  * * *

  Drove the day away. Sun was breaking through the cloud cover just in time to set down. Going east as we were, Dave and me were driving right away from the spill of that bloodletting, skywetting, menstruating sun.

  Watching the dark settle in and some town’s lights come on in the distance, lining the horizon, I put on the radio and we listened to some bit of news for a total of thirty seconds before we couldn’t take anymore and had to switch it off.

  “You know,” I said, “no one in the whole world knows where we are right now.”

  Dave paused to light the cigarette I’d rolled for him. “At least I hope no one knows where we are right now. If anyone knew, that’d likely mean we were in some kinda trouble.”

  “Some kinda deep pile of shit,” I said.

  Got out the map, and with the interior light turned on I saw how close we were to the place where I’d drawn that circle and put that big black X. Dave looked over at me, said we ought now to go there and get that over with and I nodded yes. He said if I wanted to drive, I could, but I said no, that he ought to, said that I just wanted to have a think and look out the window. Maybe have a drink. So we started back down the highway, going east and south, and looking out for a turn onto a highway numbered 11 because that’s where Slava O’Right lived. In a trailer behind a motel called the U-Bet Inn, and I knew that not because Slava had told me, but from the registration he kept up front in the cab of his truck, clipped to a board where he logged all the deliveries he made and the kilometres he put on. In the truck once, all alone and waiting for him, I had memorized what it said there, knowing that I’d one day take off from Bellyache and it’d be a good idea to know the whereabouts of at least one soul in the whole of the Canadian country. When we got to Slava’s he’d be all surprised I’d found him, and so be taken way off guard, making his body and his brains easy pickings. Didn’t quite know what I was going to do to him. Him just seeing me, the shock of it all, would be a start. He’d know I’d found out what was really between us—he’d see it, if not in my face, then in those fingernails. The bad blood that ran between us so deep it was black as oil, thick as hot tar, and his eyes would pop, his jaw would drop, and I’d start with Pickles and then get on to me, and then I could say to him fuck off and goodbye and go on with Dave and not look back.

  Dave turned off the stereo. He said for me to go to sleep, he’d wake me up when we got there.

  “I’m OK,” I said.

  Got out tobacco and papers and rolled a smoke, drank from the bottle, and swallowed deep and swallowed hard. Wanted to burn the throat because my eyes were burning and so sore, and being out there at the end of some goddamn road, well, I thought I might just give in like a baby and have a little cry.

  From the glove compartment I got out Pickles’s knife, and then I took down his boots from the rearview mirror. Had a vision of me knocking on Slava’s trailer door and then him opening it up and me just saying, It wasn’t a deer, and plunking down those boots, and him just going pale and white from all the guilt of it. Distract him with the boots. Then I’d pull out the knife. Lunge, poke, grapple with him if I had to. To make him bleed and leave him alone to do it—that’s why I was out there. Looked over at Dave with my beaten eyes.

  Said to Dave how I wished so bad Pickles wasn’t dead. How I wished all of that had gone some other way instead.

  “We can always just go on,” Dave told me, “if you’re scared.”

  “Scared, sure,” I said. “But I came too far to care about that now.”

  Cool night, black but for our headlights, my head back and my boots on the dash. Closed my eyes as Dave drove on. Laces of Pickles’s boots I’d tie together and I’d carry them over the shoulder like the carcass of a fresh old kill, brought home to clean and to cook. Those boots, gripped in my fist, I’d hold them fast. They were the shortest straw, and I’d pulled it and was stuck with it and was cursed by it, my burden and my mission and my misery. But in the other fist, in the right one, would be the knife. Sharp and stained fresh from the night just before. Old Slava, when he’d come out to open the door, I’d be there and it’d be for Pickles.

  Woke up when the cigarette lighter popped. Smelled it, metal and red-hot. We were stopped. Lights were off, and in the dark I followed the ember of the lighter and was able to make out Dave’s face.

  “We here now? This Slava’s?” Sat up and groped for the boots, hand to the belt to feel the safety of my knife there. Asked Dave where the goddamn flashlight was. Said I’d need it to find my way from the road to Slava’s trailer. Popped the glove compartment because I remembered seeing one stashed inside. Grabbed it, then went for the door. Opening it, the interior light came on.

  “I won’t be long,” I said. Took a big breath of air, tasting the tang of our bodies.

  “Shut the fucking door,” Dave whispered at me through the dark.

  Did what he told me. “Fuck, what for? Where are we?”

  Dave was quiet. He smoked. A car went by and in its flash of light I saw we were on Highway 19 now, and I knew that meant we had gone well beyond Slava O’Right’s.

  “We lost?”

  He had the tooth out, was rubbing it, urgent and scared.

  “Dave, what the fuck are you up to?”

  “He was out there, kid.”

  Swallowed deep. “The old man?”

  “Right by the turn-off to O’Right’s.”

  “So you just kept going?” Shouted that.

  Dave didn’t say anything.

  “You could have dropped me off at least. I’ve got balls and I got my own business and you just kept on driving, and now where the fuck are we?”

  “You don’t get it, kid. You didn’t see it. I mean, he has a car now. Was pulled over, standing out by the road. Bastard was waving as we went past.”

  “OK. So now go back.”

  Dave shook his head. “I’m just not ready to fight him, kid. Don’t you see that?”

  “No, I don’t see that, Dave. I thought you had balls.”

  Dave shook his head, and his voice became a yell. “I’m already beat up. Don’t want to go through another shit-kicking like that. Not now.”

  “So when?” Called Dave an asshole and a coward. Punched him in the arm. Then in the side of the head, hitting the ear beneath his hair. Started yelling, hating the sound of my voice. High, like a girl. “You’re both full of shit. You and the old man, fucking me up the whole way to New York. He just keeps on bluffing and you fall for it, Indian shithead.”

  Cold in the car, but I was really sweating. Sick in the heart, sickness bubbling to the surface of my dirty skin.

  We were silent. A car came up behind us, its high beams exploding in the rearview mirror, meltdown for our tender, swollen eyes. Winced and a cut on my face opened up, started bleeding
. The car slowed as it passed, then rushed on.

  “Next time it’ll be the goddamn cops,” Dave said. He rolled down the window a crack. Cigarette smoke was exchanged for icy air.

  “I have to go back, Dave,” I said. Lit a cigarette.

  Looked over at Dave. He was hunched up, right boot up on the dash, smoking, shaking his head.

  “Well, I won’t let you.”

  “Fuck you, Dave.” And I spat a thick gob at him, and it hit him on the shoulder and just stuck. Reaching over him, I took a hold of the keys in the ignition.

  Dave straightened up. Cigarette got tossed out the window. He wiped the spit off his shoulder, nice and calm, smeared it on the door. Then his hand covered the fucked-up, sore and nail-less fist that was closed over the keys. Squeezed down on it like pure goddamn torture.

  Eyes filled up with water. My neck, it disappeared into my shoulders. Inside mitt and inside skin, all those little bitty hand bones had gone soft, and I thought I heard them cracking.

  “I stole this car too,” I spat through my bloody, blubbery lips. “It’s not just yours to decide what we do.”

  “You’re acting like a retard. Like a stupid girl.”

  Snaked up, writhing in my seat, my free left mitt tried at prying open the vice of Dave’s grip.

  Dave was trying not to yell, and me, I was trying not to scream.

  Finally, Dave eased off and took his hand away.

  Slowly, I straightened up. Cradling my hand like it was a baby, I started peeling the mitt off, but it was sticking to the opened-up scabs and it hurt too much, so I stopped. Dave, he was sitting back in his seat, looking out at all that black.

  The windshield and the rearview were equally blank and depthless, like sludge, like thick, drowning water. It made me lost, no way to map it, the touchless sprawl of deep, goddamn night. Sitting there, my eyes tried to find a point to fix on, to hold me steady. Front and back and side to side, all was night and quiet and I had no air to breathe, so I started gulping and choking, strangling myself with wanting to get the fuck out.

  So I grabbed my pack from the back and Pickles’s boots from where they were again hanging, and I got myself out of that car and ran into the night, back toward Slava O’Right’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Full of grace. A pair of young thoroughbreds.

  Louisville, Kentucky.

  DAYS OF DESPERADO. NIGHTS ARE THE SAME. “EXPRESSWAY TO YOUR SKULL,” JUST LIKE THE SONG SINGS, AND THE SIGN SAYS. OUTSIDE IT’S GOING DUSK. MUST BE dinner hour. Parked in front of some big hospital, the stranger watches as doctors and nurses and ambulance attendants exit and enter the main doors. Without enough money or good answers, going for help would mean leaving the kid. There must be a better way. Sweat dries on the stranger’s face, tight and hot from the sun. In the air is pollen, cut grass, flowers popping on a bright young bush growing just there on the boulevard. Shifts around. Feels suspicious, imagining that a cop will come up at any moment, jot down the licence plate of that battered old cross-border supply truck. Will peer in the windows, see the baby, and assume it to be exactly what it is—stolen, suffering from suffocation and now starvation, even after all that’s been done to revive it.

  Then a woman emerges from the hospital wearing white high heels and a short skirt, blonde wig, big suede purse over the arm. Lips stitched. Eyes red and black. She gets herself into one of the cabs waiting out front. The supply truck follows. They wind their way through downtown Louisville, then turn east, coast down a raunchy strip, stopping in front of a nightclub, naked in the tired neon glow of its signage. The woman squeezes herself out of the vehicle and disappears inside. The truck, meanwhile, continues on down the block and parks close enough that the clubs are still visible.

  To save the kid, the stranger’s got a plan. Waits for night to fall. Down the way, women held together with spandex and plastic leather pace the sidewalk. The kid is asleep. Smokes, has a drink, counts out several bills from the pile of U.S. dollars. Waiting not only for a fuller dark to hide in, but for a fuller female figure to emerge from one of those bars. Then the truck will cruise slowly past, offering to pay for the use of her ripe breasts. Whatever price she asks.

  Walking up the block and then back down again, slowly, shaking in her high heels, a big-breasted woman, the woman the stranger has been waiting for. The stranger starts the truck, drives down nightclub row, pulls over to where she’s standing on the curb. Kid is hidden behind the seat, otherwise she might not get inside.

  “Drive around the corner,” she says. Voice is raw. Goes with her vice-grip jaw. Face is powdered into a tan. Maybe she is twenty-five, though the look in her eyes and the thickness of her breasts would say she is twice that.

  They drive around the corner. She lists her prices for services rendered. Pulls out a cigarette, extra long and skinny and tipped with black and gold.

  Lighting her cigarette with a match, the stranger says, “I thought you were a mom.”

  She snorts, offended. “And I thought you were a fag. Or at least a poor excuse for a girl. Or a boy. I can’t decide.”

  “We don’t want sex, lady,” the stranger says. Lifts up the kid from underneath.

  Their eyes meet. The look goes on for a good minute, each side held equally hard, searching within the other for an outcome.

  “My kid stopped feeding many months ago,” she says. “I’m all dried up, baby-doll.” But she is intrigued. Does not ask any questions except one. “You got enough money for this, ’cause it’s worth more than the usual.”

  The stranger shows her a fistful of cash. “Hope this’ll do the trick.”

  “The trick,” the woman says. “A different kind of trick than the ones I’m used to, hon.”

  It is quiet in the truck. The woman squints at the stranger, trying to find badness or meanness, but there is none.

  “Heather’ll do it,” she says. “She’ll feed this one if her own hasn’t yet emptied her pumps.”

  Starts the truck.

  “I’ll take over while you watch the road,” she says, pulling the kid onto her lap. “The first left. Here at the stop sign.” She waves a long nicotine finger, its nail mottled with red.

  They go left, they go off, negotiating the Louisville back roads.

  They wait in the living room while the transaction goes on in Heather’s bedroom, The place smells of wood shavings and fresh new glue. They watch tv, drink cans of beer. Smoke and talk a little.

  “So what’s a faggy boy like you doing with a baby like that?”

  “Getting the child home safe,” is all that the stranger can think of to say.

  It took about an hour. Heather returned the baby dressed in different clothes, diaper clean, skin smelling sweet. It was sleeping, but looked refreshed, like a watered plant.

  “Was hungry,” Heather said. “Fed until it just crashed right out.”

  Heather is big, having recently had a baby. Ruddy, healthy, said on account of her kids she didn’t smoke, do drugs, drink anything but beer.

  The stranger pays her generously for the feeding and an extra bottle of pumped milk.

  They are on a mission now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Looked behind me only when I was maybe a kilometre away and the car had long melted into the night. Clouds covered moon and with them came more rain. A car passed, and I thought it would be Dave, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was his dad, but I didn’t care just then. Went on, shivering because I had no shirt under my jacket, and I thought about opening my pack and finding a layer to put on, but I just kept walking faster. Using sweat to warm me. Then, the further I got, the slower I went. All me and no moon, and where was Dave now? Driving off down the road, the passenger seat empty beside him and so empty it would be inside him, I hoped, because I was not there to go on with. Stopped then. Threw down Pickles’s boots and I crouc
hed up on my haunches, buried my terrible mask in my rotting mitts, and just squeezed my brain for some answer I could live with. Rocking on my heels like that, I waited for Dave to drive up, but he didn’t come and he didn’t come and then I stood, grabbed Pickles’s boots, and I went running back to where I’d left him sitting in the Hidatsa. Fast and hard and I’d try to catch up. If not, I’d hitch a ride when day broke, and find Dave filling up at a gas bar and I’d get back in the Hidatsa and it’d go back to being the same.

  That road was not lit. Ran on through rain. Spurs rattling along with me. Stuck to the gravel shoulder as best I could, then went down the white line painted in the centre because smooth asphalt was faster, less likely to make me slip.

  Ran on and I was sure I’d passed the place where the car had been parked. He was gone, drove off and left me. Called my goddamn bluff.

  “Dave!” That was me in the middle of a nowhere road, just screaming. Standing there, boots in hand, bag on back, soaked and stupid, stranded in my own shit, I screamed for Dave and I was the only one who heard me.