Orphan Love

by Nadia Bozak

  They’d picked up Michelle at a truck stop, drove her all the way to Memphis. Said she was going back to her kids. Had left them with her husband to run off with a boyfriend, who’d then run off with a girlfriend, leaving her stranded, with only her thumb to get back home. She’d approached the stranger, eating eggs and bacon at the counter, asking for a ride. The stranger heard she was a mom, and right away laid out the conditions. Michelle accepted without a blink or a think.

  Michelle had a breasty chest, big hands, a shimmer in her eyes, warmth in her smile. Tanned, dressed in too-tight denim, her thighs and ass and bare arms burst with a sensual teenage cellulite, an ample plumpness that was not yet thick. She fed the stranger’s baby along the way, played with it, pampered it with warm words, coos, and kisses, saying all along how much she missed her own babies. At a gas station near Memphis, they stopped so she could duck into the ladies’ room and change the kid, pump its mouth full of fresh drink.

  “Better that my husband don’t see you,” she explained before they dropped her off downtown. “Though with you queer and all, maybe it don’t matter.”

  “Or maybe,” the stranger says, “that’d make it even worse.”

  It was a bright afternoon. The city rolled by, slow and easy. Not a hurry in sight. Buildings were low and wide, their wood painted white. Michelle pointed out a corner where she could catch the bus. They paid her, promised to stop in at Graceland, and then left her on her own.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  That night we crossed the border, Dave insisted on it. To be on the other side, over the line, find entrance into a new land, there where his fears would not follow, and I wanted that too.

  Didn’t even realize we’d done it. There were no sirens, no gunshots, no flash of light, no calls to halt came crying through the night. There was no wall for us to scale, no barbed wire to cut, no stealthy swims, and neither were there shouts of victory or shouts of revenge. Kind of let us down and it all felt pretty lonely. Dave and me weren’t convinced we’d made any such crossing until the Richelieu widened into a lake, and we just had to assume that this here must be Champlain and somehow we had made it over and left Canada behind our backs at long last.

  After the fight, I’d helped Dave clean his face in the river.

  Beaten eyes he kept closed against the water. The big old welt above his left eyebrow was already visible. And there was a cut under his bottom lip where one of his dad’s kicks had made his front teeth bite right through the flesh. It was hard for Dave to talk with that because every time he did, what might have been a clot would open up and bleed. His shirt was covered in blood. Blood in his hair dripped into his ears and onto the toes of his boots. We knew we wouldn’t see how bad it all was until we got him doused in the bright light of morning. Though I said for him to shut up and be quiet, let that cut form a clot, he mumbled on about the shit of that bush and how Los Angeles was the future and why was it his dad had to come beat his ass on a night he was so tired and how shitty it was I had to see it. Then he choked a bit, covered his face in his hands. Me, I crouched close beside him. Felt his body shaking, trying to wriggle free of all the bad luck his father had given him to live through and grow up in. When I put a sweaty wet mitt on his back, he shook it off.

  So I’d walked back to the clearing, leaving Dave alone. Picked up T-shirts and other shit strewn about. Checked the boots were all right, that the postcard was there where I’d stashed it. Got the sleeping bags unrolled and also tended to the fire.

  Took some minutes, but after Dave got his mind straight and his heart put together, he came back.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re at the border, right? We can fuck this country for good.”

  “For good?”

  “Sure. Bury those boots and then go from there.”

  Me, though, I had Slava O’Right in my mind. The coast was clear now for me to go back and fuck with him. Looked away from Dave, his poor old monster face.

  “What are you thinking, kid?”

  “How this was where you said we’d split up. You know, ‘You go your way and I’ll go mine.’”

  Dave put his hand on my shoulder and shook me. Soft and then hard, almost violent. “I said a lot of shit, see. Stuff you ought to forget.”

  Dave, his eyes twice black with midnight bruising, his face a map of how far we had come and how miserable it had been. Could not ask him to go back up there with me. Did not want him to go, and even if he’d begged to come, I would not have let him. Not when I saw how abused he now was. That country, that province, that miserable lay of North had not been kind to Dave Bashed-up-Boat. Leave Dave and go wading back through the shit so as to throw my bottled revenge in Slava O’Right’s face. But, no, Dave had me by the heart now. And I’d follow it south—my heart, that is—and so I’d follow the rocker Indian who held it.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s go on like you said.”

  Dave nursed his fucked-up face while I got our stuff together. His dad had made a big goddamn mess. Me, I was throwing stuff in our packs, and then Dave stepped into what was left of the firelight and took his jacket off. Exchanging his bloody shirt for a muddy one, he stood there half-naked and felt his ribs to see for sure that none were broken.

  “Lucky for that,” he said. “But the bruises are going to be something else.”

  Little-boy skinny—his flesh, through dirt and stains, glowed like raw cedar. Saw his ribs like I saw those of his boat. Hungry and battered, full of holes, and somehow both of them were still staying afloat, keeping pace in the goddamn race.

  Me, I was saying how he’d done really well and he was totally free now, just like the fucker said.

  “Ruined my good goddamn looks, though,” he said. Tried to laugh, but it hurt him.

  “That’s OK. You’ll be a great Pelado now.”

  “Except I didn’t get scalped.”

  “Good thing too. Eye for an eye. Wig for a wig.”

  “Nothing for a tooth, though.”

  Passed Dave the staple gun when he’d asked after it. He got Pickles’s boots and, flipping the boat upright, fixed them back in place.

  Then, sucking up our guts, we went on.

  Waiting to get caught by some kind of border patrol, we kept our heads low and kept glancing back. Listened tight, but all we heard was the sound of our paddles, just quietly churning at the water. Heard another train screaming from out of the north, saw its only lonely eye rocket past and burn out in the distance. Paddled beneath a train trestle, and then we passed another town burning on the lightening horizon.

  “Watch out, kid,” Dave called back, wincing against his damaged face. “Things are going to change. Industries, cities, and towns. You’ll see. This here is the land of the living, not like where we come from.”

  His shoulders slumped and his strokes pulled slow, Dave still kept up with the flow of our getaway. The wind felt cool on his face, he said. Gave him energy, being out there on the water, sucking down the fresh breath of the world.

  Morning broke into grey. The sun rose up in the eastern sky with a fiery hole of rawness shot through a flat blue sky. Paddled on, favouring the east side of the water. All around we saw lights and low-slung lines of electricity and communication. Heard the far-off roar of a highway just waking. In the distance we saw the grey haze of towns and on the other side were all these rugged islands laid out head to toe with shorelines thick with trees and strung along by a railway, its trestles rising and falling, up, onto, and down off of the rocky old shores. Beyond that, further to the east and some kilometres away, Dave and me saw a concrete highway that linked all those islands with bridges and dips and inclines.

  When Dave said he could go on no more, we pulled over at a jutting tip that was edged with dense bush and looked to us pretty lonely. A wooden train trestle was just near. Camped there because we liked the look of that big old skeleton, abandoned it was, battered and age
d, as it rose above the water and then careened down into the bush.

  “Look at that highway,” Dave said slowly, nodding at the mighty concrete car bridge rising in the distance, beside which the train trestle looked like an old man’s backbone, like Bellyache’s might be by now, broken up and hunched up and still somehow standing. “This railway’s been lost to that.”

  “Like the water will be.”

  “But the water’ll just rot and stink up like a corpse.”

  “Starting to stink already,” I said.

  “And sink. Heavy with dirt and disease.”

  “Really? Sinking water?”

  “Water will one day be gone.”

  “So we’ll get to New York while we still can.”

  “Sure,” said Dave. “Then none of this wilderness shit will matter to us anymore.”

  His body was so stiffened up, I thought I could hear it rusting on the spot. Dave stretched out on his back, arm flung over his eyes to keep out the bright hurt of daylight.

  “Wish I had some ice,” he said. “Just a few cubes for my eyes. And some too for my sides.”

  Did what I could for Dave. One of his bandannas I took and wet in the cool of the Champlain. Head in my lap, I daubed his stubbled face while he stayed quiet and still and drifted in and out of sleep. The cut under his lip where the teeth had gone through, that had clotted and was already partly husked in scab. His eyes were swollen, but not as badly bruised as they had been back on the Ottawa River. There was a cut on the bridge of his nose, and his cheeks wore patches of scratch from where he’d taken face-dives in the dirt. Beneath the right eye, the cut from the bush bash had mostly shed its scab, but showing through was a bright pink worm.

  When the bandanna was warm, I went back to the water. Rinsed away the bits of blood and dirt and I brought it back, cool and wet again. Dave was sitting up and he had his jacket off. Groaning, he rolled up his T-shirt and together we saw the violence he wore, his brown skin mottled in a confusion of black and blue, pocked with bright, sore red.

  “Christ, you and him should have taken your boots off.”

  “I know,” he said. “This is the worse it’s ever been, me against him.”

  “Ought to go in the water,” I said. “Will cool that pain.”

  Dave got to his feet and I found his soap, the cloth we’d both been using to wash, and also, when it was dry, for a towel. His smoky sleeping bag too. Brought these down to the water. His naked back to me, he was bent over, undoing his boots. The knobs of his spine stuck out like a string of sharp beads. Kicked off his boots, then he took down his pants, moving so tender all the while, and when I came up behind him, he was naked except for filthy grey underwear. In some other life they must have been white, looking bright against his dark skin, and also, I supposed, they had not drooped and bagged, but were snug in how they had fit him.

  “Here,” I said. Passed him the soap. The cloth. Set the sleeping bag down on the shore.

  The lake before us was silver grey, still, and cool. It was painted in a kind of sadness I had never seen before. Was peace, I guess. The meaning, the feeling, like learning after so long, a lifetime maybe, just to breathe.

  “What state are we in?”

  “Vermont, I think.”

  “So green here. Hills are soft, not like up north.”

  Dave would not look at me. Shivering beside me, shy in his new body, shrivelled and beaten and so worn out, skinny besides, if it were not for the sun and the day, I would have reached out and taken hold of him. Rubbed him down. Smoothed him out. Touched his flesh with my mouth.

  But I still needed a bit of darkness to do that.

  * * *

  Down shore from Dave I got the rod going. Fished a fat trout. Killed it with a stone. Unhooked its lip and then I paunched it. Its guts I tossed out into the water. Built a fire just there beside the railroad tracks and cooked it, split open and hung lengthwise along a thick green stick of maple. Flames of fire were soaked up into the light of the morning such that they were made almost invisible.

  Dave was wrapped up in his sleeping bag, close to the fire. His hair was thick with clean and it shone in the sun. He said he felt better, his body less burdened with the leftover burn of his father’s booted kicks. He had shaved his face too, but carefully, going around the hole beneath his bottom lip, the scratches on his cheeks.

  “Sure nothing’s broken?” I asked. Winced at the sight of his bruised ribs. He was putting on his cleanest shirt, the one for Lupicide.

  “Maybe cracked. One or two,” he said. “Nothing you can do about that, though.”

  When the meat went white, we laid it out on a dusted rock, salted it with the McDonald’s packets and devoured it with our fingers.

  Going for my matches to light a smoke, my fingers touched the tooth, now in my jacket pocket.

  Put it on the ground between us. “What’ll you do with this?”

  Dave took the tooth, held it in his open palm.

  “Can’t burn bone,” I said. “Could drown it, though. Flick it in the water.”

  “No. I’m going to keep it.”

  “For a guitar pick, right? Like you said, when you get your metal band going?”

  “That’s horseshit, kid. I can’t play the guitar. Just drums.”

  “So be in a punk band. Then what you don’t know won’t matter.”

  “Maybe.”

  Paused. Lit the smoke I had rolled. Dave was rubbing the tooth between thumb and forefinger, his hands so clean now, they were almost someone else’s.

  “Was really from an acid dream, Dave? Your dad hungering after that tooth?”

  “An acid dream, I guess. An acid fight too. You know how that stuff makes you so invincible.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I felt that before.”

  “That’s the only reason I beat him, knocked out this here tooth.”

  “Too bad you didn’t drop this time. Should have saved some hits for it, special.”

  “No, I had to lose that fight. Else maybe he would have crossed the border, kept on coming. Just had to teach me one last lesson.”

  “That he’s the father.”

  “The stronger, therefore.”

  Dave put the tooth in his pocket. “I’ll keep it, and it’ll help me remember the shit of all this. Sitting there in the California sun, I’ll look at the tooth and it’ll keep me humble, you know?”

  Nodded. “Sure. After you get things going for yourself, in the movies and all, you don’t want a swollen head.”

  “The tooth will keep me honest.”

  “And it’ll be proof, in case no one believes you, about all this.”

  “Including me.”

  “Especially so. That’s true.”

  Side by side under Dave’s blue tarp. Sunlight leaking through. My dry sleeping bag unzipped and thrown over us. Rolled over and got my arms around Dave’s waist, pulled myself into him. Smelling the same, of wood and water, even through his clean and my dirt. Our mouths found each other, tongues and teeth. His taste was of blood and smoke, salt from the fish we’d eaten, like mine must have been too. Though I wanted to, I did not hold hard and tight to Dave, for that would have hurt him. His wrecked body, I touched as light as I knew how. Wounds on his face, I used my scabby fingers to trace, my lips heated up the bruises.

  No one else in the world would have us, and so we found ourselves together. A goddamn miracle as much as it was a curse.

  Touched Dave, smoothed his injuries, and smothered his frays until we both could do nothing but sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Dave was up before me. Rolled out from under the tarp. Rubbed the rust from my eyes, shod myself with the boots I’d used for a pillow, and walked down to the water. Dave was standing there on shore, the fishing rod going. Above him the sun had long ago ripened and was now growing old. When he
heard my spurs approaching, he turned to me and said how good this lake seemed to be for fish.

  Said he felt good now. The sleep had been a deep one.

  “Strong to go on?”

  He nodded.

  Watching the sun sink down into the western sky, we ate another trout, less fat this time. Sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes, picking bits of tobacco from our lips and just saying nothing at all. When the horizon had soaked up the sun, Dave and me stamped out the remains of the fire, set the canoe to water, and pushed on into the night.

  We were closing in on the head of Champlain and looking forward to the Hudson. Setting out at dusk, there was enough light remaining that we saw how mountainous the terrain on either side of the water was becoming, how soft were the rolling hills, how they flowed back into the horizon, not unlike the waves on a deep and roughened ocean.

  The moon was as good as full and the stars were out too. Paddled past cities on the shore, passed by small towns, stretches of black emptiness studded here and there with what looked like the blinks of fallen stars. Dodged islands, saw radio towers throbbing red, airports with their runways lit up like stages. More and more there came the strobe of traffic spilling down the highway along the western shore. Back there in the stern I watched the land less than I watched Dave Bashed-up-Boat. Though he was shit-kicked, he was up there slicing pretty easy through the water. That paddle of his, when I’d first struck out with him, had been shiny and almost new, but was by now all gashed up and gouged out, especially along the blade where the wood was raw and fresh looking, like the skin under a picked scab. Knew his paddle and my paddle and that boat better now than what I could think my own face looked like or must look like: still rough and ravaged was likely, as rough and ravaged as the canoe we went by and the paddles we used to drive it. And I knew the back of Dave Bashed-up-Boat better than I did his front, his shoulders more familiar than his chest. And I saw the Metallica patch before I saw his eyes, and I saw all the black hair falling down his back before I could ever picture his high forehead or his cheekbone with that big long gash.