Life on Mars

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Life on Mars Page 12

by Lori McNulty


  Bella began scratching the earth with her worn rubber heel. “Here,” she said. She could not find her way back. “To this state.” Her boots had not even marred the mountain face. By morning, the trail would be snow-dusted, not even a bare trace of her footsteps remaining.

  He replied that all along his back were twisted scars, and these trails were old wounds that would lead her back to him.

  Bella strapped her arms tightly against her chest. Feeling the tender flesh along her breastbone, the skin growing rough and thick, coarser than even a month previous, she began to shake, feverish. When she buried her pale face in her arms, he sent down a fine bedrock spray, a gale of laughter to wipe away her tears.

  “Forget it. Just let me be,” Bella said and turned abruptly from his spiked ridges, setting off down his rocky slopes.

  On a sombre walk through the woods, Bella had trouble squeezing breath from her lungs, her lumbering legs growing heavier with each step. Resting for a few minutes on a rock, Bella saw the yearling bear climbing over the log before she could react.

  Clap. Make noise.

  Run.

  The startled mother reared on hind legs. Bella felt the magnificent paw graze her cheek. The trees were growling as she took three faint-headed steps backward. A huff-pant. Chest wide. Another low growl seemed to split the earth open at her feet. Her legs collapsed, Bella stumbled back, her body careening off balance, spilling backward through stunted trees, then into a knot of prickly bushes on the wet slope, before tumbling down into a muddy ravine. She awoke with a faint smile, on a mossy green pillow, touched the fine blood bead running across her cheek; the cold seeped into her like a soft, psychedelic rain.

  Cynth reads aloud from the guidebook. “After the encounter, the Participant will acknowledge her behaviour. If she admits it, pack a bag and escort her for treatment. If she denies it, the consequences must begin immediately.”

  Bella holds her hand up, requesting permission to use the toilet.

  “Follow me,” Cynth says, as she leads Bella to the smartly decorated powder room at the end of the hall. Her friend lays a gentle hand on her shoulder, tucking a glossy pamphlet into her back pocket. “It’s okay. They know how to treat a situation like yours.”

  Door shut in Cynth’s powder room, Bella gives a tired sigh. She unbuttons her shirt, holds her arms out at her side.

  Feet set wide on the tile floor, her chest is fully exposed. She bares her teeth, rubs the back of her hand across her ruddy, wind-bitten cheeks. Holding her hands below the open taps, the sound is like a hot roaring breath in her palms. Bella rakes a hand through her matted locks, pulling from them a clutch of mountain heather, its white bells scattering across the bathroom tile.

  “Ready, honey?” Her father knocks lightly, her packed suitcase in his hand.

  Exiting the powder room, Bella returns down the hallway and back into the living room. She watches the room recoil as she grabs a bunch of grapes from the fruit platter, chews noisily, and spits the seeds across the table.

  Raff jumps up. Louise knocks her wine to the floor. Her father reaches out for her. Cynth gasps, when, with a great heaving breath, Bella yawns, shakes their grip, and climbs out the open window.

  The following summer, Bella treks along a lakeside trail to where a wide-winged glacier drapes across the jagged mountain face. Continuing up through the subalpine, she follows a rocky ridge that breaks toward a blooming alpine meadow. Her belly filled with bright berries plucked ripe from a thorny bush en route, she lies back in the purple field where mountain crocuses trumpet in a jazz of moonlight.

  Hooked to her belt, a sealed map marking the hidden route to a high alpine crossing.

  In her survival pack: a knife, poncho, and potato.

  Last Down

  Samuary.

  That’s what we called it.

  The month Sam Feltimore carted out his brand-new cowhide, shipped all the way from Detroit by his divorced dad. Brown-paper packaged. Not even a shitty Christmas bow.

  Coldest afternoon on the planet. New Year’s 1981.

  Ass-deep in snow on the backfield of St. Joseph’s High.

  First down.

  And counting.

  No one else from the neighbourhood can hack the cold, so it’s just me, Pork-Eye, and Nick against the dead-end zoners, Sam, Prem, and Kevin.

  Across the line, Prem’s yellow turban winds above his head like a creamy malt. He caresses his beefy chest with gloved hands, then paws the ground between us.

  “Sugar Mounds, you’re going down.”

  “Shut up, Phlegm!”

  I look down at my moundless number thirty-three and spit into the snow.

  “Ready set.” I am starting quarterback Tom Clements. Capacity crowd in my ears. I’ll drop back into the pocket and roll right, unless there’s a scramble, in which case I’ll hit Nick going long.

  I look left. All fibreglass and flames along the scrimmage line, helmets spray-painted with a lightning-streaked W, a rough and ready R: Go Riders! Go Ticats! Go Bombers! Go Argos! Winning teams spray-painted over the losing ones, because after the Cup anything goes.

  “Stand back and wince, Dickhead,” I yell at Prem, who keeps taunting me with his rabid tongue-flicks.

  “Sack this,” he shoots back, grabbing his crotch.

  I look over at Yani, who is draped over a coat pile on the sidelines, a legal thriller wedged between his mitts. He yells at Prem, something about his missing ball sack.

  “Hut one. Hut two. Hit me, P-Eye.”

  Downfield, Nick sprints, slips on a patch of ice, then cuts across, waving at me like he’s flagging a rescue ship. I launch a tight spiral just ahead of his defender, and the ball sails right into Nick’s arms and dribbles through them again to sink missile-deep in snow.

  Prem trots up to me while I’m wiping down the football with a tea towel tucked in my jeans. “You’re like a female puppy today. Can’t hit a target and you smell like shit.”

  That’s when Yani decides to help Prem find his missing ball sack.

  Samuary.

  Practice. Push-ups. Don’t hesitate. Long into that afternoon, I could hear my father’s voice in my head. Step into it. Relax, May, open your shoulders up. Remember, ninety degrees at the elbow and armpit.

  All day I threw bullets against the pale winter sky, found the open man on the field, could see each play unfolding long before we even clapped out of the huddle.

  What happened between Yani and me in those last weeks of December, I’ve never been able to master.

  Two years ago, Yani showed up at my high school all twitchy and brooding, refusing to remove his Jets toque at assembly. He was fourteen, a year older than me in grade nine. New kid. Nasty mouth. Instant attraction.

  I volunteered to buddy-walk him around school. Soon, we were patrolling the hallways, wearing our screw-you armour. I wasn’t pretty-popular like my older sister, Amy. Never part of the please-give-us-tits-by-summer brigade. But I could do fractal geometry and advanced algebra in my sleep. Yani was pure brain monkey, wicked with words. Approach him without a wry joke about test-tube babies and he’d bite.

  In our black-and-white world, Yani was this baffling, bulging grey matter, with his laboured hop-step and a Jets toque soon to become more famous at school than a Bee Gees’s beard. Our quest was greatness. At least in our own minds. I went from being a somewhat recognized five-foot-nothing pixie-cut jock or brain (depending on who you asked), to being part of an infamous duo. In our dawning teen years, this was a serious second wind.

  When Yani came down with double pneumonia the next year, he stayed away from school for eight weeks. I wandered around cursing Christ Almighty, but it was Gordy who ended up needing resurrection.

  “He was only down for a sec,” I protested to Principal Charon. Tried to explain how Gordy had found one of Yani’s long-missing Jets toques, had gone limping down the hall like he was one of Jerry’s telethon kids. Gordy hadn’t counted on my rough start in French Roman Catholic school, where ki
ds had sold baggies of hash at recess or got assaulted on safety patrol duty while wearing their subtle orange belts and sashes. I knew my Tabernac from my Criss de calice and definitely my Osti de tabarnak de calice. I could say the Lord’s Prayer in French and curse it in English, and no cretin like Gordy was ever going to mess with Yani. Maudit marde!

  When I told Gordy to quit, he forced my arm behind my back. I swung around, striking out wildly then slipped from his grasp, squeezing his hand so hard Gordy literally squealed.

  Two eyebrow stitches and a sprained wrist later, I got hauled into Charon’s office. Man was shark-eyed and short-fused, so much so Yani and I called him Heir Emperor, to the left of Genghis Khan. I had seen Charon openly berate a social studies teacher because he had both his ears pierced and wore pants so tight if he leaned over, we joked he might split the atom. Charon pulled out a rattling bottom drawer that he kept filled with confiscated pocket knives. Withdrawing one with a fake wood-grain handle, he leaned forward, unfolding the blade in his hands. A girl with such excellent grades, he admonished, his eyes forecasting my ever-diminishing prospects.

  “He mocked a disabled kid.”

  “Yani’s not the issue.”

  “Gordy’s a manipulative freak.”

  “He’s got a gash above his left eye,” he said, gesturing to his own furtive brow, “and you’re getting a three-day suspension.” He began writing something serious in a leather notebook.

  “Welcome to Stalin’s Gulag,” I huffed, mostly under my breath, and sat back.

  So the principal’s blade flashed in his hands. So I pulled my chair closer to his desk, letting the steel legs scrape across the vinyl floor. He was so tall, twisting that sharp blade in his hands, but the disparity worked in my favour. He tried to joke at first. Said he had a kid in there last week with a broken pinky finger and told the boy it was easier to cut off the finger than to set it. I looked up into his eyes, then down at the open blade he kept testing in his palm, and finally leaned forward and placed my fingers flat on his desk.

  “Go ahead,” I said, fanning my fingers wide. “I plan to write a book about you one day.”

  Yani was my triple-weave Kevlar companion, my Batman cape, my mission. His presence gave me courage.

  All over the TV, men were aiming shoulder-mounted machine guns at each other. There were soldiers, some as young as Yani, hobbling across scorched earth, blowing up decimated villages. Tanks and helicopters flew over hillsides, missiles landed in places I couldn’t yet identify on a map. After dinner my parents talked about Saddam Hussein like he was a recurring character in some serial horror flick. While they moaned about the oil crisis that December, Yani and I were busy building a brick wall. On one side stood the world, on the other Yani and I, wild with indignation over Cheron and Ethiopian famine and saccharine mainstream pop, and growing comfortably numb to Pink Floyd over a half-mug of stolen vodka from Yani’s father’s basement stash.

  Meanwhile my older sister, Ames, was going to graduate in a few months and go backpacking with friends to summon the ghost of Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise. I couldn’t abide my sister’s lack of athletic grace, her desperate need to triumph on student council. The two of us fought so hard my father started calling us the Iran-Iraq conflict. While I was wedged into the purgatory of a grade eleven classroom, she was getting ready to see the world.

  Escalating struggles had become an obsession. I had gone wild for the doomed Romanovs, with that crazy Rasputin and their sad sack of a hemophiliac son. Fell for men in fur hats and porcelain-skinned women roaming gilded palaces in St. Petersburg. Back then, revolts and revolutions were still twinkling and remote, exotic as the embroidered silver cloth that bound Czarina Alexandra’s slender waist at her wedding. My own graduation plan was to visit the Winter Palace with Yani, to take in the Baroque architecture, walk the red velvet staircase, and pore over the gods on the eighteenth-century ceiling paintings before my sister ever set foot on the continent. During our bloodless coup, we would storm the palace just like Bolsheviks, and take home a souvenir Lenin pin. Yani, Lenin, and I were like leaders in exile, part of a revolutionary faction, an idea you couldn’t split, until the fractures started forming in December.

  It was three weeks before Christmas and everyone on earth seemed to think looking smart meant shelling out two bucks for a Rubik’s Cube. I had orders to buy Ames a gift, and new locks for our front door weren’t going to cut it. Leaving the mall, I spotted Yani on the other side of the street, stepping off the downtown bus. He was favouring his hip. It made my chest hurt seeing him try to stumble over all the plowed snow. When I called out, he pretended not to hear me. I ran over anyway.

  Yani and I had been struggling. In late October we were hardly speaking. Not in the hallways. Not behind the chain-link fence, where we used to mock the stoners. Not at our favourite diner with the mile-high greasy fries and the missing toilet seat. I had made one goddamn mistake. His name was Finn.

  Finn was only in my life for five minutes in mid-October. Our mothers had volunteered to drag us out to help at an annual charity drive for disadvantaged kids, complete with white cake, pumpkin vomit, and kids shrieking in pirate hats and black capes. On a break, we decided to go for a walk around the park to stave off madness. He was from a different school, had a bristly patch of blond fuzz on his chin, and a lisp that I expected tasted of sour cherry gum. Yani spotted us eating fries at our usual diner and went AWOL. He plunged into after-hours physics. Hung out with some Zork-obsessed dude named Letsky.

  He took my calls. But his answers were often staccato, impatient, occasionally insulting. Apparently, I didn’t understand the definition of sacred. The diner was not our hallowed ground, I told him, and Finn had spent most of the hour sucking on ice chips after burning the tip of his tongue on a french fry. Anyway, I never saw Finn again.

  “Hey,” I said, out of breath as I reached Yani, who was still struggling with the plowed snow.

  Yani pulled his toque down so low he resembled one of Pac-Man’s ghosts.

  “Whatsup?” he said, coolly, like nothing had happened between us.

  I knew Yani’s dad had recently moved out and was shacked up with Anna, who worked in the principal’s office and did the books for Yani’s father. I had called him. He didn’t take the phone.

  “How is your mom doing?” I said in a voice too pity-filled for him to bear.

  He drove his cane into a foot of fresh snow. “What did the normal baby say to the test-tube baby?”

  “Your dad’s a wanker,” I answered automatically.

  “Exactly,” Yani observed, looking away.

  “It’s a real goddamn tragedy,” I replied, trying to find the right distance.

  Yani just kept poking deeper holes in the snow mound around him.

  “Come on,” I gestured toward the mall. “Let’s get some Cokes.”

  “Look,” he said in a robotic voice, waving his cane at the rush of shoppers. “Tiny … computer … chip … in … brain … must … spend, spend, spend.” He tapped his temples.

  Giant lacy snowflakes began falling across our shoulders. We were in a classic Russian novel. There was a family scandal. A doomed friendship. Looming exile. It was almost Romanov.

  “Got a few quarters for the arcade,” I offered, tentatively.

  Yani declined, saying he and his mom were headed for his aunt’s house for a few days so he needed to get back.

  “Maybe he’ll come around. Make it up to you guys?” I said.

  “Well, you should understand betrayal,” he replied so sharply it was as if someone had run cold tap water up my spine.

  “I’ve been here this whole time,” I pointed out and wouldn’t let him leave until he eased up and agreed to come mock the grade niners with their spectacular feathered hair wings at the school Christmas dance the following week.

  He grunted and made a Pac-Man whirring sound.

  “Game over,” he muttered, turning around, and tapping his cane in the direction of the westbound b
us.

  Christmas dance. Last one before the holiday break. Glory days for green-and-red crêpe paper, blue hair gel, and hallway bitches in baggy knit sweaters. Lurking near the stage, I watched three boob bunnies in floppy Santa hats hop toward the shaggy lead singer, who was strumming a cover tune on his cheap Yamaha guitar. Definitely not excellent.

  Adrift in my sister’s sateen gypsy blouse I fanned out my pencil arms in the crowded, overheated gym. Yani and I had been counting down the days to freedom, practising our best Clint Eastwood lip snarl for our upcoming Escape from Alcatraz movie marathon at the repertory theatre. Scanning the gym’s darkest corners, I found Yani doing his usual back-bleacher sprawl, showing off his derisive smirk for the crowd. He was wearing his ripped Ramones T-shirt, eyes squinting like he’d just broken out of an alien seedpod. I waved at him. He returned a look of unfettered dread about being there, something between post-apocalyptic annihilation and invasion-of-the-body-snatcher paranoia. Imitating one of the invading clones, I held my arm out and hissed. I gestured for him to join me. He nodded his head but didn’t budge from his roost.

  I had begged him to come. Even suggested wrapping his yellow cane in black electrical tape. “A caution sign,” I joked, though no one needed the warning.

  On the field at the park, even the men turned to watch me throw spirals. Here at the dance, sporting this Frankenstein sweep of my sister’s pink blush and blow-dried bangs, I watched the guys just turn their backs.

  Except Sam, who asked me to dance when the cover band struck up ELO’s “Turn to Stone,” the fog machine spewing vapour across our sneakers. We hip swayed, a foot apart. A soft breath away from my ear, he shouted that his dad was driving all the way up from Detroit after Boxing Day. Then the band began a slow strum. Sam stepped closer, put his hands around my waist, drew my hips against his. A sweaty-sock-ball feeling climbed in my throat, his musky Brut making my behind-the-knee-pits perspire. He pressed his lips to my ear, asked if I want to see an action flick with him and his dad over the holidays. I nodded approval. We swayed, belly to pelvis, his hand falling to the small of my back. We inched closer. My face flushed. When the song stopped, Sam broke away.

 

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