Thirteen Shells

by Nadia Bozak

  The phone rings. Jesse throws down his cigarette butt, pushes through the booth’s doors.

  “Yeah?” he says, practically swallowing the receiver. And then he listens, his eyes flicking back and forth like crazy.

  Carla and Shell guard Jesse’s skateboard. Then Kremski comes riding up the sidewalk, scanning the ground for cigarettes. Shell pulls Carla — quick — around the corner.

  “I bet you-know-who will be there,” Carla gushes, less to Shell than to the spring sky above.

  Outside the phone booth, Kremski toes Jesse’s smoking butt, shoulders hunched and neck flesh hanging loose over his collar. Dad doesn’t look that old yet. Not even close. Kremski’s bald spot has taken over his entire head. Or else it’s the yellow of his beard or the clouded eyes behind his glasses — the same metal frames he’s had since he was giving Shell Soviet Barbie dolls and buying lemonade at her stands.

  “No. Who?” Shell ducks behind Carla as Kremski pushes on towards the bus stop, a gold mine of half-smoked butts.

  Carla links Shell’s arm. “Walk me to work?”

  The phone booth, when they pass it, is empty now and Jesse’s skateboard is gone.

  At the back of Harvey’s hamburgers, Shell and Carla sit on overturned milk crates next to a pile of juicy garbage bags. A sack of pre-cut french-fried potatoes props open a bent metal door; fatty meat sizzles inside and boiling grease smokes. Shell unhooks a safety pin from the cuff of her jacket and bends it open. She smears deep green hash oil on a cigarette paper, which she then rolls into a slim joint. Carla lights her Zippo. Shell leans in. The joint comes alive with an earthy, comforting reek.

  “Christ, I look hideous.”

  Carla always says that before a shift. Her short-sleeved Harvey’s blouse is held at the bust with safety pins while the regulation polyester pants are fuzzy and too tight, so she’s always checking her reflection in the chrome fridge to make sure she does not have what her sister Jasmine calls “hungry buns.” But Carla jangles her big silver hoop earrings anyway, insists on her red Chuck Taylor high-tops though they’re against the rules, and always gives extra pickles to any cool guy who comes in.

  “So what about that guy Jesse?” Shell tucks her vial into the secret pocket sewn inside her backpack.

  “Who? Lipper?” Carla wrinkles her nose but is too nice to imitate that snarling lip. “You into him?”

  Carla’s sister Jasmine is twenty-one and already lives on her own, and from her Carla knows about boys, as well as how to skip school, apply eyeliner, get into bars without ID, and smoke. And also Carla shaves her legs, buys her own specialty shampoo, and wears tampons not pads, because pads are like diapers. The first time Carla slept over, she ate a bag of cookies then threw up in the basement toilet. Throwing up works for Jasmine; she is tall and slender and wears tight jeans in a way Shell and Carla long to do — without shirttails hanging down to conceal bulges and rolls.

  “No,” Shell says. “Not into. He’s just kinda familiar.”

  Carla holds in her toke until the smoke seeps out her nostrils. “He’s older. A little intense. Oh, and he loves that frickin’ skateboard.”

  “So what’s with the lip?” Shell takes her turn on the joint.

  “Heard Maček say it’s from a fight.” Carla sips from her Harvey’s cup of icy fountain Pepsi. “Like the other guy had a knife.”

  “Really? Oww.” Shell burns her fingers on the paper.

  Carla unhooks a roach clip from her key chain. “I mean, that’s what Maček said. Who knows? But imagine kissing that guy? Very weird.”

  Shell shrinks up and looks at the toes of her boots.

  “Yeah. Weird.”

  The door behind them opens wide.

  “Heads up!”

  A wet garbage bag comes flying, missing the Dumpster and spilling its guts on the pavement.

  “Jackasses.” Carla sucks in the final toke. She crushes the roach under her sneaker then puts on her orange sun visor with the hamburger on the brim. “I’m pretty high.”

  “Me too,” Shell says. “Stay away from the deep fryers, buddy.”

  When Carla laughs, her chestnut eyes twinkle like stars are supposed to.

  Shell promises to be back at nine-thirty. “I’ll help you mop up.”

  Shell takes off her boots and gets into her sour basement bed. The floor is stacked with banker’s boxes Mum brought home from school. Now that the last boarder has finally moved out, Shell’s old room just needs to be painted and then Shell can move back in. But the paint has to be something creamy white; the deep dark Sugar Plum that Shell circled on the colour wheel is out of the question. Shell clicks the tape player on the floor: the Doors. If she had been born back when Mum was, she would have gone to see Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin and Black Sabbath. Above all else, she’d have found her way to the Chelsea Hotel and made friends with Patti Smith.

  Shell tries a poem about Jesse — his snarl, his smoke, the darting eyes, how time works backwards as much as forwards, and the way things in your past you thought you were moving away from are actually coming up ahead. But the poem succumbs to some kind of dark Dr. Seuss rhyme, so she flips the page and starts a letter to good old Patti Smith.

  Dear Patti, I met this skater today. I know him, Patti. I know it’s him from before. What does that mean, Patti? Because it means something — a secret something, like fate. Don’t you think?

  Dinner is Whole wheat spaghetti with lean chicken meatballs and green salad — all homemade except the noodles. Now that it’s just the two of them, Mum’s back to cooking from scratch again; both she and Shell could slim down a bit. “Enough with the Fig Newtons and frozen junk,” she said. The radio in the kitchen has the news on loud, otherwise it’ll be a whole lot of silence. Mum’s hungry; her eyes — the grey drained to merest silver — do not look up from her plate.

  “How’s the rich-bastard Sumac Valley kids?” Shell asks of the high school near her and Dad’s fiddlehead ravine.

  The first day Mum supplied there, she stopped at Consumers Distributing on the way home and bought an electric razor. Now she keeps her legs hair free: smooth white bone caught in a net of fine purple veins. And she doesn’t wear as many handmade clothes, and also she parks the brown Datsun station wagon on a side street where the kids can’t get at it with their keys; she’s still paying off the paint job to hide the pentagram scratched on the door.

  “Oh, just a joy,” Mum says, swallowing. “Only one girl fainted from hunger and no angry calls from parents. Where you going tonight, anyway?” Mum reaches for Shell’s dirty plate, stacks it beneath her own.

  “Nowhere. Just over to watch TV with Carla.”

  Shell paints her lips Morocco brown. The piece of rope she ties around her plaid shirt turns it into a dress. A couple of beers clatter in her backpack.

  Cross-legged on the damp floor of her bedroom, she waits — eyes to the ceiling — for Mum’s footsteps to recede up to the second floor and an early night to bed. Splayed on her stomach, Shell reaches under her bed, drawing out the horsehair button box from behind dusty shoeboxes and a garbage bag of sweaters. Shell sneezes. She runs her fingers over the bits and pieces nestled inside the box’s silk interior: a necklace made of pasta shells, a crinkled wedding invitation, the key for her old strap-on roller skates, medicine bottles she and Dad dug up from the backyard. There’s a broken hair comb made of tortoiseshell, a scallop of cracked soap, and also a jagged piece of green glass, the broken bottom of a Mountain Dew bottle. The glass’s serrated edge corresponds to the thick white scar that spans the length and width of Shell’s right foot, cutting clear across the meaty ball. She peels back her sock and holds the glass against the scar; the two seal-like lips, a broken plate, a letter torn in two.

  Mum finally treads up the stairs to the second floor, dragging her fatigue — thump, thump — behind her. It’s nine-fifteen by the blush of the clock radio
by Shell’s bed. She replaces the jagged glass and closes the box. Then she carries her boots up the basement stairs, grabs a pocketful of cookies from the pantry, and, locking the back door behind her, disappears into Friday night.

  The number two Clayton East smells of the greasy Harvey’s bag Carla clutches on her lap. Stopped at a red light, Carla takes out her lipstick and compact and touches up her Firefly lips.

  “Is it straight?” She turns to Shell, plumping out her mouth. Shell nods and Carla says, “Well, yours isn’t, buddy.”

  Against her reflection in the dark bus window, Shell wipes the underside of her bottom lip with a thick finger.

  At Wood Street, a couple of punks get on, each carrying a case of beer. One has a flopped-over bleached Mohawk and the other a shaved head with sideburns. Carla sits up and smiles. The punks don’t look at her, but the guy they’re with, Rollo, says hey. Shell’s stomach jitters. She hunches up and feels for her Essential Rimbaud through her backpack. Maybe she’ll just find a corner to read in until it’s time for her and Carla to catch the last bus home.

  The bright lights inside the bus obscure the city beyond. They pass the toasted corn of Kellogg’s and the bubblegum sweet of Washko, and then — blindness, a tunnel of dark. But Carla’s been out to Dan and Maček’s before and knows when to pull the bell. They exit through the front doors. The punks and Rollo get off at the back. Shell starts to step into a storefront — a dry cleaner’s, but with lush begonias and succulents filling the window — to let them pass. But Carla grabs her arm and pulls her ahead so they’re the ones leading the way. Behind them, the punks and Rollo duck into a Korean grocery store on the corner of King and the dead end called Alberta, down which Shell and Carla have turned.

  This far from the haze of downtown, the firelight from what must be Dan and Maček’s place glares bright. Up and down the short street, the properties are dark and alternate with vacant lots. Dan and Maček’s is right at the end. The front porch is half sunk into the ground. Beneath the glow of a bare red bulb, maybe twenty people are sitting-leaning-crouching, beer bottles in hand. Shell follows Carla up the sloped steps. To the few people who look over, Carla says, hey, they’re looking for Dan and Maček and that Jesse invited them. But no one cares — not the skaters on the front walk pulling tricks; not the new wave girls in pointy boots and short skirts sitting, legs crossed, on the low, sagging couch; not their boyfriends leaning up against the railing opposite, a procession of faded T-shirts for the Cramps, Misfits, Smiths, The Clash, Minor Threat, ccr, Bauhaus, the Doors.

  “Hey, cool, Patti Smith,” one says about Shell, and starts singing, “‘So you wanna be a rock and roll star…’”

  Then Rollo and the punks come up the sidewalk. Against the swell of whistles and high-fives, Carla pulls Shell inside.

  Maček has blond hair to his shoulders, acne-scarred cheeks, and Dracula teeth when he laughs. He is quiet, never gets too high because he’s the one who sells the drugs, so he’s got to keep one eye open, always. Some say he was in the Czech army before he came to Canada and that he left his whole family behind. Dan, Maček’s best friend and business partner, wears black — jeans, runners, raincoat, Slayer T-shirt. His long, wavy hair is dark and the moles on his cheeks are so black they look green. Shell can’t be the only one who thinks Dan’s thick glasses make him look like “Weird Al” Yankovic. As Carla says of guys who are nice but not hot, Dan and Maček are “sweet.”

  The kitchen is bright with fluorescent lights, warm with dope smoke. Dan and Maček smile big when Carla and Shell come in. The back door opens inward; one long leather leg at a time, Darren steps in from the porch. Carla stands tall, sucks in her tummy.

  “Hey, hamburgers!” Dan digs into the paper bag. “Thanks, man.”

  “Awesome.” Darren’s eyes flare open. “Can I grab one?”

  Carla laughs and says she can’t guarantee the burgers won’t have spit in them.

  “Wanna hot knife?” Darren says to Carla when she passes him a wax-papered package. “This one’s a double.” He leans into the greasy stove, turning on the rear burner and propping a pair of blackened butter knives between the element’s rings. When the knives are red-hot, Darren uses one to pick up a pebble of dark brown hash from a plate on the counter. He squeezes the two blades together and a thick coil of hash smoke rises.

  Carla leans over and with an empty toilet paper roll inhales the sweet hash smoke deep into her lungs. She holds the toke, her nostrils flaring, allowing the warm wave of narcotic to wash over her brain. She opens her eyes. Smoke escapes from her lips and nose. And she coughs, good and stoned.

  “Now one for Shell,” Maček tells Darren. His voice is flat. Shell says thanks and Maček gives her his vampire smile. “Here’s to nuclear sanity,” he says, lifting his beer.

  Shell drank too much to remember a lot from the time when, under the Clayton Street Bridge, she and Maček talked about war and disarmament. Shell must have gone on and on about Chomsky again, because now Maček tells everyone she’s pretty smart.

  Shell takes the toilet paper roll from Carla and when the knives are hot, she leans into her toke: a fiery wash of full-body nourishment. In the glow of the smoky kitchen, hot knives brewing and beer and burgers, Carla and Shell are making all kinds of jokes and everyone’s laughing, even Rollo and the punks, who’ve come in with their cases. The fridge is jam-packed, so they start emptying it of beer in cans and bottles, ketchup and spaghetti sauce, a murky jar with a stem of dill weed in the bottom, cramming in their own drinks instead.

  Dan stands up from the sticky table.

  “That’s not cool.”

  Maček, hunching over a marijuana joint, turns around. His voice is gruff from Czech and filterless cigarettes: “Hey man, that’s our stuff.”

  The punks say, “Oh, sorry, man. We’ll get ours chilled and then switch it back, cool?”

  “No,” Maček says, his pale eyes narrowing.

  Then someone calls someone else an asshole. Shell and Carla back away from the gathering scrum. Darren turns off the stove and gathers up his hash. The blackened knives sizzle as he releases them into a dirty pot in the sink. Then the girls from the porch come in to put something on the ghetto blaster and one starts moaning because — what the fuck, man — her beer is sitting out, and that’s when Darren slips out the screen door into the back. Carla follows him and Shell after that.

  In the middle of the narrow yard and towards the back, a campfire rages. While everyone else has found a chair, jacket, milk crate, skateboard, or lap to sit on, Jesse is on his feet, circling the flames, fists full of snapped branches and thin maple switches. Like a matador goading his rival bull, Jesse twists each piece of wood upon inserting it into the fire, challenging the flames to rise and meet his stature. And then, when his fists are empty — the sticks devoured — he picks up a thick arm of crooked maple and shoves it with grit force into the fiery swell. A roar, sparks fly; Jesse’s eyes enlarge along with the broadening flames. But though every other body leans away or otherwise reacts, Jesse does not move. And so he is singed. Hot, popping embers touch down on his bare arms and live there for a moment before they die, extinguished.

  One of a cluster of girls sitting close and passing around a mickey of rum and a bottle of Diet Coke goes: “Hey, watch it, Lipper!” Black ash streaks their faded jeans and there are bits of dry leaves caught in their ponytails. Tomorrow, late morning or afternoon, everyone around this fire will wake to the deep dark smoke still infusing the oils of their hair and skin, the fibres of their denim. And they will think of the kid with that cloven lip who smells the same as they do, only he does not know it or care, and that will make them soap themselves harder, scrubbing the night’s fire from their scalps and eyes, between the legs.

  Shell fishes the beers from her backpack — warm, labels worn, dark European lagers pinched the last time Carla’s sister had a party. Darren opens the bottles against the edge
of the rusted barbecue collapsed in a corner beside the back stoop. They drink — Shell, Carla, and then Darren from Carla’s bottle — and then Darren retrieves a moulded plastic lawn chair from among the junk on the neighbouring porch, ripping the knee of his leather pants climbing back over the saggy chain-link fencing. He wipes the dirty seat with his shirt cuff and offers the chair to Carla while Shell steps backwards into the shadows where she can just watch the party come and go and also, by penlight, read her Rimbaud. But Carla calls her over.

  “Why not talk to Jesse?” she whispers so Darren, on whose lap she is now sitting, will not hear. His hand, on Carla’s thigh just above her knee, has a thick silver ring and the wrist is lopped with a bracelet, which Shell agrees is totally like Jim Morrison.

  “Why?” Shell hisses. “And what the hell about?”

  Carla removes the plastic wrap and protective foil from a fresh pack of Belmont Milds. She holds it out to Shell — twenty-five pristine white cigarettes, as inviting and comforting to consider as a full sheet of cookies just pulled from the oven, as uncut cake, a crisp, clean bed. Shell takes one, another.

  “Go!” Carla says, nodding her away.

  A diseased maple behind the place next door leans over into Dan and Maček’s yard, showering it with misshapen castoffs. Jesse is in the shadows, drinking 50. The breadknife with which he strips leaves from a bundle of fallen wood is rusty and dull.

  “Hey. Jesse?”

  Jesse glances over, his eyes round and his thin face warm with flush.

  Shell takes a Belmont from behind her ear. “Got a light?”

  Jesse pulls a book of matches from the breast pocket of his jean jacket and tosses them over.

  “I remember you,” Shell says, striking-lighting-inhaling.

  Jesse grabs the matches from the palm of her hand, held flat, like feeding an apple to a horse. “Me too.”

  “Really?” Shell smiles. “It was a long time ago.”