by Nadia Bozak
“Huh?” he says. “It was just this afternoon.” He stabs the knife into the earth and wipes his hands on his pants. “You’re that chick Carla’s friend…” His voice is shallow and his words are slurred — not with alcohol but with the cleft that so wholly pinches away what might otherwise be an upper lip.
“Shell.”
He considers the word and then turns his attention back to the flames.
“And you’re Jesse.” Shell offers him her cigarette. Jesse’s fingers are chicken feet compared with her own, thick with abundant food and Nivea cream. Jesse is not much taller than Shell, either, and while her clothes cannot disguise her wide hips and broad shoulders and thick legs, it is not clear just exactly how scrawny is the body floating within the loose articles Jesse wears. The narrowness of his hands and wrists, however, suggests they are connected to a sinewy skeleton with countable ribs, a bony butterfly for a pelvis, and a chest that’s caved in.
Then there is nothing more to say, so Shell picks up Jesse’s bundle of sticks, divides it in half.
“I know about fires too,” she says, tossing the cigarette — now a butt — into the flames, which have grown milder.
Jesse and Shell roam the fire’s periphery, building the flames into a bellowing mass, the heat and spew of which force those around to move further back, to the fenceline. This includes the ponytailed girls with the rum and Diet Coke. They get up and, brushing off their damp bums, look at Shell with dirt in their eyes, with piss and stink, and one whose bangs touch her lips calls Shell or Jesse — or both — freak.
That’s okay.
The flames, for Shell, are an instrument she cannot play, the dull moan she goes to sleep with every night, the stupid scream of having to live here in Somerset and be ugly and fat when really, inside, she is as light and breezy and full of poetry as the rock star on her chest. And looking at Jesse through the crackling flames, Shell hears in their orange heat his own wail, howl, growl, which, if he played a guitar or basketball or had a mountain to climb or field to plant, would come out no less powerfully, but oh so different. And maybe then he’d be free.
Maček touches Shell’s arm. “Hey, fire’s too big.” He says the same to Jesse, offering him a can of Blue.
The cops come not twenty minutes later anyway. Everyone goes home.
Now that it’s spring, there’s parties both nights of every weekend and sometimes on weeknights too. Or maybe it’s just that Carla and Shell know more people now and are themselves starting to get known as being pretty funny and cool for fifteen-year-olds.
Shell helps Carla mop the floors at Harvey’s and together they walk over to Field Street, south of downtown and near the forks of the river. The air is chill from recent rain. Carla borrowed a black scoop-neck from Jasmine, showing off the moonstone pendant Shell stole for her from Siddhartha. Over that, Carla’s wearing the corduroy blazer that was once Jasmine’s, while Shell has a Salvation Army jean jacket on top of her plaid. Her Patti Smith T-shirt is the same as always, because if anything is going to give Shell luck or power tonight, it’s that shirt.
“Whose place is it?”
Carla and Shell pass a cigarette back and forth, sipping from the mickey of Prince Igor vodka Shell got from the lcbo. An old guy fished it for her; she was so polite, how could he resist? Excuse me, sir? I forgot my ID and…
Carla winces. “Next time, get something smooth. Okay, dudette? Jägermeister or Bailey’s, please.” The only thing Carla knows about the party is that gorgeous, beautiful, sweet-hearted Darren invited her at school today. “Oh, and it’s number thirty-two.”
Field Street is behind the beer factory, so maybe the permanent stink of hops accounts for some of the parties and fires and fighting. Or else it’s just the concentration of subsidized housing and the open flow of drugs into and out of downtown. Of the empty bungalows that line the stubby street, every other one has squatters inside. The smell of their fires is toxic, garbagey; flashlights in the windows strobe yellow and blue as, elsewhere, TVs might. One house is burned to the ground. Shell wonders how many charred corpses are inside.
“Christ, Shell,” Carla says, “you are just so morbid all the time.”
“You sure you got that address right?” Shell says.
“Yeah.” Carla squints at the shadowed houses. “Darren wouldn’t tell me wrong. Right? Shell?”
The neat brick bungalow on the next corner has no house number. Instead, a beware of dog sign carefully reordered as beware of god hangs on the door; the mailbox alongside says male.
Maček, Dan, and Darren are in the kitchen, near the stove, though there are, as yet, no hot knives going. One of those mint-green dinette sets from the time of ducktails and banana splits dominates the room, along with a wide window through which a back porch is visible. A circle of guys in ball caps lounge in lawn chairs; so does Moses, combing his beard with his nails, eyes rolled back and lids as fluttery as trapped moths. Jesse and his skateboard are outside too, down on the porch steps, his backpack on, turned away from the party.
Shell sits down at the table. The couple who live here are about as old as Mum and Dad. In fact, they probably know Mum and Dad. The tall, thin lady has an underbite and hair dyed Eggplant with drugstore Flirt. The guy has red hair in an army brush cut and a dimple poked deep into his chin — like a finger testing dough — and silver John Lennon glasses that make him look like the folksinger Bruce Cockburn. They both wear black tank tops and Levi’s safety-pinned at the ankles and have so many tattoos it’s like the ink is part of their clothing. While the lady wears a silver ankh around her neck, the guy’s is wreathed with a Polaroid camera. Of the piles and shelves of books around, most are glossy hardcovers that have to do with African tribes or samurai, but there’s also tons of homemade Xeroxed cartoon books, the covers showing cone-shaped boobs and penises doing violence. Crates of records are stacked as high as the walls in the living room, and whatever Japanese-type stuff is currently on the turntable plays low enough that people can talk. The guy, Bruce Cockburn, is shooting Polaroids of a girl with about a million earrings and two hoops in her nose and her forearms covered in bloody Band-Aids.
“Nice, nice,” he keeps saying as she peels back the Band-Aids.
One of Kremski’s oil paintings hangs on the wall: a grizzly blowing a big pink bubble of gum. Shell always loved that one. Kremski laughed at her when she asked how much allowance she should save up to buy it.
Shell whispers to Carla she’s sure her parents know that guy.
“Who? The Bruce Cockburn look-alike?”
They laugh and Carla mock-sings “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” but Shell keeps her back to him all the same and even pulls her hair over her face.
Maček gives Shell a bottle of Radeberger beer.
“Cool.” It’s what her dad drinks.
Maček says, “Nice.” And it’s too bad the cops gave them a noise fine because they won’t have another party for a while. Shell’s sorry about how big the fire got. Maček smiles — Dracula — and says it’s cool. “That’s what parties are for.” But he says Carla and Shell can come over any time, it’s just that things will be mellow for a while. “Okay?”
“Oh, okay,” Shell says.
Carla pinches her when Maček goes to help Darren pick the right type of butter knives, singing, “Maček likes yoooouuuu!”
“Fuck off, does not.”
Carla goes: “Don’t say fuck off to me.”
“Sorry. But you’re scaring me with that shit, okay?”
Carla rolls her eyes and goes to stand next to Darren at the stove.
Shell finishes the beer from Maček then remembers her and Carla’s Prince Igor. There’s nothing else to do, so she sips. And again. And then her belly and brain get fuzzy, just enough to feel like everything’s going to be okay. But after the next sip the fuzz turns dark, giving way to emptiness, homesickness, something. Shell goes outside, caps t
he Prince Igor, otherwise she’ll wake up on the front lawn again, her bag gone and wanting to kill herself. Hash is just so much better for her and maybe the whole human race.
The handsome guy who works at Mister Sound is talking about his new drum kit. “Like, really tight, man.” He has dark hair and stubble and wears the best T-shirts in Somerset. Tonight is Hüsker Dü.
Jesse is sitting on the lowest step, his skateboard propped between his knees.
“Hey Jesse.”
Jesse shifts his backpack and moves over. Shell sits. It smells like maybe he washed his T-shirt, and his hands are for sure less dirty.
“Things are okay, yeah,” he slurs. He’s crashing at Maček and Dan’s, and Dan’s going to try to get him into his autobody class, too.
“Cool. At Somerset Tech?”
“Yeah.”
“Well then, I’ll see ya, because I go there too.” Shell offers the Prince Igor to Jesse and when he takes it, their fingers meet. Shell’s heart gets warm and fast. Then their knees are touching. Shell takes a long swallow when Jesse passes back the bottle.
She says: “I know where you come from, Jesse. I knew you as a kid. You remember?”
Jesse pulls his knee away from Shell’s. He doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about.
“On Cashel Street. That place you lived. You know, with the school buses?”
The muscles in Jesse’s neck pop. He closes his eyes. “Man, I lived so many fucking places and had so many fucking parents, how can I remember them all?”
It is then that Bruce Cockburn comes out onto the porch. He’s looking for the kid with the best scar of all.
“You know who I mean, right?” he says to the Mister Sound guy.
“Lipper?” says Mister Sound, pointing at the steps with his beer bottle.
From where he stands, Bruce Cockburn cannot see Jesse’s face. If he could, he would retrace his steps right back into the house. And lock the door. Like you do when a growling dog comes between you and wherever it is you had intended to go.
Bruce Cockburn nods his thanks. He crosses the porch with a silent tread, then kneels down and lays his hand on Jesse’s chiselled shoulder.
“Oh, hey. Hey, uh, Lipper? That’s what they call you, right?”
Jesse’s shoulders peak, touching the cartilage of his ears. Finally he turns.
“Wow, that’s quite a scar.” Bruce Cockburn speaks with tenderness. Like a doctor, his gaze fixes upon the injury and not the injured, the illness and not the one who must endure it. “Can I, uh, take your picture?” He holds up his Polaroid and asks Jesse to come inside where there’s light.
“You wanna what?” Jesse says, low and quiet.
“Oh, ah” — Bruce Cockburn pushes up his glasses — “just get a shot of your lip. I mean, I research scarification and I have never seen what you have unless it’s in, like, a Foster Parents Plan ad, you know? Like, it’s really wild.” Bruce Cockburn is talking on and on like people do on cocaine and that’s probably what it is because he’s not smoking or drinking or anything and something has to be making him buzz like that.
If they weren’t before, everyone on the porch is looking at Jesse now. He boils, digging his nails into the underside of his skateboard. But Bruce Cockburn keeps smoothing his brush cut with his free hand, talking about scars and social transgression, and when he reaches out with his index finger going for Jesse’s lip, Jesse reels back and hits him right square in the face.
Bones really do crack when they break. But there is also a wet sound. Blood explodes.
Bruce Cockburn drops his camera and falls off the steps into the forsythia bushes, his broken glasses left mangled on the porch.
“Stop!” Shell grabs for Jesse, but he is fast and focused and he knows how to hurt. With his knees straddling Bruce Cockburn’s limp form, he unloads two more cracks onto the head area before jumping back.
“Fucking creep,” he shouts. “Motherfucking creep.”
Bodies with beers and cigarettes flow down the steps.
“Oh my God, oh my God.” The girl with the Band-Aids starts crying.
Maček yells at Jesse, something in Czech. Inside, Carla and Darren squint through the glare of the window, straining to get a view. A towel appears. Mister Sound holds it to Bruce Cockburn’s face. “Stay cool, man.” Bruce Cockburn’s wife comes out, screams, her skin turning translucent — rice paper. She rakes her fingers through her hair and pulls it so hard it must hurt, and then a guy in a ball cap catches her from behind as she teeters, withering into a faint.
Someone says, “Police.” Shell pulls back from the bodies crowding around the forsythia. Complete with striped socks, Bruce Cockburn’s sneakered feet poke out from the scrum like the Wicked Witch of the East under the fallen house.
“Jesse?”
His bag is gone from the porch, alongside which a shadow crawls, shoulder blades slinking through the tall grass. Jesse grabs the Polaroid camera from the flower bed where it landed, crushing a young hosta just unfurling its leaves. As Shell steps towards him, he shoves the gleaming thing into his backpack and disappears down the narrow lane between Bruce Cockburn’s and his neighbour’s with all the Confederate flags for curtains.
“Jesse,” Shell whispers, watching him, head low, duck out and away.
Bruce Cockburn is moaning, choking on something that might be his teeth. The crowd parts to allow his wife access to the mound in the forsythia bush.
“Where the fuck’s Lipper?”
“He’s a loose goddamn cannon.”
“Call the cops on that kid.”
“Leave him alone” — that’s Maček — “me and Dan’ll deal with him.”
“Well, here’s his board,” says the girl with the Band-Aids, pointing to the forgotten skateboard leaning against the bottom porch step. Maček picks up the skateboard before anyone else and smiles as Shell steps out of the dark. A smile that falls fast and hard as Shell grabs the skateboard away from his blond hands and runs down the lane and out to the street.
Ker-click. Jesse snaps a Polaroid of Shell filling her extra-large at the Big Gulp machine. The wet photograph slides out. Jesse waves it through the air and when the image comes to life, Shell says, jeez, how awful she looks.
“Instant memories,” Jesse says, handing it over.
Does Jesse want anything to eat? “I have five dollars, you know.”
Jesse shakes his head. “Just some of your drink.”
“Because you love pop,” Shell says. “I remember: Mountain Dew.”
“Huh?”
Shell pays and they pass through the front doors, setting off the buzzer.
“Mountain Dew. I thought it was your favourite.”
Jesse says maybe. Once. Now he has no favourites.
The Marion Street Parkette is swampy with dew. Through the cracked leather of Mum’s boots, the wet of grass seeps. They find a bench away from the floodlit monkey bars.
“You’re cold,” Jesse tells Shell when she shivers, the Big Gulp freezing her hand.
Shell says no, not really, because Jesse has fewer clothes than her, what with his bare arms and the rips in his pants.
The knuckles on Jesse’s right hand are swollen and red. He opens and closes his fist to keep it from stiffening.
“I really popped the guy,” he says. “But what’s with that camera? He a perv or what?” Jesse turns to Shell, snarling. “Hey? You’re supposed to be so smart.”
Shell kind of knows or at least can guess, because she’s read Mum’s anthropology textbooks and she goes to art galleries in Toronto with Dad. People like that Bruce Cockburn guy think Western people are not so advanced or special and in fact we’re no different from people with bones in their noses and tattooed faces — they’re not weird or exotic at all, you know? It’s all just relative.
“He was on cocaine, wasn’
t he?” Shell says.
“Shit, that’s no excuse.”
“So why do you let people call you that name?”
“Lipper? It’s like a joke.”
“Yeah. But it’s just as mean.”
Jesse shakes his head. “Naw, they’re my friends. It’s like black people now call themselves —”
“Stop!” Shell squeezes the Big Gulp between her thighs and plugs her ears. “It’s ugly.”
Jesse snorts. As Shell eases, he reaches over and takes the Big Gulp, brushing her leg. He inhales pop through the wide red straw, cheeks funnelled and nostrils flared.
“Can’t you get it fixed?”
Jesse shrugs. “My case worker says it’s too late. You know, I just turned eighteen and that means no more fostering, right? No more benefits and shit. I’m on my own.” He snaps his skinny fingers. “Just like that, they cut you off: bye-bye, see ya later, done.”
Out on the street, a bus goes streaking past towards downtown, to make the night’s final connection. If Carla’s not on that bus, mad and worried about Shell, she’ll be with Darren: keeping warm, whispering secret things Carla will tell Shell tomorrow anyway.
Jesse takes her hand and pulls her to her feet, skateboard slung under his arm. Shell squeezes his cold, bruised fist.
“See if you remember where I live. From back then, before, when we first met.”
They don’t say anything all the way there. Shell’s boots resound against the cold pavement, following Jesse’s lead. The further south Jesse takes them, the bigger the lawns become and the further back the houses are set from the road. Bungalows, cottages, ranch-style — a car or two on guard in the driveway — all are similarly suspended in this time of gloom and blue, without birds or wind or direct light, a dim no-space, against which they move. A few times Jesse drops his skateboard to the street, shattering the stillness. He does a few tricks, then flips the board into his grip and keeps on going, Shell just behind.
Jesse turns right at Maurice Street then again at Cashel, and continues west, Shell clomping behind. He stops once, looks around before crossing over, leading Shell through this lights-out movie-set version of the street she’s known almost all her life, but never this way, Jesse’s way, not ever.