by Nadia Bozak
“Shell!” Mum frowns, turning onto Catherine, past the Masonic Temple. “He is no such thing.”
Mum speeds up so as to miss the eight-oh-five cnr freight that blocks north-south traffic every morning. On the other side of the tracks, packs of kids start cropping up, heading east to Somerset Tech or, if they are Portuguese or Filipino, to Pope Pius; they run against the traffic lights, break into air guitar, lean against mailboxes to copy homework.
“If not Soren, who?” Mum pulls into the Dutchie’s Donuts parking lot on Joyce Street behind Somerset Tech. She glances up into her rear-view mirror as Tony and Gilberto Silva whip around the corner on their skateboards, Big Gulps in hand, hips sashaying. “One of those lumps?”
Shell grabs her backpack from between her feet. “Those’re my friends, Mum,” she says, slamming the door.
Mum almost hits Gilberto pulling back onto Joyce Street. She toots the horn. As the Datsun trundles away, Tony waves at Shell with his Big Gulp and gives Mum the finger.
Shell stands on the studio roof. She can see into backyards all the way up and down Cashel Street. This being Saturday, most people have patio furniture out; one guy three doors down is in shorts and has hot dogs on the barbecue and a fourth Canadian open. The high three o’clock sun beats down on Shell’s bare arms. Her jeans are tight and moist with sweat, and Mum’s black Amnesty T-shirt is the wrong colour to be roofing in. The worst part is how her hair keeps slipping out from Dad’s old Expos ball cap that Mum said she ought to wear with such strong sun.
Shell swigs the last inch of water from a plastic bottle and crouches, not quite taking a break. Mum should be back from Hobbs Build-All soon, with enough new shingles for Soren Nutt to start laying them first thing tomorrow morning. Mum’s paying Soren six hundred dollars, flat rate, for what should be three days’ work. But Shell has to scrape the old ones off first; Soren’s not doing that grunt work. Shell stands, her spine knotted. And because the leather work gloves Mum found in the shed are hot and way too big to wear, her hands are calloused, swollen, the nails black with tar resin. There’s just one last patch of old shingles now, along the peak of the western slope. Shell grabs the pitchfork. She started at the bottom edge of the eastern slope around ten this morning. As morning turned to afternoon, Mum coached her and fetched water and snacks and then lunch, and did not say anything when Shell swore or said how much roofing sucks. And it truly does suck, even with Mum paying her six dollars an hour, because the rafters are rotting, especially along the eastern peak.
“Christ,” Mum had said as Shell pried the ruined shingles with the pitchfork, exposing wet black wood underneath. “I just want to get rid of this goddamn house, Shell. Even if we rent something.”
Shell crouches into the roof’s steep slant, slides the pitchfork prongs under the remaining gritty green shingles before wrenching them up, tarpaper tearing. While some shingles pop off as easy as a bottle cap, other areas are stubborn. Once this last swath of shingles is loosened, Shell switches to the coal shovel and pushes them — with great echoing scrapes — off the front of the roof. They scatter in the air before slapping down upon the wide heap of ripped-up shingles below. This morning that spot down there was a weed patch, and before that rows of squash and beans used to grow.
It’s nearly four when Mum comes back. The dump closes at five, so they leave the shingles where they are, though Mum would prefer to just load them into the back of the Datsun and get them the hell out of her sight.
“God, even just one load,” she says, frowning at her watch.
“Can’t Soren do it?” Shell winces, pulling off the Expos cap. Hot, thick hair, dry enough it might as well be barnyard straw, tumbles out and sticks to her neck, back, and sides. “Isn’t that what you’re paying him for?”
“Okay,” Mum says. Shell is right. “And some buddy of his is supposed to have access to a truck or something.”
But together they do unload the back of the Datsun. There are twenty packs of new shingles, wrapped in brown paper, three feet long by two feet wide and four inches high or so, thirty pounds each. Mum also bought a dozen boxes of galvanized nails, a thirty-pound roll of felt underlay, a tin reel Mum calls a chalk line, and strips of flat four-inch flashing for making a drip edge.
“That’s it?” Shell says, wiping her face with her hot red hands.
Mum pushes up her sunglasses and, with Shell, looks around. The yard is littered with chunks of tarpaper and scraps of shingle that didn’t make it onto the pile, and the air is hung with the sick residue of old asphalt, as well as the char of the neighbour’s meaty barbecue. Shell smiles, woozy with nausea.
Shell is technically allowed to sleep in the next morning, Sunday. But the phone rings at about seven o’clock and she can’t get back to sleep after that. She had fallen asleep reading so early the night before. Mum had come in, switched off her light, and removed the glasses from her face. Mum shuffles around downstairs getting herself an early breakfast; Soren is due at seven-thirty. Shell stays in bed. She reads The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for about the tenth time since Mrs. Poole assigned it to the class last week, and then, eyes closed, she tries to not forget about Maček: voice like a rake pulled through gravel; the feathers of his shaggy hair falling back from cheeks dull with acne scars; rare smile showing off his Dracula teeth. Has it already been a month since they played pool at Wizard’s? Leaning against her pool cue, Shell told Maček that when Wizard’s was a movie theatre she saw Star Wars there, her first real movie. Now a dozen pool tables dominate the floor, the green felt tops catching in the light of low-hanging lamps suspended on wires from the high cathedral ceiling. Maček took his shot — his number three banking. Would she believe him if he said he’d still never seen Star Wars?
“You’re not missing much,” Shell had promised, calling nine in the corner and then sinking it. Shell wouldn’t or couldn’t let Maček beat her.
How’d she get so good?
“My dad.” Shell shrugged. “I can skate and throw a football too.”
Maček bought them Cokes between games, and they smoked Shell’s Gauloise. The Who was playing too loud; some off-duty stripper from across the street kept putting “I Can See for Miles” on the jukebox — not once or twice, but three times. Later, a bunch of Somerset Tech kids walked over to the train bridge to drink the forty of tequila that Jason, a bug-eyed kid with an acne disorder, had got from the Mohawk reserve. Maček and Shell dawdled behind the others, then deked back to St. Paul’s, where there’s a parkette and benches. Maček rolled them a joint, warning her that this batch of hash was crazy potent. They sat near the maple tree where Shell goes to fall asleep in the long, lush grass, reading poetry instead of sitting in boring old Creative Writing class. “What a drag, man,” she had said of that class. “Too much cornball writing.”
Yup, Maček’s was strong hash, but beautifully so, glowing. When they got to the train bridge, they shot a tequila each then shimmied down the ravine away from the others, close to the eggy water of the Somerset River. In not too many words, Maček told Shell about the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia where his father still works in a munitions plant and his mother stays home to raise the goats. He grew up on that milk, warm and thick and smelling of grass, plus soft fresh cheese. After his military service, Maček went to East Germany, then hid in an arms truck to get into West Germany, where he got a visa because his mother’s cousin Jakub was in Somerset with his own roofing business. He laid roofs seven days a week that first summer in Canada. Then Jakub fell off a three-storey century mansion in north Somerset, some rich lawyer’s place, and broke his neck. He’s alive, “kind of,” Maček said. Maček’s visa ran out and instead of going back he picked tobacco and then, at a party, hooked up with Dan. Maček had touched the bulge in the breast of his jacket, zipped up despite the night’s warmth. It could have been a baseball in there, but instead it was about four hundred dollars’ worth of Moroccan hashish.
And where was Dan?
Shell had asked.
Maček shrugged. “Maybe with that girl…um…”
“Kate?” The really pretty one — Irish or Scottish — with jade-green eyes and heaps of curly auburn hair.
“Yeah. Her.” Maček said he’d better go back to Wizard’s to wait for him. They had to meet someone later.
“At midnight?”
Maček helped her up, a firm grip on her elbow. Then he walked Shell to the bus stop and waited until the number twenty came. And he stayed and watched as it pulled away — hands shoved deep into the pockets of his tight black jeans, the thinness of his bandy legs accentuated by his high-top Adidas, delicate gold chain around his ropy neck glinting. She had dreamed about Maček all the next day, felt him as though he was an apparition, a shadow of her psyche, always with her, watching. Then Monday at school, Gilberto Silva bummed a smoke and said Dan had been busted on Saturday. “Right out front of Wizard’s.”
Shell’s heart had turned to ice. “And Maček?”
Gilberto said no, he hadn’t been there. But if Maček knows what’s good for him, he’ll be lying real low. “Heard he’s here illegal, eh.”
Shell had nodded. “I know.”
By eight-thirty, Shell’s bedroom is hot and stuffy. When she goes downstairs, the house is quiet. Mum must be out with Soren, but the backyard is empty, the pile of shingles unmoved.
“He’s not coming,” Mum says, coming up from the basement as Shell fills the coffee carafe with water.
“Soren?”
Mum folds her arms. “Little bugger got a job house painting.”
“Jerk,” Shell mutters. “I knew he’d bail.”
Mum’s lips are thin and her face so pale Shell can make out a faint pattern of freckles she never had before. “Make me a cup too,” Mum says as Shell’s measuring out coffee. Mum turns to the back door. Through the window, the naked plywood of the studio roof is orange in the sun, but with spots of brown age and black rot. “God, what if it rains before I find someone?”
“He should have to do the work anyway, Mum.” Shell turns on the coffee and bangs around in the cupboard for a plate. “We got it all ready — I mean, you bought new shingles and everything!”
“I know, I know.”
“Did the shithead at least call you himself?”
Mum shakes her head and turns back from the door. “Barb.”
“So now what?” Shell drops a heel of rye bread into the toaster. Then another for Mum, when she asks.
“Look around for someone else, I guess. Someone cheap.”
Mrs. Poole puts on a crackly LP of a British guy reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, complete with crashing waves and bird cry. Two girls with ponytails and jean skirts keep whispering, so Shell tells them to be quiet, and then Mrs. Poole snaps her fingers and shushes all three of them and that makes Shell really mad. She was going to tell Mrs. Poole about how she stayed up all night reading poetry — and why does Blake spell tiger with a y, anyway?
Shell smokes half a Gauloise in the pit, the smell of toasted French tobacco enriching the chemical haze of everyone else’s Player’s Lights and Exports, Canadian brands Shell hopes to never have to smoke again. And while other kids are talking hangovers and Driver’s Ed, Shell squints up into the gold of the sun. “Tyger, tyger,” she whispers. The beauty is in the repetition, right? Or is it the word itself? “Horse, horse,” Shell whispers next. “Bear, bear. Giraffe, giraffe.” None are even close to “tyger.” The second-period bell rings, clearing the smoking pit. But it’s way too nice to go do free-fall prompts in Creative Writing, so Shell takes her books and lunch to the parkette behind St. Paul’s. She could really use a sunny nap.
The grass is still a bit damp. Shell sits on her jean jacket and leans up against the thick maple that is her favourite, grooved perfectly to support her back. It’s only ten-thirty, too early for her sandwich. Shell opens Blake and polishes her apple. There’s lots of squirrels around, plus homeless guys milling around garbage cans, grandmas in thick coats and broken shoes pulling fold-up carts, and young mums hunched over collapsible strollers. They’re all heading towards the back of the church, where they disappear into an unmarked door and then come out again with full shopping bags; a few old white men and some young brown guys in baseball hats carry out cardboard boxes perched on their shoulders.
“When my mother died, I was very young,” Shell reads out loud between bites of McIntosh, “and my father sold me while yet my tongue / could scarcely cry ‘weep’ ‘weep’ ‘weep’ ‘weep’/ so your chimneys I sweep and in soot I sleep.” She thinks about that, savouring the repeated “weep” and how Blake makes rhyming poems seem okay when Leonard Cohen or Ginsberg do otherwise. When Shell looks up again, she sees someone who could be Maček.
It is Maček. His gold chain catches the light and his head is down, watching his Adidas taking their quick steps. He’s coming right towards her. Shell sticks Blake in front of her face. Before she can think of the right words to say, Maček turns sharp, picking up the path with the poor mums and grandmas and brown people, leading to the back of St. Paul’s. Then he disappears into that same unmarked door, just behind a pair of women in bright orange head scarves.
Shell is fast packing up her bag. She stands, shakes cramps and ants from her legs, and wanders over to an outlying bench right where the parkette meets the sidewalk on Clayton Street. When Maček comes out of the church, he clutches a yellow No Frills bag in each hand. His face is barely visible the way his shaggy hair falls forward. The clothes he wears are the same as always — leather jacket, jeans — but look too big for him now. Shell swings her backpack onto her shoulder and takes the path back into the park, striding towards him oh so natural. She smiles. Inside, her heart is going bam-bam-bam.
“Hey! Maček,” she says, a bit too loud. There’s about three yards between them. “What’s up?”
Maček looks up, eyes big as golf balls. He stops. “Hey,” he says, swallowing. He looks around.
“How are you?” Shell smiles huge to make up for Maček’s grimace.
“Fine.” Maček’s voice is flat. He tucks his arms behind him so the bags bang the backs of his knees.
“Haven’t seen you around for a while.”
“No,” Maček says.
Maček and Shell move over to let the women in the orange scarves pass. They are young-looking from this close; the No Frills bags that weigh them down accent the colour scheme of their drapy outfits.
“So,” Shell says. “What are you up to?”
Maček’s face goes red. “Tough to say.”
“Oh.” Shell steps back, swings her pack onto her other shoulder. “You want a Gauloise?”
Maček’s eyes narrow and his brow creases. “Really?”
Shell shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, they were your favourite before.”
Maček’s hard mouth allows a brief smile. “Okay.”
They sit on a bench near Shell’s maple. The grocery bags slump over at Maček’s feet. Shell tries not to look too puzzled over the contents: Kraft Dinner, Skippy peanut butter, loaf of white Dempster’s, tins of baked beans, and mandarin segments in light syrup. Maček inhales the tobacco so deeply Shell is surprised any smoke comes out again. His body relaxes. They both watch his hands: stocky nicotine fingers and knuckles rough with dry skin.
“Been lying low,” he says.
“I heard.”
“Been broke. Sleeping on Dan’s sister’s couch.”
“How’s she?”
Maček shrugs, winces into the sun. “Monica’s got a bad back and two kids.” He glances at Shell. “They’ll be wanting lunch soon.” He nods at the back of the church. “St. Paul’s gives the best food, but it’s only once a week.”
Shell swallows. Her stomach knots. She wants to puke up her apple and her Blake poems and her dreaming about Maček when he’s been hungry and without a bed and support
ing a family not even his own. “Okay, yeah,” Shell stutters. “I was going to eat my sandwich soon and —”
“You should be in school, right?” Maček drags on the last of the Gauloise.
“Yeah, well. It’s just so nice out today and I was reading anyway, so it’s like self-schooling or something.”
Maček stands up, a bag in each hand. “See you around, Shell,” he says, turning, going.
His shoulders round against the strain of the groceries and, it’s true, his tight black jeans have loosened. But he still walks tall, his body sort of muscles along. He’s at the edge of the park, turning south, when Shell calls, “Wait,” and goes running up after him, ducking around an old man with a full grocery bag hooked on the handle of his walker. Shell catches Maček’s arm. His eyes narrow at her.
“You want a job?” she breathes, bursting.
“Huh?” Maček’s brow gets all ridged.
“Because I got one for you,” Shell says. “Or my mum does, I mean.”
“What?”
“Roofing.”
Maček leans back, the handles of the grocery bags cutting into his palms. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll consider it.”
“He’s taking autobody at school,” Shell lies to Mum. “And he has at least a year of roofing experience.” Which is true.
“How much does he charge?”
“Don’t know. Whatever you were set to pay Soren.”
Mum says she wants to meet him first, this “friend of a friend” from school who Shell says is a bit older but she doesn’t know by how much. “He was in the Czech army, so as old as that. Okay?”
Dan’s sister doesn’t have a phone, so Maček calls Shell from a pay phone, right at seven like they had agreed in the parkette. It’s weird to hear his gravelly voice on the other end, and the way he says “Shell?” truly makes her feel weak. Now they know each other. Now they are something more than whatever they were before.
Maček knocks at seven forty-five the next morning, right on time. Shell has been up and dressed since six, typing to Carla in her room: “Buddy, guess who’s on his way over???”