At school all the Dead Kids from up the hill take off their outside shoes and put on their inside shoes. White with stripes and velcro instead of laces, or high-tops with thick laces that are always clean. Inside the school it’s dark and hard to see, especially after having been outside for so long. Kids move around in the dark like they’re underwater, bubbles rising from their yappy mouths.
Today I figure the whole school is underwater and all the Dead Kids are jellyfish, and you can’t touch a jellyfish ’cause you’ll get stung, see. Good thing I’ve got my snorkel and my flashlight. I figure some conquistadors must have sunk around here somewhere. Jellyfish come close and I duck and pivot like they taught us in basketball. Jellyfish stare at me with their buggy jellyfish eyes, floating on stalks in the murky water. A bell rings, it must be a fishing lure; all the jellyfish start floating off in the same direction. I bet it’s a trap, I bet there’s nets and harpoons waiting down the hall. They clog up the hall, all their oozy tentacles get caught up into one big jelly lump. I bob along behind them, breathing through my snorkel, in, out. Far enough behind that when the fishing starts, I won’t get trampled if they panic. I wonder if jellyfish panic when harpoons start sticking into their crowd, when brother and sister jellyfish get hauled up all of a sudden, out and away. Or maybe they just bob along stupid-like, waiting, bubbling, not knowing any better, until the harpoon gets them right square.
Pete Leakie sits on the sidewalk, legs spread out, drawing with chalk. Hey Pete, what are you doing? Drawing, he says. He rubs a stub of chalk into the grainy concrete. A house, with orange flames, and people sitting on the roof. Are they yelling, Pete? They’re laughing, he says. See? See all the smiles? Why’s the house on fire, Pete? Pete shrugs.
Pete reaches into his knapsack, blue and full of holes, reaches in and gets some green chalk. Starts drawing green circles above the house. Where’s Mullen? asks Pete. Mullen’s at home, I say, doing the dishes. Mullen’s dad makes him do the dishes? Sure, I say, every night after supper. Pete starts drawing green X’s inside the green circles. What are you drawing now, Pete? Well, the house is on fire, says Pete.
Pete wears sweaters and glasses and has two chins. There’s yellow chalk smudged in his black hair, and chalk handprints all up and down his overalls. Chalk on the arms of his black-rimmed glasses. Last year, when Mullen and I got sent up for putting wallpaper paste on all the shower floors at school, Pete brought us potato chips in the detention room. Pete Leakie isn’t a Dead Kid. He’s all right.
Pete shuffles backward on the concrete; he sticks a piece of blue chalk into his mouth and creases his forehead up all critical-like, examining his work.
Do you know how to draw horses? Pete asks me. I don’t like drawing horses, I tell him. Yeah? What do you like drawing? You know, I say, the same old stuff. Today at school I drew some rhinoceroses. No kidding, says Pete. Yeah, no kidding.
I look at my watch. If Pete Leakie were a Dead Kid, it would be a whole different ball of wax. If Pete Leakie were a Dead Kid we’d just talk about Mr. Weissman’s math class and how many problems there are to do. A Dead Kid would be shifty and stuttery, ’cause Dead Kids don’t much like me and aren’t supposed to talk to me. But a Dead Kid would never draw on the sidewalk with chalk, so Pete Leakie’s not so bad.
Mullen comes around the corner. Hey, Mullen, Pete Leakie says, your dad makes you do the dishes every night?
Oh yeah, Mullen says. We make quite a mess, the old man and me. Spaghetti sauce and baked-on cheese. Stacks of dishes up past your head.
Don’t you have a dishwasher? Pete asks.
We got a sink. Mullen looks down the street, looks at his watch. A sink and one of those wire brushes, with the soap inside.
My parents bought a new dishwasher last year, with the tax-return money, Pete says. You don’t even have to rinse the dishes off first, just put them right in. That’s great, Pete, Mullen says. Yeah, I say. Great, Pete.
Mullen’s got that look, that look he gets, like the time he found the boat at the bottom of the river, or when he wanted to start collecting flyers from all the offices on Main Street. It doesn’t do any good to ask him, Hey, Mullen, why do you want to fill garbage bags with driver’s-education pamphlets and pizza-delivery menus and bible-retreat brochures and mortgage application forms? He’ll just get that look. I bet they’d have a lot of flyers at the IGA, he’ll say, I bet they’ve got all kinds of flyers there.
Mullen grabs my elbow and whispers, Hey, do you know where we can get a telescope?
A telescope?
Yeah, he says, we oughta go and do some what, some surveilling.
I’ve got some plastic binoculars, I tell him, but they’re at my house.
We have to go now. She might leave any time.
Who might leave?
Mullen stretches his arms up above his head and his black T-shirt tugs up above his belly button. Gosh, Pete, Mullen yawns, it sure has been something, watching you draw, but we have to go. See you around.
Yeah, Pete Leakie says, see you guys around. Pete Leakie finds his orange chalk. Starts drawing an orange octopus on the sidewalk.
Where are we going, Mullen?
We have to go surveil, he says. Down the street, across from the post office.
There isn’t anything across from the post office.
There is now.
You can smell the Russians’ barbecue all the way up the street. We walk up the sidewalk and there they are, out in their yard, sitting in their lawn chairs, reaching over now and then to prod at the steaks sizzling away on the grill. Most people have already put their barbecues back into their garages on account of it being fall, but the Russians do everything later than everybody else. They probably won’t put up their Christmas lights until two days after Christmas again this year, and then leave them out until June. They wave with their brown beer bottles.
Hey, Mullen, Vaslav hollers, where’s your dad?
Still at work I guess, he says.
Solzhenitsyn sticks his hands into the pockets of his skinny jeans. I left work an hour ago, says Solzhenitsyn, and he had already gone.
Well, Mullen says, I don’t know then.
Tell him to come over when he gets home, Solzhenitsyn says. Solzhenitsyn works with Mullen’s dad at the meatpacking plant, smashing ice. Every day they get into the truck together, wearing their overalls and rubber boots, and drive out of town, almost to High River. They smash ice with sledgehammers, in a small steel room, and come home red and sweating, with sore backs and wet socks, ice in the toes of their boots and seams of their blue jeans.
We walk down the alley instead of down Main Street, ’cause we like to throw rocks at garbage cans. Mullen gets a few pretty good dents into a stainless-steel can outside an empty garage. I like the sound the plastic cans make when you hit them with a rock, especially if they’re empty. Even though it’s only six, the sun is starting to go down out on the other side of town, where the foothills start. Sometimes Mullen’s dad takes us for drives out into the hills, up past the provincial-park line, and shows us the forest-fire watch towers and abandoned farmhouses and other good stuff.
As long as I can remember, the windows in the building across from the post office have been covered with paper like you wrap boxes in at Christmas to mail to Ontario. We sit on the sidewalk in front of the post office and Mullen takes some comic books out of his backpack. Here, make like some dumb kid, he says. We make like to flip through comic books but peek over the tops at the woman in the window.
She doesn’t look like other women, the woman in the window. The women down at the hair salon or the drugstore wear sweaters and short jackets, with blue jeans. The women at the United Church wear gold earrings and black blouses. Mrs. Lampman across the street always wears a blazer when she teaches social studies at the school. The woman in the window across from the post office wears a sweater, but it fits different than any I’ve ever seen. Looks thin, and when she moves, it holds on to her. She wears a grey skirt that goes down to h
er ankles but stays close to her thighs and the backs of her knees. Her hair is pulled back into some sort of clip, but it sticks out in all sorts of directions, trying to escape.
What do you think she’s doing in there? I don’t know, Mullen says, peeking over the top of his comic book. The room is empty, bare drywall with putty patches showing, and the electrical sockets unfinished, hairy clumps of wire. She wanders around with a tape measure. Measures a wall and writes on a pad of yellow paper tucked into the belt of her skirt. She sticks the pen behind her ear and frowns.
I bet she’s from the city, Mullen says. That’s how all the women look in the city. I sat on a bus in Calgary with two women like that. All pretty and high classified.
She drops her tape measure and lights a cigarette, a long, thin one. Smoke mixes in with the sawdust in the air. Mullen flips a few pages of his comic.
We watch her for a while. She writes stuff down and holds her hands in front of her face like a square, at arm’s length, looks at the walls through the square. She doesn’t ever look out the window. People drive by, and if they know us they wave. Nobody cares if Mullen and I sit on the post office steps and read comic books, ’cause nobody cares what we do, so long as it isn’t causing public mischief. That’s what the caretaker at the First Evangelical Church said when they made us appologize about the flyers. That we were causing public mischief. Public mischief, it turns out, is when you climb up on the roof of the school with three garbage bags full of flyers, fold them into paper airplanes, and throw them at Dead Kids. Even if you only get through half of one bag in two hours. They sent us up for that: for skipping class and making a mess of the playground. They said taking that many flyers was like stealing, even though flyers are free and in piles that say Take One. And after we’d cleaned up the whole playground we had to go down Main Street and apologize at the insurance office, and the bank, and the First Evangelical Church. When they told Mullen’s dad he laughed, but the way people sometimes laugh on television, when you can tell they’re only actors.
I have to go home soon, Mullen.
No, come on, she’s still doing stuff, he says. I bet she’ll smoke another cigarette soon. Look, she has sawhorses in there. You think she might saw something up? Maybe she’s got one of those circular saws.
I have to go home, Mullen. Seriously.
Since when does it matter when you go home?
I stand up and hand him his comic. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Yeah, tomorrow.
I walk down to the end of the block and turn around. Mullen’s still sitting there, pretending to read his comic, watching the woman in the window.
An old man with patches on his elbow leans on McClaghan’s counter, looking at the lighters in the rotating shelf. One of those flat hats on his wrinkly old head, all covered in buttons. Annual Rotarian Convention, and Legion Number 19, and Vets Get Set. He takes a scratchy old Zippo lighter out of his jacket. A flint, he says to McClaghan, I need a new flint for this.
Where’d you get this? McClaghan takes the lighter, turns it over. Mail order?
Antwerp, says the old man, I got it in Antwerp. Pressed into my hands out of gratitude.
McClaghan spits in his jar.
McClaghan’s jar is the worst thing in town. You always have to go to McClaghan’s hardware store after school, though, for model-airplane paint or thirty-five-cent gum or hockey tape, so you always have to see the jar. He leaves it on the counter right beside the hockey cards, this beet-pickle jar two-thirds full of old-man phlegm, brown tobacco juice, stubby toothpicks. He takes it everywhere. Any time you walk by, there’s McClaghan out on the step, under the 40% OFF sign, listening to his radio, spitting. But spitting on the sidewalk is bad for business I guess, so he spits in the jar. You can hear it all up the street, the hack and plop of old-man spit landing in that beet-pickle jar.
McClaghan rummages in his drawer. Pulls out envelopes, paper boxes. Opens them, frowns, puts them back. The old man puts all his nickels on the counter, one at a time, lining them all up and trying to get them all straight, but his hands shake and push the nickels all over the place.
In McClaghan’s hardware store they’ve got everything you could ever want. Table saws and new bicycle chains, and four-man tents and car batteries, rubber boots, fishing rods, pickaxes and wheelbarrows – everything. Stacks of plywood and two-by-fours, router bits, camping stoves and jerry cans. They’ve got a paint-shaker, just about the loudest thing I ever heard, shakes so fast you can’t read the label on the can. And all that stuff is great, but the best part about McClaghan’s is fireworks.
So, McClaghan, Mullen says, pulling his elbows, his chin, up on the counter. McClaghan’s counter is way taller than it needs to be. How about some of those roman candles you’ve got back there? I bet those pack a whole bunch, yeah?
McClaghan wraps his fingers around the jar. Out. Both of you, beat it.
How much does one of those big boxes cost, anyway?
Split, kid! McClaghan barks. We scoot outside. Sit down on the sidewalk. People sure get worked up about stuff, says Mullen. Hey, you want to come for dinner with the Russians? Me and my dad are going over, well, pretty quick I guess.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I say. We walk past the Lions Club playground. Two kids crouch on the teeter-totter. Neither one wants to go up because they know the other will hop off and crash the hard seat down on the hard ground. They just bob up and down, glaring at each other, never quite leaving the ground.
Hey, Mullen, what’s Solzhenitsyn’s real name? I don’t know, he says, I thought Solzhenitsyn was his real name. I saw some other guy on TV with that name, I say, some famous Russian from history. Mullen throws a rock out across the street. They can’t both have the same name? Course they can’t have the same name. You never met anyone named Benjamin Franklin, did you? Or Genghis Khan? I met a Benjamin once, Mullen says. Back in Winnipeg in the second grade. When his front teeth fell out no new ones grew back, so he had fake teeth. He could take them out. You can’t name your kid after somebody famous, I say. It’s not allowed. That’s why you have to get a birth certificate when you’re born, to make sure that you’ve got an allowed name. I don’t know what Solzhenitsyn’s real name is; that’s what my dad always calls him, Mullen says. All the other Russians call him Solly. Is that an allowed name?
Mullen’s dad comes out of his house carrying a bunch of TV trays tight against his chest. Closes the door with his hip. Walks out onto the sidewalk, past Deke’s. Pushes open the little wooden gate with his hip. The Russians’ lawn is about as dead as everybody else’s on the block, except for Mrs. Lamp-man’s maybe. In the summer she always digs little patches along the path, plants sweet peas. Everybody else on the street is doing pretty good if they keep their lawn cut. Pavel and Solzhenitsyn sit in their lawn chairs around the barbecue, their heavy jean jackets buttoned all the way up in the cold, brown beer bottles tight in black gloves. Vaslav sits on the step, his belt undone and his big stomach pushing the bottom of his sweater up over his belly button. He’s working on his novel. Drinks beer and scribbles on a huge pile of paper in his lap. He scratches his forehead with his pen, leaves a blue line.
Hey, you ever torn the corset from the heaving chest of a kidnapped virginal millionairess?
The kids, says Mullen’s dad. Starts to unfold TV trays.
The kids have never torn the corsets off anything. I’m trying to get the facts straight. So as to be historically accurate.
They’ve got a lot of buttons on them. Those corsets. It would take some tearing.
Right, says Vaslav, it sure would.
Does the virginal millionairess have a name? asks Mullen.
Well, I’ve got it narrowed down to a short list of about eighteen. Has to have the right tone, see. I’ve left it blank so far in the manuscript. He holds up the top few pages and, sure enough, the pencil script is full of blank spaces. It’s got to go well with all the other words, see, he says, especially the ones I use a lot. And it’s got to evoke
the proper balance of Victorian restraint and bottled passion. Voluptuous without being lusty, see. Owing to the virginalness of the character.
Pavel takes the lid off the barbecue and starts to turn chicken legs with his black-ended tongs. He squints with his one eye, making sure he gets the legs okay with the tongs. His glass eye looks off somewhere else, never quite in line with the real one. Solzhenitsyn goes back and forth to the refrigerator inside, bringing out all kinds of food: jars and jars of all kinds of pickles, and plates with different coloured strips of fish, covered tight in plastic wrap. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs. Him and Mullen’s dad talk all serious-like, in between bites of pickled beets and anchovies, lots of big serious words, like newscasters on television.
Vaslav reaches across them for a pickle. Hey, he asks Mullen’s dad, is there hot water in your house?
Hot water? Sure there is.
Vaslav sticks the pickle in the side of his mouth. Wedges a beer bottle against the arm of his lawn chair, hits it with the flat of his palm, pops the cap off. I called McClaghan three times last week about the hot water, he says through a mouthful of pickle. Each time he tells me to leave it alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, he says. I told him an ounce of prevention is the whole cure and he hung up on me.
Our hot water is fine, says Mullen’s dad.
Our hot water is fine too, says Pavel. Vaslav makes a face. Pass me the herring, he says.
You left work early, says Solzhenitsyn.
Mullen’s dad opens another bottle of beer. Shrugs. Sometimes you’ve got to leave work early. Solly drums his pencil on his knee.
I can’t tell who’s skinnier, Solzhenitsyn or Mullen’s dad. It’s hard to imagine the two of them with sledgehammers, in a steel room, smashing blocks of ice. It must get slippery in the ice room. The floor must get slushy and deep, like outside the curling rink in March, when the weather starts to break.
Milk Chicken Bomb Page 2