Just call the school, says Mullen. I don’t want to talk about it.
Pete Leakie got struck by lightning, I say.
What?
You know, Pete Leakie, I say. Draws on the sidewalk, wears glasses. Lives a few blocks up the hill.
You can’t get struck by lightning in October, says Mullen’s dad. There’s no cumulus clouds. No thunderstorms. You need the heat on the ground for the pressure difference, to make the static electricity.
Go call the school, says Mullen.
Mullen’s dad goes inside. Later he comes back out.
We all walk downtown to watch them knock down the grain elevators. Old farmers with high–peaked hats and mouths full of chewing tobacco stand around watching. They spit on the ground. Mullen and I sit over on the curb watching all the old men. An RCMP constable gets out of his car and waves his arms to get everybody’s attention. Talks to them for a while, pointing up at the elevators. The old men nod and they all take a few steps back.
Just like Deke said. Two Bobcats. Steel mesh over the windows. They drive the Bobcats into the wall. The wood splinters, cracks all the way up. The Alberta Wheat Pool logo cracks in half. One side caves in, broken lumber crashes on the steel roofs of the Bobcats. The elevator leans, you can hear it crack and break, all the wood. Is a grain elevator hollow? Are there stairs, drywall, light bulbs inside? The whole top half crashes down in one piece, topples over and crashes into the gravel. Can’t see anything for the dust. Deke was right, saying it was like dry toast.
Workmen in hard hats walk through the wreck. Walls and parts of walls that didn’t fall they hit with sledgehammers. The Bobcats push broken boards into a pile. Some of the old men flick their cigarettes at the wreck, turn away.
The rain turns to snow after school, around four o’clock, before the school buses even get out of town. Cars slide around in the slush; they stall in intersections, in front of Town Hall, at the railroad tracks. Somebody tips over a shopping cart in front of the Alberta Liquor Control Board. School buses drive slow up the hill, their back halves at wrong angles, take up the whole street. In the windows kids scrape at the frost.
Mullen stomps his feet, looks into the sky. Slaps his hands on his hips. You see that? The real thing, he says. Look at those clouds. Look how low they are. Mullen picks up some soggy snow and packs it into a ball. Tosses it up and down. We’ll have to wax the toboggan, he says. We’ll keep snowballs under the porch. He runs and slides in the slush, arms held out.
We head down to the river to throw some rocks. The water’s too fast to skip rocks, but we like to throw them anyway. We like to sit down by the old rowboat we pulled up from the bottom last summer. Mullen gets a big chunk of concrete and heaves it into the river. I find some flat rocks and throw them at trees on the far bank. The snow comes down wet and steady. All the rocks around the river are slick with ice and covered in snow. We walk carefully on the slick rocks, arms out for balance, trying not to fall over.
If we had a pickup truck we could rob McClaghan’s store, Mullen says. Go late at night, park in the back alley. I bet we could get that door open with a file. We could get all the fireworks we wanted and fill up the truck and drive away before anybody even heard. Nobody would say anything ’cause nobody likes McClaghan anyway.
We can’t drive, Mullen.
Lots of people know how to drive, he says, and nobody likes McClaghan, they all talk about what an old jerk he is and how he’s always raising the rent.
I bet you couldn’t get his back door open even with a file, I say.
Mullen throws some rocks in the river. Nobody likes McClaghan so much, we could throw a rock through his front window, says Mullen, break his front window and people would hear and not care. All the fireworks we wanted.
Hey, you hear that sound? asks Mullen. We listen. It sounds like somebody digging, I say. It does, Mullen says, it does.
A little bit up the river, Deke, digging a hole. Wearing just jeans and a T-shirt, even though it’s cold and snowing. His mesh Skoal hat. All covered in sweat. Deke is digging a hole about ten feet up from the river, where the bank is shored up with big grey rocks. All around, the brush and shrubs have been hacked down. There’s a wheelbarrow, with a pickaxe and hedge trimmers.
Hey, Deke, what are you doing? Deke looks up, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. Get out of here, you kids. What are you digging, Deke? asks Mullen. A hole? A trench? Deke leans his shovel against the wall of the hole, already about four feet deep. You kids are going to get me found out. Step off. He sits down, drinks out of his water bottle.
I stay at Mullen’s house for a while. We sit in the kitchen and read comic books while Mullen’s dad makes us macaroni and cheese. Across the street Deke comes home, pushing his wheelbarrow, with all his muddy shovels.
In gym class we play dodgeball. Everybody runs around throwing balls at each other. Dodgeball isn’t much fun because Dead Kids like to come right up to you and throw the ball as hard as they can at the top of your head or your stomach. We all run around and Mr. Weissman waves his arms. It’s about reflexes, he shouts, not brutality. Be considerate. I’m pretty much the slowest – the slowest except for Pete Leakie maybe. But Pete Leakie still isn’t back at school, so mostly I get hit with the ball. Mullen likes dodge-ball but isn’t allowed to come to gym class these days, on account of his detention backlog.
Dave Steadman walks up to Jenny Tierney while everybody is playing dodgeball. Leans in and whispers something in her ear. She turns a colour. Everybody stops. The ball, mid-throw, slaps against the wall and rolls into the corner. She stands there, that colour that Jenny Tierney has never turned before, and then she walks out of the gym. Dodgeball, says Mr. Weissman. Let’s not forget about dodgeball!
After school the country kids wait for their buses. Town kids stand around in the rain, muttering. Every kid knows what’s coming. Steadman and his friends stand around by the blue dumpster, waiting. Looking nervous, for Dead Kids. It’s too bad Mullen’s in detention, Dwayne Klatz says to me, I bet he’d appreciate seeing Steadman get murdered. I tug on my mitts. Yep. He’d sure like to see that, I say.
Dwayne points at the front door. Here she comes, he whispers. Figure she’ll murder him right now? Guess so, Dwayne, I say. We sit down on our lunch boxes. Dwayne draws in the snow with his finger.
Jenny has her keys on a bit of shoelace. Spins them around, the way Mullen’s dad does. Steadman and his friends stand up and puff out their chests. Girls from the sixth grade huddle by the gym doors, whisper and point.
I’m going to murder you, Dave Steadman.
Steadman puts his hands in his pockets. Takes them out. I’d like to see that, he says. Some real tough girl. He folds his arms across his chest. Go on, he says, I’d like to see that. I’d like to see you try. He juts out his chin.
She presses the point of her keys into her palm. Now? Of course I’m not going to murder you now. How would that be fun? She reaches out, casual-like, and grabs one of Stead-man’s friends. Twists his arm up behind his back. He yelps. Falls down on one knee. Steadman sticks his chin out further. You don’t get it, Steadman, she says. You still think life will turn out all right.
She holds the Dead Kid like that, one knee in the snow, sniffling. Staring at Steadman. With her free hand she gets out her cigarettes, shakes one out and puts it in her mouth. She pulls out a yellow plastic lighter. Light my cigarette, she says. Steadman blinks at her. She twists the arm a bit, the Dead Kid whimpers. I’m not going to light your cigarette, Steadman says. The kid in the snow starts to say something but she gives him another twist and he chokes up. I’m going to murder you if you light my cigarette or not, she says. You don’t get any more choices, Dave. Things are pretty much finished.
Steadman takes the lighter. Cuffs his hands around her cigarette. Everybody holds their breath. The insides of Dave’s hands flicker. He has to flick the lighter a few times before Jenny can get a puff. Then she blows out a thick cloud.
Jenny lets go of the whi
mpering kid. He just lies there in the slush, moaning. Steadman puts his hands back in his pockets. Jenny smokes. Remember, Dave, she says. Murder. Like in the Bible. Any day now. She blows smoke off to the side and walks away. We all stand still and don’t talk, just watch her walk away across the playground, smoking.
Too bad Mullen couldn’t have seen that, says Dwayne Klatz. Too bad, I say. Nobody goes anywhere. I don’t know why, but I cup my hands around my mouth and shout, Some kind of real prizefighter, Steadman.
Nobody goes anywhere until Jenny Tierney is out of sight. The country kids take their backpacks and get on their buses. Steadman and his friends stand around, like they don’t know what to do.
Dwayne Klatz kicks the snow. Spits. Hey, Dwayne, I say, aren’t you going to catch your bus? Dwayne watches Jenny Tierney disappear over the hill, the last puff like a cartoon train behind her. Yeah, he says, the bus. What about you? You just walking home?
Well, Mullen won’t get out of detention for another twenty minutes, I say.
Right, says Dwayne. Looks back to where Jenny vanished. Well, I guess I’ll see you around then. He hitches up his backpack and gets on his bus.
Mullen’s dad gives us ten dollars. Go to the IGA, he says, Get some laundry soap. The kind without bleach. He writes No Bleach on the back of a crumpled receipt. Can we get popsicles? Mullen asks. Mullen’s dad flips through the newspaper, not really reading. Don’t get popsicles, he says, get Christmas oranges. Wouldn’t you rather have some Christmas oranges? They don’t have those yet, Dad. It’s only October. Mullen’s dad rustles the pages. See if they sell them individually, he says. So that you don’t have to get a whole box.
We do up our jackets and pull our toques down over our ears. We run and slide on the frozen sidewalk, like curlers, arms out. Mullen runs and slides into a light post. Staggers away, rubs his nose. We get wet, our toques get soggy and drip.
At the IGA they’ve got a picture of town, blown up as big as a tabletop, taken from an airplane. Must be a few years old. There’s only one rink at the recreation centre. And three grain elevators still, down by the railroad tracks. Must’ve been taken in the summer – you can see tiny hay bales in the square fields around town. Marvin sure looks funny, all made of roofs sticking out of those brown and green squares.
We get a shopping cart and push it through the aisles. It’s fun to push the cart fast and then hop up on the back bar, but they’ll make you leave if they catch you, the teenagers who work there. I hope we’ll have enough space, says Mullen. He grabs a box of cereal, one of the marshmallow kinds neither of us is allowed to eat. I’ll stop here, he says. You go to the butcher aisle. He puts a brown bag of oatmeal in the cart. Brown rice in a sack.
They sure have a lot of meat. Things I’ve never heard of, sliding in blood on Styrofoam trays. I get a pork tenderloin, some flank sirloins, ham hocks. The packages are real cold; I have to stack them up on my forearms. You can get wrapped chunks of what might have been heads, faces. I get a fish, Chinook Salmon, says the tag. Its big eye not quite staring at me. I have to balance the stack with the bottom of my chin.
Hey, Mullen, I got us a Chinook Salmon. Mullen puts some canned ham in the cart. Fantastic, he says. He prods the fish eye with the tip of his finger, it presses into the soft head. We stuff the bottom rack of the cart with cans of split-pea soup and dried pinto beans. You know anything about pinto beans, Mullen? Mullen grabs some more cans. Feel how heavy these are, he says. I bet pinto-bean cans are heavier than any other sort of bean cans. We push the cart around and it lurches, the wheels get turned sometimes and it makes like it might fall over.
At the till Mullen gets out the bank receipt. We need laundry detergent, he says, without any bleach. And a box of popsicles, I say, the sort where you get all the different colours. The teenager at the till looks at our cart: mop heads, cat litter, light bulbs. Are you going to need a hand out with that? It isn’t ours, Mullen says. We found it by the milk cooler. What we need is laundry detergent without any bleach. Where do we find that?
Out in the parking lot, Vaslav sets two paper grocery bags on the hood of his truck. Takes a credit card out of his wallet and scrapes ice off his windshield.
Hey, you got some groceries? asks Mullen. Vaslav puts his wallet away and opens the door. Get in, kids, he says. Snow. Time to make mustard. Mustard? I ask. We get in the truck and scoot up against the passenger door so Vaslav has room to shift the stick. He starts up the truck, grinds the gears and coughs and backs up out of the IGA lot.
Mustard, says Vaslav. Have to make mustard when it snows.
Inside the Russians’ house we all take off our boots and put them on the little shelf beside the door. We shuffle in our socks across the wooden floor. Vaslav sets his brown paper bags on the counter in the kitchen, pulls out bottles of white vinegar, jars of spices, cloves of garlic. Solzhenitsyn sits in his chair by the window, reading the newspaper. Folds it up so he can hold it in one hand and drink beer with the other. We sit in the wooden chairs and rock – none of the legs are quite the same length. Our feet don’t reach the ground.
Summertime mustard is bad for the digestion, says Vaslav, and rain mustard gives you bad dreams.
I dreamed I had a beard, says Mullen. A big beard, all bushy, I could keep stuff in it. Pencils and matches and a harmonica. Do you know how to play the harmonica?
Rain mustard gives you mildew dreams, says Vaslav. Mould and rot and centipedes. He bends down and gets some steel mixing bowls out of a cupboard, a dented pot, a wooden spoon. In Petersburg we always made mustard on the first snowfall because that makes it the luckiest. First-snow mustard makes your kids grow up strong and smart, and melts women’s hearts. There’s no women in this town to melt, says Solzhenitsyn. He folds up a paper airplane and throws it over Mullen’s head. Lands in a potted plant on the window sill. Vaslav coughs. Go chase a skirt, he says. Go down to the post office and buy some stamps. Right, says Solzhenitsyn, looking at us. Stamps.
Vaslav gets a mortar and pestle out of a cupboard, like on Steadman’s Drugstore’s sign. Pours in yellow mustard seeds and crushes them up. Sour yellow dust rises up in the air. Mullen kicks me with his damp sock under the table and I kick him back. Solzhenitsyn gets a beer out of the fridge and sits back down. Picks his paper back up, moves his finger along the hockey scores, counting to himself. Vaslav grinds up the mustard seeds and shakes the yellow powder into a steel bowl. Opens a white paper bag tied up with a string. Pours in more yellow, more yellow dust rises. Napa Valley, he says. I have to get this through the mail. A goddamn headache getting it over the border. Solly coughs.
He stirs all the powders and sets the bowl on top of the toaster oven. Chops up garlic cloves, two, four, six. Smashes them with the blade of his big knife. The air gets thick. Sprinkles salt on the garlic and mashes it down flat into the cutting board. He turns on the gas stove and narrows his eyes at the flame, turns the knob slowly right, then left, right again, until the flame is the right size. He sticks his finger in the butter dish above the stove, drops a yellow smudge in the pan. When Brezhnev was in charge we couldn’t get butter and had to save soap shavings, for fat, he says. You’re full of it, says Solly. Vaslav drops in the garlic and it sputters and stinks. Brown sugar and salt, and ginger and cinnamon, and other spices, I don’t know what they are and he doesn’t say.
The most important part of mustard, says Vaslav, is vodka.
Russian vodka, I say, ’Cause it’s the best, right?
You can’t get good vodka even if you drive to Calgary, says Vaslav. He stands on his tiptoes and cranes up into the top shelf. Grunts. Good vodka, I mean Russian or Polish vodka, is repeatedly distilled, smooth, doesn’t have any crap in it. But good vodka doesn’t make good mustard. He grunts and gets the bottle down, puffs. Lloydminster’s Finest Polar Vodka, says the label. Has a picture of a moustachioed man in a fur hat, with lightning bolts in the background. This isn’t good vodka? asks Mullen. Vaslav laughs. This will take enamel off the side of a bathtub, he says.
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The pan spits and stinks and steams and he opens the vodka bottle and turns it upside down over the pan and a big cloud goes up and sizzles. He stands with the bottle upside down and glugs the whole thing into the pan.
Lord, says Vaslav, Lord, the earth is hard. We dig in the cold earth and always, underneath, harder and colder. The stone heart of the earth will freeze the lungs and burst the chest. We cough ice, we gasp and die, harder and colder, mouths full of snow and with picks and shovels left helpless. Lord warm my fingers, Jesus warm my toes, and I’ll dig in your frozen heart no longer.
Have you heard the pipes making any more fuss? asks Solly.
Vaslav stirs the pan. I’m a busy guy, he says, I don’t just sit around listening to the plumbing all day.
Sorry, I forgot, says Solly. Unfolds the newspaper, turns a page. Folds it back up. A very busy guy.
We need to get McClaghan to look at our hot-water tank, says Vaslav. When was the last time that thing got any attention? When did you last see a repairman? It’s the water we cook our food in. The water we brush our teeth with. He picks up the steaming pan, moves it onto the back burner. Picks up the steel bowl with the mustard powder and pours in a stream of cold water. Stirs it into a thick paste.
Our water tank is fine, says Solly. It’s the pipes, the pipes up this whole street. All these houses of McClaghan’s. I don’t trust any of it. At least he could move to central heating in most of them. In the places that aren’t straight write-offs. A furnace, you just clean the filter. No need to panic. But these boilers, I don’t know.
We have a boiler?
Don’t you pay attention? Haven’t you noticed the radiators?
I’ve got things on my mind, says Vaslav.
Someday, says Solzhenitsyn, I’m going to buy this place. He wouldn’t refuse a reasonable offer. I bet I could get Jarvis Lester to cosign a loan for me. He’s always on about how his packing plant is a family, how he’s there to help us out. Not even McClaghan would refuse a reasonable offer. We’d tear out all those cranky pipes and radiators and get the sturdiest, least exciting furnace around.
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