“All she lets me have is a measly old jackknife.”
Danny fingered the one in his pocket as he followed his friend across Portage Avenue to Sydney I. Robinson on Vaughan Street.
“Let’s look at the knives first and save the guns for last,” said Paul, as they trundled down the stairs.
Sydney I. had a much bigger selection of knives.
“I wish they weren’t under glass,” said Danny. “Why do they always have to be under glass?”
“Why do you think?” Paul said. “Because a guy might go berserk and grab one and kill somebody before anyone has a chance to stop him.”
He picked up a compass from the selection on top of the counter.
“This is nice,” he said.
“You already have a compass.”
“Yeah, but this one has a leather case.”
“So what?”
“I like leather cases.”
“May I help you boys with something?”
It was an older gentleman asking, dapper in his manner. Danny wondered if he might be Sydney I. Robinson himself.
“No thanks, sir. We’re just browsing,” Paul said.
Danny had heard his mum say a version of those words, except for the sir part. He supposed Paul’s mum said them too.
“Are any of these knives rare?” he asked the man.
If he ever bought a hunting knife he wanted it to be rare.
“No. Not as such.”
The man looked over Danny’s head when he spoke and then moved on. Danny turned to watch a large hand come down on Paul’s shoulder.
“I think you’d better put that back, son,” said the man with the hand.
He was a burly man.
Paul took the compass out of his pocket and placed it on the counter.
With a hand on each of their backs, the man guided them to the rear of the store, where aromatic animal pelts hung on racks. He knocked on a closed door, and when no one answered he ushered them into a cramped office. There was a desk with a phone on it, two folding metal chairs, and merchandise. The merchandise took up every square inch where the desk and chairs weren’t. The man asked the boys for their names and phone numbers and then made three calls: one to the police and one to each of their homes.
Danny thought later that maybe the call to the police was pretend, because no cop ever came. The one to his mum may as well have been pretend, because she didn’t come either.
The burly man went back into the main part of the store to nab more criminals. Danny and Paul were left with a lady who didn’t say one single word, just sat on a chair and looked at her fingernails from time to time. Paul sat in the remaining chair, and Danny sat on part of a cardboard box that poked out from the boxes piled on top of it. The woman crossed and uncrossed her legs more than once, and when she did that her nylon stockings rubbed against each other and made a sound that Danny liked. He pictured putting his hand there, where the stockings touched.
Paul’s mum arrived, and the dapper man followed her into the room and introduced himself to her as Mr. Blandings.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Blandings,” Mrs. Carter said. “I assure you, nothing like this will ever happen again.”
She clutched Paul’s arm and yanked him out of his chair.
Danny thought Paul would speak up and say that it was him, not Danny who had stolen, but he didn’t. They were both being painted with the same brush of juvenile delinquency. At that point he still expected a cop to burst in and he thought Mrs. Carter was just there to accompany them to the Vaughan Street jail and post bail. Or not. The Carters weren’t rich, and bail could be in the thousands.
Paul’s mum was usually very nice-looking. She didn’t look so great right now because she was upset. Her nose was red and she trembled, but Danny hoped that Mr. Blandings saw past those things and got how attractive she was. Maybe he would think that her husband was dead or had run off, and that he had a chance with her.
“I’ll hold you to that, Mrs. Carter,” he said.
Danny saw the suggestion of a smile.
She herded the boys out to their family station wagon, and Paul still didn’t say anything about how it was all his fault. She drove to the Blue house on Lyndale Drive and got out to see Danny to the door.
“I wouldn’t trouble your mother with this, Danny,” she said. “But they phoned her too. She already knows.”
It wasn’t me, he wanted to shout. It was that asshole son of yours.
But ratting out a friend was close to the worst thing you could do. He looked back at the car and saw Paul grinning from the back seat.
Dirty rotten asshole of a friend.
Aunt Dot greeted them. Barbara Blue was behind her, supporting herself on two canes. She only used them both when she was extra tired. That’s what she said. Since Cookie died she had been extra tired all the time. She probably would have used her wheelchair but it was too big for the house.
She waited till Mrs. Carter left to say, “Go to your room, Danny. I don’t want to look at you.”
He fought back tears as he trudged upstairs. He sat in his chair, stared out the window, and thought about how they didn’t even get a chance to look at the guns.
A little later Dot brought him a snack of fancy sandwiches left over from the funeral. He didn’t eat them. They were cold from the freezer and they made him think about Cookie, which was worse than thinking about his so-called friend.
When he went to the bathroom he heard them talking. His mum said something nasty about Mrs. Carter’s high heels and then, “My dear lost boy.” She had tears in her voice when she said it.
Dear lost boy. That sounded promising. Maybe it wasn’t going to be as bad as he thought. They were talking so quietly he couldn’t grasp any more words. She sure hadn’t spoken to him as though he was her dear lost boy, but there it was. Hard to fathom, but there it was.
4
Danny couldn’t get out of his bedroom chair. Could not.
From where he sat he had a view of the Red River and beyond it the pale green suburb of Riverview. But he didn’t see it. Sometimes he caught a movement, a car or a passing bird, but if someone were to ask him to describe what was in front of him, he wouldn’t be able to say. Cookie was his only thought.
He was eating a melted Jersey Milk chocolate bar, taking no pleasure from it. There was a fine line for Danny between a soft Jersey Milk and one that was too far gone. This one was past its best because he hadn’t been alert to the rays of the sun on the table by his side.
A muted rage took a turn through his system and left as quickly as it came. It reminded him that he needed to do something, something connected to Cookie, but he didn’t yet know what it was. There were only inklings.
His fingers were sticky from the chocolate. He licked them absently and wiped them on the front of his T-shirt. His thin body was lost inside of it. It had belonged to Cookie, who had been taller than him and plumper once, though not in recent months. According to their mum, she took after their dad’s branch of the family. Danny couldn’t know this for sure as he didn’t remember his dad, and his mother said there were no photographs. She had often bemoaned the fact that it was Danny with his lean build that took after her side.
“It’s more important for girls to be slim,” she had said.
“Why?” Cookie and Danny both asked at the same time.
“It just is,” said their mother in the unsatisfactory way she had of answering their questions. “Honestly, when I was young, people compared my shape to that of a wasp.”
When they both looked blank she added, “You know…I went in in the middle; I had a waist.”
She also had a sting.
It was Cookie who had taught him about the pleasure of soft chocolate. He hadn’t known it since she died and he wondered if it would ever come back, and if it did, if it would be lesser someh
ow. A lesser pleasure.
Two weeks had passed since her death. The time had gone by in a blur — fog all through it, like at the graveside service.
Uncle Edwin went home after a week. He and Aunt Dot farmed a half section near Baldur, a couple of hours southwest of Winnipeg. Aunt Dot stayed on. She brought Danny his meals and encouraged him to have baths, even tried to jolly him out to the yard once for a game of catch, but mostly she left him alone. No one mentioned school.
Paul had dropped over a few times, but Danny refused to see him.
His dog Russell sat with him most of the time. She got up now to investigate voices in the kitchen. Paul and Dot. Then in the living room. Just Paul. Danny heard no response. Now there were footsteps on the stairs.
“Hi.” Paul entered his room.
“Hi.” Danny continued to look out the window.
“Your Aunt Dot said I could come up.”
“So what.”
“I talked to your mum. I told her it was all my fault that day at Sydney I. Robinson’s.”
“What did she say?”
“Nothing.”
Danny had seen little of his mother. From time to time, he heard murmurs from the living room which was directly below his bedroom, so he figured she must be spending most of her time in there. She hadn’t been up to see him, but she rarely made the effort to climb the stairs even under normal circumstances. Her bedroom and the only bathroom were on the main floor.
And he hadn’t ventured down to see her. They had passed each other in the downstairs hall at night when both of them needed the bathroom at the same time, she using a cane even for the few steps it took her to get there. All he felt when that happened was irritation that the timing was so unlucky. They hadn’t spoken; they could have been sleepwalking. He didn’t feel at all like her dear lost boy. Lost maybe, but for sure not dear.
“Did your mum make you?” Danny said to Paul.
“What?”
“Did your mum make you come over and tell my mum that I had nothing to do with it?”
Paul didn’t answer at first.
“She did, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Get lost.”
Paul stood in the doorway for a minute, then shrugged and took off down the stairs.
Danny was glad Paul had owned up to his mother. But his anger didn’t go anywhere; it seethed inside of him. It had been this way since Cookie’s death, which he saw as murder, plain and simple. Somebody had to pay.
He needed to kill someone. That was the thing he needed to do. If he took a life, a bad one, it could help to even out with what had happened to Cookie. It was worth a try.
Dot came up to try and coax him to come down, now that Paul had come clean.
“Does Mum believe him?” said Danny. “Is she sorry?”
“Of course she believes him, honey.”
“She’s not sorry though, is she?” he said, staring out the window.
“We can’t expect too much of her these days, pet.”
5
When Danny thought about killing someone, the first person who came to mind was his mother, but he pushed that thought aside. You couldn’t kill your mother. Somebody somewhere must have done it, but all the same. It seemed beyond his purpose of evening things out. He didn’t want to go overboard.
He even thought of killing himself. When he went over in his head the last words Cookie had ever heard him speak he wanted to gouge out his own eyes and grind them into the dirt.
The idea of killing Paul wasn’t unappealing, but that was for reasons totally unconnected to Cookie. And he didn’t want to hate him — he missed the day-to-day fooling around — but he didn’t know if it could ever go back to the way it was.
Really, there was only one person. He let his mind circle her for a while, circle and then land.
And he knew how he would do it.
He rose from his chair.
When he went downstairs, his mother was slouching against a counter in the kitchen, holding a mug of coffee. When she saw him, she dropped it on the floor. The mug didn’t break, but the dark liquid splashed up onto the white cupboards and onto her greying robe and it spread like river water over the faded green linoleum.
Dot came running, and Danny kept walking.
“Where are you going?” she said, throwing a dishrag and a tea towel at the spill.
He stopped on the landing. “To visit Cookie’s grave.”
“Would you like something to eat first?”
She rummaged under the sink and found more rags.
“No, thanks.”
“You’re sure?”
He’d never been surer of anything in his life.
“For goodness’ sakes, Barbara, get out of the way,” said Dot.
Coffee surrounded his mother’s bare feet, seeped under her long ugly toes.
“I can drive you.” Dot had been using their old DeSoto for errands.
“No, thanks.”
His bike was dusty, and one of the tires needed air, but other than that it was fine. He filled the tire and headed out. If it didn’t hold the air he could stop at a gas station and top it up.
He weaved in and out of the cars on St. Mary’s Road. Drivers honked at him and shouted comments: stick to the sidewalk, buddy; hey, Mr. Magoo, watch where you’re going.
In his mind he saw himself being cut down, but not lucky enough to die. His injuries would worsen his life further. He would lie in a hospital bed with tubes and casts, and disgusting fluids would leak out all over him. People would hover, expecting him to try to get better.
He moved to the sidewalk, and things quietened down.
Cookie was lucky in a way. Death had been fairly fast, though Danny could imagine few worse ways to go. He changed his mind; she wasn’t lucky, and it wasn’t fast. It was a drawn-out affair, just like the sickness of cancer victims who waste away to nothing in their hospital beds. It took her years to die.
She was dying when she asked not to be cremated, but he hadn’t known. They were playing Chinese checkers at the dining room table, and she was trouncing him as usual.
“Don’t let them burn me,” she whispered.
It surprised him, coming out of nowhere like that, with no preamble, but he knew right away what she meant because they had talked about it before: what they wanted to happen to them after they died. They had heard about cremation, it was becoming common in Canada, and it scared Cookie, made her think of Joan of Arc. What if she woke up from the dead during the fire? She also feared being buried alive, so made Danny promise that he would see to it that she was embalmed, that all the blood was drained out of her so she wouldn’t wake up under the ground. She had read up on embalming.
Cremation wasn’t even mentioned after her death, but neither was embalming, so Danny took it upon himself, with Edwin at his side, to speak to the undertaker and convey Cookie’s wishes.
The undertaker was kind and unsurprised by these words from a young boy.
“Please promise me,” Danny said, “that there is no chance in the world that my sister will wake up after her coffin has been closed.”
“I promise,” said the undertaker, and put his hand on Danny’s shoulder as he looked into his eyes.
Danny believed him.
His tire was losing air. He stopped at a Texaco station to fill it up and then he gave the road another try. The cars had thinned. The streets had a wee-hours-of-the-morning look to them. What if one day all the adults decided not to go to work? And all the kids pretended they were sick and stayed home from school, and the old folks cancelled their doctors’ appointments and bowling dates? What if everybody stayed home one day, all in the same city? For that one day the streets would be empty. He supposed the odds of it happening were very low.
The cemetery parking lot was empty. D
anny imagined that he was the only person left alive in the world, living amongst the dead. He didn’t know if he liked the feeling or not.
He found the grave. It had a small granite headstone that read: Cordelia Ruby Blue 1948 – 1964. Beloved daughter and sister.
Rage tore through him, like when he left the chocolate bar too long in the sun. But not muted this time and not soon gone.
Cordelia was Cookie’s actual name, but no one had called her that in her entire life, as far as Danny knew. Except maybe teachers, at first, till they knew her.
He looked around at nearby graves. Some of them had flowers in various stages of death. He couldn’t bear the thought of flowers wilting and dying on top of Cookie.
She was inside the coffin in the ground, right beneath his feet. He wondered if it was possible that some of her flesh was already gone.
As he stared at her patch of lawn he remembered a conversation he had overheard between his mum and Aunt Dot. It wasn’t very long ago. They were talking about Cookie and how she had fainted in maths class and been sent home.
His mum had said, “It might just be the hole in her heart. I haven’t heard of fainting as a symptom, but I suppose it’s possible.”
“Just the hole in her heart?” Danny had burst into the kitchen. It sounded disastrous to him — life-threatening. “What are you talking about — a hole in her heart? Who’s going to fix it?”
Even when his mother explained it to him, he was certain that it would kill Cookie sooner or later, probably sooner.
“But can her heart handle having a hole in it? I mean with...” He looked over his shoulder to make sure Cookie wasn’t listening. “You know…with the way she is, with what she does to herself.”
“What does she do to herself?” said Dot.
“Nothing,” said his mum. “It’s gradually closing on its own, Danny. Dr. Briggs said there’s no need for reparative surgery, at least not at present. He’s keeping an eye on it.”
Blue Vengeance Page 2