They put on their socks and shoes now and sauntered back down Lyndale Drive.
“See ya later, alligator,” said Paul when he turned off at Cedar Place.
“In a while, crocodile,” said Danny.
“Not too soon, ya big baboon.”
If only his mum could be like Mrs. Carter. He couldn’t imagine her inviting a friend of his in for supper at the last minute. She rarely even answered the door. They never had people for supper except Aunt Dot and Uncle Edwin, and when that happened Dot did the cooking.
And why hadn’t Cookie done normal girl stuff, like Paul’s sisters?
His house wasn’t like other people’s. The missing dad was the biggest part, he supposed, but everything felt different there — even before Cookie died — and none of it in a good way.
9
School interfered with Danny’s slingshot practice, but going to school was one of the things Dot had made him promise to do.
He practised at the river — aiming at trees, then at individual branches, then at single leaves. He didn’t graduate to branches till he aced the tree trunks and he didn’t graduate to leaves till he aced the branches. It was hard work. His arms felt strong as he pulled back the sling and held fast to the Y-shaped instrument that he had carved himself. He felt like a he-man.
“Leaves are way too feeble of a thing to aim at,” Paul said.
He was coming by less and less often.
“What then?” Danny didn’t look up from the task at hand. “Any better ideas?”
“I don’t know. Squirrels? Cars? Shooting at nothing would be better than leaves.”
It was true. Leaves were boring, and hitting them was practically impossible because of their size and their thin way of resting sideways on the air. Even when he did hit one (oak leaves were the easiest) it provided little satisfaction. You needed a good solid hit for that — if possible with some wreckage. But Danny stuck with it because he needed to perfect his aim and he couldn’t think of anything else that presented itself in such abundance. It was his job, like it was Paul’s job to practise piano after school — no fun, but it had to be done. And no question — he was getting good. That was what provided the scrap of satisfaction.
Birchdale Betty’s yard had good stones. She had them trucked in. Whenever he got low, he would take a pail over and scoop them up by the handful. She caught him once.
“I see you, Danny Blue,” she said, scaring him witless. “I’ve got my eye on you.”
It was after dark, and he had thought for sure she would be inside her house. He should have known better. With her putting-green lawn and prize-winning flowers, she often stood guard against the neighbourhood hooligans who couldn’t resist the dwarves and flamingoes that dwelled so happily in amongst her shrubbery.
“Put them back,” she said, looming over him with a broom and her famous crazed eyes.
He obeyed her and ran all the way home.
There was no way he could conquer leaves, but he moved on anyway, to shooting at those same three things: tree trunks, branches, and leaves, but from different angles — hard left, hard right, and everything in between. It was time to advance to moving objects. He tried to enlist Paul for that, to throw things for him.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Paul said. “You can’t hit moving objects unless you’re Superman or someone like that. Probably he can’t even do it. You know what? I’m tired of this whole thing. At least when we looked for stones we covered some territory. This is just stupid.”
Danny no longer wanted to do the old things: ride bikes all over town, swim in the pool, go to scary shows at the Lyceum, walk around doing not much of anything.
“Let’s go downtown,” Paul said.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
When he didn’t answer, Paul threw his own slingshot as far out into the river as he could and walked away.
It didn’t take Danny long to realize that Paul had been right about the moving objects thing. What had he been thinking? He hoped there weren’t other things that he was clued out about in regard to his plan.
He cared about the loss of his friend’s presence, but not very much. It had been handy having him help with the search for stones, but tiresome listening to him whine. It played havoc with his concentration.
Now that he was on his own, he was free to do whatever he liked. He solved the moving objects challenge by becoming one himself. From his bicycle he shot at everything he saw that wasn’t alive. He was good at no-hands — he had perfected that the summer before. He liked to chew Double Bubble while he rode, and blow bubbles as he shot — the bigger the bubble the better. Three activities at once. The only person he could have bragged to about it was Cookie.
Neighbours had come by at first with casseroles and pot pies, detailed instructions attached to the foil wrappings. When Danny showed them to his mum she didn’t seem interested so he warmed them up in the oven himself and dished some out for each of them. Sometimes she ate hers; sometimes she didn’t.
The only hard part about it was explaining to the women repeatedly that his mum was lying down. They never pushed. He came to suspect they were relieved not to see her. It meant they didn’t have to figure out what to say.
Sometimes two of them came at once, with a supper apiece. Danny figured they came together in case his mum surprised them and made an appearance. It would be less awkward for them if they weren’t alone.
These ready-made suppers eventually dwindled and then stopped.
Danny had no problem feeding himself with the eats his aunt and uncle left and he wore the same clothes several days in a row. He was beginning to think that wearing clean clothes was overrated. At first he didn’t know if his mum ate or not after the ready-made meals stopped coming. He leaned towards not. The only disturbances in the kitchen seemed to be those he caused himself. So he started taking her some of whatever he was having: cereal, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, TV dinners, butterscotch pudding.
His mum had always been big on Swanson’s TV dinners. Danny remembered watching her elation the first time she brought some home from the grocery store years ago, heated them up, and placed them in front of him and Cookie.
“Ninety-eight cents a pop,” she announced gaily.
It was as gay as she got.
Cookie’s eyes had grown big. She sometimes ate TV dinners in secret, any time of day, and then biked over to the Dominion store to buy more, to replace them before her mother found out what she had done. She spent a good portion of her allowance on them. She hadn’t known that Danny knew, and he was too embarrassed to mention it. He also knew that in the past couple of years she had thrown them up soon after she ate them. For sure he couldn’t mention that.
His mum usually thanked him when he made her a meal, but as with the neighbours’ casseroles, she didn’t always eat what he set in front of her.
“What would you like to eat?” he said one lunchtime when she hadn’t touched her brown sugar and butter sandwich.
“Nothing, thanks,” she said. “I’m having a little trouble swallowing lately.”
So he kept on the way he was, giving her some of whatever he made for himself. The meal making wasn’t difficult, and it didn’t get in the way of his practice. Not much anyway. At the end of every day he washed the dishes and cutlery that he had used. The sink looked out over the backyard with its swimming pool and clothesline and shed. His thoughts could roam wherever they chose. Chores were something he and Cookie had co-operated on daily, and he missed her most during those times.
He was late for school off and on. Part of his preparations involved the study of his quarry: her comings and goings, her habits. She taught at Nelson Mac, and Danny went to Nordale, the elementary school, so he had to move back and forth between the two. The school year was drawing to an end; time was closing in.
Aunt Dot phoned daily to see how t
hey were getting along. If he hadn’t answered the phone, it would have rung and rung. He called his mother so that Dot could hear him, and she dragged herself, inside of her sheet or blanket, to the telephone table in the hall.
“Yes, Dot. We’re fine. Everything’s fine. For Christ’s sake, Dot, we’re fine.”
Danny didn’t like hearing her swear. It was just one more thing that had changed, one more thing to get used to.
Uncle Edwin and Aunt Dot made a day trip into town once a week at first, and then they began to come for a couple of days every two weeks or so. During these times Danny’s mum would force herself off the couch and pretend she was going about the business of living a miniature life. She slept in her bedroom instead of on the couch, had baths, and put on clothes.
Dot and Edwin replenished the eats and the money drawer, did load after load of laundry, and cleaned the place up. Dot cooked and nagged Barbara about her pills, and Edwin mowed the lawn, pulled weeds, washed windows, did whatever he felt needed doing around the place. He even saw to the filling of the pool and cleaned it whenever he came to town. Danny never used it, but he didn’t say so.
When Dot insisted on hiring a cleaning woman, Barbara fought it with what little fight she had.
“No, Dot, for heaven’s sake, I can manage.”
“You’re not managing, Barb. I can see that. And too much is being put on Danny.”
Dot won, and a woman named Lena began to come in once a week. She came recommended by a friend of Dot’s, and her wages were paid up front for a full year.
Danny worried at first that Lena would be in his way, but he worked around her nicely. She even cooked and did laundry on the day she came, so it eased up on his chores.
Every day he shot 250 stones. By the time he turned fourteen on June 24, 1964, he was a pro. He thought of himself as a modern-day Billy the Kid. His favourite gunfighter was Paladin, a gentleman killer who only performed the deed when he had run out of other options. But Billy the Kid was, well…a kid. And Danny’s mind was not willing to let in any peaceful alternatives. He differed from Paladin in that way.
Cookie was gone from the world, and Miss Hartley would pay.
Danny’s birthday fell on a Wednesday. He thought that would be a good day to go to the cemetery and tell Cookie about his plan. As he rode out after school he thought about the first time she had mentioned her phys ed teacher’s name. It was January, he remembered, around the time that he first heard “All My Lovin’” on the radio.
“Miss Hartley called me a scrawny cockroach,” she’d said.
“Who’s Miss Hartley?” said Danny.
“My phys ed teacher.”
“What’s a cockroach?”
“I don’t know, but I know it’s ugly, and everybody hates it and doesn’t want to go near it.”
“What happened?”
“We were all in the locker room changing into our gym clothes. I always go into the bathroom because I don’t want the other girls looking at me in my underwear. She’s always in there with us and she started yelling at me to come out and change with the others. What was so special about me that I needed extra privacy — stuff like that.
“I hurried but not fast enough, and she banged on the door of the cubicle. ‘Cordelia!’ she said. Oh, Danny, I hate her so much. I got the door open and she yelled at me to step out. Some of the girls had gathered ’round by then, and she said, ‘Look at you. You’re a scrawny cockroach. It makes me sick to look at you.’ And she said. ‘No wonder you want to hide.’ And she told the other girls to have a good look at what no boy is ever going to want to touch or marry. She went on and on. Some girls giggled. Most of them didn’t.”
Danny winced now as he remembered the tears streaming down her face and how he had been unable to come up with anything to make her feel better.
He’d said, “Most of the girls didn’t giggle,” and then asked her if she’d like to play checkers.
She hadn’t wanted to.
The only car in the cemetery parking lot was a pale blue Cadillac. Danny wondered if it was the same one that was there the day of Cookie’s funeral. It had to be. Maybe it belonged to the groundskeeper. Maybe the groundskeeper was independently wealthy but wanted his job because he liked to hang around dead people, and it gave him a good reason for doing so.
He parked his bike and walked the short distance to Cookie’s grave. Nothing about it had changed. It still said Cordelia. He sat down and told her what he had in mind.
When he looked up he saw a man standing a ways off, across an expanse of graves. The man was looking at him, or seemed to be. Maybe he was just looking in his general direction. Danny stared at him, and the man looked away.
Then he turned back to telling Cookie more about what was going on: his falling out with Paul, his developing skill with a slingshot, the worsening of their mum’s health.
When he looked again the man was gone. He glanced at the parking lot and saw the Cadillac pulling away.
10
Danny had to delay his plan until fall. He had been watching for over a month, but he needed more time to fine-tune the details.
Miss Hartley drove a Volkswagen that she parked on the street in front of the school. Danny often forced himself out of bed in time to watch her arrive. Classes didn’t begin till five to nine, but she was always there by seven-thirty because of her coaching duties. The sporty girls got there before eight, carrying their gym bags.
She left at four most afternoons, unless there was a game. The tournaments had wound down now that school was almost over.
On the last Monday of the school year, Danny decided to go through a trial run. For the execution of the actual deed, he’d decided the days needed to be shorter. He wanted a slight cover of dusk, only slight, not enough to affect his sight line: straight to the temple.
The trial run got away on him. In his place inside the shrubbery by the house next to the school, he lost control of his intention.
He watched Miss Hartley walk briskly from the front doors of the school to her dark blue Beetle. She opened the door and threw her purse inside. He took aim — a trial run aim. She surprised him by partially closing the door and reaching over her windshield to retrieve a flapping piece of paper. It gave him more time. The angle wasn’t good, but that was okay. He was a master of difficult angles.
A dog barked from behind him somewhere, a high-pitched sound that pierced his ear at the moment that he took his shot. He missed.
He stunned himself with his inaccuracy. The only thing he accomplished was a thunk to her windshield, satisfying in itself — Paul would have liked the thunk — but it was off the mark. He was too far away to see, but he could tell from the sound that he hadn’t even made a star on the glass. Maybe, though, a nick that could grow into one. That had happened to the DeSoto once, when they had driven up to Rock Lake a million years ago. He wished for a star now. It could be a reminder to Miss Hartley that there would be a next time.
The dog’s bark had both caused the shot and wrecked his aim. Danny was grateful for the wrecking part. It was too soon. There wasn’t supposed to be a shot this day. He didn’t have a hold on himself.
Miss Hartley looked around her, unhinged. Sounds escaped her throat, but no words.
Danny enjoyed the look on her face. It seemed to be a mixture of terror and guilt. Under the unexpected circumstances he couldn’t have hoped for more. She knew how close she had come and she may not have known exactly why, but she knew she deserved it.
Clutching the stone in her fist, she ran back inside the school. She wasn’t wearing running shoes, as usual, but ladies’ shoes with a small heel. She went over on one ankle.
“Shit.” She shouted it.
Danny laughed. It was the sort of laugh kids use when they make fun of others, but quieter. He didn’t like the sound of it coming from his own throat.
He figured shit
was probably the type of word Miss Hartley used all the time after school hours. She probably even said fuck sometimes, and women weren’t supposed to say either of those words. She was a foul-mouthed pig when she was away from her job, even worse of a person than when she was at school.
Danny wondered if she was running to protect herself from another shot or just to report the misdeed to anyone who would listen. He suspected a little of each.
Almost immediately she emerged from the school with the vice-principal, Mr. Calder, in tow. Danny knew him from an errand he had run for his teacher on the day he had first seen Miss Hartley in action.
He was pleased with himself for not taking off when she went inside for those few moments. He wouldn’t have had time to make a clean getaway.
Mr. Calder was not wearing a suit jacket, and his pants were pulled up impossibly high. Danny wondered if they had a longer zipper than standard pants. He vowed to himself that if he lived to be a hundred he would never wear his pants pulled up to his shoulders.
Miss Hartley waved her arms over the windshield and then faced Mr. Calder with her hands on her hips. Danny could hear some of her words.
“…could have been killed,” she said.
The vice-principal looked nothing but tired. He stepped back from her noise and put his hands over his ears.
Her screeching stopped. Even she seemed to know that if a fellow grownup had his hands over his ears at the sound of her voice, it was time to shut up. They looked around them vaguely, never in Danny’s direction. He was home free. They must have assumed that the culprit wasn’t the type of person who would stick around.
Miss Hartley got in her car and wormed away down Birchdale, hunched forward, hands squeezing the steering wheel.
Blue Vengeance Page 4