Mr. Calder took a handkerchief from his pants pocket, wiped his forehead, and went back inside the school.
Danny sat still inside the bush till the only car remaining was an old Hudson. A stooped man dressed in workman’s clothes came out of the school, locked the doors behind him, got in the car, and drove away. Mr. Potter, Danny supposed: the janitor. Cookie had told him that she’d heard Miss Hartley yell at him more than once about the state of the gymnasium floor, so he was sure the old guy would be one person, at least, who wouldn’t object to a fast-moving projectile aimed at her nasty head.
A warning shot had been fired. Miss Hartley could sweat a little. He toyed with the idea of another warning shot on the last day of school, but decided against it. He didn’t want to take stupid chances.
When he emerged from the honeysuckle bush he backtracked till he came to Highfield. Birchdale Betty was in her yard squirting dandelions with a rod-like instrument. She fixed her loony eyes on him, but he was convinced that her only thoughts in life were about her yard, and protecting it from marauders. He crossed over and sauntered home down the back lane between Birchdale and Lawndale.
He thought about adding surprise sounds to his practice, like those of a barking dog, but he couldn’t do that without another person. Also, he had to consider Russell, who could easily mess things up just by being there. She would need to be secured at home.
For the first time, he worried that he might be famous for his slingshot skills. Maybe it had gotten around…or maybe he wasn’t famous at all. He hadn’t heard his name shouted out during Miss Hartley’s rant. And lots of boys had slingshots.
He liked the idea of being admired for his sharpshooting, especially when he was riding no hands on his bike, but he made the decision now to tone it down, appear average, maybe stop altogether for a while till his fame, if there was any, died down. He would feel Paul out on the subject. That wouldn’t be easy; they hadn’t seen much of each other these past weeks.
When Dot was in town the last time she had accused him of becoming a lone wolf. She said that was dangerous, but didn’t say why. He didn’t like being a lone wolf, if that’s what he was, but these days he didn’t know any other way to be.
When he talked to Paul he’d need to word the fame business in such a way that he didn’t sound like a moron.
11
It was a little early for supper when Danny got home, but he boiled up three wieners and made hotdogs. He wanted to get it over with. He ate two, with mustard and Cheez Whiz. His mother ate none.
“I couldn’t possibly face a hotdog,” she said from her nest on the couch.
So starve then. Out loud he said nothing, just removed her plate from the coffee table.
The phone rang. He answered it and called her. She made getting up look like a gargantuan effort, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. How could she not get that if Dot didn’t think things were normal, she’d come back? He had gotten quite used to not having her around.
His mother at least tried to sound breezy today.
Sometimes she told a lie — said she had caught some sun by the pool, baked some muffins, spoken to someone on the phone. Danny couldn’t look at her when she lied, but at the same time, he didn’t mind.
Dot made Edwin call sometimes. There was no way he would have done it without being forced. Those calls were shorter. His mum didn’t work as hard for him, but still, everything was fine, just fine.
Danny waited till he was sure Paul’s supper would be over and then knocked on his door to see if he’d like to come out. Russell accompanied him.
Paul seemed happier to see the dog than to see Danny.
“I’m meeting Stu and Stubby later,” he said, “but I guess I could, for a while.”
A well of loneliness swelled up inside him. Paul didn’t really want to come out; he was just being polite, in his way.
They walked along in the tall grass by the river.
“Let’s go down to the monkey speedway,” said Danny, “where the blueberries are.”
“They’re not ready yet.”
In summers gone by they had eaten the ripened fruit till their tongues and lips turned blue, and the thought of just one more made them sick. But it was too early in the season now, of course. And Paul had made this discovery without him.
He and Paul might find nothing to do, in an uncomfortable way.
Russell romped along beside them; Danny threw a stick. She snatched it up and kept running.
Danny hoped Paul would suggest that he join him and Stubby and Stu for whatever it was they had planned, which was probably just hanging around, but in a good easy way. It was something he had never had to hope for before. He had always just drifted along inside his friendships without questioning whether he was wanted or liked, whether his company mattered in a good way or bad.
He thought about inviting all three of them over for a swim in his neglected pool, but he didn’t want to feel the way he’d feel if they said no.
Well, first things first.
“If you wanted to be famous for something,” he said, “what would it be?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, say you wanted to be known the world over for something, what would the something be?”
Paul kicked at a clump of dry dirt.
“I don’t wanna be known the world over for anything.”
Danny watched Russell disappear into the bushes.
“Say you were forced to pick something.”
“Well…I guess I’d like to hit like Mickey Mantle.”
“Good one.”
“Or play drums like Ringo.”
“Another good one.”
“Or maybe be a ventriloquist.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was time for Paul to stop reeling off things he wanted to be famous for. He hadn’t even liked the idea at first.
They walked in silence, kicking dirt, kicking stones. Paul hit a stone that was too big and said, “Ow.”
Russell bounded back, wet from the river, expecting praise. None came.
“Guess what I’d like to be famous for?” said Danny.
“Why do I have to guess?”
“I don’t know. Just guess.”
Paul looked at him as though he were someone he didn’t know — had never known — and wouldn’t like if he did get to know him. His oldest friend didn’t like him anymore.
Danny slowed down, and Paul slowed too.
“Your slingshot,” said Paul. “You’d wanna be famous for your jeesly shithead slingshot.”
A train went by on the other side of the river, chugging its way slowly towards the CN station.
“I have to go.” Paul quickened his step. “You’re seriously certifiable.”
He headed up towards Lyndale Drive.
Danny didn’t follow. “Later, alligator,” he called.
The train drowned him out.
Paul reached the top of the dike and was soon out of sight.
It hadn’t gone well on any front. Danny still didn’t know if he was famous because he hadn’t asked the right questions, and his best friend was no longer his friend at all.
All this was Miss Hartley’s fault. If he didn’t hate her so much, he wouldn’t have come up with the slingshot idea and he wouldn’t have pissed Paul off this much. That didn’t seem quite true to him, but as he moped along, he couldn’t figure out what the real truth was. His thoughts rattled inside his head.
Russell shook herself down and leapt up in the air with all four feet off the ground.
“Good girl, Russ,” Danny said.
It sure didn’t take much to lose a friend. Maybe it had to do with more than his slingshot and how mean he had been to Paul after the Sydney I. Robinson thing. He regretted that now, even though Paul had deserved it. He wondered if maybe Paul
had finally seen that he came from a creepy place. A standard family didn’t have a fifteen-year-old girl in it who threw up everything she ate. A girl who died. And no dad, and an old mum who lived on a chesterfield. As far as he knew, no one but him and Dot and Edwin knew about the chesterfield part, but it wasn’t impossible. People got to know stuff.
This total disconnection from Paul’s world was worse than anything except Cookie’s death. It practically equalled it.
To an extent he had always felt an apartness from the people in his life, even from Cookie. His mother no longer counted, and he couldn’t remember meeting his father. There was Aunt Dot and Uncle Edwin and, till recently, friends that he had horsed around with: Paul and, to a lesser extent, Stubby and Stu. Paul had been the hub, friend-wise.
But he had always felt there was a missing piece, as if his own shadow had gone astray. When he’d had that thought he checked for his shadow a few days in a row, and there it was: long in the morning, short at lunchtime, and long again in the late afternoon on his way home from school, following him or preceding him wherever he went.
He had never felt the apartness like now. He was adrift like a balloon that had slipped through the fingers of a kid at a birthday party. The kid would cry, and the balloon would be forgotten and replaced soon enough with another one. Danny didn’t want to be a balloon.
When he got home he went up to his room to assess his gear. There was a useless piece of crap cap gun that made a half-hearted sound. Often the rolls of caps didn’t even work. The smell it gave off was good; it hinted at fire and destruction. But it couldn’t put a dent in Miss Hartley or even in her windshield. Danny and Paul had sometimes used rocks to bang the strips of caps on the pavement to set them off, but there was only marginally more satisfaction in that than in hitting the pavement with rocks independently of the caps.
He picked up some spurs from his old cowboy outfit. They looked sharp, and actually were, kind of, but a piece of one fell off in his hand, and then another. He hefted a broken piece, took its measure as a weapon, and found that it easily snapped in two. Piece of shit spurs. No wonder he had never worn them.
There was a pea shooter. You could bother people with that, but nothing more. A yo-yo and a kaleidoscope — two items that had amazed him in his younger years, especially the kaleidoscope. Uncle Edwin had tried to explain it to him, but Danny hadn’t wanted to believe there was a practical explanation. It was sheer magic, still was, but he didn’t care about it anymore.
He put the yo-yo in his pocket and took the spurs downstairs to the kitchen garbage. Maybe he could still master ’round-the-world and walking the dog. Other kids could do tricks with their yo-yos — even Cookie had been able to make it sleep, but Danny couldn’t get the hang of anything but the most basic move.
A kid at school had one of those knives that opened in an instant when you pressed a button. It was confiscated almost immediately, before Danny could get close to it. The kid couldn’t keep himself from showing it off. Switchblade. That’s what it was called. Danny wished he had a switchblade.
He took his jackknife out of his pocket and opened it. It was difficult to picture his small knife causing any real damage. And even if he had a dagger or a sword, like Zorro, it would be messy and loud. Miss Hartley would scream like a banshee when he got going on her.
There was no choice, nothing to weigh. It had to be his slingshot. If he got caught he could run, like Billy the Kid. He could flee to the furthest tip of South America. Patagonia! They had learned about it in geography class. No one would find him there — not the cops, not Uncle Edwin and Aunt Dot. His mum wouldn’t even search.
He could get a job washing dishes in Patagonia. There would always be dishes to wash; he could make a career of it.
12
It was a late afternoon in early July, and Danny was in his backyard shooting at Campbell soup tins. He had placed the cans on the flat fence posts that ran alongside their empty lot next door. His mum had posted a NO TRESPASSING sign on it, back when she still did things.
Soup was one of the main things that Danny made for lunch and often again for supper. He prepared it in a small pot, sometimes with milk, sometimes with water, depending on the kind of soup. He had a favourite pot by now, one he had grown attached to. When the soup was hot he poured it into bowls, placed one on a tray along with a little pile of soda crackers, and took it in to his mother.
When she didn’t eat hers, Danny threw it down the sink. He didn’t want to eat anything that her spit might have touched. The soda crackers went back in the box.
He ate his soup in the kitchen with a piece of toast. He had started out making toast for his mum, but it usually went to waste, and that hadn’t sat well with him. Wasted bread meant he had to go to the store more often.
She was most inclined to eat tomato soup. Danny could tell by her bowl that she even crumbled the soda crackers into it. That was something she used to do before Cookie died. So he made it regularly, even though it wasn’t close to his favourite. It hurt his tongue. The ones he liked best were Scotch broth, which you made with water, and cheddar cheese, which you made with milk. He also made tomato soup with milk, so that was another thing he had to lay in regularly. But that was easy; the Spanish Court store had milk. It had bread too, but it wasn’t as good as what he got at Dominion or the A&P.
He shot the cans off the fence posts one by one, then replaced them and did it again. Soon his mind began to wander, so he took a break and sat on the stoop. Wielders of slingshots shouldn’t have wandering minds.
Russell sat with him.
A girl stood outside the gate. The girl he’d seen on the bus. He didn’t know how long she had been there. She was a small girl, but older than Danny by two years. He knew that because she had been in Cookie’s room at school. Her hands were pushed down into the front pockets of her jeans. She stared at him.
“Hi,” said Danny.
She didn’t answer, but she came closer, right up to the gate.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“You were?”
“Yup.”
“Come on in,” he said. “I can hardly hear you.”
She came inside the yard and closed the gate behind her. She wore no shoes. Russell walked over slowly with her tail wagging, also slowly. The girl put her hand down for Russell to sniff. The dog did so.
The girl came closer.
“I’m Janine,” she said. “I was friends with Cookie. I was there the day you saw Hardass being mean to her.”
“I know who you are,” he said.
How could he forget? He sounded unfriendly to his own ears; he didn’t mean to. Janine was the girl who had helped, and who he had seen on the bus reading the book that had madding in the title. And she said she was Cookie’s friend. That was good news. He hadn’t known Cookie to have any friends in the past couple of years. Since she started at Nelson Mac her old ones seemed to have drifted away.
Janine didn’t mind his tone, not outwardly, anyway. She seemed the sort that didn’t mind much, the sort that wouldn’t let an incidental like an unfriendly tone get in the way.
“I was thinking you might want an assistant,” she said.
Russell circled her and sat down. The girl crouched and scratched her behind her ears.
“What do you mean? An assistant for what?”
“You know. For your slingshot practice and that.”
“Oh, jeez.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” he said. It was a lie.
Had his fame reached as far as girls who were way older than him, who should be thinking about makeup and garter belts?
The day she referred to was just three months ago when Cookie was still alive. Danny’s teacher had asked the grade eight class who would like to take a message for the principal over to the high school. The hands of most of the kids had shot up,
of course — anything to get out and taste freedom, however briefly. She picked Danny; he couldn’t believe his luck. The message contained a list of all the grade eight kids from Nordale that would be heading over to the high school in the fall.
A few of the other kids chanted teacher’s pet after him as he snatched his jacket off a hook in the cloakroom and dashed out the door. It was good-natured chanting, and Danny smiled to himself as he walked down Highfield with a spring in his step. The April wind was cool, but the sun was high enough and close enough to warm his face when he raised it skywards.
He left the list with the vice-principal, Mr. Calder, and was deciding which roundabout route he would take back to Nordale as he walked past the gymnasium on his way out.
The double doors to the gym were open, and he saw a class of girls lined up in their white shorts and blouses. He didn’t see Cookie at first; she was out of his line of vision. When she appeared she was panting hard and her face was blood red. She was the only one running and she was barely able to keep putting one foot in front of the other. To Danny she looked like a person about to have a heart attack. And she was so thin. He hadn’t seen her in shorts for a long time. When had she gotten so thin?
The rest of the class watched: some snickering, some with worry on their faces, some slack-jawed, some turning away in embarrassment. He wanted to mow them all down.
“Come on, cockroach,” Miss Hartley said. “If you can’t run, crawl. Look at her, girls. Watch the stinky cockroach. Puke stink. I can smell it from here.”
Cookie looked close to collapse.
Danny hesitated for a second or two. Did he want all these beautiful awful girls to know that the feeblest person in the class was related to him? He made a beeline for her at the exact moment that Janine stepped away from the others and moved forward, calling out words of protest.
She got there first, and put her hand on Cookie’s arm to slow her down and then stop her. Her legs folded beneath her and she crumpled to the floor.
“I can’t do it,” she gasped, all bony and bruised.
Blue Vengeance Page 5