“It’s summer, Danny,” she’d said from the couch, the back of her hand over her eyes. “We don’t turn lights on in summer till night time.”
He hadn’t heard that rule before. He suspected it was a new one. Not for the first time, he wondered if Miss Hartley was the wrong target.
As he’d left the house today, he’d stared into his mum’s lengthened face at the kitchen table and turned on the light in the back landing, just for fun. When he got to the lane he heard Dot’s voice shouting after him, something about rain gear, but he pretended not to hear.
By the time he got to Janine’s, he was soaked. He stood on the stoop and peered through the kitchen window. She and her dad were sitting at the table. They drank from steaming mugs and moved their hands as though they were playing a game. He knocked on the door.
“Danny,” said Janine. “Come on in.”
They were playing Monopoly. She gave him a towel and dry clothes — a green T-shirt that he’d seen her wear, and jeans that must have been hers as well — and sent him to the bathroom to dry off. He left his underwear on even though it was damp. He didn’t think his ass, balls, and especially his dick should touch Janine’s clothes directly. The T-shirt had an iron-on picture of the Rolling Stones on it, and the jeans had beads woven in somehow to cover one of the back pockets. He wouldn’t be able to go out on the street in these clothes, and nothing fit, but they weren’t too bad.
“We’ve just started, Danny,” Jake said, “if you’d like to pick a man and jump in. Jan’s running your clothes through the wringer to give them a head start.”
Danny chose the milk bottle. He and Cookie had always fought over it. He was amazed that neither Janine nor her dad had chosen it. Janine had the thimble, Jake the shoe. He smiled at Jake, who winked back at him.
In a couple of hours the sun came out. The game could have gone all day, but they packed it in and declared Janine the winner. She had bought Boardwalk and Park Place on her first two swings around the board and never looked back.
Danny pegged his clothes to the line in the yard and set his sneakers out to dry. He and Janine sat on old cushions on the stoop with their legs stretched out in front of them. The eaves dripped and the leaves sparkled in the sunlight.
Janine’s sandals were crisscrosses of red, yellow, and blue.
“Your toenails are red,” Danny said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never noticed your toes before.”
“Probably because my toenails have never been a colour before.” Janine tilted her head to the side as she studied her feet. “My dad said I could paint either my fingers or my toes, so I picked my toes.”
“Why just one or the other?”
“I don’t know. I guess he didn’t want me overdoing it.”
“That makes sense.”
They admired the willow tree, its branches drooping with the wet, and discussed the slingshot Danny would carve some day soon.
“Do you kids want some Johnny cake?” Jake spoke through the screen.
By the time they had eaten their fill and helped to clean up the kitchen Danny’s clothes were dry enough to put on.
“Let’s go out,” said Janine.
She went to get her slingshot, and Danny tied on his damp shoes. They started walking. A cool wind had come up, and already the gravel in the lane had dried under the sun.
“People have seen us together,” Danny said. “If you’re the one to do it, they’ll suspect that you’re doin’ my dirty work for me.”
“Danny, no one knows how much you hate Hardass. Or do they? Have you been announcing it to everyone?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, stop worrying then. You only think that people will suspect you because you suspect you. No one else does.”
Danny tried to step outside of himself to look at things from a different angle, but he couldn’t manage it.
“We could ease up on hanging around together if that would make you feel better,” said Janine.
Danny sat down on a curb on Lyndale Drive and looked off towards the river.
“I don’t wanna ease up on it,” he said.
She sat down beside him. “Let me think about it some more.”
They watched the occasional car drive by. Danny recognized Mr. and Mrs. Carter in their beige Plymouth, with Paul in the back seat. Mr. Carter smiled and honked his horn, and Mrs. Carter waved gaily. Paul stared straight ahead.
“There’s an example right there,” Danny said, “of people seein’ us.”
“Yeah, but they’re not seeing us in relation to Hardass.”
She stood up. “Oh, man. I’ve got a great idea.”
“What?”
“We can pretend you’re teaching me. We can practise in the school grounds, not give a hoot who sees us.”
“Yeah, and?”
“And I can get her by supposed accident, like we planned, and come clean right from the start.”
Get her. He still wasn’t sure Janine knew how far he needed it to go. She was winning him over, though, to the idea of her being the one to do it, and that wasn’t all good. There were good parts to it, a letting go of sorts for one, but it might not be a good thing to let go of. A sick feeling, a familiar one, lay heavy in his gut. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt it before. It might have had something to do with Cookie, or not. It was about him not being good enough. Not slingshot wise, he was good enough that way. Person wise. If he let Janine do it for him, it meant he wasn’t a good enough person — he wasn’t doing his best. He wanted to lie down on the road and succumb to the leaden weight that dragged him down.
“You’ll be looked down upon forever,” he said.
“No I won’t. It’ll be an accident, like when I put my cousin’s eye out.”
“Second cousin.”
“Whatever.”
Did she not get that a real accident and a fake one differed from one another? That she might feel different after the fake one than she did after the real one? Did she not have those types of thoughts?
She was so cheerful that he started to think perhaps it was a good idea — never mind her lack of thoughts — and then no it wasn’t, and then yes it was. He felt as if his head was full of butter that had melted and then turned hard again.
“Come on,” Janine said. “I want you to meet someone.”
19
They cut through the icehouse lot to see if their ice was still there, and it was barely a puddle. Danny was astounded that from the first day to the second it had seemed practically the same size, and then from the second day to the third it almost vanished. Janine wasn’t astounded, just suggested that once it got seriously started on melting it picked up speed. They walked down Lyndale to a tidy little house with yellow trim. Janine knocked on the door, and no one answered.
They sat down on the front steps.
“Who lives here?” said Danny, knowing the answer.
“Rock Sand.” Janine’s voice broke in two. “Now he’s someone who really is famous. In these parts anyway,” she added, perhaps remembering that Danny had never heard of him. “He’s famous just for being who he is,” she went on, answering the question he had no intention of asking.
Now he went from not wanting to be famous at all to wanting to be world-renowned. It didn’t matter for what, as long as it beat out the legendary asshole whose front steps he was sitting on and whose name ground your teeth down to dust.
“Why don’t we go?” he said.
“I think it’s just an aura about him that makes him famous,” said Janine.
It angered Danny that she answered questions that he didn’t ask and ignored the ones he did. And her eyes went funny again, like the other time she talked about Rock Sand, as though they were seeing something that he couldn’t. It made her look mental. It made her look like Russell in one of
her denser moments.
“You know how some people just have an aura about them that makes them special?” she said.
“No.”
Danny was unsure about his answer. It was possible that he liked Janine so much because she had an aura about her. Part of it, he knew, was that she seemed to like him, without him having to do much.
But another part of it might have to do with auras. He would look the word up in the dictionary when he got home.
“How do you spell aura?”
“A-u-r-a.”
“I don’t wanna meet this guy. Why do I have to meet him?”
“Well, jeez. You don’t have to. I thought you might want to. You know, to broaden your horizons.”
“I don’t want my horizons broadened.”
“Sure you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
Danny looked at her to see if the dreamy look was still there. It wasn’t. She was back on planet earth.
“That way is east, right?” Danny pointed towards St. Mary’s Road.
“Yes. Jesus, Danny. Do you not know where the sun comes up?”
“I guess I haven’t really thought about it before.”
“It’s not the kind of thing you think about,” said Janine. “You just know it, like how many toes you have or what your middle name is.”
“My middle name is Arthur.” He took out his jackknife, opened it, closed it again, and put it back in his pocket.
“Does he live with his parents or is this his very own house?”
“Oh no, he’s got parents. He’s not an adult or anything, but he lives in the basement. His folks pretty much leave him alone.”
“Let’s get out of here.” Danny stood up.
Janine stood too, and they walked to the front sidewalk and began a discussion about what to do next. Her cutoffs were too big for her, as if they had once been a pair of her dad’s old jeans. They hung on her hips, and Danny could see her belly button, and slightly lower, to either side, the hint of an indentation.
An old black car came towards them and stopped near where they were standing.
He felt the change in her. Her body shifted into a different gear, one that lifted her clear out of their conversation and towards the car.
“Let’s go down to the river,” he said uselessly.
A boy got out of the car and reached into the back seat for an electric guitar that he slung over his shoulder. He was small in stature, but the muscles in his arms bulged, stretching the cloth of his T-shirt. It was stretched further by a pack of cigarettes. He took a deep drag from one as he approached. It had no filter.
“Hi, Rock,” said Janine.
Danny didn’t like the way she said his name. Plus, who the hell would name their kid Rock? His parents must be retarded.
“Hi, Jan.”
So this muscle-bound freak was in the secret club that got to call her Jan. Him and Jake. How many other boys and men belonged to the club? He wanted to join it and he wanted to run as far away from it as he could get.
“This is the guy I was telling you about,” said Janine. “Remember?”
“Hi, guy-that-Jan-told-me-about.”
They’d been talking about him. Sweat began to trickle down his sides.
“I have to go now,” he said, staring hard at her.
“No, you don’t,” said Janine.
“Yes, I do.”
“A minute ago we were talking about what we were going to do next.”
“So what.”
Rock laughed and crushed his cigarette under his foot. He wore black boots that came up to his ankles. They had chains attached to them.
“I’ll leave you kids to your bickering.” He walked down the sidewalk and disappeared around the corner of his house.
“Thanks a lot,” said Janine, again the person who had stood beside him before the car’s arrival had changed the whole world.
“Thank you a lot,” Danny said. “You told him about me too. Who haven’t you told about me? I don’t wanna be told about.”
“I didn’t give him any details.”
“Yeah, just like you didn’t blab to your dad, and then he goes ramblin’ on about me bein’ a dab hand. Don’t you get that the fewer people that know about me the better?”
“I didn’t tell Rock about your slingshot skills, and even if I had, we can trust him. He’s cool.”
“This is unbelievable. If you didn’t talk about my slingshot skills, what could you possibly have talked about? There’s nothing about me except my slingshot skills.”
“Cookie.”
“You told him about Cookie?”
“Yeah.”
“What about her?”
“That she died.”
“What else?”
“That she was my friend and your sister.”
“What else?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re nuts.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re nuts about him, and that makes you nuts in all ways.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, it does. And you’re stupid to think you can trust him. Why did you have to talk about Cookie with him?”
“Sorry.”
Danny decided on the spot to carry out his plan alone. He couldn’t trust her, not with thoughts of Rock Sand messing up her head.
“I’m not stupid,” she said.
“Well, maybe not. But nuts for sure. And a blabbermouth.”
“I’m not a blabbermouth. I didn’t blab about Cookie. I just talked.”
She walked away from him, up Lyndale and back to the path by the river. Danny followed and caught up. He wasn’t done with her.
He chuckled. It was a mean chuckle, the kind that accompanies the word amused. He had noticed that people who said they were amused never really were. They were filled with something bad — hate maybe, or envy — and they pretended they were amused. His mum said it sometimes: It amuses me that Jean Carter thinks she can get away with spike heels at her age. He heard her say that to Dot on the day Paul’s mum dropped him off after the Sydney I. Robinson incident. She only said it because her own legs were lumpy and white, and Mrs. Carter’s were shapely and smooth and tanned. He knew it.
“What?” said Janine. “What could possibly be funny?”
“Your heart-throb. He’s short.”
Danny laughed out loud and bounced along beside her. He skipped ahead a step or two and walked backwards. He had imagined Rock to be six feet tall at least.
“He’s not my heart-throb,” said Janine. “Where’d you get that stupid word? And he’s not short.”
“Yes, he is. He’s a pipsqueak.”
“He’s not as short as you.”
“Yes, he is, and besides, I’m way younger than him. And his eyelashes and eyebrows are white.”
“So what.”
“He looks like a sissy. No wonder he lifts weights. He has to protect himself from all the people who make fun of him. And he has a ducktail. Nobody has a ducktail anymore, not even morons.”
Janine turned towards him. Her face had hate on it, inside of it. He had gone too far, but he couldn’t stand her starry-eyed carrying on. Who did she think she was, Sandra Dee?
She started to run back towards her house.
“Oh no. Wait.”
“Go away, Danny.”
“Sorry, wait up.” He ran after her.
“Leave me alone, you little prick,” she shouted. “If you follow me, I’ll tell everyone in the universe what you’re gonna do. I’ll testify in court.”
Danny stopped. He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean anything. Somebody could have heard.
Janine stopped too and faced him.
“His eyelashes are beautiful, and he’
s a good kisser too. Best I ever had.” She wasn’t yelling anymore.
“Kids don’t go to trial; they go to reform school.” It was the best he could do.
He turned around and walked towards the river. The upper half of his body strained to leave the rest of him behind.
How many other people had she kissed? He knew very little about kissing as yet. Once last year three older girls had held him down in the school grounds and taken turns pressing their lips against his. Two of them pressed really hard. One of them didn’t, and he didn’t hate it. His body responded in an instant.
Frank Foote had driven the girls off that day. Just his appearance on the scene seemed to deflate the girls’ intentions somehow. He had been walking by the school with his younger sister, pushing her in her wheelchair. She suffered from something horrible that she’d been born with and she couldn’t walk or even talk. People said she probably wouldn’t grow to be very old. Frank could often be seen pushing her up and down the streets of the neighbourhood, talking to her, pointing things out.
He was a good brother to her, Danny thought now. If only he could go back to Cookie’s last day and change just a couple of the sentences he had spoken. The last words she heard from him should have been kind.
She had been the same age as Frank and Janine. He wondered if she’d had any ideas about what a good kiss was. If so, it would have been only in her imagination. He was almost certain there were no real kisses in her life. Not that kind, anyway — the kind Janine was talking about.
A picture came to him; he’d seen it before. It was what he thought of as his first memory, and he attached the age of three to it. That might be right.
His mother was sitting in a chair in the front room. It was around the time of Cookie saying Daddy to her as she sewed. There was a sunbeam this day too. Maybe it was the same day, the same sunbeam.
Cookie crawled up onto her lap. Their mother’s arms hung down on either side of her chair. They made no move to encircle her daughter, to touch her in any way. The lack of movement was out of whack. It puzzled Danny then, and he wondered about it again now. His mum had used her arms for practical reasons, to move Cookie and him from place to place: bath mat to tub, road to car seat, dewy grass to dry cement. Surely it was too early on in her illness for touching to have become such a problem for her. Or maybe that was one of the first symptoms. Yes, maybe that was it. A grimace was attached to every effort she made, then and now.
Blue Vengeance Page 10