Living with the hawk

by Robert Currie

  It was well after nine when I got to Warren Crescent. There were no sidewalks on the crescent, and the street was jammed with cars. I walked on the pavement, trying to pick out the house numbers, but none of them were lit up. It didn’t matter though. As I walked farther, I could hear a throbbing bass from a large two-storey house where the crescent turned, the bass booming like the music in those cars you hear coming at you in the night long before you see them. The smart thing, maybe, would be to get out of here and go home.

  They’d have the party in the basement, I figured, in the family room — a house this size was bound to have one — so I went around to the back door. The yard was dark, but in the light of a window across the alley I could see two guys sitting on the back fence. I waved at them, but they didn’t seem to notice me. They each had a bottle of beer. I wasn’t sure if I should talk to them or go inside — or maybe just take off.

  I crossed a wooden deck to knock on the door, gave it a good pounding, but no one answered. No wonder, I thought, they wouldn’t even hear me with that music hammering away inside. What the heck, might as well go right in.

  I turned the knob, was starting to pull at the door, when it swung open, a girl falling into me, her red sweater like a flare in the sudden light from the landing, the music driving in my ears. She grabbed my shoulder, clung there, her breast round and firm against my chest. The smell of beer was everywhere. “Sorry,” she said and stepped away, off the back deck, missing a step, staggering as she hit the lawn.

  “Doan mind her.” It was another girl I didn’t recognize. “She’s gonna walk it off.” The second girl stood a moment watching her friend, then abruptly spun around, almost stumbled back into the house. I hesitated, thinking that was all right, her breast against my chest, before I went gingerly down the stairs behind the second girl. The basement was packed, kids dancing, leaning on the walls, clustered in groups, two couches and three or four chairs clogged with kids. Lots of them I’d never seen before, boys and girls both. The room was dark and full of smoke, the only light coming from behind me on the landing.

  “Where you think you’re going?” A big guy pushed himself off the wall and came towards me. He wasn’t someone from the football team; I was sure I’d never seen him before. “Asked you a question!”

  I backed up a step, wondering what to say. The music stopped right then, the CD finished, I guess, and although I mumbled, everybody in the room must have heard me say, “I’m s’posed to be here.” Even then I knew it sounded stupid.

  “S’posed to be here, eh? Who the hell says so?”

  That one I could handle. “Vaughn. He said to come.”

  “Who the hell’s Vaughn?” He stepped into me, grabbed me by the front of my jacket, beery breath on my face.

  “Leave him alone.” It was Jordan Phelps, his hand on the guy’s shoulder, the guy wheeling around, ready to throw a punch, seeing who it was, backing off at once — no hesitation when he saw it was Jordan — the music on again, and he was gone into the crowd. I took a deep breath, the air thick with beer fumes, smoke and something sweet, sickening sweet — Lord, it was probably pot — and I couldn’t help thinking, What would have happened if Jordan hadn’t stepped in?

  “Jeez, I thought he was gonna pound me. Thanks, eh?” I was doing it again, thanking Jordan Phelps. The thing was, I really meant it.

  “Don’t mind him,” he said. “Played last year, and he’s missing it. Here, rookie, have yourself a beer.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not much of a drinker.”

  “Have a beer.” He thrust it at me. I watched the bottle dangling from his hand, red leaf on white label, beer slopping in the bottle, maybe half of it gone — he’d been drinking it himself — the bottle beginning to swing, like a pendulum, against my chest, away, against my chest again.

  “Come on, have a belt.” The same guy who’d once stood up for Blake with some jerk forcing gin on him, and here he was, pushing beer at me, as if now it was the thing to do.

  The bottle swung away, hit me in the chest, hard. I took it from his hand, raised it to my lips, swallowed, the taste so bitter I wanted to spit.

  “Have fun, rookie.” He was smiling at me now. “I gotta get myself a drink.”

  Okay, I thought, fine, I’ll carry this beer around, but not another sip.

  I watched Jordan walk over to a cabinet against the far wall, where a boom box was blasting out the tunes, a cluster of kids opening up to make room for him. He squatted down, pulled a beer from a case on the floor.

  “Hi, Blair.”

  I turned around. It was a girl from my geometry class at school, a little on the porky side, maybe, but real cute. Her name was Joan, I was sure of that, though her desk was way across the room from mine.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I live here.”

  “You’re kidding?” Bright response, eh? Sometimes I’m about as sharp as a wad of Kleenex.

  “Vaughn’s my brother.”

  “I didn’t know.” It was so early in the term I’d never heard her last name.

  “He’s really going to catch it when my dad gets home.”

  I looked around the room. Even in the darkness, you could see empty beer bottles everywhere you looked, cheesies and chips on the floor, some of them getting ground into an area rug by the couch, dark liquid spilled on the tile in one corner of the room. “Uh-huh, the place is quite a mess.”

  “He’ll be grounded for a month,” she said. “You want to dance?”

  “I’m not much of a dancer.”

  “Who’s going to notice here? Come on. All you have to do is shake.”

  She grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me away from the doorway at the bottom of the stairs. I managed to get rid of my bottle of beer, setting it on a divider by the stairs. Nobody would think a thing about it. The floor was so crowded, you kept bumping someone else, but I discovered it wasn’t hard to dance, the beat so loud you kind of felt it, like a drum inside your torso, your feet automatically picking up the rhythm. She was dancing with me, just an inch or so away, looking dreamy-eyed, smiling up at me. Still, I felt like a nerd.

  Later on, quite a while later, she stopped dancing, said something to me, but we were right beside the boom box, I couldn’t hear a thing.

  “What?”

  “Got to go to the can.”

  She pushed through the dancers, heading for a door in the corner of the basement. Feeling stupid, out there by myself, couples gyrating all around, I went after her. She turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t open. Someone had beat her to it. She stood in front of the door, the music blaring behind us, and pretty soon, she was bouncing from one foot to the other, like a little kid who’s really got to go, but all the while her feet kept perfect time to the rhythm of the music. I had to smile at that. She was about as sophisticated as a kindergarten grad, uh-huh, about as sophisticated as I was myself. After another minute, she pounded on the door. It still didn’t open. Then the music stopped, the room hushed in the sudden silence between tunes, and behind the bathroom door we heard someone throwing up.

  “I’m gonna pee myself,” she said. “Going to the upstairs can.” She turned and ran up the stairs.

  I was left standing by the bathroom, alone again in a room full of drunks, and it was time to go, man, I wished I was somewhere else. At home, at school, anywhere but here.

  That was when the bathroom door opened, the smell of vomit so thick I felt my stomach churn, and out came Neil Tucker, the other rookie on the team. He was staggering, his face a chalky white. “Gotta siddown,” he said. He bounced off a couple of dancers and collapsed into a chair, a girl I didn’t know trying to escape from the chair, but slow to move, pinned under him for a second until she managed to squirm loose.

  He’d walked right past me, so drunk he hadn’t even seen me.

  Time to get out of here, I thought, and started up the stairs. Laughter below me, shrieks, a girl yelling, “Look at all the puke.”

  I wa
s out the back door like a shot, the noise and stink, all the crazy people left behind, night air wrapping around me, cool and fresh, but there was laughter in the back yard too, half a dozen guys in a line, arms flung around each other’s shoulders, all of them swaying slowly, side to side.

  When I saw Jordan Phelps at the end of the line, Todd Branton and Vaughn Foster beside him, I should have known enough to keep going. But no, I was curious, wanted to see what was going on.

  I stayed on the left side of the yard, crouching in the shadow of an overgrown caragana hedge, walking on the lawn where the grass would muffle any sound my footsteps made. It didn’t matter. The guys were laughing so loud they wouldn’t have heard me anyway. When I was parallel with them, I could see someone else — the girl in the red sweater, the one who’d fallen against me when I opened the back door, her breast an instant on my chest — she was sprawled on the grass in front of them, passed out, I guess, her sweater bright even in the dark yard. Just then a light came on in the house next door, and now I could see the guys looking down at her, still laughing, all of them with their dicks out.

  They were pissing on her.

  “Shut the hell up!” A man’s voice, loud and angry. “Or I’m calling the cops.”

  Their hands were at their flies then, stuffing their dicks inside their pants, but they were laughing still, gasping, hysteria throbbing in their voices as they bumped against each other and backed away. They turned around then and ran for the door.

  The last one inside was my brother.

  I lay in bed for hours that night before I finally fell asleep, and then it was tossing and turning, strange dreams that left me terrified and sweating, but I must have dropped into a deep sleep at some point because the floorboards in the hall outside my door always creaked, the sound like the squeal of a mouse having its tail stepped on, and some time that night my brother walked down the hall, across those boards, and I never heard a thing. For a while, later on, I guess, I was trapped in a cave, darkness everywhere and bats wheeling around, you could hear their wings beating the black air, but it wasn’t a cave, it was a mine, and the shaft was shrinking, boulders tumbling down to fill it, the entrance blocked, detonations, rock torn from rock, everything collapsing, water pouring in, and my legs wouldn’t move, they were pinned beneath me, more explosions, barOOP, barOOP, and I couldn’t run away.

  I tried to roll over, but my legs were caught in something, the sheet, the sheet twisted and damp, my pyjama collar soaked — I was in my own bed, but the explosions kept coming at me, barOOP, barOOP, the whole house shaking. The room was dark, but when I turned my head I could see numbers glowing inches from my face, the time on my clock radio: 4:03. BarOOP! A pause. BarOOOP! Louder yet, the sound from the wall behind the headboard of my bed. The bathroom wall.

  And then I knew it was my brother vomiting. Well, let him suffer. He had it coming, pissing on that girl with all those other jerks. I could picture him on the bathroom floor, hanging on to the toilet bowl as if nothing else connected him with life, gasping for air, the stench of vomit all around him, heaving up the pain from deep within, dry heaves, and nothing coming, nothing but another string of phlegm. Then I heard my father’s voice, a mumble through the wall, but Blake just kept spewing.

  I knew what it must be like. A few hours before I’d watched the girl in the red sweater throwing up in Fosters’ back yard, my hand on her back, patting her, trying to comfort her. My hand wet with urine.

  After everyone had disappeared into the house, I’d squatted down beside her, seen that the grass around her face was already stained with vomit. She must’ve been throwing up before she passed out. I reached for her, touched her shoulder.

  “Are you — okay?” Stupid question. She was anything but okay.

  No answer. I gave her shoulder a little squeeze, felt her begin to stir. Then she hunched up beneath my hand, a long moan, and she was throwing up again, her body wrung with what I could only call convulsions. I had to do something here.

  “What the hell is this?”

  When I looked up, I recognized the dark hulk of Ivan Buchko on the back porch. He jumped down and strode toward us, his step quick and purposeful, and I thought, he isn’t drunk, maybe he can help me.

  “She’s awful sick,” I said. “We need to get her home.”

  “Man, she pissed herself.”

  I hesitated. “Yeah, I guess so.” I couldn’t tell him — heck, I could hardly believe it myself. “You got a car?”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “I’m not taking her like that.”

  She had quit throwing up now, but she started to cry, sobs and hiccups mixed together, her body shaking on the grass.

  “We can’t just leave her here.”

  Ivan crouched beside us. She was still crying, but she had her hands up by her shoulders now, trying to lift her head from the vomit. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we could wrap her up in something.”

  “I got an idea. Stay with her. I’ll be right back.” I ran for the house.

  It took a while pushing through the drunks to find Joan, but she showed me where to look, the second shelf on the landing, and then I was running back across the lawn, my fingers digging at the bag, getting it open, the orange garbage bag flaring out, filling with air as I ran. “We can get her into this,” I said. “She won’t mess up your car then.”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  I knelt at her feet, started to work the bag up her legs, over her wet jeans.

  “Wait.” He reached down, got his arms under hers, heaved her to her feet, lifted her into the air. “Shit,” he said, “she’s wet all over. Soaked.” But it was easy now. I pulled the bag up and around her, right up to her arm pits.

  “I can help you carry her.”

  “No. Just steady her.” He lowered her till the bag hit the ground, me grabbing her shoulders, holding her upright; then with one arm still beneath her armpit, he got the other arm behind her knees and lifted her, stepped away.

  “You sure you can manage?”

  “Hell yes. Get the gate, will you?”

  I started toward the side of the house.

  “The back gate, car’s in the alley.” He began walking, his legs wide apart, her head flopping over his arm. When we got to the car —it was an old Ford, his own car, I guess — he laid her against the trunk, held her there with one hand while he dug in his pocket with the other, fished out the keys. He handed them to me and I opened the back door. Then he lifted her again, turned her around and set her feet on the ground beside the door. As soon as he had her bum on the seat, he dropped her, and she fell backwards, her head bouncing once, something like a snort or a belch erupting from her open mouth as she landed. I lifted her feet into the car and swung the door shut. Handed Ivan the keys. He strode around to the driver’s side, opened the front door, turned back to me.

  “You get in there with her,” he said. “We ain’t going nowhere till you shove her head out the window.”

  I ran around the car, slid in beside her, forced my hands under her, lifting, and pushed her against the window. Held her there and reached across her to get the window open, but Ivan had hit a button, the window purring down. I turned her shoulders, leaned against her, got her head out the window. Ivan drove slowly down the alley. “Where we going?” he said.

  “Jeez, I don’t know.” I didn’t even know her name.

  “For Christ’s sakes, ask her where she lives.”

  I gave her a shake. “Where do you live?”

  A snort that turned into a moan. She was too far gone to answer.

  “Come on. What’s your address.?”

  No response.

  “Shit! What am I s’posed to do?” He glared at me in the rearview mirror.

  “Maybe if we keep going, cold air on her face, that might do it.”

  “Fat chance.”

  I got my arm around her, my hand under her chin, turned her face into the wind as the car bounced out of the alley, picking up speed on the pavement. I
felt her chin move in my hand.

  “Chew doin’?”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Leggo me.”

  “What’s your address?”

  She mumbled something I couldn’t hear, but at least she was talking.

  “What?” I slid against her, trying to get my ear closer to her mouth.

  I could make out most of it, the words slurred, running together.

  “I think she said Avon Drive. Something like that. Twenty-two, for sure.”

  “Must mean Avord Drive. We’ll try that.” I was pitched back against her as he swung the car around, making a U-turn in the middle of the block.

  “Ohhh! Off-a-me.”

  “You keep her head out that bloody window.”

  I was as gentle as I could be, but I held her head out the window till we turned onto Avord Drive, pulling up at a bungalow, the only house in the block with its front light still on. Sure enough, it was number twenty-two.

  “Okay. Get her the hell out.”

  She had her elbows on the doorframe now, her chin cupped in her hands. I went around to her side of the car, lifted her chin and pulled the door open.

  “You think you can walk?”

  “Feeter tiedup.”

  “No, you’re in a garbage bag.”

  “Wha . . . ?”

  I reached for her feet and lifted them out of the car, pulled her upright. She flopped back against the doorframe.

  “Ivan, I think I need a hand.”

  “No way!” He cranked his head around toward me, but he didn’t open the door. “This was your idea, you get her up to the house.”

  I grabbed the top of the garbage bag, pulled it down, the acid smell of urine stronger now than that of vomit. When she started to lean, sliding sideways toward the trunk, I ducked under her arm, pulled it over my shoulders, wrapped my other arm around her back, and stepped away from the car. She had no choice but to come with me. Her right foot caught in the garbage bag, and I had to force the bag down with my foot, at the same time jerking her away from it. I got her started up the sidewalk then — she wasn’t as heavy as I thought she’d be, must’ve been carrying most of her own weight — and once we were moving, instinct took over, she began picking up her feet, shoving them ahead. Still, the porch light was a long way off.