Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels

by Michael Libling

  Annie was a teacher’s pet, too. Like Jack, she didn’t milk it. Girls, they can get away with the goody-two-shoes routine, where boys don’t have a prayer.

  I felt bad about Pecker, though not so bad you’d call it guilt. And not so bad I couldn’t sleep. Bad might not even be the right word; my feelings might have been closer to good. There was much to be said for Mr. Malbasic’s version of events. Still, I worried the true story might yet reach my mother. Her loss of faith would be tough to bear. Never again would my name be spoken of in the same breath as Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein or Walt Disney or Winston Churchill.

  And so it was, in the weeks following, to preempt my mother’s presumptive disapproval, I strove to tell Pecker how relatively sorry I was. Not that I let anyone in on the effort besides Pecker. It was a balancing act. Going ballistic on him had earned me standing. I was the Wild Man of Borneo. A public apology would destroy the image.

  I caught Pecker off the beaten track, just him and me. I was remorseful, too, called after him, “Hey, Charles! Charles, wait up!” No fists. No overt hostility. No cry of Pecker. “I just wanna talk, I swear.”

  The dork wouldn’t let me within a hundred yards. Quick off the mark. A four-minute miler. Fast as hell, for a boy who ran like a girl.

  I’d done my duty. He had his chance. Two chances, in fact. I was home free.

  The Unknown is not the same as The Unexplained.

  The Unknown is what’s out there waiting for you. The Unexplained is what comes after.

  Sixteen

  The sweetest sound I’ve ever heard

  The creosote plant blew up on a Saturday night at dinnertime, spring yet soggy with winter. The smell of smoke drew Mom and me onto the stoop, joining with neighbours to watch the airborne sludge cremate the sunset. Rumours flew, guesses aplenty as to the source, and whether the flames originated east or west of the river. Mom returned inside, lit a cigarette by the kitchen sink. End times were near. The Du Maurier pack was my red flag, one to three cigarettes per cataclysm. (Like Dad’s suit at the dry cleaners, the Du Mauriers were leftovers, two stale cartons in the middle drawer of his desk.)

  She extinguished the stub under the faucet. “Well, I suppose, you’d like to go up the mountain.”

  I grabbed my jacket.

  Pelion was the main venue for watching the town burn. So frequent were the fires, a councilman proposed installing benches on the mountainside and charging admission. Might have happened, too, had a Record editorial not pointed out how this would attract more firebugs to the region.

  Cars crept bumper to bumper up the road defacing the mountain’s middle. Mom and I took the footpath, a snaky trail that wriggled to the ceremonial cannon.

  There might have been a moon. Hard to say in the thickening gloom. Even so, I spotted the Levins right off. Jack. His mom. His sisters. I slipped into underdrive, hoping to keep us in the dark and apart. Mollie Levin had other ideas. Her jumping jacks and yoo-hoos could have scrambled fighter jets.

  Mom hustled to catch up. I plodded behind. Dead weight. Sack of venom.

  Jack’s displeasure synced with mine.

  Nothing had changed between us. The guy had yet to acknowledge I’d saved his butt. I didn’t want his thanks, merely an IOU. Then again, he might’ve felt his butt didn’t need saving. He was no chicken, clearly. Perhaps he resented how I’d stolen his thunder, upstaged him in the main event. Or it could have been he recognized I was not the rescuer type, and what I’d visited on Pecker I’d visited on impulse, absent Jack’s plight.

  “Make a mask with your hands, children. Watch me.” Mollie Levin splayed fingers over nostrils and mouth. Jack’s sisters strived to comply. “The fumes may be poisonous.”

  Mom added, “Try not to breathe any more than you must.”

  I fell behind promptly and with purpose, distancing myself from the embarrassment and Jack the Ingrate. And wouldn’t you know, he fell behind promptly and with purpose, too.

  We plunged our hands into our pockets and sulked ahead, each wishing to be rid of the other. The path worked against us, narrowing as it double-backed, forcing us onward and upward, side by stride. The sky glowed orange above the tree line. Flames lapped at clouds of their own making. Folks cheered the slapdash spectacle.

  Jack and I slogged on, sullen in our arbitrary resolve.

  Funny how deafening silence can be. We were in a staring contest of the blind, holding out for the other’s tongue to blink.

  Jack cracked. “Did you hear about my latest find?”

  I shook my head, savoured victory in a contest he was unaware had been declared.

  “Yeah,” he said, “those screws that went loose from inside your head.”

  “What?” I backed abruptly up and off the path, dug my heels into the mossy incline to let others pass below.

  Flashlights were out. Beams danced to and fro the length of the path, bobbing ever closer to the cluster of light at the summit. With night came cold, anonymity betrayed by vapours.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  Jack scooted up next to me. “The screws that went loose when you beat up Pecker. Why else would you go off on him like you did?”

  “It worked, didn’t it? I got Mickey Mental and the others off your back, didn’t I?”

  “Who?”

  “Mickey Mental. That jerk Dunwood.”

  “That’s what you call him?”

  “That’s what he is.”

  “To his face? You call him Mickey Mental to his face?”

  “You call him Dumbwood.”

  “That’s different.” Jack laughed out loud. “He’s my friend.”

  “Was your friend.”

  “You, he’ll kill.”

  “Like he was going to kill you? He’s so full of it his eyes are brown.”

  “All those guys are full of it. That’s why I didn’t need your help.”

  “I wasn’t helping, okay? Pecker asked for it and I gave it to him. You lucked out.”

  “Yeah. Right. Some tough guy you are. Who you gonna take on next, a girl? Bitsy Fritzy?”

  “Guess you’d better give me back my loose screws, then.”

  “Here,” Jack said, his palm extended in offering. I thought he might actually have screws in hand, but he was laughing, and I started laughing, and nothing ever sounded sweeter, Jack Levin and me splitting our guts over dumb shit.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Even if you didn’t mean to save my ass.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Even if I did.”

  I wanted to shout Geronimo! We were paratroopers over Germany, Jack and me, fireworks on the ground, flak blistering the skies. We climbed the rest of the way, recapped The Battle that Never Was—Crates slinking and sliming, Double Al’s “Clock him!”, Mickey Mental’s chickenshit indecision, Pecker’s wimped-out “Teachers pet!” We were as giddy as two friends could be, which made me all the giddier. Sure, I had Annie. But this was different. Jeff and Porky different. Cisco and Pancho different. Paratroopers over Germany different.

  People milled about the mountaintop, bodies jostling for vantage. I stuck close to Jack as we wended our way to where he promised our families would be. “It’s the creosote plant,” Mollie Levin informed us as we trotted up. “Do any of you know what creosote is?”

  “Rotten eggs?” Abigail Levin ventured. She was the sister with straight hair and was maybe five or six. “Smells like tar,” Isabel said. She was six or seven, her hair curly. (To be honest, I never could get them straight, even when I met up with the younger one years later. At any given time, Abigail could have been Isabel and Isabel Abigail.)

  “Very good,” Mrs. Levin said. “Creosote is a chemical that comes from coal tar. And does anyone know what it’s used for?”

  “To preserve wood,” Jack said, as though it was common knowledge.

  “Bingo!” Mrs. Levin exclaimed, and I shrivelled in the reciprocal glare of our mothers’ sweepstake grins.

  Jack’s soft-
spoken aside was for my ears only. “I pick up a lot of oddball facts in the restaurant.”

  “Like where to find the stuff you find?”

  “I don’t just find things,” Jack said. “I find out things.”

  I’d grown up watching good parts of the town burn, but nothing to compare to this. One sec, there’d be this inferno ripping across the ground, four football fields of rage that roared up from the river and slammed our eardrums. No sooner would we think we’d lost our hearing than we’d fear our sight had gone, as well, the fire falling inward upon itself, black to black to blackout. And just as the disappointment was setting in, that this was all there was, the dragon roared again, low and slow, razor-thin and foundry-red, layer upon layer of roiling soot, then sis boom bah! and oooo and ahhh, the firestorm renewed, and fireballs exploded 1-2-3, skyrocketed, stoking the infinite above.

  Abby and Issie were bawling their heads off, hands over ears, begging to be taken home. And they weren’t the only terrorized kids on the mountain. Could be they knew something the rest of us didn’t. It’d be just like the town to keep the truth from us, that Pelion had been snoozing, a volcano overdue to blow. Hell, maybe that’s how the fire had started, lava bubbling up from the Earth’s core into the creosote works.

  There was coughing. Who wasn’t coughing? And pointing, pointing. Orange fireflies flitted over the river and through the valley, rising as dandelion puffs above the town and up the mountainside.

  I won’t lie. I was worried, too. And, in my peculiar logic, also comforted by the possibility these were the last days of my personal Pompeii. This was how I wanted to die, the whole world going down with me. How else could I be sure I would never miss a thing, that life would not go on without me?

  Cinders sparked and spiked. Ash fell plump and greasy, charcoal flakes from a Transylvanian Christmas. The Levin girls and their pleas were heard at last. Our moms dragged us from the mountain.

  On the night the creosote plant burned, an old man went down to the river to watch from the best seat in the house. Overcome by smoke, he fell into the Trent. His grown daughter and grown son jumped in to save him.

  The old man’s body bobbed up next morning, near where he’d last been seen. The daughter washed ashore later in the day, her jacket caught up on a spike in an old railroad tie, the sleeve a tourniquet around her neck. By no coincidence, the tie had been treated with creosote. The son never turned up, which led some to speculate he had exploited the tragedy to exit his troubled marriage and begin a new life elsewhere. The same was said of every Trenton man or woman who had ever gone missing without a trace, whether their marriage was troubled or whether they were married at all. Should you think you might want to make yourself scarce one day, relocate to Trenton. The town will take care of the rest.

  The Record identified the dead as Russell Coleman, his daughter Margaret, son Kevin. “I knew him,” Jack would tell me the next day.

  “The old guy?”

  “Everyone called him Rusty.”

  “Like on Rin Tin Tin?” I’d never met a live Rusty. Or for that matter a Corky, Cuffy, Cubby, Lonnie, Porky, Chip, Tag, Spin, or Beaver.

  “He loved my mom’s coconut cream pie. Her liver and onions. And, boy, could he talk.”

  “Everybody talks to you, Jack.”

  “Yeah, but there’s one story he told me . . . and when you look at what just happened . . .”

  “I’m all ears, man.”

  “Rusty grew up by the Welland Canal, you know, near Niagara. Anyhow, he’s out fishing with some pals one day when a ship barges into the locks. Next he knows, water is rushing down on top of them. Rusty gets away, but the others, three of them, drown. He said he never could make sense of it. He fought in the war and everything, too, lost buddies left and right. But those kids, he said, he’d have an empty space in his heart for them till the day he died. Weird, eh, how the water still got him after all this time?”

  “Water doesn’t forget,” I said.

  “Wow. Sounds like something I’d say,” Jack said.

  “It takes a certain crazy to appreciate crazy, I guess.”

  “We just might become friends, after all.”

  “So what are you saying? Your screws are loose, too?”

  A triple drowning was nothing.

  The dying can start ten million miles away—Metaluna, Popocatépetl, Timbuktu, or up the road in Welland—and Trenton will finish it. The lake. The river. The bay. Water, water, everywhere . . . Among local pastimes, only hunting, fishing, and arson rank higher than drowning.

  Anyone who’s lived five minutes in the town knows somebody who has drowned.

  I know four.

  Seventeen

  Wyatt Earp, The Wild Man of Borneo, and Robby the Robot

  “We’ll keep them off balance,” Jack said. “They won’t know what to make of us.”

  We were a team, all right, Wyatt Earp and The Wild Man of Borneo.

  “But I don’t know how to be that guy,” I said.

  “Sure you do. You are as long as people believe you are. Your job is to keep them believing.”

  I doubted my notoriety would hold. I’d gone after the biggest creampuff in school. Pecker was a joke, and Crates, for one, had been looking at me funny since. Sooner or later it would dawn on Mickey Mental, Double Al, and their flunkies that I was the second biggest creampuff going, the soft target they had always known me to be. Already there’d been inklings, sniping, jostling. “Stare ’em in the eye,” Jack said. “Give ’em your mad-dog grin. Make ’em think you’re itching for a fight.”

  “I’m not itching.”

  “You don’t get the choice. The trick is to put enough doubt in their dumb heads, so even if they beat the crap out of you, they’ll pay a price—you’ll bite their ears or fingers or worse clean off. Wild Man of Borneo, Gus, Wild Man of Borneo.”

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “You kidding? None of them has the guts for that. Okay, Crates, possibly. But Double Al or Dumbwood, you think they’ve sent one single person to the hospital, ever? They’re too afraid to take it too far. And knowing this, it’s like having your own secret weapon. Because you, my friend, are not afraid to send them to the hospital.”

  I disagreed. The only secret weapon I had was Jack. His friends turning on him was the best thing to ever happen to me.

  “What are you afraid of, anyhow? You took the strap and lived to tell. What’d Malbasic give you, three, four?”

  “Eight,” I said. “Each hand.” It wasn’t a lie, it was a favour. The truth would only have disappointed Jack.

  “Jesus. Seriously? Eight? On each hand?”

  “Yup.”

  “Even better, then. Think about it. How long did you feel it—the pain, I mean?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Right. So what does it tell you?”

  “Um . . . that I have nothing to fear but fear itself?”

  “Wow. Yeah. Right. And nobody can hurt you any worse than Malbasic already has. You keep that in your head and you’re Superman.”

  “And if Mickey Mental or somebody shows up with Kryptonite, Jack?”

  “Then you’re Batman.”

  We fell into an easy routine. Before school. At school. After school. Our common ground covered more territory than we could have hoped. No one would ever characterize Gloomy Gus a conversationalist, but I was with Jack, I tell you.

  “Best movie ever?” he’d say, and we’d be off and running.

  “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.”

  “Best scary movie?”

  “Horrors of the Black Museum . . . when the girl looks into those binoculars and the spikes shoot into her eyes. . . .”

  “Red licorice or black?”

  “Black.”

  “Rin Tin Tin or Lassie?”

  “Mr. Peabody.”

  “You kill me, Gus. You kill me. Sick, Cracked, or Mad?”

  “Anyone ever tell you how you look like Alfred E. Neuman?”

  “What? My e
ars?”

  “And nose and eyes and mouth. You could be his brother.”

  “Thanks, jerk-face.”

  “Okay, maybe not your ears.”

  “Space movie?”

  “It! The Terror from Beyond Space.”

  “Better than Forbidden Planet? C’mon, Gus.”

  “C’mon, yourself. The monster was stupid. A string of Christmas lights with teeth.”

  “Never saw it that way.”

  “As soon as you hear adults talking about how great a movie is, you know it’s bad. I’ll bet your dad loved Forbidden Planet.”

  “We went together.”

  “And he thought the monster was the best ever, right?”

  “He kept asking if I understood the difference between id and ego. He said the story was Shakespearean.”

  “Jesus. What’s that mean? Super-super boring?”

  “I’m told we’ll find out in high school.”

  “And you, did you think the monster was all that special?”

  “No Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

  “You ever see the Tarzan movie where he fights the giant spider? That stupid spider was ten times better than the thing in Forbidden Planet.”

  “At least Robby was good.”

  “Robots always are.”

  We talked about nothing, and nothing was everything. Only after our cultural parameters had been established did we up the ante.

  “I used to think I was invisible to you,” I confessed. “You’d pass me in the halls and it was like I wasn’t there.”

  “Who’s to say you weren’t invisible, eh? You’ve got this taxidermy look to you. A bear. Or a Yeti. Yeah, that’s you, a Yeti.”

  “I hate that shit so much. The owls, they’re the worst. They set their eyes on you . . .”

  “It’s the smell that gets to me.”

  “You smell them?”

  “You don’t?”

  “You’re kidding. . . .”

  “No. I swear. I’m not sure what death smells like, exactly, but I’m telling you, Gus, it’s got to be close to taxidermy.”