“Not if you drown. Death would smell different then.”
“Think so?”
“I’m just saying. It’d be watered down, wouldn’t it? So it wouldn’t smell so bad.”
“You ever stand next to a wet dog?”
“That’s what I’m saying. Different death, different smell.”
“But what about after they dried you out?”
“You’d still smell different. Like fish maybe.”
“Or seaweed. Yeah. Okay. I can see it.”
“There’s only one way to die and not smell bad, Jack.”
“You’ve really thought this through, eh?”
“Burn to death.”
We agreed to keep the Marquee off limits. We kept a low profile, a nod and muttered mutter. Any display of enthusiasm would unleash a frenzy. Give our moms an inch and we’d die the death of a thousand sleepovers.
And it wasn’t friendship, either. We were only on the road. Odds were I’d screw it up long before Wyatt and Wild Man reached the Wild Bill Hickok and Jingles stage.
Eighteen
The day Howdy Doody chased a beach ball into Lake Ontario
Billy Burgess was the first person I knew who drowned. He drowned in June on the last Sunday before the end of our first year of school.
We had played together when we were younger. Billy was fun until he bonked me on the head with a chestnut. I stayed clear of him after he put his foot through the bass of the drum kit my mother’s friend Dottie Lange gave me for my fifth birthday. Not that I was Cubby O’Brien or anything; I had overheard my mother giggling with Dottie on the phone. “Leo absolutely loves it, hasn’t left it for a second. But he’s so much like his father—not a smidge of rhythm in him.”
When we entered Dufferin, I lucked out by getting Miss Proctor. Billy ended up with Mrs. Gannon across the hall. I was happy. Gannon was a yeller and Billy would be yelled at plenty.
Billy drowned at Sandbanks Beach near Picton. He chased a beach ball into Lake Ontario and the ball came back without him. It wasn’t his ball, either, which did not surprise me. It belonged to the girl he’d snatched it from. When Billy went under, she retrieved her ball and went back to playing.
Billy’s family didn’t notice Billy missing until packing up for home. When the girl saw them calling for him on the beach, she said, “Are you looking for Howdy Doody?” and pointed to where she’d seen him last. I know this because Annie told me. She was best friends with Billy’s twin sister, Susan Burgess.
I could see how the girl mistook Billy for Howdy Doody. Billy and Susan were redheads. Susan had more freckles. She was nicer, too.
The weirdest part for me was how Susan never missed a day of school. This includes the Monday after Billy’s last dive.
Years later, when we graduated from Dufferin, Principal Malbasic awarded Susan a certificate for perfect attendance. Afterwards, I saw Susan and her parents sitting in their station wagon outside the school. They were crying. Mr. Burgess, too. “Stop staring,” my mother said to me, her voice tailing to shaky.
“But why are they crying now?” I said.
“Why do you think?”
“But Billy was so long ago.”
Mom searched her purse for a tissue. “Grieving isn’t only about what was. More often it’s about what would have been.”
Billy’s death kept me awake most every night into August. I had questions.
Is it easier to lose a twin who isn’t identical, because then you wouldn’t have to look at yourself and be reminded half of you was dead?
Or is it easier if you are identical, because then you could look at yourself and it’d be the same as if your other half was still alive? Like half a cherry Popsicle in your hand and half in the freezer. You could eat the half in your hand with no worries, because the exact same cherry Popsicle would be waiting for you in the fridge.
And what was going through Billy’s head as the water filled him up and took him down? Was he sorry for what he’d done to me? Did he think God was punishing him for the chestnut and the drum? The drum, for sure, Billy had to regret that.
Dottie Lange would become the second person I knew to drown, though she wasn’t Dottie Lange when it happened. She was Dottie Swartz, a newlywed at forty-four, bride of thirty-seven-year-old Helmut Swartz, a machinist at Central Bridge and Tuesday-evenings cha-cha teacher at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, upstairs from Sure Press Dry Cleaners on King.
I once asked Helmut if he knew Mr. Blackhurst.
“He ruined my tux,” Helmut said. “But I made him pay double what it was worth. For the inconvenience. And the reefers I’d forgotten in my pocket.”
“Did you ever see a strange lady in there?”
“The kooky broad at the sewing machine?”
“No. Some other strange lady. Dressed in black. Hiding at the back.”
“I’ve never met a dame in a dry cleaners who wasn’t strange, kid. You’d be strange, too, breathing in them fumes all day.”
Second Reel
One
1988 and I was in an Avis rental
with Jack, my mom, and 13 ghosts
We were in the breakneck dark of a tunnel, light and shadow tripping across the walls, steel rushing steel, locomotive plowing wind, wind thrashing stone, when Jack interrupted the soundtrack: “Sainte-Hilaire, Quebec, 1864. Deadliest rail accident in Canadian history. Guess how many?”
The train hurtled from night into the underwhelming dawn of winter’s day.
“C’mon, man. Guess.”
I would have preferred a good coma.
“Ninety-nine, Gus. Ninety-nine dead.”
He could not help himself.
“Jim Heckenast had railroad stories you wouldn’t believe. Worked for CN. Nice guy. Sharp. A Marquee regular. He had a thing for my mother’s cherry pie—a big scoop of vanilla on the side. You, too, right? Or was it her apple?”
He wouldn’t quit.
“Of course, you and me, we’ll always have Trenton and the wreck of ’98. A piddling dozen killed, still nothing to sneeze at.”
“Enough!” I said, and the Pfizer rep, the golden-haired survivor of Air Canada 797, answered, “You’re telling me.” She gathered up her belongings and skated down the aisle. We were twenty minutes from Toronto. She couldn’t exit soon enough.
I collected the rental car and left the sprawl of the city behind, connecting to the old road. Highway 2. I was in no hurry. I was on my way home, after all. Like Winnipeg, the best part about getting there was the getting away from there.
This would be my first trip back since 1977, the week my mother died. My young, lovely, and winsome mother. Dead at forty-four. Natural causes. As if there is anything remotely natural in death at forty-four. Let the doctors call it what they will, the cause to me, until I knew better, was terminal despondency. Should be coroner orthodoxy in that town.
On the bright side, Mom didn’t drown.
I sold the house, auctioned off the contents. I needed the money. My business card read Job Applicant.
Letting go of my father’s books was the toughest. I picked through the library, searched for the assorted treasures I’d hidden between the pages, between and behind volumes.
The cardboard ghost viewer from 13 Ghosts fluttered to the carpet. Unlike the 3D glasses handed out for Creature from the Black Lagoon or House of Wax, these were double-decker goggles, a rectangle of red cellophane on top through which to see the ghosts and, for the faint-hearted, a blue lens below to not see the ghosts. I put the viewer to the test, scanned the room for paranormal activity. Detected none outside my head.
The real treasures I was looking for, of course, were the cards. The first turned up in a Hammond World Atlas, between Lithuania and Luxembourg:
Jack and I had buried it in 1962, along with forty-six others, every single one of which I would disinter from Dad’s library in the days to follow. But seeing this first card, touching it again, I had to get a grip, memories flooding in, synapses misfiring. All the mo
re reason to tie up the loose ends of my mother’s short life and clear the hell out of Trenton for good.
I held on to nine books.
Two copies of Collected Poems of Robert Service.
Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels.
Audubon’s The Birds of America—a 1937 reprint and not the million dollar original.
Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Lenin’s The State and Revolution. Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World. Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution. Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
Plus my 13 Ghosts viewer. The cards, too, of course. The intertitles. No chance I’d let them go.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to ride a barrel on the Niagara River as it surges toward the Falls, drive a 1988 Ford Tempo sometime.
Avis had provided enough fuel to get me clear of the city, the gauge nudging empty as we hit Oshawa, of all places. Home to the gas station bathroom where my father spilled his brains.
“Whaddya say we go find it?” Jack said. “A Texaco, wasn’t it?”
Two
Straight out of Central Casting
“That night, that fire. You think that fire was something?” Jack had the walk of someone going somewhere, and it didn’t feel like school. “That fire was nothing.”
“You kidding?” I said. “It was Vesuvius up there.”
“Reading too much National Geographic will do that to you, kid. That magazine is scarier than Famous Monsters.”
“I saw the movie,” I said. “You know, Last Days of Pompeii? Steve Reeves?”
“He looked wimpy without his beard.”
“Yeah. But when the volcano blew . . .”
Three weeks in and I’d yet to screw it up, I was approaching a personal high with Jack. While we hadn’t attained Wild Bill and Jingles status, the situation was looking good, increasing the likelihood it would soon look bad.
Annie was my confessor, my sounding board. Jack was my buddy-in-waiting and I’d never had anyone like him. With other kids, Mom’s recruits, I’d groped for shared intelligence. Hell, I’d hung out with dopes who couldn’t tell Tarzan’s Cheeta from Jungle Jim’s Tamba. But Jack and me, we were on the same wavelength from the get-go. I knew myself too well to pretend it would last. I hoped to keep it going, at least, until I got to see him find something more exciting than lost keys. Another meteorite. Or a magic lamp. Or King Solomon’s mines. Or Atlantis. Anything. Before he figured me out.
“How could the fire be nothing?” I said.
“In the scheme of things.”
“Scheme of what things?”
“People tell me stuff.”
“In the restaurant. Yeah. I’ve seen. You told me. You don’t just find things, you find out things.”
“And a lot of times I wish I didn’t.”
I supposed this was how those dim bulbs on Concentration felt, the contestants who couldn’t solve the rebus even after the entire board had been revealed. “You wish you didn’t what—find things or find out things?”
“The finding out, mostly.”
“Jesus, Jack. Stop beating ’round the bush.”
“What if I fill your head with stuff you don’t want to know?”
“There’s nothing I don’t want to know.” I saw my opening. “Especially how you find stuff. You gotta let me tag along one time.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Then tell me how it does.”
“Nothing to tell. Finding just happens.”
“Bullshit.”
“How long you been waiting to ask me, huh? Is this why you want to be friends? To know my secrets?”
“Yeah,” I said, and stopped him in his tracks.
“Wow.”
“I told you. I want to be a finder.”
“Why?”
“I like neat junk. And I’ve never been in the newspaper.”
“Jesus! Haven’t you seen all the good it’s done me? Done a head count of my friends lately?”
“Well,” I said, a finger raised. “Better than nothing, aren’t I?”
Jack gave me the smile generals use when bestowing medals. “You would know, wouldn’t you?”
My shrug was modest.
“You’re a funny one, Gus. But are you better than nothing? Yeah. You are. Way better, man. You’re not nothing. You’re something. And any day now I hope I’ll figure out what.”
We arrived at school as the five-minute warning bell rang.
“Later, ’gator, I will tell you all,” Jack vowed, and up the tarmac he dashed for an early morning convening of the Teachers’ Pets’ Club. It’s what I called it, anyhow.
In a distant corner of the playground, Crates lounged with cigarette upon the seesaw. He was watching me watching him. But who the hell had started watching first?
Mickey Mental galloped up from behind, swatted me on the back of the head and cackled past.
At the curb, Annie blew her dad a kiss as he drove off. Partway along the walk, Susan Burgess waited. Annie scurried up to meet her, waved as she hastened by me. A tiny, two-finger wave. She had Teachers’ Pets’ Club to get to, too.
Down the block, Pecker careened toward the school full tilt, his panicked wheezing a hundred yards out front of him, and a crazy-hungry-unhinged-insane black Lab ten yards behind, and closing. Jesus!
10:30 3 ON SAFARI—Nature
A lion mauls a gazelle. A hyena mauls a zebra. A black Lab mauls Pecker.
Pecker zigged. Pecker zagged. But he could not shake the demon as it bridled for takedown.
Pecker dodged into the teacher’s parking lot. He could see it, taste it—the Girls entrance and refuge. The dog lunged, sprung, bloodshot eyes gleaming. And wham! A yelp. A crunch. And the hound bit pavement.
The blue Buick Electra reversed.
A second, squishier crunch. A splorg.
Mr. Malbasic unloaded his bulk from his car, wagged a fistful of accusation at Pecker, tapped his watch, and motioned for the boy to hurry along.
Pecker circled wide when he saw me, backpedalled a wiggy beeline.
Mr. Malbasic assessed the damage to his fender, then the dog. He reached down, latched onto a foreleg and a hind, and with the stuttered entreaties of a man three months constipated, Dufferin’s longest-serving principal cleaned and jerked the carcass to the grass.
Huffing, puffing, perspiring, he fixed his butt cheeks to a hapless birch, dropped his hands onto his knees, and gorged on all available oxygen.
I’d been wise to the taxidermy from the start. I should’ve seen black dogs with red eyes were ill omens, too.
Jack didn’t show at recess. Not unusual. The pets were often kept back to enjoy random perks. When the badger family was added to the taxidermy collection, for instance, they were given advance previews and got to meet Ranger Clegg, the taxidermist and retired Parks Canada warden. “My grandmother ate badgers during the war,” Annie related after the fact. Jack said, “Badgers stink like skunks.”
Recess was not a total loss. I got to see Mr. Pennington, the caretaker, wrestle the dead Lab into a trash can.
Jack’s absence extended through lunch.
On nice days I ate dessert by the monkey bars, which was where I was headed with three chocolate chip cookies when Mr. Malbasic’s office door swung wide, and Pecker and Cruella d’ Olive Oyl cut me off at the pass. “That’s the boy, Mother,” Pecker pointed, and Mrs. Geoffrey Dahl-Packer of Packer Family Pharmacy took my measure with rancid awareness, her eyes black prunes, her lips dry figs, her fragrance Ajax The Foaming Cleanser.
I hustled The Wild Man of Borneo to the rear, ventured a subdued, “Hi.”
Mrs. Dahl-Packer was appalled. “Of all the nerve!”
“I told you, Mother.”
The woman grabbed me by the ear, surveyed the hall for potential witnesses, and bundled me into an empty classroom. She seized my second ear, held me as she might a sugar bowl, and lifted me to my toes, my nose between her not insubstantial breasts. “How fortunate to
have the opportunity to meet in person. Ah, yes, come look, Charles, the breeding is evident. You can see it in his brow, his eyes. Look, Charles, look. Do you see it, the vestige of the Neanderthal? You know what you are, little boy? A troglodyte is what you are.”
“I told you, Mother.”
“You will not be harassing my son any further, will you?” She pumped my head in furious affirmation. “Because I will make your life a living hell should you so much as sneeze in his direction,” she said, and flicked me off as she would a booger.
A week-old bouquet of posies drooped from the monkey bars. I didn’t feel much like cookies anymore, anyways.
Grown-ups fell into four categories. The delirious. The oblivious. The furious. The villainous.
Bullies were all four at once.
Annie, Jack, and me, we were the only real people in town.
But everyone, everyone, was straight out of Central Casting.
Three
Once it’s in your head, there is no going back
Life was short and getting shorter. For me, anyhow. I gave my cookies to Jack. “My mom never uses enough chocolate chips,” he said. “Tons in these.”
“C’mon, man. I’ve been waiting all day. Tell me what you were going to tell me.”
“Creosote is used to preserve wood,” he said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“Or paint. What do you know about paint?”
“I don’t care about paint.”
“A gallon covers four hundred square feet.”
My yawn would’ve made the pages of Guinness.
“Mr. Fox paints houses. He’s an encyclopedia of paint.”
“Good for him.”
“You know the secret to cleaning paint brushes?”
“Throw them out.”
“Dish soap and olive oil.”
“I don’t care.”
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 8