“What did you do with that Charles kid?”
“Huh?” This was weird. “Pecker?”
Vito gave up on the headlock. He allowed me to straighten before twisting my left arm behind my back to overlap with my right, currently held by Wayne.
“The drugstore kid,” Double Al clarified.
“Where have you been? It’s over two years,” I said. “His parents sent him to boarding school. Port Hope.”
Lloyd delivered four sharp pokes to the chest. His fingernails needed trimming. “I want my Camels.”
“And the cigs the little shit owes me.” Wayne’s tongue was purple. His breath smelled of grape Kool-Aid. But then everybody’s tongue was purple. An hour earlier, we’d been living it up in our classrooms, Dixie cups raised in toast to summer vacation.
“How am I supposed to do that?” I said.
“That’s your problem,” Double Al said. “You shouldn’t got rid of the little fucker. Now you owe us.”
I gave logic a shot. “Pecker will be home for the summer. I’m sure he’ll keep his promise to you then.”
“Yeah, but we want you, smartass.” Double Al punched me in the stomach and as I doubled over, he waved their shopping list in my face. They were after a hell of a lot more than smokes.
4 transistor radios
1 can of Player’s chewing tobacco
6 packs of Wrigley’s Spearmint
1 bolt cutter
1 glass cutter
Kiwi shoe polish, black
1 duffel bag
8 packs of Ramses
4 Gillette Right Guards
“What are Ramses?” I asked, which they thought was hilarious.
“He’s never used a rubber.” Double Al stomped on my foot, kicked me in the shin. “The Boy Scout said you were the sneakiest bastard he knew. Said we should keep an eye on you. Swiping this shit, c’mon, it’s gonna be a breeze for you. You steal shit all the time.” He stuffed the list into my pocket. “Think nobody’s seen you going into them dead peoples’ houses?”
“My grandmother lived there.”
“How many grandmothers you got?”
I caught a glimpse of red among the cedars. The ribbon in Annie’s ponytail. She was watching. I’d give her something to see, all right. And went for broke. “Too chicken to swipe it all yourself, eh? Bigger the mouth, bigger the pussy.”
Double Al didn’t hold back. His elbow hit my throat, laid me flat. Vito dropped onto me, pounding me. Wayne stood over me, kicking me. And there was Annie in her gingham party dress, pink and white and panic, yelling, “Get off of him! Get off of him!”
I didn’t feel a thing. Swear to God. They weren’t going to kill me, so how bad could any of this be? A busted arm? Dufferin bullies didn’t kill, Jack had said. Heck, the assholes had barely touched my face. A few swats in the mouth, but with floppy fishy fists, and I had to smile at that. Fact was, I couldn’t stop smiling. Made sure to keep my smile in place even as pain began to give notice. And, oh man, my smile, it drove them wild, a razor-blade grin and razor-blade eyes, the look Crates had working for him.
Annie tried to pull them off. They pushed her down. She went back for more, screeching at the top of her lungs, Help! Help! Help! in every colour and variety you could imagine.
And somewhere in the midst of this, I saw Mr. Malbasic at his watchtower window, raising the blinds, his tongue darting as he peered down on the scene. I laughed. And, sure enough, the halfwits thought my laugh was meant for them. And their fists closed up, dime bags of cement. Two black eyes. Yeah, I’d come out of this with two black eyes. Two swollen ears. A swollen jaw. And for the rest of my life I would wonder how Malbasic—pop a bonnet onto the fucker’s head and he’d pass for Dumbo’s mom—how Malbasic had had it in him to climb the thousand stairs to the peak of his big old house.
It was therapeutic, I tell you, letting him see yet again how I was a boy who could take it. Malbasic the analgesic, that’s what he was to me. Until he raised his window, bellowed down, “You, there! Stop that. Stop that, this instant. I know who you are. I know every last one of you hoodlums. The police. I’m calling the police.”
The rats scattered.
“Are you badly hurt, Mr. Berry?” Malbasic called. “Do you require assistance?”
I cranked myself to sitting.
“Do you want me to call your mother, Mr. Berry? She was here not two hours ago.”
“What?” What did he say?
“Your mother, do you wish me to call her?”
“No. I’m fine,” I croaked, churning saliva to dilute the taste of the blood. A grape Kool-Aid would have been welcome right then, I tell you.
I stood, rubbed where it hurt, which was everywhere.
Mr. Malbasic nodded approvingly and lowered the window. He continued to watch from behind the glass.
“Your nose is bleeding,” Annie said. “It might be broken.”
“I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody.”
She was trembling, fighting tears.
I shooed her hands away and then brushed past her. I did not look back. I did not want to see her tears. I would not fall for her tears.
She was sobbing, a sound as mournful as my mother’s on her worst days. “Nothing more I can do,” Annie said, rejected and dejected. “If that’s how you want to be.”
It wasn’t anywhere near how I wanted to be. It was how I was.
You know what bugged me most? You know what I couldn’t stop thinking about? Double Al. Vito. Lloyd. Wayne. I hadn’t laid a hand on any of them. Hadn’t thrown a goddamn punch.
I am a bad person. If you didn’t believe me before, you’d be wise to believe me now.
Four
Heaven is for real
And yet again, Mom fretted in the open doorway. Would I never be permitted to suffer in solitude? “My God, what’s happened to you?” She’d known I was coming. She’d been waiting and watching. More than once I’d told Jack her ESP was worth investigating.
And I was a sight, all right, a metamorphic mass of black, blue, and blood. An Alamogordo amoeba after an A-bomb test. Two mesas to the left of the mutant ants of Them! But I had something more on my mind. “Why were you at Mr. Malbasic’s house?” I said, determined and grim. Talking hurt. My lips were balloons, the sort clowns twist into sausage dogs.
Mom met me on the walk, her gentle hand at my back.
“Tell me,” I said.
“You first.”
“I fell off my bike.”
“Your bike is in the garage.”
“I fell down the stairs at school.”
“Tell me who did this to you.”
“Is Mr. Malbasic your new boyfriend?” I said.
She sat me down on a stool at the kitchen sink, dabbed at my split lip and slit eyebrow with warm water and soap. She blotted the blood from my nose, stuffed a nostril with cotton, and swabbed me with witch hazel, calamine, iodine, and Bactine.
“I can get their names without any trouble. Mrs. Malbasic phoned. She told me everything. Her husband saw it all. He knows who they are.”
“They didn’t kill me.”
“Thank God for that. But next time, if those boys—”
“They won’t. I’ll take care of it.”
“What do you mean you’ll ‘take care of it’? You can’t fight them. Look what they did to you.”
“You should have seen what I did to them.”
“But it was only you—they were four.”
“The Battle of Thermopylae—three hundred Spartans held off a million Persians.” And trust me, getting Thermopylae off my tongue was pure torture.
Mom failed to hide her grin, her dubious pride. She planted a kiss between a welt and a bruise. “You didn’t start the fight, did you? Mr. Malbasic said you appeared to be defending a girl. Is it true? Was it Annie Barker?”
“I did what I had to do.”
“Well, whatever it was, I hope it’s out of your system. The way you’ve been behaving lately . . .”
“What way?”
“Angry. Always angry at something. Is it because of Jack? Or me? Have I done something wrong?”
Were I to run down the reasons, there’d be no stopping. “Isn’t Mrs. Malbasic mad at you because Mr. Malbasic likes you so much?”
“So that’s it?”
“Some of it.”
“Florence Malbasic is my biggest customer. Mr. Malbasic has been on his best behaviour since the afternoon he came home to see me in his living room, sitting on his loveseat, reviewing the Avon brochure with his wife. He insisted she buy one of everything. Florence and I laughed. And then she did buy one of just about everything. How’s that?”
“Wow,” I said.
“And if you’re worried about him giving you any more trouble at school—if that is what’s been upsetting you—it’s over. I promise. He told me to my face, he’s going to do everything in his power to ensure you achieve your ‘fullest academic and societal potential.’”
“He said that?”
“Who else would say something so pompous? But I have no doubt he’ll keep his promise, now that I have his wife’s ear. The more immediate question is, what are we going to do about you?”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“But I do, sweetheart. I haven’t stopped since the day you were born. I won’t stop till the day I die.”
A few days later, Mom was hanging laundry when she came across Double Al’s shopping list. It had gone through the wash. “Is this yours?” she asked. “I hope it wasn’t impor—oh, my!” She covered her mouth, recoiled from the note, and gawked at me, a sudden stranger.
I peeled the damp list from her hand. One word had survived the wash: Ramses.
“They’re supposed to be good rubbers,” I said.
Mom became Trenton’s top Avon Lady. And then the county’s. In her first year, she ranked number twelve in the province and had a gold pin to prove it. A letter from head office declared her rise “meteoric and unprecedented.” In her second year, she ranked number three.
Between house calls, she’d host makeup parties in our living room.
“Your look is so natural, Emily,” the ladies would tell her.
And Mom, conspiring and inspiring, would say, “As natural as Avon and the miracles of modern cosmetology science.” Genes never entered the conversation.
I’d shut my door. Blast my transistor.
Mom worried about my behaviour. I worried about hers.
Success made her more confident. You could see it in her hair, her eyes, her clothes, her shoes, her walk. She liked herself more. I liked her less. And don’t think I didn’t hate myself for it.
Twice a week, at least, she would take out the TV tables and we’d eat dinner with 6 O’Clock Movie on channel 4. One night Leave Her to Heaven came on. It was the Gene Tierney movie Mr. Malbasic had been so keen on. In two minutes flat I saw all I never wanted to know. I skipped dessert, went up to my room. It was the last 6 O’Clock Movie Mom and I would ever watch together.
I would leave Dufferin without a black mark against me. I didn’t thank Malbasic. Didn’t thank Mom. I thanked Dottie Swartz. “Thank you for drowning, Dottie.” Closest to sincere prayer my thirteen-year-old self had come.
Thank you for drowning, Dottie. Mom would never have left the Unemployment Insurance Office and become an Avon Lady, if you hadn’t.
Thank you for drowning, Dottie. Mom would never have become friends with Florence Malbasic, if you hadn’t.
Thank you for drowning, Dottie. Mr. Malbasic would never have recognized the errors of his ways, if you hadn’t.
I would have liked to have told Annie, if only to ridicule her holy-rolling. “What have I been telling you, Gus?” she would have said. “Heaven is for real.”
Five
Life without Jack
(July 1, 1963 to June 17, 1966)
Episode 1
Jack would have loved the dogs and the baby. The sucker would have been all over it.
One sunny July morning, a baby carriage sat on the veranda of a Tompkins Street house. It was an older, larger home, easily dwarfing Iris Lebel’s shed farther down the block. Three black dogs came marauding up the middle of the road. They passed the house by, peed on an abandoned tricycle, sniffed each other’s butts, caught wind of a fresher scent, and reversed in pack formation.
The lead dog nudged open the unlatched gate of the grey picket fence and the dogs loped into the yard and up the four steps to the porch. They knocked over the pram and the baby rolled out.
The baby’s mother screamed onto the scene and a dog took her down by the head.
The baby died on the spot. The Record left details to the reader’s imagination and rumours filled in the blanks.
The baby’s mother was given rabies shots and hospitalized for shock. She also required reconstructive facial surgery, which led to a series of fundraising efforts over the next few months. Bottle drives. Bake sales. Car washes. Sock hops.
A bounty was placed on the heads of the dogs, local hunters invited to participate.
By month’s end, twenty-two dogs were dead. Eighteen were black Labs and two chocolate. The carcasses were strung up in market square, as they came in, and left to hang until a provincial health inspector intervened. The Springer Spaniel and Miniature Poodle killed in the hunt were not displayed.
Three hunters were also shot, none fatally, though a man who worked at the Black Diamond Cheese Factory lost the use of his legs, which was when the town called off the hunt.
Episode 2
Mom’s maternal shortcomings were mounting. The Marquee mitigated her guilt. “It’s as close to eating home as eating out can be,” she told me, as if this was a good thing.
Then, too, there was Bert Levin. With Mollie out of the picture, it didn’t take long for him to pay more attention to Mom. Two weeks, if that.
Bert was a handsome guy. Tall. Solid. Reliable. With a dash of bad boy, courtesy of his Clark Gable mustache. His apron might have deterred some. Not Mom. She saw a man at ease with his masculinity.
If you needed a bite to eat or a few bucks to carry you through, you could count on Bert Levin. The Record had run stories on his grab bag of kindnesses. A lonely widow saddled with a teenage sad sack was right up his alley.
In the years prior, Bert had been friendly within limits. Now he was quick to sit with Mom and me, nurse a ginger ale, munch chips. “Dessert’s on the house from now on,” he told Mom.
His generosity had been a bone of contention for Mollie. According to Mom, she’d accused Bert of frittering away Marquee profits. “No matter how kind Bert is, Mollie played a big part in those earnings. Her pies, my goodness. If they serve apple pie in Heaven, you know it’s going to be Mollie Levin’s.”
I’d been half-listening, coaxing a long grey hair from my layer cake. “She’s dead?” Had Jack crossed a line? Had McGrath and his elephant gun paid a visit to Montreal? Would Mom be next?
“What? Mrs. Levin? No. No.” Mom overcompensated for the confusion. “It’s just an expression. Mrs. Levin is fine. Absolutely fine.”
I went for broke, figured I’d never have a better opening. “When you die, will you promise to contact me from the Beyond, same way Houdini promised Mrs. Houdini?”
She inundated me with mush. “With every ounce of my soul, I promise.” I ducked under her hugs and kisses, knowing she’d carry on twenty minutes past unbearable.
Mom composed herself, cast her attention to the open kitchen and Bert. “Still, his heart is in the right place. With the right woman, I suspect he’d do just fine.”
Episode 3
Two weeks after the attack on the baby, I was standing in Sure Press with the latest batch of Mom’s dry cleaning. For the first time in memory, Iris wasn’t there. “She sick?” I said.
“Funeral today,” Mr. Blackhurst said.
“Hers?”
“Dog baby’s.”
Helmut Swartz, who now owned the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, and
doing quite well by all accounts—dance instructor and wife killer an irresistible combination to Trenton women—was unlocking his door when he saw me exit the cleaners. “You know what they’re going to say about the mother, don’t you, Leo? They’re going to say she fed her baby to the dogs on purpose. You watch. You’ll see.”
Not five minutes later I crossed paths with Crates. I was at Division below St. Peter’s Church, observing the funeral crowds heading up the hill. I didn’t know he was on me until he was at my ear. “Too late to grab a good seat.” He wore a white shirt and a solid brown tie with a silver Pilots Hall clip.
“What?”
“You’re the Ramses kid, eh?”
“Me?”
“Ramses. What Double calls you.”
Downright disheartening. Seven years in school together and he didn’t know my name.
“Waiting for the funeral to start, are you, before you break into the dog baby’s house?” He had this whoosh to his voice, reminded me of fly casting.
“Who, me? I wouldn’t do that.”
“So you’re going, then?”
“Where?”
“The funeral.”
“Of course.”
“You should have a tie.”
“I forgot it,” I said.
We sat in the nosebleed pews, most distant the pulpit. Crates smelled of sawdust. “The boys worked you over good,” he said.
I laughed it off. “I can handle them.”
“Pay your taxes.”
“What?”
“Every tax they collect they gimme a cut, so they don’t get cut. Smokes. Rubbers. Sen-Sen. You don’t pay up, you get cut. I can do it right here, right now. You can be the next funeral.”
“I’m not Catholic,” I said.
“But you’re friends with that Jack the Finder kid who’s got the store.”
“Yeah, but he’s gone away.”
“Starting next Friday and every Friday, we cut out the middleman. You pay me direct. Down by the tracks, same time and place as today. Smokes. I’m easy. Any kind. All you can get. Got it?”
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 23