Blue Vengeance (4 page)

 

During the next few days Danny cruised the neighbourhood for suitable stones, which he brought home and placed on a shelf in the shed.

Since he was up from his chair and out and around, Dot decided she could go home, at least for a few days. Mid-week, Danny heard whispers coming from the living room as he sat at the kitchen table eating fried eggs and sausages that Dot had prepared for him. The words
pills
and
pull yourself together
were uttered more than once. From his mother's side of the conversation came mostly sighs.

She suffered from something called fibrositis. It was the cause of her fatigue and her pain. Heaven help you if you touched her — it hurt too much. She couldn't bear to be touched. She needed pills for all kinds of things: stiffness, sleeplessness, what she called her
excruciating pain
. There were some yellow ones that she took
just to make me feel a little better
. The pills worried Dot. In her opinion there were far too many of them, and she objected on the grounds that they didn't seem to help anyway.

“Do you want me to suffer, Dot? Is that it?” said Barbara.

“Of course not, Barb, of course not. I just worry that you're overdoing the pills, that you lose track of them sometimes.”

“I'm a big girl, Dot.”

The eggs on Danny's plate looked a little too jiggly this morning. He liked them sunny side up, but with no jiggle to them. Dot's mind hadn't been on her cooking.

Edwin drove in to pick her up. They left the cupboards and fridge full of
eats
, as Edwin called them, and a brand new pile of money in the kitchen drawer. The money in the drawer was nothing new. It always arrived by way of Dot.

Barbara got off the couch to say goodbye to her sister. It was the first time in a couple of days that Danny had seen her upright, and he wondered if the whole time he had stayed in his room, she had stayed on the couch — if she had remained horizontal except for her ghostly appearances on her way to the bathroom in the night. She put a hand on his shoulder now, a feeble unwanted pressure, and he forced himself not to shrug her off.

“Take care of your mother, son,” Edwin said as he started up his Olds. “She'll need your help now more than ever.”

Those words hit Danny hard in the gut. It hadn't occurred to him that he would have to look after anybody but himself. It reminded him of one Hallowe'en, when he was much younger. His teacher had passed out cards with little slits in them that were supposed to be filled with dimes. The whole scheme was called
The March of Dimes,
and it was to help people all across Canada who had been crippled by polio. Danny had thought that it was up to him to take his dime card to them wherever they lived and he wondered why none of his classmates looked as alarmed as he felt, with his silent questions about train derailments and dog sled travel to the Northwest Territories where he imagined some of them lived, in particular the ones he was responsible for. He was afraid to ask anyone for details, so he hid the card in a shoe box at the back of his closet and did nothing more about it. After a week or so, when the subject hadn't come up again, he stopped worrying.

He had a similar feeling now, when Uncle Edwin mentioned taking care of his mother. At first he had been relieved that Dot was leaving, but now he understood that he hadn't given any real thought to the meals that had turned up three times a day, or the clean clothes that fluttered and snapped on the clothesline. He did not doubt that he could cook and do laundry for himself — he and Cookie had been doing that for years. Well, mostly Cookie; he had helped. But when he thought about looking after the human lump on the couch, it seemed way harder than taking dimes to the Arctic Circle.

Dot kissed her sister on the cheek and Danny on top of his head and gave Uncle Edwin a look that went along with the way Danny felt. If she were to speak then, he was sure her words would be:
Edwin, don't scare the boy
.

When she was settled in the passenger seat she rolled down the window. “We'll come in to town and check on you from time to time.”

“When?” Danny said.

He knew it would be hard for them to get away. Farmers couldn't just up and leave anytime they liked, or anytime their sister lay limp and pathetic on a chesterfield. He had spent a week with them a couple of summers ago and watched them rise with the sun and work all day long. He had helped, but not very much; mostly he had sought out modest adventures with two brothers from a neighbouring farm.

Dot took his hand and squeezed.

“Soon.”

She looked at her sister as she spoke. The line of her lips went straight across, no up or down to it.

Danny watched them drive away. He was on his own.

When he turned around, his mother was gone. He glanced at the house and saw nothing in any of the windows. He went inside and found her on the couch.

“Can I have a shelf in the shed all my own?” A stupid question but he needed to say something to sort of kick off their new life together.

And his thoughts had returned to the gathering of stones.

“Sure,” she said.

He figured if he asked her if he could take a piss on the rug she would agree to that too.

She lay with the back of her forearm covering her eyes. The living room was thick with her smoke.

He started to open a window.

“Don't,” she said.

So she cared about something.

 

Danny enlisted Paul's help. They worked in back lanes mostly. He didn't want the sharp edges of gravel, but they found rounded stones, often in groups.

“Why are we doin' this?” Paul said on day two.

“For slingshot practice, what else?”

“We haven't shot our slingshots once. This is weird.”

“I thought it would be a good idea to gather up a million stones first.”

“I'm sick of it.”

Paul quit that day, so Danny did too. He didn't want to be weird.

They deposited what stones they had in the shed and biked over to the Rowing Club, where they sat on the dock and watched the rowers.

“I don't like rowers,” said Paul.

“Why?”

“I'm not sure. I just don't.”

Russell came scrabbling down to the dock and leapt into the river, splashing both boys.

“Jesus, Russell,” said Paul.

Two rowers manoeuvred their way around the dog and glared at the boys as they lifted their craft out of the water and headed up to the club.

“Is that your dog?” one of them called out.

“No.” They answered in unison.

“See?” Paul said. “They're assholes.”

Danny took off his sneakers and socks and dangled his feet in the river. It was still a little swollen from the spring melt.

“Christ, that's cold,” he said. “Imagine your mum thinkin' we might go swimmin'.”

“She's out of her head,” said Paul.

“No, she's not.”

Paul took off his socks and shoes and lowered his feet into the water alongside Danny's.

Russell swam over in a frenzy of excitement.

“Easy, Russ,” Paul said. “We're not comin' in.”

“Do you have conversations at your house?” said Danny.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, do you talk to each other?”

“Not much. I mean my mum and dad talk, my sisters never shut up, but I don't listen. If I'm involved it's just mainly to be yelled at or ordered around.”

“I guess that's normal.”

 

Danny thought about the way his house was, had been as long as he could remember. At Paul's there were his two older sisters who put rollers in their hair and talked too long on the phone — like girls on television did — like Gidget did. And there was a mum who made good suppers and was nice about it if one was interrupted.

One day, last winter, when he had knocked on their door Mrs. Carter had answered and said, “We're just sitting down to supper, Danny, but I'll tell Paul you dropped by.”

“Oh, sorry, Mrs. Carter,” he said.

“It's okay, dear. We're eating a little earlier than usual. Sherry has CGIT. I can easily set another place, if you'd like to join us.”

“No, thanks,” he said and walked away. He remembered that he hadn't wanted to go home that day. But it had been too cold to do anything else.

 

They put on their socks and shoes now and sauntered back down Lyndale Drive.

“See ya later, alligator,” said Paul when he turned off at Cedar Place.

“In a while, crocodile,” said Danny.

“Not too soon, ya big baboon.”

 

If only his mum could be like Mrs. Carter. He couldn't imagine her inviting a friend of his in for supper at the last minute. She rarely even answered the door. They never had people for supper except Aunt Dot and Uncle Edwin, and when that happened Dot did the cooking.

And why hadn't Cookie done normal girl stuff, like Paul's sisters?

His house wasn't like other people's. The missing dad was the biggest part, he supposed, but everything felt different there — even before Cookie died — and none of it in a good way.

 

School interfered with Danny's slingshot practice, but going to school was one of the things Dot had made him promise to do.

He practised at the river — aiming at trees, then at individual branches, then at single leaves. He didn't graduate to branches till he aced the tree trunks and he didn't graduate to leaves till he aced the branches. It was hard work. His arms felt strong as he pulled back the sling and held fast to the Y-shaped instrument that he had carved himself. He felt like a he-man.

“Leaves are way too feeble of a thing to aim at,” Paul said.

He was coming by less and less often.

“What then?” Danny didn't look up from the task at hand. “Any better ideas?”

“I don't know. Squirrels? Cars? Shooting at nothing would be better than leaves.”

It was true. Leaves were boring, and hitting them was practically impossible because of their size and their thin way of resting sideways on the air. Even when he did hit one (oak leaves were the easiest) it provided little satisfaction. You needed a good solid hit for that — if possible with some wreckage. But Danny stuck with it because he needed to perfect his aim and he couldn't think of anything else that presented itself in such abundance. It was his job, like it was Paul's job to practise piano after school — no fun, but it had to be done. And no question — he was getting good. That was what provided the scrap of satisfaction.

Birchdale Betty's yard had good stones. She had them trucked in. Whenever he got low, he would take a pail over and scoop them up by the handful. She caught him once.

“I see you, Danny Blue,” she said, scaring him witless. “I've got my eye on you.”

It was after dark, and he had thought for sure she would be inside her house. He should have known better. With her putting-green lawn and prize-winning flowers, she often stood guard against the neighbourhood hooligans who couldn't resist the dwarves and flamingoes that dwelled so happily in amongst her shrubbery.

“Put them back,” she said, looming over him with a broom and her famous crazed eyes.

He obeyed her and ran all the way home.

There was no way he could conquer leaves, but he moved on anyway, to shooting at those same three things: tree trunks, branches, and leaves, but from different angles — hard left, hard right, and everything in between. It was time to advance to moving objects. He tried to enlist Paul for that, to throw things for him.

“Don't be an idiot,” Paul said. “You can't hit moving objects unless you're Superman or someone like that. Probably he can't even do it. You know what? I'm tired of this whole thing. At least when we looked for stones we covered some territory. This is just stupid.”

Danny no longer wanted to do the old things: ride bikes all over town, swim in the pool, go to scary shows at the Lyceum, walk around doing not much of anything.

“Let's go downtown,” Paul said.

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

When he didn't answer, Paul threw his own slingshot as far out into the river as he could and walked away.

 

It didn't take Danny long to realize that Paul had been right about the moving objects thing. What had he been thinking? He hoped there weren't other things that he was clued out about in regard to his plan.

He cared about the loss of his friend's presence, but not very much. It had been handy having him help with the search for stones, but tiresome listening to him whine. It played havoc with his concentration.

Now that he was on his own, he was free to do whatever he liked. He solved the moving objects challenge by becoming one himself. From his bicycle he shot at everything he saw that wasn't alive. He was good at no-hands — he had perfected that the summer before. He liked to chew Double Bubble while he rode, and blow bubbles as he shot — the bigger the bubble the better. Three activities at once. The only person he could have bragged to about it was Cookie.

 

Neighbours had come by at first with casseroles and pot pies, detailed instructions attached to the foil wrappings. When Danny showed them to his mum she didn't seem interested so he warmed them up in the oven himself and dished some out for each of them. Sometimes she ate hers; sometimes she didn't.

The only hard part about it was explaining to the women repeatedly that his mum was lying down. They never pushed. He came to suspect they were relieved not to see her. It meant they didn't have to figure out what to say.

Sometimes two of them came at once, with a supper apiece. Danny figured they came together in case his mum surprised them and made an appearance. It would be less awkward for them if they weren't alone.

These ready-made suppers eventually dwindled and then stopped.

Danny had no problem feeding himself with the eats his aunt and uncle left and he wore the same clothes several days in a row. He was beginning to think that wearing clean clothes was overrated. At first he didn't know if his mum ate or not after the ready-made meals stopped coming. He leaned towards not. The only disturbances in the kitchen seemed to be those he caused himself. So he started taking her some of whatever he was having: cereal, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, TV dinners, butterscotch pudding.

His mum had always been big on Swanson's TV dinners. Danny remembered watching her elation the first time she brought some home from the grocery store years ago, heated them up, and placed them in front of him and Cookie.

“Ninety-eight cents a pop,” she announced gaily.

It was as gay as she got.

Cookie's eyes had grown big. She sometimes ate TV dinners in secret, any time of day, and then biked over to the Dominion store to buy more, to replace them before her mother found out what she had done. She spent a good portion of her allowance on them. She hadn't known that Danny knew, and he was too embarrassed to mention it. He also knew that in the past couple of years she had thrown them up soon after she ate them. For sure he couldn't mention that.

 

His mum usually thanked him when he made her a meal, but as with the neighbours' casseroles, she didn't always eat what he set in front of her.

“What would you like to eat?” he said one lunchtime when she hadn't touched her brown sugar and butter sandwich.

“Nothing, thanks,” she said. “I'm having a little trouble swallowing lately.”

So he kept on the way he was, giving her some of whatever he made for himself. The meal making wasn't difficult, and it didn't get in the way of his practice. Not much anyway. At the end of every day he washed the dishes and cutlery that he had used. The sink looked out over the backyard with its swimming pool and clothesline and shed. His thoughts could roam wherever they chose. Chores were something he and Cookie had co-operated on daily, and he missed her most during those times.

 

He was late for school off and on. Part of his preparations involved the study of his quarry: her comings and goings, her habits. She taught at Nelson Mac, and Danny went to Nordale, the elementary school, so he had to move back and forth between the two. The school year was drawing to an end; time was closing in.

Aunt Dot phoned daily to see how they were getting along. If he hadn't answered the phone, it would have rung and rung. He called his mother so that Dot could hear him, and she dragged herself, inside of her sheet or blanket, to the telephone table in the hall.

“Yes, Dot. We're fine. Everything's fine. For Christ's sake, Dot, we're fine.”

Danny didn't like hearing her swear. It was just one more thing that had changed, one more thing to get used to.

Uncle Edwin and Aunt Dot made a day trip into town once a week at first, and then they began to come for a couple of days every two weeks or so. During these times Danny's mum would force herself off the couch and pretend she was going about the business of living a miniature life. She slept in her bedroom instead of on the couch, had baths, and put on clothes.

Dot and Edwin replenished the eats and the money drawer, did load after load of laundry, and cleaned the place up. Dot cooked and nagged Barbara about her pills, and Edwin mowed the lawn, pulled weeds, washed windows, did whatever he felt needed doing around the place. He even saw to the filling of the pool and cleaned it whenever he came to town. Danny never used it, but he didn't say so.

When Dot insisted on hiring a cleaning woman, Barbara fought it with what little fight she had.

“No, Dot, for heaven's sake, I can manage.”

“You're not managing, Barb. I can see that. And too much is being put on Danny.”

Dot won, and a woman named Lena began to come in once a week. She came recommended by a friend of Dot's, and her wages were paid up front for a full year.

Danny worried at first that Lena would be in his way, but he worked around her nicely. She even cooked and did laundry on the day she came, so it eased up on his chores.

Every day he shot 250 stones. By the time he turned fourteen on June 24, 1964, he was a pro. He thought of himself as a modern-day Billy the Kid. His favourite gunfighter was Paladin, a gentleman killer who only performed the deed when he had run out of other options. But Billy the Kid was, well…a kid. And Danny's mind was not willing to let in any peaceful alternatives. He differed from Paladin in that way.

Cookie was gone from the world, and Miss Hartley would pay.

 

Danny's birthday fell on a Wednesday. He thought that would be a good day to go to the cemetery and tell Cookie about his plan. As he rode out after school he thought about the first time she had mentioned her phys ed teacher's name. It was January, he remembered, around the time that he first heard “All My Lovin'” on the radio.

“Miss Hartley called me a scrawny cockroach,” she'd said.

“Who's Miss Hartley?” said Danny.

“My phys ed teacher.”

“What's a cockroach?”

“I don't know, but I know it's ugly, and everybody hates it and doesn't want to go near it.”

“What happened?”

“We were all in the locker room changing into our gym clothes. I always go into the bathroom because I don't want the other girls looking at me in my underwear. She's always in there with us and she started yelling at me to come out and change with the others. What was so special about me that I needed extra privacy — stuff like that.

“I hurried but not fast enough, and she banged on the door of the cubicle. ‘Cordelia!' she said. Oh, Danny, I hate her so much. I got the door open and she yelled at me to step out. Some of the girls had gathered 'round by then, and she said, ‘Look at you. You're a scrawny cockroach. It makes me sick to look at you.' And she said. ‘No wonder you want to hide.' And she told the other girls to have a good look at what no boy is ever going to want to touch or marry. She went on and on. Some girls giggled. Most of them didn't.”

 

Danny winced now as he remembered the tears streaming down her face and how he had been unable to come up with anything to make her feel better.

He'd said, “Most of the girls didn't giggle,” and then asked her if she'd like to play checkers.

She hadn't wanted to.

 

The only car in the cemetery parking lot was a pale blue Cadillac. Danny wondered if it was the same one that was there the day of Cookie's funeral. It had to be. Maybe it belonged to the groundskeeper. Maybe the groundskeeper was independently wealthy but wanted his job because he liked to hang around dead people, and it gave him a good reason for doing so.

He parked his bike and walked the short distance to Cookie's grave. Nothing about it had changed. It still said
Cordelia
. He sat down and told her what he had in mind.

When he looked up he saw a man standing a ways off, across an expanse of graves. The man was looking at him, or seemed to be. Maybe he was just looking in his general direction. Danny stared at him, and the man looked away.

Then he turned back to telling Cookie more about what was going on: his falling out with Paul, his developing skill with a slingshot, the worsening of their mum's health.

When he looked again the man was gone. He glanced at the parking lot and saw the Cadillac pulling away.