Cinnamon Toast and the End of the World (10 page)

So I was sixteen and could legally drive. This was pretty incredible.

Mom wouldn’t let me get a car of my own: she thought I’d drive drunk and end up killing myself. Besides, she said, we couldn’t
afford it. Mark had a car, though. A real piece of shit, but it had a tape deck so he could assault the neighbourhood with
his crappy metal-head music at four in the morning. And, yeah, we drove drunk all the time.

We were deep into 1986. The superpowers were still stockpiling weapons and aiming them at each other, but Sting wrote a song
about it, so that was okay. I’d sing the song at Mom to bug her because it was about Russians.

‘Pop songs about nuclear war,’ she said, disgusted. ‘As if you poor kids didn’t have enough troubles.’

Normal people started getting AIDS and then all of us were glad to be living in a nice safe place like Riverside. Nothing
to worry about except herpes, crabs and gonorrhoea. Also substance abuse, child abuse, arson, teenage pregnancy, morons in
Satan cults, suicide by firearms and the occasional episode of cow-fucking.

In the spring, Mark met a girl named Stacey in Arnottville, and they got serious fast.

I tried to see the appeal. She was blonde and had big tits – two qualities he admired. And blue eyes, which I believe he liked.
Watery blue eyes. Hair the texture of fibreglass. A voice that seemed to droop into the back of her throat. Looked people
up and down and kept whatever conclusions she’d drawn to herself. She looked me up and down sometimes. And dismissed me: Mark’s
annoying little sidekick, something left over from childhood.

Was he careful and serious, I wondered, when he kissed her?

I spent quite a bit of time with Stacey that summer, after Mark got thrown into Juvenile Detention for assault. Hard to believe
that was only last year. The assault was really just a fight that got out of control outside a Valentine’s Day dance at the
Arnottville Legion Hall. They’d made Mark serve the three weeks in June and July so he wouldn’t miss classes, which had totally
pissed him off.

One afternoon me and Stacey were both waiting for him in the visitors’ area at Juvie, and all these guys were coming up to
me and calling me ‘Mini-McAllister’. I asked Mark about this. He said he’d told everybody I was his younger brother.

‘You just don’t look like the kind of friend I’d have,’ he said. ‘Everybody in Riverside’s used to it, but not these guys.’

‘So!’ I was in the car with Stacey going home. ‘Guess I don’t seem tough, huh?’

She glanced sideways, one hand on the steering wheel. ‘No.’

‘Think I should get a tattoo?’

We drove past a field of corn, sun turning the long folded leaves to dusty gold. Stacey lit a cigarette. I waited for her
to offer me one. She didn’t. I picked the pack up off the dashboard and took one anyway.

‘Depends,’ she said after a while. ‘Tattoo of what?’

‘The Jolly Green Giant.’ I started laughing. ‘I’d get the Jolly Green Giant on my arm. Would that be tough?’

‘No.’

Safe to say I didn’t like Stacey.

Then it was the end of July. Mark’s birthday. He was out of Juvie and just turning seventeen, so there was a lot of drinking.
And he got totally obnoxious.

‘Hey! Hey ladies! This is my little brother. He’s a virgin!’

‘Jesus Christ, Mark, shut up!’

He could barely stand. We’d all just been thrown out of another Legion Hall dance in Arnottville, and Mark was reeling around
the parking lot yelling at girls, while me and Stacey tried to keep him from falling on his face. You could hear music from
the Legion, fuzzy and muffled like something underwater – that song I never liked about patio lanterns.

‘Thought you didn’t have a brother,’ said a girl with a sticky lion’s mane of hair frozen around her face.

Mark got me in a headlock and started rubbing his knuckles against my skull. ‘You interested, Pam? Want to be his first?’
He was choking me. ‘Be gentle now.’ Mark’s voice was a dull slur. ‘You be gentle with this one.’

‘Fuck off.’ All I could see were Mark’s shoes and the pavement. Stacey and the other girl were laughing. ‘Fuck off, fuck off,
fuck off. Mark, fuck right off!’

‘Aw, c’mon, don’t say that.’ Shifting his feet and rocking us. ‘I love you, man. I totally do.’

He let me go and I was shaking my head, blinking. Mark turned to yell at more strangers walking by. ‘This is my little brother!
He’s fucking helpless without me!’

Near the end of August, it was my turn. Seventeen years old. I told everybody I didn’t want to celebrate – I wasn’t much for
birthdays – but Mom made a cake and Lana put together a stack of mix tapes and Mark took me out to this bar off the highway
on the road to Arnottville. They didn’t ID very often, otherwise there’d be no reason to be there.

We drank a lot of watered-down beer, listened to some terrible music and tried to pretend we were good at pool. None of the
girls would talk to us because it was obvious we were high-school kids. And at the end of the night, Mark was out in the parking
lot kicking the shit out of somebody. This time it was a sleazy-looking guy of about thirty-five, in a leather jacket and
baseball cap. The hat had writing on it, stark capital letters. ‘If girls are made of sugar and spice then why do they taste
like tuna?’

The hat was on the ground. So was the guy who owned it. And a length of wood that had been propping open the screen to the
back door, until Mark had wrenched it away so he could slam it into the side of the guy’s head. Float like a butterfly, sting
like a bee, whack with a two-by-four. That was Mark’s style of hand-to-hand.

He was cursing and spitting. ‘You cheap – stupid – piece – of shit!’ Punctuating each word with a kick – to the guy’s stomach,
his throat, his ribs. I watched until I couldn’t take it anymore.

I clutched at his arm and tried to drag him away. ‘Stop it. Mark, stop it! You’re gonna kill him! I don’t want you to kill
anybody.’

He let me have it – an elbow to the guts. I doubled over, almost threw up. But we had to get out of there before the guy’s
friends showed. Mark grabbed my arm and dragged me along after him. I followed with cramped steps and we ended up at a picnic
table behind the Tasty Freeze across the highway from the bar, rustling cornfields on both sides of us, gravel making the
ground roll away under our feet.

Mark was obviously still in the fight. He kicked at a rusty trash barrel with garbage foaming over the top. It was anchored
to the side of the building by a chain, so it shuddered but didn’t fall. He lunged at me, grabbed the neck of my T-shirt and
yelled into my face.

‘You fucking girl! I wasn’t gonna kill him. And if I did, he deserves it!’ Gave me a shove that threw me back a few steps.

‘I … I didn’t want you to get in trouble.’

He kicked the trash can again. Dented it.

‘Fuck you, Stephen! Don’t you know who that was?’

One of his mom’s old boyfriends, he told me. Made sense, how quickly he’d set Mark off back at the bar.

‘Hey, look, it’s Maggie’s little boy,’ the guy had said, grinning and looking around at his friends, who were also in baseball
caps and leather jackets. ‘Mag-gie Mc-Al-lis-ter.’ Savouring the name. A couple of the others had laughed.

‘The fucker. The
fucker
,’ Mark said. ‘Used to sit there at the kitchen table, trip me up every time I went past …’ Mark started pacing. He seemed
to deflate the longer he walked. At first he was a man, a person who could have killed somebody. And then he was a kid like
me. Tired and a long way from home.

Mark sat on the picnic table. He closed his eyes. I became aware of the sound of crickets in the cold night air. That creaky
noise vibrating like the beat of a clock’s second hand.

‘This dickhead doing hot knives on the stove in front of my sister. Like he lived there. Him and not me. You remember?’

I remembered ‘Tastes Like Tuna’ then. Mark was right. The guy had moved right in and made himself at home, drinking in the
middle of the day and watching TV with the curtains closed. Then one night Mark had shown up at our place around two in the
morning because
his mother had told him to leave. There’d been a fight between him and this guy, and Mark had lost.

‘Should have killed him back there,’ he said. ‘Let the fucker die.’

I sat beside him on the table, dug into my pockets and handed Mark a lint-covered ball of Kleenex for his knuckles. When he
pressed the white into the back of his hand, I saw dark spots emerge like ghost eyes. I stayed quiet. Some kind of bug town
was building up around this one light in the back of the Tasty Freeze. Insects with legs like bundles of eyelashes. Little
fluffs of moths. Crawly buzzing things.

‘It was my house. I let him push me around like some stupid kid. I let her kick me out.’ His eyes closed again and his hands
were clenched together. ‘God, I am so fucking worthless …’

‘Aw, Mark. Don’t.’ I put my arm around him.

Then I was on the ground, all my weight on one elbow. Mark had pushed me off the picnic table. He was yelling at me.

‘What is wrong with you? You queer or something?’

I turned my back, told him in a sulky growl to fuck off. Then I paced over sliding gravel, blinking and bending my arm to
see if it still worked.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

I ignored him.

‘Stephen, I’m
sorry
. C’mere.’

The lights were still on at the bar across the way. I listened to the stupid crickets, thought about walking into the corn
rows and falling asleep there. Or heading off down the highway alone. Better than going anywhere with him.

‘Get
over
here!’ Mark was slapping the surface of the picnic table. I called him an asshole and a psycho. We stared at each other in
the dark. Then I plodded over and took a seat on the table, at the farthest corner
from him. Mark slid himself close. He grabbed my arm and draped it over his shoulders, like a dog angling its head under your
hand when it wants a pat. His back started to tremble.

I reached my other arm around him, held on tight.

He told me everything. He couldn’t seem to stop. He said he was sorry he’d pushed me, that he was stupid, that he didn’t understand
himself. How he’d almost hit Stacey a couple of weeks before when he was drunk, and he was terrified he might hit his little
sister Krystal someday.

‘If that ever happens, I’ll kill myself.’ One hand was clasping my arm, still tight across his chest. ‘Maybe I’ll do it anyway.
I don’t know what I’m good at. I don’t know what I’m good
for
. I don’t even know if I still believe in God.’ He squeezed my forearm harder. It hurt. ‘And look how I acted with you tonight.
It’s your birthday, man. It’s your fucking birthday.’

‘Come on. You know I don’t give a shit.’ I relaxed my hold and moved away by inches. He pressed his hand to his eyes, bloody
tissue like a parade float flower still stuck to his knuckles.

‘Never should’ve called you that,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t judge me. Except Krystal, and I can’t exactly
be a real person for her.’ Mark took out his cigarettes and offered the pack to me. I took one, slapped my pockets but couldn’t
find my lighter. He struck a match and held it out.

His face in the brief firelight was so beautiful it shocked me.

‘You don’t judge me and you don’t lie,’ he was saying. ‘You know how rare that is?’

‘I lie all the time.’ My voice died away on the last word.

‘Not to me. You don’t lie to me.’

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I noticed a baseball cap on the ground by the table. Telling us about girls tasting like tuna. Mark
must have carried it
over, like a trophy. Or maybe I had, just to have something to cling to out of nerves. He saw it and gave a choked little
laugh, settled the hat on my head at an awkward angle.

‘Happy birthday. Looks fucking debonair.’

We had to go back to the bar to get Mark’s wheels, went straight to the parking lot.

The guy Mark had beat up was long gone. But a couple of girls were there leaning against his car and the stupid hat turned
out to be a conversation starter. Mark convinced them to go for a drive. We ended up somewhere on a dirt road surrounded by
woods.