Given (27 page)

Hooker made himself at home; he hung up his jacket then sat down on the bottom bunk and took off his shirt. He pulled off his cowboy boots and let them drop to the floor, and got under the covers, still wearing his socks and his jeans.

Yo! Pistola!
Rainy said, picking herself off Say Muh. She scuttled back up onto the top bunk where she lay on her belly, watching him.
He be a watermelon I eat him, seeds and all. I wouldn't spit him out.

Frenchy peered over the edge of the upper berth, too, as the HE emerged from the bathroom, going
gack gack gack
trying to blow out the bullet that had lodged itself above his nose. Rainy said his hairball-vomiting noises hurt her headache.

He miss his boo
, Frenchy said, defensively.

Boo hoo,
Rainy said.

I took off my coat and hung it over the top of Hooker's jacket. Rainy grabbed my hand and held on to it. Her cold hand, at such times, squeezed my heart; she pulled me up onto the top bunk and I tried to get comfortable between the two of them. I didn't sleep, but went into a dreamy kind of meditation that involved carrying my baby in a sling, just high enough that he could see out above the line of my shoulders where he swivelled his head, like an owlet. Rainy nudged me fully awake and I heard, over the loud speaker outside our cabin door, “Attention passengers. Would the owner of a dog please come to the cafeteria. Would the owner come to the cafeteria immediately.”

“That would be Toop,” Hooker sighed. “Looking for a handout, no doubt.”

“I'll get him,” I said. I climbed out of the bunk and threw my clothes back on.

“I owe you one,” Hooker said. “Tell Toop I'm keeping the bed warm for him.”

In the cafeteria I found Hooker's dog, who had made friends with the cleaner, scarfing a chicken salad sandwich. I apologized, saying he must have escaped from the car, I'd make sure he was locked up for the night, and the cleaner looked at Toop, sympathetically.

Toop stayed close until we were out of the cleaner's sight, and then ran all the way back to the solarium where he hid under Grace's chair. I didn't have the heart to make him stay in the hearse with a python and a rat, so I took him with me to the cabin. When I opened the door he leapt into bed with Hooker, put his head on the pillow, and squeezed his eyes shut.

I told Hooker what had happened, and he laughed. “Toop's a sneaky Indian,” he said. “He knows how to get out of the kitchen if there's too much heat.”

As soon as the HE smelled Toop, he lost control of his body and began smashing his face against the door. Frenchy said the smell brought back memories —
he woke up ready to kill dogs —
as she slipped to the floor and tried calming him by repeating the names of sniper rifles:
AI Arctic Warfare .50, Truvelo .50, Mechem NTW-20, Barrett.

I struggled onto the top bunk and tried to sleep. Beneath me I could hear Toop grinding his teeth.

“Let me know if it gets lonely up there without me,” I heard Hooker say, before I drifted into sleep.

Neither Rainy nor Frenchy nor I had slept well, and when I woke early the next morning to an announcement that the ship was about to dock, Hooker and Toop were gone. Say Muh knelt on the bottom bunk blowing down the front of her blouse, trying to warm up her heart. The HE sat in the middle of the floor, jabbing his finger in the stripes of light where it came through the vents in the door.

When we'd made our way down to the car deck I found Hooker — holding Toop with one arm and supporting Gracie with the other — leaning against our ride, waiting. Rainy said Grace, even with a baby getting ready to pop out of her, still looked too skinny, like a body-of-Christ wafer.
She be like the Holy Uterus,
Rainy said.

Hooker apologized for leaving without waking me, but he had started worrying about Grace in the middle of the night. He asked if the three of them could bum a lift into town.

I said yes, of course, wherever they had to go. I left it vague, remembering that Hooker didn't like being pinned down:
when you make plans you interfere with the way things ought to turn out on their own.
Hooker thought Grace would be best off lying down so I unlatched the back doors of the hearse and made a bed for her out of the pillows. Grace went limp in Hooker's arms when she saw the wicker coffin. Riding in a hearse with a coffin, she said, pressing Baby-Think-It-Over to her breast, was what dead people do.

“Nobody's going to die,” Hooker said. When he glanced at me I could see the questions in his eyes: why was I travelling with an empty coffin, in the very place we had laid Al's body?

I said Grace could ride in the front with us, if she felt well enough to sit up. “I'm sick,” she said, but accepted my offer. Toop jumped in and curled up in the Moses basket I placed at Grace's feet.

Rainy forced Say Muh into the back, though she refused to share the coffin with the HE, who couldn't find his rat. I could feel every terrorist cell of his skin revolting against his loss, as if he wished his skin could wriggle free of itself, the way a snake's could, and escape from being dead. He threw himself on the ground, behind the rear wheels of the hearse, and began smashing his face off on the fender. Frenchy searched the hearse and came up with two whiskers and a small section of tail. She figured that Say Muh's twin, in her python-manifestation, had eaten the rat. When I looked I saw the python had a rodent-shaped bulge in its belly. The snake flicked out its forked tongue, as if taking the emotional temperature of the air, then slithered its way up between Rainy's legs.

I slipped in behind the wheel, waiting for Frenchy to get control of her boy. She kissed his bloodied face and whispered the word he loved most, the one she used when all others failed —
Kalashnikov
— like a mantra, or magical charm, in the hole where one of his ears had been. Gradually the HE stopped his smashing, his vacant eyes coming into focus as he let Frenchy lift him into the back.

“We ready to roll?” Hooker said. I got out and closed the back doors, but when the HE smelled Toop he began spitting and rolling his eyes and banging his broken head again. Rainy helped Frenchy wrestle him into the coffin; Frenchy closed the lid and sat down on it saying he could stay in there until he learned how to behave.

I eased ahead down the steeply sloping ramp. Rainy worried that I was going to put us all in the ocean, as I watched in the rear-view mirror the python crawl out from between her legs, undulate up her body and coil itself around her neck. Rainy unzipped her bongolock and the snake disappeared back into its nest of hair. A moment later Say Muh's no-name twin manifested herself back into her
kamikaze
form, and sat leaning against the coffin, stroking the bulge in her stomach.

We crept past the ferry terminal parking lot. It was still dark and raining, and the visibility was poor. Gulls flew in and out of the fog, their wings illuminated by the fluorescent dock lights.

Rainy, who had let down her hair and was nibbling at the ends, tried to squeeze in between Hooker and Grace on the front seat.
Front seat get to go everywhere first,
she complained, when I signalled for her to stay back. Toop opened one eye, growled and covered his flop ears with his paws.

“
Now
what's bugging him?” Hooker said. “We got
lumaloos
riding with us again, or what?”

I watched the ferry-terminal world recede through the side mirror, and had to pump the brakes hard and swerve to the left to avoid rear-ending a white stretch limousine that had come to an abrupt stop in front of us. A sign in the rear window read, “Ride in style — at no extra cost.”

“I was supposed to get a brake job,” I said. Hooker shook his head and said, “thanks for the warning.”

I glanced over at Grace, who had green strings of mucous dripping from her nose. Her body was trembling and she was drenched in sweat.

“Been there, done that,” Hooker said. “When you quit, cold turkey, you get life with its skin torn away.”

I had never been addicted to heroin, but I knew what quitting everything but heroin was like, “everything but” being the cocktail of drugs I'd become a slave to on Tranquilandia. Even now I could start to shake and feel nauseated, thinking about that time. I crept up on the limo, and had to swerve onto the shoulder to avoid hitting it when it stopped, again, unexpectedly.

What they mean, ride in style for no extra cost?
asked Frenchy, who'd been thrown forward into the front seat by my inattention to the road.
You pay for a limo you
want
people to think you rich and important.

Grace moaned and began scratching at herself, digging her chewed fingernails deep into her skin. She couldn't stop shivering, even though I had the heat turned on high.

“Maybe we ought to do Grace a favour and drop her at Mercy first?” Hooker was saying. “Then I'll stop over at my cousin's, I guess.” He had an address on the eastside of Vancouver, but figured he should call to invite himself first.

“A
favour
?” Grace cried. She felt too sick to go to any hospital, she said, wiping her nose on her sleeve. She said Mercy was for hardcore addicts who went there to die, not to dry out and have babies. She remembered a hotel, the Outer Planet, on the downtown eastside. “Not five diamonds or anything, but nice.” Hooker reminded her that the last time they'd stayed there a man had been stabbed in the foyer, the couple in the next room had died of an overdose and they hadn't slept all night because someone kept banging on their door demanding that “Fuckface open up.”

“I was just saying,” Grace said. Her voice could have sucked the breath out of sorrow.

Morning had broken through the fog, a fog so dense I could see the suggestion of trees, but not their branches, as I pulled off the highway and drew up at a Petro-Can station. Hooker said, “back in a minute,” and vanished into the gloom.

Grace, who hadn't stopped scratching, gradually nodded off. Frenchy figured Gracie was about to give birth in the dead-wagon; moaning and shivering were early warning signals. I said the baby wasn't due until Christmas, two weeks away.
That be Son Jesus' birthday
, said Rainy, blowing down the back of Gracie's neck.
Holy Uterus' boy be Come Back Jesus, best believe.

Grace woke up, complaining about a draft. Hooker returned saying the telephone booth had been stolen. It took two more attempts — the Shell service station had got rid of its pay phone because too many drug deals were being made, and the Esso's had been vandalized so many times they had given up trying to fix it. When Hooker finally found a phone that worked, at a Mohawk station, his cousin's number was no longer in service. He remembered her telling him she was moving to the Interior to grow dope with her boyfriend last April, but he'd thought she was just trying to impress him.

They crib with us,
Rainy whispered.
What else they gon do, bail?
She was right: what could I do but offer to take them home.

“You could stay at our place — there's plenty of room,” I heard myself say. I said we would take turns watching Grace until she got through withdrawal. That way she wouldn't have to be hospitalized until she went into labour.

Hooker was quiet for a long time. “That's not a bad idea,” he said, when he finally spoke — his way, I knew, of being grateful.

Welcome to Astoria
“Your Gateway to Another Life”

Just past the sign we came up on a low, grey cement melancholy of a building shrouded in fog and surrounded by a chain-link fence. The words on the reader board under Astoria Collegiate had been edited, and now read, “End of Term Titeracy Fest Today 1:30 in the jism”. Frenchy said all she'd ever wanted was for her boy to have the same opportunities as other boys his age.

What that be, chance to shoot off his gatt in a school cafeteria?
Rainy said. She had pulled out a handful of hair and swallowed it without chewing it first.
You plan on shooting up any muhfo school, include me out,
she added, cutting Frenchy a look.