Going Down Swinging (18 page)

He worked on fishing boats—he’d go out to sea for a couple months, make a wad of dough then come home and do nothing for a while. After a couple or three months of living with us, he was making Mum nuts—always in her hair, she said, sitting around the living room with those creepy black-rimmed glasses, reading or watching TV. And for the first time, when it came to someone who wasn’t us, I wanted her to get lost; I liked it when he put on his glasses to read, they made him look like a professor or something. And besides, half the time the glasses were on, it was for me. I’d lie flopped on the couch with my head on his lap and he’d read me
Paul Bunyan
or
The Black Stallion
. Or he’d be at the kitchen table flipping through one of my math books. The school year was almost finished and I was having trouble with “New Math.” Mum got all pissed off just looking at it. “What the hell was wrong with the old math?” she kept saying, but George sat with me, squeaking the table every time he erased something, and explaining how come it didn’t work the way I was doing it.

One night after dinner he was trying to get long division in my head. Looking out the bottom half of his bifocals, he wrote down number after number, under and on top of each other, splitting them, carrying them, bringing them down, and then suddenly he said, “Here, try it this way,” and started with short division. It was making me feel stupid and scared that George wasn’t going to think I was that great. And anyway, it was his fault for expecting me to know stuff we weren’t even learning yet. So I said, “I haven’t even figured out the first thing—we’re not supposed to do it that way.”

“Well, that’s OK, give this a shot, just try it and see if it makes any more sense.”

“It doesn’t and I can’t do it that way. You’re doing it wrong, just show me what they want me to do.”

“Don’t get yourself all worked up, now, just take a look at wh—”

“No! I can’t. I can’t do it. I don’t even understand how come in the minussing part with the subtraction before, you crossed that out and it’s a nine; it was a zero before and now it’s a nine.”

He turned back pages and grabbed the scrap we were just working on. “Because you’ve borrowed from the number …” and blah blah blah, then “You see?”

“No! I don’t see nothing—”

“Grace!” Mum came stomping into the kitchen from the living room. “Look, if you can’t just listen to what he’s trying to show you, instead of contradicting every word, then maybe you should just go in the bedroom and do it by yourself!”

“Oh, go drink your Fresca,” George told her, and squeaked the table again, erasing stuff. Mum’s lips went tight and then opened and smacked shut again. She turned around and stomped back in the living room. George and I looked at each other; she wasn’t speechless that often. I stared at the stuff he was scribbling and tried not to make any smirky noises; I could feel Mum crackling around the corner on the couch.

“Do you wanna take a tea break?” he said. “We can have a cuppa tea and take a look at tonight’s racing form; a few of ’em’ll probably be racing on Saturday too. Did you ask Josh? Do you wanna bring him along?”

I didn’t. Well I did, but it was just that this would be my second time at the track with George—I never went to one before George came along and he was teaching me things: how to bet, how to read a racing form, what it meant when the odds were five to two or four to three. And I was getting it—I was becoming a horse-racing expert, and if Josh came we’d have to start right from the beginning again. And plus, what if they liked each other better? Maybe Josh would be smarter and make better bets and George would like having him around. Mum told me after we came to Vancouver that my dad wanted a boy before I was born and he said if I was a boy he’d teach me to be a thief or get me into acting. She told me that after she already let the cat out of the bag: I caught her on the phone saying, “When Danny was in jail those years …” Jail! And all that time she made me go around thinking he was at camp. Whenever Mum said camp, I used to picture the army, like the army camps on TV, and figured that must’ve been where he was. She said he was working there. He never wrote, though, or called us from camp and he never talked about it afterwards. I asked him once, in Toronto, when he was digging a hole in the backyard (to build me the swing that never got built), how camp was. He said, “Camp? Oh. Oh, it was fun. We went swim-min’ and fishin’ and all kindsa stuff,” and he grinned and kept digging his hole. No wonder he didn’t want to hang around me if I was that dumb.

Then I find out it was Jail. I made Mum tell me everything afterward and made her say she was sorry—cuz the whole thing about her and me was how we didn’t lie to each other and then she went and broke the code of honour. I didn’t even care about him being in jail; it sounded better than
camp
. Jail could be kind of cool; cowboys and cat burglars got jailed. I imagined my dad in a super-tall skyscraper, all in black, prowling down hallways in soft unsqueaky shoes, in and out of windows, diamonds glistening in the palm of his leather glove. She told me he’d said he got framed or they got the wrong guy or something and he knew who the real guy was but as part of honours around thieves he did the time. Either way, he was like the movies all the sudden. Except for what I found out later about being a boy; if I was a boy he would’ve taught me stuff. If I was a boy, he would’ve called more probably or visited me. He might not have let me go to Vancouver in the first place.

“Umm, nah, I don’t know if Josh likes horse racing. He likes music and drawing and stuff. It’s probably not his thing, I bet. Let’s just us go, ’K?”

The whistle on the kettle squealed. “OK. It’ll probably be more fun anyway. Do you wanna bring …” He poured water into our cups and nodded his head toward my mum on the other side of the wall. I didn’t. Lately, I liked hanging around with George better, sort of. I mean, you could count on him to be there for sure and also not to have to go pee every five minutes and complain about his back, sitting up in the stands. That’s how it would be with Mum. And every time someone lost two bucks she’d start talking about money down the drain. I shrugged at first so I wouldn’t seem too mean, then made my shrug into a head shake and mouthed
nahh
.

The next day after school, I went down to Josh’s place. When I started grade 4, I switched schools to the same one as Josh, General Wolfe, cuz Josh said there wasn’t so many tough kids at General Wolfe—and I was super-sick of tough kids. But we still never walked home from school together or stuff because Josh was in grade 5 and I hated those grade 5er boys he hung around with. They always made fun of me and Josh like we were boyfriend/girlfriend and all that junk, so I said forget-it to them. Sometimes I got home first, so I’d go hang around with Josh’s mum and wait for him. They were on welfare too, so she was home most of the time. She was there when I knocked on the door; Josh wasn’t. His mum was Sheryl. Their last name was Sugarman. I said her whole name whenever I could just for the fun of all that
shhing
. She brought me in and offered me a cup of tea.

And then she said, “You just caught me, I was about to go to the supermarket.”

“Oh. Should I go? I can come back later.”

“Nah, sit, you’ve got tea coming. I’ll wait with you till Josh gets home.” She turned on the burner under the kettle and went to the fridge for milk. She made it the way Mum wanted me to drink it: half milk to give me more protein. “So, Miss Gracey, where’s your mum today?”

“School maybe, or else she might’ve gone downtown to the
AA
club with George. I don’t know. Was Josh painting this morning?” There were tubes and brushes all over the place on the living-room floor. A big square of Josh’s art paper was taped on a foam board beside them, the top part all swirly with reds and oranges.

“Yeah. I refuse to put his junk away for him, so I left it. He’s doing some autumn painting for his art teacher. He wants a girl in the middle of the woods with a horse—actually, I think he wants you to model for him. I guess because you like horses so much.” I was all flattered. Josh could draw and paint better than any grown-up I knew. I asked her who was going to be the horse. She laughed. “Actually, he was thinking that maybe when you and George go to the racetrack again, he could come and do some sketches of the horses and you together.”

“Oh. Yeah. Can you look at these math things? George was trying to help me last night, I mostly needed help with the subtraction stuff, and then he got into this other dividing thing and I got all confused and then my mum started getting mad and then —oh, it was just dumb. Here—these ones here, I just want someone to explain this stuff about carrying the number. See how come you can just take a one from this one and suddenly it’s a ten or whatever?”

Sheryl Sugarman went into a thing about digits and numerical values and decimals and then I started hearing them again. The voices. She didn’t know about them; I never told anyone. But they were yapping in my brain, in the background, kind of, so I couldn’t pay that good of attention to stuff. My teeth clenched. It helped, kind of, if I clenched. Josh came in around then and they were quiet. They kept quiet around Josh. He said, “Hey, what’re you doing here?”

“I live here.”

He tisked at Sheryl and rolled his eyes. “Not you.”

“I came to see you and to ask your mum about these math things. I think I get it now.” I didn’t get anything. I just didn’t want to talk about it any more.

“Well, I’m gonna go for a bike ride, some of my friends are meeting up at Riley Park to ride around. You wanna go? I’ll double you.”

“Yeah, ’K.” I slapped my book shut and left it on the table. I could feel Sheryl Sugarman watching me. She told Josh she might not be there when he got back, so make sure he had his key.

My head started getting more clear when we got onto Main Street. Josh was on his bike with his feet on the ground, stepping himself along with me walking beside him. “I’ll double you as soon as we get down on the side streets, there’s too many curbs and lights and stuff here.”

“’K.” I only knew Josh a little longer than George. I trusted him the same way, though; even when we argued and I couldn’t stand him, I still wanted Josh around.

We crossed 33rd Avenue and someone whispered behind me. I looked back. No one was near. And then again—my name this time. I snapped my head around thinking maybe it was one of Josh’s friends. Nothing. No one was anywhere near us, just cars and buses. It’d never happened around Josh before, he was my safe place.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing!”

“Fine! Don’t have a hairy. Is it the math? Don’t you get the math still?”

“No! I get it!” Josh was a year ahead of me and he never had problems with math. Or anything. Kids liked him, he never got into fights, his mum didn’t have to threaten them if they didn’t leave him alone. And his art; anyone who saw his art-stuff slobbered all over it. He even won twenty bucks in a contest around when I met him. I never won any contests, but I had twenty-one dollars I was saving since Toronto in my drawer. I never bragged about that, though—only some came from my allowance, and five dollars from last time at the racetrack and the rest I stole from my mum’s wallet a little bit at a time. My plan was to buy her something beautiful one day, something she’d never get for herself. Or else, if we got broke again, like in Toronto, with no food in the house and nothing in her purse, I would spring it on her and say something like, “Look, it’s OK, I’ve got money for whatever you want.” I imagined how her eyes would be so happy she’d start to cry and she’d squeeze me and say, “What would I ever do without you?” I was thinking about starting that with her nerve pills too, so she wouldn’t get so upset when she ran out. But in the meantime I didn’t want anyone to know about it. I figured she’d thank me in the long run.

Josh and I turned onto Quebec Street, past Sadie and Eddy’s house. I sneezed and wondered how many sneezes it took to drop dead. Sadie’d told me on the weekend that every time you sneeze your heart stops. I didn’t want to run into her.

“Do you wanna get on, I can double you now.”

“No. I want to keep walking still.”

“You’re bitchy today” I didn’t answer him. I hated when he used that word on me. “Well, if nothing’s wrong then how come you got two big frown lines between your eyebrows—you’re gonna look like an old lady if you don’t knock it off. Don’t worry, though, my mum’s got tons of Oil of Olay so I can keep you young and beautiful—even when you’re twenty-five, everyone’ll think you’re eight still.”

“Shut up.”

“Jesus! What’s up your ass?”

And then the whispers echoed
ass and bitchy. ass and bitchy
. I yelled, “Shut up!” over top of them, and then told him, “Don’t say that! I hate when you say that. Ass and bitchy. Don’t say ass and bitchy.”

Josh laughed down at his handlebars and said, “Ay ay, captain.”

My head was quiet again. He coasted and I walked another block; we were getting close to the park. I was scared of having it start up again around those other boys. “Do you have to go right to Riley Park, can’t we keep walking a bit?”

“Uh huh,” and he leaned down, sort of folding his arms across his handlebars, staring into the front wheel while it turned and skipping his toes along the road, “if you quit biting my head off for a while.”

“I am not. Can you just—um. OK, I’m sorry! I have to, can you just—’K, don’t say anything, just, um. Do you ever hear stuff?”

He turned his head and looked at me. I looked back, then down at my feet stepping. He said, “Can I answer?” I rolled my eyes, so he said, “OK. I don’t get it, what stuff?”

“Stuff. Stuff, like voices. Like sometimes someone whispers your name and you turn around and they’re not there, nobody’s there or else there’s maybe someone there but you know they never said anything because it was a lady’s voice and it’s a man behind you.”

“Um. Sometimes I dream it, like once I woke up and saw my zaidy sitting in a rocking chair smiling at me and he was wearing a red baseball cap. He never even owned a baseball cap. And then we got a call from the hospital that he died during the night. Weird eh? My mum says I dreamed it, but it was pretty real. I think he came to see me before he left.—Like that, like a ghost?”