How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (18 page)

After my parents took me to see
Night of the Living Dead
—when I was
seven
(note to self: check statute of limitations with Child Protective Services)—Norman the Boogeyman evolved into a never-ending slew of random dead guys. And the under-my-bed part was replaced by
the whole world
. That pile of leaves? A cover for a rotting cadaver. That upright freezer by the side of the road? Filled with bodies chopped up and stacked like logs. Attics, closets, crawl spaces, porta-potties—all were fair game for my corpse-based fears.

Perhaps this is where my daughter and I diverge?

Perhaps not.

The kid is in her little girly room, diligently focused on drawing a picture. “What's that?” I ask. “Is that a kitty and a doggy hugging?”

“NO,” she says. “IT'S TWO VAMPIRES. THEY'RE EATING EACH OTHER. SEE? THAT'S THE BLOOD!”

My immediate instinct is to correct her and point out that she's way off base with this one: vampires are not the same as zombies—they don't eat flesh; they suck blood. Everybody knows that—it's a pretty basic distinction. And even if they did eat flesh, how could they eat each other simultaneously? It doesn't even make sense. Then I remember—she's only three. Such subtleties would only be lost on her. Instead, I praise her for how well she's coloring inside the lines.

I grew up in Winnipeg, which is a Cree word meaning “Mucky Waters,” in a house on the banks of the Red River, the very mucky waters for which the city was named.

Friends were in short supply the summer after seventh grade. I was no longer speaking with Theresa Spak, not since she'd disputed my claim that I'd invented the euphemisms “Number One” and “Number Two” for discussing bodily functions. “
Somebody
invented it. Why is it so hard to believe it was me?” I'd screamed over mayonnaise sandwiches. (Years later I would come to realize that I was wrong, but by then there was too much Number One under the bridge to do anything about it.)

Then there was Elena Hrabiuk, a girl I'd met at orchestra camp. Elena had wide-set eyes and usually smelled of fried pierogi. Seeing that my only alternative was to spend the afternoon with my brother Aaron while he belched “This Land Is Your Land” at my face, I called Elena and invited her over.

We hung out in my room for forty-five minutes or so, crying to the greatest hits of Air Supply. After the batteries in my boom box died, we went out to the backyard, where my dad was standing over the barbecue, swearing at a plate of raw hamburger. My dad was once a radical hippie, and back in the day he had marched at Berkeley, but now he was living on the Canadian prairies and the only remnants of his hippie past were the three hits of acid chilling in the refrigerator crisper. He suggested we “go play down by the river.” Since Elena was raised in eastern Europe and unfamiliar with the concept of sarcasm, she led the way.

We climbed down the bank through the slimy grass and muck and jumped onto our neighbor's dock.

The
Paddlewheel Queen
chugged past for its daily afternoon cruise. We jumped up and down, waving and yelling obscenities at the boat whose passengers consisted of a few drunken old ladies and some handicapped kids from a nearby group home. The boat sent a ripple of waves toward the dock, disturbing the dark water. My eye caught something floating, maybe fifty feet out. I picked up a rock and threw it at the object, nailing it.
^*

The object pitched and bobbed slowly with the weight of something dense.

I decided instantly that it was a human head.

I opened my mouth to call for my father, then stopped. Instinctively, I knew that this would go over like a lead turd due to my reputation as “The Little Girl Who Cried Corpse.”

I looked again. There was no way I was imagining this one. That floating head was so obviously the real deal, it made all my other dead-body hunches seem like the ramblings of a madwoman.

I yelled for him. “Dad!”

No answer.

I called again. “Dad!”

Finally, a response. “Fuck off, I'm cooking!”

Elena looked confused—there was no time to explain to her the intricacies of my family, or the fact that my father was likely stoned at that very moment. She took off in the direction of her house while I ran up the grassy slope, up to the barbecue, where my father was attempting to swat a bug with a greasy spatula.

I spoke carefully, “Dad, I need to show you something. We—I . . . I found a head.”

A tiny piece of hamburger flew off his fly-swatting spatula and hit me in the cheek. I gave him a serious look, the kind I'd seen Lucy Ewing give J. R. numerous times.

“Dad. Please.”

“Oh, for chrissake—all right, let's go.”

I led him down to the dock and pointed to the bobbing head in the water.

My dad squinted at it. “That? It's just a piece of driftwood. Probably upturned by that fascist with the speedboat.” I begged him to look again.

My dad considered it. “I guess I could call the River Patrol. It'll give me a chance to register a complaint about that fascist bastard.”

He called, and in twenty minutes two mustachioed officers pulled up in a motorboat. I waved frantically, pointing to the spot where my detached head was bobbing. Mustache Number One drove the boat, circling around my soon-to-be-validated discovery. Mustache Number Two lowered a length of rope into the murky sludge and then, hand over hand, pulled the rope back into the boat.

On the end of the rope was not a head, but an entire friggin body.

I held my breath while they lifted the old man's corpse into the boat and then drove it over to the dock, where they laid him out. Pressing every wrinkly crease of my brain into service, I recorded the details of the unfolding event: The red-and-white-plaid shirt. The bald head that held a few soggy wisps, just above each ear. The brown leather shoe and leg brace on the right foot, and the shoeless black sock on the left.

One of the officers pulled a wallet from the dead guy's pocket. He opened it and retrieved a water-logged driver's license that showed an address just three blocks away. I caught sight of a huge wad of cash, possibly as much as twenty dollars, then wondered if my “finder's keepers” status would be legally binding when it came to claiming the money.

A couple of houses over was a tiny strip of public land where they found a cane and some muddy footprints at the river's edge. “Looks like he just fell in, eh?” said Mustache Number Two. As his partner radioed a call back to the precinct, my family started back up to the house to eat
dinner. I was stunned. “How can you eat? There's a dead man in our yard!” My dad shrugged. “Ask him what he wants on his burger,” he said as he walked up the steps and then pulled the sliding screen door shut behind him.

I stayed with the River Patrol until two more official-looking men with mustaches showed up, put the body onto a stretcher, and carried it to a plain white van in our driveway.

As the van pulled away I sat on the curb and pondered my future. Surely, I'd be getting a call from the police for my minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the whole body-finding event. Then I'd probably hear from Sylvia Kuzyk, the anchor lady from CKY-TV, with a request for an interview. I ran my fingers through my hair and silently cursed my mother for not letting me get my ears pierced now that I was going to be famous.

Sylvia didn't call. The police didn't call. Nobody called.

But that was okay. I didn't need their public recognition. I had something better and more lasting: sweet vindication. I wasn't weird for thinking dead bodies were everywhere. Turns out I was right all along.

So back to my Steve-fearing toddler. Maybe it was a onetime deal. Maybe a nightmare about a sexy, balding children's TV host is just that: a nightmare about a sexy, balding children's TV host. And yeah, maybe it's premature to be connecting the dots from a three-year-old's vision of a Nickelodeon television star with oddly sensual sloping shoulders to a lifetime of searching for corpses.

Or maybe it's a
sign
. A sign that she carries my gene. The body-finding one.

And maybe that's all she inherited from me. She may not share the disturbingly long, three-knuckled second toe that I possess, or my irrational fear of pigeons, but these differences don't make me love her any less. I can promise one thing: when she says, “Mom, I think there's a face staring up at me from the toilet,” she's going to find me standing by her side with an understanding ear. And a camera, just in case she's right. Because it's a big world out there, and it's filled with corpses. And they're not going to find themselves. They need us, my daughter and me.

*
Which is odd for me, since I throw like a girl with no arms.

eleven