Light Lifting (22 page)

“You are going to feel yourself being lifted,” she said. “We're going to lift you and put you on a stretcher and take you in the ambulance. Do you understand what I'm telling you?” Her voice came out at that perfect pace.

“Just nod your head if you understand.”

Barney nodded his head, but his eyes were panicked and they skittered around the room, clunking off the walls and the couch and the TV. Then he settled on me, the only person he recognized, standing about a foot away. All the confusion went out of his face and his expression changed back, back in one second, to the same angry and disgusted stare we saved only for each other. That's when he finally made his move on me. His arm shot up from the floor, faster than you'd think and he grabbed hold of my arm. He gripped it so tight, with so much pressure, it felt like he was going right through me and holding onto those two skinny little bones in the middle of my forearm. There was so much power in him, even then, so much strength in just one of his hands that I knew right away I would have never been able to fight him off. That was the only time we ever touched.

“It's okay,” the woman told Barney in her soothing voice. “He's right here. Don't worry. He's not leaving.”

Then she used both hands to pry open the trap and get my arm out. Barney kept staring at me all the time and I think he tried to say something, a word that fogged up the inside of his mask, but I couldn't make it out.

“Immediate family members can ride in the back of the ambulance if you want,” the man said to me.

“He's not family,” the woman said to her partner, and she pointed at me. “Just a bystander.”

“There's no relation, right?” she asked again.

“No,” I said.

“Well you can meet us at the hospital then,” she said. “Hotel Dieu.”

They covered him with a blue blanket and strapped him in tight and then they just rolled him out of the room and took him down the steps of his front porch. They loaded him into the back of the ambulance and the woman followed him in while the man went to the front to drive. I stood on the porch watching it all and she waved at me just before she pulled the door shut.

“See you down there,” she said and they were gone. The rig pulled away without using the sirens or the lights and it slipped back into the new dark. They left me there standing in the middle of Barney's empty house.

There was nothing left to do. I went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and rinse out my mouth and I was kind of surprised by how neat Barney kept everything in there. I didn't expect that he would have a bottle of liquid soap by the taps and a clean hand towel hanging on the rack. It was a kind of soap that we didn't sell and I pressed a couple squirts of it into my hands and rubbed them together under the warm water. Then I lowered my head a bit and I cupped my hands together and took a drink. The water swished around inside my head and I felt the faint taste of soap burning against my gums and the inside of my cheeks before I spat it out.

Then I went into reverse. I walked straight out and as I left the house, I turned the knob so the door would lock behind me. When I got back onto my own side, I looked down at the bag as it sat there, slumped on the porch and waiting for me. It was still full of all the orders for that day, all those little white packages, the things people needed. But it wasn't going to be my job anymore. I aimed the bike straight back to Musgrave and started thinking up how I would explain it all to him and break the news.

More than anything, I wanted to go home and be exactly my own age for as long as I could. That was my new plan. I would go home and lie on my bed and stare at the Guy Lafleur poster on my wall and love the way he didn't need a helmet. Then I'd eat nothing but junk – just Twizzlers and Blow Pops and Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip – and I'd listen to my music as loud as I wanted. Maybe I'd watch
The Dukes of
Hazzard.
I thought about Bo and Luke Duke and how they never killed anyone and never used guns. Instead, they used to tape a stick of dynamite to one of their arrows and fire it straight into the bad guy's hideout and blast the whole thing into a pile of splinters and falling straw. That would be just about right, I thought. It would be great to just sit with them in the backseat of the
General Lee
and scream as loud as you could as they punched the gas and their orange car started up its long flight across the river, over to the other side, where no one could follow and you always got away.

Good Kids

I
f he is still alive – and there is no reason to think he wouldn't be – Reggie Laroque is probably close to thirty now. Maybe he still lives here, in the same city with the rest of us, or maybe it's Toronto now, or Calgary, or Cleveland. “We get around a lot,” he told me once, when he was seven and I was twelve.

After Reggie moved out of the house across the road, the students came next and then the cats. A whole ragged, night-scrapping pack of them showed up one day and took over an abandoned car that had been sitting there for years, docked at the back of the driveway. The car was a four-door Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with all its tires missing. It had belonged to another former tenant, a long-haired guy who used to work on it in the evenings. One night, he moved away too and that was that. No one ever came back to claim the car for parts and nobody was going to pay to have it hauled off, so it just stayed there with its metal rims slowly grinding their way down into their masonry blocks. It seemed almost logical at first when the cats moved in, like the car was getting a second chance. Overnight it changed from a piece of junk into a sort of shelter. It stopped being a station wagon and became more like a cave, like something made of stone, a hole carved right into the earth that would never be moved. We called it, obviously, the “cat car” and after about a week, it became just another part of the landscape: a writhing, urine-soaked chunk of our terrain – almost entirely covered in hair.

The house across the way was the only rental property on our street. Its address was 237. My family lived on the even side, at 234, and if there was ever a mix-up, their mail might get accidentally delivered into our box. Mostly we got their bills with “Final Notice” printed in red ink and once in a while there might be a personal letter from someone whose messy handwriting made it difficult to tell the difference between the 4 and the 7. Whenever that happened my mother would make a special point of printing “wrong house” on the envelope before she gave it back to the mailman. She would use big block letters and press down hard with her pen, going over it two or three times, and underlining the word “wrong.”

“That place is an insult,” she used to say, peeking through the curtains.

“It's a revolving door. In and out, back and forth. No good for the area. Just you watch. When that place goes all to hell, it's going to drag us right down with it.”

To us, 237 seemed like one of those doomed store locations that can't support any kind of business. All sorts of different people tried to make a go of it over there, but no one ever broke through. In the beginning there were a lot of quiet, single men, guys who never spoke to anybody and seemed utterly alone in the universe, but we also had a few couples and some families. They did what they could. In the springtime, somebody might get a surge of energy and they'd try and scrape off all the old paint and splash on a brand new colour, or maybe there'd be some flowers that would get planted in May, but never watered after that. A lot of things ended up half-done over there. The place was like a Bermuda triangle for hopeful people. No matter what they tried, it always seemed like the same persistent, revolving futility kept coming around to mow them down. Reggie was the only one who ever managed to hold if off.

He was younger than us, but seemed older. I'm pretty sure Reggie was one of those children who spent too many of his early years around adults and he ended up being more comfortable with grown-ups than he was with kids his own age. Everything about him was more formal than you'd expect. His hair was cut very short and he always wore a collared shirt that was tucked into his pants all the way around. He had a little brown belt and it went all the way around too, through all the little loops. He wore white socks and hard-bottom church shoes. When he walked up to us that first time, we were playing road hockey in the street between our houses and he just clicked-clicked-clicked his way right down the sidewalk, no problem at all.

“My name is Reggie,” he announced, like this was a job interview. “Reggie Bartholomew Laroque.”

Then he just stood there, perfectly still and patient, smiling and looking at each of us, waiting to see what we would do with this information. Long silences did not make Reggie uncomfortable. We kind of froze, trying to figure out the right response. He seemed like one of those religious people, like the child-version of one of those men in a white, short-sleeved shirt who can walk right up to your house, ring the doorbell and start talking to you about how to save your soul. My brother Matt slid over and put his hand up to my ear.

“Maybe he's retarded,” he whispered. “Maybe he's slow.”

I nodded my head a bit, but didn't say anything.

There are four boys in our family. I am the oldest and there's a set of twins in the middle – Matt and Christopher – and the youngest is James. During that time we spent with Reggie, we were all clustered in there between the ages of 8 and 12. This was right at the peak of our infatuation with hockey, when we cared about it in that total and absolute way that only kids can care about anything. None of us could skate, and we had never actually played in a real league on real ice, but we dumped everything we had into our games in the street. We built our own nets out of old two-by-fours nailed into posts and crossbars and instead of string netting, we used this heavy-duty industrial plastic sheeting that we had found behind a meat-packing plant. We cut the plastic and staple-gunned it right into the wood so that every time someone fired a ball into the net, it made a satisfying pop, like a burst balloon or a gun being fired. Our sticks were Koho and Sherwood shafts with plastic blades that had been wickedly curved over the front burner of the stove and we usually played with tennis balls that were too small and kept falling down through the grates of the sewer. We had the other kind of ball, too, a couple of those hard, orange, no-bouncers that are designed especially for the street and we believed that if one of those ever got fired straight into a guy's nuts, then that person would die. It became one of our most reliable standby threats – “I swear, I'll fire this fucking thing right into your fucking nuts if you don't fucking shut up.” We had a pair of real goalie pads and a baseball glove trapper. For the blocker we used to spend five minutes taping an old phone book onto the outstretched arm of whoever was unlucky enough to play in the net.

“Can I join you,” Reggie said. “Can I be a joiner?”

Right after his name, this was the first thing to come out of his mouth. I didn't think it was a big deal, and I was going to say no problem, but James was defiant from the start.

“It's two-on-two,” he said, pointing at each of us and trying to make it clear. “Adding another guy will throw everything off.”

James waved his hand at some of the other houses on our street where there were all kinds of kids who would have played.

“You find a friend and we'll go three on three,” he said. “Three on three works.”

Reggie never even considered it.

“No, no, no,” he said. “That's fine. Forget it. Maybe I'll just watch. Is that okay with you if I just watch?”

He looked around and found a clean spot on the curb. Then he sat down and leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees like this was Joe Louis Arena. When the ball went up on his lawn, he'd run and toss it back to us in the street and whenever somebody scored he'd say, “All right,” but other than that he did nothing. You could tell that he'd never really played much of anything in his life. All his lines had been picked up from watching TV.

“Nice pass,” he might say, or “Good execution.”

The words he could use didn't match up with his body. It was like we had our own little Danny Gallivan there on the sidewalk, watching over us and rolling along all the time, keeping up a steady stream of compliments.

We showed off our drop passes for Reggie and our between-the-legs passes and the passes where we'd bank the tennis ball off a parked car. Sometimes we'd have break away contests or we'd use pop cans for targets and try to see who had the most accurate shot. Chris and Matt even used to practice their fighting. In the middle of a game they'd nudge each other and stare for that one dramatic second before they threw down their sticks.

“You wanna go? You wanna go me?” They'd scream at each other, trying not to laugh.

“I think those two are on the same team, aren't they?” Reggie asked, the first time he saw them shimmying around, trying to grab onto each other.

It didn't matter. One guy would try to trip the other or pull the shirt over his head and then, once he had the upper hand, he'd start pummelling away with these crazy exaggerated swings, piling on the furious, fake punches.

“Take that and that and that.”

It was like those fights you see on pro-wrestling. The big, hollow blows kept coming down but there was never any real force behind them. Even if one of us caught the other in a crippling figure-four leg lock or if we slapped on the sleeper hold or a killer iron claw – a grip so dangerous it was guaranteed to cause permanent brain damage – it still meant nothing. All that rage washed over and left us completely untouched and unharmed and ready to go another round.

You hardly ever see big families like we had anymore. Especially not with boys. Today, if a couple has two or three boys in a row, they quit. I guess you could probably still make it through with four girls living in the same house, but I wouldn't know anything about that. Even back then we were different. From the outside we looked like good kids, like a bunch of those super-skinny, old-fashioned boys who might be headed down to the swimming hole in a Norman Rockwell painting. One of us was always in line to skip a grade – though none of us ever did – and we each had a paper route winding through the neighbourhood. One of us would probably mow your grass or shovel your sidewalk even though you didn't ask and if our school ever needed somebody to read something in public – at an assembly or a concert or a church service – we'd get that call. At Christmas, our parents made us collect cans for the needy and we grudgingly stuffed our quarters into the share-Lent pyramid that sat on our kitchen table during the weeks before Easter. When the nasty Greek couple who lived three doors down needed someone to look after their matching Pomeranians, Hector and Achilles, while they went back to Thessalonica for vacation, we said no problem. And when they came back and paid us only three dollars for the whole summer – three dollars for us to split four ways – we smiled and asked them to tell us all about the trip and to show us their pictures. It took a lot of consistent performing to pull this off, but it was like we couldn't help ourselves. We seemed exactly like good kids on the outside, but we weren't soft. There was more than enough hard waiting below the surface.