Little Bastards in Springtime (30 page)

I’m outside, looking both ways. The sleet has turned to snow. White flakes zigzag in every direction. I know where the man lives, but don’t know which route he takes. I want to get him before he arrives home. My foot taps to some inner beat that’s not my heart.

I get in the car and we drive slowly along St. Clair. We see
the man lurching along the slick sidewalk, his joints rubbery and uncooperative.

“He looks pathetic,” Madzid says. “A pathetic old grandpa.”

“That’s no excuse,” I say, “there are lots of grandpas out there who are scum of the earth,” and Sava nods. She understands. Maybe this will be the one that brings us together again.

We cruise beside the man, rolling down our windows.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, over here.”

The man looks at the car, then points his head forward again.

“Hey, old man, I’m talking to you.”

“Maybe he’s too drunk to understand,” Geordie says.

“Let’s put him in the trunk,” Sava says, a glimmer of enthusiasm in her voice.

Before she’s finished her brilliant sentence, we’re out of the car. We scoop the man up by legs and chest, him crying, “
Ahh ahh
,” and swing him into the trunk. He doesn’t fit very well, but we rearrange his limbs and force the trunk closed. And there is Papa, standing on the other side of the street, hands in his pockets, looking straight at me, shaking his head, his shoulders up in that what-the-fuck posture that he sometimes had.

I
THINK
the eastern horizon is paler than before. I think I can see a hint of blue. But basically, we’re in darkness, except for a distant street lamp. The invisible water laps calmly. It’s very relaxing to be at the lakeshore, but the ground is cold. We’ve been smoking joint after joint, and downing Madzid’s bottle of vodka. For the last few hours, the man has stumbled around, sat awkwardly on the ground, gestured at the sky, calling out, why me, why me, why me, and babbled on about accountants, tax men, customs officials, politicians, all the people who have treated him badly.

“What do you want from me?” he keeps croaking. “What? What?”

“It’s six fifteen,” Sava says. “Sunrise soon.”

I get up and stride over to the man. He clearly won’t guess by himself why he is here. The thought will not cross his mind in a million years, which is too long for us.

“We’ve invited you here for a reason,” I say to him. “You have to figure it out yourself.”

“Are you crazy?” the man asks. “Who are you? Who set you onto me? I paid those debts. I paid them in full. Yes, I did. You ask Pickle.”

“We don’t know any Pickle,” I say. “Like I said, we’re here to tell you something about life, you fucking low-life.”

“But what do you
want
?”

“We want you to look at yourself and see what a giant fucking asshole you are, then we want you to stop being a giant fucking asshole.”

“But I don’t understand,” the man wails, and shivers and stamps his rickety feet.

I pick up Sava’s baseball bat and saunter toward him. The man stares at me with incomprehension and terror. I guess he’ll never see what he needs to see all by himself, maybe a little head-rattling will help.

The eastern horizon turns a glowing swimming-pool blue. Lake Ontario materializes before our eyes, moving restlessly, waiting for something to happen. The ducks push off for some other part of the shore. Birds begin to twitter all at once, a thousand cars suddenly roar along the highway behind us, and the silence of pre-dawn gives way to a raucous barrage of sound.

‡

A
T SCHOOL
, we trudge down the deserted, echoing hallway. Shiny floors, scuffed walls. We’re late, as usual, and so tired our ears are ringing and our hearts are racing.

“That wasn’t cool,” Sava says, icy voice. “That was for Baka?”

Zijad takes a handful of pills and offers some around. “Anyone?” he asks.

“Torturing is for Baka?” She’s not letting this one go.

“For Christ’s sake, Sava, we just scared the nasty wife-beating shit a little.” I flash her a wide smile, but I don’t feel fully confident that she understands my thinking on this. “And it was time someone did. Apart from the kidnapping, we didn’t touch him at all.”

She’s not laughing, not smiling. None of them are. They’re staring at me in a strange way, like I’m a dangerous freak they’ve never seen before, like they think stealing stuff is way less fucked up than giving this dude a little talking-to for the good of society and his cringing, pathetic wife. It’s a look that sinks into me like a knife, for some reason. There’s a sharp little pain, then an ache that says whatever’s holding things together in there has been slit apart, that it’s all sliding around loose, that I’m never going to get it together again. I don’t know why I’m so shaky today, but I kind of feel like sobbing my guts out, my vision is blurry, my hands are cold and clammy. Maybe it’s because all the signs are there: the days of our gang are over, we’re going in different directions, I don’t know what the fuck I’m trying to do for Baka, and when nothing makes sense anymore, when the gang is no more, what will exist in the world for me?

I
HOLD
my breath, look up and down the street carefully, calculating angles and distances. It’s too open, this street. No trees,
no awnings, no newspaper stands, no municipal buses turned on their sides and stacked on top of each other like giant shields against the sniper fire. Only a few parked cars. What am I doing here? I spot a sheltered doorway. Two people are huddled there already. I aim for it and sprint like a greyhound with eyes on the rabbit. I crash into the door, huddle, pant. The two others, a man, a woman, stare at me, then look at each other with wide eyes.

“There’s a sniper up there,” I say. “I can feel it in my bones. Just wait here for now.”

But they look at each other again and step quickly out into the street.

“What are you doing?” I call after them.

Sometimes it’s impossible to help people. Sometimes they just have a death wish and there is nothing you can do. I watch them walking away fast, looking over their shoulders. But walking out in the open here means doom. I follow them with my eyes, and there it is, the small, glistening whale-spurt of blood pluming out of the woman’s head. I wait for the rag-doll collapse, I see the man drop to his knees shouting,
noooo, noooo.
Then the Red Cross is on its way. I hear the sirens. I hear women screaming. Someone else got it too. Maybe a whole crowd of people. Well, I’m not going to wait around for the next bullet, I’m going to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to walk up into the mountain forest, I’m done with being held hostage in this death trap of inertia and waiting.

Drops of water land on the black rock beside me. They make a small slapping sound at regular intervals, while mossy pools glisten and shiver, reflecting a brooding spring sky. I look up at the tangle of black branches, which shine and click and rustle. The forest is charcoal and brown, but I sense the coming of green. Beyond the trees are valleys, mountain peaks, moving clouds, and Croatia floats in the distance like an island. I’m
happy here, in the brush, close to the earth, sheltered by trees, but I wish I could get in deeper, like an animal in its hole, to where I’m invisible, untouchable. I scrabble in the dirt and rotted leaves with my fingers, my fingernails lifting from the flesh, with my mouth, my teeth, my tongue, but it’s useless, it’s so cold in these parts that the earth is still frozen, it doesn’t let me in. So I just lie here and let the mountain air rush over the burning surface of my skin.

Someone is slapping my face. “Andric,” she shouts at me. “Andric.”

The voice rattles me, my nerves are live wires.

“Jesus.” I try to raise my head. It pounds with too much blood.

“What the hell, Andric?”

It’s Sava and her face is close to mine. It’s white like a chalk drawing, lines drawn in black from nose to mouth.

“We’ve been searching for you forever.”

“Oh yeah?” I say. My mouth is filled with a bitter taste, my lips feel brittle, burnt, about to split open.

“You’re acting totally insane.”

I lift my head, look around. There is no valley, Croatia isn’t floating like an island in the distance.

“Look at you. You’re lying under bushes in a ditch. Your eyes are completely red.”

“How did I get here?” I ask her. “I was in the mountain forest.”

“You’re scaring me,” Sava says. “You’re cracking up. Get a grip.”

“On what?” I say. I feel weird, like I’m impersonating someone I’ve never met.

“On life, Andric.” She pauses. “And death. People die in everyday life. They get old. It’s okay. You don’t have to go crazy over it. Just cry or something.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, and I wish she’d go away. The sight of her makes me sad. I try to get up, but my head really hurts. Maybe I hit it on the way down.

I
SIT
for hours in the roti shop on Eglinton chain-smoking like Papa and drinking warm Cokes. Sava says I should lock myself up in a psych ward, that my mind is broken. I don’t think she’s joking. It’s true, yesterday I lost a few hours, or a day maybe; it was like a crazy time-travelling speed trip, just as freaking tense and fucked up. It’s stress, Zijad says, and stress does that shit to sensitive kids like us. But everything’s back to normal today.

“You look rough,” the guy behind the counter says. He’s cooking up a storm. “Try eating something, brother, this food will do you good.”

But I don’t feel like eating. I’m trying to think. I’m picturing a log jam, how one log gets pulled loose, then all the other logs slowly start to move, jostling each other, finding space, how they one by one begin to flow with the river. Except for the ones at the edges, they stay stuck, they get bleached white on the top and rot black on the bottom. I’m a log on the edge, I think. I’m watching all the other logs sail by. I have to focus, get myself moving, stay with the plan, with or without Sava and the others, with or without Baka watching over the good of my soul.

“Brother, are you wanting some advice?”

The owner behind the counter is getting sick of me, he’s going to get rid of me with friendliness.

“I don’t need advice,” I say. “I know what’s what. Something’s gotta give in my life.”

He nods, flashes a wide smile, points at his ghetto blaster propped on a high shelf.
Sittin’ in the morning sun. And watching all the birds passing by
…

I trudge down Oakwood, then along side streets lined with little houses no taller than their doors and windows. Even the poor, shabby neighbourhoods in Toronto are tidy, with cut grass, gardens, hedges, trees. Inside a garage with its door wide open Papa is fiddling with a small fridge. He’s got the door off, and is going into the back panel with a screwdriver. Papa, I say, how’s it going? Papa raises his head and looks around for the source of the voice but doesn’t see me. He looks as happy and purposeful as a child with a toy as he sticks his head in the fridge again.

I let myself in through the back door and sit down at the kitchen table. It’s time to move this story along. I’ve decided what I’m going to do, which is the only way forward for me, through the eye of the needle. There are voices in the living room, the low rumble of a man talking and a woman’s laugh that’s a familiar echo from a time long ago. That’s Mama, the one we left behind, I think she’s back.

I walk into the living room and there she is perched on the piano bench telling a story in French with both her hands and her whole body. The person she’s telling it to is a man with grey hair in a hipster suit, bright blue shirt, string tie. He’s folded himself into one end of the couch, he’s holding a cap in his hands, he’s wearing a crooked, mischievous smile on his face, and his eyes are glinting over something funny that Mama just said. Mama turns and plays a few chords and a melody line on the piano. The man says, oui, oui, c’est ca, c’est ça. He sings a few words of a song in low, raunchy tones. Then he sees me and stops.

“This must be your son,” he says in French, and looks at me with interest.

Mama leans toward me on the piano stool. “Jevrem. There you are. This is Leo Colard. I’m going to accompany him at an upcoming concert in Toronto. His songs are so beautiful.” She’s speaking Serbo-Croatian to me as if he can understand.

“Hi, good to meet you,” I say, in English. And there we are, three people in a room speaking three different languages.

Leo stands up and bows in an old-school hippie beatnik kind of way. “The pleasure is all mine, my friend.”

“I’m going downstairs,” I say to the empty space between us.

“Why don’t you join us for dinner,” Leo asks. “Your mother and I are going to sample some delectable Ethiopian food. I’ve been telling her about the fine Ethiopian restos in the city. Exquisite coffee served with frankincense, such a fragrant after-dinner puja. But there’s also Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Indian, Punjabi, Pakistani, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Caribbean, Polish, Hungarian, Latin American.” He pauses to smile his crooked smile that I already know means
isn’t the world a beautiful array of glittering wonders
, he’s that kind of tuned-in grooving old peacenik dude. “Some of it as authentic and magnificent as you can get back in the old country. That’s the kind of city Toronto is, and I say this as a proud Montrealer.”

“No thanks,” I say. I try to think of the last time Mama, Aisha, and I went out to a restaurant, just a regular one from wherever, and can’t. I try to think of anywhere we’ve gone as a family in all the time we’ve been here but nothing comes to mind, except visits to Milan and Iva. You need money for that kind of thing, and the energy to get out of the house.

“Aisha is coming,” Mama says.

She’s in four dimensions today with her lily perfume on, the smell of it making me want to scream. I see the four of us
sitting at a table like a family, discussing the plot of a movie, or whose turn it is to mow the lawn, or whatever it is families talk about at dinner.

“I’m busy, have fun,” I say, and walk through the kitchen and down my stairs.

‡ ‡ ‡

T
HEY’RE ALWAYS THERE ON THE STEPS OF THE
boarded-up building, garbage and rags trampled all around them like compacted earth. A main intersection, a steady flow of traffic, these people on the steps, drinking, laughing, sleeping, looking like they’re about to die, everyone skirting around them, pretending they don’t exist.