Milk Chicken Bomb (27 page)

The first thing I've got to do is block off that hallway. I can see it, further than where the light reaches – the real dark.
Breathing and waiting. I unlace my boots and set them on the floor. Take a deep breath and turn on my flashlight. At first the white beam stings my eyes. Dust and dust, strings of dust hang from the roof, dust, cobwebs, balls of dust like tumble–weeds in the corners. The whitewashed doors hang there, more leaning–like I guess, and behind the hall is black and sleeping dark – or at least I hope it's sleeping.

It's pretty easy to shove a lot of the boxes over in front of the hallway. I pile up heavy boxes, must be full of books and magazines, one on top of another. Under cracking leather luggage and picture frames I find some wooden cabinets, a chest. It takes quite a lot of heaving but I get a good wall of furniture shoved in front of the door. I fill cracks with encyclopedias, stuff an overcoat here and some striped pants there. I bank the whole wall with some wrought–iron chairs, wedged up into ledges. I get dirty and tired.

I eat some sandwiches. The bread soggy, the crust stale. When Dwayne Klatz's mom makes a sandwich, it just seems to stay good all day. I sure can't make a sandwich that good. Now my mouth is sticky, peanut–buttered. I smack my lips. I run my tongue over my teeth for clumps of bread.

I try not to think about rats, their teeth. Centipedes, their little feet. Mould, flatworms, rotten fruit, leeches in ponds.

Once you get used to the cracks and seams of light, you can make out lots. I set a chair under a pretty good sunbeam by the wall, where the wood above the foundation is thin and splintered. I flip through the brittle pages of magazines: old–time magazines with fancy cars, women in long skirts, ironing boards, canned ham. Some of the magazines in French. I look at
National Geographic
s: rainforests, Arctic sled trips, Hawaiian volcanoes.

I find pictures. Curling at the corners, the colours all faded to brown and yellow. None of them in albums or frames, just jumbled in a box, jumbled and dusty. There's a little town, on the side of a harbour, with sailboat masts in
the background. On all the poles and stop signs a flag, three bars like a French flag, only with a yellow star at the one end. And there's a table in the middle of a long room, white light bulbs, a tablecloth. People sit all around, the women in dresses, the men in high collars, their hands down. The colours all real old, like on the
CBC
dramas. At the end of the table a large man in a grey jacket, a thick beard, arms out.

There's a little girl at a piano in a velvet dress, all serious–like. Straight hair tied back in a schoolteacher bun, fingers just above the keys. Looking black and white at the camera, eyes very hard.

Old men. An old man with a thick beard and cowboy hat. The other, a skinny face and a moustache like the villain in a black–and–white movie. And there she is. Only younger, a lot younger. A black leather jacket, a skinny black tie. In between the two of them. Around a table in a bar, all smoking, with whisky glasses.

I look at the little girl at the piano. At the woman with the skinny tie.

I snooze for a bit.

What I really need is some water. I smack my sticky mouth, my fuzzy tongue. I shine the flashlight around the uncovered ceiling, on the ducts and wires, stapled to the floorboards. I follow copper pipes with the beam but they disappear, down the hall, to Over There. I try to keep myself busy. I snooze, sometimes, when I run out of stuff to do.

I wake up and her face leans down over me. I holler and try to crawl out of the way and she puts her hands on my shoulders and I yell and flail my arms and she grabs my wrists and pushes my hands down and then she lets me go.

I crawl up on hands and knees and scuttle away, but the washboards and buckets, the meat grinders missing cranks, the lantern frames and Christmas ornaments and thick yellow dust are everywhere. I stop and turn around. Hélène sits where she was, sits back on her calves, her palms flat on top of her thighs. She looks around the basement. Looks at me. She looks at her hands, smeared with the white dust. White smudges, handprints on her black pants. I look at myself: I'm covered in dirt, dust, my hands black and smudged, my clothes grey, like I've rolled in dirty flour. I open my mouth and it's sticky and I just smack my lips a few times and watch her, palms flat on top of her thighs. She doesn't stand up.

After a while, she asks, Is anyone going to look for you? Her French accent making every word sound careful in the quiet basement.

I think about it. Somebody will, I say. Probably.

She nods.

Is it warm enough?

It's not too bad.

She nods. She stands up and goes to the ladder. On the floor there's a jug of water and a plate of sandwiches. Tomatoes and white cheese. I wait for her legs, calves, feet to vanish up the ladder.

Her shoes clatter from one room to another. She stops, a soft plunk, then barefoot, soft steps. Something scrapes. A chair? A bench? I try to be as quiet as I can. Nothing but the buzz from down the hall.

Sometimes she plays soft, just barely music. Sometimes she hammers on the keys, shrill chords over and over and over and so many times and so long, I can't believe anybody could do the same thing for that long. Sometimes she plays the sad, dramatic – I guess you call it classical music, what the composers wrote. She drifts in and out. Sometimes I hear her walk across the floor and stop, there's a pause, then she hurries over to the piano and plinks out a few notes, maybe a little trill or run.

I don't know much about music. At school, when Mr. Hyslop plays the piano it's one chord at a time. One chord with his left hand and then the melody you're supposed to sing with the right, his back straight, his elbows high. Slow and careful. She doesn't play the piano like that at all.

Sometimes, just the tap tap tap of her foot, keeping time to something I can't hear.

Sometimes I hear digging. Pick pick picking, ringing on the rocks. He's out there somewhere. Digging away. Deeper and deeper and further and further away.

It's tough to sleep in the basement. My backpack isn't much of a pillow. My jacket isn't much of a blanket. I listen to the digging. The clank and scrape of metal on rock. My knees are sore. My back is stiff. I stand up and reach my arms up toward the ceiling, feel my stiff back tug and roll over.

I don't know how long I've been down here. I thought someone would have come looking for me by now. Maybe I finally hid too well.

The house is quiet for a long time. Then I hear the floorboards shift. The light out of one vent, the cracks around it, smothers out. Her voice comes down the vent.

How did you know about the ringing? she asks. Her voice really close to the vent. It gets all echoey and funny–sounding, coming out of the duct. How did you know about the ringing in my ears?

Well, sometimes you grab your head, I say, like it hurts.

No, she says, you were very specific. You asked about the ringing in my ears. Because you know about my grandfather.

They were talking about him at the hardware store, I say. They said he came here to make the ringing go away.

The hardware store, she says.

Fleer has a thermostat, I say. McClaghan told him not to give it to you.

Of course he did.

So your ears ring just like your grandpa's did?

Some cigarette smoke puffs down the vent. The floor creaks while she stretches out. It can't be comfortable, lying on the floor, talking into a vent.

In Halifax we had a weekly engagement, she says. Three one–hour sets in a cocktail bar, down a long flight of stairs. Red lights and black granite and thin, languid people with long, strong drinks.

Marcel would come in an hour before the set started, while the staff was still sitting at the bar, polishing the silverware with vinegar, rolling it up in paper napkins. He'd set up his drums; he had all this little jazz hardware which the pieces of his kit were too big for: this deep, awful–sounding snare,
one floor–tom – no rack – and these cracked, appalling cymbals. And he'd hit them a few times and make no effort to tune them. Then he'd start to play.

This thumping starts on the floor; she's drumming on the floor with her hands. I try to imagine Mr. Hyslop counting along to it – one
two
one
two
one
two
one
two
– the second beat always right on the heel and harder than the first. She drums along on the floor like that for a while and my head starts to bob up and down along to it.

And he'd just play that, she says. Kick snare and a rasp on the hi-hat for each quarter, never opening it up, and he never touched the floor–tom and he never touched those other cracked cymbals.

And people started to show up, coming down the stairs, unwinding their scarves, pushing themselves into their favourite booths, and Marcel would still be playing, nothing changing, one
two
one
two
, and sometimes the waiter would bring a drink by and hold it there for him to sip at with a straw. Then I would show up and play the piano. Luis would play the guitar.

I put a microphone into the top of the upright piano they kept in that bar. I ran it through a tubed pa head. Two four–by–ten guitar cabinets.

What does that mean? I ask.

That means we were loud, she says. We billed ourselves as the loudest act in the Maritimes. We played one-chord songs to Marcel's beat, as long as we could manage. Over and over. Luis would hold his guitar upside down with the headstock planted against the head of his amplifier making white noise and I just played that one chord, over and over, to that one beat. We never found out if Marcel knew another beat. People would sit there drinking their drinks as long as they could stand it. They'd get up and their knees would buckle, because it was so loud that it changed the pressure in your ears. Luis would stand there with his guitar feeding back and the

pitches changing as people moved through the bar. As they changed the angles of reflection. People would walk around the bar with their hands over their ears, changing the pitch of the guitar feedback with their bodies, and I'd change the piano chords to accompany the new tones. That's how loud we were.

We played on Sunday nights and my ears would ring all day Monday. And after a while they would start to ring later in the week. Later, after we got fired, and I was living in Montreal, I was sitting at a bus bench. And my ears started ringing. Much, much louder than they ever had before. I sat there holding the sides of my head and the bus drove up, and the door opened, people got out, the door closed, it drove away, and I couldn't move. I remember sitting there holding the sides of my head, unable to move. And my whole life I'd known that it was coming, but at least now it might have been my own fault.

You wanted the ringing in your ears to be your own fault?

I couldn't let him have all the bad things, she says. He had too many already, my grandfather. Too many bad things.

Worse things than your ears ringing? I ask.

Much, much worse.

I think about it for a while.

You sure have lived in a lot of places, I say.

She's quiet for quite a while. When you leave early, she says, you have more time.

Why would anybody move to Marvin? I ask. Sitting on the dirt floor with my arms around my knees. Her feet stop moving. I start to breathe fast and heavy. Why would anybody move to Marvin? I shout, as loud as I can.

I wait a while. The floor doesn't creak right away. Her voice comes out of the vent.

You can't stay in my basement, she says. You have to go home.

Go home, I say. I don't think loudly enough for her to hear. I sit there with my arms wrapped around my knees, staring into the dark. The dark in the corners of the basement pulses and breathes. I'm lucky 'cause it's asleep. Eventually the dark is going to wake up and find me, though.

You have to go home.

And what good will that do? My face is all hot. Huh? I say. What then? If I just go home again. Without – without making them do anything about it. Again.

Again? she asks.

Yeah, I say, and it's hard to be loud this time because my voice isn't really sounding the way I want. I want it to sound all tough but it sure doesn't sound that way. 'Cause if it just happens that way again, I say, I don't know how I'm ever going to make them do anything about it.

Again.

Right.

She doesn't say anything. The floor gives a big creak, I guess she's standing up, and I hear her walk away out of the room. Somewhere water starts to move through the pipes; a few of them start to shake in their brackets, up there in the beams. A rushing sound and a high-pitched whistling sound.
I hear some splashing and clanking, sounds like dishes getting stacked. In the corners the dark just breathes and doesn't do anything. What if it's already awake, and just waiting? What if it's just waiting, watching me, taking its time deciding what to do? I sit there and hug my knees and want to get the flashlight out of my backpack and run around shining it in all the corners. But I don't. I sit there hugging my knees and wait.

I start to smell cigarette smoke, down from the ceiling. The boards creak when she shifts on the floor. She must be lying out straight, smoking.

Is it cold out? I ask.

There's, how do you call it, the strong wind, and the clouds make an arch above the mountains.

A chinook, I say.

Windy but not terribly cold, she says. It gives me a headache.

I stand in the boiler room, watching the red pulse of the space-heater coils. They make a really quiet sound, too quiet to be a buzz. Almost a sizzle. I hitch up my backpack, stuffed full again with all the used sandwich wrappers.

I guess I had always thought that a boiler would be huge: pipes and hoses, bellows and valves. Hélène's boiler just sits there, sits there in the middle of that knot of pipes, thin copper pipes and thick black plastic pipes with heavy joints. Sits there, quiet, all red–rimmed from the space heaters. Up ahead the old blanket stretches across the tunnel. Behind it that heavy tunnel darkness waits. I guess I've gotten away from it long enough. There's thin window–grey dark and space–heater red dark, and then there's tunnel dark, and tunnel dark sure is dark. It's cold. My heart beats real fast and I want to pee. I really want to pee. I should turn around, back into the basement, run up the stairs, pound on Hélène's door. She'll open the door and pick me up, carry me up the stairs to where she lives. Carry me up there and fix everything.