Milosz (2 page)

‘Does Robertson know?' he asks.

‘Not yet.'

‘Maybe you should talk about it in the morning.'

‘He hit Robertson.'

‘When?'

‘Tonight.'

‘Hard?'

‘What do you mean “hard”? He hit him.'

‘But people do that,' Milo says.

‘What people?'

‘My father.'

‘Oh, well, that's different. Your father was ... your father wasn't normal.'

‘What's normal?'

‘A father who doesn't hit his child.' She begins to twirl some of her hair so hard it looks as though it hurts.

‘Why don't you see how you feel in the morning?' Milo suggests, standing as though trapped in netting, understanding he has no place here.

‘A ten-year-old boy was abducted and sexually assaulted for six hours,' she says. ‘What could be worse than that? Death, I suppose. I worry about Robertson. He'll talk to anybody.'

Milo has witnessed Robertson speaking with total strangers. He'll ask them abruptly about things most people would only ponder. Deformity fascinates him and he won't hesitate to ask the disabled what it's like to have flaps for arms or a misshapen head. He reprimands anyone who litters, regardless of their size. And, of course, if he overhears a conversation in which he feels he should take part, he will, in that too-loud voice of his.

‘They were bouncing a basketball off his head,' Tanis says. ‘Usually he manages to avoid them, pretends to be tying a shoelace or something. When a group of kids starts to pass he jumps up and tries to blend in. It didn't work today.'

‘Was he hurt?'

‘Not physically.'

‘Is he going to school tomorrow?'

‘I don't know.' She twirls her hair. ‘They win if he doesn't go.'

Milo would like to ask, ‘Don't they win anyway? Has Robertson ever won?' But Tanis seems scarily fragile, and her husband is leaving her. A samurai warrior, dishonoured in defeat, kneels and commits hara-kiri.

‘Sorry if we kept you awake,' she says.

‘Don't worry about it.'

‘You should get some sleep.'

‘Ditto,' he says.

She nods as the warrior falls forward over his dagger and blood pools around him.

‘Till tomorrow then,' Milo says.

Closing the sliding doors, he can still hear her rocking.

ope there aren't any fucking Rottweilers,' Wallace says. ‘Last house I did there were
two
fucking Rottweilers. Black.'

‘All Rottweilers are black,' Milo says.

‘These were, like,
totally
fucking black.' Wallace slides a flathead screwdriver between the door and frame, and then leverages the cylinder out of the lock as he twists the doorknob with a clamp wrench. ‘We're in,' he says. ‘Get a fucking move on. And no way do you read their fucking mail.'

The rancid stench of abandonment greets them. Wallace immediately starts taking photos of the contents and condition of the house while Milo shakes out a garbage bag and begins to toss in the mail. It's mostly bills, easy to ignore. It's the personal letters that stop him, carefully penned and sent. When his father disappeared, Milo felt obliged to respond to Gustaw's personal mail. It was Christmas, which meant greeting cards from relatives his father couldn't stand. Gustaw wanted to forget Poland, the Nazi invasion, the raping and pillaging, the betrayal of Jews and the theft of their property, the mass graves, the Russian invasion, the raping and pillaging, the slaughter of priests. Gustaw remade himself in Canada, became Gus and atheist, learned English and, with much practice, removed all traces of Polish from his accent, even mastering the ‘th' sound. Reborn as a Canadian, he married a bubbly Canadian girl and then argued her to death. Milo remembers the soft hairs on her forearms, the smell of Bailey's Irish Cream on her breath and the ragged sound of her sobs, but little else, except the arguing.

Pablo stumbles through the front door.

‘I thought you had to go to the dentist,' Milo says.

‘I been already,' Pablo mumbles through gauze.

‘Did he say it was okay for you to work?'

‘He don't know shit.' He pulls a piece of gauze out of his mouth, sees blood on it and shoves it back in. ‘That
hijo de puta
charge me two hundred bucks, can you believe that?'

‘What the fuck are
you
doing here?' Wallace demands, clutching his sledgehammer. Any furniture too big for the truck gets demolished in seconds.

‘I need cash,' Pablo says.

‘No fucking slacking, asswipe, you read me?'

‘
Sí, sí
.'

Pablo, although short, can lift entire couches. He spends hours bodybuilding and comes to cause destruction wearing a bodybuilding belt. For this reason, Milo leaves the heavy lifting to the boys. Upstairs he empties a closet of a mildewed fake fur coat and a wedding dress covered in plastic, several pairs of high-heeled shoes moulded to the shape of a small foot, boxes of obsolete PC technology, exercise equipment and numerous garbage bags filled and labelled. Presumably the evictees had intended to take the bags of
summer clothes
and
winter hats/gloves
but had, at the last moment, realized they had nowhere to store them.

‘Milo,' Pablo calls. ‘Check this out.' He beckons Milo to a pink and blue room undisturbed by the evacuation. ‘This is a baby's room, man.'

‘So?'

‘Nothing's been used, man. Everything's, like, still wrapped up. There's never been no baby here.'

Milo looks at basket of baby toys wrapped in cellophane. ‘What's your point?'

‘They couldn't have no
bambinos
. They got the house and the nursery but no babies. That's sad, man. They just left everything.'

‘What else are they supposed to do with it?'

The upstairs back room of Milo's house was intended for a baby. His parents referred to it as
the baby's room
. But after repeated miscarriages the baby's room became the back room again, and Milo's parents stopped exchanging the smallest of tender gestures. From the age of four, Milo never saw them sit in the same room at the same time, although they continued to share a bed, and argue. He'd block his ears with his teddy bears until Mrs. Cauldershot, with hands like sandpaper, yanked them away from him. ‘Best to keep busy,' she told him. ‘Sitting around never helped anybody.' Which is probably true. Milo has done more sitting around than keeping busy and look where it's got him, en route to becoming a fire hazard. But then wasn't Gustaw mercilessly busy? Isn't it possible he walked into the storm to
stop
being busy, to inhale the brisk air, to die?

The bubbly Canadian girl died of a heart attack at forty-two.

‘Wakey, wakey,' Pablo says, ‘you don't want the boss man on your back. We got fleas. He wants us to pull up the hall carpet.' Pablo tucks his track pants into his socks and starts ripping up broadloom with an X-acto knife. Just the mention of fleas starts Milo scratching. He too tucks his pants into his socks.

‘We got to get poison to spray on these suckers,' Pablo says. ‘If I bring bugs to my girlfriend's, she'll kill me.'

Pablo's girlfriend is always about to kill him. Milo has difficulty understanding what Pablo gets out of the relationship, but then who is Milo to judge, having blown each and every one of his relationships? ‘I don't think she'll kill you, Pablo.'

‘Are you fucking slackers getting a move on?' bellows Wallace. ‘No fucking group therapy, you read me?'

Wallace doesn't like it when Pablo and Milo commune.

‘She told me,' Pablo says, ‘I'm not committed. She says I'm always doing stuff without her. What's she talking about, I gave her a ring.' He rips up more carpet. ‘What's she want from me? I gave her a
ring
.'

Milo rolls up pieces of carpet and binds them with twine. ‘Maybe she wants affection rather than material things. I mean, rings are just rings.' Although maybe if he'd given Zosia a ring, she wouldn't have dumped him. ‘Where did you buy it?' he asks.

‘Walmart. They got nice jewellery there.'

‘Oh, so it wasn't like an engagement ring?'

‘Shit, no. It was a honey-I-love-you ring. That's what guys do, they buy girls rings. You never done that?'

‘No.' Zosia left a silk scarf behind. In moments of howling woefulness Milo lies with it draped over his face. What if he'd bought her a honey-I-love-you ring? ‘How much did it cost?'

‘What?'

‘The ring.'

‘Fifty bucks.'

‘Maybe it was too cheap. Maybe she wanted an expensive ring.'

‘Not Maria. She don't like extravagances.'

‘How do you know? I mean, maybe she just says that.'

‘
Qué?
'

‘Maybe she just says she doesn't like extravagances. Maybe she's secretly hoping you'll splurge.'

‘What do you know? You never bought a girl a ring.'

The sound of splintering wood interrupts them. ‘I told you deadbeats to shut the fuck up.'

‘
Come mierda
,' Pablo mutters, which Milo knows from previous translations means ‘eat shit.'

At McDonald's, Pablo continues to work out the girlfriend thing. ‘Sometimes, when she's shouting at me, I'm thinking she's trying to reach out. I saw that on
Oprah
. When people shout, they're just trying to reach out.'

Is that what Milo's parents were doing? Is that what Christopher and Robertson were doing?

‘She's shouting because you're not fucking getting it, asshole,' Wallace says.

‘You are a very negative person, Wallace. Always. You are just trying to protect yourself from being hurt.'

‘By who, dickwad?'

‘You never loved a girl, Wallace.'

‘What the fuck do you know about it?'

‘I know you never loved nobody. Not even your mother.'

‘Fuck you, asshole, you fucking Mexican.'

‘He's Cuban,' Milo says.

The afternoon shift involves spraying bug killer throughout the house. Pablo takes charge, even spraying himself.

‘That's toxic,' Milo warns.

‘If I bring fleas to Maria's she'll kill me.'

‘It's getting hard to breathe, Pablo.' They remove more labelled garbage bags and broken exercise equipment. On good days Milo discovers books in the deserted homes but the only books here are
How to Eat What You Want and Stay Skinny
and
How to Get the Love You Want
, both of which Pablo intends to give Maria.

‘You have to forgive people,' he says. ‘That's what it's all about.'

‘Forgive them for what?' Milo asks.

‘What they did to you, forgive them. I saw this movie about this family who were all mad at each other. At the end they forgave each other, were all, like, hugging and kissing. It made me cry.'

‘It's a fucking movie, butthead,' Wallace says, emptying a chest of drawers at their feet.

‘Wallace, people do forgive each other. If you love somebody, you forgive them.'


Milo tries to forgive his father. Everyone has to move beyond blaming their parents, don't they? Particularly if their parents are dead, or presumed dead. Increasingly Milo feels a seeping regret for opportunities lost, distances maintained, intentions misunderstood. After all, as his father was so fond of telling him, he's had it easy. Milo was not a child in war-ravaged Poland, did not cower under a table while five drunken Russians raped his beloved sister. According to Gus, Poles were spineless, letting the Nazis, then the Russians, walk all over them. According to Gus, Poles turned on Poles so they could steal their pigs. Poles betrayed the Jewish boy who'd been buried under corpses and had run naked to Gus's father's barn. When the Nazis came for Jakob, he was in the woods searching for his cousin, even though it was assumed that the cousin was in a mass grave along with Jakob's parents and uncle. The Nazis lured the Jews to town squares by telling them they were taking them to Palestine. Then they'd march them to the graves, force them to strip and trample the recently murdered to make room for their own soon-to-be-dead bodies.

When Jakob returned from searching for his cousin, Gustaw's father told him he had to leave immediately or they would all be shot. Jakob had become like a brother to Gus; they'd shared a bed and talked about outer space and how one day Jakob would fly a rocket to the moon. Gustaw never forgave his father for ordering Jakob to leave. He watched his friend creep into the woods like an animal. Within days he was back, shivering and begging for food. Gus's mother packed him some bread and cheese. Gus's father told Jakob that if he returned again, he would shoot him.

Such grim reminiscences cause Milo tremors of compassion for his father, until he remembers Gustaw swatting his head after parent-teacher interviews. ‘How can my son be such an
idiot
?' Milo knew that Gus was longing for his other sons who weren't idiots, the ones who died before they were born.

•••

Robertson tosses the ball for the dog. Fortunately for Sal, Robertson, unlike normal children, is never bored by this activity. He can play fetch for hours.

‘How goes it?' Milo asks, approaching slowly because sudden movements startle the boy.  ‘Any snails about?'

‘Didn't look.'

‘Did you go to school today?'