Payback (5 page)

Sammy gives a dirty laugh

“Screw off,” I tell them.

At the end of English as we're leaving the room, Rebar trips Benny, and Sammy pretends it's an accident when he falls on top of him. Mr. Korda helps Benny to his feet and tells everyone to be more careful.

Benny is holding his back. He is in pain. I help pick up his books.

On Tuesday, me and Benny are supposed to present our Prospero assignment to the class and lead a class discussion.

I decide to take the day off and get some quality sleep time in Ma's closet instead.

Why do I skip out and miss my part of the presentation?

Well, to tell the truth, I'm scared of standing up in front of the class with Benny.

I can just see it. Sammy and Rebar pulling faces, especially every time me or Benny mention Ariel, a fairy and a servant of Prospero in the play. Some of the kids laughing out loud.

I can't stand the thought of that. So I skip out and leave Benny to do it alone.

Call me a coward if you like.

When I return, Benny tells me that Mr. Korda
gave him the option of doing it alone or waiting to give the presentation when I was there to help him. Benny went ahead on his own. I think he knew why I wasn't there, but he didn't say anything.

Mr. Korda says he will allow me to do a make-up assignment if I bring a sick note, otherwise I will lose the mark.

So I lose the mark.

When me and Annie get to Aunt Maeve's after school she says, “Your da is home for Thanksgiving. He just called and said to go straight over. So I didn't do snacks for you.”

We find Da making soup. We can smell it before we even open the door.

He always lifts Annie off her feet in a big bear hug and dances her around the room. He used to do the same with me, yonks ago when I was small, but not now. He knows I don't go for that kind of stuff. I'm not a little kid any more.

It's the Thanksgiving holiday and the weather is perfect. I have a grand time riding the trails on my Hammer. I still do my hotdog job in the mall, and we have Thanksgiving dinner at Aunt Maeve's. Da buys the turkey and Aunt Maeve cooks it. Uncle
Rufus says the grace and I bet you never heard a grace like it in all your life, because it goes on and on and includes most of Ireland's troubled history over the past eight hundred years.

In the end, Aunt Maeve is forced to interrupt him.

“Amen!” she says. “Won't we all die of the hunger while we're waiting for the blessing to be over?”

Everyone laughs.

But it's back to school after Thanksgiving.

At lunch, Benny is about to sit across the table from me in the cafeteria when Sammy and Rebar and Tony Marusyk and another boy named Phil Pitman come over.

Marusyk growls at Benny, “Hey! Nancy Boy!” He keeps his voice down so only his pals and me and Benny can hear.

Pitman and Marusyk don't look at me.

“Hi, Tinkerbell,” Pitman says to Benny,

Sammy leans into me and gives my shoulder a friendly punch that really hurts. I don't flinch.

“How ya doin', Red, my friend?”

I tell him, “Get lost, Cisco.”

Rebar says, “Hey, Sammy, you believe in fairies?”

“Well, Rebar, I sure do,” Sammy says, “especially since our school got its own little Ariel.”

Yuk, yuk. They laugh.

Benny Mason stands, humiliated and helpless. Then he looks at me, his brown eyes damp with pleading.

I feel my face flush with shame.

But I've got nothing to be ashamed about. No one else ever says anything. Why should I speak up and stick my neck out?

The guy's got to learn to take care of himself.

He's nothing to me.

I said at the beginning that this is about Benny Mason. Not about me and not about my ma, but I've got to tell about her. There's no way out of it. I've just got to get it off my chest.

She was Kathleen Foley before she married Da to become Mrs. Tim Callaghan. Pictures of her taken when she was at Dublin College show how pretty she was. I look at the pictures and it's terrible hard trying to see my ma as a girl — my brain has got to shift some really stiff gears — but it's her, all right, a slim shy slip of a girl with green eyes and red hair. She didn't change all that much — until she got sick.

Da took time off from work last July so he could be with her. He took me and Annie with him every day to the hospital because Ma was dying and soon she would be gone and we would never see her again.

Toward the end Da tried to leave Annie with Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus, thinking it would upset her too much to see Ma's desperate condition, what the disease was doing to her. But Annie started to throw a fit, so Da let her come. The three of us spent every day by her bed, leaving only in shifts to grab a sandwich or a drink in the hospital cafeteria.

Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus popped in for a short visit every day, too. Lots of times, Da went back again and spent the night there with Ma while Aunt Maeve slept over at our place.

Going down in the hospital elevator at the end of each day, leaving Ma behind, I felt like I was running out on her. Da never said much, but he held Annie's hand and hung an arm round my shoulder as we walked to the car. Sometimes, when we stayed late and Annie was wrecked with fatigue, Da carried her in his arms and I held the car door open while he sat her in the front passenger seat and buckled the seat belt around her.

For over a month we watched Ma wasting away. She was like a Polaroid picture in reverse, brilliant color fading away to nothing. She slept most of the
time. When she was awake she wasn't saying much, and what she did say didn't always make sense, except for the word “home.” She knew she was dying and she wanted to die at home. That was clear enough.

We brung her home and Da and Aunt Maeve took care of her. She didn't last long, but at least she died in her own bed with her family around her.

Me and Annie, we couldn't believe she was gone, that we would never see her again.

We were left only with snapshots. And her things, the closet full of her clothes, where I go when I skip school sometimes and I've got the house to myself to remember the smell of her.

Ma left us.

That was back in August.

Kathleen Foley Callaghan's ashes are now a part of Mosquito Creek Trail, behind where we live, where she'd started to jog two or three times a week when we first got here from Dublin.

After the memorial service, I walked the trail with Da and Annie carrying the urn in my backpack. At a spot by the creek where a small waterfall tumbles over the rocks, Da opened the urn and shook it and
we watched the ashes blow away in the wind. Then we sat by the creek and listened to the birds.

I was thinking of Ma, the way she was before the sickness. Now she was a tiny part of a Canadian creek bottom and its soil and a part of its trees and grasses.

Annie was sniffling.

Da said to us, “Your ma isn't gone. She's here.” He waved his hands around at the sky and the creek and the trees. “She's here,” he said again. Then he put his arms round us. “And she's here in both of you, too. Kathleen Foley Callaghan will never die as long as you both live. Do you believe that?”

I did.

It's the third week of October and the weather is getting chilly. But the leaves are great, brilliant.

They remind me of St. Stephen's Green in Dublin and racing my bike with Sean, Fergus and Seamus, the grass buried under piles of leaves. The start of the race was at the park entrance, Fusilier's Arch, only a spit from Grafton Street, and the course went around the pond, past the Garden for the Blind where scented plants are labeled in Braille, past the bandstand and the fountain, past the Yeats Memorial Garden, past a statue of another famous Irish writer I forget the name of, and ending at the big bronze statue of these three spooky women who are supposed to control our destinies.

Here in North Van the trees are different. There's lots of leaf droppers all right but most of them are
evergreens — cedars and hemlocks and pines — that drop cones and scented needles on the trails. The smells are brilliant.

I bike the Mosquito Creek Trail all the way up to Skyline Drive, and push through a bright carpet of yellow and gold, my chest pumping with excitement.

My job at the mall is the same as usual. Harvey hasn't fired me, not yet.

School's the same — mostly boring. Sammy and Rebar are the same, too. They leave me alone, but continue to slag Benny. You'd think they'd get tired of it, but no.

I watched them yesterday. Followed by a pack of their new friends, they went up to Benny and started fluttering limp wrists and mincing about in front of him. The pack laughed and howled and Benny ran away.

On Friday morning Mr. Estereicher takes two classes together, an eight and a nine because one of the other PE teachers is off. The floor is crowded while he gets everyone organized.

I see two ninth-grade boys jump Benny, drag him down and pull down his gym shorts. By the time I
get there Benny has managed to pull his shorts back up and climb to his feet.

Mr. Estereicher doesn't see anything. He hears the loud laughter, though, and tells the class to cut it out.

••••

The next Friday is Halloween.

Da is in Nanaimo, over on Vancouver Island, so we're at Aunt Maeve's place.

Aunt Maeve's house is big, with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. Why did they buy such a big place for only two people? I don't know. Unless it was because they needed the space for all their holy pictures and statues.

They've got Popes, Sacred Hearts and Virgin Marys, St. Anthonys and other saints I don't even know the names of. In the bedrooms they've got Blessed Virgin holy water fonts with built-in night-lights. In the bathrooms there's pictures of St. Sebastian with a whole bunch of arrows sticking out of him, which works pretty good if you happen to be constipated.

There's even a big statue of St. Francis of Assisi in
the hallway. I often touch the bird in his hand for luck when I come down the stairs.

So whenever me and Annie stay over we've got our own rooms. Our own house isn't as big as Aunt Maeve's. Even though we've got three bedrooms, there's only one bathroom. I've got to say, though, the houses here in Maple Leaf Land are enormous compared to the dog boxes in Upper Kimmage Street, Dublin, and they're so comfortable with their central heating.

In Dublin, we rented a “two-up-two-down” house — two rooms upstairs; two rooms down. “Not enough room to swing a cat,” Ma used to say. The downstairs rooms were a living room and a “parlor.” The parlor became my bedroom. Annie had a room to herself upstairs next to Ma and Da. The tiny kitchen was a part of the living room, and the bathroom was at the top of the stairs. No central heating made taking a bath in your overcoat an ordeal.

Crazy Uncle Rufus wants to take Annie trick-or-treating round the neighborhood, but Annie doesn't want to go. I can understand why, with Ma just gone and everything.

So we help Aunt Maeve give out little Kit Kats and Mars bars. She's got three Halloween pumpkins in her front window. When the doorbell rings we open the door and hand out the treats. Crazy Uncle Rufus is wearing his false eyeballs.

The next morning me and Annie and Aunt Maeve have breakfast together. It's early on Saturday. Crazy Uncle Rufus isn't up yet.

There's a knock at the door just as I start slathering marmalade on my toast.

It's Uncle's friend, Paddy Mullen.

“Is Rufus not up yet?” he says, eyes like a codfish. “We're supposed to be at Gleneagles at eight.”

“Rufus said nothing about playing golf this morning,” says Aunt Maeve. “I'll go wake him up.”

But just then Crazy Uncle Rufus comes rushing down the stairs, talking to himself as usual.

“G'marnin' all,” he says. “I'll be right with ye, Paddy.” He disappears for a few seconds and reappears with his golf bag. “Let's be goin'.” His lips burn skin as they skid a kiss off Aunt Maeve's cheek. Then he rushes out the door behind Paddy.

Suddenly he drops his golf bag and collapses onto
his knees beside one of the garbage bins left outside the door last night because today is garbage pickup day.

Heart attack!

Me and Annie jump to our feet. Aunt Maeve groans.

Crazy Uncle Rufus, elbows on the dustbin, bows his head and joins his hands together.

“I forgot me friggin' prayers!” he yells.

It's not a heart attack.

Crazy Uncle Rufus makes a lightning-fast sign of the cross and then, elbows still on the garbage bin, jabbers his prayers in a long muddled stream of words, eyes closed tight, hands joined together in front of his nose.

“I'll be in the car,” says Paddy, rolling his eyes.

Aunt Maeve looks at me and Annie and shrugs her shoulders.

“Didn't I marry an amadán?” she says with a smile.

Crazy Uncle Rufus' prayers gallop to a finish. He crosses himself quickly and then jumps into Paddy's SUV.

We watch it till it's out of sight.

We go back to our breakfast — Aunt Maeve to her boiled egg and me to my toast and marmalade.

Before she starts back on her corn flakes, Annie smiles over at me.

I can see Ma smiling at me out of Annie.

••••

I've got the damaged Socials textbook in my room at Aunt Maeve's. It's mine now. I paid for it. I can throw it out with the rubbish if I want.

But I don't. I lie on my bed, leafing through its pages until I find my doodles, the bikes and the screaming heads.

Then I look at the section dealing with World War II, at the pictures of planes and tanks and famous people. I like to read about WWII. It's really interesting.

When I was Annie's age I used to make airplane models from kits. I made a Spitfire and a Hawker Hurricane and a Messerschmitt and hung them from my ceiling. I liked to look at them swinging above my head and imagine myself behind the controls of the Mark V Spitfire in a dog-fight high above the
English Channel, soaring and diving, firing my two 20-millimeter cannons and four .303 machine guns at the German Messerschmitt.