Smoke (28 page)

“I'm afraid I'm not up for any more today,” he says. “I'm sorry Judy. Buster can drive you to Simcoe another afternoon.”

“Oh, all right.” She is disappointed. “Gee, you do look awfully pale.”

Buster jumps to his feet, notices the stiff, pained way that the doctor is advancing. “Where'd you go?”

“Had to see Doc Baker about this flu.”

“He'll be fine,” Alice reassures Buster when he drops the doctor off at home. “The heat most likely. He just needs a rest. Off you two go, and keep the car until you're done with it.” She shoos Buster off the veranda and waves to Jelly Bean who is sitting in the front seat. “Oh and Buster. There's just been a meeting called for tonight at the church. What to do about the bandit. He struck again. Make sure your father knows.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

A moment later he pulls up in front of the hardware store. “Here we are.” He expects Jelly Bean to let herself out.

“Yup, here I am.” But she doesn't move. She can't. The thought of that cross-eyed Barbara Ann Scott doll and her mother waiting with bleach and dye keeps her feet rooted to the car floor. She looks at him, really looks at him.

“Buster?”

“Yeah.”

“Wanna tell more stories?”

A
T THE FARM
they walk around the house and Jelly Bean stops to admire Isabel's lily pond and garden. She rubs lemon thyme on her wrists and neck while Buster runs into the house to fetch his transistor radio. Then she follows him across the lawn to the root cellar where a tabby is asleep curled up on the trap door, purring. “This is where I used to hang out,” Buster says, pushing the cat away and lifting the door. “Quick, before someone sees.” He helps her down and she tears her pedal pushers on a nail sticking out of the wall.

It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust. The cellar is a small, square room with one wall of wooden shelves—a dozen Mason jars arranged like medicine bottles, though they'd only ever contained tomatoes, green beans, cherries, pears. There are dates written and faded on the wall above each shelf—1949, 1954, 1957—the years that his mother put up preserves. A stream of late-afternoon light fans in where the trap door is propped open with a stone. Sun filters down white and irreverent. It isn't much of a balm from the world above but it is quiet. From this muffled underground place his mother's charmed voice is a vague and distant dream and his father's brassy commands provoke no reaction. The smell is of raw dirt and old potato skins, a smell he never tires of. There's also a faint odour of sawdust and wood chips that, when stronger, used to cause his nose to tingle and sometimes made him sneeze. He ignores the hint of tobacco smoke. Here he is with Jelly Bean, between the stillness of the underground, like a premature grave, and the lively madness of the fields above. It's the last place he was before the accident. Being down here with her is like a starting gate, a shot at getting back into the game. Their figures loom large on one wall and creep up towards the ceiling.

“Look.” Jelly Bean points. “Our shadows.”

Buster sets the radio down and makes a peculiar figure with his hands. He casts the shape of a rabbit onto the wall. “Guess what this is?”

“It's a rabbit. That's easy, do another.”

He changes the position of his fingers, thinks about how a shadow is just a projection onto a hard surface; it isn't there but people accept it as real.

“Dog,” Jelly Bean says this time.

“No, try again.”

“Cat?”

He drops his hands, moves to switch on the radio. Johnny Cash is playing.

“I know another game.” Jelly Bean steps forward. “Close your eyes.” Buster shakes his head so she pushes her plump lower lip out. “
C'mon,
close your eyes.” This time he does as instructed, though he flinches when she reaches out and runs her fingertips across his cheek.

“What are you doing that for?”

“Trust me. It'll be fun.”

He closes his eyes once more, simply to feel the velvet touch of her fingertips on his paper skin, to know a featherweight touch, not quite a tickle but less than a scratch. He is surprised that he can feel her. Desire resides in his flesh as well as in his mind after all. She smells of the garden and vaguely of his mother and of all things hopeful and steady. He permits himself to smell nothing except this, feel nothing but the heat from her palm near his mouth as she traces a thick, dense spine of mottled flesh all the way along his nose, follows his one good eyebrow and continues down the right cheekbone to where his scar knots and raises up like a railroad track. The tendons in his neck pull taut as if they are currents in a river that has never been explored. The cellar smells of salty, acrid sweat and determination. He balls his fists and the veins in his arms bulge out blue-black as if poisonous blue worms are coursing through his body, as if the fire is inside. Blue and hot and ready to explode.

There is little fresh air and his hair is sweaty beneath his hat, which gives off a musty odour. Of all the shades a flame can burn, he thinks, blue is by far the most dangerous. Of all the shades a flame can burn—red, orange, even mean old white—blue burns hottest. Buster is sure he is meant to know something few people ever learn; that Hell isn't red at all. No fire can scald like an unlived life. Hell is as blue as the hydrangea in his mother's garden he's no longer able to smell. A Chevy Bel Air that he can't afford. Hell is the sky and Jelly Bean Johnson's eyes, no end in sight. Yes, yes. Jelly Bean's true blue eyes. Hell, he knows, is right here on planet Earth. He tries not to think about what she must be seeing, tries not to flinch again or open his eyes and banish the sensation. He pretends he is someone else.

Jelly Bean runs her fingers across his cheek and under his chin.

“Where am I?”

“What?”

“Concentrate.” She circles a patch of scar tissue. “Here's the post office….” She presses her finger to his bottom lip. “This is the bank.” She underlines his lips, back and forth. “And here's Main Street.… Now where am I?” Buster squeezes his eyes even more tightly, imagines himself as Ray Bernstein, a real ladies' man. He focuses on the song playing in the background.
If they freed me from this prison, if that railroad train was mine, I bet I'd move it on a little farther down the line
. He concentrates on the invisible path she is drawing with her finger. His eyelids flutter.

“This is a stupid game.”

“Just try.
Please
.” She has him within reach and can't let go. His skin curves and overlaps beneath her hand, layers and texture and shades of pain. On his skin her pain too, on his skin transcendence. In this moment she wants nothing more than to be his girl, ride on the handlebars of his bicycle, go to a drive-in movie. She isn't worried that he's dangerous or weird looking. In fact, his ugliness could rub off and she wouldn't mind for hers is a mask of a different kind, but a mask nonetheless. Buster is grotesque, surreal, and yet it occurs to Jelly Bean now that beauty is not goodness, though the two are often equated. She imagines he has scars on his lungs the shape of home.

“The park,” he guesses.

“Yes but
where
in the park?”

“Near the swimming pool.” He sounds irritated, impatient. “Are you at the swimming pool?” Jelly Bean smiles and then does something without thinking, something she didn't intend to do; she leans in and kisses him on the corner of his mouth where her parents' hardware store sits. A taste as sweet as a lump of sugar explodes on her tongue. Buster blinks and pulls away fast, stands looking down as if a dumbwaiter has fallen from his chest to his knees. “Don't,” he says, opening his eyes and half-expecting to see Mo Axler's daughter there, sealing his fate. He grabs Jelly Bean's wrist and holds it tightly away from the side of his head. “I said, don't!”

She drops her arm and shrinks back, tries to remember what he looked like before; that appears to be what he wants. What would anything look like without mutation? She doesn't know. She understands only how she's always felt; half in one world and half in another, neither this nor that. And to think that they share this feeling? It's irresistible. In this moment his features could be as pure and smooth as Devon cream but she couldn't want him any more. The farm sitting above them might be glimmering crisp and bright, cupping the sun beneath their chins like buttercups, but if all is predictable and flat, why bother? Jelly Bean takes Buster's scars in deeper. She'd rather see only this if it means she never has to look at the dull repetition of beauty again. “I don't want to stop, Buster,” she finally whispers. “Let's not stop.”

They stand in a silence marred only by the sound of their own weighty breath. The song comes to an end and he hears his name as she spoke it.
Buster
with a soft “B.”
Buster
with a pleading tone. His scars aren't as obvious when his name is said out loud like that. His face is merely a smudge. He's a chameleon. A ruffian.

He is anybody she wants him to be.

L
ATER THAT EVENING
Buster sits between his father and Hank in a pew at the United church on Palmer's Hill, staring at the back of Len Rombout's head. Len called the meeting after another break in, this time in Springford. Most everyone has turned up. Lorraine Rombout with Ivan and Susan. Herb and Gladys Peacock. The Claxtons. Percy brought another primer, Frank Wadley, along. The Brysons are missing and so are the Grays. Is Doc John still sick? Buster is ill at ease without his fedora. “You're not wearing it into the church,” his mother said as he and Hank stepped inside. So his father reached over, elbowing Hank in the process, and lifted the hat from his head. Now it rests in his father's lap as innocently as Buster did when he was a boy playing horse or tractor.

He admires the organ on stage, the austere stained glass windows to his left—a series depicting Jesus carrying his cross, being crucified, and finally rising again. Jelly Bean is squished between Hazel and Walter five pews ahead, also examining the windows. Buster can still feel her lips brushing against his own. He tries to see in the windows what she might. Bright colours. The face of Christ—pale and healthy, blue-eyed—apparently indestructible.

Jelly Bean cranes her neck and meets Buster's gaze. She hasn't stopped thinking about him since the cellar. She didn't expect him to be as tender as he was. She's seen him silent and angry. She's known him to dismiss people with a coarse joke or act the tease until feelings got hurt, but with her in the cellar he'd been respectful. He'd looked at her with an expression that said “I will prove myself to you” rather than the usual “I will make you mine.” Alone, away from others, he'd been a little bit flattering and a whole lot of butterflies in the belly. And then there was the kiss. The kiss that joined them together against the rest of the world. She's played it over in her mind as if it's a moving picture show, and in each version she is more embarrassed by her brazen behaviour. As the meeting gets underway, her mother pinches her arm and she rights herself.

“All right, everyone.” Len stands and faces the room. “Thanks go to Minister Duff for letting us meet here on short notice. You've all heard by now; there was another theft this morning. The Robertson place in Springford. Some of you may remember Vern Robertson from church years ago. He was born in Smoke.”

“Was anyone hurt?” calls out a voice from the back pew.

“No. Just rattled. But Vern's gold watch was stolen. I'd say it's high time we started taking this bandit for the threat that he is.”

“I hear he's been spotted,” calls out another voice.

Everyone turns.

“You seen him, George?”

“No. I thought you did.”

Eyes shift back to Len Rombout.

“I seen an odd-looking sort pass through town early this morning.”

“That must've been him,” says Percy.

“Now how do we know that?” Tom rises from his seat.

“You saying we don't know who belongs and who doesn't?” Len's face is red.

“I'm just saying we can't go tossing accusations around like insults. Tillsonburg was crawling the day he hit up the dairy bar, and we were all at the spring fling when he broke into Mrs. Bozek's. If the Robertsons didn't get a look at him then we can't be sure of anything.”

“He's getting too close for comfort,” says Len. “We can be sure of that. First Tillsonburg, then Zenda, and now Springford. We're sitting ducks.”

“Listen,” interrupts Hazel. “For all we know the bandit is from right here in Smoke.”

There comes a collective gasp from the women in the church. Laura Claxton's eyes grow wide and glassy and Gladys Peacock covers her mouth. “Hazel Johnson, what on earth would make you say such a thing?” She scans the pews. “To think that any of my neighbours would—”

“Well it
could
be one of us.” She rests her gaze on Buster momentarily. “It could be someone right before our very eyes.”