The Journey Prize Stories 24 (24 page)

“Knowing my luck, Rick’s probably come and gone, we took so long getting here,” Dad griped. “I’ll just drive around for a bit till I find him. Did you remember the hot chocolate?”

I nodded.

“Mom packed cookies too,” Janie said.

“You can have those if you get bored.” He stared at the lake. “I’m sorry if you get bored. People are just different, you know? We can’t help who we are. It no big deal, eh?”

“Uncle Rick’s there, Dad, look,” Janie said.

“Where? For Christ’s sake, where?” Dad said. He drove forward slowly.

I looked too. We’d passed ten or twelve men, some of them in pairs, hunched over holes. They were dark shapes in the white-grey globe. I couldn’t see Uncle Rick either.

“Keep going, Dad, he’s out there, I can see him,” Janie said. “Past that guy with the dog.”

Dad drove on. And then I heard a loud crack, like a gun going off, and the front of the truck tipped forward. It was like those dreams where everything is in slow motion and sounds are muffled and all the people have gone and only we are left. The truck tipped forward, and then the front wheels were in the water.

The men said they helped me out, but nobody did. I got up on my own, when I finally found the hole. After Dad pushed me
out of the truck, I floated up and hit the ice from underneath. Over and over, I kept hitting ice. It took the longest time to find the hole.

I wasn’t in the hospital for long. Just overnight. My new jeans had to be cut off. It seemed like the wrong thing to be sad about, so I didn’t tell anyone. My hip was bruised. And my right shoulder and my cheek, where the buckle hit it. The bruises were there for a long time.

The funeral was on Thursday. Janie’s face had make-up all over. She didn’t look like Janie. Her lips and cheeks were red, from the make-up. She looked like a baby, with her smooth, soft skin, but she also looked grown up. Like she was sixteen instead of nine. Her hair was washed and neatly combed. They even put make-up on Dad. I looked at their chests for the longest time, waiting for them to move up and down.

I asked Marla, when Mom wasn’t near, what she meant about the Pichowskys, and she said she didn’t remember. But her face turned bright pink, so I knew she knew.

Marla said we were living in a flower shop, with all the potted mums that filled the living room and the kitchen, some green, some purple, dark glum colours. There were so many we had to put some on the floor. We were in the news, too, the radio and the newspaper and the television even, and Mom said, over and over, at least he was doing something he loved. I wanted her to say the other part, what she talked to Aunt Helen about, that she was angry with Dad for going, after she and Aunt Helen had told Dad and Uncle Rick it was late in the season and the ice was rotten. She never mentioned that on the news.

I wanted her to say more about Janie, too. I’d seen her in Janie’s room, holding a crumpled blue shirt of Janie’s up to her
chest, then pulling it till it ripped and crying as though she was going to break open, right down the middle, like the shirt. Just once she mentioned Janie, to one of the reporters who stayed asking more questions. She told the reporter that Janie was just a little girl. An adult has a choice, she said, but a child –. Then she saw me and Marla lingering in the doorway, as we so often did in the early days after the funeral, lingered near her, and she stopped talking and told the reporter to go. I kept waiting for her to say something, to a reporter or me or Marla, anyone, about getting Janie’s clothes back and finding the five-dollar bill in her jeans pocket, soaking wet. But she never did.

I
’d made it through a real rough patch, and so I had to do everything I could to try and get something going that would keep me together. My brother wouldn’t let me stay with him, but he did put up the money so I could get an apartment. Said he’d help me more if I started going to meetings, but I said I didn’t need that shit. Said all I needed was a job, and believed it, too. Eventually I’m hired to do clean up at one wing of a building at the far end of the university campus – mostly dorm rooms, but there’s a cafeteria and kitchen, a daycare, and two floors of offices for the teachers. I had to clean from midnight until it was done, which was usually five in the morning, and for the first time in years, I really try to stay on top of it and do a good job because I really have nothing else.

I got hired even though for the first week I had to smoke every five minutes, take a dump every two, and was sweating so much I looked like I’d been out in the rain. But the cleaning boss, Charles, seemed to understand. He has one of those
big, bloated noses and you could see he’d been through some rough patches himself. You could never know how bad someone else has had it, but even the worst alcoholics didn’t have it as bad as me. I was a special case – even the doctor said so – but it was still nice to know he had an idea or two about it. One time, he even asked how I was handling it, and I said
good
, because it was mostly true. The job gave me a place to be at the exact time most everyone would be going downtown to drive drinks into them. And it was a job that, for the most part, was quiet and didn’t involve other people. Sometimes I’d see a college kid or two, shuffling around in their pajamas but that was it. And the only other people I’d see were the professors, a couple of young ones who would even talk to me sometimes. They seemed to always be working late, smoking pipes and cigars and laughing a lot. I never really let myself get in too close, because something about them seemed dangerous.

It was impossible to start the shift at the dormitory end, because any day of the week the kids would be going right until three or four in the morning, and if you cleaned it too early, you’d have to pick up trash, mop up drinks or even puke, broken glass, shredded papers, then come back and do it all over again. Instead you’d start with the offices, go down each floor, sweep, mop, and buff. Change garbages. Vacuum the mats near the doors. Clean walls once a week. Wipe down doorknobs and railings and light switches with disinfectant. Do the toilets and sinks and stock everything up, too.

Charles said I had it right. That it was best never to even see the kids, to never even lay eyes on them. A guy who had my job from before, a few years ago, he got fired for fucking one of the girls.

“Whether or not he even did,” Charles said, “And I fucking tell you he
did not
so keep that in mind, too, young fella.”

One night I did end up seeing a girl, at maybe quarter to four, hanging over the stairwell, watching me buff the floor. Her tits were dangling down at me in her silvery shirt and I had to do everything not to take a second look at her. Problem was it was summer, it was hot, and we were both stripped down to almost nothing. I had on shorts and a muscle shirt, and she had on that party top, and as far as I could tell, her underwear. Even with the noise from the buffer and all the space between us, I swear I could almost
feel
her body against mine. Smell her. It had been so long since I’d been with a woman, I almost dropped that big hand-operated thing down the stairs a dozen times.

She kept saying stuff like
you’re hot
, and
you’re younger than the other guy
, and
I like your tattoos
. Shouted them right down on top of me so it bounced off every surface and into my ears. And to be honest, I was scared, scared all around. For my job and my life and to even be seen with her. But I was most scared of what she might think if I actually went for it, if she got a good look at my face and eyes and smelled the stink coming out of my pores. So I put my head down and pushed hard on the handles, as hard as I could, got out of there with the job half done, my prick sticking straight out in front of me.

And so I kept away from there until the very end of the night for both those reasons, and because the only way for things to get back to normal was for me not to lay eyes on any bottles, not to even smell the stuff or look at it. I knew I couldn’t even look at someone when they’re screwed up and having a time. Doctor told me I had to do whatever I had to do in order to
make it work, and the old guys who’d been able to quit altogether all said shit like
it never gets easier
and I had to believe it because what else could I believe? Even all the pamphlets said the same thing, and I imagine the meetings would, too.

Being alone might not have been the solution I needed, though. For the first part, it was. When my system was changing, trying to turn itself into something that didn’t run on grain alcohol and bar food, I needed to be alone. When I would have sudden bursts of energy and the air smelled fresh, when all I wanted to do was tell the world how beautiful it was, when I was so emotional the taste of Mike and Ikes nearly moved me to tears, I knew it was good no one was around. Same as when I’d have a real downward dip and I would be so angry at absolutely nothing – angry at dirt and streaks and myself and the walls – those were times it was good to be alone. And then when I’d have a blackout, and I’d come out of it, scared and confused and I would have a moment where I wasn’t sure if it was a new day or one that happened a long time ago. Those were times I was glad to be alone.

And then other times it would’ve helped to have someone there. Part of drinking so much that your brain is permanently fucked means that you have trouble staying focused on tasks, or else you can get distracted from the ones you need to be doing by ones that don’t matter. For a while I got to counting all the bricks at eye level. I got to thinking for a while that if the number of bricks came out odd, it was an omen that things were going downhill again. I’d feel grim and grey and once even thought about opening one of those big green windows in the bathroom and stepping out headfirst. When it was even, I’d get a burst of energy and I’d hear a whistling sound like my
life was flying down the right path. Those were things that another person could have kept from coming.

The brick count came out odd a few too many times and so I started to get the idea that the building was against me. It wasn’t a thought that occurred to me – it was just that one day I realized it was what I believed, was what I had always believed about the place. Almost immediately after I realized it, I started to see it everywhere.

There was a brick missing from one of the walls, low and on a corner that I hadn’t noticed. I’d walk by it, or just clean the little red crumbs where the hole met the rest of the wall. It wasn’t until I realized that the dirt and bits around it on the ground were from someone’s foot, climbing on it, that I paid it any attention. When I stuck my foot in it and take a step up, I realized there’s another brick missing, a whole arm’s reach up near the top. I felt something slimy up there and let go, and a moment later a few white things went plop onto the ground. At first I thought they were worms – maggots – and I froze, held my breath while my brain tried to work it out. With what I have, figuring things out can take longer than it should, and it was only when I smelled my hand that I finally realized what they are. It’s a horrible smell. Latex and come. Somehow that was worse than maggots and I heard myself scream.

The scream started a chain reaction and then other people are screaming, too. Shouting, yelling, a bunch of men’s voices coming down the hallway. I watched a group of kids bust through the atrium, carrying something over their heads. They were chanting. Saying
Edmond Burke
, the name of the building. I could feel something bad coming off them so I went up the stairs to the cafeteria and stood behind a bunch of
garbage bins just to get something between me and them. Then I noticed what they were holding. A person. A girl. The girl from the dorms – no pants on, just sneakers and that silver shirt. At first I think they’re going to throw her through one of the windows, but then they open the door and throw her outside. It almost looks like a prank, until they chuck her right at one of those boulders near the doors, the ones that kids sit on. She lands on her back and makes a terrible sound but I don’t stay to watch the rest.

I scramble into the cafeteria. Hide. Hide for so long that I fall asleep. When I wake up, it’s still dark, but I leave that whole area alone, don’t even go back to it. The next day I don’t get in trouble for my shitty job, and there’s no blood or skin or teeth or sign of struggle and the boulder looks fine. The condom is still in my uniform pocket though, and there are more used ones in the missing brick. To me, it looked like a pattern, but when I was feeling like that, everything did.

And then, a voice in my head said,
something in this place makes you crazy
. A moment later, it added,
you probably have it too
.

The next week, one of the walls collapses. I was the last person to be told, and so I just come across a whole mess of caution tape and scaffolding and tarps and dust where I was supposed to be cleaning. When I call Charles, he apologizes and tells me to just leave that part and move on.

“Yeah, the fucking thing just let go. Been spitting rocks the size of grapefruits out the front of it for years. One kid even got hit in the ’90s,” Charles tells me. “The whole fucking thing just let go. Two kids died. Girls. Happened to be walking through the door at that exact moment. There’s gonna be a hell of a lawsuit.”