The Journey Prize Stories 27 (3 page)

“Don’t you cry,” Gus says, pounding his thigh on the bathroom floor. “Don’t.”

He weeps silently, then rising, pictures himself racing up the stairs of his mother’s house, hands locked around a pair of scissors. He digs his keys into his thighs.

Gus enters the middle stall, unfolds the tabloid paper left behind on the floor, and drapes it across his lap. When he’s through emptying his loose bowels, he scoops out his own feces with the newspaper.

“There’s stuff in here that could bring me down,” he mumbles, folding the mess up on his way back to the table.

When he returns, the manager is waiting to escort him out. Rain flooding the streets is gunfire in his head. He slaps at his skull while he waits for an overcrowded bus to stop.

Donny thwacks his muddy work boots against his truck. His cell is ringing the special tone. He holds up a finger to the impatient engineer.

Gus has left his shit (Mrs. B says “excrement”) on the table at Alberto’s Pizza. Donny listens, but the phone cuts out so he asks her to repeat it. She does. “I can’t just leave,” he shouts at the phone. “I’m the fucking guy in charge,” he says, instantly regretting his tone. He punches the truck door, feels acid backing up in his throat. Donny digs his boots into the muck. Mud sucks his ankles until his boots disappear to the top red stripe of his wool socks.

Beetles storming his lids, something loose crawling. Riding back to the HMS Shitstorm from Alberto’s Pizza, Gus paws his eye socket, fist deep, until he sees lime-coloured streaks. He slides the bus window open and breathes, the stench of sweaty fish seat making his stomach churn.

At the next stop, the bus door opens with a shudder. Bookbag waves from the aisle, then sits down next to him.

She’s dressed in black, wishbone thin, prickly teenaged forehead. Gus watches her smooth back her raven hair, bunch a ponytail she never fastens. Her fingertips sift and sort, thunderbolts, won’t stop moving light around.

Gus pockets his balled fist. He tries to focus on the brittle slogans screaming across her tits:
No blood for oil. Draft beer, not war. Fuck yoga
. Seeing the bulge in her breast pocket, he taps two fingers to his lips. She slides out a Player’s Light and hands it to him.

“You okay, Gus?”

Gus drives his palm heel into his cornea. Her voice, too shrill. He closes his droopy lids, makes a wish, opens—she’s still there. Emma twisting the curling iron at her cheek. An orange ball bursts from the rod, ashes dusting her gingham blouse. A mouth opens—a thousand night birds shrieking.

Gus pulls out the spoon he’s stolen from the restaurant, licks the metal, and sticks it to his chin.

“That’s cool,” Bookbag says, “like a shiny goatee.” She rakes her fingers through her tangled hair.

Gus can’t stop the screams, sees all the bones in Emma’s cheek shattered. “Savemesavemesavememoneybackguarantee.” Gus’s mouth begins running on bus rhythm.

Bookbag pulls Gus’s hand from his face, gently turns it over. His whole body vibrates while she smoothes the padded skin. After a while, Gus’s baggy body slumps down in its seat. Together they look out the rain-spattered window, watch the hanging duck breasts glimmer along the gluey sidewalks of Chinatown’s Dim-Sum Drive.

“This is me,” Bookbag says, rising uncertainly. “Gonna be all right?”

Gus hauls her back down. She stiffens when he slaps something into her hand. A wad of bills crackles in her palm. Gus is rocking in his seat again.

“Okay, okay, I’ll keep this safe for you,” she says uncertainly. “Four more stops then pull the cord. See you tomorrow?”

Gus watches Bookbag climb down the stairs, light up, blow a silver plume through the open doors. He fans the sulphur sting, feeling sharp metal boxes clang and clip the corners of his skin.

Mrs. B is waiting for Gus in the doorway, knowing better than to make him talk. She leads him back to his room and settles him down on the bed.

“Trouble comes,” she says, patting his hand, then pulling a tight arm around his torso. “Blame genes, or blame Jesus, just don’t let it get you down.” She rises to fetch water for his pills. “Better tomorrow.”

Gus lies with his back against the wall, watches the floor beams split, the light shattering him into a thousand pieces.

Two heel-clicks, three stomps down the hall before lights out. When Joe knocks on his door, Gus doesn’t answer. Gus swallows two white pills, letting the night swarm slowly under his chin. Metal flies and bounces from the top of his skull. Knife-prick fingertips until his hands go numb.

By 3 a.m., he is still wide awake. His knocking head won’t quiet. He decides to slip downstairs to the kitchen, grabs his favourite apple-green cereal bowl from the cupboard. Mrs. B
is lying on the living room couch, a wet facecloth across her forehead. Gus fills his bowl with Cheerios, tucking the box under his arm. Creeping past Mrs. B, he sees her hand jerk on her belly. He bends over, kissing her lightly on the lips. Her eyelids flutter but she hardly moves. Padding back up to the third floor, he pushes on to the end of the hall, closing the bathroom door behind him.

From the back of the toilet tank, he removes the pills he’s been collecting all year. He drains the last of the Cheerios box, mixes the blue turtles and O’s with water, watches the candies sink and toss in their oat sea. He tosses in another few. He pulls the restaurant spoon from his khakis’ pocket and stirs the mess before shovelling it into his mouth, craving a long, cement-headed sleep.

Mrs. B is clutching the cordless when Donny arrives. The ambulance attendants are balancing Gus on the stretcher as they descend the stairs, Joe yelling at them to hurry.

Donny orders them to put his brother down in the living room. Reluctantly, they set their burden down. With all his force, he lifts his brother’s torso from the stretcher, works his way down the arms, torso, feels for the broken soul bones.

Sirens silent, he watches the ambulance roll down the street.

Donny motions he’ll be right back, needs to get the cell from his truck to call his wife. He closes the front door, making sure he hears the solid click.

In the truck, he steers straight for an after-hours bar. Head swimming in booze, he drives until he remembers.

On his way home from his buddy Cheevie’s house, pie-stuffed and pleased with himself after winning drunken Pong on Nintendo. Light on in his sister’s room above the garage. When the acrid stench reaches him in the hallway, he mounts the stairs two by two.

From the doorway, Donny sees Emma on her knees, hair locked in a curling iron set flat against her skull. Smoke streams from the brittle strands of Emma’s hair. Everyone is screaming. Lying next to his sister, Gus is face down, his right hand closed around a pair of scissors to set Emma free.

Head swimming with Cheevie’s dad’s cheap rye, he watches Emma punch out weakly with her left arm. His mother is giving Emma the old Fingernecklace from behind, her hands locked around his sister’s fragile windpipe. Donny touches his throat. So drunk he can hardly move.

It won’t stop.

Not when Emma falls forward, face striking the bed stand.

Not when his mother tears the electric cord from the wall, lifts the ceramic lamp overhead.

Parked on the demolition site, Donny sucks in a chestful of diesel. The smell comforts him, in a quiet way, as dawn breaks between glass and steel, bathing Yonge Street in fractured yellow hues. He bends to tighten his bootlaces, then rising, deliberately smashes his face against the side-view mirror.

Gus and Mom and he and Gus and Pinky and Joe and the sharp, bottomless world tucks a rusty hook in his mouth, hoisting him over the city twenty storeys. His swooning face a wrecking ball, Donny cracks a fat-lipped grin, the momentum in him growing, knowing now he’ll never be able to avoid the crash.

G
host-Mom has been hanging around me all evening, smoking her cigarette. When she was alive she always had a pack of her
fer shit sake sticks
nearby in case of an emergency. Now that she’s dead, a machine-rolled Du Maurier hangs endlessly from her lips. She sucks on it pathologically. In the last few months, I’ve yet to see her need to light a new one.

“Why are you
here
, Mercy Beatrice?” she says. Her see-through body bristles up like a used scrub brush. “I told you to stay away from this place.”

Here
is Bodie, British Columbia. Bodie used to be a self-sufficient whistle-stop along the Canadian Pacific Railway during the lure of Gold Mountain. When the rush was over, they flooded 920 hectares of forest to power the twin turbines running the aluminum smelter on the other side of the cordillera. Now all that remains is my father, his junkyard that operates off scrap brought in on the train, and Pauley.

I know she isn’t really angry because I’m in Bodie; she just
wants to know why I’m hanging around my father. My mother’s ghost is a bit like the ones in those Biblical bully-fests she used to read to me at bedtime. Her voice comes from a bottomless pit, and there’s a warning in it, like she’s asking for some sort of repentance, but I don’t know what for. What does she expect me to do? Air-grip her legs and squirt tears of supplication out of my eyes? She’s on repeat: Why are you
here
? I told you to stay away from
this place …
over and over. When she sucks in, the fiery cherry burns off her fog-body and evaporates her mouth.

The first time I saw her here, wind was tearing through the rusted carcasses in the junkyard, gathering speed off the reservoir. It was a few days after I’d arrived and she surfaced suddenly, as if she had always been there, but the wind took away the haze, leaving behind only the stubborn: the rocks, the trees, my mom. Immediately, cold goosebumps prickled up along my arms, but when I went toward her, there was nothing—no smell of her tar soap or trace of acrid cabbage soup on her breath. I cautiously waved my hand through her torso. She just stared and drained her cigarette like she always did when she thought I was being theatrical.

I have to admit, Ghost-Mom looks amazingly accurate, even down to the wiry dark hairs on her forearms, the muscular face, and the thin lipless dash of her mouth. She’s always dressed in her professional wrestling costume, the one she wore when she performed as “The Polish Poo-Bah,” with the blue tights and a flowing shirt with a wide red belt cinched around her diaphragm where her breasts should be. Her cape, with its carefully embroidered gold crucifix, falls flat against her back and its stiff collar rises behind her head like an old
carapace. All I had when I got to Bodie was my suitcase and my dad’s old trading card, fished out of the garbage from one of Mom’s tossed cigarette packs years ago. The picture was taken around the time my parents met during a mixed tagteam event, when he was one of the world’s most feared heavyweights. He had just won the 1940 Midwestern title. His name, “Little Lew,” sashays across the stiff paper and underneath my father looks out like an Adonis.

When I handed over the money I got from Mom to buy the train ticket, I slipped Dad’s card into her empty cold-cream tin to take with me and held tight. All I knew of him was what was found on the back of that card: 6 feet 2 inches tall; 140 consecutive wins; 350 pounds, plus an anecdote describing how he once jumped off a balcony with a noose tied around his neck while he whistled “Yankee Doodle”—and lived due to the impressive strength of his 22-inch neck.

I stepped off the train and waltzed up to the junkyard with a dry knot stuck like a hairball in the heart. I couldn’t believe that I was about to finally meet my long-lost father. That I had made it here on my own. Most of all, I was relieved to have finally escaped the confines of the Old Ursine School for Orphans, its endless laundry chain, and the nuns with their arthritic charity. Even Mom in her last days of fighting TB was more chipper than Sister Patricia.

My father, it turns out, is pink-jowled and hog-necked. His pants are usually held up with twine suspenders tied with multiple knots because he doesn’t bother to undo when he goes to bed at night; he just cuts his way out with a knife. Pauley told me soon after I arrived that my father downs a daily spoonful of brandy mixed with strychnine, his old
manager Blumenkranz’s prescription for broken collarbones and bent knuckles.

That first time we met he looked at me through milky eyes, perplexed, his forehead wrinkles lapping the shore of his balding head. He smelled like old Mr. Armchair Antoni from the front lobby of our last apartment. And he must have seen it in my face—the sheer disappointment. I tried, unsuccessfully, to mask its presentation. Oh great, I thought. Then again, who did I think would ever marry The Poo-Bah?

“It’s your long-lost daughter,” I chirped, spreading my arms.

“Daughter?” he grunted, stroking his chin with knuckleless fingers.

I grinned, but even to me my smile felt rubbery and huge and my eyes red. Despite my efforts, I could feel one eye twitching wildly under the weight of his stare. There I was, one tiny moment away from jelly-lipped. I grinned a little harder.

“What’s wrong with your face, kid?”

I get the feeling that there aren’t many moments in life where what you think is going to happen works out exactly like how you’d plan it. That by the time you comprehend the sinkhole reality of it, it’s generally too late. It wasn’t like I thought my father would appear in a golden glow and sweep me into his arms. But I didn’t think the first thing he’d do after he met me was reach down and grab a 200-pound yard sow snuffling around his feet like a puppy, and then, in some sort of potential display of mentorship, jack it over his head.

“This pig’s been here since she was just a two-pound runt,” he slurred. Underneath the mass of his brow, his eyes looked
small and sad. He did a slow, shaky turn and, as if to affirm that doggedness is the main key to worldly success, said, “I’ve just made it a habit of lifting her a little
every day
.”

And then there’s that devastating moment when you see that you may have based a choice on shaky foundations.