The Lava in My Bones (12 page)

Estelle often chatted with Millie by the north wall. When the boys passed, she'd glance at the stains on their pants. Then her head would turn in my direction so quickly that her neck muscles clicked. Her eyes slitted and her lips formed a perfect horizontal line. “The guys in this school are going mental if they wanna be with Sue.”

My downfall was set in motion the day Jimmy Bridock asked me on a date. Jimmy smelled like wood fires, smoked venison, and gunpowder. He had a lick of hair that swung over his forehead like a cow's tail batting flies. His round cheeks were volcanic with acne, and he had moist eyes and cracked lips always twisting one way then another, as if chronically unsure of what
expression to make. His father took him to the bush where Jimmy cut the steel-jawed traps that clenched dead foxes. He had a homing pigeon's ability to locate trapped animals. Even when I was a little girl, he'd liked me. When I'd push open the door of the grade-school washroom, he'd be standing in the hall with his head down. I'd walk past him and he'd look away and kick at the floor—but when I turned back, he'd be squinting after me. He'd never spoken to me because he probably sensed that my attention was directed elsewhere, for those were the days when your presence filled me, Sam, and I didn't notice other kids. I think our isolation crippled me. Still, I remember the wonderful contraptions you made for me, pendulums swinging from axles you nailed into my bedroom wall, whirling bike wheels perched on steel prongs, and circular plates that hung from ropes—you'd set everything spinning and turn the radio up full blast, “The Nipper in the Cod and the Codder in the Pail,” and it seemed the circles were spinning to the sound and the music was rotating the circles and what we heard and saw were joined to the same relentless, throbbing, rhythmic source.

Now, in grade eleven, with my sweat flowing rapidly, Jimmy became bolder. In shop class one day, I hammered parallel rows of nails into a wooden beam. Unlike the other students, I could whack the silver heads straight on so the iron rods thrust in without bending. Jimmy eyed my forearm moving up and down like the crossbar on a train wheel.
Bang, bang
cried the hammerhead. I stopped to brush away the sawdust. In the silent space between blows, Jimmy spoke to me for the first time ever. His voice started as a rumbling in his throat and emerged as a gasp,
then a strange sing-song squeak as his tongue stumbled around the syllables. Did he speak so rarely that when he did, he used tools rusted from lack of use?

“You're stronger than other girls,” he rasped. A cloud of sawdust hung in the air between us. A power drill wailed. “If we had an arm wrestle,” his voice rose triumphantly over the din, “I bet you'd win.”

The room was now full of the repetitive rah-rah sound of saws cutting. I saw that Jimmy had kind eyes. The swath of protruding, unshaven hairs across his jaw was like a fire-razed forest. He smiled a checkerboard grin and walked away. Could he at last replace you in my heart, dear brother?

The next day in the cafeteria, Jimmy walked up to me and knocked on the tabletop. When he spoke, spit flew from his lips and landed on my hamburger macaroni. His cheeks were flushed. Was this because I'd spoken to him yesterday? Was I the first girl who hadn't run from him in terror? He said, “If you don't mind it, we can get together after school. I wants to go to the bushes.” Jimmy's smile wavered, disappeared, slanted sideways, collapsed, reformed.

I answered “Yes,” like I did when the other boys asked me to the end of the field. The word gave me a feeling of what I thought was power. “Let's meet there.”

Jimmy's cowlick quavered like a radar device. His lips parted, spread, lifted, and his smile was so huge I could see the line separating his teeth from his gums. “Great,” he said. “Let's meet by the bleachers at four.”

When he'd left, I stared after him for a long time. Somewhere
in the distance, I sensed winds lashing seaside cliffs. If I found and gave way to a desire for Jimmy, would my honey finally stop flowing?

Sam, did you know that Estelle and Esther's father owned the new steel foundry? The sisters shared clothes and did their hair the same way. Esther never married. She'd had a series of bad love affairs, but yours was the first, and she believed you'd set the pattern.

Now Esther ran a dressmaking shop overlooking the ocean. She was always furiously whipping doorknobs with strips of fabric and stabbing pins into the eyeballs of mannequins. She only felt satisfied during storms when ships sank at sea and oil rigs collapsed. Few people bought her clothing since it was too fancy, but Estelle often wore her creations, “because I'm a lady,” she'd say, “not like you savage bitches.” On special days (her birthday, the last day of school), Estelle even wore elegant gowns with ruffles and lace, “because I'm special. Only lady-like girls deserve boyfriends.”

In the hallway one day she said to me, “My sister told me your family are goddamned freaks, and I believe it's true. Does your mom love looking at your underwear, too?”

I had the urge to push her to the ground. That'd be easy; Estelle's limbs were pencil-thin, her behind like two eggshells beneath her frilly dress. Sometimes I longed to tear off her clothes and smear wet mud over her ivory-white skin. But
Estelle had a large entourage of admirers, and my status, though higher than before, was tenuous—more than I knew.

Cartwright was playing the visiting Dove Brook team, and we were winning. I met Jimmy in the striped shade behind the crowded football stands where everyone had gathered to cheer. I could see the clump of bushes from a distance, like three ice cream scoops beside a large oak.

“Way to go, Cartwright. Way to go!”
Clap, clap.

Jimmy leaned against a wood pillar and fidgeted as if his entire body were itchy. He said, “Let's walk by the stands.”

The football players ran two abreast across the field. A squad of cheerleaders in yellow blouses and red skirts (I recognized Estelle among them) shook wool pom-poms and screamed, “Cart-wright is all-right! Cart-wright can fight-fight!”
Clap, clap.

Jimmy beamed as if they were cheering for him. He turned a couple of times toward the crowd. He wanted to be seen going into the bushes with a girl. Was this his way of raising his status? I wouldn't mind. I might have used him for the same purpose. Even before my honey problem, my broad shoulders, thick biceps, and plaid shirts had scared people away. As we approached the wall of bracken, I became frightened. What were we actually going to do in there? Jimmy motioned for me to sit on the shadow-dappled earth, and I reminded myself that I was stronger than him. I worried that Mother would find out, but
then I remembered you, Sam, and your advice that I get beyond her power.

Jimmy shyly asked me if he could wipe his finger along my collarbone. I nodded. He wanted a honey drop from the hollow below my ankle, and I said yes. He asked for some sweetness from the space between my breasts, just visible in the V-cut of my shirt. I let him have that too. As he peered at the golden thread hanging from his fingertip, I wondered if I could make myself desire a boy. It was probably interesting to want—
really
want—another person. How fascinating and unusual it'd be to find someone attractive and completely enjoy his or her presence.

A wind blew that rattled the tree branches and brought the scent of faraway forests, pine sap, juniper flowers—a smell part-piquant, part-sour. The wind woke an excitement in my body. It made every pore in my skin open wide and caused my backbone to straighten so completely that I was sitting more erect than ever before. The mouths of my ears gaped, and my eardrums became as still as the water on a lake so distant and hidden that no wind had ever rippled its surface, a lake that had waited an eternity for something even remotely resembling weather. What was I listening for?

To my surprise, Jimmy brought the honeyed fingers of his hand together and shoved them into his mouth. His large tongue swirled out and round in a long, luxuriant movement, licking the liquid off both sides of his fingers. Drops glimmered on his lips. He stared me straight in the eyes as he loudly and definitively swallowed. His Adam's apple leapt forward once.

A strange expression came over his face. His cheeks slowly
reddened and his eyes grew larger, bulging forward like egg yolks. His chest had stopped moving.

“Jimmy?” I said. “Jimmy? Are you all right?”

Flapping his hands in the air, he raced out of the trembling bushes just in time for the home team to score its final goal. The spiralling football descended through the posts and struck him square in the face. He fell to the earth and, his mouth puckering, thrashed on the ground like a fish pulled from water.

I charged out into the blinding sunshine. The spectators in the stands turned toward me. “Dr Merton!” I cried. “Somebody call Dr Merton!”

When the ambulance arrived, everyone was on the field shaking hands with the winning players. Only Estelle noticed me, her shaggy pom-pom fronds dangling from her hands like tentacles. She eyed me for what seemed an eternity, her head a stuck weathercock, the corners of her mouth upturned. On the front of her cheerleader uniform, below her right breast, a circle of sweat bloomed like a flower.

Jimmy remained in the hospital all night.

The next morning, I learned that my honey had caused the sides of his throat to adhere. Although he recovered, his desk at school remained empty for a month. This wasn't altogether unusual. I assumed he was in the woods helping his father cut open metal traps. It was September and the hunting season was in full swing.

Still, the other students grew wary of me. After Jimmy disappeared, the boys stopped asking me to be part of their schoolyard circle. Girls didn't want me to walk home with them. When
students came upon drops of honey on the school steps or the handle of the water fountain, they regarded them at first with annoyance, then outrage, and finally with pure, unmitigated terror. In gym class no one let me join their squads. Exasperated, Mr Schmidt said, “Kids, you can sit beside Sue. She won't bite.”

I noticed Estelle everywhere. She talked constantly, her voice no longer high-pitched and metallic, but husky, full of sly hissing s's and cruel, explosive p's and t's. She spoke at an agonizingly low decibel that everyone but me heard. And she listened to people, one hand on her chin, mentally storing this bit of gossip and that piece of information. She'd become a seamstress stitching together rumours and facts; from myriad ingredients, she created a seamless cloth woven together with real needs and deeply rooted desires, all unified by an innate logic. In the end, the story was not hers but everyone's.