When the Saints (27 page)

I go over and tap Jackie’s shoulder. “Saturday night all right for fighting?” I yell over the music.

He gestures at three hard-looking men standing in front of the dartboard. “I came down to meet the welcome wagon.”

“Picking out the new Troy, are you?”

“No. I came to put a stop to this right here. And don’t say that name to me. You say that name enough times, I’m on the highway back to Jubilant.”

“Drop it. You’re even.”

He stands up. “We’ll never be even.”

He walks up to the bar and I see West hesitate a half second before grabbing five Oland’s from the fridge, plunking them on the bar and snapping the caps off in a line. He shoots me a wary look as Jackie heads over to the dartboard.

I scout the exits and squeeze my eyes closed, but all I can hear is Aerosmith playing on the speakers. When I open one eye, I see Jackie’s beers have found their way into the men’s mitts. I can’t hear their conversation, but I can tell no one’s gearing up for a fight. I know what that looks like. It starts with chest puffing, followed by warnings and insults. Then the warnings turn to threats, then crazy eyes, then whoever’s about to throw the first punch takes off his jacket. I always wondered why there’s such a lead-up. If I really wanted to whoop someone, I’d just come at them like a flying squirrel, but I’ve seen guys seven feet tall with
spikes on their collars follow this same stupid ritual, giving the other guy every opportunity to take back what he said about the frigging Leafs.

Jackie beckons me over. “This is my sister, Tabby.” He hands me the extra beer.

The men smell like leather and fried fish. One of them is wearing a wool sweater in this heat. He looks me over as he takes a gulp of beer.

“I seen you yesterday,” he says. “In the bank.”

“I went to settle some accounts,” I tell him. “Our father just passed away after he was in a taxicab accident and we got a big chunk of insurance money. We’re using it to put up a new house on our old land.”

“
What the fuck?
” Jackie mouths.

“Anyway,” I continue, “the money’s all gone now and we’ve got a niece and nephew who eat like wrestlers. Plus Jackie’s got one on the way, so we’re looking for work. You know if anyone’s hiring?”

The tall one with the shiny bald head pulls out his wallet. “I got a one-year-old.” He slides out a photo of a chubby toddler with blond pigtails. “Ain’t she something?”

“You hitting on my girlfriend?” West thumps him on the back. I didn’t even notice him approach.

“This your woman?” Shiny Head turns to me and rolls his eyes. “Fuck. West don’t do nothing these days except talk about you. I used to come in here to talk about me. Now it’s the girlfriend this and the girlfriend that.”

I raise my eyebrow at West. “What’s the this-and-that part?”

“Never mind,” West says. “Who needs a drink?”

“Give me a Dory 72 and Coke,” Shiny Head says.

West gives him a look. “You ain’t no Dory lush.”

“How do you know?”

“Because your clothes are clean and you still got all your teeth.”

“Ah, but the night is young.”

I notice Wool Sweater getting agitated. When West walks away, he says to Jackie, “That new house you put up is pissing off a lot of people.”

“Why’s that, now?” Jackie asks.

“I think you know why.”

“If it’s about my father, I know he wasn’t nothing but a dumb drunk who stole whatever wasn’t nailed down, but that bitch is dead. Ding dong the merry-o. Let’s all move on.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” I cut in. “We came back to Solace River to have a nice place for the kids to grow up.”

Wool Sweater glances around the room. “Let me put it this way. There’s people looking to get back their losses.”

“You’re starting to piss me off.” Jackie raises his voice. “I’ve had to deal with every shit pile Daddy ever left and I didn’t even know the man past growing up. Yes, I know he cheated people. I
am
one of those people. Tell your ‘party’ if that ain’t good enough, they can dig him up and kick the fuck out of his bones. I’m done with this shit.”

“Just watch your back is all I’m saying.”

I grab Jackie’s arm, and once we’re out the door and halfway up the road, I realize he’s not resisting. I let go, sit down on the curb and let out a small, tight scream.

Jackie glances back down the road, spitting tobacco over his shoulder. “Those guys don’t scare me.”

“No?” I push my hair back hard from my face. “What about the guys behind those guys?”

“They probably don’t exist. Forget it. Poppy read them creepy cards of hers. She said it’s going to be smooth sailing from here.”

“Well, then.” I stand back up. “If Junkie Jane’s creepy cards said so, what am I so worried for?”

“Come on, now. It ain’t fair to call her a junkie when she’s trying to get clean.”

“Why are you always defending her?”

“What?”

“I’m your sister too.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t even think I’m a Saint.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You said so yourself.”

“When?”

A porch light snaps on and a little old man comes out of his house with his hands on his hips, street lights glaring off his glasses. Without waiting for him to ask us if we know what the hell time it is, Jackie and I split off. He heads straight up toward the motel and I cross the street toward West’s. What I really want to do is run back and karate-chop the fucker in the neck.

I feel like I’m ten again. Bird and I never fought as kids, but Jackie and I were like Sylvester and Tweety Bird. I remember one time I overheard Jackie telling Bird that I took off with Daddy’s good hammer. He’d lost it in the woods while he was building
a love shack for his little girlfriends and was hoping I’d get the beating for it. People sometimes say they see red, but I saw actual flames. I picked up a brick over my head and came running at him with it. Bird saw what was happening and pushed Jackie out of the way, held me down and made me use my words. He told Jackie to go find the hammer, and the little jerk must have found it, too, because a few days later my school books went missing and reappeared nailed way up in the trees where only Jackie was crazy enough to climb. I had detention three times for forgetting my books until Bird chucked rocks up to make them fall down. I stayed up all night thinking about what I could do to get revenge. I got out of bed early and spread margarine inside Jackie’s ball cap and shoes. That didn’t seem like enough, so I drew a big dick on the back of his windbreaker with whiteout. Later that day at school, he walked up behind me in the hallway with a pair of scissors and cut off half my ponytail.

When I get back to West’s, I ransack the hall closet looking for that framed photograph of him and his bitch wife. I eventually find it stashed in a box under his bed, take it out back and smash it on the fence post. I let the broken glass slide off and stash the metal frame in his neighbour’s garbage. Then I rip the photo to shreds and flush it down the toilet. One of the pieces has Abriel’s eyeball on it and I watch it go around and around, giving me the stink eye one last time before she’s sucked down to the sewer.

I sit in the living room, chewing on the skin around my fingernails and trying to relax. Before West gets home, I slip back outside and pick up all the tiny glass shards I can find in the moonlight so he doesn’t cut his foot while he’s watering the lawn.

N
OW THAT IT’S TWENTY-THREE DEGREES OUTSIDE, THE
real estate lady is wearing a black turtleneck dress and riding boots. She has a gaudy, gold-painted clip in her hair that slips down toward her ear as she counts our money. She counts it at least eight times and then she can’t get Ma and me out of there fast enough.

“I hope she buys some new clothes with her cut,” I say in the car. “Something that shows us she’s a woman but still a professional. I’d put her in a white sleeveless blouse with an olive green skirt.” I keep chatting away, making up different paper-doll outfits for our salesgirl so Ma won’t notice I’m driving in the opposite direction of the motel. When I pull in to the legal aid office building, she bolts upright and grabs the dash.

“What are you doing? Turn around!”

“This is where you have to go to apply for legal guardianship of Janis and Swimmer.”

“I can’t go in there. They know everything your father’s ever done. As soon as we walk out, they’ll be saying the Saints are all the same, that we can’t take care of our own kids.”

“Things are different, Ma. Daddy’s gone, the house is gone. You’ll see. People are going to melt when they meet Janis out pushing her uncle Bird around, asking the store clerks if they have any bubble wrap he can pop.”

Ma takes a small bottle of lotion out of her purse and coats her finger with it. She slides her wedding ring up and down until it comes off and gently sets it in the glove compartment.

When we walk into the office, a woman in a shiny tube top is screaming at the person behind the desk. A man comes out from
the back and tells her the police are on their way. “We’re getting a restraining order this time,” he says. “You and your family can’t come in here making threats.” After she throws an artificial bonsai tree at him, he looks over and gives us an apologetic smile. “Sorry for the disruption. We’ll be right with you.”

“See?” I whisper to Ma. “The Saints who?”

L
ATER THAT NIGHT, WE MEET UP IN THE MOTEL RESTAURANT
to dicuss what to do with the rest of the money. Jewell offers to transfer her bank account from Jubilant to Solace River and deposit what’s left in her name. In total, there’s about three grand. Along with Bird’s disability cheques, it should keep everybody going until Jackie finds work.

Jackie and I don’t say much to each other, but I stopped being mad at him after I remembered what happened after he cut off my ponytail. He kept it and used to wave it in front of my face, and I constantly searched his and Bird’s room for it. I never found it, but in one of his drawers I discovered a cash box and a homemade fundraising letter for a fake Little League team. Jackie had been going door to door asking for donations and had already collected forty-eight dollars. To make it look legit, he had his pledgers sign their names and write down the amount of their donation. I saw that Mrs. Glen had pledged fifteen dollars. When I showed Ma, she had a conniption.

I look at him smugly across the table, remembering Ma dragging him by the ear up to all the neighbours’ houses. She made
him give back every cent. Apparently, he’d been saving up for a gun that shoots out a grappling hook.

“So, it’s all worked out,” Jewell says. “Once a month, Jackie’s skanky exes are going to come here to pick up their child support and bring the kids so he can spend some time with them. I’ll conveniently be anywhere else.”

Ma asks Jackie if he’s okay for child support payments for now and he tells us he already found work. There’s a new call centre going up just outside of town and he got on with the construction company that won the contract.

“I heard once it’s up they’re going to need shitloads of people in there answering phones,” he tells me. “You should check it out.”

A few days later, I see a notice tacked up at the grocery store: CALL CENTRE JOBS! INFO SESSION 9 A.M. SATURDAY AT THE LIBRARY.

On Friday night, I’m so nervous I get the runs. When I walk into the library the next morning, I see about thirty people sitting around waiting. I recognize a few faces from the old days at the Doyle Street Country Club. They’re holding cookies on napkins, drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. I seat myself on a squeaky chair and everyone turns to stare.

“Hi, my name’s Tabby and I’m an alcoholic.”

Most laugh at my joke, but a few shoot back, “Hello, Tabby,” in unison. The awkward silence seeps back in.

Finally, a woman in a bright blue pantsuit introduces herself and gets the ball rolling. She explains a bit about the job, which is fielding calls from customers experiencing glitches with
their computers. It doesn’t sound so hard. All the solutions to the problems are in a manual that employees keep at their stations.

At the end of the session, I hand in an application. The woman thanks me for my interest, tells me I’ll be contacted if I’m selected for an interview. I compliment her pantsuit and she writes something at the top of my paper, which I’m hoping is,
I like her.

Before I head back to West’s, I walk into the Frenchy’s thrift store and try on some pantsuits. They’re all too dowdy, but I find a dress with a matching jacket that’s pretty sharp. I try it on and stare at my reflection. I feel like I’m wearing a Halloween costume.

“Now that’s a power suit,” the saleslady says. “You can go all the way to the top in that outfit.”

I wouldn’t have far to go. In the info session, they told us their incentive program is that employees with the highest customer satisfaction rating each month get to put their names in a draw for a gift certificate to Swiss Chalet.

West comes home from work as I’m ironing the outfit for the third time, and I tell him everything I learned about the job.

“You know anything about computers?” He looks skeptical.

“The woman said I don’t need to. I just need to know about people.”

He watches me flatten the collar of the jacket and run the iron over it.

“Folks get pretty pissed off when shit stops working. Are you sure you can keep your cool?”

“Try me.” I unplug the iron. “Pretend you’re a client.”

He looks at me blank-faced.

“Clients are what we call the callers. Probably so they’ll think we’re in an LA high-rise instead of downwind of the Solace River landfill.”

“All right.” He puts his fist up to his ear. “Ring.”

“Clien-Tel. You’re speaking with Tabby.”

“It’s about damn time,” West barks into his fist. “I’ve been on hold for twenty Jesus minutes!”

“Are those the same as regular minutes?”

“You getting smart?”

“If I was, I’d leave this dead-end job and go work for Microsoft. Can I assist you with a computer issue today, sir?”

“The fucking thing is fucked.”

“Can you describe for me exactly what it’s doing?”