Andrew has water coming out of his mouth. I asked Mom why Andrew has water coming out of his mouth, but she didn’t answer. He sits beside me on the bus going to school and he has a big long coat and he speaks differently, which seems to have something to do with the water coming out of his mouth. Certain words he doesn’t seem to be able to say, and his lips twist weirdly and the clear, shining water—spit, I guess—comes streaming from his mouth as he tries to talk, but mostly he doesn’t talk he just sits there, which I like because I can hold my fingers up before my eyes and wriggle them around and when I do that, I can see Mickey Mouse and Goofy, and I can see all the scenes that I imagine, like in the Walt Disney films where everything goes wrong at once, and the colours and the hilarity and funniness all shimmer and agitate, and my heart beats quicker.
Most kids I sit with on the bus I won’t do it beside, but Andrew never seems to notice, or if he does notice he doesn’t care, or maybe even accepts it, where the other kids make fun of me and put me down, and my dad sure doesn’t like it, he gets mad and yells at me, and of all the things I do he acts like it’s the worst, so I do it in my room where he can’t see, or before he comes home from work in the living room, where I do it instead of watching TV, and I look forward to it all day at school, and with Andrew beside me I don’t have to wait until I get home to do it, I can do it on the bus on the way home from school, and when I do it, it seems like the long bus ride doesn’t take long at all, it seems I just start doing it and then when I next look up I’m home and the bus driver is saying it’s my stop, and I don’t know where all the time went, just like when I go in the house and sit in the chair in the living room and do it, and I don’t know what’s on TV anymore, and I don’t know where the time goes, or even what’s going on around me, and my dad comes home from work and I don’t notice, till he stands at the door to the living room and slams his hand against the side of the door and it shocks me out of doing it. I jerk with an awful feeling as the visions of Mickey Mouse blast apart, and all I see is my dad’s angry face shouting at me: “Tim! Stop that!”
A hard, sparking feeling goes through my body and turns to dread at my dad’s anger, though it’s better than at other times when he just looks at me and shakes his head disappointedly. Or the time when I was sitting in the chair by the front window and he drove in the laneway and got out of his car, and he got out and just stood there staring at me through the window, which I didn’t notice until some feeling told me and I looked away from my fingers, from my “diddling” as he calls it, and saw him standing outside staring at me with an angry, sad expression on his face, that would have been bad if it was just angry, or just sad, but with the two of them together it was worse, and when he came in and asked me what I was doing and I said, “Diddling, I guess,” and he said, “Oh, I thought you were waving at me, or something,” almost joking—that was worse than if he had been angry and mad and shouting.
But Andrew doesn’t take any notice, he mostly just looks out the window at the fields and forests drifting by, with the water on his lower lip and sometimes on his chin, glistening and shining in the sunlight coming through the window. He has shoes with strips on them called Velcro which stick together and keep them on instead of shoelaces, and I say to Mom I wish I could have those kind of shoes like Andrew and she says, “You don’t want them,” and I say yes, I do, because when I try to tie my shoelaces they don’t stay tied and people get mad, and when I try again my fingers get nervous because people are watching me, because I think I can’t do it and will never be able to do it, and the strings won’t do what my fumbling fingers want, like they’re making fun of me, like they’re escaping me, and my eyes fill with tears and I feel cold sweat at the top of my forehead, and I want shoes like Andrew has, I ask my mom why can’t I have them. She says I want them so I don’t have to learn to tie my shoes, and it’s true, but also because I don’t think I ever will learn to tie my shoes, and it doesn’t make sense when I could just slip my shoes on if I had shoes like Andrew has, and press the fuzzy, sticky bands over the front to put them on, and I wouldn’t have to want to cry. But Mom says, “You’ll learn to tie your shoes,” and I can tell she’s about to say something else, about Andrew, but she says, “You’ll learn to tie your shoes,” again like she didn’t say it the first time, so I know I have to live with my fingers fumbling with the strings again, or people laughing at me when I walk around with them untied, adults saying, “You’ll trip over that lace,” but I never do.
But no one ever says that to Andrew because he has no laces, and even if he did they probably wouldn’t say it, at least the adults, because none of them talk to him very much anyway. It’s the other kids who laugh and poke fun at him, but that doesn’t matter because he never talks back to them or gets upset by them, and just keeps walking in that slow way, and he’s much bigger than all the other kids, and I’m one of the smallest kids in class, so I like hanging with him because he’s almost like an adult, a quiet, slow, accepting adult, and I get upset when they laugh at me, when they call out rude names and say they’re going to hurt me. But beside Andrew I don’t get so upset or scared, it feels like he takes in all the bad words and the rude making-fun and it makes no difference to him so it should make no difference to me, or maybe he really is taking it into his big, slow body, pulling it in like a sponge or a shield, so it can’t hit or hurt me, it goes all into him and none at me, like now he sits beside me on the bus so I can diddle, and he just sits at the window, the sun going down gleaming on the water on his chin.
At school Andrew has to leave every afternoon for a couple of hours, with a couple other kids for a special class, and sometimes I wish I could go too in the same way I wish I could have his Velcro shoes. He goes out the door with Sally, a thin girl with bright butter-coloured hair, and Jerry Passingmore, who has really short black hair cut close to his skull, and little white spots in his skin along his skinny jawbone. I remember on Valentine’s Day when we all made little mailboxes for our valentines out of big orange envelopes that we taped up on the chalk ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard that went all around the room, and Jerry Passingmore didn’t get one Valentine in his envelope and later when we sat at our desks waiting for the bell to ring to get on the bus, we smelled this weird bad smell, and looked at each other, and then we all looked at Jerry Passingmore.
He sat there staring down at the top of his desk, his face getting redder and making the white dots on his jaw stand out more, because the sickly sweet, heavy, warm, almost touchable smell told us all that he’d pooped his pants. Though kids smiled and laughed at each other, and some of the kids would later make fun of Jerry for pooping his pants, it was one of those things that you almost didn’t want to make fun of or talk about, each of us imagining a log of poop in a toilet bowl, or more so the log emerging from Jerry’s bum, and crumpling, folding over into itself in his underwear and filling it, stretching it with its pulp between his bum and the hard seat of his chair under it. You didn’t really want to mention it because it was like death, a dead squirrel by the side of the road, or some other terrible thing.
Though it did make me think of when I had to pee, and I had it in my head that I didn’t want to ask the teacher because I kept thinking I could hold it till the end of the class, and I kept feeling its tightness, that crackly, spidery feeling at the end of my penis until I was really fighting just to keep it in, till I was straining like when you’re running and you can’t run anymore, then you think you’ll run to the next tree, and after that, you think you’ll run just to the next pole, and so I thought if I can just hold it in until… and then maybe I thought I could just let a little bit out, and I did whatever you do in your mind to let a few drops out, and when those drops came out it wasn’t like just a few drops coming out, but they were a fact, a fact that pulled more drops of pee out of the end of my penis, and aside from the fact, their coming out was one of the most wonderful feelings I ever felt, they were a fact that pulled the rest of the pee out of me and I couldn’t stop it, still thinking as the warm almost-hot liquid spread across the crotch of my pants that maybe no one would notice, the beauty and the relief of the sensation overwhelming me, pulling all of me from my head and all the other parts of my body down to my penis and through it, and the lovely warm flow overtaking the entirety of my lower torso and out onto the indented plastic seat of my chair, and then overflowing the seat, and then I feel and hear the urine splattering over the edge, dripping over the sides of the seat and pattering on the floor below. I hear it and do not dare to look down, knowing if I do what I’ll see, the shining pool of pale yellow over the linoleum tiles composed of white and grey little stones and dots I often think of as planets when I stare down at them during boring math.
Now I knew they would be floating serenely under the reflective pool of pee, just as I knew kids were looking at me, that the spattering against the floor had got their attention, and I could feel their eyes on me and also see them from the corners of my eyes, and I dared not look at them just as I dared not look down at the pool I knew was growing on the floor beneath me, as the pee was not stopping, as I didn’t know the volume of pee from a normal pee, or maybe I did know but my body fooled me that it wouldn’t be so much, or wouldn’t be noticeable by the others if I let some out, or if I let some out the rest wouldn’t want to follow, or I wouldn’t want the rest to follow, or I would be able to control or resist letting the rest go as it was now coming in a fast, vicious river of hot urgency, sending its rain rushing over all the sides of the seat, splashing and splattering on the hard floor below, and I knew and saw all eyes around me now focused, alerted by the sound, seeing the insidious glinting of the industrious seeping of the pool, and the darkening blackening stain of my pants now extending to my thighs, the pee on the floor widening till I have to move my shoes to escape the warm smelly wetness.
And when the teacher asks if I have to go to the washroom, then asks over the intercom if they can send Mr. Morton down, I get up, still not looking around at the kids, including Toby Norton who I know is grinning at me with sneering eyes, and the girls who I know are more sympathetic, but somehow that makes it all the worse. I meet Mr. Morton coming in with his mop and pail, and he doesn’t look at me, not because he’s mad or angry but more like he knows it’s me that’s done what I’ve done and it’s no big deal, it’s what he’s used to or what he expects because he’s the one who cleans up all the kids’ messes, like when a kid gets sick he comes and sprinkles the white powder over the throw-up, which I don’t know if it makes it easier to clean up or makes the smell go away, the smell that’s so awful and inescapable that you can’t smell anything else, and so strong it makes you want to throw up, almost like the throw-up on the floor is calling to the throw-up inside of you and is making it come out, making you gag to pull the throw-up out of you almost like the other throw-up is lonely, just like the first few drops of pee you think you can let out with no problem call to the rest of the pee and soon your seat is full of pee, the floor is full of pee, your pants are black with pee and you’re walking to the washroom, your shoes squeaking with the pee and as horrible as the attention of the whole classroom is, it was wonderful to feel the flow, wonderful to feel the warmth, now going worriedly cool.
Some say that Andrew wears diapers, along with his Velcro-banded shoes, and the special classes he goes to, but what Andrew does best is carry snow. At recess we build forts and I take charge directing the other kids, Walter and Rachel Safer, to roll up the massive balls of snow and then carry them and set the other balls of snow to build a wall, for we are the kids who have no other friends, and the other kids build snow forts too, but ours is the best for we have Andrew and Rachel who is almost as big as Andrew to lift the giant balls of snow onto the others to make the walls bigger, and Andrew is the best at it. I tell him what to do and it seems he isn’t listening, he just stands there, poised, not looking at me, the water dripping down his chin, but then he goes and does exactly what I tell him, rolling up a massive ball then lifting it and carrying it like it is a big beach ball filled with air, and he takes it even though he can’t do a lot of things like tie his shoes or print or fold paper, he puts the snowball right in the right place in the wall, although I have to smooth it down and mould it in so it stays. He works away like one of those big machines, or like an animal, a horse that gives itself to help people, or an elephant that works with its small blinking peaceful eyes, never asking for anything, just eager to do what’s required though with no particular urgency or stress—he walks carrying the boulders of snow as if he has always done it, a million times before, or as if he always will do it, forever.
But just like with the Velcro shoes, when I ask Mom if he can come to my birthday party she says, “Are you sure you really want him to come to your birthday party?” with the look like she had when I asked for the giant Mickey Mouse doll at Zellers, or when I said I wanted a dollhouse to play with, and maybe it’s because the teacher said on my report card that I have trouble folding paper, or the gym teacher said my coordination was bad and asked my mom and dad to come in for a special meeting, or when I play sports at school and no one wants me on their team so when the captains are picking teams everyone gets picked and I’m left there on my own at the end, with both sides picked and the captains arguing about which one will have to pick me.
Maybe because of all that, and the diddling too, they think I’m like Andrew or Andrew’s like me, since I heard Dad say that Andrew was “off,” and I asked what that meant and he said Andrew “isn’t normal,” and it made me want to ask if I was normal but I didn’t because I didn’t know what he would answer, but it was like Andrew was some other thing, another thing that doesn’t seem right, like a raccoon that lay beside the edge of the schoolyard and its body wasn’t there anymore, all that was there was these shiny, bright things moving around constantly—maggots—and I said they were gross, and another boy said they were eating its body and I said they were gross again, and he said, “Why do you keep looking at them then?” And the truth was that I couldn’t help looking at them, that my eyes and attention were sucked in horribly and totally by them, just like they sucked at the dead body of the raccoon, and I wanted, needed, to look at them, as though if I could take them in completely I’d have no need ever again to be horrified by them. I had to come back to them till they horrified me no longer, but at the same time I knew there was no end to their ability to horrify and that in itself was more horrifying and infinitely fascinating too, a deep dark bottomless well of horrification that was inexhaustible, that made all your bones feel hollow, and made you catch your breath painfully in your throat, yet was tremendously exciting at the same time, or something you knew that was not right but you had to go there anyway, you were impelled to cross the line because somehow if you didn’t you might as well have never lived that day, you might as well have just gone back to bed and done nothing, like with the fluffy white kitten we got, Sally, and they said don’t be rough with the kitten, and when I was alone with her in the living room I could hear them talking in the kitchen, and I picked up the kitten by the tail, and slowly began to swing her in a circle around me, and as she swung around at the end of the length of my arms and of her tail, her panicked eyes wide, as the lamp and the sofa and the TV all revolved around her like a merry-go-round, her body softly dipping and coasting in the graceful wind, an almost unbearable excitement and horror surged in me, and it was bad, and it was “off,” and I let go of the tail and the kitten soared through the air, through the living room, and plopped into the curtains over the big picture window, then fell and plopped against the floor.
Just after that happened with the kitten my dad walked into the room, and he didn’t know and never knew what happened and that made me think, as he went and turned on the TV then went and laid down on the couch like he did every night to watch it, that anything could happen the minute before a person walked into a room, and they would never know it, so that it was, for them, as if it had never happened at all, and so with this, the only person to know it happened was me (and the kitten, who was now padding dizzily out from behind a chair) so that it really was as if it never happened at all, except to me, who knew, but there was something desperate and awful, like a knife blade about it, something shameful and unpleasant, a piece of poop you suddenly find on your finger after wiping yourself, or those things your parents talk about in low voices and when you ask them what they’re talking about they just stop talking about it, and look at each other and don’t answer: Is Andrew like that and are they afraid I’m like that and is that why they don’t want Andrew at my birthday because if he’s there I’ll become more like Andrew the same way more pee wants to come out when you start peeing, or the way throw-up wants to come out of your stomach when you see throw-up on the floor? Just like if they got me the special Velcro shoes I wanted then I wouldn’t have to learn to tie my shoes, then I might have to go to special classes and wear diapers, and have water come out of my mouth like Andrew?
Or maybe it was like the trillium flower I saw back in the bush behind our house, when my dad pointed at it and said, “That’s a trillium flower, but don’t ever pick it.” I asked why and he said, “Because that’s a trillium flower. It’s the official flower of our province and it’s against the law to pick it.”
It was a white, almost impossibly white flower whose petals were like a whole bunch of triangles, or the folded-up paper things that girls make at school that they move around with their fingers and ask you what your favourite colour is, and it glowed there amongst the indiscriminate weeds and brush and decayed wood and I said, “If you pick it will they put you in jail?” and my dad chuckled, “Maybe, little buddy—more ’n likely they’ll give you a fine—but don’t pick it, I don’t wanna be payin’ any fines,” and we walked on and I looked back at the trillium glowing in the brush, and I knew I never would pick it but at the same time I wondered how anyone’d know if I did, whether they had police or inspectors going through the bush, or whether if I picked it someday men would just arrive at our door and ask for me without any of us knowing why, but mostly knowing that if I picked it my dad would know, and that was good enough for me.
Maybe Andrew was more like that trillium for me. He was like a secret, and if he came to my birthday party, or if I argued for him to come, they wouldn’t allow me to be friends with him anymore, so I needed to let the trillium stay in the forest, and keep the secret of the cat swung around the living room, just like I needed to keep the secret of picking my nose and eating it, because it tasted good and salty, just like the sleepers in my eyes tasted good and salty, as the Plasticine at school tasted good and salty, like the white glue tasted tangy and salty, almost like mayonnaise, and the yellow glue from the tiny clear plastic bottles with the red, mouth-like applicators you could suck it out of tasted vinegar-like and sweet, though the stuff you picked out of your ears didn’t taste that pleasant at all, and had a far less enjoyable, waxy consistency.
I suppose I knew I wasn’t like Andrew just like they knew I wasn’t, because I could talk, and I didn’t have water coming out of my mouth like he did, and I didn’t have to go to special classes like he did, and it’s not like I wanted to be like him, but I didn’t want to be like the other kids, or rather I didn’t understand them, like the boy who stood behind me on the very first day of school and kept pushing at my back, and I turned around and asked him to stop, but then when I turned back around he kept on doing it, and I turned around and asked him why he kept doing it after I asked him to stop and he didn’t answer, just smiled, and I didn’t understand and I still don’t understand, but Andrew would never do that, mostly because he of course doesn’t talk at all, but also Andrew only does one thing, and only is one way, not lots of different ways like everybody else.
But also if not tying my shoes makes me more like Andrew and not like everyone else, that’s my way of showing Andrew is my friend and I didn’t care if I was like Andrew if that was the case, because I was uncoordinated and because I diddled, and because I didn’t play with the ball mitt that my dad got the night I was born from his friend Fred Scott, as he always said, “The night you were born I went out drinkin’, you know, celebratin’ with my friends, and my friend Fred Scott, he said, ‘Hey Dirk, you got a brand new son, hey?’ and he left the club and came back with this ball mitt and said, ‘Here, this is for your son, we’ll make a pitcher or a left fielder outta him,’” and my dad would hold up the mitt when he told the story, the mitt that was born the same day I was, and I felt bad because I didn’t play baseball, like I had broken some law of God by not playing with the mitt that had come into being at the same moment I had, but I just had no interest like I had no interest in hockey or football or any of the sports my dad had played, and even when my dad would say, “Whyn’t you go play with the ball mitt—Fred Scott was in the other day and said ‘How’s your boy doin’ with that ball mitt, is he a left fielder yet?’” I never had any interest in the ball mitt so maybe that’s why they thought I might be like Andrew, or would become like Andrew through hanging around with him.
But anyway I had my birthday party, with all the kids coming to it bringing notes for the bus driver so he’d drop them off at my house instead of theirs at the end of the day, and Mom had a box full of little toys, each with a string tied around them that dangled out of the box and she brought it out, holding it up and letting the kids pull at the strings to get the surprise toy, and when my mom was getting it ready before the party I saw that one of the toys was a Mickey Mouse figurine that I wanted, so she put a little mark on the string attached to it with a red magic marker so I knew which string to pull, and also when she brought it around at the party she held that side of the box where the string was towards me, so I got the Mickey Mouse figurine and none of the other kids knew. Big Michelle from across the road was helping with the party and when it came time for the birthday spanking she held me across her lap where she sat on the floor, and let all the kids spank me for my birthday and when it was her turn to spank me she hit hard and it really hurt, and then she did a “pinch to grow an inch” and that really hurt, and tears came into my eyes from the pain and also from the anger that she would do this on my birthday—and for the rest of my birthday my backside smarted and I was mad.
That was in the house before the bush in which the trillium glowed, down a gravel side road from Highway 7, beside the creek the side road bridged across, though a lot of the time it seemed the bridge was out, and the creek ran up the side of where we lived, and then there was a pond back a ways. On one Easter the Easter Bunny brought me and my brother plastic colourful bug catchers, and after we unwrapped them and Mom and Dad went back to bed, me and my brother went to use the bug catchers where we knew there were lots of bugs, at the pond, where the bulrushes grew up high, and the tall grass, and the pussy willows and cattails, the strange milkweed plants that had pouches you open up that are filled with milk like you might get from an animal, like the white glue you get at school, or the pussy willows just like the paw of a cat, or the furry rabbit foot you got for a keychain (and Dad shot rabbits with the twenty-two gun he told you to never go near, and he cut up the rabbit in the kitchen sink) and the weird weeds that gave off little yellow pellets, or white ones, and the green thistles whose greenness seemed to add to their evil, as they waited for you to step on them to cause you pain.
Down in the pond was the seemingly powdery green stuff that gathered on its surface, making it seem almost solid, and all around the pond the earth was nearly liquid and the tall grass and the reeds hid it so there was no clear line where the pond ended and where the land began, it was all muddy and deceptive and most of all there were bugs flitting all around, the butterflies and also their more nondescript cousins, the moths and other bugs that whipped around but with wings only of white or grey or black, and the simple common flies that joined along, but with maybe a strip of electric blue or purple or green, the shining grasshoppers that leapt up suddenly from who knows where to throw themselves suddenly across your eyes, the mosquitoes that plagued every summer, the tiny almost-nothings inflicting their petty damage who were almost benign compared to the bees and the hornets—the bees which I hated because everyone told me they wouldn’t sting you if you left them alone and didn’t bother them, and once when I saw a bee I stood stock-still so as not to bother him, and he landed on my temple beside my eye, and he sat there and I felt and heard him buzzing, and I felt him moving around, his horrible buzzing like the turning over of an evil motor. I held my breath and willed myself into paralysis, as my insides crawled with the awful feeling moving at my temples like a cat pawing at its bed, until I knew that him moving around was just to get a decent grip from which to sting me as I felt the sharp stinger pierce into my temple with the fierce terrible buzzing seemingly gaining in volume and I cried with the pain but also with the feeling of betrayal from all those who said that if I left the bee alone he wouldn’t bother me.
At least with the bees you got the satisfaction of knowing they gave their lives to sting you, because their stingers had rough edges so they couldn’t pull them out without pulling their guts out and dying. It wasn’t that way with hornets who, as my dad said, had long slick stingers that could go in and out like a needle on a sewing machine over and over again, as my brother found out when he went into my dad’s old abandoned Jeep by the laneway and a whole swarm of hornets come out at him, like a long piece of black fabric unwrapping and flapping in the wind the swarm came, chasing his small boy body across the yard and stinging him over and over, so he got taken to the doctor who said now he was allergic to hornet stings and if he ever got stung by a bee or a hornet again he could die and my dad said, “I told you to stay out of that Jeep!”
All this was on our minds as we crept through the weeds to the pond on Easter morning with our bug catchers, and we heard the trilling all around that we always heard in the summer which I always used to associate with my mother’s cigarette smoke and the way it smelled outside, but when I heard the buzzing trilling when she wasn’t around I thought it must be the engine of summer keeping the summer going, or the sound made by the golden spidery rays of the sun that you saw when you half-closed your eyes and looked at it, for the sound sounded like the gold spidery rays looked, as though they shone so bright they became sound. Our excitement made our hearts beat faster as we came to the pond, and there above the pale green powdery growth on the surface of the pond, we saw the flittering, jiggling bugs of every description, some adding their sound to the buzzing trilling of spring, the insects coming at us from every direction and we rushed forth with our bug catchers thinking there wasn’t a better place for their use in all the world, there beneath the blue Sunday morning sky, there in this perfect pond hidden from the world by its natural protective fence of weed and reed, and tall grass and pussy willows.
Running forward through the muck at the periphery of the pond, the tall grass bending down before us, we reached out with our bug catchers and I told my brother Jason to wait a bit behind, and we heard the low murmur of frogs and heard but did not see them plopping into the water at our arrival, and my feet in boots now splashing, now sinking with a sucking noise down into the muck which reached up to grab at my boots as we saw the most rare dragonfly seeming as big and stationary as a hummingbird hovering before us, its long tail we knew not to be a stinger but somehow very scary nonetheless, its grey bombardier body seeming weirdly big and its wings vibrating in a blur like an optical illusion looking weirdly unnatural and untrustworthy as I felt my feet go deeper into the muck, like a hand at the bottom of the green speckled pond was grasping them, and I tried to lift my feet, but found the sucking, squishing, sticking muck unseen would not relinquish and in fact seemed to pull my legs deeper like the quicksand we’d seen in cartoons and Gilligan’s Island.
I clutched the bug catcher as I looked at the dragonfly and its whirring wings now abandoning its space in air as it turned and flitted, zooming like an untraceable shadow through the bright clear air, and then my attention turned to my feet ever sinking, and the water coming in over my boots, and my panic rising as I realized I was powerless over the earth which had now taken a notion to suck me into its innards. I reached out to my brother at the shore where the tall grasses grew and I called to him, “I’m stuck!” and he with his bug catcher just stared at me for a moment until I cried with my panic making me almost rigid for I’d realized that the more I moved the more the muck pulled me in, any movement increasing the gravity sinking me, and I called to my brother, “Get Mom and Dad. Tell them I’m stuck!”
He raced back through the tall grasses, and down along the creek back to our house where Mom and Dad were lying in bed and he called, “Tim’s in the pond and he can’t get out!” and they sparked into action: Mom in her nighty and Dad in his pajama bottoms, right out of bed and down the hall and out the door, through the bush that was our backyard, the bare feet going over the sticks and twigs and thistles, whipping back the branches, my dad’s bare chest scratched by the thorns, for in both their minds was the pond, and me lying in the pond, face down beneath the green powdery sediment, stuck in the pond and unable to get out because I had drowned and was dead and nothing could be done but to pull my pulpy, rubbery body from the water, spiritlessly try resuscitation, then break at the point where past and future ended.
But no, they saw me from a distance as the weeds and reeds parted before them, my lower legs submerged, bug catcher in my hand, and the bugs still zipping and flitting around me, the jiggling flies and moths, butterflies and dragonflies unaffected by my cries of panic as the dark mud below and out of sight stubbornly and determinedly pulled, and Dad splashed into the pond, the look on his face a fear I’d never seen before but which I felt turning to anger in his arm clamping around me and lifting me from the sucking scum, up against his chest and to the bank of the pond my mother crying, and my brother too, almost too young to know what was going on, and Dad telling us we should have never gone down there alone, struggling to get his breath back as I saw the drops of water glimmering on the hairs of his heaving chest as we all sat there for a minute in the weeds by the pond on the almost indecently bright Easter Sunday morning.
That was in the house before the bush where the trillium was, when we could play on a fallen tree that was half propped up against another tree so we could pretend it was a bridge by the creek where you could fish, and when your fishing pole came apart and fell in the creek your visiting grandfather could wade in and get it back, and you could catch catfish and put them in a pail where they swam around. That’s the house my dad built himself after work while we lived in a trailer, and he called in all his favours, and the workers all came and worked with him building the house that he’d designed, and he always told the story of one of the workers up on top of the roof nailing in the shingles, when he said to the guy, “You putting in four nails a shingle?” and the guy said, “Yep!” and Dad went in the house and looked up at the ceiling and only saw three nails coming through for each shingle, and he said, “Bullshit! I want four nails a shingle!” and he went back in and saw four nails come through for each shingle and never less than four nails ever again.
Local kids would come at night and vandalize the half-finished house, so he started sleeping there on the bare floor in his sleeping bag with his twenty-two but the police said he could be charged if he shot the vandals in the back as they were running away, so make sure to shoot them in the front. When the big front picture window was installed they came and scratched it up, so that he had it tinted blue so that the scratches wouldn’t show so much, because he couldn’t afford a new window. He worked on building the house at nights after his job and got so tired that he fell asleep while driving over the Bluewater Bridge one night and smashed into the toll booth on the other side.
That was the house with the fireplace in the basement and two sinks in the bathroom, with a front yard that was a sea of weeds—the house that was down a long laneway from the gravel road and one time when they had a party the lane was so mucky no cars could drive in so people parked at the road and Dad drove back and forth in the Jeep ferrying them from the road to the house, and after eating chicken we’d throw the bones into the ditch because he said the bones splinter and can choke dogs if they chew on them, but it’s okay to throw them in the ditch because then the foxes would chew on them and choke and die.
When Mom and Dad went to work my little brother Jason and I were looked after by the Simpson family at their pig farm on the highway and I always felt bad because they liked Jason better than me, and they laughed and imitated him when he invented a pig sound to make, and said it was cute and asked him to do it again, but when I invented a frog sound they didn’t pay any attention. Even at home I’d lie in bed and hear Mom and Dad playing with Jason and I’d feel bad and wish he had never been born. When we drove in Dad’s car he’d always make us yell “Contact!” when he started his engine and driving down the sideroad the steady grinding of the engine always made me think I heard music in it, and when I thought of a song it seemed like the engine was singing the song too.
That was before we saw the men with orange bands over their chests taking pictures around our yard, or it seemed like they were taking pictures with tripods they would set up in the fields of weeds and even in the shadows of the bush you would see them, stretching long strings from one tripod to another, and at first there were just a few of them, but then there were more and they were all around until Mom said they were from the government and that Highway 401 was being built, and the way they planned it, it was going right through where our living room was, where the blue-tinted front window was, and we would have to move. They’d give us money for the property and a big sign got put up that they were auctioning off our house, and we’d have to pack up everything and leave.
Someone bought the house and put it on a trailer and towed it away somewhere else, and trucks and cranes and backhoes came, and far into the future there was only a highway, and the gravel sideroad that had led to our house only came to a dead end with room to turn your car around and head back, and there was no creek and no pond and no bush with the trillium in it, and there was no Andrew, there was only the highway and everything else existed only in your mind if you could even still remember it.