BO LAY IN HIS BED and stared at the ceiling, at the wallpaper, at the drawings he had made there. How should he begin? Once upon a time, he thought. Yes. Once there was a war that went on for years and years, and no one went unscathed, neither the side that lost nor the side that won. It went on and on, and some say still lingered in smaller ugly ways, passing from generation to generation.
In the country where this war took place, there lived a boy and his mother and father, and because of their ingenuity, and their luck, when the war ended, they were able to escape. They fled on a small wooden fishing boat, and were lost at sea, with some hundred or more other people.
The father soon fell ill, and even though he had survived treacherous battles, he was only human. One calm day, only three days into the voyage, he died. The people on the boat slid his body into the sea and tried to console the mother, who wailed and keened and reached her hand toward the ocean surface to try to grab at his shirt as he sank. Below deck, the boy pulsed his angry little body against a stranger who clung to him to keep him from seeing his father disposed of in this way.
Days passed, and they landed safely. They lived in a camp with others like themselves, and then the boy and his mother and the baby she was growing found a new home in a faraway country where no one knew them and they knew no one. And now they’d lived here for years, and it was like a dream where some things were real but you were never sure.
THE COCK WAS CROWING. A day like every other. A Friday in September. Bo would get out of bed, he would dress, he would go to school. And he would fight. Bo did not know why the fighting had started or what exactly he was fighting over or about or for. He only knew that without the fights he was invisible. He’d been fighting all of the four years he’d been here, every day it seemed.
The neighbour to the west had a brood of hens and a cock. The cock and the fact of no curtains on his window were the main reasons why Bo never needed an alarm clock to get himself up and why his mother, whose real name was Thao, but whom everyone called Rose, never had to wake him. The cock’s crow tore the day from the night, and gave Bo enough time to watch, from his bed, the light edge up from the horizon, like the slow reveal of the movie screen at the Humber cinema when the velvet drapery began its ascent. Something—anything—could happen in a movie, even if nothing ever happened in real life, or nothing new. Still, this did not stop Bo from wondering if something could, and what this new something might look or feel like.
A sharp ray of light reached his eyes, and he shut them, then pushed his body to get out of bed. His T-shirt lay where he left it the day before, crumpled on the floor. He put it on, and also his jeans, which had been donated by the church people and, for once, were not too short. He pulled his shoes on. The shoes had been a gift from Teacher. They were Adidas, which in spite of being the height of fashion, did not improve his social standing. Sometimes when he looked at himself in a mirror he wondered how every kid at school knew that he was abnormal. He looked so normal to the naked eye.
He stretched in the middle of the kitchen. He did thirty squats and then thirty jumping jacks and then thirty push-ups. He wished he had a bar for pull-ups. It would be easy enough to mount one in the doorway to the hall but his mother had said no, that it wasn’t their house and it would leave holes in the wood trim. The tiny bungalow belonged to the church group and his mother paid rent.
He heard her clearing her throat as she emerged from her bedroom and walked to the end of the hall. He heard the tap run. Bo curled his fists and held them in front of his chest, moved them up and down as if he were doing pull-ups, his body tense. It was a training day and he wanted to be ready for Mr. Morley.
“What have you eaten, Bo?” His mother had come into the kitchen. Her small figure bent toward the sink. She peered in at the dishes she had not done the night before.
“Nothing.”
“There’s food in the fridge.”
Rose had made an ugly casserole from the recipe on the back of the mayonnaise jar. She did this, he believed, to feel more North American. Bo opened the fridge door and looked at it now. It was caved in. Cheese and sauce congealed around the edges of the pan and it did not look edible. Glistening orange-yellow tubes of crisped macaroni had dried up—their little round mouths pleading. It hadn’t been that awful warm, but sitting there between the fish sauce and the eggs, it made him think of underwater creatures—squid and octopi—and how they could grab and squeeze you dead.
“Eat something!” his mum said. She reached in past him and pulled an apple from the keeper.
He could smell her. She smelled of puke.
“Mum.”
Rose was heading to the little ancestor altar in the corner, but she turned and squinted at him, indignant—she could be like that in the mornings. Bo put some macaroni in a bowl and spread it out, then cut it and cut it until it no longer resembled something so unspeakably dreadful. Then he ate, staring out the window, away from his mum. He heard a whistle and listened for the train that ran on the tracks near the house. The ground shifted and the rumble went up through his body. He loved this feeling, even if he knew the trains were bringing farm animals to the stockyards to be slaughtered. Sometimes, the trains would stop and he would hear a sheep bleating or a cow bellowing. He loved to hear them in spite of everything he knew.
“I have track and field this morning,” Bo said. “And also after school.” He was reminding her that his sister would be alone for a short time. Rose worked shifts. In Vietnam she had been a housewife but here she cleaned at the hospital to make money.
“Okay.”
They spoke English in their home—she wanted him to fit in. His mother knew English from school, had been a good student, but now, in Canada, in public, she sometimes pretended not to understand.
Rose crouched at the altar. It was a painted, six-inch medallion of the Buddha shoved into a sand-filled red metal box. It sat on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. Rose lit three sticks of incense, nestled them into the sand in front of the Buddha, and then placed the apple beside them. She made a hasty little prayer, then said, “I’ll make something for lunch.”
“Can we have soup?”
“Yes. But I won’t be home for dinner, remember. I’ll be late. Ten-thirty maybe.”
“Okay.”
Rose looked away from his food, averting her gaze on purpose. What you choose to see, Bo thought, and what you pretend not to see. He thought of the pieces of his past, and how he held them like photos, and the way they did not flow. The past lay in snippets, little nothings not adding up. He was picturing Rose in a doorway, somewhere. Where?
He whispered, “Mum, remember before?”
“I am lucky to have a bad memory,” she said.
Then she smiled. It was nice when she smiled.
Bo said housewife when asked at school what his mother’s occupation was, even though she never did anything remotely domestic if she could avoid it. She only did chores if they felt dramatic and interesting, or made a statement, like mayonnaise cheese slice casserole.
She looked back at his plate now. “Oh, Bo,” she said.
His fork hovering between his plate and his mouth, the pasta screaming Help at him.
“It’s for the dogs.” Rose pointed at the failed dish. “Put it out for them.”
“Okay,” Bo said. Dogs wandered around in their neighbourhood in the mornings, their owners too busy or lazy to take them on leashes to High Park. If Bo fed them, maybe they would come by for visits more often. It would be like having his own pet.
Rose turned back toward her bedroom, saying, “Check on Sister when you get home.” But he didn’t need reminding.
Orange.
Bo’s sister’s name meant Orange Blossom in Vietnamese, so he called her Orange. Rose called her Sister. Orange was their family tragedy. The one they mustn’t mention to others. Orange was unspeakable and unspeaking. She could not see very well and was all wrong, every part of her.
Bo barged through the front door and set the dish out on the lowest front step. No dogs were out. It was early though, and he didn’t see even a squirrel.
He called “Goodbye” to his mother, then walked backwards—he had practised this—watching in case anything showed up. He moved east on Maria Street until he hit the corner, then he took a last scan for dogs and turned south toward school. It was a Catholic school, and because of the church group’s generosity, Rose had allowed Bo to be baptized so he could be sent there. She went to church herself, despite the fact of the shrine, and despite the truth, which was she didn’t put much stock in Jesus. Rose put stock in gratitude.
At Dundas and Gilmour streets a boy named Peter joined him. Peter was Bo’s friend from Dundas and Gilmour to Dundas and Clendenan, and down Clendenan until 86, at which point it was impossible to maintain the friendship. Ernie Wheeler lived in that little white clapboard house, so Peter lagged or sped up and occasionally punched Bo or yelled “Chink!” at him if he thought Ernie might be looking. The three blocks of friendship were worth it.
MR. MORLEY WORKED the track team hard. If a child got cramps, Mr. Morley ignored that child. Bo never complained. The easy thing with Mr. Morley was that it was unnecessary to speak much—you could be like a dog, or like Orange. By the slight flicker in the coach’s eyes, or the edge of something like a smile behind his mouth, or the way his body leaned into the weather, Bo knew what Mr. Morley wanted and adjusted to please him.
Morley looked at his chrome stopwatch. “Three minutes.” He meant three minutes to get from their yard to the high school racetrack. The team crossed the playground, then Clendenan, and went in through the chain-link fence to the track where they would do their laps. All the way, Bo tried to step so that he missed cracks in the pavement, for better luck. Now, he admired the shiny silver casing of Mr. Morley’s stopwatch.
Mr. Morley held the watch high, clicked down the starter, and nodded at the team. They began jogging around and around the track. Bo controlled his breathing, felt the hardness of pavement tremor up his legs, and worked to absorb and soften it into propulsion.
A mandatory ten laps to stay on the team, but Bo did more. He lost count. He didn’t care that this infuriated some of the other kids—the running removed care. Different things came and went from his mind: his mother, his father, sharks, Orange—her protruding eyes, and the way her body bent and twisted, and what she could be thinking. He wished he knew what she thought about when he was away.
Mr. Morley blew his whistle. Practice was over. An hour had passed inside the space of no time.
TEACHER DREW A wooden ship with a beautiful prow on the chalkboard. She wrote in cursive: History. She told stories about Cabot and Columbus. The one Bo liked best was a story about a boat with horses on it and how they eventually ran away and made all the horses in North America.
“Like Noah’s Ark,” said Emily.
“Yes, a little like that,” said Teacher. She smiled at Emily. “Imagine how magical finding a new land must have been. I wonder if any of you has ever been in a boat on the ocean?”
Bo shrank down in his chair, but Sally stretched her hand skyward, like her shoulder might dislocate if she jammed it higher.
“Yes, Sally.”
Teacher always smiled a little when she listened. Her bobbed hair touched her shoulders. He’d known her for a long time—since he and Rose had come to Canada—and he had to pretend he didn’t know her all that well. It wasn’t cool to know the teacher. Bo didn’t know why this was, just that it was. But Teacher knew everything about him. He practised a neutral face.
Sally said, “We took the ferry back and forth to Ward’s Island over the summer. Twice.” Her arm stayed waving in the air as she spoke.
“Thank you, Sally. Anyone else?” Teacher tilted her head toward Bo. “That’s Lake Ontario, of course, a ferry boat. A lake is much smaller than an ocean, and it has sweet water in it, not salt water. Most of the animals that live in a lake cannot survive in the ocean. They cannot master the salt.” She looked directly at him.
She knew he had been in a boat on the ocean. She and ten other families had sponsored Rose and Bo to come to Canada. And even though her name was really Ann Lily, his mother called her Teacher, out of respect, and in his mind, so did he. And now, after four years, she was his teacher. Grade eight. He preferred not to think of that boat. Sweet water or salt water.
“Have you ever been on the ocean, Bo?” she asked.
Everyone knew already. It was the source of much of the ridicule he’d endured from the class and even from some of the younger children in the school. At fourteen, Bo should be in grade nine; he’d been held back in grade five to learn to speak and read and write in English.
Teacher said, “Bo?”
He stared into the middle distance, and answered. “I was on a boat on the ocean.” He did not say that everything about the boat and the ocean shamed him. The memory of it was like a monster, but just the feeling of a monster, without the actual monster, so he couldn’t fight it. That there was no actual monster made it much worse. The bad feeling settled in if he let it.
“Can you tell the class how it was?”
He knew she wanted only and very badly to make him real to the class, but adults didn’t understand real. They understood nice and kind and the rest they tried to ignore. In this way, they were far worse than the children, who at least teased him about the rest. The odd thing about the teasing was it made him real to the other kids for the duration of the mockery. That might be the only kind of real he would ever have.
“I don’t remember very much, Miss. It was windy some of the time. There were fish following the boat.” In fact, he remembered everything about it. He lived those five days over and over, the looping horror of them.
“Oh, lovely,” she said, stretching out the word, blinking, “and did you fish?”
“No.”
His mother made him stay far back from the side of the boat because they were a waiting kind of fish. They were sharks. He’d seen how fast they took the dead when the living shoved them off the deck. The ocean housed another world you couldn’t see unless it came to the surface, or where the water was very shallow.
When his father died, his mother asked one of the men to keep him below deck. Bo thrashed to get away but the man held him, until Bo was panting, furious. He had a right to see his own dead father. His mother told people—if they dared ask—that her husband had been lost at sea, but he was never lost. She gave him to the sea.
Bo’s face must have showed some of this, for Teacher put her hand to her mouth, then changed the subject.
“Okay, class, eyes up at the front.” She yanked a map down and picked up her wooden pointer. They named all the oceans until they could reel them off in any order. It was a kind of apology, he knew—the class was lulled by it. Teacher had a way of entrancing them: Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic, Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Antarctic. The class had the oceans memorized, but they did not really know them, did not know the flat expanse of shimmer, did not know their boredom and how they held the key to whether they might find land and live, or just sail on forever, like some of the other boats had, never to be found, the people dying one by one.
“Bo,” Teacher said, finding her way again.
He’d been looking at his desk, and now he looked up fast. “Yes, Miss?”
“Can you show us on this map where you lived?”
Bo preferred not to. But he got up and located Toronto on the map. “Here,” he said, and the class erupted into laughter.
Teacher smiled. “Okay, but before, where?”
“Vietnam,” Bo said, and traced his finger across and across until he got there, “is here.”
“The other side of the world, class. Bo, you may sit down.” Teacher began to pace down one aisle. “Vietnam had a terrible war,” she said. “And many people had to leave.”
The whole class could feel that this was not part of the lesson. This was something else. They looked into the air, and some of them at Bo, as if he could stop her. The class seemed to tighten—not just the children, but the walls, windows, knotting around Bo. And still she went on.
“The U.S. wanted to stop communism and they did horrible things to fight the North Vietnamese Army. For one thing, they sprayed poison over their forests, and killed everything.”
Teacher had stopped pacing and was standing halfway between the back and the front of the class, going on and on. From where he sat, Bo could smell her perfume. He stopped listening to her. He just smelled her, and tried to find space. He imagined the chalk and the chalk brushes and all the little things in the room hurtling toward him as if he were a magnet, and then, without him even knowing it, he whispered, “Stop,” and she heard and looked down at him and seemed to awaken from whatever trance she’d been in.
“Class,” Teacher said, through that tunnel of waking. “History lesson is over. Moving on to something very important.” She unhooked the ocean map scroll and rummaged for another one, an old-times map that she pulled down, fidgeting until the locking system held. Smiling at them all, she pointed to Ancient Greece. “The play we are going to put on for this year’s Variety Show in June has its origins in Ancient Greece. We are going to start studying this old story now because it fits nicely with our study unit What Is a Hero?”
There came a heaving groan from the class. It was a reaction to the words play and Variety Show. The class felt itself too old for plays, too old to be corralled into such a thing, even if secretly many of them loved both the idea of a play and the annual Variety Show. These students were smart enough to hide their enchantment. Teacher tried to rally them.
“The play will be based on an old hero tale from the Middle Ages, the story of Sir Orfeo.” She plunked a mimeographed and paper-clipped stack of papers on the first desk—Emily’s—and indicated she wanted them passed back. “By Monday, you will have read the poem, and memorized the first ten lines. It’s a poem about a hero. It’s a fairy tale. There’s magic.”
Everything changed about her when she said that it was magic. She looked beautiful. She didn’t speak for a while, and Bo stared. He wondered what she was thinking.
“What’s it about, anyway?” said Peter.
And she told them about how Sir Orfeo loved his Queen Heurodis, and how one day she had such a terrible nightmare while asleep under a tree in a garden that she ripped her clothing to shreds and also her skin. She dreamt a Fairy King kidnapped and stole her away to his fairy kingdom. Orfeo set up guards but it didn’t matter—the dream came true. Anguished, Orfeo went barefoot to the forest and for ten years searched for her, playing on his harp to keep himself company. Orfeo loved to tell stories and sing, and even the animals came to hear him. One day, he spied Heurodis with a group of fairy ladies and even though he looked terrible after all that time in the forest, she knew him. He followed her to the Fairy King’s underground castle and sang for the Fairy King. The Fairy King loved his songs so much he offered him any reward he wanted—and, of course, Sir Orfeo chose Heurodis. The King didn’t want to give her back, but in the end, he relented. Orfeo and Heurodis returned to their land, were crowned, and lived happily ever after.
“Sounds retarded,” said Ernie, so that only Bo and a few others near him heard.
Bo thought of Orange, and watched how Teacher’s face lost its strange enchantment and went back to normal. She had not heard Ernie.
She said, “It’s a very old story.” And she turned her face a little away from them. “It has survived because people keep telling it.”
It was as if some secret was hidden in her face that no one would ever uncover. He must practise not caring. Bo’s shoulders lowered at the sound of the lunch bell ringing.
IN THE PLAYGROUND, Emily stopped Bo. “Why did Miss Lily say all that?”
Bo looked at her with only his eyes and not his whole face. Emily was too pretty to face. “Say all what?”
“About Vietnam.”
“Come on. Yes, you do.”
“I don’t.” But what he thought was that it was none of Teacher’s business. She had once said to him that he ought to know about the war and where he came from, but her attentiveness felt like pity. It was pity. Bo said, “You never talk to me usually.”
Emily shrugged. “Can I have the red tab from your jeans pocket?”
Bo knew there was a contest on, that if Emily could collect fifteen red tags from Levi’s jeans she could cash them in for a free pair. But he was still surprised that pretty Emily would ask for his. His tag should be off limits, tainted in some way. He only had them from a donation bin at the church. Some of the other boys had dared the girls to twist and grab and pull them off the pockets while they still wore their pants.
“Sure,” he said.
“I’ve got nine already.” She handed him a small pair of nail scissors and watched as he tried to reach back and cut off the red tab. But he was awkward and people were now watching. “Forget it,” Emily said. “I’ll get it from you tomorrow.”
Bo nodded, tucked the scissors in his pocket, and walked home for lunch.
EVEN THE DOGS HAD SPURNED the macaroni casserole. Bo left the dish on the stoop and went in the house. He ate soup with his mother, but they hardly spoke. “Thank you,” he said, when he finished. Rose smiled at him.
He found Orange in her bedroom on her mattress, rocking. Her eyes were pushed so far out of their sockets, she looked Martian. He might look weird to Orange through her convex eyes, he thought, flattened out, unreal. He lay on the mattress and curved in toward her. He hoped this made her feel safe. She was four years old.
She had sailed over in his mother’s belly. Bo imagined her in a boat—a tiny half-walnut-shell boat—in his mother’s womb, dancing waves, skirting danger. Hurry, he thought. When she was born they had only been in Toronto a short while. It was winter, and cold, and he and his mother barely knew where they were—where the hospital was and where home was, or how anything related to anything else.
Orange looked like she was sneering, her body kicking back and forth, the momentum bringing her nowhere. He watched her twitch and rock. She sometimes pummelled the floor, and bashed at the walls. She hated. One of the new English words his mum and he had to come to understand was monster. And another was pity. Certainly none of the sponsor families had expected to be caring for such a hideous thing, had not reckoned on the depth of pity they might have to feel. Orange rocked such that Bo could tell she was moaning even though no sound came. Her rabbity head stretched out behind her, and her eyes were veined, wrong. There was nothing the matter with her mouth but her tongue wasn’t right. The doctors predicted she would scream out of frustration, but she never did. Her shoulders pinched up too high and she was so skinny it looked like her body belonged to a different head. She had only thin wisps of hair falling over her forehead. He thought: ugly means when you don’t love something.
“Orange!” Bo said. “Hello!”
Orange swivelled her eyes toward and around his face and then commenced rocking again. She lifted her arms and tucked her stumpy-fingered hands into her T-shirt sleeves and wound and wound them into the cloth. She slid down from the bed and turned and heaved herself to stand using only her crooked legs. Bo sat down beside her and waited to see if she would come to him.
It wasn’t a good idea to try to handle her.
“Little Orange,” he whispered, over and over as she rocked. He had only thirty minutes left in his lunch hour and he would like to pet her if she would let him. He did not look directly at her, but pretended to be picking at something on the bedspread. This sometimes worked as a decoy. Orange was now crouched to pounce. She looked mean.
Regularly, in catechism at school, there were stories about healings and the miracles that Jesus performed and that the disciples wrote about in their books. There was the leper, the bleeding woman, the mute, and yesterday Teacher had read the story of the restoration of the dead man. Lazarus. He looked sad in the picture in the textbook. In all the pictures, the sick were pitiable and everyone was pleased to have them cured. Bo could never figure out if Jesus performed miracles out of grace or to prove that He was the Son of God. It seemed to make a difference, but this was never discussed.
The mute person and the leper were interesting, but once they were healed they were like everyone—a great sea of people all the same. He would like his father back, but surely a dead man’s soul would not like to be sucked back into his body. If Jesus could make Orange a normal four-year-old, she would not be Orange. All of these thoughts unsettled Bo and he would have liked to ask someone, but adults hated to be asked questions they could not answer, so he kept them to himself. Sometimes when he was running at track, the answers came to him as feelings, driving right up from the earth through his legs to his brain.
Orange bit him like a dog. He did not like to think of her as an animal, so he shook his head to rid himself of that thought. She bit often. Her mouth clenched hard until blood sprang from his hand, and he sat very still until she forgot to bite and let go. The blood congealed right away, a small dribble along the teeth crease on his hand.
She slumped down now with her head in his lap, and lay there looking into nowhere. It must be strange to never be able to properly close your eyes. He wondered about sleeping and whether Orange could dream. Maybe all her life was a dream or maybe none of it was. Bo traced a finger over her ear. He could tell by the weight of her body against him how she felt. She was really lovely if you gave her the chance.
When he walked back through the house, he saw his mother staring out the kitchen window. “I’ll see you after work,” she said, but did not look at him. He must not notice his mother crying.
“Okay.”
He looked at her through the glass once he was outside, wondered if she saw him, and made a face. No. She didn’t see him.
All afternoon, until track practice, Bo paid no attention. He drifted.
AFTER TRACK, Bo found a quarter jammed in between two sidewalk paving stones. He slipped the quarter into his pocket and felt Emily’s little folding nail scissors nestled in there.
He’d taken a different route home along Evelyn, which meandered in ways that did not seem to make sense given the landscape, but he liked it, and felt strongly, once he found the coin, that it had been the correct path for him to take. There was a caribou embossed on one side. The antlers were especially impressive. Bo wanted to take the money to the store and buy a popsicle but the scissors reminded him of the promise he had made Emily, and then promises in general, and then Orange, who had been alone for fifteen minutes by now. His mum left for work at four. He shuffled faster toward home.
ORANGE HAD COVERED HER FACE with a piece of flannel Rose had trimmed from a diaper, and was asleep, her breath lifting and collapsing her rib cage in a calm rhythm. Bo said, “Hang on.” He spoke to himself.
He shimmied his jeans down as far as he could with his hands and then jogged his legs to get them lower so that he could use his feet and ankles to twist them off entirely. He scooped them up, found the scissors in the front pocket, and, holding the jeans by the tag, cut it off, then let the jeans fall to the ground in a heap.
He laughed, holding the red tag up in the air. He opened the little sheaf of cloth like a tiny book and turned it every which way. Levi’s, it said, in black thread. He kissed it, whispered the name “Emily,” and then shot a look at Orange in case she had woken up. She had not.
“Orange,” he said, as he tugged his jeans back on. “Stay.”
He wanted to bring Emily the tag and give her back her scissors. He told this to his sister’s bent and sleeping body. He tucked pillows on each side of her. He did not want her to fall out of bed and hurt herself, and he thought she might like the feel of being hugged. Emily, he knew, lived on St. Johns Road in a huge Victorian with peeling gingerbread. The house looked haunted. Ivy swept up the red brick, twining along the arched portico, and a wooden veranda seemed to dangle off the main building. It was said there was a swimming pool in the backyard, an idea that frightened him. He would not go near the backyard if he could avoid it. He would be there and back before his sister woke up. He ran.
BO COULD HEAR A FLUTE being played. When he knocked, the music stopped and Emily opened the door. He handed her back her scissors and the red tag, and she thanked him.
“Do you want to come in?” she said. Emily had green eyes and a face daubed with freckles.
He did want to. “No,” he said. “Was that you playing?”
“Yeah, my parents make me take lessons. They claim it’s edifying.” She thrust her hip out, and he didn’t really know what he should do. Finally, she said, “So what part do you want?”
“Part?”
“Sir Orfeo? I’m trying out for Heurodis. All the girls are.” She struck a pose tearing her nails along her face. “Well?” she said.
“That’s pretty realistic,” Bo said.
“I looked up the Greek story in Britannica,” said Emily, meaning the encyclopedias at the school library. “It’s old, like Miss Lily said. Orpheus—that’s his name—has to promise not to turn around when they are leaving the underworld. He breaks his promise and in the end he loses her forever. I looked it up,” she said again, as if he hadn’t heard or believed her. Then, “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”
Bo shook his head.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and laughed. And when he didn’t leave, she added, “By the way, I am going to close the door now.”
“Okay,” Bo said. He stood there until the door was fully shut and even after Emily pushed her fingers through the mail slot and waved goodbye, giggling. Even when she said, “Really goodbye, this time, Bo,” with a tone.
Only when the mail-slot cover clanged shut did he bolt down the stairs and over to the corner store. He had enough for Pop Rocks, and ripped the pouch open as he left the store. He licked his index finger and shoved it into the candy crystals and then into his mouth. It was wild the way they sparked along his tongue and up to the roof of his mouth. He decided to save some for Orange, and folded the pouch shut.
At home, Bo licked his finger and stuck it in the packet, placed the red and blue sugar on his tongue. He lay alongside Orange on the mattress and took the covering off her face. The little crystals took off pinging inside the dark space of his mouth. He wondered: was she awake or was she still sleeping? Either way she would watch this beautiful thing and it would be real or it would be a dream.
Over and over he dipped his finger and placed the candy onto his tongue until the surface of his tongue went first blue and red and then so blue it darkened to black. Finally, Orange made a gesture toward the packet, then toward her own mouth. And so he dabbed his finger into the candy, and onto her tongue, and watched her jolt about until she got used to it. Then she opened her mouth again, and he fed her more of the miracle of Pop Rocks.
What would he audition for when the time came? Certainly not Orfeo. That was a part for one of the other boys. He would offer to pull the curtain cords. He had touched them once before and remembered the way the silk rope slid through his hands, and how good it felt to pull and have the curtain respond. He could watch the action from the side, from the arch the curtains made over everything.
AT EIGHT, AFTER TRYING to get her to sleep for half an hour, Bo left Orange skidding across the bedroom, back and forth on her bottom. He set a doll and a stuffed donkey down for her to play with, but when he shut the door on her, she thumped against it.
“I have to go, Orange,” he said. “Please!”
She thumped and banged as he left the house.
Now he waited at the corner of Maria and Gilmour, his fists stuffed in his pockets. He looked up and down the street.
“He’s going to really give it to you this time.” Peter had come up behind him, tall and gangly. “Maybe you should have stayed at home,” he said.
“Why?”
“Ernie means it this time.”
“Means what?” Bo said. Ernie never meant anything except the contact of his body on Bo’s and the way that pain ricocheted back and forth between them.
Peter faked a left hook; his messy hair bounced a bit. Then he said, “Oof,” and doubled over as if he had punched himself. “What if he kills you?” he said when he’d recovered.
Then I’m dead, thought Bo, and they’ll have to deal with that. But Ernie couldn’t kill him. He knew. He would let Ernie win before anything like that could happen. He’d seem to go wild and it would fool everyone.
Well, it would fool everyone except Ernie. You can’t fool the guy you are fighting—the guy you are fighting can feel the fake. That guy, Bo knew, was the only one who really truly knew your capacity, or if not your capacity, he would know if you weren’t full-on. Bo was never ever at capacity, and Ernie never let on.
Bo and Ernie had fought regularly since Ernie moved to the neighbourhood four years earlier. It occurred to Bo once when he was shadow boxing in his room that in some way, Ernie was his best friend, the human closest to him in the whole world. Bo and Ernie were addicted to one another.
Bo barely ever said a word to Ernie as they sparred and scratched and belted one another, but Ernie was a talker. They knew each other’s moves, each other’s bodies, their various smells. If they stopped, Bo would miss the fights. In fact he loved them, and by extension he loved the immense hatred Ernie had for him.
“Well, well, well,” called out Ernie, “here you are.” An entourage of children trailed behind him—some of them mimicking his walk and his particular snarl. What he said made no sense. Bo always showed up.
“Fight,” one of the bystanders murmured, and then louder: “Fight!” The children herded them in, encircled them. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Bo shifted from foot to foot, not letting Ernie see which way he intended to swing or which way he might deke. Meanwhile he watched everything about Ernie, especially his eyes. The eyes always looked in the direction the brain planned to move the body, and they were fast—you had to pay close attention.
“You move like a faggot,” said Ernie, and this brought snickers.
I move like a butterfly, thought Bo, thinking of Ali, though he knew not to say anything out loud. He reached out, cuffed Ernie on the neck, and then held on. This brought their chests together in a clutch. Bo had him tight and out of the corner of his eye saw that Ernie’s face was growing red. He was trying to buck Bo backwards, but Bo had planted his feet and bent his knees, and he thrust into Ernie using his leverage and momentum.
“You dance, you hug—”
“Shh,” Bo said. The talking. It drove him crazy.
“No, you little chinky fairy.”
Ernie swung his arms up and around and tucked his head down, releasing his hold, and then grabbed Bo’s waist and swung, nipping him from behind and toppling him. Bo’s shoulder hit the sidewalk, his ear slammed down hard, and he was winded. He lay there huffing as the circle of children moved, forming again around the shifting fight. Ernie waited for him and then not. Bo saw his shadow first.
Ernie tried to roll him over and pin both his shoulders. But Bo tucked his toes into the road, imagined them shoved deep into the concrete, imagined all the force of the earth, every layer, even the molten core, anchoring up his propped legs, and then he used that force to buck his back and neck and head up into Ernie’s. Ernie fell back and Bo rolled on top of him. The crowd whooped.
Now Ernie was beneath him, spitting mad. He tossed his torso to and fro, trying to unsettle Bo. Both boys slowed to catch their breath.
“Chink,” said Ernie.
“I’m not a Chink,” said Bo, but he might as well be Chinese for all Ernie cared. It was just a way to get at him. “Shut up. You talk too much.”
“Boat Boy.”
This hit home. Bo moved his forearm up under Ernie’s chin and pressed in and down. “Take it back,” he said.
“No.”
Bo applied more pressure. “Take it back.”
“No.” Ernie’s voice wheezed out—he was struggling to suck in oxygen.
He tried to edge one elbow out from under Bo’s knee and Bo let him, feigning inattention. And then came Ernie’s open palm at Bo’s face and then the other palm, so that while Bo struggled to keep pressure on Ernie’s windpipe, Ernie forced Bo’s head back so that now neither of them could easily breathe.
It was as if, then, everything fell away. There was no space nor was there time and the two boys floated toward death. It did not feel so bad. But then Bo released his hold, lifted his body, and slammed it back down onto Ernie’s midriff. He slammed Ernie’s body again, felt it shudder.
Someone yelled, “Hey!”
The circle wavered and, and in that split second of wavering, Bo shifted focus—he let himself shift focus—and Ernie slid out from under him and with his leg, toppled him.
“Adult. Shit. Run!” someone yelled. It sounded like Peter.
Ernie leaned down, the sweat and stink of him enveloping Bo. He leaned so that his lips were almost brushing Bo’s lips, so when he spoke, Bo not only heard the words, but also felt the puffs of air entering his mouth—Ernie’s breath—and surely, Bo thought, Ernie also felt the warmth of his own struggling breath.
“Tomorrow,” Ernie said, and he stood up, checked to see who was left to see, and horked on Bo’s cheek.
Then Ernie stumble-ran away—Bo watched the wreck of him finding strength to just leave.
BO CURLED OVER ONTO HIS SIDE, tried to catch his breath. He saw no one. He wondered if maybe Peter had fabricated an adult in order to stop the fight. Bo’s nose dripped snot and blood. He hadn’t noticed Ernie hitting his nose but it might have smashed in any number of ways. Bo felt his head for lumps.
A small pool of blood congealed on the pavement under his face. Bo wiped his nose with the tips of his fingers. His nostrils had already started crusting up. From where he lay, he could see clear down Maria to his house. Orange, he thought. For years, this fight had played itself out in one way or another. In a moment Bo would get up and go to see Orange. She would be asleep, he hoped. He had better get back before his mother got home. She did not like it when he left Orange.
“Up,” he muttered, and heaved himself onto hands and knees.
Bo noticed the trouser cuffs of a man standing beside him. Beige dress pants. Bo looked up. The man’s belt: black leather and almost worn out. The buckle displayed a nickel-plate grizzly bear head, roaring. The man’s shirt was a blaring sort of white and reflected the street light so that it seemed made of sun, and his jacket was yellow and dirty, the shoulder pads sunken.
“You can fight,” the man said, his hands on his hips, his head cocked.
Bo sat up on his heels, staring at him.
“Sorry,” said the man, shaking his head. “I’m rude. The name is Gerry—Mr. Gerald Whitman.” He shot his hand out and pulled Bo up to standing. “Golly,” he said. “I would have thought you’d be bigger! What are you, all of ten?”
“Gerry. Please call me Gerry.”
Bo nodded.
“You ever thought of making some money from that?”
Bo wondered what from that might be and the confusion must have washed over his face.
“You ever considered working in the circuit? Fighting? I can set you up.”
“No—”
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Bo.”
The man smiled, his mouth shot full of decay and gold, and something else—happiness, goodness, times past, Bo wasn’t sure—but he liked the man straightaway, and so smiled back.
“Well, Mr. Bo Jangles. What you may not have noticed while you were scratching and pummelling the life out of that shithole of an excuse for a kid, was that money was changing hands. Green was flowing.” Gerry glanced up at the darkening sky, at the moon poking up in the east. He turned to catch a glimpse of the last of the orange orb of the sun sinking in the west. Then, he sniffed. “Moolah,” he said. “I smelled it all the way from Dundas Street and Keele.”
Bo squinted at the strange man. He was strange.
“Tall kid with glasses?” Gerry said. “He made a fiver off your loss. He would have made more if you didn’t lose every time—”
Kid with glasses—that was surely Peter.
“Kids’ll bet more risky if you win some, lose others.”
Bo stared at him some more.
“Oh, you’re wondering how I knew you lost on purpose? I saw you pull back, that’s how I know. You were, what? Seventy-five percent, eighty? Holding at least twenty percent back, right?”
Bo considered the shininess of Gerry’s shirt buttons. “I have to go,” he said.
“Go, then,” Gerry said. “See ya.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket’s inside pocket and tapped one out. Craven “A.” Menthol. He looked up to see Bo still standing there. “The cigarette of choice for quitters,” he said, smiling, gesturing with the smoke at Bo. “Don’t ever start, Bo Jangles.”
Bo said, “Nice to meet you,” and headed down the street toward his house. Gerry’s eyes followed him the whole way.
“IT IS APPROXIMATELY one hundred years since the end of the American War,” Bo said to his sister. “I am Orange!”
He looked over to see her reaction. Gleeful—that was good. He was trying to cheer her up before Rose got home. It was a game he had played with her for forever. Not a game exactly, but a kind of storytelling. She watched more than listened, he figured. She loved it when he was animated, and he loved the words and the thoughts scrolling out of his head. It relieved him of them.
Orange was snotty with misery—he’d been away too long. “When the doctors caught me,” he said, “they shrieked. The nurses shrieked, my mother shrieked, my brother shrieked, and so was I born amid shrieking.” He could say what he liked because she didn’t understand him. She gave no sign of understanding. “In the worldly hierarchy, I am below the vulture. I believe I may be below the dandelion, which is very low indeed. I have no earthly use. But do not worry for I am quiet.”
Orange rocked back and forth on the bed but made not a sound. She wanted to hear what Bo was saying. He stopped to see what she would do if he stopped. She rocked for a while and turned herself toward him, so that her bulging eyes could—
“I am hideous!” he screamed, and her lips slid around like a smile. “I am ugly!” Her lips curled back, revealing gums and teeth, and there was her tongue plastered down and stunted. Even her tongue was bent. “Do not feel sorry for me,” he whispered. “For I am powerful. I am the great-great-great-great-grandchild of chemical number 2, 4–D plus 2, 4, 5–T.”
He flourished his hands like a conductor of a symphony. He leaned over her, for effect. “I am that which scares you the most,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I am the pure ugliness of love. I am melancholy. I am joy. I am the BIG MISTAKE you once made.”
Orange swung her arms—fleshy cudgels—and Bo pulled back for fear of getting punched. The words were flowing. It felt fine to him and he continued, whispering this time:
“I am Orange, and I have a girlfriend. Her name is Emily and she loves me. I am Orange and she sucks in breath when she sees me. She sucks in one breath and pulls a tornado from me—she takes my roof right off.” Bo stopped, his finger swirling the air, cotton candy, air.
Orange stood on the bed and put one foot in front of the other and did not fall. She did this two or three times and then threw her arms up above her head and bounced them back to her waist so fast she made wind. Was this walking?
“Orange, Jesus. Stop that.”
But she wouldn’t or she couldn’t, so the arm-throwing went on for a long time before she slowed, panted back her breath, and fell in a heap. He lay beside her. Stared at the fancy toile wallpaper, its luxurious embossment, paper that had been put on the wall long before Bo had even known there was a wall here, so long that it had turned yellow, and brittle. There were sections torn right off, others peeling. But the images! Men on horses and women with parasols—there were centaurs and deer. In between them, over the years they’d lived here, Bo had drawn small shadowy men with big guns taking aim at the men on horses, at the women with parasols. The deer and centaurs frolicked all around them, oblivious.
A golden deer lay every few feet transfixed by an arrow and dying. “Little sister,” Bo said, and carefully placed his arm over her, so as not to startle her even the slightest. “You can walk.” He looked straight into her eyes and he felt like she must see him. She saw something.
He looked at the wallpaper again, entered its flat forest, traced his finger along the paths between the figures. He said, “I am Orange! I am ugly! I wander in the painted forest. So long has passed since the end of the war. The soldiers have all been forgiven! I am a princess now and I was a princess then. I wander in the forest of paint. One day I will be paint, too, and that day will be glorious. Even ugly things become beautiful.”
He liked the feel of English words roiling around in his mouth, how you could build them up to make something that hadn’t previously been there. “My brother rocks me until I fall asleep,” he added, squinting at her, wondering if she would fall for it.
And then he did rock her and then she did fall asleep.
IT WAS AFTER TEN O’CLOCK when his mother pushed open the door to the bedroom and woke him. He’d fallen asleep beside Orange.
“Come,” she said. “I warmed the soup.”
Bo and Rose sat at the table and ate. She smelled of lemon floor wax and antiseptic and gin. She’d pulled a bottle from the space behind the dish detergent under the sink and poured some into her glass. Always between them there were questions, but never were these questions asked. For Bo it was as if the air thickened in the space between his thought and his voice. He could not ask about his father; he could not ask about the family they’d left behind in Vietnam.
“How was work?” he could ask.
A crazy woman died. First she went crazy and then she died.
“How was work?”
It was quiet today.
“How was work?”
I don’t remember.
Every time he asked her this same question, it was a variation on these: Do you love me? Did my father love me?
The TV droned from the little living room—it went to test pattern, the volume low, dull static to keep them company—and his mother so tired. The trains punctuated time with their irregular passage—a loud clanging outside of himself. This was helpful.
“How was Sister today?” Rose asked, this question loaded with some awful truth Bo could not fathom.
It was said that children with severe birth defects, true monsters, often had shortened life spans. They could not expect to live to be one hundred, or even five, and sometimes not even one year old. A doctor stood beside Bo by his mother’s hospital bed four years earlier, while Rose nursed Orange, when she was just born, and said this, with a tone that suggested relief, that suggested they might be happy to know.
“She walked,” Bo said.
“No,” Rose said. It was not a no of surprise, it was a no of will, as if Rose could stop this from happening. Her statement held such vitality, Bo’s body shocked at it. He was not used to anything so forceful from his mother. Rose slumped at the table, always tired, so not right, with no expectation that happiness would ever visit her. She did not seem to think of it or else had given up on it. Maybe mothers did not require happiness.
“Yes, she stepped forward and backward on her bed. I’ve never seen her do that. It wasn’t like my walk or yours but she was on her feet and she went like this—” He showed, with his fingers on the table, Orange’s weird walking.
“Then she has walked.” Rose closed her eyes, so deeply inside herself.
“Yes,” whispered Bo.
Her eyes opened. “Sister may not go outside,” she said, glaring at him as if he had taught her to walk. Had he?
Since she was born, he’d swaddled Orange and smuggled her out into the yard. It was a small transgression—even smaller if he considered that his mum had never actually said she had to stay inside. It was just that he knew Orange was to stay inside. And so he disobeyed. In the night, through the various stages of the moon, to the heartbeat of the trains pulsing through the backyard, he unwrapped her and let the night air breathe over her, let it whisper, let her know it. He looked at his mother. Of course she had seen.
He said, “No one else ever saw her.”
Rose sucked air in through her teeth. “I don’t want her to cause problems for you, Bo. It’s already so hard,” and then: “Sister walks.”
Bo started to say something, but Rose lifted her palm to indicate she didn’t want to talk anymore. She didn’t want to think about Orange out in the world. She didn’t want to think about Orange at all. Once she had called Orange the devil that came out of her body. She planted a picture in Bo’s mind then of a deformed baby emerging from between her legs. Bo’s mouth dropped open recalling the image. “I made you,” she had said. “And I made Sister. You are both mine.”
But now, she just looked over at him, weary-eyed, sad—his beautiful mother—and said simply, “No one must see her.”