THE BRIDGE HAS A NEW SIGN ON IT: ERNIE ELLS BRIDGE. I guess that means Ernie’s cashed in his chips. He didn’t live too far from our house. He used to ride his Supercycle down here every morning and wave at the cars that crossed the river. It was part of his routine. From nine in the morning till noon, he stood on the bridge waving at cars. Then he’d go home and let all his cats run around the yard while he counted them, 1-2-3-4-5-6, over and over again. After that he’d hide and wait for Mrs. Glen on her afternoon walk. He’d get behind a bush or a tree, jump out at her and yell, “I get a kick out of you!” She hated it, but there was only one road. Ernie wasn’t that great a hider anyway.
Mrs. Glen was always talking to whoever would listen about how her husband died in a factory accident. She must have told Ernie the date of their wedding anniversary because he boasted to everyone in town that he had a surprise planned. He put on a ski mask and a pair of yellow dish gloves, climbed the tree at the edge of his property and waited over an hour. When Mrs. Glen was right underneath him, he jumped down, hollering, “I get a kick out of yoooooooooooou!” He almost kicked her in the head. She had an anxiety attack and Ernie wasn’t sure what to do, so he came up and banged on our door. Ma went down and helped Mrs. Glen up to the house. I was in the kitchen when they came in. I watched Mrs. Glen’s heavy makeup lift off her skin in beads of sweat until it hovered over her face like a mask. She wouldn’t sit on our chair until I laid her sweater on it, and she didn’t trust our water, so Ma had to boil it for her. At one point she turned to me and said, “Which one are you?” I told her I was Tabby, and right in front of Ma she asked me, “Do all your brothers and sisters have the same father?” As she was leaving, Jackie loudly asked Ma why she didn’t tell the bitch to go fuck herself. Ma waited till the door was closed after Mrs. Glen before she turned to him and hissed, “Because it’s her anniversary with her dead husband.”
I guess they named the bridge after Ernie simply because he liked to stand on it and wave at cars. If Mrs. Glen’s still around, I wonder what she thinks of that. Her poor husband got pressed into paper by two forklifts, and Ernie gets all the glory. That alone might have killed her.
Just off the exit ramp, I see a giant square rock on the side of the highway that some bored hick painted to look like a Rubik’s cube. Most of the squares are almost faded off, but I can still make out the colours. Two sides of the cube are partially solved, which, if you’ve ever tried to crack one of those bastards, doesn’t mean shit. Even if you get five sides lined up, you end up having to break them up again to line up the sixth. The only way to solve it is to peel off the stickers and re-stick them when no one’s looking.
Three oncoming cars in a row flick their lights to tip me off there’s a cop hiding around the bend. West’s headlight knob is jerry-rigged with a wine cork and I don’t want to mess with it too much, so after I pass the cop car I pass on the warning by pointing my index finger in the air and rotating it like a siren.
This has to be the most unscenic stretch of highway. The only thing distinguishing one long run of trees from another is the occasional Christmas tree farm, and the only difference between those trees and the rest of the forest is signs that say CHRISTMAS TREES. Around the halfway point, my stomach starts to growl and I turn off the highway looking for a nice place to park while I eat my lunch. I pass an old Mi’kmaq burial ground, a one-truck volunteer fire station, a sign telling me to Choose Life. There’s grass growing up through the pavement in some spots. Finally, I spy a small farm. I pull over and walk up to the fence, hold out my apple and wait for one of the ponies to trot over. I’m stroking her nose with those big horsey eyelashes brushing my fingers and the rain holding off and West’s big truck parked behind me, and I realize part of me is waiting for the farmer to come out here and yell for me to get the hell off his property. I have to remind myself I’m not fourteen anymore and nobody way out here’s going to know I’m a Saint unless I tell them myself.
I get back in the truck and eat the bologna sandwiches while I listen to the country stillness. I keep trying to remember the tune of this old church hymn Ma used to hum low and quiet at the foot of our beds. She didn’t think she had a voice for singing, so she’d speak the lyrics. It was maybe what church was like if your mother delivered the sermon in her nightgown and all you could see was the tip of her Export “A” glowing in the dark. Even when the verses were punctuated by Jackie’s farts, she would just keep droning on in that creepy voice. Ma was never one for brightening the mood. If you skinned your knee, she’d say, “Course you did.” If you asked if it might rain, she’d say, “Only if you don’t want it to.”
I wonder if there really is such a thing as blood ties. Even though I always thought of my family as just a pack of wolves forced to live together in that big drafty shack, I do feel something pull on me every now and then. I imagine there’s a long string holding us together, stretching and fraying as the years drag on. Maybe that’s why I’m driving through the armpit of nowhere trying to find a sister I haven’t seen since she was ten years old and who may well spread her legs for a living. I guess I’m afraid the string’s about to finally snap.
DOWNTOWN JUBILANT MAKES SOLACE RIVER LOOK LIKE Shangri-La. Some of the shops even have bars on their windows. West says stories of trouble in Jubilant have swamped the news ever since the lobster population started to dwindle. A few weeks ago, some fishermen surrounded a truck delivering cheap US lobsters to the processing plant and busted a few of the driver’s ribs, and last summer there was a murder over trapping turf. West said the dead guy’s boat washed up so full of gunshot holes it looked like a hunk of Swiss cheese.
It’s early afternoon when I pull into town, but dusk is settling in by the time I find out where Poppy lives. The owners of the feed store give me directions. I walked in as they were closing and the old man said he never heard of Poppy Saint. “She’s leggy,” I said. “Probably swears a lot, doesn’t dress for the weather.” His wife came out, wiped off her hands and drew me a map on a piece of cardboard.
I crawl along in the truck with the windows rolled down so I can see the numbers on the houses. There are homemade protest signs in people’s windows with slogans like FEELING THE PINCH? or TRY ON OUR RUBBER BOOTS FOR A DAY AND SEA HOW IT FEELS. Some homes have dulse laid out to dry on the rooftops and fishing buoys piled on the lawns. I’m hoping one of these hard-working places is Poppy’s, but of course she’s in the rusty trailer up at the edge of the woods.
I park at the end of the long driveway and take my time getting out, hoping she’ll see me before I have to walk up and knock on the door. The air is much cooler and damper here. I can’t see the ocean, but I can smell it.
There’s a swing set on Poppy’s lawn made from the back seat of a car and a broken plastic swan planter full of Popsicle wrappers and beer caps. The wrought iron steps aren’t attached to the trailer, just propped up against it. The paint is chipped on the mailbox nailed to the exterior wall, and the name says Saint. It feels like a punch to look at it, that ugly peeling name.
After a long minute, a woman comes to the door. She looks like an ashtray that’s been left out in the rain. Her eyeglasses are hanging around her neck on one of those granny strings. She puts them on roughly and stares at me from behind the screen, takes a drag of her smoke.
“Poppy?” I say stupidly.
“She ain’t here.”
“I’m Poppy’s sister.”
“She don’t got no sister.”
“She used to.”
The woman retreats inside and stubs out her cigarette. Then she comes back and looks at me again, moves her tongue around in her mouth as if to make sure her teeth are in there.
“Tabby?”
“Hi, Ma.”
I stand there with the fog falling between us like a curtain until she finally opens the door. The interior light floods the steps, and I follow her inside. There’s a permeating smell of microwave cooking mixing with the general bouquet of cigarette smoke. The chesterfield looks like a werewolf got hold of it, stuffing coming out at all the seams.
“What a dump.”
“Nice of you to say.” Ma lights a fresh cigarette from her blouse pocket and lowers herself into a faded armchair. I remembered her being so pretty, but now she’s all slumped and puffy-faced. Her hair looks like she cut it with a pocket knife.
“Sorry.”
She avoids my eyes. “My God, Tabby. Where have you been all these years?”
She puts down the cigarette. “Come here. Let me hold you.” Neither of us makes a move and finally she picks her smoke back up. “Poppy disappeared. Went to work one night five weeks ago and never came back.”
I ask Ma what line of work Poppy’s in, but she won’t answer. So I ask if she gets paid by the hour and Ma picks up a cloth and starts wiping the table as if somebody just spilled something. Not that there’s anything to spill. She didn’t offer me coffee.
Poppy takes off like this every once in a while, Ma says, but never for more than a week because of her kids. Janis and Swimmer. Janis is five and wears sunglasses in the house. Swimmer is three. He’s got a big round head and eyes so huge they remind me of peanut butter cups. They pretend to be shy at first, peeking around the corner, but then they march in and curl up on either side of me like little bookends.
“So, where’ve you been living?” Ma asks.
“All over New Brunswick, but I came back and met a guy in Solace River.”
“Solace River?” Ma freezes. “Why the hell would you go back there?”
“I was looking for you.”
She picks up the cloth again. “This man of yours. He got a job?”
“Of course,” I say, like I’m so used to having a man, let alone one with a job. “He runs his own business.”
“Good.” She nods. “Good for you.”
“Where’s Daddy?”
“He’s in hospital waiting to die.” She wrings the cloth in her hands. “They say he’s got colon cancer. He might be dead already for all I know.”
“How can you not know?”
“We cut ties a long time ago.”
“Oh.” I can’t seem to find an emotion. “What about Bird and Jackie?”
Janis tugs on my arm. “I got a picture of you.”
“Of me? I haven’t even got one of those.”
She pulls on my arm. “Come on. I’ll show it to you.”
I follow her down the short hallway into a tiny bedroom crammed with toys. The purple walls are covered in personalized stamps, gold stars with her name inside them. I can tell she tried to stamp up the whole room with JANIS! but the ink faded and wore out. There are a few stray stars on the dresser and ceiling like the faded embers of a dream.
She hauls out a pink plastic cash register from under the bunk bed, removes some old, sticky photographs from the drawer and slaps them into my palm.
The photo on top is one of all of us in front of our house: Daddy, Ma, Bird, Jackie, Poppy and me. We look like we’re in a police lineup. I wonder who took the picture, and why on that particular day. I flip through the stack and find the one of just me. I’m wearing a dress with a hole in it and my hair is so blond it’s almost invisible.
“I hated those shoes,” I say.
There’s a used Q-tip stuck to the photograph and when I pull it off, a piece of my little leg comes with it.
“Gross.” Janis screws up her face. “You can keep that one.”
“Thanks,” I say, tucking it into my purse.
I walk out of the room when Ma comes in to get the kids ready for bed, and Janis yells after me, “Will you still be here when it’s morning? If you are, I can learn you how to do two somersaults in a row.”
“You can do two somersaults in a row?”
“Probably four.”
“Then how come you’re only going to show me how to do two?”
She doesn’t get back to me on that, so I head for the living room. Ten minutes later, Ma comes with an armful of wool blankets and some flannel sheets. “You can have the bedroom,” she says.
“I’m not going to take your bed.”
“It ain’t mine. It’s Poppy’s.”
“I’ll be fine on the sofa.”
She watches me make it up before shuffling off. I can’t sleep, and I can tell she can’t either. She coughs constantly and the bedsprings squeak every time she rolls over. When I glance at the clock, it’s barely nine. When we were kids, Ma never went to bed before 2 a.m. She’d sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee, doing word search puzzles and thinking up worst-case scenarios. I trudged past her once on the way to the bathroom and she reminded me I couldn’t flush the toilet because the well was almost dry. Then she said, “Tabby, if the house catches fire and none of you can get out, give the kids all the pink pills in my bottom drawer.” I nodded, squinting against the kitchen light, and by the time I realized I’d just agreed to poison Poppy and Jackie to death, she’d licked her finger and flipped to the next puzzle.
There are so many things I want to ask her now. I consider knocking on her door, but every time I sit up, I chicken out and lie back down.
In the morning, Janis drops a piece of toast on my chest from over the back of the sofa and it scares the living shit out of me.
“Shhh,” Janis whispers. “Grandma’s sleeping.” She climbs under the blanket with me and chews loudly, raining crumbs all over both of us.
“This is delicious,” I whisper. “You’re a good cook.” I lift up her sunglasses and see my baby sister Poppy looking back at me.
“What’s the matter?”
“You look just like your mother.”
“Why are you making a sad face?”
“I miss her, I guess.”
Janis sighs, her mouth circled in strawberry jam. “I miss her too.”
A cat jumps on top of us. When I put my hand out to pet it, Janis says, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I sit up so fast, I knock Janis to the floor.
“That’s Gord the Ferret,” she says as it slithers away. “We got him for our pet so he would kill the rat, but Swimmer’s more scared of Gord than the rat, so Grandma put Gord out to the woods, but he keeps on coming back in here whenever he feels like it.” She throws a hunk of toast at its face. “He always has poop and bugs on him.”
I look around at the room in daylight. Aside from the ratty furniture, there’s a stereo, a lamp, a stand-up ashtray, a peeling plastic rocking horse on springs, and that’s about it. The grey carpet is just about worn through to the plywood floor underneath, and the whole place needs a bucket of bleach.
Janis gets up and straddles the plastic horse, bounces on it a few times for my benefit. Then she stands up on its back and starts to lift one shaky leg in the air behind her like a figure skater. I realize I should probably stop the show, but I’m not sure what the safety rules are around here. Before I can speak up, she loses her balance and crashes down on the saddle. If it hurt, she doesn’t let on. I look away and she follows my gaze to matching velvet paintings of palm trees hanging on the wall.
“Those are some pictures of Toronto. Mama says when we get there, we’ll be rich. Everyone there has white cars and gold teeth. We might go soon if the bad people come.”
“Bad people?”
“They think she stoled their money, but it wasn’t her. It was Petunia.”
“Who?”
“PET-OO-NEE-YA. She’s always getting in trouble. Mama had to sleep in jail one time because of her.”
“Have you ever met Petunia?”
“Nope. Don’t want to neither.”
Petunia my ass. “Hey, Janis.” I glance at the clock. “Do you think Ma would mind if you came with me to run some errands?”
“Mind?” Janis leaps off the horse like she’s going to Disney World. “She’ll be glad to get rid of me!”
She changes into elastic-waist blue jeans but leaves her pyjama top on. I offer to comb some of the tangles out of her long brown pigtails, but she won’t let me. I leave a note for Ma and just as we’re going out the door, Swimmer stumbles into the hallway. His head is so much larger than the rest of him that he walks like a drunk, all leaned over toward one wall.
“You stay here with your cartoon shows, Swimmer,” Janis says, pushing him back into the bedroom and shutting the door. “Quick, before he gets out!” she yells.
“Can’t Swimmer come too?”
Janis looks as if she might cry if I insist, so I don’t. She runs out ahead of me and hauls the truck door open all by herself. When I get in, she’s touching the knobs on the dash, careful not to turn any, though I can tell she’s dying to. She takes a good long survey of the bench seat and pats the vinyl.
“Nice ride.”
“Thanks. It’s not mine, though.”
“I know. What’s your man’s name?”
“West.” I feel a little guilty for letting on like he’s my boyfriend.
She nods. “That’s a good name.”
“Speaking of names,” I say, changing the subject. “Are you a Saint?”
“Yup. But I ain’t no saint. That’s what Ma says. She says saint means someone who’s good all the time.”
“Have you ever had a different last name?”
“Nope.”
“You know who your father is?”
“His name is Bruce or Barty. Something stupid like that.”
“Nope.”
“Do you wish you had a daddy?”
She shrugs. “It don’t make no difference.”
She’s a Saint all right, I think, revving up the truck.
JUBILANT ISN’T MUCH OF A TOWN. JANIS GIVES ME THE lowdown. It’s got a movie theatre that only shows movies on Saturday nights, and the duct-taped popcorn machine catches on fire when it gets too hot. The trains are all gone. Janis said they ripped up all the tracks and made footpaths that nobody can walk on because of all the ATV riders hot-rodding up and down.
“Ran buddy’s foot right over. There was blood squirting out of him like this!” She flings her fingers in every direction.
“You saw it?”
“And we got one of them nail salons, but I never been in there.”
“Do you think they paint little pictures on people’s fingernails? Your grandma used to do that. She could even make shooting stars.”
I wonder if Ma remembers when she used to do my nails. She would get out her blow-dryer and dry them one at a time. Maybe she’d be rich now if she’d started her own business.
Janis points out Frosty’s Convenience Store in case I need any Cracker Jack. There’s a giant neon orange sign in the window: We Cash EI Cheques! We come to a stoplight and I turn left onto the main street of town, drive along a row of faded businesses with the ocean whitecapping between them until I find the salon. I easily nab a place to park and we go inside. The sign on the wall lists prices for hair, nails, waxing, body piercing and pet portraits. There’s a camera set up on a tripod in the corner next to a shelf of props, including chef hats and bow ties. Janis shakes her head no when I ask her if she knows the woman cleaning the sink.
“Hi there!” I call out. “This one needs her nails done.”
The woman lays down her towel, comes over, picks up Janis’s hand and examines it like a surgeon. “All right, honey. Come over here with me and have a seat.”
“I’m getting my nails done?” Janis can hardly sit still. She chooses turquoise with glow-in-the-dark ladybugs. Every time the woman finishes a nail, Janis whispers, “Oh. My. God.”
“You hiring?” I ask, trying to imagine how I’d get a cat to hold still while I drape it in a feather boa.
“No one is.”
“Well, there goes that idea. I’d planned on popping into a few gift shops after this, figuring they might need someone to hand-paint Bay of Fundy on all those conch shells they import from the Bahamas.”
The back window looks out onto a rain-slickened wharf where some fishermen are stacking traps. I watch them finish the job and start goofing off, scooping up mussel shells and tossing them at each other. It quickly leads to a shoving match.
“You ever have Poppy Saint in here getting her nails done?”
The woman pauses with her nail brush mid-air and stares at me.
“Poppy’s this little girl’s mother before you say anything,” I say. “She’s gone AWOL and we can’t find her.”
“She’s been in here once or twice. I haven’t seen her lately. You want to ask Lyle Kenzie.”
“Who’s he, now?”
“He hangs out down at Jody’s.”
“Jody’s? Is that around here?”
She points with her free hand down the street. When she finishes up, I pay her with the money West gave me for truck emergencies. She hands Janis a coupon for 10 percent off a pet portrait, but Janis hands it back and says, “My dog got run over by the garbage truck.” The woman turns white, apologizes to us twice. When we get back on the road, Janis tells me she never had a dog.
“Why’d you say you did?”
She tilts her sunglasses down to look me in the eye. “Because if I said I don’t got no dog, she’d say, ‘Well then, honey, give it to your friend.’ I only know one kid that got a dog and I wouldn’t give that girl a used fart.”
“What’s a used fart?”
“A fart that’s already used. My mama called the mailman a used fart because he keeps giving us flyers with toys on them, and Swimmer sees them and wants her to go buy them all.”
“But how do you use a fart?”
“You fart, then you smell it, then when someone else smells it, it’s already used.”
“She called him that to his face?”
“Yup. She hates his guts ever since he told on her.”
“Told on her for what?”
“For leaving me and Swimmer alone when he was just a baby. I hotted up the milk in the microwave and when he pooped in his diaper, I chucked it out the window so it didn’t stink him up.”
I lean to put my arm around her, but she straightens up and slaps my hand. I put it back on the wheel and she relaxes again.
JODY’S GARAGE IS A BUSINESS ATTACHED TO SOMEONE’S house. It’s empty except for some old cars in various stages of dismantle and a sea of fast-food wrappers. I whisper to Janis that the place smells like a used fart. She nods sagely. When we walk out, some woman sticks her head out the front door of the house and yells, “They’re all down at the diner!” so we get back in the car.
Dot’s Daughter’s Diner is long and narrow, half full of customers who stare outright at whoever walks in. Janis holds up her nails and tells the woman at the cash register, “They glow in the dark. If the power goes out, you’ll know where I’m at, so I can’t steal nothing.”
We grab a booth.
“Have you been in here before?” I ask Janis.
She nods. “Grandma brings us here when my mother forgets to cook dinner.”
I look around. One whole wall is plastered in photographs of customers posing with their meals. At the centre is a framed eight-by-ten of a bemused-looking Rita MacNeil holding up a bowl and spoon. The inscription says Cape Breton’s First Lady of Song Getting Her Mac ‘N’ Cheese On.
“Is your mother in any of these pictures?”
Janis shakes her head. “They tried to get us in their camera, but Mama wouldn’t let them. She said she’d bring them in one of her mug shots.”
I laugh.
“What?”
“Do you know what a mug shot is?”
“Yup. It’s a picture of a lady sitting in a lawn chair drinking coffee.”
The laminated menu posted above the table informs us that customers come to Jubilant from far and wide to taste Dot’s legendary recipes handed down to her daughter. I glance around, but no one in here looks like they’re from farther down the road than the old fish meal factory I saw yesterday. The rest of the menu is barely legible from all the revisions made with a ballpoint pen. Most of the fixes are to prices, but I notice someone crossed out the words “home-cooked” in Home-cooked lasagna – just like Dot used to make! It’s a thinker. I keep running my finger down the list. A scary set of quotation marks were added to Try Our World Famous Fresh-From-The-Boat Lobster Roll. Not to “world famous,” or even “fresh-from-the-boat,” but to “lobster.”
The waitress comes over with her pencil.
“You must be Dot’s daughter,” I say.
She rolls her eyes.
“I don’t suppose you’re hiring?”
“I don’t suppose I am.”
“We’ll have a double order of Tater Dots and a smile.”
“And a milkshake.” Janis swings her legs.
“Strawberry okay?” The waitress lowers her pad. “We’re all out of chocolate.”
Janis mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “Bullshit.”
“Has Janis’s mother been in here today, by any chance?” I ask quickly.
“No.”
“How about yesterday?”
“Haven’t seen her in ages.”
“Is one of those men over there Lyle Kenzie?”
She follows my gaze. “Black baseball cap.” She walks off, comes back a few minutes later with the milkshake and a look that tells me I better not ask any more questions that aren’t about the food.
“I hope Dot has more than one daughter,” I whisper to Janis. “This one’s kind of crusty.”
Janis ignores the straw and takes a big sip from the rim of her shake, coating half her face in it. “She forgot the smile. You should order another one. Ask for one that looks like this.” She sets down her heavy glass and stretches her mouth into an exaggerated grimace.
“How’s the milkshake?” I ask, feeling my stomach gnaw on itself. “Better than the service?”
She shimmies her shoulders, which I take it means yes. She seems to have a whole set of moves. Pumping her fist up and down means, Drive! Putting her hands together in prayer means, Please stop asking me questions.
“I was going to order strawberry anyway,” she says when she comes up for air. “My mother says I should try every kind.”
“Well,” I say, glancing over my shoulder at Lyle Kenzie, “she certainly practises what she preaches.” I lower my voice. “Do you know the man in the black baseball hat?”
“He’s been over at our trailer.”
“Farewell to Nova Scotia” is playing on the jukebox and it’s stuck on the line “But still there was no rest for me … But still there was no rest for me … But still there was no rest for me …” Janis hops down, picks up a hammer lying next to the machine and gives the side of the jukebox a good whack. It skips to the next song.
“That’s what the hammer’s there for,” she tells me.
I keep my eye on Lyle Kenzie as he puts on his jacket. He’s staring right back at me.
“Sit tight a minute, okay?” I tell Janis. I get up and walk outside.
Lyle pauses in the doorway a moment before letting the screen creak closed. “You looking for me?” He adjusts the pasty beer gut flopping over the waistband of his jeans and reaches into a grease-stained shirt pocket for cigarettes.
“I’m looking for Poppy Saint.”
“You and me both.” He lights a smoke, jams his lighter back in his pocket.
“My name is Opal Kent. I work for the police department.” I try not to blink. Opal Kent was one of my favourite characters when I lived in a group home and got addicted to soaps. She had steel-blue eyes and a matching blazer.
“You’re a cop?”
“I’m a private investigator working with the Jubilant Police Department.”
He sneers and starts walking away toward a new Ford truck.
I follow him and say, “Miss Saint should be easy to find, but if you want to make it easier by giving me an address or a phone number, I’ll put you down as a false lead. I’ve been watching that garage for two days now, and I think you know what I mean when I say that I wouldn’t want to have to disclose what goes on in there. The cops are only interested in Poppy at this point.”
It’s a stab in the dark, but Jody’s must be the base for something shady, because Lyle blinks like crazy for a few seconds then goes into his truck and scrawls something on a piece of paper. He comes back and shoves it at me. “I don’t know anything about what she’s been up to and if she says I do, she’s a fucking liar.”
He glances in the rear-view at least four times as he pulls away. I stand watching until the roar of his souped-up engine fades down the road. Then I go back inside and slide in across from Janis.
“That was easy,” I say.
She slurps her straw on the bottom of her empty glass. “Mama said that Lyle’s about as bright as the hooks on Grandma’s bra.”
I glance down at the table. The Tater Dots arrived while I was outside and now they’re just a plate of crumbs. I sigh and scoop some up with my fingers. “Grandma’s still alive?”
“You just talked to her last night. Wasn’t no ghost.”
“Oh, right. I thought you meant my grandma.”
“Great-Grandma Jean? She choked on a Mars bar and died at the table.”
“You were there?”
“Nope, it wasn’t our table. She never lived with us. She does now, though. She’s in a box in our trailer.”
“What?”
“They took her to the fire place and burned her up so she looked like dirt. Once Swimmer was driving his Dinky trucks through her on the kitchen floor. We had to scoop her back into the box, and now there’s a few Cheerios in there with her.”
“Janis, you are a source of information.”
MA IS WAITING FOR US OUTSIDE THE TRAILER. SEEING her shocks me all over again. She looks like she’s wearing an old-lady costume. When Janis runs inside to show off to Swimmer about her fingernails, I fill Ma in on what happened.
“Lyle Kenzie is small-time,” she says. “Don’t let him scare you.”
“He doesn’t scare me. I scared him. Who is he?”
“I used to think he was her boyfriend. She was checking in with him all the time. But I think he’s a contact.”
“Pills, pipe or needle?”
She averts her eyes. “I don’t know exactly. It don’t make her see things or nothing like that, and she won’t do it in front of the kids. But she needs to have it. That’s what she always says. She needs to have it, just like food. She says she wishes she never got it in her blood because now she can’t get through the day without taking something.” She shakes her head. “I’ll never understand it.”
We stand there with our arms crossed, staring down at the dirt.
“There’s something I got to show you just down the road.” Ma says. She looks at me kind of funny and lights a cigarette, takes three or four hauls on it before crushing it out with her heel. She goes to the door and tells Janis we’ll be right back, locks it with her key. We start walking, Ma and me, and it’s sort of like the reunion I’d once imagined: me all grown up and Ma with grey in her hair, strolling down a sunset road.
“I’m taking you to your brother.”
“Which one?”
“Bird.”
“Bird! Really? What I remember most about Bird are the whoppers he’d come up with. Like that time you asked him where he got that brand new gold watch with the price tag still on it and he said he found it in the empty ice cooler out back of the Kwikway. Or when he said he failed math because the teacher added up his marks wrong. Remember how he used to kiss people’s mothers on the hand when he met them?” I laugh. “Does he still have all that long blond hair?”
I keep rambling until Ma stops short in front of a little blue house and puts her hands on my shoulders. “Now, Tabby. Don’t you say nothing about it.”
“About what?”
She goes up the stairs and in through the screen door, and I follow. We enter a dank room with wallpaper that’s been ripped to shreds in two-inch-wide strips at waist height along every wall. The ceiling fan is missing two paddles and the cord that makes it spin is so long it drags on the brown shag carpet. Three men are sitting around a table drinking rye. The one with his back to us is slumped in a wheelchair. The man on his right has an eye patch and a good eye that won’t hold still, and the squat, fat man on the left doesn’t seem to be wearing any pants.
“Hey, Birdie!” Ma trots over, scoots in behind the wheelchair, leans down and kisses him on the cheek.
I come at the table from the other side so I can see his face. He has a scar that runs from his left temple all the way across to his right jawline. It looks like an eel, all grey and rubbery. There’s a bald spot on the back of his head with a flaky rash on it and his fingernails are bruised black, as if he slammed every one of them in a drawer. He’s drooling all over his shirt front.
Ma pats his head. “What are you boys doing? Getting in trouble?”
“Nothing,” the fat one says. Now I see he’s not even wearing underpants. Just a T-shirt, like Winnie-the-Pooh.
“This is Tabby,” Ma tells him. “She’s Bird’s sister.”
“Hi, Bird,” I say, trying to hold a smile. “Do you remember me?”
His tongue dangles out of the corner of his mouth as he shakes his head side to side.
“That’s okay,” I say finally.
He keeps his eyes on me as he slowly reaches his arm out, grabs hold of an edge of wallpaper and tears it off in a long line. Ma leaves the room to check the cupboards, and the rest of us go mute until she comes back and sets a bowl of soup down in front of each of the men. She ties a dishrag around Bird’s neck and starts to feed him with a plastic ladle. After he slurps a few mouthfuls, she taps the elbow of the man with the eye patch and says, “Go ahead and eat your soup, Stanley. Tabby won’t bite you.”
When they finish eating, Ma washes the dishes while I dry. She tells me Bird’s not fit to live on his own, but he won’t go to a facility. She tried to take him once and he spit on the nurses and broke a television set. “I asked around and heard about these two living here with an older brother. Bird gets a disability cheque every month, so I told the man we could pay a little rent and I’d help out with the cleaning and meals. Bird moved in the next week and the brother said he was going on a fishing trip. That’s the last we seen of him.” Ma dabs the cloth on some soup spills. “I stayed here for a little while, but then I had to move to the trailer after Poppy took off. Now I go back and forth all the damn day trying to keep everyone fed.”
I hear a loud noise and poke my head in the other room. Winnie-the-Pooh has a hold of Bird’s wheelchair handles, trying to dump him out onto the floor. I tell Ma and she takes her time finishing the dishes before going to break it up. She comes back in with a Game Boy device in her hand.
“I’m taking this away from them for good. It’s a fight in a can.” She shows me the video screen. “See these bars falling down? You got to move them around real fast to make them fit together before the next ones come.” She keeps demonstrating until I ask if it’s time to leave.
When we’re finally outside, I take a big breath of air and walk away as fast as I can.
“Why didn’t you warn me, Ma?” I yell. “What the hell happened to him?”
“He got jumped. Lost the use of his legs and half his brain. Some days I think he’s better off. The way he was going, someone would’ve killed him by now.”
“Who jumped him?”
“It started right after we moved here, some pissing contest. There was probably a woman involved, ‘cause you know there always is. Bird was getting even with somebody every other month. Now he’s fine most of the time, except for when the cards come out. He gets a temper when he can’t keep the rules straight. I just feel bad about his little girls. Their mother took them away out west after he got out of the hospital. Every once in a while he’ll ask where they are, but mostly he forgets about them, which is best for everybody.”
“How is that best for anybody?”
She doesn’t have an answer. “It’s a hard life, Tabby. I always blamed your father for everything, but it’s been just as bad with him gone.”
“Should I even ask about Jackie?”
“Jackie’s around. He’s hell-bent on finding out who did this to Bird. But he’s doing all right, works construction, don’t even smoke no more. His girlfriend says he watches fishing shows and goes to bed early most nights.”
“Can I call him?”
“Of course.”
“He doesn’t speak through a voice box or have a glass eye or anything?”
“Well.”
“What?”
“He’s about to become a father.”
“Jesus. You scared me.”
“You don’t think that’s scary?”
BEFORE I SETTLE IN ON THE SOFA FOR THE NIGHT, I GIVE West a call from the telephone in the kitchen.
“I’m going to go see my other brother, Jackie, tomorrow night,” I whisper. “If you don’t need your truck right away.”
“I guess not.”
I fiddle with the mustard-coloured phone cord. “I lied. I never drove a Mustang.”
“Mustangs aren’t that great.”
“I have a five-year-old niece, Janis. She likes your name.”
“Oh yeah?”
I try to think of what to say next. “Your voice sounds good on the phone. Just like angel food cake.”
“Angel food cake does sound good. Maybe that’s for dessert after my roast.”