We were reading the one act play Summer Comes to the Diamond O in class that afternoon, a goofy cowboy comedy was what Miss Lambert said it was, something we could have some fun with. There were grief counsellors talking to the senior grades, sure, but they probably figured those of us in grade nine were so far removed from Anna Big Sky that carrying on like normal was the best thing for us to do. Of course, we were expected to volunteer for all the parts in the play, those with the main roles pulling their desks to the front of the room and turning them around so they could face the rest of us as they read. I didn’t volunteer for anything. I’m not exactly sure what the play was about, a bunch of cowhands coming in for dinner in a cookshack, something about a stranger who tells them fancy stories, but I kept drifting off to things that really mattered.
I wondered what I ought to do. If only my brother wasn’t involved — that complicated everything. It would’ve been easy to turn Jordan and the rest of them in, but my brother — that was different. Why the hell couldn’t he just this once have done what I asked him? But oh no, he wanted me to stay out of it. As if there was any way he could handle it himself. He didn’t give a damn about Anna, didn’t care about anybody but himself.
Never had.
No, that wasn’t fair.
He didn’t used to be like that.
The stranger going on about real old-fashioned baking powder biscuits, how nice and firm they were, and suddenly I was somewhere else, with my brother, out at Douglas Park, the two of us gazing across the beach at the grey waters of Diefenbaker Lake, white caps rolling into shore, kids on air mattresses laughing and hooting, riding the waves like cowboys, and neither one of us could swim. I was maybe four at the time. “Listen now,” my father said. “You two stay right here on this blanket. I just have to run up to the washroom. Be back in a minute.” As soon as he was out of sight around the corner of the washroom, I headed for the water.
“You’re s’posed to stay here,” said Blake.
“I’m just gonna wade a bit. Up to my ankles.”
The water wasn’t even cold. The bottom was all sand under my feet, not a rock anywhere, the sand in lines of little ridges where the waves washed it in. You could scratch them with your toes or stomp them with your heels, and the water got all fuzzy with sand.
There was a kid on a yellow sea-horse, a little kid, not much bigger than me, it was bucking in the waves and he kept falling off and grabbing it, climbing on to ride again, but I knew that it would get away from him, pretty soon it would, and then I’d have my chance, I’d grab it and show him how to ride. He was off again, a big wave lifting it, heaving it away, and now I was gonna show him, but my feet went down.
The bottom wasn’t there.
Somehow the water got on top of me.
I could just see that yellow sea-horse up above, rolling up above, but I couldn’t get to it, and I was rolling too. I tried to yell, but there was water in my mouth, I was coughing, spitting and coughing, more water coming in. Something underneath my arms, lifting, my mouth was in the air, coughing, choking, it was Blake had a hold of me, only he was going down, and so was I, but I had a mouth full of air, and he was right beside me, I could see him in a blur of water shaking, splashing, bubbles streaming from his nose, and I needed up again, I got my hands on his shoulders, tried to push myself up, if I could only get my head above the water. . .
My father’s face like a fish before me, a few strands of hair streaming off his head, seaweed in the current, and he had me around the waist, lifting, and my head was out of the water, I was breathing air, and Blake was right beside me, he’d be breathing too, our father dragging both of us back toward the beach, setting us down on the sand, kneeling in front of us while we gasped and coughed.
I’d expected him to give me heck, to turn me over his knee and nail me with the spanking I deserved, but he never even yelled. His voice was just a whisper when he spoke. “Blair,” he said, “Blair, you could have drowned.” When I was through coughing, he put a hand on either side of my face and held me still, his head lowered to my own. “Listen now. You must never go in the water unless I’m there, or your mother is. Right there. You understand?” His grip on my face was so tight I could barely nod my head. “Good. That’s important. I hate to think what would have happened here if it wasn’t for your brother.” He let me go then and turned to Blake, but I could still feel his fingers on my cheekbones.
“Blake, I know you were trying to help, going in after him like that. But you can’t swim, it could’ve been the end of you too. You were very brave, son, but you should have called an adult.” He said some more, his voice quiet, still surprisingly calm, I guess, but I was crying by then and didn’t hear the rest. Blake was crying too.
I found myself rubbing my eyes, and all around me kids were snickering. I scrunched down in my seat, but it was okay, they were laughing at the play. A sheriff had walked into the cookshack and called the stranger Windy. “Windy!” someone exclaimed, and the kids reading at the front were all trying to look horrified.
He was my brother, and he used to be a good guy. How was I going to turn him in? If he hadn’t been drinking, this never would’ve happened — I knew that was the truth. It was the beer, it had to be.
Yeah, but it did happen. Anna was dead. They’d already shipped her body back to the reserve at Wood Mountain, and there was going to be a big funeral early next week. I wanted to go, but I wasn’t sure my parents would let me out of school. When the funeral was out of town like that — not in Wood Mountain, but in Assiniboia, which was almost as far away — hardly anybody from school would be there, well, maybe the girls’ volleyball team and a few close friends, and somebody sent to represent the student council. She deserved more than that.
Uh-huh, she deserved justice. But for her it was too late for that. The guys who did it to her, though, they needed to see how justice worked. It would have been easy, too, if it was just Jordan Phelps, Jordan and Vaughn Foster, sure, and Todd Branton, but this was Blake, my brother, I wasn’t sure that I could do it. Except I knew it was the right thing to do.
“This kid at school,” my father had said, sounding almost as though he knew who the kid was, “has a pretty good idea of right and wrong. I think he already knows what to do.” And maybe he did figure out that I was the kid. Because then he had to go and quote the Bible: “Let your heart take courage.”
As if that was going to help me.
And this Windy fellow was yapping on about the time he sailed around Cape Horn and he was sleeping in a hammock while the ship ploughed through huge waves, and the kids playing parts and the others in their desks, they were all listening to him just as if his name wasn’t Windy and he wasn’t full of crap.
I knew I’d be late for practice after school that day. The telephone was in the hall by the gym where kids were always using it to phone home for rides after games and practices. Kids like me who didn’t have cell phones. Some days you’d look down there and there’d be such a line-up, sheesh, you’d think the school had a bloody ban on cell phones. The halls would take a while to clear after the bell at 3:30, and I sure as heck didn’t want anyone hearing what I had to say. I stayed at my desk, working on the questions we’d been assigned in English class, but they didn’t make much sense because I’d been in such a haze throughout the reading of the play. At 3:45 I gave it up, dumped my books into my locker and headed for the gym.
The hall was empty except for one guy, Al Richardson, and he was on the phone. One of the debate team, he was the kind of person who hated silence as much as any deejay blathering between programmed selections on the radio. I walked past him, into the lounge and got myself a coke from the drink machine.
Moment of panic. I plunged my finger back into the coin pocket on my jeans. No, it was okay, I still had money for the phone.
I pulled a chair over to where I could watch Richardson and went to work on my coke. One hand held the phone beside his ear, of course, but the other hand, his right one, was slicing patterns in the air, beating out the rhythm of his words. Man, all I’d have to do is tie down that hand and he’d totally lose his ability to speak — he’d have to hang up the phone. Come on, I thought, get it over with. He paused once for what must have been a full minute, his right hand hanging lifeless at his side. He was leaning against the wall now, turning back and forth, almost writhing, listening to whoever was on the other end of the line, the pain of keeping silent too much for him. Twice I saw his mouth open, then fall shut again, disappointment like a mask on his face. Another second and he made his move, lips flapping, his right hand back in action. Yeah, he came off that wall like a player coming off the bench when the coach sends him into the game with a trick play they know is going to mean their last chance to win.
I dropped my empty can into the bin and ambled down toward him. Maybe if I hung around beside the phone he’d take the hint.
I was almost upon him when his eyes seemed to focus on me, as if he suddenly realized this object coming towards him wasn’t just a piece of moving furniture, and he turned away from me, hunching over, shielding the phone with his shoulder. Probably trying to impress some girl, I thought. The jerk likes himself almost as much as Jordan Phelps. I walked past him so he couldn’t pretend I wasn’t there, and leaned against the wall a few yards from him. He immediately turned the other way, cupping his right hand over his mouth and the phone to cut down any chance that I might hear whatever line he was using. Hey, maybe that would do the trick. He was going to have trouble keeping up his share of the dialogue with his hand motionless beside his mouth.
I pulled out a quarter, began to flip it into the air and catch it. After another minute he glanced over his shoulder.
“You gonna be long?” I asked.
“I paid my money,” he said. “Don’t rush me.” But his voice was quiet on the phone, his hand still, the animation gone from his chatter. I had him now. It was just a matter of time.
After yet another minute, I heard him say, “I got to go now. There’s some creep here keeps trying to listen in.” When he hung up the phone, he stuck his nose in the air and walked past me without another word. Yeah, but if he’d been Jordan Phelps, he would’ve body-checked me into the wall. I waited until he had gone all the way down the hall and disappeared toward the outside door.
I couldn’t just phone 9-1-1, could I? This wasn’t exactly an emergency, not now it wasn’t, and back on Saturday night, when someone might have saved Anna, nobody was phoning the police to help her. I grabbed the directory from where it was chained in the rack beneath the phone. “Crime Stoppers,” that was what they said on T.V. They were always doing robbery reenactments on the suppertime news, guys wearing ski masks sidling toward cash registers in convenience stores, pulling knives, threatening clerks, running outside with handfuls of cash, a policeman in full close-up abruptly commandeering the screen to tell us about the importance of phoning Crime Stoppers if we had any information that might in any way be useful. Oh man, I could tell him what he needed to know.
My hands unsteady, I flipped through the yellow pages. “CRESTS,” “CRISIS CENTRES,” but no headings between them. Jeez, you had to be a sleuth just to find the damned phone number. I tried the white pages, some names in huge bold print and highlighted in yellow, some in smaller bold print, “CRESTVIEW ROOFING LTD” leaping out at me, and “CROCKER DAVID CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT” and nothing but small print between them. Didn’t these guys want your tips?
But there it was, in the small print, “Crime Stoppers (Saskatchewan)” and an 800 number (Call No Charge). I checked both ways down the hall. Not another person anywhere in sight. No charge — did that mean for pay phones or long distance? I dropped my quarter in the slot just in case and pressed the numbers: 1-800-222-8477, and almost dropped the phone when a girl was immediately on the line, not a single ring at her end, but there she was, talking to me: “Thank you for calling the Crime Stoppers Tip Line.” Just a recording, I thought, she isn’t really there, this might be okay. “Your help is appreciated, and we want to assure you that at no time will your call be monitored or traced. To reach Palliser Crime Stoppers, press One. To reach Saskatchewan Crime Stoppers — “
I pressed one.
This was it then; I was going to do it. Brnnng . . . Brnnng . . .Brnnng . . . four . . . five . . . six rings — they didn’t give a damn — seven rings, and someone was picking up the phone. “Hello. Crime Stoppers.” A woman’s voice. “How can we help you?” This was a real woman on the other end of the line, I could hear her breathing, she was waiting for me to talk. “Can I help you?” An edge to her tone.
“Yes.” Damn, my voice like a squeak, but I could lower it. I took a deep breath. “I want to report a crime.” No, that wasn’t right. They knew about the crime. “Report on a crime. This girl from school, Anna Big Sky, she was killed. The cops — ” no, they wouldn’t like me saying ‘cops’ “ — the police, they already know that, but I can tell them who did it.” I’d hardly said a thing, yet I was out of breath, almost gasping.
“I’m going to give you a number, sir.” She was all politeness now. “It will protect your identity, but you’ll still be eligible — ”
“I don’t want a bloody number.”
“Go ahead, then.” She was still trying for politeness, but her voice was curt. “If you can give me names, that would be helpful.”
I could still hang up.
Just drop the phone on the cradle and walk away from here, hustle down to the locker room and get dressed for practice, everything would be okay, nobody would guess what I’d nearly done. Blake would never know.
Yeah, but I had a pretty good idea of right and wrong — my father knew that much, didn’t he? — and what they’d done was wrong.
“Jordan Phelps,” I said. “He’d be the one who got them started. Todd Branton, you can bet that he was there, and . . . Vaughn Foster — probably him too. Those guys — they do everything Phelps says.” The light above my head was flickering. I looked up, one fluorescent tube going on and off and on again, as if it couldn’t make up its mind about what it ought to do. “I don’t know how many were involved all together, but those three, they’re the guys to check. Have the police talk to them.”
And one other guy, I thought, Blake Russell, but oh no, I couldn’t say his name. Did it matter though? The rest of them would be quick to turn him in.
She read the three names back to me and added, “Now, you’re sure about this information?”
“Yes,” I said, “but I wish I wasn’t,” and I hung up the phone.
I thought I’d feel better after I made the call, but somehow I felt worse.
After I got into my equipment, I sat for a long time on the bench, staring into my locker, my jeans hanging in the shadows like a haggard outlaw dangling from a gallows. What about Blake, what was going to happen there? They’d get him anyway, I thought, even though I chickened out and didn’t say his name. Finally, I kicked the locker door shut and left the room.
My brother was on the practice field, working out of the shotgun because our centre needed to practice his long snaps. Blake was throwing passes to five different receivers, but they were dogging it, trotting through their routes, laughing and waving at balls they should have been catching, horsing around, I guess, while Coach Conley was down by the goal line, working with the other linemen. When I trotted onto the field, I couldn’t see Blake’s eyes because of the dark visor on his helmet, but I could tell from the thrust of his jaw that he was angry. If I was a receiver, I’d be running full-out every time he threw the ball. I looked around for Jordan Phelps — he never dogged it when a pass was thrown his way — but there was no sign of him. No sign of Vaughn Foster either.
I tried to keep a blank look on my face, but it wouldn’t matter — he could always read me like an actor with a script.
When Blake saw me coming he was fading back to throw, but he stopped, his arm cocked, and studied me, his jaw thrust out even farther. I knew what he was thinking. Yeah, one look and he knew. He took a step toward me.
“Shit,” he said, “shit! You’ve gone and done it.” He hurled the ball at my head, but I got my hand up in time to knock it away. He wrenched his helmet off, glaring at me, and I prepared to duck, but he stood there for a long moment, his body rigid, motionless. In the end he fired his helmet at the goalpost. When it hit, there was a sharp crack, which must have been the visor breaking, and the helmet bounced to the ground. Before it stopped rolling, my brother had walked off the field.
On his way toward the gate, he strode past Coach Ramsey, who was usually late for practice after getting off work at the asphalt plant. Blake went by him so close, in fact, that he almost bumped him. Ramsey stopped and said something — I could see his lips move, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Whatever it was, it had little effect on Blake; he spoke to Ramsey, a word or two, but he kept right on walking toward the door of the gym.
When Ramsey turned around, he looked flustered and hurried onto the field. He noticed me watching him and came directly towards me.
“What the hell’s wrong with Blake?”
I shrugged.
He reached for me then, tapped me on the chest, his finger like a spike. “I saw him throw that ball at you. Then he says, ‘My stupid brother told.’ What the hell’s going on?”
“He’s pissed off at me, I guess.” I almost shrugged again, but caught myself in time. “He’s pissed off a lot lately.”
“He’s pissed off? You want to see pissed off, watch me if he doesn’t get the hell back out here. And soon too.” He put his hand flat on my chest, pushed me back from him. Took a step away, then swung around again. “Trouble with your brother, he’s got a swelled head. Just because he’s throwing to the best receiver this league ever saw, he thinks he’s a half-assed quarterback.”
“He’s a good quarterback.”
Ramsey was so close I could feel his breath on my face. For a second I thought he was going to take a swing at me, his right hand coming up fast, but it hovered in front of me, one finger extended, pointing beyond my shoulder.
“Get the hell out there and run your laps,” he said.
I wasn’t crazy enough to argue with him. I turned and jogged toward the track that circled the field.
“Where’s your brother?” my father asked. We were at the supper table, chicken noodle soup and toasted cheese sandwiches laid out before us.
I shook my head. “He’s not upstairs.” I took a bite of the sandwich, felt the melted cheese hot on my lower lip. The little television was on, the suppertime news coming at us from the far corner of the kitchen counter. When the weather man stepped before his map, my father picked up the remote and turned the volume down a few notches. The guy was always laughing at things that weren’t funny, his laugh loud and phoney.
My mother had her spoon in her soup, was idly stirring it in little circles. “I don’t know what’s with him lately,” she said. For a second, I thought she meant the weather man. “He hasn’t been himself all week. There’s something on his mind.”
“He’s been pretty slack about his homework too,” said my father. “Maybe needs some tuning up.”
The poor bugger, I thought, Jordan would’ve ratted on him, he’s probably getting tuned up right now. I could picture him in some bare room in the basement of the police station, a couple of tin chairs, a single wooden table, somebody leaning across the table, grilling him, shaking a nightstick in his face, my brother squirming on the chair, another cop pacing behind him, nodding, yes, that’s the idea, another minute and he’s going to break.
“Anything at school? Blair?” My father was staring at me, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Pardon?”
“I was talking to you. Maybe Blake isn’t the only one who needs some tuning up.” His voice was louder than before, but he looked frustrated rather than angry.
“I was trying to catch the forecast.”
“And I was asking if you’d noticed anything at school — about your brother.”
There was no way I could tell them what I knew. “He doesn’t talk to me all that much anymore.” I took a bite of my sandwich, the cheese cooler now. My father waited while I chewed.
“Something going on between the two of you?”
“I don’t know — not really.” They’d find out soon enough, but someone else would have to tell them. Still, I had to say something. “Being quarterback, I think maybe all that responsibility is getting to him. And Coach Ramsey’s a bit of a dink.”
“Blair!” My mother’s interjection.
“Coach Conley’s in charge, isn’t he?” My father again. He said something more about the coaching, but I was watching the television, Anna Big Sky’s face in black and white, a yearbook photograph was what it was, that smile frozen there, the same smile she wore whenever we passed in the halls, a photo the only way anyone would see it now or ever again, the volume still turned down low, but in the silence after my father’s words, I heard the announcer say there was breaking news, the police were expecting to make arrests, of high school boys, no names would be released.
“You know anything about this?” my father asked.
I shook my head, wishing I hadn’t been so busy staring at the television set that I’d missed the reaction of my parents. I wondered, did they have any suspicions?