THERE WERE FAMILIES IN Duchess Creek who knew trouble like their own skin. Things went wrong for these families as a matter of course, and they were the subject of kitchen table conversations over the pouring of coffee and the dipping of biscuits. The Lutzes were one of those families. They lived a couple of miles from our place in a half-built house with plastic stapled over the windows and tarps on the roof to keep the rain out.
“It always comes in threes.” Glenna was having tea with my mother at the kitchen table. Her spoon rang against her cup, punctuating the authority of this remark. She let it sink in. Glenna worked at the nursing station in Duchess Creek, so she had the inside story on most of the tragedies in the area. “First the twins, then Peggy’s cancer treatments, and now this.”
“Poor Mickey,” Mom said.
Mickey Lutz was my best friend in Duchess Creek. Mom would let me go to their house for sleepovers only if Helmer was away on one of his hunting trips with his buddies. “On a tear,” was what Mom called it. The house smelled like baby piss and sour milk. Dirty dishtowels hardened into place littered the living room, and balled-up socks, chewed baby toys, and drifts of dog hair. The Lutzes had a little white and brown dog named Trixie. Trixie was going grey around the mouth, like an old man, but she was so faithful she would run alongside Mickey and me on our bikes, limping to keep up. When we stopped, she’d curl up in the gravel on the side of the road, exhausted. But as soon as we made a move again, she’d force herself up on her rickety old legs and start running.
The bed Mickey and I slept in was always coated with white dog hair, and I would try to discreetly brush it off before I got in. Once, before bed, Peggy gave me an orange that smelled like a dirty sock. When I peeled it, the segments were dried out. I ate it anyway, because Mickey was eating hers and didn’t seem to notice. For breakfast we had crackers and orange pop.
“The Lutzes all came in together,” Glenna continued. “Just showed up at the nursing station like a pack of wolves with their injured. Helmer was hanging off Peggy’s shoulder, poor thing; she could barely hold him up, and him dragging this bloody foot across the floor. Little Mickey had the baby.”
When Glenna came for coffee, she would bring her own packets of Sweet’N Low. She bought them in big boxes at the co-op in Williams Lake. It allowed her to count calories, so she said. It seemed to be her only gesture towards trying to lose weight. She tore open the Sweet’N Low packets as Mom refilled her cup and then, two at once, poured the powder into her coffee. She stirred, staring into her cup, giving Mom time to ask the questions to which she’d have the answers.
“Poor Peggy,” said Mom. “How did he do it?”
“He was hunting.”
They both laughed at this. I knew it was because Helmer’s idea of hunting was sitting on the tailgate of his truck in the sun, drinking beer and waiting for game to wander by. “You know Helmer,” Glenna said, “if there’s trouble, he’ll find it. He forgot the rifle was loaded? Who knows? Took off the whole big toe and part of the next two.”
Their heads moved left to right, slowly, in unison. It was pity, sincere, but with just a hint of self-satisfaction. I don’t think it’s fair to call their talk gossip, though. If they could have, they would have set Helmer up with a regular paying job. Driving truck would suit him, Mom said, doing deliveries town to town, up and down Highway 20, something not too challenging that would keep him out of the house and Peggy and the kids in groceries.
Still, there was always that underlying confidence that things like this couldn’t happen to us. Glenna and Mom had husbands who knew better than to carry around their rifles with the safety off. They themselves knew better than to stay home pregnant with twins, like Peggy had, well past the due date.
“I don’t know why she didn’t get him to drive her to Williams Lake,” Glenna still said every time she came to visit, though it had happened months ago now and she’d heard all of Helmer’s excuses. I’d heard Mom say Glenna kept talking about it because she felt guilty since one of the babies died on her shift, and Peggy herself had nearly bled to death in the nursing station and had to be rushed to the Williams Lake hospital.
As for the cancer, the talk was that Peggy had never taken good care of herself. She spent too much time inside, she didn’t get enough fresh air. They didn’t eat properly either. Everyone knew that when Helmer got his welfare cheque, Peggy would stock up on TV dinners. I’d seen her myself in the store, wearing that defiantly ashamed face as she stacked the counter with the flat boxes. Then when the money ran out, the Lutzes lived on Wonderbread and jam.
“He’s a dead weight around Peggy’s neck,” Glenna said, stirring. “She’d be better off without him. Best thing that could happen to that family, Helmer isn’t paying attention, gets airborne out over the canyon.”
“He’s got horseshoes up the whazoo, that guy,” Mom said. “He should be dead by now.”
“He should be dead three times over. Listen to us. I take it back, God,” Glenna called to the kitchen ceiling.
“Yeah, well,” muttered Mom. “More coffee?” She glanced at me and Jenny playing checkers in the patch of sunlight by the woodstove. I suppose Mom thought that her conversations with Glenna were part of our education.
Mickey stayed with us the night her mother lost one of the twins. She stayed with us again when her mom found out she had cancer and had to fly to Vancouver for treatments. And she stayed with us the night after her dad shot off half his foot with his 30.30. Mom had bought the new McCall’s magazine and Mickey and I sat cross-legged on the bed cutting out the Betsy dolls. I could hear Mom at the kitchen counter, getting down pans, then the crash as they all slid to the floor.
“Sorry!” she called, to no one in particular. She began to hum “Sweet Caroline.” Something else clattered to the floor. She was making meatloaf following a recipe that allowed her to use the roasting pan on top of the woodstove. Mickey’s and my feet were dusted with breadcrumbs from running through the kitchen looking for scissors and tape. Mom called to me to bring her a piece of toilet paper—she had grated her finger along with the carrots.
She was making meatloaf following a recipe that allowed her to use the roasting pan on top of the woodstove. Mickey’s and my feet were dusted with breadcrumbs from running through the kitchen looking for scissors and tape. Mom called to me to bring her a piece of toilet paper—she had grated her finger along with the carrots.
“Let’s pretend I’m the dad,” said Mickey when I came back. She said it like “lepretend,” which irritated me. She wasn’t a baby. She should speak properly.
“Lepretend I just bought a new truck. Like it?” She drove her paper doll along the edge of my bedspread.
“What colour is it?” I asked.
Her games bored me, but I played along because I knew that this was the Lutz family story about how one twin died. Helmer didn’t drive to Williams Lake that night because he didn’t think his truck would make it. He always kept a couple of cans of transmission fluid in the back so he could top it up every few miles, all the while complaining about how he needed a new truck.
Mom had fumed about it for days when she’d heard.
“Slouching around with his guilty, hangdog look,” she said. Hangdog was the word Mom used to describe the kind of men who treated their families so badly in the privacy of their own homes that when they went out, they couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Especially other women. Guilty conscience, that was the hangdog look.
“Lazy son-of-a-bitch,” Mom had said. “Cowardly, lazy son-of-a-bitch. Blames it on his truck.”
Dad had laughed.
“What?” Mom demanded.
“Oh nothing, nothing,” he’d said, smiling.
“Tell me what’s so funny then. You think losing a baby and almost dying yourself is funny?” She was really mad. “She’d be better off without him. At least then she could keep the welfare cheque for herself and the kids. He’s useless. Like a baby, only he’s bigger and he eats more.”
—
“Lepretend you’re the mom and you’re going to have a baby,” said Mickey.
Mickey always wanted to play these improved-version-of-reality games. Even though they bored me, usually I said, “Okay and my baby is the next king of the empire and we have to protect him from the kidnappers who are hiding in the hills nearby.” And that way we were both happy. But not today. Today I made my Betsy doll say, “I don’t feel so good. I think I’m going to have my baby.”
“I’ll drive you to the hospital,” Mickey’s doll said.
“No thanks. I have my own truck,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.
Mickey stared at me, at a loss for a minute.
“My truck’s not new,” I said. “But it works fine.”
“Let’s go outside and play,” said Mickey.
That night, lying with Mickey’s feet near my head and Jenny whistle-snoring in the next bed, I listened as the coyotes started yipping. One began it, a full-voiced, forsaken wail, long and high. Then others took it up, and the dogs from the nearby Indian reserve joined in, their unburdening ringing in the night.
At the other end of my bed, Mickey was crying. I could hear her, though she tried to stifle it.
I felt sorry for Mickey. But more than that, I was glad I was not her.