Little Bastards in Springtime (16 page)

Later, the teacher told me she was sorry she’d put me on the spot, but it was too late for me. The kids had already laughed, I’d already lied my first lie.

T
HE BASTARDS
have no discipline, it’s a sad fact. Where are they? We’ve got stuff to do. Baggies to fill, boys to bring into line, livelihoods to make. Specifically this Andrew motherfucker who called Madzid a rag-head, we’ll drag him out of his parents’ house and beat the crap out of him, then do a house ten blocks over while we’re at it. I need more plunder to get more cash to give to Mama, which she’ll refuse to take. Maybe Baka needs something nice. A blouse or slippers, a pearl necklace or whatever the fuck someone old and sick like her would want. I have no idea. But that’s a lie. I know what she wants. She wants to spend time with me like when I was small, tell me her stories, sing some communist working songs. I loved her then because she was fierce, like a woman should be. Now she sits on the living room couch all day staring at nothing. Now she shuffles and shakes, now she nags at me with accusing eyes.

They’re finally here. They clatter down the stairs, Milan, who’s sitting at the kitchen table with Mama, calling after them, “Hey, aren’t you going to say hello to your elders?” in that half-joking, half-serious way of his. He tries to get me to go out with him, to be my male role model or some such ridiculous horseshit. He even bribes me with beer, as if that’s a huge thrill for me, so he can sit me down and tell me how things are with my family. Your mother repressed her grief the whole time she worked to get you and Aisha and Baka here to Canada, and now it’s coming out, now she’s suffering so much. She needs your support, Jevrem, she needs you to be considerate.
Can you do that for her? But Mama’s got Aisha to be the perfect child, she doesn’t need me for that. She needs me to dig in the grime, even if she hates me for it, because sometimes you have to do what you have to do to get what you need, whether people like it or not.

Geordie, Zijad, Madzid, Sava, and me, that’s our gang of little bastards. The five of us spend time together, time and energy and other people’s money. We lie around and dream, we go out into the night and do things. They’re all Yugo too, speak the same language, share the same memories of humanitarian lunch packets, water pills, rice and beans, smelly stoves, lineups, noise, dirt, rubble, feeling sick and weak and bored and terrified. Of death everywhere. But we’re more than that, we’re nomads of the world, that’s what Zijad says when he’s in a dreamy, philosophical state, when he’s snorted some random pills he’s found in a rich person’s bathroom cabinet. Ethnicity-is-destiny is bullshit, the biggest lie, that’s pretty obvious everywhere you look around the world, he says, but we know each other’s background anyway, it’s impossible not to since the war. That’s how the fascists ruined things for us.

“I’ve got the stuff.” Geordie sits down on the floor, takes off her ski jacket. She lived pretty close to us back home but I didn’t know her there. She’s Croat one hundred percent, which means mixed in with a bunch of bloodlines, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Gypsy, Albanian, ones that can never be mentioned, so she’s still a bastard to us.

“Roll us a few,” says Zijad, and makes himself comfortable on my sleeping bag. He’s the son of Dora and Orhan, Mama and Papa’s friends who didn’t make it out of the city. They were killed on their way to a concert one day, so much for culture. He doesn’t talk about them. He’s also a dog’s breakfast of Bosniak, which means he’s Muslim, with traces of Turkish and German
and Macedonian, staying with his Bosniak aunt and uncle not far from here. The three of us met at some lame Yugo event just after we landed in Toronto.

“Here, I’ll do it, pass it here.” Madzid is huge, with long dark hair hanging in his eyes. He’s a Bosniak on one side, a Catholic Croat and Italian on the other, with a Serb grandfather lurking somewhere in his closet too.

“Hey, Andric,” says Sava, “you motherfucker.” She slumps down against the wall. She calls me by my last name, I don’t know why. She’s Serbian with Slovenian and Jewish and Hungarian mixed in, so what?

A year ago, when we started grade ten, we found Madzid and Sava wandering the hallways of our school, a skinny pair of pale homesick Yugo kids looking for some action.

“Hey,” I say back. I think of adding
you cocksucker
for half a second but I can’t say the words out loud. Putting Sava’s mouth on some random cock even just in all our minds as a joke is impossible, that’s how proud and untouchable and glorious she is.

Sava is gorgeous in a rough kind of way, combining fearless strength and agility with crazy curves and long, supermodel legs, an unholy combo for any warm-blooded onlooker like me, especially when she flicks her blond fuck-you hair over her shoulder while staring you down with mountain-grey eyes and an angry pouting mouth. I could stare at her non-stop for the rest of time, but she walks like a fighter and growls at me when I do, so I only look when she can’t see, when she’s distracted by being pissed off with the rest of the world. Whenever she’s around, I feel okay, like there’s one upside to life, like at least one glittering ray of sunshine is making it through the murky fog of existence. I wish I could grab her and kiss her for ten thousand years, but that’s not how she rolls.

“It’s fucking crazy outside,” says Zijad. “It’s raining and snowing at the same time. And there’s lightning. Total weather overkill.”

Geordie pulls a huge bottle of vodka, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a large plastic bag of weed, and a scale out of her knapsack. Madzid begins to roll. The rest of us sit on the carpet in a circle, smoking cigarettes and bagging weed into small, super-locking Ziplocs. We don’t speak, we’re on a schedule. It’s in moments like this, when we’re all together, before the action begins, that I sometimes think of Pero and the others. Mahmud, Zakir, Cena, and Nezira, how we used to hang out in the same way, the younger-kid version of us Bastards, with a soccer ball, skipping ropes, with our first cigarettes and our first kisses. I know they’re alive somewhere, except Cena, breathing in and out just like us, scattered across the world, figuring things out, finding stuff to do, forgetting and remembering, trying to get by.

After a while, Mama comes down and stands in the doorway, speaking very quietly.

“Jevrem, it’s Sunday evening, we have guests.”

I say, “Sorry to disturb the endless family reunion, Ma, I’m going out.” I know Mama has smelled the pot, but that’s not what bothers her, and she doesn’t care that I’m not entertaining the guests. Her main goal in life is to keep me at home safe, to keep me from walking out the door. “I’ll be back soon,” I add, a completely pointless lie.

We leave by the side door. Outside, ice is slicing down at an angle, but we don’t feel it because we’ve just smoked a bale of weed, downed a bottle of cheap vodka, and our faces are numb. We run down the cement walkway and jump into Madzid’s car, which is parked on the road. We love to drive all over town,
weaving between evening commuters, zipping along deserted late-night roads, coming home early in the morning when the sun begins to rise. Gas is cheap here, gas is easy, you just go to the pump and buy it, no need to steal it, or bribe U.N. forces with cheesy Yugo porn to get it. Once, at 3 a.m., we raced all the highways of the city, up the curving Don Valley Parkway, across the sixteen-lane 401, down the 427, and across the Gardiner Expressway perched on its concrete pillars at the edge of the lake, flying like devils unleashed from hell, all the cops parked, eating doughnuts.

Zijad drives because Madzid is cracked, he snorted some blow, but Zijad is stoned and drives so slowly it feels like we’re floating like exotic birdwatchers in a rubber dinghy along a swampy river of buckling asphalt. The icy rain makes the night seem darker, so we can hardly see the bedraggled little matchbox houses of my neighbourhood glide by, with their tiny front lawns and crumbling cement steps, their short driveways and uneven walkways. C’mon, we say, step on it, but Zijad pulls out onto St. Clair in a wonky slow-motion arc, cars honking all around us. Jesus, we say, and observe with curiosity as he straightens out and begins to weave all over the road, bumping up onto the sidewalk, scaring the uptight pedestrians. It’s funny watching the pedestrians scamper so awkwardly, but we aren’t going to get to Andrew’s place anytime soon, and I’m an impatient guy, so we stop and Sava gets in the driver’s seat. When she drives the car is a heat-seeking missile.

Andrew’s place is a small, rundown bungalow, just like mine, but there’s a big old tree on the front lawn and pots of spring flowers on each side of the front door, so it looks more cheerful. By this time, it’s only 9:20 p.m., and the lights are still on everywhere.

“Hey, his parents are around, what the hell?” says Sava.
“Look the dad is at the door with a garbage bag. I thought they were meant to be out.” She looks at me and frowns. “And it’s only just past nine, we can’t beat the crap out of him on his front lawn when the whole street’s awake watching
Law and Order.
”

“Losers,” says Madzid. “It’s the same show over and over again. Don’t they realize that? Don’t they get so bored they want to rip their eyeballs out?” He sighs. He has high standards when it comes to TV.

“It’s escapism,” says Zijad.

“Whatever,” says Madzid. “What do these people need to escape from?”

He has a scraggly Ayatollah beard, a nose ring in his left nostril, and never wears more than a T-shirt and a jean jacket, even in deepest winter, to prove that there’s only mind and no matter.

“Not escapism,” I say. “All humans like to hear stories about other humans. We watch each other, we listen to each other, it’s how we figure out how to act and feel. TV, movies, plays, they’re all part of that.”

“Yeah,” Madzid says, “books, plays, opera, sitcoms, commercials, gossip. Stories for smart people, stories for dumb people.”

So there we are sitting in a car in front of Andrew’s friendly house having a ridiculous uninformed conversation about what makes the human mind and heart tick. I scowl at everyone.

“We’re going in now anyway,” I say. “Did he call you a fucking rag-head when everyone was asleep in their beds? No, he did not, so we won’t give him the same courtesy.”

We pull our scarves up over our faces and we pick up our weapons of choice. I have a gun, as always, the sniper’s rifle I got from that creepy weird place way up in Maple. Lie. It’s not really a sniper’s rifle, that would cost a fortune. It’s just a plain old crappy hand gun, the kind you can buy for a hundred bucks
south of the border. The others have baseball bats, hunting knives, their fists. We get out of the car, march up to the house, open the front door, walk in. The front hallway is bright. There is a smell of bland food, chicken with rice, maybe, and some kind of air freshener. The TV is booming in the living room. Mom calls out to us, “Hey, who’s there?” Then she appears in the hallway, goes pale, staggers backwards. With the scarves we probably look to her like battle-ready Mohawks. The poor freaking Indians, too nice and polite for their own good, and still the scariest motherfuckers she can think of.

Geordie and Sava are the ones who do a lot of the shouting and directing. Sava is as tall as I am, Geordie the opposite, small, dark, quick, and vicious as hell when it’s necessary. Back home, they grew up in different neighbourhoods, their families on different sides of the roadblocks, their fathers and uncles shooting at each other across soccer fields, one-way streets, laundry lines, wading pools, rose gardens, and farmers’ markets.

Sava slaps Mom across the face to get the ball rolling. Mom shrieks and falls to the floor. That’s when Dad finally turns up in the hallway. I always like the part where the man shows up, when he tries to confront us, tries to take charge. Because he’s always scared out of his mind, knowing he should save his women and children, save the day, but not knowing how to do it. The thing is, he has no tools or techniques, no plans or strategies or strength or fitness. He’s always counted on his Y chromosome, like it can be heroic for him without any practice or thought at all.

I say to him, “Hey, Dad, where’s Andrew?”

Dad says, “Get out of my house. Get out.”

I say, “We’re just looking for Andrew, and we want your TV too.”

Dad says, “I’m calling the police.”

Sava says, “No, you’re not.”

Dad says, “This is an outrage, young lady.” I’m not lying, that’s really what he says.

I say, “Go find Andrew.”

Dad says, “Get out of my house.”

Mom is crying in a heap. Her body looks awkward, broken. Like she hasn’t sat on the floor in forty years.

Sava walks up to Dad menacingly, in that way she does so well. Dad sticks out his chest and steps back at the same time.

“Call Andrew,” says Sava, softly.

“This is an outrage,” says Dad again, more hesitantly.

So Sava punches Dad in the gut. Dad collapses slowly, then he’s lying next to Mom, gasping and moaning and holding his stomach. It’s so easy to hurt people, I think, just a small jab and they’re writhing at your feet. While they’re down blubbering and sniffling, we search the house. There’s a bright yellow kitchen, a neat guest bedroom, a large beige master bedroom that smells of musty sheets. The living room has too much furniture in it, its large TV blabbing on about the massive amount of energy it takes to get a barrel of oil out of the ground. This stupidity depresses me, so I shoot the TV instead of taking it. Zijad is in the bathroom searching for the pills he likes the best, and the rest of us take slugs from the whisky on the sideboard, which burns nicely all the way down. There’s a pipe on the mantelpiece but we can’t find tobacco. I like the smell of pipes. They remind me of the old men back home, their wool vests, their non-stop chatter, the way they could sit on the bench for a whole day, not moving an inch. I wonder if they’re still chattering now, or if they froze to death or got shot in the head one fine morning.

Andrew’s probably downstairs. He’ll come up in a couple of seconds. A gunshot catches people’s attention, even the attention of a teenage boy connected by headphones to a stereo, lying on his bed, watching TV, playing games, jerking off, sleeping, dreaming, believing he’s alpha dog.