The Journey Prize Stories 27 (13 page)

“Paul. Seriously. This is some Jane Eyre shit.”

“Oh man,” there’s a sound of something falling over, glass hitting glass and shattering. “College boy.”

“Wait, listen, are you okay? Did you fall over?”

“You cheap bastard, why the fuck are you calling me collect? You own a goddamn farm.”

There’s a woman in line behind me who’s wearing a lot of velour and tapping her foot.

“Listen Paul, I have to go, someone else needs the phone. But, um, are things, uh, are they pretty much the same back there? At home?”

There is another deep inhale and exhale on the other end of the line. “Different. Very different. We just got a Dixie Lee.”

There’s no time to say I think his half-retarded sister is on the bus.

No one knew exactly what was wrong with Joanna Estey growing up, and I don’t think anyone ever really tried to find out. When I moved to town Paul staked me out as a friend right away. We were nine, and he wore his Green Lantern pyjama top to school like it was a shirt. He kept trying to get the other kids to call him “The Rooster” because it sounded cool. That’s how he introduced himself.

“Hey, I’m Paul, but everyone calls me The Rooster.”

Paul was clearly the biggest loser in the class, but he demanded respect from the other kids by insulting them, and he had a BB gun.

He brings me to his house after the first day of school and starts naming off a list of endless brothers that reads like a nursery rhyme.

Dave does laundry, for the ER.

Ian joined the army, married a stacked nurse.

No one talks to Randy; he’s living with Dennis (and not in the macho kind of way).

Norm’s a lawyer; don’t talk to him much.

Ben moved to Toronto, goddamned bastard.

And Percy is twelve but just lies in his crib.

Paul stops in front of his house, which is smaller than mine, even though there’s only Mom and me to fill it. The middle drags the rest of the house toward it, like it needs more boards at the centre for warmth. The porch is supported by huge sheets of corrugated tin propped up between pillars, ending three inches from the roof. Someone tried to cheer up the entryway by painting the inside green. The effect isn’t cheerful; it just makes everyone at the door look like they are about to throw up.

Just as he puts his hand on the door Paul turns to me. “Before we go in, I have to tell you about my sister. She’s fifteen.” His eyes dart toward the door handle.

“What, is she like, mean or something?”

Paul shakes his head. “No you dope, it’s not that, it’s just that, well, she’s kind of gross.”

Sisters were annoying, pigs maybe if they were fat, but no one had ever told me they had a gross sister before. “She’s
gross
?”

Paul grabs the rusting door handle and pulls it so it shrieks under his hand. “You’ll see. Just go in the living room. She’s watching TV. She won’t even notice.”

Paul’s foyer has a strange phlegmy smell, like moulding boots and mushrooms. I step over piled hills of shoes, none of which seem to belong to a woman. The whole place looks dingy, and there isn’t any of the usual cheap junk on the walls—no “Bless This Mess,” or souvenir crucifixes, not even a badly framed family picture. Around the corner is Joanna. She is sitting in the middle of an aggressively ugly couch that blooms mustard coloured out of the orange shag carpet. She stares straight ahead, mouth slightly open, blue reptilian eyes dead in their sockets. Her face looks like old skin under a Band-Aid. I take one look at her, this teenage girl with saggy boobs and some grey hair, and have to concede in a whisper, “Yeah Paul, I guess she is kind of gross.”

“Told ya, dopey.” He slaps me on the shoulder, pleased I’m seeing things his way, and pulls me through the hallway, toward the back door. The house is only this hallway with rooms on either side, not even a second floor. We reach the last room and Paul signals for me to stay back and stay quiet, he knocks softly on the door frame, his voice changed. “Ma?
Ma? I’m home.” The lights are off, but I can make out the shape of a woman, squat, dressed in shapeless eggplant-coloured cotton. She is leaning over a crib, and touching the face of a child. It’s a boy, folded onto his side, his eyes shut and limbs twitching slightly. He is fully dressed in overalls, checked shirt, even a bow tie, shoes with unworn treads. She doesn’t look up, but mutters something at Paul.

“Say hello to your brother, Paul. Don’t be rude.”

“Hello, Percy. I’m going to my friend Dave’s house for dinner. That all right?”

Mrs. Estey turns toward the door to make sure I exist, then turns back to the child in the crib. “Sure, sure, that’s fine.” Paul pulls me out through the back door and into the sunlight, tilts back his head, and crows in triumph. He looks at me and grins.

“That’s all right, eh, Davey?”

I shrug. “I guess so. It’s just my mom and me.”

“No old man, huh? Me too. C’mon!”

Their backyard opens up onto fields and the back lot of a strip mall, full of corroded train tracks and discarded junk. There is a claw foot bathtub, piles of old
Penthouses
mixed in with Nancy Drews baking under the sun. Small paths cut through the grass leading to the more populated areas of the suburb, and Paul darts in front of me instinctively heading for the paved and shaded neighbourhood ahead of us, assuming I live there or somewhere like it. Panting, I slow down and notice a house raised above the rest on a hill, old-fashioned with columns and lacy trim, even a part that goes higher than the rest, capped in black tar shingles with an iron railing around its square top. There are rusty whirligigs
on the lawn and porch, moving slowly, measuring something heavier than air.

“What’s
that
house?”

Paul barely slows down, pulling me ahead. “Mr. Murray’s. He sells houses. Me and Joanna go over on Thursdays.”

“What, so he like, babysits you?”

“I guess. C’mon, I’m hungry, I want to go.”

“What’s wrong with your sister anyway?”

“I dunno. Just slow I guess. She just watches TV and rides the bus. C’mon, Davey.”

“Why do you go over there?”

“We just do. He helps out with Percy. Now stop screwing around, dopey, I’m goddamned hungry.”

My mom, Eva, does not get mad when I bring Paul home, even though I didn’t ask first. Maybe it’s his pyjama top, the way he eats his casserole so fast, even the burnt parts where the corn is fused to the tuna, or because he says with her curled black hair she looks like Lynda Carter, the way he strokes the binding of the books in our living room, how he’s never had tapioca pudding, how he doesn’t make pretend gagging noises when she plays James Taylor, how he slips up once and says “shit,” blushing deeply. And when he leaves, he says, “Thanks Ms. Anderson. You can call me The Rooster if you want. Everyone does.”

She says, “You can call me Eva,” and is all of a sudden someone who is not my mother, or at least not only my mother.

That night when she comes to turn off the lights, she leans over to kiss me and pauses, touching my cheek. “Paul is welcome over any time. You be a good friend to that boy.” I wonder what she means.

The pigs all died together in the corner of the pen, their skins glistening with the early morning frost, bound to the surface of the mud like ballooning flesh-toned fungus. I waded out into their deaths, boots breaking through the half-resistant slop until I was standing over them. They were strangely hairy, covered in white humanoid fuzz tapering across their snouts and ears. The one closest to me fluttered albino lashes weakly but couldn’t move his head, mud getting sucked into his throat with each inhale, slopping up his bare gums and down into his great swollen esophagus. The rest of them lay there, in a bloated naked orgy, six obese corpses.

I vomited as quietly as I could in the slop bucket. Then I went inside and called Paul.

“They’re all dead, Paul. All of them.”

“Get in the car, Joanna! Okay what, Davey? Who’s all dead?” “The pigs, Paul. The pigs are all dead outside.”

Paul sighed. “Shit, son. The pigs. I thought you were going to say your neighbours or something. They’re just pigs, dopey. Relax, I’ll be right there. ‘They’re all dead.’ Jesus.”

When Paul got there I was standing in the pen and the pig was still blinking at me in desperation with his straw lashes. Paul looked scraggly, maybe stoned. He had a three-day beard growth and he was not someone who should grow a beard. It was a reddish blond while the rest of his hair was dark and curly. “This one’s still alive,” I said, nudging it with my boot. It wheezed softly. I gagged into the slop bucket.

“Jesus Davey. Where the fuck do you think bacon comes
from?” Paul stuck his hands in his pockets and sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Did ol’ Phil have a gun? He did. Over the stove or something, am I right?”

“Yeah. Yeah. A rifle. Over the mantel.”

The pig gave a soft little gasp. I swallowed hard. “Oh all right,” Paul conceded. “Go in and get the gun, dopey, then call the vet.”

I looked into the doghouse on the way past, just to confirm the night hadn’t resulted in a total catastrophe, that no one had decreed all life on the farm must be wiped out. I bent down and saw two brown eyes blinking at me like a pilot light. Somewhere, the goat was bleating. “Good dog,” I whispered.

Joanna held the door to the house open. Had been holding the door open. She stared straight ahead as I brought the gun out, straight ahead as I went back inside and dialled the vet, straight ahead as the shot sounded. She held it open as Paul came inside, then gently let it go so it latched shut.

“Let’s get some food in you,” Paul said to me, as if he didn’t just shoot a two-hundred-pound animal. “Joanna, how do you feel about riding the bus for a while?” She didn’t respond, just walked toward the truck, signalling that yes, a bus ride would be fine.

I grabbed my coat. “Triple Seven?

Paul shrugged. “Where else?”

When we get back from dinner, the bodies have been moved from the pen to the pasture and the vet has left a note on the door:
Intestinal torsion. Change in diet? Call me
.

It is a Thursday in the summertime, so there is no school, which means there is no way to tell what day it is—time by the hour is non-existent. In the field behind Paul’s house we are running madly, cartwheeling over rusted nails and mattress springs, dancing around tetanus. Paul has brought an enormous bag of peanuts in shells that taste like sawdust on the tongue, animal feed, pulpy masses spit onto the ground. Paul begins to throw them in the air, and I run through them, and they are suddenly a swarm of locusts rising and descending onto the field. We throw handfuls in the air and run through them screaming “REPENT” and “WRATH OF GOD” when Paul says, “Shit it’s Thursday, isn’t it?” And he’s running up to the house on the hill saying, “Go home, go home, go home, Davey, you dope.”

But I don’t know if Mom’s home and I have no key, so I follow, begging, up to Mr. Murray’s, to the weather-beaten board porch, which is assembled fancily, but unpainted. And Paul says, “Fine, stay, you goddamned leech, but don’t come in. Just stay.”

The heat is awful, there is a bug screaming at the same frequency as a smoke detector. I move into the shade of the door frame and begin to toss peanut shells into the wind, seeing if I can throw them into the gears of the whirligigs on the lawn, prying pebbles from my shoe treads and weighting the shells down, cutting slits in them with my nails, fitting them together to form lopsided flightless rotocopters.