The Journey Prize Stories 27 (14 page)

It’s been a long time since Paul went in. It’s very hot.

If I go inside then Mr. Murray will offer me something to drink, water at least, maybe something sweet with ice, or I can just ask him where the nearest tap is, if there is a hose around back. That’s it, just ask if he has a hose around back.

The door is well oiled; it opens without a sound. It is cool inside, and even though the house seems huge and old there is no dust. There is an electric chemical smell. There are pictures on the walls all the way up the staircase. There are sounds, little susurruses, hushing, murmuring, rustling, the shushing of the trees blowing outside. But there is no wind. More susurrusses, fabrics moving, murmurs. Voices? There is a door at the top of the stairs. Open slightly already, a man’s voice and whispers, he is soothing someone, there is a toneless animal groan. Eye to the crack, and there is a strange tangle of bodies. What is this configuration? A toneless animal groan. Blue reptile eyes dead in their sockets, she is bent over and makes eye contact with me, staring straight ahead. He doesn’t see me, green lantern visible over the curve of his sister’s back. The man is secondary.

What? What? What?

Backing away as quickly as I can, over the landing trying to get down the stairs, but I run into a sidetable and it’s upended. The bedroom door is thrown open, a man’s voice is yelling but I’ve bolted, vaulted, over the railing across the field, tripping over tires, flying across deposits of broken glass, into the shady neighbourhoods, down the street through my own front door. It is open, unlocked. My foot is bleeding. I’ve stepped on a nail. “Mom?” I say. Then again, “Mom?” She comes to me and says, as I did, “What?”

The dog’s death was more manageable somehow. It was a death I could get my head around: there was one of him. He
was covered in brownish golden fur, with burnt-black patches, some kind of shepherd-lab mix. And people’s dogs died. This was something that happened. He had never greeted me, never licked my hand or come to say hello, never barked protectively over the house, the pigs, the chickens. It’s not that it wasn’t tragic—he lay on the floor of the potting shed, great blue tongue lolling out of his mouth, blue foam coating his nose and teeth, eyes closed in release from what must have been a painful end. I bent down and stroked the fur on the bridge of his nose. When I say to myself, “My dog is dead,” it sounds natural, but the blue foam is toxic and synthetic.

Just there, an inch from his head is a pile of what I think is chicken feed. Large sunflower seeds, smaller grains, black granules. A meal that would only be appealing to a dog that hadn’t been fed on time, and yes: in the sand-like particles there is the faint ghostly tint of a tracing agent. Eradi-Rat.

When I call Paul he’s not surprised. “Didn’t you even think to put it on a higher shelf?”

“No, I guess I didn’t.” I can see the dog’s tawny body from the kitchen window, and I don’t even bother to ask if there’s any meaning in this. The rooster begins to lurch his way purposefully toward the potting shed, death drive in full swing. “Shit, I have to go. Rooster’s going for it.”

“I’ll bring a shovel over, and you owe me some takeout.”

Paul arrives with Joanna in tow, both of them looking worn at the edges. Paul smells strange and peppery—the result of smoking dozens of joints and not washing his hair, his curls like sponges. “Joanna, sit on the step,” he says, and she does. We carry the dog between us, Paul holding his front legs, me his back, eighty pounds of dead weight to be slung into a hole
we’ve yet to dig. We don’t say anything while the shovels break ground in the pasture, digging through layers of mud, throwing rocks aside and finally, lowering the body down, reversing the process, smoothing the top of our handmade grave.

We’re pretty hungry after that.

The Triple Seven is a mediocre Chinese place where the lo mein is all right, but they serve you onions chopped into quarters if you ask for extra veggies. Before it was the Triple Seven, it used to be a restaurant called Jives, which served pub food but made the wait staff wear bowler hats. Before that, an Italian place. Before that, a novelty fifties diner. Before that, Mr. Murray’s house. But Paul insists that egg rolls beat fried chicken, which is all you can get at the Dixie Lee. It is the place to be if you don’t cook and hate poultry.

Joanna sits silently in the back of the truck. When we get out, so does she, but she stays glued to the truck, doesn’t budge even though we’re all the way to the restaurant door.

“C’mon Joanna,” Paul says, about to go in. I see her turn herself around. There are some box stores around the lot now—a Zellers, a hair salon, but you still have a clean view of the tree-lined neighbourhoods. “C’mon, Jo.” He’s sweet, convincing. “You can get the buffet.” She turns herself around again, facing downhill toward the field, and spots her own house, she must. The sagging middle, corrugated tin, green porch. A family passes us on their way into the restaurant. Mother, father, a boy of about ten, a girl of thirteen or so. Joanna turns to Paul. She opens her mouth and pulls back her lips, baring remarkably white and beautiful teeth. She screams, and screams, and screams. She bellows as the owners walk out, as Paul pleads with her, touches her arm. She enters a state of
catatonic noise, a deep desperate cry that draws everyone outside to observe, that renders us unable to load her back into the car. She wails as the owner calls an ambulance, howls along with the sirens, refuses to stop as they carry her in. Paul remains frozen beside me as she disappears through the double doors. They close, muffling the sound, but it’s too late: the parking lot remains haunted.

Mom—Eva—brings me over to the Esteys’ the day after it happened. Friday. She is there in Paul’s foyer, the heel of her nude pump spearing a deflated orthopedic shoe. Mrs. Estey is taking up most of the door frame, making it so that Mom can’t get through. Mom is calling over the top of Mrs. Estey’s hair, which she’s dyed a strange purplish orange, like she mixed together two kinds of Kool-Aid and went at it. “Joanna, sweetie,” Mom is calling, “Joanna, honey, come here a sec.”

Mrs. Estey stands there, arms folded, her lips withered over her teeth, like her mouth isn’t hers and they’re shrinking away from the alien parts. “She won’t come.
The Waltons
is on.”

“Paul? Paul, honey?” “He’s off somewhere.”

I watch them through the screen, sometimes hearing them, sometimes not. The holes make it look like they’re moving on dotted comic book paper, adding lines around their arms and mouths, making them look shady and cool. I wonder if I’ll be able to see Paul again. Mom is getting louder, trying her hardest to explain something to Mrs. Estey, whose face has stayed the same this whole while. There’s a strange edge to her voice. She is all Eva, raging and begging at the same time.

“Do you know what he does in that house?”

“He’s a Shriner. He’s in real estate.”

“Do you know what he does?”

“He gives me money for my Percy.”

“Mrs. Estey, you have more than one child. Paul and Joanna—”

“He’s sleeping.”

Joanna has come to the door frame and stands slightly behind her mother, her teenaged body looking as if it’s gone through seven babies, her mom’s exact shape. She smiles vacantly straight ahead, focused on Eva, who is beautiful in her skirt suit. Joanna’s blue eyes glint as they catch mine through the screen. Her smile shows a lot of gum, and it’s more like she’s rolling her lips back slowly over her teeth, not really smiling at all. I start to feel sick, because all doors toward her lead to the same thing, and I’m not sure what that is.

Eva is worn down now, each word hard but important work. “Do you know, Mrs. Estey. Do you
know
what that man does with your children in his house?”

Mrs. Estey shrugs. “Of course I know. He loves ’em, that’s all. He loves ’em.”

My mom, because she is my mom now, throws her hands up like she’s been burnt, her mouth open, and takes me, and we’re in the car, speeding toward home, and she is shaking but not mad at me, and then we’re home and she says go to your room, but not angry, very quietly. I stay there for a while and think about Paul and try not to think about Paul. When I go into the kitchen she’s sitting there at the table, her head frozen in her hands, her fingers spread across the sides of her skull as though she is trying to stop her thoughts from spilling into the kitchen.

I grab a pop from the fridge, even though I’m not supposed to have sugar after seven. “Mom?” It’s seven-thirty. “Mommy?”

She stays there, a maternal statue, her sadness collecting in droplets on the table.

Paul doesn’t come to school for a week, but I think I see him running by sometimes, out around the big boulders on the playground, up to the soccer field and away.

The goat was the only one I bothered to name, the rest of them I called by their Christian names—dog, pig, chicken, rooster—and that seemed to do. But when Paul and I drank with the goat, we had to name her. It was a week after the dog died and the goat had moved into the doghouse. It seemed cute and homey, a little
Green Acres
or something. Paul and I went out with some stubbies and popped the caps off, watching the goat settle into its house and trying to think of a name.

“How about Zsa Zsa?”

Paul pulls out some rolling papers. “That’s a fucking pussy name. Zsa Zsa the goat. What are you, trying to attract women with your goat or something?” He tosses me the paper, and goes back inside, coming out a second later with a carving knife and the good cutting board. He sits down, balances the board on his lap, and begins to chop some weed.

“All right then. Daisy. Daisy the goat.” “That’s more like it. Daisy. Fuckin’-A.”

The sound of the knife echoes out over the pigpen, into the clearing where the livestock is buried. Paul’s beard is longer,
it’s even more weirdly mottled: splotches of orange vivid against his dark, black hair, like his face is trying to camouflage itself. He lights himself a cigarette, then lights one for me too.

“Thanks man.”

Paul starts laughing quietly as he rolls. “You remember that time we were sleeping over here and a bat got into the bedroom? And you went out to get Philip and he comes in sauced with the gun, tells us to plug our ears, and fires four times straight into the ceiling. Shot bat everywhere. What did you used to call him?”

“Drunkle Phil.”

“What did we call my junkie uncle?”

“Crackle Basil.”

“Or, when Phil woke us up and made us pluck ten chickens?”

“A gentleman farmer’s dozen.” I toss my cigarette butt over by the goat house and keep an eye on Paul. He places the cutting board carefully next to the step and stands up slowly, flicking his lighter at the end of the joint but never quite lighting it. “So, where’s Joanna tonight?”

“She’s on the bus.”

“They run this late?”

“She’s on the bus to the Restigouche Hospital Centre.” Paul touches the flame to the tip, watches the moment of ignition and lets it burn without inhaling. “I just couldn’t fucking do it, Davey.”

“Did something happen?”

He draws the smoke in as hard as he can. “Did something happen. Did something fucking happen. I don’t know, you tell me, Davey. Did something happen?”