The Journey Prize Stories 27 (8 page)

“A kerosene lantern can explode,” says Dad. “I knew a family once who came home and set their kerosene lantern down on the woodstove. The whole house went up in a fireball, two kids just about your age,” he says to my brother and sister, “and parents and grandparents too. They all lived in the little house with the woodstove and kerosene lanterns. They were good devout people but they were ignorant. They didn’t know any better. The bodies were so badly burned they had to get forensics experts to identify them through dental records.” The air is heavy when he pauses. “Maybe we should blow out the kerosene light, Mom?” I ask. She pretends not to hear me or my dad. She’s rocking my little sister to sleep, humming “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Neither fear nor irony can deter her constant drone. Sheets of rain pummel the ground. We can’t see out the windows anymore.

The wind sounds like voices crying in the tree limbs. “We had a neighbour, once,” says Dad. “Old Joshua was his name, a loner type. He lived down the road in that big old brick house all by himself. His wife died years ago, before I knew him, the baby too. He used to go out in the storm, thinking he heard them in the wind. One night he put on a big scarf, wrapped it around his neck a few times, and headed out into the storm.” I’m holding my little brother. I feel less scared when I comfort him. “He went through the dark windy night knocking on neighbours’ doors. ‘Did they hear a child
screaming?’ he asked. Perhaps they had—a baby crying—or maybe a young woman in distress. He was sure now that he had heard a woman’s screams in the night and a baby crying.” I listen to the wind, and I can hear them, the young woman, terrified of death; the baby who would cry briefly, motherless and alone with no one to save it. Maybe Old Josh could still find them. We know he can’t, that he shouldn’t look, that he will find only ghostly fiends instead of his real wife and child. “In the morning,” says Dad, “after the storm had passed, the neighbours didn’t see Joshua in his garden and that night no lights went on in his house. When he didn’t show up at church that Sunday, some of the townspeople started talking. Maybe they should put a search party together and look for Old Josh.

“We found him swinging by the neck from a tree limb, down by the canal,” says my dad, “hanged by his own scarf. We found him under a circle of turkey vultures. Crows had already picked out his eyes. Funny thing is there was a woman’s hanky stuck way up in the tree limb—the old-fashioned kind with handmade lace, not like the ones they make today.” My little brother looks up; his eyes are saucer-round. “It must have been hers,” he exclaims, “the ghost of the dead lady.” Dad shrugs. “Nawh,” he says, “it probably just blew out of his pocket. Old Josh probably had it with him the whole time.” The thunder crashes; we know it has hit nearby trees and it may start a forest fire. We are startled by the clock chiming nine. “Bedtime,” my mom announces brightly. “It’s a good night to remember your prayers before bed!” Dad can’t resist one more story. “Good thing we turned the power off,” he says. “I knew a family not too far from here that got so scared by a lightning storm that they all joined hands and got down
on their knees to pray. One little barefoot boy stuck his toe right into a loose 220 outlet. He electrocuted the whole family at once.”

I lie awake listening to the wind in the trees, wondering if the big elm will come crashing down through the ceiling. Dad insists that we go to sleep in our own beds like normal. It’s about the importance of routine, of discipline; it’s about having faith in the Lord and not being a coward in the face of adversity and the importance of learning to be alone in the darkness and never trusting your ghosts. My sister sleeps soundly in her bed on the other side of the room. My mom is sitting up with my little brother, who is too afraid to go to sleep. He has a room of his own. I can hear her singing to him across the hall. I try to imagine walking out in the rain like Old Josh, except that I won’t believe in the ghosts. I will have my own magic and draw down the thunder. But every time my eyelids close, I see Old Josh swinging by his neck from the tree, staring with empty eye sockets, drawn in by the underworld voices.

We’re ticking down the minutes until the nightclubs close. There is a feeling of ozone descending like just before a lightning storm. The air smells like rain despite the pervasive sub-odour of french fry grease. Everything is extra quiet, only a few semi-sober customers drifting around before last call; then the hungry drunks come crashing in. The late-night crowd looks like they’ve never met a mirror they can trust—a mob of unkempt vampires, their skin looking pale
and minimally undead under the fluorescent lights. This is a Toronto institution; the city’s only all-night restaurant. A cockroach emerges from behind the red vinyl banquettes, having feasted on nearly three decades of crumbs from the much-touted “homemade” apple pies. “Just like Mom makes.”

“How was school today?” Mom asks, as she spoons soup into our tin mugs. I shrug in response. The heat instantly transfers to the tin handle and I pull my sleeve down around my hand so as not to get burned. “Don’t stretch your sweater out of shape, honey. Sit up straight and ladylike.” She smiles at me like I’m three years old. “Just wait for the soup to cool.” I am fifteen. Nothing about me will cool soon. Dad is annoyed. He came in at five and the table wasn’t set. My math assignment had encroached on the place settings: papers on the chairs, a textbook flapped open where the serving dishes should be. “There’s no point in learning algebra if you can’t even tell time,” he quips. My grandfather shakes his head. “Blue Stocking,” he says affectionately and rubs my head. That’s his name for me. “You’re going to be too smart for your own good,” he jokes, “too big for your britches.” It’s not really a joke. My mom laughs as she chivvies my little brother and sister into their seats after they wash their hands. “Let’s say grace,” she says. It’s a children’s rhyme that she made us memorize. My little brother and sister kick each other under the table and giggle:
Thank you for the world so sweet
/
Thank you for the food we eat
. I’m the only one who doesn’t open my mouth or close my eyes.

Suddenly, the gates of hell open wide. It is an absurd horror show. Het couples make out in the booths; some fight and cry.
Drag queens dance on the tables and the crowds of generally wasted zombies come looking for coffee after getting stoned. Two girly het-girls are necking and feeling each other up while their boyfriends are banging out a rhythm on the tables with their fists, cheering them on. There’s an itchy junkie at the takeout counter. I watch him scratching the track marks on his arms, then trying to twist his fingers around to the unreachable itch between his shoulder blades before I realize I’m digging my own nails under the back of my bra strap, scratching where the sweat and polyester meet. Every so often he twitches as if to shake off a bug. I twitch too. I realize I’ve been staring at him and make myself look the other way.

Cocoa Cherry sashays in. This is her kingdom, and she always makes an entrance. She yells out, “We real cool. We left school.” A middle-aged man, who has spent his single-malt evening at the Rose and Thistle, yells back in a thick Glaswegian brogue, “Lerrnsum rrree-al English, yabitch!” We shout out our Gwendolyn Brooks tribute with our own twists—a different rhyme each time. I yell back to Cocoa Puff, “We work late. We tempt fate.” She stands on a chair and points at me: “You jail bait. You can’t wait!” We high five as I stack the coffee cups in my left hand. She turns to Michael, who’s running his ass off, and we get Brooks’s poem back on track: “We jazz June. We die soon.” It’s true.

No one’s making more coffee—every station has run out. I brew more, running from station to station while my unclaimed food orders start to wilt. Once there’s some coffee going, there aren’t any cups. The dishwasher can’t keep up. I grab some dirty mugs, quickly wipe the lipstick off the rims, and fill them up again. I glance back at the kitchen. “Kumar,” I yell, “we
need more cups.” He doesn’t understand English, but I have to say something so that maybe the invocation alone will make the cups appear. I can see the bread on the sandwiches curling up under the heat lamps and feel a panic of urgency as the bacteria breeds: mmm salmonella sandwiches—the perfect ritual end to a night of debauchery. I have a table of eight reasonably sober women who all want more coffee, and they’ve been waiting forever for their food: four skinny-mini salads, one Mu-Mu Hawaiian burger, and three orders of chicken Wing-Dings. I can’t bear to say “Wing-Dings” again over the PA system, it’s just too humiliating. But I realize that Stacey-Jane has unwittingly picked up my order from the kitchen and is serving it to a table of jocks who are flirting with her.

I have a table of drunken hockey fans. “Go Leafs Go!” they chant. “Leafs all the way, the Habs are gay.” I figure they won’t even notice if I give them dirty spoons, they’re so loaded. But there are more people coming in, and the hostess is seating them at dirty tables because the bus boys are hopelessly behind. There’s a drunken Leafs fan following me into the kitchen looking for a clean spoon and, reaching down, he makes a sloppy grab at my thigh. I accidentally kick him in the lip and he starts bleeding. Steve is coming toward me and I know I’m in trouble for assaulting a customer. I pretend like nothing has happened and dash away with a coffee pot, giving the last thick dregs to the semi-sober women. I pause at the pickup window and yell at Billy, “Where the hell is my Mu-Mu Burger?” “Moo,” says the grill man. “Moo Moo,” says the next line cook. The kitchen exists in a different time zone that’s two hours behind. “Why don’t you ask the fucking cow?” asks Billy. “What am I, a psychic?”

I grab more dirty teaspoons out of the bus pan and run them under the tap. There are never enough utensils. The clan from the pub is getting too mouthy. “Hey sexy, give us a smile—smile you fucking bitch—are you waiting for the coffee beans to grow? Hey, girlie, I bet you can’t count to six. Them taking all our jobs: all those stupid fucking faggots and filthy foreigners.” The accidental alliteration makes them think they’ve said something clever, and they laugh. “How many fingers am I holding there, lassie?” One: he’s shoving his middle finger in my face. I walk away like I’m deaf. He pinches me on the ass. “Don’t do that!” I yell and they laugh.

There are two girly-girls flirting with the table of hockey fans and they’re still holding their cocktails from the bar, just standing there in my section without a seat. One is chewing on the ends of her teased-up hair; she laughs at me. “Can I get a milkshake?” I have no idea if she’s serious. I have no idea how I’m going to get through this. My feet feel swollen; blisters rub against the insides of my shoes. I try to forget I have feet. I slip sideways out of myself for a moment and just try to feel whole again in a perfect split second of calm certainty. If you believe strongly enough in the weirdness of the universe, some goddess of the absurd might just come down and save your queer ass. And it happens.

I open my eyes just in time to see Stacey-Jane in front of a toaster. Smoke is billowing out and little flames follow as she cremates the delicate, white Wonder Bread. She has a glass of water in one hand and a metal fork in the other. John is a moment behind her. Everything moves in slow motion as he lunges to pull out the toaster plug that moment too late. Almost simultaneously, she douses the toaster blaze and
attacks the burnt offerings with her fork. Everyone in the room takes a collective gasp before the bang of the short circuit sends us into darkness. There is silence. For a second I think we might all be dead. “Sweet Baby Jesus!” blubbers out Stacey-Jane in the sexiest, trembling, most innocent sobbing voice that carries through the darkness.