Things Withered (19 page)

Jesu anumi ablo.

What would Jesus do?

“Jesus wouldn’t have claimed them in the first place,” Les said from the door. “I’m picking up Beaner and we’re getting that starter for the pickup,” he said vaguely. “I might stop over at mom’s after,” he said. She didn’t look up. He picked his way around the piles of paper and said nothing about them.

Good bye.
Maybe she only thought it.

Ramona Jacobson called back at ten. “Don’t forget the willimusteers and the mono-magnisiums. Also the Pat-Rilancers; they’re with the S-2 forms.
Okay?
Gotta run. You know you didn’t bring them to the last meeting and that was your choice, Lancaster. Oh! For god’s sake, jiggle things around and make sure there’s at least a thousand bucks in your mainstream, eh? Get me on the cell, 873dog95-24eat at sam’s30” And she hung up.

Janet cut her finger, a paper cut, on the pad of note paper by the phone. She sucked at it.

There were six more boxes, all unopened when she walked back into the kitchen. She stared at them with a baleful, exhausted sort of defiance. They were marked only randomly, some had the routine, black felt marker scrawled across, others didn’t. They were marked, “Hornets, 98.” “Case Histories, 1996.” And worse, “Receipts and Recipes for Disaster, 1998.”

In one she found a bird’s nest.

Her grade ten orienteering report.

A bill of sale for a car she’d never owned.

A copy of the
Desiderata
on pink paper, decorated with filigrees on the edges.

A receipt for fourteen pairs of panty hose (taupe) in size 7.

“Go placidly among the noise and haste—”
she recited, remembered from a vague and unmemorable adolescence.

Sometime after four that day, Les and Beaner walked into the house and heard the phone ringing. They’d picked up the starter for the truck and then dropped by Les’s mom’s place. She’d given him twenty bucks after a hard ride.
You get a job, Lester. Get a haircut, Lester. You’re living in sin, Lester.

He and Beaner had laughed at this at the Kegger on Main, Les a little less hardier than Beaner, whose mother was dead and in her grave fifteen years.

“You gotta tape that, Mom, put it on a loop so I can play it back later, like a motivational thing, you know,” Les had said to his mom. They’d repeated this bon mot up until their fourth beer when they got into sports with more of a vengeance.

“Janet,” Les screamed when he walked in. The phone rang. “Let the machine get it,” he said to Beaner. “Old lady’s not home. Must be working,” he said to Beaner.

“Wanna beer?”

“Does the Pope shit in the woods?” Beaner answered. This struck Les as hilarious.

In the livingroom the machine picked up the phone. A woman’s voice screamed fast, into it. “Lancaster! Lancaster! Lancaster!” The boys ignored it.

Beaner followed Les into the kitchen. The fridge was blocked by an enormous pile of paper, literally blocked. Everywhere in the room was paper. It reached as high as the counter.

“What the
hell?
” Beaner gasped.

Les tried to get the fridge door open and couldn’t. He looked around at the mess, a mess he sure-as-shit wasn’t cleaning up.

“She had some tax thing. Guess she didn’t get it cleaned up. She’ll do it later,” he said, but his mouth was dry. It was more paper than he’d ever seen, ever. He brought a hand up to shield his eyes, the sunlight, filtering in the west window was shining off the endless white, nearly blinding him. “Fuck,” he said, equally vaguely, utterly unsure as to what to do. The paper presented a problem.

“Holy
shit
!” Beaner said. “What the hell is that?”

Les looked at his buddy and then followed his gaze to a spot on the floor where the mountain dipped nearly to linoleum. Pinky-brown flesh showed against the blinding white. A slender wrist and hand.

Without a word, Les stepped one giant step around the mound nearest the fridge and crouched, piles of paper reaching right to his crotch, a necessary lunge that pulled his groin muscle.

He picked up the hand, gingerly, like he might a mouse. “Cold,” he said, but not without feeling. “Better call someone,” he added, his voice cracking. Beaner didn’t move.

There were tiny scratches all over the arm, little nicks in otherwise, white, smooth flesh.

“What are those marks?” Beaner said.

“Looks like paper cuts,” Les said, nodding. One summer Les had worked at a heating and ventilating company in the city. Mostly he had stuffed pink insulation into walls and then covered them up. He stuck his hand through the mounds of paper, along the route of the arm that he’d just felt, curious.

The body itself was warm.

“Body’s warm,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at Beaner’s pale, sick face.

“Paper’s a good insulator,” he said.

The woman with the naturally occurring pigment hemp bag—Trudy knew it was hemp because the word HEMP was (probably) vegetable dyed in large-cap sans serif Helvetica across the off-centre of the bag—was staring at them. The woman’s daughter followed her mother’s gaze and as soon as she looked at Trudy and Timmy, the mother tapped the girl on the shoulder, forcing her to look away.
Don’t stare, it’s not polite.
Parenting practices learned on
Bewitched
and
The Partridge Family
.
Nothing to see here folks, just another Saturday. Mother gripping toddler’s arm too tightly during quality time.

East Fairfax Mall and the petting zoo. Or as Timmy had so appropriately mispronounced it to his father, the petty zoo.
Wild Kingdom Mobile Safari
was at least an hour late opening the gates set up in the centre court. The area was sectioned off from regular Saturday shoppers with clanging portable fencing. Inside the fence was festive papier-mâché jungle trees
and plants (Trudy assumed) and life-size papier-mâché treatments of the animals offered beyond the cubicle walls and metal gate. Jungle sounds came over the PA system, screeches and hoots that could have just as easily been mimicked by the hundred or so children left to run Wild Kingdom-style out of boredom. Parents had stopped controlling their children about twenty minutes earlier; in another ten minutes or so, Trudy sensed there would be a huge parental uprising, in an effort to make
someone
pay for the delay in the opening of the gate, and the kids would all be called back to hold places in line while parents ran to the mobile Starbucks or the mobile Moxie’s in the corner of the food court for a little infusion.

She was gripping Timmy’s arm too tightly, it was true. Her face was screwed up in that harried way he no doubt recognized. She was tired, her feet were sore—why did she wear goddamn heels, for chrissake?—and she was bored out of her skull. Her
fucking
skull; she would have liked to shout it.
Pitter patter assholes.
My baby wants his picture taken with an alligator.

“Mom?” Timmy wiggled in an effort to break some of the hold on his arm and she yanked discreetly, about to lean over and snarl
enough
, but he said, “Mom, you’re hurting my
arm
,” and he said it with such deliberation, such equanimity, she immediately broke hold. She shot a look at the hemp-bag woman. She was still looking. Equally discreetly. Trudy noted with amusement that the woman and her daughter wore the same shoes. Daughter’s attempt to look older, or woman’s attempt to be hip. Did they still call it
hip
, or was it
with it
, now; or something else;
happening
maybe. They used them all when Trudy was the daughter’s age; she wished they would get their own words.

“Sorry,” she mumbled to Timmy. Quality time. The petty zoo. She and Sam got stoned the night before and came up with variations on the petty zoo. Her favourite was
A Visit to the Petty Mall at the Zoo
. The neon lights were giving her a headache. There was little action behind the gates—which were padlocked (like someone couldn’t just move them two feet to the left and walk right in—just the odd green-jacketed
Wild Kingdom
er strutting by, careful to keep his eyes ahead in case he caught the beady, angry eyes of a consumer about to go a little
Wild Kingdom
on his petty zoo ass for making her stand an hour in line with a four-year-old.

Timmy wanted to run in the fake jungle like the other kids. The other kids were unparented. She already had a
Bewitched
mom staring at her. What would Samantha do? It wasn’t that easy, of course, because Tabitha was a preternaturally well-behaved sitcom accessory. While sitcom kids regularly did typical four-year-old acts like shove purple crayons up both nostrils, there was never a moment of preternatural sitcom horror when the sitcom mom couldn’t get them out when the sitcom kid couldn’t breathe. The kids usually sneezed on cue. Therefore, not applicable.

In front of them was a woman who had presumably brought a child with her, since she had a Hello Kitty knapsack in her free hand, but no child present. Behind them was a man who had brought two children, a little girl who had stood quietly at daddy’s side throughout the whole ordeal, and whose son was raising hell amongst the papier-mâché rainforest. He came back at intervals for quarters implying a video game somewhere in the jungle.

Pitter patter, let’s get at ’er, pitter patter—
bastards at these things didn’t give a shit that parents had exactly forty-eight hours worth of love to shower on their offspring, none of which should be spent in a mall—yet somehow always was. It wasn’t like they were shopping. When she was a kid, her mother dragged her to the mall for school clothes and to buy her dad and brother a Christmas present. Now kids wanted to go.

“What’s the damn holdup?” the man said. She admired his free use of the curse word. Men had balls, even when they were with the kids.

Trudy turned, shrugging. “I can’t tell—” She had to look up to meet his eyes. They were blue. Of course they were.

“This is crazy, waiting this long—” he ran a hand across his jaw. His blue eyes were watery, red-rimmed like he’d been up all night reading, or playing Xbox. He was wearing a long coat, unbuttoned, with a jacket underneath and a black t-shirt. Black was probably in an effort to look slimming: the white Nike swoosh strained at the waistline.

“They should at least come out and say something—” From behind the jungle-cubicles came an animal screech, a real animal, not through the PA, loud and sudden. The crowd in line and around the papier-mâché jungle turned en masse toward the sound. Trudy jumped a little, startled by the suddenness and clutched her chest, grinning. She turned back to the dad behind her—
I don’t think the alligator wants his picture taken
—when a flutter of something terribly bright and garish even in the neon-lit mall flew wildly up from behind the cubicles, screeching in a repetitive trumpet that made all the people lean back and crouch at the same time.

It was a parrot. Once identified (as not the alligator or leopard or tiger) people laughed and enjoyed the show. The bird flew as high as it could—not very—then dived back down, obviously confused. From the floor there were a series of
oohs
and
ahhs
like at an air show. The bird swooped low over the jungle and a little child screamed. A mother dashed out of line, crouching as though the parrot were a bat, looking up over her shoulder, and made her way to the screaming child (a girl it turned out) and Trudy said, “Oh no, it’s
The Birds
.” She said it to the man, who didn’t get the reference.

The mother crooned to the child, but did not come out of her crouch, instead squatted beside the crying child, who had thrown her hands over her head. Lines of green ink ran from the child’s fingers on her left hand to beneath the cuff of her sweater. Green wasn’t bad, it wore off; Crayola orange marker stained the flesh for a very long time, the mark of the beast. The mother crooned mostly that it was all right.

It was apparently not.

The bird swooped next over the line of people waiting. There was a group shriek then, and some people in line broke ranks, diving low themselves, hands over their hair. They were not all women. Once the mothers or fathers screamed, the children lost all sense and began bellowing for their parents, running randomly from the centre of the fake jungle to the outskirts as though for the safety of corporate culture Gap Second Cup Suzy Shier Disney. There was still some laughter among the crying, parents feeling foolish after their initial panic, and the new panic of having lost their place in line. The bird flew up to the rafters and perched. Someone said something about
heads up
and
umbrellas
and while they were laughing, they prudently moved up in line, closing the spaces left by the timid. The bird continued to trumpet at intervals. People looked up sympathetically, now concerned for the poor, cageless bird.

People from behind the gate came out in official-looking green bomber jackets with
Wild Kingdom Mobile Safari
embroidered over their pockets. All looking up, not at the crowd at all. A young man stood tentatively half behind and half inside the gate. His left hand was wrapped in a bandage. He looked back over his shoulder a couple of times.

That’s when Trudy realized that not all of the howls and animal screeches were coming from the PA system. There was a sudden roar from behind the kid at the gate and he ducked instinctively. The PA cut out suddenly, and all that could be heard was the crying of kids and generic crowd noises, helpfully pointing out the parrot.

Metallic clicks and white noise replaced the piped-in jungle for a moment and then a voice came on, “Good afternoon Shoppers, welcome to the East Fairfax Mall Wild Kingdom Mobile Safari. There will be
a slight delay as crews from the Safari prepare for your visit. Please be patient.” There was an overall cry of indignation from the crowd. A slight delay? Trudy and Timmy had been waiting an hour.

“Oh, Timmy, it’s going to be later still. Why don’t we skip this and we’ll come next time? Hey? We can go to McDonald’s—” She was all for just dragging him out of the line and through the endless mall hallway to (C? D?) where she had parked the Range Rover, but then desperation could be smelled coming off her four-year-old only child (
do you know how much it costs to put a child through school?!)
in waves, heady like fear-sweat.

Timmy yanked on her arm this time, repeatedly, desperately. “Nooooo, please stay? Please stay?
Pleeeee-ssssse?
I wanna stay. I wanna wait. Pulll-eees?” The commercial had run all week, savvy marketers playing the commercial fifty times between four
P.M.
and six. Prime kid time. That easy-to-reach after-school crowd: captive, reliant, and with tired, guilty, working parents trying to make supper. They laid it on thick with the wild animals: a fast-cut montage of creatures, constant reminders that you could have your picture taken with an
alligator
! They might as well have told the kids to go get mommy’s purse.

Trudy made a feeble attempt at a deep-breathing calming thing that had been the focus of a lunch-hour workshop in natural stress reduction four weeks earlier when someone screamed from behind the cubicles. Something soft but
HUGE
fell to the floor behind them, with an upsetting and primally familiar
ooomph!
Trudy reached down in a smooth motion and picked Timmy up; the two of them stared ahead. A bizarre stillness seemed to settle on the crowd for just a second, like holding a breath. Trudy craned her neck around the people who still stood in line. There was nothing to see, really, but there was this pregnant kind of feeling, of something major happening just beyond view.

Something
roared.

Then there was screaming. People scattered like ball bearings in all directions. Little kids fell in the wave of bigger bodies scrambling. Shoes clattered on the hard mall floor. For a moment it was impossible to see what had happened, but Trudy backed up, towards the west corner of the centre court, to the Disney/Gap/Tommy Hilfiger triad. She backed into the man who had been standing behind her in the lineup for the Safari. She spun around.

He stared wide-eyed ahead, still as a statue. His little girl had her face pressed into his overcoat and Trudy could see her body shaking in absolute silence.

“What is it—” she began. The man backed up a step, stepping on, nearly over, his little girl and she squealed, but didn’t take her face away from his coat, instead buried herself deeper in its folds.

The man sucked breath up, as though he were going to speak, but air just sucked in and out in gasps like a fish. More shrieks and howls joined the wailing of kids, hundreds of people, until it was impossible to tell which was which. The animals behind the cubicles called. There was a clatter of metal behind the jungle walls. Timmy clung tightly to her neck, cutting off the circulation in her arm—he’d gotten much much heavier and Trudy wondered inanely,
When was the last time I carried him?
They spun around to the sound of the clatter, just as the little girl whose Hello Kitty knapsack had been her calling card, screamed from her mother’s side.

“TIGGER!” Was what she screamed.

A human cry of pain and terror followed an inhuman cry of rage and power and the glimpse of a green-coated thing sliding? across the floor. Trudy followed its path thinking,
What? Tigger? Disney? Pooh Bear? Can’t be Tigger did she say TIGGER?

Tiger.

The man in the faux cammo coat screamed in agony as the monster, not catlike at all but hugely out of proportion to cats or anything else she’d ever seen—massively out of proportion, monstrous, enormous, a mutant festively coloured and not real—leaped upon the cammo-man and the screams of the crowd mingled with the screams of the man and people ran and ducked and fell and some just lay, playing dead like they taught you to do in the event of a shooting in a public building.

Trudy ran blindly, squeezing Timmy to her, into her. Behind them the cat roared and she heard the squawk of the parrot—or maybe something else, something larger. She ran smashing into children, women, men, a teenager who pushed past her hard saying
excuse me.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of the hemp-bag lady. She was screaming too, and something the size of a dog was buried in her arm. Her pretty blouse, cropped pants, both were coloured red, the red splashing huge drops as she shook her arm, up and down and still the thing clung.

“Get off get off get off,”
she shrieked, backing away from it, as if she could.

Trudy pushed past a man who was kicking a raccoon, even as another leaped from the middle of the crowd and landed on him. He did not scream but each movement of his body was punctuated with an
oof!