I’ll put a concrete slab on top of it so animals don’t get at him, he said.
Yeah, I said, but more like yeeeaaaaahhhhh.
Or maybe we should cremate him first? asked my dad and I said naaaaahhhhhh. I was trying to pull myself up with a branch that was about fifty feet in the air. Finally I gave up and lay there, spreadeagled like a wheel. It was really dark outside and I thought how white my dad’s shirt was. He’d tucked his tie in between the buttons.
Tired? he asked.
No, just lazy, I said. Travis had taught me the importance of denying fatigue. He was always telling me not to yawn. My dad suggested that my phosphates might need replenishing. Phosphates, I thought to myself. Phosphates.
Dad, I said, why aren’t trains allowed here again?
What? he said.
No trains here? I said.
Neither one of us knew what I was talking about. But then after a minute or two my dad said: Oh, the train. Yes. The elders thought it would bring with it worldly influences.
With it worldly influences? I asked.
My dad looked up from his digging and said: It would make it easier to come and go. Especially go.
Oooooohhhhhh, I said. Don’t let me die out here, dude, I said, and my dad went: No, no. He smiled at me. I could make his teeth out in the dark. I wanted to lie there forever.
I said: I want to lie here forever and my dad said no, no, that’s Blackula’s job now, heh, heh.
Everything felt really, really nice. The grass, the dark sky and stars and my dad smiling and wearing his white, white shirt and cracking awful jokes that weren’t even jokes, and the smell of the fresh dirt and some faraway stubble fire.
What are the blue fields again? I asked him.
Blue? he said. That would be alfalfa.
Yeaaaahhhhh, I said. Affafa, alfffa, alfafafa.
Alfalfa! said my dad.
Okaaaaaayyyy, I said.
And still the night wasn’t over. My dad left me lying in the grass next to Blackula and told me I needed to work on my rest, an idea I kept repeating over and over in my mind because I thought it was interesting, anachronistically.
I watched the sky turn purple and listened to the late-night sound of doors closing. Fluffy white things were floating around and I spent a long time trying to catch one in my hand. I felt the bumps on my head. I examined the various plates of my skull. I need a razor for my bangs, I thought. I crawled slowly through the grass towards the back door. Its brown sections reminded me of a Jersey Milk bar.
Travis liked straight bangs but Travis was going to Montreal. I liked the way my bangs looked razored. I put on Tash’s Thelonius Monk record quietly and stared at myself in the mirror. I could hear my dad snoring. I turned down the volume and waited for him to stop breathing.
I’d forgotten how to count. I remembered my grandpa telling me he was so old they didn’t have numbers when he was a kid.
I put on Tash’s baby-blue kangaroo jacket and tied the hood around my razored head. I walked out the front door, past the bullet hole and down the driveway, across the number twelve, through my neighbour’s yard, into their clothesline, down First Street, up Friesen, and onto Main. I sat down on the sparkly granite of the cenotaph next to the post office and read the names of people who had died four million years ago and then I heard my name being called.
Nomi, said Tash. I like what you’ve done to your hair. But who said you could wear my jacket?
This piece of shit? I asked. You left it behind. It’s mine now.
It looked better on me, she said. You gotta boyfriend now, eh?
Yeah. Are you still with Ian?
No, I left him in Flagstaff. Prick.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Is he sweet? she asked.
Who? I said.
Your boyfriend.
Sort of, I guess. Yeah.
That’s why you’re all alone out here? she asked.
You’re here, though, I told her. Right?
God. Not only was I incapable of having an articulate conversation, I couldn’t even imagine one.
When I got home I sat on the floor of the garage and tied the hood as tightly as I could around my face, leaving an opening only large enough to accommodate a Sweet Cap. It was a good night. Maybe someday I could be a photographer, I thought. And then, unpredictably, a corner of the garage roof collapsed.
twenty-one
School the next day. I fell asleep in math. And geography. The principal invited me into his office.
I decided not to say a word. I picked a spot on the wall to stare at the way they tell you to when you’re in labour. Clearly these are not the best years of your life, he said to me.
I felt almost drunk with gratitude when he said that. I felt as though he had entered my mind and, like a weapons inspector, had thoroughly assessed the situation with a cool, slick professionalism and was, even as we spoke, formulating some kind of counteraction. It was a type of understanding. I thought he was going to rescue me. But that’s where it ended.
At lunch Travis came to pick me up. Then left again all pissed off when the first thing I said to him was: Tell me you’re not wearing a poncho. He spun out of the gravel and a tiny stone hit my binder. I wondered if I might have been killed if it hadn’t been for the binder. Other kids were sitting in the grass eating their lunches and I had to walk past them to get back into the school. Time to find another boyfriend, said this primate, Gordo. I’ll take yours, I said. Fuck you, bitch, he screamed. You’ll get over it, I said. I fell asleep in American History. But it was the kind of non-committal sleep that allowed my memory to function, only in the role of a dream. I could hear people talking about Crazy Horse and Wounded Knee but all I could see and smell and touch was Trudie.
I remember walking through the town at night, barefoot and in my pyjamas, holding my mother’s hand. Tash had left and I had woken up screaming, yet again, and Trudie said she couldn’t take it any more. And my dad was standing in the doorway of my room begging her not to do it. May I please have the keys to the car, she asked him. May I? Please? And he said no, Trudie, don’t go there. Please don’t go there. And then the next thing I remember is walking down the quiet street in my pyjamas. And walking up the front path of my uncle’s house and my mom banging away on the door until my aunt finally came and opened it and asked my mom if she was insane, like her daughter, meaning Tash, not me, and my mom said don’t you ever speak that way about my daughter again. And then The Mouth was there and my mom asked me to sit in the grass but it was wet and I said no. Trudie, said The Mouth, what’s going on here? What are you doing? And then she told him to apologize to me. She said tell Nomi you’re sorry. She kept pointing at me and I just stared at the white pillars in front of The Mouth’s house until my vision blurred. Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit right out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.
The Mouth stood there, right in the centre of the pillars, with his eyes closed and his head tilted up to the sky. She just went on and on. Now tell Nomi you’re sorry and ask her to forgive you. Right now, Hans. You will not go back inside without apologizing.
Then Trudie was quiet for one or two seconds and I could hear crickets and I thought, now we’ll go home. But then she said: No? No? No? You won’t apologize? That’s good. That’s good. Because you know what? I will never forgive you. Nomi will never forgive you. It would bring you too much joy, wouldn’t it, you smug monster, you…ask away. Apologize. Forget it. Forget it! I wanted to tell Trudie I would forgive him, that she was wrong, and then The Mouth told his wife to go into the house and phone my dad. Tell that man to come and get his wife, he said. He told my mom his heart wept for her. Then he went into his house. I sat on the curb waiting for my dad while my mom threw rocks at her brother’s house and screamed profanities that I had never heard before.