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Mama showed me a photo of baby chickadees: LOVE. A soldier in a ditch beside a bombed farmhouse: LONELY.

Cappy Lonnigan arrived, drunk, while we were at it.

“It’s the blind leading the blind.”

Good, eviclass="underline" I can differentiate. But I am not impelled to pursue one path to the exclusion of the other. I camouflage myself through conditioned responses. Were a lady to set her head on my shoulder at a car wreck, I could identify her emotion as GRIEF.

“What a waste,” I could say. I could mean the cars.

I often find myself trapped in difficult emotional waters. But I can tread water. I employ conversational strategies. One is to repeat what someone says, slightly altered. If I was at a funeral for those killed in that hypothetical car wreck, that same lady might say: “What a pity. They were far too young. So much promise.”

“Too young,” I might try. “Such promise.”

Or at a supermarket. A boy making a scene his mother is helpless to arrest. A fellow shopper could whisper: “Someone should tame that little brat.”

“Whip him,” I might say, that being how a lion tamer tames his lions. “Whip that brat.”

I also have trouble fitting warring notions in my head. Like: the first time I saw a banana I realized you had to peel its skin to eat its insides. That banana had been given to me by a human. The two knotted in my head. Snapping the top off a banana sounds a lot like snapping the neck of a small, armless, legless, yellow person. I do not eat bananas. Ever. Or welcome yellow objects into my proximity.

“You got a case of the brainfarts,” Cappy said when I tried to explain.

“That’s vulgar,” said Mama. “Call them cramps.”

“Whaddaya mean — like, menstrual cramps?”

Farts within my brain make me mistake prone. Example: Cappy would bring Mama breakfast in bed. “Great way to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno, kid.” Beyond that, he never elaborated.

One afternoon Gadzooks! quarrelled with a robin. I shinnied up the tree — I had beaten Nicholas Saberhagen in a climbing contest, even though his father made him climb trees daily — to spy eggs in the nest. I brought them home, cracked them into a skillet. Eggs so small fried rapidly. So tiny on that big white plate. I arranged pretty blue egg shells around. When I presented them Mama was HAPPY. Until she studied closely.

“Jeffrey, where did these come from?”

“From the tree in Mister Burger’s yard.”

Mama shrieked. I mustn’t go stealing eggs out of nests. But I worked especially hard to get those eggs. Farmers stole eggs from under chickens’ bums. An egg was an egg…? I only wanted to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno. For Mama.

I stock for Vend-O-Mat Incorporated. Class-A Vending Machine Technician. Member of Vending Machine Union Local 104. At my other job I am, at best, a hobbyist.

I restock claw machines at bars. The key: place a plush teddy bear in the centre of the cube surrounded by cheap trinkets. The claw is too weak to pick it up, but fixated drunks waste many coins trying. I service Hot Nuts machines, too, but the only place that has one stopped paying their maintenance fee.

Machines are logical. When I twist my multiuse flat barrel skeleton key on a Beaver 970 gumball dispensing unit — same insides as every Beaver 970 dispensing unit — I instantly spot the problem. Usually a torn-apart gumball in the ratchet mechanism. Or if I open an Aaxon frontload dualcycle washing machine, I will usually find a 3/4-inch washer stuck in the coin slide. You can look into any machine to know exactly what is wrong. How to fix it.

Weeks ago I was at a school, stocking a Slim Line Mark X — voted Most Reliable Dispensing Unit by the Independent Vendors Association — when a boy interrupted me.

“Vhat are joo do-ink, blah?”

“I’m a stocker.”

“Zee Night Stalker?”

Gym shorts. A cape. Fat. A short, fat vampire boy. “I stock vending machines.”

“Do joo stock Nerds?”

“I do not stalk anybody.”

“Nerds zee candy.”

“Products in boxed form do not vend well. Also tube form. Certs vend poorly.”

“But, blah!” Fists clenched. “Neeeeerds!” He says this the same way Marlon Brando shouted “ Steeellla!” in A Streetcar Named Desire. The fat vampire boy chin-pointed at the Slim Line Mark X.

“It ate my dollar last week. So I kicked it.”

“Never kick them. This one weighs a thousand pounds. That is how much a female grizzly bear weighs. Five people a year die from vending machines tipping on them. Squished.”

“Whoa.”

There may be some Nerds in my truck, I said. He tagged along.

“Should you be in gym class?”

“Jeem eez strictly for zee blood bags.”

“Us alone in a truck full of treats. I could get in trouble.”

“Vy?”

“I could be a molester.”

The fat vampire boy squinted at the sun. Pulled the cape over his head. Wind goose-pimpled his bare legs. There was a case of Strawberry-Lime Nerds stashed under a box of Mallomars.

“Seriously? Wow, thanks.”

“Do not eat them all at once. You are fat already, as I imagine you must know. You risk hyperphagia. Childhood onset diabetes.”

I checked my pulse. The boy asked what was I doing.

“Your pulse is the most reliable indicator of overall health.”

I showed him my wrist. The radial vein popping through tightened skin.

“Check here.”

Instead, the boy clutched his crotch.

“I don’t feel anyzing. I yam zee valking undead!”

I helped him locate it properly. On his wrist. He looked DISAPPOINTED.

The day I arrived at Mama’s she baked angel’s food cake. Aside from Cappy, I cannot recollect who was there. Cases — when angry, Mama called us by our Social Services case number — came, went. I ate plentiful welcome cake. She took in cases other systems would not abide. Social Services paid a premium. We dressed alike: tan trousers, hush puppies. Flowbee haircuts.

“Built like a brick shithouse”: Cappy’s term for Mama. Legs thick as Japanese radishes. One night a big case, Gothia, experienced an episode. Mama weathered his ravings then slapped him. A skullrattler. She pounced on Gothia’s back. Her callused hands on Gothia’s head sounded like sledgehammers breaking open a cement sack. Her pet expression was “Gadzooks!” The night she beat on Gothia, every time she rained down a blow she yelped, “Gadzooks! Gadzooks!”

Mama was also prone to what she called “spells.” During one she came out of the bathroom with dental floss wound round her fingers so tight her fingertips were bloodless.

“Who left this? I’ll have a DNA test done, so help me God! This is not the brand we use in this house!

How did she identify used dental floss by brand? She was convinced somebody, a stranger, had broke into her home to floss their teeth — also, they would have had to bring their own floss. One of Cappy’s whores, in all probability.

“Three wolves and three sheep deciding what to eat for supper,” said Cappy Lonnigan, regarding life in Mama’s house. “Who says democracy works?”

He was her on-again off-again boyfriend. When he found work at the Port Weller dry docks—“I’m hell-on-wheels with a riveting gun, kid”—they were on. When contracts were scarce, so was he. My understanding of human behaviour is that people fall into one another’s orbits out of an inability to exist alone.

“Type of woman you’d call brassy,” he said of her. “Way a cabaret torch singer is brassy. Big teeth, big hair, big… overall. Throwing herself out there not giving a sweet tweet. Except she isn’t really pretty enough to pull it off.”