“I’m starved.” She pulled out the other one and offered it.
Cyril felt the bus pitch like a small boat in a steep sea. She set the warm fruit in his cold hand: its heat penetrated his palm. No ball of gold, no meteor, no bauble from an ancient treasure hoard was more valuable. As the bus wheezed and jolted up Granville they peeled and ate their oranges—the sweetest orange he’d ever experienced. At Forty-First Avenue they transferred and headed east then got off and walked, the lines in the sidewalk ticking past beneath their feet as if they were walking railroad racks. Cyril’s mind raced ahead. Kiss her? Ask her out again? When they reached her gate she took care of all questions by hanging her arms over his shoulders and kissing him, not a peck but a real kiss, long and lingering; sighing she moved closer.
“I loved your drawings,” she whispered. “I could taste the metal, like blood in my mouth.”
He was alarmed, and yet apparently she liked that. “I’m glad.”
“It was real,” she said, her tone implying she was starved for something real.
Cyril had two drawings in the year-end show. One was of his dad’s hammer and pliers and welding mask. The other was of a small anvil with an egg balanced on top. Both drawings were done in pencil that shone like dully gleaming lead, and both were big, two-by-three feet, and filled the paper to the edges. He’d worked for weeks on them down in the basement at his dad’s old workbench.
Cyril and Connie kissed some more and all the way home he tasted citrus.
The next afternoon he and Gilbert tossed the football in the alley. Gilbert dropped back and launched a bomb. “Kapp!” he shouted. Cyril sprinted. “Willie the Wisp!” Gilbert’s throw sailed over the hedge and into the cemetery and struck a gravestone and went wobbling off across the grass. Shoving his way through the laurel hedge Cyril retrieved it. Gilbert’s every second throw bounced off carport roofs, flattened flowers, or shattered graveyard vases. But he hurled the ball with a gusto Joe Kapp would have envied.
Later, they headed for their booth in the Aristocratic, where Gilbert set his elbows on the table and leaned forward demanding details.
Cyril knew a kiss wouldn’t count for Gilbert nor would an orange, no matter where it had been, so he shrugged and tried to appear offhand.
“Not even a feel?”
Cyril tasted citrus again, but how could he mention that?
“Figures.” Gilbert sat back, relieved that Cyril hadn’t jumped ahead in the race to losing their virginity. “What did you see?”
“Psycho.”
“Sure, and I got two cocks.
Cyril said nothing, merely gazed off out the window at the traffic. Silence was the only weapon that worked with Gilbert; you had to wait him out.
“No shit?”
“You don’t really see anything,” he said, hoping Connie would cover for him.
Gilbert yawned as if it didn’t matter anyway. He had a dismissive manner, as if he’d heard everything before. He had long teeth, dark blue eyes, and hair as thick and black as a slab of fresh tar. His jaw was big but his nose small, as if his features had been mismatched.
“I’m thinking of killing myself,” said Gilbert. They’d known each other since the first grade, long enough for Cyril to indulge such posturing. Gilbert had no intention of croaking before he made his million. He was obsessed with schemes that ranged from forgery—using Cyril’s draughting skills—to robbing Shaughnessy mansions, to stealing whisky from Seagrams where his old man drove a forklift. Not a huge money-maker, that last one, but it would give him ‘operating capital.’
Cyril indulged him. “You down?”
“Bored.”
“Who isn’t?” Cyril watched the cars waiting at the intersection. When the light changed they began moving forward in an obedient fashion, as if they were all hypnotized, obeying some voice from above. Was that the future? Was that adulthood? Cyril worried about the future, but he wasn’t the least bit bored, not now, not since his date with Connie.
“How you going to do it?”
“Dunno.”
“Poison?”
Gilbert grimaced. “I wanna die, not suffer.”
“Carbon monoxide?”
“The old man won’t even let me start the car.”
“Booze and pills?”
“Blow it and they put you in Riverview and you end up wearing pyjamas the rest of your life.”
“Shoot yourself.”
“Kind of requires a gun.”
“Drown?”
Now Gilbert sat forward. “That might be good. Lemme borrow your weight shoes.”
His weight shoes were new: cast iron, Joe Weider, and had cost him eight bucks. “Buy your own.”
“You’ll get them back when they drag the bottom.”
“Put rocks in your pockets.”
“It’s my last request.”
“What if they don’t find you?”
“I’ll leave a note and a map.”
“I’ll think about it.”
The next Saturday Cyril and Connie saw The Apartment, and they held hands and afterward walked across the bridge then angled their way home, eventually reaching the corner of the cemetery. Connie said she envied him living across from a graveyard. Cyril went into a Bela Lugosi accent. “Ze smell of ze cemetery is good. It remind me of Transylwania.”
“The veeping and moaningk is music to my pointed ears,” she said, right on cue.
They wandered around reading headstones by starlight. Many graves had photos set right into the markers. Connie bent to read something scratched into a slab: “Bastard. I’m glad you’re dead.” She gave a thumbs up. “Nice.”
It was a warm night and they heard cars beating their way up Fraser Street. Sharing a piece of Black Cat gum, they stood face-to-face and blew bubbles that touched and popped over each other’s mouths and then chewed them from each other’s lips. He hooked his forefinger into the front pocket of her jeans and she did the same to his and they stood there, both leaning away and holding each other’s weight in a game of trust, then they pulled toward each other and kissed again.
“We taste good,” she said.
He embraced her and slid one hand down to her rear. She removed the hand but held on to it and they resumed walking through the trees. Connie patted the trunk of a maple as though it was the haunch of a horse.
This was his favourite tree in all the graveyard. He’d spent a lot of time in that tree, contemplating life and death, the past and the future, the North Shore Mountains, and the crows that migrated east each evening. How appropriate—how right—that it was the one Connie chose to pat.
Connie reached for the lowest branch but it was too high, so Cyril made a stirrup of his hands and hoisted her up. She caught the limb and hung there a moment, feet pedaling the air before hauling herself into a sitting position against the trunk.
“Okay, see you,” chirped Cyril.
“Fine. I’ll become a tree spirit. Every autumn when my leaves fall you’ll hear my lament in the wind.” She put the back of her wrist to her brow.
He leapt and pulled himself up beside her. The world smelled of grass and sap and bark and Black Cat gum. The next branch was within easy reach. They moved methodically from limb to limb and the higher they went the farther away school, the city, the world receded.
“Think we’d die if we fell?” she asked.