Bible Camp Bloodbath

Bible Camp Bloodbath

Joey Comeau

First edition November 2010

Copyright © Joey Comeau, 2010

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without express written permission from the copyright holder, except for brief excerpts for review purposes.

This is a work of fiction. I think. Names, characters, and places are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is probably cause for alarm.

Printed in the USA

ISBN 145387769X

EAN-13 9781453877692

Cover by Joey Comeau

Design by Emily Horne

Drawing by Kate Beaton

Edited by Derek McCormack

Tony’s wardrobe by Maison Martin Margiela

This book is set in Baskerville.

for

Derek McCormack

1.

“I got the job!” Martin’s mother announced. She tossed her bag on the pile of shoes by the front door and came into the living room, scooping Martin up in her arms. “I’m going to be spending three weeks making flaps of wet torn skin, jutting white broken bones, and drooling chunks of flesh for Blood Socket 2. Blood Socket 2, Martin! Pus! Spleens! Teeth! I’ll be spreading fake guts all over the walls. They said they loved my work in particular on Undead Hungry Grandmother Birthday Party. I didn’t think anyone even saw that movie.”

Martin squeezed his mother while she spun him around the room. He kissed her neck. She was so happy. This would be good for them. She was always happiest when she was working on the movies. She was too good for the makeup counter at the mall. She was too smart.

“You may have to go and stay with your aunt and uncle for a few weeks,” she said. “A lot of the filming is going to be in Toronto, so I’ll have to stay in a hotel. Those filthy big city streets will run with blood. They’ll have to install blood gutters.”

For dinner they had an ice cream cake. Vanilla with a chocolate crumble centre, and on the top of it, in pink glossy icing, it read, “Happy Birthday Lucifer, Our Sugary Dark Lord.” A celebration! Tonight she would have her friends over and Martin would be sent to bed while they partied late, but right now it was just the two of them. They sat at the kitchen table eating ice cream cake while Martin’s mother sketched ideas for gore effects. Martin rested his head on her shoulder and together they planned the perfect dangling kitten eyeballs.

* * *

Martin had a picture he’d clipped from a magazine of a goat standing on the back of a cow. It seemed otherworldly to him, but neither the goat nor the cow looked concerned. They didn’t care that the goats in picture books never stood on cows. They pulled this shit all the time. This was just how it was. His mother had that same look on her face, up on the kitchen table with someone else’s bottle of wine in her hand, head tilted to avoid the light fixture. Martin could see mud caked around the edges of her boots, smeared on the tabletop.

He stayed quiet, out of sight. He knew how this worked. It was against the rules for her to wear her boots in the house, but if he spoke up the response would be, “Bed time, kiddo.” Forget that. He liked to watch his mother when she was around her friends. As long as the table didn’t break again, it was okay. Mud was easy to clean up.

* * *

With his baggy shirts and wire rim glasses, Martin looked like he’d been picked too soon. He was eleven years old, and he wore button-up shirts that were always too big on him. He looked like the kind of kid who cut pictures of goats standing on cows out of magazines, like the kind of kid who was proud when people called him a nerd. And he was proud. His mother was a nerd. Sure she was a violent and unpredictable nerd who dressed like a panhandling teen, but she was a nerd. She knew more about chemistry than any of his teachers. Sometimes, just for fun, she made the strangest things broil and ooze for Martin. For his last birthday, she set a Halloween mask over a shot glass full of mystery sludge, so that sickly foam drooled and spat from the mouth. Martin made her repeat the trick again and again, watching the foaming grin in horror.

* * *

Up on the table, Martin’s mother cleared her throat to quiet the room. When that didn’t work, she stomped her boot. Everyone turned to look, and she gave a small curtsy. She took a drink from the bottle of wine, an empty glass in her other hand, then she raised both over the whole room.

“To the Royal goddamned Bank of Canada, and their kindhearted vat-grown employees,” she said, “for being so understanding of the plight of a young single mother. God bless their tiny little hearts and may none of them be out sick or on vacation when I go down there to burn their building to the ground.”

Everyone laughed. His mother wore the white t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. Across the front there was a black drawing of a crow. It clung to a branch that ran around to her back, out of sight. It was one of her favourite t-shirts. The tail end of her snake tattoo came winding down the skin of her arm from her shoulder.

“No wait!” she said. “This is a celebration. Fuck the banks. I got the job! I am gonna help make people feel sick to their stomachs! I’m contributing to society! Little kids hiding behind couches, that will be my legacy! Turn the music up!” his mother yelled. “Turn it up!” She stomped her boot on the table. “Let’s see how those shit dicks downstairs like it for once.”

Everyone sang and laughed at the same time, and someone turned the music up. Martin’s mother took another drink. She stomped again. She stomped her boot one more time, and the table broke under her weight. Crack.

Martin’s heart closed for that half second while his mother’s eyes were white and her arms were thrown up in the air. He lost track of the wine. He lost track of her friends. All Martin could see was the startled look on her face.

She landed on the broken table and slid to the side, rolling when she hit the floor. Martin held his breath. There was a crunch. Martin’s mother was okay. That crunch was just the wine glass. She sat stunned on the floor. Then she smiled and came alive.

“Fucking bullshit.” She scrambled to wipe up the red wine with the bottom of her shirt and with the tablecloth. “Fucking dog garbage,” she said. She was ruining her shirt and the tablecloth and laughing. She wasn’t hurt. Martin couldn’t help it, he laughed too. This was a cheap table they bought at a yard sale to replace the last one. Next time they were going to have to buy something that could support her weight.

“Dog garbage” was something she said all the time. Martin had started saying it, too. Not on purpose, but he caught himself saying it every once in a while. When people spend all their time together, they start to talk the same.

* * *

“Your shirt is filthy,” Tom, the skinny one, said to Martin’s mother. “I advise you to take it off immediately.” Laughter. And then, after a second, Tom said, “That’s what I’m talking about!”

Martin couldn’t see what was going on. He tore a square of the paper towel off the roll and carefully folded it twice into perfect quarters. He tore another square off and folded it twice. This would be good to start. Then he could come back for more. If he took too long, the wine would have longer to stain. He elbowed through the group of them all crowded around his mother. She was in her bra now, shirt in hand. The room got quiet when Martin pushed through to give her the paper towel.

“Oh, great,” Tom said, “there goes our fun.” Martin could feel them looking at him, but he didn’t care. If she didn’t get that shirt dealt with, it would stain. The wine would stain the floor, too. It always had to be red wine. “Kid, fuck off,” Tom said. Martin ignored him, and crouched beside his mother. He offered the folded paper towels.

“It’s red wine,” Martin said. It was a stupid thing to say. She knew it was red wine.

2.

Martin woke in the dark, certain that there was a man in the bedroom with him. He covered his mouth to keep from making any noise and listened. There were quiet sounds from the street coming through the window, but what else? Was there someone breathing? A man could be standing there above him, just smiling. Any second he could whisper Martin’s name, his lips pulling back slowly, his hairy fingers slick with sweat. Martin was going to scream and kick and thrash. He could feel it. He closed his eyes and pulled the comforter tighter. Nobody was there. It was just the dream again. Nobody was there. He held the blanket tight to protect himself, and eventually he fell back asleep.

* * *

In the morning he woke up from a much nicer dream. He was planting bushes in his grandmother’s garden, and one of the bushes was actually a lost kitten. The sun was so bright it was almost invisible in the sky. Sometimes you just know things in a dream. Martin dug a small hole in the dirt and planted a dark green bush with wide leaves that was also a lost kitten. It meowed. Meow. Meow. Meow. And then Martin was awake and that repeating sound was his mother’s alarm in the other room. The window was open and it was cool in his room. The alarm kept going. All his blankets were on the floor.

Martin stood up before he was really awake and stood there for a second. He picked his glasses up off the dresser and dressed for the day. His clothes from last night still needed to be folded and put away. The alarm kept going and for a second he was torn. Should he deal with his mother or fold his clothes? His clothes were just crumpled on the floor. They had to be folded. So he folded fast, but carefully, tucked the clothes into the dirty laundry hamper and then hurried down the hall to the kitchen.

The table knelt broken in the broken glass. The wooden legs jutted out from underneath it in crazy directions so that the table looked like a baby horse trying to stand up for the first time. Someone - probably one of his mother’s friends - had tried to clean up the glass. They’d swept some of it into a pile against the kitchen wall. A half-assed job. There were still shards everywhere. Martin took the broom and cleared a path to the counter and the fridge, so it was safe to walk in his socks.

He made his mother tea. No cream. No sugar. The cup rattled on the saucer as he carried it to her room. The more he tried to hold still, the more it rattled.

His mom was sprawled asleep on the bed, facedown in the pillow, and Martin turned the alarm off and set her tea on the nightstand. She had a much darker room than he did and the shades were always drawn in the mornings. It took him a second to adjust to the dim light. There were shelves and shelves of books against the wall and books stacked on the floor beside them. Martin looked around for anything he could clean up before he woke her. Her clothes were strewn and there was a pile of her special effects books on the end of the bed, by her ankles. Martin folded her clothes and placed them in the hamper. He stacked the books on her dresser beside a broken tube of lipstick.

On the dresser mirror, in thick red lipstick, his mother had written, “Get your fucking shit together!” and when he first saw it, Martin thought it was directed at him. But it wasn’t. It never was. He sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. The snake tattoo curled all over the skin on her back, jet black with twists of green. The eyes were looking right at him.

“Hello,” he whispered to it, and the snake twisted a little as Martin’s mother shifted in her sleep. He kissed the tips of his fingers and reached out and touched them to the snake’s nose. “Hello, good morning,” Martin whispered. The snake’s name was Sicily, like the place. When Martin touched his fingers to Sicily, he could hear the snake slithering, like a slow rasp.

He liked this part of the day, just sitting with Sicily in the morning, before his mother woke up. It was calm. The sun was out there, but it couldn’t get into the room until they let it. The world hadn’t started yet.

Martin poked his mother in the back and she groaned and rolled over a bit, but she didn’t wake up. So he shook her shoulder, careful where to grip, not squeezing Sicily. His mother grunted. She opened her eyes and stared at Martin for a second before she realized what was happening.

Martin looked down at his hands while she wrapped herself in a blanket. Part of Sicily’s tail went around the front of his mother’s body, where you weren’t supposed to look. Martin picked up her tea from the dresser and held it out.

“Thanks,” she said. It took her a minute to wake up and for a while she just sat on the edge of her bed sipping the tea. She didn’t smile and say, “Was I a total idiot last night or what?” the way she always did. Instead, she stared at the words on the mirror and she drank her tea quietly. After she was done, she sat for a few minutes more, wrapped in her bed sheet. Sicily’s tail peeked out at Martin and he smiled at it. “I’m sorry,” his mother said after a while. Martin shrugged his shoulders, even though he didn’t know what she was sorry for. “I’m sorry you had to see me like that last night.” Did she mean in her bra? She was naked right now. It didn’t matter to Martin.

“Whatever,” he said. “It’s okay. Nothing I haven’t seen before!” He laughed, and he expected her to laugh too. “Nothing I haven’t seen before” was what she always said when he was having a bath and she had to pee. She’d say, “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” and then it was okay for her to come in.

It wasn’t the right thing to say now, though. She set the teacup down and started crying. Martin didn’t know what else to do so he hugged her. He wrapped his arms around her and pushed his head into her shoulder and squeezed hard.

“I love you,” Martin said. “And you can’t be sad. Did you forget about Blood Socket 2?” She unwrapped herself from his arms and kissed his cheek.

“How could I forget about Blood Socket 2?” she said. Then she saw what time it was. “Fuck Jesus, I’m late.”