When the Saints (17 page)

“Did you tell the doctor?”

“Who’s going to find a priest near Jubilant that ain’t bleached as toilet paper, let alone one that would stand in the same room as Daddy? Fuck him. He don’t deserve saving.”

Maybe there’s still time. I walk out and go find Janis. She’s stretched out in the lounge, taking up a whole sofa.

“Look,” she says, holding up the book. “These bats will rip your eyes out of your head.”

A little blond girl on the opposite sofa burrows her face into her father’s shoulder.

“They bite your eye out of your head,” Janice says, louder, “and you have to wear a pirate patch like Bird’s friend.”

I confiscate the book and put it back on the shelf, but Janis snatches it back. I can’t be bothered to fight her, so I let her take it.

“Come on,” I say, steering her by the hood of her jacket.

When we get up to Daddy’s room, Ma is seated at his bedside. She nods for us to come in. Daddy looks just like one of the bats Janis just showed me, all shrivelled and small-faced.

“He can’t talk, but he can hear you,” Ma says.

Janis points to herself. “JAN-IS.”

Daddy grabs his elbows, moving them side to side like he’s rocking a baby.

“That’s right,” Ma says to him. “You held her once when she was a baby.” She turns to Janis. “He sang you songs.”

“What songs?” Janis demands.

“Probably the one about the drunken sailor.”

“How does it go?”

Daddy wheezes and grunts, trying to sing it for her.

I have only two good memories of my father and one of them is him teaching me this song. It was a summer day in Solace River and he and I were sitting on a blanket at the secret lake, right where I sat with West.

I start the song and Daddy tries to hit the bed rails in time. He’s too weak and collapses against the pillow. I sing the verses that start “Put him in the longboat till he’s sober” and “Shave his belly with a rusty razor,” and then Janis makes one up, “Kick him in the head until he’s sorry.”

After we run out of stuff to sing, Janis reads Daddy the entire bat book, inventing most of it. I have to admit her version is pretty entertaining. There are spitting contests and midnight birthday parties. A sort of bat tribunal decides whether a
captured creature lives or dies. Most of them die. Daddy seems to enjoy it very much for someone at death’s door himself.
Poor bastard,
I think, watching the little red-rimmed eyes fly around our faces. He’s going to die with his dirty soul all clogged up with glue and nobody really cares.

We all look up as Jackie appears in the doorway. He seems as startled as we are, shuffling to the corner without a word. After a while Ma asks him if there’s something he wants to say. He takes off his ball cap, holds it in front of him with both hands.

“I’m about to be a father,” he tells the floor. “I fucked it up three times already, but I’m trying to do better. That’s something you never done, Daddy. I’m going to do right by every kid I bring into the world. I ain’t even got a clue how, except to do the opposite of everything you did. You’re a piece of shit,” he says hoarsely. “But I forgive you.”

Daddy is swallowing non-stop during this speech, the hard grooves of his cheeks sinking deeper into shadow. I glance at the phone. We could call for a priest, or a shaman. Or an exorcist.

Jackie leans in as Daddy beckons, and we watch Daddy kiss his own palm, reach up and press it to Jackie’s face. Jackie’s lower lip twitches and he walks out of the room so fast he knocks Daddy’s chart off the hook on the back of the door. It hits the floor with a bang and Ma flinches.

As I bend down to pick it up, I realize Poppy’s right. Daddy doesn’t deserve it.

M
Y FIRST WEEK AT RASPBERRY,
I
GOT PUNCHED IN THE
face for not passing the salt fast enough. When I didn’t start bawling or rat anyone out, the bitches backed off. But soon they got bored again, and I noticed these three girls eyeing me, talking about how I deserved to bleed for what I said about Arlene the lunch lady. Everyone loved Arlene because she’d give second helpings of home fries. Of course, I hadn’t trash-talked anyone; they were just looking for any excuse. As I walked past them to leave, I said, “I never ribbed Arlene. The poor woman’s just trying to get through the day without her buns sticking together.”

They looked at me blankly.

“She’s got enough on her plate without me stirring the pot.”

Nothing.

“If you carrot all about Arlene, go let off steam somewhere else.”

When they finally got my puns, one of them chased me down the hall and demanded I come back and be funny some more. She looked like Danny DeVito, but I decided I better not start there. After a few more jokes about how I’m on a roll but I butter stop before I milk it, I told them my last name was Smith and invented a whole backstory, complete with dead parents and a loyal pit bull with whom I wandered the city streets. I was practically Little Orphan Annie, except with hickies and a cigarette behind one ear.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that all the girls were from families no better than Saints. We were all trying to hide it, but it seeps out of our pores and stinks up the air around us. Sometimes, when a girl was going to be sent back to her family,
she’d freak out and beg to stay. It must have been contagious, because every time I thought about Solace River I saw Daddy’s swinging fist.

The counsellor assigned to me at Raspberry was in his late twenties and not bad-looking. He let me call him Pete instead of Mr. Chambers. He was stocky and pale with ice-blue eyes and nice shirts. After my tooth got fixed, he started writing me little notes about how he thought I was cute and more mature than the other girls. I’d never had a boyfriend before, and I kind of liked the attention. One day he brought me into the gym storage room and whispered that he wasn’t allowed to touch me so I’d have to touch him. After that, all my “counselling sessions” were about him getting off. I found out later he was the main reason they kept me at Raspberry for so many years. He wrote in my record that I was a danger to the public, that I’d told him in detail all the violent crimes I intended to commit once I was out.

Apparently, this kind of stuff was happening all the time. Everyone from janitors up to parole officers was getting action off the girls. I found out when I started hanging out in metal shop with the senior girls who spent all their unsupervised hours making knuckle rings and slim jims. For forty bucks of Barbara Best’s money, they told me everything there was to know about Raspberry. For another twenty, they cut me copies of every key for the building.

When I told Counsellor Pete I was done shining his shaft, he freaked out, thinking I was about to tell on him, and locked me in the basement. The first thing I did when he let me out was break into the kitchen and gorge myself on anything that
wasn’t locked up. Then I went back to the basement to get this industrial stapler I’d seen down there. I used my keys to get into his room later that night and woke him up with my mouth. As soon as he relaxed and closed his eyes, I pulled that heavy thing out from under my sweater and drove three or four metal staples straight down into his balls.

Not all the staff at Raspberry were criminals. There was one teacher I liked, Mrs. Dunphy, who taught us sewing and cooking. She wore steel-toed boots with long denim dresses, threw F-bombs around even more than we did. After I cracked her code for multiple-choice tests (the first four answers always spelled ABBA and the last four ACDC), she asked me if I came from a family of geniuses. I told her about the time Daddy put on a thrift store tie, drove to another town and impersonated a member of their school board. He purchased a hot water heater on the board’s credit account, even had the store employee load it onto his truck before he promptly drove out of town, changing his licence plate on the way. Mrs. Dunphy laughed till she had to thump her chest with her fist to get some air. But then she sat me down and said I should find a way to use my powers for good.

So I did. The girls at Raspberry were always complaining that they couldn’t talk to their boyfriends. We were only allowed sixty minutes’ phone time per week and you could only use them to call designated family members. One night we were all sitting around the common room watching MuchMusic and the VJ announced that fans could phone in to the show, speak into an answering machine, and the message would be converted into type that ran
in an ongoing stream across the bottom of the screen. I pointed out to the girls that they could receive messages this way. Soon enough, during music videos, we saw a string of fake gushing about a certain band followed by the instructions:
R.S. meet L.J. back field at 7pm 05/03.
We could barely hold in our cheers in front of the supervisors on duty. They didn’t catch on for almost a year, and by then there had been eight covert conjugal visits.

I
T TAKES A WHILE TO CONVINCE
M
A OF THE PLAN.
S
HE
tells me that she and the kids nearly froze to the chesterfield last winter and she’s saving Daddy’s money for the oil tank. But she finally forks it over.

I walk into Jody’s Garage and Lyle Kenzie starts toward me with a wrench in his hand, tightening his grip like he might hit me with it. I haven’t had a whiff of him since the police warned him to stay away from Poppy’s trailer, but I can tell he’s still looking to collect.

“You ain’t no cop,” he says.

I hand him an envelope containing the cash and watch him count it.

“Fuck is this? She owes me a grand. If I don’t get the rest, I’ll go to the hospital and shoot her in the face.”

“Bet you won’t get caught doing that.”

He yanks his pants higher, trying to think of a comeback.

“I’ll give you double what she owes, cash in hand. All you have to do is talk to the people who have Poppy’s kid.”

“What?” He sniffs the air.

“We’re leaving.” I hand him the deed. “Poppy’s trailer. Tell Troy he can have it.”

“Who’d want that piece of crap?”

“It’s the only way to show him we’re serious. He can use it as a meth lab for all I care.”

Lyle stares at the paper so long I wonder if he’s just pretending to know how to read. Finally, he rolls it up and sticks it in his back pocket. “What the fuck do you want me to do?”

“Bring Swimmer to the trailer. We’ll tell the police he came wandering back on his own and that’ll be the end of it. We’ll drive away in moving trucks and Troy can be king of the castle again.”

Lyle smacks the wrench against his hand. “You better not be playing games.”

“Don’t fuck it up.” I turn to leave. “By the way, your barn door’s open.”

“Huh?”

“The wiener’s leaving the bean pot.”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

He turns back to the workbench muttering and I finally hear his zipper go up.

T
HE LAST THING
D
ADDY SAID TO
P
OPPY BEFORE THEY
stuck the tubes down his throat was, “I was born on a Friday, going to die on a Friday.” He should have put money on it.

Nobody was with him when he went. A nurse just casually mentioned it to Poppy, which pissed her off to no end. Then she turned around and did the same thing to us.

“Daddy’s dead,” she barked into the phone. “Can someone bring me down a bag of ketchup chips? The vending machine ate my fucking loonie.”

Ma slammed down the receiver and called the main switchboard to ask what was going to happen to his body. They said if no one claims him, he’ll be cremated after the weekend, so we wait it out. First thing Monday morning, Jackie and I take Ma down to the room where families are allowed to sit and watch the cremation fire through a window. Jackie puts his arm around Ma, settles in like he’s at the movies.

After a few hours, the furnace man pokes his head in the little room to tell us it’s taking longer than usual.

“The crisper’s got to work extra hard to get through that tough black heart, hey Ma?” Jackie grins.

The furnace looks like a big pizza oven. I picture the flames devouring Daddy’s hands and feet, his soft grey belly and jackal smile. After we run out of things to say, I slowly tune out all sound in the room and search my heart for the only other good memory I have of my father.

It was January and all of us kids were home sick with the flu. My and Poppy’s beds had been moved into Bird and Jackie’s room, where the radiators worked better. Ma was sick too and couldn’t do much for us. It hadn’t snowed all winter, but that morning the whole house shook with what sounded like a giant whip crack and snow started pouring out of the sky in heavy
tufts. We could hear the little thuds on the windows, but none of us had the energy to pick up our heads to look. Daddy’s feet came pounding up the stairs and we placed fast bets on who was going to get it. But Daddy said, “Come on! Get up!” and in two trips he peeled the four of us out of our beds, blankets and all, and parked us on the old sofa in front of the picture window.

“Wendell!” Ma called out from her bedroom. “Why are them kids out of bed?”

He banged around near the kitchen door and then there was silence. Four-year-old Jackie rolled himself into a sweaty ball, muttering, “I didn’t do nothing.” I copied Bird, pressing my hot forehead to the cool glass, and suddenly Daddy appeared before us in the yard. He had on two pairs of pants, a goofy-looking hat with earflaps and wool socks over his hands.

Baby Poppy giggled as Daddy started strutting back and forth. We all sat up straight as he spun around in circles, jumped up and kicked his heels then hopped like a rabbit, wriggling his nose, all the while sneaking glances back to the window to catch our reaction. He stuck out his tongue to catch some flakes then pretended he caught too much and was choking. He wrapped his hand around his throat and mouthed, “Help me.” Now we were all giggling. Finally, he spread his arms, fell backward and made a snow angel. It was beautiful, except the flask of whisky in one hand made his wings uneven.

I close my eyes and freeze the memory in my mind into the shape of a plastic snow globe. I trap a tiny man inside that looks like Daddy and gently lay him on his back atop the drifts.