When the Saints (22 page)

But by Saturday morning, I still haven’t heard from Lyle. I’m starting to have fantasies that involve kerosene, matches and his shiny new truck. I get up early to try the garage again, but Ma stops me.

“Happy Jubilant Day.” She takes a shot of Pepto-Bismol. “There’s a parade downtown in an hour.”

She’s wearing the same clothes she was wearing last night. I don’t think she’s slept at all the past few nights. All she does is keep her ear to the scanner and wait for the phone to ring.

“I’ll take Janis.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “I always do.”

“Then I’ll come. I can’t just sit here.”

I walk down the hall and duck my head in Janis’s room. Her leg is hanging over the side of the bunk and I shake it gently. Three of her toes are poking out of one sock.

“Who wants to go to the parade?”

“Me.” She opens one eye then the other. “Swimmer will be there. He claps when those Shiners go by in those little cars honking the horns.”

She finds her sunglasses in the sheets and jumps down off the bed. I watch her dig through a laundry basket and pull out a lobster claw hat from three festivals ago. It’s too small for her now. Every time she yanks it down on her forehead, it slowly creeps back up on top of her head.

“Shriners,”
I correct her.

“Nope, they’re called Shiners!” she screams. “Because they shine everything! Like those little cars. If you need something shined, you call them and they drive over right away!”

I try to take the hat off her head to brush out her hair, but she squirms past me, runs down the hall, through the kitchen all the way out to the driveway to buckle Swimmer’s stuffed husky dog into the back seat of the car. Then she comes back in, sets herself up at the table with a bag of tobacco and starts pumping paper tubes one at a time into Ma’s sliding machine, lining up the finished cigarettes in a neat row. In the meantime Ma showers, does a few dishes, tidies up and fills a Thermos with tea. She inspects Janis’s work, hands her a Baggie, and Janis tosses the smokes in, twist-ties it and places it in Ma’s purse. Then they both turn and walk in opposite directions, checking to make sure all the lights and the stove are off. This must be their routine.

“Let’s pick up Bird,” I say as we’re pulling out of the driveway.

Ma shakes her head. “Jackie won’t like that.”

“Why? He wants Bird to stay inside peeling the walls off every day?”

“He don’t want anyone to know how bad off Bird is.”

“That’s the whole point. Everyone needs to know. Let them talk about how Bird can barely hold his head up and Troy will realize he won the war a long time ago.”

She clicks her tongue but stays silent as I pull in to the blue house. Bird is sitting out on the porch. I bring him down, lift him out of his chair, and Ma folds it up and puts it in the trunk. As
I’m wrangling him into the back seat, I suggest we squeeze in the other two Musketeers, but Ma says we better not.

“They’re too unpredictable, those two. I took them with me to get groceries once and they attacked each other in the pasta aisle. There were noodles goddamn everywhere.”

Once we’re on the road, I glance in the rear-view mirror and say, “Hey, Janis, you should tell everyone at the parade we’re moving to Solace River.”

“Why?”

“So when they see a big house riding on a truck, they won’t think it got lost from the parade. They’ll say, ‘Hey look! There goes Janis Saint’s brand new house!’”

“Yup.” Janis nods. “They’ll say, ‘There goes the fastest house in the world!’ Right, Uncle Bird?”

He turns his head side to side, drooling.

It takes a while to find a place to park and then we have to walk along the street trying to find an empty spot to watch the parade. Every time Bird sees a little girl with pigtails on either side of her head, he grunts and starts pointing. Ma has to say, “No, Birdie. That’s not Josie,” every time.

I ask someone where we can buy festival hats and he tells me to go to the festival kiosk. We walk all over hell’s half acre before I realize the “kiosk” is just two sawhorses with a sign taped between them. It’s manned by the town stoner, a teenage boy who looks like he’s fast asleep except for the big greasy grin. Once he remembers why he’s sitting there, he sells me a headband with light-up antennae, but then it takes him five hundred years to figure out my change.

I clamp the headband crooked on Bird’s head, trying to make him look as pathetic as possible. I spy some kids with plastic lobster bibs and buy one of those too. Ma has no energy to fight me. She just looks down at the lights bobbing around on Bird’s head and sighs.

Finally, a troupe of ten majorettes comes marching around the corner. The chubby, freckle-faced kid keeps dropping her baton. She throws it in the air, misses right in front of us, and sighs, “Fuuuck.” She picks it up, shakes it angrily at the sky and yells, “Seriously?” then yanks out her wedgie one-handed and runs panting to catch up with the others.

“She said the F-word,” Janis informs everyone around us.

Two teenage girls are carrying the parade banner: TOWN OF JUBILANT: PRIDE AND PROGRESS. One of them has a lit cigarette in her hand. Ma points to her.

“That’s Frosty’s daughter.”

“His name’s not Frosty,” I tell her. “That’s just the name of his store.”

She lowers her voice. “Progress, my ass. That Frosty’s still renting out porn movies on VHS. He tapes them off the Quebec channel, and he don’t know French, so he makes up the titles. They all got ‘Miss Frenchie’ in them.”

The Jubilant Lobster Fishermen’s Association’s float has a bunch of people in sou’westers standing single file under a sign painted UNEMPLOYMENT LINE. Some lobster traps tied to the back of the truck drag empty along the pavement. The crowd falls silent as it passes.

When the pipe band comes into view, I tap Janis on the shoulder.

“I know,” she snaps, shrugging me off. She steps off the curb and gives each piper a thumbs-up.

“You really think you can blow that much air into those bags?” I ask.

“Yup,” she says. “I blew up six hundred balloons for Swimmer’s birthday party.”

“Six hundred?”

“Probably seven hundred.”

The Jubilant Day Queen has a big hickey on her neck, which didn’t make her think twice about an updo. She waves to the crowd in white gloves like she’s been doing this her whole life. As if Ma and I didn’t just see her half an hour ago bumming change outside the liquor store, screeching to someone in a car, “Where’s Jimmy at? He said he was getting hash for the Gravitron!”

“What’s the Gravitron?” Ma asked me once we’d passed.

“It’s a carnival ride that looks like a UFO and spins around at warp speed blasting Mötley Crüe songs until everybody’s pinned to the walls. Then sometimes one of the workers will do tricks, skulking sideways across the seats or flipping upside down. You’d be surprised at how often those tricks get carnies laid.”

“I’m sure I would,” Ma barked. “What’s the hash for? That sounds like enough on its own.”

W
HEN THE PARADE CLEARS, THE CROWD JAMS THE
street. Janis takes out one of her drawings of Swimmer, unfolds it and stops different kids to ask if they’ve seen him. She says, “He’s
wearing a yellow shirt in this picture, but now he might be wearing a blue one, or an orange one, or a green one. But not brown. He won’t wear brown shirts, because brown makes him need to poop.” She runs up to a little boy who looks like Swimmer from behind and grabs him by the hair.

“Control her,” the boy’s mother says to Ma. Then she narrows her eyes. “I know who you are.”

“Do you know who I am?” I ask. She starts to make a snarky comment, but I lean in and whisper, “You open that tacky lipstick mouth again, I’ll find out who your husband is and fuck his ever-loving brains out.”

It was the only thing I could think of. She yanks her son away and as soon as they’re at a safe distance, she spins around and gives me the double middle finger.

Looking around, all I see are idiots stuffing their faces with hot dogs and cigarettes, pushing their baby strollers, hollering at their older kids who are whining because they blew all their junk food money on face tattoos. Camouflage gear seems to be the prevailing fashion trend and I can’t imagine the draw. A three-hundred-pound woman in a camo skirt will not blend into her surroundings. Even if she was standing in a thicket, she’d be hard to miss with the rhinestone belt and the seeming inability to stop screeching, “Mama’s getting on the hooch!”

I take a look at us, and we’re no better. Ma didn’t even comb her hair. Janis looks like she’s dressed as a hobo for Halloween, with two different shoes on again and a bright orange stain on her shirt front. I find some Wet-naps in my purse and clean her up a bit, tuck in her shirt.

We make our way down the road to the fire hall parking lot where the carnival games are set up, and Ma starts making that furball noise in her throat. I ask her if she wants to go home, but she shakes her head no. She silently weeps as we walk around watching people whack moles and toss rings. I buy some wilted cotton candy that no one eats and try to smile every time Janis looks up. Ma tells me there used to be a big tug-of-war match after the parade, but the Jubilant Day Committee banned it after last year’s accident.

“What happened?”

“Buddy had the rope twisted around his wrist,” Janis jumps in. “The other guys pulled the rope over and saw a bloody hand hanging off it. I said to the newspaper, ‘That’s the craziest thing I ever seen in my life.’ After the ambulance drove away, they had to bring a fire truck out and hose all the different-colour barf off the street.”

“She didn’t see it,” Ma says. “We were in the bathroom changing Swimmer’s diaper. But she did tell the reporter that. We have the newspaper article at home with her name in it.”

“Wait.” Janis sticks her arm out in front of us. “I see something for Uncle Bird.”

She turns and wheels Bird up to the craft tables and we overhear her ask how much the tissue paper angels cost. She talks the old lady down to two dollars then zips her sequined purse back up. She grabs a delicate angel from the lady’s outstretched hands and drops it into Bird’s lap. I turn my head as Bird starts ripping the thing to shreds.

Angela from the Lighthouse is leaning against the fire hall. She’s got those leopard shoes on again. She looks right at me, but
I don’t seem to register. She must have been drunk as a porcupine that night.

Janis pulls up her shirt and shows me she wore her bathing suit under her clothes so she can go in the dunk tank. We take her over to the rickety old thing and when it’s her turn, she climbs up on the swing and sways back and forth in her sunglasses, trash-talking grown men. No one knocks her down and after half an hour Ma starts to get impatient in the heat. Her nerves are so fried I can almost smell the sizzle.

“Oh, yeah, right,” Janis groans when Ma buys a ball from the man. She barely gets that out of her mouth when Ma fires it underhand and smacks the orange target dead-on. The seat collapses and Janis vanishes. She stays down extra long on purpose. Eventually, her head pops up and she crawls out of the booth dripping wet, fake gasping for air. I ask her how it was and she puts her hand on her chest, huffing away. Ma tells her it’s time to leave and she drops the act, gets a panicked look on her face.

Janis grabs Bird’s chair handles and pushes him with all her strength up to the auction booth. The auction’s over, but the auctioneer is still there packing up.

“I bet she’s asking him if she can sing into his microphone,” Ma says.

We watch as the man lifts Janis up onto his platform, switches on the microphone and places it in her hands.

“Hey, everybody!” she yells into it, then “WHAT?” when the man tries to tell her not to press it directly to her mouth. “I’m Janis and this is Uncle Bird. Say hello, Bird.” She crouches and shoves the microphone at Bird, but he’s half asleep. She stands
back up. “Does anyone here know where’s my little brother, Swimmer? I have a picture right here.” She holds up her drawing. “See. He has brown hair and he’s only this big.” She pushes the palm of her hand down six inches from the ground. “And he likes Dolly Pardon and dogs and candy.”

I look around and notice people are actually listening. The guy working the dunk booth has stopped selling balls while she’s talking. Some elderly women are shushing people and pointing up at the platform.

“If you have him up at your house, please give him back.” Her lip trembles and big tears start rolling down her cheeks. “Because he’s my brother. We have to go to live at Saw-liss River, but we can’t go without Swimmer because he won’t know how to find us and I have his husky dog from Grandma Jean.” She puts the microphone down and it makes a big thump into the speaker. Then she wipes her eyes with the backs of her hands, picks the mic back up in both hands and presses it right up to her mouth. “And if anyone wants me to, I can sing a song.”

Ma goes over to collect her.

E
VERYBODY’S QUIET ON THE DRIVE HOME.
I
GET OUT AT
the blue house with Bird, draw him a bath and feed him supper. The Musketeers are having a music night. The fat one’s strumming an old guitar with three strings and making up lyrics, most of them about how he’s a sharp-tooth man that ain’t gonna go down to the river. Eye Patch Stanley grunts along, tapping the
table off time with a wooden spoon, as Bird rocks back and forth, dancing in his chair. After his bath, he makes me put his antennae back on him. I sit for one more song before I say good night. Halfway across the field, I turn to see the colourful lights on Bird’s head swaying in the window.

I kick my boots off in the trailer and the phone rings a single time. I run over to pick it up, but there’s a dial tone. Two minutes later, same thing. Ma says it’s been happening for the past hour. I wonder if it could be Lyle trying to send a message. I put my boots back on without explaining, get in her car and speed down to Jody’s Garage.

Lyle’s there. He sticks his neck out as I arrive, looks up and down the street, then tells me to park around back. He lets me in a side door, locking it behind us.

“Well?” My heart is thrashing around my chest like a bird trapped in the house. I look for somewhere to sit, but everything’s covered in car grease.