"Where's Lucy?" I asked Ma after I was all cleaned up, waiting for my friend Harold.
"The doctor said... She has shingles, Ian. He gave me cream for her forehead so she won't feel itchy. It could get worse or it could get better, that's what he said. But she's okay."
"Where is she now?" I wanted to ask Ma if shingles made you dig holes.
"Where do you think?"
I knew she must be digging her big pit in the sand by the river. She's only five, half as old as me, and she's been sort of crazy since school started three weeks ago. I can't figure out why she digs that pit all the time. I hadn't seen her face all day, so I headed for the screen door.
On the back porch I saw that Lucy had left the jar with her black widow spider on the step. The black tarpaper on our new house makes heat shimmers from the desert sun in the afternoons. The jar was hot. Inside, the widow was crinkled up and dried out like a raisin with whiskers. It was still shiny black and the hourglass was still bright red like the patch on Lucy's forehead, but it was dead.
When we got here to the Okanagan desert in the spring, Lucy was scared of the cactuses and rattlesnakes and scorpions. We have five whole acres between the river and the gravel pit across the road, where the Indian Reserve starts. I told her we were so lucky to live in the only desert in Canada, with our own river and even a gravel pit. We couldn't go barefoot until we ploughed up our land for a tomato field and the sprinklers made the scary things go away because they hate water. I explained how safe it was at the Down Below riverbottom, which is all sand and horsetails and wet air from the river, so rattlesnakes would never go there. She thinks a rattlesnake will bite her and kill her but I said it was my job to protect her.
Maybe I made her think about dying when I told her about Tyler getting buried at the cemetery when I was her age. Tyler was 17 when he got killed logging with Pa in the woods, but Lucy never met him because she was born the year he died. He was lying asleep in a box wearing a suit. I went around to hold the hands of my aunts and uncles but they wouldn't stop crying. Nobody told me what death was and I kept waiting and waiting for Tyler to come home. They lowered him into that hole and I couldn't figure out why he would want that. Maybe I was supposed to lie to Lucy about scary things. It was so confusing.
My alive big brother Lawrence pulled up in his '53 sky-blue Plymouth with the flying seagull on the hood. His car was five years old, just like Lucy, but it looked brand new. Lawrence didn't let me ride with him to school in his seagull car because we didn't want people to think I'm someone special because my brother's a teacher.
He'd given me a ride home an hour before, though, after I did what I did in the classroom. Then he'd gone back to talk to my teacher. "I thought you were going back to the school," I said. His face was white.
"Ian, just go play or something, okay? I need to talk to Ma." He started up the stairs and then turned around and went back to his car and reached in for something. He handed me my Batman comic and I stuffed it in my pocket.
"How did you get that?"
"It looks... I think Harold was on his way to give it back to you. Go play, okay?"
"Okay," I said. But I got that funny feeling in my stomach and my throat at the same time that feels like I just know something for no reason. It's pretty crazy to have something inside figure things out before you do. I followed Lawrence inside because something true was going to happen. He looked at me following him and when he saw me look right back, he didn't try to stop me.
###
That Friday morning had started off bad. I was brushing my teeth over the pail in the kitchen when I made Ma cry. That made Lawrence come into the kitchen. He was putting golden cufflinks into his teacher shirt. I could smell his cologne. He said, "What's wrong, Ma?"
Ma went into our new bathroom with no water and closed the door. Lawrence looked at me. I looked at my Batman comic beside the sink so I wouldn't have to see his eyes. Lawrence was away for a whole year at Normal School to turn himself into a teacher which I guess is sort of normal, but I don't think he likes being back home. He's hard to figure out. He's sort of like when I ride my bike and get a flat tire because I didn't see broken glass in time. I can't tell where Lawrence's broken pieces are.
"What's the matter with you?" he said to me.
"I don't know." I wanted to tell him I wondered that, too, but I just looked away.
"What did you say to Ma?"
"I just asked her if Harold could come with us on Tyler's birthday to see his grave," I said. Tyler had been my oldest brother. He died five years ago when a dead snag tree fell on top of him the first day he went logging with Pa up in the mountains.
"Harold? Why would Harold want to do that?"
"His dad is there. And the plums."
Lawrence is 22 but he sounds older when he's mad at me. He sort of snorted and looked at the bathroom door. Harold is my new best friend at Mondegreen school and he's in Lawrence's Grade 6 class. Harold's mom is Mrs. Palmer, my Grade 4 teacher. She doesn't like me, but Harold does. I didn't mean to make Ma sad. I just miss Tyler every time I start a new school. It's hard to make friends and Tyler was my best friend when I was little. Now I have Harold for a friend and I thought going to the cemetery on Sunday would be fun since his birthday was September 20, just like Tyler's.
I like Tyler's cemetery. It has plum trees on the edge and if the farmer isn't there, you get to steal some. I knew Harold would like that even though his dad was a policeman. The only thing Harold likes more than eating is stealing.
"Ian, did Sharon say anything to you about moving Harold out of my class?"
"Who's Sharon?"
"Mrs. Palmer. Her first name is Sharon. Did she talk to you?"
This was a little bit shocking. We're not supposed to know a teacher's first name. I was going to tell Lawrence that Mrs. Palmer doesn't like to talk to me at all, when I remembered, and felt stupid. I reached into my shorts pocket and pulled out the envelope and handed it to him.
"Gee, Lawrence. She gave me this yesterday to give to you. I forgot." The envelope was crumpled and ripped up a bit and Lawrence held it by one corner as if it was a dead mouse and looked at me like I had the brains of a jar of beets. His fingernails were all clean and smooth for school. He liked things to be neat, not all falling apart. "I'm sorry," I said. "I was swimming in the river yesterday and it was in my pocket."
He opened it up and pulled a crinkled note out and read it and his whole face turned bright red.
"Why does Mrs. Palmer want Harold out of your class?"
"Sometimes nothing goes right," he said. "Go tell Ma you're sorry."
Now I had another thing I didn't understand. I thought Mrs. Palmer wanted me out of her class but why would she want Harold out of Lawrence's class? Lawrence can even play the piano but not when Pa's home from logging, because then we listen to "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" and "Cool Clear Water" by Roy Rogers on our record player, and boxing on the radio on Friday nights. Pa says piano music is for people who can't sing.
I rolled up my comic and put it in my pocket. Ma came out of the bathroom with a sad little smile. "Sorry, Ma," I told her.
Mrs. Palmer would like Ma. I told her that. "Mrs. Palmer always tells us to get ourselves under control," I said. "You got your crying under control real good."
I hoped that would make her feel better but I felt stupid again. I knew I wasn't supposed to talk about Tyler near his birthday because Ma missed him too much.
My compliment to Ma was wrong, too. She pinched up her lips and crinkled her eyes in the corner, so I knew she wanted to cry some more, but she kept herself under control. She said to me, "You look just like him, you know."
I didn't know what to say. I had brown skin from the sun and a ski-jump nose and black eyebrows and black hair like Tyler and Pa. Lawrence and Lucy had blond hair and pink skin like Ma and they all got sunburns here in the desert.
Ma sniffed up her tears and said, "Go set the sprinklers, okay?"
"Okay, Ma." I didn't tell her I already did the sprinklers and fed the chickens when the sun got up, like always. She forgets stuff when she's upset.
I went outside feeling awful. Ma'd been all smiling before I made her cry. She was wearing her dress with little roses on it, because Pa likes roses, and he comes home from logging in the mountains on Fridays. When he comes home Ma sends Lucy and me to play at the Down Below sandbar by the river so they can have a teeny tiny nap. That's what Ma calls it, a teeny tiny nap, but Lucy and I think they have sex. We know what sex is. Once we stayed behind and listened and peeked through their window. For sex you take all your clothes off and then you snort, just like our two pigs do if you take their food away. I don't know why Ma lies about it.
Lucy was on the back porch trying to catch fruit flies for a spider hiding in the tarpaper. Our whole house is covered in black tarpaper. Sonavabitch Burgh gave us boards from his mill to build our house for free since he drank up Pa's money from logging for him. I told Pa I'd like to see sonavabitch Burgh drink money and he said all I have to do is go work for him, which is a joke by Pa. We didn't get enough free boards for siding, though. Pa said he's not going to log trees for any more goddamned fly-by-night mills, but he's said that a lot of times in the places we've lived in the mountains. He's always gone back to log trees. He just doesn't get paid. Maybe it will be different now that we have our own farm in the desert.
Lucy scratched the red patch on her forehead and said, "Will you take me to the outhouse?"
"Nah. I only have to go with you at nighttime, Lucy."
I had to go myself but figured I'd go at school. Lucy and I don't like the outhouse. She hears the coyotes howling at night and thinks one lives under the hole in the outhouse waiting to bite her. When she said that it made me kind of scrinch up when I went at night. I couldn't tell if I was scrinching up because of the howling or because it was so stinky in there.
I showed Lucy the page in my Batman comic with the redheaded girl who looks just like Linda Healy in my class who smells like a strawberry milkshake. "I'm gonna show Linda that she's in Batman and then give it to Harold for his birthday," I told Lucy.
"I like Harold," Lucy said. "He's fat."
"He has Batman muscles underneath though. He's really strong."
"Can we catch a black widow?"
"I have to go to school pretty soon, Luce." She liked spiders a lot. I watched her itch her forehead. "Don't do that. Your brain will fall out."
"You promised."
I wished I could ignore what people say like Lucy could.
So I got a jar with a lid and took her through the tomato field down to the irrigation pump house at the riverbottom. "There's one," Lucy said, scrinching her eyes at cobwebs in the shadows. She wanted to put the jar over the black widow on her own. I let her do that but I put the lid on myself.
"She's so pretty," Lucy said. "Her hourglass is all shiny red."
"What are you going to do with her?"
"Keep her in my room. I want to see her kill flies."
"Why?"
"I just want to."
Lucy sure liked to see things get killed. There was a hammer in the pumphouse and I pulled out a crooked nail and made holes in the lid. "Don't take the lid off by yourself. They can jump." I was lying. Billy and Carl, the kids on the farm next door, told me rattlesnakes can jump three feet and I think that's a lie, too.
"No, they can't."
"They can if they see a pretty little girl. They think pretty little girls are delicious." I could see Lucy knew I was lying but she liked being called pretty. Lucy and I didn't see any other kids when we lived up in the mountains before. I would've got lonely if it hadn't been for her. She's my very best sister and I like being her big brother. If I had more than one sister I think she'd still be my very best.
"I'm going to call her Barbara."
"Barbara what?"
"Just Barbara."
There was some poison ivy growing behind the pump house and I peed on it. I'd been peeing on it all summer because whenever Billy and Carl came over, that's what we did. Billy said peeing would kill the poison ivy but the leaves had just got bigger and darker green. I didn't like Billy and Carl much. They smelled a bit sour, like bad meat. And they had a dog on a chain and threw rocks at it for fun.
Lucy took Barbara and started digging her big pit in the sand. It was so deep I couldn't see her head. The Down Below riverbottom has nothing bad except poison ivy and the green river gurgles all the time like a purr. Sometimes Lucy and I dug pits in the sand and covered them with horsetails so Billy and Carl would fall in. Lucy really liked that. Me, too. I left her digging her pit and ran up the hill to catch the bus.
Mondegreen is ten miles away and the bus was late so I had to wait down the road with Billy and Carl Metzner. Billy wanted to see my sandwiches, so I showed him. Peanut butter and honey, and cheese and tomato. He had mustard sandwiches and chocolate syrup sandwiches. Ma doesn't know how to make me mustard or chocolate syrup sandwiches, so Billy and I traded. Carl wanted to trade, too, but he's almost as small as me and Billy likes to hurt Carl so he just pounded him in the shoulder like he usually does. I felt sorry for Carl but I wouldn't let him look at my Batman comic when he asked because it's almost new and his fingers are always sticky.
Then Billy amazed me by taking out his dick and peeing right there on the road. He tried to pee his name in the brown dust of the dirt road, but he only got to “Bil” before he ran out. He watched me while he did it so it wasn't very good writing. I just looked as if I wasn't really interested, the way Ma says to look at the busdriver, Mr. Fredericks, so he doesn't get embarrassed. Mr. Fredericks only has one arm to drive the bus with.
Then the bus came. I didn't look at Mr. Frederick's eyes in case he thought I was the one who peed right where his tires went.
On the bus I sat at the very front to watch Mr. Fredericks use his one arm to turn that neat handle that opens the door. Two stops later Harold got on and sat beside me as usual. I had to scoot over fast because Harold is pretty fat everywhere on his body, even his face. All his fat is sprinkled with freckles just like Mrs. Palmer and he has big round cheeks and a tiny little mouth. He's the biggest Grade Sixer in Lawrence's class just like I'm the smallest in his mom's class. I wish they'd trade us like mustard sandwiches but I think that's against the law.
Harold misses a lot of school because he's so clumsy that he has accidents and hurts himself. He's not clumsy when he's around me but today he had bruises on his big cheeks and his pinkie finger was covered in white bandages.
I showed him the page in Batman with the redheaded girl who looked just like Linda Healy. I didn't tell him I was going to give him Batman for his birthday after I showed the page to Linda. I asked him, "What did you do to your little finger?"
"Gotitcaughtinthebicyclegears."
That's how he said it, like it was all one word. That wasn't how Harold talked at all. He talked real slow, which was one of the things I liked about him, because he slowed me down.
Then something very weird happened. I like to figure things out for myself and it was so easy up in the forest where Pa logged the trees and there were almost no people around. Down here in Mondregreen things look one way but underneath they're different, like when Mrs. Palmer said we could ask her anything and I asked where the blue in the sky went at nighttime and she said that was a stupid question so she really meant we could ask her anything but not about the sky.
I got this funny feeling in my stomach and in my throat at the same time when she said that. I knew it wasn't because of the sky. It was because she just doesn't like me. I could feel that.
Now I had that feeling with Harold. It scared me when I heard the feeling figure itself out on its own. That's when I got worried for him. I said, "Harold, is somebody hurting you?"
"SHUT UP!" he yelled, right on the bus. He grabbed my comic and got up and sat right behind me and flicked my ear, really hard. "How do you like it, shrimp?"
My ear hurt really bad. He'd never called me shrimp before, just like I never called him Pig Palmer. He flicked me again. I turned around in my seat and it was like looking at a freckle mountain. "Don't, Harold. That hurts."
He flicked me again, so hard it made my eyes wet. " Whatcha gonna do about it, crybaby, tell my mom? Want me to break your fingers? You're a rat, just like your loony brother."
"Give Batman back."
"Make me," he said, and stuffed it in his own pocket with one hand and snapped me on the nose with the other.
I didn't want to be Pig's best friend anymore.
I did want him to stop hurting me. I didn't know what he meant by "rat" but I got up and stood beside Mr. Fredericks, even though I was a standee and he had a sign on the ceiling that said "No Standees." I tried not to look at his shoulder that had no arm. "Mr. Fredericks, Harold is flicking me on the ear and it hurts. Can you make him stop?"
"I just drive the bus, kid."
"You're the bus driver. You're in charge."
"I'm in charge of the bus. I drive, you sit. Go sit. Ignore him."
That was terrible advice and no help at all.
I moved to the back of the bus and sat across from stinky Billy and Carl, hoping Pig wouldn't follow. He didn't. He was sure mad at me, though. I didn't see how he could have hurt his finger in his bicyle gears. Mrs. Palmer lives right on the road with a really steep driveway and Pig likes to barrel down the driveway onto the road and once he almost got hit by a car. I figured his bicycle might hurt him doing that, but why would he put his finger in the gears?
We got to Mondegreen Lake where Linda Healy's big white house with a swimming pool is. Her daddy makes cherrypicker machines for the cherry farmers and the Healys were the richest people in town. Linda got on the bus with her best friend, Melissa, whose daddy was the town doctor. Linda and Melissa were both really pretty. Linda was the only girl in Grade 4 to wear earrings. She said they were diamonds and maybe they were.
Linda and Melissa sat down in the seat right in front of me and started whispering. About me. They'd never talked about me before.
"He lives in the gravel pit," Melissa whispered.
"The gravel pit?"
"You know, on the reserve. By the Metzners."
"The Metzners. Well, no wonder then. He doesn't look like a Metzner boy. His face is washed."
"No, he's not a Metzner. Beside them. In the gravel pit."
Linda turned around in her seat and spoke to me. She had big blue eyes and lots of little tiny teeth. "Do you live in the gravel pit?" she asked.
"No, I don't live in it. Across from it. It's on the other side of the road." I thought she might be kind of jealous. Nobody else except me and Lucy and Billy and Carl had a whole gravel pit to play in.
"Beside the Metzners, though? In that little black house?"
"They're our neighbours. Billy and Carl."
"Those two?" Linda pointed to Billy and Carl, who had moved a few seats up. Carl was making fart noises with his armpit.
"I think I can smell them from here," Linda said. She looked cute when she wrinkled her little turned-up nose. Melissa giggled and covered her mouth.
"I can't," I said. "Only when I'm up close." Melissa giggled again.
"You look like an Indian," Linda said.
I smiled. It was the first nice thing she'd said to me.
"Are you?" she said.
"I don't think so."
"Don't you know? You're so brown."
I smiled again. She was right. I was very brown. I didn't want to tell her that my skin started to turn brown every springtime. It would sound like bragging. She had very white skin. I hadn't known she liked brown skin but I didn't want to embarrass her about it. "I'm not so brown," I said.
"Yes, you are. You must be an Indian."
She sounded so certain. The Indian kids were as brown as I was but I didn't know any of them yet.
"Maybe I am. I don't know."
"Well, I think you are."
"Thanks," I said. Linda and Melissa both laughed and I stopped feeling so good.
I didn't say anything the rest of the way to school. By the time we got there I had figured some of it out. It wasn't good to be a Metzner. It wasn't good to live beside the Metzners or the gravel pit. It wasn't good to be an Indian or live in a house with tarpaper. None of it made sense. I decided Linda probably didn't even like Batman.
At the school I waited for Pig to get off first with my comic and then I went to the water fountain and leaned my head in so my flicked ear got all cooled off and had a drink. The water is so good. We didn't have a water fountain at the mountain school, just a pot with cold water and a ladle. I thought about asking Lawrence to show me how to fight, in case Pig hurt me some more. But I didn't think Lawrence knew how to fight. He liked music too much. He played piano with Mr. Daniels, the music teacher, who looks like a movie star and has even more teacher suits and cufflinks than Lawrence.
As soon as Mrs. Palmer's class started I had to go to the bathroom. But I held it and settled down quietly like she said and started writing. It's a lot of work to be in her class. Every morning when you walk in she has every single blackboard filled with her writing. She had one blackboard that slides right up to the ceiling and when she lifts it up after recess, there's another one underneath that's filled with writing, too. We always hope that one day she'll lift it up and there will be nothing on it, but there always is.
We have to copy it all down in our notebooks all morning and after recess she lifts the sliding board up and we have to copy that down, too. While we're doing that Mrs. Palmer gets the fast writers to clean off the other blackboards so she can fill them up with words for us to copy down until lunch.
We never ever catch up to her.
Linda Healy sat right in front of me and wrote faster than anybody but she doesn't get the chance to catch up because she was one of the kids Mrs. Palmer picks to clean the boards, which have to be very very clean before Linda can sit down. Linda had freckles all over the place just like Mrs. Palmer and I used to think that's why she got chosen, but I finally figured out that's not it at all.
Mrs. Palmer doesn't want any of us to catch up because then she'd have to talk to us.
The writing all the stuff down isn't that bad except I already knew the things about the Canadian explorers and the vocabulary words and life in a pond and magnetism from last year, up in the mountains. I was in grade three four five in that little school. I told Mrs. Palmer that I learned about the explorers in grade three last year but she said she couldn't help it if my last school taught me the wrong stuff. So I learn it all over again by writing it down this time and by lunchtime my hand hurts real bad.
Mrs. Palmer had special bathroom rules. In my other schools you just put up your hand when you had to go and then you went. Mrs. Palmer only gives you three chances for the whole day. You had to write your name each time on the corner of the blackboard by the door. When your name is up three times, that's it.
I try to save it up for recess and noon hour so I can use my chances in the afternoon, but as soon as class started I just had to go. That was one. Then I didn't make it to recess and that was two.
At recess I did my marble business. I'm no good at shooting marbles so I run notch games the way we did in the mountains. The way it works is you make notches in a board. The notches are different sizes and you hold the board on the ground and kids try to shoot their marbles through the notches. If they do it, you give them an extra marble. If they miss, you get to keep their marble.
They didn't know about this game in the Mondegreen desert so I'd made two boards at home and brought them to school. Pig was still mad so I got Billy and Carl to run the other board. At the end of recess I had 32 new marbles including five cat's eyes. I didn't realize I had to pee again until I sat down at my desk and started writing down stuff about gases and liquids and solids. So I wrote my name on the bathroom list and that was three.
At lunch Mrs. Palmer came right out onto the playground and looked at the marble boards and then at me and said, "Are you gambling? Gambling is a sin."
Pa doesn't believe in biblethumpers and Christers, so we don't have sin at home. I said, "We're playing marble games. Are marbles a sin?" I said it nice because I really wanted to know.
"For all intensive purposes," she said. I didn't know what she meant but I knew she didn't like me asking about sin. She just took my marble boards and walked away.
After lunch we had art. Mrs. Palmer has these pictures from a colouring book that she makes copies of on the mimeograph machine. The copies we get have light purple ink and if you hold them up close to your nose, they even smell light purple. You get to choose whatever crayons you want to colour with and Mrs. Palmer tells you afterward if you got the colours wrong. I like the yellow-green the best because it's strong and bright, like the sun and yellow grapes at the same time. And the magenta. In the mountain school we only had dark purple, which is very nice and grapey and sweet, but here we have magenta, which is like a flying purple that crashed into red. I like magenta a lot. Even the word sounds big and brave.
Mrs. Palmer says almost nothing should be coloured magenta, especially trees. I told her my trees are supposed to look like when the sun is just going down and all the colours of the desert get twisted into different colours of purple and magenta to get ready for night, but she says trees are always green. I tried putting an edge of green all around the outside of the magenta but she says they have to be green all the way through.
The important thing during art is to stay inside the lines. Mrs. Palmer marks your art when you're finished and bring it up to her. You only get an “A” if everywhere is inside the lines and you get the colours right. I make lots of mistakes about the lines. I'm watching the colour growing on the paper and it just keeps getting bigger and brighter until I'm already over the line, so I get a “C”. It's easy to get “A's” in all the other stuff but I only get “C's” in art. And phys-ed.
Today we did a swan on a pond with bullrushes. I did the swan magenta because it looked good against the blue water and it seemed silly to colour the swan white with the white crayon on white paper. Mrs. Palmer said maybe I needed to get my eyes tested and gave me a “D” so I was wrong again. I've never got a “D” in anything before, except the first day here, when Mrs. Palmer gave me one for doing MacLean's Penmanship wrong, and Ma made me practice writing at home until I got better. Pa said Mrs. Palmer's all backed up, but I don't know what that means. She never backs up, she just sits at her desk with her red marking pen.
When I sat down after my “D” I knew I was in trouble. I had to pee and the other one also. I checked the board to make sure but there was my name, all three times. I finished my art too fast so I had to sit quietly. I watched Linda Healy do her swan for awhile and wished I could have shown her the girl in the Batman comic who had thick red hair and a real pretty smile, just like Linda. Sometimes I lean forward when she can't see me just to smell the smell of strawberries in her hair. Her swan was very tidy at the edges and she got all the colours right. I tried sitting on just one half of my bum because of the pressure but that made me lean into the aisle and Mrs. Palmer told me to sit up straight.
I made it all the way through art until spelling, which usually I like. I was getting bigger and bigger inside.
Then it happened. I just couldn't stop it. I could feel the pee going all down my leg, hot and wet. I couldn't stop the other, either. I knew it was terrible to be filling my pants in Grade 4 but it felt so good right then. I decided to try to make a run for it, but when I stood up I felt a lump of it falling down my pants and landing right beside my foot, so I sat back down again and pretended I was invisible. Linda could smell it though and turned around to look at me and then under the desk. She put one hand over her mouth and raised her other hand.
Mrs. Palmer liked Linda and came down the aisle. Linda pointed under my desk. I looked straight ahead at the spelling on the board. Mrs. Palmer bent over to look and then stood straight up. She marched back to her desk and pulled a whole bunch of tissues from her box.
Mrs. Palmer marched straight back to me, leaned right over with the tissue and scooped up the mess I'd made, and took my hand. My face was very hot from everyone's eyes landing on it. “I'm taking you to see Mr. Guidi,” she said, and we left the room. She held her hand with the tissues straight out in front of her.
I didn't cry in the hallway. It was like I was somewhere where I couldn't feel anything. Mrs. Palmer went into the girls' washroom and I heard a flush. She took my hand again but sort of jerked it as if I wouldn't go with her and then she squeezed my fingers real hard until it hurt so bad I yelled out loud. I pulled my hand away and said, "Mrs. Palmer, are you hurting Harold?"
She grabbed my hand again and that's when I saw Harold standing right there in the hallway holding my Batman comic out for me. "Let him go, Mom."
She did, too.
Harold didn't move. Just stood there like he had a cape on. Mrs. Palmer looked at him like she'd looked at me when I was sinning with the marbles. She whispered at him really quiet, like a snake. "Get back to class you little shit." Then she pulled me down the stairs.
Mr. Guidi was a very tall round man with a round bald head who always smiled, but I was terrified of him. He had a wide leather strap hanging on the wall of his office and you only got sent to see Mr. Guidi if you were going to get strapped. He closed the door to his office when he strapped somebody, but you could hear the thwap, thwap, thwap in the hallway, always three of them. The crying usually started after the first one, even with the Grade Sixers. Mr. Guidi walked down the halls sort of like a ballerina, all graceful, with his pinkie finger sticking out sideways as he swung his arm back and forth. He reminded me of those hippotomases in tutus in Fantasia and I liked to watch him walking around.
His thwaps were so strong, I thought he would break me in half when he found out what I'd done. I was sure no one in the school had ever before done number one and number two right in the classroom during spelling. Mr. Guidi had huge hands. He would probably have to beat me with his fists.
I had to sit on top of a towel on the wooden bench where you wait until Mr. Guidi is ready to strap you. I heard Lawrence get called on the PA and Mrs. Palmer telling Mr. Guidi about my gambling sin and when Lawrence walked in and Mr. Guidi came out of his office at the same time, I started crying for the first time.
I was very smelly and I thought he was going to hit me right in front of Lawrence but Mr. Guidi crouched down real low like he does for the little kids in Grade 1 who don't know about the strap yet. His cologne was mixing with Lawrence's cologne when he said, "Ian, what happened in your class?"
He gave me a big smile which surprised me so much I got scared again. I said, “I used up all my three chances. I should have gone at lunchtime but I just forgot. Then I got my swan wrong with magenta and it hurt so bad by spelling and I couldn't raise my hand.”
“What three chances?” Lawrence said.
“You get three chances to go to the bathroom. I try to save enough for the afternoon but today I used them all up. I didn't know what to do. I had to go.”
“Did you ask Mrs. Palmer?” Mr. Guidi said.
“No. It's not allowed. You have to get yourself under control.”
“What do you mean?”
“That's what Mrs. Palmer told Billy when he had to go a fourth time. ‘You just have to learn how to get yourself under control, young man.' And he did. But I couldn't.”
Mr. Guidi stood up very tall and I thought it was time for the strapping but it wasn't. Mrs. Palmer looked at Lawrence and said, "I'm not done here. You and your brother are not normal."
"In my office," Mr. Guidi said.
"Fine with me," Lawrence said.
It got loud in there about my sins and Harold's hurt finger and Lawrence not minding his own business, but I stopped listening. It felt like that time when I hit a big hole with my bike and it went right upside down and when I was in the air it was like everything just stopped for a little while before the ground hit me and everything hurt. I wanted to die before I hit the ground.
They all came out and Lawrence took the towel and said, "Let's go home. No more school for you today." Mr. Guidi waved at me as if I was going out to recess and Mrs. Palmer told Lawrence she was coming to see him. He said, "That's fine, Sharon."
Her face got red and she said, "You know what you are" and then something fell onto the floor between her shoes and broke, and yellow stuff splashed onto Mr. Guidi's floor. Lawrence stepped in front of me so I couldn't see what had happened to her.
At the parking lot I got into Lawrence's blue car and sat on the towel. I could see Harold wave at me from behind a tree. He held up my comic and signalled that he was going to meet me at our farm. He looked funny pretending he was riding his bike. I gave him a little wave so Lawrence wouldn't see.
On the way home I had this big feeling that I'd been having ever since coming to the desert and starting at the new school in Mondegreen. I felt like giving up pretending I was all right. "Lawrence, is there something wrong with me?" I said. "I went to the bathroom right in the middle of spelling."
“Well, don't worry about it, Ian. Everybody's different. Some people go to the bathroom five or six times a day. Others only go every couple of days.”
“Every couple of days? How do they do that?”
“People are built different. You have a small bladder, probably. How often do you pee every day?”
This was an alarming conversation. Lawrence talked to me about spelling and stories and music, not pee. I thought about it. “I don't know. About ten times, some days.”
“What about shitting? How often do you take a shit?”
The whole universe was spinning totally out of control. I'd never heard Lawrence say the word “shit” before. Pa, sure, like when he was building stuff and he hammered his thumb and he'd yell, “JesusMotherFuckingChristHoppingBullshittingCocksuckingChrist” which always made me stop breathing. But not Lawrence. He was getting to be as weird as Billy peeing right on the road. I looked straight ahead at the flying silver seagull on the hood of his sky blue car. “Two or three times. A day. Maybe four.”
“See what I mean?” Lawrence said. “That's a lot. You must have the digestive system of a gerbil. Everybody's different. Some people only take a shit every few days. Once a week, even.” He rolled down the window then. It was hot. And I stank. “You know what?”
“What?”
“It's a secret.”
“What?”
“Sharon poops only once a year, that's it. On her birthday.”
We both laughed. I was embarrassed to think of poor Mrs. Palmer only pooping on her birthday, but it was still funny. “That's not true.”
Lawrence turned to me again. “No. She just acts like it sometimes. But you know what else?”
“What?”
“She pees in a bag.”
This was too much. “She does not, Lawrence.” I tried to imagine Mrs. Palmer peeing into a lunch bag, but nothing came.
“What do you think happened in the office back there? That was her pee bag. Mr. Daniels told me that she had an accident in the staff room last year and had to tell people about it. Her plumbing's all screwed up. She has a little bag tied to her leg."
“What's she do when it's full?”
“She empties it, squirt. What do you think?”
“Don't call me squirt.”
He turned off the dirt road down our long driveway. “You know what else else?”
“What else else?”
“You stink like shit, little brother.”
He brushed my cheek with his long fingers and we both laughed again. It was pretty funny to be laughing when I had been feeling so miserable.
"Lawrence, why do you think Mrs. Palmer named Harold after God?"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, when we do the Lord's Prayer every morning. 'Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.'"
Lawrence looked at me with squinty eyes as if he thought I was making a joke. "You got me," he said. "I guess she loves him that much underneath."
When I got out I said, "Is Harold going to be all right?"
"That's what I'm going to find out right now," he said. "But from now on you can bet that Sharon will let you go to the bathroom whenever you need to. Goosey Guidi is telling her just that right now. Poor old Sharon is probably peeing her pants.”
“Her bag, you mean.” Goosey sounded like a very strange first name.
I took the towel with me when I got out. Lawrence smiled and tapped his horn and took off.
Ma was real nice about it. Mr. Guidi had phoned her already on our new black telephone. She had made hot water on the woodstove for a bath and after I cleaned off and got new shorts on, I asked her, “What's Pa going to say?”
“What do you think he'll say?” Ma asked. We both knew what he'd say.
“He'll say, ‘I'm gonna cut her gizzard out from stem to stern!'”
Ma chuckled. “He might say that.”
“He won't might. He will. He's always gonna cut somebody's gizzard out from stem to stern.”
“That's just the way he talks.”
“I don't think Mrs. Palmer has a gizzard.”
“No.”
“Just a bag.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It doesn't matter.” I was feeling a lot better. I told Ma my secret, which was that sometimes I wished for Mrs. Palmer to rot in Hell but that I was finished with wanting that.
She said, “That's a good thing. People get there on their own steam. They don't need anybody pushing.” Ma didn't like to say That Word. We had a lot of words that we weren't supposed to say, except Pa could because he brought home the bacon. I knew that Pa would come home and side with me, no matter what. Pa didn't teach me how to catch a ball but he always backed me up.
"Where's Lucy?" I asked Ma.
##
That's when I found out about Lucy's shingles and then Lawrence came back home before I could see her. I followed him into the kitchen where he sat down at the table with his white face and Ma said, "My goodness, Lawrence!" She gave him a glass of water from the water pail and sat beside him.
"I've never seen..." Lawrence said. He inhaled like it was hard to breathe. "The kid I was worried about?"
"Harold," Ma said. "Dear heavens. What?"
"The fire truck blocked the road. The Palmer house... Harold was... I think he'd gone home to get his bike to ride here to see you, Ian. That steep driveway... Sharon was on her way here, too. Ma, she ran into him on his bike. Oh, god, the kid was lying right there in the road... Ma, there was blood..."
Ma said, "Lawrence!"
"Lawrence, is Harold okay?" I said.
"No... no... he died... I saw---"
"Ah, jesusfuckingchrist!" I ran out of the house then and all the way down the tomato field with grunting sounds in my throat, I was so mad. My eyes were wet so I couldn't see with them but I kept running right down the hillside until I got to the big pile of sand with Lucy behind it in her pit.
Right on top of the sand was a rattlesnake right there in the Down Below where it was always safe and never any rattlesnakes. I knew it couldn't jump three feet.
"Lucy, don't move, okay?" She stopped digging when she heard the mad in my voice and I reached for Pa's big shovel and I chopped that fucking snake's head off and then I chopped him and chopped him and chopped him until he was just stupid dead pieces.
Then I started breathing again and climbed into the pit with Lucy. She must have thought I was playing a game or something because she looked at me and smiled, pointing.
She had hit water. She asked me where it came from. I wiped my eyes and told her that our green river only looked like it was going where it was going. Really, it was going everywhere, even underground, at the same time. I told her that if you dig deep enough anywhere, that's what you hit, the river. It's always there, underneath everything. I told her she was probably the first five-year-old to know that, so I was pretty proud of her.
But she didn't care about that. She just said, "I have to stop digging?"
I nodded and asked her why she had dug the hole.
"I was looking for Tyler."
I just took a deep breath and said, "Me, too" and we climbed out of the hole together.
I looked at her little red forehead and wondered if she was going to die, too. We walked to the edge of the green river and I gave her the stupid Batman comic to throw into the current. She did, and pointed downstream. "What's that?"
It was a dead dog with its paws pointing to the sky, floating down the river. I thought of telling Lucy it was just broken branches.
"That's a dead dog," I said.
—Copyright © Barry Friesen, July, 2014