The Chrome Suite (10 page)

The leader’s mouth flew open in astonishment and he slammed on his brakes. The others, caught off guard, crashed into him, and instantly all three toppled to the ground. I began to run. I headed towards the footbridge and the street on the other side of it. “Shit-faces! Hoors! Flake-heads!” As I ran across the bridge I heard the sound of water rushing beneath it. The sound matched the rush of exhilaration in my chest. Their raw voices rose up in shouted oaths
and then an explosion of laughter. “Hey! Hey you kid! We’re not bitches. We’re sons of bitches!”

I looked back and saw them rising slowly and untangling the mess of bicycles. They had no intention of following me and so I slowed down to a fast walk, swinging my arms, trying to appear as though I had a definite destination. I was furious, filled with righteous indignation. Margaret had said we were supposed to stay together, and Mel had deserted me. He was going to pay for it. I wanted to plot my revenge but the boys’ taunts echoed inside my head and I saw myself in their circle, heard myself speak, and saw again their bicycles fall to the ground. I made thunder with my feet. They fell. I said “Pigs” and they fell. I became infused with energy and confidence, and as I felt my new weightlessness return, the colours, sound, and movement in the busy street began to emerge. I hadn’t needed Mel after all.

I watched cars idling at an intersection, waiting for the traffic light to give them permission to go. Music rose up from a white convertible. A Cadillac. A woman with platinum hair and red sunglasses that matched the convertible’s leather interior smiled and nodded at me. Jayne Mansfield, I thought. The light changed and the car sped away. I was standing in front of a cafe. Through its windows I saw people sitting in bright vinyl booths, and the sound of rock and roll music vibrated against the windowpanes. Across the street a bearded hobo painted on the side of a building pointed out the way to the next town. A man and a woman approached me, parted, and passed by on either side. I watched as they joined hands and crossed the intersection. I decided to follow them. I walked by a row of new cars, the sun reflecting in spotless chrome bumpers. Overhead, red and blue plastic banners swayed limply in the heat. The couple swung their arms as they walked. Ahead of them an amplified voice rose up and echoed between the buildings. A man’s voice, twangy,
nasal, and then I heard the thrum of a guitar. I looked back. I could still see the entrance to the park and down from it the tall hobo. It would be easy to find my way back. Walk in a straight line and don’t go down any side streets no matter how interesting they might look, I told myself. I would find my way back easily. In the meantime I thought it only fair that Mel chew his fingernails over where I had got to, so I continued to follow the couple who headed towards the sound of applause and then laughter crackling in a
PA
system. “You all get in a little closer now, you hear?” cajoled a man whom I would come to know as Stu Farmer. “You all gotta get in close if you want to hear this musical genius.” I followed the voice and hurried towards meeting a player in his country and western band: Hank. The man I would some day marry.

Mel whistles softly as he stands, hands on hips, looking up at a maple tree. “Holy Toledo,” he says, and then, “Wow!” because Elsa and Jill are ignoring him. The rye whisky he’s drunk buzzes in his limbs and he feels inches taller, that his movements are athletic and fluid. “You girls should come and see this.”

Elsa’s pale moon face seems to glow out at him from the deep shadows where she sits halfway up a gentle embankment. She leans against a tree and Jill sprawls on her back beside her. It has only taken several timid sips of Mel’s spiked cola and they’ve become stupid, bird-brainy, Mel thinks.
“Du bist ein kleines Schwein.”
Jill has been chanting the sentence Elsa taught her, over and over.

The maple tree has been blasted open by lightning. Its trunk looks as though giant hands have grabbed hold, wrung it dry until the trunk split open with the force. Reduced to a pile of toothpicks, Mel thinks. Its wood is streaked the colour red, veins that glisten with wet sap. Mel’s imagination fails him when he examines the
destroyed tree. He can’t imagine the power, can only be awed by it and admit silently that he lies when he tells himself that he accompanies Margaret downstairs during thunderstorms because he has promised Timothy to be the man of the house when he is away.

They had waited several minutes for Amy to follow them into the trees, and when she didn’t, they reasoned that she knew she wasn’t wanted and her nose was out of joint as usual, the spoiled brat that she was. They reasoned that Amy went back to the picnic. So they skirted the border of the park, walking through a narrow band of trees growing beside the Assiniboine River, picking their way among the sinewy tree roots, dragon tails writhing up through thin soil, until the sound of the Lutheran Sunday School picnic, the cheering on of participants in the sack races, three-legged races, grew fainter. They agreed to rest where the trees grew wilder and thicker and the earth smelled musty, of mushroom spores and wild fern. They smeared their bodies with insect repellent and Mel revealed the contents of his schoolbag. Then they sat beneath the umbrella of shade, felt insects light against their arms and legs or attempting to crawl inside their noses and ears and then bounce off at the scent of repellent. They watched a fat beaver waddle along the river bank on the opposite shore, sipped at the spiked cola, and felt themselves take on the veneer of sophistication.

But while the girls are now languid and content to loll in the shade, Mel becomes energetic. Behind him the land drops away sharply to the rain-swollen river that flows swiftly on through the city. Its water, coloured by the yellow clay of the region, grows muddy-looking where sewer conduits empty out storm water and the refuse of the city. Mel finds a path and climbs down its bank to scout for wildlife. Otters, he explains later to Elsa, hoping to impress upon her the other side of him, his outdoorsy spirit of adventure. But Mel is always just a step behind. He hears the slap of a tail or the soft
plop!
of an animal’s body meeting water, turns quickly, only to see the
ripple of its wake. He sees the river’s course, how it passes beneath the arch of a stone bridge at the park’s entrance and on into the centre of the city. At the horizon, a crane’s boom swings in an arc and hovers above the skeleton of a building. Mel imagines that he enjoys the shushing of traffic, its steady sound muffled slightly by the row of newly constructed apartment blocks. In his altered state he believes that he would like to sit out on a balcony and smoke a cigarette and watch traffic stream by below. The rye whisky causes him to forget how city people make him feel so out of place in his own skin. They seem noisier, almost hostile in their indifference to his presence. Margaret often embarrasses him when she goes shopping in the way she engages clerks in long conversations, not noticing how the clerks’ faces look pained with the expression of boredom or disinterest or, worse, how their faces turn smug and seem to say “hicks.” He climbs back up along the path until he gets to the shattered maple tree.

Elsa rests her elbows against her knees, cups her chin, and smiles down at him. “Don’t you want to see this?” Mel is desperate to gain her attention. She smiles again, shakes her head no.

“See what?” Jill sounds half asleep.

“This tree. It’s been hit by lightning.”

“If scientists could discover a way to harness a bolt of lightning,” Jill recites, “they’d be able to light up a billion light bulbs.”

“New York.”

“Whatever.”

“Or the City of Lights.” Elsa laughs.

“She’s been to Paris,” Jill says. “She’s seen the Eiffel Tower.” Her legs flash as she rocks herself up into a sitting position.

“Was that before or after Germany?” Mel hopes he sounds sarcastic.

Jill pulls at the ribbon around one of her braids. She unties it and lets it drop. Then her nimble fingers tug at her dark hair as she unravels the plait.

“I was born in Germany,” Elsa says.

“Dresden. She showed me on a map,” Jill adds.

They have become like Siamese twins, Mel thinks, with a surge of envy.

“Then I went to Poland. Was taken to Poland, I don’t remember. That’s where Esther found me and adopted me. And Adele.”

“In Warsaw,” Jill says.

“Zelazowa-Wola. Not far from Warsaw.”

Mel likes the strangeness of Elsa’s voice, her style. The way she wears her woollen tam in winter, for instance, not tilted to one side but pulled down over her ears and forehead, a frame for her round face. Her leather shoulder bag seems to be a part of her and not just something she wears when she wants to dress up like the other girls, who carry their bags stiffly on special occasions or with a hint of self-consciousness when they bring them to school. Then, the bag betrays that it’s that time of the month and they keep their little secrets in it for when they go to the bathroom and come back with lumps at the back of their skirts. Mel runs his hand over the tree’s shattered bark and then reaches inside its core where splinters bristle like a porcupine. He wants to pull a sliver loose and present it to Elsa, and say, Here, a toothpick carved by nature. He winces as a splinter pierces the back of his hand. He sucks at the wound and tastes salt.

“Then Esther took us to France,” Elsa continues, “England, and now here.”

Jill has unravelled her other braid and shakes the thick hair free. “Turn around. I think you’d look good like this,” Elsa says and begins to gather Jill’s hair up on top of her head. Mel glances at them and then turns away with a blink of shock. Elsa isn’t wearing underpants. Earlier she’d made a tent of her dress, made a careful point of tucking it in beneath her thighs. But as she reached for Jill’s hair her dress slid up and in his quick glance he believes that he saw
bare skin. Well, all right, Mel thinks as he drinks the last bit of spiked cola. He tells himself that maybe it’s a custom or something, not to wear underpants. Elsa fusses over Jill, declaring her envy, her desire to possess such thick shiny hair. She twists it into a knot, drawing the skin on Jill’s face taut.

“Hey, Mel, look,” Jill says. She pulls the skin beside one eye up until the eye almost closes in a slanted slit. “Mother Chinese,” she says in a sing-song voice. Then she pulls the skin beneath the other eye and the lid droops. “Father Japanese.” She finishes the joke by pulling one eye up and the other down at the same time. “Me.” She laughs. Elsa laughs top. A bit uncomfortable, Mel thinks, probably embarrassed because she doesn’t get the joke. It doesn’t occur to Mel that perhaps Elsa thinks it’s in bad taste. His eyes are drawn to her bent knees. The dress has hitched up higher, and he sees the rout of flesh between her legs. His scalp goes tight with the realization that he’s right. She isn’t wearing underpants. It looks like a mouth, he thinks. What Elsa has down there is a sideways plump mouth. Not the slender, elongated shape of Jill’s.

“I want your hair,” Elsa says to Jill. “I wish we could trade heads.” She turns to face Mel as she speaks. Her blue eyes shine out from the shadows. She smiles and then very slowly draws her dress back down into place.

She wanted me to see it, Mel thinks. But even as he thinks this it seems to be a preposterous idea or the result of an overactive imagination. It must be that she’s foreign, he thinks. He goes over to where the school bag rests beneath a clump of bushes. He searches through it while his mind races around a maze of possibilities and comes to a thudding stop at the word “fuck.” While the word is used frequently by others around him, he doesn’t use it. Even when he looks at the magazines or the hand-drawn cartoons that circulate at school, he thinks “screwing” or “banging.” “Fuck” is something dogs or trashy
poor people do. Elsa’s blue eyes meet his and there is a knowing there, an understanding between them. “I’m thirsty,” she says.

Mel holds up the mickey of rye and shakes it. It’s still about three-quarters full. “We need more mix.”

Elsa lets go of Jill’s hair and it ripples around her shoulders. “Why don’t you go, Jill? When you get back I’ll do your hair up and you’ll see what it looks like. I’ve got pins in my bag.”

The protest in Jill’s mouth dies as she looks first at Elsa and then at Mel. She grins. “Sure.” She slides down the incline and slaps dirt from the seat of her shorts as she walks towards Mel. Her eyes flash with amusement. She stands in front of him almost nose to nose while he flips through his wallet. “Just one cola?” Her hair, a frizzy loose cloud, obscures Mel’s view of Elsa. He hands her a dollar. Her fingers close around it as she leans forward and says the words softly: “Elsa says she’s not a virgin.”

Mel’s throat goes dry as he watches Jill climb up the slope again and wind her way among the trees. She’s like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he thinks, as he watches bits of Jill, the glimmer of a tanned calf, forearm, a swatch of pink cotton, flit away among the black tree trunks and into the deep shadows. He’s aware of Elsa in the foreground holding up a little mirror, the aura of gold around her head as branches sway in a light breeze and a beam of sunlight shines through her wispy curls. His body pulses with heat.