A Complicated Kindness (16 page)

I put on Tash’s baby-blue kangaroo jacket and tied the hood around my razored head. I walked out the front door, past the bullet hole and down the driveway, across the number twelve, through my neighbour’s yard, into their clothesline, down First Street, up Friesen, and onto Main. I sat down on the sparkly granite of the cenotaph next to the post office and read the names of people who had died four million years ago and then I heard my name being called.

Nomi, said Tash. I like what you’ve done to your hair. But who said you could wear my jacket?

This piece of shit? I asked. You left it behind. It’s mine now.

It looked better on me, she said. You gotta boyfriend now, eh?

Yeah. Are you still with Ian?

No, I left him in Flagstaff. Prick.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Is he sweet? she asked.

Who? I said.

Your boyfriend.

Sort of, I guess. Yeah.

That’s why you’re all alone out here? she asked.

You’re here, though, I told her. Right?

God. Not only was I incapable of having an articulate conversation, I couldn’t even imagine one.

When I got home I sat on the floor of the garage and tied the hood as tightly as I could around my face, leaving an opening only large enough to accommodate a Sweet Cap. It was a good night. Maybe someday I could be a photographer, I thought. And then, unpredictably, a corner of the garage roof collapsed.

twenty-one

S
chool the next day. I fell asleep in math. And geography. The principal invited me into his office.

I decided not to say a word. I picked a spot on the wall to stare at the way they tell you to when you’re in labour. Clearly these are not the best years of your life, he said to me.

I felt almost drunk with gratitude when he said that. I felt as though he had entered my mind and, like a weapons inspector, had thoroughly assessed the situation with a cool, slick professionalism and was, even as we spoke, formulating some kind of counteraction. It was a type of understanding. I thought he was going to rescue me. But that’s where it ended.

At lunch Travis came to pick me up. Then left again all pissed off when the first thing I said to him was: Tell me you’re not wearing a poncho. He spun out of the gravel and a tiny stone hit my binder. I wondered if I might have been killed if it hadn’t been for the binder. Other kids were sitting in the grass eating their lunches and I had to walk past them to get back into the school. Time to find another boyfriend, said this primate, Gordo. I’ll take yours, I said. Fuck you, bitch, he screamed. You’ll get over it, I said. I fell asleep in American History. But it was the kind of non-committal sleep that allowed my memory to function, only in the role of a dream. I
could hear people talking about Crazy Horse and Wounded Knee but all I could see and smell and touch was Trudie.

I remember walking through the town at night, barefoot and in my pyjamas, holding my mother’s hand. Tash had left and I had woken up screaming, yet again, and Trudie said she couldn’t take it any more. And my dad was standing in the doorway of my room begging her not to do it. May I please have the keys to the car, she asked him. May I? Please? And he said no, Trudie, don’t go there. Please don’t go there. And then the next thing I remember is walking down the quiet street in my pyjamas. And walking up the front path of my uncle’s house and my mom banging away on the door until my aunt finally came and opened it and asked my mom if she was insane, like her daughter, meaning Tash, not me, and my mom said don’t you ever speak that way about my daughter again. And then The Mouth was there and my mom asked me to sit in the grass but it was wet and I said no. Trudie, said The Mouth, what’s going on here? What are you doing? And then she told him to apologize to me. She said tell Nomi you’re sorry. She kept pointing at me and I just stared at the white pillars in front of The Mouth’s house until my vision blurred. Ask her to forgive you, Trudie said. You’ve scared the shit right out of her, Hans. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her! Tell her it’s not true. Tell her they are stories. You know nothing about love, nothing. You know nothing about anything at all and I hate you so much.

The Mouth stood there, right in the centre of the pillars, with his eyes closed and his head tilted up to the sky. She just went on and on. Now tell Nomi you’re sorry and ask her to forgive you. Right now, Hans. You will not go back inside without apologizing.

Then Trudie was quiet for one or two seconds and I could hear crickets and I thought, now we’ll go home. But then she said: No? No? No? You won’t apologize? That’s good. That’s
good. Because you know what? I will never forgive you. Nomi will never forgive you. It would bring you too much joy, wouldn’t it, you smug monster, you…ask away. Apologize. Forget it. Forget it! I wanted to tell Trudie I would forgive him, that she was wrong, and then The Mouth told his wife to go into the house and phone my dad. Tell that man to come and get his wife, he said. He told my mom his heart wept for her. Then he went into his house. I sat on the curb waiting for my dad while my mom threw rocks at her brother’s house and screamed profanities that I had never heard before.

After school Travis came back without the poncho and apologized. I told him he was full of shit sometimes and he said yeah he knew that but I could give niceness a whirl.

You’re the kind of guy who in a simple robbery would panic and pull the trigger and end up wrecking a whole bunch of lives including your own, I told him.

Are you ever gonna take that hood off? he asked. We drove out of town in silence towards a different town called Anola.

I wanted to ask him if he was planning to truss me up and kill me in the bushes but I was too pissed off to open my mouth. We kept driving. Travis was singing with the radio…and I was breathing in dust from the gravel road until we got to this even smaller dirt road and we followed that for a while and then he pulled into this clearing in the bush that had a log cabin in the middle of it. He parked by the cabin and looked at me.

So? I said.

It’s my parents’ snowmobile pad. It’s got a fireplace.

Great, I said. Fires are good.

And a bed and shit, said Travis.

Ohhhhh, I said. We both stared at the cabin. I guess this is where we’ll come when…yeah. It’s good? I took his hand and said yeah, it’s pretty nice.

He asked me if I’d want to take my hood off and I said no thanks, I liked it that way. I told him I thought the chemicals had probably successfully tricked my body. He glanced in the general direction of my barren uterus and nodded. We sat there staring at the cabin holding hands and wondering and trying to find something good on the radio.

We drove back to town slowly. I leaned against his shoulder and stuck my feet out the window, and we shared my last cigarette. He called me baby. Here, baby, he said when he passed the cigarette over my head. Wouldn’t it be so great if we could just keep driving and driving? I asked. He kissed my hair. He said yeah, someday we would. The Cars were playing on the radio. Everything was so nice. The air was a perfect temperature and smelled so good. All I could see was blue sky and smoke. Then he had to go and lay a carpet with his dad.

Everything my mother did after that night when she stoned her brother’s house and called him really bad names seemed mysterious and troubling. I think now I’d call it grief. It’s hard to grieve in a town where everything that happens is God’s will. It’s hard to know what to do with your emptiness when you’re not supposed to have emptiness. Trudie started going for long walks at night. During the day, at home, she’d still do things like housework and cooking but she almost entirely stopped speaking. I came home from wherever one afternoon to find her and my dad standing in the middle of the kitchen in each other’s arms with tears streaming down their faces.

What’s wrong? I asked. And they said nothing is wrong and smiled and told me not to worry about a single thing. The kids at school had been talking to me about Trudie, wondering if she was a vampire or completely insane or what.

Why does she walk around like that at night, they’d ask.

I’d shrug. How the hell would I know, I’d say.

One day there was no supper and I got mad. What a spoiled little shit, eh? Anyway, I told her: Mom, we have to eat every day. And she said to me you know you’re absolutely right and then she went over to the calendar and wrote the word
EAT
in every square, every day of every week of every month. There, she said when she was finished. That should help. When my dad came home from school he looked at the calendar, stared at it for five or ten minutes, quietly flipping the pages of the months, and then went and sat down beside my mom on the couch and took her hand and stared with her, catatonically, out the picture window at the world of sky and highway.

Somehow I managed to find the time to wander aimlessly around town and stare at stuff with a new expression I’d been working on that suggested a complex combination of hostility and hopelessness mingled with sad longing and redemptive love.

If I had a magic wand I would walk down Main Street and go
ting
—you’re now CBGBs.
Ting
—you’re an angry street vendor.
Ting
—you’re Lou Reed. Hey Nomi. Hey Lou. Tour with me. You got it, man.

The Mouth had put up a new sign in front of the church.
YOU THINK IT’S HOT HERE…GOD.
I stopped and stared at the sign. I couldn’t believe it. This was an entirely new approach. It wasn’t even a verse. It was supposed to be funny. It was The Mouth making threats and using God as a dummy. The man was insane. My new expression fell apart entirely and
I stood there with my mouth open and my hand on my heart. It could have been the heat or the pot or the excitement of being with Travis or overtiredness or the effects of my body thinking it was pregnant when it wasn’t but I started to cry and couldn’t stop. Why couldn’t the sign say: And you shall be like a spring whose waters fail not. Why not offer some goddamn encouragement?

I got up and walked around to the side of the church where The Mouth had his office and banged on the door. I kicked the door and then I threw rocks at the window.

I screamed: Let me in! Let me in right now! I guess he wasn’t there. Or if he was, he was too busy with damnation work to see me. I walked back to the sign and kicked the shit out of it so that by the time I was finished black letters lay randomly on the ground next to twisted pieces of plastic. I sat on the curb breathing heavily and stared at the two cars that passed in a time span of at least fifteen minutes. How much for a blow job? one of the occupants inquired. A man with a six-inch reinforced heel on one of his shoes walked past me very, very slowly and asked me in the mother tongue if I was waiting for a parade. I shook my head and smiled. He patted my hair and said: And she being desolate shall sit upon the ground. I watched him disappear into Jesus’ arms at the end of Main Street.

A tall girl, about twelve, and a short boy, about ten, walked up to me and asked me if I’d wrecked the sign.

I did, yeah, I said.

Why? they asked. The girl put her elbow on the boy’s head. I shrugged.

Will you get in trouble? asked the boy.

I doubt it, I said. I asked them where they were going. The girl said to buy a box of chocolates. For him, she said, pointing at the boy. For being my faithful armrest all year. The boy smiled from under the girl’s elbow.

That’s handy, I said.

I know, said the girl. I get so tired of standing.

They promised they wouldn’t tell anybody that I had wrecked the sign and I thanked them and watched as they too walked towards our man from Nazareth.

I missed Lids. Aimless isn’t quite so aimless when you’re doing nothing with a friend. I walked through a little park next to the Rest Haven and noticed a pup tent set up under a tree. I went up to it and said hello and a woman poked her head out of the flap. Oh sorry, I said. I was just curious about the tent. We’re waiting for a home, she said. Oh, okay, I said. Sorry. Yesterday we found a twenty-dollar bill and we used it to buy food and soap. Right on, I said. We know we’ll be provided for, she said. I smiled and nodded. Where are you from? Paraguay, said the woman. The Gran Chaco. Wow, I said. Do you know Doft? I asked. We know we’ll be provided for, said the woman, again. I nodded. Well, have fun, I said. She thanked me and closed the flap.

I walked on to the hospital, taking Reimer Avenue past the Kids Korner where I used to work at trying to stay awake, and then the morgue tunnel. I took the elevator up to the main floor and went to Lids’s room. Her parents were there and so was Dr. Hunter and a nurse.

Lids was lying in her bed looking scared and helpless and her face was glowing, almost flickering.

Oh, Naomi, said Lids’s mom. We’re having a bit of a discussion here. Would it be possible for you to come back another time?

Sure, yeah, I said.

Lids and I exchanged one very brief look and no smiles. I went into the hallway and asked the nurse, the nice one behind the desk, what was going on. She shook her head and said she didn’t know. Some type of conference, maybe. Possibly related to Lids’s having been stranded that afternoon.

What do you mean, stranded? I asked. The nurse told me that Lids had suddenly decided to get up and go for a walk but had only made it to the corner of Barkman and Lumber before collapsing on the sidewalk. Somebody saw her from their kitchen window and called the cop and he went over there to help her but she wouldn’t let him touch her because it hurt too much. Then her parents came and so did Dr. Hunter but she wouldn’t let anybody touch her. She just lay there on the sidewalk, moaning.

Then how did she get back here? I asked the nurse. Her parents finally just picked her up and put her in the back seat of the car, she said.

Is she feeling better now? I asked the nurse. Well, yes, in a way, said the nurse. We’ve given her a sedative and some toast.

Lids had been
wrestled into the back seat of a car.
Her parents had wanted to take her home but Lids had insisted on coming back to the hospital, said the nurse.

That’s because at home they treat her with prayer and tomato juice, I told her.

Well, said the nurse, it’s really not that much different here. We don’t know what to do, to be perfectly honest.

I know that feeling, I said.

The nurse gave me a finger of her Kit Kat bar and told me she’d tell Lids that I’d be back soon.

I walked out of the town, past the parka factory, towards the lagoon. I’d never been there before. I had to climb a chain-link
fence to get inside. There were four Olympic-sized pools containing the town’s raw waste. It didn’t look bad. It didn’t smell bad either. If you could get past the idea of it, it was kind of pretty. The sun was in a position that made everything soft orange, like the inside of a cantaloupe. This is where it all began, I thought. Were it not for this strangely beautiful cesspool of unfiltered crap I would not be here. I just sat for a while. It occurred to me that Tash may have been bullshitting me when she said this was the place where Dad had asked Mom to marry him. Nobody else came. I tried psychically to prevent seagulls from landing in the pools. Eventually I got up and climbed back over the chain-link fence.

I stood in the lobby of the bank with my face against the cool granite, soaking up the air conditioning. Someone opened the door and I heard a familiar voice in the distance. Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman, pass by. Only my dad would quote the words on Yeats’s grave to a fundamentalist bank teller in a floral print dress. I didn’t know the context. I saw her nodding and smiling and my dad standing solemnly on the other side of the counter like he was waiting for directions to the body. That’s right, I heard him say. I’m fond of certain carbons. I couldn’t hear what the teller was saying. She must have been a former student of his. Yes, he said morosely, I recall…the type of carbon where atoms are joined in a hollow structure…oh yes. He looked up and I waved.