All the Broken Things (13 page)

“Yes.” It was all he could think to say.

“What’s her name?”

“My mother calls her Sister.”

“And you?”

“Her Vietnamese name means Orange Blossom. I call her Orange.”

“Wow,” said Emily, and squatted down closer to Orange. “I’m Emily,” she said. “Hello there.”

Orange swung her head side to side as if not to notice Emily, but Bo could see she was taking it in, the shiny novelty in her midst—a new person. Emily twisted her smiling face up to Bo.

“My mother works with disabled kids. Did you know? She teaches swimming. It’s therapeutic.”

“Swimming,” repeated Bo, and felt sick. His toes were clutching at the edge of the deep end, the water surface oscillating, flicking light at him in a fearful enticement. Sharks.

“Maybe Orange would like it. Not everyone is afraid of the water, you know.”

“I’m not afraid,” Bo said.

“Come on,” she said. “Remember grade five—the field trip to Sunnyside pool?” and then, “If someone held her on a flutter board, though.”

“She wouldn’t like it. She doesn’t like other people to touch her.” At Sunnyside, he had sat tucked into himself against the chain-link fence, claiming a stomach ache.

“Well, you could hold her.”

All the cells in his body built tight walls around themselves and he stood there thinking of standing in the water holding Orange, his father sinking into the murky dark deep end, shirt billowing. Bo’s head began—of its own accord—to shake back and forth. Emily reached
out her hand to push a strand of Orange’s wispy hair back off her cheek. And Orange did not move. She let Emily move the hair behind her ear, and she kept very still. A marvel.

“She doesn’t let anyone touch her.” Bo moved beside Emily and squatted down on his haunches. “Orange—”

“My name is Emily. Do you like to dance? I do. Very much.” Emily spoke very quietly, the words tumbling over each other. Orange let her inch closer. “Do you like to swim? Does she, Bo?”

“I don’t know. She’s never—”

“Does she like to bathe?” said Emily, then turned back to Orange before he answered. “If you like the bath, you will like the pool. I’ll take you one day. Emily.” She repeated, nodding, “Emily,” and touched her own collarbone, “Me.”

Orange, sweaty and dirty, leaned her torso against Emily. Her breath purred. Bo edged over to sit beside his sister, and when he put his hands out, she began to bash him with her stubby fists. She hammered him—his arms, his shoulders, his face—so fast, hard.

“Oh my God.” Emily sunk down to the floor. “That’s enough, Orange. You stop that.” But Orange did not. If anything she increased the pummelling.

Her hands were nothing but fists. She used them as cudgels upon him, but she was small and the damage she did was minor. Bo said, “It’s okay. It’s normal.” He
was used to it, and began to laugh a little, especially since Emily looked so concerned. “She doesn’t mean it, Emily.”

“Oh,” said Emily. “Oh!”

Bo opened the palms of his hands and caught Orange’s fists in his. He let her struggle against him to slow the momentum of her beating so that somehow he unwound her from herself, and stopping seemed like her idea. Soon she was calm and relocated, contained.

“She’s like a new creature,” said Emily. “Not a human and not an animal. Some new thing.”

Bo liked this. It made it sound as if Orange were a rare discovery. He pulled his lips in, and held them there, thinking, then said, “My mum—” He thought of Orange butting her head and body against the door to her room while his mother twisted the dial on the TV or the radio louder and louder to keep Orange’s yearning at bay. If he admitted it was horrific, he was admitting something about his mum, and this seemed equally horrific. A bad feeling, like water pushing at the back of his heart and up toward his eyes, came over him. “She thinks Orange is shameful.”

“She’s human.”

“My mum?”

“I guess. I meant Orange, though.”

“No,” said Bo. “You said it yourself. She is something new.”

“Next year, when the weather gets warm and our pool is open, we’ll sneak her out and bring her to my house. We’ll be quiet.”

“No.”

“Promise.”

“I can’t.”

Emily folded her arms and turned a quarter-turn away. “Promise.”

“Maybe,” he said, then, “Hey, Emily, don’t tell anyone you were here. That you saw her,” he said. “Promise?” The limp child was now deeply asleep in his arms. “My mum will be home soon,” he said, hoping that Emily would leave. He saw she was looking elsewhere, down the hallway, into his life.

“Why did you come?” he said. “I mean, in the first place?”

“Oh,” she said, and twirled around. She stared at him and smiled.

Bo shook his head. He didn’t get it.

“Dummy,” she said.

And then he saw. New jeans. They were cigarette legs, holding tight to her body. She looked taller, and he wondered whether he imagined that or whether she really was.

“They look nice,” he said.

“Yeah, I finally got them.”

Bo shifted Orange over his shoulder and stood nodding
for a bit, feeling awkward, not knowing what to say to Emily anymore. “I better put her to bed,” he finally said.

“Okay,” Emily said. “I’ll let myself out.” She waved with her fingers and turned to go. “See you.”

But after she left, he did not put Orange to bed, but sat with her, in the living room, a dumb sitcom flickering on the TV. He sat in the only comfortable chair they owned, an upholstered rocker, green, the Naugahyde peeling, and watched her sleep in his arms.

G
ERRY CAME BACK
for Bo in early October. “You ready for work?” he said.

“Yes.”

There were fifteen country fairs scattered through Ontario. Gerry intended them to get to each one, at least two or three per weekend. Inside the cab, Bo could smell the truck falling apart, gas fumes leaking in through holes in the floor. He missed school every Friday and some Thursdays if they had a ways to travel to get to someplace that looked just the same as the last place they’d been. Loralei was stressed, so Gerry had started giving her Valium. It made her slower, which made her seem dumb, but it was better than risking her swatting someone, or so
Gerry claimed. Bo spent some of the travel time staring out the window, some of it counting his money. Today was a Sunday and they were heading to Walkerton.

Bo placed his bills in piles on the truck bench between him and Gerry—ones, twos, fives, tens—which got Gerry singing about how the king was in the counting house, counting out his money. Bo didn’t mind because he loved the part of the song about the blackbirds, which always made him childishly check for his nose. The air was thick with summer still, as if no one had told October about fall, and Gerry, out of the blue, seeing him happy, asked Bo about that kid he’d been fighting when he found him.

Bo thought about Gerry “finding” him, and said, “Ernie?”

“That the ass-wipe’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Do you fight other kids?”

“No.”

“Why only him?”

Bo shrugged, leaned in to the radio. “Can I change the channel?” he asked, which made Gerry laugh.

“Sure you can, kid.” Then nodding to the money, Gerry said, “How much?”

“Four hundred and fifteen.” “Rubber Band Man” began pouring out of the radio. Bo rocked in his seat to it.

“A bundle,” said Gerry.

“Should I get a bank account?”

“I never bother.”

There would be two fights for Bo that day. He’d fought other boys, and he fought Loralei, and he always knew who would win and who would lose from the outset. Not once had there been a bout that went wrong. When he wasn’t at fairs with Gerry, he fought Ernie. He thought of it as training, that the experience was building him. He was strong. Mr. Morley had nodded and smiled when he broke a school record for sit-ups. He’d won the fitness medal, and been called a fucking slant for it by Ernie, who had red-faced it to second place. If he counted those slams with Ernie, he’d thrown his body at some other body thirty times these twenty-one days.

“I’m not tired,” Bo said, as if saying it would make it true.

“Why’d you say that, kid?”

He shook his head and furrowed his eyebrows.
He would sleep when he was dead
, a line Gerry spouted now and then. The thought of it made Bo shiver, then shrug it off, since sleeping wasn’t like dying, anyhow.

In Walkerton, it looked like the same kids milling around, same mums and dads, same
4
-H Jersey calves, same giant pumpkin. Bo lost the first bout on purpose, at a cue from Max Jennings, who had begun to work more closely with Gerry on rigging the show. There must have been a lot of money at stake. The skinny boy who beat Bo was the son of the mayor. The kid had no sense of gravity, which made it difficult for Bo to create a decent spectacle,
make it look good. It was easier to make a show with the overweight boys. They knew how to stand, and people seemed to find fat funny.

Bo had played this boy, getting him to chase, then evading his touch. He’d held the kid in a clutch, then shifted his weight in whatever direction the kid wanted it to go, so it looked as if Bo had lost his balance, which he had. The betting crowd didn’t need to know he was losing his balance on purpose. He’d let the kid ram his chest with a bony knee, and even that didn’t really hurt. When it got too much he slid out from under so the kid hit the boards with his knee. Bo smiled when he yelped. The thin padding on the ring floor did not forgive. Bo put on his most angry face when the referee lofted the mayor’s son’s hand in the air. Being a shitty loser made him hated, and hatred meant they’d bet against him with Loralei. The green would flow.

After the match, Gerry said, “You got two hours to kill, kid.”

Max Jennings thrust his chin toward Bo. “How’s the family?” he asked, meaning Orange. He wore a pristine, cut-silk, silver suit that glimmered. He knew how to make his face look sympathetic. “I’m just asking,” he said.

“They’re okay,” Bo said. But it wasn’t true. The family was not okay.

Max fanned twenty-dollar bills in his palm like a magician. “The offer stands.” He flicked his perfect eyebrows.

Bo walked away.

He heard Max as if he were talking through a foghorn in a dream. “Jesus, come on, kid!”

B
O WAS THROUGH THE SHORT
Walkerton midway strip in no time, so he circled back, angling past the bingo hall, and used his pass to enter the freak show. Freaks were nothing more than strangely built humans, some of them suffering diseases, all of them finding a home in this otherworld. If a person thought that humans only came in one shape, then they were fascinated by these beings. It was as simple as that. Bo knew that Orange would be excited to be here—to be anywhere. She wouldn’t notice kids staring, dropping their cotton candy, spilling their pops to get a look, necks craning. That she wouldn’t notice made it somehow worse.

Many of the regular summer attractions—freaks Bo had only heard about from Gerry—had already headed south for the winter, so the feature at this fair was a dwarf and his talking dog. People crowded in.

How’s the family?
Max’s question leapt in his mind. A bad asking. His mum was vacant or drunk, his sister out of control. His own fake carnie bouts had become more real, and more reliable, than anything really real.

Bo watched the dog flip and beg and roll itself up in a ball and cry for a bone. It might have been interesting
if the dwarf hadn’t looked bored and resentful. His act consisted of baiting the audience. The dog was just a cog in a carefully designed routine, but it had range. It could baa and moo, and make something like a quack. The dwarf finished up, then took a long pull from a beer bottle. The spectators milled around the tent, whispered over the mummified mermaid, the bottled microcephalic baby, the hairless cats, scared and drugged in their bright yellow miniature circus-train car, and the live cow with the second head sprouting from her skull. “Wow,” people said. “Will you look at that?”

Bo imagined Orange in a cage, or an aquarium, looking baffled, or worse, getting wild with that fury she had, bashing her twisted self against the floor, the walls, while these people, the normals, laughed, pointed in awe, shame, whatever they felt. He checked the time and left the freak show.

The crowd pressed in on him. Kids making their way to this or that ride, the pop of pellets hitting and missing paper targets, some toddler wailing. He thought of his mother despondent at the kitchen table two weeks before. “I lost my job.” Her eyes glancing up at him at the last second.

“Did you quit?”

“No,” she said.

“What happened?”

“I missed too many days.”

Bo had kept that news from Gerry and Max, not wanting pity, or any sort of drama. He forgot to breathe whenever he recalled Father Bart looming at him after mass that time. “Where is your mother?” It was something he, too, wondered from time to time.

For twenty minutes, Bo stood in line for the Ferris wheel, as a snake of twittering couples fed into the dangling cars. Before his fights, Bo sometimes spent his tension on the Ferris wheel or the Loop-the-Loop, whatever ride was biggest, fastest. It was like a dare he had with himself. The operator was an older man who looked like he hadn’t slept in a long time. He performed his job like a robot, shuffled Bo through the gate, then closed it, opened the bar on the ride, made sure Bo was strapped in, closed the bar, pushed a button to shift the car up. Automatic. He didn’t look at Bo, though Bo recognized him from every fair in all the different counties he’d been to.