All the Broken Things (18 page)

“Naughty Orange,” Bo said, a number of times, even if he kept glancing at her and half smiling, shaking his head. He breathed through his mouth to avoid smelling all the bad smells.

Bear whimpered out back, and Bo said, “Do you hear that, Orange? It’s the bear. It’s Bear.”

Bo brought Orange into the kitchen and turned on the radio, holding her in one arm while he fiddled for the right station. And then he blasted it so that the house seemed to shake. He set Orange down and she swivelled on her butt along the linoleum floor. Bo told her to wait while he let Bear in. He went to the back and opened the door, unhooked Bear from her chain, a chain long enough that she could get beneath the porch and hide in the wooden cabinet he had found on a garbage day and turned into a kennel for her. He climbed back up the stairs and whistled for her to come.

The bear barrelled up the back steps and down the hallway, stopping short to somersault through the kitchen door. Bo pulled off Bear’s collar and then stooped to take off his shoes. He glided in his socks all over the slick lino flooring.

“Dance!” Bo said—the music was loud—and Orange pushed her bum in the air so that on all fours she began to sway, and this is how she found the rhythm. The bear
lunged up to standing and bounced from one foot to the other, following Bo’s arms as if he were a conductor. When the music stopped, and the announcer talked weather, and sports, and news, Orange pounded the floor with her little hands until the next song made her sway again. This was happiness, Bo could see. This was a full-body smile when the mouth wouldn’t do the work.

He turned the radio even louder, felt the music pulse through the floorboards. The walls breathed, and Bo danced like crazy, laughing at Orange’s twisting ways, her bent, nutty self exploring the bass here, the drum there, until, closing his eyes for a time, it felt as if there were nothing else but song and pulse and sway.

And then the song ended. Ads were playing. Bear stopped to clean her paws. Bo doubled over. Between the wild swinging and the laughing, he was heaving for breath. He splayed himself on the floor and watched Bear lumber off down the hall to Orange’s bedroom. Happy.

L
ATER, DARKNESS COMING
, his mother still not home, and Orange asleep, Bo collared and leashed Bear to take her down the street. He did want some fresh air, but more, he wanted to feel the trains hurtle by, that violent shift of air. It was like he was in a dream, the bear sitting beside him, quivering nose up in the air,
scenting Bo didn’t know what, maybe the cattle at the stockyard a mile away, or maybe just spring rising from the earth. The train pulled him toward it as it raced downtown, and he imagined being sucked right into it, his body slammed. Bear recoiled from that same train’s shattering wind, tugged on the leash, afraid. Bo let go and laughed, watching her bound back toward the house, then he followed.

Rose was home. She leaned over the table, the ceiling light giving her face a golden halo and illuminating the script, which she had clearly been reading. She looked up and Bo watched her pupils adjust.

“I was just gone for a few minutes,” he said. “Orange was asleep.”

“It’s okay. She’s still sleeping,” Rose said, and then, “What is the underworld? The fairy place?” He thought she looked like a child when she asked this.

“It’s just what it says,” he answered, but he wasn’t actually sure anymore. Teacher had said something about thresholds, and he had liked the word so much he had thought about it, and moved it around in his head, and felt it in his mouth, like food, and in doing this, he had stopped listening.

“No,” said Rose. “It says: ‘I rode into a rock, and went three miles or more.’ How can this be? How can a person ride into a rock?” She poked herself when she said “person,” to show her own solidity.

“Thresholds,” Bo said, and looked at the wood trim of the doorway he stood in. “Teacher said something about doorways, and magic. We were talking about the play, and she said something about them being important.”

“What did she mean?”

“I can’t remember.” He wondered if the thing he had forgotten happened in every doorway, and this began to stress him out. “I’ll bring Bear out back,” he said.

“When it’s warm, you should bathe her. She stinks, Bo.”

“Okay.”

Then she looked back down at the script. “A castle! I see a castle over there!” She was reading his lines.

Bo knew them all, and had begun the work of making them come alive in the way Teacher wanted. He always imagined the castle made of blue paint—Orange’s castle. He knocked on the doorway to the kitchen, just as he was supposed to knock in the play, and turned to his mother as if she played the porter. In fact, Sally was the porter.

“Listen,” he said. “I am here to soothe the king with my music and stories. Let me in.”

Then his mum said, “You have to say this?”

Bo nodded and recited, “Some stood without heads, and some had no arms, and some had wounds through the body and some lay mad, bound, and some sat on horses, and some choked as they ate, and some were drowned in water, and some were all shrivelled with fire, wives lay
in childbirth—” and here he looked over and realized his mother was sobbing.

“Mum,” he said. “Mum.”

“What a sad play,” she managed to say.

“Not really,” Bo said. “It’s about a hero. He rescues his beautiful queen from the underworld.”

His mum looked up at him. “That never happens,” she said.

He wanted to go to her, but he had already promised himself not to step through the doorway, so he turned and walked past Orange’s room, careful not to wake her, and out to the backyard. He chained Bear to the metal floor of the porch. Bear hurled herself down the stairs and hid straightaway.

When he came back through the house, his mother was reading again. Maybe he had been mistaken about her sobbing. “I remember,” he said. “The doorways mean change. Transformation. That’s what Teacher said.”

Rose looked up and then back to the script. She said, “You’ve got a lot of lines.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t look up again, but he could see the tiniest smile at the edge of her mouth as she read, and he knew she was proud of this—that he could learn all these lines, that he’d been chosen for this hard part in the play.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, after school, Ernie slammed Bo’s face into the last of winter’s snow in the yard, and then slammed it again. It was the same old thing only it had accelerated as spring approached. Bo didn’t feel like fighting Ernie. He wanted only to play-grapple with Bear, or to be back again fighting for a paying audience. In some way, he didn’t care to exist for Ernie anymore. It had become dull. A bunch of children gathered, forming a circle in motion around them, and the fight was on.

“Try harder, Bo,” someone yelled.

The ground didn’t hurt but it looked as if it might. Bo let Ernie think he’d won. It was uncanny that almost every afternoon after school a fight could break out and no one, not one teacher, janitor or parent seemed to notice. It was as if the kids cheering and yelling surrounded them in magic. Bo reached up as Ernie basked in his win, grabbed Ernie’s face and pulled his cheeks down to his own face and bit him.

“You fuck,” said Ernie. The cheek had reddened but the skin wasn’t broken, and the fight was on again.

Ernie retaliated by pushing Bo’s face away from his. A bad move, it turned out, since it forced him to let go of the grip he had on Bo, and gave Bo the opportunity to shove him off, then scissor-kick him in the ass, and get to standing. This riled the crowd. The rest of Ernie’s face turned red now, out of embarrassment, and he ran at Bo. The impact of this should have hurt, and it did hurt, but
not Bo, because he sidestepped and let a couple of the boys in the audience take the hit. Ernie turned, angry, and fisted Bo in the gut twice and then punched his nose. The blood dripping out of his nose cinched Ernie’s triumph. Bo held his head back and limped off toward home. The entire episode lasted maybe three minutes.

“Wait up.” Bo turned and there was Peter.

“I’m busy,” he said, blood trailing from his nose.

“Yeah, I see that. Here.” Peter handed Bo a Kleenex, and Bo made two wands and shoved one up each nostril. Red wicked along them.

“I gotta get home.”

“Yeah.” But when Bo started walking, Peter followed him. “The thing is,” Peter said, “is that every day for years I’ve been betting on you. I figure you can beat him. You got the footwork, Bo. Why don’t you give it to him for once?”

Bo stopped and stared at Peter. “You bet
for
me?”

“Yeah. You’re better on your feet than he is. Anyone can see that.”

Bo pulled the Kleenex out of one nostril, checked to see if the blood still flowed. It did. He put it back. “So, how much have you lost on me so far?”

“Maybe a hundred dollars.”

“I didn’t know you were so stupid, Peter.”

Peter made puppy eyes, scrunched his mouth up to his nose, a plea, and when Bo started walking, Peter
called, “Come on. Just win once, okay. You owe it to yourself, man. Ernie is a dick. We all know that.”

But Bo wasn’t listening. He had to get to Bear, then train. Because Rose wouldn’t let Orange out to watch, he would bring Bear in for Orange. Bo had taught Orange to hold one end of a stick while Bear chewed and tugged on the other. With her instability, Orange got tossed side to side while Bear yanked, yanked and shook the stick like it was prey she’d hard-won. Gerry hadn’t lied. With the table scraps they gave her, and the immense bags of kibble Gerry brought by, she was getting big.

When Bo got home, he slipped past his mum, who was sitting in the living room, and washed his face in the kitchen sink. He dried his face on a tea towel and went to his mother, watched her for a minute until she looked up at him.

“Mum,” he said. “I’m gonna train in Orange’s room.”

“No bear shit,” she said.

When he brought Bear into Orange’s room, Orange woke to them mirroring each other, the bear clumsy and silly, the boy persistent. Bo sang the Prince song “Purple Rain,” and made up a simple routine with hand and feet motions. The cub mimicked him clumsily, bored with her day under the porch, eager for treats. Orange clapped for them, contorted her strange little body, huffed when Bear huffed, and begged for treats too, not when she did something clever but when the bear did, as if she had something to do with Bear’s ingenuity.

Bo heard the doorbell ring but ignored it. His mum could get it. He kept training, giving Bear and Orange each half a cookie, even as he heard the door close and then voices. He didn’t dare bring Bear out, but after twenty minutes or so, he made her sit and stay, and brought Orange out into the hallway, and set her down, before closing the bedroom door and making his way to the kitchen. His mother was sitting behind her sewing machine, working on a costume for the play, and Teacher was about to leave.

“Miss Lily has asked me to sew more costumes,” his mother said. She concentrated on pushing gold thread through the machine’s needle. There was an abundance of material around her, so that it looked as if she were nestled in a golden cloud.

“Some of the other mothers dropped out—” Teacher began.

His mother cut her off. “This is Emily’s dress for the final scene.” She stopped threading and gestured at the bunched goldenness of it. “She will be beautiful.”

Teacher said, “Yes!” and at the same time Bo said, “Emily?”

It was as if they had manifested her. When he turned toward the hallway door, there she was, holding Orange’s hand.

“Hi, Bo.” That wave again. “I was just in the bathroom.”

“Hi, Emily.” Bo looked back at Rose and she gave him an achingly tiny smile.

“We’re fitting,” Teacher said.

“Oh.”

“Can you take Orange?” his mother said, and then rapidly, “Họ đột nhiên xuất hiện. Tôi có thể làm gì?”
They just showed up so what was I supposed to do?

Orange clutched Emily’s hand.

“It’s okay.” Emily squatted down to Orange’s height. “We were just practising walking, right?” and then she picked Orange up and handed her to Bo. “All yours,” she said.