All the Broken Things (7 page)

“You got the change going, Bo Jangles?” he said.

Bo cocked his head at Gerry, confused.

“Your dick growing?” Gerry clarified. “You got hair? In your armpits and all that? You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, I know,” said Bo, to shut him up. Geez.

“Why’m I asking, you might ask?” Gerry laughed. “I’ll tell you, Bo.”

Bo shoved his hand into his pocket, felt the crumpled ten-dollar bill, and thought how he would not ever tell anyone this part.

Gerry switched the radio on again then off, reached over to the glove compartment for his Craven “A”s. He pushed in the lighter, waited for it to pop, and snuggled it into the end of the cigarette that sat waiting between his lips.

“I can’t have no little boys in the ring, is what.” His inhale was deep and full of knowledge. “You a virgin, kid?” He opened his window a crack and exhaled up toward the gap.

“Virgin?” said Bo.

Gerry crinkled his eyes against the smoke and broke into a cheeky smile. He looked directly and purposefully
out the windshield. “You need me to break it down for you?”

Bo snorted and stared out in the direction Gerry stared.

“I lost mine at twelve,” Gerry said, “to Amy, who was supposed to be babysitting. Well, I wasn’t a baby, but she did sit.” He burst out laughing.

“Lost what?”

“My innocence,” said Gerry. He rolled his eyes like he was swooning and made a strange guttural sound.

Bo had not lost anything.

“Kid?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s in the bag?”

Bo realized he was clutching his rucksack tight, and let it loose. “Nothing,” he said, and then, “a camera.” Teacher had given it to him. Bo had gone to her apartment one day when Rose was just home from the hospital with Orange. He could already speak a little English but it felt strange to hear it coming out of his body and he was shy. He followed her down the street to her place. Her walls were painted bright colours, and there were tapestries and paintings everywhere. There was no spot that did not hold some new object or picture to inspect. He walked around slowly and looked at her things. She had a typewriter and this fancy camera that lay on a little table strewn with photographs. The camera had dials and different lenses.

“Do you want something to drink?” she said. “Some Coke?”

“Yes, please.”

She noticed him staring at the camera, so she showed him, letting him look through the lens. She pointed out how to focus, and how to set the aperture, the rate of light coming in. And then, “You press here.” She put her own finger on the place. “I’ll show you.” She pointed the lens at him and twisted the dials on the camera. He heard the
click
when she pressed down on the button. “Now, you try,” she said, handing it to him.

Bo rotated the dials until he could see the line of her face so sharply cut from the walls and the other things behind her. She wore lipstick.

“Hold the camera as still as you can.”

He clicked the camera at the exact moment she put her hands on her waist and leaned toward him, laughing. And then he looked at the camera for a while, admiring its shiny casing. He loved the weight of it.

“Photographs,” she said, “are absolutely marvellous, don’t you think?” She riffled through her scattered pile and pulled one out. “Here’s a funny one of me,” she said, and handed him the picture. She was standing in a wide green field, except she wasn’t standing, she was hovering off the ground a few inches.

“It’s nice,” he said. Teacher was wearing a pretty white dress with little lacy holes in it. “How did you do it?”

“Oh, it’s magic,” she said, and laughed.

He just blinked at her.

“Okay,” she said. “I jumped.” She jumped to show him and then they both laughed.

But still, it was a kind of magic.

She pointed to the camera, then. “Would you like it?”

There was a charmed waiting between them. He read the word
Nikon
in raised plastic letters on the casing. “Yes, please,” he said, softly. He did want it. “I could borrow,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Or keep it.” She emptied the film from it, and gave him some fresh rolls. She showed him how to load it. “I never use it,” she said. “I have a newer one.” She smiled. “Maybe you can make a photo album.”

Weeks later she had given him the photograph she had taken of him, and the funny one, of her floating. Bo had taped them into his journal.

“You see that sign?” Gerry was pointing to a billboard for Fergus.

“Yes.” It was huge. You couldn’t miss it.

“Your life won’t be the same after today,” said Gerry. “After today, everything changes.” And then he said, “Come to think of it, you might want to take a picture or two.”

Bo moved the rucksack to the floor and pushed it behind his feet. He hardly had money for film, and processing was so expensive that when he finished a roll, he
rarely could afford to develop the photographs. The finished film rolls nestled like secrets in a box under his bed, with his journal and a few other treasures he kept hidden.

T
HE TRUCK LURCHED INTO A FIELD
, the trucks and trailers lined up in a makeshift parking lot. Gerry swung the truck around so the back end faced a cage set up there. Choking dust rose up around them as they got out. Bo pulled his rucksack onto his back, felt the soft thump of the camera against his spine. Gerry spoke to two men, gave them some instructions and the keys to his vehicle, and then put his arm around Bo’s shoulder and spun him around to face the barns. People milled everywhere.

“Let’s go look around, Bo Jangles. You ever been to a county fair?” And when Bo gaped back at him, Gerry said, “I didn’t think so.”

The tour of the animal barns never felt like more than a diversion, but just the same Bo enjoyed the stench of animal droppings, hay, oats, and straw, and he loved the costumes some of the handlers wore. The stockyards near his house were the closest he’d come to this, but there was nothing bucolic about the yards, just the baying of beasts sensing some awful approaching truth. He would return to the city, he would tell Orange, and maybe Emily if she would listen; he fantasized about this, smiled.

Eventually, Gerry led him toward a ring set in a grassy field, around which a large group of people had formed. Their chatter wound up to the sky. Bo couldn’t hear a word, just talk-noise and the occasional sputter of laughter. A man in a striped jersey grinned in the corner of the ring—the referee. Beside him, a man in a silky housecoat hopped on his toes and then loped around the ring, gesturing to the crowd and roaring.

“Wolfman,” said Gerry, squinting into the middle distance, something—love or respect—softening his face.

Wolfman beat his chest, and some of the people in the crowd—adults!—beat their own chests back, laughing, mocking. The fighter ripped his housecoat off his shoulders and let it hang from the tie at his fat waist, and there was his massive bare-naked chest, black hair already matted with sweat, and a belly round and hard. Downy hair started at his neck, went down across his back—he was so like an animal.

“Where is she?” Wolfman roared, spit flying. “I’m in a fighting mood.” His housecoat unwrapped and fell as he pranced about, and he kicked it out of the way.

The crowd cheered, and Gerry said, “The thing to remember, Bo Jangles, is that all the world’s a stage, and wrestling is no different.”

Everything Gerry said seemed to have some laughter in it, some deep-down joke Bo did not get. He smiled in spite of this. He rummaged in his rucksack for the
camera, thinking to take a picture of Wolfman, but Gerry saw him and tapped his arm and said, “Wait for it, kid,” and pointed. Bunting decorated the outside of the ring, and a wide temporary ramp led up to it on one side, kitty-corner from where Bo and Gerry stood.

Bo wondered only briefly what that might be for, before the two men from the parking lot, now clad in shiny red underpants and wearing shiny red and silver masks, yipped like dogs to get the attention of the crowd. They stood in front of a cage and sprang the door open. And then Bo saw it poking out—a bear, its eyes alive and seeking.

The sparkle he had noticed cowering at the back of the darkened cage in Gerry’s truck.

Gerry watched him, his grin cracking dimples in his cheeks. “That’s it, Bo. Now you begin to see.”

The beautiful creature came out scenting the air, its nose sky high. Bo’s first bear. And what a fine thing. The creature was three and a half feet or so at its back, he figured, and up to his own neck. It took its time lumbering out of the cage, stopping to scratch itself—a place on the rump rubbed raw to the skin. The wrestler was not so hairy after all, for between the matted fur of him, Wolfman’s awful pink skin showed through. Bo felt suddenly repulsed at the vulnerability of that skin—it was miserable, miserly even, compared with the bear’s coat, its shagginess, the refined swirls of hair along the beast’s muzzle and down its chest.

“Wow,” Bo said. He watched the bear through the lens of Teacher’s camera, struggling to find the perfect frame, while she moved, and shook herself out, and moved again. That ripple of fur when she shook. Bo tracked her beauty.

“That there’s Loralei,” said Gerry. “Girlfriend to many, lover to few.”

“Loralei,” repeated Bo. The name sounded like a song.

He shifted as close to ringside as he could and snapped another picture. The bear turned to face him. He let the camera hang from its strap and just watched. She rubbed and rubbed at the outside of the cage and seemed not to notice that anyone else was there. And then, she bounded directly up the ramp and into the ring. People began tossing drink cups, fistfuls of dandelions, anything they could grab. The referee yelled down at them and held up his hands. And then it was like in church, that stillness that can come over a crowd looking up.

“Usually the trainer is required to hold her by a chain,” said Gerry. “Just in case. But Wolfman is special, see?” Gerry rolled his eyes. “His courage knows no bounds.”

The announcer now repeated this exact same thing through the crackle and feedback bleat of the cheap microphone, and Gerry said, “Now you watch carefully and earn your ten dollars.”

Wolfman circled Loralei, taking time here and there to throw the garbage out of the ring and make fists at the crowd. “Don’t mess with my bear,” he yelled, and, “Leave
my girl alone!” Loralei was nosing a weed someone had thrown at centre ring when all at once Wolfman bumped his chest against her side and grunted.

The bear rose onto her back legs and settled on her haunches, twisting about to take in the view, the smells. Gerry waved to her, his hand partway up and the wave noncommittal—a signal maybe, thought Bo.

“Howdy, Lora,” Gerry whispered.

Loralei came to her full height and Wolfman reeled back and fell, from the sheer shock of it, it seemed to Bo. And down she came over him, the skin flaps at her armpits stretching like wings. The great stench of her wafted out into the audience as she worked to pin Wolfman.

“Whoa!”

People reeled, the magnitude of her body odour hitting them in waves. But the referee leaned in close.

Under the bear, Wolfman squirmed and bellowed, making jokes the whole time: “Let me on top, girlfriend! How is this polite? This ain’t right.”

Bo felt he would need a lifetime to sort out all he was seeing and feeling as he watched this.

“Look at her now,” said Gerry. “She’s smelling us, and everything else—french fries, wieners, that nice lady there.”

It was hard to believe the bear could smell anything over her own stench, but Loralei rolled her head back and around, taking in the scents the crowd gave off, her
body rocking a bit as Wolfman tried to slip out from under her, and when that failed, tried to buck the huge creature off.

Bo recalled his last fight with Ernie.
Feet
, Bo thought,
feet
, but it was too late. Loralei shifted to the side, her front paw now holding Wolfman, and sniffing, always sniffing. She rotated so that now she was back to front, pushing her great dreadful butt into Wolfman’s neck. The crowd went wild.

Wolfman was struggling for breath. His arm was caught against his own chest, which meant he was surely not choking from much but the odour—he had built a bit of space between himself and the bear. The crowd was now laughing hysterically, and Bo saw Wolfman’s face show astonishment then indignation then fake pleasure. What
was
this?

“A show,” said Gerry.

Bo moved so he could see better what the crowd was laughing about. Loralei had pulled back, her great paws on either side of Wolfman’s legs and her face nestled in between them, the pink of her tongue curling in and out of her mouth as she licked his crotch.

“It’s honey,” Gerry whispered behind Bo, then leaned in. “Loralei has a penchant. She loves honey.”

“Honey?”

“Yeah, he’s smeared down there with it. The crowd loves it.”

People sobbed from laughter, tears streaming. Wolfman’s eyes rolled up in his head. The great bear licked and licked, would not stop licking, her leg muscles rippling whenever she dug in for more sweet. Bo supposed a bear would lick anything covered in honey, so what was so funny about this? He frowned—Gerry caught this.