Blue Vengeance (11 page)

 

They cut through the icehouse lot to see if their ice was still there, and it was barely a puddle. Danny was astounded that from the first day to the second it had seemed practically the same size, and then from the second day to the third it almost vanished. Janine wasn't astounded, just suggested that once it got seriously started on melting it picked up speed. They walked down Lyndale to a tidy little house with yellow trim. Janine knocked on the door, and no one answered.

They sat down on the front steps.

“Who lives here?” said Danny, knowing the answer.

“Rock Sand.” Janine's voice broke in two. “Now he's someone who really is famous. In these parts anyway,” she added, perhaps remembering that Danny had never heard of him. “He's famous just for being who he is,” she went on, answering the question he had no intention of asking.

Now he went from not wanting to be famous at all to wanting to be world-renowned. It didn't matter for what, as long as it beat out the legendary asshole whose front steps he was sitting on and whose name ground your teeth down to dust.

“Why don't we go?” he said.

“I think it's just an aura about him that makes him famous,” said Janine.

It angered Danny that she answered questions that he didn't ask and ignored the ones he did. And her eyes went funny again, like the other time she talked about Rock Sand, as though they were seeing something that he couldn't. It made her look mental. It made her look like Russell in one of her denser moments.

“You know how some people just have an aura about them that makes them special?” she said.

“No.”

Danny was unsure about his answer. It was possible that he liked Janine so much because she had an aura about her. Part of it, he knew, was that she seemed to like him, without him having to do much.

But another part of it might have to do with auras. He would look the word up in the dictionary when he got home.

“How do you spell aura?”

“A-u-r-a.”

“I don't wanna meet this guy. Why do I have to meet him?”

“Well, jeez. You don't have to. I thought you might want to. You know, to broaden your horizons.”

“I don't want my horizons broadened.”

“Sure you do.”

“No, I don't.”

Danny looked at her to see if the dreamy look was still there. It wasn't. She was back on planet earth.

“That way is east, right?” Danny pointed towards St. Mary's Road.

“Yes. Jesus, Danny. Do you not know where the sun comes up?”

“I guess I haven't really thought about it before.”

“It's not the kind of thing you think about,” said Janine. “You just know it, like how many toes you have or what your middle name is.”

“My middle name is Arthur.” He took out his jackknife, opened it, closed it again, and put it back in his pocket.

“Does he live with his parents or is this his very own house?”

“Oh no, he's got parents. He's not an adult or anything, but he lives in the basement. His folks pretty much leave him alone.”

“Let's get out of here.” Danny stood up.

Janine stood too, and they walked to the front sidewalk and began a discussion about what to do next. Her cutoffs were too big for her, as if they had once been a pair of her dad's old jeans. They hung on her hips, and Danny could see her belly button, and slightly lower, to either side, the hint of an indentation.

An old black car came towards them and stopped near where they were standing.

He felt the change in her. Her body shifted into a different gear, one that lifted her clear out of their conversation and towards the car.

“Let's go down to the river,” he said uselessly.

A boy got out of the car and reached into the back seat for an electric guitar that he slung over his shoulder. He was small in stature, but the muscles in his arms bulged, stretching the cloth of his T-shirt. It was stretched further by a pack of cigarettes. He took a deep drag from one as he approached. It had no filter.

“Hi, Rock,” said Janine.

Danny didn't like the way she said his name. Plus, who the hell would name their kid Rock? His parents must be retarded.

“Hi, Jan.”

So this muscle-bound freak was in the secret club that got to call her Jan. Him and Jake. How many other boys and men belonged to the club? He wanted to join it and he wanted to run as far away from it as he could get.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” said Janine. “Remember?”

“Hi, guy-that-Jan-told-me-about.”

They'd been talking about him. Sweat began to trickle down his sides.

“I have to go now,” he said, staring hard at her.

“No, you don't,” said Janine.

“Yes, I do.”

“A minute ago we were talking about what we were going to do next.”

“So what.”

Rock laughed and crushed his cigarette under his foot. He wore black boots that came up to his ankles. They had chains attached to them.

“I'll leave you kids to your bickering.” He walked down the sidewalk and disappeared around the corner of his house.

“Thanks a lot,” said Janine, again the person who had stood beside him before the car's arrival had changed the whole world.

“Thank you a lot,” Danny said. “You told him about me too. Who haven't you told about me? I don't wanna be told about.”

“I didn't give him any details.”

“Yeah, just like you didn't blab to your dad, and then he goes ramblin' on about me bein' a dab hand. Don't you get that the fewer people that know about me the better?”

“I didn't tell Rock about your slingshot skills, and even if I had, we can trust him. He's cool.”

“This is unbelievable. If you didn't talk about my slingshot skills, what could you possibly have talked about? There's nothing about me except my slingshot skills.”

“Cookie.”

“You told him about Cookie?”

“Yeah.”

“What about her?”

“That she died.”

“What else?”

“That she was my friend and your sister.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“You're nuts.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. You're nuts about him, and that makes you nuts in all ways.”

“No, it doesn't.”

“Yes, it does. And you're stupid to think you can trust him. Why did you have to talk about Cookie with him?”

“Sorry.”

Danny decided on the spot to carry out his plan alone. He couldn't trust her, not with thoughts of Rock Sand messing up her head.

“I'm not stupid,” she said.

“Well, maybe not. But nuts for sure. And a blabbermouth.”

“I'm not a blabbermouth. I didn't blab about Cookie. I just talked.”

She walked away from him, up Lyndale and back to the path by the river. Danny followed and caught up. He wasn't done with her.

He chuckled. It was a mean chuckle, the kind that accompanies the word
amused
. He had noticed that people who said they were amused never really were. They were filled with something bad — hate maybe, or envy — and they pretended they were amused. His mum said it sometimes:
It amuses me that Jean Carter thinks she can get away with spike heels at her age
. He heard her say that to Dot on the day Paul's mum dropped him off after the Sydney I. Robinson incident. She only said it because her own legs were lumpy and white, and Mrs. Carter's were shapely and smooth and tanned. He knew it.

“What?” said Janine. “What could possibly be funny?”

“Your heart-throb. He's short.”

Danny laughed out loud and bounced along beside her. He skipped ahead a step or two and walked backwards. He had imagined Rock to be six feet tall at least.

“He's not my heart-throb,” said Janine. “Where'd you get that stupid word? And he's not short.”

“Yes, he is. He's a pipsqueak.”

“He's not as short as you.”

“Yes, he is, and besides, I'm way younger than him. And his eyelashes and eyebrows are white.”

“So what.”

“He looks like a sissy. No wonder he lifts weights. He has to protect himself from all the people who make fun of him. And he has a ducktail. Nobody has a ducktail anymore, not even morons.”

Janine turned towards him. Her face had hate on it, inside of it. He had gone too far, but he couldn't stand her starry-eyed carrying on. Who did she think she was, Sandra Dee?

She started to run back towards her house.

“Oh no. Wait.”

“Go away, Danny.”

“Sorry, wait up.” He ran after her.

“Leave me alone, you little prick,” she shouted. “If you follow me, I'll tell everyone in the universe what you're gonna do. I'll testify in court.”

Danny stopped. He didn't see anyone, but that didn't mean anything. Somebody could have heard.

Janine stopped too and faced him.

“His eyelashes are beautiful, and he's a good kisser too. Best I ever had.” She wasn't yelling anymore.

“Kids don't go to trial; they go to reform school.” It was the best he could do.

He turned around and walked towards the river. The upper half of his body strained to leave the rest of him behind.

How many other people had she kissed? He knew very little about kissing as yet. Once last year three older girls had held him down in the school grounds and taken turns pressing their lips against his. Two of them pressed really hard. One of them didn't, and he didn't hate it. His body responded in an instant.

Frank Foote had driven the girls off that day. Just his appearance on the scene seemed to deflate the girls' intentions somehow. He had been walking by the school with his younger sister, pushing her in her wheelchair. She suffered from something horrible that she'd been born with and she couldn't walk or even talk. People said she probably wouldn't grow to be very old. Frank could often be seen pushing her up and down the streets of the neighbourhood, talking to her, pointing things out.

He was a good brother to her, Danny thought now. If only he could go back to Cookie's last day and change just a couple of the sentences he had spoken. The last words she heard from him should have been kind.

She had been the same age as Frank and Janine. He wondered if she'd had any ideas about what a good kiss was. If so, it would have been only in her imagination. He was almost certain there were no real kisses in her life. Not that kind, anyway — the kind Janine was talking about.

A picture came to him; he'd seen it before. It was what he thought of as his first memory, and he attached the age of three to it. That might be right.

His mother was sitting in a chair in the front room. It was around the time of Cookie saying
Daddy
to her as she sewed. There was a sunbeam this day too. Maybe it was the same day, the same sunbeam.

Cookie crawled up onto her lap. Their mother's arms hung down on either side of her chair. They made no move to encircle her daughter, to touch her in any way. The lack of movement was out of whack. It puzzled Danny then, and he wondered about it again now. His mum had used her arms for practical reasons, to move Cookie and him from place to place: bath mat to tub, road to car seat, dewy grass to dry cement. Surely it was too early on in her illness for touching to have become such a problem for her. Or maybe that was one of the first symptoms. Yes, maybe that was it. A grimace was attached to every effort she made, then and now.

Had Cookie ever known their mother's arms in the way he knew was missing that day? He knew he hadn't.

 

By the time he got home the cool wind had calmed, along with his distress.

His mum and Dot were sitting down to supper.

“Danny, finally. We'd about given up on you,” said Dot. “Do you realize it going on seven o'clock?”

“Sorry. I guess I lost track of time.”

It was Sunday, so Dot had cooked a roast with all the trimmings.

After supper he helped with the dishes, and when Dot and his mum were settled in the living room, he hauled the dictionary off its shelf in the dining room and looked up
aura
. There were three meanings. One of them had to do with headaches and epilepsy, so he discounted that one. The other two were much alike, but one seemed to apply to the very air we breathe, and the other to something more particular. It said:
subtly pervasive quality or atmosphere seen as emanating from a person, place, or thing
.

Okay, emanating. Emanate:
to flow out from a source or origin
.

In this case, the aura emanated from Rock Sand, who was the source. Danny wished the dictionary went into more detail. Both words,
aura
and
emanate
, were vague. They offered nothing he could sink his teeth into. All he knew for sure was that the emanation from Rock surrounded Janine and pulled her in. Away from him.

He needed an emanation, a first-class one, so that he could gather Janine in to himself. It was hard to think about. He doubted he had it in him to be the source of an aura, not a good one, anyway. If he could muster one up at all, it would probably be prickly like a cactus and stinky like the garbage under the sink when he let it sit too long.

Anyway, he had for sure ruined things with her. There was no fixing what he'd said.

He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He forgot all about Rock Sand for a few minutes and thought about Janine's heart-shaped face, as it was before he had damaged it with his words, and then he fixed his mind on the smooth golden indentations hinted at above the line of her cutoffs where they hung down low and caught on her hips. If he could lick one of them, slowly, he would give up anything else he had hoped for in his whole life, including his plan for Miss Hartley.

For the rest of the evening he stayed in his bedroom. He wondered about the possibility of having a television installed in his room, so he could watch the shows he used to watch with Cookie before his mum took to the couch.
Cannonball
was his favourite. He supposed some rich kids had TVs in their rooms. And, according to Janine, he was rich. There was no way he was going to sit in the same room as his mum for even half an hour. Plus, Dot was there and she'd probably talk through the whole thing.