Little Bastards in Springtime (28 page)

“No,” I say, unless dead people can visit you in your dreams.

“I do, they sit at the foot of my bed and play cards.”

“Do you talk to them?”

“Yes, I’ve tried, but they ignore me.”

“What game do they play?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Take a closer look next time.”

Aisha rolls her eyes. She wishes I were more serious, a thinker like her and Papa.

“Do you think it was a good thing that youth worked together in the brigades to help build the country?” she asks.

“It depends who you ask. A communist will say yes, an anti-communist will say no.”

“Who do you think is right?”

I stare at her. I’ve never thought about it. “The communist will say they are, the anti-communist will say they are. I guess they each have their reasons and arguments.”

“I mean, what do
you
think?”

My mind goes blank. I don’t know what I think, except that no one could force me to be a youth shock worker, but I’d like to be one anyway, it would be a blast and you could feel good about yourself at the end of the day.

Aisha is watching my face, still waiting for me to say something intelligent. “I guess it all depends on your values,” she says. “So the real question is, why were, are, some people communists and some people anti-communists?” She’s doing that teacher thing again, asking questions that are meant to suck the answers out of you.

I
’M DOWNING
thick black espressos at this café on College Street full of Toronto hipsters eating cheap food, drinking expensive coffee, thinking about conquering the world with
art and secretly investing in stocks and the next cool uncool haircut, or whatever goes through their complicated minds. I’m waiting for Sava. She wants to meet in a real place, a place that’s not school, not my bed, not someone’s bedroom floor. A place with chairs, tables, waiters, drinks, food, music, like we’re real people living real lives in a real city. We need to talk, she said, which sounds like bad news, something she never says. We need to talk, but I’ll meet her anywhere she wants, in the street, in a parking lot, in a ditch, on the front line of life.

The thing is, last night in bed an army of fire ants drinking Jack Daniel’s invaded my veins, colonized my mind, heart, hands, sad lonely cock, and commanded me to touch her, feel her, pull her to me, kiss her neck, shoulders, hold her tight for a few heart-thumping moments of sweetness before she woke up and slapped me, swore at me, grabbed her clothes and stormed out of the house. I’m thinking about what I should tell her while the hipsters flip pages of magazines, scribble in notebooks, talk softly as they look over each other’s shoulders. I pull out another letter and think what my grandfather, this man named H., would have said if Baka did the same, if she’d squirmed away from his reach. Because the letters do send me some kind of message. That the two of them, way back five hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, or whatever the fuck, were not only in love, they got it on whenever they wanted to without any obstacles in the way. Maybe that’s what happens when you fight for years, when you face death constantly. You get over the idea of life, how it should be, and you just fucking live it to the max every moment of the day.

Sava is standing at the table.

Sava sits down, looks around, scowls. “Who
are
these people, Andric?”

“They’re real people, living real lives. You see, chairs, tables, cutlery,” I say.

“If you say so,” she says. “They don’t look real to me. They look like they’ve bought themselves off a rack in some department store.”

I smile. Sava cuts, she slices, she dices, she takes people apart. I wonder what she’ll be like when she’s older, when she needs people, the world, to hang together.

“What do you want to talk about?” I ask her. I’ve decided on a tactic.

“What the fuck was up with you last night? Why are you getting weird on me?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Last night, you … you … Jesus. You were mauling me.”

“I was what? What are you talking about?”

“C’mon, Jevrem.”

“I woke up and you were gone.” I say this with my most innocent look all over my face.

Sava says, “Argh,” and stands up, scraping her chair backward loudly. “It’s impossible to get through to you.”

She’s walking out the door when I’m struck with a realization. Denial is a kind of lying too, and I decided not to do that. Not to lie to her.

“Sava,” I call out. “You’re right. Come back, goddammit.”

She’s striding down the street like a bullfighter, hair billowing behind her. I see everyone else on the street turn their heads to stare at her, I see both men and women thinking secret thoughts of possession and fulfillment. Her long strides, her steady eyes and set jaw, that hair, those bones, that way she throws her hips. It’s even worse than I thought, she’s royalty, she’s a goddess, everyone can see it. I catch up with her. I grab her arm.

“Can we grow up for a minute?” I say. “We’re not kids anymore. We like each other. We have things in common. Why can’t we get it on? Jesus.”

Sava stops and stares at me. I think I see tears in her eyes.

“Jesus, Jevrem, what’s happening to you? You’re changing on me.”

“So? What’s so wrong with that? Things change. Life moves us along. In a year we’ll be done high school, we’ll be adults. We’ll be out in the world living real lives.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Back off. Don’t ever do that again.” Sava pulls loose, begins to walk away.

I stick by her side. “You’re in my bed all the time, I love having you there. Look at me. We have to get real here.”

“Sex would screw up everything,” Sava mutters, her eyes flashing lightning bolts. “If that’s what you’re talking about.”

“It’s my bed, and you’re in it,” I reply.

“That makes no sense. We stole that bed together.”

“But, it’s not just a bed,” I say, “it’s
me and you in it.
We made it out alive. Don’t you see? Our bodies are
alive.
” What’s wrong with Sava, forcing me to say these words out loud? Suddenly I do something I’ve never done before. I grab her and wrestle her against the side of a building. I’ve surprised her, so she thuds up against the brick easily, letting out a puff of air as her lungs compress.

“I’m not just a poor boy with a body,” I whisper in her ear. “I’m a poor boy who wants you.”
With a heart
, I want to say, but it sounds cheesy. And I can’t use the
L
word.
Love.
It’s a word that you can never take back. It’s a word that changes everything once it’s escaped from the guarded gate of your mouth.

“Andric, snap out of it,” Sava hisses, and that’s when I realize why she calls me by my last name.

She slips out of my arms and disappears. I turn and walk back the way we came. I refuse to watch her striding away from me, like the last woman alive after the apocalypse, through the dark concrete valleys of the city.

I
N THE
bar in Kensington Market a girl wears straps. They’re over her shoulders, around her neck, criss-crossing her back, clutching her biceps, protecting her wrists, holding up her stockings, pulling back her hair. I drink vodka, she drinks beer. I drink beer, she drinks vodka. I ask her if she’s built a railway, she asks me if I’ve built a railway. She says no, I say no. We two have a lot in common.

She says that she built a footstool once, out of orange crates. I say that I’ve built nothing at all in my entire life. Not a thing. She says that’s okay, I shouldn’t feel bad about it, not many people have. We don’t need to build things, she says, the world has already been built for us. And I say, what about doing good, and she says that’s not so hard, you just have to help people when you see they need help, not act like an asshole, be kind. It’s not that hard.

The girl’s hair is raven black. It’s been dyed that way and it suits her green eyes. Her plucked eyebrows make her seem wise beyond her years,
she’s seen it all
, those eyebrows say,
she’s seen it, she’s fine with it.
She shows me her tattoos. Celtic patterns and symbols, she says, very powerful, if you want it to be. I say, are you Celtic, and she says, no. And I say, oh. And she says, that has nothing to do with it, anyone can feel the Celtic spirit running through their veins. Culture, she says, is radically transferable, that’s the great thing about it. And spirit too, come to think of it. Nothing to do with biology. It’s about where you live now,
what you do, create, think, feel, desire, experience now.
You. Now.
That’s what’s real.

The girl goes to university and studies theory of something. Third year, she says.

I show her my scars.

Quite a bit later, we’re doing bumps of coke in the bathroom, I’m not thinking about Sava, the girl is unstrapping her straps, the bathroom is glittering, the bar is roaring, the universe is streaming through the top of my head. It’s a wonderful life if you let it be, maybe that’s the message, I think, from Baka and my grandad H., and their delirious letters. Seize the day, seize the hour, seize the minute, seize every last second, all that cheesy crap’s just the truth, no one can deny it. The girl drags me into a stall and locks the door. She throws me against the wall and I let out a puff of air as my back hits the toilet paper dispenser. I think, so that’s how it feels to be commanded, but the thought is remote, very remote, maybe out in the stratosphere between clouds and nothingness. Closer in, I’ve got a mouthful of girl, her tongue, her lips, her neck, her shoulders, her Celtic patterns and symbols. She tastes, she pulsates, she hums, she quivers with life like a newborn creature. The straps are off and there are breasts to sing to, to build a whole network of railways for, they’re just there, out in the open, waiting to be consumed, so I consume them like a carnivore, and I feel so much better than ever before. She sits on the toilet tank, opens her legs to all possibilities and I dive in headfirst, like snorkellers and deep-sea divers who chase after flashes of colour their whole lives. My sad lonely cock is feeling better too, way better, now that I have her ankles at my ears, her hips in my hands, the stamina of mountains. I say to the girl, do you want to keep doing this forever? And she answers with a mysterious smile. I
say, why do sex and poetry and drugs go together? And she says, have some more, use my key. Time weaves, warps, stretches. There’s more of time and feeling good than I ever thought possible in the little box I’ve been living in all these years. Outside, kids come in and out of the bathroom like waves on a beach. They do bumps of coke, they unstrap their straps, they glitter, they roar, they feel the universe sucking them into orbit. And, floating out there like dust in sunlight, they look back at our perfectly smooth glowing marble of a planet and wonder.

‡ ‡ ‡

W
E SIT IN THE CAR, STARING AT THE SMALL,
shabby house. Overflowing garbage can out front, soaking newspapers and torn candy wrappers in the shrubbery. Flaking paint, rusting metal, crumbling brick, rotting wood, cardboard blocking up windows, torn blinds. It’s perfect. Perfectly sad and pathetic.

“Okay,” I say. “Be quiet and fucking careful, this time. Don’t break anything.”

The others slouch across the deserted street to the house, heels dragging, chins tucked in. There’s no exhilaration this time, I note. They’re just humouring me. You don’t deny a person crazy with grief, they’re thinking. They don’t realize that I’m not crazy with grief, I’m just crazy. That’s how I feel. I feel crazy, like someone born again is crazy, or a person quitting drugs is crazy. The extraordinary people, the people filled with this unexpected, driving, glittering energy that allows them to do a hundred things at once, when before they could hardly get off the couch.

Zijad and Madzid haul the grocery bags. Milk, bread, cereal. A carton of cigarettes. Enough cans to feed a monster family for a month. We work for ten minutes to get into the house without shattering glass, Sava sweating over the window frame, swearing the whole time. She manages to get the frame up in one piece, and slips in silently. We wait, and then she’s at the door, holding her sleeve over her mouth, gagging. The stench inside is dense, opaque. I can’t read it. It has many layers, layers that have chemically bonded to each other, layers that repel each other. A tiny, skinny cat slips between Sava’s legs. Sava looks at me with hard, furious eyes.

“Food in the fridge,” I say. “Cans on the counter. Zijad, stay outside and clean up the yard,”

Zijad bolts off the spongy porch, garbage bag in hand, and Sava and Madzid follow him.

“I’m not going in that house, Andric,” Sava hisses at me. “It’s disgusting.”

“Quiet,” I whisper back. “Don’t be such a baby.” But I let them go. We thought we were tough. This takes real balls. I go in alone.

The hallway and small living room are filled to the ceiling with furniture, sagging boxes, tall piles of paper, magazines, newspapers, books. I can see this in the murky light from a grimy forty-watt bulb hanging on a high wire in the hallway. The kitchen also bulges with stacks of paper, assorted chairs, a three-legged table, two filing cabinets, boxes stained with unidentifiable seepage, empty food cartons, wraps, strewn packaging; there’s only a small clearing around sink, stove, and fridge. The fridge is empty but for a carton of milk, half a bag of bread, ten empty cat-food cans, and green algae-like scum swimming in the vegetable crisper. I take everything out
of the fridge, pour out the sour milk, throw the cans into a garbage bag. Then I look under the sink for cleaners. There are many, neatly congregated, all unopened, and next to them, a shiny red bucket. I fill the bucket, get down on my knees in front of the fridge. The hot water steams beside me, and I realize that this house is not heated, which is a real drag on an April night in Toronto. I scour the inside of the fridge with Ajax, then take the crisper out and let the scum swirl and slither its way down the sink’s crusty drain, releasing a smell like liquid manure.

Zijad, Sava, and Madzid are at the front door.

“Jevrem, get your ass out of there. We’re going.”