Little Bastards in Springtime (36 page)

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W
OUNDED BELLY BOY IS CROUCHING NEXT TO
my bed, at the very top where my pillow is. I walk silently toward him, my hair wet from the morning shower, and see that he’s got my roll of bills in his hand, that he’s fished
it out from under my mattress, that his trembling fingers are trying to work the elastic off. I know that I am going to kill this skinny, shivering, squinting boy who is challenging me so pathetically, right out in the open, that I am going to enjoy it because I’ve caught him red-handed disrespecting me. Barefoot, silent, I slide up close and stand behind him for a few seconds until he feels my heat. He turns, flinches, then covers his face with his arm and squeezes his eyes shut like someone who knows the drill. I say, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” and throw my granite fist at his temple, but right in that moment, when my bone hits his bone, I have a realization. He knows the drill, that’s the deal. I’m his tormenter and he wants my attention, that’s how it works when that’s all the attention you can get. Well, he’s got my attention, he invites my fist against his temple, he doesn’t care about money, he doesn’t care about getting hurt, he doesn’t care about crawling in the dust. So I hit him again in the mouth, just to be polite and give him what he needs. He crumples, he moans, he curls into a ball at the foot of my bed and lies there without saying a word.

“Who sent you?” I say, to give him some shred of dignity. “Is it those ridiculous brothers of yours, your so-called gang? Are they trying to send a message?”

He nods his head, then shakes his head.

“Yes, no? Which is it, you fuck?”

He just lies there, cringing, shivering, waiting for more blows, hoping they never stop. Contempt is lava through my veins, scalding my tissues. I could keep hitting his pathetic, sorry face forever like all the billions of downtrodden losers in the world and their contemptuous overlords and he’d never stop me, he’d not even try. This makes me want to smack him harder, that’s how this works. Then I remember what I’ve
learned about reacting like an idiot to every little thing even when I know the real reason why those little things are happening. I’m playing a role, and this boy is playing his. But we could stop it, we could just fucking play some other game, there are so many to choose from.

“Who sent you?” I say again.

“Not the gang,” he whispers, his head turned away, eyes staring up at the ceiling.

“I know,” I say, stepping back, sighing, “you’re here just to say hi,” and the world swings on its axis and what was down is now up. It’s quite easy to do the opposite of what you always do, if you take a moment to think. So I kneel beside him, take his bloody face in my lap, wrap my arms around his head, hug it tight, very tight, and I put my hand on his forehead and I kiss his temple, and that’s just how it is.

“My name is Eddie,” he says.

He gets up and I get up and we look at each other for a moment, really look.

“Eddie,” I say. “I’m Jevrem.”

The other crazy boys come into the room and see us, eyes locked, and shout, “Fight, fight, fight,” with taunts and gestures, performing for each other, and Wounded Belly Boy ducks and turns and runs from the room. “Faggot,” they cry after him, and laugh. “Fucking loser, cocksucker.”

D
R. GHORBANI
sits behind her small desk like a sprinter waiting for the gun, she has that kind of energy. She writes something down on her notepad. Her fingers drum the desk. I sit back in the chair and study the empty patch of blue sky that the small, high window reveals.

“I’ve taken note, Jevrem, that you’re on strike,” she sighs, shifts in her chair. “But you know, your story is more common than you think. No human calamity in history is inevitable; it happens because not enough people prevent it from happening, and this is going on all around the world. So, instead of feeling sorry for yourself, put your energy into preventing the next calamity. That will provide enough meaning and direction to last you a lifetime, starting right here with the programs we offer. It’s really that simple.”

I sit there with stinging cheek, my ears ringing. I realize I’ve just been slapped in the face without the use of hands, and I’m shocked, I didn’t see it coming. I squeeze my head between my palms, I breathe like a boxer. Then I finally look Dr. Ghorbani right in the eyes and say something.

“Stop feeling sorry for myself?” I say to her. “That’s what you have for me?”

“Yes, Jevrem. That’s it, in essence, distilled. It’s not complicated, but it changes everything. We can go the long way round with hours of talking and analyzing, but you’ve made it clear that you don’t want that. You want someone to tell you the way it is, not feed you lines, so I will.”

I’m about to feel furious at this woman who is sitting so pretty on the other side of the desk where it’s easy to talk about shit in the world, when it hits me once again, the exact same thought as this morning with Wounded Belly Boy Eddie, exactly what she’s trying to tell me about myself. I’m a dog that barks pointlessly at every freaking little leaf that rustles in the grass. And as I’m thinking about this, another thought flashes into my mind: she has an Iranian name. I know because they came flooding into Sarajevo during the war, Muslim brotherhood, Islamic solidarity, with weapons and fire in their eyes,
and all of that. She’s been through it all too, that’s what she’s telling me with her eyes. She lived through civil war too. I suddenly see why she’s kept going with me even though I’ve been a total fucking sullen asshole. She’s had her own fascists and crazies who ruined everything just at the moment when everything was possible.

She’s on a roll. “Your cynicism is not unique.”

She’s decided to change tactics with me, make me feel like we share something, and it’s working. If I weren’t leaving this place in a matter of days, I might even let her know a thing or two that’s on my mind about heroes and villains.

“Many of us in the field know that this system of detention is lousy. I disagree with a lot about it. It causes additional trauma and it’s not set up to bring about healing. Why lock up society’s disaffected, abused, poor, broken, marginalized, neglected, addicted, ill, which is the bulk of the prison population? It’s only different in degree from all the other repressive systems of incarceration in the world, where they round up dissenting voices as well. That’s why I’m here, Jevrem. To study it. I’m doing research, I’m here for a reason. I know what my role is in society. What will your role be?”

Dr. Ghorbani squints her eyes. She’s scrutinizing my soul to see how many of her words have sunk in.

I
CARRY
my tray to a table. The plate is piled high with mush. Powdered potato mush, canned pea mush, stringy chicken-leg mush. And a carton of milk. I don’t look at the others sitting there, I don’t care who sits where. I create space with my legs, with my elbows, I force myself in, and no one says a word because I’m the man, that’s how it is in a place like this. I turn and
signal Wounded Belly Boy Eddie, hanging off the end of a bench at a back table, allowed only six inches for his meal. “Hey, Eddie,” I yell. He looks up, sees me, raises his eyebrows, gets up, walks over, and then he’s standing behind me. “Make some space,” I say, and the crazy boys do, and Eddie sits down beside me, hunches over, and directs his eyes at his bleeding fingernails. The crazy boys continue to slurp, burp, shout insults, snigger at nothing. They shovel food in their mouths, I shovel food in my mouth, Eddie shovels food in his mouth, and we all know what’s just happened. Power has shifted. Eddie is with me now, inside and outside, he’s going to make it, he’s going to survive, that’s how it works because I’m the man and I’ve decided. But it doesn’t make me happy. This isn’t a moment to feel warm and fuzzy about, this fucked-up way that people stay safe, this game of thugs, all over the world. It’s how wars start, and I’m sick of it, I’m done. Goodbye, everyone, I think, I’m moving on, in the simplest way I can think of, after thinking of all the complicated ways. Minimum security is the clue. A fence, a few guards slouching around, lots of distractions. I’m not playing warlords anymore

After lunch, we trudge through the door one after the other. Outside, the sky has cracked open, the sun is everywhere. The crazy boys turn their faces to the south. They blink, they joke, they do their deals, they look at the trees beyond the fence with veiled eyes. Maybe they have springtime memories of longer days, open jackets, curbside games, loitering twilights, but they don’t show it. Their eyes reveal no regret, no yearning, nothing to show their captors their souls are still alive.

Half an hour goes by, then I move like I know how to move. No thinking, just acting in the here and now, calculating, manoeuvring, hunting the goal like a predator. In this moment, in
the middle of this afternoon, I’m as alert, pumped, primed, high as all those times before when I was young, running from snipers, running from cops. I just go for it, ploughing into a huge Jamaican posse boy with rasta hair, ploughing into him, saying, sorry, this dude pushed me, and I point to a giant Indian crazy boy with missing teeth and bulbous muscles. Like in the movies, they challenge each other, chests out, chins up, moving slowly as mud, throwing ugly stares, and the guards turn their heads, make grim faces, saunter over. And I, skinny boy from Bosnia, back up, sit on the table, move to the wall, skulk behind a huddle of boys, slip around the corner, crouch next to the electrical box, run to the fence and just climb it.

I pull myself over lightning-fast, clothes tearing, skin slicing, like I used to go through windows in the old days, like I used to whip through houses to get to doors to make it to the car with the cops four minutes away, no hesitation, no looking back, my body like an animal knowing what it must do to get what it needs to survive on this earth. I am over the fence and running so fast I don’t feel the ground at all, just a strong breeze against my scalp and blood pounding in my eyeballs. Now it is me and time bartering for a good deal. I think of snipers and I think of a million shells raining down on my head and I turn into an Olympic sprinter to cover the open ground and soon I’m in the trees, I am crashing through the forest like a deranged bear, panting, spit flying, thinking of nothing but moving forward. Then I slow down, stop, listen. There is silence, but this doesn’t make me safe.

I don’t know where I am exactly except that it’s near a small town north of Toronto. I start walking fast and lightly through the forest, thinking about police dogs and heat-sensing helicopters, which they probably wouldn’t waste on a skinny-assed
refugee kid like me, but I don’t know that for sure. What I want is a road, and a truck driving to the other end of the country. Soon I’m standing at the edge of someone’s backyard. I see an empty pool, a large house, acres of lawn. And beyond that a country road. There is nothing to do but just walk out of the forest toward the road, and I do, feeling like a giant bull’s eye, a clear shot for a thousand sharpshooters. My shoulders hunch, my fists clench, but I don’t run, I walk, and then I’m on the road watching cars and trucks go by. Cars with moms and kids in them, old men out to buy a litre of milk, ordinary folk going about their ordinary day. And small local trucks, guys driving home from fixing a toilet or sealing a foundation. And I wonder what kind of man would pick me up with my detention clothes, my flushed face, my sweaty hair, my black eyes and hungry mouth. A decent man, I think, who will call the cops, or a crazy man who’ll fuck me up, that’s what kind of man. So I cancel the plan to catch a ride in broad daylight. I don’t stick out my thumb, I don’t wave a truck down, I dive into the nearest culvert when the road is clear, I cover myself with rotting cardboard and last year’s leaves. I coil up into a tight ball and lie as still as I can with my blood crashing through my veins.

For hours there is nothing but graveyard cold, heartbeats, pulses, breathing, blinking, twitching. Centuries go by while I think of dogs on the prowl, sniffing through the forest, of police on the hunt, probing my people, my places. I think of Mama’s face, its lines and creases, its glow when she’s happy; I think of the Bastards, their musty rooms, their cagey, clever ways; I think of Sava like I always do and wish she were lying next to me like she always did, how she’d love this, how she’d challenge a hundred police forces to catch us, how she’d know exactly what to do next. I wait for Papa to show up, but he’s not
close by anymore, he’s still floating down the river of the past that Mama and Leo the French dude put him on. I want him to lean into the culvert, to whistle, to chuckle, I want him to say,
interesting place to find yourself, Jevrem, in a dank culvert in the countryside outside a small Ontario town on the Canadian Shield, it’s definitely a long way from the Jerusalem of Europe, maybe as far away as a person can get.
I pray for sleep so Dušan can grab my hand and lead me to a safe-house that he knows about, a bunker or trench, where we can lie side by side smoking and talking about things, all kinds of things. That would kill quite a bit of time while we wait for the darkness to come.

But finally darkness comes without anyone’s help, and I’m out, standing in the infinite night, inhaling the black fresh air, clear and sweet as water in a desert, observing the car lights sweeping the road, listening to the trees having conversations with the wind. The wet ground, the chattering branches, the dark blue fog, the road leading to the horizon, they’re all welcoming me to a world without walls, doors, locks, basements, streets, rules, bullshit, stuff, conflict, outrage. I turn in one direction rather than the other, and I start walking.

I
FOLLOW
the road until I meet another, bigger road. It has two lanes with wide gravel shoulders and ploughed fields on either side. I turn right, hoping it’s south, toward the Trans-Canada Highway and thousands of miles east and west. It takes me two hours to get to the nearest gas station, me fading into every tree along the way when car lights appear. At the gas station, I avoid the pumps, their blinding lights, their crisp red and white markings. I avoid the kiosk, its stoned attendant and tinny music. I have no cash, anyway, to buy cigarettes, coffee, chocolate, I left it
all with Wounded Belly Boy Eddie to buy more important stuff. Friends, for example. Security. The chance to make it through. Instead, I walk along the row of transport trucks parked on the murky off-ramp to the highway. I sit behind a tree, staring at my knees, getting ready to spring into action, my stomach knuckling into a fist, my head itching with foreshadowed triumph. Then I hear the sound of an engine revving, a truck coming to life, slowly, light by light. I hear it sigh and suck air and fart toxins out its fat exhaust pipe. I stand, stretch, look around. There it is at the head of the pack, creaking into movement, beginning to roll, and suddenly I’m a rodent scampering madly in the tall grass, then I’m a blind man plastered to the truck’s back end, scrabbling and clutching and tapping its hooks and handles, anything for a solid grip. It takes four minutes for the truck to pick up enough speed to kill me if I fall.