Live it Again (11 page)

If Hugh’s mother hadn’t heard him tearing
Gordo’s room apart, she never would’ve come upstairs. She never would’ve gotten
a head start on putting the fire out.

“Get out of the house!” she yelled as
rushed into the room, coughing on the smoke. She was frantically beating away
at the flames with a bed sheet. Hugh ignored her and grabbed a crumple blanket
off the floor to help. In that instant, he realized the fire wasn’t totally out
of control. The posters on the north side wall had been consumed, but besides
that and the sheet in her hands which was now a mass of flames, the fire seemed
to be concentrated around the doorframe where a collage of older comic book
covers had been taped up.

“Drop it Mom! Let it go!” He swatted at her
hands until she let it fall in a ball of yellow and grey smoke. It extinguished
in a few black poofs as she stamped down on it. Hugh covered the remaining
flames with his blanket, effectively smothering the flames instead of fanning
them any further like his mother had been doing. In seconds the last of the
fire was out, the lower pressure outside sucked the heavier smoke through the
screen window.

“I told you to get out of the house,” she
said breathlessly.

Hugh was afraid she was going to have a
heart attack. Her face was deathly pale and coated with sweat. Her hands were
swollen red and streaked with soot. He reached out to her, helped her sit down
in the chair in front of the window. “I-I couldn’t leave you up here alone. You
would’ve…died.”

“What did you do?” Tears streamed down her
cheeks as she traced the line the flames had made. A pile of clothes directly
beneath the window sill had caught first. A three foot wide path of black and
grey ran up the wall to where the first poster had been. Farah was gone. It had
jumped to another picture, the Justice League of America. From there the flames
had dropped down to his drawing desk and leapt up to the door frame, where
thankfully, they had caught it in time.

Hugh watched as she looked back down at her
burnt hands. They sat on her lap, palms up. It looked incredibly painful. “We
have to get those under cold water right away.”

“Were you
smoking
up here?”

“I was--I thought I’d put it out…”

“My God, Hugh, you could’ve burned the
house down.”

Her look of disappointment, that wide-eyed
stare of incomprehensible shock stung him as much as the blisters already
forming on her swollen fingers must have pained her. “I’ve been trying to
quit…I didn’t want you and dad to know yet.”

So much for not trying to alter history.

He could’ve died decades before he was
supposed to, and taken his mother with him. “I’m so sorry, mom.”

“You’re sorry? You make it sound like you’ve
been smoking for years. You’re only thirteen
years old!”

Should I tell her the truth now? No…She’d
probably slap me across the face if I told a whopper like that.

“Well? How long has this been going on?
Have you been stealing from your father?”

“Well maybe just a bit, in the beginning.”
He heard her groan, watched as she rolled her eyes upward. Could he possibly
upset her any further? “I swear mom, I’ll never smoke again…I
swear it
.”

Her next words were like a blow to the gut.

“If you have to smoke, please do it
downstairs in front of the rest of us.”

She’d left him a note once in his first
life when he was fifteen. He’d come home from school and found it on his drawing
desk, next to an empty pack of cigarettes he’d forgotten to throw away. He
remembered it word for word. ‘
If you have to smoke, please do it downstairs
in front of the rest of us. We don’t want you burning the house down.’

History sometimes had a cruel way of
repeating itself, a wicked sense of humor.

“I feel terrible what I did. I know it’s
all my fault, and--

“Of course it’s all your fault! Who else
can you blame it on?”

“I was just so godda-- I was so darned mad
at Gordo for what he did.”

There was a look on her face that made Hugh
feel not all was lost. “What did your brother do this time?” She asked gently.

Hugh picked a few of the ruined comic books
off the floor and handed them to her. He remembered the condition of her hands.
“Sorry.” He spread one open on the bed, slightly embarrassed to show her the pornographic
cartoons, but determined to get Gordo in trouble.

“Gordon did that?” She looked repulsed.

Hugh should’ve felt satisfied, but instead
he felt guiltier. Hadn’t he hurt her enough today? Was it really necessary to
twist the knife further?

I’ve gone too far…again.

“There’s more, mom. I mean there’s more bad
stuff that I did.” It was time for him to clean up his act. “I got so worked up,
that I went into his room and wrecked all his stuff.”

“Oh Hugh,” was all she said. He followed
her into his brother’s room and watched her try to take it all in.

“I know I shouldn’t have done it, I just
kinda lost it after I saw what he did to my comics.”

She stood silently for a full minute, her
eyes distant. Hugh stepped back when she finally spoke. “I want you to go
downstairs and get the broom.”

“Oh, for sure,” he answered quickly. “I’ll
clean the whole thing up myself, even my room. I’ll wash the walls and--,”

“Shut up.”

Hugh shut up. He’d never heard her say that
before.

“Just shut your mouth and listen. Get the
broom and something to sweep this entire mess into. I want it so clean in here
that no one will ever suspect it’s been vandalized.” She paused and looked at a
dark spot on the bed. She sniffed the air and grimaced. “Did you pee on here?”

Hugh nodded and opened the top dresser
drawer. “I went on his shirts too.”

She slapped his face and cried out with the
pain it caused. Hugh remained quiet, his face turned down to the floor. “How
could you be filled with so much hate…over a bunch of comic books?”

He didn’t have an answer for her. He didn’t
have an answer for himself.

“Hurry up, before Gordon and your father
get home. I’ll tell him I took all his awards away as punishment for ruining
your books.” She started downstairs, Hugh followed at a safe distance.

“Won’t you have to give them all back after
a while? What’re you going to say then?”

She stopped halfway down and spun around. “For
Christ’s sake, Hugh! You almost burnt the house down! How am I going to explain
that and all the rest of…of this mess to your father? Let me worry about the
rest later. Throw those dirty shirts away as well, strip his bed down and take
the blankets to the laundry room. I want you to grab fresh sheets and remake
his bed when you’re finished cleaning.”

“Why are you doing this for me, mom? I
should tell everyone the truth.”

“I’m not doing this for you; I’m doing it
for your father. He’s very proud of Gordon’s accomplishments.” Wish I could say
he was proud of yours, her face told him.
“You can explain about the
smoking and the fire, I won’t help you out there.”

She went into the bathroom and turned on
the cold water tap with her elbow. He watched shamefully as the water cascaded
over her red hands. She shuddered with the relief it offered, but started
weeping uncontrollably. What hurt more, he wondered? The burnt skin or the
broken heart?

Hugh left her
there and went to find the broom. Their father had never laid a hand on any of his
children. He hoped this time that he would.

***

His father didn’t hit him, and Hugh quit
smoking once and for all. It was either quit or move into the barn. That was
his choice, and Hugh knew it was no joke. As it turned out, only a small stack
of comic books had been wrecked, less than a dozen in all. The upstairs smelled
of smoke for a couple of weeks, but the rift the missing trophies had caused
between his parents lasted a lot longer. Hugh desperately wanted to tell his
father the truth. His mother stuck to her story however, and he had no choice
but to go along with it. The trophies were gone, and that was the end of that.
Gordo took it out on his brother with more than one beating. Hugh didn’t mind,
in fact he took it like the man he should’ve been.

He had finally got the message. Hugh became
a better kid, a better man, a better person. He quit daydreaming (with great
difficulty) about nailing teenage girls. The love for his daughters, the
longing he felt inside for them overcame the raging hormones.

By the beginning of September, things were
looking up. Hugh started grade seven with a whole new outlook on life. He now
believed history was like a river that flowed through time and space. It ran a
steady, constant course forward. Minute details, small events occurring on any
given day could be altered, and in fact
would
be altered if someone with
prior knowledge tinkered with the flow. All rivers run downstream, but not all
rivers are identical, the flow never constant. There were back eddies, shallow
shores and deep under currents. Rivers ran at different speeds, some travelled
relatively straight while others forked and curved erratically. All Hugh had to
do was stay somewhere in the middle of the stream, mindful of the flash floods
that could alter events drastically, and the droughts and freezes that could
make reliving it all seem so terribly long and boring.

With this new and improved attitude, Hugh
set out to make a difference in the lives of those around him. He would center
less on himself, and concentrate on helping others where he knew he could.

Hugh set out to save the life of Herbert
McDonald. The story went that Thomas Nelson had murdered Mrs. McDonald’s
husband in the fall of 1977. It had never been proven, and the authorities hadn’t
even bothered to investigate the possibility. All the evidence suggested it had
been a suicide, and contrary to the coffee shop gossip, that’s where the case
ended. Mr. McDonald’s pharmaceutical business had failed, as had his marriage,
and in an act of despair the fifty-four-year old had stepped off the edge of a
bridge, into a pile of discarded railway ties and boulders a hundred and fifty
feet below.

Or had he?

Hugh believed there was more truth in the
stories told around town than in any police reports. He was determined to stop
the murder from taking place, and if he ended up looking like a hero in the
process, that would be okay too. Besides, where would he buy his comic books if
the pharmacy shut down?

He would need help.

Hugh ran to catch up to Bob Richards after
school on Friday, September the 9
^th
. “Hey Bob, ol’ buddy, wait up! What’re
you doing this weekend?”

Bob stopped on the sidewalk and waited for
his friend. “Not much, might go see that new Star Wars movie tomorrow night.”
The movie had been out for months, but little towns like Braedon didn’t get new
releases until they were anything but new.

Hugh laughed. “Wait for the DVD, I got a
better idea.”

“DVD?”

“I was thinking of camping out near the old
train bridge.”

“Been awhile since we went camping,” Bob
said. The two had been in Boy Scouts and had done their fair share of sleeping
under the stars. “I guess I could see the movie next weekend. You wanna head
out this evening and make it a two-nighter?”

Hugh didn’t even want to go for one night.
He’d come to detest sleeping outdoors after having to do it so many times with
his own children. “Nah, I’ve got some other stuff to do tonight. I thought we
could set out first thing in the morning. Besides, it gets pretty chilly this
time of year. Probably wouldn’t want to do more than one night anyway.”

Bob’s eyes began to gleam. “Maybe I could
sneak Rhonda along too.”

“No frickin’ girls, Bob, guys only.”

“You gonna try and take advantage of me?”

“Very funny. Billy’s coming too.”

“Threesome?”

“Quit being an asshole. You wanna come or
not?”

“Yeah, sure I’ll come,” Bob said with a
laugh. He hit Hugh in the shoulder a little too hard. “Maybe I’ll even steal a
bottle of the old man’s rye. We could get good and hammered.”

“When did you start drinking?”

“It’s nothing major, me and my brother like
to have a few shots now and then, you know, just for kicks.”

Hugh was still rubbing his sore shoulder. “Whatever
turns your crank, but no cigarettes.”

“The Three Stooges. We’ll have a blast.”

He didn’t want to take Bob at all. He’d grown
to dislike him even more in this second life. But his strength and speed may be
needed, Hugh figured. He didn’t want to face what was to come with only the
asthmatic Billy Parton at his side.

“Yeah, a real blast.”

Murder, as they would all soon learn, can
be a very complicated business.

It rained most of Saturday morning, and
Hugh had worried they’d have to cancel their adventure. Fortunately, the clouds
cleared in early afternoon, and shortly after four, Hugh’s dad dropped the
three boys off a few miles outside the southwest end of town. They hiked the
next two and a half miles down into a scenic valley where the Braedon River
meandered its way into the larger Assiniboine River. The sun was warm on their
faces but the air was cool, everything around them was a carpet of damp orange,
brown, and grey.

“I should’ve stayed home,” Billy whined. He
wiped his runny nose clean on the sleeve of his jacket. “How the hell are we
ever gonna get a fire started in this crap?”

“Where there’s a will,” Hugh answered
holding up a small mason jar half-filled with diesel. His first instinct would’ve
been to sneak the fuel, but he’d been honest with his father and asked
permission. He wanted to prove he could be trusted again when it came to fire.
His father had agreed, warily. But instead of gasoline as Hugh had intended,
his father told him it had to be diesel fuel. It wasn’t near as flammable.

“And if that doesn’t work, this will.” Bob
produced an uncracked, forty ounce bottle of Jack Daniels from his backpack.

Hugh wanted to say what a fine sipping
whiskey it was. He kept quiet instead, and led the little group further on. They
met up with the Assiniboine, a muddy, roiling brute, four times the width of
the Braedon. Onwards the three walked, cracking jokes and talking about girls
until a sharp turn to the northwest revealed the expansive structure off in the
distance.

It was a mass of black iron girders held up
across the half-mile wide valley by a dozen main supports. The Assiniboine, as
big a river as you would find on the prairies, looked like a stream running two
hundred feet beneath.

“Now
that’s
a fucking bridge,” Billy
said.

Hugh grinned at his friend. “You’ve seen it
before.”

“Yeah, but still…I haven’t been out here in
years. You know how things appear bigger when you’re a little kid? That thing
looks even bigger. We should do this more often.”

Bob shook the stolen liquor at him. “You
wanted to go home a little while ago. I’ll give the first one who climbs all
the way to the top the first chug. Deal?”

Hugh had no desire to drink anything but
hot chocolate. And there was no way in hell he was climbing the bridge. It was
another promise he’d made willingly to his father.

“I forgot to bring my inhaler,” Billy
offered.

“It’s not Mount Everest, nimrod. You won’t
need oxygen.”

Hugh had the sudden urge to smack Bob’s
face in with the square end of the whiskey bottle.

Arrogant little shit. I’d like to see
how funny he is with most of his teeth knocked out.

Billy shook his head adamantly. “No way,
nada, ain’t gonna happen.”

Hugh threw the tent bag onto the ground. “We’ll
set up camp here.”

“But we’re still a mile from the bridge,”
Bob complained. “I thought we were going to set up right beneath it.”

Hugh had planned for this. If they camped
too close to the bridge, old man Nelson would surely spot them when the time
came. He probably wouldn’t even try to push Mr. McDonald off the edge if he
knew someone was below. That would have been the best course of action, but
Hugh wanted to know what had actually happened on that fateful day. Had there
been a murder, or had it been suicide? What if it had just been an accident? A
simple misstep, a shoe caught beneath a rail?

I’m not here to witness it; I’m here to
prevent it.

“Right here,” he repeated, and pointed to
the ridge they’d just hiked around. “That hill will shelter us a bit from the
wind. We can check out the bridge tomorrow.”

Billy nodded enthusiastically this time.

“Whatever,” Bob said. He took a long swig
from the bottle and tried his best not to wince afterward. “Guess the first
shot’s for me.”

Within fifteen minutes Hugh and Billy had
successfully put up the tent, Bob had scrounged a few armloads of semi-dry wood
and doused a good sized pile of it with most of the diesel. He lit a match to
it and jumped back. Blue flame flickered slowly and then the whole thing caught
on, throwing up a cloud of black smoke.

“Easier than doing it the old fashioned
way, but man does that stink,” Bob said, waving the air in front of his face.
He sat back on a half-rotted tree trunk and took a second, smaller sip from the
bottle. “You fellas care to join me now?”

“Maybe you should slow down on that,” Hugh
said. He wanted Bob to remain at his clear-headed, athletic best. He wouldn’t
be any good to them if he was puking sick the next day.

Billy spread an old, patched blanket on the
ground and stretched out comfortably in front of the fire. He motioned for Bob
to hand him the bottle. He took a swig and coughed. “What’s up with you these
days, Hugh?” He finally managed to ask. “You’re always so serious…you never
want to have any fun.”

“The campout was my idea, wasn’t it?”

“You know what I mean,” he offered him the
bottle. “The last few months you’ve become a real goody-two-shoes. You don’t
drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t even talk about girls that much.”

Hugh grabbed the bottle and was sorely
tempted to pour the rest out onto the ground. “Just listen to the two of you!
You’re thirteen years old! Why do you need to be involved with all that crap at
your age?” He sounded like a lecturing adult, but he couldn’t help himself. He
wished he was still ten years old. All kids cared about at that age were
playing and candy. Teenagers were a confused jumble of hormones, sensitive ego,
and mindless rebellion. He’d had enough of it to last three or four lifetimes.
And then there were his teenage children to think about. Did boys think about
his daughters like that? Was Colton pounding back stolen booze with his friends
somewhere in the future? Mourning the death of his father?

Oh, to hell with it.

He took three long swallows from the
bottle. The other boys stared at him with wide-eyed expectation. Where was the
red face? Where was the coughing fit? Hugh smiled coolly. The liquor burned
through his chest, but he knew how to drink and he wasn’t about to give these
two grinning idiots the satisfaction of seeing him hurt.

“Holy shit!” Bob finally said taking the
bottle from him and tucking it into his backpack. “Maybe I
should
save
some for tonight.”

Hugh was grateful to see it put away. If
the two spaced out the remainder over the next twelve hours or so, it wouldn’t
create much of a problem. “Sorry for snapping like that, guys. I just don’t see
any good reason to get totally shit-faced. What do we even need that stuff for?”

Billy rolled his eyes. “What do you wanna
do next? Play hide and seek?”

Hide and seek had been his first taste of
this second life. The next time they played it, the stakes would be much
higher. “How about a good ghost story?”

“Gotta wait for it to get dark before that,”
Bob pointed out.

Hugh looked at the sun hanging low in the
sky, fat, orange, and oblong. It would sink below the horizon in a few more
minutes. “It’s close enough, besides, this one may take some time to tell.”

Billy threw a few more damp sticks to the
fire and settled back onto his blanket. “This should be good.”

“It’s a story about a guy who lives in the
year 2011 that travels back in time.”

“So what’s 2011 like?” Billy asked. “They
got an outpost on the moon yet? Any cities on Mars?”

“This sounds more like science fiction,”
said Bob. “I should’ve stayed in Braedon and gone to that movie.”

“There are no outposts, there are no cities,
and it’s not science fiction. There’s not enough goddamned money in the future
to get off the planet’s surface anymore.”

Billy shook his head. “Not enough money? How
did this guy afford to build a time machine?”

“Who said anything about a time machine? It’s
just a story for fuck’s sake! Now would you both shut up and listen?”

Billy winked at Bob, but remained quiet.

“Alright then, this guy from 2011 travels
back to the past…not in any kind of machine, but he’s guided by some kind of
alien presence he can’t see.”

“I’ve heard of alien abduction stories like
this,” said Bob from his log.

“Well this ain’t one of those stories. This
guy, we’ll call him Hank, he gets himself killed in a car crash and ends up in
this place he’s never seen before.”

Billy’s grin is gone. “Heaven?”

“No, not heaven--and not hell either. He’s
not sure where he is. There’s nothing around he identify with, just this thick
brown air.”

“It’s gotta be the inside of their
spaceship,” Bob said.

“Not a spaceship.”

What if it was a spaceship? How the hell
would I’ve known?

Hugh shook his head and continued.
“It’s
just some nameless void, you know, like where dead people go to wait and see
where they’re supposed to end up.”

Billy sat up and crossed his legs. He
leaned forward, his hands cupped under his chin. “Sounds like purgatory.”

“No, I think purgatory is more like hell…he’s
more in limbo than anything.”

“Limbo’s a place?” Bob asked. “I thought it
was a dance.”

“It’s both, okay? Anyway, this voice starts
speaking to him. It offers him a choice. Hank can either drift off into the
ever after, or he can live his life over again, knowing everything he knows,
beginning at ten years old.”

Billy started to stir the fire up with a
long stick. “I’d definitely take the second chance. Holy shit, can you imagine
the fun you’d have if you knew what was gonna happen next?”

Hugh nodded and studied his friend
sympathetically.

You wouldn’t want to know everything.

“Well Hank took that second chance and
ended back up in the past. Trouble was though, he was a forty-something-year-old
in a ten-year-old body. This is where the story gets interesting. You see, Hank
starts screwing things up, messes things up real bad. He starts getting into
bad shit that only older people get into. People start to change because of it,
and some things that are supposed to happen, never happen at all.”

“I’d kill Hitler if I went back to the
past,” Bob said.

“You’d try and bang every chick in junior
high first,” Billy laughed. “No wait, that’s what you’re trying to do now!”

“What do mean, trying? I’m halfway through
already.”

Hugh’s patience was running thin. “Hank
never went back to the forties, and even if he did, how the hell would he get
over to Europe and kill Hitler?” The boys nodded and let him continue. “Poor
old Hank tries to stop all the bad shit, he begins to lead a normal, quiet
life, but things still keep changing. He begins to wonder if he’ll ever catch
up to his old life, if he’ll ever meet the woman he’s meant to marry, and have
the kids he’s supposed to have.”

Bob stood up and rubbed his rear end with
both hands where it was beginning to fall asleep. “Yeah, but who cares? He’ll
just meet someone else, and if he’s smart, she’ll be hotter than his first
wife. And if he’s a real genius, he won’t even bother having any kids.”

The three boys debated for another half hour
over Hank’s dilemma. The sun had set and the sky was a brilliant orange
streaked with purple in the west when Billy finally asked, “So how does this
become a ghost story? Does Hank die again?”

“I think I get it,” Bob said. “You see,
Hank never really went back to the past. He died in the car crash and he stayed
dead. The rest, well the rest was just a dream.”

The thought made Hugh feel sick. It was one
he’d had many times before. Was his mangled body still burning under the wreck
of a fuel tanker on a cold, ice-covered highway? If a dummy like Bob could pick
up on the idea so quickly…

The voice in the brown told me there was
no such place as hell. What the hell did it know?

Hugh looked up at the first dim stars and
wondered where and when he was.

“So is that the end of the story?” Billy
asked. “
Was
Hank just a ghost after all?”

“Sure, why not? It’s as good an ending as
any other.” He went over to Bob’s backpack. “Where’s the rest of that whiskey?
I feel like getting drunk.”

Bob clapped him on the back. “That’s the
spirit!” He helped fish it out and over the next few hours, the boys finished
it off. They told more ghost stories, roasted wieners and marshmallows, sang
dirty songs, and finally the conversation led back to girls. They finally went
to sleep after one in the morning.

Hugh staggered out of the fart-ridden tent
less than an hour later. He only managed four wobbly steps before falling to
his knees. He heaved twice, and on the third try brought up his half-digested
hotdogs. He vomited half a dozen more times until there was nothing left to
come out, and then he dry-heaved a little while longer. He toppled over onto
the damp ground and decided to spend the remainder of the night there.