Milk Chicken Bomb (26 page)

Jesus Christ, she says after a while.

I can, well, I can go, if –

No, she says. She frowns and sighs. Some scared little boy will be around any given corner in this stupid town. Stay there.

She rolls her shoulders forward, pulls off her jacket. I try not to stare. She stops and looks at me. I fidget with the comic book and look over at the wall. She watches me and takes off her jacket.

Do you come down here a lot?

I usually go out to the equipment shed, she says. At the end of the playground. Where they keep the lawnmower. I get left alone. But it's too cold out there now.

My stomach feels real tight. Like getting on a ride at the Calgary Stampede. Something that swings way out high in the air, and what if your little seat snaps off and you shoot out into the sky?

How old are you?

I'm ten.

Ten, she says. I was ten.

I guess you'll kill Dave Steadman today, huh?

She watches me. In a few more days. During hockey practice, I think, in front of his friends. I need his face all wrecked still on Christmas Day.

What did he say to you?

She smiles. I've never seen Jenny Tierney smile like that. If I told you, you'd know, she says.

But it must have been pretty bad.

She thinks about it. Then she isn't smiling anymore. You're probably right, she says. I'd probably better just kill him today.

I fidget with the comic book. We sit under the stairwell. Far away the bell rings, feet hurry all over.

Jenny Tierney is skinny, skinny shoulders, red elbows. Her black T-shirt worn out around the hems, a few holes around the waist. She leans against the back of the stairwell, her jacket beside her in a pile, her long arms loose beside her. A few red patches on her face, behind her long black hair hanging in her eyes. Jenny Tierney is skinnier than I thought, right here up close to her. I can smell her damp cotton socks, nicotine.

Are you scared of me?

No, I say.

She leans forward. She crawls toward me and I back up and she pushes me down. She climbs on top of me. She grabs my wrists and holds them up above my head, she covers my mouth with her other hand. Heavy on my chest, her thighs tight around the sides of my chest. My breath is hot and wet against her palm, like the inside of a scarf in winter.

Scared little boys, she says. Scared little boys everywhere. She holds me down. I stare up at her, her black hair hangs down between us.

There's more and more of them, the older you get, she says. Scared little boys, with trucks and scraggly moustaches, that suck on your tongue, that try and put their fingers in your panties. That can't undo a bra. She watches me. I try to breathe slowly. More scared little boys, she says. But I was ten once.

She shifts her weight, her hips, on my chest. Holds me down on the ground. I stare up at her. Far away there's fewer and fewer feet, and then quiet.

You'll think about me more and more, she says, the older you get. You don't know yet, but you will. Someday you'll think about me, and you'll realize what I meant. And you'll always wish you had right now back. She takes her hand off my mouth. She lets go of my hands and leans back, me stuck underneath. She's careful when she stands up not to hit her head on the bottom of the stairs. She gets her coat and disappears. I listen to her feet, far away, back up there.

I lie in the dark where she left me. Damp and sweaty where she was heavy on top of me.

The last bell rings and all the Dead Kids put their duotangs and textbooks back into their bins. All the kids push in their chairs and some of them wave to Mrs. Lampman on the way out the door. We get our coats down off our hooks, we take off our inside shoes and put on our winter boots. The hallway is dark and wet, wet from soggy jackets, from mitts and scarves all full of snow, from wet boots.

Town kids all head out the door, friends who live together walking together, and country kids all head over to the bus loop, where the big yellow school buses sit and idle, the drivers reading the newspaper or listening to the radio. You never know how long they've been sitting there, waiting to fill up with kids. Some country kids have to wait quite a while before their bus shows up.

I stand in the hallway getting ready to head outside. Christmas vacation, two weeks no school. Two weeks to see Mullen every day and do whatever I want.

Dave Steadman puts on his shiny ski jacket, all neon blue and fluorescent yellow; he pulls on his white boots and picks up his backpack and starts up the hallway. He stops at the water fountain and has a long slurp. He wipes his mouth, then thinks about it, pushes open the washroom door and goes inside.

Jenny Tierney comes from around the corner, just walks right up to the boys' washroom door, and she sees me standing there, and winks, and waves, and says, See you some other time, kid, and pushes open the washroom door. Pushes it open with her brown-paper-wrapped math textbook and goes inside. And then the noise starts.

McClaghan comes up the sidewalk, shuffling like he does. In one hand, a wooden stake, with a big, flat sign. A mallet in the other. Mullen and I see him and run up onto the porch, we crouch behind the snow–covered lawn chairs and peek around.

McClaghan stops on Deke's lawn. He grunts and hammers the sign into the snow. He slips, knocks down a corner. Swears to himself. He hammers the sign into the cold ground with his mallet and spits on the ground and walks back up the street.

FOR RENT, says the sign, dog–eared like a library book. Mullen whistles. We crouch behind the lawn chairs and watch McClaghan, not really moving his knees, shuffle away.

The door is locked. I push on the window and it opens up, just like the other day. I wait for a while, trying not to breathe too loudly. The house is dark and quiet. I wait, on the porch, in the snow, under the white moon. Then I pull my backpack off and push it through the window. Let it drop down onto the floor, to thump in the empty house. But the light doesn't come on and he doesn't come out into the kitchen. So I pull myself up, over the window sill, and drop down inside.

The kitchen is just the way we left it the other day, me and Stullus and the accountant. The same overflowing garbage bags, the same muddy footprints all over the floor. I unzip my backpack. Pull out my heavy black flashlight. I don't turn it on, though. I wait until my eyes have adjusted to the dark, hitch up my backback, head inside, careful about the sound of my boots.

The light is on, down in the cellar. I stand at the top of the stairs and crouch down to try and get a look down there. Hey, Deke, I say. Not too loudly. I lean in a bit and cup a hand around my mouth. Hey, Deke. Are you down there? Don't shoot me, okay? I crouch at the top of the stairs and wait. If he's down there, he doesn't say anything. I head down the stairs, careful not to creak too much.

I can't tell if the heaps of dirt and gravel have gotten bigger, down in the cellar, around the dark mouth of the tunnel. I walk up to the entrance. The dark swims around in front of my face. The dark swirls like a snowstorm. I reach my hand out into the opening, stretching out fingers, pushing into the black. I feel dizzy. My throat catches and I have to
lean back and take a few deep breaths. The dark swimming around my face.

I think about Vaslav's mustard. Lucky mustard, I say to myself. We made lucky mustard, first–snow mustard, so everything will be fine. I flick on the flashlight. The dark hisses and pushes back, spinning and swirling, back into the cracks and rough patches in the dirt tunnel walls, the craggy sides, the wooden supports. I wave the beam down the tunnel and step in.

You can see the shovel marks in the dirt walls, the flat cuts into the earth. Sometimes rocks and hairy tree roots stick out of the hard dirt. Up ahead there's a pipe jutted out from the side, the iron flaking off in red metal scabs. The crooked ground runs up and down, covered in loose gravel and clumps of dirt – it gets really steep in places. My boots catch in little nicks and cuts. Sometimes I need to heave myself up over ridges, rocky steps that he couldn't dig through. Sometimes I need both hands and have to set the flashlight down. The tunnel twists around, leaning in different directions to go around chunks of concrete, roots, boulders – anything that couldn't be dug through or cut out.

The tunnel gets wider. The floor evens out. More wooden braces hold up the roof, different than the four–by–eights behind me. These are old and thick, soaked in green wood preservative. Rusty nails poking out here and there, rusty bolts. Wooden beams frame a black doorway that leads down another tunnel.

I stop and think really hard about how far I've walked already. I try to remember all the turns. I think about the alley up there, about walking down the alley and how many different backyards and garages there are, how many garbage cans and latched gates. I shine the flashlight around. I keep walking. Sometimes the ceiling comes down, and I have to duck my head. If I were a grown–up I'd have a hard time fitting down here. I try to imagine stabbing into the walls with a
shovel, or trying to swing a pick, down here in the tight space. I walk past more side openings – they look rough, a few of them just cutting a few feet into the tunnel wall and then stopping. I have to hold my breath and run a little every time I go by one.

It's so quiet. There isn't anything at all to listen to. Up there you hear stuff all the time: classroom fluorescent lights, cars idling, furnaces,
TVS
, ringing telephones, and sometimes, way off in the distance, train whistles, going wherever it is they go. Down here it's just quiet. Nothing to listen to. Nothing you can even try and listen to. Like up above me the whole town just blew away in a stiff wind.

The tunnel opens up again, and the floor gets flat enough that I can walk pretty quickly. I walk quite a ways, underground, in the dark. I see an old dusty lantern hanging off one of the braces, like you see in antique shops. The dirty glass all cracked and full inside with spiderwebs.

Then I hear the sound: heavy clanking, metal hammering into something, echoing down the tunnel.

I run, stumbling on the rough floor, the flashlight beam skipping back and forth in front of me, throwing dirt corners and shadows into a jumble. I can feel that damp, wet dark breathing on the back of my neck. I run and run with the old wooden braces whipping past, all sickly green and bent.

There's a split in the tunnel and I run up the other way, through a round passage. The tunnel gets tight and heads up. I'm sure it's going up. I pant and creep forward, following the flashlight.

A mouldy, tattered old blanket stretches across the front of the tunnel. I stop. I can hear the dark, hissing and rushing behind me. I hold my breath and push on the blanket. Push it aside and step through, wincing when the dusty, oily cloth touches me.

Red coils glow down on a concrete floor. Hot red elements glowing and lighting up the shapes in the room. An old hot–
water tank stands on a square of plywood. Pink insulation peels down from wall studs. Pipes hang from the ceiling, thick with tinfoil, pinched in bands with masking tape.

And there in the middle, a metal box. Pipes coiling down around it. A pale blue pilot light flickers underneath it.

Somewhere behind me I hear the clanking sound. I let go of the old blanket and creep across the room. I creep through an open doorway.

The room is full. I run my flashlight around and everywhere shapes jump out in the light: jagged, rough things, horns and springs, antlers, yellow smudges, metal fingers. I turn around and shine the flashlight around and stinging light stabs out into my eyes. I see hooks and claws and iron bars, jagged bones and spines, wires, beaks. There's no way out. I'm surrounded, boxed in by spikes and saws, tearing, chewing. I put my hand over the flashlight. The light squeezes out, just a red glow that spills out from between my fingers. The shapes all push back into the dark. I try to make my breathing slow down. Lucky mustard. I wait, wait for all those hooks and fingers and teeth to jump out of the dark. But they don't. I wait, shoulder tight, eyes squeezed shut. I don't get torn to pieces, alone in the dark.

I sit down on the concrete. I hear the clanking – I think it's getting further away. The dark pushes in and out at the corners of the room.

I have to stay somewhere. I'm not going back into the tunnel, and I'm not going back up, so this is it, I guess. I try not to look up at the walls. If I'd waited till later to come down here, the sun would be up soon. But I didn't, so it won't. I take my backpack off and set it down. I turn the flashlight off. Everything turns off. I wait in the dark.

I wake up in the corner, my neck all stiff, eyes gummy. At first I can't see anything, just blurry dark, like when you close your eyes and press on the lids with your thumbs. I sit up and tilt back my head. Above me, a ladder runs up the wall to the white–rimmed edge of the cellar hatch. Light peeks in here and there through gaps in the plywood.

It takes me a second to realize that I'm not scared. All I can remember from last night is being scared. I get up and stretch, try to stretch out the kinks in my neck. I reach down and touch my toes.

My eyes start to make things out in the dark. The basement is small and packed to the ceiling. Mattress springs and cardboard boxes, black marker scrawls, bicycle handlebars, rocking chairs stacked one on top of the other, leaning over me. A bookshelf crammed with yellow National Geographic spines, cabinets and chests, open a scary crack. There are old mirrors, with writing etched into the glass. Plates and teacups and deer antlers, a rusty old lumberjack saw, rakes and shovels. Coiled extension cords hung off nails. Wires run across the ceiling, stapled to the old wood beams. Metal pipes, ducts, all uncovered. The pipes creak and groan; they strain against the beams and sound like they'll jump right out of the roof, rattle and hiss, snake down the hallway dragging old stools, brown coffee sacks, window grates with them.

Above me, feet pad across the floor. I sit as still as I can. Clanks and rattles. Heavy things set down on the floor, then the feet again. A scuffling sound, then clomping steps, shoes I guess. A door squeaks, shuts. A lock rattles.