The Journey Prize Stories 24 (27 page)

“Sure.”

Back turned, he pours. My eyes are ultraviolet pinpricks sucking up the light, but my legs and thighs are like stones. Soon he’s right beside me, and again we’re toasting our booze, this time sipping it up from cheap ceramic teacups.

“Like it?” he says, watching me gulp. “It’s homemade. From a friend in Montreal.”

I’ve had the homemade stuff before. This shit is sweet, fresh, like apple cider. Part of me notices that Rick is barely touching
his. Instead he’s put on some electronic house music. He’s nodding his head and standing like a giant above me. He dances to the tunes, exaggerating his jives and humpy hip twists. I stagger up and try to move and groove, feeling suddenly sad and far away from my body, like an angel or Peter Pan. I end up, after a while, dropping the little mug onto the floor.

I watch it roll under the table in fascinating slow motion.

“Sorry,” I mumble, trying to slide down to pick up the cup. But Rick grabs my shoulder, pressing knobby fingers into my deltoids, guiding me back to the bed, pecking me chastely on the cheek.

“Easy, sailor.”

Secret video footage would show my father returning to base camp early the next morning carrying roses. My mother, weaned on a steady diet of Carole King and James Taylor in the pre-Oprah seventies, sensed an impending proposal, and pressed her nail-bitten fingers to her lips like a lovesick teen-aged girl. But the most he could offer in the form of tangible love was a promise to pay her expenses if she visited the clinic in Edmonton, where the sluts and the Indians would go.

Don’t you even love me
, she wanted to shout, like she was an Oscar-winning heroine in some high-stakes Hollywood blockbuster, crying on cue in a close-up.

From the squeaky bed in Rick’s stuffy apartment the ceiling begins to spin. I start shaking, afraid, ’cause I can’t seem to keep my head on top of my neck.

“Don’t worry,” he says, cradling my skull. I see him start to unbutton the top of his shirt. Hair, black furry tufts, puff out
over the button. He continues to undress, making it into a show, like I’m paying for it. Soon a small gut flips out. His stubby fingers cup the front of his jeans.

“Do you want more to drink?”

I manage to shake my head.

“What do you think?” he asks, palming the soft bulge inside his pants.

I try to speak. I do. But no words, no sighs or declarations come to my rescue. Just a fey sloppy
unnh
sound, like I have a motor-neural disease, something like cerebral palsy, like a gag has been shoved deep into the gut of my mouth.

All of this appears to please him.

“Do you live alone?” he says, running one hand through my hair, slipping the other over my cheek, forcing one of the meaty fingers into my mouth.

I can’t answer at all. His finger’s in my throat. I can’t even really move.

“It’s not good to live alone, you know.”

He runs a greasy fingertip, damp with my own saliva, in an arc across my forehead. I can feel the cool spit hit gravity, river like invisible gravy down into my ear. I used to drool when I was a kid. My mom told me to be careful, be brave, try to be a big boy now, or she’d have to get me a chin cup, and force me to wear it to school.

She claimed she refused the abortion, I learned from her sister light years after her death, because growing up in Ontario she had dreams of what it would be like to be a mother. She had fantasies of falling asleep at night listening to a child’s breathing. She wanted to feel a stream of warm milk being suckled
from her breast, just like in the European movies. And she wanted to hold a little baby in her arms – a creature so tiny and helpless, so entirely dependent on her – and to know that in the flimsy black-and-white tragedy of her life, here at long last was the proof that God loved her.

The irony of this fantasy is that we were never a physical family. Not the kind of people who ever touched. We were only two. There were rarely goodnight kisses, no hugs at the end of the day. No running home breathless from school for chocolate-chip cookies and an armful of tender caresses before
Degrassi Junior High
. No baths at the start of the night.

I don’t know why.

Rick strokes me gently, brushing the matted hair up and away from my sweaty face.

“That’s a good boy.”

It’s cold. I know it’s time to zip up my hoodie, all the way to my throat, and get the fuck out of there. But my arms are totally punked.

“You’re cold,” he says. He kneads the thin muscles of my back some more, kisses me again on the forehead. He strokes my hair too, appears to ruminate or consider some larger existential question. Then he grunts. Pig-like. Slips a calloused hand inside my pants.

“Poor Elliot. We should really warm you up now.”

I try not to think. I manage to shut my eyes. In the background the music changes to a local radio call-in show, and Beth from St. Thomas High would like to hear some U2. There’s a whoosh as he slides toward me on the tiny bed. He hooks his arms around me and sits me up like an old man or a
doll, unzipping my stupid hoodie, pulling my numb arms out one by one, tugging each frayed sleeve until my hands and fingers are free. After that he stretches the faded Leafs T over my fuzzy head. He spends a lot of time on my chest, biting and pinching the nipples, caressing the bony shoulders, squeezing the skinny biceps, then leans down to lick me under the ear, juicy and dog-like, along the tender jugular.

“You like this,” he says, nuzzling down. He whispers this, and I feel his warm beer breath tickling my stomach. While he’s down there, he peels me out of my jeans. When he’s got me lying back, he sighs, studying me for a minute and then stroking the inside of my thigh, playing with my shaved balls through my shorts. Here my blood betrays me, pooling into my groin, racing its biblical way from one hidden vault into another, one tight vein into the next, until I’m stiff and shamefully hard.

On the phone that afternoon, that snowy afternoon, she clears her throat, then speaks after what seems like a long time. She’s calm all of a sudden. Composed now, even important sounding. Like she is being interviewed for the afternoon news or one of the famous talk shows. Like her life, finally, is beginning to make some sense, framed in this tragic new twilight.

I heard from the doctor today, El. Remember I went to Lindsay? For all those weird tests? Well I got a call today. And guess what, El? They found something.

I picture her in her
Cagney & Lacey
nightgown, hugging the rotary phone and pacing at the far end of the hallway upstairs. She’d be itching for a smoke. Jonesing. Picking at her teeth.

She tells me the gritty details, but doesn’t say breast. She says she has a lump, but in a self-conscious, whispery voice, so I understand right away what she means.

Rick stands up. He watches me a couple of minutes, while clouds of tiny crickets float inside my eyes. There’s a scratch at the back of my throat, sweat like a humid lake under my arms.

He finishes undressing. When he gets back into bed, I can tell by the heat on my right shoulder that he’s naked. He rises, crouching over me, pressing his warm dick, the sweaty pubes, up against my cheek. Then he starts to stroke himself, moaning, tapping my lips with his penis, then more quickly, rubbing the head of his cock across my damp forehead before slipping it into my mouth, telling me it’s good, it’s so fucking sweet, how proud he is that I can take so much at once.

“Elliot. Oh fuck.”

I try not to puke. Drool leaks out and pools into the crook of my neck. When I finally start to gag, he pulls out fast, edging, and this movement creates a loud suctioning noise. I heave a few times, pull away, curling up, a man-sized gimpy fetus. But before I can recover he grabs my shoulders and flips me onto my stomach, wrenches down my shorts and pushes me face-first onto the mattress.

“It’s okay, buddy. You’re okay.”

But I’m not. He’s fucking heavy. In the tiny padded panic room deep inside my mind I feel rational, calm – at least I’ll remember it this way later, thinking
at least I survived the fall
instead of
this is what it’s like to suffocate
. It’s the feeling I had as a kid, crawling into the dryer while my older cousin stood outside and held the door shut with the weight of his body,
cranking the machine up to full load and laughing, watching me go round and around.

I manage to twist my head an inch, maybe two, but no air. Just a puddle of pissy drool.

My body makes an unrecognizable sound, a squishy girlish whine.

There’s the ricochet of TV gunfire whizzing through the apartment wall.

“I bet you like this,” he says again, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

I’m your mother, she used to say, when I’d ask her as a kid why I had to listen to her, why I had to turn down the music or get the truck back by midnight or try to improve myself out in the world by going away to university.

Just because I’m your mother.

A few seconds later, one of his fingers wiggles down, testing the air like a divining rod before digging into my ass. It pinches and aches in ways I am unprepared for. If I was a believer, I would whip up some half-baked prayer, ask God or one of his henchmen to spare my Levitical body. Instead I disappear. I close the lonely eyes inside my eyes. He slides a meaty finger farther in – no lube – then two, then he climbs all the way onboard and levers himself into me and buries himself deeper and deeper, all the while balancing his weight on my hips and slapping my goose-pimpled ass cheeks like a slightly depressed percussionist – with a reasonable amount of energy, but without any real emotion.

—

You’re just like your father, she said, on more than one occasion. Mostly when I was doing something that didn’t please her, being stubborn about fixing the VCR, or slamming one of my work boots into the kitchen door, because she wouldn’t stop lecturing me.

Sometimes you remind me exactly of your father.

Eventually, before he’s done, before he’s had his fill, I black out. When I wake up later, sewer mouth, drill bit to the head, the apartment is still dark, with just the soft light from the street-lamps casting a long dirty glow across the bed. It takes a moment to make sense of where I am. I’m damp. Still shivering.

When I get up, sheet draped over me, pain winches through me, gathering like a cinch low inside my gut.

“Well, look who’s wide awake now! Did you have a nice sleep?”

I want his voice to be tough, brittle and full of evil, a monster from kids’ TV. But it’s quiet, soft, disappointingly feminine, as if it’s been punctured by a hatpin and deflated. He’s there in one of the kitchen chairs, regal and fully clothed, a cavalier Gargamel, stroking a mangy Siamese cat who must have been hiding before.

“Welcome back, Elliot.”

It’s hard to stand. But eventually I do, pulling the sheet around me like a kimono.

“Your things are on the end of the bed. If you need to borrow anything …”

A couple of steps later and I locate everything, folded into a neat pile.

I find my white Jockeys and struggle, keeping my back
turned. A warm line of blood, a thin greasy trickle, blots the seat of my shorts. I just know it.

He’s watching me.

I hurry to pull on my jeans.

“I had a good night,” he says, breathless. “I hope you come back again. I mean it. If you’re ever bored or lonely.”

Let the record show that when she told me her news that snowy afternoon, when she needed me the most, at last and for real, I refused to come to her rescue. A person should always be judged, a man once said, by his actions and not his intentions. I believe this is true.

Perhaps I didn’t know what to say. I thought about this after the call, rubbing my sweaty face against the window. Watching that freakish light in the apartment disappear, the sky splitting up above me into splinters of chemical orange, I could feel my body grow tense, and my lungs tighten inside me, like I was being lowered into a pool or an iron casket. I tried to stay calm. I tried to imagine the nervous joy she must have felt, and the wonder, seeing me for the first time as my head ripped through her insides and I breathed and choked in the world: whether my birth gave her any hope; whether it made her less afraid; what this might mean for her now.

After a couple of hard tokes I started to relax.

I think I was embarrassed by my silence, but I must have made some noise. Or said something else eventually.

Because after a while we hung up, and when we did I felt relieved.

As though as long as she wasn’t near me, as long as I could forget it, none of what she was saying could ever touch me.

Kris Bertin
works as a bartender and bouncer at Bearly’s House of Blues and Ribs in Halifax. He has had stories published in
The Malahat Review, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Riddle Fence, Pilot
, and others. Kris recently put all of his favourite short stories into a pile and named it
Bad Things Happen
. He is currently working on a novel. He is from Lower Lincoln, New Brunswick.

Shashi Bhat
is the author of the novel
The Family Took Shape
(Cormorant Books, 2012). Her short fiction has appeared in several journals, including
PRISM international, Event, The Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review
, and
Nimrod International
. She was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2009, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Halifax, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Dalhousie University.

Astrid Blodgett
’s short stories have been read on CBC Radio’s
Alberta Anthology
and appeared in
Meltwater: 25 Years of Writing from Banff Centre, Alberta Views, Prairie Fire
, and
The Antigonish Review
. Her first collection of stories, which includes “Ice Break” and is tentatively titled
Let’s Go Straight to the Lake
, will be published by The University of Alberta Press sometime in the near future. Astrid lives in Edmonton.