The Journey Prize Stories 25 (22 page)

He had a halting half-lidded shyness about him and said things along the lines of “Uhuh. Oh, uhuh. Now, well. My,” if you asked him something specific, like: “Hey Nelson, what’s in the bag, man?” None of that “wisdom of the downtrodden” for Nelson. There were Derricks at Clive and Carl’s school but they disavowed any connection. Clive’s grandfather seemed to remember something about pop bottles for a bus ticket to Halifax, but as far as Clive and Carl were concerned Nelson had been living in the gym-pad cupboard forever. They don’t make bums like Nelson Derrick anymore. He was of those days when young children walked themselves to school through back alleys and large parks, and after supper were asked only to be home before the streetlights came on. His shambling hobo-hippy
self, blond and blown, burdened and slow, was at one with the neighbourhood and nobody gave him a second thought.

The thing that Carl has written about in the letter – the thing that had Clive digging through the photo albums this morning – happened in a storm sewer that could be accessed by prying open a manhole cover at the halfway mark between Ray and Locke in the alley behind the church. That they could open this secret door at all was a trick they’d discovered the summer before when Carl had taken a piece of fence pipe and wedged it diagonally into one of the holes in the iron. The two of them bouncing on the lever until it magically came lip up with a satisfying scrape onto the crumbling asphalt.

There was a dainty metal ladder that disappeared into the blackness and a smell that steamed up as though every rotten head cheese and kielbasa in the city had been dumped at this one spot. Dropped down fifteen feet, the inside was dark like a cave and dripped and echoed – a low tunnel with a slimy pebbled, plastic-garbaged trench in the middle, concrete, brick, and mud seeping through the cracks.

They found the body of a dead raccoon twenty feet from the manhole entrance in near complete and stinking darkness. The animal’s skin was in such a state of desiccation that a stick could be pushed through it with little effort. Creeping further and further into the blackness with the ebb and flow of droning Locke Street traffic like sucking giant’s breath never failed to titillate. The still and foul tunnel seemed to somehow represent a truer, or at least more possess-able, world for little boys. It was as though they’d discovered the location for the private thoughts of the city where secrets were stored that, while hidden, were nonetheless imminent, dark, and poisoning.

When the snow began to fall it was early on a Thursday morning, and there was no wind at first so that giant flakes fell in lacy columns from the sky and patted hugely on faces and hands at recess and continued to accumulate on top of the grass yard at Borden Elementary. It was almost knee high after school with no sign of letting up. The talk was of a coming snow day and the feeling of melt soaking through Clive’s and Carl’s pants on the trudge home was the feeling of wild freedom. Clive celebrated by slam-dunking Carl into a mound of snow by the tire swings. “I yam what I yam!” he yelled. “And I’ll be swimmin with bare naked women!” Carl yelled back.

The alley was already drifted steeply on its northern side and only just traversable on the opposite edge, even then there being some necessity to hand-over-hand it along the top boards of the occasional fence. There was a smooth bowl at the halfway point where the rising heat seeping upward through the manhole had resisted the storm somewhat and Carl had the idea to jimmy it open now before continuing home so that they would be able to find and enter it the next day.

Carl slept over on the floor of Clive’s room that night. They ate their macaroni in the back section of Clive’s room in which a huge blanket with a spaceman motif had been hung to create a fort for Clive’s monster models. It was a childish thing but it was okay for Carl to see it since Carl had helped him build it. They consulted Clive’s book of
Ancient Egyptian Mysteries
and talked themselves into a frenzy of fear, imagining the “dead eyes of the boy king held open in his golden sarcophagus” and the beating hearts of bald and beaded slaves sacrificed up for devouring by a god with a head like a collie. They felt the mysterious kingdom, its secret knowledge and
power, stretch its sinewy arm across forever and scoop them up into its confidence.

The photograph was taken the next morning when the snow had stopped and the radio had confirmed the school closing. Everybody in the city just waited it out, relieved and happy. They were Egyptians all morning, that morning. Egyptian 1 and his sidekick, Egyptian 2. And in the afternoon they adventured up the alley in search of passage to the mummy underworld. The yawning opening, its shucked lid just a slender new moon of metal peeking out from under the white, was surrounded on all sides by deep snow that had to be bodily ploughed through in their parkas.

And what it was, the thing that Carl raised in his letter after such a long time removed, was that Nelson Derrick had obviously come home the previous afternoon. And he’d obviously not seen or hadn’t had the wherewithal in the first place to simply watch his footing in the deep snow. Hadn’t thought, couldn’t think. And Nelson Derrick lying there, broken, blond hair clumped and twisted, at the bottom of the ladder and his duffle bag snagged and torn on one tip of it and thousands and thousands of old lottery tickets spilled out around the rim of the manhole and plastered with wet to everything.

And it was like nothing to push it all safely into the sewer, where it belonged and dig free and slide the cover closed and simply leave and wait until the snow had melted away in the sun and washed down through the intakes along the streets. That long and still like nothing. And wait even for the spring to disappear the winter, and the small mystery of Nelson Derrick, all together with new greenness before Carl took a flashlight and shone it down through one piercing in the
manhole while Clive put his eye to another. A hint of grey and echo and then the first taste of a whole and unexpected universe of experience, the flip side to everything exposed, its horror spun face up, its pleasure spun face down. And the possibility of ruin.

Clive’s watch says 1:34. Minutes, minutes. He works a seed from this morning’s muesli loose from between two molars and crushes it between his teeth. A slight bitterness. Brandon has climbed onto the very top of the kayak stands and Fiona has given up or is just beguiled by the play of light on the moving water. His watch says 1:34. The moment was soon or the moment could be now. No one has yet bothered to remove the paint can. It’s as if life is a constant rehearsal for some
people, and never the real thing. He himself is ready where he should be. A large silhouette against the sparkles.

“Go get them, will you?” Clive motions his daughter down the dock with a sweep of his arms. She looks at him like he’s an infomercial for denture cream. There are people watching. The cameras are trained on the ribbon stretched and waiting. Bob Nausmann’s hypocritical Smart car is turning the corner and about to come right into the complex. They’ll be five minutes gathering and making their way to the rise and down to the water. He remembers to take off his gloves.

With considerable management of the pounding pumps and pistons inside of him, he clops down the grated aluminium toward the pontoons and the water to settle things himself. A photograph seems so real. It begs to be taken seriously. But it’s just a trick of emulsion, of chemicals and human perception. There is no such repository for the moment.

“Brandon – Brandon – do you remember what you’re going to say to … look at me … Please. Do you remember … ! Fiona? Can you do something to help? Can you turn the fuck around and please drag him to the ribbon where everybody is now on their way?”

Fiona sucks in a whisper and comes to from some minor reverie. “Brandon, listen to your daddy.”

“I thought you were going to be on my side today,” says Clive. “I am starting to feel so disappointed.”

“Do you think it matters to anyone but you who gives Bob the scissors?” says Fiona.

“Come down here, Brandon.” Clive stomps the dock and the reverberation travels through the wood and plastic and ripples out into the waterway.

The members of the board are coming. The event coordinator is talking to the woman with the green scarf. Bob Naussman is smoking a cigarette by a brushed-steel bin. There’s nothing wrong. They can all meet at the lampposts. They can rise up to meet everyone, like a family that’s just been having fun, that’s just been looking for the shadows of playful fish around the slime-free moorings that anchor the dock to the sea bed.

Clive steps back from rack and the opens his arms. “Come on, Brandon, jump down. I’ll catch you. It’s fun.” He smiles up at his son, imagining the way the two of them might look from above against the water’s sparkle and flash. A strong father and his gleeful son, relaxed enough to forget themselves and play on such an important day.

“Who’s your Baghdaddy!” says Brandon and leaps with a mid-air back-kick flourish of total trust.

The two of them fall after the paint can into the water. The paint rises to the surface in swirling Tremclad Cotton globs as Clive loses Brandon in a blast of cold against his chest and his heavy overcoat turns him round and up and round and up in a current whose strength he’d never imagined staring down into the water from the promenade. The surface is mirrored above and there’s a vague sense of his own self, a flash of shape, some colour, reflected on the dull tin of it. The undersides of the white pontoons, a set of almost two-dimensional ovals, are all that remains of the ceiling world. All around him there’s a soft sound like muffled pan pipes.

Brandon is a writhing tangle above him and his panicked boot catches Clive in the face, spinning him downward and deeper. His clothes offset the natural buoyancy of his body
and he sinks then floats underwater like a sleeping humpback whale. The bottom of the waterway is shot through with veins of astonishing blue that disappear into the gloom of the deeper coursing. Hundreds, thousands of worn Jenn Cola bottles are crusted to the seaweed with tiny armoured life. The bottles are broken, scrubbed soft and porous but also lucent and unsullied. Clive floats. And before he breaks the surface directly in view of his first, most precious unit buyers, before he lugs his wailing child up the finger of the dock toward the crowded landing full of everything groomed and polished and loaded, before he himself sullies the viewing platform at the head of the promenade with diluted drips of white paint draining in a circle around him from his eight-hundred-pound coat, Clive feels the current tug at his boot heels and struggle to release him deeper, set him drifting toward the shapes of things further away – fish, garbage, fallen leaves – that flicker and glint in and out of perception as they race through the dim water, ceaselessly surrendered to the persistence of that flow out into Victoria’s inner harbour, out beyond the breakwater which stills the waves for the cruise ships in dock, before finally disappearing into the appetite of the pounding ocean.

My dragoons and I were gathered to discuss our plans for neighbourhood domination. Yellow Peril, the Chairman, Suzie Wrong, Riceboy, and I, the Sick Man of Asia, converged every Friday night to chop suey like a group of triad bosses. Chingers, all of us. Slanty-eyed teenage disappointments with no better place to haunt but the schoolyard near the abode of my
ma ma
and
ba ba
.

Tags covered the walls of our institution of mediocre learning. Every overzealous territory marker in the area had hit the walls like vicious dogs, making it difficult to discern that the school had once been grey. The poor spelling that appeared in most of the graffiti was evidence of the region’s subpar education system; the choice was not a self-aware homage to hip hop influences. To one-up all the noddies and ain’t-gonna-everbees, last winter the Chairman had stencilled OBEY MAO on the basketball court blacktop. He even included an image based on the portrait of Mao at Tiananmen Square, but the only thing that looked right in the Chairman’s version was
Mao’s giant mole, located on his chin. Some of the neighbourhood children thought the tag said OBEY YAO; they had a rather limited knowledge of history, no respect for our people’s illustrious past.

The Chairman and I had a re-education program for the neighbourhood youths, which consisted primarily of lectures and rigorous beatings. We enjoyed thrashing sense into the ignorant youngsters. The Chairman elected to go the Bruce Lee way of the empty hand, while I preferred the traditional tools of corporal punishment. Nothing pleased me more than placing a dunce cap on an eight-year-old simpleton’s head while making jokes about dimwits and slow learners and applying the strap to tender hands. Riceboy took offence to this, which was why he refused to partake in the re-education scheme – he had been subjected to ESL classes during elementary school despite his fluency in the language of the colonizer.

Anyhow, the stupider the children were, the harder we would hit them. The Chairman and I made the little noddies stand in urine-stained corners, holding their ears, while we unleashed our fury upon them. No mercy for the retards, either. The Chairman didn’t stand for any PC bullshit. “We’re equal opportunity,” he once said, while smacking a child whose IQ was reported to be in the low seventies. “Retards are kids too. Why should we make them feel lesser than their fellow nose-picking classmates? They should be included in all the reindeer games. As you know, I’m anti-exclusionary policy.”