The Journey Prize Stories 27 Read online

  Paul shakes his head. “No you dope, it’s not that, it’s just that, well, she’s kind of gross.”

  Sisters were annoying, pigs maybe if they were fat, but no one had ever told me they had a gross sister before. “She’s gross?”

  Paul grabs the rusting door handle and pulls it so it shrieks under his hand. “You’ll see. Just go in the living room. She’s watching TV. She won’t even notice.”

  Paul’s foyer has a strange phlegmy smell, like moulding boots and mushrooms. I step over piled hills of shoes, none of which seem to belong to a woman. The whole place looks dingy, and there isn’t any of the usual cheap junk on the walls—no “Bless This Mess,” or souvenir crucifixes, not even a badly framed family picture. Around the corner is Joanna. She is sitting in the middle of an aggressively ugly couch that blooms mustard coloured out of the orange shag carpet. She stares straight ahead, mouth slightly open, blue reptilian eyes dead in their sockets. Her face looks like old skin under a Band-Aid. I take one look at her, this teenage girl with saggy boobs and some grey hair, and have to concede in a whisper, “Yeah Paul, I guess she is kind of gross.”

  “Told ya, dopey.” He slaps me on the shoulder, pleased I’m seeing things his way, and pulls me through the hallway, toward the back door. The house is only this hallway with rooms on either side, not even a second floor. We reach the last room and Paul signals for me to stay back and stay quiet, he knocks softly on the door frame, his voice changed. “Ma? Ma? I’m home.” The lights are off, but I can make out the shape of a woman, squat, dressed in shapeless eggplant-coloured cotton. She is leaning over a crib, and touching the face of a child. It’s a boy, folded onto his side, his eyes shut and limbs twitching slightly. He is fully dressed in overalls, checked shirt, even a bow tie, shoes with unworn treads. She doesn’t look up, but mutters something at Paul.

  “Say hello to your brother, Paul. Don’t be rude.”

  “Hello, Percy. I’m going to my friend Dave’s house for dinner. That all right?”

  Mrs. Estey turns toward the door to make sure I exist, then turns back to the child in the crib. “Sure, sure, that’s fine.” Paul pulls me out through the back door and into the sunlight, tilts back his head, and crows in triumph. He looks at me and grins.

  “That’s all right, eh, Davey?”

  I shrug. “I guess so. It’s just my mom and me.”

  “No old man, huh? Me too. C’mon!”

  Their backyard opens up onto fields and the back lot of a strip mall, full of corroded train tracks and discarded junk. There is a claw foot bathtub, piles of old Penthouses mixed in with Nancy Drews baking under the sun. Small paths cut through the grass leading to the more populated areas of the suburb, and Paul darts in front of me instinctively heading for the paved and shaded neighbourhood ahead of us, assuming I live there or somewhere like it. Panting, I slow down and notice a house raised above the rest on a hill, old-fashioned with columns and lacy trim, even a part that goes higher than the rest, capped in black tar shingles with an iron railing around its square top. There are rusty whirligigs on the lawn and porch, moving slowly, measuring something heavier than air.

  “What’s that house?”

  Paul barely slows down, pulling me ahead. “Mr. Murray’s. He sells houses. Me and Joanna go over on Thursdays.”

  “What, so he like, babysits you?”

  “I guess. C’mon, I’m hungry, I want to go.”

  “What’s wrong with your sister anyway?”

  “I dunno. Just slow I guess. She just watches TV and rides the bus. C’mon, Davey.”

  “Why do you go over there?”

  “We just do. He helps out with Percy. Now stop screwing around, dopey, I’m goddamned hungry.”

  My mom, Eva, does not get mad when I bring Paul home, even though I didn’t ask first. Maybe it’s his pyjama top, the way he eats his casserole so fast, even the burnt parts where the corn is fused to the tuna, or because he says with her curled black hair she looks like Lynda Carter, the way he strokes the binding of the books in our living room, how he’s never had tapioca pudding, how he doesn’t make pretend gagging noises when she plays James Taylor, how he slips up once and says “shit,” blushing deeply. And when he leaves, he says, “Thanks Ms. Anderson. You can call me The Rooster if you want. Everyone does.”

  She says, “You can call me Eva,” and is all of a sudden someone who is not my mother, or at least not only my mother.

  That night when she comes to turn off the lights, she leans over to kiss me and pauses, touching my cheek. “Paul is welcome over any time. You be a good friend to that boy.” I wonder what she means.

  The pigs all died together in the corner of the pen, their skins glistening with the early morning frost, bound to the surface of the mud like ballooning flesh-toned fungus. I waded out into their deaths, boots breaking through the half-resistant slop until I was standing over them. They were strangely hairy, covered in white humanoid fuzz tapering across their snouts and ears. The one closest to me fluttered albino lashes weakly but couldn’t move his head, mud getting sucked into his throat with each inhale, slopping up his bare gums and down into his great swollen esophagus. The rest of them lay there, in a bloated naked orgy, six obese corpses.

  I vomited as quietly as I could in the slop bucket. Then I went inside and called Paul.

  “They’re all dead, Paul. All of them.”

  “Get in the car, Joanna! Okay what, Davey? Who’s all dead?” “The pigs, Paul. The pigs are all dead outside.”

  Paul sighed. “Shit, son. The pigs. I thought you were going to say your neighbours or something. They’re just pigs, dopey. Relax, I’ll be right there. ‘They’re all dead.’ Jesus.”

  When Paul got there I was standing in the pen and the pig was still blinking at me in desperation with his straw lashes. Paul looked scraggly, maybe stoned. He had a three-day beard growth and he was not someone who should grow a beard. It was a reddish blond while the rest of his hair was dark and curly. “This one’s still alive,” I said, nudging it with my boot. It wheezed softly. I gagged into the slop bucket.

  “Jesus Davey. Where the fuck do you think bacon comes from?” Paul stuck his hands in his pockets and sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Did ol’ Phil have a gun? He did. Over the stove or something, am I right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. A rifle. Over the mantel.”

  The pig gave a soft little gasp. I swallowed hard. “Oh all right,” Paul conceded. “Go in and get the gun, dopey, then call the vet.”

  I looked into the doghouse on the way past, just to confirm the night hadn’t resulted in a total catastrophe, that no one had decreed all life on the farm must be wiped out. I bent down and saw two brown eyes blinking at me like a pilot light. Somewhere, the goat was bleating. “Good dog,” I whispered.

  Joanna held the door to the house open. Had been holding the door open. She stared straight ahead as I brought the gun out, straight ahead as I went back inside and dialled the vet, straight ahead as the shot sounded. She held it open as Paul came inside, then gently let it go so it latched shut.

  “Let’s get some food in you,” Paul said to me, as if he didn’t just shoot a two-hundred-pound animal. “Joanna, how do you feel about riding the bus for a while?” She didn’t respond, just walked toward the truck, signalling that yes, a bus ride would be fine.

  I grabbed my coat. “Triple Seven?

  Paul shrugged. “Where else?”

  When we get back from dinner, the bodies have been moved from the pen to the pasture and the vet has left a note on the door: Intestinal torsion. Change in diet? Call me.

  It is a Thursday in the summertime, so there is no school, which means there is no way to tell what day it is—time by the hour is non-existent. In the field behind Paul’s house we are running madly, cartwheeling over rusted nails and mattress springs, dancing around tetanus. Paul has brought an enormous bag of peanuts in shells that taste like sawdust on the tongue, animal feed, pulpy masses spit onto the ground. Paul begins to throw them
in the air, and I run through them, and they are suddenly a swarm of locusts rising and descending onto the field. We throw handfuls in the air and run through them screaming “REPENT” and “WRATH OF GOD” when Paul says, “Shit it’s Thursday, isn’t it?” And he’s running up to the house on the hill saying, “Go home, go home, go home, Davey, you dope.”

  But I don’t know if Mom’s home and I have no key, so I follow, begging, up to Mr. Murray’s, to the weather-beaten board porch, which is assembled fancily, but unpainted. And Paul says, “Fine, stay, you goddamned leech, but don’t come in. Just stay.”

  The heat is awful, there is a bug screaming at the same frequency as a smoke detector. I move into the shade of the door frame and begin to toss peanut shells into the wind, seeing if I can throw them into the gears of the whirligigs on the lawn, prying pebbles from my shoe treads and weighting the shells down, cutting slits in them with my nails, fitting them together to form lopsided flightless rotocopters.

  It’s been a long time since Paul went in. It’s very hot.

  If I go inside then Mr. Murray will offer me something to drink, water at least, maybe something sweet with ice, or I can just ask him where the nearest tap is, if there is a hose around back. That’s it, just ask if he has a hose around back.

  The door is well oiled; it opens without a sound. It is cool inside, and even though the house seems huge and old there is no dust. There is an electric chemical smell. There are pictures on the walls all the way up the staircase. There are sounds, little susurruses, hushing, murmuring, rustling, the shushing of the trees blowing outside. But there is no wind. More susurrusses, fabrics moving, murmurs. Voices? There is a door at the top of the stairs. Open slightly already, a man’s voice and whispers, he is soothing someone, there is a toneless animal groan. Eye to the crack, and there is a strange tangle of bodies. What is this configuration? A toneless animal groan. Blue reptile eyes dead in their sockets, she is bent over and makes eye contact with me, staring straight ahead. He doesn’t see me, green lantern visible over the curve of his sister’s back. The man is secondary.

  What? What? What?

  Backing away as quickly as I can, over the landing trying to get down the stairs, but I run into a sidetable and it’s upended. The bedroom door is thrown open, a man’s voice is yelling but I’ve bolted, vaulted, over the railing across the field, tripping over tires, flying across deposits of broken glass, into the shady neighbourhoods, down the street through my own front door. It is open, unlocked. My foot is bleeding. I’ve stepped on a nail. “Mom?” I say. Then again, “Mom?” She comes to me and says, as I did, “What?”

  The dog’s death was more manageable somehow. It was a death I could get my head around: there was one of him. He was covered in brownish golden fur, with burnt-black patches, some kind of shepherd-lab mix. And people’s dogs died. This was something that happened. He had never greeted me, never licked my hand or come to say hello, never barked protectively over the house, the pigs, the chickens. It’s not that it wasn’t tragic—he lay on the floor of the potting shed, great blue tongue lolling out of his mouth, blue foam coating his nose and teeth, eyes closed in release from what must have been a painful end. I bent down and stroked the fur on the bridge of his nose. When I say to myself, “My dog is dead,” it sounds natural, but the blue foam is toxic and synthetic.

  Just there, an inch from his head is a pile of what I think is chicken feed. Large sunflower seeds, smaller grains, black granules. A meal that would only be appealing to a dog that hadn’t been fed on time, and yes: in the sand-like particles there is the faint ghostly tint of a tracing agent. Eradi-Rat.

  When I call Paul he’s not surprised. “Didn’t you even think to put it on a higher shelf?”

  “No, I guess I didn’t.” I can see the dog’s tawny body from the kitchen window, and I don’t even bother to ask if there’s any meaning in this. The rooster begins to lurch his way purposefully toward the potting shed, death drive in full swing. “Shit, I have to go. Rooster’s going for it.”

  “I’ll bring a shovel over, and you owe me some takeout.”

  Paul arrives with Joanna in tow, both of them looking worn at the edges. Paul smells strange and peppery—the result of smoking dozens of joints and not washing his hair, his curls like sponges. “Joanna, sit on the step,” he says, and she does. We carry the dog between us, Paul holding his front legs, me his back, eighty pounds of dead weight to be slung into a hole we’ve yet to dig. We don’t say anything while the shovels break ground in the pasture, digging through layers of mud, throwing rocks aside and finally, lowering the body down, reversing the process, smoothing the top of our handmade grave.

  We’re pretty hungry after that.

  The Triple Seven is a mediocre Chinese place where the lo mein is all right, but they serve you onions chopped into quarters if you ask for extra veggies. Before it was the Triple Seven, it used to be a restaurant called Jives, which served pub food but made the wait staff wear bowler hats. Before that, an Italian place. Before that, a novelty fifties diner. Before that, Mr. Murray’s house. But Paul insists that egg rolls beat fried chicken, which is all you can get at the Dixie Lee. It is the place to be if you don’t cook and hate poultry.

  Joanna sits silently in the back of the truck. When we get out, so does she, but she stays glued to the truck, doesn’t budge even though we’re all the way to the restaurant door.

  “C’mon Joanna,” Paul says, about to go in. I see her turn herself around. There are some box stores around the lot now—a Zellers, a hair salon, but you still have a clean view of the tree-lined neighbourhoods. “C’mon, Jo.” He’s sweet, convincing. “You can get the buffet.” She turns herself around again, facing downhill toward the field, and spots her own house, she must. The sagging middle, corrugated tin, green porch. A family passes us on their way into the restaurant. Mother, father, a boy of about ten, a girl of thirteen or so. Joanna turns to Paul. She opens her mouth and pulls back her lips, baring remarkably white and beautiful teeth. She screams, and screams, and screams. She bellows as the owners walk out, as Paul pleads with her, touches her arm. She enters a state of catatonic noise, a deep desperate cry that draws everyone outside to observe, that renders us unable to load her back into the car. She wails as the owner calls an ambulance, howls along with the sirens, refuses to stop as they carry her in. Paul remains frozen beside me as she disappears through the double doors. They close, muffling the sound, but it’s too late: the parking lot remains haunted.

  Mom—Eva—brings me over to the Esteys’ the day after it happened. Friday. She is there in Paul’s foyer, the heel of her nude pump spearing a deflated orthopedic shoe. Mrs. Estey is taking up most of the door frame, making it so that Mom can’t get through. Mom is calling over the top of Mrs. Estey’s hair, which she’s dyed a strange purplish orange, like she mixed together two kinds of Kool-Aid and went at it. “Joanna, sweetie,” Mom is calling, “Joanna, honey, come here a sec.”

  Mrs. Estey stands there, arms folded, her lips withered over her teeth, like her mouth isn’t hers and they’re shrinking away from the alien parts. “She won’t come. The Waltons is on.”

  “Paul? Paul, honey?” “He’s off somewhere.”

  I watch them through the screen, sometimes hearing them, sometimes not. The holes make it look like they’re moving on dotted comic book paper, adding lines around their arms and mouths, making them look shady and cool. I wonder if I’ll be able to see Paul again. Mom is getting louder, trying her hardest to explain something to Mrs. Estey, whose face has stayed the same this whole while. There’s a strange edge to her voice. She is all Eva, raging and begging at the same time.

  “Do you know what he does in that house?”

  “He’s a Shriner. He’s in real estate.”

  “Do you know what he does?”

  “He gives me money for my Percy.”

  “Mrs. Estey, you have more than one child. Paul and Joanna—”

  “He’s sleeping.”

  Joan
na has come to the door frame and stands slightly behind her mother, her teenaged body looking as if it’s gone through seven babies, her mom’s exact shape. She smiles vacantly straight ahead, focused on Eva, who is beautiful in her skirt suit. Joanna’s blue eyes glint as they catch mine through the screen. Her smile shows a lot of gum, and it’s more like she’s rolling her lips back slowly over her teeth, not really smiling at all. I start to feel sick, because all doors toward her lead to the same thing, and I’m not sure what that is.

  Eva is worn down now, each word hard but important work. “Do you know, Mrs. Estey. Do you know what that man does with your children in his house?”

  Mrs. Estey shrugs. “Of course I know. He loves ’em, that’s all. He loves ’em.”

  My mom, because she is my mom now, throws her hands up like she’s been burnt, her mouth open, and takes me, and we’re in the car, speeding toward home, and she is shaking but not mad at me, and then we’re home and she says go to your room, but not angry, very quietly. I stay there for a while and think about Paul and try not to think about Paul. When I go into the kitchen she’s sitting there at the table, her head frozen in her hands, her fingers spread across the sides of her skull as though she is trying to stop her thoughts from spilling into the kitchen.

  I grab a pop from the fridge, even though I’m not supposed to have sugar after seven. “Mom?” It’s seven-thirty. “Mommy?”

  She stays there, a maternal statue, her sadness collecting in droplets on the table.

  Paul doesn’t come to school for a week, but I think I see him running by sometimes, out around the big boulders on the playground, up to the soccer field and away.

  The goat was the only one I bothered to name, the rest of them I called by their Christian names—dog, pig, chicken, rooster—and that seemed to do. But when Paul and I drank with the goat, we had to name her. It was a week after the dog died and the goat had moved into the doghouse. It seemed cute and homey, a little Green Acres or something. Paul and I went out with some stubbies and popped the caps off, watching the goat settle into its house and trying to think of a name.