All the Broken Things (33 page)

He stood at a pop machine, the can dropping in that second after he had shoved the coin in and pushed the button. The sound of gunshots sliced through him. The clunk reinforced the realization. Cold can wrapped in his palm, Bo walked back, weeping now for Loralei and Gerry. For the waste, and for himself.

He could barely stand to look at the heap of Loralei’s body. Bo sat down beside Max on the stoop of the trailer, and watched the cops milling, the carnies gawking.

“I wish people would stop staring,” he said, though he himself could not look away.

And Max said, “All the world’s a stage.” Then he turned to Bo, as if he were only then waking, and said, “Hey, kid, you know they won’t stop with Loralei.”

Bo ran. Let the sun set, he was thinking, let me go under cover of night, let me take my bear and go. He found Bear in a dream, her paws scurrying nowhere, fast.

B
O LEASHED
B
EAR
and they hustled south, the sun setting—a huge red ball spewing colour to the west. The bear lolloped alongside him, looking forward, scenting. The land sloped down in a subtle way, but she seemed to know they were heading to nature. It didn’t take them long to cross the Lake Shore, so few cars at dusk—though a truck driver craned to get a look at what he thought he couldn’t possibly be seeing—and with the sun a thin crease of light at the horizon, they made it to Lake Ontario. The beach.

Bo was so deeply in his head, knowing what he was walking away from—Orange, some duty he didn’t know exactly how to fulfill—that he did not sense the shuffling
of Soldier Man behind him. But the vet was beside him when he stopped to scan the shore—a kind of magic. It wouldn’t be long before the news that Bo had run off with a bear would be widely known. He had to avoid people. Again.

“Kid.” His voice sputtering, liquid, weird.

“Hey.”

Bear glanced and then turned away. She would have known he was there all along. She sat politely at the end of the leash, snuffing and looking up at Bo, swinging her head around to the water. Bo crouched and looked her in the eye, leaned in to unclasp her leash.

“Go,” he said. He didn’t need to say it. She bounded sideways in crazy bear glee and was up to her flanks in lake before Bo had even stood up. She popped her head under the water, slammed the surface with her great paw, delighting in the splash, the arc of water droplets as they sprayed back at her. Bo pulled off his clothes, thinking hard about Gerry, that flayed body, and wanting some kind of cleansing. It was all he could think of, watching Bear cavort, the bear seeming to invite him in.

“Take it easy, kid.”

Bo was down to his underwear, cramming his clothing into a canvas satchel Morgana had handed him as he left. He waded in, the water cold but velvet-smooth against his skin. The bear was in deep by now, and swimming.

“Not too deep,” Soldier Man shouted from the shore.

“I can’t swim,” Bo shouted back. “I’m scared of water.” He plunked himself down, shivering, and sat chest-deep in the shallows. He sat so that he could watch the bear in one direction, Soldier Man in the other. Bear was coming back, fast, first swimming and then, when she bottomed out, running. Soon she would be on him. He started clucking, talking soft, trying to talk her down. Could she see who it was?

“It’s okay,” he said, putting his palms up in the water so that they created a visual wall around him. He was afraid she couldn’t see his body below the surface. “Easy,” he said.

“Get the fuck out of the way,” shouted Soldier Man. He looked like he was going to step into the lake to save him.

Bo could see Bear already shifting her energy. “It’s okay.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s okay. Look.” Bear came right up and head-butted him gently, and then she was turning and turning to find a seat. She circled five or six times, enjoying the water swirling around her. Every turn, Bo noted where she had fully scratched a patch of fur off her rump, right down to the skin. There were nasty scabs scattered through the baldness. “Sit, girl.” But she did better. She lounged flat, her body so huge she could lie down and still keep her head above the surface. She swayed her head and dipped it, playing at wave making, keeping him in the game whenever he looked away. There were no treacherous fish in fresh water, Bo told himself.

The night had fully fallen. There was only the merest sliver of moon, and Bo could barely see her now, and best when she was in motion, bear eye glinting. Bo pulled his hand out of the water and plowed the surface.

“Take that,” he said, real soft, and watched the splash hit her. She recoiled, assessing this. He did it again.

“Come out, now, kid,” Soldier Man called.

But Bo arced water at Bear faster and faster. She rolled away and sat watching him, and then, before he knew what she was doing, she threw her body up out of the water and slapped the surface so hard, he choked on the wave that hit him. She finished him off by swiping her huge paw sideways along the water, and he was briefly submerged, and then he was up, sputtering, and then retaliating, throwing as much water in the bear’s direction as he could.

“Bo!”

Soldier Man’s voice was plaintive. But in the night there was only Bo and Bear and water and laughing. Pure pleasure.

Finally Bo staggered toward shore, out of breath, saying, “I’m here, Soldier Man. I’m here.” The bear took a few more languid swipes at the water and ambled after him, chuffing, lips pulled back into an insane bear smile.

“She’s okay?” Soldier Man said.

“Yep.”

They discussed the dark then, Bo telling Soldier Man all that had happened, and Soldier Man reminding him
how each night the moon would grow and with it visibility. They would have to keep moving, keep to green spaces, and waterways, to allow themselves and the bear cover, and hope of food and water.

“Down below Baby Point. It’s safe all along the Humber at night. There’s fish for the bear right now. The salmon run is on.”

“Okay,” Bo said.

They crept along the lake until they reached the mouth of the river and then followed it north for a time. The glint of curious animal eyes met them here and there, along the bank, and Bo had to regularly whistle Bear to heel, stopping her from chasing after every smell and rustle of bush. The undercover was lively with night sounds, and they caught whiffs of skunk, which they wanted to avoid.

The whole area smelled of dead fish too—a stench to Bo and Soldier Man, but to the bear, an enticement. She pulled Bo toward the bank and plunged into the water wherever she could, luxuriating in the salmon stink. They walked for an hour until Soldier Man insisted they hide for the rest of the night and catch some sleep. He knew a crevice in the hillside tucked below an overhanging rock. “It used to be an Indian place but now people live in mansions up there and sleep under silk sheets.”

“We have dirt,” said Bo.

“We have dirt.”
The slit in the earth Soldier Man found opened up into a cavern. Soldier Man was asleep and snoring before the bear even made it into the cave. But she settled fast too, and left Bo wondering where they would go the next night, if they could hide and run forever. As he fell asleep he thought how Soldier Man had suggested he set Bear free. He wondered if this is what he was doing. He did not want to be free of Bear.

When he woke up again, it was dark, the bear was snoring deep and loud, and the soldier was gone. He wasn’t surprised. That man came and went. He couldn’t be relied upon.

F
OR WEEKS
, Bo stayed below Baby Point. He was held there where Soldier Man had left him. It was easy living. In the thick of night, Bear would amble into the river and wait for salmon to jump, and catch them mid-air. Bo wondered what the fish were thinking, if they thought, and how that split second of flying in the air must feel to them, unable to breathe, and then failure and a quick death. Bear ate more fish in an hour than Bo could count. She never shared her catch, though she was happy to share Bo’s when he was swift enough to catch one.

There was already a chill in the air—the bear was readying her body for winter sleep, even if she might not get it. From newspapers he had salvaged from a bin, Bo
knew that because Loralei had killed Gerry, bear wrestling would be banned in the province. There was probably no future for Bear in any sideshow circuit. Max’s carnival had hit Woodstock, and was heading to Elmira.

Then, in late September, the first leaves began to fall, and Bo woke one morning to a memory. He was six or seven, it was sultry out. He was in Vietnam, a place he never thought of anymore, except in connection with some fantasy about his father. Yet here he was, opening the front door of the house they’d lived in. He looked outside. It was morning. The world had transformed. Every green thing that had grown around their house the night before was gone. The world had blackened and dripped with an acrid stench. The earth was sending up water.

“Dead,” said his father, standing behind him. He wore his uniform, so he must have been on furlough.

It didn’t feel dead to Bo, though, just strange, a kind of powerful magic that could take everything away, that could turn the whole world into another world. He was too young to be afraid. It had no deeper meaning than this: change. He ran out into the forest, through the long grasses all dead around the house. He touched a tree, watching the leaves fall around him. With the foliage all gone, he could see farther than he had ever thought possible. He could see the houses of his friends and his grandfather down the incline from his house.

He stood with his hand protecting his eyes from the sun, marvelling for a long time, oblivious to the bad smell. Then he ran farther even though he could hear his father and his mother calling him back, such alertness in their voices that he should have been alarmed. But how wondrous this not-green world was, where you could see through the jungle—where you could see
everything
!

There were other children wandering through the strange landscape, lost, as if without the markers—this shrub, that knoll—they could never begin to know where they were. They began a game. Someone touched someone else, and then they were all running, howling through the devastation, tagging each other and tearing away again, the ruined flora swiping their legs and arms.

When he came back in to eat, his father yelled at him. “You didn’t listen!”

Bo hardly ever saw this man, and so had made him large in his mind, a hero, to be sure, but something even more—an epic character in the story of the war, of his family, of his own position. But now his father was home, and scolding him. His father was the opposite of the father he had created.

“Sorry,” Bo said. But he wasn’t really.

“You can’t run and play in the jungle when it’s been sprayed. It’s poison. Look,” and here he pulled his khaki shirt up to reveal an oozing wound.

Then Bo’s mother pulled him to a tub, stripped off his
clothes, and began to scrub all the dirt and jungle debris from him. Bo watched his arms turn red in swaths where the brush she used scraped him.

“Ow,” he said, but she did not stop.

His father did not speak at all while she did this. He sang. Bo did not recall the song except that it was a lament. His father sang it often. Perhaps it had become his song. Sometimes, Bo heard him whistling it, sometimes he hummed it—always it seemed to be part of him, coming out with his breath. His mother hated this.

“Stop singing that awful song,” she said now. His father had not known he’d been singing, which made it worse.

It was Rose who decided they must leave Vietnam, that they must take the risk to get out. They argued at the shore before they boarded the fishing boat. Bo could recall his father protesting, saying, “I’m too sick.” Rose spoke to Bo’s father as if he were a child.

These recollections had no continuity. They were vignettes added to some story he’d told himself about his parents’ marriage, about the circumstances of his father’s death. And then this memory brought him to another more recent one. He and his mother were in their kitchen. They were always in the kitchen. The walls pulsed with her anger but she wouldn’t say a word. She took a sweater off, and under it she wore a T-shirt, something donated certainly, but she looked beautiful no matter what she wore. Even when she was tired, she was
radiant. Sometimes he did not know how she could be his mother. There on her arm, along the soft skin on the inside was a long sore. It festered, he saw. She put her hand over it when she noticed him staring.

“From work,” she said. “A cut. It will heal.”

Now he wondered about that. His mouth fell open. He recalled the sore on his father’s chest, the frenzy of hungry fish. Wondered about the way he had lined up his memories. That his father did not want to get on the boat. Forever it had meant that she had had a hand in his death. Forever he had blamed her for the sharks and the fear. Forever he had blamed her for every bad and sad thing. Now he wondered.

A few nights later, on the river, Bo watched Bear concentrating so hard on the water it looked like she was willing those fish up into her mouth. One after the other. He knew he did not really exist for her. She did not look up to find him. She did not need him. She was fishing, fish filled her thoughts. They leapt to her mouth as if they knew their fate, and delighted in it.