All the Broken Things (5 page)

“You dance, you hug—”

“Shh,” Bo said. The talking. It drove him crazy.

“No, you little chinky fairy.”

Ernie swung his arms up and around and tucked his head down, releasing his hold, and then grabbed Bo’s waist and swung, nipping him from behind and toppling him. Bo’s shoulder hit the sidewalk, his ear slammed down hard, and he was winded. He lay there huffing as the circle of children moved, forming again around the shifting fight. Ernie waited for him and then not. Bo saw his shadow first.

Ernie tried to roll him over and pin both his shoulders. But Bo tucked his toes into the road, imagined them
shoved deep into the concrete, imagined all the force of the earth, every layer, even the molten core, anchoring up his propped legs, and then he used that force to buck his back and neck and head up into Ernie’s. Ernie fell back and Bo rolled on top of him. The crowd whooped.

Now Ernie was beneath him, spitting mad. He tossed his torso to and fro, trying to unsettle Bo. Both boys slowed to catch their breath.

“Chink,” said Ernie.

“I’m not a Chink,” said Bo, but he might as well be Chinese for all Ernie cared. It was just a way to get at him. “Shut up. You talk too much.”

“Boat Boy.”

This hit home. Bo moved his forearm up under Ernie’s chin and pressed in and down. “Take it back,” he said.

“No.”

Bo applied more pressure. “Take it back.”

“No.” Ernie’s voice wheezed out—he was struggling to suck in oxygen.

He tried to edge one elbow out from under Bo’s knee and Bo let him, feigning inattention. And then came Ernie’s open palm at Bo’s face and then the other palm, so that while Bo struggled to keep pressure on Ernie’s windpipe, Ernie forced Bo’s head back so that now neither of them could easily breathe.

It was as if, then, everything fell away. There was no space nor was there time and the two boys floated toward
death. It did not feel so bad. But then Bo released his hold, lifted his body, and slammed it back down onto Ernie’s midriff. He slammed Ernie’s body again, felt it shudder.

Someone yelled, “Hey!”

The circle wavered and, and in that split second of wavering, Bo shifted focus—he let himself shift focus—and Ernie slid out from under him and with his leg, toppled him.

“Adult. Shit. Run!” someone yelled. It sounded like Peter.

Ernie leaned down, the sweat and stink of him enveloping Bo. He leaned so that his lips were almost brushing Bo’s lips, so when he spoke, Bo not only heard the words, but also felt the puffs of air entering his mouth—Ernie’s breath—and surely, Bo thought, Ernie also felt the warmth of his own struggling breath.

“Tomorrow,” Ernie said, and he stood up, checked to see who was left to see, and horked on Bo’s cheek.

Then Ernie stumble-ran away—Bo watched the wreck of him finding strength to just leave.

B
O CURLED OVER ONTO HIS SIDE
, tried to catch his breath. He saw no one. He wondered if maybe Peter had fabricated an adult in order to stop the fight. Bo’s nose dripped snot and blood. He hadn’t noticed Ernie hitting
his nose but it might have smashed in any number of ways. Bo felt his head for lumps.

A small pool of blood congealed on the pavement under his face. Bo wiped his nose with the tips of his fingers. His nostrils had already started crusting up. From where he lay, he could see clear down Maria to his house. Orange, he thought. For years, this fight had played itself out in one way or another. In a moment Bo would get up and go to see Orange. She would be asleep, he hoped. He had better get back before his mother got home. She did not like it when he left Orange.

“Up,” he muttered, and heaved himself onto hands and knees.

Bo noticed the trouser cuffs of a man standing beside him. Beige dress pants. Bo looked up. The man’s belt: black leather and almost worn out. The buckle displayed a nickel-plate grizzly bear head, roaring. The man’s shirt was a blaring sort of white and reflected the street light so that it seemed made of sun, and his jacket was yellow and dirty, the shoulder pads sunken.

“You can fight,” the man said, his hands on his hips, his head cocked.

Bo sat up on his heels, staring at him.

“Sorry,” said the man, shaking his head. “I’m rude. The name is Gerry—Mr. Gerald Whitman.” He shot his hand out and pulled Bo up to standing. “Golly,” he said. “I would have thought you’d be bigger! What are you, all of ten?”

“Fourteen.”

“Gerry. Please call me Gerry.”

Bo nodded.

“You ever thought of making some money from that?”

Bo wondered what
from that
might be and the confusion must have washed over his face.

“You ever considered working in the circuit? Fighting? I can set you up.”

“No—”

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Bo.”

The man smiled, his mouth shot full of decay and gold, and something else—happiness, goodness, times past, Bo wasn’t sure—but he liked the man straightaway, and so smiled back.

“Well, Mr. Bo Jangles. What you may not have noticed while you were scratching and pummelling the life out of that shithole of an excuse for a kid, was that money was changing hands. Green was flowing.” Gerry glanced up at the darkening sky, at the moon poking up in the east. He turned to catch a glimpse of the last of the orange orb of the sun sinking in the west. Then, he sniffed. “Moolah,” he said. “I smelled it all the way from Dundas Street and Keele.”

Bo squinted at the strange man. He
was
strange.

“Tall kid with glasses?” Gerry said. “He made a fiver off your loss. He would have made more if you didn’t lose every time—”

Kid with glasses—that was surely Peter.

“Kids’ll bet more risky if you win some, lose others.”

Bo stared at him some more.

“Oh, you’re wondering how I knew you lost on purpose? I saw you pull back, that’s how I know. You were, what? Seventy-five percent, eighty? Holding at least twenty percent back, right?”

Bo considered the shininess of Gerry’s shirt buttons. “I have to go,” he said.

“Go, then,” Gerry said. “See ya.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket’s inside pocket and tapped one out. Craven “A.” Menthol. He looked up to see Bo still standing there. “The cigarette of choice for quitters,” he said, smiling, gesturing with the smoke at Bo. “Don’t ever start, Bo Jangles.”

Bo said, “Nice to meet you,” and headed down the street toward his house. Gerry’s eyes followed him the whole way.

“I
T IS APPROXIMATELY
one hundred years since the end of the American War,” Bo said to his sister. “I am Orange!”

He looked over to see her reaction. Gleeful—that was good. He was trying to cheer her up before Rose got home. It was a game he had played with her for forever. Not a game exactly, but a kind of storytelling. She watched
more than listened, he figured. She loved it when he was animated, and he loved the words and the thoughts scrolling out of his head. It relieved him of them.

Orange was snotty with misery—he’d been away too long. “When the doctors caught me,” he said, “they shrieked. The nurses shrieked, my mother shrieked, my brother shrieked, and so was I born amid shrieking.” He could say what he liked because she didn’t understand him. She gave no sign of understanding. “In the worldly hierarchy, I am below the vulture. I believe I may be below the dandelion, which is very low indeed. I have no earthly use. But do not worry for I am quiet.”

Orange rocked back and forth on the bed but made not a sound. She wanted to hear what Bo was saying. He stopped to see what she would do if he stopped. She rocked for a while and turned herself toward him, so that her bulging eyes could—

“I am hideous!” he screamed, and her lips slid around like a smile. “I am ugly!” Her lips curled back, revealing gums and teeth, and there was her tongue plastered down and stunted. Even her tongue was bent. “Do not feel sorry for me,” he whispered. “For I am powerful. I am the great-great-great-great-grandchild of chemical number 2, 4–D plus 2, 4, 5–T.”

He flourished his hands like a conductor of a symphony. He leaned over her, for effect. “I am that which scares you the most,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “I am
the pure ugliness of love. I am melancholy. I am joy. I am the BIG MISTAKE you once made.”

Orange swung her arms—fleshy cudgels—and Bo pulled back for fear of getting punched. The words were flowing. It felt fine to him and he continued, whispering this time:

“I am Orange, and I have a girlfriend. Her name is Emily and she loves me. I am Orange and she sucks in breath when she sees me. She sucks in one breath and pulls a tornado from me—she takes my roof right off.” Bo stopped, his finger swirling the air, cotton candy, air.

Orange stood on the bed and put one foot in front of the other and did not fall. She did this two or three times and then threw her arms up above her head and bounced them back to her waist so fast she made wind. Was this walking?

“Orange, Jesus. Stop that.”

But she wouldn’t or she couldn’t, so the arm-throwing went on for a long time before she slowed, panted back her breath, and fell in a heap. He lay beside her. Stared at the fancy toile wallpaper, its luxurious embossment, paper that had been put on the wall long before Bo had even known there was a wall here, so long that it had turned yellow, and brittle. There were sections torn right off, others peeling. But the images! Men on horses and women with parasols—there were centaurs and deer. In between them, over the years they’d lived here, Bo had drawn small shadowy men with big guns taking aim at
the men on horses, at the women with parasols. The deer and centaurs frolicked all around them, oblivious.

A golden deer lay every few feet transfixed by an arrow and dying. “Little sister,” Bo said, and carefully placed his arm over her, so as not to startle her even the slightest. “You can walk.” He looked straight into her eyes and he felt like she must see him. She saw something.

He looked at the wallpaper again, entered its flat forest, traced his finger along the paths between the figures. He said, “I am Orange! I am ugly! I wander in the painted forest. So long has passed since the end of the war. The soldiers have all been forgiven! I am a princess now and I was a princess then. I wander in the forest of paint. One day I will be paint, too, and that day will be glorious. Even ugly things become beautiful.”

He liked the feel of English words roiling around in his mouth, how you could build them up to make something that hadn’t previously been there. “My brother rocks me until I fall asleep,” he added, squinting at her, wondering if she would fall for it.

And then he did rock her and then she did fall asleep.

I
T WAS AFTER TEN O
’
CLOCK
when his mother pushed open the door to the bedroom and woke him. He’d fallen asleep beside Orange.

“Come,” she said. “I warmed the soup.”

Bo and Rose sat at the table and ate. She smelled of lemon floor wax and antiseptic and gin. She’d pulled a bottle from the space behind the dish detergent under the sink and poured some into her glass. Always between them there were questions, but never were these questions asked. For Bo it was as if the air thickened in the space between his thought and his voice. He could not ask about his father; he could not ask about the family they’d left behind in Vietnam.