Bonechiller (9 page)

Right now Pike’s destroying the nachos.

“Don’t steal all the cheese,” I say. “Leave some for the champ.”

“The champ’s on her third burger,” Pike mumbles around a mouthful. “She ain’t gonna starve.”

A couple of crew cuts in uniform come up to our table.

“Hey, Captain. One of the new guys wants to try out your arm.”

Ash’s dad is a legendary arm wrestler. He won an army competition a few years back.

Nick scowls playfully up at them, flexing his massive right hand. “You mean the Crippler?”

“Yeah. We’re taking bets. What do you say?”

Nick makes a fearsome fist, knuckles popping. “Cut me in.”

He gets up and follows the crew cuts into the crowd.

“Time to ride the Reaper,” Pike says. “You guys gonna come watch?”

The Reaper is the mechanical bull over in the corner, roped off and surrounded by cushioned mats.

“We can see from here,” I say. “But it sounds like a bad idea, man. You’re gonna be puking nachos all over the saddle.”

Pike stands on the seat to peer over the mob and see if the bull is free. “I think I’ll try it on five tonight.” (The thing goes up to a spine-shattering, testicle-pulverizing six.) “Yep. I’m gonna reap the Reaper.”

Pike makes off for the bull, and Howie gets up. “Somebody has to be there to pick up the pieces,” he says, leaving me and Ash alone.

She finishes off her third burger and leans back.

“You finally full?” I have to shout over the music.

“Just pacing myself.”

“So you have to tell me—”

“What?”

I start to lean over the table so she can hear, but she waves me over to her side of the booth. I slide in next to her.

“You have to tell me,” I say, leaning in close enough to smell her shampoo. “What was that thing your dad was yelling to you during the fight? Something Indian?”

She gives me a small smile, curving her swollen lower lip. “It’s just this thing he says to get me juiced for battle.”

With my leg against hers, I can feel the heat coming off her.

“What was it?”

“Netaga waab minodoo.”
She twists her tongue around the strange words. “It’s Ojibwa. Kind of an inside joke between me and him. Means ‘Kill the white devil.’ ”

“What’s the white devil?”

Her grin gets wider, and she hits my leg lightly with her fist. “You are, man. Whitey.”

“Kill the white devil?” I laugh nervously.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll let you live. You’re too cute to put in a coffin.”

I go red and have to look away.

Through the crowd, I see Pike’s head whiplashing around as the bull spins and bucks under him. His red Mohawk flashes in the light like a struck match.

Ash stretches her left arm, laying it down along the back of the booth, resting it on my shoulders. I lose sight of everything but her.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she says. “It’s just I think I strained my rotator cuff. Gotta stretch it out.”

“Right. Anything else you need to stretch out?”

She shrugs her “strained” shoulder. “I’ll let you know.”

We share a nice silence, picking at the remains of the feast.

Howie slides into the other side of the booth. He notices Ash’s arm around me and gives a shy little smile. “Pike’s waiting in line to have another go at the bull.”

Ash stuffs some fries in her face. “Remember back at Gagetown, him and the rottweiler?”

Howie shakes his head. “He’s lucky it didn’t rip his head off.”

“What’s that about?” I ask.

Ash, Howie and Pike grew up at the army base in Gagetown, New Brunswick. They’ve got some serious history together.

“Pike, when he was little,” Howie tells me, “wanted to run away and join the rodeo. He saw this bull-riding competition on TV and thought that was, like, his destiny. So he started out practicing his riding technique on the local dogs. He tried this big rottweiler named Napalm. A hundred pounds of mean, slobbering muscle. Pike hopped on, grabbed its collar and locked his legs against its sides. That thing spun, twisting and trying to take a chunk out of him. It rolled in the dirt to get him off, but Pike wouldn’t let go.
Finally, Napalm just gave up and lay down on its belly, exhausted.”

“That was when we knew Pike was kind of wrong in the head,” Ash says.

Howie grunts. “We knew way before then. But seeing him break Napalm—that was something.”

He’s proud of his brother, no matter what.

Ash taps my shoulder. “Let me out. Gotta take a leak.”

When she’s gone, I remember my cell phone pictures. Now that I’ve got Howie alone, I can’t put it off any longer.

“Gotta show you something.” I dig out my cell. “I found these weird tracks in the snow. From some kind of animal, I guess. See if you can tell me what made them.”

I pull up the shots from the ditch. “There.” I hand my cell over to him.

Howie pages through the shots on the little screen. “Where was this?”

I gulp some of my Coke, stalling. I don’t want to say too much, don’t want to come off like I’m nuts.

“Down by the lake,” I say. “In a … ditch.”

“Hmmm.” He frowns. “What were you doing in a ditch?”

“Doesn’t matter. Long, weird story. But what do you think? What kind of animal left those?”

He makes more
hmmming
sounds, squinting at the pictures. “The claws marks are bizarre. Eight digits to a paw? And the impression of the pad …?”

Howie keeps flicking back and forth through the photos.

“What size shoe are you?” he asks, looking at the shot where I set my foot down next to the tracks to get scale.

“Ten.”

Howie blinks at the image on the screen. Then he pulls out a pen. “Give me your shoes.”

“Huh?”

I hesitate as he clears some space on the tabletop. But then I pull them off and hand them over. Never question a genius.

Using the photo and my running shoes for reference, he paces out lengths and widths, drawing lines in ink on the pale wood of the table. Then he draws an outline, adding little circles in a curve at the top to show the position of the claw marks.

The outline stretches most of the width of the table.

“Wow, that’s …” His voice dies off. “I don’t know what that is.”

“How about a bear or something?”

“Nah. Even if you had one gigantic polar bear on steroids, the structure’s all wrong. The heel, the span of the digits.”

“So what then?”

Howie shrugs, with a puzzled half smile. “Bigfoot, maybe? The Abominable Snowman?”

“Any way you can look into it?” I ask, glad that he’s not pressing me for the full story yet.

“Definitely. Just let me e-mail these shots.”

He sends the digital images to his own address.

Ash shows up then and sees my shoes on the table.

“What’s this? Strip poker? Can I get in on it?”

I grin, glancing at her sideways as she slips in next to me.

Midnight is closing time at the Legion Hall.

This was a good night. The best in a long, long time. As
we make our way out to the parking lot, the crisp air shivering in our lungs, we’re all flying high.

Ash is pumped with her victory in the ring. Pike’s bragging about beating the Reaper and then getting some girl’s number after. Howie’s staring into space, focused on the mystery monster tracks.

And me? I’m still riding the electric buzz of Ash’s touch. The feel of her heat.

Right now, there’s no past, no future. Nowhere else we need to be. Beneath a clear black sky crowded with stars, the shock of the cold braces us, shouting that we’re alive. Right here and now.

And we’re all feeling—invincible, maybe.

Immortal
.

It always catches me when I’m not expecting it.

I’m getting out of the shower, toweling my hair dry. The mirror is cloudy from the steam. Reaching to wipe a patch clear, I see the marks where Dad has done the same thing earlier. The glass holds the print of his hand where he swiped away the steam.

And just like that, the memories flood back, stopping my hand in midreach.

It was something Mom used to do. She was always the early riser, the first to hit the shower. So when I’d get done with mine later on, sometimes I’d find one of her mirror doodles waiting for me. I’m a heat freak when it comes to showers, so she knew that when I got out I’d find the invisible finger drawings she’d made in the steam on the glass.

She’d draw these stick figures with round lollipop heads. Dumb stuff, but it was
our
dumb stuff. We had a running thing with a stick figure called Stinkboy. My alter ego. He
was the one who got mud on the carpet, left dirty laundry everywhere and was responsible for those foul sneakers. Mom drew the evil stick figure with pointy shark teeth, beady little eyes and wavy stink lines coming off him. Sometimes I’d add another stick figure to the scene, shooting tiny bullets at Stinkboy or stabbing him to death.

Dumb stuff. Our stuff.

I remember that the morning Mom showed the first sign something was wrong, I’d drawn a nuke attack on Stinkboy, surrounding him with little exploding mushroom clouds.

“I think we’ve seen the last of Stinkboy,” Mom said, coming into the kitchen. “No way he can survive that.”

I was nodding off into my cereal but snorted awake at the sound of her voice. “He’s been shot,” I mumbled. “Been stabbed, burned, bombed and decapitated. Still, he comes back. The guy’s immortal.”

Mom was in her usual crazy rush, eating toast and chugging coffee while texting messages on her cell phone. She was a real estate agent, always racing around town showing places. Always with a million things on her mind.

So it was almost funny at first. A slip of the tongue. She’d just downed her second black coffee and set the cup in the sink.

“Toss me the elephant,” she said to me.

“Huh?” I looked up from my cereal.

“Elephant,” she said. “Elephant.”

I just stared at her, frowning. She pointed to something on the table by my elbow. Her keys were lying there.

“These?” I asked. “Your keys?”

“Yeah. Toss them.”

I did, and she caught them without even pausing in her texting. Mom was a master multitasker.

“You said
elephant
.”

“What’s that, honey?”

“Just now, you said
Toss me the elephant
.”

She glanced up from her cell, raising an eyebrow. “I don’t get it. What’s that mean?”

“Hey, you tell me. You said it.”

She gave me a look like I was talking crazy. “I think you must have inhaled one of those mushroom clouds meant for Stinkboy.”

We shrugged it off. A slip of the tongue. It was almost forgotten by the time she did it again.

More slips, getting words wrong. Kind of funny at first. Not so funny when the migraines started.

She went in for tests. MRI, CAT scan, EEG.

Aphasia
, they called it. Getting words wrong, forgetting the names of things. It was the first symptom, soon followed by the headaches, nausea, clumsiness and disorientation.

Then they found
it
in the left hemisphere of her brain. The part that controls speech recognition, balance, memory. Mom said the image on the MRI scan made the tumor look kind of like an octopus, with tentacles reaching out, holding on. The biopsy showed it was bad. Its location, up against the brain stem, was worse.

Then the real nightmare started.

All this flashes through my head now as I’m standing here in front of the mirror.

I use the towel to wipe the glass clear, and catch my
reflection. My eyes are tearing up, and my heart feels like a fist inside my chest. A surge of panic rises.

No! Not now. Not now.

I shut my eyes tight, leaning on the sink. Forcing myself to breathe slow, I try to erase my thoughts like I swiped away the steam. Get a grip on the panic before it pushes me off the deep end. Takes a minute, but I manage to flatline my emotions. The wave of raw grief falls back.

I’ve almost stopped shaking when there’s a knock at the bathroom door. I jump, opening my eyes on my own startled reflection in the mirror.

“Danny,” Dad says, muffled through the door. “Phone.”

I have to swallow before I can speak.

“Okay. I’m coming.”

I push off from the sink, avoiding eye contact with that mess in the mirror that looks like me.