I closed my eyes for a second. James smelled of armpits.
“You’re a special boy, Antonio,” he whispered, taking another step toward me.
“Antonio!” Edite called out.
The light of the garage illuminated Edite, who stood tall in the lane, all dressed up in wedge shoes and her shawl tied around her waist. “What are you doing here?” I caught the concern in her face. James whistled and she cracked a smile.
“Your mother’s worried sick. You need to go home right now,” she said, all the while looking at James.
I walked my bike home, but before going in looked back. Edite’s body had relaxed, slinked against the garage doorway. I could hear James still urging her to come in. For a moment, it looked as if she would. Instead, she turned and walked up the laneway.
My lungs were filling up with a burning fire—no room left. My mouth was dry, my throat blocked, and yet their voices grew nearer, louder. “Treat you good, like one of the boys. Have some fun, lots of play with our adult toys.” The alley seemed to stretch forever. I saw Senhora Gloria leaning against a garage door, her eyes smeared with black mascara. She lifted her skirt to show the dimply flesh of her leg. I ran past her. When I dared to look back I saw my mother instead. I stopped running and turned toward her. I was safe; she wouldn’t let the men catch me. I tried to call out to her but my voice was gone. I took off again, cupped my ears to stop the giggling and laughter. That’s when I saw Ricky crouched at James’s feet. James was handing him five-dollar bills. I stopped. Suddenly, the men who were chasing me touched me with their large hands. I felt them tearing at my shirt, tearing at me. I cried for help but again no sound
.
The orange numbers glowed 1:20 a.m., then flipped to 1:21. I sat up in bed, with my arms crossed over my knees, hugging them to my chest. If I was quiet, didn’t move, the trembling might go away and I would hear my house breathe. I tried it for a minute or two, but I couldn’t stop shaking. I heard the smash of glass breaking. I ran to the window and saw two stretched shadows running down Palmerston Avenue.
A glow came through Mr. Wilenski’s broken window. I drew the curtains and jumped back into bed. This time I pulled the clock radio under the covers and pressed it to my ear. I took in the scratchy static and the world got quiet.
A
HOT PLATE WITH
two elements sat atop a stripped drop-leaf table. Ricky poured some hot water from the kettle into a mug. He stirred in a spoonful of Nescafé, careful not to clink too loudly, then tucked the spoon in his back pocket. Biting his lip in concentration, he climbed up the ladder and left the mug on the floor of the loft.
“James likes to wake up to a hot cup of coffee,” he told me.
In the days that followed the march, my parents tried to keep me in the house, but it was a losing battle. Everyone slipped back into their routines. The newspapers no longer carried pictures of Emanuel, and stories about the march had disappeared from the six o’clock news. We all pretended everything was okay. I guess we figured if you pretended long enough it would be. I wasn’t sure if I trusted James, but I played along. Manny and Ricky were spending all their time in his garage and I didn’t want to miss out on anything. Besides, Edite told me she thought my father had spoken to James, asked him to keep an eye out for me, the way everyone in the neighbourhood was expected to. I was pretty sure that even if he had, my mother knew nothing about it. She never once asked me about James. Meanwhile, James made us feel his garage was pretty much our own. We could use it as long as we took care of it and of him. Manny had been sneaking James’s clothes home, wrapped in a plastic bag and tucked
under his arm. When his parents went to work, he would shake the bag into the washer. He’d bring them back, still damp, to be strung along the clothesline that James had tacked along the peaked fold of the loft. He never asked, but I snuck James food from our fridge. My mother cooked the week’s meals on the weekend—roasts and large pots of soup and stews that were full of cabbage, sausage, and sweet potatoes. If a little was missing, no one would notice.
It was ten o’clock and we still had not heard James’s thick-soled feet on the floorboards. Ricky climbed up the ladder again and peeked into the space. “He’s not here. You think he’s okay?”
“He’s fine,” Manny said, and sat himself down at the breakfast table, his eyes glued to the map he had flattened there the night before.
I went over to have a look. “What are you doing?”
“The richer they are, the better the bikes,” Manny said, his finger tracing his route for the day.
“Hey, Ricky, wanna go down to the fort park?” I asked. Before Emanuel, before James, we would go down to the park at the foot of Bathurst, where the city had created a mini construction site for kids to play and build. My dad hated it.
I no come to Canada for you to work in construction
, he had said when he found out where we were going. I didn’t care; our fort was almost finished when Emanuel disappeared.
Ricky looked around the garage. “I got to go home, do some things for my dad,” he said.
“What should I do, then?”
“Look pretty.” Manny lifted his eyes from his map. “Sit back and look pretty, that’s all.”
“What the hell does that mean, dipshit?”
“Don’t get all worked up,” Manny said, raising both of his middle fingers.
“Stick them up your ass and rotate,” I said.
Manny pushed his chair back. Ricky came to my side and blocked him.
“You’re the lucky one,” Manny said.
“What’s your fuckin’ problem?” I said.
“Don’t play stupid. You got your aunt and your dad sniffing around, telling James to look out for you. You’re no better than us,” Manny said, his face close enough that our noses almost touched.
“You jealous?” I said, my eyes glued to his.
“Nah. The way I see it, I’ll do my part and James’ll let me spend as much time in here as I like,” Manny said.
The roar of a familiar engine made him brush past me and lift the door. Manny’s brother, Eugene, was cruising up the lane in his red Trans Am, a golden phoenix rising from a bed of flames across its hood. Eugene’s fuckmobile, Manny called it. Manny said Eugene had no problem finding someone to get into it. Eugene was twenty-one, like James, and had been working in construction ever since he dropped out of school at sixteen. Eugene could afford a Trans Am and, according to Manny, an engagement ring for Amilcar’s sister, Lygia, who was seventeen.
The car stopped in front of the garage and Lygia rolled down the tinted window. She had recently permed her hair with one of the home kits they advertised on TV. Manny had once walked in on her, half-naked in his bathroom when his parents were at work. He couldn’t stop talking about her tits for a month. Lygia flicked open a compact and fixed her curls.
“What are you guys doing?” Eugene called, the furry dice swaying from his rear-view mirror.
“Hanging around,” Manny replied.
Eugene nodded, trying to take a look inside the garage. “Later!” he called out. His car farted a couple of times up the laneway before the roar took over.
Through the Trans Am’s cloud of dust, we didn’t notice James walk up beside us. “Hey, boys!” he said. He had a faraway look about him, like Moses in the movie
The Ten Commandments
after he witnessed the burning bush. James had draped his T-shirt through the side loop in his painter pants, which were barely hanging on to his hips.
“I made some coffee for you,” Ricky said. “Probably cold now but I can warm it up.”
“Thanks, little man, but I just need some sleep.”
“Where were you?” I said.
He stretched his arms and rose on his toes. “You guys promise to keep a secret? I came across this Indian girl who got her face smashed up by her pimp, so I helped her out. Took a few bucks and got a motel room so I could clean her up, keep her safe for a little while. I must have crashed. Before long, this chick’s got her hand in my pants like she’s lookin’ to pay me back.”
“So what happened?” Manny was practically drooling.
“Will she be okay?” Ricky asked. I thought Manny was going to slap him.
“Things’ll work out. I could use a shower, though. A real scrubbin’.” He picked at his groin, adjusted his cock. “Damn hose I hooked up from the backyard just trickles over my head like cat piss.”
“Why didn’t you shower in the motel?” I said.
Manny looked at me like I was a moron.
“Didn’t think of it, I guess,” James said.
“Well, no one’s home at my place,” I said, my scalp tingling. “You can take a quick shower in the basement.”
Manny’s eyes got huge, and Ricky’s mouth made a perfect O.
The minute I said it I wanted to pee. I wasn’t allowed to bring people into the house without my parents there, not even my friends. But I couldn’t take it back. Manny’d never let me forget it.
James tossed his T-shirt into the corner of the garage and emptied his pockets: crumpled bills mixed with coins and a couple of Sheik condom packets. We had seen the wrappers before, windswept against the fences in our lanes, but those were always empty. “You sure?”
I nodded, trying to look uninterested. He reached in his back pocket and placed some cherry bombs and a string of firecrackers on the counter.
Manny stared at the firecrackers but didn’t move.
“Now, boys, you better not blow up the joint,” James said. “Antonio, lead the way.”
James ducked through the doorway and came into our damp basement. He trailed his fingertips over my father’s workbench, along the shelves stocked with Mason jars and tin cans. He stopped to look at the photographs that lined the panelled walls and started to fire questions at me.
How long had we lived in the house? How high did I think the basement ceiling was, between the joists, of course? Who lived here before and how many bathrooms were there?
“How old were you in this one?” he said, pointing to one of the photos.
“Probably one or so,” I said.
“It’s a nice family shot.” My mother sat on a chair with me on her lap dressed in shorts and a vest and tie. My father stood behind us, looking tall in his suit, one hand on the back of my mother’s chair, the other on Terri’s shoulder. She stood in front of him, wearing a tartan dress, bobby socks, and shiny shoes. She was the only one in the photograph not smiling.
“You can’t go upstairs,” I said, without needing to.
“Can I ask you something?” James said. “What’s that Portuguese word I hear in the laneway sometimes—sounds like
feel you
?”
“Filho?”
“That’s it.”
“Son. It means son, but my uncles and aunts call me it too. Manny’s dad calls me filho. I think it’s a way of saying I belong to them, to the neighbourhood. It means they care, I guess.”
“Nice.”
I felt my mouth getting pasty and my joints were achy.
“What’s that thing over there?”
“It’s a bidet.” I turned the faucet on and the water shot up out of the spout in the centre of the bowl. “All Portuguese houses have them.”
“I’ve never seen a drinking fountain in a bathroom before.”
“It’s to wash yourself. You know, between your legs,” I said.
He started laughing, hard. “I grew up with a shithouse, man, fifty yards back from the house. And here you all are.” I looked at him, filling the bathroom space with his body. He turned on the shower and began to unbutton his pants.
“I’ll get you a towel.”
Keeping watch upstairs by the living-room window, in case my sister came home, I heard James trying to mimic Rod Stewart’s voice—“Tonight’s the night, gonna be alright.” I looked over at Mr. Wilenski’s house, forcing myself to think of something other than James singing in my shower. A large sheet of plywood covered their window. I wondered what Mr. Wilenski was planning to do. My father said they’d be moving soon. “They better move. If they no move, lots of people make troubles for them.” Getting people right was one of the things my father was proud of.
The shower finally stopped running. I raced downstairs just as James appeared from a cloud of steam: barefoot, damp hair, his underwear tucked in the front pocket of his jeans, which he hadn’t buttoned up to the top.
“That was the best damn shower I’ve had since I left home.”
“Where do you come from?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just curious, I guess. Where did you grow up?”
“A town. Up north.”
“Why did you come down here?” I asked. The fog in the bathroom was beginning to clear. I reached for a hand towel to dry the shower door.
“There were no jobs where I’m from,” he said. He shook his head a little, wiggled his fingers in his ears. “Travelled around a bit. Moved all over the place before settling down. This is where it’s happening, little man.” I caught his reflection in the shower door. He buttoned up the last two buttons of his fly with one hand, staring at me as he did. I wanted to rewind to James’s garage, except this time I’d keep my damn
mouth shut. “You wanna know something?” he said, flinging the towel at my face. When I whipped it off my head he was standing right in front of me, smiling. I could hear his breathing and I wanted to close my eyes. “Where I come from we don’t wash our asses in drinking fountains.” James laughed as he messed up my hair.
“Were you making that story up?”
“Which one?”
“About the Indian girl who got beat up.” When James had told the story I couldn’t shake the feeling he was just trying to impress us.
“It went something like that.” He checked himself in the mirror one last time. “We should scram before you get caught in here with me. We don’t want people to talk.”
We made our way back from the cool of the basement out into the backyard. I felt relieved to be outside again. I was crouching down to raise our garage door when James’s hand grabbed hold of my shoulder. “I won’t forget this, you know.”
“It was nothing,” I said.
“Okay, filho,” he whispered, before strutting into the sunny laneway. Manny and Ricky were standing outside James’s garage, waiting. Manny must have lit some firecrackers already—the smell of sulphur hung in the air. When they saw us coming, they ran down the lane to meet us. As we approached his garage, James raised his arms into the air. “Now, where’s my coffee?”