I took a couple of wipeouts before I turned the corner onto
College Street and rode up Elizabeth. I thought I was going to explode with relief when I saw James standing near the corner with a few young guys, drinking from a Styrofoam cup, puffing clouds into the falling snow. He saw me and right away knew something wasn’t right. He yelled “Move!” and I slid back on my Chopper’s seat. He slammed his cup to the sidewalk and hopped on. With his ass in the air he pounded the pedals furiously. I held on tight to his waist.
Drifts had begun to form and it was difficult for James to read the curb. I closed my eyes and turned my face from the wind, wobbling on the back as the bike’s tires battled sewer grates and streetcar tracks. There were few cars on the road. The city grader had done its first plow-through and now the salting trucks were coming round, their blue lights flashing. The last traces of street lights had been blotted out. My fingers were frozen. James hopped onto the sidewalk just as a salting truck turned the corner. The salt ripped across my ankles, rattled and clanged across the bike’s frame and wheels. It didn’t matter. James didn’t slow down.
We burst into the garage. Ricky stood off to Agnes’s side, cradling the baby. He had wrapped it in the yellow blanket, which hung down to his knees. Agnes wasn’t crying. She sat in the chair wearing the same cotton dress, now drenched and pulled up on her thighs. Her naked legs were white against the bloody towel stuck between them. Her sneakers had been kicked off. The stones had become dislodged from underneath the runners and she rocked slowly in her chair, humming the same song my mother had sung to me when I was a child,
põe, põe a galinha põe, põe
. Manny was up now, pacing around the garage, trying to shake it off.
“She won’t hold the baby,” Ricky whispered, taking a few steps toward us. He held the tiny bundle up to James. “It’s not breathing.”
The blanket made the baby look bigger than it was. The way Ricky held the baby up so gently made me want to cry. He had done it all by himself. James walked past him, took off his jacket and covered Agnes’s lap. He bent over, plunged his hand into her hair, and matched Agnes’s slow rocking, to kiss her forehead.
I had caught a glimpse of the baby’s grey face, all scrunched up. Its head was bald and pointed, no bigger than an orange. The room swirled. The Christmas lights twinkled colours onto the baby’s skin.
“It’s dead,” Manny said. James turned and looked to the garage door and his painting, squinted against the wind that howled outside.
“Get rid of it,” he said, his hair dripping wet, his neck and cheeks red from cold.
Ricky tucked the baby back under his chin. He pinched its nose and breathed soft puffs into its mouth. He nuzzled his lips to the baby’s ear and whispered something. I looked past Ricky’s shoulder. James had placed a chair next to Agnes’s rocker. His lips touched her ear, her eyes half-opened staring at the ceiling, as she hummed and rocked in the garage’s heat.
Early the next morning, I stood at my bedroom window looking down on my father’s dump truck, filled with clumps of hardened cement mixed with mud and dirt. In the bed of the truck, I could see the slab of concrete we had unearthed. Under it, I knew, was the baby in a tiny dirt hole. Ricky had insisted the baby be
wrapped. He had found a dirty apron in the garage. It was one of those touristy ones with the nine islands of the Azores on it. He had swaddled the baby and tied the apron strings around tightly so that it looked like a colourful cocoon. “She won’t be cold now,” he had said. I wondered if the baby could feel the cold. Manny wouldn’t help us; he had slipped away when none of us was looking. Ricky and I did it all by ourselves.
My mother appeared, the wide collar of her fake-fur coat hoisted up to shield the sides of her head. She was off to work her regular shift. I watched her walk down our path. She turned to close the gate, then stopped. She stood motionless as if sniffing the air for danger, like one of those animal mothers on
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
. She looked up to the bare chestnut tree. I hid behind the curtain panel. For a moment I thought she might climb into the dumper, dig out the baby, and somehow bring her back to life. She was my mother. She could do that. I held my breath and watched out the window. My mother trudged down Palmerston through the snow, her figure getting smaller with every step.
The flush of the toilet was all it took for me to make my way downstairs. My father was coming out of the bathroom, dressed and freshly shaved.
“Why you up so early?” he said. “You feeling okay?” He raised his hand to my forehead, but I dodged it.
“I can’t sleep.”
“Go back to bed,” he said as he brushed past me toward the front vestibule. He tied his construction boots and tucked the laces into them. He rammed his Thermos under his arm like a football player. “Is too early for school,” he said, so quietly I could barely hear him.
“There’s no school today.”
“Another one?” It was one of his favourite things to do, complain about how many days the teachers took off.
“Can I come with you?” I asked. Before he could answer I added, “I’ll be just a minute,” and bolted up the stairs, three at a time.
When I went outside the street was quiet, and the world still. I sat in the passenger seat, my hands tucked under my bum. It would take a while before the truck warmed up and the vinyl seats softened.
“Why you want to come with me?” I could tell he really didn’t want an answer. After what happened with the
lapa
and the silent treatment I was giving him, he was happy to have me share in his work. I rolled down the window. I liked to drive with the windows open, even in winter.
“You like driving a truck?” I chose a question that I thought he’d take a long time to answer.
“I like being my own bossa. I no take orders from other guys. I decide. I am the captain. You see James? He no come to work yesterday.”
I said nothing.
“He call and say he no come to work for the next Saturday. This is a problema.”
“You still need him.”
“I have lots of business.”
“I heard he found another job.” It was a good lie because I said it without skipping a beat.
My father didn’t say much after that. Maybe he was waiting for me to say what kind of job or that I knew the reason James wasn’t telling him flat out.
I was relieved when my father stopped talking. He pointed his chin in the direction of the plaid Thermos. I unscrewed the cup and poured some coffee. I offered it to him, but he motioned for me to drink first. Pursing my lips, I blew over the rim and sipped—double-double. I looked back through the long rectangular window, unable to see inside the bed of the dump truck, only its steel shell. I noticed movement underneath a pile of blankets my father usually kept neatly folded in the sleeper cab behind the front seats. I forced myself to look back, and that’s when I saw Ricky, his eyes peeking out from under the wool blanket. My father looked into his rear-view mirror and saw him too.
“Ricardo?” The shock on my father’s face quickly transformed to tenderness.
“Sorry, Senhor Manuel,” Ricky said as he pulled the blanket off his head.
“What you doing here?”
“I couldn’t,” Ricky began, but looking at my father, he mustered some sense. “I couldn’t get in my house. Must have lost my keys. I kept knocking but my father didn’t hear me. Then I stopped because I didn’t want to wake him up.”
“He no work the night shift, filho?” my father asked, before it all made sense to him. Ricky’s father’s drinking was the kind of thing adults knew about but never discussed when we were around.
“Why you not come inside our house? You stay all night by yourself? You not cold?”
Ricky shook his head. His soft brown eyes could convince anyone of anything. “I didn’t want to make him mad, Senhor Manuel.”
“You no worry. I fix things.” My father raised his hands off the steering wheel and then slammed them down, hard enough that the truck swerved a bit. He rolled down his window to spit outside. There was a shine in his eyes I hadn’t seen in a long time. It made me love him. He lit a cigarette. The cab of the truck filled with smoke. I could see my childhood drifting away from me, those moments when my father hoisted me atop his shoulders so I could look over a crowd.
I turned to Ricky and forced a smile. He smiled back. I was glad Ricky was with me. We would see things to the end together. He jumped up front and sat next to me on the passenger seat, his arm tucked behind my back, and mine over his shoulders.
We rattled east along Lakeshore Boulevard, underneath the Gardiner Expressway.
“We go to Leslie Street,” my father said. The city was building a spit out of construction debris that extended out into Lake Ontario. At the foot of Leslie Street, we came to what looked like a toll booth. A man sat in a chair, all bundled up with a coat and fingerless gloves, the kind Adam wore. He slid the glass window open and without looking at my dad shouted, “What ya got?” The man’s matted beard and thick neck made his whole head look like it was stuck onto his body like Plasticine.
“Clean fill,” my father said.
Please don’t check. Please don’t check
. Ricky’s breath whistled in his nostrils. After a long pause the man simply nodded and slid the glass window shut.
My father drove onto a narrow dirt road that ran down the middle of the man-made peninsula. A light wind riffled across the surface of Lake Ontario. We were the only ones there. This was what the surface of the moon must look like, I
thought, with hills and craters all covered in white dust. Ice had formed along the lip of the shore. It was peaceful. My father drove the truck right out to the long finger of land, then reversed it until it backed onto the shore.
The truck stopped with a grind of metal. Seagulls hovered above. Some landed around small mounds of garbage, rummaging through the heaps. Ricky got all jittery when he saw this and I thought of the baby too. My father pressed the Lift button. The dumper slowly inched its way up. Ricky bowed his head so low it almost touched the heat vent that blasted from the dash. His hands were woven in prayer.
Just then the truck bounced and the dumper stalled.
“What’s that?” I heard myself say the words in fear, even though I hadn’t meant to.
“Is nothing. Something get stuck. I go see. Antonio, when I say go, you press the button. Okay?”
My father hopped down onto a mound of snow and I slid over to the driver’s side, careful not to knock the stick shift into another gear. My father’s seat was warm.
Ricky remained quiet, his eyes shut tight.
I looked out the driver’s mirror. The truck’s rear wheels had cracked a slab of ice on the shore. The rubble would go directly into the lake. I waited quietly, hoping to hear the cry of a baby from underneath the dirt. Her last chance.
“What if she floats?” Ricky whispered.
“Okay … Okay!” My father had taken some kind of rake that was tucked under the belly of the truck, and he was pulling things from under the dumper lid, attempting to dislodge what looked like the large stone we had buried the baby under. I thought I’d piss my pants.
“Okay!” he shouted. “Stop!”
Instead, I pressed the button and the hydraulic tilted the dumper higher. I grabbed hold of the chain above my head and pulled. The horn sounded, deep and rolling across the water. Again I tugged.
“What are you doing?” Ricky pleaded.
In the mirror I could see my father walking back to the driver’s seat, determination in his short stride and anger flashing across his face.
I mumbled an apology as he climbed back into his seat. He looked unimpressed, but the diversion had made him look away from making sure everything tumbled into the frigid lake. It had also sent the seagulls back up into the sky.
I scooched back over to the passenger side and looked in the mirror as the load emptied: red clay and sand mixed with rocks and brick and cut pieces of rebar.
“You see anything?” Ricky barely whispered.
I shook my head, too nervous to even speak.
There were bubbles of air and weeds and sand and cold water. The clouds were drifting and I could see beautiful strips of light hitting the water. I spotted a chunk of concrete steps, partially submerged in the water. On a summer’s day, I thought, swimmers could use the stairs to walk into the lake water.
“Pronto! We go home now and I make breakfast.”
The truck lurched forward, the slap of the dumper lid sending its metallic clap across the lake. The cold rippled through my body. I couldn’t stop shivering until Ricky’s small hand slipped into my pocket and he pressed his thumb to mine.
B
aby Mary—Ricky had given her a name; he felt it was the right thing to do—rolled in the water’s current. I could see her curled up, the umbilical cord tugging at her belly, the other end anchored somewhere below, where the lake turned dark. I wanted to reach in and pluck her out of the water, warm the little body in a towel. But every time I tried my fingers rammed into the icy surface of the lake. The baby swayed in the water, kept to the rhythm of the lake’s tide. I leaned over. The baby’s eyelids flashed open to reveal nothing but black holes. The ice cracked and the cold stabbed me, a million needles covering my skin like a blanket
.
“Filho!” My mother held me, crunched my body in her arms and smothered my face in her smell. The swallow charm had been threaded back onto her chain. She rocked me, whispered words into my ears that I didn’t quite understand, pecking my cheeks with her lips. My sister stood at my bedroom door, looking worried and sucking on her pyjama sleeve. “Filho, this has been going on a few nights now.” She brushed my hair away from my forehead. “What is it? You haven’t slept in days.” she said, her eyes and mouth all squished to her nose. I buried my face in my mother’s chest and sobbed.
“We put it in my father’s truck, under some dirt, and then we drove it to a landfill and dumped everything into the lake.”
Edite let her paper bag of groceries slip a bit. She leaned against the door of a boarded-up store. A streetcar rattled past.