“You saw the baby get buried, then.”
I nodded.
“Good.” A puff of breath covered her face, fading the red tip of her nose.
“That’s it? ‘Good’?”
“You did the right thing, Antonio.”
“How can you say that?”
“It’s not your fault.” She placed the bag of groceries at her feet, straddled it so her legs kept it from tipping over. I wanted to kick the bag over and take off. She reached into her pocket for her cigarettes. The pack was empty. She crumpled it into a ball and tossed it on the ground. “James came to get me. He carried Agnes over to her parents’ house. We thought she’d rest better in her own bed. She wouldn’t let us take her upstairs. I guess there were too many ghosts. I stayed to help clean her—gave her a warm bath. The bleeding had stopped.”
“And James did nothing,” I said, my voice raised.
“James didn’t leave her side. Agnes slept on the basement couch and he lay on the ceramic floor beside her.”
“Right, and left Ricky and me to do all the dirty work.” I spat on the ground, just missing Edite’s boot.
Saturday afternoon I walked by Mr. Serjeant’s veranda. I wanted to get to the garage from the front of the house—better not to lift the garage door and expose everyone to the laneway. I hoped James wasn’t there. A week had passed since Baby Mary’s birth and it was Agnes I wanted to see. I saw a box addressed to Manny. Underneath his name was a large sticker with the words
Baby?
And
Star Santa Claus Fund
. Manny must have written a letter to the newspaper asking for
one of the gift boxes they handed out to poor families in the city. I hugged the box and walked along the side of the house into the backyard. I couldn’t let Agnes see it. The last thing she needed was to be reminded. In the backyard I found an empty garbage can. I dropped the box inside. It wouldn’t make sense to open it now.
Snow melted within five feet of the garage’s perimeter. Inside the garage, baseboard heaters had been connected to beat-up extension cords we called the Octopus. They sizzled all night and day to keep Agnes warm.
I found James standing away from the garage door, looking at his painting. He was almost naked, a pair of white briefs, and a cycling cap turned backwards on his head. He looked like he had lost weight. He held the paintbrush in one hand and a roach clip in the other, the tip of his joint burning. It smelled of beer and piss. The heat made the stink worse.
I felt a pinch on my calf. I jumped, thinking it was a rat. A small puppy was trying to climb up my leg. It was tiny, too small to have left its litter. I picked up the ball of black fur, nuzzled the pup under my chin.
“I got it for Agnes,” James said, “thought it could snap her out of it.” He splashed the canvas with a muddy green paint, short flicks with his brush or with his hand that he scooped paint into from the tin. “It’s been a week. She doesn’t talk anymore. Think the pup will cheer her when Christmas comes?” He refused to face me. His voice was a bit shaky. “Thought she’d need something to take care of.”
James drew the rag he used to dry his paintbrush across his face and around his neck. The sweat glistened over his body. I forced my eyes to look away. The pup licked under my chin.
I placed it in a box James had set up against the wall, between some heaters.
“So she’s still there?”
James lifted a beer from the counter and took a swig.
“This is her home,” he said. “Manny and I took her rocking chair across the street, set it in front of the TV. I go over there and she just rocks in her chair.”
“I’ll go see her.”
“I sent Ricky over to see if he could get her to eat something.”
“She lost her baby.”
He took a long drink. His Adam’s apple beat like a heart.
“You should have taken care of it yourself,” I said.
“Fuck you!”
“It wasn’t fair—making me and Ricky get rid of the baby.”
James whipped the bottle against the wall, where it smashed. I didn’t flinch. The foam trailed down the wall. He raised his joint to his lips, tilted his head up to the ceiling, and blew out.
“You say you’re here for us, that you’ll protect us. But that’s a lie.”
“I wanted to be sure she was okay. I needed to stay with her. She was out of it, didn’t know what was happening.”
“Ricky and I had to watch the baby get dumped like garbage into freezing water while you did nothing.”
James looked up to the rafters and opened his mouth into a big O, all the muscles in his neck becoming sharp like knife blades. He was screaming but hardly a sound came out. He closed his eyes, and almost in a whisper said, “Agnes likes to touch my hands, you know.”
“You didn’t even look at the baby,” I said, softly.
James walked past me, reached for a rung, and slowly climbed up to his loft.
I was coming home from the last day of school before Christmas break. Now was my chance to sneak out with the gifts I had for my friends. I had used the forty dollars my father had given me from the collection can after the
lapa
disappeared. I felt too guilty to use it to buy myself something. I had a kite for Ricky, the kind you had to assemble, and a blue hair pick for Manny. I had found the perfect scarf for Agnes, red wool, just like Adam’s. I had scored everything from Woolworth’s going-out-of-business sale, and Terri had helped with her employee discount. I was tempted to buy James a gift—a leather wallet—but I didn’t. The whole time I had the gifts stored under my bed, I thought of Ricky running down the laneway in his bare feet, his hand raised straight in the air as the kite kicked and looped in the wind. I’d be chasing its tail, flying across the rooftops in huge bounds. I thought of the pick I’d bought for Manny and how it would flash against his Afro, Manny plucking away till he looked like one of the kids from the Jackson 5, maybe Michael. The blue against his black hair and dark skin was sure to make him smile.
It was just after five o’clock when I entered the laneway with my gifts tucked under my arms. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a whimpering, whistle-like, coming from somewhere in the laneway. I walked toward it, thought it might be an injured cat or dog. I peered around the edge of a garage. Ricky was crumpled up, drowning in his bomber jacket, leaning up in the corner of two garages.
“Ricky?” I rushed to him. His eyes were heavy and dark. He was burning up. “What are you doing here?” His head was heavy and flopped down onto his shoulder. He said something—
bed
or
dead
. He breathed as if through a straw sucking up pop at the bottom of the bottle. I dropped the Christmas gifts in the snow and scooped him under my arms. “You need to get to bed.” I lifted him like a forklift. He was light, feather-light. His butt was wet from sitting in the snow. I turned back to make sure he hadn’t peed. His spot was blotted like a cherry snow cone. I broke into a sweat. I saw his mukluk footprints trailing from Red’s gate.
Red!
With Ricky in my arms, I trudged along the laneway, keeping close to the garages, the untouched snow dotted with what I knew to be specks of Ricky’s blood. I stopped in front of James’s garage and kicked the aluminum door hard with my boot.
The garage door rolled up and over. James, his red eyes barely open, looked at Ricky’s limp body in my arms. “He was at Red’s,” I said, sidestepping him. “But you knew that.” As I went past, James’s hand shot out to touch Ricky. I whipped Ricky away from him, wouldn’t let him lay a finger on him, and carried Ricky over to a cot James had set up for Agnes. He had positioned it near the blue chest, close to what would have been her baby’s crib. I let Ricky roll from my arms onto the mattress, and I carefully unzipped his jacket. I caught James, still in his pyjamas, pulling on his jeans. He was a stoned slug, slipping his coat over his bare shoulders. I gingerly took off Ricky’s coat. From the corner of my eye I could see James teetering, trying to balance himself as he slipped his long white feet into a pair of rubber boots. I struggled to take Ricky’s mukluks off his feet. Ricky wouldn’t let me take
off his pants, his limp hand trying to push my hands away. Drowsy, he let his head fall back onto the pillow. I let him just lie there, breathing for a while, before pulling his boots off. I tugged the blanket out from under him and drew it over his chest. I unplugged a few of the heaters and threw open the window with its painted panes. In my search for a rag to wet and cool Ricky’s head, I realized James had taken off.
I warmed up a can of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup over the hot plate, but Ricky continued to sleep. “Ricky,” I whispered. It felt weird to speak to him when I knew he couldn’t hear me. “You’re going to feel better soon and no one’s ever gonna hurt you again.” I leaned in closer. His breathing still sounded as though he was sucking through a straw. The baseboard heaters were humming full blast. I pulled back the blanket from Ricky’s chin. “Ricky. Remember the time we fell into the dumpster at the toy factory? The toys were up to our waist. We could hardly move. It was like being stuck in quicksand. They were all defects but we didn’t care. You found that doll with the squashed head, remember? And I found that Smash-Up Derby set? Oh, and the Evel Knievel figure with the missing leg? Then the security guard yelled at us to get out and chased us off the property. I still remember looking back and saw you running with that Evel Knievel doll stuffed down the front of your pants and I couldn’t stop laughing.” I caught the faintest curl of a smile turning up his lips. I realized I was crying.
James’s canvas was a wash of Spackle and paint that had been flung across it or splattered and dripped with turpentine to wash areas out. It was his bad mood on that canvas. The garage door whipped up with a clang. James walked in and
slammed the door down behind him. Ricky had not moved; he slept and breathed small puffs between his cracked lips. James carried a large silver box under his arm. It was an eight-track tape recorder trailed by a frayed electrical cord and wires. He slammed the thing on the kitchen table and tossed a whole bunch of bills into the air.
“What happened this afternoon wasn’t part of the deal I had with Red.” Now sober, he ripped off his jacket and threw it across the room. “Two hundred bucks was all I could pound outta him.” He took the backyard hose he had fed through a hole in the window and ran his bloodied knuckles under the stream of water. “You can go now. I’ll take care of Ricky.”
“Fuck you!” I said. I tried to suck in my lower lip, stop the trembling. James hung his head, and then slowly turned the tap to shut the water. “Fuck you,” I said again.
He walked over and reached into the cardboard box where the puppy lay sleeping among some rags. He scooped up the dog in his massive hand. The puppy licked the traces of blood from his knuckles. He sat on the cot and placed the puppy on Ricky’s chest. The puppy licked Ricky’s face. “Merry Christmas, Hoot,” James said.
M
Y MOTHER HAD BEEN
cooking
petiscos
all day long, and only stopped just before we got dressed for Midnight Mass. Street salt crunched under our feet as we walked down Palmerston Avenue toward St. Mary’s. My father walked ahead of us. I was behind him with my mother, and Edite—who I still wasn’t speaking to—followed behind with Terri, their arms locked as they stepped carefully in their high heels. My father went to church only twice a year—Easter and Christmas—a gift to my mother, instead of the chocolate or flowers the commercials told him to buy. He stopped, turning in frustration at the pace the women had set for themselves. I caught up to him. He placed a hand on my shoulder.
“We’re going to be late and I not going to stand up for the whole thing.” I didn’t care about a seat; I was in a hurry to light a candle for Ricky and Agnes and Baby Mary. I wasn’t sure the message would get to God because so many sins had been committed. I let the idea creep into my mind that what happened to Ricky was punishment for what we had done with Agnes’s baby. God could be mean. I knew
I
still needed to be punished for my part in everything. I just wanted it to happen soon so I could get it over with. We crossed Queen Street and my father continued to talk about stuff he had read in the newspaper. I was beginning to think he had touched the
música
again. It was an expression my family had about slipping
brandy or cognac into one’s coffee,
um café com música
. Whatever had loosened his tongue, I didn’t care—the sound of his voice made me feel safe.
“This boy, Gretzky, is very good. He’s Polish. Those Polish work hard.” My father and uncles loved to watch hockey. “Is like
football
,” they said, “ice instead of grass, puck and sticks instead of a ball and footwork.” My father
was
tipsy. I looked up and saw he was also nervous. It had thought about it—we probably all had. He was going to walk into the church and confront Padre Costa for the first time since he had come to visit at our garage.
We got to church a few minutes early. The smell of wax, spiced with incense and mothballs, wafted up past the traces of lemon oil from the pews. Tiers of candles stood in iron holders. The men wore suits, shiny on the knees. The women were shrouded in black lace veils. And for the first time I could remember, I wasn’t angry with my mother for dragging me to Midnight Mass. I wanted to be there, wrapped in the warmth of the place. I wanted to be with my family. So many people don’t know what that feels like. It was the
something
my father couldn’t fully re-create in our garage.
I wanted to pray. For Ricky, Manny, Agnes, and Baby Mary for sure, and for Adam, that he was warm and had a roof over his head. And even for James, because we were supposed to pray for sinners. Jesus loved them like all the rest, maybe even more. My father huffed and a few people turned. Once recognized, our family was allowed to shuffle onto a bench at the back, everyone sidestepping to make room. They didn’t blame us. They were upset to hear the holy limpet had been stolen. We were all victims.
My father pressed his fingers together, forming a steeple. I stared at his strong hands, his white starched shirt cuffs held together by silver cufflinks. Edite nudged her way past my mother and sister to sit beside me, reached for my hand, and snuck it in her coat pocket. The pocket’s lining had a gaping hole.