“I think you need to know about how Scott and I became friends,” Cooper says, his voice soft. But his eyes are hard.
Chapter 8
“I was eight years old when I met Scott,” Cooper says. “It was by accident.”
Cooper had just moved from the southwest part of Calgary, up in Huntington Hills where the Asians and rich white people lived. His parents split up, and his mom took the kids and came to the southeast.
“My house was down at the end of the block,” he says, pointing to the kitchen wall on the eastern side of the house. Like she could see it if she turned and looked right now, through all the boards and nails and dead things.
“Scott was this weird kid nobody wanted to be friends with. Other kids were scared of him. He was a tough little fucker back then. He used to get in fights with brown kids, two or three at a time. That’s how they always fought him, because he could take on kids three grades higher than he was. Just mean, when he wanted to be. “
“I’m an easy target because I got nice clothes,” he continues. “Fancy shit. I take ‘em to school and I get rolled for them. Take my mp3 player, my video games, whatever. I’m getting in fights every day, and I’m getting my ass kicked just about every time.” Cooper smiles and rubs the side of his face, like just remembering those days brings back welts and bruises he can still feel.
“So what,” Bretta says. “Scott saved you? You guys been besties ever since?”
Cooper laughs. “Not exactly. Scott beat the shit outta me too, all the time. He just never stole nothin’.”
“Then one time he’s beating me up in front of my house and my mom comes out and grabs Scott by the arm. Scott’s hollering and calling her a fucking cunt and he’s gonna rip her cunt off.
“He’s spitting and punching and she drags his ass over to his house and rings the doorbell and that’s how Scott’s dad sees his boy when he opens the door, spitting and swearing like he’s possessed, and my mom is holding him at arm’s length and she tells Scott’s dad he keeps attacking me.”
“What did his dad do?”
“He reaches out and slaps Scott right upside the head. A damned good one too, just pow, like that. I’m out on the grass, and I can see the whole thing.”
Cooper’s still rubbing the side of his face, and he frowns at the memory.
“Scott just starts wailing like that, crying really hard, and Scott’s dad, he’s gonna hit him again for being a baby. But my mom grabs Scott back and hugs him close to her hip, real close, getting in the way in case his dad tries hitting him again. She knows the old man ain’t gonna hit her, and she shields him. She tells him he hits Scott again, there’s gonna be hell to pay. She’s gonna call the cops, and they’ll be carted off to jail.
“I guess they believed her. Scott never had another bruise on him again, far as I could see. And once he hit fifteen, he was too big for his old man to put down, and it all stopped.”
“Scott never told me anything about his childhood,” Bretta says. “He doesn’t talk about anything.”
Cooper spits on the floor. “They were real assholes. Scott’s mom kept a good house for appearances, but neither one of them gave a shit about him. After that, he’s over at my house all the time. He’s like ten years old and in love with my mom, like he wants her to be his mom too. She was, in a lot of ways. He’d be over for days, and she just took him in, no worries. I go school shopping, Scott comes with us and my mom buys him clothes too. Christmas presents, birthdays, you name it. Ironic, we’d get stuck here. His parents finally did right by him.”
Bretta says, “You sound more like brothers.”
“In every way,” Cooper says. “Except blood.”
“So, what does this have to do with Scott now?” Bretta says.
“I’m telling you this because you need to know how close Scott and my mom were when she first noticed it.”
“Noticed what?”
Cooper lets out a long sigh. “Scott and I are at school all day together, and nobody kicks my ass after that. And Scott’s over at my house, like three, four nights a week easy. Every weekend for sure. He likes how calm it is there, right? Nobody giving him shit.”
Bretta can see that. While her own parents were more or less fine with her, they had rough spots with her sister. She was already in her teens when that stuff started though.
Cooper licks his lips when he speaks. His voice slows down, and he starts looking down at the floor. “Actually, I noticed it first. But what the hell do I know? I was just a dumb kid. My mom didn’t know for a long time. Then one day, she asks me if something is different about Scott. And I tell her yeah.”
“So what was it?” Bretta says, though she’s not sure she wants to know.
“Scott used to play these weird games,” Cooper says. “It wasn’t until I was a lot older that it made a little more sense.”
Bretta stares at him, urging him on with her eyes, and Cooper starts talking about how Scott would rub his palm with his thumb back and forth, so it made a rubbing noise. And Scott would put it near his face, so he could hear it better.
“What was he listening to?” Bretta says.
“Scott was listening to another Scott,” Cooper says, his voice grave. “He said he could hear another little boy when he rubbed his palm, like the sound of rubbing brought a voice out of his skin. And Other Scott was kind of a bastard. He wanted to fight and do bad shit. He told Scott the kids at school were telling his parents we were doing gay shit when he came over, so they’d know and be mad at him, and hit him.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bretta says.
“It wasn’t just that. He was afraid of corners with shadows in them. Like inside corners, if we were outside, and they were dark, he said there were funnel spiders in there with little baby fingers for legs. They grab you if you get too close and leave little pinch marks. He showed me one time, he had these purple welts all over his arms, and that’s when my mom stepped in.”
“The spiders grabbed him?” Bretta asked.
“He was doing it to himself. And tonight, at the table, I saw him doing that thing again, rubbing the palm of his hand. Like when he talked to Other Scott.”
“What are you saying?” Bretta’s face is tight and strained, her cheeks in bloom. “You think Scott’s crazy?”
“It was schizophrenia,” Cooper says. “He had it as a kid. He took a lot of heavy drugs and did tons of therapy. He even went away for an entire summer, when we were in grade nine. He came back, he was like a different kid. Calm, you know? Like they cured it. Apparently, it goes into remission and you can be fine for years. Then you hit a wall of stress, and boom.”
He makes a fluttery motion with his hands. “It’s like the stitching comes off your mask and you’re right back where you were.”
“Maybe that’s not it,” Bretta says slowly. “His temperature was off. Maybe he is sick.”
“That what you want?” Cooper says. “Have him sick instead of sick in the head?”
“I want him better,” she says. But in a way, she kind of does, because that’s something she can deal with. They can try and get some antibiotics or something, find some way to make him better. Sick in the head, though, they might wander the streets of Calgary forever and never find a shrink.
“Either way, he could get very dangerous,” Cooper says.
Bretta looks at him, and a horrible realization creeps over her.
He’s right.
Chapter 9
It’s a different day, and the house is quiet. The girls are in the living room and Scott is in his bedroom. Cooper is coming down the hall, and he’s barefoot and wearing a pair of dirty Calgary Flames boxers and a T-shirt. He’s got a set of keys jangling in one hand. He’s got a plastic bag rolled up in the other.
Scott’s door is open and Cooper pokes his head in. Scott’s laying down, naked, except for a sheet covering his waist, his hands together on his stomach. Thumb is in palm, making swift, vicious little circles. Scott is reciting something, but it isn’t really words so Cooper can’t hear it.
“You need anything, Scotty?” he asks. “Everything OK?”
Scott doesn’t reply with words. Instead, he shakes his head and puts his hands under the sheet so Cooper can’t see what is happening. Scott’s hands where they are, it looks like something else is happening, and Cooper leaves the room. He makes a bee-line for the basement.
He takes the stairs one at a time, like a bride entering a church, one foot and then together, then another foot, and together. He makes it to the bottom of the stairs like this, slowly, approaching some imaginary groom-to-be. It’s dark down here. There’s little to see. The keys have a tiny LED flashlight with a rubber button, the kind you buy for five bucks and three bucks goes to a charity. Disabled kids, usually, but sometimes homeless kids, abused kids, or lost kids. These flashlights, they never make money for adults. If you’re a lost adult, or one without legs, you’re on your own.
He shuffles around the pallets of food and follows the rows of bottles to the back wall, farthest away from the basement. There, sitting under a brown jacket just like Denise said it would be, is a milk crate filled with old cans of spray paint.
Cooper picks up a black can, then puts it down and picks up a blue one. He likes blue better as a colour. Besides, black isn’t a real colour. It’s the absence of colour. Just like huffing paint isn’t really doing drugs. It’s the absence of drugs that forces you to do stuff like this.
He sprays paint into the bottom of the bag, a great swatch of blue. It’s like a school-age ocean across the bottom of a canvas of plastic membrane. It’s a kindergarten tsunami of blue. He sprays until rivulets of paint are running around, and then he closes off the top of the bag in his fist, leaving an opening about the size of a grape. That hole, it looks like a watery blue eyeball staring up at him now, judging him. Paint runs from production holes at the bottom of the bag. He spreads his feet apart to avoid getting blue on them. He puts his lips to the opening of the bag and breathes.
He tastes blue in the chemical-rich air as it rushes past his teeth, past his tongue. Blue fills his lungs. He can feel it seeping into the pores of his lips and in the skin around his mouth. He feels it filling the dentine lines of his teeth. It coats the back of his throat. Once inside, it fills his chest with blue, until his eyes are bobbing in it like bloodshot crab apples in a rain barrel. A chemical fog rolls in like a marshy cloud around his brain. He breathes and breathes, and the world begins to go away. Somewhere upstairs there are dead people, and people who wish they were dead. But none of that matters, because it’s not blue up there. It’s blue down here.
Holding the bag to his face, Cooper sits on the cold cement of the basement floor. He puts the paint can down beside him. Blue is coursing through his body; it’s leaking from his pores and running down his legs. The insides of his knees are sticky with it. The smell of chemical is in everything. He’s done this before; he has a process. He takes four quick, hyperventilating breaths in the bag. Every fifth breath, he pulls his face away from the bag and exhales slowly. He replaces chemical air with a single, deep breath of regular air. He follows that breath with four quick deep blue ones, and on he goes.
Sometimes huffers breathe themselves to death by forgetting they need oxygen, and Cooper doesn’t want to end up a blue zombie because he lost count of his breathing method. He counts his limbs with every four breaths; one for both arms and then both legs. He thinks about each limb as he breathes and clenches the major muscles in each one. Left side, right side. Left side, right side. His fifth breath is his head, and he looks up at the ceiling so his airways have a clean line down into his lungs.
He props himself up against boxes of macaroni and canned soup; the thick kind you can eat with a fork or a spoon. The ritual continues. Lefts and rights. The world is more blue every time he looks back and takes that one deep breath.
And then Denise is there when he looks up at him, and she’s got a half-puzzled, half-stern look on her face. Like he’s a bad child who’s been caught with cookies before dinner, but because it’s Christmas everything is okay. Like she’s going to reach down and pat his head and send him on his way. Instead, she says, “You’ve got paint all over you.”
He smiles and his teeth are blue. “It’s coming out everywhere.”
She reaches for his hand and he holds up the paint bag. She looks at it. And then she takes it. She sits down beside him and tells him she doesn’t want to get paint all over her clothes like he does.
“So take them off,” he says, and they both laugh.
Later, when Bretta smells paint in the house and comes downstairs to see what is going on, she sees Denise in her bra and panties and Scott with his shirt off but still wearing his boxers. He has an awkward bulge in his pants. They’re both giggling, and Denise bursts into high, semi-hysterical laughter when she sees Bretta. Scott laughs too.
They’re both laughing again. Laughing, and covered in blue paint.
Bretta says something, but neither one of them really hear her. She turns on a heel and stomps upstairs. She slams the door behind her.
Scott and Denise think that’s pretty damned funny.
Chapter 10
Bretta doesn’t say anything. The sound of the basement door crashing on the frame is enough to get the attention of the dead people outside, and they bang the walls in response. She clenches her hands into fists and takes deep breaths that stink like blue paint. She swallows pure rage like razors going down her throat, and it sits like hot lead in her guts. Her teeth are clenched to the point of pain. It takes everything she’s got not to start screaming at the dead people outside, telling them to shut up. Telling them to go away forever and leave the people in the house alone. She breathes, and her lungs heave paint and dirty air. She tastes blood still. They haven’t been able to get the smell of Allen and Nancy out of the house. It’s possible they never will.
Sometimes, Bretta thinks their lives will be this strange half-existence forever. They’ll hide in the house until they run out of food, and then they’ll die doing something stupid. There’s a straight line right to the end, and most days she can see it clearly enough. Right now, all she’s thinking about is Cooper and Denise. The two of them sitting on the floor, half clothed, Cooper with his ugly boner and his body sticky with blue paint. Denise with her shirt off, the two of them stupid-eyed and laughing about something only stoned people find funny. Rolling on the floor like a couple blue hobos.
She stalks down the hall to her bedroom, where Scott is now, all the time, and throws the door open. He’s lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling and he doesn’t look over when she enters the room.
“We’ve got to do something about your idiot friends,” she says. Like they’re children, and Scott and Bretta are the parents. When the children are good, they belong to Bretta. When they’re bad, they belong to Scott. Huffing paint in the basement, that’s definitely Scott behaviour. Having awkward boners, that’s all Scott.
Scott says nothing. His breath comes and goes in calm, shallow waves. His bloodshot eyes are circled with exhaustion. Even though all he seems to do anymore is sleep.
Bretta says Scott’s name, and then again. When he doesn’t say anything the second time, she screams it. Outside, the dead trip over themselves to get to the window. It’s the closest point of contact between them and the voice in the house.
“What?” he asks, the tone in his voice letting her know she’s getting on his nerves.
“Your friends are huffing paint like a couple bums.” Her words are an accusation. Their behavior is somehow his fault.
Scott shakes his head. He blinks slowly. He looks back up at the ceiling. His voice is faint and he asks if she can stop because his back hurts. “I feel like I’m settling,” he whispers. He says
lividity
, but Bretta doesn’t know what that word means and it sinks to the floor.
Instead, she comes to the end of the bed. “I don’t think you’re paying attention. The house stinks like paint, and they can both die from doing it. If they die,” she says, “they can come back.”
Scott shakes his head. Bretta puts her hand on his leg, just below the knee, and can feel sweat through the sheet he has sprawled across his legs and midsection. Scott kicks away from her, and the move catches her by surprise. Her thumb is caught on his shin and her wrist bends painfully.
He comes alive, scrambling to get away from her, into the corner of the room. His heels dig into the mattress, and he pushes it away from the walls, out of the corner, and then he falls into the hole he makes. The force of the bed moving knocks Bretta down. The side of the bed catches her across the calves.
“Get the fuck away from me!” he screams. “Stop touching me!”
“Jesus, Scott!” she says, collecting herself from the bed. “Stop!” She’s holding her wrist, and she holds it up so she can watch the tendons in her arm move. “You hurt me.”
“Just go,” Scott says, ignoring her. Dead people are pounding on the wood covering the window, and one of the boards spits a nail and comes loose. For a moment, they’re both looking at a woman’s hand, rotten and stinking; scraped and sporting a perfect French manicure that seems weirdly out of place in the filth.
“You can’t touch me,” Scott says. “Not ever.”
There’s a sharp smell in the bed, and Bretta catches a whiff of it just before the smell of the woman outside comes across the room at her. It’s warm sweat and urine, and now she can see the stain under the sheet. Scott wasn’t just wet from sweating when she touched him.
“How long has this been happening?” she says, pulling the sheet back from the bed. Scott stares at the wet stain, about the size of a large pizza but more square than round.
He doesn’t take his eyes off it. “I’m bleeding out,” he says. Beside him, the woman scratches at the wall and breaks one of her perfect nails. She leaves four long scratches in the paint and one short one.
“It’s piss.” Bretta starts to touch it, and then she says it again. “It’s piss. It’s not blood.”
Scott has been pissing the bed and not bothering to tell anyone. He hasn’t been bothering to get up, either. Just lying there like a corpse, and pissing as the need arises.
Scott shakes his head. “Nobody listens to me. It’s blood.” He’s got his hands on his stomach now, and his face is half-crying, half-surprised. Like he can’t believe how sad he is, or he’s sad that he sees so much blood.
“It’s not blood,” Bretta says again, and this time she does touch it. Just two fingers. She holds them up so he can see the dampness.
“Don’t touch it!” Scott yells, and he throws his pillow at her. “I’m an infection now, and I’m gonna make you all sick. You’re all gonna die in here.”
Bretta wipes her hand and holds it up for him to see. “It’s OK. I’m fine, you can calm down.”
The woman’s arm in the window is still scrambling around like a blind snake, scratching the wall and leaving streaks of dirty pus behind. Bretta walks over to the window, her hands out so Scott can see them.
“It’s okay,” she says again, and throws her shoulder into the wooden plank that’s been knocked loose by the dead woman. There’s a crunch of bone in the arm, and a groan as the nails on the other side of the window shift in the board and loosen. Her arm comes away sore, the tricep throbbing. She clenches her fist and hits the board again, and this time, the arm breaks clean and flops down. The tendons pull tight and the woman makes a dirty fist.
Bretta pulls away from the window, and now the board is open just enough for the woman to pull her arm back outside the house. It disappears into the gap backwards, with her fingers clawed like a chicken’s foot. Bretta pushes the wood back into place. The nails are loose and the board wobbles. “We’ll have to get that fixed,” she says.
Scott looks down at the piss stain on the bed. “So much blood.”
Bretta reaches out to him, but he pulls away, curling himself into the corner.
“You need to leave,” he says. “You’re attracting the dead with your warmth.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I can smell it on you,” he says, lifting his head like a wolf sniffing for prey.
Seeing him crouched there, covered in piss, holding his hand to his stomach, his thumb making little circles in his palm, she just wants to reach out. She wants to connect to him, to help him out of this dark time. The look on his face says he doesn’t need any help.
“Get out!” he says again, louder.
Bretta puts her hands up. A surrender. “OK. I’m leaving.”
She walks slowly and backwards. She doesn’t turn away until she’s got the door open, and she closes it just as Scott is flopping back down into his piss stain, foregoing the sheet now. Staring at something on the ceiling that’s so damned important all of the sudden.
Bretta stands outside the door, her hand on the knob, sucking in the stink of blue paint and doing her best to keep down the hard emotions stabbing her in the lungs at that moment.
She turns and walks up the stairs, away from Scott. Away from Denise and Cooper and their weird paint orgy in the basement. She heads upstairs to the rooms where they can open windows. She can stick her head out them and pretend to be away from the madhouse for a little while. Be outside, where she hasn’t been or months. At the end of the hallway, the window is sitting half open, and she walks by Allen’s room to get to it. On the other side of the hallway is the room Scott’s parents died in. At least, that’s where his mom died.
She sticks her head way out of the window at the end of the hall, taking gasping, shuddered breaths, trying to keep a lid on how hurt and alone she feels, and doing a pretty good job. Until she looks down and sees Nancy splayed open like a dead starfish, staring up at the window with her broken face. Allen is further out in the yard, lying on his stomach. He’s been pulled open as well, the two of them a pair of raw sausages someone stepped on to drive them out of their casings.
“We’re never going to get out of here alive,” she says to Nancy, and then bursts into tears. They fall from her face into the bloody soil under the window, and the noise attracts the dead people in the yard. They try to look up at her, like they expect her to jump. Some of them almost manage. Others fall over, so they can lay on their backs and watch.
When Bretta sees what they’re doing, she pulls her head in and shuts the window. Then she dries her face on her T-shirt.