Solzhenitsyn sticks his hands into the pockets of his skinny jeans. I left work an hour ago, says Solzhenitsyn, and he had already gone.
Well, Mullen says, I don't know then.
Tell him to come over when he gets home, Solzhenitsyn says. Solzhenitsyn works with Mullen's dad at the meatpacking plant, smashing ice. Every day they get into the truck together, wearing their overalls and rubber boots, and drive out of town, almost to High River. They smash ice with sledgehammers, in a small steel room, and come home red
and sweating, with sore backs and wet socks, ice in the toes of their boots and seams of their blue jeans.
We walk down the alley instead of down Main Street, 'cause we like to throw rocks at garbage cans. Mullen gets a few pretty good dents into a stainless-steel can outside an empty garage. I like the sound the plastic cans make when you hit them with a rock, especially if they're empty. Even though it's only six, the sun is starting to go down out on the other side of town, where the foothills start. Sometimes Mullen's dad takes us for drives out into the hills, up past the provincial-park line, and shows us the forest-fire watch towers and abandoned farmhouses and other good stuff.
As long as I can remember, the windows in the building across from the post office have been covered with paper like you wrap boxes in at Christmas to mail to Ontario. We sit on the sidewalk in front of the post office and Mullen takes some comic books out of his backpack. Here, make like some dumb kid, he says. We make like to flip through comic books but peek over the tops at the woman in the window.
She doesn't look like other women, the woman in the window. The women down at the hair salon or the drugstore wear sweaters and short jackets, with blue jeans. The women at the United Church wear gold earrings and black blouses. Mrs. Lampman across the street always wears a blazer when she teaches social studies at the school. The woman in the window across from the post office wears a sweater, but it fits different than any I've ever seen. Looks thin, and when she moves, it holds on to her. She wears a grey skirt that goes down to her ankles but stays close to her thighs and the backs of her knees. Her hair is pulled back into some sort of clip, but it sticks out in all sorts of directions, trying to escape.
What do you think she's doing in there? I don't know, Mullen says, peeking over the top of his comic book. The room is empty, bare drywall with putty patches showing, and
the electrical sockets unfinished, hairy clumps of wire. She wanders around with a tape measure. Measures a wall and writes on a pad of yellow paper tucked into the belt of her skirt. She sticks the pen behind her ear and frowns.
I bet she's from the city, Mullen says. That's how all the women look in the city. I sat on a bus in Calgary with two women like that. All pretty and high classified.
She drops her tape measure and lights a cigarette, a long, thin one. Smoke mixes in with the sawdust in the air. Mullen flips a few pages of his comic.
We watch her for a while. She writes stuff down and holds her hands in front of her face like a square, at arm's length, looks at the walls through the square. She doesn't ever look out the window. People drive by, and if they know us they wave. Nobody cares if Mullen and I sit on the post office steps and read comic books, 'cause nobody cares what we do, so long as it isn't causing public mischief. That's what the caretaker at the First Evangelical Church said when they made us appologize about the flyers. That we were causing public mischief. Public mischief, it turns out, is when you climb up on the roof of the school with three garbage bags full of flyers, fold them into paper airplanes, and throw them at Dead Kids. Even if you only get through half of one bag in two hours. They sent us up for that: for skipping class and making a mess of the playground. They said taking that many flyers was like stealing, even though flyers are free and in piles that say Take One. And after we'd cleaned up the whole playground we had to go down Main Street and apologize at the insurance office, and the bank, and the First Evangelical Church. When they told Mullen's dad he laughed, but the way people sometimes laugh on television, when you can tell they're only actors.
I have to go home soon, Mullen.
No, come on, she's still doing stuff, he says. I bet she'll smoke another cigarette soon. Look, she has sawhorses in
there. You think she might saw something up? Maybe she's got one of those circular saws.
I have to go home, Mullen. Seriously.
Since when does it matter when you go home?
I stand up and hand him his comic. I'll see you tomorrow.
Yeah, tomorrow.
I walk down to the end of the block and turn around. Mullen's still sitting there, pretending to read his comic, watching the woman in the window.
An old man with patches on his elbow leans on McClaghan's counter, looking at the lighters in the rotating shelf. One of those flat hats on his wrinkly old head, all covered in buttons. Annual Rotarian Convention, and Legion Number 19, and Vets Get Set. He takes a scratchy old Zippo lighter out of his jacket. A flint, he says to McClaghan, I need a new flint for this.
Where'd you get this? McClaghan takes the lighter, turns it over. Mail order?
Antwerp, says the old man, I got it in Antwerp. Pressed into my hands out of gratitude.
McClaghan spits in his jar.
McClaghan's jar is the worst thing in town. You always have to go to McClaghan's hardware store after school, though, for model-airplane paint or thirty-five-cent gum or hockey tape, so you always have to see the jar. He leaves it on the counter right beside the hockey cards, this beet-pickle jar two-thirds full of old-man phlegm, brown tobacco juice, stubby toothpicks. He takes it everywhere. Any time you walk by, there's McClaghan out on the step, under the 40% OFF sign, listening to his radio, spitting. But spitting on the sidewalk is bad for business I guess, so he spits in the jar. You can hear it all up the street, the hack and plop of old-man spit landing in that beet-pickle jar.
McClaghan rummages in his drawer. Pulls out envelopes, paper boxes. Opens them, frowns, puts them back. The old man puts all his nickels on the counter, one at a time, lining them all up and trying to get them all straight, but his hands shake and push the nickels all over the place.
In McClaghan's hardware store they've got everything you could ever want. Table saws and new bicycle chains, and four-man tents and car batteries, rubber boots, fishing rods, pickaxes and wheelbarrows â everything. Stacks of plywood and two-by-fours, router bits, camping stoves and jerry cans. They've got a paint-shaker, just about the loudest thing I ever heard, shakes so fast you can't read the label on the can. And all that stuff is great, but the best part about McClaghan's is fireworks.
So, McClaghan, Mullen says, pulling his elbows, his chin, up on the counter. McClaghan's counter is way taller than it needs to be. How about some of those roman candles you've got back there? I bet those pack a whole bunch, yeah?
McClaghan wraps his fingers around the jar. Out. Both of you, beat it.
How much does one of those big boxes cost, anyway?
Split, kid! McClaghan barks. We scoot outside. Sit down on the sidewalk. People sure get worked up about stuff, says Mullen. Hey, you want to come for dinner with the Russians? Me and my dad are going over, well, pretty quick I guess.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I say. We walk past the Lions Club playground. Two kids crouch on the teeter-totter. Neither one wants to go up because they know the other will hop off and crash the hard seat down on the hard ground. They just bob up and down, glaring at each other, never quite leaving the ground.
Hey, Mullen, what's Solzhenitsyn's real name? I don't know, he says, I thought Solzhenitsyn was his real name. I saw some other guy on
TV
with that name, I say, some famous Russian from history. Mullen throws a rock out across the street. They can't both have the same name? Course they can't have the same name. You never met anyone named Benjamin Franklin, did you? Or Genghis Khan? I met a Benjamin once, Mullen says. Back in Winnipeg in the second grade. When his front teeth fell out no new ones grew back, so he had fake
teeth. He could take them out. You can't name your kid after somebody famous, I say. It's not allowed. That's why you have to get a birth certificate when you're born, to make sure that you've got an allowed name. I don't know what Solzhenitsyn's real name is; that's what my dad always calls him, Mullen says. All the other Russians call him Solly. Is that an allowed name?
Mullen's dad comes out of his house carrying a bunch of
TV
trays tight against his chest. Closes the door with his hip. Walks out onto the sidewalk, past Deke's. Pushes open the little wooden gate with his hip. The Russians' lawn is about as dead as everybody else's on the block, except for Mrs. Lamp-man's maybe. In the summer she always digs little patches along the path, plants sweet peas. Everybody else on the street is doing pretty good if they keep their lawn cut. Pavel and Solzhenitsyn sit in their lawn chairs around the barbecue, their heavy jean jackets buttoned all the way up in the cold, brown beer bottles tight in black gloves. Vaslav sits on the step, his belt undone and his big stomach pushing the bottom of his sweater up over his belly button. He's working on his novel. Drinks beer and scribbles on a huge pile of paper in his lap. He scratches his forehead with his pen, leaves a blue line.
Hey, you ever torn the corset from the heaving chest of a kidnapped virginal millionairess?
The kids, says Mullen's dad. Starts to unfold
TV
trays.
The kids have never torn the corsets off anything. I'm trying to get the facts straight. So as to be historically accurate.
They've got a lot of buttons on them. Those corsets. It would take some tearing.
Right, says Vaslav, it sure would.
Does the virginal millionairess have a name? asks Mullen.
Well, I've got it narrowed down to a short list of about eighteen. Has to have the right tone, see. I've left it blank so far in the manuscript. He holds up the top few pages and, sure
enough, the pencil script is full of blank spaces. It's got to go well with all the other words, see, he says, especially the ones I use a lot. And it's got to evoke the proper balance of Victorian restraint and bottled passion. Voluptuous without being lusty, see. Owing to the virginalness of the character.
Pavel takes the lid off the barbecue and starts to turn chicken legs with his black-ended tongs. He squints with his one eye, making sure he gets the legs okay with the tongs. His glass eye looks off somewhere else, never quite in line with the real one. Solzhenitsyn goes back and forth to the refrigerator inside, bringing out all kinds of food: jars and jars of all kinds of pickles, and plates with different coloured strips of fish, covered tight in plastic wrap. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs. Him and Mullen's dad talk all serious-like, in between bites of pickled beets and anchovies, lots of big serious words, like newscasters on television.
Vaslav reaches across them for a pickle. Hey, he asks Mullen's dad, is there hot water in your house?
Hot water? Sure there is.
Vaslav sticks the pickle in the side of his mouth. Wedges a beer bottle against the arm of his lawn chair, hits it with the flat of his palm, pops the cap off. I called McClaghan three times last week about the hot water, he says through a mouthful of pickle. Each time he tells me to leave it alone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, he says. I told him an ounce of prevention is the whole cure and he hung up on me.
Our hot water is fine, says Mullen's dad.
Our hot water is fine too, says Pavel. Vaslav makes a face. Pass me the herring, he says.
You left work early, says Solzhenitsyn.
Mullen's dad opens another bottle of beer. Shrugs. Sometimes you've got to leave work early. Solly drums his pencil on his knee.
I can't tell who's skinnier, Solzhenitsyn or Mullen's dad. It's hard to imagine the two of them with sledgehammers, in
a steel room, smashing blocks of ice. It must get slippery in the ice room. The floor must get slushy and deep, like outside the curling rink in March, when the weather starts to break.
Earl Barrie got hit by a side of beef just before three o'clock, Soltzhenitsyn says.
What?
A frozen side of beef. Took a wrong swing and hit him in the head. Luckily, his hard hat â
And he's â¦
Jarvis and I drove him to the High River hospital. Had to clear all the empty egg cartons out of the cab and lay him across our laps. His head in Jarvis's lap and his feet sticking out the window. To keep his head steady. He got conscious every now and then, went on and on about spanking his wife. Lord, just let me spank my wife again, he'd say. Jarvis had to put the talk-radio station on.
Earl hates talk radio.
Right. Kept him awake. So he went off about how much he hates talk radio, and how he wants to spank his wife, all the way to High River.
Why does Earl Barrie want to spank his wife? asks Mullen.
His dad glares at Solly. I don't know, Mullen. He must have taken quite a bump. Pretty delirious.
Days I can't find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There's this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it. Or I like to walk over to the football field and watch them building houses in the new subdivision. Some of them wearing hard hats, with stickers: Safety First, and 1,000 Consecutive Hours. They've got heavy belts and hammers. If Mullen and I had hammers and tools like that, we could build all sorts of stuff. We could get shovels and dig out the back wall Underground. Dig tunnels and other rooms: a library for our comics and a workshop for all the building we'd do. We could build shelves, put down a plywood floor. We could put down roofing felt so we could take off our shoes and not get slivers. We could build a wall, like the fur-trading forts in social studies class, with sharpened logs, and a drawbridge. Then we could just stay down there and do whatever we wanted. Grown-ups from the school could come by and hammer on the log walls and we'd just ignore them from inside our underground fort. They'd fall into the sharpened logs underneath our drawbridge and we'd laugh and laugh.