View From a Kite (9 page)

On the way back to Sydney, about a mile out of town, John Malcolm starts hammering on the side of the bus and yelling that he has to take a leak right now.

“Stop the bus,” he yells. “Stop the bus, goddamnit, or I'll piss on the floor!”

The bus driver gets all rattled and swerves to a halt. OFN shakes her head and goes to soothe whiny Mrs. Charmichael, who is having palpitations.

“I have to go, too,” insists Bobby Donovan, and then Trevor MacDonald, and before OFN can say a word they've all hustled off the bus.

“Shoot,” says Mary. “They're going to make a run for it and get OFN in big trouble. Stupid fools.” She cranks down the window and yells, “You assholes get back in here!”

Trevor gives her a wink and hauls down his fly. She slams the window shut and sits down with her back to it. “Jerk,” she says.

They take forever, but they do come back.

“It's Bobby,” explains John Malcolm. “He can't piss if he thinks anyone can hear him so he has to walk into the woods until he can't hear any traffic going by. Otherwise, nothing doing.”

Bobby has his coat all in a bundle, and he looks sheepish and embarrassed. He ducks into his seat and puts his head down.

“Your coat smells like you dropped it in a swamp,” says OFN. “Give it to me and I'll put it in a bag and give it to the laundry.”

“Naw,” says Bobby. “She'll dry.”

John Malcolm takes OFN by the arm and steers her away. “Don't worry,” he whispers to her, “we'll get it from him after we get back to the ward and you can take it down to the laundry while he's sleeping. He's some fond of that jacket, it belonged to his best friend that was killed in a car accident. If you try to take ‘er away now he'll get right upset.”

“All right,” sighs OFN. “If you can stand the smell of it, I can.”

John Malcolm pats her arm.

Bobby keeps his jacket curved in his arms the whole rest of the trip. He only puts it down long enough to eat the three Big Macs John Malcolm passes in through the bus window to him while the rest of us stand around outside, eating ours in the fresh air. The sun has finally won out over the clouds and the air is golden and warm in the McDonald's parking lot. We stuff ourselves. I have two orders of fries and a burger and a half and wrap the other half up for a late night snack. All in all, it isn't a bad day. By about nine o'clock I am ready for sleep. All those fries, though, were not a good idea. I have the egg dream.

The egg dream goes like this:

I'm lying in bed, in acres of white sheets, and on my chest is an ostrich egg. The doctors come in and start tap-tapping on it.

“Don't, don't,” I plead, “you'll crack the shell and then I'll leak over the bed and die.”

Tap, tap, tap they go with their stethoscopes and hammers and tongue depressors.

“Can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,” says one.

“The blue bird of happiness is trapped in her chest,” says another.

“We'll have to operate to set it free,” says a third.

“There's no one to sit on her chest to hatch the heart,” says the first.

“She's doomed,” says the second.

Can you imagine me telling this stuff to the staff psychologist? They'd lock me up in the loony bin and throw away the key. They've just got to the “doomed” part when Mary shakes me awake. She slaps her hand over my mouth and hisses, “Don't make any noise!”

“Tell that to my heart, it's booming like a cannon, you maniac,” I hiss, once I've dragged her hand off my face.

“Bobby and John Malcolm need you,” says Mary. “Get your slippers and come on.” She eases the draft board away from the window, raises the screen and slips out and onto the grass below. “Hurry up.”

Unfortunately I almost always do what I'm told. I find my slippers and robe and follow her out the window.

“What time is it?”

“Three-thirty,” says Mary in a low voice as we round the corner of the building. “John Malcolm gave me something to put in The Witch's tea. She's dozing on her chair and as long as the phone doesn't ring she won't wake up.”

“What's the matter with Bobby?”

“Nothing.”

“John Malcolm?”

“Nothing. You're the skinniest one they can trust.”

“Trust to do what?”

“Break into the x-ray department.”

“Oh.”

Seems that on the trip to Louisbourg Bobby'd spotted a dead raccoon by the side of the highway and while the rest of us were admiring the fortress he and the boys were cooking up a plan to have some fun. The pee-stop on the highway was a set-up, of course. While John Malcolm and Trevor were making a great show of rinsing the mud off the bus tires Bobby—of the delicate sensibilities—was half a mile down the road, around a bend, scooping up the raccoon corpse and wrapping it up in his jacket.

“That smell's never gonna come out,” says Mary. “That raccoon's been dead quite a while.”

“Not so long,” says Bobby. “The crows hardly picked 'er at all.”

I edge away from the fragrant beast. “What is it you guys want me to do?”

“The x-ray department's locked up tighter'n a nun's ass,” says Trevor. “We tried picking the lock, but she don't work. Window's locked, too. We needs you to climb up into that there vent and squeeze in and open ‘er up from the inside, nice and quiet.”

The vent looks to be about ten by eighteen.

“Are you crazy?” I say. “I'll never fit through there!”

“Sure you will,” says John Malcolm, “with inches to spare. You're nothing but a breath of air, Gwennie. You'll just slide on through.”

“Have a drink, first,” says Bobby. “It'll relax ya.”

What the heck, I think, and take a swig of whatever's in the bottle he's holding out to me. Takes my breath away. Takes me a few minutes to haul it back in again, but when I do I feel wonderfully relaxed. Velvet on the bones, syrup in the veins.

“What is that stuff?” I want to know.

“Shine and that red cough medicine with the codeine in 'er,” says Trevor. “Bobby stole a bottle from the dispensary. Some good, eh? We calls it the Big Red Smile.”

“Oh,” I say. They gave me that cough medicine when I first came in and they were scared I'd cough my guts up and rupture my lungs and bleed to death. Soon as I started to heal they cut me back and now they hardly ever give it to me.

“It's addictive,” said OFN. “You don't want to be taking it if you don't really need it.”

I do want to be taking it, but I understand what she means. I don't want to fall into the role of opium-eating, consumptive-ridden poet. I've read the biographies, and it's nowhere near as much fun as you might think. It always ends badly.

Bobby heaves me up onto Trevor's shoulders and from there, loose as a drunken eel, I wriggle and squirm through the vent. The yard lights shine in just enough so I can manoeuvre around the bulky equipment and find the door. I undo a bunch of locks and wait for the crew to sneak back in the laundry room door, up the stairs, and down the hall. Once in, they lay the raccoon out on the x-ray table and we all huddle in the booth while John Malcolm, who picks the technician's brains every time he's hauled in for an x-ray, operates the machine and uses up a lot of film. He takes about a dozen x-rays—some for himself, some for Bobby and Trevor, one for Mary, and none for me. I don't want that kind of evidence in my possession should we ever get caught. The last three x-rays, from various angles, are the main point of the whole exercise. Bobby breaks open the filing cabinet with the staff x-rays in it (they have to have regular x-rays too, to make sure they haven't caught anything nasty from the invalids). John Malcolm finds The Witch's file, tosses her last three x-rays out the air vent, and replaces them with three of the raccoon. Bobby giggles like a maniac the whole time and Trevor keeps stuffing paper, Kleenex, finally his ball cap into his mouth to keep him quiet.

“Shut up, b'y,” he hisses. “Shut up for Chrissakes.”

Finally they all sneak back out the door, out of the building, and back around to the air vent. I lock up, squeeze out the way I came and drop into John Malcolm's waiting arms. The x-rays we'd tossed out go into the dumpster, along with the raccoon. A dozen blasts of radiation have done nothing to sterilize the thing and it smells higher by the second. We all have one last slug of the Big Red Smile.

“Rest in Peace,” says Bobby.

“Amen,” and we all nod solemnly in the direction of the dumpster.

“It could be weeks before they notice the x-rays,” says Mary.

“We can wait,” says John Malcolm. “We can wait.”

Mary and I climb back into our room, put the draft board back in place, and fall asleep. No more egg dreams. Nothing at all. I sleep until the rattle of breakfast trays wake me. The sun purrs in the window, slides all around the room, and it's a gorgeous day.

CHAPTER 16

Those kids are out there again, flying kites, and they've brought reinforcements. The smallest two belong to Robichaud, the redhead is OFN's. The rest I don't know, but I think they belong to the staff. They've got two new kites, cheap plastic things that lift off like daydreams. I once had a silk kite, white with painted red poppies and gold Chinese writing, that Edith ordered for me from a catalogue somewhere. This was in the midst of our kite fever. It was beautiful to look at but balanced wrong and no matter what we hung on it or stuck to it to try to compensate, time after time it would loop around and then drive itself into the ground. I wanted it to fly so badly, it was so pretty. We finally gave up on about the fifth outing with it—there was a kid on the beach that day, with a homemade newspaper kite. He tossed it up in the air, it grabbed straight for the sky and then just hung there, perfectly balanced. It would dip if a breeze came along, then right itself. Eventually the kid laid his end of the string on the beach, put a rock on it to hold it down, and sat down to eat his lunch. Then he lay back and daydreamed for a while. The kite, like a perfectly trained dog, sat quiet and steady and waited for him. We offered to trade him our kite for his, but he just laughed. His was the real beauty, and we all knew it.

Robert threw the silk kite into the trunk in a temper and drove us home. We hung it on a wall, which is where it really wanted to be all along anyway, but we told Edith it flew just fine.

I decide to go up to Rehab and make a kite for Colum's ten-year-old out of orange and blue crêpe paper.

“It's got to fit in the box,” Rudy reminds me.

Shoot. The box isn't big enough for what I had planned, but there's more than one way to make a kite. I make a dragon, a long string of connecting circles, like a snake. The first circle is as big as the width of the box, each one behind is a little smaller. You can make as many as you want, down to nothing, though the ones at the end don't catch much wind. They're just to snake around and look dragonish. I use super-fine wire (meant to be used to make stems for artificial flowers, but nobody ever uses it for that) for the frames of the circles. I make a dozen of them, each covered in a different shade of crepe paper. Then I rig them all together. It takes me all afternoon and Rudy and Colum are fascinated. I make them hold things while they dry, and then help me make the harness. It takes the three of us, and Mary, to carry the finished kite outside.

There isn't much wind. We go around three sides of the building before we scare up a breeze coming from the east. The dragon wiggles along the ground and collapses. We throw it up a dozen times more and finally it nibbles the breeze, bites on, and leaps for the sun. Rudy and Colum, and everyone looking out the windows, cheer, and I'm playing out string as fast as I can, and Mary's smoking cigarettes and looking as smug as if she'd made the whole thing herself.

The nurses finally come after us to make us go back indoors and behave like proper invalids, so we reel in the kite. It's coming on for supper time, anyway.

The gas in the box mutes the colours a little, but Colum takes it off to Port Hawkesbury and when he comes back he says it flies just beautiful and his boys want to make a bigger one.

IDIOTS AND FOOLS

1.Frank E. Rollins sold a concoction, meant to cure tuberculosis, called B&M External Remedy. Originally used as a horse liniment, its ingredients included turpentine, raw eggs, and ammonia. Mrs. Edith Merchant was so convinced of its healing power that she wrote testimonials on its behalf and Mr. Rollins was so pleased with her enthusiasm that he provided her with stationery, stamps, a desk, and modest financial remuneration, until she died of tuberculosis.

2. Dr. L. Burfield, in the December 1920 issue of Physical Culture, wrote that tuberculosis was caused by germs, but that they could be starved out if the patient underwent a twenty-four hour water fast.

3. Marie Bashkirtsev, from her journal, published after her death in 1887 at age twenty-four:
   “I cough continually…this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.”

4. Lord Byron:
   “I look pale. I should like to die of consumption.”
   When asked why (by a tubercular friend), he replied, “Because the ladies would all say, ‘Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying!'”

5. Théophile Gautier:
   “…I could not have accepted as a lyrical poet anyone weighing more than ninety-nine pounds.”

   Acceptable poets would be, of course, John Keats—wan and frail, wasted away by the age of twenty-six; Percy Bysshe Shelley—well advanced down the same romantic path when he accidentally drowned at age thirty.

CHAPTER 17

Dr. Robichaud sits behind his army surplus desk and smiles. The sun coming in the window flares off his glasses so I cannot see his eyes. His hair is grey and black, slicked back, no parting. Cigarette ash keeps the moths from his tweed jacket, at least that's his theory. Really he's just a slob who spills things all over himself. Behind him is a row of x-rays. Clipped to a light board, they are time-lapse photography.