All We Want Is Everything (8 page)

It’s the not knowing that brands you. Leaves a mark for everyone to see.

“Del! Del you gotta come in here now! You gotta get up! Fuckin’ Jimmy—”

Donna is up off the couch and running down the stunted hall. There are only five rooms in this box and I can hear Del stumbling around in the bedroom, looking for the rifle his uncle gave him for protection after the cops confiscated everything. I grab another bottle of something from the sticky floor and chuck it down the hall after Donna. It catches her in the back. She falls onto the floor and the smell of gin fills my face. Not knowing is the worst part. Donna has all those letters with the details laid out in ink.

“Jimmy, there aren’t any letters! There’s nothing!”

Donna’s looking up at me from the floor. I can hear Del stump toward me from the bedroom with one arm done up in plaster. The signatures on the cast are all his own. His ancient gun scrapes the wall as he moves. His tattoos are black and blue impressions of Donna’s face.

No way will he buy that TV now.

“Get the fuck out of here, Jim,” Del says. The floor is sticky. Cal tries to slip out the front door behind me with a handful of videotapes. Del is almost as tall as Cal. Used to toss dirt clods at his mom’s car whenever she came to pick him up. Del liked to call her the town drain.

“Oh you brought the ’tard with you, eh? Doin’ some community service tonight, Jim? He ain’t taking any of those tapes with him, you know. Those are an investment. How you doin’ anyway, Cali? You’re momma ever end up taking you out there?”

Cal is tugging at my arm. He wants to go. He’s forgot his postcards on the floor. According to the addresses, he’s been all the way down to San Diego this week.

“You dumb fucks,” Del says. “You think I wouldn’t just jack the thing myself? I should just shoot you both down now, but no point there. With the injury, I might just get probation. Look at that poor ’tarded bastard. Why you gotta bring him, Jimmy?”

Everyone knows Cal was a mistake. Grew up with his mother and a bunch of rotating uncles, who left behind cigarette burns and the taste of soap in his mouth. Their cars stained the driveway until it looked like one big oil patch shining in the dark.

“We’re going Del, alright? Just put your shit down. You don’t need another violation.”

Cal shakes his head. He doesn’t want to put down Del’s investment. I grab a few of the tapes from his giant hands. Cal’s mother always told him his dad had run off to Sacramento, where he was doing play by play for the Kings on the radio. Del says the tapes are worth something, worth protecting, and Cal won’t let them go. He needs the money for a ticket to the coast.

“Just give me the tapes. Give me all that shit and take your junk ass TV down to the pawn.”

Cal starts chucking tapes at Del, just whipping them at the cast. One bounces off Del’s face and spools of black tape sprout out across the floor. Little frames of naked Donna writhing on the pole unfurl across the sticky yellow carpeting. I can’t see her face, but the outline looks like her. She’s still crying on the floor, trying to avoid the broken glass. Cal hasn’t been taking his meds for six hours now, and Del has been after him for seventeen years.

I watch Cal grab Del’s broken arm and slam him against the wall. There is a snap.

“Put him down Cal, you gotta put him down,” Donna screams.

The lawyer says the best thing for me right now is to stay out of trouble. Stay away from Alice’s friends, her family. Stay away from everyone. I’ve spent too many nights inside, but I understand his point. Del is making some weird choking sound and his face is changing colours. I slowly back out the front door and let the screen shut quietly behind me. Donna yells something after me, something about calling off my fucking dog, but I don’t got a leash. Cal won’t need the money from the TV now.

The air outside is cold and the snowmen are still watching me. There’s another bellow from the bungalow. Everything looks pink and grey. I put the car into reverse and pull out of the driveway. Cal is probably choking Del until he blacks out, the same strategy he’s been using at the Stockyard for the last two weeks. You see the patrons walking around with purple throats the next morning, trying to order eggs through mangled voice boxes. Donna’s probably flushing all their pills down the toilet ’cause the neighbours will be calling the cops again—a morning ritual in this neighbourhood. Sirens and birds to wake the children with the sun.

Brad Paisley is on the radio and his voice is singing to me about all little moments, all the dirty words. The time she lost the directions, and the time she burnt his birthday cake. He’s singing about Alice and I know she’s not coming back. I know there are no letters. The Panasonic is still in the backseat and it’s watching me make a left onto a one-way street. One television is better than none, even without the remote. Only houses I’ve ever seen with two were in Cal’s magazines and travel brochures. Palatial places down by the ocean. Places where the view goes on forever, a sight beyond your reach.

I need something I can’t touch. Something my hands can’t quite hold. Everything I cling to these days turns to shit and lead. Even the Panasonic is beginning to crack around the edges.

It’s only twenty-five hundred miles until Modesto.

Dad says I’m never supposed to show no one the tattoo. They wanted my name to be Hatchetman on the birth certificate, but Grandma Hubert said no. She’s dead now like the dog and the fish and all the other stuff that dies in our house. It was her house, but now it’s our house. She couldn’t say no no more. You can’t say no to cancer, Mom says. You can’t tell cancer to go nowhere. Mom says it goes wherever it damn pleases and sometimes I get scared it’ll go for me next. People say I look the most like Grandma Hubert, even though I’m a boy. I think it’s ’cause Mom shaves my head.

Dad’s sayin’ skin is stronger than paper, stronger than any bullshit certificate. He’s sayin’ skin is durable, skin is leather, skin is what they made Grandma Hubert’s couches out of—animal skin but still. He’s saying Hatchetman is a good name, a strong name, a name to be proud of and he’s draggin’ me into a truck we bought off of Sleepy, who’s my uncle, but a fake uncle. He don’t have any blood with me, and so he don’t gotta worry ’bout the cancer like I do.

And we’re in the truck with all the bottles from the rec centre we haven’t returned yet and all the dead wasps in the bottles and all the half-dead wasps trying to crawl out of the bottles and Dad is sayin’ skin is for life, skin is a pact. He says he’s learned as much in twenty-six years on this earth. The stereo is the only new thing in the truck and it’s playin’ Dad’s favourite Insane Clown Posse album, the one with the golden face on the front. I wanna pull over and pee, but the grass outside is long and yellow and filled with weeds. Dad holds my hand while he steers.

I’m lookin’ for snakes in the ditches, tryin’ not to think about peein’ or Grandma Hubert or Uncle Sleepy and his two lazy eyes. I never wanna look at them, but it’s like when you step on a bug—you got to look. And then Dad is sayin’ how Grandma Hubert’s final will was bullshit. But she wanted to live, I think. He’s still mad that I look like her. He’s still mad my name is Austin Saintclaire-Hubert on report cards, and doctor’s notes, and detention slips. I never got to be called Hatchetman. He’s mad, but he’s holdin’ my hand so I don’t say she wanted to live. I nod and say yes, fuck Grandma Hubert and the dog and the fish and everything else that leaves me.

Dad is drivin’ with one hand and we’re off the good roads now, we’re goin’ to see Harmony, and we don’t need a map because I been goin’ here my whole life. All ten years. I remember the sounds of the needle and my Dad’s back turnin’ black like a cape and what cough syrup smells like. And then there is gravel under my feet and Dad’s talkin’ ’bout the Dark Carnival and a new album and he’s so excited. He and Mom get so excited whenever ICP comes to town. They throw dishes and smoke in the bathroom and go see Harmony for days, but they can’t now ’cause Grandma Hubert is fifty-six and dead and who’s gonna watch me and little Hurley?

Harmony is Dad’s best friend from way back in juvi, and he don’t care that he’s got a girl’s name. He is sippin’ Faygo he gets shipped in from Detroit, but it smells like he puts paint in it. He asks me if I ever heard of Johnny Cash, the first unofficial Juggalo, author of “A Boy Named Sue” and I say no and he laughs. I feel bad for the teeth he’s got left. They gotta be lonely.

I was born a Juggalo and I will die a Juggalo, Mom says. I seen ’em throwin’ dirt on grandma’s Styrofoam coffin, I seen what dyin’ is and I don’t think it matters one way or ’nother if I’m a Juggalo or not. No matter how many times I paint my face or go to the Gathering or get righteous with some mainstream faggots, I know I’ll still end up in Styrofoam under all that dirt.

And Harmony says it’s time for my first tattoo now that Grandma Hubert is gone—fuck that old cow, right Hatchetman? And no one calls me Austin at home, they all call me Hatchetman. I got named after the logo they put on all those Psychopathic Records—the logo you see tattooed on knuckles and tits and shoulders when summer comes around. That’s their mascot—the Hatchetman. It’s hot and Dad is lifting my shirt, but Harmony is pointing at my neck. How about there, right there, let’s put it there instead. His lonely teeth shake when he laughs.

Skin is a pact. Blood is a pact. Me and little Hurley are in a pact for life and she’s only five. She doesn’t know about keggers or five
am
police calls or what Mom’s puke smells like. She doesn’t know I’m here right now on Harmony’s stupid porch. Only things she knows are she’ll die if she eats peanut butter and Mom and Dad love to paint their faces on weekends.

Dad is sayin’ I don’t know, I don’t know, and Harmony is laughing. We’re on the porch and it’s startin’ to rain out there on all the yellow grass and the weeds and the hidden snakes. Come on, don’t be a bitch, you hide your tatts at the factory, let the boy be a man. Let him be a real Hatchetman, a real psycho clown for once, and Dad is nodding okay, okay, go ahead and Harmony claps his hands together like thunder, but it’s just rain out there.

The needle is sharp and hot on my neck and I’m not crying yet. I’m thinking about that dog and the fish and Grandma Hubert and what dirt tastes like. Dad is saying he doesn’t like the blood, too much blood, and Harmony is singing his favourite ICP song under his breath. And I don’t wanna feel the needle so I stay still and watch the rain outside the porch, watch the wasps drownin’ in their bottles, the snakes suffocatin’ in their ditches, all things just falling apart.

They’re writing Hatchetman onto my neck in blue ink. I can feel the letters growin’ and I don’t wanna cry. They’re on the letter “c” and the rain is still comin’ down and I still gotta pee and Harmony is humming, humming out all the hate he has inside, and my Dad is smiling at me. He’s smiling and he’s so happy and I know my neck don’t say Hatchetman. I know it don’t say that. It can’t. I can see it in his face.

Even dead Grandma Hubert knows all he’s trying to say is “I love you.”

Greg the Golden Goose named the first lesion Winnipeg. He blamed that cold city for the illness that wracked his body now, the one that woke him up in the middle of the night screaming. It was the screaming that got him kicked out of the men’s home the night before. He had lesions up and down both his arms like nodes on a map, crisscrossing veins, moles and scars from broken bottles. Calgary. Medicine Hat. Niagara Falls. Each lesion had a place these days.

He’d only ever been as east as Moncton, but that was far enough. He couldn’t speak French and he didn’t like the cops out there. They talked to you by looking you in the eye. They tried to act like a father figure, but all their kids were just as screwed up as anybody else’s. They tried to call him Gregory. Greg had spat in one cop’s face and spent the night getting beaten with a bar of soap. He would travel no further east than Montréal these days. The booze was cheaper there.

The line at the grocery store moved slowly. Greg clutched his last ten-dollar bill between two shaking fingers. He twirled it back and forth like a leaf. The Sun Chips in his other hand kept crackling every time he moved. Greg knew that the ridges on those chips would help them hold onto the inside of his stomach. He was tired of vomiting up all his food in tidy little piles in empty parks or dark corners in the shelters. He needed something with some texture, something with a little bit of grit to keep it down. Doritos hadn’t done the job and he had given up on eating meat after two weeks in a slaughterhouse outside Hamilton. They had him push a broom to wipe up all the chin bristles from the pigs, bristles boiled off their snouts by the hot, high-pressured water. He could still hear the creatures grunting. They destroyed his love for bacon in that place. Greg would never forgive the slaughterhouse for that one. Sun Chips would have to do for now.

“Sir, this is the line for sixteen items or less. If you could go line up at another cashier…”

Winnipeg was still the worst though. The place was filled with tired faces and buses that couldn’t make it two blocks without stalling. Your breath froze in the winter. You couldn’t even piss yourself in the park without it freezing to your leg by morning. The summers were filled with mosquitoes and black flies, slowly turning your skin into one giant, red pulsing organ. They always seemed to go for the joints, the inside of elbows and the outsides of ankles and wrists. And there were always more to come. They would suck you dry if they could. The city tried to fight them off, spraying down the streets with trucks full of toxins. The first lesion was named Winnipeg, but he couldn’t place all the blame on that place. It all went back to Jeremiah.

When it finally tore between Greg’s fingers, the bill split down its length. The bottom half of its face fluttered to the floor. Greg watched it slide under a magazine rack decorated with wide blue-white smiles and horrible headlines about cellulite and murder and lesbian divorces. He could not pick it up now. The smaller, limp half of his ten-dollar bill stared back at him. The face was just eyes and the top of a nose now. It looked upset. Greg stuttered as the cashier gestured toward him. The yellow walls of the grocery store were pressed up tightly against him. The line of customers behind him seemed to stretch down all the aisles until all he saw was faces, sighing, angry faces gesturing for him to place his fucking Sun Chips on the belt so they could go home to warm beds and warm wives and all their whining children. The cashier rang his Sun Chips through and then stared at Greg’s bent and twisted hands. The lesions hid under his long sleeves like the virus hiding inside his bloodstream. He held out what was left of Sir John A. Macdonald toward the cashier. She only shook her head. The man behind Greg coughed into his hand.

“We can’t take that, sir. We can take debit and MasterCard. Do you have any change?”

Greg shook his head. He pulled the torn pink and purple bill back against his chest and walked toward the exit. The Sun Chips remained on the conveyor belt. No one followed him.

Winnipeg. Napanee. Hamilton. Fort McMurray. Nelson. All the named lesions and track marks on his arm hummed in the cold, but he was used to their bite. Greg the Golden Goose couldn’t blame it all on Winnipeg. There had been the whorehouse in Saskatoon filled with American bush pilots and hunters. He had lost two teeth there, but they were molars, so it wasn’t so bad. He had kept them in a jar until someone lifted his bag at a bus station in Oshawa. Another hole, another impression of an impression of Windsor, the hole of all holes, the hole eating through your arm and looking for light on the other side. Greg was never going back to Windsor either. There were also the Lebanese brothers in Hull who thought Greg could get them cheap E. They had held him in the back of a stretch Hummer until he bit one of them on the cheek. The man had tasted like Aqua Velva and had chased him for two hours before giving up. It wasn’t all Winnipeg’s fault. This whole country was letting him down on a daily basis.

Greg was the screaming man at the shelter now. He was the one who woke everyone up in the middle of the night, the one who got threatened with knives and bottles and a thick heavy hand shoved right up his ass if he didn’t shut the fuck up. Greg wanted none of those things. He had worked very hard to avoid those things for the last five years on the road. So he was outside now and it was December, but still warm for December. December in Sioux Lookout was a different story—that was a place to go and die. Greg thought about doing that sometimes, just walking out into the snow and never coming back. Leaving behind all the Greyhound buses and the stupid CP trains. Letting nature run its course before whatever was inside his arms decided to make its final move. Sometimes Greg woke up and all he saw was light, but it was usually just a cop with a flashlight telling him to move along. All Greg did these days was fucking move, officer, but he complied. He was good at moving. He was getting better at complying.

The torn bill tried to escape from Greg’s hand, but he clutched it tight against the wind. The Sun Chips probably wouldn’t have stayed down anyway. They were related to Doritos in one way or another and the Doritos had been a disaster. The bathroom at Union Station had learned this the hard way, just like Greg usually did. He had determined this somewhere between Lethbridge and Regina after the frostbite took part of his thumb. He hadn’t given that wound a name yet, but they were all connected anyway. You could follow the lines across his skin and they always connected with some gash, some hole, some new and spreading scab. Maybe he would keep fleeing until he hit Newfoundland and just skip New Brunswick altogether. He’d once bummed smokes off a Newfie who insisted on being called a Newfoundlander. The man even let him keep the lighter. If you held it right, the lady on it appeared naked. It couldn’t be all that bad out there. Ontario had been a bust. Even the money here couldn’t hold it together.

Sitting down on a bench in the park, Greg the Golden Goose held his damaged cash up to his eyes. The eyes of the former prime minister gazed back at him. They were asking a lot of questions. Why hadn’t he shaved? Where was his hat? Did he know how cold it could get out here in December? Did he remember Confederation? Was he ever part of something from the beginning or had he always been one of those to bottom out on the end, to arrive just when everything was beginning to collapse?

Greg didn’t have a lot of answers for the half-face staring back at him. He was too sober, too aware, too twisted by some strange pain in his spine, but yes, he had a beginning once. He didn’t know where his hat was and he wasn’t sure how cold it would get tonight, but Greg did know where all of this had started and it wasn’t fucking Winnipeg, no matter how much he hated the smell of that place and the taste of its beer. It wasn’t Saskatoon and it wasn’t Hamilton either.

Splayed out on the park bench, Greg the Golden Goose remembered the pharmacy where they had hired him on after two years of college. It was just outside Surrey. It was quiet and it was mainly old folks with diet pills and cholesterol medication who came by on a weekly basis. They had a kid who rode around and dropped off medications. They had two women who ran the cash up front and a whole list of patients who kept dying off in their sleep. And then there was Jeremiah and his stupid hair and his stupid deal. It was easy enough at first, just slipping cold medication out during inventory, over ordering and underreporting. Most of the stuff wasn’t even prescription. There was a new car and Jeremiah was always there for him. He was the one who called him the Golden Goose. Greg was the supplier. He was laying all these perfect eggs, and no one else had noticed.

So yes, half-face, he had been there for beginnings, for the great rise when everything looks like it makes sense, when all the pieces fit and everything is fresh and new and perfect. He had gathered hundreds of that face and so many others just like it and stacked them up in bank accounts and crammed them into a wallet too fat for his back pocket. He had to carry it in his jacket instead, had to swagger with the weight of all those full, fat faces in his pocket. Greg closed his eyes and blew a cold cloud out at the torn ten-dollar bill. He had been there for the fall too, been there to see how everything can fall apart just as fast. He was there from the start.

It was the kid with his bike who caught them slipping all those boxes out the back, the same kid some cops found in a river two weeks later with a Kmart shopping bag pulled over his head. And then suddenly the eggs were no longer golden and there was no more Jeremiah. There was just Greg the Golden Goose scurrying from place to place. Bank accounts were closed, cars were seized and property was claimed. Deals were made, and so Greg found himself fleeing from BC with a duffel bag and five hundred dollars. He found needles in Edmonton and flophouses on the border of Saskatchewan. He spent three days picking rocks before sunstroke took him out. He tumbled from place to place with eyes following him everywhere, asking about Jeremiah and the kid in the river, but he had no idea. He never asked for that. He just wanted to lay his fucking eggs filled with codeine and joy and fucking money. Jeremiah ended all of that.

Winnipeg throbbed on his forearm. He tried not to scratch the wound, but it was hard to keep his dirty fingers from probing the busted flesh. Everywhere he went, a new line was formed, hardening his arteries and weakening his veins until he had to poke at holes in his feet and armpits. London. Churchill. Kitchener. Thompson. Each one like another railway stop stretched across his body, whittling its way through his flesh until nothing else remained. Niagara Falls was right above his junk, a yellow pulsing thing he had been hesitant to name at first. The name fit now though—it was tacky and sticky and never seemed to stop leaking pus.

“I know all about beginnings, you asshole,” Greg said aloud. He tossed the busted bill up into the air and waited for the wind to carry it away. The bill would end up in a sewer somewhere or in some bird’s nest, covered in baby bird shit. Greg really wanted those Sun Chips when he thought about it. He needed something with some salt. The bill refused to disappear though and fluttered back down toward his feet. The eyes stared back up at him and did not blink.

“Alright, fine.”

He tucked the bill back into his pocket and pulled a hood over his head. Greg still had no idea where his hat was—the half-faced bill was right about that one. Some asshole probably took it back at the shelter during all the screaming chaos the night before. He could feel the wind in his ears, carrying laughter from down the street. The bench was going to have to do for now. Winnipeg continued to throb on his forearm, but Greg the Golden Goose pushed away the pain. His veins would collapse eventually, but it didn’t have to happen here.

This whole country had failed him, broken him slowly, but surely, into smaller and smaller pieces. His blood helped push the rot around, discovering new nerves to twist and muscles to paralyze. Greg would catch a train for Newfoundland tomorrow, until it ran out of track and he had to swim. He would find a bus or a car or whatever it took and then he would dive into the water. He would go to the very edge of this fucking country, and he would find an ocean there without any kids floating in its waves, their heads covered in plastic shopping bags.

He would just find water there.

The torn bill disagreed, but it was too late. It didn’t have much say from deep inside Greg’s pocket. The man from Newfoundland had said he’d wanted to secede, to escape all of this bullshit in Canada. That sounded alright with Greg. He bet they had cheap Sun Chips there too.