Blue Vengeance (14 page)

 

During the past few days there had been no more talk of whisking Danny and his mother out to the farm, but he knew he'd have to remain on his toes as far as Dot was concerned.

She was in the kitchen preparing to go home. This involved attaching notes to casseroles and rearranging the fridge by moving the older stuff to the front.

“I've laid in some groceries, Danny. There are some things that are going to run out before I come back — milk and such — and I may not have covered everything you like. We really should sit down, you and I, and make a master list.”

“We can manage, Auntie Dot. I'm good at shopping for groceries.”

She tousled his hair. He wished people would stop doing that. He'd just combed it and added a little Wildroot Cream-Oil that he'd picked up at Wade's last time he was there.

“I know you are, dear.” Dot wiped her hand on her apron.

“There's a carrier on my bike. It holds a lot.”

They had eaten lunch, and Danny was itching to get out of the house.

“Your mum's set up on the couch again.” Dot said it as if it was normal. “Edwin's going to be here in a few minutes to pick me up. Did you brush your teeth, honey?”

He sighed.

“I'm sorry, dear. I know you don't need that type of reminder.” She sighed too and sat down at the kitchen table.

“Sit with me for a minute, Danny.”

“I have to go,” he said. “Things to do.”

“Just for a minute.”

He pulled out a chair and perched on the edge of it.

Dot made a steeple of her fingers.

“This girl, Janine, isn't she a little…I don't know…mature for you?”

Danny wondered for a second if she was referring to the two nicely contained mounds underneath Janine's T-shirt.

“No,” he said.

He thought about things Janine had said that hinted at experiences beyond his and he saw how Dot might think she was right about this. But it didn't matter. He was just a couple of years and one or two experiences behind Janine. He would catch up to her, no sweat.

“Don't get me wrong, honey. She seems like a nice girl. It's just that she's…well…she must be at least Cookie's age, isn't she?”

“Yeah. She's pretty much exactly Cookie's age.”

His aunt didn't say anything for a minute or two. Danny hoped she was thinking that he thought of Janine as an older sister, a sort of substitute for Cookie.

“I haven't seen Paul in a while,” Dot said. “Or those other fellas, Stu and Stumpy, is it?”

“Stubby.”

He wished he could talk things over with Cookie now. She'd know it was okay for him to be friends with Janine and might even have the words for him to say so Dot would think so too. She'd often been good at knowing what other people should do or say — just not herself.

Too bad he hadn't been friends with Janine before Cookie died. Too bad Cookie had never brought her home. They could have hung around, the three of them. He and Janine could have saved her together.

“Janine was Cookie's best friend,” Danny said.

It wasn't untrue.

“Oh,” said Dot. “I didn't know that. I guess it makes sense, then, that you'd want to spend time together.”

“Yeah.”

“To help each other with losing Cookie.”

“Yeah.”

He was soon out the door, marvelling at his own genius.

As he practised at the river he wondered how Janine was feeling in the aftermath of eating supper with him and Dot. Fine, he supposed.

Then his thoughts turned again to Cookie, to the aftermath of her death.

 

Because of the uncertainty surrounding it, the City Medical Officer of Health was called in. They looked into it: talked to Frank, to Danny, to Barbara Blue. They talked to the ambulance attendants, and studied the riverbank. Then they wrote up a report and ruled what happened to Cookie
death by misadventure.

Frank explained to them that she was knocking against the river's edge when he saw her. He was out early with his new dog. It was the pup that spotted her first. She was caught between a rock and a large branch. He had to go right into the water to free her from the branch. Yes, he admitted — he was a strong swimmer, a strong treader of water. He was able to lift her up onto the shore. She was very light.

The autopsy report said that she had water in her lungs. That meant she drowned. If she hadn't had water in her lungs it would have meant that she died first and then fell in.

So Danny imagined her drowning — swallowing water, breathing water, till there was no place inside her that allowed for any more.

The report also said that there were marks on her body where she'd been cut, inches below her naval and on her breasts and just inside her hipbones. Cuts made with a knife, some of which had healed and left scars, some with scabs, some brand new. No one told Danny that part. He overheard Dot and Edwin discussing it using their most serious voices.

Uncle Edwin was the only person he could ask about the particulars.

“Why didn't the weight of Cookie sink her?” he said. “I know she didn't weigh much, but still.”

“It would have, Daniel, along with the pull of the current. Long enough that she took in enough water to drown. But then the current would have pushed her up again, wedging her into her resting place between the tree limb and the rock. Currents are funny that way.”

“Funny,” said Danny.

“And then, as you know, her housecoat was caught on the limb.”

“Frank uncaught it.”

“Yes. It was lucky that she got caught that way, so that Frank and his pup found her.”

“Yeah,” said Danny. “Lucky.”

His uncle explained about eddies, but Danny wasn't listening anymore. He pictured Cookie holding her breath till she couldn't and then breathing water instead of air. Then he pictured her not holding her breath at all, just welcoming the filthy river till it took her over. He hoped it didn't take too long.

Someone found the plate that had held the pineapple upside-down cake that Danny, Cookie, and their mother had eaten for dessert at Cookie's last supper. It had been licked clean.

She'd had two cans of beans and two cans of Klik in the deep pockets of her housecoat. No one talked about that. But that's how Danny knew she was dead on purpose. She had used them to weigh herself down.

He didn't know if other people thought she had meant to do it. Edwin made a big to-do about the slick flatness of the grass where they figured she had gone in, as though she had slipped unintentionally at the top of the low cliff, gone over the side, and kept on sliding.

 

Danny and Russell passed that way now, and he stopped to look.

There hadn't been a whisper of suicide, but he knew that's what it was. Also, deep in his heart, he knew that Miss Hartley wasn't the sole cause of Cookie's agonizing misery. Still, someone had to pay, and she was by far the best of all possible targets, she with her poisonous words and brutal acts of cruelty.

 

It took Danny a couple of days to realize that something potentially very useful was happening. It was shortly after Dot had gone home.

Construction began in the empty lot on the north side of the high school. He noticed it one evening on his way home from baseball at the flood bowl. He had signed up after Janine's speech about needing more than one friend.

The friend part was going nowhere, but he didn't expect or even want it to. He didn't hate baseball and he wasn't terrible at it. He never got picked last because there were three or four other guys who were worse than he was.

His position was usually centre field; sometimes he played shortstop between first and second. The good players played at the official shortstop position between second and third. When he occasionally caught a ball, his fellow teammates shouted things like, “Atta way to be, Danno,” and he liked that.

It was getting tiresome, though. He had to force himself to go and he didn't always make it.

Paul and Stubby played, but so far neither of them had been on his team. Paul wasn't mean to Danny, but neither did he seek him out, and Danny didn't try. Trying didn't feel right. Maybe later, when it was all over.

In the good old days, Danny and Paul would have spent a large portion of their time at the construction site beside the school. This one was pretty boring compared to some. A couple of summers ago they had revelled in the chaos of two classrooms being built on the west side of Nordale. For the whole season it kept them occupied in the evenings, when the workmen had gone home. They fashioned forts and caves and a high-wire area, where they placed a two-by-four over a couple of sawhorses and performed amazing feats of balance and skill. Sometimes they pretended they were workmen.

“Hand me that level, will ya, Bert,” Paul would say. “This window is lookin' a little lopsided. And I wanna shim up those joists.”

“Sure thing, Marv. Just wait till I finish here with the winch. It's actin' up again.”

The day after Danny had noticed this new site he went back while the men were at work and watched them dig, level, and prepare to lay cement. When one of them sat down on a crate for a smoke and a drink from his thermos, Danny sauntered over.

“What are you building?” he said.

“Just a parking lot for the teachers, buddy boy. Nothing very exciting.”

Danny couldn't think of anything more to say, so he stepped away and left the man to his cigarette and coffee. There were some kids on the other side of the school grounds playing baseball. He wanted to join them and wondered why it had suddenly become so hard. Joining in used to come naturally, like drinking cool water to quench his thirst. He sat down in a sunny spot against the school, where he couldn't see either the parking lot or the game, and watched instead the pictures inside his head, mostly of Janine.

 

Two mornings later, he presented his mum with a bowl of Rice Krispies and made two pieces of toast for himself. He buttered them and looked for jam. What he found was an empty jar of E.D. Smith apricot. Why would someone put an empty jar of jam back in the cupboard, he wondered, and then realized it had probably been him.

He spread brown sugar on his toast and as he ate it he made a grocery list without asking his mum if she wanted anything. He took some bills from the drawer and folded them into his pocket.

On the ride home from the A&P Danny congratulated himself. It was the best job of shopping he'd done so far. There was cherry jam, bread, eggs, peanuts in the shell, milk — everything on his list plus a few items that he hadn't thought to buy before: Sugar Pops, two kinds of cheese that weren't Velveeta, and crackers that weren't soda crackers. They were called Sociables and they looked good on the box. He concentrated on the road to avoid trouble with the eggs. He whistled as he cycled.

When he got home the couch was silent.

It came to him as he put the groceries away. The new parking lot was directly adjacent to the north side of the school grounds. If he and Janine were to practise in that area, it would make all the sense in the world for one of them to accidentally hit Miss Hartley on her temple and watch her die instead of get into her car.

In his head when he described it to Janine he said,
the north side of the school
, hoping she would be impressed with his grasp of directions and forget that he had not known which way was east. He could also say,
on the way home from baseball
, so she would know that he was playing with others. And then he would quit but not tell her. It seemed dumber all the time to be putting himself through it just because a girl thought he should have more than one friend.

He had the sense of time running out. Winter was a long way off, but when he pictured it, he saw an impossible place, with snow-covered streets and thick mitts and heavy hooded parkas.

 

Danny had planned on two new pieces of toast, with jam this time, but he couldn't wait.

As he rode over to Janine's, he thought about Cookie. In 1966 he would be older than she ever was, ever would be. He supposed that when he was ninety he would still think of her as his big sister because he had never experienced her as anything else.

Why had she been so messed up? There was a time when she ate like a regular kid and hated throwing up as much as he did.

He remembered her love of Cherry Blossoms. She had thought they were almost too good to be true, the same way he thought about yo-yos and kaleidoscopes. Danny thought they were a gyp. He thought they shouldn't cost as much as other chocolate bars; they seemed so small. She explained to him that they were as big as the others. She pointed out the weight on the box compared to the weight on a Jersey Milk. He still didn't buy it.

She was particular about chocolate bars. For instance, she liked Jersey Milks better than Dairy Milks. Danny hadn't been able to tell the difference. She made him sit down for a taste test, and he couldn't say why exactly, but he found he agreed. Jersey Milk was better.

“Told ya,” she'd said.

That was a long time ago.

 

He almost missed Janine. She was on her bike.

“I have to go grocery shopping.” She skidded to a stop. “Do you want to come with me?”

“Sure.”

He didn't tell her that he had just been.

“Do you have money in case you want to get something?” she said.

“Yup. Go home, Russell. We're gonna be ridin' in traffic.”

Russell made an about-face and trotted off back up the lane.

“Will she really go home?” said Janine.

“Yup. She'll probably head out again soon after she gets there, but for sure she'll go home first.”

They pedalled over to Dominion against the warm dusty wind. Janine had a big carrier too.

“We've got a lot in common,” said Danny.

“Like what?”

“We both have big carriers on our bikes. I know loads of kids with no carriers at all.”

They parked and got a cart.

Janine whisked through the aisles, throwing things into it.

“Don't you have a list?” Danny said.

“No.

“Don't you forget stuff without a list?”

“No.”

She stopped so abruptly that Danny banged into the back of her.

“Don't move,” she said. “Don't look anywhere. Back up. Hardass is over there in the frozen foods. She's with another woman.”

“Let me look.” Danny moved to get past her.

“Stop. Use your head.”

“What?”

“We don't want her to see us together, you idiot.”

“Why?”

Janine ignored his question and approached the end of the aisle again.

“They're not actually sharing a cart, but they're definitely together,” she said when she came back. “It must be her sister. Unbelievable.”

“What's unbelievable?”

She ignored him again.

“Let me have a look,” Danny said.

“You can in a minute.”

“Why do you think it's her sister? Couldn't it just be a friend?”

“Shh! They look a lot alike. Christ, they look exactly alike.” Janine took another peek. “The shape of them, their size. Plus, I doubt if Hardass has any friends.”

“Let me see.”

“Okay, quick. They're comparing items. One second at most.”

Danny peered around the cans of pineapple stacked at the end of the aisle. “They look alike except for their hair.”

“They sure do,” said Janine, “right down to their flat asses.”

“I can't see those,” said Danny, straining again to look.

“Okay, pull back.”

“They don't dress much alike,” Danny said.

“So?”

“Maybe they're sisters, but not twins.”

“Who said they were twins?”

“I don't know. Me?”

“Who cares? We can use this.”

“How?”

“I don't know.”

Janine took another look. “They gotta be twins. This is unreal.”

“I wonder why they don't dress alike if they're twins.”

Janine sighed. “Jesus, Danny. Twins don't dress alike after the age of six, when they go to school and get teased to death and realize their mums have been making fools of them all through the first years of their lives. You absolutely flabbergast me with the things you don't know.”

He poked his head out again and stared in plain sight at the two women chuckling over the frozen foods. He didn't care if they saw him. It was the only thing he could think of doing to pay Janine back for her meanness.

“They're laughin',” he said.

“Bitches. That makes me sick. They shouldn't be allowed to laugh.”

She pulled his T-shirt till it stretched out about a foot and a half.

“You're wreckin' my shirt.” He stepped back out of sight. “I wonder if they live together.”

“Probably not,” said Janine. “They have separate shopping carts. Unless they live together, but keep their food separate. I can see them doing that — yelling at each other if, say, Hardass's tomatoes touch the sister's lettuce. Coming to blows. Maybe the sister'll end up killing Hardass, and we can sit back and relax.”

“That'd be great,” said Danny. “But then...”
Then, we wouldn't get to do it.
He stopped himself before he said it. “Maybe they live together but have two fridges,” he said instead.

Janine chuckled.

She reminded him of Jake when she laughed. He remembered the splendour of her honest laughter, as father and daughter sat next to one another and shared a joke in their backyard.

“I think it's most likely that they live in separate houses,” she said. “The sister might have a husband. Most women do.”

“Miss Hardass doesn't,” Danny said.

“Probably because every man she's ever met in her entire life hates her,” said Janine. “You gotta get out of here. We don't want them to see us together. Meet me back at my house. It'll be okay if they see me on my own.”

“I'm not clear on why they can't see us together if it's gonna be an accident,” said Danny.

“Oh, yeah. Well…it just seems right is all.”