Blue Vengeance (2 page)

 

On Saturday, two days after Cookie's funeral, Paul came over to see if Danny could come out to hang around with him. Danny didn't know if he would be allowed to go; he wanted to, but he didn't know the rules for a week after your sister's death.

Dot encouraged him. “Go out, Danny. Have some fun.”

They boarded a bus at the corner of Pinedale and Highfield. The plan was to go downtown on their usual rounds.

Aunt Dot had told him to have fun; maybe there still was such a thing.

A girl got on the bus at the corner of Taché and Coniston. Danny saw her reading a book while she stood at the bus stop, and she continued to read it once she got settled. She didn't seem to see him. He knew her; she was the girl who had helped him.

The title of the book was
Far from the Madding Crowd
. He could see it from where he sat. He didn't like the word
madding
and wondered if that was a solid enough reason to talk to her. But Paul was chatting away about going further afield when they got downtown, and the girl looked content. He decided to leave her to it.

When they stopped at Coronation Park, Paul stopped talking, and the inside of the bus was quiet for a moment or two. The girl looked over at Danny and smiled. Just a trace. He smiled too; at least he hoped he did.

It was impossible that the girl would not have been on the bus. Her presence across the aisle was a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that made up the section of Danny's life that took place following Cookie's death. It fell neatly into its spot and clicked.

The boys got off at The Bay. They climbed the wide stairs to the mezzanine floor, where they found two comfortable chairs side by side. There they sat and watched the people come and go, mostly women, often with their daughters. The ladies smoked; the daughters waited — impatient — hung around the fountain, dragged their fingers through the water, threw pennies.

Paul and Danny made up stories about the people they saw:

“That one has loads of man friends that her husband doesn't know about.”

“That girl lets the boys in her class see her tits.”

“Squeeze them too.”

“That kid still shits his pants regularly.”

Rarely did they make up anything kind.

Sometimes, if they stayed too long, a man who worked for the store would tell them to move along, especially if it was busy, and all the chairs were taken. They weren't doing anything bad, but they were boys. That in itself could be considered bad enough.

It didn't happen that day, but they tired before long and took the escalators up to the Paddlewheel Restaurant on the sixth floor.

Paul ordered a strawberry milkshake, and Danny struggled. Normally he would have ordered a root beer float, but he didn't want one now; he didn't want anything. Maybe water, but he couldn't order water. He didn't want to make Paul nervous. Finally he settled on a Coke.

Next they went to the sporting goods department on the second floor and admired the hunting knives, which were under glass. Danny tried to listen as Paul talked about what he would do with his, if his mum would only let him have one.

“All she lets me have is a measly old jackknife.”

Danny fingered the one in his pocket as he followed his friend across Portage Avenue to Sydney I. Robinson on Vaughan Street.

“Let's look at the knives first and save the guns for last,” said Paul, as they trundled down the stairs.

Sydney I. had a much bigger selection of knives.

“I wish they weren't under glass,” said Danny. “Why do they always have to be under glass?”

“Why do you think?” Paul said. “Because a guy might go berserk and grab one and kill somebody before anyone has a chance to stop him.”

He picked up a compass from the selection on top of the counter.

“This is nice,” he said.

“You already have a compass.”

“Yeah, but this one has a leather case.”

“So what?”

“I like leather cases.”

“May I help you boys with something?”

It was an older gentleman asking, dapper in his manner. Danny wondered if he might be Sydney I. Robinson himself.

“No thanks, sir. We're just browsing,” Paul said.

Danny had heard his mum say a version of those words, except for the
sir
part. He supposed Paul's mum said them too.

“Are any of these knives rare?” he asked the man.

If he ever bought a hunting knife he wanted it to be rare.

“No. Not as such.”

The man looked over Danny's head when he spoke and then moved on. Danny turned to watch a large hand come down on Paul's shoulder.

“I think you'd better put that back, son,” said the man with the hand.

He was a burly man.

Paul took the compass out of his pocket and placed it on the counter.

With a hand on each of their backs, the man guided them to the rear of the store, where aromatic animal pelts hung on racks. He knocked on a closed door, and when no one answered he ushered them into a cramped office. There was a desk with a phone on it, two folding metal chairs, and merchandise. The merchandise took up every square inch where the desk and chairs weren't. The man asked the boys for their names and phone numbers and then made three calls: one to the police and one to each of their homes.

Danny thought later that maybe the call to the police was pretend, because no cop ever came. The one to his mum may as well have been pretend, because she didn't come either.

The burly man went back into the main part of the store to nab more criminals. Danny and Paul were left with a lady who didn't say one single word, just sat on a chair and looked at her fingernails from time to time. Paul sat in the remaining chair, and Danny sat on part of a cardboard box that poked out from the boxes piled on top of it. The woman crossed and uncrossed her legs more than once, and when she did that her nylon stockings rubbed against each other and made a sound that Danny liked. He pictured putting his hand there, where the stockings touched.

Paul's mum arrived, and the dapper man followed her into the room and introduced himself to her as Mr. Blandings.

“I'm so sorry, Mr. Blandings,” Mrs. Carter said. “I assure you, nothing like this will ever happen again.”

She clutched Paul's arm and yanked him out of his chair.

Danny thought Paul would speak up and say that it was him, not Danny who had stolen, but he didn't. They were both being painted with the same brush of juvenile delinquency. At that point he still expected a cop to burst in and he thought Mrs. Carter was just there to accompany them to the Vaughan Street jail and post bail. Or not. The Carters weren't rich, and bail could be in the thousands.

Paul's mum was usually very nice-looking. She didn't look so great right now because she was upset. Her nose was red and she trembled, but Danny hoped that Mr. Blandings saw past those things and got how attractive she was. Maybe he would think that her husband was dead or had run off, and that he had a chance with her.

“I'll hold you to that, Mrs. Carter,” he said.

Danny saw the suggestion of a smile.

She herded the boys out to their family station wagon, and Paul still didn't say anything about how it was all his fault. She drove to the Blue house on Lyndale Drive and got out to see Danny to the door.

“I wouldn't trouble your mother with this, Danny,” she said. “But they phoned her too. She already knows.”

It wasn't me
, he wanted to shout.
It was that asshole son of yours.

But ratting out a friend was close to the worst thing you could do. He looked back at the car and saw Paul grinning from the back seat.

Dirty rotten asshole of a friend.

Aunt Dot greeted them. Barbara Blue was behind her, supporting herself on two canes. She only used them both when she was extra tired. That's what she said. Since Cookie died she had been extra tired all the time. She probably would have used her wheelchair but it was too big for the house.

She waited till Mrs. Carter left to say, “Go to your room, Danny. I don't want to look at you.”

He fought back tears as he trudged upstairs. He sat in his chair, stared out the window, and thought about how they didn't even get a chance to look at the guns.

A little later Dot brought him a snack of fancy sandwiches left over from the funeral. He didn't eat them. They were cold from the freezer and they made him think about Cookie, which was worse than thinking about his so-called friend.

When he went to the bathroom he heard them talking. His mum said something nasty about Mrs. Carter's high heels and then, “My dear lost boy.” She had tears in her voice when she said it.

Dear lost boy
. That sounded promising. Maybe it wasn't going to be as bad as he thought. They were talking so quietly he couldn't grasp any more words. She sure hadn't spoken to him as though he was her
dear lost boy
, but there it was. Hard to fathom, but there it was.

 

Danny couldn't get out of his bedroom chair. Could not.

From where he sat he had a view of the Red River and beyond it the pale green suburb of Riverview. But he didn't see it. Sometimes he caught a movement, a car or a passing bird, but if someone were to ask him to describe what was in front of him, he wouldn't be able to say. Cookie was his only thought.

He was eating a melted Jersey Milk chocolate bar, taking no pleasure from it. There was a fine line for Danny between a soft Jersey Milk and one that was too far gone. This one was past its best because he hadn't been alert to the rays of the sun on the table by his side.

A muted rage took a turn through his system and left as quickly as it came. It reminded him that he needed to do something, something connected to Cookie, but he didn't yet know what it was. There were only inklings.

His fingers were sticky from the chocolate. He licked them absently and wiped them on the front of his T-shirt. His thin body was lost inside of it. It had belonged to Cookie, who had been taller than him and plumper once, though not in recent months. According to their mum, she took after their dad's branch of the family. Danny couldn't know this for sure as he didn't remember his dad, and his mother said there were no photographs. She had often bemoaned the fact that it was Danny with his lean build that took after her side.

 

“It's more important for girls to be slim,” she had said.

“Why?” Cookie and Danny both asked at the same time.

“It just is,” said their mother in the unsatisfactory way she had of answering their questions. “Honestly, when I was young, people compared my shape to that of a wasp.”

When they both looked blank she added, “You know…I went in in the middle; I had a waist.”

She also had a sting.

 

It was Cookie who had taught him about the pleasure of soft chocolate. He hadn't known it since she died and he wondered if it would ever come back, and if it did, if it would be lesser somehow. A lesser pleasure.

Two weeks had passed since her death. The time had gone by in a blur — fog all through it, like at the graveside service.

Uncle Edwin went home after a week. He and Aunt Dot farmed a half section near Baldur, a couple of hours southwest of Winnipeg. Aunt Dot stayed on. She brought Danny his meals and encouraged him to have baths, even tried to jolly him out to the yard once for a game of catch, but mostly she left him alone. No one mentioned school.

Paul had dropped over a few times, but Danny refused to see him.

His dog Russell sat with him most of the time. She got up now to investigate voices in the kitchen. Paul and Dot. Then in the living room. Just Paul. Danny heard no response. Now there were footsteps on the stairs.

“Hi.” Paul entered his room.

“Hi.” Danny continued to look out the window.

“Your Aunt Dot said I could come up.”

“So what.”

“I talked to your mum. I told her it was all my fault that day at Sydney I. Robinson's.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing.”

Danny had seen little of his mother. From time to time, he heard murmurs from the living room which was directly below his bedroom, so he figured she must be spending most of her time in there. She hadn't been up to see him, but she rarely made the effort to climb the stairs even under normal circumstances. Her bedroom and the only bathroom were on the main floor.

And he hadn't ventured down to see her. They had passed each other in the downstairs hall at night when both of them needed the bathroom at the same time, she using a cane even for the few steps it took her to get there. All he felt when that happened was irritation that the timing was so unlucky. They hadn't spoken; they could have been sleepwalking. He didn't feel at all like her
dear lost boy
. Lost maybe, but for sure not dear.

“Did your mum make you?” Danny said to Paul.

“What?”

“Did your mum make you come over and tell my mum that I had nothing to do with it?”

Paul didn't answer at first.

“She did, didn't she?”

“I don't know.”

“Get lost.”

Paul stood in the doorway for a minute, then shrugged and took off down the stairs.

Danny was glad Paul had owned up to his mother. But his anger didn't go anywhere; it seethed inside of him. It had been this way since Cookie's death, which he saw as murder, plain and simple. Somebody had to pay.

He needed to kill someone. That was the thing he needed to do. If he took a life, a bad one, it could help to even out with what had happened to Cookie. It was worth a try.

Dot came up to try and coax him to come down, now that Paul had come clean.

“Does Mum believe him?” said Danny. “Is she sorry?”

“Of course she believes him, honey.”

“She's not sorry though, is she?” he said, staring out the window.

“We can't expect too much of her these days, pet.”