Blue Vengeance (7 page)

“That oughta do it,” he said to Russell.

When he went in the house, his mother was on the couch. He hated the couch almost as much as he hated Miss Hartley. He started opening windows.

“What are you doing?” his mother said.

He ignored her at first.

“What are you doing?”

“I'm opening windows. The house stinks. It smells like lazy bums live here.”

He went into the kitchen, dumped a can of cream of mushroom soup into a pot with water, and heated it through. Usually he added milk to mushroom soup — it was better with milk — but not this time. He didn't want it to be better.

When he took the tray in to his mother, she didn't look at him.

“Thanks,” she said.

He didn't say,
you're welcome.

It was the first time he didn't say it, and the painting of Scottish cows did not crash down from the wall, and the breeze continued to drift through the freshly opened window. It felt as if there were worlds of things he could not say, or say, and get away with it.

After supper he retrieved the dogwood from the lot next door. What if he never saw Janine again? What if he never found a willow tree? What if he did, but couldn't find a suitable branch? He placed the rough wood back on its shelf in the shed.

Why had she said it wouldn't be good for him to go over to her house? Maybe she had a sick mother too. She was making supper for her dad.

He liked the way she talked, there was something about it.

It was a relief to have something to think about other than Miss Hartley. Janine had called her
Hardass
. He liked that too. He wondered if she had been there the day that Cookie was made to feel bad in the locker room. Probably.

Sometimes he thought it would be enough just to hurt Miss Hartley; that held its appeal. He could keep her captive, tie her up in the shed, naked on all fours. Feed her hard crusts of mouldy bread and dirty water between the hurting. That way she would know what was happening to her and why. He could buy a whip. But mostly he just wanted her gone.

From time to time, since Cookie's death, he had thought about dying, as it applied to himself. It was a faint, barely uplifting desire. Maybe he could talk to Janine about it, hear some of her thoughts.

He wanted to believe in heaven, but by now he knew that everything he'd learned at Sunday school was a steaming pile of crap. He'd liked some of the stories, but not the impossible ones. Even they might have been okay if the stupid teacher hadn't tried to convince them that they were true. Some of the kids had believed her. He'd known that from the looks of amazement on their faces.

Danny liked far-fetched stories, like
Gulliver's Travels
, because no one had spoiled them by telling him they were true. Still,
Robin Hood
and
Treasure Island
were the best, because they could have happened in real life. He'd only read
Gulliver's Travels
and
Treasure Island
in comic book form, but he intended to read the books as soon as he had some time, once this Miss Hartley situation was out of the way.

There was comfort in Janine knowing about his plan, if she really did know about it. It eased his load somehow. But he worried about having been unaware of her watching him the day of the botched trial run.

You missed, didn't you?
That's what she'd said. She had seen him.

She couldn't know for sure how far he wanted to take it. Could she? No. It was as unlikely as the story about Jesus waking up after three days of being dead. She couldn't know, but she could have an inkling; she seemed pretty smart. She could probably make a yo-yo go 'round-the-world.

Maybe she could help him by making unexpected loud sounds as he took aim. Mimic a barking dog, say, or the blast of a train's whistle.

His real plans were starting now, with Janine. Her appearance in his life shifted things for the good.

He took his yo-yo out of his pocket and after a few tries made it sleep for the first time in his life.

 

At one o'clock the next day, Danny started walking towards the St. Mary's end of Lyndale, where Janine had said she lived. He couldn't wait for two o'clock, had no idea why he'd suggested two.

Lyndale Drive formed the arc of the D that framed the Norwood Flats. It had been built as a dike during the flood of 1950. One end of the arc was at the Norwood Bridge, the other at St. Mary's Road. Danny's house was in the middle.

It was hot. The air in the lane shimmered as he saw her moving towards him down the lane. She was carrying something that required both hands. When he got close, he saw that it was a flat of eggs.

“What the…?”

“Yeah,” Janine said. “It's eggs. Don't worry. They're rotten. My dad's going to kill the egg man.”

“There must be what…three dozen eggs here? This is great.”

In Danny's house the eggs used to come in pristine one-dozen cartons from the A&P or Dominion store. It hit him that eggs were another thing he could make for his mum and him to eat. Dot must have already bought some; she'd served them to him lots of times. He'd have to learn how to cook them, but how hard could it be?

Janine's eggs were nothing like the ones from the A&P. Hers came from an egg man who her dad was going to kill, and there were feathers attached to some of them.

“I thought we could balance them on the fence posts with gravel,” she said, “and you could shoot them. They seemed too good to throw away. My dad was glad to know they were going to be put to use.”

It would be very satisfying to hit an egg. Danny thought of Paul. He would have liked to shoot at eggs, especially rotten ones. But it was too late for Paul.

He and Cookie used to eat milk chocolate eggs at Easter (when Jesus purportedly woke up after his three-day death). They got them at Wade's drugstore. It would never happen again.

Sometimes she hadn't been able to stop once she got started. He tried to step in a couple of times — not with the Easter eggs, but other times — when he saw that she was eating way too much for it to be okay. She had told him to go away in a voice that scared him, a low voice that wasn't hers.

It had turned into a secret thing, the eating too much, and Danny wondered if that could have been his fault, because of poking his nose in.

With Cookie being his older sister had come an assumption that she knew better than him. Still, she only made it to fifteen. How much could you really know after only fifteen years or so? During some of those years you could barely walk or talk. His mother was forty-nine, and she didn't even know she was supposed to get up off the couch.

Cookie had seemed pretty normal in her younger days, before the weird eating got a hold on her. She had gamely gone along to the toboggan run in the winter and taken a couple of slides down the riverbank. She hadn't liked it much. Danny hadn't either — it was scary — but they both felt as if they were supposed to like it because everyone else did. He wondered for the first time if in reality no one liked tobogganing. He hoped so. Cookie liked the post-tobogganing part the best: the indoor part with cocoa and baby marshmallows.

Skating was different. She took to the ice, sailed across it. Forwards like a speed skater, backwards with a grace she shared with no one else on the ice. There were three rinks at the Norwood Community Club: two for hockey and one for “pleasure.” Cookie had owned the pleasure rink, a boy named Butch Goring, the hockey rinks; people stopped to watch both of them. But that was a long time ago, when she'd had a friend or two. He hadn't known one of them might have been Janine. Cookie had hung up her skates a few years ago.

“Too busy,” she'd said when Danny asked her why.

He realized now that it was probably true. She had taken over most of their mother's responsibilities as her illness worsened, and Barbara Blue came to rely on her more and more.

 

“What are you thinking about?” Janine said now.

“Nothing.”

“You look sad. Are you thinking about Cookie?”

“No.”

They had walked the short distance back to his house.

Janine lined the eggs up on the fence posts, placing pointy bits of gravel from the lane around each one to hold it in place.

Danny admired her while she worked, pretended to be watching the placing of the eggs. The skin on her bare arms was golden. He wanted to taste it.

The moment of connection was satisfying, more than with soup tins. The eggs were almost alive. Russell and another dog from the neighbourhood snorfelled around them.

“Go on,” Danny said. “Find something else to do.” He drove them off and turned to Janine. “Would you like to have a go?” The eggs were about half done.

“No. I'm fine,” she said.

She put up more eggs as he knocked them down, seeming to enjoy her role as sidekick.

“It's you who needs the practice,” she said.

Again, he wondered if she knew the scope of his intention.

 

The next day Janine arrived with a small paper bag half full of ball bearings.

“These are perfect,” Danny said. “Where did you get them?”

“My house. My dad had them.”

Danny stuck his hand in the bag and let the smooth round projectiles run through his fingers.

“Won't he miss them?”

“Nope. He said I could have them.”

“Does he know what you want them for?”

“He didn't ask.”

She took out her slingshot and placed one of the silver orbs inside the leather pocket. She looked around her for a moment or two and then aimed.

There was an oak tree in the vacant lot next door. At its apex the glossy leaves stood out against the pastel sky. She took her shot and the topmost leaf disappeared.

“What were you aimin' at?” Danny said.

“What I hit.”

He looked back at the treetop and wasn't sure now if the leaf was gone.

“Paul thinks leaves are too feeble of a thing to aim at,” said Danny.

“Who's Paul?”

“My former friend.”

They took the ball bearings with them to the icehouse on the corner of Lyndale and Gauvin Avenue. They bought two solid bricks of ice for twenty-five cents apiece and set them up in the scrubby lot behind the building. They shone in the sunlight.

Janine joined in this time. She was at least as good as he was. They shot till the bag was empty and then gathered up as many of the ball bearings as they could find. They were too precious to leave behind.

At the river they sat down in the long grass, Janine cross-legged, Danny with his legs sticking out in front of him, supporting himself with his two brown arms. Russell joined them there.

“Why is Paul your former friend?”

A fist formed in the centre of Danny's chest and settled there. It was a tiny fist, the size of a small sour crabapple, but too big for a spot that had no space for it.

“Because I just want to practise with my slingshot, and he wants to do other stuff, like we used to. It's kinda my fault.”

“Maybe you can be friends with him again…after.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Don't you have any other friends?”

“I did. But they might not be my friends anymore either.” He thought of Stu and Stubby and the way they all vied for Paul's attention. The fist inside his chest clenched.

“What kinds of suppers do you make for your dad?” he said.

He didn't want to think about things that hurt his insides.

“Nothing special. He has his favourites, but they're simple, and he's easy to please. Why do you ask?”

“I have to make stuff for my mum and I never know what to make.”

“What does she like?”

“Nothing.”

“Hmm, that makes it hard.”

A dog barked from somewhere far away. Russell's ears twitched and then settled down. Danny stroked her stiff coat and wondered if a dog of the same size and breed as the one barking now had sounded the same a thousand years ago. He suspected so.

“She needs a bath,” said Janine.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Why is she called Russell if she's a girl?”

“She's mostly Jack Russell terrier, so we figured on either Jack or Russell and finally chose Russell.”

“Who, you and Cookie?”

“Yup.”

She rubbed one of Russell's ears and the dog closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Janine wiped her hand on her shorts.

“She's kind of big for a terrier, isn't she?”

“There's other stuff in her too, Lab, we think, because of her size and her floppy ears.”

Russell knew they were talking about her and shifted her gaze from one to the other and back again. She looked doltish, and Danny hoped Janine didn't think so.

“What are you makin' for supper tonight?” he said.

“Beans and toast probably. I make that at least once a week.”

“Hey, I forgot about beans. I could make that. She used to like beans, I think.”

“What's the matter with her? I mean, is there something more than Cookie dying?”

“Yeah, she's got fibrositis.”

“What's that?”

“It's a disease that means everything hurts, and you don't sleep and you sometimes have trouble swallowing.”

“Sheesh. That covers a lot of bad stuff.”

“She can't stand it if you touch her because even the lightest touch hurts.”

“Jeez, your poor mum.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Danny stood up. There were beer bottles strewn around the area, and he took a few shots, this time with stones from his pockets. He missed two out of five.

When Janine said she better get going, he asked her which house on Lyndale was hers.

“It's on the other side of the street from Rock Sand's house,” she said, “and not as far east.”

“Who's Roxanne?”

Janine looked at him sideways.

“Rock Sand,” she said and spelled it for him. “You're kidding, right?”

“No.”

“He's a guy. I can't believe you don't know who he is.”

“Well, I don't. Why would I?”

“Everyone knows who he is.”

“I don't.”

A vertical line appeared on the smooth skin of Janine's forehead between her brows.

“Hmm. Maybe he's more of an eastern Norwood phenomenon,” she said.

Danny was sick of the conversation. He didn't want to think about which way was east and some guy whose house was probably full of sand that got under your fingernails even right after a bath and turned up inside your sandwiches.

“So who is he?” He didn't want to care, but he did.

“Well, he's kind of a rebel, for one thing. He doesn't take any guff from anybody.”

“What's so great about that?”

“I didn't say it was great. Did I say it was great?”

“No. I guess not.”

“He is great, though. For all kinds of reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Well, let's see…he's cool and smart and he plays the guitar and is full of good ideas.”

Danny didn't know anyone who was cool. Maybe Paul verged on it.

“Lots of people are smart,” he said, though he was hard-pressed to think of any of those either. A couple of his teachers maybe. Uncle Edwin? Perry Mason was smart, but Janine would probably think he didn't count. Paul for sure wasn't smart; he was an imbecile. A coolish imbecile.

There was no arguing with playing the guitar. George Harrison played the guitar, and one-quarter of the girls in the universe wanted to marry him. All the ones who didn't want to marry John, Paul, or Ringo.

“Plus he's got weights in his basement,” Janine said, “that he lifts to make his muscles stand out and so he can beat people up if he needs to.”

“Why would he need to?”

“Well, say someone was giving him a hard time for something.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I don't know, do I?”

“Is he a greaser?”

“Yeah, I guess people would call him a greaser.”

“Greasers are idiots,” Danny said, but he said it quietly, and Janine was so starry-eyed she didn't seem to hear him. He was glad. He was heating up inside, but he didn't want to have a fight with her.

“His biceps are hard as rocks. He let me touch one.”

“What's a bicep?” Danny said, leery of the answer.

“It's an arm muscle. Arm muscles are called biceps.”

She said this as though she knew everything in the world, and part of Danny wanted her to go away.

“Plus, he has a car,” Janine said. “A really neat one. It's old, but it's in mint condition, and he does all the work on it himself. I think it's a model of car they don't even make anymore.”

Danny understood what was great about having a car. You could take girls into the back seat and touch them all over.

“Why would anyone wanna be a greaser?” he said, not meaning to, wanting the talk to go back to what they made their parents for supper.

“In Rock's case,” said Janine, “I think he was born one.”

“I don't think that's the kind of thing you're born to be.”

She reached in the bag for a ball bearing and stood up to shoot.

“He's got blond hair,” she said.

Danny didn't like Rock Sand. He didn't like the way Janine's eyes went when she talked about him. She missed the shot.

“What were you shootin' at?” he said, needing her to admit it.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “I didn't hit it.”

At least she came clean.

“Greasers don't usually have blond hair, do they?” Now Danny wanted to take issue with something.

She rolled her eyes. He preferred that to the faraway look she'd had a moment ago.

“Marlon Brando has blond hair,” she said.

“No, he doesn't.”

“Yes, he does.”

“No, he doesn't. And anyway, he's an actor, not a greaser.”

Janine rolled her eyes again, but Danny knew he had her on both counts. He'd read in one of his mum's old movie magazines that when Marlon Brando turned up with blond hair it was “from a bottle.” That meant he dyed it, just like women did. That made him a sissy.

“You said this guy has good ideas,” Danny said. “Like what?”

A moment or two passed before she came up with one. “He's going to get so good on the guitar that he'll play in a band.”

“Yeah, and?”

“He drives like the wind down the highway with the windows open.”

“How can he drive like the wind in a rickety old car that they don't even make anymore?”

“He just can, okay? It's not rickety.”

It was Danny's turn to roll his eyes. He wanted to stick his finger down his throat and throw up on Janine's feet.
Cookie
.

She was setting herself up for another shot.

“Don't waste the ball bearings,” Danny said. “We won't be able to find them, if you shoot them into the trees.”

“I'll shoot them where I want to,” she said. “They're mine.”

She picked up the bag and took off. Danny stayed at the river for a while. He had thought the ball bearings had become both of theirs.

Russell had strayed off, but she came bounding back now.

“You're a good girl, Russ. I'm sorry if I've been ignorin' you. I've got a lot on my mind.”

Back at the house he lifted her into the bathtub. It was something he couldn't have gotten away with before Cookie's death. Now he was certain his mum wouldn't care, in the unlikely event she even noticed. He decided he would pick up a new movie magazine for her — try to find one with Doris Day or Natalie Wood on the cover. She used to like both of those movie stars. He wished his mum were Doris Day, with her lively way and her freckly smile.

After he put Russell outside to dry off he went to the cellar pantry to look for beans and found none.

It worried him that he had angered Janine. He didn't want to lose the one person he could talk to these days. There was Russell, but she couldn't answer back when he asked her questions. Sometimes he liked to pretend that Russell could talk, and he imagined the kinds of answers she would give. They would be jolly kind-hearted answers no matter what. Even if he told her his plan for Miss Hartley, she would root for him, scamper along beside him all the way.

Danny and Janine still hadn't talked about it out loud. They had hinted at it, when they talked of targets and lookout positions and good cover, but they had yet to discuss the degree of damage they wished to cause, to call it by its name. Maybe she would vanish if she knew how far his intentions went. Maybe she thought he just wanted to hit Miss Hartley on her scrawny, no-account ass.