Charlie's Key (12 page)
Frankie’s friend gives a laugh, but not Frankie. He shuts right up and looks hard at Nick. Then he nods, the tiniest bit, a nod you wouldn’t see if you weren’t looking right at him.
“You’re Nick Sykes,” Frankie says.
“So how come the kid doesn’t have the lobster claw?” says the friend. “Or maybe it doesn’t run in the family?”
“Shut up, Gerald, b’y,” Frankie snaps back at his friend, before turning toward Nick.
“Don’t mind him, Mr. Sykes—he’s a bit of an arsehole by times.”
“I see that,” says Nick.
“I didn’t know who you was a minute ago there. I’m Frankie Walsh—Roger’s boy.”
Frankie holds out his hand for Nick to shake, but Nick just lets it sit.
“My old man used to move some stuff through your old man,” says Frankie.
“I knows who he is,” says Nick. “How’s he doing? Still drinkin’?”
“Like a dog at a toilet,” says Frankie.
“You best watch yourself around the booze,” says Nick. “Ruined yer old man. He coulda done something with himself, ’cept he were pissed all the time.”
Nick looks at the friend.
“And who’s this turd ya got hangin’ from yer shorts?”
The guy looks like he’s going to say something, but Frankie shakes his head.
“Gerald—lives up off Logy Bay Road.”
“Yacht club kid,” says Nick. “Thought his clothes were a bit too pretty for a Rabbit Town punk.”
“He’s a friend—we hang out,” says Frankie.
“Well,” says Nick, “I think I’ll go search out a friend or two and hang out a bit myself.”
He turns to me.
“We’ll have ta finish our chat later, Charlie. See if we can’t find something for ya to remember yer old man by— like a key what he might a had on him when he died. See if we can’t track that down. It’d be a nice thing to have,” he says, then starts walking off down the brook.
“A nice thing to have,” he says again to himself, but loud enough for me to hear.
Gerald’s got a car waiting for us on a little street up over the riverbank. It’s big and blue, and right away I know it’s the nicest car I’ve ever been in. The inside is black and leather and hot from the sun that came out a while ago, and sitting in it is like being inside a nice, old catcher’s mitt.
My dad bought me one of those last year when I signed up for Little League. At first he didn’t want me to join, but I kept bugging him because I didn’t ever have anything to do all summer except watch
TV
and go to the store, since Robert always went to his cottage when school got out.
“Like my car, kid?” Gerald says when he sees me looking around.
I nod.
“Ain’t his,” says Frankie. “It’s his old man’s.”
“But I get to drive it whenever I want,” says Gerald.
“So get driving,” says Frankie. “To the Cape.”
We take off so fast I get thrown back into the seat, then against the window when Gerald swings the car sharp up onto the ramp to the highway. We’re only on that for a second when there’s another ramp and we’re onto a smaller road, two lanes, with lots of hills.
“Gun ’er, b’y,” says Frankie. “All the cops is off to Osgoode’s, looking for Cowboy.”
The car makes a rumble I can feel through the seat and starts going fast, really fast—fast enough that I can’t make out anything if I look straight through the side window. Frankie bends down in the front seat, then passes something back to me—a can with beer foaming up through the top. He passes one to Gerald, too, then flips a switch to open up the sunroof. The wind coming in makes a giant roar. Then Frankie presses something on the dash and
boom
,
boom
,
boom
starts shaking the seat. Frankie leans over to yell something in Gerald’s ear, and they both have a big laugh. But I can’t hear anything except the wind and the music, meaning I can’t ask Gerald to watch out for moose, which is what I want to do since this is my first time in a car since the accident.
The music’s so loud and the car’s going so fast that the beer is foaming outta the can. I’ll have to lick some off. And it tastes gross, which I knew it would. It’s that way with a lot of stuff grown-ups like. It looks like it should taste good, but you take a sip and it’s all bitter and makes your mouth scrinch up so much that you think it might be poison. Anyways, I can’t drink this, so I tap Frankie on the shoulder and pass it up to him. He finishes it in one long gulp just when Gerald drives into a big empty parking lot, with a sign that says
Cape Spear, Most Easterly Point in North America.
And all of a sudden it’s quiet. The car is off, the radio’s off, the wind is gone and everything’s still. Right in the middle of which, Frankie lets out a giant burp that seems to go on for an hour. Then he’s outta the car with Gerald right behind him, headed up a wooden boardwalk to a lighthouse up on a cliff.
“Cowboy, c’mon—let’s go,” Frankie yells down to me. “An’ grab that six-pack from the front seat.”
A minute later I’m beside them, walking up wooden steps past the lighthouse painted red and white. We go by it and head out farther along the cliff on a path. Off to the right it’s miles and miles of scrubby trees and grass and rocks, and on the left there’s a couple a feet of grass and the edge of the cliff and then nothing except the ocean way down at the bottom. After a minute or two, Gerald and Frankie go right out to that edge and take a seat, hanging their legs out into the nothing.
“Pass us the beer,” Frankie says back to where I’m standing a bit away from the edge. He opens two, passes one to Gerald, then lights a cigarette.
It’s quiet now except for the wind and the crash of the waves whapping into the rocks a hundred feet down. Looking out at the ocean, all blue and black and white in the wind, it’s like being at the front of a ship, the wind coming in, our jackets snapping in it. Frankie holds out his hand and points with a beer can.
“Whales,” he says. I don’t see anything at first. Then I spot one, two, three bunches of white spray shooting up into the sky. Then a black tail that flips up and sinks under the water.
“You’ll smell ’em in a minute,” says Frankie, watching the spray going up. And in a bit I get a whiff of salt and fish mixed together, coming off the water in the wind. Then it’s gone, and there’s just the wind and Frankie smoking and the beer cans
plonk
ing on the rocks when Frankie and Gerald set them down.
“A rare day,” says Frankie, his jacket flying back toward me in the wind like a flag on a pole. “A rare friggin’ day.”
The sun’s a big orange half-eaten by the sea when we start back to town. Frankie opens another beer as we drive, and it’s quiet with the sunroof closed and the music off. Frankie’s quiet, too, just drinking every once in a while and looking out at the trees zipping past. Mostly it’s just trees, though once in a while there’s ocean and cliffs that run up into St. John’s. If I wasn’t in a car—if I was walking along, maybe off into the trees a little ways—it’d be like I was in one of those old movies with knights and dragons. That’s how it looks with the sun starting to go down, all green hills and gray cliffs that end sharp at the ocean. Just like the edge of a table, with the sea way down below—so far down that when we were out at Cape Spear, seagulls were flying
underneath
our feet.
It’s beautiful.
I wouldn’t use that word if it wasn’t, because it’s not a word I use very often—maybe even ever, when I think about it. But it is.
Beautiful.
Then we’re in town, just like that. We come over a hilltop and take a windy road down, and there’s traffic lights with taxis and dump trucks and corner stores. Farther along toward downtown there’s a big hockey rink, all new and concrete. Then there’s old wooden houses, squinched all together in rows, each one painted a different color. There’s red ones and orange ones and blue ones and even a purple one. I never saw a house painted purple before. Most of the houses back home are white or gray or brown or brick. I never even knew they made purple paint for houses. I thought they only made it for inside rooms and that only girls liked it.
“You hungry?” Frankie says, talking for the first time in about half an hour.
“A little,” I say.
“Gerald, drop up to Leo’s and we’ll grab three mediums and some Pepsis.”
Gerald swings the car up a steep hill, past an old church with a spiky fence that’s half falling down. When we come over the top of the hill, I see a lot of stuff is half falling down in this part of town. The houses are still in rows, but they’re tiny—so tiny I can’t believe anybody really lives in them. And they’re not reds and blues like the ones down the hill. They’re green, like in a hospital, or brown or dirty old white. A lot have paint peeling off or whole bunches of their siding missing.
“The old man’s place is just down there,” says Frankie, nodding toward a little dead-end street. There’s a streetlight at the far end, flickering on and off, with kids standing around underneath. They’re chucking a pair of tied-together sneakers at the power lines going to the light. Then the street’s behind us and Gerald pulls up in front of a little restaurant, all bright inside.
“Stay where you’re to,” Frankie says when he gets out. “Even the RNC’s smart enough to figure a kid on the run might be wanting to get himself something to eat around suppertime. I’ll bring your order out. You want gravy?”
“For what?” I say.
“For your fee and chee, b’y,” says Frankie, pointing to the Leo’s Fish and Chips sign. “What do you think?”
“But you said gravy.”
Frankie nods. “Gravy. For your chips. You want some or not?”
“What kind of gravy?”
“What kind?” says Frankie. He’s looking at Gerald, and I can see him push his eyebrows up.
“Jesus Christ, Cowboy. It’s brown. That’s what kind it is. Brown.”
“I never heard of getting gravy from fish,” I say, which is my way of being polite, because I
know
you don’t get gravy from fish. At least in Alberta you don’t. I’ve had lots of fish— fish fingers, fish fillets, fish nuggets, even a whole big Char from up north. I never got gravy with it. Not once.
“I don’t know where they gets it from,” says Frankie. “I just know it’s brown, and it’s good. Now do you want some or not?”
“No,” I say.
Frankie and Gerald head to the diner.
“What kind of gravy is it?” I hear Gerald say in a girly voice.
“Stunned mainlander,” Frankie says.
Ten minutes later Frankie hands me something wrapped up in plain paper.
“Get that down ya,” he says.
“And don’t make a mess,” says Gerald. “Get any fish on the seat and I’ll break yer neck.”
I don’t get anything on the seat. I eat it all, every last bit. It’s the best fish I ever had. The best fish. The best fries. It likely woulda been the best gravy, too, even if it didn’t come from a fish. Even with it being so good, I almost can’t finish it, till I let out a big Pepsi burp and I’m hungry again.
“Good one, Cowboy,” says Frankie, squishing his paper up into a ball. He passes it to Gerald, who reaches back for mine and then chucks it all toward a trash can by the curb. The balled-up papers bounce off the steel mesh and onto the sidewalk. But he doesn’t get out to pick it up—just starts the car and drives away, which is no better than just chucking the whole mess out onto the sidewalk. I look back, and it’s already blowing down the street, the wads coming apart, spreading garbage everywhere. There’s lot of garbage around—plastic bags up in trees, pop cans blown against curbs, garbage bags with crows hopping around them. Now our crap is there too. It’ll blow around till it bangs into something—a fence, a house, a gate—then it’ll get wet and rotten and gross and it’ll sit there till somebody scoops it up, or until it gets walked on and walked on till it turns into part of the mud. It makes me kind of sad—all the garbage floating round ’cause everybody’s too lazy to do something about it. Me included, I guess.
“We’re off to a little party now, Cowboy,” Frankie says, turning back to me. “Friend of Gerald’s—been away for a bit, and she’s having a welcome-home thing. We gotta make one stop on the way to pick up some shit from a guy I knows. Then we’ll make like babies and head out. Couple a friends—couple a drinks. You up for that?”
“Guess so.”
It’s dark now. The streetlights are on—except for the one on Frankie’s street, which is out I see when we drive past, those sneakers hanging from the wire. I don’t really think I have much choice besides saying okay. If I said, “No, let me out,” what would I do? I don’t know anybody here except for Frankie, and, I guess, Dezzy. But if I called him I’d be right back in The Hollow. And I have to admit, eating those fish and chips with Frankie and Gerald is way better than sitting in The Hollow cafeteria, wondering when Flarehead is going to bash my face in.
“Party’s out to the Gut,” says Gerald, heading back down the steep hill again.
“Quidi Vidi,” says Frankie, opening up another beer. “Just behind Signal Hill.”
I’m guessing that’s the big hill I see right in front of us. There’s a big house at the top of it, lit up by spotlights, like a castle stuck up high on a cliff.
“What’s the building?” I say.
“Cabot Tower,” says Gerald.
“It’s where Columbus landed,” says Frankie.
Gerald laughs. “What?” he says, turning to Frankie. “You serious or what, b’y?”
“Well,” says Frankie, “Columbus or some other prick who come sailing over here.”
“Jesus—what do they teach you in that school?” asks Gerald. He looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“Frankie’s full of shit,” he says. “It’s called that after John Cabot—the guy who discovered Newfoundland. The hill it’s on is Signal Hill, ’cause they used to run flags up a pole to signal ships coming into the harbor.”
“Now who’s full of shit,” says Frankie. “It’s Signal Hill ’cause some wop sent some message off to Italy or somewheres from up there, back before they had phones or anything.”
“To Ireland,” says Gerald. “A radio signal they sent to Ireland from up there. But that’s not why they call it Signal Hill.”
“Oh, really,” says Frankie, taking another drink. “And I suppose you’d know all about it, Professor.”