Cherry Bites (6 page)

The girls at school were infatuated with Pete and he counted several of them among his friends. But he didn’t have a real girlfriend till the summer he was sixteen. I heard him say to someone that he had observed the way girlfriends could take the wind out of your sails. His choice for his first girlfriend remains a puzzle to me to this day.

It wasn’t Myrna, but not for want of her trying. She was cute in a short, cheerleader kind of way and she had a trace of wildness in her character that I fully expected would appeal to Pete. But he remained aloof from her, maybe because she was my friend, maybe because of the huge age difference between them, although I couldn’t imagine that mattering to him. Here was his chance to get laid, for Christ’s sake. Even when she used her trump card—access to the dead—he resisted.

She invited me over in a loud voice when she knew he was in the next room.

“There’s a guy at the funeral home who blew his brains out in a car. Do you want to come and look at him?”

“No,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

We did go to the Red Top Carwash where we heard that the car, a ’57 Caddy, was being cleaned. Pete was there, too, with Tim and Ralph, gaping, like we were. A man took a hose to the inside of the car. Something slippery and grey spilled out onto the pavement. I’ll never forget the smell. It reminded me of worms on sidewalks after rain.

“What if I’d said yes?” I asked Myrna.

We sat in a booth at the Red Top with our root beers and our cigarettes. The restaurant was next door to the car wash. The same three men owned both businesses.

“Pardon?” said Myrna.

“What if I had said yes, I did want to see the dead guy?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.”

“But what if I did?”

“I wouldn’t let you. It’s private.”

“So it’s all for show, you and your fancy offers.”

Myrna smiled. “Don’t tell anybody.”

I woke up screaming that night. Nora’s boyfriend, Mr. Jones, came to check on me. He stood in the doorway of my room and asked if everything was all right.

“Yes, thanks,” I said.

What else could I say to a stranger?

I wanted to set Nora’s journal aside for a while after reading the bit about Luce lying down for the men. But I couldn’t leave it for long. It was like a drug, one of the nasty ones, that whispers your name like an angel and then leaves you feeling wretched before you’re even done with it.

So I sat down again with a glass of iced tea and read on.

August, 1939

Luce locked me in the root seller before the men came. The men and Darcy. When I started out yelling Luce said she’d stuff my mouth with dirty rags to shut me up so I didn’t yell for long. I did nothing wrong I swear. I reckon it’s to do with the men having at her but that’s nothing to do with me. It’s not fair. She stared down at me with her bad black eyes, the sky white behind her all wrong. I thought skies were sposed to be blue.

I took Spike for a walk, to get us both some air. We went to the river. Spike wanted to go in the water, but I didn’t let him. It’s full of poisons.

We walked down Taché Avenue to Norwood United Church and on to my friend Hermione’s place, Cuts Only. She was still open. Hermione is a haircutter who does me when I need it and Joanne and Myrna too.

“Well, well, well,” she said as we scrabbled through the door. Spike slipped on the wooden floor in his excitement to get to her. All conceivable colours of hair stuck to his fur. Hermione was cutting her own hair, taking long hanks of her salt and pepper tresses and snipping them off near her scalp.

She put down her scissors and scooped Spike up in her arms. She kissed him and he sneezed and licked her face and sneezed again.

“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.

She laughed. “I’m going to shave my head. Hey! You can help!” She set Spike down and he shook himself off as best he could and sat blinking up at her.

“Why?”

“I don’t like the white mixed in with the dark brown. It makes me look dowdy.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does.” She looked in the mirror. Half her head was short tufts, the other half long and wavy. “Maybe when it’s all gone white I’ll be okay with it.”

“Are you sure about this?” I asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“How about just colouring it or highlighting it or something?”

“I don’t do colours. I don’t do highlights. That’s why this place is called Cuts Only. You know that.”

“You could make an exception for yourself,” I said.

Hermione filled a bowl with water and stray hair and set it on the floor for Spike, who slurped eagerly till he had his fill. Then he coughed for a while and Hemione went back to her image in the mirror.

“I’ve been reading Nora’s journal,” I said and sat down in her second chair to watch.

“No wonder you look as if someone knocked you on the head with a shovel.”

“It’s hard to read, but I have to do it.”

“I know you do, hon.”

“Tell me again why I have to do it?”

“Because you want to find out what made Nora tick.”

“Oh, yeah.”

After she had finished cutting her hair Hermione got out her shaving equipment. “Okay, this is the part where you help me.”

By the time we were finished, her beautifully shaped head was bare and smooth and her eyes looked enormous.

“You actually look quite nice,” I said.

Hermione laughed. “It would take a hell of a lot more than a haircut to destroy these looks, babe.”

I laughed too.

“Let’s drink,” she said.

“Yes, let’s.”

Hermione poured bourbon into two glasses and we sipped and talked for a half hour or so about the possibilities for tomato sauces. Everyone in our cooking class was taking a turn concocting a sauce and then presenting it with a small amount of pasta for the rest of us to taste. I dreaded my turn. I pictured noses turning up and comments like, what the hell went into this mess?

The door opened and Hermione’s last customer of the day walked in.

“Well, look at you!” he said.

The new look suited her and she has kept it to this day. She still plans to let it grow when it turns completely white.

She went back to work and I headed home with Spike leading the way.

I cooked some spaghetti, did a pretty good job of getting it al dente, and stirred it up with butter and salt and pepper. That’s the way I like it best. Sometimes I mix a little olive oil in with the butter but today I couldn’t be bothered. I’m really not much of a cook.

It was eight o’clock by the time I finished eating, too late to go back to the journal if I was going to stick to my plan of not reading it late in the day. But it turned out I wasn’t sticking to that plan. Maybe it was Hermione’s bourbon that caused me to throw caution to the wind and sit down with it again. Just one more passage:

She gave me a blanket and a pillow but it was cold down there with the jars and the potatoes. I fell asleep before the men went home but the cold woke me twice. Also, when something crawled across my neck I woke to hear them still at it. It was morning before she came to get me. The stink of Darcy Root was on her. I’ve seen boys in the fields with sheep. I see what they do to the ewes. But Darcy is a girl too. I don’t know what she does to Luce. Something. That’s for sure.

Aunt Luce was saving Nora from a nightmare of larger proportions than her most frightening stay in the root cellar but my mother didn’t see it yet.

I let Spike out for a last scramble around the yard and then headed up to bed with a Robert Parker book. I needed to laugh.

To think that it was only ten years between the summer that Nora smelled the stink of Darcy Root on her aunt and 1949 when I was born. This was my mother who was holed up with spiders on the dirt floor of a pitch-black root cellar.

I know she was sent into the city after Luce died. It must have been soon after that summer of ’39 because I believe she was just twelve when Mr. Trent had the sense to get rid of her.

What a handful she must have been for her foster parents—the Kennaughs, they were called—with her messy past and her rough country edges. A major project for them, for sure, and for her teachers. She was a success story though, if immaculate grammar and self-presentation to the outside world were the yardsticks.

Maybe it had been a source of pride for Nora that I went to university. This had never occurred to me before. I attended the University of Winnipeg.

Henry Ferris turned up in my second year Twentieth Century History class. His dad had been transferred again. We got back together, but it felt different this time. I wasn’t as interested in kissing him, not like I had been before my Duane experience, but I stuck it out because his friendship was important to me and I didn’t want to lose that. It seemed complicated and unfair, my merely moderate physical desire for Henry: one of life’s bummers. I struggled with it; I didn’t want to feel dishonest, but the spark was missing.

“You’ve changed somehow,” Henry said.

It was a windy fall day in1968. We were sitting on the lawn in the quadrangle at the university. “Helter Skelter” was blaring out of a window in the men’s residence. The Manson Family hadn’t done their killing yet.

“Sorry,” I said.

I smoked and Henry studied me.

“No, it’s not bad or anything,” he said. “You just seem a little further away or something, sort of…secretive.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay, Cherry. It’s nothing you have to apologize for.”

That was all he said. He never pestered me about anything.

“Henry?” I put my cigarette out in the grass.

“Yes.”

“If we were ever to split up, you would never tell anyone all the secrets I’ve told you, would you?”

“God! Of course not!”

“Like stuff about Pete and everything.”

By this time I had told Henry everything about biting Pete, about our visits to Dr. Bondurant, and some parts about the state of our relationship. I wanted him in the picture and besides, he saw a lot of it for himself.

“Cherry, no! I would never, ever say anything to anyone.”

He had risen to his knees and he took both my hands in his. He didn’t argue with me about the splitting up part. Maybe he sensed that we were doomed.

Henry was in a local band by now. It didn’t take long for him to hook up with a ready-made group. Everyone needed a singer and Henry was good; he was often compared to Stevie Winwood. They even changed the band’s name from Prairie Lightning to O Henry. I disagreed with the change; it made them sound like bubble gummers, but I kept my mouth shut. Henry liked having his name up front like that. So far, they had played one school dance and a fashion show. Their dream was to play in pubs.

It was odd, because everyone wanted to sleep with band members—it was a fact of life—but during that particular time, he seemed too familiar to me, and too good. I wanted guys with their own apartments downtown, places that stank of dope and sweat, guys who ignored me if I said it hurt. Henry still lived with his parents and cared too much about pleasing me.

Nora’s man had been around for several years by then. His name was Dougwell Jones and he wore a hat when he was out and around. It was an old-fashioned hat like the one Humphrey Bogart wore in
The Maltese Falcon
. My dad had worn hats like that a long time ago. Mr. Jones seemed to me like a throwback. Maybe Nora was searching for her past, for the days before Pete and me, but after her move to the city, that slim period of time when she still had a chance.

Mr. Jones taught science at the same school where Murray had been a teacher. Nora had known him before Murray died. I found that part of it distasteful. As though she had been lusting after Mr. Jones when my dad was still alive.

I chose not to know him. He interfered with my memories of Murray. He appeared around corners when I least expected to see a grown man and I couldn’t get over my disappointment in who he was, or wasn’t. I didn’t go as far as to pull a Pete on him, but I just gave him the basics in terms of greetings and answering the odd question. That is one of my regrets: I wasted a fine presence for many years.

Mr. Jones and his first wife hadn’t been able to have any children. I wonder sometimes if he had hoped to be a father of sorts to Pete and me. Neither of us gave him much of a chance.

One day, not that long ago, maybe eleven years or so, I was sitting in one of Hermione’s chairs getting a trim. It was soon after I discovered her. It came out somehow that Dougwell Jones had taught her when she was in grade eight. She had lived in the inner city as a kid and gone to Hugh John for junior high. She was too young to have been in one of Murray’s classes but she remembered Mr. Jones. He was her all-time favourite teacher.

I remembered the pictures of Murray’s classes and had no trouble placing Hermione there with the young ruffians and the wayward girls.

“Man, I can’t believe you’re practically related to Mr. Jones,” she had said that day. “Does he ever come to visit you?”

“No. He lives on the coast with my mother,” I said. “And I’m pretty estranged from her.”

“I understand what that’s like,” said Hermione. “My mother’s dead, thank God.”

We laughed.

“Mr. Jones convinced me that I was smart enough to go to university,” Hermione said. “I had been getting all set to take the commercial course, you know, typing, Gestetner machines and all that. But he talked me into taking the university entrance course.”

“What’s a Gestetner machine?”

Hermione laughed. “I don’t know.”

“Did you go to university?”

“No. But I could have.”

“Well, when I get talking to Dougwell again I’ll tell him about you and how you’re getting along.”

“Yes. Do. Tell him I’m the best fuckin’ haircutter in Manitoba.”

Sometimes I think that Dougwell’s goodness entered me through osmosis. I couldn’t keep him out entirely. He had a grace about him that touched the core of me and I feel that would have sat well with Murray.

He pretty much lived with us by the summer of 1969. He was addicted to Nora, as I think Murray had been. I don’t know how else to explain it. She had something that both men wanted, that neither man wanted to live without. It was more than sex. The thing she possessed mingled with a certain energy inside both of them to create the powerful mists that ensnared them. It is the only way I can visualize it and the only way I can keep from laying blame. Oh sure, Nora tried to be sexy and she worked to keep her figure and all, but the thing that captured them wasn’t something she had control over; it just was.

And that co-mingling of magical mists was what was missing between Henry and me. From where I stood, anyway.