Monstrous Affections (8 page)

It was true, Janie thought. Because although the smell of cooked
meat was all over her, although Mr. Swayze wouldn’t let go even
though she told him to, although she was so Goddamned hungry
she could just about gnaw off her own arm for it and would have just
loved to go into the kitchen for some meat now, none of those things
could compel her. Ernie was the only one who ever really could, and
he was gone.

Janie reached up and grabbed Mr. Swayze by the ear, which his
big old grin had nearly reached. He stopped grinning when she
twisted it and his face went like that wasp nest that time, all angry
and twisted and ready to bite. She twisted it some more, and then
there was some blood, and then Mr. Swayze’s hand came away from
her shoulder and took hold of her arm.

It didn’t do him any good, though. Janie felt the heat in her arm
before his hand got to it. She made a fist, and there was a tearing
sound, and then Mr. Swayze howled, and the last bit of bloody
gristle went snap! and his ear came clean off. Mr. Swayze stumbled
backward, holding onto his head and squealing like a pig.

Without thinking, Janie pushed the ear into her mouth. It was
crunchy, like a chicken knee, and it tasted a little bitter on account
of the ear wax. She got it down in two gulps, and as she swallowed,
her stomach stopped complaining.

The fire went out of Mr. Swayze’s eye then, and he turned and
tried to run from her, but she wasn’t going to let him go. She kicked
out, and caught him in the small of the back — and when he fell, she
stood over him and kicked down, like she had on the canoe. She
heard the crack of another couple of ribs breaking — these ones in
Mr. Swayze’s chest and not in the canoe. Her stomach didn’t give her
any trouble about breaking these ribs, though, or about breaking the
skin on the next kick.

If anything, she thought it might be egging her on.

Janie kicked him once more in the head, and with that, Mr.
Swayze’s neck cricked all funny and he stopped moving. For a
moment, she thought about bending down and opening her mouth
wide, and just finishing him that way.

Instead, she stepped back and sealed her lips.

Yum-tum
, said her stomach as she moved over to the bookshelf.
She pulled down the copy of ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE
DEAD BIRD.

Janie ran her finger along the book-cover’s feather-bumps. They
were pretty good feathers. She wondered for a minute whether they
might have used a real feather to make it — some complicated thing
where you pressed the paper on top of the feather with a steam iron,
so the real thing would be there in the book. Maybe the book people
had come out here, and rubbed it off the stone up the hill.

Janie opened up the book.

“
Pro-log-oo
,” she said. “Oh. I get it.
Prologue
.”

Yum-tum
. There were other smells too — more exquisite in their
way, coming off of Mr. Swayze’s cooling corpse by the kitchen door.
Janie could imagine burying her face in that fresh meat, lapping up
the blood like it was a fine liquor.

“The — the — ” Janie concentrated on the next word. “Laughing,”
she finally said, and laughed herself. “The
laughing
man stood on the
side of the dirt road and — and . . .”

. . . and watched the storm boil in from the west. It was going to be
bad, he knew; twisters like claws from some ancient beast would scour
the lands and lift the things of those lands high into the sky. The storm
would ride this place — ride it, and devour it. Nothing would be left in
its wake but ruin and sadness. The laughing man thought about that. It
would leave the land exposed. And that would be bad for the ones who
were left. Because they would be easy pickings, he knew.

Easy pickings for It
.

Behind her, glass cracked as the wind outside grew, and flung
something at the house — no doubt to get Janie’s attention. She
hunched over the book — let her mind go to the words inside it, the
way the wind — the Wen-digo — wanted her mind to go to it.

Mr. Swayze’s book didn’t say it yet, but Janie had a pretty good
idea what “It” was. In the book, it was more than likely that DEAD
BIRD from the cover.

Janie closed ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD and
put it back on the shelf. There had been a photograph underneath
the author biography at the back of the book, but it wasn’t Mr.
Swayze’s. They’d taken a picture of a bearded man — hair down to
his shoulders, up near to his eyes. Might have even been the funny
man. Or maybe the Laughing Man? Laughing and funny: the words
meant just about the same thing, as Janie thought about it.

“Yum-tum,” she said.

The wind outside wasn’t letting up — if anything, it was getting
worse. Frothing the waters; scouring the land; exposing those that
remained . . . Making them easy pickings.

Easy pickings for Janie
.

That was just how it was going to be.

That wind was calling to her, it was time to move on, and
somehow she knew she wouldn’t be able to stay put anywhere for
very long now. She ran her tongue along her sharpening teeth.
Good thing she hadn’t holed that canoe, else she’d be swimming.

A nasty breeze caught the fumes off the still-bubbling tar pot and
brought them along the shortest route it could find into Shelly’s
nostrils. It was the foulest thing that Shelly had ever smelled; tar
fumes stank like distilled pain, a kick in the gut or a smack across
the ear, and they made her cough when they reached down into her
lungs. At the sound she made, her brother Blaine punched her hard
in the side.

“Shut up!” he hissed. “We’re gonna get caught!”

“You shut up!” said Shelly. It was a struggle to keep her voice from
quavering — Blaine was thirteen, three years older than her, and he
was starting to get his man-arm. He’d hit her harder than he knew,
maybe, and her ribs ached from it.

“Quiet, both of you.” Their dad crouched beside them, behind the
highway sign that announced a new Petro-Canada service centre
was coming here by October. His arms were crossed on the washbasin he’d brought with them. The trowel dangling in his hand cut
through the air to emphasize what he said. “This is just what I was
talking about back at the house. This is why we’re here tonight. Time
to stop all the fighting.”

“Whatever,” said Blaine. “This won’t land you back in jail, will it?”

“This,” said Dad, “will keep all of us from jail, for the rest of our
lives.”

“Then why are you stealing tar, not paying for it down at the
hardware?”

“Got to be filched,” said Dad. “That’s part of the magic.”

“Whatever.” Blaine rolled his eyes.

It was pretty clear that Blaine didn’t buy any of this — and Shelly
knew she should probably defer to her brother’s judgement. After all,
the last time their dad had been home for any length of time, Shelly
was just five years old; Blaine, at eight, had known their father that
much longer — lived through five more years of Dad’s promises and
schemes, aftermaths of his barroom fights and late-night visits from
angry OPP patrolmen; Lord knew how many three-day benders with
his former buddy Mark Hollins; and maybe one or two more solemn
pledges to improve himself, and turn all their lives around.

Maybe Mom was right, and Dad was just full of shit.

Dad started down from the sign, and into the midst of the
construction site. The workers had laid foundations for the garage
in a huge cinderblock rectangle; there were more bricks stacked over
by the trees, along with some lumber, and there was a yellow digging
machine that Dad figured was to hollow out a place for the big tanks
underneath the pumps.

But Dad didn’t care about the digging machine, or where the
tanks would go or anything else. He was after the tar pot, which had
been left simmering through the night. Dad figured they had about
half an hour from the time the work crew left, to the time the night
watchman arrived — and that would be plenty of time to do what
they needed to do.

Dad set the basin down beside the tar pot, making the bent-up
twigs and wire rattle.

“Get the turpentine ready,” he said. “Blaine, you listening?”

“I’m listening.” Blaine reached into his pack, and pulled out the
shoebox-sized tin of turpentine they’d brought along. “It’s here,” he
said.

“All right.” Dad set the trowel down a moment and rubbed his
hands together. He reached into the breast pocket of his jean jacket,
and pulled out a little brown plastic bottle Shelly recognized as one
of Mom’s old painkiller prescriptions. He pushed on the safety lid,
twisted it open, and held it over the pot. After a couple of seconds,
something thick and white like condensed milk dripped out, made a
long, snotty line between bottle and pot. Dad held it there until the
last was poured out, then threw the empty bottle behind him.

“Shelly,” he said, “hand me the skeleton.”

“Don’t call it that,” said Shelly quietly.

“That’s what it is,” said Dad, sounding puzzled. “But I won’t call it
that. Just give it to me careful.”

Shelly reached down and lifted the thing from the basin. It wasn’t
more than two feet long — bigger than a newborn, to be sure; but not
so big she should be scared of it. She shouldn’t be scared; but when
a still-green twig bent like an arm flopped against Shelly’s knee as
she lifted it, she nearly dropped the thing. Dad was right — this
was
a
skeleton, and it was crazy to call it anything else. When she handed
the skeleton off to Dad, she was trembling.

“I hate this,” she said.

“I know.” Dad smiled down at her with what seemed like real
love — but it didn’t make her feel better. He cradled the little wooden
skeleton with nearly as much affection as he lowered it to the
stinking tar.

“This is going to help us all,” he said, as he dipped it head-first
into the boiling tar. “Everything’s better from now on.”

“Dad?” said Shelly as they worked. “What do we need a tar baby for
anyway?”

Dad was watching the tar. “You remember what I told you about
Mr. Baldwin, don’t you, honey?”

Shelly remembered the story, all right; Dad had told it his first
night back, while everyone sat around the kitchen table not looking
at each other and picking at their food.

Mr. Baldwin was Dad’s prison buddy — his cell-mate for years.
And Mr. Baldwin swore by his tar baby; a little man he kept under
his bunk.

Mr. Baldwin’s tar baby was made from a pot on the roof of the
pen’s south wing when it was under construction back in the 1970s
and Mr. Baldwin had drawn work duty there. According to Dad, Mr.
Baldwin was a puny fellow, more like a boy than a man in those days,
and although Dad wouldn’t say why, small size and smooth skin was
always a problem in a jail house. “Particularly when you’re like Mr.
Baldwin, and won’t stand for nothing,” he said.

Mr. Baldwin had explained how he’d made the tar baby when
he and Dad were cell-mates for a few months before Dad’s release,
and Dad had paid close attention. After all, Dad explained — Mr.
Baldwin was still alive after all these years, and although he wasn’t
any bigger, and his skin wasn’t smooth anymore, it wasn’t scarred
much either. Mr. Baldwin said he’d never been forced to do anything
he didn’t care for, and over time since that day on the roof when the
tar baby got born, everyone got to calling him Mister.

“It was a good time, when I was in with Mr. Baldwin,” Dad
said, eyes focused far away and voice gone wistful. “No threats, no
fights — nothing bad, nothing harmful. Men were respectful. The
tar baby taught
everyone
a lesson.”

“Sounds boring,” said Blaine, watching the tar boil and bubble,
the brambly skeleton now vanished beneath its surface.

“Hush,” said Dad. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,
boy.” He leaned forward, peering through the thick fumes into the
pot. “We need a tar baby, little girl, because your brother thinks
peacefulness and respect are
boring
.”

Shelly still didn’t understand why Dad wanted a tar baby now
that he was outside of jail, but she figured it was better not to press
the point. Dad was concentrating.

“Is it done?” she asked instead.

“I think so. Lord, I wish Mr. Baldwin were here now. He’d know
for sure.”

“Maybe we should wait,” said Shelly.

Dad thought about this, and shook his head. “No. It’s time now.
Blaine?” Without looking up, Dad held his hand out. Blaine rolled
his eyes at Shelly, and hefted the can of turpentine. Dad took it,
unscrewed the top and held it over the pot.

“Hold your nose,” said Dad. He mumbled a verse about hair and
salt and lizards, and began to pour. The turpentine in the hot tar
made an awful dark vapour where it etched out the tar baby from
the rest of it, and even though Shelly’s nose was held tight, she could
taste it on her tongue and feel it in her eyes as it rose up around
them and blotted out the dim light of the evening. She shut her
eyes against it, sealed her lips, but it was still around her; she felt
it sticking to her like the tar it’d come from, and the substance of it
stayed on her even when the smoke cleared and Dad, arms tar-black
to the elbow and grinning like a little boy, pronounced them done
for the night.

“Come on,” said Blaine. “Get up off the ground, stupid, and let’s
go.”

Shelly flinched back — expecting another punch maybe. But
Blaine stood against the darkening sky with Dad, his hands tucked
safely into his armpits.

“Before the cops come,” said Blaine.

Mom was watching an old episode of
Frasier
on TV when they got
back, and when Dad came through the door after Shelly and Blaine,
she glared at him like he was trespassing. In a way, he was. This
was, strictly speaking, Mom’s house; she’d inherited it from her own
mother, free and clear back before Shelly’d been born. The house
was miles outside town, on an ugly flat scratch of land where the
grass grew too high and you saw the neighbours by the smoke from
their woodstoves in the winter. But it was theirs, free and clear.