Payback (3 page)

The tears in Benny's eyes turn my sympathy to disgust.

You don't let the enemy see you cry. Everyone knows that. I feel sorry for him but it's his own fault if he won't stand up to them. Benny has got to learn to take care of himself the same as everyone else.

As I said, it's no business of mine. It's hard enough for a feller to take care of himself without poking his nose into another feller's business.

A bunch of kids come, opening lockers on the other side of the hallway, so Sammy and Rebar rattle their lockers shut and take off, sneering and waving limp wrists at Benny.

These two hyenas scare me, I've got to admit. They're so mindless and mean.

The rain is still lashing down as I get to Annie's school — did I mention that the elementary school is just across from the high school on the other side of the playing fields? Anyway, Aunt Maeve is there to pick us up in her Honda and take us back to her place.

Annie and Aunt Maeve chatter away like a pair of crows, which is a good sign. Annie has been so down. It looks like she's perking up at last.

Anyway, I leave them to it. I don't have to say a thing.

The next morning is bright and sunny. The storm passed during the night. When Annie and I get up there's only Aunt Maeve downstairs cooking breakfast. Crazy Uncle Rufus has already gone to work.

Annie is quiet as she plays with her scrambled eggs, pushing the food about on her plate, not eating it.

She's missing Ma. I know it's because of the eggs. Aunt Maeve's scrambled eggs are okay but they're not the same as Ma's. Ma's were lighter and fluffier and had bits of bright green parsley mixed in.

“Yellow and green are the two main colors of the Irish flag,” she used to say. “What better way to start the day than with a bit of Irish in your stomachs?”

Have I described Annie yet? In case I haven't she's small for an eight-year-old, maybe even skinny, with serious green eyes just like Ma's, and fine auburn hair
— a color between Ma's red and Da's brown — that falls straight to her shoulders. I've got red hair like my ma but my eyes are neither green nor brown but a kind of in-between color called hazel, and I'm built like a beanpole. The top of Annie's head comes barely above my elbow. Normally, when she's her usual self, she walks lightly, with her shoulders and back straight, nose in the air, like she's a princess whose feet are too royal to touch the common ground. You would never guess we were brother and sister.

Annie is my responsibility. It's my job to get my sister safely to and from school every day, no ifs or buts, Da's orders. Not that I mind. Annie's okay most of the time. She misses Ma as much as I do.

Annie leaves most of her eggs and we set off together for school. Except for a few tree branches and leaves lying about you wouldn't think there'd been a storm at all except everything looks and smells fresh, like the whole neighborhood just tumbled out of the dryer.

Annie drags her feet, like it's Monday instead of Friday, and I briefly consider taking her back to our own house, skipping school together and making it a long weekend for the pair of us.

Then I decide against it. Annie might blab to Da or Aunt Maeve if we skip out. Girls are dreadful blabbers right enough. They can keep nothing to themselves, isn't that the truth?

Benny Mason is absent. The morning drags. I'm in my house-plant mode, my vegetable state.

In social studies I stare out the classroom window, my mind wandering, thinking of riding my bike and my job in the mall and the new cycling shoes I'm saving for.

And thinking of Ma.

Mrs. Pickles — the kids call her Dill Pickles — asks me to stay behind after class.

“I wish to discuss your attendance,” she says.

It's the lunch hour. Mrs. Pickles talks as she walks about the room.

“The school year has hardly begun and you have been absent from my class twice already. I've talked with Mr. Bennett, your homeroom teacher. He tells me he's had no notes from your parents explaining these absences, even though he has asked for them and left messages on your voice mail. You were, what, sick on those days?”

“Well...” I start, but she carries on talking.

“That's not all. You have handed in no homework. None. Not one assignment out of...” — she glances at her mark book —”...the three assigned so far on the course. What do you have to say about that?”

“Well...” I start, but again she talks over me.

“And I'm not at all happy with your behavior in class, staring out the window when you should be listening or working. Next Socials period you will sit here...” — she walks over to a desk at the front of the class and slaps one hand loudly on its top — “...where I can keep a closer eye on you.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And after school on Monday you will report to me for a detention class, during which you will begin to catch up on the missing work.”

“I can't come after school. I pick up my sister every day. She's only eight, you see. I could come in the lunch hour instead if that's all right.”

She asks a bunch more questions and we argue back and forth and in the end she agrees that I come for a lunch hour detention on Monday.

Some of the other teachers have started flagging me as a problem, too.

So why am I skipping school?

I never used to be like this, honest. It's just that, as I said, I can't get interested in school this year. It's terrible pointless and unimportant to me right now.

I mean, why waste precious time doing things you don't like — school, for instance — so you're supposed to have a better future? How do you know you'll even have a future? We're all going to die — like what happened to Ma, dying so soon when most people live to twice her age.

Is that what Shakespeare means in
The Tempest
when he says we've got a
little
life? Does little mean our lives are short?

Thinking about this kind of stuff could drive a feller barking mad.

It might be different if I had friends. It'd give me something to look forward to instead of all this dreadful business with Sammy and Rebar and Benny Mason. I don't want to be here in school at all.

On the days Da is away from home, it's easy to skip out, because nobody knows what I'm up to, not even Annie. Nobody's home, you see, at our house.

I've always got my key on a cord around my neck, so once I've taken Annie to school I'm free to return
to our own house and ride my truly grand Rocky Mountain Hammer bike I bought second-hand through the
Buy & Sell
before Ma started getting sick. Or if it's raining I can sit around at home listening to music, watching telly or reading back copies of the bicycling magazine I borrowed from the school library, or I can take a nap in my own badger's den, Ma's closet upstairs.

I've got the house to myself. No one knows I'm there. The universe goes along without me.

If the school office or my teachers phone home about me and leave voice-mail messages, I erase them before Annie or Da can get a chance to listen.

I'm bad.

••••

I don't hang about after school because I always have Annie to pick up, so I don't see too much of what goes on. What I've been hearing lately, though, is that thanks to Sammy, Rebar and their friends, Benny Mason is becoming known through the whole school. Even some of the older kids are starting to call him names.

I saw this happening a bit on Friday as I was on my way to pick up Annie. Benny was leaving the school, tripping lightly down the concrete steps when a couple of seniors walked by.

One of them yelled, “Hey, Benny! Pacific Ballet wanna know if you're free to do the dying swan for them this weekend.”

They all laughed.

I do my usual weekend job at the mall — more about that later — and get to school on Monday.

In the lunch hour, I go to Mrs. Pickles' room for my social studies detention and start catching up on my missed homework while I scarf down one of Aunt Maeve's damp sandwiches.

The missed homework is so boring that soon I'm drawing pictures of racing bikes and other stuff with my ballpoint that has three different colors — red, blue and black.

Then, just as a splotch of tomato juice from one of Aunt Maeve's soggy sandwiches parachutes onto my Socials textbook, Mrs. Pickles stalks over and stands over me.

“Do you realize you're damaging school property?”

I look down at the book.

She's right. As well as the tomato splotch, which I'm aware of, there's a whole bunch of doodling all over my textbook, which I'm not so aware of.

I look up at her. “Sorry, ma'am. I wasn't thinking.”

“That's your problem, Charley Callaghan. You don't think. You have ruined a perfectly good textbook.” She picks up the book and peers at the doodles and the tomato splotch. “You can just take this along to the vice-principal and show him how you waste my time and your own, and how you waste the taxpayers' money!”

“Look, I said I'm sorry. I'll pay for the book, okay?” It's a big expensive-looking book with a hard cover and a million pages. It weighs several tons.

She hands me the heavy textbook and an envelope with a note inside and sends me to the vice-principal's office.

I should've taken the day off. I feel terrible bad about the textbook, though. I meant it when I said I would pay, even if it takes three weekend pay checks.

I'm destroyed for sure. I'm toast, as we Canadians say.

The vice-principal is an old geezer. Mr. Hundle lost his marbles ages ago, everyone says, and he spends most of the day asleep in his office, which probably isn't true but you know how kids talk.

His nickname is Attila the Hundle. That's what most of the kids call him behind his back. He's brutal. But vice-principals in Canadian schools are supposed to be brutal. Like army drill sergeants, they're supposed to scare the crap out of you.

Come to think of it, my old headmaster in Dublin came second to none at scaring the crap out of us whenever the situation required it. His name was Mr. Hayes. His first name was Daniel. We called him — you guessed it — Danny Boy.

He dropped in to each and every classroom about once a month to terrorize us with his mental arithmetic questions. The classroom teacher, also terrorized, kept out of the way by hiding behind the blackboard.

Danny Boy stood up front in his sharp suit and black bow tie and fired numbers at us. We were supposed to add them up. There would be about four or five numbers, double digits, many of them, and when he came to the end of the sequence, he
barked out your name and you stood and gave the answer.

If you didn't have the right answer ready it meant going to his office after school and getting a tongue lashing that'd make Superman pee his tights.

I can't figure it out. Adults are free to be happy and do whatever they want; so how come so many of them have got such lousy jobs and such depressing lives? I mean, take a look at most of the adults around you every day. Would you want to grow up to be like them?

Anyway, back to Attila the Hundle. The door to his office is slightly open, so I walk in and sit in the hot seat. He is standing at the window with his back to me, looking out at the schoolyard.

Without turning, he's like, “Go back out and knock.”

I'm like, “Sorry, sir, but the door was open. I thought —”

“Go back out and knock.”

I get up, march outside and knock on the door. “Come.”

I shuffle back in, put the textbook and envelope
on his desk blotter and stand waiting. He keeps me standing there for ages.

I'm thinking he's got a heart like a plum stone, small and dry and hard.

Then, finally, “It is always polite to knock, boy!” Cold as ice.

I admit he scares me but I'm not about to let him see it.

“Sit.”

I sit. He doesn't turn round, just stands looking out the window, arms folded. My legs are jerking, I'm so nervous.

He finally turns from the window, strides over to his desk and sits down. Looks at me coldly through rimless glasses. He's got those deep-set kind of eyes that make you think you're looking at them through a dark tunnel.

“What's this?” Picks up the textbook.

I shrug. It's the same kind of shrug Lance Armstrong gives when he's being interviewed after a day of racing in the Tour de France and the TV reporters ask him what he thinks his chances are of keeping his
maillot jaune
the next day.

Attila the Hundle opens the envelope and reads
the note. Then he looks at the damaged pages in the textbook.

“You admit you mutilated this book?”

I nod, though I think “mutilated” is exaggerating the damage a bit.

“Speak up, boy!”

He waits with tight lips. “Yes, sir.”

It's like we just moved into another ice age it's so cold in here.

He pushes the open book toward me so I can see again my sinful ways. He says, “Tell me why you vandalized an expensive school textbook with these distasteful markings.”

I look. I don't see anything distasteful, except maybe the tomato splotch. There's a couple of crudely drawn bicycles in the empty space between chapters, and around the margins of the two pages there's about twenty screaming heads, like the one in the famous painting I like so much —
The Scream
. You know the one — the woman on the bridge screaming, her hands pressed to the sides of her head? Painted by a feller named Eddie Munch? I've got a poster of
The Scream
I brung with me from Dublin.
I got it when Ma was sick the first time, about five years ago. It's on the wall of my room next to my poster of Lance Armstrong.

I've been drawing little screaming heads like the one in the painting ever since Da was laid off from the Dublin gasworks and he and Ma told us we were leaving Dublin and going off to join Aunt Maeve and Crazy Uncle Rufus out in Canada where we would all be better off.