Skylark (6 page)

like a skylark, that bird of lightness

of flying high and diving low.

It was Florence's ride, Florence
the man's late wife.

Late? She won't be showing up.

In the living room as Mom signs the

     
deed

a clock ticks on the mantelpiece

its mechanical heart off-balance—

tick-TOCK tick-TOCK tick-TOCK

as if the man's house is on a slant

     
now

the pendulum called somewhere

     
deeper.

“Do you want to buy the piano,

     
too?” he jokes.

“Florence played. Saturday

     
afternoons—”

the old man forces a smile

     
and I get a shock, a little intake

     
of breath

seeing the gap in his teeth, the hole

     
in his heart where the wind blows

     
through.

I approach the piano and play the

     
only song I know—

a simple song, learned in school.

I glance at the old man—

he's smiling, practically airborne.

But one ivory key doesn't work.

The hammer is broken.

My finger pushes and pushes

but every time the song lands there

it dives down, down into silence

silence hidden in the grass

a silence where birds go

and apples lie on their sides.

The café stays quiet after I finish. I bite my lip—have I messed up? No. People are nodding thoughtfully. Then they clap for a long time. On the way back to my table, Mercy Girl catches my eye. She looks angry. Surfer is sitting with her, and he looks angry too. I don't get it. But others smile. Their eyes follow me. Like I'm famous or something. Like they admire me. I'm relieved when the next person takes the stage. I like my privacy.

“That was weird,” Clem whispers. “Good weird.”

“How?”

“Lots of that story was true—lots of it really happened. But I played the piano, not you, and the guy, Graham, wasn't missing a tooth. And there was no apple. Where did you get all that?”

“I don't know,” I say. “I just flip my memories over, bend and twist and mash them together. It's like dreaming, but I'm awake.”

“Whatever,” Clem says, smiling.

But he's not making fun of me. He's telling me it's cool. He seems to know what I'm on about.

“You do the same on the track,” I say. “You bend and flip and twist.”

“That's right,” Clem says. “We're in the air, both of us, making up dreams.”

At the end of the night, I try to talk with Mercy Girl in the washroom lineup. “Pretty funny both our slam poems were about buying cars, hey?”

“Yeah, right,” Mercy Girl answers. “That line about wind blowing through the hole in the guy's heart. ‘Everyone can see the wind blow…' That's straight from Paul Simon's song ‘Graceland.' Didn't you think people would notice?”

“I was, like, sampling,” I say.

Mercy Girl's shoulders relax. “Oh.”

“But maybe it wasn't such a good choice. Maybe not everyone knows it.”

“I know it. My mom has that
CD
,” Mercy Girl says.

“My mom has it too,” I say.

Mercy Girl smiles. She actually smiles! I smile back, but then a wave of hopelessness ripples through me. I get a picture of Mercy's mother dancing to Paul Simon in a sun-filled living room. Then I imagine
my
mother, squished in the front seat, listening to “Graceland” through the cheap, tinny speaker of our old iPod. I can't make friends with Mercy Girl. Because one day, she'll want to come to my house. We don't have room for visitors.

Payday

Every second Saturday is payday. We start the day by cleaning “the house.” We repack our stuff, bundle up garbage, wash down the dash and console. We drive to the gas station and buy two gold-colored tokens that we plug into a big outdoor vacuum cleaner beside the gas pumps. I hate hearing the
clink-clank
of things going up the hose. What did I just rob ourselves of? An earring? A quarter? I have to decide it was nothing more than a bobby pin or a penny. Why bother worrying that I've lost something valuable when I have no idea whether I did?

My mind has always wandered, but since I started doing slams, I pay attention to where it goes. And where it goes seems to be where the stories and poems are. Musing. Daydreaming. Remembering. Inventing. Figuring. Fancying. Whatiffing. Picturing. Reliving. Unpacking. Searching. Idling. Considering. Contemplating. Speculating. Tripping. I write it all down in my binder with the stars and Sharpie hearts and the little brown bird with the crest on its head. I started on the last page of the binder and have been working back toward the middle. Soon my pages of what-iffing will meet my notes from math. And then what? My binder will explode.

An explosion doesn't seem all that impossible, actually. Ever since I started going to slams, I've been reading poems and essays (my English marks have improved), and it's been like explosion after explosion in my head. Walls tumbling down. I can go anywhere. It's like Clem rolling down the car window and sticking his legs out for a stretch. I can sit in the backseat of our dark cave of a car, hunched and barely moving, but I'm a million miles away. I'm freed from our little car, our compressed lives, our waiting for that municipal housing address.

On payday, after we have vacuumed the Skylark, Mom fills the tank—
full
—and we drive. Sometimes we motor all the way over the Malahat, stopping at the top to look down onto the inlet, the birds swooping
beneath
us. Sometimes we carry on to Bright Angel Park, where we cross the suspension bridge, Clem stomping his feet and making the bridge swing and bolt, Mom and me running and screaming. Usually, Clem and I strip down and wade into the river. Even in late winter, we'll do it. The water is so clean and clear, we can see each other's entire bodies under the surface, every toe. We have a rule that we have to get our hair wet, have to dunk our heads, which ring afterward. It's like we've rebooted our brains. Payday offers a fresh start.

On the way back into town, we stop for supper. We
never
do drive-through. We take any chance to get
out
of the car. We'll go into A&W or Denny's. Last payday, we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory with a two-for-one coupon. Mom has gotten really good at clipping coupons. Clem and I ate every last bite of the minestrone soup, spaghetti and spumoni ice cream. Mom had a Caesar salad.

“Too bad Dad isn't here,” I said. It just came out. Dad always used to be with us when we went to the Old Spaghetti Factory, which was usually for someone's birthday. He'd moon over the old farm tools on the walls and explain to us what they were used for. “We had one of those. I remember my poor dad working with it, colorful words flying out of his mouth. That part always came loose, see?” Mom would have a Caesar salad then too. Through-line.

“I wish he was here too,” Mom said quietly. “He misses you two, you know that.”

“Yeah, I know that,” I said. “He misses you too. He says so every letter.”

“Does he?”

I gulped. “He tells me to look after you,” I said.

“He tells me the same thing,” Clem said.

Mom smiled. “And he tells me to look after you two.”

After supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory, we drove along the ocean to the terminal where the cruise ships dock on their way between California and Alaska. We parked as close as we could to MS
Amsterdam
. The giant cruise ship towered over us. Mom pointed out the disks on the giant ropes tying it to shore.

“They stop the rats from getting on board and traveling port to port,” Mom said. “If they'd had those a few hundred years ago, there wouldn't have been the bubonic plague.”

A station wagon was parked next to us. A couple sat in the front seats, and there was a kid in the back, about twelve years old. They were eating supper—it looked like burritos—from takeout wrappings. The car was packed with stuff—clothes and books and dishes.

I was up front with Mom. I angled the rearview so Clem could see me. We often adjust the mirror so we can see each other as we talk. In the early days, we'd crane our necks and look back, but we've evolved. I gestured toward the car next door. Mom was going on about how ship design changed after the plague while Clem and I just stared. Another family living in a car
.
They could have just been traveling on a road trip, but I didn't think so. They looked too much like they had nowhere to go
.
How many of us are there?

We gawked for a while longer at the cruise ship looming over our heads and at the passengers coming and going, all of them looking overfed and slow.

“These folks pay a thousand dollars for the joy of being cooped up,” Mom said. “I've heard that after the first two days of all-you-can-eat and swimming in the pool, they get bored and start to drink.”

“They should have a BMX track on the top. That would be wicked,” Clem said.

“I thought we'd sleep at Marifield tonight,” Mom said, turning the key in the ignition. The red dashboard lights went on and the engine revved high. “It's like starting up a submarine,” Graham had said when he first showed us the car. “The red glow, the dials and gauges, engine revving like it's going into the unknown.”

Marifield is just a block long, with small houses and an apartment block. One of the houses seemed to be abandoned. We parked beside it and peed in the back-yard bushes. We like Marifield because it's close to school. Mom often drives us to school while we're getting dressed and eating breakfast—that's one of the perks of living in a car. Of course, she drops us off a few blocks from school—I would die if anyone at school saw me being dropped off.

On our way to Marifield, we passed the parking lot where carriage horses are led after a day pulling tourists through the city. They're fed there and watered as they wait, restless, tails flicking, to be loaded onto a trailer that will take them out of the city for the night, to the farm where they belong, where they can sleep. I watched them standing in the moonlight, free of the carriage and their cumbersome bridles. They stamped their feet every so often, shook their manes. I felt sad as I watched them. I felt wistful. They were like me and Mom and Clem—they had each other, but they weren't quite home.

Scars

I've gone to eight slams so far and placed second or third in three of them. I'm careful each week to come up with something new, something no one else has done. Mercy Girl made me anxious about imitating others, but that might be a lucky thing. It means I've got to figure out exactly what the other performers are doing so I don't just do the same. I especially don't want to imitate the hollow, empty delivery a lot of the slammers use, ending their lines with a rise in pitch as if they're asking a question. Clem can't stand it. Somehow, he figured out the problem. “They're just saying the words,” he said. “They aren't thinking about what the words mean. Here's some advice. Every word you say, make it real. Like, if you're saying fridge, picture a fridge.”

So I do. I even imagine my hand on the sticky handle of that fridge. I invest energy in every word. If a word can't take any energy, then maybe I need to cut it.

I'm also careful not to use words that keep coming up in other people's slam pieces.
Shards
is a favorite of theirs, and
scars.

I think about scars all the time. Scars are zippers—you open them up and a story tumbles out. When Mom is done putting on her makeup and brushing her hair in the morning, she turns the mirror so I can use it from the backseat. Sometimes, the morning light bounces off and brings to my eyes the shining dots on my forehead where the rose thorns went especially deep that day I went through the arbor and Dad kneeled before me.

The scars remind me of the day Mom fell off the ladder. Mom was on the couch with her hand on her forehead, and Dad kneeled on the floor beside her. She told Dad she'd fallen while washing windows at the big house in Fairfield and how, luckily, the woman she was working for drove her home.

“Didn't she take you to a hospital?” Dad asked.

“She said I didn't need a hospital. Said I was fine. And I am. I will be.”

Mom tried to sit but couldn't.

“I'll make supper,” Dad said.

We had grilled-cheese sandwiches and cucumber slices for supper, all of us in the living room, since Mom wasn't about to move to the table. Dad had to fish around in the junk drawer for a bendy straw so she wouldn't have to lift her head too much. Clem and I sat on the floor, and Dad pulled the armchair up close to Mom. Dad was still in his work clothes, the dust all over him glowing white as the sun went down and the living room darkened. Mom never moved off the couch that evening. Dad got her painkillers from the drugstore and fed her a couple every few hours. Mom fell asleep, and we tiptoed around.

In the morning, Clem and I got our own breakfasts and made our lunches for school. After that, Mom didn't work for over two months.

When I think about it, that was the evening everything changed. That's when the swerving and the veering started, the fighting between Mom and Dad, then Dad selling his truck, the truck he was so proud of.

That last night Dad was home, when he said “I do” and Mom burst into tears, Dad said, “That woman should have taken you to the hospital. We should have sued her for having you work on an old ladder that was about to break.”

“She didn't know it was going to break,” Mom said between her tears.