Small Beneath the Sky (9 page)

spit
, v. To eject saliva from the mouth by the special effect
involved in expelling saliva. (1568, Ascham, Scholem.
ii
: Their
whole knowledge... was tied onely to their tong & lips... and
therefore was sone spitte out of the mouth againe.)

Five grade 1 girls played in the corner of the school grounds by the fence near the girls' entrance, just past the wide granite steps. Away from the big kids, all in a row, we grasped the wire mesh with our mittened hands, spit on the snow and then slid our feet back and forth as fast as we could to make a patch of ice. If the teacher would let us in, we'd dash through the doors down the marble floor to the fountain and fill our mouths, then dart to the fence again and splat the water at our feet. Every recess with my friends I rode the ice, frenetic as a gerbil on a wheel, my caged body running nowhere on its own spit and me too young to know what that might mean.

spit
,
1633 P. Fletcher. See how with streams of spit th' art
drencht.

“Come on,” she said, “do it!” I gathered the saliva above my tongue, pushed it to the front of my mouth, pursed my lips and forced it out. It fell in a long translucent string, dribbled down the cheek of the girl my friend held on the ground, though the girl squirmed and started to cry.

“Don't be a baby,” my friend said to her. “Now you're in the club, you're one of us.”

spitter
: One who spits. (1615, Crooke, Body of Man. Melan
choly men are all of them... great spitters.)

My brother hawked on the ground when I walked with him—a shocking thing—that liquid, guttural sound, then a
phhutt
to the side, right where anyone could step in bare feet or fancy shoes. He was so proud to miss his chin and jacket, to leave his mark on the cement, a circle thin and shiny as a coin, and he wasn't the only one. A chain of spit linked the squares of the sidewalk showing where the men had walked. My father and grandfather did it too, my grandfather's saliva red from snoose. Mom told my brother it was disgusting, he had to stop. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “Swallow it?”

spit
, 1700, Floyer, Cold Baths. Temperate bathing... ripens
the Spit and helps it up.

The kids on the block called him Drool Face. He was the older boy who lived in the house two doors down and who never went to school. We saw him only in the summer, when he sat by the back steps on a chrome kitchen chair, his mouth open, a thin stream from the corner of his lower lip running down his chin like it did in the dentist's office until the assistant told you to spit into the bowl. Our mothers warned us to stay away from him, but one day, cutting across his yard, I came too close and he grabbed me, held me on his lap. I wasn't scared, though I knew something wasn't right. He didn't try to rub me between the legs like the old man at the paddling pool who always brought his own towel and asked to dry us. He just held me on his lap, my back against his chest, my head tucked under his chin, my legs dangling. His pants were the thick green cotton grown men wore, and his shirt had metal snap buttons down the front. I could feel them press into my back. I was glad I was turned away, because his face was hard to look at—the slack mouth and wet chin, his eyes a soft hurt brown as if he knew what people said about him. I let myself go limp in his arms and listened to his breathing. It sounded like the panting of a sick cat who had crawled under the bed and wouldn't come out. I wouldn't tell anyone. “Wally,” I said, “you should let me go now,” then squirmed out of his hug and ran through his yard to my friends, the top of my head damp with drool.

spit
: The act of spitting; an instance of this. 1658: Lovelace,
Lucasta, Toad and Spider. The speckl'd Toad... Defies his foe
with a fell Spit.

My friend's brother, who was in grade 12 when I was in grade 10, took me aside at the Teen Town dance one Friday night. He was still as skinny as a little kid, and he wore a dumb-looking wool hat even though it was summer. There was something he had to tell me, but I had to promise not to get mad. It was a trick, he said, he and his friend Jimmy used to play on us. In winter they'd slobber on the branch of a tree. If it was cold enough, and they got the angle right, their saliva froze before it could hit the ground, forming a row of thin icicles. They'd wait for me and my friend to come up the alley on our way to school. “You were always giggling and chattering,” he said, “we could hear you half a block away.” He and Jimmy would act nice. They'd break the glass sticks from the branch and offer us the best ones, long and glittering in their hands. We'd lick the pointed ends and then put them in our mouths. Now I understood why the boys danced around us as we sucked the ice, why they laughed and punched each other in the arm, laughed so hard they doubled over and hugged themselves, hugged themselves to keep their secret from spilling out.

spit
, sb., saliva, spittle; a clot of this. See also cuckoo-spit,
frog spit.

The practical uses of human spit: To hold a kiss curl in place, to shine a shoe, to express disgust, to remove a smear of mascara, to lubricate, to seal an envelope, to slicken the lips for a photograph, to defog a scuba-diving mask, to test the hotness of an iron, to clear the throat, to turn a dull stone to jade, to determine the direction of the wind, to moisten a wad of gum or a plug of tobacco, to turn a page, to clean a face. “Wait,” she would say when I was halfway out the door. “Let me look at you.” Always she'd find something, lick her finger and rub at a spot on my cheek or chin. I'd wiggle free of her hands and walk from the house, marked with the snail-slide of my mother's fingers, slick tattoos telling my tribe and lineage, my face shining with the signs she drew to place me in the world.

light years

T
HE SUMMER
we were eleven, almost every evening after supper, Lynda and I would jive in her basement to Elvis's “Don't Be Cruel.” The glossy 45 spun on her portable record player, which you opened and closed with two brass snaps like the ones on a suitcase meant to travel far. When it was time to leave, I ran the four houses from Lynda's place to mine, then paused, shaking, scared to go down the six steep steps that cut through the lilac bushes leaning in on either side, the brittle hands of branches reaching out. There were no streetlights, no porch light over the door, and the curtains were closed. If I shouted no one would hear.

Sometimes Lynda snuck out her back door, sprinted ahead of me, then leapt from behind the hollyhocks and caraganas just past her house to call out, “Scaredy-cat!” My mother thought my terror came from Lynda's teasing or from the homeless men who lived in the Salvation Army house one block down, but none of them were out after the evening meal, and in the day they looked as harmless as old forgotten uncles who'd wandered off the farm and spent their hours looking for the road back to Cabri or Success or Antelope.

I didn't tell anyone the fear had arrived the first time I saw the stars,
really
saw them, looking down hard-edged and blank. When I was little, I loved to hold their gaze. Every Sunday, on our drive home from my grandparents' farm, I'd lie in the front seat with my head on Mom's lap, my feet on Dad's legs below the steering wheel. If it was winter it would be dark outside, the stars drilling their distance through the windshield and into the small place warmed by my parents and the heat blowing from the vents below the dashboard lights. One small star travelled with us in the car. It glowed round and red on the end of the lighter my dad pulled from its socket, then swept in an arc to the end of his cigarette, setting it aglow.

Then, the stars were a source of wonder as they followed us like faithful frost-quilled dogs the thirty miles from the farm to the city, where they paled slightly above the neon signs of Central Avenue. Often I'd pretend to be asleep as we pulled up to our house, and Dad would carry me from the car to my bed, the stars inside my head now, shooting luminescent needles from the dome of my skull to the bottom of my feet as Mom pulled off my boots and socks and tucked me in.

Soon I was big enough to sit alone in the back seat. Sometimes as we neared home, my skin prickled, as if I'd rolled in nettles, from the tense silence that stretched between my parents. It lasted from the car to the house and into the living room, where my father, without a word, turned on the
TV
. One such night, before I went to bed, I slipped outside. Lying on my back in the yard, I saw a different sky. Had someone told me the stars were dead or dying? The light that touched me was blue-white and icy, like my glowing bones as I stood on the
X
-ray machine at Cooper's store so the salesman and my mother could see my feet inside my new shoes. The same stars pierced the sky, but with them now came a foreboding, unnervingly familiar yet strange.

That night I knew there was no comfort in the world. Something pitiless among the stars had shown itself and seemed to know me. Among a thousand earthly things, it had picked me out for loneliness, chosen me as its cold companion, though I heard no voices and saw only stars and stars and stars, deaf and far away, staring down. I knew then that was what waited in the dark, even if the sky was clouded over or my mother in her housecoat, blind to what I feared, stood in the doorway and called me home.

the only swimmer
    
in the world

S
WIFT CURRENT'S
outdoor swimming pool was only a block and a half from our house, up the alley and past the tall dented boards of the hockey rink. I was eight when my mother started working there as a checker. The job involved hefting a wire basket full of each swimmer's clothes into a numbered position on a long, six-tiered shelf. The number was stamped on a round piece of metal clipped to an elastic band, which the swimmer stretched around an ankle. The baskets were often heavy; workers from the oil fields and construction sites arrived at the end of the day with their big boots, their clothes smelly from their labours. Mom had to dash back and forth across a concrete floor from the boys' section to the girls' as people waited for her to give them an empty basket or slapped their metal tags on the counter, impatient to change out of their dripping bathing suits.

The easier job was Mrs. Brewster's. She was the cashier. Mom got to run the register on Mrs. Brewster's days off and when Mrs. Brewster left for supper, or when Mom let her sneak home, without their supervisor knowing, to look in on her eldest son, Bobby. He was what we called retarded then. Mrs. Brewster and her husband had tried to put him in the home in Moose Jaw when he was eight, she told Mom, but he'd wailed so pitifully when they walked away that they went back and got him.

Few people knew about Bobby. During the day Mrs. Brewster left him in a room behind a baby's safety gate, though he wasn't a baby. He was around twenty, and he hadn't been expected to live that long. He couldn't talk or walk but dragged himself across the floor and wore a diaper. Mom told us Mrs. Brewster worried constantly that Bobby would be caught in a fire while she was at work or have a seizure and bang his head against the floor. She had three other kids, younger than Bobby, and perhaps one of them looked after him sometimes. Mom said she understood why Mrs. Brewster didn't hire someone to care for Bobby. She left him alone because she didn't want everyone in town to know she had a son like that. It was nobody's business but her own.

Mrs. Brewster was a friend of sorts to Mom, but she thought herself superior. Rarely would she leave her tall stool at the ticket window to help if Mom was busy. She wasn't dependent on the income from her job as Mom was, at least that's what she said, and she liked to rub it in. She claimed she cashiered because the little kids she sold tickets to made her happy, and it was nice to make some money to pay for extras, like cigarettes. Two of the fingers on her right hand were yellow like my dad's.

The Brewsters owned their house, and Mr. Brewster, who made good money as an agent at the Pioneer grain elevator, didn't drink. Even in the years when there wasn't much grain to be bought and sold, elevator agents got a cheque each month. They kept their jobs because people thought the good crops would come again next year. Unlike many local farmers, always on the verge of going under, agents could buy clothes and groceries for their families.

The first summer my mother worked at the pool, Lynda and I hung around it every day. Mom wanted me there so she could keep an eye on me. We'd line up at the window and pretend to pay, but Mom or Mrs. Brewster would let us in for free. Before we were good enough to swim laps, we'd stay in the shallow end, pinch our noses and somersault. We'd sink to the bottom and turn to face one another. Then we'd shout, the bubbles rising above our heads. When we ran out of air, we'd bob to the surface and try to figure out what the other had said. “No,” Lynda would say, laughing and shaking her head, the water flying. We'd kick to the bottom and start again.

By the end of the next summer, after taking swimming lessons, I could survive in the deep end. I spent hours surface diving to the blue bottom near the grates, where everything sounded and looked different; the uncanny colour and the echoes of shouts and splashes converged to form another sense, one that had no name. The water had a body to it: it was tactile and noisy and smelled of chlorine. When you held your breath and peered up through it from the bottom to the sky, it was like looking through a sheet of broken glass, the light golden and refracted.