A Complicated Kindness

nineteen

It was still early, my dad was asleep, and I didn’t so much want the night not to end as I wanted the next day not to begin so I walked over to Second Avenue to The Trampoline House, which was next door to the boarded-up bus depot, a disastrous experiment that had resulted only in people leaving. If you threw a dime into this coffee can they kept between the doors and took your shoes off you could jump for a while, at least until the next person with a dime showed up or until the family woke up.

It felt good to be alone, jumping, while the rest of the town remained unconscious, and I tried with every bounce to go higher and higher without knocking my head against the hydro wire. I tried to sort out my problems by putting them into categories. Travis. School. Environment. I wasn’t pretty enough to be the complex, silent girl and yet I never knew what to say. I didn’t want to be the ugly, quiet girl. There was no such thing as the ugly, mysterious girl. I could be the tortured, self-destructive girl. But where does that lead? I remembered a conversation I’d had with Tash on the same trampoline a hundred years ago when it only cost a nickel.

Tash: What do you say to a boy you like when he passes you in the hall?

Me: Hello?

Tash: Nope.

Me: Hi, how are you?

Tash: Nooooo.

Me: Okay. Bonjour?

Tash: (says nothing, gives me a look)

Me: What then?

Tash: Nothing.

I jumped up and down, hands at my side like a punk until I heard the Trampoline House people open their door and take their can with my dime inside which meant they were closed. I had to go to school in two hours and write a fifteen-hundred-word story that included a triggering point, a climax and a resolution. On my way home I came up with my first sentence: The administration passed her around for beatings like a hookah pipe at a Turkish wedding.

Which got panned by Mr. Quiring. No…no, he said. He tapped me hard on my forehead. He didn’t even bother reading the rest of it. So far in English I was not allowed to write about Kahlil Gibran, Marianne Faithfull lyrics, marigold seeds, Holden Caulfield, Nietzsche, Django, Nabokov, preternatural gifts for self-analysis, urges, blowtorches, and now Turkish weddings.

So what should I write about? I asked him. He sat on my desk and crossed his legs and clung to one knee with both hands like it was hurting him. I stared at his belt buckle. Hmmm…he said. Let’s use our imaginations. What do you see when you close your eyes? Nothing, I said. He frowned. Are you not upset when you get your paper back and everything is underlined in red, he asked. No, I said, not really, in the Bible the words of Je—

Get out, he said. I got up and walked away and he threw my pencil case at me. It hit me in the small of my back, near my kidneys. I thanked him, picked it up, and left. I went into the doorless girls’ can and threw up, said hello to the stoners sitting on the sinks throwing wet toilet paper at the ceiling and walked out into the killer sunshine. It was 9:08 a.m.

Suddenly I wished I owned a dog. He and I would spend the day exploring some place off in the bush, maybe make a fire, roast a gopher he’d have caught. Fall gently asleep together in a pile of leaves. Maybe save a life. I decided to walk downtown and check out the latest old-man boots at the Style-Rite.

I saw my simple cousin Norm sitting at his lottery booth outside Economy Foods. When me and Tash were younger we weren’t allowed to sit on his lap. I waved from a distance and he said what he always says: Awwww, c’maawwwnn. I sat for a while with my other simple cousin, Jakie, at the post office and smoked a Sweet Cap. We watched sixteen Hutterites emerge from a parked Land Rover.

I shook hands with Jakie. That’s a big hand, I said, and he looked at it. Then I got him to tell me the day I was born. Thursday. I told him he was automatically saved. He nodded his head slowly for a really long time, like he was listening to music.

Jakie used to have a full-time position sitting on the bench with the high school boys’ basketball team. I never knew what that was all about. They just let him sit there during the games and at half-time he’d get up and shoot hoops with them. He’d always get up and do the three cheers thing with them too and then shake hands with the other team. He loved shaking hands. I never knew why he stopped doing the bench thing, unless it made some people nervous to have a forty-year-old guy in a ball cap sitting next to their kid. But the team didn’t mind at all. They sometimes let him go with them to away games.

I never made it to the Style-Rite. Jakie and I shared a bag of chips and a Coke and I got him to tell me the birthdays of everyone I knew. That’s cool, I told him, reaching out to take his hand. I’m a character, he said. I asked him how many hours a day he sat at the post office and he stared off at something and said dogs love better, which made me wonder if he was psychic because I’d just been thinking about dogs. We shook hands again. And then again. When I said goodbye he looked away.

I passed the church and read the sign outside: AND THEY SHALL GO FORTH, AND LOOK UPON THE CARCASSES OF THE MEN THAT HAVE TRANSGRESSED AGAINST ME: FOR THEIR WORM SHALL NOT DIE, NEITHER SHALL THEIR FIRE BE QUENCHED; AND THEY SHALL BE AN ABHORRING UNTO ALL FLESH.

How sweet. The Mouth must have been in a good mood when he dug up that ol’ chestnut. I walked down the shady side of Main Street thinking about triggering points.

There was a new sign in the Tomboy window. COME ON IN AND CHECK OUT OUR NEW MEAT DEPARTMENT! I stared at it for a while. And then I crossed the little parking lot and went in and walked to the back of the store and looked at the pieces of meat behind the glass. The butcher, who was also the man who opened the windows in church with a long stick that had a hook on the end of it, said hello and wondered if there was something he could do for me. I told him I was just checking out the meat.

Is this the new meat department? I asked.

That’s right, he said. We’ve expanded our selection. He spread his arms.

I nodded. It’s nice, I said. It’s very um…you have a lot of interesting meat products here.

Yes, he said, we’re very happy with it.

Yeah, I said. Well, me too. I smiled. He smiled.

Is there anything I can help you with, he asked me. He seemed much friendlier now than in church when he sombrely walked down the aisles unhooking windows with the broom handle.

Do you sell Klik? I asked him.

Klik? he said. You mean the luncheon meat? I nodded. Well, this here is fresh meat. This is the fresh meat area. Canned meats are in aisle four near the pet food.

Oh, right, I said. Yeah. I nodded. Sorry.

That’s okay, he said. He looked a little sad and I didn’t want to disappoint him so I asked for a pound of meat.

What kind of meat would you like? he asked.

Well, I said, um, just…meat that I could make for my dad. He likes meat. He enjoys meat.

Hmmm, said the butcher, how about a roast?

Yeah, that would be perfect, I said. I left the store with a giant roast gift-wrapped in brown paper and string. He’d written the price on it with a Magic Marker.

I stood at the new crosswalk for a long time with my arm out. I pushed the button to get the lights to flash. The crosswalk was a new concept in town. It was feared and loathed as an extravagant expense.

Nobody stopped, although a couple of guys in a truck slowed down long enough for me to hear them shout Nomi you doob. Doobs are what we call condoms around here. I don’t know why. Voices inside my head told me not to throw the roast at the truck.

I met Marina Dyck and Patty Pauls on Autumnwood Drive pulling the Funk kids in a wagon and they told me they were babysitting and I could come back with them to the Funk house for some Bundt cake and vodka from the hidden stash. We were there for a while watching TV and eating cake, but I was waiting for the vodka.

Then Marina said, oh the parents are coming home soon, you guys better go. So Patty and I took off in separate directions. About ten minutes later I was standing in the kitchen drinking water looking out the window and I saw Pat going back over to the Funks’. Oh, I thought, I get it. I understand. I am a doob.

Ray came in from watering his flowers and sat down at the kitchen table. Hey Nomi, he said. I didn’t look at him. I fooled around with the taps. And then he asked me how my day had been and I asked him what he saw when he closed his eyes. Obviously nothing, he said.

I think he figured out that I was crying because I didn’t say anything and I still wasn’t looking at him and he’d said to me in his tragically cheerful voice: How about accompanying me to the nuisance grounds.

We say dump now, Raymond, I told him. For Ray the dump is consolation. He appreciates specific areas of waste as opposed to the type of wide-range, free-floating mess that has taken up too much of his life.

Tash once told me that Ray had proposed to my mom at the sewage lagoon behind the parka factory outside of town.

Help me unload some of those old two-by-fours from your playhouse and that rusty bed frame taking up room in the garage, he said. Ray has a way of offering comfort in a well-meaning but ridiculous way. He tends to go overboard in the same spirit as people who overwater thirsty plants.

I remember my mother tearfully telling him that she had to go to the morgue to identify her sister after her horse-and-buggy accident and Ray walked over to her and put his arms around her and said don’t let it be an entirely negative experience, honey. He couldn’t understand why my mom had peeled out of the driveway. Tash and I watched him walk outside and stare in befuddlement at the blackies her tires had left behind, like there’d be clues.

It was nice seeing Ray’s tanned hairy arms draped over the wheel, like he was in control of something. I put the visor down for him so he wouldn’t have to squint and he said how do you like that. Simple things that make life easier, like visors, don’t figure into his world.

What was my first word? I asked him, and he said: Don’t. I asked him what my second word was but he couldn’t remember. I think I’d have made something up if I was him. Like go.

Hey, I said, I bought a roast today but I lost it on the way home. I’d forgotten it at the Funks’ when we left in that big hurry.

Oh, really? said Ray. That’s okay. Roasts are an awful lot of work.

Actually they’re not, I said. The butcher said they were easy. You put them in before you go to church and when you come home they’re done.

Well, said my dad. They’re easy to lose.

Well, no, I said. Only complete idiots lose roasts. He told me I wouldn’t believe the amount of meat he’d lost in his life. Yeah, yeah, I said, and stared out the window.

We can always get another roast, Nome, he said. I didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes.

Right? asked my dad. He turned to look at me briefly and I opened my eyes and noticed him smiling so I smiled back at him and said yes, he was right.

We were supposed to pay a dollar to get into the dump but the guy there knew Ray and waved him right in. VIP? I asked him. Well, he said, he hadn’t wanted to brag but he never has to pay when he goes into the dump. Then he told me that he sometimes cleans up at the dump late at night after the guy at the gate goes home and the dump people liked that.

You clean up the dump? I asked him. At night?

No, no, he said.

Yeah you do, I said.

Well, yes, he said, I do.

That’s cool though, I said thinking Jesus, let’s not be the kind of family that tidies up the dump at night. The dump is the dump though Dad, I said. The central idea at work in a dump is that it’s not a clean place.

Ray said: Well, yes, but I organize the garbage in a way I feel makes sense. I patted him on the arm. Not so much to encourage him, but because I needed to feel something solid right then.

Being there was kind of nice though, like the beach but less oppressive. Smoky with thousands of seagulls, which was odd, like they were lost, and a pair of gloves my dad gave me that had little rubber bumps on them for grip. I liked the way he rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist.

We talked a bit about eyebrows and their purpose. Then other hair topics. He said if he kept losing hair he’d have a forehead he could show movies on.

Like a drive-in? I asked him.

He said yeah, he’d stand out in a field and get paid.

You could sit, I said.

I’d have to sit, he agreed.

In your lawn chair, I added.

Yes, Nomi, in my lawn chair, he said. He knows I have an irrational hatred of his lawn chair. We saw a little red cowboy boot sticking out of a heap of badly organized garbage that did not make sense and my dad said to me whoah, remember Misty? Misty was a palomino I used to barrel-race in rodeos before I accepted boys and drugs into my heart.

That horse could turn on a dime, said my dad.

Yeah, I said. Powerful hindquarters.

You used to take those corners like Mario Andretti, he said, staring off dreamily at acres of decomposing trash.

Well, I said, it was fun. My dad used to shout, take it home Nomi! on the final stretch of the race. Remember when you’d yell, take it home Nomi! I asked him. He looked at me.

I did say that, didn’t I? I nodded. Was that wrong?

No, no, it was funny, I said. I remembered him leaning up against the log fence of the corral in his suit and tie and jacket. The only person in town formally dressed for a rodeo. A kid had come up to him once and asked him if he was one of those clowns that distract the bull while the cowboy escapes.

He nodded and stared at the boot. Should it be there? I asked him. He shook his head but didn’t move the boot. I knew he wanted to move it more than anything. He was working really hard to appear normal, for my sake.

Let’s move it, I said.

Oh…no, he said. He waved off the idea.

Yeah, c’mon, I said. I picked up the little boot.

Where to? I asked.

Oh, really, he said. He tried to act dismissive.

No, c’mon, I said. Where should it go? He stared at me for a few seconds and smiled.

Fine, he said. I’ll indulge you by allowing myself to be indulged. He took the boot and we walked about a hundred yards to a different section of the dump that included broken wagons, Hula Hoops, bent and rusted-out pogo sticks, cracked-up Footsies, headless dolls and some other assorted brightly coloured broken plastic stuff. Ray put the little boot in the middle of it and said, good. We walked back to where we’d been. The dump was kind of like a department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together.