Summer of My Amazing Luck

ten

Lish and I had things to do. We had to get ready for the trip.

I’ll tell you right now I had misgivings. We only had about ten days before we were supposed to leave. Rodger said the van was working alright, except for the sliding door. Around sharp curves, one of us would have to hang onto it, he said, so it wouldn’t come right off. But the van wasn’t the real problem: this whole trip would be pointless, futile. I knew it. Lish didn’t know it, but I knew it. She was so excited and the twins were excited, though they still didn’t know it was their father we were out to find, and even the older girls were looking forward to hitting the road. They hadn’t been out of the city since the last time Rodger’s van was working, and that was five years ago, when Lish was volunteering for the busking festival and the kids were off with Rodger and his mom, at somebody’s cabin in Alberta.

At least Podborczintski had checked out my apartment. I didn’t have to worry about his coming when I was gone. I had one dole appointment before we left and that cash would come in handy. Tanya told us we could use one of her beer coolers in our van for food, so we wouldn’t have to eat in restaurants. Much. Even if we didn’t find the busker, we’d be getting a bit of a break from Half-a-Life. With all the rain, and the prospect of school ending for the summer, the mothers in the block, as well as the on-again-off-again fathers, were getting tense. Serenity Place too, apparently, was getting rowdy. I had noticed the cops over there three times in the past week. They always had one woman cop, so you knew it was a domestic dispute. That was kind of satisfying, really, and the more stressful things got over there, the more organized Sarah became.

She had landed the job with the carnival, which only lasted a couple of weeks, but still, she was getting out of Half-a-Life every day. And, in the evening, she was still helping Sing Dylan scrub the graffiti (someone had recently written KILL THE RICH THEN FUCK THEM and this was too much for Sing Dylan, so he had thrown an orange tarp over it when they weren’t hosing it down). And he and Sarah were also busy digging the trench away from Sing Dylan’s basement apartment, toward the front doors of Serenity Place. They were serious about revenge. Sarah wanted her son back, and she wanted to show the women, especially Sindy, that she could fight back. Already, when it rained, you could see the trickle heading over there. But it hadn’t arrived yet and we’d need a really big storm for it to make it all the way. And a deeper trench. So Sing Dylan and Sarah had a purpose, a goal. Okay, it was a mischievous one but hey, they deserved it. The women in Serenity Place would stand around watching Sarah and Sing Dylan dig and laugh at them, and sometimes call out to them, insults and things. Once one of them even said, “You’re not gonna get your kid back if you’re sleeping around with a Paki.” They hadn’t seemed to figure out what the trench was all about. Sing Dylan and Sarah just kept digging, and digging, in the rain, in the mosquitoes, in the sun, sometimes at night. The women in Serenity Place would soon be flooded out and revenge would be Sarah’s and Sing Dylan’s. At the end of the day I imagined Sing Dylan saying to Sarah, “Thank you. Thank you kindly.”

When Emmanuel came to visit, Sarah stopped digging and put on her peach t-shirt dress and they sat together on their balcony playing checkers and sucking on Freezies. Sometimes Sing Dylan would look up from his digging and give the thumbs up sign to Emmanuel, which always cracked up me and Lish. Another thing, Emmanuel was coming for longer and longer visits: when it wasn’t raining, he was out in the parking lot roller-blading and riding his bike, and when he and his mom said goodbye, they smiled instead of cried. Sing Dylan shook his hand.

Lish was acting funny, too, in a good way. She was giddy and full of beans, pushing for the high yellow note, as Vincent Van Gogh would have said, as Lish herself told me: the high yellow note being that kind of intense but temporary manic creative force. If Vincent Van Gogh had given birth, he’d probably have called birthing the high yellow note.

I knew Lish was excited about leaving, which didn’t exactly make my mood any better. But it was fun to see her so happy. Everything she did, she did with a little flourish. Like, when she picked up toys and clothes and things, she’d pick them up, throw them in the air so they spun and then snatch them before they fell to the floor. When she put milk in her coffee, she’d stir it and then ding the spoon a couple of times against the side of her cup and then slice the air with the spoon, like a symphony conductor. And then there was the little patch of sunlight on her kitchen wall. It didn’t last very long in the morning, about twenty minutes or so. And with the rain and everything, there was only ever enough sunshine for it to materialize about once every two or three weeks, so it wasn’t a regular thing. It was a square of white light on the wall beside the fridge. It came through the kitchen window. Lish would stop to spread her fingers in it briefly, making goofy shadow monsters, birds and rabbits. Then she’d dart off to whatever errands she was performing that day; I had seen her doing it a couple of times when she thought I wasn’t looking. She didn’t talk about it with me, and when Terrapin told Lish that she and her kids played shadow puppets instead of seeing movies, Lish told her to get a life.

So Lish was happy. She was buying food for the trip and learning about Colorado in the encyclopedia at the library. She was gathering little games and craft things the kids could do in the back of the van and checking out maps and routes and interesting places along the way, like the Badlands.

“You know, nothing, well just about nothing, lives in the Badlands,” she said. “They’re called the Badlands because cowboys knew they could die there on their treks across America. Isn’t that cool? I mean, nothing lives. Everything’s dry and hot and flaky.”

I could see the appeal. The rain hadn’t stopped in ages. Mercy was going nuts down at the flood disaster board, and more and more people were losing all their possessions. Farmers were committing suicide and some disease from rotting cattle was spreading to the farm animals that were still alive. The Infectious Disease people said there was a slim chance the disease could be spread to humans, and only if they had a lot of contact with animal fecal material. (Just walking down the street it’s hard to say who those folks would be.) One good thing, the mosquitoes had died out a bit. But about the flood: some guy had invented a sandbag-filling machine. It could fill them in one tenth of the time it took to fill them by shovel. Apparently he was going to just hand the machine over to the government to fight the flood and then try to market it to the States and other places. But the government, I think it was Bunnie Hutchison, refused his offer. She said it was better to put the single men on welfare to work shovelling than to try to use something with no track record of success. What made her think single men on the dole had a track record of success?

But speaking of Bunnie Hutchison, apparently Mercy did have some dirt on her. It was true, she had filed for flood relief money, claiming she had no insurance when she actually did. Now a group of welfare mothers was going to try to frame her. Mercy was their key, their secret weapon. This was the plan — blackmail. The mothers would tell Bunnie Hutchison that Mercy would suppress the file, but she would have to do something for the mothers in return: she would have to save the child tax credit. At Half-a-Life, there was a petition being passed around to sign. Even at Serenity Place, they were signing up. When all the petitions had been filled out they’d be presented to Bunnie Hutchison. Mercy would have to remain anonymous in case the plan backfired and she got into trouble and lost her job. The petitions were to be put in Bunnie Hutchison’s mailbox along with a note saying, “We, all of us, knew what Bunnie Hutchison was up to at the Disaster Board. Comply with our wishes, give us back our extra one thousand dollars a year, and nobody’ll be the wiser.” This was the plan. Naturally, Mercy was nervous. She was always nervous, but now she was really nervous. She didn’t want to lose her job. She had already been under observation because of Joe.

Joe and Pillar were going through a bad time. Joe had been unfaithful. He’d got drunk after one of their big fights and picked up a girl of no more than sixteen, in a bar. They’d had sex in Joe’s car and Joe ended up with a case of genital warts which, naturally, he’d passed on to Pillar. Pillar freaked out and told Joe they were history. She had her warts burned off, had an AIDS test and told the kids that their father was mentally ill. He had to leave. But, as so often before, he talked his way back into her heart and her home. He appealed to the kids, he showered her with affection and bought her flowers and said it would never ever happen again. He blamed his actions on booze and depression, on feeling unloved and unappreciated. He turned it around. If Pillar had been more attentive, Joe wouldn’t have been forced to sleep with the girl. Poor Joe. Pillar said there were certain things he’d have to do if he wanted to come back. One was get a job and support them. Lish and I thought he should have to get the name Pillar tattooed on his penis. As his penis grew, so would the letters of her name Pillar get stretched out, maybe in red or black, on his swollen member, forever reminding him where it belonged. Pillar told Joe that she was tired of living with a fuck-up. She told him the only way he could be a fuck-up in his personal life was if he was brilliant in a career. Then you can get away with it because you’re special. Look at Chaplin, or Picasso. But Joe wasn’t an artist and Pillar was nobody’s muse.

For a while Joe did lumpy labour. Every morning he went downtown to the job centre and sat around waiting to be told where to go. One day he had to sweep roads, one day he had to pick up garbage, one day he had to move pig parts from one warehouse to another. One day he had to clean the sludge from the porto-toilets on a construction site. One day he was sent to work in a glass factory. He had steel-toed boots, but no work gloves, and when he came home after twelve hours in the glass factory, his hands were all cut up. Pillar poured hydrogen peroxide into his open cuts and Joe’s screams could be heard throughout Half-a-Life. Pillar felt bad. She told Joe the next day he could wear a pair of the kids’ hockey mitts. He shouted, “OH I CAN, CAN I? WELL THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!! THIS IS FUCKING GREAT. I’M THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD AND I HAVE A WIFE AND THREE KIDS AND I HAVE A CAREER PICKING UP GLASS OFF THE FUCKING FLOOR WEARING CHILDREN’S MITTENS!!” Then for two weeks he didn’t go to the job centre. He lay on the couch and drank gin and slept. Pillar told us he wore the same sweatpants every day on that couch.

Mercy heard about Joe and Pillar, as we all eventually did, and she said she would try to get him a job at the Disaster Board. Like I said, they were hiring anybody and everybody. When Pillar told Joe that Mercy might be able to get him a job with the disaster board, he yelled, “MY WHOLE FUCKING LIFE IS A DISASTER. I’M FUCKING WAY OVERQUALIFIED FOR THAT JOB I’LL TELL YOU. WHY THE FUCK WOULD I BE INTERESTED IN OTHER PEOPLE’S DISASTERS I CAN BARELY FUCKING KEEP UP WITH MY OWN. WHY DON’T you BECOME A FLOOD INSPECTOR IF YOU’RE SO EXCITED ABOUT IT?” And then he started laughing in a deranged way. Pillar told him she would, but she couldn’t count on him to look after the kids when he could barely look after himself. She told him inspecting flooded basements was a lot less work than looking after three kids, and if he had half a brain, he’d get out of those grimy sweatpants, and take the job. Pretty soon, the dole would force him to do more lumpy labour, or he’d have to move out so Pillar could get the dole herself as a single mother. And where would Joe go?

So Mercy got him the job as a flood inspector. He had to go into people’s basements with a clipboard and all sorts of forms. He had to get down all the information about every room. Like what the walls were made of, whether or not there was carpet or insulation, and how old everything was. He had to draw out the floor plan with windows and doors and everything colour-coded on graph paper with the square feet and the place where the water entered. He also had to make lists of everything damaged, how old it was, what it had cost, how much time had been spent cleaning up and on and on. It was complicated for Joe and he was one of the slowest inspectors. Mercy’s bosses were asking her, “What’s with this guy?”

Well, it turned out he was casing every house for his own purposes. He was taking note of which windows were unlocked, which doors had dead-bolts, and, more importantly, which ones didn’t. Where the VCRs were kept, and whether or not there were home alarms installed. The first house he broke into, the owners caught him red-handed and said, “Hey, you look familiar.” They figured it out and reported him to the cops and the Disaster Board. He was fired, naturally, fined, and put in jail. And Pillar was really alone with the kids, and Mercy was doing her best to make up for her error in judgement. So, she was in no position to get caught blackmailing Bunnie Hutchison, Minister of Families and Welfare, in a crazy scheme concocted by angry mothers on the dole.

With Joe on his way to jail for a couple of months, Pillar could focus on what she considered his good qualities. Instead of getting him out of her life, she seemed to resolve to make their relationship work upon his release. Lish and I were over there having coffee. The kids were colouring all over the back sides of Disaster Board inspector sheets, Pillar had a lot of them around for scrap paper. Dill was playing with Joe’s guitar, dropping bits of toast inside it and then trying to get them out.

Lish asked Pillar, “What do you like about Joe?”

“Well, he’s very loyal, you know …”

“Loyal? Yeah? But Pillar …”

“Yeah. And he’s independent. He doesn’t run with the pack.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” Pillar hesitated and put her hair behind her ear. “He’s affectionate, you know, frisky.”

“My god, Pillar, what is he? A dog?”

“Lish, I’ll tell you something. He’s a man. And I’m damn happy to have one. You would be, too. I know it. When Joe and I wake up in the morning I’m so happy, really. Like, I tremble with happiness. My chest tightens, my eyes burn with tears of happiness. Sometimes. Like I can’t believe I’ve got Joe. This world is so fucked up and cold and mean it’s amazing Joe and I could ever even get close enough to each other to have kids. He’s got a problem with employment, sure, but …”

“Not to mention other women,” added Lish.

“That was not really his fault.”

“Oh god, Pillar. Honestly, you know what he wants? He’s got this perfect picture of domestic bliss: you wearing a red dress or something and no underwear and washing dishes, supper in the oven — and boning you from behind while the kids watch YTV in the other room. That’s his idea of happiness.”

“Well Lish, you don’t even know him. At least he didn’t knock me up and then disappear. At least I’m not chasing him around the countryside. At least I have more than a spoon to hold onto at night.”

“Yeah, well, Pillar, he’s not exactly going anywhere, is he? Even if he wasn’t going to jail, he wouldn’t leave here. He’s got it so good. You just keep forgiving him, blaming yourself for his mistakes, cooking his dinner, smiling at his stupid guitar songs and fooling yourself into thinking you’ve got something really fine. The guy’s a loser, Pillar.”

“Yeah, well, he’s my loser.”

I was confused. Maybe Pillar had a point. When you’re a mother on the dole you don’t get a lot of opportunities to meet men. And it’s damn lonely at times. Maybe Joe was better than nothing after all. Then again, is it stupid to want something better when you are on the dole? So maybe Lish was right. Why not roam around the countryside looking for the real thing? What have we got to lose? Pillar could probably do better than Joe, but could Lish ever find the busker? And make him stay put? And would she want him after she got him? And if you keep having kids with different guys? What does that mean?

I thought of my own situation. I know for a fact that Dill’s father must have had some kind of red hair gene in his body. He certainly doesn’t get that from my side. Red hair is recessive, right, so I would have to find the grandparents or the parents of every guy I had an encounter with and see if they had red hair. There could be baldness or dye jobs thrown in there, so really the chances of finding a redhead are remote. And besides, they probably wouldn’t want anything to do with me. Or Dill. I would have to concoct some sort of story about who his father was. Immaculate conception wouldn’t work. So what happens if Dill decides to go off and find him? Some fictional man? And comes back all bitter telling me I’m nuts for leading him on that way and then he becomes a serial killer of women who look like me.

Why didn’t I just tell him the truth? What was my frigging problem? ’Course I’ve created fictional men before. My dad, for instance. In a story in school, I wrote a poem about him, but it wasn’t really him, about him sailing and me drowning and how he sailed right past me at two hundred miles an hour and plucked me from the freezing water of Falcon Lake. Then we both climbed the rigging and brought her home. I realize now that you can’t be up in the rigging when you’re sailing a boat, but the image of me and him up there silhouetted against the setting sun, all tanned and tough, was a good one. What actually happened was that my uncle took my dad out in his catamaran and my dad fell off the edge and ripped his swimming trunks and had to sit in the hold with a towel around his bottom until they got back to the dock. My mom and my aunt were sitting on lawn chairs and when they saw him they burst out laughing and my dad said, “I’m so happy to be the butt of your joke,” and my mom said, “Oooh good one. A merry heart doeth good like a medicine, Geoffrey.” She appreciated any joke. She loved to laugh. She was always laughing at the goofy things I did. She was a great audience. She’d had a good life, a funny life. The day my dad dies is going to be a lot sadder than the day my mom died. I know that for sure.

I had never really known my dad, and now I wasn’t giving Dill the chance to know his dad. Maybe I should write down everything I know about every guy I was with and then let Dill choose who … but what difference does it make? At the very least, I knew I was his mother.

Things were wrapping up at Hope and Maya’s school. As soon as they had picked up their final report cards we could hit the road. Lish had actually volunteered at the school a couple of times. She hadn’t wanted to, but the girls had convinced her that it would be fun. And, they said, if she was so critical of school, she should really know what it was she was being critical of. The first day she volunteered she took the twins with her. She thought she could put them off the idea of school by showing them what it was about. But everything had changed since Lish had been in school, The teacher and the kids thought Lish was cool. They wanted to know about the spider on her hat. Desks weren’t lined up in rows. Instead they had tables, and the kids moved from one to another, depending on their activity. The kids chose their own themes and read their own stories to the class. They conducted their own scientific experiments. They moved freely around the classroom, using playing cards and string and books and their own shoes for math exercises. They had mice, and plants, and painted scenes on the windows. Some listened quietly to music in the hallway if they were feeling uptight and moody. Others were encouraged to sign up for one-on-one conferences with the teacher to talk about stuff. They baked bread and charted the progress of the moon. They were up-to-date on the flood disaster. Parents were encouraged to volunteer and offer suggestions. The kids had their own personal files on the class computer. Nobody was sent to the principal’s office. Nobody was made to feel stupid. The teacher ate lunch with them. They put on plays and poetry (their own) readings and dances for whoever was interested. The twins ended up loving it and crying when they had to leave. They made Lish promise they would be able to go to nursery school in the fall. I was there when they were begging her to sign them up for the fall.

“God,” said Lish, “I think I’ll have to have another baby.”

“Why, Lish?” I asked. “Just think, all your girls could be in school. The twins at least for half days and you could have some time to do your own thing, go out, get a job, go to university, oh I guess not, but you know, learn how to make shoes, paint, read, lie in the park. It would be great.”

“I guess. I don’t know. Besides, when all your kids are in school, the dole figures it’s time for you to get a job. Now that you have no excuse to be at home.”

“So. Maybe you’d like that. You could decorate other people’s houses or help them plant gardens or read books to blind people. You could have your own personal catering business with all your garlic dishes. You could set up a secondhand shop. You could sew costumes for the theatres. You could freelance and work out of your home and have your own hours, and you know how to do tons of stuff.”

“I think it would be easier to have another kid.”

“Are you kidding? With who?” I threw my arms up in the air. “At least have one with somebody who doesn’t live in a van or disappears. Then at least have a kid with someone who has some cash, someone who would stick around and help you out, invest in RRSPs or cook a meal once in a while.”

“I don’t want anyone to help me out.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Because you have to compromise then. At least with no man around I don’t have any expectations. If I don’t have any expectations, I’ll never be disappointed. And, I’m too disagreeable.”

“You are not disagreeable.”

“Yes I am.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes I am. Dammit,”

We both started to laugh. In two days we’d be leaving Halfa-Life, not for long, but for a while. And that was a good thing, too. I thought it would be nice for Lish to get another letter from the busker. Just to encourage her, strengthen her resolve. And so she did. This time it was a postcard with a picture of a sunset.

Dear Alicia

,

Did you get my other letter? I’m doing pretty good here in Colorado. The inside of my mouth is burnt to hell but hey, at least I’m not wearing a suit and tie. I’ve had my picture in a few local papers and had a late night spot on

TV

. I’m becoming something of an institution around here I think. That is, if you can call a fire-eating clown an institution. A bunch of us are sleeping in a tent in Denver. We always get moved along by the cops, so the park changes just about every night. One of my buddies was shot when he was doing a show downtown. He’s from Australia and so he doesn’t have any medical insurance. We’re taking care of him ourselves. We’re cowboys man! At night I cover myself with a blanket made out of your hair, metaphorically speaking. Of course. Well, gotta go. Someday I know I’ll make it to Canada again. Has it stopped raining up there? Love, Gotcha

Yup. Lish was psyched. “God,” she said, “he’s a terrible writer.” And then she kissed the postcard. I was unimpressed with that but Lish didn’t notice. We were Colorado-bound. Everything was happening according to plan. If you can believe it.