Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  “Right.”

  “I thought he was going to shoot the school up.”

  “Columbine our asses.”

  “Would have served us right.”

  “Shell!”

  “Well, we were total bitches.”

  “Speak for yourself, Shelly.”

  “Yeah. Speak for yourself. So what about McGill?”

  “He—came back into my life,” she said. In spite of myself, I grinned and bounced in my seat. She withdrew her hand, brought it into her lap.

  “Ooo,” said the flabby one, “that’s creepy.”

  “Not really. We hired him. To help with Simon.”

  “What, as a babysitter?”

  She shook her head. “He’s . . . a therapist now. Really, you wouldn’t recognize him. From before. His skin’s cleared up. He dresses better. And it’s like . . . he’s found purpose.”

  “A therapist? For Simon? Shell, is he okay?”

  “He’s fine now. McGill fixed him right up.”

  “Wow. McGill. A therapist.”

  She laughed, a little too lightly. “A behavioural therapist, yeah. Little Simon here . . . he was a handful.”

  I cooed. Under the table, she crossed her ankles, and uncrossed them. She was fidgeting—the way they do as the feelings take hold. She took a sip from a glass of spring water.

  “I gotta say, I’m surprised to hear that about McGill. He was such a mess back then.”

  “Teenage boys are a mess. They grow out of it.”

  “He had a lot to grow out of. Did you ever see his mom?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t have seen her much. You never went on that trip to Ottawa.”

  “I had the flu. Did McGill’s mother go on that?”

  “Not exactly. McGill was going to go. He made it all the way to the bus. He had this suit jacket, and this crazy old trunk with him that was way too big. He got it into the luggage compartment somehow—I think Mr. Evans had to help him with it. And just before we were going to leave, she pulls up.”

  “His mother?”

  “His mother. Bat-shit crazy. She was driving this old Lincoln or something like it. Pulled it up right in front of the bus, so it was blocked in. She got out—huge woman. Not fat—but big like a linebacker. Her hair was white—she wore a big black fake-fur coat like it was winter. She climbed onto the bus, and pointed at McGill, and she yelled: “I Revoke my Permission! Return my Son to me!”

  “Jesus.”

  “Poor McGill.”

  “Yeah, well he knew what was good for him. He got up and said he couldn’t go to Ottawa any more, and got off the bus. Into his mom’s car. Didn’t even stop to get his trunk out of the luggage area. Had to collect it when we got back.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah. But you know something, Shell?” The flabby blonde leaned across the table. “I think he was kind of relieved.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You weren’t there,” she said. “And it was pretty easy to tell . . . McGill was more interested in you than he was in the Houses of Parliament.”

  Quiet for just a moment, before the three of them broke into a braying round of laughter. The waitress returned with some salads, drinks, and a plate of fried yams. Trickier job this time; she had to sneak in between strollers and the two rattan chairs that’d been displaced to make room for us. She didn’t quite pull it off, and several pieces of cutlery slid off her tray. She promised to get more, bent to grab the ones she could find, and hurried off back into the bar.

  “I barely knew he was alive,” she said.

  “Well, he sure knew you were alive.”

  “Stop fucking—messing with Shelly’s head. Stop messing with her head.”

  “One for the swear jar?”

  “No, really. He was a sweet, quiet kid. With, you know, unfortunate skin. If he had a crush on Shelly—well, everybody had a crush on Shelly. Look—” the skinny one with the teeth pointed at her with her fork “—you’re making her blush.”

  She laughed. “Well, he’s turned out all right now.”

  “It’s nice to know that boys turn into men, eh?”

  “To boys turning into men!” The blonde one raised a glass of spring water, and the others joined the toast. I let myself giggle and clap, and looked right at her as she glanced down. Things were going well, I thought. And at first, I had no idea why her face fell the way it did.

  She nearly dropped her glass as she bent and lunged over me, filling my face for a moment with her sweet-smelling tit. To my side, there was a scream—and I looked over just in time to see her pluck a gleaming blade from the big baby’s little hand.

  He had gotten out of his stroller. He had crawled around beneath the table unseen—by any of us—and he had located a steak-knife the waitress had dropped. And then, the little worm . . . he found his legs.

  He had carried the knife three glorious steps, from his mother’s feet to the edge of my stroller. It appeared as though the fat little tyke had been about to plunge the knife deep into my left eye.

  This kind of event is rare; usually, it happens with a family pet . . . dogs, to be sure, but more perilously, cats. They’ve a fine sense of smell, they do. And that’s why, when I arrive in a new vessel, that’s the first thing I do.

  I make sure the cat is dead.

  But you know all about that.

  The first time McGill and I met after all was over the carcass of a cat.

  Remember that place? Squalid little rooms near the very top of a crumbling old apartment building filled with whores and addicts and murderers. Cheap wallpaper peeling off the entry hall. No doors on the kitchen cabinets. No father either. What was it that McGill’s mother had said when she first visited the little girl and her overwhelmed, demon-beset mother?

  Slattern?

  It hadn’t gone over well with the mother. I watched from the back of the sofa, where I made the brat I inhabited squat and growl. What, she wanted to know, did McGill’s mother have over her, to pass judgement? Could McGill’s mother keep a man any better, who didn’t want to stay? By the empty divot in her ring finger, she guessed not. That hit a nerve, it did. And so it was that she turned on her heel and strode out of there, and left the poor woman to me.

  McGill was the one who finally faced me. His mother had no idea. He came up the next day, on his own, in uniform: a tatty old Nirvana T-shirt, too-loose black jeans and that pustule of a face. He wasn’t ready. That was obvious. But for whatever reason, he didn’t feel right about disturbing his mother with the contrite phone message, begging her to return because My God, it’s killed the cat!

  I’d done more than that. I’d smashed windows in the bedroom, caved in the ceiling over the door to the balcony, overturned the sofa and caused the television tube to implode. I caused the slattern’s neighbour, a man who carried a gun in his trouser-band and dabbled in the narcotics trade to, if not love, then lust for her in an overly solicitous way.

  I was, I admit, not pleased when McGill’s mother left in such a rage. I wanted her back. To finish things.

  McGill found me in the bathtub. The cat, who had been the child’s dearest friend, was there too—laid out in the doorframe, its head turned hard back, so it looked at its own tail. I saw to it that it wasn’t moved. I wanted McGill’s mother to see it. So she’d know who she was dealing with.

  It had a different effect on McGill. He didn’t know me, then. His mother had left him at home when she met me at the schoolhouse. He’d waited in the car when we danced at the shopping plaza, and she vanquished me again. She obviously didn’t tell him about me—about the things I could do, to the world . . . to the hearts and heads of men and women. How formidable I was.

  He saw that cat, and he saw me, in the tub smeared with feces and vomit and blood, and there was no fear. All that came up was anger.

  “Let tha
t little girl go, you fuckin’ cocksucker,” he said, and made fists. The camera he’d brought fell to the floor. His eyes filled with tears. And like a stupid, tantruming child, he stepped up to the fight.

  That was the first time we met, and the only time I came close to besting McGill. I don’t know how his mother taught him . . . what talent he might have simply inherited . . . But even new to the game, blinded by stupid rage. . . .

  He was a chip off the block.

  She was giddy when we got home. She set my stroller in the living room, in front of the TV, and I sat there alone for a time, watching some colourful cartoon show about dinosaurs and science, while she scoured the basement.

  She returned with a stack of slim, hard-covered books. Four of them. She settled on the floor in front of the sofa. Opened one of them. The inside flaps were covered in scribbles, notes like a greeting card. She pored over those for a few minutes, then flipped through the pages. It was filled with photographs.

  “This is a yearbook, baby,” she said, as she noticed me looking over her shoulder. She scudded nearer me, and flipped through it. “This is mummy when she was a lot younger,” she said, stopping at a page filled with faces. Hers grinned out at me. She flipped a few more pages, and there she was, among a crowd of other girls wearing shorts and tank-tops. “This was the girl’s track and field team. That’s mummy.” And finally, she flipped back, to another of those face-filled pages. There, stuck in the middle like a dried piece of chewing gum, was McGill’s grinning face.

  “And this is the man who brought you back, baby.”

  I grinned and waved my hands, and she laughed.

  “He’s our hero,” she said, and when I giggled in what I was sure then to be my triumph, she said, “Yes he is. I wish he was here too.”

  One more day—an awful, interminable day, filled with tears and silences after questions and accusations—and we were in the car.

  She had been fiddling around on her computer, looking things up, putting it together in the morning, after he left, silent and stiff-backed. Oh, how it must have stung him, those words: You didn’t do anything to help! McGill saved our baby, and the best you could do was sulk!

  He hadn’t said anything to her, but he came to see me in the night, clutching the waistband of his pajama bottoms, damp-eyed and snuffling, declaring his love for me. “I hope you’ll remember that, no matter what happens,” he said, and touched my cheek.

  She strapped me into the child seat behind her. It offered a terrible view, and that made me fussy. After all these years, I must admit that I was acutely curious as to where precisely McGill bedded down at night. In all of our transactions, the McGill family only ever came to me. Never had I had occasion or opportunity to play the visitor.

  We sped along blacktop. She braked three times—the last time hard enough to leave skid-marks—before the surface under the wheels grew rougher, and gravel popped up against the underside. The brilliant blue sky above me disappeared behind a canopy of leaves, and soon after that, the car slowed and lurched to one side as she negotiated a narrow turn, onto an even rougher surface. And then we came to a stop and she climbed out.

  “Wish me luck,” she said, and kissed my forehead before unbuckling me and lifting me out of the seat, and the car.

  We were in a small clearing in the middle of the woods. In the middle of that, was a house that I could only guess belonged to McGill.

  It was made of wood, its walls shingled in rough, dark cedar, and happily, it had but a single storey to it. The shadow of the trees all around kept grass from growing, but there had been some attempt at a little garden underneath the living room window. The nose of an old Lincoln poked out from underneath a carport. There was a metal shed behind that.

  Although it was the middle of summer, the space here had a chill to it. I fussed, and she held me close, and she fussed too, in her way. She took a step toward the house, and another one—then stepped back. She looked back at the car, and shook her head, and said, “damn” in almost a sob. She might have gotten into it, too, if she’d been left to her devices.

  But—lucky her—she was rescued.

  “Mrs. Reesor?”

  McGill stood at the door. He was wearing an old bathrobe. A cigarette dangled between thumb and forefinger, and he flicked ash away onto the steps. His hair stood up on one side—no doubt where he’d slept.

  She turned to him, holding me close. “Hey, you,” she said.

  “How—” he frowned. “How did you find me here?”

  “Online,” she said. “I looked up your address online.”

  “It’s not under my name.”

  “It’s not. But it is under your mother’s.”

  He didn’t say anything to that.

  “Look,” she said finally. “I’m sorry for coming here like this. I . . . I hoped it would be okay, but maybe it’s not.”

  “It’s okay.” He dropped the cigarette to the steps, and put it out with the heel of one bare foot. “Is Simon all right?”

  She nodded. “He’s fine.” And she held me up, jiggling me like a carnival prize. I giggled appropriately. “See?”

  “He looks good.” McGill set his head forward and squinted at her. “Really good. So you’re here . . . why?”

  She giggled, inappropriately. She let her bangs fall over her eyes. She smiled at him through them. “I remember now,” she said softly.

  McGill’s mouth hung open stupidly for a second. “Mrs. Reesor?”

  “Shelly,” she said, and with that, found her courage. She strode across the stony yard, and up the steps, and holding me in one arm, wrapped an arm around his neck, and drew him into a kiss.

  It wouldn’t be as simple as that soon enough. But for the moment, it was.

  McGill’s house stank of old smoke and urine. The living room was a shadowy place. Dishes from a recent meal spread across a coffee table. Random-seeming pieces of clothing, yellowing paperbacks and empty bottles and cans clotted its shadowed corners. A large box of adult diapers sat near the doorway to the kitchen. She noticed none of it, of course—love sees, or smells, only what it wishes—but McGill was still ashamed.

  “I . . . apologize for the state of things,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You probably can’t afford a housekeeper. You don’t charge enough for what you do.”

  “It’s not right.”

  “You saved my baby. It’s right to charge fairly for that.”

  Of course, that was not what McGill meant. He meant that this wasn’t right, that there was no natural way that she would arrive at his door, and kiss him so. . . .

  How was it for him these past days? I can only guess. When he watched her sashay past his locker those years ago, didn’t he dream of this day? When he could grow into and harness the talents of his mother, and use them to rescue that pale princess—to possess her, even as he drove the demons from her? Then, might he not have slipped his finger into the moist caverns of her mind, and communed with her as does my kind? And in so doing, truly possess her?

  Shameful thoughts, for men of McGill’s avocation. Shameful, but once entertained, so difficult to dismiss.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, standing near him now. Her heart was pounding—I could feel it as she held me to her breast. “I’m not going to try and give you more money. Come on with me.”

  And she led us all, down a hallway, past a shut door—where the stink of piss seemed strongest—and through an open door.

  McGill whispered an apology for the state of his bedroom. She told him she didn’t care—that she remembered now . . . that she wished she could undo the years and that she should apologize for not being able to.

  There was an ache, she said, a hollowness in her that she had dismissed as ennui, until she saw him again. McGill might have said: that is how it feels, when a demon tweaks a heart, and turns it to another direction. He might have made fists, and turne
d to me, and said, “Let that woman go, you fuckin’ cocksucker.”

  But our McGill . . . in spite of his vow, in spite of his avocation . . . in spite of his other responsibilities . . . he said nothing.

  She took the pillows stacked at one end of his sagging bed, and made a small nest for me on the floor beside the bed.

  Then she whispered an apology to me, and set me in it. “Mummy’s right here,” she said, and turned away.

  And McGill . . . precious McGill . . . your McGill, he took her in his arms, and ran his hands over the soft skin of her waist, the curve of her buttock. For that moment, he forgot everything . . . transformed forever, by his awful dream made flesh.

  And so, I crawled.

  It was a strain—the infant wasn’t really ready for crawling. But such as we know nothing so well as the bending of sinew, the diversion of will. And off I went—out the door, back to the hallway, past the lavatory, and to your door. It opened for me without protest: any wards McGill had ever bothered to place on it had long ago faded.

  You smell of piss. I wonder if you know that? I wonder how much you know, locked in that skull of yours? I can see you now, in your old hospital bed.

  I can see the leather straps that McGill uses to keep you still . . . to keep you from harming yourself, or burning the place down, or harming him. You could still do a lot of harm—you were always a big girl. I remember how you held down that boy I took, down south, as you slid your thick thumb into his skull and sent me back to hell.

  Even then you stank.

  Are you in hell now? Trapped in that confused swamp of shit that fills your skull these days? Is there any hope you have left?

  I’m on your bed now. You can feel me clambering over your fat leg. It’s not easy—I’m pushing this little one to its limits to make my way up your torso, over your sagging, spent teats, to your face—your rheumy, drooping eyes.

  I want to make sure that you know. McGill is lost. You have no son. Really, as I’ve proven, you never fully did.

  Now, my dear old friend, all the world is only you, and I.