worked at a shit house. So we spent a week stealing all the mail from the houses on Pine Street. Then we stuck a week’s worth of mail into his gym locker the day we knew Mr. Weissman would be in to watch us clean them out. Nobody believed Roland when he said he didn’t do it, ’cause everybody knows he’s always stealing cigarettes from the IGA.
Pine Street’s all the way across town, says Deke. Why did you steal their mail?
Come on, Deke. You’ve got to cover your tracks. Get away from the scene of the crime and all that. Besides, we’d have felt bad stealing mail from people we know.
When I was a kid, Deke says, drinking his coffee and scratching his cheeks, in the second grade, there was this kid, Link Ashcroft. How old was I in the second grade? He looks at his fingers. Eight?
Seven, I tell him. You’d have been seven.
Right, seven, says Deke. Well, Link liked to kiss girls. All the rest of us played street hockey and shot marbles and Link would just run around the playground, looking for girls to kiss. But not other second-graders. Link liked to kiss girls in the sixth grade. What grade are you in?
The fifth, Deke, the fifth.
Right, says Deke. Link liked to kiss eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, and they went along with it, ’cause they thought it was funny I guess, this seven-year-old kid. Girls would sneak off at recess in twos and threes, he’d meet them behind the gym. He’d set his little lunch pail on the ground and stand on top of it to reach the mouths of the girls he was kissing. And Link didn’t just peck these girls on the cheek – why else do you think they were so excited about him? They’d hold him up, on his lunch box, and he’d put his little tongue in their mouths and go to work.
Pretty soon, girls were coming over from the junior high school, hearing about this seven-year-old who liked to make out. They’d stand behind the big blue dumpster, smoking cigarettes, waiting for Link to get out of class. Link, he didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’d take his hand and put it up their shirts, kiss the kid all over. He’d come into class all covered with teenage lip gloss, smelling like menthol Matinée Slims, this big dumb grin all over his face.
You ever see that woman before, in the window?
I never had, Deke.
He dips the tip of his finger in his coffee, draws a damp line down the middle of the green table. Looked like she was from the city, he says. Sophisticated-like.
Deke sips some coffee. He tears open a few more sugar packets and stirs them in. Taps the cup with his spoon.
You know what they’re doing pretty soon, kid? They’re knocking down the grain elevator.
Why are they doing that?
Say it’s obsolete. Say they’re going to build a new community centre there, for the Rotarians.
The green elevator, I ask, or the orange one?
I don’t know. Maybe both. You want to go see that? I was there when they knocked down an elevator in Okotoks, two or three years ago. A couple of guys in Bobcats, they just drove into the walls. Fell down like it was made of dry toast. You’d think that a grain elevator would be sturdier. That the walls would be thicker.
You can smell the meat-packing plant here in Aldersyde. Smells like burning, and the outhouses at summer camp. Like the elephant building at the ZOO. The gas jockeys sit around outside by the propane tank. Two of them play rock paper scissors. The same guy always loses, has to go lean on the windows of the cars when they pull up. Props the gas nozzle in the sides of the cars. Cleans the windshields.
Hey, Mullen, where’s your dad going? I dunno, Mullen says. Hey, Dad, where’re you going? Mullen’s dad throws his jean jacket into his truck.
I want you to sweep the porch. Mullen sticks his fists into his pockets, hits the back of his heel on the sidewalk. Come on, Dad. Come on. Sweep the porch and the sidewalk, Mullen’s dad says, get all those leaves and twigs. Come on, Dad, it’s winter. It’ll snow any minute. See all those clouds? Mullen’s dad pats his back pockets, takes his wallet out, looks in it. And don’t just sweep everything into the gutter, he says, or the neighbours’ yard. Get the dustpan. Tell you what, Dad, Mullen says. When the snow melts in March, I’ll sweep the porch. Sweep it real good. Like, put it all in garbage bags. I’ll put the bags on the curb, in March. Real good-like. Mullen’s dad pats the front of his grey jeans, feels the pockets of his jean jacket. Your keys are inside on the desk, by the mail, Mullen says. Mullen’s dad takes a pencil out of his pocket, the flat kind they sell at the hardware store, sticks it between his teeth. Put the bags in the alley, he says. And don’t pick up anything sharp, like broken glass. Leave that for me. He goes into the house. Comes back out spinning his keys around on his index finger. Stops to look in the mailbox.
Mullen’s dad hunches down on one knee. Show me your shoulder, he says. My shoulder’s fine, says Mullen. Come on, show me. Mullen pulls his sweater up around his neck. Mmblfr, he says through his sweater. The white bandage is taped in a wide square to his pink skin with white tape. Whenever I cut myself, on the side of an open can of peaches, or in the teeth of the gate in a backyard, I always get a pink bandage, just a little sticky strip, brown and fuzzy. Mullen’s bandage is white and plastic and puffy, like a jacket, and has to be held on with tape. His dad has a look at it but doesn’t peel back the tape to look underneath. Don’t pick at it, he says, and don’t poke at it. Mmblnfrmnr, says Mullen. His dad pulls the sweater back down, careful to tug it well clear of the bandage. Mullen coughs while his dad smooths out his sweater.
It’s hot, says Mullen.
You got burned, says his dad. I’ll bet it’s hot.
You going to be home in time for dinner? asks Mullen.
We’re eating at the Russians’ tonight, says his dad. If I’m not back just go over there. Take that bottle of wine, I said we’d bring one. The red one, in the rack. He pats Mullen on the head, gets into his truck. Plays with the rear-view mirror a bit. See you at dinner. Yeah, Dad, at dinner.
Where’s your dad going, Mullen? Mullen climbs up on the porch railing. It creaks. I dunno, he says. Hey, you know what I found down by the river? A bucket of paint. They don’t put paint in buckets, I tell Mullen, they put it in pails. Mullen reaches up, tries to grab the lip of the roof. Yessir, a whole bucket of paint, just sitting there under some leaves, by a stump. You know down by the river where we dug that hole that one time? Somebody must have dropped off a bunch of trash there.
We wander around the back of the house. Mullen’s dad has a tire hung off the only tree. In summertime during storms you can hear it, banging on the tree, into the side of the fence. On the back porch there’s a little table, some beer bottles neatly stacked in their cardboard boxes underneath.
We climb the fence. I hang on the edge for a second, like I always do, one leg swinging on the other side. The alley behind the yard is overgrown with old poplar trees and rose bushes; there’s a chain-link fence and the big hill on the other side. Mullen pushes a piece of plywood off the fence; behind it we’ve got a pretty good hole cut in the chain. We get on our hands and knees and crawl through the fence, into the scrub.
What colour paint is it, in this pail? I ask. Mullen’s shoelaces scurry away ahead of me. Red, he says. We crawl through the bushes until the side of the hill runs up straight vertical, where the big tractor tire is, leaned up against the mouth of the culvert. Which is how you get Underground.
Everything we keep, we keep Underground. Like the traffic pylon, and the construction light – we’ve had it for months and it still blinks. The orange blinking gives us all the light we need; it makes you kind of dizzy at first, but we know our way around pretty well. We have an old card table, with ring marks and a wobbly leg, and we’ve got some milk crates we found behind the IGA. All our stuff is stacked up against the wall there: the burnt-out fluorescent tubes and the old rake with the taped-up handle, our cattle-auction posters and our air-show posters. We’ve got Russian pictures that Solly gave us, of red-jerseyed hockey players and frowning statues. Square letters with English underneath: Visit Leningrad, Moscow Metro 1973. We have a