Going Down Swinging Read online

  You’re shaking now and shoving your hands deep in the dirty soapy water, gasping back the tears and hysterics that threaten up your throat. No, that’s all you can say. Not really. You knew some things. Cops came and searched your place once while Danny was out. One of the other wives called to let you know they’d just left her place. It was all—well, what could you—it was better than being alone—he was better than the one before him.

  Remember how repulsed you were by the women in that crowd, Danny’s crowd, the look of their skin, the way they spoke. Scenes from the gutter, you thought. And then you started to feel foolish around them, the way they mocked you, called you a squarejohn broad. Twenty-eight years old and there you were trying to act cool and tough. Trying to show you could be bad as all hell. Wonder if Larry knows about your record for stealing a steak and a half-pound of butter for Chrissake. God, they laughed at you for that, all the hookers and girlfriends of thieves and arm-breakers, card sharps and hustlers.

  Thirteen years later and now look—you’re a squarejohn broad with a jailhouse mouth. Nice combo, lady.

  Larry puts the dishtowel down and takes your shoulder, dances you around so that his back’s against the sink and you’re against his chest like a child or a lover. He holds you and says, You’re better than this, sweetheart Rests his cheek against your head. Whenever I come back to this place, I start seeing what turned us all into such assholes.

  You shake your head no in his chest. Don’t say that.

  OK. I’m just saying … look, you’ve got Grace still and she’s a great kid. You’re going to have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, honey. I’m talking from experience and I’ll tell you, you’ve got a little Wilfred in you, Eilleen, we all do; start using it to make your life work instead of screwing it up. If you’ve gotta get out of Toronto, do it, do whatever it takes, just don’t stay in this life of yours, the way it is … don’t do it, sweetheart. He rubs your back while you sniffle, tilts your chin up and says, Ah, you’re no big sister, you’re my little girl. And you laugh and duck your head.

  Grace Two

  JUNE 1973

  TWICE, AN AMBULANCE showed up and took her away, unconscious. Frank and Janet from upstairs called them both times, before I knew what was going on and, both times, they hung around at the front door, hard-faced, telling the ambulance guys how old Mum was and what she took. I told them twenty-eight and Janet came behind and told them forty-one. I told them aspirin and Janet said, “At least a bottle of wine and God knows how many of these,” handing them pill bottles, some empty and some rattling. I wouldn’t look at Janet afterwards. She was a traitor and she may’s well know it, I figured.

  Stupid Frank and Janet. When my dad moved out, he put a fridge and a hot plate in my sister Charlie’s old room and rented it out to these newlyweds called Frank and Janet. They almost never came out of their room and mostly you wouldn’t even know they were there, except for sometimes when it was quiet, you could hear a whimpery noise, sort of like a puppy or a parrot or something.

  Anyways, after that, Frank and Janet left. Because of me, probably, me ignoring them. But they deserved it and they shouldn’t have been in Charlie’s room anyhow. But then, just when it started getting good, with them gone and Charlie’s room empty in case she decided to come back to Toronto, Mum got in a big fight with my dad over the phone and she was madder than when she told him to get out in the first place. She spat out one last thing and smashed down the receiver, so I asked her what he said.

  She stared at the rug. “Your father’s got short arms and deep pockets.”

  “What?”

  “He’s kicking us out is what it amounts to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s moving us into some dive of his down on Gerrard Street. He’d rather his child live in a dump than forfeit the jacked-up rent he’ll get for this place.” Our house on Woodfield was pretty nice, like other families’ houses, like with a matching rug and toilet-seat cover in the bathroom and big long curtains in the living room and wall-to-wall carpeting. Mum liked wall-to-wall carpeting cuz of us seeming more rich and cuz it keeps your feet warm when you get up in the morning.

  “Is he still giving you your ’lowance?” Mum got five bucks a week for a ’lowance when my dad lived with us and Charlie used to get two and I got seventy-five cents. It was mostly mine I wanted to know about, but Mum was in a crabby mood so I was being not-selfish.

  “Screw him and his lounce … We don’t need his crap.” We did so. I thought she should’ve acted nice to him at least for that. And maybe even ask if we could get Charlie’s still. We could’ve split it maybe.

  “Do you think Charlie’ll come back again?” I wished I hadn’t asked that. I kept feeling like I was going to cry when we talked about my sister. Every time I heard a plane growling overhead, I imagined it was full Charlie. That she was coming back. I pictured her up there fidgeting in the smoking section, complaining about the food, her big deer eyes staring tough on anyone who rubbed her the wrong way. I saw her in tight hip-hugger jeans with a paisley blouse, and long hair hanging loose in her eyes, thinking about me and singing, “Sock it to me, baby, let it all hang out.” But every plane kept going and took her someplace else and she’d press her hands against the window, crying, and I’d lie in my bed and cry back, like we were talking to each other with ESP, kind of.

  “I don’t know,” Mum told me. And I started getting a strangle in my stomach. Charlie was sixteen—old enough to do anything she wanted. I wondered if she’d come back or if, from now on, there’d just be us two.

  Mum took a breath the way she did when she was trying to get her mind out of a bad memory.

  The new house was on Gerrard, the closest big street. It was beside an old empty gas station and around half the size of our old house. There weren’t any bedrooms, just a place between the kitchen and front room that seemed more of a room to eat than sleep. We crammed Mum’s bed in there, though, and slept together. The front room was dark and traffic-loud with a kind of greasy-looking wood floor. The kitchen was the last room at the back. It smelled like basement, like the rest of the place but stronger and wetter. A curtain went around a toilet and shower in the corner of the kitchen. The shower stall was tin and inside there was a fight in the corners between the rust and the mould.

  We had to share the house with Dad’s other renters, Nelly and her son Dale—they had the upstairs, we had the down. Nelly was mean-looking with kind of see-through skin that always looked a bit dirty. She had egg-coloured hair—white bits and yellow bits that she brushed and hairsprayed hard, down the back of her neck. I always wanted to lift just one piece to see how much would come with it.

  Nelly’s son Dale bugged me the same way Nelly bugged Mum —they were like the kids at school that win every fight because they don’t care if they bash up their own selves or not. Dale had a couple years on me, he was nine I think, and had reddy-black hair and a cowlick in the same place as mine, except his stayed shoved off to the side and sproinged up only when he had one of his mad yelling attacks at squirrels or crows or telephone poles. His arms and legs were always jerking and looking for stuff to break.

  It was summer again and I was boring; school was out and I felt like I had no friends any more. I decided to take the bus to the Riverdale Zoo and wander around. I spent practically all day staring down in the bear cages that were really just super-deep cement boxes in the ground. The bears were mangy and looked lonesome, walking round and round under the world—they only saw us when they looked up for sky. At lunchtime, zookeepers threw down bags of white bread to them, the kind I wasn’t allowed to have because Mum said it had no nutritional value. I watched and wished for handfuls of bear through the black bars over their holes; I wanted to get down there and curl up in their dark fur and lie in the corner with our noses tucked together so tight we wouldn’t notice the lousy kids over us throwing stuff even though the signs said not to. When the sun started going down and making everything yellowy, I
figured I better get home.

  Back to being bored cuz of there being nothing good to do at home any more. I never went to the park at the top of our old street once since we moved and the friends I had six blocks ago seemed a million years away—I couldn’t remember what it was we used to do and if they’d still want to do it when I got there, TV was boring. I tried playing with Shadow but he was boring—he was more Charlie’s cat than mine anyhow. And Mum was super-boring: she was lying on her bed again, like scribble on a crumpled sheet. Seemed like she was always sick and sad. When she wasn’t flat on her back, she sang in the kitchen with Patsy Cline or Julie London or sometimes alone into a tape recorder. Lots of “Crazy” and “Cry Me a River,” or else a song she made up about love and men and needing a man. And at the end of each one she’d cry. I almost hated her for not being fixed by my I-love-yous, but I still fitted myself in her lap sometimes and rocked back and forth with her while she sang.

  I went back out of the house and stood on our side of the chain-link fence. Dale from upstairs was over on the old gas station side, on his knees, sharpening a stick with a paring knife. He looked up while he was hacking and made the knife hit the ground. He squinted and said, “Whatdya lookin’ at?”

  So I shrugged and told him, “Nothin’.”

  He held up the stick. “Yeah you are, you’re lookin at a murder weapon.” I didn’t say anything; he looked at the point of his stick and started jabbing the air. “Better watch your fuckin cat, kid.”

  I looked over my shoulder, worried my mum heard and afraid Shadow was out. I hated the push in his voice. I tried to make my voice hard and told him, “Better not touch my cat or you’re dead.”

  Dale made a phony howly laugh and went, “You and whose army?” Then he said, “Hey, what’s your name again, kid? I forget your name.”

  Grace.

  “Oh yeah, like ‘Hey Grace, come sit on my face’?”

  “I’d rather stand on it.”

  He gave me his fake-shocked face. “You better watch it, little girl,” and he shook his stick and stabbed the air then gave it a yank like he just stuck it through me and wanted it back. I watched and wondered what it would take to make Dale think I was crazy. My dad said that once—make ’em think you’re crazy and they’ll leave you alone. I wrapped my fingers in the fence and rested my cheeks and looked past him.

  “Wanna do something?” he asked me. “Wanna climb the tree in the back.” I shrugged. He looked like he was getting pissed off. “Why not, you’re always out there sitting in it. You look like a skinny ugly squirrel up there.” He threw his stick over the fence into our backyard. The knife was still beside his feet. He looked at it too. “I’m not gonna hurtcha,” and he kicked it across the pavement. “Come on.”

  I came through the opening in the fence onto the gas station part. He picked up a rock and threw it at one of the old pumps. “I betcha ten bucks you can’t hit the hose part on the pump with …” he leaned and snatched it off the pavement, “this rock.”

  “I don’t bet suckers, I eat ’em.”

  “Yeah, yeah, just cuz you can’t.”

  I went close enough to get the rock from him and eyeballed the hose. It was around twenty feet away. He watched me aim and miss the pump by a mile, then he laughed his over-loud cackle again. “Ahha, ten bucks, y’feeb. You throw like a girl.”

  “So. I am one,” and I wandered off to look inside what used to be the garage. He followed and stood beside me trying to spy through the dirty window. There was nothing in there but part of an old car’s insides.

  Dale leaned his forehead against the glass. “I could take a car apart and put it back together, you know.”

  I moved along the garage to a side room where the cashier’s desk was. “Could not.”

  “I fuckin’ could so, eh. I’m a really good driver. I’d have my licence if it wasn’t for the stupid cops—my brother even told me. And he should know, man, he’s a race-car driver.”

  “Really? Where is he?” There were posters on the wall of the Michelin Man and red cars that looked like sharks, and one of a red-haired lady in tight shorts holding a wrench to her lips. I had to move before Dale saw her.

  “He’s with my dad. In the States. In New York. They’re both race-car drivers.” Dale followed after me. “Where you goin’? We should break in and get some stuff.”

  “There is no stuff. What do you mean, break in?” He was crazier than I could even fake.

  “Just bust in, man, it’s all glass, just bust in.” I walked away, not wanting to be there if he did it, scared he was going to follow me and scared he wasn’t. He came along to the side of the building. “Come on, there’s a cash register in there, maybe there’d still be money in it or else they hid money under it or something, or maybe there’s stuff in the back like a secret compartment or a safe.” We walked up to a sheet of glass leaning against the garage with a chunk the shape of a telephone broken out of the top. I could hear Dale starting to breathe all weird when we came to it, and he barked “This is mine” at me as if I was going to steal it.

  “Why do you have a piece of broken glass?”

  “I mean it’s mine, like I’m saving it.” I asked him why. “Cuz. Cuz there’s days like today, man.” He was getting more fidgety. “Back up,” and he shoved me off to the side. Then he faced it, took a couple steps back and did a sideways jump, busting through the sheet to the wall. Glass flew everywhere and I screamed and turned my back. Pieces whacked against my T-shirt and fell. One hit low on my calf and slashed so that blood dripped down to my heel. It wasn’t that deep, but seeing it made me scream even more.

  Dale was on the ground from losing his balance. His voice was shaky a little. “Shit.”

  I had bare feet and there was glass all over the place around him, so I moved back trying to find a place where it wasn’t. “Are you OK?” I asked him.

  He got up off his arms and rested on his knees to see what he did to himself. His jeans saved his skin but the tank top didn’t There was skinny pins of glass stuck in his skin up to the elbow and blood crawled out where they were shining. The piece that did the worst of it fell on the ground and left a big gash on the underpart of his elbow. I got butterflies watching the red streams come down his arm.

  Dale had mouth-twitches while he concentrated on picking all the pieces out. I started to cry. He looked up at me with his eyes all watery and smiled.

  “I’ll get your mum,” I told him.

  “No.” It came out of him like a bark again. He kind of looked like his mum for a second, the way her eyes scrunched when she left a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. “She’s not home.”

  “Yes she is, you might have to go to the hospital.” I was sure I heard her up there earlier.

  “She’s not home, just forget it. I’m fine.” He held his arm to the sun trying to make sure he found all the glass.

  “Well, I’ll tell my mum then.” I didn’t know what mine would even do, the way she was.

  “Don’t tell your mum nothing—she’s a whore.” My mouth dropped and he said, “She is, my mum told me; your mum’s a hooker.”

  “No! She is not.” I squinted back at him. “No she’s not.”

  Dale stood up. “Yeah she is, my mum told me, she knows your mum is and quit walkin’ away from me, y’ little baby; if you tell her I told you that, you’re dead.”

  I glanced at Dale’s arm; I didn’t care any more. “I’m not, I just don’t want to stay outside any more. What if someone comes and sees what you did? I don’t wanna be there when you get it.”

  “I mean it, you tell your mum and I’ll kill you—and don’t think I won’t know.”

  “I’m not, I’m just going in. Cuz anyway, she’s sick today.” I backed up some more, watching the ground.

  “You mean she’s hungover.” He took a couple steps toward me with his wrist in the air and blood coming off his elbow like drool.

  “No, she has the flu.” I went back toward the house.

  Dale holle
red after me, “I mean it, kid: tell her and you’re dead.” Glass skidded on the ground behind me.

  It was hot when I came in, but I locked the door and closed the window. I pulled the blind by our bed. Mum was the same: on her back with her mouth open and her head tilted back in her pillow as if she was trying to get as much air as she could without working that hard. I sat down beside her, watching the door and crouched in near to her ear.

  “Mum? Mummy.” She whimpered. “Mummy, Dale said you’re a hooker.” She mumbled. “Mum?”

  “I can’t hear you.” Her tongue smacked the roof of her mouth trying to get wet again.

  “Shh! Dale said you’re a hooker.”

  “I can’t hear what you’re saying, honey, get me some water.”

  I hissed at her, “I can’t talk loud, I’m not supposed to tell you because he said he’d kill me—he said you’re a hooker.” The phone rang. I pushed her arm. She asked for water again. I flicked hard, where I pushed her. And she went, “What! Get the phone.”

  It was Charlie. In Vancouver. Mostly we wrote letters, but I loved it the best when we got to be on the phone together. She said, “I miss you, Grace-face,” and asked how I was. I felt all babyish like I was going to cry from her voice and I wanted to just be normal and tell her how much I loved her. All I said was I was OK. Charlie said I didn’t sound so OK. I was OK, just that Mum was sick, I said. That way maybe she’d feel sorry for Mum just in case she was still mad at her. I looked down at the back of my ankle. The blood was pretty much dried. “And I cut myself.”

  “Oh no. Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, it’s OK.”

  “What’s wrong with Mum? Sick with a fever or sick lying-on-her-back-throwing-up?”

  “Lying on her back.”