Lemon (10 page)

I'm going to call my play
Truly Loved
. Old Lillian's going to endeavour to live the passion enjoyed by the humping toy boys and girls on the tube. Faking laughs, orgasms and interest until, crushed by the dull realities of life outside the box, she will lash out. Maybe she'll blow up the bank or something. My email is cluttered with butt-scratchers who want to be in the play. Yesterday they wouldn't have noticed if I got hit by a bus. My plan is to make them perform demeaning acts, not unlike those allegedly performed by Rossi. My plan is to audition and reject them.

Vaughn's never heard of Bob and Bing's road movies.

‘Road to Morocco?'
I inquire. ‘You've never heard of
Road to Morocco?'
I start singing the
Road to Morocco
song, bopping around the way Bob and Bing do on the fake camel. Vaughn's drinking tea made from tree bark or something.

I fit
Road to Bali
into the player. I figure if Treeboy can't handle it, he can go meditate or something. I'm not used to having a stranger around the house, particularly a mute. I wish he'd go save the oak in the backyard.

He doesn't laugh once, not even when the octopus squirts black ink in Bob's face. When it's over, I look at Vaughn and realize he isn't even watching. He's staring off into some forest.

‘À demain,' I say.

He looks as though he'd forgotten I was there. ‘Good night.'

I'm woken by the two of them talking. Drew's a little testy due to Vaughn's silent owl treatment. I creep to the head of the stairs to hear better. It turns out a friend of his, another tree sitter, got killed by loggers. They chased him up a tree with chainsaws, lopping off the lower branches. When the chainsaw got too close, he leapt into another tree, so they sheared the bottom limbs off that one too. Trapped, the guy clung to the tree with no water or food for forty-eight hours. The whole time the loggers and forestry thugs were shouting insults at him, shining lights and blaring music. The tree sitter finally passed out and fell sixty feet, slamming into some limbs before crashing to the ground. Besides all the broken bones, his head was split open and his lungs punctured. All the forestry department said about it was that it was unfortunate and something they'd hoped wouldn't happen.

‘I should have been there,' Vaughn says.

‘What could you have done?' Drew asks.

‘Created some diversion. He would have made it down.'

‘You don't know that.'

‘We're supposed to watch out for each other,' he says as though she's a right-winger who can't possibly understand.

A monstrously gloomy silence ensues until she says, ‘You mustn't go back. It would be suicide.'

Vaughn doesn't respond and I know his tree-coloured eyes are focused above and beyond her.

‘It was an 800-year-old Douglas fir,' he says. ‘You can't replant a 1000-year-old forest. We're destroying something we don't understand.'

If you think about it, those trees have witnessed every ruthless, selfish, greedy, destructive human act since whitey started having his way around the place. Maybe that's why whitey's determined to cut them down. The trees know too much.

I offer to make them pancakes. They don't look too interested. I dollop and flip batter anyway. ‘How about some sightseeing?' I say to Vaughn, determined to cheer him up now that I know about his personal tragedy. ‘A stroll down Yonge? It's the longest street in the world, you know.'

He gives me the tree-frog stare.

‘Or we could shoot up the
CN
Tower.' Right away I deduce that concrete towers aren't too inviting to tree sitters. ‘What about the island? We could rent bikes and pedal around. There's lots of trees there.'

‘Lemon,' Drew intervenes, ‘I'm sure Vaughn has other things to do.'

‘Not really,' he says.

‘It's fun on the ferry,' I say. ‘You can pretend you're on a voyage.'

He cuts into a pancake with his fork. He's forgotten to put syrup on it. I pass it to him. ‘It's real syrup,' I say, ‘from trees.' He forks a piece of pancake into his mouth. Guess it's against his principles to eat maple syrup. Maybe taking sap from trees is like sucking their blood. I'll have to avoid the
tree
word in future. Like I avoid the
cancer
word at the hospital.

He looks goofy on the bike. The rentals have thick tires, upright handlebars and cushy seats. They're the only style of bike that doesn't hurt my butt. But old Vaughn must be over six feet and his knees jut out as he pedals. He seems oblivious to how hilarious he looks. He may be the one person in existence who doesn't check out his ass in store windows. We sit in the grass and stare at the lake. I try to get a conversation going, ask him about the tree life, but it's pretty obvious he doesn't want to talk. The water looks like it does in postcards. ‘It's a picture-perfect day,' I say, sounding demented. I'm only yammering because he isn't. It's like I have to prove I have a brain. Which is pretty sad considering I don't even know if old Vaughn can tell a brain from a kidney. Just because he's quiet doesn't mean he's deep. I shut up, lie back and watch a plane and wish I were on it, going anywhere except where there's war and pestilence, famine and ecological disasters.

Unable to sleep with visions of a murdered tree sitter in my head, I worked some more on
Truly Loved
, got old Lillian, fuelled by the motivational speakers, to rally the deadbeats at the bank to protest. Half of them are being transferred to a new location in Oakville. Most of them don't have cars, which means a two-hour commute to and from work on public transit. But management says that's where the jobs are if they want them. Plus they're extending branch hours, which means some shifts will start at seven in the morning. Nobody objects because they know there's a bunch of the downsized in Oakville who'd be grateful to get their jobs. Lillian starts jumping up and down beside a plastic plant, chanting about self-respect, solidarity, human rights and union busting. Nobody's too interested. The manager gets the security guard to take her out.

Vaughn looks unconscious and it occurs to me he might be dead from all that tree-related sorrow so I say, ‘Yo, Vaughn.'

‘What?'

‘Just checking.'

‘What?'

‘If you're dead.' Immediately I regret saying this with his friend being dead and all that.

‘I'll keep you posted,' he says.

It's pretty obvious he has no time for plebs who aren't sitting in trees and I can respect that. I'm thinking maybe Lillian, after the big disillusionment, could become a tree sitter. After she blows up the bank.

11

O
ld Blecher asks me if I think I'm doing what God put me here to do.

‘He didn't put me here.'

Personally I think we'd be a whole lot better off if we dropped the God concept. Without the God concept, we'd be equals. Nobody could make deals. Old Swails was telling us about Martin Luther figuring out that the Catholic church was all about making money. Priests would show up in villages and say, ‘Buy this bit of parchment with Latin scribbled on it and your granddaddy will not burn in Eternal Damnation.' The people were dirt-poor so buying religious junk meant no bread for their children. Martin Luther said, ‘Forget all the junk, I'll translate the Bible for you and you can practice your faith without worrying about what the old cardinal has to say about it.' Was the Vatican ever pissed. Old Swails was jumping around pretending to be the cardinal, shouting in an Italian accent. ‘Thisa heretic MUSTA BE BURNED!'

‘Let me put it differently,' Blecher says. ‘Do you find purpose and meaning in your daily life?'

She's giddy because she just got certified as a Life and Career Coach by the Institute of Life Purpose. She thinks people are going to pay her to ask them profound questions like ‘Do you have clear goals and direction?'

She pulls the lid off a yogourt and licks it. ‘Do you feel that you're making a positive contribution to others?'

‘Negative.'

‘Do you feel good about yourself?'

‘Negative.'

She digs around in the yogourt with a plastic spoon. ‘You know what I think? I think you're holding yourself back from living your life's purpose.'

Last week in Sociology Mrs. Freeman was talking about the Underground Railroad. She asked if anybody knew what it was. Kirsten said it was a railway that went underground. Nicole said it was a series of secret pathways. Mrs. Freeman went gospel as she bellowed that it wasn't like that at all, that it was the slaves just following the gourd. Then she started singing ‘Follow the Drinkin' Gourd.' One of Drew's Extraordinary Women books is about Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who went back to the south hundreds of times to rescue more slaves even though she'd been beaten and raped by her masters since she was seven years old. She'd decided she'd rather die than live in slavery. She ran barefoot through woods and swamps with bloodhounds and shotguns chasing her. Big rewards were offered for her capture. She made it though, and soon after started risking her life on a regular basis heading back south to lead more slaves to freedom. Hearing about Harriet Tubman exhausted me. I had a stash of mini-marshmallows in my backpack. I kept eating them to keep my strength up.

Harriet Tubman was someone with a life purpose.

‘What if you have no life purpose?' I ask.

Blecher spoons yogourt into her yob. She's acting a little aloof because I caught her reading a
Double Digest Archie
comic hidden inside a
National Geographic
.

‘I mean,' I clarify, ‘don't you think it's possible that some people don't have a life purpose?'

Harriet Tubman lived to be ninety-two. No way do I want to live to be ninety-two.

‘Your life purpose reflects your deepest values,' Blecher says.

I can't even think of my shallowest values, never mind my deepest ones.

‘Living your life purpose,' Blecher says, ‘requires being clear and aligning yourself with your spiritual nature, moving past your inner blocks.'

I listen for the lunch bell. I only came here to get away from Bonehead and company who have taken to calling me a bull dyke and braying in my direction.

‘Inner blocks can defeat us all,' Blecher says. She taps her temple and her gut in case I don't know the meaning of
inner blocks
. ‘You are your own worst enemy,' she adds.

‘Can you give me some examples of people with life purposes?' I ask, stalling for time. ‘I mean, I can only think of dead ones.'

Blecher rips a granola bar wrapper with her teeth.

‘Harriet Beecher Stowe would be a good candidate,' I say. ‘But she's dead.'

‘Harriet who?'

‘She wrote
Uncle Tom's Cabin.'

‘Haven't read that one.' She starts chomping the granola bar.

‘It was the first novel to really expose slavery in America,' I explain, knowing she's bored out of her mind. ‘She wrote it long before old Mark Twain figured out to write
Huckleberry Finn
, which is everybody's all-time favourite novel. Personally I think the last third needs work. Everybody talks like old Mark was the first one to point the finger at slavery, but the truth is it was Harriet. You have to wonder how much longer it would have taken to get the Civil War going without Harriet blowing the whistle.'

Blecher crumples up the granola bar wrapper and pitches it at the trash can, missing it, of course. With her mouth full of oats she can't speak, which is a plus. She holds up a finger to indicate that she will offer words of wisdom after she gets the fibre down. Fortunately the bell goes.

Rossi corners me at my locker. ‘I said I was sorry,' she says.

‘Don't sweat it,' I say.

‘Doyle invited me to Kirsten's party. Do you mind?'

‘Not at all.'

‘You guys aren't going steady or anything?'

‘Negative.'

She stands gnawing on a Bic. Under all that sparkly eyeliner I see the kid I used to know and I feel so sad. Because she was my best friend and we had answers and now we don't know
anything
.

‘Everybody thinks it's really cool that you're writing a play.'

‘Who says I'm writing a play?'

‘Did you really kick Larry Bone in the face?'

‘I didn't kick anybody.'

‘He says he's going to whip your ass.'

I walk away from her, to my biology class where I can get some sleep.

‘Come over later?' she asks.

In chemistry Doyle blows up something that singes his eyebrows. Conkwright starts yelling at him. Conkwright's one of those Scottish types who came here at age two or something but still speak with a Scots accent. ‘Just what do ya think yarr dooin'? D'ya want to buurrrn the eyeballs oot of yarr head?' He gets all red and starts blowing spit. Conkwright has this idea that he's sexy. He wears shirts unbuttoned to his chest and wraparound shades even when it's raining. The girls think he's hysterical and call him Cockwrong.

I finished
The Mayor of Casterbridge
. It ended with a wedding. Somebody had to kick off, of course. In this case it was Elizabeth-Jane's fake father, who'd figured out he loved her even though she wasn't his daughter. She continued to think he was her real father, but her real father showed up and the fake father told him that Elizabeth-Jane was dead. Then the Scottish guy bumped into her real father and sent for her. This caused the fake father to take off in shame with a couple of farm implements. Meanwhile the Scottish guy and Elizabeth-Jane started rutting because his wife died. The fake father returned for Elizabeth-Jane's wedding to the Scottish guy, but chickened out when he saw how happy she was with her real father, and left a bird in a cage for her. The bird died, of course, because no one fed it. A servant told Elizabeth-Jane that her fake father had left it for her, so she ran around looking for him. She found him dead in some old barn, but didn't sweat it because she was so happy with the wedding and her real father and all that. Happy happy happy. Meanwhile old Thomas was beating his wife.