Rush Home Road
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For Milan
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
I wish to acknowledge a number of writers whose books were important to my research. They are, in no particular order: A. C. Robbins, Gwendolyn and John W. Robinson, John Rhodes, G. H. Gervais, Stanley G. Grizzle, John Cooper, Elaine Latzman, Moon, Robin W. Winks, Victor Lauriston, and Victor Ullman.
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I also wish to thank my mother and father, and my family, for things too numerous to mention.
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Indian corn
IT STINKS OF PISS
in the room. Sharla Cody breathes it in, thinking it's a sweet stink. Reminds her of the little white flowers Mum Addy planted instead of grass on the square out front of her trailer. They keep coming up, those little flowers, year after year. Sharla likes the notion of seeing them each spring, like an expected but unreliable guest.
Sharla forgets the name of that piss-stink flower.
Alyssum
, Mum Addy had told her, and said though it was not technically a perennial it would surely come back, and it did. Mum Addy said that's nature. Some flowers self-seed and
that's just what is.
Only a fool would take the time to wonder about
what is.
Once Sharla made a bride's bouquet out of the white flowers. Mum Addy shook a yellowed curtain from her mending bin and fastened it to Sharla's hair with wooden clothespins. They walked down the mud lane like Sharla was the princess bride and Mum Addy was the lady holding her train, doing that step then stop, step then stop, like brides do. Mum Addy sang some pretty love song Sharla never heard before or since.
At five years old Sharla still pissed the bed when she got lonely. Mum Addy'd cluck her tongue but never smack her. Both of them half asleep, she'd wipe down Sharla's parts with a scratchy wet rag that used to be a brown sock, then she'd take her back down the skinny hall to her own musky bed to sleep the rest of the night.
Mum Addy wasn't Sharla's Mum. She wasn't even a relation. She was an old, cigarette-smoking coloured lady from the mud lane of the Lakeview trailer park, twenty miles outside of Chatham, Ontario. Sharla was sent to live with the old woman when Emilio moved in with her real Mum, Collette. Emilio said if Sharla gave him a thimble more grief he'd set her fat ass on the stove. After that, Collette walked over to the mud lane and started knocking on doors. At the third place she tried, old Addy Shadd said she'd take the child in if Collette would give her a few dollars for food and such.
They never did get to the Kmart for new summer sandals like Collette had promised. Collette stuffed a white plastic bag with Sharla's bunched-up shorts and a couple of tops, a too-small swimsuit, and the pyjamas with the kitten on it. Collette said, “Mothers send their kids to camp, don't they? And boarding school if they got the money. No difference, so.”
“Yeah, but it ain't camp,” her neighbour friend, Krystal, said.
“I could give a shit, Krystal. Anyways, it's only till September and Emilio's car accident money runs out.”
Sharla knew her numbers, so there was no good reason why Collette had to walk her all the way over to Addy Shadd's. If she wasn't retarded, though Emilio suspected she was, she'd find number four on the mud lane. Besides, Emilio couldn't wait to fuck Collette on that green velveteen La-Z-Boy in the living room without worrying Sharla'd walk in on them again.
Collette lived off welfare and whatever boyfriend. You'd guess her about seventeen if you didn't know she was twenty-two. She was shapely, with creamy white skin, dyed blonde hair, and rare-coloured eyes that men said things about sincerely. She fucked Emilio good after she found out how much he'd be getting from the settlement. Emilio knew he'd be gone when his money was gone. He didn't care. Just looking at her mouth made him throb.
When it was time to leave for Addy Shadd's, Emilio hustled Sharla out the door. “Have fun swinging with them porch monkeys.”
Sharla was confused because she hadn't been told there'd be monkeys. Collette waved, whispering sad things about sending off her baby girl. Emilio patted her shoulder and pretended he didn't think she was full of shit.
In spite of the name of the place, there was no view of Lake Erie from the trailer park. And in spite of the claims, no way you could see across the lake to Cleveland on the American side, even on the clearest of days. Addy Shadd had settled at the trailer park in the late fifties because it was as close to the water as she could get on the money she
had. She thought it'd just be a temporary address, but after twenty years at the park she accepted that she'd never have a real lake view.
The weather'd been dry. Sun baked the mud lane where Mum Addy and most of the other coloured people lived and formed it into rivulets of hard earth. Hurt to walk on in bare feet and no good for a bicycle tire. Between the evenly spaced white and silver trailers, tomato and cucumber plants got ready to choke up cages of rusty chicken wire. On most of the squares in front there were old wood chairs and dented trash cans, a patch of crabgrass, or nothing. But Mum Addy grew those tiny, white, piss-smelling flowers on her square and felt the better for beautifying her neighbourhood.
Sharla was squatting on her haunches, picking up kernels of hard Indian corn from a pile near a shabby trailer somewhere on the way to Addy Shadd's. She knew she was stealing the makings of some child's necklace because each red or purple or golden kernel already had a neat hole in the middle from a needle pierce. She wanted the kernels and meant to make her own pretty necklace, maybe for Collette.
As Sharla pinched the corn gems out of the dust and dropped them into her white plastic bag, she imagined her necklace and how it'd be admired. She saw the shadow, but not soon enough. The foot caught her in the small of her back and drove her into the ground. She turned around to see who'd kicked her, blocking the sun with her hand. “What, Fawn?”
Fawn Trochaud was seven years old and lived with her Aunt Krystal in the trailer across from Sharla and Collette. Fawn had curly yellow hair and cloud white skin and big blue eyes like a picture-Bible angel. Sharla knew the Indian corn didn't belong to Fawn. She also knew it didn't matter.
Sharla got up, clutching the white plastic bag, watching Fawn. She didn't dare speak. Fawn took a step closer, kicking dust at Sharla with her dog-chewed flip-flops. Sharla flinched, thinking Fawn meant to hit her. But Fawn didn't strike again. She just ripped the plastic bag from Sharla's clutches and ran away.
A couple of bored mutts started a fight on the road. Sharla watched them, thinking she'd feel better and know what to do next if she could cry. But Sharla didn't cry, ever, and she had no sense of why.
Collette knew why. It happened when Sharla was almost two years old. She'd been an early walker but didn't get out of her crib much so she'd lost her head start. She had a few words:
Mummy, bottle, stinky, lighter, juice.
Collette's boyfriend at the time, Wally, was a huge man with shoulders so wide he had to duck and go sideways to fit through the trailer door. Sharla recalled him coming into her tiny baby room, filling it up like water in a glass, with his yeasty breath and cigarette hair.
It was a late fall day, smelling of Macintosh apples and maple-leaf fire. Baby Sharla shuffled to the back of the crib, grinding the nipple of her empty bottle with her tiny white teeth. Wally'd come to get something from the room.
He stumbled in, in all his bigness, and banged his shin hard on the edge of the old crib. He screamed,
Jesus Fuck, Collette!
, raised his leg, and kicked the rickety crib like he wanted to send it through the wall.
Little Sharla'd been steadying herself with her hand on the edge of the crib, and when Wally kicked it, her chubby brown fingers got slammed between the crib and the wall. Collette came in, fierce about the noise and the screaming. “Shit, Wally! You fucking asshole! Why'd you get her going?!”
“I never laid a finger! I never fucking touched her!”
Collette threw a “Shh” Sharla's way and pushed Wally out of the room, banging the door shut behind her.
Baby Sharla screamed and tried to pull her mashed fingers out from between the wall and the crib. She used her words. “Mummy. Hand. Mummy. Hand. Mummy. Mummy! Mummy! Mum-my!”
Collette only came back into the room to yell, “Shut up! Shut up and go to sleep!”
An hour passed while Sharla cried. She puked up sour milk and Chef Boyardee supper, chewed the rubber nipple off her empty bottle, and cried some more. The sound of the television in the living room went up, then off. There was no sound, then a
click-click
and banging metal noise. Baby Sharla knew her mother and Wally'd gone out the door and there was no one left to hear her. She stopped crying then and never did again for a long, long time.
After a while, Sharla's fingers went numb. The quiet
made her sleepy. She wanted to sink down into her sour, puked-on blanket but she couldn't sink down because of her hand being jammed, so she rested her forehead on the soft part of her arm and closed her puffy eyes.
In the morning, Collette was sick from too much Southern Comfort, grateful that Sharla was quiet and letting her sleep in. Around noon she thought she better go check though because her daughter had never slept that late before. Baby Sharla was standing up in the crib, her head turned to the window, runny shit spilling out the edges of her diaper. She acted like she didn't hear her mother open the door. Collette knew Sharla was mad about last night and going to be a brat all day to make her pay for it.
The smell in the room made Collette gag, then she saw the puke on the blankets and decided Sharla was going to get a smack so she'd learn. Collette reached into the crib with her fingernails. She took Sharla by the armpits to lift her out but she was stuck. That's when Collette saw the arm, purple and blue up to the elbow, the smashed fingers swollen like sausages. Collette said, “Shit,” and pulled the crib from the wall. Sharla didn't move her hand. She couldn't. Collette said, “Shit” again and called for Wally.
Wally was gone forever the next day. Collette took care to change the bandage on Sharla's hand and let her have a bottle whenever she wanted. She let her out of her crib more, too, with Wally gone and being lonely for company. Collette even brought Sharla a presentâa fat, mewling, orange and white kitten from the box under Krystal's
porch. Collette called the kitten Trixie and thought of getting her fixed but never did. Sharla fell on Trixie twice the first day, pulled her tail, and fed her Cracker Jacks. Trixie learned early to make herself scarce.
When a few weeks passed and Sharla could pick up a banana with the mashed fingers, Collette felt satisfied she was healed and that was the end of it. They never saw much of Trixie, though the bowls of cat food kept disappearing. Collette was sorry she brought the cat home at all, because now she had to put up with Trixie's heat screaming in the middle of the night and all the Toms squirting on her broken screen door.
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AND SO SHARLA STOOD
now in the hot sun somewhere on the way to the stranger Addy Shadd's, wishing she could cry and that someone would tell her what to do. There was no point in going after Fawn and the white plastic bag. The only thing she missed out of it was the Indian corn anyway. But she felt funny showing up at Addy Shadd's without her bag of summer clothes and didn't want to be asked questions about why Collette would send her empty-handed.
Sharla started walking toward the mud lane hoping some idea would jump in her head, and when she saw some ladies clothes hanging from a clothesline, one did. Sharla could hear the TV on in the trailer beside the clothesline so she snuck over quietly and pulled off three things fastâa
pair of big underpants, a shiny triangle-print blouse, and a blue-flower housedress with square pockets on the front.
There was something churning in Sharla's stomach. Maybe it was her shame at stealing the clothes, maybe it was because she was getting closer to Addy Shadd's trailer, or maybe it was that she hadn't had any breakfast. Sharla made a bundle out of the ladies clothes and squinted at the sun. She kicked up dust to amuse herself but wished she hadn't because of the way it stuck to her damp shins. Her shoes made
scuffa scuffa
sounds as she went along.
Except for the fact it wasn't paved, the mud lane was pretty much like the rest of the park, lined with white and silver trailers, most permanent, some ready to hitch and go. Little space to play or have a catch except the road. Cars, some better, some worse, parked everywhere. Sharla started at the bottom of the lane, looking up at the numbers, knowing that twenty-eight was a lot bigger than four. Up ahead, she could see two coloured children she knew. Nedda was the girl and Lionel Chase was the boy.