Smoke (5 page)

Tom turns his back to the boy, begins flipping through the newspaper on the coffee table. “Guess it's settled then. Now eat up; I'm driving.”

Buster's shoulders droop, he reaches for the plate and silverware his mother is still holding and stabs at his eggs with a vengeance. When he looks up, a mangled scowl upon his face, he's in time to catch his father and mother exchange worried glances.

T
OM'S RED DODGE
rattles and hums backwards along the drive with its wide fender flashing in the bright sun like a toothy smile. The name McFiddie is stencilled on the side in thick black letters. As Tom heads down the road he feels the dry pinch of his chapped skin and unwashed hair dangling in his eyes from beneath his cap. His mouth waters at the scent of a freshly cured kiln and fills him like a good meal. A Mennonite family in their horse-drawn carriage
click-clack, click-clack,
passes and waves. The man, holding the reins, tips his large wide-brimmed hat and the young woman, with a small child in her lap, smiles from under her black bonnet. Buster keeps his head low, eyes on the rubber floor mat. The windows in the Dodge are rolled down and his father speeds much faster towards Norwich, it seems, than he's ever done before. Fast, fast, carrying him backwards into an old life that will no longer fit.

The wind whips across Buster's ruddy face and directly into his lungs as if a giant bellows has exhaled. His eyes tear from the force of it and just as soon dry—salt and trepidation crystallizing. It's been so long since he's been off his own property that everything holds new fascination—a fascination tempered by anxiety. An insect hits the centre of the truck's windshield and its plump body spatters green and red. The Dodge's springs creak as they bounce over every pothole, over loose stones spinning backwards under the tires. Buster sits impassive and seething while his father lurches into a higher gear.

He can't help feeling anger; his father dutifully arranged for the business of cold cloths and changing bandages during his recovery, but he wouldn't talk with him about it. Sometimes Tom wouldn't even bring himself to look at Buster straight on. And whenever Doc John visited the house his father retired to the humid barn and sat on a bale of tobacco listening to a ginger or a tabby cat scratching at the door—no comfort to Buster, who has begun to sense that even the world of fathers and sons is off limits to him now. He shuts his eyes tightly and tries to conjure his once fine features, his tanned skin and dirty blond hair, scruffy and hanging in his green eyes. And then he remembers something the doctor told him. “Living leaves its fingerprints on each of us, son. Now yours are on the outside is all.” More than providing comfort, these words made Buster realize that his boyhood was gone for good, shed as remarkably as a snake sheds its skin.

Tom leans forward and twists the knob on the AM radio, jacks up the volume so that Elvis is belting it out as they turn a sharp corner veering north onto Highway 59. There is a field of tall corn, a dozen Holsteins grazing in a pasture next to a red barn. The last of the goldenrod sway like a sea of earth tones. Morning sun warms the land and the day-song of crickets and birds accompanies Buster's rushing pulse. The whole country moves and rings and coils up inside him with the smell of corn, pig and sweet, bitter tobacco leaf, one smell and sound leaking into the next. It's peaceful. He concentrates on the radio—
Don't be cruel
… Tom pulls to an abrupt stop forty feet from the school's entrance, shifts his truck into neutral. “Anybody gives you trouble, Buster, you let me know.” He gestures to the door with a prominent chin. “Now, show 'em what we're made of.”

Buster opens his mouth to protest, but making a public appearance is unavoidable and is as much for his family's sake—more so— than for his own. In the face of war, unemployment, even scandalous local affairs, the villagers always look ahead with a resounding “Never mind!” Stony-faced and tight-lipped is the only respectable way to carry on. He understands first-hand the courage this stoicism requires. He is different in a place that doesn't accommodate difference easily. Hell, even
he
doesn't. Maybe there are other villages, he tells himself, other towns and cities far away where someone like him, with his appearance the way it now is, might feel less exposed. Though if such places exist he doesn't know where. No, odd is odd. Different is different, anywhere. Even among gangsters like those in Doc John's stories. Even in sprawling, electric places like Detroit or Chicago or New York. Why should Smoke be any better? He cranks the door handle and slides out of the truck without raising his eyes. He slams the door as hard as he can and watches his father drive away, leaving him standing there to face his new life with fear and dread coursing through his body like wildfire, the gritty taste of soil sticking to his tongue.

Norwich High sits mightily on the outskirts between villages. Its yellow brick walls are two storeys high and as unyielding as Buster remembers. Open windows sparkle and wink in mocking delight. He covers his face with one hand, using it as a visor, and squints. Others arrive—three, four, five to a cluster. Hank, years before, walked to school with him, and in a rare instance Buster wishes his big brother was alongside. He faces the school like David facing Goliath, shrinks back into his mottled skin until he's certain he is surrounded by scars on all sides, and darts across the street to hide behind a large oak tree.

He watches with gigantic eyes as his best old buddy in the world, Donny Bryson, drives up in a big car with whitewall tires. It's so big, Buster thinks, it probably doesn't fit inside Mr. Bryson's garage. And then Donny skids that robin's egg blue Chevy Bel Air to a careless stop in the school parking lot and slips out the open window instead of using the door, like a flaxen-haired James Dean. How did Donny have money for it? He must've bought it second-hand, Buster thinks. Fixed it up. It hadn't occurred to Buster that while his life turned inside out, someone else's might have altered. Donny has also grown an inch or more, his chest filled out barrel-like. He even has muscles.

The most popular girls stand nearby in a small circle, comparing new clothes, a wristwatch, who is wearing a girdle. Buster knows their names: Sandra, Diane, Karen, Susan. They giggle and titter by the front entrance, craning their pale thin necks like Canada geese while Ivan Rombout and Donny slug each other, pull off their black leather jackets, sling them over their shoulders and puff up, peacocks showing off plumes.

Jelly Bean trails the others. She slips out of the school bus and runs to catch up to the older girls in her shiny navy and white saddle shoes that pinch. She is younger than her classmates by one year, and was advanced to grade ten because she is clever. She might have spotted Buster across the street before he ducked back out of view. He isn't sure. “Just keep moving,” he whispers under his breath. “No one's asking you to be friendly.”

Nobody asks Jelly Bean Johnson for anything. Not to a dance or to the movies or even for a walk home after school. It's her air of desperation, always trying too hard to fit in, coupled with her clumsiness, which causes people to avoid her. Her skinned knees and plum bruises mark her for an absence of grace. She's even been known, on occasion, to trip over her own two feet. Rumour has it that once she was taken, at her mother's insistence, to visit Doc John about an inner ear problem, perhaps find an organic explanation for why she was so often off balance. But it turned out that there was nothing physically wrong with her and ever since her mother accepts no excuses for what she sees as her daughter's careless and lazy habits. Hazel attributes the problem to Walter. To his kind. Not that she considers herself prejudiced. Certainly not. She simply reasons that it's the uncivilized side of the family making itself present. And she says so every chance she gets.

In an effort to compensate for her shortcomings, Jelly Bean walks, before bed each night, with the new King James Bible (in white leather) balanced on her head. She studies hard at school and rarely speaks out of turn. She keeps her clothing pressed and neat and in the winter she ceaselessly practises those ice figures Barbara Ann Scott has made famous. Though she is unlikely to ever make a nation proud, Jelly Bean would settle for the village or even her mother. The excruciating combination of her pursuit of excellence in all regards and her chronic inability to achieve it keeps her isolated from the others. She wears prim outfits the other girls envy, and her hair is bleached to an unnatural white-blond, always pinned back tightly with a bow or rolled into ringlets. She is beautiful by conventional standards, but only when standing still. The rest of the time she seems at odds with her appearance, trapped inside bumbling flesh.

It was Ivan's twin sister, Susan, who, after losing a relay race because Jelly Bean dropped the baton, publicly declared the girl to be clumsy. “She's as uncoordinated as a gimp,” was how Susan put it, in true Rombout fashion, and Jelly Bean has been living up to expectations ever since. Unlike Susan, whose perpetually combative nature and leggy soldier's stride clear her a path wherever she goes, Jelly Bean moves with captive longing, insinuates her way into the tight network of girls and stands around the tattered edges of social circles with whoever will have her, biting her nails and hunching her shoulders as if she has something of which to be ashamed.

The boys take each other beyond the bounds of the schoolyard at lunch for a punch and jab and are done with it. No big messy emotional deal. Ivan might start a fist fight or tease a younger fellow until he finds himself stuttering; those are the prices to be paid for hanging out with the big boys. It's all good for building character, at least that's what Buster's father and the grown men like to say. The boys with cars head into a starless night for a chicken run out on the Wolftrack to see who will flinch and veer off first. Sometimes there are accidents near the curve before Ball's Falls. Still, all of this is nothing compared with what a girl will do to another girl. Susan, as hardened as her brother, has formed a catty little gang, a frightening horde of backward glances and grimy sneers that linger for days and weeks and even years.

Buster watches Jelly Bean walk over to Susan and the others and sighs with relief when she doesn't stop to say hello to him. Then, as if sensing his eyes on her, she turns, finds him and waves. “Hey look everybody. Look who's back. Hi Buster!” He drops his hand from his brow and ducks back flat against the tree. He stands with both arms tightly at his sides and a lump the size of a cherry jawbreaker lodged in his throat. There is whispering but nobody moves. Nobody knows what to say or how to behave. The moment holds a raw and creeping stillness that somehow tells them all to keep back. It's his one chance, Buster knows, his only moment to cross that invisible line the fire has drawn and reintroduce himself, but he can't find the courage. The familiar faces stare with blank, unmarked expressions as if the sight of one so disfigured has erased their sense of themselves. It's a look he will soon come to expect, and even take for granted. He steps up halfway to meet Donny and Ivan.

“C'mon,” says Donny fidgeting with his hands. “We should make good.”

“Act normal,” whispers Ivan.

Buster reaches out for the secret shake and Donny hesitates, then gives the double wink, the right eye and the left. Buster tries to reciprocate but his left eyelid simply will not move. The scar has grown dense, closing the outer edge of his lid to the top of his cheek. He grimaces with the effort and this draws lingering attention to his face. Donny shuffles his feet and Ivan stares. Again Buster tries, using all the muscles in one side of his face, to force his eye into that old position and render everything right again. But it won't cooperate, and when he realizes this he drops Donny's hand.

“No big deal,” Donny says, wiping his sweaty palm on his jeans. “Let's just go in.” He turns, hoping his revulsion is concealed and that Buster will simply follow him back towards the others. Buster doesn't budge. He expected the others to react as he might have if the accident had happened to someone else. He expected nervous laughter. Pointing. Staring. Name-calling like “Matches McFiddie,” “Buster the Combuster” or something simple and mean like “The Face.” But they're being phony and this shows how profoundly different things are. Even the handshake is changed. “You coming?” Donny calls out from the bottom of the school steps.

Buster shakes his head. His face is a terrible new truth, an errant tale. Run away, run away, the morning breeze seems to whisper in his ears. Or else fall now, and know the sudden weight of exile. Ivan turns and, as if on cue, the others turn away also. Buster doesn't see or hear anything except his own hideousness and fear until everyone has scuffled safely up the school stairs and is far away inside. They're afraid of me, he thinks. They don't know me any more. He is strangely relieved.

Soon large windows open from inside the school and the distant echo of chatter and excitement carry out. It's the sound of lunch boxes, lockers, new seats being selected, rubber bands shooting through the air and the singing of the anthem, followed by laughter. So much laughter rippling, pealing, stabbing at the day until Buster knows for certain that there's no way he's walking in there now. No one is going to treat him with kid gloves ever again. Jelly Bean has a big mouth, he thinks. Why can't she mind her own business? And Ivan is a jerk. It was Ivan who'd made the dare and led the charge to taunt him into drinking to the point of blotto in the root cellar that fateful night, and now in Ivan's face Buster can see exactly how far he's fallen. But
Donny
. Donny is the one Buster is disappointed in and disappointment is far worse than any anger or resentment he carries. Donny stayed away all these months pretending there hadn't even been an accident—no sense of loyalty whatsoever—and now he's tiptoeing around, all nicey-nice. He used to be a real pal, Buster thinks. Now he's nothing but a fake. Him and his fancy car!