The Cloaca (9 page)

Instead, Frances rewound her
Golden Girls
tape to the beginning.

The only hint of a party at the address Derek had given was an orange balloon tied to the hook of the mailbox. It lolled on the porch with the same spits of breeze that seemed intent on lifting Frances's party dress. There didn't seem to be anybody home, never mind a kid's party raging. For years the neighborhood had been something of a slum, the houses sectioned into apartments in which dead bodies were sometimes found. But now families were moving back, and the houses were being restored. Derek's house, or the one he claimed was his, had an awkward look, like a pair of cut-off jeans that had had the legs sewed back on.

Frances made up her mind that this party was all a trick and decided to go home, where she could smoke an apple and lay carpet in the shed. Instead she went up and knocked. She had bought a present and a new dress, after all. In a vintage boutique, Frances had fingered the racks of the children's section and found some options, most of which, when she tried them on, looked more slutty than cute, settling at last on a bland mauve dress with shapes on it that looked like flowers if you weren't looking. Paying for the dress, Frances had spotted the perfect gift for Derek on the shelf behind the cash.

Peering through the cup of her hands, Frances could make out nothing through the bevelled glass. With her ear against the door now, she rang the bell and waited for sound.

Something hit her between her shoulders and she jumped, dropping Derek's present. “Fuck you!” Frances yelled out. Reaching around, she grabbed for the arrow or the knife or for whatever the fuck might be sticking out of her back.

Derek was at the bottom of the concrete steps, arms limp at his sides. A hot pink plastic bird the size of a mouse lay there on the porch. Frances picked it up and shook her fist. “I'm keeping this,” she seethed at Derek, trying to crush the thing in her hand. The beak and feet just dug in.

“It was for you anyway. Everyone gets one.”

“Well I'm still keeping it.”

Party or no party, Derek was dressed for one. He had on what appeared to be a crinkly plastic Dracula cape and two pointed party hats on either side of his head, making horns. The T-shirt he had tucked into his swim trunks read
It took me 50 years to look this good.

“Happy birthday,” Frances said.

“I didn't do anything.” He took a few urgent pinches at his crotch.

“Then where's your mother? I'll congratulate her.”

“She's out. Her and my dad. They went out to pick up the clown and the magician. Their car broke down.”

“The clown and the magician were coming in the same car?”

“I guess.” Derek walked up the steps, his cape luffing behind, and picked up his present. “This is mine?”

“Maybe.” The only thing Frances had around the house that resembled wrapping paper was tinfoil. The present glinted in Derek's hand like a piece of some crappy spaceship.

“Is it a book? Or is it one of those things where I'm supposed to think it's a book but that's only to throw me off the trail of what it really is?”

“You'll have to open it to see.”

“I'll put it with the rest.”

“Where's everyone else?”

Derek looked around suspiciously. “I don't know,” he said, an impish lilt to his voice.

“I guess they could be
anywhere
,” he yelled, and winked.

Derek looked at Frances looking at him, screwed up his face in imitation. “If you're not careful,” he said, “your face will stick that ugly way.”

Frances followed him into the house. It didn't smell like a boy lived here. The place had the smell of cardboard and potpourri. She imagined a trembling elderly couple bound and gagged in a closet somewhere. Hung low on the foyer wall was a framed picture of Derek with Shania Twain. Shania had been caught in a blink and Derek was holding a baby like he was asking the camera what it was. His smile looked out of place. Frances had only ever seen a grimace carved into his pumpkin. She pressed her thumb on Derek and then considered the patterned haze she had left over his face.

“I didn't know you knew Shania.”

“She smelled like old macaroni,” he called from the other room.

In the living room she found him on his hands and knees, lifting up the flaps of the couch. He had taken off his sandals where the hallway linoleum turned to salmon-coloured carpet. Frances slipped her own sandals off.

She wanted to bend down and pet him like a cat.

“I can get up fine on my own,” Derek said, looking at Frances's outstretched hand. With a put-upon sigh, he stood up and dusted off his hands like he had been fixing the couch.

“Did you lose something?”

“I'll lose it on you if you want.”

The living room was stale and staid like a department store. Innocuous pastel floral patterns covered the surface of the room and the carpet looked and felt like it had hardly been walked on, except for a few slithering lines that had been gouged into it. Frances imagined Derek rolling through the house on the rollerblades she had seen him delivering papers in.

“So this is where you live?”

Derek put his finger to his lips and kissed it viciously. He pointed at the curtains and nodded at Frances. Frances nodded back. And she tried winking. Derek tiptoed to the curtains and poked his head behind, then submitted himself completely.

“So you weren't there for it, but Marilyn gave us our final project last class.” There was a disturbance behind the curtain, like he was wrestling with something back there, but then the fabric settled. Derek's toes, pale baby carrots, stuck out from under the hem. “She says she wants us to draw what we want in life. She says that all she wants it to be is true.”

Derek came out the other end of the curtain, and Frances half-expected him to have performed a costume change.

“‘All it has to be is true?' What does that even mean?”

“If you'd gone to class, you wouldn't have to ask. Sheesh. She said that there's no such thing as good. She said that we have to stop worrying about if something is good or bad, and just do it true.”

“Oh please.”

“What?”

“Don't you just hate that?”

“Hate what?”

“Marilyn. All her hippy shit. Don't you just hate her?”

“No,” Derek said. He stared at her, and blinked.

“I love Miss Voss,” he said, in a kid way, where he didn't seem to mean that he liked her a lot, or liked her class a lot, but that he actually loved her in a sincere way. “You don't like the class?”

He passed Frances, slipped his sandals back on, and went into the dining room where he bent slightly to look under the table, and then parted a fern in the corner. Carrying on into the kitchen, he opened up all the drawers, and the oven, peeping into all these nooks. Frances kept on him. On the fridge there were seven little magnets with the days of week on them, each pinching a twenty-dollar bill.

“Derek,” she said, “about that class.”

“What about it?”

“Well, to tell you the truth—” She had imagined quitting the class as being a crushing blow to this kid. Maybe the Bad Service teens were right and Frances was his first love. Maybe his cagey-ness had everything to do with the awkwardness of being enamored with an older woman who was showing a consistent interest in him. Maybe she was a replacement for his non-existent mother. Maybe the thing he had been working so maturely on, the thing that he worked so hard to keep hidden from her, was a grand, badly drawn declaration of love. But, now that Frances was poised to tell him, it seemed likelier that he wouldn't care in the slightest.

“You've been lying to me so far?” His face took on that old, serious cast.

“No. I've… That's just a thing to say.”

“What a thing to just say.”

“Derek, I don't think…”

“Wait,” he said. “Shh,” he said. “Wait here. Don't move.”

Derek winked at Frances, and with stealth and lightness passed back through the foyer, careful not to make a sound closing the door behind him. Abandoned, Frances waited. She wanted to be in the exact same position when he came back.

While she waited Frances did the math in her head. For this boy to be turning ten today he would have been born in 1999. What had Frances been doing in 1999? She didn't think she had even been on the internet by 1999. That Betsy girl would have been eight. Meaning Frances had put her mouth on the private parts of someone who had been eight at the same time that Frances had been, legally, an adult. How was that not a kind of pedophilia? What was the difference, then, between that and putting her mouth all over Derek's private parts?

Probably she had been starting her first year of university, or already a year in, doing too many chemical drugs and drinking too much, in love with bands she would never listen to again. She had lasted a year and a half in biology before becoming convinced that she wasn't learning anything. She had been dating this Gregory guy for a lot of that time and when she dropped out they moved together into a communal house with a few people and a couple families in a part of town that was all identical looking houses now. There were so many people doing so many things, all of them options. Frances could become an organic farmer, or a magician, or a social worker, or she could work in a café in Guatemala, or she could be a brewer, or a bass player, or a paleontologist, or speleologist, or who the fuck knew what. Life became so gaping and full all of a sudden. There were doors everywhere, all of them wide open. Any of these people she could be like, but Frances wanted to be like all of them all at once. Then one of the children brought lice home and everyone in the house was crawling with them. Everyone had to shave their heads. And while Frances loved how she looked with a shaved head, she hated how a house full of people with shaved heads looked.

If Frances went bald on a Friday, she had moved into her father's house on the Sunday, where she had lived for a season. She watched talk shows and read
Franny and Zooey
over and over again until she became convinced that her not understanding the stories was a kind of understanding. She got lit in the backyard while her dad was at work, found a few alien-looking fake penises in her step-mom's drawer and put the batteries upside down, and yelled at her dying cat Aleatha to get a job. And somewhere during all of this, some poor woman was forcing a football with red hair out of her strained privates.

When after a few minutes Derek didn't come back, Frances gave up not moving and went to the drawers and considered stealing a spoon. She found one like she liked, but had no pockets in her dress to hide it away in. She tried to stow it in what little cleavage she had, but the spoon fell right out the bottom of her dress. She settled on sticking it in her armpit, bending it, and then returning it to the drawer. A cough came from upstairs.

A track ran along the wall. At the top was a simple metal chair like the ones that flight attendants use. Making as little noise as possible, Frances climbed up to the chair and sat down on it. She searched for a switch to work the thing. On her knees, she saw the imprints. In the carpet there were two trails like the ones in the living room. They wended under the door of the first room. Frances got close to the wood and listened. There was the sound of a person trying not to make any noise. And maybe it was her own desire for just a little sip of some right then, but Frances was sure she could smell just the faintest hint of pot wafting from the room.

Frances curled her fingers to make a tiny, cautious knock, but instead headed for the door at the end of the hall.

A normal boy's room with A
Star Wars
poster on the wall, a few actions figures scattered on the floor that were probably being played with less and less each day, a tiny desk that was more a place to throw things than to do work at, a bed made by an adult. Frances opened the top drawer of Derek's dresser and took out a pair of underwear. Little robin's-egg-blue boy's underwear, practically panties. With no pockets to stuff the little bundle in, Frances pulled Derek's panties up over her own.

There were two framed newspaper articles hung beside the door. One had Derek smiling that same creepy smile in a heap of books. According to the caption, he had read two hundred books this summer, raising over one thousand dollars for the MS Read-a-Thon. The other announced Derek as the Corbet Mercury's Carrier of the Month for April. Derek's bio read, “Derek enjoys school, baseball and drawing! He is committed to delivering the news to you on time, rain or shine!”

Frances decided she would destroy the room. Tear the sheets from the bed, empty out the drawers over the floor, knock down his books. Instead, Frances went to the bookcase, set up just under the window, and looked at his collection. Among the
Encyclopedia Brown
s,
Hardy Boy
s, R.L. Steins, and a few John Grishams and Michael Crichtons, there was the library's copy of
Beginner's Ornithology
.

She flipped through, looking for that bird Derek had claimed to be the night she drove him home, the one that went “su-weet.” But most of the birds were indistinguishable, as birds do seem unless you know specifically what you're looking for. Printed in the late 40s, Frances figured a handful of the birds in the guide must have since died, eaten into extinction by neighbourhood cats, the only sign of them left in the world a stunned engraving in some overdue library book. Any beginner ornithologist learning with this book would be watching the skies and bushes for little things that had disappeared forever ago.

On the desk Frances saw, under a pile of neatly folded shirts, Derek's sketchbook from class. She slipped it out from under the clothes and considered it. The pages Derek had drawn on were wavy and thick next to the remaining, fresh pages. She could rip out all the art, scribble over every drawing, or steal the notebook and hand it into Marilyn as her own, becoming the star pupil of the class, eventually rocketing to international fame, her work lauded for its “youthful unpretentiousness.”