The Journey Prize Stories 27 (22 page)

Margaret looks as shocked as the girl feels. “How dare you speak to me this way?” she asks, stepping backwards, away from the boy and closer to the stove. “How dare you? I won’t have this disgusting, disrespectful language in
my
house. You do not come to
my
house and speak to me this way—”

“I don’t give a fuck about you or your house,” the boy says. “Give us our money! Aren’t you
listening?
We’re not leaving without our fucking money, the money we worked hard for—”

The girl grabs the boy’s arm to stop him from moving closer to Margaret, but he shakes her off and takes another step.

Margaret yelps. She’s bumped into the hot stove. She stays perfectly still, caught between the boy and the stove. Her eyes are wide and fearful.

“We want our money—”

“Shh!” Margaret hisses, cutting the boy off. Her voice is shrill. “My guest is still sleeping! You will wake my guest!”

“We want—”

“Fine!” she breathes. “Fine! I’ll give you the money. Move, move! Get out of my way!”

Margaret skitters across the hall into her office, backing into it so she doesn’t have to take her eyes off the boy. “You will wait here,” she says. “I will return in one moment.” She closes the door behind her; the handle trembles as she locks it from inside.

The girl kneels down and looks through the keyhole. She watches as Margaret pauses behind her antique desk, in front of a large portrait of a woman with dark, puffy hair and a
husky build. The girl had often looked at the portrait while feeding the fire in Margaret’s office. Now she realizes that it must be one of Margaret’s ancestors.

Margaret takes the portrait off of the wall to reveal a small, steel safe in a niche cut into the stones above the fireplace. She reaches into the safe and withdraws a thick, brown manila envelope. After pulling a handful of euros out of the envelope, she closes the safe and replaces the picture.

“What’s she doing?” the boy asks. He’s stepping from foot to foot, as if he’s about to charge at the door.

“She’s getting the money,” says the girl. “It looks like she has lots.”

There’s a crinkling sound; the bills emerge from under the crack in the door, as if Margaret is the ghost inside a haunted ATM.

“Thank you,” the girl says, as she picks them up. “Thank you very much.”

“Now go away!” Margaret calls. Even though her voice is muffled, the girl can still hear the fear in it. “You will pack your belongings and leave the premises immediately.”

The girl feels very strange as she and the boy start up the hill toward the cabin. She wants to say something to the boy—some words of comfort, or at least support. But she finds she can’t think of anything. Margaret gave them even less money than she expected; it won’t last long—maybe just long enough to get them to their next job. So instead she says:

“All that food. We bought all that food and now we’re going to have to leave most of it behind. We’ll never be able to carry it in our bags. And the refrigerated stuff will spoil.”

The boy doesn’t say anything. In the moonlight he looks deathly pale. His brow is dotted with sweat, as if he’s desperately fighting the desire to be sick. He’s looking at the courtyard gate. The girl sees Diane standing there, smoking another cigarette.

“She knew,” the girl whispers. “She could have said something, at least.”

“You really gave it to poor Margaret,” Diane says, when they get close enough. “I was listening, through the kitchen window.”

“I—I just snapped,” says the boy. “It was almost like I couldn’t help myself.”

“Well, some people just have that sort of temper,” Diane says. She blows out a lungful of smoke, making the girl cough.

“That’s the thing,” the boy says. “Usually, I’m not like that at all. I’ve never yelled at anyone like that in my life.”

“He’s not,” the girl says. “He’s the gentlest person I know.”

The girl can tell that Diane isn’t really interested in anything she or the boy has to say. Diane doesn’t know that the girl and the boy had been starving before coming to Margaret’s farm. When Diane shows the cabin to the next set of new hires, and she sees the unwashed dishes piled high in the sink, and the muddy footprints leading to and from the furnace, she won’t take into account how tired, how overworked and overwrought they were. She’ll just think they lived like pigs.

Diane follows them into the cabin and stands near the door while they pack their bags. The girl wonders if Margaret asked her to watch them, to make sure they didn’t break or steal anything before leaving.

“Where are you going to go?” Diane asks.

“To the town with the grocery store,” the boy says.

“There isn’t a bus station there.”

“There’s a hotel. We saw one.”

“Nobody in that whole town speaks a word of English,” says Diane. “There’s no bus, and there’s no train. How are you going to find more work?”

“Worst comes to worst, we can always just go home,” the boy says.

“But first we’re going to Venice,” says the girl. She doesn’t know why she says “Venice.” It’s the first city that comes to her mind.

Diane looks smug; or, somehow validated. “Venice?” she asks. “I hear it’s a beautiful city. But very expensive. Wish I had enough saved up for Venice. Well, I guess this is goodbye, then. You take care of yourselves. Take care, now. Take care.”

Diane follows them to the door and watches them close it before turning around and heading back toward the house. But she’s only gone a few steps when a shrill whinny sounds from somewhere near the bottom of the valley. The mule’s mother, who’s eating from the rotten round bale just outside the barn, throws her head up and returns the call, her belly heaving. A split second later, a dark blur shoots into the courtyard, clatters across the cobbles, and then leaps over the courtyard fence.

“It’s the mule!” the boy says.

“
Basta!
” Diane cries. “Basta! Basta!”

But the mule charges past her, gaining speed as It mounts the slope that leads toward the main gate.

“Catch It!” Margaret screams. She’s hanging out of her bedroom window. “Someone catch It, now!”

But neither the girl nor the boy make an effort to stop the mule as It gallops past them. They watch It come to within two strides of the main gate, collect Itself, and then leap high into the air.

When It lands on the other side, It kicks up Its heels and then bolts down the road. The silvery rays of the moon highlight the glossy auburn sheen of Its coat as It picks up speed, travels around a bend, and then disappears into the night.

“Do you think she’ll open the gate for us?” the boy asks.

The girl shakes her head.

They take off their packs and then the boy helps the girl over the fence. The boy passes the packs to the girl and then he too scrambles over, tearing his sweater on the way down. They start toward town, following the mule down the moonlit road.

A
chilles. Not like the god, in French you say it like “a shill”—the
s
is silent. He was my grandfather and he was strong, he could crack a walnut in one hand, he could do that until he got sick and died. I don’t remember what it was—I want to say it was his heart. I remember that they put a hospital bed in his room and that it looked funny with all the normal furniture. I remember that he looked like a child; is it a cliché, to say that dying people look like children? Because it’s more than just the way we tuck them in.

The day he died we didn’t go to his deathbed because I had lice real bad. My mom shampooed my hair with insecticide and sat me at the dining room table and combed out all the dead lice, wiping the comb on a mottled old towel. She has a very expressive mouth and I think that’s why she didn’t do it in the bathroom. We had a vanity with a chair and everything and it would’ve been the best place for it, but she didn’t want me to watch her.

“Are there a lot?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, honey, there’s lots of these babies,” she said in her trying-not-to-sound-excited voice. It was the voice she used when she told my dad she was gonna pop his zit. “Wanna see one?”

There was a dead louse on her thumbnail, its exoskeleton was beige, like a worm. I could see the brown food inside, my blood. But I couldn’t see the part that mattered, the piercing and sucking mouthpart.

My sister stared at us. She was doing her homework at the table, because she wanted to gloat or she wanted to be near us. That morning, after my father had stood up from the table with his dirty plate and peered down at my head and told me I had lice, they had checked her too. She was hysterical, the eczema and the asthma made her meticulous about her person. Now, she stared like she wanted to see the lice and didn’t want to see them.

“Do you want to talk about Pépé?” Mom asked.

I felt itchy and sorry, but mostly for myself.

“No,” we said. We hated feelings talks.

I could feel the comb’s metal tines scrape my scalp. Well, the lice were almost gone, it would take two weeks of daily combing. It wasn’t fair. I was eleven years old—too old for lice. I was a lost boy in
Peter Pan
and one of the other lost boys must’ve had them. There was another girl lost boy, but most of us were boys. I had thick, mouse brown hair that I never brushed. It stuck out from my head like a triangle. I had to cut it. And I knew that instead of a girl with wild eyes and wild hair, I would look like a weak-chinned, weak little boy. I had a crush on Eric E. He was my birdhouse project partner. I wanted to be pretty. I wanted him to think I was pretty, but
nobody thought I was pretty. I wished I were a boy and had a penis. I would write my name in pee. No, I would pee in a drinking fountain.

“Are you thinking about Pépé?” Mom asked.

“No,” I said.

The phone rang and my mom grabbed the cordless, still holding the tiny comb. She stood in the doorway and nodded and asked my father eager unthinking questions, “How’s your mother? How’s your brother? How are you?”

I watched my sister flip multiplication table flashcards that my mom let her laminate at the school board office. I liked to laminate pictures of whales from
National Geographic
. If you laminate something it says that thing is important and that you know how to take care of things that are important. We all loved the laminator. It was huge and it looked like a loom and it looked like a computer. Trimming the plastic edges with the paper cutter frightened me. I thought of a paper cutter as a finger guillotine and felt afraid of myself.

“What are you thinking about, honey?” Mom asked.

“Jane Eyre,”
I said.

“Which part are you at?” she asked.

“There’s a big black dog, but I don’t know if it’s a real dog or if it’s in her head,” I said. I wanted to read but it would’ve been rude. I asked my mom how much she’d gone through and she tugged the section of my hair from my nape to my earlobes and said, “Baby, I’ve gotta go slow.” So I stared at my sister, staring at her flashcards, and wished my eyes were blue like hers. Mom quizzed her on her multiplication tables, from six to ten, and she looked pleased with herself, and I hated her, the way you hate your sister.

I twisted up a tress of wet hair and imagined I could wring the lice out. I let it go and it clung to my neck, like a disgusting thing. If I were a Medusa I wouldn’t have lice. But I knew I wasn’t brave enough to be a Medusa. And I wanted to be pretty. I wondered what I would look like when I was a woman.

Mom asked Nadine to put the radio on and it was smooth and she moaned along. Alan Almond played Sade, Marvin Gaye, that kind of thing. My favourite part was the requests. Someone loves Linda, in Flint, and so the listening audience knows that Linda, of Flint, is loved.

The phone rang. This time my mom just left the comb hanging in my hair while she talked to Papa. After, she asked us about our funeral clothes and we pretended not to feel like funeral clothes are weird and boring to talk about. When they played “My Girl” we all sang along. Mom had the most gusto and Dini had the best voice and all our voices together made a mood.

We didn’t talk for a while. I asked Mom how much hair she’d done and she drew a line on my scalp with the comb, way beneath the crown. My sister drew the same two-and-a-half-storey house with a fence that she always drew. The sun and the seagull were there, in each corner of the sky. Looking at her drawing, she asked, “What’s for dinner?”

“You’re in charge,” Mom said. Nadine beamed because she was bossy. Mom knew how to appeal to us. She appealed to everyone, she always said, it’s not hard to be nice. There were no more frozen entrees so Nadine said, “Toast,” and we said, “Toast.” And I was grateful that she put the baguette under the broiler instead of toasting the Weight Watchers bread. I ate slowly, because I was hungry but disgusted. Mom kept
pushing my head down and saying, “I’ve gotta get some light on the subject.” But it was hard to eat with my head bowed.

“Shit,” Mom said. A louse fell out of my hair onto the dining room table. It scurried onto the napkin and onto my toast and got stuck in the peanut butter. Its posterior, which was most of it, twitched. We all stared at it. Against the rich ochre of the peanut butter you could see that my blood was very dark.

Mom said, “Oh, honey.”

The louse twitched still. I didn’t want my body anymore. White crumbs fell from my mouth, white louse eggs fell from my hair. Mom said, “Dini, throw away the toast,” and Dini whimpered with every breath until she dropped it in the bin.

“Those lice are fuckers,” Mom said. Nadine’s eyebrows went up. “Call them what you want.”

“They’re motherfuckers,” I said, and Mom grinned.

“Motherfuckers,” Mom said. And I wanted to crawl into her grinning mouth.

“Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers!” we screamed. We were all looking at the towel that was moist with what my mother had been wiping on it. The bugs and eggs she’d gathered from my damp hair in her comb. Mom touched the small of my back and I was glad she was touching me.

“That feels better,” she said. She liked to identify a mood to make sure it was a worthy one. It was an annoying habit, but right then it was right.