Orphan Love Read online

  ORPHAN LOVE

  A Novel

  NADIA BOZAK

  For Joe

  CHAPTER ONE

  Across the highway from the lake there’s a trailer hidden in the bush, far enough back you can’t see it from the road. The man inside thinks this helps keep him and his kid and his wife, before she left him, safe from law and men and Indians, blood brothers and half-sisters and anyone else who wants to tear his skin or break his nose, his neck, his hardened heart. But one morning in spring this stranger comes walking down that bit of lost and empty highway and spots the trailer through the dawn-lit trees. So doing, the stranger crosses the road and disappears into the forest. And with careful, soundless bootsteps creeps up on that hidden trailer, stealing quick peeks in each of its four windows, and then, gun cocked, breaks through its plywood door.

  Inside there is a little old baby, maybe the last one of its kind. Diaper rotting, skin crawling, and all alone except for its dad, passed out in pissy pants and muddy boots, jacket open and without a shirt on. So the baby and its dad are together soiled and shit-smelling and, though it’s cold, almost naked. Maybe if that stranger hadn’t come, they would have died out there, the dad and the baby. The dad drinking himself to death, and the baby, meanwhile, dying of thirst. It doesn’t have to be like that. And it isn’t like that anymore, not after the gun-slinging stranger comes busting in on them that morning in spring.

  The dad knows the stranger, or once did, back in the town where both had the misfortune to have been born. Now, though, the hair is dark and cropped to the skull and the body has turned to toughened bone. The face is different too. Bloodless, lean, and meaner than before so the baby’s dad can no longer say he knows that face, though once it had been as familiar to him as his own. Before, he could see himself in the stranger, especially in the eyes. Now those eyes are sharp as razorblades and hard as winter stone. Now those eyes are the stranger’s alone. Dad and baby both try to find in them some sadness or sympathy. But there is none.

  Once the dad is belted to the bedstead, the stranger stands above him, gun pointed at the place where the heart should be. Boozy, woozy, madder than usual, the dad speaks in angry whispers, which turn into hissing, and finally he and the stranger both are yelling and then the dad starts getting beaten. Behind them the poor old baby lets out this slow, dry cry. No tears in the eyes or spit on the chin, for the kid is too long without a drink or a sip or a slug of milk or juice or sugar water to afford this kind of moisture. Poor old baby, mouth chapped up, its lips cracked and bleeding, instead of a coo or a cuddle, half-thawed hands tear it from its stinking crib. The baby tries to scream for real so the stranger, wanting it only to shut-the-fuck-up, shoves the closest thing into that tiny, dried-up mouth. Not a soother or a thumb, not a tit’s ripe nipple or a bottle’s rubbery one, but instead it’s the nub of the stranger’s twice-stolen gun. Not deep enough to gag the kid or hard enough to hurt it, but enough to say that the baby’s head—soft skull and jelly brain—is going to pop all over that trailer unless its dad speaks some words of truth.

  Seeing his kid like that, the dad begins to cry and soon enough he’s begging for the baby to be left alone, dribbling blood all down his chin and naked chest from where the stranger has been hitting him with the butt of the gun that is now in his baby’s mouth. And also there’s smoke. Something has been set to burning. No flames yet, but soon there’ll be. A dropped cigarette, and it’s smouldering in the sheets, you see. And it’s getting hot inside the trailer and also hard to breathe. The dad cries and bleeds and coughs and the baby is held hostage and finally he slobbers out what the stranger has come all that way to hear. Then he says too how sorry he is, again and again, he is sorry.

  And all the while the poor old kid is tucked tight in the cradle of a leather arm, suckling on a gun as if it was the real live nip of the mom who is by then several days long gone. Not much to ask for—just a little something to hold tight between soft little teeth and rub the tongue against, eking out some bit of comfort and relief. And looking down and seeing that, something clicks and clacks and breaks a bit, and the stranger says to the dad, “I’m taking your goddamn kid with me, for this here’s the last baby Bozak.”

  And the dad says, “It ain’t a real Bozak.”

  And the stranger says to that, “The shit me and this kid were born into is way thicker between the two of us than any kind of blood you say is inside the two of you. So fuck you.”

  And then they go. Leave the dad—now untied—but still inside that broken, smoking trailer. The kid’s still sucking on the cocked-up gun as they drive off down the road in the battered-up truck that was once the dad’s but is now the stranger’s.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pickles would come down to Black Dew Seat every year with my Uncle Bellyache after the two of them had worked a season together. Going further north, they’d sign on slugging pulp, driving truck, laying road, pulling their lanky weights with axe, shovel, hammer, and sledge. Their backs then were not yet bent. Laughs did not just turn right on into cough and the noses on them were coloured other than with vein and red. Worked well and went hard and then all of a sudden they found themselves sapped, whatever youth they’d had was gone. It didn’t take a lifetime for those two to grow old, their bodies and the spirits within quickened their decay, somehow foreseeing that neither of them would be given enough time to do so naturally. And so Pickles and Bellyache both in turn got sick and bent, and I watched as they went from men to skeletons.

  Septembers Bellyache and Pickles would wander back down to Black Dew Seat and help one another fritter away on booze and pool what for other men might have been a grub steak. Pickles stayed with us, and he slept on my floor because there was a rug in there while the rest of the trailer had only cold, waxed linoleum. Late in the night they’d crawl back from Kate’s Place in town, and Pickles would open my door, quiet and steady even though he was as drunk as Bellyache. There he would stand, this big Indian with long hair and booze breath, and in the cold dark I would meet his black eyes and just hold onto them, me lying there and his shadow fallen over me like an extra sheet. From behind him came the electric mist of the TV that Bellyache would have switched on and was doing his best to watch though it was only buzzing static or the colour bars. For minutes, one or two, we were still, held together by the silence of night, the glass of our stares. Then I’d give him a blink and only then would Pickles step into my room and shut the door behind him.

  Pickles didn’t like my name so he called me other things, as long as there was a B in front. Betty, Beth, Barb, Bonnie. “Evening, Bertha,” he’d whisper through the dark, crumpling down on his hands and knees. He’d scrounge for his sleeping bag. Smoothing it out, he’d lie on top of it, a mattress instead of a cover. Flat on his back, hands folded across his belly, he’d stay a corpse like that until morning. Except he’d whisper in his sleep, words that in the dark of my room and the glaze of my eyes took shape and moved, lasting just long enough for me to see them before they’d melt away and go. Pickles whispered about his brothers, his ladies, his mom’s home-cooked dishes, spoke words to songs I learned later were by Bob Dylan. The moon stained blue would be coming through the window covered with nothing but the night beyond it. And Pickles’s breath warmed the room that was always cold enough to make the nose run, and his words cradled my spirit. If he had a smoke still going, I’d hop down and pluck it from his big old paw, finish it off if there was something left to puff on. A little kid like I was, that little bit of smoke made my head as watery and light as a dream, and I’d hold still and milk its poison waves until they returned me to sleep. It was a bit of comfort, Pickles bunking with me. And though these nights did not total up to many, my little kid’s mind made the most of the
m. Would have liked Pickles for a guardian instead of my uncle, he being gentle in his silence while Bellyache’s was steeped in disinterest and, later on, disgust. The whole of Black Dew Seat said when I was a baby, Bellyache Bozak had found me and saved me, kept me fed and raised me best as a lonely man like him could do. For that, they said, I should be thankful. But I really, really wasn’t.

  So Bellyache quit working on account of poor health, and Pickles came less to Black Dew Seat. He’d pass through on his way to a job or a lady or some kind of promise waiting on him someplace, usually in the South. He’d come out and stay with us a few days, maybe even a week, but then Bellyache’s insides turned rotten and he started shrivelling up into a downright asshole, all of a sudden hating Indians and the government, and he even hated me a bit. Worst of all were the O’Right band of half-brothers who by then owned Black Dew Seat and much of the North. When I’d see Pickles in Black Dew Seat, he’d ask about my uncle and shake his head and say how Belly was once a good egg and real pal. Pickles was sick too. Didn’t talk about it, though, unlike Bellyache. His frame became half of what it was when I was a kid, and every time I’d see him it’d be a little less than that even. Grey hair to match his once brown skin. Thin as grass, tall as sky, he strode around Ontario on the biggest goddamn feet anyone in Black Dew Seat had ever seen. Going to Toronto or Montreal, maybe Chicago, but he never got there because he’d get some job along the way and keep at it until it was eaten up and drunk away, and then we’d see him on his way back north to get his shit together again. Then the next year, like a sign of spring, Pickles would be back at our crossroads trying for someplace sunk even further and deeper in the faraway cross-border South.

  That last time he was going for New York City, and stopping by Black Dew Seat once more, Pickles came into Kate’s Place. Not many folks in there, it being a weeknight and also many men had already gone up north for jobs, the season starting a little early. Only men left in town were old or sick or, more likely, hooked up with the O’Right contraband racket. At the bar sipping a coffee because that or pop was all Kate would give me, I was waiting on Slava O’Right, in the back shooting pool with some fellas and talking business too. Wasn’t allowed to go beyond where Kate could see me, and it was too cold for me to wait out in his truck. So no music or anything but there was hockey on tv, and Kate’s smelled strong of smoke and men’s cologne and from the bathrooms was something like overripe fruit, half sweet and half rotten. From low-hung lamps of red glass, light was puddled up in the gloss of seats, bar, and tabletops. That high shine plus the smell of the place and the smoke and the getting bored of waiting for Slava, I was slumped up over my coffee, burnt and sugared, whitened with powdered cream.

  Turned when the door opened. Pickles came in and from the night he brought with him a cloud of damp and wind. A wet snow was beginning to fall, and his clothes were moist and his loose jeans were darkened at the cuff. He lurched in and up to the bar. Such a bone-rack now. Long hair hung over his face to hide its thinness, he looked through it like tattered curtain.

  “Becky,” he said. “How’s things?”

  Me, I smiled, then shrugged. “Same old.”

  “You must be getting old, you in Kate’s already.”

  “I got connections.”

  Behind the bar Kate put down her knitting and sort of waddled over, groping for the glasses hung by a chain around her fatty neck. Pickles ordered whisky and a bottle of beer.

  “Your Uncle Belly still with us?”

  Nodded he was.

  “He know you’re here?”

  “That’s a dumb question if I ever heard one.” Lit a cigarette. Looked up at the TV though I didn’t give a shit about the game that was playing. Me hating hockey out of nothing but prickled goddamn principle.

  Kate returned with the drinks.

  “Well, here’s to you, Bonnie,” Pickles said. He tossed back his whisky. “And to New York City.” He sipped his beer.

  Looked over at Pickles, eyes narrowed, wondering how he knew going to New York City was for me a private kind of dirty dream and a desperate goddamn destiny. New York was where punk was born, and though that scene was pretty much dead and they were on their last legs now, Bob Crater and the Goddamns still played there sometimes. Or so Slava O’Right had said.

  “Really? New York City?”

  He pulled from the inside pocket of his coat a postcard. Not black and white, but grey and yellow. Wrinkled and crinkled and smoked. He set it on the bar before me, folded in half like it was a tent.

  “‘Central Park in Spring, 1969,’” I read off the front. “Twenty whole years ago. Looks nice.” Had to squint to make out what was pictured there. A real faraway shot of a big old lawn with a fancy water fountain and hot-dog cart with balloons tied to it. There was a wide path too and some benches. Thick trees made up the background, and behind them and above them was visible some of the city’s skyline. Maybe just its age, but the postcard looked all out of focus and blurry and also there were no people in that snapshot, not one. Even the hot-dog cart was unmanned. So ghosts on front and on the back was nothing but smudge. Not even the lines to write the person’s address, or a square to show you where to put the stamp. Me, I liked that on postcards you don’t put where they come from and they can never be sent back to you if you fuck up the address or your friend moves on or whatever. Instead you just kind of risk that it’ll get to wherever you mean it to. So open and honest and lost like that. No envelope to hide in, just words on a card. Must trust it’ll get there and must trust the whole goddamn world won’t read it along the way.

  “Is far,” I said, passing it back. “I want to go to there too.”

  “South and east, will take only a month or two.”

  In the generous spread of Pickles’s hands that postcard looked more like a matchbook. Palms were creased and calloused, the backs all routed with popping veins, smoking fingers stained ripe pumpkin.

  “Send me a card when you get there? Do that for me, Pickles?”

  Pickles nodded he would. “Don’t know where to send it, though.”

  Me, I didn’t either, never having had to give out the official whereabouts of the trailer I shared with my uncle. So I asked Kate the address of her tavern, and with the permanent black marker I used for both lipstick and nail polish I wrote that down on a bar napkin. Above it I put “Bozak” and a “c/o.”

  “Will be nice to get something in the mail,” I said, sliding him the napkin.

  Pickles nodded, took in a deep breath. “Going to see New York, Bea. Even if I just turn around and come home. But what I’m hoping is to die there. No better place to do it.”

  Then Pickles coughed for what seemed a whole minute. Gulped down the beer to calm his throat.

  He put the card and the napkin away, and as he pulled back his jacket to get at the inside pocket, I saw his big old hunting knife strapped to his belt. A real ferocious weapon it was, one I’d always longed for, fantasized about. Not to take hunting, no way, but to fend off the legions of shithead rockers at school who made my daily life something less than worth living.

  Were sitting quiet together, talking a bit. Heard Slava and his boys being jerks in the back. Pickles said he liked my nails coloured black like I had them.

  “Never seen that before except if you get one slammed in a car door. Then they got to drill a hole in it to let the blood out.”

  Shuddered at the thought of it, looked down at my fingers and the nails they grew. Black and jagged and long enough I could scratch someone nice and deep if I needed to. Pickles had his knife, I had my nails.

  Then some asshole up on the TV scored a dumb goal, and Slava and some of his fellas, pool cues in hands, smokes in mouths, came rushing out to see what important shit had happened. Whatever it was made them pretty goddamn happy, and they jeered and whistled and slapped hands and all the rest, and when things calmed down again, Slava ordered more shots
and pitchers of draft and told Kate to get me whatever I wanted too.

  He kept his eyes on the TV, but said to me, “Hang in there. Won’t be long.”

  Me, I got a little nervous about that because Pickles shouldn’t be seeing us together, him knowing better than most how Bozaks and O’Rights are supposed to really hate each other. So I just nodded real easy, trying to make like there was nothing much between us and maybe Pickles wouldn’t think I was in Kate’s just on account of him.

  An ad came on for some hardware store we didn’t have that far in the North. Slava turned to me then, and saw how I wasn’t alone. He sort of ran those green marbles of his up and down the bandy figure folded up beside me at the bar. Then one of them he winked. “How are ya, Pickles?”

  Pickles said nothing. Stayed still, clutching his beer bottle.

  Just to get something started, Slava put his arm around me and gave me an awkward sideways hug, drink turning him into even more of a cocky bastard than usual and making him even worse than dumb.

  Without even looking over Pickles said, “What’re you two up to? Should know better.”

  “Now you sound just like goddamn Bellyache,” I said back, kind of quiet.

  Pickles’s paws got tight, and the veins gave a ripple.

  “Oh, come on,” said Slava. “Me and the kid here are nothing more than friends.”

  Slava’s fellas headed to the back, and they called for him to come take his shot, but he stayed where he was. He lit a smoke. Stared hard at Pickles. “And it’s none of your goddamn business anyway. You just keep that liver of yours nice and pickled. And I’ll help you do it, too.”

  He picked up his pitcher and called for Kate to get Pickles another round.

  Pickles stood and his shadow fell over the stocky, cocky frame of Slava O’Right. He brushed his hair aside so the dug-out cheekbones and the sideways twist his mouth had acquired were partly visible. “You watch, O’Right,” he said slow and old and even. “Her uncle’ll find out and raise major shit.”