The Sweetest One Read online

  We walk back with our groceries in the handcart. As soon as we get home, my dad starts on supper. He’s an awesome cook, works wonders with a wok. The first thing he did when he moved here twenty-five years ago was install a gas wok in the wall. It’s still there — massive, three feet wide, the kind you’d find in the back of a Chinese restaurant, which makes sense, because he spent his first ten or twenty years in Canada working restaurants. His food is so good you could sell it.

  He pulls a giant chicken out of the fridge on a Styrofoam tray and makes it halfway to the cutting board before the tray cracks and the chicken tumbles onto the floor. Flecks of dirt on it like pepper. My dad plunks it into the sink, sees my face. “It’s just a little dirt,” he says, rinsing it off, annoyed, probably thinking what is it with this family and its health standards as he pulls the chicken out, his hands under its wings like it’s a baby.

  With about an hour left in the workday, it’s time for me to go back down to the store, but before I do, I watch him tie up the chicken. If you grew up poor in the old country — any old country will do — it means you know how to tie a knot — out of grass, reeds, string, rope, animal hair, whatever. Nothing more useful than tying a knot to keep your cow, to keep your door shut, to keep your stuff together on a very long trip, to keep your memories. The chicken’s way too big for the pan, but in twenty seconds he makes it fit. My dad, the shoemaker, tells the chicken who’s boss.

  Downstairs, I sit around bored for most of an hour then run for the four customers who come in ten minutes before close. I come back upstairs just in time to catch my dad at the table with his shoebox of pills and his shirt pulled up. His age spots, his gallbladder scar — purple, eight inches long — and the bottom two inches of his triple bypass scar. He applies the alcohol, fills a syringe with insulin, and stabs himself in the gut. One time, I asked if I could help. Why not? he said, and showed me how. It felt weird, like poking a pin through canvas, resistance then give. He winced. I pushed the plunger down and he put his hand on my head and shoved it around, a loving gesture. Do it faster next time, he said.

  When my mom’s done the books, she comes up for dinner. The chicken, in pieces on a metal plate, smells really good but is a little too pink. Trina would have eaten it. I can’t.

  Two minutes into the meal, I drop a chopstick then duck under the table to find it and see my mom’s already taken her shoes and socks off, her calloused, flaking feet hovering over the filthy floor. She’s kicking them together like a little girl. Up top, a pained expression, her eating face. My mom doesn’t eat for taste, she does it to stay alive. Probably wouldn’t eat if she didn’t have to. I grab a new chopstick and when I get back there’s a chicken drum on my plate. “Thanks, Ba,” I say.

  His toothy, greasy-lipped smile, a piece of chicken in his hands. He sucks the meat off, happy as a clam. Then he gives my mom the giblets.

  “Mo bei gnoa!” she yells. Don’t give it to me. The giblets stay on her bone plate, I watch them get cold. He tries giving her other food, too, and she keeps yelling “Ngoa ji gei loa!” — I’ll get it myself — but she doesn’t.

  At the end of the meal, my dad complains about all the left-over meat. Best chicken in the world and most of it will be thrown out in three days. Indignantly, he picks the congealed giblets off my mom’s plate and eats them. Watching him chew it all up, I think of rocks and grit and coronary blockages. He looks back, astonished by my interest, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be eating that stuff, then his face melts into a smile, a guilty grin — but what’s he guilty of? We smile at each other, hold it for a while. I get up for more rice and he swats me on the ass. Some dads hug you, support your decisions, tell you that they love you. Mine hits me, bites me, swears at me, shows his love with aggression. Love hurt, he calls this.

  I’m hiding the chicken drum in the kitchen when the phone rings. It almost never does outside store hours. Trina. No, it’s a telemarketer. We wash the dishes then hang out in the living room, my mom in her armchair, my dad flat out on the couch. They’re watching Chinese tv on satellite. Me, I’m walking on my dad’s back and legs, soft and firm like Jell-O that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge for a month. When I’m done, I pull up a chair from the dining room table and watch the lawyer show with them till it’s time to sleep.

  When they’re in bed, I go to my room and write in my notebook, jobs that require the tying of knots: cook, cowboy, sailor, justice of the peace. Creaking. My bedroom door opens. It’s my dad, wondering why I’m not asleep yet. I’m a straight-A student, almost an adult, I can tell him what to buy at the Co-op, he trusts me with money at the store, but he still thinks he can tell me when to sleep. I guess he can. We take care of each other.

  Soon after he turns out the light, I sneak down the hall past their room, then down the front stairs and out. I’ve got posters and a tape gun with me. I started making the posters in June — a description of Trina and her car, when she was last seen, all that. I need to know, does she live nearby? Has someone seen her? Maybe she’s in danger or hooked on drugs.

  One step out the door, cold wind slams me in the face. Mike Brown’s dad Gary drives by in his cop car. I go walking down Main, down Fiftieth, putting posters on brick walls, lampposts, and windows downtown, and end up on the highway. Walk in this town long enough, and that’s where you’ll end up. That or a dead end. There are businesses along Main — my parents’ store, for one — but the highway is where the action is. School, grocery stores, some fast food places. I tape posters by the bars, by the all-night truck stop diner, on gas pumps, even though I know they’ll be torn down tomorrow. Gary Brown told me that business owners and town maintenance people have complained, that the posters constitute vandalism, but frankly, I doubt he’d do any different if his precious little Mikey went missing.

  I’ve halfway decided to tape a poster to the cop shop window when I see a single headlight on the highway, moving slow. A bike. Someone in an old man parka. Nice. And when I see who it is, my heart jumps. Ty Rodriguez. I wanna call out. He’s smiling big, toothy, thinks he’s alone, but I’m here, too. One a.m. We’re the only ones in town still out. Say something. Thirty feet away but he’d hear you. Where’s he going? Maybe just out for a ride. It’s a great night for it. Freezing cold and fucking windy, but it’s gorgeous and so dark out and the snow is blue. I’ve always loved an empty street. Even better when it’s a highway. I guess he thinks they’re special, too.

  Should I call out or shouldn’t I? I think as he sails by, past the town limit sign. A gust of wind goes through me.

  I watch till I can’t see him anymore, then walk up to the sign to see if I’ll exist past it. Just one step, just a couple. What’s the harm? One time I stood there for more than twenty minutes weighing the options, taking baby steps forward and big steps back. The streetlights are on but there’s a lot you can’t see. Maybe someone in a field with a knife. I could get hit by a car. It’s stupid to walk on the highway at night.

  Trina is right: I’m a chickenshit. There could be millions of dollars on the other side of this sign, or all the knowledge in the world, the perfect boy, the most beautiful thing I could imagine, all for the taking — but there’s only one thing, one person, I’d leave town for, and she’s already long gone.

  I finish the posters and go home.

  3

  *

  IN THE BEGINNING there was Sean. Or maybe it wasn’t Sean. Maybe there were others. You can only go so far back. I don’t remember what I liked about him, for years I only remembered him as a name. Something happened to him. Maybe he moved away or transferred to another school because he hadn’t been around in so long, more than ten years, maybe. Then in March, this guy came into the store, this total rig pig with permanently dirty overalls and hands. I only knew it was Sean ’cause he was cashing a cheque. He smelled like alcohol. I wanted him. Can I say that? Something about him, about all those rigger guys. But he didn’t remember me. I didn’t ask if he did, but I knew. I cashed
him out and didn’t say shit. I guess it’s fine. He’s probably stupid now. He was probably stupid then, too.

  Sometime after Sean was Craig Jamieson, with the machine-gun laugh. His dad owned the fruit stand. My dad and I would go on Saturdays or after schools, we would pull up in the grey Olds, and fear would creep up unannounced like a lion in a nature show, then pounce. My dad would get out of the car. Me, I wouldn’t even unlatch my seatbelt. “Lui la,” he would say. Come on. Then we’d stand out there on the gravel in the heat, my dad pointing at the baskets of cherries and peaches he wanted, changing his mind sometimes, while Craig and I would have an awkward moment, talk a bit about a light subject like school or the weather, I don’t remember. Craig would joke. I wouldn’t, not with my dad standing there. What’s the worst that would’ve happened if I’d talked to him more? I don’t know, didn’t think that far, I was that scared. What I did know was I’d catch shit from my dad if he so much as suspected. He’d beat the shit out of me with a shoe, a hanger, whatever he could find when we got home. He would.

  Between Sean and Craig was Derek Mason, who I remember one time on the steps of Spring Hills El drawing a big fucking tank shooting puny little soldiers. Pinpricks of spattered blood. That was our moment, me watching him draw. Five years later, in Grade Seven, some of us were at this glacial erratic on the bike path, a big rock people in town call Big Rock. I’m not sure why I was there. Derek was about to make out with Amanda Rice, and it made me feel weird, the way he was touching her, the way he was getting in. A nursery rhyme song about the eensy weensy spider, only it was going up her leg and she liked it.

  I even liked Mike Brown at one time, until he came into the store with his dad, saying something about Stef or Trina’s ass, something about a “nice Chinese butt.” Fuck that guy.

  There was Travis Ingmire, who I don’t remember much of, and Steve McInnes, brother of Peggy McInnes, who used to date my brother Reggie. There was John Nelson, whose house I called. I found his number in the phonebook. I was so nervous, the moment after you dial the last number and it starts to call and you can’t turn back, the ringing, one, two, three, four, the woman who picked up who must have been his mom, but I forged ahead and asked for him. When he got on the phone, I asked him how he was and what he thought of the weather. His answers were brief, so I asked him more questions, about basketball — he was on the team — and about some funny thing that happened in math class that week. Eventually he asked me why I was calling, and I couldn’t handle it. He probably told his friends all about it. It scared me off calling guys I liked for years. I still don’t do it.

  There was Mark Petersen, this friend of Gene’s who I ended up being friends with, too, whose first words to me were “You look ravishing.” That ravishing thing was a joke, a thing he did to be weird, but I had daydreams of putting my face on his crotch on the benches in the hall at school. Things were not anatomically correct in my imaginings, warps in the space-time continuum were required. He didn’t know how I felt — I didn’t tell him — and before he moved away for university, he dated my friend Kay Berringer.

  There was Jake Kowalchuk, handsome and friendly, who everybody liked. We had mutual friends, and when Jake’s dad ended up dying in a fourteen-car pileup out on Highway 11, I thought our having something in common would make us closer. It didn’t. He was out of my league. There was Jason Parsons in Grade Six, who I chased and kicked in the shins, John Niedermeyer last year, who was ugly and sweet, but still too scary to approach, Andrew Grabowski, this guy from Interior bc who wore skater clothes but wasn’t a skater. There’s a lot I’m leaving out. Other than John Nelson, none of them knew, or maybe some did but didn’t show it, or they showed it and I was just too fucking scared to notice or do anything back.

  Do you ever feel like there’s maybe no one for you? Or that there’s someone and you have to find them, and if you’ve found them, you have to win them, and only when you do will your life be forever changed for the better and in ways you could barely imagine? That’s exactly how I feel, like there’s no one for me. Or maybe it’s Ty, and there’s no goddamn way whatsoever he’d be interested in me.

  I used to say stuff like that to Stef and Trina. Stef would encourage me, tell me in her no-bullshit way that I was smart and beautiful and that someday I’d know it was true, and guys would flock. One time, Trina started crying. “It’s sad, all right,” I said, laughing at myself, but she said she was crying because she didn’t understand how I’d grown up in such a way that I could never once believe a single good thing about myself. It made me feel even worse — like not only am I totally not attractive to anyone but also I’m fucked up in a way that is even weirder than I thought, and can’t be changed.

  One time when I was maybe fourteen, I was talking to Trina about this guy, Dirk Klassen, who was a snowboarder, canoer, mountain-climber kind of guy. I was saying there wasn’t any way, I barely even walked on the bike trail, and plus I was ugly.

  “Fuckin’ rights you are,” she said.

  “What?” I said, wounded.

  “See, even you don’t believe that shit,” she said.

  I guess she had a point. But being scared and worrying about whether or not someone good would want you is one thing. Letting someone else shit all over your self-esteem is another.

  I KNOW THAT, as a teenager, I’m supposed to hate teachers, but they’re okay. Nothing special about me, just I like learning, and they’ve got my fix. Plus, they’re all nice to me, even though I’m a bit of a dick at times. Biology is my favourite, and I do okay in French, but Mr. MacAvoy — Mac — my English teacher, is exceptional. There’s something about him, he has this passion you can see when he reads something he likes. He’s like that Dead Poets Society guy but less cheesy. He started the writing club, theatre club, music appreciation club, book club, and the school’s literary magazine. Spring Hills is a town of rednecks and skids and Mac singlehandedly brought culture to it.

  Today he spends class reading chapters eight and nine of Lord of the Flies. They’re the ones where Simon, my favourite character, goes crazy in the jungle. The boys mistake him for the beast and kill him, and it’s hard to read, devastating. Afterwards, Mac asks us questions, and I try to come up with answers, but after each of my attempts, he calls on someone else and builds their answer, not mine, into the teachable moment. It makes me ashamed of myself but I still try. There’s so much to say about a book like that.

  I’m surprised when he pulls me aside at the end of class to tell me about a student writing contest. He acts like it’s some big news. I tell him that most of the things I’ve written are sad, cheesy, angsty, or plagiarized, but he gives me an entry form anyway.

  At lunch, I find Nancy in the library, finger at her drooly mouth, reading Mists of Avalon. In the movie of my life, she would play my best friend, but “best” means “most good,” not necessarily “very good.” She’s not the bottle I pour my life into — she doesn’t always know what to say, and I don’t run to her when things get tough.

  Nancy wants to keep at it, so I get up, find The Illustrated Man. I love the idea of an illustrated man. If you were in love with one, you’d be allowed to stare. When you were together, he wouldn’t have to tell you how he felt about things — all those moving pictures on his skin. For a while, he might stare back, but you’re plain as a blank page. Eventually he’d get bored and leave. Or maybe he would see something. Maybe he’s tired of all those tattoos and would be glad to look at you.

  After school, some of us go to kfc. Nancy says she got a letter yesterday from the University of Alberta that said they’d keep her in mind for a full scholarship, and that they’d let her know early next year. I don’t want to talk about this but we start going around the table anyway. Kay says, “Yeah, I don’t know,” and Luke says he got conditional acceptance to u of c.

  “Seriously?” I say. Luke’s marks are in the Cs.

  “Serious as a pig’s teats,” he says, and I’m so happy for him that I get up and give him a noog
ie. “Yeah,” he says. “Figured it’s the only way to get out of this shithole. How about you?”

  “Haven’t really thought about it. I mean, I’ve looked into it, but I haven’t made up my mind,” I say, then ask — though it’s only Tuesday — “What’s everyone doing on the weekend?” Luke says Kat Mitchum might be having a party. Kay says she’ll go if it happens.

  When we’re done at kfc, Luke and I go downtown. His dad owns Johnson Hardware on Main. We walk down Fifty-Second, turn down at the hospital. Fewer streets in this town than wrinkles, than blood vessels in my hand.

  It’s minus ten, but he’s wearing shorts, no coat, and his arms are crossed. We’re breathing clouds. “God, put on a fucking coat, will you?” I say.

  “Fuck you,” he says, over-emphatic, and it hurts though I know he’s kidding.

  We pass posters I put up last night. Luke sees them but doesn’t mention them. Not much of a talker, Luke. We pass the old iga, the old Zellers, the Nutters.

  “Fuck, I can’t wait to be in Calgary,” he says. “My mom’s such a fucking dick.” I agree, but don’t say anything. Ruth Carcadian thinks she’s hot shit, and likes nothing better than to gossip at the iga.

  After leaving Luke at his dad’s store, I go to the library, the public one this time, to read the encyclopedia. Yeah, it’s geeky. My brother Reggie read the dictionary because he thought it’d help him get into a better school. It didn’t help his communication skills, though maybe all those words gave him a rich internal life. I hardly knew him, but I liked to think of him composing secret poems in his head about the conundrum of existence, or about butterflies, while he was pumping gas or folding jeans at the store. Me, I read the encyclopedia for fun. Learning for learning’s sake. I’m a model citizen. Who needs university when you’ve got the encyclopedia? S for sloths and snails and squid.