Help Me, Jacques Cousteau Read online

  It’s been a night. The adults all agree, it’s been a night. The dark lawn still flickers with the shapes of children. My father has found some sparklers and a boomerang and a long piece of nautical rope. My aunt says, “Just don’t hang anybody with it.”

  They’ve moved the kitchen table out onto the porch and lit candles. My brother is half asleep underneath it in a cardboard box; Mum has her bare feet inside the box, tapping her toe on the baby’s backside to keep him quiet. She and I look out over the lawn, where someone tightrope-walks along the fence and the girls spell their names against the dark with sparklers.

  My mother says, “Life is good when you’re little.” But the sister next to her snorts and reminds her of a few things. The two of them biting and punching and whacking with brooms, burying alive, hanging off banisters, jumping out of trees like Tarzan, fighting silently and in a conspiracy of nastiness. If an adult caught them, they would stand at attention, furious, with throbbing lip and grass in their hair. Fighting was private.

  “Your body remembers fighting too,” she said, and my mother nodded. Once a crazy old man had tried to kiss my mother on the street and she knocked him on his seat before she knew what she had done.

  “I’m so sorry!” she said, helping him up. “But you shouldn’t kiss strangers.”

  She looks at her sister now, who is pink in the cheeks with wine. Even I know that the two sisters are still competitive: who drives faster, whose memory is better, who saw a shooting star first. And the past is never forgotten. Last Christmas my aunt complained: “It wasn’t fair. You were always Tarzan and I got stuck being the ape.”

  Now I’m eight, lying in my room listening to someone’s nose buzz in their sleep. It’s another yearly visit from my cousins, and we have all chosen to sleep in my room, even five-year-old Andrew, who sleeps in my bed. His head points the other way and he’s brought his hockey pillow with him. We’re badly sunburnt, tired, and one of the cousins is allergic to something, her nose buzzing and clicking. Andrew sits up and his hand searches the bedside table for his glasses.

  “Hey,” he whispers, blinking at me through the lenses.

  “What?”

  “Which would you rather eat, a dead squirrel or a live snake?”

  Someone moans in his sleep. Someone else, closer to the door, says, “Dead squirrel.”

  “Okay, if you had to kill your best friend or your parents, which would it be?”

  Two voices now: “Parents.”

  “Oh, nice.”

  “Okay,” Andrew goes on, “what if you were …”

  The voices blather on and I slump down in the bed, tune the sound out. You can get the feeling that your parents are the only thing between you and disaster. But I also know that people’s parents do die. There was a girl at school…. I’m sure my mother could fend off just about anything, but sometimes I feel afraid for my dad — the way he drives, as if he’s in a bobsled, whipping along, his elbow out the window. Once I had a dream that my father froze to death, his car broken down in winter on a lonely road. In the dream, no one would admit to me that he had ever existed. I woke up in anguish. That afternoon, he was pulling apart both the dishwasher and the lawn mower, and I didn’t let him out of my sight. I told him jokes, asked him questions, followed him back and forth between the two mounds of wreckage.

  I’m drifting off to sleep while Andrew and one of the cousins discuss the merits of using high voltage on the alligators who live in the sewers. No one has noticed the nose-buzzer, who has woken up and is now crawling silently across the floor towards my bed. In a moment, just as talk turns to giant spiders, her hand will seize my brother’s leg though the covers and Andrew will go off like a train whistle, kicking me in the process.

  Andrew’s scream is legendary. He closes his eyes and his little fists shake, and when it’s over he grins, his cheeks crimson. Everyone wants to hear it. The bigger kids at school, realizing that they get only grunts and complaints if they hassle him, have started paying to hear it. Andrew’s been making some good money. In a moment, all of us, the cousins, the parents, the assorted dogs — perhaps even a few neighbours — will be rigid and wide-eyed, hearing a small boy falling from the sky, falling helpless through skyscrapers, dragging catastrophe down on us all. And then silence, followed by Andrew’s low, kooky laugh and the weary thump of adult feet on the stairs. A house full of pounding hearts.

  HEAVEN IS A PLACE THAT STARTS WITH H

  ………… ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK MY grandfather pulls up in his convertible and says do I want to go to the beach. I think that’s great and I run to open the car door — but then I see it. He’s got a dead dog in the back seat, and when I say, “What’s that?” he says it’s Rufus, but he doesn’t turn around. “Aren’t ya, boy?” he asks, not looking at it. I’m just catching the stink when grandfather gets an idea: “Race you!” he shouts, stomps on the accelerator, and fishtails down the street.

  My mother looks up as I scramble past her through the kitchen. She can hear the sound of squealing tires outside.

  “Was that Gerald?” she calls as I hit the back porch. “What’s he doing?” But I don’t answer; I’m planning my perfect route to the beach.

  When I get there I can see grandfather in his wide trunks standing in the water, swishing drops into the air, all stiff-legged as if this were the Arctic Ocean. Then he makes a big whoop and throws himself in. The dog is still in the back seat.

  My grandfather is paddling around in the water. I go running in with my clothes on to swim with him. It is as cold as the Arctic Ocean. I have this urge to run out again faster than I went in, but I just float there, freezing. Grandfather notices my face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m fine,” I say, gritting my teeth. When we get out my grandfather tells me my lips are blue. This is a sign my mother used to look for whenever we went swimming. If that happens, you’re about to get hypothermia, she’d say. The thing my mother finds so thrilling about hypothermia is that you can still die even after they warm you up. It’s as if your brain stays cold and then dies slowly while you sit there drinking cocoa.

  We get back in the car and Grandfather drives me towards home, but I tell him I want to go out for burgers, and he thinks that’s great. He turns the engine off and we glide by my house because my brother knows the sound of the car and would come running out. Then everybody would have to come and my grandfather might be forced to do something about the dog. It is getting late and the street lights are on, but the sun hasn’t quite disappeared yet. It kind of shoots out at you between the houses.

  “What do you want on your burger?” Grandfather asks.

  “Onions, relish, tomato, mustard, ketchup, lettuce, pickles, hot peppers, green peppers, mayonnaise, salt, and black pepper.”

  My grandfather turns to the little speaker outside the car window. “Every damned thing you got.”

  The speaker emits a crackle and a burst of gibberish and he says, “Right.”

  “I do calisthenics every day,” my grandfather says between bites. We’re in an open field and Grandfather has parked the car facing upwind.

  “I sit on my bum. But I’m not fat,” I reply.

  “You ought to exercise, Hazel, even at your age. It would build a good mind as well as a good body.”

  “Everything I eat has sugar in it.”

  “So?”

  “So I might get overstimulated and have a cardiac.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I say and wipe my chin.

  “On top of that, Granddad, Andrew kicks me every chance he gets and I can’t stay in one place that long. If I started doing sit-ups he’d be trying to sit on my face.”

  “Good point. You could always take up running.”

  “Flat feet.”

  “No!” he says, looking pleased, “You got that from your grandmother. At least you have something that makes you seem like family.”

  I sit and think about that for a second. “You mean I don’t l
ook like family?”

  “Well,” he says and looks down on me, “not that you look … well, you … frankly, no. I don’t know where you came from.”

  “What! What do you mean?”

  He smiles and bites at his double-decker burger. “Birth’s a mystery,” he shrugs. I realize he isn’t going to say anything more. I feel like getting in the back with Rufus.

  My brother is clamped to the TV, both arms around it, his forehead pressed to the glass as he stares at Rocketship Seven. Commander Tom says, “Sit back, son, you’ll ruin your eyes.”

  “No,” my brother says in his little voice.

  “Sit back, now. What if your mother walks in?”

  “No,” Andrew says and stares into Commander Tom’s soul.

  It is seven in the morning, a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, and I come down to find my grandmother sitting in our kitchen.

  “I’m not going back until he gets rid of it,” she says, embarrassing me with this honesty. I feel that children should never know about marital problems. Our lives are confusing enough.

  “I’m not going back,” she repeats.

  “You want some Eggos, Grandmama?” I ask.

  My brother shouts, “Me too!” from the other room, and his breath clouds Rocky the Squirrel for a second.

  My grandmother is folding and refolding a napkin, and she says, “What is he doing with it, the smelly thing?”

  “Maybe he misses it,” I venture.

  “Can’t he miss something if it’s in the ground instead of soaking into the Cadillac?” I know she’s not asking me. She’s sort of pretending he’s there and she’s talking to him.

  I put a plate of waffles in front of my grandmother. “Blueberry,” I say. “They’re good.”

  She pokes at the crusted edges with a long, slender finger, scowls at the plate. The look on her face reminds me of how I felt when I smelled the dog, Rufus, as I was standing in the sun beside the car.

  “That dog sure smells,” I say.

  “What dog?” Andrew calls. My grandmother covers her face and rushes from the room.

  “Andrew, let go of the TV,” my mother says in passing.

  “No,” he says.

  She keeps going and joins me in the kitchen. “What did your grandfather say to your grandmother? She’s all upset.”

  “He didn’t say anything.”

  “When was he here?”

  “He wasn’t. Mum … can I have —” But she has gone upstairs to tell my grandmother she’s not fooling anyone, she’s making things up; who in the world would keep a dead dog? I don’t have a chance to ask her for money. I ask for money every morning, and if I get it I buy as much chocolate as I can. My brother takes his face away from the TV to glance at me, and his hair sticks to the screen with static.

  “Andrew, let go of the TV.”

  He thumps his forehead back in place. “No.”

  I’m in the backyard trying to do sit-ups. I get about three done before I feel my stomach start to rip open. I stand up and hold on to it. Andrew comes out back, his eyes like pinwheels.

  “What’re you doing?” he says, hoping I’ll go back to it so he can kick me.

  “My gut just ripped.” I try not to move in case all the intestines come tumbling out. I imagine them looking like toothpaste when you spit it into the sink.

  “Did Granddad make you do that? Commander Tom’s a fascist. I ate Eggos for breakfast. Can you sing with your mouth closed? A is for apple.”

  “Andrew, go get Mum.”

  “This is a test; do not adjust your Indian. Have you seen the Breakaway Twins? Sound off at eleven,” Andrew says as he goes back into the house.

  “Hurry!” I yell and feel another little tear.

  I know the truth then. Granddad’s right. I am not really from this family. Something terrible happened at the hospital. Everything starts to make sense. I mean, at school they always forget who I am, and I’ve been there for four years! I could walk up to the teacher in health class and get weighed and she’d say, “Well, Freddie, or whoever you are, you’ve lost weight and a couple of inches! Do you eat properly?” I bet I could do someone else’s tests for them and no one would know. And don’t babies all look the same?

  My mother comes down and sees me out on the grass.

  “I was the wrong baby, wasn’t I?” I yell.

  “What in heaven’s name have you been doing?” she sighs, and hustles me in to breakfast.

  “Where’d the dog go, Granddad?” I ask. Andrew is standing with me beside the car as grandfather roars the engine.

  “What dog?” says Andrew, looking up at me.

  “God! That smelly thing!” Grandfather bellows. “I looked around one day and couldn’t believe it. He was dead!” He hit the steering wheel.

  “What dog?” Andrew repeats.

  “Is that boy all right?” Grandfather asks, looking closely at my brother.

  “I have twelve teeth. Heaven is a place that starts with H,” Andrew says.

  “You know, young man, you’re a little off-centre. You don’t look much like your sister, either.”

  “Grandfather —” I want to stop him.

  “Hospitals are terrible places, Andrew —”

  “Grandfather!”

  “— and I think you got packaged wrong.”

  “Prizes inside!” Andrew says, but he looks worried.

  “Want to go for a burger, son?” Granddad says, and off they go, Andrew holding onto the dashboard with both hands, pressing his face to the glass.

  II

  BISHOP AND THE AUNTIES

  ………… THE STORY ABOUT THE BIRDS is popular. Imagine a cold summer in Halifax, a restlessness in people, especially at night, and all summer an arsonist is hard at work. Warehouses burn, ground-floor shops roll smoke into the windows of apartments above, houseboats flame out along the shoreline, drift away. Finally, the Port Haven bird sanctuary down by the docks goes up. On that night, when he’s on leave from his troopship, Bishop says, he follows the smell of smoke to the huge glass dome, and he finds it lit from inside by flame. The shadows of birds, wild for escape, batter the glass. The uppermost leaves of indoor trees wave in the thick, convecting air; glass overheats, bursts over the street; rag bodies of tropical birds plummet through the night air, lie struggling on the sidewalk, or pit the hoods of cars.

  Andrew and I are paralyzed as Bishop tells it, his hands raised as if pointing out the horror. He lowers his voice and tells us the air smelled good.

  “Malarkey,” my mother tells us later. “He read that in one of those awful boys’ books.”

  On a mild Tuesday one midsummer, my uncle Bishop washed up on the riverbank near his home, barely alive. Perhaps it was a matter of drinking as much as he did, and then not remembering anything but shining stars, dogs as big as houses that passed by, growling at him, voices coming from far off, maybe the voices of the dead, and then fish. He was nudged headfirst into shore mud, burping and full of remorse, strings of snotty weeds and twine and rotten cloth draping his shoulders. It was a new story to tell his grandkids, he reasoned, assuming he ever got any, assuming he ever got married.

  That’s the problem, anyway. He’s had women, one at a time, lined up over the years, and each one makes me and my brother call her “auntie.”My father’s pretty much had it with Bishop and his crazy women. With Bishop, he says, it just goes on and on. My mother doesn’t mind one way or the other. She says Dad should be thankful he doesn’t have any sisters.

  All because of the most recent auntie, Bishop got drunk, got beat up, and floated down the river, so my father had to come and see if he was all right. The auntie left him, took almost everything he had, and said she didn’t believe his stories anymore. That’s the worst slap in the face to Bishop. His stories are his currency, his way in the world. It had never occurred to me or my brother that Bishop made things up. We didn’t see how he could invent things like that. Andrew’s always been a little scared of Bishop. Bishop the dog-shooter,
the barroomclearer; Bishop the noose expert. What my father says is, “If it isn’t all true, it should be.”

  There’s the tale about Bishop being in Brazil, going into a bar and seeing the courtyard decorated with a lost piece of NASA equipment that had blown off course and landed in the mountains. The bartender had taken the machine apart and pulled out the long sheet of paper with its squiggles and signs of the weather and the stars. He had strung it from the ceiling, like there was a party going on. Bishop says he called NASA collect, and the next evening men arrived in black suits, came through town like an invasion from Mars, and they got everything back, every last screw. The party was over. Bishop stood among the dripping trees, regretting his phone call, looking up at the stars and imagining a satellite burning to earth with its precious bell of information, needles in distress, recording every fiery moment.

  You get to like him, my uncle, especially when you’re little and you need a story to go to sleep. He’s got a way of seeing the world, mostly as something that surrounds and centres on him. Bishop is in love with the possibilities of life. But eventually it gets to his girlfriends.

  The evening of the Monday the last auntie left him, Bishop walked to town, following the railway tracks by the river. The pale river and the silver line of the railway pass together through the mountains here. Two lines tracing the dark valley, one straight and man-made, the other wild, uneven. And there, in the moonlight, was Bishop, walking along the rail like a kid on a wall, going to town, with firm plans to drink too much.

  He doesn’t remember exactly what happened, but, well after midnight, someone beat up my uncle and threw him in the river. My father assures us: he can be annoying. It was almost morning when he came to a stop, not more than a mile from home, floating face-up like a canoe, growling a church song through his swollen lips and paddling with the feeble hands of the near dead. Two boys ran down to the shore and put Bishop in their wheelbarrow. They took him to their house like a trophy, but their mother said he had to go to his own home, so they wheeled him back, following a line of trees, one boy under each handle. Bishop kicked at them and swore in all the languages he’d learned, and the boys grew frightened of his sputtering mouth and his muddy beard. They dumped him like a cord of wood in his yard and ran away home, the wheelbarrow jumping in the ruts.