One Hit Wonders Page 8

  Al climbs in last and turns the key in the ignition. The engine catches so smoothly that the slight vibration in the floor is the only sign the vehicle is running.

  “Nice ride, Al,” Snuffy says.

  “A lease.”

  “Pretty name.”

  They move down King’s Bridge Road, making a right by the stadium. Snuffy slumps against the door; he hasn’t bothered with a seatbelt. Waves of drunkenness and tiredness whisper he should shut his eyes, fall asleep, which he does. He dreams he is a teenager, fishing with Gosse and a red-haired boy in the Southside River—or the Waterford River as it is called in his dream. In waking life, it was something he and Gosse had done together no more than two or three times one summer during junior high; something he’d almost forgotten because there was nothing about it that was worth remembering. In the dream, however, those days are recast as both magical and sinister, a golden summer in which the bonds of friendship were forged and tested in a place where rustling reeds and the smell of river mud infused their interactions with something erotic.

  “Know why the trout down here are so big?” Gosse calls out.

  “Why?”

  “They fattens up on all those creamy turds from the quality up on Waterford Bridge Road. Their toilets empties right in the river.”

  “I caught one with a rubber on its head here once,” Snuffy says, “like it was on its way to rob the Trout-o Dominion Bank.”

  “Haw-Haw.”

  The Waterford River between the footbridge and the waterfall is their uncontested turf. The reeds camouflage them; the soft mud at the water’s edge roots them. The river, with its trout and sewage, is their medium, a place where they can be alone and together at the same time. It is their place away from the street corner, a place where so little happens that they forget their worries. They become less aware of themselves and more aware of their surroundings—birdlife and the sounds of flowing water putting the city sounds on mute.

  Occasionally, old timers stop to tell them what the area looked like back in the day, when the harbour extended much farther inland and was full of steamships and sail boats, when the streets around the wharves bustled. They point out where the small boat basin used to be, the broken pylons where fish flakes and splitting tables once stood. They turn weathered faces towards the hills and the meadow, tall with buttercups and yarrow, where fishermen used to spread their nets to dry.

  Snuffy and Gosse aren’t one bit interested, but they know enough to pretend—some of these old guys can be cranky. Sometimes Snuffy eggs them on: “Some good berries up there where they used to spread the nets.”

  “Yes, b’y. No problem to fill your bucket and your belly too.”

  Sometimes advice is offered about how and where to catch the big ones. One fellow with broken teeth tells them to use the guts of the first one to catch the second, the guts of the second to catch the third, and so on.

  “What if you don’t catch a first one?” Snuffy asks one day.

  The man appears to give the question serious thought, his eyes disappearing into the folds of his frown. “I guess you’re in a bit of a pickle then,” he says. “Yes, my son, everyone needs a spell of luck to get started.”

  Occasionally, groups of sullen-looking Bulgarians, carrying fifteen-foot lacquered fishing poles, come by and stare at the two boys from the opposite bank. Their cigarettes are half cardboard filter. They wear acid-washed denim. They don’t even try to speak English. They shout to Snuffy and Gosse in their sooky-sounding language. The boys don’t answer. They won’t be intimidated. The foreigners move on.

  One day a boy appears on the bank directly across from where they are fishing. He is tall and thin with a wild mop of side-parted red hair and two front teeth sticking out at an acute angle to his face. He nods to them as he removes a hook from where he has embedded it in the cork handle of his fishing rod. His rod is silver with a gold spinning reel. When he raises it above his head to cast, it catches the sun, sending a bolt of light towards them. Through his aviator shades, Snuffy watches something match-like drop from the flare and land with a tiny splash midstream. It’s a stick bobber, lacquered black with a creamy-white tip. Snuffy watches as it cuts a wide arc through the current, coming to settle in a pool just below the footbridge.

  “Hey, this is our spot.”

  “He can be here if he wants,” Gosse says, loud enough for Snuffy and the boy to hear.

  The boy says nothing. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that he has Gosse’s official sanction. He slowly turns the handle of his reel until the line guard clicks shut. He continues to turn it until the catgut pulls taut and the stick float skips across the surface.

  “Don’t go reeling in, b’y,” Gosse says, “you’re good right there. I saw at least a half-dozen big mud trout in that pool earlier on.” His tone is friendly, sincere almost, and his mouth is bent upwards into the parody of a smile. It is all Snuffy can do not to laugh.

  The boy offers a toothy grin.

  “Perce Foley is my name and this is Snuffy.”

  “Freddy,” says the boy.

  Snuffy begins to sing quietly: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, to escape from reality…”

  Not much is said that first day. The boy scores points by giving Snuffy some line when he loses half his spool to a shopping cart midstream.

  “Ever wonder why there’s always a shopping cart in the river?” Snuffy asks, threading the new 8-lb test through his rod rings. “Nearest supermarket is a mile away.”

  “The recycling plant is just up there,” says the boy, gesturing behind with an easy flick of his head.

  Just then—as if summoned by their conversation—a lean man with a long beard passes up the road, pushing a trolley full of bottles and stomped-flat cans.

  “There goes Mick Fleetwood,” says Gosse. “He’ll be looking for a draw later.”

  Snuffy doesn’t expect to see carrot-top again, but the next fine afternoon, the boy is already in position on the opposite bank when they arrive. This time, he is sitting on a fold-up tripod stool.

  “Hey! When’s the piano being delivered?” Snuffy shouts, laughing at his zinger, laughing all the louder when no one joins in.

  Snuffy feels all at sea, shut down by Gosse’s attentiveness to the boy, by his—and Snuffy has no other word for it—friendliness. At the same time, he knows better than to question Gosse. Gosse likes to keep a couple of aces up his sleeve. It is possible that he is playing a long game, that his out-of-character behaviour is a set-up of some kind.

  Nor can Snuffy get a fix on the goofy kid. He’s quiet, but he’s no pushover. He doesn’t kowtow to Gosse. He doesn’t play dumb. Snuffy wonders if the boy is into martial arts of some kind. A black belt would explain his calm exterior, his cool, fearlessness in the face of Gosse’s slant-eyed scowl.

  Freddy gives little away. In fact, he hardly tells them anything about himself. When he does speak he is often surprisingly offbeat and dirty-minded. “Hey,” he says, on their third day together by the river, after he makes a perfect cast, “did you know that Chinese girl’s slits go the other way, side to side, not up and down?”

  Gosse was right on it. “It’s true,” he says, “Junior Hickey went out with a Chinee, Lizzie Lee, from the Big Wok, and said hers was like that. Said he could get at her standing up, even when her legs were together. Pogo-poking, he called it.”

  Snuffy does his best to play along. This is a new wrinkle in his body of knowledge about female anatomy, a subject he thought he had mastered. In the following weeks, he tries every information source he knows in an effort to either prove or disprove the boy’s claim, finally forking out thirty dollars for a porn magazine from Hong Kong that leaves him in no doubt about the answer to the question.

  All summer, Freddy can be found by the river almost as often as Snuffy and Gosse. Their favourite spot is by the footbridge. But as the summer drags on, there are days when that part of the river is thick with sewage, when it liter
ally smells of diesel fuel and eggs. Strands of toilet paper attach like bunting to their fishing lines; knotted condoms and perfectly formed turds float past. On such days they opt to walk upstream to the waterfall. It is here, behind the bakery, that Gosse shows the boy how to use a worm and a wet fly together. In return, the boy teaches them how to make a spinner bait from a teaspoon. He tells them the best spoons are the small copper-silver ones that are found in souvenir shops.

  That same night, Gosse breaks into the Come-From-Away Tourist Chalet where he liberates six miniature silver-plated spoons, each one with a Newfoundland dog on the handle. He also lifs a flat tweed cap that he plans to give his Pop for his eightieth birthday. As a parting gift, before he leaves the tiny overcrowded shop, he rearranges the stuffed-toy animals to make it look like a snapshot taken at an orgy: moose humping caribou, Canada geese buggering puffins, a polar bear fellating a grinning Harp seal, minks locked in a 69.

  The next day, he brings spoons, hacksaw, punch, and hammer to their meeting place by the river. Under the boy’s direction, Gosse makes three new spinners, each one with a tiny triple hook dangling from it. Snuffy loses his, overcasting to the far bank and snapping his line while trying to pull the bait loose. Gosse, on his third cast, catches the biggest trout he had ever taken from the Waterford River, easily a pound-and-a-half. He is so happy that he puts the still-living fish to his lips and kisses it. “This calls for a celebration,” he says, pulling a flattened joint from his back pocket.

  The boy backs away when Gosse licks and sucks the tiny white stick before lighting it up. He says no when offered the smouldering spliff, claiming he doesn’t want to try it because he’s not a smoker.

  Gosse makes a long face. “Just a draw, b’y, that’s all. No biggie.”

  Freddy changes his mind on the second pass around and takes a few quick puffs, but refuses the joint when it is offered to him again.

  “Feeling anything yet, Fred?” Snuffy asks.

  “Don’t call me Fred.”

  “Whoa,” Gosse says, “good gear. I can feel my tailbone starting to buzz. Any tingles, Freddy?”

  “Nothing. Nada. Not a thing,” the red-haired boy says.

  But Freddy has begun to register an effect. His mouth is suddenly so dry he thinks he has lost the power of speech. This is followed by a total brain freeze. The feather-topped reeds, the feather-topped reeds…There is something different about them, something he has never noticed before. They seem more animated, alive. He watches for a long time, until he is certain: they are moving out of sync with the wind, rippling in a steady counter-clockwise motion. A bead of sweat runs from his hairline, down the back of his neck. Each reed is a hair or a strand of fur plugged into a blood-filled follicle; the whole reed bank is fauna not flora. His heartbeat splits in two: one rhythm races while the other slows down, becomes irregular. At unpredictable intervals he feels a pulse above his left nipple, as if someone with a peashooter is repeatedly targeting the same spot. He feels himself sinking into the mud and it is hardening around his rubber boots. With some effort, he lifts one foot and then the other. His boots make a sucking sound. He watches the impressions they leave fill up with gasoline-streaked water. He hears a whooshing noise. He looks over at Gosse who is going to work on the last half-centimetre of the joint, now pinched in a crocodile clip that has a tiny green feather dangling from it. The wind gusts. The boy watches ash and sparks blow from the joint’s glowing tip. Sparks and ashes fly in his direction like a formation of insects, dive down towards the gasoline puddles at his feet. He only has seconds before the entire embankment will erupt into flames. He feels himself rise out of his body and drift along the riverbank. He pictures the three of them lying among the burnt reeds, bodies barbecued black.

  “Hey, where you going?” Snuffy shouts.

  “Hey, Freddy, your rod, man,” Gosse calls. “You coming back?”

  The boy raises an arm above his head and makes a gesture of either acknowledgement or dismissal. He staggers, breaks into a run.

  “Sorry to take off like that,” Freddy says, the next time they meet up. “I had to find a bathroom, fast. It was either that or shit myself. Thanks for looking after my gear.”

  “Speaking of gear, I think what we smoked the other day was some bad gear. Sprayed, maybe,” Gosse says.

  Freddy has not felt normal since smoking the joint. Now he feels the beginnings of another panic attack. It is like the drug prised open some long-closed nerve bud at the base of his skull. He is groggy during the day, but at night his sleep is disturbed. His skin is unusually sensitive. Light hurts his eyes. That morning, half-asleep and half-awake, he dreamed of a brown dove. It fluttered around him where he stood fishing on the bank of a great river that he knew in his dream was the Mississippi. He held out his hand and the dove alighted on his index finger, which—when he thinks about it in sober daylight—looked a lot like the tip of Gosse’s bamboo fishing pole. The bird’s feet were the colour of raspberry sour jellies. They were warm and soft, but clawed too. Its feathers were brown with pink speckles. But the most remarkable thing about the bird was that it had a blue rim around its eye. It was the same shade as the eye shadow worn by the street walkers he’d seen in doorways on Duckworth Street. The bird blinked at him, rolled a vowel in its crop.

  Freddy snaps out of his flashback, struggles with the idea that his mind is no longer under his control. When Gosse says the word “sprayed,” Freddy pictures two dark-skinned men in a jungle compound spraying bales of marijuana with chemicals. They wear plastic tanks which, from time to time, they refill with a colourless liquid from yellow and black oil drums. The liquid smells like cat piss. It attracts the iridescent green cockerels that are everywhere high-stepping on the baked clay.

  Snuffy knows that by telling him the weed was “sprayed” Gosse is giving Freddy a chance to save face. He smiles inwardly at his friend’s ingeniousness. Snuffy is convinced that when it comes to the boy, Gosse is playing some kind of long game. Being kind puts the boy in his debt, and that—whether Freddy knows it or not—is a dangerous place to be.

  Snuffy knows it will only be a matter of time before things take a nasty turn. Sooner or later Gosse will turn on the boy: cross fishing lines and blame Freddy for causing the tangle; charge the red-haired boy with stealing his Zippo; accuse him of being queer.

  Snuffy pictures the two boys tumbling down the riverbank, leaving a trail of broken reeds in their wake. He hears the sound of Gosse’s fist hitting Freddy’s flesh. He pictures Gosse holding the boy’s head under the sewage pipe, Freddy’s strangely kinked hair growing soft and losing its zigzag pattern, like dried noodles dropped in a pot of boiling water.

  The summer slips past. The three boys continue to meet by the river long after the trout have become scarce. Snuffy watches and waits, but Gosse still doesn’t make his move. If anything, Gosse becomes more patient, more attentive. Snuffy returns to the thought that his friend simply likes the boy. It is a peculiar notion, one he finds hard to believe. He has never known Gosse to befriend anyone. Gosse is all business. People are either buyers, potential partners, or competition. Even more disturbing to Snuffy is his jealousy of the boy. He shrugs it off. And yet he can’t completely ignore it, can’t help but notice how Gosse listens when the boy talks about the feeding habits of trout, why they disappear at certain times of the day, why they won’t eat worms in high summer, what newly hatched flies look like, why the bigger trout swim deep to find cooler water as temperatures rise.

  This last piece of information leads to Gosse’s suggestion that they take a trip to Freshwater Bay. He tells Freddy about the deep, cold lake on the other side of the Southside Hills. He says he wants to beat his own record for the biggest trout of the summer. “Dirty big trout to be had there, my son. I reckon your little spinney would do the trick. Enough weight to get a long cast. Let her sink down to where the big ones are. Keep trawling back over them until they get pissed off and go for it.”

  “Arrr, Cap’n Hindgrinder,” gro
wls Snuffy.

  Gosse gives him a look.

  “How would we get there?”

  “We could ride our bikes out the Cape Spear Road and walk from there or we could hike up over the hill. Takes about two hours.”

  “We could camp overnight,” the boy says. “I have an old army tent sleeps four.”

  “Now you’re talking,” says Gosse.

  “We can bring a bottle,” says Snuffy.

  “And sing campfire songs,” says Gosse, giving Snuffy a sly look. “Saturday afternoon—how about it? We’ll meet up here at the bridge and hike over. We’ll come back Sunday. Everyone brings their own food.”

  The night before the trip, Snuffy can’t sleep. His stomach squirms. Thoughts of how it could play out make him nervous and excited. He sees the black waters of that freshwater lake, hears the ocean boom on the other side of the breakwater, pictures eels squirming from salt water to sweet through cracks in the boulders as night closes in, black and starless. He sees the three of them sitting around the campfire, bacon and beans bubbling on an iron skillet. Out there alone together, where anything might happen. He fantasizes about Gosse turning on Freddy and beating him into submission. Snuffy turns the word “submission” over in his mind. He pictures blood in the corner of Freddy’s mouth, his eyes swollen shut, like fat pea pods. They could make Freddy do whatever they want. They could make him crawl around and talk baby talk. They could make him say anything. They could make him strip naked. Snuffy pictures Freddy’s skin by firelight, his freckles, and the tobaccocoloured pubic hair around his wormy prick. He feels the boy’s fear. They could do anything they want to Freddy. If they get him drunk and stoned enough, they can make him think it was all his idea. The thought is enough to make Snuffy come into the soft argyle-patterned sock he keeps for such a purpose. Afterwards, he still can’t sleep. He listens to the silence: it reverberates as if he had cried out.