Читать книгу Tell Everything - Sally Cooper - Страница 8

The summer Peck was nine, her mother ran away with another man. Peck was playing with Malcolm Salter next door when his mom brought her a can of root beer and said, “Go home now. Your dad wants you.”

That night, and for many nights afterward, she felt dead, as if her mother had murdered her.

In the years that followed, she read the paperbacks about the Black Donnellys and Jack the Ripper her mom had left in the bathroom. With her mom’s card, Peck signed murder books out of the Kashag Public Library. She looked at the victims before their deaths, the women in headscarves and sunglasses, the men in suits with skinny ties, and she looked at the killers’ hooded eyes and beat-down faces in their mug shots. Sometimes she looked at the bodies and their dumping grounds. Bodies on couches or beds, in ditches or fields. Some books blanked out the corpses. Others showed autopsy photos with pulpy mouths, glassy stares, bloodsmears.

She imagined her mom killing her. She pictured her body stuffed in the rocks, her mom’s thumbprints bruised into her throat. When the police lifted her up, maggots would drop off. The police would gag at the smell. Then they’d put her mom in jail. Faced with the autopsy photos, her mom would say, “Shoot, she was prettier when I knew her.”

Her mom was Margery Virginia and she was Pauline Elizabeth and her dad was Harold Ray Brown. Nobody called him Harold — nor Harry, a name for a rounder, balder man. He was Hank. When other men said it, especially when drinking, it came out like a swear. Sometimes it sounded like Hunk. She pictured him as a side of meat, rosy brown and slimy. He called her Peck for the hard kisses she gave. She liked to call him Heck. Heck no, it’s not a bother. What the heck. I’m gonna give you heck. A watered-down cuss. A non-word. She liked that Heck rhymed with Peck.

One fall during moose season, Malcolm Salter from next door came into her kitchen swinging a plastic bag.

“Want to see?” he said, and Peck said, “Sure.”

Grinning, he displayed a moose heart with veins and tubes and fat. One whiff of iron blood and she kicked him. Malcolm snatched the bag away and kicked her back.

She helped Hank do the tanning. They mashed the brains into a paste over a fire. He staked the hide on racks behind the shed, and she worked it soft with a stick.

One time Hank presented her with a deerskin purse, from his first. “She stood out like sawdust against the snow,” he said. Peck pictured the bullet hitting the doe’s glowing heart and a cooked venison roast revealed in a burst of wood shavings. “I had this made for your mother, but she left it behind. Might be she wanted you to have it.” He spoke with a strangled cheeriness. Stiff, she watched him hang the strap from her shoulder, his features receding as if washed out by sudden, heavy rain. The purse moved like cloth and had a stubbly nap Peck liked to brush against her skin. She stored it under her bed with her mom’s library card and feathered clip inside.

At twelve she wrote her first story. Her characters laughed and swung their Cher hair as they killed whole families in inventive, domestic ways. They always got caught, though, and not by their daughters, either.

Peck stopped talking about her mom, but Hank didn’t. He told stories about Margery as if they’d had coffee that morning. If she ever came back, Peck figured he’d yield like worked skin.

In June 1980, five years before they moved to Westwoods, Hank turned thirty-five. Peck was twelve. The morning of his birthday, she caught her orderly father standing in the kitchen in boxers and a vest. A gob of shaving foam trailed along his jaw as he tilted his head back and poured a stream of milk down his throat. Other changes followed. He came home earlier from his horseshoe tourneys and what he called his “Poke Her” nights. He mentioned Margery less and limited himself to one girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old horsewoman named Sue Smedley. And he started the plan. The plan he said would give them something to show for their lives. The plan that meant moving. He applied to more than a hundred companies and pored over MLS catalogues with house listings north and west of Toronto. He would get a good job and set up a life far from his friends. From Kashag. Peck could only watch as Hank grew up.

By the time they moved south, Hank had worked there for four years, at Apco Moulding running a machine that made margarine tubs. He drove the two hours and change each way and took twelve-hour shifts, three nights on, two days off; four nights on, three days off; sometimes seven and seven.

Peck’s chief impression of this period was Hank collapsed stubble-cheeked on the couch, tan boots lolling, sock bottoms black, coveralls faded airplane grey with musky grease stains. Measured snores replaced the ripping songs that used to follow his benders.

When he was upright between shifts after a sixteen-hour sleep and a shave, his smile had a new quality, and he held Peck in his gaze. He acted proud and on the verge of a promise. Peck hated him then, but she had no right. He was throwing their lives through this upheaval to give her a better future, but she worried that one day she might look up from her murder stories and find he, too, had stepped out for good.

Malcolm Salter grew tall and hard-shouldered the summer before Peck left for Westwoods. They took to playing Monopoly in the Salters’ trailer and talking about the Beatles. Peck had fallen in love with Paul McCartney after she’d found out he was fourteen when his mother died of cancer. John Lennon had seen his mother get hit by a streetcar, but he had Aunt Mimi. Whom did Paul have? She didn’t tell Malcolm that she wrote letters to Paul or that she wrote Paul’s replies. In the letters, Paul called her “my love” and told her maybe he was amazed. She would go to Scotland and work as a nanny at the McCartney sheep farm, and Paul would love her and Linda would bow out. She believed in the goodness of Linda.

One day, at the end of a treatise on the backward looping of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Malcolm straightened his money piles. They’d turned on the lamps and closed the curtains against the sun. He picked at the vinyl piping on a cushion.

“Let’s go into the house,” he said. “I’ll show you my Beatlemags.”

She scooped up four houses and placed a hotel on Indiana Avenue and said, “As long as we come back to this game.”

Inside the door, one set of stairs led up to the kitchen and another to a curtained-off area of the basement. Malcolm had taped a collage of Beatles pictures to the unpainted drywall.

Malcolm fetched two cans of beer and put on Abbey Road. He offered her a Beatlemag then disappeared upstairs. Unconcerned, Peck read a column about real-life Beatle encounters. She planned to submit her Paul letters.

Malcolm dropped back on the couch, crossed his legs, jiggled his foot. He reached an arm up, then dropped it to his side. “Come upstairs,” he said. “The rentals are out.” Malcolm’s parents spent their days fishing at Twelve Mile Lake. His father was a retired police officer known as the Sergeant.

“Like Sergeant Pepper,” Peck had said.

“But not as cool.”

Malcolm scorned sports and the outdoors. He said it disgusted the Sergeant that he wouldn’t make a military man, let alone a cop.

Under the bathroom sink, Malcolm displayed a stack of crimped Penthouses and Hustlers. Peck told him about the toilet reading material her mother had left behind and said, “I guess that’s the difference between my house and yours.”

“Not necessarily,” Malcolm said. He took her to his brother Mike’s room and handed her a binder. The plastic sleeves held photographs of murder scenes. There were women strangled by pantyhose, bras, or ties and men shot in the back of the head or the chest, and there was much dismemberment. A brain blown out of a victim’s skull and lying at his feet. A severed head sitting on railroad tracks. A woman with her head on her lap. A woman’s limbless torso. Bodies burned, stabbed, mangled, shot. Malcolm cocked his head as she turned the pages and thumbed the plastic.

“The Sergeant collected these. He gave them to my brother when he got on the force.”

“Imagine what you’ll get if you become a cop.”

“We’ll never know.”

The pattern of their afternoons changed. After passing Go five times each, they sat on Mike’s bed, the carnage album on their laps. Malcolm told the story of each photo, the crime, where and when it happened, what the police figured out. Sometimes they analyzed the bodies in the Hustler spreads, but they preferred the corpses. Malcolm delivered his comments on the nude models and the crime scenes in the same measured, baffled tone he used when detailing the Beatles’ recording techniques or informing her she owed him $90 for landing on St. James Place with one house. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes in a show of shock and disgust, though her library true crimes had plenty of photos, and (something she wouldn’t tell Malcolm) a Hustler lived under the sink at her home, too.

At school, they developed a set of greetings based on Beatles songs. Her favourite was Sergeant Salter’s Lonely Hearts Club Son. He liked Strawberry Peck Forever.

The day before she moved to Westwoods, Peck found Malcolm on the trailer couch reading Mad.

“Polythene Peck.”

“Back in the U.S.S. Malcolm.”

“Peck Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”

“Nowhere Malcolm.”

She sat on the sink and asked, “How’s the Sergeant?”

“They released the boat two weeks ago. Let the game begin.” Malcolm tossed the Mad aside and swung up.

“I don’t have time for Monopoly, Malcolm. We’re going tomorrow. My dad’s moving stuff today.”

“Okay.”

“We could do other things. What we usually do. What about the Beatlemag s?”

His head knocked the skylight handle. His thighs in jeans brushed her bare knees. She stayed put. He propped one hand on the stove and the other on the sink and kissed her without asking. She found his tongue and sucked it.

He recoiled. “Where’d you learn that?”

Saliva dried on her cheeks. She’d never kissed with her mouth open before.

He wiped his lips and cupped her head. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “It’s an asshole guy thing to say. What a guy who reads Hustler would say.”

“Mean Mr. Malcolm.”

“A Hard Day’s Peck.”

He lifted her onto the couch, where they wrestled and ribtickled then settled into an unbroken kiss. Her tongue met his, and she gave herself over to the sun cradling her neck and the cushions’ dry-vinyl crackle.

“I am moving tomorrow,” she said after a while.

“I know. That’s what makes this okay.”

“It wouldn’t be if I weren’t?”

“It would be better. But we’d be playing Monopoly right now if you weren’t.”

His damp armpit curved around her cheek. She breathed his cottony T-shirt heat.

“We won’t write each other or anything, will we?”

“Give me your address. I may show up someday.” He kissed her bangs. “Just don’t off anybody without me.”

“Bang Bang Malcolm’s Silver Hammer —”

“— came down upon Peck’s head!”

They didn’t kiss again.

On June 7, 1985, Hank strapped their beds, dressers, and suitcases to the Ranger and drove Peck to their new house on Hartley Horse Way in Westwoods, a new development in north Brampton. She carried The Black Donnellys, the feathered clip, her mom’s library card, and the McCartney letters in her mom’s deerskin purse.

They arrived at Westwoods late Sunday morning under a yellow sky. Number 39 looked the same as the others, a twostorey semi-detached with a garage. It had two small windows upstairs and one medium down. It had no shutters or any other decorations. The bricks were rusty pink and the trim off-white. Steep concrete stairs led to the front door. Three evergreen shrubs squatted under the front window, and a spindly tree with pointy leaves graced the end of the driveway. No tree on Hartley Horse Way reached higher than the roof peaks, and there was little shade.

They entered through the garage, which smelled like potatoes. Hank had arranged the living room the same as in Kashag. Above the couch hung the gun rack adorned with photos of two does suspended by their hind hooves from winter branches. Saloon doors took her into the kitchen, set up like home. The red table and yellow chairs below the sunburst clock. Mrs. Salter’s lemon squares in a Tupperware container on the counter. Sue Smedley’s thoroughbred calendar on the fridge. Only Burt was missing. Dogs didn’t belong in subdivisions, claimed Hank, so the Salters had kept him. The dog was in his prime, and Hank intended to hunt him that year.

Hank banned her from her bedroom until he had it ready. She helped him move the furniture into the hall. Then he showed her the cable box. She punched buttons and ended up watching a woman in a long dress strolling through a park singing, “He walks with us, he talks with us.”

After an hour or so, Hank called her down the hall. “This is it, baby,” he said. “This is your new life.”

He stepped aside and nudged her. She didn’t dare turn back and show him that although she loved him and wanted to feel as happy as he did, this room with its white walls and its high square window made her think not of her future, but of her mom. Her new room, her Beatles poster pinned above her dresser like at home, was not her new life, but a reminder of what had irretrievably gone.