I tell him. Yeah? What do you like drawing? You know, I say, the same old stuff. Today at school I drew some rhinoceroses. No kidding, says Pete. Yeah, no kidding.
I look at my watch. If Pete Leakie were a Dead Kid, it would be a whole different ball of wax. If Pete Leakie were a Dead Kid we’d just talk about Mr. Weissman’s math class and how many problems there are to do. A Dead Kid would be shifty and stuttery, ’cause Dead Kids don’t much like me and aren’t supposed to talk to me. But a Dead Kid would never draw on the sidewalk with chalk, so Pete Leakie’s not so bad.
Mullen comes around the corner. Hey, Mullen, Pete Leakie says, your dad makes you do the dishes every night?
Oh yeah, Mullen says. We make quite a mess, the old man and me. Spaghetti sauce and baked-on cheese. Stacks of dishes up past your head.
Don’t you have a dishwasher? Pete asks.
We got a sink. Mullen looks down the street, looks at his watch. A sink and one of those wire brushes, with the soap inside.
My parents bought a new dishwasher last year, with the tax-return money, Pete says. You don’t even have to rinse the dishes off first, just put them right in. That’s great, Pete, Mullen says. Yeah, I say. Great, Pete.
Mullen’s got that look, that look he gets, like the time he found the boat at the bottom of the river, or when he wanted to start collecting flyers from all the offices on Main Street. It doesn’t do any good to ask him, Hey, Mullen, why do you want to fill garbage bags with driver’s-education pamphlets and pizza-delivery menus and bible-retreat brochures and mortgage application forms? He’ll just get that look. I bet they’d have a lot of flyers at the IGA, he’ll say, I bet they’ve got all kinds of flyers there.
Mullen grabs my elbow and whispers, Hey, do you know where we can get a telescope?
A telescope?
Yeah, he says, we oughta go and do some what, some surveilling.
I’ve got some plastic binoculars, I tell him, but they’re at my house.
We have to go now. She might leave any time.
Who might leave?
Mullen stretches his arms up above his head and his black T-shirt tugs up above his belly button. Gosh, Pete, Mullen yawns, it sure has been something, watching you draw, but we have to go. See you around.
Yeah, Pete Leakie says, see you guys around. Pete Leakie finds his orange chalk. Starts drawing an orange octopus on the sidewalk.
Where are we going, Mullen?
We have to go surveil, he says. Down the street, across from the post office.
There isn’t anything across from the post office.
There is now.
You can smell the Russians’ barbecue all the way up the street. We walk up the sidewalk and there they are, out in their yard, sitting in their lawn chairs, reaching over now and then to prod at the steaks sizzling away on the grill. Most people have already put their barbecues back into their garages on account of it being fall, but the Russians do everything later than everybody else. They probably won’t put up their Christmas lights until two days after Christmas again this year, and then leave them out until June. They wave with their brown beer bottles.
Hey, Mullen, Vaslav hollers, where’s your dad?
Still at work I guess, he says.
Solzhenitsyn sticks his hands into the pockets of his skinny jeans. I left work an hour ago, says Solzhenitsyn, and he had already gone.
Well, Mullen says, I don’t know then.
Tell him to come over when he gets home, Solzhenitsyn says. Solzhenitsyn works with Mullen’s dad at the meatpacking plant, smashing ice. Every day they get into the truck together, wearing their overalls and rubber boots, and drive out of town, almost to High River. They smash ice with sledgehammers, in a small steel room, and come home red and sweating, with sore backs and wet socks, ice in the toes of their boots and seams of their blue jeans.
We walk down the alley instead of down Main Street, ’cause we like to throw rocks at garbage cans. Mullen gets a few pretty good dents into a stainless-steel can outside an empty garage. I like the sound the plastic cans make when you hit them with a rock, especially if they’re empty. Even though it’s only six, the sun is starting to go down out on the other side of town, where the foothills start. Sometimes Mullen’s dad takes us for drives out into the hills, up past the provincial-park line, and shows us the forest-fire watch towers and abandoned farmhouses and other good stuff.
As long as I can remember, the windows in the building across from the post office have been covered with paper like you wrap boxes in at Christmas to mail to Ontario. We sit on the sidewalk in front of the post office and Mullen takes some comic books out of his backpack. Here, make like some dumb kid, he says. We make like to flip through comic books but peek over the tops at the woman in the window.
She doesn’t look like other women, the woman in the window. The women down at the hair salon or the drugstore wear sweaters and short jackets, with blue jeans. The women at the United Church wear gold earrings and black blouses. Mrs. Lampman across the street always wears a blazer when she teaches social studies at the school. The woman in the window across from the post office wears a sweater, but it fits different than any I’ve ever seen. Looks thin, and when she moves, it holds on to her. She wears a grey skirt that goes down to her ankles but stays close to her thighs and the backs of her knees. Her hair is pulled back into some sort of clip, but it sticks out in all sorts of directions, trying to escape.
What do you think she’s doing in there? I don’t know, Mullen says, peeking over the top of his comic book. The room is empty, bare drywall with putty patches showing, and the electrical sockets unfinished, hairy clumps of wire. She wanders around with a tape measure. Measures a wall and writes on a pad of yellow paper tucked into the belt of her skirt. She sticks the pen behind her ear and frowns.
I bet she’s from the city, Mullen says. That’s how all the women look in the city. I sat on a bus in Calgary with two women like that. All pretty and high classified.
She drops her tape measure and lights a cigarette, a long, thin one. Smoke mixes in with the sawdust in the air. Mullen flips a few pages of his comic.
We watch her for a while. She writes stuff down and holds her hands in front of her face like a square, at arm’s length, looks at the walls through the square. She doesn’t ever look out the window. People drive by, and if they know us they wave. Nobody cares if Mullen and I sit on the post office steps and read comic books, ’cause nobody cares what we do, so long as it isn’t causing public mischief. That’s what the caretaker at the First Evangelical Church said when they made us appologize about the flyers. That we were causing public mischief. Public mischief, it turns out, is when you climb up on the roof of the school with three garbage bags full of flyers, fold them into paper airplanes, and throw them at Dead Kids. Even if you only get through half of one bag in two hours. They sent us up for that: for skipping class and making a mess of the playground. They said taking that many flyers was like stealing, even though flyers are free and in piles that say Take One. And after we’d cleaned up the whole playground we had to go down Main Street and apologize at the insurance office, and the bank, and the First Evangelical Church. When they told Mullen’s dad he laughed, but the way people sometimes laugh on television, when you can tell they’re only actors.
I
