Well, I guess not. See you at school.
Yeah, says Mullen, school.
So I was at the post office, getting my mail, Deke says, driving down Main Street. He takes a black plastic comb out of his jacket, starts combing his hair, one hand on the wheel. From the P.O. box? I ask. Yeah, from the P.O. box, says Deke. The Davis Howe Oceanography office. And you know the building across the street from the post office? That empty building with the papered-over windows? They aren’t papered over anymore, I say. Deke puts his comb back into his pocket. Chews on his cigarette filter. That’s right, he says.
There was some woman in there a few weeks ago, I say. She had a measuring tape. Measured everything. Is that right? Deke says. Yeah, measured the walls and the doorways and the spaces between the electrical outlets. You ever seen her before? No, Deke, I never saw her before. No, Deke says, neither had I.
The car stalls at a stop sign. Aw fer Christ, Deke says. He grinds the engine a few times. When the car finally starts, it coughs like an old woman at the drugstore, like a good throatful of snot. Maybe we should let her warm up a bit first, Deke says.
I yawn. Yawn so wide it makes my head ring. I hold a hand up in front of my mouth.
Holy, kid, says Deke. Need a little shut-eye there?
I guess so, Deke, I say. Yawn a little more.
What are you doing getting up so early anyway? Looks like you need some more sleep. What good’s it do, getting up hours before you need to go to school?
Sometimes you’re just up, Deke. It’s not like I don’t want to be sleeping.
I know I’d be in bed if I could be. Hey, you want to see my vacation pictures? They’re in the glovebox.
Deke’s glovebox is full of maps: Lake Athabasca Region, the Columbia Ice Fields. There’s a packet of photos from a drugstore in Calgary.
Pine trees and mountains. Deke holding the camera out in front of him, in front of a waterfall. Where’s this, Deke? That’s just outside of Dawson City, he says. In the Yukon. I flip through the pictures. A moose on the highway. Other cars all stopped around it, people standing around taking pictures. Doesn’t get much more beautiful than the Yukon, says Deke.
I like driving in Deke’s car ’cause the seats are wide and scoopy, with leather padding. Deke’s car smells like Deke: cigarettes and chocolate bars and cardboard air fresheners shaped like pine trees. His Banff park passes take up a quarter of his windshield: 1973 through 1986.
We stop at the truck stop in Aldersyde. Just leave your lunch box in the car, he tells me. All the guys at the truck stop know Deke. They punch him in the shoulder and tell him jokes – they must be pretty funny I guess, ’cause everybody laughs. We sit down in the coffee shop. I try to get a look back behind the counter but I don’t see Hoyle the waitress anywhere. Everything else is pretty much the same, though. Deke scratches his cheek and they bring him a cup of coffee. Scratches the bridge of his nose. They bring me hot chocolate, with little marshmallows.
That guy’s got a real chip on his shoulder, Deke says, blowing the steam off the top of his coffee. You know that, kid? A real chip. You have to watch people with attitudes like that.
Mullen’s dad used to be a geologist, I tell Deke, in Winnipeg. He used to know where oil was. You ought to see all his books – shelves and shelves of them, the hardcovered kind, without jackets. With the names stamped onto the sides.
Deke sniffs and sips his coffee. Guys like that, he says, where do they get off? It’s not like I don’t work damn hard. What was he doing living in Winnipeg if he was a geologist?
I dunno, Deke. My hot chocolate is still too hot. I pick a marshmallow out with my spoon and slurp it up.
Mullen get teased a lot at school?
Kids tease Mullen but Mullen doesn’t care, I say. They tease him a lot ’cause he’s short and lives down the hill.
So they don’t tease you, then?
Well, I say, I guess so. I’m his best friend. But things have been different lately. We got Roland Carlyle, this sixth-grader, sent up for mail fraud. Kids aren’t so likely to tease Mullen now.
Mail fraud?
Yeah, I say, Roland Carlyle said that Mullen’s dad worked at a shit house. So we spent a week stealing all the mail from the houses on Pine Street. Then we stuck a week’s worth of mail into his gym locker the day we knew Mr. Weissman would be in to watch us clean them out. Nobody believed Roland when he said he didn’t do it, ’cause everybody knows he’s always stealing cigarettes from the IGA.
Pine Street’s all the way across town, says Deke. Why did you steal their mail?
Come on, Deke. You’ve got to cover your tracks. Get away from the scene of the crime and all that. Besides, we’d have felt bad stealing mail from people we know.
When I was a kid, Deke says, drinking his coffee and scratching his cheeks, in the second grade, there was this kid, Link Ashcroft. How old was I in the second grade? He looks at his fingers. Eight?
Seven, I tell him. You’d have been seven.
Right, seven, says Deke. Well, Link liked to kiss girls. All the rest of us played street hockey and shot marbles and Link would just run around the playground, looking for girls to kiss. But not other second-graders. Link liked to kiss girls in the sixth grade. What grade are you in?
The fifth, Deke, the fifth.
Right, says Deke. Link liked to kiss eleven- and twelve-year-old girls, and they went along with it, ’cause they thought it was funny I guess, this seven-year-old kid. Girls would sneak off at recess in twos and threes, he’d meet them behind the gym. He’d set his little lunch pail on the ground and stand on top of it to reach the mouths of the girls he was kissing. And Link didn’t just peck these girls on the cheek – why else do you think they were so excited about him? They’d hold him up, on his lunch box, and he’d put his little tongue in their mouths and go to work.
Pretty soon, girls were coming over from the junior high school, hearing about this seven-year-old who liked to make out. They’d stand behind the big blue dumpster, smoking cigarettes, waiting for Link to get out of class. Link, he didn’t know what the hell was going on. They’d take his hand and put it up their shirts, kiss the kid all over. He’d come into class all covered with teenage lip gloss, smelling like menthol Matinée Slims, this big dumb grin all over his face.
You ever see that woman before, in the window?
I never had, Deke.
He dips the tip of his finger in his coffee, draws a damp line down the middle of the green table. Looked like she was from the city, he says. Sophisticated-like.
Deke sips some coffee. He tears open a few more sugar packets and stirs them in. Taps the cup with his spoon.
You know what they’re doing pretty soon, kid? They’re knocking down the grain elevator.
Why are they doing that?
Say it’s obsolete. Say they’re going to build a new community centre there, for the Rotarians.
The
