don’t know. Maybe both. You want to go see that? I was there when they knocked down an elevator in Okotoks, two or three years ago. A couple of guys in Bobcats, they just drove into the walls. Fell down like it was made of dry toast. You’d think that a grain elevator would be sturdier. That the walls would be thicker.
You can smell the meat-packing plant here in Aldersyde. Smells like burning, and the outhouses at summer camp. Like the elephant building at the ZOO. The gas jockeys sit around outside by the propane tank. Two of them play rock paper scissors. The same guy always loses, has to go lean on the windows of the cars when they pull up. Props the gas nozzle in the sides of the cars. Cleans the windshields.
Hey, Mullen, where’s your dad going? I dunno, Mullen says. Hey, Dad, where’re you going? Mullen’s dad throws his jean jacket into his truck.
I want you to sweep the porch. Mullen sticks his fists into his pockets, hits the back of his heel on the sidewalk. Come on, Dad. Come on. Sweep the porch and the sidewalk, Mullen’s dad says, get all those leaves and twigs. Come on, Dad, it’s winter. It’ll snow any minute. See all those clouds? Mullen’s dad pats his back pockets, takes his wallet out, looks in it. And don’t just sweep everything into the gutter, he says, or the neighbours’ yard. Get the dustpan. Tell you what, Dad, Mullen says. When the snow melts in March, I’ll sweep the porch. Sweep it real good. Like, put it all in garbage bags. I’ll put the bags on the curb, in March. Real good-like. Mullen’s dad pats the front of his grey jeans, feels the pockets of his jean jacket. Your keys are inside on the desk, by the mail, Mullen says. Mullen’s dad takes a pencil out of his pocket, the flat kind they sell at the hardware store, sticks it between his teeth. Put the bags in the alley, he says. And don’t pick up anything sharp, like broken glass. Leave that for me. He goes into the house. Comes back out spinning his keys around on his index finger. Stops to look in the mailbox.
Mullen’s dad hunches down on one knee. Show me your shoulder, he says. My shoulder’s fine, says Mullen. Come on, show me. Mullen pulls his sweater up around his neck. Mmblfr, he says through his sweater. The white bandage is taped in a wide square to his pink skin with white tape. Whenever I cut myself, on the side of an open can of peaches, or in the teeth of the gate in a backyard, I always get a pink bandage, just a little sticky strip, brown and fuzzy. Mullen’s bandage is white and plastic and puffy, like a jacket, and has to be held on with tape. His dad has a look at it but doesn’t peel back the tape to look underneath. Don’t pick at it, he says, and don’t poke at it. Mmblnfrmnr, says Mullen. His dad pulls the sweater back down, careful to tug it well clear of the bandage. Mullen coughs while his dad smooths out his sweater.
It’s hot, says Mullen.
You got burned, says his dad. I’ll bet it’s hot.
You going to be home in time for dinner? asks Mullen.
We’re eating at the Russians’ tonight, says his dad. If I’m not back just go over there. Take that bottle of wine, I said we’d bring one. The red one, in the rack. He pats Mullen on the head, gets into his truck. Plays with the rear-view mirror a bit. See you at dinner. Yeah, Dad, at dinner.
Where’s your dad going, Mullen? Mullen climbs up on the porch railing. It creaks. I dunno, he says. Hey, you know what I found down by the river? A bucket of paint. They don’t put paint in buckets, I tell Mullen, they put it in pails. Mullen reaches up, tries to grab the lip of the roof. Yessir, a whole bucket of paint, just sitting there under some leaves, by a stump. You know down by the river where we dug that hole that one time? Somebody must have dropped off a bunch of trash there.
We wander around the back of the house. Mullen’s dad has a tire hung off the only tree. In summertime during storms you can hear it, banging on the tree, into the side of the fence. On the back porch there’s a little table, some beer bottles neatly stacked in their cardboard boxes underneath.
We climb the fence. I hang on the edge for a second, like I always do, one leg swinging on the other side. The alley behind the yard is overgrown with old poplar trees and rose bushes; there’s a chain-link fence and the big hill on the other side. Mullen pushes a piece of plywood off the fence; behind it we’ve got a pretty good hole cut in the chain. We get on our hands and knees and crawl through the fence, into the scrub.
What colour paint is it, in this pail? I ask. Mullen’s shoelaces scurry away ahead of me. Red, he says. We crawl through the bushes until the side of the hill runs up straight vertical, where the big tractor tire is, leaned up against the mouth of the culvert. Which is how you get Underground.
Everything we keep, we keep Underground. Like the traffic pylon, and the construction light – we’ve had it for months and it still blinks. The orange blinking gives us all the light we need; it makes you kind of dizzy at first, but we know our way around pretty well. We have an old card table, with ring marks and a wobbly leg, and we’ve got some milk crates we found behind the IGA. All our stuff is stacked up against the wall there: the burnt-out fluorescent tubes and the old rake with the taped-up handle, our cattle-auction posters and our air-show posters. We’ve got Russian pictures that Solly gave us, of red-jerseyed hockey players and frowning statues. Square letters with English underneath: Visit Leningrad, Moscow Metro 1973. We have a Sears catalogue, the thick winter one, all the pages stuck together because of the damp. Vodka bottles, one of them filled with sand, and a tea cup with a mouse we found under Solly’s porch.
We brought in all this stuff ourselves, except the old refrigerator, which was already here, leaned up on the dirt wall at the back of the culvert, the door hanging open. Bent in all funny to make it fit. The culvert is just tall enough for Mullen to stand, but I have to duck my head. Our feet ring on the ribbed steel. Mullen opens the fridge door and gets out a big white plastic pail with a steel handle. It’s definitely a pail. Smears of red around the edge of the lid.
What do you want to do with all that paint? I ask. Mullen grunts and sets the pail down with a clang. Well, you know the fluorescent tubes we found behind the IGA? I figure we could go down to the railroad tracks and throw those tubes around, like they were whatsit, javelins. What about the paint? Well, he says, I figure we could pour the paint into the tubes. So they blow up when they hit the ground. I think it over while Mullen looks around for the tubes. Yeah, that sounds like fun. Yeah, Mullen says, I figure it’ll be.
Turns out the tops of the fluorescent tubes don’t screw off, so instead we dip the ends of them in the paint and then throw them, over in the alley behind the credit union. They float real good and you can see the red up there in the grey sky, and when they hit the ground they explode, glass bursting in a big red splash.
Isn’t it ever going to snow? Mullen says.
It’s not even October yet, I tell him. It isn’t even winter.
Back in Winnipeg it snowed so much I couldn’t pass the second grade, on account of all the not-going days, Mullen says. Dad would stand out on the balcony and watch cars slide down the street, drinking coffee, all these cars sliding in the snow and him laughing and pointing. He didn’t have a job and just wrote letters all winter, trying-to-get-work sort of letters and when he wasn’t writing letters he’d read the newspaper. So when I didn’t have to go to school I’d just sit around with him and we’d laugh at the cars.
Mullen smears a puddle of red paint with the tip of his shoe. He knows how to make an igloo, my dad, that’s how much snow we had in Winnipeg. And he’d let me build snowmen on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. I’d put my snowsuit on and go make snowmen and he’d sit on the balcony, shout things at me. Hey, Mullen, he’d shout, you ought to give that one by the mailbox a nose. He’d throw old ball caps and carrots down to me, and spatulas and flyswatters and crummy old ties. This one day it snowed and school closed and the snowplow didn’t come, nobody could drive down the street ’cause of all the snow, and
