of the truck to pop the cap on his Northern and takes a long pull of warm beer. Scratches his belly through blue-checkered flannel, looks at the twenty-foot head of King George looking back at him. Damned big thing. Bunch of damned wood with some silver paint – doesn’t know that but it’s what he’s heard.
A red two-door pulls up, kicking gravel. Laughter and teenagers sliding out. The girl skips up to the pedestal, suddenly self-conscious as she poses underneath the damned big thing while the boy Polaroids her. She’s in her pyjamas, for chrissakes. Normando slips off the tailgate, knees cracking, and limps to the edge of the hillside, the town spilling out before him. His back hurting like it always does, only worse.
He breathes it in, the fall air and dead-looking trees on the neighbourhood lanes, the black rock hills jumping up, leaning over the houses clustered around and beneath them. He has gone up and down every one of those streets. This is his town.
The long keen of a whistle and an old itch tells him the morning shift’s going underground. He turns back to King George, the face on the giant coin glowing in the early sun. At its base, those two damned kids rolling around on the ground like it’s their town. Like there could never be nothing else around that alive.
Behind them he catches the black smoke coming off the smelter. Getting on fine without him.
3
Francie Duluoz opens her eyes and sees the mobile above her bed going lazy one way and then back, just like it’s been doing every morning since her dad put it up there when she was three. The light through the shutters on the carpet, the poster of Ivan Doroschuk on her door, the stairs, one two three fourteen of them, the kitchen with the butterfly wallpaper, her favourite bowl, favourite spoon, the taste of the cereal so known, so familiar that it’s no taste at all. Moving through everything this morning just like yesterday and the day before and every day of Francie’s days on this planet to now.
She sucks up the last of the milk in her bowl and fiddles with a pad and paper on the kitchen table. She gets as far as dear mom and dad before running out of words. There’s the purring of a car over gravel and she scratches out the dear, heads for the back door. Grabs her bag on the way.
The Duluoz backyard is a dead, overgrown mess. Even in summer, but now in the late fall, it’s greyer and deader than ever. Her dad pays attention to the front because that’s what the neighbours see. The back is his own damn business. Let her mom plant tomatoes or something. But there’re so many roots the only thing that grows is rhubarb. Francie hates rhubarb, and strawberries and pie crust by association.
Slim’s on a branch of the old twisted maple. Wearing that smelly denim jacket with the sleeves too short. Trying to look like a rebel and maybe he does a bit. Right away she sees him dangling his new fashion statement from the branch. Cowboy boots.
‘Where’d you get those shitkickers?’
‘Found em. Around.’
She sits on the ground, back against the trunk. ‘Liar.’
He laughs because they both know it’s true. Slim always lying about everything because he thinks it’s funny. Because it’s easier that way. He pulls a sucker out of his pocket, peels the plastic and tosses it in the breeze.
‘That’s littering, y’know.’
He shrugs, sticks the sucker in his mouth. ‘When’re your parents back?’
‘Funeral’s today, so probably tomorrow.’ Feeling with her hand the place he cut their initials in the bark. ‘You’re late.’
‘It’s early.’
‘You’re still late.’
He drops out of the tree and heads for the driveway. ‘Let’s book then.’
‘I’m in my fuckin pyjamas, Slim.’
‘They look great.’
Francie grabs her bag and follows him out to the red Dart, all polished up and not a spot of rust on her. On the passenger side, Slim runs his hand from headlight to handle, touching it like he touches Francie sometimes when nobody would notice. He swings the big door open for her. She tries to duck past him, but he grabs her bag.
‘Trunk’s full.’ He tosses it in the back seat. ‘That all you got?’
‘Don’t need much.’ She looks up at the house. Grey with burgundy trim – like Cape Cod, her dad said, like this was cultured, like this was the excuse for never repainting and letting it peel like some old onion. The house of yesterday and the days and days before, the house of this morning, and that was it.
Slim clicks the heels of the cowboy boots together three times and holds the door wide for her. ‘No place like home.’
As they pull away, she watches her upstairs window, catching a bit of her mobile. Spinning one way and then back.
Francie rolls down the window to let in the fall air and when Slim gives her The Look she says, ‘It stinks,’ because it does. Slim cleans the dash with a toothbrush and vacuums the upholstery, but the car still reeks three years after Heck puked in the back. Four milkshakes and an hour swinging around in a rubber tire and no amount of shampoo can get the smell out. Today worse than usual.
Slim crosses Regent and trucks on down Ontario, hardly a car out yet. ‘Where’re we going?’
‘Got a couple stops to make.’ He rubs his eyes, red rimmed and grey bagged. Scratches some of his poor excuse for stubble.
‘You look tired.’
‘What?’ He puts a hand on her leg like he’s trying to reassure her. But the hand is a dead thing weighed down by that big dumb gold watch and he’s looking at the road with some thousand-mile stare like he’s seeing anything but her, this car, this road.
‘You okay, Slim?’
He takes his hand away and pops in the New Order eight-track, Francie’s favourite. The same album they played racing through the slag heaps in summer, sweating and tangled in Slim’s secret cabin, talking their way into the next day, the next month, all the nexts you could come up with. Music sounds different on different days. Today as that echoing guitar kicks in, all she can hear is the grey blue of all the loneliness in the world. Both of them singing along, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, oh, I’ve lost you. Slim slapping the steering wheel out of time as the drum rolls on.
He pulls right up to the base of it and pops the parking brake on. Francie staring up at the big coin. ‘You’re kidding, right?’
Slim reaches across her to the glove compartment and pulls out his Polaroid. Swings his door open.
‘C’mon.’
‘You’re not kidding.’
‘People get their picture taken with the Eiffel Tower, don’t they?’
‘It’s so tacky.’
‘We’ll do a whole series of you in front of giant coins. Big dimes, big pennies. It’ll be my first show.’
He laughs, Slim all over again, and his laugh is so stupid, honking like a goose, that she’s laughing too. Out of the car, him chasing, her dodging.
