Broke City Read online

  ‒ The whole family’s gone. The whole family. Bodies in the yard . . . in the house . . . shot while they slept in their own beds. Who could even think up such a thing? The baby was found outside with the mother, I guess . . . the little thing shot as she held it right in her arms. She must have seen the guy coming. She must’ve tried to run.

  ‒ But how far could you run with a baby in your arms?

  ‒ Gone just like that.

  On the floor beside the chair was a pile of True Detective Stories magazines. The top half of the covers were missing, but Christine saw the name on the page underneath. She picked up the first magazine on the pile and opened it to a random page and read: “ . . . she screamed again and again as the depraved maniac cut into the soft flesh of her thighs . . . ” In that moment, Christine wished she hadn’t learned to read. She pictured the girl, the screams, the blood . . .

  Christine went to bed without being asked. She didn’t want to hear any more talking. She’d quickly rinsed her face to get into the safety of the bed and get to sleep so the adults would be awake to protect the house. Some soap had gotten into her eyes and she blinked against the sting, rubbing her eyes with the corner of the warm pillow case. Christine’s body and her thoughts remained in the kitchen as she listened to her mother and her grandmother talking. She was waiting for something to make her feel safe. She felt as if she were imagining herself there in bed and waited for something that would make her feel like her body and her thoughts were real again. What if someone broke into the house right now? Killed them all. She pinched herself. The plastic curtains moved against the window with a sigh.

  ‹›‹›‹›

  Christine awakened and heard footsteps. A click. Light under the door. Silence.

  ‒ That’s the fifth time she’s checked if the door’s locked, her mother whispered to her father in the other bed.

  ‒ Whoever it is . . . we could know him.

  ‒ Some nut on the loose . . . no one from around here . . .

  ‹›‹›‹›

  Christine woke up the next morning, she heard her mother’s and her grandmother’s voices in the kitchen. She lay in bed and thought: I am still alive. The Vietnam War hadn’t come to Canada, UFOs didn’t come to get me, and nobody’s killed me.

  The morning gently pulled the plastic curtain in and out from the window screen. It might be okay in the end. She crawled over her sleeping little sister and stood on the bedroom floor. It was already warm against the soles of her feet. Spikes of green and pine cones worn dull and shabby led her to the kitchen.

  II

  The heavy air smelled a mix of burnt hair and something rancid. Frying fat. Christine’s mother closed the windows.

  ‒ What stinks?

  ‒ Those damn meat plants. The wind is blowing in our direction.

  But when Christine’s mother struck a match to light a cigarette, the flame was still and as she drew breath from the cigarette the thin snake of smoke slithered straight up to the ceiling. Disappeared.

  ‒ I hope the wind blows the other way soon, Christine said.

  The dad of the family who lived in the house across the alley worked at one of the meat-packing plants. Christine didn’t know which one exactly. Sometimes Christine would see him carrying a cardboard box into the house across the alley after he worked a day shift at the plant. Christine’s friend told her most of the time he brought home hamburger, but sometimes he brought home steaks. Christine asked what her friend’s father did at the plant and she said he worked in the abattoir. Christine thought it must be like a fancy ballroom where there were shining chandeliers that cast a yellow light on everything. There was probably music playing. Her friend’s father came home from work wearing a clean white shirt and black pants. Christine remembered once, when she waited in the porch at her friend’s house, she had seen a small red smear on her friend’s father’s shoe. She remembered a bright red cut on her mother’s foot once a long time ago and how a sad, dangling piece of ripped white lace seemed to reach toward it to blot the blood and make it disappear. A fear, a sadness came over Christine. She pictured her mother that morning: tired-looking and, now she remembered, scared.

  The meat-packing plants were near her neighbourhood, Santa Rosa. Christine’s mother said they lived in Packingtown. Santa Rosa sounded better. Rosa meant rose. It was the name of a saint and roses smelled better than the air from the packing plants. Sundays, they drove to church along 66th street, toward Fort Road and the Transit Hotel. Christine loved to look at the tall tower in the Canada Packers stockyard. Beautiful red brick with a grey ring at the top. Did her friend’s father go up there? She couldn’t see any stairs or steps or even a ladder. Someone could get trapped in there.

  Maybe her friend’s father. More likely a beautiful princess, right here in Packingtown. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel . . . let down your hair.” If the wind from the packing plants was blowing in the direction of the tower, Christine was pretty sure Rapunzel would hate the smell too. In her book of fairy tales, Rapunzel dangled her hair out of a window in a tower and let a prince climb up it to free her. That would hurt. Even when her mother brushed the knots out of her hair and pulled strands to braid it, it hurt. She did like having braids in her hair though. Christine liked to run her hands over the braids, rippling smooth and thick and then tapering to a point like a paintbrush. Christine knew there was a world far beyond Santa Rosa, beyond their green city but sometimes she felt like Rapunzel. She was alone and looking down on everything that went on around her: her father and mother, her sister. Sometimes she felt as if her parents were far away even when they were in the same house, talking in a language she didn’t understand. That didn’t make sense when she thought about it. She knew the words they were saying and, if anyone asked, she would be able to tell them what each one meant on its own. One. By. One. Why was it, then, that when her parents talked they seemed to mean something else, something she couldn’t quite catch. A word, or a maybe it was a picture, the blueprints her father looked at sometimes, that everyone else seemed to understand but her. One day, Christine would paint herself out of Santa Rosa and into that bigger world she knew must be out there. Beautiful colours that she would use to create a story of her own. She would write it and she would colour it whatever way she wanted and she would know exactly what everything meant because she would say it first. What to say and when to say it.

  ‒ Will you braid my hair, Mom?

  ‒ Okay, run and get an elastic and the tail comb.

  Christine pulled open the drawer in the bathroom. A tube of Brylcreem, tube of toothpaste, jar of Noxzema, and two twisted red elastics with pieces of her dark brown hair snarled around them from the last time she pulled them out of her hair. The black tail comb. There was her father’s can of shaving cream, but not his silver razor. It was on the shelf in the medicine cabinet. It must be dangerous. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN. Why was “THE” missing? That was wrong and it was written on so many things. Drano and pink baby aspirins and Comet powder and Pine-Sol and bleach. There were so many things that were out of the reach of children. But Christine knew where the razor rested, clean and shiny on the shelf where her father left it to dry. She knew the blades were right beside it, in their own little box like some mysterious treasure. She would watch her father shave but she had never told him or her mother that once she had climbed up on the vanity and taken down the small box of razor blades and the razor. That one time, she had gripped the razor the way her father did and was surprised how heavy it felt. She slowly, secretly, slid a paper-wrapped silver blade from the box. The paper made a quiet scraping sound. The blade inside was so light and so thin. How could something that weighed nothing be so dangerous? Keep out of reach of children. There was always something to be afraid of. She slowly returned the blade to its box and set it back beside the razor, making sure every item faced the same way as before.

  Christine put the elastic knot on the table beside her mother’s ashtray. Her mother looked at the them and sent a s
tream of smoke toward the ceiling. She set the cigarette on the metal ashtray and moved it to the opposite side of the table. The smoke slithered toward Christine.

  ‒ Turn around her mother said and made a circle with her index finger.

  ‒ Don’t pull too hard okay, Mom?

  ‒ Just want to make sure there are no stray hairs.

  Christine felt the comb’s teeth scrape against her forehead, her temples, over her ears as her mother gathered her hair in one hand at the base of her neck.

  ‒ Your hair’s so thick.

  ‒ Someone could climb up on it.

  ‒ What?

  ‒ Rapunzel. Rapunzel, must have had thick hair. How long would it take me to grow my hair that long?

  ‒ Years. I think hair stops growing at some point anyway. No one can live a fairy tale.

  ‒ It’s a good story though.

  Her mother’s cigarette burned away in the ashtray, strands of smoke weaving themselves in the air and disappearing. Christine could feel her mother pulling in sequence — 1 – 2 – 3 — on the lengths of her own hair, moving her hands in invisible circles that conjured a braid half-way down the length of her spine.

  ‒ Fairy tales make me think of real life sometimes. Rapunzel’s in a tower . . . there’s a tower at Canada Packers . . .

  ‒ A smoke stack, her mother laughed. Christine hardly ever heard her mother laugh, especially at things she said. She didn’t know this joke either.

  ‒ Well, it looks like a tower. Is that where the stink is coming from?

  ‒ Some of it must . . .

  ‒ Is that where Brenda’s Dad works?

  ‒ At Canada Packers? Yep, Andy works regular shift work and gets a regular paycheque . . .

  Christine could sense her mother’s hands moving faster as she got closer to the end of the braid, the narrowest part. She heard the snap of the elastic and out of the corner of her eye saw her mother stretch it wide open with the fingers of her right-hand reach behind her head and

  snap snap snap

  coil it around the tip of the braid.

  ‒ There.

  She held Christine by the shoulders and turned her around to face her. Her mother took a drag from her cigarette and blew smoke to the floor like she was playing the flute. Christine had seen a flute player on TV. It was jazz. “Take Five” was the name of the song. She and her mother were taking five.

  ‒ Mr. Vanderveen works on the floor with Brenda’s Dad.

  ‒ The floor?

  ‒ The kill floor.

  ‒ Brenda calls it an abattoir.

  ‒ Same thing.

  ‒ What is it? Christine thought she knew. Her throat was getting tight and her stomach felt as tight as the elastic on the end of her braid.

  ‒ That’s where the animals are killed.

  ‒ What animals?

  ‒ Cows, pigs . . .

  ‒ Who kills them?

  ‒ The workers.

  ‒ Mr. Vanderveen? Mr. Vanderveen and Brenda’s Dad kill the animals?

  ‒ I don’t know exactly what he does, I’ve never really asked . . . her mother’s voice trailed off distractedly. She licked her fingers and smoothed the stray hairs at Christine’s temples. Christine could smell the faint remnants of cigarette smoke. She felt sick.

  ‒ I think Brenda’s Dad might kill the animals. I saw blood on his shoe once.

  ‒ It’s part of his job then.

  ‒ Do you think it’s animal blood?

  ‒ Well what else would it be?

  ‒ I saw some blood on your foot once.

  Her mother stared straight at her.

  ‒ You imagined it.

  ‒ No, I didn’t. I saw it. That time in the morning.

  Christine remembered blue. A piece of lace ripped and trailing above a cut on her mother’s foot. Blood.

  ‒ You must be thinking of something else.

  What? That drive-in movie with Julius Caesar and Brutus? The knives and blood she couldn’t forget.

  ‒ No. It wasn’t that Mom. I remember.

  ‒ Okay, that’s enough of that. You have such an imagination. You’ve got to stop thinking about those kinds of things. Do you want to read a book? C’mon we’ll go read a book.

  Smiling, her mother trapped her cigarette between her fingers, took a drag and cradled the ashtray in her palm as she walked to the living room. Christine’s sister played with plastic farm animals on the hardwood floor. There were cows and pigs and sheep . . . Christine thought of Brenda’s Dad and Mr. Vanderveen on the kill floor standing in blood wearing nice clean white shirts. No, it couldn’t be true. Any of it. Her sister clutched a little brown plastic cow. Chez Hélène was on TV. “. . . écoutez bien mes petits amis . . .”

  Her mother patted the chesterfield and opened the book of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. It was a big heavy book that was frayed along the edges and the corners of the fading green cover. Christine sat beside her mother and her sister sat on her mother’s lap.

  ‒ Now what should we read . . .

  ‒ Rapunzel.

  Christine’s sister said Rapunzel too and leaned her small head into her mother.

  III

  “Your-dad’s-side-of-the-family” lived in a basement suite not far away from Christine’s small house in Santa Rosa. They were going there for Christmas Eve and the leaving couldn’t come fast enough. She tried looking out the living room window, but it was covered with frost. She knew by heart what was outside: the big trees lining their street, leafless, cold and solemn and the church down the street with its stained-glass windows. They were like the church’s very own Christmas lights. Christine still had hopes for this day, Christmas Eve. Wasn’t that what Christmas was all about? Hope? That’s what everyone was saying on TV anyway.

  Christine thought their TV was beautiful. It rested on a wire frame like something in a museum. When she put her hands on the warm screen and spread her fingers she was part of this beautiful object. “Warm up the idiot box,” her father would say. But when Christine turned on the TV she knew it was not an idiot box. Its name was Sylvania. It was Sylvania’s box. The TV was turquoise and beige and it was like a spaceship control made from the velvet gown of a regal princess in a knights-in-shining-armour movie.

  Sylvania also made her think of sylvan, where the trees were thick with green leaves in the summer. Summer had the longest day and December had the longest night. But it seemed like today was the longest day after all. She was waiting for something good to happen on Christmas Eve. Sure, Santa was coming tonight after she went to sleep, but something good to happen besides that. If anything good would happen before that, it would have to be at her father’s-side-of-the-family.

  Her parents did not seem to have the same hope as Christine.

  That morning, Christine got up in the quiet dark and plugged in the Christmas tree. She knelt in front of it. The colours from the lights shone on the walls and turned the living room walls into stained glass. The scent of pine defined that one small moment and that one place in the house. The tree had turned into something else, something that she didn’t even have a name for anymore. She would give it a new name. Not pine tree. Not Christmas tree. This new name might not even be an actual word, but something beyond a word. A shape or the taste of scribbled green needles and painted branches growing from an invisible place and sap escaping from the rough bark — all of those things became part of her. She could taste the green and she gathered it in as if the rest of the day depended on the taste of this moment right now. There was a yellow plastic star at the top of the tree and Christine closed her eyes and imagined she could fly above that moment, above that star, and above the snow and the cold and the puffs of white coming out of the chimneys of the houses in Santa Rosa and find a green city with grass you could see and feel in every season, even winter, and that was full of trees like their Christmas tree and smelled this beautiful all the time and everywhere. She closed her eyes and tried to hold on but the moment and the feeling and the word-not-a-word
was gone. She felt the tops of her feet cold against the floor. She stood and shook her legs walking silently back to her room. Christine’s sister woke while she searched in a drawer for her green socks and pulled them on. Better. “Come on, it’s Christmas Eve!” Christine said to her sister. “Let’s go have our breakfast.” “Happy Christmas Eve,” her sister said. “Happy Christmas Eve!” and they both cheered.

  Her mother made Christine and her sister cream of wheat. It was Christmas Eve and her mother told them it was a happy tradition, but Christine couldn’t remember ever having it on Christmas Eve and when her mother closed the cupboard door to put back the box of cereal, Christine noticed it was the only cereal on the shelf. Christine slowly stirred the brown sugar and white cream of wheat in the bowl. The white snow of winter mixed with the sand on the streets with the spoon making tracks to her grandmother’s place for Christmas Eve.