One Good Hustle

TWENTY-THREE




DREW AND I step off the bus in the middle of shit-kicking nowhere.

Across the two-lane highway, a half-dozen Holsteins munch grass in a wide flat field. Only a handful of houses are visible from where we stand and each of them is set way back, its own private little dirt road leading out to this half-assed highway we’re on.

I watch the bus roll back onto the pavement and lumber away from us.

Drew inhales deeply.

“Smells like cow shit,” I say.

“Seems like there’s less bull shit out here, though.” He laughs a little.

“Shouldn’t’ve brought me if you didn’t want bullshit.” I laugh too and then stop short.

It feels crunchy between us. Took an hour to get here on the bus. I told him that I didn’t bring his socks with me because I had to wash them first. Drew told me not to worry about it. That was the sum total of our conversation.

“Maggie’s place is just over there,” Drew says, and nods across the massive field behind us. We’ll have to trudge another quarter-mile until we get to a smaller road, turn left and walk until we can’t go any farther.

“Can’t we cut across the field?”

“S’posed to be a bull in there.”

All I see are two or three black and white cows spread out on acres of grass. No point in arguing, though. I follow him down the gravel shoulder. There are fresh bandages on my heels and my own thick socks in my old gym sneakers.

“She’s going to think I’m a goof,” I say, “for not having riding boots but—”

“I’ve just got running shoes on too, see—oh shit, your feet.” He stops and looks down at my shoes. “The blisters. I wasn’t thinking. It’s almost a mile to Maggie’s place.”

“I’m fine.”

He looks doubtful, but I start walking again so he does too.

We walk for about five minutes and the silence is killing me. Bits of last night flash through my head: Drew putting his socks on my feet; Maggie so golden-haired and serene at the foot of the stairs. Battle of the battleaxes! Ha ha ha!

“So …” I say, just as Drew says the same.

“Go ’head …”

“No, you go.”

“When did you get that job at the banquet hall?”

“It’s the catering company who hired me. Last night was my first—”

“Right, right. You said that. I forgot.”

More silence. The gravel crunches under our feet. Then somewhere in the distance one of those cows gives a loud moan and another answers.

“The cattle are lowing,” I say.

“Huh?”

“Nothing.”

I loved “Away in a Manger” when I was small. I really liked the part where it said that the cattle were lowing. It sounded cozy. You could almost smell the hay. I also liked the bits about the little Lord Jesus laying down his sweet head. And how the stars looked down where he lay asleep on the hay. All that stuff sounded like the best thing in the world when I was six or seven, even though I didn’t really know who the hell the little Lord Jesus was. I figured his parents must have been rich people—a royal family who had recently lost everything. They were still kind and gentle, though, even now that they were all stuck sleeping in a barn. Even the cows and horses loved them and stayed close to keep them warm.

I don’t tell Drew any of that. Used to be, when I remembered that kind of story, I’d say it right away and Drew would laugh and tell me some goofy thing that he used to believe when he was a little kid.

“Maggie seems nice,” I try, finally. “Funny, I mean, and, um, down-to-earth. She’s a real hippie-chick, huh?”

“Yeah, Maggie’s cool. She can get along with anybody.”

“ ‘Battle of the battleaxes’!” I quote out loud. “So, was that, uh, how’d she—? What’d she mean? By that.” Jesus, I can’t even talk. I am the idiot child of Farmer Lug.

“It’s stupid. Just my mother—She means my mother is friggin’ nosy. Hey look, goats!” He points as we turn the corner and head down the narrow back road toward Maggie’s farm.

Outside a beat-up shed, a kid head-butts his mother’s backside and she turns around and bleats at him. Sounds as if she’s laughing when she gives him a shove. The kid laughs along and comes back for more. Three or four more goats graze beyond them. Part of me wants to stay here, just sit on the fence and listen to these little goats ha-ha-ha at each other.

“Maggie’s brother … Shaye doesn’t live out here at the farm, you know,” Drew says. “Even, like, before he got married. He had a place in town, down in the west end, with Maurice.”

I nod.

“There was this sort of joke going around,” Drew says, his voice suddenly tight, “or rumour or whatever, that Shaye and Maurice were boyfriends.”

“Maurice is gay, right?”

“No!” Drew looks offended, which makes me want to disappear into the ditch. “He’s a Christian. Shaye and Maurice are both Christians. So how can they be gay? That’s not—”

“Can’t you be into Jesus-stuff and be gay?”

“No! I mean, you could, but it’s a sin. A major one. Like a—a hell sin, you know.”

I’ve never heard him so emphatic about the sin stuff.

“Anyway.” Drew looks rattled now. “My mother gets into the fray and she starts calling Aunt Katy and saying that her and Uncle Ralph should get Shaye out of that apartment and into therapy. She actually started talking about kidnapping him and getting him deprogrammed. Like they do with the Moonies. I mean … F*ck!”

I flinch. It’s not as if Drew never swears but it’s kind of a big deal when he says f*ck. Way more impressive than when I do it.

“Meanwhile, Shaye’s dating Trudy. And Trudy, she goes to Broadway Tabernacle and those people are really, you know—those Broadway Tab people are hard-core! Trudy couldn’t even say the word gay. The next thing you know, Shaye and Trudy are engaged and the plan is to get married right away, which, I admit, seems suspicious, but what do I know?”

“You think they rushed the wedding just to shut people up?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “And neither does my mother. She phones up Aunt Katy and this huge battle breaks out. And, of course, it all got back to Trudy and she got so freaked. Poor Trudy. She’s really pretty but did you see her face last night? She’s got a rash all over her cheeks right down onto her neck. It’s all over her hands—she’s covered in eczema or something. From the stress. In the end, my mother refused to go to the wedding because she’s convinced that Shaye and Maurice have an ‘unnatural’ relationship. It’s good she stayed the hell home, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s none of her friggin’ business!”

“Well, I hope Shaye’s not gay,” I say. “That’d be shitty for Trudy.”

Drew stares at his feet as he walks. “He’s not gay.”

“Well, what if he is?”

“Then he should knock it off.”

“What if he can’t help it? Some babies are born with both sets of stuff, you know—like a hermaphrodite. What if a boy baby was born with a girl brain? He’d probably like guys. Then what?”

Drew starts to sputter and then says, “Well, if I had that problem then it’d be up to me to give what little I had to a woman. How can I be around Shaye if he’s gay?”

“Because of sinning?”

He looks into my eyes for a second but doesn’t say anything more.

“I didn’t think you were so mean about sin.”

I stop walking and look down into the ditch, and then out into the field at the one scruffy black and white cow grazing in the middle. It’s a huge cow. Huge. It dawns on me that this must be the bull. I can see a slim wire fence now and realize that it separates him from a second cow. Another monster. I bet that second “she” is a he too.

Drew stops next to me. He jams his hands in his pockets and scrubs the gravel with his shoe.

“I don’t feel good,” I say.

Drew bounces his shoulders three or four times fast as if he’s trying hard to shrug off the whole gay thing. He looks away, searching for words.

“Guess I just can’t deal,” he finally says. He keeps his face turned to the field, sucks in a nervous breath. “Are your feet hurting?”

No. My head is hurting. My heart is hurting. My whole life is hurting. If Drew knew who the hell I was, what my dad does, what my whole family is really like, he wouldn’t be playing me Stevie Nicks songs, that’s for damn sure.

“I don’t know if I want to get on a horse today, to tell you the truth. I don’t—I don’t feel like making conversation with strangers right now.”

He turns to me. “Maggie’s not … Okay. We don’t have to.”

“I shouldn’t have come out here. I only wanted to say thank you about the socks.”

Drew nods.

“It’s just that …” I look at the bull in the field. He’s got no horns but I can see now that he’s a bull all right. He looks harmless, though. Like Ferdinand. Suddenly I’m sure that something terrible will happen to that bull one day and I want to cry. “I’m sorry,” I say. “That I’ve been such a shitty friend. You always do good-friend stuff. Like the socks last night. You’re not mean, you’re true—I mean real.”

“I don’t feel real. I feel like a total shit-heel.”

We stand there together and watch the bull for another minute or two until I speak again. “They put my mom in some kind of mental institution.”

Drew winces.

“Not like a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest type of place. She could have gone home if she wanted to. Except she didn’t. She did things, crazy shit, to make herself seem like she needed to be there. She didn’t want to go home. I think she finally had to leave, though.”

Drew stares into the ditch and then looks back the way we came. An eighteen-wheeler roars down the main highway, blasts his horn. A car coming from the opposite direction seems to disappear in the cloud of sand and dirt kicked up by the truck. Poor car. Poor bull. Poor everybody.

When it’s quiet again, Drew says, “That night that your mom was at the police station, I meant what I said, you know. I wished I could have just driven you home with me and put you in my brother’s old bed. I wished I had a quiet place just for you.”

I shake my head. My eyes sting.

“Are you going to go back home with her or are you going to stay with Jill and her parents?”

“I thought my dad would come. I phoned him in Toronto and his girlfriend, Peggy, said he’s here. In Vancouver.”

Drew’s hand brushes mine. His pinky grabs my pinky for a few seconds and then he takes my whole hand. It feels naked to me, my hand in his like this. As if all of my clothes have disappeared and I’m standing in the middle of Broadway.

He glances over his shoulder. “Come on,” he whispers, and leads me across the road and up a grassy slope.

I can just see a big white house over the hill. It’s set way back but this must be part of the same property. We sit down in the shade of a few trees.

Drew takes my hand with both of his now and holds it to his chest. There’s a rush up and down me, as if cool air is zinging through my veins and into my brain. Part of me wants to pull my hand back, but if I do I might just float away, into the air like a helium balloon, fly into the sun and burst into shreds.

Then I burst anyway. “I mean, f*cking Peggy—who the hell does she think she is? She was just some booster and now she acts like this. She used to be my mom’s friend.” Tears start down my face and no matter how hard I clench my jaws, I can’t stop them. “I think my dad doesn’t like me.”

“Of course he does. He’s your dad.”

“Lots of people don’t like their kids. His life has been way worse because of me.”

“That’s not true.”

“You don’t know me.” I pull my hand away after all. “You don’t know who I am. Or my dad. Or my mom. We’re not nice—” I shut my eyes and mouth.

“I do so know you, Sammie. Just because I don’t know every little—Who cares!”

“He’s got good reason not to want to talk to me.”

Drew fidgets with the grass in front of him, pulling out blades and twisting them together.

“Do you want to know or not?”

He nods.

If I tell this stuff to Drew now, I am the biggest traitor there ever was. But it’s my goddamn story too.