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Yeah, that sounds pretty good, I say. We walk past the Lions Club playground. Two kids crouch on the teeter-totter. Neither one wants to go up because they know the other will hop off and crash the hard seat down on the hard ground. They just bob up and down, glaring at each other, never quite leaving the ground.
Hey, Mullen, what’s Solzhenitsyn’s real name? I don’t know, he says, I thought Solzhenitsyn was his real name. I saw some other guy on TV with that name, I say, some famous Russian from history. Mullen throws a rock out across the street. They can’t both have the same name? Course they can’t have the same name. You never met anyone named Benjamin Franklin, did you? Or Genghis Khan? I met a Benjamin once, Mullen says. Back in Winnipeg in the second grade. When his front teeth fell out no new ones grew back, so he had fake teeth. He could take them out. You can’t name your kid after somebody famous, I say. It’s not allowed. That’s why you have to get a birth certificate when you’re born, to make sure that you’ve got an allowed name. I don’t know what Solzhenitsyn’s real name is; that’s what my dad always calls him, Mullen says. All the other Russians call him Solly. Is that an allowed name?
Mullen’s dad comes out of his house carrying a bunch of TV trays tight against his chest. Closes the door with his hip. Walks out onto the sidewalk, past Deke’s. Pushes open the little wooden gate with his hip. The Russians’ lawn is about as dead as everybody else’s on the block, except for Mrs. Lamp-man’s maybe. In the summer she always digs little patches along the path, plants sweet peas. Everybody else on the street is doing pretty good if they keep their lawn cut. Pavel and Solzhenitsyn sit in their lawn chairs around the barbecue, their heavy jean jackets buttoned all the way up in the cold, brown beer bottles tight in black gloves. Vaslav sits on the step, his belt undone and his big stomach pushing the bottom of his sweater up over his belly button. He’s working on his novel. Drinks beer and scribbles on a huge pile of paper in his lap. He scratches his forehead with his pen, leaves a blue line.
Hey, you ever torn the corset from the heaving chest of a kidnapped virginal millionairess?
The kids, says Mullen’s dad. Starts to unfold TV trays.
The kids have never torn the corsets off anything. I’m trying to get the facts straight. So as to be historically accurate.
They’ve got a lot of buttons on them. Those corsets. It would take some tearing.
Right, says Vaslav, it sure would.
Does the virginal millionairess have a name? asks Mullen.
Well, I’ve got it narrowed down to a short list of about eighteen. Has to have the right tone, see. I’ve left it blank so far in the manuscript. He holds up the top few pages and, sure enough, the pencil script is full of blank spaces. It’s got to go well with all the other words, see, he says, especially the ones I use a lot. And it’s got to evoke the proper balance of Victorian restraint and bottled passion. Voluptuous without being lusty, see. Owing to the virginalness of the character.
Pavel takes the lid off the barbecue and starts to turn chicken legs with his black-ended tongs. He squints with his one eye, making sure he gets the legs okay with the tongs. His glass eye looks off somewhere else, never quite in line with the real one. Solzhenitsyn goes back and forth to the refrigerator inside, bringing out all kinds of food: jars and jars of all kinds of pickles, and plates with different coloured strips of fish, covered tight in plastic wrap. A bowl of hard-boiled eggs. Him and Mullen’s dad talk all serious-like, in between bites of pickled beets and anchovies, lots of big serious words, like newscasters on television.
Vaslav reaches across them for a pickle. Hey, he asks Mullen’s dad, is there hot water in your house?
Hot water? Sure there is.
Vaslav sticks the pickle in the side of his mouth. Wedges a beer bottle against the arm of his lawn chair, hits it with the flat of his palm, pops the cap off. I called McClaghan three times last week about the hot water, he says through a mouthful of pickle. Each time he tells me to leave it alone. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, he says. I told him an ounce of prevention is the whole cure and he hung up on me.
Our hot water is fine, says Mullen’s dad.
Our hot water is fine too, says Pavel. Vaslav makes a face. Pass me the herring, he says.
You left work early, says Solzhenitsyn.
Mullen’s dad opens another bottle of beer. Shrugs. Sometimes you’ve got to leave work early. Solly drums his pencil on his knee.
I can’t tell who’s skinnier, Solzhenitsyn or Mullen’s dad. It’s hard to imagine the two of them with sledgehammers, in a steel room, smashing blocks of ice. It must get slippery in the ice room. The floor must get slushy and deep, like outside the curling rink in March, when the weather starts to break.
Earl Barrie got hit by a side of beef just before three o’clock, Soltzhenitsyn says.
What?
A frozen side of beef. Took a wrong swing and hit him in the head. Luckily, his hard hat –
And he’s …
Jarvis and I drove him to the High River hospital. Had to clear all the empty egg cartons out of the cab and lay him across our laps. His head in Jarvis’s lap and his feet sticking out the window. To keep his head steady. He got conscious every now and then, went on and on about spanking his wife. Lord, just let me spank my wife again, he’d say. Jarvis had to put the talk-radio station on.
Earl hates talk radio.
Right. Kept him awake. So he went off about how much he hates talk radio, and how he wants to spank his wife, all the way to High River.
Why does Earl Barrie want to spank his wife? asks Mullen.
His dad glares at Solly. I don’t know, Mullen. He must have taken quite a bump. Pretty delirious.
Days I can’t find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There’s this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it. Or I like to walk over to the football field and watch them building houses in the new subdivision. Some of them wearing hard hats, with stickers: Safety First, and 1,000 Consecutive Hours. They’ve got heavy belts and hammers. If Mullen and I had hammers and tools like that, we could build all sorts of stuff. We could get shovels and dig out the back wall Underground. Dig tunnels and other rooms: a library for our comics and a workshop for all the building we’d do. We could build shelves, put down a plywood floor. We could put down roofing felt so we could take off our shoes and not get slivers. We could build a wall, like the fur-trading forts in social studies class, with sharpened logs, and a drawbridge. Then we could just stay down there and do whatever we wanted. Grown-ups from the school could come by and hammer on the log walls and we’d just ignore them from inside our underground fort. They’d fall into the sharpened logs underneath our drawbridge and we’d laugh and laugh.
After recess, all the Dead Kids stop what they’re doing: hanging up coats or unlacing boots or popping open the rings of their new binders. They start to point and then realize what they’re doing, and stand there, looking awkward. A few binders pop, like grasshoppers jumping.
Jenny Tierney walks to her coat hook. Hangs up her black leather purse. Takes off her black jean jacket. She looks around the hallway and all the kids have to pretend like they weren’t staring at her, get back to taking off their boots or getting their textbooks off the shelf.
Jenny Tierney is the only kid who gets sent up more than me and Mullen. But me and Mullen get sent up for dumb stuff, like wallpaper paste and soap flakes and racing toilet-paper rolls down the staircase. Jenny Tierney told a kid to stick scissors into an electric socket, and he did. Jenny Tierney is twelve years old and still in the fifth grade, like us. She’s two inches taller than me and four inches taller than Mullen. Jenny Tierney hit a kid in the face with her math textbook so hard he has to wear glasses now. They didn’t even send her