Light Lifting Page 15

  I saw Barney on the other side. He was still wearing his nylon shorts and his Hawaiian shirt, but he was down on the floor now, piled up in a fleshy lump and surrounded by newspapers and old magazines and take-out food wrappers. One of his arms was bent back at an angle that didn’t seem right and his head was turned away from me so I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed. There was a bowl of Ravioli turned over near his head and the grainy red meat sauce was seeping into the carpet. It looked like all the hard stuff, all the bone and the muscle, had been sucked out of his body. The Medic Alert necklace was resting on the coffee table where he must have put it before he started eating and the steady red light kept blinking on and off like nothing was wrong.

  My first thought was just to leave him there. I had my nose pushed up against the glass and I was only a foot away, but I couldn’t shake this feeling in my stomach that this was how Barney did it. This was his master trick, his secret way of getting kids into his house.

  “Barney,” I yelled and I banged on the glass with my fist. “Get up. It’s not going to work. I’m not coming in there.”

  But nothing came back from him. The shouting and the banging on the window didn’t even send a ripple through him. I walked over to the door and I opened it again and stared in at him. The greasy smell of the house came outside, but there was no sound and no movement. His body was just a thing, like a pile of laundry in the middle of the room, as still as the furniture. I think it was that stillness that got me. I was sure you couldn’t fake it. A person just couldn’t hold themselves forever like that. You couldn’t do it on purpose.

  I said his name again. I said “Barney” and I crossed over. It was like stepping out of an airplane.

  Everything happened quickly after that. I walked over to the end table and pushed the red flashing Medic Alert button a couple times. Then it was only the two of us. I went over to Barney and rolled him over onto his back. His eyes were closed and everything had gone limp. Even the shape of his face was different and you wouldn’t have recognized him. There was nothing left to hold him up from the inside and I didn’t know what I should do. His body lumped in front of me like the low, half-built wall of a kid’s snow fort, big enough so you could duck down and hide behind it. He was way larger than I realized and much softer and his skin was cooler than I thought it would be. There was a thin, white paste coming from his mouth and the head of his penis had flopped out of his twisted shorts. I put my ear down on his chest and felt his hair pushing against my cheek. I listened for a rattle or some kind of breath coming from way down inside of him and I ran my fingers around his neck trying to feel for the thudding or just a little surge of anything that might still be flowing through him.

  I didn’t have any training, but I set myself up for the kind of CPR I had seen on television. I tilted Barney’s head back so his chin was pointed straight at the ceiling and I tried to flatten everything else out, his arms and his legs. I wanted to make sure all those hoses and pipes that I imagined running inside of him would be in line. Then I just did it and I put myself through a set of actions that would have been impossible to imagine five minutes earlier and were now just as impossible to avoid. I pinched Barney’s nostrils together and brought my mouth down until my lips came right up against his. I held back for maybe half a second and then pushed down even harder until I had a tight seal over his mouth. It was simple after that. I blew my air into his lungs, sucking the oxygen out of myself and forcing it down into him. The taste of the ravioli and the beer and the white paste were still there in his mouth and I thought I might throw up when I lifted my head to pull in another clean breath. But then I went back down and I gave him two more breaths, as full as I could make them. Then I moved over to the middle of his chest and put my fingers together so my hands came down almost like one plunger pushing down on his round chest, squeezing at his heart ten or twelve or maybe fifteen times before I had to go back to the head and blow into him again. As I shuffled back and forth on my knees, moving just a couple inches from the top of Barney to the middle of him, it hit me that this was all it took. A person just needed the air to go in and go out and the essential liquids to go around and around. This was how they did it. This was how they kept your life going at the worst of times, by blowing it in and pushing it around and forcing it all the way through your body even if you didn’t want or deserve it.

  Everything worked exactly like it’s supposed to. I kept it up with Barney for maybe five minutes, taking turns blowing and pushing, and then I heard the sirens. The ambulance stopped in front of the house and the flashing purple and red lights came in through the window. I looked over at the necklace again. It was still there, resting on the end table, still blinking on and off. I couldn’t believe it had actually done what it was supposed to do. It was just a brown plastic circle in the middle of a beige plastic square with a piece of string attached to it and it didn’t look like it had been cared for well enough to work. Then they were inside, an older guy and a younger woman wearing dark blue baseball caps, and they took over.

  “Family?” the woman said to me as she unzipped her gym bag and started pulling out her gear.

  “No,” I said.

  “How long have you been at it, approximately?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Five minutes, no more than that.” She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and took out a syringe and stuck it in a little vial and filled it halfway up with a clear liquid. Then, without any hesitation, without even changing the expression on her face, she found her spot and drove that needle right into Barney’s arm and pushed down on the plunger with her thumb.

  The man kept muttering to himself as he fiddled around with the wires and tried to untangle the paddles on his portable defibrillator.

  “They never pack this right,” he mumbled to his partner. There was a flat, bored sound in the way he talked and she just nodded her head and said the guys on the night shift were always like that.

  It took him maybe fifteen seconds to get everything straight. And then it was just like you’d expect. The man pressed the paddles onto Barney’s bare chest and the woman put her straight arm against my body to make sure I was standing far enough away. The man said “clear,” very quietly as if there was really no one to warn, and then he sent a shock wave into Barney. It wasn’t as loud as I expected. Just a sizzling sound and it made a kind of burning smell, but nothing happened. Then he said “clear” again and gave him another blast and that was the one that did it. Just like jumping a car after the lights have been left on all night. This big shiver went all the way through Barney’s body and his face suddenly came back to its normal shape and he took in this enormous breath like he was coming back to the top of the lake after being under too long. He started coughing hard and spitting up. The woman rubbed her hand on his chest and she looked straight into his eyes. Then she looped an elastic band around the back of his head to hold the oxygen mask in place and she turned the dial on a little tank to set the gas flowing. She shined a little pen flashlight into his eyes and started talking to him in this very slow, calm voice. She told him there’d been an accident, a cardiac event. But now everything was going to be okay. His signs were looking good, she said, and they were going to take him to the hospital.

  “You are going to feel yourself being lifted,” she said. “We’re going to lift you and put you on a stretcher and take you in the ambulance. Do you understand what I’m telling you?” Her voice came out at that perfect pace.

  “Just nod your head if you understand.”

  Barney nodded his head, but his eyes were panicked and they skittered around the room, clunking off the walls and the couch and the TV. Then he settled on me, the only person he recognized, standing about a foot away. All the confusion went out of his face and his expression changed back, back in one second, to the same angry and disgusted stare we saved only for each other. That’s when he finally made his move on me. His arm shot up from the floor, faster than you’d think and he grabbed ho
ld of my arm. He gripped it so tight, with so much pressure, it felt like he was going right through me and holding onto those two skinny little bones in the middle of my forearm. There was so much power in him, even then, so much strength in just one of his hands that I knew right away I would have never been able to fight him off. That was the only time we ever touched.

  “It’s okay,” the woman told Barney in her soothing voice. “He’s right here. Don’t worry. He’s not leaving.”

  Then she used both hands to pry open the trap and get my arm out. Barney kept staring at me all the time and I think he tried to say something, a word that fogged up the inside of his mask, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “Immediate family members can ride in the back of the ambulance if you want,” the man said to me.

  “He’s not family,” the woman said to her partner, and she pointed at me. “Just a bystander.”

  “There’s no relation, right?” she asked again.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well you can meet us at the hospital then,” she said. “Hotel Dieu.”

  They covered him with a blue blanket and strapped him in tight and then they just rolled him out of the room and took him down the steps of his front porch. They loaded him into the back of the ambulance and the woman followed him in while the man went to the front to drive. I stood on the porch watching it all and she waved at me just before she pulled the door shut.

  “See you down there,” she said and they were gone. The rig pulled away without using the sirens or the lights and it slipped back into the new dark. They left me there standing in the middle of Barney’s empty house.

  There was nothing left to do. I went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and rinse out my mouth and I was kind of surprised by how neat Barney kept everything in there. I didn’t expect that he would have a bottle of liquid soap by the taps and a clean hand towel hanging on the rack. It was a kind of soap that we didn’t sell and I pressed a couple squirts of it into my hands and rubbed them together under the warm water. Then I lowered my head a bit and I cupped my hands together and took a drink. The water swished around inside my head and I felt the faint taste of soap burning against my gums and the inside of my cheeks before I spat it out.

  Then I went into reverse. I walked straight out and as I left the house, I turned the knob so the door would lock behind me. When I got back onto my own side, I looked down at the bag as it sat there, slumped on the porch and waiting for me. It was still full of all the orders for that day, all those little white packages, the things people needed. But it wasn’t going to be my job anymore. I aimed the bike straight back to Musgrave and started thinking up how I would explain it all to him and break the news.

  More than anything, I wanted to go home and be exactly my own age for as long as I could. That was my new plan. I would go home and lie on my bed and stare at the Guy Lafleur poster on my wall and love the way he didn’t need a helmet. Then I’d eat nothing but junk – just Twizzlers and Blow Pops and Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip – and I’d listen to my music as loud as I wanted. Maybe I’d watch The Dukes of Hazzard. I thought about Bo and Luke Duke and how they never killed anyone and never used guns. Instead, they used to tape a stick of dynamite to one of their arrows and fire it straight into the bad guy’s hideout and blast the whole thing into a pile of splinters and falling straw. That would be just about right, I thought. It would be great to just sit with them in the backseat of the General Lee and scream as loud as you could as they punched the gas and their orange car started up its long flight across the river, over to the other side, where no one could follow and you always got away.

  Good Kids

  If he is still alive – and there is no reason to think he wouldn’t be – Reggie Laroque is probably close to thirty now. Maybe he still lives here, in the same city with the rest of us, or maybe it’s Toronto now, or Calgary, or Cleveland. “We get around a lot,” he told me once, when he was seven and I was twelve.

  After Reggie moved out of the house across the road, the students came next and then the cats. A whole ragged, night-scrapping pack of them showed up one day and took over an abandoned car that had been sitting there for years, docked at the back of the driveway. The car was a four-door Chevrolet Caprice station wagon with all its tires missing. It had belonged to another former tenant, a long-haired guy who used to work on it in the evenings. One night, he moved away too and that was that. No one ever came back to claim the car for parts and nobody was going to pay to have it hauled off, so it just stayed there with its metal rims slowly grinding their way down into their masonry blocks. It seemed almost logical at first when the cats moved in, like the car was getting a second chance. Overnight it changed from a piece of junk into a sort of shelter. It stopped being a station wagon and became more like a cave, like something made of stone, a hole carved right into the earth that would never be moved. We called it, obviously, the “cat car” and after about a week, it became just another part of the landscape: a writhing, urine-soaked chunk of our terrain – almost entirely covered in hair.

  The house across the way was the only rental property on our street. Its address was 237. My family lived on the even side, at 234, and if there was ever a mix-up, their mail might get accidentally delivered into our box. Mostly we got their bills with “Final Notice” printed in red ink and once in a while there might be a personal letter from someone whose messy handwriting made it difficult to tell the difference between the 4 and the 7. Whenever that happened my mother would make a special point of printing “wrong house” on the envelope before she gave it back to the mailman. She would use big block letters and press down hard with her pen, going over it two or three times, and underlining the word “wrong.”

  “That place is an insult,” she used to say, peeking through the curtains.

  “It’s a revolving door. In and out, back and forth. No good for the area. Just you watch. When that place goes all to hell, it’s going to drag us right down with it.”

  To us, 237 seemed like one of those doomed store locations that can’t support any kind of business. All sorts of different people tried to make a go of it over there, but no one ever broke through. In the beginning there were a lot of quiet, single men, guys who never spoke to anybody and seemed utterly alone in the universe, but we also had a few couples and some families. They did what they could. In the springtime, somebody might get a surge of energy and they’d try and scrape off all the old paint and splash on a brand new colour, or maybe there’d be some flowers that would get planted in May, but never watered after that. A lot of things ended up half-done over there. The place was like a Bermuda triangle for hopeful people. No matter what they tried, it always seemed like the same persistent, revolving futility kept coming around to mow them down. Reggie was the only one who ever managed to hold if off.

  He was younger than us, but seemed older. I’m pretty sure Reggie was one of those children who spent too many of his early years around adults and he ended up being more comfortable with grown-ups than he was with kids his own age. Everything about him was more formal than you’d expect. His hair was cut very short and he always wore a collared shirt that was tucked into his pants all the way around. He had a little brown belt and it went all the way around too, through all the little loops. He wore white socks and hard-bottom church shoes. When he walked up to us that first time, we were playing road hockey in the street between our houses and he just clicked-clicked-clicked his way right down the sidewalk, no problem at all.

  “My name is Reggie,” he announced, like this was a job interview. “Reggie Bartholomew Laroque.”

  Then he just stood there, perfectly still and patient, smiling and looking at each of us, waiting to see what we would do with this information. Long silences did not make Reggie uncomfortable. We kind of froze, trying to figure out the right response. He seemed like one of those religious people, like the child-version of one of those men in a white, short-sleeved shirt who can walk right up to your house, ring t
he doorbell and start talking to you about how to save your soul. My brother Matt slid over and put his hand up to my ear.

  “Maybe he’s retarded,” he whispered. “Maybe he’s slow.”

  I nodded my head a bit, but didn’t say anything.

  There are four boys in our family. I am the oldest and there’s a set of twins in the middle – Matt and Christopher – and the youngest is James. During that time we spent with Reggie, we were all clustered in there between the ages of 8 and 12. This was right at the peak of our infatuation with hockey, when we cared about it in that total and absolute way that only kids can care about anything. None of us could skate, and we had never actually played in a real league on real ice, but we dumped everything we had into our games in the street. We built our own nets out of old two-by-fours nailed into posts and crossbars and instead of string netting, we used this heavy-duty industrial plastic sheeting that we had found behind a meat-packing plant. We cut the plastic and staple-gunned it right into the wood so that every time someone fired a ball into the net, it made a satisfying pop, like a burst balloon or a gun being fired. Our sticks were Koho and Sherwood shafts with plastic blades that had been wickedly curved over the front burner of the stove and we usually played with tennis balls that were too small and kept falling down through the grates of the sewer. We had the other kind of ball, too, a couple of those hard, orange, no-bouncers that are designed especially for the street and we believed that if one of those ever got fired straight into a guy’s nuts, then that person would die. It became one of our most reliable standby threats – “I swear, I’ll fire this fucking thing right into your fucking nuts if you don’t fucking shut up.” We had a pair of real goalie pads and a baseball glove trapper. For the blocker we used to spend five minutes taping an old phone book onto the outstretched arm of whoever was unlucky enough to play in the net.