Down Read online

  Down

  Down

  Norah McClintock

  orca soundings

  Copyright © Norah McClintock 2007

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McClintock, Norah

  Down / written by Norah McClintock.

  (Orca soundings)

  ISBN 978-1-55143-768-2 (bound)

  ISBN 978-1-55143-766-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.C62D69 2007 jC813’.54 C2007-903839-5

  Summary: After serving time for assault, Remy must learn to

  control his anger.

  First published in the United States, 2007

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007930413

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design: Teresa Bubela

  Cover photography: Getty Images

  Orca Book Publishers Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Station B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  010 09 08 07 • 5 4 3 2 1

  To H.B. and D.R.—Down a dead-end street.

  Chapter One

  I’m back about three days when I run into Asia. She’s across the street with her friend Lissa. They’re talking. Lissa says something, and Asia laughs. Then she turns her head and sees me.

  I’m just standing there staring at her. She looks even prettier than I remember, which is really something because Asia’s one of those girls who belongs in a magazine, she’s that beautiful. You don’t even notice her hand—at least, I don’t. Her brown eyes meet mine, and her whole face changes. She looks surprised to see me. Well, why not? I only wrote to her twice—once almost as soon as I went away and once more after I got her first letter. After that, she kept writing, but I stopped reading. I didn’t read any letters from anyone, not that many people wrote to me. What was the point of reading letters? They would just tell me about stuff that was happening without me. It would be like no one even missed me or noticed I was gone. Finally the letters from Asia stopped. But they probably wouldn’t have if I’d written back.

  And now there she is, looking across the street at me, surprised, and then—boy, it’s a miracle—she smiles at me. Lissa doesn’t smile, though. Lissa glowers at me and says something to Asia. She shakes her head when Asia runs across the street toward me.

  “Remy,” she says, breathless. “I thought I was seeing things. No one told me you were back.” She’s looking me over like she can’t believe I’m really there. It makes me feel pretty good. “How are you, Remy?” she says.

  I tell her I’m fine. I tell her I’m back living with my mother and my sister. But I don’t tell her how weird they both act around me and how I feel like a stranger in my own house now.

  Then Asia’s expression changes. She gets serious and looks a little worried. She says, “You stopped writing to me.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, so I just shrug.

  “Are you mad at me, Remy?” she says.

  Mad at her? How could I ever be mad at her?

  “You wrote me two letters. I was so glad to hear from you. But then you stopped.” She hesitates and looks back across the street at Lissa, who’s waiting for her. Lissa doesn’t look mad anymore. She looks worried, like she’s afraid maybe I’ll do something to Asia. “You stopped writing to me,” Asia says again. I’m sorry now that I did. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal to her after the way we left things.

  Asia’s eyes are brown and warm, like melted chocolate. She’s frowning now. “I thought you were mad at me,” she says. “You know, about school. I wanted you to write back to me, Remy. I wanted to know what you were thinking and how you were doing. But when you didn’t...” She shakes her head, like she’s shaking out something she doesn’t want to think about. She smiles, but this time it looks like she’s forcing it. “Well,” she says, “I guess it’s like you always said—it’s not like we were going to get married or anything, right?”

  Lissa calls to her. “Come on. Marcus will be waiting.”

  “Marcus?” I say.

  Asia looks down. “I’m sorry,” she says. She raises her eyes to meet mine. “But you stopped writing. And I really like him, Remy. I’m sorry.”

  I tell her it’s okay. I tell her she’s right, it’s not like we were going to get married or anything. I tell her nine months is a long time, people change. Then I tell her I have to go, I have an appointment. It’s not true, but I say it anyway so I have an excuse to walk away. I think maybe if I stop looking into Asia’s warm chocolate eyes, the pain will go away.

  It doesn’t.

  Chapter Two

  It was my own stupid fault that I got sent away. When I told one of the counselors that, he asked if I was sorry for what I did. I said I was, but I didn’t mean it the way he thought I did. He thought I was saying I was sorry for beating up that guy. But I wasn’t. I was just sorry I did it when there were people around who could tell the cops everything. And I was sorry I did it when it was still light out. What I should have done was waited and jumped the guy from behind when it was dark. I should have made sure that neither he nor anyone else got a good look at me.

  But I didn’t. I was too pissed off to wait.

  I’m still not sorry I did it. The guy deserved it. After what he said, he totally deserved it. Asia asked me why I’d beaten the guy so bad—but I didn’t tell her. I couldn’t. Which meant that I couldn’t tell anyone else, either. Not that anyone else seemed all that interested. My mother, the cops, my lawyer, even the judge, all acted like they expected it from me. It was like they figured a guy like me, with all the stuff I’d done, would beat on a guy because maybe he looked at me the wrong way or said some stupid thing that set me off. And I guess that last part is true. So what? They can think what they want. The guy had it coming to him—that and more.

  Anyway, after I see Asia on the street, I start walking home. But I only go a couple of blocks before I realize that home is the last place I want to be. My mother doesn’t want me there. She’s tense around me, like she’s afraid of what I might do. My sister won’t talk to me except to tell me stuff my mother tells her to tell me, like, Mom says you should take the garbage out or Mom wants you to mow the grass. I look at them in the kitchen together making supper or sitting together on the couch watching TV and talking about whatever program it is, and I imagine how well they must have got along while I was away. So I don’t go home.

  The problem is, I don’t know where to go. I haven’t told any of my old friends that I’m back. I’m not sure how they’ll react, whether they’ll want to see me or not. A couple of them wrote me once or twice, but I didn’t write back to them, either. What was there to say? That I hate it here, that there are people in here who are way more messed up than me, that being in here is like being in school 24-7, but with a principal from hell and locks on all the doors? What kind of letter would that be? And what would I say in the next letter? Nothing ever changed. It was one day after the next after the next. Nothing interesting happened and for sure nothing fun.

  So
instead of going home, I just walk around. I don’t think I’m going anywhere in particular. But I guess my feet have their own plans because after a while I see the schoolyard up ahead and a bunch of guys playing hoops. The guys see me, and a couple of them come out through the opening in the fence that runs around the basketball court. They grin at me—James and Stephen and John—and thump me on the back and ask me when I got home. James says, “Come on and shoot some hoops with us.” So I do. And it’s okay. It’s relaxed. No one asks me questions I don’t want to answer about what it was like in there. No one hassles me about what happened. No one even mentions the guy I beat up. We just shoot hoops and have a good time.

  We’re about to go and get something to eat when some other guys show up. I don’t know who they are, but I can tell that the guys I’m with know them. Know them and don’t like them. Don’t get along with them.

  The new guys stand outside the fence. They have a ball with them and I can see that they want to play, but they don’t want to play with us. They watch us, and the guys I’m with look back at them. Then, all of a sudden, they start playing ball again. I don’t get it. A minute ago they were ready to leave. They were talking about going to a burger joint. But now they’re shooting hoops again and making a big deal out of it. It’s like they’re in some big competition, like the game is gearing up instead of winding down.

  I look at James. He says, “No way those guys are playing on our court.” He doesn’t even bother to keep his voice low. It’s like he wants the other guys to hear him. And they do. They hear him loud and clear, and the next thing you know, they’re inside the fence and everyone is shoving everyone else.

  The shoving turns into punching. Someone takes it on the nose and I see blood.

  I look around. I don’t even know these guys. I sure don’t want to fight them. But then two of them are all over James, and I have no choice. I have to help him. That’s exactly what I’m doing when the cops show up.

  Chapter Three

  It’s only one cop car. Sometimes it takes a lot more than that to settle things. Sometimes one is enough. Today, one is all it takes. As soon as the other guys see the two uniforms get out of the cop car, they take off running.

  “Cowards,” James says. There’s a cut over his eye. I don’t know how it got there, and already that eye is starting to swell shut. “Cowards,” he says again as the cops come toward him. One of them is Dunlop, but he’s hanging back, letting his new partner make the first move. Well, I guess I’d do the same thing if I were him. The way I heard it, he nearly died that time. If I were him, I would have quit the cops. I would have figured it’s not worth it. For some reason, Dunlop didn’t quit. But, boy, he sure hangs back.

  James doesn’t.

  James says, “You see those guys who ran? They attacked us. They came here to our court and they attacked us.”

  He’s yelling this at Dunlop’s partner, who is so young he looks like he could be Dunlop’s son.

  “Those—” James stops. I know what he was going to say, and I know why he stops. He wants the cops to lay it all on the other guys, and he’s afraid that if he calls the other guys what he was going to call them, the cops will blame him instead of the other way around. My dad, when he was around, used to say there was a time when regular people—by which he meant people who were born here—could count on cops to take their side. He said that wasn’t true anymore. He said now they teach cops about crap like diversity. They teach them about cultural sensitivity. He said they recruit those people. The result, he said, is that regular people can’t count on cops the way they used to. I guess James knows that. Maybe his dad is like my dad, but I don’t know for sure. I never talked to James much.

  The young cop looks at James like he doesn’t believe him. He says, “Why would those kids attack you?” Really what he’s saying is, “What did you do to make them attack you?”

  Then Dunlop steps up. He looks at James and Stephen and John and the rest of us—it seems like he looks at me the longest—and he says, “The city’s changing, boys.”

  I glance at James. I don’t have to be a mind reader to know what he’s thinking— No kidding it’s changing!

  “You better start swimming,” Dunlop says. The rest of the guys look baffled. Who said anything about swimming? But I know what he means because I know a few things about Dunlop. He doesn’t mean we should put on our bathing suits and jump into the water. He’s just saying that we have a choice, you know, like that old Bob Dylan song. You either swim or you sink like a stone. I think that’s how it goes.

  Dunlop zeroes in on James. He says, “You want to press charges?”

  James laughs. Right. Like getting the cops involved ever made a situation better instead of worse.

  “Those guys,” he says. “They think they can just take over. But they can’t. No way.”

  The young cop gives us a warning. Fighting never solves anything, he says. Dunlop looks right at me. He knows me—not like a friend, but like a cop. He’s stopped me a few times. He even let me off with a warning a couple of times. I bet he’s sorry he did. He knows I’ve been away, and I bet that tells him everything he needs to know about me from here on in.

  The cops leave.

  James touches his swollen eye and winces. Everyone tells him how bad the eye is going to look later. It will probably swell shut, and the bruise will turn a rainbow of colors before it goes away. James has a smile on his face, but it’s phony, not real. After all the kidding dies down, he says, “This is our court. Those guys have no right to take it over.”

  I still don’t get it. “What’s the big deal about those guys?” I say. “They look like they have play.”

  “Yeah,” James says. “They got play. But they act like they’re the only ones who’ve got it.”

  He sounds bitter and I try to think why. The guys who were just here are no different from a lot of guys who were in my school before I went away. There were all kinds of guys in my school—probably still are. So what?

  “Those guys,” James says. “They move into our school and they think they can take over everything.”

  “What do you mean?” I say.

  “I mean, you go down to the courts and they’re all there together. Just them, like they’re too good for anyone else. They’re all like that.”

  I think, does he know who he’s talking to? Does he even remember Asia? But, yes, it turns out he does.

  “You know what I’m talking about, Remy,” he says. “You saw how Asia’s parents were with you.”

  “That’s different,” I say. “That was because of all the trouble I’ve been in.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t here,” James says. “You don’t know what those guys are like. They closed the school near Eastdale.” Eastdale is a big subsidized housing project. “So all those kids came to our school. They didn’t even try to fit in, Remy. They just hung together. They tried to take over.”

  “What happened to their school?” I say. What I’m really wondering is, What happened to the basketball court down there? The one in the schoolyard is the only one anywhere near Eastdale.

  “They tore it down,” James says. “They’re building condos or something. It’ll be a real improvement, if you ask me.”

  He looks at me like he expects me to agree with him, so I nod. He can read whatever he wants into it. But I’m thinking about all those kids who live down in Eastdale. Where are they supposed to play ball? I’m thinking, If guys like James freeze them out, no wonder they stick together. How would James feel if our school was torn down and we all had to transfer to the school near Eastdale? I wonder what he would do and who he would hang out with. And I think of Asia.

  Then everyone starts to talk about the other guys. Who do they think they are? If they think they can take over, they better think again. That’s when I get another picture of how much things have changed in nine months. When James and the rest of them talk about the other guys, their faces get all twisted so that they don’t even look l
ike themselves. I wonder if I looked like that when I beat up that guy. I sure was mad enough.

  Chapter Four

  Two days later, the city feels like a giant steam bath. It’s so hot and so humid that the minute I go outside, I’m drenched in sweat. But it’s not much better inside. We live in a tiny house with no central air, just one antique air conditioner in the living room window that my mother never wants to put on because the hydro isn’t included in the rent and the rates are so high. She’s made the point more than once that now that I’m back, there’s one more mouth to feed. She’s always asking me when I am going to get a job.

  It’s not like I don’t want a job. I’m flat broke. My clothes are all at least a year old. My sneakers have holes in them, and my mother counts out just enough money to buy the cheapest possible pair. I keep the money and head down to the youth employment center instead.

  I get pretty much what I expected. I get a bunch of questions—like, how come I don’t have any recent experience—and a bunch of looks when I answer the questions. Still, a guy there helps me put together a resume that says I am a hard worker and I learn fast. I tell him references could be a problem. He tells me that the kinds of places that would even take a second look at me are the kinds of places that don’t care about references.

  It takes a week, but I finally get hired on a trial basis by a contractor who pays me minimum wage to shovel some lady’s front yard into a Dumpster. The woman wants her lawn lowered—can you believe it? The guy hires me because I’m strong, I’m cheap, and the job doesn’t require me to do anything but sweat to death out there in the sun while I dig. I’m even cheaper than renting one of those little digging machines.

  But it’s work. And work means money. And money means my mother will maybe get off my back for a few seconds.

  By the end of the week, the woman’s lawn is a foot and a half lower—level with her driveway, which is just the way she wanted it. The contractor pays me cash under the table because the woman pays him the same way, and the contractor says he can use me again next week. He tells me when and where to show up.