Ten eighty, p.1
Ten-Eighty, page 1
Copyright © 2023 Allan Davis
Iguana Books
720 Bathurst Street, Suite 410
Toronto, ON M5S 2R4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of the author or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit Access Copyright or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Publisher: Cheryl Hawley
Editor: Toby Keymer
Front cover design: Ruth Dwight, designplayground.ca
Cover images: van photo by Zachary Keimig on Unsplash
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77180-598-8 (paperback).
ISBN 978-1-77180-597-1 (epub).
This is the original electronic edition of Ten-Eighty.
Other books in the Discards Series
Discards
From Muddy Water
Beyond the Headlights
Goodnight, Mr. Knight
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright
Other books in the Discards Series
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
About the Author
Chapter One
Katria never thought about cemeteries or about the dead people lying in boxes six feet under until, on her fourteenth birthday, March 5, 2022, coming home from watching one of those Undead movies with her older sister, Renata, they got delayed by a funeral. They stood at the traffic light eating the rest of their popcorn and watched the hearse and the black flags flap the cars through red to yellow to green like a parade to the cemetery gate.
Renata said, “First they drain the blood and then they stuff the mouth with cotton and then they, like, open the windows before they stuff the butthole and then, hello hello, stuff that hole too.”
Katria said, “Yeah. Totally.”
* * *
It was the rhubarb growing along the back fence of their father’s manicured lawn that got him started on his diet books. If he accidentally stepped on a rhubarb stalk, it didn’t bother the rhubarb. It would grow up tall and straight the next day. If he accidentally ran over it with his brand-new Troy-Bilt XP lawnmower, canvas cover included, it didn’t bother the rhubarb. The next day it would sprout up again and start to grow again and stand up straight again. He could cut it to pieces with the ax he had sharpened every spring, whether he had used it or not, and the rhubarb would grow back.
His diet books didn’t have recipes for turning the stiff, straight stalks into pie or jam or pudding or squares, lots of sugar added, like a normal person’s recipe book. His recipes turned rhubarb into strings of slimy stuff to be served with organic yogurt. His recipes turned rhubarb into a red sauce to spread over organic vegetables. His recipes turned rhubarb into a reddish gravy for lean organic free-range grass-fed meat.
Renata stared down at her plate of Dr. Ivan Boscov’s No-Stroke Healthy Heart Through Rhubarb dinner and said, “It looks like my period.”
And refused to eat it.
Katria said, “Yeah, totally.”
And refused to eat it.
Not so for the people who bought the books. They ate the rhubarb and turned from sick to healthy. They ate the rhubarb and turned from fat to thin. They ate the rhubarb and turned from old to young. But then, oh my gosh, Katria hid the newspaper, March 6, 2022, under her mattress the day it got published, oh my gosh, just when her father was getting ready to go on the road selling his diet book, the Toronto Sun printed a picture of Sarah, his two-hundred-pound wife, Katria and Renata’s two-hundred-pound mother, wolfing down Boston Creams in Tim Hortons.
One week later, Sarah died from a stroke. There was no funeral and no cemetery parade and no hearse and no black flags flapping the cars through red to yellow to green to the cemetery gate.
Katria said, “I don’t get it, Renata. Why no funeral? And why won’t our own father, Comrade Ivan, tell his own two daughters where their own mother is buried?”
Before Renata could answer, Comrade Ivan said, “We will have no more talk of your mother. She’s disgraced me.”
He said this as he was ripping up her death certificate. Katria intended to pick those pieces out of the garbage and Scotch tape them back together and hide the proof of death under her mattress. But Comrade Ivan used them like a collage pattern for the front and back covers of his next diet book: Dr. Ivan Boscov’s No-Stroke Healthy Heart: Leaner and Cleaner Through Rhubarb.
* * *
Katria was standing at her bedroom window watching Comrade Ivan spraying his grass with pesticides. While he sprayed, he whistled and hummed a marching tune; she could hear it all the way up to her ears, like he was waving those little black cemetery flags for the little creatures soon to curl up comatose dead under his steel-toed boots.
When he finished spraying, he covered and tucked away his XP Sprayer in his garden shed. Then he unfolded his lawn chair from its hook on the right side behind the door and he sat admiring the flowers growing next to his rhubarb patch. He looked like he was deciding which to pick and wrap in green paper to take to Sarah, who, as far as Katria was concerned, did not die of a stroke on March 13, 2022, a week after Katria’s fourteenth birthday, but was poisoned.
Chapter Two
The word “dead” written in that jumble of letters on the diet book's cover was not like the word “dead” written in Katria’s brain. Dead according to the law was not dead according to heart. Dead in some cemetery too far away to find was not dead in the cemetery close to her thoughts.
“Every time I look at the book cover, I get the feeling she’s not, like, really dead.”
Renata said, “Moms is dead. Grow up.”
Renata said, “Moms was married to Ivan. Which means Moms has gone to a better place.”
Renata said, “He didn’t poison her; she had a stroke.”
Katria said, “In those zombie movies the undead who walk the cemetery lanes barefoot with black toenails talk to the spirits of the real dead buried down below. I found this picture in Nana’s storage room. See how much me and Moms look alike? I could almost pass for her. When I look at myself in the mirror, I think it’s Moms come back from the undead.”
Renata said, “Moms is dead. Get over it.”
Katria began to notice that her thinking about the dead during the day and her thinking about the dead during the night were two different kinds of thinking. In her daytime thinking, she knew her mother was legally dead. But in her nighttime thinking, Katria began wondering if a living person, like herself, could make a connection with someone who seemed both not alive and not dead, like her mother. Katria began to think of Alexander Graham Bell from grade nine science class; if he could, with two tin cans and a length of wire, talk to his buddy in a room nearby, maybe she could, by using an umbilical spirit wire, talk to her mother in a cemetery nearby, if she knew which one.
Katria told Comrade Ivan, “I’m fourteen years old. I have a right to know. Where’s the cemetery?”
A strange look came into Ivan’s eyes. He said, “Whatever is buried must stay buried, gone for good.”
Katria knew what was happening: Cover up, he might as well have said. Yes, I poisoned her for ruining the sales of my diet books.
Katria learned from studying the Undead movies that, if no one cared about the dead when they were alive, and no one cared about the dead when they were dead, then no one would ever come through the cemetery gate to visit their graves, which meant no one would ever try to make a connection with the dead on, say, Thanksgiving or Easter, or any other day. That was why they were the undead; they were waiting for their visitors, like, for example, Moms was waiting for her two daughters. Well, maybe not Renata, but for sure Katria.
& nbsp; In her bedroom in the dark of night, Katria imagined her mother drifting and wandering with the undead among the tombstones of this unknown cemetery. In the dim light of early morning, Katria could hear the mournful moanings of her mother mingled with the hollow wailings of the other undead walking with blackened toenails the cemetery lanes, midnight to dawn, waiting for their visitors.
But although during the night Katria felt chills and shivers up and down her spine and heard whispers and sighs in her head as she stared into the mirror at midnight trying to make a spirit umbilical hook-up through the glass, like a virtual visit on her laptop with someone who’d stepped off the map but was still somewhere close by, she never felt any actual connection, at least not like the undead with the not-dead in the Living Dead movies.
Renata said, “All the midnight noises you’re hearing are caused by the wind in the trees and shit like that, know what I’m saying?”
Renata said, “And the creaking in the attic … And yeah, maybe stray cats in the bushes. Know what I’m saying?”
* * *
As Katria watched Comrade Ivan step by step sweep his spray of poison brew back to front across the lawn, she imagined the little creatures beneath the fall of his steel-toed boots curling up dead the minute he passed. She imagined his poison percolating through the soil and traveling underground to the roots of rhubarb stalks that he had made Moms eat in large quantities to try to make her lose weight. Then, Katria could hardly believe it, the voice she heard sat her straight up in bed, almost like a down-on-her-knees vision, for from somewhere came the words of her mother: “It wasn’t a stroke.”
Chapter Three
Renata Boscov’s Cutting Corner Hair Salon, situated in downtown Toronto at Church and Carlton, drew a mix of clients: upscale business types, university kids, and a few from Regent Park public housing. The shop was narrow. The mirrors on two long walls reflected three leather chairs in a row and, at the back, one sink with a shampoo chair.
Renata’s five o’clock customer for the third of May was an older lady for a perm: Mrs. Rawson, who had a Regent Park address. Not one of Renata’s regulars.
Mrs. Rawlins was short and stout with a double chin that jiggled as she struggled to ease her ample self into the shampoo chair. Mrs. Rawlins settled herself while Renata turned on the water, tested it for temperature, and then tipped Mrs. Rawlins’s head back for the gentle wash, at the same time inspecting the scalp for any sores that might be irritated by perm products. The hair, a natural grey, was a bit too thin for a good curl, which meant a perm was not a good idea. It didn’t suit her age either, but … what the lady wants, the lady gets.
Renata finished the rinse, and Mrs. Rawlins pulled herself upright.
Mrs. Rawlins said, “You look too young to give a decent perm.” Her voice was hard and raspy.
A smoker, thought Renata, as she wrapped the towel around the damp hair.
“I’m twenty-two. I’ve been a hairdresser for five years. I know what I’m doing.” But don’t blame me if you don’t like it, she wanted to add, your hair strands are too thin.
Renata helped her from the shampoo station to the chair nearest the door. In the mirrors, Renata noticed the lady scowling at her doubtfully, sizing up Renata’s tight jeans, her sleeveless top, her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. This was her standard uniform most days, although each day she wore a different style of jeans and a different top.
Mrs. Rawlins pointed. “I see you’re well prepared. You've got all your stuff ready. Like a dentist.”
“I’m well prepared, everything I need, like a dentist, yes.”
“Every time I get a perm, my husband calls me The Poodle. He says I look more loopy than usual. Poodles are lovable and cute and intelligent, I say. ‘Unlike you,’ he says.”
Renata said, “When I was little, my aunt Gizla, she called my sister and me Dearie because she couldn’t remember our names or which one was which. Sometimes she called me Emma, who’s my half-sister from my father’s first marriage. My nana was the same. They each had a poodle called Rolfie and they each had a goldfish called Dr. Goldstein. Nana got mentally bent from hiding out in a storage room in Moscow until the war ended. Nana passed her bentness on to her daughter, my aunt Gizla. So, when they moved to this country they each got a one-bed apartment with a walk-in closet they called the storage room. They babysat us a lot, you know, either we were at Nana’s or Aunt Gizla’s, and, if we were bad, we’d be locked in the storage room.”
“I think that’s called abuse.”
“Yeah, totally. But you know, from the war.” Renata fiddled with the smock, making certain it would prevent any product from running down into Mrs. Rawlins’s dress, not all that easy, like covering a cruise ship with Saran wrap.
“My daughter told me don’t get a perm if you’re in menopause because your hormones are going haywire, and your hair will end up looking like haywire.”
“You’ll like the perm,” Renata assured her, “but I can’t do much about your menopause.”
“My husband calls menopause Mad Cow Disease.”
Ha ha. You’re a funny old bitch, Mrs. Rawlins. Renata slipped one latex glove onto her left hand. She began to part the hair into three sections, one down the middle and two on each side. In the mirror, Renata caught Mrs. Rawlins giving her the up and down.
“If I had your looks, I wouldn’t need a perm. And your figure. You look like Marilyn Monroe. Well, she was before your time. You’ve already won the birth lottery. What did you say your name was?”
“Renata.”
“Don’t make me look like a goddamn poodle, Renata. I don’t want to get killed by that dog poisoner.”
“The dog poisoner, yeah. Totally.”
“He’s becoming a bit of a hero, you know. Everyone hates pit bulls and Rottweilers and Dobermans. And those little yappers are all over the place. But the dog poisoner isn’t bothering with the little ones. Do you know why? He's being paid by the pound.”
Ha ha. You’re a funny old bitch, Mrs. Rawlins. Renata said, “You’re not going to look like a poodle.”
“I listened to a radio program. A woman phoned in to say a man moved in down the street with a wolf-dog. That’s what it looked like, she said. It weighed about a hundred pounds. She was coming along the sidewalk from the 7-Eleven with a bag of chips and this wolf-dog lunged at the chips and ripped them out of her hand. The man dragged off the dog and gave her five dollars for the chips, which the dog was eating, bag and all. So, she told a friend who gave her a phone number, and a week later that dog was dead.”
Renata paused to flex her fingers, which today were feeling a little stiff. “I guess that’s why the dog poisoner is a hero.”
“I heard of another lady who was terrorized by the black Lab next door. It would jump over the fence and gallop around and knock her over. While she was digging in the flower garden, it would grab her hand, leaving teeth marks, so she’d go inside, leaving it out there trampling the flowers while she phoned the owner who’d say, ‘Oh he’s just a pup, just being playful.’ So the lady phoned the police and they said for her to build a better fence.”
“Yeah. Totally. The police don’t do anything.”
“I saw a news interview with the Humane Society . The reporter asked what’s the most common dog complaint. So the Humane Society man says, ‘Barking.’ So the reporter says, ‘What should people do about that instead of hiring the dog poisoner?’ So the Humane Society man says, ‘Hire a burglar. Give the dog a reason to bark.’”
“Yeah, totally. No one is taking the dog complaints seriously. But I’m taking your perm seriously. You’re going to look lovely.”
“As well as being young and pretty, you’re a good liar. There are good liars and bad liars. The prisons are full of bad liars, the churches are full of good liars. But you don’t look like you go to church and you don’t look like you’ve been in prison.”
“I’ve been to church but not to prison.”
“My husband says, ‘Here’s what I learned in church: You got to try and make the best of not much. That’s why I married a poodle.’”
