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| Making Tracks | |
| By andybyers | ||||||||||
| 20 September 2007 | ||||||||||
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It was the smell of new wood, still fresh, and it tied my stomach in knots. I’d smelled that smell before, just a couple of years earlier. Wordlessly, automatically it put a cold sweat across my shoulders. It was the smell of lost friends, a new school, bullies, loneliness. The utter discontinuation of almost every certainty in life. “This’ll be your room, honey,” she called, her voice bouncing off unfinished walls and falling out unglazed windows into the chilly late winter air. I pretended not to hear. “Allie, come here and look,” she beckoned. She wasn’t angry, she was excited. She wanted me to be excited too. “Come and see what you think…” I was staring at a group of tiny knotholes that looked like a stupid little man with a surprised mouth. “What difference does it make what I think?” I whispered to him. He just looked shocked that I’d even say such a thing out loud, even in a whisper. “Albert!” my father barked. I snarled and wandered out of… whatever room that was going to be, and out into the hall. My parents were glancing around in a half-finished set of walls, their eyes already full of the things they would fill it up with. All I saw was the empty, ragged spaces that defined what would soon be all that remained of my life. “So what do you think, honey?” my mother asked. I shrugged. It was as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “Bigger than the room you have now,” my father smiled. “And look, your window looks right out into the forest. Just across there, see?” “We’ll have room for that desk you want,” she said, her eyes already placing it. She turned to my father. “Or do you think this should be the baby’s room, Mike? It’s closer to the master bedroom.” He shook his head, patting her on the stomach. “We got a lot of time to figure it out. We’ll work out what’s best.” He gave her a kiss and she turned and pressed back into his arms. “I want the bigger room,” I said. “The biggest room.” If I had to go, I wasn’t going to go cheap. “Sure, sport,” my dad said. I stood at the window while they said those grown-up words that children understand but don’t really understand, and looked out into the trees. The sky seemed like an ally, hanging heavy over them, slowly mixing a concoction of rain or snow or both. It was for me. It was all for me. It was getting ready to quietly say what I could not. They wouldn’t listen; not to it and not to me; but it would be said, all the same. I wanted to go and think my thoughts out into it. “Can I go look outside?” They looked at each other. My dad said, “Sure, I guess so.” My mom said, “Don’t go far, though. We’re not going to be that long.” Then the measuring tape came out. They were going to be a while. The stairs didn’t have a railing yet, so I plodded down them with my shoulder to the wall. Outside, I stood with my hands jammed into my pockets and I tried to imagine what it was going to be like next September, on my first day of school in this foreign place. In truth it was probably less than ten miles from where I was living, but it might as well have been an ocean away. I tried to see lawns and the scrawny saplings that would never compare to the mighty sidewalk overlords of Poplar Hill; tried to picture the streets clean and cleared of mud and construction debris; tried to imagine a pack of friends clamouring down the sidewalk, beckoning me to join them. None of it seemed possible. All I could see was this dull, muddy, half-finished wasteland. I looked back at the door, the wind stinging my eyes to tears, and I wondered how they could do this to me. “Hey!” I turned. There he stood at the foot of the driveway, his own hands jammed into his coat pockets, a boy my age. He wore a delighted smile; right off the bat, he knew what was going on, and I felt a flash of resentment that my misfortune was the source of his joy. Lethargically I descended the porch steps. He advanced up the driveway. “What’s your name?” he called. “What’s yours?” “Well, I asked you first.” “Then you tell me first,” I demanded. He could see I was not happy to be here; I had that advantage. In the hopes of moving things along, he backed down, and said, “My name’s Reid.” “I’m Allie,” I said. No need to own up to Albert; not till I knew him better — if I ever knew him better. “You moving here?” “Looks like.” His hand emerged from his pocket, waving away my concerns. “It’s not so bad,” he told me. “We moved here around Christmas. From Calgary.” I knew Calgary was much further away from Trillium than Poplar Hill. I wouldn’t even be moving out of the city I was living in, and here Reid had moved several provinces over. At least, I mused, there was a chance I might see my old friends, once in a while; for Reid, it must have been like being dead. “Are you from around here?” he asked me. I looked around slowly, trying to get my bearings. In the end, I just guessed, and feebly pointed in the direction I thought Poplar Hill was. If nothing else, we both understood that I was coming from not all that far away. He nodded. “You wanna see where the school is?” he asked me. I thought it over. Did I really want to face it this soon? But on the other hand, at a gut level, the idea of confronting the place for the first time in the company of a friendly face — if not yet an actual friend — appealed to me. “Let me ask my mom and dad,” I told him, turning and leaving him in the driveway. I didn’t hurry. I didn’t run. This was just the everyday business of being a kid. I climbed the stairs and found them in the en suite bathroom. “Is it okay if I go look at the school? There’s this kid outside called Reid who’s going to show it to me.” My mother looked dubious but my father seemed impressed. “Is he your age?” “I think so.” “What time’s your watch say?” I looked. “Nine-thirty-eight,” I reported. He tapped the nail of his index finger on the crystal. “You be back here by ten-thirty,” he told me. “What time did I say?” “Ten-thirty,” I grumbled. “How long is that from now?” “Fifty-two minutes.” “About an hour,” my father nodded. I never understood why adults rounded time and prices up or down the way they did; why was it so hard to say fifty-two minutes, or one thousand, two hundred and seventy-seven, instead of ‘an hour’ or ‘thirteen hundred’? But I had neither the time nor the liberty to correct him, so I nodded and left. “I have to be back at ten-thirty,” I told Reid as I emerged. “What time’s it now?” he asked. “Nine-thirty-eight.” I looked. “Nine-thirty-nine.” “Okay,” he said. We started down the driveway, him leading me along to the left. “How old are you?” he asked, and remembering my obstinacy, he volunteered, “I’m eight.” “Me too,” I said, and I let myself smile. “When’s your birthday?” “June sixteenth.” “Mine’s August fourth,” he said, a bit chagrined that I outranked him. “Fourteen… thirty-one; forty-five… I’m forty-nine days older than you. Seven weeks exactly,” I told him. “Exactly seven weeks,” he repeated. “That’s kind of cool. Do you think it means anything?” “I dunno. Seven’s lucky number, though. Seven times seven is especially good,” I pronounced. “Maybe it means you’ll like it here,” Reid suggested. I couldn’t help wondering that myself. When you’re eight years old, and nothing in the world is in your control, you look for any sign of approval or guidance from the powers that be. Like some shaman or Stone Age mystic, your life is governed by portent and powers beyond your reckoning. Seven squared was a good indicator, and since I had no real say in the pending move, I grasped at any straw. Reid led me down the long street that was to be my home. House after house after incomplete house lined the way, bracketed on both sides by the towering pines they’d pushed aside. The air reeked with the sweet, face-slapping scent of cut timber, both that of construction like inside the house, and also that of the trees that had lost their lives to make way for human habitation. Mud born of the melting snow clung to our boots as we picked our way back and forth across the empty street. It was my turn to seem interested. “So what do you like to do?” I asked him. “I like to make up stories,” he told me. “I used to show them to Mr. Halsey in my old school back in Alberta. He thought they were really good.” “Show them to anybody here?” He shrugged. I understood. Reid hadn’t been here long enough to decide if anyone would be interested — really interested — rather than merely polite. Adults don’t think they can, but kids can tell the difference. “What about you?” “I make up stories too,” I said, “but mostly I draw.” “Maybe you could draw pictures for my stories,” he smiled. “Could be,” I said. Without any fanfare, there we were. We stopped in front of it. The school was so new, it didn’t even have a lawn yet, just a flagpole. On the cold, antiseptic beige brick façade, in boring sans serif lettering, was the name Barefoot Park Elementary School. Accompanying it, just up the street, was Umbra Lake Middle School, where we would presumably be going a few years hence. “They’re supposed to put up swings and stuff to climb on this spring,” Reid said. “Some kids have been telling me that on the last day of school, they’re going to let us step in paint and make footprints on the pavement.” “Yeah?” “Well, maybe. Other kids said it’s just going to be on long strips of paper in the gym that they’re going to put up on the walls of the hallways.” “Sounds neat, either way. Is that ‘cause of the name of the school?” “I guess so,” he said. He pointed, saying, “That’s the library there. Lunch hours after I eat I go there and write stories.” “Don’t you go home for lunch?” He shook his head. “How come?” “My mom and dad both work,” he said. “There’s no one there. So I eat at school. Mostly by myself,” he muttered. “So which one’s your classroom?” I asked. “C’mon, I’ll show you,” he said, and led me around the back. The windows were protected by an iron mesh; Reid twined his fingers into it, leaning forward. I did likewise. If you leaned forward enough to duck out of the pale sunlight, you could just make out the interior of the class. “I sit in the fourth row, five seats from the front.” “There?” “Yeah. You’re in grade three, right?” “Uh huh. Do you think we’ll be in the same class?” He smiled, like the fix was in. “We have to be. Not enough kids here yet for two classes. Right now there’s only one class for each grade.” I evaluated the playground, such as it was. The pavement, having been poured in just the last year or two, was still smooth and even. “Looks like a great place for can tag,” I decided. “What’s can tag?” “It’s a game Jay made up. Jay and Alan. Friends of mine. You play it with a can,” I said. “What do you do?” Reid asked. I looked around, trying to find an appropriate location. “We play it down at the end of the school driveway,” I said, so off we went. “The game has boundaries, see, and if you go outside them, you’re it. So one is the end of the driveway. If you step on the street, you’re out of bounds. If you step on the grass on either side, you’re it. We use the shadow of this telephone pole across the driveway as the other boundary, and if you cross that, you’re it again. So we play it in this long square, see.” “Uh huh...” “But first we need a can. A pop can.” We searched around for a moment till Reid found one in the ditch. God bless the human propensity for littering. “You have to make the can flat,” I said. “There’s two ways you can make it flat. Shaped like a ‘C’ and shaped like a ‘Z’. Shaped like a ‘C’, the top and bottom are on the same side. Like a ‘Z’, the top’s on one side and the bottom’s on the other. It works better shaped like a ‘C’.” I put a dent in the can so that the top and bottom bowed in toward each other, then dropped it and started mashing it flat with my boot. “What about if you squish it top to bottom?” he asked. “It makes it too small. It’s like a puck then instead of a frisbee, and it really hurts your ankle,” I advised him. “Okay,” he nodded. “So, the game is, the guy who’s it kicks the flat can at the other guys. If the can tags them, they’re it.” “Hey, that’s a neat idea,” he said. I smiled, looking forward to the day I would officially introduce the game at Barefoot Park Elementary. I kicked the can at Reid, and he instinctively dodged the shot. “That’s it,” I said. “That was good.” “Can’t hit me,” he taunted. It took a few tries, but I finally proved him wrong. Laughing, we practiced the game for a few minutes, taking turns being ‘it’. I looked at my watch. Nine-fifty-six. I had to call an end to the exhibition game. We wandered back in the direction of my (unofficial) new house. The subdivision was being built in sections, and some were already finished. Others were nearing completion. In one such section, Reid hoisted himself up onto a wooden privacy fence between two houses, and sat like a cat looking out over the neighbourhood. I climbed up to join him. “Which one’s yours?” I asked. “You can’t see it from here, but it’s over there,” he said, pointing past where the house that would soon be my home stood. Reid started to bang his heels rhythmically against the fence. Below us, the snow that clung wetly to the shadowed base began to lose its grip and fall away. We laughed and I joined my own feet in the effort. Wordlessly we kept at it till we’d shaken all the snow from below us. “You got any brothers and sisters?” I asked. “A big sister. Claire. She’s eleven. What about you?” “Not yet, but I’m gonna.” “Huh?” “My mom’s having a baby.” “So you don’t have any brothers or sisters yet so far?” he deduced. “No. I wanted one when I was four or five.” “Not now?” I shrugged one shoulder. “I think I’d like it,” Reid said. “Do you know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl?” “Not yet. She’s not supposed to have it till September.” “When school starts again…” he mused. “But I’m eight years old,” I complained. “I’ll be nine when he’s born. I don’t want to have a baby in the family now, I’m way too old to play with a baby. By the time he’s my age, I’ll be seventeen, out driving cars! But then I’ll probably get stuck babysitting him.” “Or her,” Reid said. I rolled my eyes. “Even better,” I said. “Why didn’t they have another baby years and years ago? It would have been different.” “Well, maybe he’ll look up to you,” Reid said, still hammering the fence with his boots. “Like you’ll be his hero. Almost like a second dad.” “Think I’ll get to boss him around?” “Definitely,” he said. He nudged me. “I’ll help you boss him, if you like. I get bossed by Claire all the time, so I’d be good at it.” I smiled at him. “Yeah, thanks.” It was as if someone had flicked a switch. Suddenly fat, wet, heavy flakes of snow were all around us, falling thickly all over Trillium, hiding the town before us like a spotty fog. We leaned back with our mouths open and tongues bared, as if to receive communion from Mother Nature herself. She dropped the cold white wafers into our mouths; truly it was her body. “Nobody likes me, Allie,” Reid confessed. “I try to make friends, but they think writing all the time is weird. They all want to play sports and run around. I’m not from around here. They don’t like me.” “I like you,” I told him. “When do you move?” he asked, anxiously. “I don’t know… after school ends, I guess. This summer.” He looked pained. “That long?” “I need to say good-bye to everyone,” I told him. I understood where he was coming from, but he had to understand my feelings just as plainly. “Oh yeah, sure,” he said, getting it. “Do you have a lot of friends?” “Yeah, some. Did you?” “Some.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the school, barely visible in the falling snow. “I guess that means you’ll miss making paint footprints.” “Oh, yeah… that would have been cool.” He chuckled. “Maybe we could sneak out one night and bring some paint and you could do it,” he suggested. “Camp out by the brook so you can wash it off.” “There’s a brook here?” “Yeah, it runs in the woods behind your place,” he nodded. “I have to cross it to get to school. You wanna see it?” I checked the time. Ten-oh-seven. “Yeah, alright, but we can’t be too long, okay?” “It won’t take long,” he said, launching himself off the fence and taking the six-foot drop on his feet. We ran through the piles of lumber and brick, intoning brave television theme songs as we went, until he led me into the pine forest, and down into a little valley. Still crusted with ice, a lively little brook babbled to itself as it hurried off to make a date with one of the creeks in the west end. Reid picked up a stone the size of his fist and tossed it into the brook. It punched through the ice perfectly, leaving a precisely-shaped hole behind as it disappeared. “Wow, that was great,” I applauded. I tried, and sure enough the rock I sent did the same. The ice was at just the right thickness; solid enough to support itself but thin enough not to spread the load and collapse. “If we do it just right, we can fill it with holes before the whole shelf falls in,” I told him. Rock after rock punched hole after hole in the ice. The brook just swallowed up our rocks without flinching as the snow lit in our hair and on our eyelashes. “What do you write about?” I asked him. “Oh… different things. Going into space. Wars. Other things.” “What other things?” “Just stuff.” “Come on,” I prodded. “Animals,” he said. “Animals?” “Yeah, you know, ones that can talk. I made up a whole world about them. But I don’t show those stories.” “How come?” “It’s just for me,” he said, finding a boulder and sitting on the bank. “Have you ever seen two trees, sort of, growing out of the same spot?” “I don’t know, maybe…” “Well, I pretend that if they have branches that cross, and you know the right way, or the right words or magic or something, that you can step between them and go someplace else. The animal world.” “What happens there?” “Adventures. You make good friends. You can run around free. If anyone tries to hurt you, your friends help you out, and you help them. I made up a fox called Nippy. Sometimes he’s good, sometimes he’s bad. I like to pretend I’m Nippy. Sometimes friendly, sometimes not.” Reid picked up a thick branch that looked like one some other kid had twisted off a tree, and started tapping the ice with it. “What kind of animal would you be?” “Are there people there?” “Just the other animals. Well… maybe. Sometimes I think there are humans there, but I can’t make up my mind for sure.” “Well, I think I’d be a bear,” I said. “How come?” “Because if there were no humans there, nobody could hurt you,” I said. “Wolves could,” he said. “In packs, anyway.” “Not if I had friends,” I said. Reid nodded, smiling. He brushed his snowy bangs from his eyes. “That’s true.” He tapped the ice one last time and the whole shelf gave way and fell to pieces into the waiting jaws of the brook. We both cheered. I looked at my watch. Ten-twenty-two. “Time to go?” he sighed. “Just about.” Reid started up the hill. “I’m writing a book about it,” he told me. “No one’s ever seen it. If I show it to you, will you draw the pictures for it?” “Yeah, sure I will!” “We’ll sell it. We’ll be millionaires. Get it on TV and everything,” he assured me. The trees gave way to muddy clearing again and we were back in the world of men. We stood in front of the new house. “So I guess I won’t see you for a while,” he murmured. “Probably not for a couple months, anyway.” “You won’t forget, will you? About me? About the book?” “No, I won’t forget. I promise.” “I won’t forget about you either,” he said. “I wish you were moving in today.” “It won’t be that long,” I reminded him. Standing at the door, I waved to him. “So long, Allie.” “So long, Reid.” I kept my promise to be back by ten-thirty. My parents weren’t ready to go till nearly eleven, but wouldn’t let me go back out, constantly reassuring me they were ‘just about’ set to leave and didn’t want to have to go looking for me. When we finally did emerge back into the snow, Reid was long gone. When my sister Kelly was born that fall, I was still in Poplar Hill Public School. In the end, we never did move to Trillium. My parents decided the new house was too expensive, and settled for something a couple of rooms bigger back in Poplar Hill. As much as I was relieved not to be leaving my old friends behind, it pained me to think to Reid, waiting. Waiting for me to fulfill a promise it was beyond my power to keep. I pictured him watching the moving van pulling up to that house that was supposed to have been ours, and the horrible realization that must have washed over him as it dawned on him that it was some other family. But that’s what it is to be eight years old. Years later, when I was in high school, I made some friends in Trillium, so I got over there once in a while. It wasn’t easy to broach the subject but every so often I would ask people in Trillium if they knew a guy named Reid. No one ever did, until one girl recalled a shy, quiet boy called Reid whose family had ‘moved back out west’ at the end of grade six. It may or may not have been him; I would never know for sure. But after that, I stopped asking. I remember wandering up to Barefoot Park Elementary once and seeing the pavement around the school covered in footprints. Red and blue, white and green, yellow and orange; a tribute to the arrival of summer a few years before, and already beginning to fade. Somewhere in there was the evidence. One of those sets of tracks was the proof Reid hadn’t been a ghost or a figment of my imagination. It crossed my mind that I might come back and add a few token footprints of my own, in solidarity with the friend I’d never gotten to know. But it just as quickly occurred to me that I hadn’t earned the right. These were the tracks of people who had lived and learned here. For better or worse, my own tracks had been laid down elsewhere. I’ll always wonder how things would have turned out if some of those footprints had been mine, but they weren’t. No matter. At least I have one snowy day, bright with promise, to hold in my mind. And somewhere, so does Reid. In a world where nothing’s certain except what we hope and dream, maybe that’s the important thing.
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