The Milk Chicken Bomb. Andrew Wedderburn
See you around.
Yeah, Pete Leakie says, see you guys around. Pete Leakie finds his orange chalk. Starts drawing an orange octopus on the sidewalk.
Where are we going, Mullen?
We have to go surveil, he says. Down the street, across from the post office.
There isn’t anything across from the post office.
There is now.
You can smell the Russians’ barbecue all the way up the street. We walk up the sidewalk and there they are, out in their yard, sitting in their lawn chairs, reaching over now and then to prod at the steaks sizzling away on the grill. Most people have already put their barbecues back into their garages on account of it being fall, but the Russians do everything later than everybody else. They probably won’t put up their Christmas lights until two days after Christmas again this year, and then leave them out until June. They wave with their brown beer bottles.
Hey, Mullen, Vaslav hollers, where’s your dad?
Still at work I guess, he says.
Solzhenitsyn sticks his hands into the pockets of his skinny jeans. I left work an hour ago, says Solzhenitsyn, and he had already gone.
Well, Mullen says, I don’t know then.
Tell him to come over when he gets home, Solzhenitsyn says. Solzhenitsyn works with Mullen’s dad at the meatpacking plant, smashing ice. Every day they get into the truck together, wearing their overalls and rubber boots, and drive out of town, almost to High River. They smash ice with sledgehammers, in a small steel room, and come home red and sweating, with sore backs and wet socks, ice in the toes of their boots and seams of their blue jeans.
We walk down the alley instead of down Main Street, ’cause we like to throw rocks at garbage cans. Mullen gets a few pretty good dents into a stainless-steel can outside an empty garage. I like the sound the plastic cans make when you hit them with a rock, especially if they’re empty. Even though it’s only six, the sun is starting to go down out on the other side of town, where the foothills start. Sometimes Mullen’s dad takes us for drives out into the hills, up past the provincial-park line, and shows us the forest-fire watch towers and abandoned farmhouses and other good stuff.
As long as I can remember, the windows in the building across from the post office have been covered with paper like you wrap boxes in at Christmas to mail to Ontario. We sit on the sidewalk in front of the post office and Mullen takes some comic books out of his backpack. Here, make like some dumb kid, he says. We make like to flip through comic books but peek over the tops at the woman in the window.
She doesn’t look like other women, the woman in the window. The women down at the hair salon or the drugstore wear sweaters and short jackets, with blue jeans. The women at the United Church wear gold earrings and black blouses. Mrs. Lampman across the street always wears a blazer when she teaches social studies at the school. The woman in the window across from the post office wears a sweater, but it fits different than any I’ve ever seen. Looks thin, and when she moves, it holds on to her. She wears a grey skirt that goes down to her ankles but stays close to her thighs and the backs of her knees. Her hair is pulled back into some sort of clip, but it sticks out in all sorts of directions, trying to escape.
What do you think she’s doing in there? I don’t know, Mullen says, peeking over the top of his comic book. The room is empty, bare drywall with putty patches showing, and the electrical sockets unfinished, hairy clumps of wire. She wanders around with a tape measure. Measures a wall and writes on a pad of yellow paper tucked into the belt of her skirt. She sticks the pen behind her ear and frowns.
I bet she’s from the city, Mullen says. That’s how all the women look in the city. I sat on a bus in Calgary with two women like that. All pretty and high classified.
She drops her tape measure and lights a cigarette, a long, thin one. Smoke mixes in with the sawdust in the air. Mullen flips a few pages of his comic.
We watch her for a while. She writes stuff down and holds her hands in front of her face like a square, at arm’s length, looks at the walls through the square. She doesn’t ever look out the window. People drive by, and if they know us they wave. Nobody cares if Mullen and I sit on the post office steps and read comic books, ’cause nobody cares what we do, so long as it isn’t causing public mischief. That’s what the caretaker at the First Evangelical Church said when they made us appologize about the flyers. That we were causing public mischief. Public mischief, it turns out, is when you climb up on the roof of the school with three garbage bags full of flyers, fold them into paper airplanes, and throw them at Dead Kids. Even if you only get through half of one bag in two hours. They sent us up for that: for skipping class and making a mess of the playground. They said taking that many flyers was like stealing, even though flyers are free and in piles that say Take One. And after we’d cleaned up the whole playground we had to go down Main Street and apologize at the insurance office, and the bank, and the First Evangelical Church. When they told Mullen’s dad he laughed, but the way people sometimes laugh on television, when you can tell they’re only actors.
I have to go home soon, Mullen.
No, come on, she’s still doing stuff, he says. I bet she’ll smoke another cigarette soon. Look, she has sawhorses in there. You think she might saw something up? Maybe she’s got one of those circular saws.
I have to go home, Mullen. Seriously.
Since when does it matter when you go home?
I stand up and hand him his comic. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Yeah, tomorrow.
I walk down to the end of the block and turn around. Mullen’s still sitting there, pretending to read his comic, watching the woman in the window.
An old man with patches on his elbow leans on McClaghan’s counter, looking at the lighters in the rotating shelf. One of those flat hats on his wrinkly old head, all covered in buttons. Annual Rotarian Convention, and Legion Number 19, and Vets Get Set. He takes a scratchy old Zippo lighter out of his jacket. A flint, he says to McClaghan, I need a new flint for this.
Where’d you get this? McClaghan takes the lighter, turns it over. Mail order?
Antwerp, says the old man, I got it in Antwerp. Pressed into my hands out of gratitude.
McClaghan spits in his jar.
McClaghan’s jar is the worst thing in town. You always have to go to McClaghan’s hardware store after school, though, for model-airplane paint or thirty-five-cent gum or hockey tape, so you always have to see the jar. He leaves it on the counter right beside the hockey cards, this beet-pickle jar two-thirds full of old-man phlegm, brown tobacco juice, stubby toothpicks. He takes it everywhere. Any time you walk by, there’s McClaghan out on the step, under the 40% OFF sign, listening to his radio, spitting. But spitting on the sidewalk is bad for business I guess, so he spits in the jar. You can hear it all up the street, the hack and plop of old-man spit landing in that beet-pickle jar.
McClaghan rummages in his drawer. Pulls out envelopes, paper boxes. Opens them, frowns, puts them back. The old man puts all his nickels on the counter, one at a time, lining them all up and trying to get them all straight, but his hands shake and push the nickels all over the place.
In McClaghan’s hardware store they’ve got everything you could ever want. Table saws and new bicycle chains, and four-man tents and car batteries, rubber boots, fishing rods, pickaxes and wheelbarrows – everything. Stacks of plywood and two-by-fours, router bits, camping stoves and jerry cans. They’ve got a paint-shaker, just about the loudest thing I ever heard, shakes so fast you can’t read the label on the can. And all that stuff is great, but the best part about McClaghan’s is fireworks.
So, McClaghan, Mullen says, pulling his elbows, his chin, up on the counter. McClaghan’s counter is way taller than it needs to be. How about some of those roman candles you’ve got back there? I bet those pack a whole bunch, yeah?
McClaghan wraps his fingers around the jar. Out. Both of you, beat it.
How