him, a great exhalation. Ray lay down with his arms at his sides and clutched the blankets. What was there for him to say? It felt like highschool, the first time he ever had sex, the winces and squinting eyes, cold sweat on the bedsheets. Kelly coiledaround him. Her warmth spilled into his backside; the human body produces as much heat as a one-hundred-watt bulb. Ray let the night happen. She prodded his feet with her toenails and, later, laced her fingers through his. He didnât flinch. He didnât even shiver. All the problems could wait.
SEDIMENT
In the last weeks of the school year the hallways empty out and summer gets so close you can taste it like iron in your throat. Invermere, the whole town â maybe all of B.C. â is suddenly the eye of a desert storm. The wind kicks dust down the main haul but thereâs not a soul, not a tumbleweed, only this feeling in your gut that youâre shooting on through. My days blur into report cards and administration and the occasional phone call to a studentâs mom. Ceremonies, grad pranks, a party in some teacherâs backyard with a bonfire as big as a motorhome. Itâs euphoria, itâs like a thing earned, and the hours swelter by without worry over recompense.
But you never quite move on from what youâve left behind. At night, on my porch, I eat grapefruit wedges and think about who got me here. The air smells like the mountain wind and the citrus juice pooling on my plate. Life is a series of events between shitstorms, or so my dad used to say. On the porch, Iâll imagine Bellows, the only guy who ever bared his teeth for me, his bob-and-weavewalk, his messy hair and that grin more bucktooth than lip. Then Iâll remember the hick, Ham, huffing on the asphalt, his breath sticky with hops and his mouth full of blood and sand, how bad he looked after Bellows beat him pulpy. And for a moment I lose track of myself: thereâs only the grapefruit and the valley wind and the questions that will trouble me to the end of days.
WE MET AT THE end of our grade eleven year when Ham, this highschool dropout with a pigskin face, caught me late for class. He pinned me to the schoolâs stuccoed wall and waved a bony fist under my nose. âThis is what you get, he said, and pushed the knuckles against my nostrils. I was a hundred and five pounds and Ham had one fat arm across my chest. He stunk of chewing tobacco, wore an nWo ballcap turned one-eighty, a button-up denim coat. I was a teacherâs boy, the kind of kid rednecks take a fancy to, and I generally spent my free time hiding behind the tungsten-coloured portables, in a cubby someone had hollowed in the earth.
I smelled that jagged fist and imagined how bad Ham would smash my face with it, but then Bellows, a Jehovahâs Witness with biceps bigger than my neck, came out of nowhere. He threw himself at Ham, this tornado of arms and grunts and spit. Afterward, he brushed dirt off my shoulder and asked if I was alright. âYeah, I told him. âAnd thanks.
Bellows was new to town, said being a JW often caused him trouble in Christian settlements like the KootenayValley. Settlements â he used that word, I remember. He had dog-brown hair and freckles and a mole beside his nose. Having him around felt like having a police escort. His family had moved to the valley from Manitoba, where his dad worked as a mechanic for a JW community outside Winnipeg. Bellows claimed to not touch alcohol and he was forbidden from eating ketchup or having sex out of wedlock, but rumours said he and a girl named Charlie tried it in the backdoor. He had one green eye but the other was colourless grey. His dad could refute the theory of evolution. I once saw him curl a one-hundred-pound dumbbell in each arm, and that made him the stuff of legend, like a figure out of the WWF.
We killed time together at lunch hour in a walled-off courtyard accessible by a door marked Staff Only . The stucco