Ravenna Gets Read online

  “Something I can help you with?”

  Lisa balances her weight for a moment, suggesting that she might make a turn, but brings herself down on the right.

  “Somethin’ smells off. What’s that shitty smell?”

  Shelley lowers his head and points his heavy boot under a stick.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Lisa sees something. A little pattern of wretch sinking into the dirt.

  “What that? That what stinks?”

  “Nope. That, little lady, is where I just had a puke.”

  “How come?”

  “Isn’t there somewhere you need to be?”

  “How come you sicked up?”

  “Dead bodies.”

  Shelley gestures with a thrown thumb.

  “In there.”

  Lisa looks at the closed door and makes a thinking sneer.

  “So. Haven’t you ever smelled dead bodies before? You’re a cop.”

  “Yes, Miss. I have. But what’s in there is …”

  Shelley stops. His sinuses are filling up. He sniffs hard.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No. I’m not crying.”

  “Shouldn’t you be catching out whoever did this, instead of crying all over?”

  “I ain’t cryin’, I got … my nose is bothered.”

  “So what’s in there?”

  Shelley is annoyed now and wants to scare her. He pulls his glasses down his nose so she can see his big honest eyes.

  “There’s a man in there all cut open by a knife.”

  “So.”

  “Yeah, so. And his wiener cut clean off.”

  “His wiener?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “So. I know somebody who needs to have that done.”

  “By his own mom?”

  “His mom cut off his wiener?”

  “She’s dead, too. Lying right beside him with his dead wiener in her hand. And it’s cut in two right down the middle like a goddamn hot dog.”

  “Is that what smells?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That and seeing as to the fact that they shit themselves.”

  “How come?”

  “How come what?”

  “How come they shit themselves?”

  Shelley runs a pen down the blue piping on the side of his knee. He clicks it, retracting the ballpoint.

  “Because, that is what you do.”

  The Rabbit Place

  Belle and Cor examine the map of Italy on a placemat.

  “How big are whales?”

  A whale with a sunny smile and a jaunty plume sits off the toe. Belle knows that Cor is trying to gauge the size of things on the map. If the whale is a mile long, then it is about four miles from Roma to Milano. Cor’s first instinct is to trust what he sees, then try to understand it. Belle smiles. She has no idea how big the boot is, but she knows that there is no way to tell by looking at this drawing.

  “Whales are bigger than any animal. Ever.”

  Cor studies the map again. “Where’s Duntroon?”

  Belle tosses her hair back with both hands. She’s about to settle for Cor the impossibility of knowing everything when, as she often does, she decides that Cor’s onto something.

  Belle pulls the paper cup of crayons over and starts to draw lines across Italy.

  “What’s that s’posed to be?”

  Belle takes a stubby pencil and writes Sydenham Trail. Erie Street. In a heavy cross in the middle she writes 124 and 91.

  “Now. It’s a map of Duntroon.”

  “Write that.”

  Belle writes DUNTROON in big blocks across the word Italy. Making the I an N, the T a bolder T, the A an R, the L an O. The best she can to with the Y is a Q. Cor sees this and can now accept that it is a map of Duntroon.

  “Now we have to put stuff from Duntroon on it. We don’t have whales.”

  Cor looks at her as if she’s crazy, then puts thinking fingers under each eye.

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Raccoons?”

  Belle looks out the tall window beside their table. Cor watches her do this, then lays his head down. A heavy truck hammers past. A small red car. Blue. A long white truck with a milk logo. Belle sits back as if stung. She points without pointing. Cor turns his head on his arm, then sits up quickly.

  Whispered: Poo Lady.

  Poo Lady appears once a day in Duntroon. She pushes an old-fashioned light blue baby carriage and wears a green housecoat. She has curlers in her hair. Local children believe she rolls poo that she finds in the park, and maybe even her own, into her hair. They also believe that there is a baby made of poo bouncing around in the pram. There is a literal aura around this woman, a fecal spell, and it is believed that if you even say her name, Poo Lady, or, God forbid, ever spoke to her that your breath would smell of farts for the rest of your life. Everything about her, the colour of green, the thin black wheels, the filthy fart cigarette in her mouth, had done something unspeakable to someone at some point. The worst part of her is the lie, the horrible pushing as if the baby were in there. Belle and Cor shudder. She has passed the window.

  “Put the (whispered) Poo Lady on the map.”

  Belle sighs. She suffers for having a younger brother. Cor’s forehead lands hard on the back of his hands and stays.

  “Okay. Okay. I know. I know exactly. We’ll do the weird map of Duntroon. All the things that are here that no one talks about. All the stuff we know about.”

  Cor sits up.

  “Poo Lady?”

  “Poo Lady.”

  And so they begin to make their map starting with a colour-true drawing of the Poo Lady on the 124. She is encircled in light brown. Then there is the House of Cruelty at the end of Erie Street. A pilot lives there who has gone mad because he spends more time in the sky than on the ground. The only way he can keep from killing children is to drown cats in a barrel in his back yard. Then there is the Stab Forest. A heavy tangle of thorn trees down the hill behind the legion on the west route out of town. The body of a woman was found in there five years ago. Her husband was taken away, but the children know it was the spikes that got her. Piercing through her clothes and literally pulling out her heart and flinging it to the ground. Then on Sydenham, the Cherry House. In it lives a giant woman and her daughter who is grown up but only as tall as a two-year-old. This woman sings songs to God under her breath and the daughter cackles and twists when she walks. Half of her body never came out of her mother, is still growing inside somewhere, tightening the old woman’s shoulders. The mother is in so much pain that she sings to God under her breath every second of every day. The daughter is a kind of devil.

  Belle and Cor sit silently for a long while trying to think of other things to put on the map.

  “The fishing hole.”

  “That’s not weird.”

  “All the grade sixers pee in it on their way home from school.”

  “So? That’s just gross.”

  “Yeah. But nobody knows. Might be good to tell them.”

  Belle makes a blue circle and fills it with yellow. Gross alone is too low a standard, but gross and informative isn’t.

  Belle and Cor stand on the narrow walkway at the side of their house. Belle turns and faces the heavy ivy. She lifts the back of her shirt and instructs her brother to press the map against her bare back then pull the shirt over it.

  “Mom and Dad don’t need to know about this.”

  She instructs Cor to hurry. Wasps are emerging from the shadows beneath the leaves. She closes her eyes until he is done.

  That night Belle lies awake in her bed. The map lies in the dust beneath her box spring. She is waiting, as she does every night, for her fear to rise before falling asleep. She has to select what the fear can rise into safely. Usually a sound or rather the space between two sounds. The ductwork snaps somewhere in the house. Too alert, too random to make a proper space. A pump scrolls through water in the base
ment. Across the hall, Cor coughs. Cor is coughing in his sleep. Then she finds it. The electric clock groans and ticks and then is silent. Not silent really, more suspended until the next groan and tick. That is the space. Belle focuses on the space. She needs to be accurate or the fear will never come and she will never sleep. The space is a hole. A gap. A non-groan and a non-tick. It is a thing covered or a thing removed. She races around it trying to make it what it is. It is a groan breathing in instead of out. It is all the silent ticks awaiting selection. Belle feels her ears grow larger than her pillow. It is the thinking about groaning and the remembering about ticking. Her eyes reach down and draw heavy bedding up into her thoughts. Belle feels her heart start to plink in the space. It is dying. The space between the groan and the tick is dying. Belle’s hands release around the bear at her chest and she falls to sleep.

  Belle checks that Cor’s shoes are on the right feet. He stands looking up at her, waiting. She nods.

  “Do you have the map?”

  Belle nods.

  “I gave it a title. It needs to be called something.”

  Cor grabs his cheeks, agreeing.

  “What is it called? What? What?”

  “Shhhh. Outside.”

  Belle looks back into the house as the storm door slaps closed behind Cor.

  Cor waits outside, standing in a puddle. He feels dirty water wick up his instep. Belle emerges and carefully turns to close the door. She points to the end of the driveway then follows her brother, avoiding the puddle and stepping between the faint shades of his wet footprints.

  “Keep going. Don’t act weird.”

  The end of Erie Street and stop. Duntroon sits on top of the Niagara Escarpment and from there you can see all of Clearview Township. From Creemore out to Cashtown. The steeples of Stayner and the entire Nottawasaga Bay including the beaches of Tiny Township. The view is sweeping and the perspective so odd that it translates to your eye like wallpaper in a Chinese restaurant. Belle turns her back and casts a quick shadow, her head darkens the centre of Christian Island some eighty kilometres away. She carefully rolls up the back of her shirt and Cor draws the map off her skin.

  “It’s called The Evil Tour of Duntroon.”

  Cor closes an eye to think. Belle watches.

  “Anyway, that’s what it is.”

  Cor’s face falls.

  “It’s mine too. I thought it.”

  Belle remembers.

  “Okay. Okay. What do you think? The Evil Tour of Duntroon.”

  Cor closes the eye again and Belle patiently looks at her map.

  “What about Giant Scorpion Attacks?”

  “What about what?”

  “Giant Scorpion Attacks.”

  Belle controls herself. Cor holds his chin and stares at the map. He is the decider.

  “Okay. We go with your one. What was it again?”

  “The Evil Tour of Duntroon.”

  Belle pulls out a drawing pencil and begins to write the title in block letters at the top.

  Neither child is aware that a man has approached. He has come down from the crest of the high street and is stopped, stooped over them as Belle finishes.

  “The Evil Tour of Duntroon.”

  The children jump towards each other as if to pounce on the words written that they have just heard spoken.

  The man laughs and pulls his hat back off his face.

  “Don’t worry! Don’t worry. The secret’s safe. Is it a secret?”

  Belle is too upset to speak. Cor grins and nods. He believes the map’s importance has now begun.

  “Can I see your map?”

  The man’s hand falls open against Belle’s arm. She knows him. She has seen him. Not his name, but him. He sits on the stool beside the antique tractors at the fair in October. He sits beside a barrel fire with a yellow dog resting by his feet. At the fair his hat is light-coloured. He holds the map up close to his face and studies it.

  “The Poo Lady. Hmmm.”

  Belle feels fire move around her throat. Cor claps both hands to his mouth. He’s too nervous to actually laugh, but he thinks this could be funny.

  “Astounding. I didn’t know children could still see her.”

  Belle looks at his face. He is serious. She dislikes being patronized and can tell quickly when that’s happening.

  “It’s an impressive tour. I will never tell a soul. You have my word.”

  He reaches his hand out and after a pause Belle takes it and they shake once, firmly. The man looks slightly nervous. Surprised.

  “I look forward to seeing it completed.”

  He bows and turns. Cor is suddenly overcome with the sensation that the police will come. He repeats his phone number and address carefully in his head. Belle calls after the man.

  “But it is. It is done.”

  The man stops and pauses before turning around. He looks at the children and slowly removes his hat. A long strip of grey wires spring up off his head and point away from the bay. He takes a step towards them and stops.

  “Okay. You’re done then. It’s a terrific map.”

  Belle walks up to him before he can turn to go.

  “No, it’s not. It’s not done. Is it?”

  The man looks down at the girl. His eyes are wide. She has caught him at something.

  “Why isn’t it done?”

  For a moment she thinks the man is going to cry, but breathes deep, accepting a responsibility, and leans in close to speak. There’s something too grown up about him now. Belle regrets her question.

  “If your map is complete you must include the rabbit place behind the community centre.”

  Belle blinks and looks down at her map. Rabbit place?

  “When we were kids the family raised rabbits there. It’s right there.”

  His finger stabs at the map. Belle looks back to check for Cor. He hasn’t moved.

  “Why should I? What’s weird about that place?”

  “Evil. Your map is the evil tour. This spot. This place is.”

  “Is what?”

  “Is evil.”

  The man scans the street around him, looks out into the bay.

  “Just don’t go there. Just put it on your map.”

  “I will go there.”

  “I said don’t. You listen to me.”

  “Then tell me what’s there.”

  The man might yell. He’s drawing himself up to yell.

  “Please, Mister.”

  His shoulders fall in as if something substantial has just escaped from him. He pushes his mouth hard into the back of his hand then speaks in a long single breath.

  “I didn’t see it myself. Not well. I did see it. There’s a head on the couch at the top of the stairs.”

  He glares, wanting this to sink in. Belle takes a step back.

  “There’s a what on a what?”

  “A head on a couch. I saw it from halfway up the stairs and that day, three of my friends who did get to the top never came back down.”

  “What happened?”

  “I ran away before I could see. They just … they were missing from that moment on. Other kids too. That summer and the next.”

  Cor is now beside Belle. He asks her instead of the man.

  “What kind of head?”

  The man closes his eyes tightly.

  “An old woman’s head, I think. There was no body.”

  Again to his sister.

  “Was she dead?”

  The man uses his hand to stop from laughing.

  “Actually, no. She wasn’t. It was yelling at him from the couch.”

  The man takes a deep shivery breath, wipes his face, then stands straight. He is looking down now and Belle can tell that he’s finished playing this game, whatever it is.

  “And so, that’s that. I told you and that’s that. Put it in your map or don’t.”

  Belle feels sharply that there is real meanness in this story. She knows that when strangers try to scare children very bad things are involved.


  Belle and Cor watch the man walking quickly down the hill to the long road that rolls over farmland to Stayner.

  From that moment on Belle stopped hiding the map. She wasn’t sure what had happened to it, but was aware that it had lost something. It had lost its pull. It was something that adults do. They have no sense of proportion, of size. It wasn’t that he was trying to lure the children into a derelict building; to Belle, that was garden variety grown-up shenanigans and not her problem. Her problem was that the map had been deformed. An old woman’s head on a couch that somehow removed children from the world. This is more than just a lie. It forced everything else on the map to be true and she wasn’t sure, now that the map had lost its voice, that these things were true. The half-baby growing inside the mother. The cherry tree tearing out the lady’s heart. None of it stays together if it isn’t said in a certain way by certain people at a certain time. Belle pictures the whale smiling as it rests on the water by the Italian toe. It is its second nature that is sunny and insane and probably twenty miles long.

  Belle and Cor play in the park until lunchtime. They don’t speak of the map again. They pretend they are apes for a while, then they walk on the moon and then, and she doesn’t know how or why, they pretend to steal straw from the baby Jesus’s manger. At home Belle lays the map on the counter for her mom to find. It will end up on the fridge beside drawings of her stick family beneath the sun.

  Cor scoops up his tomato soup in a spoon too big for his mouth. Belle thinks he’s no smarter than a dog. She’s aware that this is another effect of the ruined map. She blows on her soup until it cools, then pushes it away.

  “I’m going to my room.”

  Cor turns his heavy spoon and the rash-coloured soup drops to the table. He is a puppy standing in its water dish. Belle leaves him. She lies on her bed for an hour looking up at the glow in the dark stars on her ceiling. The room is sunny so the stars are taking light and not giving it. In time she becomes aware of an odd sensation. A shift in the sunlight. A cloud probably passed over the sun, but it triggers a mild panic in her. Belle sits up on the edge of her bed. Her shadow waves across the floor as if time has sped up. Something is wrong.

  The map is gone. Belle slaps her hand on the counter where she left it.