Bad Land by Corinna Chong

Author:Corinna Chong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

13

THE STRIP MALLS and motels of Edmonton went by in a blur. My heart was galloping with the chaos of it all—the early morning light blaring, vehicles packed on all sides, from compacts to semi trucks, construction workers directing traffic out of lanes where the smells of fresh tar mingled with clouds of exhaust. It seemed that driving the speed limit was some kind of unforgivable offence in the city. I kept my hands gripped tightly on the wheel, face forward, each time a monstrous truck veered around us, the driver’s steely eyes trying to bore a hole through my window as he passed. So that I would not lose focus, I set Jez to counting all the red and white signs of the Tim Hortonses along the highway. Six. The traffic did not seem at all distressing to her, though. Her only acknowledgment of it was to cluck her tongue when one driver nearly cut us off as a way of making his point. “Watch it, buddy,” she said under her breath.

Truth be told, Edmonton was a harrowing place in my memory because of the time I’d visited with Ricky and his father when I was young. Unlike me, Ricky had known his father for a time, although a short one. He worked as a guard at the penitentiary and was a born-again Christian evangelist. In fact, it was his faith that prompted him to seek out Ricky and begin what he called “a relationship” with him, which mostly involved taking Ricky out to Arby’s and the mall every odd weekend and buying him some extravagance—once a Hot Wheels racetrack, another time a ghetto blaster, then a Nintendo. Ricky always gloated over the gifts, and I pretended not to be jealous. “Regina doesn’t want such silly boy things anyway,” Mutti would say in my defence, which was true, but we all knew it wasn’t really the gifts I was secretly coveting.

The first time Clint came to our house, I was struck dumb by the way he moved and talked like Ricky, his face morphing in and out of Ricky’s expressions, and how he had Ricky’s same nervous laugh that he kept trapped in his throat. I saw him as a kind of mischievous shape-shifter, cloning pieces of Ricky one by one and using them whenever he saw fit, though of course it was the other way around; Ricky was a copy of him, with the cheeks and jawline of Mutti mixed in.

It was obvious to me that Ricky liked Clint for the gifts and attention he would provide on those rare Saturdays, but that Clint himself was something merely to be endured, like the doctor’s checkup before the lollipop reward. It was Clint’s preaching, especially, that prickled Ricky. Clint would say things like, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,” and “Forecast for tomorrow: God reigns, and the Son shines!” and Ricky and I would look at each other like he’d just pulled his pants down right there in the living room.

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