The Union of Smokers by Paddy Scott

Author:Paddy Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2020-01-28T19:27:05+00:00

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As most of Quinton has discovered today, there are times when even a union is not a picture of stability, and we have to find and celebrate brotherhoods and sisterhoods where we can:

When Grumps wasn’t explaining farming and old movies to me, he liked to rail against scabs and union busters. I was never clear about why I should care until this exact moment, when a lanky, pimple-faced greaseball stepped out of a cluster of zombie mobsters and slid across the road. Before I could scream, “Look out!” he was pulling our cigarette from Mary Lynn’s mouth and sticking it in his own. Pretty intimate gesture for a scab, I thought, especially considering he’d done nothing to earn the smoke—he’d jumped the line, bold as brass. Worse than anything, though, when he finished his drag he dropped the butt on the ground and twisted it into dust with his running shoe, just as me and my rubbers were stumbling up to the curb, him leaning in like he was about to kiss her on the mouth or something. The loose tobacco got caught up in a cold gust of wind arrived off the river and whirled away. I curled my lip.

“I’m sorry,” I’d heard her say, just before she planted a peck on his cheek. “Maybe something better will come along.”

Trawl (his name was painted on the side of the lunch pail dangling from one hand, as well as stitched onto his green nylon jacket in white lettering, green and white being the high school’s colours, and a year under that which put him beyond an appropriate best-before date for Mary Lynn) passed up the opportunity to kiss her because, I hoped, I was that “something better.”

“You didn’t tell me you had a little brother.” He winked at Mary Lynn. “You know this twerp?” He sneered down at me from at least a foot above, in case I missed the double slam of being both brotherly and a twerp. I was too steamed over the cigarette’s loss and what a piss-poor job Mary Lynn had done of protecting our property to return a slam of my own, however.

“Jeezuz, you again.” She seemed genuinely surprised to see me parked at her shoulder, like I hadn’t been parked at her shoulder off and on for most of the day. “I dunno…the Kid or something.”

Trawl sniffed. “Hello, the Kid. You got a real name?”

I did, but as Mary Lynn would shortly delight in discovering, my first name was pretty susceptible to abuse, so Trawl sure wasn’t going to hear it from me.

“You a mute?” He poked my chest.

A normal twerp would have walked away when the finger landed. I didn’t budge. I blame love. Some people run away from that too, skedaddle into the sunset rather than hang around a little longer to see how the world turns with him still in it. I refused to even consider the possibility that the person I wanted already had somebody in her life.

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