Wood
by Rob McClure Smith
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: An American boy in Scotland has strange experiences on Guy Fawkes night.
_____________________________________________________________________
Every Guy Fawkes the schemies built bonfires. The council of course banned the blazes, which just led to more creativity in hiding the flammable material. This year was tough, though, ever since Wee Man had decided a sausage table was the perfect frame.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was just walking down the tallest of the seven hills the town was built on (like Rome, my dad said, except there the Christians took on the lions, not the other Christians). See, Fall mornings when wildcat teacher strikes nixed school, I liked to climb up there and lie on the clover beds, watch the forklifts scoot in the Boots factory, think more about how a dying Scottish town like this was no place for a corn-fed boy, contemplate how much I missed my girlfriend.
To get back to my grandfather’s house I had to cross the burn looping the north end of Rawyards. The scheme was an unbroken vista of blocks of gray, dingy flats, just a desert with windows. Smudged seagulls blanketed the roof of The Boar’s Head pub from whence noontime drunks slunk homeward, pawing the dyke.
Wee Man and Go-Go squatted on the gray steps of a close mouth, Embassy Regal tipped dangling from their lips. They spotted me.
“Hey, Yankee Doodle Dandy,” they bawled.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” I said. “If coach sees you, he’ll rip your ears off and make you eat them.”
“Nicotine makes me smart,” said Go-Go. “Ah tried tae quit and felt stupider.”
“Hard tae imagine that,” said Wee Man.
“If ah still had aw the money ah’ve spent oan fags,” Go-Go added, “ah’d spend it aw oan fags.”
“‘Fag’ means something different where I come from,” I informed them. “It’s slang for homosexual.”
“In Scotland we don't say ‘homosexual’,” Go-Go noted. “Oor word for that is ‘priest’”. He guffawed, and delivered a two-fingered salute to a double-decker. “Ah thought ah saw somebody ah knew,” he explained.
“We use the one finger for that too,” I noted.
“It’s gonnae rain,” Wee Man announced.
“Dude, it always looks like that here.”
“Aye, but this time for real.”
“So,” I ventured, “what are you two juvenile delinquents doing?”
“Wur gonnae borra a wee sausage table. Lend us a hand?”
Across the street, by the Ex-Serviceman’s Club, a little girl in a blue gingham dress leaned over her baby carriage, screamed something, and slapped her doll.
“O.K.” I said, up for new experiences.
Seemingly, it took four people to borrow a sausage table. Shug lived in 12 F. The stairwells of the 12 close were rimed with dirt and lined with empty milk bottles. There was a faint odour of urine also.
Wee Man chapped and the door opened. He shrugged. “It wis oan the snib.”
Mrs. Hall greeted us inside, a fish-pale fat woman in a nightshirt with a picture of a sad-eyed kitten on the front. Her hair was blonde and baby-thin and when she saw us she tucked it behind her ears. She was wrinkled, but it didn't look like she'd got that way having any fun.
“Hullo, Mrs. H. Shug in?”
“Come in, Gordon. He’s washing his feet in the sink.” She screamed “HUGH!” and I jumped out my skin.
An ugly orange carpet flowed through the rooms. It had a leaf pattern, but the leaves were crisped and black pinhole burns pitted the shag. The furniture was mismatched, the sofa jaundice yellow, a pile of breakfast dishes on the coffee table. An unpleasant smell too, something yeasty and familiar I couldn't place.
“He's making himsel gorgeous,” she said, crossing chalky legs. “Gittin’ fashion conscious. At the baths he acts like he disnae know me. Ken why?"
We shook our heads, politely.
“Mah bathing suit. Thinks his mither should wear a wan-piece wi’ a frumpy skirt. Ah says ah'd buy masel a fuckin thong thing jist tae scunner him.” She swiped a pack of Woodbines off the pouffe as bluebottles buzzed a bulb. “Take a keek and see if he’s done. Ah huv tae water mah Busy Lizzies.”
“It could be worse,” Wee Man whispered, “auld slag could huv been in the scud.”
Shug was loose limbed and lanky with a mop of curly black hair and the faint outline of a moustache sketched on his lip. He wore a yellow Brazil soccer strip.
“Aaaah,” cried Go-Go, shielding his eyes. “Mah sunglasses? Ah'm blinded.”
“You comin’ banana boy?” said Wee Man.
“Naw,” said Shug, examining his groin. “It’s jist the way ah’m standing.”
Shug was dying for a fag. Outside the back close, red sandblasted chips slotted in slab rectangles punctured with paint-flaked red metal poles, some bent, some crisscrossed with ropes, and a narrow strip of grass on an embankment running up to a sleeper fence. On the strip garbage bins, piles of trash, egg cartons, soup cans, strewn round their metal cages. There was an enclave inside the back closes for the trash, but it was too great a temptation for the incendiaries and the stairs had burned black so often the residents had given up keeping the bins there. The soot was finger painted with graffiti—“1690”, “Celtic”, “Azob”, “Carntyne Casuals”, “For a good time call 999”, “Sandra Luvs Elephant Man”. The architects of council estates were drunks or madmen.
Shug pulled a tobacco tin out his Levis and rolled his own with puce fingertips. He licked the wrapper, observing me, the newbie.
“Got a match?” he inquired.
“His arse and your face?” suggested Wee Man.
They showed me the planned site of this year’s bonfire, a scrabble of dirt on the south side of the estate worn down by a million soccer games. Weeds grew there, yellow moss and nettles, and there was a sign embedded. It said: “No Ball Games”.
“Bandy Dunbar got that there,” said Go-Go, scowling. “The morra night, it goes up as well.”
Earlier reconnaissance established how the abattoir employees left sausage tables outside to dry off during the lunch hour. We crawled through the grass, sprinted across a patio strewn with flecks of viscera, hoisted a table, and staggered off with it. The thing was about the size of a gallows, and heavier. We heaved it through the Ex-Servicemen’s car park. A woman in a red headscarf stopped to watch us schlepping this enormous stolen slaughterhouse rack.
“Hullo, Mrs. Patrick,” said Go-Go cheerfully. “How’s it going?”
We lugged the table into an old abandoned dairy. Planks of wood, sleepers, broken furniture, piles of magazines stacked high against the remnants of wall.
“Stowed stuff back of the Boar’s Heid night afore last,” announced Shug. “Help us shift it?”
In the bushes back of the pub were piles of fresh lumber, white planks fresh cut.
“Found it at a building site,” explained Shug. “Jist lying there. Except there wis this massive Alsatian ripped mah troosers but.”
On the return trip, Go-Go, overloaded, stumbled and let a rotten sleeper fall on the road. An ancient rust-blue Cortina swerved around it.
“You a fuckin' heidcase, son?” inquired the driver.
“Don’t leave that there,” Shug yelled, annoyed. “Wood disnae grow oan trees.”
Later, mission accomplished, we lay exhausted on the grass embankment behind the flats.
“Shug's dumber than yir average Tim even,” Go-Go remarked to me. “He's mental as anythin’. Know how it says ‘vitreous china’ oan the lavvy bowls? Shug goes tae me, ‘Go-Go, wis yir bog made in China tae?’ Serious he wis.”
“Ah wis kidding,” muttered Shug.
“Ah mind when we wur wee boys, back in Primary, ah used tae play wi’ this yin and oor matchbox cars.”
I looked at Go-Go, curious as to his narrative’s relevance to anything.
“So wan day ah ask, ‘Whit's the difference between Catholics and Protestants?’ Shug squints a minute then goes, ‘There's nae difference. Except ah'm goin’ tae heaven.’ So ah ask him where ah’m goin’ then. He widnae tell me. So ah asked mah mither.”
“What did she say?”
“She said ah wis goin’ tae heaven, says it’s that wee Fenian bastard Hall is oan a highway tae hell.”
“You Prods need tae spend as much time ootdoors in Summer as youse can,” Shug noted. “Git yirsels used tae the intense heat.”
“That's funny,” said Go-Go. “Laugh? Ah thought ah'd never start.”
“Hey Yank,” Shug said. "Whit do ye git when ye cross a Rangers fan wi' a pig?”
“What?”
“Ah don't know either. There’s some things a pig jist won't do.” He grinned. “Whit's the difference between a Rangers fan and a trampoline?”
“Jist ignore him,” said Wee Man.
“I don't know.”
“You take aff yir boots tae jump oan a trampoline.” Shug smiled again. “You should come ower the morrow night, Yank.”
“Aye,” said Wee Man. “Guy Fawkes wis anither Fenian arsehole. Tried tae blow up King James he did, the good wan. No the Boyne James.”
“He was homosexual,” I observed.
“Guy Fawkes wis a poofter?”
“No, James the first. The King was gay.”
“Slander that is,” muttered Go-Go, looking perturbed. “A Papist myth.”
Shug winked at me.
That night was great for fireworks, ceiling clear and stars plentiful in a sky dark as tar. North of the estate rockets commenced to whoosh up, white chalking streaking the blackboard, parachute showers of red and blue. Their bonfire was roaring up to the height of the three-storey roofs and the flames painted the telephone wires molten red. The raggedy Guy had long since tipped into the blaze and been charred to a cinder. The fresher wood crackled and spat out sparks.
Wee Man and Go-Go, bored, ignited Catherine Wheels on the sleepers separating the flats from the semi-detached houses. The Wheels spun green and gold and left whorls of black in the grain. Shug lit bangers and tossed them into the gardens. The firecrackers exploded in the rhubarb patches and the smell of scorched vegetable matter percolated.
“We’ve a bevvy stashed,” Wee Man whispered. “Dozen cans of Tennant's.” He paused to yell at the little kids hauling a large cross-shaped lump of wood towards the bonfire. “Hey, that disnae go in there,” he said. “That's special.”
The No Ball Games sign had been neatly severed.
“What the hell are you going to do with that thing?” I asked.
A half hour later the sign was propped against the front door of their nemesis Bandy Dunbar. Opening it, the poor man ran the risk of being flattened.
“Ah wish ah could see it brain the fat bastard,” said Wee Man, sighing.
“I take it this Dunbar guy is a Catholic,” I said to Shug.
“Naw,” said Shug, thoughtfully. “He’s of the other persuasion.”
There was only now the question of how to get Dunbar to open his door.
“How’s aboot we fire a rocket in his window?” suggested Shug.
“Dude, are you insane?”
“Look,” he said, pointing reasonably at a window propped by a can of shaving foam. “It's open.”
“That might work,” said Wee Man. This he uttered in a considered way, as if launching a rocket through an open window might prove an interesting experiment. He proceeded to embed a milk bottle in the chips, angling the rocket and gauging trajectory. I watched his engineering with a creeping sense of horror. What if we lit the apartment on fire? I didn't think they'd go through with it. Not till I saw the matchbox. Wee Man lit the tip of his Regal, took a long drag, crouched to the fuse. The milk bottle scraped back and the rocket flew at a forty-five degree angle, ricocheted off the window with a thud, bounced off a window box, and came to rest, fizzing, on the verandah.
“Ach,” said Go-Go. “We should jist huv thrown that brick thing.”
The stupendous bang was followed by a clatter of breaking crockery and shattering glass. As nearly as I could tell, the rocket had exploded a flowerpot and a fragment had bulleted through the pane in the verandah door.
“Scram,” yelped Go-Go, bolting across the chips, up the embankment, and over the fence. Wee Man shimmied the wall by the dairy, dropped, and scampered off. Shug and I went in the other direction. Five minutes later we slumped, winded, on the step of the 16 back close by its charred alcove.
“We'll never git tae the lager noo,” said Shug, sadly.
“Well, you're a very impetuous lot,” I said.
Shug looked at me, smiling. “Yir a regular walking dictionary, you. Impetuous! You must be dead good at crosswords.”
We sat in silence. I didn't want to draw further attention to my vocabulary.
“How come yir ower here anyhow?”
“My father died last year,” I told him. “My mother came back—she's Scottish—to be with her parents. It's just for the rest of the year, then we go back. I'm at the Academy. I know the others from soc. . . football.”
One close down, thirty yards away, a shadow swayed, faint clinking sound also.
“There's someone there,” I whispered.
Shug squinted into the murk. “Naebody. Jist us two.” He sounded hoarse. “It's jist a rat. Or Wee Man tryin' tae scare the shite oot of us.”
“Well, it's working,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Ah'm sorry aboot yir auld man and that.”
Saying this, he inclined towards me, gripping my jacket sleeve, tugging. He was trembling. I thought he was afraid of the shadow in the close. But then he kissed me. I was mortified, but didn't push him away. I stepped back and looked at him haloed in the yellow glow of the alcove bulb like that. His eyes were cat-green, lips full and moist. This is what I did: I hooked my left thumb in his belt loop, grabbed the scruff of his hair with my right hand, jerked him towards me, and shoved my tongue deep in his mouth.
Yes. I gave that Catholic boy the kiss of his life.
Then a bathroom light flicked on in a second-floor flat and the shadow came bounding out the close, followed by a body.
“Jesus,” said Shug. “It's the man.”
We took off, stumbling through the close and coming out the front door into the street scrabbling on hands and knees like escaped lunatic apes.
I followed Shug. He sprinted up the steps of the Ex-Serviceman's club, taking them three at a time and ran round back towards a row of decrepit wooden garages. We raced between them towards an illuminated shed from which came the whine of a circular saw. The air here was thick with sawdust and the smell of mahogany. Through a window I glimpsed two old men in white aprons standing long planks of wood on end. Outside was a row of ebony-stained pine coffins. Shug clambered inside one and disappeared. I did the same.
I had never been in a coffin. I lay still, arms against my sides, feeling a tad claustrophobic and a lot weirded out. I thought of that old jingle: “Hey, Mister Coffin-maker/ Plane that pine with care/An eternity of splinters/Is more than I could bear.” My heart jackhammered, above me a cold dark sky. I thought about my father and how infinite was that sky. Nothing matters to the dead, that’s what’s so hard for us. It’s the not caring. That got me back to the feel of Shug's lips on my own.
Footsteps crunched the gravel, closer and closer. Sweat prickling my scalp. A dark shadow draped itself over my coffin and, freaked out, I leapt up.
“It wasn't me,” I screamed.
Go-Go jumped three feet in the air. “Aiieee,” he cried. It wasn't so much a cry as a pitiful squeak.
“Whit wisnae you?” asked Shug, sitting upright in the coffin next to mine, levitating suavely, like some Caledonian Bela Lugosi.
The two old men came outside to check the rumpus and we didn't break stride until we lay in the tall grass behind Tariq’s cornershop.
“I've never been in a coffin before,” I said, shaking still. “Now, there’s a once in a lifetime experience for you.”
“No really,” said Go-Go. “We nicked a coffin last Halloween. Wee Man built a go-cart oot of it.”
“He went riding down the street in an open coffin?”
Go-Go shrugged. “Aye. He liked tae ride doon the brae yellin' stuff like ‘Hey Doc, can you give me sumthin' tae stop mah coffin?’ It wisnae as funny as he thought.” Go-Go turned to look at me. “'It wasn’t me!’” he squeaked in a falsetto. “Whit the fuck wis that? You sounded like a wee lassie.”
“Sorry,” I said, looking away.
“So, whit huv youse two been doing?”
“Nothing,” I squeaked.
“The usual guy stuff,” said Shug, sucker-punching Go-Go on the shoulder.
“Ah wonder how a coffin wid burn?" mused Go-Go, rubbing his arm. “We could keep the bonfire going wi’ a couple of they things.
“No,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, no.”
“Aye,” said Shug, looking at me, “there’s been enough things burned the night. Gunpowder, treason and plot.”
I walked back to my grandfather’s house in the glittering dark, stray clouds in the night sky tousled by the orange fingers of a November moon. The street smelled like bad beer, the pavements gloss-slick in the reflected glow of the streetlamps. I watched a petrol spill rainbow down a drain, and wondered if it was a chill night on the prairie too, if they were burning the fall leaves on Seminary, smoke curling low outside lit windows, drifting as if crusted, weighted by evening frost, Jack-o-lanterns on the porches still.
I was still trembling, from fear and who knew what else. See, I knew it would be time to go back soon, start high school over, baseball and girls and the rest, and on this night lit with fire I figured I might have difficulty putting some of this out of my mind.
Swearwords: Some strong ones.
Description: An American boy in Scotland has strange experiences on Guy Fawkes night.
_____________________________________________________________________
Every Guy Fawkes the schemies built bonfires. The council of course banned the blazes, which just led to more creativity in hiding the flammable material. This year was tough, though, ever since Wee Man had decided a sausage table was the perfect frame.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I wasn’t looking for trouble. I was just walking down the tallest of the seven hills the town was built on (like Rome, my dad said, except there the Christians took on the lions, not the other Christians). See, Fall mornings when wildcat teacher strikes nixed school, I liked to climb up there and lie on the clover beds, watch the forklifts scoot in the Boots factory, think more about how a dying Scottish town like this was no place for a corn-fed boy, contemplate how much I missed my girlfriend.
To get back to my grandfather’s house I had to cross the burn looping the north end of Rawyards. The scheme was an unbroken vista of blocks of gray, dingy flats, just a desert with windows. Smudged seagulls blanketed the roof of The Boar’s Head pub from whence noontime drunks slunk homeward, pawing the dyke.
Wee Man and Go-Go squatted on the gray steps of a close mouth, Embassy Regal tipped dangling from their lips. They spotted me.
“Hey, Yankee Doodle Dandy,” they bawled.
“You shouldn’t be smoking,” I said. “If coach sees you, he’ll rip your ears off and make you eat them.”
“Nicotine makes me smart,” said Go-Go. “Ah tried tae quit and felt stupider.”
“Hard tae imagine that,” said Wee Man.
“If ah still had aw the money ah’ve spent oan fags,” Go-Go added, “ah’d spend it aw oan fags.”
“‘Fag’ means something different where I come from,” I informed them. “It’s slang for homosexual.”
“In Scotland we don't say ‘homosexual’,” Go-Go noted. “Oor word for that is ‘priest’”. He guffawed, and delivered a two-fingered salute to a double-decker. “Ah thought ah saw somebody ah knew,” he explained.
“We use the one finger for that too,” I noted.
“It’s gonnae rain,” Wee Man announced.
“Dude, it always looks like that here.”
“Aye, but this time for real.”
“So,” I ventured, “what are you two juvenile delinquents doing?”
“Wur gonnae borra a wee sausage table. Lend us a hand?”
Across the street, by the Ex-Serviceman’s Club, a little girl in a blue gingham dress leaned over her baby carriage, screamed something, and slapped her doll.
“O.K.” I said, up for new experiences.
Seemingly, it took four people to borrow a sausage table. Shug lived in 12 F. The stairwells of the 12 close were rimed with dirt and lined with empty milk bottles. There was a faint odour of urine also.
Wee Man chapped and the door opened. He shrugged. “It wis oan the snib.”
Mrs. Hall greeted us inside, a fish-pale fat woman in a nightshirt with a picture of a sad-eyed kitten on the front. Her hair was blonde and baby-thin and when she saw us she tucked it behind her ears. She was wrinkled, but it didn't look like she'd got that way having any fun.
“Hullo, Mrs. H. Shug in?”
“Come in, Gordon. He’s washing his feet in the sink.” She screamed “HUGH!” and I jumped out my skin.
An ugly orange carpet flowed through the rooms. It had a leaf pattern, but the leaves were crisped and black pinhole burns pitted the shag. The furniture was mismatched, the sofa jaundice yellow, a pile of breakfast dishes on the coffee table. An unpleasant smell too, something yeasty and familiar I couldn't place.
“He's making himsel gorgeous,” she said, crossing chalky legs. “Gittin’ fashion conscious. At the baths he acts like he disnae know me. Ken why?"
We shook our heads, politely.
“Mah bathing suit. Thinks his mither should wear a wan-piece wi’ a frumpy skirt. Ah says ah'd buy masel a fuckin thong thing jist tae scunner him.” She swiped a pack of Woodbines off the pouffe as bluebottles buzzed a bulb. “Take a keek and see if he’s done. Ah huv tae water mah Busy Lizzies.”
“It could be worse,” Wee Man whispered, “auld slag could huv been in the scud.”
Shug was loose limbed and lanky with a mop of curly black hair and the faint outline of a moustache sketched on his lip. He wore a yellow Brazil soccer strip.
“Aaaah,” cried Go-Go, shielding his eyes. “Mah sunglasses? Ah'm blinded.”
“You comin’ banana boy?” said Wee Man.
“Naw,” said Shug, examining his groin. “It’s jist the way ah’m standing.”
Shug was dying for a fag. Outside the back close, red sandblasted chips slotted in slab rectangles punctured with paint-flaked red metal poles, some bent, some crisscrossed with ropes, and a narrow strip of grass on an embankment running up to a sleeper fence. On the strip garbage bins, piles of trash, egg cartons, soup cans, strewn round their metal cages. There was an enclave inside the back closes for the trash, but it was too great a temptation for the incendiaries and the stairs had burned black so often the residents had given up keeping the bins there. The soot was finger painted with graffiti—“1690”, “Celtic”, “Azob”, “Carntyne Casuals”, “For a good time call 999”, “Sandra Luvs Elephant Man”. The architects of council estates were drunks or madmen.
Shug pulled a tobacco tin out his Levis and rolled his own with puce fingertips. He licked the wrapper, observing me, the newbie.
“Got a match?” he inquired.
“His arse and your face?” suggested Wee Man.
They showed me the planned site of this year’s bonfire, a scrabble of dirt on the south side of the estate worn down by a million soccer games. Weeds grew there, yellow moss and nettles, and there was a sign embedded. It said: “No Ball Games”.
“Bandy Dunbar got that there,” said Go-Go, scowling. “The morra night, it goes up as well.”
Earlier reconnaissance established how the abattoir employees left sausage tables outside to dry off during the lunch hour. We crawled through the grass, sprinted across a patio strewn with flecks of viscera, hoisted a table, and staggered off with it. The thing was about the size of a gallows, and heavier. We heaved it through the Ex-Servicemen’s car park. A woman in a red headscarf stopped to watch us schlepping this enormous stolen slaughterhouse rack.
“Hullo, Mrs. Patrick,” said Go-Go cheerfully. “How’s it going?”
We lugged the table into an old abandoned dairy. Planks of wood, sleepers, broken furniture, piles of magazines stacked high against the remnants of wall.
“Stowed stuff back of the Boar’s Heid night afore last,” announced Shug. “Help us shift it?”
In the bushes back of the pub were piles of fresh lumber, white planks fresh cut.
“Found it at a building site,” explained Shug. “Jist lying there. Except there wis this massive Alsatian ripped mah troosers but.”
On the return trip, Go-Go, overloaded, stumbled and let a rotten sleeper fall on the road. An ancient rust-blue Cortina swerved around it.
“You a fuckin' heidcase, son?” inquired the driver.
“Don’t leave that there,” Shug yelled, annoyed. “Wood disnae grow oan trees.”
Later, mission accomplished, we lay exhausted on the grass embankment behind the flats.
“Shug's dumber than yir average Tim even,” Go-Go remarked to me. “He's mental as anythin’. Know how it says ‘vitreous china’ oan the lavvy bowls? Shug goes tae me, ‘Go-Go, wis yir bog made in China tae?’ Serious he wis.”
“Ah wis kidding,” muttered Shug.
“Ah mind when we wur wee boys, back in Primary, ah used tae play wi’ this yin and oor matchbox cars.”
I looked at Go-Go, curious as to his narrative’s relevance to anything.
“So wan day ah ask, ‘Whit's the difference between Catholics and Protestants?’ Shug squints a minute then goes, ‘There's nae difference. Except ah'm goin’ tae heaven.’ So ah ask him where ah’m goin’ then. He widnae tell me. So ah asked mah mither.”
“What did she say?”
“She said ah wis goin’ tae heaven, says it’s that wee Fenian bastard Hall is oan a highway tae hell.”
“You Prods need tae spend as much time ootdoors in Summer as youse can,” Shug noted. “Git yirsels used tae the intense heat.”
“That's funny,” said Go-Go. “Laugh? Ah thought ah'd never start.”
“Hey Yank,” Shug said. "Whit do ye git when ye cross a Rangers fan wi' a pig?”
“What?”
“Ah don't know either. There’s some things a pig jist won't do.” He grinned. “Whit's the difference between a Rangers fan and a trampoline?”
“Jist ignore him,” said Wee Man.
“I don't know.”
“You take aff yir boots tae jump oan a trampoline.” Shug smiled again. “You should come ower the morrow night, Yank.”
“Aye,” said Wee Man. “Guy Fawkes wis anither Fenian arsehole. Tried tae blow up King James he did, the good wan. No the Boyne James.”
“He was homosexual,” I observed.
“Guy Fawkes wis a poofter?”
“No, James the first. The King was gay.”
“Slander that is,” muttered Go-Go, looking perturbed. “A Papist myth.”
Shug winked at me.
That night was great for fireworks, ceiling clear and stars plentiful in a sky dark as tar. North of the estate rockets commenced to whoosh up, white chalking streaking the blackboard, parachute showers of red and blue. Their bonfire was roaring up to the height of the three-storey roofs and the flames painted the telephone wires molten red. The raggedy Guy had long since tipped into the blaze and been charred to a cinder. The fresher wood crackled and spat out sparks.
Wee Man and Go-Go, bored, ignited Catherine Wheels on the sleepers separating the flats from the semi-detached houses. The Wheels spun green and gold and left whorls of black in the grain. Shug lit bangers and tossed them into the gardens. The firecrackers exploded in the rhubarb patches and the smell of scorched vegetable matter percolated.
“We’ve a bevvy stashed,” Wee Man whispered. “Dozen cans of Tennant's.” He paused to yell at the little kids hauling a large cross-shaped lump of wood towards the bonfire. “Hey, that disnae go in there,” he said. “That's special.”
The No Ball Games sign had been neatly severed.
“What the hell are you going to do with that thing?” I asked.
A half hour later the sign was propped against the front door of their nemesis Bandy Dunbar. Opening it, the poor man ran the risk of being flattened.
“Ah wish ah could see it brain the fat bastard,” said Wee Man, sighing.
“I take it this Dunbar guy is a Catholic,” I said to Shug.
“Naw,” said Shug, thoughtfully. “He’s of the other persuasion.”
There was only now the question of how to get Dunbar to open his door.
“How’s aboot we fire a rocket in his window?” suggested Shug.
“Dude, are you insane?”
“Look,” he said, pointing reasonably at a window propped by a can of shaving foam. “It's open.”
“That might work,” said Wee Man. This he uttered in a considered way, as if launching a rocket through an open window might prove an interesting experiment. He proceeded to embed a milk bottle in the chips, angling the rocket and gauging trajectory. I watched his engineering with a creeping sense of horror. What if we lit the apartment on fire? I didn't think they'd go through with it. Not till I saw the matchbox. Wee Man lit the tip of his Regal, took a long drag, crouched to the fuse. The milk bottle scraped back and the rocket flew at a forty-five degree angle, ricocheted off the window with a thud, bounced off a window box, and came to rest, fizzing, on the verandah.
“Ach,” said Go-Go. “We should jist huv thrown that brick thing.”
The stupendous bang was followed by a clatter of breaking crockery and shattering glass. As nearly as I could tell, the rocket had exploded a flowerpot and a fragment had bulleted through the pane in the verandah door.
“Scram,” yelped Go-Go, bolting across the chips, up the embankment, and over the fence. Wee Man shimmied the wall by the dairy, dropped, and scampered off. Shug and I went in the other direction. Five minutes later we slumped, winded, on the step of the 16 back close by its charred alcove.
“We'll never git tae the lager noo,” said Shug, sadly.
“Well, you're a very impetuous lot,” I said.
Shug looked at me, smiling. “Yir a regular walking dictionary, you. Impetuous! You must be dead good at crosswords.”
We sat in silence. I didn't want to draw further attention to my vocabulary.
“How come yir ower here anyhow?”
“My father died last year,” I told him. “My mother came back—she's Scottish—to be with her parents. It's just for the rest of the year, then we go back. I'm at the Academy. I know the others from soc. . . football.”
One close down, thirty yards away, a shadow swayed, faint clinking sound also.
“There's someone there,” I whispered.
Shug squinted into the murk. “Naebody. Jist us two.” He sounded hoarse. “It's jist a rat. Or Wee Man tryin' tae scare the shite oot of us.”
“Well, it's working,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Ah'm sorry aboot yir auld man and that.”
Saying this, he inclined towards me, gripping my jacket sleeve, tugging. He was trembling. I thought he was afraid of the shadow in the close. But then he kissed me. I was mortified, but didn't push him away. I stepped back and looked at him haloed in the yellow glow of the alcove bulb like that. His eyes were cat-green, lips full and moist. This is what I did: I hooked my left thumb in his belt loop, grabbed the scruff of his hair with my right hand, jerked him towards me, and shoved my tongue deep in his mouth.
Yes. I gave that Catholic boy the kiss of his life.
Then a bathroom light flicked on in a second-floor flat and the shadow came bounding out the close, followed by a body.
“Jesus,” said Shug. “It's the man.”
We took off, stumbling through the close and coming out the front door into the street scrabbling on hands and knees like escaped lunatic apes.
I followed Shug. He sprinted up the steps of the Ex-Serviceman's club, taking them three at a time and ran round back towards a row of decrepit wooden garages. We raced between them towards an illuminated shed from which came the whine of a circular saw. The air here was thick with sawdust and the smell of mahogany. Through a window I glimpsed two old men in white aprons standing long planks of wood on end. Outside was a row of ebony-stained pine coffins. Shug clambered inside one and disappeared. I did the same.
I had never been in a coffin. I lay still, arms against my sides, feeling a tad claustrophobic and a lot weirded out. I thought of that old jingle: “Hey, Mister Coffin-maker/ Plane that pine with care/An eternity of splinters/Is more than I could bear.” My heart jackhammered, above me a cold dark sky. I thought about my father and how infinite was that sky. Nothing matters to the dead, that’s what’s so hard for us. It’s the not caring. That got me back to the feel of Shug's lips on my own.
Footsteps crunched the gravel, closer and closer. Sweat prickling my scalp. A dark shadow draped itself over my coffin and, freaked out, I leapt up.
“It wasn't me,” I screamed.
Go-Go jumped three feet in the air. “Aiieee,” he cried. It wasn't so much a cry as a pitiful squeak.
“Whit wisnae you?” asked Shug, sitting upright in the coffin next to mine, levitating suavely, like some Caledonian Bela Lugosi.
The two old men came outside to check the rumpus and we didn't break stride until we lay in the tall grass behind Tariq’s cornershop.
“I've never been in a coffin before,” I said, shaking still. “Now, there’s a once in a lifetime experience for you.”
“No really,” said Go-Go. “We nicked a coffin last Halloween. Wee Man built a go-cart oot of it.”
“He went riding down the street in an open coffin?”
Go-Go shrugged. “Aye. He liked tae ride doon the brae yellin' stuff like ‘Hey Doc, can you give me sumthin' tae stop mah coffin?’ It wisnae as funny as he thought.” Go-Go turned to look at me. “'It wasn’t me!’” he squeaked in a falsetto. “Whit the fuck wis that? You sounded like a wee lassie.”
“Sorry,” I said, looking away.
“So, whit huv youse two been doing?”
“Nothing,” I squeaked.
“The usual guy stuff,” said Shug, sucker-punching Go-Go on the shoulder.
“Ah wonder how a coffin wid burn?" mused Go-Go, rubbing his arm. “We could keep the bonfire going wi’ a couple of they things.
“No,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, no.”
“Aye,” said Shug, looking at me, “there’s been enough things burned the night. Gunpowder, treason and plot.”
I walked back to my grandfather’s house in the glittering dark, stray clouds in the night sky tousled by the orange fingers of a November moon. The street smelled like bad beer, the pavements gloss-slick in the reflected glow of the streetlamps. I watched a petrol spill rainbow down a drain, and wondered if it was a chill night on the prairie too, if they were burning the fall leaves on Seminary, smoke curling low outside lit windows, drifting as if crusted, weighted by evening frost, Jack-o-lanterns on the porches still.
I was still trembling, from fear and who knew what else. See, I knew it would be time to go back soon, start high school over, baseball and girls and the rest, and on this night lit with fire I figured I might have difficulty putting some of this out of my mind.
About the Author
Rob McClure Smith grew up in Airdrie. He studied at the University of Strathclyde and went on to take a teaching qualification at Jordanhill College. His short fiction has appeared in Gettysburg Review, StoryQuarterly, Barcelona Review, Manchester Review, Chapman, Gutter and many other literary magazines in Europe and the United States. He teaches film studies at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.