Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Later, after eating their sandwiches in silence, they played lawn darts, both shirtless in the heat. As always, the boy used the yellow darts and his grandfather the red. Kyle claimed that he was going to win this time and Earl replied, “We’ll see.”

From the start, the boy played poorly, sending his darts in great lofting arcs and cursing them as they thudded into the grass, feet from the ring. Earl nearly offered him advice on technique but figured this was not the best time. But letting the boy win wouldn’t do him any good either, so Earl threw his own darts as best he could.

The boy’s next throw hit the door of the tool shed, leaving a mark, and Earl spoke softly—“A little too much”—as he licked his finger and rubbed the paint while Kyle kicked at the dirt at the edge of the vegetable garden.

“Not everything turns out like we think it should, chum,” Earl said.

Kyle considered this, twisting the dart in his hand. “I’m going to work with Dennis when I save up some money,” he said.

“You wouldn’t last two days in that mine, not with your attitude.”

“He’s going to be mad at you when he gets back, when he sees all his good stuff went into the garbage, and that my mother is too retarded to take care of me.”

Earl threw his last dart of the round, and it landed nearly dead-centre in the hoop across the yard. He turned and took Kyle by the shoulders, shaking him a little so this time he’d actually listen. He was sick of having to spell everything out for a kid who took pleasure in acting like a fool, a kid who refused outright to make the best of his situation, and he told him in no uncertain terms what he thought the chances were of Dennis ever coming back.

Earl would later admit to Tuuli he knew what Kyle was going to do before he did it. Their eyes had met before the boy slithered from his grip. Kyle took a step back and bent low and swung his arm upward with as much force as his small body could muster. He’d thrown the dart straight up, like a space launch, and they followed the yellow plastic fins until they were lost in the sun. Earl searched the sky for it, acutely aware of what was happening, of what was coming. He found only blurs of cloud behind the grid of telephone and power lines that criss-crossed the small yard. It’s going to hit where it’s going to hit and there’s nothing we can do about it, he remembers thinking. He was still hunting for it in the sun when he heard that awful, hollow popping, like opening a new jar of pickles, followed by the hush of his grandson collapsing into the soft grass.

“Nice and easy,” Earl said as he held it still while Tuuli, who’d never had a licence, drove. There was frighteningly little blood, and he remembers thinking he would have felt better if there were just a little more. It had lanced the corner of Kyle’s left eye, squeezing in snug to the tear duct, the thing sticking up proudly like an antenna, its yellow fins bright above the boy’s clenching face. Halfway there, Kyle started to panic and Earl had to grip his arms to keep him from pulling it loose.

Earl opens his eyes without remembering closing them and knows he must have passed out. He manages to sit by pushing his back against the wall of the dumpster. His calves throb in his nylon stockings. He decides his hip is not broken, and his next thought is that the chicken has gone cold. He can’t see his watch, but Kyle is certainly late and Earl keeps himself from speculating on the many ways a street-dwelling man could be harmed. Minutes pass. Earl’s breathing slows, and his mind becomes more collected. The terrible smell has weakened. Or perhaps it is him. Even the nose gets tired, Earl thinks, then he wonders how this odour strikes his grandson when he lifts the lids of the dumpsters he frequents each week, if he smells it at all.

He hears a rumbling that is not a car, then footsteps. The lid comes open and the streetlights bathe Earl in a yellowness that hurts his eyes. A hand grips his arm, and though he does not quite feel ready, he is hoisted to his feet.

“Up you get,” says a voice from a man standing on the floral armchair from which Earl fell what seems like ages ago. He feels hands in his armpits and he is dragged up over the lip by a measured strength and dropped on his feet in the alley. His knee quakes, then holds.

“Sleeping one off in there?” Kyle says. “I wouldn’t. That’s a good way to get squished.”

Earl looks down to examine himself in the light. On his shoulder there is a darkening ellipse of blood, his shirt is untucked, and the front of his pants and coat are splattered with grease, soil, and a yellow gravy-like liquid. He puts his hand to his head and feels a small gash beneath a clotted mat of his thin hair, and doing this, brushes his face with his forearm and realizes he hasn’t shaved in weeks.

“This yours?” Kyle says, holding out an aluminum cane. Earl realizes he’s been standing without his cane for some time. Adrenalin, he figures.

“Yes, that’s mine,” he says. “Thank you.”

“Good find,” Kyle says, handing it to him, and Earl is relieved to have it back.

“A real bump you took there,” Kyle says and grabs Earl’s head, turning it roughly. Then he makes the sound one uses to call a chipmunk. “I think I got somethin’ for that,” he says, and goes rooting in one of the many bags that hang from his cart.

Kyle returns with a tube in his hand and squeezes a pea of opaque gel onto his dirty finger. He leans in, turns his good eye to the task, and begins to apply it to Earl’s wound. It is a gesture of such tenderness that Earl feels all at once entirely unworthy of it. In his weeks of watching Kyle, tracking him, mapping his route, he had never been this close to him, and this proximity warms him now, something similar to the softness in his chest that came when Tuuli used to cut his hair in the kitchen, or when he watched Sarah float boats built from milk cartons down McVicar Creek. Kyle pulls back to assess his work, and for a moment Earl thinks there’s a catch of recognition in Kyle’s good eye, but the moment passes and Kyle walks back to the dumpster.

“This is one of my bins, don’t you know that?” he says and lifts the lid and peers inside. “But you’re half in the grave anyways so I’ll let you slide. Just don’t make a habit of coming round here too much — it’s not like you can’t find your own, there’s plenty of ‘em around.” Then he reaches in and pulls out the chicken in its container.

“I’m guessing this is yours too, right?” he says, admiring the bird.

“No,” Earl says, then clears his throat. “It’s yours.”

“You know I keep finding these things,” Kyle says, “all over the place, people just buy ‘em and throw ‘em out. Don’t make any sense. Sometimes I think they just come from nowhere, that things come out of these bins that nobody ever put in.” Kyle attempts to brush some grime from the skin with his dirty hand. “You hungry? You look like hell anyways, you drunks don’t know when to take a pit stop. Here, we’ll go halfers on this, how’s that?”

“That’d be fine,” Earl says, suddenly wobbly. He sits in the armchair.

Kyle sits cross-legged on the pavement and tears the bird in half with a cracking sound. He sets Earl’s portion in the lid of the container.

Earl isn’t hungry, but he accepts his ration, pinching a bit of meat and placing it in his mouth. Though it has gone cold it doesn’t taste half bad, nothing like the dumpster smells. Kyle stops talking for a spell while they eat, and Earl gets his first good look at him. His shoulder-length red hair is drawn into a ponytail and he is wearing the polar fleece Earl left for him a few weeks back. Earl can see now that it is a bit small and decides to next time buy him a size up. He sees that the eye is aimed outward and it looks cloudy, as though filled with yoghurt. Earl could not remember it looking that way when they’d removed the bandage. It had been crooked, but clear. The doctor had fit Kyle with a patch for his good eye in hopes of forcing the bad one to aim straight, but Kyle refused to wear it. When the swelling diminished, Earl insisted Kyle return to school. Only two days into the week he was suspended for breaking two fingers of a boy who Earl had thought was the closest thing Kyle had to a friend. After that, Kyle was caught by floorwalkers at Zellers stealing odd things like women’s perfume and clothes that weren’t even close to his size. He lit fires and tore up Earl’s garden. No longer just a show-off, he was a wild animal, and Earl couldn’t help but think the dart had injected some manner of evil deep in his head. The boy seemed to have set out to break their wills. And though she wouldn’t say it, Tuuli feared him too. Earl responded with a severity and rigidity he’d never known himself capable of, tactics he’d never employed when raising Sarah. He decreed curfews and ratcheted down bedtimes. He called in favours with folks he knew around town and got Kyle jobs — stock boy, gas jockey, even farmhand at a U-pick strawberry place — but he was fired from them all. “Can’t take instructions,” “Pumped diesel into a Honda Civic,” or as one of Earl’s old buddies from Hydro had put it, “Got too much angry in him.” With each disappointment, he found himself punishing the boy more and more severely, and now, as he watches his grandson devour the chicken, Earl knows that he behaved in ways that would repulse him today. Only recently, drinking alone in his motel while listening to men argue about money in an adjacent room, Earl remembered striking the boy, though the years had washed out the details, whether it was closed fist or open. He doesn’t remember taking any joy in doing it, but this offers little comfort. In his darker moments he fears he did worse.