Ann-Marie MacDonald: Way the Crow Flies

Bikes and trikes and red wagons, sprinklers going, the distant roar of a lawnmower, the smell of freshly cut grass. Kids glance up, mildly curious, strange adults wave casually at the car, Jack and Mimi wave back.

“Who’s that?” Madeleine asks.

“We don’t know yet,” says Dad.

“But we will soon,” says Maman.

Or maybe they won’t. The people who waved may be moving out just as the McCarthys move in. Or you may run into a family from two or three postings ago, and it’s a great reunion but either way it’s just as well to start off as old friends. That’s how it is in the forces. You bond, you move on, there is no contradiction.

They drive past a park with swings, a slide, merry-go-round and teeter-totters. Paved footpaths run between the houses and open onto empty fields full of possibilities invisible to the adult eye. Among Centralia’s PMQs there are sixty-four such empty acres — big grassy circles rimmed by the backs of houses. Someone’s mother can always see you. No one worries about children in Centralia.

“Dad, why is it called Centralia?” asks Madeleine.

“Because it’s at the centre of the world.” Jack winks at his son in the rearview mirror.

“Every place is the centre of the world,” says Mike, “’cause the world is round.” And Centralia feels round, the looping streets, the neatly mown fields that fill the centres of these loops. Madeleine pictures a target. And in the crosshairs, Centralia. Bombs away. Rubble. Women in kerchiefs picking up the coloured pieces of the PMQs. Lego.

“Madeleine, stop daydreaming and look at your new neighbourhood,” says her mother. “Where do you think your best friend lives?”

Gee, doc, maybe in that garbage can with Popeye the Sailor Man . “I don’t know, Maman.” I like to go swimmin with bare naked wimmin, I’m Popeye the Sailor Man! Rude lyrics she learned from Mike. She pictures her Popeye ukulele. It’s on the same moving van with her hair and the rest of their stuff — including, unfortunately, her accordion.

“Madeleine.”

“Oui, maman?”

“I said, pick one and then later you’ll see if you were right.”

Madeleine rests her chin on the window frame and tries to guess where her best friend lives. The one she has not yet met. Does she live in the pink house, the green one …? Suddenly she remembers that she already has a best friend, Laurie Ferry. But she can no longer quite picture her face.

“There’s your new school, kids.” Jack stops the car. Modern single-storey white stucco with big windows and a taller section at one end, the gym. J. A. D. McCurdy School, kindergarten through grade eight. Deserted, deep in its summer sleep. The flagpole stands empty. The swings hang motionless, the slide and teeter-totters static.

“Hop out and take a look,” says Dad. Mike opens his door and Madeleine slides out after him.

Their parents watch from the car as they cross the playground without stopping to swing or slide, past the bike racks and up the broad front steps. In just over a week they will line up here with other kids, some of whom they will know by then. Friends.

Brother and sister cup their hands around their eyes and peer through the glass of the big double doors. The first thing they see, once their eyes have adjusted to the gloom, is an arrangement of framed photos. Mike rhymes them off: “Sabre, CF-100, Lancaster….”

Two larger photos preside over the rest. Queen Elizabeth II, “our gracious Queen,” and her husband, Prince Philip. Their portraits greet you in the foyer of every Canadian school here and abroad. The Queen and Prince Philip, your old friends. Your godparents, in a way.

Hi, Your Majesty. Madeleine stares up at the Queen and thinks, this will be my last year in Brownies. This spring, I will fly up to Girl Guides. There is the congenial sense that the Queen has heard her and serenely agrees, “Why yes, Madeleine, it is high time you flew up to Guides.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“You’re welcome.”

Mike has strolled away and hoisted himself onto a window ledge to get a better look. She joins him and he hops down and gives her a boost. She gazes in. “I wonder which one is my classroom.”

“This one is.”

“It is not, Mike.”

This classroom has the alphabet marching in block letters above the blackboard, and happy numbers skipping hand in hand. It is obviously the kindergarten classroom. The pile of pastel-coloured nap mats in the corner clinches it. Madeleine is going into grade four, you do not have naps on mats in grade four. Mike is going into grade seven.

“Due to my superior intelligence,” he says suavely.

“Due to it’s automatic when you’re turning twelve,” she says with withering sarcasm. Mike never withers.

“You have to pass first, stunned one.”

“Like wow, man,” she drawls, “you passed. How womantic, how positively gwoovy,” snapping her fingers and swaggering like a beatnik, “Hey Daddyo.”

Mike laughs. “Do Elvis.”

She swivels her hips, wrinkling her brow over the microphone, dropping her voice, dribbling it like a basketball, “‘We-hell it’s won foh the money, two foh the show….’”

“Do Barbie!” he yells, giggling furiously — it’s so easy to make her go crazy. Madeleine goes up on tiptoes, sticks out her chest, points her hands and totters about with a plastic face and mechanically blinking eyes. “Oh Ken, can you pick up my handkerchief for me, please?” she simpers. “I cannot bend my legs, I cannot bend my arms, eek! Oh Ken, save me. My hero!” Mike takes out an imaginary machine gun and Barbie dies in a hail of bullets.

Madeleine gets up. “Hey Mike, want me to do Sylvester? ‘Thufferin’ Thuckotash!’ Want me to do Elmer Fudd? ‘A hunting we wiw go, a hunting we wiw go—’”

But Mike takes off around the corner of the building. She follows. They run around the whole school three times, then they run to the teeter-totters and hang over the steel bar on their stomachs.

“Hop on,” says Mike, and they teeter-totter violently while Madeleine hangs on for dear life, not complaining about the bumps, laughing every time she wants to cry, “Ow!”

He abandons the teeter-totter. Madeleine crashes onto her tailbone, laughs and follows, convinced her bum is flashing visible cartoon pain behind her. He has climbed halfway up the mesh of the baseball backstop by the time she reaches it. “Come on men, follow me,” he cries, making explosion sounds, pulling a pin from a grenade with his teeth, “I need ammo!” and she tosses up a bandolier of bullets, “Thanks, corporal,” he calls through the hell of battle — normally Madeleine is just a private, she swells with pride.

“Sarge!” she yells, “look out!”

Mike turns to see a Japanese soldier clambering up after him. Madeleine takes aim and snipes. “Got him!” she yells and, as the Nazi tumbles to his death, “Auf Wiedersehen!”

“He was a Jap,” says Mike, “not a Kraut.”

“Mike!” says Madeleine. “Don’t say Jap and Kraut, we’re not allowed.”

Mike’s head snaps to one side. “I’m hit!” His grip loosens and he half-tumbles down the mesh, bleeding, dying.

“Sarge! I’ll save you!” She slides down the backstop, fingers and toes skimming the metal links, and releases her hold an impressive eight feet from the ground, tuck and roll. “It doesn’t hurt,” she announces before he can ask.

Their parents are still in the car, chatting. Mike and Madeleine are sweating. He pulls out an imaginary pack of smokes, and offers her one. Lucky Strikes. They lean against the backstop and puff, gazing across the road at a farmer’s field and a stand of woods beyond. “First chance I get, I’m going to light out into those woods,” says Mike.