The Trinidadian Babysitter

During the summers of 1991 through 1994, Marty Murray was my Trinidadian babysitter while school was out and my parents were at work.

He lived five houses down from us and my family had known his since the mid-80s when we moved into the neighbourhood. All the neighbourhood kids would play baseball on the street when the weather was nice. The street was a cul-de-sac, with my home forming the bulk of the it, sitting right at the base. The end of my driveway was home plate. We used a tennis ball and Marty Murray’s older brother, Michael Murray was usually the pitcher. He was the oldest kid on the block, about six or seven years older than most of us, who were not even teenagers yet.

To hit a homerun you had to land the ball on a houses roof. Now, because of the cul-de-sac shape of our street, there was already the basic formulation of a baseball diamond. Our street was shaped like a bulbous beaker. One of the houses in left field had a sloping roof and there was nothing better than watching the green tennis ball bounce off the roof and land on their yard. Centre field was problematic because the ball could simply roll all the way down the street, so those became ground rule doubles, unless of course, the centre-fielder made an error and the ball rolled by him, in which the play is still live and he has to run like hell to catch the rolling ball.

Cars were hit all the time, but they were part of the field and all the parents didn’t care. It was only a tennis ball, after all. What can a tennis ball do to a car?

I had so much fun in the summer. No school, my parents out of the house all day working, friends coming over to watch TV and have marble fights in the basement. Who would ever think that couch cushions could be the most entertaining, versatile invention ever? We could build forts with them to stop marble bombs and we could bash the shit out of each other with them, too. Couch cushions: both protectors and attackers. It was this old set of tan coloured couches with two distinct types of cushions. The smaller type was a simple rectangle, and the coveted one was an L-shape. The more scarce L-shaped cushion was substantially larger and the natural boomerang shape made for maximum torque. Take one of those to the dome and you’re going down.

         

Marty would come over at eight am as my Mom was leaving for work. Dad had to drive all the way downtown Toronto so he left shortly after six am. Marty would greet my Mom cordially. He was a very well adjusted, nice young man; all sixteen years of him. But I knew a darker side of him. He would engage in simple platitudes, but even my twelve year-old ears could see through the sham. He’s putting on this voice and talking so nice and respectful, but I knew that when my Mom left he’d call us ragamuffins and act totally different—beating up on us and talking about sex. Then he’d morph back into the respectful young man when Mom came home at five-twenty pm asking him how the day went, handing him a crisp twenty dollar bill.

The thing is, my friends and I loved the abuse! We’d be building complex forts out of cushions and blankets in the basement and then hide with the lights off. We’d then yell out something like, “Hey bumbaclat! Come and get it!” And then Marty would open the door to the basement and stand on the landing breathing intentionally loud. In the silent darkness, his footsteps down the stairs rang out like thunder as we tried to breathe as silently as possible. The basement was one large main room with two beams near the middle.

Two rooms down a short hallway were never entered. One was a spare room with nothing in it and the other my Dad’s office where he crunched numbers for Sears.

The large room was not a recognizable shape. It was shaped more like something a child would instinctively draw on an etch-o-gram; a rectangle at a Grateful Dead show. Perfect for hiding out and making complexly shaped forts.

There was Ryan hiding in one corner, the short, blonde-haired Irish kid who was way stronger for his size than you would imagine. And the two brothers from a few houses down, Jamie and Kyle, hiding somewhere else. Usually there was at least one other friend, either Waleed, the Palestinian guy from down the street, with four eligible sisters, or Hitesh from a few streets over (who for some reason we all called Chucky), or Johnny, the impossibly skinny Trinidadian kid from one street over. My house came to be a hub in the summer months.

You could hear Marty rummaging around the darkened room. We’d stuff a rectangular cushion into the single basement window to drown out any of the mid-day light that crept through. All of a sudden, there was a howl and you knew he found one of us and they were in for a hardcore tickling and beating appropriate by middle-class suburban Canadian standards. Marty held the unfortunate one down with his knees and gave him the business while the rest of us would wait for some brave soul to take an L-cushion and thwack Marty upside the head with it. There was hooting and hollering as time seemed to almost stop. There was no outside world, only this dark one of cushion forts, truth and consequences.

Even though Marty was technically my babysitter, he didn’t spare me from a brutal tickle-beating. On the contrary, he’d go harder on me just to show the other kids that there’s no nepotism in this underground kingdom.

On this particular day, Waleed was the courageous one who gave Marty a good L-shot to the head as Marty tickle-tortured Ryan, the poor runt of the litter. We were all easy targets for an average-sized sixteen year old, but Ryan was especially so. He was small, but he was the kind of kid you wanted beside you in battle. Maybe not the strongest, but he never gave up and took his beatings like a pro. Ryan laughed and squirmed like a maniac and then –kathumpf!—Marty ate the shot from Waleed and Marty left Ryan supine on the carpet to chase the shadowy attacker. A flurry of silhouettes flitted about the room as Waleed attempted to flee to the safety of the stairs with Marty in hot pursuit. Unfortunately, the hero was thwarted and taken down into a mound of blankets and cushions. His actions were all the more heroic because it was Ramadan and Waleed was on an empty stomach. The sacrifice bore fruit, though, because it allowed Kyle, the largest and slowest of our group, with that weird skin disease that turns it two different colours all over, to escape up the stairs out of the subterranean netherworld, into the light of day. Johnny also escaped and was pushing Kyle’s butt up the stairs so he went faster.

I, too, attempted to escape behind Johnny, but an arm grabbed my midsection and swung me around as I climbed the first step and my head narrowly missed one of the beams as I crashed into a lean-to of cushions and ate carpet. I wailed, “Ahh, haha, ahh!” as Marty laid a tickle-beating on me as the rest of my friends bolted up the stairs towards the light of freedom.

***

The pot was boiling on the stove and the box of KD was on the counter.

Game day.

It was Marty and my mostly white friends against the Brampton Indians (as they called themselves). The Indians were a group of East Indian immigrants of the same age as me. We all went to the same school and were mostly friends with each other. They all lived in the same neighbourhood and the baseball diamond at the school was equidistant between the two groups. A couple of times a week during the summer months we’d play ball against each other. No cellphones or text messages were necessary, or even invented, merely an agreement at the end of one game to meet again at high noon in a few days. No one wanted to miss it, anyways. It was battle time. Us vs. Them. What better things do twelve year old boys have to do when school’s out?

The memories of last year’s World Series was still fresh in our collective minds. It didn’t matter if you were from Calcutta or Kanata, if you lived in Brampton in 1993 you were a die-hard Blue Jays fan. I still remembered watching game six with friends and family the previous year.

The bottom of the 11^th, 4-3 Blue Jays over the Braves. The tension was so thick you could barely watch the screen. Nixon bunted to try to score Smoltz from third base and tie the game. There were two outs and it struck me immediately as a dumb move. Why on Earth did he bunt! The fool! There are two outs! Nixon made contact, the shallow ball lolling in the direction of first base. The pitcher, Timlin, had little problem getting to the ball. It was a routine play but with the World Series in your glove and the braying crowd it was anything but. Time slowed down and it seemed that Timlin hesitated a millisecond throwing the ball to Joe Carter at first base; like the weight of history was impeding his movements. He got the ball to Carter just in the nick of time.

The spastic jumping of Carter, like he was being electrocuted is etched into my mind for forever. Surprisingly, he had no rhythm. On the contrary, he was a flailing mess; the most beautiful flailing mess in the world. His celebration will always remind me of pure, ecstatic joy, the kind that is so intensely frenetic your body is unable to contain it.

Marty dumped the yellow macaroni into the boiling water and gave it a stir. About ten minutes later he strained the pasta in a colander, then put in a clump of butter and some milk and that bright orange magic cheese powder. That processed cheese powder was my homerun fuel.

We sat down in front of the TV in the living room and Marty flipped channels.

11:28 am.

We had to be at the ball park in forty-two minutes. It was a twenty minute walk. “Hurry up, boy,” Marty said, upon seeing my half-eaten bowl. “Shut up. I’m not that hungry. Let’s go,” I replied.

          “Put the bowl in the fridge, I don’t want bugs eating it.”

          I plopped the half-eaten bowl between the relish and the milk and rounded up the gear. All the balls, bases, bats, extra gloves. That was part of the deal with the Brampton Indians: Hey, if you’re going to field this sixteen year-old you have to bring most of the stuff. Not to say they didn’t bring plenty of their own bats, gloves, etc., but in the off chance one of their regular guys couldn’t make it and they had some new guy who had no glove, it’s good to have some back up gear. Most of these kids’ parents were very culturally Indian and so some of them only recently acquired an appreciation for baseball, whereas most our team had been playing baseball for years already, all the way back to tee-ball. They had some good players, but not enough. There was always some ragtag guy out in right field who could barely catch and throw, to the benefit of the left-handed hitters like myself.

          Just about noon most of us were at the diamond, with a few stragglers milling in out of the suburban distance. Our team always took the dugout on the right side because of the direction our guys were coming from was closer and the same could be said of the Indians. The dugouts were caged in benches to protect from rogue line drives and foul balls. There were no formal greetings. Not out of any hatred, but rather because we were boys who only wanted to get on with the game. Subtle social interactions fraught with implication were still some years away. Any pomp and circumstance that impeded the beginning of the game was superfluous. No anthems, no tributes, no moments of silence. Shut up and play ball.

          The first thing Marty did was walk the infield, counting his measured steps and placing some ragged old square cushions down as bases. To keep them in place he drove a railroad spike through a hole in the middle of the cushion with a bat.

With the small end of the bat he marked a small ‘X’ in the gravel right above the base, and would periodically check the bases to make sure they weren’t being moved in any helpful direction.

Marty was the communal pitcher. He tossed the baseball at a batting practice speed. He wanted you to make contact. No curveballs, change-ups, or any of that crap; just straight and true. It was a testament to Marty’s prowess on the mound that there were never accusations about favouritism from the Indians. There were the usual scuffles and arguments about a base runner being safe or out, especially because we had to umpire ourselves. Yet things for the most part moved along smoothly and this day was no different. We clobbered the Indians 10-2. In one inning, their third-basemen, Jindy, short for Harjinder, almost took a line drive from Marty’s bat right on the bubble of his turban. “Lorda Mercy!” he cried as his portly frame got up off the gravel, hand on turban to make sure it was still there. Jindy ducked just in the nick of time, and Marty strolled to second with a leisurely double.

Losing spectacularly over and over is not easy for anyone, let alone adolescent boys.

          “Let’s play Cricket if you guys think you’re Alomar,” Dhillon said from first base, cocking his head to get his whispy bangs out of his eyes.  

          “Cricket?” Kyle piped in from the dugout, “This isn’t India, dude.”

          “It’s only like the second most popular sport in the world next to Soccer, dude,” Dhillon replied.

          “Yeah but not here, dummy, and here is what matters,” Kyle shot back.

Our team spent quite a bit of time in the dugout because we were usually putting players on base and banging in runs.

Marty was on the mound the whole game (except when he batted, when one of their guys would pitch), so Ryan spoke freely of his freshly hatched plan to give Marty a good tickle beating. He wanted us to simultaneously—on some kind of agreed upon signal—all attack Marty in the basement and hold him down. “Tay, you take his left arm; Jamie, take his left leg; Waleed take his right leg; and Kyle, you’re the strongest, you take his right arm.” It was the old switcheroo. The hunted were to be the hunters. “Then we all give it to the rasclat until he can’t take it anymore.”

“Yeah!”

          “Fucking right.”

          “Sounds like a plan.”

          “Niiice.”

          “We’ll have to do it at the end of the summer,” Ryan went on, “so we don’t have to deal with it, afterwards.”

          “There’s always next summer,” I said.

          “Ahh, don’t be a suck about it. Everyone agrees, right?”

          “Yep.”

          “Yeah.”

          “Uh-huh.”

          “Sounds like a plan to me.”

          “Hey, I’m going along with it. I’m just saying . . .”

          And all of a sudden Marty hit the ball so hard, we all just stood up to see how far it would go. Even the left-fielder, Preet, stood casually and craned his neck to watch as the ball sailed over his head and rolled towards the pre-school playground. It kept on rolling and rolling, eventually going out of sight and settling amongst a set of play-school swings.

          Everyone packed up their stuff and headed off in the direction of home. It was another endless summer day girded by a carefree walk home under the mantle of victory. If only the feeling could last forever.  

***

I was out in the backyard throwing a baseball up into the air as high as I could while Marty was futzing around with the stereo system. He had our kitchen windows opened as wide as they would go and a wood-panelled speaker placed by each one.

          We started tossing the ball back and forth, moving farther apart with each throw. A voice echoed across the backyard, while Marty mouthed the words: “Six million ways to die . . . choose one.” At first, it was a simple baseline. Like the riff on “Satisfaction” with a Jamaican flavour. Then Cutty Ranks started rapping with dancehall swagger. Marty’s family and mine had lived on the same street for about seven years and were on friendly terms right from the start. I’d known Marty since I was six years old, but this was my first exposure to old school reggae and dancehall. My virgin ears registered it as Trinidadian Voodoo rap. I didn’t like it or hate it too much. It was so laughably alien to me, the music and rhythms were beyond mere liking or hating, a two star or a four star review. I couldn’t imagine how or why you would want to sing like that, but it was intriguing. I heard “A Who Seh Me Dun (Wake De Man)” a hundred times during the summer and the singing remained almost entirely gibberish and bafflegab. Nice groove, though. It sounded so cool. It was fun to play catch to. There was Chinese Laundry and Shabba Ranks, too. The speakers vibrated with the bass to the point that the bass was fuzzy. The couple times I was in a car with Marty, the bass shook the rear-view mirror like a T-rex was approaching. He got into dancehall through his older brother, of course. Michael was the progenitor of our cul-de-sac. Not only was he like six feet tall, not only did he pitch street games and smoke tennis-ball homers by the bucketful, but he actually did stuff with girls. White girls. He liked white girls and they liked him. I saw them surreptitiously around the street and they were all drawn to him like a magnet. Sometimes one would watch us play ball in the street and I would swung the bat extra hard. I don’t know why; she was like sixteen and I had nothing really to say to her, but we never had an audience except for the odd adult stepping out of their house to their car, so if you wanted to watch Michael try to strike me out I was sure as hell going to try a little harder to smash a homerun.

          “A Who Seh Me Dun (Wake De Man)” pierced the thick, suburban summer void. You could practically feel the wrinkled noses of some of the neighbours, as if they came across a dumpster fire.

Marty threw some high banana balls and timed it so the ball would barely go over the backyard fence so I could leap and lean my glove over the borderline and crash into the fence. Sometimes he over cooked it and I had to jump the wooden fence into the neighbour’s yard.

“Oh man, wait until you get into girls,” Marty began after a few minutes of blissful ball-tossing silence. “It’ll change your life, my man. When it happens you won’t be able to control your hips—they just go back and forth uncontrollably.”

He tossed the ball to me and humped the air in time with the reggae. I thought, Huh, that’s odd. It’s pretty easy to control my hips and I can’t imagine not being able to stop them from going back and forth. “Eh, you’re just some island animal,” I said, and threw the ball back with a good amount of speed. 

“You’ll see soon enough, don’t you worry white boi.”

Just then, Jamie came into the backyard and Marty gingerly lobbed the ball to him because he had no glove; while the ball was in motion he ran up to Jamie and started humping him from behind. “It’ll be like this Taylor! But with a girl!”

I started laughing.

“Get off me you fucking ragamuffin!” Jamie howled, crumpling into a shell. Marty eventually let him go. The three of us slid off our shoes and entered the kitchen through the sliding glass door. Marty started to prepare hot dogs and KD, so Jamie and me went into the TV room. We had to turn the volume up on the TV because Marty reversed all the speakers and now Cutty Ranks and Beenie Man bellowed throughout the house. That simple, driving bass line over and over again: Do-do, dah-do-dah-do. Do-do, dah-do-dah-do . . .

          I absent-mindedly flipped through some channels—MuchMusic, TSN, whatever, until Marty called out that lunch was ready. He turned the music low and the three of us sat at the kitchen table. It’s tough to beat KD and hot dogs when you’re twelve years old. Three plates laid out with three forks and a bottle of ketchup in the middle. Marty had two hot dogs and Jamie and myself had one. All three of us had a large dollop of KD.

Jamie said to no one in particular, “I wonder what it tastes like if you put some noodles onto the hot dog.”

          “Well, go for it, big man,” Marty said, barely interested in our senseless, childish mash-ups.

          “I guess, I don’t know . . . I guess it just tastes like a pasta-dog,” Jamie concluded after a bite.

          “Or maybe like a K-Dog?” I offered.

          I grabbed the ketchup and squirted some onto my dwindling mound of pasta, then mixed it all together—the orange and red bleeding together into a brownish goop.

          Halfway through lunch there is a forceful knock at the door, followed by two door-bell rings. There was a sense of urgency or at least impatience on the other side of the door. Marty kissed his teeth and got up from the kitchen and went through the hallway towards the front door. Jamie and myself stopped eating and were watching to see who it would be. I wasn’t expecting any other friends today, and most of the time they’d just walk right in anyways as they hit the doorbell. But who knocks that hard and double taps the door-bell?

          Marty cracked the door open just wide enough to poke his head out. We didn’t have a peephole. A lot of doors in the suburbs didn’t have peepholes, at least not in 1993. There were some hushed whispers exchanged. Jamie and I exchanged puzzled looks, Like what the hell is going on? Then it appeared as if Marty was actually pushing against the door, trying to close it while some opposing force was trying to pry it open. Slowly but surely, Marty’s force was not equal to the outside one, and the door finally swung open. Michael stepped into the foyer like a looming tower and slapped Marty upside his head. There was another person, too, standing timidly behind Michael; it was a girl, wearing tight jean shorts and a white tank-top.

          “Yo! Taylor, bumbaclat, what’s up with you?” Michael yelled out to me.

          “Hey,” I said back.

          This cute white girl with shining auburn hair and red lipstick just stood there with her hands on her hips, while Michael and Marty were having a quiet, yet heated conversation. I could only make out, “. . . no, you’re not allowed,” and “. . . they won’t find out, shut up.”

          Eventually Marty must have relented for Michael and his friend walked towards the basement stairs and disappeared into the darkness.

          “Just ignore them,” Marty said when he came back into the kitchen, “They’ll be gone soon.”

“We’re gonna go watch TV,” I said quickly, and we headed back to the TV room.

“Yeak, OK . . . stay upstairs, though,” he said, preparing to wash the dirty dishes luxuriating in the sink’s soapy bubbles.

I turned the TV on perfunctorily, and for once I didn’t give a flying karate kick what was on.

“Whadya think they’re doing down there?” Jamie asked.

“I don’t know, but we’re gonna find out.”

The front door opened again after a quick double tap. “Yo! It’s just me,” Chucky’s voice said. He slipped off his shoes.

“In here,” I yelled out.

“Marty’s reading some kind of textbook, or something,” Chucky said, entering the TV room.

“Good,” I replied. “He’ll be studying Chemistry stuff for the next while. Now’s the time.”

“What the hell’s going on?” Chucky asked.

“We got company in the basement,” Jamie explained. “Michael Murray is down there with a girl.”

“Man, your parents let him do that?”

“Do what?” I asked.

“My parents would beat the crap out of me . . . let alone him.”

“Are my parents here? Did they approve of this, you bumbaclat? Just shut-up. Don’t you want to see what they’re doing? We got like half an hour left before Marty will be done studying, so let’s go.”

The plan was to stay close against the wall and crab walk towards the basement door as silently as possible. I turned the TV off, and the house reverberated with thumping dancehall.

          Perfect cover.

          I led the way, Jamie behind me, and Chucky in the rear. We slithered along the hallway wall to the stairs that led to the basement. It was bevelled and we moved seamlessly along its contours. I turned around to my accomplices and made the shhh sign with my index finger to my mouth. I knew best that the handle could squeak like fingers on a chalkboard if you didn’t open it right. I gripped the knob and turned it just so, not too fast and not too slow; a pristine whoosh of silence followed. No lights were on, but the basement was flooded with a deep blue. The summer sun was bright enough that the one small window in the main room illuminated the shapes of the couches and the beams.

In a single file, our trio descended the first set of steps to the landing. For guidance, Jamie’s hand was on my back, Chucky’s hand on Jamie’s. I thought I could make out some vaguely human shapes squirming around like tentacles. I couldn’t quite tell if what my eyes were seeing was real, or what was my imagination attempting to connect the dots in darkness.

We were exposed, so I stopped and reversed up the landing, our unit moving instinctively backwards in tandem. “I can’t really see anything, it’s too dark,” I whispered over my shoulder.

There was a row of three round light-switch knobs by Chucky’s head. “Chucky, hit the first dimmer beside you, and barely turn it,” I instructed.

He pushed the tan, plastic circle until there was a small click. A few bulbs downstairs were now live. Chucky twisted the knob ever so slightly until a faint orangey glow grew out of the depths of the bluish dark. “A little more,” I said, taking a peek. “OK, good.”

This prepubescent human centipede again went down the small set of stairs to the landing. With our newfound light, I could see Michael lying on top of the girl, his right foot planted on the carpet. He was grabbing her breasts and making out with her; then he grabbed the meaty part of her thigh.

“Whoa,” I said aloud, some residual KD cheese still stuck to the corners of my mouth.

“What is it?” Jamie whispered.

“I think they’re about to do it, or something,” I whispered back.

“No way. Lemme see,” Chucky said, barely keeping his voice down.

The mix of lights and voices didn’t seem to impact Michael, but the girl, lying on her back, locked eyes with me. She broke off the face-sucking and giggled. “Come on, Mikey, look, he’s watching us.”

Jamie and Chucky were now leaning so hard to get a peak, our heads were stacked on top of one another—like an ice-cream cone with two scoops of vanilla and one chocolate scoop on top. Michael sat up and there was a noticeable tent in his shorts. He sucked his teeth, “Hey, get the fuck out of here, you rasclats.”

The pressure on our pyramid mounted and we toppled over onto the landing, laughing hysterically. Michael got up and made as if to chase us, and that was enough to make us scatter out of the basement, to the safety of ground level.

We spent a few minutes milling about, watching Marty highlight sentences in his textbook. He also had a big chart with a whole bunch of upper and lower case letters together. It didn’t interest us in the least. Within a few minutes were bored again. Sometimes, there are those days in the middle of summer where there’s just nothing to do and you have to use your imagination and make something up.

Chucky said, “I’m going to go blast all the lights.”

“Oh my God, do it,” Jamie said.

“Yup,” I said, knowing it was the single most perfect thing to do in this scenario, and thus required no more elocution on my part.

Marty smiled wryly. Do what you gotta do.

Chucky cautiously opened the door and gave us a final look before he disappeared.

A faint glint of light broke through the space at the bottom of the door, and then there was a scream followed by frantic footfalls thundering up the stairs. Marty capped his yellow highlighter just in time to see the basement door fly open; Chucky flew out of the opening, the door hitting the hinges and swinging back until Michael held out a forearm to block it, in hot pursuit of Chucky.

          Chucky ran down the hallway, heading for the front door. There was no time to grab his shoes. He swung the heavy brown front door open and flew out of sight. Michael ran up to the front door and stopped. “I’ll get ya, Paki-boi!”

          Before he slammed the door shut, we could hear Chucky laughing in the distance.

          The girl had emerged from the basement and was standing there sheepishly. Michael took her arm and they left without a word, only Michael’s extra loud teeth-kiss echoing in the hallway to tell us all we needed to know about the current state of things.

***  

The lights are off and the pillow is stuffed into the window. The series of forts that were built earlier in the afternoon were still intact. Almost all of us were there, sitting in a circle inside one of the larger forts. It was almost pitch black except for the flashlight Marty held to his face. It gave his face an eerie glow. Waleed’s stomach growled and Marty shone the light right into his eyes. “Shut that belly up, boi!”

          Marty whirled the flashlight all over like it was a disco. “Listen to da mahn. Here me now!” he proclaimed. With a flourish he abruptly stopped and brought the flashlight back under his chin. He licked his lips, going all the way around twice.

          “Everyone here remembers Mr. Harlow, right? He was always messing around in his driveway, working on cars, lawn mowers, stuff like that? Ever wonder how you don’t see him anymore?”

          Perhaps some of us gave a passing thought to Mr. Harlow’s recent absence, but he lived down near the end of the street and, to be honest, young boys kind of live in their own world, anyways. Now that Marty was forcing us to think about it, I recalled that I hadn’t seen him once this summer.

“Well, his brain literally melted one day—just like that,” Marty snapped his fingers and I flinched. “Ha ha, you pussy,” Ryan said.

“Shut up, loser,” I said back.

“No one knows exactly what happened. The hospital said it was the only case they’ve ever seen of a person’s brain melting like candle wax. They wouldn’t even let his family bury the body because it was too important for science. The government even paid for the funeral. Some people think it was spontaneous human combustion, where for no reason, a part of your body just explodes, but that’s usually one of your arms—” Marty squeezed Chucky’s forearm, “or one of your legs—” then he squeezed one of Kyle’s huge legs in a pincer grip, just above the knee.

“Ow!” Kyle cried.

“But this was different,” Marty continued, switching hands with the flashlight.

“Mr. Harlow’s brain just melted and he died almost right away.” He kissed his teeth. “Nothing anybody could do about it. Mrs. Harlow found him lying there in the garage and immediately called the police. No one really knows what happened to his body. There was no body to bury. Some people think the government got its hands on it and is doing special testing. But I heard from the old Iraqi guy who lives right before the wasteland, he says Mr. Harlow was contacted by aliens and his mind just couldn’t handle it.”

“Yeah, maybe he got anally probed,” Jamie said, and everyone giggled. My favourite show on TV was “The X-Files”. There was a period of months where the show had come close to overtaking my life; it bled into my everyday existence. I longed to be Mulder when I grew up. That one day I would tell the Prime Minister that Sir, we need to halt all flights from Pearson Airport immediately! There’re aliens in the skies!

I wanted to believe so hard.

But I couldn’t fool myself—the only smoking man was my Dad after he got home from work. And my Mom was no Scully. She sat in the living room watching TV, sheathed in a bathrobe, smoking DuMaurier 100’s—“bitch sticks” as we called them. Our cat, Ruffy, a tabby with black and white splotching, like a dairy cow, was always licking her toes. Ruffy was an ice queen. She looked down upon everyone who wasn’t part of our immediate family. The way she licked my Mother’s toes was done in the most regal feline fashion, as if she was licking Jesus’s wounds after he fell from the cross.

 “Wait until you hear the rest, youngblood.” Marty said, calm and collected.

By this time I was positively freaking out. I knew where Marty was going with this story; I put the pieces together in my head. Judging by the circle’s reaction so far, I don’t think anyone else knew, or they would have piped up and said something.

Only I knew.

          I was sure of it.

          Marty continued: “Here’s the thing, though. Take a look at Taylor’s face. He’s the only one who gets it. Marty flashed the light on my chest area to illuminate my face without blinding me. I couldn’t really see anyone else’s expression but I felt their eyes on me. He brought the flashlight back under his chin. “You’re sitting on the work of a dead man. He’s in the sockets, he’s in the carpet, he’s in the walls, he’s in the pillars, he’s in the light, he’s in the dark. Mr. Harlow is everywhere in this basement. He did all the work down here!” Marty shouted. “All of it!”

          We had all heard odd creaks and noises in the basement, most of it the product of our overactive imaginations. We joked about there being ghosts in the basement while simultaneously being scared that there were ghosts in the basement. And this freaked us all out.

          “Taylor’s parents contracted Mr. Harlow to do the basement earlier this year. The project took one month, and then one month after he finished the project his brain melted. I’ve heard him walking around down here.” He slowly panned the flashlight across our silent faces. “Haven’t you?”

There were a couple gulps; inchoate Adam’s apples like small triangles, barely poking through our necks.

Ryan tried to get everyone’s attention with his eyes, but the flashlight kept whirring around the fort and no one noticed. Everyone was caught thinking about Mr. Harlow, so he just yelled out, “Now!” and at first we sat there in stunned silence, unable to move.

          “Now wha—” Marty got out before Kyle lunged for his right arm and the flashlight fell with a thud onto the grey carpet and went out.

Waleed yelled out, “I got his left leg!—”

“—You guys are fucking dead, oh my god, you’re so fucking dead,” Marty said, semi-pinned down and thrashing wildly in the darkness. I grabbed hold of his flailing left arm and Chucky clung to his right leg. There was nothing he could do, nowhere he could go.

All of us began violently tickling him.

          And from his subterranean blanket prison, Marty screamed and screamed.