“Like Sergeant Pepper,” Peck had said.
“But not as cool.”
Malcolm scorned sports and the outdoors. He said it disgusted the Sergeant that he wouldn’t make a military man, let alone a cop.
Under the bathroom sink, Malcolm displayed a stack of crimped Penthouses and Hustlers. Peck told him about the toilet reading material her mother had left behind and said, “I guess that’s the difference between my house and yours.”
“Not necessarily,” Malcolm said. He took her to his brother Mike’s room and handed her a binder. The plastic sleeves held photographs of murder scenes. There were women strangled by pantyhose, bras, or ties and men shot in the back of the head or the chest, and there was much dismemberment. A brain blown out of a victim’s skull and lying at his feet. A severed head sitting on railroad tracks. A woman with her head on her lap. A woman’s limbless torso. Bodies burned, stabbed, mangled, shot. Malcolm cocked his head as she turned the pages and thumbed the plastic.
“The Sergeant collected these. He gave them to my brother when he got on the force.”
“Imagine what you’ll get if you become a cop.”
“We’ll never know.”
The pattern of their afternoons changed. After passing Go five times each, they sat on Mike’s bed, the carnage album on their laps. Malcolm told the story of each photo, the crime, where and when it happened, what the police figured out. Sometimes they analyzed the bodies in the Hustler spreads, but they preferred the corpses. Malcolm delivered his comments on the nude models and the crime scenes in the same measured, baffled tone he used when detailing the Beatles’ recording techniques or informing her she owed him $90 for landing on St. James Place with one house. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes in a show of shock and disgust, though her library true crimes had plenty of photos, and (something she wouldn’t tell Malcolm) a Hustler lived under the sink at her home, too.
At school, they developed a set of greetings based on Beatles songs. Her favourite was Sergeant Salter’s Lonely Hearts Club Son. He liked Strawberry Peck Forever.
The day before she moved to Westwoods, Peck found Malcolm on the trailer couch reading Mad.
“Polythene Peck.”
“Back in the U.S.S. Malcolm.”
“Peck Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”
“Nowhere Malcolm.”
She sat on the sink and asked, “How’s the Sergeant?”
“They released the boat two weeks ago. Let the game begin.” Malcolm tossed the Mad aside and swung up.
“I don’t have time for Monopoly, Malcolm. We’re going tomorrow. My dad’s moving stuff today.”
“Okay.”
“We could do other things. What we usually do. What about the Beatlemag s?”
His head knocked the skylight handle. His thighs in jeans brushed her bare knees. She stayed put. He propped one hand on the stove and the other on the sink and kissed her without asking. She found his tongue and sucked it.
He recoiled. “Where’d you learn that?”
Saliva dried on her cheeks. She’d never kissed with her mouth open before.
He wiped his lips and cupped her head. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “It’s an asshole guy thing to say. What a guy who reads Hustler would say.”
“Mean Mr. Malcolm.”
“A Hard Day’s Peck.”
He lifted her onto the couch, where they wrestled and ribtickled then settled into an unbroken kiss. Her tongue met his, and she gave herself over to the sun cradling her neck and the cushions’ dry-vinyl crackle.
“I am moving tomorrow,” she said after a while.
“I know. That’s what makes this okay.”
“It wouldn’t be if I weren’t?”
“It would be better. But we’d be playing Monopoly right now if you weren’t.”
His damp armpit curved around her cheek. She breathed his cottony T-shirt heat.
“We won’t write each other or anything, will we?”
“Give me your address. I may show up someday.” He kissed her bangs. “Just don’t off anybody without me.”
“Bang Bang Malcolm’s Silver Hammer —”
“— came down upon Peck’s head!”
They didn’t kiss again.
On June 7, 1985, Hank strapped their beds, dressers, and suitcases to the Ranger and drove Peck to their new house on Hartley Horse Way in Westwoods, a new development in north Brampton. She carried The Black Donnellys, the feathered clip, her mom’s library card, and the McCartney letters in her mom’s deerskin purse.
They arrived at Westwoods late Sunday morning under a yellow sky. Number 39 looked the same as the others, a twostorey semi-detached with a garage. It had two small windows upstairs and one medium down. It had no shutters or any other decorations. The bricks were rusty pink and the trim off-white. Steep concrete stairs led to the front door. Three evergreen shrubs squatted under the front window, and a spindly tree with pointy leaves graced the end of the driveway. No tree on Hartley Horse Way reached higher than the roof peaks, and there was little shade.
They entered through the garage, which smelled like potatoes. Hank had arranged the living room the same as in Kashag. Above the couch hung the gun rack adorned with photos of two does suspended by their hind hooves from winter branches. Saloon doors took her into the kitchen, set up like home. The red table and yellow chairs below the sunburst clock. Mrs. Salter’s lemon squares in a Tupperware container on the counter. Sue Smedley’s thoroughbred calendar on the fridge. Only Burt was missing. Dogs didn’t belong in subdivisions, claimed Hank, so the Salters had kept him. The dog was in his prime, and Hank intended to hunt him that year.
Hank banned her from her bedroom until he had it ready. She helped him move the furniture into the hall. Then he showed her the cable box. She punched buttons and ended up watching a woman in a long dress strolling through a park singing, “He walks with us, he talks with us.”
After an hour or so, Hank called her down the hall. “This is it, baby,” he said. “This is your new life.”
He stepped aside and nudged her. She didn’t dare turn back and show him that although she loved him and wanted to feel as happy as he did, this room with its white walls and its high square window made her think not of her future, but of her mom. Her new room, her Beatles poster pinned above her dresser like at home, was not her new life, but a reminder of what had irretrievably gone.
chapter 3
In February, I was making blueberry pancakes when cops visited our house again. Alex shovelled the driveway while I stood on the stoop in my slippers. An officer confirmed my name and wrote down my occupation as unemployed. He handed me a subpoena then drove off.
I dropped the sheet on the kitchen table. New butter sizzled straight to brown, the element too high. I tossed the frying pan into the sink and slammed another onto a cold burner. Stanton had lied. And the other one, Young — crafty blonde. Weekends were supposed to be sacred. They couldn’t make me testify. What happened had nothing to do with our lives now, I’d tell Alex, and trust him not to hold a grudge. Snow clods rattled the window. Untroubled, he’d stayed outside. I didn’t