Chapter 3: The Underground Lair of His Highness Ben Kalish Ezab - Asbestos

July 1986

Come summer, the bushes in the empty lot between Black Lake Road and the forest filled up with cicadas and clusters of flowers. Though it was vetch, we called them grapes. Edible? Who knew for sure – we chewed on them anyway. Their pulpy flesh would explode in our mouths, cooling us for a second or two and getting us drunk on nothing at all, and then we’d spit them out. Sand and fine gravel would stick between our smooth toes and our sandals, fashioned from the same nut-brown leather as our schoolbags. The fibrous dust of our asbestos town billowed up with our footsteps, leaving a chalky grey film that stuck to our sweat and coated our calves in layers of talc. People said it caused cancer. We lived in the Land of White Gold.

Poulie and I were ambling side by side toward our new abode. Our tiny almost-twin frames rippled in mirages of morning heat, a veil of secrecy enshrouded our conversations. Then we left behind the empty lot and made our way into the cool pine forest.

These woods stretched out at the foot of the King-Beaver Mine, from Alfred Street to the parking lots and sheds by the truck crossing. It was about a hundred yards from my backyard, a buffer between Black Lake Road and the miles of chain-linked fencing surrounding the mine. We generally built our forts close to my house, but that summer we’d chosen a thick pine tree further off, closer to the mine parking lot. Desperate times, desperate shelter.

Our bastard stand of pines was a beleaguered outcropping of some larger forest, a honey-red and ever-changing grove losing ground to less orderly flora. The tall pines brought us comfort. Small, tough deciduous trees had sprouted up between them, and glades of stunning ferns. Big rocks too, here and there; small runnels, mudholes, rotting stumps. Fat orange mushrooms and slugs and moss overgrowing everything. Not too many mosquitoes, except at dusk, but lots of small mammals: chipmunks, groundhogs, skunks, porcupines, even neighbourhood cats giving birth in rocky clefts. I’d once seen a fox, and a few deer in winter. In springtime, between the surviving patches of slow-melting snow and the carpet of rust-coloured pine needles, we’d find little thickets of wild daffodils. Resisting the urge to pick a bunch, I’d bring home a single flower at a time and set it out to dry, in secret. I would have loved a bouquet for my room, even just for a few days, but breathing in flowers at night isn’t good for you, Mom said, lapsing into English. Especially daffodils, they’re poisonous. Dad would have found it kind of gay. Daffodils? Who died, ha ha? They must be full of ants. Ants in April, right.

Choosing the spot to build a fort is an exacting labour. First, you need a pine with a long pair of branches outspread in a V and, ideally, a second, similar pair a little higher up: your floor and ceiling. At the foot of the chosen tree, you stack the wood you’ve gathered: boards when you can find them and branches if not, as long and straight as you can get. We each had our own hatchet, and even a saw. In our toolbelts were hammers and nails of every size. Jackknives, rope, twine, and zip ties; a mouldering tarp or a shower curtain in a pinch. We’d set up a pulley, run the rope, hoist up the lumber. Lay out our boards from short to long across the V widening outward from the trunk. Pound nails and feel the sap seep out almost tenderly, leaving behind an inviting gumminess that would of course never fully dry. Same technique for the ceiling, but the tarp had to be fastened first – under the ceiling boards to guard against the rain, with any extra hanging over one side. We’d raise our sticky fingers to suss out the direction of the wind and determine where our makeshift wall should fall.

This fort would be the great work of our early summer, standing straight and tall in the perfect pine tree, a construction for the ages. Our wide and almost level floor was made from solid boards pried off a disused little footbridge over the creek, out by Dostie Road, after multiple bike trips, much measuring and sawing. A huge red tarp formed the roof and, for the first time in our humble careers as forest tree-fort architects, we’d managed to fashion two walls from a single tarp. You had to climb to reach our fort, over twelve feet off the ground by our reckoning, up in the high branches. We’d nailed a few boards into the trunk, steps up to the first branch. Further up we banged in more nails for hooks to hang our hammers and attached a wooden box for storage, and higher up yet, just before the branches grew too weak to support our weight, we screwed in the pulley for the clothesline Poulie had salvaged from the previous summer’s fort.

Up we wheeled the day’s victuals and dry goods: twin granola bars, juice boxes, cherry gum from the corner store, one thick grey blanket, and of course our Tintins. Poulie, a fan of political intrigue, had brought The Calculus Affair. Keen to spend more time with Chang Chong-Chen, I’d hemmed and hawed between Tintin in Tibet and The Blue Lotus. Life was a rich pageant.

* * *

One year earlier: August 1985

Atop the dump of the abandoned BC Mine, six budding miscreants from Mitchelltown – two eleven-year-olds and four eight- or nine-year-olds – were grappling with a surprisingly recalcitrant greyish ring of cracked and weathered rubber. Instead of lending traction to its forward motion, the tire’s treads seemed to slow its roll as it hobbled down the hill. We knew we’d never have the strength to right it if it capsized.

Péloquin had resumed his natural role as our leader, standing off to the side and steering us toward what he deemed the best launch pad for our circular rocket. Hope it doesn’t roll all the way downtown, hey guys? The idea was striking. The sight of Ouellet, Binette, and Pépin pushing the upright tire – Poulie and I were too short to do much at this exhilarating stage – turned my giddiness into a low-level yet deafening fear. Sure, I was panicking inside, but I knew in my heart I would follow my new friend to the ends of the earth as surely as this tire would crush everything in its downward path. The comically large tire reminded me of the giant wheel in The Price Is Right, a show my mother sometimes watched at noon, until my thoughts turned to the gravity of the crime we were poised to commit. The tire was a revolt. Poulie leapt up and down with joy as our tank crept toward the front line – an upright disk vying in grandeur with the sun. The landscape at the foot of our mountain lay supplicant before it.

From the moment we relinquished our rubber Manhattan Project to the forces of slope and gravity, everything unfolded in slow motion. From The Price Is Right my thoughts jerked to another TV memory, a scene from a movie I’d chanced on one night just a week earlier.

* * *

One week earlier: August 1985

In a fog of confusion and shame, I’d dragged myself out of the bed I’d just wet, awake from a dream too good to be true. My parents were in the living room watching a movie – a comedy, judging from my father’s laughter, coarsened by hacking from the Matinées both my parents smoked in an unbroken chain. A large garnet-glass ashtray sat in its place on the coffee table in front of the couch, and my father emptied it a few times a night. Standing a couple steps back from the living room, I let my eyes adjust to the light on the screen, as I steeled myself to tell my mom what had woken me. I was mesmerized by the luminous figures on the TV, which I could still not see clearly, half-submerged in the haze of an unconscious erotic dream, when I was confronted by the disturbing image of a massive fleshy breast moving through the greenery at the bottom of a hill, monstrously squirting milk and crushing everything in its path while a ridiculous little man with glasses attempted to trap it in a giant bra. The scene on the screen, now burned into my retinas, unfolded with a gnawing slowness, a throbbing hollow stretching from my throat to the recently emptied region below, and sent a shiver down my spine. I knew I’d walked in on something I would never have been allowed to watch, with the breast’s grotesquely caricatured anatomy, not to mention the oblique eroticism of its danger, a repression complicated by the contradiction of my dad’s hearty laughter and my mom’s whispered premonition, You’re gonna wake up Steve, right before she turned around and saw me standing there.

Change the channel, Pierre, he’s too young, she hissed, falling back on the English that was always her language of panic. She shrugged my father’s arm off her shoulders. C’mon, he’s seen ‘em before, and he’ll see ‘em again, he grumbled back.

Had I not just copiously urinated on my sheets, I’d have peed my pants then and there. I said I’d heard a funny noise, No need to get up, Mom, and went back to bed and tried to convince myself that the slick of cold liquid against my skin was warm and creamy. I’d spend what was left of the night at once restless and transfixed by the thought of one day ‘seeing ‘em again.’

* * *

August 1985

Now our tire was gathering speed, increasing with each of the sharp little bumps that rose up and dropped off out of nowhere. By the halfway mark, it was not so much rolling as hopping along on its surreal and noiseless course, impelled by a force that seemed to have been torn from our bodies and amplified a hundredfold, spliced together from our breath and the burning air above our heads. Six boys of varying heights, enthralled and out of breath, were lined up, our eyes wide open despite the blinding sun as we watched a tire hurtling its full tonnage of grey rubber down toward the muddy clearing at the foot of the dump, traversed in a split second without losing one iota of momentum, pummelling the saplings before crashing head-on into a mature yellow birch whose shattered trunk cracked like a giant femur breaking.

Binette snapped us from our trance by howling like a wild man. Ouellet joined in, fists pointed at the sky, while the tire, wobbling from its impact, completed the final ten yards of its blitzkrieg before falling flat on its flank, dead as a dodo. I glanced in amazement at Poulie, whose toothy grin had spread so wide it made the tendons in his neck stick out. Pépin alone seemed to share my shock at the sheer magnitude of what we had accomplished.

Seriously, guys, if I hadn’t steered it would have rolled all the way downtown. For real! We could have killed … But Ouellet stifled Péloquin’s buzz with an order, Okay, let’s move, we’ve gotta get down the hill. C’mon Dubois, wake up! And of our descent I hold not one solitary memory beyond the beating sun and perhaps the vague notion that something had died.

* * *

July 1986

The temperature was in Fahrenheit. Eighty degrees already, but the cool breeze at our lofty height and the shade of our red roof offered some relief. After we’d eaten our granola bars and drunk our juice boxes, read our Tintins front to back, and run out of things to talk about, we stretched out on our backs. If we were still hungry, we’d chew on the pine gum that gunged up our tiny molars. It would tide us over, surely. We were a world unto ourselves.

Splayed out in the pounding noonday sun, there was nothing special about it. Room enough for our two bodies to lie side by side, but we had to bend our knees and prop our toes against the trunk of the pine, our bare thighs pressed together, Poulie’s right against my left. We wore short shorts and tank tops, had kicked off our sandals. Our heads stopping just before the fort’s opening, in the V of the branches that joisted our floor. The feverish air burned off in the sun. Sometimes we’d pee in unison out the opening, kneeling and laughing, our different-coloured streams hitting the ground in twin long warm lines that sizzled on the carpet of needles and ferns. For now, our hands lay still on our bellies. We fell asleep, twin striplings dozing in the humid pine forest.

I was in China, swimming down a river, coaxed along by the current as I craned my neck, keeping my throat out of the water, trying not to drown. There is a rainbow in my heart, Chang said in The Blue Lotus. The water cleared, into an alcove. We looked beneath the surface, my friend Chang and I, eyeing the anemones swaying beneath the surface of a lagoon thick with animal flowers the colour of rust, blood, and mandarin oranges. Lotus. Above us, in the branches of our pine, a singing warbler slipped into my lacustrine dream. There was nothing unreal about it.

A hush fell in the forest. Even the grasshoppers paused their stridulations. Sunlight dappled the red walls of our iridescent fort. Our roof of pine branchlets and needles cast orange shadows on my eyelids.

I unsealed my eyes; there was Charlélie’s face. A diagonal of creamy light caressed the deep amber brown of his hair, illuminating his long lashes. His eyelids were perfectly still, his breathing slow, imperceptible through his half-open mouth. Peach fuzz barely darkened his lip, and down tickled the skin just in front of his ears. His bare shoulder gleamed too. His hand stirred, then slid with a twitch toward the elastic waist-band of his shorts. The skin of his thigh against mine was a contrast, uniting us. A warm field of electricity bound our bodies, mine pink and raw, flammable, all veins apparent, his tanned with a dusting of freckles over his cheekbones. A sudden deep breath; I started. A long sigh emptied his lungs, his stomach falling. His fingers fidgeted on the fabric. His shorts were pulled tight, like a jockey’s. I arched my back. My whole body breathed and swelled. I closed my eyes. A sovereign Ouija, an unconquerable magnet with a stellar patience, drew my hand toward the back of his, where it hovered. There was nothing accidental about it.

My arm slowly relaxed, my hand found its way over his, which fell first against my thigh and then onto it. The ridgeline of his short shorts was tight, almost throbbing, when I gently laid my hand over it. Every muscle in our thighs, bums, and lower backs was flexing, then relaxing, while our stomachs fluttered with moist sighs, in the arms of this big tree in the wind. An inaudible and irresistible force carried the air from our mouths, a mere two breaths apart, shared in our little orange-hued emirate. I gently tightened my grip on Charlélie’s organ, discovered its firm roundness by moulding my palm to its shape – different than mine, which I was also encircling, in the same way, with my free hand. I enjoyed its feel against the inside of my wrist, the wetness forming at its point, a drop of milk for me, a newborn.

The rustling of a bird taking flight. We woke up. There was nothing eternal about it.