Fiction by Janina Hornosty

Four Way Stop

by Janina Hornosty

Julian, the older brother, ran, and nobody ever cut his name in half. Maurice, the younger one, dawdled, two steps back for every one forward, and they called him Mo. Julian tripped, stumbled, flew headlong, failed school, stole money, and ran by his teacher's window waving. Mo burned his foot in a fire in his back yard, and then his single mother had to bring him things to eat in his bed, things he'd consume with maddening slowness, but no-one could blame him, because he'd burned his foot, right? Later, when his foot was healed, he'd still walk it forward like it was wanting to go back, or down to the ground where it came from.

* * *

The man sitting at the table sucking his Canadian beer was Billy. Billy was watching the comedian who'd been on at the Rexy for the third night. The comedian was getting under his skin, and Billy, who'd been hearing more chatter in his head for no reason lately, was nursing a slow hostility. The man up there wasn't funny, not in the way that he was used to. Billy liked jokes about women and their periods and bloating and jockey shorts and cucumbers. This guy was talking about other things. Once in a while Billy felt a whip of energy in his chest when the comedian cruised his voice into some quiet, explosive place. Once the comedian read a poem by a guy named Tom Wayman, about men and factories, and the poem wasn't funny either but the whipping got so bad Billy had to get up, go out to the parking lot, and squeal his truck out of the place.

* * *

Maurice's mother, Renee, was on the phone. Maurice, outside the kitchen window noodling around with some pieces of wood and a hammer, heard her say to his father that she needed to work next weekend and he had to take Mo. Maurice heard his father's silence and then the volley of grunts through the receiver. Maurice's mother hung up and drew a hand through her long tired hair. He asked her through the window for a drink, and she asked him what he wanted it for.

It wasn't always like that with his mom. Last week, or last month, or sometime, she looked pretty getting into the truck with her man friend and Mo and Julian and they went to the man friend's work picnic at a park with a river. There was a huge cake with blue icing for somebody's birthday, and it had vanilla pudding filling. The cake felt so good inside, and then outside too. Mo smoothed the blue icing and the pudding down his bare legs and arms and then lay in a shallow trench he had discovered in the river bank. The trench fit his body just so. He breathed in and out and the sun shone on his blue sweetness and he grinned at the universe like he would break.

* * *

Billy lost his job in the mill and he was back at school. He was upgrading his highschool Math and English and then he was going to take College courses, that's what the employment counselor hired by the mill said he should do. Somebody in his life was always telling him he was smart. Once it was his mother. Now it was his girlfriend. He hated it when people told him he was smart, like it was something they had thought of. He knew he was smart. What was so important about being smart that people had to be talking about it all the time? Why did people have to be talking all the time?

* * *

Julian's mother, Renee, who was also Maurice's mother, talked about Julian on the phone with her friend Leanne. She talked about him like he was an earthquake or a volcano. Renee had been to College for a while, before single motherhood shook her down, and she had words like "behavioral" and "acting out". She had some words to speak about Julian but not enough words to think about where the words came from in the first place. Julian's dad acted out too.

The person who didn't come up much in the conversations between Renee and Leanne was Mo.

* * *

Where the comedian taught English at a small college, he knew a guy whose senses were blunted by failure, rage and envy. He knew a few guys like that. But the main guy was his office mate and so every week day he steeled himself to walk in and face Bob's face. When he wasn't in class, Bob would always be sitting in his office chair by the window, not looking out but towards the door where the comedian would come in. Bob hated the place, but he was married to it like some stinking old bat he'd been lured to long ago by the nauseating and addictive scent of her ballyhoo. His words, not the comedian's. Bob could sure paint a phrase, but it gave him no pleasure. When the comedian came in, Bob's looking at him was always like a door slamming. The comedian was never sure if the door was shutting him out or, worse, in. Bob fancied that the comedian hated the place for the same reasons he did, because neither of them was a tenured professor, and so he half-liked the comedian, with an ugly sulphurous affection.

Bob was wrong about the comedian. He was wrong because his senses were blunted by failure, rage, and envy. The comedian didn't hate the college, he saw it for what it was, a place among places where one might be. Only his wife, and one or two friends, understood that the comedian was an angel, always himself everywhere. So far in his time on earth, the comedian had occupied the following places: student, planter of trees, coordinator of wilderness trips for people who heard voices, teacher of composition, maker of laughter deeper than sound.

* * *

Julian had to leave one school because he started a fire in the boys' washroom. The fire snaked its way up some pipes and emerged in a grade nine physics classroom, where it was drawn like mad to some powder that rearranged itself into an explosion. The explosion did not hurt anyone because no one was in the classroom at the time, but it did alert the principal to the need to redraw Julian's official geography: from home to the bus to the school out in the country where teachers and administrators made their careers out of being ready for boys like Julian. Maurice stayed where he was, because there was no need to move him.

* * *

The comedian brushed the wings of his mind against failure, rage, envy and grief. He hovered there, trying for a lighter and lighter touch. The routine he was working on was eluding him at its centre, always threatening to collapse into something crass or coy or sentimental or smart. The comedian paced around it, trying to be patient, trying not to make false moves.

* * *

Out the window, Maurice heard most of what his Mom and Leanne were talking about on the phone. Mo's dad had been lying on his back on a mat on the floor of the room where a lot of other men were doing the same thing. The anger management counselor was telling them all to breath shallowly and clear their minds of all thoughts. Mo's dad was not lying on his back in anger management class of his own free will. It was this or something he wanted to do even less. Anyway, the anger management counselor told the men that today they would try something different. Instead of just breathing in and out and picturing peaceful scenes and healthy ways to express their energy, the men would breath out and then on the in-breath imagine being breathed by the universe. Not breathing in but being breathed, like the universe was giving them mouth-to-mouth. So, it turns out that being breathed by the universe did not have an agreeable effect on Mo's dad. He went crazy right there on the floor, screaming and swiping at the men on either side of him. The guys who came to take him away and adjust his medication called it a panic attack. Mo's mom called it acting out.

* * *

Billy kept going to the Rexy all week, even though it made him mad they still had this comic. He liked the Rexy and he wasn't going to change. Nobody was going to move him out of his spot. Leanne wouldn't like this comic either but for different reasons. She didn't come here, but her reasons would be different, if she did. What reasons? She liked movies with Sally Field, about women and feelings. What kinds of feelings? Why was he asking himself for reasons? What feelings? Sad feelings and then reconciling feelings. Why didn't he like those movies? It wasn't that he didn't feel comfortable about feelings, like that gremlin counselor at the mill said, the word feelings stretching his mouth so that his chin receded even further into his stumpy neck. What a moron, feelings aren't supposed to be comfortable, that's why they're feelings. He didn't like those feelings, those Sally Field feelings. What feelings? Dissolving into tears feelings and sympathy feelings and then women arm-in-arm stumping across the screen, limping and stumping through life together, which they could accept now for some reason. What reason?

* * *

If Julian and Maurice spent more than 15 minutes together someone would always get hurt and it would always be Maurice. Julian didn't mean to hurt Maurice, but he was hardwired for having accidents or losing control, so a tennis ball would careen into Maurice's eye or Maurice would get in the way of a long-armed back-hand while they were wrestling in the grass. At the climax, when he was whacked or crushed or cut, Maurice was anointed with a sullen rage. The mottled red of his cheeks was like a blotchy wall of fire that Julian sprayed at with his frantic apologies, sorry, sorry, sorry, I can't even believe that happened, how did it happen? Julian would bring Mo treats and stroke his glossy brown hair and Maurice would chew slowly, put his head back and close his eyes. For a short time, this would release them both, until the heat in Maurice's cheeks cooled. Then it was business as usual.

* * *

It was the comedian's last night at the Rexy. Billy was still there, in his spot.

* * *

Julian was telling Mo to hurry, stop dragging his feet. Julian wanted to get somewhere, Mo wasn't sure where, but it meant crossing the street, a street that crossed a highway, fast. Julian kept running a bit of a way and then going back to Mo like he was a stubborn puppy that needed things acted out. Suddenly out of nowhere a truck was barreling through the intersection and Julian was in the middle of the cross and he had to go back or forward.

* * *

When Billy saw the comedian at the gas station in broad daylight he suddenly wanted to heckle or get close or get away. He watched as the comedian finished at the pump, went in to pay, got in his car and turned on the engine. Billy watched him pull on to the highway and then without thinking Billy was in his truck gunning after the green car with the comedian in it. He had to bob and weave through some traffic to catch up, but he did and soon he was right behind the guy, mouthing stuff into his mirror, trying it on. "Faggot" he tried first, but even his own face in the rear-view mirror told him he was slumming. Then he tried parroting one of the comedian's own lines, delivered with a twangy edge of sarcasm: "What do you want it for? What do you want it for, bucko?" He had his hand on the crank for the window, and he started to throw the words outside into the wind as practise. "What do you want it for, asshole? Why do you want that?! For what reason, you motherfucker, what's the reason?!? Billy was screaming as he maneuvered to pass and then get in front of the comedian. He passed him and threw the words back into the wind. He tried to get a bead on the guy in the green car, was he looking at Billy, was he listening? The wind was strong out there on the highway and it was slowly sinking in to Billy that the words were just coming back in his face, like that scene in The Big Lebowski where the guy throws his buddy's ashes out to sea but the wind is blowing from the sea and the ashes end up all over him. Or was it all over his other buddy standing behind him? He couldn't remember, but the buddies end up hugging, not like they're gay or anything, they just kind of lean in to each other because their bowling friend is gone. That was a great fucking movie even though Billy's buddy told Billy some arty college boys made it. Billy was still craning his neck back trying to see the comedian's face, and yes, he thought the comedian might be looking, but the weird thing was that the face seemed to be getting smaller and smaller like when you're moving past a landmark in the scenery, and the next thing he knew Billy was cruising through the middle of an intersection at the heart of a four-way stop and there were two kids there in different places and some yelling outside his truck and inside his truck and he couldn't stop.

* * *

Julian and Maurice's mother was on the phone. She was telling Leanne that it sounded bad but she'd be happy when Julian was grown up and out of her hair. She knew it sounded bad but the counselor told her that she had to stay in touch with her feelings.

* * *

The sun was bright and warm, and Julian's shouts about doing or not doing something were just another sound. Maurice found it pleasant to toe the sandy stuff and weeds on the ground at the curb, loving the magic dallying. He guessed he'd cross the road now, but no one was going to rush him.

* * *

Julian had to go back or forward and since he was running forward he just kept going.

* * *

The comedian was in his small green car, moving down the highway and then coming to a halt at the four-way stop. The guy in the truck was yelling behind him all the way from the gas station, and still yelling as he passed the comedian's slowing and then stopped car. The wind blew his words away as he careened into the intersection, head craned around, face growing smaller but the mouth still forming agitated shapes. On the road crossing the highway, at the edge of the crosswalk, a kid was emerging, dangling one foot and then the other out onto the highway. Another taller kid was dancing in short sprints across the highway and back, yelling something to the smaller kid. The comedian read the moment of realization when the truck guy's face snapped forward to attention but it was too late to stop and two thousand pounds of steel obeyed Newton's first law of motion.

* * *

Sometimes the sun is shining and the wind blows words away and accidents don't happen even though everything says they will. Julian, the older brother, ran, and he reached the other side. Maurice, the younger one, dawdled, and he didn't get too far on the road. Billy couldn't stop or even slow down but there was nothing in the path of his truck and the universe breathed him another chance. In his place, stopped at the four-way stop, the comedian was brushing the wings of his mind against failure, rage, envy, grief and grace.

Janina Hornosty lives and works in Nanaimo, BC. She has published one collection of short fiction, Snackers (Oolichan, 1997).