Chapter 55

Athan’s afternoon nap time ended at three o’clock.
Athan was wide awake upstairs and had apparently crawled out of his crib. How he did that, Rawle could not imagine. He must somehow flip himself right over the railing.
Rawle ran upstairs to get him before he tumbled down the stairs and broke his neck. Athan had already opened his door and was walking down the precarious staircase of their rental home, which had no banister or railing of any kind. We really have got to move out of this piss-hole, Rawle said to himself for the hundredth time.
“-What a big boy!”
Athan was wearing his puffy blue jogging pants and no T-shirt. His room got really hot compared to the other rooms in the house, for some reason, and he often slept with no shirt on.
When he saw Rawle, he immediately took a running jump right off the staircase, sailing into his outstretched arms, “Dadd-eeeee!”
Rawle caught him under the tiny armpits and swung his legs out over the kitchen below, then held him in his arms and they grinned at eachother.
“You’re some ballsy.”
“Baw-zee?” Athan said.
“Ball-sy,” Rawle corrected his pronunciation.
“Don’t,” Kelloway scolded gently from the living room. She was watching Oprah and drinking a Screwdriver, two addictions yet to be cured by watching Dr. Phil.
Athan and Rawle got cups of thick plain eggnog from the kitchen and went in to join her. Rawle sat on the carpet with Athan on his lap drinking.
Rawle watched his tiny throat muscles bob up and down, both shirtless and cool in the blasting electric baseboard heat.
Porkbutt, the family pitbull, waddled in after a couple minutes and crouched at Rawle’s elbow, hoping for a pat on his big python head.
It was a perfect family moment.
The stress of the poisoning, maybe even some of the other normal marriage stuff too, seemed to have disappeared somehow. Rawle felt enormously thankful, like he really was getting some rest for the first time in weeks, like a good night’s sleep.
That commercial for yogurt that everyone hates came on the TV. Kelloway pressed mute.
“Can I use your razor?” she asked, sounding innocent.
“Yeah….” Then he thought about it. “What for?”
“To shave the pubic sprigs you have growing out of your shoulders and your back.”
Rawle started laughing. “What’re you talking about? What pubic sprigs?”
“You have what looks like pubic hair growing on your back.”
“Bull-shit. I’ve never had a single back hair in my whole life. I didn’t even get hair on my balls until I was 18.”
“-You do! You do,” she nearly shouted. “It’s in little tufts right on your back. You know, I broke up with someone because they had back hair. That’s a deal-breaker. That’s my right of refusal.”
“Son-of-a-bitch. I do not!”
Athan began to raise the volume of his gibberish, imitating his parents tone of friendly arguing. His music-like gibberish played always, like a soft aquarium pump, in the background of the Powder home.
“Keep it down, Rawle.”
“It’s OK bud, we’re not fighting. Mommy’s just trying to be funny.”
“No I’m not. I’m not. Your daddy really has back-hair, Athan.”
“F-U-O-F-F,” Rawle said, spelling the words, as he often did to avoid swearing in front of the toddler.
“What?” Kelloway said.
“You heard me.”
Porkbutt heard a soft thump at the front door. He jolted up immediately from the carpet, letting out a low, cluck-like bark.
He trotted into the kitchen, like a muscular pig, toward the front hallway to investigate.
Rawle had heard the sound too. He picked Athan up off his lap and set him back down on the carpet, then made his way to the front door a few feet behind the dog.
One thing about Porkbutt, he never barked unless something was going on.
On his way to the front door, Rawle opened up the closet underneath the staircase and drew out a small wooden baseball bat that he’d picked up at a garage sale last summer, for Athan, although the Toronto Blue Jay’s bat was too heavy for the young fella to swing yet.
Porkbutt was sniffing at the crack under the front door.
Rawle snuck up and looked out the tiny brass peephole. No one.
“Boof,” Porkbutt barked again. Something was out there.
“What’s going on?” Rawle whispered. Porkbutt whined at the door crack.
Kelloway called from the other room, sounding nervous. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Rawle said. “Don’t worry about it.”
He took a deep breathe and pulled the door open quickly with one hand, the bat at the ready in the other. Porkbutt nosed out through the screen door, eager to brush his snout across a clear plastic object tucked against the door jamb. The object was leaking garish red fluid onto the snowy porch.
“What the fuck?” It took a second to register what it was but when he figured it out he felt queasy instantly and knew he would puke.
He kicked out his leg and connected with Porkbutt’s muscular rear-end, sending the surprised pitbull sailing off the two-step porch, down onto the stone path below. The dog landed with a clatter of nails on the stone and tucked his tail between his legs. What’d I do, then slunk away down the sidewalk toward the back yard. “Get in the back!” Rawle yelled. “For fuck’s sake!”
It was too late. Whatever diseases were in the red stuff, Porkbutt had already stuffed his nose in it. Could a dog get Hepititus or AIDS?
The dog had slopped all around in the blood. Rawle could see red paw prints in the snow. “God dammit!” he whispered his swear words to keep Kelloway from hearing.
He shut the front door tightly behind him.
Fred Fenerty was out salting his walkway, of course and he gave Rawle a suspicious, insectile stare above his steamy glasses.
“Not now Fenerty, you cunt,” Rawle mumbled.
He stepped across the contaminated porch, moving slowly and gingerly, careful to avoid any contact with the textured puddle of fluid.
The object was a 2-litre soft clear-plastic cylinder with blue tubing sticking out of the circular lid. The lid had come off and the body fluids in the cylinder had splattered all over the porch when somebody chucked it at the front door.
Rawle vaguely knew what the object was and where it came from. It was something from the hospital. Once again, someone connected to the hospital had attacked his family, this time, right at home, with a used suction container.
Because of his wife’s work, Rawle had picked up a lot of useless hospital information over the years. He knew for example, that anytime suction was used, the fluid being drained was collected in disposable plastic cyclinder, which when full, was capped closed and incinerated as medical waste. Judging by the amount of blood in this particular canister, Rawle reasoned it probably came from the trauma room in emerg, or an operating room.
He felt the gorge in his neck lift steadily like an escalator. There was nothing he could do to prevent himself from throwing up, although he tried to stop the inevitable by taking deep, cold breaths.
Porkbutt was shivering in the snow at the edge of the house, still wondering what he’d done wrong.
Some syrupy red jelly in the puddle began to tremble in the wind. Clotted blood. That was enough.
The stinging vomit jerked up into Rawle’s throat with a roaring sound.
He went over the railing and he blew puke down into the large evergreen bush growing alongside the front porch.
“Ehhhhhhhh… Oh no.” There was more. There was a second prong in the attack. The bush was littered with dirty needles. Someone had dumped hospital sharps into the bushes. There looked to be about four dozen bloody needles and syringes with orange or blue caps, White IV connection needles, butterfly needles, bloody scalpels and mini-scissors, all scattered in the greenery of the bush like filthy Christmas ornaments.
Rawle re-coiled from the sight, viscerally, as if he’d uncovered a nest of rats. He could feel the waves of filth and illness emanating off them. A chill ran up and down his spine.
“Matthew Fucking Pye.”
He made two fists and shook them at his sides in frustration and anger, then walked down the steps carefully and headed toward the back shed in his bare feet, looking for some garbage bags and gardening gloves to clean up the mess with.