The Right Time to Strike

by Lindsey Maclean

            Frank Hall Jr.’s basement was filthy. It reeked of weed and cat piss, which somehow masked the pungent cigarette smell that sat, stale and eternal, through the rest of the house. It was, undisputedly, a trash heap, but we didn’t care.

            Every Wednesday, we would hurry down those creaky plywood steps, toting cola and powdered donuts, and play video games for hours. It made no sense to anybody why I’d want to spend my time in Frank’s dingy basement, but then again, I wasn’t sure anybody understood why I’d spend my time with Frank in the first place.

            Within the mass of kids at our middle school, he stood out like a fly on a wedding cake. He was as grubby as a back-alley dumpster and nearly as wide, with low, heavy eyebrows and buzzed hair so blonde it looked white. Despite his disheveled appearance, the bullies let him be. Some might’ve attributed this to his monk-like perpetual silence, but loners got picked on all the time. What set Frank apart was the aura of intimidation that seemed to ooze out of him. He didn’t need to say a word for everybody to know he’d seen real hurt, and that he wasn’t afraid of it anymore. That was why sometimes, behind his back, the other kids would call him “The Tank”; the big guy always had his armor up.

 

            I’d been walking home in the same direction as Frank for the better part of 8th grade, keeping to the opposite side of the street to lend him his space. He always looked to be thinking deeply about something. Once, I told my mother about him—about the way he’d trundle on alone, never a word to anybody, like his backpack was full of lead.

            “Well, that sounds lonely,” said my mother, “Maybe he could use somebody to talk to. Go say hello -- you’re great at talking.”

            My mind was made up. The next day, an unseasonably warm day in March, I found him after school. He’d taken a seat on a large decorative rock by the front door to tie his scuffed, faded sneakers. As he sat there, fiddling with the fraying laces, he didn’t look so scary anymore. After going over the pitch I’d rehearsed a million times, I marched straight up to him and stuck out my hand.

            “Hi, Frank. I know you don’t know me, but we walk home the same way. I don’t know if you’d want to, but I thought maybe we could walk together, since you’re on Cloverview and I’m just a block over on Lester and—”

            I cut the pitch short, because a little smile had found its way onto Frank’s stony face as he grabbed my hand to shake it firmly. His fingers were soft and sticky, like taffy left in the sun. The last of my fear washed away, and we started to the street.

 

            Wordlessly, we passed by houses squeezed so tightly together their gutters nearly touched, packed in to make use of every inch of our crowded city. The duplexes didn’t look like much, but it was clear that everybody on the block struggled to afford them. I thought about how much happier Frank seemed to be with a little company, even in our silence. He walked like somebody was finally helping him carry all that lead in his bag. I guessed that loneliness might have been a heavy burden. I had never thought about it— I hadn’t ever really been that lonely.

             As we came up on Frank’s house, worse kept than the others, with its paint peeling and a rusted tricycle on the overgrown lawn, he came to a standstill, eyes glued to his worn-out shoes.

            “You wanna come in?” he muttered nervously, “Can’t usually have guests over. I’m not allowed, on account of the house is always a mess. Ma doesn’t like people seeing it. But it’s Wednesday; nobody’s ever home on Wednesdays.”

            I was stunned. This was the most I’d ever heard Frank say, and he had clearly stepped far beyond his usual depth, so I couldn’t say no. I followed him inside.

 

            The exterior of the house kept no secrets for the interior was every bit as shabby, every bit as dirty. I had never seen so much beige furniture in one place, though it could’ve been argued that many of the pieces had started to go an unflattering shade of grey around spots of frequent contact. Frank attempted to usher me away from the living room, seemingly in a rush to distract my attention from the chaos.

            We shuffled down a narrow hallway cramped by bags of old clothes, marked “Give Away?”. I noted a number of deep punch-holes in the walls.

            “How’d those get there?”

            “Ah,” sighed Frank, “Dad put ‘em in before he left. I think he just liked how the plaster felt when it crunched. Ma says coke’ll do that.”

            He said it all with a shrug, like it was nothing. That was something I admired about Frank -- the whole world just rolled off his back.

            “Anyway, she says we’re gonna fix it when we get our inheritance money from Grammy.”

            I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I decided not to pry any further.

            By then, we were standing at the top of a dark set of stairs, unfinished and steep.

            “What’s down there?” I asked.

            “The basement.”

 

            And so began a weekly routine.

            Our Wednesdays consisted mostly of round after round of Mortal Kombat played on a Playstation 2, hooked up to the basement’s massive, boxy television. We’d sit in front of the olive green futon that stood in the middle of the room, but never on it. That sofa belonged to Mrs. Hall’s beloved, albeit ancient, cat, Bootsie. It was anybody's guess as to when she’d last left it to urinate, and somehow that mystery made the idea of sticking to the floor infinitely more appealing.

            The space was lit by a single lightbulb controlled by a pull-chain; this did pitifully little to cut through the dim atmosphere, though Frank noted what a miracle it was that the bulb still shone at all, given that it hadn’t been changed in a number of years. Regardless of the grunge, to us, the basement was perfect. As long as there were two controllers and something to eat, we were right at home.

            My favourite thing about playing games with Frank was that I almost always won, not because he was bad at them particularly; he just spent too much time thinking, waiting for the right time to strike. He was never a sore loser, though. He’d laugh along, give his congratulations, and throw on another round. I wished that we could’ve hung out in the basement every day.

 

            One time, after winning my third consecutive match, I asked Frank, “Why’s your house empty on Wednesdays?”

            “Because,” said Frank, eyes still trained on the television as he cued the next game, “On Wednesdays, Ma goes to visit Grammy in the old folks home. She used to live here, but then she started forgetting things. Started forgetting Ma. I guess she just didn’t wanna have to be around it all the time, y’know? All of Grammy’s forgetting.”

            I nodded solemnly, and tried to imagine the forgetting. I pictured a frail old woman, wandering the house, casting suspicious glances at her own shadow. Frank said that it was something like that.

 

            At Frank’s, I got to eat things I’d have never been allowed to eat at home. Chips, soda, candy, and limitless PB and J’s. Sometimes, if we were extra hungry, we’d even get to heat up a frozen dinner. The more time I spent there, the more sense Frank’s build made. My parents always said sugar hooked you faster than most drugs.

            “Do you guys ever cook here?” I had asked Frank once while we smeared strawberry jam on slices of Wonderbread.

            “We used to,” said Frank. “Dad made real good chili sometimes. Not anymore, though. Ma always burns whatever she makes, so I figure she just gave up trying.”

            He presented his finished sandwich to me with a smile. It was absolute perfection—a  7-layered beast. We took it back to the basement.

 

            The months passed by faster than we could find new video games to play, so we resorted to half-watching whatever old Western was on the public access channel. It was either that or CTV, and we had decided that cowboys made cooler white noise than news anchors.

            Mostly, we just talked. No matter how many questions I asked Frank about his life, he always had something new and shocking to reveal. He was like a movie character, each new story revealing a bit more about his harrowing origins.

            While initially it was clear that all the probing made him uncomfortable, he grew fond of it. His answers got lengthier, and at some point they were no longer just portraits painted of the sad people that surrounded him—he spoke about himself, about his feelings of isolation and of hope. I often felt that was when I got to see him at his truest, his heavy brows furrowing and his tone grave. Still, he kept his composure. He may have been my best friend, but he was also, persistently, The Tank.

 

            There was a question I had been avoiding. I was concerned that it might make me sound unappreciative of our afternoons in the basement, or that it might come across as judgmental, but by early June, as we hid from the sweltering heat in our cinderblock oasis, I knew I had to ask.

            “Frank,” I started, switching off the TV. “Why do you never go with your mom to visit your grandmother? Isn’t she about to die?”

            Frank put down the soda he’d been sipping and let out a single, dry chuckle, letting the television’s silence echo. Suddenly, I regretted turning it off.

            “Yeah. She’s gonna die. So what?” He ran his hand over his pale, prickly hair. “You know what, my Ma goes down there every single week just to sit around with some corpse who can’t tell her from the nurses. Why should I bother?”

            He let out a ragged breath, and as I opened my mouth to speak, he cut me off.

            “Don’t answer that, man. Look, you want the truth?” He turned to me, and his nostrils flared. I felt like looking away, but I couldn’t. “I can’t wait for the old hag to go. Ma dotes on her, and she doesn’t even have to try, doesn’t even have to say ‘Thank you’. Then, she gets back home, and all through the rest of the week that's all Ma thinks about. Some old woman who doesn’t remember what she ate for breakfast.

            “When she dies, it’ll just be done. We’ll get some money and Ma can have a life, get some things done, maybe, if it isn’t too damn much to ask, be a mother again. When she goes, I’ll throw a fuckin’ parade.”

            Big, bitter tears had begun to stream down Frank’s round face, and a terrible quiet overtook us as we both stared, straight forward, at the blank TV screen.

            “You probably think I’m some sort of psycho now, huh?” He sniffled, breaking the silence.

            “No,” I began to say, “I just think you’re in a tough—”

 

            My voice caught in my throat as I heard the sound of the front door swinging open. The colour drained from both of our faces. She shouldn’t have been home for another 2 hours.

            “Frankie!” a shrill voice called.

            “Down here, Ma!” Frank replied, scrambling to conceal me beneath the stairs.

            I listened as a pair of heels clicked their way to the basement’s entrance. For a moment, things were quiet again.

            “Grammy’s gone...” Mrs. Hall mumbled, tearfully. “I know you don’t care, but she’s gone.”

             I watched as absolute despair filled Frank’s features. He shot me a quick look, and I knew what he was thinking. He felt responsible. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t just speak it into being, but I was trapped.

 

            Mrs. Hall launched straight into a tirade about her sister, and how she’d doubtlessly try to squirrel away more than her fair share of inheritance, starting down the stairs with deafening clacks. As she did, she knocked loose untold amounts of dust, filling my lungs, burning my throat. I tried, but there was no use in attempting to hold it in—I began to cough.

            The horror on Frank’s face deepened as Mrs. Hall’s voice raised by six octaves.

            “What the hell?” she snapped, whipping around the side of the stairs to face me as she reached the bottom.

            She looked nothing at all like Frank. She was small and bone-thin, with box-dyed red hair so volumized that it dwarfed her makeup-caked face. She wore a playboy t-shirt several sizes too small, which revealed a pierced belly button. As she spoke, her breath wafted into my nose. I knew now where the house's cigarette smell came from.

            “It’s probably best you head home now. Frank and I have some family business to discuss. I’m Rita, it’s been a pleasure.”

            She spoke through a smile that she plastered on only long enough for me to slink up the stairs. I took the time to wonder if this would really be a day worthy of a parade. My suspicions were confirmed about halfway down the hall when the yelling began. I only caught the words “sneak”, “lie”, and “disappointing” on the way out.

 

            After that night, on my trips back from school, I returned to walking on the opposite side of the street, but my eyes burned holes into Frank the whole way home, as if to say, “I’m still here, but only if you want me to be”. I worried he might not think I was worth the trouble I had caused. Some days, he’d look back, like he was thinking about it, but he never did cross over.

             As we moved on into high school, he started showing up less and less, until eventually he stopped coming altogether. Rumours began to circulate, and my new friends brought up theories that ranged from Frank following in his dad's footsteps, becoming a junkie and disappearing, to his having simply offed himself. Without anybody close to him to tell us, who was to say?

 

What I did know for certain was that when I passed that old house, it was like no time had gone by at all. The grass still grew long, the tricycle still rusted, and the paint still peeled, obscuring the home that lay underneath. It looked like Frank, and like Rita, and like everybody else on their block. It was as if the whole house was sitting there, waiting for the right time to strike.