Page 36 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. III #12

TalaN McMoNagle
Bleeding Boy
he summer my mother died Heff became my best friend. His name was Heffer- nan, that’s why he was called Heff. Heff
Her husband was a car salesman and looked like a toad. “What is she doing with him?”
Heff demanded to know. The way he asked it
I thought he wouldn’t sleep until he was given an answer that satisfied him. It was a question that had no answer and my friend agonized restlessly.
could tell you what song was number one the week you were born and do the Rubik’s cube in fifty-three seconds. He had a pool table in his bedroom. He was tall and great at telling jokes. For much of that summer the last things I was in the mood for were jokes but when Heff told one I laughed. He played basketball too. That’s where we first met – at the courts.
Shortly after I began calling for Heff, Mrs. Cas- sidy smiled at me when we passed each other in the street. It was a lovely smile, friendly and kind, and her lips pouted just before the smile, as though she was considering whether or not I deserved one. I wanted to stop and have a conversation with her. Get to know her a little better. See what sort of a personality she had. But I knew I would be tongue-tied.
A few weeks after becoming best friends we made a list each of our favourite women. After wading through photographs of pop singers and supermodels in magazines, after countless close studies of girls who bounced around our neighbourhood, we confined our selections to mothers living along our road. This was Heff’s idea. This was a list that hadn’t been made be- fore, he said. In our friendship, as well as being the joke teller, he was the ideas man.
I said nothing to Heff about my encounter.
I wanted to keep the vision of that smile all
for myself, and assemble an entire personal- ity around it. Usually, if you said a girl had
a good personality that was code for saying
she looked like the back of a tractor. That was Heff’s phrase. He had one for every occasion. But after receiving that smile from Mrs Cas- sidy I knew the codebook could be torn up. Her smile, and the obvious things about her, made her the perfect woman. That was another thing Heff had going that summer. According to Heff, to be perfect a woman had to have three things. A good face. A good body. And a good personal- ity. “He drives a hard bargain,” my father said when I told him Heff’s terms. “You haven’t seen Mrs Cassidy recently,” I whispered, which was true – that summer he had barely set foot out- side the door of our house.
Very quickly we both had a top five. We dif- fered on numbers two, three and four, but we agreed on number one.
Mrs. Cassidy.
Mrs. Cassidy was gorgeous. She was young for a mother, had brown hair that curved into her neck, her lips were moist and plump. She wore singlets with glittery writing and short denim skirts. She had a tattoo on her right shoulder.
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