Crow

by Amy Spurway

  “Nobody’s getting beat or busted here tonight. Not even any drugs in the truck, except the medicinals.” Gimp leans over and kisses my cheek.

  Next thing I know, his hand is wrestling a tie around his neck. He drapes a black blazer over my shoulders when we step out into the weather, takes my hand and leads me to the rundown entrance. Part of me still feels like we’re breaking into an abandoned building to drink and smoke and screw like dumb kids, which would still be among the better ways I can think of to spend my thirty-ninth birthday. Instead, the dirty old door opens without kicking or jimmying. We walk down into the basement of the old bank.

  “Welcome to The Vault,” Willy’s voice purrs in my ear as we glide into Cape Breton’s answer to high-end dining.

  It’s a swanky little place. The texture and depth of the original brick walls are accentuated by a deep red glaze. Ornate antique picture-less frames have been painted black, slightly scuffed, and hung on the walls in a laissez-faire way. Candles and strings of fairy lights create a warm glow where shadows and light play together. Damn, Cape Breton, when’d you get hip and classy enough to spawn something like this?

  “And they make the best pizza in the world,” Gimp says.

  “How come you’ve been hiding from me since the whole reunion debacle?” I try to say all cute and coy, so as not to kill the mood before we get drinks and pizza and a chance to grope each other.

  “Not you I’m hiding from,” he says. “Just stuff. With Chrissy.”

  I can make a semi-educated guess about what he means by “stuff” based on the dirt I heard from Mama and Peggy. Chrissy got into the OxyContin again. Chrissy’s brother Cracker is protective of his baby sister, and he wants her in rehab. And what Cracker Parsons wants, he gets. They call him Cracker because he’s not afraid to breaks things. Laws. Windows. Legs.

  Lucky for Willy, I’m not in the mood to press for details. All I want is pizza, wine, cake, and a birthday lay in the dark sketchy parking lot behind the old bank. Or, in the wheelchair-accessible bathroom of The Vault, which we occupy just long enough to make it look suspicious when we wander back to our table. As if the ear-to-ear grins weren’t enough to give us away. Happy World Toilet Day to me. Outside, it just keeps snowing.

  […]

  Willy groans as he rolls over onto his back, stretching himself awake beneath the cool, clean whiteness of the king-sized ­hotel bedding. I languidly stroke the ginger-haired mermaid inked into the sea of his bare bicep, thinking about childhood summers at The Wharf. And the time Ricky Dicks called me a whale, even though I was clearly trying to swim like a mermaid.

  “So how was that for a birthday?” Gimp nuzzles in closer to me.

  I want to say wonderful, because it was. The part where we walked out of the restaurant and into a full-on blizzard, and realized we were stuck here for the night. The part where we took a cab to the nicest hotel in Town, Town and the cab driver tried not to gawk at us in the rear-view mirror while we made out, and then let us smoke a joint in his car. The part where they almost didn’t let us have this swanky hotel room because Gimp was so high and giddy that he kept giving them his Air Miles instead of his credit card. The part where Gimp and I slept together and then slept together, tossing and turning and drooling and dreaming like people who love each other do.

  Instead of telling him it was wonderful though, I just mumble, “Not bad.” Because all of it made me feel so alive. Which reminds me that I’m dying. As Gimp wraps an arm around me and pulls me even closer, my gut clenches with a claustrophobic guilt over letting him think he can love a dying woman. Or that a dying woman can love him. I push away and make a mad dash to the spacious, pristine hotel suite bathroom and unleash a gush of undigested urgency into the spacious, pristine hotel suite toilet.

  I’d like to make this morning after feel as non-awkward and un-weird as possible. But, no dice. Awkward and weird ooze from my ungraceful stagger as I emerge from the can. Awkward and weird cling to my surprisingly unruly buzz cut bed-head and garbage breath. Awkward and weird roll in and settle like a bank of fog on the Bras d’Or when I crawl back in bed with him, and stare up at the ceiling because I don’t want to see his face when I say, “So. What’s the deal here? What are we?”

  This is not the first time these words have been uttered between us. The summer before I started grade twelve, we were joined at the hip in public. In private, we were joined at other parts, but neither of us would fess up to that. One August night as we sat on the beach doing post-coital bottle tokes and trying to shimmy the sand out of our arse cracks, he stared up at the clear, ceilingless sky and said those exact words to me: “So. What’s the deal here? What are we?”

  And I laughed. Not to be mean, but because it just seemed so random, so out of the blue. We’d been doing this kind of thing off and on for years. It seemed silly that all of a sudden it needed to have a name. That there was even a “deal” or a “we.” That there was anything other than a mutual desire to smoke and laugh and fuck. A wounded look sunk into his faraway eyes, and right then I knew there was nothing funny about it to him.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “This is perfect. This is what all the other wankers out there with their cheesy pet names and promise rings and four-month anniversaries of their first dry hump, this is what they really wish they had. Why fuck up something good with a label?” Then I sucked back my bottle toke, grabbed Gimp by the face and stuck my tongue in his mouth. Or something like that.

  So now, I am lying here praying like hell that he won’t say the same thing. Because while I was puking my tumour-riddled brains out in the bathroom just now, I had my own epiphany. I don’t want to be alone on a hospital ward, with no one but my mother to bear full witness to my life and death. I need a steady, consistent supply of partnership, of love, of high-quality mutually orgasmic sexual encounters before I die. I want it carved in stone. Labelled for everyone to see. And I want it with Willy Gimp. I think.

  “Ahhh, the ol’ ‘what are we’ conversation.” Gimp sighs. My eyes stay glued to the ceiling. Still, the room spins, my stomach churns again, and in my peripheral vision I can see pale grey clouds tinged with a sour yellow and royal blue gathering around Willy’s head. And I suddenly wish I’d kept my big mouth shut.

  “Crow, you know I can’t —” and that’s the moment his phone rings. “Shit. I gotta take this.”

  He yanks on his boxer shorts with one hand and presses his phone to his ear with the other while he shuffles to the bathroom and closes the door. Three minutes later, he is off the phone and pulling the half-buttoned white dress shirt over his head.

  “What’s up? Something at the garage?” I say, using Occam’s razor to cut through all the wild assumptions and speculations I managed to jump to in the span of a three-minute hushed phone conversation.

  “It’s complicated. Want me to drop you off somewhere in Town, or stay here and I’ll come back and get ya later because I gotta —”

  “I want you to tell me what the fuck is going on. I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”

  Softening, slowing down, bracing for the wounded look he knows he’s about to see in my faraway eyes when he tells me, he says, “You want the truth?” Like he knows the answer.

  “No. Probably not. Lie to me.” I stare back up at the ceiling, pouring my fractured attention back into observing the little swirls of plaster. Because for all the times I claim to want truth, it turns out I mostly want comfort. And comfort tends to come swaddled in lies.

  “I gotta go rescue a sick and hurt old cat,” he says as he gathers his cufflinks and shoes, and smooths his salt-and-pepper bed-head. “She’s trapped under a pile of garbage, and I’m the one who accidentally left that garbage there so it’s my fault. And the old cat’s brother is a pit bull who will rip my balls off if I don’t go help.”

  “Jesus, I said I wanted a lie. Not a stupid cat metaphor for the truth.”

  “It is complic —”

  “It’s always complicated,” I sulk. “Go dra
g that nasty old pussy out of whatever dumpster she flung herself in.”

  “Do you want me to —”

  “No. I can take care of myself.”

  So here I am, storm-stranded in a hotel in beautiful down­town Town, Town, feeling like I got dragged through a knothole backwards, with no underwear, a face full of sex-smeared makeup, and a little black dress that screams walk of shame. I may well be one year older, but I’m sure as hell none the wiser.

  The cogent streams of searing hot water in the hotel shower makes for quite a sharp contrast to the lukewarm iron-smelling dribble dunks that I take at Mama’s house. As the water pelts my skin, I come to a needling, precise realization: I need truth. Truth about my family. Truth about my father. Truth about myself. It’s not going to find itself. It’s not gonna drop from the sky. I’m gonna have to boot down some doors and drag all the family skeletons out to play, myself. Truth with a capital T is another item for my Fuck It List, and I best not be burning daylight. I scrub my scalded skin dry, squirm back into my dress, and go ask the bright-eyed girl at the front desk to call me a taxi.

  “Might be kinda tricky to get someone out on them roads today, ma’am,” she says, laying on a thick commercial brogue. “Lemme call our handyman Roger, though. He’s got a four-wheel drive. Get you wherever you need to go. He’s right good like that.”

  “I have a few stops to make. And I need to get to the Northside,” I say, hoping she’ll just call me a cab and not subject me to more chit-chat about this Roger buddy.

  I almost tell her that I’m from here. That she can drop the aren’t-we-just-the-nicest-people-on-the-planet shtick and just biff me into the body-odour-scented, cigarette-burned back seat of a City Slicker Taxi Cab, driven by an ex-con named Rooster. And I can charge Gimp’s credit card for the extra coffee pods and pillow case I tucked in my purse on the way out. But really, what good would that do? I need to get where I need to go.

  “Thank you,” I say, bringing my hands into a grateful-looking Namaste position, doing a half-assed little flakey bitch bow, and trying to sound like I’m from somewhere really exotic. Like Toronto. Or BC even. “All the brochures were right. This place is truly magical. Everyone is just. So. Friendly.”

  “Oh look, he’s out there now! Just go hop in and tell him where you need to go.” Then, with her grandest grin yet, she says, “Nice to see ya, Crow. Tell your mom that Corrine Burton’s daughter Julie says hi, will ya?”

  Behind the wheel of the big, beige Cossack that looks like a cardboard box jacked up on monster truck wheels, plastered with bumper stickers of “Why Be Normal” and “Magic Happens” and “Welcome to Cape Breton, Set Your Clock Back 20 Years,” and with two massive spruce trees lashed to the roof, sits grizzled old Roger the handyman. He introduces himself as I try to hoist myself into the passenger seat without flashing him. His last name’s Leblanc, but here it is pronounced “Lib-Long.” His people were from over Chéticamp way. Shetty Camp.

  Before I can ask, Roger Lib-long volunteers the story of the trees. “Christmas trees for the malls,” he tells me. “Cuts ’em off me buddy Skip’s land out in Mira Gut, and delivers ’em to the malls every year, for the Christmas Daddies Telethon.”

  “Appreciate the ride,” I say as I pull out my phone to text Allie, hoping she’ll pick me up in Town if the highway over the mountain’s not too bad. Also hoping that my full immersion in my little screen is a clear signal that I’m not in the mood for conversation.

  Roger Leblanc doesn’t get the hint.

  “You from here or away?” he says.

  Trick question. Damned either way. If I say “away,” I’m in for a grilling about where and why I came, followed by tales of somebody’s sister’s husband’s first cousin twice removed who visited that place once in 1981. If I say “here,” I’ll get the classic “Whereabouts?” and “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Family’s here. I’m back from away,” I mumble.

  “Where ya back from?”

  “Toronto.”

  “The big Shitty. Oops, pardon my French!” He claps a hand over his wrinkled clown smile, as if the word shitty fell out from between the gaps where some teeth should have been. As if a playful swear might offend the buzz-cut-haired, hooker-dressed, drawers-less human hangover in the passenger seat. “My brother’s son lives up there now. Works on that there Bay Street. Stuart Lib-Long. Ever hear tell of him up there?”

  “No.” I smile politely, trying to ignore the good-natured twinkles of earthen orange and leafy green Highland flinging around Roger Leblanc’s noggin.

  “What’s your father’s name?” he says with a musical lilt. Yep, here we go.

  “Alec Spenser.”

  And that’s when poor ol’ Roger damn near puts us in the ditch when he reefs on the brake and lets out a belt of knee-slapping glee.

  “Well, didn’t I know your father, then!” he whoops. “Poor bugger woulda flunked grade ten without me lettin’ him skiff off my sheets. Poor Smart Alec, God rest his soul.”

  “So which Fortune do you belong to then?” he starts up again after a short, awkward silence, his fingertips doing a delicate drum on the steering wheel.

  “Effie,” I say absently, retreating from the scenery and back into my cellphone screen, anxiously awaiting confirmation that Allie will come get my underdressed ass.

  “Yes, yes. Crow, is it?”

  “Yeah.” My voice does not waiver from the curt side of friendly.

  “Quite the rigs, them Spensers. Smart Alec was a good head, though. What brought you back?”

  “Illness in the family.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he says solemnly, and stays quiet for the rest of the ride, like he somehow gathered that the illness in the family is mine.

  Roger Leblanc wheels right up to the front doors of the Bay Flower Mall. As in, up over the curb. All the way under the awning at the main entrance, the trees on the roof scratching against snow-laden canvas as we get within spitting distance of the automatic sliding doors of the Island’s grandest shopping mecca, currently a blizzardy ghost town.

  “You got time for a little shopping while I get the tree set up. Hop out here, dear. Save you a trek through that snow,” he says. “Meet you right in this same spot in ’alf an ’our.”

  The last time I set foot in this mall was when Char, Allie, and I went to Le Drapeau hunting for skin-tight shirts, platform espadrilles, and giant earrings to complement our grad caps and gowns. When a pock-faced rent-a-cop with a big gut and a tiny walkie-talkie started following us, Char got a little riled up. She asked him if he was following us because we looked like shoplifters or because he liked high school–girl asses. She pulled a wad of cash out of her purse and waved it in his face, before she marched over to the counter, where she demanded to speak to the manager. Char railed about her ample disposable income, her right to be respected as a customer, and her trend-setting influence among the sophisticatedly slutty high school set. Minutes later, Char strutted out with a smug grin, a heartfelt apology, and a twenty per cent off coupon. And in our grad pictures, all three of us are wearing shiny new Le Drapeau earrings that Char lifted from the store when the rent-a-cop wasn’t looking.

  There’s no rent-a-cop in sight now. There’s no “I Heart CB” souvenir T-shirt shop that sells loose cigs and hash pipes. No dark, dodgy arcade for the burnouts and the drug dealers. No old guys picking butts out of the ashtrays beside the benches down past the food court. No kids skateboarding inside. No big-haired mall rats. The mall isn’t the glorious teenage wasteland of my memory. Now, it’s just a place to shop. Le Drapeau is still there but no longer the bastion of cheap, tight, teenybopper crap it once was. Now it is “European-style” designer collections and two hundred dollar dresses. I make a beeline for it, thinking about Char the entire time.

  Minutes later, I’m slinking out of Le Drapeau, embarrassed and empty-handed. Turns out that what was left on the overdraft of my bank account wouldn’t buy the pack of drawers and warm gloves I spen
t twenty minutes picking out. I wander down to the far end of the mall, choking back hungover, flat-broke, post-birthday tears and lamenting the fact that my five-finger-discount friend is locked up in the Nouveau Butterscotch, just when I need her most. The scummy arcade has been replaced by one of those anything-for-a-buck stores. The lone employee who made it in for her shift on this stormy morning hauls a series of big cardboard bins out front, as if the hordes of little old ladies who dribble away their measly pensions on hair curlers and peppermints and plastic flowers there are still coming today. She scuttles out of sight as I near the storefront, and I pick up the pace for fear that the reek of sweatshops and chemicals will set off a wave of sick. Until something in one of the bins catches my eye. Something shiny. A pair of metallic-black gloves, the cuffs bedazzled with bright teal rhinestones. There’s no rent-a-cop in sight. But there’s now a pair of criminally cheap, gaudy, glittery gloves from a cardboard bin jammed into my purse, as I make my way to the mall exit.

  I wait until I’m in a secluded corner outside Pott’s Coffee before I pull out the gloves, and when I do, a crumpled twenty dollar bill comes tumbling out of my purse. I have no idea where it came from, until I do. Gimp must have stuffed it in there before he left me, and for a moment, I can’t help feel a bit like a hooker. A shoplifting hooker who was too dumb to dress for the weather and eat the free continental breakfast at the hotel. There’s a moment of moral quandary, where I think about going back to the anything-for-a-buck store to pay for the chintzy gloves. Or at least discretely dump them back in the bin and return to Le Drapeau to spend my new-found fortune on something to assuage my guilt. Like underwear. Instead, I stalk into Pott’s Coffee with my crumpled twenty and stalk out with a burned bagel and coffee that needed four sugars to be drinkable. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mall mirrors. The ones I used to preen in, imagining I looked like the sassy girls in tampon commercials. Now, I just look old and sick, and like an arsehole for not buying a coffee for the guy who drove me here. Back into Pott’s Coffee I go, to get one for ol’ Roger Leblanc.