by Ursula Pflug
I’ll do anything once. But only once.
An oil drum, homeless men and women gathered around the fire. I go up and have a smoke with them, a DuMaurier. I’ve taken up not just her habit but Denise’s brand. I chat, pass out butts and coins as best I can. And throw the phone in, watch it hiss and bubble, the cancerous smell of melting petrochemicals. Walk away, alone, back downriver. Not afraid. They never rape real women. And then remember: they could still jump out from behind a building, chloroform you, dope you so bad you don’t know what you’re acting in, how it’ll be used. It happened to me.
What happened to Louise? Is she there by choice, because she loves Martin, because she thinks she’s being hip and noir and cutting-edge? Or are they doing something to her, like what they did to me? But I can’t help her, and least not here. I’m just a little girl, alone, screwed up. When I get back to the other side I’ll call the cops, but they’ll guess it was me. It’s no excuse but some of them, like Matt, don’t like where they are, or when.
I’ll never know now what Martin truly desires, never know what made me love the dark stranger so blindly for so many years. Only in becoming him did I see enough to fully wake up, get away.
Huge flakes of snow fall from the sky, so big and fluffy and fairy tale looking. For a moment I think I see two alike, have a nanosecond’s certainty they aren’t real but bitmapped in. VR. But then their tiny spines, their spires, melt and now I’ll never know.
I miss Matt, but know I’ll never look in there for him again, too afraid I might come face to face with myself, a hidden un-erased copy. Hail a taxi, go back to the west side, where I belong.
sss
We think what we do on the sleazy side of town is invisible, but it’s not. Perhaps it is true, and not just a crazy thought of mine, brought home from Carnival, that what we do on the other side of the screen has an effect in the real world.
I may, for a time, have forgotten my name, my address, even what city I live in, but I remembered this: we have to live as though it is true, no longer Faking Life.
Judy
THAT WAS THE SUMMER all the non-smokers died. It was a hot summer, murderously hot. Everyone who had air conditioning kept it going day and night, so of course the first thing they checked was Legionnaire’s Disease.
Frank and I didn’t have air conditioning, so we slept through the days with the fan on, and come dusk we’d climb up on the roof with Judy, our cigarettes, a bottle, and Judy’s dog, Hamilton. Hamilton didn’t smoke and drink like the rest of us, but he survived that summer anyway. The Tobacco Fiasco, as it came to be known, turned out not to affect dogs, but we didn’t know that at the time. Legionnaire’s Disease didn’t pan out, and after that we didn’t know anything at all, and tried not to think too much about what we didn’t know. That’s why we spent so much time up on the roof, getting drunk. Judy was up there with us, but she was thinking.
Right after the Tobacco Fiasco got cleared up we left for the east coast to watch the whales die. It was a strange thing to do, drive all those miles to watch them die. It was Judy’s idea; she said she wanted to document it. “Document what?” Frank had asked, like she was crazy.
She was crazy. “We’ve got to document it,” she’d said, like we were crazy. We were, but we listened to her, because she’d been right about the cigarettes. We listened to her even though she stuffed the trunk of Frank’s Volkswagen so full of camera equipment that we hardly had room for the tent.
She’d done the same thing when all those people started dying. While Frank and I slept Judy would be out there making notes and taking photographs. In the evenings she’d join us on the roof, and, although she’d already been up all day, she’d spend the night measuring her gathered data against each new theory that entered her head between jokes, cigarettes, and swigs off the bottle.
We ran out of cigarettes around four thirty one of those mornings, and it was Judy who offered to walk up to the 7-Eleven to pick up a deck. She explained that she was the least drunk of the three of us, and not to worry, that she’d take Hamilton with her.
They ran all the way home from College Street. Frank and I couldn’t understand it, what with Judy’s smoker’s lungs. Even Hamilton was breathless by the time they got back up to the roof, and he’s a big, non-smoking dog.
Judy waved the pack of cigarettes around like it was a live grenade. It was.
“We all smoke like forest fires till sunrise!” She yelled it so loud she woke the neighbours, but Judy didn’t care; she knew she was on to something. Frank and I were too drunk to get excited, but Judy ran downstairs, cigarette in hand, to dial the hot line to the Surgeon General’s office. She read them her statistics for at least an hour, and when she got off the phone she came back out on the roof and worked on the second bottle with us. By the time it was finished, daylight had arrived, so we called it a night and all went downstairs to sleep.
The headlines made the afternoon papers. Judy never did get any credit for it, except that people stopped dying. Tobacco prices rose faster than interest rates until the government got nervous and imposed sanctions; they knew it would look bad if people were spending so much money on cigarettes they couldn’t afford to eat, never mind pay their taxes. After that, prices levelled off, but by then every backyard in the city was planted with tobacco, and we were already halfway to the east coast.
sss
They were huge, pale grey things, and they’d come moaning out of the sea in that white light you see only on the ocean at sunrise. Just when you thought you’d seen the last one, another would appear, its cavernous head lunging sadly for the shoreline. Judy would be there to greet it, embracing her tripod as though it was some strange prehistoric tree, counting the seconds till the shot was perfect. Frank and I walked out to the road after three days, leaving Judy on the beach with the Volks, her cameras, and all those dying whales. She hardly saw us go. She didn’t even notice when we took Hamilton with us. He was a carnivorous dog, but after three days all those whale carcasses had him as grossed out as we were.
We rented a Toyota in the nearest town and headed for Halifax, intending to get hammered. In Yarmouth we stopped at the Yellow Dog bar for a drink and directions. In spite of the name, they wouldn’t let us take Hamilton in, so we left him tied to an elm tree outside. We got inside and ordered a couple of drinks from Eddie. Eddie was the big, friendly guy behind the bar. The second our drinks arrived, Hamilton began to howl like all get out. Eddie looked at us. He waited for the dog to stop howling. He looked at us some more. Finally he jerked his thumb towards the door. “That animal out there belong to you guys?”
Frank and I looked at one another. We both got uncomfortable. We looked at one another too long. Frank looked at Eddie, saying, “Yeah, yeah, it’s our dog.”
“Then go outside and get it to shut up.” Maybe Eddie wasn’t such a friendly guy after all. Frank went. Eddie turned to me. “You guys aren’t from around here, are you?”
“Around where?” I felt like a jerk. I found myself wishing Judy were here; she always knew what to say to guys like this.
“You from the city, right?” I knew what he meant by the city. To guys like that the city is the city. Any city, but especially the one we were from.
“Yeah.”
Hamilton hadn’t stopped howling. “You sure that’s your dog?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, it sure as hell ain’t your friend’s dog, ’cause if it was, he’d have stopped howling by now. And if it was yours, I’d wonder why you’re not the one out there.” I sat there, not saying a thing. Some bars are like that. “Let’s see, you’re from the city, it’s not your dog. Makes me wonder. Another thing, what did you say you were in the neighbourhood for?”
“Ah, you know, lie around on the beach. Catch some rays.”
“Only one beach for miles around here, fella. And if you’ve been there you’d know it was
n’t the kind of beach you want to do much lying around on.”
“Oh.” I was running out of snappy answers. Hamilton still hadn’t stopped howling.
“Go outside, untie the dog, bring him in. When you get inside you can tell me who the dog belongs to and what happened to them.” I did as I was told. Frank came in with me, looking bewildered. Hamilton wasn’t bewildered. When he saw Eddie he stopped howling right away. Eddie patted him thoughtfully and brought him a big dish of cool water. “Don’t worry, kid, we’re getting to it.” He looked at me. “You got an answer for me yet, fella?”
“It’s Judy’s dog, Eddie.”
“And you left Judy on the beach by herself?”
“You don’t understand, Eddie, she—”
“I understand more than you think. You don’t leave anybody on that beach alone.”
“Why not?” Frank was starting to sound as stupid as me.
“Well, think about it. She might run out of smokes.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’ll forgive you, considering as you’re not so bright.”
“But Judy can take of herself, she’s very—”
“She takes care of you, right?”
“Huh?” Frank looked at me, horror stricken.
“What would have happened if you or me had decided to quit smoking last month, before she—”
“Fat chance, Ace, but I get your drift.”
“See?” said Eddie. “Besides, that’s a bad beach. You shouldn’t let people stay there alone. Them whales hypnotizes people.”
“Hypnotizes?” Frank laughed.
“Frank,” I said, “she was a little, you know…”
“Right,” said Eddie. “The drinks are on me. Now you guys clear out and go get your friend. And if you decide to change your mind, just remember how happy her dog will be to see her.” Hamilton howled on cue. “Attaboy.”
We left. We felt like jackasses. Eddie had put such a fear of the lord into our hearts that we drove like mad, crazed people all the way to Whale Beach, which wasn’t a short distance. And then we looked for Judy.
sss
They were huge and white and towered high above our heads. I kept losing Frank in the labyrinth made by their huge, heaving bodies. The ones that had been dead a few days were starting to make a stench like nothing else. We shouted at each other, and sometimes it seemed as though their bodies were casting our voices like echoes, and Frank would turn out to be where I had least expected him. We didn’t find her. We didn’t find her strange tree of a tripod; we didn’t find any of her cameras. Even Hamilton couldn’t find her. He howled forlornly for his lost mistress. Then the sun set. We slept on the beach, with Hamilton between us for warmth. We didn’t sleep much, because he would wake up from time to time and howl as though his heart was breaking. With sunrise the mist rolled in.
When I woke up, I was face down in an alleyway that reeked of beer and vomit. It was the cockroaches that woke me up, them and the rats. They thought I was spending too much time in their territory.
I made the rounds of the streets and the bars for days. I was looking for Frank, I was looking for Judy, I was looking for Hamilton, for the Volkswagen, for the rented Toyota. I was looking for anything I knew. I would have been happy if I’d found Eddie and the Yellow Dog bar, but when I asked about it people just laughed at me viciously.
I found Judy’s tripod. It stood alone at the far end of the beach, pointed out to sea. What had she been photographing? The camera was gone. I took the tripod with me, that and the huge clean rib of a whale.
I hitchhiked back to the city, where I went to our old house. I set up the sad tripod on the roof, which was as empty as the house, except for the wake of bottles and cigarette packs remaining from the summer. The phone kept ringing, but it was always for Judy. They wanted to interview her about her Tobacco Fiasco research. I always told them I didn’t know where she was, and I never did see her again, except for maybe once, on the cover of Life Magazine.
Myrtle’s Marina
GOD KNOWS WHAT THEY FARMED, Peter thought. Stones, maybe. And turned away from the winter fields towards the water and the marina office: a little brown painted clapboard house with a pitched roof and small casement windows, a screen door, one large and three little rooms inside. It always reminded Peter of the cabins at Camp Wawanesa. He’d go to camp for two weeks in August before the family came here all together, to stay at Myrtle’s Marina. Since he no longer used it as the office perhaps he should open a little sailing camp, with rows of bunk beds. The counsellors could smoke up in the store room, looking out at the water, although, he thought, they usually did that in some locked room they’d swiped the keys to, a woods clearing, or beyond a place with a name like Cedar Point, on a scrubby, secluded little beach or island. Likewise where they went to have sex, discreetly, because getting caught meant getting fired. Although the kids always knew, he remembered, gossiping about things they were too young to understand. Had anyone known about Peter and Marti, either the other employees or any of the customers?
Probably.
The little house, situated as it was between the road and the boat launch, was intended to be the official entry point to the marina, containing in its large front room a solid brown desk and an equally solid oak swivel chair, the kind Peter remembered only the principal got at school when he was young enough to be impressed by principals. Now he was at an age where he could be one himself, figured it to be just another kind of job; not so different from sailing school really, just fewer water hazards. Better pay, though, and more regular. Peter went inside, sifting the dusty stillness. Nothing happened here, ever. Not since he and Marti used to come here to make love.
The old-timers understood when he told them why he came back. Because it was there, because his great-grandfather built the first version of the marina eighty years before, an eye on tourism as an upgrade from farming the stony unforthcoming fields. His parents and his brother, and even Aunt Myrtle no longer thought the old family farmstead on the water important, so why did he? Maybe because of that, because of them no longer wanting it.
“Our family throws everything of value away,” Peter had said, when his father had asked, perplexed; maybe one had to be eighty to understand a thing like that. Yet Peter understood, just as the seniors did. Was he so prematurely aged, inside, to believe something only very old people believed otherwise? “Someone has to stop it,” he’d said stubbornly, and bought the land back from the stranger Aunt Myrtle had sold it to. The stranger had taken a loss, sold it to Peter for less than he’d paid Myrtle, who had inherited it, along with Peter’s father.
“I wanted nothing to do with it. It going for even less should’ve been a sign,” his father had said, but Peter hadn’t cared. He didn’t want to be a doctor in Toronto like his brother Mark, who lived in a fancy condominium sixteen floors above Lake Ontario. He’d miss skipping stones from his private beach. What woman who wanted a family could resist this unkempt shoreline, these stony beaches? You’d look after toddlers here and not go stir-crazy, a stone’s throw from the lake. But Marti was gone, a goner. And if Peter chose to sell, he’d take a loss too, and lose his shirt. And so he stayed, year after year.
Usually he didn’t stay long, going back outside almost immediately to re-caulk the rental boats or back across the gravel road to the farmhouse to do his bookkeeping. He put the new computer on the main house’s kitchen table when he upgraded, and not in the little office building at all. He told himself it was so he didn’t have to heat two buildings. Most people who wanted him had learned to call at the house phone.
Peter remembered Myrtle telling him the office was spooky when she’d heard he was buying the place. They never saw one another much, although she only lived one township away. But she’d called him up, invited him to dinner when the news had broken of the sale going through. She looked good in her new blue sweater
, better than she had when she’d run the marina, running around in old sneakers and an older anorak, her face drawn, always behind on the work and the bills.
“The old people always said it was haunted,” Myrtle said over salmon and white wine, “although I never saw or heard anything.”
“It’s not why you sold?” Peter asked.
“Oh no. It’s a money sink; the farmhouse is log. It’s never been re-chinked, because the repairs money always goes to the marina buildings across the road, it being the income generator. Ostensibly. And the barn’s fallen down so bad no one will ever get it up again.”
“Nobody’s going to farm, Myrtle. Don’t need the barn.”
“But you already know all that, you already know we all think you’re crazy to want it. Especially because you had to buy it, as me and your dad didn’t.”
“It’s my childhood,” Peter said, “and our family history.”
Myrtle had just rolled her eyes at his sentimentality. She had a gift shop in Buckhorn now. It didn’t make any more money than the marina, but it was a lot less work. Like Peter, she’d never married nor had kids. The marina required a man, and Myrtle’d had to hire them, although Peter had come and helped most summers when he was in college studying tourism, which was probably when he’d cemented his attachment. And then he’d bought it a few years later. Was it the second summer Marti came, or the third? He should be able to remember a thing like that.
All blonde and blue, like sun on water.
He hadn’t thought anymore about the alleged ghost until the old-timers started stopping by. He’d laughed, shrugged, been too busy with the business end to listen to old people’s tales of nameless fears. Horror meant, after all, wondering how to pay the mortgage on the property in the winter months when there was no income, hoping his summer savings from all those boat rentals to tourists would stretch till spring. But if the oldsters had been right about one thing perhaps they could be right about two, for today Peter didn’t just feel the spiraling sense of dusty, empty mystery he’d gotten used to and learned to enjoy, but something new and a little menacing.