A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  But she can’t find it in herself to be resentful, not with the front door halfway open and her own escape so imminent. True, this return to 100 Mile House has gone much smoother than the initial adventure, which she would’ve vetoed right there in the parking lot if she hadn’t been so shocked by the recent sight of her only daughter’s corpse. It wasn’t so much the bullet holes — maybe because they’d been so clean and gentle looking, more like dramatic blackheads than death-dealing puncture wounds. There had been a lack of electricity in Keisha’s body, and that’s what Cassie found truly disturbing. Just this basic, fundamental lifelessness, a grey aura she remembered from her mother’s dead body — observed in a hospital bed, after a full and happy life, which concluded in sleep — but nothing she’d ever expected to see in her child. “Let’s follow them,” Del had said, and Cassie suddenly found herself sobbing in the passenger seat while Del weaved through traffic in a mad effort to catch up to the Maceys’ scrapheap pickup truck.

  Roger clocked their pursuit at a gas station outside Kamloops. He nodded grimly, one hand clutching the bucket of his truck, the other toggling gas into the tank. Through the rear windshield, Nancy’s head remained still and focused straight ahead. Del took this to be just the sort of invitation a gruff and taciturn man would extend to fellow sufferers of incalculable loss, so he pressed on for the remaining hours it took to reach 100 Mile House. Cassie simply watched the countryside blur past. She hated the interior. It was better not to focus.

  Around twilight, they pulled into the trailer park and followed Roger and Nancy to their lot. Roger had barely killed the engine before bursting out of the driver’s side door and storming into the trailer. Nancy moved more slowly, more ambiguously, and even though she didn’t look back, Del imagined she’d invited them in. The shut and locked front door was just an accident. Same with the bare bulb suspended from a fixture in the wall above their heads; its dull and dirty glow snapped off as soon as their feet landed on the stoop.

  “They probably thought it was already off,” Del said, raising a slack fist to knock on the door. “Right? Because they probably left it on the whole time they were gone. Which was daytime. See what I mean?”

  The door opened, however reluctantly, and Nancy invited them in. The trailer was in vile condition. The carpets had begun to come up in various corners and the plywood flooring was visible beneath. The furniture stank of dead skin and a million aggressive cold seasons. The walls were blotchy with fresh compound, as if Roger had been in the middle of some DIY-renovation effort when the phone call had come from Vancouver.

  They ate microwaved pizza pouches in absolute silence. Cassie vacillated between grief and revulsion. She could feel the absence of sea salt in the air. Her guts bubbled and cramped as the processed meal waged war on her digestive enzymes. When finally the silence was broken, it was by Del, who spoke to them as he might a classroom, starting first with a tearful and impromptu eulogy for both Keisha and William, but moving fast into an apology for West Africa, an explanation of the various political and historical forces that destabilized countries like Mali, and then imploring them, as a group, himself included, not to confuse the continent’s episodic tensions for its daily life. “Because after all,” he said, “tempting though it may be, we don’t call the RCMP a posse of gangsters because of how that Polish fellow died in the Vancouver airport, now do we?”

  Roger disintegrated on the spot. It was impossible to register the order of events, but after twenty seconds of near-paranormal shrieking, the table had been overturned, a pizza pouch exploded between Cassie’s breasts, Nancy huddled crying in the corner, and Roger held Del an inch off the floor by the scruff of his neck, shaking him as if he were trying to beat the dust out of an old carpet.

  So indeed, this visit has been a marked improvement over the last. Sure, she had to resist the still-hammering urge to correct Nancy’s tendency to conflate Vancouver with Whistler — or, somehow worse, that embarrassing little speech placing Colombia in Central America. Meanwhile, the Maceys’ blame-fueled coping skills are still as obvious and offensive as they are misguided and misplaced. According to Roger, it’s their fault William died. According to Nancy, it’s Keisha’s.

  It takes tremendous effort to set aside the bitter, whip-smacked feelings inspired by those accusations. But it’s the right thing to do. Cassie will never admit this out loud, not even to Del, but she expects that kind of ignorance when she travels any farther east than Hope. These people have been nurtured by a steady diet of suspicion and fear, the whole vein-bursting mess served up by the inadequacy of rural education and the culture of anger that permeates the sorts of male-dominated trades you find stuck like barnacles to the fat hull of natural resource economies.

  And you know what else? There’s more of them coming, and they’re headed straight for the coast. Because, honestly, where does everyone think these hardened hate-machines are going when their mines and their mills shutter down for good? They’ll congeal right downtown Capital City, digging through the dumpsters behind McDonald’s and throwing rocks through the windows of her restaurants whenever a favoured sports team is shut out of the finals.

  Point is, Cassie can adjust to the legions of Rogers and Nancys in the world, even if they mean her harm. She refuses to let them beat her into a life of anger and resentment.

  “And, dear,” Nancy’s saying, fingers laced against the tiny bulge of her belly, “will you tell Del that we say goodbye? It must be a very important phone call. Best to leave him to it.”

  She stands against the shrunken backdrop of her husband, who at dinner appeared headed straight for another of his violent paroxysms. But right now Roger looks like he nipped out front to do a jay with Del. His whole posture is deflated, like a suit jacket hung from a hook instead of a coat hanger. He couldn’t threaten a child right now, and Cassie knows better than to chalk it up to beer. Roger has the vacancy of prescription drugs about him, the same dull-steel complexion her mother had at the end. Finished with her pumps and standing up to say her goodbyes, Cassie wonders if Roger might be sick. After all, he is fairly old. And unhealthy.

  “Of course I’ll tell him,” she says, and now there’s another bout of that same awkward tension the four of them experienced when she and Del first arrived. The problem is they just don’t know how to touch each other. They fumble through a series of inchoate gestures: raised arms and dipping shoulders, flitting eye contact and clumsy half-steps, everyone holding their breath. Cassie is tempted to give up on the whole thing and slip right out the crack in the door, but finally Nancy happens upon a suitably inviting manoeuvre, just the right distance between her thin, outstretched arms, and a beckoning twitch to her fingers. Cassie finds herself sliding into a hug.

  Nancy feels precious in her arms, like a small, frightened dog. Cassie buries her chin in Nancy’s clavicle and, surprising herself, whispers into her neck: “Del and I wanted to invite you guys for a visit next month. Our treat. I’m opening a new restaurant in the East End and we’d both love it if you guys could join our table.”

  They release each other and draw back. Nancy nods, a faint smile on her lips, equal parts trepidation and gratitude. Roger mutters something she can’t understand, but his chin is bobbing in the affirmative, so Cassie shakes his slackened hand and steps outside into the night.

  As she approaches the hybrid, Del looks past her and waves boyishly, his pretense of an important phone call completely forgotten. He says nothing as Cassie backs out of the driveway. Despite the thickening darkness, he flips through the pages of his magazine, licking his lips in concentration.

  “Do you think I should try them again next year?” he says, once they’ve left the trailer park behind and merged onto the highway toward the hotel. “About the bursary?”

  “Yeah.” Cassie takes one hand off the wheel and squeezes his knee. “I think you should, honey. And who knows? We may see them even sooner.”

  Rag
<
br />   I.

  It wasn’t even lunchtime when I decided Robbie stole my cash. His first day on crew, dope-lines carved in his sallow face, pin-prick eyes bleached right out, and constantly sniffling, sneezing, stammering stories about faggots jerking off online with barb wire round their dicks, about his girlfriend’s yeast infections, about a kid who got raped in a lower-city park, broad daylight, and the guy cut her a hundred times, doused her in vinegar, and left her trembling in the bushes. Robbie gave himself away first thing in the foggy morning after we gassed up the van. Inside the store, with the stench of burnt coffee and overflowing toilets, he queued up in front of me, a shitty tattoo on his neck, nautical star or something like that, and I clearly saw him slide a ten dollar bill to the clerk, ask for a small pack of cheap cigarettes, then insist he’d paid with a twenty, so where’s his fucking change already?

  “Unreal, guy,” he said while I drove up the escarpment switchbacks, ladders on the roof rattling in the wind, red rag tied to the back-end rungs barely visible in the rear-view. “Fucking Pakis are unreal, you know? Like, go back to fuckin’ Bangladesh, guy. ’Cause you stink like dog shit, asshole.”

  Then we were dredging gutters on mountain brow mansions, the lake and lower city hidden beneath a cloak of smeared mist. I felt a twinge of anxiety and circled back to the van. The money Giuseppe lent me was folded inside the pouch of my backpack, so crucial, so vulnerable, so easy to steal. I felt around for it, my hand grasping at nothing, a sick feeling in my stomach.

  Giuseppe was dragging bags of sodden gutter-mush to the curbside, a trail of blackened leaves scattered across the otherwise pristine lawn behind him. He spat yellow phlegm into the street, wiped his pockmarked forehead, and turned to face the house, one hand on the small of his back.

  The house was one of those three-bay homes with circular windows and brown-egg stucco exteriors, roofs pitched steep like alpine slopes, multiple gardens, cast-iron fencing, backyard kidney-shaped pool covered in a bright blue tarp, and a red vintage Trans Am in the uncracked double driveway, storm clouds reflected in the tinted windshield. Once upon a time, you knew who owned houses like this. You knew they were steel barons or railway tycoons. You knew they were local shipping kings. But now you can’t be sure. Could be West Coast real estate junkies trying to get ahead of the inevitable housing bubble. Could be absentee Americans bored of Great Lakes cottage country and the Niagara wax museum. Could be a couple of those self-sucking young professionals from Toronto, always trying to use their credit cards in our east Hamilton taverns.

  In the cobblestone walkway that curled toward their front door, there was a sandwich board with an election poster on it, a Liberal candidate, some foreign chick wearing a man’s suit blazer, and the words under her barely decent tits said this: Because the economy belongs to all of us.

  Giuseppe jabbed his chin at the sign. “It’s too much fuckin’ stupid, you know what I’m saying?”

  We’d been working together for about three months now, time enough to learn the basics. I know Giuseppe’s biggest temper trigger, which is drivers who change lanes too slow on the freeway, because he thinks it means they’re selfish. He knows I hate it when our fuck-face, ex-cop, shit-bird manager calls us pal. I know he likes fat white chicks with tramp-stamps and their thongs hanging out, and he knows I prefer older broads with dye jobs and round sunglasses. I know he likes sketching superheroes from the comic books his kid reads, but he never has time anymore, too much work. He knows I used to do card tricks, rapid little sleights of hand, but I never practice anymore either. And in a not-so-distant past, each of us worked in the city’s mostly bygone steel industry, made good blue-collar money and lived entirely more comfortable lives.

  It’s not much information, but you don’t usually get more on jobs like this, so you could call us friends. When I needed to borrow money, I told Giuseppe I had to make these child support payments, and my credit card was maxed out. The lower city east was dragging me down and I needed a boost.

  He took his squinty eyes off the road to stare at me. “You’re serious right now? Because I’m rich over here, working the same job as you? I can lend a couple hundred bucks like it’s some few pennies? Jesus, Nicky, I don’t know about that, man. Money’s precious.”

  But this morning, before Robbie oozed into the back seat, Giuseppe slipped me the two-five, all crisp twenties folded discretely inside a ten. He shrugged and offered me a half-smile that was almost a sneer. “You’re good for it. That part I know already.”

  I grabbed a pen from the centre console and doodled sunglasses on whatever dead prime minister they got on the ten. Giuseppe laughed, lit a smoke, and exhaled like a humid sewer. “You, you’re one of God’s special spaghettis, aren’t you?”

  Now he’s lighting another cigarette and staring at this monster home on the edge of the mountain, this cheerful chink on the campaign sign, Robbie climbing down the forty-foot ladder at the side of the house, swinging an orange bucket high above the fog rising off the lake down below. I stride down the driveway, press my thumb and finger into my eyes, and my voice is hoarse with anticipation: “He stole the money you lent me, ’Seppy. It’s all fucking gone, man.”

  II.

  Giuseppe tells me he wants to be sure. He says he doesn’t like conflict with crew, says there’s too much of that on too many other jobs, so how’s people like us ever going to get ahead if we keep fighting all the time? He sighs, a bitter look on his tired face. “But how you want to steal from your partners?” His breath reeks, and I picture him shuffling around a small, mould-infested apartment every morning, waiting for his wife to get out of the bathroom so he can brush his teeth before work.

  We’re at the foot of the client’s driveway having a smoke and watching Robbie as he tries to grunt-hoist the forty-foot ladder onto the roof of the van. The red rag is wet now and bunched up between the ladder’s lower rungs. It won’t hang down anymore, and you can totally picture some office type crossing an upper city parking lot, head down as he thumbs through his phone, then — bam! — he cranks his forehead off the cold, invisible steel. There’s a crunching noise as Robbie drops the ladder onto the collapsing roof racks. He dizzily stumbles back from the van, malnutrition writ large on his face, which is sweaty even in the damp and chilly weather.

  “Looks like a drug addict to me,” I say. “I mean, who can’t manage a forty-footer?”

  “A pussy can’t manage, that’s who. But apart from that, it don’t make him a thief. You don’t know for sure you didn’t lose the money, Nicky? You know? Like maybe you misplaced it?”

  “Trust me. He took it.”

  The next job is in the lower city, so we back the van out of the driveway, come close to bumping a white Mustang parked in the road, then head for the small grid of downtown streets that separates the mountain from Lake Ontario.

  On the way, we stop at an east-end convenience store for lunch, one of these abused little dumps they got near the rows of co-op and assisted housing, not far from the filthy buildings that used to house the steel unions, always with a bunch of druggy scumbags drooling out of the alleyways now. All three of us pour out of the van, stretching, spitting, swearing. I look over my shoulder as I head for the entrance to the store, but the top of the escarpment is invisible, just a red light dimly flashing on a tower somewhere to remind us it even exists at all. In the grungy bathroom, my gray-grizzled face is old and exhausted, with furrows in my forehead that never go away, no matter how calm I am.

  I splash cold water on my cheeks.

  I take a moment to reflect.

  He fucking took it. That’s just the way it is.

  In the parking lot, I see Giuseppe standing behind the van, a homemade sandwich hanging out of his mouth as he wrestles with the red rag, trying to free it from the ladder rungs so it hangs visibly again. “Someone could get hurt on these ladders, Nicky. Some poor bum who don’t see them because the rag ain’t out. It’
s good to be careful, you know? I don’t want for somebody to get hurt.”

  I point to the dumpster near the back of the store. “Look, man. See what I’m saying?”

  I can’t believe he’s doing this shit right in front of us, but Robbie’s over there, manically shifting his weight from one foot to the other while he talks to a scrawny, ghoulish girl in a jean skirt and torn sweater. They shake hands, holding on longer than necessary, and then the girl slinks back behind the dumpster and Robbie turns toward the van. He looks at us briefly but drops his eyes as he approaches, shoes scraping along the pavement. We stuff ourselves back into the van and Robbie is conspicuously silent.

  The next job is a window-washing gig at one of the repurposed office spaces on the western edge of downtown, where the lower city shines with the same wealth as the upper. No more shirtless guys with blurry tattoos standing on street corners, no more haggard women in leopard-print tights, no more teenage girls pushing baby carriages, cigarettes stuck between their pale lips. It’s a three-storey building, crisp brickwork with tinted windows, well-dressed people inside occupied with work we’ll never understand, individual incomes higher than the city-block totals of their eastern neighbours. The three of us stand in front of the building like insects looking for a way inside.

  “You take care of the high ones,” I tell Robbie, jerking my head at the forty-foot ladder on the roof of the van. “Beginners got to pay their dues, you know?”

  A truly miserable look rips across his face, and I see him about to form some kind of excuse, some kind of defence against the idea of him lifting that beast of a ladder and slogging it up against the side of the building. But I look at him and, without saying a word, fill my eyes with fury. Robbie’s body sags as he slumps toward the van, heaves up on the tire, and starts unstrapping the ladder.