A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  Giuseppe and I mix windshield washer into a bucket of cold water. We shove rags into our pockets, grab hold of scrubbers and squeegees, and set off around the building to take care of the lower windows.

  Giuseppe spits. He’s got this dark look on his face, preoccupied with the Robbie situation, which is exactly what I need him to be thinking about. “What you think we should do about the fucking prick?”

  “I don’t know, man. What if he spent all the money back there, you know? Buying drugs? Then I’m fucked.”

  Giuseppe stops walking, puts his hand on my shoulder, and studies me with his gloomy brown eyes. “No, you ain’t fucked, Nicky. I know you got your kid to think about. Thing is just that I still ain’t a hundred percent, you know? Something still don’t feel right, you know? Like something just ain’t quite mathematical.”

  “He took it, ’Seppy. That’s the only way it can be.”

  We start soaking windows, scrubbing away the bugs and grime, sliding our squeegees through the suds, a motion we’ve each repeated a million times, day in and out, the windows coming cleaner and cleaner, the two of us looking through them at lives we’ll never live: jewel-encrusted statues and glittering chandeliers, graduated children smiling from photos arranged on tidy desk blotters, fully modern kitchens with fruit baskets on the counter, laptop computers humming, bottles of expensive wine, counters of marble, glass, and oak. I wipe the muddy slush off the sill with one rag, and attack streaks on the pane with the other. When that rag’s too wet to be effective, I shove off to the van for a freshy.

  Robbie’s got his ladder against the side of the building, gray clouds hanging above him. I hear him sniffling as I round the corner. He’s maybe thirty-plus feet in the air, and there’s a new energy in his body as he gamely scrubs the windows, swipes the sludge away, and leans back a bit to appraise his work, which is streaky and won’t cut it with the customer or management either.

  “Shit work,” I shout at him, and he jolts, startled, drops his squeegee and smiles tightly.

  “Aw, fuck, buddy, come on. First day, you know? First day and I’m just trying to take home the bacon, you know, just like you, man. Just like you. I’ll do the window good. Good as anyone. Just need a couple days’ practice, man, you know? It’s hard to see the streaks from up here, man, and hey, you want to throw that squeegee back up at me? Just toss it up here, okay?”

  No question he’s fucked up right now, probably soft cocaine, but you can’t rule out the hard rocks either. Guys like this, you just never know.

  “Fuck that,” I say. “Come down here and get it yourself.”

  He shakes his head, sees that I’m serious, and begins gingerly picking his way down the ladder. I wait until he’s about halfway down, roughly twenty feet between his scabby shoes and the pavement, and then I shove the ladder, hard, so that it begins to slide down the side of the building with a grating noise that showers me in a mist of brick dust.

  There’s dick all Robbie can do. He realizes the ladder’s falling, maybe even understands that I’ve pushed it, but all he can do is clench it with one hand, grasping at the wall in a failed effort to reverse the momentum, and he doesn’t even make a sound as the angle becomes too steep for him to keep his feet on the rungs, and off he goes, legs pointing straight down and a weird smile on his face as he shoots to the ground like a high-diver committing suicide.

  There’s the thump and crunch of Robbie’s body smashing into the pavement. The clatter of the fallen ladder drowns out his first anguished groan. He’s lying there like a splattered cartoon, arms splayed out to either side, his face clammy, a bone sticking out of a hole in his jeans, bits of flesh hanging from it, blood quickly pooling under his leg.

  His lips are blue and trembling. I squat beside him. “Don’t worry, man. We won’t tell them you’re high. You’ll still get worker’s comp.”

  Tears boil out of his eyes. “Hurts,” he says, voice like a child’s. “Hurts real bad, guy.”

  I’ve got my hand in his pocket, but he doesn’t notice. “Yeah. I bet it does. I’m sorry it had to be this way, okay? You’ll be fine, though. Just hang tough.”

  Giuseppe’s feet smack hard on the pavement as he comes running round the corner. He kneels down, takes Robbie’s head in his hands, and tenderly wipes sweat from his face using a dirty rag. He’s staring at me hard, trying to figure out where he stands on what he knows I’ve done. “Jesus Christ, Nicky, what the fuck? Ambulance. You called an ambulance, right? Jesus Christ, man, look at his leg.”

  “Hurts,” Robbie says again, his voice choked with snot and tears.

  I start groping at the pockets of Robbie’s jeans again. “I will, ‘Seppy. For sure. But first I want to prove something, okay?”

  Giuseppe almost reaches out to grab my wrist, but I’m too fast, and I burrow into Robbie’s pocket and pull the ten dollar bill out, the one I drew on, and Giuseppe’s face turns cold. He drops Robbie’s head on the pavement, stands up, and slowly walks to the van, where he keeps his cellphone in the glove compartment. “I’ll call them,” he says, hand on his stomach. “Even for a fucking thief, I’ll call them.”

  It’s about ten minutes before the ambulance shows up. Robbie is in and out of consciousness, a stink of shit and sweat all around him. Once he even throws up, probably from pain. They won’t find the baggy of powder Giuseppe and I dug out of his back pocket, but they’ll probably test his blood at the hospital. He won’t get worker’s comp. He’ll probably face a charge. He’s got months of poverty ahead of him, and I feel bad as the medics strap him onto a gurney, load him into the ambulance, and ferry him to the hospital.

  On the ride home, Giuseppe directs me to a convenience store. He tells me to wait in the van as raindrops spatter the windshield. He flicks his smoke out the open window. When he comes back out, shoulders slumped in the drizzle, I realize how crushed he is by what happened. Guys like Giuseppe, they’re natural optimists born into life’s most pessimistic machinery. They can’t understand why all their morals are so easily betrayed. But they hold onto their beliefs anyway, always convinced that things will get better soon. They’re sadly predictable, and you feel sorry for them even as you use them. You feel sorry for everyone.

  “Here,” he says, climbing back into the van. “A hundred bones. I know it ain’t enough, but it’s all I can spare right now. We stick together, you and I. Only way this works, you know what I mean?”

  “I hear you, ’Sep. I’d be lost without you, man.”

  III.

  At home, I throw off my work clothes and change into an almost-clean pair of jeans. I got a couple beers left in the fridge, and I suck the bottom right out of the first one, then sip slowly at the second. Roaches cruise the kitchen counter, their mandibles rotating like radar. My landlord is a prick from Toronto who hasn’t set foot in the apartment for years. He keeps saying the fumigators are coming, but I know they aren’t.

  In my living room, I’ve got an old desk and some plastic patio furniture. I sit at the desk, dump the contents of Robbie’s baggy onto the surface, and begin scraping it into a line. My second slip in a week, but that’s how these kinds of mistakes happen. You don’t fuck up once. You fuck up over and over again. Then you do whatever it takes to sober up and make things better, because you’ll never be able to make them right. Robbie’s coke is pretty much what you’d expect from a hooker dealer who hangs out behind dumpsters. It’s speedy, burns like hell on a rip through my sinuses, and it makes me more anxious than high.

  It’s barely wearing off when a heavy knock sounds at my door, right on schedule. Probably the only time people like this are punctual: when they want something from you. Otherwise, you wait on them for hours, tense in darkened parks, paranoid in filthy alleys, conspicuous on sketchy street corners.

  I open the door, see the whore first, her eyes still bruised and swollen from where I punched her, and next to her is Gator, her white-nigger pimp wit
h rotten teeth and vacant eyes. He’s got one arm around the girl and the hand of his other stuffed into the pocket of his hoodie, like he’s got a gun. “Money, motherfucker. You got the money, or what?”

  “Yeah. Come inside.”

  Gator stomps on in, his boots tracking mud. But the girl is tentative, probably still scared, because the last time she was here, I got drunk and high and fucked her with no condom and the smell of us like shit on the floor. Later, when I caught her going through my wallet, I just unleashed, beat her down and sent her packing. She showed up with Gator a few hours later, when my buzz was crashing and I felt suicidal. Pay up, he told me. Fines due.

  “It’s all here,” I say, passing him the three hundred and fifty. “Almost, anyway. I’ll get you the other hundred and fifty next week, after I get paid.”

  He snaps the money out of my hand, counts it quickly, and tilts his head at me, probing with his scumbag eyes. “One more week,” he says, patting the pocket of his sweater. “And don’t be thinking a hundred-fifty ain’t worth my violence. ’Cause I’d fucking crack you down for twenty. Understand?”

  After they leave, I sit on the floor and scroll through the contact list on my cellphone, looking for my sponsor’s number. I find it, call him, and his sturdy voice on the other end of the line is what I should’ve sought out weeks ago. “Nicky, bro. What’s up? You vote today, man? Everything cool?”

  I try not to cry. “No, man. I’m having a terrible time at work. I’m fucked and I need you to take me to a meeting, okay?”

  He doesn’t miss a beat. “Absolutely, man. You at your apartment? Don’t go anywhere, okay? Promise me that much, and I’ll be right there. We’ll get you through this, bro, okay?”

  “Yeah, man. I’ll be here.”

  I hang up the phone and light a cigarette. Like usual, he’ll try to convince me to move up north, and not the Muskokas. He means the territories, the mining camps, digging diamonds out of the snow, thousands of miles from all this. But there’d be no point, because nothing changes, no matter where you go.

  I listen to the heavy rain as it slaps against my filthy windows. In the parking lot below, the red rag hangs from the ladder, water gushing off it like a cataract.

  These Rats Have a Job To Do

  I.

  Bev sticks her fingertip in her mouth. Strawberry jam, and grease from inside the stove. She wets her finger, pops it out, and trails it through a huge backlog of mail, searching. A summer downpour batters the living room window, beneath which her mom is splayed across the ratty couch like a mess of dirty laundry. In the next room, behind a flimsy door, her niece is napping, which means her sister Sissy has time to supervise, and she’s resting her dry, cracked elbows on the coffee table while Bev hunts for envelopes marked FINAL NOTICE. Their time together has become less and less pleasant since the spring’s abrupt shift in gears — “No more being a pussy,” Sissy said. “You have a niece now” — and Bev’s world is cracking up, because along with new chores like mail sorting, she’s also had to learn how to change diapers (shitty diapers!), and a lot of them have been their mom’s.

  Bev works hard to be brave, to maintain a neutral face. She needs to stay calm when squaring off against human waste of all thickness and odour — the feel of it sliding down her fingers, sticking to her cheeks. And the smells. Especially from her mother, the smells have been shocking.

  But the less revolting aspects of her new life aren’t that much easier. Bravery is many parts endurance, which Bev needs in mass amounts to finish her chores. She has to scrub burnt strips of breaded fish from the blackened grills of the oven or sort by colour the thousands of sweat-hardened tube socks piled up at the base of their prehistoric washing machine or, when it’s not her turn to sweep and wipe and dab at the endless entanglements of hair on the bathroom floor, in the tub, and behind the toilet, she has to sort the mail, which Sissy only filters for welfare cheques, meaning all the flyers and bills and sweepstakes announcements are tossed in the corner, next to a doormat that doesn’t quite conceal the fraying edges of the living room carpet.

  Like with controlling her face, Bev thinks she’s good at this endurance game. But then again, maybe not, because Sissy very suddenly snatches a letter from the trash pile, launches out of her chair, and stomps off to her room, slamming the door and disturbing their mother, who looks up from the couch and presses her palms over her ears, grey eyes like smoke from campfires Bev has only seen in movies.

  She’s thinking about this, trying to imagine the smell of those fires, when she hears Sissy laughing and cooing at her baby. Those are happy sounds, very rare these days, so Bev smiles at her mother and ignores the smell, because anyway there’s mail to sort.

  II.

  Bev is named after the character from It, because her mom loves Stephen King, especially the movies, but also the books, although she stopped reading when everything changed. Sissy is named after Sissy Spacek, who stars in the movie Carrie, which Bev thinks is old and stupid, even though it’s her mother’s favourite thing to watch on the VCR, and sometimes she’ll watch it again and again, just lying there with crumbs all over her nightie, which she wears all day despite what it’s called.

  Her mom doesn’t talk anymore, but Bev thinks she knows how Sissy got her name. She’s got a theory: Sissy’s pretty in a typical way, like with freckles and pale skin and that sort of thing. When she was in school, boys used to pull her hair and spit on her back. Lots of pretty girls get that kind of treatment. But those girls aren’t super pretty, because boys don’t taunt or torment super pretty girls. They just get all clumsy and awkward. Maybe her mom took one look at little baby Sissy and just knew she’d never grow up to be a super pretty girl, and that’s what happened: Sissy never did, not when she was thin and tired, not when she was fat and pregnant, and not now that she’s somewhere in between. But plain or not, you can’t push Sissy too far or she’ll snap, which wouldn’t be any good for anyone, and maybe their mom’s always known that too.

  Bev developed this theory years ago, when Sissy used to spend a lot of time at the Chester house next door. She came home one morning, hunkered over the kitchen sink, and chugged one glass of water after another. Bev had been awake for hours already, climbing on the counters and rifling the cupboards, opening the fridge door and slamming it shut, but she still hadn’t found anything to eat, so she started poking Sissy in the thigh, singing her name like Alvin and the Chipmunks, until finally Sissy snapped. She grabbed Bev by the shoulder, fingers like iron bars, and she said Bev was named after Beverly from It, who let all the boys have sex with her in a sewer tunnel so the group could have something to share after they killed the evil clown. They don’t show that part in the movie — Bev has seen it — but it’s in the book, and Sissy said mom always knew Bev would work best on her back. She said Bev would be an ugly slut when she grew up, and mom knew that from the moment Bev was born.

  Bev isn’t sure about this story, but it might be true. There’s no way to really know, because her mom can’t really talk, and probably wouldn’t admit to something like that even if she could.

  As for names, Sissy tried a whole new approach with her own baby. She told Bev the Stephen King heritage was a bad one — it was just too loaded — so she named her daughter Cindy, which she said is short for Cinderella, even though Bev has seen the birth certificate and all it says is Cindy. But she’s not supposed to tell that to anyone. She’s supposed to repeat the Cinderella story, especially to Cindy, which is dumb because Cindy’s just a baby and babies don’t understand anything anyway. They’re loud and hungry and extremely disgusting.

  That’s why it sucks that Sissy got Bev a job babysitting next door at the Chester house. Colleen Chester is a mean-faced woman with a patch of prickly looking hair on her neck and a huge ass-crack that pops out whenever she bends over to pick up the lid of her garbage can. She had a baby eight months ago, not so long before Sissy had Cindy, and she’s strugglin
g because her husband went to jail, so now the only way to make money is to work all the time serving drinks at shitty bars.

  “It’ll be good experience inside that house,” Sissy says, and she doesn’t know that Bev knows Sissy’s always been fascinated with the Chester house.

  From the outside, it looks just like theirs, so it’s hard to imagine why she’s so interested. It’s got a screen door with no screen and a driveway full of potholes. The shingles are peeling off the roof and sometimes end up all over the yard when it’s windy. Before Sissy got pregnant she used to go over there when the driveway was full of motorcycles and heavy metal roared out of the garage. She’d stay out late and the next morning she’d be jittery and wild eyed, cracking eggs into a pan and making burnt omelets.

  In a lot of ways that was a long time ago, but in most ways it seems like yesterday.

  Bev butters a piece of white bread. “I don’t like babies,” she whispers, wrinkling her nose. They’re sitting at the kitchen table. It’s really hot and their mom smells because Sissy hasn’t bathed her. Cindy’s there too, and Bev doesn’t want her to hear, just in case, so she whispers even more quietly: “Babies stink.”

  Sissy shrugs and shakes her dyed-black hair out of her face. “Those are the rules, Bev. You’ve had a free ride since Dad left. Now it’s time to stop being a pussy, okay? I need help, okay? If you don’t like it, get a boyfriend.”

  III.

  From the front step, Bev can see the park across the street. It’s like one of those parks in movies where the city has gone to hell and no one fixes the teeter-totters anymore. At night, lots of teenagers go there and get really drunk. Bev likes to watch their shadowy shapes as they push each other around. They smash bottles and howl with all the angry dogs. Sometimes, she investigates the mess the next morning. She finds shards of glass, squashed cigarette butts, and used condoms. Once, she brought a broom to sweep up, but there was nowhere to put the trash, so she spread it back all over the place.