by Nora Decter
Here’s a thought I’ve been having lately. I don’t know if I believe in time. I mean, I don’t believe it works for me the same way it works for other people. Other people can count on today turning into tomorrow and tomorrow turning into the day after that. But I can’t count on it at all.
So I come here to collect proof that it’s passing. There isn’t as much as you’d think. You can see it in the sun rising above the trees on the far side of the frozen river, and in a few months, if all goes well, you’ll see it in the cracks in the ice and the flowing water below. It looks like nothing is moving, but it is moving under there. It better be. In a few months the ice better crack up and the river better swell until it floods the plains surrounding the city. If it doesn’t, that means this is the winter that will never end. This is the one.
This can’t be the one. Because if time isn’t passing, then everything is staying the same. And that would kill me. That’s why I have to kill time first.
I stand up and call, “Come on, Howl! Time to wake the dead.”
But she’s right there behind me. Howl knows all about time. How it can stop short. Hold very still. When what you want is for it to fly. When what you want is for it to blur.
Our house is the one with the double yard. It gives us a certain status, though we only have it because the place next door got torched and they didn’t rebuild.
When the crew came to level what the fire left, Jim took his beer outside to watch. “Thing is, Jo,” he said, “you’ve gotta find the sweet spot. Once you do, one tap and the whole thing comes tumbling down.”
Jim destroys things for a living. He and Maggie were still together then. We all were.
The day of the fire, after the trucks had left and all the neighbors had gone back inside, I snuck over to investigate. The ground was burned darker in the places where the flames had blown out the windows. I bent down to touch it, but it wasn’t warm anymore like I’d wanted it to be.
I was eight. I remember because divorce was in the air. By the end of that summer Jim had moved across town. Every summer since, Maggie has dragged a barbecue home, and cracked plastic lawn chairs appear, and she and her crowd drink sweaty beers and cook hot dogs to a crisp and carry on, carry on until something dark happens to shut it down, like the sun comes up or the cops show or whatever. When the leaves change and fall all at once, the way they do here, she takes the barbecue over to the scrapyard by the tracks, where you can get ten bucks for the lid alone.
Grass never grew back in the spot where the house next door burned down. I suppose if we had planted some it might have, but we did not. We’re Tuckers, and we do not build things. We only tear them down.
At the front door I listen. Radio still on but tuned to a single station with the volume low. Bacon in the pan. Char, Maggie’s best friend, is in the kitchen. She comes over most mornings to make sure all the bodies have dispersed and that we don’t stay in bed longer than we’re supposed to. It’s annoying, but she’s not wrong. Otherwise we would both probably stay in bed.
I let Howl go, and she races ahead toward the smell. “Jo?” Char calls.
“Uh-huh,” I say, shedding layers in the hall. The living room is empty—the drunks have cleared out.
“Breakfast,” says Char.
“School,” I say, walking into the room. Char’s rat dog, Baby, is on the table, sniffing at a box of donuts. I toss her onto a chair and pour myself some coffee. Upstairs, Maggie is singing in the shower. Sounds like Shania. Maggie loves all her divas equally, but she believes she and Shania are spiritually aligned. This is based on their common roots in the poor backwoods of Northern Ontario and because they’ve both been dragged through the mud by evil, heartless men while maintaining relatively svelte figures and immaculate hairdos against all odds.
Char and I both relax a tad, because if Maggie’s singing that means she’s not too hungover. I help myself to a donut.
“Good girl,” says Char. “You gonna be around tonight?”
I shake my head no.
“Me neither. I’ve got a date.”
“Oh yeah?” I say. “Who’s this week’s winner?”
Char’s been on an Internet dating rampage lately. It’s hard to keep track.
“He’s a new one. His profile says he’s an entrepreneur.”
I raise an eyebrow. She watches me refill my coffee. No sleep again last night.
“It’s too bad you’re not going to be around later,” she says, all faux-casual, obviously working an angle. “Your mom could use someone to help her run through her number for karaoke. She’s gotta get a high score tonight to make it to the next round.”
“We’ll see,” I say, even though we won’t. Maggie worships at the karaoke altar. It’s sad, but I also get it a little. Aside from taking trips in my head, music is my favorite way to kill time, and I guess some people might call what Maggie does music. She acts like she’s got a gig every week when really any old drunk can pick a song and sing it onstage. They’re running a contest this month, though, American Idol style, with judges and shit. The rehearsals that have been going on nightly in the living room would be enough to send me into hiding, if I wasn’t hiding already.
“Quarterfinals are tonight,” says Char. “Competition’s heating up.”
I hear Maggie’s phone ring upstairs. It’s probably Dwayne, Maggie’s long-suffering boss and unofficial benefactor of our lives. He’s another one of her cousins, who for some unfathomable reason never tires of helping us out of cash-money jams. Dwayne hit the jackpot when he got into the tanning-salon business about ten years ago. Turns out fake tans are big business around here, there not being many months of the year in which to get a real one. He paid my swim club dues and for Matt’s guitar lessons, not to mention the down payment on this house. Two years ago he took the plunge and gave Maggie a job. Amazingly, she generally shows up five days a week, more or less on time, thanks to Char.
Now Char sighs over her cell phone. “Maybe I need another new profile. Could you help me with it tomorrow?”
Maggie’s voice moves toward the stairs. I wave my donut at Char and go down to the basement. We are trying a new thing, my Maggie and I. We don’t talk except through third parties. Works great.
The Gibson is on the bed where I left it. I sit down to eat my donut before I pick it up. Howl has followed me—she doesn’t really like the basement, but she likes Baby less—and she settles onto the floor and gives me this look. This look that says, You should get ready for school.
It’s still early.
Not that early, she says, her eyes following the donut as I move it into my mouth.
I talk through crumbs. Nothing important happens at school before 10 AM, plus I went yesterday. That should hold me for a while.
You did not go yesterday! I know you were downtown.
I toss her the last bite of donut. She snaps her jaws and catches it easy. Relax, man, I say, licking the sugar from my fingers. (She hates it when I call her “man.”) School and I have reached an understanding.
Howl sniffs. I sure hope so.
I know so, I say, picking up the guitar and starting to play. I just want to keep practicing the song I wrote last night.
Your E is flat, says Howl. She stands up, turns around twice and sits back down facing away from me. And don’t be a jerk. Help Char with her profile.
She’s right. The dog’s got a good ear.
Char gets me to write all her dating profiles, even though I doubt my carefully curated list of musical interests is helping her get laid. I don’t understand Internet dating. But then, I don’t understand much of anything to do with people. If I wrote a profile for myself it’d say I reside in the frozen armpit that is the North End of Winnipeg with a semi-telepathic dog and my mother, who named me Jolene after a slutty lady in a Dolly Parton song. It would list my favorite things as sandwiches and music played at a volume that will destroy my eardrums by the time I’m twenty. My pastimes include taking my can of mace and my dog for lon
g walks along the seedy riverbank, where in summer I can watch the mud-hued waters of the Red drift by, placid yet menacing. I used to swim competitively, but I quit last year, washed up at fifteen. Last summer I worked at a frozen-yogurt place downtown, and I think I did an okay job even though I don’t speak small talk. Technically, I still work there—they just put me on call for the off-season, and they never call. My skills include being able to read the facial expressions of dogs with a high degree of accuracy, holding my breath for extended periods of time and giving my five-foot-ten-inch mother a fireman’s lift up the stairs. I’ve read a wide array of depressing works of literature, and despite my love of loud music I’ve got extremely good, possibly supernatural, hearing. But I never would write an Internet dating profile for myself. So it’s just more shit I’ll never say out loud.
I stop to rest my fingertips. My calluses are peeling because it’s winter and everyone’s skin is flaking off, but also because I’ve been playing so much.
When Matt left, parts of me stopped working. My mouth doesn’t move when I try to talk. Or it opens but nothing comes out. At night when I lie down to sleep, I can’t close my eyes, even when I try. My feet won’t listen to reason. Some days they insist on carrying me to a strange part of town, like they have an appointment to keep that I’m not privy to. My brain can’t compute simple things. Like, I forget to listen when people talk, and sometimes it slips my mind where I am, what I’m doing, and when I wake back up to it, it’s alarming.
But I can play better than I could play before. My hands do things they couldn’t. My voice reaches for the note it needs. There’s no thinking involved. It’s something else.
Matt only took the custom-made blues guitar with him. The rest are all mine now—the little acoustic, the Gibson and good old Shredder—and I’ve been teaching myself how to play. I had to. Otherwise I’d only get to sing silently.
I play my song again, trying to get it perfect this time. I think it counts as a song, but I don’t know how to tell when you’re making more than noise, when you’ve given the sound enough shape to call it something else. I played it over and over last night so I wouldn’t forget it. I played till it infiltrated my bones and my pulse fell in step alongside it, until I could hear it even when I stopped playing, so that any dreams I might have had were drowned out. Music is the noise I make out loud. The rest I keep inside myself.
When I stop, the house goes silent. Howl rises as I do, and I switch off the amp, then climb the stairs into daylight. Maggie and Char have both gone to work. I layer up and put my boots back on. No snow pants when I go downtown. Means cold legs, but I have my pride, you know. I pause on the front steps to let my eyes adjust. The sky is clear, and the sun on all that snow is blinding. It’s February, and it feels like it’ll never thaw.
TWO
Most of what they say about Winnipeg is true. It’s cold and flat. When it’s not cold it’s flooding or burning down in an act of arson, or someone is being knifed in a back lane as a swarm of mosquitoes feast on the flesh of victim and assailant alike. But it always persists in being profoundly, devastatingly flat.
The flatness is almost unchallenged. There is only a handful of high-rise buildings downtown, so mostly what you notice here is the emptiness and, above you, the sky.
That’d be the third thing of note about Winnipeg. We have an abundance of sky, so much I think we could sell some of it off and still have a surplus. It really doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except to remind you what a blip you are in the grand old scheme of things.
Here is what I know of this place.
The city is cut in two by a train yard. Predictably, there’s a right and a wrong side of the tracks. We live in the North End, the wrong side, where teen moms push pudgy-cheeked babies in rickety strollers, and corners are haunted by gang members in their colors and hookers in their heels. Not every stereotype is true; there are nuances, exceptions, but you also get what you’d expect. Businesses open and close in time with the rhythms of city-hall-speak about inner-city revitalization, but only the fast-food chains seem to flourish. Over by the tracks are the scrapyards, where you can hawk stolen manhole covers and other precious metals. In front yards, muscle-bound dogs test the limits of their chains until the grass wears down to dirt.
Lots of Indigenous people live in the North End, so many that sometimes it’s called an urban reserve. We’re white, which means we live here but a lot of things that happen here don’t happen to us. Like, you know, the fallout from a couple of centuries of racism and cultural genocide. We can just leave the North End, and it’s behind us. Char is Ojibwa, and she says the North End follows her wherever she goes.
Two bridges go over the tracks to the right side of town, but I’m afraid of bridges. I’m afraid of a lot of things. I work around it.
You can also escape the North End by walking down Main to the underpass that goes below the tracks or by taking the path that runs along the river. That’s the way I go if I don’t feel like navigating the crowds that huddle outside the hotel beverage rooms on Main at all times of day. Lean-tos left by last summer’s hobos poke out from underneath the snow, and sometimes you’ll pass a few drinkers resting on the riverbank, king cans between their knees. Mostly it’s deserted this time of year, except for the stuffed animals that are propped up next to a tree, a memorial for two brothers who went through the ice last year, one of them going under and the other plunging in after. No one found them until the ice cracked up a couple of weeks later.
This winter has been the coldest on record. This winter it’s been colder here than it is on Mars. That’s a true fact—they keep repeating it on TV. Everyone here watches the Weather Channel. It validates our suffering somehow.
Usually winter is quiet, what with the sun going down by four, but this year it’s so dead you can’t even imagine. But try. Imagine air so cold bare skin freezes in less than sixty seconds. Imagine a horror movie where the entire city you live in is trying to kill you. Everyone stays locked up tight in their homes, afraid to go outside. That’s what this winter has been like.
Except for me. I go out. I do it all the time.
King’s Cash for Gold is my favorite pawnshop, hands down. Don’t be fooled by the name—they deal in much more than gold. Behind the thick, yellowed glass of the front window is a wide array of the kind of junk no one ever buys. A coat rack and a pinball machine. A collection of old license plates, pool cues and an eight-track player. The massive head of a moose who’s misplaced one eye. Shelves of movies and CDs spill over into milk crates on the floor, board games from bygone eras lurk underneath tables, and a portrait of the Queen presides over it all.
The stuff people trade in for fast cash is fascinating. Most of this shit has been here since I was a kid. Electronics and instruments seem to be all that ever sells. Everything else just sits around accumulating dust, including Earl, who glances up when I come in, blinks and turns back to the stereo he’s tinkering with. For all the attention he pays, I could be the wind. It’s the relationship I’ve built with Earl over the years that keeps me coming back.
I haven’t been by yet this week, but there’s nothing new except for a pretty blond acoustic. I slip behind the counter and reach for it. Earl gave me behind-the-counter privileges a while back. He got tired of me coming in to ogle the guitars. Must figure it runs in the family.
The first time Matt and I came to King’s it was to buy the TV back after Maggie pawned it to acquire funds for a bottle of Canadian Club, one of the really massive bottles they keep locked up on a special shelf at the liquor store.
“You guys aren’t thinking about this logically,” she said when we protested. “It’s an investment. By buying one big bottle instead of all those little ones, I’ll save enough for three TVs by the end of the month.”
I don’t know how long I play—there are no clocks in here, and Earl doesn’t care. Like I said, music helps me pass the time. Sometimes I play for what I think is five minutes when in fact it’s been
an hour. Sometimes I come up from the basement and two days have passed.
Eventually I put the acoustic back in its place on the wall. It’s a nice guitar, but all wrong. Earl’s given up on my ever buying one of the guitars I ogle, but I do want to. It’s just that I’m looking for something in particular.
If I think about it too hard, I start feeling really bad for the pawnshop guitars. You know their owners loved them once, but then they fucked up and had to make a desperate move, or else the guitar got old and they craved something better or different or both. Like a lot of things that make me sad, I try not to think about it.
There are also times when I pester Earl with questions. That’s how I know our DVD player could buy me a bus ticket as far as Virden. Add the TV to that, and I’d make it to Swift Current. My iPod would get me to Lethbridge, and the gold ring from Maggie’s ex, the one we called Sideburn Guy, that might take me all the way to the coast, but Earl said he’d have to see it to say for sure.
At the university I buy a large carton of chocolate milk in the cafeteria and sit on a bench at the bottom of the escalators to drink it. The school is made up of a bunch of little buildings scattered over a couple of downtown blocks, connected by walkways so you don’t have to go outside. People are big on not going outside around here.
Several of these buildings connect in a hub of activity by the escalators, with passersby coming from five or six directions. It’s one of the best places to go unnoticed. Sometimes I read or write in my notebook, but mostly I just watch. I like the bustle—everyone is going somewhere, not like at my high school, where they’re all just hanging around.
My milk carton is empty by the time I spot a target. Young guy, probably first year. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and dark clothes all faded from the wash. I hop on the escalator a few steps behind him, noting the thin paperback he’s got tucked under one arm. I’ve gotten pretty good at being able to tell chemistry students from psych students from theater students. I trail him into a lecture hall and grab a seat at the back. In the aisle in front of me a girl pulls books out of her bag. I catch sight of a title. Atwood. That’ll do.