by Lisa Moore
He believed his mother was responsible for this impossible beauty. She had presented it to him. She was capable of smashing open the universe to create such a thing, even more profound because it was unsustainable. In an instant the fountains collapsed, folded into themselves, toppled downward and disappeared. No sign of them but the ruffled surface of the trough and the wet mist on his face.
This was why she left him at the after-school program every day from three to five thirty; this was why he was often the last kid to be picked up; this is what she was doing while she was away from him.
But as he got older David realized her job seemed to bleach the colour out of her face. Her stomach and backside spread. She was dumpy. His mother had no interest in men. She liked, she said, to come home to a nice gin and tonic. They had a white cat. It lay across her chest in the black leather easy chair with a purring that was so loud he could hear it in his bedroom, even with the door closed. The cat had warts on the top of his head, between his two ears, and David could not stand to touch it. He worried that his mother’s long red fingernails would inadvertently scratch off one of the warts and there would be blood and disease.
This is the only man I need, his mother would say about the cat. And she would lift one of the animal’s paws and put it on her lips. The cat would close its eyes and sink into itself, and once David had been close enough to see the claws extend above and below his mother’s lips, stitching them shut. The tips of the white claws pressed to the very point of piercing. Then his mother opened her mouth and took the paw between her teeth, holding it there even as the cat tugged against her.
The kitty litter was in the back porch and the stink of it, conjoined with the frigid air (the singled-paned window in the back door had cracked) was the last thing he smelled when they headed out in the morning, and the first thing when he came home. He listened at night when the cat was in the litter box. The animal shed his normal sloth to flick the grey gravel over his clots of shit with uncharacteristic vigour. Sometimes the linoleum in the porch had speckles of it that had sprayed from the mouth of the plastic hutch.
When the footstool on the leather recliner snapped out beneath his mother’s feet each night David felt inconsolable.
He decided to watch over this girl, Chelsea, through the fifteen minutes in the skywalk and past the construction site, no matter what. She was rubbing his nose in her fear. He could smell the ammonia of it.
Among themselves, the boys he knew had an earnest, shallow camaraderie and no interest in the emotional bog of relationships with the opposite sex, the threat of which promised to suffocate them if they gave it any attention. They were hungry for girls, hungry to fuck, but they were desperate to avoid the cloying heat of a conversation, or a meal in public. They didn’t know who or what, just the turmoil of continuous horniness. They could be profane, even perverse when talking about sex; they bragged about what they could do with their cocks, how they would nail, screw, skewer, hammer, plough, and bang but they never talked about their actual sex lives, and never about their emotions. Never about the particular girls who kept them awake and never about clutching their dicks in their sleep, fetal and caught in a torque of twisting bedsheets.
Before he was born his mother had worked in a Marriott in Fort Mac though everybody called the hotel Sutherlands. Sixteen propane burners and sixteen mini-sized cast iron frying pans that held two eggs a piece. Rochelle had to flip the eggs without using a spatula and if the yolks broke they went in the garbage. She was contemplative when she cooked his breakfast every morning. Patient as the bright yellow of the yolks turned grey with a creeping glaucoma, butter spitting at the flubbery edges of egg whites.
His mother had been at the stove that morning with her fist on her hip while the radio gave a report about another rape and she shook the pan so it rattled on the orange burner. The rapist was taking their phones. He put a knife to their throats and told them to hand the phones over. This was the third rape. Two of the three rapes had happened in their neighbourhood, though the radio reports were vague about exactly where.
They lived in an old Victorian house downtown. A ring of sex workers operated in the neighbourhood, driven in by their pimps and left to work all night and into the morning.
For all of David’s childhood there was a sign of a thermometer on the parking lot of the church with the mercury painted red and rising to show the amount of donated funding for the restoration of the church. Now it seemed to him a measurement of the fear in the city. His mother’s fear, the fear of the girls he knew, the fear on Facebook.
* * *
After the night at Bitters and the skywalk, after her phone call with David, Chelsea entered Gabby’s house as quietly as she could, but Gabby was sitting up with a drink beside her on the little marble side table. She was reading a fat novel, with the cover folded back. She held it out at arm’s length, as though to keep the power of it at a distance.
You’re back, Gabby said.
I’m sorry, Chelsea said.
I had no idea where you were. With that monster out there. I was terrified. You didn’t answer my texts. He takes their phones, this bastard. He rapes them and beats the shit out of them and he takes their phones. I thought, why wouldn’t she text to say she was okay?
I was in a bar. I didn’t hear the texts coming in. The phone was in my coat pocket.
I didn’t call your mother, I couldn’t. Not after everything she’s been through.
I’ve found a place, Chelsea said. I would like to stay with you until it’s available. It’s just a room, but with other students. I think I’m drunk.
So am I, Gabby said. Very drunk. My ex never drank. So I try to treat myself, now and then, to a good bottle of wine. Here’s a life hack for you. Did you know if you hold a blowtorch to the neck of a wine bottle you can pop the cork? Just eases up the neck, then you let the wine breathe. I’ve joined a group of wine tasters. I’ve just been sitting here reading Anna Karenina. I’ve read it four times already. My ex loves it. This is a new translation. The other one had all these Britishisms, full of tally-hos and that kind of thing. Chin up. I think I preferred it.
Gabby put the book on her knees and spread the fat halves apart by pressing down with the heels of her hands. Chelsea heard the spine crack. The book lay flat and a page slipped out onto the floor.
She throws herself under a train, Gabby said. Because of a lover. I can’t figure out what she saw in him. It’s just nonsense. Light reading before bed. A bit of fluff.
Chelsea eased her knapsack off her shoulders and let it drop to the floor. She undid the flap and the drawstring and took out a brown paper bag splotched with grease.
I bought us some croissants for breakfast, she said. There’s an Icelandic bakery up by a house I saw. I had to get off the bus. But I had a transfer. I forgot I had them. She was holding the bag out in front of her like a shield.
3.
Chelsea moved to the house on Merrymeeting and decided to stay on during the summer semester, rather than go back to Grand Falls. It meant she could finish faster. There had been two more rapes, one in February near the university. The fifth had happened in April, on the west end of Water Street.
It was the end of May when the engineering students in the blue house next door moved out and got a new place on Kimberly Row. They left the house next door vacant. By mid-June, new tenants had moved in. The house a dilapidated three-storey with light blue vinyl siding, a strip of which unpeeled and slapped in the wind, exposing the Tyvek underneath. Small slider windows in the front, on the second floor, a sheet of plywood over one of the bigger windows in the back.
Three or four men lived there, but several women came and went. One of the men had a tattoo of leaves on his arms. He wore black jeans, camouflage muscle shirts or medieval, dragon-themed T-shirts. Both of his wrists had cuffs of leather, and he had what looked like a dog collar around his neck. There were big, silver rings on eac
h of his fingers. The rings were serpents.
Chelsea knew the rings because one morning, when she was outside studying, he called her over to the fence. His hands rested loosely on the pickets. She couldn’t raise her eyes to his face. He called her over and she went, knowing the encounter probably meant she would have to find a new place to live.
He asked if she had any extra coffee.
Do you want me to make some and bring you out a cup? she asked. But he only wanted to borrow some.
I can make it, he said. It’s not instant, is it?
No, it’s good coffee, she said.
Just enough for a cup, he said. So I can get on the go here. He looked out over the back of the garden on his side of the fence. There was a rusted swing set with two turquoise bucket seats full of rotting leaves, two legs of which had risen off the dirt so the contraption tilted backwards, and a white van up on blocks. A few lawn chairs with skewed aluminum frames and a pile of hub cabs, an orange sphere-shaped barbeque on three legs, the bottom of which had rusted away, and a giant semi-deflated yoga ball that had been red but had faded in the weather.
Chelsea would look anywhere but the man’s face. There was also, on his side of the fence, a new Hibachi that Chelsea and her roommates had all chipped in on. The men from the blue house had stolen it and left it out in plain view. Chelsea’s roommates had talked about it in their house meeting. One of her roommates, John, who was doing a Ph.D. in sociology, said they should just hop the fence and take it back. Jess, who was doing gender studies, said they should confront the neighbours. But they hadn’t retrieved the Hibachi, or mentioned it again. It remained on a stack of cinderblocks, on the other side of the fence, like a taunt.
I got a chance at some road construction, the guy said. Holding up a fucking sign. Hard on the back. Standing that long on the pavement, see. The back seizes up. He had reached into his pocket and pulled out two small blue sponges.
These here, he said. Earplugs. For the noise. I already got a ringing, drives me crazy. He wiped his forearm under his nose and sniffed and hawked a glob of mucus. She could see the yellowish clot of it bending the blades of grass where it landed, near his feet. She guessed he was about thirty-five. His arms were big and muscled. He was big but not fat.
She went back in the house and came out with a Tupperware container of coffee. She held it out to him.
You’re after giving me everything you got, he said. He said it so softly that she darted another look. His eyes were pale blue, dark hair. His skin was ruddy and pitted. There was a shaving cut stuck with a piece of tissue on his jawline, the blood had seeped through, crusty and brown. He had to squint against the sun coming up over the maple trees on the other side of her yard.
There’s more, she said.
What are you, he asked. Students?
Yes, she said. Up to the university.
She’d used the plastic scoop, in the kitchen, measuring out spoonful after spoonful, her hand shaking, getting it over the counter, and realized she was taking too much time. Then she’d just dumped the whole bag of coffee into the container and she smoothed the hill of it with her hand so she could get the lid on. She should have just brought him the whole bag. She would not tell her roommates; they would be furious. She wanted to get the counter cleaned up before somebody woke.
The men in the blue house belonged to a gang. One of them had a heavily tattooed face and a pronounced limp. The women, who showed up at odd hours, were sex workers that the men were pimping. The backyard, and even the sidewalk out front, was littered with syringes. Once, a used condom on Chelsea’s doorstep. The cops came every week, sometimes more often. Chelsea had watched them take a girl’s purse and put it on the hood of the cruiser, and then usher the girl into the backseat. A cop stood with his elbow resting on the top of the driver’s door as he leaned in to speak to the woman. The other cop had put on latex gloves and opened the mouth of the purse with his baton. He was riffling through the purse, lifting out pill bottles, standing them up in a row on the hood of the cop car. The light was still turning, but the siren had stopped.
Chelsea had been trying to walk past them, on her way to class. She and the young cop had each stepped to the same side to let the other one go by. They did this twice, then a third time. He’d lifted the baton up out of her way. They’d been on the verge of laughing, but then Chelsea had caught the eyes of the girl in the back of the cruiser.
The girl was someone she recognized. Chelsea had seen her around the house a few times — and she’d talked to her once when the men had first moved in. In the window of the cruiser, the girl’s face had, at first, been obscured by the reflection of blue vinyl siding. But as Chelsea stepped closer to the cruiser, trying to get around the cop on the sidewalk, the girl glanced upward from the backseat, and her face appeared in the vinyl strips. Chelsea could see her blue eyes with the black eyeliner and the sparkly blue eye shadow.
You’re blocking the sidewalk, Chelsea said to the cop.
We’re conducting some business here, the cop said.
You’re in my way, Chelsea said. The woman in the car had shifted back and the reflection of the vinyl siding closed over the brief vision of her face.
In June the woman had asked Chelsea for a smoke, and Chelsea had seen the glint of a stud in her tongue. Her name was Raylene, she’d said, and she was from Fortune Bay.
I don’t smoke, Chelsea had said. The girl had glanced away with her arms crossed tight over her emaciated body.
I’m trying to become a nurse, Chelsea had told her.
I was at the upgrading but I got no use for it, the girl said. I never had nobody growing up, just my little brother, and I had to rear him from when he was a baby. We was left alone but I reared him. Made sure nobody ever hurt him or nothing like they done to me. I never had no time to get high school or nothing like that. I never had no time for nothing. All the time I was taking care of him.
Where is he now? Chelsea asked. The girl, Raylene, had suddenly grinned. Her teeth were bad but there was something spontaneous and clean in her smile.
He’s a civil engineer now up to Alberta, she said. Then she took a wallet out of her back pocket and flipped it open to a Walmart portrait of two little boys, one a toddler, the other perhaps three years old. There was a backdrop of blue sky and clouds. The boys were wearing jeans and matching short-sleeved plaid shirts. Their hair had been slicked down with gel.
These are my two little ones, she told Chelsea. They’re in foster care now, but the family they’re with got everything. You should see the way they got the room done up. It’s all with Finding Nemo and that. They’re really good to them, until I gets back on my feet. I’ve been clean nine days now and I’m going to the clinic they has in Pleasantville. My great aunt drives me but she’s old and her memory is going. Got to get her eyes checked where they might take her licence off her, then I got no way to get down there. I gets right distracted when she’s late. Sometimes she don’t show up.
I’m sorry I don’t have a smoke, Chelsea said.
Nobody ever says nothing to you here, the girl said. Back home people might speak to you, on the street, if you’re going by. Here they don’t say nothing. I finds people right cold.
Is that somebody’s name on your neck? Chelsea asked.
That’s my brother, she said. Her hand went to her neck, and she touched the line of cursive writing with one finger.
See, she said, Cody. That’s his name. It just says I love Cody, all the way around my neck over and over. Only thing I ever done was raise up Cody.
Are you in touch with him? Chelsea asked.
Up in Fort Mac, he’s gone, see, for long stretches in the camps. They has them working up there really hard. And I loses my phone all the time.
Does he ever send you money? Chelsea asked.
Where I am after moving so much, the girl said. I give him a good start. I was just f
our years old myself when we were left alone the first time. I just made sure, see. Food and that. We come in here from Fortune. Once we came in, he went to a different home, separate from me. He got the student loans and that. He’s making lots of money now. Everything depends on the kind of home you gets put into. My little ones got a really good home.
Last time I spoke to my brother was there when they had the fire, Raylene said. You must have seen it, all the cars with fire going up on both sides of the highway, higher than that house, the fire was, right up to the sky. He had his two youngsters in the truck with him, and see, cars were after running out of gas on the road, blocking traffic, and it was so close they could feel it getting hot inside the car. The tires exploding with the heat, and then they’d just be blocking the traffic. He called me to say he was after losing everything, the whole street was after catching where he had his house. That was the last I heard from him. He said they’d been in the car ten hours with the youngsters crying and they was after drinking all the water they had, and all of that, and they were just after getting out of the worst of it, made it into Calgary, and that. He said he wanted me to know he loved me and appreciated all I done. But he said to me, while he was still in the traffic with the fire and that, he said, Raylene, I want you to take care of yourself. He made me promise with the youngsters in the truck. Had me on speakerphone. He said, Raylene, I want you to promise with the youngsters listening. I’m after trying. It’s hard to quit. Nine days is the longest I never done though. I’m doing good.
And Chelsea had said, I don’t smoke because I saw what it did to my dad. My dad was on the patch all the time I was growing up. Sometimes the patch and nicotine gum at the same time. He’d leave the chewed-up gum in the ashtrays. My little brother used to go around and put them in his mouth.