The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Before descending again to an unsteady slumber, Sam recalled his car parked in a garage downtown, no doubt accruing a book of tickets. Though he and Anna were wealthy by most measures, a fear of poverty persisted deep in him—this being perhaps a legacy of his father—and at the bank he often felt guilty and fraudulent to be in receipt of such a generous salary. Despite their considerable savings, he couldn’t shake the notion that he was just a few paycheques away from being stripped of all he held dear. That’s what money’s for, Sam assured himself about the tickets, now aware that tomorrow he’d have to wear the same suit, the one he hadn’t felt the urge to remove before bed.

  The next afternoon, Sam found the old panhandler in the same spot and held out to him a large slab of cardboard. The old man extended a grimy palm and took it.

  “What in the hell is this?” he said.

  Sam had spent that morning at his desk pondering the old panhandler’s sign, the connotations of it, its brief, penitent request for alms, its assurance of sobriety, and its parting block-letter invocation of God’s blessing. While unread messages simmered in his inbox and his phone rang until losing its charge, Sam had become convinced that the sign could be improved.

  He rode the service elevator down to the loading dock at the rear of the bank tower and fished out a cardboard box from the recycling bin. He took a marker and inscribed it with his message, then lightly charred the edges of the sign like a pirate’s map he’d once made for Cricket after burying her birthday present in a bed of kale in Anna’s vegetable garden.

  New to vancuver. Spare Chanje for food and medecine? Thanks.

  “This for me?” said the beggar. “It ain’t even spelt right.” “You’re right about that. But this one is more effective,” Sam said.

  “Oh,” said the old man. “Why’s that?”

  Sam’s reasons were many. New to vancuver suggested only a trip gone wrong, a more temporary impoverishment; the spelling errors hinted gently at mental dysfunction; and the God Bless of the old sign had seemed too obvious, in addition to the fact that Christians were now in the minority, statistically speaking. Overall, Sam had gone for a simple plea from a guy who’d just shown up in town, who’d fallen on hard times and was looking for an honest meal. He’d also added the cryptic medecine to imply a mysterious chronic illness and potentially expensive treatments. Cutting the drug/alcohol free part he’d wavered on, but in the end he’d figured it was best not to mention these matters explicitly. Most important, Sam had concluded, was that people believed their contribution would go toward something rehabilitory, not just serve as a reward for sheer laziness or be flushed down the thirsty drain of addiction.

  “How much do you make, a day, would you say?” said Sam.

  “Weekday or weekend?”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Oh, yes sirree there is, people are more generous in their leisure time, that’s a known fact. A weekday? I’d say about fifteen. Weekend about twenty-five. That’s sitting all day, mind you.”

  Sam made a note in his pocket account book and paused for some calculations in his head.

  “I have a proposition for you,” he said. “Shoot.”

  “I want to be your manager.”

  The old man was quick to his feet and hoarsely yelling, “I ain’t doing no fighting of nobody—”

  “No, no!” said Sam. “Please, not like that! I mean more like a … well, a financial adviser.”

  “Ya don’t say,” he said, sitting slowly, wincing, like he was lowering himself into a hot tub.

  Sam sat down on the sidewalk beside him and was bowled over by the unruly stench of animal and vinegar. He swallowed hard and made his proposition. Sam would offer the panhandler advice, at no charge, on how better to ply his trade, and the beggar would agree to follow his instructions, however odd they might seem.

  The beggar looked miffed. “Why are you doing this if you don’t get no cut? Ain’t you got better things to do?”

  For the first time that day, Sam’s thoughts touched on his absent family, and recoiled from their memory with the sour bite of a tongue put to a nine-volt battery. “Not really,” he said.

  Then, as a show of good faith, Sam leafed five 20s from his wallet into the cup. “Consider this a signing bonus,” he said.

  The beggar regarded the bills with wide, blinking eyes, turning his lower lip inside out. “That’ll work,” he said.

  They agreed the beggar would keep a twelve-dollar per diem, which Sam saw as ample, and the rest Sam would deposit in the bank and give to him whenever he requested it. They would start right away with the contents of the beggar’s yoghurt cup.

  When he returned to his desk, Sam opened a special high-interest savings account available only to bank employees, then walked to a branch across the street and slid the cup of filthy change to the teller, who greeted it with a tired shrug.

  Weeks steamed past with all of Sam’s waking hours occupied by this new partnership. He conducted an exploratory interview with the panhandler over gourmet burgers, two of which the beggar devoured in quick succession while Sam took scrupulous notes.

  His name was Isaac. He slept under an abutment of the train bridge near the old sugar refinery. He was from Vancouver, and in 1964, at nineteen years of age, had left to work as a faller in logging camps in the north. After some years up there, he was working alone one rainy day on a big spruce that was all rotten inside. He’d already done the backcut and had only just started the undercut when the tree, with no good wood to hold it, cracked, twisted, and leapt from the stump, catching him just above his groin, snapping his pelvis, and pinning him to the emerald moss. He was found hours later by his crew boss, having screamed his voice to a whisper. They brought him down in a wooden floatplane and he spent almost a year at St. Paul’s learning to make his legs work again. When he stepped out onto the street, he had no savings or family or inclination to find a job, so he just slept where he could and had done so ever since.

  It pained Isaac to tell the story, and more than once tears had threatened in Sam’s eyes. It was as if Isaac had entrusted him with a thing of great value, a sort of artifact that Sam felt honoured to possess.

  Sam met Isaac each day after work, collected the change, paid him out, then went and deposited the money, tracking the growth of the account on a spreadsheet that could produce line graphs, though Isaac didn’t seem to understand them when they were displayed on Sam’s laptop.

  Though he’d found the subject deeply uninteresting, Sam had sat through numerous marketing courses as part of his MBA. He soon realized that Isaac was essentially in the business of advertising; that his product was his story, the authenticity of it, the emotional power it brought to bear on those who heard it; and that this story was conveyed by his demeanour, his dress, his attitude. Isaac’s job was simple, to win pity, and Sam knew he had to improve his product if Isaac was to be more generously and regularly compensated for his services.

  “What are my services, exactly?” Isaac asked when Sam explained this.

  “To tell the truth,” Sam said, handing him a sweaty hotdog purchased from a nearby cart.

  “That’s what I always done.” “That’s what I mean.”

  The first thing Sam had Isaac do was hide his shoes while he was working. A shoeless old beggar with beaten, dirty feet resting on the sidewalk was all the more pitiful for passersby to behold, and Sam saw big increases from this immediately, especially among older women. Next he coached him on the humble yet not overly articulate manner with which he should converse with patrons, and on the necessity of lowering his eyes, snatching only brief but friendly glances at the faces standing over him. Sam considered a more radical change in dress, more tatters and filth, to convey a greater need, but the acid burns he’d noted on his own designer jeans reminded him that real wear was difficult to imitate credibly. Finally, Sam considered doing away with the sign altogether and drafting a pamphlet that succinctly detailed the narrative of Isaac’s sad life, which he c
ould hand to customers. He suspected that no matter how poorly produced or pitifully worded, it would raise questions regarding how a beggar could pay printing costs. They’d just have to keep with the sign.

  Sam soon observed that while they met, the flow of change dried up. Nobody wanted to donate to a beggar conversing with a well-to-do man. Perhaps Sam was a cop, or a drug dealer; either way, he only ratcheted up suspicion, so they agreed to meet a few blocks over in Oppenheimer Park, where drug dealers convened and a few old men threw a bent Frisbee around. What Isaac did with the money was the only aspect of the scheme in which Sam would not involve himself. He was clearly in need; the depth or texture of that need Sam had no business investigating. Occasionally, Sam smelled alcohol on his breath. But Isaac was discreet, and this Sam appreciated; it was better for business. He nipped from a jam jar he carried in the coat he wore in all weather and must have refilled it when Sam wasn’t around. There were really no negative effects, aside from some mornings when for the odd fifteen-minute stretch his eyes seemed to function independently.

  Best of all, their partnership proved to be a merciful distraction. The few times Sam had managed to speak to Cricket she’d been monosyllabic, and he detected in her tone the same limpness she’d shown on her eighth birthday when a girl gave her a pop-up book that she’d had memorized since she was three. His conversations with Anna were curt and perfunctory. A terrible mutual unfathomability had befallen them. Greetings and passing comments whipped up connotations in the other’s mind that were far removed from their intended meaning. Now, when looking back at those months before Anna’s departure, Sam couldn’t say they had lacked signs of what was to come. Anna had commenced a campaign to rid them of clutter, donating furniture and clothes—theirs, Cricket’s, anything that hadn’t been worn in a year was her rule—to a church thrift store a few blocks over. This appeared now to Sam akin to the mute crew of a bombarded ship throwing their cargo overboard to buy a few minutes more before submergence.

  When a few weeks had passed with no measurable increases in Isaac’s profit, Sam considered more drastic adjustments. Isaac had sat on the same spot for twenty-five years, thus violating the begging must be only temporary rule that Sam had established early on. After hours of searching, Sam found the perfect new place: “historic” Gastown, where hundreds of stunned cruise-ship passengers, mostly sturdy, khakied Scandinavian couples or wary American families all in the same leather-strapped baseball hat, washed ashore to lumber and gawk on the bricked sidewalks and hold aloft tiny cameras clasped between forefinger and thumb, aiming at landmarks such as the famous steam-driven clock. There’d be plenty of change in their pockets, left over from purchases of smoked salmon in mailable cedar boxes, authentic Coast Salish carvings, Cowichan sweaters, and four-litre canisters of maple syrup. The tourists were ideal—an ever-rotating and disposably incomed clientele who barely understood the Canadian system of currency—for Isaac to intercept and ply his trade.

  The area already supported many beggars, who mostly encircled the bustling currency exchange kiosk. But this area was dark and crowded. Sam took two days off work to comb Gastown for a south-facing spot, as favourable lighting went a long way toward positive judgment of character. He found the perfect nook near a chain coffee shop, with a nice overhang to shelter Isaac from the rain.

  “People been coming to me for twenty-some odd years,” Isaac said wistfully when Sam informed him of the relocation. “I got a whole bunch of interest in this place, the sights’re familiar to me, I could tell you who’s gonna walk past just by looking at how the sun comes off that parking sign.”

  “I can understand that,” Sam said, “but this is going to double our profits—that’s a conservative estimate.”

  “I suppose it will,” said Isaac.

  And it did. The tourists were helpless against Isaac’s dirty feet and murmurs of humble appreciation. To celebrate, Sam offered to take him on a road trip. It had been eight years since Isaac had left the neighbourhood, so Sam scheduled the next Monday off to drive him to a rainy beach where Isaac ate two ice cream cones and stuffed his pockets with the unremarkable grey shells that were scattered in the dark sand like bad coins.

  “Looks like I gotta find a new patch to rest my head,” Isaac said on the ride home. “The cops been coming round the train bridge and kicking over shelters.”

  “Why don’t you rent a room?” said Sam. “You could afford it, we could do up a budget.”

  “Nope. That ain’t me,” Isaac said, doing his best to contain an indignance. “I’d rather sleep out in the air than shack up with the crackheads and rip-offs in one of those roached-up, firetrap hotels.” To this Sam agreed and Isaac’s anger waned. Isaac spent a quiet moment investigating the mechanism of his power window, stuttering it in place like a broken robot.

  “I’ll find something,” Isaac said as they sailed over the Granville Bridge, high above the pleasure boats that bumped together in the False Creek marina. “I been very lucky in my life, for the most part, and I got a few good years left.” Though Sam could not apply the same outlook to his own situation, the old beggar’s almost pathological optimism, as misguided as it may have been, warmed his heart, like the astronaut dreams of children.

  That evening, when he returned home, he discovered a text message from Anna requesting he fly out to Calgary for Cricket’s birthday. The message was worded with her usual legal precision melded with a kind of forced casualness, though underneath it Sam perceived a tingle of warmth, so he agreed and booked a ticket. The thought of his shed standing empty while Isaac wandered the city in search of a new cranny to crawl into did not sit right with him. He asked Isaac if he wanted to housesit while he was gone.

  “They’re really fixing this old neighbourhood up nice, aren’t they?” Isaac said, as they approached Sam’s house the following evening. “I used to live in a rooming house a few blocks over. This was years ago. Don’t remember much of that, to tell the truth,” he said. “Rice wine.” These last words he uttered with a distal stare as if invoking the name of a demon.

  Walking up to the house, Isaac emitted a long descending whistle that sounded like a bomb. Sam clicked opened the side gate and led him around back.

  “This is most definitely kind of you to have me stay back here. No worry, I won’t bug you or come by the house or nothing, because I respect a man’s private moments and whatnot,” Isaac said, setting his suitcase down on the cot beside the window.

  “Actually, that’s my bed,” Sam said. “You sleep over there.” He pointed to the bedroll set against the opposing wall.

  Isaac’s eyes darted to the square broken-out window that faced the rear of Sam’s towering home. He displayed a puzzlement that arrived and dispersed almost immediately. “You’re the adviser,” he said, and rearranged his things.

  For dinner, Isaac cut some stumps of wiener into a pot of baked beans that he warmed on the camp stove. It would be a long painful walk for the old guy to his usual begging position in Gastown, so Sam suggested he take a few days off, which he would reimburse of course. “I’m not sure I’m in need of too much free time to chew on,” Isaac said. “It’s always done me no good in the past. But maybe I’ll go collecting some bottles.”

  While they ate, Isaac sucked brown sauce from the grey mottle of his beard, and it occurred to Sam that he hadn’t touched his own shaver in weeks. He wasn’t sure of the bank’s dress code but could think of several bearded co-workers as proof he wasn’t endangering himself. Granted, they were contained, manicured growths, clipped and neatly edged, not like the unruly mass of spindly blond that now abounded on his chin. The point was moot anyway, because Sam hadn’t been at the office as long as he’d had it. There was just so much important work to do with Isaac.

  “So it’s your in-laws, then? My condolences,” Isaac said swallowing. “Course I ain’t never been married. But I managed to mix myself up with a few women—some good, some not close to good. But my overall experiences with family ain’t what you�
��d call positive.”

  “You ever get in touch with your parents?”

  “Well, my older brother, he’s batshit crazy, locked up since he was just a young one. Did something terrible to a woman was what people said. After he was gone, my folks weren’t the same. They didn’t take much interest in me no more neither, afraid I’d go the same route. That’s mostly why I went up north to cut trees.”

  After he’d packed, Sam did some dishes in a bucket while listening to zephyrs of air whistle through Isaac’s nasal cavity. He’d bedded down, still in his coat, on his back with his head on his pack and his hands deep in his pockets. Sam knocked a tin plate against the galvanized watering can and Isaac’s eyes opened, slick and yellowed in the moonlight.

  “Can I put a question to you?” Isaac said.

  “Shoot,” said Sam.

  “Why you sleeping out here exactly?”

  “Because I can’t stand being in my own house.”

  Isaac drew his hands from his pockets and threaded them behind his head. “I heard that,” he said, and re-attained sleep with an instantaneousness astonishing to Sam. Sam flew out the next morning—a parabolic jaunt over jagged spires of grey rock. Dennis, Anna’s father, fetched him from the airport in an immaculate hybrid car. He talked quietly into his phone as they loaded his bags and continued to do so while they whisked over a dead-straight road through an endless procession of camel-tinged foothills. Sam nodded off, and woke to his father-in-law driving with an impenetrable air, two thumbs hooked at the bottom of the wheel. While Sam had slept, a carpet of white cloud had appeared, ridged and crumpled, like the roof of a mouth.