Ragged Company

by Richard Wagamese

  I know what it takes to stay alive out here. Me, I’m a digger, and that’s what they call me. Digger. Dig for cans, bottles, metal, anything I can turn for cash. There’s a route I walked for years and I do it every day. Even in that cold. Takes me four hours and by ten in the morning I’ve always got enough cash for the day. Always got enough for me and the three out of all of them that I allow myself to be with. They pitch in, sure, and it’s pitiful even by our standards, but at least they always make the fucking reach and that’s what counts. They’re all rounders, too. That’s the other thing. No one but a rounder gets squat from me, and those three have proven themselves over time and that’s the fucking acid test. Time.

  There’s no leader. Doesn’t need to be. A good fucking idea is a good fucking idea no matter who comes up with it. Now, granted I ain’t what you’d call the best at follow-the-fuckin’-leader but I know that out here, one decision, one choice, one move is all it takes to change things for a fucking hour or a fucking day and this one, well, this one fucking changed everything. I remember. We hook up at the soup kitchen around noon like we always do and I can tell right off that I’m not the only one feeling the bite of this bastard. The three of them in their handout coats still bundled up while sittin’ at the table, wrapped around their coffee cups like they were pot-bellied stoves. The old lady just winks at me. Her face is all red and raw from wind.

  “In-fucking-credible,” I go, plopping down beside her. “So damn cold out guys are smoking just so they can get their face close to the lit end.”

  No one says word one, so I can tell they’re worried.

  “What’re we gonna do?” Double Dick goes.

  You gotta get a load of this guy. Double Dick Dumont. Gotta be one of the most all-time fucked-up street names I ever heard. Not because he has this huge dick or anything. No. It couldn’t be that simple. You see, Dick’s parents argued over his name when he was born. They both liked the name Richard. But it turns out his father, who was French, wanted his kid called in the French fashion. You know: Ree-shard. His mother, who was not French, wanted him called in the English way. So they fought tooth and nail. Not so much about the name itself but over how it sounded. There’d be a bottle over the head for Richard followed by a slap in the yap for Ree-shard. Well, I guess the neighbours were less than impressed and an old woman was called in to settle the issue. Her call, and this was one for the fucking ages, was to have him baptized Richard Richard Dumont. That way everyone could walk away happy. Well, everyone but Richard Richard, who, when he got to the street, was hung with the handle Double Dick. Unfortunately, so the word goes, that’s about all he was hung with.

  So, anyway, no one answers his question right away. Instead, we settle for looking into our coffee cups like we’re expecting the solution to bob to the fucking surface and stun us with its brilliance. Turns out, it did.

  “Well, you know,” the old lady goes, looking at us in turn, “there’s a place we could go where we could stay warm, sleep if we like, have a drink, and no one would bother us.”

  “Indoors?” Timber, the other one, goes. They call him Timber because you never knew when the fucking curtain’s coming down on this guy. He’d drink all day and carry on like normal, give no sign of even being drunk, then stand up, take a few steps, and pass right the fuck out. Never a warning. The regulars in the old-man bar he hung out in would call out to each other every time he stood up: “Timber!” And everyone would grab their glasses and their jugs so they wouldn’t lose them when he knocked their table over on his way down. He was a street drinker by now but the name followed along.

  “Yes. Indoors,” she goes.

  “What is this place?” Dick goes, all worried-looking like he gets.

  “The movies,” she goes.

  “The movies? They’re not going to let us into the movies,” Timber goes.

  “No shit,” I go. “Square Johns are pretty protective about their Square John hangouts and I doubt they’d let a herd of rounders into the flicks. At least not without a hassle.”

  “There’s really no telling how long this cold is going to last, and while it does we need someplace to go where we’ll be out of it,” she goes. “We can’t go to a mall. We can’t stay here all day, and knowing how all of you need to be private, away from people, I figure there’s no better place than the movies.”

  “Why’s that?” Dick goes.

  “Well, at the movies you get to sit in the dark. No one can see you. It’s private that way. It’s warm there and if we behave ourselves and don’t get too carried away, a drink or two in a warm place like that would feel pretty good, I figure.” She looks around at us and somehow I feel myself nodding in agreement. I can tell Timber’s considering it too and Dick, well, Dick just eyeballs all of us waiting for someone to tell him what to do.

  “Plus, you could nap there if you wanted. Or we might find that we really like watching the movie. They’re not that expensive and we can all gather up enough to get ourselves in, probably enough in the mornings for two afternoon movies and a jug.”

  “For as long as the cold spell lasts?” I go.

  “Yes.”

  “I haven’t been to the movies in years,” Timber goes. “I can’t remember what the last one I saw was.”

  “Me neither,” Dick goes.

  “Well, you know, I figure if we keep our eyes peeled, we can slop back a little sauce while we’re there. Hell, if we ain’t loaded they can’t kick us out if we’re payin’ and the idea of a warm, dark place to lay up for a few hours sounds damn good to me. Dark, I can’t see them and they can’t see me, I gotta like the sound of that,” I go.

  “Then it’s a plan?” she goes.

  “Lady,” I go, “it is the plan of all fucking plans.”

  Timber

  I ONLY EVER SEEN one cold like this one. It came on straight across snow—the wind so tight and hard it blew along parallel to the ground. You could hear it. It didn’t so much scream across the flatlands as it whispered. Pssst. Sharp, slicing like a fingernail across silk. Many a man would tear up in the face of it. That’s what I remember. Big red-faced men, their eyes glistening wetly through the slits between their scarves and toques, their breath hanging like curly white beards in the fabric. They would huff and puff for air because that cold was so deep and dense it would suck the air right out of your lungs. It was a huge, everywhere kind of cold. They called it a “monster” cold. Monster because it was huge. Monster because it was unknown and fearful. Monster because it came in at night and monster because it killed things.

  The cows. That was the first sign that things weren’t right. In that kind of cold you expect the stock to find shelter. Even a cow knows when the weather’s gonna turn, and even a cow would get itself to the barn. But I guess that wind blew it in so quick it fooled everything. We found the first one about a half-mile out. I’ll never forget it. She was standing there leaned up against a rail fence looking like an old woman waiting for a bus. She stared at everything unblinking, her eyes red, the irises dulled with death, frozen open in surprise. The others were the same. Thirty of them. Not huddled together like you’d expect but spread about all loosey-goosey, frozen into place like statues with that dull look of wonder on their iced-over faces. That was one son of a bitch of a cold.

  Just like this one. I thought about that as we made our way along the street. You could feel your nostrils start to freeze. Everywhere there were people hunched over against the cold, moving in a crazy armless trot, peering through slits in scarf and hat and hood. I could hear Digger mutter a curse and Dick ahead of me huffing away in short, sharp gasps. Amelia took it all in silence.

  “Shoot me your cash and I’ll pick up,” Digger says when we reach the liquor store.

  “Vodka,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, “so what else is new?”

  So we get to the theatre and pause on the sidewalk. All of us feeling out of place, out of sorts, out of the predictable patterns we live. We spend a few moments eyeballi
ng each other. Waiting, I guess. Waiting for the brave one to pull the plug on this trip and send us all back to the alleyways, lanes, and doorways that we understand. But no one says a word.

  Finally, Amelia nods at us. Just nods, and we head up the steps to the big glass doors. Digger shoots me a look that says, Keep your eyes peeled, and Dick moves a step closer to us all. Only Amelia seems certain, unafraid. She walks to the ticket window and says, “Four for Wings of Desire, please.” Just like that. Just like this was the kind of thing she did every day. Casual. She sounded casual, asking.

  “Pardon?” the young guy in the booth asks, and I know we’re scuttled.

  “Four for Wings of Desire,” she says again.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, looking the three of us over.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Amelia says, still soft, still under control even though I know she knows the guy’s ready to call the cops. “Four. Wings of Desire. I hear it’s very good.”

  “Ah, yes it is,” the young guy says, waving out the back of the booth. “I’ve seen it three times myself.”

  “Three? Well, it must be good.”

  “May I help you?” a briskly walking man in a red blazer asks twenty feet before he gets to us.

  “Yes. Four for Wings of Desire, please,” she says again with a little wink at Red Blazer that surprises me.

  “Wings of Desire. Yes. It’s in German, you know? You have to read the little sentences under the picture while you watch,” he says, coming to a stop five feet from us, giving us the once-over.

  “I’m sure we’ll love it,” she says, reaching into her pocket and surprising the hell out of the three of us with a roll of bills the size of a good potato. Red Blazer’s eyes widen, too.

  “Ah, yes, well, I’m sure you will, ma’am,” he says waving at the young man in the booth to do business with us. “However, I’m not going to have any trouble from you, am I?”

  “Trouble?” Amelia says with an arch of one eyebrow. “Trouble? Feel much like trouble, boys?”

  We shake our heads. Wordless.

  “See? Way too cold out there for any of us to want any trouble in here.”

  “Yes. Yes. Good. That’s good. Well, I hope you enjoy the film,” Red Blazer says and waves us past.

  It’s like a scene from a movie itself. The four of us, clearly rough and tattered, walking slowly along this dimly lit corridor, our feet kinda scuffing over the carpet that sinks beneath us. No one says nothing. I don’t know about the rest but me, I’m shocked. Shocked by the sudden way the world you think you know can disappear on you. We move along this corridor where they got little signs telling you which picture’s playing in which room until we get to the next to last one that reads Wings of Desire. Can’t tell much from the sign, just a man’s face on a big blue background and some kind of wings behind him. Me, I figure a good old-time war movie or even a romance about pilots. But we walk in and we just stand there looking. It’s a lot smaller than the movie rooms I remember. Kinda like a big living room with a dozen rows of seats and maybe a twenty-foot screen at the front. There’s no one there. Well, there’s us and one other old guy, looks about sixty, sixty-five. He’s all slicked up with a topcoat, hat, and a long looks-like-silk scarf. He one-times us from the corner of his eye but other than that there’s no reaction.

  The three of us take to eyeballing each other, waiting on Amelia to tell us where to go. My choice would be one of the back rows nearest the far wall so we can see the usher coming. Kinda hunker down over there and fade into the background. That’d be my choice. But Amelia starts down the aisle and heads right into the same row as the old guy. Me ’n Digger give each other the look and follow right after. I figure it’s close enough to be in the same row as the only other guy in the theatre but Amelia slides right along and plops down two seats away from him.

  “Hey, mister,” she says, “cold enough for ya?”

  Well, I gotta give the guy credit. He was cool. Real cool. He just sits there, gives her a small grin, goes “Ahem,” and moves on over one seat. No drama, no over-the-top freak-out or nothing, just goes “Ahem” and slides over. Cool.

  That would have been the end of it and harmless enough, I guess, until Amelia looks at him for a few seconds, goes “Ahem” herself, and slides over one seat too. Well, I about fell over. I figure now the heat’s gonna be on us for sure. This old guy’s gonna scurry off after Red Blazer himself and we’ll be back in the deep freeze again lickety-split. But the guy’s cool. He sits there, looks over at Amelia, looks over at the three of us standing there in the row like storefront dummies, nods once, looks at the screen, and starts playing with the buttons on his topcoat. That’s it. Just fiddles with his buttons.

  Amelia nods at us and we kinda fall into our seats—Dick right beside her, me in the middle, and Digger at the end closest to the aisle.

  “What the fuck?” Digger whispers to me.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  And I sit back and look around and I can feel that feeling again. I feel dreamlike. But there’s no panic in it. No need to run away from this. Instead, it’s like that last light over the fields on the farm. The dividing line between day and night. That time when every sound you hear, from the cows mooing in the fields to the clink of the sink through the window to the creak of the porch chair you sit in, becomes another colour in the deep blue bowl of evening. Everything, even you, all huddled up against itself like you gotta hold yourself in or you’ll explode. That’s how it feels and for the first time in a long time, thinking of that, I don’t feel no big rush of sorrow, no big unstoppable wetness in the middle of my chest. Just okay. Just calm. And when those lights start to fade, slow and almost unnoticeable like falling into a dream, I let go, I allow myself to fall, sliding, sliding away from the monster cold beyond this place and into the soft, warm arms of the darkness.

  Granite

  THERE’S A SONG in every board and nail. That is what he told me, my father. On those nights of my youth when the north wind would rise off the lake behind our house to rattle bony knuckled fingers along the eaves and shutters, I would cry. And he’d come to me. He would emerge from the darkness, silently, this monolith of a man that was my father. Listen, he’d say. Listen. The wind is coaxing them free again. They live in every timber, every stone, and every nail. Your people. Your ancestors. They’re with you, around you, watching over you all the time. That’s what you hear, son. Lullabies. Not ghosts or goblins or witches. Just songs. The wind sets them free to sing them to you. There’s a song in every board and nail in this old house and if you listen you can hear them. And he would stretch out his great length beside me trailing the faint aura of granite dust that always clung to him, and we would open ourselves up to the chorus.

  In my child’s mind I imagined a fabulous music that would become the lullabies and hymns that eased me into sleep. When I woke he would be gone, off well before dawn to the granite quarry where he, like my grandfather and great-grandfather, had built the life that gave me mine. And my name: Granite Harvey.

  The house itself was built of the selfsame rock they quarried. Large slabs laboriously placed three storeys high. The ashen face of granite was augmented by lively rows of chert, feldspar, and gneiss, their minerals adding an unencumbered glee to the austerity of pale stone. Each piece had been carried by wagon from neighbouring fields and shoreline. Even the roof timbers, eaves, and shutters were fitted and sawn from the felled trees of the ten acres it sat upon. In this way it seemed not so much to dominate the land as become a natural part of it. For years, I truly believed it had spoken. I believed that the rocks and timbers and nails whispered to me constantly. So that nights alone, reading in front of that huge fireplace, ancestors I had never met kept me company. Now, I shake my head and stare around the empty room.

  Above me I hear Mac prowling. He was always a good prowler. It was what made him a good reporter and eventually a great editor. Always able to spot the hidden detail that turned a good story into an outstanding one. N
ow he was likely inspecting the house in the same way.

  I was busy with the fireplace flues when I heard him heading down the stairs. “Fine wood,” he said, entering the room. “This whole place is built of really fine wood. Maple, oak, and just the right touches of pine and cedar in the baths. Someone really knew what they were doing, Gran. They don’t build them like this anymore.”

  “No,” I said. “Great-grandfather built things to last.”

  “Still, you know, there’s a great place for a sauna up there and a skylight or two would brighten it. Right now, it’s almost Gothic—all that Wuthering gloom and cold.”

  “Are you kidding? You should have heard the fight I had just to get the old man to put in the furnace system. He said the house would never be the same again. Said he wanted it kept the way it was.”

  “Nice sentiment,” Mac said. “There’s some people who believe that heritage should remain heritage and to alter it forces it to lose its value, its place in time. That’s important to a lot of people, Gran—that one place in time that anchors them. You sure you want to sell it?”

  I moved to pull across the louvred shutters that covered the twin windows on either side of the fireplace, sending the house into a final gloaming. “Let’s smoke,” I said. “By the lake, one last time.”

  He followed me out the back door and across the wide stone terrace I’d helped build as a teenager. At its far end a short set of steps led down to the scraggly patch of grass my father had steadfastly referred to as lawn. Beyond that, a pair of rough timbers and carefully placed stones became the stairs that led to the small dock at their bottom. Neither of us spoke. Mac content to gaze about at the snow-covered rocks and trees, and me lost in the dullness I’d carried for some time now.

  “It’s a hell of a lake, Gran,” Mac said. “Great house, a dock, two hours out of the city, quiet. You ask me, at your age you couldn’t swing a better deal. Most of us slave for years to get hold of half of what you have here. It’s what everyone wants nearing retirement age.”