Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  Frank … ? François repeated.

  I’ve tried the apartment up there, but the old lady won’t get up to open the door.

  Dat apartment, François managed to say. His throat ached. Dat boy, he said, he move out long time a-go.

  He looked carefully at the man’s swollen features, the food stains on his jacket, the cheap shirt, the veiny nose. Maybe ’e die, François added. ’It by car or someting.

  The man stood. He worked his lips. His coarse cheeks bunched beneath his eyes. He pounded down the stairs with short, bulky steps and limped away.

  François went in, past his grandmother, who sat with her eyes half-closed. He fell onto his bed and pushed his sleeve into his mouth to stop the sound of his weeping until he no longer could or cared if she heard. Then he got up and ran outside, down the steps and along the street, but the man was gone.

  Each day that week he started at the rumbling foundations of the Stade Olympique and walked, to St. Laurent, to Outremont, where Jewish women strolled with their prams and headwraps and wigs. He saw Italians loading trucks and shouting. He saw the Chinese in their stinky butcher shops. He explored Ste. Catherine’s from the rundown walk-ups of Hochelaga to the wide, manicured lawns of the west and the English girls with their yellow hair. He skipped Mass.

  It was on one of these walks that he saw the prostitute from the clinic. She’d noticed him first and told him he looked lost—T’as l’air perdu. Are you the boy I met last week?

  Oui, he said. When she asked what he was doing, he told her, Walking. She offered to go along. She introduced herself as Ernestine. At first she talked about medical experiments, that there was a market for contraceptive tests and she’d gotten a couple jobs because of her situation. She stopped and looked at him seriously. He nodded. After a moment she smiled and asked where he was from. He found himself telling everything, the prairies, his mother, the father, the twenty dollars he’d kept, that he was supposed to be good but wasn’t and desired things he didn’t even know he could. He felt the words would never stop coming.

  Do you want to eat something? he asked, and she said, Okay, in a squeaky, surprised voice. The first restaurant they came to was Italian and they ordered plates of spaghetti and worked their forks in circles and took turns talking while the other chewed.

  Everyone hates my profession, she said, even though Jesus was always hanging out —comme il se tenait—with people like me. It’s not that I like what I do. I don’t have a choice. But I’m taking classes. She looked at him significantly. I’m good inside, she said, tapping the deformed sternum visible through her tight blouse.

  She described how she’d run away from home. She’d been in love and had come to Montréal, but the guy had left her, and her parents wouldn’t take her back. As she spoke, her eyes crowded with emotion. She told François that Catholics were mean, that her mother was too Catholic and had named her Ernestine after her aunt who was a nun who was also named after her aunt who was a nun. François imagined generation after generation of pigeon-chested nuns named Ernestine like clipped snowflakes unfolded from paper.

  But I’d never run away from anyone, she said. You know what I mean?

  Oui, he said. Absolument. Oui.

  She narrowed her eyes. I believe in things. You don’t have to be Catholic to believe.

  I know, he said.

  I think we’re a lot alike, she told him. They’d finished eating. Anyway, I have to go. It’s getting late. She wrote her address on the napkin. You know, if you want to visit—not like that. Pas comme ça. But just to talk or something, if you’re lonely. It happens. But don’t come too late. She smiled, seeming to see beyond him. I like you. See you later. Bonne nuit. As she kissed his cheek, he looked at her painted eyelids and trumpet nose. Bonne nuit, she repeated. He glanced at the address written in looping cursive. Not until she was walking away did he notice how skinny her legs were.

  When he arrived for the Lulu, the man was still alone, inscrutable and deliberate, scanning printouts as if not a day had passed.

  Come in, he said and made François wait. The same process followed though without the slide projector. François dropped his pants for the rubber underwear. The vacuum hose took hold. The green light flickered and stayed lit, and the man covered it with a piece of electrical tape. This time he brought out padded earphones.

  Put these on and begin counting.

  He closed the door.

  The darkness dizzied François. He blinked but his eyes refused to adjust. Then through the earphones came the hurried breathing of a girl, so near she might have been in the room. Just from the high catch of terror in her throat, he could picture her.

  He kept bolting his eyes to see the running feet, the mouth forming each frantic breath. Another pair of footsteps interrupted the continuity, these heavier, faster. Then she cried out, and there was the low, almost inaudible thud of bodies.

  Come on, a man’s voice said. Bitch. Then just sounds: cloth tearing up what seemed the length of her body, her suppressed squeals as if she was being gagged. A span of near-silence followed, rustling and scraping. Then the breaths returned. His gasps were human only in that they almost formed words, hers shrill. François was painfully erect. The grunts came faster in the man, her breath now a rapid pulse of intermittent, involuntary sound. The rasp of cloth on concrete was briefly lost to the distant honking of a car. Somewhere a window slid in its frame and slammed. Everything ended with the man’s panting as he ran into a silence that came too soon. The footsteps simply disappeared.

  Eyes shut, François listened for her chattering teeth, her last whimpers and sobs.

  After a suitable pause, the man came in and freed him.

  In the street François stood with his money. Traffic rushed by. Slanting sunlight lit graffiti and bricked-up windows, pigeons on sills and white smears of shit from storey to storey. A gas station was on the corner. He went in and asked the cashier for the bathroom key. The light hummed. The floor tiles were filthy. Toilet paper hung from the rim of the bowl.

  He took off his shirt and lay it on the sink and looked in the mirror. He pushed down his pants and underwear. He listened for the sound of the girl, but the reek of the bathroom was stifling. He leaned close to the mirror. His chest showed his ribs, the silky patter of his heart.

  Outside the sky refused to grow dark. He walked along Ste. Catherine’s, past the plywood on abandoned shops, the dusty entrances and cracked windows webbed together with masking tape. The downtown was crowded, raucous, cars blaring horns.

  At the church the evening Mass had yet to begin and a few people still waited for confession. He stood in the pews and looked at the saints carved in the wall. For them faith seemed a terrible thing, painful and isolating, and he wondered if they had chosen or if God was simply within them, like an affliction.

  He went to the confessional and sat. The wood on the other side of the partition creaked. Wilbrod spoke the usual words. Stale cigarette smoke and the scent of varnish was suddenly nauseating. Wilbrod began to repeat himself, and François threw back the curtain. He ran outside the church and stood, trembling, slugging breaths in the cool air. He found Ernestine’s address and the money in his pocket. The sun had set. Wind blew up from the distant river and rustled the leaves of sidewalk trees. Old people were out for the last walk of the day.

  Québec–Ontario–Manitoba–

  Saskatchewan–Alberta–British Columbia

  1977–1981

  By twenty François was still small, with the sparse whiskers of a Chinese and the unrelenting hair of a Greek. He’d long ago given up being an altar boy, and when he’d told his grandmother, she hadn’t replied. The petrification that eventually reached her heart had already done in her brain. On occasion her eyes blazed and she ranted that the Church was no longer vigilant. Les jeunes curés d’aujourd’hui, she said bitterly as if he were one. But this was the habit of anger. She didn’t notice his absences, and he had no way of mentioning an amorous interest four years in the
making, his first love, that pigeon-chested prostitute named Ernestine. Then his grandmother succumbed, and the century raced past with him on its back. He sold the family Bible to an antique store for two dollars.

  His first night with Ernestine he’d explained that nothing was as he’d believed—there’d never been a great family, a shining father—the body was more powerful than any flimsy soul. He spoke of a profound confusion, a force within him. In no great act of genius she, being more intuitive than verbal, let drop her chintzy bathrobe. Her nipples were large for her breasts, and her underwear sagged, taken off and put on a little too often. In this way the years passed.

  After his grandmother’s death he began living with Ernestine. By then he knew the good life of a guinea pig and was bored perhaps only of nighttime walks, evenings alone. Was it wrong that men took cheap pleasure, Ernestine nothing to advertise, neither ardent Asian nor buxom black nor svelte Russian import, but homegrown, la pute générique? Should it bother him that he was a lab rat though it was an easy life? At best he sipped pop, commented on tanginess and effervescence, took a guess at popular brands. But the money was in the at-worst category, washing down pills with beer, headaches and belching, horrible howling gas that had Ernestine out of bed lighting candles. He ate protein mixes and rode exercise bikes while men in lab coats took muscle samples from his anaesthetized thigh. Once, because of a side effect, he stopped urinating for a week. He would have the urge but would stand above the toilet unavailed. When he asked the scientist running the project, Where does it go? the man shrugged and said, The miracles of the human body, the miracles of science, and almost seemed happy.

  Back in the street, bleary eyed, François treated himself to a hot dog. The sun was casting shadows, his home now a place of business.

  Those years Ernestine warned François that she was a broken article, that he was made for better, to which he disagreed. He’d never gone back to church. Now it was the other stories that he recalled, the ones that hadn’t jived with his grandmother’s religion—fighters and soldiers. Was there any of that heroic Hervé blood in him after all? Was the name his even if it hadn’t been for those first six muddled but prismatic years? He recalled prairie wind, sunlight that opened outward from the clouds with the power of geologic upheaval. Montréal wanted to inject him with the questions of the age. He and Ernestine would be of value only so long as their bodies held up. When the Olympics had come into town, business had boomed, and since then the stadium provided rich hunting grounds, always a lonely drunk staggering out with the crowds. When François could finally go home, Ernestine was asleep, chaffed thighs to the air, smelling of antiseptic.

  They managed to live in the afternoon, picnics at the park, telling the same stories, her memories of up north, his of out west, as if they were children. He welcomed his medication-induced fevers so she’d have to take a night off and coddle him. Dorloter, she said, j’va dorloter mon tit bébé. She tidied up, burned cheap incense, read from trashy romances and sometimes, sick even, his blood ran hot and she made the only sounds of love her neighbours would hear.

  Eventually he started wondering about her clients. He didn’t know why. It ate him up. He’d be with a nurse after taking a pill, and she’d say, Well, I don’t know if it’s you or the medication, but you’ve got blood pressure through the roof. He’d lie, Non, pas moi. He’d return home at five in the morning and, with trembling hands, take Ernestine’s shoulders. Smelling like a gym though fresh from the shower, she would let him repossess her until she gave in, bucking and pulling at his hair. She wept like a little girl, retroussé nose puffy. Je t’aime, she told him, stroking his neck. He wanted to tear down the black drapes, spill the apartment into the street. Traffic carried past, horns and air brakes and the rumble of cargo. Exhausted after a night watching the emptying street from the plastic counter of a hamburger shack, he listened to the day begin. That was it. The world expanding its sound and light without them.

  Finally he told her everything had to change. No more clients, no more experiments. They’d go out west before it was too late. He described the prairie sunsets. But when he returned the next morning it had all been done. The drapes torn and heaped, the puny furnishings kicked into piles, and a note: François, tu es trop bon. Je ne t’aime pas. Au revoir.

  He cleaned and rehung the drapes and set the tin tea set back on the paisley bandana. He returned the romance novels to a shelf as rickety as a spice rack. He slept now in what he’d hated. He couldn’t look at it enough, couldn’t turn in the bed too many times. Her hand mirror pooled what light slipped past the curtains. From upstairs the sound of people rising for work came through the vents. The city, as he’d seen it so often, suspended in morning light, held millions of rooms like this one, sleeping, dreaming bodies oblivious to each other, so numerous that perhaps God couldn’t touch them all, like the prairie sun at dusk on the reaching grass, each blade lost in the shadow of another.

  He left before the rent was due. He hitchhiked, and with each mile he felt himself expanding, taking in rivers and mountains. On his nightly walks he’d talked to hippies and understood how they wanted it, sleeping, eating and making love, smoking weed. Their confidence awed him, a power assumed, an astral alignment that permitted casual living. He imagined that out there, on the boundless Canadian earth, there was a place for him.

  His longest ride was with a trucker who shared coffee and sandwiches and who confessed, during the hourless night, that he liked to dress up as a woman and hang around at rest stops. Abba was on the radio, the pleasure at the world’s kindness streaking like headlights within them.

  By Toronto, François was low on money. He took a damp room in a boarding house and worked all winter and through the next summer washing dishes and subsisting on leftovers and practising his English on the line cooks. He was miserable, lonely. He shovelled snow on the side, saving every penny. He tried not to think of Ernestine and kept his spirits up by dreaming.

  After a year and a half, he had enough to buy an old green Ford. It came with a wooden camper, and just seeing it he thought of how the tortoise must feel with its home on its back. Spring had finally arrived, and he was off again, west, rains blowing up into the electrical system, making the truck sputter, though the heaving engine dried within its own heat. Crossing into Manitoba, he thought of his grandmother on foot. He imagined her ghost within the landscape, the strength of her wandering a slow motion against eternity.

  Those next weeks he travelled with a sense of intention. Every day seemed a revelation. Slight bumps in the highway radiated through the seat in a gentle coasting motion. The western sky sopped and drained in an endless dye bath beyond the edge of the earth. The smell of fields and grass, the wind and rattle of the pickup had an old-fashioned feeling, like a hayride. Evenings, he parked on overgrown farm roads, mullein sprouting hugely from the dry husks of the previous year. The truck tires crushed wild chamomile, and he sat in the dark, breathing the perfumed air.

  At times, as he meandered west, he stopped on the side of the highway and walked into the budding fields and stood, squinting in the flashing sunlight. He tried to sense that absence of consequence before his grandmother had arrived with her primitive head. In nature, he’d thought he would always be back where he’d started, but money was running low and he was realizing that there was nothing to return to. It seemed obvious now, but the emotion of finding what he’d lost had been so strong for so long that he’d never considered what he would do here. How long could he wander the prairies? The world seemed to be asking what he was, the farmers with their lead gazes, the squinting cowhands. A few hippies were hitchhiking west, going to B.C. They talked of paradise, El Dorado. They grinned and asked where he was heading.

  But three weeks later, though it felt sudden, he wandered too far and reached the mountains. He camped on the shores of lakes and rivers. Sitting alone, he felt erased, the truth of this measureless earth and stone pouring like light into his eyes until there was no room left in his hea
d for himself. He searched for another truth, for one that might include him, but in the end, the only other that he found was money. His truck engine stopped with the thundering of hot steel. Smoke issued from every panel. He lingered awhile, then set off for help. Walking a mountain road, he looked up from the kicking, battered cuffs of his jeans. He saw the vantage of himself from the sky, a diminishing speck between rocks and cliffs and trees. He hardly had a penny to his name.

  The next week he slept in a few odd places, tried to make deals with mechanics in towns occasioned by two roads slipping past each other. A man took pity and gave François a lift. But either one lonely valley lane was identical to a thousand others or his truck had vanished. The scenery came in wave upon wave until the sound of shifting gears emanated from their bones. At last, François thanked the man. He opened the door and put his boots on the broken asphalt. He started walking in a direction that turned out to be west.

  The first job he found was in a valley near Mission, an hour from Vancouver. An elderly Polish couple needed help bucking hay and clearing drainage ditches. They gave him twenty dollars for a day’s work and let him live in a damp cabin on the back of their farm. Summer had ripened the sun to golden, and it seemed he’d found paradise at last. But at night he came awake, heart thudding, sweat dampening his chest though he couldn’t recall any dream or sound.

  He pulled on his jeans and walked from the cabin into the dew-soaked grass. He entered the woods overhanging the stream. Tree frogs croaked in the darkness. Something harmless rattled across last year’s leaves, a muskrat or groundhog, sounding enormous. The sky deepened and revolved as he stared upward and swayed and breathed the cold air that poured off the stream, hardly existing, trees cast up against stars. He felt numb, detached, alone, without purpose. He told himself that he should just let things be, that he should work and find peace in nature.