The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She’s a neighbour of yours, Michael, believe it or not. You don’t go to the New Wave His and Hers Hairstyling Salon in Churchill Square, by any chance, do you?” He smirked at my hair. “No…I guess not. Well, she works in there, been there for years.”

  We were silent, considering the implications of all this.

  “She sounds pretty sweet, I have to say, innocent-like,” Hubert said, “though she’s forty years old, and a single mom. ‘Call me Ray,’ she said to me. ‘That might get a bit confusing, honey,’ I said, and I told her about her darling twin. I told her there were three of us, and she wants to meet us all. So…what do you think, b’ys? Would you like to meet her?”

  “How did she get hold of you?” I asked.

  “Well, you’re not in the phone book, are you—you’re conveniently unlisted—and he’s on the other side of the country.”

  Hubert had always regarded the unlisting of my telephone number as some sort of elitist, anti-social act, rather than an attempt, not altogether successful, to avoid the ever-increasing number of commercial solicitations.

  “When Raylene finally got the old man’s name out of her mother,” he explained, “she was going to call every Lowe in the book. There’s no more than a dozen, so it wouldn’t have been too hard. But she got lucky on the fist try. The week she won a hundred dollars in the lottery, she said, she put all the names and numbers in a hat, and picked out mine. Luckily, mother doesn’t have an extension in the basement apartment. I know she already knows about the woman—the women—but she doesn’t need any reminders about that. And she doesn’t know about any child.”

  “I don’t know,” Raymond said indifferently. “It’s not for me, I don’t think. What’s the point?”

  “What about you, Michael?” Hubert said.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I said.

  “Of course, of course. The unlisted thinker will have to retire to his study and…What’s wrong with the two of you, anyway? Never a clear yes or no. Well, no yes’s equals two no’s in my book, and mine makes three. It’s unanimous. That’s the decision. We keep our distance. I don’t want Raylene turning up at the house—I’m not unlisted. Mother’s seventy-nine years old, and she’d be really upset if she got wind of this. We don’t want to stir up all that shit again.”

  Big brother, charmer of a bully that he was, always ready for a fight, though caring in his own carefree way, seemed just as irritated by the fact that his premeditated resolve was wasted in the face of our indifference as he was by the unexpected intrusion of Raylene. But no one had anything else to say, and we were content, perhaps even eager, to leave and let the matter drop for now.

  When I left, I walked down the stairs and found myself exiting the building at the back, facing an old neighbourhood whose residents had their view of the hills and the harbour blocked by the glass tower that had risen up in their midst. All they could see from their windows, decks, and gardens was a reflecting wall of opaque, blue-tinted glass in which the wavering images of their houses floated before their eyes like ghostly, Dali-like shapes rising out of the painful memories of the resettled Newfoundlanders depicted in the photographs upstairs, those who had floated their own houses across various bays, bights, arms, sounds, and tickles in the dark days of resettlement more than a generation ago. The residents of this neighbourhood had not been forcibly evicted like their fellow Newfoundlanders in the outports, their houses and land had not been expropriated like the properties of some of their fellow Townies in the core of the downtown—residents of Brazil Square, Burke’s Square, and the appropriately named Kickham Place—but they still must have been emotionally unsettled by it all, as anyone would be witnessing a small skyscraper going up in their backyard.

  I walked down King’s Bridge Road to Rennie’s River and then up the river trail toward Portugal Cove Road. A light, dry, powdery sort of snow—perhaps the snowgrains that had been forecast earlier—was being blown about by a strong wind gusting down the valley. When I reached the crosswalk at Portugal Cove Road, who should be driving down over the hill but Hubert himself, at high speed. Holding his cellphone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, he was obviously on his way straight through the crosswalk, but came skidding to a halt when he saw me standing at the curb. He peered out through the windshield of a big silver-blue car that I hadn’t seen before. Several other cars slid to a stop behind him. The window on my side rolled down automatically, and he gestured to me to get in. I really wanted to keep on walking, but he was holding up traffic, so I pulled open the heavy door and fell into a well of a bucket seat. I was glad that Anton wasn’t walking home with me.

  A jogger, a woman in black leotards, appeared suddenly at the crosswalk on the other side of the street, her large breasts bobbing as she treaded pavement and waited for a car coming toward us to stop.

  “Jesus, will you look at that,” Hubert said, as she glided past the windshield. “Now wouldn’t you like to trace her circuits.”

  He drove on. His cellphone rang. “Hello,” he shouted. “Yeah…around four-thirty or so. Yeah…yeah…that should be all right. Okay, okay.

  “That was Gert,” he said. “I’m picking her up at the mall.”

  “What’s this you’re driving?” I asked after he put down the phone.

  “What’s this I’m driving,” he repeated flatly, stressing every word. “Michael, you’re too much. You are probably the only person in Newfoundland…in Canada…in the world…who doesn’t recognize a Volvo. I bet you don’t even know what you’re driving. This is the best car on the road. The safest car on the road. They don’t call it a tank for nothing. I’ve had accidents in this thing that I haven’t found out about for weeks afterwards. What are you driving, anyway?”

  “A Toyota Tercel,” I said. “The one Elaine left behind. She didn’t want to drive anymore.”

  “Jesus, get rid of it. You can’t keep rotors on the thing. Drilled rotors, they have on it, prone to cracking, probably made with cheap cast iron to boot. Pardon me…I see I’ve lost you. Brakes, b’y. I’m talkin’ about brakes. We had a Toyota as a second car, a leaser that had been turned in after only three years. We had the rotors replaced three times in the next three years. They wouldn’t admit the things were faulty. They kept telling me it must be the way Gert drives. Every time I tried to see the manager, he seemed to be out in the woods moose hunting, like that judge you once told me about who spent more time grouse hunting than on the bench. But one day I was in there just for a service check, and he came out to the counter with a big smile on his face. He greeted me by name, shook my hand. I hadn’t even asked to see the bugger, but I guess I’d been grousing so much about the rotors that they alerted him to the fact that I was there. He led me into an office almost as big as the showroom. There were two moose heads with antlers on the walls, and between them was a big framed photograph of him in the woods, standing with his foot cocked up on a carcass. He had the tall gangly body of a moose himself. There was another photograph of him with fake antlers on his head, sitting at a banquet table eating a huge moose steak. We sat in two big sofa chairs with a table and lamp between them, not looking at each other, but out through the window at all the shiny new cars on the lot. And do you know what he did? Do you know what that bull-shooting, bullshitting old fucker did?”

  “Offered to take you bull shooting,” I said.

  “Close. He tried to pawn me off with a hunting knife. After I told him my sob story—three rotor replacements in three years, all of which I had to pay for myself—the slimy old bastard went to a safe that was hidden behind the photo of him with antlers on his head and took out a brown leather knife case with a big belt loop. He sat down again and handed it to me. Inside the case was a knife big enough to kill a moose. ‘Sorry for your trouble,’ he said.

  “Perhaps it was an expensive item, I don’t know. Perhaps it had a gold h
andle, a silver blade. I don’t know, I didn’t look. I felt so goddamn insulted, I didn’t care. ‘Toyota, It’s More Than Just a Car’ was stamped in red on the case—or perhaps that was just the colour I was seeing. ‘Goddamn right,’ I said. ‘It’s just a goddamn nuisance.’ And I threw the knife on the floor and walked out the door. So take my advice and get rid of that car.”

  “I hardly use it,” I said. “I’d rather walk.”

  “Well, you’re able to walk where you’re living. I got to get back and forth to Mount Pearl. We may be moving into town, all the same. The traffic’s getting worse every day. You remember when that bunch o’ hippies tried to stop the Arterial Road? Jesus…sure I’d only be gettin’ to work at lunchtime if I still had to drive in Topsail Road. It’s just one long string of stores from Mount Pearl to St. John’s. And now they’re at it again…trying to stop the Outer Ring Road, which is going to connect the tch with the East End. Everyone seems to want to live there, in spite of the fog. We may move out there ourselves, if they ever finish the road.”

  “But it’s going right through Pippy Park,” I said.

  “Most of that is not park, Michael. It’s just woods…and a great big friggin’ hill. The rest is bogland…swamp. People got to get back and forth to work. Cars have to be able to move. If they get jammed up, they burn a lot of gas. It’s bad for the environment.”

  “Maybe people should get out of their cars,” I said, repeating Anton’s mantra.

  “They don’t want to get out of their cars, Michael. It’s too friggin’ cold. This is iceland, without the name. You don’t mind walking around in the ice and snow, but most people do. That’s another reason we’re thinking of leaving Mount Pearl. It’s too bloody high and windy out there, and we get twice as much snow as anyone else. Nothing so far this winter, though. Haven’t even pressed my Winter Button yet. You see this button here? One touch and I’m ready for winter. Now that’s technology for you. Don’t know exactly what it does, but after it’s pressed the car grips the road like a tractor.”

  “What about carpooling, buses, public transportation?” I persisted.

  “That’s communism, Michael. Haven’t you heard? That world is dead and gone. People want their own cars, they want cellphones, laptops, home theatre, big-screen TVs. The playoffs are on for three months now. You get bleary-eyed watching a piddly little TV.”

  Not having seen a hockey game in all of thirty years, I’d forgotten that Hubert used to be a hockey player, and a good one at that, a defenceman in the St. John’s senior league who’d been on many Boyle Trophy–winning teams. He used to mesmerize opposing forwards with unexpected pirouettes in the corners. Though he was not a goal scorer, he was always the best skater on the team.

  “Besides,” he added, “we got television ten years later than everyone else. That’s why we watch more than the rest of the country. We’re just trying to catch up. And how come you’re so friggin’ concerned all of a sudden? You’ve had your head buried in books all your life. Soon you’ll be up on the Ring Road with a placard. Is it that Dutchman who’s got you all stirred up?”

  “Well, I think he’s right about a lot of things that—”

  “Jesus, Michael, who’s got the fuckin’ time? Michael, Michael, Michael…where have you been? I know you’re up in an ivory tower but…take a look at the view. This is the Third World, for Chrissake. Tell him that, will you. Tell him this is the fuckin’ Third World. Now that we got a drop of oil on the go, and we might get unemployment down to 10 percent, are we s’posed to leave it in the ground—in the seabed—just because his country is gettin’ wet, is goin’ back under the ocean where it came from in the first place? Reclaimed, wasn’t it? Well, the ocean’s claiming it back. It’s just a natural cycle, the water cycle. Whoa!”

  He stepped on the brake and we skidded sideways. We were on the Parkway and a car had skipped into our lane without warning.

  “It’s startin’ to get a bit greasy,” he said nonchalantly. “Maybe I’ll press that Winter Button right now.” He let out a big laugh, a har-har-har.

  “Okay…watch this…here we go. There…you feel that? Like we were sort of floating before, and now we’re more…like…hugging the road.”

  “Hmmfff,” I sniffed.

  “Ah, what odds, Michael. As the old man used to say, you’re not mechanically inclined. But, hey, you were only four or five at the time. Is it okay if I drop you off right here?”

  “Actually, I think I’m going to do some work at home. But this is fine, I can walk from here.”

  “Yeah, good for the environment. Moochin’, eh?”

  “What about you?”

  He let out his hearty har-har again.

  “Ah, Michael, we’re livin’ off the fat o’ the land, the fat o’ the land, my son, the fat of the land. Who cares, anyway. It’s Christmas.”

  “It’s still November,” I said, “and I thought you didn’t celebrate Christmas.”

  “Well, I’m still a back-pew Christian, I suppose. We all need an ace-in-the-hole…and it gives me some time off. You have to love the whole fairy-tale idea of it, don’t you? Better than anything dreamed up by the Grimms. Putting all our hope in an innocent little babe come to redeem us. But we’re fucking unredeemable, Michael. Even you know that.”

  I was holding open the car door. “I guess the kids will be home for Christmas?” I said.

  “They will, they will, and they’d love to see you. Come out and I’ll show you Santa’s workshop. I’ll turn you out a bowl or two.”

  “I’ll give you a call,” I said. “Say hello to Gert for me.”

  “I will,” he said, and he raised his hand and was gone.

  13. THE BONES OF THE SNOWMAN

  Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?

  —Book of Job

  I was surprised to find myself thinking about half-sister Raylene quite a bit over the next few days, and the thought that came to me most often, procrastinator that I am, was that if I didn’t contact her very soon I would never bother to contact her at all. It would be permanently put off, like the summer house by the sea that I’d always wanted to buy but had never bought, or the countless other things that I’d planned to do but had never done, faded flags or weathered windsocks in memory’s vacuum now, at half-mast and limp with regret; but perhaps they had always hung over this airless, landlocked realm of hesitation and indecision—my own private emotional domain—the cause of which it was hard to say.

  Not that I really wanted to meet Raylene—I leaned more toward Raymond’s immediate instinctive response—but I was curious. I was beginning to understand Anton’s reluctance to go in search of his father, to put it off for as long as possible, perhaps put it off for good. To have lived thirty, forty, or fifty years without someone, even ten or twenty years—and not even someone you’d once known and loved but someone you’d never met, family ties, bonds of blood, notwithstanding—well, as Raymond had succinctly put it: what’s the point? What’s the point of meeting this someone, this anyone, this stranger, be it brother, son, father, half-sister, or birth mother? No point, or not much point, as far as I could see. A darkive of absence and silence—and what emotional deposits had been left in there?

  But Raylene, of course, was way out on the emotional perimeter, had been totally unaware of my existence, as I had been of hers. I was not the lost father, the birth mother, or the abandoned child. So my curiosity was not fraught with any kind of anxiety. Still, it felt strange to share a father with a stranger, even a father who had been a complete stranger to me. I considered various approaches, from the straightforward—simply phoning her up and introducing myself and asking her to join me for a coffee in the Square some day after work—to the complicated and devious.

  I considered just having a look at her, anonymously, to see what, or who, she looked like, going into New Wave His and Hers Hairstyling Salon for a haircut
and taking whatever opportunity presented itself to size up the hairstylists working there to see if either one of them looked familiar, like the old man, perhaps. His face was unclear in my memory, however, and I would have to dig out the old family photo album that Mother had given me many years ago and size him up. Or she might look like Raymond, Hubert, or me. New Wave was a big open space with large front windows, and you could see the hairstylists working away even as you walked by on the sidewalk. The bolder and more courageous plan, of course, was to make an actual appointment with Raylene and then surprise her with an introduction as I was sitting in the chair having my hair cut. Or have my hair cut without revealing myself at all.

  I decided to take the middle ground, my comfortable home territory: make an appointment with Raylene, but keep the surprise revelation in reserve. I called New Wave at lunchtime on a Friday, spoke to a hairstylist who may have called herself New Wave Barb—“New Wave Barb speaking”—and asked if I could make an appointment for the afternoon, hoping to ride my unusual decisiveness to the finish line that very day. I said I was a new customer, that my own hairstylist had retired, and that Raylene had been highly recommended by a friend.

  “That’s nice,” Barb said sweetly, but added, with a hint of a barb, “we have some room for new clients.”

  Luckily, however, she didn’t ask any personal questions, such as: Who is this friend? A regular client of ours, perhaps? Who was your hairstylist? Where did she work? The truth was, I didn’t have one. I had never been to a hairstyling salon, a hair-design studio, or a hairdressing solarium and spa (hair-tanning, too, perhaps?), though along with New Wave, the Hairitage Traditional Styling Salon, Hair Today, Hair Force, and Hair for You were all at my service in this part of town. I had never had my hair styled, dressed, tanned, or designed, only cut, or barbered, at Bill’s Barber Shop downtown, once or twice a year. When it reached the point where I needed to put it in a ponytail, I would reluctantly traipse downtown to have the job done.