by Tony Burgess
“Are you kidding me? The three-foot catfish is a common creature. OK. So Mr. Whiskers is cruising along in the dark. He goes along, and you know what he’s doin’?”
Kathy has finished her fries and is now using the empty box as an ashtray. She rolls the burning tip of her cigarette along the carton’s top and when she lifts it to take a drag, she notices ketchup sizzling in the ember. She blows on it and heat brightens around a black splotch.
“He’s sniffin’. Smellin’ the water. And he’s on to something. Pickin’ up some odour. But it’s a wide river, with lots of current, so how’s he gonna zero in on it?”
Kathy’s cigarette is now stained pink with ketchup and the stickiness and smell of week-old garbage in her hand is making her feel squalid. She drops the smoke into the box and lobs it up into a tree behind them.
“Hey, zero, didya get any napkins?”
“No. C’mon. Listen to me, this is cool. Use my pants, here.”
Kathy flips her hands back and forth on his thigh.
“Don’t pop a fuckin’ boner, you pathetic loser.”
“Yeah, yeah. So there he is, Mr. Torpedo, coming up to midnight and he’s slidin’ along under the full moon, head like a gravedigger’s shovel and he goes …”
Jack leans over and sniffs the air above Kathy’s crossed legs. She shoves him back by the shoulders.
“Fuck off!”
“OK. So he’s got the scent and he slurps along, noticing first that the scent is tingling most on his left barbels, so he scoots up in that direction and then the tingle crawls across to the other side of his face and he curves back around. Ya see he’s doin’ this S pattern up the river. Until, bang! He’s nudging dinner and he hasn’t even opened his eyes. It’s so cool.”
Kathy knits her face and twists up a half smile.
“No it’s not.”
“Well, this is what I’m thinkin’. When the cops are dragging the river for a body, right? They just put a leash on ole Mr. Whiskers. See? And they click on the fishfinder and go snaking up river until they reach the cat nibblin’ on some floater’s earlobe. Cool, huh? The catfish unit. Tonight on Real TV.”
Kathy laughs and pushes three fingers against his knee until they bend backward. The affectionate gesture causes him to go quiet, to sink.
“Well, I’m beginning to wonder if the Mayor himself isn’t a few barbels short of a trip home.”
★
As the evening grows toward dawn, the Mayor remains at large. Jack and Kathy fall asleep against each other in the long, tall grass. The sun eventually rises on the front of the weed-strangled house and a figure becomes visible in the front window. Its face is dark crimson and grinning with sharp blue teeth. The eyes glow yellow and the pupils race in manic circles until the creature reaches up and pokes two long black nails into the foaming balls. Its smile, menacing and sharp, drops to a purse as it flicks its eyeballs against the window. They meet the surface and penetrate it, exploding into the wild garden as a luminous dotted line drifts over the sleeping couple and falls on their bodies. It lands as icy wet slugs.
So strange. This happens; and, now that it has, it cannot be recalled.
When spaceships visit the earth, and they do — every goddamn day that you draw your goddamned breath — they do not come as saucers with low, heavy bellies. And they do not roll across the clouds like fat cigars. No, they come by accident, slicing their edges into the earth — their pilots reaching up and back, screaming for help.
So, as a pair of purple antennae wave and joust with the long black hair of Kathy’s leg — as a slug drags its humped back against the threads that stray from her cut-off jeans — she feels it in her sleep and swats.
The slug puckers its belly over Kathy’s thumb and hangs resting, content and safe.
FIVE
“I can’t! I can’t! Go away!”
The Treasurer braces the car window closed with flat hands that drive upward. The pull at the tips of her fingers pushes her nails against the glass surface. One of them pops off, striking her on the eyelid.
“Oh no! Oh God, no! Leave me alone! Go away!”
Her voice is hoarse with screaming. The Mayor steps back from the car and lowers his open hands, slowly.
“Marion, you don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to, OK? I just want to ask you something.”
Marion picks the nail from her lap and uses it to scratch the dried glue on her fingertip. She ignores the man standing beside the car.
“Marion, please.”
Marion throws her head back, bouncing it off the padded rest. She gyrates against the padding as she lowers the window.
“OK. What do you want, Robert?”
“Christ, Marion, what’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me that! Just ask me your goddamn question!”
“Well, why don’t you come inside. You gotta chair the meeting, Marion.”
“OK, Robert, I’m gonna roll this window up again, you son of a bitch.”
“Alright, Marion, I need the list of contractors. Names for this water sewage proposal, that’s all.”
Marion suddenly rolls over in her seat and begins to crawl into the back. The Mayor steps away as her large navy blue bum lands against the door. She spins over once again to a sitting position. A black leather case is passed through the open window.
“Here’s everything, Robert. I’m not goin’ in there. I can’t talk to anyone right now.”
“OK, Marion, no problem, I’ll take care of this. But, can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“No, I can’t, for Christ’s sake. I’m just not feelin’ well.”
“Marion, listen. Why don’t you just go home and I’ll call ya later, see how you’re doing? How’s that sound?”
The window is already closing, forcing the Mayor to pull his hand away. Marion stops it an inch from the top and cranes her head to the opening.
“I can’t go home, Robert.”
The car rolls away slowly. It heads to the far end of the parking lot, and stops in the shade of an oak tree. The Mayor watches Marion sitting, not moving, looking terribly lonely and desperate in the dark shadow of the driver’s seat. He turns and walks toward the town hall.
“Crazy old woman. God help her.”
Just inside the front foyer is the women’s washroom; the men’s is up the stairs. The Mayor begins the climb, and at the second landing he hears the door open. He turns, hoping, and a bit frightened, that Marion has decided to come in after all.
“Oh, hi Brian.”
“Hi, Rob. Go on up. I gotta talk to ya up there.”
At the urinal Brian looks away from the Mayor. He will not talk until they have finished. The Mayor has the strange habit of standing two feet back from the urinal to piss, pointing his big, brown penis up, sending a stream under the top collar of the receptacle. Brian finishes and waits for the Mayor, closing his eyes, anxious that the urine stream doesn’t jump over its target and splatter all over both their suits.
“OK, now, have you been in touch with any of the contractors, Robert?”
“Gee, no, Brian.”
“Were you going to?”
“Ummm, maybe I was …”
“Maybe. Maybe? Were you, or weren’t you, gonna contact them?”
“I gotta say I was thinking about it.”
“You were?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“So you were thinking, were ya?”
“Yeah, I was thinking.”
“Well, don’t.”
“OK.”
“You know what, I’ll tell ya something. These bastards are tough and they’re mean. They don’t do things like you do. They’re very physical.”
“Christ, Brian, I wasn’t gonna get physical with them, I was just gonna see …”
Brian grabs the Mayor by the upp
er arm and pushes him slowly until he is pressed against the tiles.
“OK, I’m tellin ya. I don’t want you talking to any of them. And I want you to tell the council today that for the time being everything is going forward and all discussion is closed. OK?”
“Sure, Brian, sure …”
“Good, ’cause if you fuck this up, I’m gonna have to beat the shit out of you again, got it?”
The Mayor attempts to walk towards the sink. Robert’s embarrassed because Brian won’t allow him to move. Brian releases the Mayor’s arm, then asks:
“Oh yeah, one other thing. I was wondering if everything’s going smoothly with that island deal?”
The Mayor turns on the tap and tries to grab the column of hot water in the seconds before it’s automatically shut off. He scalds his fingertips and tosses the burning drops up to his face.
“Uh, far as I know. That’s a done deal anyway, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is. Just that I been getting some weird fuckin’ email from some outfit in the States, bunch of goddamn dykes or something. As a far as I can tell they seem to know something about our island. I looked at the forward addresses and I saw that Kathy Barrette’s name. She ever say anything to you?”
The Mayor walks over to the hand dryer and slaps the large round button.
“Uh, in fact, yeah. She doesn’t want it to go through. She stopped me yesterday and said something about the sewage problem there.”
“Right. I fuckin’ thought so. I went around to your place last night, looking for ya. Did you know that at about eight o’clock there were two people hidin’ out in that crazy fuckin’ lawn of yours?”
“Yeah, I … Well, no, I didn’t.”
“Well, there was. And I think it might have been that Barrette woman and her sidekick, the fuckin’ loser, whatshisname.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I think I better make contact with that girl. And, Robert?”
“Yeah, Brian?”
“Where the fuck were you last night?”
The Mayor pushes down on his hips, stretching his back, unable to answer. The Deputy rolls his eyes and looks away. He sees a dark ring of dirt in the sink the Mayor has washed his hands in. On the floor beneath the sink are three dusty cattails.
They fell out of his pant cuffs.
★
The season is beginning to flash in highlights across Ontario. Dark green clouds burr at the limits of black fields, meringue is piled in wasteholes that spin slowly in midair, and the summer’s inimitable signature, the lightning bolt, twists up out of rough cornstalks. As usual the atmosphere is both arresting and plural, a question of curtains. Even the sky, that distant travelling companion, is still around; it’s up there, in a tight hatching of blue thread.
Here in Caesarea there is a secret. It’s the secret of how minds are made up.
You can think for yourself, of course, but if Caesarea were to ever discover you doing this, then we would not even remember what we’ve shared. There would be no time. You would only have seconds, glancing up as the sky calls down to you: “Here I come!”
And then?
Then, a long serrated spoon comes down across your brow.
SIX
The small town of Caesarea consists of an arrangement of garden boxes and cottages collected on a hillside lush with willow and maple. Everything drops dramatically into a deep lake.
The colour of this lake is complex. Its blue appears as Braille when wind brushes the sky across the water. Its heart is a delicate shimmer of various focal depths. The surface is very nearly black, except for a reflective fire of copper and candlelight. The area just beneath the water, where daylight holds to the smooth pale ledge, is the roomy, magnifying colour of cold. Its easy to picture moving peacefully from tall room to tall room. There is a whisper down here, a series of wet phrases: “Do not move. Close to you, too close, is the place where you vanished.”
Further down are the dark colours of Cuba, charred and fertile shapes which drain the light away. And when the focal depths separate, only for a second and only by accident, the deep mines of sienna flash away from the floor of the lake and the bottom is a wild and limitless chasm. The rubber of eternity bends the walls of your stomach.
Seated on a tall rock at the edge of the lake is a young man scratching with a pen on a pad of paper. He is the beautiful poet of the lake. With a white, narrow jaw and ink black hair, his cheeks scooped out by glaciers, he is as complex as the sunlight dispersed around him. He lifts the pen from the page.
“Rubber of eternity? The rubber of eternity. Rubber, hmmm. Rubber cement. Rubber … the robber.”
He hears the quiet bounce of water under the edge of his rock and he hears it as “rubber, robber, rubber, robber.” Then, as the wind flips the vowels across the top of the water, he hears “ribber, ribber, ribber, ribber.” He looks over at a smooth curling current where the river falls into the lake, a ghost haunting it, invisible and everywhere. He says, “The ribber flows,” and he sighs.
The poet’s younger brother appears from behind a tree. He is wearing bright yellow swimming trunks and is carefully placing one bare foot after the other as he negotiates the steep rock. His thin, naked arms spike out from his shoulders as he juggles with gravity.
“Hey, fagissimo!”
The word is sharp, and the poet doesn’t like it. He has been suspecting, lately, that he may be homosexual. The fact that he can’t get women off his mind is unimportant, overshadowed by the lively, tragic mood that he is cultivating — that must be a sign of his other heart, his gay brain.
“Fagissimo! Look out!”
His brother bounds past him and springs off the rock. His skinny body breaks toward the sky, hangs for a second, then slips like a knife through the clear water. He is perfectly visible, slightly larger beneath the surface, and he soars along and then skims up, outward. The poet pictures himself scooping his brother from the water, holding his shivering body, and kissing him deeply on the mouth.
“Hey, fagissimo, come on in!”
The poet draws a long line down the page, a sensual line, an attenuated S that bends up at the bottom — the sprung line of his own flesh and blood.
“I CAN’T.”
The poet hears the word like this, italicized, in tall caps, without the apostrophe. Not truncated, but another word. He turns his head away. Oh God, the word “cant,” the beveled earth, a slippery fashion. Pronounced with the longer vowel, the name, Kant. He looks up, and yes, broken off a leaf, a browned tip is airborne: the apostrophe swung back and low. I, Kant. He goes to record this phenomenon, smiling. And when he writes he writes the phrase “I can’t,” and feels the ruthless persistence of words, the brutal lyre strung through his heart, he stabs the page with the pen.
“Fagissimo! Fagissimo!”
The brother has pulled himself up onto a ledge coming out from the underside of the poet’s rock. The poet slams down his pad.
“Thomas (do)nt call me that, you k(now) /eye/ (do)nt l/eye/k it. m/eye/ name is K/eye/l.”
Thomas is making his way up the rock, back in the air, and four long limbs grappling.
“What?”
“No(thing).”
“You’re a freak. Hey, let’s play rock sculpture.”
Rock sculpture was a game that Kyle had begun by himself, when the writing wouldn’t come. He would crawl to the water’s edge, where glaciers had deposited hundreds of white oblong stones. He lifted the stones out and attempted to stand them in precarious balance on the larger rock. He found this an absorbing pastime. Once, when he had dozens of these smooth bright stones sitting up across the rough green back of his rock, like a strange city of cocoons, little Thomas burst on the scene. Kyle flailed across the rock, mortified, knocking over stones with foot and hand, trying desperately, nearly in tears, to find the domino effect that would end h
is embarrassment. Much to his surprise Thomas was completely taken by the visual effect of these stones standing on their ends like eerie blobs, and he said to his brother, “Wow, cool. Can I play?”
It was the only time Thomas ever looked up to his big brother as an artist, and together they set up the tower again, this time arranging the big rocks so that they could be toppled with a single initiating stone. Kyle hoped that the cascade would erase the awful visual evidence of his emerging gay brain.
Now Kyle watches as his brother bends down into the water. The boy doesn’t appear as sexual any more. He heaves four long stones up behind him and Kyle leans down and grabs the closest one, swinging it up and dropping it on its round end. He rolls the stone over, inspecting it for a viable face. He is not aware that they are being observed from behind the bushes. Brian Hellgate, Deputy Mayor, is assessing this piece of property as a location for two short films he wants to make. One would be geared towards developers and the other, a public relations film, would brag about the pristine condition of the land and water. He steps out from the trees.
“Hey there.”
Without looking back Thomas tips a stone and sends a quick clicking of small towers tumbling over and down into the water.
“This ain’t a playground here, y’know.”
Kyle shivers at this and feels a burning shame fall forward. His mouth dries and a fever creeps up his cheeks.
“Yeah, Christ, what are you doin’?”
Thomas stands, lifts a stone, and lobs it into the air over the water. He spins around and faces the man.
“Fuck off, Fagissimo!”
Brian staggers back, pulling on a branch.
“Awright sonny boy, awright.”
Brian leaps toward the boys, but before he can reach them Thomas has disappeared beneath the water. Kyle has crumpled and begun to cry. He hears the loud bonk as the Deputy Mayor falls beside him, bouncing his forehead off the rock.
“Awww! Ah shit! You little pecker!”
Brian dabs his fingers in the blood on his brow and looks over to the boy cowering beside him. Not a boy. He swings a hand out and slaps his thigh hard.