In the quartermaster’s store.
My eyes are dim, I cannot see,
I have not brought my specs with me,
I have not brought my specs with me.
There are beans, beans, big as submarines …
There are bees, bees with little knobby knees …
The last thing that Eavan heard was Tallie’s rosary beads, wrapped around the belt loop of her jeans, clack against the wall as she swung around to open the door. This was followed by a barely audible squeak that escaped from Serafine’s lips. The walls trembled and began to crack into strange zigzagged fissures and then heaved inward in a huge tidal wave. The floor buckled under and swallowed them.
“I’m sorry, Father,” is all that Eavan can muster. This phrase, I’m sorry, appears in her conversation more and more as she tries to navigate her way through the dense fog of death and decay. Sometimes it comes at the beginning of a sentence, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end. Most of the time, though, it just hovers there, suspended, not connected to any other phrase or thought.
Father Dalcour has secured three working flashlights and sets them on a desk that had catapulted into the yard during the last aftershock. He squats down into the gloomy shafts of light and starts to tug. There is resistance, but he continues to yank at Tallie’s shoulder, and then moves in closer to grapple with her neck. The usually unflappable priest breaks into a sweat, trying to extricate her upper body from between two slabs of cement, one of which he has resourcefully jimmied up with a tire jack. Eavan does not move. She rubs her sleeve against her lenses and shudders as plumes of dust float away and bring the scene into sharper focus. Tallie’s scapula pokes upward through her skin. The lower part of her arm and the side of her face are smashed, comminuted to a fine, white porridge. During the last convulsion, six hours before, the rubble regurgitated the lower part of her body so that her legs stood straight up, as though she was in mid cartwheel. With the next quake, they became impaled on a huge shard of stained glass that had flown eastward from the church. Serafine, whose face is now visible, eyes burst open like two black bullet holes, is pinned under Tallie.
They had finished afternoon classes, and Eavan was arranging plates of food on the backyard table for the picnic. Most of the older children were lined up alongside of the confessional waiting for Father Dalcour, who was still in the garden. Antoine, a former student and now the custodian, was applying a fresh coat of lemon oil to the last row of pews. Tallie had just conducted the younger children through a recitation of the Apostle’s Creed and shooed them out into the courtyard.
“We usually do the Nicene,” Eavan insisted. “It’s what I’ve taught them.”
“Well, why would you do that? The Apostle’s is shorter.” Tallie smiled. “Who doesn’t like the occasional short cut?”
Tallie had arrived from a large parish in Boston two months into the school year and made a crash-hot impression on everyone. Everyone but Eavan. She smoked more Gitanes than an over-caffeinated French actress and moved like a whirlwind. She was startlingly clear-eyed, perpetually happy, and consumed with a light, almost diaphanous energy. Father Dalcour found her boundless energy and unconventional approach refreshing, but didn’t know what to make of her wardrobe, which consisted of an array of T-shirts with slogans that said things like “Bummer Man,” and “The more you complain, the longer God will let you live.” That day’s selection was an indigo T-shirt with a winking Buddha silk-screened in the centre. It said “Bad Karma.”
In her first week, Tallie had won over René, Antoine, and some of the older boys by kicking the soccer ball around with them after supper and allowing them to sponge a few cigarettes. She also rated high with Serafine and her friends after she loaned out her iPod, one that was loaded with American Top Forty songs and some early mizik rasin, which was apparently making a comeback. This prompted Serafine to rap something about Eavan being “too old skool” to Tallie’s “rock-star cool.”
At first, Eavan chafed at the simple fact of Tallie’s presence and how acutely aware it made her of her own personal shortcomings, namely her inability to connect with the older kids. She and Father Dalcour, both in their mid-fifties and having been at the school for over twenty years, had yet to propel themselves into the technology of the twenty-first century. Tallie arrived armed with gifts, donations of hand-held video games, several new laptops, and a few cell phones rigged with the ringtones of Jimmy O. These would often erupt during class and meal time, throwing Eavan into a tailspin and leading her to believe that she had no means to compete with any device designed for a population that now had the attention span of a lightning bolt. Although she baulked at some of Tallie’s teaching methods, like her abbreviated versions of daily prayers, her sluggishness in learning Creole, and her barely passable attempts at French, Eavan had to concede to a most important truth. From the moment she arrived, Tallie was a magnet. All of the children were drawn to her.
“Stand tall and let yourself bloom, my little flowers,” she would announce at the end of each kindergarten class. Eavan thought that the cheese factor in these little adages was high, but they never failed to inspire. As soon as Tallie delivered them, Eavan could see the smaller boys puffing out in little barrel-chested swaggers and the girls gliding around the room like little swans. Then Tallie would empty her knapsack and ply them all with dous makós.
Viens ici, mes petites fleurs became code for Candy, we are getting more candy from the new teacher. They would rush her, practically wrestling her to the ground, to get at the blocks of sweets.
The episode lasted less than a minute. It was apocalyptic. The buildings offered no struggle as they violently pancaked inward. During the first jolt, Eavan’s glasses were swept off her face and flung beyond the rattling structures. This sudden myopia provided a small pocket of relief for her as objects in the distance became distorted. She could not see the breadth of the destruction or the victims being consumed by it. She was astonished at her own agility and the precision with which she leapt forward from one swatch of rumbling earth to another, scissoring her legs as if she were jumping ice floes. Like a divining rod, she located and snatched three children into her arms at once and stumbled away from the opening recesses. She repeated this scoop-and-run technique until all of the children were safely deposited on what appeared to be the only section of level ground.
When it stopped, the silence was alarming. None of the children she rescued made a sound. There were no cries, no screams. They huddled in the corner of the yard, trembling like a dock of condemned prisoners, their small faces ossified and caked in blood, and their clothes crusted in a thick, grey silt. She plotted her way over to them, crouched down, and began to check for broken bones. Miraculously, all that she discovered were a few cuts and several small wounds.
She heard Father Dalcour yelling her name, but could not see him through the haze of skyscraping dust and debris. She followed his voice through the shadows and stumbled upon him dragging Antoine’s body from the entrance of where the apse once stood. They grabbed at several stray linen cloths that had quivered out from the ruins of the sacristy and tried to staunch his wounds. Antoine sputtered like a sprinkler and hovered in and out of consciousness. As Father Dalcour performed the last rites, Antoine bolted upright from the ground into a sitting position, looked directly into Eavan’s eyes, and whispered, “Ne désespérer pas, ma soeur,” then died.
By nightfall of that first day, the entire perimeter of the property had become an abattoir with body parts wedged between or sticking out from collapsed walls and buttresses, compressed slabs of chalky cement, and shredded wood. Everyone who had been inside of the church, the school, and the orphanage, was dead. Father Dalcour frantically circled the wreckage, draping linens and blankets over the exposed corpses so the surviving children would not have to look at them.
The next morning, as small shafts of sunlight lapped against her face, Eavan woke to the sound of stuttering gunshots coming from the streets. She
realized that she had fallen asleep standing against the back of an overturned school bus. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and remembered that her glasses were still missing. She considered this a small blessing as it prevented her from absorbing the scope of the detritus surrounding her. Father Dalcour, who she was certain had not slept at all, was sidling toward her through the carpets of debris, his vestments smothered in mud and dirt.
“I have taken inventory,” he declared, almost pleased with himself. “Eight towels, six bed sheets, and three blankets. Two broken pews. A couple of strips of tarpaulin from the garden shed, and enough food and water from the picnic to last us for several days.” He also confirmed that there was no access to the town so neither of them would be able to leave and look for help. The road in front of the church had collapsed into three large chasms that were too unstable to be traversed.
With unwavering discipline, she and Father Dalcour work into the night, successfully unearthing Tallie and Serafine. They will be buried beside Antoine. After placing both bodies on a couple of makeshift litters they had crafted from an unhinged door and a broken pew, Eavan begins to pray.
“God our Father, Your power brings us to birth, Your providence guides our lives, and by Your command we return to dust.”
She cannot continue as a fresh swell of pain resurfaces. Her glasses are so veiled with tears that she does not see Father Dalcour standing beside her.
“I know it feels that we have been forgotten, but God is always with us.” He cups her chin in a small pat of affection, then turns away to embark on some greater crusade.
Eavan weeps for a few moments, then takes a deep breath and collects herself as a small aftershock disturbs the ground momentarily. One of the flashlights, sitting on the desk, begins to flicker over the sleeping children. She looks down on Gaétan, sleeping soundly, strangely unaffected and not crippled by grief. She cleans off her glasses, places them on her nose, and settles down to watch the thready little pulse flutter in his neck.
MICHELLE WINTERS
TOUPÉE
I saw him on the subway for the first time the day I brought the meat bomb to work. He wore the most glorious toupée. It was the colour of a fox with the front curled under in a Prince Valiant thing that continued on around the sides and back of his head. It didn’t blend in whatsoever with the rest of his real hair, which was a wispy greyish brown. The toupée had a side part that didn’t so much part the hair as simply create a break in the bangs to indicate where a real part would be. The hair itself was just like a helmet or a cushion molded to his head.
We were on the same packed car and I had to stand on my toes to reach the hand strap, which gave me a better view down the train. I saw him appear when a man and a woman standing close together moved their heads to opposite edges of my field of vision, just enough to reveal him. He was reading the paper and looked genuinely happy. He was actually smiling. He didn’t look crazy or simple, only like he was having a nice time finding out the news. He wore a dark green suit from an indefinable era.
You could tell that as a young man he had been extremely handsome. Like a film star. Even though he wasn’t looking up from his paper, it was clear that he knew he was being watched. A man as handsome as he would once have been is always aware of being watched. He had all the confidence of a man with a head of lush, flowing hair all his own.
As his eyes reached the bottom of the paper and he was shaking it out to turn the page, he looked right up, directly at me, and winked.
The doors opened at my stop and I shuffled out with everybody else, looking back to see if he was still there. He wasn’t.
Nobody winks at me. People rarely look at me. Obviously, he knew about the bomb. I almost backed out of the whole thing then and there.
But then I thought about Glenn.
When I got to work that morning, I planted the bomb in the hole behind the stereo cabinet. Then I put on a pot of coffee and started peeling eight pounds of potatoes to stick in a bucket of cold water for the day. Glenn wouldn’t be in for another half hour, so I didn’t even have to sneak around. I have opened up the restaurant every morning for the past four years. To peel potatoes.
Working with Glenn makes me want to set things on fire. I hate him for employing me, I hate him for being who he is, and I hate him for imposing his flaccid proximity on me. But when I think of leaving, I don’t see another job, another boss, another life. I see only his pasty face. And it makes me hate him more.
I had found the hole in the cabinet a few weeks earlier when I was dusting. It looked like someone had kicked it or possibly termites had eaten through it. It was jagged and in a spot down by the baseboard that was impossible for Glenn to see, because it would require bending over, and he’s a million years old with a bad back. If he has to reach his fingertips further down than his knees to get something, he asks someone to get it for him. He should really be in a nursing home, or a museum, but as the owner he feels he has to be present at the restaurant as an ambassador to the clientele, who can’t stand him. Whenever he musters up the generosity to send a very weak drink to the table of some important patron and minces over to shake their hand, trying to look magnanimous, you can see the mild distaste forming on their faces as he approaches. Then his weedy handshake seals their revulsion. You don’t need to know Glenn to hate him; you only have to see him.
I had been thinking about the bomb for a while, but when I found the hole in the stereo case, I figured it must be a sign.
The thing about the stereo is that Glenn worked in radio forty years ago and feels he still has his finger on the pulse of what’s hip and hot with the kids. He pro grams the music for the evening in the restaurant, then locks up the stereo in the cupboard and takes home the key. Even though he knows we can’t get at the stereo and have to languish for the entire shift, listening to instrumental covers of the Beach Boys, he still calls in the middle of the night and demands that we hold the phone up to the speakers so he can hear for sure that the rotation hasn’t been tampered with. Everybody hates the music there. Everybody has complained to him about it and he smiles his insipid smile, nods calmly, and says, “Well, I’ll look into that.” He’ll never look into that.
The next week on my way to work, I saw the man again. This time he wasn’t reading anything; he was just sitting with his hands folded in his lap.
I was standing facing the doors, and since he was sitting sideways in his seat, he was staring right at my back. As I looked at my own reflection in the darkened window of the train, I noticed him behind me, also looking at my reflection.
He saw me see him.
I unintentionally raised my eyebrows.
He intentionally raised his eyebrows back.
I averted my gaze because the last thing I wanted to do was play the mirror game with a psycho on the subway, only to have him follow me to work and be sitting outside at the end of the night, ready to follow me home. This would invariably be the thing that would happen.
I unfocused my eyes to avoid his gaze and as I did, in my peripheral vision, I saw his hand slowly move up toward his face and touch the edge of his rug at me like a cowboy tipping his hat.
I couldn’t think of how to respond. He saw me see him again, so I nodded, just barely, in return. Then he shook his head sternly at me and smiled almost paternally, as though I had done something that wasn’t really bad, and he kind of approved in a way, but he trusted that I would take care of it because I knew right from wrong. Then he nodded to himself, folding his arms and resting his chin on his chest.
He didn’t look up for the rest of the ride.
When I got to work I took the bomb out of its hiding place and had a good look at it. It seemed to be working. There was an active white foam bubbling all around the chicken gizzards and guts. The meat was fermenting in milk. The pressure would overpower the glass of the jar and it would blow within a couple of weeks. The smell would be unbearable. Glenn would have to replace that wall and possibly the entire floor.
He might have to abandon the restaurant, or it might have to be torn down. More than anything though, he would run around just furious, screaming like a preschooler, veins bulging through the papery, translucent skin on his temples. He might even have a heart attack. I held onto the jar for a minute, transported. Glenn would be wearing shorts, beige shorts with black socks and black shoes, as he did in the summer. I could hear the pitch of his squeal when he demanded to know who could possibly have done such a thing.
I put the bomb back in its hiding place.
Glenn has a trick he does that he thinks is really good. He finds a cigarette butt outside and picks it up, presumably with a stick with a nail through it or a really long pair of tweezers, and he puts it on the steps out front and waits to see how long it takes one of the staff members to see it and pick it up. Then he comes into the kitchen and announces how many days it’s been there with no one noticing. Glenn believes in the kind of employee loyalty that would make someone stop and pick up a cigarette butt on the stairs because it was marring the beauty of their place of work.
“You’d pick it up if this was your own house, wouldn’t you?” he whines. “Why can’t you keep my restaurant clean? Is it disdain? You can tell me.”
He keeps up the cigarette trick and we all play along now, which isn’t hard because the cigarette butt is always in the same place. We try to pick it up the second he puts it there, which makes it like a game. The whole point of his trick, Glenn doesn’t realize, is defeated now, because our picking up the cigarette butt doesn’t mean anyone cares any more about the well-being of the restaurant, but it certainly does make him feel as though his stupid crybaby will is being obeyed, which is more important to him than even employee loyalty.
I had started dreaming about the bomb every night, and was getting downright giddy every time I looked at Glenn, which I had to try to conceal because smiling at him would have been so out of character as to give me away.
The Journey Prize Stories 23 Page 10