Red Mass

by Aubert, Rosemary

  In the basement of Old City Hall, as in the basement of most courthouses, there were cells. Such a cell might be nothing but an enclosure built of cinderblock painted white so that graffiti would not easily adhere to it. In the middle might be a partial wall about three feet high, just high enough to give a man a little privacy while he squatted to use the stainless-steel toilet that had no seat.

  Stow was a marble man, unveined snow Carrara his preference. I couldn’t imagine how cinderblock and stainless steel would strike him, though I could remember the cold steel edge of the toilet against my own once-pampered bottom.

  I continued east. Past the Eaton Center, now, as always, full of tourists and shoppers. Past construction at the corner of Queen and Yonge. The odor of fresh cement filled my nostrils, bringing instantly to mind, as it always did, memories of my father, the muratore, the brickière.

  I walked past St. Michael’s Hospital, then the “United Church Cathedral” on the grounds of which the indigent lounged in the cooling air. Past the pawnshops of Church Street, past Moss Park with its armory and arena, outside of which there was always a pile of snow, even on the hottest day. Queen Street East, like much of downtown Toronto, was getting more upscale as the years went by. The greasy spoons, dingy bars, dusty secondhand furniture stores and run-down used-car lots were being replaced by art galleries, antique sellers, chic little bistros, car dealers for European imports. The day would soon come when no seedy stretch of downtown would be comfortable for the panhandlers, hustlers and hookers who had kept streets like Queen alive for a couple of hundred years.

  At the corner of Parliament and Queen sat the building I hadn’t realized I was headed for: Harmony Circle Health Center, which everybody called “the clinic.”

  “She ain’t here,” I was informed when I got within a few feet of the door. Three men of indeterminate age were sprawled on the sidewalk with their backs up against the wall of the storefront. They had the tough, weather-beaten, dark red skin of “bush Nish,” as they liked to call themselves. “Bush” meant they lived outside, most likely in one of the many wild ravines that cut through the city. “Nish” meant Anishawbe, “the People,” native North Americans.

  “Thanks,” I said as I stepped past them and tried the door. It sprang open to my touch.

  “She’s not here,” a pretty young receptionist told me. She wore a white smock like a nurse’s uniform, but embroidered on the front was a circle divided into quarters: white, black, red, yellow. All the races of the earth.

  “Did she go home?” I asked, surprised. Since returning to Toronto from nursing school in her hometown, the Cree settlement of Moosonee on James Bay, my dear friend Queenie Johnson spent nearly every waking hour at the clinic. Not only was she the chief nurse practitioner at the health center, she was also its administrator. When she wasn’t treating patients, she was chairing meetings where prominent members of the community planned projects to assist the homeless and the otherwise disadvantaged of the inner city. “I hope she’s not sick?”

  “Mr. Portal,” the young woman answered, “you know as well as I do that Queenie probably wouldn’t stop working if she was sick. But, thank goodness, she’s not. No, she’s down at Tent City.”

  “Tent City? Is it still up by the marsh near the Bloor Viaduct?”

  The receptionist shook her head. Like so many of the workers at the clinic, she was a person Queenie had rescued. I didn’t know the girl’s past. Perhaps she’d been a prostitute or an addict, or both. But now, she glowed with health, and her thick black hair shone with blue highlights in the fluorescent light of the white office. “No. They had to move again.”

  “Can you tell me where?”

  She looked up at me and smiled. “Of course I can, Your Honor,” she said.

  It had been my street name when both Queenie and I had been on the skids. Nobody called me “Your Honor” anymore except the people at this clinic—including Queenie, and recently, I realized with confusion, as a term of endearment.

  “They’re down before Broadview Avenue on the east side of the river above the Toshiba sign.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Are you going down there?”

  “Yes. Why? Do you have a message for Queenie?”

  The girl laughed. “I don’t need to send her a smoke signal, Your Honor. She’s got her cell phone. I can call her if I need to. You want me to tell her you’re on your way?”

  I toyed with the idea of going back on the streetcar to retrieve my car near Osgoode, but Broadview was less than a fifteen-minute walk, and I wanted to talk to Queenie as soon as I could. It would be best to get down to Tent City before dark.

  “No need to call her,” I answered.

  “Okay.” She hesitated. “You have any reason to be concerned about the police?”

  “No,” I answered, surprised at the question, though I was certain it was one that was often asked at the clinic. “Why?”

  “I think there’s plainclothes guys down there.”

  “I’d be amazed if there weren’t,” I told her. “Those officers are everywhere. There’s one sitting outside right now. He told me Queenie wasn’t here.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s Constable Moran. He looks pretty authentic, doesn’t he?”

  “Listen,” I answered, “he’s been working plainclothes for so many years that if he ever went back into uniform, he’d get arrested within the hour for trying to impersonate an officer.”

  The sinking sun was warm on my back as I walked toward the bridge over the lower Don River at Queen Street just west of Broadview. Spanning the bridge was an arch and across it, in wrought-iron letters, a quotation from the ancient philosopher Heraclitus: “This river I step in is not the river I stand in.” It meant that everything changes.

  I glanced north to where the river flowed down from a massive ridge separating the city from the sprawling suburbs. I had more in common with bush Nish than most people. I’d lived rough myself, up there in the wild ravines.

  To the south, I spotted the massive electronic sign advertising Toshiba. Nearer, the steel skeleton of a former factory rose against the sky with eerie emptiness. I could see construction equipment beside it. Soon it would become some sparkling new dealership for expensive foreign cars, like the buildings already rising out of the industrial ruins on the other side of the river.

  “You think you know everything since you been to that damn government college, but I’m telling you, you got more cops and reporters around than our people—and if you think there’s any native down here except yourself, you’re as much of a fool as you was when you was a stinkin’ drunk.”

  I heard the belligerent voice before I spotted the camp strung along the riverbank, but I couldn’t see the speaker, nor the person being spoken to.

  I half ran, half slid down from the embankment beside the roadway to a narrow stretch of land squeezed between the brown waters of the stream and the concrete-and-metal abutment of the Don Valley Parkway off-ramp.

  A scattering of dirty white canvas tents, wooden packing crates, cardboard boxes and pup tents made from blue plastic tarpaulins lined the eastern shore, so near to the water that the bottoms of some of the wooden crates were wet. I couldn’t imagine who had suggested such a precarious site for an encampment. I could see from the way most of the packing crates were nailed together that these people lacked the skills necessary to live comfortably in the wild. Screws are far better than nails, and wooden pegs, if you know how to choose the right twig and have the strength and the patience to whittle it, are the best of all.

  “Your Honor, what are you doing here? I thought you were with the judges at St. Mike’s.”

  A slender figure emerged from the shadows beneath the poplar trees and stepped into the rays of the low-lying sun. I reached out to keep her from tripping over a man prone on the ground before her feet. Her fingers were warm to my touch, and instinctively, I gave her hand a squeeze. She squeezed back. Queenie would never tell me how old she was,
but she had to be over fifty. The first time I remembered seeing her, over a decade before, she’d looked like an old woman with dull matted hair, broken teeth and nails, bulky with too many clothes, awkward with the gait of a drunkard.

  All was different now. Her straight silver hair was shiny, her slim figure unhidden by the snug jeans she wore with a fringed leather jacket that hugged her waist. The jacket was partly unzipped, and beneath it, I could see a tee-shirt with the circle symbol of the clinic.

  “I’m interrupting you in your work,” I said with a sudden stab of guilt. “I should have phoned you ...”

  She smiled a little. In the old days, I used to think Queenie didn’t know how to smile. “It wouldn’t have done you any good, Your Honor. I forgot my cell phone. I left in a hurry because we ...”

  “He don’t need a report,” interrupted the belligerent voice I’d heard before. A ragged figure stepped out from behind Queenie. Little had changed in his appearance since the last time I’d set eyes on him. The same filthy long hair, the same dirty face and blue jeans and denim jacket, the same shoes held together by gray-beige plastic packing tape. It all looked too authentic to be real, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have taken him to be one of the plainclothes cops.

  “Johnny,” I said, trying to hide my distaste at meeting him face-to-face. “I saw your picture in the paper.”

  He smiled. His teeth were brown and cracked, but they were still whiter than his face and seemed to glow in the rapidly failing light. I could tell he was genuinely pleased that I had paid enough attention to him to mention the news photo. “I’m doin’ what I can for my fellow man,” he said with apparent sincerity.

  Queenie smiled again. Her white teeth were perfect. ‘Johnny’s standing up for everybody on the street,” she said. “He’s better at giving speeches than anybody would have thought.”

  Not so. Johnny Dirt, as he had been known on the street all his adult life, was one of the biggest purveyors of claptrap I’d ever encountered. Johnny and Queenie had some history between them. He had once left her daughter for dead on the street. Queenie was a churchgoer, a devout Anglican. She had forgiven him. The same did not apply to me.

  “Queenie,” I said, taking her by the elbow and moving her away to a spot farther down the river where we could talk privately. “What’s going on down here? I thought this encampment was up by the Bloor Viaduct. I thought you had helpers coming down and a service to bring people up to the clinic.”

  She stared across the water. Queenie was pure Cree. Her profile against the gold-toned river was sharply etched. She was one of those women who become more rather than less beautiful as the years pass by. And she was reticent—always had been.

  A mallard skidded across the metallic surface of the water, leaving a necklace of ripples in its wake. Queenie waited for the bird to fold its wings and settle into a swim before she said, “Everybody in the city wants these poor people out of the valley. I’m doing all I can, but this is my problem, not yours. You, Your Honor, have a different problem.”

  “What?”

  She turned her face toward mine as she spoke, but I couldn’t look her in the eye. I had the feeling she was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  “Justice Stoughton-Melville—the one you always call Stow? He wants you. And he wants you now. You’ve got to find him, and you’ve got to get him out of this trouble he got into today.”

  “But Queenie ...” She didn’t know Stow, had never met him. So how did she know more about my friend than I knew myself?

  Before I could question her, the man we’d almost tripped over found us. Without saying anything, he sat down on the ground at Queenie’s feet. She lowered herself and made him more comfortable by helping him to lean against a slimy black rock. I couldn’t tell whether it was covered with old moss or new pollution, but the man made no objection to using it as a backrest.

  She pulled a small but very powerful flashlight out of the pocket of her jacket and asked me if I’d hold it.

  The wool shirt the old man wore was wretched, but Queenie rolled back its sleeve with the amount of careful attention another person would have expended on new silk. Beneath the sleeve lay a bright white patch of surgical gauze secured by clean strips of adhesive tape. The center of the square of gauze was stained dark red, surrounded by a vile shade of green, the sight of which made the back of my throat lock.

  “Let’s see how you’re doin’ tonight,” Queenie said.

  I could see the man’s effort to hide his pain when Queenie, with one swift, practiced move, ripped the bandage from his arm. A laceration the size of a two-dollar coin, oozing with blood and pus and ringed by puffy scarlet skin, festered on the limb of the old man.

  Remarkably, Queenie seemed cheered by this gruesome sight. “Much better than yesterday,” she said with satisfaction.

  The patient looked pleased with himself, as though he’d accomplished a difficult feat and earned the approval of a beloved mother.

  Chapter 2

  “Queenie—?”

  When she finished with her patient, she glanced at me, but I could read nothing in her eyes, at least in part because darkness had begun to descend. “Excuse me,” she said simply and moved away toward a small knot of women who had been waiting for her.

  I slipped into the shadows and watched the scene unfolding in front of me. In the flickering campfires of falling night, shadows flitted across the face of the dispossessed, revealing them to be as various as the faces of the lawyers, judges and deputies at the Osgoode reception. I saw young people with the premature look of age that life on the street dispenses. And I also saw the blank look of innocence on the faces of older men and women whose minds had been wiped clean of thought by years of abuse: drugs, alcohol, tobacco, sex and the most powerful of all abusers of humans—poverty.

  Not knowing that I watched, Queenie moved among the outcasts, her lithe figure smoothly bending in the firelight to administer a drink here, a pill there, even, in one instance, a hypodermic. She was quiet and gentle among these vagabonds, but she was confident and knowledgeable, too. She was one of them, one, I mean, of us.

  When I was sure I would not be interrupting her, I called her name softly and stepped into yellowish light that filtered down from the roadway above. “Can you take a little break?” I asked.

  She was startled to see me still about, but her face registered obvious pleasure. “Can you stay for supper?”

  “Stay. We ain’t eatin’ like yer fancy friends, but we ain’t eatin’ rat neither.”

  I fought something I hadn’t felt in a long time: the urge to punch Johnny Dirt in the face. “I know a rat when I see one,” I answered.

  “The Good Hand food bank van came around this afternoon,” Queenie said, ignoring us both. “We’ve got beef and mushrooms cooked over the open fire—and also a lot of hot dogs, potato chips and lentil soup. And day-old brownies and bruised bananas for dessert.”

  “It sounds like a feast, Queenie,” I said, “but I think I’ll head back home. I left my car at Osgoode.”

  She reached out and took my hand again. Her warm skin brushed the cool gold of the figured ring on the third finger of my right hand. Queenie was as familiar with that ring as I was by now. She knew it had been a gift from Stow more than thirty years before. “You came down here tonight because you’re feelin’ bad about him, ain’t you?”

  Since graduating from nursing school, Queenie could speak perfect English, but sometimes she reverted to ungrammatical language to make the street people feel more at ease. When she spoke that way with me, I felt she was being intimate, that she was alluding to the rough past we shared.

  “Queenie,” I said, squatting down close to the fire and gently pulling her down beside me, “if I thought that Stow were using you in any way ...” I shook my head, not wanting to remind her of the days when violent anger had ruled me. “I won’t go there, but I need you to remember that no matter what favors he’s done for me, he’s never let
me forget that I’m his inferior. I’ve paid dearly for everything he ever gave me. Why would he send a message to me through you? He’s perfectly free to say anything he wants to anybody. And, I don’t need to add, free to pay anybody he wants for whatever he needs. He can do what he likes.”

  She kept perfectly still beside me as if she had to think about what I’d said. Then she shook her own head slowly. “I don’t think so, Your Honor,” she said. “I don’t really think so.”

  “Tell me why he used you to get to me.”

  A sudden cold breeze blew up from the river, and Queenie stiffened as if to brace herself against the coming coldness of the autumn night.

  “Nobody uses me.”

  For a moment we seemed unable to say anything more to each other. Into the silence between us came the sound of the Tent City dwellers spreading their bedding, some beneath the sky, others in the boxes and lean-tos and under the tarps. One young girl unwittingly set up too close between two old men, both of whom, I knew, would “accidentally” roll on top of her in the night. What business is it of mine?

  “If you care about somebody,” Queenie said softly, “you don’t need to ask yourself why. You just go with the caring, and you help them. You don’t ask what they owe you, and you don’t stop at what you owe them.”

  “Are you talking about Stow?” I asked in alarm. “Do you owe him something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I owe him the client’s privilege of confidentiality. Don’t ask me why I know he needs you.” She leaned closer and kissed my cheek. “Go back to your fancy car and get home, Your Honor. You’re getting too old and too soft to squat by the river in the light of the moon.”

  “There’s no moon out, old woman.”

  “There will be by the time you get home.”

  She was right. It took me half an hour to make my way back up to the roadway because a number of people stopped me to tell me how glad they were to see me back down in the river valley. They said it was nice to know a man who didn’t forget where he came from—as if anybody came from the skids. They also seemed to think I had friends at City Hall and that I would tell these friends to leave Tent City alone.