Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  With Byron in the back seat, they travelled about from one new mall to the other. Byron, seeming to study them, would flick his hand in the air now and then against the winter light when Myhrra said anything that disturbed him, and now and then he’d suddenly look startled, as if he was seeing Myhrra in a new way.

  Byron did not have many friends and was sometimes chased home from school. Some of the kids would ambush him by the convent and he would begin his trek, turning to run across the hospital parking lot, making it down across the big houses, rushing in the twilight across the highway to Turcotte’s, climbing the fence, and making his way knee-deep in snow across the back field to Joe Walsh’s. There Rita would come out of the door and fend off the neighbourhood. As soon as he saw Rita, Byron – having good dexterity when he needed it – would boot someone who had unwittingly turned away, and then he would rush into Rita’s house, with his ski mask pulled down over his face and only his eyes and mouth visible.

  “Water,” he would say.

  And with his scarf covered in snow knobs, and his eyes returning again to a sort of sly dismissive nature, he would move to a corner and sit there, drinking his second glass of water, his lips visible, something like an exhausted trout in a clear pool.

  But whenever he had a project going the kids would watch him and be conciliatory. Byron would take fifteen mice in cages down to Zellers to sell them – and the trailer and the world he lived in, which was so different from their world at that moment, would overwhelm them and down they would go with him, watch as he walked right into the back of the building, saying: “Mice,” and watch as Gerard took the cages into the stock room and paid him.

  Sometimes Myhrra would be ecstatic because so many children called for him. Byron, dressed in his scout uniform with his new scout cap tilted on his head, would be going out to a movie, and all the kids would follow him down. The toughest kid, Evan, the kid he had paid to pretend he had beaten up, would be his buddy that day, and he would (from his sale of mice) take four or five of them to the movie that day, buy them treats, and sit there with a sort of brooding fascination as he watched the show.

  Then after the movie, walking home in the twilight, with the smell of evening in the houses and in the poplar shoots that stuck up in the snow, and all the buildings trembling as the four o’clock train moved through town, his friends one by one would fade into the background, and he would go home and sit in his room and stare at his pregnant guppy that he had named “Isabella of Spain.”

  “Did you have a good time?” Myhrra would ask. He would stare at her hips in the twilight as she came in to touch his hair. Sometimes when the top of her thigh touched his shoulder as she patted him he would say in a defiant voice:

  “You’re a stupid mother, you don’t know anything,” and he would reach up and turn on the tank light so as to better watch Isabella of Spain.

  Sometimes Byron would go to Ralphie’s apartment and sit in the chair over by the pipe, waiting for Ralphie to come back. Byron would talk about guppies and swordtails and he would become very excited. His hair, which Myhrra continually fashioned, would sit just on the collar of his shirt. He had now started lifting weights at the gym after school and was learning judo at the recreation centre. His eyes were becoming more deep-set like his father’s. He told Ralphie about a girl at school named Gidget. She was a little French girl from the crossroads, and this was the girl he was going to like.

  He was in Grade Six and there was going to be a skating party. His mother would drive him, they would pick Gidget up, and they would go to the skating party. He would buy her a hot dog. He didn’t want his mother to stand at the rink watching him – she would have to go and come back.

  “I’m going to take extra money too – for lots of stuff – and then at nine o’clock I’ll take her home,” Byron said pulling at his mitts and then sniffing, and waiting for Ralphie to answer him. “She will be my squeeze,” he said. “Just like Adele is yours.”

  “Is Adele my squeeze?” Ralphie said, smiling.

  “Sure, I’ve read all about it, Adele is your main squeeze – Gidget will be mine – I’ve read about it a number of times.”

  Joe would sometimes come to the apartment as well. He would walk up and down the street, as if making sure Adele was not there, and then he would come to the stairs and climb up them, using the railing and stubbing the cane he sometimes took with him when he went out.

  “Now that I haven’t swallowed any booze in a while,” Joe would say to Ralphie, “I can feel it’s a test of some sort. All the time I was drinking, my back wasn’t this bad. Do you think it’s a test?”

  “It might be,” Ralphie said, who still believed he was an atheist and didn’t know much about what Joe was talking about. Like all young people, he also thought there was something distasteful about AA that he couldn’t put his finger on. And though he liked Joe and was proud of him, there was a feeling that he had to be loyal to Adele who, last New Year’s Eve, told him all about Joe’s drinking. Staring at the birthmark on Joe’s forehead, and his broad shoulders, which looked immensely strong, and noticing also that at times Joe’s eyes seemed to stare at you from a place far beyond where he was sitting, Ralphie could see the ruined house, the kitchen light broken, and all the lost jobs and frustrations. Rita’s hands. Adele pooping her pants.

  Ralphie had all kinds of worries. He had to listen to Vera and Nevin and his mother Thelma, and try to keep Adele from being angry with him. He would meet her in the park after school, near the fountain. By March, some warm days had come. The ground could be seen in yellow patches, the benches were wet. The stores sometimes had the smell of sun lingering on their bricks. Some nights as he sat upstairs in the apartment and drank beer, it was warm enough to smell the tile floor, and the faint scent of last fall’s wax. Gone were the parties and the boys and girls. The window was still broken, there was still a shotgun hole in the wall. A picture from Penthouse magazine still adorned the bathroom wall, and an old guitar with three strings still collected dust under the couch. Now they were all alone again.

  When Adele spoke to him one night it was just at twilight. The neon light came into the room. Ralphie knew she was mixed up and sad by times but he didn’t know why. He told her that everything would be alright – and suddenly he smiled. She looked like a little princess sitting on the floor. He reached out and touched her hair and stroked it gently. He kept stroking it for the longest time.

  Without designing to, Ralphie had become, that winter, one of the people others relied on to listen to them, because Ralphie always somehow sided with them.

  Ralphie had gotten a job at the mines around this time. He worked underground, and he had gained weight. Often, he would come straight from work and arrive at the Walshes’ door at five o’clock. That he was now doing the same job Joe had done years before made Adele happy. She was happy when Joe thought she would be angry.

  After the first pay cheque Ralphie got, he came to the house with a present for everyone, and a new pair of work boots. He also wanted to give the family some money.

  “Look, Rita – I’ve eaten here for over a year, I’ve been at the house more than I’ve been home – I want you to take the money.”

  All of them knew they could use the money, and yet everyone understood why Rita and Joe didn’t want to take it, except for Ralphie.

  Ralphie, with blasting caps still in his shirt (it was illegal to take them off the mines property but he had forgotten them) and a big piece of ore in his pocket which he wanted to study under a microscope, and the smell of the soap that was as familiar to Rita and Joe as the smell of life, walked about in absolute contentment.

  He was now going to chew tobacco. He was now going to build himself a camp.

  And all of this made Joe nostalgic. “Is Glen still up there?”

  “Sure is,” Ralphie said. “He’s my boss.” And he said this as if suddenly he had a boss, and bosses were good things to have. He drank a beer and handed one to Rita, tickled Milly, and ta
lked about what he’d heard that day – that there might be a strike. Actually Ralphie tried to talk as if the strike was important and he, like everyone else, needed the strike. But he didn’t want to strike because he’d just started to work – and he didn’t seem to realize that a lot of men talk about a strike because they want a holiday, and after a week or so, are not only wanting to go back to work but are angry with their union representative who they believe got them into the strike in the first place.

  In everything Ralphie did, Joe saw himself many years ago. First in how he was filled with self-delight and yet totally unaware of some of the foolish things he said. He talked about the processes that went on in the mines, as if Joe would not know about them. He talked about some of the things the men said as if Joe would not have heard of these things. He talked about how wild some of the men were, without ever thinking that Joe had once been there, and had perhaps been as wild as anyone.

  Joe had always said if things were bad, they could be worse. When he was injured and had to lie in hospital for three months, or whenever he went to see the doctors – at these times when he found himself face to face with something he knew would be impossible to alter, he suddenly took hold of the idea: “Well things could be worse.”

  But the thing he had to face was not only his lack of work, but his self-esteem. Because he had not done anything for so long a length of time, he knew he would have to face up to the fact that no matter what had happened in his life he had to forget it and start a brand new life, whether or not he was ill, or whether or not he had the sympathy of the one person he loved more than all the others – Adele.

  Therefore, he took a job as a bouncer at the tavern. He did not mention this to Rita or Adele. He had to work Thursday through Sunday.

  By mid-March the evenings were warming. The hallway smelled of aftershave and soap, the plastic curtains hung limply. There was a smell of dust in the corners, and a pile of wash on the floor and Pampers in the garbage. Rita had almost taken over the care of one ten-year-old boy – Evan. He lived down on the bank with his mother and his grandparents. He was in and out of trouble. Generally he went over to Rita’s in the morning, and had toast before he went to school. Then he came at noon for a sandwich and a glass of milk. After school he came into the house and stood in the kitchen asking if Milly was about. Rita then told him he may as well stay for supper.

  Joe would go out in the evening, saying he was going to a meeting, either across the river or on one of the reserves, and he’d park his truck in behind the Royal Bank and walk to work. The trouble was all the old familiar faces – the same laughter, the smell of smoke and beer – would make him remember some of the drunks he’d been on.

  But now it was different. Standing by the upstairs coat-rack, or clearing beer glasses from tables, he hobbled about silently. Joe could always tell who would be in a fight before the night was over and who would be noisy – and he never minded this. Nor when an occasion arose did he ever hit anyone; some he would ask to leave, others he would pick up and carry to the door. Then at night he would lock the front door and go out the back way, through the alley, with the smell of spring in the dark windows, and head for home.

  Rita would wake up, turn on the light, and watch him as he got into bed.

  “Where were you?” she would say. “It’s one o’clock – Milly waited up for her ice cream.”

  “Her what?”

  “You promised her ice cream.”

  “Oh,” he would say.

  One night when he was working, Gloria and Myhrra came into the bar. Gloria looked at him, then looked away, smiled at someone, and waved to the back table. Myhrra went up to him. She had been drinking. It was her shower – and only she and Gloria were left – all the rest of her friends had dispersed and gone home.

  “Joe,” Myhrra said, “you know you shouldn’t be here.”

  She looked at him sadly, as if she had long been waiting for this moment so she could tell him this. Then she touched his arm with a cold hand. There was a smell of perfume on her neck and her little blouse was unbuttoned one button. She wore eye shadow with silver sparkles, and her face looked puffy, as if she had been crying. And just as she said this, her eyes did get damp.

  “I don’t know about you, Joe,” she said, blinking, so that one tear ran down her cheek. “You aren’t goin ta put Rita through this again –”

  Joe smiled and stammered, but he could say nothing. Sometimes a man or woman, perfectly in the right, will look and act guilty, and with no reason to be. If it had been just Myhrra, Joe would not have acted guilty – but it was the presence of Gloria. Gloria glanced up at him, her dark hair and black eyes were all he saw out of the corner of his eye.

  “Come on,” Gloria said. “Let’s go and get a table there with Peter. Don’t worry, Joe,” she said, “you’re allowed – I won’t tell your wife.” And why “wife” sounded particularly demeaning at this moment Joe didn’t know.

  They found out that Joe was a bouncer because he came home one night with his head cut open from the claws of a hammer. It was during the liquor strike and boys were running truckloads of beer from the border. In the yard, with the smell of cigars faint in the snow, he was tackled – someone thought Joe would have the keys to the stockroom on him. When they couldn’t throw him down, and when he stood in position and planted his feet to throw them off, someone hit him with a hammer. He fell and grabbed his head, and heard their feet retreating toward the wharf, and the shadows going up over the path of snow.

  Blood ran over his eyes and down his face. Rita screeched, and tried to take him to the hospital.

  Joe shook his head, and said that all he needed was a face-cloth.

  “Crazy young fuckers,” Joe said.

  Everyone assumed Adele would faint – because she had often fainted when she saw a speck of blood. The first time she had her period, she fell down stiff as a board, and when anyone cut themselves. But at this moment her face became filled with the compassion that always brings out beauty.

  “Joe,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “Oh god – Joe.” And, without knowing that she would ever be able to do something like this, she took away the face-cloth to look at the wound.

  All weddings are the same, and Vye wanted everything done the way everyone else did it, including the stag party – where they showed four skin-flicks – and Vye sat with his friends, as if stag films and all the rest of it were things he was now going to leave behind. The talk, which he had no interest in, was about hockey and ball. The book, which showed a variety of things that would happen on a honeymoon, he took to be funny because it was supposed to be. His hands were thick, and his face, when he drank, became passive, and at times brooding. He rubbed his eyes and looked about, and smiled at his friends.

  Then they brought a girl from the tavern, who was supposed to take him into another room. Vye went into the other room with her. She looked at him and smiled. It was cold in the room. But what happened was perhaps just the same as most other times. Vye was too drunk, and only ended up telling her he loved her.

  “I love you too,” she said. “What are we going to do?” She held one of those multi-coloured party twisters in her hand, that she was intent on pulling apart.

  “I don’t know,” Vye said, “I just don’t know anymore.”

  The next afternoon, which was cloudy and cold, he had to go and visit his mother. He remembered the little girl from the tavern, the tattoo she had – and how after a while everyone got angry with her. How her neck smelled of twigs.

  Vye had lately thought of his mother in this way: that she was not really a part of his life anymore, but that he still had an obligation to her. So as he sat in her room, on the chair with its plastic seat, and told her about the marriage, he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t seem to understand. He wasn’t surprised, but he could not help being disappointed. He showed her a picture of Myhrra – Myhrra was leaning against a cottage door down river. There had been a barbecue. For some strange reason
Vye had always wanted to show his, mother this picture. It was taken at a time when Myhrra was pretending to be the outrageous divorcee – she was going to parties, and she was getting a bad reputation – leaving Byron to be taken care of by Rita – and trying to pay her ex-husband back. And yet this was the picture Vye – wearing his red coat and high-heeled cowboy boots, which left hard bites in the snow – wanted to show her, and he was disappointed she did not think Myhrra as daring as the picture made out.

  When Vye went home, there was sun on the porch. The place was a mess. The living room was still dark, and Vye didn’t want to open the living room drapes. There were bottles everywhere. Cans of smoked oysters lay on the table. A plate of crackers and cheese looked damp, as if someone had spilled a beer on it. He remembered speaking to the young girl from the tavern and telling her everything about himself, as they sat on the side of the bed, and he’d acted as if he’d finally found someone he could talk to. Now he was worried about what he’d said, and if she would go around town talking about him. He sat down on a kitchen chair feeling depressed and nervous.

  Myhrra and Vye were married. Myhrra cried at her wedding, because she could not help doing so. She wanted everything to be better than other weddings.

  At the reception at the community centre she had to go into the kitchen twice and, standing in her white dress with the veil, look up at the caterer and tell her they weren’t serving the food properly. Byron, who sat at the head table, clinked his fork and spoon monotonously. The matches with the names Myhrra and Vye on them caught the thin afternoon light. Myhrra’s mother was gloomy – and in this light looked the way Myhrra would twenty years from now. The night before, she had gotten into an argument with Myhrra over something and it had not settled yet. Three little cousins ran about the table screeching, and every once in a while Byron would throw a bun in their direction. Every time Byron was told to stop throwing a bun, he would look about as if it wasn’t him who was throwing it, and look at his mother in her white dress as if she was foolish, and this made Myhrra sad.