Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  There’s a clothesline that reaches from the corner of my house just into the neighbour’s yard, attached with an old hook to the trunk of the maple nearest to our property line, and I don’t think I’ve ever hung anything on that line at all. But that line of string is the closest thing I get to owning one of those big trees — Mary convinced our neighbour to let us tie the clothesline to the hook. The hook predated us, rusty and beckoning.

  You don’t see maple trees like that in this city much. Not big like these.

  Neighbours? Down at the end of the yard is one neighbour with two cats that piss right on my back door and manage to look insolent even when I catch them in the act. Then there are the neighbours on either side, the guy on the left with the dogs that still bark at me even though they’ve seen me out there in the yard for at least five years, and the couple on the right who bought one of those outdoor fireplaces that make you keep the windows closed at night in summer or lay there choking on someone else’s smoke right in your own bedroom. You can call the city to complain, but really, where’s that going to end up? I’ll tell you where — in the kind of bad feeling that never fades.

  I wave to them all, I make involved small talk about the weather if I’m forced to, and if they have something more on their minds, I find someplace else I suddenly have to be. The bare edge of politeness is what I’ve got, if I’m pushed to it, because there’s not really much margin in it for me now.

  I’m sure they get along much better with each other than they do with me — I see them sometimes, talking to each other over the fence and across the no man’s land of my yard, and they always seem more animated, more interested, than they ever do when they’re talking to me.

  Like most things, that’s probably a two-way street, the kind I’m just not all that used to driving on. Sometimes, I look outside at them and tell myself that I should try harder — that I should go out and listen to whatever it is they’re talking about, that I should at least try to work up some interest. But I can’t find the energy I’d need.

  I like it better inside, upstairs, looking down on the street as people go by. They don’t look up; they never look up.

  The front room upstairs, I call it the study. It’s a fancy name, but really it’s just another bedroom. It faces right out on the street, no front yard or anything, just the sidewalk, and I’m sure it would be hard to sleep in there with the noise, especially since they changed the bus routes around and now I’ve got an express downtown going right by the front door every twenty minutes or so. I mean, they start at seven and sometimes I like to sleep a little later than that. I might not have gotten off work until five on the overnight swing — hell, I might not have gotten home from walking around the city until seven, so the buses would be coming on full service just as I was getting into bed.

  We mix shifts at work. Sometimes I’m on during the day for the simple cleanups: the bottles of olives that get dropped and the toddler who throws up all over a cart — and there’s always the trash bins and all of that, the stuff out back that people don’t ever think about. The crushed boxes for the dumpster, the garbage to be hauled out into the loading bay for the truck that swings through pretty much daily.

  Other times, I get overnight shifts for the big wall-to-wall cleans and the regular weekend Sunday night floor waxing, squiring around the big buffing machine that brings the floor up with a gloss you’re never going to get with anything else. The whole store empty and just as well because you can’t hear anything anyway, and you don’t want to think about what it would be like if someone just came up behind you and tapped you on the shoulder or something. The vibrations from the buffer go spinning right up through my arms and settle there so that even hours later it still feels like I’m guiding the thing around. If I were to go home and fall straight asleep, I know I’d dream about waxing. Flipping the extension cord over at the end of every sweep — if I do it right, I can make a big long loop roll slowly over all the way down the aisle, like a Wild West cowboy completely in control of his rope.

  I’ve always been comfortable in my job. I don’t think it’s a dead end or anything — even if that’s the way Mary thought about it sometimes.

  I got fed up with school early, that’s all, even though I still read plenty and they told me all through I was smart enough to keep going. That was back when the schools used to do testing and tell you afterwards that you had “potential.” But I wasn’t looking for potential. I just found someplace where I like what I do — because I actually do something. You can measure it, even if, just about the time you get everything finished, the whole place clean, it’s time to start all over again.

  I don’t push paper around for someone else. I’m not yakking on the phone about the price of silver, or stomping around in court, trying to keep the next shoplifter from getting a criminal record.

  I’m not spending hours convincing anyone they’ve just got to buy this thing — something it turns out they don’t need or want at all. I did that for a while and it was hell.

  No, I keep one place clean, and it’s got to be clean, so it is. It’s hard, heavy work sometimes, but I’m fine with that. Nothing wrong with hard work, with the way it leaves your muscles stretched right out, ropey and tingling at the end of a long shift. I’m fine with going in the front doors of the store and having the place smell exactly like it’s supposed to, with coming into the back where my cart is and finding every single thing in its right place, right there at my fingertips, waiting for me. The same, every single time.

  I get to go through the day, my day, every day, and then I go home, and the phone never rings and they don’t call me back in. If there are extra shifts, they ask me if I want them ahead of time — sometimes I say yes, and sometimes I say no.

  I’m fine with all of it.

  I wash my hands of everything the very minute I step out the door.

  End of story.

  Chapter 9

  Nov. 21 — I walked back from the grocery store, because it was one of those fall days where it’s wet but it’s all warm, too, like the rain’s brought the warm air back into town and just left it lying over the city. The rain had stopped and the sidewalk was all covered with wet maple leaves — a kind of throwback to earlier in fall, and I had a bag of groceries in each hand, swinging them like I was a kid or something, and I looked back down the street over my shoulder, and there was a guy behind me, way back — like nine or ten houses back — just a round-shouldered little guy in a dark jacket, but it was like I could see his eyes, like they were fixed right on me or something. And I know he caught me looking, because even from that far away I saw him tuck his chin down against his chest, and then he turned up a walk to a house and reached up for the mailbox. Then he walked back to the street and away from me, but I took a laneway in the complete opposite direction from my place and waited right on the corner to see if he turned up, but he didn’t. I spent the whole evening thinking about it, wondering if there was anything I could pick out to describe him, anything that I could tell someone about how he looked, and there really wasn’t anything. But I think I’d know the shape of him if I saw him again.

  Chapter 10

  Starlae

  Potatoes

  Milk

  Meat

  Cat

  Beans

  Bread

  Cheese

  Fish

  Cake

  Candy

  Pie

  The first grocery list I found and actually kept? July 24, 1961. Well, it was dated 1961, anyway.

  It came out of a book I found on a sale table years ago, and the list is almost as old as I am. It’s actually on the back of the library card, the dates nice and clear there from someone’s effort with a hand stamp. And, yes, I know that starlae isn’t a word.

  I’ve looked at it a hundred times if I’ve looked at it once, and that’s the closest I can come to making out what it
says. Maybe it’s a trade name for something, and if I were old enough, maybe I’d recognize it right away — the right parts of the word in the right places to make it coalesce into meaning something. Klik is still on the shelves, just another luncheon meat in a can with a key — but drop that word with half of St. John’s and they can taste that pink potted meat, feel the mealiness of it on their tongue like they’ve just taken a bite out of their lunch sandwich at school. Chances are, they’ll remember wanting to trade it for something else, too.

  I still take that list out every once in a while, just to see if the penny will drop, just to see whether or not starlae might finally come to me, as if the letters might come into focus in a way they never have before.

  The rest of it just stares me in the face — the same old things, the same things I might even buy. The paper’s browning now, but the best part is the handwriting, the way the words stack up right over each other, but every word is so clearly, carefully, exactly the same script as the one above it. Four capital Cs, two Bs, two Ps. And each one the absolute exact mirror of its fellow. Cursive — I don’t know for sure if that’s the right word, but it sounds right. It sounds old enough.

  People don’t write like that anymore. They just don’t have the skills hammered into them the way they used to — they don’t build up that same muscle memory any more, the results of the forced effort of making the same letters over and over again in a handwriting primer with some Christian brother down at the end of the aisle, Brother John or Brother Jim with a big ruler to swing at you when you did it wrong or you went too slow. People now probably wouldn’t even know what a script book was anymore, even if you put it right there in front of them. They’d look at those strange sets of lines and ask if they were expected to be composing music or something.

  That’s something that comes over me more often now, a feeling like I’m straddling too much stuff all at once. More to the point, that I’m straddling too many years.

  I’ll be looking at one single thing, and the next thing you know, I’ve got it all tied up with a whole bunch of other stuff — memories and experience and the things I don’t feel like ever telling anyone — and, all at once, it’s just too exhausting to keep thinking about.

  The lists are part of it. There are so many now. It’s been too many years, with too little of me spread across them really thin, so thin that I’m almost transparent. I’m stretched right out, trying to hang on to everything I can’t let go of.

  It should all be useful, it should be of value to someone. All that information. All the stuff I know.

  Because it’s not only my teeth that I’ve still got — I’ve got my hearing, too, and it’s perfectly good hearing — not that it would have to be for me to hear them.

  I mean, I can be standing right next to someone, standing right there, and as long as I’m working, wearing the dark blue overalls with my first name on the patch on the front — an oval with Walt in a stupid fancy script I never would have chosen — they’ll be completely oblivious.

  There’s something about being staff that just makes you invisible, at least until they need you. There’s something about being cleaning staff that’s even worse. Like I’m deaf or maybe stupid. And I can tell you one thing — I’m not stupid.

  It’s the same with the cashiers; they’re not even two feet away from you as they push the groceries across the scanner, but people will still stand right in front of them talking about all kinds of stuff or fighting with whoever’s in the store with them. And it’s like you’re not supposed to hear any of it, much less take it back to the break room so you can share it with each other and have a really good laugh. You wouldn’t believe half the things the cashiers know.

  And people just spill it out, none the wiser. The conveyor belt between you isn’t soundproofed. It’s like people chattering away on their cellphones, spilling out all kinds of personal information for anyone who wants to listen. Anyone like me.

  I think you should only spread stuff around if you want to share it, if you trust someone with it.

  There’s not all that much I’m willing to share.

  I grew up downtown, right in the centre of St. John’s, in one of those row house neighbourhoods where you know all your neighbours’ business real well because you share a wall with them and their life is pressed right up tight against yours. I lived on Bond, a long, narrow street that runs parallel with the waterfront, on a block where all of our backyards were framed in by other houses. When I looked down on them from my bedroom up on the second storey at night, it was like a walled courtyard — wooden houses, cheek by jowl with each other, all hoarding those small backyards. Two or three trees down in there, the crowns up higher than the roofs on the downhill side of the block, their branches matte black against the twilight sky. When I was lying there on my back, waiting for sleep, it didn’t matter whose yard the trunks actually stood in; it was like the trees belonged to every house on that block.

  There are people who spend a lot of time and effort blaming their parents for who they are, and maybe they have a point: “Look how fucked up I am, but it’s only because they were so fucked up first.”

  I don’t subscribe to that particular theory. My dad drove truck, my mother was a housewife, I had two brothers and, in age, I was stuck right in the middle.

  Robert and Allen. Robert’s a linguistics professor in western Ontario and Allen’s got a heavy-equipment business in northern Alberta. Dad died first, right at retirement, out in the backyard with a gardening fork stuck into the ground next to the great big spread of his rhubarb, shut down in barely a blink of an eye by a myocardial infarction. Mom died three years later, three lonely, needy years later, and everyone else was off on the tenure track or whatever, except for me.

  Walt, well, Walt was a grocery store janitor and of course he was home, even if he was the disappointment of the three. The disappointment, even though I was the one who drove over to shovel the snow. I was the one who kept track of the medical appointments and took Mom in the car to see the doctor. I was the one who had to juggle shifts and bring over groceries and finally clean up all kinds of shit, literal and otherwise. I should have been prepared for that.

  I was just a janitor, after all.

  And I wasn’t even the executor.

  Allen was.

  Chapter 11

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) is seeking the assistance of the general public in their investigation of a criminal trespass in the west end of St. John’s. The RNC is looking for witnesses who may have seen a male suspect in the Cowan Heights area, especially in the area of the linear park, on Saturday, Dec. 14. Anyone with information on the alleged trespasser is asked to contact the RNC at 729-8000 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

  “Now they’re giving us peeping Toms? What’s next? Lost snot-noses from the mall?” Scoville was more upset that Dean had ever seen him, twitching behind his desk near the wall like an angry little bantam chicken.

  “This keeps up, and we’ll end up with every jumped-up teenaged girl with a job downtown and an attitude, and every single time one of them decides not to come home at night, we’ll have her mother on the phone wondering why we haven’t found precious little Bethany yet. They’re all dumping their shit on us, Dean, and I bet they’re having a good laugh about it, too.”

  Dean didn’t disagree. But he also couldn’t always find the energy to care. The new job was mostly time in the files with Scoville, and Dean wasn’t sure he was ever going to like the guy. Sitting in the office with him, Dean thought, was like sitting particularly close to a small, angry, pot-bellied wood stove. It was hours of flipping through files and hearing the other officer sighing, pushing his chair back, sometimes muttering under his breath.

  About three times a day, Scoville said he had liked arson investigation better : “You drive your own bus, and fires are public, so there’s always enough
pressure to keep you sharp.”

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if the cases were bigger — or if we could take more time with them. I could spend a month just on that Mary Carter file and that Walt guy. Dig into the whole thing, just the way it gets under you skin,” Dean said. “A woman missing, enough question marks about her husband and the whole investigation to keep it on the front burner. But it’s not like we’re ever going to get the chance.”

  There was no direct pressure in their office, but there was the continuing pile of cases sloughed off from all over the building. After the first press conference, they hadn’t heard a single word from upstairs. Scoville had put a sign up over his desk, magic marker on white paper: “The Mushroom Patrol.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of someone seeing it?” Dean asked.

  “If someone important were to actually come down here, I’d be afraid already,” Scoville said.

  Even when they managed to get out of the office it was just to follow old tracks: redoing interviews, hoping that the latest talk with a witness or a family member would jar something loose, something that they hadn’t coughed up in all those other interviews. Often, the interviewees were disinterested or downright dismissive. Dean had already heard “it was a long time ago” more times than he could count.

  It was hard to even find the energy to come into work.

  Some mornings, Dean would lay on his back in bed, look at the ceiling, and believe there really was no good reason to get up. Nothing would be challenging or different — it would all be the same.