Alligator

by Lisa Moore

  He’d read a book called The Successful Executive published in the 1930s and found everything he had already assumed to be correct. Ask questions later. Don’t ask. There was a stream of philosophy that recommended reflection but those guys were all dead. He could persuade, or coerce, he had both these abilities. He had an intermittent genius that came and went like a bad cellphone connection. Plans came to him this way: fully formed and without flaw.

  For example, he had decided he would douse the house on Morris Avenue with gasoline. He would take the pickup to every gas station in St. John’s over the period of two weeks and fill up three five-gallon plastic tanks in each gas station.

  The idea of torching the house came to him when Isobel Turner was opening her mail. She had a letter from her insurance company and as she stood reading it she opened the breadbox and then became still, transfixed by the statement.

  She put the statement on the counter and took out the loaf of bread. She said insurance rates had doubled since she bought the house. She said this to the toaster. She picked up the statement again and the toaster began to smoke. At first she did nothing.

  The fire alarm began to bleat and it was a new design with a female voice between each peal of shrilling rings that said, This is an automated message. This is a fire alarm. This is a fire alarm.

  Isobel flapped at it with the dishtowel, dragged a chair over, and pulled the batteries out. The toaster made a grinding squeal and she got a fork from the drawer and poked at the bread that was blackened and tossed it, smoking, into the garbage bucket under the sink.

  She’d bought the house fifteen years before, filled it with her grandmother’s furniture. The contents of her grand-mother’s house in Old Perlican had been left to her in a will. She’d rented out the house to a family until she came home from Toronto. The husband had worked for the telephone company and his wife had kept the house immaculate, as if it were her own.

  Valentin had sent her flowers in December, after they had spent their first night together. He had been gentle with her and he found a way to respect her during the evening. She was a woman who enjoyed sex, who could summon a kind of exaltation. There was no trace of selfishness in the way she made love. When she came, Valentin thought of it as a kind of giving over; the soft clutching of her orgasms sent tremors through him. He decided, too, that Isobel Turner had been smart once, but something had got away from her. She wasn’t smart any more.

  She was working on a film shoot that winter and after they made love she would put in a fire and go over her lines. He watched her lips move while she silently memorized the script. She hardly knew he was there.

  He could see a gaping weakness in her, a profound vulnerability that he knew he could take advantage of. He’d known nervous people; he’d seen people fall apart. People who had struggled doggedly against far worse odds than Isobel Turner would ever know; people who had suddenly given up, without warning or obvious cause. He had seen it in prison, during his brief stint in the Soviet Army, in the crews of the ships he sailed with.

  His own mother had left Valentin and his sister without a word and no way to support themselves when he was ten years old. They had gone without food for a day before his sister left the house to ask the neighbours for something to eat. Those kinds of collapses came in incremental stages; his mother had worried about natural disasters, earthquakes, floods. Some days she wouldn’t get out of bed and kept the curtains closed; they’d had very little money after his father died. He remembered waking up on the morning she had left, knowing something was wrong. He’d walked down the hall from his bedroom to hers, his fingers on the wall beside him. He stood for a long time in front of her bedroom door, unable to turn the knob, afraid of disturbing her. He felt someone watching his back and he turned and there was his sister in her nightgown and she was standing still, waiting. He turned the knob and gave the heavy door a push and there was his mother’s bed. She had made it and the sunlight from her bedroom window lay over the bed in a bright rectangle and the pillow squarely in the centre of bed beneath the headboard. A bird was singing outside. No object had been tipped over or smashed in the kitchen; his mother hadn’t taken anything but the clothes on her back. The house had boomed with her absence.

  He had started to drop by Isobel’s regularly for tea when he was certain she was alone. He liked it when she offered him food. Her cupboards were full of pharmaceuticals and tinctures. Bunches of dried herbs were bound with thread and hung from the window frames. She didn’t eat much, and there were expensive cheeses and withered vegetables in the crispers. She was cool and firm with him, but she was also vulnerable. Sometimes when he arrived there were three or four loaves of hot homemade bread covered with checkered tea towels sitting on her kitchen table. She was compliant and self-absorbed, and she intrigued him. He began to realize she was taking lots of pills, and maybe her languid sexiness was nothing more than a doped funk. They’d seen each other throughout the winter and spring, mostly when he felt like it. She was starting to prepare for another shoot for the same film. She had become more focused over the last week, contained and distant.

  Outside her kitchen the garden was brilliant green, sun filtering through the overgrown trees. The leaves had been eaten by the elm spanworms so the branches were naked. From the window he could see the spanworms hanging. It was the third consecutive summer of infestation and the trees would not last, they said. If it were his house he would have sprayed. He would have blasted the worms straight back to hell, where he imagined they had come from.

  She was wearing a sheer, lime-coloured nightdress while she read the insurance statement. She had taken her foot out of one slipper and scratched the heel of her other foot with her bright red toenails. She put the slipper back on and turned the statement over, continuing to read. The sun from the window showed the lines around her eyes and he liked that she was much older than him. He’d guessed she was older but she would not say by how much. He knew she would never spray the worms.

  I have my tomatoes to think of, she’d said when he told her to spray. She stood reading the statement from the insurance company and the toast smoked and he decided. He would burn down the house.

  Last week they’d both gone out into the backyard after making love and they had stood beneath her mature maples and listened to the worms. It was a sultry evening, and Isobel stood with a shawl over her bare shoulders, staring up into the trees. It was a clicking noise, like the inner workings of a combination lock, all the wheels and dials and tumblers falling into place. Tiny jaws munching persistently, killing everything. She was an actress, she’d told him, which, as a skill, amounted to looking into the camera as though it were another person.

  That’s not a skill, he’d said.

  Sentient beings, she’d whispered, staring up into the branches of her trees.

  He would burn the house down, Isobel Turner’s house, and when she collected the insurance money he would take most of it from her.

  Valentin asked how much money she would collect and she said $82,000. She answered him without realizing she had spoken, so absorbed was she in the mail.

  This $82,000 was definitely the right amount. He would not stay in St. John’s for another winter. He had been in Newfoundland for more than a year and he hated the place as he had never hated any place in his life.

  He told Isobel Turner what he was going to do and he said she would get a cut and he threatened to kill her.

  You must have someone you can visit around the bay for the weekend, he’d said.

  He had gone to her several times during the week and said these things over and over, sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening, and one night she turned her back on him and took a bottle of pills from the cupboard and tapped them into her palm while the water ran and he saw she was taking too many and he slapped her hand so they bounced all over the floor and she crumpled slightly.

  He took her in his arms and she was absolutely still, except a gentle heaving of her shoulders, and he could
feel the front of his shirt getting wet. He could hardly believe how moved he was by her crying. He almost cried himself.

  Instead, he reached his arm along the wall toward the light switch and snapped it off. He began kissing her and she kissed him back and they had sex on the kitchen floor and she came several times and was slippery with sweat and she felt very strong in his arms.

  When he got off the floor, there was some kind of grit, perhaps dried breadcrumbs, imbedded in his knees and elbows, which he brushed away, and his legs were watery and he was full of a spiritual freshness. He reached down and helped her up. She gathered up her clothes, held them against her breasts, and left the room and he could hear her bare feet on the stairs and he counted her footsteps.

  He felt he had attained, through the lovemaking, clarity of thought. He decided Isobel Turner would benefit from the fire too. As a gesture of goodwill, because she was such a profound lover, he would drag her out of the entropic dreaminess she was mired in and get her started on some venture. She could sell luxury items of one kind or another. He was certain she could convince older women to pay great amounts of money for things they didn’t need. That was a skill.

  He realized, then, that the water was still running in the sink. She had turned the water on so she could swallow the pills he had knocked from her hand. She had put a finger under the tap and flicked at the stream of water waiting for it to get cold and she had tapped all the pills into her palm. A whole handful of whatever they were.

  He turned off the tap and thought about the extreme heat of her body, she was like a furnace, and the fresh slick of sweat that had glistened on her chest in the street light from her kitchen window and how she gripped him so tightly with her thighs and how she had shuddered after each orgasm, and how the whites of her eyes had shown in a thin silvery line through her lashes — he understood all of this had to do with the fact that she was close to eating those pills. She had reached around with one hand and held his ass, her nails digging into him, and the palm of her other hand squeaked on the cold kitchen tiles.

  When Valentin turned off the water, it became silent in the kitchen and he couldn’t hear her walking around upstairs, but knew she was awake. He knew she was lying in her bed in the dark with her eyes open and she was probably very afraid. Afraid was good, he thought. Change requires fear, he knew this too. He wanted her to change for her own sake. Part of him had fallen in love.

  He put his clothes back on and left the house quietly. He left the house thinking he had saved her life. He strolled downtown whistling and lighthearted.

  He drank the last shot and ordered five more and decided the OxyContin addict wasn’t going to show. He’d lost Anton to a shadowy corner of the bar. Anton was small-boned and bald and was now leaning over a young woman, his hand spread on the wall near her head. Valentin watched as he leaned forward to kiss the woman and a blue spotlight that had been blocked by Anton’s shoulder struck the pints of beer sitting on the bar: one, two, three.

  Valentin believed that groupings of three precipitated a streak of luck. He had a habit of counting stairs and neigh-bourhood blocks, or cars of a certain make, and believed in a system of recrimination that was visited upon anyone who didn’t pay attention to these signs. It was important to be fluent in the language of signs and never to stand still when the signs advised action. He was convinced that the way to escape a dark fate was never to stand still. Traces of superstition, of one sort or another, infected every decision he made.

  Earlier today he’d ordered soup at Tim Hortons and watched the girl dip the ladle three times and when he stepped outside he’d found a five-dollar bill in the gutter. He has a recurring dream of his mother stirring soup that fills him with exploding ambition. Always the same, simple moment, steam rising from the pot, wisps of her hair falling away from a long dark ponytail, she turns and smiles at him, she touches the top of his head, and then she bends and folds him in her arms; he wakes full of abstract terror. He wants to get ahead. Getting ahead is the way he thinks of it; racing toward a different end than his mother’s, whatever it was. She had gone into St. Petersburg to find work, they’d heard later from the neighbours, and they had lost track of her altogether. They never heard from her again.

  There was a girl at the pool table, Valentin saw, who was wearing white leather spike-heeled boots that were laced up to her thighs. He watched the girl from the corner of his eye. He put the chess pieces down on the board, setting up a new game. They were pieces carved from marble, they looked like Inuit hunters and the rooks were walruses and the pawns were seals. Valentin held the queen in his fist and moved his thumb over her carved cloak.

  Sometimes when the girl at the pool table bent over to line up her shot, one of her boots lifted off the ground. There were seven balls left on the green felt. Valentin gestured to the bartender and the man poured a pint and brought it to the girl just before she took her shot and she looked around the bar.

  When she finally glanced at Valentin he tipped his shot glass. The girl turned back to the table and she struck the ball sharply with a hard jut of the cue and everything on the felt rolled and smacked against each other. She sank three balls.

  He would set fire to Isabel Turner’s house and he would collect the insurance. He would start her on some business venture and he would get out of Newfoundland. He would never return, nor think of it again. He had come to a cold and ugly island that hardly existed, could not be found on many maps. He was nowhere. He could imagine the house on Morris Avenue collapsing in the heart of a roaring fire.

  COLLEEN

  BEVERLY AND COLLEEN were in the food court of Atlantic Place and Beverly had chosen a table as far from the one with the four police officers as possible.The courtrooms and Colleen’s meeting with the youth diversion officer were upstairs. Her daughter would soon go up and meet Mr. Duffy and he would have his say and Colleen would spend the rest of her summer, the long, hot month of August, doing community work, begrudging all of life, Beverly’s existence and her own. And Beverly would have to be supportive and motherly throughout. It was her job; what was expected. She was tired of her daughter and the heat and her own loneliness. She wanted to drive to the ocean and get in. She wanted to feel that kind of cold, end up with hypothermia, be washed ashore and discovered by someone willing to take over. But, instead, she was in the food court of Atlantic Place, jittery from bad coffee and a suffocating, unconditional love for her daughter with the bruised nose.

  They were one table away from Mr. John Harvey, a downtown vagrant who had settled into his seat and had bent over and unzipped the rubber boots he wore, exposing ankles so pale and veined and bluish white they looked opalescent.

  Mr. John Harvey wore an army-surplus parka done up to his chin. Beverly could only imagine how hot he was. Looking out at the harbour, she found she suddenly felt like talking.

  This time you’ve gone too far, young lady, she said.

  And then a moment later, One day I suppose you’ll be able to say you’re sorry for all this.

  A cruise ship crept into the window frame. There were thousands of black portals and the ship was fiercely white, even through the tinted glass. It was a monstrous vessel casting a cool shadow over the families walking along the harbourfront.

  Mr. John Harvey thumped his chest several times with his fist and eventually, raucously, coughed up something he folded into a paper napkin and put in his pocket.

  Colleen suddenly wanted her mother to accompany her to the youth diversion meeting. She would give anything to have her mother there. This was what mothers were for: to swoop in and rescue.

  Tough love, her mother said.

  The cops on the other side of the room burst into laughter. One of them removed his cap and hit the female cop on the shoulder with it. She pretended to topple off her chair. They were just people, these cops.

  Beverly asked, Have you ever given me a thought?

  I wanted to change things, Colleen said. When she said this phrase she saw the planet e
arth from a great distance. It was so far away it appeared to be dislodged from the present, a part of some distant future. They had all lived past this moment: the police, Mr. John Harvey, her mother. The world was still the world but they weren’t in it any more. They had long since died and been replaced with new, better people.

  Once, her mother said, I left you in a basket on the kitchen table and went upstairs to get something. And when I came back downstairs fifteen minutes later the kitchen was full of smoke. I’d put potatoes on to boil and burned the bottom out of the pot. I’d almost asphyxiated you. Why am I feeling so sentimental?

  I’m sorry this happened, Colleen blurted. She wanted to be rewarded with her mother’s forgiveness, and then the sun would fire all the prisms in their empty kitchen, the cruise ship would pass, and the arms of the sun would reach beyond its massive, gliding bulk.

  Colleen was willing to accept the consequences of her actions — in imagining them she had seen a beer-bellied developer stomping his foot with impotent rage — but she hadn’t imagined getting caught.

  David had always said, Goodness prevails. He was like a mason laying bricks. There was a right and honest way; things must stack up.

  So few things are worth doing, he’d once said. It was after the construction business failed and he’d spent a week in bed. He said he had contracted some virus, more than likely contagious. He’d come out of the bedroom only to smoke in front of Canada AM, wearing pyjamas — the buttons done up wrong — and a terry-cloth housecoat of maroon and grey stripes with the belt dragging on the carpet behind him.

  David had once organized a benefit to raise money for teenage rugby players. He’d spent weeks selling tickets for a gala dinner and dance so that children from lower income families could go to Sweden with the St. John’s rugby team. Colleen had heard him on the radio — he’d spoken with emotion in his voice, seemingly overcome with conviction — Every kid on this team gets to play ball.