by Lisa Moore
They were just nineteen and eighteen, not even pregnant.
But maybe even the guy with the Queen Elizabeth dress and the crown and the giant corseted gut could not sully the event of their marriage.
Maybe it hadn’t been sullied at all. Perhaps they had been at their purest then. They were too young for sacred.
He saw in this girl, Colleen, a similar kind of sadness; the same dark thing his wife had.
Do you always wear your cowboy hat at the table? she said. She had taken a swig of her beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. He removed the hat and laid it on the table between them.
It was as though all the ugliness in the world affected these women, he thought. They had no way to turn it off. They felt everything. They wanted to save everything. That was it; they wanted to save everything.
The alligator farm was dense with green light and the smell was virile, like sex itself, but he was alone. He had made a miscalculation with that alligator. Or maybe that one animal was a rogue, or it was as simple as the drop of sweat that had done him in.
Eight months in hospital and he was not the same afterwards.
There had been infection in the brain and he had trouble with simple things for a long while afterwards. He couldn’t tell the time. His vision was blurred. The fits started.
The sacred had busted out of them; it had a kind of deafness, it spilled in his inner ear and made the room tilt.
The sight of the Impala bouncing backwards over the rutted road: it could not be repeated, or contained, or understood. It was an altar and a wordless story because he’d never really spoken of it. He lost his purchase when his wife left.
He became sensitive about his appearance. And he forgot he had an appearance. The leather cowboy hat was an example. How he had come to a place in his life where he would wear such a thing was a mystery. The events that had led him into a souvenir shop in Mobile and drew him to the rack of hats were absolutely lost to him. But the crown had darkened with oil from his scalp and he was never without the hat. He remembered standing in a shopping mall confronted by a bin of white underwear and coming to understand the absurdity of the bin and the underwear and of being unattached.
He lifted weights in the evening listening to Bjork or Lucinda Williams or Thelonious Monk. He attended to the reservation and the alligators and the tourists.
What he did: he attached himself to an idea. The idea was to make money. He had no need for money other than the action of making it. There is in the making of money a propelling forward. Energy is exerted and boardrooms come into being. They form themselves seconds before you open the door and there they are when you open the door and if they are in Houston the walls are glass and there are seven or eight men in suits and a blast of sun that eradicates history.
Money moves by instinct, he’d found. It will lie still and then it will move. He found he could keep in his head the trajectories of futures as easily as he could make his breakfast in the morning.
His sister called from the hospital in Houston when she was delivering her second child, moaning through the call, telling him again and again how much it hurt and how much she loved him and would he come for a visit and he sat in the house by himself with the phone to his ear and tears streaming down his face and nodding his head silently. But he found he did not like to leave the reserve. He had the tourists to deal with and the alligators and premonitions about investments and that was enough.
His sister called one day to say she’d heard Meg, his ex-wife, was singing in Nashville. For several weeks he slept with a waitress who worked in a bar sixty miles away. But after a while he couldn’t bring himself to drive that far every weekend.
The girl who showed up was from Canada and she had hitchhiked from the airport, or maybe stolen some money and he let her have the trailer. He had met her aunt, the girl said. A woman from Newfoundland, she’d said, but he couldn’t remember ever meeting anyone from Newfoundland before and the girl had left it at that.
Might as well let her sleep in the trailer, he thought. She was young and she reminded him of when he and Meg got married and he thought he might tell her about the Queen Elizabeth impersonator.
She wanted to see the reserve.
After supper, he kicked open the door of the trailer and light came through the lime green curtains that were sun-faded and she looked green in the light. He had an airboat and he said he would take her out in the morning when he had to collect eggs, before the regular tours started. Then, if she wouldn’t mind, he’d like to give her some money and get her on a plane and send her home.
It didn’t seem right to him, a girl her age, wandering around when her mother didn’t know where she was. He showed her the phone and he told her he would be much obliged if she’d call her mother that night and never mind about the charges.
He explained about the ecological reserve and how he was putting the babies back in the swamp.
She asked if they were dangerous and she immediately burned bright red because of his face.
He said he’d seen them swallow a few dogs, and an old woman in Florida with a lawn mower had been attacked. But people felt it was the lawn mower that agitated the gator and if she hadn’t gone near it with the noise the attack wouldn’t have happened.
He said, If you keep your head out of their jaws you do pretty well.
They like marshmallows, he said.
MADELEINE
WHEN SHE THINKS of her childhood home she thinks of Beverly playing piano for all she’s worth. Madeleine watching the snow through the window on the landing; she was almost a teenager. The window was beaded with water droplets, and beyond, lazy, fat snowflakes fell and lifted in the wind. A Sunday-evening dimness crept from all the corners of the house, mingling with the smell of boiling cabbage and the pies. Partridge berries. In the Sunday late afternoons of her childhood she liked to sit on the landing of the stairs and hear everyone moving through the house. She just sat on the worn Persian runner and listened to Beverly play.
Mrs. McCarthy, the housekeeper, had skinned the rabbits on the kitchen counter. Her knuckles whitening as she ripped the fur from flesh. The purplish flesh wrapped over tiny bones lined with skeins of yellow fat. Five rabbits in the sink, cold water splashing over them.
The cleaver came down and a paw fell off the cutting board. Madeleine put it in the pocket of her dress.
Mrs. McCarthy smoothed her chapped, red hands over her apron and lifted the kettle off the stove. A comb hung by a strand of wrinkled hair from her loose braid, her face was mottled.
That Sunday they’d gone to the Basilica for five o’clock mass, Father Dunphy raised the Eucharist. Something flew from one perch to another in the rafters. Christ’s red glass robes lit up with sunlight, the white of his downcast eye, his hand, the blood. The choir sang, Mrs. Hill’s high-pitched trill above everyone else. Mrs. Hill had arranged the turkey tea, two hundred paper plates with tiny pieces of fruit cocktail in green jelly and the beet-coloured scoops of potato, dry turkey, and a pearly grey slice of processed ham rolled around a raw carrot stick.
In the dark living room, Beverly digs notes out of the piano, playing it as hard as she can. The low notes send a vibration through the wooden spindles of the stair rail. A flood of light hits the glass, a passing car, and each drop gets full of burning white. The shimmer leaps from drop to drop. Beverly hits a discordant note but she recovers; she’s a skater racing across the pond and the tip of her skate hooks, her heart, her red mitts — what was it? Mozart? — but she regains her balance and she sails on, the last few notes like the sweep of the headlights illuminating all, catching, lastly, the cut-crystal decanter on the side table, busting it open so bits of light zoom over the walls, the piano, Beverly’s back, the portrait of their grandfather in the convex frame, his eyes, and the coat of dust. A pot cover drops in the kitchen.
Beverly stops playing. The piano bench creaks. There are forbidden chocolates in an enamel bowl and Madeleine can see Beverly reach for a c
hocolate. Madeleine is startled by the audacity. The chocolate melts in Beverly’s mouth. Then tires crunch on the gravel. Beverly tentatively touches the keys, the music is more viscous, the cherry centre and the sour liqueur, dark chocolate.
A man has come to the door, snow whirls in around his pant legs and there is Madeleine’s mother, her hand on the door and the smell of fresh snow, the frigid air, the wind crashing through the branches outside. This is the end of Madeleine’s childhood. She holds the spindle of the stair rail, from here she will lose faith, she will go hungry, she will be fuelled by anger and sex and a desire to make every moment tangible; she isn’t thinking about making films, of course, she has never heard of making films, she’s not quite a teenager, this is St. John’s — the light passing through each raindrop on the window in the stairwell — but she decides she will make films.
It is decided, whoever decides.
Madeleine watches the man speak to her mother, the brim of his hat, and her mother’s shoulders crumple. She hugs herself and her shoulders quake with little shudders. Their father has finally died.
Madeleine has been making films ever since. She has made industrial films to support documentaries with radical political slants. She has made television cooking shows and political campaign ads. She has made films in India and Africa and Australia. She has made films about the Yanomami and the Inuit and the Andaman Islanders and the more obscure members of the royal family.
The film she is making now will be better than any film ever made by anyone. Better than Bergman. This film will contain everything. It will contain everything. It will contain everything.
COLLEEN
I CHECKED THE sheets and they were clean, but there was a musty smell. The door was rickety but there was a lock. There was a single toothbrush in the holder over the sink and it was stiff and crusted with toothpaste. I smelled it and it smelled like toothpaste. I ran my thumb over the bristles and the toothpaste came off in a little cloud of powder. I opened the medicine cabinet and there was a tube of toothpaste and dental floss and a bottle of Aspirin.
I heard him go back along the path and I heard the screen door.
I brushed my teeth and I put the cap back on the toothpaste and put it back on the shelf and closed the door to the medicine cabinet. I stood there looking at myself in the mirror.
If you look at yourself for a long time without blinking your face starts to change shape. I looked at myself that way and I felt afraid of the ride through the swamp tomorrow and I blinked hard. Then I just looked at myself and something black and fast ran from my nose to my lips and it was blood.
I tried tilting my head back but then I could taste it.
After a while the nosebleed stopped and I lay awake for a long time and the sounds of the swamp didn’t frighten me as much but I was wide awake.
His face was shredded and flaps of skin overlapped other flaps and there was a loose web of lines all over his face and head. He was almost bald and I saw where the teeth had punctured his skull. His hands had a constant shake, he nearly spilled his beer. At supper there was a moment, maybe thirty seconds, when he stared into space and didn’t seem to hear me.
He has a compound for the alligators, and there are bridges all through it where the tourists can walk for five bucks and the whole compound is surrounded by a chain link fence and there are more than a hundred animals.
At first you don’t see them and then you see them. You see them on the bank and just a strip of their backs breaking the water and they look like floating logs in the green algae. The algae are luminous and there’s a dank smell and they don’t move at all but when they move they’re fast. They flick their tails and they are like monsters.
I knelt down near the fence and looked into the eye of a giant alligator that was very near the fence. The alligator did not move and did not move. I saw myself kneeling in its eye and I was tiny and fragile-looking in a long velvet tunnel and I wasn’t ever coming back from there. Then the animal turned and waddled over the hard-packed, cracked mud and algae. Its tail swung with lazy muscular swishes. Then it sank into the water and glided out of sight. He told me to get my fingers off the fence.
FRANK
FOUR BOYS ON skateboards appeared to float momentarily on the crest of a hill on Gower Street and then gathered speed.
Their arms hung by their sides, they wore baggy jeans and bright polyester hockey shirts. They came down the hill accompanied by a growing rumble and just before they smacked into an oncoming refrigerated truck advertising meat, all four jumped and the skateboards leapt from beneath their feet into their hands and it was exactly as though they had never been on them.
They waited on the curb for a break in the traffic, then strolled across the street and one called after Frank. There were quick pulses of lightning followed by a distant crack.
On the other side of the street the boys dropped the skate-boards with a clatter and stepped onto them again. Their bodies dipped and rose three times as they kicked themselves up to speed, then they followed each other in lazy, swerving paths around the corner of Prescott Street and out of sight.
Kevin Nolan was leaning on a door frame sucking hard on a cigarette. Frank realized with a peculiar clarity, heightened, it seemed, by the smell of ozone, that he would ask Kevin for the money he needed and that Kevin would give it to him.
It meant he would have to endure Kevin’s company for perhaps an hour, then outright ask for the money, and it meant the end of the fragile, important friendship the two young men had nursed since they were five.
Come in and have a cup of tea, Frank, Kevin said.
There was a narrow hallway that led to a cramped kitchen smelling faintly of mould. Kevin took out a frying pan, looked at it closely, and then tapped it twice against the counter dislodging a shower of mouse shit onto a waiting piece of newspaper. He put the pan under a running faucet and wiped it carefully with the bottom of his T-shirt. He tipped it into the light until he was satisfied the pan was clean.
He waved the pan toward a kitchen chair and Frank sat down. There were several marijuana plants hanging from the ceiling in macramé holders, and more on a table by a window that looked out onto a small backyard. Kevin’s T-shirt had a picture of a skeleton holding a beer can in the bones of his hand.
I’m doing small machine repair up to the technical college, Kevin said. There’s nothing I don’t know about photocopiers.
It was Kevin who had got Frank the part-time job at the photocopy place.
He dumped a half-bag of frozen fries into a saucepan on the back burner. The saucepan roared up, spitting boiling fat.
Kevin took a step back and then reached over the stove holding his shirt close to his stomach to hit a button on the fan. He had the waxy complexion of an insomniac, an open cold sore on his upper lip, and the dark eye sockets of a heavy pot smoker.
A rapacious vitality kept some part of his body always tapping, he made weird noises, softly whispered expulsions of air that mimicked machine-gun bursts or the feedback of amplifiers, kapow kapow kapow kapow, yeah, uh huh, yeah, va-voom, all the while slapping his thigh with both hands and Frank felt sorry he had come inside.
Kevin was thoroughly unlovable with his Adam’s apple raw from a recent shave, the home-done tattoo of a skull peeking out from behind a torn heart, and, most painful to witness, his baldly searching look. He sold hash but was discreet with his money and might have become an IT specialist — he had a vicious intelligence and was intuitive with computers — except for bouts of depression that kept him on a couch for months at a time.
Frank thought of the first day they had both gone to day-care together with Mrs. Hallett, the foster mother they had shared for six months when they were five. Frank’s mother was in hospital having her breasts removed and Kevin’s mother had left him standing under a tree during the St. John’s regatta. She said she would be right back but it took a month.
When Frank got inside the daycare he could smell chicken noodle soup. The lukewa
rm, piss-coloured, salty broth in bright plastic bowls dimpled with globules of oil and sinking noodles engulfed him in despair.
Three weeks before meeting Kevin, he’d glimpsed the gauze taped to his mother’s weirdly boyish chest. He’d watched the doctor lift the gauze, look beneath, and touch whatever was under the bandage with his gloved index finger. He gingerly taped the gauze back down and it was the extreme gentleness his mother required that spread the same fear through Frank that had caused him to wet his bed for months after that first operation.
Mrs. Hallett, Frank’s foster mother, was a heavy woman with thick curly black and grey hair that tumbled around her wide red face and onto her shoulders. Her cheeks, close up, were covered with a minute network of capillaries, broken from laughter and exertion in her extensive garden. Her eyes were a light brown, fringed with black lashes, and she had a space between her front teeth.
She was always grinning, glowing with excitement, unless she was lost in thought, bent on her knees in the bathroom checking the temperature of the water for the boys’ baths. She would grunt, absorbed by some inner argument, and push herself up with the knuckles of one hand down on the floor. He can see her pressing down the pastry cutter, too, a tan-coloured bowl tucked into her hip.
She was a nurse and kept her house perfectly clean and made them eat a piece of fruit each night. Frank’s mother had only ever bought McIntosh apples, with the white flesh, barely tinted green.
Mrs. Hallett bought kiwis and mangoes and pomegranates. Frank felt sorry for his mother, that she didn’t know about the diversity of fruit, that her five-year-old son knew more than she did.
The aroma of chicken noodle soup was more than Frank could bear that first visit to daycare, he dug his face into Mrs. Hallett’s thigh and whispered he wanted to go home and she peeled his hands off her and he slapped them back on, clinging to her skirt. She told him she had to go to work, that he was a big boy and she would buy him an ice cream and they would visit his mother.