six@sixty

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  A few stay in the room; either they didn’t do it or they live here; until this second I hadn’t thought of someone living here. A home. It was just a party. One well-dressed man stops, calmly checks the body on the stained carpet.

  “E morto!” he states as if saying the weather is inclement.

  Maria the stoned woman takes the staple gun.

  My cousin Eve says, “They called the police. Let’s go, okay?”

  “What about an ambulance?”

  “The polizia will handle it. We have to leave.”

  “My beer.”

  “Forget your fucking beer!”

  I grab the tiny bag of coke and step over the body in the liminal doorway. Why did I ever walk up this narrow hall? Morto, blood flees a human so quickly and all of us drain the rooms so quickly and down the crowded stairs, slim bodies draped in black suits and pants, knees and arms moving jerkily in black-crow angles against sharp white stucco, stucco where you cut your elbow and bleed if you touch the wall.

  On the street we run past the World War II tanks again, run like pale ghosts past the same Chinese factory and radioactive canal water and a distant figure throwing something, a tiny splash in the silver canal, perhaps a stolen phone or the knife from the neighbour’s leg.

  Eve and I turn a corner, and there are two policemen standing in pretty leather boots and jodphurs.

  Oh fuck, I think. We attempt to impersonate people walking calmly, but how? I have forgotten the details of calm, I should have taken notes during a calm time, knowing this would happen down the line.

  One policeman hugs a middle-aged woman who is crying non-stop, she can’t stop. The policeman holds up a device for her to breathe into. Is it a puffer to help her breathe or to measure alcohol in her system? No idea. The policeman tells her to stop struggling or she can be charged. She grips the policeman’s face in her hands, chants something into his face. He asks her to stop, but she won’t remove her hands from his face.

  My cousin whispers a rough translation: “I’m putting my fifty-year-old hands in your face if I feel like it. You’re half my age you little fucking dick.”

  Perhaps, as I’ve told my cousin and Tamika, I’m invisible. The police don’t care about us, as they are busy loosening her hands from his face. Men in soccer shirts outside a social club watch my cousin and me come up the sidewalk. Word cannot have spread of the nearby party.

  “Scusi,” says my cousin. “Train? Trena? Stazione?” Her Italian is better than mine.

  They point down the boulevard toward the sea. “Giri a sinistra.”

  “Left,” I say. I know that sinister means left and enjoy that word, sinistra. The left hand is unlucky.

  “Si. Sinistra. Andate avanti per due minuti.”

  “Grazie,” says my cousin, “grazie.”

  “First you come drink with us,” the man says.

  “Sorry, we must go.”

  “No. One drink! To life! One drink!”

  “Numero di telefono?” another asks hopefully.

  “No, no,” says my pretty cousin, “in Italy I have no phone.”

  “Sieta a piedi?”

  “Si, we’re walking.”

  “A nice walk,” says one and grabs her backside. “If that was my wife . . .”

  “That’s my ass!” I yell. Why did I say that?

  “Fuck off,” she yells.

  “To life!” they yell. We’re way down the block; I think that’s what they yell.

  We’re running, we run blocks to the train station and I’m gasping; I can ride a clunker bike all day, but I’m not used to running. The station ticket window is empty, no one is in charge, which is fine by me. I’ve been travelling on an expired pass that also allows one into art galleries and museums around Napoli. I’ll pay a fine, I’m just glad to be on board. Now if we will just move. I can’t sit. Move, move.

  I don’t care where the train goes, I just don’t want to be around if the polizia are looking for witnesses or a scapegoat for the knifing, don’t want to be a person of interest. Father Silas’s art school is not officially recognized in Italy. Move!

  “Are we supposed to carry our passports? Mine’s at the hotel.”

  “Any blood on us?”

  “No one knows we were there.”

  We check our clothes for blood splatters anyway, our hands.

  “Check the bottom of my shoes.”

  Did I walk through the dead man’s blood? And that blood-sodden tea towel.

  “Maybe the guy’s ok.”

  “I’d say he was pretty well gone.” Gone west. We sit for what seems like humming hours, then our train betrays that buzzy feeling just before movement begins, that pre-coital imminence, and we sail forward in a silent sway of deliverance.

  I remember a funeral for a good friend on the West Coast, a lively giant of a man, very well liked. I’ve never heard so many people say, He was my best friend. I was getting jealous. At the open-coffin funeral we sat in solemn pews waiting for the sad service to start, and instead the Steppenwolf song “Born to be Wild” roared to life, loud as hell.

  Everyone in the funeral chapel laughed; he would have liked that; he laughed a lot. But I saw his big face blank in the coffin and his combed beard and thought, yes, he is spent, he is dead, he is missing from his own face. Some force that was him no longer there (Elvis has left the apartment building). Maybe that’s why we have open-casket funerals or a wake with the body right in your parlour, so you know, really feel the knowledge physically and don’t wait for him to show up at your door or expect to see your old friend for a pint in Swan’s pub. E morto. You must know.

  Our night train will swallow us, will travel all the way to Sorrento. The swallows return. Now, is that Sorrento or Capistrano? A leg with a knife severing a major artery. No more stoned young women for the neighbour with the staple gun. Come back. The dead hand, like the men on the crowded subway in Rome leaving their hand low to grope women, mortua manus. See the wonders of the ancient world!

  “Did you even see who stabbed him?”

  I decide to lie. “No, no, I just saw legs and a blade swinging.” And all that blood that should stay inside.

  “I just want to be back at the hotel. Be back home.”

  “We’ll be back soon enough.”

  She looks so forlorn, whereas I feel immense relief that the train is shunting us away. I show my cousin the stolen baggy.

  “You took that from the dead guy? Why?” She looks around the train. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “I had some years ago and really liked it, but I could never afford it.”

  “Fuck! What if we get stopped?”

  “I’ll get rid of it.”

  “They’d see you tossing it.”

  My Irish cousins have an expression when something is little use: like throwing water on a dead rat. I realize it’s my birthday, and I missed it, wandering this beautiful rat’s nest on a bay. My birthday present.

  “I don’t know. It was sitting there. I wanted to try some again. I’ll hide it in my sock.”

  We’ll be okay. The familiar train will deliver us back to chapels and chipped frescoes and Fabergé eggs and our whining art group. The aged conductor always so calm in the heat and sweat of day and the ennui of night. Our conductor possesses natural dignity. He does not bring up the idea of tickets. I am glad he runs the train. His childhood bride waits at home: this I am sure of. She is plumper than when they met at the dance and the world was shot in black and white.

  The calm conductor and his bride make me think about marriage. Marriage is success, marriage is failure, marriage is music, a ride, marriage is a train with windows. Every room is a train with windows, every office and every head is a train with windows, everything in the world is a train with windows.

  The question is: Do you kick out the windows or do you sit politely and hope for the uniformed conductor? Does our conductor live with his wife in smoldering Napoli or far out on the flank of the famous volcano? Does Maria the stoned Cobal
t Woman live on the volcano? She was nice to me and then ran.

  . . .

  A man very near on the train answers his phone: “Pronto!?” His voice sounds so hopeful in my ear, rising sharply at the end of the fast word: pron-TO!! But his phone will not agree to work.

  “I’m on the train, I might lose you,” he shouts.

  The dead man went pale as we lost him, as we watched, no more phone calls for him. In the mountain tunnels, this time, no one kicks out the glass. There is no one Italy, there is a vast collection of Italys, but this Italy tonight is somber, in black, this Italy is sixteen coaches long, our train moving beside the sea, our train on top of the rolling sea.

  Dories on painters drift, reach the end of the rope, pale boats wobbling between stars under water, submerged light the shape of lost milky amphoras, yachts and white moving lights on water and light under the sea, and then I see the spotlights touching the church and city hall where I bought a handsome watch from a flea market table.

  Ah, I recognize where we are now. Next stop. I’m becoming an old hand, an expert.

  “Prossima fermata,” I say very slowly to my cousin, my best sing-song Italian accent, drawing out the pleasing words as I try them on. “Next stop is ours. How are you doing?”

  “Rock and roll,” she says weakly.

  “Pronto!” calls the man. He is having such problems with the tunnels. Can you hear me now? Now can you hear me?

  We stop and start with the train’s moves, lean into each other, her head fitting under my jaw. I like my cousin’s warm form against me.

  The room is warm, and Eve lies on my hotel bed stripped down to a T-shirt and small white panties. She says, “You don’t need to sleep on the floor because of me. But I’m afraid to be in my room alone. You still have the dead guy’s dope?”

  “You don’t want that now.”

  Her clean leg by my eye. She says we can share the bed. The unstabbed skin of my cousin’s fine thigh leading my eye up to her hips and her secrets, where I want to touch, tension vibrating in the air like silver wires, I will explode if I don’t touch, but I don’t touch her. Mortua manus, the dead hand. She is worried, jittery, but there is no knife in her leg. The night air is sweet and light golden on cobbles below.

  “At the topless beach today I was so happy,” Eve whispers as she moves into sleep. “I met those Italian boys. We’ll pray for him. In a real church. Promise? That one with the amazing Caravaggio that just pops. The other paintings, no. That Caravaggio is the one. Promise?”

  Yes, I promise. She is drifting off in my bed, and I stay on the sea-coloured tiles the Croatian woman cleans every morning. In my head for some reason an old Blondie tune, “Fade Away and Radiate.” Those NYC junkies, how did they hang on through all the shit like this? Does Eve mean the Caravaggio with the boy bitten by the lizard, or the crucifixion (someone else noteworthy, but not Christ), or the man on the horse, or the daughter breastfeeding her father who is starving behind bars? My cousin’s face looked so pale reflected in the train window, inside tunnels, our train inside a dark mountain, something pushed into a body. Tomorrow we’ll pray for everyone. I promise.

  Later that week, I discover that my party souvenir is gone, my baggy with the dead guy’s cocaine is gone. Maybe Naples is also gone, buried once again by the volcano.

  Could Eve have taken the baggy? She is a person of interest. Certainly not clean-living Tamika with her white shoes or the train conductor who loves his wife so. The pretty Croatian woman who cleans my room? Or did I consume all the stolen cocaine during a deranged night and also consume the memory? That has happened before.

  Around this same time, our director Father Silas misplaces his fat envelope full of so many Euro notes (cash is king at Italian hotel desks), and now our group is bereft, now we are bankrupt. Is our Dauphin getting dotty or were the Euros nicked by the rooftop cat burglar who plucked an American’s Rolex and Nikon camera from an open third-floor window? Knaves and harridans and coal burners and a slim hand coming in the liminal space.

  Our director wears a houndstooth jacket draped upon his shoulders like a cape, hoping for that continental La Dolce Vita matador look. How will we survive, when he has lost all our money? How to pay for meals at Bernardo’s cafe, for so many nights at the hotel? How will we get home? Perhaps our future holds a giant dine & dash with luggage. Can we sneak our backpacks past the vigilant French woman who never leaves the front desk?

  And what happens after you feel the sly knife penetrate your thigh and you expire in a kitchen across the hall from your home? Can you bring a staple gun to heaven? His daughter was there at the party, saw her father die. I don’t know how I missed that, but my cousin insists this is true. In the hall the weeping daughter held her father in her arms as we left the party, as he left the country, as the father vanished into the afterlife.

  The stoned girl with the cobalt vein and volcanic hair: I threw my drink on her to help her, I feel we had some link, some strange chemistry. Maria! What can you do with a girl named Maria? So many things you will never know, so many naked legs you will never touch. But if any of us do make it to heaven, I hope these matters will seem less important.

  Some nights Eve can’t sleep and takes tiny blue pills; my pretty cousin says she remembers the knife and can’t sleep. Like me, she remembers waiting on a train and willing the monster to move. But time passes and we forget. I love time. Time gives me everything, time cracks me up, time kills me.

  photo: Brian Atkinson

  MARK ANTHONY JARMAN’s writings run the gamut from fiction to poetry to travel writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he has been shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize and has won the Gold National Magazine Award in nonfiction, the Maclean-Hunter Endowment Award (twice), and the Jack Hodgins Fiction Prize. His novel Salvage King Ya! is on Amazon.ca’s 50 Essential Canadian Books. He has published in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Hobart, The Barcelona Review, Vrig Nederland, and The Globe and Mail. He currently teaches at the University of New Brunswick and is a fiction editor at The Fiddlehead.

  Copyright © 2014 Goose Lane Editions. All stories copyright by the authors.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Series edited by Martin James Ainsley.

  Cover and series design by Chris Tompkins.

  Art direction and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Six@sixty / edited by Martin James Ainsley.

  Short stories compiled to commemorate Goose Lane’s sixtieth anniversary.

  1. A boy’s life of Napoleon / Alden Nowlan — 2. Woman gored by bison

  lives / Douglas Glover — 3. The three Marys / Lynn Coady — 4. Simran

  / Shauna Singh Baldwin — 5. What had become of us / Kathryn

  Kuitenbrouwer — 6. Knife party / Mark Anthony Jarman.

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-793-4 (set : epub).—ISBN 978-0-86492-732-3 (v. 1 : epub).—

  ISBN 978-0-86492-733-0 (v. 2 : epub).—ISBN 978-0-86492-734-7 (v. 3 : epub).—

  ISBN 978-0-86492-735-4 (v. 4 : epub).—ISBN 978-0-86492-736-1 (v. 5 : epub).—

  ISBN 978-0-86492-737-8 (v. 6 : epub)

  I. Ainsley, Martin James, 1969-, editor. II. Nowlan, Alden, 1933-1983.

  Boy’s life of Napoleon. III. Glover, Douglas, 1948- . Woman gored by bison

  lives. IV. Coady, Lynn, 1970- . Three Marys. V. Baldwin, Shauna Singh,

  1962- . Simran. VI. Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn, 1965- . What had become of

  us. VII. Jarman, Mark Anthony, 1955- . Knife party.

  PS8321.S59 2014
C813’.010806 C2014-903186-6

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

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