I took a bus back to Frayne. Booked a room in a motel, a brand new Super 8 that had been under construction when I’d left. The room smelled like fresh paint.
On Friday night I prowled the graveyard and visited Darcy’s headstone. The inscription was the same as what he’d scrawled on his bedroom door in permanent marker: the Oscar Wilde quip, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” I placed two twigs over his grave and made a crucifix out of them, then stomped on it with my heel, crunching it into bits. A crude cross shape remained. It seemed like the kind of thing Darcy would have appreciated.
On Saturday I went to church. I brought my mother’s urn with me.
The pews were mostly empty save a few lonely worshippers, all of them women. I went up to the balcony and looked at the stained-glass windows, then down at the deserted altar. The building hummed. One of the worshippers lit a candle in front of a statue of Mary and left.
I looked up at the ceiling. Six or seven giant fans hung from the rafters, spinning silently as though propelled by sacred air.
I took the lid off my mother’s urn and stood up. There was one person left in the church, a middle-aged woman in the second row. I held my breath and flung my mother’s ashes upward into the swirl of the fans, again and again, until the urn was empty. A cloud of black dust spread and fell among the pews. The woman did nothing and continued to pray as if all was well. As if, in a world presided over by God, a shower of ashes was a blessing to be ignored.
My bus back to Toronto was leaving on Sunday morning. I didn’t feel like sitting around my motel room and coating my lungs with paint fumes, so I decided to take a walk around town, revisit some old haunts.
I felt good, like I’d really accomplished something meaningful at the church, though I didn’t fully understand why.
There was a cop car parked in the lot outside Darryl’s Doughnuts. I went inside, thinking I might find Darvish or one of his lackeys. It turned out to be a fat patrolman who looked exactly like Bill Barber. I ordered a coffee and a Boston cream doughnut and stared at Bill’s lookalike as I ate and drank. He didn’t look at me once, just chatted with the teenaged girl behind the counter. She kept asking to see his badge like she didn’t believe he was a real cop. I wasn’t sure I believed him either.
Afterwards I went to visit my old apartment. I stood on the street outside and stared up at the window above the laundromat. The new tenant had put up leopard-print curtains, and there was a half-drunk bottle of gin on the windowsill. For some reason it occurred to me that a prostitute might live there. I hoped it wasn’t Melanie. I didn’t press the buzzer to find out.
The windows of The Bloody Paw were covered in newsprint. The place had been shut down. I tried to peek through a torn piece of newspaper, but I couldn’t see anything. It was black inside. An abyss. I wondered what had become of all the hunting pictures, the ones I hadn’t managed to destroy.
I remembered reading in the Toronto Star that Viktor Lozowsky, kidnapper and murderer, had been transferred to Kingston Penitentiary, a maximum security prison in Ontario. He’d probably be back on the streets in a couple of years — if he survived being sodomized on a nightly basis by a six-foot-eight goliath I hoped was named Darcy.
The last place I went to was my mother’s old building. I wondered if Red Hot was somewhere inside. Perhaps it had found its way to some kid’s equipment bag, some future pro-leaguer who would use it to hit his first home run.
In the distance I saw someone with blazing red hair on a bench outside a bus stop, feeding bread crumbs to a flock of pigeons. It was Melanie. There were two forearm crutches propped against the bench beside her. I could hear the pigeons cooing from where I stood: a warbling chorus of hungry birds.
I looked at her for a long time. She seemed like a different person than the wildcat I’d known. She wasn’t just some girl — she was a woman, a real woman, and here she was, very much alive, feeding birds and smiling down at them, because there was still beauty in the world despite all the bad things that can happen, and she was a part of that beauty.
After a while, she stood up and fastened the crutches to her arms. The pigeons waddled around her feet like a single entity, some of them fluttering a few feet off the ground before landing again.
She threw one last handful of crumbs in the air. The pigeons burst after them like a feathered wave. She hobbled down the street, away from me, in the direction of my mother’s old building. I wanted to run after her. I wanted to look at her face and see forgiveness in it. I wanted her to know that she’d changed my life forever.
But I didn’t follow her. Not this time.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I don’t deserve the support and assistance I received from the following people:
Michael Holmes
Russell Smith
Andrew Pyper
Amanda Wetmore
Jowita Bydlowska
Sarah Dunn
Erin Creasey
Jake Howell
David Gee
Cat London
Matthew Firth
Sarah Gardner Borden
Everyone at ECW Press
Everyone involved in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Guelph
STACEY MADDEN holds a BA from the University of Toronto and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. He lives in Toronto.
Copyright © Stacey Madden, 2012
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Madden, Stacey, 1982–
Poison shy : a novel / Stacey Madden.
ISBN 978-1-77041-075-6
ALSO ISSUED AS: 978-1-77090-286-2 (PDF); 978-1-77090-287-9 (ePUB)
I. Title.
PS8626.A314P63 2012 C813’.6 C2012-902687-5
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misfit Book
Cover design: Dave Gee
Cover image: i.m. ruzz
Interior image: The black silhouette of a bedbug © lantapix / Shutterstock
Type: Troy Cunningham
The publication of Poison Shy has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
-moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Poison Shy Page 14