Life on Mars

by Lori McNulty

  Alone, you text Jemma under the tarp. Storm came up. Lake so rough we’re holed up in a pub. Ted already pickled. Will bring home a chewy red. xoxo

  Jemma texts back. Throw Ted to pike. Make it a full-bodied Cabernet. Two forks. xoxo

  Tin-taps on the dumpster drum you to sleep. When you open your eyes and step out, Gindelle is nowhere to be seen.

  Leaning over a garbage can, Cleopatra approaches, is batting heavy lashes at you.

  “Have you seen my dog?” she asks, one pinky hooked inside her jeans belt loop.

  You have not seen her dog. Groggy, you realize the rain has finally stopped.

  A yellow T-shirt slides off of Cleopatra’s bony right shoulder. Raccoon smudges around her green eyes, tiny mascara flecks dot her eyelids. You notice her skin is sliced with small silver hoops in three places.

  She holds her hands waist wide. “He’s kind of barky,” she explains.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Made him a collar out of leather and twist ties,” she says, looking down the alleyway. She walks a few feet toward the Chinese place and returns. Her tongue clicks, and she yanks a wad of gum between her fingers that she snaps back against her two crooked front teeth.

  “Roddie,” she tells you, scraping the gum from her front teeth.

  “No dogs except us old ones,” you say, realizing how creepy that sounds.

  Eyeing the coins in your cap, Cleopatra tells you she and her boyfriend could use some money for dog food. You search her eyes. Six years of Saturdays, you know this girl is hocking one loogie of a lie.

  “Where’s your boyfriend now?” you say, casually rubbing your eyes.

  Cleopatra points to a white van you had noticed circling the block earlier in the day. Precision Roofing is painted across it next to a corgi howling Roof! Roof! The van swings back around and stops at the alley entrance. Cleopatra waves. The van screeches. A spot opens up. Vanboy reverses hard, parks, and slams the door behind him.

  He’s tall, slack-boned, with a sloppy smile, like a runny fried egg. You notice a scribble of hair around his mouth. He’s at least twenty-eight. Probably older.

  “Fuck you been?” Vanboy shouts at Cleopatra.

  You hand Cleopatra four dollars in change from your pocket. “I’ll keep an eye out for Roddie.”

  She pockets the coins and returns to Vanboy. “He broke the leash,” she grumbles, but her voice is wobbly.

  You can tell. Cleopatra is living a life that will split her open by seventeen. You’ve seen it first-hand. Like that girl on Tamrack Street a month ago, lying across a pool table, dead after scoring pills laced with fentanyl. Instinctively, you touch the vial of naloxone dangling from an old shoelace around your neck. You keep it tucked under your black T-shirt along with a sterile syringe hidden in an inside coat pocket. You’re a vampire in reverse, fighting off death by injecting life back into the next overdose.

  When Cleopatra turns back toward you, she tugs at her T-shirt collar, revealing a string of plum-shaped bruises running from her neck down her left shoulder.

  The back alley barks. Crouching, Cleopatra holds out her arms for a mangy hound-lab that trots up and flops onto her feet, smelling of rotting shrimp. His paws are sticky, a clipped right ear folds forward. When he begins nibbling at his own bottom, Cleopatra scoops him up into her arms.

  Vanboy cuffs the dog’s head, then holds his hand too close to Cleopatra’s cheek.

  Cleopatra twists away from him to shield the dog.

  “Hey,” you say, taking a bold step toward Vanboy.

  He takes hold of one of her elbows, whips the girl out in the direction of the van. He sneers and shows you his folding knife.

  From the far end of the alley entrance, there is a loud clatter. He sees Gindelle carrying her food court remnants in her hands. Vanboy looks back at you, sharpening his pinpoint pupils.

  “Your old lady?” he says, shaking his head. “Fucking ugly.”

  Heat rises from your scalp. He’s nothing but a low-level, scrape-it-together dealer. Not interested in any goddamn pennies. He’s probably plying Cleopatra with drugs, luring her into service.

  When Vanboy turns away, you don’t say a goddamn bloody thing to the back of him. You watch them climb back into the van.

  Cleopatra tries to keep the dog still on her lap in the van. She’s staring out the side window. Your feet are made of clay. Coward. Fake.

  Vanboy wheels into traffic, a lurch to beat the red. There’s a bang, the shrill sound of metal scraping metal.

  Mr. Kon from the noodle place is running toward the intersection with you. You find Cleopatra looking rattled in her seatbelt. You open the passenger door, escort her and the dog to the sidewalk, claiming the girl is your niece.

  “You okay, honey?”

  Vanboy is holding onto his unhooked left shoulder, screaming. Oblivious to anyone else, he is slamming the hood of the parked car he’s managed to plow into.

  “Fucking assholes!” he shouts into the empty vehicle.

  He points at his own windshield while the crowds circle him.

  By the time sirens whir into the intersection, you’ve moved your dazed Cleopatra to a safer place.

  Where Cleopatra leans forward, the edge of the double bed sags, and the springs almost poke up under the sheets. The odour of bug spray makes you both sneeze. You ask again. She recites the days of the week, backward and forward.

  You drag your chair closer toward the edge of the bed in the no-frills hotel room. She is asking about Vanboy.

  “He has a dislocated shoulder. He was sitting up on a stretcher, cursing the paramedics.”

  Cleopatra reaches in her bag, holds up her phone, and snaps your picture. “Pervert,” she says, her hands shaking. She pitches the peach-coloured comforter from her lap, demanding to know more about what happened. To know about Roddie.

  You guide her to the curtained window, point to a weedy strip of grass where Roddie is munching on kibble next to a silver water dish. He’s tied up to a bench.

  “Police found drugs,” you lie to her, not for the first time. “Under the driver’s seat,” you add. “I had to act fast.”

  Cleopatra looks you over suspiciously. With her fingers, she brushes the top of her lip. You feel her heavy stare and realize your moustache is slipping. You pat it down again, but the whiskers keep peeling away from your bristly skin.

  “What are you? Some fucking child rapist?” Cleopatra shouts.

  “No, no.” Your hands fly up, open palmed. “My car is a few blocks away,” you say. Another lie. “Take you anywhere. Hospital. Shelter. Friend’s house?”

  Cleopatra finds her backpack on the floor, pitches it over her shoulder and heads for the door. Blocking the way, you promise to drop her off at the bus station.

  “Buy you a ticket. No strings.”

  “Fuck you, porn stash,” she says and snaps your picture again.

  “Wait.”

  When she grabs for the door handle, you press the door shut.

  You dig out a clip of twenty-dollar bills and hand her a few, backing away.

  Cleopatra weighs the bills in her palm. She cocks her head.

  “Seen guys like you,” she replies, sliding the cash into her front pocket. She holds up the phone again and clicks.

  “What if I send this picture to the cops?”

  What if Jemma finds out you buy prostitutes soup on your lunch hour? That some winter nights when she’s teaching her advanced clay-throwing class, you hop into the front seat with cabbies going nowhere. That you almost killed your father — he was drunk, you were almost eighteen and tired of his fists. Your old man had misjudged the forklift, clipped a warehouse rack at the end of a twenty-four-hour shift and ended up getting pinned beneath a load of steel tubing. The surgeon managed to save his arm, but the man he struck, the one who was bent over his clipboard counting rows, would never walk again. Your father was not the same man afterward. The distance between you and your father’s grief became a gulf neither of you co
uld manage to cross. Your mother held her tongue, made him breaded pork chops, taught you how to vanish.

  It wasn’t so much your mother’s words as the dusty look in her copper eyes, the fallen smile whenever she glanced over at your father, permanently anchored in rose-armchair misery, sighing in a way that meant that’s the way your life goes sometimes.

  He’ll hurt you, you think. Your mind is lost and lurking in the dark of this cigarette-stained motel room.

  Cleopatra tugs again at her T-shirt, exposing her bruise-ringed neck. Seeing your alarmed reaction, she shrugs.

  “Mall cops,” she gestures at her neck. “Over a fucking hoodie.” She touches her upper lip again and smirks.

  “I can find out where they took him,” you say, in a casual tone. “Stick around and we’ll figure it all out.”

  Cleopatra brushes her lip again.

  “It’s a trial run,” you mutter self-consciously, patting the dip in your upper lip. “Wife isn’t sure about facial hair.”

  You ask her to wait another second and rummage around in the backpack, handing her a dog collar with a stainless steel clip and matching leather leash. “Got these while you were napping.”

  “Thanks,” she says, then pats her front pocket. “He’s a roofer. Laid off. An asshole sometimes. We’re working it out. Fucked-up world, isn’t it?”

  “Can I drive you and Roddie someplace quiet?” you offer. “Please?” Because she’s a comet floating toward your sun, and everything’s hot and speeding up in your brain now.

  She shakes her head. “A thousand girls like me out there. We don’t need you.”

  Before Cleopatra leaves, she takes your moustache in like she’s figuring out how to fix a crooked jigsaw puzzle piece. “Go home, porn stash,” she says finally. “Maybe Jesus had it coming.”

  You pick your way back to Gindelle through men with slow shifting eyes. Near Second Avenue you watch an old woman trade threats with a man across the street. A wispy-haired old-timer, his skin the colour of spent tea bags, sits slapping at his neck, eating from a paper cup filled with sugar. You drop a few dollars in his lap and make your way to the fast-food place.

  Gindelle beams at you below the green awning. When you sit down next to her, you hand over the grease-stained paper bag, because you know Gindelle is crazy for fries.

  “Red, Red, Red.” Gindelle smiles and munches. She pulls the burger from the bottom of the sack, lets out a squeal of delight when she lifts the bun from the patty.

  “Extra pickles!”

  “And double sauce.”

  She takes a bite, offering you the next one, but you wave her away, saying you’ve already feasted. Some lanky kid with long dreads dropped a ten-dollar bill in your hat.

  Gindelle tucks her blanket around her shoulders and licks ketchup from the corners of her mouth. Instinctively, you touch your freshly glued moustache.

  “Ain’t life grand,” she says.

  Pulling out your sleeping bag from behind the pillar, you drag it next to hers. Fumbling with the zipper, you get a whiff of baked chocolate coming from the coffee shop three doors down.

  “Where did you get to, Red?”

  “Met an old friend at the Y.”

  “Too bad,” she says, shaking her head, tearing away the last bit of meat. “You were gone before I could say anything.”

  “Say what?”

  “It was so good,” she replies, and pulls her arm across her chest in a pitching motion.

  “What was?”

  Gindelle unleashes her wild laugh that ends with an excited shiver falling across her shoulders. She giggles and points to the end of the alley, her eyes wide open. “When my big-ass Coke hit that van prick’s windshield.”

  Jemma is dining on huevos rancheros when you arrive home, much later than expected. The concoction, heavy on the tomato-chili sauce, runs sloppily over her rye toast. She looks up at you, swallows a messy forkful. She licks salsa bits from her lips.

  “How’s Ted?” she asks, her voice straining for warmth.

  “Left him passed out on his couch.” You drop the Cabernet on the counter and pull up a chair. “Should have texted you again.”

  “I ruined the bowl with the inlaid clays,” she says. Another forkful of chili vanishes.

  While she slides her rye toast under a mound of the spicy sauce, in silence, you look around the room. Jemma has an inclination for fin de siècle movements, so your house is filled with images of wilting French women and decadent men in top hats. She likes to guide you on museum visits, dropping words like rococo and dada and the grotesque as you scan paintings signed by artists with furious-sounding names. Her dazzling mind is an elite gym and you’re barely reaching the swing sets. You understand fluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride. A chemist for a company that deals in home insulating foams, not finger frostbite and foot rot.

  She grabs her breasts and holds them together like pressed oranges, a pained look crossing her face.

  “Sore?”

  Jemma makes a plus symbol with her index fingers. She grabs the indicator from the bathroom and drops it on the table.

  You look down, hold her tight, until the huevos rancheros fire up her throat again and she reaches for a glass of water.

  “Can we?” she asks.

  You nod. “Yes.”

  It’s just pee on a stick right now, you think. You know urine contains human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone produced when an egg attaches to the uterus. Conception after thirty-five was like winning the goddamn lottery, the gyno had said it right out. With her irregular periods, and your family history of diabetes, odds were slim to none.

  You had both accepted the idea of childlessness. Jemma kept on spinning masterpieces. You held on to your secrets, imagining the vases growing ever-widening bellies.

  She gives you a cautious smile, and you kiss her sweet, onion mouth. That tickle in her stomach is the sensation of molecules binding, but there’s no reason yet to believe in a miracle. Her mouth, this spell, the long intoxicating night, is not the only thing you love unconditionally.

  The beard arrives two weeks late in an unmarked bubble package. Jemma hands the package over with a puzzled look, giving the envelope a quick shake. You mutter something about Sean’s laptop at work, a graphics card, some tech term you know will bore Jemma blind.

  She shrugs and returns to her studio.

  On the way to the basement to tuck the beard in your bottom drawer, you linger outside her studio, watch her small belly graze the wooden shelf of her mud-spattered wheel. She’s wearing goggles, a white mask to avoid blowing dust. Mesmerized by the throwing, you watch how her fingers find the hollow, with a slight pinch a muddy neck wobbles, rises, then drops back into her spinning lap.

  You think of Gindelle’s loose throat and smile.

  You tear open the padded package and pull out the expensive beard you’ve kept hidden for six months. The beard is a thing of beauty. Hand-knotted, Swiss-lace backing, a little scratchy, but a snug fit over your freshly shaven face. The packaging boasts “100% human-hair beard,” next to a photo of a smiling young man inviting you to choose your transformation: pimp, emperor, or detective! And you can’t decide which. Laying it down, you pull out a fresh bottle of spirit gum and begin painting your chin.

  All along Second Avenue where you walk, heavy winter jackets are slung over chair backs in the restaurants and bars.

  At the corner, you find Gindelle tucked inside her sleeping bag below the awning, with its messy patchwork of silver duct tape. She has a takeout coffee cup between her hands, is wearing the grey toque you gave her three weeks ago.

  She smiles broadly, her lap wrapped in a skirt made of a rubber doormat. Gindelle is so beguiling, you think, bowing to her as you approach from the sidewalk.

  She scans your too-trimmed bearded face.

  “Pretty eyes, Red,” she says and squints to get a better look at your face as you approach. “You look like a grey wolf,” Gindelle laughs. “Missed you.”

  Whi
le you unroll your sleeping bag, she gestures up.

  “Cold and clear tonight,” she says. “On the farm at night you could see the Milky Way like a giant, hazy pinwheel. Sometimes even Mars, outshining all the stars.”

  “Ever want to visit?”

  “Me and a bunch of little green men?” she says, tucking her arms back inside her bag. “I’m good here.”

  “Commute would kill me.” You wink. Looking over at Gindelle you think no place more strange and remote than now. If you can just figure out how to stay.

  A bitter wind tonight and Gindelle yearns, not for the single-room hotel further east, for thin sheets lined with bed bugs, but for this faded awning sheltering her from the tattered edges of night. Only when freezing to death is her only option will Gindelle finally relinquish her throne, she says. In the shelter, she claims she’s nothing but a sad old woman with ghoulish teeth.

  When you shake out the dirt from your bag and crawl inside, Gindelle gestures for you to slide up closer. Hip to hip, you trade heat, and she throws her cape around your shoulders, to stifle the chill threading up your spines. You resolve to find Gindelle another coat, something with satin lining and puffy sleeves, tell her a box went missing off the loading bay at the shopping mall.

  Gindelle’s bony fingers find your wrist and squeeze. You pet her arm. There isn’t enough time, you think. Already Saturday excuses are wearing thin. Jemma needs more of you. Last night you held her hair back while she was hugging the toilet over the smell of raw chicken.

  You watch Gindelle sway quietly, her legs tucked up close to yours, then she tips sideways against you. Her rattling breath against your thick-bearded chin is a force keeping you fixed to the ground. Feeling Gindelle’s tired body against yours steals your next breath, makes you believe in this moment you can keep the world safe.

  Gindelle starts to breathe heavy, a cough caught deep in her chest. She sighs and her whole body relaxes again.

  You want to ask her about thresholds. Last chances. Where life begins. You would offer all the gold coins in your purse, pull the secrets from every locked drawer.

  “Red,” she says, “I’m tired,” and falls asleep in your arms.