“I love Kimiko,” I said. “I love her so much.” I placed my hands gently on her shoulders and moved her toward me. “I love Kimiko,” I said again, my voice breaking. My body shuddered and tears dripped down my cheeks. She remained rigid, her arms at her sides, like sinewy old brooms. She smelled of tea and something like fresh cut grass. Suddenly, I felt her fingers on my back just above my waist, her old hand patted me a few times, very gently, like a cat tapping at a new toy.
As Kimiko’s time lessened, we still spent our evenings on the love seat, but several times Mrs. Shibayama joined us, sitting on an oak chair near us, though there was a large comfortable sofa across the room.
Tonight, the TV show is over. The three of us have finished our tea. I stand in front of Kimiko, offer my hand to help her up from the sofa.
“I’m so tired,” she says, “I think you’ll have to carry me.”
Our standing joke.
But this time, as I look at her strained face; I scoop her gently into my arms, afghan and all, her cheek against mine, an arm tight around my neck. She weighs scarcely more than her clothes. I carry her for the very first time, down the hall, resolutely toward the stairs, my heart so full of love, but bleeding with each step.
For Barbara Turner Kinsella
April 6, 1956–December 24, 2012
Ever Loved, Sorely Missed
The Job
The building was in the warehouse district, brick long ago painted white, freckled now, paint curling like untended fingernails. The door said merely PERSONNEL. No company name. The ad in the newspaper read Person with driver’s license, followed by the address.
Inside, the building was like a hangar, three stories high, with windows at the second and third levels suffering from occasional broken panes. In the ceiling were skylights muffled by years of cobwebs. The whole place smelled of oil and bird droppings. There were perhaps two dozen motorcycles of various makes and models scattered about. Toward the back of the building a fleet of vans was parked in a long row, their windshields like the sad eyes of children. The motorcycles and vans were all past their prime.
Part of the cement floor was turning back to gravel, the remainder was cracked and oil-stained. I heard the sound of a mechanic’s dolly, and a man in soiled pin-striped overalls bumped from beneath a van, arms flailing as if he were swimming. A pigeon fluttered in the rafters.
When I stood up, I saw he was fortyish, with a ragged crewcut, a cigarette dangling from his pouty lower lip.
“I came about the job,” I said, in reply to his questioning glance.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Lemme see your driver’s license.”
I showed it to him. He turned it over a couple of times with oily fingers, compared the photo to my face, then said, “You’ll do. Wanna start tonight?”
“What is it I do?”
“You ride a bike,” he said, pointing at the congregation of motorcycles.
“To where?”
He looked at me as though I were stupid. Perhaps he had recently explained the intricacies of the job to someone who looked like me. Exasperated, he walked to one of the bikes, an elderly Harley, leapt on and started it up. It didn’t appear to have a muffler and was out of tune.
“I’ll assign a four-square-block area,” he yelled over the rumble of the bike. “From nine in the evening to three in the morning you just ride around those streets on your bike. Stick to your assigned area and everything will be fine. There’s a pump out back to gas up. You sign in and out over there,” pointing to a greasy, black, ledger-like book lying among tools on a workbench.
“But why?” I asked. “What’s my job?”
He shut off the Harley. “You live in a residential district?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, isn’t there a motorcycle without a muffler that travels around your neighborhood?”
I stopped to think for a minute before I replied. “Yeah, there is,” I finally said.
“Well, you don’t think those things happen by accident, do you?”
“You mean you supply motorcycles to drive around and keep people awake, make them mad, disturb their TV reception?”
“You got it. In the winter we use vans. The drivers sit them at the curb, work their wheels into the ice until they’re stuck, then spin their wheels and roar their engines for an hour or so.”
“Always outside my house,” I said.
“Right. Probably they’re three or four doors away, but if we do a good job, everybody thinks it’s in front of their house.”
“I’ve never driven a bike before,” I said.
“I could give you an ambulance,” he went on. “We have a couple, but you have to cover a twelve-block-square area. The consolation is you get to turn the siren (he pronounced it “si-reen”) up to full wail.”
“Are you a government agency?”
“We’re not sure. It’s all very hush-hush. My paycheck comes from a holding company; it would take twenty years to find out who owns it. Personally, I think we’re sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention—there are thirteen million of those suckers, did you know that?—or maybe Oral Roberts. Duke—he’s the night man—thinks we’re CIA or FBI, but I don’t think so. You’d have to be religious to want to make everybody miserable.”
“Just driving, that’s all?”
“Well, you burn a lot of rubber, make quick stops and starts. Just try to remember how the driver in your area does it. Now, you want it or not? I got a muffler to tear off and a couple of motors to get out of tune before the nightshift.”
“I think I’ll pass. Thanks anyway.”
“Suit yourself. You can’t change your mind though. If you come back tomorrow, you’ll find a sash-and-door plant here.”
I’ve often wondered if that was true. Every time a motorcycle roars past my bedroom window, or a stuck van screams at the curb, I make a mental note to go back and check. But in the morning it all seems like a dream.
Risk Takers
1969. Jee was not her real name. And I never knew her last name, though it was Van de something, or Vander something, for she was from a Dutch immigrant family. “Never mind,” she used to say, “you couldn’t pronounce it anyway.”
The valley east of us was farmed by established Dutch immigrants who came to Canada after WWII, the fertile delta land was used for dairy farming and for market gardening. However, Jee told me she had come to Canada only five years ago, when she was twelve. She said her father had been in some kind of trouble in Holland and that relatives had paid the family passage to Canada so they could make a new start.
“Ha,” Jee said derisively at that point in her story. Her father had worked on a dairy farm, but apparently lacked whatever skills were required for such work, and was fired.
“He was lazy and stupid,” Jee said. He then stole a cultivator, but was not even a good thief, for the RCMP caught him towing the cultivator behind his ragged pick-up truck, only a mile from his former employer’s farm.
“Now, the asshole’s in jail,” Jee said.
We were both new arrivals in a community of tiny, rundown cottages and shacks about a mile outside a small city east of Vancouver. It was a rural slum occupied by the poor and the shiftless, designations that were not interchangeable, my mother insisted.
“There is nothing wrong with being poor,” she said, “it can happen to anyone, Cathy,” by which she meant us. Until a few months before, our family, my mother and father, myself and a younger brother, lived in a small rented house in a quiet neighborhood in East Vancouver. Then one Sunday afternoon in March my father died of a heart attack, after which Mother explained that while we had lived comfortably, we had lived month to month.
There wasn’t even enough money to pay the next month’s rent. There was an insurance policy with my father’s union, but the company and union were stalling, the union rep said it could take another year before Mother saw a dime.
Mother got a part-time job with a janitor service in this small c
ity and we moved into a basementless, mildew-smelling cottage, amidst a cluster of shacks and cabins outside the city limits. The rent is twenty dollars a month. We have no indoor plumbing, a wood-burning stove, and we carry water from a community spigot two blocks away.
“Her name is Markje,” a market gardener’s daughter told me on the school bus one morning. “She’s stuck up. Thinks she’s too good for the rest of us,” the girl hissed into my ear. “And her living out in Darktown.” She stopped, embarrassed, realizing that I, too, lived in Darktown.
I was surprised the market gardener’s daughter even talked to me. The area we lived in was called Darktown, because the original inhabitants had been a few black people who came to the coast from an all-black town in Alberta and set up their own community in the 1920s. Over the years most of the blacks and their descendants found employment with the railways and integrated into Vancouver, it is said some of them are the landlords who collect rent on these dilapidated buildings, occupied now by the really poor and truly shiftless.
Jee’s long, lemon-colored hair touched the back pockets of her jeans, which were faded to an existential blue and held to her wide hips by an expensive black belt with a heavy buckle sporting an embossed marijuana leaf. The principal spoke to Jee about the marijuana leaf, saying it was unacceptable, just as it was unacceptable for her to carry her cigarettes in the front pocket of her jean jacket, the top of the red cigarette pack peeking out like a pocket handkerchief.
“Fuck him and his creepy rules,” said Jee. “He’s from the valley, everybody from the valley is Dutch Reformed Church, like Christian Fundamentalists, only stricter and creepier. My mother reads her Dutch Bible as if it’s going to put food on the table, and my old man, when he’s home, and when he isn’t using one of the family as a punching bag, puts on a suit every Sunday and acts so pious shit wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”
Jee was everything I was not. She was pretty and sexy, with almond-colored eyes and full lips. I have plain black hair and a very dark complexion with a few seed-like freckles on my cheeks and nose.
“There were black Russians in your daddy’s family,” Mother said. “Your grandfather had the blackest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
It doesn’t matter how little I eat I’m still plump. I’d look better if I could afford to dress like everyone else, but I won’t ask Mom for clothes money, I take whatever she scrounges at the Goodwill store. I’ve tried for an after-school job, but there aren’t many, and I live so far from civilization.
Jee had arrived in Darktown only a few weeks before I did.
“Second day I got on the school bus, that big bastard Cory DeJong sat down beside me. First he grabbed my tits and I told him to fuck off. He sat back and looked surprised like these little Christian girls in their skirts and sweaters let him twist their nipples every morning. Then the son of a bitch leaned across me, pinning me to the wall of the bus, and shoved his hand down the front of my jeans, pushed my panties aside and had a finger inside me all in one motion. I shrieked, but nobody paid any attention except his friends who were all staring.
“Maybe these plain-looking Christian girls do let him fuck with them, I thought. I wiggled like I was getting off on it. ‘You don’t need to hold me down,’ I said. ‘Move your arm and I’ll do you, too.’ He did.
“I reached over and unzipped his fly, his erection was just dying to escape his jeans. His buddies across the aisle were watching and drooling, their eyes glazed with lust. I took hold of his cock, nice and gentle until I got a good grip on it, then I bent and squeezed and pulled and he screamed like he was being fucking murdered. He leapt into the aisle, screeching and tears running down his cheeks, trying to stuff himself back into his pants. ‘Anybody else want a turn?’ I said to the boys across the aisle. That was the first and last time any of them fucked with me.”
That story was true; it was confirmed to me by several other students. I wondered, though, about some of the other things Jee told me.
“I steal,” she said, “five-finger bargains, all my clothes.” We were walking the back roads after school on a sunny, lazy spring day, there was calm water in the ditches while crocuses and daffodils spangled the right of way and the smell of warm tree sap filled the air. Jee took a deep drag on her cigarette.
“You know you don’t have to stop and give yourself up just because some security creep tells you to. Like the day I grabbed this belt,” she fingered the heavy buckle with the marijuana leaf, “just as I stepped out the door of the store this old lady lays a hand on my arm and says, ‘You better come with me, young lady.’
“Well, I gave her a push and beat it across the parking lot. For an old lady she could move right along, but I got away with no sweat. Unless the security staff catches and holds you the police don’t put a high priority on shoplifting calls. You don’t see a police car, siren wailing, on the way to chase down a kid who snatched a lipstick and ran. You ought to come with me sometime,” Jee said. “You need some cool clothes.”
She was right, I wore a plastic belt that was cracked and falling apart, and my jeans were the on-sale kind, with plain pockets and no rivets or sexy inseams.
“There’s nothing I ain’t seen,” Jee said on another occasion. “On that fucking dairy farm the five of us lived in one room with a bathroom tacked on as an afterthought. It came furnished with a few sticks and a picture of Jesus on each wall. Living in a place like that you learn about sex quickly, not that I didn’t know before. Our place in Holland wasn’t much larger. They’d wait to have sex until they were sure us kids were asleep. But I’d outwait them. For all her Bible reading and all she said about Papa being lazy and stupid, when he’d go down on her she’d fucking freak. I felt sorry for her because she couldn’t scream out the way she wanted to. She’d take a mouthful of pillow to keep from yelling. Then she’d go down on him, for like hours, and he’d sigh and groan and say the sweetest, sexiest things to her. Seeing them like that made me realize what kept them together.”
I had little idea of what she was talking about, sex education in the schools was only a rumor, and there were no red-hot videos to watch on a VCR after school. While my parents, when my father was alive, were civil with each other, they did not show affection in public, my presence, or my brother’s, being considered public, and it had never occurred to me that they might actually engage in sex at their advanced ages. What went on in the night behind their closed bedroom door was never a subject of speculation for me.
Many of the things Jee said shocked me, though I tried not to let on, though I felt my face blush furiously. I was not quite able to picture the sex acts she described, they were just out of my vision like animals hidden in a thicket.
But there were apparently some things Jee didn’t share with me. A girl at school told me that Jee’s father had been out of jail for some time, had not come back to his family, was rumored to have returned to Holland, perhaps had been deported because of his imprisonment. The girl said she thought that Jee and her family, as non-citizens would be scheduled for deportation, too. And maybe the authorities didn’t know where they were.
In the washroom at school I commented on Jee’s new lipstick, on the fact she always had cigarettes. “I got to fend for myself,” she said. “The old lady doesn’t have a dime. The church pays the rent, gives her a few dollars for food. Everybody else in Darktown is on welfare but she’s afraid, and maybe with good reason, to get involved with the government in any way.”
I’d seen Jee in the hall at school talking animatedly with a boy, one of the hoody types with a car that he drove at high speed up and down in front of the school at noon hour, wheels churning dust. Jee had her fingers on his bicep, leaning in allowing her knee to rub his leg. When she left him she had a pack of cigarettes three-quarters full. We went to the washroom, locked ourselves in a booth and lit up. “Those creepy types are the easiest to con,” Jee said, “they’re not shy, they think they’re God’s gift to horny girls. ‘Come for a ride,’ he said to me. ‘Give m
e your cigarettes,’ I said, and rubbed my tits against him, just one touch to let him know I was serious. Easier than taking candy from a baby. I got bus fare from him, too. We’ll go into Vancouver after school. You need some clothes and I need some makeup. The great thing is I can con him again tomorrow, and the next day, these creeps who think they’re irresistible, who think every chick who makes eye contact with them is dying to suck their cock, are the easiest to rip off.”
“Don’t they catch on and become dangerous after you rip them off a few times?”
“Not likely,” she said, “They’re marks. Their egos are too big, they consider being ripped off foreplay. Steve, the guy I was talking to today, is cute in a James Dean kind of way. I’d trade him a blow job some noon hour for a carton of cigarettes and bus fare for a week.”
We strolled through a department store while she pocketed a lipstick that I’d admired, stashed some perfume for herself and eye shadow for both of us. She was brazen about stealing, never skulking, or looking suspicious. She never glanced around to see if someone might be watching her.
“This is something you’d look really good in,” she said in the clothing department, a few minutes later. She took a bomber jacket of soft brown leather off its hanger and held it up in front of me; it had silver buckles on the sleeves and shoulders. The price tag was astronomical.
“Go wait at the bus stop two blocks over,” Jee said as we rode an escalator toward the first floor. Outside, she handed me the cosmetics.
The Essential W. P. Kinsella Page 37