I look up from the floor and fall into her eyes. Whether her gaze is voyeurism or compassion, she’s taken the bait and the hook is in deep.
“My father owned a sailboat called The Cuthian. We only took it out a few times a year, always on a weekend. It was my favorite thing about my childhood, but now…”
“Yes?” She gives me a small, encouraging smile and moves a little closer, leaning in. Time to reel her in all the way.
“My father took Mum on a…last…trip in the Cuthian. They closed up the house, left the keys with my brother and sailed off at dawn one day. My brother said she looked happier that day than she had in weeks. She said they were going to count sunsets together.”
“Where’d they go?”
“Into the sunset, I guess. I think they decided to do it when she couldn’t see the pretty colors anymore. Mum said they were going to count sunsets. It was kind of a grim countdown.”
“What are you saying?”
I can almost taste her lips now. Her eyes are a bright blue you never see anywhere but in a young girl’s eyes. I love dating girls. I’m going to get so depressed when I get so old I have to start dating women. I gaze into those eyes and I love what they see.
“Some fishermen found the boat abandoned.”
“Oh?”
“Empty and drifting. There was a half-empty bottle of champagne rolling around the deck and two broken glasses by the rail. The last entry in the Cuthian’s log had just one line in my father’s handwriting.”
I drag it out and she’s just about to burst but out of respect she swallows it down and waits, vibrating a little. Her blue eyes are wide but those pupils are tiny dots.
“The last entry just said, ‘Warm breezes but no sunset tonight.’”
“What are you telling me?”
“Well, you see,” I say slowly, putting on the Irish even more, “my parents’ insurance wouldn’t have paid out for a double suicide.”
She swallows hard and her eyes are wet. This may be the saddest thing she has ever heard. “Um. So…?” She swallows with a click.
“So they went sailing,” I say. I do things with my face that I think will approximate regret, then a resolution to be brave that falls just short of succeeding.
“Wow,” she says.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “I think my Da loved my mother more than I ever suspected. I think the two of them had a rich inner life they never let me or my brother see. They must have had such a…”
“Passion?” she said.
I look her in the eyes. “Passion. Yes. You’re right. Deep and surprising and fresh right till the black curtain came down.” Nobody talks like this unless it’s rehearsed — which it has been, many delicious times — and it doesn’t matter at all. I’m a tragic figure yearning for the mythic love my erstwhile parents had.
I pull her into the boat. And yes, she shudders and flops like a fish when I land her.
My cell rings harshly while soft light arrives slowly to illuminate an unfamiliar bedroom. It’s my brother on the phone. I’m up, and following my trail of clothes back to the living room. Her roommate is up early for work and freezes, her coffee cup halfway to her mouth as I pull on my underwear. I ignore her stare and clap my cell shut. “Can you give me a ride to the airport, please?”
She of the bright blue eyes emerges from her room wearing just a T-shirt. She looks thoroughly tousled. Rightly so. “What’s going on?”
“Uh…I’ve got to go!” I yank on my jeans and start lacing up my sneakers as fast as I can. I don’t know where my socks are.
This is the first I’ve met the roommate and the sight of me without pants seems to have amused her. “Your date wants a ride.”
“I gave you a ride,” Blue Eyes says. Her red lipstick is still smeared, like she’s a kid who got into Mommy’s make-up.
“I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to go! Uh! I’ll have to go by my place before I go to the airport!”
“What’s the big emergency?”
“My mum died last night.”
She is not sympathetic. She throws things at me — shoes, a plate, the roommate’s coffee cup and, oddly, a couple of dishtowels. I run down the long hallway to the elevator and push and push and push the down button. She’s screaming curses. I look back down the hallway. I do not know what to say. I have no script for this.
She stops and runs back into her apartment. It’s quiet for a moment and just when I let my shoulders loosen a little, she emerges from her apartment door with a floor lamp in her hands.
Uh-oh.
The person coming at me is no longer a girl so easily deceived. She’s now a woman on a rampage. I suspect that, as well as our first date went, there will not be a second. She’s grown up a lot in the last few minutes. I’m really just a tall boy.
The elevator doors slowly part and I push and push and push the button to close the goddamn doors. A flood of salty curses washes over me and she’s coming fast, running now as she senses I’m about to escape. After a few decades of her advancing footfalls, the lazy doors close.
It’s early morning in Toronto, so naturally the elevator stops at the very next floor down and Blue Eyes is still kicking the elevator doors and cursing. The hollow of the elevator shaft above us gives each insult a black weight, like thunder directly overhead. A middle-aged woman in a smart pinstripe business suit steps on the elevator. She listens to the storm rage above us and rolls her eyes.
I look away and wonder if we could all be obliterated by a happy asteroid strike, please. The elevator floor’s carpet smells of mildew and chemicals meant to kill mildew. The woman is wearing dirty and scuffed sneakers for her morning commute. When I look up, she looks back at me. Her nose and the corners of her eyes crinkle as if I’m a new and particularly nasty species of swine she has never encountered.
In fairness to me, I’m sure she has met my kind. We’re everywhere. The woman’s mouth is hanging open as we continue to descend toward the ground floor. The storm recedes but doesn’t seem to have less power. Blue Eyes has quite a temper.
I meet my new companion’s gaze with a blank look that I hope conveys, “Who? Me?” I smile and shrug. “Somebody ran out of decaf, huh?” I stand there for an Ice Age before the doors slide open and she steams out.
I’m in the street trying to get a taxi to stop when I realize my shirttails are still flapping outside the waist of my jeans and my fly is south of where it ought to be. That’s the moment I realize that, all at once, I’ve lost my socks, my mother and my magic story.
And this is what forever feels like. The feeling of loss is a vast cold bottomless sea.
I get on a plane. The blackness reaches deeper and deeper. I fly across the Atlantic. I am ice.
The loss does not begin to drain away until I arrive at Shannon Airport. Only then does my ocean refill with ugly dread. I get on a bus for Galway. From there, I get on another bus which will finally takes me home to my tiny village of Cuthian.
My father sits by my mother’s body. His one good suit used to be for both weddings and wakes, but the last wedding he attended was my older brother’s, years ago. On the phone just last week my parents gently chided me, saying I’d better hurry up and marry that special girl. My father observed that the only use he’ll have left for his suit is his funeral.
“Oh, Da! Don’t talk like that! I’m settling down soon,” I said. “Soon enough.”
Her casket stays open. I glimpse her face but the cherub is gone. The corpse’s sunken cheeks make her face horse-long. I cannot look so I watch my father watch her. He says she’s beautiful but she seems to me merely a bad copy, an approximation made from afar. Ma without animation and laughter is just a familiar stranger. Wherever she is, she is not here.
I made bread with her, kneading the dough, squishing it cool and soft and buttery between chubby fingers and floured palms. We made biscuits, too, each one made perfect, cut with the mold of the mouth of a water glass. Push, twist left,
right, lift away, and plop the biscuit dough on a cookie sheet. The kitchen was always warm from the oven. I refilled the firebox and kept it hot. Yeasty smells and pine mixed with vanilla always call me back home. It was safe there. Nothing was asked of me that I could not do.
Da holds her hand a long time. “Her hand is warming under my touch.” He smiles at me, lost in memory, lost in history, lost to history. I shudder at this abandon, his quick nullification. He loved her more than he loves himself. I’m astonished. I can’t imagine daring it.
SIDEWALKERS
This was originally called The Storyteller. Not much of a title, but in any case, I think the story works out as an exploration of our true motivations, even when we think we’re doing good. ~ Chazz
Oz hums some nameless tune stuck in his head. I suspect he’s trying to get rid of it by letting it worm into my brain but I’m preoccupied with yesterday’s maggots. I balance my journal on one knee. Oz steers for potholes. I ignore him and my loopy writing gets jagged, slashing with each bounce of the van’s worn suspension.
About the maggots: A wild one went lame and I offered to look at his leg. He rolled down his sock and maggots slithered out. Why do ugly scenes make you look closer instead of wisely avoiding the baggage of heavy memory? I looked. White maggots boiled through blue flesh. I didn’t know what diabetes could do. We dropped the guy at St. Mike’s and I threw up behind an ambulance.
“I can’t believe you, girl!” Oz said. “We’re bus drivers and babysitters, not doctors.”
“I was worried about the guy.”
“Curious, more like it.”
“You wouldn’t look at the poor guy’s leg?”
“I don’t even sit on a public toilet. Hell, even at home I hover.”
“Thanks for the second great visual of the day.”
That was yesterday. So far, today is gloriously maggot-free.
I flip back a few pages, find a sentence I like and read to Oz. “They are nomadic exiles in a concrete hellscape.”
He looks at me like I’m one of them. “They’re low-functioning people with crashed operating systems.”
“Thud.”
“You’ve been riding this bus for like a week.”
“Six months.”
“Jean, being perpetually uncomfortable isn’t cool. It’s camping that never ends. Resist romanticizing.” He stabs at the radio and cranks the volume.
I turn back to the first page. We net a lot of kids. The first one I pulled in was a ten-year-old girl. She’d made it all the way to Toronto from Saskatoon. I started keeping a journal after I forgot her story. The first line reads, “She had so many lice, it looked like her scalp was moving.”
All my tragic fascinations were cute little kids once. They each have a turning point, the moment things really went sour. It’s so easy to fall and what tripped you can only be seen clearly when you look back.
Vanilla citizens move with purpose, chugging between debt-slave labor, lattes, and retail assaults. Oz still thinks I’m his idiot apprentice, so I’m pleased when I spot the next stray before he does. Sitting motionless on broken steps, she’s the one with nowhere to go, wearing too many clothes for a warm September afternoon. It’s easier to wear too much than to carry too much. Homeless people are closetless people.
“Client!”
Oz glances away from the traffic to scan the sidewalk.
“Right side. Library steps. Lone female.” Our job talk is telegraphic, like we’re on safari spotting game.
Oz hits the four-way flashers half a block down. Even though Oz is flamboyantly gay, women sometimes get squirrelly if he goes in alone. I leave him to his thermos of coffee. When I look back, he’s adjusting the van’s big mirror on my side so he can make sure I’m safe while I corral her.
I’m dressed down, slinging my heavy Mary Poppins bag. The only sign I’m official is the identification badge clipped to the strap. We’re supposed to flash our IDs but sidewalkers already have a problem with authority. Oz insists I keep the Agent of the State thing low key. His mantra is “They’re your crazy Aunt Sadie. Be friendly, not scary, helpful but wary.”
I march up. She sits, the eye of a consumer hurricane. Black smudges her temples but it’s dirt, not bruises. She’s got a round face that could be pretty if she smiled. Bad news: It’s ugly to be pretty out here. Good news: She’s in her mid-30s, so she’s too old for johns on The Stroll. Her eyes are cry-your-eyes-out red. That means either she’s smoked lots of weed or she’s not numb yet. Cherries accept help more easily because there’s no street mom or pimp. Yet.
“I’m Jean Driscoll,” I say. Her furtive glances don’t meet my eyes. I take it slow. Anxious is okay, better than the thousand-yard stare. The crazy gaze means sexual assault, depression, addiction and concussions.
“My friends call me Jean. You can call me Jean.” Yes, it’s obvious and manipulative and it usually works. Except this time it doesn’t. She gives me a dismissive flick of her head. Maybe that means she’s prone to aggression or less desperate than she looks. Maybe she’s just smarter than most clients.
I take a breath and take her in. She’s sweating through a watch cap and three layers of clothes. It was cold enough last night that she needed at least that much. Citizens in captivity sleep in warm beds. Walls keep the world out. When your bed is a sewer grate, you don’t care about what percolates through your skin with the steam.
I move a little closer. Cops stand over the homeless, so we crouch. Our eyes meet at the same level. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Jean?” she says.
“Jean.” I turn on The Smile. C’mere, timid deer.
“Blue Jean. Are you blue, Jean?”
“I’m okay. How about you?”
“I’m blue, Jean,”
Is that code for I’m off my meds? She smiles a little. Her teeth look good so she’s definitely fresh to the street scene. There is still light in her eyes.
I dig into my bag. In the van we carry sandwiches in a cooler called the bait box. We give the bait out freely without asking for information. “Would you like one?” I hold it out like I’m reaching through the bars of a cage. Hunger is a pinched look. She plucks it out of my palm. I help myself, too. It’s my third stale ham and cheese today.
I have a clipboard in my bag, but that’s for later. The blankets and sleeping bags are in the van, but for those we need information. Some accountant cooks the data into a pie graph to justify city funding and I get to keep wrangling.
She pumps the sandwich down like I’ll snatch it back. They all eat like that. I wrap up the other triangle of my sandwich and put it on the step between us and give her an encouraging nod. She snaps it up.
Reading people is much more challenging than reading books. Stories are wrapped up with neat red ribbon. The magic trick to working the street is to do what no one really does — look and listen. For instance, she chews with a click that’s probably nothing but might mean an ex broke her jaw once upon a time.
While she eats, she people watches and I do her math. I can see the citizen she was — no visible wounds, piercings or tattoos. The young runaways look haunted and worn. The pros too old to work get harsh and serrated. Sixty-six percent have addictions and sixty-six percent have mental disorders, though it’s not necessarily the same sixty-six percent. Her cheeks are clear of tell-a-rotten tale meth scabs that make 20-somethings look like 50-somethings who won’t be 60-somethings.
I sit beside her and wait, but not too close. Oz says he keeps smoking just so he can’t smell the clients. I’ve got other reasons. Masks and gloves are ready in my bag if she starts coughing. Before I went on safari, I was a social worker in the shelters. That’s where I picked up TB. It was a resistant form, so I ended up taking the tuberculosis drugs for a year with a public health nurse checking on me daily to make sure I was a good girl.
After that, my boss said I was an antisocial social worker and sent me out with Oz to breathe the fresh air mixed
liberally with car exhaust. Most homeless tread water or drown. If I catch them fresh, they might swim. Theoretically, I’m useful again.
The throng streams by, eyes straight, salmon with cell phones. To the casual observer we could be friends sharing lunch, but never be casual. Oz Rule. She’s got a lumpy hockey bag at her feet. I see no weapons but I watch her hands.
Lots of street people carry something to ward off monsters. Last week three college boys rolled a man of no fixed address by University Stadium. They gave him quite a beating but the cops caught them because the guy, a sometime client I know named Sam NoLastName, successfully knifed one in the spleen. They were freshman business majors on an Orientation Week adventure. They’re oriented now, I guess.
She tears at the sandwich cellophane with filthy paws. Fingernails tell stories. Long ragged nails tug at scabs. Fingernails bitten short say anxiety. Yellow fingernails mean nicotine. White spots on the fingernails mean zinc deficiency and not enough nutrition generally. Upside down spoon nails mean lung disease. Her claws are caked in black and her hands and forearms seem to be striped with smudged, sooty camouflage.
“I told you my name. What’s yours?” You always give first so you’re owed a take. Always get a name first — real name, street name — doesn’t matter. Oz Rule. Names make us real, he says.
“May…may not. Are you going to convert me to Allah or Jesus or L. Ron?”
“No, I work for the city.”
“Taxes, then?”
“Nope. Just here to help.”
“I doubt it’s really ‘just’, but my name is May.”
“Pleased to meet you, May.”
“Uh-huh.”
Another silence stretches out so long I wonder if I’m giving her line too much play. Then she says, “Look at them. They have no idea.” A few clothes horses click by in spike heels, eyes fixed on the horizon, always knowing what comes next. The future is iPhone-scheduled.
I study her profile. She feels my stare and whips her neck to look at me full on. Her thin pale lips are a hard line. Her eyes harbour secrets. Her gaze strips me of mine.
Murders Among Dead Trees Page 4