The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

by Paul Carlucci

  Billy worked his first shift that same night. The motel was slow, ever less profitable as cheaper franchises proliferated on the edges of the city. He watched TV in the office, comfortable in a leather captain’s chair. No new guests arrived that night, nor the next. Would Kristen just show up here one day? Did the universe work like that? He thought it might, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The owner’s name was Max. He offered Billy a room in the hotel for fifty bucks a month, a narrow rectangle with a double bed and sparse brown carpets, plus a fruit-and-flowers still life pinned to the wall with wire and a disintegrating nail.

  Six months ticked by. Sometimes, after Gwen had finished cleaning the rooms, the two of them played cards in the lobby, simple stuff like Hearts or Crazy Eights. Gwen had learned the games from her mother and taught them to her daughter, and now her daughter lived on Vancouver Island. She moved about eight years ago because her husband found work as a millwright in Port Alberni, and now they had a little girl themselves. Gwen hoped the card games would be passed on, but there was no way to know for sure because she hadn’t seen her daughter for years, had never even met her granddaughter, and maybe flights were too expensive, even once a year, but millwrights made good money, didn’t they? Who knew. She settled for emails and monthly phone calls and she taught the games to Billy.

  Another year passed. Gwen lived in a bachelor apartment downtown La Prairie, as she called it, and once a week she would have Billy over for dinner. She made pasta and tomato sauce every single time, and they’d watch a DVD. She’d be snoring by the middle of the movie, and at the end she’d wake up and drive Billy home. He’d put leftover pasta in the little fridge in his room and eat it the next morning while watching TV in the office. After that, he’d call Norman and they’d talk for ten minutes and say goodbye.

  It was late November when he realized just how relaxed he’d become, just how comfortable. He wasn’t waiting for Kristen anymore. He wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t noticed the change. But there it was.

  On New Year’s Eve, a little bit drunk from the whisky Gwen brought to work, she and Billy kissed. Her lips were both hard and soft. She touched his deformed cheek and he pulled her hand away, and then she pressed it into the small of his back. The hotel was empty but for a few kids partying, so Billy locked the office and led Gwen to his room, and they could hear bottles smashing in the parking lot as they made love with clumsy spirit, and then they did it again more ably. The next morning, when he got out of the shower, he found the sheets all neatly tucked and folded, and Gwen standing in front of the mirror, smoothing her apron, smiling. He kissed her cheek on his way past, said he had to clean the parking lot, all the broken glass, and she said, “You should move in with me. I want you to be comfortable.”

  VI

  Norman liked to sleep in the underground. After his dad died, he took three loaves of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and six litres of water down there, and he didn’t come up for two days. Gwen called before he went down. She said his dad had woken up with chest pains and they hadn’t thought much of it. She’d beaten him in cards the night before, but she fudged the score from the very first round, and if he’d caught on, he didn’t say so. She got ready for work while he showered, and after forty minutes she knocked on the bathroom door. He didn’t answer. She opened the door and saw water pooling all over the floor because his dad’s heel had plugged the drain. He was crumpled on his back. The tub had filled. The water was cold. The shower curtain floated on the surface and covered his face. Gwen said she kneeled in the tub. She said she gathered him against her chest and tried to warm him, but he was too wet, too cold, so she managed to get him into bed. Then she called the ambulance and sat beside him to wait.

  After that, Norman went underground more and more. He liked how his tenants couldn’t find him, how the worst among them could fight and drink and do drugs, kill each other if they wanted to, take shots at the cops, and none of their belligerence could touch him.

  He’d sink into the cot and try to picture his parents fumbling around under the blanket, the remaining years of their lives locking into place, a staggering geometry of moments leading relentlessly to the one he was experiencing right then, the past laying constant siege to the future, freezing, thawing, flowing, then freezing again.

  He liked to be near all the guns. His dad told him they were antiques, said they’d be worth a lot of money, and when Norman asked him if they worked, he said he didn’t know. Probably. His grandfather took good care of things, and the guns had been his. So Norman didn’t touch them, especially not the big one, which he knew from TV was a Maxim gun, how crazy to find a thing like that down there. He crouched in front of it, stared down the barrel, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch it.

  He kept his money down there, too. The stuff that Monster had given him. There was probably six or seven grand now, not a whole lot for four years of complicity, but more than he wanted, because truth was he didn’t want any of it. And that was the truth, no matter the theories of Sergeant Morris. He hated Monster even more than he hated the rest of his tenants, but he’d seen something once, keyed into the apartment a little too soon after knocking, because there was a leak in the unit above, because he had no choice but to go in and fix the plaster. He didn’t want his tenants looking behind the walls on their own. He knew they’d uncover the mould crawling up the concrete like a plague. He knew it was everywhere. He could see it in their glassy eyes and hear it in their hacking coughs. They were stuffed with spores, these fucking people. Their heads were just pounding with toxins. So he went into Monster’s apartment and saw him passed out on the couch with his shirt off, all spider-web tattoos and his head shaved except for a long, black rattail. Then he saw the drugs all over the coffee table. Weed. Cocaine. Pills of all colours. A wide electric scale.

  Norman stopped, froze, regained his movement and stepped back into the hallway, but he closed the door too loudly. He closed it too loudly and it was open again before he could get to the stairwell. There was Monster with a .22 rifle in his hands (where’d he get that? must’ve been under the couch) and he pointed it at Norman and the two of them were quiet. Norman looked into Monster’s eyes and expected to see drugs pumping up his pupils, but he didn’t see that, rather just an intelligent man calmly pointing a gun. Monster said, “You know what, bud? You and me could be partners, we could. Oh yes, could we ever.”

  And so it was that these little payoffs were forced on him in exchange for his silence, and sometimes Monster would ask him for the keys to a vacant unit, no need to know why, and this would come with a little bit of cash, and other times Monster would press him to approve a rental application, don’t ask why, and maybe there’d be a little bit of money in return, don’t ask any questions. Once Monster called him to an empty apartment on the ground floor, and there was a girl in there from Edmonton, pretty, and Monster, smiling, left them alone together.

  Then the double homicide happened and Sergeant Morris showed up at his door. By fall, the building inspectors were called and Franklin Place was condemned. Tenants brought a class-action suit against Norman. The building would be destroyed the following summer, the end of an era, according to the local newspaper. When it finally happened, the editor sent the paper’s lone photographer to cover the demolition.

  But first, Norman had to disappear, at least for a short while. He waited until spring, when the river truly burst its banks, a record-breaking flood. He was sleeping underground when the chilly water swept through Old Town toward the building. A winter’s worth of unusually heavy snow had drained into the Albertan watershed that fed Little Raven Lake. The ice broke up over the course of the night, great slabs of it crashing down the falls and bobbing in the northbound current, all of them clotting up the river, amassing at the mouth of the lake, squeezing muskrats and whitefish out of the current.

  The underground was filling up, like a sinking submarine. Norman’s muscles were stiff in the cold, almost paralyzed. Pain woke him up, teeth cha
ttering like a haywire machine. Black water spilled down the stairs, ran out the cracks in the concrete, the sound of its constant collection like glass shattering slowly. Norman’s body lifted off the cot, still now as it sloshed on the surface of the flood, rising upward, floating like a corpse. His lips turned blue, and he stared at the ceiling, mould speckled all over, like it was blossoming right before his eyes.

  He thought of his grandfather’s guns, pictured them drifting silently along the floor of the underground, stray bills of drug money curling around them, all these secrets hidden beneath a building and a flood. Shivering and numb, Norman swam down to look for the weapons. He knew the Maxim would be ruined, and anyway, it wasn’t practical. No, what he needed was a pistol. Yes, a pistol would do fine.

  I

  Ms. Baker’s doorbell was cute because the button was the nose of a slinky cat made out of metal, and Marly rooted for cats; most people thought they didn’t want love or attention, but she sometimes went to the animal shelter in the industrial area and she thought they were sweet and maybe even a little needy, so a cat’s nose for a doorbell seemed perfect, like Pet me and I will come to you and never leave. Ms. Baker’s daughter got it at a garden centre down south and mailed it north in a bunch of bubble wrap, which was pretty fun until all the bubbles were dead, then not so much. Marly climbed the porch steps, stood in the sun, and rang the bell. She was wearing a red dress with buttons on the front and her mom said she looked cute, but Marly thought cats looked cute; she looked fat. Still, she went with the dress because her mom was older, and today, with chocolates to sell, it was older people Marly wanted to impress.

  Dust swirled around the entrance to the house, lit up by the sun, and from this cloud Ms. Baker emerged, the vague outline of her hunched shoulders, her frizzy gray hair, and the hem of her dress, which must’ve been her favourite, because she wore it all the time; it was white with hundreds of tiny roses, like around the edges of the tea saucers decorating her walls. It was always like that when Marly came to the door. Always this eruption of dust, as if Ms. Baker lived motionless on the couch, or in bed, or upright in an armchair, completely still within her bungalow, one of several along a tiny nest of Old Town streets people called the Shorelines. Marly could picture it. When the doorbell rang, Ms. Baker groaned to her feet, disturbing the calm as she hobbled from one whirling cloud to the next, never coughing or sneezing, eyes always dry, even as Marly fanned a hand in front of her face, or pinched her nose to fend off a sneeze, or stuck her head out the squeaky screen door to choke back a cough. When the dust settled, Ms. Baker was there, wrinkled, smiling, gesturing for Marly to come inside, and if Marly looked over her shoulder before crossing the threshold, which often she did, she would see Franklin Place rising over the neighbourhood, and she’d wish she lived on the top floor, so she could get on the roof and feel the wind in her hair, and if the roof was locked, then she’d just stick her head out the window, ’cause why not, that’s why.

  Marly stepped out of her shoes, socks glued to her sweaty feet, and she left toe-shaped wet marks like flower petals on the floor. She had two plastic bags hanging from her arms. They were full of chocolate. They rustled against her knees as she followed Ms. Baker into the sitting room, shrinking backward as a cloud of dust leapt up from the couch and briefly swallowed the old woman whole.

  “Okay, Ms. Baker,” Marly said. “Okay, you won’t believe this. Ready?”

  The dust settled. “What? What won’t I believe? And my, you look lovely in that dress.”

  Marly giggled. “Okay, so listen to this.” She yanked her arms out of the bags and they thumped against the floor. When she started talking, her words came out the way they always did when she visited Ms. Baker, all giddy and clipped. “You know how I always want to go to camp, right? Like in the summers? And you know how people like Carolyn al-ways go to camp and everyone in town loves her because her family has the best house in Shorelines and most people would rather live there than even on the top floor of the high-rise and”—she stopped, took a deep breath, continued—“that’s why Carolyn gets to go to French camp, or music or dance or sports? And her parents work for the government and they travel everywhere all summer? Remember how I told you?”

  This was not news. Everyone knew this, and Marly knew everyone knew, but it had to be repeated because it was an outrage. Ms. Baker pursed her lips and bobbed her head in consideration. She leaned forward, extended one of her frail and wrinkly arms, and beckoned with her finger. “Come here a minute, Marly-buttons. Let me smell your breath.”

  Marly licked her teeth and sucked chocolate out of her molars. She’d been visiting Ms. Baker for as long as she could remember and the old lady still talked to her like she was an eight-year-old. But Marly sort of liked that. It was nice. It took the pressure off. She tiptoed between Ms. Baker’s stocking-clad knees, tilted her head all the way back, and opened her mouth as wide as she could.

  “Oh dear,” Ms. Baker said, wrinkling her nose. “This is a stinky mouth. Oh my, my. It’s very stinky with chocolate, Marly, which means you’ve had too much sugar and your father will be angry when you can’t sit still at supper.”

  “But that’s the thing!” She pointed at the bags of chocolate. “I’ve gone into business. So I can go to camp myself. Like, with my own money. I bought this chocolate on discount from Northern Groceries. I bought it in bulk, remember? And now I’m going around Shorelines trying to sell it. And if I do good here, I’m going to go to the high-rise and do better. I’m going to do that for all the whole school year, so next summer, when you see me before school starts, I’ll be fresh from camp.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re saying you would like me to buy some chocolate?”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly what I’d like.”

  “But there’s a problem, and it’s very big.” Ms. Baker wrinkled her brow and her lips ballooned as she swept her tongue across her front teeth. She arched her thin eyebrows and crossed her eyes behind her glasses.

  “What?” Marly snapped. “You’re broke again?”

  “Worse than that, I’m afraid.” She leaned back in her chair, flattening the curls on the back of her head, and when she looked down again, her dentures were pinched between her lips, all shiny and white.

  “Gross!” Marly covered her mouth with her hand. “What happened to your face?”

  She tried to imagine those teeth chomping through her chocolate. Would they even be able? Probably, but what if they bent or broke and fell to the floor? Nah, that was silly. They were fake teeth. If anything, they’d be too able, too likely to shred right through the wrapping and maybe Ms. Baker’s lower lip, too. Marly stepped forward, reached out, and tried to tap Ms. Baker’s spontaneous deformity with one of her grubby fingers, but the old woman sucked her teeth back into her mouth and gave an ambiguous shrug. She gripped her cane, clattered the floor with its worn tip, and lifted herself to her feet. The couch exhaled dust as she left its cushions.

  “I have something special for you, Marly-buttons, to celebrate you going into ninth grade next week.” Ms. Baker’s cane punched the pocked floorboards as she weaved out of the room. “Oh, and she’s very special. I found her in the backyard just this morning. You wait right here.”

  The screen door at the back of the house slammed. Marly felt gross after looking at Ms. Baker’s detachable teeth. She almost sat on one of the squat, doily-draped couches, but then she remembered the choking, eclipsing, eye-watering dust, so she sat on the floor instead, and then she lay flat on her stomach, to hide from the dust.

  That was the thing about Ms. Baker’s house. Marly loved going there, loved how it was just a five-minute walk from her own, how it glowed with invitation every day and night, even though it was surrounded by some of the Shorelines’ meanest-looking homes, all plastic sheets flapping over the windows, rotten shingles scattered across the driveways, twisted scraps of metal abandoned in the tall grass.

  Ms. Baker’s house had those things, too, but there was just something diff
erent about it. There were terracotta planters on the front porch, with determined green sprouts poking through the soil at the start of every short, bright growing season. When the sun wasn’t too hot, Ms. Baker would sit in a rocking chair and say hello to everyone who walked past, even Carolyn. In the winter, Marly was allowed to build snowmen on the front lawn, and even though a lot of the older kids would destroy them before she finished, it was still one of the things she loved most about the season, and she felt a little sad that she was getting too old for that kind of fun, but this was a sadness she’d never confess, not even to Ms. Baker.

  Inside the house, there were thousands of dips and grooves in the worn-out wooden floor, and whenever Marly came to visit, she imagined herself shrinking down to the size of a seed and rolling from groove to groove, because she was practising for when she went to camp in Vancouver, where Carolyn said they used trains to travel from one side of the city to the other. Marly would roll past the wood stove and then she’d grow just a little bit bigger and climb up the tan-brown coffee-table legs, all the way to the top, and on the surface were all the swooping, milky-white arches from a hundred cup rings or more, and in the middle of the table was the picture of Ms. Baker’s daughter.

  Marly remembered Becky only vaguely because she was an older girl and she moved south before Marly was tall enough to make friends. But she was beautiful and always had the hottest hair, and she even looked good in styles that had long gone out of fashion, like in this picture, where her blonde bangs were teased and frizzed into a wave that curled high over her forehead. She had a kitten in her arms and there was a younger, straighter version of Ms. Baker standing behind her, squinting in the sun, smiling at the top of her daughter’s head.