Wendy heard the girls scream in the bedroom. Panic filled her chest like a cold white liquid and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. She stepped backwards as Ryan came again, waving the knife, the blade glinting. She raised her hands and waited.
“Stop it!” Connor cried, jumping up and rushing Ryan. But before he got very far the small stocky guy decked him with a sucker punch. Two others joined in and started giving Connor the boots.
Ryan grinned at Wendy, swivelling his head to watch the beating. “Looks like your boy there forgot who his friends are.”
“You’re nothing but a scumbag,” she said quietly.
“Maybe I am,” Ryan said.
When the blade slid across her cheek Wendy felt nothing unusual, just a cold edge glancing the skin. Then she touched her cheek and looked at her fingers: wet with blood. The other boys stopped beating Connor. He lay on the floor moaning. A moment passed where no one moved, no one breathed. Then the doorbell rang, and it resounded through the flat with the clear, pure tone of a gong. All eyes looked to the door.
Ryan pocketed his knife. The others shuffled around, unsure of themselves.
“The fire exit’s blocked!” someone cried from the back. Then someone blurted that a cop was at the door, and the panic set in.
“I’ll fucking smoke him,” Ryan said.
“Yeah,” said the small stocky guy, “with that penknife you’re going to smoke a cop. Get serious. We’re fucked.”
“Hold it!” someone cried. “I don’t think it’s a cop. Never seen him before.”
The doorbell rang again.
“Answer the fucking door,” the small guy said. “Tell Connor to answer the door. When the guy comes in we’ll jump him.”
“Connor’s fucked up, bro,” Ryan said, twitching.
“Then I’ll answer it, tell him I’m a cousin or something. Keep the bitch quiet.”
Ryan and another of the boys dragged Wendy to the bathroom. She went without a fight.
They threw her against the tub and left her there, bloodied and stunned. She wondered if Ronnie had come. Or cops. She who hated cops prayed it was cops this time.
Something crashed against the door and she cringed, drawing up and hugging her knees. The glare of the bright ceiling lights pierced her eyes and she recoiled, blinking, wiping away tears and blood. The commotion continued and she wondered about the girls, but they seemed far away, safe and sound somewhere else—not here, they could not be here. She draped herself over the bathtub and saw the green alligator jammed in the drain.
She heard hitting sounds and sounds of people falling. She shut her eyes and prayed it would stop. But she knew that when it stopped worse would follow. She had seen things escalate before, in her father’s house growing up, in her own house, mayhem fueled by booze and drugs but often something in itself—violence as its own thing. She rocked back and forth as the fighting continued, eyes shut, fists clenched. Then she made her mind black, black as a pool of ink, blacker, and leaning closer, closer, let herself fall.
And then quiet. It took a moment to focus. She tried to stand but her legs felt flimsy. Blood streaked the floor and the side of the tub, and dried blood crusted her face like a mud mask. She waited and listened, hoping to hear something, anything.
Then she heard the doorknob jiggle, and the door opened. Felix, the counsellor, stood there with a grim expression, white shirt bloodied and torn, one of his hands wrapped in a dishtowel bright with blood. He shut the door.
“Wendy,” he said.
She couldn’t believe it was him, this big man, bigger than life, filling up the bathroom like an apparition. He didn’t seem real. And then he smiled that smile and her entire being felt relief. She wanted to get up and hug the man, kiss him on the lips. His dark eyes studied her with empathy and tenderness. She wanted to ask about the girls but her mouth wouldn’t open; yet she knew they were safe—now that Felix had arrived they were all safe.
“You’re hurt,” he said.
Wendy pointed to her cheek.
Felix touched the wound. She winced.
“Not too bad,” he said. “You’ll live.” His smile returned, bright and white and perfect. “The ambulance is here. They’re attending to the others first.” He stopped smiling and grasped Wendy’s wrist. “Hey, if you’re wondering about the girls—they’re okay. They’re in good hands now.”
Wendy tried to ask where they were but her words came out garbled. Felix looked at her strangely and shook his head. Then his smile returned.
“Maybe you want to know what happened out there,” he said, lifting the toweled hand. “I’ll give you the short version. When the punk who opened the door refused to look me in the eye, I knew something was up. I used to work in detention. I’m a martial arts expert.”
Felix paused. People shuffled around the flat, moving things. A vacuum cleaner screeched on. Wendy wondered what was happening. She tried to get up but couldn’t.
“Anyway,” he said. “After I took care of him, I dealt with the others. Then the biggest, oldest looking one—pulled a knife. Imagine. So I disarmed him, and turned the tables, so to speak.” Felix roared with laughter, nodding and wiping his eyes.
Again Wendy tried to get up but Felix barred her with his arm.
“You don’t want to hear the rest of my story?” he asked.
Wendy shook her head. She noticed how hard he was breathing, his chest heaving in and out. Sweat streamed from his temples, bending round his nostrils and blood-smudged lips. She could smell his body, its heat. She tried again to get up but his arm pressed down.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “You’re good right there. Trust me. Don’t move.”
Wendy remained still.
Felix smiled. He wiped the sweat off his brow with annoyance and shook his hand. “You have beautiful daughters, Wendy—mind if I call you Wendy? I hate formalities. As I was saying, the girls are beautiful, and three of them identical to the eye, my goodness, what a gift, what a gift from God. I envy and admire you, Wendy. I do. I think it’s great how you’ve maintained a household for them despite all your barriers. You are my hero. Yes, well. I have news about your daughters, and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way.”
Wendy sat up straight and pushed against Felix’s thick arm. It didn’t budge. Felix pressed himself closer, smiling.
“Your social worker said she’d find good placements.”
Wendy’s mouth fell open.
Felix stopped smiling. “What I mean is that I don’t think you’re fit to care for them in your condition, do you?”
Wendy shook her head. She felt his hot breath in her eyes, his hand pushing between her legs. She tried one final time to get up but Felix pushed her shoulders down, and she sat back and shut her eyes, feeling nothing above or below her, nothing at all.
The Dream of Giraffe
Francois Giraffe pressed his hands against his flanks to keep them from shaking. He clenched his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering. He said he was calm, but he wasn’t calm.
They spooned him cherry syrup before bedtime and it helped him sleep for a while. He dreamed he was crossing the blue-green water of the Niagara River, hanging over with his legs hooked to a wire. A breeches-buoy operated by an ape in white overalls winched across the river to save him. A ticker-tape parade ensued. A huge billboard illuminated by a golden sun portrayed his triumphant visage. Then he awoke to the sound of scraping. A man in a yellow tunic stood at the window with a metal scraper, scooping out filth from the sill. His shoulders rocked as he worked. The back of his head looked like the face of a beast. Francois wanted to ask him what he was doing but before he could, the man put the scraper in his pocket and sauntered out of the room, the back of his head barking. Francois returned to sleep.
Someone brought him yellow flowers and they looked lovely against the bone white wall. Who brought them? A little man with big hands and big feet. Someone else brought a book with a black cover, written by a man with a black beard and beady eyes. Francois tr
ied to read it that morning, in the early light, but the words bored him and his eyelids closed. Then he dreamed he was dancing with a long-necked woman wearing a gown with black flowers and yellow stripes. The top of his head nestled under her chin. She asked him where he had learned to dance so well and he said Morocco. When she reached down and bit his ear, he awoke to the sound of a train rushing through his room. He pounded the bed and screamed but the train drowned him out. Then a green gas hissed from the vents and filled the room. He could barely see the walls. What rotten luck to miss another sunrise. He took his pills, blue and white. He took them under the presumption that they helped.
He pulled out a blue velvet sack from the bed stand and removed from it an orange. He peeled the orange and separated its segments. Oranges held sunlight in their core. Sunlight powered the world, fueled its slow green lifeblood. Otherwise all would be mud and rock, inanimate and sterile. Francois liked to watch the sunrise on occasion. He put an orange segment in his mouth and sucked the juice from it without chewing. Then he spit the mush into his hand. The orange tasted warm and too sweet for his liking, so he stopped eating it and chucked it into the trash.
His feet sweated under the blanket. He rolled it off his legs. His feet looked like aubergines, his toenails like chips of charcoal. Good thing the doctor planned to visit him that afternoon. If he failed to come Francois would hold him accountable. Last time he came late, he blamed traffic, the tourists, and so forth. Why did Francois have to suffer because of a traffic jam or because of some bloody tourists? What did he care about tourists? He had seen a hundred million of them in his life, more, more.
“Don’t argue with me!” someone yelled in the hallway.
“Get baked, you fucking retard.”
“Say one more thing!”
Sounds of scuffling and slapping erupted and Francois sat up in his bed and listened. They had worked better before, his ears, in the past, when it mattered. Now he heard the sound of rushing water all the time. Was that okay? He had lived in the Falls too long. The cataract and its incessant din had nearly deafened him, among other things. He had once dreamed of going over in a barrel. The idea of it made him smile. Going over in a barrel! Maybe he still would. That would draw the crowds. Maybe they’d erect a billboard with his smiling face on it. The light looked rough this time of day—what time of day was it? Other people passing talked in street tones, cursing and dragging their feet like zombies. Francois had no tolerance for retrogrades and drug addicts. Were it up to him, he would command a score of marksmen to load their rifles and open fire on anyone who vaguely fit the description. But Francois knew that this would never happen.
A woman in a pale green tunic wearing her hair very short handled his wrist and looked at her watch. This wasn’t the first time she had done this. Indeed she often came. Sometimes another woman came, wearing pink, her hair not short. Her teeth reminded Francois of the gorge. The one in green never showed him her teeth. She never said a word, breathing calmly through her small black nostrils.
No one said a word, sleeping through the endless days with open eyes. Violins whined and oboes moaned and nothing made Francois sicker to his stomach than tepid music. Why not drums? Give everyone a heartbeat. Thump a little. Trash the joint. Francois smiled as he imagined all the noise.
“Let’s go see the scow!”
“Fuck the scow, it ain’t nothing.”
“It won’t hardly stay there.”
“Fuck the scow.”
Francois recalled the day he went down to see the steel sand scow near the Falls, and its rusted condition depressed him. He could hear the voices: “We’re going over, we’re lost!” People rushing to and fro. Never a dull moment in the Falls. Daredevils flocked to these parts, testing nature’s fury, seeking acclaim and infamy, sometimes dying but dying well, as it were. He had read of people fishing bodies out of the Whirlpool to harvest the organs. Other bizarre schemes for making money. Often, it was all about the money.
He spent the rest of the morning in the resident lounge reading the black book, making neither head nor tails of it, and coughing up black phlegm. Then everyone came to play in the euchre tournament.
They huddled round the table cracking their knuckles and grimacing. The dealer wore a red velvet tux for the occasion, but his sleeves kept catching on the felt of the card table and he misdealt at least ten times. Finally they gave him the boot and brought in a liver-lipped woman wearing a yellow turtleneck with black designs. Hands squeezed. These people knew their euchre, even though they lived inside their heads now. They filled up on grape juice and counted their cards, then recounted them, then again. They slapped trumps on the table top with skill and fury. Someone steeped English breakfast tea and served it with stale biscuits. All good.
“He’s cheating!”
“No, I’m not.”
“Take him out.”
Someone took Francois by the arm and led him out into the hall and to his room. After yesterday’s fall his face looked like road kill. He felt no different, though.
He sat in his room and counted the cows he could see on the nearby farm. Twenty-four. No, twenty-five. A little black one gamboled away from the herd. Had a wolf appeared, great harm may have come to that calf. But later, the cows huddled under a tree, shading themselves from the sun, yet so crowded their rising vapors propelled a white-tailed hawk into the heavens.
Where was Francois then? For a time he sat there by the window thinking of nothing at all. Then he thought of how much time had passed when he had not been thinking but quickly lost his thoughts entirely. He stalked around his room in a paper hat he made that afternoon in crafts class. Once a week a lady from Niagara College came and gave them little projects. Francois talked a lot to her, but she never more than nodded. Her aloofness bothered him, but then that is the way with artists. They while away the time, crucify themselves to their work with nothing but fire in their souls and steel in their hearts.
A splash of cognac would have served him well in the dense afternoons when his eyes refused to open and his limbs felt like molten lead, spreading over his bed and pooling in its folds and wrinkles. But where could he get cognac now? It was an impossibility.
“Shut the fuck up!”
“I’ll shank you, motherfucker!”
“Go ahead and try!”
Someone screamed.
Then a herd of antelope clattered down the hall, cleared out the obstructions, and it went quiet again. This happened now and then. These little bursts of violent sounds. Francois shut his eyes and listened. He heard something creeping through the vent. Was it his friend, Maurice? Maurice, a wee man, came to visit him on occasion. He was different. Never stayed long.
“Francois!” cried a squeaky voice from the vent.
“Maurice! You are here again! I am delighted.”
“You’re delighted? No, I am! I am!”
“How are you doing?”
“Simply superb! And I must say you look very fit! Well, must be leaving, the little lass and so forth.”
“Won’t you stay for tea?”
But he was gone. Francois had never actually seen Maurice, but he knew he could trust him with his life if need be. You can tell with some folks. Civilization itself depends upon the efficacy of these human bonds. A blue jay flapped by his nose, just missing. It vanished into the mirror over the sink. The brain is but a tool, Francois reflected. Manifold in function true, but a tool nonetheless. People go to school for years to sharpen their tool. The same holds true for people who better their minds living life directly. Never rule that out as a viable alternative to years in dusty libraries and lecture halls listening to professors bark like seals.
People lose their marbles all the time and don’t know it. But sometimes sadness gets mistaken for madness. Francois understood his heart had blown a tire. It was a long story that he could no longer remember. His life was going reasonably well until . . . See, he could not remember. But the truth was that happiness had eluded him and this made
him blue, not deranged. Still, they ignored his turgid letters of complaint and they tolerated his phlegm—and forgave him for the fire in the belfry.
All this. All this.
True or not, he killed a bird the other day while gardening. Knocked it from the sky with a hoe, a bird with golden wings and blood-red eyes. One of the other fellows started whistling like the dolphins at Marineland when he saw the bird. Then he started hitting himself in the face. Whap, whap, whap. This fellow often hit himself in the face, he was always looking for a reason. Francois wept when he realized what he had done to the bird, but his tears made no difference to the world. Nothing altered for their falling. And everything must die; no one gets away from the chap with the scythe. Scream all you want.
After a moment, a man in yellow pajamas arrived with a portable blue blowtorch. He fired it up and put on a pair of goggles. He aimed the rushing flame at the yellow flowers on the windowsill, carbonizing them in an instant. Francois wanted to ask the man what business he had torching his flowers, but he didn’t want to make a fuss. The man killed the blowtorch, removed his goggles, and, without acknowledging Francois, departed. This gesture, or lack of one, offended him to the quick.
Two giant pandas escorted Francois to the yard for recreation. They were new to the facility, or at least he did not recognize them. He liked to walk in circles until he fainted. The pandas watched him while he wheeled around the yard, pumping his arms. I feel alive, he thought, for the first time in . . . again, like a vapor, his thoughts were gone. But he didn’t have to think to keep walking, left right, very nice. He felt alive. This was fun! Then he ran into a tree stump and his fun came to an end. The purple skin of his feet burst, releasing a yellow goo that reeked like cheese.
Black Rabbit and Other Stories Page 6