Memory Lane

by Laurence Gough

  He bought two jelly donuts and a take-out Styrofoam cup of coffee from a dead-eyed kid wearing six tiny gold hoops in his ear. As the kid bagged the donuts, Ross told him he used to be a cop, had an addiction. The kid stared across the counter at him with caution and disdain. Outside, Ross spilled an inch of coffee into the gutter and began walking back the way he had come.

  A woman in her mid-teens pushed a double stroller past him. She wore a wedding ring. You could see the flash of the diamond, if you looked close. She was a blonde. Ditto the kids. She wore a hip-length rain jacket in a glossy black fabric, tight jeans. He watched her hips move as she shoved the stroller through that part of her life, the one grid in a billion that the two of them happened to share. She was a good-looking girl, but how long would that last? Man, he’d put in five hard years, but she was looking at eighteen to twenty.

  He came upon an entrance to the graveyard, stone pillars flanking an iron gate. He leaned against a damp column of stone, eating and drinking. Nipping and sipping.

  When he was a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, he’d been in the kitchen one day after school, talking to his mother while she prepared dinner. She was at the counter, slicing carrots, and he was standing by the fridge. The gas stove was about midway between them. Suddenly the lid rose off a stainless-steel pot full of mashed potatoes, shot a foot into the air and crashed down on the stove. A split-second later, a double handful of mashed potatoes curved up out of the pot and flew six feet across the kitchen, landing at his astonished mother’s feet. They could find no explanation for this phenomenon. Nothing like it had happened before and nothing like it ever happened again.

  Did Ross believe in spirits? Yeah, kind of.

  He swallowed the last of the second jelly donut, wiped his mouth and hands with a paper napkin, stuffed the napkin into the empty Styrofoam cup and shoved the cup deep into the hedge that surrounded the graveyard.

  He stepped through the gate. Now that he was here, where was he? A middle-aged guy who was pruning shrubbery set aside his shears long enough to explain to Ross that he needed to find a man named Mr. Oswald, that it was Oswald’s responsibility to show visitors how to get where they wanted to go, find whoever they were looking for. The guy pointed out a small stone building that stood at the crest of a miniature hill, far off in the distance.

  *

  Mr. Oswald was in his mid-sixties. He wore round wire-rim glasses that were a little too small for his face. His eyes were the colour of pre-washed jeans. His mousy brown hair sat on his head as if it would rather be almost anywhere else. His drab grey cardigan was home to a wide variety of buttons. His shirt collar had curled in on itself. His pants looked like Tweedledum’s hand-me-downs. Mr. Oswald smacked his plump lips when he spoke, made a sound like someone tramping aggressively through a bog. But the habit so remarkably suited his character that Ross found it inoffensive.

  There was a large-scale map of the cemetery on the wall, numbered grave sites, an alphabetical list of the tenants.

  Ross told Oswald he wanted to view the gravesite of his brother, Garret Mosby.

  “Oh yes, Garret. A new arrival. We have a few murderers staying here, but not many.” Oswald gave Ross a sharp look. “I was unaware the boy had a brother.”

  Ross held his ground. “Well, he does. And it’s me.” Oswald came out from behind his desk with all the grace of a bumper car. He took Ross’s hand, led him outside and pointed at the tangled branches of an oak tree about a hundred yards’ distant.

  “Do you see that tree? The oak tree?”

  Ross nodded.

  “In your opinion, is that a well-tended tree?”

  “It looks dead, from here.”

  Oswald’s smile was dotted with sesame seeds, tiny chunks of all-beef patty, a sliver of lettuce. He said, “No, the tree’s doing fine. There’s buds on it. A couple of months from now it’ll be buried in shiny green leaves. What I’m talking about, I’m referring to the branches. Look closely. Notice how some of the branches point inwards? That is not an introspective tree. Charles pruned that tree, and he did it all wrong.” Unsubtle pressure on Ross’s arm turned him about eighty degrees. “Do you see that fellow over there, by the boxwood hedge?”

  Ross nodded. It was the guy who’d given him directions.

  “That’s Charles. My son, my only child. The fruit of my loins. I told him what he’d done wrong. I asked him to try again. He flatly refused. Now I’ve got to do it myself, and fall off a ladder and break a leg. That or hire someone else to do the job, and pay for it out of my own pocket.” Oswald gave Ross’s arm a friendly squeeze. “Is that fair?”

  “Not really.”

  Oswald stared bitterly at his son across the gently rolling lawn. After a moment he said, “There’s only the two of us. Everybody else is dead.”

  Ross trudged down a narrow asphalt path. Garret had come to rest just past the mighty oak. His grave was marked by a homely slab of stone just large enough to fit in his full name and birthdate and the day he’d died. Garret had lived fast and died young. Or maybe a better word was immature. He lived fast and died immature. Somehow the reworked phrase didn’t have nearly the same weight.

  Ross lit a cigarette, dropped the match on the damp grass. He tried to imagine what might be left of Garret, in a year or so. Bones. Scraps of cloth. The plastic buttons on his shirt would last a thousand years. In a thousand years people would excavate the site and scratch their heads as they tried to make sense of all those headstones, all those buttons.

  When Ross died, he wanted to be cremated. Shoved feet-first into a blast furnace and reduced to a tidy pile of ashes. Better a quick burn than slow decay. But imagine the soul waking up at the moment he burst into flames, the soul assuming it had gone straight to hell. Ross stood there, the toe of his shoe resting on the slab, smoke leaking from the corner of his mouth. He imagined the flames racing through his coffin, that fragile shell collapsing soundlessly. Poof! went his gelled hair. His big green eyes disappeared in a puff of steam. His clothes were swallowed by the fire. Ya gimme fever. The marrow boiled in his bones. At what temperature would his skull spontaneously ignite? Bright beads of steel dripped into his thighs as the zipper of his black suit melted.

  Ross sat down to avoid falling over. He felt the gathered coldness of the headstone suck the heat from his body, and he wondered, for the first time, what fate had befallen the biker he’d stabbed back there on the wrong side of the wall. The guy had been a loner, lucky for Ross. No friends, no family.

  He glanced around. Distance had reduced Oswald’s truculent son to the size of a bug.

  Maybe the place got busy on weekends, when people had a little leisure time to dispose of. He shifted his hips, making himself as comfortable as the unforgiving stone allowed. He mashed the smoking butt of his cigarette into the grass, and lit another. Garret had died because his body had failed him. Something had gone wrong, and he’d died. What a devastatingly simple equation.

  A sudden hunger for easy money turned Ross’s gut into a tight knot. Two hundred and twenty grand. Did Shannon have it? He took a deep breath, held it for a moment and let it out in a rush. Sometimes it was better to turn your back on things, but all too often it was impossible to do what was best.

  He walked as far as Main Street, caught a bus that took him to Broadway and then sprinted across the street against the light and flashed his transfer as he brushed past the driver of another bus. He sat at the back, in a window seat, and was carried west on Broadway for mile upon mile, to the intersection of Broadway and Maple. There was an IGA next to the liquor store where the assault on the armoured car had taken place.

  Garret had told him the store was a Safeway. The IGA must’ve been a Safeway, back then. The main thing was that the liquor store was right where it was supposed to be, and so was the 7-Eleven. Ross remembered what Garret had told him about the shootout. He smiled, as he pictured the fat guy who’d tried to hide behind a case of beer. But it wasn’t all that funny, was it?

  R
oss saw the bright muzzle-flashes, heard the volley of shots, the shouts and screams. A stray bullet smacked into the liquor store’s plate-glass window, spewed fragments of glass across a radius of thirty feet. Clerks hit the deck. A .357 Magnum hollow-point had silenced the fat guy who’d taken cover behind his beer. Ross’s finger twitched as Billy pulled his shotgun’s trigger. Garret shot from the hip. Loads of steel double-ought buckshot slammed into the two uniformed guards and knocked the life out of them, murdered them where they stood. He watched them collapse, saw their bodies sprawl across the snow.

  Ross walked unsteadily to the curb. He reached out and pushed the pedestrian crosswalk button. Traffic slipped past, and then the light changed to yellow and then red. Four lanes of traffic ground to a halt. An orange hand, palm out, metamorphosed into a pure white dancer. Ross stepped off the curb, down memory lane.

  The armoured-car guard was resurrected, shot dead a second time, slid nose-first across the bloody slush. Garret reloaded the shotgun, scrambled into the stolen Caddy. Billy hung onto a canvas bag stuffed full of money. He knelt by the open door, and chucked his biscuits. Sirens. Man, they were running out of time. Garret reached out and grabbed a handful of Billy’s jacket, yanked him into the Caddy and punched it. They fishtailed across the parking lot, all of Garret’s weight on the gas pedal. They shot past the armoured car, the flank of the vehicle almost close enough to touch. A red light flashed. The driver’s side door suddenly flew open, the protruding muzzle of a shotgun swung towards him.

  His night vision was shredded by explosions of fire. He was deafened by the shriek of metal, as the Caddy absorbed multiple fistfuls of buckshot. Both side windows and then the rear window blew out. He was staggered by a heavy punch on the shoulder. Razor-wire flailed at the wound. Blood splashed across his cheek. The Caddy deflected off a parked car and across Maple, accelerated into the cinderblock wall of the 7-Eleven.

  A horn blared. Ross discovered himself standing in the middle of the intersection. The light had changed. A silver-haired woman in a matching BMW had him in her sights. He jogged over to the sidewalk. A skinny girl with starved eyes stared at him as she walked past.

  Man, oh man, he’d been right there, and barely made it back.

  He crossed Maple, strolled across the strip of asphalt in front of the 7-Eleven. He studied the cinderblock wall. No way you could tell a stolen Coupe De Ville had punched right through there, put its shiny grill up against the Slurpee machine.

  Ross went around to the front, walked inside. He bought cigarettes from the girl behind the counter. As he accepted his change he asked her if this was the place where the gas pumps blew up, a few years ago.

  She gave him a puzzled look, as if she hoped he was kidding, but wasn’t about to bet the farm on it. But then, the crime had gone down more than five years ago. What front-liner in the 7-Eleven organization ever hung in there for that kind of seniority?

  Man, he’d rather spend a year in jail than ten minutes wearing one of those ugly corporate jackets. He went outside, stripped the cellophane wrapper off the cigarettes, let the wrapper and inner foil drop to the oil-stained asphalt. A guy going inside gave him a black-hearted look. Littering. Was there a more heinous crime? Ross gave the guy that same look right back, in spades. He lit up, drew the smoke deep into his lungs. He was scheduled to start his new life as a dishwasher at five and he’d been told to show up at least an hour early, his first day at work. He was hungry. By the time he’d found a restaurant and had something to eat, it’d be time to go to work.

  *

  Brillo’s — Ross’s new home away from home — was located in the newly hip neighbourhood of Yaletown. Located just south of the downtown core, Yaletown had originally been a warehouse district. The area had languished for decades, until the adjacent waterfront acreage on the north side of False Creek was sold at a criminally low price to a canny Hong Kong developer. Decades of industrial pollution had made the waterfront lethally toxic. Following the land’s sale, many thousands of tons of contaminated soil had been trucked to the suburbs. Fresh soil was trucked in. In jig time the waterfront was declared safe for development. A dozen pricey high rise condominium towers emerged mushroom-sudden on the site, and were nearly toppled by a tsunami of eager buyers. Predictably, the development’s success fuelled neighbouring Yaletown’s revitalization. Aletown, some of the locals called it.

  By the time Ross found the place, it was closing in on five. He loitered outside the double-glazed plate-glass windows. Though it was early, the wining and dining had already begun. The people inside were for the most part about his age, or younger, expensively dressed, smiling hard enough to bruise their faces. A happy couple brushed past Ross and hurried inside. The scent of expensive perfume made him twitch. A sudden burst of laughter rolled like mock-thunder across the gleaming, sharp-edged landscape.

  A guy about twenty years old materialized out of the shadows. His face was shiny and hard. He wore a tuxedo. The way his pointy shoes reflected the light made them look as if they were made of water. A plastic nametag identified him as Robert at your service. Ross figured him for a car-shuffler. He showed no teeth as he asked Ross if he could help him.

  Ross said, “Maybe. Go ahead, see what you can do.”

  Robert’s face clouded over. “No, what I mean is, may I ask you what you’re doing here?” He shifted his feet, getting himself squared away for imminent conflict. “What I’m saying, maybe you should beat it.”

  In the slammer, back there on the high side of the wall, Ross wouldn’t have had much choice. The rule was: Do to, or be done to. But out here, it was different. Wasn’t it? He took a deep, shuddery breath, shoved his hands in his pockets and said, “I’m the new guy. I got a job in the kitchen.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Scrubbing pots.”

  Robert was an inch or two shorter than Ross but still found a way to smile down at him. Grinning, the car jockey pointed towards an open door that lit up a rectangle of alley, a battered dumpster. Ross gritted his teeth. He told himself he was a damn lucky felon, that scouring muck out of king-size pots was a fine way to earn a dollar. Fate in the guise of the parole board had blessed him in ways he could scarcely comprehend.

  He walked himself into the square of light and took the three wooden steps one at a time, all the way to the doorway. Inside, the lights were bright and people were moving fast.

  Ross’s immediate superior was emaciated, unshaven, foul-mouthed and cavern-chested. His name was Orville, and it quickly became apparent that he cared nothing for any part of the world that wasn’t a pot or pan. Ross was issued with knee-high rubber boots, a thick rubber apron and rubber-duck-yellow gloves that covered his arms to his elbows. He was led to a sink the size of a small bathtub, full to the brim with foul-smelling, steamy-hot water. A variety of primitive cleaning instruments hung from nails sunk into the wall above the sink. On the counter, several tons of metal and muck awaited his pleasure.

  Orville lit a home-rolled cigarette. “What’d you do?”

  “About what?”

  Orville blew smoke in his face, sneered.

  Ross said, “I punched a guy in a bar.”

  “Yeah?” Orville flicked ash into the sink. “You start anything around here, we ain’t gonna phone the cops. We’ll take care of you our own selves, get what I mean?”

  “Sure,” said Ross.

  “Beat the piss out of you and toss you in the dumpster,” said Orville with a threatening leer. Ross lowered his fists into the water and swam carefully around, made quacking sounds too soft for Orville to hear.

  At a few minutes past ten, Orville grudgingly told him he was entitled to take half an hour for lunch. Ross hadn’t thought to bring anything to eat, not that he had an appetite. The stench of grease and the sour knowledge that he was the lowest grunt on the totem pole had kept his stomach in knots all night long. Man, even the busboy had snubbed him.

  He stepped outside. It was raining again, surprise, surprise. He leaned against
the cold flank of the dumpster, shucked his gloves and thrust them in the back pocket of his jeans. His hands were ghostly white. His skin felt soft and pulpy. He wiggled his aching fingers and lit his first smoke since he’d started work. He flinched as he heard a fresh load of pots clatter down on the counter by the sink. There was a monstrous iron frying pan with a notch shaped chunk missing from the handle that he’d already washed seven times. He didn’t know what the frying pan was used for, but it always came back containing unidentifiable lumps of food burned black and crispy, clinging like glue.

  Ross knew that when he finally went home and tumbled into bed he was going to see that frying pan in his dreams. The tip of his cigarette glowed bright as he sucked smoke deep into his lungs. Close behind him, someone coughed delicately, as if to gain his attention. He turned and looked.

  A vertical bar of white materialized out of the darkness. A pale oval gradually took the shape of Robert’s grinning face. He had somebody with him — another kid in a cheap rental tux. They walked slowly toward him until, all too soon, they were a little too close for comfort.

  The other guys nose had been broken over and mended at an angle. Ross read his name tag. Ted at your service.

  “Got a smoke?”

  Ross kept his eyes wide open as he fished the pack out of his shirt pocket. Robert snatched the pack away and skimmed it into the dumpster. Five bucks, gone.

  Ted grinned crookedly. “Wrong brand, asshole.”

  Ross stepped back a pace. He jumped, clawed his way up on top of the dumpster. The bin was pretty full. No bottles, because the restaurant recycled its glass. But there was plenty of other stuff to choose from. Ross retrieved his cigarettes, shoved them into his shirt pocket. He wriggled into his gloves and grabbed a double handful of vegetable sludge, and let fire. The gooey muck hit Robert at your service smack in the cummerbund. A complicated process of emotional osmosis wiped the grin right off his face. Ross dipped his hand into the garbage, reared back and fired. His face splattered with a kilo or more of something evil-smelling and viscous, Ted at your service backed away, stumbled and fell. Ross bailed out on the far side of the dumpster. In his apron and rubber boots, he clumsily hotfooted it down the alley.