Nova Scotia Love Stories

by Lesley Choyce

  As he spoke he tried to read her eyes, but as usual her Mona Lisa visage revealed nothing of whatever she might be feeling. Inside she could have been laughing or crying or wondering how she came to be alone with this maniac. When he finished his story he fought, for the two-hundredth time, the impulse to lean in and kiss her, and he wondered why he fought the impulse when his victory over it gave him only regret. Several minutes passed in the quiet of the city night. Gerry searched the sky and saw a blurred light that might have been a bright star or a muted streetlight on a distant hill.

  “It’s a great metaphor for civilization,” Zoëy said finally. “How it’s taken ownership over everything and you could never accept that. Could you, Gerry? So, your very wildness prevents you from living in any kind of traditional way.” She pulled out a baggie of weed from her jeans. “Speaking of which, do you know about the animal testing going on at Dal?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s totally insane,” Zoëy said. “They drill holes into the brains and eyes of kittens, puppies, rabbits and mice while they’re still alive, just to install things – poisons, monitors. When the experiment is done they kill them.”

  “Why would they do that?” Gerry said, horrified.

  “Trying to cure blindness, stuff like that. They kill them by the millions in labs all over the world.”

  “Because they think they’re our property,” Gerry said.

  “What would your Mamaceqtaw people think of that, Gerry?”

  He shrugged and accepted the joint from her. “I think maybe the moose clan would think it’s our job to fight back.”

  “That’s what Terry said when I told her about it. That we have to fight back.”

  Gerry took a toke. He told Zoëy about the time he tried to free a local drug dealer’s pit bull puppies, when he was nine years old. He expected her to laugh but there was no reason to. She was a serious person. He appreciated that about her because it made him realize he’d played the clown too many times in his life.

  “I wish I’d known you then,” she said.

  He smiled, feeling like there may not come a better time to kiss her. But he was always uncertain of her meaning. Did she wish she’d known him then because they were soulmates? Maybe because he was so badass back then but he had gone soft. Maybe she wished she’d known him then and taught him these things before he got so suburbanized.

  “Maybe that’s what we should do at the vivisection lab,” she said, smiling then in earnest, showing her slightly crooked teeth on the bottom and the more perfect ones on top overbiting slightly, as if embarrassed by what was happening underneath them. If he kissed her, would that be a problem or would the fullness of her lips cushion the blow?

  “The mother dog left me with a limp for weeks. I’m lucky I didn’t get rabies.”

  “These are bunny rabbits and mice, Gerry,” she said. “And a few puppies. No angry mamma dogs.”

  He knew he’d do it if she were serious, that he’d do anything she asked really. He wished he could make them kids again so she could know him at that age, whatever her reasoning.

  “How do we get in?” he said.

  Terry and Sue proved invaluable in what they called Operation Niblet, after the kind of wound Gerry might sustain should a bunny rabbit react as the drug dealer’s dog had done in his last animal heist. They came up with an elaborate plan to break into the lab and release as many mice and rabbits as they could into Point Pleasant Park, take a few kittens and puppies to give friends as pets. They spent several days scoping the place, walking around it from a comfortable distance and then sneaking in with help from a sympathetic friend of a friend who did janitorial shift work there. They got floor plans from the university archives and they mapped out an escape route.

  They borrowed a friend’s dark green minivan and took out the back seat to make room for the cages. Terry would drive. Sue and Zoëy would be the lookouts. The custodian they knew would help them get in without tripping alarms. And Gerry got the glory job. “You’re skinny and strong and I bet you can run fast,” Terry said. “The cages are only locked with padlocks, so you can bust them open with hammer and chisel.”

  Gerry had a mild adrenaline rush thinking about it. He’d agreed to participate in a criminal mission for the sake of a hippie girl. A hippie girl he happened to love. He’d gone insane. “Ever hear the expression ‘herding cats’?” he said.

  “You grab whatever you can carry, leave the rest running around the building, wreaking havoc. And smash the shit out of every computer you see, take any disks you find.”

  “What will that accomplish?”

  “The PETA freaks haven’t accomplished shit,” Terry said. “All their sternly worded letters and listserv groups. Useless. They go right on torturing and killing. No animals are saved by that bullshit.”

  He didn’t see how this would be any different, which made the risk he was taking all the more absurd. Zoëy. She was so hot she made him physically ill, and apparently mentally ill too. It made no sense, but he couldn’t stop thinking it: if he could get through this thing unscathed, then he could kiss her.

  The plan was simple: all Gerry had to do was go to a basement window at exactly 3:00 a.m., a window that was never used but would be unlocked by their inside person, who had also popped in earlier in the evening to turn off the alarm. The building was patrolled by campus security, but Terry reassured him it was vacant from 3:00 to 4:00. Gerry would go alone, dressed all in black with a balaclava because of the video surveillance, with hammer and chisel hanging from his belt. The green minivan would be outside waiting the whole time.

  He was two minutes late arriving, but that left plenty of time. He glanced around for the van but didn’t see it. It would be there. He pulled the window open and crawled down, ducked under the ceiling pipes and ran to the stairs on the far side of the room.

  The stairs were sunk in darkness but he’d been told there were eight large steps. As he counted seven there was a deafening crash and he felt blood rush to his nose. He turned on his flashlight to look at a heavy metallic door. It had blood on it. His blood. They’d given him the wrong number of stairs. He’d been lured into this insanity by amateurs, gifted bullshitters clueless when it came to capers.

  “Fuck,” he whispered. Before it could dry he wiped it off with the inside of one of his black gloves. The inside was white cotton. He spit and wiped, spit and wiped, wondered about DNA, and realized he was damned either way. The best he could do was clear up the visual evidence. He looked at his watch: 3:07. “Fuck.”

  He tried the door. Locked. “Fuck. For fuck’s sake!” He kicked it and hurt his foot. There was no way in. He flashed his light down the stairs and descended, willing his muscles to experience each movement, ignoring his heart pounding at the back of his eyeballs. It took him several minutes to get back to the window, and he felt a surge of relief when it opened. He had tried his best and there was nothing left to do, though his chest heaved for the failure to earn that kiss that stared him in the face each night, so clear from such distance.

  Gerry pulled himself up onto the grass and looked again for the van. No sign of it. No matter. With no animals he could ditch the balaclava and bloodied gloves and walk home.

  “Hold up a minute,” a voice said.

  Gerry glanced over his left shoulder and froze at the sight of a security guard ambling toward him. The guard froze at the sight of Gerry, in his all-black balaclava suit. He wished he could stroll to the guard and put his arm around him and point to the trees at some hidden camera. Ha ha, what a farce!

  Instead, Gerry bolted, slipped on the wet grass, and lurched forward into a puddle. He got up and ran again, his feet squishing with each step. Gerry sprinted south and cut to a side street all the way to Point Pleasant Park. He scanned his surroundings for the van. He was afraid to look back, but he was pretty sure he’d lost his security friend. He collapsed under a tree and laughed so hard tears ran down his cheeks. Someday he’d give the boys back in Sackv
ille a huge laugh with this story. For now, he wanted to see Zoëy.

  Zoëy apologized a million times for not showing up. A cop had pulled them over on their way. They were so nervous about the slim possibility of that very occurrence that they were driving too far below the speed limit.

  The cop, on seeing what looked like three dykes crawling along at 2:30 a.m., was suspicious. But they were dressed normally – for them – Terry and Sue with their multi-coloured hair, khaki pants and button-up shirts, and Zoëy with her dreads and hoodie and tight brown cords. The cop looked in the back of the van and found a couple dozen small animal cages.

  “I’m a vet,” Terry said.

  “Get out, all of you,” the cop said. He checked their pockets and ran their licenses, but they weren’t wanted for anything anymore and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.

  The cop followed them as they drove away, and stayed with them at every turn. Finally, they went home and hung out quietly until the cop car drove off. By the time they got to the park, Gerry was huddled up shivering by the trunk of a Norway Maple, afraid to walk home dressed like a thief, his adrenalin-induced arrhythmia failing to keep him warm.

  He was half-asleep when he heard the minivan. He jumped up, ran to it and pounded on the back as they passed.

  “Gerry?” Zoëy whispered when they stopped.

  “Yes.”

  They opened the rear sliding door and he climbed in.

  “Did you get any animals?”

  Gerry burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. He was soaked and covered in mud and blood and hadn’t come within a hundred metres of a live animal except the dogs on Tower Road howling at picture windows.

  He looked at Zoëy’s serious face, concerned, though he couldn’t tell if it was for him or the animals. He tried to reflect her Mona Lisa smile on his own face. He’d been afraid since finding the door locked in the lab basement that the futility of this effort would not only erase her respect for him, but his for her. He needn’t have worried. This approach was all wrong, trying to attack systematic cruelty with a hammer and chisel and balaclava and minivan. But her intentions were pure. Operation Niblet had failed, but she would change the world and he would be right there with her.

  “The door was locked,” he said. “Couldn’t get in at all.” Before she could answer he leaned to her and kissed her. When she kissed back as if trying to douse a flame with her spit, his heart slowed for the first time since climbing into the lab’s basement.

  In the weeks following the failure of Operation Niblet, Terry, Sue and Zoëy tried to convince him to have another go at the lab, and that their inside person could take care of that unexpected locked door, and that usually security was nowhere near the lab between 3:00 and 4:00 and it must have been a busy night on campus or something.

  He didn’t regret his actions. They gave him the courage or the rush he needed to kiss Zoëy. But busting animals loose from the joint wasn’t his style. He was more a thinker, and an artist as well.

  The failed caper and subsequent fumbling through Zoëy’s loose clothing to her skin inspired several new paintings, all pounded into canvas while Zoëy slept after their intense fucking, during which their hands groped at every curve and seam in an attempt to become one multiorgasmic body. Gerry couldn’t sleep afterward; he was jolted awake by the intensity of her legs wrapped around him and he shook as he painted with the urgency of night, the need to finish before dawn.

  The paintings weren’t obvious interpretations of animal rights or love or the clear association between the two in Gerry’s mind. They were pictures of dew on spider webs and piglets running through dandelions, waves exploding on rocks and other snippets of glory etched in his memory by orgasm. Such pictures had no more hope of changing the world than smoking a joint and shooting the shit on the porch, he realized, but they came more naturally to him. And he feared going to jail, alone, having to find another new identity in order to fit in with another new group. He’d rather stay here with Zoëy.

  The paintings were his only answer to Zoëy’s escalating demands for radical action of some sort. He’d nod and kiss her and go down on her until she forgot about nonhuman animals and he’d paint the rest of the night. The more they fucked the more radicalized she became – the more obsessed with proving a revolution could work – and the more she ranted on revolution the more obsessed he became with fucking her. She gave him books about the world’s great revolutions and he bought her a copy of the Kama Sutra. When she asked him to consider what would be lost if they did nothing, he took it as a threat to stop fucking him. “All right,” he told her, “tell me about your revolution then.” He hoped she had something better than a bigger and crazier version of Niblet.

  He realized one night as she spooned him that he felt safe and protected, as he’d once felt with his high school buddies in Sackville, that happiness is something so elusive a man will do anything to keep it once he’s found it. He laughed aloud. A bigger and crazier version of Operation Niblet was exactly what he was going to get.

  The Only Way Home

  Steven Laffoley

  In this fictional tale excerpted from The Blue Tattoo, a novel set in Halifax around the time of the Halifax Explosion, Danny Cohen is a working-class fighter dreaming of a better life, and Elizabeth Beckett is a medical student and suffragette hoping to change the world.

  Halifax, October 5, 1917

  At the cinema kiosk, Danny self-consciously took off the straw boater he had borrowed from Tom and squeezed it tightly in his hands. He felt silly in Tom’s oversized tweed coat and wool knickers, but Tom had told him, “If you want to make an impression on her kind, kid, you need to dress above your station.” Then he laughed, though Danny couldn’t tell if he was laughing at how he looked or at his romantic ambitions. Or both.

  Danny reached into his pocket for change, and as he did, he glanced at Elizabeth. She seemed to him someone from a magazine picture in her narrow dress of light brown serge with a dark velvet collar open at the neck. Danny felt his mouth grow dry as he stared at the light pink skin of Elizabeth’s throat and the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed.

  “Fifty cents,” said the box office clerk.

  Danny spun his head back toward the clerk, embarrassed. He nodded and slid the change through the window, and the clerk slid two paper tickets back. Danny thanked her and turned toward Elizabeth. She smiled, but was conscious of Danny’s gaze and looked down. Danny’s face flushed. She looked up again and their eyes met. Danny could feel their childhood friendship – born amid the many days in Elizabeth’s parents’ kitchen, where Danny’s mother had been maid and cook – dissipate into the silence, replaced by – by something. He just wasn’t sure what.

  Danny cleared his throat. “Should we go in?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, “let’s.” She seemed to Danny relieved that the silence was broken, and he turned his arm parallel to the ground and took on an exaggerated doorman’s pose, indicating that Elizabeth should walk this way. She laughed, happy to return to the comfortable context of a rekindled childhood friendship, and entered the music hall.

  The hall was illuminated by the soft light of Edison bulbs, which reflected off the brass railings that ran along the walls and into the balcony. Danny and Elizabeth walked slowly down the aisle until they found two seats near the front. They shuffled past the seated patrons and sat, side by side, in two red leather chairs. When Danny turned to talk, his arm brushed against Elizabeth’s and, again, their eyes met and the uncertain silence returned. Danny offered a clumsy smile.

  “Not quite like the last time, is it?” he said. His voice, usually confident and resonant, was suddenly tentative and cracked. “Remember?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “Of course,” she said. “It was Le Voyage dans la Lune, wasn’t it?”

  Danny nodded and smiled, though he found himself self-conscious at Elizabeth’s French. It reminded him that while she had travelled Europe for a year, he had worked at the sugar refinery in
Richmond. He looked again at Tom’s boater in his lap and once more felt silly in his clothes. He tried to find his confidence. “Now that was a good flicker,” he said. Elizabeth nodded and looked toward the screen.

  Danny turned his own gaze to the blank screen and recalled how, when they were ten, Danny’s mother shooed them out of the kitchen for being nuisances. And he recalled how he had convinced Elizabeth to see Professor Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Vaudeville Show, set up in tents along Lower Water Street.

  Elizabeth saw him staring at his hat in silence. “Do you remember the barker?” she asked.

  “Do I ever,” Danny smiled and laughed. “He was blind as a bat and mean as a snake.”

  He remembered how the two of them had made their way along South Street to the waterfront, where they ran among the crates and coils of ropes, and dodged stevedores and sailors, until they saw the white and grey tents of Professor Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show. He had never remembered seeing a crowd that big before, gathered out front of the main tent. It made them both nervous and excited, and they moved with caution. When they came close, they found themselves in a tangle of suits and dresses, but they could hear and just see the barker, in his tails, top hat, and cane, standing atop a broad pedestal in front of the gate. “You will be amazed by Professor Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Show,” he crowed to an eager audience moving ever closer, “and enchanted in the moving picture tent. Step up now and buy your tickets.”

  The eager crowd produced their money and moved into the camp of tents. The cold-eyed barker watched as they entered, making sure that each customer paid his or her way. When one boy tried to slip through, the barker snapped him on the head with his cane and another attendant pushed him back out.

  Having no money, Danny and Elizabeth scanned the area for another way in. At the far end of the encampment, Danny saw a loosely tied tent flap. He watched the barker and waited for him to be distracted, then grabbed Elizabeth by the hand and they sprinted along the gravel and dirt until they reached the corner. Danny looked around to see if they had been noticed. Then he knelt down, lifted the burlap tent flap, and poked his head through.