“Too bad, man. Like, I could die for some shit right now.”
“If I die I’m gonna die like I wanna die,” he said.
“Don’t matter which way you wanna die, man. When you die, you’re dead.”
“Nope,” he said.
“What nope?”
“Not my grandfather. He’s not dead.”
“Who’s your grandfather?”
“He got himself hung,” he said. “Hung for murder, out by Bowmanville. The judge, he promised he’d let us lay his body out in the old way, up in the air in a tree. But the judge lied. He fucking lied. A priest buried him.”
“Don’t shit me, man. Nobody sticks dead bodies up in trees around here.”
“Look,” he said, nodding toward the men curled asleep on the grass, their faces swollen, “we’re drinking ourselves fucking dead so that when we die you can bury us in the ground.” He laughed and then spat. “That’s what you lard-asses want. You wanna trap our spirits forever.”
“Like fuck,” she said.
He leaned closer to her. “But the dead don’t stay dead. My grandfather’s not dead. There’s been graves opened.” He was very close to her, whispering. He saw the old blind man sitting in the sun under the rainbow. The old man was smiling. “Even in the cemetery right here downtown, over by Parliament Street” he said, “there’s people who’ve dug open graves so the spirits are free.”
She bent over and rubbed the dust off her boots.
They heard the carillon, a new song, and the old man sitting on the bench tapped his cane between his feet and sang:
Sometimes I’m happy,
Sometimes I’m blue,
My disposition
Depends on you…
She suddenly gave Abner a pecking kiss on the cheek. “I don’t kiss so good with my braces on,” she said. Her hand was on the Bible. He covered her hand with his.
“I haven’t been kissed like that since my little kid kissed me.”
“You got a kid?”
“I been a daddy since I was sixteen. Ain’t seen my kid for two years, but I ain’t seen my own daddy since I was six. Unlucky six.”
“I wish I had a kid,” she said. “I tried once to get a kid but I got trouble in my tubes, you know, so I pray and I pray a lot.”
“I don’t pray your kinda prayers,” he said. “They pray,” and he pointed at the men asleep on the grass. “They all got rosaries.”
“I ain’t no Catholic,” she said.
“Neither are they.”
“This here’s my grandmother’s Bible. I’m her kinda Christian.”
“No shit.”
“I wouldn’t shit you about Jesus.”
“What kinda Christian?”
“Not one of them weird Pentecostals, man. They’s always looking for blue smoke on the floor,” she said. “That’s what my father is, and my mother, though she just goes along for the ride, like she’s scared, too, collecting prayer cloths, always on the road pretending she’s Rose of Sharon looking for the next miracle.”
“She got some kinda road map for miracles?”
“They got an old bunged-up trailer, that’s what they got, and they’re always looking for some brainless preacher who’s just got the gift of tongues.”
“I got the gift of tongue.”
“I’m talking miracles, man.”
“Me, too.”
“Don’t make no mistake, man. Don’t play me for dumb. You remember Dumbo. He was a baby elephant. He had big ears. I don’t have big ears.”
“You’re looking for miracles.”
“I believe I’m a miracle, like, we’re all miracles.”
“Hello!”
“All of us being here is a miracle, man, and some of us are even washed in the Blood of the Lamb, except most people are fucking well scared of being alive.” She opened the Bible. “See,” she said. “Second Timothy, one: seven, ‘For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love…’ I’m not scared of no love.” She put the Bible back in the canvas sack.
“Let’s split,” he said.
“Where you wanna go?”
“Around.”
They walked past the painted foothills, past the old blind man, out onto a boutique mall where office clerks on their lunch hour from Household Trust were browsing among racks of polyester Blue Jays hats, plaster lawn pigs the colour of candy floss, satin embroidered BEAVER cushions, and desktop models of the SkyDome designed to hold elastic bands or paper clips. At the end of the mall a balding man, wearing wide red suspenders over his yellow shirt, beckoned to them. There was a sign above his head: Put Your Polaroid Face On A Genuine Porcelain Plate. “Come on,” Abner said, “it’s only a couple of bucks. It’ll be like getting married.”
They sat on a plush red velvet sofa. “Everybody comfy?” the balding man asked. He took their photograph. Then they picked a purple and gold-rimmed plate from a display rack. Their Polaroid print was trimmed and pasted over the white moon in the centre of the purple plate.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “Real sweet.”
“You bet your sweet ass.”
“My ass ain’t so sweet,” she said coyly.
“I like your ass.”
“I like my hair, and I like your cowboy boots,” she said.
“You two should be honeymooners,” the balding man said, handing them the plate.
They put the plate in her canvas sack beside the Bible and walked down the mall past Winners and Sadine’s Dry Cleaners and two sapling lindens set in cement boxes, the trunks wrapped in protective plastic webbing.
“You wanna go up to the glass house?”
“No prob,” she said.
They crossed the mall to the brass doors of the Household Trust Tower. He sang along with somebody’s boom-box blasting in the tower:
You can’t always get what you wa-ant,,
You can’t always get what you wa-ant...
They rode a chrome escalator to the second floor, a glass-enclosed garden of shrubs and dwarf trees and shallow pools, ferns, pink hydrangeas, laminated benches, and serpentine walks made of interlocking ochre bricks. They sat down on a bench in the windless and humid air. Nothing moved, no leaf, no fern, no breathing sound in the dense ground cover. All they could hear was the rush of motor-driven water in a pond.
“I think I love it here,” she said.
“I could see you’d like this kinda outdoors thing,” he said and stretched his legs, then smoothed his black jeans along the inside of his thighs. “I mean, it’s peaceful, like it’s almost really real, you know.”
“The trees are maybe real,” she said.
“Yeah, but really real is still not like this.”
There were little bronze deer standing in a pond close to a tiny red bridge.
“Can I ask you something? I mean, seeing as how you asked me about my braces.”
“Okay.”
“I was looking at the guys lying on the lawn, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And one of them woke up and was looking at me.”
“Right.”
“He was looking at me like I was weird.”
“Right.”
“You know a lot of white men?”
“Some.”
“What d’you call white men?”
“What d’you mean?”
“How do you call them? White people?”
“Lard-asses.”
“No, like in your own language. You got a fucking language?”
“It don’t come out in my language like white people.”
“What’s it come out like?”
“It’s a long story.”
“How long’s long?”
“Pretty long.”
“So, I got all day.”
“What my grandfather told me is white people got no colour, so the word we use is K’ohali, it means a certain part of animal fat, right, like the white part of the fat, the colour of fat people, lard.”
�
�I ain’t fat.”
“All white people are fat, like, you know, you live off the fat of the land.”
“Ain’t no fat land around here, man.”
“Shit, all you white people got life ass-backwards.”
“You’re telling me I’m ass-backwards and you’re, like, sitting here like a regular goddamn fucking warrior clomping around in cowboy boots?”
“That’s got nothing to do with nothing.”
“My boots are better anyway.”
“You probably like this glass shit-box better than the woods, all the trees you never seen.”
“I seen trees.”
“What d’you mean trees?”
“Trees.”
“This goddamn city’s got trees in those cement boxes, it’s more like what we call a wilderness. I got to watch out for animals going by, like that fucking car, because maybe it’ll swallow me up or run over me and kill me.” He put his arm around her, cradling her. “Salvation for the nation, that’s what I say, the United Iroquois Hour…”
“You Iroquois?”
“Ojibwa. Way north, Lake Superior.”
“You miss the water?”
“Life goes by calmer when you’re close to water.”
“We got water all around us.”
“These goddamn piddly pools ain’t water.”
“I don’t mean here. I mean in all the windows.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“There’s waterbed stores all around here.”
“So?”
“Half the city’s out there sleeping on their own fucking little lakes.”
It was very humid in the enclosed garden. She laughed as she undid the buttons to her fatigue jacket. He saw she had a small tattoo, a cross, between her breasts. “I meet this guy a week ago,” she said, “and he tells me he’s got five waterbeds. Couldn’t stand them, except his wife and kids love ’em and every night he says he’s dreaming he is drowning because he’s never learned to swim and when he told his wife they had to get rid of their waterbed because he couldn’t sleep, she told him he had to learn how to swim.”
He laughed loudly. A young clerk with a pencil moustache, who had bleached his close-cropped hair, snorted with irritation, closed his cardboard carton of sweet potato fries, and moved down the path to a Chinese waterfall wheel.
“Can you swim?” He still had his arm around her and he could smell talcum powder on her shaved head.
“No. And I don’t need no lesson,” she said fiercely. “I already been saved.”
“I was just talking.” He hugged her again.
“Absolutely no one talks to you fucking Indians except us street angels, so be nice. Like, don’t pretend, man. Like, we’re all part of the same thing, the same fucking grateful guys.”
“Goddamn.”
“You guys are like ghosts. You listening up, man? All the dead fucking Indians who are still alive, you’re ghosts. You figure that out, man, you’re all mostly brain dead.”
“Who’s brain dead?”
“You, otherwise you wouldn’t ask me questions like you ask me.”
“What questions?”
“I’m not scared of you or anyone, except Jesus. I’m scared of Jesus, so I don’t try to pretend nothing.”
“Who’s pretending?”
“You better not be.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay,” she said, mollified. “That’s cool.”
“We’re cool?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not mad at whatever you were mad at?”
“No.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You wanta know how I shave my head?” She opened her canvas sack. “I got a straight razor.”
“A real question.”
“There’s no real questions, man.”
“Sure there are.”
“So ask me.”
“You’re saved, right? Born again.”
“Right.”
“How did you know you were saved?”
“What do you care?”
“I want to know.”
“See my boots.” She stretched her legs. “That’s my old boyfriend. He taught me how to varnish my boots. He was in the army.”
“Okay, I love your boots. I love your hair and I love your boots.”
She crossed her legs. There was a long slit in her denim skirt. He could see the white of her thighs. She rested the canvas sack on her knees. “I got this big window in my bedroom, see, facing east, man, and there were these cross-bars in the window and the sun used to come through the window in the morning.” She laid her hand on the sack, on the Bible in it. “And one morning standing in the sun I could feel the heat, man, and the shadow of the cross from the cross-bar in the window on me, on my boobs, and like, I felt full of joy. I knew right then that I was saved, that I had the mark of the cross on me, and I bear witness, man, I bear witness to the joy in the Lord wherever I go.”
He pursed his lips like he was thinking hard and cracked his knuckles.
“You think that’s joy, eh?”
“That’s what I felt that day,” she said.
“One day at a time, right, that’s what I say.”
“Right.”
“One day.”
“Absolutely fucking right,” she said. “Dead on, man.”
“I got myself a joystick,” he said and spread his big hand over hers.
“You looking to fuck me?” she said.
“I don’t wanta just fuck you.”
“So what then?”
“I wanta give you that baby.”
“What baby?”
“The baby you said you was wanting so hard to have.”
“You watch out. Don’t go bullshitting me. Nobody just fucking-well has babies.”
“Sure you do. That’s what real fucking’s for.”
“The final days are coming, man, so don’t go bottom-feeding on me, man.”
“My grandfather, he told me that all the time.”
“What?”
“The world’s gonna end.”
“So, how?”
“He told me when I was a kid, he told me to take this here little pail outside and bring some sand in to him. And when I did, he poured the sand into piles and said these are the cities and there’ll be bigger cities in the future and then there’s gonna be a punishment, but the only thing we don’t know is when we’re gonna get punished but it’s gonna happen.”
“That’s great, being a grandfather like that.”
“They hung him.”
“That’s what you get for going around murdering people.”
“He didn’t go around.”
“He went somewhere.”
“The priest said he went to Hell.”
“You know what I can’t figure about you?”
“What?”
“Why a guy who should hate cowboys is wearing cowboy boots, and you think my hair and braces are weird.” She laughed, gathered her canvas sack, and got up.
“I stole them off a white drunk,” he said.
“You’re fucking kidding.”
“He was lying drunk in a crapper in a bar so I took his boots off and left him my sneakers.”
They went down the escalator, came out in the mall, and saw the lady sitting at the carillon in the Household Trust Tower window. She was smoking, and then stubbed her cigarette in an ashtray and started to play:
The first time ever I saw your face
I thought the sun rose in your eyes…
They walked through the park. A shadow from the tower had fallen across the painted ochre fields and the white clouds and the rainbow. The blind old man was slumped on a bench, sound asleep in the sun, snoring. Others were still huddled on the grass under the shade trees. It was two o’clock. The lady at the carillon shut down the loudspeaker system. It made a pop, like a pistol shot heard from a long way off.
“So where’s home?” he asked.
“T
he Bond Hotel on Bond.”
“You kidding me?” he said.
“Cindy Witchita never kids.”
“I copped a bed there a couple of months ago,” he said. “Or maybe it was last year.” They walked arm-in-arm toward the old hotel, passing pawnshop windows cluttered with fishing gear, clocks, chairs hung from the ceiling, wedding rings, birthstones.
“What room you in?” he asked.
“319, man.”
“Really?”
“End of the hall.”
“We were neighbours when I was there, so how come you never visited me?”
“Because I didn’t live there then, man. Anyway, I always mind my business. I don’t bother people.”
“Me neither,” he said.
“Too many nosey people always butt in.”
“When I wake up at two in the morning it’s what I wanta do. Butt in on somebody’s life.”
“Somebody might be sleeping.”
“Right, so I don’t do it. Instead. I chase dust bunnies across the floor or I make me a coffee instead.”
“Then you really don’t get no sleep.”
“It’s not the coffee that keeps me awake,” she said, moving closer to him.
“It ain’t booze either.”
“If you got nothing to do and go to sleep too early, man, you wake up too early, so what’re you going to do?”
He laughed and squeezed her hand. “You ain’t scared of me, eh?”
“I never been scared of nobody’s love,” she said.
“You still look like all the goddamn Mohawks I ever seen in the movies,” he said.
“Yeah, but they weren’t real Indians like you are, man.” She skipped up the hotel stairs, surprisingly light on her feet in her shiny policeman’s boots.
Once they were in room 319, he set his broad-brimmed black hat on the straight-back chair’s seat, the only chair in the room. She draped her battle-fatigue jacket over the end of the bed and took the purple china plate with their photograph from her canvas sack.
“Where’ll I put our picture?”
“Top of the TV.”
“Nice,” she said. “We look real nice, man. Happy,” and she took her grandmother’s Bible out of the sack, put it under her pillow, and began to undress.
“How old are you?”
“Nineteen,” she said.
“Spring chicken.”
“Don’t call me no fucking chicken, man. I hate chickens. Only pimps got chickens.”
All the Lonely People Page 34