All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

“Sorry,” he said, drawing off his tight black jeans. Naked, he stepped back into his cowboy boots.

  “I gotta tell you this,” she said. “My real name’s Alice.” She sat on the edge of the bed, pulling off her boots. “You were close. Cindy’s a name I stole from a movie star.”

  “Yeah, well, my real name’s Falling Moon Feather. Goddamn priests at the mission school named me Abner.”

  “They hurt you? Those fucking priests.” She lay down on the narrow bed, tucking the other grey pillow under her hips.

  “Naw.This guy, Father Eudall, he used to give me whisker rubs and kiss me a lot but he never hurt me.”

  “I had an uncle named Abner.”

  “Was he cool?”

  “He married a moron, man, like she was a big woman, you know, but she had a real fucking midget mind. He always called me his little Alice and touched my tits, always telling me how unhappy he was, and how fucking unhappy God was, always touching my tits.”

  Falling Moon Feather knelt on the bed beside her.

  “Take your boots off, man,” she said, laughing. “You gotta take your boots off.”

  “They’re not my boots,” he said and kicked them off toward the window where a seagull was standing on the windowsill. Falling Moon Feather said he was sorry that there was no music for them to hear in the trees as he brushed his lips against her breasts and throat, his long black hair falling over her face. He kissed the cross tattooed between her breasts.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  “That’s what Father Eudall taught me,” he said. “To kiss the cross.”

  “I knew there was something totally right between us,” she said. “I knew right away when I was sitting there with my eyes closed.”

  “Me, too.”

  “You didn’t have your eyes closed.”

  “No, but I knew. I was watching a blind old man sit in the sun and when I sat down beside you, even though he couldn’t see us, he smiled at me. Like it was a good sign.”

  “How come you ditched your kid’s mother?”

  “She turfed me.”

  “How come?”

  “She’s a good woman but a good woman can go bad. Her heart can go bad on her.”

  “What’s in your fucking heart, that’s what counts.”

  The seagull rose from the sill and flew off into the red sky reflected in the glass wall of the Household Trust Tower.

  “Except now she says I should go home to her because she hears I’m happy.”

  “She’s unhappy…”

  “She’s unhappy because I’m happy.”

  “That’s the way it goes, man. Most people aren’t happy unless we’re unhappy.”

  “I tell you, Alice,” he said as he kissed her and entered her, and she accepted the weight of his body in her arms.

  “What?”

  “Unhappiness is fucking overrated.”

  THE STATE OF THE UNION

  I don’t know how to tell a story so I’ll tell what I know. This is what I knew when I was sixteen:

  The spider’s kiss,

  a wrench in the womb,

  a petal falls,

  my face in the water by the white reeds.

  I was sitting down on a rock by the pond. The house was up the hill. We lived on Humberview Crescent. It was dark. At my feet there was a branch, and a spider waiting in the white throat of the branch.

  There were always frogs in the big pond. I always listened to the frogs at dusk. There were hundreds of them on all sides of the pond – shrill lost souls drowning in the darkness – frogs who’d suddenly found themselves upright with hands and feet, sinking, clutching at the water, trying to walk on the water, flailing, beating the water with their tiny hands as they sank, and at my feet, a spider in the white throat of a branch, waiting.

  It was the white throat, the white reeds, the whiteness that fascinated me. And the frogs trying to walk on water.

  We could see the pond from our living-room window – an elbow of black water, black because it was so deep. More than a hundred years ago, when the pond was on the edge of the town limits, a company of grenadiers on a forced march, trying to get into town before night fell, cut across the pond in a mid-winter mist, marching in single file through the deep snow over the ice. The ice broke and they all died, drowned. They went down like a long chain into the cold water. In the summertime, when swans on the pond ducked their heads into the water, I always thought they were looking for the dead soldiers. They weren’t. Still, there are some people who say they can hear the soldiers crying out at night. I can’t. But I could hear my mother. She often cried at night in her bedroom in the dark. I think my father beat her though I never saw bruises on her body. He did not look like a man who would beat a woman, so clear-eyed, a good nose, and his white hair. He was too young to have white hair but it had turned white during the war, Korea, and he had medals from the war. A row of medals. He wore them on police parade or at police funerals; otherwise, they were kept on the living-room mantelpiece. My mother polished them. If anyone spoke admiringly of them, however, she smiled, a wry smile. If she laughed out loud, that seemed to enrage my father. I never laughed at my father but there still seemed to be something he refused to forgive me for. “He is a man, that father of yours, who’s got a lot of resentments, a lot of secrets,” she said. She had a lot of resentments and secrets also.

  One day, she had just let the screen door slam behind her when she told me, as if I weren’t her son who might be shocked, that she was in love. She was feeling sorry for herself, or not so much sorry as vulnerable – soft, she called it. “I’m a soft woman,” she said to me, “so soft, you see…and I want only the best for us all.” No sooner had she said how soft she was than a red beetle crossed the concrete stoop, a hard-shelled beetle, and I said, “Should we kill it?” “Yes,” she said and didn’t blink an eye as she stomped it dead with her shoe.

  “That’ll do it,” I said.

  “You bet.” She scraped the sole of her shoe against the stair. “I’m going out,” she said.

  “Will you be back soon?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Should I lock the door?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you ever lock the door?”

  “I never have, not in all the years. It’s just not been my way, no matter how strange it seems. No, I’ve never locked a door in this house, never, and it’s not because I’m looking for loads of family or strangers to come in. I’m certainly not looking for that, no sir, but as for locking people out, you can’t lock a thief out. You can lock a fool out, but not a thief if he really wants to get in, and besides, I keep all the locks off the doors, not because I want to keep evil from getting in, but to make sure evil can get out…”

  She touched my cheek, looking wistful. “Now do your mother a favour and give her a big kiss.”

  There was a snowstorm, the snow thick and wet. At about three in the morning it stopped. It turned cold and a crust hardened on the snow. My mother and father were asleep. I pulled on my high black boots and went out walking down the centre of the street. There were no lights on in the house windows. There was only the deep white snow, and the crust was a brittle shell shining in the light of the street lamps. The crust bellied and broke under my boots, black boots that sank into the clinging softness of the snow, and the only sound up in the black branches of the trees was the cracking of the crust, breakage, the sound of small murders, and I could hear the halftone of hands whispering in the dark…

  My father bullied his way out of my heart. At least he tried to. He was a big man, a sergeant of detectives. He broke men’s legs, two or three times, he said. He was never charged. He told my mother, not as a confession, but just as a matter of fact across the breakfast table, that he’d broken men’s legs with a crowbar. He was a burly man who would moan and pout if his eggs were not properly poached. He would also glower at himself in the mirror. And then touch his face gently, as if he expected his face to shatter. “There’s a tiny l
ittle criminal, a real creep, a puppet, dancing in all of us all the time,” he said. He saw darkness in everyone. Sometimes he said he saw faces in the mirror, black faces with popping eyes. Black faces enraged him, not because they were black but because the faces were always there in the mirror. Sneering at him. He said this to me one afternoon. He told me that he couldn’t tell anyone else how he saw them sneering because they’d call him a racist. The men whose legs he broke were black. They were cocaine dealers. Black snowbirds, is what he said. “I broke their wings. I told them I’d rip their beaks off, too.” But the worst, he said, were the Vietnamese. Saigon shivs, he called them, his voice shrill. Sometimes when his voice was shrill like that he sounded afraid. Womanly. It was hard to imagine him ever being womanly and afraid, not with the glints of amber in his grey eyes. But often when he was afraid his hands trembled. “Shakey Jake,” he said, trying to laugh. “Shakey Jake McDice.” That’s when he got most cruel, when he was afraid and his hands were shaking, and he was trying to make fun of himself.

  “Most of the time a man gets what he deserves,” he said as he sat gripping the arms of his heavily tufted chair.

  “Sometimes he does,” my mother said. She slipped off her shoes, studied the turn of her ankle, and said, “Sometimes I think I deserve better than I’ve got. I don’t know who to blame. Problem is, without blame, who are we?”

  “I don’t want to know,” he said.

  “You don’t?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Nope.”

  “You don’t want anybody to know how crazy all this is?”

  “I’ll tell you how crazy this is. This is as crazy as it gets. It’s like you never letting us lock all our doors, that’s crazy,” he yelled. He got up and strode from the room and locked all the doors. “Safe and sound,” he said. “I’m a cop. I know what’s going on.” She got up and threw his golf clubs through the windows, breaking the windows one by one. “I’ll break your legs,” he yelled. He closed his eyes and began to tug and pull at his hair. “Not likely,” she said, “not bloody likely,” and she went out and got in her car and drove off. She loved her car. She loved her racing gloves. She wore her racing gloves in the house. She loved to talk about camshafts and carburetors. “I love empty roads,” she said, but she didn’t want to go anywhere. She just wanted to drive, full throttle, by herself. She’d drive along the lakeshore expressway in the middle of the night and get speeding tickets. They were yellow ribbons that she laid out beside his poached eggs in the morning. He put them in his pocket and said, “What you better remember, what you want to remember about freedom, is that you get nothing for free.” He narrowed his eyes. The leper’s squint, my mother called it when he narrowed his eyes. “Nothing,” he said, “Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Waking in the morning, I was always excited, always sure that something crooked in the air was about to correct itself. I was an optimist. I believed that there was something like an open seam in space, a seam that opened onto a scream of outrage, a silent scream that I could almost hear. I could feel this scream. I could feel the outrage. It sometimes made me cringe with pain. But whenever I was in pain I took a cold shower, shivering afterwards as I put on a heavy white terry cloth robe, certain that I could outlast, outlive this pain. Every morning I was certain, certain that the crooked would be straight. That’s when my father went to work. Unless it was raining, he walked to work. On those good mornings I opened my bedroom window, always surprised by the slant of morning shadows on the lawn, shadows that were a dun colour, earth tones full of promise. “Dun is the colour of my true love’s hair,” I used to sing, trying to make a little joke. “Dun is the colour of my true love’s shit,” my father said the one time he heard me. Then, right away, he apologized. “Sorry,” he yelled, really angry. I cranked up the lever to the sound system in my room as my father came out onto the walk and I sang along with Engelbert Humperdinck, singing as loud as I could in front of the open window, the street booming with our blended voices, a splendour of sound that my father took as it was intended, as a taunt. He understood that I despised Humperdinck. I’d tell him, “Anybody who sings like that is a dink.” I cranked the sound lever to full. Feeling the treble reverberation trembling my bones, I lifted my open arms, as if welcoming someone’s embrace. I threw my voice as far as I could and went off-key.

  The moon trailing flowers is the clock’s nursery rhyme. From the other side of the moon the world is in a blind (a half-rhyme…). I made a list of my father’s favourite songs. I called it the Humperdinck list: Release Me; Our Love Is Here to Stay; Someone to Watch Over Me; There Goes My Everything; But Not for Me; They Can’t Take That Away from Me; The Last Waltz; I’ll Never Be Free; Time Out for Tears; Please Send Me Someone to Love; Am I That Easy to Forget?; So Lonely I Could Cry; Mixed Emotions; I Apologize; A Man Without Love; Don’t Say You’re Sorry Again; In My Solitude; Don’t Explain; Winter World of Love. These are the songs of Engelbert Humperdinck. My father knew them all. He said over and over again that he loved Humperdink. He loved listening to them with my mother. He loved golfing. He swung at my mother with a golf club. Such is love, such are the songs of love. The frogs are good dancers.

  Mrs. McGuane lived down the street. She had married late, in her early thirties, and then her husband, who she said was a mining engineer, had died in a north country plane crash in the winter. “Icing on the wings,” she said with a look full of bemused sadness. “Icing on the cake, now it’s around my heart.” She told me this with a sensual laugh, as if she really liked the sound of the words, and of her laugh. My mother told me some months later that none of this was true. She refused to tell me what was true, except to say that Mrs. McGuane’s husband had some kind of connection with the church but was, in fact, dead, and her own family had left her well off. Mrs. McGuane hired me to dig up her garden. On hot days I stripped down to my waist and I sweated and I sweated until I was sopping wet. She used to watch me. One day she invited me in for a glass of water. She didn’t bother with the water. She drew her finger down the sweat on my chest and opened my trousers and began stroking me, slow at first, and then hard as I stood there, staring at a kind of glee in her face until three or four jism shots went looping through the air to the tile floor. “Surprise, surprise,” she said and went to get me a glass of water. My thighs were shaking. I thought I was going to fall over. She held the glass of water out to me, smiling benevolently. I knew she was not benevolent. I could feel that. She would be good to me, but not benevolent. I worked every second day in her garden. On those days she took off her blouse or sweater and brassiere and sat cross-legged on the floor of the breakfast room. She didn’t take off her shoes. She had light freckles between her breasts. She said her husband had never noticed that. Another day, she draped a silk shawl around my bare shoulders, and the next day she made me wear a single strand of pearls at my throat. Then she asked if she could make up my face – eyeliner and lipstick. The lipstick was bright red. She gave me a silver hand mirror from her dressing table so that I could see my face and told me to watch my face while she knelt and sucked on me until I came in her mouth. I watched my face, or the face that was in front of my face, the parted red lips, the socketed eyes. The next time, I watched her, a woman who might have been my mother, on her knees before me, moaning at prayer. I told her that I wanted to make love to her, that I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t make love with me even if maybe I really didn’t know how to make love, but she said, “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Don’t you like sex?” I asked.

  “Not afterwards,” she said.

  “Maybe I love you,” I said.

  She sat very still, staring at the floor, and then narrowing her eyes, said, “If you keep that up it will change everything for the worse. No talk about love allowed.”

  She asked me what I thought about when I was coming. I said I didn’t think, I heard things.

  “What?”

  “Fr
ogs,” I said. “I could hear them drowning in the darkness.”

  My father always looked at a person like nothing could be simpler than what he was thinking. He had a mind that was machine-tooled. He had a turnstile in his head, whipping around back and forth, gu-thunk, gu-thunk, a head full of contradictions, at least they were contradictions to me, which is why I could not read his mind. Maybe my mother could. Not me. He said he hated TV, how tv got inside your head, yet on Sunday mornings he always sat watching the Crystal Cathedral of Tomorrow’s The Hour of Power, glass on glass walls, piles and piles of glass sheeting and mirrors, the smarm of salvation, a salvation that was all coiffure and self-esteem. And he always brushed his hair before he sat down to watch, as if someone in the Crystal Cathedral might look up from a pew and see him on the other side of the tube. He didn’t watch because he was religious. He watched because he had a yellow-dog eye, a jaundice in his eyeball, and a contempt for preachers and he relished his own contempt. He could get high on his contempt. Almost nobody deserved his admiration. Nobody. Except maybe General Patton and Ronnie Reagan. And Joe Frazier. And Gordie Howe. He liked Gordie Howe. He hated Muhammad Ali. Always called him Cassius Clay. And he thought all preachers were a crock. That was his word. Billy Graham was a crock, and politicians like Pierre Trudeau were a crock, but the Pope, any Pope, was even worse. Buckrakers for every pooch in the world in a black suit. As for the local politicians, he would lie back in his La-Z-Boy chair and say, “The mayor’s a bumper sticker. Got all of what he knows off the back of a puffed wheat box. You can buy him by the yard – give him a set of used dining-room furniture and he’s yours.” He felt he was going good when he said things like that, and when he was feeling real good he would insist on taking me golfing or bowling. I didn’t like going bowling because even as a child I thought that anyone who wanted to run quick short sprints in rented shoes while carrying a twenty-pound ball was slightly demented. He was smart, he was meticulous, always spanking clean, keeping his nails pared. He was attractive, and mysterious, because you never knew what was going on behind those grey eyes. He was the worst kind of secretive man; he seemed so open, so abrasively friendly. He liked to say, smacking me on the shoulder, that he had the common touch, but if anyone said that he was common, then he was on them as quick as white lightning in a water glass. That’s what my mother told him, sitting in her bath soaping herself, and she blurted out as if she’d been brooding on it for years, “You’re common, Jake, common.” Then she yelled to me, “Your father’s totally common.” I walked into the bathroom and stared at my father. He looked like he’d been slapped behind the ears with a two-by-four, he was so furious he was smirking stupidly. He had a right to be furious. After all, he loved her, at least he said he did, and he insisted she loved him – though she’d told me she also loved somebody else. “I’ve taken somebody else to my heart,” she’d said. My mother’s breasts were splotchy with soap. She slid down into the water up to her chin to hide them from me, her head floating on the water, and he said, “I will kill you, I’ll lop your fucking head off.” He laughed. A tinny, high-pitched laugh. She had sloe-eyes. She looked up and said, “You don’t scare me, talking to me like that. God scares me, I’ll admit that. I don’t know how to talk to God and He doesn’t know how to talk to me, but you don’t scare me.” No matter what she said, she was always smiling, smiling though she was more often than not hurt and bitter. Smiling was something that she had learned in school, along with two and two are four and little ladies don’t sit with their legs apart. Smile! She nursed a powerful sense of being wronged. “Your mother,” my father said, looking at her like he was looking at a criminal, “and all her friends like her, are only busy being busy. Busy while they’re unloading all their hyped-up complaints and self-pity and grief on any unsuspecting stiff who’ll listen to them. Bleating on and on about how something pure inside themselves has been defiled. Defiled, the goddamn cock-wallopers.”