All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  They were crushed and burned; scorched, the police said. Their bodies were put in bags and then in closed caskets. “Gave up trying to get watermelon seeds outta their bodies,” the mortician said. “I understand,” Elmer said. “I guess you would,” the mortician said, “you being in that war like you said.” As Elmer stood at attention in his airman’s dress blues, he looked down into the twin graves, and what he suddenly remembered was a black soldier in Saigon, a grunt who had bobbed his head drunkenly, saying, “Life’s like a black woman’s left tit. It ain’t right, and it ain’t fair.” As Elmer left the graveyard, the minister asked, “Well, Mr. Sadine, what’ll you do now?”

  “Politics,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, that’s some job.”

  “I don’t want a job, I want a position.”

  He shaved off his moustache and settled into the house. It was a big house with many small rooms. He did not like to sleep in his own bed. He left a light on in their room all night, and usually kept their door closed. Sometimes, stretched out on a sofa in the study, drinking several glasses of whisky to ease himself to sleep, he stared at their bedroom door. One night, for no reason, he opened it and went in and looked under their bed. There was a bugle, his father’s. He’d never heard his father play the bugle. He left it there and entered politics.

  3

  His election slogan was: UP UP AND AWAY WITH ELMER SADINE. He stumped the narrow row houses of Ward 9, the downtown ward. He talked about family values in public life. He wore his flyer’s wings on his lapel. He made speeches at several Legion Halls but did not find it easy to be with other airmen, other fighter pilots who had fought in other wars. His eyelid fluttered when they talked about air strikes and carpet bombing. He shuffled his big feet. When he was asked one night why he had wanted to fight for another country in another country’s war, he said that he had nothing to say about war because war was like a black seed that they all carried in their bones, everybody, Americans or Canucks, and whenever he said this he broke into a cold sweat. He could not blame the sweat on fatigue or dreams of a free fall through the air in flames. Whenever he had to talk about war he felt dead on his feet at the podium.

  The campaign lasted six weeks. The voting results in the ward were close. After a recount he was elected as alderman by nine votes. He’d run in Ward 9 because his only opposition was a florist with a lisp, and also because he had been born on the ninth day of the ninth month. He appeared at a breakfast prayer meeting one week after the election and said that he hoped to serve the city for nine years. He said that while standing under a cold shower that morning, he had brooded on the number 9, looking for a meaning, and he had seen that no matter how you looked at 9 in all its multiples, it always added up to 9 (9 x 8 was 72, which was 7 + 2, a 9; and 6 x 9 was 54, 5 + 4, a 9; and 9 x 9 was 81, 8 + 1, a 9). No other number, he said smiling happily, was so self-contained. “I can assure you, I’m my own man,” he said.

  The next morning, his photograph appeared in the newspaper: OLD NUMBER NINE TAKES HIS SEAT. He was startled to see such a big picture of himself in the paper, and though he knew his mother would have been pleased, he was slightly offended. He was not old. He studied his face in the mirror. He was a young man. He had his father’s nose and eyes. He looked hard and long into the mirror. He heard the grandfather clock in the hall chime. He’d been looking into his own eyes for nearly ten minutes. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he said. He laughed loudly at that and then he remembered that his mother had always said, “The loud laugh bespeaks the vacant mind.”

  He started wearing flight glasses, not just on the street and to nursing homes and old folks’ homes, but to council meetings. He wondered what people thought. “I like them,” his secretary said. “They give you a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain élan. They go with your wings.” He thanked her. He decided to look up those words to see what they meant. He asked her to write them down. That’s what he told his secretary to do when anyone asked him a question, “Write that down.” He soon had a large filing box full of questions. He’d say, “Oh yes, I remember you, the question you asked.” He did not pretend to have answers. He gradually became known as a tight-lipped spokesman for reduced taxes. “There’s no such thing as loose change,” he said. “There’s loose morals but no loose change.” During Lent, a reporter from Your Catholic Neighbour, writing about morals in civic life, asked him what he believed in. “The number 9,” he answered. The reporter did not laugh. “Don’t worry, I won’t quote you,” the reporter said.

  4

  Three years later, the mayor, Mort McLeod, who had been elected to bring casino gambling to the city, suddenly died of heart failure in The Dutch Sisters, a cheap lakeshore motel. It was whispered in the council cloakroom that he’d been found in bed with a high school baton twirler. Sadine had only contempt for cloakroom gossip. Shitheads, he said to himself. Then he told several newspapermen that he was his own man, a hands-on man, “And I trust what I can touch, what I can see. I trust these sandstone walls, that battleship linoleum.” During the conversation with the newsmen, he said to a startled fellow alderman, “That’s a fine door, a fine glass door you’ve got there, and the mayor was a fine mayor.”

  The Requiem Mass for the mayor was said in the cathedral. The De La Salle College Drum and Bugle Corps blew their silver bugles at the elevation of the host. Sadine wished that he’d had bugles blown over his mother and father’s graves. Taps. We’re all fallen warriors, he thought as he stood at the cathedral’s centre door beside the Monsignor. He said to the Monsignor in a loud, clear voice, “Good work is public work. And the public work is our private work. And our work was the mayor’s.” The Monsignor looked doubtful but smiled and said, “I’m sure you must be right.” Sadine, as he shook hands with the parishioners, felt a sudden bond with the Monsignor. Though he wasn’t Catholic, he thought he might start coming to church. His eyelid began to flutter wildly, so he put on his flight glasses. The Monsignor turned to him and made the sign of the cross, saying, “May the Holy Mary, Mother of God, and all Her angels and saints, bless you.” Sadine went home feeling pleased, so pleased he was sure something was going to go wrong.

  5

  As the sitting alderman from the central ward he was asked to take over the mayor’s chair until an election could be called. “I’m just sitting in,” he said expansively to a news photographer, “sitting in for the next eight months or so.” He agreed to meet with a rakish old Chinese real estate broker at Bistro 990 on Bay Street. The broker said, while winking and spooning ice cream into the bruised mouth of a delicate-boned young man, “A fool and his money are soon parted. I should like to play the fool in your life.” The broker offered Sadine a trip to Hong Kong if he would help to ease the stringent garbage collection regulations in Chinatown. Sadine said, “I’ve already been to the Far East, thanks.” He declined cash, but a week later he accepted shares in an established chain of funeral homes that asked for his help in the rezoning of several new parking lots. “You name me a better bet than death,” the broker had said. Sadine, now that he had such a secure income, decided to invest the money he’d inherited from his father in an old store in the east end that needed refurbishing, calling it Sadine’s Dry Cleaning store. The store’s motto was: Let the Mayor Take You to the Cleaners. His aides said the motto was a political mistake because he wasn’t really the mayor, but he said, “You don’t understand how popular a dumb joke can be.”

  As acting mayor he refused to support the extension of an elevated cantilevered concrete skyway along the east-end lakeshore. Trying to make a joke, he said the skyway would desecrate the memory of the dead mayor by casting a shadow over The Dutch Sisters motel. Then he stood up in chambers, stroked his chin, and said: “Taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Stupid.” and sat down. Later, at a large fundraiser in Little Italy, Igidio Ciparone, a construction executive, said, “How do we get this guy’s nose into joint?” Ciparone’s wife, a woman who had plump, swollen arms, sa
id sourly, “Look at your shoes, Sadine. Only a low-flying bore like you would wear shoes with such thick heavy soles.” He shuffled his big feet and looked down at his shoes, wondering why anyone would be interested in the weight of his footwear, and he said, “Sensible people wear good solid shoes.” He went home. “A lot she knows,” he said. He went out to the garage, where there were rows of shelves on the walls, the shelves lined with model airplanes. He’d started building the planes shortly after becoming an alderman. Sometimes he stood in the unlit garage and stroked the taut paper bodies of the planes, chanting in a whisper: “Up up and away with Elmer Sadine!” Sometimes, while waiting for the glued struts to dry, he wondered why he’d never played with model planes like these as a boy. He wondered why his fondest childhood memory was sitting beside his mother, holding her hand, watching squirrels run across the garage roof and up into the branches of the big sugar maple. “Tree rats,” she’d said. “Just common rats who look loveable because they have bushy tails and run around in the air.” He felt a cold chill. He missed his mother. He went back up to his study and sat down and doodled several 9s on a piece of notepaper. After half an hour, he said, “When all’s said and done, there’s nowhere to go but up.”

  6

  He ran for mayor because it was expected of him. But he’d lost interest, going from meeting to meeting feeling lethargic, bored, and angry at his own lethargy. It was how he’d felt in Saigon on the night when he’d gone out to the shanties beside the lagoon and fired a blind shot into the night. His mind wandered on the hustings. In the middle of a speech to the Knights of Columbus, he suddenly started talking angrily to his nurse in Saigon. “Teeth will be provided,” he declared. There was loud questioning. “You mean clackers?” someone yelled. Everyone laughed. He didn’t care. He was deeply upset because he couldn’t remember the nurse’s face. He could smell the flowers around the whorehouse. He remembered the smell of a child-whore’s hair, Tiger Rose Pomade, and her fingers. He remembered the final two days in Saigon, lying in bed with three little girls as they stroked and kissed him and giggled. He could remember the mayor’s face, though they’d never had a conversation alone, but he couldn’t remember the nurse’s face. He was sure he could remember his mother’s face. Or perhaps, he thought suddenly in a panic, he was confused. Maybe he could remember the nurse but not his mother.

  He went home and had several glasses of whisky. An empty whisky glass fell out of his hand and he heard his mother say, “Oh dear! You’re drunk.” He heard his father laughing in the bedroom. “Son-of-a-bitch, I’d kill you if I knew where you were,” he said. He went and got the bugle from under the bed and blew a loud BRAAAK.

  The next day, as soon as the polls closed, he conceded defeat. When asked by a reporter how he felt, he said, staring straight into the tv camera, “I have no shame at how I did.” He was astonished when the reporter turned to the camera and said, “Well, there you have it. At last a politician who admits he has no shame.”

  7

  Though he was still a young man, Sadine quit politics. He wept when the Organization of Funeral Home Directors, at a lunch, told him that they would make sure a small, little-used park close by his house would be named Sadine Park. He felt so good he stood up and cried, “Up up and away with Elmer Sadine!” Everyone laughed. He went to the bank. He was told by the manager that he was in a very good position financially. He opened one more Sadine’s Dry Cleaning store, across the road from another funeral parlour, this in the west end. “Widening my view of things.” He did not change the store’s motto: Let the Mayor Take You to the Cleaners. He thought that it was still a very good joke.

  When he wasn’t at his stores, he stayed at home and worked in his study at a long pine table with an X-Acto knife and boxes of balsa strips and tubes of glue. Then he went out to the garage. The garage was empty because he didn’t drive a car. There were more than fifty model planes on the shelves. Every Saturday, he went to Sadine Park on the edge of a ravine. He flew his planes in the park.

  One morning a tall, lanky man came into the park through the gate and pointed at Sadine with his walking stick. Sadine was standing by a cluster of honeysuckle bushes with several model planes at his feet. He stepped back into the bushes but the man came directly to him, reached over the bushes and grasped him by the hand. “The name’s Mellens, Martin Mellens. I wanted to meet you. I wanted to know what kind of a neighbour of mine sleeps with a light on in his house all night.” He said he lived in a coach house down near the old iron footbridge that crossed over the ravine.

  He was older than Sadine. He had long spindly legs, a tanned skin that was tight on his skull, and cropped hair. Sadine stared at Mellens. He didn’t like his house being watched. “I was sure,” he said dryly, “that I was out of the public eye.” Mellens laughed, took his hand again, and said, “My young Mr. Mayor, I’m not the public, I’m your neighbour.” He strode back to the gate, calling out, “And if I can’t be your neighbour, I’ll be your friend.” Sadine, seeing the older man’s spindly long legs and boyish bounce, thought, The man walks like a water spider who’s run out of water.

  Sadine asked the postman about Mellens. The postman said he was Russian, a widower whose young wife had died after giving birth to a son, and the baby had died, too. But when he asked a neighbour across the road, the neighbour said, “No, he is not Russian, he’s Latvian. And not only is there no baby, but the wife, a young woman, she ran off with an evangelist who goes in for holy roller services, preaching out of his motorhome church.” The neighbour laughed. “She swapped Mellens for a Winnebago,” and he slapped his thigh at his own joke.

  8

  On the next Saturday, Mellens knelt by the planes at Sadine’s feet. He helped inject fuel into the tiny stainless-steel motors. He grinned. As the humid afternoon passed, he mopped his brow with a big white handkerchief and told Sadine that he had made his money in the nursery business, not shrubs and flowers, but a pesticide he had developed that was not toxic but killed grubs. “I don’t mind telling you, I’ve got a streak in me that’s a touch flamboyant. See this, my walking stick? That’s a grub,” he said, putting the ivory handle of his stick into Sadine’s hand. The handle had been carved into the shape of a maggot. “Mellens is the name, grubs are the game.” He laughed. Then, late in the afternoon, he suffered short uncontrollable fits of shaking that started in his hands. His whole body shook. He grinned and said, “Pay no attention. It goes away.” Sadine was glad to hear that. Without thinking, he began to sing:

  She wheeled her wheelbarrow

  Through streets broad and narrow

  Crying cockles and mussels

  Alive alive-oh…

  “Sometimes,” Mellens said, interrupting Sadine,“there’s a pain that comes with the shaking. It’s almost as if it were right in the centre of my bones. Unbearable. Nothing works on it. Aspirin. Cocaine. Nothing.”

  Sadine stroked his chin. At last he said, “You should try morphine sulphate. Get your hands on that. I’ve seen how it works in Saigon. I was in Saigon.”

  Mellens began to stop shaking. He leaned on his stick.

  “You were?”

  “Sure.”

  “Must’ve been quite terrible.”

  “Nearly got killed. Charlie punched me in the face, stuck his pistol right down my throat.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Nearly shit myself.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Nearly fucking shit myself.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Long way to go to shit yourself.”

  “They say travel broadens the mind.”

  “Right. Well, it concentrated mine. I was tonguing the hole in the barrel.”

  “Jesus,” Mellens said, looking at him with what Sadine thought was a wry smile. Sadine suddenly feared that Mellens knew he was lying, about Charlie, about ever coming close to getting killed, and Sadine, astonished at himself, wondered why he had twisted the truth of the story.

  “The travelling I like to do n
ow,” Mellens said, “is the cruise ships. You ever been on a cruise ship?” He fitted a fuel injection needle into a motor. Sadine said, No, he had not. Mellens told Sadine that he had met a young woman on a cruise to Curaçao. “Changed my whole life.” After a night of shipboard dancing, she’d come to his cabin. She’d started to sing and snap her hips as she undressed, and he’d begun to shake. “It was like having a high fever. She held me all night, asking me no questions.” She had towelled the sweat from his body until dawn. Drained and calm, he’d fallen into a deep sleep. He’d slept through the whole day and into the next night, and then they’d gone dancing again. They’d made love. She’d come home with him, home to his house, and they’d got married. “But now I’m not with her. I don’t sweat, I don’t dance, I just shake.” He laughed as one of Sadine’s model planes, a Spitfire, circled over their heads. It flew in low. The motor’s ratcheting noise forced Sadine to yell out, “You’re a lonely man.”

  “I suppose I am,” Mellens said, smiling.

  “I suppose you are,” Sadine said.

  “It’s kind of like tonguing that hole you were talking about,” Mellens said.

  9

  Sadine sat at night by his bedroom window, staring into his own reflection in the dark glass. He distrusted Mellens, a man so free with his feelings, so openly full of himself in the generosity of his friendliness. “Alive, alive-oh,” his mother had sung. “Crying cockles and mussels…” Sadine poured himself a glass of whisky. He felt the soundless weight of emptiness in the house. He’d never felt this emptiness before. He thought of his mother. He had come home once late at night and found her wearing a black bonnet with jet sequins, peering through the bay window curtains, whispering, “Albert, Albert, fly away home, your house is on fire, your son has no shoes.” He’d laughed. He’d always had shoes. His mother had been drunk. She’d looked up at him and said, “Don’t you know how to pray, son? So you can put on the shoes of the fisherman?” It was very dark. He saw himself in his bedroom mirror. He wasn’t wearing his shoes. He was in his bare feet. Everything was still. He blamed Mellens for this sudden weight of silence in his house. He walked into his parents’ bedroom and looked around. There were no more bugles under the bed. Nothing else had been touched. His mother had always been cheerful, wary and cheerful, sometimes almost feverish in her cheerfulness. He realized he’d never gone to see the Monsignor, never gone back to the church to Mass. “Taps.” He decided that a lone bugle blown in the night might be the most beautiful sound in the world.