All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “‘Under the O – twin 5s, the number 55, and so big,’ and what did these fine people of ours call out? – Dolly Parton!”

  He told Sadine stories about his trip until the sun sank behind the trees. All the planes landed safely. As they walked home along the heavily treed streets, past limestone rockeries, they were subdued and reflective, but inside the garage, as Sadine shelved the planes, regretting that there was no repair work to be done so that they could stay there, Mellens said, “You know the strangest thing I saw? You should’ve seen this ship’s casino. It was sitting there totally empty except for this nice-looking old man at the end of the craps table, and when he threw the dice, the croupier, he calls, ‘Hard Eight, your point is 9.’ The old man had his cane hooked to the edge of the table and it’s a white cane. He was blind, he’s a blind man shooting craps all alone. And when the old blind man says, ‘Double my bets,’ the croupier took his money from the rack and counted it out very carefully and I felt right there, felt what I’d never understood before – the complete wonder of human trust, the trust in life as it is. Life as it is is better than no life at all. A blind shot in the dark. That’s how we learned to sleep in shit with our own lice. I could see it in the cane hanging on the lip of the table as though it was hanging on the edge of the world, a crazy blind man, beautiful, in a world he’d never seen.”

  “A blind man shooting craps!”

  “Yeah, and a winner.”

  “He made his point?”

  “Yeah, and later, I thought about you.”

  “You did?”

  “Your planes. Once we left Acapulco, I was standing on deck late at night somewhere outside Panama City and all these planes are coming in, lights blinking, and I thought of you, that light you keep on all night in your house.”

  “Not anymore,” Sadine said as he stepped out of the garage into the pale shadows of dusk. Mellens followed, his cane clacking on the interlocking brick driveway.

  “It’s strange,” Sadine said.

  “What?”

  “How one thing leads to another.” He walked down the driveway, suddenly wanting to tell Mellens that he was seriously thinking of really learning how to play his father’s bugle. Instead he said, “One night I was in Calgary for some aldermans’ convention or other, staying out by the airport. You could see all the landing lights from the window, and I hired a hooker…”

  “You went with a hooker?” Mellens said, grinning, so that Sadine could see the line of his dentures.

  “A girl who wore silver stockings and had braided hair with little beads in it, and a sequined purse. Funny how I remember that.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked. She was from Detroit, I know that. She was a black girl from Detroit and I suddenly told her I wanted to watch the planes come in, I wanted to stand out in a field in the dark somewhere while she was doing me and watch the planes come in. So she drove me to this side road and said, ‘There’s no planes at one in the morning,’ but I said, ‘There are always planes.’ I stood there staring at nothing in the sky happening while she knelt down to do me and the next minute there were these great goddamn rabbits going by in the night, a herd of rabbits.”

  “Don’t be crazy.”

  “Big like this,” and Sadine opened his arms.

  “They must’ve been hares.”

  “Who cares? They were the ghosts of something going by.”

  “You’re seeing things.”

  “Sure, I was seeing things,” Sadine said. “I’m hauling my pants up around my throat and I’m seeing things and they’ve got big red eyes.”

  “Maybe they were ghosts getting out of town.”

  “They were going straight downtown. They were screaming. You know that? Rabbits scream, and all of a sudden, standing there holding my pants so I wouldn’t fall down, I yelled, ‘Sweet Jesus, get me out of here!’”

  Mellens laughed and put his arm around Sadine’s shoulder. “I’d never have guessed that you’ve got this low-life taste for hookers.” Sadine stiffened, offended. He would never be able to make Mellens understand that his use of hookers was essentially a practical matter, that he’d always left the hotel rooms feeling braced and buoyant. Cleansed. It was nothing personal. He’d learned in politics that people who took things personally ended up wounded, enraged, and belittled, but he wanted to protect himself so he tried to sound light-hearted. “I give her the number nine,” he sang, “drive it home, drive it home.” They stood side by side on the sidewalk, smiling like secure old friends. He wished, as he stepped out of Mellens’ embrace, that he’d never told him about the rabbits, their screaming and their red eyes.

  14

  Mellens telephoned later in the week. He said he was sick, a congestion in his chest. As Sadine hung up, he realized that they had never talked to each other on the phone before, and though they were neighbours who’d met for weeks in the park, they had never been in each other’s house. “Probably a good thing, too,” Sadine said. He took Mellens’ call as a sign, a warning. Late one night, after several glasses of whisky, he thought he heard Mellens’ step on the stair, and then was certain he heard Mellens talking to his father in the bedroom. He thought they were arguing and he put down his whisky, got up, and stood in the hall to listen. He heard nothing. They had stopped. Perhaps they knew he was there. “They’re fucking hiding,” he said. In two weeks, in early October, he talked to Mellens again. Mellens phoned and asked, “You still there?”

  “Where else would I be?”

  “In the grave.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “That’s what’s left,” Mellens said.

  “What?”

  “Being ridiculous.”

  On Saturday, Sadine was shocked by Mellens as he came through the gate, wizened and yellow under the eyes. “Sick, sick as a dog,” he said, pulling the shawl collar of a woollen sweater-coat close to his throat.

  “With what?”

  “With life, with nothing.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I’m dying,” Mellens said, jabbing his cane at Sadine. “Get going. Let’s get this act of ours up in the air.”

  Sadine had to wait as the elderly couple strolled across his take-off path. He was shaking, his eyelid out of control. He suddenly wished that Mellens had met his mother, had met her before she had put on her black bonnet with the jet sequins. “My mother was a lonely woman,” he said. “Today, she would probably have baked us a cake. She had this peculiar faith in cake.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yes. The more I think about it, she was very lonely. She used to sing Alive, alive-oh…” He sent a Mirage bumping across the grass and up into the sun. “So you’re feeling really sick?”

  “The ghosts got me, I guess.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “Those rabbits of yours. My wife, she came home and got me, too.”

  “You saw her?”

  The Mirage swooped low over clumps of dogwood bushes. “Sure. It was just like she’d come back down a wormhole and stood there at the foot of my bed.”

  “She’s come back to haunt you?”

  “That’s exactly what I said the first time I ever saw her. Here is a haunting beauty.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “If you’ve got no ghosts, you’ve got no life,” Mellens said grimly.

  “I still don’t believe.”

  “Sure you do.”

  They heard a smack. Under the lilac trees, the old woman had slapped the old man, knocking him down, and now the man was up and shambling from the park, weeping. “Ah, young love,” Mellens said. His laughter made him look so gaunt that Sadine was ashamed that he’d ever been angry at him. “Wait’ll you see this,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for weeks.” He drew a cloth back from a sleek black swept-wing plane. “Stealth,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a Stealth bomber. No radar can track it.”

  “Really.
”

  There were twin motors in the belly of the bomber. It rose slowly, in a long, graceful low-flying arc. “You know what I’ve been thinking about while I’ve been sick?” Mellens said, shielding his eyes from the sun and following the flight line of the plane. “Remember that trip to the glacier bays, those glaciers growing like they do at two or three hundred feet a year, their damned relentless lifeless growth…”

  “Mellens, for Christ’s sake!”

  “What?”

  “We’re trying to have some fun flying planes.”

  “You fly and I watch.”

  “Right.”

  “Because you got your wings,” Mellens said, chuckling. “But I’ve got your number. Yessir, Mr. Mayor.”

  “What number?”

  The Stealth bomber pulled straight up over the trees, their leaves all changed in colour, pulling into the sky and disappearing in a sun flash.

  “You want to see something, look at that,” Sadine said proudly. “Look at that,” and the black plane reappeared out of the sun, diving at high speed.

  Mellens yelled out, “There it goes! Heading straight for the wormholes!”

  “Cut it out. You and your goddamn wormholes,” Sadine cried, making his cry sound like a warning as he looped the plane back over their heads.

  Mellens drove his cane into the soft earth. It stuck and quivered. “Yeah, well, old pal, old number 9, you know what? Everything is up for grabs. I don’t think any Viet Cong stuck a pistol in your mouth, and you know what else? Maybe I’ve never been on a cruise ship.” Eyes closed, he’d gone red in the face. “What d’you think about that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘Nothing?’”

  “Be careful,” Sadine said.

  “I’m too old to be careful. Careful gets you a cup of coffee.”

  “Then be nice.”

  “Nice. What’s nice? What a dreadful word, nice.”

  “Get a life!” Sadine suddenly screamed out. “For Christ’s sake. Get a life.”

  Mellens hurried across the lawn. “I told you I’m dying.” He left his walking stick in the earth. He turned at the gate. “You remember, Sadine, there’s a great big white silence out there,” he cried. He went through the gate and Sadine sent the Stealth bomber, its twin motors shearing the stillness in the park, straight up in the air again. But then it went into a series of tight turns that he had not sent by signal, so he levered a new flight pattern into the control panel but the bomber widened its circles and picked up speed until it levelled off. It crossed overhead and disappeared between the tops of the yellow, ochre, and red trees, heading downtown. Sadine took off his flight glasses. He stood rooted to the ground for a long time, staring off between the trees, waiting for the plane to come back. “Something about those leaves,” he heard his father say. “They’re so beautiful they make you wish life wasn’t the way it is.” He picked up the Mirage and the control panel and he drew Mellens’ walking stick out of the ground. The ivory grub handle was warm in his hands. He felt so heavy-footed he used the cane for support on the walk home.

  15

  All week he worried about what to say to Mellens and what to do about the plane. He scanned the newspapers to see if there might be a story about a model Stealth bomber that had showed up out of nowhere in a child’s backyard, but there was no word, and he had no idea where to look for the plane. A week passed and he decided that he had to see how Mellens was feeling. When he telephoned, a woman answered. She said that she was his wife. “Are you a friend?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, almost defiantly.

  “Well, in that case, the burial is tomorrow morning. You’d best come.”

  16

  Sadine drank six glasses of whisky but did not fall asleep. He dreamed that his mother was hiding a cowering Mellens under her pleated white skirt, and then he saw Mellens as a scrawny long-legged boy in a Soviet gulag work camp, grinning as if he’d known that they would meet, saying, “Sadine, Sadine, teeth will be provided.” Sadine was sopping wet, shivering. “For Christ’s sake,” he said. He heard his mother singing, his mother who had bathed and washed him as a child. He thought of the women who had washed him and then taken him in their mouths, swallowing his semen. His seed. He had no children. No one to wash. He’d never wanted a child. Mellens had told him, “No, no children. No.” They shared that. And the black seed they carried in their bones, he could feel the seed inside his body, soot along his bones. “But at least I’m still alive,” he said. He got up, his hands shaking as if he’d been accused of something shameful. He went into his parents’ bedroom and lay down again and went to sleep.

  17

  When he awoke in the morning, he began to shiver, dreaming – though he knew that he was awake – that he was lost alone on the runway of a wilderness airport in a snowstorm and there were red warning lights all around him. But then he realized that the warning lights were eyes, the red eyes of the dead, the dead who were so white he could not see them. He could see the whiteness of everything, including the dead, and yet he could not see anyone. He was certain that Mellens was standing in front of him but he couldn’t see him. The clarity of seeing nothing stayed with him as he showered and then put on his dress blue uniform, folded away for years so that it still smelled slightly of cleaning fluid. He was a little flabby and the belt was tight but he hadn’t put on too much weight. He drank a cup of black coffee and called a taxi. He sat in the back seat of the taxi with Mellens’ cane across his knees. He was in a cold sweat again, trembling. He had pricked his thumb, drawing a drop of blood as he had fastened his wings to his lapel. He’d sucked his thumb to stop the bleeding. He was still sucking his thumb as he got out of the back seat of the taxi.

  18

  He crossed the grass to the graveside, his shoulders back, his head held high. There was a minister at the grave, whose red-white-and-blue Winnebago was parked under a weeping willow, and there were six professional pallbearers. He noted that they were not from his funeral home. A young woman who had long blonde hair was wearing a veil. Sadine could not see her eyes. There was a white orchid on the lapel of her black suit. He was wearing his flight glasses.

  “You must have been a very good friend,” she said, noticing the cane that he carried under his arm. “If he gave you his walking stick you were a very good friend.”

  The minister ended a brief prayer, asking flights of angels to carry Mellens home. He blessed the coffin as it was lowered into the earth.

  Sadine wanted to do something. He was furious with himself for not having learned to play the bugle. “I would have played ‘Taps’…” he said. The veiled woman looked startled. “Pardon?” she said. Then he tore the wings from his lapel, ripping the cloth, and he dropped the wings down into the hole. The metal clunked against the coffin. His feet sank into the soft, loose earth. His eyelid fluttered. “From time to time,” he said, “we flew together.”

  PAUL VALÉRY’S SHOE

  I have tried as hard as I can to tell stories, not necessarily what I’d call true stories, but stories that have a true feel to their ending, true to how I feel in my heart. What happens is that I start a story with a particular face, a particular phrase, and soon thereafter I have a page or two – or ten or twelve – but coming to where the story has to end, the only thing that ends is my knowing what more there is to say. I sit staring at the dance of dust in the light. Sometimes I’ll keep typing, searching for that shoe that Paul Valéry said is out there waiting for the story that’s true to itself, the perfect fit. But no matter how bold my start has been, soon there’s nothing more to say and I end up shelved in my own head. The hours pass and I try to peck out a line, a paragraph. I keep trying to look for the ending back in the beginning. I refuse to take the easy way out of the story by just killing off the main man or the woman in the story because that is not an ending. That’s just death. That’s just having absolutely nothing to say. So what do I do, caught between nothing to say and no ending because I don
’t understand my beginning? I sit here in this room with these ridiculous old curtains on the window, curtains that remind me of my childhood because they are worked with an appliqué of the letters of the alphabet, the promise that the alphabet contains. And I am sitting in this dark room lit only by a lamp on the bed table with the stand-up mirror on the table, trying to tell this particular story about a writer who is actually starving to death while he is writing the story of how he is eating himself alive – refusing under any circumstances to quit on himself or his story because he is too much of an optimist, as all storytellers have to be optimists, because they believe that there is that shoe out there that fits. They can’t help themselves from starting a new story because they know that somewhere in the beginning there is an end – as I believe that there has to be an end even for this tawdry, shameful story that I’m trying to write – a story as cramped as these two tiny rooms where I sit and catch inadvertently an appalling glimpse of my sneaky little face in the bedside mirror, the face of a dolt sneering back at me – sneering because that dolt knows that I still believe the phrase “a petal falls” is a touching, moving phrase – sneering at me, his eyes shining bright in the gloom, as I’m sure my own eyes are shining, the eyes of a starving man, chewing like an anxious girl on my knuckle, too stupid to feel pain, and then chewing on another knuckle, as if coming to an agreement with that dolt about a phrase could save me, could spring open the light that is in all the little phrases I have hidden away in notebooks – the lines of conversation overheard and written down, lines so quick and easy to whoever said them, quick as the curl of a lip, quick as an eye dropped in sleep, all, all of them, the words, seeming at first as fresh and alive as fireflies at night but turning to ash in the morning, ashes in the mouth whenever I’ve sat here like I’m sitting here now, day-after-day, TAP TAP on the keys, hearing “a petal falls” – “a petal falls” not eating for six days now – stroking my wrists, stroking the mildew-like tracing of my own veins in the skin, so delicate, not believing that any of what is now happening is true. I mean, could I actually die of hunger, die out of want for a story, die at the only point in my storytelling life where I actually have an ending, die because in fact I have absolutely nothing left of myself? Could I actually end by eating my own heart out? Could I end up, after more pages pile up and pass, being so light-headed from hunger and typing and licking between my tendons in this hour that is so cold that it takes my breath away, eating what is necessary, possible, getting down to the heart of who I am as I ease one word, and then another, into a shoe – a shoe that fits as I end my story, yes, end it by saying, yes, with utter storytelling simplicity, yes, how much I hate to admit I love the words “Once upon a time…?”