He himself was in a college doing some cooking course. He had dropped out of high school after his parents split up and his mother moved briefly to a neighbourhood called Malvern. After a year of fooling around he signed up with a programme run by the Scarborough School Board that fast-tracked him to a high school diploma. It was at some alternative centre at the Centennial College campus. He boasted a bit of his cooking classes. I mentioned that in Trinidad, there were only girls in the home economic class, and that got him more offended than my Regent Park mistake. After he left I felt I should have kept my mouth shut, as he was quite helpful. I tried to picture myself in the kitchen of a Canadian restaurant; however, that place was too unfamiliar so I shifted first to a Mayaro bakery where I was punching balls of flour, and then in Rio Claro where I was a doubles vendor slapping channa into a barra. Vendors in Trinidad were usually fat and sweaty and every week someone claimed they had found a rotten tooth or a couple pubic hairs, which we called jhat, in some purchased food. I decided to write off that profession.
In any case there were so many other interesting courses. Design and fashion and film and computer stuff and everything under the sun. It was exciting just to read about them. Once I saw a course on dentistry and remembered something so vague I couldn’t be sure if it was just a memory. It must have been a year or so before my father left Mayaro for good and in my recollection he was bent over a tray with some white powder. Next to the tray was a flambeau shining on a skull. There may have been knives and icepicks on the table too. He was making a set of teeth and not once did he quarrel with me.
The next day I wished he was still as peaceful because I discovered that for me to be admitted to the college I needed him to sign my admission form, as I was still a minor. This was a funny word. I had never considered myself a minor in any way. A few weeks earlier, a group of Sri Lankan men in the laundry room of our building were talking about minorities. One of the men, a real dark fella with jacket and tie was saying that everybody pushed them to the side and yet complained because they didn’t mingle. After that they broke into their own language talking real fast and rolling their tongues. I guess they were chatting about a zoo as another fella mentioned something about a tiger.
Anyways back to my own problem. For close to two weeks I tried to think of some way to approach my father. Should I suggest that we move to a two-bedroom apartment using a portion of Uncle Boysie’s money? However, I didn’t know how he would react to the news that money had been sent to me. Perhaps I could redecorate the apartment or buy him some present like teeth-making equipment. Other ideas came but I had to throw them out them one after the other.
At work I told Paul that a friend was worried as his visitor’s visa was up. He said that half the taxi drivers were in the same position and they regularly used each other’s identity papers and driving permits. Same with the Chinese people in Markham. He made it sound like an exciting game, and after that conversation I pretended I was part of a shadowy group, like Professor Xavier’s mutants, that only came out at nights. This fantasy disappeared by the time I got home.
Once Uncle Boysie had told me that the fella upstairs knew exactly how much weight we could carry on our shoulders and he always increased and lightened the burden to suit. I think maybe he forgot about the rules in my case because the same time I was worrying about my status I learned that I would be laid off from the gas station at the end of the month. For a while I suspected that Paul had reported my question about visitor’s visas to the boss but Paul seemed genuinely sad to see me leave. On my last day he took off a beaded necklace and held it before me. He said it had been left by the Vikings at Pistolet Bay (which I guessed was somewhere in Newfoundland) and that it would bring me good luck.
That night I decided to test its powers on my father.
This is how it went. First he said that every day he was discovering that sending for me was a big mistake, then he shifted to some trap he felt I was laying for him and finally he shouted, “You start back with this status nonsense again? You think anybody was rushing to help me when I come to this place? Laying out the red carpet? If is kissmeass school you wanted to go to, then why the hell you didn’t stay in Trinidad? You know anything about the rules and regulations here? I don’t know why I ever listen to that fat, lazy uncle of yours,” he shouted. “I wring my ears. I wring it a thousand times!”
While he was wringing his ears I was stroking my necklace, which got him in a worse mood. “Dressing up like a damn rasta locho.”
I had to say something. I told him, “Is no damn rasta jewellery. Is a damn charm!” I don’t know if it was because I had raised my voice to him for the first time or because he was afraid of magic, but he backed away and I felt for just a second or so his eyes went blank as if he didn’t know what to say.
By the end of the week I felt it was fear. It was a rainy evening and I was returning from the library when I saw him talking to a woman outside our building. He was wearing a yellow raincoat and was shifting from one leg to the other as if he was impatient to get out from the rain but the woman, who had no coat and was completely drenched, didn’t look as if she was in a hurry. She had frizzled red hair like a troll and high heel shoes that made her legs look even stumpier. The next day when I returned from the library I saw her in our apartment.
She and my father were sitting on opposite ends of the kitchen table and between them was some sort of Chinese checkers board but instead of marbles there were pointed little crystals in the holes. The woman was stroking the crystals and saying “Woo woo” like a mother petting a baby. She kept her eyes closed as I walked to the balcony but I caught a glimpse of my father frowning as if I had broken the spell or trance or whatever they were doing. I remained on the balcony for maybe fifteen minutes peeking at them. When they both left, I walked into the kitchen and caught a whiff of a strong smell like ground-up garlic and clove.
The next day it was the same but instead of a Chinese checkers board, on the table was a row of little vials, each a different colour. From the balcony I saw the woman picking up some of the vials and puffing out her cheeks as she blew over the fridge and stove and cupboard. My first thought was that she was getting rid of the cockroaches and rats my father often complained about but then she began her wailing sound again. From the balcony I heard her murmuring as she sprinkled: “We must fumigate the soul. We must bleach the spirits. We must scrub the mind.” I felt maybe she had been a cleaning lady before she picked up this hocus-pocus business. After they had left together, I noticed a vial on the table. I shook it a bit and almost dropped it—I don’t think I had ever smelled anything nastier. It reeked of cat shit and oil and ginger. I put it back on the table just as my father returned. He glanced at me suspiciously for a couple seconds before he said, “You trying to cancel out the blasted thing or what?”
“Cancel out what?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
It seemed like an opening to some explanation but his face got hard as usual. However, he was wrong. I did understand. In Mayaro, people only went to real doctors in emergencies, after they had visited wrinkly old ladies for scented oils and special herbs and secret prayers and a load of other nonsense. The most popular quack was not a wrinkly old lady though. His name was Amos and he made concoctions from vines and barks and roots he claimed he got from secret trees in the Guayaguayare forest. Once I heard one of our neighbours, a woman who could balance a basket of plantain on her head with no trouble at all, telling my mother she should see Amos. As far as I can tell, my mother never took the woman’s advice.
Me and a couple of my friends from Mayaro Composite went to his board house one evening. We were curious because that day, our history teacher, Mr. Chotolal, had shifted from his slavery topic to a discussion of voodoo and obeah. First, we pelted a few stones on top of Amos’s roof to make sure he was not around before we entered the building. I have to say that it was exactly as we had pictured it, with the junk he sometimes collected from people as pay
ment scattered all around a long table. On the table were also little heaps of crushed-up herbs. We noticed some mildewed copybook pages at the side of each pile. It took a while to read the crapo-foot handwriting on the pages but we were able to decipher a couple instructions like, “For woman who man leave them,” and “For ugly squingy man,” and “To stop horning,” and “Getting rid of ownway children.” We left Amos’s house laughing because we had rearranged all the pages.
This memory must have caused me to smile because my father glanced at me, uttered something about traps and went to the television. There, he settled on a channel where a man with a big puff of hair was talking about magnetic charm bracelets. This was the first time he had chosen a show other than MacGyver or The Mythbusters, and as he leaned forward to place his hands on his lap I felt that after all his years in Canada he was no better than these people from the Guayaguayare forest.
I got more curious about this woman’s sudden appearance in our apartment. It couldn’t simply be because my father was afraid of my necklace.
Five nights after I first saw her, I woke up from a sudden noise and as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw that the balcony door was open a crack and the wind was whistling through. I closed the door and returned to my foam but before I fell asleep I wondered if my father was trying to exorcise me from his apartment. In Trinidad “putting a light” on an enemy’s head was a common enough practice, and everybody knew that all the mad people who roamed about the streets in Rio Claro had been “lighted.” Maybe I was pushing my father too hard with my college talk. The next evening, I waited by the curb until the lights were off in our apartment before I entered the building. I speculated about what they were doing in the dark, my father and this strange woman with her red hair and her high heels. All of a sudden I thought of my mother. The elevator stopped at the third floor for a woman who was holding a cat in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. I moved to the corner.
“Thanks for holding open the door for me, asshole.”
I was the only other person on the elevator. I looked at her. The cat was scratching at a red boil on her arm, maybe to escape from her clutch. “I look like a blasted slave to you?” The minute the words left my mouth I was sorry. I bolted out of the elevator at our floor and before its door closed the woman shouted out some nasty curses in a whining but musical voice. When I entered our apartment the lights were still off so I coughed a couple times to alert my father and the woman, if she was still here.
“You just break the kissmeass rainbow.”
I turned on the kitchen light. “Which rainbow?”
“It not visible to jackasses.”
My annoyance returned and I tried to pack all the mockery I could muster up into my voice. “Only to you? Nice. Very nice.”
“Yes, only to me, you little bitch. Only to people with a clean heart.” I swear he said that.
The next day I felt really awkward and out of place in the library. I looked at all the boys bent so seriously over their books and computers and thought: all of them have some plan. They know where they going and how to get there. Their lives are set. I wished I knew where they were living. I was sure there were no cursing elevator ladies and obeah women and horrible fathers. Another thought came to me: this library is too organized for somebody like me. To be honest, I felt real sorry for myself then and I left the library after ten minutes or so. As I was walking to the subway, a stupid Mayaro rhyme kept ringing in my head. Loser, loser, stupid little loser.
I remained on the subway train for a while and I recalled how, just seven months earlier, I had pretended that all these tired factory workers were really molemen. For a minute or so I wished I could still think this way. Then I landed at Union Station.
I got off there because I didn’t want to return early to our apartment and so followed a rush of people out of the train and into the Union building. And the minute I entered the big hall all my loser feelings dropped off. Everybody was walking and walking and moving and moving in a long, never-ending stream. Some had briefcases, and others were dragging suitcases behind them like boxy puppies. Maybe they were leaving the city or going for a vacation or just returning from their jobs, but all this constant motion made everything feel temporary. Even my school worries.
The next evening, sitting on a bench near to a Muffins place I discovered another reason for its appeal: it reminded me of these Star Wars bars with all sort of strange aliens sitting right next to each other and not noticing all the snouts and fish faces and extra eyes and antennae right on the opposite table. The walls and ceiling looked like the building where the big X-Men movie fight had taken place and while I was gazing at a flashing schedule screen I pretended that some of the trenchcoat men bent over their laptops and the pretty women reading magazines from behind narrow moleman glasses were just waiting for some kind of action and would jump out of their coats and throw off their glasses to reveal capes and tights and tall boots.
I wandered around the upstairs floor—where the suitcases were bigger and the people better dressed, as if they were travelling farther than the downstairs crowd—and came through some fancy Spartacus columns to Front Street before I returned to the Muffins place. This building seemed a perfect place for an entrance to a secret underground city (and an hour or so later I walked through a long tunnel that led to an Air Canada Centre).
When I got home it was quite late and I noticed on the fridge a handwritten note with a drawing of a cat saying, “A million little secrets shall tumble from my lips.” The cat seemed conceited to be saying this and I felt that the only secret I was interested in was how I could get my father to understand my college worries. I thought he was asleep so I was startled to see the woman coming from his bedroom carrying an ugly little dog. The dog had the same conceited look like the cat. The woman put down the dog and said, “Go, Jezebel, go.” The dog wagged its stumpy little tail and walked to the fridge. The woman and my father followed it. The woman sprinkled some of the stuff from a vial beneath the fridge. The dog strolled to the couch with my father and the woman following. Once more she sprinkled the vial over the couch. Then the dog looked up as if it had now noticed me. It came over wagging its tail. Without any warning the woman emptied the vial straight on me. In my surprise I kicked away the dog.
That night I washed my clothes over and over in the basement laundry area, trying to get out the smell of cat shit and ginger. To my surprise when I got back, my father didn’t scream at me, and at first I wasn’t even sure he was in the apartment. I took a long shower and was about to settle on my foam when I heard, “You was always bad luck. Always.” The voice was so soft I felt I had imagined it but then I noticed his cigarette glinting by the porch door.
“I don’t believe in luck.” I said the words quietly.
“Bitch.” He matched my quiet voice.
Cult!
The next morning I saw the woman walking on the main lane. I don’t think she would have noticed me if her dog hadn’t starting barking in my direction. She came across and asked, “How is your foot?”
I didn’t know how she expected it to be but in any case I told her, “It normal.”
“When you do harm to any of God’s creatures, that same harm will spring back upon you.” She patted the dog and said, “Shh, Jezebel. Everything is going to be all right. Kiss it.”
It took a while before I realized she was talking to me. She was holding up one of the dog’s paw. “I not going to kiss any dog foot.”
“Kiss it.” I now saw how much she resembled a slowly boiled frog. Her eyes were bulgy and in the wind her hair seemed like red, wavy seaweeds.
“No. Absolutely not.” I backed away.
She kissed the foot herself and told her dog, “Don’t worry, dearie. In his next life, he is going to reborn as a dog and every single day, someone will kick him.” She said this in a happy voice. “He is just a bad luck boy.”
You ugly old troll, you. Froggie too.
A tall black woman with big
chunky breasts came up to us. I tried to walk away but the black woman sidestepped and blocked me.
“We have something we would like you to sign,” the woman told me. I thought it was some type of nonsense connected to the troll lady so I shook my head. This got the black woman mad and she said to the other woman, “This is the way it is with these people from India and Pakistan. They not interested in anything that don’t concern them. This is the way it is with them.” The troll lady nodded at this.
I got mad at the two of them, carrying on this conversation as if I wasn’t right in front of them. In Trinidad black people were called Creoles but this woman wasn’t moving like a Trinidadian Creole one bit. “Look, lady, I not from these places, and I not going to sign any damn paper that I know nothing about. So leave me alone.”
The troll lady seemed offended by my tone, but the Creole woman really surprised me by saying, “That is a Trinidadian accent, not so?” She told the troll in a whispering voice, “He worried about his status. The poor boy frighten to put his name on any paper.” She fished around in her alligator purse and brought out a crumpled sheet of paper. “What is your name, boy?”
I went through a list of made-up names but eventually told her, “Samuel.”
“That is a nice name, boy. An upstanding name. Here, read this when you have the time, Samuel.”
“Thanks.” I took the paper and hurried away. I opened it at Union and saw a photograph of a Nigerian man and beneath, in bold letters with exclamation after each sentence: No One Is Illegal! Reunite Families! Know Your Rights! Refugees Are People Too! Contact Mr. O Omewale! LLB!
Refugees. I wondered how many people wandering around here were refugees. Was there some way to detect them? Something in their clothes or gestures? What about the Ethiopian man sitting by himself? He was too well dressed and had an expensive briefcase besides. The woman from India with a dot on her forehead? She looked too fat and happy. The pink, stooped man wearing an old coat and hat? He might be too old. I changed benches and focused on another group. The seminar woman said they lived like ghosts and I imagined them, just like the Flash, vibrating at a special frequency that made them mostly invisible. Then another thought hit me. Was it possible that among this crowd there might be someone who could tell, and who might be gazing at me this very minute? Soon after I arrived in Canada I had been struck by the short glances as if these people had made their assessments in a second or less but now I scanned all the waiting passengers to determine if anyone was carefully studying me. Perhaps the security guard who was leaning on a counter and munching at a muffin, or the Filipino boy wheeling a cart with newspapers. Even the girl punching letters on her phone.
The Amazing Absorbing Boy Page 14
