How Far We Go and How Fast

by Nora Decter

  Falling is easy. The moment before you fall is not.

  If you break a second down into hundredths and then thousandths, that’s how long this moment lasts. A sliver of a second, even then a unit of time I was more acquainted with than some. It’s the difference between winning and losing, between hanging in the air and falling through it. It’s an instant that stretches out longer than gravity should allow, long enough for you to panic, wish your feet were back on the ground. But I loved it, was addicted to that private fraction of a moment. It was like a secret I discovered and kept to myself, not telling the teenagers with their vodka coolers and their tans. I didn’t even tell Matt, though maybe I should have.

  Anyway, he was never so obviously proud of me as he was when I was throwing myself off that cliff, back when I was brave.

  NINE

  I stand at the foot of the bridge for a full five minutes. It feels like a full five anyway. But it’s too late to go any other way. The streets around the tracks aren’t good after dark.

  Let’s go, I tell my feet, spurring them forward, like a horse that’s been spooked.

  The Salter Street Bridge forms a great brontosaurus-like arch over the tracks, climbing so gradually its progress is almost elegant. The lights of the city are all around, a smattering of tall buildings downtown the only thing that interrupts the sprawl. On the tracks below, shadow trains pause in their passage from one side of the continent to the other. We’re smack in the center of the country, the halfway point, the geographical middle of nowhere.

  They say that thugs sometimes wait at the top of the bridge, where there’s exactly nowhere to run. They’ll jump you for your sneakers or your jacket, tear the headphones from your ears and the phone from your pocket. I don’t have anything anyone would bother jumping me for. That’s not why I worry about bridges.

  At the top of the bridge the incline levels out for a moment, and I force my eyes up. A Viking comes toward me, but I know him—everyone does. You often see him walking around the North End. He looks like a normal workaday guy, except he wears this dollar-store Viking helmet that makes him nearly seven feet tall. We keep to our respective sides of the path as we pass, and when he’s gone the bridge starts to slope down, and then I’m back on the ground and can breathe again. I let my feet carry me home.

  Maggie is passed out on the couch, her head on Louie’s shoulder. He’s watching one of the celebrity news shows she likes. He raises one hand and nods at me silently, so he doesn’t wake her. I want to tell him that if she’s so drunk she’s blacked out by midnight, she’s not gonna wake easy, but I don’t. I’m just glad she’s not awake to interrogate me about my first day on the job.

  The kitchen is clean, counters wiped down, leftovers from dinner stowed in Tupperware in the fridge. When did we acquire Tupperware? I let Howl into the backyard. Sorry, girl. No walk tonight. Too tired. Blame Maggie. She’s the one who got me a bar job.

  But Howl doesn’t even seem to mind. I watch her circle the backyard once and then come wait by the door for me to let her in. I do, then head to the basement, pick up Shredder and plug in.

  I play until I can’t feel my fingers. Until I can’t feel my toes. Until I can’t feel a thing. Then I have to put the guitar down. Close my eyes and try to sleep.

  I try and try to sleep.

  I go underneath the covers, try singing silently.

  When everyone is sleeping, the music in my head won’t stop. It gets louder.

  I get up again. Pick up the guitar again. Play my songs again. I’m getting better at looping. It wasn’t hard to figure out. You just step on the pedal when you want to record, then build and build a creeping, haunting sound.

  I wonder what Matt would think of my music. He listened to everything, but the blues were his first love, the root of what we played together. I don’t know what to call these songs I’ve been writing. If they’re rock ’n’ roll or what. But I do know that when I play, it gets less loud in my head. Lets some of the noise out.

  I could always go west, the way Matt went. He’d called when he got there. I picked up the phone and it was him. I’d been holding his leaving against him, but at the sound of his voice I forgave him all at once, in a rush. He was still gone, but there was his voice on the phone, telling me about the guy who smoked crack on the bus and got kicked off in Kamloops. About how he had to survive the two-day ride without any music once his iPod died and that it wasn’t so bad, having an empty head. I just sang silently, he said. What’s the city like? I asked and he said, Hilly and green. More hills and more green than you can imagine, he said. He said the mountains surrounded the city, hanging in the sky in a way that didn’t look real. Like they were a hologram illusion, not something you could actually touch if you got close enough to try. He said he’d found a good record store and beaches you could walk along all day but that the word on the street was the music scene wasn’t very accessible. People mostly went to clubs or hard-core punk shows. He said he would’ve tried sleeping on the beach, but it kept raining at night. A dude he met said he should try the island if he was just looking for a cheap place to bum around, bars to play music in most nights. Buddy gave him the name of a hostel, said his friend worked there, that if Matt dropped his name the guy would probably buy him a drink at the bar and tell him what he needed to know about the town to have a good time.

  I’m catching a ferry tomorrow, Matt said. Then Maggie took the phone.

  How could you take off on me like that? she yelled. But in a minute they were laughing. Maggie never got mad at Matt for long. She’d be mad for a moment, but then he’d unwind her, I don’t know how. She complained to him for a few minutes about some injustice done to her by one of the other drunks in her friend group, and I stood there to be close to him, and then Matt’s quarters had run out and he said he’d call when he got to the island, probably not the next day but in a day or two. And he did call, for a while.

  So I could go west, except I’d stop in the city. I wouldn’t go to the island, where he went, because islands are hard to leave by virtue of being islands, and once I start leaving I might never stop. I might get really good at it.

  TEN

  Louie has been here for five days straight. I’m pretty sure. Every time I leave and come back, he’s here. She’s got him good. He was scraping the black stuff out of the bottom of the oven last night. The pile of beer bottles by the back door is immaculate, and he’s forever emptying ashtrays and bringing Maggie cups of tea. As if Maggie drinks tea. That’s like feeding salad to a pit bull. She must be spiking it with something when he’s not looking. Also, he cooks. First it was chili, then butternut-squash ravioli and now chicken soup because Maggie is feeling under the weather, which means hungover, but he doesn’t know that yet. He brought the big pot in from the back porch, the one used to chill the beers at barbecues in the summer. It’s huge, that pot, and Louie keeps using it to cook more food than we can eat. I’ve been filling Tupperware and old yogurt containers when no one is around and hiding them in the back of the freezer for later, once he’s gone. It’s going to be a long winter. We never eat this well.

  It only takes a few shifts before I’ve made friends with Maude. The hose is called a snake, and it’s suspended above the sink so you have to use your whole body to maneuver it. There’s a piece at the end you squeeze to make it spray, and when you let go it bobs around. Sometimes it hits me in the face when I bend over to open up Maude’s door. Tina intimidates me at first, but I tell a few of Cory’s dirtiest jokes, look her in the eye when she teases me and then I’m in. More or less. She starts telling me stories about growing up on the rez and joins me out back for smoke breaks sometimes. I have a list of tasks, and I complete them. I scrub out the stockpots and scrape down the grill. I sweep, mop and manhandle unwieldy bags of garbage into the Dumpster out back. One night I get ambitious and pull out the range so I can clean behind it too. Big mistake. I witness all kinds of horrors. “I don’t think anyone’s ever done that before,” Benny says, and I
believe him.

  After a few hours of work Benny makes me something to eat, kicks a milk crate my way and orders me to sit. Then he slips me a smoke, and I go into the alley without a coat on even, I’m so hot from the work. By the time I’ve sucked it down, the front of my apron is frozen, and I’m shivering and happy to get back to it. Benny tries to get me to go out and eat my staff meal at the bar, but I mostly manage not to. I like to pretend “out there” isn’t happening. And that works pretty well.

  I can tell karaoke night is busy because I don’t have time to look up from the sink. I just aim my snake and blast food off plate after plate, obliterating ketchup and bits of chili, sending fries down the drain, loading up the racks as full as possible and closing Maude’s door with a slight hip check, opening it again when the cycle is finished and getting a face full of steam.

  “Hey.” Tina appears in the doorway. She’s not frazzled but in battle mode, no movement uncalculated. There are beers to be opened, plates to be delivered, drunks to be put in their place. The times when I’m forced to go out front, to restock the ice or bring out an order if it’s busy, I do like that I get to watch Tina work. She pours drinks like it’s dancing, or like it’s chess and she sees three moves ahead. She’s the law in this town, commanding respect with just the squaring of her shoulders and the cast of her eyes. “Maggie’s about to sing,” she says, like I’d want to know.

  “Go on,” says Benny. “The dish pile will wait.”

  “No.” I shake my head and shake my head until Tina rolls her eyes and says, “Whatever,” and Benny looks down like he’s embarrassed. For me.

  The rest of the night I don’t look up from the sink even when it slows. I just aim the snake and blast crap off plates. I annihilate every mess. I make everything clean.

  I get off work and push through the crowd, but not so fast that I don’t hear the score. She’s made it to the next round. There’s big money on the line, not to mention Vegas.

  George, the bouncer, stops me at the doors. “Winston wants to see you in his office.”

  I must look scared, because he pats me on the shoulder. “S’okay, sweetie. I don’t think he’s canning you yet.”

  Winston’s office is down the hall that also contains the bathrooms. For this reason and maybe others, there’s a bit of a smell. I knock, and he barks to come in.

  “Hi…you wanted to see me?”

  “What? Oh. Right.” He rubs his jaw and sips from a mug I know from Tina contains whiskey. “Here—Benny says you’re doing a good job. Keep it up.”

  I take the envelope he holds out and don’t look inside despite the thickness of it. I put it in my pocket and go to wait for the bus that will take me on my roundabout journey home. After the first night I remembered to take the underpass on Main to get back to the North End, even though avoiding the bridge is a pain in the ass. When I’m sitting at the back of the nearly empty bus, I peek inside the envelope, and my stomach does a funny thing. It’s like it soars and plummets at the same time. At home I hide the money under the mattress in the basement, sit down on top of it and think.

  “So is this your office or something? I always find you here.”

  I look up from my notebook. I’m at my spot by the escalators, trying to come up with lyrics for a new song.

  “I guess,” I say, as Ivy plops down beside me on the bench and takes a bite of the sandwich she’s holding in one hand. A piece of lettuce falls onto her lap.

  “You skipped today too, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  She nods. The dye in her hair has almost faded out, leaving it a silvery gray. Or maybe she dyed it that way? I don’t know how these things work. “I’m having a hard time making myself show up for class, man. I told you I’m going to art school next year, right? They’re taking my transfer credits so I can’t flunk out, but I’m not exactly invested. I just want to make cool art, ya know?”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t seem to think I’m insane, but I try not to say much just in case.

  “Hey, what are you doing right now? Want to get high and go to the art gallery with me? Come on. It’ll be fun. I’m meeting my friend there in a few minutes.”

  I do want to. But there are too many variables. Like, what’ll we do once we’re high at the art gallery? Who is this friend? What if he or she isn’t as tolerant of my weirdness as Ivy seems to be? And how high exactly does she intend on getting? Then I remember I’ve got an actual real-life excuse for once. “Thanks, but I’ve gotta get to work soon.”

  “That sucks,” she says. “Where do you work?”

  “The Caledonia? Over on Isabel?”

  “No way! That place is badass!”

  It takes me a minute to realize she isn’t making fun of me. “I guess?”

  “I have to come visit you. I always wanted to go in there, but I was a little afraid of getting shanked. Do you think I’d get shanked in there? What night do you recommend going? I’m not into amateur strip night. That shit’s depressing. Maybe karaoke night? I bet that’s golden.”

  “No!”

  Her face is surprised at first, but then it settles back into its usual amused expression. “No, not golden?”

  “No, well, I guess it’s golden, if you like watching sad drunks mangle music—”

  “Oh,” she says, “I really do.”

  “Well, it’s kind of a rough scene. Have you ever heard of welfare Wednesday? See, karaoke night is on Thursdays, so like, the welfare checks have cleared by then, and everyone has cash to burn.” This is total nonsense, but I can’t stop. “Don’t ever come on karaoke night. You’d definitely get shanked. Maybe I’ll, like, let you know when would be good?”

  “Sweet!” she says. Before I can get away she insists I give her my number, and I do, but then I’m too embarrassed to mention that it’s a landline, that my mother has confiscated my cell phone because I made too many long-distance phone calls, which is why I’m working at the Cal in the first place, meaning it does not make me cool. Not at all. Not even a little bit. Still. I can’t help but walk away feeling like I may not have totally flubbed the encounter. I may have actually acted like an almost-cool human being.

  Ivy wasn’t wrong to be worried about waltzing into the Cal. The regulars don’t take kindly to tourists. Matt taught me about tourists back when he took me to the blues jams at various downtown hotel beverage rooms. We’d go on summer nights when I didn’t have to get up to swim in the morning, and I’d sit on a stool nursing a Coke under the watch of the bartender while Matt went onstage and played.

  During the breaks, when the musicians put down their guitars and picked up their beers, Matt told me not to go to places like that without him, and then he taught me how to act if I ever did. The most important thing, he said, was not to be a tourist. These were the young people who came downtown from the south end and the suburbs, strutting into places like the Woodbine and the Windsor and the Cal like doing so earned them some kind of badass badge of honor. Not to mention you could go into the off-sales with ten dollars and walk out with a king can, a pack of Player’s and a glory story.

  The regulars never treated Matt or me like tourists. We were there for the music, but it was more than that. Matt had a way with a room. He’d walk in and it’d turn toward him. Whether or not you wanted to, you’d turn too.

  I’m feeling subtly optimistic, so I stop in to see Earl at the pawnshop. No new guitars on the wall, but I noodle around on an acoustic for a few before sidling up to the counter. Earl’s wearing his Jets jersey, as always, and a funny visor with a translucent yellow bill that casts a jaundiced glow across his craggy face. “Any chance you’ve seen a—”

  “Nope.” He cuts me off before I get the question out. I take it in stride.

  “Okay, but how far away would an Xbox, a bunch of authentic mid-’90s concert T-shirts and a vaporizer get me?”

  “Don’t waste my time,” he says, but as I’m leaving he takes pity and tells me the Xbox would get me to Brandon. “You’re gonna have to up
the ante if you wanna make the Manitoba border though.”

  It’s just about the most encouraging thing I’ve heard all day.

  ELEVEN

  Something strange is happening at home. Every day things get a bit shinier.

  “Isn’t he great?” Char asks.

  “Sure.” I shrug.

  “Come on. Look at this place. It’s never been this tidy.”

  “I guess.”

  “I wish I could find a nice guy. I just meet one fucker after another.”

  “Where’d she meet him anyway?” I ask.

  Char looks at me for a while before answering. “I thought Maggie would have told you.”

  “Since when does Maggie tell me anything?”

  “Come here, Baby.” She pulls the dog onto her lap.

  “I think I deserve to know where the stranger in my home came from.”

  “Louie isn’t strange. He’s been in the picture for a while.”

  I snort. “Yeah, a week is pretty good for her. You’re right.”

  “Jo, they’ve been dating for a couple of months now.”

  She’s looking at me strange again, so I stand up. “Don’t mind me—I just live here.”

  I stomp down the basement stairs like a typical teenage idiot. At least it was only Char, and I know she’ll act like it never happened. I plug in. Who needs friends when you have a loop pedal? I have a whole band with the turn of a dial and a tap of my foot. I shouldn’t be able to hear the knocking, hear them call my name for dinner, but I do hear. Doesn’t matter. There’s a lock on the door, and I turned it.