George & Rue

by George Elliott Clarke

  He took the empty bucket and the clean towel back into the house to Dutchy. He asked for and got a room with a window hinging on the harbour. The last moonlight glimmered. That moon seemed too white: the smell of Silver’s blood was still in George’s nostrils and its colour was staining everything. The very air was ramshackle; the walls papery, so he could hear colossal trucks mucking by, shaking beds that were already jittery from don’t-give-a-damn couplings. The toilet case was sweaty; the shower tiles mildewed. Just when Georgie began to feel he could relax, the wind came up against the building, heavier and heavier, like hammers.

  A rap at his door, and suddenly there stood Lovea, a vixen with copper hair and sable skin, smelling of cinnamon. She wore a black dress—but was heart-stoppingly naked underneath. She rolled off her silk stockings and draped them sultrily over the lampshade. Her little purse held lipstick, compact, rouge, and a mickey of rum, all of which she used briefly before slipping easily into the bed. George studied her hungrily. For twenty dollars and a pair of nylons, Lovea opened to him like a narrow, twisted grin: Lovea—a love. As his lust trickled into her acidly, so did Silver’s blood trickle slippery onto the snow beneath the trunk.

  With morning, Georgie glimpsed a city of oil refinery fires streaking the filthy Saint John River a dirty orange. He felt dirty. Lovea rolled over funkily and he got a cigarette-and-rum breath into his nostrils that jolted him stiff. Despite the rooftop, outdoor noises of screeching, falling rats.

  Later, Lovea brought Georgie a breakfast of corn flakes and scrambled eggs and sausages and toast with marmalade and hash browns and Red Rose coffee (“good coffee—as good as Red Rose tea”). He spooned up only a few cereal flakes, nibbled at the eggs, toast, and meat, but gulped down the hash and the coffee. Lovea ask George to drop her and her little Heinz 57 mutt, Martial, at the dog hospital.

  First, though, Dutchy ask George to run him up the Main Street liquor store at 9:30 a.m. The trip was necessary because, of seven other men staying at 47 Moore, one was a boxer within inches of going to jail and one was a wino within seconds of going crazy. The guys’d asked Dutchy to spot em for First Breakfasts, and Dutchy declared it Georgie’s Christian duty to help. On Georgie’s last visit, he’d run up a tab Dutchy’d paid. Now, in return, Georgie bought the entrepreneur seven quarts of wine and Assyrian take-out.

  Returning to 47 Moore Street, Dutchy was concerned to see a dog licking at a big red spot in the snow where Georgie’s Ford had been. Two small boys were shooing the dog away so they could make snowballs using the freaky, pinkish snow.

  Dutchy ask, “Oil leak, Georgie?”

  George nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  Dutchy whooshed out with his liquor, and Lovea high-step from the house and sail into the car. She placed the leashed, panting, yelping Martial in the back seat. Lovea sat in the front seat beside George. But the dog went haywire, yipping, yapping, sniffing, whining, and scratching at the divider separating the trunk from the passenger compartment.

  Lovea ask, “What you got back there, pig meat?”

  Georgie teeheed: “Yeah.”

  At the vet’s office, he got out and opened the door—like chivalrous Silver—for Lovea. After she descended from the car and retrieved Martial, Lovea kissed George. She smiled and began to sashay away, her boots pinking the snow, while Martial growled.

  She yelled, “Better eat up that frozen shit in the trunk!” George removed Silver’s taxi-driver cap from his head and gave it to Lovea: a gallant gesture. She noticed dark stains on it, but thought it could be a snazzy prop. She kissed George again and then led the yelping Martial into the vet’s. George watched her progress, then turned, bareheaded in the snowing air, back to the hearse he had commandeered, snow crunching underfoot. You murderer, the snow squealed. You thief, crackled the ice. George saw a stream erupting—like Christ’s damning blood—down a close hillside. Eleven-thirty a.m. now.

  Heading back northeast to Fredericton, he viewed torn snow, dry wind, harsh sunlight—then none. A vomit of white drifting snow turned the sun into a pale smear along the Lincoln Road. Flakes of snow were calfing. Winter heaped wind at the windows. The highway blanked out frequently. The road was a curse, snapping, snarling. Gloom and near-zero visibility.

  Shook up, sleepy, Georgie lost control of the powerful sedan at Oak Point, caroomed off the road and smashed up the front fender by running into boulders. He’d been doin bout seventy miles an hour in all that fog of snow and the fog of a head-bashing alcohol mist and the fog of no sleep and the fog of a disgraced conscience. Awake sharply now, he tried to back the car out of the ditch it were in, but couldn’t. The wheels writhed and howled and spat snow, but wouldn’t reverse the car.

  Passersby stopped, heart-stoppingly, to help. A middle-aged white man and his thin, youngish wife determined that their truck—a red something-ton Ford, could salvage George’s car. They hooked a chain around the bumper and hauled the sedan slowly out of the ditch. Getting the black Ford car out of the white snow ditch was a long, freezing struggle for the red Ford truck. Georgie was nauseous with fear the trunk would flip open, giving him a lot to explain. The trunk latch creaked, squeaked, but didn’t let go, and then the car was on nice, white terra firma again. George said his thank-yous to his Good Samaritans, who took the ten bucks he proffered, then he said his goodbyes. He jumped back in the hearse with what felt like three inches of icicles hanging from the rims of his eyes. He now felt his living difference from Silver.

  My pulse is tinny; his blood was brassy.

  It was on to Fredericton, the car engine noxious, snow copying a hurricane.

  George remembered he’d promised Rue he’d leave the car and its corpse in Saint John. But now that he was steering his fate, he could relinquish neither the vehicle nor its silent passenger. Dead, Silver was as close to him as Rue.

  About two miles this side of Oromocto, Georgie met a Mi’kmaq hitchhiker, young, tan, black silk-haired, husky, with blue jeans, a salt-and-pepper cap, a backpack, and, dangling there from, a typewriter. The lad, Noel Christmas, bore all this weight jauntily. George offered him a ride. Noel was also bound for Fred Town.

  George had to ask, “Why tote a typewriter?”

  Noel said, “I’m a poet—like E. Pauline Johnson and Bliss Carman. Know em?”

  Georgie: “Nope.”

  Noel said, “I’m goin to Fredericton to visit Bliss Carman’s grave.”

  Georgie let the poet out at the outskirts of Fredericton. He moved down a by-road spiking off from the Wilsey Road, near the Dominion Experimental Farm, and parked in brush on the side of the road going up toward a train track (to which he was oblivious). He got out of the car, in swirling snow, and hurled the ignition keys into a brook. Nigh 2:20 p.m. now. He locked all the car doors but one (an oversight). He strode quickly to the Wilsey Road, abandoning a shiny black car, all that gleaming promise of America and prosperity, amid bush, brush, remnants of the raw Canadian Shield and the scraping, scraggly terrors of the Ice Age. In fine, the car was visibly out of place where it was.

  George’d spotted a snowy owl at Saint John, hovering above the river. Now he observed a gull near Fredericton.

  George walked further down the road when a truck, operated by Moses Klein, coming from the city dump, pulled alongside, so that black-bearded, heavy-set Moses could ask George where he was goin.

  George said, “Victoria Hospital.”

  Moses: “Are ya sick? Ya don’t look sick.”

  George: “I’m going up to see the wife and my baby girl.”

  Moses said, “Hop in.”

  George dozed for blissful minutes. For one hundred miles plus, he’d worn a dead man’s cap, and had cried and got drunk in mourning, from Fredericton to Saint John and back again.

  VI

  GEORGIE visited Blondola at about 3 p.m. He stayed with her and Desiah an hour. He left money to pay Dr. Pond, he caught the bus to Eatman Avenue. No one was home. Everyone—Rufus, Plumsy, Otho—was at Mrs. Roach’s. George joined em. It was the firs
t time he and Rue had glimpsed each other since early that day. Their eyes hardly saw each other. Guilt was one reason, wine the other. (Rue was so blue-mouthed blotted, he be all blue-blasted.) Then, under a debris field of clouds, Rue left to go shopping.

  After talking with Mrs. Roach awhile, George walked to the corner store and bought twenty-five dollars’ worth of groceries, plus baby oil, baby powder, different things. He got home just in time to see Rue unwrap his parcels. George then ask for something for the house.

  Rue said, “I’ve spent every dime and dollar of Silver.”

  Cranky, George said, “If you ain’t goin to put no cash towards the house or wood, you ain’t goin to eat none.”

  Rue chuckled: “I’s goin to eat at Mrs. Roach’s then.” George say, “Go ahead—until I tell Roach bout you and his wife.”

  Rue said, “Yeah, and I’m gonna tell Blondola bout you and Lovea. I bet you saw her last night, eh?”

  George was flustered. “I got the house full up with food, and it’s goin to stay like that until Blondola comes out the hospital, and I will get some wood on Monday. I’m goin to try hard this winter to see if the house can be kept warm and that the wife and the children has clothes, wood, and food, and you ain’t goin enjoy none of it.”

  Rue guffawed. “You know, Joygee, all that money’s tainted: t’ain’t mine an t’ain’t yours.”

  Rue laughed more. He opened a box and took out a new fedora—black, with a feather—and put it on. He tried on his new black overcoat, a black scarf, black galoshes on his new black shoes, and posed like a gangster. He admired his new black pants and the silver-buckled black belt (his keepsake of Easter) that set them off so splendidly. He planned now to leave piss-ass Fredericton and go back to pianissimo Halifax. He’d scoop up India and go to Montreal and settle and never banter with bozo Georgie again.

  The sun hung before them like a gigantic noose swinging the world. Rue uncorked a slim, glimmering bottle of burgundy—delicious grapes of wrath—got two tumblers and poured a dash for George, a splash for himself.

  “George, you did leave the car in Saint John, didn’t you? And you did leave Silver’s body where it was, right?”

  George nodded yes and drank the red wine.

  Then, Rue sliced him off a chunk of brown bread.

  ROPE

  Écoutez: il nous est indifférent que ce soit l’un ou lautre qui ait commis le crime…, si un homme est un homme, un nègre est un nègre, et il nous suffit de deux bras, deux jambes à casser, d’un cou à passer dans le noeud coulant, et notre justice est heureuse.

  —JEAN GENET

  I

  ON MONDAY, January 10, at 2:14p.m., a brakeman, Hub Howard, walking in front of a creeping freight, spied a spanking-new Ford sedan awkward in the bush, saw that one of its doors was open, saw that a dog had been in there and shitted. Suspicious, Howard radioed the RCMP.

  The Mounties’ sensitive eyes spied ghost traces of blood at once. They called a mechanic, who unhinged and removed the back seat so they could peer inside the locked trunk. A locksmith cracked the trunk and then they called the coroner. The coroner, Sylvanus Mitchum, with the help of police officers who knew the taxi driver, determined that the body in the trunk was that of Nacre Pearly Burgundy, and that he was dead due to a blow to the head that was probably inflicted by a blunt object. The police photographer came to map out and snap the body; Mitchum examined it. An ambulance blossomed redly in the afternoon like blood seeping through a sheet. Then a black hearse—from McAdam’s Funeral Home (“First Choice for Last Respects”)—parked beside the black taxi. Finally, a tow truck arrived to bear away the comatose car.

  Citizenry, cops, and always rabid politicians went mad after that railway brakeman found Silver’s dinged-up car and cops eyed Silver’s dinged-in skull. Folks turned edgy, narrow, and volatile. People locked up everything and wanted to shoot any suspect face. Pandemonium pushed to panic. Fredericton’s two hardware stores sold out of shotguns and shot and newfangled locks. Lights burned all night, pleasing the kerosene and kilowatt merchants.

  The police suspected a gang. Their maniacal manhunt triggered, as usual, raiding of the Negro quarter—“camp”—of Barker’s Point. Mounties had to check every outhouse, every sty, and looked ready to kill. There was vandalism as they entered tubercular kitchens and crippled bedrooms; the threat of vigilantism where they found ingenious stills. Carrying Tommy guns, they itched to spray the shantytown with bullets. Quizzical cops handcuffed every black man or boy for the routine third degree, but no movie-style roughhousing. Fact was, none was necessary. Them Negroes, even surly, I-don’t-like-white-folks-none ones, had to clear their lives of this bothersome homicide. So folks gossiped about Georgie drivin the dead man’s taxi, but it was easy to mix up Coloured guys at night. Sides, they figured the killers were smarter than a clown like Georgie.

  After two days of shakin down Barker’s Point, siftin through squalor, as the sweating cops saw it, and even haulin in riff-raff, the dragnet was annoyingly empty. Soon, blood-sniffing tabloids in Fredericton and Saint John, cities that despised each other (pitting the bureaucrats in one against the workers in the other), would be caterwauling in harmony. A stink sharper than the sulphurous, bad-egg smell of pulp-and-paper mills would rise up stabbingly like the shittiest stench of Hades. If the Negroes were innocent, every white man was maybe guilty. The case might drag on, putting re-elections at risk.

  Then dawned the minor but scalding sunlight of flashbulbs. Silver got front-page, red-carpet treatment in his casket, and hundreds of exasperated and vengeful citizens congressed alongside. The funeral cortège was a moving flotilla of black taxis from across New Brunswick. Mourners motored graciously through Fredericton to the packed cemetery. Folks worried sick about their own flesh.

  Tabloids acted grief-stricken. They was contrite about what happened, wished they’d cared more for public servants like cabbies. They commented about life withering like snow, about the way light tears itself to bits, struggling through pines, about how anyone’s blood is always like a newborn’s, pungently fresh and precious, about how rock could spill and fall toward no end. They wept for a crushed yellow flower in the funeral parlour, the mashed body of a fly.

  Georgie saw em headlines; he felt sick bout all em smarting feelings. Nausea shook him from clenched jaw to quivering bowels when he thought of Silver displaying the photos of golden Donna and his pretty, priceless children. Georgie knew he could get all the entertainment in the world just by watching his own babies play. Then he’d vomit tears because, my God, Silver was dead and his moolah all pissed away.

  George knew no theology, even less about law, but he treasured one redemptive fact: he hadn’t tagged Silver; no, he’d just tagged along with Rue, who had. Georgie believed his part in the scrape was just layin the hammered man’s body aside, then takin some bloodstained bills. George prayed, prayed, prayed, when he wasn’t drunk, when he was breathing in the milky new-baby smell of Desiah, or when he was cuddled beside Blondola, spoon fashion, staying warm, his hands cupping, gently, her full breasts, while January worsened outdoors and Rue puttered in the kitchen, so, so innocently, never registering any tic or sigh about his and George’s successful execution of murder. While Rufus sat in the lamp-lit kitchen, guzzling red wine and waving his hand back and forth in time to some soundless music, George wept silently, but fully. If only he’d gone muskratting in April, fixin traps in logs and lettin em catch their feet and drown, he could’ve got pocket money, nice money.

  Feeling his hot moisture trickling onto her neck, Blondola, so fleshily good and rose-smelling, turned and asked, “Is ya cryin cause we’s poor, or cause you’s happy to be a papa again?”

  George nodded.

  II

  DOETECTIVES Michael Evans—forty, wiry, and severe—and Ishmael Stark—thirtyish, dirty, and squat—visited every garage, pool hall, tavern, welfare office, and brothel in the district. Sallow, with dark brown hair streaked grey, Evans was a natural partner for Stark, who was pa
le, with hair as black as shoe polish. The pair were like village poets, scrutinizing every aspect of their fellow and sister citizens’ lives, recording details, eavesdropping, jotting down info. They were convinced the killer—maybe plural—of Nacre Pearly Burgundy was a culprit who’d needed money but no getaway car. Why leave a Fredericton taxi in Fredericton? They figured the murderer was local, didn’t own a car, but knew the roads. The two detectives fixated on Barker’s Point, where taxis were always shunting. They sucked up rumours—from citizens like Yamila James, Jehial States, and Zelda King—that ex-con George and ex-con Rufus were seen in Silver’s company, in his car, and with remarkable, miracle cash that’d appeared as suddenly as a blizzard. So, they’d converse with chatterbox, chicken-thievin, high-steppin, firewood-stealin George. That Coloured fellow were not, they thought, smart enough to murder and obliterate the evidence, but he’d surely help pinpoint Silver’s last movements. They brought George downtown, with no promises or threats, only a wish for him to help them reduce their honest ignorance. They knew he’d been in the car that night. What else happened?

  George took scared, but glued himself to his alibi, telling the Mounties he was gambling all night on January 7, 1949, but had gone to Jehial States, with Silver, lookin to invite him to see his wife and newborn girl. He’d had Silver drop him off at Barker’s Point, maybe, must’ve been, bout 10 p.m.

  “That’s the last I seen of him.”

  Stark and Evans let Georgie go because they had no evidence, and Georgie had a newborn. The next day, January 12, George was asked back to the RCMP depot for a few more questions. All day he waited to be questioned. No one got around to it until that night. (The delay was deliberate—to give his conscience time to sober up and to make him feel too tired to lie.) The ceiling lights in the corridor bit like barbed wire into his eyes. The cop station bristled with filing cabinets—as if the files held the real firepower: an accusatory bullet for every man, woman, and child. George cheered up when Evans, wearing grey pants and a grey-pinstripe black vest, and Stark, in a black suit and tie, finally showed up, apologizing extravagantly, carrying big mugs of coffee, even one for him. Then they entered, all palsy-wellsy, all swell buddies, the interrogation room.