“Michael, we can talk about this another time, okay? Please. I won’t call the police.”
“Why would you call the police?”
“Michael, look at my door. I can’t go to bed with my door like that.”
“Then I will stay. I will stay and watch the door. I am used to the night watch.”
Michael’s heavy hand wrapped itself around Becca’s waist. She tried to pull away as he stood up from the table. Outside, the world was beginning to rupture around the edges. Pink bits of light bit away at the darkness. Michael’s breath pushed itself into Becca’s face.
“I showed you everything, didn’t I? Do you think it’s a coincidence we both spring from the Bible? You, a creator of nations, a mother to the father of the chosen people. And me, I could be that angel. I could be the one who gave Jacob his limp. The touch of my hand against his thigh ruined his leg forever. Did you know this? They taught us how to break a knee in training. How to break it firmly, how to break a leg so they will never be able to run from you again.”
Up close, Becca could see the scars running down Michael’s chin. That was where the shrapnel hit him, he had told her at the bakery. He took her hand and made her feel his skin.
“I know how to break a bone.”
“I know you do, Michael. You told me. You told me.”
He released her arm and sat back down at the kitchen table. Becca wanted to run, but she remembered Darla’s chest rising and falling in the other room. The neighbours here were all asleep or working the night shift. This was a building where the elevator always smelt like piss and dogs were tied up on balconies. Terry was gone and no one from work could call this place.
“Why did you take apart the phone?”
Michael flicked at the numbers. He didn’t answer her. Becca stepped back behind the counter toward her bedroom. She was too nice. Terry had barely paid rent during the five years they were together. Becca always gave the regulars extra frosting on their Danishes; she never argued with a work schedule that saw her rising at 5:00 am to board a bus across the city while Jim and Alicia slept in until seven. She did not jaywalk at empty intersections, but instead waited until the light decided to change. The world was already chaotic enough, filled with Michaels and Terrys and all that revelation. She didn’t want a hand in the chaos. She was afraid she might lose it in the process.
“They use phones to make us die. You know this though. Like I told you. They will not face you like the angel. They will wait until you are in range, and they will blow off half your face so you can’t recognize yourself. They will make sure you are not the same. If you cannot touch them, you cannot assert your dominance. They will take your teeth and cast their spells and you will be left on that strip shuddering. I shuddered. That word. I did that until someone dragged me away. A phone is for those who can’t stare their enemies in the face, for those who want to listen, to speak without betraying their face.
“You can lie over a phone. You can tell me this makes sense. You can tell me I should go home. A Christian in Israel, still a Jew in Russia. I am homeless like all those sick and dying dogs in Moscow. The ones who ride the subway as if they are people because they do not know themselves. I clatter around my own tongue.”
Becca continued to back toward her bedroom. She watched Michael remove his shirt, the black lines of his tattoo rippling with the effort. He tossed it onto the floor beside the fragments of the phone. His voice continued speaking. Becca paused before stepping into her bedroom.
“You gave birth to all of this, and I wrestle with the demons you left behind. I find them lurking everywhere, even in your bakery. I see them snickering behind us and I know you cannot hold a secret. I thought maybe you could help me rebuild things. They could only help me with my face. You told me of your Terry and your Darla, and I knew you could do better. I knew you could find better names. We are all wrestling through the night, and in the morning, some of us lose. Some of us awaken without a friend on a mattress in the dark. And it is always so dark.”
Terry was the religious one, if you could call it that. He called it the last resort. One night he sat where Michael was now and told Becca he could never be a true believer, but the science was just too depressing. Terry did not like to check his stats, his on-base percentage or his fielding numbers. He despised the breakdown of his sport into columns and lines and algorithms. Not because they were wrong or misguided; they were all too accurate in fact. Terry couldn’t bear to see all of it laid out before him. He could not watch his thoughts, his dreams, all of it, reduced to chemical reactions. Terry told Becca he did not want a world where every cell was just slowly unspooling toward its own end. This biological pre-destination was just as bad as all those evangelicals preaching their guaranteed promises of redemption. All this decay was purchased in advance and Terry was tired of being confronted with the best before date.
“I followed you here, but I did not think I would come in. I am not usually such a rude houseguest. But I am tired of this haunting, Rebecca. I am tired of trying to make all my friends from scratch. They want me to go back to Israel. They want me to sneak off with them in the night, to use my new face, the one no one will recognize. I am wires and wet work now. I read those words about wrestling with Jacob, and I am always that angel who is losing. I am the one who must rename him, who must surrender part of myself. I am that demon or whatever it was that found him alone amongst the sheep. I need you to make me new.”
Becca disagreed with Terry. She watched his career spiral ever downward, his numbers declining while his waistband expanded. She watched his confidence crumble, the easy grounders slipping through his legs, the fly balls lost to the sun or to his hangover. She could not allow for some grand mystery to conceal the facts, to deny the reality she faced every day. The science inside the bakery was not a mystery, the science was sound and it was repeated daily. It was not all death and destruction. It was new and well-crafted and reusable. Terry told her all things had to end and he preferred not to see them coming. He left her at the bus station with a cross hanging around her neck. Bits of his chest hair clung to the chain.
“You need me here, Rebecca. You can help me create something new, just like your Darla.”
Darla did not talk much about her father. She was only four. She liked to play with the pieces he left behind. The well-worn baseballs and chipped bats he kept in the closets. They did not fit into his luggage. Becca stepped back into her bedroom and fumbled through the dark.
“We will have to start the world over, Rebecca. This is what I realized today. I realized it when you told me you didn’t know where to turn anymore. You told me you did not want things to stay the same. I can change all these things. Do not think anything of these problems though. Even the whores in the Bible, they are all eventually redeemed. Even Mary Magdalene.”
The bat was chipped at its tip. It was heavy in her hands. Michael still sat facing the busted door. His hands covered his face as if he were weeping, but there was no sound. A knife lay beside the phone on the table. The apartment was filled with pink light. The tattoo on his back featured a seven-headed dragon with a woman on its back. It rippled as Michael spoke through false teeth and stitched lips. It seemed to enunciate his words.
“You gave birth to a nation, to all the tribes, and I know you can do it again, Rebecca. We can do it again. I just need to show you how it is done. I will show you one way or another.”
Becca crossed herself and swung. She still believed in physics.
Thaw
I have two fingers lodged in Big Dave’s right cheek when his fat fist connects with my left eye socket. The world is made of gin and pain and salt as I hit the ground amongst the snow. Blood is spat onto my face and some of the townie girls are giggling, but they don’t move to lift me up. I can hear Tanya in there somewhere, her voice hitching itself to the tumour in her throat, the one the doctor’s called benign and circled in red marker on her scans.
This is the third weekend in a row; th
e third time I’ve stumbled out behind the Trap with hands balled up into fists and tonic on my tongue. I can already hear the siren again, but for once I’m the one on the ground and there is a weight on my chest. It joins forces with some other pain and presses down onto each rib, reminding my lungs of their limits. Big Dave kneels down over my face and his thin blood drips down into my eye. He is silent, except for the hoarse cough rattling his chest. I think about diseases, the viruses coursing through his veins, the smell of his two kids covered in their own shit down at the welfare office. His wife lost custody a few weeks ago. Big Dave rolls back off my chest, and I gasp for breath as one more fist connects with my teeth. I underestimated his rage, the hate boiling in his rounded gut. Women’s voices scatter as a flashlight reveals their bundled faces to the dark.
“Get offa him. Now. Get. All of you. Get. Go home.”
Red and blue lights go on and off, but the edge of my vision only sees snow and broken bottles. Bottle caps and cardboard support my back as I try to piece together what my face must look like now. Probably like the two boys I clashed with last weekend, the ones who asked for their mothers while their girlfriends fled screaming for non-existent bouncers and help, help from anyone who would listen. I ruined my new winter coat with the splash-back from their pimpled faces. I got locked up for a few days after that one. I have a lot of fines to pay.
The Trap stands on the edge of town, the end of one long road with two stoplights and no crosswalks. There are dead dogs under the snow that we will find in May once all the ice recedes back toward the lake. There are teeth and fleshy bits of ears and gums beneath the frost, pieces put there by men like me and some of the natives who fall asleep while trying to walk home after the bar has closed. The government ships us body bags at a discount in the spring once the snow starts to disappear. Lately, I’ve been sleeping with the Zamboni at the arena, letting it thrum against my chest when I wake in the morning, scabs and fluids dripping from my face like fleshy post-it notes from the night before.
“Chuck, get the fuck up. Get your ass up. You dumb shit, up. Up!”
Mitch is staring down at me. The collar of his uniform chafes his neck and I can see where the razor must have skid across his Adam’s apple this morning. He yanks me up by the hood of my coat and the cold bracelets embrace my wrists one by one. Mitch boots me in the tailbone like he used to when we were kids, and I land on my face. Cuffed on the ground, I realize I can’t stand up. The snow tastes like old beer and smoke.
“Good job, Mitchell. Good fucking job. Are you going to help me up or am I going to sit here all night? Davey got his blood all over my face. I think it’s freezing to my skin.”
Maybe it was just something with Big Dave’s face. A long face filled with baby teeth and a fat tongue always hanging from one side of his mouth. The kind of face that leers in its sleep, scoping out whatever ass walks into its dreams, following women into bathrooms, listening to their private sounds through the door. Maybe Tanya just laughed at one of his jokes. I don’t need many reasons right now. I press my tongue against loose teeth and then Mitch hauls me off the ground again and starts dragging me toward his cruiser. A few onlookers snap pictures with their phones. Big Dave is gone by now, humped shoulders lurching toward his basement apartment and the mangy cat he keeps on a leash in the summer. A replacement for his kids.
“Third weekend in a row now, Chuck? Shit, you smell like the fucking recycling bin. Always back at the fucking Trap. You could just stay home, you know? Drink in the dark like the rest of us do. Now stop dragging your fucking feet and get in the goddamn car.”
The Trap has had a lot of different names. For the last few months, it has been the High Table. Before that it was the Sparrow’s Nest. Donnelly’s. The Roost. Number 7. The Hole. None of them last though. The bartenders remain the same, sneaking bottles out the backdoor, halving their prices out there in the tiny parking lot. Only the owners change, dumping their investments and fleeing back down to Thunder Bay or Toronto or wherever fleets of snowplows wait for intermittent storms. I’m on call for the plow up here. We only have one.
The car door slams behind me. The heater in Mitch’s cruiser is still broken. He’s yelling at the group gathered around the Trap, the one leering at my busted face and the red impressions I left scattered around the dumpster. We all started calling it the Trap back in high school when the first place burned down, filled with a touring group of strippers and their drunken admirers. The local rag told us all about the screams and the underwear seared like a second skin to fleshy forms identified with dental records and skin samples. They flew a plane in with the families from Quebec and South Dakota to make identifications on some of the victims. Mitch and Jake and I walked through the wreckage on our Christmas break, fascinated by the lonely chrome pole still held upright in its centre. No one dared to lick it in the dark.
“Can’t you do something productive, Chuck? Get a dog or some shit.”
Mitch turns off his flashers and we begin cruising down the strip. There is no snow tonight. I am prepared for another night in a cell away from photo albums, high school yearbooks and old letters. I am ready for a night without my shoelaces.
“Where’s your good old partner Gordo?” I ask, and kick at Mitch’s seat.
“Quit that shit, Chuck. Gord’s got appendicitis or whatever he made up this week. He’s at home. He’s warm. He’s a dick.”
“So my suspicions are confirmed.”
“Shut up, Chuck. Take a look at your face.”
I can see a ridge of purple over my eyebrow in the rear-view mirror. There are long brown lines down my cheek where Big Dave’s blood has begun to dry. Outside the car, we pull past the police station. It looks like a high school portable with a few stranded Christmas lights affixed to the roof. Soon the streetlights begin to disappear and homes dissolve into shacks and sheds. Mitch switches to his high beams. We are the only car on the road.
“Uh, buddy, where are we going? I’m bleeding from the head here.”
“You know it’ll probably be charges this time? After those two kids last week, it’ll probably be charges. Three weeks in a row. I talked to Tanya, and she says you keep calling too. Calling at five, six in the morning. Calling and hanging up. People have call display, you know that, right Chuck? People got jobs to go to in the morning. Three weeks buddy. Just go talk to her.”
The trees reach up to block out the sky and the paving turns to gravel. I feel each stone rattling my bones as I bob up and down in the backseat.
“I don’t call anybody…”
Jake was the one who got out. Got the grades, the placements, the money. Mitch and I lingered behind, sticking with what we knew. Jake was the one who had us sneak out into the dark and stare at that pole, looking for leftover wallets and cases of rum that hadn’t exploded in the flames. The Trap always called him back for the holidays, an institution that never wavered in the cold. Always rebuilding, always rebranding; never changing at its core.
Jake was the one who tied himself on skis to the back of cars, the one who climbed trees for the sole purpose of jumping back down from their branches. He liked to run naked in the snow.
“We’re going to the lake,” Mitch says. He won’t look at me in the rear-view and I don’t blame him. The ice out there before us glows along its blunt and ragged edges. Mitch and I had both stuck around town once all the exams and track meets and bullshit house parties ended, just like Tanya did. She didn’t want to follow her brother anywhere. She told me she liked the cold. She liked being able to sit in total darkness. She said that’s where you find exactly what you needed. I agreed because I wanted to see her again.
I agreed because it sounded stupid and I didn’t know what else to say.
“Just take me to the station, Mitch. I know it’ll be charges or court or whatever. I don’t care. Pile it on. It’s cold out here. Your shift ends in like, what, two hours?”
Jake was back to celebrate that the tumour was benign. It was a faulty killer, a
failed revolution against the state of Tanya’s body. There would be no surgery, no radiation, no wisps of hair lingering in every sink and bathtub in her wake. There were drinks and piles of wings and the smell of pork trapped in the air that night. As it got darker, Mitch clocked in across town for his shift while Jake and I argued over snowmobiles. Tanya watched from the window as we revved engines in the dark and headed out into the snow. November was supposed to be cold enough, but lakes aren’t arenas. They hold cracks and crevices, clutching lives and smaller things in stasis. They rupture like bodies do, like teenage faces in the dark. They crumple and swallow, but rarely spit things back up. Not until they are ready. Not until they decide it’s time.
“I said you can just take me back to the station, Mitch. I don’t fucking care. Maybe it’ll get me some more time off. Just have one of the other guys deal with me. One from down south, one of the boys who can’t get his car started in the morning. Come on. This is stupid.”
The funeral was quiet with an empty casket. No one pounded at their breast. No one pointed fingers in my direction. I sat in the front row, but I didn’t move. I never heard him tumble through the ice. I didn’t look back to see him fall. Once I circled around, the hole was too wide. The water was black and nothing glowed under the surface. I felt it splitting like a quake behind me as I drove away, unable to lift anything out of the water, unable to recover the body.
“We are going to the lake. You know Big Dave will forget he destroyed you by the time he wakes up tomorrow anyway,” Mitch says. “We’ll keep you off the books for now. I know you’ll be out there next week anyway, looking for more black eyes or whatever you’re trying to fucking collect. I won’t always be the one who drags you off them. Eventually, some idiot is going to go head first into a window or a wall and then you will be gone too. But you fucking know that, don’t you Chuck? Of course you do.”
All We Want Is Everything Page 9
