The Proxy Bride

by Terri Favro

  He enters the house.

  There’s nothing in it. Almost nothing. A couple of broken-down kitchen chairs. A mattress on the floor of the front room. (The Nonna’s?) A bucket. A plastic crucifix with a faded palm frond stuck behind it. A bank calendar dated January 1966 tacked to the wall.

  The home of a compulsive gambler, thinks Marcello. One who loses and loses and keeps staking whatever he has around him so that he can lose again. He’ll bet anything, including his kid.

  There’s no sign of Bum Bum or either of his parents. No wonder he sleeps out in the alleyways at night. Marcello leaves the house through the back door and gets back in the car. There’s only one place left to try now: Canal Road.

  The street, he’s relieved to see, is deserted: in this heat, everyone would normally be out on their porches and front stoops drinking beer and yelling at their kids in the street. But with Apollo 11 hurtling toward the Moon, the neighbourhood is indoors watching Walter Cronkite interview the astronauts’ wives.

  He parks in the craps players’ alley and walks across the street to Italian Tobacco & Sweets. A CLOSED sign is on the door, the lights are off and everything is locked up tight, even the storeroom window. But when he steps away from the store and looks up at the window of the flat, he’s puzzled to see something white, flattened against the glass – a sheet maybe?

  Standing in front of the store, Marcello’s ear picks up a sound, a low, steady hum that seems to be coming from the building. He walks up to the exterior wall and places his hands against the weather-beaten grey clapboard: through his fingertips, he can feel a vibration, as if the building is trembling.

  Marcello takes the stairs of the fire escape quickly, fishes for the key in his pants and unlocks the door. When it swings open, he finds himself looking at something so bright and hot it dazzles his eyes and warms his skin. Two giant lights blaze, the size of garbage can lids, a Panavision camera on a tripod standing on the table, its lens pointed down at the couch. Electrical cables crisscross the room like fat orange snakes, their heads all meeting in a splitter shoved into the room’s only wall socket. They’re sucking away at the power like a mass of leeches in a bog.

  Someone has moved the TV up here. The sound is down but he can see a scratchy image of an astronaut (Armstrong?) bouncing down a ladder from the lunar lander. The first man on the Moon, thinks Marcello in amazement, but the flat itself is even more surprising. The front room has been turned into a caricature of the Sea of Tranquility, cardboard flats painted the lurid orange-yellow of processed cheese, craters clumsily drawn with felt tip pens still scattered on the floor. A black sheet stickered with silver and gold stars provides an unconvincing backdrop of outer space. The air has a sweet vomity smell; someone has been sick in the corner amongst an army of empty peppermint schnapps bottles. That’s when Marcello notices the girl asleep in a pile of pillows. It’s one of the twins – Jane, he thinks – snoring, wearing only her white tasselled majorette boots. Her skin has been painted a bright, shiny green like a lily pad. Two silver antennae bob from her head.

  Legs spread, Kowalchuck sprawls on the couch, naked except for his socks and a pair of briefs caught around one ankle, the other twin straddling his lap. Like her sister, Judy is white-booted, her bare, green-skinned back to Marcello.

  “Junior! Join the celebration.” Kowalchuck shouts when he sees Marcello, welcoming him like an old friend. “You missed the shoot! But you’re just in the time for the whatsamcallit, after-party. Grab a twin and I’ll turn on the camera.”

  “I’m here for Ida,” says Marcello, glancing around; he’s relieved not to see her here.

  Kowalchuck puts his hand on the back of Judy’s lolling head. “Blondie’s mine now. Along with this shitty store. Had to evict your Pop, I’m afraid.”

  Marcello wants desperately to beat this man down to nothingness, rendering him into bone and gristle and blood, like a stain on the slaughterhouse floor. He puts his hand in his pocket and feels the brass knuckles.

  As if reading his mind, Kowalchuck grins. “I know you haven’t got the balls to kill me, Junior. You couldn’t even bring yourself to slap a kid. Even if you did, a thousand other guys will show up to take my place. I’m immortal.”

  The twin in his embrace – Judy, Marcello thinks – rolls her head to peer at him over her shoulder. “Wanna party, Cello?” she slurs. Her hands are braced against Kowalchuck’s knees, fingernails painted the same creamsicle shade as Claudia’s.

  “I’m taking you and your sister home,” answers Marcello. As he stoops to gather Jane from the floor, Ida appears in the bedroom door. Swaying a little, she clasps a silver bikini top in her fist, between her silver breasts. Even her hair has been turned silver. When she sees Marcello, the top slips from her hand and her face collapses into silver tears.

  “Marcello, run, he kill you,” she whispers. “Go now, don’t look at me.”

  Kowalchuck cranes his head backwards at them. “You done a good job breaking Ida in, Junior. Stan and Stinky and me, we hardly had to force her at all.”

  Ida shines like a mirror. The lights are like huge suns, making the paint on her face drip to the floor. Through the door behind her, he sees Stan, face down on the bed, pants to his knees, thrusting. Pasquale is barely visible beneath him. The boy’s face is buried in the blue counterpane, his arms hanging limply over the sides of the bed.

  We’ve gone to hell, realizes Marcello.

  He now knows the source of that low malevolent hum shaking the building: it’s the sound of electricity with no place to go, unfocused energy pulsing through the old knob and tube wiring, into the fat orange cables, round and round in a never-ending circuit. With no breaker to trip, the electricity is over-amping, urgently looking for some place to go to ground.

  Marcello puts his hand in his pocket, closing them around the brass knuckles. He pulls them out slowly and shows them to Kowalchuck.

  “You’re right: I don’t have the guts to kill you. Here, you take them.”

  When Kowalchuck rises from the couch, Judy slides off him like a blanket. He walks slowly toward Marcello, penis bobbing, empty eyes fixed on the brass knuckles. They are a weapon, after all.

  Electricity used to be considered a mysterious, unexplainable force, not unlike the Holy Spirit, according to Marcello’s grade twelve physics teacher, an elderly priest who invoked the names of Edison and Tesla in tones usually reserved for saints. He spoke of electricity as a gift, something natural and powerful that God had bestowed upon the earth. Just look up when you see a lightning storm if you don’t believe me, he lectured. It was not, he cautioned, a power invented or harnessed by man, but God’s gift that man accidentally discovered and learned how to tame. Like a lion, he said. If you mistreat it, it can kill you.

  And this, it turns out, is true. When Marcello tosses the brass knuckles toward the exposed condenser coils at the top of the fridge, Kowalchuck grabs at them.

  The electricity shows itself as a bright line, thin as wire, an arc connecting Kowalchuck to the brass knuckles to the fridge, in an unbroken circuit of metal and flesh. The electrical charge flashes around this tight circle. Kowalchuck’s naked body takes on a whiplash shape as he spasms and a sulfurous smell rises as his skin scorches and his lungs, heart and brain start to cook inside him. Sparks shoot from the condenser coils before he collapses to the floor. Flames leap from the fridge coils, to the plaster walls, to the curtains, to the plywood floor. The glass in the windows starts to shimmer and run, reverting to its true liquid state.

  The bedroom doorway blazing, Stan is the first one out, pants around his knees as he hurtles down the fire escape. Marcello yells to Ida to get moving as he goes through the burning doorway to pull Pasquale into his arms. The boy is limp and light as a sackful of sticks, but the weight of his body sets off a stabbing pain in Marcello’s ribs. Groaning, he throws him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and
runs back into the main room, where he bundles a twin under each arm like a sack of sugar; they descend together, flames running down the stairway behind them. Marcello’s cracked ribs cry out under his load of three children as Ida takes the railing hand over hand. There is no time to consider Kowalchuck, who Marcello believes may well be immortal, as he claimed. By the time they stagger out onto Canal Road, the candy store is a ball of fire, the flames fed by the Depression-era sawdust used to insulate the building’s walls. Marcello can hear the sirens of fire trucks crossing the canal bridge.

  Debris rains down on them. Bits of lath and scorched roof tiles float to earth like burnt leaves. Neighbours have left their TVs to gather on the street – the Hryhorchucks, Claudia Donato, Angela So-and-So, some of the craps players. When Marcello sinks to his knees at the bottom of the fire escape, Claudia runs to him with a shout, pulling the twins into her arms.

  Marcello lays Pasquale on the ground, yanks his jeans up and looks into his face; his eyes are open but unfocused. He’s drunk, Marcello realizes. Christie is beside him now, pulling a blanket around Ida. Marcello grabs Christie’s arm: “Make sure the firemen take him to the hospital. Then you talk to Prima. Tell her I want her to make sure he’s looked after. Someplace safe.”

  Christie nods. “Where are you going?

  Marcello shakes his head. “I’ll send you a message.”

  He leans down to kiss Pasquale, then entrusts him to Christie’s care. Children looking after children seems to be the only hope.

  In the Chevy, Marcello pulls Ida into his arms. Paint is sliding off her face in silver tears. She smells like sulfur and her mouth stings against his.

  He holds her, and holds her, and wonders whether they should just stay here like this, growing old together, letting the world revolve around their everlasting embrace. Eventually he and Ida and the Chevy would transform into a garden or a stand of birch trees, like in a classical myth or one of those operas from the old country.

  Ridiculous, he tells himself. This is Canada. We have to be practical.

  With his arms still around Ida, he says, “The faster we get out of Niagara, the less chance they have of stopping us. I have enough money to get us anywhere you want to go. We’ll be okay. Ready?”

  Ida nods her head.

  “Avanti. Just drive.”

  Marcello twists together the ignition wires again – red, blue, green. The engine screams in agony, the tips of his fingers sizzle, but the starter catches and the engine turns over.

  They make their getaway in a shower of sparks.

  13

  May 1, 1970

  Christie stands on the stoop in her school uniform, waiting for the mail. She can see the postman in the distance, working his way along Canal Road; the last two weeks she’s met him at the door every morning before she leaves for school. He’s grown used to the ritual.

  “Anything for me?”

  He always shakes his head. “Not yet, but don’t worry. I’m keeping my eye out.”

  This time, though, he mounts the stairs to the stoop to hand her two pieces of mail: one of them a white legal envelope, the other, a postcard.

  “Good luck,” the postman says.

  The legal envelope is postmarked Guelph, Ontario. This is it.

  Christie doesn’t open the letter right away. She watches the postman continue walking along Canal Road, past the old candy store. He never stops there anymore – the front stoop has finally collapsed, taking the mailbox with it. Anyway, who would send letters to a burned-out wreck? It’s been up for sale for months. Rumour is that someone will buy the lot and put up a gas bar. Or maybe a Mac’s Milk.

  Finally, Christie takes a deep breath and opens the envelope.

  It’s a yes. She’s been accepted: Arts and Sciences. She closes her eyes, letting the sun warm her face. In a moment, she’ll go in and tell her mother. Telling her father will be more difficult. Not that there’s anything he can do to stop her, really.

  Pasquale will be sad. He’ll miss her going out to the Andolini farm to tutor him but she’ll find someone to keep up his reading. He’s actually managed to get through most of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not bad, for a twelve-year-old.

  She looks at the postcard. A blonde rider on a black horse races around a barrel, leaning far to one side, waving her Stetson in the air. Greetings from Prince George, the words on the photograph say.

  Flipping the postcard, she sees a one-line message, printed in a careful draughtsman’s hand:

  Welcome to the World of Tomorrow.

  Michael

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go to the spirited team at Quattro Books for the Ken Klonsky Novella Award and the wisdom of editors of Luciano Iaccobelli and Allan Briesmaster. Thanks also to Maria Meindl, Heather McCulloch, Chris Caswell, Joey Edding, Jake Edding, Izzy Ferguson, Lynn Sproatt, Glen Petrie, Kris Rothstein, Guingo Sylwan, Annalisa Magnini-Sanangelantoni and Rick Favro for their advice and encouragement.

  I wish to acknowledge Accenti magazine, where a section of The Proxy Bride was published in a slightly different form as the story, “Flora and Bruno.” I am also grateful to Diaspora Dialogues for the mentorship of David Layton and publication of “A Shout from God”, Marcello’s ‘origin’ story, in TOK Vol. 6.

  Finally, my deepest appreciation to my husband Ron and the Edding, Tessier, Hurd, Favro and Scrocchi families for the wine-and-memory-soaked meals, and for putting up with me.

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