Earl would later admit to Tuuli he knew what Kyle was going to do before he did it. Their eyes had met before the boy slithered from his grip. Kyle took a step back and bent low and swung his arm upward with as much force as his small body could muster. He’d thrown the dart straight up, like a space launch, and they followed the yellow plastic fins until they were lost in the sun. Earl searched the sky for it, acutely aware of what was happening, of what was coming. He found only blurs of cloud behind the grid of telephone and power lines that criss-crossed the small yard. It’s going to hit where it’s going to hit and there’s nothing we can do about it, he remembers thinking. He was still hunting for it in the sun when he heard that awful, hollow popping, like opening a new jar of pickles, followed by the hush of his grandson collapsing into the soft grass.
“Nice and easy,” Earl said as he held it still while Tuuli, who’d never had a licence, drove. There was frighteningly little blood, and he remembers thinking he would have felt better if there were just a little more. It had lanced the corner of Kyle’s left eye, squeezing in snug to the tear duct, the thing sticking up proudly like an antenna, its yellow fins bright above the boy’s clenching face. Halfway there, Kyle started to panic and Earl had to grip his arms to keep him from pulling it loose.
Earl opens his eyes without remembering closing them and knows he must have passed out. He manages to sit by pushing his back against the wall of the dumpster. His calves throb in his nylon stockings. He decides his hip is not broken, and his next thought is that the chicken has gone cold. He can’t see his watch, but Kyle is certainly late and Earl keeps himself from speculating on the many ways a street-dwelling man could be harmed. Minutes pass. Earl’s breathing slows, and his mind becomes more collected. The terrible smell has weakened. Or perhaps it is him. Even the nose gets tired, Earl thinks, then he wonders how this odour strikes his grandson when he lifts the lids of the dumpsters he frequents each week, if he smells it at all.
He hears a rumbling that is not a car, then footsteps. The lid comes open and the streetlights bathe Earl in a yellowness that hurts his eyes. A hand grips his arm, and though he does not quite feel ready, he is hoisted to his feet.
“Up you get,” says a voice from a man standing on the floral armchair from which Earl fell what seems like ages ago. He feels hands in his armpits and he is dragged up over the lip by a measured strength and dropped on his feet in the alley. His knee quakes, then holds.
“Sleeping one off in there?” Kyle says. “I wouldn’t. That’s a good way to get squished.”
Earl looks down to examine himself in the light. On his shoulder there is a darkening ellipse of blood, his shirt is untucked, and the front of his pants and coat are splattered with grease, soil, and a yellow gravy-like liquid. He puts his hand to his head and feels a small gash beneath a clotted mat of his thin hair, and doing this, brushes his face with his forearm and realizes he hasn’t shaved in weeks.
“This yours?” Kyle says, holding out an aluminum cane. Earl realizes he’s been standing without his cane for some time. Adrenalin, he figures.
“Yes, that’s mine,” he says. “Thank you.”
“Good find,” Kyle says, handing it to him, and Earl is relieved to have it back.
“A real bump you took there,” Kyle says and grabs Earl’s head, turning it roughly. Then he makes the sound one uses to call a chipmunk. “I think I got somethin’ for that,” he says, and goes rooting in one of the many bags that hang from his cart.
Kyle returns with a tube in his hand and squeezes a pea of opaque gel onto his dirty finger. He leans in, turns his good eye to the task, and begins to apply it to Earl’s wound. It is a gesture of such tenderness that Earl feels all at once entirely unworthy of it. In his weeks of watching Kyle, tracking him, mapping his route, he had never been this close to him, and this proximity warms him now, something similar to the softness in his chest that came when Tuuli used to cut his hair in the kitchen, or when he watched Sarah float boats built from milk cartons down McVicar Creek. Kyle pulls back to assess his work, and for a moment Earl thinks there’s a catch of recognition in Kyle’s good eye, but the moment passes and Kyle walks back to the dumpster.
“This is one of my bins, don’t you know that?” he says and lifts the lid and peers inside. “But you’re half in the grave anyways so I’ll let you slide. Just don’t make a habit of coming round here too much—it’s not like you can’t find your own, there’s plenty of ‘em around.” Then he reaches in and pulls out the chicken in its container.
“I’m guessing this is yours too, right?” he says, admiring the bird.
“No,” Earl says, then clears his throat. “It’s yours.”
“You know I keep finding these things,” Kyle says, “all over the place, people just buy ‘em and throw ‘em out. Don’t make any sense. Sometimes I think they just come from nowhere, that things come out of these bins that nobody ever put in.” Kyle attempts to brush some grime from the skin with his dirty hand. “You hungry? You look like hell anyways, you drunks don’t know when to take a pit stop. Here, we’ll go halfers on this, how’s that?”
“That’d be fine,” Earl says, suddenly wobbly. He sits in the armchair.
Kyle sits cross-legged on the pavement and tears the bird in half with a cracking sound. He sets Earl’s portion in the lid of the container.
Earl isn’t hungry, but he accepts his ration, pinching a bit of meat and placing it in his mouth. Though it has gone cold it doesn’t taste half bad, nothing like the dumpster smells. Kyle stops talking for a spell while they eat, and Earl gets his first good look at him. His shoulder-length red hair is drawn into a ponytail and he is wearing the polar fleece Earl left for him a few weeks back. Earl can see now that it is a bit small and decides to next time buy him a size up. He sees that the eye is aimed outward and it looks cloudy, as though filled with yoghurt. Earl could not remember it looking that way when they’d removed the bandage. It had been crooked, but clear. The doctor had fit Kyle with a patch for his good eye in hopes of forcing the bad one to aim straight, but Kyle refused to wear it. When the swelling diminished, Earl insisted Kyle return to school. Only two days into the week he was suspended for breaking two fingers of a boy who Earl had thought was the closest thing Kyle had to a friend. After that, Kyle was caught by floorwalkers at Zellers stealing odd things like women’s perfume and clothes that weren’t even close to his size. He lit fires and tore up Earl’s garden. No longer just a show-off, he was a wild animal, and Earl couldn’t help but think the dart had injected some manner of evil deep in his head. The boy seemed to have set out to break their wills. And though she wouldn’t say it, Tuuli feared him too. Earl responded with a severity and rigidity he’d never known himself capable of, tactics he’d never employed when raising Sarah. He decreed curfews and ratcheted down bedtimes. He called in favours with folks he knew around town and got Kyle jobs—stock boy, gas jockey, even farmhand at a U-pick strawberry place—but he was fired from them all. “Can’t take instructions,” “Pumped diesel into a Honda Civic,” or as one of Earl’s old buddies from Hydro had put it, “Got too much angry in him.” With each disappointment, he found himself punishing the boy more and more severely, and now, as he watches his grandson devour the chicken, Earl knows that he behaved in ways that would repulse him today. Only recently, drinking alone in his motel while listening to men argue about money in an adjacent room, Earl remembered striking the boy, though the years had washed out the details, whether it was closed fist or open. He doesn’t remember taking any joy in doing it, but this offers little comfort. In his darker moments he fears he did worse.
Earl realizes he has lost his appetite and stands to toss the chicken back into the dumpster. Light-headedness forces him to sit for fear of falling. “You want some cake? There’s a whole cake in there,” Kyle says with a full mouth.
“No,” Earl says, “I’m stuffed.”
Kyle rises shouting, “Lookat this thing!” He rushes over to the schoolteacher’s desk
. “What a beauty.” He runs his hand over the wood and opens the drawers.
“This thing is worth money, I can smell it, look at this wood, this is solid wood—oak, you know, that’s why it’s heavy, particle board ain’t heavy—it’s probably an antique, that’s what it is, definitely an antique, somebody didn’t know what they had, just threw out a good thing that they had, you believe that? I bet we could get at least forty for this thing if we can get it to Harold before he shuts down.”
“It’s too heavy for the two of us,” Earl says.
Kyle scans the alley and walks to a moving truck that’s parked in the adjacent lot. He pulls a large pin that’s attached to a chain and unlatches the side door. He disappears inside and returns with a rolling carpeted dolly.
“Look, buddy, if you can just help me get this thing up this hill, I’ll be able to get it to Harold myself.”
Though the alley rises in only a modest slope, with the heavy desk it will be gruelling, and after his stint in the dumpster Earl doubts he is up to the task. But when Kyle begins to flip the desk over and the cupboard doors swing open and the drawers all come sliding out, Earl can’t stand to watch him do it alone. When they finally get it over, Earl’s breath comes in tense, shallow gasps. Then Kyle lifts one end of it and has Earl slide the dolly underneath. “Wait,” Kyle says, and goes to stash his cart behind a parked car. Clouds are sweeping overhead and it must be later than Earl thought because the windows of the office towers have darkened except for a few. If he hadn’t fallen into the dumpster, he would have been asleep hours ago. It is turning into a fine evening, warm and fresh-smelling. They find that the desk rolls easily enough, but when they reach the hill, the going slows, and Earl’s knees grind and his calves throb with stagnant blood. Earl stops again to chase his breath.
“Come on, push, you bag of bones,” Kyle says, and Earl lowers his head and puts his shoulder to the desk, offering up all of the little strength he has left.
Goodbye Porkpie Hat
Purpose
I’m lying on a sheetless mattress in my room, watching a moth bludgeon itself on my naked light bulb. Over near the window sits a small television I never watch, beside it a hot plate I never use. I spend most of my time here, thinking about rock cocaine, not thinking about rock cocaine, performing rudimentary experiments, smoking rolled tobacco rescued from public ashtrays, trying to remember what my mind used to feel like, and, of course, studying my science book. I dumpstered it two years ago and ever since it has been beside my mattress like a friend at a slumber party, pretending to sleep, dying for consultation. I read it for at least two hours every day; I know this because I time myself. It’s a grade-ten textbook, a newer edition, complete with glossy diagrams and photos of famous scientists who all look so regal and determined, it’s as though the flashbulb had caught them at the very moment their thoughts were shifting the scientific paradigm forever. I like to think that when they gazed pensively up at the stars and pondered the fate of future generations, they were actually thinking of me.
I excavated the book in June. The kid who threw it out thought he would never have to see science again, that September would never come. What an idiot—I used to believe that.
My room is about the size of a jail cell. One time, two guys came through my open window and beat me with a pipe until I could no longer flinch and stole my former TV and a can of butts, so I hired a professional security company called Apex to install bars on my window. I spent my entire welfare cheque on them, just sat and safely starved for a whole month. I had to pay the guy cash up front because he didn’t believe I could possibly have that kind of money. It felt good to pay him that kind of money, he did a good job.
Someone is yelling at someone outside, so I go to the window and look out into Oppenheimer Park, which is across the street from my rooming house. There I see only a man calmly sitting on a bench, smoking. Everyone says this park was named after the scientist who invented the nuclear bomb. It has playground equipment, but it’s always empty because no parent would ever bring their kid there, on account of it being normally frequented by people who are like me or Steve or worse. The park is infamous, an open-air drug market, they say. From my window, I’ve seen people get stabbed there, but not all the time, good things happen in the park too. Some people lie in the grass all day and read. The people who are reading don’t get stabbed. I’m not sure why that is.
I’m finished studying, so I go out and cut across the northeast corner of the park, walking west up Powell. I approach a group of about six Vietnamese men. You can always tell the drug dealers because they are the ones with bikes. I purchase a ten rock with a ten-dollar bill, all of my money until Wednesday. Eye contact somehow seems to make things more illegal, so I stare at the ground while one of them barks at me. He is cartoonish, his teeth brown and haphazard like tusks. He shifts side to side on his toes like a warmed-up boxer and aims nervous glances to the street. “Pipe?” he barks. “No,” I say, “I have one, thanks.”
Crack melts at a tepid eighty, and if you heat it too fast, it just burns off with minimal smoke. Smoking it is one thing I’m good at. I don’t really feel the crack craving people talk about; I would describe it more as a healthy interest than anything else, like I’m fine-tuning a hypothesis, or conducting a sort of protracted experiment. I know it sounds strange, but I feel if I could get high enough one time I would quit, content with the knowledge of the actual crack high, the genuine article. Unfortunately, a paltry approximation is the only high I have been able to afford so far.
In an alley, my brain has a family reunion with some long-lost neurochemicals, and I crouch beneath the party, not wanting to disturb it, shivering and euphoric. A seemingly infinite and profound series of connections and theories swamp my mind. It is a better-than-expected stone and it makes me long for my room and my book.
A man and woman are suddenly five feet away, arguing. I am unsure how long they’ve been there. I have an urge to explain something complex and scientific to them, to light their eyes with wonder. The man is talking.
“Hey bro.”
“Hi, are you guys doing okay?” I sputter, feeling sweat rim my eyelids.
“Oh yeah, she’s just being a harsh bitch.” The last word he turns and yells in her face, actually puffing her bangs back with it. After an emphatic pause, he turns back. “Hey bro, how about you give us a toke and make us feel better?” he says to my clutching hands with a smile and an assumed entitlement. I’m briefly embarrassed for being so absurdly high and unable to share it with them or anyone else.
I tell him, “It’s all gone. Sorry,” with what I feel is a genuine sincerity, my high already beginning its diminuendo.
“How about giving me my pipe back then?” he says, steps closer.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this type of tactic before. I tell him sorry, there is only one, careful not to combine the words my and pipe, a pairing that would no doubt signal the commencement of my probably already inevitable beating.
The woman tells him to leave me alone. Her cropped shirt reveals an abdomen stretch-marked and harbouring unearthly wrinkles in the texture of a scrotum or an elderly elephant. The man is yelling now. Blurry and ill-advised jail tattoos populate his arms, and I watch them wave above my head. I wonder if any woman who has told her boyfriend to leave somebody alone has ever meant it. If ever, I conclude, it is a statistically insignificant proportion. Amidst his racket, the urge to smoke another rock comes over me in a bland revelation, like I need to do the dishes. I hear rats scrabbling inside the wall and I try to think if I have ever seen a rat look up, into the sky I mean, and wonder if it is possible for them to see that far. As I’m trying to stand, the man kicks me in the chest with his fungal shoe and I feel a crunch inside my shoulder and it begins to buzz, and I bring my other arm up to shield my face.
I hear my pipe hit the ground, but it doesn’t break because crack pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes. People dumpster them from medical supply la
boratories. They are test tubes with no bottom, no end, all that smoke and mania just funnels through them unhindered. My lungs have tested the tubes and their acrid samples, but unfortunately there has been no control group, so the results of these experiments are often difficult to observe.
I am crumpling to the ground, hearing him pick up my pipe and smelling the tang of fermented piss. When urine evaporates it leaves a sticky yellow film, and I am thinking about how urine is a solution, not a mixture, of this I am absolutely sure and the beating continues from there.
Materials
In the room beside me lives an old junkie named Steve, who at some indeterminate point took to fixing between his toes, the rest of his veins being too thickened and prone to abscesses. He blows his welfare cheques in about three days, pupils whittled down, head pitched on the stormy sea of his neck like an Alzheimer’s patient. He warns me by banging on the wall when he suspects he may be about to shoot too much dope. I’ve rescued him twice by calling in the Narcan injection, plucking the needle from his foot before they arrive with their strange antidote. I guess you could say he is my only friend.
Steve knows nothing of science. Doomed to forever repeat the same experiment, he arrives on his sticky floor at the same vomit-soaked conclusion over and over. I’m well aware that experimental replication is a cornerstone of the scientific method, but not to the extent Steve takes it.
In his nasal junkie voice, he calls me a tweaker or a coconut because I smoke crack, but it doesn’t bother me. He doesn’t mean anything bad by it. One time he sold me a kernel of soap, saying it was a rock he found on the street and he would let go for cheap. At first I didn’t believe him, but it was the way he held it, with reverence, two hands together, a child holding a cricket. I didn’t speak to him for weeks until he almost overdosed, and when he woke up, he’d completely forgotten ripping me off, so I forgave him, plus I stole the money back anyway. And I guess I was lonely.
The Beggar's Garden Page 5
