The Taste of Ashes

by Sheila Peters

  It dropped them five minutes later at the bottom of steps hedged by dark shrubs.

  “Just start walking,” George said, “and a light will come on.” His eyes bright with the pleasure of a surprise. “Walter Prytuluk’s in there.”

  If the taxi hadn’t already driven off, Álvaro would have jumped back inside to escape. It was as if tonight he was doomed to relive every mistake he’d ever made. Every humiliation. Every failure. Father Walter Prytuluk.

  After his ordination, Álvaro assumed he’d be sent to work somewhere in Latin America. But a request had come from Canada, a diocese in northern British Columbia where the Oblate priests had been baptising, confirming, marrying, and burying the Indians for over a hundred years. They’d been looking a role model for the local tribes. Álvaro had some of his mother’s Mayan features and the English he’d learned at the plantation she’d worked for. La finca.

  Walter Prytuluk had been his mentor. All had gone well for the first months and the initial welcome grew into trust and mutual respect. But Álvaro had destroyed that within a few short weeks. Walter’s tolerance and derision had been worse than anger. You stick your little candlestick where it doesn’t belong and all of a sudden you’re ready to throw it all away, he’d said. On a woman who’s already got two babies by two different men. How are you going to support them and any more she might pop out? Give Spanish lessons to men who want to ride motorbikes on Mexican beaches and screw little Mexican girls?

  All this time Walter had been holding Isabel’s shoes. Dangling them from his thumb. Red leather sandals with high cork platforms. The insoles imprinted with the mark of each toe. The indentation of her heels. Isabel, who had taught Álvaro what a priest’s vows really meant. Because when a priest makes love, he breaks them all. Celibacy. Obedience. And the vow of poverty. He didn’t truly understand the concept of poverty until he lost Isabel. With her, all the knees and elbows and forehead of prayer were clothed in the radiance of flesh. With her, there was not a single patch of skin that didn’t have nerve endings. You were inside your own body and inside hers at the same time, you became the tongue in her mouth and the mouth drinking her tongue. It was only when you were without her, back inside your bones, your skin a nerveless paper envelope, that you understood poverty, a fasting penance your belly could never teach you. And began to truly understand the Oblates’ fourth vow. Persistence.

  Which Walter embodied. Here again to witness his failure. Álvaro stood in the dark, all the shreds of his life fluttering around him. The Guatemalan boy hiding in the bush and the seasoned voice of God on Winnipeg’s coldest streets. A scoured hull, smoldering in the fires of the city dump, beyond the reach of Guatemala City’s most resourceful scavengers. And still the young priest, sticky from his lover.

  How wise Walter had seemed that summer. How tough. When Álvaro had tried to go out the door after Isabel, stricken by the thought of her walking across town at night on her tender feet, Walter wrestled him up against the wall, his breath in his face, his eyes fierce. Oh, no you don’t, boy, he’d said. There’s always some who like the priests and if you’re not a priest they don’t want you anymore. So, what’ll you do then? Come back into the fold, dip your pecker in the holy water and begin again? You’re worth a thousand Isabels and don’t you forget it.

  How flattered he’d felt in the midst of his longing. How full of love.

  He moved forward and a light came on, illuminating the narrow path and the stairs up to the tall narrow house. How noble he’d felt to walk away from her without a whimper.

  Walter would have been in his fifties then, about the same age Álvaro was now. Over twenty years ago.

  “Alvie, old buddy! What are you waiting for?”

  The voice, the nasal garrulous pleasure, rolled over him like water.

  “Haul your ass up here and give an old man a hug.” Glasses winked as the man pushed his walker to the edge of the stairs. “I’m warning you. If I have to come any further, I’ll be right in your lap.”

  It was the surprise of joy that sent Álvaro up the stairs. The old man cackled, gleeful, put one hand out, warm and strong, and grabbed Álvaro’s.

  “Help me get this turned around and come inside out of this rain. You look like crap.”

  Álvaro knew what he looked like. The bathrooms in American bus stations were wallpapered with mirrors. Over the sinks and beside the doors. He was surprised each time by the stranger who turned out to be him. The hair, shot with grey now and longer than it had ever been, curling down onto his neck — he could feel it there, startling him, as if someone was brushing against him. The pouches of skin that pushed up under his eyes. One scar sending an eyebrow awry, the other one drawing a question mark along his chin and down his throat.

  Inside the small house, the smell of fresh bread drove everything out of his head but his sudden, sickening hunger. He staggered.

  “Hang on there,” Walter said. “Let’s get you into the kitchen. I don’t know what’s with George, making you walk. There’s a perfectly good car around here somewhere. He thinks a walk will cure everything. A walk or a swim. Just be glad you didn’t have to cross False Creek.”

  A loaf of bread stood on a wooden board, a knife ready. A big chipped teapot and thick mugs were set out on a turquoise Formica table. The plastic mat under the salt, pepper, sugar, chrome napkin dispenser, and toothpicks in the centre of the table released Álvaro. This was his past come back, the years vanished. He was in trouble, but for that moment it seemed like nothing the kindly bulldozer of Walter’s talk couldn’t set straight.

  The tea was spiked with whiskey, the bread slathered in butter and honey, and within half an hour Álvaro was feeling the warmth of food and liquor right to his fingertips. His eyes drooped. George and the others had come, eaten, and gone, not saying much, attentive, uncertain. Walter pulled himself upright into his walker, and Álvaro followed him into a small bedroom off the kitchen. The covers were pulled back, the sheets white, the quilt’s squares framing little stars, flowers, moons, and crosses. Curtains drawn and a small lamp on a bedside table. A big easy chair at the foot of the bed. His bag waited on the low dresser.

  After he had washed, he pulled on the pajamas George had given him and stood beside the bed. It was always a toss-up between the pain and the dreams — he’d flip from one to the other. What he really wanted was oblivion. He put the vial of morphine tablets on the table; a glass of water was already there. He stretched out beneath the covers and waited, afraid as always of what would come. The sudden starts. The lurching awake. The small birds pecking his head.

  Walter knocked and came in wearing pajamas and a shabby cardigan. He settled himself in the chair.

  “I’ll be here,” he said, pulling a blanket over his legs. He brushed aside Álvaro’s protests, saying if he lay down he coughed — he often dozed in the chair all night. “Is there a place I can touch you?” he asked. “If you need waking?”

  There was no safe place on Álvaro’s body, no place that did not remember. When they’d shoved him out onto the road, he could not stand on his shredded feet. His broken ribs made every breath agony. To be alive had come to mean the same thing as to be in pain. He’d made a cave of his body and balanced on the edges of his limbs in a whimpering mound until someone whispered, “Come!” The arms trying to lift him. “Hurry!” In the hospital, they’d said he’d been in a car accident.

  He slid one foot out from under the quilt. In the dim light Walter’s old eyes would not see the scars. Walter put out his hand and rested it on Álvaro’s heel, his rough thumb on the anklebone. The calluses were a comfort. Gardening, Álvaro remembered. Walter always liked to put his hands in the earth. And for a few miraculous hours, his body still weaving in the currents of travel, hope fluttering against the jagged lines of his ribs, Álvaro escaped.

  3

  The sun was already warm when Janna Catherine Lee joined the stream of students leaving residence for morning classes. Boys in hoodies and low-slung jeans. Girls in
capri pants, sleeveless shirts, and flip-flops. Her tan bell-bottoms, black blouse, and fleece vest felt out of place, but she was glad for them when the cool ocean air filtered between the thick shrubs that seemed to cluster around every building and line every path. Huge trees, their leaves still glossy and green, shaded much of the grass. Chestnuts split open on the path.

  Up north, the grass would be slick with frost this early in the morning, the leaves yellow in the ditches. In Smithers, the smell of fresh-cut logs from the sawmill down the tracks would ride the thermals past Janna’s mother’s house right into town. Two hundred and fifty miles east in Prince George, just where the highway turned south toward Vancouver, the high-pressure sunshine would trap the stink of the pulp mills and squeeze it into every corner of the community college where she’d done her business diploma, where she’d topped her class and won the scholarship that brought her to the University of British Columbia to finish her degree and the chance for jobs with some of the city’s biggest financial firms. Janna Lee, chartered accountant.

  She turned into the lane leading to the back entrance of the commerce building. Today began with a statistics lecture, then a workout at the gym, an entrepreneurship seminar, a statistics tutorial, the grocery store, dinner, and the orientation to the accounting recruitment program. Only two classes tomorrow; she could fit in laundry and, if the weather stayed good, a jog on the forest trails.

  She dodged a delivery truck backing up to a service door and walked into the dim hallway still holding yesterday’s stale heat. Halfway up three flights of stairs, she decided to forget the platform shoes for daytime wear. She was more of a track and field girl, really, and this UBC Asian look with the stretch bell-bottoms flapping over three-inch heels didn’t feel right. Though for all she knew, Asian was exactly what she was. Her mother had steadfastly refused to inform her about the source of the colour in her skin, the slant in her brown eyes, the little dab of white in her straight black hair, and her insistence that everything be kept in its proper place. Her brothers swore they knew nothing. After all, Isabel had had quite a few boyfriends over the years. The less said, they insisted, the better.

  She stared at the handwritten note taped to the door. Class cancelled. Other students were already walking away, calling stragglers to come for coffee, isn’t it sweet, let’s go downtown, I don’t have another class until tomorrow, oh no, I already missed one, will there be a makeup, and it would have been nice if someone had phoned and saved me two fucking hours on the bus. The chatter pinged around her, bouncing off what felt like an invisible force shield from a bad space movie. A barrier she could see through, breathe through, hear through, one she’d felt from her first day on campus.

  Small town nerves, she told herself. Just give it a bit more time. She had worked methodically to make herself fit in. The campus alone was almost as big as the city of Prince George, so she’d spent the first couple of days walking with the university orientation guide in her hand, making a mental map of her residence, her classrooms, the faculty offices, the gym, the grocery story, and the bank. She’d listened to the conversations as students waited for lectures to start and used the information to pinpoint a few classmates she thought would be good study partners. But it had been three weeks now and she hadn’t connected with anyone.

  She ducked into the washroom to find three of her classmates clustered in front of the mirror, one talking on a cellphone in a language she didn’t understand. Their eyes slid over her as if she were a poster advertising a product they didn’t want. As if the pulp mill stink still clung to her hair. She went into one of the stalls to hide until they left and sat on the toilet staring at a picture of a blonde woman wearing a sun visor, the caption encouraging female business students to learn to play golf.

  Outside, she wandered toward the Student Union Building’s club day displays with a half-formed idea of going to find the golf club’s table. She stopped to stare at a bulletin board in the bus shelter. Desolation washed over her with the exhaust from buses idling at the loop. A cancelled class gave her two free hours and she was thinking of tacking on another self-improvement project. How pathetic. One poster advertised an introduction to rowing. She’d seen the boats sculling across the inlet down at Granville Island. Maybe she’d just go sit on the docks and listen to the seagulls. A misshapen pumpkin invited students to a Halloween pub crawl. Nuns were being tortured in Tibet. A fist called for the end of oppression of gays, lesbians, transvestites, the transgendered, and transsexuals. First-year psychology had covered those terms but she couldn’t keep the last three straight. She laughed out loud at her own pun. A girl trying to find a place to put up another poster turned to look at her.

  Janna looked back. The girl had short streaked blond hair, a pudgy face with bright blue eyes, and a pouty little mouth. She wore layers of T-shirts and a pair of plaid harem pants that sagged to reveal a little roll of fat and a belly button ring. Janna shifted her pack.

  “You got a problem?” the girl said. Janna read the girl’s poster. Overlaying the photo of a bedraggled little boy, text in a barbed wire font invited people to crash a guest lecture on international business — one she laughed to see was part of her international studies course.

  “Can I have one of those?” she asked. She could bring it to class.

  “Janna?” the girl asked.

  Hot blood rose to her face as if the girl had read her mind. Janna struggled to place her.

  “It’s Janna Lee, isn’t it?” The girl smiled. “I’m Amy Myerson. From Smithers. What’s it been? Two, three years?”

  Janna remembered. Amy’s mother was an accountant who always spoke at careers day — an elegant woman with this daughter who wore clothes with rivets and chains. Heavy boots. Amy been a couple of years ahead of Janna in high school.

  “I roomed with your mom this summer. She told me you’d be down here, or I don’t think I’d have recognized you.”

  She startled Janna by pulling her into a jangling hug. She smelled like sweat, vitamin B, and some kind of lemon shampoo. Janna’s trapped knuckles dug into Amy’s breasts. She pushed herself away, crumpled and sweaty. “Weren’t you going to South America or somewhere?”

  “Si m’ija. Somewhere Latino.” Her hips wiggled. “That’s where I went.” She tucked the posters under her arm. “Now I’m back and I’ve got to put some of these up in the SUB — how about a cup of tea?”

  Diesel fumes fluttered through the bus loop as the accordion-pleated B-line pulled away.

  “I’ve got a seminar in half an hour,” Janna lied. Amy’s familiarity confused her. She hadn’t been hugged by another human being since she’d hugged her older brother goodbye in Prince George in August. Hugs he always received reluctantly.

  “That gives us about twenty-five minutes. Come on. I’m thinking of taking in that Halloween pub crawl. What do you think? I have to keep this journal for my twenty-first century culture seminar and it would be a perfect experience. I’d probably have to borrow some clothes to fit in because most of the kids will be jocks or business types, I figure.” She prattled on, one hot hand on Janna’s arm.

  “I could probably lend you some — I have just the type you mean.” Janna didn’t try to keep the irritation out of her voice.

  “Like they’d fit me.” Amy reached to pinch Janna’s waist and her fingers slid across the tight shirt under the fleece. She dropped her hand. “God, sorry. You’re here on some business scholarship, aren’t you? Me and my mouth.”

  She grabbed her hand. “Come on. I’m going to have to buy you that tea. And maybe a brownie to go with it.”

  Janna didn’t pull away. Something about Amy’s unflappable chattiness worked its way under her defences. That and the fact that Amy knew her mom, undoubtedly knew they rarely communicated, and apparently didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.

  They never got any tea. Amy elbowed their way through all the tables and displays to find the food booths plugged with line-ups. They ducked out of the crush into a consign
ment clothing store tucked into a corner. The clothes were no Value Village cast-offs. Faculty and rich students unloaded here. Lots of wool blazers and flowing rayon skirts and tops. Satchels. Very nice cotton sweaters and shirts. Solid-colour T-shirts with small brands embroidered on the sleeves. One mannequin in a black cocktail dress. Another in designer jeans and a leather jacket Janna immediately wanted.

  “I had no idea this place was so upmarket,” Amy said, scanning the racks. “It might be perfect. Maybe you can give me a hand, pick out something that isn’t too kooky for a commerce department type like yourself.”

  Janna stroked the leather jacket and a clerk appeared.

  “Isn’t leather great?” she said, pulling it off the mannequin. “Try it on.”

  “What do you think?” Janna asked. “What club would take me if I wore this outfit?”

  “The faculty club,” Amy said. “Or the golf and country club. It’s pretty swish.”

  Janna slipped off the jacket. $150. No way could she spring for that. At least not now. She pulled some clothes off the racks for Amy. She’d be about a twelve. Stretch black bell-bottoms. A white translucent shirt and one in a blue check, a couple of fleece vests. “Try these on,” she ordered.

  Amy looked at them dubiously, but ducked behind the curtain.

  “What look is she going for?” the clerk asked.

  Janna picked out a pair of running shoes and some black platforms and tossed them in.

  “Me. She wants to look like me.”

  The clerk shook her head.

  Janna rummaged through the bags dangling from one wall. She found a pack like hers, this one baby blue with a clear plastic cellphone slot. Amy stepped out into the middle of the store, giggling. The pants stretched over her butt and accentuated the heavy thighs her skirt had hidden.