by Robert Chafe
He moved them from Montreal. She was already six, been raising her on his own. The end of winter and an early morning flight. The city grey with old snow and the airport so small. Trying to conjure hope again in distance and differentiation. The shortened distance between things, their house, and the mall. The brown tile floor of public buildings. The life behind them that could now be called old, because there was so much new. An old life was something he could finally stop talking about.
Bought a house on one of the steeper hills downtown. He had seen tourist-brochure pictures: doctored light and people in poses. Loved the music in the way people spoke, the way everything that wasn’t a church was made of wood, the constant wind. The touchable ocean, bulky hills and trails around them.
He stayed on the couch downstairs, tried to get some sleep. Left the front door unlocked, the lights on. Maybe she lost her key. Doesn’t even make sense, she would knock, but what if she didn’t? The creak of the hot-water heater, the house so old and still settling. Pretending in the noises that she might be there. Drifted in and out. Dreaming. Her mother’s face, conjured out of the distant past.
They took his statement the next afternoon. Walked around her room with their shoes on, ballpoint pens used to lift and peak under things. They accepted his coffee, told him what would happen next. Told him the name of the boy she’d been with, his parents had called in too. He had to get them to spell it. The big one, holster on his hip, hung back as they left, said he had a daughter as well. Closed the door behind him and knocked it with his knuckles as he walked away.
He phoned her school. The parents of friends he had told he’d keep posted.
Thought about those he couldn’t call, her mother. He did things: opened a can for lunch, cleaned the tops of the ceiling fans. Built the courage to look up and call the boy’s parents. No answer, he left a message.
Colder than yesterday, I hope she’s not outside. I hope she’s not cold. He’d taken her to hockey rinks, underdressed and shaking. He shouldn’t have made her do anything against her will. He remembered when she was born, lying wet on her mother’s chest, her black eyes wild. She was big, a head of hair. He had to remind himself back then that she was frail. His hands were too big and too rough to hold her. He had to remind himself she was frail, and now that was all he could think about. When she was less than a year old, her mother had called from Victoria. There to see her dying father. The slow weight of her words, the strange delight below all attempts to mask it. Told him she was going to stay a bit longer, told him how her breasts hurt and how she was expressing milk and dumping it every hour. It was meant to elicit sympathy, but he had none to give. I can’t feel sorry for you anymore. Their daughter weaned at eight months because her mother needed time, and needed it far away.
He was woken by the phone, Venetian blinds cut the sun, the coldness of the room before the heat kicks in. Quarter after seven in the morning and groggy in that way heavy sleep inspires. A sensible rest, back in his bed. A voice said his name, and he threw his legs out of the covers, the chill of the laminate floor shocking him fully awake. The cop was careful in his words. They had found a body. The missing person’s report and her last sighting sent them in a search of the harbour’s edge. A body pulled from the clearer waters at the mouth to open ocean. Badly decomposed, no positive identification, but he could at least confirm it was a male. Relief. Complicated and despairing, relief.
—Just wanted to let you know. Before you heard it on the news and thought the worst.
—Is it the boy? She was with the boy.
—There is no way to tell who it is until we have a closer look. The click of the line going dead and he sat with the phone in his lap. Didn’t turn on the light, or open the curtains, didn’t want to see himself.
He went to their house. Wanted to ask them questions about their son, how the boy knew his daughter. Never made it past their porch but he knew they knew nothing. The worry in them worse than his own. The police confirmed the body was not their boy, but the fright of it. The thought for a few hours that it could have been. They didn’t ask him in. He had wanted them to. They wanted their privacy. To be alone with it.
The next morning, the weather finally a bit better, a flash of sunlight off a passing cube truck into the living room and his eyes. Coffee made too strong. The newspaper dry in his mail slot. On the second page a picture of the man they’d found floating in the harbour. A dumb grin he recognized, the open black hole of a missing tooth. He had seen the man, selling papers in front of the bank building downtown, around the city pushing a tower of recycling in a stolen shopping cart. The picture by a local artist for a long forgotten gallery exhibit. He stared at it a long time, let his coffee grow cold on the table in front of him. He’d given an old photo to the cops, it’s not her best. She didn’t like it, she would be angry if that ended up in the paper. The roots in her hair, her dental retainer. But she looked happy.
His ex-wife. He knew he had to locate her and tell her about her daughter. A woman who had left her child fifteen years ago, last birthday card sent when she was eight. Last address he had was over seven years old. Tried the old number, got an elderly man who didn’t recognize the name. He had no firm notion of where she was in the world. Didn’t even know where to start. Went online, googled her, started picking through the options. Feeling active and purposeful for the first time in days. Nothing else he’d been able to do but wait for news from the police. Sadness of a different kind finding him hunched at the keyboard. He wondered what this would be, this horrible waiting, if he had been doing it with her. If she hadn’t left him, her breasts full and their baby hungry.
He slept in the smallest room at the back over the porch. Small rooms keep the heat, open the curtains in the morning to the sun. Boarding house where he’d been placed with four other people, farthest away from the bathroom, might be his own fault because he was too nice. Connie on the second floor with her loud voice, talking to people that weren’t even there. Don’t make her angry. Shouting those bad bad words of hers at the construction workers downtown eating lunch up high on their scaffolds. Sometimes he’d hold his pee until everyone had left. Sometimes do it in an empty pop bottle, just to stay in the room where it was quiet and safe.
Short rolling walk to downtown, slippery come winter. Slush freezing up the wheels of the shopping cart. You got to put your weight behind it. But this was still fall, and the worst thing was the muck of dead leaves. On his hands and knees every hundred feet, fingers in fingerless gloves, pinching and poking to get the wheels free and moving again. Park his empty cart at the beginning of the day behind the towering brown brick of the bank building, collect his papers for the morning and put on his best smile.
Selling papers in knee-high rubber boots, weekday mornings, rain or shine. Afternoons collecting cans and bottles from downtown trash bins, keep himself in cigarettes. Early fifties, he’d say when asked, though he wasn’t sure anymore of his exact age. Well enough liked, lopsided smile, helps with paper sales. Speaking is hard, have to concentrate. Robed lawyers and canteen workers, think he was born that way. But he was a teacher once, the little ones. No kids of his own, never married. Parents dead, no friends anymore. A wet slip and fall on a city sidewalk, his head. Left for drunk overnight in the chill spring air, poked by a meter maid in the morning and sent to the hospital. A degree from the university, good life, and then nothing. Twenty-eight years old and no way to keep track of things. Concentrate to say his words. Never getting better. A long time ago.
That woman who plays accordion. Big and blue and heavy as a piano. She worked the corner by the heritage shops, but hear her through the wind tunnel of Water Street. Long skirts and homemade hats. Sometimes, on Saturday mornings when the streets were packed with kids, she’d put on a red clown’s nose. Sneak down the block to sell his papers, just to hear her, see that nose. Drop pennies he’d found on the street into her case, ask her to play something. She’d sing, never looking at him, but he knew when she was sing
ing just for him because of the pennies.
Look in my eyes, and hold on real tight
I’ll waltz you my darling across Texas tonight…
One day he said good morning to her, and she said good morning back.
On his way home one night, loaded-up cart full of bottles and cans rolled down Prescott Street. Ran down the steep street after it, the crazy speed and him struggling to keep up. Far below him it slammed into a concrete garbage can. The front wheel dented so he couldn’t even get it to move, couldn’t get it back up the street and had to unload and lug what he could of the six bags he’d already collected. Bloody hills in this city. Need to find better boots. Cold night, the seasons moving. Hopped the metro bus the next morning, change in his hand he had counted three times. Felled it into the fare bin, the satisfying rattle of it, driver waved him on.
Route 2 to the Village Mall. Some good carts up against the rail of grey metal at the bottom of the parking lot. Took his time finding the best one, and then calm as he could muster he walked it off the parking lot onto the loud sidewalks of busy Topsail Road. Stored the cart in the backyard of the boarding house, put his muscle into lifting and lowering it over the back fence.
The next morning, found a coil of old yellow nylon rope, frayed at both ends, in the back porch of the house. Tied it as best he could to the handle of the cart and to his leather belt. Long enough to let him climb in over the sides of dumpsters. Coiled the slack into the basket. The wind, it wants to take you away from me.
Cold that night, the hours ticking into darkness. The clocks had rolled back but nobody told him. A regular time of day to be making his way up the hill, but now it was too dark and cold, so he didn’t know what to make of it. Took himself across the traffic out of downtown to the lip of the harbour. Dumpster behind the new big restaurant. Closing time, steam still coming off some of it. Sat on the red wooden border between the concrete and the drop-off into the lapping darkness. Pizza or burrito. Something with cheese and tomato. Soggy but good. Feet is gone, my feet is gone. Stretched his fingers in the chill of the wet air. Took off his shoes and against the growing brawn and bite of the wind, tried massaging some feeling back in.
A little gust of wind is all, and his foot up and in his lap. Lost his balance. Full fall backward. The growing height of the docked ships behind and above him in burning orange streetlamp light. Fell and fell and finally hit, his back first, the water hard and cold as concrete. Before his head went under he saw the trail of the long yellow rope tumbling up and over the dock and bringing the full cart of bottles and cans with it. Fully underwater, clothes doubling their weight and the skin underneath stung by the cold. Trouble now.
The new weight of the cart falling full speed through the black water down, down deep, the frayed yellow rope and himself. Not a full breath and he was under. The lights of the ships wobbling and fading as he sank. The cart hit bottom, suspended in the middle of it all, rope long enough, no breath to take and no ground to sit on. Chest growing tight and that song circling,
If you listen tonight on that high lonely plain
You’ll just hear my voice as it calls out your name.
His body hiccupping with the urge to breathe, hands trying to get under his wet coat, trying to find the knot. Tied it good this morning.
And my hand is steady, my touch is light
Look in my eyes, and hold on real tight
I’ll waltz you my darling across Texas tonight.
The rumble of the ships on the other side of the harbour, loud underwater. No fish in the harbour, the water too dirty. Can’t open his eyes to tell how far down he’d come, the sting of it. His heart beating too. So fast. Opened his mouth and took in that dirty water. Never been married, had to work hard for his words. But he had hoped all the same that someone would be holding his hand. Maybe even her, with her song and her clown’s nose meant for the kids.
Work crews on Water Street were hanging holiday bouquets of lights from the streetlamps. The whirl of a world that never clocks an absence beyond its own doors. Lawyers removed their winter boots, shaking snow from their raglan shoulders before realizing they’d entered the building without the morning paper. A bright day in late October, the sky shone cloudless and the air all the colder for it. The news of the day coming late. A body washed up by the mouth of the harbour near the suck of the open sea. The disappearance of two kids, a boy and a girl, grinning on the front page, individual pictures taken in warmer days, hair frizzed by the backlight of a summer sun.
Days before all that, he had helped her in this four-limbed scramble to the cave’s entrance and looked up to her from the face of the lower cliff, his curls framed by the white of the surf below. The steepness of the cliff face, only four feet away and he was almost underneath her. He caught her in his arms when she slipped, let his hands linger. His hand on her back, and the sudden possibility of it, sex and pleasure, what might lay in wait. She sent him a smile, full and big on innuendo, folded her body into his. The roar of the waves beat behind them.
The black crack in the hill, barely big enough to squeeze through. The Pigeon Caves he said they were called. Didn’t know why. Knew a few who had been down and ventured in, but he had never.
—Widens out once you get inside. So they say.
She squinted into the mouth of the cave, asked if he had a flashlight. He took out his lighter, smiled as he fought with it, and when it didn’t light, he dropkicked it over the lip of rock and into the freefall beyond. He said her name, said they’d only go as far as she wanted. She took his hand. She followed him in. Unafraid suddenly. The darkness not so dark because they were walking into it together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Catherine Bush, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Russell Smith.
Beverley Cooper, Shane Nielson, Jill Margo, Tyler Pennock, Naoko Kumagai, Adam Honsinger, Leesa Dean, Richard Scrimger, Natalie Helberger, David Whitton, Darren Hynes, Idman Omar, Canesia Lubren, Aaron Joo, David Mannion, and Leanne Milech.
Michael Crummey, Danielle Irvine, Leah Lewis, Flora Planchat, Willow Kean, Jillian Keiley, Alison Woolridge, Brian Marler, Megan Gail Coles, Anita Best. Memorial University and Guelph University.
“The Pigeon Caves” includes lyrics from Emmylou Harris’s “Waltz Across Texas Tonight,” written by Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Chafe has worked in theatre, dance, opera, radio, and film. His stage plays have been seen in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and in the United States, and include Oil and Water, Tempting Providence, Afterimage, Under Wraps, and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. He has been shortlisted twice for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, and he won the award in 2010. He is the playwright and Artistic Director of Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland. Two-Man Tent is his first work of fiction. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
