Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  In June, after he turned seventeen, he finally got to drive the truck out of the shop and park it in the driveway of his grandfather’s house for all to see. Gleaming, shimmering candy apple red, specially ordered for custom paint jobs. He was proud of the truck as he’d been proud of nothing before in his life. He managed to pass grade nine thanks to the applied arts classes he was now taking and the work he’d put into the truck. His grandfather came around and grew hopeful that there was at least some kind of graduation certificate within Dooley’s reach. Dooley let his grandfather think he now cared about school. He was not unhappy about going back in the fall. He had plans to put a new motor in the truck.

  Then Basie Moon went through Elliot’s only stop sign and ran smack into him. When Dooley saw the other truck coming at him, felt the smack, heard the sound of steel buckling, saw all his work going for shit in a few careless seconds, he wanted to go crazy, scream, hit someone, beat the living crap out of Basie Moon right there in the street. But then he saw the girl staring at him wide-eyed, and he remembered—the girl in the window—and he held back, although he couldn’t stop himself from calling Basie Moon an idiot. He could have said a lot worse. He could have done a lot worse. And then the cop who showed up accused Dooley of drinking—“Have you been drinking again, Dooley?”—when he hadn’t had a single drop, not yet, and everyone in town knew that Basie Moon was blind as a bat and shouldn’t be driving. He looked at his truck with the buckled hood and the hanging bumper—all that work for nothing, he should have known—and he felt a surge that he didn’t recognize, something he’d never felt before, an all-consuming contempt for everybody snaking from his feet up through his body.

  Everybody except the girl. Frances Mary Moon, watching, sitting on the bench in front of the bank with her curly hair like Little Orphan Annie, staring at him with her eyes wide, looking at him as though she were about to speak, ask him a question, invite him to sit down beside her, and it was she who stopped him from going off completely. She sat by herself while Basie Moon inspected the vehicles, or pretended to, and when her father sat down beside her, they whispered something to each other, and she reached over and touched her father’s hand, as though to make him feel better, comfort him, and Dooley thought, Why? Why don’t I have a father instead of that impossible old man? He tried to think back to a time before his grandfather, but there was nothing there. Why did he have to get stuck with an old man who liked to hang stainless steel pots in his kitchen so everyone could see them, and have stupid dinner parties—international cooking parties, he called them—and cook egg foo yong and chop suey, pretending that he, Dooley, didn’t exist whenever the house was full of teachers and the town doctor and the couple who owned the hardware store, all of them dressed up the way you don’t have to dress up in a town like Elliot, and laughing and trying to eat with chopsticks. Why did he have to be the one that happened to? Dooley watched the curly-haired girl and tried to imagine what she was whispering to her father, and he couldn’t. She was talking a foreign language. He’d never cried about being deserted by his mother. He wanted to cry now. He had to work harder than he’d ever worked to keep from crying, to keep Basie Moon and the girl and the cop and the others who were now standing around from seeing him—Dooley Sullivan, who had a reputation to uphold—break down in tears.

  The cop told him to calm down—“Dooley,” he said, “Dooley, calm down and tell me what happened or I’ll have to put you in the back of the car, and you know you don’t like it back there”—and he took their statements, and then Moon and the little girl drove off. The cop let Basie Moon drive off with his daughter, which was outrageous, criminal. If he ever had a child, Dooley thought, he would not put that child in harm’s way. And then he thought that he was already putting people in harm’s way because he drove as drunk as a sailor half the time, and so he resolved to quit drinking, to make something of himself so he could have a family someday, a real one.

  Only he didn’t quit drinking. He quit school instead. He tried to make a new start on the truck, but he was too angry. He was angry all the time now, and hating school and all the teachers, even the grade eight teacher, who still said “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley” whenever she saw him, and he understood this to be a sign of affection of some kind or another, and that just made it worse, that his former teacher was the most affectionate person in his life and all she could say to him was “Dooley, Dooley, Dooley” as she walked by, not even stopping to say it, but saying it in passing as though he was hopeless, no point in stopping.

  He quit school before September was even over. He took the truck away from the shop without fixing it, just banged the dents out as best he could, and he left his grandfather’s house and moved in with a couple of guys who were older than him and worked in the bush. He tried that too, working in the bush, only he wasn’t very good at it. The work was too hard and the men too rough, and Dooley was tall and skinny, not muscular, and they didn’t like him, and he didn’t get called to work very often. So he spent what money he had on booze, and he spent the fall of that year driving the mangled red truck in a blur of inebriation until the night he’d hit a deer and sent it flying through the air like a football, and then he’d hit the bridge, drove his truck right into it, thinking he and the truck would fly together like the deer, only that hadn’t happened. The truck had slammed into the bridge and stopped without flying anywhere, bursting into flames right after some good Samaritan dragged him from the cab. The tow truck had only a burned-out shell to haul away.

  He remembered almost nothing as he lay in a hospital bed, first in Yellowhead and then back in Elliot, the room in darkness because the light bothered his eyes, but he could still see the deer lit by the headlights, its four legs flying end over end and disappearing into the night, and then—smack!—there it was again, four legs flying, over and over, endlessly.

  Until his grandfather accused him of hitting that man on the highway, the Indian who worked at the lumberyard. He didn’t remember a man; he remembered the deer. He wanted to explain, tried to talk, one last chance to prevent people from believing the worst of him, but then his grandfather leaned over him in his hospital bed and said, “Don’t you say a word, Dooley. Not one word about that man. It will ruin your life completely, if it’s not ruined already. And I’m sick and tired of trying to bail you out of trouble. What’s done is done. Not one word.” And Dooley had thought, You miserable old prick, and he quit trying to explain.

  When the police came, he said he didn’t remember, which was mostly true.

  He clung to the image of the flying deer being swallowed by darkness, but then one day it disappeared entirely and didn’t return, and the deer was replaced by the image of a man. Struck by the bumper of his truck. A man going end over end into the snow. He began to see the man whenever he closed his eyes.

  When he was well enough—“He’ll never be completely well,” the doctors said—they sent him back to the hospital in Elliot, and Basie Moon’s daughter, the red-haired girl, delivered a get well card, the only one he received from anyone. Eventually, he limped away from the hospital with one steel plate holding his leg together and another in his head, and he moved to the city, cut off all ties with Elliot, and didn’t go back until three years later, after he heard his grandfather had died. He’d been doing not all that badly in the city, working as a carpenter’s helper, keeping his drinking under control—perhaps because he’d discovered cannabis, which made him feel almost normal. He didn’t know why he was drawn back to Elliot after his grandfather’s death, but he was, and then it all went wrong again, and he almost incinerated himself in his grandfather’s house and ended up in jail, and then Basie Moon, the same one who’d run into his truck, offered him money to go away again, and he took it. He divided his money in two, left one half in a bank and tucked the other half into a false bottom that he crafted in his backpack, and he decided to really go away, first to Alberta, then to Vancouver. He tried to find work there on a fishing boat, but no one would have him be
cause he had no experience. Eventually he went to California to see what that was all about—beaches and surfers and Hollywood—and that’s when he thought about joining the Marines as a way of turning his life around, but only for about five minutes because he had no interest in getting killed in Vietnam, and anyway, the Marines wouldn’t want a recruit with metal plates holding him together.

  Then he heard about Mexico and how you could disappear there. That was more his style, he thought: disappearing. Deserting the country of his citizenship, the place where they had records, where he was registered as a person. And when he walked across the border into Mexico and no one asked him anything, not even his name, he knew he could make that happen. And then he met Angela, and they lived on the beach with an endless stream of people coming and going, and sometimes she looked at him the way Basie Moon’s daughter had looked at her father that day on the bench in front of the bank, a day when Dooley had not been able to imagine that he could be so lucky. That he would ever feel so free. When he told Angela this—that she made him feel free—she laughed and told him that he had discovered his own soul.

  “It’s not me,” she said. “You’ve made yourself free.”

  Then she said that Dooley had given her an idea. Because she had been a dancer—she and her skating partner were junior provincial ice dance champions before the accident—she decided she and Dooley should express their gratitude for this life by dancing every day at sunset. You could hardly call what Dooley came up with dance, even Angela said that, but it didn’t matter. It was a spiritual act, she said, and whatever Dooley did, as long as it was done honestly, would be good for his soul.

  “Think of your soul as a newborn baby,” she said. “You need to nurture it, keep it alive.”

  “How did you get to be so enlightened?” he asked her, and at first she thought he was being sarcastic, but he denied that, and she said, “I should have known. You, Dooley Sullivan, do not have a sarcastic bone in your body. You’re an innocent. That’s why I love you so much.”

  He shivered from the pleasure of hearing her say those words, “love” and “you,” in the same breath. And the word “innocent,” which had never been applied to him before.

  They danced on the beach every day, Dooley in a pair of surfer shorts he bought at a market and Angela in a bright yellow bikini. Sometimes they had live music—guitars, bongo drums, a harmonica. If not, there was always someone with a battery-operated tape player. They danced to whatever music was available in someone’s backpack. Everything from Three Dog Night to classical flute to Dr. John or Memphis Slim. Periodically, a group symbiosis happened and there grew a great crowd of gyrating, swaying bodies on the beach, in bare feet and bikinis and cut-off jeans, sometimes no clothing at all, first one person shedding a wraparound peasant skirt, a tank top, a pair of surfer shorts, and then the whole line of them naked, stomping and twisting, hair and limbs and handmade jewellery flying, every person in his or her own private world of motion. Once in a while, some young man or woman with a crush on Angela misinterpreted her free spirit as a loose spirit and tried to cut in, but she danced within herself and paid no attention whatsoever while Dooley watched, amused by the futility, still hardly believing that what this hopeful intruder wanted was reserved for him.

  And then the sun would suddenly drop, sink into the Pacific so quickly you could see it move, and the sky would go pink and dove grey and then blue-black, and everything would go still without anyone announcing, “That’s it for today, I guess.”

  When Angela stopped dancing, so did Dooley.

  She was the real cock of the walk, he thought, not him.

  TEN MONTHS PASSED. A year. The magic of the beach began to wear thin. Dooley felt the old restlessness creeping in, irritation with the naivety that he saw around him, the lack of connection between himself and the other expats. He was afraid to tell Angela he was ready to move on in case it gave her the chance to say she was ready to move on too. From him. But when he finally brought it up, she agreed that the squatter’s beach was losing its appeal and he was relieved when she suggested that they—they—go farther south to where she knew of a couple who owned property, the daughter of one of her parents’ friends. Angela said she didn’t know this couple very well and didn’t really expect to like them. “But let’s check it out,” she said, just for a change from communal living. A real shower. A washing machine. Probably maid service.

  Maid service? Dooley thought she must be joking, but he retrieved his nest egg from its hiding place and they packed up and caught a ride from the peninsula to the mainland with an American fisherman in a fancy boat. A few people wanted to go with them, but they said no, they were travelling alone. Dooley grinned all the way across the Sea of Cortez over having Angela to himself. On the mainland, they took a series of buses south down the coast until they came to the town they were looking for, situated on a cliff overlooking the Pacific. They found the house and stood looking at the locked gate and the razor wire looped along the top of the fence, until finally they rang the bell and a maid let them in, surprised when Dooley spoke to her in such fluent Spanish.

  They didn’t last long at Angela’s not-exactly-friends’ house. The community was new, and the people who lived in it were all wealthy Canadians or Americans. They reminded Dooley of his grandfather, pretending to be people they weren’t. They were shallow, Angela said, too much like her parents, and they didn’t approve of Dooley, didn’t approve of his drinking (even though you rarely saw one of them without a margarita in hand, no matter what the time of day), so Angela and Dooley made plans to leave again, but not before getting roaring drunk one day and dancing crazily on the pool deck. Dooley lost his balance on his bad leg and fell into the pool, and then Angela jumped in after him, both of them in their clothes, while the friends (by this time, decidedly not friends) sat in lounge chairs on the tiled deck and glowered at them over the tops of their Ray-Ban sunglasses. When Angela took off her T-shirt and threw it up on the deck, and then stripped Dooley down and threw his wet shorts out of the pool, their hosts had a hushed conversation and then went into the house. Angela said she could just imagine the report that would get back to her parents, but she didn’t care. In fact, she overheard a phone conversation that night in which it sounded as though her father might be flying down, so she and Dooley quickly left without even saying thank you; they didn’t even wait for the bus but rather hitchhiked to Mexico City, where Angela replenished her money supply—Dooley didn’t have to replenish his because it was all in his backpack—and they found a hostel and stayed for a month, awed by the size of the city and the cultural wonders it held. When they began to crave the ocean again, they caught a bus as far south as they could go, moving from beach to beach, staying in each new place until they grew tired of it or until Angela suspected that someone hired by her father was following them. Dooley was never convinced of the truth of her suspicions, but he went along.

  “Is your father in the Mafia?” he asked once, thinking it was a joke.

  “Of course not,” Angela said, sounding, he thought, defensive. “He’s just rich. Too rich.”

  “If he found you, would he try to take you back?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose not. He would have snatched me by now if that was it.”

  “What about your mother?” Dooley asked, barely knowing the meaning of the word himself.

  “Why are you asking so many questions?”

  He didn’t ask any more.

  Sometimes they went inland, to the old colonial towns in the mountains, or to the cities, Guadalajara or San Miguel de Allende, where they stayed for over a year. They spent another year in Belize and Guatemala, having managed to cross the borders even though Dooley had no passport. They travelled from one end of Mexico to the other several times over until their nomadic life began to grow tiresome, although neither of them was quite ready to admit to feeling dissatisfied. They talked about settling somewhere, but then another town would beckon and they would yield to the promi
se of a place to which they had not yet been.

  On Dooley’s thirtieth birthday, in a hot hotel room overlooking the plaza de la ciudad in a town in the Yucatán, Angela finally said, “I’m sick of being an itinerant. Are you?”

  Dooley was relieved to hear it. He felt the same way, he said. It was wearing him out. Angela teased him then, said he was getting to be an old dog and needed a porch to lie on.

  They settled down in the state of Quintana Roo on a beach so white Dooley thought it looked like snow. From an American who called himself Don Orlando, they rented a hut on stilts with a palapa roof and hammocks for beds, just the two of them. Dooley met a local fisherman named Eduardo who was happy to have a partner, and some days Dooley went with him in his boat, beyond the reef. He learned about fish. He met a vaquero, a cowboy, who taught him a bit about horses. He liked the way the horses watched him, quietly. He watched them back. Angela, who knew about massage from her days as an ice dancer, bought a portable table and set up on the beach every morning. She led yoga classes at sunset. They paid their rent and bought food and beer and tequila without having to use either Dooley’s nest egg or Angela’s bank account. They became a part of a community of mostly Canadian and American writers and artists and jewellery makers. Angela called herself a masseuse. When asked, Dooley said he was a fisherman. He was drinking a lot now, and smoking pot all day long, every day, but he told himself it was for the headaches he’d begun having again. He couldn’t stand the pain without drugs and alcohol. Sometimes Eduardo worried that Dooley was going to fall out of the boat and drown, especially beyond the reef, where the sea was rough and threw the boat around. Eduardo had an old life vest that he tried to get Dooley to wear, but Dooley declined. Even had he agreed, the vest looked as though its days of saving anyone’s life were long over.