Twenty-Six

by Leo McKay

“I just told her about my friend in Pictou County who’s the best salesperson in women’s fashions I’ve ever come across.”

  Moving to Halifax was out of the question. Even without discussing it, Jackie knew Arvel would never agree to it. But the phone call from Colleen had been encouraging. The knowledge that she might have an option open to her gave her a little charge, seemed to set her free.

  Jackie was closing by herself tonight. She’d already tied up the garbage and put it in the Dumpster out back. She barred the fire door and padlocked it. She’d straightened all the racks and shelves and run the carpet sweeper through outerwear. At ten fifteen she sat down in fatigue and disgust. There was a woman trying on dresses from the reduced-to-clear rack who simply would not leave. This was the one thing Jackie disliked about selling to the wealthy: they knew that rules were not made for them. Jackie had told the woman at nine thirty that they would close at ten sharp. But this woman was Carmen Denelda, the wife of James Denelda Jr., one of the wealthiest men in the province. Mrs. Denelda spent two-to-three hundred dollars a month in this store alone. The retail conglomerate of which her husband was CEO owned a controlling interest in the mall. She understood that whoever else the mall closed at ten for, it did not close at ten for her. Of course, her demeanour had never been anything but gracious, but if she wanted to try on dresses until ten thirty, trying to find the right one, that is what she would do.

  At 10:21, according to Jackie’s watch, the woman apologized for keeping her late and left without buying a thing. Jackie did a cash-out on the till, filled out the deposit slip for the bank, and locked the money into a night-deposit bag. She took her purse out from behind the register and shut the machine down. With the folding partition that walled off the shop from the rest of the mall closed and locked behind her, she walked the short distance down the hall to the night-deposit slot. There was something spooky and awe-inspiring about a big empty building. Part of what she felt now was the contrast between the cavernous spaces of the mall and the tiny, dingy apartment she was returning home to.

  Even in the dim overhead lighting of the parking lot, her little two-door Datsun showed poorly. You could see from the imbalanced way the car sat on its wheels that the suspension was going. And as she drew nearer, the uneven way the paint was fading gave it a homemade body-filler look, even though this was the original finish.

  She wound the window down a crack and took a spin through the loop in New Glasgow before going home. Maybe she could convince Arvel to take a day trip to Halifax a week from Saturday. She still had not told him about Colleen and the possibility of a job, and if she could convince him she only wanted to do some Christmas bargain-hunting, maybe she could quietly visit Gregor’s in Historic Properties, just to see what it might be like to work there.

  As she was putting the key into the lock, she heard the baby crying. As soon as the door was open a crack, she could tell that it was not a cry at all, but a desperate scream. The stink of booze was in the air. An empty bottle of Captain Morgan lay on its side on the coffee table. Arvel was asleep in the armchair in front of the TV, which was on, but had the volume turned so low she could not hear it over the raging blood in her head. Passed out on the couch, with one dirty sneaker scuffed across the end table beside the couch’s arm, was Alec Morrison.

  Jackie did not stop to take a second look at the drunks in the living room. She rushed into the bedroom and lifted the screaming baby from her crib. She was wet and dirty and hungry. Jackie switched on the light overhead and quickly set about changing the diaper, putting on a new undershirt and sleeper, then wrapping the child in a clean receiving blanket. “There, baby, there,” she said in a soothing tone. Normally she would have fed the child first, but the smell in the room, and the degree to which the wetness and dirt had soaked the clothing and bedclothes, made cleaning the child first priority.

  She put the soiled clothing in a pile beside the covered bucket of clothing disinfectant. She’d rinse it later and add it to what was already in the bucket. She wiped the baby from head to foot with a succession of moist towelettes, rubbed her with a clean receiving blanket, and put on a new diaper and sleeper.

  “Poor baby,” she said soothingly. “Poor baby.” She sat in the rocker and hoisted the edge of her blouse from the waistband of her slacks and quickly touched each breast to judge which held more milk. The baby was crying more quietly since being changed, but she was gasping now, she was so hungry. In the absence of nourishment, she’d begun gulping down air. Jackie unclasped the front closure of her bra and brought the child to her left nipple. It took a minute or two before she would settle in to nurse, but when she began to suck, the apartment went silent.

  Kate nursed for twenty-five minutes on the left side without pausing. To make sure she was still getting milk, Jackie switched her to the right breast, where she nursed a short while longer before falling asleep. Jackie laid Kate momentarily on the bed while she changed the bedding on the crib. With fresh sheets and a blanket in the crib, she curled up and moaned softly in her sleep. Jackie bundled the most heavily soiled items into her arms and brought them to the bathroom sink for rinsing. When all had been rinsed and wrung out, she went back into the bedroom and submerged everything in the disinfectant solution she kept in a covered bucket by the crib.

  She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment and blew out a breath. Then she got up and went into the living room.

  The two drunks were sound asleep and snoring; neither of them had moved since she’d first come in. What she had to say was brief, but she paused a moment and reminded herself to say it calmly.

  She leaned over and thumped Arvel solidly in the chest with the end of her closed fist before stepping back beyond his reach. His eyes snapped open and lolled stupidly in their sockets. When they closed again, Jackie took a step in his direction, thumped him in the same place again, and again stepped back. Arvel began speaking unintelligibly. He shook his head as though trying to get his eyes to focus.

  When he was looking at her and nothing else, Jackie held up her arm and pointed with her index finger at the door.

  “What?” he said, his fogged up brain becoming a little clearer. “What the Jesus are you doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything,” she said. “You’re leaving.” Then, so he wouldn’t have to ask her to repeat it, “You are leaving.”

  Arvel looked at her and then searched the room for a clue as to what was happening. His gaze rested momentarily on the form of Alec Morrison, still unconscious on the couch. He looked at the empty rum bottle on the coffee table. Then he looked back at his wife. “I can … I can … I just …” he said. His brain would not work.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Jackie said. Already she was saying more than she’d planned, more than was needed, more than he deserved. “Just get up out of that chair and get out the door. And take this …” She nodded at Morrison, who in his sleep was beginning to drool down the side of his chin, “… with you, too.”

  “You’re kicking me out of my own apartment.”

  “This will be your apartment when you start acting responsibly. What am I talking for? I’m not going to talk. You’re leaving. There’s nothing to discuss.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “That’s not my concern.”

  Ennis opened his eyes. The room was black. The illuminated face of the clock radio said 12:05 a.m. He wondered what had awakened him. He usually slept like a rock. He closed his eyes and as he began to drift back to sleep, the pounding started up. It was the back door, directly below his bedroom. The knocking shook the panes in the window by the bed.

  Dunya stirred on the bed beside him. She mumbled something he couldn’t make out. He raised himself onto his elbows and swung his feet over the edge of the bed to the floor. A knifing pain shot through his hip and throbbed in one direction all the way up to the middle of his back, in the other direction down to the top of his right knee.

  Tomorrow was a working day. He’d soaked his s
ore muscles in hot water before going to bed and he’d have to do the same thing in the morning to get himself going again. He suffered angina pain, and carried nitroglycerine tablets to help with that. Physical labour was for young men, and in better economic times, he would have graduated right out of the toughest jobs by now. But the workforce at the Car Works had slowly shrunk from a high of well over two thousand, shortly after he hired on, down to a few dozen at present.

  The first-in, last-out policy for layoffs was one he himself had helped negotiate, and he knew it was the only fair way to operate. But it had hard consequences when all the young lads had been let go, leaving men in their fifties, men who had already toiled at the tough jobs for twenty, thirty years, to do the heaviest of the heavy work.

  He had started out driving rivets in the days when welding was considered untrustworthy for the sort of heavy work they did at the Trenton Works. The rivets, about the size of a large man’s thumb, were heated white hot in a stationary forge. A man with tongs worked the forge, picking up the glowing steel and tossing it to the riveter who was working the railcar they were assembling, and who caught the rivets in a dipper and drove them home while they were still white- or red-hot.

  Riveting like that was a lost process now. Welding was fast and cheap and strong enough to replace the finicky old rivets almost completely. Ennis ran a spot welder most days now, a hulking, awkward, dangerous machine that almost tore his shoulder out every time he had to manoeuvre it.

  He put a hand up and tested his aching right shoulder as he limped down the upstairs hallway. The pounding set up again.

  “Hold your Jesus horses!” he yelled. From the bedroom behind him, Dunya shouted some gibberish in response, still asleep. He gripped the railing heavily on the way down the stairs. “This better be good,” he said to himself.

  He’d forgot to turn the outside light on, and when he opened the door all he saw were two young men, stooped over drunk, standing with their hands in their pockets.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ennis said angrily.

  “Dad!” one of the figures said.

  “Arvel. It’s after midnight. People with jobs have to work in the morning.”

  “Jackie kicked us out,” Arvel said without explaining who was with him. “We’ve been wandering all over town, but we’re getting too fucking cold.”

  “Jesus! She’s got two husbands! No wonder she’s giving ye’s the boot in the middle of the night. She’s got to get some rest.”

  Arvel did not ask to come in. He brushed past his father, through the porch, and sat at the kitchen table. Alec followed him.

  In contrast to the well-lit, modern, neatly appointed kitchen in his apartment, his parents’ kitchen was a mixture of colours, patterns, and styles. They’d never been able to afford to redo the whole room at once, so they’d worked an item at a time. The oil stove had been in the house when they’d bought it. The cupboards had been painted one year, the new counter had been added the next, the chrome table and chairs had been added a couple of years later. By the time the wainscoting had been painted, the paint company had changed its palette and they were unable to find a colour that looked right with the cupboards.

  On the kitchen table sat several newspapers, the Globe and Mail, the Chronicle-Herald. Each had holes in the front pages where articles had been scissored out.

  “Hey, Mr. Dressup,” Arvel said to his father. He held up the remains of a sheet that had been clipped. “What are you doing, making a paper tree?”

  “Come right in. Make yourself at home. Start shooting off your big fucking mouth,” Ennis said. He scooped up the papers from the table and took them out to the porch.

  “Ah, fuck it, I’m drunk,” Arvel said. He put his face down in his hands, then raised his gaze to Morrison. “I knew I should have kicked you the hell out of my house when you turned up this afternoon.”

  “Nobody had to pry your lips open to pour it in you, that’s my guess,” Ennis said.

  Arvel looked at his father and held his tongue. He wanted to leave off getting thrown out of houses at the count of one.

  “Listen to your father,” Alec said.

  “You little thief,” said Ennis. He levelled a finger at Morrison. “I had two beer go missing from a box in the porch the last time you were in here. With Ziv. Don’t think I forgot.”

  Alec grinned idiotically. “It couldn’t have been me,” he said. “I’m not old enough to drink.”

  Arvel plonked his forehead against the kitchen table. “What the hell am I doing with this guy?” he said.

  “Birds of a feather,” said Ennis.

  “By my count there are three of us flocked in this fucking kitchen,” said Arvel. “The only reason you aren’t drunk is that you’ve got work tomorrow.”

  “Only reason, nothing,” said Ennis. “I’ve got thirty-fucking-eight years’ seniority down there. You don’t have shit. You don’t have thirty minutes.”

  Morrison chose this minute to stand up and open the fridge. “You got any cold drinks in here?” he said. “Any orange juice? Any pop?”

  Ennis pushed him away from the fridge. “Jesus Christ!” he said. “The nerve! You want something to drink, the tap’s right there.” He pointed at the sink.

  Arvel shook his head and looked at Alec. “This guy! This guy is ruining my life! He got me kicked out of one house already.”

  “He never got you kicked out of nothing,” Ennis said.

  “What do you know?”

  “I’m fifty-four years old. That’s what I know. If you want to know why your wife kicked you out, it’s because you don’t have a job. You think she kicked you out for getting drunk? If you were pulling in twenty-five grand a year she’d be up there right now mixing the rum and Pepsis for you!”

  “That makes a fuck of a lot of sense.”

  “You’re goddamned right it does. If your mother was going to put me out for drinking, I would have been out on my arse in 1955. Women want men to drink. It keeps them out of trouble.”

  Arvel clamped his teeth together and shook his head. He walked into the living room and lay down on the couch. The room tilted slightly, but when he was sure he would not throw up, he closed his eyes. He could still hear his father, his mouth shooting off about something, but he wasn’t listening. It was bad enough he had no choice but to humiliate himself by showing up on the old man’s doorstep in the middle of the night. He did not wish to punish himself further by actually listening to what his father was saying. He rolled over, buried his face in the back of the couch, and drifted off to sleep.

  The bus turned off the highway, descended the ramp, and began the uphill climb that would bring it eventually to downtown New Glasgow. A thick, steel-grey overcast suffused everything with a fading, subdued light. Steam swirled around automobile exhaust pipes, and although no snow appeared to be falling from the sky, powdery wisps puffed up in the slipstreams of cars, tracing a shifting, lacy pattern of white across the dark-grey pavement.

  The towns of Pictou County were all larger than the university town, and had probably grown just as much since the Second World War. But whereas growth in the university town had taken place along with the campus, growth in the towns of Pictou County had come in the waves of the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism, and each bust had left its scars on the landscape. There were abandoned industrial rail lines here and there, their railbeds gone over to weeds. There were old sheds and warehouses, small factories that had been sitting empty since before Ziv was born. There were factories large enough to house a workforce of thousands, in which mere dozens were now employed.

  As the bus pulled off of Provost Street and into the loading zone next to the rear door of the Acadian Lines terminal in New Glasgow, Ziv caught a glimpse of his father standing uneasily against the sandstone wall, waiting for him. When Ziv stepped off the bus, Ennis rolled onto the balls of his feet. His shoulders moved up and forward. The heavy canvas of his coat crinkled in the cold.

  “Is this your only bag?
” he said. He’d been suppressing a smile up to now, but one sneaked out, and once it had appeared, he was unable to wipe it off. He leaned forward and took the knapsack away from Ziv. Neither of them spoke as they made their way across the quiet parking lot. As his father drove from New Glasgow to Albion Mines, a feeling grew in Ziv of having been disconnected, unplugged from the place of his birth. He’d spent his whole life in Pictou County up to four months ago. Before he’d left at the beginning of September, the landscape of Albion Mines and the other towns, these had etched themselves on his mind as something permanent. The whole world, before September, had sloped slowly to the East River. The university town had its own topography that had begun eroding the permanence of the shape of Pictou County in his mind. But the most remarkable changes since September were completely internal. In four months, he’d been exposed to Freud, Pavlov, Marx, Weber, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, and Chaucer. He’d never had an inkling before of how deeply and completely the world had been examined for and shaped by ideas.

  After an intensive two-week period of exams, he emerged from the Acadian Lines bus, his head aswim with notions. The whole universe seemed to have been pried loose from itself.

  His father was talking to him as they drove, had been talking to him since they’d got into the car. But Ziv had not been hearing or listening. Ziv had written his philosophy exam that morning: three hours of rehashing the Sophists to Scholasticism. He had a hand on the dashboard before him and he kept drawing it back and replacing it on the padded surface, each time surprised that his hand did not pass through the plastic, rubber, and metal.

  He knew he was sitting forward in his seat, and that his head was tilted forward on his neck. He knew that the top of his back and shoulders were not touching the seat behind him, and that there was a forward twist in his neck. But his equilibrium was out-of-order. He felt as though he were lying back, far back on a flat surface, his feet elevated above his head, the world pouring through his forehead and directly into his brain.