“That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. He raised his eyebrows. She didn’t say anything for a while. Then: “I’ve been in your apartment when you weren’t there. At night.”
He could pretend to be surprised, offended. But all he said was: “And?”
“I’ve slept there when you’ve been out all night.”
“Benny,” Jeremy said.
“I found a squirrel in your refrigerator.”
Jeremy looked sharply to the window. Shit. “It was hit by a car. I took it upstairs.”
“To put in the fridge.”
“It was alive … and I took it upstairs to try and feed it … to feed it peanut butter. But it died. I felt terrible. I didn’t want to throw it in the garbage. I didn’t know what to do with it. I suddenly thought, you know, maybe I should take it to the park and bury it where it came from. I put it in the fridge to keep it until the next day. That’s what happened. I buried it in Stanley Park.”
She considered this unlikely story for several turgid seconds. Then, slowly, she nodded once. Doubt still read clearly on her features, but also a set of larger concerns that gave her the incentive to let this one go.
“I have a feeling,” she said, moving on to these larger issues, “why Dante likes you.”
“I’m sort of family.”
“It has nothing to do with that. It’s because he thinks the two of you will look good working together.”
She was right, Jeremy thought. Dante did like the idea of them together, the idea of them being seen by the world to be bound in a joint venture. But what grew intense, almost frightening, about this was the follow-up thought that Dante might have liked this idea for years. Conceivably, ever since they had that beer and lobster dinner on his deck those years before.
“More to the point, I know my own role is calculated,” Benny went on, and sensing his interruption she raised a hand to cut it off. “I know this even if you don’t. I was given the job because of what Dante wants from you. To secure your interest. To get your attention.”
Again, she was right, and it crossed his mind to warn her about what this might mean for her own future. “The Risk of the Big Heavy.” But she plunged on.
“What I’m saying is that I need you to be committed. And you wandering off for three weeks, out of touch … you see my problem.”
“You don’t have a problem. I’m committed.”
“I think I know what happens next,” she said. Her eyes were wet. “This is the moment we become just friends. Am I right?”
It was the moment. Maybe she was making it happen but that didn’t change the fact that his feelings for her were already like memories.
They hugged. “I’m a little worried what Dante will think,” Benny said, letting him go.
“I won’t tell him. It’s none of his business.”
She took his house key from her purse and put it on a sawdust-covered windowsill. He took it, pocketed it. Outside she remembered something: “I almost forgot. Philip asked me to give this card to you, for the kitchen. You are to use this for all expenses.”
Amex, platinum. Jeremy Papier, it read, member since 1995. They had apparently forgiven him his previous struggles.
“There will be design team meetings you must attend,” Benny was saying, returning to the refuge of business. “I want you there. Show the commitment we talked about.”
“I said I would.”
“Acceptance,” she continued, more sternly. “Joining. That’s the only display of commitment that will mean something.”
He grew a beard.
“Looks good, Jay,” Caruzo said through a mouthful of toasted baguette, stroking his own chin. The fact was, emblems of commitment aside, it was cold out and a bit of face covering helped. His father was shaggy. Caruzo’s beard reached his chest (he cut it off blunt with a pair of shears). Even Chladek, who made a dandy pretence of shaving once in a while, for the most part had greater concerns and distractions.
The baguette Caruzo was spraying while he spoke was part of the best meal Jeremy had made for them under the worst conditions. There was a late fall wet over everything, even if it was not raining. Jeremy was wearing three sweaters against the chill, two coats and finger gloves, which made impaling the small birds on the green wood skewers a fumbly challenge.
They had originally set out to catch a swan. “Stinky box does it,” Caruzo informed, scratching himself. “Stinky box is all.” He shambled around behind the Second Beach concession and returned with a suitably pungent cardboard box, once used to ship hotdog wieners. Jeremy guessed this particular box of wieners had been left overnight behind the concession stand under a dumpster full of broken pickle jars.
“A swan goes for that smell?” Jeremy said, looking around self-consciously. It was just six in the evening, dusky, but the seawall was still full of scuffling sneakers and the sound of nylon track suits, one leg zipping against the other.
“Believe it or not,” Caruzo said, delighted to have found something Jeremy didn’t know about food, “swans like this smell. Love this smell. OK, so. Here goes.”
They walked to the lagoon and stopped near the rushes at the base of an arched stone bridge. The swans were dipping and preening and retrieving bread cubes tossed from the bridge by a scrubbed couple in new Nikes and soccer warm-ups.
“OK. Come on now,” Caruzo said, impatiently shifting the box from hand to hand and watching them.
Jeremy looked studiously away, a hand up scratching his temple and hiding his face from view.
“ ‘And now I singe …,’ ” Caruzo said finally, under his breath, and before Jeremy could suggest otherwise he mounted the bridge to ask the young couple for change. Or what he actually did was stalk towards them calling in a loud sing-song voice: “ ‘… any food, any feeding. Feeding, drink or clothing? Come dame or maid, be not afraid …’ ”
They didn’t even fumble in their pockets. The young man was already walking, dragging his date behind him. Caruzo was back creek-side, sliding the box across the gravel until it was near the water.
It was an effective technique. The swans redirected as a group and homed in on the unusual smell. One by one they stepped up onto the shore and approached the box, sniffing curiously, until eventually the leader—the largest, fattest male—shooed away the others and climbed into the box himself, flapping his wings proudly. He began rooting, his beak diving into the corners, bobbing in circles.
“I distract him,” Caruzo said. “You kill him. Distract. Kill.”
“Wait,” Jeremy said. But Caruzo was already waving his arms and approaching the boxed swan, which stood higher on his spread black feet. His wings and neck were arching in a ready crouch, beak open and issuing the warning sound that normally preceded a flailing rush, but now, trapped in the box that it had chosen to defend, this hiss only signalled that the swan saw its threat and was committed to its position.
Asselijn’s threatened swan stood like this one, with its feet slightly offset. The beak turned to jab. It was a creature of such beauty, then and now. Made more beautiful by the approach of the outsider, made purer. And had Jeremy lived in Asselijn’s day, he would have waited until the swan turned to face Caruzo in his confusion, and then he would have killed it without remorse. He would have roasted it in a stone oven and served it in fatty pieces on the porcelain plates of his royal masters, on the pewter of the merchant and the officer, and eaten it himself out of a plain wooden trencher.
Caruzo’s arms and hands were outstretched and arched, his neck bent forward, eyes bulging. At the edge of the lagoon the other swans were beginning to bleat and squawk, sensing an impending leadership crisis.
“Caruzo, stop!” Jeremy said, louder.
They walked into the forest silently. After a hundred yards, Caruzo said only: “Little birds?” In the nearby bushes the wrens and robins, the kinglets, sparrows and starlings were flitting and singing in the dusk, preparing for their own tiny morsel of sleep.
He had what they needed back
at his camp, and Caruzo led the way along the boardwalk, past the lily-padded Beaver Lake, alive with bird calls in the weak light, and all the way up the hill as far as Reservoir Trail. There had been a salmon hatchery here that had once provided smolt to Beaver Lake, from where they had migrated yearly to the sea.
Caruzo left Jeremy standing in the middle of a maintenance yard and disappeared into a thick cane of salmonberry. He re-emerged minutes later from a different spot in the brambles with a Safeway bag swinging from one hand. Back at the boardwalk, Caruzo brought out a tin of epoxy, a jar of Squirrel brand peanut butter, a butter knife and a sturdy length of dowel. The dowel was spread first with the glue and peanut butter, then planted firmly in the bank and left extended over the water.
At first they talked only about the hunting, as the birds began their passes. Black shapes dropped from the dusk and strafed the area, looking at the stick and the seated figures with a mixture of bird curiosity and wariness. Jeremy had a strong sense of the day drawing to a close, of the meal that would be its final activity. He felt Caruzo sitting next to him, breathing, at peace.
“Caruzo. The beginning. What’s the beginning of it all?”
A starling touched down, planting both feet. The dowel held, the bird ate, flapping its wings for balance.
“Eden,” Caruzo answered.
“Eden.”
“A departure. A return.”
Clarity or madness. Angelic ramblings. The starling had eaten its fill and tried to fly again. The wings beat but the glue held. Other starlings gathered curiously in the night air, ignoring or unable to interpret the signals, swooping lower and closer. Gathering.
Caruzo fell silent, watching. Then he began again. “Always there had been the voices, Jeremy. Questions and demands. Demands and questions. Mostly demands.”
“Demands for what?” Gently.
Caruzo shifted on the bench next to Jeremy. He considered his answer, whether to answer. “Fire,” he said finally. “Mostly fire.”
There had been a room. A single room with a bed, a basin, not much more than that. He did not remember anything before this room. Any home, family, place, self. There was a man who operated the door to this room. Who brought food, never books or pencils. He was not allowed to smoke in the room. No matches. A room and voices. And while there were voices, Caruzo said, there had always been this room. The room, in turn, brought the voices very near.
Another starling touched down and began to eat. The first went still. A tiny enactment of starling despair.
He left the room for dinners. Once daily. The last time he left the room had been early autumn.
“Leaves just turning, Jay-Jay,” Caruzo said. “Golden. Red.”
He remembered it was meatloaf night. Meatloaf and french fries. They were marched across a courtyard together. He and others. He didn’t remember how many others. Perhaps a dozen.
“A hundred maybe,” he mused.
The voices grew faint in the courtyard. They always did. It was the best part of going to dinner, the fading away of those internal questions and demands just as the sky ballooned above him. Forty-five seconds to cross that courtyard. Forty-five seconds of peace and sky.
In the mess hall, the drop tiles clamped down above their heads and the voices returned.
“Fire,” Caruzo repeated.
He didn’t understand how it started. How it had grown so large. He didn’t think the paper napkin thrown onto the stove had been enough. There had been a small flame, a small guttering yellow flame.
“Shouts and voices. Voices and shouts.”
Then there had been water, a lot of water.
“From a bucket,” Caruzo said.
Jeremy winced.
Something made a very large woof sound, and the flames went from a benign yellow flicker to a great angry sheet of orange with billows of white steam and black smoke. Jeremy recognized the result of a bucket of cold water hitting the hot deep-fryer. Fat would have exploded out onto the surrounding griddles, the flaming stove top, seeped into the ovens.
The next sound was more like boom, Caruzo thought. Voices turned to screams. Nobody could see anything. He ran in the only direction he knew, back the way he’d come. In the courtyard, again. The sky ballooned, the exultant voices grew an increment quieter.
He remembered pausing, looking back. Black smoke was pouring out the mess hall door. And as he watched, the glass broke outward in one of the kitchen windows. Somebody was crawling free.
He ran for a very long time. There were cars and trucks. Buses. People. Many, many lights. Mountains on his right. Buildings on his left. Running, running. The voices very faint.
When he found the trees there had been no voices at all. He held his hands up now to demonstrate the miraculous silence. “No voices,” he said. “Just trees.”
It was time to harvest starlings. Jeremy held the dowel while Caruzo plucked them free. The stick twisted in his hands with the force of the many tiny wings. They caught five in the first ten minutes. In the second ten minutes, they caught fifteen. Afterwards they walked. Caruzo held the burlap sack he’d used to drown the birds. They walked slowly.
“And …,” Jeremy said.
He had been here a week, possibly more. “A month, maybe,” Caruzo said.
In the voiceless silence offered by the forest, he had explored, he had learned about the lay of this land. His first shelter was a stone bridge. His second a hollow log. After he recovered from what sounded like a bad case of pneumonia, he had become serious about fires and shelters and eating right.
Caruzo took a deep wheezing breath now.
The children came from time to time, he said. A boy and girl in matching outfits. They often wore toy helmets with upturned goggles. Played silently or talked in their own language.
“Brothers?” Jeremy tried.
“Brother and sister,” Caruzo said, with unswerving certainty. “Sister. Brother. Playing in the park. Always alone.”
Jeremy stopped walking on the path. He put a hand on Caruzo’s arm. Through four sweaters, it suddenly struck him that the man was very thin. Caruzo shook slightly. He turned to face Jeremy.
“Frankie,” Caruzo said. “Johnny.” After a song he remembered. They made fun of him at first. Kids will. They threw stones. “Hit me here,” Caruzo said with a smile, pointing at his left temple.
Friendship came, as it will between children left alone a great deal. A sudden, unplanned recognition of common interests. A hard and fervid alliance. They lived with their mother, in a rooming house on Burrard Street. Caruzo thought they were poor and that the rooming house was full of women like their mother. Working women. Poor and desperate women who are very often gone. For a month or more the children came, alone always. They played in the woods, a little wild. Caruzo showed them everything that he had found. Secret trails and trees that had fallen in the middle of the forest where nobody ever walked. An abandoned truck rusting back into the soil far from any road. Birds’ nests. Cat bones. Fox dens. Squirrel paths.
They brought him things. Once a cold hotdog. Then a pie, surely stolen. Another time, newspapers. Many other small things to eat or to use. The last item was a quilt with panels of blue like the night sky, a meandering trail of green that repeated itself back and forth across the cloth, and splashes of yellow like constellations and planets. A green land under a night sky.
Then they didn’t come for a while. He worried.
Caruzo’s voice was constricting as he spoke. His face wound and unwound on itself. He chewed at his nailless fingers until Jeremy reached over and put his hand on the old man’s wrist, pulling it down from his mouth.
“They came together again, finally,” Caruzo said. “The three of them.”
He followed them that day. Somewhere in his mind had been the impulse to return to his camp and get the quilt, to return it to the mother, who he imagined was very angry with him for having it. But he had been afraid to leave them. He trailed at a distance instead, an expert by now at walking sil
ently parallel to the path. Ten yards off in the bush and a dozen yards behind.
They walked into the forest through the rose gardens, down Pipeline Road. She pinched a fur coat around herself tightly, angrily, walking quickly after the children. They entered the bush near Beaver Lake. The children ran ahead, jabbering in their strange tongue. But then saying something else. Something he had not heard them say before.
“Caruzo,” he said, beginning to visibly shake now. Whispering: “Caruzo. Caruzo. Caruzo.”
He encountered a fallen tree, doubled back on his tracks to find a better route. He got turned around a second time and then he took the path. Running now.
“Faint voices,” he said. “Just now, faint voices.”
She was lying in the middle of red path, on her back. “The mother, I thought. Frankie and Johnny gone. I knelt down. Just a girl.”
He touched her. He thought for a moment she was dead, and on her forehead he touched her to make a mark with dirt and bless her passage. But when she opened her eyes and sat up sharply, Caruzo had been startled. He ran.
“Ran into the bushes, Jay-Jay. Ran for cover.” He was a quarter-mile away before he remembered Frankie and Johnny.
Caruzo seethed with the memory. His face continued to bunch and relax repeatedly, his shoulders thrusting forwards and back, his neck twisting and releasing. Jeremy’s hand rested on his shoulder while the storm blew through.
He crashed through the bush in no direction, looking for Frankie and Johnny and their mother. “And she did come back. Yeah, she did come back. Here she comes now. She’s scared now, Jay-Jay. No kids, no coat. Blood on her leg, Jay-Jay.”
And with this detail, Caruzo released a single dry sob.
He looked. Then he gave up. Later he looked again, starting at the spot where the girl had been lying. He followed the points of the compass rose from that spot to the water in all directions. It had been north-west, a little under half a mile as the crow flies. A mossy clearing, strewn with leaves. Low brush all around. The trees leaned in but did not touch that soil. She had covered them with her coat. Buried them under a thick layer of leaves. Her shoe lay nearby. The adze.
Stanley Park Page 28
