20

by John Edgar Wideman

  In the morning all was silent. Her head ached, a dull throb like a memory: her brother, alone, crawled a complex of passages, visiting various rooms that all looked the same, one image of collapse after another; outside in the dark hall her parents passed without looking at each other, her father stroking his beard, Mother shriveling inside her black dress; then she saw them seated together at the dining room table, her brother in a black bow tie, using a knife and fork, all lifting glasses, clinking crystal loudly, drinking. Shadows, they stained her body, and she realized they'd taunt her always. She raked her fingers through her hair, lashed out, rolled her eyes, bellowed, had trouble telling one of her limbs from another until the man moved beside her, broke through with noise.

  1990

  LIMBO RIVER

  Rick Hillis

  The bus trip took so long we felt like bugs trapped in a jar. It didn't seem like we were getting anywhere. The windows always framed the same rigid mountain wall, and the same highway unscrolled blackly before us like a river. I slept a lot. My mother awoke me as we passed Frank Slide, the horizon ruined by chunks of rock the size of houses.

  “In the middle of the night,” she whispered to me, “a mountain collapsed and buried the town that was here. There was only one survivor, a baby girl. Nobody knew anything about her, so they called her Frankie.”

  I pictured a mountain splintering like a rotten molar, a baby sitting in an ocean of rock and rubble. Rain was slanting into my window, making the same tinny sound as it had on the roof of our trailer back in Chilliwack. I pictured saucepans in the aisle catching the plink plink of falling rain.

  “Nobody knew anything about her,” my mother said. “Think about that. Total freedom!”

  ————

  The first thing we set eyes on when the taxi dropped us off in front of the Alamo apartments was Marcel. He was sitting on one of three kitchen chairs set out on the lawn. The legs had been pounded into the ground like tent pegs so they wouldn't move, and the grass beneath them sprang up nearly to the seats. Even though it was about seventy-five degrees out, he had on a stained canvas parka with pockets huge enough to hide his beer bottle in.

  My mother pretended to survey the area. Across the street was a park and a river that glistened like foil. The heads of some children bobbed offshore, and water-skiers slalomed around them, peeling off strips of brightness.

  When it became clear Marcel wasn't going to help Mom with the two boxes of belongings she was carrying, she thumped them down on the sidewalk and lit a cigarette. When she was on the wagon she hated drinkers, but she chain-smoked.

  Marcel said, “I don't blame them kids for playing hookey. School's just another prison.”

  Mom said flatly, “Kids belong in school.”

  “Why isn't he then?” Marcel was pointing at me.

  “Good Lord, we just got into town.” My mother looked down at Marcel. “Why aren't you at work?”

  I thought he was sick; maybe that was why he had the parka on, but Marcel said simply: “I'm on welfare.” And as if he read my thoughts: “This coat ain't warm as it looks.”

  My mother raised her chin as if about to sneeze, then patted down her skirt. “Unfortunately we are on welfare ourselves, but not for long. I think it damages the human spirit.”

  “Sure, but it beats working.”

  Mom was flabbergasted, “Work is what makes the world go around!”

  “Work is prison,” Marcel said, adding, “Give me welfare or give me death.”

  Her lips got hard as two bones. “Is that alcohol you're drinking out here in public?”

  She knew darn well it was; she'd served enough of it in her day. But she was fed up, I could see it. This man perched on a kitchen chair on a lawn drinking beer in the middle of the afternoon had my numerous “uncles” written all over him. My mother had earned an aesthetician's diploma from beauty school, and wanted to make a fresh start away from the Marcels of this world. Problem was they were the only type of person who lived in the places we could afford.

  “Is it?” she repeated.

  “Why?” Marcel held the bottle out to her. “You want a swallow?”

  “Oh!” Mom staggered inside with her boxes and Marcel said to me, “Who was that masked man?”

  “Anita Sobchuck,” I said. “She's my mother.”

  “Thank goodness,” Marcel smiled, “for a minute there I thought she was mine.”

  ————

  Marcel swore he'd never done anything wrong in his lifetime. In fact the only reason he wound up in jail in the first place was for drunk driving.

  “I drank for to get free,” he told me, “and then I drove for to get free faster. Someday you'll know what I'm talking about.” It was one of the few things Marcel ever told me that was true.

  Crimped over street signs, squealed around corners up on two wheels, got into fenderbenders. Got his license taken away four times in six months, finally got a jail term.

  “I went and nosed my car into a creek,” he explained, sounding proud. “When the cops winched me out the next morning and made me blow, I still buried the needle!”

  The pen was located out by where the blue vein of river wound through scrub prairie land. During exercise period, Marcel would hook his fingers through the chain link, look out over the river. It wasn't fair to be in there for just burning tire marks into lawns, etcetera, was it? Gusts of wind blew in off the river, pasted the hair to his head. The guards could tell he was shaking it rough, so they told an old con named Pope to go talk to him.

  “Now the Pope,” Marcel told me a few days after we'd moved into the Alamo, “was a recidivist criminal. B&Es, paperhanger, shanked a guard once…he'll die inside, but he's a smart cookie just the same. What he told me was to relax and roll with the punches.

  “‘But I didn't do nothing wrong though,’ I told him. ‘I don't even belong here!’

  “‘You and me both, pal.’ Pope slapped me on the back and said we were here for a good time, not a long time.”

  Marcel and me were sitting on the chairs pounded into the lawn, watching the river. Marcel said he liked to watch it because every day was a different river. The current worked like a knife. Ghostly sandbars rose out of the water, and each night the current would rearrange them, carve them away, or sometimes build on long spines of silt.

  “Here's what the Pope really said,” Marcel told me, “and I pass it on to you, Sean, for your wisdom bank: ‘Society don't like you and has kicked you out. That's why you're here. Take a look around,’ he said, ‘these ain't the first walls you been inside—’”

  I looked over my shoulder at the Alamo, then back out at the river.

  “‘Get wise,’ he told me, ‘roll with the punches.’. I'll never forget him telling me that.”

  ————

  My mom didn't like me hanging around with Marcel, but what else was there to do? Most of the other tenants were at the bar by the time I got home from school, and we didn't have a TV. For a while I swam in the river with the other kids, but then Mom found out they were metis and forbade it.

  “Why?”

  “They're half-breeds.”

  “So?”

  “Ringworm, rickets, head lice,” she said.

  So it was me and Marcel. He told me “Limbo is good for the body and what's good for the body is good for the soul.” Same went for smokey sausages, Player's sailor-cut cigarettes, whiskey, beer, and wine. He said, “In the old days when limbo was big and competitions were held all across the country, and the prizes were booze, nobody bought liquor when Marcel Gebege was in town.”

  And he limboed for me once in a while. Put a yardstick across the mouths of two forty-ounce whiskey bottles, spread his feet wide, and crab-walked underneath, hopping on the bolts of his ankles. I was only eight or nine at the time, and could bend like a pipe cleaner, but I couldn't get as low as Marcel. He got snakebelly low.

  He told me how a cell is a bowl about the size of an empty head. That's how teeny his thinking got
in jail. He said, “In jail, time is slow and quiet as a bowl of water. If you look into it you can see things. For instance, I sense your Mom doesn't really like me, does she?”

  “I guess not.”

  “That's OK. Most people don't. Do you like me, Sean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you would. You remind me of myself at your age. A bit of a loner.”

  ————

  The reason Marcel drank at home instead of in one of the bars across the river was because he was having an affair with the woman who lived across the hall from him, Rhonda Bighead. I already knew plenty about hanky-panky, so it didn't take long to figure it out. When Rhonda's old man would go to the bar, Marcel would watch until he was on the far side of the bridge, then he'd peel his rear end off his kitchen chair and say: “Excuse me, I think I'll repair to my place for a nap.”

  Rhonda's old man's name was Ralph. He had arm muscles like big baloney rolls and his teeth were all punched out from bar brawls.

  Mom was furious when she learned about Marcel and Rhonda. She was having a lot of trouble finding a job as an aesthetician and was smoking more than ever, which cost money.

  “That bitch is using him!” she cried at me one night. Mom had gone down to the laundry room and saw Marcel's phone cord snaking out from under his door, across the hall carpet, disappearing under Rhonda's.

  “She's just after him for his phone!” Mom insisted. I think she was jealous for not getting the idea first. Plus Marcel wasn't a bad catch. He was about fifty-five but he looked forty and seemed quite healthy for drinking all the time.

  We didn't have a phone ourselves because we couldn't afford the deposit yet, and this made it hard for Mom to fill out applications for work. Another thing was, we didn't know anybody, and sometimes we felt stranded without a phone. It made Mom's blood boil to think of that slut Rhonda Bighead having a heart-to-heart with somebody on Marcel's phone when we didn't have a phone to use, or a soul to call up even if we did.

  ————

  The river started to drop. In some places it looked more like a highway than a river. Marcel told me when the ice goes off a river, it makes a sound like somebody standing behind a hill with a handgun.

  “One of the stupidest things I ever did,” Marcel told me, “was try to escape from the pen. I climbed the fence in the night and found myself on the river ice. It was April and the ice was breaking. It started to crack up and I was leaping floe to floe, ice swirling all around me like broken bottles of rye. I could have gone under at any time, the ice would have closed over me, and I would have drowned. But I'm lucky that way. I just keep pulling up aces. What's the stupidest thing you've done so far?”

  I had taken money from my mom's purse and had shoplifted, but before I could answer, Marcel said, “Too many to pick from, huh? Well, let me tell you about the lowest I ever got. You got a minute?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, listen and you might learn something. This was up in Fort Steele where I was working—last job I ever had. Anyways, one night I get this phone call. Come to Vancouver right away. Your son's been scalded. He was about two or three years old at the time. He'd be about your age now, I guess. Anyway, his mother'd put him in the tub to sleep and somehow he turned on the tap and scalded himself and drowned—”

  He looked at me and wiped his mouth.

  “—What was I supposed to do? I went to the airport, but they said: no seats left. Lookit!—I need to get back for my little boy's funeral tomorrow! Don't raise your voice at me, the ticket woman said, what a bitch. Anyways, so I go into the little lounge they got there at the airport, and I'm telling this story to the bartender when this lady at the bar—a real good looker, kind of looked like your mom—says I can have her seat.

  “About two minutes later an announcement comes over the loudspeaker: Seats available on flight to Vancouver, seats available. So I don't need her ticket, but I'll be damned if me and this woman don't end up sitting beside each other on the flight. We have a few drinks, and when we land in Vancouver we go to a bar in Gastown, a real nice place. Anyways, we're not there half an hour when a brawl starts and I'm sucked into it. When the cops come to bust it up, they check my ID and it turns out I got a warrant out on me for not paying alimony, so they take me downtown and lock me up. Next morning I'm up before the judge. I say, ‘Your honor, sir, I am a few months behind in alimony—true—but I have come for my little boy's funeral, and I have money to cover the alimony.’ The judge looks at me for a minute. Then he says: ‘Release this man. He should never have spent the night in jail. Take him out right now, and when he hits the front doors: immediate release!’”

  “Immediate release,” I repeated dumbly. I wondered about the boy. Did he turn on the tap with his toes, or what?

  “That's the kind of guy I am,” Marcel said. “Lucky.”

  ————

  One night after school, I was in the laundry room folding shirts when I heard Ralph's voice booming through the wall.

  “What do you care?” Rhonda screeched in return. “Marcel is your friend, too!”

  Holy shit. I pressed my ear against the wall. Furniture was sliding across the floor, dishes shattering. I recognized the sound of somebody being thrown around and slapped the way Mom sometimes hit me for doing things that bugged her. She never meant to do it, but she got frustrated with my behavior sometimes. Later she would cry about it and say, “Let's forget that ever happened, OK Sean?” Sniffing back tears, hugging me. “Let's start fresh, OK honey?” And we would. For a while things would be fine, but it always happened again. So what?—I knew my mother loved me and never meant to hurt me.

  I heard a terrible scream, then nothing.

  It scared me so I ran upstairs, but I knew Mom wouldn't be home. I sat for a minute in the quiet apartment, then descended the steps and knocked on Rhonda's door.

  “What do you want?” Ralph barked.

  “This is Sean from upstairs?”

  “You better come in here, man.”

  Rhonda's arm had been opened up with a butcher knife. Also her back from when she must have tried to get out the door. She was laying on her side on the floor, eyelids flickering like she'd been woken up and was trying to get back to sleep. I tried to back out the door, but Ralph started crying.

  “What was I supposed to do?” he pleaded. “I love her.” He was sitting on the couch staring into space. “You better call Diamond Cab.” He pointed at Marcel's phone, on the carpet just inside the door.

  They were piling into the cab to take Rhonda to the hospital when two police cruisers closed in front of the Alamo, cherries pulsing the dark river. Somebody else must have phoned them and there they were, cuffing Ralph, pushing him by the head into the back seat.

  An ambulance blinked up and one of the attendants got out and snapped down the legs on a gurney. “Where's the victim at?”

  A tall cop said, “What victim? The victim of history and circumstance or the one he just carved up?” He laughed.

  Rhonda wheeled around, bandage on her arm bright. “Don't you fuck dare talk about him!”

  In the rear of the cruiser, Ralph was swimming back and forth across the dark blue cage, slamming the windows, the wire mesh.

  ————

  Marcel immersed himself in booze. He drank like a man taking off his clothes and getting into a pool of water. Floating the way a heart floats in a chest. That's how depressed he was.

  “Rhonda's cut me off,” he said to me, “but I still let her use my phone. What the hell. Know what I mean, Sean?”

  “Kind of, I guess.”

  “Well if you don't, you will soon enough. You know what I just noticed about you?” Marcel said. “You're kind of quiet the way I was when I was a kid.”

  I never felt quiet. I just thought nobody ever listened to me.

  “I'll tell you something you probably won't believe, but when I was your age—and this is just between you and me, OK?—I had a club foot that since has been repaired by su
rgery. Would you believe I spent every recess of my school life over by the playground fence, looking out at the street so I wouldn't get a soccer ball bounced off my face?”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely.” He patted his chest with the palms of his hands. “And look at me now. The sky's the limit. You'll see.”

  A few days later Marcel presented me with a bike, an expensive BMX. It wasn't new, but Marcel said it was even better than new since it had already been broken in. He'd found it in the river and used a solution to clean off the rust.

  He said he was crossing the bridge on his way to the Shamrock bar when he caught something glittering in one of the pools. He couldn't believe it: a bicycle, the chrome rims glinting like a pair of eye glasses.

  Maybe somebody stole it and threw it off the bridge when the water was high. Or maybe it happened during winter and had spent months on the ice covered in snow. Poor people were always going out onto the ice and falling through. They fell through cracks and were swept away by the current, never to be heard from again. The mounties didn't even bother to look for them until spring when they could drag the river. By then the victims were misshapen balloons hung up in debris after spending all winter locked in their frozen bodies under the ice.

  That night, on his way home from the Shamrock, Marcel stumbled down to the river, over the sandbars, and waded the shallow water to the pool. He stripped off his shirt and pants and slipped in. He said he felt superhuman: doing it for me because a boy my age should have a bike.

  He floated on the surface, looking down at the round lenses of the wheels. That's when he saw them—blue shapes darting, flashing in the blackness.