Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

  Upstairs, a woman named Belinda lived with her daughter Maggie. She was Vye’s ex-girlfriend, and had to get up every morning at five to go across the river to work. And Ralphie, though he tried to keep everyone quiet at night, could never seem to manage it. Every time the woman saw him, she fixed him with a cold stare, and then ran upstairs, two steps at a time. And at night she would take a broom and pound it on the floor. She could not afford to move out, and the landlord never acted on her complaints or on the complaints of anyone else either.

  In the afternoons, Belinda would trudge up the stairs with her groceries. With the entrance door propped open with a stick she would haul the flour up the steps as snow swirled over the welcome mat. Then she would go back down and haul the potatoes up past Ralphie’s doorway where the girls would be standing waiting for Ralphie to get home and let them in. Belinda would get the box of canned goods, and then begin to carry the bags. All the while, the girls would stand at the door with morose faces. Once, as Belinda passed them, one of the girls ran down to the entranceway and kicked the stick out of the door and rushed back up the stairs. Once, when the woman had to leave a bag of flour on the second-floor landing while she went up to the third floor to open her door, Cindi, Ruby, and Janet kicked the flour back down the steps.

  “Who did that?” the woman said.

  “We don’t know – it fell by itself.”

  “It did not.”

  “Did so.”

  “Did not.”

  “So – it fell by itself – it flopped over by itself, if ya wanta know.”

  “I can’t afford to waste flour,” the woman said.

  “Then don’t waste it,” Janet said. “No – don’t go bout wasting it.”

  When Belinda went up to her apartment and when she came back down she told them she had telephoned the police. She wore an old dress too tight for her legs, a big sweater, a lime-green woollen winter coat. Vye had promised to marry her at one time, and she had been hoping he would.

  Because she always said she telephoned the police, and the police never came, the girls laughed. Just at that moment Adele came up the stairs: “There’s Del, there’s Del,” they all said, with more excitement than usual, as if she would immediately know what was going on, and immediately recognize the hilarity of the situation.

  Adele had no idea what was going on, but at the moment believed she did, and that it was hilarious. She burst out laughing and put her hands over her mouth. The smell of late afternoon pervaded the walls, and in the half-dark apartment building they had the feeling that this was the best place to be.

  Even though Adele finally had friends now, she still became constipated and couldn’t sleep, and then she became afraid that Ralphie liked Cindi, or Ruby, or even Janet, more than he liked her. She became scared that this is what the girls wanted. She remembered how Ruby once put her arm about him and laughed and winked. Every time Adele lay down to go to sleep, she saw that wink.

  In many of the things his friends said, Ralphie felt at a loss to argue with them, not because he agreed with them, but because he was only sure that he wasn’t sure one way or the other. And sometimes he took a stand on things that were particularly contradictory to others in the apartment.

  One of the great debates was that this generation had somehow not only invented drugs, but that everyone who did drugs was more aware of life. Ralphie – with his bottle of Paarl brandy and his father’s old coat, coming back from a meeting with his mother where she cried and was angry with her dead husband because the fence boards were loose at the back of the house – would say that he didn’t know if that was true.

  This was the idea of certain people who came to his apartment, which gave rise to the idea, with the town police, that his apartment was a commune, and the place was raided twice in a month.

  That the police could and did pick Ralphie up allowed his mother’s neighbours to sympathize with her, and to feel a little gleeful that such a smart aleck – which is what they considered Ralphie to be once this happened – was getting his comeuppance.

  Once, the band that played at the rink dropped in after their performance and brought in some booze, and word got around that there was a party at Ralphie’s. He himself didn’t hear about it until he was walking home from his mother’s.

  Ralphie soon found, at a hundred and twenty-seven pounds, and wearing a great big cowboy belt, that he was not able to take care of the apartment the way he should, and whenever he visited his mother, she would always ask him to come home before he got into trouble.

  The drapes and the furniture in Thelma’s house were white. The coffee table was made of heavy glass, with round glass coasters on it. There was a smell of faint cigarette smoke in the air, but it never seemed to be in the room you were in.

  Thelma would talk to Ralphie, about having to do something with his life, and having to think of his father, who had wanted him to go into law. “All as he wanted you to do, was to do something with your life,” she would say to him. Her biggest disappointment was her daughter Vera, and she did not want Ralphie to be a Vera!

  “You know, Ralphie, that it isn’t any kind of life to hang around downtown – that can only lead to trouble. We have one girl now who does that. We have one girl who didn’t even come to his funeral. We have one girl already, Ralphie, who travels about with hippie people and has lived in a commune and was married and divorced. We have one girl now, Ralphie, like that –”

  Then she would look at him, breathe deeply, and return her gaze to the far side of the den.

  Sometimes he would go and visit his mother and bring Adele along with him. Her house was beyond the tracks, above Myhrra’s trailer, and it would loom up sorrowfully in the night air. There was a stream that ran through some dying bushes behind it, and an old swing sat in the trampled grass. The fence boards were loose and rattled in the wind, the brick made the windows look blank, and though the front yard had been landscaped, there was an unfinished quality to it. The garage was huge and smelled of chipped paint. Adele and he would sit out on the swing, which was hidden from the wind, and sometimes you could see her unbuttoned coat flapping. There was a smell of iron in the autumn evening, the pervading scent of apples in the darkening lanes.

  Beyond the swing, on the other side of the shed, which was brand new and had nothing in it but a lawn hose, beyond the trampled garden, too, there was a small enclosure where they used to go after school to get away from everyone. Adele would sit on Ralphie’s knee and eat carrots – which she constantly did for her eyes because she was afraid of going blind. Ralphie would put his hands up under her coat, and down the top of her elastic pants to keep them warm, and Adele, tapping her feet and chewing carrots, would worry about her teeth going bad and her eyes getting strained from looking at the blackboard. There would be wind along her legs, and the smell of frost in the upturned earth, earth that had amongst the stones the hardness of turnips.

  Joe Walsh started working when he was fourteen. He joined the navy just after his seventeenth birthday, and was a diver on the HMCS Yukon. One time, because of a remark made by the Chief Petty Officer about someone Joe knew, Joe threw him down the teak-wood stairs leading to the galley. He was sent off to jail because of this. The Chief Petty Officer said it was an unprovoked attack, and Joe, stubborn – and with a trait that men often have, who believe that if they are stubborn they are right – refused to speak or to defend himself. He then got fed up with the navy and came home. He married Rita, while all of those that knew her wondered why she would bother with him. They had two children.

  It was in his nature to drink, and he had to drink – he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t. To be what he was – what image he had of himself – it was only natural and authentic that he do so.

  He crossed the line after he was thirty, that is, he fell under a tractor while fighting a fire. He was laid up for almost a year – periodically. And finally lost his job, and got drunk every day. Every time he drank, Joe would resolve to quit. Sitting about
the tavern, or down at the wharf, or working outside around the house, or hobbling once again to the liquor store through a variety of streets, as if he was making for himself some obstacle course and really wasn’t thinking of the wine he was about to buy, he would resolve to quit.

  He would take his bottles down to the bank and throw them over – only to climb down after them in the middle of the night. The bank was about sixty yards from their back door, which faced the river. There were small spaces of grass and alders where men and women hid away in the afternoons to drink – old veterans and girls who had grown up to go nowhere, and ended up at fifty somehow still in print dresses, their hair clasped by some silver broach. Joe often hopped down there to drink with them, and they would sing some songs together. And sometimes one of his friends, a salesman from the Gaspé, who always had a bottle in the trunk of his car, would come along. Joe would bring him into the house, and the man would try to get Adele to call him Uncle Pete. Then in the morning Joe wouldn’t be able to stare himself or anyone else in the face. He would sit out in the porch, with his chair turned about facing the wall, while Rita and Adele walked out the door to church.

  Once in January in his bare feet, he walked down over the bank and stepped on a broken wine bottle, cutting through to a tendon. After this his left foot bothered him also, and he found that he could no longer get a job full time – but only part-time doing odd jobs. For a while he took a job with a local finance company repossessing furniture. He would go into houses and while children cried in bewilderment and men swore at him and threatened him, and women both yelled and pleaded, outside the days were bright, and the heat played down like a vapour on the steps, and dandelion heads lay tousled in the fresh-mown grass. He would take away chairs and couches – and feel sick of himself and the world. After a while he gave almost everything up, except drink.

  Because of his difficulty, Rita had to start fending for herself at a time when it wasn’t as accepted or as natural for women to go out to work. At this time, for a woman to work meant the family had somehow fallen. That is, the very women who today were saying that a woman’s career was indispensable were quite prepared to stay home then, because staying home was as much commonplace as working now is. But Rita, and a thousand Rita’s like her, worked every day.

  Joe remained in this phase of his drinking for seven years. Pledges from the priest didn’t solve matters, even when Father Dolan walked in telling Joe he would go to hell – if hell was not where he already was – while Rita sat in the corner, her breasts heavy, and Joe, who towered over the priest, nodded like a child.

  Joe managed to stay away from the hospitals and clinics, and managed to stay clear of anyone who suggested they might have a solution for his drinking. In those days he hated the AA and the detox with a passion, and cursed every time they were mentioned. He also looked at Rita at this time as if he was blaming her for something that no one else understood.

  Some nights they would find him alongside the ditch, as far away as Ridge Road, with his coat and mittens on, alone in a snowbank. Adele became coolly efficient at spotting his huge somewhat misshapen back against the long evening sky.

  Then he gave it up for three months.

  One night, after that three months, when Rita needed him to baby-sit, his nerves were bad; that is, she was going out with people he felt had made fun of him and he felt one drink would make everything all right.

  Well, all I need is one drink, he thought to himself. One beer. What’s a beer – it is nothing – a beer is nothing – it’s not going to be like last time – yes last time –”

  And with these thoughts he went back and forth and looked out the window nervously – convinced at this instant that he would not drink. Or if he did everything would be different.

  He had promised Rita he would baby-sit Adele. Rita was helping to make props for the Christmas play, she was pregnant with Milly. She had tried to get Joe interested in the Christmas play because she knew as long as he was working he would not drink – and Rita perhaps could also sense a drunk coming on.

  It was getting close to Christmas and Joe had always found staying sober at Christmas impossible.

  “Keep care of Delly – I’ll keep care of Delly – no problem.”

  Thinking of a drink he was accustomed to the immediate fear that was now associated with this thought – and then the overwhelming security that he had been dry for three months – and that one beer wouldn’t hurt.

  One beer is not going to make the difference between life and death, he thought. The fact that Rita did housework for people who had no respect for him suddenly came to mind and made him angry.

  He woke up Adele and put her in the half-ton and headed to the tavern. He had stolen the Christmas money that Rita kept in the kitchen drawer, but he only planned to use a small amount of it, and he proceeded to buy two draft, while Adele waited out in the truck. He stared at them for an hour – almost, he was sure – resolved to not drink them.

  Later that night he made it back home – up over the bank with stars sparkling off the snow, singing an old Irish song he’d learned on his ship, remembering a fight in Vancouver, and forgetting completely about the truck, or Adele sitting in it.

  Rita was still a young woman and there were men, who for obvious reasons thought she was easy, or available. That is, they assumed concern for her, because they could condescend to her husband. To make matters worse, they often pretended that they liked Joe, and that they wished to include him in what they did. Joe would sometimes find himself going somewhere with Rita, and feeling that she was embarrassed he was there.

  Joe felt, only rightly, that it was not him they wanted, it was her, and though he didn’t tell Rita this, the same stubbornness he had when he had thrown the Chief Petty Officer down the stairs came over him.

  As it happened, every six or seven months Myhrra would find new friends. And so, caught up with new friends, Myhrra didn’t come to the house very often. Sometimes, feeling obligated, she would drop in, sit down in the chair for a moment, and then she would be out the door after a cup of tea.

  One always knows how a family feels toward you by how the children react to your presence. It was invariable that Adele and Milly were now scared stiff that Myhrra would leave once she got there, or that she would stay only a certain amount of time, or that Joe or Rita, who seemed to have no one coming in at all anymore, would do something to make her leave. Adele would always try to tell some jokes to lighten everyone up, and Milly would tell these jokes right after her. Myhrra would sit there listening, in her blue slacks and kerchief, and then, just at the punch line (or so it seemed to Adele), she would get ready to leave. No matter how fast she told her joke, or no matter what style she told it in, or no matter how Rita sat, Myhrra would (it seemed to Adele) be unable to get the punch line.

  The whole family felt they had done something wrong. One night Adele saw a group of cars in Myhrra’s yard.

  “Go on up, go on up,” Adele said to Rita, excitedly. “I’ll baby-sit, I will I will. Go on up, they’re probably playing auction or something.”

  “I’ll behave – I’ll behave,” Milly screeched, running about the house. “I’ll behave –”

  Rita got dressed and went out, only to come back a few minutes later. When Adele pestered her she got angry.

  “They’re having a bridge party up there,” she said. “I’m not going to intrude on a bunch of ladies sitting down to play a game of bridge. I have a load of ironing to do as it is.”

  “Ha, you could beat any of them,” Adele screamed, throwing a sudden tantrum and throwing a dishcloth over Milly’s head, and then kicking a chair.

  “I haven’t played bridge in my life,” Rita said.

  And then for some reason Adele got doubly angry at this.

  Rita, with her loose top and her ponytail and her scuffed shoes, smiled and asked Adele and Milly to help her make divinity fudge, but Adele went upstairs instead and played an old Beatles record, while Milly stood at her d
oor begging her to come out.

  It was a tradition for Myhrra to take Adele for a drive on Tuesday afternoons. On one particular day Myhrra was quieter than usual, and Adele, sitting on the passenger side of the car and staring out the window at the river, past houses and fields, tried desperately to think of something nice to say, but every time Myhrra glanced at her she would promptly look at her boots.

  Myhrra stopped on a lane and looked at the field with some apple trees in it She got out of the car and stayed outside for a long time, leaning against the hood and staring, smoking one cigarette after another. It was the field that she and Mike, her ex-husband, had at one time owned, and which they sold during their divorce.

  “Do you want me to come outside, My?” Adele said, rolling down the window half an inch. “What are you thinking about?”

  “H’m?”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing so much.”

  “I have to pee, My.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I have to real bad. My back teeth are floating about, the school bus has already gone down river.”

  “I know, I know, Delly dear. Just a moment, I have to pee too.”

  Another few minutes went by and Myhrra stayed exactly where she was, with the red kerchief she wore blowing up in a gust of autumn wind, and the smell of pebbles.

  “I was invited to your house for supper tonight, Delly hon, but I can’t go. Tell your mom I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  Adele looked at the big rabbit paw on the mirror and stroked it for good luck.

  Myhrra didn’t visit them for some time, spending more time with her friends from across the river. One night just after Rita had closed the drapes, they heard Myhrra’s car turn in their yard, and blow the horn, but no one this time went to the window.