Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  WALT

  A NOVEL

  Russell

  Wangersky

  Copyright © 2014 Russell Wangersky

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Distribution of this electronic edition via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyrighted material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author’s rights.

  This edition published in 2014 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wangersky, Russell, 1962-, author

  Walt / by Russell Wangersky.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-467-9 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-77089-468-6 (html)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A5333W34 2014 C813’.6 C2014-902743-5

  C2014-902744-3

  Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

  Cover image: © Christian Adams / Getty Images

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  For Leslie

  Chapter 1

  We needs

  Cereal

  Bread

  Choco & White Milk

  Cat

  Yougurts

  Toilet paper

  Deorant

  Shampoo

  Oranges

  Banans

  Hard to forget a list like that — hard to forget the girl, too. Her name’s Alisha. Skirt right up to there, the kind that makes you wish you could be somewhere nearby and watching when she finally has to sit down. Just to see how she’d manage it, scissoring those long legs at the knees without showing you anything else. Not getting caught looking, of course. But if you’re not supposed to be looking, then why’s she wearing it, anyway? Her hair dark and short and cut in tight next to her face, and she’s got that beautiful-girl way of looking back at you when she does catch you staring — I’m not saying she looks right through you, but that somehow she looks right around you, as if light rays can be bent and you’re the kind of a person that she just doesn’t need to be seeing right now.

  And you know she’s not single, it’s right there in the note that she’s got to be part of a couple — that’s easy to figure with We needs right there at the top. She dropped the list by the bin at the cash registers, the one that’s usually full of torn coin rollers and the receipts that people shed before they’re even out the door. Just try returning the wrong-sized batteries without that receipt, mister. I already know her name, and her Facebook says she’s “In a relationship,” too, but I’m getting way ahead of myself.

  Timing is everything — I empty the bins almost before there’s anything in them, so connecting the scraps of paper to the people who discarded them is easier than you might think. And her note, tossed down there, well, the spelling’s a mess, and the banans makes me wonder if she’s French or European or in some other way just not from here. The cat part gets me, too, because she doesn’t look like a pet person. Not at all like a pet person, not like she’s ready for the mess or the bother.

  There’s something about the way she’s done up that makes you think she’s not going to put up with something that’s going to always be shedding or hooking your clothes with its claws.

  “Done up like a stick of gum.” That’s the saying, whatever that’s supposed to mean. She’s all about the clothes, right down to the way she opens one button on her coat, just the right button, when she swings her legs into the cab. Always a cab, too, and that’s gotta add up to some coin for sure — five bucks each time even if you’re barely going around the corner, and who always has five bucks to throw away?

  Kev told me where she lived when I asked, because he drives for Co-Op — the yellow ones that always pick her up — and I’ve known Kev since he was five, so it’s not like he’s going to keep something as harmless as a name and a neighbourhood away from me. Little two-storey house, one in from the corner, white with rusty-coloured trim, and when you look inside from the front, even if you’re staring from across the street, you can see there’s art up on the walls, and the cat looks out the front window almost all the time, sitting there like it’s stuffed, or more like everything outside is a movie it’s barely interested in.

  After that, bit by bit, it wasn’t that hard to track down more information.

  I go on the Internet and check Facebook to see if she’s put up any new pictures. She likes pictures of herself, likes putting them up. I’m not her Facebook friend or anything — I’ve never asked to be; she doesn’t even know I’m out here — but she doesn’t have all the privacy stuff done, and I think that maybe she likes the idea of someone having a look at her stuff, like it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be noticed or desired remotely.

  Well, she must like it, judging by the pictures she puts up. Once, one of her in the shower — dressed in a T-shirt, all right, nothing perverted or anything. But she was in the shower, the water streaming down so that it looked like long threads, like she was surrounded by a tepee of straws or something. It’s crazy. Her friends leaving notes right there under it, like it’s so ordinary that everybody does it every day, piling into the shower and letting the water come down on you until your clothes are clinging.

  I go in every day or so just to see if she’s got another picture up there, and what it is she’s doing this time. It’s addictive enough. It always makes me wonder when she’ll be back to the grocery store.

  You probably think a grocery store is big and anonymous, with its ruler-straight aisles of canned goods and pet food and laundry soap. And it is — to a point. Anonymous to the point that there’s no real personality to it, no matter how hard they might try to make you think it’s a neighbourhood or something. Because neighbourhood’s in your head.

  The store’s anonymous until you’ve lived somewhere long enough to start making familiar paths, until you start making routes from here to there so that you carve your own small space out of the bigger place.

  With a city, you make your trails by choice. Same flower shop where you always get flowers, same Thai place for hot and spicy soup, same video store where you know almost every single one of the titles and where they’ll be on the shelves. Anonymous is nice, but it’s better when at least a few people behind the counters start to recognize you, when they give you that smile and nod that says you’re familiar, maybe even read the patch on your shirt and start calling you “Walt.”

  It’s the same in the store, the way you learn your place. The way it turns out you like the same cereal as the stock guy with the black hair, the way you learn you can be saucy with the cashier with the piercings and she’ll be saucy right back, whether or not there’s a manager lurking around.

  Maybe the first time you’re here — maybe the first ten times — you’re a stranger to me, but come in often enough and I’m going to start remembering you. I’m good with faces. Anyone can be, if they see someone enough. Think about it: there’s a red-haired girl here who’s always working the flower counter. I bet you’re probably picturi
ng her right now, and you probably even know the way she usually does her hair — always pulled back, isn’t it? — and you know that because you’ve got to go by her counter with your cart on the way to the parking lot every time, and there she is, almost every time.

  Well, it’s a two-way street. Maybe your coat’s familiar. Maybe it’s your hair, or the way your mouth smiles but you manage to keep your eyes diffuse, unfocused. After a while, you’re familiar even if no one makes an effort to point you out.

  You’re familiar, and the things you always put in the cart are familiar, too.

  Some people make a different kind of mark. The brusque ones and the cold ones who can’t even bring themselves to smile back when you make a particular point of smiling at them — they’re bad enough, but there are worse.

  Me, I can’t stand the people who think they own the place. It’s stupid, I know, because it shouldn’t mean anything to me. Not my problem, not my profits. But the ones who just pick up a bunch of grapes and eat them as they go, the ones who peel a banana and stuff it in their mouth, leaving the emptied peel in their cart before they’ve even paid for it — I can’t help but get angry with them.

  Can’t help wanting to go right up to them and set them straight.

  It’s like someone walking in through your front door without saying hello and going straight to your fridge.

  Someone did that at my parents’ house, years ago. They were having a party, and I opened the door when the bell rang. A man walked right by me, down the hall, and into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and had a good look around at the beer and the single bottle of white wine lying on its side, and when he turned to me, the very first thing he said was “Have you got any Coke or what?” It’s stuck with me ever since, so maybe I’m just overly sensitive. And I know you’re going to say that the store isn’t my house, that it’s not my food, but I kind of feel like it is, in a way, with the number of hours I spend here.

  I’ll cut you some slack if you’re in a rush or something, if something about you says hurried and harried and unable to keep it all together. If you’re so pressed that it looks like you don’t even have any idea what you’re doing. It’s different if you just don’t care, if you drop scraps of trash from your pockets or your purse right there on the floor just past the broccoli. The amount of balled-up tissue I pick up in the run of a week would simply amaze you. And I know some of it is accidental, stuff just falling on the floor when your hands come out of your pockets, and that some of it is because people are always in a rush. But a lot of it isn’t.

  If I think you just don’t give a damn, if I’m sure you’re doing it on purpose, I’ll give you the hard stare — as if that makes any difference — and I’ll also make it my business to follow you around the store after that, as if I’m supposed to be keeping tabs on you. Not much more I can do than that.

  But it’s strange how unsettling some people find that — some middle-aged guy trailing them through the grocery store, just daring them to drop something else.

  You wouldn’t believe what people do. I’ve found fresh chicken breast quarters left high and dry on a tideline of popcorn packages in the snack aisle, and it’s not like you can just look at them, shrug, and put the package back in the cooler.

  You don’t know for sure how long something like that has been there. If it’s not cold — and I mean really cold, like I’ve found it right after someone changed their mind and dumped it there — then I have to throw it out, and it goes down in inventory as “shrinkage,” which is, on the accounts, in exactly the same place as shoplifting.

  And the thing is, you’re paying for it anyway. You and everyone else, paying because you’re too lazy to go back and put away something you didn’t want after all. It’s built right into the price. Everything’s built in there, right down to the wages of the guy who’s picking up your used tissues. Me. You just don’t see me spelled out word for word on your grocery receipt.

  Maybe you should.

  Because it’s funny how quickly out of sight can become out of mind.

  Chapter 2

  Sept. 26 — Dear Diary: Is that stupid or what? So maybe not a diary really — just keeping track. Writing stuff down to see if I’m blowing things out of proportion. Rain today. Got groceries. Fed the cat. Called Mom, and she asked about Daniel — again — like always, asking if we are getting serious. So here’s the short version of chapter and verse on Alisha Monaghan; all boring. I wish I was writing about moving to France to teach English as a Second Language or starting to work on a master’s degree or having sex on a train or something. If anyone read this, what would they have? A detailed record of just how dull my life is. Wake up, go to work, buy groceries. I mean, I’m twenty-five years old — a quarter century, if you want to look at it that way. I should have things sorted out by now. I should be getting on track. I should be working in another province, living a bigger life — except my parents would still want me to come home for dinner every Sunday. A degree in French and Spanish, and I’m living in a province with almost no use for either of them. I can just see my future, everything stretching out one plodding step at a time, achieving nothing but surviving. That’s not enough. And something else — I’m writing this part down because I can’t shake it. Just a feeling, but almost constant. You know that “not alone” thing they always talk about in ghost stories? That first clue before the scary stuff actually starts? That’s where I am, all shook up and nervous, and I have no idea why. For weeks now I’ve been on edge, looking over my shoulder, second-guessing. Twenty-five years old and I’m worried about the bogeyman. I wish I could shed the feeling, because it’s just plain stupid.

  Chapter 3

  garlic (minced)

  Russets

  sour creme

  Oranges

  chips

  gatorade

  Sometimes, you just don’t get enough to figure anything concrete out. Part of a meal, maybe, certainly only a fragment of a life. But I’m good at fragments of life.

  I look around my kitchen and about the best I can think of it is that it looks just how anyone would expect a lonely middle-aged man’s kitchen to look. Big white fridge, and it has a kind of grumble to it every time the motor stops, a kind of double rattle followed by a single, heavier thump. I hardly even hear it any more. When I do, I’m convinced it’s actually going to stop right then for good, and I’m going to wake up in the morning to thawed frozen vegetables and a bunch of stuff gone to mush. But, then again, at least it will be defrosted — first time in a long time for that.

  The rest of the place sort of echoes that half-stepping, old, and potentially failing fridge. There’s the linoleum, curling up right there where it meets the front of the cupboards — the dirt gets caught there if you get right down and look at it close. Not that anyone would. It doesn’t really bother me, so I’m not going to get down there with a toothbrush any time soon.

  There’s usually a plate or two in the sink, unless I’ve just done the dishes that day. But don’t think I’m grubby like “the place is a risk for food-poisoning” grubby. The fridge is pretty much empty, because it has only the things I like and nothing else, and it almost always has a shelf or two that has nothing at all, a wasteland of shelf. Beer, when I want some — and that’s not very often.

  There’s usually a coffee cup on the wooden kitchen table, off-centre where I leave it, and I don’t take milk or anything, so even when the cup’s dirty, it’s almost clean. Well, clean enough.

  I always find that cup in the same place, even though I never once think about putting it there. It’s like the bones in my arm are a particular length, like my muscles and tendons prefer to unspool in the same familiar way, and the table itself has all its edges in the same place always. The same lever, the same pulley, the same fulcrum, so why wouldn’t my cup wind up within fractions of an inch of where it always does? It’s not like anyone else is trying to mark out thei
r own space on the surface. The only motions here are my own.

  I bought that table, unpainted and unassembled, years ago in a big-box hardware store on the edge of the city. I pulled the pieces out of the long, flat box that was exactly like fifty other boxes stacked up right there at the store. I put the bolts for the legs through the brackets under the tabletop, spun on the nuts, and tightened them with the crescent wrench. I put the varnish on it, too, four coats, and I can’t go through the kitchen even now without dragging a knuckle across the top, just to feel the way it’s supposed to feel. And I swear sometimes I can smell the raw wood still, just the way I could when I opened the box.

  There’s a spot, right near one end, where someone smacked a beer bottle down hard enough on the wood to leave a little half-circle of dents. That probably would have been me.

  Hardwood, too. Aspen — I think that’s what the box said — thin strips of it all glued together to make one big, wide surface. Strips from maybe thirty different trees, and all of them coming together to be something that stands in my kitchen all day long while I’m somewhere else. The whole thing made in some Pennsylvania town with a German-sounding name, “some assembly required,” and opening the box brought a small waterfall of sawdust, as if it had been packed up the moment they had finished working and shut the planer down, the tabletop sliding right straight out of the machines and into the box without so much as a final dusting.

  And that beer bottle mark on top?

  I know it by heart, even if I have no idea exactly when it happened. I sometimes let my index finger run over the top of it, the even little “bump-bump-bump” of it, the order reassuring in its regularity. Each dent corresponding to a ridge on the bottle, like cold-stamped, inverted Braille.

  What I’m saying, I guess, is that there’s a whole lot of information that’s right here in this house, right out in the open. Sometimes silly little keys can unlock far more than anyone thinks. There’s information all around, all about me, if anyone cares to look. Just like there’s information out there about all of us.