Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  The old cabinets in the kitchen are white laminate — slick fronts and a dark wood strip along the bottom with a groove where you put your fingers to pull them open, real 1980s stuff. If they were open, all you’d get to see are the handful of plates and cups and glasses I’ve got left. I don’t need anything fancy for company, because there isn’t going to be any.

  The kitchen cabinets are worn and out of style, but there’s a way of holding your eyes, a way of dialing things up in your memory so you can see it all just like it was when it came out of the box — as if buying stupid kitchen cabinets was somehow like putting down mooring lines and tying yourself safe and fast in place.

  I remember when we went out to buy the range and that stupid grumbling fridge. The two of us were in the Sears store at the mall and we could see the sales guys angling toward us from all over the appliance section like there was blood in the water or something. Two or three of them made their way around and through the familiar maze of the furniture display, and they looked at us and back at each other, trying to figure out the shortest route to reach us first.

  Commission sales. I couldn’t stand it, myself, even though I tried it once or twice before I found my feet at the store. I was doing it before we were married, making good money. I suppose for the right people, it’s just like a sport or something. But I couldn’t stand the customers or the other salesmen.

  I know how they think: here comes another young couple with stars in their eyes and their futures all caught up there in their heads, probably money in their pockets or at least willing to sign up for the payment plans. Sharks, turning sharp and fast — ready to hook their teeth right in, to try to make you think about how nice your place is going to be with your new appliances and the smell of pot roast and scalloped potatoes curling in around your near-perfect brand new life. It’s a particularly tawdry kind of magic, but it’s magic just the same. If they could pump that smell of roast and potatoes into the furniture store, I don’t doubt for a moment that they would.

  That range is still here — white, the enamel chipped in a few places, and I’ve replaced a couple of the burners myself and had someone in to do the thermostat in the oven once when it burned out. But pretty much it’s still exactly what it always was.

  Everything else, too.

  The sink’s right there so you can look out the back window, centred in the counter, the window above it four feet long and looking down the back garden toward the fence. The kind of window that makes a dishwasher unnecessary, because you can stand there for hours and just look outside, even if you’re looking at nothing, your hands doing whatever it is they’re doing, and it’s not like work or chores or anything. It’s like humming while you’re doing something else — you just slip into doing it, because everything feels so comfortably right.

  Mary never liked humming.

  Hated it, actually — for some reason, the sound of it just grated on her like nobody’s business. Like it was hard to accept that anyone could be happy when she wasn’t. Or maybe she wasn’t happy and just hadn’t figured it out yet, so the lack of her own humming was meant to be some kind of clue. Humming? Bad enough. Only whistling was worse. Introverts hum. Extroverts whistle. All of them irritate. That was her theory.

  Mary.

  Yeah, I was married once, for a while — that “a while” was almost eighteen years.

  Not my decision, any of it — not the getting married part, not the splitting up part either. I always felt like a cork in an ocean in that marriage, tossed around in all directions by different winds and currents that were impossible to resist but that had nothing at all to do with me. I never felt it was completely my fault, but I imagine some of it probably was.

  So, Mary. Her last name was Carter — one of the Carter girls from up in Rabbittown — and she kept it after we got married. Four girls before Mrs. Carter had a boy by Caesarean, going under the gas with the blunt message for her doctor that “Boy or girl, I don’t care, but for God’s sake tie my tubes while you’re in there. And don’t you dare tell Frank.”

  Rabbittown is a hard little St. John’s neighbourhood, the kind of place that’s more than capable of taking care of its own, the kind of place well experienced with the skill of turning its back on everyone else like they don’t even exist.

  Mary came out of there fast, like a refugee sprung from a rough bare-ground tent camp somewhere, never once looking back, although they were sure willing to open the gates and take her back quickly enough afterwards, I’ll bet. Or at least I suppose they did — it’s not like I ever saw her again. Small neighbourhood, everyone tight. It’s the kind of place I was barely tolerated when we were a couple, and where I certainly wasn’t, once we weren’t.

  We were rocky, always. I got tossed around, but so did she. She drank, I drank. She hit, and I did that, too. I’m not proud of it, but we were pretty evenly matched, even if I had twenty pounds on her. Because she didn’t hold back, ever. She threw herself right into it, every time, flat out, the same way as she argued — fists and slaps and raking you with her fingernails without a moment’s thought if you gave her the opening.

  We made up, fought again, made up. In fact, we made a kind of specialty of having the same old fights each time, like we were two trains permanently set on the same tracks — always aimed head-on at each other, quite able to see the big staring headlight but completely unable to do anything but charge blindly forward. We’d crash, get up bruised, set ourselves right back on the same tracks, and do it all over again. The same old starting places, every time. And every time, we revved up faster, cut to the chase quicker, and managed to go for the soft spots every married person knows their spouse has, only faster, each and every time. Like shorthand.

  That’s that definition of crazy, isn’t it? Doing the same thing every time and still expecting it to turn out different? Or better? Or something?

  At least once a week, you can see a couple just like we used to be in my grocery store: zero to fury in six seconds flat, and if you stand there and listen, you realize pretty quick that the words they’re trading back and forth mean a lot more to them than they do to anyone else in the store. When “Did you forget the milk again?” can get a response like “Shut the fuck up,” you know they’re mining a strip of the pure ore and not messing around with the dross.

  We were like that. Fast and sharp and hard. All in, every time.

  If I have to give her credit for anything, I’d say the thing Mary was best at was making the hard decisions — because I didn’t. I’d put things off, think about deciding on something later. Mary just went ahead and did it.

  Really, both of us had the right to leave first — both of us had reasons.

  Except she actually did the leaving.

  But that’s not the way it started.

  Chapter 4

  Limes

  Salt

  Tequila

  In the beginning, Mary threw herself straight at me — and that’s something, boy, that’s something downright incredible if you’ve never had it happen to you before. And I hadn’t.

  Makes you confident in a hurry, makes you think that you’re a lot more than you really are. Puffs you right up, even if you’re not the kind of person to get puffed up.

  It started at a house party just on the edge of Rabbittown. The house belonged to a guy I was working with then, Robert, and I remember that I had a new shirt on, right straight out of the plastic package and onto my back as I was going out the door, and one of those stupid little silver straight pins they use to hold the sleeve just so on the front of the package had found a soft spot on the inside of my wrist. It was a wonder that the cardboard from inside the collar wasn’t still stuck there on my neck. I had my wrist up to my mouth, trying to stop the constant little flame of bright-red bleeding when I first saw her. It was a Mexican party, margaritas and tequila and limes and people staggering around way too fast because they we
re drinking hard and we were all really only used to beer.

  I caught her staring at me from the living room. I was in the kitchen where all the noise was at the time, two blenders and the hard-edged, jagged drinking laughter you hear right before the falling down and the crying. It was darker where she was — the living room lit mostly by big fat candles with guttering flames and too much melting wax, and one lone dull floor lamp in a corner near the couch — and the light from the kitchen was reflecting brightly back to me in the pupils of her eyes.

  She was a pretty girl, gorgeous, really, and she was like a sprinter, out of the blocks all at once and running right straight at me.

  It’s funny what you remember and for how long. The way some details are carved right into you and all the rest just fade away.

  Robert was having a goodbye party because someone was leaving town. Back then someone was always leaving town for work or for school or because they were just plain fed up with the weather. It was a cold summer night, and it was raining like it had been for all of June and most of July that year, the street outside sharp silver and completely running with water. But inside it was warm, with that heavy damp feeling of too many people packed into a small space, talking too loud and breathing too much. Everyone had brought tequila and we were already running out. Two girls locked themselves in the bathroom upstairs, laughing and who knows what else. Everyone was drunk, and I’ll always remember the feeling of nacho chips crunching on the floor under my sock feet because the bowls had been knocked over once or twice, and nobody really noticed or cared.

  It was a long time ago; it’s almost silly now, thinking about it.

  But Mary.

  It’s flattering, sure — you’re out in a crowded place with a bunch of people and there’s a pretty girl (hell, a lovely girl) who only ever looks at you, her eyes big wide circles and staring all the time. I got sucked in so fast. It’s hard to recognize, hard even to believe, that it might all be for show, or at least that it all might have been done on purpose. When you’re a young guy, you never think of a girl standing in front of a mirror, making her eyes open wide like that, practising just in case she might need it. I didn’t even realize what was happening.

  If nothing else, Mary could make up her mind. It can be a very bad thing, getting yourself hooked up with someone who already knows all the answers, someone who’s written your life story complete with all your lines, all of it without even giving you a chance to speak.

  I always figured I’d meet up with a Katie or a Linda or a Leslie, something exotic or different, or something, someone with high, sharp cheekbones that scream out “I’m not from here.” Not a Mary — not a hard, local, familiar Mary, that serious and religious name, like a stern upper lip and no time for jokes here, buddy.

  Seriously — in this town, a Mary?

  But the next thing I knew, I was walking her home, the road all bright with the streetlights reflecting in water and that metal smell you notice in the air when it’s summer and there’s rain.

  The houses crowded too close together so it was like they were leaning in to listen to whatever it was we were talking about. She was telling me she had three sisters and a brother, that she lived with her parents in a too-small house where they were all packed in on top of each other, and that she couldn’t wait to get away. We passed a hard guy out in front of a red house, and he was watching us and smoking a cigarette right down tight to the filter like he’d never be able to have another. We crossed the street in front of a car stopped at a stop sign, and as soon as we were out of the way, it peeled out fast, accelerator right to the floor and holding it while the tires spun and the back end of the car swung back and forth. Sharp, precise memories, like important points on a map, coordinates, and every time I think about that night, I think about every single one of those things, like the particular order of them is essential for everything that came later, because that was exactly the route for how we got from there to here.

  We were in front of her parents’ place pretty quickly and then she was in the door and gone. A straightforward night, and I turned my face up toward the sky after she went in, feeling the rain pecking down, sharp, cold drops, not caring one bit about getting wet.

  Each passing week things just got better.

  I kick myself a little now, wondering just how simple a sap I was. She wanted me, and only me. Looking back, I think my mistake was believing that I was the end, rather than just the means.

  We’ll leave it at that for now.

  I’m Walt and she was Mary, and she’s somewhere else now.

  Good riddance, I guess.

  I’m fifty, and I’ll admit I’m not in the best shape, a bit of a gut out in front of me for all my sins, which mostly err toward two — gluttony and sloth — if they go anywhere at all. Pretty small sins, all things considered. Only deadly the way gravity is — inevitable and waiting. Not deadly like speed, the way you rush toward that. Not like falling, like sex. I don’t have that many sex sins, not just now. Adultery? You’ve got to still be married for that, and I’m not, even if she keeps coming up in my head at the strangest of times.

  My hair’s pretty much all grey and I keep it short now because of that, because distinguished looks better than just plain unkempt and old. I’ve still got all my own teeth — my mother would want you to know that. Teeth were important to her, for some reason. She was the kind of lady who would just grab your chin and twist your mouth open to have a look around, as if she didn’t trust a word you said and had to check things out for herself. She took me to the dentist two weeks before Mary and I got married. He finished things up all neat and she paid, like she was washing her hands of me right then and there. Bought me all new underwear, too, ten pairs.

  My mother’s been dead three years now. She died hard and long, so there’s not ever one little bit of doubt in my mind that she’s really gone, or that she’s better off. Dad’s been gone longer, so I hardly even think about him now. But her words still have a way of echoing around inside my head, like she’s always going to live there or something. Just another unbidden planet caught in orbit too close to me.

  Every couple of days, something my mother said will creep into my thoughts. Sayings were so much a part of her that it sometimes seems to me she was more like a great ball of sayings — all wrapped up on itself like yarn or those thin rubber bands inside a golf ball — than a person.

  Maybe that’s what we all are — lists of stuff preserved in the memories of other people. Collections of scraps, ordered in our own particular ways.

  So, if you want to add me to your list, here I am: a little paunchy, grey, old, flat-footed, and a bad back the next time, every time, I have to shovel wet snow. I’m not hard to get along with. I have a sense of humour — or I think so, anyway. Someone who knows me better would probably have a few memories to kick around, or would remember stuff I said that might have made someone else laugh.

  But I don’t think I could pick out who that person is anymore — that person who knows me better. You move further and further away from people when you stop even trying to stay close.

  Which is hard.

  But when you’re gone, when you’re dead, that’s all that will be left of you — the part that lives in other people’s heads until they’re gone, too. And that’s a much smaller package than you really are, like the way your ashes are so much less than your body.

  It’s not even like you’re distilled, like the world ends up left with some essence, some essential you. Memories are more like leftovers — the pieces other people think are worth keeping, at least for a little while.

  I’m not sure why I’m going on like this. When I’m the only one talking, I go off on tangents, because there’s no one to shut me up with some snide comment or to just haul me back into line.

  What I mean is that memories are fine, but things are always better right when they are happening, when they’re f
resh and sharp and complete and you’re wearing them out there on your skin, feeling and smelling and tasting them. Everyone knows that. Leftovers are what’s in the fridge after everyone goes home. I guess you get used to them, and make do with what you have.

  Chapter 5

  (St. John’s, NL) — The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary (RNC) will hold a press conference at 11 a.m., Nov. 12, at the Fort Townshend headquarters to announce a new government policing initiative. The chief of police will be joined by the minister of justice for the announcement. Media are requested to be set up by 10:45 a.m. All media are required to present police-issued identification.

  At Maddox Cove, just about as far east as Inspector Dean Hill could drive and still be on land, the big Atlantic swells rolled in the fall’s sharp sunlight, hiding the white teeth of their peaks until they were practically upon him.

  Standing by the car, he was thinking about leaving his last job — the one he’d had before the limbo he was caught in now, the one where he’d run stats for the Major Crimes Division. Leaving that job had also meant leaving the office he’d had for so long, the office with the tall tree outside, taking up precisely one-third of the window. The sort of image, he thought absently, that photographers pointed to when they talked about the law of threes. He’d liked the work there, the easy rhythm of crime stats and neighbourhood maps, the patterns that seemed to jump out at him when all the work was right and everything fell into place. He watched the waves, part of his mind pulling up the pattern of building crests, five up and then two falling back, thinking about it without even really thinking about it. It still felt like a loss: he’d come to love the patterns of that job, the way pieces just slipped into order. It didn’t help, either, that it had all happened at once: the loss of his job and the loss of his marriage. Julie had come at him out of the blue, a suitcase waiting by the back door even as she was telling him she was leaving, and it wasn’t a trial separation either. It was, in her words, “a done deal,” though she’d reached up to kiss him on the cheek as he stood there, dumbfounded, by the open back door.