Caught

by Lisa Moore

  He had wanted her all the while he was in jail but being on the fire escape with the sun and the horse — someone smashed a bottle downstairs — Slaney wanted her more. The meadows stretching as far as the eye could see cranked his senses open. All of who he was dilated. It hurt. He’d been so afraid that prison had stolen this for good, but it was coming back.

  He gave himself a shake and horked over the railing. Then he hunched down near the barbecue and had to bounce a bit on the balls of his feet to unwedge the matches from the pocket of the tight new jeans and he struck a match and dropped it on the hibachi and the fire leapt up in tatters and lay flat and filmed over the coals, blue and green.

  The flames pattered over each black glittery lump. He went back inside and turned the TV on with the sound down and dropped into the armchair and put his feet up on the humpty.

  It was an old leather humpty with a pattern of embossed elephants parading around the side, each elephant holding the tail of the elephant before it in its trunk, a foreleg raised in anticipation of the next step. The stitching had given way and beneath the leather was a burlap sack and that had a tear in the side and golden sawdust spilled out onto the tiles, disembowelling one of the elephants.

  Slaney slept in the chair and woke to a hard knocking on the door.

  He leapt up and stood with his heart galloping in his chest. He had no idea where he was; the room had different dimensions than his cell. It was gaping and shapeless and gutted in the dark. He could not place the room and then knew exactly where he was. His insides turned to water and cramped and there was a great spilling inside him. A loss of balance and a fear so suffocating and profound he could not move.

  Slaney was staring at the floor tiles; there was the tab of a pop can near the toe of his shoe. He looked at it but didn’t see it. He knew he wasn’t seeing it. What he saw was his body flung to the floor, a knee on his back, hands cuffed behind. There was a second round of knocking. Whoever it was kicked the door so it boomed.

  He had been caught.

  Or he had not been caught.

  These were two truths that lived under shells in a shell game that was the filthy, unloved room above the bar where he had given in to sleep. Falling asleep had been a mistake. Sleep had overtaken him even while he was vigilant against the idea of succumbing to it.

  Things had transpired while he slept and the roof had blown off his life and he’d missed it. The dormant houseflies on the kitchen windowsill had revived under the fluorescent light and he could hear them buzzing. Or the fluorescent light over the sink was buzzing. A low-watt buzz had begun in his sleep and infiltrated his dreams and now it was the roar of a chainsaw touching down on his skull, ripping through.

  Slaney walked to the door soundlessly and touched his hand to it. He listened and heard a foot scuff on the tile outside the door. He had his ear straining toward the tiny sound. The knock came again and it made him jerk nearly out of his skin and then he opened the door.

  Celeste and Annette

  You got a barbecue going? the girl asked.

  I’m Annette and she’s Celeste, the other girl said. They were the exotic dancers from the bar.

  Slaney had fallen asleep to the lewd whoops of the men in the audience downstairs. They’d started a chant that had infiltrated his dream; the clapping and stamping feet had been charging elephants, thunderclouds of dust.

  Strippers, Slaney said. Come in.

  Annette lifted the wine bottle she had in her hand as a kind of salute, wagging it back and forth by the neck. Then she sidled in past him.

  Nice place you got here, she said. She snapped on a light and stood with her hands on her hips, kind of mock nodding as if she could see the decorating possibilities.

  The test pattern was on the television. An Indian chief with feathered headgear, his profile of bone and forbearance. There was a bookshelf with miniature figurines of woodland animals, perhaps two hundred of them that had been collected from boxes of Red Rose tea. The figurines sat on the peeling vinyl skin of the pressboard shelf as if they were climbing hills and descending into valleys in a great exodus.

  Celeste tilted her head.

  That clock is right twice a day, she said. Next to the bookshelf was a sunburst clock with a bronze face and gold roman numerals and long pointy shafts of metal sticking out on all sides like rays of sunshine. It was stopped at three forty-five and below it was a hole in the wall the size of a fist.

  Slaney had the wieners he’d taken from the fridge and the three of them sat out on the fire escape. The flames had died away and the coals were coated in thick pale ash, but they pulsed orange at their core when the breeze lifted. Slaney put his hand over the coals and felt a small wavering heat and put the wieners on, turning them with a plastic fork.

  Annette took a joint from her purse and lit it up and they passed it along. Slaney said that he thought being right twice a day was a good average. He made up a theory that there were gradations of accuracy but wrongness was a tolling bell that came out of nowhere. Slaney had thought the girls were the cops and he had touched his hand to the door.

  Gradations, Celeste said. She was frowning at the end of the joint. She licked her finger and touched a drop of spittle to the side of the paper.

  You can be partway right, Slaney said. But wrong is wrong.

  Like with a pregnancy test, Annette said. You’re either pregnant or you’re not.

  She means no such thing as a false positive, Celeste said. But you can get a false negative.

  This is very good dope, Slaney said. Colombian Gold, right? He was thinking the words false negative were achingly beautiful. He wished he could get his mind around them. He thought of his English teacher in grade seven. Miss Benson with her heels and the dress with big flowers and her cleavage and her mouth.

  No such thing as a double negative either, he said. And he thought it meant things couldn’t go wrong twice.

  Slaney had heard the knocking and he’d thought caught but instead they were having a kind of party, Slaney and two beautiful, very stoned, crazy strippers, while overlooking the fields of swishing grass.

  I thought you were the cops, Slaney said. But you’re from the other end of the spectrum.

  What spectrum, asked Celeste. Slaney had taken the joint from her and he’d held the smoke down in his lungs, letting it billow out as he spoke.

  The spectrum that has cops on one end, Slaney said. He moved the orange tip of the joint in a curve through the dark to illustrate how far away they might be from all of that.

  You opened the door and there we were, Celeste said. It occurred to him that for a long time, perhaps the rest of his life, a closed door would be a threat. It was why he needed to do the next trip right away, get it over with. He needed the money. He needed a new identity and money to live on. He needed to pay off what happened before.

  The big payoff, Slaney said. He’d left the courtroom in shackles, flashbulbs bursting all around him, four years and three days ago. There had been phone calls and visits over those years and this night was part of a larger plan that was coming together on the outside.

  Hearn was making things unfold. Slaney and Hearn were partners. The job required Hearn’s imagination and a faith that things would turn out.

  The first trip had gone wrong because they had not trusted their intuition. Hearn was a great believer in a private, inborn wisdom. Ever since they were kids, when Hearn needed to make a decision, he would close his eyes and hold up a hand to stop all outside motion and sound, just for a brief moment, so he could listen to his own deepest thoughts.

  Slaney stuck a fork into a hot dog that was burnt black on one side and rolled it over. Annette said she didn’t care how burnt it was. She said it looked good enough to eat.

  Celeste went into the kitchen and they could hear her opening the drawers and cupboards and slamming them shut.

  You got you
r eyeliner all smudged, Slaney said to Annette. It’s like someone gave you a couple of black eyes.

  I was crying before, Annette said. They were leaning with their backs against the clapboard but she turned to him.

  Fix it, she said. Slaney licked the side of his thumb and rubbed beneath her eye a couple of times until the smudge was gone. She had an iridescent peacock blue eyeshadow that went up to her eyebrows.

  Stupid bastard in the front row, she said. She was glancing upward and her mouth was open and when he was done she blinked several times. Then he did the other eye.

  Pretty good there now, he said. Celeste came back with the corkscrew and held the bottle between her knees. The cork made glassy squeaks and it popped and Celeste took a long swig and the bottle glugged and she tipped it back down and wiped the germs off with her hand. She ran the back of her hand across her mouth. Slaney handed around the condiments. They ate the wieners, still cold at the centre, off the plastic forks, looking up at the stars.

  In the southern hemisphere they’re all askew, Slaney said.

  Does the toilet water go the other way down there? said Celeste.

  I didn’t see too many flush toilets, Slaney said.

  What were you doing down there? Annette asked.

  I’d say he was up to no good, Celeste said. Then they each said what they wanted most. Celeste wanted to be a certified beautician and Annette wanted to do her upgrading and Slaney wanted another wiener. Then he said he wanted to be rich.

  La-de-da, said Annette. Excuse us.

  I’d like to get on that horse down there and gallop away, Celeste said. The horse was standing still in the moonlight with its head hanging low. It was abject or it was asleep.

  Slaney looked at his watch and said it was his birthday. He didn’t tell them he’d broken out of jail for the occasion but he felt sure they knew. At first he thought he might sleep with one or the other of them, but it became clear they were each going off to bed alone and they would wake up alone, and Slaney would never see either of them again.

  Pair of Kings

  Slaney had slept all day. He made the bed and switched off the lights before locking the door of the apartment behind him.

  He entered the gloom of the dance hall downstairs at four in the afternoon and waited for the bartender to come out from the back so he could return the key and say thank you.

  It was the same woman from the day before but her silver hair was fanned out over her shoulders and she was wearing a jean jacket with a happy-face button on the lapel. There didn’t seem to be anything else happy about her. She gave Slaney a once-over and asked how Harold was doing in prison.

  What’s it like in there? she said. Is it bad? Slaney ducked a little to the side as if she’d tried to cuff him on the chin.

  She said Harold had got off on the wrong foot in life. She was Harold’s eldest sister. Sue Ellen Molloy, her name was, she said, and she’d tried to look out for him but she’d had a lot on her plate when Harold was growing up.

  There’s twenty-one in our family, she said. It was hard on our mother’s teeth. Leached off the enamel. They turned to dust in her mouth. Her bones got soft. Took the good out of her. Our father died all of a sudden and Harold came after that. Nobody knows from where. He’s only my half-brother. That never made any difference to me. I tried as hard with Harold as I did with the rest of them after our mother passed on.

  Slaney said Harold had asked for him to say hello to her and thank her for all she had done for him.

  Sue Ellen rang in the price of Slaney’s room on the cash register and then rang it in again so the numbers rolled up and reappeared in the little window at the back of the machine with a minus sign in front of them. She tore off the receipt and handed it to him with the amount owed saying zero. He took it from her and tucked it in his pocket.

  He was born during a hurricane, Harold was, she said. I woke up that morning and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Next thing the trees were lifting out of the ground, stumbling around like drunks in a brawl. Harold was a colicky baby and it went downhill from there.

  Harold keeps busy, wheeling and dealing, Slaney said.

  He’s of a smaller build, she said. Her lips pursed up tight as though she had broken a confidence and regretted it. Then she said she was afraid for Harold and that a day didn’t go by without him crossing her mind.

  I have ulcers the size of pennies just thinking about him, she said. That’s why I’m so drawn. She put her hands to her face, pressing in on her cheeks, pulling back the wrinkled skin around her temples so she looked like she was walking in a big wind, her eyes glassy slits. Then she ran her hands under her hair, lifting the curtain of silver so it glinted all over in the light, and let it drop again.

  You can avoid a lot of trouble in the pen just by looking the other way, Slaney said.

  This is what I’m telling you, she said. Harold has a knack for wading into the middle of one cesspool after another. He comes out of there every couple of years or so and it’s like he can’t get back in fast enough. She opened a cooler under the bar and the bottles tinkled against one another and she took the cap off a beer bottle and handed it to him.

  Then the side door was kicked open. The golden afternoon sun, already sinking, blazed through a man’s legs and over his shoulders, between his elbows. He was carrying something in his outstretched arms about the size of a small child.

  When the door closed behind him the bar was very dark, and as the man came forward, Slaney began to make out something coiled and python-thick around the man’s neck. He heard something slithering and snicking over the tiles.

  What have you got there? Harold’s sister asked.

  This here is hardly used, the man said.

  That’s somebody’s vacuum, she said.

  A brand-new Electrolux, the man said. And I’ve all the doohickeys that attach to it.

  He told Slaney and Harold’s sister that he’d lost his couch and matching recliner in an all-night game of poker and he hadn’t been to bed.

  It came down to the furniture, he said. He was looking right into Slaney’s eyes but he seemed to be watching the moment before he lost the couch play out before him.

  A pair of kings, he said. For a moment Slaney thought he was talking about the two of them.

  I’m looking for someone to make me a nice offer, he said. Sue Ellen picked up her newspaper where she had started to work a crossword and gave it a snap.

  You look like a guy could use a vacuum cleaner, the man said to Slaney. He had stepped up close to the bar and in the band of light hanging over the cash register Slaney could see the man’s face yellow-lit and crackled like a varnished painting. He had a high colour in his burst-veined cheeks and purpled nose and his eyes were bloodshot and the whites were lizard yellow. There was a crust stuck to his colourless lower eyelashes. Whatever he was on had him in a fevered grip. There was a glaze of snot over his upper lip, and he glistened with sweat. Below his full wet mouth there was a goatee.

  Slaney said he didn’t need a vacuum. If he’d told the man he was a victim of leprosy the comment might have had the same effect. The man was overcome with nervous trembling. A shake that came up his body from his right knee to the top of his head.

  He put the vacuum down on the floor and cranked his neck to the left side several times to get a hold of himself. He gripped one of his bony shoulders with the opposite hand and rotated it in slow circles.

  Everybody vacuums, the man said. His stare penetrated Slaney through and through.

  Jesus, the man said. Am I right? Everybody vacuums? Slaney put his beer bottle down on the bar without making a noise.

  What kind of guy doesn’t keep his house tidy, the man asked. That’s what I’d like to know.

  The whiff of violence stirred like a draft around Slaney’s ankles. It felt as though an unleashing might occur, the bolt of mythical
strength that weakened people can summon just before they give out. The man’s eyes had a homicidal ferocity but he spoke with something approaching a singsong quality, an effeminate wheedling, like a fortune teller grabbing a passing spirit’s voice from the air.

  A man’s house is his kingdom, the guy said. What are you, some kind of pig? Sue Ellen put down her pencil. She asked the man for the vacuum plug. He passed it to her without taking his eyes off Slaney or breaking his speech at all.

  Some filthy pig of a man who doesn’t clean up, the man said. Wouldn’t know one end of a vacuum from the other. Your mother was a pig. A filthy swine who didn’t clean up after herself, nor did she pass on to her son the value of cleanliness.

  Let’s see if this thing works, Harold’s sister said. She drew the cord out hand over hand.

  A good vacuum is an investment, she said. I learned the hard way, bought cheap. What I found, the cheap ones only picked up half of what’s on the floor. You got to go over it twice. Next thing I said to myself, you want something of value, you have to pay for it.

  She plugged it in and the vacuum roared up and she yelled at him to demonstrate.

  Pardon me, the man said. Whatever had possessed him had suddenly fled. He had put a finger in the belt loop of his jeans and cocked a hip, trying for something like a Sears catalogue pose, but he couldn’t sustain it. His knee started up again.

  Let’s see what this baby can do, the bartender said. The man vacuumed the floor of the bar for three strokes and stopped to look up at the bartender but she rolled her hand in the air, telling him to keep going.

  Look at that machine, she yelled. That’s a good vacuum. Look at how it picks up the dirt.

  He started vacuuming with harnessed concentration and the engine was loud and Slaney finished the beer and she got him another one and hooked the opener over it and the cap popped off and danced around until she put her hand over it. Then she became absorbed in her crossword puzzle. She had a ring with a speck of a diamond. The diamond and the little band of gold tin that held the eraser onto the top of the pencil sparkled in the oval of light on the bar as she jotted letters.