by Grant Buday
“So you live here, eh?”
Horst points down the hall.
She leans out and checks both directions.
“Hey, sorry ‘bout the noise. We got a situation here. Don’t got a smoke do ya?”
Horst pats his pockets even though he doesn’t smoke. He steps into the room’s dog-blanket stink and sees a puddle of vomit. He follows her past a kicked-in TV, and on into a tiny bathroom with a bare bulb.
“Hit himself up with a boot-full,” says the blonde.
Horst sees Werner slumped in the tub. Cold water sloshes around him. He’s fully dressed in his work clothes, paint-scabbed shirt, white pants, General Paint hat. A biker-type in a ripped jean jacket, goatee, and long greasy hair flung straight back, splashes water on Werner’s death-white face.
Horst is fascinated. In fact, he wishes he was here earlier to see Werner shoot up. Horst’s never seen anyone shoot up. He leans in close, studying the blue-black bruises inside Werner’s elbow. Maybe Werner’ll die. Horst hasn’t seen anyone die in years. It’d certainly salvage a dull Saturday night. The bruises remind Horst of a picture he saw in a magazine of a torture victim from Argentina. The police had beaten the guy’s arms with axe handles. The picture had terrified Horst. It had made him weep. But this doesn’t make him weep. It occurs to Horst he should suggest they call an ambulance. That’d liven things up even more. There might even be a TV crew. But, at that very moment, the biker suggests exactly that:
“Like, maybe we should call him an ambulance?”
“No fucking ambulance!” The blonde shoves by Horst and leans over Werner. “Baby, you don’t want a dirty old ambulance, do you?”
Werner stares at his knees.
The blonde makes a fist and punches Werner in the cheek.
Horst cringes.
Werner doesn’t blink.
The blonde grips Werner by the jaw, turns his face one way, then the other, then lets go. His head flops forward. She looks at Horst and the biker. “Get him up. He goes under now that’s it. He’s dead. I’ve seen it.” Then she glares at the guy in the jean jacket. “Ambulance! You piece’a shit. Ambulance means cops!” She raises her arm as if to give him a backhand. Defiant, the guy stands up tall and flexes his chest. Then the blonde sees Horst just standing there by the sink. “The fuck you waitin’ for? Get him up!”
The biker gets Werner under the armpit then looks at Horst. “Get in here!”
Horst wishes he wasn’t such a good neighbour.
They drag Werner up, along with half the water in the tub, soaking their feet. They step high and curse. As they haul Werner into the front room his feet start moving, as if they’ve been kick-started.
“That’s it, baby. Come back to us.” The blonde’s voice comes from the kitchen, where she’s got her head in the fridge. “Fuck! We use all the ice?” She pours vodka into a glass, gulps, then pours more.
For the next half hour, Horst and the biker walk Werner back and forth past the kicked-in TV, avoiding the puddle of vomit. Werner’s arm is slung across Horst’s shoulder, and Horst can feel Werner’s clammy armpit and smell his hair, his b.o., and the rancid blanket they’ve wrapped around him. The blonde, meanwhile, drinks vodka, and bitches.
“Fuck this. I’m gonna be a stewardess. I mean come on! I’ve been a waitress. I know what they do. Sure there’s that safety shit — life-vest, oxygen mask. But fuck. Hey, you got any ice?” She stares at Horst.
Horst looks at her crotch-taut jeans. He thinks you’d have to have a cock like a hammer to fuck her.
“I’ll check.” He knows he doesn’t have any ice. He never has ice. His ice trays are in the drawer by the kitchen sink. But he figures this is his excuse to get out from under Werner’s armpit. He leaves Werner slumped on the biker and heads out. Back in his place, Horst scrubs his hands and face and neck, getting Werner’s stink off. He wonders if he should run down to the 7–11 and buy a bag of ice. She might get pissed off if he comes back empty-handed.
When Horst returns, he finds Werner facedown on the floor and the others gone.
It takes Horst half an hour to wrestle Werner into a coat and shoes. A half hour of touching and holding the guy. When he finally gets Werner outside, the winter air hardens Horst’s lungs to sacks of ice. His ears turn to tin and his clothes hang as stiff as aluminum. The air smells sharp with impending snow. Horst whimpers in frustration at what he’s got himself into. He struggles just to hold Werner up. “You junkie shit motherfucker!” Horst stops cursing only when he has to shift sides, at which point Werner collapses to the frozen sidewalk. “Fuck!” Horst is already exhausted. He stares at Werner, then glances round, thinking of just leaving him. But it hits him — they have to keep going.
Horst hauls him up. They head toward the waterfront because it’s easier walking downhill. They’re halfway there when Horst thinks — Shit! Why didn’t I just call that ambulance? They arrest Werner for smack it’s fine with me. He stops, and, propping Werner up like a mattress, looks for a phone booth. Nothing. So Horst tries hurrying on, suddenly frantic to find a telephone. He slips on ice and goes down, forehead hitting cement.
Horst isn’t sure if he passed out, but when he’s thinking again he knows he’s freezing to death. He crawls out from beneath Werner. Blood, like red glue, has sealed Horst’s left eye shut. He wipes it away. His forehead is hot, and delicate as a soft-boiled egg. It’s the one warm place on Horst’s body. He touches his forehead with numb fingers. Werner is facedown, half on the sidewalk and half off. Horst nudges him with his foot. “Hey.” Nothing. Horst hauls at Werner’s arm (and flashes on a scene from the evening news of a fireman pulling at a man’s arm and the arm coming clean off, and the fireman falling backward still holding it). Horst tries heading them back uphill toward the house, but no way, it’s too steep. And so, having to move or freeze, they go downhill, across the railroad tracks where Horst hears the gunshot shunt of coupling railcars and sees, every fifty yards, patches of glass glittering beneath cones of light. In a moment that hits Horst like an hallucination, they pass a bag lady standing with her shopping cart in the narrow alley between shipping containers stacked four high. Her face is turned upward, basking in the light of a tower lamp.
When the containers end, Horst sees the black water of Burrard Inlet. Long scarves of red and yellow ripple on its surface. From up ahead comes the crack and roar of the Alberta Wheat Pool. Beyond, the Second Narrows Bridge spans the inlet. They cross the frozen grass of New Brighton Park, and by the time they reach the pissy stink of pigeons and fermenting grain at the wheat pool, Werner is finally walking on his own. Horst is relieved, but has to admit it was warmer with Werner’s arm over his shoulder.
Like a zombie come to life, Werner says: “Paid her fifty bucks and she got away.”
Horst stares. Not a word of thanks. Not a word about the blood all over Horst’s face. Horst realizes he has as much chance of a thank you from Werner as he does from a lizard for throwing it meat.
Still, Horst keeps moving along with Werner, past the wheat pool, whose massive pipes and silos are lit up like some 1930s science-fiction city. Horst is beaten. He’s done in. His frustration has burned itself out and exhausted him. He wants only to sleep. His feet are bricks, his pant legs stiff as pipes, the fronts of his thighs frozen, and his forehead throbs.
Horst and Werner are heading back to the house when the snow finally begins. The first flakes settle slowly. Then they speed up. And suddenly Horst is engulfed in a swarm of white, a welcome plague of snow-white locusts that will scour the city. Horst’s glad it’s snowing. When it snows the city becomes clean and quiet. Raising his face, he feels the flakes touch his bruised forehead.
“Bitch was standing in this alley right here,” says Werner, pointing.
Horst looks into the alley. The dumpsters, the cars, and the ground are white and still and innocent.
“I’ll be looking for her,” says Werner. “You thought I was fucked up. But I saw her.” He hunches his shoulders and leans har
der into the spinning snow.
RUPP ASKED HORSThow the job search was going.
“Lousy.” Horst had held one hundred and four jobs. Some as long as a month, others less than an hour. Once he got — then quit — two jobs in the same day. He’s done everything, from gardening to working as a store detective to filling condom dispensers.
“How many jobs you had?”
Rupp knew exactly how many.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
Rupp was smiling.
Horst planted his forearm on the table and leaned forward. “Hey Rupp. What the fuck you grinning at? You think I’m a character? You probably wish I’d had two hundred and four jobs.” Horst shook his head. Still, he described the interview he had the other day for a toupee company. “They wanna do Before and After shots of me.”
“But you got lotsa hair.”
“Yeah. First they do the After pictures, then they’re gonna shave the top off and do the Before ones.”
“Ever sling beer?”
Horst nodded. He saw Rupp warming up for THE GAME, which consisted of guessing a job Horst hadn’t done. Horst hated THE GAME.
Rupp looked around the pub for inspiration. “Window washer?”
“Yeah.”
“Painter?”
Horst nodded.
“Laying carpet?”
Horst nodded again.
They sat in the Ivanhoe, which served the cheapest beer in Vancouver, two bucks for a pint of sour, soapy draft. The walls were done in medieval swords and shields. Nearby, beer-league baseball players argued.
One of the women stood and bashed a mug against a guy’s head. Then she put up her fists, still gripping the mug-handle like brass knuckles.
“Fuck you, Eddie! It was a strike!”
But Eddie was out.
The bar fell silent. No one made a move as the woman, barely five feet, marched out the door. She wore a blue nylon team jacket with EDDIE’S ELECTRIC on the back underlined by a baseball bat. Everybody at that table wore the same jackets.
When she was gone, the pub returned to life. The police and ambulance arrived, and Eddie was packed out on a stretcher. Across the bar, a table full of young guys erupted in laughter.
Rupp turned to Horst. “Ambulance driver?”
“No. I worked in a hospital, though.”
“I hate hospitals,” said Rupp.
“Me too.”
“How long you last?”
“One day.”
NOVEMBER
You’ll be working with blood,” said the nurse. “Will that upset you?” Her nametag said Trapp. “You’ll have four operating rooms to clean each afternoon, and sometimes there’s blood.”
“A lot of blood,” said the other interviewer. His nametag said Stubbert. He was propped back on the rear legs of his chair, head against a calendar picture of cancer-fighting foods that included fruit, vegetables, and whole-grain bread spilling from a horn o’plenty. Stubbert had a cold sore the size of a barnacle on his lower lip.
“We had one orderly vomit in an operating room and it plugged the drain in the floor,” said Trapp. “Two hernias had to be cancelled.”
“I can handle it.”
Stubbert let his chair drop forward onto all four legs. He leaned his elbows on the desk, folded his hands, and looked intently at Horst. “What draws you to this position?”
Horst had expected that question. After a hundred and four jobs, he knew all the questions. “I like people. I like to feel relevant. I like a challenge.”
“We’re looking for someone who’ll stay permanently,” said Stubbert.
“Are you ready to make a commitment?” asked Trapp.
“Definitely.” Horst explained how he was getting to that point in life where he needed stability.
Stubbert gave Horst’s résumé one last scan, then looked over at Trapp and nodded.
She turned to Horst. “Can you start tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Stubbert pointed down the hall with his pen. “Go to Stores and get measured for whites.”
Horst shook hands with each of them. Then he went down a cement tunnel to Stores, where a queer named Lamont nudged him repeatedly in the nuts while measuring his inseam. Horst was allotted six pairs of white cotton pants, six white shirts, a locker, and a combination lock.
When Horst stepped out of the surgical rubber and meat smell of the hospital, it was noon, still November, still raining. He headed downhill toward the SeaBus to cross from North Vancouver to downtown. On the far side of the inlet, the city squatted under a low ceiling of cloud. A commitment? Horst wasn’t looking forward to this job.
The next morning, Horst changed into his whites with a queer named Jaryl watching. Jaryl was about forty, and his pearly hair was swirled and scalloped like vanilla icing.
“You look great in white,” said Jaryl.
“Thanks.” Horst headed through the cement tunnel to the kitchen, where a Scotsman named Duggan, who had teeth like toenails, pushed a rubber apron at him and said: “You’re mush.” He shoved Horst toward a conveyor belt that ran between two rows of hairnetted women who leaned on food trolleys. They eyed Horst and yawned. The conveyor jerked to life, and Horst slopped porridge into every bowl that passed. The bowls looked like dog dishes. Horst thought he had it under control, until the Scotsman said:
“Fook me.” The belt halted. Duggan stood by Horst, breathing hard. “Kin yae raed?”
Horst nodded.
“Then fooking well dae it man!” He snapped up the menu card from the closest tray and showed him there were three varieties of mush: oatmeal, cream of wheat, and rice gruel. “Ya daft bugger.”
When the tray line ended, Horst followed a big blonde named Dallas up three flights of cement steps to a dumbwaiter, where she slid trays onto trolleys, telling Horst: “Fuckin’ move, buddy!”
Horst raced a trolley down the hall between nurses who crisscrossed from room to room on hissing white shoes. At the first bed he zinged aside the curtain and faced an old woman, gown pulled up, groaning on top of a bed pan. He backed out, still holding the tray, then reached forward to close the curtain and spilled a bowl of cream of wheat over the woman’s foot.
The next floor was maternity, where women waddled the hall holding their backs, sat weeping in wheelchairs, or breastfed their raisin-eyed piglets. When he was done, he ran back down to the kitchen, where Duggan, the Scotsman, pointed a meat cleaver at him and said: “Yae’re a dish pig.”
Horst hauled on the mush-sodden apron again, plus a pair of black rubber gloves that were wet inside; he went into the dish room feeling like he had used condoms on his fingers. The trays returned in a relentless line of leftovers and Horst raced to keep up, scraping meat and eggs and mush. He found a set of false teeth; an East Indian woman named Maxine found a hearing aid.
Horst spent half his coffee break washing food off himself. Then he went into the cafeteria. In one corner sat doctors, administrators, and RNs. In the opposite corner, separated by a desert of bald, grey carpet, sat the kitchen staff.
Horst sat at a separate table with Maxine, who read The Link, one of Vancouver’s East Indian papers. She wore a poppy. It was Poppy Day. Horst had forgotten.
“My grandfather fought at Vimy Ridge,” said Maxine.
Horst said nothing. One of his grandfathers had only one leg, so hadn’t served; the other ran off to Brazil and was never heard from again.
“My daughter is upstairs in maternity. Twins. Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Wife?”
“No.”
“Fiancée?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Horst mumbled: “Not really.”
Maxine looked at him. “You’re not one of these, are you?” She let her wrist flop, meaning queer.
Horst shook his head. Then he glanced at the other table, hoping no one overheard.
After lunch, Duggan, the Scotsman, shook a ladle at Horst and said, “Go muck o
ut the slaughterhouse.”
Horst rode the elevator with a mop, a bucket of near-boiling water, and a jug of antiseptic detergent called Sept-Off II that smelled like pee.
Horst had never seen an operating room. He was disappointed. It looked like a washroom. A sink and arborite-topped counter, a paper-towel dispenser, linoleum floor, and on the wall a laminated poster of two cartoon vultures on a branch, one saying to the other: Patience my ass! I’m gonna kill something! He swabbed down three operating rooms, leaving them sharp with the stink of ammonia. When he opened the door of the last one, however, the warm iron-sweet smell of blood filled his throat. The door sucked shut behind him, and Horst faced a slimy pool. He felt his stomach rise. He saw, in his mind’s eye, surgical-gloved hands, red to the wrists, stirring the tripe of a slit stomach, the intestines oozing wet and slick as an orgy of slugs.
When Horst stepped outside it was late afternoon. The cold drizzle cleared his head. At the SeaBus a palsied old man sat in a wheelchair with a blanket across his legs selling poppies. Horst crossed over the inlet then caught the Hastings bus.
He got off at Glen and walked past the old row houses, narrow wooden boxes with steep roofs and sagging porches. They’d been old in the fifties, when he was a kid. Back then it had been Eastern Europeans living in them. Poles, Hungarians, Slavs. The Wops called them Hunkies. Now it was Chinatown.
Horst had his own key and walked right into the smell of ham and cabbage. His feet recognized the linoleum. The oak-cased clock ticked in the living room, and his mother slept in a chair by the iron stove in the kitchen. She had a wadded Kleenex in one fist and a rosary in the other. She wore two wedding rings, her own and that of her dead husband, Horst’s father. Horst sat down quietly at the table. It was red arborite and metal tubing. The tape on the slit vinyl seat was peeling, and he felt it sticking to his pants. He was supposed to have come around weeks ago to fix it.
His mother slept solidly, a sack of potatoes in an old woollen shawl. The long hairs on her shins were pressed flat by her nylons, and she wore a pair of rubber boots because the floor was like ice. Horst hadn’t been around in seven, eight weeks. He sat forward, elbows on his knees and head in his hands. Someday she’d be in the hospital.
