by Grant Buday
“Lucky.”
“Lucky? Worst thing that could’ve happened! Now Sergio was blaming me for getting kicked out! He had a real reason to go after us. He stood there at the fence yelling how he was going to get us. We hid in the midway for the rest of the afternoon.”
Rupp shakes his head.
“By the time we’d blown all our money I had four ashtrays and Leonard had two more of those fridge-magnet crucifixes. We were searching the ground for more money when we see this blind guy playing the violin. His case was open and full of coins and even dollar bills. We pass back and forth like dogs. Leonard finally makes a lunge, but this blind fucker has the ears of a bat. He swings his bow cracking Leonard across the back of the head, and the same guard who’d turfed Sergio marched us out the exit.
“Well. We were kind of proud of being booted. But I knew Sergio was gonna be after us. So we run for the waterfront, two blocks away, thinking of heading home along the docks. And it looked like we were gonna make it until you know who stepped out from behind some bushes. Blackberry juice all over his mouth. Looked like blood. He chased us down across the tracks into New Brighton Park and trapped us against the beach. He picked up a horsewhip of that bull kelp and started whipping us, driving us right into the water. Kept whipping us until we were in up to our waists, then up to our chests, and finally we’re dog-paddling. It was August, but the water along there’s freezing. And Leonard, he had that jean jacket on, right, and so he couldn’t move his arms. Didn’t know how to swim anyway, and Sergio he kept whipping at us so we couldn’t get back in … ”
“So he drowned?”
Horst looks down. “Yeah.”
“Jesus …” Rupp turns his cup in its saucer.
“I know,” says Horst. “I still can’t believe it. Leonard never made a sound the whole time. Just went down …” Horst blinks, seeing it all right there in front of him.
After a while Rupp says, “So what happened to Santini?”
“Nothing.”
“Whataya mean?”
“He was a minor.”
“Not even Reform School?”
“No charge. Death by Accident.”
“You didn’t tell!”
Horst, raises his hands then lets them drop. “I was ten … ”
Rupp looks back down at his coffee cup.
They sit a long time in silence. Cars hiss past in the slush.
“So where is he now?”
Horst points across the street to Hastings Bakery.
Rupp looks. A string of Christmas lights blinks around the window. “That big guy with the apron?”
Horst nods.
“He’s a nice guy!”
“Married Grace Beretti. Has five kids.”
“You go in there?”
Horst shrugs, “No. Sometimes.”
Rupp doesn’t know what to say. “He still call you Hoor?”
“No.” Horst stares past Rupp out the window at the traffic moving slow along Hastings. It’s January and cold and the sky is a stone bowl over the world.
HORST LISTENED TOthe frogs burping across the alley in the Chinese lady’s yard. He heard the roar of the Alberta Wheat Pool down on the waterfront, and the far-away clang of coupling railcars. He continued pacing, the linoleum tiles cool under his bare feet. Today he’d cleared out his drawers and shelves and closet of thirteen years’ worth of horoscopes, racing forms, receipts, notes, and junk. It was all out in the alley in a green plastic garbage bag. Thirteen years’ worth. He’d kept letters though, and photographs, and put them in a cookie tin with a Victorian scene on the lid of a woman sitting in the shade of a pear tree. He’d found the tin in the basement, and liked to think it had belonged to the family that had lived here back before World War One when the house was built, when it smelled of fresh paint and new wood, when the doorknobs didn’t dangle and the ceiling wasn’t cracked.
Horst’s soul was in that tin. It wasn’t much, but there it was. He put the tin on the shelf by the door, so that in case of fire, or in case he finally decided he was ready to move on, he could grab it on his way out. He hoped it’d be soon.
Mr. Buday is a frequent contributor to The Vancouver Review and the Saturday Review in the Vancouver Sun. Several stories from this collection have been published over the last year in literary magazines across the country, with pieces forthcoming in The Malahat Review and Canadian Fiction Magazine. One of the stories from the collection, “The Tears of Saint Lawrence” was selected as the winning entry in the 4th Annual Penny Dreadful Short Story contest, sponsored by sub-TERRAIN Magazine. Mr. Buday’s last novel, Under Glass, was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson fiction prize in 1994.
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