The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Blue had only been to a strip joint once before. One of his tow-trucking colleagues had had a stag party at Jilly’s in Toronto, and although he had been mesmerized by the long, young bodies that floated in and among their tables, he had been disconcerted by the men around him. They looked like they’d been stunned stupid. They sat with their greedy mouths open, their hands wandering, and were gently chastised by the women moving their bodies in luxurious waves before them. When the song was over and they had to be men among men again, they flipped it all over in their heads and hurled crude insults at the women who, minutes before, had so enchanted them that they’d lost all motor control. Blue had felt embarrassed. Kept his eyes fixed on a pierced belly button and tried to smile politely at the woman who finished dancing in front of him.

  On a summer Saturday night as cold as winter, Mitch picked him up at the hotel and said he fancied seeing a little pussy flirting in his face.

  “Enough with the language, okay?” Blue said. “Don’t you have a sister?”

  “Of course I have a sister.”

  “Well, imagine if guys spoke about your sister like that.”

  “Oh, come on, Lou. Relax, man,” he said, pushing the accelerator and careening down the main street.

  In the club, Blue gripped his beer bottle and looked for a pierced belly button to give him purpose. He stared at a woman with a snake tattoo that curled from the top of her thigh to her nipple, and when she caught him staring she asked him if he wanted her to dance for him. “I was just admiring your tattoo,” he said to her, blushing.

  “Yeah, well watch this,” she said. “Watch how the snake moves when I dance,” she said, winding her hips and torso like a belly dancer to “Like a Virgin.” He watched the length of primary colours rippling up and down her body. She spread her legs, revealing a cavern of silver: rows of rings through her labia and clitoris. He leaned in, fascinated, and Mitch laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and said, “Yeah, just like a virgin.”

  Blue was amazed by the hardware between her legs. Sculpted and adorned so precisely he could feel the pain of it. He reached up and rubbed his bicep, remembered the pinch and then the dull ache of pulling needles through his own skin. He wanted more of that. “It’s beautiful,” he said to her.

  “Feels beautiful when you pull,” she smiled, and then tugged at the rings and threw her head back in a convincing performance of rapture.

  After a few more beers, a small, lithe, blonde girl wearing a body-hugging layer of leopard skin approached Blue. “Want a dance?” she asked. “Discount for a cutie like you,” she smiled. She had a pink puckered mouth and hips so narrow she could still be a child and he had to stop himself from asking her how old she was. He hesitated, catching sight of the little gold butterfly around her neck. “That’s pretty,” he said.

  “This?” she said, fingering the pendant around her neck. “Thanks. Present from my stepdad. I love butterflies.”

  “Yeah? Me too,” he said nervously. “I used to go to this amazing place—this butterfly conservatory in Niagara Falls,” he found himself telling her. As he said it, he chastised himself: Be cool. Shut up, you idiot. He needn’t have, though—she was more than willing to engage.

  “You’re from Niagara Falls?” she asked him.

  “Yeah.”

  “No kidding?”

  “You too?”

  “Yeah,” she nodded enthusiastically. “How long you been here?”

  “A month. You?”

  “Year and a half.”

  “That’s a long time,” he said.

  She shrugged. “Guess so.”

  “Do you miss home?”

  “Nah. It’s a shit hole.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Listen, do you want me to dance for you? Larry, the manager, gets pissed off if I’m yakking—I don’t get paid for that.”

  Blue felt uncomfortable. “I’ll pay you just for talking,” he said.

  “Can’t do that,” she said. “Looks bad.”

  “Hey, he can pay you for talking and you can dance for me, sweetheart,” Mitch said, budding in.

  “Okay with you?” she asked.

  Blue shrugged. “Be my guest.” But he couldn’t watch. He stared off in the other direction for the next four interminable minutes as she moved her way through Prince’s whining.

  “My name’s Amy,” she said, whispering into Blue’s ear as she moved away from the table. Her breath was enough to make him hard.

  “I think she likes you, buddy,” Mitch said, nudge nudge, wink winking him.

  “Nah. It’s just we’re both from Niagara Falls. Nice coincidence, that’s all,” Blue said.

  “She’s got a hot little tamale of a body,” Mitch added.

  “I didn’t really notice.”

  The following Saturday he went to the club alone. He wore a baseball cap—some attempt at concealing himself—and sat down in the same seat as he had the week before. Amy noticed him soon after he arrived and said it was nice to see him back. “Do you want a dance tonight?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I just came to say hi,” he said. “I was wondering, if maybe, well …” he hesitated. “Maybe you’d like to go out with me some time.”

  She puckered her pink lips. “That could get me into trouble.”

  “Is that a no?”

  “Just a caution. But if you just happened to ever-so-discreetly scribble your number down on the table, I think I might take notice of it,” she winked. “Gotta go now.”

  “My name’s Llewellyn,” he said over the music.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Just call me Blue.”

  She did call. Called the very next day in fact. Sunday, his day off. “Well, what are you doing today, then?” he asked her.

  “Me? Going for a big long walk.”

  “You a hiker?”

  “I love the mountains. They keep me breathing, keep me in shape. You want to come with me?”

  “Uh, sure,” he said through his tar-filled lungs. “But I’m not in great shape.”

  “We’ll take it easy,” she assured him.

  She picked him up in a rusty old brown Ford Mustang not yet old enough to be considered retro. She was wearing a hooded Gap sweatshirt under a black leather jacket, jeans, and hiking boots. She wore no makeup and her hair was pulled back. She looked as unlike a stripper as he could imagine.

  “You’ve been here for a month and you haven’t climbed any of these mountains?” she asked him, incredulous.

  He shook his head.

  “I just look at them and I want to run up,” she said. “Why are you here then?”

  “Because it’s better than there, I guess,” he said. “Money,” he answered, thinking it was something she would understand.

  “I came for these mountains,” she gestured. “Let’s take the gondola up Sulphur Mountain. Then you’ll really be able to see what you’re missing. Those boots aren’t going to get you very far anyway.”

  It suited him to be lifted up into the air on a clear, bright blue day, sitting in a swinging cubicle, across from the prettiest girl he’d ever known.

  It was a whole new perspective on top of the mountain where the air was thin and quiet. “I had no idea,” he said.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Amy beamed. “I love it here.”

  They drank hot chocolate in the café at the summit and Amy talked about her life in Niagara Falls. They weren’t happy, the memories she recalled. “I hated high school,” she groaned.

  “Me too,” he nodded. “I didn’t last very long, actually.”

  “I got thrown out because my idiot boyfriend left his drugs in my locker.”

  “Oh, that’s bad. I just dropped out.”

  “Yeah, well, I probably would have dropped out eventually anyway. So many assholes at McArthur.”

  “You went to McArthur?”

  “Only for a year.”

  “My sister went there too.”

  “Where’
s your sister now?”

  “University of Toronto.”

  “What’s she doing there?” Amy asked, obviously impressed.

  “She wants to be an archaeologist.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded, and looked down.

  “Why do you look sad then?”

  “Aw, I’m not really sad. It’s just my sister’s going through something weird right now. You know, like trying to find herself or something retarded like that. She’d kind of disappeared a while before she left anyway. Do you know what I mean?”

  “You aren’t close?”

  “Used to be. Used to be like glue. Then she—I don’t know—I think she was mad because after my parents split up, my dad stayed in touch with me, but not her. Like she was jealous, or hurt or something. So she kind of said, ‘Fuck all this,’ and went and moved in with this total dweeb and started going to university.”

  He felt embarrassed, like words were new for him and they were tumbling out without his full participation.

  “She must be really smart,” Amy said, encouraging him to continue.

  “I’m really proud of her, you know, trying to make something out of her life, but she’s become a bit of a snob in the process, like she doesn’t really want to have anything to do with us any more. She thought I was a loser because I didn’t have big ambitions like her, and she hated my dad because he was a fuck-up. The funny thing is, though, she’s just like him. Both a couple of dreamers at heart.”

  “Your dad’s a fuck-up?”

  “Pretty much,” Blue muttered. He couldn’t believe he’d just said that to someone he didn’t really know. “I’m talking too much,” he apologized.

  “My dad is too,” she said. “But my stepfather is great. You know, after my mum died I continued living with him, and it was okay for a while, but then he got this new girlfriend and she moved in, and soon it was like way too small for the three of us. She was so lazy—and, like, I’m going out to work and helping my stepdad pay the mortgage and she’s sitting on her ass all day. That’s when I said to myself I had to just start my own life, you know?”

  He nodded. He was sort of doing the same thing. “My dad disappeared,” he told her.

  “Really?”

  “He was kind of losing it. I was in touch with him, right, and I was going down to Toronto to see him on weekends and stuff, and then one weekend, I just couldn’t find him. I kept looking for months, but the guy had gone.”

  “Any clue where?”

  “Apparently he’d been talking about going out west.”

  “Really,” she said seriously. “So is that why you came out here?”

  He hesitated, wondering if he should just stop here. But her face was open, so fresh that she looked like a clear river you’d trust was safe to drink. He’d never seen such clean water and it made him incredibly thirsty. “Partially,” he finally replied. “But mostly because I needed to get away. Like you—I wanted to start my own life.”

  Once they’d reached ground level later that afternoon, she squeezed his hand and said, “You’re the first guy I’ve ever shared that with.”

  “Hopefully, I’ll be the last.”

  “Whoa. You move fast!” she laughed.

  “I’m serious. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  That’s when she planted the first of a series of big ones on his lips. They both dove in for more, their breath steaming like geysers. In a tight, furious embrace, they carried each other back to her place and made love on the floor, and then the couch, and then the bed, and then the floor again. From top to bottom to bottom to top and all over again until they were laughing like children amazed by their own strength.

  Their skin stung with rug burn as they lowered themselves down into the narrow bath. They passed a beer bottle between them and grinned stupidly in the first, wordless moments of love.

  “She’s amazing,” he repeated at the end of the letter to his sister. “P.S.,” he added. “Why don’t you get your stupid ass back home and come out here and see me. Can’t you take a break? Sounds like you could use one. Drive my truck out. It’ll be excellent. Just put your foot all the way to the floor when you change the gears and put on your mascara before you get behind the wheel.”

  Gold

  The porter could see she was headed for trouble. She had always seemed a little strange to him, muttering as she did, all that cow manure under her nails, but now she’d picked up the pace and was moving with a peculiar intensity. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe she was just memorizing things aloud for her final exam, but he wasn’t so sure.

  What Emma was, was deeply preoccupied. She thought she’d found something, something big, but she had to be sure, or at least surer, before she told Professor Rocker. She had to find a way to put it into words. A large area of flat rock at the far end of the site. A long linear crevice in rock that shouldn’t crack—at least not in straight lines. It was wrong somehow. It was too deliberate. A couple of centimetres wide, it looked deep, deep enough to warrant investigation.

  In her knapsack that day she had packed a bread knife and a flashlight. She lingered at the site at the end of the day, as everybody collected their gear and made their way to the bus.

  “Aren’t you coming, Emma?” Professor Rocker asked.

  “I’m just going to finish this sketch. I won’t be long. I’ll take the next bus,” she said, waving him off.

  “All right then. But try and get some sleep tonight. You look like a wreck.”

  She nodded dismissively and continued with the pretence of sketching.

  When they’d all left, she got the bread knife out of her bag and ran it through the crevice. She plunged the knife in as far as it would reach. She took the flashlight from her bag and held it over the split rock. The beam spilled into the width of the crack and then burst like a sparkler in the dead of night. There was a cave of some sort below. The rock must have been deliberately cut and placed overtop to obscure it. Her heart beat rapidly. She knew she was on to something big.

  It came to her as a vision that night. Through the crack, in the hidden cave, there were a thousand skeletons. The jumbled remains of various bodies. A burial pit—an ossuary—a massive native grave. All the smaller graves of a century dug up; bodies and pottery lifted and lowered into a communal pit where they could sing as a chorus in the afterlife. Together forevermore under blue and orange skies, under the rain of a thousand seasons. The way burial should be: rubbing femurs and fibulas with everyone you’ve ever known and loved.

  Strictly Leather

  Blue scribbled a note to his sister on the back of a postcard of two moose mating below the slogan: “Get Your Rocks Off in Banff.” “Shacked up with Amy. Getting all domestic. Hope you’re keeping your hands dirty,” he wrote, and then flung it in the mail.

  After their first weekend together, things between Blue and Amy continued in much the same way—with big expeditions during the day, and even bigger ones at night. She showed him the magic of her world, the mountains, the ice that never melts. She had otherwise discovered these wonders on her own and felt grateful for the sweet, doting presence beside her that made them seem all the more dramatic. She loved his size. Blue was larger than life: a complicated mixture of untamed innocence and erotic danger that had hooked her from the very beginning.

  Together, they bought him proper hiking boots in a respectable store and Blue laughed at his feet looking normal and conservative. “Okay, I’m drawing the line here,” he said. “You won’t be getting me into a ski jacket or parka.”

  “No way, babe,” she laughed. “I know you—strictly leather or lumberjack.”

  “That’s right. And don’t you forget it.”

  More than just the shoes had changed, though. He was learning how to breathe, climbing up the side of mountains, scrambling after his diminutive girlfriend who leapt over boulders with the ease of a deer.

  Amy moved in with Blue a month to the day after th
ey had first met. He got a bigger room at the Ptarmigan Inn and they took all the nasty framed pictures off the wall and put up posters of Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead in their place. They gave it atmosphere. Filled the mini-fridge with cheap wine and processed cheese and burned incense when the cigarette smoke became oppressive. “You’re a civilizing influence,” he told her.

  He called Elaine with the good news. He neglected to mention that Amy was a stripper. Elaine was relieved to hear that he’d met someone and she did an uncharacteristically motherly thing in response—she sent them a case of pickled things: beets, eggplant, mushrooms, and onions. She’d actually pickled them herself. Labelled them with her own brand of humour, a humour her children had never really seen—Blue’s Beets, Elaine’s Eggplant, Magic Mushrooms, and Oliver’s Only Onions.

  Blue didn’t get it. Didn’t get her sense of humour or what possessed her to pickle vegetables. He wondered if she might have found herself a boyfriend. Something to have unleashed this unprecedented outpouring of affection.

  Elaine was proud of the way her children were turning out in her fantasies. She imagined Emma discovering the tomb of King Tut’s father and turning the world of ancient ruins on its head. She imagined Blue, well adjusted and middle class, wearing an expensive parka and making weekend jaunts to Whistler where he skied with his girlfriend among the rich and fabulous. Having first felt abandoned, she had come to savour the thought of them at this distance where she could assign them good lives and they couldn’t disrupt her illusions.

  Her desire to make maternal contact with Blue had, as Blue suspected, come fast on the heels of meeting a man, a good-looking man who, although he happened to be married, had started paying her a fair deal of attention. She’d boasted about her children to him, and in so doing, had constructed these successful lives for them.

  Blue looked in the package his mother had sent and told Amy that meeting her had changed everything in his life.