by Lisa Moore
In the evening, after the funeral, they drove home without talking and when they pulled into the driveway Beverly turned off the car and they just sat there. All the lights were off in the house.
Let’s go in, Beverly said. But neither of them moved.
Finally, Colleen’s feet were so cold she got out of the car and her boots broke through the thin glossy crust on the banks of snow. Each step she took toward the house made a loud crunching noise.
When she got inside she went to the bathroom and when she lifted the toilet lid she saw the thin nest of her mother’s hair, pulled from the hairbrush earlier that morning, floating on the top of the water in the toilet.
The hair in the toilet was floating in an idle circle and there was, in that subtle movement, something sinister.
It struck Colleen her mother had aged with David’s death. She became instantly ancient. She had always been older than all the other mothers who wore jeans and got on the toboggans with their kids and knew, instinctively, the right kinds of junk to put in loot bags. But now she was ancient.
Colleen stared at the hair and thought that her mother had been hurtled into a remote solitude, far away from Colleen or anyone else, sealed away forever. She had been robbed of sex and the intricate privacy and rituals of a couple who have been in love for a long time — the aspects of her mother’s life that had been invisible to Colleen before David’s death. But, yes, they must have had sex, they must have loved, they were each other’s best friends, they’d spoken together in murmurs while they cooked; she saw the staggering, bald truth of it, the bottomless loss. Her mother’s vast, new solitude was a stigma, banishing her from fun or lightheartedness, banishing her unequivocally; it was a solitude that seemed to Colleen infectious.
The dark hair, floating in the toilet bowl, embodied the simplicity and horror of her mother’s grief and it terrified Colleen. She wanted to be as far away from the voyeuristic intimacy of that floating nest of tangles as she could get.
She woke up on her bed, the light still on; she was wearing her winter coat. The snow on her boots had melted all over the bedspread. She woke as though she hadn’t slept at all but it was 4 a.m. and she went to the living-room window and saw her mother had fallen asleep in the car, her forehead resting on the steering wheel, the windshield frosted over.
BEVERLY
COLLEEN FINISHED THE undercooked, mucuslike egg Beverly had prepared. Beverly believed in a proper breakfast. She believed that even a daughter who disappoints irrevocably deserves breakfast.
She put the cracked eggcup on the placemat in front of Colleen.
Just eat it, she said. She stood at the window with her back to her daughter. She was watching a cat stalking a robin in the backyard. She looked vindicated and dreamy.
What can possibly happen to me next? she whispered. The cat pounced and held the bird under its paws for a long, considered instant, then tore off its head.
You look lovely, she said. They had fought over the piercing in her tongue for three months and, as a concession, Colleen had removed the stud.
Off to youth diversion then, said Beverly.
FRANK
HE HAD BOUGHT the first hot-dog cart with his paper route money. He put every cent of it away for four years and during the winter he went door to door asking if people wanted shovelling and he asked if there were beer bottles they wanted to get rid of.
There was a restaurant downtown that let him wash dishes in the summer when it was busy.
His friend Kevin got him a part-time job at a photocopy place; he helped cut posters and business cards, he fiddled with the machines when they wouldn’t work. He put every cent away and paid for his own school supplies in September.
One day in June he and his mother got the bus to the Village Mall and took a taxi the rest of the way out Topsail Road. They told the taxi driver the address he’d found in the Express and when they arrived it was a used-car lot with a string of faded plastic flags sagging from one street light to another.
They’d arrived at dusk and it was cold and had been raining for eight days and the lot was muddy and someone had laid down two-by-fours on the walk up to the house. The cars had their prices marked in white shoe polish on the windshields and some were missing a tire or two and the rusted axles sank into the ground. There was a small bungalow at the end of a dirt driveway. It had pale blue vinyl siding and two narrow windows. The front door was six feet above the ground with no front steps. They went around the side and found the back door and rang the bell. A row of faded men’s jeans hung on a clothesline. There was a German shepherd on a short chain tied to a doghouse. Someone had written Shep on the doghouse in red, dripping paint that looked like horror-movie blood. The dog rose when they approached and it sniffed the air and turned three circles and lay down again on a patch of concrete. They had heard the doorbell chiming through the house but no one came to the door so they knocked.
The man who finally opened the door wore jeans and a white undershirt and he asked them in and they had to take off their shoes in the tiny porch and step through a pile of children’s boots and toys. In the kitchen the heat was on bust and a kettle started to whistle and the man waved at the kitchen table for them to sit down. He took out three cups and he got a tin of Carnation milk from the fridge.
There was a TV on in the living room. He had a belly that was hard and round and grey hair sprouted out from under his arms and above the neck of the white undershirt and he got out a package of Jam Jams, slit the plastic with his thumbnail, and put them on the table.
Frank saw the man’s hands had a kind of tremble; they hovered over the cookies as if he were deciding how best to offer them. The trembling made Frank think the man was in financial need and would demand a good price for the hot-dog stand.
His mother reached across the table with a sigh and poured the Carnation milk from a bit of a height and gave the tin a jovial little dip and twist when she had enough milk and she stirred the tea very quickly and knocked the spoon on the edge of the cup three times.
He saw that his mother was prepared to engage with the owner of the hot-dog stand as if he mattered greatly to her. She would warm him the way she warmed everyone who came into her path, and this might be enough. His mother’s natural, enduring warmth might carry the day.
The kitchen was clean, there were dishes drying in the rack, and a cuckoo clock sent out a bird nine times and they had to wait for it to stop before Frank felt comfortable talking about the hot-dog stand. He felt a reckless anticipation.
The truth was he wanted the hot-dog stand and he had only $1,000 and the man was asking $1,300 and it was possible, Frank felt, that if he went home without the hot-dog stand it would break his will.
COLLEEN
SHE HAD HITCHHIKED on a Friday evening for six hours and then began her walk up the timberline. She walked for three hours with just the moon and a flashlight beam to show up the stumps sticking out of the earth. She felt a blister form on the back of one heel and felt it break and rub against her leather sneaker. The breeze was chilly and when it rushed through the trees, making them jostle together, she became aware of how audacious the vandalism would appear. She felt adrenalin rush through her and she was exhilarated and weary. Nothing could compel her to turn back.
There had been a short-lived group at the university who had come together to protest the clear-cut that was endangering the pine marten. They’d argued whether it was true about the Newfoundland pine marten being a separate species and how it could be saved and how they could raise funds and how urgent it all was. There was a definite sense of urgency. There was talk about a bake sale and a letter to the premier. They were dressed mostly in Polarfleece, and hiking boots; they were studying biology or literature or geography. Colleen had gone because of an ad she’d seen on a paper placemat at a café downtown.
She’d downloaded material about international groups and people who had handcuffed themselves around the trunks of trees and people who had gone without fo
od or set themselves on fire. She had photographs of Julia Butterfly Hill, who had climbed a tree and refused to come down for two years. But she couldn’t bring herself to speak up. They were all older and seemed to know each other. She sat in a desk at the back and listened and her cheeks burned red and her blood thumped in her temples and finally she drew her material from her knapsack and flicked at the edge of the folder with her thumb, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She’d gone to a meeting in April and only two other people had shown up. At the final meeting in May, when university was winding down, no one had shown up but her. She’d sat with her back against the locked door of the seminar room and waited for a half-hour. She felt oddly humiliated. She decided to act by herself.
The shadows of the underbrush stretched out and swivelled away from her as the beam of the flashlight travelled over the brush and the stars were very bright. She had to be in and out before the morning shift showed up. Twenty-five men were employed to raze the forest. They would come bouncing up over the timberline on ATVs at dawn.
By the time Colleen reached the clear-cut it had begun to grow light. A gleam appeared along the edge of the river at the base of a very long hillside that had been scraped of vegetation. A dawn light showed the tips of the trees against the sky. There was a streak of bluish green at the horizon and the indigo darkness was turning a softer blue. The bulldozers, in silhouette, looked like prehistoric animals, majestic and slouching.
She had already climbed up into the first bulldozer, had opened her knapsack and taken out the bread and cheese she had packed, when the door of the plywood shed at the edge of the clear-cut smacked against the wall.
A man in a plaid shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of the hut and began to piss. When he was finished she could hear him moving around inside, pouring water, and there was a clatter of dishes. She stayed crouched inside the bulldozer for a long time.
Finally she took a zip-lock bag of sugar from her knapsack and found her way to the top of the machine where the lid to the diesel tank was. She unscrewed the lid, keeping her eye on the shed.
She thought about what she was doing. She closed her eyes and imagined the sugar falling into the guts of the machine, working its way through all the pipes and gaskets. She thought of the surprise and consternation all the men would feel when the five machines cut out almost in unison.
She could hear a radio. There was no way to know when it was safe to move without being seen. Not getting caught required a telepathic vision of the future and an ability to somehow manipulate it, the power of positive thinking, or dumb luck.
She heard a sudden slap and it was the man tossing a bucket of water on the rocks beside the shed. She waited and then she moved to the next bulldozer.
The noise of the pouring sugar, a loud, erotic gushing, caused the hairs to stand up on her arms.
She moved under the window of the shed and tripped over an enamel cup and it clattered against a rock and she ran for all she was worth. The man yelled at her. But she was running and she heard him running behind her. She got over a hump in the path and she ducked into the woods and he ran past her. She stayed where she was and once he was out of sight she dug her way back through the woods so that she was sure she could not be seen. Her neck and wrists were bitten by blackflies and they were burning. She felt a bite between her toes and she tried to rub it against the weave of her cotton sock and couldn’t wait to scratch it until it bled. But she stayed perfectly still. The man came back over the road and passed her again. She waited for an hour and then crept out of the bushes and ran as fast as she could.
What she’d felt when she reached the highway was elation. There were fifty pine martens left in this forest. She had not saved the pine martens of course. The clear-cut would continue. But it would take a few days to replace the machines. There would be men who would be paid to sit around and do nothing.
VALENTIN
VALENTIN AND ANTON sat in opposite chairs, each with a row of seven shot glasses in front of him. They were methodical about drinking, taking very little pleasure in it. They were not talking to each other. Once, Valentin, the older man at forty-five, put his fist against his chest because the alcohol burned on the way down. Anton stood and shrugged himself into his leather jacket and headed for the bar.
Valentin was a steady drinker who never slurred or swaggered, but when he drank his face became softer. He was a brutal man and drinking made him decisive and composed. Even the scraggly, bleached-out, delicate women who always gravitate toward nasty men were shy of him when he was sober. Drinking made him resolute in a dangerously attractive way.
Often, he had the bartender send a drink to a woman who interested him. He’d watch while she scanned the room and when she found him he’d tip his glass in her direction.
There was nothing for her to do but nod back.
He knew that tipping his glass, as he did, appeared disdainful; he knew there was some slight adjustment required; some subtle aspect of the North American culture he needed to grasp before his attentions could be appreciated. But he had never mastered an easy charm. He attracted women, instead, with a wily sense of purpose that was itself intoxicating.
The door to the bar was open and it was raining hard. He could smell the rain and heavy cigarette smoke and some dank, despairing smell — the mouldy carpet, briny harbour, and pigeon-shit reek the rain released.
He was waiting for a young woman who had a supply of prescription drugs he was willing to sell for her. She was fifteen minutes late.
The woman was on a month-long OxyContin binge and he imagined she would probably be dead by the end of the summer. It had impressed him how long she had hung on already. She might have been beautiful, but the binge had left her jaundiced, bony, and drawn. He might have made love to her, but she was fitful and distracted. He found that when he made love he liked to have a girl’s attention. It was a mandatory courtesy he hadn’t cared about or noticed when he was young.
Valentin had a heavy brow and broad cheekbones. His eyes were large and almost rusty brown and his mouth was crooked and sensuous. He assessed himself every morning when he shaved, gave himself a cold look, but he found himself handsome.
In Russia, as a teenager, Valentin had been a chess champion. If the girl didn’t show he would play a game of chess. He had an Old World cunning that amounted to a talent for being flexible.
He knew he was the picture of European sophistication when he sat behind a chessboard with his arms resting on the table. He affected a brooding look. He could win without much effort. He liked the feel of onlookers. He liked the way they didn’t speak, and would wander away and come back to see how the game progressed. He liked the good-natured losers who shook his hand or clapped him on the shoulder.
Flexibility meant a prismatic comprehension of all aspects of experience. A burst of intuition that stripped a situation of its complexity and made plain what was most advantageous. What he believed in most was being thorough.
He had travelled through countries where the worth of a loaf of bread had soared and dropped in the time it took him to eat it. He’d seen a Jeep fly into the air; he’d seen legs torn from bodies.
He’d seen his father dragged from his bed and made to kneel on the ground and then shot in the back of the head. It was a night that came back to him frequently in dreams. He had not seen it; he had heard it through an open window. Or it had been recounted to him. His sister had whispered the story to him while he was falling asleep; he had heard the neighbours speak of it. Here or there, a spoken phrase so vivid he couldn’t remember what he’d seen for himself and what he’d been told.
His father kneeling in the mud is a memory he feels he must have seen with his own eyes, first one knee then the other, the concentrated spot of a flashlight jiggling on his father’s bare white neck and then becoming diffuse, flying off into the trees. But he cannot remember a gunshot.
Valentin and his sister were hiding under a bed, he remembers, and the smell of mothball
s still brings the night back distinctly, though he was only three, though he might have been sound asleep throughout. Mothball is not a word he has ever read; he doesn’t even know what they are made of. Perhaps mothballs are natural, occur in nature.
He had been tortured once for six days in a cinderblock cell and believed himself to be abandoned in this cell, buried alive, and lived with this belief for two and a half days and three cracked ribs and an eye swollen shut — they had dislodged the retina in his left eye and now it caught the light in a strange way, like the irregularities in a piece of amber — and had then been released for no reason he could figure out, though he’d examined every detail of his experience in confinement for logic or pattern. When he got out into the light of day it was supernaturally bright and he recognized that he had been altered so radically that he could no longer be certain of who he was.
It was an uncertainty that lasted for almost a month. During that month his hearing became unbearably sensitive. Words failed him. What do you call the utensil you eat soup with? The struggle for the word caused an acute anxiety. He would think he was speaking Russian and realize it was English. He would tell a French waitress he wanted a thing to eat his spoon but he would be speaking English. He would say he meant soup but he had switched to Russian.
He’d made love to the widow of a dentist in Bosnia and had taken her husband’s dental instruments in a satchel and claimed he was a professional for so long that a weak paper trail identified him as such and he had crossed some European borders he would not have crossed if they’d known he was a common thug. By the end of it he could remove a rotten tooth with the appropriate tool causing minimal pain.
Thug was an English word with which he identified. He liked its truncated sound, its gangster-movie anonymity, its gritty truthfulness.
