by Lisa Moore
Groggy with sleep, the flowers and cold night wind made her potently frightened. She was way too much in love.
Smell the flower, the Spaniard said.
I am too much in love, she said.
Smell the flower, he demanded. And he shook the twig near her nose and raindrops fell on her face. She wanted to know what was in the back of the transport truck. What they were carrying.
The landscape had been slipping past them for weeks and it felt like having a tablecloth pulled from beneath an elaborately laid feast.
For the rest of her life she would judge every trip against this trip and every love again this love and none would measure up.
No love would ever measure up.
The truck driver said they had come through the mountains and it had snowed. She saw a rim of slush outside the arc of the wipers and was surprised because two days before they had been swimming in the ocean near Marseille. Marty had pulled a pink starfish out of the waves, handed it to her, and the arms curled around her wrist.
BEVERLY
DAVID HAD MADE a substantial profit in downtown development in the early ‘90s. He’d had a hand in the construction of many downtown buildings whose main architectural characteristic was an arrogant disregard of the skyline they butchered. This sort of construction — fast and ugly — had inspired months of bitter letters to the Telegram, and left a handful of Newfoundland men as wealthy as any men in the world. David had come very close to attaining that sort of wealth.
Or who can say, Beverly thought, what is close. For years, thinking about how close they’d come to extravagant wealth was a metaphysical exercise that gave Beverly pre-migraine symptoms. A blurry spot hung over her newspaper all morning. The altered vision was accompanied by a hypersensitivity to smells.
She vaguely associated the condition with the supernatural. When she felt a migraine coming she almost always bought a lottery ticket.
The two and a half years of wealth had been the best years of her life. She started to work part-time and had time for watercolour lessons and played tennis three times a week. She sunbathed on the veranda that ran around their house, even in May, when the snow was sliding off the tree branches and the icicles on the eaves were dripping. She never wanted to have to work full-time again.
David had taken the family on three trips to the Caribbean during those wealthy years.
Colleen would remember for the rest of her life a sugar plantation in Barbados she had visited when she was seven; a plantation mistress had poisoned a series of husbands with voodoo.
Colleen had fed wild monkeys from her hand, and later heard they’d torn a Rottweiler limb from limb. She remembered crouching indefinitely on a floor of dried palm leaves, the ground full of flashing spears of light and shadow, waiting with the banana held before her. The monkeys blinked quickly and rushed forward and held still and fled to a safe distance. With each brave, wily scramble toward the banana the numbers of monkeys grew until there were perhaps thirty.
They screamed to each other and bared their teeth and a small monkey snatched the whole banana from Colleen’s hand. Then the gardener came out waving a machete and telling her to back away slowly.
As quickly as David had got rich, he’d lost everything. He returned to his job at a computer imaging company, specializing in hospital software; three-dimensional graphics that allowed surgeons to watch a laser operation three provinces away, then pick up the phone and tell the guys who were gouging away at someone’s tumour that they’d missed a spot.
He had handed in his resignation two years before with some flourish.
I’m getting a fat ass from all the airplane food, he’d said. He was an engineer and liked the clank of one steel girder lowered by crane onto another steel girder; he liked the smell of outdoor work. He hated the rinky-dink hospitals he’d had to visit and their earnest staffs. He wanted to work with men who had tattoos on their forearms, who could swing a sledgehammer without throwing out their backs.
Although David had not exactly told them to stuff their job, as Colleen had heard him rehearse in the bathroom mirror, his chin raised to the ceiling while he dragged viciously on the knot of his tie, speaking through gritted teeth and looking as though he might strangle himself, he had returned to the position bitter and flinty.
The company rehired him for almost double what he had been paid two years before. He had to travel for work and was gone once a month.
Beverly got calls from Provo, Utah, where David said the women were athletic and blond and dazed.
Impossible to get a drink, he said. He was doing pushups as he spoke, grunting after each sentence. He called from Texas to say they were having a windstorm. He had opened the patio windows because it was exhilarating.
Long white curtains are billowing into the room, he said. She heard a smash.
My God, he said. Now there’s porridge all over the floor.
He called from Ireland and when she hung up she heard a racket in the living room and her heart beat jaggedly; a bird had flown in through the chimney, an unmistakable omen of death.
The next time she spoke to David he was in Berlin and he said that he’d stood at the edge of a cliff in Ireland, in a small village full of ancient Druid dwellings of stone, and the wind through the crevices had sounded like voices and he’d suffered from vertigo and nearly given in.
Given in? she asked.
I could have jumped, he said.
Something had been compelling in Ireland, that’s what she remembered. Something had almost drawn him away. She could hear techno music bleating in the background like cash registers or air conditioners or hundreds of women panting toward orgasm.
I’m in an underground bar, he said.
What do you mean underground? she asked. She was imagining catacombs and rats.
Illegal, he said. It moves location, it doesn’t exist.
Do you still feel like giving in? she said.
That was Ireland, he said. Berlin is all broken glass and BMWs.
She was feeling around on the nightstand for her glasses. She hadn’t said anything about the bird. She’d had to ask eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Fowler from next door, who had taught botany at the university, to come over and catch it. Mrs. Fowler had Parkinson’s and stumbled in, gripping her walker from which there was hanging a clear plastic bag of urine. She positioned herself in the centre of the living room. She wore a lilac cardigan with a large stain that looked like pea soup and her glasses were hanging on a red satin ribbon.
The bird dive-bombed them twice, then settled on the curtain rod, and cocked its head, blinking inquisitively. Mrs. Fowler slowly put a quivering hand into the pocket of her black polyester pants and removed a plastic whistle.
The whistle shook violently in her hand and she dropped it twice and Beverly retrieved it and wiped it clean. When Mrs. Fowler finally had the whistle clenched in her teeth she blew with all her might and it was piercingly shrill and had an otherworldly warble. The bird flung itself at the opposite window and fell with a thud to the floor.
You’ve killed it, Beverly whispered. Mrs. Fowler shut her eyes in the effort to speak.
I am so often uncertain these days, she said. Beverly picked up the bird carefully and the fragile neck tipped over her finger but she could feel its heart, faster than anything, under her thumb.
I don’t know who you are, my dear, Mrs. Fowler said. Wasn’t there a nurse or someone to accompany the poor woman? How had she managed to find her way through the hedge? Mrs. Fowler had held annual garden parties for the neighbourhood several years ago. She served punch in a crystal bowl with floating slices of lemon and orange. People had smoked dope in the back of the garden. Mrs. Fowler had worn jeans and had participated in the New York marathon a decade before. What had happened?
The bird’s heart terrified Beverly, so speeded up and frantic. The heart said the bird mattered. And David, who must have been staring into an abyss, the seductive roil of the Atlantic, convinced it might be pleasant to
simply give up; David mattered.
But when she got to the front door, the bird was fighting against her cupped hands and she opened them and it flew straight into the sky.
It flew with such unexpected purpose — it made Beverly wonder if they might have been spared whatever ill luck was about to befall them.
Everybody here is naked, David shouted. Beverly heard a woman speaking German very near the phone.
Your speech is slurred, she said.
They’ve got on leather hoods, he said. I wish you were here. Where are you? she said.
There are girls in cages with nothing on but go-go boots.
Are you with friends? she asked, tilting the bedside clock so she could see the time. She would be awake now until dawn.
David called from Toronto the next day to say his flight was delayed and he wanted more than anything to be home.
You would not believe my head, he said. He said he would give anything to be in her arms. He thanked her for their marriage which he said was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He felt like weeping because he was so hungover, he said, and jetlagged and because she was his wife and he loved her and he was unbelievably lucky to have her. He told her these things couldn’t be said often enough and no amount of talking could ever express how he really felt.
I’ve come to an understanding, he said, about how lucky I am to have you. He said that he’d taken some kind of pill, something a woman had dropped in his drink.
I feel all hollowed out, he said.
A woman put something in your drink? she asked.
I think she was a woman, he said. Beverly had hired a teenage boy from down the street to mow the lawn. It would be the last mowing of the season. Already the trees were bare and the dogberries were violent orange all over the sidewalks. The air had stiffened. The boy was wearing a red eiderdown jacket. She watched him flick the extension cord and bend into the lawn mower.
It was a matter of putting your weight behind something, all of your weight. Giving yourself over to a chore, believing it was worthwhile. She would raise her daughter the same way that boy mowed. She would love her husband that way, no matter what infidelity or loss of faith had occurred. She had wanted the lawn done before the snow arrived.
She was practically naked, Beverly, and very muscular, David said. She had dropped the pill into his beer and he guzzled it down.
Too muscular, if you know what I mean, he said. Beverly could hear, in the background, the wheels of luggage rumbling over tiles, airport announcements. The blade of the mower hit a rock, a bright dangerous clank. She had no idea what he meant.
Too muscular for a woman, David said after a long pause.
You gave me a start, Beverly said. She closed her eyes and saw him falling off the cliff in Ireland.
It’s already winter in Toronto, David said.
Maybe you need a good meal, Beverly said.
Everything is white.
Get yourself some juice, she said.
I’m just looking out a big window, he said.
It makes me wonder, David.
They have those guys on the runway. I love those guys. All suited up. They’re so alone out there, waving those beacons. They are the unsung heroes.
I’m left wondering.
I have to get something to drink, I’m parched, he said. Whatever it was in his drink had changed him and he couldn’t wait to get back and hold her, because he saw now that his life was nothing without her.
She was stirring linguine noodles and the steam covered the window, obscuring the garden, and the boy pushed the mower past a flare of condensation on the glass and walked out the other side, his red jacket seeming even brighter than before. She told David she loved him too. She remembers saying that. Or she has the impression she said it. She left him with the general impression.
Whatever had happened, she’d given the impression she was willing to push through it. She’d made that clear she’s pretty sure.
There was no call from Halifax. The aneurysm had struck — if that is what aneurysms do, for some reason the word brought to mind a clock tower swathed in fog, a clutch of pigeons rising in the air, desolation, and the final hour — around four in the afternoon. The storm had hit St. John’s around the same time, everything shut down in a few hours, her lawn mower almost buried. David had been coming through the revolving door of a shopping mall. He had a drugstore bag in his hand that contained dental floss and medicated bandages for planter warts. In the pocket of his suit she’d found a restaurant bill. He’d had two draft beer and a cheeseburger at The Keg, bought a New Yorker, which was open to a story by Arthur Miller.
VALENTIN
VALENTIN WALKED DOWN the road to the Robin Hood Bay dump until he came to the fence. Beside the fence was a small shack with a single window and the door was locked. Valentin eased the frame of the door gently with a file he’d brought in his backpack and the nails squeaked but he was able to lift the frame without splintering the wood and he jiggled the door handle until the lock gave.
There was a scarred wooden desk with a brown plastic tray on which there was a teacup on a saucer and a squeezed teabag sitting beside the cup. A kettle, a glass dish of sugar packets, and coffee whitener were sitting on a miniature fridge in the corner. The electrical panel that controlled the fence was over the fridge, and Valentin threw the switch and heard the noise of the fence die away. Then he heard the gulls in the distance. A ring of keys was hanging by the electrical panel, and he assumed one of the keys would open the padlock on the gate.
When he touched the fence his peripheral vision turned black and closed in like the shutter on a camera closing, almost instantly, until there was only a point of light and that was also extinguished and he found himself on the ground and the back of his head had hit a rock.
He lay on his back for several minutes tingling all over and aching deeply in his bones. On the side of the road were several flatbeds with stacks of flattened cars, rusty crinkled sheets of metal hanging out between the brightly coloured, smashed hoods like lettuce in a sandwich.
The blue of the sky was so blue it hurt his eyes and the gulls were very white and far away. There was a field of concrete culverts, but Valentin couldn’t remember the word culvert in English and he doubted he had ever known it. He remembered, or thought he remembered, a train ride where he had been jostled from a dream and saw, out the window, thousands of culverts in an industrial yard, stacked high, like a honeycomb. There were cranes gently lifting them into place and men in hard hats standing around in pairs or alone. The sun was going down and bands of golden light streamed through the cylinders and he couldn’t remember what country it had been. He felt jangled all through his body. He felt weepy and childlike and he was afraid of the dump.
The earth he was lying on was packed down hard and threaded with pieces of metal and bits of fabric and plastic bags that had been churned with the gravel and ploughed under and then packed down by bulldozers and the tracks were still visible and he stood up and felt dizzy. He went back into the shack and sat down on a swivel chair, the seat of which was worn and a tuft of foam hung out, and Valentin started to cry.
He was afraid of rats. He had been in prison and he knew how to inflict pain effectively and how to endure it. The way you endure pain: you make up your mind you will endure it. He had given up smoking cigarettes in prison and he had taken part in the organization of a sex racket that he profited from, and that eventually got him out of prison altogether. He had been through all this, but he was still mortally afraid of rats. The ship he had arrived on was overrun with rats, though he had not seen them.
The Russian vessel had been seized by the Canadian government in Harbour Grace with a crew of forty-three sailors on board. The shipping company responsible for the vessel and crew had folded without a trace and the men’s wages were frozen or there were no wages and they had run out of supplies and had used up all their fuel after only a week in port.
The Catholic Church in the pa
rish of Harbour Grace held a bingo game when it realized the predicament the sailors were in and raised $600 and the men came ashore for the evening and stood around the parish hall, looking ashamed and hungry. They cleaned out the bowls of chips and pretzels that were put out on the card tables where people were playing bridge. There were bowls of Bridge Mixture and the Ladies Auxiliary had made sandwiches and the Russians ate those too.
The cash from the bingo night was handed over to one of the Russians the next morning and Mrs. Furlong, who was the parish priest’s housekeeper, and who was a member of the town council, took the cook from the vessel to the supermarket and drove him down to the dock with the supplies.
Everyone expected the Canadian government to intervene quickly on behalf of the sailors, but by the following weekend the crew was out of food again and had no electricity and there was another bingo game and enough money was raised to provide groceries for another week.
An emergency meeting was called by the town council and Mrs. Furlong said she had heard from the gentleman who bought the groceries that the ship was overrun with rats. She said they had purchased several tins of baked beans at the supermarket, but the Russians were eating them cold, directly out of the tins.
Someone pointed out that the money from the bingo games had been previously allotted to the town library for the purchase of computers.
The minutes of the council meeting reflected all of these comments and were distributed the following morning to the council members, the media, several other members of government, and a copy was delivered to the vessel and Valentin read about the rats, which he hadn’t known about, and became terrified and knew he had to get off the ship.
He rowed into town from the ship the next day and went to the Family Restaurant at twelve and sat beside a terrarium built into the wall enclosing eight budgies, blue and yellow and lime green. The back of the cage was lined with a poster of a half-dozen kittens. The budgies mostly stayed still, their eyes closed, their heads cocked to the side. They might have been stuffed except the glass was encrusted with bird shit and there was a small cardboard sign in the corner, written in ballpoint pen, which said, Please don’t tap glass.
