Alligator

by Lisa Moore

  He has to get to the hot-dog cart. But couldn’t he just ask her maybe to dance?

  He’ll make money tonight hand over fist. There will be light breaking over the South Side Hills by the time he heads home. George Street will be covered in garbage, drunks lurching, the cops will be out.

  Frank has a permit for the corner of George Street, which is the best spot in the city. This is a street with bars on both sides and is famous now for the festival, which is just drinking all night long.

  He had to get down to City Hall before it opened and line up to get that spot. He paid good money.

  A guy can move hot dogs on George Street.

  He’s seen a guy out by Sobey’s Square have to depend on when the movies let out. The guy spends all his time looking at an empty parking lot. George Street in the summer and Frank can pull in close to a grand every week.

  The taxi drivers keep him company. Gulliver’s Taxis lined up near the pizza place across the street, the drivers leaning on their cars, the ends of their cigarettes moving in the dark.

  They’re the kind of men who have a little timeshare trailer somewhere in the Florida Keys they drive down to because they are afraid to fly and their children are grown up and some of them have done a bit of time and they have faded tattoos on their hands to prove it, between the thumb and index finger, a sword and cross or a four-leaf clover, their wives want to go to Florida for their arthritis and you can’t hang on to it one guy said because they put you in a home and the government just takes it and there’s bastards sat off on their arses their whole lives collecting dole and doing fuck all and you know what they get? The same sort of bed in the same sort of old-age home as guys that worked all night long on George Street dragging vomiting drunks in and out of cars for the last thirty years. College kids losing their stomachs all over the upholstery, more money than you can bat an eye, they have to hose the van out the next morning, and so they spend two weeks of the winter in Florida because their youngsters won’t get a cent after they’re gone, the home will eat it all up, nest egg my fucking foot, and please, God, I’ll be taken in my sleep before it comes to that.

  The taxi drivers are something else, Frank knows, but they keep an eye on him because he works so hard and they kid him about being skinny and they say stuff about his wiener but mostly they watch out for him because when he leaves the corner of George Street after a night on the hot-dog stand he can have as much as five hundred bucks on him.

  Just a kid, they tell each other.

  At 4 a.m. everyone wants a hot dog, the taxi drivers tell him as they pull out their wallets and hand him a five and look off into the fog or rain and wait while the wieners barbecue.

  Give me some of them what are they banana peppers my stomach will hate me, they say.

  A crowd tonight, they tell him.

  What have you got a cold drink back there, Frank?

  Have you got a girl, Frank? I bet you got a girl, they say.

  Look at Frank, look at the colour of him.

  He must have a girl.

  Some crowd tonight, Frank, they say. Give me a couple of them napkins. The taxi drivers come over and talk whether they want a hot dog or not.

  Frank has never given a hot dog away.

  The taxi drivers understand this perfectly.

  There are people outside the door of the Ship Inn trying to cool down or having a smoke. She has a rhinestone in her belly button. She’s slender, her arms are golden, her neck is golden, and there’s an elastic riding over her hip, a part of her red thong and it makes him crazy to think about sliding a finger under that elastic. He’d like to take that elastic in his teeth. Her arms are raised over her head, and her face is turned down and to the side and she’s biting her lower lip to keep from smiling to herself because she’s so sexy.

  If he could tell half the things about himself she would fall in love with him.

  If he could have some of her time.

  Just to tell her a few things.

  He watched her dance with the guy who is the town simpleton, delayed person, and the delayed guy has on glasses that make his eyes googly and he is a type of thin that speaks medication and he breathes through clenched teeth, and spittle comes out but she doesn’t seem to mind. She dances with her eyes closed and when she opens her eyes she smiles at the delayed guy. What is that smile, good-natured? It is without condescension and that’s why he is starting to fall in love with her.

  When the song ends the delayed guy goes to the bar and this is the moment Frank should ask her to dance with him.

  He feels the moment getting bigger in his chest.

  He is very close to just walking right up to her.

  She lifts her arms and gathers her hair and twists it and piles it on the top of her head and he sees her bare neck and he should ask her right now and she drops her hair and gives it a shake and it falls in a curtain down her back.

  The band is starting up — a retro band, joyfully ironic and smouldering with self-satisfied mirth. The girls love them — and she’s just standing there almost all alone and he could go right up to her now. She turns slightly and the rhinestone catches one of the stage lights and winks and sends out a blue laser for half a second and the music begins and it’s Meatloaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

  She sort of rocks her hips.

  She’s looking like she might dance to Meatloaf and he should just put down his drink and go up there and if she said no that would be okay. If she said no he could just walk out but he knows she wouldn’t say no. He knows she would say yes if his feet would just move but they are stuck and his chest is bursting now with the want to ask her.

  She bites her lower lip when she dances as if the look on her face would be full of such profound sexual pleasure, it would be dangerous to let it show, so she bites her lip instead.

  If he doesn’t ask her to dance right now: but he doesn’t. And a guy touches her shoulder and she lays her hand on his arm and she is laughing and her hips are rocking and the guy touches her hip he lays his hand right over the red elastic thong on her bare hip above her low-slung jeans and her arms are over her head and her hair hangs down over her face and a red light from the stage falls all over her bare arms.

  The floor is so crowded nobody can move.

  Frank charges out of the bar, furious. Some people sharing a joint on the sidewalk open their eyes wide at him and he looks like he might kill them, except he also looks like he doesn’t see them. He takes the stairs two at a time to Water Street.

  He strides along Water Street and the couples go past, guys holding on to elbows or an arm draped over a girl’s neck and their reflections in the big windows of empty storefronts stretch and lurch past.

  There’s music on George Street and the taxis try to drive through the crowds. The crowds take their time. Some girl lies over the hood of a car and the driver leans on the horn. Frank feels the drumming from the band through the soles of his sneakers. The girls have on miniskirts and little T-shirts with spaghetti straps. The straps slip off their shoulders and they have shiny bra straps and some of them are Americans from the cruise ship. Everybody tanned, mildly drunk, the high heels make the girls gawky and vulnerable and he could put a fist through a window he’s so furious.

  He passes a guy with a hot-dog stand. There’s a lineup all around the stand and just the sight of it makes Frank want to take a bat to it.

  He was in Sears buying the duvet cover that afternoon and the salesgirl said wet bar.

  What you want is a wet bar, she said.

  He didn’t like to drink. He especially wasn’t interested in stocking a bar. But he followed her down the aisle because she had a walk.

  He followed her down the aisle because it was air-conditioned in the Village Mall. He’d bought a soft serve and sat in the food court where his mother used to take him for a treat.

  He saw that there were a lot of handicapped people in the food court, and people who looked fucked up in one way or another, and then he saw
the two Russians who’d moved into the bed-sit above his and they saw him and he finished his cone and walked through Sears because he didn’t want to leave the mall right away in case they noticed and thought he was afraid of them.

  They had come to his stand on George Street the night before and they stood on the curb just behind him and they watched him selling hot dogs. George Street was full of crowds, there was a band outdoors, people had plastic cups of beer, and the Russians just stood there watching him for more than an hour.

  He had paid good money for the permit and it was his permit.

  The guy named Valentin waited with his hands linked behind his back.

  They just stood there and looked at the crowds.

  Valentin had on a pair of sunglasses and the lenses were black and he wore a black leather jacket.

  Some customers came and Frank put on some Polish sausages and he slit them with the knife and the fat leaked out and the flames sizzled. There were three customers and they took a long time dressing the hot dogs and when they left Valentin stepped up beside Frank and he said he wanted Frank’s stand and he wanted the permit.

  Frank put down the tongs he had for turning the wieners and he wiped his hands on his apron.

  We will offer a good price, said Valentin.

  The hot-dog stand isn’t for sale, Frank said. Valentin lifted his lip then in a kind of slow snarl and a toothpick unfolded out of his mouth and he picked at his eyetooth with it and examined the pick and dropped it in the gutter. His black sunglasses were full of the coloured lanterns that were strung across the street. He turned and the lanterns ran across the black lenses, one after the other. The city had done up George Street to look like drinking was a Newfoundland tradition. But the old-fashioned street lights were brand new.

  Valentin was taking all this in, this Old World look. There was a strip joint very near the hot-dog stand and the windows were covered with posters so you couldn’t look in, but light leaked out the sides. Frank glanced over at the taxi drivers and he noticed Lloyd with his back against his car, his arms folded over his chest. Someone in the Sundance had started up the mechanical bull. They could hear the rodeo music and the metal wrenching kicks and bucks and the yowls of whoever was riding it.

  The permit is my permit, said Frank.

  I think you’ll change your mind, Valentin said. At first Frank thought there might be something that wasn’t translating properly.

  I think you’ll change your mind. He waited in case something else was coming. He waited for something else. He waited for things not to be the way they were.

  But everything was the way it was.

  He had understood perfectly.

  Valentin had made himself understood.

  Frank saw that things were exactly the way he had always understood things to be all his life. He had understood things to be this way when he was five and had to go into a foster home because his mother was hospitalized for breast cancer and had to have both her breasts removed.

  He had understood things to be this way on several different occasions when he was, however briefly, a guest of the Whitbourne Correctional Institute for Juvenile Delinquents at the age of fourteen after a bout of shoplifting — he was caught, the last time, putting two T-bone steaks down the front of his jeans in the meat section of Dominion.

  He understood things were this way when his mother was diagnosed with cancer a second time and when she explained to him that it was all through her, a phrase that has haunted him ever since, all through me, all through me, all through me, how thorough and definite such a phrase can prove to be, he well understood, and they wanted her to go to hospital at once because in the hospital they could manage the pain and there was a very good chance she wouldn’t be coming out of the hospital and all of that proved to unfold exactly as his mother had said it would for the simple reason that that was the way things were.

  And when the Russians moved into the bed-sit on the third floor, Frank had the uncomfortable feeling that things would once again prove to turn out the way things often turned out.

  The guy named Valentin had been slapping a girl around the bed-sit the night before and Frank heard her screaming and he heard what he thought was her head smack the wall and then he heard her running down the stairs. They had one of her shoes and Frank went to his window and she was dishevelled and snot-nosed and the knee was torn out of her stocking and her knee was bleeding like she’d scraped it.

  The shoe flew out the window and hit her in the head and she dropped to her knees on the pavement and the men were laughing and a Gulliver’s Taxi came up and there was a long wait with her knock-kneed because of her tight skirt and she was dazed by the smack of the shoe on her head and the terrible predicament she’d got into because Valentin was yelling he would look for her wherever she went.

  Try to leave, he shouted.

  Just try.

  Kneeling on the street and the back door of the cab opened and still she stayed and finally the driver got out, the guy named Lloyd. He picked up the shoe, took the girl by the elbow, and got her standing up. He put her in the back seat and a beer bottle flew out the window and smashed near Lloyd’s heel. The glass glittering and rocking near the heel of Lloyd’s boot and Lloyd didn’t even acknowledge it; he just walked around to his side and closed his door. The taxi sat for a moment because Lloyd must have been asking the girl where she wanted to go and probably wasn’t getting any sense out of her. Another beer bottle flew out the window and bounced off the roof of the taxi but it didn’t break, it just rolled down the street. Then Lloyd drove away. He didn’t burn rubber, he just drove off quietly.

  Frank’s mother believed there was no difficulty that couldn’t be surmounted. This unending willingness not to be defeated kept his mother going, but she was also beaten down by it. Frank had learned from his mother not to give up on those things that are sacred. He could be yielding, but if something was sacred he would not bend.

  What was sacred was he would not give up the hot-dog permit to those Russians because he had worked for it.

  The girl at Sears had pink lipstick on, which made him focus on her mouth and the word wet bar sounded like an invitation to something altogether different; so he followed her to that part of the store.

  It was black padded vinyl with vinyl-covered buttons that held the diamonds of padding in place. It had a shoulder of chrome and the part you’d rest your elbow on was a smoked mirror with gold veins running through it. It had a lazy Susan, which he had never seen before and thought ingenious. There was a lone bottle of Tabasco sauce in the lazy Susan. He had to admit it was an impressive piece of furniture.

  The girl was chewing gum and she blew a bubble. She said she was getting married in a month to a guy who drove a bus and they had put this exact item on their registered wedding list and many of the guests had already put down as much as fifty dollars toward it. She said they had been buying furniture for three years always with the same plan in mind, when they had enough to furnish a small apartment they’d get married. They didn’t have a single thing on credit. Her fiancé was going to the technical college at night. She wouldn’t always be working at Sears, she said. What she wanted, and what she would eventually achieve, was accreditation as a dental hygienist.

  Nothing is going to stand in my way, she said. Frank thought he could leave the mall now, the Russians had probably forgotten him.

  I don’t want a wet bar, Frank said.

  You should go to school, she said. You look smart enough. You don’t know anything about me, Frank said. The girl blew another bubble and it got big and sagged and clung to her chin. She took the gum out of her mouth and peeled it off her face.

  I can see when people got potential, she said. She slapped the bar twice and turned her back on him and sauntered down the aisle running her hand over the stacks of towels.

  MADELEINE

  WHAT SHE MISSES is convention. She misses security and not having to explain to people she’s just meeting. She misses the wa
y he sometimes held her at night when her heart was racing with anxiety. When she is afraid of having a heart attack, alone, dying alone, she misses him then.

  Marty’s mother and father had nine children, and his siblings were either domineering and wild-eyed or acutely shy. They were either Irish-looking with big blue eyes and black hair or they had a Spanish look, dark-eyed and vixenish. One of his sisters was a ballerina with a small company in Boston, another owned a consulting firm that assessed the environmental impact of new industry and was known to be impartial and thorough. There was a nurse who taught prenatal classes, having helped deliver hundreds of babies early in her career. She was cheerful and fresh-faced and had a deformed hip that gave her a strange gait and she told stories of women on their knees in elevators, and husbands fainting at the sight of blood.

  Martin’s sisters were good-looking, skinny, and energetic. The brothers were intellectual, three of them teaching at the university, two in politics. At family gatherings they were loud and drank as much wine as they could. Fights erupted easily. They were storytellers and fought each other for a chance to hold forth and slapped the table laughing.

  The ballerina especially had a squawking laugh that turned her face red and made her gasp for breath. The table was always set formally and the men did not enter the kitchen. Madeleine loved being in the midst of them.

  She loved the noise, the swish and grind of the labouring dishwasher, clatter of cutlery, laughter, and when the lids came off the steaming casserole dishes. But it wasn’t a life she could imitate; it was too clean and big. Once she went in the kitchen and three of his sisters were whispering and she knew they had said something about her.

  She demanded, What is it?

  The ballerina said, You let him push you around. You’ll never get what you want. Don’t you have any ambition of your own?