Alligator

by Lisa Moore

  She left and he threw up. He could remember Kevin looking on solemnly as Frank covered both their shoes with half-digested Cheerios and watery milk. Kevin patting his shoulder as he trembled and shook with dry heaves and eventually Kevin was hugging him, and promising him full ownership of a remote-control airplane, the only toy Kevin had brought with him to the foster home.

  Kevin himself had spent the evening of the regatta at the police station and when nobody could be found to come and get him he was sent to the Janeway Children’s Hospital and didn’t see his mother again for a month, by which time Social Services had decided she was unfit to raise him.

  After that, she and Kevin met every second weekend, usually at McDonald’s, and in the presence of a social worker. Kevin played in a glass room full of climbing tunnels and coloured balls while his mother and the social worker read the newspaper on the stools outside the window. Sometimes his mother came into the room and yelled up through the tubing for Kevin to behave himself, or to leave the little girls alone, though he was always scrupulously polite and fair with other children, or to come down and finish his milk.

  Mrs. Hallett kept Kevin until he was sixteen, visited him every weekend when he moved out. She still took Kevin’s laundry and brought him homemade suppers in Tupperware containers, and slipped twenty-dollar bills in greeting cards on every possible occasion.

  Blue smoke bulged out from the lip of the saucepan with the boiling fat and curled up and then rose obediently in a straight column to the fan.

  Frank took off his baseball cap, put it on his knee, and tried to calculate when he could leave without being rude. He wanted to leave. He didn’t want Kevin’s money. He would leave without the money.

  Kevin slapped margarine into the frying pan and put the burner on high. He opened the fridge and Frank saw it was empty and brilliant white except for a bottle of mustard pickles and a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. Kevin tossed the package onto the counter. Frank could smell the margarine turn brown.

  Photocopiers I’m specialized in, Kevin said. Mostly it’s the carbon tray empty when there’s a problem. Utensils hit the back of the drawers noisily as he slammed them with his hip.

  My ex-girlfriend laughed at me buying this pan. This is Teflon and you can’t use metal or nothing like that on it. And where is the Jesus spatula, Frank, I wish I knew. My girlfriend said when she saw the pan you’ll have that all scratched up before the week is out. You’ll never own anything worth anything is what she said. I don’t know how many times she said that. I’d like to see someone try to point out a scratch on this pan though, Frank.

  It looks to be working pretty good there now, Kevin, Frank said.

  Kevin turned from the stove and looked out the window. He had a garden, Frank saw, with a little patio and two chairs and a rusted wrought-iron table with a glass top. The garden darkened and a wind showed the grey side of the whispering aspen’s leaves and let them flop back washed green and lifted them again.

  The rain came down hard, drilling the metal garbage tin, rising up like white fur from the slabs of concrete that made up the patio, spiking off the arm of the plastic lawn chair. Kevin unwrapped the bologna and, peeling off the wax rind, dropped each slice in the sizzling margarine.

  Frank saw there was no way he could leave while the rain was heavy and before the fries and bologna were done and decided to take the money.

  He needed the money; he would take it.

  He felt angry with Kevin for making the money mean so much; for having enough of it to lend in the first place.

  I hear your mother died, Frank, Kevin said.

  I still have her ashes, Frank said. He couldn’t think what had made him admit such a thing.

  The fries are done perfect, Kevin said, ladling them out of the fat with a slotted spoon. He put a salt shaker and the ketchup on the table. Then he got the pickles out of the fridge. He put a plate in front of Frank, piled with french fries and a piece of bologna, and Frank began to eat.

  My girlfriend left there the spring, Kevin said. He cut the slabs of bologna with the side of his fork, slapping both sides of it in the ketchup and folding it into his mouth. He stabbed the fries until the fork tines were jammed and he ate the plateful in less than three minutes. Tipping his chair onto its back legs he dropped his plate into the sink behind him.

  I need a thousand dollars, Frank said.

  KEVIN

  KEVIN LOWERED HIS chair to the floor and he ran both his hands up and down his thighs. He stood and pulled a thick wallet from his back pocket. The wallet was attached to his jeans with a retractable cord that he tugged on and then drew out several bills and put them on the table beside Frank. He put the wallet back in his pocket and Frank heard the cord slither into place.

  Kevin sat down again and tore a piece of paper towel off the roll in the middle of the table and wiped his mouth. He folded the paper towel and rubbed each corner of his mouth carefully and folded it again, and just patted his lips gently with it and stared forward, out the window.

  When they told my mother she wasn’t fit, my mother smirked. It was a smirk, Frank, Kevin said.

  He put the folded paper towel under the bottom of the ketchup bottle. He was thinking of an afternoon when he and his mother were walking up from downtown and a parade passed by them. Cadets coming down Long’s Hill. First the older men, looking straight ahead, their lower lips firm with the grim promise never to look anywhere but straight ahead, because everything depended on that. They had agreed to look straight ahead and they could be true to their word.

  They wore black pants with a red stripe down the leg and jackets with brass buttons and the man in front wore a high black fur hat. He gripped a sceptre near his chest and the silver knob at its tip caught the sun and glowed like an incandescent light bulb. Above, on the hill by the Kirk, a bagpipe player in a kilt stepped onto the ridge from amid a patch of alders and began to play.

  The music swelled out and carried down the hill toward the harbour and vibrated in Kevin’s chest. There were some women who wore their hair in tight buns below their folded caps and they looked ahead too, just like the men. Then came younger cadets, their blue nylon uniforms whispering loudly as they marched past and he watched them go all the way down Long’s Hill, their hands swinging together, sunlight on the polished shoes and his mother swept him up in her arms and kissed his face all over. She kissed him so much he lost his breath.

  She wrestled him onto the sidewalk and put a knee on his chest. She was laughing and saying, Who’s my boy, who’s my boy, who’s my boy, tickling him until he was overheated and shaking with laughter.

  The sun dropped spears of light through the maple trees that leaned out over Long’s Hill, as the wind ruffled the leaves. He needed her to stop, he could not breathe, and when she did stop she was flushed. Her smile was big and her eyes were pale blue and the blue patches of sky through the leaves above her head were painfully bright.

  Then she gripped his head, her hands over his ears, and she looked into his eyes with an intensity that had nothing to do with laughter.

  It was a kind of intensity that had to do with the horror of her addiction and her struggle against it. He could see a vein in her temple pulsing, her breath smelled of cinnamon gum, her sweater was a pale pink angora and her jeans were acid wash and she wore lip gloss that smelled like watermelon. No one will ever convince him that she did not love him, that she had not always loved him. He was pressed under her knee on the sidewalk, the wind nearly knocked out of him, because she was afraid of losing him.

  From this experience he learned that authentic love is capable of disappointing you. This disappointment can be paralyzing, but it does not diminish the quality of authentic love. Watch out, if you stand in the path of that kind of love, he thinks. It can leave you blazing and numb. It may not be worth it. But it is worth it.

  As soon as the money was produced Frank had burned a dark red. He sat inert before his plate. It seemed to Kevin as if Frank saw no way to av
oid putting the money in his pocket but neither could he bring himself to do it.

  They had each felt a binding loneliness as children that they had no words for, nor would they have wanted to articulate it, if they could, because it was shameful and something they would struggle to avoid acknowledging for the rest of their lives. But each boy had felt the presence of this absence in the other and felt a reciprocal and grim admiration because they had both more or less withstood its gravitational pull.

  Kevin stood up, got himself a spoon, and took a tub of ice cream from the freezer. He ate directly from the tub and then saw a smear of blood on the spoonful of vanilla ice cream he was about to put in his mouth. It was blood from his cold sore and it turned him and he swore softly and gave the ice-cream tub a toss into the garbage.

  He cleaned the spoon off, opened the back door, and the sound of the rain and a fresh briny ocean smell filled the kitchen. Kevin began to sing a scat with hisses and machine-gun putt-putts and the grindings of a photocopier. Then he threw the spoon he had been tapping against the door frame into the sink and said, Fuck it, Frank, it’s only money. It doesn’t have to ruin our friendship, such as it is.

  Kevin thought of the backyard at Mrs. Hallett’s, the heavy plastic jungle gym with wooden beams, knotted ropes, and a rubber tire that filled with rain. The grass, early Saturday mornings, was covered in dew that was greyish silver, almost frost, and full of sparkle where the sun struck.

  When he and Frank wandered the rolling lawns they left two green trails of footprints in the fogged-over grass. From the garden they could see the patio window behind which Mrs. Hallett was ironing blouses, or one of her pale uniforms.

  Because they knew she was just beyond the dark glass, they could forget her and be absorbed by a trail of ants sometimes carrying a dead ant out of the path of the others. They watched the sun light up beads of dew on a spider’s web that jiggled violently with a breeze. They watched wasps crawl from their papery nests and hover and pitch and crawl back in. These miniature garden dramas absorbed the boys so thoroughly they became, for that brief time in their childhood, almost as one.

  It was a wordless union based entirely on mutual wonder in a big garden. Frank took the money off the table and put it in his breast pocket and buttoned the flap.

  Good luck with the small machine repair, Kevin, he said. He was ready to leave and Kevin wanted him to go now, but he stood still.

  FRANK

  DID FRANK THINK? Yes, he did. He was exceptionally lucid. He was in the centre of a ball of fire. The air was jellied. He couldn’t get air into his lungs. He had been locked in a house and the house had exploded into flame and his clothes were on fire and his hair and his face. He had woken up in a blazing room with no memory of passing out.

  His windpipe was scorched and his lungs were scorched and the blood that rushed through his veins and capillaries toward his lungs, desperate for oxygen, was hot. His arms were bubbling; he saw rather than felt the blisters coming up. But all he knew was he could not breathe.

  He thought of the door and where it was in relation to the centre of the room. Glass crashed; the mirror over the fireplace splintered and then fell from the wall in jagged pieces. The flames were swaying around his knees like a field of long grass and the heat climbed each piece of furniture and gave the piano a liquid glaze. The piano top was a rippling lake and the heat twisted around Frank like bedsheets, and he kicked out of the sheets of flame and got to the door and when he touched the doorknob it was already too hot to touch. He lifted his shirt over his mouth and nose. Time was not behaving, he knew. He was in the room for no more than a minute. Five minutes? But the minutes had melted and warped. Time, without oxygen, collapsed. It couldn’t have been more than a minute.

  He threw his shoulder against the door but the door didn’t budge. There was one way out and it was this door and the door was not opening. A massive blast of tumbling heat tore through the living room to funnel up the staircase and on the way it smacked against Frank nearly knocking him down and it transformed upon touch into more flame and it licked him all over his back and ran up his spine and shoulders, and it had grabbed his scalp, tugging viciously at his hair. He could feel a blister form on one eyelid. His eye was closing over. He couldn’t keep it open. He wiped at the blister with his finger-nails and it broke and the water ran into his eye. He was gasping, there was nothing in his lungs.

  He stumbled back into the centre of the room and he saw the goldfish in the bowl flicking madly back and forth. He understood perfectly that Valentin had jammed something against the door.

  He’d had a shot of vodka in Valentin’s apartment but what followed was out of all proportion to a shot of vodka. What followed was a weak-limbed euphoria, an easing up of gravity and everything grave. Frank hadn’t had a good rest since his mother died. Whatever had been in the vodka, it was odourless and colourless and extremely potent. It made him feel rested.

  He knew Valentin had dropped a match; that much he knew. Everything that had come before, his mother’s death, the evenings at the hot-dog stand, the way Colleen had clamped her body against his, all the rain that had fallen over the summer, the money, the hunger for it, the need, the compelling need to accumulate money, the stark ugliness of his bed-sit, and the infestation of worms, all of this had been forgotten, briefly, gently, thoroughly forgotten when he drank from the shot glass Valentin had given him.

  Valentin had put the glass down in front of Frank and he had a shot glass for himself and the glasses were small and printed with Christmas trees. The glasses matched, Frank had noticed. Valentin had pulled out the chair opposite Frank’s and he sat with his elbows on the table, hunched over, and watched Frank drink. He was intent and patient. Valentin’s brown eyes had a beer-bottle colour, amber flecks.

  How are you, my friend? Valentin said.

  They had gone down the stairs and got into Valentin’s truck and then they wandered into the house on Morris Avenue where the furniture needed to be moved.

  He was supposed to be helping Valentin move furniture.

  But here he was, standing in the centre of the fire and he reflected on the nature and texture of his exhaustion, which he knew to be physical and having as much to do with the vacuum created by the fire, the loss of oxygen, as with his spiritual fatigue. Spiritual fatigue was a term his dance teacher, Dr. Callahan, used to use and it was a term Frank had forgotten completely but it came back to him in the fire on Morris Avenue and the phrase was so apt he nearly wept while the flames ran up the arms of his nylon jacket and made the material shrivel and burned runnels into his arms. He felt his forehead tighten because his eyebrows had sizzled off his face. He felt all his facial hair, even the bristles under his skin, burn away. Here’s what happened: he woke, he threw himself out a window. But later the goldfish came back to him.

  Being in the very centre of a fire is a religious experience, Frank thought. He had been told the house was empty, someone had moved, and there were household items for sale.

  There was a stereo he could have, Valentin had said, for next to nothing.

  The Russian had passed him on the stairs and said, Just come and have a look, my friend. I need help moving some furniture.

  Frank had given him Kevin’s money, right there on the stairs, without a word, and Valentin clapped him on the arm and told him it was very good. He held the money in his fist and shook his fist for emphasis and he said the money would be doubled in a few short days. But he still insisted Frank go with him to move furniture.

  You could use some furniture, the Russian said. It was a reference, Frank knew, to his mother’s ashes and the ruined waterbed.

  They’d gone up the stairs to Valentin’s bed-sit for a drink.

  First we will drink together, Valentin had said. The Russian’s bed-sit was tidy. There was a stuffed flamingo on the floor in the corner with long lime green legs; it must have been a prize from the regatta.

  I have a young son, Valentin said, nodding toward the toy.
r />   I’m sure he’ll appreciate it, Frank said.

  It was that or a teddy bear.

  You went with the flamingo, Frank said. He downed the shot and it hit him like a pillow fight. He felt gently bashed and full of wonder.

  An Inuit guy hanged himself in this room, Frank said.

  There’s a strong smell, Frank had said, when he walked into the house on Morris Avenue. He knew it was gasoline. He was putting it together as he spoke. If his body was found after the fire, the police would think he had started it. Just as he put it together he had passed out.

  VALENTIN

  HE HAD THE accelerator jammed to the floor and Frank had slumped against him. The boy’s head had fallen onto Valentin’s thigh and it was as heavy as a bowling ball. Valentin had dragged him over the grass to the cab of the truck with the boy’s arm flung over his shoulder. When he gripped the boy’s wrist he felt a blister burst under his hand. The water made his grip slippery. The boy was heavier than Valentin had expected and when he became semi-conscious his feet tripped all over themselves on the driveway.

  Valentin had given the boy a larger dose of the drug than he thought was strictly necessary because he didn’t want him to suffer. He had seen this drug work on women, had seen them sleep for almost a full day after they’d been given it. He couldn’t understand what had roused the boy once his head had dropped onto his chest.

  In the cab of the truck the boy’s eyes were rolled back in his head and his eyeballs were bluish. The eyelids quivered but didn’t close. The whites of the eyes stared up at the roof of the cab and Valentin was taking the corner on two wheels. Froth bubbled up from the corners of the boy’s mouth; his breathing was ragged; his lips were moving as in prayer. The boy was reciting something to himself, something ancient and ordinary, full of rote spirituality. The wordless praying was interrupted by rough, weak coughs full of phlegm and it sounded like the boy’s lungs were irrevocably damaged. Blisters had come up all over his face and neck. The truck stank of melted plastic and smoke and the boy’s burns. His windbreaker had shrivelled in rough glittery scales, like the skin a snake leaves behind.