The City Still Breathing

by Matthew Heiti

  He slides the door closed again.

  He falls back into his seat, his breath coming out in a cloud, already disbelieving. He wants to open the slot, to prove it’s just his twisted imagination, but he is paralyzed by what he might find instead. The numbness crawls from his fingers and toes inward, turning his legs and arms to stumps.

  It takes minutes or hours, but the cold seeps deeper into him, silencing each organ, stopping his blood, shrivelling his penis, slowly turning his body into a great weight. His head is being dragged down by this weight, to stare at this pale, useless thing attached to it. He knows the flesh is dying, but all he can feel is this great fatigue at the long road being put behind him. No real value. No real loss.

  Lights and colours reel around him, igniting this useless body, and when he finally hears a knock at his window, Wally finds he can move again.

  The cavalry is an asshole named Simpson who makes a lot of noise about taking their badges and dumping them back on the side of the road before he finally gives them the boost they need and tells them to take the corpse in anyway. There’s light coming over the hills as they take off down the road to swing onto Highway 17 and head back east into the city. Fisher’s been driving and talking a mile about his big plans for the future: ‘ … I get back I’m gonna put in for the big time – provincial, city, don’t give a damn. No offence, Kag, driving with you is fine, but I’m just done with all this shit. Don’t know how you put up with it so many years.’

  Wally nods and checks the speedometer. Fisher’s all amped up and driving too fast as usual, but this time he doesn’t say anything about it, turning to the window instead. He puts his hand on the glass, thinking through this sensation, the cool surface against his palm. Outside, a light snow has begun to fall, settling on tree branches and dusting the highway.

  ‘They don’t hurry up, not gonna find out anything about this guy’s story.’ Fisher adjusts the mirror and brushes at his hair. ‘The first snow covers everything.’

  Wally slides the slot door open and looks into the back. The hold has a padded bench on each wall and a bucket under one of these benches for emergencies. The first rays of sunlight are coming in at an angle through the rear windows, splashing across the floor. He notices he’s been holding his breath only when he sees the body laid out, a thin vapour rising as it thaws.

  He turns back to the window, watching for the big coin monument on the hill to let him know they’re home.

  2

  Normando sits on the tail of his Warlock, bow legs dangling, sun coming up. He uses the fender of the truck to pop the cap on his Northern and takes a long pull of warm beer. Scratches his belly through blue-checkered flannel, looks at the twenty-foot head of King George looking back at him. Damned big thing. Bunch of damned wood with some silver paint – doesn’t know that but it’s what he’s heard.

  A red two-door pulls up, kicking gravel. Laughter and teenagers sliding out. The girl skips up to the pedestal, suddenly self-conscious as she poses underneath the damned big thing while the boy Polaroids her. She’s in her pyjamas, for chrissakes. Normando slips off the tailgate, knees cracking, and limps to the edge of the hillside, the town spilling out before him. His back hurting like it always does, only worse.

  He breathes it in, the fall air and dead-looking trees on the neighbourhood lanes, the black rock hills jumping up, leaning over the houses clustered around and beneath them. He has gone up and down every one of those streets. This is his town.

  The long keen of a whistle and an old itch tells him the morning shift’s going underground. He turns back to King George, the face on the giant coin glowing in the early sun. At its base, those two damned kids rolling around on the ground like it’s their town. Like there could never be nothing else around that alive.

  Behind them he catches the black smoke coming off the smelter. Getting on fine without him.

  3

  Francie Duluoz opens her eyes and sees the mobile above her bed going lazy one way and then back, just like it’s been doing every morning since her dad put it up there when she was three. The light through the shutters on the carpet, the poster of Ivan Doroschuk on her door, the stairs, one two three fourteen of them, the kitchen with the butterfly wallpaper, her favourite bowl, favourite spoon, the taste of the cereal so known, so familiar that it’s no taste at all. Moving through everything this morning just like yesterday and the day before and every day of Francie’s days on this planet to now.

  She sucks up the last of the milk in her bowl and fiddles with a pad and paper on the kitchen table. She gets as far as dear mom and dad before running out of words. There’s the purring of a car over gravel and she scratches out the dear, heads for the back door. Grabs her bag on the way.

  The Duluoz backyard is a dead, overgrown mess. Even in summer, but now in the late fall, it’s greyer and deader than ever. Her dad pays attention to the front because that’s what the neighbours see. The back is his own damn business. Let her mom plant tomatoes or something. But there’re so many roots the only thing that grows is rhubarb. Francie hates rhubarb, and strawberries and pie crust by association.

  Slim’s on a branch of the old twisted maple. Wearing that smelly denim jacket with the sleeves too short. Trying to look like a rebel and maybe he does a bit. Right away she sees him dangling his new fashion statement from the branch. Cowboy boots.

  ‘Where’d you get those shitkickers?’

  ‘Found em. Around.’

  She sits on the ground, back against the trunk. ‘Liar.’

  He laughs because they both know it’s true. Slim always lying about everything because he thinks it’s funny. Because it’s easier that way. He pulls a sucker out of his pocket, peels the plastic and tosses it in the breeze.

  ‘That’s littering, y’know.’

  He shrugs, sticks the sucker in his mouth. ‘When’re your parents back?’

  ‘Funeral’s today, so probably tomorrow.’ Feeling with her hand the place he cut their initials in the bark. ‘You’re late.’

  ‘It’s early.’

  ‘You’re still late.’

  He drops out of the tree and heads for the driveway. ‘Let’s book then.’

  ‘I’m in my fuckin pyjamas, Slim.’

  ‘They look great.’

  Francie grabs her bag and follows him out to the red Dart, all polished up and not a spot of rust on her. On the passenger side, Slim runs his hand from headlight to handle, touching it like he touches Francie sometimes when nobody would notice. He swings the big door open for her. She tries to duck past him, but he grabs her bag.

  ‘Trunk’s full.’ He tosses it in the back seat. ‘That all you got?’

  ‘Don’t need much.’ She looks up at the house. Grey with burgundy trim – like Cape Cod, her dad said, like this was cultured, like this was the excuse for never repainting and letting it peel like some old onion. The house of yesterday and the days and days before, the house of this morning, and that was it.

  Slim clicks the heels of the cowboy boots together three times and holds the door wide for her. ‘No place like home.’

  As they pull away, she watches her upstairs window, catching a bit of her mobile. Spinning one way and then back.

  Francie rolls down the window to let in the fall air and when Slim gives her The Look she says, ‘It stinks,’ because it does. Slim cleans the dash with a toothbrush and vacuums the upholstery, but the car still reeks three years after Heck puked in the back. Four milkshakes and an hour swinging around in a rubber tire and no amount of shampoo can get the smell out. Today worse than usual.

  Slim crosses Regent and trucks on down Ontario, hardly a car out yet. ‘Where’re we going?’

  ‘Got a couple stops to make.’ He rubs his eyes, red rimmed and grey bagged. Scratches some of his poor excuse for stubble.

  ‘You look tired.’

  ‘What?’ He puts a hand on her leg like he’s trying to reassure her. But the hand is a dead thing weighed down by that big dumb gold watch and he’
s looking at the road with some thousand-mile stare like he’s seeing anything but her, this car, this road.

  ‘You okay, Slim?’

  He takes his hand away and pops in the New Order eight-track, Francie’s favourite. The same album they played racing through the slag heaps in summer, sweating and tangled in Slim’s secret cabin, talking their way into the next day, the next month, all the nexts you could come up with. Music sounds different on different days. Today as that echoing guitar kicks in, all she can hear is the grey blue of all the loneliness in the world. Both of them singing along, I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you, oh, I’ve lost you. Slim slapping the steering wheel out of time as the drum rolls on.

  He pulls right up to the base of it and pops the parking brake on. Francie staring up at the big coin. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  Slim reaches across her to the glove compartment and pulls out his Polaroid. Swings his door open.

  ‘C’mon.’

  ‘You’re not kidding.’

  ‘People get their picture taken with the Eiffel Tower, don’t they?’

  ‘It’s so tacky.’

  ‘We’ll do a whole series of you in front of giant coins. Big dimes, big pennies. It’ll be my first show.’

  He laughs, Slim all over again, and his laugh is so stupid, honking like a goose, that she’s laughing too. Out of the car, him chasing, her dodging. She jumps up on the concrete base and strikes a pose, something she saw in a magazine, one leg bent and a hand on her cheek. Slim goes down on one knee, holding the camera like a rifle, a real professional.

  ‘Hey, isn’t that Normando?’ Slim points his camera off to the side and buzzes a Polaroid through.

  She follows his aim and sees they’re not alone – off at the end of the lot, a black truck, some ugly old man sitting on the fender staring at her with ugly eyes, drinking an ugly beer. ‘Who?’

  ‘The popcorn guy. Y’know, with the popcorn cart?’

  ‘The one who eats children?’

  ‘He doesn’t eat – Jesus, he’s like a local legend, Francie. They practically built the city around him.’

  He looks like he could be that old. All the ugly oldness of this city. She’d been to Toronto last summer. Those high-rise apartments up in the clouds. All the restaurants and shops. Everything so new and fun and everything even uglier when she got back here.

  The buzz of the Polaroid brings her back to Slim, grinning up at her.

  ‘Catch me!’ And she’s jumping off the pedestal, Slim trying to grab her with one arm, protecting the camera, both of them tumbling over in a dusty laughing heap. She looks up at the big dumb coin.

  Laughing at this great tourist act. Laughing that in all the days of ­Francie’s days on this planet, this is her first time up here. The whole city down there and the rim of slag like a ring tight around the two of them. She laughs so hard she might puke. ‘Oh god I hate this place.’

  She dozes off in the car for what feels like five minutes and then they’re stopping already. Slim pulling up at Gloria’s and she says, ‘It’ll be midnight before we get there.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  She sighs, making it as noisy as possible and says, ‘I’ll meet you inside’ in a wait-for-me way. But he’s already out and slamming the door. She pulls the rear-view down and checks her hair, ties it up to one side. She thinks about changing out of her pyjamas but doesn’t.

  Every girl in her graduating class wore a pound of makeup. Her friend Caitlin says she’s a natural beauty, but that’s just another way of saying princess and she isn’t that. She just doesn’t like makeup and anyway she does wear a bit of eyeliner now and then. If she feels like it. But not now, now she looks like she just crawled out of bed, but Slim says she looks good any time of the day. The way he takes her picture, he has a way of making her feel easy – not in that way – but in that moment, in the camera flash, she feels like she can be whatever it is she’s gonna be.

  Whatever. She gets out of the car. Slim’s waited just long enough to start to wonder.

  It’s a blue haze inside the diner, graveyard shifters and nine-to-fivers rubbing elbows over greasy plates and bad coffee. Francie finds Slim in the corner booth, leg up, showing off one of the new boots, back to the wall, reading the menu like it’s the work of one of his Russian poets. Two steaming mugs on the table.

  Here comes Lucy, her shoulders all hunched up in her ears, gum going. ‘What can I get you?’

  ‘I’m fine with coffee.’ Francie slides the menu across the table and Lucy snatches it away, swivelling her little eyes onto Slim.

  ‘Two eggs over hard, home fries, brown toast.’

  ‘Only got white.’ Scribbling on her notepad like she might need to testify later. ‘Ham, bacon, sausage.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘No meat.’

  ‘It comes with meat.’

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘No meat?’ Like she’s never heard of this before, like he might as well eat a baby as eat breakfast without meat.

  ‘Nope.’

  She gives him a nuclear stare and then walks off to the kitchen, still shaking her head as the doors swing closed.

  Francie goes through her pockets and comes out with her pack of smokes, lights one. Slim giving her That Look. ‘What? It’s a menthol.’ He shrugs as if he doesn’t care and looks away. ‘So I’m thinking, first thing we do is we start looking for an apartment.’

  ‘Thought your sister had space.’

  ‘She does, it’s just my parents are going to kill her when they find out. And we can find something closer to school so you don’t have to drag all your lenses and stuff around on the subway.’

  ‘You know how expensive rent is, Francie?’

  ‘I know.’ The diner coffee is brewed so black she might glow in the dark. Slim not even touching his. Habits are reassuring. Something to collect, like she used to do with her marbles. Handfuls of alleys and a few croakers still in a bag in her closet. Left behind. ‘But I’ll get a job or something for a bit and I’ll be pulling in some money soons I get an agent.’

  ‘Right. Might as well get a penthouse, all the cash from the magazine covers.’

  ‘Don’t.’ That easy, with a tone or a word or a look, to take all the light out of it. To puncture a dream. Like Francie’s sister using a pin on a balloon at her birthday party and her crying, Dad coming over with more, no one understanding that other balloons were not that balloon. So easy to make someone else feel stupid. ‘Don’t make fun of me.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Because he sees right away what he’s done, and all of a sudden he lets himself not be cool. The leg comes down and he leans across, takes her hand. ‘You’re fucking gorgeous.’

  ‘Sure sure.’

  ‘You are. To the max. You’ll be all over the place – billboards, TV.’

  ‘It’s not about that, it’s just … I want it so bad. I’ll work my ass off.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. You’re gonna be great.’

  ‘And you’ll do the photo shoots. My personal photographer.’

  ‘Sure.’ His hand’s still there but now he’s pulling away.

  ‘When you can. You’ll be busy with school and putting on art shows at little museums. I’ll help you hang the photos. I’m good at that.’

  He leans back to make room for the plate Lucy drops in front of him. Heaps of everything, bacon piled on the side, oozing grease. She refills Francie’s mug. ‘No school today?’

  Slim answers by driving his bacon onto the tabletop with his fork. Lucy almost chokes on her gum. ‘Slim Novak, you little devil.’

  ‘It’s Slider. My last name is Slider.’

  ‘What?’ Lucy’s eyes bug out like a cartoon character and Francie swallows a giggle.

  ‘Yeah, I changed it.’

  ‘Your poor mother,’ Lucy says with a huff and then she’s off with her coffee pot, spreading joy.

  Slim picks at his potatoes. Francie grabs a piece of his toast, too bleached for him to
eat. ‘If we leave right after this, we’ll be there by one, right?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘I can’t wait to get there. We can go get some food at this rad little Mexican place around the corner from Morgan’s – you’ll love it.’

  ‘Mm.’

  He’s not looking at her, but she doesn’t need his eyes to see right into him. Some people say that whole eyes-are-the-window thing, but with Slim it’s his forehead. Which eyebrow is up, how many creases, one two or three, what shade of red is streaking across – an equation only she understands. Not just a window but an airplane hangar into his soul. ‘You’re not comin, are you?’

  ‘What?’ Dropping his fork. ‘What are you talking about – I told you we were going. We’re going.’

  ‘You’re acting all weird – what’s your damage?’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘That’s not it.’

  Big sigh. Francie you’re such a child. ‘I had to pawn some stuff, okay?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘The lens pack, my flash … the Nikon.’

  ‘Your gear?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But you loved that camera.’

  ‘Yeah, well I pawned it at Oz’s.’

  ‘Why the hell?’ She can feel her voice rising and she catches Lucy giving them a nasty look from a table over.

  ‘For money – that’s why you pawn stuff, Francie.’

  ‘But we got enough for the trip.’

  ‘Yeah, for the trip, but that’s not enough.’ He’s been playing with the salt shaker, wiggling it like a little man across the tabletop, like this conversation isn’t worth anything. But she grabs his hand and the touch brings his eyes up.

  ‘Why didn’t you pawn your stupid watch then?’

  He pulls his hand away and picks at that chintzy gold thing around his wrist. ‘It was my dad’s, Francie.’

  ‘It’s not even real.’

  ‘Francie.’

  A dumb thing to say, even she knows it. ‘We gotta get your gear back – we’ll just return the money.’