As she remained silent and angry in her silence, agitated while Lee answered her in words that came from afar, from another planet, strange even in the way they sounded, she felt as if she was being washed out into the sea. The silence on the line continued a little longer, as she listened to the voice she had known for so many years, telling her she was wrong, that the police, to a man, was there to “protect you and me.” And it made her sad to know that this voice, and these words, were coming from perhaps the only person, woman or man, in this city, in this country, in the whole world, whom she ever trusted.
“It is pure and simple, a case of ordinary sinfulness, Lee.”
“No, darling. It is merely law and order.”
The telephone went silent. She could hear the heavy breathing coming through her ears. She could feel the hot breath of the breathing. She could even see Lee’s eyes gone smaller, like slits, and see how her face became crimson. Lee’s face went red whenever she was overjoyed, when her favourite baseball pitcher fired a shut-out; when she was embarrassed by a dirty joke; and when, she said, she had orgasm. She had confessed all these things.
She ignored Lee’s sentiments, and tried to take her mind off the disappointment, splitting her attention between the breathing silence coming through her Solo, and looking at the Christmas card with its undisturbed snow like thick coagulated paint on the eaves and trees and roads. She took off her winter boots, using one foot against the heel, and then the other.
“May I ask you a personal question?”
“About Mr. Johnson again? Or about my views on law-and-order?”
“You know anything about mental breakdowns?”
“Who having one?”
“Can you tell?”
“There’re books. But there’re lots of signs.”
“Is falling asleep, one?”
“Could be. Could be not.”
“Can I tell you something?” Before she told it, she took her pantyhose off. The room was hot. Her skin was itching. Her upper arms and legs. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? You just said.”
She rubbed her upper arms with the Solo. The cord needed unwrapping.
“It’s nothing.”
Lee began to laugh. Lee’s voice with the laughter in it was deep and suggestive. The telephone cord was untangled now, and she started to rub her legs with her left hand. Her skin felt warm. But the itching was disappearing.
Lee was still laughing her suggestive laugh; and she continued to pass her hand up and down her legs. She was beginning to feel warmer. It was a strange sensation. She had never rubbed her legs this way before. And the pleasant sensation went all through her body as if it was her own blood surging; as blood would surge and pump life and vigor through the system after a long run, or after a strong rubbing with Limacol, or after pushups, or after orgasm. Her hand was now rubbing her other leg.
“Are you there?”
The sensation of pleasure was turning to one of satisfaction and excitement. She had never done this rubbing to herself before. She raised her dress above her knees, following the itchiness that travelled like a contagion. She looked at her legs. They were strong. And the hair there was thick and black and strong. She could still hear Lee’s breathing through the receiver. The excitement from her rubbing, her blood which she could almost feel circulating freely throughout her legs, was getting hot now. The delicate pure cotton that had protected her from such extravagances was now damp, and fragile; barely able to withstand the force and the passion of her fingers moving up and down rapidly strong and sure like white-head bush bleaching stains and spots away; determined to get rid of the blemish.
There was no way of telling now, of telling at all, if her breathing was her own. Or Lee’s. Silence fell. The line that joined them seemed dead. The cord, the breathing, the silence and caressing became one compelling, encompassing activity. Falling outside the basement were thick pieces of white feathers. Flakes falling off a tree that was being shaken. She was barely aware of their falling. And she remembered airing pillow cases in the backyard, near the white-limbed trees that gave too much shade to her tomatoes in the summer, and always, in winter and summer, seeing the feathers fall out of the two pillows, and carried away immediately in the wind. And she remembered hearing the howling of the wind through the branches of the white-limbed trees. Cedars? Maples? Those with white limbs. And next door now, someone turned on a stereo, and the booming of heavy music, steel and voice, tore through the thin wall. Her back was resting on this wall, leaning to be more comfortable; to be relaxed; to be free to commit her act; to be more accommodating to the demand of her body.
The music pouring through the sand, the poured concrete and the plastic of the barricade dividing her from the laughter next door, was slow and full and thick, just like the music she listened to, in better moments. The falling pieces of feathers by her front window passed before her eyes in the time and rhythm almost, of the music. The wind was splattering snow against the glass; and that was the only sound that was breaking the flow of her fingers as they rubbed her skin, covered partially by the one hundred percent cotton; and the falling snow was, too, the only soft relief from the pounding of the reggae music next door.
“May I ask you a personal question, Lee?”
A dog is scratching the outer door of the basement entrance.
“That dog again! That blasted dog and those sinners next door!” She laughed aloud, and deep; and there was more than a sense of sensuality in her laughter. “The personal question I was going to ask you. Being alone, Lee. Being alone all the time and doing things like taking off all my clothes with the lights turned out, even though there’s not a living soul here, but me. And those people next door playing all this tuk-music., I am sure you can year it coming through the telephone. Listen. You hear it? Deafening me all hours o’ the night. Sometimes, I swear that if I don’t cover myself in total darkness whilst I dress and undress, I might see one o’ those bastards’ eyes spying through a knot-hole in the wall, spying at me as I dress and undress. I can never, never, after all these years living alone, undress with the lights on. Is something wrong with me? There’s that dog scratching at my door, again! God, no, Lee! I can’t do that. Poison a dog? No, man. That isn’t Christian. I know you’ve told me many times to do that, and I myself threaten to do the same, but I couldn’t bring myself to that final action. How would it look for me to see my name in the Toronto Star, or on the ten o’clock CBC J ournal, arrested and charged and in front of a judge? Oh God, no, Lee! And to be put in prison with a lotta women, wickers all of them, ’cause I heard one of the doctors at the hospital saying that the condition in prison breeds lesbian women who are wickers. And he said you can never tell what dirtiness women in prison are proned to do, and what would happen in those circumstances? But listen to me, now. If I was to put just a lil ground-up glass bottle on a bone and feed it to this blasted animal, I wonder what would happen. Perhaps, up in Scarborough where you live, people does behave so. But down here, in this ghetto, where there’s all this crime, with people unemploy’, undecentness to make a sinner croil in shame, rapes every day, they would swear there’s a connection between the colour of my skin and the extremity of my action. Not me, darling. There’s that dog, again.”
The dog was scratching against the metal frame of the storm door.
Without asking Lee to hold, she placed her Solo on the bed; unrolled the hem of her dress; pulled her winter coat back on over her shoulders; and went to the front door. The dog smelled her kindness. And it began scratching more vigorously, and started to yelp. Before she could open the door more than an inch, the dog was squeezing itself through the crack of space. She watched the animal do dances of happiness on the linoleum and scatter rugs, leaving trails and puddles, as she remained holding the door, now with a large enough space. But the savage was already inside. And the opened door brought in the wind and the cold which ripped the cloth protecting her legs, and made her legs seem like paper. Her legs were no longer
itching. But the cold drilled a thin icicle of pain through her breasts. The dog was still dancing a dance of happiness. Prints from its paws, and puddles marked its circular frantic progress over the floor.
She closed the outer door. She closed the inner door. She applied the three bolts, and turned the key, and locked out the cold and the night.
“Imagine those Eskimos and explorers in the olden days!”
“What Eskimos?” Lee asked her. She was surprised that she was still on the phone.
“Let me give this blasted dog some milk.”
“Without warming it?”
“That never crossed my mind.”
“Warm it, and call me back.’
The telephone went dead.
The dog was quieter now. It sprawled itself on the linoleum. It followed her movements with its eyes and its tail that moved like darts and a snake.
She opened her small, white, chipped fridge, which was packed with food. In the shelves in the door were wedges of cheese in yellow plastic wrapping; bottles of soda water “for gas,” tomatoes and apples wrapped in cellophane paper; milk in cartons, one carton of homogenized, and one of two percent fat; pieces of ginger bought months ago in the Kensington Market, and looking not like human fingers, deformed and amputated above the wrist, and tins of marmalade and jams from Jamaica, which she had never visited. And in the fridge itself, on its three wire shelves, were plastic containers of food: rice, peas, rice-and-peas, roast beef, roast lamb, roast pork; and bottles of tomato paste, bottles of grapefruit juice, and five containers of yogurt, “for losing weight.” One of these days, soon, she said, talking to the dog, I have to get rid of this food. You could eat this? Tummuch food for one person! And at the front of the top shelf, was her bottle of five-star Hennessy brandy.
The two-burner stove whose elements were like two staring eyes, standing beside the fridge, made of white enamel and chipped in as many places as the fridge was, had two saucepans on the elements. The saucepans were made of enamel. She had bought them at a fifty-percent sale at Honest Ed’s. She cleaned them and made them shine as if they were made of precious metal, as if they were silver. In them was split-peas and rice, and a thick, rich, dark-brown stew of braising beef, chunks of pig tail, carrots, onions and mushrooms. When she lifted the lid, the dog scampered on its legs, wagged its tail as if it had seen a stranger it liked. She could never tell with dogs. They danced whether it was a friend or a foe, except that this one did not growl. The noise it made told her it was trying to speak. The smell of the stew was making it salivate. But she gave it milk. In a Pyrex bowl. Cold milk. “Not my stew, you brute-beast!” she told the dog, oblivious of her words and her presence now, and consumed in the taste of the milk, wagging its tail in a different meaning and excitement. “Waste my food on you, a blasted stray-dog!”
She stooped and ran her hands over the wet fur of the dog, taking from its coat the accumulation of snow and icicles; and probably fleas, from the wet, grey hairs. Her hands touched more bone than flesh.
She poured herself a Hennessy. A large one. “This cold weather,” she told the dog. And all the time she sipped, and the dog lapped, she could feel eyes from behind the wall spying on her. The next-door eyes, the eyes she was sure watched her undressing every night. “The ghost of Satan watching me,” she told the dog. And she made the double shot of Hennessy the strong justification of her indulgence.
She began to undress. And stopped. And turned the lights off. The Pyrex bowl moved as the dog tried to find its food. She turned the lights back on. And stood in front of the looking glass on the bureau, and tried to see her whole back, from the neck to the bottom of her spine. The dog was bending itself into a hairpin, using its fangs to bite into its wet, itching fur. And she stopped undressing and watched the dog and wished she herself had double joint, was supple and young still, like this dog, so that she might see herself from every angle, just as the dog was doing. She looked at herself long, and critical, and then, as if with a sudden pang of self-consciousness, or of shame, for the dog was staring up at her, she chose a new nightgown. She was no longer cold, and she did not have to select a flannelette. She pulled the long black silk night-gown over her head, adjusted her left breast which had slipped out, holding it with tenderness, and fitted it inside the bodice of the delicate, shiny material, all the while allowing her hand to hold its weight for a longer moment than the adjustment required. “Cancer, boy,” she told the dog. She looked at the dog. The dog was on its high legs. A small, pointed, pink-coloured thing came up and out from under the dog’s belly. The dog was looking square into her eyes. And it continued standing on its hind leg, and then rushed to her, and grabbed her right leg with its front paws and started its motion. “Are you trying to foop me, dog? Is this what you carries on with, next door?” She swallowed all the Hennessy in one gulp. The dog was still on her leg, making its motions. “Is this the kind o’ dog you are? Did those bastards next door train you to foop people?” She threw the dog aside with the fling of her leg, and her slipper slid across the linoleum. She dragged the long telephone cord with the Solo from the living room area, said something to the dog to get it to leave her leg, and it did not, and then she screamed, “Git! Git!” It sat on the linoleum, wagging its tail. She put the television on to bring more people into the room, to protect her. The dog turned its attention to an American woman who was spraining her brain to name the Prime Minister of Canada. “Is it Church? Winston Churchill?” she asked the host.
She lay on her back on the soft, large bed, and its accommodating springs took all of her weight and her exhaustion, her heaviness of spirit and of body, in the middle of its soft trough. The springs cried out a little, as she moved, making herself comfortable as she dialed her third friend for the night. These same bed springs had once been crushed by the weight of two bodies, hers and his, the one heavier than the other, long, long ago, on nights when their two desires were as loud as the music pumping from next door. The body of the man she was married to had left its mark on the damaged springs, and on her attitude to men ever since. It is five years since she has had a man in this bed; and she doesn’t really know how she has withstood the abstinence, and the foopless nights, her Bible and her Christianity having nothing at all to do with it; and the dog in its own way of knowing things, using its smell in place of human intelligence must have sensed it, and acted.
“Last January the second, is five years, to the day,” she said, with the dog appearing to listen, turning its head away from the correct answer to the question about the Prime Minister of Canada. “Of course!” the woman on television said, purple with shame. She spread her legs, passing her hand across her nightgown to make room for the spread of her legs, and the dog jumped into that space.
“You dirty son of a bitch!”
Her scream was more of terror than of shock. She held the dog by the collar and in one movement which encompassed her jumping up from the bed while holding the dog, and opening the door, and then the other door, she slammed the dog into the snow on the steps, on the concrete perhaps, closing and rebolting the door in the same action. She could feel the pain in the dog’s moaning even with the door shut tight. The cruelty of it, but the same of it, too. She tried to shut it out, but it seeped through, nevertheless.
She dialed Ruby.
The voice was moaning. Her own voice reflected the passing of time and of shame and of the Hennessy. And at last, there was one final moan.
She had killed the dog.
She dropped the Solo.
She gave out a sound that was high and chilling and terrible. Like the painful joy of giving birth. But higher and with more pain.
She dialed again. And there was a busy tone. Ruby had taken her telephone off the hook. It was now past midnight. The passing of time and of shame and the working of the Hennessy collapsed her into a shape on the bed, with her legs drawn up to her breasts and with her arms wrapped round her body. Her body was cold. Three days have passed now, and have found her flat on her
back, unable to move, too weak and too weakened; too tormented and afraid that should she move from beneath the three thick blankets, the thing on her mind, the death of the dog, its murder would be exposed to the world, and bring her continuing bad luck. Her world is the world of her three best friends.
Her Solo has been ringing and ringing, and left unanswered. Once, she counted the ringing for thirty-nine times. That would be Ruby, who was persistent. And it rang at intervals which were irregular, but on account of her state, it seemed it was ringing with an annoying persistence, as if the caller could, like the bastards next door who owned the dog, see her and know she was home. Her silence and pretense, and the stiff body of the dog, fortunate in its cold undug grave and not yet attracting flies and other things and worms that would devour its body from the inside, burst its bulge and make the tightened skin pop, and give off the smell she had walked beside on the hot tarred roads, under the sun that was no friend of weak bodies and things, she was glad for once that she was living in this cold, cold place.
This cold, this bitter cold, this cold she had cursed more than she had blessed it, was now a preserver of rot and decay, a concealer of murder. Inside the cold basement apartment, cut off from her outside world, by her deed and by her own wish, the body of the dead dog grew into a proportion as serious as the murder of her friend Mr. Johnson by the policeman, and turned her action into a sin, which she had not quite faced, nor prepared an explanation for. And worst of all, she suffered the chill and the scandal that it would come out in her church. To her pastor. And to the congregation of West Indians, mostly women, always willing to receive rumours about members in their community of the church and of the home; and more telling than that, even in their Christian manner and righteousness, to make those rumours grow, like the quantity of rice in a saucepan with water, expands.
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