So, when I ducked my head to shake the snow from out of my ears, I became unbalanced, and I almost got knocked down by the shape coming invisible and silent through the thick mist of snow. He did not see me. She did not see me. I try to be fair in this city, where I cannot be as sure as an oath taken upon the thin page of the Holy Bible, that I can say with truth and sureness, that it is a man or a woman coming against me, that it is a man; or if I say it is a woman coming against me, that she is a woman. Men and women in this democratic, fun-loving, gay city, coated at this time of year in deep, falling snow and wool, all look the same. Sometimes the bodies of men and women shake and behave the same.
The shape did not see me. I was just another obstacle that the shape had to walk around, or walk into, continuing in its journey, with spirited childlike glee at the fresh fall of this thickness that transformed the sidewalk into a skating rink.
This snow, through which I am trying to move, and which I am trying to like, as if I were born to its thickness and trickiness underfoot, and in which I live, is a curtain. It reminds me of the thick white ones, sheers, which my mother strung with herringbone twine, at each of the sixteen windows in our walled house, a house with six gables or roofs. These curtains looked and behaved like six waves or big sails against the wind and the blue sea, if you were sitting on the sand and watching them.
And I can see nothing in front of me now. Nothing. But I try to pretend that I am native to this kind of treachery on ice, that I was born here into this white, cold miserableness, and am not really an obstacle.
A new spasm of life comes into my steps. My feet become less heavy. I am back there. And the wet khaki cut-down pants have dried suddenly in the sun; and I am a sprinter running through thick green fields of sugar cane and cush-cush grass after the animals, my mother’s livestock, goats and sheep and pigs and pigeons. And I hear a voice. Her voice? The chauffeur’s voice? Coming out of this thick snow which blindfolds the afternoon. Out of this surrounding curtain comes a voice. “Move-out o’ my goddamn way, man!” The words injure the sweet, white silence of the snow. “What the arse …?”
It is like a voice crying out from amongst thick belching smoke and crackling shingles, of a house on fire, burning for help and assistance. But it is also a voice of anger. I know the anger in the voice of a burning house. I have heard it many times. Voices like this come after a ball bowled too fast and causing injury. This is a voice that comes after a race that is lost, after a wrong key in a solo, in a descant. It is as if the burning house and the white snow engulfing it has to clear before I can learn the distinctness in the voice. The second reprimand is a longer declaration for assistance. This makes the thick smoke clear. It is a voice I know. I heard it once on a beach. “What the arse … You want to lick me down, man?”
Still, I cannot see. No shape, or owner of this voice. And in this blinding snow he cannot see me. But I stop walking, though I am unable to stand motionless, in this snow which shifts like an uncontrollable roller skate, for too long. My shoes are sliding. I can feel winter on my soles. My left foot is wet from the soaked, cold, woollen sock. And I go back to that time, on a pasture, the Garrison Savannah Parade Ground, so hot and so sticking wet, when I was made to stand at attention, while the Governor moved through our ranks taking his royal time, and I could barely see him in the distance; for in that regal distance, the Governor was nothing more than a bunch of regimental plumes, all white. At that distance, it was as if he were a gigantic common fowl-cock or a Leghorn about to crow the morning in, from the top of the wooden fence, his roost surrounding our yard, and bring his hundred hens to sexual attention. This voice, though, is the same voice I had heard next to me, as I wavered while ordered to stand at “atten-shunn!”; when the water in my bladder was making it impossible for me to be rigid and soldierly, when I moved ever so slightly to ease the pain and the burning of the sun and the sweat pouring down my face and into my neck, making the khaki uniform shirt no longer stiff, and down into the white, blancoed belt me and my mother had laboured over, and changed from green canvas to spotless white.
I am now close enough to stand, to see. And to wonder. And recognize. And call back, in this thickening snow, in this flash of abusive time, all those years.
“John!”
“You?”
“John?”
“Goddamn, man!” he says. I am sitting beside him once more, on the warm afternoon sand. And an inner tube is drifting out, into the sea, into the Atlantic which we knew would join us up again, some time later, in a land too far for our young eyes to see, after it has separated us.
“Jesus Christ!” I say, giving the miracle of this reacquaintance credence and reality, giving the sudden reunion its greeting of incredulity, giving his appearance its dramatic significance.
“You?” he asks, believing and not believing.
How can he believe so easily, in this mist of time, in this street, in this city, in this country which we had not only studied in our geography books at Combermere School for Boys and knew by heart, but still had refused to believe to be the place we would choose to live in? In this North America? In all these forty-fifty years we had not once exchanged even a post card at Christmas. Birthdays were forgotten landmarks. And the telephone neither of us thought about. It was out of the question.
In all this time, neither of us knew we would voluntarily live with this cold, this ice, this snow.
“God bless my eyesight!” I say.
“Too goddamn good to be true!” he says.
“Jesus Christ!”
“If anybody had-tell me that you and me, who last see each other sitting-down that afternoon on the beach by Paynes Bay! Look at this thing, though! God bless my eyesight! How long you in this place?”
“This is really you?”
“Is me, man!”
“But, Jesus Christ! Not calling the name of the Lord in vain, but this is a goddamn … Tell me something, though. I been thinking of this for donkey-years. Must be over forty years now, I been thinking of finding you, to axe you this question. You learn how to swim yet?”
And our laughter explodes. Out of the white mist come shapes which pause to look, to understand, to wonder why this loud tropical laughter and equatorial joy must take place in this deadening cold, to break the quiet peace of this cold, clean afternoon. What could cause this joy? And cause these two old black men to embrace each other, laughing and slipping on the ice, and pummelling each other on the backs of their thick black and light-brown cashmere winter coats, with hands that are magnified in brown leather gloves, weighing down their hands and their bodies bloated by thick scarves and wool and sweaters? I sometimes laugh at myself, as I see my reflection in a store window, as I pass wearing all this clothing, making me walk after all these years with added weight and meaning and cold experience in this new environment, I see how it makes us, at our age, walk with a limp, like huge tamed monkeys, since neither of us has got accustomed to this way of dressing, nor has learned to walk in winter. And all this laughing in the people’s street?
We are hugging each other. I am slapping him, he is slapping me on the back, and I am judging how much size he has put on his frail boyhood body. He is slapping me as if he is a Black Muslim. His after-shave lotion is pungent in my nostrils, as he is moving from cheek to cheek slapping me all the time on the back as if he is trying to make me burp, as our mothers used to do after the bottle; and later, after the Cream of Wheat. His after-shave lotion follows me, as he is changing from the left shoulder to the right, when that first shoulder blade has suffered sufficient pummelling from the affection that had first poured on that sand the colour of coral, the colour of the empty conch-shell, when he showed me how to walk on his hands like a crab.
“I don’t believe my two goddamn eyes!”
“If you want to know the truth,” I say, “if you want to know the truth, I was thinking about home, just before I bounced into you.”
“Bounce into me? Man, you nearly licked-me-to-fuck dow
n! Goddamn! And a black man like me don’t look too good sprawl-out on the goddamn snow! Never learned how to walk in all this goddamn snow in the goddamn winter, after all these years. And never want to, neither!” We stand and stare at each other; and do not talk for a long while; and then the need for time and place and history comes spewing out. “Been in England for years. The Mother Country, eh? Tried Europe for a piece. France and Italy and Germany. Like their food and their women, but not their goddamn language! Catch their winters in my arse! And you know how racist the fuckers are! I hear Canada better. Liberté and égalité. But France? Those two words are mother-fuckers! Never could figure out how Amurcans like Wright, Richard Wright, and Baldwin could say that France is such a liberal place. France? I had a French wife once. But I never learned to speak their parlez-vous. Not one goddamn vowel in français pass my lips. Stayed pure-fucking-Barbadian, and spoke the Bajan language. Bajan is my foreign language. I spoke it in France as if it was a foreign language. And the French woman that I married would nod her head and say, oui, oui, oui-oui! Goddamn! But you was about to say something when I cut-you-off. What was you about to say when I butt-in?”
“I was about to ask you what you’re doing here. If you have a family. You’re here on a job? A conference? Business …?”
“Man, look at you, though! Look at little Timmy! And not one goddamn grey hair in your head! Still fooping? Screwing chicks? You’re too goddamn old to be still fooping!” His sudden outburst, like thunder, frightens and embarrasses me. “If you see what I’m saying …”
He hollers so much, and so loudly when he says this, and with such wicked warmth, that all those years are peeled back, revealing us and a time when we were in love with the same girl, Chermadene.
“And neither of us really got to first base with her,” he says, “because she was a virgin, and because we never played baseball in the island, and because her mother threatened us.”
And in his words, I am facing the hurtful memory of those glorious, happy days.
I am standing now in front of a window with men’s suits the size of giants, with matching shoes, and the trunks of men with pink skin made of shining plastic, with false silk hair; and I can see rows of shoes of shiny leather and stiff lasts of large feet attached to long trousers, to bodies that end at the waist, as if a mass-murderer has hacked the bodies into halves, and left them in these show windows which look like glass coffins that cannot hold them from head to foot. And my glance touches matching shirts for men made famous in movies about men who like to chop down trees tall as skyscrapers, and have a preference for heights; and I can see the sidewalk now, for to my right are long windows that reach to the ground, all glass with shirts in them, made in foreign countries like the ones John says he lived in, and made by foreign hands, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, and other designers; and briefcases and travel bags made from the sides of animals which the television says are killed illegally. I can see now where I am standing, and where I am going. I am standing across the street from the south end of the Eaton Centre. It has taken me all this time, in physical movement and in the span of years, to travel this short distance from the edge of the Lake, which before this moment was completely blotted out by the thick falling snow. Now I can see where I am standing and where I am going. It is as if John’s breath, and the violence he has put into his laughing speech, his exuberance and warmth, show me how unsmiling an old man’s walk, this afternoon in December, has been.
The snow has disappeared. All around us, it seems, the street and the sidewalk have come alive. And I am sure also that we two black men, old geezers as they call us in this city, and as we appear, two old-age pensioners, we two old West Indian men are the only two living, happy persons in the world, on this cold honest Toronto afternoon. It is like sitting on that warm sand, possessing the entire beach and owning our lives, conquerors of the entire beach, and with no one in sight, no one threatening, no one pretending to our throne of ownership.
“Where’s the nearest bar? This calls for a drink. Goddamn!” John says.
“Not a drink, man. Drinks!” I say.
“Do you have time? You’re on your lunchtime?” he says.
“I don’t work,” I tell him.
“Unemploy, huh? Goddamn!”
“I don’t work.”
“Goddamn! You’re retired, then?”
“I am not retired.”
“Goddamn! Things tough with everybody these days? But you still hustling the chicks, though!”
“I am free. Of chicks and work. The only work I do is walking. I walk all day. Work is for immigrants. I was never an immigrant. Ten years ago I stopped working. Nowadays I just walk. As the song says, I walk the lonely streets. Ten years almost to the day … the twenty-six of this month is …”
“You won’t be pimping, would ya?”
“Just walking. And looking at people, and …”
“If a man don’t work, he’s gotta be pimping. And I don’t mean you personally, nor that you be pimping off chicks, if you see what I mean.”
“… but the twenty-six of this month ten years ago is when I made up my mind not to lift another finger even if it was to save my life. Not since eighty-six, or eighty-seven. December the twenty-six, nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, to be exact. I have it written down. I even walk with it in my wallet. Been doing that for years! Right here. When we sit down, I’ll show you the note, the reminder I wrote to myself, December the twenty-six, nineteen eighty-seven.”
“Goddamn!”
We are walking slowly now. We are looking for the nearest bar. The snow is deep, and fresh and beautiful like clouds you see from the windows of planes travelling to the West Indies. The snow is pure and enervating as a morning sea bath, when you enter the water first, and here no human foot has touched the long unsullied stretch ahead of us. Our footsteps are slipping still, from the hidden ice. But we are in no hurry to get anywhere. John’s hand is on my shoulder as we walk, as we used to stand on the school pasture talking, at lunch and after school, while he prepared to take batting practice in the nets: he to bat, and I to watch. “You shoulda seen the length of those needles from the cobbler that came outta my foot that night! One inch long, at least, every one o’ them. But, getting back to you …”
“Here we are!” I say, and we enter the bar we are standing beside.
The bar is almost empty. We move to the rear, in the semi-darkness, away from the entrance, from the sudden blasts of cold, and to give rein and space to the explosion of our happiness in our dramatic chance meeting. When we get accustomed to the new, subdued light in the bar, we see two other men, younger than ourselves, sitting at opposite ends of the long bar itself, drinking draught beer. One of them has just said, “Another Bud, eh, Bud?” And the man behind the bar comes out of the darkness, whistling a tune, and nods in our direction.
“In all this time, in all these years, you ever wondered what happen to me, or where I was?” John asks. “I never wrote, not even a card, ’cause I didn’t know how to track you down. In all this goddamn time.” He slaps me on the back, hard, and says, “I’m here for a few days only. Came in two nights ago.”
“Never,” I say, about the writing.
“I never wrote you a letter. From all those different foreign countries!” John says. “Knew, though. Knew I’ll bump into you, one o’ these days. Here, or back home. Perhaps, on the beach back home.”
“Ever thought of going back home?”
“Three times. After each divorce. Three times, but never tried it. Thought of it though,” John says, “to relax, and to dead. That’s all home means to me!”
“Can’t decide myself, either.”
“Get married? Ever get married?” John says.
“Going back? I’m not going back, even to die.”
“Shit, I can’t even ask you what you’re drinking these days,” John says, “ ’cause when we last was together, neither you nor me was drinking liquor, To me, though, you look like a Scotch man. R
ight?”
“Scotch and soda,” I tell him. The other man drinking draught raises his hand towards the barman, who says, “Another draught?” And the man says, “Yeah, Bud.”
“Goddamn! You know something?” John says. “Something I been watching on television lately, that have to do with twins. Two twins. I never had twin-brothers, as you know. Nor twin-thrildren. I know you don’t have twins in your family. But this thing about twins and their habits. Generical twins, they call it. Where one go, the other is sure to go. Goddamn! Just like that nursery rhyme we had to learn by heart in elementary school! Mary had a little lamb, the lamb was white as snow, and every goddamn way that Mary split to, the goddamn lamb was sure to go! These generic twins. Where one goes, even in secret, the other twin was sure to go! Who one foops, the other one is sure to foop. Ain’t that a motherfucker? Now, I axe you, how goddamn would I, even though I am a therapist who haven’t seen you in forty-something, fifty-somebody years, how would I know that your drink is Scotch, not seeing you after all this goddamn time? Forty years? Or fifty?”
“Forty-fifty,” I say. But I am wondering what he means about being a therapist. I do not think of asking him. “Forty-fifty.”
“Gotta be more.”
“Fifty years at least! It was nineteen forty-three. The War was still on. We were ten at the time.”
“Goddamn! That makes you sixty-three!”
“Makes you, too!”
Another man enters the bar and orders a beer. “Any brand,” he says. “Cold today, eh, Buddy?” he adds; and I know now that the barman’s name is Buddy. It is warm in this bar, and friendly; and I am thirsty; but John is talking and talking; and Buddy looks at us, wondering. John has just gestured to him, to wait a minute. I can feel the cold thawing from my feet.
“Goddamn! We’re pensioners, goddamn!” John says.
“I may be sixty-somebody years,” I say, “but I’m no damn pensioner. I will never be a Canadian pensioner! And live in a home for the aged!”
The Origin of Waves Page 3
