Alligator (13 page)

They moved the sky sideways in long white sweeps and then there were sweeps of white sky sliding in the other direction. The gulls filled up the sky, gave it volume and motion. He came upon a small mountain of green garbage bags covered in gulls and there was a
TV
and a toy castle of durable plastic in primary colours big enough for a child to climb around and play inside.

Valentin thought for a moment he heard a baby crying and it chilled him, but it was only one of the gulls. They screamed in different voices and some of them sounded human and some of them sounded like evil spirits. He didn’t see any rats. He was sure the rats would appear all at once and he would realize they had always been there. The garbage bags were too real and the gulls in the distance were not real enough. He shook his head because the landfill was vast and there was no one else there and he had a hard time drawing his thoughts together because of the bolt of electricity that had jangled every atom of him and seemed to dismantle his sense of purpose.

Valentin had a son in St. Petersburg who was three, a boy with pale blond curls and brown eyes. He loved the child with a quick, hard, religious depth. If it wasn’t for the child, Valentin would have killed himself in prison, or allowed himself to be killed, but instead, he managed to get out and found himself a berth on the ship because he wanted to buy the child things like the plastic castle and, later, an education.

He had an idea that his son would never ever find himself standing in a vast sea of filth, confronting helplessness. He would make certain of it. Near the garbage bags there was a pink velveteen armchair, it looked brand new, without a scratch or stain, and there was a gull perched on the back. He thought of his son and picked up a piece of pipe and raised it over his head and yelled at the top of his lungs. He flung the pipe at the gull on the back of the chair and the bird lifted itself a foot or two out of the path of the tumbling welter of metal and settled down again.

Sometimes the boy fell asleep on Valentin’s chest while they watched television and Valentin was greatly moved by the rhythm of the child’s breathing, which was deep and committed and gentle and trusting. He would never let the boy see what his father was really like, Valentin had decided. As the child grew older Valentin would show up at the apartment less and less, gradually establishing a distance between himself and the boy. But he would provide for the boy and watch from afar and send money and pay for his education.

Valentin loved to run his fingers through the boy’s hair or hold one of his feet in the palm of his hand. He loved to feel the spring of his curls in his fingers. He loved the smell of him.

The gulls were very big and they tore at the plastic bags, puncturing them and pulling out the contents. He saw a gull dragging the carcass of a chicken from one of the bags. The gull’s wings flapped hard but it was moored to the bag and then the bag gave and the carcass came out and the gull squawked and tossed the chicken, and grabbed at it with angry pecks and abandoned it.

The stink came in dense clouds and went away and came back. He saw a stove with a red-and-white-checked dishcloth still folded over the chrome bar of the oven door. Valentin came upon six scattered paper plates that still had gravy on them and green peas and tiny cubed carrots, the same frozen peas and carrots that were served with his lunch. The bright orange of the carrots on the white plates had a menacing buzz and he had to look away.

He left the road, walked for perhaps ten minutes over the hills of ploughed garbage, and the gulls became thicker and he could feel the breeze from their wings near his head; he was not afraid of gulls. He saw, on the distant hills, narrow pathways beaten into the grass and knew they were rat paths, probably several years old and when it started to get dark the rats would pour down the paths like oil.

In less than three hours he had filled two sacks with copper pipes and brass fittings. Then he hitchhiked to St. John’s and found White’s Salvage, where he sold the piping for $187.

He found the Salvation Army twenty minutes before closing time and he bought a suit jacket and a pair of jeans and a white shirt that fit him well, though under the arms the shirt was slightly yellowed. Valentin went into the bathroom in the back of the Salvation Army warehouse and he found a small bar of soap wrapped in paper on the sink and he unwrapped it and stripped naked and washed every part of himself, even his feet.

He dried himself with paper towels and put on the new clothes and tore the tags off.

The woman who had sold him the suit banged on the bathroom door and told him to come out because they were closing and he’d been in there long enough.

She waited outside the door and he stood still on the other side and for reasons he could not understand, the noise of her fist on the door made him break into a cold sweat and he jammed his own clothes into the garbage bin and flung the door open and it frightened her and he saw all the lights were turned off and they were in the building alone.

Valentin went to a downtown bar and ordered five shots of vodka and sat in front of a chessboard. By eleven o’clock in the evening he had played fourteen games in four different bars and won each of them and had $325 in his pocket.

He slept in his new clothes on a bench in Bannerman Park that night.

In the morning he went to a house on Gower Street he’d heard about and purchased seven cartons of stolen cigarettes; he was back on the ship by suppertime and sold the cigarettes to the rest of the sailors by the package or singly and had $500 by the end of the evening. That night he went back into St. John’s and rented a room and slept on the floor. Before leaving Harbour Grace he stopped at the restaurant and paid the bill. He asked for the waitress who served him but she wasn’t there. He left a garishly large tip for her. That was sixteen months ago.

MR. DUFFY

T
HIS SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD
girl had walked into the forest, Duffy was thinking, came upon his bulldozers, and she nearly destroyed them. Sugar doesn’t do much damage when you get down to it, but she had certainly tried to destroy them. She must have walked all night. The nights might still have been pretty cold in early July; she must have gone without sleep.The mother had called ahead to ask if she could be present at the meeting.

The mother is not welcome, Duffy shouted to the social worker. This is no time for the mother. The mother should have been around when her kid was dumping sugar into my heavy equipment. Where was the mother then?

He was sitting in a shed of plywood with one window and there were chainsaws and falling trees in the background and insects taking pieces out of him. He slapped bug repellent on his arms and they had an angry sheen. Sweat crept from under his hard hat, tingling in his hairline. The hard plastic band inside the hat was wet and it dug into his forehead. He could take the hard hat off talking on the phone but you forget to put it back on. Leave the hard hat on, he’s always saying. His shirt was stuck to his back.

He’d had to hire a truck and a crane and four mechanics. There was a guy came to him with his finger hanging by a flap of skin and blood made Duffy weak. These were some of the things he’d dealt with that morning. He had to shout to be heard, but the social worker was meek and keen and he took advantage of it.

The purpose of the meeting, the social worker said, is to give the incident a human face.

I have no interest in the mother, he shouted. Bring on the youngster. She wants a human face, I’ll show her a human face.

But the mother had ambushed him in the underground parking lot of Atlantic Place. Duffy saw she was an attractive woman; the fawn-coloured suit she wore fit snugly, a filmy scarf at her throat, pointy shoes with high heels, as he had seen all the women wearing this season in Montreal. Even without the heels she was a good three inches taller than him. Duffy liked tall women. He liked the way they commanded attention on a convention floor or in a ballroom. He liked a woman who could dress with formality in a heat wave.

I’m Beverly Clark, she said. I was a Holden. I think my mother knew your family. We were the Holdens from the East End. My father’s family had the Meat Market.

Even in the underground parking lot, where Duffy thought it might have been cool, the air felt close and smelled of warm tar and exhaust.

Now that Beverly Clark was right there in front of him he felt deflated. He looked for the daughter.

I forgot my purse, Beverly said, putting her hand on his arm. Colleen is upstairs already.

She was intent on making him feel bad, the hand on his arm, and he was irritated by it. He wanted to turn the full bulk and range of his considerable might against the daughter when he met her. She had not committed a peaceful intervention for ecology, she had pissed off Gerry Duffy, and he had every intention of impressing upon her the difference.

Minor my ass, he thought. At fifteen he was peddling salt fish on the harbourfront. He was supporting his widowed mother at fifteen. They thought she was widowed; she may not have been Jesus widowed; his father had wandered off in a snowstorm and not come back. Gerry was up at five making bread every morning when he was fifteen, he delivered groceries in the dark, cold winter evenings. He cleaned the Newfoundland Hotel during the night, and had never had a mark below ninety at school, until he dropped out in Grade 10 to work on a construction site. At seventeen, the girl’s age, he had a child on the way, the first of twelve.

Seventeen-year-old Colleen Clark would not be familiar with the nuanced understanding of limitation he had grown accustomed to by fifteen.

She’s shameless, he thought.

Gerry had come to believe that hard work and missed opportunities had made him invulnerable.

Coming over Garrison Hill in a Ford pickup some years ago he had gripped the wheel tightly — it was a Sunday morning and mass was getting out at the Basilica, his youngest daughter had given birth the night before and he’d delivered a dozen roses and had seen the infant in her little plastic cot beside her mother’s hospital bed. He had, earlier in the week, closed a deal for a subdivision that was three-quarters pre-sold and the church bells pealed and it occurred to him he was invulnerable.

Nothing would surprise him or overtake him. This is the thought he had going down Garrison Hill: he was equal to whatever came next.

Mrs. Duffy, Gerry’s mother, had been a willowy Catholic who had accepted poverty, saw the honour in it, and allowed it to make her hard-tempered, vehemently selfless, and reclusive. She almost never left the house. She had once slapped Gerry’s face for coming home from a card game with alcohol on his breath.

He used to cook for her each evening and hand over his paycheque. They had been sitting at the dining-room table over a meal of cod and mashed potato one evening when there was a knock at the front door.

Mr. and Mrs. Foley and their daughter, Mary, stood huddled on the sidewalk, rain falling like a string of rhinestones from Mr. Foley’s peaked cap. Gerry’s mother was standing in the doorway of the living room with her napkin clutched in her fist against her chest. Gerry saw that his mother was an old woman, much older than Mrs. Foley, who wore bright red lipstick and looked like she could be Mary’s sister.

Mr. Foley said he was wondering if they might come in and have a talk with Mrs. Duffy and her son.

We’ve interrupted your meal, Mrs. Foley said. She could see the plates abandoned on the dining-room table.

That certainly wasn’t our intention, Mr. Foley said. Once in the living room, he sat on the sofa but jumped up from it again. He tried to lean against the marble mantle, but it was the wrong height for him and he eventually stood in the shadows, in the corner of the room with his arms crossed over his chest. He worked at the post office on Water Street, and his face was grey and pocked like concrete.

We always eat at this hour, Gerry’s mother had answered grimly. She meant they could be trusted to follow through in all things. No matter what the Foleys wanted to throw at them they would rise to the occasion. She waved her hand with the napkin vaguely in the direction of the table as proof of their consistency.

Mary, we’d like you to tell Mrs. Duffy what you’ve told us, her father said. The girl was staring at her hands, which were on the lap of her navy coat and looked very white. Her fine blond hair had come free of the braid that hung down her back and her face was bright red. They were going to have a baby.

The young couple married in the Basilica and shared the room across the hall from his mother until there were five small children and it was time to put his mother into an old-age home. The marriage was passionate and durable until Mary died of ovarian cancer after her last child, fifteen years later. The oldest by that time could take care of the youngest, and Duffy had already started on his fortune.

He was looking forward to this meeting with Colleen Clark. He’d driven over the highway at sunrise to get here on time. August was a busy time for him, but he was curious about the girl. He saw the sun come up over the barrens, all those grey, lichen-scabbed boulders tinged pink, one or two men on the side of the highway with fly rods. The ponds between the rocks like sheets of metal, the sun twinned in every one. He meant to make sure Colleen Clark remembered him every time she saw a sugar dispenser for the rest of her life.

COLLEEN

I
WALK INTO
the liquor store at the mall and they’ve got four people working there. This is the day before the youth diversion meeting and I’m revved up and anxious. I take a bottle of vodka off the shelf and a bottle of wine and I go to the counter and say, My friend bought me this, but I don’t drink vodka so I’d like to exchange it for this bottle of wine which is almost the same price. It’s a horseshoe counter and they have baskets done up with coloured Cellophane and bows, bottles of wine and corkscrews, fancy wineglasses.

If I have to, I can gently nudge one of these gift baskets off the counter. The woman at the cash says, Do you have a bill? and I say, It was a gift, which is why I want to exchange it, and the manager turns and says, Did she have that bottle in a bag when she came in? and the other woman who has just finished serving someone on the other register says, Do you have identification? The manager’s arms hang away from his body, as if he were wearing an eiderdown coat, and he flexes his fingers. The girls behind the counter step closer to the manager. Either they step closer or they are already close. They form a phalanx, ready to pounce.