Caught (11 page)

Who is he?

He’s just a guy, some guy.

What’s his name?

I don’t know his name, Frank Decker, or Fred. He’s a civil servant. Ticks boxes all day. He’d been asking for years, according to Dick, and she finally said to him yes. Dick got all this from his sister. His sister knew Jennifer growing up, kept in touch.

The customer at the corner of the bar hooked his finger in the knot of his tie and wrenched it left and right, stretching his chin up. For a second he bared his teeth. The man picked up his fork and stared down at the pie. Then he put the fork down. He made a fist with one hand and wrapped his other hand around the fist and he put his forehead to his hands. He was saying grace.

Slaney gave himself a shake.

I’m looking around, he said.

Where are you? Hearn asked.

Tried to find a place spoke English, Slaney said. Get a drop of soup.

This time it’s going to be different.

Better be.

I’ve got everything covered, Slaney.

I have to tell you, Hearn, Slaney said.

Christ, Hearn said.

It’s bad in there.

Christ almighty.

It was very bad.

We’re doing it right this time. I have the name of a man for you. A guy you have to see, pick up some backing and get the hell over here. We’re going to have a party for you, Slaney. A coming-out party.

I think I see my lunch, Slaney said. There’s a bowl of soup there, going begging.

My father made himself.

Yes he did, Slaney said. He made himself. When you think of where he came from.

I ruined him, Hearn said. Slaney didn’t say anything.

I ruined him. I ruined him.

I’m sorry, Slaney said.

You’re sorry, Hearn said. Slaney could hear him opening cupboards. He was looking for the salt. Slaney heard the clunk of a glass bottle on a counter. It was the ketchup or Hearn had opened a beer.

I’m
sorry, man, Hearn said. I’m sorry for the way it went down. I’m sorry you went to jail.

There was a paper placemat, already set, at the bar beside the man with the pie. The waitress had turned to the bright window behind the bar that opened onto the kitchen and there was the steaming bowl sitting on the shelf. Slaney’s soup.

The girl lifted the bowl down from the shelf, holding it with both hands, careful not to slop. She looked over the whole bar until she saw Slaney at the back on the pay phone. Her blue, too close-together eyes. She tilted up her chin a bit toward him and he nodded to her.

I got a room for you to stay in Montreal, Hearn said. And he gave Slaney the address. There’s a key for you with the janitor. You got your own bathroom and a phone.

You’re going to pay a visit to this guy named Lefevre. Lay low, Slane. In a couple of days, I’ll call you with the details. You go see Lefevre and he gives you the backing. Then you get the hell out of there. They haven’t forgot about us in Montreal.

I heard, Slaney said.

People are still hurting up there from the last trip. You get the cash from Lefevre and you take a train. We’ll be waiting here for you, Slane.

Listen, man, Slaney said. I’ll be there. I’m on my way. Slaney hung up and leaned against the wall and pressed his fists into his eye sockets and twisted the knuckles into the corners of his eyes.

The sound of Hearn’s voice. The Newfoundland accent. Jennifer was married. She was in Ottawa and she was married. He was full-on crying now. She’d married somebody.

He put the rest of his change in the phone and dialled and waited for maybe twenty rings. He lost track of how many rings and finally a man answered. The man’s voice was sloughing phlegm, and he yelled hello. He was alarmed, woken from a long sleep, yelling hello, hello in a quavering voice.

Is Charmaine there, please?

Where are you calling from? the man said.

I’m on a pay phone.

Don’t make me get out of this bed, the man said.

You’re not Charmaine, I guess, Slaney said. It says here, For a good time.

Because if I come down there.

Call somebody named Charmaine and it gives the number, Slaney said. For a good time call Charmaine.

I’m going to tear that pay phone off the wall and you’re going to swallow it. You’ll be talking through your ass.

Doll

The salesclerk in
the toy department wore a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and navy work pants. She was down on her knees with a pricing gun that spat out fluorescent orange tags when she pulled the trigger. She glanced up at Slaney and swung the gun around on her finger and pointed it at him from her hip like they were in a cowboy movie.

You tell me what you want and I’ll help you find it, she said. We have everything here. She knew he was Anglo by the look of him and addressed him in English. She flattened everything she said like she was running it through a ringer washer. All the
th
’s were
d
’s and she was dropping
h
’s and she was emphatic. Her vowels had carbuncles and she resented having to spit them out and it was as sexy as anything Slaney had ever heard.

Yeah, bonjour, Slaney said. He said he was looking for a doll.

What kind of doll did you have in mind? the girl said. We got all kinds of dolls.

I want the biggest doll you got, Slaney said.

Plenty are big, she said. She had straight black hair parted in the middle that shone blue and hung around her white face. She wore giant silver hoops in her ears and bangles on both her arms. She was skinny, the bones of her hips two hard knobs and the hollows of her clavicles were deep and she had high cheekbones.

Have you got one of those dolls that can walk and talk? he said. And if it can do other things besides, I’d like that too.

It’s hard to get one can do it all.

Slaney saw she was about his age and everything she said was accompanied by a gentle sneer. He wasn’t accustomed to irony coming from female salesclerks and he found it hard to get his footing. All he wanted was a doll.

We got one you can give a real bottle to and she pees. That one is supposed to nurture maternal feelings. I don’t know if you want to encourage that kind of thing.

Slaney said he didn’t know either. He said he was buying a present for a little girl, a six-year-old.

The best doll you got, he said.

Did you think of a fire truck? the clerk asked.

It’s a little girl, Slaney said.

Or a Hot Wheels set?

Slaney said he had his heart set on a doll.

We have a fire truck you press a button the lights come on and sirens blare out all over the house.

I never thought fire truck, Slaney said.

How about a chemistry set? She could look at her own saliva on a little glass slide under the microscope. See all the things swimming around in her spit.

I just thought a doll, Slaney said. That’s what I had pictured.

All right, then, the clerk said. Fine. You want to get her a doll, that’s your business. Get her a doll.

Slaney followed the clerk down the aisle. They turned the corner together and there was a giant display of identical dolls running the length of the back wall of the department store. There must have been hundreds of them. Each doll was in a pink box with a cellophane window and a big pink bow over the outside.

Her name is Saucy Suzy, the clerk said. She got five or six things she says. You pull a string on the back of her neck.

What does she talk about? Slaney asked.

She has lots of interests, the salesclerk said. She counted the phrases off on her fingers.

Let’s see, she says, Take me with you, and Let’s play house, Change my dress, and Let’s bake cookies. She says, Tell me a story, and Let’s do acid and fuck like bunnies.

She’s pretty provocative, Slaney said. The doll’s hands stood out a little from her pleated skirt. The first two fingers on both hands were stuck together, but the other two fingers and the thumb fanned away from the rest. The hands gave the impression that the doll had suffered an electric shock.

Can I see her in action? Slaney said. The girl reached up and her bangles fell down her arms and she took the display doll down off a shelf and set her on the floor.

She pressed a button in the back of the doll, under her curls, and the eyes flicked open. The doll stared forward with bleak astonishment. There was a whirring and ticking of small parts. The doll tilted dangerously to one side. Her shocked fingers seemed to tremble. Each sausage curl quivered and she lifted her left foot. The step was part shove, part scuff. The foot dropped down and the doll tottered and the momentum lifted the other foot.

Jennifer had been in the courtroom four years ago and she kept her eyes on Slaney for most of the trial and she watched him shuffle away in chains. She hadn’t known about the trip to Colombia until they were caught.

Slaney had gone through the door of the courtroom to the paddy wagon in shackles. His wrists were cuffed and a chain ran through the cuffs to the heavy bands around his ankles.

It had required a new shuffle to leave the court. It was a dance that had to be learned on the spot. That dance is a depravity they foist on you.

The salesclerk tossed the doll up onto her shoulder and walked Slaney to the cash register with it. She rang in his purchase and took his money and slammed the register drawer shut with her hip.

Jennifer, Juniper

Before the first
trip, they’d had their big goodbye on the sidewalk outside Jennifer’s Gower Street apartment, the Jamaican flag hanging in the upstairs window, sopping K-Mart flyers hanging out the mailbox, her tears wet on his neck while she held him.

Jennifer had thought Alberta, not Colombia. Slaney had said he was going to Alberta for work and as soon as he landed a job he’d send for her and Crystal. He’d have a nice house set up for them and he’d buy them everything they’d ever wanted, all the furniture and clothes and toys they could imagine. Jennifer wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore.

Slaney had bent down by the stroller and pulled out Crystal’s pacifier and kissed her and stuck it back in before she had a chance to scream for it. And Jennifer stood there on the sidewalk, one hand on the stroller, pulling it back and forth, waving with the other. She kept waving until the car had disappeared around the corner.

He’d loved to
watch her eat cereal in the morning. A drop of milk clinging to the bottom of her spoon. Reading a paperback. The book in one hand and a film of milk coating the convex side of spoon, forming a single trembling drop, clinging and letting go, falling into the bowl.
Plink
. Turning a page. Or she’d put the book on the table and press the heel of her hand over the centre, trying to get it to stay open.

Crystal slept in his old army jacket, the silver stripes on the sleeves that glowed in the dark. Slaney smoothing the little girl’s damp golden curls off her forehead while she slept.

Touching his nose to the child’s soft neck and the smell of her. Dried breast milk, slightly soured and sweet, like cotton candy, and the clean Velour sleepers with the feet in them.

He’d sung the Donovan song to Jennifer, after they made love: Jennifer, Juniper. Whispering a bit of the song into her hair.

They’d go to Topsail Beach on his motorcycle, the child between them, riding under the trees near the railway bed, everything splotches of sun and shadow.

The noise Jennifer made in bed. She didn’t care who heard, or she didn’t know how loud she was.

She often said thank you after sex. She thanked him. He couldn’t get used to that. He would say thank you right back. She always called out to God in the middle of it. She told Slaney she loved him over and over when they were fucking and he forgot to say it back. Sometimes she would sulk afterwards and it would take him a while to figure out what was wrong, then he’d say he loved her and she’d wrap her arms around his neck, nearly choking him.

Slaney had grown up with her. But she became new to him when she was sixteen.

He’d started seeing her around downtown and it confused him. The look she gave him when he came into Lar’s Fruit Store that day in August after her baby was born.

Slaney had known Jennifer Baker since kindergarten. There were vast swathes of time when he hadn’t thought of her at all.

But there were also the bright burning stars of her: she had played basketball (weaving through the thrash of girls, all elbows and knees, down the court, the sneakers squeaking to a halt, everyone turning at once, thundering down the court after her, and her leap, one knee up, arm raised over her head, the ball balanced on her fingertips, suspended in the air for a long, still moment, before tipping the ball through the hoop). She’d come to his door one Halloween and how earnest in her homemade Wonder Woman costume, a bodice of tinfoil and construction paper, matching wrist cuffs, a lasso spray-painted gold.

They’d both placed in the grade eight public speaking contest, he for the boys’ school and she for the girls’. He’d argued that there was life on Mars and had the place in an uproar of laughter; she said it was wrong to dissect frogs and won without a single joke.

Neighbourhood baseball, and street hockey, water balloon fights, spotlight, spin the bottle, smoking pot behind Woolworth’s and her uniform at the new A&W.

But she was like a stranger that day in August at Lar’s Fruit Store. She had asked for a custard cone and she was blushing and she’d stumbled over her words. The first time he’d seen her since she’d had the baby. The ice cream had been soft and toppled off the cone even as she raised it to her mouth. She stood there holding the empty cone out with the ice cream on the floor at her feet.

Now my hand is all sticky, she said.

It’s the heat, Slaney said. The woman behind the counter said she was going to get Jennifer another ice cream.

You just hold on there, the woman said. I can fix this situation. She wet a dishrag and handed it over the counter to Slaney, who got down on the floor and tried to scoop up the mess. The woman said the weather was making everything melt. She said she was run off her feet.