Stunt (12 page)

We nod. We do. A raven hops by with a toy in its beak.

Leopold continues, ‘The trouble started with Burk the Elf Killer, my mother's boyfriend before Rolf. He would wake me up in the middle of the night wearing a balaclava and think it funny. He was the cat and I was the baby who smelled of milk.'

Immaculata, pleased by this image, prompts Leopold, who has fallen quiet. Her tone appropriate to a wake in a parlour room, she inquires, ‘And what happened to Burk the Elf Killer?'

Leopold returns to his story. ‘He was a wrestler too. Now he's in traction. So Susie got hungry.'

He growls. I step back. Immaculata steps forward.

‘And your father?' she asks.

‘He sends me a calendar every year for Christmas and sometimes a toy boat.' We frown. ‘But it's a model schooner and made of real wood. He lives on the East Coast. He has three new children and a wife named Debdeb. I've never met them. My mother thinks it's for the best. That he's gone. He pays for my schooling, but what's the point, I just get knocked out on the playing field and left for dead. They call me Snot Smurf. Even the gym teacher. So I haven't gone for a year. I spend the money on T-shirts. What about the forgotten people? What about them?'

He sings the question. And then he is his own backup singer: ‘Who?'

Leopold looks at Immaculata. ‘I'm growing my hair.'

‘That's nice,' she says.

‘Like an infidel.'

‘You could disappear,' I suggest.

‘No. I can't. My mother last night was like, “Oh, why can't you just macramé or something you're just staring staring staring,” but I was like, “At least I'm in the marching band.” Later
today, she will tan in her sports bra and matching underwear with an emergency blanket under her chin while listening to her shower radio and drinking raw eggs. I tried to drown myself in the kitchen sink. Lady Hips found me. Now he calls me Lee for short.'

Another breath that is drawing lava through a straw. ‘Can I watch you do something?'

‘Like what?' Immaculata asks.

‘Anything. Eat breakfast. Hang from the ceiling. Build a bird bath. Anything.' We look at each other. Leopold offers, ‘I could put a table here and say I'm a mind reader.'

‘But you're not a mind reader.'

‘Hey, a man has to make a living. Or I could just set up my pup tent. The acoustics are good and I can pretend I'm an anchorite. Want to join?'

Before we can answer, there is a scratching sound from inside his house. Leopold blinks rapidly. He starts to hiccup.

‘I forgot to lock them in the bathroom.' He hiccups. ‘The dogs. When I shaved (
hiccup
), I forgot to put them (
hiccup
) back on their chains.' He lifts his finger. ‘Wait.'

He looks up to the bedroom windows.
Hiccup.
Still dark.
Hiccup.
He opens the door. The dogs come outside, look at Leopold and immediately lie down, mouths black with blood, heads burrowing ostrich. Leopold goes inside. He returns moments later with a graveyard face, hiccups gone.

‘If our parents aren't parents anymore, do we still have to be sons and daughters?'

Leopold dashes his finger between his eyes until his hand drops, a hero shot in the shoulder. He falls still, unblinking. Immaculata kneels below him. Patiently, she waits for him to
wake. Instead, he grows, like Immaculata, uncomfortably tall. He fills out the black leather jacket. They appear to be the twins now, the pale twins, she and Leopold, frail and beautiful lines drawn against the hard surfaces of the world. Set there to be pawed by time. Set there with their white eyelashes.

‘You should stay here, Immaculata,' I say. Insects cresting under our feet, the weeds climbing up around us.

‘Yes,' she nods, ‘I should. With Leopold.' The way she says
Leopold
makes his name longer than it is. Her calling has announced itself.

I give her the black suitcase. She insists on splitting the contents. I stuff my share of Mr. Next Door's trunk money into the bag of onions. Her hair still a rope between us.

Suddenly, Leopold's face takes on the quality of a baby having a nightmare. Immaculata whistles him awake. He looks at her, so thankful. He looks at her and he thinks
forever
and he prays that she thinks it too. He prays that she will say it before he has to. Forever is just too much of a risk to offer first.

Leopold cannot cry. That is why he has so many onions. When he needed to cry to his mother, he would crawl under his bed with a butter knife and slice the onions open and gaze into them until his eyes went watery. When you left, and he had to beg and bleed for days to attend your funeral, she caught him under his bed with the onions. That is why he had the surplus. You left just when he thought of asking you to teach him how to cry. He wanted his hurt to fit him the way it fit you.

Immaculata straightens the cuffs of my suit and runs her fingers down my face, a Braille she can read. We untwine her hair from my wrist. It leaves a red tangle. We hug, buoyant as ocean water, a love surging between us, indelible, my sister's indelible imprint. Feeling the impermanence of all things, the spin of the earth, the pull of a gravity all my own, I move away. She leans into my ear, sugar breath, ‘Just don't let it make you love differently.' I look at her bones. Archaeologists will mull over them one day. Even as dust in their hands, they will be able to tell that she was beautiful, oppressively beautiful.
This is how we lived, this is how we lived.

Her step a lope, she returns to Leopold and the dogs, the pine needles not breaking beneath her feet. Beside them, her face is a burning white candle.

And then, the one word we never heard, ‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye.'

We sew up the moment.

I open the letter.

Ms. Ledoux,
Did your doom-fucked policemen not sing, E minor, ‘The
gentleman Finbar is dead, dear, the gentleman Finbar is dead'?

The letters are tall and shaken, the last word,
dead,
and its attendant question mark, only partly on the page. His eyes could not see where the page ended and the dresser began. He writes on a dresser. All other surfaces occupied: bottles, nail clippers, rinds of cheese, the stale ends of bread, newspapers, photographs, costume jewellery from the days before her fall. I lift it to my nose. The weather lingers in the paper, the wet weather, the extravagant heavy green. All of his windows must be either open or broken.

I do not see the letter as a caution. He took the time to pull himself from the deep, and he wrote. Oh. And he's not dead. Huzzah.
Huzzah.

Return address: a
PO
box.

Postage: Canada.

June 10, 1981

Dear I. I. Finbar Me the Three,
I am eighteen now. As I understand it, this has some currency
in your world. Please send directions.

Eugenia

Past the prostitutes, heeled and shimmering, calling me
pussycat
and
honeydoughnut
and
angelface,
past the church, past the mission, I mail the letter to Finbar and step off our street. Goodbye, Dunn Avenue. I salute the air.
Pow pow.

I could live anywhere now. I could dig a hole and hammer in a flag that says
home
and make myself believe it to be true. I could buy a door and stand it up somewhere and write
do not enter
on it and crouch behind it. I could kneel on a family's doorstep, their mismatched furniture on the front porch, and I could beg to be admitted and then add my boots to their lineup of new shoes in the front hall and smell their new food smells and be fed their noodles and sleep with them on mats on the floor and listen to their new parsed breath and try to match it to my own. I could call myself Cheryl. I could never wash again and let myself become feral and walk shirtless through the streets, a filthy mammal who makes terrible scratching sounds and scares women and children. I could freeze to death next winter. I could play the piano and emit the smell of roses. I could decide to wear nothing but skates and only use the word
skate
for everything.
Skate skate skate.
I could tell anyone anything. That I am a sex maniac and I need a frog and a bird fighting in my pants right now. That my father was a welder and beat me with an iron until I was unconscious and then while unconscious he made me banana splits and when I awoke he fed them to me with his shaking hands.
Skate skate skate.
That my mother made me sleep with hundreds of clothespins pinching my skin and called me Laundry Line and she never turned the nickname into a story. I could tell people that I have a horrible disease that is eating my bones
and my lungs and I am dying and I need to be flown to a beach in Germany, it must be Germany, to rest in the shade and to hear German songs. I love you. And now I don't love you. I love you again. Now I don't. I unbutton my jacket and I knot my undershirt so that it sits just below my breasts. I pull the ends of my hair. Doesn't hurt. Doesn't nothing. I walk, a strut, a swoop, a death prance. Birds flying against the wind, but not me. My body home to new lusts. The sun seems dim. My stride is pornographic. My balance is impeccable. I should have a halo, a whip and a tiger. If there were open bottles on the sidewalk I would drink from them. If a man with a cigar walked by me I would finish his cigar in one inhalation and then I would ask him to live with me in a hotel in a language I invented on the spot. Transfixed, he would nod yes. There, we would order food and take showers all day and then finally I would beg him to jump from the window. He would. I would jump after him and land like a cat. He would be dead and, like a cat, I would walk away from him and find someone else to circle.

I climb a hydro pole and I sing ‘Angel of the Morning' as loud as I can. A small crowd forms below me. They eat their sandwiches and pick at their nail polish and twist the braids in their hair and they point at me. When I am done, I climb down and I break them with the flint of my eyes. Every look is a match against stone. They will never forget me. Now I know what it is to be you.

Queen Street. Parkdale's jugular. Sausage and scaffolding, dog shit and the dust of construction – the city curdles in a messy inverted maniac love with itself. A current of heat claps against me. I have opened the door to an incinerator and inside it is the sun and it does a great yawn. A comet in a boxcar. I squint. My eyes spot. The tops of the buildings are cut and curled like they are saloons from the days of yore, making Toronto, for a moment, a frontier town, and us, with our packed bags and our business, its new settlers, hurrying to cheat and beg and bleed and peddle and hang our handwritten signs – the paint still wet, and so hot on this day that it will not dry. There is not one cloud in the sky. The road should be dirt. Chickens should be running loose and dizzy.

Not looking ahead of me, but above, seeing my rope tied between clock towers and buildings, spider silk embalming the sky, and I am walking heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe, I slam into something. Hard as the hide of a bull. I fall to the pavement. Hit my head. A moment of blackness. The jog of my brain. I look up. The sun, a white-yellow blaze behind him, I cannot make out his face. Only his outline. And it is unruly. An etching from one of Marta's books. The mutineer. Hair in wet tendrils, it drips. He is his own weather system.

‘I am so sorry.' The man hoists me up with a kind of jester leap, so strong I slam into him again. ‘Sorry.'

I pull my face from his chest. He smells of the lake. The middle of it. Where it is two hundred feet deep, and you might find a piano on the bottom.

‘I was looking up,' I say.

‘I was looking down. You won't believe the things people lose.'

There is a formality to his way of speaking like he is trying on the words, seeing if they fit. Immaculata told me, overarticulating, ‘Children are born with the capacity to speak every language as they adapt to their environment they discard the shapes for syllables and vowels they deem to be unnecessary we should try to adapt Euge we should really try to adapt.' The man forgot to throw away these extra shapes. His mouth is crowded with the sounds of every alphabet. He could pronounce anything.

He is carrying a cooking pot, which hangs from one hand. A grey shoelace pulls his hair back off his face. His eyes troll from the toes of my boots up to the crown of my head and then back down again, pausing at my belly button. He stares at it. Just when I think it is a blue finch and he will stroke it, he leads me to a bench, protectively, as though I am blindfolded. We sit and pull our knees up to our chests. The two of us, beside each other, forgotten accordions, waiting to be opened and played.

‘I found a coin once outside a bus station. When I picked it up, I thought, only one thing is this heavy in a hand.' The man's eyes are elfin in shape, tapered at the corners. They are the colour of gun smoke. ‘Gold.'

‘My sister used to find all kinds of things.' I picture the small, soft bodies of rodents, snakes and bats swirling in jars under her bed, her zigzagged afghan pulled down around them. She lay on her back between them and painted the black slates of her cot into constellations and planets.
To them Euge this is the universe.

‘Are you all right?'

I nod. He beams, making creases of his face.

‘You don't have a concussion? I won't have to wake through the night?'

He laughs a molten-core laugh. His laugh is older than he is. When he is finished, he hums a bit.

He has a tuxedo stripe down his black pants. He is wearing tennis shoes. They are also wet. He could tell me that he swam here, with nothing but his cooking pot, and I would believe him. He could tell me that his cooking pot holds the lake, and now, when I look out, all I will see is a piano.

He tilts the pot toward me. It is three inches deep with fresh raspberries. ‘Please.'