The Cloaca (14 page)

With one bulb left I call “Erma?” and get a sustained cough with tears in it back to follow down the hall to the door open there, which is the bedroom. Water's being run inside, I guess in the connected bathroom, and there's some porcelainy tinkling on the sink and cabinets being rolled open and shut.

Not wanting to stand up on the bed to change the ceiling fan bulb, I give her light enough to find her smokes in the middle of the night by and change the bedside lamp. The water stops and Erma comes out of the bathroom prepped for bed. Across the bed from me Erma is lit up in her nightgown and underneath the fabric the shadow of her body is in the shape of a woman's body in the way that those chicken nuggets are in the shapes of what they're supposed to be.

“That's the last,” I tell her.

She takes off and folds her glasses and not magnified and now squinting in the light her eyes look like her original eyes have been ripped from their sockets, and these little bulbs there now are the weird, gnarled, staved-in way they healed.

“Then have a lie down,” is what she says.

“Until I fall asleep,” is what she says to me, or what she asks to me.

The weirder things she could be asking me are she could be asking me to take her to the tub and reach with one of those hand loofas the spotty, rotting places that she can't get to anymore. Or she could be asking me to administer some strange-smelling medicinal vagina cream, or she could be flat out asking me to make love to her like her husband used to. Or she could be with trembling hands pulling a gun from the bedside table's drawer explaining to me that every night she sits up with the mouth of that thing kissing her forehead goodnight because she came all this way, lived all this way, if only to see what was at the end of the road, and only found a dump of loneliness and rejection and losing lottery tickets where she supposed there would be a park or a lake or at least some nice view. But she's only asking me to lay down for a few minutes, on top of the covers, no closer to her than we just were in the car.

Except I'm already on the bed when I'm thinking about this, trying to answer for myself why I sat so agreeably down. Why I reached across her to turn out the light.

She sparks a cigarette in the dark and her face lights up and as near as I can tell she takes only a lung full like it's a last breath before diving to the bottom of a pool, and then she puts the thing in the ashtray to let it burn like a stick of incense.

“I got so used to him,” she whispers after us lying quiet for a while, her voice sounding like it's coming from in her chest. “I got so used to that fatso taking up all the room. You live long enough,” and she here yawns with the whine of a dog yawning, “You realize that the only thing you can rely on is those goddamn annoying things. They somehow make life… Okay.”

Only she says Okay in her way of agreeing only to get me to stop talking to her, and not Okay like Okay, fine, I think. Ken's beer's gone flat enough to drink the rest of the can easy.

One night after work and after 40s for both of us I was lying wasted next to Lorrie in that park where the Canadian Tire is now, us angled towards each other so that only our shoulders touched barely and our heads touched even more barely, and I became aware the way you become aware of things when you're newly drunk like that that something had to happen right then. It just came to me that if anything was ever going to happen between her and me it would have to be then, and it would have to be nudged into action by me. And what I did was I didn't do anything. There were these dark things swooping all over the sky and I wondered what sort of bird would be out that late until I realized they were bats, and instead of moving one inch towards her, or reaching out and simply dropping my hand on top of hers, I just watched those bats, listened to their weird chirping. And we lay for like an hour in that moment where something has to happen, we just lay there in that, at least I did, and what I'm realizing now is that who knows where Lorrie's head and heart was about all that stuff going on between us. Either she was completely into it and that explains why she's so cold to me now, because I didn't do anything and she blames my not doing anything for the way her life went, or else she was completely out of it and that explains why she treats me like nothing. Whatever it was, we lay there with that discomfort, and we just got used to it. I got used to the pain of not doing anything because I decided without deciding that the pain of doing something might be more painful. For an hour we were splayed out, and then sure we hung out again still, but never the same way, and then she left, and then she came back. And now I can't put my finger on the difference between not caring and not being willing to take the lumps that come along with caring.

Breath comes into Erma like the melt of a milkshake being sucked through a straw clogged with still solid milkshake.

“Erma,” I say. And then “Erma” again, to make sure she's asleep. The smoldering eye of her cigarette burning is the only light in the room.

Leaving her, I go to the fridge for another beer. Out the window the Chinese family have tossed in the towel, and now there are only streamers of reflected patio light waving on the pool's surface and what's either a fat cat or a raccoon pawing at those wiggles. Watching the thing work, I empty that second beer and decide on another and then a few more just in case.

Put up on the fridge with a campaign magnet for Pierre Elliott Trudeau there's a yellowed black and white picture of Erma and Ken standing in some driveway at hardly twenty I bet. Ken is clutching his beefy arm around Erma, who poses for the shot with that same frank look of injury on her face from the family portrait. I want to decide if she was ever attractive so I take the picture off the fridge for a closer peek. Where the magnet was there's a perfect, full white sun high in the tea-stained sky and where the picture had been is a perfect white square on the fridge. The fridge is the colour of phlegm spat up by someone who's smoked their whole life, and right in the middle of it is this clean, untouched plot of healthy white.

I go and from over the couch I lift the Roberts family off their hook, which is like pulling the blinds or parting the curtains or lifting the flag and letting the day in because underneath the picture is this long rectangle of bright new wallpaper like a picture window. Here's the same coral colour that J.R. must have lived in as a boy, that got murky and dull along with him as he grew older. And somehow the light I let in through this window shines on how filthy Erma's living room is, like daylight will show the dust over everything, and the screen of mote always in the air, and the texture of grime over everything.

In the light of that day, and with whatever buzz of the beer I've already drank, I start to tidy up the living room, the mess so obvious now it's impossible to just leave. Mostly this cleaning up is just gathering up all the butts and pitching them and collecting all of Erma's loser cards. Opening another beer, I sit down on the couch with that stack of all different games, and with a dime double-check Erma's work. And I think about going through the whole house with this dime, scratching at the walls with it. Erma's missed boxes on every card, and while not all of these reveal a win some of them do, and by the dregs of the last of who knows how many of dead Ken's beers I've killed I've won Erma sixty dollars. Not exactly enough for her to retire from the fast food industry, not exactly enough to escape that Place, but nothing to wag a stick at.

At this point too wasted to drive home, I try to pass out on the couch. When that doesn't take, I stumble back to where I left Erma. Behind me as I go I turn out all the lights.

I'd say Erma looks dead, only I've never seen a dead thing to compare to how Erma looks lying in the bed. She looks unoccupied—no lights on inside. From the racket of her breathing, though, I can say for sure that she's not at all dead. Standing in the doorway, considering the big empty spot beside her, I listen to her painful-sounding shallow gurgle. As horrible as it all sounds, it at least lets me know that she's still alive, which is something.

I'm Sorry and Thank You
|
8

He came out onto his porch and there was some hippy mother changing her baby on his lawn. On a Hudson Bay blanket the mother was wiping and dabbing at the muddy rolls and creases of her little girl. A gust of wind whipped up leaves around the two, and it was like last night on TV. Some pear-shaped Spanish grandma had been crammed into this glass booth with money going nuts all around her. The grandma had grabbed at the bills, stuffing her clothes with money, this twisted look of desperation on her leathery face. She had looked so stupid. He couldn't tell if the point was to degrade the grandma, but he could tell that this grandma didn't care. When the wind in the booth was turned off all the money dropped and lay in a pile at her feet. All that money just right there, but not for her. She had gotten some, but not enough. Never enough. Not quite like money, brittle and wet leaves stuck to the felt of the hippy mother's dreadlocks and onto the swamp of the little girl.

“I'll just be a sec,” the hippy mother said when she saw him there on the porch. He took a sip from his mug and nodded, slid a hand into the pocket of his housecoat as a sign of being a-okay with things.

The hippy mother stood up with a bundle in her hand and walked to him. The baby writhed on the blanket like it was trying to crawl along the air.

“Hi,” the hippy mother said. She had one of those cute, tired, hippy-dippy faces that would have been ugly if she had tried to pretty it up with make-up, he thought.

“Morning,” he said.

The mother winced at the sun high above them and looked back at him, squinting still.

“Listen,” she said, “I'm sorry to do this, but I've got nowhere to toss this.” She held up the bundle. “I was wondering if you wouldn't mind taking it for me.”

“That's shit in there?” he asked, gesturing at the bundle with his mug.

“Pretty much.”

“I don't know why,” he said, “but I always think that babies have those things that birds have. Now, what are those things called?”

The hippy mother didn't know.

“You know. It's that thing that birds have where they do a combination of shitting and peeing so you can't tell what the hell it is that's coming out. Just a bunch of disgusting stuff that doesn't make any sense. It's called
something
, what they have. It's like ‘The Cloister,' only it's not. It's got
ache
in it somewhere I think.” He shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth, trying to force the word to the surface. “And it's right there, too.”

“Fuck,” he said, popping open his eyes. “It's frustrating, huh? When you can't think of a word you know. It's like having one of those sneezes where you can't sneeze. Do you ever get those?”

The hippy mother did get those. She was smiling still, but it was a smile that didn't mean anything, like when a car in front of him would forget to turn a turn signal off.

“Do you mind if I just leave this here?” she asked, and anyway bent down and set the soiled bundle on the bottom step of his porch.

“Just so long as you don't set it on fire,” he said, and laughed.

“Right. I promise not to,” she said. “But thank you. And, again, I'm sorry. She already… And I was just going to… Anyway, I'm sorry and thank you.”

She turned and walked back across the lawn, picking leaves out of her hair.

“Don't forget your baby,” he called from the porch. He took another sip from his mug and made a surprised, sour baby face, expecting it to actually be coffee, forgetting about the Canadian Club. The only club he'd ever belonged to, his wife used to say. She had thought she was just a riot, that woman. Now, there was someone he'd like to cram into a booth. But not a booth with money. Maybe a booth full of razor blades or something. How easily could those become airborne?

“Got her, thanks,” the mother said, gathering up her squirming girl.

He watched her put the kid into one of those hippy slings that he was starting to see regular people use now, too, and he watched her go, watched her bum as she went.

“Cloaca,” he said.

“Cloaca!” he yelled. “It was the cloaca!” he yelled at her. Down the sidewalk, the hippy mother turned to look at him, then turned away and moved off a bit more swiftly.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling good, feeling like he had sneezed that sneeze out, or like he had suffered water in his ear all day from a swim and finally it was trickling out now, all hot and amazing.

“Cloaca,” he said.

He had come out for the paper when he saw the shitty baby on his lawn. Now he squatted and sorted through the rolls that had built up by his door and found the one with the most recent date. All these people had died somewhere because of something, he read.

He picked out the business section, shook it out as he stepped down the steps of his porch, fluffed the paper, and then spread it next to the bundle the hippy mother had left him. With his bare toe, he nudged the wad of cloth onto the paper and wrapped it up.

He breathed in. There was the sweet and pungent smell, the complicated scent of baby shit. Any smell you miss, even if it's a bad one, is a good one.

Wadding the newspaper and the cloth full of shit into a ball the size of a softball, he walked to the end of the driveway, and then he threw it. The wad landed with a light heaviness onto his neighbour across the street's roof.

Opening his nostrils and opening his lungs, he hoped for that autumn smell, but still it was baby stench. He smelt his hands, but it was not his hands. It was all over the air now, that baby smell.

Another whirl of wind came and tossed the salad of dead leaves on his lawn. The leaves flirted around him, and he began to grab at them. He snatched all he could out of the air, stuffing them into the pockets of his bathrobe, and then into his robe so they scratched his bare chest.

The wind died and he stood there with the heap at his feet, his pockets full and his chest bulky. A leaf had landed in his mug. He could drink around that.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling pretty okay about himself.