The Freedom in American Songs (7 page)

“I wish you,” she said, making a little prayer-fold with her hands against her heart, a thing she sometimes liked seeing people do but which she never did, “the happiest life in New York.” It was the first time she felt that the blessing had gone from herself to the Mexican butcher. Usually it was the other way around.

“Thank you,” he said, and they parted, for the last time, on the street that would miss him when he was gone, since that particular street, though it saw magnolia and cherry blossom and iris and soon roses as well, did not see many men with the Mexican butcher's excess reserves of kindness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Zamboni Mechanic's Blood

 

 

My husband came home
from his new job at the funeral service and made miso soup while I checked the mirror to see if those were really moustache hairs I'd noticed on my own face, glowing in the sun. Had he noticed the hairs?

“No.”

“Please tell me honestly.”

“I've known a lot of women with moustaches.” He chopped leeks. He had thrown his fedora with the red feather in it on our water cooler. He wasn't sure if he liked the new job. He looked good in that fedora but he was putting a dead man in the ground every day.

“Have you?”

I wondered about the moustachioed women my husband had known. I saw them in my mind. Moustaches and long hair. Moustaches and hot pink patent leather handbags. He had never mentioned these women before.

“We were talking in the church, me and one of the other porteurs. He used to be a Zamboni mechanic for all the big NHL games at the old forum. It was great. He only had to work three hours and they gave him a nice ticket up close.”

“Does this fall into the category of other part-time jobs more desirable than the one you just found at the funeral service?”

“Eh?”

“The Zamboni mechanic.”

“It was great for him—he saw all the games …”

“Wait. We were just talking about moustaches.”

“I mean he had a moustache. A nice little grey moustache, nice and full and wide, from the nose to the lip. And it stopped at the edge of the mouth, on a 45. He'd sit with the wives of the hockey players.”

“He told you this today?”

“Yes, it was a Ukrainian funeral. The priest had red robes all embroidered: a beautiful young man. We had to place four chandeliers around the body.”

“With burning candles?”

“Yes and the songs were lovely. Different from any other kind of song. And I saw another thing: a young man crying, and an old man wiping away his tears.”

“And the Zamboni mechanic was telling you about his job.”

“Yes, in the lobby, before the graveyard. One time he got called all the way up to Quebec City to fix a Zamboni that had stopped in mid game. Big fines for that. No one would admit it ran out of gas. Pranksters are always doing that to the forklift guys in warehouses as well. Zambonis and forklifts run on propane. All you have to do is open the valve. And one time Patrick Roy got knocked out.”

“Patrick Roy?”

“He's the most decorated goalie in the NHL. He got knocked out and his wife was sitting beside the Zamboni mechanic and she grabbed him and ripped his shirt and dug her long fingernails in his arm and drew blood. He had to throw away that shirt.”

Leek and carrot shavings floated in the miso. We'd eat then walk to the market for café au lait at the place we call the garage door. That was one thing about his new job. After a three-hour funeral he could do what he wanted, but I knew he didn't like it. All the porteurs were a bit older than he was. They were semi-retired. The Zamboni mechanic had told him he regretted deciding to become old too fast. Sometimes a widow flung herself on a coffin and the porteurs had to be careful not to drop it. You were the porteur of other people's passion, and if you weren't careful you missed the moment when a red-feathered bird stole off with your own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anhinga

 

 

Sanibel Island felt somehow
Victorian to Claire, or it felt, at least, like something that belonged to a Victorian concept of exotic lands. She couldn't stop wondering how Darwin might have felt when, as a young man, much younger than she was now, he sailed for the first time to a place like this and saw with his own eyes how plants and animals had adapted to tropical conditions. Here on Sanibel the anhingas and other dinosaur-like birds were sheathed in platelets of armour against wind and heat. Their size was unnerving. The vegetation, too, was armoured, palm trees and prickly pears bristling with shingles and blades, paddles and spines. Despite all this protection, strangler figs managed to twine around exposed trunks with ever-constricting tendons, gradually throttling the life out of them. Glittering lizards forever darted from under the varnished bush outside her rented cottage, startling her; miniature versions of the malevolent iguana her daughter had volunteered to have in the house one summer because the science teacher's wife was terrified of it. Even the local people looked reptilian. She'd wanted heat and respite from a Montreal winter, but this was comfortless. It wasn't really hot enough—she should have gone farther south—a raw wind thrashed leaf-plates and scaled pinions until they threatened to fly off their outlandish owners and slice into her temples, leaving her sprawled and bleeding on the bike path.

What was it one of the Victorian poets had written, mourning an absence of things diminutive and northern, about a gaudy melon flower? One of the Roberts … Stevenson? No, it was Browning … yes, Browning, three years younger than Darwin, homesick on his own exotic travels.
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
. That was the poem. Well, there was nothing diminutive here, the airport road lined with synthetic stucco buildings stretching for miles and decorated with molded urethane medallions, painted foam balustrades and non-supporting Tuscan, Corinthian and Doric columns: conglomerate commercial bungalows whose faux stone arches bore fibreglass signs advertising ribs and burgers along with the most involved bodily restructuring: Corneal Transplants, Kidney Extraction, Neck Lifts and Fat Transfer … all of it as ghastly as she'd imagined Florida might be … what had possessed her to come?
Imagine a Stunning New You
, the signs proclaimed.
Begin Your New Life Today!

Sanibel Island was different, it was true: it had a great deal of wilderness preserved by benevolent citizens and the government. On trees that fringed the little beach that her cottage brochure had promised—not the big beaches everyone visited, but a scrap of sand hardly existent at high tide—the ospreys were nesting, and they glared at her as if they would peck her eyes out if she made one wrong move. And the pelicans—how ungainly they were, plunging for fish with a great splash as if someone had lobbed them into the water and they had no control over their own tangle of wing and claw.

Her cottage was next to a famous little café that had a long porch and many kinds of ice cream that you could not persuade the staff to administer in anything but triple mounds no matter how you beseeched them to give you one small scoop on a child's cone. She tried not to lose her temper but lost it anyway, as she had done at home over trivial matters with her loved ones … when the pretty student handed her the teetering scoops she tore off the top two, threw them in the bin and grabbed a napkin for the impossible task of cleaning the stickiness. Way to go, Claire—you're really going to enjoy that ice cream now.

The porch was lined with painted recliners, filled with ancient couples from Michigan and Illinois, couples who'd stuck it out with each other through intense underground hostilities and now shared expressions of fathomless grumpiness that no amount of Sanibel Coconut Banana Tango could help. Morbidly obese, legs spindly, they'd come in cars, cars, cars that choked Periwinkle Way, driving the locals crazy with the schizophrenic knowledge that without tourists this place would be a forgotten backwater, but with them … god, what was it?

On the big beach a bike ride away, near the lighthouse and pier, Claire watched them walk barefoot on the cold sand, picking up moon shells and clamshells and lightning whelk egg cases that they all mistook for eel skeletons: discs of cartilage on a spiralling cord. A net bag of shells in one hand, cellphone in the other …

“Did Joan feed the rabbit?… Has Moe moved Aunt Cindy's car? Don't forget to shovel her back gate … ”

In the fish shack on Periwinkle Way a woman in capris exhibited the family's latest photos on her phone, the friend dutiful … “Oh my, nice, yes, I love your new yellow countertop.”

In the restaurants it was impossible to get a meal that would have passed muster had anyone involved in its preparation performed the most rudimentary taste test. Arugula salad with buffalo mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes sat drenched in vinegar. The butterfish, from which, it was true, the waiter had tried to dissuade her, had the texture of a candle extinguished just as the wax had turned soft throughout. Everything here was meant for tourists, for sale, and not for real life, which was why Claire congratulated herself on the fact that she had at least rented a cottage that had a two-burner stove, which meant she could cook rice and beans and a bit of kale, or boil the tiny non-stick pot for tea, though she could hear her mother now telling her how non-stick coatings break off and
migrate
into one's body taking up permanent residence, being made of elements the body can't recognize as substances to be eliminated. They migrated, undetectable, to the far reaches of every capillary.

Claire had realized, too late to do anything about it, that the people she had not brought to Sanibel with her were nevertheless in her thoughts, and that she was in for a fortnight of torturous loneliness. Nobody was here to share the absurdities or the hot sun or the rather frightening birds and plants, yet she would know exactly how they'd have reacted to everything here and what they would have thought of it all. She would have their commentary—imagined, yes … but startlingly realistic in her mind—without any warm-bloodedness or laughter she might have shared had she had the sense to bring any of them along in person.

She'd gotten the wrong impression about the locals from the taxi driver who'd driven her at night from the airport. He was from Kentucky and had moved here to look after his parents. His mother could no longer cook or remember anything and his father had both hips replaced but it wasn't going well … yet in spite of this the taxi driver, Callum Tyree, possessed an air of real easygoing friendliness, even happiness. He was happy this fare was taking him over the causeway from Fort Myers to Sanibel.

“When I've dropped you off,” he said, “I'm not gonna go back to work right away. I'm gonna take a ride around the island. You're gonna love it there … just watch out for the alligators.”

“… really?”

“I believe,” he said slowly, “a lady got eaten last year by an alligator on Sanibel. Didn't get away fast enough.”

“Are alligators fast?”

“They can sprint. Probably she had something wrong with her, that lady. Probably she couldn't get up and run all that fast, for some reason.” He fell into silence and she noticed he was not an aggressive driver. He let other drivers cut in front of him and he hung back until the way was easy again. “I found a boat on Craigslist for two thousand five hundred … thinking of buying it and living on it.”

“I always loved houseboats.”

“Got a buddy moored off Sanibel with the shrimp boats—doesn't even have sails. Boat's just an old wreck—when he wants something in town he goes ashore in a rowboat. You can live almost for free if you got a boat like him.”

“A person can still do that?”

“Sure.”

“Mmm … I wouldn't mind … bobbing on the water, being rocked to sleep … you can stay out there for free?”

“If you want you can pay a hundred and fifty dollars for a mooring and that'll get you electricity and a shower …”

They stopped at a convenience store so she could buy breakfast things for the cottage in the morning. He came in with her and bought a bag of chips and stood munching them while she found apples and eggs. The store did not have an onion in it. They met at the last aisle in front of a display of straw hats.

“This one here,” he picked up a dramatic number furled at the sides, “is a real Kentucky hat.”

“I'd like to see you put it on.”

He sported it for her.

“Looks pretty good.”

They'd gone on like that for the rest of the ride, and when he pulled up outside the pitch black cottage area—there were no streetlights so as not to disorient migrating birds—he got out of the car to make sure she found her key and got in all right. It was one of those vacation rentals where the owners are offsite. Her bike was waiting for her under a tree that had orange flowers all over it. The cottage was simple as she'd hoped, advertised as an old-style Florida beach cottage. The interior walls were pale blue—there was a writing desk, a bed, a two-burner stove and a little kitchen table and fridge. Because it was a bit like the kind of simple living arrangement she imagined his friend had on the boat with no sails, she asked Callum Tyree as he hovered near the taxi if he'd like to look in at it.

“I'd suggest,” he said, “putting your bike inside for the night, or it might get stolen.” He stepped in and stood for a second near the wicker couch then stepped out again, but for the moment that he was inside she felt the loneliness of the night and the slight impropriety of having asked him to come in and look—would he … ? No, he would not take it the wrong way, and she was a big woman, used to unconsciously assessing her ability to fend off physical attacks or advances … it was in her imagination, any hesitation on his part to leave—he left with perfect politeness, but the friendly good humour of their talk … had it almost been a kind of planning, together, of a possible life out there on the water in an old houseboat among the shrimp fishers? No, she told herself, it had not been that at all. But it had been fun—she hadn't known then that trying on the hat and discussing the vagabond life would be the only real human conversation she'd enjoy the whole time she was on Sanibel. From the time Callum Tyree left her alone in the cottage, she would be utterly and essentially lonely. What a fool, coming by herself. She was a woman who did not know the first thing about her own temperament. Solitude? Why in the name of all that was alive on this earth—anhingas, orange flowers, shrimp fishermen—why had she imagined solitude was a thing she wanted?

By her fourth day she had ridden all the bike paths and seen all she could bear of geriatric beachcomber couples tolerating each other in cold fury. Even the little beach where she could sit alone with the ospreys felt full of malevolence—she couldn't blame the ospreys, on whose nesting grounds intruders continually encroached, but she did not want her eyes plucked out. There was an outfitting company that worked with the big wildlife reserve toward the northeastern part of the island, and you could rent a canoe and go around the mangroves, where there would be herons and brown pelicans and oyster beds and … she had not quite figured out the alligator situation—it was something she could ask the outfitters. The ospreys, menacing in their own way, had taken days to disturb her completely, whereas the tourists had done so in far less time. Maybe the herons and alligators or whatever lived in the mangroves … maybe they wouldn't be so … The people she had left at home made their views known. The eldest daughter urged her to go deeply into the mangroves, to the most dangerous place possible. The youngest said,
Don't get et
. Her mother shuddered in revulsion.

The canoes were blue and made of scratched plastic. They looked like toys. It seemed unlikely that any outfitter would provide such canoes if there were real dangers out there. It would be like floating around in an elongated Frisbee. She had slid down the hill in Montreal's Parc du Mont-Royal on a dollar-store toboggan more substantial than those canoes.

“I noticed,” she told the person upstairs in the gift shop as she handed over her credit card, “on my bike, on one of the bridges … a sign that said do not feed the alligators, and I wondered …”

“Hmm …” thinly veiled scorn.

“I mean I understand why no one should feed them—what I'm wondering about is, exactly how it works … I mean …”

“Just look where you're going. For one thing, you're probably not going to get that close to one, but if you see one lying across the path …”

“Okay.”

“And an alligator is not likely to consider you as food because you're—for one thing—huge …”

“What do alligators normally consider food?”

No wonder the woman was looking at her that way. Why, Claire wondered, had seventeen years of formal education not implanted an image somewhere in her brain of an alligator eating something … She suddenly remembered that her brother Craig had camped in Orlando in his van for a year and had mentioned to her that he tossed the alligators strawberry shortcake and hard-boiled eggs. Possibly this image had supplanted others she'd learned from her high school geography teacher, Mr. Ollerhead. Such names her teachers had possessed … there had been a Mr. Wigglesworth too, a fact her daughters refused to believe.

“Birds. Frogs. Raccoons. Fish. Turtles. Snakes.”

“Okay, so … under normal circumstances …”

“Sometimes a deer or a cow, depending …” She handed Claire the Visa receipt to sign, and told her to be down at the water's edge in fifteen minutes where Chris would give her a canoe.