The Journey Prize Stories 25 (4 page)

—You mean my work around the 13e arrondissement? It’s vital.

—You’re saving Chinatown and letting the heart of Paris stop beating.

I flex my wrists. —Blood can’t circulate without arteries.

His sweaty, overgrown eyebrows form a road map of mixed emotions, hills of wonderment at the centre bottoming out into vales of anger near the pink pulp of his tear ducts.

—I have to submit the plans to city council tonight, he tells me.

The choice for him is simple: submit my plans and seem illogical, or ask for an extension and seem weak. A wet sound passes between his lips, the last bubble rising to the lake’s surface above a drowning man.

With his back turned, he carries the blueprints past the recycling bin and folds them safely under his arm. —If you have nothing more to say, he manages, then show yourself the door.

Colette is a lover of cubism. She tells me on our walk to Montmartre that, at one time, she had a tattoo of Georges Braque’s
Le Portugais
, but had it removed because too many people asked her what it was supposed to be.

I have come to this neighbourhood only once, to step inside the Sacré-Coeur after Claire slipped away. I was afraid, racing
against a riptide of darkness, and had little left to believe in but the spirit of the ancient basilica.

—Look at that townhouse, Colette says, pointing to a grey box with a For Sale sign. Just look at the stone siding.

All I can think of is the gutters to be swept of cypress leaves, the faucets to be sponged and polished, the furnace air filters to be replaced.

—Do you want to live in a hotel forever? she asks, scratching down the realtor’s number on a folded receipt.

—The room service is nice.

—Well, then, she says, slapping the receipt into my palm, it’s me or the lobster canapés.

What I remember of childhood autumns is Bordeaux, hunting wild boar with a recurve crossbow, rifling the life from ring-neck pheasants. I would swat horseflies into the oil slicks of my forearms, pressing hard when I caught one between my thumb and forefinger, until I heard a crunch and saw what was inside.

On a boar, tusks gleaming through the gooseberry bushes, you would aim straight for the meaty bell of the mid-shoulder. But the only way to hunt a pheasant is to gun into the air a foot ahead of them, in the direction of flight.

—Boys are mean by nature, my mother would say, and then fold me, star-eyed, into sleep.

In the pond beside our cottage, I sometimes caught flashes of a Rouen duck – black banding on the crown, royal-blue speculum feathers – when it flickered between the bulrushes. Though it moved like this from place to place, it always went alone.

I was in bed, laid up in eiderdown, when through my window I saw the duck catch his webbed feet on a jag of basalt and snap his legs like sticks of cinnamon. I watched him tumble through the thistled border of the pond, plunge deep below its canopy of lily pads. For hours, I heard the awful scraping of his wings against the water, and then nothing.

I know now, as I knew then: I could have saved that bird.

A cold front has sliced through the humidity, Paris slipping off its mantle of rain. For the first time in weeks, I can sit comfortably in my office.

My boss enters the room wig first. —I’m letting you go, he says, so nonchalant that he might as well conclude the sentence with “for an early lunch.”

Any possible reaction of mine would satisfy him. So I look straight ahead and ask, without ceremony, —What’s the city decided for you?

He looks down at the carpet, which is argyled in an unsettling shade of papaya whip, so that his wig stares me square in the eye.

—How I envy you, Serge. You don’t have a family to disappoint.

In the street, a battleship fleet of half-smoked cigarettes floats past my ankles. Though the storm sewers are still overwhelmed, brimmed too full to function, at least, for the moment, things are not getting worse.

Colette runs to meet me in a tunic dress the colour of otter bone; from a distance, she looks airy, figmental, a forward-floating ghost from some unforgotten past.

—Hope you haven’t been waiting long, she says, when she is close enough that I can smell cardamom on her breath. —The traffic is hell right now.

She must see the clouds forming on my forehead because she pauses. Fashions her hands into small canoes and glides the watery channels of my cheeks.

—Did something happen? she asks.

—Something happened, I say.

She takes me by the bulb of the elbow, where my jacket sleeve is patched with grey suede, and steers me across the flooded street. I feel I could float with the tide, lay back and let it move me, like a sprig of sea kelp, like a caravel skimming some long corridor of blue, easily, with the sun as its sentinel.

Marty came down out of the mountains in early March, trailing a string of bad decisions. He started high up in the Rockies and swept into Calgary, coasting at great speed, almost like his brake lines had been cut.

I was working in a big sporting goods store, selling skis and running shoes and golf clubs. I had been thinking about heading back to Ontario, but that would’ve required putting my tail between my legs, and I wasn’t ready for that just yet.

He’d been married to my sister for a short time, before she cracked up. My mother still says Eileen’s “taken ill.” Most recently Marty had been in Hundred Mile House, doing I don’t know what, exactly. The details were vague. Before that he’d been in Vancouver. Trouble trailed him like a wake; bad ideas poured off him like a stench. Every time I saw him he was driving a different car. Not new cars, but different ones. This time it was a blue Cavalier with lightning bolts down the sides.

Since he and Eileen split and she walked herself into an emergency room wearing a nightgown, Marty has drifted like
pollen from place to place, his welding papers in his back pocket. He’d stay for a time, use up his luck, then move on to the next town. He’d done like that after he got out of the Air Force at Cold Lake, but then he met Eileen and they had a couple of years where they imitated normal people, settled in one place, rented a nice house east of the city. They stayed in nights. Then real colours began to show through and things went haywire, like I’d felt they would.

Since then he and I have kept in touch, in a fashion, and all the while I’ve battled feelings of guilt for some sort of disloyalty to my sister. But then again I have since childhood suspected my sister to be the cause of all bad things.

Marty is big. Not obese, just large, built on a different scale than most human beings. He stands about six-foot-four, and his limbs are like telephone poles. His torso is like the front of a transport truck, and on his feet he wears a size thirteen or fourteen pair of boots. When he drinks, which he often does, it’s usually from something big, a jar or a big plastic travel coffee mug. He drinks vodka mostly, Russians or Screwdrivers. Drinks them like water. Sometimes the only way you can tell he’s on his way down is that his face and neck get beet red. Eventually he just collapses. Finds a bed or a sofa and you can forget about Marty for twelve hours or so.

The thing with Marty is, when he comes to stay with you, there’s no way of knowing how long he’ll be there. He arrived on a Saturday afternoon and immediately went to sleep on the futon in the other room, the room that had been empty since my roommate skipped out on me. Marty stayed there until midday Sunday. I could hear him snoring. Once or twice in the night I heard him get up to use the washroom, a bear of a
man, a lumberjack, shaking the whole apartment as he moved, then planting his feet before the toilet and uncorking a torrent of piss. Water running, then slow, heavy footsteps back down the hallway, the sound of a California redwood being felled as he tumbled back into bed, and then nothing, just faint sawing, for hours and hours thereafter.

A chinook had followed Marty down from the hills, and Sunday was a warm, springy day, a breeze alive with smells where the day before it had been cold and dead. By Sunday noon it was a beaut of a day, the sun at its full strength, the sound of water running off the roofs, everything slick. I could sit at my window and watch the snowbanks below melting like ice cubes in an empty glass. I’d opened the windows and was listening to CCR when Marty emerged from the second bedroom. I always listen to CCR when winter turns to spring, and even if this was a false beginning, I needed to feel good about things after the winter I’d had.

“What in the hell are you doing?” he asked me.

“Polishing my boots,” I said. I was standing hunched over the table where I’d spread out newspapers, some spare rags, and an old shoebox containing my polish kit: a tin of polish, two brushes, and a shining rag.

“Look at you, your highness!”

“Sunday,” I said. “Every Sunday I polish my boots. My dad used to do it.”

“I see,” he said, then looked around, sniffed, and rubbed his stomach. The smell of polish in his nose must have reminded him of the smell of food.

“Got any vittles here?” he asked.

“Sure, yeah. Cereal, toast …”

“Eggs? Bacon? Potatoes?”

“Yeah,” I said, “though the potatoes might have sprouted.”

“All right then, you do your thing, I’ll cook.” And he did. He went to work in my pathetic little kitchen, and with a cutting board, a dull knife, and a single fry pan he beavered away until he had made us a rich spread of eggs and bacon, toast, beans, warm stewed tomatoes. When my plate was empty he refilled it. Only once I was done did Marty sit down and eat. He had thirds, finished everything. I had forgotten this about Marty, that he loved to spend time in the kitchen, and that Eileen never had to cook.

By mid-afternoon, still full, we were sitting on the couch sharing my cigarettes, the sliding door to the patio wide open to let in the sweet warm breeze. CCR had given way to Rush in the five-disc changer: Marty’s choice.

“What time do you work tomorrow?” Marty asked me.

“One,” I said. “One ’til close.”

“Good, then you can sleep in,” he said, lighting another.

“Why do I need to sleep in?”

“There’s a bar I think we should close tonight,” he said. “Passed it on the way here.”

And I thought, why not? What’s the worst that could happen to me, in the company of this man who’d cooked me such a generous meal, on a Sunday night in the foothills with the warm breath of springtime upon me?

“Let’s do that,” I said.

We took my truck, the truck I drove out to Alberta from Kingston, the truck that I lived in for two weeks until I found an apartment. It occurred to me that there was no definite plan
as to what we might do with the truck, how we might get back to my apartment or, failing that, where we would stay after this night of drinking. It’s something I felt that we were actively not discussing, a thing floating between us. I kept returning to it in my head, but deciding that I shouldn’t bring it up, because I felt like Marty was daring me to do just that, to be the responsible one, so that he could be proven, in a single chop, the opposite. Marty defined himself by these sorts of oppositions.

We drove west, straight toward the Rockies, which loomed purple and holy before us, an unreal painted backdrop. The last of the sun was honey oozing between the peaks, and through it we moved slowly, lazily. In the middle distance the foothills burped up from the prairie, little practice runs, junior topography. That’s where we were headed, to a place called the Starlite, located nowhere in particular, just a sign, a parking lot, and a roadhouse.

We stood in the parking lot, Marty and I, feeling – what? Apprehension? Excitement? It’s likely, given what transpired later, that we were not feeling the same thing at that moment, though it felt for all the world that we were comrades, men linked by uneven pasts and a hope that the near future, namely this night, would prove to be a kind one.

We leaned against the truck and did some damage to a six-pack liberated from my fridge. The light disappeared and the night came on and we watched two or three trucks pull in, their drivers making their way to the Starlite’s steel door with their heads down.

My hair plastered down and my boots newly polished, I felt like a handsome devil. Maybe there’d be women inside, I thought. That’s why I had come, for drinks and whatever
interesting faces this evening might invite in. The usual things. I assumed that’s why Marty had brought us out there, an assumption I’d find to be false in due time.

Marty specialized in broken women: those who’d known bad men, bad times, those who’d become familiar with the youth justice system. That’s what drew him to my sister, of course. She hadn’t yet gone off the rails, but he saw something in her. Marty would ride their momentum for a time, have some laughs, then jump off before things completely fell apart. He had a knack for it. When you were riding alongside Marty, you would meet women who quickly began to tell you all about themselves – everything, in one sitting – and you’d hear some crazy things. Then they’d want you to commend them on their strength, given all they’d endured. Sometimes I’d say something along the lines of, “Well, we’ve all got trouble, sweetness, but we don’t necessarily go blabbing it to the first person we meet in a bar.” This stance had, on more than one occasion, hurt Marty’s chances with certain women, and he openly discouraged me from adopting it, or at least voicing it. I’d try to comply, if only because part of me felt that I owed Marty something.

An explanation on that one: while duck hunting with borrowed guns three years earlier, I broke my tibia galloping down a slope toward the spot we’d selected, on the rim of a broad marsh. Marty tied a stick to my leg and then put me on his shoulder and carried me three kilometres back to the truck. He let me drain the vodka from his flask while he drove me to the hospital. An episode like that can endear a person to you, even in the face of their obvious shortcomings.

I was remembering all this as we stood outside the Starlite.
I could hear the wind, which had taken on a coolness I didn’t welcome, and I could hear the bar’s sign buzzing. Far out in the night I could hear traffic on the highway, transports moving between Calgary and the mountains, and Vancouver beyond that, though at that moment the road in front of us was empty.