The Withdrawal Method (14 page)

BEING LIKE BULLS

IT TOOK THREE weeks in a row of no one coming in before the place really got to me. My parents' old shop had always been full of stuff that, even back when we still got tourists through, I couldn't imagine anyone would ever want. Junk. Everywhere, piled up on shelves or hanging from display racks, all with more or less the same tacky logo splashed across the front in neon script: Niagara Falls, Ontario. It might have been gradual, building up over time, or it might have just been that something snapped. But suddenly everything my eyes landed on - the coffee mugs, the key chains and pencils and snow globes, the T-shirts and sweatshirts and jackets and hats, the daytime postcards with the water flowing green and frothing white over the edge, the sunset postcards burning orange, the nighttime postcards all purple and blue - came needling back into my brain. Simply put, the place was a museum of crap. So I got my jacket on, closed up, and drove over to CanAm Tower.

Dave and a new girl I hadn't seen before were out in the parking lot having a smoke. They both had their uniforms on, navy blue jumpsuits stamped with the CanAm logo: the stars and stripes and maple leaf styled into a yin-yang sort of thing. Cross-border solutions, it said along the bottom. Their belts dangled various paraphernalia: flashlight, walkie-talkie, nightstick.

The nightsticks Dave and I used to joke about - until one morning just before dawn he caught some pickers trying to drag an old fridge out of the pit and bashed one of them into a coma. The guy had been from one of the camps out in wine country and for a while things got pretty dicey: while Dave's victim was still in hospital a few of his pals snuck into town one night and beat two American pit workers to near death. CanAm responded by equipping its night security with tasers and instructions to zap first and ask questions later. But the picker came out of the coma and things settled down. Instead of being reprimanded, Dave was just put on the day shift at the top of the tower, told to radio in if he saw anything suspicious.

I came across the lot, waving. Dave nodded back. "Busy day?"

"Right," I said. "Something like that."

The girl - her nametag read Kaede - was plugging her nose with one hand and smoking with the other. She was young, mid-twenties or so, and when she grinned at me I was surprised to find myself grinning back. Looking away, I scratched at my elbow through my jacket. "Cold out today," I said.

Dave turned toward me and I could smell the liquor coming off him in waves. Nine thirty in the morning, so this was probably remnants of the night before. Lately I'd been staying in, reading magazines and falling asleep by ten. "Kaede," he said, in a weird, slow voice, "this is my good friend Aagyapal."

"Paul's fine," I told her, eyeing Dave.

"Hi, Paul," she said, fingers still pinching her nose, breathing smoke through her mouth.

Then she checked her watch, took one last drag, smiled again at both of us, and wandered off down the street, flicking her butt over her shoulder. It spun there on the pavement in the wind, sparking orange, until a bigger gust snuffed it out.

"Cheery girl," I said.

"Japanese," Dave whispered. He punched my shoulder, seemed like he was about to say something else, paused, and eventually added, "But totally speaks English fine." Kaede moved off in the direction of Rainbow Bridge until she was out of sight.

I shivered. "Mind if I come up? Some October. Feels more like January."

We shot up the tower in the elevator, the view spreading out beneath us. In the observation room Dave sprawled on the couch in the corner while I gazed through the south-facing windows over that end of town. It was empty, nearly derelict. Nobody along any of the little avenues that used to be so full of tourists, nobody down the end of the boardwalk where folks would line up to watch the river come crashing down over the edge, nobody at the coin-op viewfinders tilted on haphazard angles from the last time - months ago, now - that anyone had fed a loonie in to spy on what was happening below.

"Those fuckers were hogging the pool table again last night," Dave said, stretching. Then he laughed. "I feel like my old man -'Send them back to their own country."'

Way down below, two bulldozers plowed their way through a heap of trash. A group of workers followed, shovels at the ready. "It's not like it's their choice to be up here, man," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, they work for the same company you do; they get stationed wherever they're told. Even you, right? They could have you over on the American side. But you're here."

"Thank Christ for that," Dave grunted. "Pauly, you should try to get on with security. They're looking for people right now - I guess the pickers on both sides are getting pretty out of control again. But a little guy like you they'd never make work nights. You'd be on days like me and Kaede and you wouldn't have to do shit."

"And I'd do what with the shop? Sell it?"

"Oh, fuck. Here we go. How long have we been going through this shit with you, man? There's got to be a point where you just let go. And what about money?"

"Don't worry about me and money." Dave didn't need to know that my parents had stashed enough of their income away that I could go right through to a doctorate without a dollar in loans. He'd have thought "trust fund" and then I would have heard it - especially now that I was living off their hard work and not going to school.

The diggers and bulldozers kept working, shifting the garbage around, moving it into the compactors. The sounds drifted up: the grumble and growls, the grinding of trash packed into neat little squares, the buzz of generators, and the steady drone of trucks moving single file in and out of the pit, dumping their loads and then heading out to fetch more garbage.

THE NEXT DAY I drove down to the store, pulled up into that familiar spot out front. Above loomed our sign, paint flaking; the G of Gold had peeled off in the past year and I'd never bothered to replace it - so now the family business was called Canada _old Souvenirs. I caught myself sighing as I got out of the car, my standard reaction to thinking about the day ahead: sitting there, waiting in vain for the chime of the doors opening.

Leaving the Closed sign turned out, I took my spot behind the counter. Dust had settled over everything, the gleam of figurines and paperweights hidden under greyish fluff. I thought about cleaning it off, going around with one of those feather things. But what was the point? Quickly the feelings from the day before began to rear up again, as sickly and shame-soaked as a hangover.

I looked at the photograph of my parents taped to the cash register, something that usually kept me going. It'd been taken the day they opened the store and stuck up there shortly thereafter. In the picture the two of them stood out front, my mom in a sari and my dad in his turban, the new sign shiny and bright above. Later they laughed at how arbitrarily they'd named it, the naive, immigrant enthusiasm of Gold, and the photo captured exactly that in their faces: eagerness, trepidation, hope.

I'd been born a few years later. We never had many problems. Mostly people found us charming, maybe a little perplexing, this polite Sikh family hawking Canadiana. The honeymooners would come and ooh and ahh at our shop full of kitsch, or there were the tour groups who went nuts for our novelty T-shirts. You could just imagine them parading around back home in their new duds like they were something special, someone worldly. But we sold the same things to everyone. Each tourist who came to the Falls had the same experience: pay too much for parking, look at the water, buy something shitty, load back onto your chartered bus, and go home. There was nothing special about it.

The register itself was an old, clunky thing. We'd never modernized to digital for some reason, and whenever we rang up a sale - as I remember sales, anyway - the thing dinged and clunked as we filed the cash away. Without a second thought, I punched the drawer open, peeled the picture of my folks off the register, and stashed it in the cash drawer, banging it closed. Maybe Dave was right, I thought. Maybe it was time to call it quits, sell the land to CanAm, finish school with the money.

There was a knocking sound then - I had this crazy idea that it was my folks from inside the register, begging to be set free, before I realized someone was at the front door of the shop. I hopped the counter and saw that it was the new girl, Kaede, uniform on, looking very official.

"We're actually open," I said. "Just haven't turned the sign around yet."

She nodded, that big goofy smile splashing across her face. I'm not a big guy, but I had to look down at her: she was maybe five feet tall, with broad cheekbones and a little bob haircut streaked with gold. Her grin exuded a warmth that I'd nearly forgotten could exist in people.

Kaede stepped past me, started moving through the store. She had a camera strapped around her neck.

"Any trouble?" I asked. "With security, I mean?"

"Hardly," she said, and kept looking around. Was she actually shopping?

From one of the racks, she picked up a pen with a little Maid of the Mist boat that went sliding up and down the stem when you tilted it. She pointed it at me like a sword, cocked her head in an inquisitive way. "How much?"

"Honestly, when they closed, every tourist shop in town unloaded their stock on us. We've got a warehouse full of this crap. Take it. Take whatever you want."

Kaede shot me a quizzical look. "Yeah? How about if I take some pictures?"

"What? Of this place?" I laughed. "Knock yourself out."

The lens cap came off and she was at it, snapping away, doing little knee bends and leaning back to get certain angles. When she turned toward me, though, I put my hand up. "Whoa."

"Oh, sorry. I didn't -"

I forced a smile. "No, you know. Just didn't have a chance to do my hair."

She capped the camera. "Gotcha."

"Hey, can I ask you something? What the hell are you doing here? In Niagara Falls, I mean. I know you're in our shop because it's totally amazing. But to come all the way from Japan to work guarding a garbage dump - I don't know, seems a little weird."

"Paul," said Kaede. "I'm from Calgary. My parents are Japanese, and I taught English in Tokyo for a bit, but - no, anyway, I'm here mainly for a project." She held up the camera. "I'm a photographer. Back when the Falls were here, people took thousands of pictures, but they're all the same - the water, the boat-ride, whatever. I want to document the way it is now, for an entire year. The people who live here, their homes, their jobs, and what's become of all the old sites - Marineland, especially."

"Marineland? There's nothing there."

"Exactly. And CanAm gives me a place for free, and I can shoot on the job, so..."

"So you'll be here for a year?"

I felt like I should add that I'd be around, that I could take her out to Marineland sometime, whatever. But I'd forgotten how to do this sort of thing. My last attempt at romance ended with me humiliating myself with some German backpacker, a big horsy woman down for one night from Toronto. We'd met at Dooley's and gone back to her hotel. But it'd been a bust. The machinery didn't work, I guess you'd say; I ended up sneaking off as soon as she passed out. And that had been months ago now.

Kaede was making for the door. "Hey, Paul - can I askyou something?"

"Um. Sure."

"Am I ever going to get used to the smell? It's awful."

"Ha, yeah," I said. "Give it a couple months."

She shook her head, said something about getting back to work. At the door of the shop, she paused. "Your friend Dave said something about a bar? Do you ever go there?"

"Dooley's?" I thought of the German. "I used to. Not so much any more."

"Dave invited me tomorrow night. You should come. I haven't got a phone yet, but why don't you drop by my place beforehand? We'll go together."

AFTER SPENDING AN hour trying to find my going-out shirt, I headed up to Kaede's apartment off Lundy's Lane, in the back of the old Econo Lodge. She was waiting on the steps, cycling through the images in her camera. On the walk down to Dooley's we went around to some of the old tourist stops so she could take a few pictures in the dusky light. Most of them were boarded up; the few that still had their windows intact had been converted to housing or CanAm offices.

"Find it depressing?" I asked.

"No," she said. Click, click. "More interesting."

We took a little detour to Clifton Hill, stopping in front of what used to be the old Guinness Museum. While Kaede snapped away I explained how, at first, the place had been turned into a nostalgic retrospective. "They filled it with interactive displays and old videos about the nutbars who went over in barrels, and there was a little working model with water rushing over the side and a pair of headphones to listen to the actual sound of it, recorded way back when."

"And what was that like?"

"The real sound? It's weird, I can't really tell you. I mean, I know what noise waterfalls make, I just can't remember exactly what it was like here - like if we were standing in this spot, what we'd be listening to. Or if we could hear anything at all."

She stood looking at me with the camera in her hands, waiting for more. But I just said, "Let's go," and started walking again, leading us through Victoria Park. With the overcast sky darkening, the shadows of the trees stretched and deepened.

"Is it true I shouldn't walk around here alone at night?" she said.

"Well, after dark you get garbage pickers coming down from Welland or Fort Erie and that. There have been some problems."

"But I'm security, Paul." Her hand brushed mine, sending a ripple of heat up my arm. "If I was working nights these are the people I'd have to deal with, right?"

DOOLEY'S WAS RUN by its namesake, a salmon-coloured, tubby little Newfie who had opened the place back in the days of happy tourism. When asked about keeping it going while everyone else went under, Dooley would shrug and give his standard answer: "Folks gotta drink."

The place was split into two gloomy rooms: one featured a pool table ringed with stools; the other side had the bar and a few booths. The clientele practised a similar division. Guys like me and Dave, locals from way back, stuck together, while anyone else - especially the Americans who'd been stationed up here - went to the side of the bar where we weren't. Every now and then one of our guys would get a few drinks in him and start to feel sore, "accidentally" spill a beer on someone's lap and have to take it outside. Not me, though. I've never been a fighter.