Alligator (12 page)

I don’t know who you are, my dear, Mrs. Fowler said. Wasn’t there a nurse or someone to accompany the poor woman? How had she managed to find her way through the hedge? Mrs. Fowler had held annual garden parties for the neighbourhood several years ago. She served punch in a crystal bowl with floating slices of lemon and orange. People had smoked dope in the back of the garden. Mrs. Fowler had worn jeans and had participated in the New York marathon a decade before. What had happened?

The bird’s heart terrified Beverly, so speeded up and frantic. The heart said the bird mattered. And David, who must have been staring into an abyss, the seductive roil of the Atlantic, convinced it might be pleasant to simply give up; David mattered.

But when she got to the front door, the bird was fighting against her cupped hands and she opened them and it flew straight into the sky.

It flew with such unexpected purpose — it made Beverly wonder if they might have been spared whatever ill luck was about to befall them.

Everybody here is naked, David shouted. Beverly heard a woman speaking German very near the phone.

Your speech is slurred, she said.

They’ve got on leather hoods, he said. I wish you were here. Where are you? she said.

There are girls in cages with nothing on but go-go boots.

Are you with friends? she asked, tilting the bedside clock so she could see the time. She would be awake now until dawn.

David called from Toronto the next day to say his flight was delayed and he wanted more than anything to be home.

You would not believe my head, he said. He said he would give anything to be in her arms. He thanked her for their marriage which he said was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He felt like weeping because he was so hungover, he said, and jetlagged and because she was his wife and he loved her and he was unbelievably lucky to have her. He told her these things couldn’t be said often enough and no amount of talking could ever express how he really felt.

I’ve come to an understanding, he said, about how lucky I am to have you. He said that he’d taken some kind of pill, something a woman had dropped in his drink.

I feel all hollowed out, he said.

A woman put something in your drink? she asked.

I think she was a woman, he said. Beverly had hired a teenage boy from down the street to mow the lawn. It would be the last mowing of the season. Already the trees were bare and the dogberries were violent orange all over the sidewalks. The air had stiffened. The boy was wearing a red eiderdown jacket. She watched him flick the extension cord and bend into the lawn mower.

It was a matter of putting your weight behind something, all of your weight. Giving yourself over to a chore, believing it was worthwhile. She would raise her daughter the same way that boy mowed. She would love her husband that way, no matter what infidelity or loss of faith had occurred. She had wanted the lawn done before the snow arrived.

She was practically naked, Beverly, and very muscular, David said. She had dropped the pill into his beer and he guzzled it down.

Too muscular, if you know what I mean, he said. Beverly could hear, in the background, the wheels of luggage rumbling over tiles, airport announcements. The blade of the mower hit a rock, a bright dangerous clank. She had no idea what he meant.

Too muscular for a woman, David said after a long pause.

You gave me a start, Beverly said. She closed her eyes and saw him falling off the cliff in Ireland.

It’s already winter in Toronto, David said.

Maybe you need a good meal, Beverly said.

Everything is white.

Get yourself some juice, she said.

I’m just looking out a big window, he said.

It makes me wonder, David.

They have those guys on the runway. I love those guys. All suited up. They’re so alone out there, waving those beacons. They are the unsung heroes.

I’m left wondering.

I have to get something to drink, I’m parched, he said. Whatever it was in his drink had changed him and he couldn’t wait to get back and hold her, because he saw now that his life was nothing without her.

She was stirring linguine noodles and the steam covered the window, obscuring the garden, and the boy pushed the mower past a flare of condensation on the glass and walked out the other side, his red jacket seeming even brighter than before. She told David she loved him too. She remembers saying that. Or she has the impression she said it. She left him with the general impression.

Whatever had happened, she’d given the impression she was willing to push through it. She’d made that clear she’s pretty sure.

There was no call from Halifax. The aneurysm had struck — if that is what aneurysms do, for some reason the word brought to mind a clock tower swathed in fog, a clutch of pigeons rising in the air, desolation, and the final hour — around four in the afternoon. The storm had hit St. John’s around the same time, everything shut down in a few hours, her lawn mower almost buried. David had been coming through the revolving door of a shopping mall. He had a drugstore bag in his hand that contained dental floss and medicated bandages for planter warts. In the pocket of his suit she’d found a restaurant bill. He’d had two draft beer and a cheeseburger at The Keg, bought a
New Yorker
, which was open to a story by Arthur Miller.

VALENTIN

V
ALENTIN WALKED DOWN
the road to the Robin Hood Bay dump until he came to the fence. Beside the fence was a small shack with a single window and the door was locked. Valentin eased the frame of the door gently with a file he’d brought in his backpack and the nails squeaked but he was able to lift the frame without splintering the wood and he jiggled the door handle until the lock gave.

There was a scarred wooden desk with a brown plastic tray on which there was a teacup on a saucer and a squeezed teabag sitting beside the cup. A kettle, a glass dish of sugar packets, and coffee whitener were sitting on a miniature fridge in the corner. The electrical panel that controlled the fence was over the fridge, and Valentin threw the switch and heard the noise of the fence die away. Then he heard the gulls in the distance. A ring of keys was hanging by the electrical panel, and he assumed one of the keys would open the padlock on the gate.

When he touched the fence his peripheral vision turned black and closed in like the shutter on a camera closing, almost instantly, until there was only a point of light and that was also extinguished and he found himself on the ground and the back of his head had hit a rock.

He lay on his back for several minutes tingling all over and aching deeply in his bones. On the side of the road were several flatbeds with stacks of flattened cars, rusty crinkled sheets of metal hanging out between the brightly coloured, smashed hoods like lettuce in a sandwich.

The blue of the sky was so blue it hurt his eyes and the gulls were very white and far away. There was a field of concrete culverts, but Valentin couldn’t remember the word
culvert
in English and he doubted he had ever known it. He remembered, or thought he remembered, a train ride where he had been jostled from a dream and saw, out the window, thousands of culverts in an industrial yard, stacked high, like a honeycomb. There were cranes gently lifting them into place and men in hard hats standing around in pairs or alone. The sun was going down and bands of golden light streamed through the cylinders and he couldn’t remember what country it had been. He felt jangled all through his body. He felt weepy and childlike and he was afraid of the dump.

The earth he was lying on was packed down hard and threaded with pieces of metal and bits of fabric and plastic bags that had been churned with the gravel and ploughed under and then packed down by bulldozers and the tracks were still visible and he stood up and felt dizzy. He went back into the shack and sat down on a swivel chair, the seat of which was worn and a tuft of foam hung out, and Valentin started to cry.

He was afraid of rats. He had been in prison and he knew how to inflict pain effectively and how to endure it. The way you endure pain: you make up your mind you will endure it. He had given up smoking cigarettes in prison and he had taken part in the organization of a sex racket that he profited from, and that eventually got him out of prison altogether. He had been through all this, but he was still mortally afraid of rats. The ship he had arrived on was overrun with rats, though he had not seen them.

The Russian vessel had been seized by the Canadian government in Harbour Grace with a crew of forty-three sailors on board. The shipping company responsible for the vessel and crew had folded without a trace and the men’s wages were frozen or there were no wages and they had run out of supplies and had used up all their fuel after only a week in port.

The Catholic Church in the parish of Harbour Grace held a bingo game when it realized the predicament the sailors were in and raised $600 and the men came ashore for the evening and stood around the parish hall, looking ashamed and hungry. They cleaned out the bowls of chips and pretzels that were put out on the card tables where people were playing bridge. There were bowls of Bridge Mixture and the Ladies Auxiliary had made sandwiches and the Russians ate those too.

The cash from the bingo night was handed over to one of the Russians the next morning and Mrs. Furlong, who was the parish priest’s housekeeper, and who was a member of the town council, took the cook from the vessel to the supermarket and drove him down to the dock with the supplies.

Everyone expected the Canadian government to intervene quickly on behalf of the sailors, but by the following weekend the crew was out of food again and had no electricity and there was another bingo game and enough money was raised to provide groceries for another week.

An emergency meeting was called by the town council and Mrs. Furlong said she had heard from the gentleman who bought the groceries that the ship was overrun with rats. She said they had purchased several tins of baked beans at the supermarket, but the Russians were eating them cold, directly out of the tins.

Someone pointed out that the money from the bingo games had been previously allotted to the town library for the purchase of computers.

The minutes of the council meeting reflected all of these comments and were distributed the following morning to the council members, the media, several other members of government, and a copy was delivered to the vessel and Valentin read about the rats, which he hadn’t known about, and became terrified and knew he had to get off the ship.

He rowed into town from the ship the next day and went to the Family Restaurant at twelve and sat beside a terrarium built into the wall enclosing eight budgies, blue and yellow and lime green. The back of the cage was lined with a poster of a half-dozen kittens. The budgies mostly stayed still, their eyes closed, their heads cocked to the side. They might have been stuffed except the glass was encrusted with bird shit and there was a small cardboard sign in the corner, written in ballpoint pen, which said, Please don’t tap glass.

The restaurant was noisy and the waitresses sprayed the plastic tablecloths with Windex as soon as they cleared the dishes and wiped them down vigorously but the blue ammonia scent hung over Valentin’s table along with the smell of gravy and french fries and trapped restaurant heat.

Valentin ordered a hot turkey sandwich. It came with dressing, peas and carrots, and cranberry jelly, which still held the ribbed indentation of the can it had slid out of. He ate all of it quickly and wiped his plate with the dinner roll that came with the meal and pushed the plate away with his thumb. He had tucked his paper napkin into the collar of his shirt, but he looked around now and saw no one else had done so and he took it off.

The waitress came to clear his plate and she asked if he wanted his bill and he said he’d like to pay tomorrow. He took his watch off and laid it by his plate. He saw right away it was the wrong thing to do. The offer of the watch had depressed the waitress.

She stood with a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of ketchup in one hand and his cleaned-off plate in the other and she put the bottles down and wiped her forehead with her free hand. It was as though his removing the watch had made her extra tired, and her shoulders slumped. She had a warm, damp look because of the heat and the place was crowded but she didn’t look hurried.

The waitress, Valentin saw, was beautiful and calm and disappointed. She stood with the back of her hand pressed to her warm forehead and his plate in her other hand, staring out the window. The water in the harbour was electric with sunlight, a spank of blinding white light, and his vessel was almost in silhouette. He could see someone walking around on the deck, pausing to lean on the rail. The waitress seemed arrested by the sight of the ship. Then, as though she could feel him looking, her fingers fluttered down from her forehead to the neck of her blouse and she touched a wedding ring that was hanging there on a chain.

You can put your watch back on, she said. She picked up the bottles and walked away and only turned around to put her bum against the kitchen door and push through it and he saw in her face she had already forgotten him.

Outside, on the front step of the restaurant, Valentin found a man having a smoke. He offered to drive Valentin into the Robin Hood Bay dump outside St. John’s, but he said the dump was closed on Monday afternoons and there was no use going there and you weren’t allowed to scavenge anyway and you couldn’t go in without a vehicle and he wasn’t taking his truck in because every time he did he got a flat, besides they had an electric fence.

Do you understand the concept
electric fence
? the man asked. He was squinting up at Valentin, his hand over his eyes.

The man tossed the butt of his cigarette and said, I’ll take you to the dump and you can see for yourself since you got your mind set on it. It’s no skin off my arse if you crowd decide to electrocute yourselves.

Valentin flicked another switch in the electrical panel and turned off the electric fence and touched it again and nothing happened so he opened the padlock. He walked past the weigh station and the fields were ploughed hard on both sides of the road. In the distance he could see the gulls sliding sideways across the sky.