Canary (9 page)

Clarisse picked up a box of coral tissues, plucked one out, twisted it into a flower, and tied the stem of the flower around the chicken wire.

“God,” said Sean when he reappeared a quarter of an hour later, “I can't believe how hot it is tonight. How's it going?”

Clarisse looked down at Sean's empty hand. “It would go a lot better if I had that beer I asked for.”

“Valentine's bringing it out to you. I have to go.”

“You're really not going to stay and help?”

“I honestly can't, Clarisse. I've got some tapes to set up for tomorrow night. I'm gonna be working straight through myself.”

“Traitor,” Clarisse remarked. “Turncoat. Villain.”

Valentine ambled out of the bar with her beer. “I told him it was okay,” he told her.

“All right, then,” said Clarisse, taking the bottle of beer. He carried a Miller Lite for himself. The fingers Valentine had badly sprained weeks earlier had healed sufficiently for the bandage and splint to be removed. He had developed an unconscious habit of flexing his hand to work out the lingering stiffness.

“See you at the rally,” Sean said. Waving, he sauntered into the darkness of Warren Avenue on his way toward Clarendon Street.

Clarisse took a swallow of her beer, relaxed, and said, “You and I'll have this done in record time.”

“I don't know how to stuff chicken wire,” Valentine admitted.

“Don't worry, I'll teach you.” Clarisse pulled out a tissue and waved it up toward the light for Valentine to see. “It's the easiest thing in the world.”

“Clarisse, may I remind you that you
wanted
to do this part of the job? That you
begged
for it.”

Clarisse glumly turned back to the barrel of the blow-dryer. It was about four feet long. “I thought it would be sort of fun,” she said glumly. “But I also thought I'd get help doing this.”

Valentine shrugged. “I helped. I built the platform.”

“You're not even going to keep me company at least?”

“I suppose I could bring a pillow out and sleep on the curb,” he offered, “but I have no intention of being awake in the next ten minutes.”

“Then go inside,” Clarisse said loftily. “Let me work in peace.”

“Thank you, Ms. Martyr,” said Valentine. “Now that that's settled, I'm going to bed.” He looked up at the inky sky as he finished his beer. “It'll be dawn soon enough,” he said. “The boys across the street'll come running if you need them.”

“Go to bed, Val, before you make me paranoid.” Valentine said a final farewell and went inside by the private door to the right of the bar's entrance.

Alone, Clarisse continued working. Noise abated slightly down the dark street. It was evidently too hot to sleep. Police cars came and went, discharging prisoners. The policemen occasionally wandered over to Clarisse and her float.

“What's it going to be?” one of the cops asked. “What's the theme?”

“Antivivisection,” said Clarisse offhandedly.

“Oh, yeah?” said the cop doubtfully. He moved over to view the blow-dryer from a slightly different angle. “At first I thought it might be gun control. The thing looks like a pistol.”

By four A.M. Clarisse had finished with the dryer frame. She climbed down from the float, stepped back a short distance, and looked at it. In the stark sodium light of the street lamp, the colors seemed peculiar and false, but Clarisse assumed that in daylight they would look fabulous. She went inside the bar and brought out another bottle of Molson and a folding chair. She opened the chair and set it in the street next to the truck. She sat down and began on one of the side panels that would eventually read PERSONAL GROOMING in enormous block letters.

The panel on the back of the truck would spell out SLATE in the script lettering used in all the bar's advertising.

She had finished PERS and was moving her chair when she suddenly developed the eerie sensation of being watched. She flicked up her eyes and scanned Warren Avenue. It was deserted now in the last truly dark half hour before dawn, but the feeling seized her more strongly than ever. She twisted about in her chair and drew her breath sharply, a handful of pink tissue fluttering from one hand.

Three faces—B.J. and the men Valentine had told her were nicknamed Ruder and Cruder—stared at her intently. The men wore mirrored sunglasses and were dressed in their usual ill-fitting leather outfits. B.J. wore leather also—pants and a vest buttoned high enough not to disguise her cleavage. In one hand she carried a black leather brassiere, slapping it rhythmically against her thigh.

B.J. waved her brassiere at the wire-and-wood frame extending well up over the cabin of the truck.

“This it?” B.J. asked, disappointed. She shook back her rumpled wavy hair.

“It's not quite finished yet,” Clarisse said defensively. “The colors will show up much better in the sunlight.”

“We heard somebody was down here building a float in my honor. A seventeen-foot B.J.”

“It looks like a gun to me,” commented Ruder, at B.J's right.

“I can't tell what it is,” Cruder said, “but it sure as hell doesn't look like you, B.J.”

“It's a blow-dryer,” said Clarisse, exasperated. “Where did you hear this rumor anyway?”

“At a party,” said B.J.

“A party? Did Sean Alexander tell it to you? If he left me here with all this work and sneaked off to some party, I'll—”

“Sean?” B.J. interrupted. “That bartender? Cute, clean shaven…”

Clarisse nodded.

“Haven't seen him,” said B.J. “I'd have remembered it if I came across that one tonight. Especially at this party.” B.J. twirled her leather bra about her hand. “It was an intimate affair.”

“I got rope burns.” Ruder held up his arms, pushing his wrists a couple of inches out of his jacket. “Got 'em on my ankles, too.”

“Oh…” Clarisse blinked. “I see…” She turned back distractedly to the float. “Excuse me, but I have to get this finished.”

The sound of rock music erupted from down the street. Both B.J. and her companions swiveled their heads in that direction.

“Sounds like a party,” Ruder said vaguely. “Somebody's having a party down there somewhere.”

“Let's go find out,” Cruder said. “I'm still speeding, anyway.”

“Why not?” B.J. added. “It's Saturday now. Who's holding the Quaaludes?”

The trio wandered away into the darkness, and Clarisse worked steadily and uninterrupted for the next two hours. The street grew quieter at last, though the temperature seemed to rise and the air grew more sultry. The sky began to lighten, and the streetlights flickered off. Clarisse could see the colored tissues in natural light. They would have looked wonderful, she decided, if they had not already begun to wilt so badly.

She finally finished the float at eight o'clock and was suddenly aware of the ringing of a distant bell marking the hour. She took this to be a good omen. Stretching and yawning, she decided she was too tired to climb the stairs to her apartment and did not want to leave the float unattended. Instead, she climbed into the cab of the truck, rolled down the windows, stretched out as best she could across the seat, and fell asleep.

C
LARISSE DIDN'T IMMEDIATELY
open her eyes. As she awoke she tried to figure out where she was. She heard many voices in conversation and laughter. She heard a badly amplified woman's voice singing from a distance. She smelled hot dogs and shish kebab.

Her legs itched badly, and whatever she was lying on was hard and lumpy. As she opened her eyes gradually, she saw green leaves high above her. “Hmm,” she said.

“Welcome back,” Valentine said.

She turned her head in the direction of his voice. “Oh,” she groaned.

“What's the matter?”

Clarisse eased herself up and scooted back slightly to lean against the linden tree next to Valentine. She looked around. They were on the grassy knoll on the Charles Street side of the Boston Common. All about them the Gay Pride Rally was in full swing. From where she sat, Clarisse judged there were fifteen to twenty thousand people. She yawned and stretched, sitting up to arch her back. “I feel rested. How long have I been asleep?” She dropped her hands into her lap.

“Two hours. It's nearly four o'clock.”

The parade, originating in Copley Square, had wound a couple of miles along Boston's narrow streets, along the same official route the march had taken for the past ten years, before spilling finally into the Common for an afternoon of entertainment and political speeches. Many thousands had lined the streets as cheerers-on, as bemused spectators, or even in some cases as hecklers. The bars' floats were considered a great success. It was led off by Chaps' tribute to dance—a life-sized revolving figure of Michael Jackson with blaring music to back it up. The Eagle float, representing gay culinary achievements—an enormous spinach salad, quiche, and bottle of Perrier water—followed this. One of the more popular floats was the one from Buddies—which had chosen great music. The bartenders of Buddies had constructed an enormous skyline of Oz with a rainbow arched above it. A yellow road led out of Oz, in the middle of which was a slowly turning medallion displaying the profile of Judy Garland as “Over the Rainbow” played repeatedly. Next to last was Graystone's tribute to gay literature—Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman shaking hands across a lavender ocean. With Clarisse nervously driving the baby Toyota, the engine temperature indicator always hovering in the danger zone, Slate's blow-dryer brought up the rear.

After parking the Toyota truck, Valentine and Clarisse had trudged up the knoll toward the Civil War Memorial and settled themselves beneath the first unoccupied linden they found.

Clarisse got unsteadily to her feet and looked around. “It's still going great guns.”

A large, quiet group of women was gathered on blankets and towels before the bandstand, listening to two very short women singing a duet about walking hand in hand in the rain in Vermont. The AIDS Action Committee hot-air balloon was vainly trying to make another ascension from the softball field—five dollars for a perfect view of Boston. Moving through the crowd was a well-built, mustached man wearing a black half mask, green silk cape, tank top, and green-and-white-striped silk shorts. Bold red lettering across his chest read: Captain Condom. Close beside the captain was a shorter man dressed in flesh-colored spandex and resurrected Hula-Hoops, fashioned into a recognizable likeness of a condom. The two of them together represented a community health clinic with a large gay clientele. As they moved about, they distributed pamphlets on “safe sex.”

Many clustered about the dozen stands offering a wide variety of foods from hamburgers and hot dogs to exotic Greek and Eastern fare. Most of the men gave only cursory but longing glances over a table selling homemade desserts but flocked to a stand vending pita pocket bread overflowing with lettuce, fresh meat, and raw vegetables. Since the afternoon was sunny and hot, a lot of men and women simply lay on the grass, picnicked, or milled about. Cameramen and reporters from several television stations were searching for something peculiar or embarrassing to record.

Clarisse got the attention of a woman selling cold cans of Coke and bought two. She unsnapped them both and handed one to Valentine as she sat down again.

“Stop looking at those two Italian muscle boys, Val,” she said. “Looking isn't getting.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said as he took the cola from her. “I already got a wink from the little one and a nasty glare from his friend.” He took a swallow and pushed himself nearer Clarisse.

All of the entered floats, except the one from Slate, were parked on the far side of the softball-field grandstand facing toward the knoll. The Slate entry was parked on Charles Street. The large hair dryer was now no more than a piled tangle of twisted chicken wire and tissues, looking as if a small bomb had been exploded inside the float.

“You know,” said Clarisse, “our float was a real crowd pleaser—until you misjudged those low-hanging oak branches on Beacon Street.”

“People love to see parade floats get destroyed,” Valentine said defensively. “The same as they like seeing Miss America trip on the runway.”

“Well, they certainly cheered loudly enough…” She sipped her cola and then asked, “Did I miss anything while I was asleep?”

“You missed the Radical Lesbian Feminist Revolutionary Guerrilla Comedy Troupe. They did a very funny skit on Nancy Reagan and her gynecologist. You also missed—I'm happy to say—Mr. William Tunney's speech.”

“Who?”

“The ex-communicated altar boy who's rabidly anti-organized religion. Last year he read a speech called ‘Mutual Masturbation as a Revolutionary Act.' Remember?”

“Vaguely. And this year…?” Clarisse prompted.

“This year, when he came up to the podium, he was wearing a black cassock and carrying a Bible. He read all the anti-homosexual passages from Leviticus and St. Paul. After that, two friends brought on a flaming hibachi. Mr. Tunney ripped Leviticus and St. Paul out of the Bible and flung them into the flames. Then Mr. Tunney and his two friends applauded the smoke—no one else did, I'm happy to say.”