Fall (16 page)

It took courage for me to say that. Her silence felt all the more fraught. It was nonetheless true. While she stared at me or at her coffee or at her mother in her mind’s eye, I glanced around and caught several other guys staring at her. I think I only confirmed what she must have known. I think I was trying to make a point, too: trying to question whether anyone really could be oblivious to what other people thought. But more than anything I felt that I had declared that everyone, including me, wanted her beauty.

“I never got into
Vogue
,” she said. “I don’t think you can have a true relationship with anybody if you care what they think. My mom never got over my dad leaving her. Dad doesn’t know me, so, whatever. I don’t need someone to know me. I think you either love or you don’t, right? My mom never got over expecting something back.”

I tried so hard to look at her. She picked up the magazine, saying, “So I buy Mom
Vogue
.” And she smiled.

We had to hurry to get the bus back to school for dinner.

It was so dark and cold. Everyone on the bus was huddling into themselves.

I was so overwhelmed by having been alone with Fall that I still wasn’t able to respond properly to anything she said. There was no time for analysis. I never trusted myself in moments like that.

We stood next to each other on the bus. I thought about how she had acknowledged my size.

We decided to give Julius his presents that night. She said they had a regular rendezvous at ten o’clock and that this time I should show up.

I only wanted her to know me. Maybe she truly expected nothing from people she loved, but I expected everything. I knew she could be my everything. I only wanted to take her hand when we got off that bus and to hold it tightly when we looked at the field between ourselves and school.

I never felt so keenly the entrapment of St. Ebury, the enforced infantilization. We could have stayed sitting at the café and shared intimate thoughts; instead I had to sit at an assigned place in the dining hall with grade nines and people I did not want to talk to.

I can picture us walking toward the school. Her coat was red. She was small next to me. We both looked small in the dark.

T
HE BOY WROTE
to me today and said he just turned thirty and I thought, Jesus Christ, Fat William, you have twelve more years of cheese in your veins it’s no wonder the belt feels tighter.

Little Julius has made the age of thirty. I wrote to him last year and said all I can do these days is shrug. I don’t know, is all my body can say. Here at the wheel. Is that lady going to cross the street? I don’t know. Is she a nutcase? I don’t know. Does it matter? I don’t know.

It’s how you stay healthy, I told him. Shrug the shoulders.

Jim Shank got the cancer. Am I going to get the cancer? I don’t know.

Bring on the cancer, I say. Sometimes I say sit me down and pour me a nightful of cancer. Mugs of it.

Jim Shank’s a skeleton, the poor fucker.

Bring on the cancer.

And some days. Eh. How many up and down days in the endless life of William? Some days it all looks like a beautiful gift, all wrapped up for me, and my memories are mine, and somewhere in beer number three everything looks beautiful.

When you see enough that’s ugly you lower your standard there on beauty. I saw a pigeon pecking on a plastic bag last night for half an hour in the parking lot and I found it pretty beautiful.

Sometimes I wish the boy Julius could ride with me here in the bus, but he’s thirty. Like in the limo days. He says he’ll come up and visit one day. I don’t know what he would think about seeing
me. Casino de Hull on my shirt and I’m waiting in a parking lot for gamblers to come out of the lives they’re not living and I shuttle them to the casino and I drive back and forth along the same line, some days, some nights. That’s what he would see. But he knows me.

He knows life.

He’s together.

Every year his letters get me thinking.

Last night I’m watching the pigeon peck at a crumb it sees in the plastic bag. It was a quiet night last night. And the guy in the leather jacket gets on, pretty friendly. Lucky night coming, he says. Most of them don’t talk about the gambling unless they’re in groups. But this guy, we talk, we fill each other’s ears and he gets off at the casino. A few hours later, sky’s as dark as tomorrow, I pick him up at the casino and take him back to the parking lot.

Sure enough, like the rest of them, he goes to the back of the bus and stares out the window and he’s too down and shy to talk to me. Except this guy, just when he’s getting off, he says, What’s the secret?

He wants some sort of answer to how he’s going to make it through whatever’s left.

I liked him for asking me.

But all I could do was shrug. I don’t know I said.

Except I did kind of know. Driving back and forth all night, so there’s time to think. Wondering what I liked about the pigeon. I could have told the guy. There was a crumb in the plastic bag I could have said. And the secret is you’ve either gotta really want that crumb or you’ve gotta like the feel of plastic banging against your face.

And I guessed that wouldn’t have cheered him up.

Now, this is a true story here. I tell this story.

I knew a guy with just the one arm. He called himself Johnny Five on account of what was left. He woke up one morning with a sore throat and next time he woke up he had just the one arm. It was the flesh-eating disease. I tell this story at Hurley’s.

He lost the arm and he always said, you don’t know how fond you are of your arm until you lose it. And you don’t know how worthless your arm is until you lose your eyes. Because he lost his eyes a little later.

This was way back when I was driving cab and Johnny was working dispatch. I was on the radio and complaining about one of the other drivers, and at the end of the day Johnny took me aside and told me this story.

He lost his arm and hated the world and one day he decided not to hate the world. There. He cheered up and started doing things and he took up refereeing kids’ hockey. Little boys. Loved the mischief of them he says. They always liked getting the one-armed referee ’cause there were some calls he couldn’t make and they could make fun of his skating and everything else. And one day he’s checking the nets before a game and the kids are warming up and two little fellas think it’ll be funny to fire the puck at him. And this beautiful miracle occurred where puck number one and puck number two fly at him when he’s looking up and hit him at precisely the same time in each eye.

He doesn’t remember anything except waking up and being blind. What the hell are the chances of that I inquired and Johnny shrugs and says, I don’t know.

But he was a really cheerful guy. And I asked him, How do you stay cheerful? I’d want to die. And he said, All I do is remember what it was like to throw a ball. He said he used to love throwing the ball, almost became a pitcher. And the memory of it was right there in the ghost in his sleeve and for some reason it was just a simple thing there that kept him cheerful.

I drove home that day thinking about Johnny Five and I thought, Christ, William, he should be a lesson to you. And I felt guilty about complaining and all the rest of it. I thought about his story a lot, whenever I heard him over the radio, and I visited him in the office sometimes. I watched him doing everything easily, one-armed and blind, and I said to him one day, You must have had trouble getting used to doing everything left-handed. And Johnny said, No, I was always left-handed.

So I was surprised. I thought about his story a little and I said, So you always threw a ball with that arm, and he says, That’s right, and I was confused.

So I said, What about your story, the ghost in your sleeve and all that.

And he says, I made that up. I was trying to get you out of your little head, he said. It turned out he’d lost his eyes and arm making a bomb for the Hells Angels.

You know, William, he said, I’m not a good man, and I don’t like other people’s rules. But the one rule I give myself is never complain to someone else. Cheer people up or shut your fuckin’ mouth.

I
MET
F
ALL
and Julius that night and we presented him with the coffee pot and kettle. I was able to see where they had their regular rendezvous, near a large maple tree standing leafless at the edge of school property.

Julius was surprised to see me there and I said I wouldn’t stay.

He said he loved the gifts. He was talking in a silly way and kept saying “stay, stay, stay” but I didn’t want to get in the way. I said goodnight to them. I walked away wondering what they were thinking as they watched me grow smaller toward the school. I heard Julius laugh—the same laugh he had when he beat me in the race.

I turned the light out before he came back and pretended to be asleep while I listened to him undress.

Once Julius’s gating was underway he had to get a sheet signed every hour by a Master, every day right up until bedtime. This was to ensure that he didn’t leave school grounds.

“It’s not the days that get to me,” he said. “We’re stuck in fuckin’ school anyway. But the nights. Right? And every Master who asks me: What did you do, why are you gated? I’ve got to admit that I threw a bucket of Coke on someone. How fuckin’ dumb is that?”

I was cautious around him, getting out of his way, making delicate suggestions. It was he who first suggested that I talk to Fall on his behalf.

It was at each Duty Master’s discretion to punish Julius further or not. That is, some might make him do more each hour than simply
get his sheet signed. I began to get a sense of new modes of confinement and began to feel relatively free myself.

On the first day after school one of the Masters made Julius vacuum and clean his apartment on the Flats. He was going to be kept at it until dinnertime and had no way of seeing Fall until then. He asked if I would find her and tell her that he wouldn’t see her until dinner.

It was the beginning of discovering Fall’s routine, of learning who she was. She had no routine. I asked Julius where she was likely to be, and he said, “She’ll be in her room for sure.” He was never right about where she was.

Her room was on the ground floor of the Girls’ Flats. I rang the bell at the main door, feeling very nervous—mostly because I was about to see Fall, but partly because I had never rung the bell at the door of the Girls’ Flats. The Duty Mistress came to the door and said, “I’m not in the business of knocking on people’s doors for them. If you want to know if Fall is in, find your own way of knowing.”

She turned around, leaving the door open, and walked down the hall. It seemed she meant that I could go into the dorm and knock on Fall’s door while she turned a blind eye. I was deeply curious about what it was like inside that building, and as full as I was of anxiety about breaking a rule, the idea of knocking on Fall’s door felt appealingly grown-up. I nonetheless walked away.

Would it matter if I didn’t deliver Julius’s message? They would see each other at dinner anyway.

By chance, I found Fall in the library, which was small but had a surprising number of corners and dark spaces where one could feel alone. She was sitting on her own, which struck me as unusual.

“I have a message for you.” I told her Julius had to clean the Duty Master’s apartment and she laughed. She thanked me. I walked away.

I started seeing more of Ant during those weeks. It was getting too cold for rugby and the proper season wasn’t until spring, so he was usually at a loose end. We would work out together sometimes,
although his injured shoulder meant that he usually just watched me. I began exploring the late-night freedom that Julius had usually enjoyed. Ant and I would wander the halls and intimidate anyone who was awake. It was quite fun.

“I had such a great night with Fall last weekend,” Julius said. “It was so fuckin’ beautiful.”

I couldn’t bear to hear it. “I’m meeting Ant,” I said, and I left him in the dark.

Ant and I went into Edward’s room and I tied a long sock tightly over his eyes before he opened them. He didn’t see us. His roommates were afraid of us. We knocked all his books off the bookshelves and tipped over a wardrobe. It wasn’t especially funny—I wondered why we did it—but I liked all the noise.

It meant there was a crackdown on late-night misbehaviour. A Duty Master would patrol the halls later than usual. It meant that Julius wasn’t able to escape at all after Lights Out.

He gave me notes and I became a go-between. He would send me to the library and she would be in her room. I would spend an hour tracking her down. I found myself asking everyone in the school, “Have you seen Fall?”

She gave me notes in return sometimes, in an embarrassed, apologetic way. I knew she was reluctant to use me as a messenger. I had the moral resolve not to read the notes at first.

I was able to spend more time with her. People saw us together in various parts of the school. I even met her by the bare maple one night. She was expecting Julius but I appeared instead. She seemed a little shocked to see me—I suppose she had been prepared for intimacy. I simply went to tell her that Julius had been putting his coat on and was seen by the Duty Master and was told to stay put. I didn’t say much more to her on that occasion.

God, I remember a look in her eyes, though. A look that said: I’m vulnerable to surprise; I wanted company and now I’m lonely. A look that without a doubt showed more curiosity about me.

And surely that is what has died in me. I am curious about nothing. I am enthusiastic about nothing.

I’ve forgotten the joy of seeing things for the first time. Or never mind the joy. I don’t even feel the motivational fear. I’m afraid of nothing, so I am interested in nothing, and tomorrow is always Wednesday.