Lost Between Houses (20 page)

“Unpacking,” I said.

He thought about that for a bit.

“From what?”

“Thanksgiving, sir.”

“Can’t it wait till morning?”

“Absolutely,” I said and took a shirt out and put it back in my drawer.

“Everything all right here, E.K.?” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing to report?”

“No, sir.”

“Had a nice chat with your mom on the weekend. Very nice woman.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, Albright?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Goodnight, gentlemen.”

Then he went out again. I stood there, vibrating like a fucking piano string while I heard his footsteps go down the corridor.

“Jesus Christ,” E.K. whispered, face all scrunched up.

“Don’t sweat,” I said. I sat on the edge of the bed for maybe twenty more minutes, listening. Nothing. I could feel E.K. watching me with his bright little mouse eyes.

I packed up the suitcase, stuffed to busting with books and toothpaste, and deodorant, like I was going to be dining with the Queen in the foreseeable future. Sat on it and heaved it off the bed. It weighed a fucking ton.

I went over to the window and opened it up. The fall air went right to my head, all jewels and cold, it just blew through the room. I lowered my suitcase out the window and dropped it on the flagstones. I pulled back into the room.

“All right,” I said.

E.K. sat up and pulled out an envelope from his drawer, “Since you’re really going, here. It’s eleven bucks. If you stay away three days, you can keep it.”

He shook my hand.

And then I slipped out the window. I landed on the cobblestones and stood still as a statue, the wind blowing around the quad, leaves rustling, this song in my head. I waited, looking around, waiting for something to move. There was no one around, not a soul, just the leaves whisking across the flagstones, so I picked up my suitcase and followed the wall under the dorm windows, ducking my head down, slipping under the big iron gate and then, seeing that the parking lot was lit up like the fucking Berlin Wall, I kept pressed right against the brick until I hit a patch of shadow and then bolted to the back gate, suitcase banging my knee. I ran down a back street. Suddenly the noise from Avenue Road, the traffic whizzing around the school, died away. I was completely alone, my heart beating like mad, this stupid song going through my head at a hundred miles an hour.

Five foot two

Eyes are blue

Koochie, koochie

Koochie Koo.

I had to put the suitcase down, it was wedging a hole in my hand. I could barely open my fist. I put it behind a hedge. Looked up and down the street. Across from me, in a big, ivy-covered house, I could see a woman in a yellow dress moving around in the living room. It looked very cosy in there like my house in Forest Hill, and I went over and knocked on the door. The woman opened up.

I put on my best manner.

“Excuse me. I was wondering if I could use your phone to call a taxi?”

She didn’t look sure about that at all so I stepped back a few paces from the door.

“Or perhaps you could call one for me and I’ll wait out here.”

“Why didn’t you call a cab from where you were?” she asked.

I hadn’t thought of that one.

“Well, I did. But the driver turned up drunk, so I got out.”

“The cab driver was drunk?”

“Yes ma’am.

Good little boy scout me. Like, boy-oh-boy, I’m sure not going to have anything to do with a drunk driver. Like wow, what an asshole!

“All right,” she said and opened the door.

You know that great smell some people have in their foyers, I don’t know whether it’s that stuff they put in the bowl, the dead flowers, or perfume rubbed off on the coats or some kind of fancy wallpaper, but it always gets me. Like Pears soap. You just smell it and you imagine some kind of great life.

The woman had white hair and was a bit stout but she reminded me of my mother, sort of dignified and chatty at the same time. She was having a drink, looked like a gin and tonic to me. Just like the old lady. I tell you, that generation. Take away their noggins, they’ll just like wither away.

She put on her reading glasses, the neat kind you look over top of, and I could see she had quite a handsome face, with a sharp nose and smart eyes and I figured as a girl, my age, she must have been hot stuff. I also had the funniest feeling that she was lonely, that she sort of liked having company, an excuse to open up the door and let someone in.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut, even at the most obvious times, but there was something about this woman that made me want to tell her everything. But a little alarm bell sounded in my head. It was extra hard, I mean really difficult, worse than having someone not know you’re good at something you are good at. I also had a feeling she might have run away some time herself, married for love, given up a huge inheritance like my mom did once (the husband before my dad). But I sat on it. Keeping my mouth shut sort of hurt me physically. I could feel it in my chest, this thing wanting to get out.

“Downtown,” I said. I think if she’d pushed me, I’d have said the bus station, she’d have said, where are you going, and out it would have come. But she didn’t. Maybe she figured it wasn’t polite to ask a stranger so many questions.

She dialled the number and ordered the cab and we sat there for a bit, me looking around and telling her I liked the house, telling her it reminded me of my old house over on Forest Hill Road.

“What happened to your house?” she asked.

“They sold it.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Big mistake,” I said. “It was a big mistake.”

“Well, I’m sure they had their reasons.”

I was getting awful close to telling her, I just
knew
I could trust her.

“There’s your cab,” she said and then I was sure of it, that she was sad to see me go. That big, empty, beautiful-smelling house and just her.

She opened the front door.

“You should put a coat on,” she said. “It’s not summer any more.” She rubbed her arm and sort of bent over and looked down the street.

“You can say that again.”

She shut the door behind me and I went down the walk. Just as I got to the hedge, I looked over my shoulder. She was peeking at me through the window and gave me a wave. I waved back. You know that time I came down to see Scarlet? When I left the next morning, I was walking down the hall and I got to the elevator and I looked around to see if she was still there. But she’d gone back inside. I didn’t want to make a big deal of it, I wanted to leave on a good note but I had the feeling just for a split second, that if she had really, really liked me, she’d still have been there. I’ve always had that feeling. I guess I should have known right then. Not that it made any difference. No, I’d have liked Scarlet no matter what.

Well anyway, that’s over with, I thought, and got in the taxi.

The bus station in Toronto is not a place you’d take a girl you liked. I mean it’s sort of beat up and depressing. I know I sound like an asshole saying this but it’s full of poor people sitting around, luggage tied up with strings and stuff busting out of cardboard boxes, they’re smoking cigarettes and dropping the butts
on the floor. Gruesome. You just can’t imagine these people going anywhere nice, just some shitty little town up north where they’ll sit around in some too bright kitchen and smoke cigarettes and have nothing to say to the person they’re visiting five minutes after they’ve arrived. I know this is true because up in our cottage we have a party line and sometimes in the summer, I used to pick up the phone real gently and wrap the mouthpiece in a tea towel so they couldn’t hear me breathing and I’d listen to the phone calls, country people, and they never used to have fuck-all to say to each other, these big silences, and then one’d say, well, I guess I better get the washing done and then there’d be this big pause, and then some woman on the other end’d say, “Yep,” and nobody would do fuck-all, not hang up or anything, just sort of sit there, this big silence and I’d think, fuck me. Don’t believe that shit you hear about country people being just like the greatest human beings on earth. Because it’s bullshit; they’ve got the slowest, most boring lives you can imagine.

Anyway the bus station was full of these people, some guy even had a transistor radio playing country music, that stuff where the guy sings out of his nose, real shit-on-the-boots stuff. I hauled that fucking suitcase over to a bench, the place blue with cigarette smoke, and I went over to the ticket counter.

“Can I have a ticket to Buffalo?” I said, figuring Buffalo was the closest American city.

“Round-trip?”

“Just one way.”

The guy looked at me, I couldn’t tell why. “You got some ID?” he said.

“Yep.”

“You’ll need it at the border. That’s five dollars and twenty five cents. Bus loads over there in an hour.”

Figuring the cops might be looking for me already, like maybe E.K. blew the whistle on me, and if they were, the bus station’d be the first place they came, I hauled that two-ton suitcase out back of the bus station, found a shadowy place under a wall across the street and just stood there, watching the cars drive by. The prostitutes standing on the street corner. The sad old men going up and talking to them. Jesus, I don’t want to end up like that, I thought. Standing there, I just couldn’t figure out how so many people had such shitty lives. Like why didn’t they just run away like me. Go south to Florida. Get a tan. Start all over again.

Anyway.

There I was, watching for the cop cars., I mean that’s the thing about growing up in a place like Forest Hill. Going to school in a place like Upper Canada. I mean you have this feeling, they give it to you early on, that there’s this great big fly swatter hanging over your head, it’s always there, just hovering, and if you fuck up, it’s going to come down on you, wham, just like on those poor fucking deer flies in the garage. Just wham. And that’ll be the end of you. Like that poor Philip Foster who got expelled for burning down the Centennial tree. I saw him marching across the quad that last morning, head down, people looking at him like he was on the way to his execution. It scared you just looking at him, thinking, that could be me, that could be me, thank God it ain’t, and making a big promise to yourself that you were going to mend your ways, do your homework, stop talking in class, never take a drink till you were legal. And where did he go, this kid who got expelled? I never saw him again, it was like he fell off the edge of the world.

It was scary, all that, the notion of getting heaved out, of not belonging any more. Sundays in the spring, twice a year we had a church parade, got all dressed up in our blue horsehair uniforms
and rifles and berets and gaiters and polished buttons and belts and marched down Church Street, the drum core banging and slamming away, the sound echoing off the buildings, crowds of people standing on the sidewalk watching, us feeling like we were the crème de la fucking crème, seeing these raggedy-ass kids pointing at us, making fun, pretending to march, and me thinking all the time that they were jealous, that they wished they could go to a school like that, where they dressed you up like soldiers and marched you around for the whole world to look at, four hundred kids marching down the street in time. All belonging. Belonging to something. You had the feeling that if you took a wrong step anywhere, down came the fly swatter and next thing you knew you were standing by the side of the road with a dirty face watching these kids walk by. Thinking, God what assholes, but secretly wishing you were one.

All bullshit. All scaredy-cat bullshit.

So I stood out there in the shadows and I saw a big silver bus pull off Bay Street, rocking back and forth, coming around the corner, and pull into the train station. I could hear the doors wheeze open. I knew that was the bus. I waited till the folks got out and then I hurried over. Just the driver was there.

“This the bus for Buffalo?” I said.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Can I get on board?”

I climbed onto the bus, leaving my suitcase by the luggage compartment. I went right to the back. The windows were dyed sort of green. I slipped into a seat. Funny thing is, with only a little while to go, that’s when I started to get really nervous, like here I was, just minutes from a clean getaway. A cop car pulled into the station. Waited there a minute, just like a sulking dog, you know, doesn’t know whether to steal your garbage or bite
someone, and then, yellow lights going on, it moved, really slowly, down the ramp and down onto the street.

I got so nervous I wanted a cigarette. I jumped down and went into the variety store next door. A Chinese guy was working at the counter. I asked for a pack of DuMaurier’s, the kind my mother smoked, paid the guy forty-five cents, got some matches and ran back to the bus. I was in such a hurry I could hardly get the tin foil off the pack. I lit up, took a big puff, the smoke rolled out of my mouth, this blue cloud and the smell of the tobacco reminded me of the old lady, when we used to go for those drives in the country at night, and she’d ask me to light one up for her.

“God’s teeth,” she’d say, “I hope I’m not making you into a smoker.”

People started getting on board. They seemed friendly enough, I didn’t want to make any enemies, so I helped a guy with baggy jeans hanging around his ass put a parcel up in the overhead. A girl with a blond pony-tail and dark eye make-up came down the aisle, sort of snobby, like she was afraid someone was going to try and pick her up and was telling them to fuck off ahead of time. I could smell her perfume. I had a feeling she’d just finished screwing her boyfriend, and I bet she didn’t look like that when she was getting screwed. Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what turned her boyfriend on. This is the kind of horseshit I was thinking about. I don’t know why I was seeing the world in such an ugly way, like stupid people and whores and scumballs and cretins and losers, but really, that’s what I was seeing, just a parade of them, me going every other second, thank God I’m not like that asshole. I must have been nervous or something; sometimes
that
makes you see things a bit differently. Like everything could reach out and bite you on the throat.