Ragged Company (7 page)

“Poor woman,” a rail-thin, hawk-nosed woman said. “I hope she’s safe with those three.”

“You don’t think they could be heading over here do you?” asked a pretty young red-headed woman.

“Here? This is The Plaza, not the Union Mission. What would they want here?” her bespectacled friend replied, slipping a protective arm around her waist.

“Coming to the movies, I suspect,” I said, surprised at the blurt as much as those close to me who heard it.

There were polite guffaws and chuckles that melted away into stunned silence as the four of them approached the line and surreptitiously joined it.

“Hey, mister! Hey, hey, mister!” I heard suddenly.

Everyone began looking about in something close to panic as the old native woman pleaded for attention from the back of the line. I could feel people pulling themselves inward, downshifting from judgment into a pretended ignorance and sudden deafness.

“Hey, I thought it was you,” she said, approaching me and extending a hand rough and raw from wind and chill. “You remember me, don’t you?”

I glanced about in embarrassment and then reached out to shake her hand. “Yes,” I said, “I remember. How have you been?”

“Good. Me ’n the boys, we’ve been good. Been to quite a few movies since that cold spell,” she said and smiled.

“Yes, it would seem a good place to go for warmth, I suppose.”

“Well, it kinda started out that way but the more we went the more the boys seemed to enjoy it. Now, I guess, we’re hooked,” she said with a wink.

“It’s a good thing to be hooked on,” I replied, scanning the crowd.

“Better’n some things.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“So will you save us some seats?”

“Pardon me?”

She grinned. “Could you save us some seats? Something near the middle? We’d appreciate it.”

Faces were turned toward us all along the line. I could feel myself getting warmer. “Yes. I’d be happy to. Something near the middle.”

“With you,” she said.

“With me?”

“Well, yes. We got a date, remember?”

I heard a few guffaws.

“Surely you don’t think …” I began.

“Wait a minute now,” she replied, with one hand held up palm forward. “A promise is a promise. You said the next time we met at the movies we were gonna go for a drink. Right?”

Snickers now. I could see grins on people’s faces. “Yes, well, I never meant it seriously.”

“How’d you mean it then? As a joke? You were joking with me? Playing with my affections?”

I could see that people were really beginning to enjoy this.

“No. I was not playing with your affections. I was merely being polite.”

“Oh, yeah? Polite in your world means lying to people?” She winked at me again.

“Look here,” I said sternly, “I was not lying, I was merely applying a deflection, an off-the-cuff, inconsequential politeness. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“In the habit of not meaning what you say to women. Bit of a player, are you?” I could hear open laughter around us now. “I’ve been around, mister, so this isn’t what you might call an out-of-the-world experience for me. I’ve been dumped by pros.”

It was my turn to laugh.

“You’re right, of course,” I said. “Only, let’s talk about this later.”

“Later?”

“Well, after the film.”

“So you’ll save us seats?”

“Yes. I’ll save you seats.”

“With you?”

“Ahem,” I said, scratching at my lapel and glancing around. “Yes. Of course.”

“Good. Well, we’ll see ya in there.”

“Fine.” I watched her walk back to her friends. Digger leaned out from the pack and glared at me.

S
OME STORIES
become your blood. They move beyond the telling or the showing and come to rest inside you. Invade you. Inhabit you. Like there was a secret crevice in your being that it took the tale to fill. That’s what that movie was like.
Cinema Paradiso.
I liked how it sounded. A movie about heaven. Or, at least, that’s how it sounded to me. And there’s always a part of you that knows about the big somethings long before they happen in your world. Always. For me, that night, it was the colour of the night itself. The cold had cleared and left behind it a freshness like the kind we’d get in Big River after a good, hard, cleansing rain. Like the earth was declaring itself one more time, saying,
I am. I am. I am.
I always liked that feeling, and that night while walking to the theatre there was a feeling to the air that made it seem like a colour: a blue kind of colour, all steel and shadow, water and woe, all at the same time. Walking through it, I could tell that this was a night to remember.

The boys couldn’t feel it. Each of them was having a hard enough time keeping their feet moving in the direction we were heading. This was a difficult neighbourhood. This was a far step beyond where we normally went. This was one of those areas of
the city that shone and glittered everywhere. For those boys it was stepping out of shadow and being seen, and none of them liked it much. But for me it was following a beacon. It was the pull of some strange magnetic force like yearning or coming home or love even, and while that scared me some, it thrilled me too and I walked lighter than I had for years. There were no shadowed ones here, or at least they had no need to tell me of their presence that night.

Seeing the Square John in that line made it perfect. I’d wondered when we’d be thrown together again. Talking with him, teasing a little, joking was easy, and I liked his discomfort. It made him more real.

“Friggin’ can’t get away from that guy,” Digger said on our way into the theatre.

“Well, since we’ll be sitting with him, I guess we shouldn’t try to get away,” I replied.

“You have got to be fucking kidding. Sitting with him. Us?”

“Yes. He’s saving us seats.”

“Jesus.”

I grinned. Timber and Dick just watched me, waiting for their cue to move, eager to be out of the hustle of the lobby and into the dim security of the theatre. We’d made it just in time. There were no seats remaining, or at least not four together. I picked out Granite’s triangular hat easily enough and we moved down the aisle toward his row. The boys followed close behind me, none of them looking up at all, and if they could have run to their seats I believe they would have. This was the biggest crowd any of us had been in by choice for years, and all of us wanted the shelter that a seat provides.

“Ah,” I said, easing into the seat beside Granite, who nodded at our arrival, “this is the life, eh, mister? Long night at the movies, in the company of your peers.”

“Ahem,” he said, one hand edging toward his buttons. “Yes. It’s fine to be with others who appreciate fine film.”

“Like us.” I nudged his elbow. “Me and the boys.”

“Yes. The boys.”

The boys were all taking huge nervous gulps from the bottles in their pockets at that moment, and he watched them from the corner of his eye. Then the lights began to fade and everyone settled deeper into their seats.

As I said, some stories become your blood. As I watched this movie about a man who comes home for the first time in thirty years and finds an incredible gift from an old man he left behind, I felt it enter me with each frame. Here, in one place, was a story about falling in love with the movies, about shelter, about friendship, loss, and love itself. Here was a film about crying in the darkness. About seeing what you crave the most sometimes thrown up on the screen in front of you and recognizing it for the hole within you that it is. About faces, characters, and time—time passing, time stopping, and time reclaimed. It was wondrous. I couldn’t stop staring. I couldn’t sit back in my seat at all. Throughout the entire spectacle I sat leaning forward, elbows on my knees, chin cupped in my palms, crying sometimes, sighing, watching, feeling the blood moving in my veins, drinking it in, becoming it, feeling it becoming me. Invaded. Inhabited. Known.

When it ended in a long series of captured kisses and the bright flare of romance, I felt alive. None of us moved. The five of us sat there in our seats staring at the screen and watching the Italian credits roll, lost in our thoughts. When the screen went blank I still could not move. Only Digger got us into motion again with a “Fuck” that was one part whisper, one part sigh, and one part the need for a drink.

We walked out in silence.

M
E
, I
WANTED TO CRY
. Just wanted to run off into an alley somewhere an’ ball my eyes out. Don’t know why on accounta sometimes what’s going on inside me gets past my head. But I wanted to cry. I couldn’t follow the story on accounta you had to read again but I knew what was goin’ on. It was about bein’ in
love with the movies. At least that’s how it started. Then it kinda got to be about rooms. Rooms you live in an’ learn inside out. Rooms you sit in all alone an’ quiet. Rooms you leave, all sad an’ alone an’ hurtin’. An’ in the end it was about rooms you come back to sometimes if you’re lucky, an’ I guess that’s what made me so sad on accounta I can’t never go back no matter how lucky I ever get. Me’n rooms is done. That’s how come I live outside. On accounta one room always looks the same as that one room I can’t never go back to. The one room I carry around inside me. The one room where my heart made big moves one time—big, sad moves. That Cinema Paradise movie reminded me of every-thin’ an’ I wanted to cry about it all for the first time in a long time. Cry an’ cry an’ cry. But I didn’t.

“Drink, pal?” Digger asked, like he knew what I was feelin’. The others were using the washrooms an’ we stood outside waitin’.

“Yeah,” I said, tryin’ hard not to look at him.

“S’matter?” he asked, starin’ hard at me.

“Tired, I guess. Too much work tryin’ to read what was goin’ on.”

“Yeah. I know. Friggin’ good story, though.”

“You think so?” I was glad he was gettin’ me away from my feelings an’ glad that he was sharin’ his rum with me.

“Yeah. Little on the weird side, but it was okay.”

“Digger? You ever think maybe someone else knows what’s goin’ on inside your head sometimes. Someone you never met?”

He squinted at me while he took a big knock. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand an’ rooted around in his pockets for a smoke. “My head? Nah. I can’t figure out what the fuck’s going on there most of the time. Why?”

“Guess that movie made me wonder if other people know stuff. Like where you been. What you done. What you was feelin’ sometimes. Stuff like that?”

“This movie got you all rattled up inside, eh?”

“Yeah. Made me think about what I don’t wanna be thinkin’ about no more.”

“Me too, I guess,” he said.

It felt good knowin’ that someone like Digger could feel like I did. I was thinkin’ about that when One For The Dead an’ Timber walked out of the washroom doors.

“Well, that was certainly a good one, wasn’t it?” she asked, squeezin’ my elbow when she reached me.

“Yeah,” I said, lookin’ at Digger. “What are we gonna do now?”

“Well, I think we have an agreement with our seat-saver,” she said.

“Agreement?” I asked.

“Fuck sakes,” Digger said. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” she said an’ nodded toward the doors where the man was just comin’ out.

He was bigger than I thought. Sittin’ in the movies he looked like Digger’s size, but he was a big guy. Tall as me but bigger: wider, thicker. Like a worker kind of guy, an’ when he reached out to shake One For The Dead’s hand, his was so big it made hers almost disappear. Big guy.

“Well,” he said, kinda lookin’ around at us, the street, every-thin’ all at one time.

“Well,” she said back. “How’d you like that, mister?”

“The movie?”

“Yes.”

“The movie was fine,” he said. “Very, very fine.”

“Fine?” She looked at him an’ then at the three of us with that arched eyebrow that always told me she was gonna have some fun with one of us. “Fine like what?”

“Well,” he said kinda slow, playin’ with the buttons on his coat. “Fine like … like, like … you know, I don’t know.”

He laughed then. Shy kinda laugh like how I laugh sometimes on accounta I kinda know where I wanna go in my head but I can’t get there. The four of us all look at each other an’ I felt funny.

“Well, why don’t you think about it while we’re walkin’,” One For The Dead tells him.

“Fer fuck sake,” Digger said. “We ain’t gonna go through with this shit, are we? Where the fuck am I gonna go with some Square John? Tell me that, will you?”

The guy just looks at him like I look at people now an’ again on accounta I’m mystified. I asked Digger one time what that word meant an’ he told me it meant “buggered all to hell,” so I figure he was mystified.

“I think we should go somewhere where we can all be comfortable,” One For The Dead said.

“The Palace,” Digger said.

“The Palace? Downtown?”

“Well, where the fuck else do you think I’d go? This frickin’ neck of the woods?” Digger asked all hard.

“I know where the Palace is,” the guy said. “It’s a little out of my comfort zone, though.”

“Well, no shit, Sherlock,” Digger said, lightin’ a smoke.

“It seems like a good idea,” One For The Dead said. “You know, mister, we’re not exactly the indoor type of people. Going to the movies is something we started to do because of the cold. We like it out where there aren’t any walls, so I guess that would be a little out of our comfort zone too.”

“Well, let’s just do it then,” he said. “So I can get on with my evening.”

“Yeah,” Digger said, “wouldn’t want to hold you back.”

They looked at each other for a moment an’ I felt that funny feelin’ in my belly. I gotta give the guy credit, though. I ain’t seen many people get away with gunnin’ Digger off an’ he held that look for a good long time.

“F
INE LIKE RAIN
sometimes,” he said.

We were all seated around a table at the Palace, something I found to be unbe-fucking-lievable in the first place, and then this guy, this Square John guy, comes out with an unbelievable description that I could see in my head as soon as he said it. Fine like rain sometimes. When we all just stared at him, he went on.