Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (624 page)

He chuckled. “That young lady is so thoughtful, oui? It ain’t have plenty people like she anymore.” “Hmm.”

I took a quick glance around the little apartment. It was dark in there. The only light was from the kitchen, and from four candles stuck in pop bottles on the living room windowsill. The living room held one small, rump-sprung couch, two aluminum chairs, and a tiny card table. The gaudy flower-print cloth that barely covered the table was faded from years of being ironed. I was surprised; the place was spotless, if a little shabby. I perched on the edge of the love seat.

His head poked round the corner. “Yes,” he said, “that’s right. Siddown on the settee and rest yourself.”

Settee. Oui.
In his own home, he spoke in a more natural accent. “You from Trinidad, Mr. Morris?”

His face crinkled into an astonished grin. “Yes, doux-doux. How you know that?”

“That’s where my parents are from. They talk just like you.”

“You is from Trinidad?” he asked delightedly. “Is true Trini people come in all colours, but with that accent, I really take you for a Canadian, born and bred.”

I hated explaining this, but I guess I’d asked for it, letting him know something about my life. “I was born here, but my parents are black. And so was I, but I’ve had a body switch.”

A bemused expression came over his face. He stepped into the living room to take a closer look at me. “For true? I hear about people doin’ this thing, but I don’t think I ever meet anybody who make the switch. You mean to tell me, you change from a black woman body into this one? Lord, the things you young people does do for fashion, eh?”

I stood up and plastered a smile on my face. “Well, you’ve got your weekend ration, Mr. Morris; just wanted to be sure you wouldn’t go hungry on Thanksgiving, okay?”

He looked pensively at the freeze-dried turkey dinner and the cans of creamed corn (I’d made sure to put them in his ration this time). “Thanks, doux-doux. True I ain’t go be hungry, but…”

“But what, Mr. Morris?”

“Well, I don’t like to eat alone. My wife pass away ten years now, but you know, I does still miss she sometimes. You goin’ by you mummy and daddy for Thanksgiving?”

The question caught me off guard. “Yes, I’m going to see them on Sunday.”

“But you not doing anything tonight?”

“Uh, well, a movie, maybe, something like that.”

He gave me a sweet, wheedling smile. “You want to have a early Thanksgiving with a ol’ man from back home?”

“I’m not from ‘back home,’” I almost said. The hope on his face was more than I could stand. “Well, I …”

“I making a nice, nice dinner,” he pleaded.

Eleanor would stay and keep the old man company for a few minutes, if it were her. I sat back down.

Mr. Morris’s grin was incandescent. “You going to stay? All right, doux-doux. Dinner almost finish, you hear? Just pile up the ration out of the way for me.” He bustled back into the kitchen. I could hear humming, pots and pans clattering, water running.

I packed the food up against one wall, a running argument playing in my head the whole time. Why was I doing this? I’d driven our pathetic excuse for a company car through the most dangerous part of town, just begging for a baseball bat through the window, and all to have dinner with an old bum. What would he serve anyway? Peanut butter and crackers? I knew the shit that man ate—I’d given it to him myself, every Friday at the food bank! And what if he pulled some kind of sleazy, toothless come-on? The police would say I asked for it!

A wonderful smell began to waft from the kitchen. Some kind of roasting meat, with spices. Whatever Mr. Morris was cooking, he couldn’t have done it on food bank rations.

“You need a hand, Mr. Morris?”

“Not in here, darling. I nearly ready. Just sit yourself down at the table, and I go bring dinner out. I was going to freeze all the extra, but now I have a guest to share it with.”

When he brought out the main course, arms straining under the weight of the platter, my mouth fell open. And it was just the beginning. He loaded the table with plate after plate of food: roasted chicken with a giblet stuffing, rich, creamy gravy, tossed salad with exotic greens; huge mounds of mashed potatoes, some kind of fruit preserve. He refused to answer my questions. “I go tell you all about it after, doux-doux. Now is time to eat.”

It certainly was. I was so busy trying to figure out if he could have turned food bank rations into this feast, that I forgot all about calories and daily allowable grams of fat; I just ate. After the meal, though, my curiosity kicked in again.

“So, Mr. Morris, tell me the truth; you snowing the food bank? Making some money on the side?” I grinned at him. He wouldn’t be the first one to run a scam like that, working for cash so that he could still claim welfare.

“No, doux-doux.” He gave me a mischievous smile. “I see how it look that way to you, but this meal cost me next to nothing. You just have to know where to, um,
procure
your food, that is all. You see this fancy salad?” He pointed to a few frilly purple leaves that were all that remained of the salad. “You know what that is?”

“Yeah. Flowering kale. Rich people’s cabbage.”

Mr. Morris laughed. “Yes, but I bet you see it somewhere else, besides the grocery store.”

I frowned, trying to think what he meant. He went on: “You know the Dominion Bank? The big one at Bathurst and Queen?” I nodded, still mystified. His smile got even broader. “You ever look at the plants they use to decorate the front?”

I almost spat the salad out. “Ornamental cabbage? We’re eating ornamental cabbage that you
stole
from the front of a building?”

His rich laugh filled the tiny room. “Not ‘ornamental cabbage,’ darlin’: ‘flowering kale.’ And I figure, I ain’t really stealin’ it; I recyclin’ it! They does pull it all up and throw it away when the weather turn cold. All that food. It does taste nice on a Sunday morning, fry-up
with a piece of saltfish and some small-leaf thyme. I does grow the herbs-them on the windowsill, in the sun.

Salted cod and cabbage. Flavoured with French thyme and hot pepper. My mother made that on Sunday mornings too, with big fried flour dumplings on the side and huge mugs of cocoa. Not the cocoa powder from the tin, either; she bought the raw chocolate in chestnut-sized lumps from the Jamaican store, and grated it into boiling water, with vanilla, cinnamon, and condensed milk. Sitting in Mr. Morris’s living room, even with the remains of dinner on the table, I could almost smell that pure chocolate aroma. Full of fat, too. I didn’t let my mom serve it to me anymore when I visited. I’d spent too much money on my tight little butt.

Still, I didn’t believe what Old Man Morris was telling me. “So, you mean to say that you just… take stuff? From off the street?”

“Yes.”

“What about the chicken?”

He laughed. “Chicken? Doux-doux, you ever see chicken with four drumstick? That is a wild rabbit I catch meself and bring home.”

“Are you crazy? Do you know what’s in wild food? What kind of diseases it might carry? Why didn’t you tell me what we were eating?” But he was so pleased with himself, he didn’t seem to notice how upset I was. “Nah, nah, don’t worry ’bout diseases, darlin’! I been eatin’ like this for five-six years now, and I healthy like hog. De doctor say he never see a seventy-four-year-old man in such good shape.”

He’s seventy-four! He does look pretty damned good for such an old man. I’m still not convinced, though:

“Mr. Morris, this is nuts; you can’t just go around helping yourself to leaves off the trees, and people’s ornamental plants, and killing things and eating them! Besides, um, how do you catch a wild rabbit, anyway?”

“Well, that is the sweet part.” He jumped up from his chair, started rummaging around in the pockets of his old tweed jacket that was hanging in the hallway. He came back to the table, clutching a fistful of small rocks and brandishing a thick, Y-shaped twig with a loose rubber strap attached. So that’s what he kept in those pockets—whatever it was.

“This is a slingshot. When I was a small boy back home, I was aces with one of these!” He stretched the rubber strap tight with one hand, aimed the slingshot at one of his potted plants, and pretended to let off a shot.
“Plai!
Like so. Me and the boys-them used to practise shooting at all kind of ol’ tin can and thing, but I was the best. One time, I catch a coral snake in me mother kitchen, and I send one boulderstone straight through it eye with me first shot!” He chuckled. “The stone break the window, too, but me mother was only too glad that I kill the poison snake. Well, doux-doux, I does take me slingshot down into the ravine, and sometimes I get lucky and catch something.”

I was horrified. “You mean, you used that thing to kill a rabbit? And we just ate it?”

Mr. Morris’s face finally got serious. He sat back down at the table. “You mus’ understan’, Cynthia; I is a poor man. Me and my Rita, we work hard when we come to this country, and we manage to buy this little apartment, but when the last depression hit we, I get lay off at the car plant. After that, I couldn’t find no work again; I was already past fifty years old, nobody would hire me. We get by on Rita nurse work until she retire, and then hard times catch we ass. My Rita was a wonderful woman, girl; she could take a half pound of mince beef and two potatoes and make a meal that have you feelin’ like you never taste food before. She used to tell me, ‘Never mind, Johnny; so long as I have a little meat to put in this cook pot, we not goin’ to starve.’

“Then them find out that Rita have cancer. She only live a few months after that, getting weaker till she waste away and gone. Lord, child, I thought my heart woulda break. I did wish to dead too. That first year after Rita pass away, I couldn’t tell you how I get by; I don’t even remember all of it. I let the place get dirty, dirty, and I was eatin’ any ol’ kaka from the corner store, not even self goin’ to the grocery. When I get the letter from the government, telling me that them cuttin’ off Rita pension, I didn’t know what to do. My one little pension wasn’t goin’ to support me. I put on me coat, and went outside, headin’ for the train tracks to throw myself down, oui? Is must be God did make me walk through the park.”

“What happened?”

“I see a ol’ woman sittin’ on a bench, wearing a tear-up coat and two different one-side boots. She was feedin’ stale bread to the pigeons, and smiling at them. That ol’ lady with she rip-up clothes could still find something to make she happy.

“I went back home, and things start to look up a little bit from then. But pride nearly make me starve before I find meself inside the food bank to beg some bread.”

“It’s not begging, Mr. Morris,” I interrupted.

“I know, doux-doux, but in my place, I sure you woulda feel the same way. And too besides, even though I was eatin’ steady from the food bank, I wasn’t eatin’ good, you know? You can’t live all you days on tuna fish and tin peas!”

I thought of all the tins of tuna I’d just brought him, I felt myself blushing. Two years in this body, and I still wasn’t used to how easily blushes showed on its pale cheeks. “So, what gave you the idea to start foraging like this?”

“1 was eatin’ lunch one day, cheese spread and crackers and pop. One paipsy, tasteless lunch, you see? And I start thinkin’ about how I never woulda go hungry back home as a small boy, how even if I wasn’t home to eat me mother food, it always had some kinda fruit tree or something round the place. I start to remember Julie mango, how it sweet, and chataigne and peewah that me mother would boil up in a big pot a’ salt water, and how my father always had he little kitchen garden, growin’ dasheen leaf and pigeon peas and yam and thing. And I say to meself, ‘But eh-eh, Johnny, ain’t this country have plants and trees and fruit and thing too? The squirrels-them always looking fat and happy; they mus’ be eatin’ something. And the Indian people-them-self too; they must be did eat something else besides corn before the white people come and take over the place!’

“That same day, I find my ass in the library, and I tell them I want to find out about plants that you could eat. Them sit me down with all kinda book and computer, and I come to find out it have plenty to eat, right here in this city, growing wild by the roadside. Some of these books even had recipes in them, doux-doux!

“So I drag out all of Rita frying pan and cook spoon from the kitchen cupboard, and I teach meself to feed meself, yes!” He chuckled again. “Now I does eat fresh mulberries in the summer. I does dig up chicory root to take the bitterness from my coffee. I even make rowan-berry jam. All these things all around we for free, and people still starving, oui? You have to learn to make use of what you have.

“But I still think the slingshot was a master stroke, though. Nobody ain’t expect a ol’ black man to be hunting with a slingshot down in the ravine!”

* * * *

I was still chuckling as I left Mr. Morris’s building later that evening. He’d loaded me down with a container full of stuffed rabbit and a bottle of crabapple preserves. I deactivated the screamer alarm on the car, and I was just about to open the door when I felt a hand sliding down the back of my thigh.

“Yesss, stay just like that. Ain’t that pretty? We’ll get to that later. Where’s your money, sweetheart? In this purse here?” The press of a smelly body pinned me over the hood. I tried to turn my head, to scream, but he clamped a filthy hand across my face. I couldn’t breathe. The bottle of preserves crashed to the ground. Broken glass sprayed my calf.

“Shit! What’d you do that for? Stupid bitch!”

His hand tightened over my face. I couldn’t
breathe!
In fury and terror, I bit down hard, felt my teeth meet in the flesh of his palm. He swore, yanked his hand away, slammed a hard fist against my ear. Things started to go black, and I almost fell. I hung on to the car door, dragged myself to my feet, scrambled out of his reach. I didn’t dare turn away to run. I backed away, screaming, “Get away from me! Get away!” He kept coming, and he was big and muscular, and angry. Suddenly, he jerked, yelled, slapped one hand to his shoulder. “What the fuck…?” I could see wetness seeping through the shoulder of his grimy sweatshirt. Blood? He yelled again, clapped a hand to his knee. This time, I had seen the missile whiz through the air to strike him. Yes! I crouched down to give Mr. Morris a clear shot. My teeth were bared in a fighter’s grin. The mugger was still limping towards me, howling with rage. The next stone glanced by his head, leaving a deep gash on his temple. Behind him, I heard the sound of breaking glass as the stone crashed through the car window. He’d had enough. He ran, holding his injured leg.