Twenty-Six (14 page)

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” Morrison said. Arvel pressed the button to unlock the door. In the minute or so it would take Morrison to climb the stairs and come down the hall to the apartment, Arvel frantically looked about the room, as though he’d be able to hide when Morrison got there.

The first thing Arvel saw when he opened the door was a red, white, and blue Pepsi Jeux Canada Games knapsack that Alec had over one shoulder. He shook his head at Alec in disbelief. “What is it this time?” Arvel said.

The pack meant Alec had run away from home. He had done the same thing before, several times. He’d stayed at Arvel’s house for a few days once when Arvel was in Grade 9. He’d taken off by train to an aunt’s house in Cape Breton before, and he’d even camped out for three days, with no food and only a wool blanket to keep him warm at night, in the woods on the banks of the East River.

Alec was really Ziv’s friend, but since Ziv had gone off to university more than three months ago, Alec had been showing up at Arvel’s door almost daily. Alec was seventeen, younger even than Ziv, but getting a little old to be running away from home. He’d repeated twice in junior high and now found himself, in what should have been his graduating year, entering Grade 10.

Just about everyone Arvel knew had a father who drank too much. There were binge drinkers and problem drinkers, weekend alcoholics and just plain drunks. But Alec’s father was different. He was what most people called a
bad alcoholic
. A bad alcoholic was one who had entered the advanced stages of the disease. Many weekend beer drinkers, like Arvel’s father, had big beer guts. But bad alcoholics were almost always skinny. Alec’s old man was bone-thin, and because he’d clogged a couple of major organs with booze, his complexion had a waxy yellow look to it, like a boiled garden bean.

He was a heavy-duty mechanic by trade, and he made good money at it. He and his wife had been born and raised in the Red Row, but had migrated as far south as one of the less desirable streets of Valley Woods. Their split-entrance bungalow, with spanking new furniture and two new cars in the drive every two years, was the envy of every kid from the Red Row who ever visited the place. But the economic rise of the Morrisons masked a physical and spiritual decline. Ziv had been in their house plenty of times over the years, and he’d told Arvel he’d never heard anyone talking in there. Never. The father stayed in the kitchen or the
TV
room. The two kids were both holed up in their separate rooms. They did not eat meals together or even watch
TV
together.

There wasn’t much to like about Alec Morrison. He was so starved for attention that from the time he’d been in elementary school he was loud, pushy, and obnoxious. Ziv had started hanging around with him in junior high, mostly out of sympathy, Arvel had always suspected. By the time Alec was in Grade 7, almost no one would have anything to do with him. Alec had a diamond-sharp wit and a great deal of surface charm and energy that attracted people initially, but when he sensed people getting close, he did his best to drive them away with annoying pranks. The only exception seemed to be how he treated Ziv. Maybe Ziv just had thicker skin than most people, but Arvel noticed that Alec was not as bent on pissing Ziv off.

Arvel hadn’t realized how desperate Alec must be for friends until Alec had started seeking out Arvel’s company after Ziv left. Arvel had never expressed any interest or particular liking for Alec Morrison in the better than ten years they’d known each other. In fact, he could recall several incidents when Alec had so enraged him that he’d lashed out.

Once, two days after Arvel’s birthday, Arvel had come home from school to find Alec in the kitchen. There was only one piece of the birthday cake left, and everyone in the family understood that it was Arvel’s. Alec was sitting at the kitchen table, with the opened serving tray in front of him like a plate. He had a half-drunk glass of milk beside the tray and had already forked down a couple of good-sized pieces of cake.

“Where’s Ziv?” Arvel said, ready to blame his brother for what his guest had done.

“Not home from school yet,” Alec gave a big smirk and began breaking off another morsel of cake with the edge of his fork.

“Who gave you that cake?”

Alec continued smirking. He shrugged. “It was sitting there,” he said. “I took it.”

“That was my birthday cake,” Arvel said, his voice rising.

“Oh,” said Alec. “Is it your birthday? Happy birthday!”

Arvel picked the remainder of the piece of cake from the tray and squeezed it in both hands. The icing oozed out from between his fingers as he compressed the whole thing into a golf-ball-sized pellet. Alec remained seated with a blank expression. When Arvel clamped him hard in a headlock, Alec opened his mouth to protest. The cake ball fit perfectly into the open jaws, muffling any words Alec might have said.

“How’s that taste?” Arvel asked after he’d released Alec. Alec did not seem put out in the least. He chewed the lump of cake slowly, savouring the rage he’d sparked in Arvel as much as the cake. When he had part of the cake pellet swallowed, he said: “Tastes pretty good. Does your mother put coffee in the frosting?”

Still standing in the doorway of Arvel’s apartment, Alec shifted from one foot to the other. “Are you going to let me in, or what?” he said. Arvel moved out of the way and Alec entered the living room. He sat down on the couch, his navy parka rising around his ears like a shell. He zipped open his knapsack and dug around inside for a moment.

“Here,” he said, more to himself than to Arvel. He pulled out a quart bottle of Captain Morgan rum.

“Put that away!” Arvel said without hesitation.

“Just relax, man,” Alec said. “It’s only a bottle.”

“I said put that away, and I meant it. You either put that back in that bag or I’ll dump the whole fucking thing down the toilet.”

“Jesus Christ! That’d be a good one. Arvel Burrows is going to throw away booze!”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve coming into a guy’s house and talking to him like that. Most people would kick you right the fuck out on your arse.”

“Most people wouldn’t have let me in in the first place. It ain’t my fault you haven’t wised up enough to figure that one out on your own.”

“You’re some fucking piece of work, Morrison. Why don’t you just sit there and see if you can keep your mouth shut for half an hour. I’ve got a lot of stuff on my mind, I don’t want to have to deal with your foolishness. And put that bottle away.”

Morrison hesitated with his hand on the neck of the bottle for a moment, then put it back into the bag. He did not zip the bag closed, and the neck of the bottle protruded from the sack near his ankle.

“You’ve got stuff on your mind, all right,” he said. “What do you do, get your secretary to hold your calls while you change a shitty diaper?”

“Last warning,” Arvel said. He pointed directly in Alec’s face, his finger inches from Alec’s nose. Alec opened his mouth. Arvel’s index finger was as thick as two of Alec’s fingers. Arvel’s arm was bigger at the biceps than the thickest part of Alec’s legs. Arvel towered over him, a big hill of bone and flesh and muscle.

Alec closed his mouth. “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Arvel said, turning his back. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to see you or talk to you right now.” He opened the bedroom door, stepped in, and closed it. The crib lit up briefly, then disappeared in the black. He crawled into his bed and pulled
the covers over his head. The caffeine from all the tea he’d drunk was burning through his limbs. He felt like walking out to the living room and pounding on Morrison until his tongue fell out. He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists against the sheets, and stared open-eyed into the mattress.

The Highland Square Mall in New Glasgow had been open for less than two years and the early signs of decline were already setting in. When it had opened, the chrome, the retro-neon lights, the mirror-covered walls, had transported Pictou County shoppers. “It’s just like Halifax,” people said when they were describing it to a friend who hadn’t been there yet. “Just like something you’d see in Halifax.” By now, in 1982, everyone had been there, yet everyone had not been enough people to keep some of the expensive specialty shops open. There were empty shop stalls, their windows papered over with For Lease signs or the Coming Soon signs belonging to the next, lower-end business that would set up shop. A couple of the trendier, higher-priced women’s clothing stores had gone under almost right away. There was a Dollar Deals store in the mall now, an ultra-low-end department store dealing only in items that cost exactly a dollar.

Jackie worked at Exception Elle, an expensive clothing shop that had opened with the mall and prospered. Part of the reason Exception Elle did so well was Jackie herself. She had a flair for communication; she could tell women exactly how they looked when they tried something on. She had a sharp eye for fabric and colours, and how well they suited a particular woman’s
hair and skin and eyes. She was attuned to different body shapes, and knew what fashions suited women with small or large busts, women with thick waists, what cut of dress hung most flatteringly over thick thighs.

She got paid a commission on top of an hourly minimum, and the longer she worked there, the more money she was able to make. Women trusted her and came back. Middle-aged women with lots of money seemed pleased when she was talking about how they looked, and they sent their friends. Jackie’s boss had known very early on that she was drawing customers into the store, and Jackie had already managed to negotiate an increase in her commission.

Jackie’s old high-school friend, Colleen Chisolm, had moved to Halifax a few months earlier and was working at Gregor’s, a fancy clothing store in a downtown area called Historic Properties.

The day Colleen had got her first paycheque, she’d called Jackie and started listing the virtues of Halifax, trying to convince Jackie to bring Arvel and the kids to live there.

“If
I
can make this much here, just imagine what
you
could make,” Colleen said on the phone. Jackie could tell that in celebration of her first paycheque, Colleen had already had a few drinks. “Things would be easier here for Arvel, jobwise.”

“I’m doing pretty well here,” Jackie said. “We’re doing fine.”

“I’ve already mentioned you to my manager.”

“You what! I did not say you could do that!”

“I just told her about my friend in Pictou County who’s the best salesperson in women’s fashions I’ve ever come across.”

Moving to Halifax was out of the question. Even without discussing it, Jackie knew Arvel would never agree to it. But the
phone call from Colleen had been encouraging. The knowledge that she might have an option open to her gave her a little charge, seemed to set her free.

Jackie was closing by herself tonight. She’d already tied up the garbage and put it in the Dumpster out back. She barred the fire door and padlocked it. She’d straightened all the racks and shelves and run the carpet sweeper through outerwear. At ten fifteen she sat down in fatigue and disgust. There was a woman trying on dresses from the reduced-to-clear rack who simply would not leave. This was the one thing Jackie disliked about selling to the wealthy: they knew that rules were not made for them. Jackie had told the woman at nine thirty that they would close at ten sharp. But this woman was Carmen Denelda, the wife of James Denelda Jr., one of the wealthiest men in the province. Mrs. Denelda spent two-to-three hundred dollars a month in this store alone. The retail conglomerate of which her husband was
CEO
owned a controlling interest in the mall. She understood that whoever else the mall closed at ten for, it did not close at ten for her. Of course, her demeanour had never been anything but gracious, but if she wanted to try on dresses until ten thirty, trying to find the right one, that is what she would do.

At 10:21, according to Jackie’s watch, the woman apologized for keeping her late and left without buying a thing. Jackie did a cash-out on the till, filled out the deposit slip for the bank, and locked the money into a night-deposit bag. She took her purse out from behind the register and shut the machine down. With the folding partition that walled off the shop from the rest of the mall closed and locked behind her, she walked the short distance down the hall to the night-deposit slot. There was something spooky and awe-inspiring about a big empty building. Part of what she felt now was
the contrast between the cavernous spaces of the mall and the tiny, dingy apartment she was returning home to.

Even in the dim overhead lighting of the parking lot, her little two-door Datsun showed poorly. You could see from the imbalanced way the car sat on its wheels that the suspension was going. And as she drew nearer, the uneven way the paint was fading gave it a homemade body-filler look, even though this was the original finish.

She wound the window down a crack and took a spin through the loop in New Glasgow before going home. Maybe she could convince Arvel to take a day trip to Halifax a week from Saturday. She still had not told him about Colleen and the possibility of a job, and if she could convince him she only wanted to do some Christmas bargain-hunting, maybe she could quietly visit Gregor’s in Historic Properties, just to see what it might be like to work there.