Wallflowers (18 page)

I stole a tiger and two camels from the parking lot of the Honeymoon Motel because royals keep big cats and I’m in love with the Queen of Central Ontario. Because when you meet a tiger, you know it’s closer to God than anything that wears shoes. Because Miss Mississauga should see her majesty reflected in something alive, and she’s as wild as they are. The type of girl birds perch on: no seed—just a book, a park bench, and clavicles for landing. In fact, that was the talent portion, which she danced to Édith Piaf. I remember her palms and a top hat of hummingbirds, green orbs launched into wash lights. They returned at her whistle, abuzz at her wrists before Piaf got to the line about
mots de tous les jours
. Truly, the recording’s on YouTube. I figure it’s genealogical. Her dad trains the hottest quadrupeds outside L.A.—the guy off-screen coaxing the tiger with beef jerky.

It takes less time to hook the trailer to the station wagon than it does to coax my enormous queen out of bed. Supine in the polyester bedspread like an Eastern fertility goddess, full bellied and sublime. Beach-bleached hair she can sit on, voluminous with yesterday’s mousse and last night’s dreams. I say, “Blanche.” I say, “Wake up.” I say, “I’ve stolen a tiger and two camels.”

“Fuck off.”

“We have to leave. We’re on the run. I checked us out.”

She rolls over and tugs the comforter over her head.

“Seriously,” I say.

“Seriously fuck off.”

I tug the string on the venetian blind and sun filters in anticlimactically.

“Blanche.” The echo of piss in a rented toilet. “Darling?” I turn to find the bed empty and sheetless. The toilet flushes and she shuffles into the bathroom doorway, loosely cocooned in three layers of blanket.

“Get dressed,” I say, and collect odds and ends. My penguin tie, buck fifty at the Sally Ann, her nylon socks slung between the antennae of the TV.

“I think my tongue’s swollen.”

“Ten seconds.” Stuffing my tie and her socks into the suitcase. “Nine.”

“Put a run in those and you’re dead.”

“Eight.”

“Duh ih looh swo-en?”

“It’s not swollen. Put this on.”

“How do you know?” She climbs into the sundress, shimmies it over her belly, the white cotton bodice still gaping at her bust.

“You can talk.”

She frowns and fingers loose a tangle in her bangs.

Let’s begin with the dandelions. How they linked each wicket by dusty stems. The girlfriend of the postgrad golf star plucking them before the players could descend their mallets—a waste of wishes, she explained.

“Like pissin’ on four-leaf clovers,” I said from the iris bed, garden spade tapping the chipped hood of a gnome.

“Right,” Blanche said, wet lips softening. She was three months pregnant then, though she didn’t look a day over well-endowed.

Her beau ignored me and said to his colleague, “How charming she is. These hang-ups. Last night on the patio she insisted we dine in the dark because the torches were incinerating the moths.”

Blanche winced at
incinerating
and bowed over a dandelion, sank into a crouch that made the two of us level. She plucked the stalk and shut her eyes, hovering the weed at her chin for an inhale, eyelids chalked a gentle green and quivering. She tightened her mouth and blew, the seeds bursting off the dandelion and riding my way on the shape of her breath.

“Blanche. Your stroke.”

I clasped the filaments in my fist, cast my own wish and whistled them on. The seeds piggybacked with double requests, but weightless and illumined off my palm like particles of lamplight. Blanche grinned before she stood, one of her sash-and-crown smiles. Then she left me to garden by the path of their croquet course, to linger behind the delphiniums, digging and filling idle holes. After their game, she told her boyfriend she might like cranberry-walnut sandwiches for lunch at the faculty club. I prefer to clean the language departments—the pretty, plump secretaries dialoguing
en français—la photocopieuse
—or Russian, even better—“Fine day,” I might say, the assistant from Moscow nodding with breathy
da
’s. Foreign languages fit women like low-cut tops, and me, I like to play spy, pretend to pretend I’m a cleaner inside the United Nations. But that day Blanche’s desire for cranberry-walnut sandwiches had suggested the windows needed washing at the faculty club.

She sat between the guard dogs, attending more to her ginger ale than to table talk. The boyfriend moving his lips more than any of them, frequently chuckling, pleased at his own pithy revelations, not looking at the waitress as he ordered: tea, no sugar, probably—cucumber sandwich, no crust. Suds slopped down my windowpane, the soap fanning over glass, my view of the table filtered through a glycerol prism—Blanche tinted the colour of free love and Jerry Garcia. I whisked my bucket of cleaner and spread the froth on my pane for fingerpainting:
.dehs eulb eht ta em teeM

She didn’t see the note. But she caught me later to report the dog feces I’d been avoiding, and to find a hose for her pumps. I worked the tap, held her hand as she stood on one foot, and she agreed to milkshakes the next day at the student union building. That’s the date she told me she was pregnant. The boyfriend didn’t know for another month, after we’d had six more milkshakes at the student union building. She told me other secrets during those sessions too. She said she never met such a good pair of ears. Eyes, yes. She’d met lots of eyes. But they don’t understand so well if you don’t know sign language. When she told her boyfriend about the baby, they argued for three weeks and she cancelled our afternoons at the SUB. I brought a vanilla shake to her house and she answered the door with a red upper lip and bloated eyelids. She mentioned a pageant pal in Florida, and I was happy to get away myself.

Zero klicks an hour on the shoulder of Autoroute 20: Blanche warms to reality. To the regality of our captured tigress. The trailer is idled between happily ever after and the parking lot of the Honeymoon Motel. We’re at the open side door, the tiger glowering from its cage, pupils shrinking, haunches clenched in the air.

Blanche shifts her gaze to me—eyes alert and unblinking. “You’re a lunatic.”

“Now, darling.”

“Like, clinically. Like Call The Number On The Screen.”

“Hush,” I say, and reach to pinch the lint from her sleeve.

She smacks my hand away. “You stole live zoo animals. We can’t leave them now—do you
get
that?” She continues to stare at me and I’m not sure if her inflection is rhetorical. “You think we can get back to the entrance and rehook the trailer before the original driver comes out?” She looks from me to the tiger. “And if we could, then what? I don’t want to be the one who sends them back to the zoo. They trade these guys like hockey players.” She hoists herself onto the aluminum and crouches before the cage.

I think about responding, but she continues before I can think of how to word it.

“His eyes look milky,” she says. She leans closer, her nose an inch from the crate. “And look at the missing fur up his arm.” She sinks her head closer to the paw, its limb stretched across the aluminum like a log. “I’ll bet they Vaseline his teeth before showtime too.”

The cat socks a cheek into the cage and navigates the bars with his gum. I can hear hoofs knock about from the next compartment, then a flank swipe into the divider screen.

“Look, we were headed for Toronto,” says Blanche. “What if we kept north for my dad’s cabin?”

“Anywhere you like,” I say. But I’ve seen photos of the ranch, and that is exactly where I want to go. Miles from no place, bordered by butternut trees.

“The property’s huge,” she continues. “And he’s handled wild cats. He’d say no if I called. But maybe if we just showed up ...”

Her Majesty, the Queen of Central Ontario, barefoot in the sweetgrass. Hip to hip with her dozy cat.

=

Miss Mississauga. M-I-S-S—I-S-S. Miss Mississauga sucking grape slush through a too-skinny straw.

We’re doing a hundred because I’m pissed off. I tried to feed one of the camels a carrot and it bit my thumb. I’m about done with them now. I’m about ready to let them off at a rest stop.

“Jeremiah?” Blanche says, the Quebec visitor guide opened on her knee.

“She might be a she.”

“You’ll have to check.”

“Cleo?”

“Cliché. Hezekiah?”

“Heze-huh?”

She lifts the guide and thumbs it like a flipbook, cover to cover.

“Tonight let’s stay someplace with a pool,” I say.

She glances at me from the book. “You don’t think we can make it to Ontario?”

“Not with rush hour traffic. And there are nicer motels in Quebec,” I say. I don’t tell her the last thing I want to do is drive all the way to Ontario. The car stinks. I can smell the camels’ shit from in here. Or maybe it’s coming from my shoe.

“Well, I think we should try,” she says, and stares at the windshield.

“Plan B hotel, just in case?”

She sighs. “What city?”

“Whatever city you like, my darling.”

“Drummondville?”

“Sounds pretty.”

“Or a shit hole.” She turns the page. “Motel Alouette—‘warm and discreet atmosphere.’”

“Discreet,” I say. “Perfect.”

“Or hourly,” she says.

“I think I have shit on my shoe.” I lift my foot from the brake pedal. “Can you see?”

She shields herself with the book and continues to read.

“I don’t see anything.”

I lower my foot and glance in the rear-view mirror at the trailer. I can’t help but wonder, of course, if tigers eat camels, given the opportunity. Stranded on the shoulder of Autoroute 20.

“Hey, a horse show,” says Blanche.

The trailer door left carelessly ajar while Blanche and I pull over for lunch.

“I haven’t seen a horse since I helped train Popcorn for the close-ups in
Seabiscuit
.”

Divider removed. Nature and Darwin resuscitated: a tidy denouement. Though perhaps unethical. Upsetting to the Miss.

“What’s the date today? The seventeenth? Take the next exit. Right here, Richie. Turn right here.”

Exit 181 at Saint-Joachim-de-Courval. We enter the stadium by way of the sale stables—twenty grand for a Bavarian Warmblood sired Cornelius Rottaler II; thirteen grand for Sheeza Lady, the Welsh Pony next door. The stalls fortified by barrels of oats and barley. Grass bales. Cubic pyramids of alfalfa. We’ve found the mess hall, then—surely camels eat hay? Perhaps if we drop them here at a feed station, flee before security spots the humps.

Blanche has sealed her hair beneath a prodigious sun hat. She might fit in, were it not for the road-wrinkled dress and third-trimester sweat glinting between her shoulder blades. She points to the dressage arena and loops her arm through my elbow. I follow her to the bleachers.

A British announcer booms over the PA—
“the sensation really”
(rehlly)
“of today’s competition”
—as though druh-sahzh requires Anglos shipped from the motherland—
“eight-year-old Lipizzaner stallion, Neapolitano Magnifica.”

“Isn’t it awful?” says Blanche. “How they’re paraded. I wish we could save them too.” She tugs my sleeve toward the front benches. Neapolitano Magnifica glows in centre ring, white coat tossing the sun beneath my eyelids. I can’t look straight on. He’s beatific. Flawless coat, as if before showtime the rider rubbed any imperfections with wet chalk. Vaseline for the chomps, perhaps. He trots in place, ankles springing like they’re hoofing on toothpicks

“How supple his back,”
murmurs the announcer, “
a cadenced
piaffe.”

A cadenced
piaffe
. Édith Piaf. “La Vie En Rose.” Supple backs and regulation heels—toothpicks, minimum 7.5 centimetres, she said. Blanche,
ma rose
.

“Blanche, my rose,” I say. “I forgot something in the car. A couple things. I’ll find you in twenty.”

Blanche’s wrist slides from my elbow and I barely catch her smile before she drifts toward the front bench.

“Just look at the height and the freedom in front,”
the announcer rumbles as I slip back toward the trailer.

Operation Camel-y Freedom. The trailer air is thick with unventilated piss, and here’s me, hunchback of urine can, sweet-talking the beasts from the collar of my T-shirt. I make lip-sucking noises, cluck my tongue.

“Out you go, boys—all-you-can-breathe oxygen, I promise you that.”

The camels are impervious—not negotiating. I gently shoulder-check one toward the open door.

“C’mon. Go get yerselves some vitamin D.”

What’s that they say about camels and stubbornness? I glance out a window, then face the nearest brute eye to eye. His face is like how children draw cats—anchor-shaped grin dropped from a triangular nose. I think he’s laughing at me. Perhaps they expect remuneration. Food-like.