Alligator (15 page)

It came back his way.

It was part reprimand and part consolation.

But there it was at the beginning again. He looked off stage where Dr. Callahan was sitting at the piano and smiling at him with an exaggerated clown smile, big, hopeful, and sinister. Dr. Callahan taught in the folklore department at the university and was a former Christian Brother and was all about preserving the old jigs and folk dances. Sweat was dripping down Dr. Callahan’s ruddy face; his hands were raised over the keys for Frank to see.

His hands were about to come down and Frank must dance.

Dr. Callahan had one tooth in front that was grey, and the tooth frightened Frank because Dr. Callahan had said it was dead. Everything was in the tooth: all of Dr. Callahan’s fight against despair and his private, mystical arguments with God and the complicated love he had for tap dancing.

Frank chose to concentrate on a part of himself that maybe didn’t exist ever before, which he now thinks of as his will, and he made it burst into flame. He filled with something like rage or flame and decided to nail the goddamnjesus spot to the floor with his tapping so it never moved again.

He was, at ten, the best tap dancer in the province until Dr. Callahan gave him a beard rub.

Dr. Callahan said, Come and have a beard rub, Frankie. He took Frank’s face between his hands and stretched out his unshaven chin and rubbed it against Frank’s cheeks, first one, then the other, making his skin raw.

You danced well, Frank, Dr. Callahan said. The next day there was a rash where the stubble had roughed up Frank’s skin and his mother saw it in the rear-view of the taxi and asked him about it and when he said how he got it the taxi driver opened the window and spat a big hawk. His mother lowered her sunglasses, which were sitting in her hair, so they covered her eyes and she turned to look out the passenger window and Frank never went to tap dancing again.

But he loved dancing. After his dance in the spotlight there was a pause and the clapping started. It came in overlapping waves and was multi-toned and fell away and was renewed and grew louder and louder. It lasted so long in the dark he started to wander off the stage but Dr. Callahan ran into the spotlight with Frank. The professor took his hand and lifted it and the clapping got even louder and it lasted longer still. Frank’s mother had been surrounded by other parents who kept telling her how talented Frank was.

They couldn’t even get out of the auditorium because of the adults pressed against his mother to congratulate her and to ruffle his hair and tell him he was a fine boy.

He’d like to dance with the girl, Colleen, that’s what he’d like. He’d like to have his hand on the small of her bare back between the low-riding jeans and the knot in her black halter top, lay his hand just above the two dimples over her bum.

He’d like to move her around a nearly empty dance floor in Mount Pearl, or some other place where she wouldn’t know anyone except him. A war veteran sitting at the bar probably with medals on his shoulder and five fat women sitting at the slot machines in the back and some red spotlights and blue spotlights and a dance floor with nobody else on it.

He wants that girl in his arms worse than he’s wanted anything for a long time. It’s an overwhelming inarticulate compelling want that makes him lose track of who he is.

He wants to tell her about his hot-dog stand and how hard he’s worked to get it and how much money he makes. He wants to say I can make this much money in a night. He doesn’t want to say it, but he wants her to know it.

He would like to say, I don’t do drugs.

He would like to tell her about the Inuit guy who hanged himself in the apartment over his at Christmastime.

How would that be, if he told her that, him a total stranger? But he would like to get it off his chest. And about the Russians, the drug dealers who moved in above him when the room became available. He wants to talk to her about the waterbed he bought. He is swollen with pride because he had the foresight to buy a waterbed, just in case he gets a chance to mention it.

He would like to tell her, or have her intuit, how much respect he had for his mother and how empty the world is without her. He would like to explain how he feels like he has a hole in his chest. He would like her to put her hand on his chest and show him once and for all there is no hole and then he’d like her to undo his jeans and put her mouth all over him.

The door to the bar is open because it’s so hot and the smell of pigeon shit and smoke and the harbour comes in very cool. And maybe the smell of those worm droppings that are covering the sidewalks in a wet muck and smell like cat’s piss. Everybody’s face is dew-struck and soft-featured because of the drinking and Frank’s just stopped in on his way to the hotdog cart.

He has to get to the hot-dog cart. But couldn’t he just ask her maybe to dance?

He’ll make money tonight hand over fist. There will be light breaking over the South Side Hills by the time he heads home. George Street will be covered in garbage, drunks lurching, the cops will be out.

Frank has a permit for the corner of George Street, which is the best spot in the city. This is a street with bars on both sides and is famous now for the festival, which is just drinking all night long.

He had to get down to City Hall before it opened and line up to get that spot. He paid good money.

A guy can move hot dogs on George Street.

He’s seen a guy out by Sobey’s Square have to depend on when the movies let out. The guy spends all his time looking at an empty parking lot. George Street in the summer and Frank can pull in close to a grand every week.

The taxi drivers keep him company. Gulliver’s Taxis lined up near the pizza place across the street, the drivers leaning on their cars, the ends of their cigarettes moving in the dark.

They’re the kind of men who have a little timeshare trailer somewhere in the Florida Keys they drive down to because they are afraid to fly and their children are grown up and some of them have done a bit of time and they have faded tattoos on their hands to prove it, between the thumb and index finger, a sword and cross or a four-leaf clover, their wives want to go to Florida for their arthritis and you can’t hang on to it one guy said because they put you in a home and the government just takes it and there’s bastards sat off on their arses their whole lives collecting dole and doing fuck all and you know what they get? The same sort of bed in the same sort of old-age home as guys that worked all night long on George Street dragging vomiting drunks in and out of cars for the last thirty years. College kids losing their stomachs all over the upholstery, more money than you can bat an eye, they have to hose the van out the next morning, and so they spend two weeks of the winter in Florida because their youngsters won’t get a cent after they’re gone, the home will eat it all up, nest egg my fucking foot, and please, God, I’ll be taken in my sleep before it comes to that.

The taxi drivers are something else, Frank knows, but they keep an eye on him because he works so hard and they kid him about being skinny and they say stuff about his wiener but mostly they watch out for him because when he leaves the corner of George Street after a night on the hot-dog stand he can have as much as five hundred bucks on him.

Just a kid, they tell each other.

At 4 a.m. everyone wants a hot dog, the taxi drivers tell him as they pull out their wallets and hand him a five and look off into the fog or rain and wait while the wieners barbecue.

Give me some of them what are they banana peppers my stomach will hate me, they say.

A crowd tonight, they tell him.

What have you got a cold drink back there, Frank?

Have you got a girl, Frank? I bet you got a girl, they say.

Look at Frank, look at the colour of him.

He must have a girl.

Some crowd tonight, Frank, they say. Give me a couple of them napkins. The taxi drivers come over and talk whether they want a hot dog or not.

Frank has never given a hot dog away.

The taxi drivers understand this perfectly.

There are people outside the door of the Ship Inn trying to cool down or having a smoke. She has a rhinestone in her belly button. She’s slender, her arms are golden, her neck is golden, and there’s an elastic riding over her hip, a part of her red thong and it makes him crazy to think about sliding a finger under that elastic. He’d like to take that elastic in his teeth. Her arms are raised over her head, and her face is turned down and to the side and she’s biting her lower lip to keep from smiling to herself because she’s so sexy.

If he could tell half the things about himself she would fall in love with him.

If he could have some of her time.

Just to tell her a few things.

He watched her dance with the guy who is the town simpleton, delayed person, and the delayed guy has on glasses that make his eyes googly and he is a type of thin that speaks medication and he breathes through clenched teeth, and spittle comes out but she doesn’t seem to mind. She dances with her eyes closed and when she opens her eyes she smiles at the delayed guy. What is that smile, good-natured? It is without condescension and that’s why he is starting to fall in love with her.

When the song ends the delayed guy goes to the bar and this is the moment Frank should ask her to dance with him.

He feels the moment getting bigger in his chest.

He is very close to just walking right up to her.

She lifts her arms and gathers her hair and twists it and piles it on the top of her head and he sees her bare neck and he should ask her right now and she drops her hair and gives it a shake and it falls in a curtain down her back.

The band is starting up — a retro band, joyfully ironic and smouldering with self-satisfied mirth. The girls love them — and she’s just standing there almost all alone and he could go right up to her now. She turns slightly and the rhinestone catches one of the stage lights and winks and sends out a blue laser for half a second and the music begins and it’s Meatloaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.”

She sort of rocks her hips.

She’s looking like she might dance to Meatloaf and he should just put down his drink and go up there and if she said no that would be okay. If she said no he could just walk out but he knows she wouldn’t say no. He knows she would say yes if his feet would just move but they are stuck and his chest is bursting now with the want to ask her.

She bites her lower lip when she dances as if the look on her face would be full of such profound sexual pleasure, it would be dangerous to let it show, so she bites her lip instead.

If he doesn’t ask her to dance right now: but he doesn’t. And a guy touches her shoulder and she lays her hand on his arm and she is laughing and her hips are rocking and the guy touches her hip he lays his hand right over the red elastic thong on her bare hip above her low-slung jeans and her arms are over her head and her hair hangs down over her face and a red light from the stage falls all over her bare arms.

The floor is so crowded nobody can move.

Frank charges out of the bar, furious. Some people sharing a joint on the sidewalk open their eyes wide at him and he looks like he might kill them, except he also looks like he doesn’t see them. He takes the stairs two at a time to Water Street.

He strides along Water Street and the couples go past, guys holding on to elbows or an arm draped over a girl’s neck and their reflections in the big windows of empty storefronts stretch and lurch past.

There’s music on George Street and the taxis try to drive through the crowds. The crowds take their time. Some girl lies over the hood of a car and the driver leans on the horn. Frank feels the drumming from the band through the soles of his sneakers. The girls have on miniskirts and little T-shirts with spaghetti straps. The straps slip off their shoulders and they have shiny bra straps and some of them are Americans from the cruise ship. Everybody tanned, mildly drunk, the high heels make the girls gawky and vulnerable and he could put a fist through a window he’s so furious.

He passes a guy with a hot-dog stand. There’s a lineup all around the stand and just the sight of it makes Frank want to take a bat to it.

He was in Sears buying the duvet cover that afternoon and the salesgirl said
wet bar
.

What you want is a wet bar, she said.

He didn’t like to drink. He especially wasn’t interested in stocking a bar. But he followed her down the aisle because she had a walk.

He followed her down the aisle because it was air-conditioned in the Village Mall. He’d bought a soft serve and sat in the food court where his mother used to take him for a treat.

He saw that there were a lot of handicapped people in the food court, and people who looked fucked up in one way or another, and then he saw the two Russians who’d moved into the bed-sit above his and they saw him and he finished his cone and walked through Sears because he didn’t want to leave the mall right away in case they noticed and thought he was afraid of them.

They had come to his stand on George Street the night before and they stood on the curb just behind him and they watched him selling hot dogs. George Street was full of crowds, there was a band outdoors, people had plastic cups of beer, and the Russians just stood there watching him for more than an hour.

He had paid good money for the permit and it was his permit.

The guy named Valentin waited with his hands linked behind his back.

They just stood there and looked at the crowds.

Valentin had on a pair of sunglasses and the lenses were black and he wore a black leather jacket.

Some customers came and Frank put on some Polish sausages and he slit them with the knife and the fat leaked out and the flames sizzled. There were three customers and they took a long time dressing the hot dogs and when they left Valentin stepped up beside Frank and he said he wanted Frank’s stand and he wanted the permit.

Frank put down the tongs he had for turning the wieners and he wiped his hands on his apron.

We will offer a good price, said Valentin.