Alligator (22 page)

MADELEINE

FORGET YOGA, SHE’S
tried yoga. It feels like an iron clamp. Has she gone back to the doctor? She has not. Because (
A
) she has to finish this film and (
B
) she doesn’t want to go to the doctor because she made him sign the physical and (
C
) it doubles her over and (
D
) it’s indigestion.

You get an idea in your head. She wanted Newfoundland before Confederation because what kind of people were they? She remembers her mother’s housekeeper tearing the skin off rabbits in the kitchen sink.

She wanted an actress who could melt the emulsion, someone hard done by and fast. She wanted the horses from Austria.

For two weeks last winter she waited for the phone to ring about the bloody horses. She would glance at the phone and will it to ring. These Lipizzaners can bow down on one knee.

She had them come on a freighter as big as a stadium last winter and the freighter got stuck in the ice.

Things get stuck in the ice, she was told.

Men go over the sides of vessels on ropes with chainsaws tied to their backs. The ice lifts on giant swells; jagged tiles, weirdly green, lift on the crest of a wave and slide down the other side. Tropically green. The ice makes a keening noise, and cymbal crashes.

And these men begin to hack at the ice. They chop a path that closes over as soon as it opens.

The freighter was stuck and she had a cast and crew numbering in the hundreds whom she had to pay to stand around, waiting on those bloody horses that she would not give up on because she had got an idea in her head.

She’d had a meeting with the premier at the Newfoundland Hotel. He was on his way to China, a trade mission. She wanted some leverage at the bank, that’s what she wanted. They’d chatted about politics and she’d ordered bakeapple jam for her toast and insisted he have some of hers.

China, how marvellous, she’d said, pushing the dish of jam over the tablecloth. What an adventure.

She’d wanted him thinking of summer. She could not put into words about how she’d captured the history of Newfoundland in this film, new because she was inventing it, or how this film had spiritual implications, how it would transfigure human experience, how bloody gorgeous the landscape, the actress with red hair, and Archbishop Fleming and the church bells but she could distract him with the jam.

She watched his knife dip into the little pot. He tasted the jam and he was thinking and then he waved the knife at her about to say something. Something had occurred to him. He waved the knife like a magic wand.

She had a thought: I am having breakfast with the premier. She saw herself as if she were looking down from the rafters, her amber pendant and the rose-coloured blouse. She was stirring her coffee.

The premier put down his knife. He had closed his eyes and was nodding to himself about how right he was in whatever thought he was having. He had convinced himself of some small matter.

About your film, he’d said.

She’d been drinking martinis in a castle in Ireland — what was this? A year ago? A slate floor, cold underfoot, and there was a fire in the hearth kicking out a bank of heat. She was there with an international committee of filmmakers and the blotch-faced Irishman sitting beside her with the white, wax-tipped, handlebar moustache: he had a brother who ran a stable in Austria.

He was a person worth $27 million, a benefactor of the arts. That’s how she justified the Irishman’s hand on her knee: white stallions. What kind of man wears a handlebar moustache? She wanted to give it a good hard tug.

I think we can do something, the premier said. Let me jot this note. We can definitely get in touch with a shipping company. I can get those horses over here.

COLLEEN

THERE WAS A
bouncer checking
ID
at the door but he let Colleen and her friends through because she stood in front of him with a tiny pot of lip gloss. She unscrewed the lid and dipped her pinky in the gloss and the crowd pushed behind her and she let them press her into the table. There was a lot of noise and smoke and the bouncer’s muscles were gym muscles but he was unattractive and very slowly, drunkenly, she ran the tip of her pinky over her top lip and then her bottom lip and she pressed her lips together and made a big smack.

She made the smack deliberate and she was leaning near the bouncer, her breasts over the table, she couldn’t believe how much fun it was coming on to an ugly bouncer in order to gain admittance to a wet T-shirt contest that she wanted to do because she was loaded and because she had big beautiful breasts and she might win $1,000. She was very drunk and desperate to get to the edge of an anger she couldn’t describe because it was new. There was a neon sign in the window that said
Open
and the lime green light flushed through the tubing over and over and Colleen thought it was like the anger she felt, a surging, sobering anger full of neon. She wanted to commit an illicit act. It struck her as comedic — to undress before a crowd — both nightmarish and goofy. It was a banal act that had the potential to change her. It was none of those things. There was some part of herself she wanted to shed. She wanted to have fun. Colleen had waited through the whole month of July for the youth diversion meeting to be over and now she was going to be painting murals all of August to make up with Mr. Duffy and it pissed her off. She was with Sherry Ryan and a friend of Sherry’s she’d just met, Leslie, and Jennifer Galway said she was coming later. Sherry Ryan has a new hambone mohawk and a tattoo of the local punk band Beaumont Hamel on her shoulder — she has a crush on the lead singer — but she didn’t think Colleen should do the wet T-shirt thing.

It’s kind of humiliating, Sherry had shouted over the noise, her hand cupped near her mouth.

What? Colleen shouted back.

Humiliating, Sherry shouted.

What? Sherry just rolled her eyes.

Colleen would take the wet T-shirt money and get on a plane in the morning, or the morning after that. She wanted to go to Louisiana and meet the alligator guy from Madeleine’s video. She wanted to see the operation he ran. Saving alligators: that would be something to see. She could go for a long time with the prize money for beautiful breasts.

She smiled at the bouncer with her lovely teeth, recently liberated from years of braces and elastic bands and night guards and gathered everything she had ever seen on television sitcoms about looking sultry and she did it as a sort of joke, half serious. The bouncer jerked his head toward the bar and Colleen and her friends slid through the door.

A waitress worked the crowd with a tray of neon shooters; she had a tattoo near her collarbone that said
Kyle
.

A one-
thousand
-dollar prize goes to the winner, says the bartender, who stands in the centre of a small empty stage with a mike and he slithers the cord over the dirty floor.

Let’s warm up with the wet boxers, he says. Colleen hears his spittle in the mike and it makes her feel like he’s all over her with his wetness. He promises buckets of beer and a city-wide ride in a limousine. He gets the girls to clap, a slowly building beat that breaks into whoops and catcalls and laments about the absence of guys willing to have water squirted at their rods.

It’s hotter in the bar than even a half an hour ago and Colleen’s sweat smells like beer and she wants more beer. The girls have glitter in their hair, are wearing black eyeliner, push-up bras, fishnet stockings, and tongue studs that glint like a secret when they laugh. They look rumpled, unfocused, and full of lust.

Three guys lope around the stage, affecting a sort of good-humoured machismo. They look around the empty space as if they have to stake a claim. The one in the middle flexes his muscles, curling one arm and then curling the other.

Come on, Bell Island, says the bartender. Come on, Harbour Grace. Step right up. I want you to meet my lovely assistant.

The bartender’s lovely assistant is chubby and acne-faced, but she works a gigantic, pump-action water gun and it’s all over for the guys pretty quick. One of them strips off and his dick wags and swings as he does a triumphant trot around the stage. The bartender shakes his head and looks away.

Then the mood shifts. The floor is suddenly packed tight, maybe a hundred and fifty young men. Where did they all come from?

Get on with the nipple show, someone shouts.

The bartender calls on the bouncer and hands him the water gun. And there is Colleen standing on a plastic milk carton in an ultraviolet light with a white T-shirt that is phosphorescent blue and her teeth flash and the bouncer circles her and nods his head appreciatively, playing the crowd.

Boléro
bursts from the overhead speakers and laughter goes up and the bouncer takes a camouflage hat from his back pocket and fits it on his head, and this makes everybody laugh too, he gets down on one knee in front of Colleen and pretends to squint through crosshairs on the plastic Uzi.

Then he sprays her face and the water is cool and she turns her head. Her mouth is open and the water sprays into her mouth and she looks like a kid with her face all scrunched up and blinking hard to get the water out of her eyes and then he drills her breasts with steely ropes of water.

The crowd presses closer and Colleen writhes under the water and the T-shirt is soaked. She grinds and feels naked and she’s swaying to the music and the clapping, her arms over her head and she looks like she’s having a pretty good time. She can’t see Sherry Ryan in the crowd. Sherry Ryan has probably left.

Over at the other end of the stage, Peggy, from Grand Falls, topples off her milk carton onto the floor after the guy soaks her and she remains on the floor for a long time. Then Louise, on the milk carton in the middle, throws back her head and peels off her soaking shirt and holds a pose.

The crowd wants Colleen to take her shirt off too. They start to chant. The chanting gets more insistent, louder, faster, and then, out of nowhere, it has a slightly nasty edge.

There’s a definite whiff of menace.

Colleen is oblivious. She’s trying to high-five the half-naked girl beside her. Then a man separates from the crowd and it’s the guy she’s seen at the Ship who was watching her dance. He’s not bad-looking, this guy.

She hears, exactly then, the menace in the crowd, the weird collective nastiness coming to a boil.

Someone throws a pop can and it hits Frank’s shoulder and bounces off. The bartender takes Frank by the arm, but Frank shakes his arm free and puts up his fists and the bartender nods to the bouncer and the bouncer steps forward.

The bar has gone awkwardly silent.

It is part of the show, this stepping forward, this display of chest, clenched fist, and set jaw.

The cash register tings and the drawer flies open and the coins in the slots slap against each other. The ordinary noise of money changing hands and someone says about the hockey game and the moment passes. Everyone turns away from the stage and starts talking and handing around beer.

Colleen takes Frank by the hand and they work their way through the crowd and out onto the street and she says, Thanks a lot, whoever you are. It was a stupid thing for me to do, a wet T-shirt thing. Stupid.

Her hand is wet and her hair and her white T-shirt and her nipples are wet. A damp, fine gold chain, barely a thread, curves over the dip near her throat. She is holding his hand and he doesn’t know where to look. He knows not to look at her breasts or her mouth or her throat or her eyes and he looks at all of it. She is shivering and when he looks at her eyes they are so full of excitement he is mildly shocked.

Maybe you’d like to loan me your sweater, she says. He works himself out of the sweater as fast as he can. He gives it to her and she disappears in it and then she says, Smells nice. Nice sweater.

I have a place, he says.

FRANK

A
S SOON AS
Frank realized all of his money was gone, he put on the kettle and got out the plastic coffee cone and put a paper filter in it. He got the sugar bowl he’d bought at the Sally Ann out of the cupboard. It still had the piece of masking tape with
25¢
written in ballpoint pen. The day he bought the sugar bowl, there was a woman trying on a wedding dress.

She was scrawny and bucktoothed and the bones in her face were so misaligned that she appeared deformed. The two women who work at the Sally Ann on Waldegrave were excited about the wedding and they seemed to know the groom-to-be, whom they called Johnny and who seemed to be mentally retarded.

Frank found the sugar bowl in a bin of kitchen junk, spoons with enamel thumbnail pictures of P.E.I. and rusty ladles and a plastic spaghetti strainer that someone had put too close to the heat and had melted the side out of it.

The sugar bowl was pinwheel crystal, which his mother had had four wineglasses of, the same pattern; some client she cleaned for had given them to her as a Christmas present.

He picked at the tape with his finger now, and peeled it off and there was left a little skim of gritty dirt in the shape of the piece of tape that he rubbed with his thumb and it balled up there and he flicked his hand. Something about this flicking made it real to him how absolutely alone in the world he was, because he looked absurd doing it but there was no one to see.

At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered through a cardboard box of junk for a lid to the sugar bowl, he knew it should have a lid, and was surprised by how much he wanted a lid. He did not want to be someone without the lids to things. He wanted whole sets of whatever he had, or nothing at all.

He wanted, when he went to the paint store, to get the trim they suggested went with the burnt sand colour he had chosen. He wanted, when he looked into the eyes of the idiot they had working there, who said he couldn’t mix that colour but he could mix one pretty damn close, to grab him by the front of the shirt and shout in his face that he didn’t want close.