Alligator (24 page)

His mother’s urn was overturned on the wet carpet; the ashes had been dumped onto the floor and walked on. He saw the partial print of the boot treads. Carol stood just behind him and they both stared at the pile of ashes and she was still holding on to the sleeve of his shirt. Then she pushed past him.

Carol went down on her knees and stood the urn up and scooped up the ashes with both her hands. The ashes were clumping and smelled strongly like wet ashes. They smelled like what they were. Carol dragged her hands over the wet carpet until she had gathered most of the ashes and then she saw the lid of the urn that had rolled on its rim into the corner of the closet. She crossed the floor still on her knees and picked up the lid and crawled back over to the urn and put the lid on. Then she got up, which caused her to groan because of her back, and she washed her hands at the sink.

She used a squirt of the dishwashing liquid and then she dried her hands with a dishtowel. He had wanted to take the ashes to Signal Hill but he didn’t want to give them up, so he had put it off.

Gradually the idea had occurred to him that he might keep the ashes. The idea made him afraid he was too much alone. It seemed to him the thinking of someone who was out of step.

He didn’t imagine anything of his mother’s spirit remained in the ashes, he recognized them for exactly what they were — what was left of his mother’s body after it had been burned in the crematorium.

He understood, or thought he understood, the modern-day ritual of handing the ashes on to a grieving relative so that they may be scattered. He had imagined the sort of weather and the location along the trail where he could scatter the ashes.

The urn had cost $700. He doubted his mother had spent that much money on a luxury item ever in her life. The urn was solid brass and understated in design. For whatever reason he felt the urn was company.

Now the ashes were soaking wet and it was a travesty. He could imagine Valentin getting the door open and destroying the waterbed without compunction. The waterbed he saw, now that it had been slashed, was nothing more than a vanity.

But there was something so remote and alien about desecrating a grave that Frank felt weary beyond measure. He was also aware of the bald simplicity of the act.

If Valentin wanted money Frank would give him money. He would give him whatever it took because he understood, plainly, Valentin was stronger than he was. He sank to his knees and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw flecks of light. First, he would see if money was enough. If not, then he would give him the hot-dog stand.

COLLEEN

C
OLLEEN HAD NOW
attended the first meeting of juvenile delinquent mural painters who gathered at the Murphy Centre and the other delinquents were disgusting. They slouched, stank of body odour, and cigarettes, and they all wore velour pants from Zellers that hung down to reveal butt crack. They had chips and Pepsi for breakfast; their fathers were pimps and their mothers sniffed glue. They had the look, each of them, of low-intelligence, which was the nicest way she could think to put it.

Colleen felt very uncomfortable about spending August on a scaffold negotiating the class differences and flares of temper and social injustice that had created the divide between her and them, which was huge. They were assholes and she wasn’t.

A huge divide, she figured.

She recognized a girl from Grade 8. Kelly Fitzgerald, known at that time as Fitzy, who had once attacked Colleen behind the school with her gang of stringy-haired, raw-looking girls from Chalker Place.

The girls taunted her and threw a few rocks and she had run but they were on top of her and had knocked the wind out of her. There were about ten of them and they held her arms and legs, though she writhed in the dirt below them and wheezed, desperate to get her breath back.

Fitzy had a stick with a used condom on the end of it. She held the stick over Colleen’s head and told her to suck it or they’d beat the living shit out of her.

She lowered the condom an inch at a time, and the girls held tightly, grunting with the effort, murmuring consoling noises, as if they were administering medicine.

They asked her what she was going to do about it, and if she thought she was so hot now, and they said they’d heard she’d been doing the same thing Friday night with lots of guys and they’d heard she was good at it, and they promised it wasn’t going to hurt a bit if she just did what she was told.

Fitzy had one of her knees pressed into Colleen’s forehead and she had Colleen’s jaw wrenched open with one hand and was leaning over her upside down and her face was red with exertion and her eyes sparkled. She was lowering the condom down toward Colleen’s mouth with little jerks and Colleen saw there was a milky white glob of sperm in the nub at the bottom of it.

Colleen saw that Fitzy’s mouth was open too, unconsciously mimicking Colleen’s, the way a mother opens her mouth when spoon-feeding a baby.

The condom hung close enough to Colleen’s mouth and nose that she could smell its humanness. It smelled of latex and rot and fish and some drunken girl in the back of a car because she had nowhere else to go and cologne and cigarettes and failure and shuddering release. Then a police car pulled lazily onto the Holy Heart parking lot and the gang took off.

And here was Fitzy again, at the Murphy Centre, the same girl, pinned beneath a pregnant belly on a couch with bad springs. She was splayed in the humidity, arms and legs dangling, and a look of sheer relief came over her face when she saw Colleen.

We were in school together, she said, patting the seat beside her on the couch.

You’re Colleen, right? She wiggled her fingers at Colleen. What do you think of my engagement ring?

Colleen decided instantly she wouldn’t be painting murals. Something had happened when she and Frank were having sex and she felt it and he felt it too because her eyes flew open and his eyes were open and he saw it. They both felt it, which, that’s why she took the money and also because it was a lot of money. She got up from the couch.

Where are you going? Fitzy asked.

Way the hell out of here, Colleen said.

ISOBEL

W
AVES TRAVEL A
long distance without effort. They curl because they cannot not curl. Because when a wave is punched in the gut it caves. Because a wave is all show and no substance. The curdling spew rushes ahead. Foam scribbling over the sand, a note to say the wave is over. Because the glare on the water is in Sanskrit. Because the sea smells like the sea and she’s got the dress wet already and it’s clinging to her shins. Because she believes in submitting and has made a minor religion of it. Because there’s a big fat red-haired man, pale as potato in a sunhat, charging through the water with an inflatable shark. Because the theatre is a cult and people give their whole lives to the cause, which is what exactly? Because perfume is looking good right now, making a living is looking good. Not having to worry about money is looking good. Because only women who have come and come and come and come or who wear thick silver bracelets or who have lost a lover or who have vision or who have lost everything or who know what limelight feels like could possibly understand her and there are none of those women left.

Because she gave up everything and came home to Newfoundland. Because she had nothing to give up in the first place. Because early on she fell in love with Chris, who led her astray. Chris Morgan, who took her cross-country skiing, and they found their way out of the wilderness with a compass. He’d found the compass in a junk shop and had to hit it with his axe to get the needle to waver. Chris, who had drawn their supper out of a hole in the ice and built them an igloo with a fire in the centre so all night long they kicked off the blankets and slept naked and were soaked with sweat, and who made love to her in every single way it is possible to make love and the roof collapsed. Blocks of snow fell on their heads.

Chris, who was ridiculous, vital, super-horny, athletic, a liar and a cheat, who had a photographic memory, who always knew what regime had fallen where and what their major export was and how it related to the spoonful of cereal she was about to put in her mouth, who was untamable, who had introduced her to tahini and Tarkovsky, who was vigilantly agnostic; it had required a vigilance because his natural inclination was to believe.

And Isobel couldn’t not think of him whenever she snapped the clunky silver bracelet onto her wrist, the bracelet from Mexico. They had taken an outdoor steam bath in the backyard of a minor politician they’d met while hitchhiking. The pool was cobblestones and fed by a natural hot spring and there were seven or eight of them. The steam rose and shredded when it met the night air and his naked thigh bumped against her with the hot bubbles and whir of water and she loved him. Or she loved something so huge it must have been him and later there was the bracelet on her pillow.

She had come home to Newfoundland because she had failed. She didn’t get the soap and there was Chris, my God, directing a soap opera.

The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she’s getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognizes the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever?

Nobody said.

They said quite the opposite.

There is no cold on earth as unequivocal as this wave that is higher than her head and about to smash itself against her skull. It is as cold as cold can be. Because how can matter be so blasted with sunlight, so sparkle-riven, and curve with such blood lust and be so soul numbing? A wave is the bone around a marrow of light.

Isobel is standing up to her waist and wading out and she gets the wave full force, right in the face, up her nose, in her ears, in her mouth, down her throat, out her nostrils.

Valentin is behind her on the beach, overdressed. Even while she is deep under the water she can feel his eyes on her, the red dress billowing out and clinging, billowing out and clinging with every stroke she takes. She’s a jellyfish making for the horizon. She knows she’s safe for the moment; he won’t risk getting his leather shoes wet.

MADELEINE

S
HE HAD WOKEN
in a sweat; Archbishop Fleming in the corner of the room, the ghost of Archbishop Fleming.

He was showing up in her dreams more frequently since she’d gone into production with the summer shoot. Fleming had wanted silver chalices for the Eucharist in every church on the Southern Shore. Archbishop Fleming cracking a whip over the backs of four white stallions, and they come tearing out of a snow squall like the wrath of God.

She’d invented the character, Fleming, on a blustery afternoon several years ago while reading letters he’d written to the Pope. She came out of the Roman Catholic Archives and the world had been transformed, a fresh blanket of snow. And now when she falls asleep in the afternoon, there is the archbishop standing in the corner with his white robes and scarlet cape and his staff.

The premier had said they could helicopter the horses to shore. Because of the ice, they had no way to get the horses. There was a sling they could use, and it was expensive and dangerous, but it had been done with racehorses in Kentucky.

The animals would be blindfolded of course, and they would be lowered very carefully from the clouds. She had made a few phone calls. It was impossible, she had been told. It had never happened in Kentucky, or anywhere else. They would not helicopter the horses in, was she crazy? The animals would die of panic.

FRANK

H
E HAD TOLD
Valentin he would give him $1,000. They had met on the stairs and the Russian had said about cigarettes he wanted to buy cheap and sell at twice the price.

He wanted to borrow a grand that he would return the next day and even give Frank some extra for his trouble. Valentin said all of this casually, without reference to the ransacking of Frank’s apartment or the desecration of Frank’s mother’s ashes. Valentin honestly seemed to be asking for the loan the way someone might borrow a cup of sugar.

We are neighbours, said Valentin. When Frank agreed to the loan the Russian took his hand and shook it vigorously and said he thought they would be great neighbours now.

We must be friends, the Russian said. I like you because you are a businessman. You are like me. This is what we have to understand: there is a system but it is like a suspension bridge, it has give. People like us must exploit the give, do you know what I mean? Frank said he understood.

With persistence and patience, Valentin said. He clapped Frank on the shoulder.

But now all Frank’s money was gone and he could hear the Russians waking up. He could hear the toilet and something boiling and the door to the fire escape banged against the wall and he could hear them speaking to each other in Russian. Valentin would be down soon looking for the money.

She was from a comfortable home where, Frank bet, she had never needed anything. She’d never been in a welfare office. She had never had to get a brown paper bag from the breakfast program at school. She’d never been evicted from an apartment because her mother was three months behind in the rent. She had never eaten Kraft Dinner for supper unless she wanted to. She had never worn a windbreaker, one of three hundred, donated by a sports store to a shelter for battered women and distributed throughout the city to needy families, a windbreaker that became an immediately identifiable mark of poverty, but had to be worn anyway because at all costs it was important to pretend to one’s mother that one loved the wind-breaker. She had never seen her mother live with a toothache rather than pay to get it fixed.

Yet, she had taken his money, and that’s the way of it.

That is the way of money.

Frank put on a fresh T-shirt and picked up his keys and decided to walk down Duckworth Street to see if he could find Colleen. He’d get his money back.