Cherry Bites (16 page)

In the late afternoon I decided to look for Pete. I walked through my neighbourhood to downtown Norwood. I hadn’t eaten a thing all day. I noticed two yards with excellent crabapple trees; the apples were ready but I didn’t think I could swallow anything at the moment. Maybe I’d pick some on the way home.

I walked down Marion Street, past the Norwood Hotel, past Al’s Jewellers, the Legion, and the Dutch Meat Market, to the Dairi-Wip next to the Marion Hotel.

The Dairi-Wip Drive-In is famous for its burgers and fries. My stomach was growling but I had no appetite. I ordered a small vanilla ice cream cone to keep up my strength. I found a place to sit at an outside table with two burly bikers who were enjoying their Fat Boy burgers and their fries. One of them nodded at me; his mouth was full. The other guy was too busy with his food to acknowledge me. I licked daintily and consciously tried not to look like I was licking any part of a person.

It was a hot afternoon. The traffic built up on Marion Street as rush hour approached. I swallowed exhaust fumes along with my ice cream. When I was finished my cone I walked over to the hotel. The Marion was just the kind of place where Pete would feel at home and it wasn’t far from where the cops had found Henry’s car. Inside the cramped and darkened lobby a handsome young man sat behind a counter.

“Do you have a Peter Ring registered here?” I asked.

He smiled. “Is he a guest of the city?” His eyes were deep blue.

I didn’t know what he meant at first.

“All of our guests are welfare recipients,” he said. “They live here.”

“Oh, I see. So there isn’t anyone at all who would have checked in in the past day or two.”

“No. Sorry,” he said. “You could try the Chalet down the street.”

“The Chalet. That’s a good suggestion,” I said and meant it. There are exotic dancers at the Chalet. Guys have been known to get beat up there. Plus, it was close to the stockyards where Henry was found.

My walk was turning out to be way too long. It wasn’t that far to the Chalet from the Marion Hotel, but added on to the ground I’d already covered it was a fair distance. My walking sandals are comfortable and I was wearing one of my coolest dresses so I was feeling okay, but my hip was starting to ache. Back at the Dairi-Wip I asked for a large glass of water. I sat on the steps of the Ukrainian Catholic church across the street and drank it down.

I was fixing in my mind what I’d say to Pete if I found him, when I saw a familiar shape scuttling along the street heading east: Eileen. She didn’t notice me. I followed her at a distance right to the Chalet. As I walked into the lobby I saw her disappearing up the stairs to the second floor. The young woman behind the desk grinned openly at me and I smiled back.

“How ya doin’?” she called out as I made my way quickly up the stairs.

She was as beautiful as the young man at the Marion was handsome. I wanted them to run away together to a land of clean air and fresh laundry.

On the second floor I took my time, listening at doors till I knew I had the right room. I heard Eileen’s high-pitched whine and thought of Mitzi Widener.

“Let me get you something to eat, Pete. I’ll go downstairs to the restaurant.”

He murmured a reply.

“You really should eat something,” she said.

“Let it go, Eileen.” His voice was raised now.

I knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. Eileen was standing beside the bed where Pete sat slumped against the headboard. She was clutching a purse, looking more like she was shopping at Wal-Mart than visiting the junkie love of her life, sprung and free.

Pete dismissed her when he saw me. It wiped the smugness off her face and I took some satisfaction in that. She argued, but then left.

My heart was beating in my throat. What if he hit me on the head and stuck a needle in my arm? No. He’d have to take me by surprise and I wouldn’t let him do that. Poor old Henry. He’d never have dreamed Pete would try to hurt him.

“You left the Norwood,” I said.

“Good one,” he said. He was agitated.

I poked my head in the bathroom. It was clean, with new fixtures.

Pete cooked up a mixture in a spoon.

“The ’Wood was too posh for me,” he said. “The Chalet is more my style.”

He pulled his lips back and they framed his rotting teeth. He rolled up a baggy pant leg to find a vein behind his knee.

I was grateful that he didn’t pull his pants down, that I didn’t have to see his underwear or worse.

Pete sank back on the bed with his eyes half-shut. A line of drool escaped one corner of his crusty lips.

I perched on a battered chair by the window. The curtains were closed. The only way I could keep from looking at the carpet and guessing what the stains were made of was to close my eyes.

Pete spoke in his monotone. “I knew he was dead when I was building my space ship. I just pretended I didn’t.”

My eyes opened and I saw a hint of a smile on his face.

“It was easier that way,” he said.

He was talking about our dad.

“Murray,” I said.

“Kind of like it was easier to pretend that I couldn’t see you. Once I realized that people were so easy to fool, life became very simple for me.”

He adjusted the pillows behind his head so that he was almost sitting up.

“No matter how much someone thinks they know you, they can never really fathom what’s going on inside your head,” he said. “No one can read anyone’s mind.”

“Did you mean to kill Henry?” I asked.

He closed his eyes for a long moment and then opened them abruptly and sat up.

“Of course not,” he said.

“You could have.”

“I could have baked a cake. I could have run naked through the streets of St. Boniface. There are many things I could have done.”

“You know what I mean. You could have made a mistake with Henry and given him too much.”

“No, I couldn’t have; I’m a pro.” Pete fussed with his lips, picking off pieces of non-existent fluff. “I like Henry,” he added.

“You hit him on the head!”

“It was just a tap.”

“No, it wasn’t. He has a concussion.”

“Concussion, shmoncussion.” His eyes were at half-mast again, struggling to open wider.

“Let me bite you,” he said.

“No!”

My heart stopped beating and I wondered if I was going to die. I wished I hadn’t walked so far into the room. My heart must have been working because I made my way slowly toward the door.

“Come on,” he said. “You owe me that much.”

“I owe you nothing,” I said, and repeated it over and over inside my head, to convince myself of the rightness of my statement.

My breathing was shallow. I struggled to get enough air. He knew about the bite. He had known all these years. Nora must have told him.

Pete snickered. “I remember it,” he said, reading my mind, so soon after saying such a thing was impossible. “No one had to tell me.”

I didn’t try to speak; I needed all my energy to breathe.

He stood up and I could smell his chemical stink.

“Let me bite you,” he said again. “Just once.”

“No.”

I backed toward the door and he lunged at me, but stumbled over a ripple in the carpet. He meant it. He wanted a piece of my flesh. I wondered if I could overpower him; I was pretty sure I could, wonky hip and all.

He crouched with his arms out to his sides like a wild man. When he lunged again I kicked him with my right foot and connected with the side of his face. I had a hand on each wall of the hallway to do that or I never could have managed it. A buckle on my sandal sliced his cheek open. Blood oozed down his face and he howled like a rabid wolf. He held his hand to the wound and slid down the wall to the floor. The blood ran fast enough to seep through his fingers. He didn’t get up.

I closed the door behind me and ran the length of the hall and down the exit stairs. When I reached Coronation Park I was still shaking so I sat by the monument again until I calmed down.

How could he remember? He was only one. I supposed it was possible. Anyway, that didn’t matter.

I walked home with Pete’s words still buzzing through my brain.

His ignorance of my biting him, the circumstances of Murray’s death, his not seeing me till I was nineteen, all those things that I had believed for my entire life turned out to be untrue. A lifetime of lies. All those basic facts of my existence disintegrated in a matter of moments. My whole childhood was wrong, a sham. In the newness of that information I had trouble not expanding the sham to include the whole of my life.

I favoured my aching hip on the way home and completely forgot about picking crabapples.

In the evening Joanne and I went to see Henry. She drove. I didn’t tell her about my visit with Pete. I was still digesting his words.

We pretended that I was Henry’s wife and that Joanne was his sister. He wasn’t conscious, but the nurse assured us that it was sleep, not a coma, and that he might be able to visit with us as early as the next day.

Back at my place Joanne stayed for one game of Scrabble. She won.

“Are you okay?” she asked as she dumped the tiles back into the box.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, all that’s happened,” she said. “Henry, Pete. You’re very quiet. You didn’t seem to mind my winning the game.” She smiled. “That’s not like you.”

“I guess I’m okay. A little overwhelmed, I guess. Confused.”

“Would you like me to stay overnight?” she asked.

I thought about that. It was a kind offer and I knew I should say yes. But I didn’t. I said goodbye to my friend and did a little tidying up. Then I set myself up in the backyard to think about everything that was going on and to wait for whatever was going to happen next. I knew it wouldn’t be long.

It was a bright and windy night. The shining moon and the streetlamp from the lane lit up the backyard like a stage. I sat in my camp chair sipping cool white wine from a glass. I smoked like a fiend. How could I not smoke while Pete was in my life? I decided I would give it up for a while after he was gone.

I looked at the air where my garage used to stand. The warm wind lifted up wisps of black ash from the pile of rubble and set them down again. There was nothing to be saved from the mess. The small building had always been more of a junk shed than a garage. I started to feel glad that it was gone.

Murray’s hose reel stood apart and alone. I was pleased that it had survived the fire. I had reattached the hose.

Pete entered the yard through the gate and sloped toward me.

“Hello, Pete.”

“Cherry.”

It was still strange to hear him speak my name and to watch him see me.

He dragged one of Dougwell’s wooden chairs over and sat. He reeked of sweat. All those new bathroom fixtures at the Chalet Hotel were going to waste. The blood had dried on his face but he had done nothing to clean it up. It was a nasty cut, on the same side as his scar, but lower down.

“What happened to the garage?” he asked.

“It burned down.”

“I can see that.”

It wasn’t a topic I wanted to discuss.

“Drink?” I asked and showed him the bottle of La Playa.

“No thanks,” he said. “I don’t get much of a kick from drinking.”

“Wait here.” I got up. “There’s something I have that I think you might like.”

I locked the door behind me. If he were to come inside the house he might never leave. I could picture that.

Absinthe was what I was looking for. It’s about six million per cent alcohol. A city councillor gave it to me as a gift when I interviewed him. He had brought it home from Prague. It came in a gift package with a bell-shaped glass and a perforated spoon for the sugar cube. It even contained wormwood, but not near as much as the absinthe from long ago. I had tried this modern version once. It had a strong licorice flavour with a slightly medicinal edge. Not unpleasant. It certainly didn’t need the sugar. But I put all the supplies on a tray, including a pitcher of cool water. I knew the ritual would appeal to Pete and his romantic vision of himself. He could be buddies with Ernest Dowson and the other poets who had scarfed the stuff down in Paris in the 1890’s. He could show them his haiku.

All I saw when I looked out the dining room window was my own reflection but I knew Pete was watching me. I thought about calling someone. Frank Foote? There wasn’t a good enough reason. He and his cohorts didn’t want any help from me with the Henry situation. Frank had made that clear enough. I hoped the police would have spoken to Henry by morning. That’s when I’d call Frank.

Joanne would have dropped everything and been here in a minute, but to what end? There was a reason I sent her home. I wanted whatever this was to play itself out. I was pretty sure Pete wasn’t going anywhere. He was home, after all. I’d see to it that he stayed till morning came.

When the tray was ready I considered spitting in the glass, like I’d heard disgruntled serving people do, then thought better of it. It would just be something I’d be ashamed of later.

The grass felt damp beneath my bare feet. I should have been wearing shoes with all that debris around.

“Haul that little table over, would you?” I said to Pete.

He did as he was told and I set the tray down.

“Absinthe,” he said and smiled a lazy smile. His teeth, in that light, looked to be made of wood. His nose was running and his eyes were swimming in a viscous substance, something that wasn’t tears.

He poured the green liquor into the glass and added sugar to the spoon. He dipped the sugar into the absinthe and out again and lit it with a match. It burned and bubbled till he plunged it back into the glass and the liquid was ignited.

I had the horrible thought that he was going to suck it into a syringe and shoot it up. But he added water then and the potion turned slightly cloudy. He took a swig and some of it dribbled down his chin and neck. So much for any ritual I’d ever heard of.

“Why did you leave your
ID
in Henry’s pocket?” I asked. “How could you have thought it would work for more than a few minutes?”

“It seemed like a fun idea,” Pete said, “to pretend he was me. A few minutes, forever, what’s the diff?”

He drank some more, didn’t spill any this time.

“Fun,” I said.

“Why didn’t you ever leave this house?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s my home.”

Pete sat for so long with his eyes closed that I considered going inside.

“It’s my first memory,” he said, as though he felt my intention and had to stop me. “You biting me, I mean. Why did you do that, Cherry?”

“I’m so sorry, Pete. I was a kid. Kids do stupid things.”

“No need to apologize.” He smiled. “It freed me up. Anything weird I did, or didn’t do, was because of what you had done to me, at least as far as Nora and Murray and Dr. Bondurant were concerned. And I was even less on the hook by not remembering. If I’d admitted to having a recollection of it, I would have been blamed eventually for not being able to deal with it.”

He finished what was in his glass and went through the whole routine again. This time the absinthe didn’t flame when he stirred the burnt sugar into it.

“I used it forever,” Pete said. “It never got old. And I learned early that you felt you deserved any punishment that came your way. I’m glad you bit me.”

“My biting you wasn’t near as bad as you trying to run over me with Nora’s car,” I said. “You were practically a grown-up when you hurt me. You could have killed me. Aren’t you even a little bit sorry for doing that?”

“It was an accident,” said Pete.

“Honest?”

“Yes.”

It was what I wanted to hear, more than anything. So I believed it.

“You know Nora’s dead,” I said and poured the last of the wine into my glass. It wasn’t going to be enough. I threw the empty bottle toward the rubble of the garage, wanting it to smash. But it just landed damply on the blackened grass.

He didn’t acknowledge my mention of our mother.

“Being called Assface wasn’t great,” he said, “but really, it was just a bunch of letters run together to make a sound that wasn’t all that unpleasant. Assface, Ashface, Assfish, Ashes.”

I wanted to ask him about his new way of talking, in those even dead tones. But I stayed quiet.

“And it added to the sympathy that came my way, by adults especially, and even some of the kids, mostly girls.”

Sitting back in my camp chair, I listened to him tell me that my whole life had been a mistake, based on his lies.

“I got so good at not seeing you,” Pete said, “that I swear to Christ I didn’t see you a lot of the time. I really didn’t see you the night of the car accident, for instance, although I don’t think anyone would have, with the light being off and all.”

Mitzi Widener barked in her high-pitched voice. I welcomed its familiarity.

“I decided to be able to hear you,” Pete went on, “because I was interested in what you said and also, I didn’t want to work that hard.

“Not speaking to you was easy.” He smiled. “I could pick and choose behaviours.”

The absinthe wasn’t making Pete drunk. He seemed to me to be in a state of calm lucidity. But I knew I couldn’t count on that lasting.

“Dr. Bondurant told Nora that the trauma of having my sister bite me was compounded by Murray’s death. The doc was a smart guy. A lot of the time he knew I was lying, but he couldn’t get me to tell the truth. He felt powerless to help me. He told Nora that continued help would be good for me, that I should always have someone to talk to about my feelings so that I wouldn’t act out in inappropriate ways. He even gave Nora the names of other psychiatrists, in case she or I wanted to try someone else, but she didn’t bother. I seemed okay to her. My not seeing my sister didn’t seem like a big deal to her. And yeah, I know she’s dead. She let me know when she went into the hospital for the final time. She figured I should know that she was going to die.”

“So she was in touch with you at Matsqui.”

“Yup.”

“She gave you her journal.”

“Yup.”

“You sent it to me this summer.”

“Yup.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you might find it interesting, I guess.”

“Why now?”

“I was getting out.”

“So?”

“I wanted to put you in the picture before…”

“Before what?”

“In case we lose touch.”

I laughed. “Heaven forbid we should lose touch,” I said.

“A nurse phoned me on the night that Nora died. Nora had confided in her about my being in jail and all. So she phoned to let me know.”

“Dougwell didn’t know about your situation,” I said. I needed to be sure.

“No. Of course not.”

It pissed me off when he said
of course not
, as if I could possibly take anything for granted.

“Why were you in jail for so long?” I asked. “The time seems long for the crime—selling drugs to kids, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what I got sent up for, but it’s not what happened. I was buying, not selling.”

“So Nora said in her clever code.”

Pete chuckled. “Yeah, I knew you’d be able to figure it out.”

“Why was the sentence so long?” I asked again.

“I became a full-fledged junkie in prison,” Pete said. “That kind of promotes bad behaviour.” He shivered.

The wind had calmed and the night was quiet without it. The atmosphere in the yard, where there had been fire so recently, was heavy like a dead weight, killed by the flames. I love quiet but not like that. It was like the calm before…what…Pete’s next death?

“I phoned you that night,” Pete said, “the night that Nora died.”

“You did?” I was startled. “I remember the phone call I got that night.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“You asked to speak to a nun.”

Pete smiled and I did too.

“Sister Mary somebody or other.”

“Mary of the Five Wounds,” Pete said.

“Yes. That’s it.”

“That’s Myrna’s influence,” he said. “We used to fool around on the phone all the time. She had some great lines.”

A boatload of wine made an about-face and splashed up my esophagus to the back of my throat. I swallowed it.

“Myrna?”

“Yeah. We hung out for a couple of years before I went west.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“No. You weren’t supposed to know. No one was. She was five years older than me and Eileen was my official girlfriend for part of the time, and Myrna thought you would kill her if you knew. There were lots of reasons for keeping it a secret.”

“Pig.”

“Who?”

“Myrna. You. Lying pigs.”

Pete closed his eyes.

There were so many more questions I wanted to ask him, but they lost their importance next to Myrna.

“Did Myrna know you were alive all this time?” I asked.

But Pete was out; he’d gone limp.

In my basement I found a length of rope and I tied Pete to his chair. Then I tied the chair to the hose reel. He wasn’t going anywhere.

He vomited in his sleep, coughed till his throat was clear. I waited for this to be over, to make sure he didn’t die. I looked at the new wound on his face and the old scar higher up; it was barely there. Then I tied more knots to ensure that he would be there in the morning. That’s when I’d call Frank.

I hadn’t asked Pete about Duane, if he’d set me up to be hurt. Maybe I would; maybe I wouldn’t.

The car accident was an accident. That was important.