Ragged Company (48 page)

The interment was simple. I set the statue to the side of the coffin. There was a large throng of people all around us and they gave a collective sigh when they saw it. I trailed my hand across it, then looked at the coffin. It was like I touched him too, just then. When I looked up again there was silence and it moved me greatly. Two hundred people standing and waiting in perfect silence.

“Dick would want to tell you all a story if he could,” I began. “Truth is, he loved stories. He loved them when they were told to him and he loved them most when they were on a movie screen and shown to him. I think it was the words. Words amazed him, mostly because he’d never learned to read or write and the power of words to give us the world amazed him. Simply amazed him.

“I don’t know what words to offer him now except to tell a story. He’d like that. We were standing on the corner once, a long time ago. It was windy. It was cold and we didn’t have a place to go. The Mission wasn’t open all day back then like it is now, and we hadn’t hit upon the idea of hiding out in the movies yet. Dick had a little bottle of rum and I had some vodka. Our other friend Digger had whisky, so we were pretty much okay on that front.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd.

“We’re shaking and shivering and getting anxious for shelter. Anywhere but where we were. It was Sunday, so the stores were closed. Sunday afternoon. Dick spies this vacation place across the street and gets all excited and starts pestering us to walk over there. Finally, more to quiet him than anything, we do. There’re posters in the windows showing blue waters, beaches, smiling girls in bikinis, palm trees, the whole deal. So we stand there in the doorway of that travel place and Dick passes around his bottle and we drink. Digger asks what the hell we’re doing there and Dick, well, Dick just gives him this look like he’s surprised Digger doesn’t know. Then he says, ‘Permeate.’ Just like that. ‘Permeate.’

“I asked him what he meant. He looked at me, eyes all wide and excited, and said, ‘It’s what happens when you imagine.’ Then he tells us to look at the posters and imagine we’re there with rum drinks on that hot sand. Then he passes his rum around again, tells us to drink and imagine real hard that we’re on that beach as we drink. We do, and right away we feel warmer. From the belly on up, we feel warmer. I told him that and he smiled. ‘Permeate,’ he said again. ‘You imagined and it permeated you.’

“Now, I know it was the burn in the belly from the two shots of rum we’d just had back to back, and being out of the wind in that doorway, but I never told him that. I never told him because a part of me wanted to believe in the power of that word like he told it. I don’t know where he heard it or where he got its definition, but it worked for me then.

“So from now on, whenever I’m in a park, I’m going to imagine we’re still walking around and telling crazy stories to each other. Every time I go to the movies I will imagine that he’s sitting there with me. Every time I see something simple and charming and gentle, like kids playing in the sunshine, or two old people walking down the street hand in hand, I’m going to imagine he’s seeing it too and smiling that little-boy smile he always had for such things. I’m going to imagine that. I’m going to imagine that so he can permeate me, become a part of me again.

“Let the people around you permeate your life. That’s what Dick would say. That’s what he’d want for all of us.
Permeate.
It’s a rounder word. Or at least, now it is.”

I sat back down and watched as they lowered my friend into the ground, into the curve of a hill overlooking a small stream, and I imagined him sitting there in that shade looking over it too, smiling, at ease, at home. Imagine that.

A
FTER THE SERVICE
we rode in silence, each of us lost in our private thoughts, content to simply be in each other’s company knowing that we were joined by a common thread now and always. A ragged thread. A common, simple thread. But I wrestled with that feeling of union. I struggled to feel calm and at ease with knowing that Dick had been cared for and tended to very carefully and lovingly. I struggled because there was an important element missing and I felt responsible in some way for the fact that Digger had not appeared. In some way I had created a great rift in the company of friends, and despite not being completely
aware of how that had been accomplished, I felt guilty and ashamed for my ignorance.

“Are you okay?” Margo asked once we were back at the house.

“No. I’m not okay.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I feel dislocated. Out of joint. Out of balance somehow.”

“Digger?”

“Yes. I wish I knew what I did. What I said.”

“You did everything you could. It was a marvellous piece you wrote, and look at the reaction it got. It was so incredible to see all those people. You touched them. You affected them. You altered their lives.”

“I altered someone else’s, too.”

“You don’t know that.”

“He didn’t even show up to his friend’s funeral.”

“That’s a lot of weight you’re willing to bear, without knowing the whole story.”

I looked away. We’d changed from our funeral clothes in Dick’s room and stood there amid the jumble of all those movies, all those stories, all those imaginings, all those possible worlds. I missed him. Terribly. I missed both of them.

“I need some time,” I said. “Driving always helps. Driving around and thinking. Settling.”

She kissed me, a rich and gentle kiss, and let her hands stay on my face a while, looking deeply into my eyes. I kissed her again and walked out.

I drove. Steered the car unthinkingly as I mulled over the years since I’d walked away from a stone carver’s house and the tales it contained. I drove and watched the buildings as they slid by. Drove through rich, swanky estate areas, then neighbourhoods of small neat bungalows, row after row, and down streets full of worn facades, tumbled staircases, peeled shingling, and tattered eaves. I drove through market areas, recreational zones, corporate and commerce areas, derelict areas, and on into the industrial zone. All of them held stories, and as I wondered about the lives there
and how lost they become in the maze of motion that is a cosmopolis, I suddenly realized that I’d driven to Dick’s warehouse.

I’d never seen it in daylight. It was long and squat, made of rippled sheet metal with a narrow row of glass windows at the top. There were heavy chains across the doors and weeds sprung up along the seam where the frame met the ground. Derelict. Deserted. No one to hear its song. I got out of the car and walked along the wall shielded from view from the street and found the peeled-back edge of sheeting that allowed entry. Stepping through, I felt the silence immediately. This was a lonesome place. This was a place of shadow and darkness. I imagined Dick stepping through that triangle of space in the sheeting and walking through to the middle where he’d piled wood and furnishings and detritus high enough to cover the light of his small fire. I felt him. He permeated me and I walked to the middle.

There were bottles on the ground from the party Digger had thrown after the lottery win. Dust. Dirt. Spiderwebs. It appeared that no one had yet discovered this hideout. I cleared a small patch of dust from a turned-over wooden crate and sat. The light was diffused by the height of Dick’s pilings, taking on an almost bronze texture and giving the shadow a curious depth. I closed my eyes and thought about all of the nights he’d come here, alone, drinking enough to sleep by the light of his fire, a man haunted by ghosts I could not even begin to imagine, incapable of repelling them and therefore settling for the thick sludge of drink that would ease him into sleep. Dick. I wondered what I might have done differently to keep him with us. I wondered how I might have changed the way I spoke, the way I moved, the way I thought, in order to really hear him, to really see, to really feel the man I called my friend. I wondered how I could have closed the gap that existed between Square John and rounder, between the derelict and the privileged, between the lost and the secure, between Dick’s world and mine.

I thought about his smile. His laugh. I thought about the slack-jawed way he sat and watched movies. Amazed. Always amazed and surprised by the world and by stories. For him there were always stories, real or imagined, unlike myself, who had allowed
bitterness and anger to close me off. There were no real stories left, I’d told Mac. Not for me. But I was sitting right smack in the middle of one of the greatest stories I had ever heard, and it was real. It was real. It was painful and hard and joyous all at the same time and it had changed me, brought me back, made me able, perhaps, to reenter the home I sold, to hear its songs again, to write, to create, to tell the stories of this city for those willing to listen, for those who would imagine and try to see beyond what they thought they knew and let the lives around them permeate them. Double Dick Dumont had been an integral part of that great story, and right there in the shadowy world he had come to every night before fortune offered him more substantial shelter, he’d slept and drank and staved off demons, alone and frightened with no stories to comfort him. But he was at peace now. Now there were no alms to beg. Now there was no chill wind to thicken the blood, no cold rain to pucker the skin, no snow to freeze those big, flat feet, no storms to endure. Now there was only light, the eternal light on the banks of that glorious river where he walked. When I thought of him there, walking there, slack-jawed in amazement, I cried. Cried long and hard for him. Cried long and hard for myself. And then when my throat eased sufficiently to allow the air its movement, I sang.

“
Shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river,
” I sang in a whisper, tears flowing freely down my face.

“
Gather with the saints at the river,
” sang another voice, gruff and hard and out of tune. Digger stepped from behind the pilings where he’d secreted himself. He was carrying a bottle and dressed in the same clothes I’d last seen him in, unshaven, rumpled, and weary-looking.

I stood up and we looked at each other across that dim space of warehouse. No words. I didn’t know where to put my hands.

“Rock,” he said, wiping his face.

“Digger,” I answered.

“I read the paper.”

“Oh.”

“I seen all them people at Dick’s service, too.”

“You were there?”

“Yeah. I went but I was too ashamed to go in.”

“Ashamed?”

“Yeah. You loved him, didn’t you?”

“Still do.”

“Yeah. Me too. I guess I never really saw that. How much you cared. About him. About us. Big part of me never could believe it. That we were worth it. That I was worth it. Thanks,” he said, and extended his hand.

I took it. Neither of us made a move to shake. We just stood there, clasping hands firmly, looking at each other.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“Drink?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’d be good.”

We sat down on crates and he unscrewed the top from the bottle. He held the bottle up to the light and we each looked around at the place where Double Dick Dumont had come for shelter. He looked at me and poured a small dribble onto the ground.

“There’s one for the dead,” we said together.

I
T WAS
D
ICK
that stopped all the dying. I don’t know why, but the shadowed ones let me be after that. I found that curious. I wandered around the downtown core like Dick had said he wanted to do and visited people at the Mission, the shelters, the places they gathered, but I never saw them anymore. Just like that. Instead, I saw the people. Saw the way they could become a part of you if you let them. Saw the way their stories made your own richer, more meaningful, less a burden at times, all because you listened. That’s all they ever wanted, the shadowed ones, to have their stories heard, to be made real. When Granite told Dick’s story, as he did in his new column and in the book that came later, he told the shadowed ones’ stories too—and they let me be. I didn’t miss them. Not really. Instead, it was a comfort to know that story was doing what it was always meant to do: light
the fire of imagination so the things you didn’t see could permeate you. Dick’s word. So perfect.

Digger kept the store going. He started a training program for men who wanted off the street. They came to his shop and learned how to repair things. When Granite wrote about the program, scores of volunteers signed on to teach specific skills like wiring and metalwork. The money from everything sold through that store went to the Mission, and the part of the program that Digger stressed most was having the men go back to volunteer at the shelters and missions they came from. In turn, they learned skills, ways of earning money, how to work again, how to be responsible, and, especially, how to laugh again. Walking into Digger’s was to be drowned in waves of laughter coming from the back of the shop as he regaled everyone with wild tales of his rounder life.

“Guy needs a friggin’ yuk now and then,” Digger said. “What the fuck good is living through something if you can’t laugh?”

He put up a wheel, too.

It was something. It took a long time to find a ground-mounted Ferris wheel but James came through for him. They found it buried under straw in a barn where it had been abandoned by a show that had gone under some twenty years prior. They used the shop to clean it up, mend it, and prepare it for use again. Piece by piece. Length of steel by length of steel, you could see the magic working through Digger’s hands, bringing that old wheel back to life. They bought a piece of land near a playground in the downtown core and raised that wheel up into the sky one bright summer day with a crew made up of me, Timber, Granite, James, Margo, and the boys from the shop. Digger was majestic. He knew that wheel by heart, and as it reached upward into the sky I watched his face change. It went from old man to young man right in front of me, and I smiled to see it. When all of the arms had been placed and the braces, wires, and turnbuckles tautened, he put his hands on it. Placed his hands against one of the towers, leaned on it, closed his eyes, and I watched as his shoulders trembled slightly. When he opened his eyes again there were no tears there, just a light I had not seen before. And when he showed
Granite how to work the clutch and spin the wheel slowly around, then climbed onto a brace and stretched his arms and feet across it, I was thrilled for him. He nodded. Granite slipped the clutch and Digger rose into the air, spread-eagled on an arm of the great wheel. Granite slowed it to a stop when Digger reached the top and we all stared upward in amazement at the sight of the greatest wheelman in the world standing proudly against the sky again.