Skin Folk (4 page)

“So then little Zukie draws herself up real tall, and she says, ‘No, silly. The purpose of the skeleton is something to hitch
meat to.’ Really! I swear, I nearly died laughing, she sounded so serious.”

The woman eyed him as she walked past, smiled a little, glanced down. She played with her long hair and stage-whispered to
her co-worker, “God, Latino men are just so hot, don’t you think?” They giggled and moved on, trailing children.

The gears of Artho’s brain kicked back into realtime. He was standing at the southwest corner of King and Bay, holding a chicken
thighbone. Fleshless and parched, it felt dusty between his fingers. He dropped it and wiped his hand off on his jeans. Latino?
What the hell?

Streetcar coming. Artho got on, elbowing himself some rush hour standing room between an old man with a bound live chicken
that lay gasping in his market basket and three loud, hormonal young women, all politics and piercings. Artho reached for
a steady strap. Traffic was gridlocked. He stared blankly out the window as the streetcar inched its way past a woman struggling
with two huge dogs on leashes. Bergers des Pyrenées, they were; giant, woolly animals bred for rescuing skiers trapped under
alpine avalanches. They were so furry that Artho could barely make out their legs. They lumbered along in a smooth, four-on-the-floor
gait. The dogs’ handler tugged futiley at their leashes, barely able to keep up. The beasts could probably cover miles in
effortless minutes, snowshoeing on their woolly feet. Artho fancied that they would move even faster, smoother, if you changed
them to have six legs, or eight. They would glide along like enormous tarantulas. Artho looked at their handler’s legs and
had the oddest feeling, like when an old film skips a frame, and for an instant, you can see the hole-punched edges of the
film strip, black and chitinous on the screen, and then it jerks back into place, but now you’re looking at a different scene
than you were before. It was like that, Artho looking at this woman walking on ordinary woman legs, then reality skipped frames,
and he was seeing instead a being whose natural four-legged stance had been twisted and warped so that all it could manage
was this ungainly two-legged jerking from foot to foot. Made into something it wasn’t.

Alarmed, Artho blinked. He made himself relax. Tired. Too many hours at work in front of a computer screen, staring at all
that skin. He leaned his head against the streetcar window and dozed, thinking hungrily of the stewed chicken and rice he
would have for dinner, with avocado—his dad always called them alligator pears—on the side. He could see the fleshy avocado
in his mind’s eye: slit free of its bumpy rind; pegged and sitting on a plate; beads of salt melting on the sweating, creamy
skin. He imagined biting into a slice, his teeth meeting in its spineless centre. His mouth watered.

It wasn’t until he reached his stop that he realized he really had forgotten to buy the damned avocados. He found some tired,
wrinkly ones in the corner store near his apartment. The man behind the counter, who served Artho at least twice a week when
he came in for cigarettes or munchies, grumbled at the fifty dollar bill that Artho gave him, and made a big show over holding
it up to the light to see if it was counterfeit. Artho had seen the same man cheerfully make change from bills that large
for old women or guys in suits. He handed Artho a couple of twenties and some coins, scowling. Artho held each twenty up to
the light before putting it into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said sweetly to the guy, who glared. Artho took his avocados
and went home. When he sliced into them, one of them was hard and black inside. He threw it out.

“So,” Artho’s brother said, “I’m out with the guys the other night, and…”

“Huh? What’d you say?” Artho asked. Something was obscuring Aziman’s voice in the phone, making rubbing and clicking sounds
over and around his speech. “What’s that noise?” Artho asked the receiver. “Like dice rolling together or something.”

“One dice, two die. Or is it the other way around? Anyway, so I’m…”

“What’re you eating? I can’t make out what you’re saying.”

“Hold on.” Silence. Then Aziman came on again. “This any better?”

“Yeah. What was that?”

“This hard candy the kids brought home. Got me hooked on it. These little round white thingies, y’know? I had a mouthful of
them.”

“Did you spit them out?”

“Well, not round exactly. Kinda egg-shaped, but squarer than that. Is ‘squarer’ a word?”

“Did you spit them out?” Artho was just being pissy, and he knew it. He could tell that Aziman had gotten rid of the candies
somehow. His voice was coming through clearly now.

“Yeah, Artho. Can I tell my story now?”

“Where’d you spit them?”

“What’s up with you today? Down the kitchen sink.”

And Aziman started in with his story again, but Artho was distracted, thinking on the tiny white candies disappearing into
the drain, perhaps washed down with water.

“… so this man walks up to us, akid really, y’know? Smart-ass yuppie cornfed kid with naturally blond hair and a polo shirt
on. Probably an MBA. And he says to me, ‘’s up, man?’ only he says it ‘mon.’ I mean, I guess he’s decided I’m from Jamaica
or something, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Artho. “I know.”

“He gives me this weird handshake; grabs my thumb and then makes a fist and I’m supposed to touch my fist to his, I think,
I dunno if I did it right. But he says, ‘’s up’ again, and I realize I didn’t answer him, so I just say, ‘Uh, nothing much,’
which I guess isn’t the lingo, right? But I dunno what I’m supposed to say; I mean, you and me, we’re freaking north Toronto
niggers, right? And this white guy’s got Toronto suburbs written all over him, too. Probably never been any farther than Buffalo.
So what’s he trying to pull with that fake ghetto street shit anyway, you know? And he leans in close, kinda chummy like,
and whispers, ‘Think you could sell me some shit, man?’ And I’m thinking,
Like the kind you’re trying to sell me on right now?
I mean, he’s asking me for dope, or something.”

Artho laughed. “Yeah, happens to me, too. It’s always the same lame-ass question, never changes. I just point out the meanest-looking,
blackest motherfucker in the joint and say, ‘Not me, man, but I bet that guy’ll be able to help you out.’”

“Shit. I’ll try that next time.”

“Though I guess it isn’t fair, you know, my doing that. It’s like I’m picking on guys just ’cause they’re blacker than me.”

“Heh. I guess, if you want to look at things that way. You going to Mom’s for Easter?”

“Is Aunt Dee going to be there?”

But Aziman’s only reply was a rustling, shucking type of noise. Then, “Shit!”

“What?”

“I stuck my hand into the bag for more candy, y’know? Just figured out what these things are.”

“What?”

“Skulls. Little sugar skulls, f’chrissake.”

Dead people bits. That’s what the candy was. It was all in the way you looked at it.

“No,” said Artho. “It’ll be just like last year. I’m not going to Mom’s for Easter.”

A few days later it happened again, a weird unfamiliarity when Artho looked at human bodies. He was in the mall food court
on his lunch hour. When he went back to work, it would be to spend the rest of the day updating the Tit for Twat site:
Horny Vixens in Heat! No Holes Barred!

The food court was crowded. People in business suits wolfed down Jolly Meals, barked on cell phones. The buzz of conversation
was a formless noise, almost soothing.

Not many empty spaces. Artho had to share a table for two with a thirtyish man in fine beige wool, engrossed in the financial
pages of the
Globe & Mail
newspaper. The man had shaved his head completely. Artho liked it. There was something sensuous about the baldness, like
the domed heads of penises. Cute. Artho was thinking of something to say to him, some kind of opener, when the man’s ears
caught his gaze. They jutted out from the side of his head like knurls of deformed cartilage. There really was nothing odd
about the guy’s ears—that’s just how ears were—but they still gave Artho a queasy feeling. With one hand, he worried at his
own ear. He looked around at other people in the food court. All their ears seemed like twisted carbuncles of flesh sprouting
from the sides of their heads, odd excrescenses. Nausea and doubt squirmed like larvae in Artho’s chest. His fingers twitched,
the ones that he would use a few minutes from now to point, click, and drag his mouse as he smoothed out the cellulite and
firmed up the pecs of the perfect naked models on the screen, making them even more perfect. He closed his eyes to block out
the sight of all those ugly ears.

Someone was singing. A child’s voice, tuneless and repetitive, threaded its whiny way through the rumble of lunchtime chatter:

“Tain’t no sin,

Take off your skin,

And dance around in your bones.

Tain’t no sin…”

Artho opened his eyes. Wriggly as only seven-year-olds can be, a little girl slouched beside her father at a table for four,
sitting on her spine so she could kick at the centre pole supporting the table welded to its four seats. Her wiry black hair
was braided into thousands of dark medusa strands. The brown bumps of her knees were ashy with dry skin. The lumpy edge of
a brightly coloured Spider-Man knapsack jutted out from behind her back.

“Tain’t no sin…” She kicked and kicked at the pole. An old man who’d been forced to share the table with them looked up from
his chow mein and gave her a strained nice-little-girl smile.

“Quit it, Nancy.” Not even glancing at his daughter—was she his daughter?—her father reached out with one hand and stilled
the thin, kicking legs. With his other hand he hurriedly stuffed a burger into his mouth. Green relish oozed between his fingers.

The little girl stopped kicking, but all that energy had to have some outlet. She immediately started swaying her upper body
from side to side, jerking her knapsack about so that something thumped around inside it. She bobbed her head in time to her
little song. Her braids flowed like cilia. She looked around her. Her gaze connected with Artho’s. “Daddy,” she said loudly
to the man beside her, “can you see me?” She wore glasses with jam-jar-thick lenses, which refracted and multiplied her eyes.
She didn’t look up at her father.

And he didn’t look down at her, just kept gnawing on his burger. “Can’t see you at all, little girl,” he mumbled. “I only
think I can. You’re nowhere to be seen.”

She smiled at that. “I’m everywhere, though, Daddy.”

Must be some kind of weird game they had between the two of them. Then she started singing again. Artho found himself swaying
slightly from side to side in time with her song. He looked away. He’d always hated Spider-Man. As a kid, the comic book character
had frightened him. His costume made him look like a skeleton, a clattery skin-and-bone man that someone had painted red as
blood.

“… dance around in your bones!” the little girl shouted, glaring at him from the depths of her specs.

Artho leapt to his feet and dumped the remainder of his lunch in the garbage, fled the girl’s irritating ditty. His table
partner still had his nose buried in his paper.

As Artho walked the last few feet to the elevator of his office building, he suddenly became aware of the movement of his
legs: push off with left leg, bending toes for leverage; contract right knee to extend right leg, heel first; shift weight;
step onto right foot; bend right knee; repeat on the other side. For a ludicrous moment, he nearly tripped over his own feet.
It was like some kind of weird jig. He stumbled into the elevator, smiled I’m-fine-really at a plump young woman in a business
suit who was gazing at him curiously. She looked away. Then he did. They stared politely at the opaque white numbers, knobbled
as vertebrae, that indicated each floor. The numbers clicked over, lighting up one at a time: 10… 11… 12…
Roll the bones,
thought Artho.

“Um… do you know what time it is?” the woman asked him.

He checked his watch, smiled at her. “Almost ten to one.” The deep rust of the suit made her flawless cinnamon skin glow,
hinted at the buxom swell of breast, belly, hip, and thigh. Yum. Artho’s mouse fingers stopped twitching.