The Cloaca (13 page)

And this happens: looking at the guy, thinking about The Captain and about that area having been the smoking section, it's like I get sucker-punched in the gut. Because here is how time moves: time moves so automatically that it's basically like breathing. You don't pay attention until the wind gets knocked out of you, and then you feel and scrutinize every breath that you drag in and force out of yourself and along with the pain there is suddenly the something like pain that comes from focusing so tightly on a thing that you otherwise always take for granted.

Ruminating on those two old guys smoking in the smoking section, I start to think about back at the same time when Lorrie and I used to get along as easy as math on a calculator, and then about when the Canadian Tire was a park with climbers like dinosaur skeletons that we used to dangle from the ribs of wasted. And then here comes stupid remembrances of all the different coloured caps we've had since I've been here and from that comes the different ways J.R. has styled himself in a decade. When I started it was a ponytail and beard, which became a beard and a brush cut, and then a mustache and mullet, and then the same hair he has now except grey for a while and now it's been dyed this impossible brown since he's got his mistress and he's only got a plug of hair under his lip that he calls a flavour saver and that's disgusting. Thinking about him gets me thinking about me, about how I've only gained 10 pounds since starting at this Place but have somehow managed to get fat. At the start there were all these things I'd considered doing with my life, except there were too many things I half-wanted to do so I chose nothing instead of the wrong thing and so stuck around this Place until I decided, and how I've decided nothing. And I think about how things might have been different if Lorrie had stuck around, how if we weren't strong enough people on our own we might have added up to something that might have gone somewhere and done something, but now we're just who we are in the same Place we started anyway. All this from hot water and chicken nuggets.

Here's a fact: you can spend a week cleaning this Place from toe to head and still it would be filthy. From the meat sizzling on the grill and fries popping in the fryer this skin of grease has settled on every surface. I have to buy new sneakers every three months because this filth eats away at the rubber, exposing the honeycomb of bounce in the sole. Poolside rules apply around here: you don't dare rush or run because you'll for sure slip and crack your head wide open. I've seen it happen. Now, the work here has become so automated over time that the garbage bins have to be put in the exact same spot every night, otherwise you'll end up with a heap of wax burger squares on the floor beside the grill and the bunched up, sweaty plastic bags that the fries were in beside the fryer and turds of unwanted receipts on the floor beside the till. When you move these bins what you uncover are these sterling circles of tile that the grease hasn't been able to mar over all that time.

I pull up a chair, the seat across from the guy that used to be The Captain's. Hot water and chicken nuggets folds the paper in toward himself.

“It's past eleven,” I say.

He flicks his wrist a few times like his watch is a Magic 8 ball and then squints at the time there, and then puts the thing to his ear. He looks back at his watch and stands up, giving one of those Erma nods, like the time is a matter of my opinion and not a fact up on the wall in plain sight.

“Well,” he says, looking down on me, tapping the table. “Well,” he says, “Time makes fools of us all.”

Hot water and chicken nuggets folds the paper under his arm and I follow him to the door.

“Someone said that,” he says as I open the door for him to leave out of.

I lock that door after him and stand there and watch him wander out alone into that dark, empty lot not overseen by any sort of Captain.

Erma's where I know she is, laid out dead to the world, spread over a few garbage bags of plush dinosaur dolls that we're giving away with the kids' meals, pillars of cups around her and a wall of jugs of fryer oil. J.R. is probably right about her not having slept regularly since his dad's death, the way Erma conks out like she does. Her whiskery, wrinkled mouth hangs open, her lids seem barely closed like she's not very deep in, and there's a sleeve of regular-large cups beside her on the floor.

“Erma,” I say, pronouncing her name like I'm picking sides for teams.

“Okay,” is what she says. She touches at her glasses to check that they're still there, and then touches her belly, to check that her cigarettes are still in her apron's pouch. Her eyes creep open like they're two small mouths too parched to ask for water.

Out back in the parking lot Lorrie is on the curb smoking and waiting for a ride still. Hunched over, I can make out the line of spine through her shirt, clear as the cut here dots on a coupon. Her hair still holds the shape of her cap.

Erma wobbles ahead of me and climbs into the car.

“Need a ride?” I ask Lorrie, locking up.

“No. They're coming for me.”

“Want me to wait around until they show up?” I shake my keys in my hand like mixed nuts.

“That's fine. I'll be fine. Take off. Have a good weekend, Ivan.”

“Okay,” I say, agreeing with her in that Erma way because this is not fine and she will not be fine and I will not have a good weekend.

Three months into my working at that Place, J.R. calls me into his office for a sort of performance review. This was long before I was his best friend, back when he was still Mr. Roberts. He sits me down and what is it he says to me exactly?

He asks me out of the gate what my problem is, asks me why my work isn't getting done, and why it's getting done so slipshod when I actually do it. The pie that was my shift back then also had only two slices: flirting with the girls I worked with—the larger piece—and striving to be just vaguely insulting enough to the customers that they couldn't actually complain. And here's J.R. wanting me to account for the crumbs.

“Honestly?” I ask him.

“I'd rather you be,” he says. “Saves me the trouble of having to sort through your shit.”

“I don't care,” I tell him flat out.

“And just what do you care about, Ivan?”

Not thinking about it, I'm pretending to, but I just stare at the calendar on the wall behind him, which has a picture of a different burger and combo for every month.

“Ivan,” he says to me, sadly, after I don't answer, “Can I be honest with you?”

“Saves me the trouble of having to sort through your shit.” Maybe this was the first time I made him smile.

“I don't care either,” is what he finally says, laying his hands flat out on his ink blotter and letting his shoulders crumple. “I don't care, but, you know, I do it all the same. Because this is what I do. Pretending won't get you to the end, but it will get you pretty far. So, while I can't ask you to care, you can never make a person care, I can ask you that while I'm putting money in your pocket that you at least do me the solid of pretending that you do.”

“Do the whole horrible world a favour,” is what he says to me.

“Erma,” I prod.

How the headlights gawk at her dark house makes it feel like we're here to burgle the place. This is the house J.R. grew up in and it's a small, pointless house with a lawn that means nothing, that hasn't changed since it was built, that the world has grown past and changed around, and a house that students will probably move into and hang flags and sheets instead of curtains in the windows of not long after Erma leaves it or she dies in it.

“Erma,” I jostle.

These two mason jars full of pungent, yellow, swirling smoke with a few holes poked in the top to let that dirty haze out is how I imagine Erma's lungs. Because after the fifteen-minute ride where she slept the whole time the car smells like she's snarfed a pack.

A cough either wakes her up or she wakes up and coughs.

My workdays now end with these as painful as they are awkward two or however many minutes where we just sit in Erma's driveway. First it's me waiting for Erma to wake up on her own cognizance, and then it's Erma's baby-dumb wonderment of having woken up in a place different than where she fell asleep, and then it's just us waiting for something to happen. We never look at each other, but just sit and stare forward like two cats taking a shit in the same box, waiting. I know what it is I wait for: for her to clear out so I can move on to something that even if it's nothing like poking my head into a few bars to see if anyone I know is around, or renting a movie, or just going home and starting back up a paused game and getting drunk enough to fall asleep. Even if it's dick-all I've got on my plate it's mountains more important than idling in an idling car with a groggy old idling woman. But what Erma holds onto in those two minutes—okay: there's always this datey air in the car like a gas leak that I can't put my finger on, as if Erma's waiting blithely but also kind of impatiently for me to make some goodnight move on her, to jump her arthritic bones, to get a good and thorough feel of her scales, to let the hairs on my chin make static sparks with the hairs on hers, or at least for me to do the gentlemanly thing of getting out and opening the door for her.

Of all the girls I've driven home it's true that none were women, and I don't even know what you'd call Erma. The only thing Erma has in common with all the girls I've driven home over the past nearly fifteen years is that Place. And you can put bunny ears on driven home if you want. It's grodier than the floors there to think of J.R. hiring new girls with me in mind, but at the same time there was never a moment when I was without a fruity-smelling little blond to train, with soft hairs on her arms that would curl and char when she got too close to the grill. But you bet all that driving home—with and without bunny ears—had to stop as soon as I became a boss. But the thing is that as soon I stopped dating Place girls, I basically sort of stopped dating altogether. J.R. had done all the work for me up to that point, and now I feel sometimes with girls like this domesticated animal released into the wild, expected to open his own cans of chow all of a sudden. I can't help but suspect that J.R. knew he was making me reliant on him. The best way to make an animal love you is to make it need you.

Erma opens the door to finally get out and the insides of the car light up. She's stopped by some thought that has her take the smoke she has ready in her mouth out and then closes the door shut again, bringing back the muddy darkness, and turns to me.

“The light in the kitchen has been out for weeks,” she crows like it's a fact I should already be aware of. “And Ken left a fridge of beer if you want.”

I don't want to set foot inside that house, but when you're old there's no such thing anymore as asking questions, and in Erma's foreign language there's no such word as please. So, “Fine,” I say, and cut the engine.

I follow behind Erma through the front door and knuckle the foyer light switch, but no light comes on.

“And that one too,” Erma says from somewhere in the dark house ahead of me. “Bulbs're above the fridge.”

Feeling my way along the walls, every bulb in the house is unresponsive, I find out, and flicking the switches I'm just some brain sending signals to a dead heart. “Erma?” I call out, but she only responds by closing a drawer in some room somewhere. The only working light I find is the pimple of a bulb in the fridge, which gives the room only the pathetic sort of light that comes out of a cave when someone's gone in ahead of you. But it's enough light for me to make some sense out of the cupboard just above and find out of something like twenty bulbs enough that don't tinkle with a shake.

Condiments and beer is all Erma has. Having seen enough ketchup and mustard in a day, I take a beer. And a second for the road.

The colour in the kitchen for a second glitches from blue to yellow. The window above the sink stares down on Erma's Chinese backyard neighbours. There's a tame party going on out there. The strips of flame they're responsible for light up the lighter's face and of course their happy, drunk expression looks evil in that light. They're down there all laughing about something, that's for sure, and I can make out the bodies of darting children around the edge of the pool. If this is the spot where Erma snoops and reports to her son of course she assumes the worst, because whatever you're watching happen always seems more sinister anyway when you're watching it from a dark place.

I twist in the bulb and feel the first burn of working light on my fingertips.

Pipes vibrate and grumble from somewhere in the house that's a tap coming on. Working towards the water sound, I detour back into the foyer and bring light there, poke my head first into a closet and then through the door to the basement, where I screw in fresh light, and then the living room. A silver frost is settled all over the coffee table and in the strands of the carpet, along with an even finer, duller white-grey powder. Scattered over the tables and sticking out of the couch cushions are loser tickets. And ashtrays. Ashtrays overflowing and overflowed, yellow stubs doubled over like people in pain.

The walls in Erma's house are a dull buttery brown, but not one solid colour. The walls are the uneven, hazy colour of Erma's fencepost teeth, the colour of Erma's tired, empty eyes, the colour of her lungs as I see them. Probably these walls were once pristine white, or maybe some cheerier yellow, or at any rate some colour clean and new and they've been gradually painted over by years of smoking. Filth gathers so gradually you don't even notice.

Hanging over the couch there's the Roberts family, a big wide portrait of them. There's J.R. with ears sticking out like thumbs wanting a ride and his unruly hair obviously fixed in a rush, probably around the age that he started working at that place. It's him at the end of his life, when you think about it. Lording over his family there's newly dead Ken Roberts, looking forward like he's just recognized the camera guy as someone who'd done him wrong years ago. He's large and imposing and defeated and smiling because he was told to. J.R. and his dad are smiling, but they're obviously not happy. Erma's the one that's not smiling, sitting there in front of her boy and her man, there with a flowery knotted scarf around her already withered neck, her glasses as thick as if I'm running out of patience with her, Ken and J.R.'s hands resting like dead animals on either of her shoulders. And she has on her face that look of stern, detached pride that people have on their faces when they're holding up some wound or injury to be photographed. It's like it doesn't hurt as much when you're presenting it as a fact and not a feeling.