The Cloaca (5 page)

“Wasn't that travelling?” I ask.

They exchange glances.

Kim will take his penalty shot and always just barely miss.

“Two-one,” they say.

Because I am fifteen years older than them, and obviously a worse basketball player, they let me drive the lane and tie.

They're making allowances now.

Corn Rows is open under the net and I'm being halfheartedly swarmed by Shiner and Scabby. If I'm as bad at basketball as I know I am, then this is all an accident.

If anything, I should be paying
their
allowances.

I feed Corn Rows the rock.

Feed it to him when he isn't looking.

No dishes.

They wanted to end this. So I end it.

In no way like tears, blood dribbles out of Corn Rows' nose and dots his jersey that's as long as a dress.

Then the tear-tears come.

Let them clot their own selves.

At home I hide behind my kit. And the phone bringles.

My first impulse is to start banging away at the skins so as to justify not hearing it. But before I can Belly leaps up—
thump, thump
—and curls up for a nap on my floor tom.

Kim and I went for a walk when I got home from work. It's winter now, somehow.

Belly's been gone two weeks and in that time they've demolished and excavated one of the old factories to make way for condos by the spring. Which means that if Kim were still working he'd only have to travel a block over for work. Kim tells me he looks for Belly in the day, but who knows. He doesn't seem that concerned.

“I've put a missing cat into the book,” he says, as if that's something.

Either he doesn't care or he trusts that everything will be okay. Search me for the difference.

Dusk was frigid and quiet and my eyes started to water.

“Everything okay?” Kim asks.

“I'm just getting used to it,” I say.

The Price You Pay For Leaving The House
|
4

I'd been sitting Ames's house a week when a woman came to the door. She sucked apologetically through her teeth when she saw my swim trunks. “You're on your way out,” she informed me.

“Just getting back,” I lied. “Actually.”

She had grown up in the house and wondered if she might look around. Sure, I told her and stepped out of the way for her to come in.

Black Santa's tail puffed and she ran at the sight of the woman, her pink bum stink-eyeing us. This was Black Santa's house before it was mine, and who was this new person all of a sudden?

The woman was attractive in a mature, tired-looking way, the way women are attractive on the bus after everyone's had an ungovernable day. You wonder what they're coming from and where they're headed to, and whether or not you're better than either points. Her hair was curly and simple brown, and short like it had been long and just cut. Her sundress was peach and flimsy, and the tank top she was wearing underneath had some words on it, one of which looked like it might be
KILL
.

“Should I take my shoes off?” she asked, and lifted a foot for demonstration, though she was wearing complicatedly-strapped sandals, not shoes. I looked down at her feet and told her I didn't know.

“There'd been carpet when I was here. Ugly green shag shit. And there was this rule about no shoes on the carpet. The thing was my mom—oh my god, that woman—my mom was disgusted by the sight of people's feet. I mean, like, revolted.
They're like smelly hands gone horribly wrong,
she'd say. Of course in the summer my friends didn't wear socks, so right beside the door here was this wicker basket full of sock balls and if you were in bare feet you had to don a pair.”

The woman had actually said don. This was a woman I could love.

“But that carpet was ugly-ass. Of course you got rid of it. I'm glad you got rid of it. What kind of person would have kept it?”

“I didn't,” I told her, and she looked at the floor where there wasn't carpet, and then looked at me again. “I mean this isn't my house,” I said. “I mean I'm housesitting for the people whose house this is who are on their honeymoon.” I rolled eyes for her like I knew this was all so silly, all this explaining.

“Maybe it's not okay that I'm here.” She was ready to go.

“I'm sure it's fine. The people whose house this is now are good people.” And for some reason I went on to promise her that Ames and her husband Zebulon were good people, although I still hadn't met Zebulon, only seen pictures. On the beach, he had an immaculate, rangy, superhero's body. People with bodies like that usually aren't good people. His bathing suit, tie undone, had left red diamond-shaped indents in my belly.

The woman smiled. She put a hand on my shoulder for balance and with a flick of a buckle the leather crisscrossing yielded and the sandal just dropped. As soon as she had walked a comfortable distance away, Black Santa was on the sandals, sniffing fervently for information.

“I've seen those,” the woman said, pointing at a lacquered stump that was acting as a coffee table. “Those are as expensive as I don't even know what. Your friends are doing okay.”

I rehearsed a few snarky snipes about wealth and excess that would show I wasn't these people, but couldn't settle on one before the woman was done with the stump and moving on.

“There used to be a wall here,” she waved as we walked through the living room into the dining room. “It's weird. It actually feels kind of like I'm walking through a wall. Whoa,” she said, walking backwards and then forwards again through the room. “Like there's a memory of the wall here. Like a phantom limb. Oooooo.” She hunched her shoulders and wiggled her fingers in a spooky way.

She had black bike shorts under her dress and tattooed lines that looked like creeping branches or sticks of lightening travelling from her ankle all the way up her calves. She turned to me and this time the hint of letters through her dressed looked like
SKILL
.

“This is so much nicer than the house I grew up in,” she said, leading me through the kitchen, dragging her hands along the marble counter top. A week's worth of empties were piled by the sink, looking like I'd maybe had a party the night before. “Has it ever happened to you,” she said, leaving the kitchen and heading up the steps, “that you're with a person for years and it ends and then you run into them later and they look so much better, are so much better? And you think, Why couldn't you have been this great when we were together? And you realize that they had to go through you to get better and you could just kill yourself on the spot? That's kind of how this house feels. I wish I grew up in this house. Think of the different person I would have been. But, then again, I'd've had to be a different person, have had to have had a different mother, to have grown up in this house.”

She pointed out the paint job where there had been wallpaper, the new banister, the spot where her brother had run into the wall and blamed it on her, the missing wainscoting, some decorating choices that would have made her mom—she swore to God—
fucking shit
. “These photos are all so beautiful,” she said, gasping, actually unhooking a frame from the wall to get a better look. “Who took these?”

“I don't know. Maybe the guy?” I didn't think that Ames had any interest in photography. I'd been there a week and hadn't taken one look at the pictures. Inspecting them now, they were all just old barns. Just old falling-apart barns in fields with big skies behind them.

“Zebulon,” she said. “That's a fascinating name. Where's that from?”

“Fucked if I know,” I shrugged, wanting to her to know that I could swear too.

“Well, they look like they could be in a book. I love the texture of the old wood and the flaking paint. Like they've just been ripped out of a
book
.” She handed the picture to me to be rehung, and carried on down the hall. At that point it occurred to me that this woman might be crazy, and that letting her into Ames's house might have been the wrong choice.

I don't get fucked in this story, though it has all the makings of an impossible fuck story: kind of good-looking and obviously unhinged woman comes to the door, wants to take a tour of her awkward childhood.
This was my bedroom
, she says.
A lot of old memories in here
, she says, sitting down on the bed,
but how about we make some new memories?

“They kept the claw foot tub!” the yell came from the bathroom. “The one nice thing about this place and they just knew to keep it. I used to imagine that I was taking a bath in the belly of animal!”

Not being able to line the nail with the hook on the frame, I leaned the picture against the wall instead. Black Santa peeked over the top step, her eyes wide. She hissed and ran back down the stairs and I didn't see her until the next morning when I woke up to her on my chest, staring at me like she was trying to strangle me with her thoughts. Never mind that she started out as my cat. This was her house now, and I was no better than this woman.

She came out of the bathroom and walked straight to the room I had been staying in. “This was my room,” she said. “Can I go in?”

The door was open before I had a chance to answer.

For a year I lived in Montreal and worked in a small brewery that was popular enough to need to brew around the clock. On the night shift one night there was a knock at the back door. The brewer, an effete, nervous Parisian not much suited to the heavy lifting of brewing answered the knock and found a young girl in her underwear, shivering in the rain. He let her in, I'm sure thinking that this was his chance to be fucked in a scenario that was not supposed to ever happen. Long story clipped, the girl was crazy for crack and wound up stabbing the little Frenchman in an unfatal place. This is the story I thought of, slowly following the woman into her old bedroom, my current one, preparing myself to either be fucked or stabbed.

More cans of beer, these ones less organized; the ratty hand towel I had been messing nightly hung pathetically over the chair to dry; the pile of comics fallen and fanned out in the corner; a stack of sketchbooks on the desk, unopened after a week, a scattering of pens still uncapped; on the bedside table the pictures of Ames lounging on many different beaches in the same simple black bikini I had culled from the photo albums I found. The woman didn't seem to notice any of this.

“It's weird,” she said. “I don't have any memories of being in here. I was never allowed to hang posters or anything. I wasn't allowed to make it mine. My bedroom growing up was basically a guest room.” She walked around my room. There was a smell in there. I'd been in there a week and I had already left a smell distinct from the rest of the house, one of stale beer and body. Picking up the pictures of Ames, she flipped through them. “Beautiful,” she said. “Girlfriend?”

“Was.”

“I'm sorry,” she said by rote, looking still at the pictures. “Wherever these places are, I want to go there. And with a body like
that
.”

On the bed, the flaps open, was the DVD player box I had found that morning, hidden on a shelf behind suits in Ames and Zebulon's bedroom closet: pill bottles, nail clippers, the sharp kitchen knives, an antique pistol. In that first week, I hadn't done one lick of cooking and so hadn't noticed the lack of good knives, and my snooping hadn't led me yet to the cleaned-out medicine cabinet.

At the window she sighed, looking into the backyard. “Ohhh. There used to be
trees
out there. I don't remember what
kind
of trees. But there were two big ones. Two big leafy ones. Why would your friends have removed them? They were lovely, leafy trees.”

“I couldn't say.”

“I buried a time capsule back there. Not like actually a time capsule. A fucking box or something. When I was ten or something. I put pictures of myself and my friends in there. There were some poems in there and some mixtapes. I remember putting in a piece of paper with everyone I was in love with on it. God knows what else. If they dug up the tree, then they probably dug up that box.”

“Makes sense.”

“What would you do if you dug up something like that?”

“What would
I
do?”

“
You
. I mean
any
-fucking-body. It would be pretty awesome to find something like that. To find all these things that a person hid about themselves, but to not know the person. I wonder what your friends must think of me from the stuff in that box.”

Back in the foyer, I asked the woman if she had found what she was looking for. I hadn't gotten her name, and I thought it was too late to ask. Now, through her dress, it looked like her shirt said
SKULL
.

“I don't know if I was looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to have a look. My mom died. I was in town for the funeral.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It's the price you pay for leaving the house. As my mom used to say.”

Something about the way she was standing made her look like she was waiting to be hugged. She was looking at me like she wanted me to look at her, but I was only looking at her bare feet. Her toes were square and all the same length. The dark diamonds left by the straps were brown in a way that could have been either tan or dirt. I looked back up to her face. Probably she was just a few paces past thirty, probably the same age I was. People my own age still looked older than I was, compared with the image of myself I had in my head, which still put me at hardly twenty. I should have kissed her. The worst thing that could have happened was she hit me. The best thing was an impossible fuck story.

“You were on your way for a swim,” she reminded me. “I interrupted.”

“I'll let you know if I find that box.”

“Okay,” she said and left.

It wasn't until the next day, when I made another limp attempt to leave the house, to go swimming in the lake that Ames had recommended—“A gorgeous bit of water that absolutely no one else in the world knows about,”—that I found Black Santa wrestling the woman's sandals in the foyer, trying to break their neck. I hid them from her and didn't leave the house that day, sat around in Zebulon's swim trunks drinking just in case that woman came back. The next day I conceded the sandals to Black Santa and set down to rooting through the house, room to room, closet to closet, cranny to cranny, looking for that box.