The Delusionist (14 page)

Leaving Connie's, Cyril dropped the bracelet into the panhandler's hat. At the end of the street two guys stepped from some bushes wielding sharpened pencils.

“Fuckin' pay up, cocksucker.”

Cyril raised his hands palms outward. “I haven't got anything.”

“Fuck you, pay up.” The mugger was lean and sunburned and grubby and his nose was running. He wiped his forearm across his upper lip then thrust the sharpened pencil upward like a knife fighter. Cyril stepped back. The other guy was big though swaying as if drunk. He made an overhand stab. Cyril raised his arm and fended off the blow and the guy stumbled past on his own momentum. The other thrust again but the pencil slid between Cyril's ribs and elbow and Cyril found himself nose-to-nose with him, his arm clamped under his own. The guy smelled of pee and sweat. A moment passed during which neither knew what to do. Then Cyril hoistedupward on the guy's arm hyper-extending his elbow. The guy howled and stood on his toes. They stayed this way, as if in some strange dance. The one yipping while his partner got up and advanced.

Cyril hoisted higher. “I'll break his arm.”

The little one shrieked and the other halted.

“Get going,” said Cyril, and held on until the big guy was down the street by the panhandler who was just sitting there watching. The big mugger halted and said something to him—then grabbed the guy's hat and ran. Cyril released the little guy, who dropped to his knees cradling his arm.

“I should have stayed in San Vicente,” said Cyril.

“What? Are you fucking nuts?”

“I must be,” he admitted.

He'd looked through a gap in the slats of Connie's venetian blinds and seen that they were shooting a film—there was a cameraman and a sound man—and there was Connie in bed with two men, one black, one white.

THREE

CYRIL ACCOMPANIED GILBERT
to the cab depot where he met Lemuel, the dispatcher, who was eating the third of five hotdogs that were laid in a row on his desk. On Gilbert's advice, Cyril had brought along a bottle of Ballantyne's. He gave Lemuel the whisky, Lemuel gave him a set of keys, and Gilbert led him to a car.

“I got something for you,” said Gilbert conspiratorially. Reaching into the black leather briefcase in which he carried his racing forms, his
Wall Street Journal
, and his Hoagie, he shoved a .38 into Cyril's hand. “Keep it here.” He indicated a spot under the left side of the driver's seat. When Cyril pointed out that he was right-handed, Gilbert said to start practising with his left.

“Why would I want a job like this?”

Gilbert counted on his fingers. “Be your own boss. Meet interesting people. Have time to read, draw, cogitate, harass women, whatever you want. Anyway, I've never had to use mine,” he said. “Consider it a guardian angel.”

Guardian angels hadn't proven too effective as far as Cyril could see, so he didn't put much faith in the gun. Nonetheless, he had to admit that driving was diverting, and even if he wasn't really his own boss but more like a dog on a long leash, he enjoyed the pleasing delusion of independence, and it made a welcome change from construction. Most of the trips were short and many people were content to ride in silence which was fine with him. He thought often of Connie and felt naive at his shock at what he'd seen. He imagined the financial desperation that had driven her to it. Had her acting career tanked? The theatre tour bombed? Maybe that was why she'd never responded to his letter from Mexico. He considered driving the cab all the way down the coast to her motor court, parking right there beneath her door and honking the horn and when she stepped out asking if she'd called a cab, charming her with the sheer unabashed whimsy of the stunt.

His first week driving went well enough: people were polite, they tipped, they got out. By the end of the week he was taking his sketchbook with him and when things got slow he did a little work, street scenes, pedestrians, lampposts. Then he switched to evenings where, according to Gilbert, the good money lived. At first Lemuel fed him easy trips. He drove some suits, some office girls, ferried some Korean sailors to the Seaman's Club. Then there was a lull. Along with his sketchpad he had a textbook on Ukrainian History because he was considering going back to school. Paul once said Ukrainian Cossacks invaded Siberia in the late sixteenth century by carrying their riverboats over the Urals. Why anyone would want to invade Siberia mystified Cyril, but it was an impressive feat that sparked his curiosity. He was flipping through a chapter titled
The Glory That Was Kiev
when the cab doors swung open and two guys dropped into the back and a third hit the front causing the car to lurch on its springs.

“My man! A hearty good evening. What're you reading there?”

Cyril showed him the cover.

The kid plucked it from his hand. “Rooshyuh,” he said in a movie accent.

“Where to?”

“Know any fuck-houses?” demanded one in the back.

“Yeah, we want to get us some.” As if choreographed, the two in back raised their fists and pumped their hips rocking the car.

Cyril took his book from the kid's hand and said he didn't know any brothels. The guys were in their twenties, drunk, wearing sports shirts and jeans, clean-shaven, with good haircuts; suburban boys on the slum.

The two in the back reached for the doors to get out, but the one up front was apparently intrigued by Cyril and, settling himself deeper in the seat, directed Cyril to just drive.

“Just drive where?”

He pointed in the direction the car was facing. “Just drive that way.”

Gilbert had warned him about this. He'd also warned him to keep his doors locked to prevent anyone getting in before he'd had a chance to give them the once over. “I need a destination.”

“Need or want?” asked the kid. He was big, with a meaty head and thick hair and heavy dark eyes. His
T
-shirt was expensive, Cyril could tell by the cut of the collar, not your three-for-one deal from Fields. “It's important to distinguish need from want,” he advised.

“Okay, I need
and
want a destination.”

“Methinks you're avoiding the issue.”

“No, the issue is you should find another car,” said Cyril.

The kid became sad. He exhaled long and he pouted. “You don't like us.”

Cyril's glance flicked to the rearview. The two in back had tensed, like dogs at the alert, and he feared one would grab him around the neck. It was about eight o'clock and dark, a misty rain obscuring the windshield and blurring the lights of the shops that seemed far away down the suddenly empty stretch of Hastings. “You'll have better luck with another cab,” he repeated in a more reasonable tone, as if genuinely eager to see their wants and needs satisfied.

“You don't like us and I don't think you trust us.”

Cyril rested his left hand on his left thigh and took a slow breath and thought of the .38 just inches from his hand. “I'm trying to work.”

“And we want to offer you our custom. But you refuse to take us to a house where we can get our ills reputed.” He leaned to read Cyril's driver
ID
. “Cyril Andrachuk.”

The two in back chuckled.

The one next to him rediscovered the text book on the seat between them. He picked it up with exaggerated care and slowly fanned the pages and came to a marker. “Ah. Stalin. You're reading about the man who fucked your people up the ass without even the courtesy of lubricant.” He raised the book high for the benefit of his pals, as though it was a Bible and he was a preacher. “Stalin killed more people than Hitler. Did you know that? Stalin is the nightmare from which Russia has yet to awake. A man of charisma and cunning. A beast worshipped as a god. How I'd love to have met him. Purely in the interest of psychology, you understand.” He returned the book to the seat and gave it a fond pat. Then he mused, “I wonder if fucking a country is better than fucking a cunt?” The boys in back hee-hawed. “What do you think, Cyril?”

“I think it's time for you to get out.” Gripping the .38 he swivelled so that his back was braced against the door and pointed the gun at the kid's head.

When they were on the sidewalk, Cyril started the car and drove to the depot and gave Lemuel the keys, his trip sheet, announced that he was quitting, and went to his mother's, where he'd been living since his return from Mexico while he looked for a place of his own. The next day two cops showed up and informed him that charges had been laid. It went before a judge who, while not unsympathetic to the three-on-one odds, observed that the gun was unregistered and thought that Cyril had overreacted. And while he gave him a suspended sentence it also meant that Cyril now had a criminal record.

He got on with a house painter named Norbert Hek. On the first day Hek strode into the room Cyril was painting and stood with his hands on his hips and said he was worried. Roller in hand, Cyril asked what exactly Hek was worried about? It was hard to judge Hek's age, he could be forty, he could be sixty, his skin was seamed, he was missing two teeth on the upper left side of his jaw, his eyes were grey and dry and his hair long and blond and brittle. “I'm worried about your relationship with the wall,” said Hek. They were undercoating the interior of a newly built house. “About your relationship with the surface.” With his fingertips he stroked the drying paint testing for ridges. “You've got to love the surface. I was listening to the sound of your roller. It doesn't sound to me like you care about the surface.” Cyril was impressed that Hek could hear the sound of his roller from the next room and furthermore that he could read so much into this sound. As if hearing Cyril's thoughts, he said, “Smack, smack, smack. That's how it sounded.”

“Smack, smack, smack?”

Hek nodded. “Slow down. Stroke it.” He stroked the air. “Caress it. Make it feel good.” He ran his fingers—thick, stubby, paint scabbed—over the paint as though reading poetry in Braille. “Feather it out.”

“Okay.”

“Make it smooth.”

Cyril nodded.

“Think of skin.”

“Skin.”

“A woman's thigh,” said Hek. “Right here.” He ran his palm down the inside of his leg, from groin to knee. He was wearing baggy white pants stained with various pale shades of paint. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Cyril nodded to reassure him that he grasped the concept. Hek was about to go back to his own work when he said, “People don't touch enough. We're all eye. The eye should lead to the flesh. Me, I see a well-painted wall I want to get naked and press up against it.” He pressed himself to the Gyproc. Maintaining this position, he turned his head so that he could make eye contact and thus drive home his point. “You should want to make love to the wall.”

Cyril maintained a politely attentive expression.

“Understand?”

“Got it.”

Hek gave three grunting thrusts against the wall with his pelvis then left the room saying, “Now let's see what those other monkeys are up to.”

Cyril quit at the end of the day. Yet he had made two discoveries. First, even an idiot like Hek could succeed as a painting contractor; and, second, that he liked painting. The process was soothingly silent in contrast to the whack of hammers and the shriek of saws. A few days later he hooked up with a crew run by a sleepy-eyed German named Irwin who said he'd been, “Painting since I'm thirteen years.” There were half a dozen others on the crew. Irwin told them where to paint and they went at it with minimal interruption. If nothing else, painting seemed a step closer to drawing and Cyril felt a natural aptitude, discovering that painting a wall was like painting his mind: you covered one mood with another. Pale grey could be warmed up or a hot yellow could be cooled off. His mind wandered as he painted, though rarely profoundly. My mind mindlessly meanders, he said to himself. My mindlessly meandering mind. My meanderlessly mindering mind  . . . He recalled a
Three Stooges
episode where Curly accidentally swaps Moe's coffee with a can of paint and Moe takes a swallow. “Why you numbskull!” he says, and jabs two fingers in Curly's eyes.

Irwin was a philosopher of paint. He had theories about red and blue and green and yellow and black. “Red is not rage. Don't let anyone tell you red is rage. It is not rage. I get mad I don't see red I see black. Red is blood, yes, and violence maybe, but violence can be joy, communion, wine, sunset. Blue is the ice of the Virgin Mary's eyes. Green is the wall of a madhouse but is also grass and forest. God is green, green as a frog.”

Cyril was not inclined to argue with Irwin about anything, certainly not the colour of God. He nodded his acceptance of the notion that God was green. It certainly seemed as good a colour as any for the Creator. Wondering about the effects of decades of paint fumes on Irwin's brain, Cyril decided to invest in a respirator for whenever he used a spray gun, and at the very least be sure the windows were wide open when he used a brush or roller. Wasn't it lead-based paint that caused Goya to go deaf and mad?

“But you know why people really love paint?” asked Irwin with more than a hint of disgust.

Cyril was eager to hear Irwin's theory. Painters it seemed had a lot of theories. “Why?”

“Because they can cover up the past.”