When the Saints (2 page)

He straightens his glasses. “Anything else?”

I take a last look at all the half-open coffins with pink linings and little pillows so shiny they give me a headache. “Just like luxury cars,” I say, running my hand down the side of a black casket. “I’ll bet the typical dipshit who goes down in one of these showboats spent his years driving a Pinto with bald tires and a driver’s-side door that had to be duct-taped shut.”

He looks at me blankly.

I wink. “I think I liked the place better when it served beer.”

I push the door open and step out onto the sidewalk, and there’s this little ringlet-headed thing coming toward me. She’s about six years old with a flat nose and juice stains on her neck. She stops and says, “Are you lice? My mother seen you this morning, and she said you’re lice.”

“That was nice of her.” I spit my gum out on the pavement. “Who’s your mother?”

“Nancy Roth-MacDonald.”

I know that name. Nancy Roth was in my grade. She told her friends my parents were brother and sister and it spread around school like a bad fart. There were a lot of nasty things said about my family that were true; that girl had no good reason to be throwing extra stink into the pot. I bend down to this kid’s face and say, “When I was fourteen, my hair hung straight down to my ass and poor Nancy Roth had these little curls stuck to her head like pubic hairs.” I wrap a strand of her hair around my finger and wind it up to her scalp. “The meaner she was, the tighter and frizzier those curls got. You think about that.”

She hesitates, then pulls away like I scalded her with a hot curling iron.

“Tell your mother I said hi.”

T
HE TAVERN HAS A BRIGHT NEW PAINT JOB, BUT THE
men inside are worse than ever. Or maybe they’re the same drunks a decade older and uglier, but I can’t distinguish one fat
ass hanging off the back of a stool from another. I march up to the bar and the bartender finally pries himself from the television set they’re all staring at.

“You’re West?”

“I am.”

“I’m Tabby Saint.”

His face twitches like there’s a bug crawling across it. “So?”

“So nothing.” I take a stool. “Give me a beer.”

He doesn’t move. The chalkboard on the wall behind him says,
Today’s Special: Two Drinks for the Price of Two Drinks.

“I lived here till I was fourteen years old,” I tell him. “I don’t remember you.”

“I’m from Cable.”

“Did you know my father?”

He spits sideways into the sink. “Yeah. I knew your father.”

“Where’d he go?”

One of the men snorts and shakes his head. The room falls silent except for the dart game on the television. I eye a basket of stale-looking pretzels sitting on the bar. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten.

“Where’s the rest of them gone to?” I ask, taking a handful.

West uncrosses his arms, grabs a bottle of Ten-Penny from the fridge behind him, twists the cap off and smacks it down hard in front of me. “They were smoked out ages ago. Got run across the bridge.”

“What for?”

He shrugs, turns back to the television. I can tell I’m not going to get anything more out of him. Not in here, anyway. He’s
got a broken tooth on the bottom row, but other than that he’s decent-looking. Strong arms under his black shirt, full head of hair, copper-coloured eyes.

I wash down a mouthful of pretzel with a swig of beer. “I need a job.”

“Oh yeah?” West motions down the line of pasty faces. “Why don’t you join the club?”

I hang around for hours watching darts, then pool, then bowling, then darts again, until the last wino picks himself up, takes his ball cap off the coat rack and stumbles out the door. West goes out to empty the trash, comes back in and locks up the fridge, gathers some dirty glasses and sets them in the sink. “You’re still here,” he says over his shoulder, buttoning his coat.

“You hadn’t noticed?”

He leans over and crosses his forearms on the bar. “That guy who left just before Carl came in here wearing a leather jacket that belongs to a friend of mine whose truck was busted into. He must have ripped the tabs off and scuffed it up a little, but it’s the same one.” He glances down at my cleavage. “Asshole paid me with a hundred-dollar bill, which means he just sold something, and he said his name is Dave. Course, when I pretended the phone was for Dave, he didn’t react until I said it twice, and after that he knew I was on to him. Know how I know?”

I shrug.

“Because buddy left right then with a third of beer in his bottle whereas the previous two he drained to the last drop just like you and every other loser in this dump.” He takes a mint
from the glass dish next to the register and pops it in his mouth. “I notice everything.”

“I saw the hundred he paid you with,” I say. “I also saw the two fifties in his wallet and the driver’s licence that says his last name is Graves. And for the record, I’m no loser, and I don’t appreciate you making assumptions based on
my
last name.”

He bites down loudly into the mint. Then a smile creeps into his lips as he reaches out and tucks a piece of my hair behind my ear. “Okay then.”

T
HAT NIGHT
I
WRAP MY LEGS AROUND
W
EST AND ONCE
he’s done and snoring I lie awake and walk through each room of our house again in my mind. I can’t imagine what would make Daddy leave the place to rot. He used to brag that his father built it with his own hands, which wasn’t even true, but he seemed to believe it.

After Grandpa Jack fell drunk in the river and drowned the year I was born, Daddy talked him up like he was the Messiah when really he was a demented alcoholic tyrant who used to beat Daddy with this black horse statue that sat on the mantle. Once, we were riding in our old station wagon and passed a black horse grazing in a field. Daddy started rubbing the left side of his head with the palm of his hand and pressed his boot down on the gas pedal so hard that all the trees slurred together outside the windows. My baby brother Jackie started screaming and Daddy slammed on the brakes, wrenched the car to the side of the road
and told Ma she had ten seconds to shut the little bastard up. He pushed in the cigarette lighter as she jumped out and hauled Jackie from his car seat. The lighter popped and Daddy held it up where she could see it as she stood on the side of the highway cooing in Jackie’s ear. Then Daddy turned around and stared at Bird and me as he pressed the burning end to the passenger seat, melting a hole where Ma’s head had been. I grabbed onto Bird so tight my fingernails made little red half moons in his arm.

W
EST MUMBLES A STRING OF WORDS IN HIS SLEEP.
I
TRY
to make out what he’s saying. Something about drywall and getting a good deal. Last night when we got back to his place, he told me he’d been waiting a long time for a woman like me to walk into his bar. I asked what he meant by that and he said someone with half a brain. I don’t recall saying anything brilliant. Except maybe when I suggested he’d get more women in there if he made a rule that customers have to wear pants that fit. “Just try it for one week,” I said. “Put up a big sign: NOW WITH FEWER SWEATY CRACKS.”

My eyes are still open and sore when the sun comes up, so I slip out the door and walk down to the river. I manage to find my old spot between the blueberry bushes and the Space Invaders arcade console. I can’t believe that thing’s still here, lying on its stomach like a beached whale. The neon colours have leached and all the wiring’s been gutted, leaving just the box frame. I always wondered how it wound up here. Maybe some kids heisted it,
dragged it down here to bash it up for the quarters. Quarters were a hot ticket back in the day because Doreen who worked the corner store used to sell single cigarettes to kids for twenty-five cents. She loved children. She’d knit little leg warmers while she was waiting for customers, had a big stockpile ready in case anyone in town gave birth. “Need a light for that, Baby Bear?” she’d ask, stretching over the counter with her Zippo. She had a script for everything. If someone asked how she was doing, she’d say, “Just another day in paradise.” If a man purchased a lottery ticket, she’d say, “If you win, I’m single.” Every time. And then she’d laugh so hard it loosened the phlegm in her throat.

The grass is soggy after endless cold spring rains, so I lay my jacket down to sit on. I used to come down here all the time for no reason other than to watch the eddies twirl. Once in a while some flotsam would flash by, like a Dr. Pepper can or a piece of car body. I’d stay until the tide went out and there was just a big bowl of mud. Insects would crawl up and down my arms and I’d pretend I was just another blade of grass.

I tried to disappear on a city bench once, but my face must have a sign on it. Some woman tapped me on the knee and wanted to know if I’d seen her ghost. I told her I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about, and she lowered her voice and asked if a woman who looked identical to her went by about twenty minutes ago, perhaps on a bicycle with lightning streaks down the side and a white basket. She took a pen out of her purse and drew me a picture of herself.

At least in small towns, everyone knows who the crazies are and what their deal is. Someone new walks into a corner store
and they get the lowdown right away: “Don’t say hello to Angus out there or he’ll make you listen to him play the spoons for hours.” In the city, crazies float around like balloons. You don’t know one till she’s hovering over you on a park bench.

There’s something different in the air here now. When we were kids, the breeze always smelled like the car factory. Maybe it’s shut down, because all that’s wafting my way is the scent of the pines on the other side of the river. Daddy used to hide out in those woods when the law was on him. I asked Ma once what he did to pass the time and she said something like, “Oh, he’s making sure all the birds know he’s the king, getting drunk and shitting in the river, probably dreaming up a whole new way to make me wish I was dead.”

When I was three years old, I tagged along with Bird as he went trudging in to look for Daddy. He had to tell him that our furnace broke down and Ma needed money to get it fixed. My legs were bare and we didn’t get far before some wild animal sunk its teeth into my shin. Bird told everyone it was a king cobra, but it was probably a muskrat.

I squint in the other direction across the old bridge, but I can barely make out the few cars and trucks rumbling through the morning haze.

Grandma Jean, who is my mother’s mother, always said that the town of Solace River was a waste of nails from the start, that its sole purpose was to collect assholes. She used to tell us stories about Irish rumbles, grown men pummelling each other over who owned what, everybody taking sides. Her father, Cleary Foster, was a brawler who challenged boxing champs from as far
away as Boston to street fights. He’d go around begging shopkeepers to put up the train fare, and when the boxer left Solace River with his face punched through his head, they’d get their money back and more. There were legendary parties every time he won a fight. Cleary himself would preside, buying rounds and throwing bills around, placing small children on his biceps and hoisting them in the air.

After his bare-knuckle days, Cleary bought an automobile, the first Nova Scotian to own one outside of Halifax. He’d drive it around to different towns looking for barroom fights, but no one would take him on. Eventually, he got depressed and crashed the car on purpose, fizzled out his days drinking mouthwash and yelling at the radio announcer. Grandma Jean’s mother took all the kids away, and by the time she came back, the house had been looted and there were flies everywhere. Someone had even stepped right over Cleary’s corpse to snatch his Crosley radio. The church took up a collection, but she blew it on a flashy car of her own.

“She said it was her due for having put up with all them brawls,” Grandma Jean said. “But everyone knew there weren’t nothing that woman loved more than the smack of a fist into a jaw. She used to pick up the bloody teeth off the floor and keep them for souvenirs, show them to us kids at the breakfast table while she re-enacted the fight. You’d be sitting there eating oatmeal and the next thing you knew, she’d have you in a headlock.” She clicked her tongue. “Point is, the mayor, the farmers, even my own crazy ma weren’t nothing but thieves, every last one of them. People say all the trouble started with your father’s people,
but that’s just sweet-smelling bullshit. Garnet Saint didn’t invent crime in Solace River.”

We used to have a self-portrait of Garnet hanging in our house. I can still see that big nose and the boxy black hat slipping to one side of his head. From what I heard, he was a teenage runaway who wormed his way into a small crew making rum runs from St. Pierre Island to New York during Prohibition until he got kicked out for having a big mouth. Then he tried to break in with the moonshiners on McNabs Island but wound up running a crooked Wheel of Chance on the pleasure grounds.

Grandma Jean said Garnet Saint probably wasn’t even Grandpa Jack’s real father, but that Jack’s mother abandoned him in a Halifax rooming house and Garnet offered to take him off the landlady’s hands. He skipped town with little Jack and headed for the Annapolis Valley, never staying in one town long enough for people to catch on to his monkeyshines.

“The baby was his meal ticket,” Grandma said. “Garnet fed him nothing but rotten fish and sips of hooch so he’d always be passed out or spitting up. He’d moan that his poor Jack was dying so ladies’ charities would give them money for medicine.”

They arrived in Solace River around the time Garnet’s knees began to wear out. Jack was about seven years old by then. They’d come looking for an old carny buddy of Garnet’s, but the man was long dead. They squatted in the old schoolhouse, started stealing chickens and piglets until they had enough of a farm to feed themselves, and for the next ten years scraped by on just the odd con. Garnet had a shed full of painted rocks that he sold to passersby as
Genuine Meteorites!
He also touted
his services as a sort of hillbilly clairvoyant, a walking talking farmer’s almanac who could tell with a sniff of the air and a coin slapped to his palm which crops would do well that season. Of course, that ruse lasted only one season. Next, he concocted a tincture of pig’s blood and tree sap and tried selling it door to door as a cure-all, but by then no one was buying his crap. Garnet swore the joke was on them, claimed Saint’s Elixir restored not only the cartilage in his knees but also the muscle in his pants. He and his new-found vitality went around molesting people’s wives and daughters until someone did the whole town a favour and beat him to death with a tire iron behind the gas station. Jack was only a young teenager at the time. He went off to war to earn a wage and came back with a sickly little waif who died with my father still inside her. They had to cut Daddy right out of her stomach.