A Beauty (20 page)

“At least it wasn’t me who had to give in to the bastards,” she said.

At least, he thought. Whole slabs of her life, too. He reached over awkwardly and rubbed at her nose, trying to make it look like some new form of endearment.

“Did I get that Christly lipstick on my nose?” she said. “I thought I kept smelling it. I found it under the dresser in their room. Course, there’s no way of knowing if it was his daughter’s. Could of been there a year.”

They were a lot alike, he thought – maybe from living together so long and making do with getting nowhere. She’d have the same picture in her mind, thinking of the bedroom upstairs and the open, empty window that seemed to promise some kind of possible escape.

C
harlesville was big enough it took a few hours before everyone in town knew a stranger was making the rounds, asking questions. Albert Earle saw him loping down the sidewalk from the Red and White, heading for Peg’s shop. Albert had been sitting outside the fire hall, soaking in some sunshine, as he usually did mid-afternoon of a pretty nice day. He had the volunteer roster out with him, a pencil tied to the clip, so he could look busy if need be. Just about everyone who went by stopped and passed what they called the time of day with him, so he knew the man was looking for the couple in the gold Lincoln, the kids who’d bilked Peg out of her profit that day. She’d been down ever since, as if she’d been hit a knockout punch and she still wasn’t right in the head, even after she was back on her feet again. It was odd, Albert thought, that they’d had such an effect on her. She’d thought so, herself. She said, “Hitler’s made himself
Führer
of Germany, we’re in a major depression, the whole world is shite, and I’m fretting over losing some money from a sale.”

She’d told him about the young couple so he wouldn’t think it was something he’d done. Or failed to do. Most likely the latter. Crimes of omission, Albert Earle’s specialty, passivity his stock in trade, “Whatever you think” his answer to any question. What had he ever done in his life but try to slip out from under whatever was going on? Now, of course, his thinking led him to Betty, always there to be thought about, to be remembered, hanging over his life like some gigantic Somebody’s sword. He tried to think if Betty wasn’t in prison, if it was her running that shop, he’d be over there right now, making sure that fellow wasn’t annoying her. He took up the pencil dangling from his clipboard and started doodling, trying to draw an upright sword with the handle and all. It looked like a failed attempt at a penis with a scrawny pair of balls. Better than no balls at all.

A dust devil twirled up the street towards him, a little one that expanded when it got to him and threw a gust full of grit in his face. He sneezed and rubbed his eyes. He was getting tired of Betty’s life sentence being his.

Peg Golden had taken the bell off her door. The thing had driven her crazy; you couldn’t help identifying that two-stage, hell-o ring with hope, and not real hope, the other kind, the kind that leaves you with a tinny taste in your mouth and not enough air in your lungs, that puts a whine in your voice and makes you hate the day you were born. Anyway, she didn’t need a bell on the door, she was always in the store; if she wasn’t out front, she was in the back room eating her lunch or piddling in her pot, and she could hear a customer in the shop as clearly by their footsteps, even their breathing, as any bell. Sometimes, on a day like this, if the mosquitoes weren’t bad, she’d have the door propped open, but these
days the grasshoppers were as thick on Main Street as they’d usually be outside town, so no matter how hot the shop got, the door stayed closed. She sat facing it, listening attentively to the one sound in the stifling room, thinking that she was the one making the sound and that it would end if she stopped filing her nails into perfect moons, each a half-inch from her fingertips.

The man who came in was impressive. Space seemed to increase around him; the walls with their racks of ladies’ wear fell back. He was tall, lean, dignified, with grey hair, but not at all elderly. His hair sprang up like a rooster’s comb. His face was long and weathered, with deep grooves down his cheeks that made him look as if he’d repressed some bitterness most people were lucky enough to have been spared. His grey eyes held hers, something dulled in them, yet fierce. The standard line was “Can I help you?” But she only raised her eyebrows, and he came right to the point. His daughter. Yes, she could see the resemblance, not so much in face or form as in that intelligent expression in the eyes, that way of looking at you as if they already knew you well and understood every one of your troubles.

“Oh, yes, I remember her,” she said. “She was with a red-haired young man. Bought a dress and shoes.” He waited. “She talked about looking for work.” Still he waited, his patient, knowing eyes looking into hers, and she thought: Take me with you when you go. He looked down at the floor, then. She didn’t care; she wasn’t embarrassed, any more than he was. She’d be one of many he’d encountered over the years. “They were heading for Virginia Valley. She said she’d never been on a ferry.”

He nodded, said thanks, a momentary flash of something extra in his glance – she was going to call it pity. He left a vacuum behind him that wasn’t going to be filled. She went directly to the back room, to the mirror, but instead of looking at herself as she’d
intended, she stood as she always did, to the side, where she didn’t have to see her own image, but could observe the woman, whatever woman it was who needed to view her body transformed by a garment off the racks. The mirror was empty; only the cramped room, filled with last season’s clothes, was reflected in it, but she could almost conjure the girl – the daughter. The silvery reflection aged the brown dress, the tawny wavy hair, and exaggerated the resemblance to her father. But no, she wasn’t there. No one was there, so Peg stepped forward herself.

She was too short to wear clothes really well, although she was stylish enough. Her skin was too sallow, and those lines between the eyes – way too much frowning, and somehow the wrong kind of bitterness. Ah, yes, a
woman’s
resentment, aging and not alluring. She pinched her cheeks. Observed the effect. Pinched again until pink blotched the skin.

Next to the mirror was a dresser where she kept odds and ends – scarves and belts and beads to perk up an outfit or disguise the lumps and bumps women didn’t want to see. She rummaged in the top drawer and came up with a pot of rouge. She dabbed some on each cheek and blended it in with a fingertip. “Takes years from you, dear,” she said to the Peg in the mirror.

She heard the door and a hesitant step.

“Peg?”

She gave it a few seconds before she called, “In here.”

She had a curtain over the doorway to the back room, a nice voluminous length of finely woven paisley fabric that could be swept aside if you knew what you were doing, or could entangle you if you didn’t. Albert came through it like a duck through a weed patch and she had to laugh at the expression on his face when he saw her. She’d already chucked her dress and had her arms at her back, struggling with her brassiere. “Help?” she said, turning.

He ran his hands over her body. She sensed a hesitation. He was a man who put duty first. “I know it’s the middle of the afternoon,” she said.

“So do I.” He undid the clasp with ease, practised at it, and her breasts tumbled free.

The hot wind that had sent the dust devil in Albert’s direction, earlier, started blowing in earnest by mid-afternoon. Clouds of dust boiled up as high as the third storeys of the highest buildings in town and cleared the streets of anyone who didn’t have to be somewhere. In the Royal George Hotel, a few of the business travellers who figured they’d managed to get enough done to call it a day decided to go up to their rooms to take a nap. The maids were resting, too, the dining room being closed until supper time, the tables having already been set. The cook was sweating over pastry in the kitchen while a huge sirloin roast made its way towards overdone in the oven. His helper was peeling potatoes into a basin of water. In the living quarters at the back of the hotel, the owner, Mr. Macklin, was reading the
Charlesville Gazette
, a task made difficult by the fact that it lay across his face. Mrs. Macklin had completely given up the day as she did most days, calling herself an invalid even if the town’s doctor didn’t, and slept in the darkened bedroom next door to him. No one sat in the rotunda, as usually no one did, and no one manned the front desk because no one needed to man it. A bell sat on it, adequately visible, which could be rung to summon Mr. Macklin from his reading if anyone needed to register or complain about something. Not too far from the desk was a wood stove, which in the winter months supplemented the hotel’s steam boiler heating system and made at least
the lobby bearable, and close to that was a wood box where wood was stored in the wintertime and where, in summer, all kinds of unwanted things were tossed. On this particular day, one of those things happened to be a cigarette butt a young salesman named Emil Prendergast thought he’d pinched out.

As for Mr. Huhtala, he’d grabbed hold of the back of an empty grain car on a freight train rattling out of town and was miles away by the time the cook’s helper finally smelled smoke and dropped his paring knife to go and investigate. The cook’s helper, whose name was Roy Wah, and who happened to be only sixteen, returned to the kitchen for a pail of water after seeing the flames juggling each other over the wood box. The cook came with him when he went back to the rotunda, so there were two pails of water. By that time, they weren’t enough.

The Charlesville Fire Department had one motorized fire truck, a pumper bought from the city of Winnipeg, and Albert kept its red paint and all its chrome waxed and polished. He kept it full of gas and in checked and ready-to-go-any-moment condition. Once a month he drove it around town, sometimes in a parade, if there was one. Twice a month he held drills for the volunteers under him. The list of their party-line phone numbers was posted by the fire hall telephone. The fire hall door, while Albert was absent, was closed but not locked.

Roy Wah was a shy young man, anxious about his manners. He knocked on the door and got no answer. He’d run from the hotel, feeling some degree of panic, having witnessed the cook pounding up the stairs to the second floor, screaming, “Fire!” So he opened the fire hall door, but when he saw no one inside, he was flummoxed. He went next door to the post office and
asked the post office clerk what he should do. That turned out to be an intelligent choice since she also ran the telephone exchange, and with some foresight Albert had given her the list of volunteers’ names.

The Royal George, in keeping with its pretensions, had a false front that extended down both sides, and behind the false front it had a flat tarpaper roof. When the first two volunteers, remembered now only as Beasley and Conrad, arrived on the scene, they could see smoke billowing out the front door, and they could see two scared-stiff salesmen shinnying down ropes from their second-floor rooms, but they could not see that flames were already eating at the roof. In spite of the appeals of the cook, the young chambermaids, and several self-important Charlesville businessmen, Beasley and Conrad decided not to get the truck out, but to investigate first. “Mr. Macklin, Mr. Macklin,” the cook called as they went through the door. “And Mrs. Macklin, she in there.” But the roar of the fire drowned him out.

The truck’s siren alerted Albert, when finally one of the later-arriving volunteers revved it up and drove it out on the street. The sound pierced the curtain veiling the back room at the Style House, and for a second he froze, unbelieving. Peg fell back when he lurched to his feet. How his hands shook at those buttons, how white his face went, only she would know. Before his head had cleared, he was racing down Main Street, passing by a new model Chevrolet he didn’t see, a Chevrolet driven by one Emil Prendergast on his way out of Charlesville somewhat earlier than he’d expected to leave.

Albert met the truck in front of the hotel. His men were already rolling out the hose, sweating and swearing with the effort.

“Who’s in there?” Albert asked the cook, seeing him at the forefront of the crowd that had gathered.

“Nobody upstairs,” said the cook, who was wiser and more efficient at disseminating wisdom than anyone had yet given him credit for. “Macklins in back and two men went in the front.”

“Four,” Albert said. Just then a shape like a whirling dervish, almost identical to the dust devil that had assaulted him earlier, but much bigger, appeared on the roof line. This one was made of flames, flaring crimson against the black smoke that was pouring into the sky. The flames twisted and then spiralled upward and outward as if whatever it was had suddenly grown wings. Sparks blew out from it. “Oh, God,” someone said. The thing teetered on the edge of the false front.

It was for him. A sign. A promise. Retribution. The fast fall of the sword. It hung on the lip of the false front. It bowed to him. His chest hurt. He willed it to fall. Watched it plummet. Then it was writhing and fluttering and coiling at his feet, and he saw it was only a long swatch of tarpaper. Another was lifting off the roof, when he looked up again, and flying over to the pool hall. Then another, flaming, curled upward until the wind took it and deposited it two doors down, on the roof of Milt’s Pawn Shop.