Alligator (18 page)

Before she had any thought of making a feature film.

She drove Andrew to karate, she drove Melissa to ballet, that’s who she was. You can drive and become a person who drives. Sometimes she and Marty would try to have an evening. They’d plan something special, a steak, good wine to shore up their relationship; they were deliberate about ordinary intimacy at this stage — but Melissa would cry out in her sleep.

The heater in their car was always broken in those days and the windshield frosted over. She had to drive with the windows down and it was below zero.

Andrew was just five and had his black karate suit that he wore with the white belt wrapped around twice and knotted, and was he ever smart-looking.

Twenty-five, thirty years ago, she guesses.

It wasn’t the heater, it was the blower, Marty had said. The heater was fine.

Someone blasted a horn; she couldn’t see a damn thing, frost all over the windshield and she wiped it with the cuff of her sweater.

A red light that said
check oil
had been on for weeks. Chicken thighs she’d slather in cream of mushroom soup and orange zest. She was an engine of love grinding away in the dark. She was a maker of suppers, a doer of homework. She was the person who drove.

She’d had a secret project in mind at that time, a documentary series about island culture. It would take months to write the scripts but she believed this idea would fly. Nationalism, ukuleles, grass skirts, and the darker things: sharks, voodoo, and gene pools the size of thimbles. She wanted to direct; it would require two years on the road.

She doesn’t remember thinking, What about the children? Let Marty worry about the children, is what she thought. Men go off on oil rigs all the time, is what she thought; she didn’t think. She didn’t actually mention the series to Marty.

At the end of class Andrew was called forward and he did his courtesy bow and kicks and blocks and punches and he earned his yellow belt.

She was waiting at a red light and she tilted the rear-view and Andrew was asleep in the back seat. What an explosive blast of love she felt for the boy, especially when he was asleep. It was enough.

Snow slanted through the headlights and she hit slush and soaked a pedestrian. There was going to be an ice storm, the power lines knocked out, the streets would be glass and it came to her all at once: where was the bottle of champagne that had been in the hotel room on their wedding night?

Marty’s sisters had given them a bottle of champagne. They had saved it for an occasion. But they should have it tonight, she thinks. Why wait for an occasion? How frivolous and redemptive to drink champagne for no reason. She remembers tucking it away under the kitchen sink but it’s not under the kitchen sink, she’s sure. She felt the car skid and she slammed the breaks and the car fishtailed and she thinks of the champagne in the dark corner of the cupboard, under the pipes, lying on its side. There’s a car coming straight at them with her little son in the back and she shuts her eyes. She’s driving with her eyes shut and they skid out of the path of the oncoming car.

Hands up to protect the nose, the karate teacher had said to Andrew. He had promised discipline and ancient wisdom, happiness, and self-esteem. She had her script on the passenger seat and a pencil behind her ear. A red light and soon the horns were blasting. Did they drink it already? They were saving it, she’s sure.

They were on Brookfield Road, in the middle of nowhere, when the car died. She can’t remember why the car died. She tried the key and tried the key. She smacked the steering wheel and hurt her hand. Cars came upon her and swerved and zoomed past.

She put on her hazards. The road was empty ahead. She and her sleeping son abandoned by the world, soon to freeze to death. Then a car came toward them, the headlights bouncing slightly, splintering the falling sleet and she had remembered.

The champagne had been recalled, that vintage had glass shards. Someone had found shards of glass. It wasn’t under the kitchen sink. It had never been under the kitchen sink. It was a bottle of bleach she had been thinking of. She hadn’t ever used the hazards before and didn’t know where they were. But she found them, and she put the hazards on and the car engine would not turn over. She could hardly believe it; the car had died.

FRANK

F
RANK LISTENED TO
the Russians upstairs, there were violins. It was not like Newfoundland music. Their chairs scraped over his ceiling and they stomped their feet like they meant the music, they really, really meant it. The violins revved up and got turgid and squealed and poured like oil. They were drunk and their voices rose in argument. The violins got rougher, full of vengeance and craft and the music was sexual and melodic. It was the same as Newfoundland music or it had turned into Newfoundland music or all music is the same, always, and this was just another example of that.

It had been hot all day and it was still hot. Frank opened the window and put his feet up on a chair and had a coffee. He had a coffee every night before he went to the hot-dog stand.

The windowsill was covered in the elm spanworms and Frank got a rag and squished them and put the rag in a plastic bag and knotted it. He could see hundreds of worms on all the roofs and hoods of the cars parked along the street.

On the radio they said spray. Don’t spray. The trees are finished, a scientist said. The worms have won. On the radio they said the worms would be gone by the end of August.

People called the talk shows about the smell. A pissy odour that got stronger when the sun warmed it. Picnic tables and the banana seats of children’s bicycles, plastic swimming pools, everything that gets left outside was covered in worm shit. Don’t track that muck into the house. Where had they come from? They had come on the wind or in someone’s suitcase. They had come with a shipment of lumber, in a case of apples. Someone had dreamt them.

A crowd of perhaps two hundred people came up Long’s Hill and gathered across the street from Frank’s bed-sit. The man leading them wore a pirate hat and a cape. The man held a torch and he raised his arm and pointed roughly in the direction of Frank’s window. All the people turned and were quiet and the guide began to lecture. He had tones, this guy, sonorous tones.

It was the Haunted Walk, all the sites of violent murder through the ages in old St. John’s, tourists from the cruise ship, and the guy charged five bucks and Frank wished he had thought of it first. He could never make out what the guide was saying.

Someone had been buried in the basement of one of these houses, slowly poisoned and hacked to pieces, a hundred years ago.

A murmur went through the crowd at the same time each evening, all summer long. Awe and titillation, and the worms hung on their invisible threads making the leaves curl tighter.

MADELEINE

S
HE WAS MEETING
Marty for lunch because she was going to make him cough up the money she needed to finish the film. She would beg, she would cry. She would bring up all they had been to each other and force him to hand over whatever he had. She didn’t care that he had a child on the way. That was his problem.

He had always been fastidious and this she enjoyed and despised. He had loved her for the thirty years that followed her leaving him, through a string of younger and younger girlfriends. He’d become more handsome with every passing year.

The women were all bursting with intellect, were earnest and buxom, the penultimate one had become a prominent architect in Toronto. They fell hard, but not hard enough to sabotage careers or to get knocked up. Until this last one, Gerry-Ann, whom Madeleine had never met.

She thought of her need to get out of the marriage by turns as a mild perversion and a bout of forgetfulness. Her need to get out was visited upon her and beyond her control and she tried to will it away. They had never been suited.

This is not true. She will not be untrue to how hard they worked and drove each other, and how they got up in the middle of the night to take care of the babies and had fast, fast sex in the laundry room when the children were watching cartoons, pasta boiling on the stove, he put his hand over her mouth.

Or sex in the living room, drinking wine, smoking dope, with the headlights of passing traffic sweeping the walls, they had tipped the great big leather couch over and broken a wooden strut in the back of it.

It was an enduring love; it had lasted all her adult life.

She never should have married him.

What was it that finally decided her? There was a leak in the flow of time and she found she could not account for all of it. Coming along Water Street, the sky over Signal Hill would be shaggy and darkness would come barrelling in off the ocean and she would realize it was November. This was November weather. She would look around her and see the pavement glassy, the world slithering askew, and put straight and ultra-clean with each sweep of the windshield wipers.

She’d had an appointment with the dentist and had forgotten it. She had left the children waiting for her in front of the school. They were soaking wet. She had left the oven on. She put her keys in the pocket with the hole in the lining and couldn’t find her keys.

Projects started to come her way. She did industrial films about safety belts in cars and fish processing and prosthetic limbs.

They cut off the heat because she had forgotten to pay the bill. She shot a triple bypass and the doctor winked at her, clicking the tiny scissors, once, twice, like castanets, before digging into the splayed-open chest.

She shot a dummy crashing into a concrete wall in a blue sedan and the airbag puffed up and flame burst from under the hood.

You’re not here, Marty had said. He was an implacable man who kept his own counsel, but she saw she had wounded him. She took the children to the park and felt a lump in her jacket and there were her keys. She’d found her keys! She dug them out and put them on the picnic table beside her.

They had said she would die of a heart condition when she was twelve and she remembers being on a stretcher, feeling the vibrations of the wheels hitting the edge of each yellowish floor tile with a subtle nick.

How thoroughly she had succumbed to the anaesthetic. The engulfing blackness that followed the needle prick had felt like absolution for a potent sense of failure.

She marvels now, that at such a young age, she could have felt so intensely the pressures of impending financial disaster. Her father’s death had left them without any money, and her own operation meant she could not help at home.

They had almost lost her on the operating table and her mother went, during a snowstorm, down to Bowring’s to buy her a confirmation dress that would be suitable to wake her in. The dress she would wear in the casket. The dress was pointed out to her later, hanging in the window at Bowring’s; they returned it when it was clear she would recover. They couldn’t afford dresses if there wasn’t an occasion to wear them.

The sun was setting and she told the children: Down from the monkey bars, we’ll go get an ice cream.

They wandered back home, taking their time and later the moon came up on the empty park, filtering through the trees, glinting on her car keys.

COLLEEN

M
R
. D
UFFY OF
the destroyed bulldozers was a stubble-cheeked man in a blousy black and silver windbreaker and saggy jeans. His nose was shapeless and purplish at the nostrils. Colleen could see in his eyes a sort of intelligence she was unfamiliar with. An old-fashioned intelligence, more akin to cunning than what her mother had, which had to do with generosity.

He drained a can of cola, crunched it in his fist, and tossed it over Colleen’s shoulder. She felt a breeze from its flight into a pail behind her where it dinged and jangled.

Colleen understood at once she was out of her depth.

She thought of her mother in the food court below, absent-mindedly tearing the paper lids off six creamers and tipping them into her coffee.

The social worker who was facilitating wore silvery pantyhose that looked like frost. They whispered every time she crossed her legs. She plunked a leather briefcase on the table and flicked through her files until she found the one she needed, which she pulled out and spread on the table.

Now then, I am Ms. Drake, she said.

Ms. Drake’s sweater was pilled, tiny nubs of cotton clinging to the entire surface of her sweater. It meant she’d put it in the dryer. There was a whole history of resignation and maxed-out credit cards in her ugly sweater. Ms. Drake’s skin was sallow and full of pores, she had a faint moustache and a polyester skirt and she would not likely care too much about pine martens.

Colleen shifted in her chair.

She was suddenly certain Ms. Drake would not know what a pine marten was if it leapt up and bit her ass.

Colleen decided to sit up straight. She thought of Julia Butterfly Hill, who had lived in a tree for two years in the middle of a clear-cut in northern California. They had chopped down almost everything around her. They had shaved the earth of forest but Julia, a sort of wood nymph Amazon hippie creature, had stood her ground.

Ms. Drake cracked her knuckles, first in one hand, and then the other, while she perused Colleen’s file.

She jerked her head to the side, wincing, and there was another cracking sound. Then she shook her hands, making all the cartilage crackle wetly. Was it cartilage?

Julia Butterfly Hill had flowing hair to her bum and wore a woollen cap from South America. On the Net they showed her clinging to a branch as though it were a lover.

She might have been a model or a saint.

I made a promise to Luna, Julia Butterfly Hill had said. Luna was what she called the tree.

Wild-eyed, the
New York Times
had said. How strong and uncompromising she was. Imagine the shudder running through her tree when they put the chainsaw to the trunk.

Okay then, Ms. Drake said, seeming to have finished with her joints. She was shaking her head in disbelief at whatever it was Colleen’s file had revealed and when she looked up there was not a whit of intelligence anywhere in her expression. Was she hungover or premenstrual? She seemed absorbed in some way that did not bode well for Colleen. There was a crackle of cartilage under the table and Colleen realized Ms. Drake had slipped off her sandals and must have been rotating her ankles.