Alligator (2 page)

The man’s body is flicked back and forth. His fists are on the alligator’s snout for a moment. He’s flopped over and flopped back. His legs are kicking. Then, on his bare back, stripes of blood because of the claws, or being dragged in the dirt. The alligator shakes his head as if he’s having a disagreement. He really disagrees. He disagrees vehemently. The alligator is trying hard to tear the man’s head from his shoulders. Everything about the way the animal moves is repulsive and quick. Its tail stamps and lashes the man into the dirt.

The camera keeps rolling because maybe the man, should he survive, will want to view the accident later.

Or maybe he will want it viewed by others.

There must be a school where they teach, don’t turn off the camera. Because the cameraman forgets to turn the camera off, though for long stretches the only thing in the frame is dirt.

For long stretches, it’s dirt and the toe of the cameraman’s boot. Veils of dirt float across the frame and a black boot scuffs in and out and there’s a jerk and the alligator and the man are back in the centre of things.

He is not dead, his legs are moving.

How long will it take?

And then there is a corridor. An empty corridor of white walls and tile and the colour bars.

Peanut butter stuck to the roof of my mouth. I rewind and watch and rewind and watch. I look for some reason to believe the man is still alive. If you watch for long enough you will see everything.

I watch until Madeleine comes home. She leans against the door frame with her arms folded under her chest. She tugs at her amber pendant, back and forth, on the chain. It’s the beginning of August and we’ve had weather in the high twenties for three weeks. Madeleine has a dewy look from the heat; she’s tanned and blousy and she’s getting ready to shoot the second half of a big feature film she’s working on.

He’s still alive, she says. He runs an alligator farm in Louisiana, an ecological reserve.

Loyola, she says.

She pushes herself off the door frame with one shoulder and goes into the kitchen and then I hear the frying pan. I hear cupboard doors and oil sizzling, glasses clinking. Madeleine will cook at midnight if she’s hungry.

She comes back out and stands and watches the footage with me.

Loyola somebody, she says. It’ll come to me. Nice guy.

She has a glass of vodka with ice and tonic and she works one toe behind the strap of her sandal and kicks it off. She hobbles over, still wearing one high heel, and drops into the leather couch and kicks off the other sandal too, and removes her rings. Big silver rings, with amber and turquoise, and they clink on the glass coffee table as she puts them down.

He lived through that, she says. Loyola Rosewood.

Madeleine’s entirely consumed with her new film. She acts like someone in a dream.

I rewind to the beginning. The man is strutting around the perimeter of the crowd again and his stomach is washboard ridges and his fists are by his hips and he has serious muscles. He has a proud, worn-out look. There is the silver balloon burning a hole in the sky, the kinetic halo of sunlight in the girl’s hair.

I had a thing with that guy, Madeleine says. An ice cube in her glass busts open.

The alligator guy?

We had a little thing.

FRANK

F
RANK
’
S GOT THE
windows open and the warm night breeze jostles the handful of forget-me-nots sitting in a Mason jar of yellowish water on the windowsill. A few petals move on the surface of the water like tiny boats on a still lake.The glass jar and the submerged flower stems are coated with silvery beads of air. There’s a housefly near the jar, bluish and iridescent, cocooned in a spider’s web and dust. The fly has been there, lying on the crackled paint of the windowsill, since Frank moved in a few months before Christmas, two days after his nineteenth birthday.

The breeze draws his door shut with a loud slam and he thinks about the girl, Colleen, sitting on a downtown doorstep eating a Popsicle. He’d seen her fling a handful of breadcrumbs from a paper bag, and the pigeons had dropped down from the trees and telephone wires. She was wearing a white undershirt and he could see one black shiny bra strap pressing into her tanned shoulder. Her bare arms were wrapped around her knees and the pigeons were strutting as close as they dared.

Frank had said about the weather, and she put her hand over her eyes to block the sun so she could see him, and the Popsicle stick wagged up and down as she shifted it from one cheek to the other. A door slammed down the street and the pigeons flew up all at once. She pulled the Popsicle slowly out of her pouted-up mouth, and she considered him.

He had said it might rain. There was absolutely no chance of rain but he’s said it before he knew what he was saying and she had considered it. Her lips were fluorescent pink from the Popsicle and he could not believe he had spoken about the weather. It was hot and the sky was without a cloud and her lips looked very cold and luminous pink. He was
transfixed
is the word for what he felt, but there was no chance of rain. It might never rain again. Transfixed on her mouth and her bra strap and how alive and smart her eyes looked in the shade of her cupped hand.

Frank had seen her around and didn’t know her name but made a vow he would find it out. It was the sort of information he felt he should have known without ever having to be told. It was knowledge he should have attained almost magically and he was thinking this when he discovered her name. He saw it on her necklace, a necklace of wooden beads on a leather string, one letter on each bead, spelling Colleen.

The grass is starting to die, he’d said. And without thinking he had bent forward and turned over one of the beads, the second “e,” and a moment later he could not get over his audacity.

Thanks, she said. She had dipped her chin in so she could watch him turn over the letter, and she’d sighed and he felt her breath on the back of his hand. Then he stood up and brushed the back pockets of her jeans and went inside the house.

I’m just visiting my Aunt, she said. She waved good-bye with a little wave and then just stood there for a moment with her hand on her necklace. He had touched her almost by accident and then became aware of what he’d done and he saw she was aware of it too, and they were both pleasantly flustered. Everything about turning over that letter had been gentle and unpremeditated and ridiculous. It was a ridiculous thing to do and she had allowed it.

See you later, she said. And then she had closed the door. He could hear her walking to the back of the house.

He was getting ready for work and thinking about the girl and it made him self-conscious. He found himself making up a conversation with her, something else he might have said rather than talking about the weather. They could have said something about the bridal party over in Bannerman Park getting their pictures taken under the trees, or that there had been a funeral that morning at the Gower Street United Church blocking the traffic, and all the dark suits in the heat. The organ music coming out onto the sidewalk.

The pigeons had cooed throatily, sounding intimate and provocative and flapping all around them when the door slammed down the street and the knees had been out of her jeans. A few strands of white thread, still intact, pressing against her bare knees, and she had a canvas bag covered with buttons about peace, and a pewter pin of a whale. He might have asked her about the pins. She’d sucked on the top of the Popsicle and drew the pink colour out of the tip so it went whitish like snow, and he had been adamant about the weather changing.

He carries on a conversation with her while he gets ready for work, only half-aware he’s doing it. Part of him thinks there’s a chance he’ll run into her downtown. Then he sees himself as though from the outside, alone in his apartment, thinking about a girl he doesn’t know at all, that he’s barely met. He feels his thumb brush against the dip in her throat just as it did when he turned over the bead on her necklace and he burns a hot red, so hot the tips of his ears tingle. He cannot believe he touched her necklace; his fingers had brushed against her neck. Because her hair was down and it was long and thick and curly and dark, it had trapped the heat of the sun and her neck had felt moist and warm. It had happened without any thought. He’s glad he’s alone so nobody can see him blush. At the same time he knows, unequivocally, that he has been alone too long.

Frank has been selling hot dogs on George Street since April, but he knows this will be his best month. He has four weeks of steady sales until September, even longer, if the weather holds. He’ll work every night until the cruise ships have left for the season and the university crowd heads back to school.

He hears a band warming up on George Street. He lives a few streets up from downtown in a bed-sit, the cheapest housing he could find. There’s a retired Avon Lady on the floor beneath Frank and two Russian drug dealers on the floor above. Carol, the ex–Avon Lady, says they’re drug dealers.

There used to be an Inuit guy on the third floor, but he hanged himself on Boxing Day. They’d never got his name and it was something Carol felt bad about. She had been the one to call the police, when she noticed the Inuit guy wasn’t coming and going.

Frank dropped a bag of laundry on his bed and, opening the zipper, took out his pressed, folded shirts in a neat stack. There were eight. The woman at the laundromat on Gower Street put sheets of crisp white tissue paper inside Frank’s shirts when he had them pressed and he liked the soft crumpling sound when he was getting ready for the evening. He paid extra to get his shirts done and it was his only extravagance. He liked to wear a white shirt when he was selling hot dogs. He liked to look clean, and whatever kind of detergent the lady used — she had spiky black hair, wore tank tops and leopard-print leggings — his shirts always smelled as if they’d been hanging on a line. He wore a baseball cap to keep his hair out of the way of the hot dogs. He’d never had a complaint about hygiene.

He and Carol had known the Inuit guy was in trouble, but they’d tried to mind their own business. They’d listened to him shouting and crying in the middle of the night; they’d seen him with his cases of beer. Then there had been no sign of him. The cops had arrived seven minutes after Carol called them, ducking under the icicles that had hung from the door frame. They’d brushed against each other trying to wipe their feet on the welcome mat Carol had bought at her own expense and put out to cover the hole in the linoleum. They’d shut the door and the draft made the light bulb swing and their shadows dipped and stretched. The cops looked windburnt and content, as if they had worked most of the day outdoors and were ready to get home.

Have you got any reason to worry? one officer had asked, directing his questions to Carol, who seemed self-important and frail in their company.

Frank turns on the shower and takes the can of shaving cream out of the cabinet over the sink. He pulls the chain overhead and the light from the bare hanging bulb swings a soft gold arc on the beige wall. Steam roils above the shower curtain, which is transparent except for a print of big red roses. Frank takes off his T-shirt and leans over the sink to look at the stubble on his chin. He stretches his neck, checking both sides of his jaw. The mirror clouds with steam and he wipes a streak with a face cloth and begins to shave.

There was nothing in the bed-sit when he moved in except a hotplate and fridge and the bathroom with a toilet and shower stall. There was a mantelpiece above a bricked-in fire-place and he’d taken the urn with his mother’s ashes out of his suitcase first thing and put it in the centre of the mantelpiece.

A rectangle of autumn light had come through the window and he set the brass urn down so the light struck it and the urn looked like it might become warm to the touch if it sat in the sun long enough. He didn’t know if it was right to display the urn but he decided he felt more comfortable with it in view.

He’d sold all of his mother’s furniture in an open house he’d advertised in the
Telegram
. He stood in the centre of the bed-sit, on that first day, and he could see his breath. He stood there thinking about his mother. There were two windows and they gave an unobstructed view of the harbour. Frank had sat on the floor with his back against the opposite wall and looked at the harbour for a long time. He’d had a pencil and a notepad and he was jotting down the items he wanted to list in the
Buy & Sell
under Freebies. There were things belonging to his mother he couldn’t bring himself to sell or keep: a vinyl recording of the Pope’s address to the people of Newfoundland when he visited in 1984, still in its Cellophane cover, a set of rosary beads carved from narwhal tusk, and a hooked mat his mother had done herself, a portrait of the Pope, his hand raised in benediction.

While he sat there he decided he would buy a waterbed. He had always imagined owning a waterbed when he was successful, but now it struck him that getting the bed might invoke the man he wanted to become. You bought a waterbed and so became the sort of man who owned a waterbed.

Frank had waited until his mother was dead to give her landlord notice. He kept up the belief that she might get well as long as she was alive out of a sort of respect and faithfulness, though he had given up hope of getting the money together to send her to the Mayo Clinic. He talked every day, during his hospital visits, about the airfares he was checking into and the medical advancements the clinic offered that were superior to anything she could hope for in Newfoundland. But his mother’s cancer had progressed so far by the time it was diagnosed that there had been no hope, even if he’d had the money for the Mayo Clinic.

The police knocked on the Inuit guy’s door several times. Then one of them came back down to Carol’s to borrow a butter knife and they used it to jimmy the door. Frank stepped out onto the landing and listened with Carol. They both stood, Frank staring at Carol’s fluffy pink slippers and her peach toe-nail polish, and they heard an utterance. It was not a shout but not muffled either, it was a human noise that expressed surprise and awfulness at the same time and it came from the cop’s gut. Frank heard him say, He’s after hanging himself in here, Greg.