Alligator (3 page)

Frank dragged his eyes up from the floor and Carol had covered her mouth with her hand, and her eyes looked watery behind her glasses and her fingernails were painted the same colour as her toes. They hadn’t decided to stand on the landing but they found themselves there. The Inuit boy was twentyone, two years older than Frank, and he had arrived three months before Frank and drank continuously and kept to himself, except one morning when he and Frank had shovelled the walk together.

Frank heard a thump and this must have been the body being lowered from whatever kind of noose. The police were speaking quietly to each other. They sounded respectful and upset. Frank and Carol stood, almost unable to move, because they’d both felt a dread building in them all through the week before Christmas without ever talking about it.

On Christmas Eve, Frank had knocked on Carol’s door and given her a box of chocolates and she said she had something for him. He told her not to bother but she said, Come in, come in. He saw her place was bigger but he stayed just inside the door while she opened and slammed drawers in her bedroom and took a long time, and he heard tape.

He stood waiting and finally she came out and handed him the present, blowing the hair out of her eyes as if she were winded. He opened the present and it was a bottle of Avon cologne for men. The bottle was in the shape of a stallion, one hoof pawing the air. Half the cologne had already been used.

Carol asked him did he want to come in and have a glass of Scotch with her if he were old enough to drink and then the bagpipes started from the Kirk across the street and Frank had said that maybe they should call the police about the guy on the third floor. He was holding the glass horse in his hand and the balled-up wrapping paper.

Carol was shorter than Frank and she wore bifocals. The lower half of her lenses magnified the soft pouches under her eyes, which were pale white and delicately veined; her eyelashes were almost transparent. She gripped the edge of the door frame and looked up at him and her eyes snapped several times while she decided what they should do.

Neither of them wanted to go up and knock.

They’d seen him stumbling out of taxis and they’d heard him singing to himself at all hours. Then there had been nothing for two days, not a sound.

The very afternoon Frank had moved into the bed-sit he’d gone outside to the bus stop and caught the number two to the Village Mall and went to Sears and lay down on five or six beds. He lay there and spread his arms and was careful to keep his boots off the mattresses. A man came by and asked if he needed help and he said he wanted a waterbed and he’d want it delivered.

The man said that a waterbed was the most expensive bed you could buy. Frank was still lying on his back. The ceiling was a long way up.

I have lots of money, Frank said.

The police came out of the apartment and passed Frank and Carol on the landing and Frank became aware of himself, just standing in the way, and went back into his room and shut the door. Then he opened the door and stood watching in case someone needed help moving the body.

An ambulance arrived and two attendants got the body on a stretcher and with the help of one of the cops carried it down the stairs. They were giving instructions to each other, wincing under the weight. One of the attendants caught his knuckles on the banister on the second-floor landing. He had to stop and rest the stretcher on his hip and shake his hand because of the pain. He’d grazed the skin on each of his knuckles on the left hand and blood got all over the front of his white shirt. Frank got him some paper towel and he wound it around his hand and dropped the roll and it went bouncing down the stairs and rolled all the way to the front door.

Frank and the Inuit guy had shovelled the walk together one morning after a snowstorm when the sun had come out and the street was an achy ultra-white and the ploughed banks were way above their heads. All down the street cars were buried.

Children had come out in their snowsuits and their voices rang out in the clear air and the chink of shovels. People were shovelling and veils of snow trailed after each shovelful and hung in the air sparkling. The pavement, where it showed through, was as shiny and black as patent leather. The traffic could hardly move.

Frank and the Inuit guy nodded to each other and they shovelled for more than an hour. They didn’t introduce themselves. The moment for doing that came and lasted and passed without either of them speaking up.

The Inuit guy had sunglasses on and a yellow anorak and his hair was blue black and he shovelled effortlessly and took regular breaks to lean on his shovel for a moment and still made more progress than Frank.

The young nurse who lives across the street, a new single mother, was backing out of her driveway over a ploughed hill and she made the engine rev until it was squealing. They went over to push and Frank gave her directions on which way to turn her wheels and saw her eyes in the rear-view and they were brown and he would give anything to kiss her and make love to her because he had been watching her since she moved in, and she’d call out hi and wave and sometimes that was all anybody said to him in the run of a day.

He and the Inuit guy leaned into the fender of her car with all their might. The Inuit guy had pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and he was grinning at Frank and he knew, had seen Frank looking at the girl in the rear-view, and they were laughing and rocking this big mother of a car and finally it gave and the girl covered them from the waist down with slush, and she then pulled over a little farther down the road and ran back to them and brushed at both of them with the end of her scarf, almost down on her knees flicking the slush off, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and he and the Inuit guy grinned at each other.

Frank got out of the shower wrapped in the only towel he had. He lifted a shirt off the pile of shirts and, holding it by the shoulders, gave it a little shake and the tissue paper wafted to the floor. He had dried his back but he was damp with a fine perspiration because of the heat and he put the shirt on and rolled his shoulders to get it to hang nicely. He took a float from the envelope of money he kept under his bedside table and buttoned it into his shirt pocket. He turned off the lights and gave the door a good slam behind him.

Out on the sidewalk a flock of pigeons lifted as he came down the stairs. They cooed and settled again to peck at the bread crumbs left for them. Inside Frank’s empty bed-sit, water drops travelled in hesitant, zigzagging paths down the plastic shower curtain, and in the window several air bubbles on the stems of the flowers in the Mason jar floated to the surface and broke soundlessly. The breeze nudged the flowers into one another and the stems tippytoed across the bottom of the jar.

COLLEEN

T
HE ELEVATOR DOORS
fling themselves open and Colleen sees a judge heading toward her from the end of a long hallway. He’s in full stride, forehead first, the arms of his black robes billowing. The reflection from a tube of fluorescent ceiling light runs over his oily bald head like a charging train.

She assumes he’s a judge; he towers above her. Colleen is seventeen and slight, with pale white skin, a light spray of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her hair is kinky, almost black, like bitter chocolate, and gathered loosely with a rainbow-coloured shoelace at the nape of her neck. Her expression is forthright and blatantly innocent. But she has recently been caught trying to destroy several thousand dollars’ worth of privately owned forestry equipment. Colleen Clark had poured sugar into the fuel tanks of some bulldozers belonging to Mr. Gerry Duffy; the youth diversion meeting had been set for early August and she had waited, feeling sure of herself and unsure by turns, all through July. She had wanted more than anything for the day to be over. She had fervently imagined the rest of her summer with the youth diversion meeting behind her. But she had not imagined being in an elevator about to come face to face with Mr. Duffy. She had not imagined this judge or the light sweat she could feel at her hairline on her forehead. She had not imagined the pitch and tone of her fright.

Mr. Duffy is waiting in an office several floors above to talk about the damage and how she might pay for her vandalism with community service.

Colleen looks at the judge’s reflection in the brass panels of the elevator. His eyebrows hang down into his watery eyes. His face is warped in the polished metal.

A haze of smarting cologne hits her; she can taste it at the back of her throat. When she was six years old she gave a gift package of four bottles of Aqua Velva to her father for Christmas. David was her stepfather, really, though she has never thought of him that way. She thought of him only as her father and she was obsessed that Christmas with buying him a present. She had received an allowance that year and saved most of it in a pink plastic bank shaped like a pig with a rubber stopper in its belly. She’d had to fish the bills out with a fork.

Two days before Christmas, at the door of Wal-Mart in the Avalon Mall, with a flurry of snow and wind at their backs, Colleen and her mother, Beverly, were greeted by a woman in a white plastic apron with eggplant-dark lipstick and big teeth who brought a hand-held whirring set of blades in close proximity to a carrot and sent film-thin coins flying into the air.

Imagine all the time you’d save, Beverly had said, giving her hands a quick clap. Beverly had short, curly hair that she dyed a dramatic, solid black as soon as streaks of silver appeared at her temples. Her eyes were large, strikingly luminous — the white visible below the pupil. The wrinkles at the corners of her eyes gave her an etched intensity. She could look rapt and full of judgement, but when she smiled her face was entirely altered. When Beverly smiled she looked girlish and wantonly generous. Her expressions were too honest and full of bare emotion for anyone to think her pretty. But she was strongly attractive.

The woman with the vegetable dicer attacked an onion and, most disturbingly, a chunk of purplish meat. Everything the blade buzzed near held its shape for the briefest instant and then fell into a thousand limp slices.

It had been snowing since dawn on that day. The parking lot was covered in snow; the cars looked crammed together and restful under sloppy white caps. Men and women in orange vests waved glowing wands to direct traffic. The buses were sweeping their headlights into the grey dusk of the afternoon.

The Aqua Velva was the first gift Colleen had ever picked out by herself. A tower of boxes ingeniously piled one on top of the other, each with a corner slightly off-kilter so the stack rose like a spiral staircase. There were giant Christmas bulbs hanging from the rafters, carols bubbling wordlessly through the overhead speakers, shoppers in bright coats rushing forward and away like the bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope.

Inside the department store Colleen’s tight red wool coat with the black velvet trim and matching buttons smelled of the cold. The coat had been purchased at an expensive children’s clothing boutique on Duckworth Street, the first of its kind in St. John’s, which had closed after only one season. Beverly had eyed the coat for four months, watching the price go down, and bought it in the spring close-out sale for the following winter. As a result the sleeves were too short, but Colleen had to wear it anyway.

Beverly had lifted Colleen into a shopping cart and she was hanging on tightly while her mother charged forward into the crowd, unwilling to slow down for the customers who wandered into her path, until the front of the cart hit a motorized wheelchair and snagged on a protruding bar.

The woman in the wheelchair was obese. Her body was composed of three distinct rolls of fat that settled on top of each other and made Colleen think of soft-serve ice cream pouring out of the nozzle at Moo Moos. The woman’s shiny red rubber boots didn’t quite reach the footrests and the appliqué Christmas tree on her sweater had green lights that blinked on and off.

Colleen was well into Grade 1 and had been taught to look adults in the eye, to shake hands when introduced, never to mumble. But the woman in the wheelchair frightened her. Colleen looked down from the cart, now jerking back and forth on only two wheels, to the top of the woman’s head. Greasy white hair lay flat over her skull. The grooves made by her comb were still visible and the pink of her scalp showed through.

It was all her mother’s fault — the bravado she brought to every gesture that most often paid off and sometimes went very badly.

BEVERLY

B
EVERLY WAS WAITING
in the food court on the ground floor of Atlantic Place, having watched Colleen get into the elevator near the bank. Before the doors closed Beverly had called out, There’s nothing shameful about being wrong.

They were not speaking very much these days. Beverly had taken the vandalism as a personal affront. Colleen was trying to protect the Newfoundland pine marten, an endangered species.

A whole species wiped off the face of the earth, she had screamed at her mother.

Pine martens, Beverly had said. She could not fathom what Colleen might mean by trying to save them.

They’re rodents, her mother said.

They’re dying out forever, Mother, Colleen said. Somehow Beverly had raised a daughter whose voice could be as shrill as a fire alarm. Was that genetic? Does it skip generations? Beverly had never even seen a picture of a pine marten. There was a whole subgroup of animals — squirrels, badgers, beavers, rats, mostly grey-haired or brown, flicking through peripheral vision if seen at all — in whom Beverly had no interest. Why not albino tigers?

I’m sure we can manage without them, she’d answered. She wondered what David would have thought.

Beverly had met David, Colleen’s stepfather, at a prenatal class. David was with a downtown barmaid whose husband had left her during the pregnancy. The barmaid had asked him to accompany her to the classes — be her birth coach — because she was afraid to do it alone.

She’d served David a martini with a twist during happy hour at the bar he’d been drinking in since he’d turned nineteen. Then she put her fingers over her mouth as if to hold the words back. They’d known each other since high school.