Alligator (8 page)

He saw that his mother was prepared to engage with the owner of the hot-dog stand as if he mattered greatly to her. She would warm him the way she warmed everyone who came into her path, and this might be enough. His mother’s natural, enduring warmth might carry the day.

The kitchen was clean, there were dishes drying in the rack, and a cuckoo clock sent out a bird nine times and they had to wait for it to stop before Frank felt comfortable talking about the hot-dog stand. He felt a reckless anticipation.

The truth was he wanted the hot-dog stand and he had only $1,000 and the man was asking $1,300 and it was possible, Frank felt, that if he went home without the hot-dog stand it would break his will.

COLLEEN

S
HE HAD HITCHHIKED
on a Friday evening for six hours and then began her walk up the timberline. She walked for three hours with just the moon and a flashlight beam to show up the stumps sticking out of the earth. She felt a blister form on the back of one heel and felt it break and rub against her leather sneaker. The breeze was chilly and when it rushed through the trees, making them jostle together, she became aware of how audacious the vandalism would appear. She felt adrenalin rush through her and she was exhilarated and weary. Nothing could compel her to turn back.

There had been a short-lived group at the university who had come together to protest the clear-cut that was endangering the pine marten. They’d argued whether it was true about the Newfoundland pine marten being a separate species and how it could be saved and how they could raise funds and how urgent it all was. There was a definite sense of urgency. There was talk about a bake sale and a letter to the premier. They were dressed mostly in Polarfleece, and hiking boots; they were studying biology or literature or geography. Colleen had gone because of an ad she’d seen on a paper placemat at a café downtown.

She’d downloaded material about international groups and people who had handcuffed themselves around the trunks of trees and people who had gone without food or set themselves on fire. She had photographs of Julia Butterfly Hill, who had climbed a tree and refused to come down for two years. But she couldn’t bring herself to speak up. They were all older and seemed to know each other. She sat in a desk at the back and listened and her cheeks burned red and her blood thumped in her temples and finally she drew her material from her knapsack and flicked at the edge of the folder with her thumb, but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She’d gone to a meeting in April and only two other people had shown up. At the final meeting in May, when university was winding down, no one had shown up but her. She’d sat with her back against the locked door of the seminar room and waited for a half-hour. She felt oddly humiliated. She decided to act by herself.

The shadows of the underbrush stretched out and swivelled away from her as the beam of the flashlight travelled over the brush and the stars were very bright. She had to be in and out before the morning shift showed up. Twenty-five men were employed to raze the forest. They would come bouncing up over the timberline on
ATV
s at dawn.

By the time Colleen reached the clear-cut it had begun to grow light. A gleam appeared along the edge of the river at the base of a very long hillside that had been scraped of vegetation. A dawn light showed the tips of the trees against the sky. There was a streak of bluish green at the horizon and the indigo darkness was turning a softer blue. The bulldozers, in silhouette, looked like prehistoric animals, majestic and slouching.

She had already climbed up into the first bulldozer, had opened her knapsack and taken out the bread and cheese she had packed, when the door of the plywood shed at the edge of the clear-cut smacked against the wall.

A man in a plaid shirt and jeans stood in the doorway of the hut and began to piss. When he was finished she could hear him moving around inside, pouring water, and there was a clatter of dishes. She stayed crouched inside the bulldozer for a long time.

Finally she took a zip-lock bag of sugar from her knapsack and found her way to the top of the machine where the lid to the diesel tank was. She unscrewed the lid, keeping her eye on the shed.

She thought about what she was doing. She closed her eyes and imagined the sugar falling into the guts of the machine, working its way through all the pipes and gaskets. She thought of the surprise and consternation all the men would feel when the five machines cut out almost in unison.

She could hear a radio. There was no way to know when it was safe to move without being seen. Not getting caught required a telepathic vision of the future and an ability to somehow manipulate it, the power of positive thinking, or dumb luck.

She heard a sudden slap and it was the man tossing a bucket of water on the rocks beside the shed. She waited and then she moved to the next bulldozer.

The noise of the pouring sugar, a loud, erotic gushing, caused the hairs to stand up on her arms.

She moved under the window of the shed and tripped over an enamel cup and it clattered against a rock and she ran for all she was worth. The man yelled at her. But she was running and she heard him running behind her. She got over a hump in the path and she ducked into the woods and he ran past her. She stayed where she was and once he was out of sight she dug her way back through the woods so that she was sure she could not be seen. Her neck and wrists were bitten by blackflies and they were burning. She felt a bite between her toes and she tried to rub it against the weave of her cotton sock and couldn’t wait to scratch it until it bled. But she stayed perfectly still. The man came back over the road and passed her again. She waited for an hour and then crept out of the bushes and ran as fast as she could.

What she’d felt when she reached the highway was elation. There were fifty pine martens left in this forest. She had not saved the pine martens of course. The clear-cut would continue. But it would take a few days to replace the machines. There would be men who would be paid to sit around and do nothing.

VALENTIN

V
ALENTIN AND
A
NTON
sat in opposite chairs, each with a row of seven shot glasses in front of him. They were methodical about drinking, taking very little pleasure in it. They were not talking to each other. Once, Valentin, the older man at forty-five, put his fist against his chest because the alcohol burned on the way down. Anton stood and shrugged himself into his leather jacket and headed for the bar.

Valentin was a steady drinker who never slurred or swaggered, but when he drank his face became softer. He was a brutal man and drinking made him decisive and composed. Even the scraggly, bleached-out, delicate women who always gravitate toward nasty men were shy of him when he was sober. Drinking made him resolute in a dangerously attractive way.

Often, he had the bartender send a drink to a woman who interested him. He’d watch while she scanned the room and when she found him he’d tip his glass in her direction.

There was nothing for her to do but nod back.

He knew that tipping his glass, as he did, appeared disdainful; he knew there was some slight adjustment required; some subtle aspect of the North American culture he needed to grasp before his attentions could be appreciated. But he had never mastered an easy charm. He attracted women, instead, with a wily sense of purpose that was itself intoxicating.

The door to the bar was open and it was raining hard. He could smell the rain and heavy cigarette smoke and some dank, despairing smell — the mouldy carpet, briny harbour, and pigeon-shit reek the rain released.

He was waiting for a young woman who had a supply of prescription drugs he was willing to sell for her. She was fifteen minutes late.

The woman was on a month-long OxyContin binge and he imagined she would probably be dead by the end of the summer. It had impressed him how long she had hung on already. She might have been beautiful, but the binge had left her jaundiced, bony, and drawn. He might have made love to her, but she was fitful and distracted. He found that when he made love he liked to have a girl’s attention. It was a mandatory courtesy he hadn’t cared about or noticed when he was young.

Valentin had a heavy brow and broad cheekbones. His eyes were large and almost rusty brown and his mouth was crooked and sensuous. He assessed himself every morning when he shaved, gave himself a cold look, but he found himself handsome.

In Russia, as a teenager, Valentin had been a chess champion. If the girl didn’t show he would play a game of chess. He had an Old World cunning that amounted to a talent for being flexible.

He knew he was the picture of European sophistication when he sat behind a chessboard with his arms resting on the table. He affected a brooding look. He could win without much effort. He liked the feel of onlookers. He liked the way they didn’t speak, and would wander away and come back to see how the game progressed. He liked the good-natured losers who shook his hand or clapped him on the shoulder.

Flexibility meant a prismatic comprehension of all aspects of experience. A burst of intuition that stripped a situation of its complexity and made plain what was most advantageous. What he believed in most was being thorough.

He had travelled through countries where the worth of a loaf of bread had soared and dropped in the time it took him to eat it. He’d seen a Jeep fly into the air; he’d seen legs torn from bodies.

He’d seen his father dragged from his bed and made to kneel on the ground and then shot in the back of the head. It was a night that came back to him frequently in dreams. He had not seen it; he had heard it through an open window. Or it had been recounted to him. His sister had whispered the story to him while he was falling asleep; he had heard the neighbours speak of it. Here or there, a spoken phrase so vivid he couldn’t remember what he’d seen for himself and what he’d been told.

His father kneeling in the mud is a memory he feels he must have seen with his own eyes, first one knee then the other, the concentrated spot of a flashlight jiggling on his father’s bare white neck and then becoming diffuse, flying off into the trees. But he cannot remember a gunshot.

Valentin and his sister were hiding under a bed, he remembers, and the smell of mothballs still brings the night back distinctly, though he was only three, though he might have been sound asleep throughout.
Mothball
is not a word he has ever read; he doesn’t even know what they are made of. Perhaps mothballs are natural, occur in nature.

He had been tortured once for six days in a cinderblock cell and believed himself to be abandoned in this cell, buried alive, and lived with this belief for two and a half days and three cracked ribs and an eye swollen shut — they had dislodged the retina in his left eye and now it caught the light in a strange way, like the irregularities in a piece of amber — and had then been released for no reason he could figure out, though he’d examined every detail of his experience in confinement for logic or pattern. When he got out into the light of day it was supernaturally bright and he recognized that he had been altered so radically that he could no longer be certain of who he was.

It was an uncertainty that lasted for almost a month. During that month his hearing became unbearably sensitive. Words failed him. What do you call the utensil you eat soup with? The struggle for the word caused an acute anxiety. He would think he was speaking Russian and realize it was English. He would tell a French waitress he wanted a thing to eat his spoon but he would be speaking English. He would say he meant soup but he had switched to Russian.

He’d made love to the widow of a dentist in Bosnia and had taken her husband’s dental instruments in a satchel and claimed he was a professional for so long that a weak paper trail identified him as such and he had crossed some European borders he would not have crossed if they’d known he was a common thug. By the end of it he could remove a rotten tooth with the appropriate tool causing minimal pain.

Thug
was an English word with which he identified. He liked its truncated sound, its gangster-movie anonymity, its gritty truthfulness.

He’d read a book called
The Successful Executive
published in the 1930s and found everything he had already assumed to be correct. Ask questions later. Don’t ask. There was a stream of philosophy that recommended reflection but those guys were all dead. He could persuade, or coerce, he had both these abilities. He had an intermittent genius that came and went like a bad cellphone connection. Plans came to him this way: fully formed and without flaw.

For example, he had decided he would douse the house on Morris Avenue with gasoline. He would take the pickup to every gas station in St. John’s over the period of two weeks and fill up three five-gallon plastic tanks in each gas station.

The idea of torching the house came to him when Isobel Turner was opening her mail. She had a letter from her insurance company and as she stood reading it she opened the breadbox and then became still, transfixed by the statement.

She put the statement on the counter and took out the loaf of bread. She said insurance rates had doubled since she bought the house. She said this to the toaster. She picked up the statement again and the toaster began to smoke. At first she did nothing.

The fire alarm began to bleat and it was a new design with a female voice between each peal of shrilling rings that said, This is an automated message. This
is
a fire alarm. This
is
a fire alarm.

Isobel flapped at it with the dishtowel, dragged a chair over, and pulled the batteries out. The toaster made a grinding squeal and she got a fork from the drawer and poked at the bread that was blackened and tossed it, smoking, into the garbage bucket under the sink.

She’d bought the house fifteen years before, filled it with her grandmother’s furniture. The contents of her grand-mother’s house in Old Perlican had been left to her in a will. She’d rented out the house to a family until she came home from Toronto. The husband had worked for the telephone company and his wife had kept the house immaculate, as if it were her own.