Down to the Dirt (12 page)

Keith landed in St. John’s, skinny as a rake and hell-bent on a new tattoo. We found a little hole on the west end of Water
Street called the Black Rose. Keith was lookin’ for a small tattoo of a scallop shell with the words
never again
underneath it. There was nothing even remotely like that available, so he settled for a little spider. He wanted it on his hand, between his thumb and index finger, but I talked him out of it and he got it on the inside of his wrist instead. Thank God. All bad enough. He told me to take my pick too. He’d gotten an advance of five hundred dollars off the boat and was expecting another twelve hundred the next day. I had a good look around while he was havin’ his tattoo done. Mostly just broken hearts and schooners and angry biker symbols though. Nothing there to suit me.

After that we went lookin’ at apartments. All the best ones were too expensive. Keith fell right in love with this hideous place above a bar called the Hatchet on Water Street. Whoever had just moved out were most likely checked into the mental. There was sick, demonic murals all over the walls. Everything was smashed to bits, holes in the ceiling. Something like spaghetti was splattered everywhere, dried onto the walls. The guy showin’ it to us also happened to own the bar beneath it, told Keith he’d make a fine bartender. Not exactly what I had in mind.

I called Mom and to see if I could keep the car overnight. After a good racket with her, me and Keith checked into the Captain’s Quarters on Kings Bridge Road. When we settled into our room I had him call R.N.C. headquarters. I was dyin’ to know what that was all about. But Ms. Nancy Drew was out of town. After that we watched a bit of pay-per-view and had a nice, sweaty night. Fish and chips, queen-sized bed. I hadn’t realized how much I was missin’ him. Next morning we found the place on Anderson Avenue, paid the damage deposit, and
that was it. We went and got a couple of keys cut and then I drove up the Shore by myself. Keith stayed in town. I dropped him off on Water Street before I left. He said he was goin’ for a bite to eat. I knew he’d end up in the bars.

I made half a dozen trips back and forth to St. John’s that week. Aside from my own gear, I had to go all over the Cove trackin’ down Keith’s stuff for him. A hockey bag full of tapes at Gerald Careen’s place, a chest full of books down in the twine shed by the plant. A lot of his stuff was in my room. He asked me to go by his parents’ place and pick up the rest of his clothes, said they’d be packed up in garbage bags in the porch. But I couldn’t go there. Last time I’d been there his mother called me down to the dirt.

Mom brought me out with the last load of gear. We stopped at Value Village and I got a few things for the kitchen. Like I said, Mom wasn’t too keen on me movin’ in with Keith. He was in the black books at the Healy house ever since he brought the cops to the door. Mom got talkin’ about this summer job in Toronto. Dad had a friend in real estate that was lookin’ for a summer secretary. Two or three months. Good money. Dad wanted to pay for the whole lot. It sounded pretty decent, I must say. But I was determined to at least give it a try with Keith. Mom dropped me off in a huff and wouldn’t even come inside for a look around.

Keith was s’posed to meet me at the apartment for a little celebration. Of course he wasn’t there. I waited. I called around to a few bars. When I called the Hatchet, the bartender muffled the phone with her hand and I heard her say:

—Keith? Phone. Are you here?

She came back on the line to tell me that she hadn’t seen him all night.

I lugged all the gear down over the basement steps on my own. Then I got ready and went downtown to get Keith. I’d never set foot in the Hatchet before and I almost choked on the stench when I walked in. Smoke, sweat, piss, shit, fermented booze and vomit. Smelled almost like…like burnt flesh. Like the time Dad singed his hand on the stove. And what a crowd of wasters. I never saw the like in my life. Half past ten on a weeknight and no one with a leg to stand on. I walked through the whole bar, even checked the men’s toilet. The smell. I’d smelled it off Keith’s jacket before. On my way back through the bar I could feel all eyes on me, like I was a slab of meat or something. Or maybe they were just amazed that I could walk a straight line.

I was in the porch and just about to push the door open when I caught a glimpse, through a little grime-laden window, of a couple tucked away in the corner near the front windows. They were goin’ right to town, suckin’ the face off one another. I felt my knees go weak. I walked back into the bar and turned the corner behind the door. Sure enough it was Keith, face and eyes into some slut with a big shock of red hair and about twenty earrings in her ear. I grabbed him by the head of the hair and yanked him away from her. The slut looked up at me, all insulted, but she caught on quick enough. I was vicious. She jumped up and stumbled over to the bar, giggling and glancin’ over her shoulder at me. Keith tried to pull away from me, but I had a firm grip on his hair. I dragged him to his feet and out onto the street and gave him a good crack across the face. He fell down on the sidewalk, loaded. Didn’t even know who I was. I hailed a cab and the cabbie
helped me load him in the car. We had to stop twice on the way uptown for him to throw up. I got him into the apartment and into bed. Somewhere along the way he’d gone out and bought himself a pair of leather pants. They didn’t look cheap either. They were tough-lookin’ biker pants. Nice to know he had his priorities straight.

He couldn’t remember anything the next morning. He was a mess. Shakin’ and bawlin’. I didn’t have the energy to bring up the incident with the slut at the bar.

Nancy Drew called that afternoon. I walked down to the police station with Keith, mostly to make sure he found his way home afterwards. On the way, we passed by the building where the Second Chance Society should have been. There was a chunky padlock on the front door and the big bright Second Chance sign was gone. We peeked in through the windows of the front office. The place was gutted, not a lick of furniture, nothing on the walls, like it’d been vacant for years.

Keith was still half-staggering when we walked through the front doors of the station. His breath reeked too. He was askin’ for it alright.

Turns out they were investigating Adams for his suspected involvement with some child pornography ring on the mainland! The good Reverend was on the missin’ list as well. Keith went and told the detective everything he knew, all about his own experience with Adams, his suspicions. Then of course he had to go and tell her that
I’d
been talkin’ to Adams. She called me in. Pumped me for information.

—Did he say anything,
anything
that might attest to his whereabouts, Ms. Healy?

There was nothing I could tell her.

Keith was some delighted with himself though. How he saw through the whole thing all along. He wouldn’t shut up. I felt like chokin’ him.

We spent the next while fixin’ up the apartment, scrubbin’, buyin’ groceries and all that happy domestic shit. My heart wasn’t in it. After Keith got through the initial stages of booze withdrawal, he lapsed into this dark, gloomy silence. I found myself bouncin’ around, grinnin’ like a proper fool, tryin’ to cheer him up. He’d look at me and grunt. Enough to sicken you. He told me one time that there was nothing, only silence, in his house for months on end when he was growin’ up. If that’s what I had to look forward to…

Anyhow, we’ve finally gotten around to our little house warmin’ celebration tonight. I bought some whole-wheat pasta and a pack of ground beef at Stockwoods. Stir-fried some veggies. Keith sat around in front of the little black and white TV ’til the table was all laid out. I put on a nice top and a bit of makeup and everything. He hasn’t changed them leather pants from the time he bought ’em. I s’pose he thinks he’s Jim Morrison now. Wouldn’t surprise me. He was Leonard Cohen last week.

Look at him, shovellin’ it aboard himself like a savage. That vicious scowl on his face. Swear he never saw a bit of ground beef in his life.

SMASH!

Glass shattering on the bathroom floor.

I’m up out of bed in a flash.

I checks my bedside clock.

2:35 a.m.

I sleeps with a big piece of steel pipe at the foot of the bed. I grabs it and creeps out into the living room. I’m gonna be sick. I wish I had my boots on. It’s always easier with my boots on. What’s that? A rustle and a scuff from the bathroom. A low murmur. The light is on. I never left that light on.

I’m braced, legs spraddled for balance, pipe clenched in both hands. Mortified. Some of the most ear-piercing and nerve-racking sounds in the world are the ones made by someone, or something, tryin’ to keep quiet.

The familiar squeak of the bathroom doorknob pushes my heart up into my throat. The bathroom light falls across my face and I screams, chargin’ at the opening with the pipe up over my head, aimin’ to maim and maim for keeps. But my intruder screams too and slams the door shut just as I’m about to make contact with a face. The pipe digs into the first layer of
wood on the bathroom door and something, maybe the mirror, falls from the wall and shatters onto the bathroom floor.

—Who’s here? C’mon then. You picked the wrong fella to—

From the bathroom, a quivering, choked-up voice:

—Keith? Keith, honey, it’s me. What’s wrong? Sleepwalking are you?

It’s Natasha. Up using the bathroom. I forgot she was back. Shit. Where does my head go? She regains herself and is not at all pleased when she inspects the hole in the bathroom door.

—Natasha. Jesus. I heard a noise. I thought it was the window and I’m half asleep girl. I had a horrible dream—

—The cat knocked a bottle into the bathtub, Keith. And the mirror is ruined now too. I got my period back. Be careful in the morning ’cause there’s glass.

The cat comes lumbering out of the bathroom, altogether oblivious to my life. I’m standin’ there with the pipe, feelin’ foolish and wantin’ the moment to pass. Natasha starin’ at me, shakin’ her head.

—You coulda killed me, Keith. I’m goin’ to bed.

She cut me off, that’s what happened. Nothing was gettin’ in the way of that job. There were greener pastures in Toronto for some reason. Greener pastures in Toronto. For the love of Christ. We’d been livin’ in St. John’s not two weeks and we were a long way from settled in. She cut me off. Just like that.

Her old man had set her up with a cozy office job for some fancy real-estate firm up there and she’d be gone all summer. The unspoken plan was that she’d meet some nice fella up there, get a taste for the good life, and leave me in the dust. By
hookin’ her up with a place to stay, payin’ for her ticket and sendin’ her off with some cash in her hands, they had more or less obligated her to pay ’em back by never lookin’ back. Not in my direction anyway. She was cold as ice the days before she left, said it was a family thing.

—Family comes first, Keith. Family comes first.

Family? Two and a half years and she still don’t think of me as family? Well what am I then? I was cryin’, sobbin’ out on the steps on a blistering hot day in June. The whole summer was comin’, but it didn’t matter shit to me. I just knew that when she went, she was gone for good. This was her big chance and she was jumpin’ at it.

She laughed at me too. Laughed ’cause I was weak and she was gettin’ stronger. That’s the way it always is I s’pose. The one who walks away first carries all the power. But she swore she wasn’t walkin’ away from me, that she’d be back, and that it was all good. Good for us. Time and space. Empty bullshit used to appease me so she wouldn’t have to deal with
the Keith situation.
All she wanted was to be happy and free and off to Toronto for the summer. I didn’t see it for the blessing it shoulda been.

We fucked like rabbits when we first met. Four, five times a day. Never did take any precautions, practised and well-timed withdrawal bein’ our only form of birth control. A thousand times I’m sure. Condoms were too clumsy, and the pill…well, the last thing we needed was more hormones floatin’ around. But, when I got the phone call two weeks after she’d arrived in the big T.O., tellin’ me she was pregnant, my first reaction was complete and utter disbelief. Not shock or any
thing like that. I just didn’t believe her. It seemed so fitting for her to go and make it all up so’s she could still have that grip on me, a grip which, as I’m sure she must have figured out by then, had been loosening up considerably.

See, I was well able to let her go once she’d gone, that was the funny thing. I wasn’t the volatile, blubbering, desperate mess we both expected me to be. I was movin’ on, makin’ a clean break from my last real connection with the Cove. Natasha. Now she was tryin’ to tell me we were gonna be bound to each other
by blood
for the rest of our lives? Like fuck.

But then I knew. I knew it was true ’cause I knew Natasha. It’s not in her nature to be
that
manipulative. She wanted a clean break just as bad as I did. I doubted very much she’d go to that length just to suck me back in.

We talked some more.

Pregnant.

I hung up the phone and went out for a walk.

How in the fuck did it happen? But I knew that too. In the back of my mind I knew that phone call was on the way. I was losin’ her, see? Or I
thought
I was losin’ her, and the prospect of it scared me. The night before she left she softened up a bit, for my sake I s’pose, and we managed a bit of routine, mindless and mechanical sex. But towards the end, some part of me wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pull out of her. Not right away, not before I’d left some part of myself in her. To keep her with me.

I walked for a long time. I hung my head in case maybe the heavens were watchin’ and might one day show me a recording of my reaction. The big camera in the sky.
This is your life.
But I never cried. I certainly never jumped for joy. I never felt a thing. I just roamed the streets for a while and tried to look the part.

When she called me up later that night and told me she wasn’t gonna have a baby, that she’d make an appointment in the morning and go alone to some clinic to have this new crisis sucked out of her, I never felt a thing. There was no question of morals where I was concerned. Not for a second did I even consider any other alternative. All I could think was that I was low on smokes.

We spent hours on the phone those few weeks before her appointment. Hours. She wouldn’t go see a counsellor for fear she might be guilted out of it. And I’m pretty sure she wanted to be guilted out of it. She was scared shitless while I managed a level of calm that surprised and impressed me. She’d call me up, bawlin’ with the panic, and I’d have her settled down in no time. You’d swear I was an old hand at it. But at the same time I wanted to throw it all in her face about how she’d tortured me, left me with nothing, talked down to me.
Family comes first.
But how cruel is that?

I knows she was struggling with it though. I knows she wanted me to say shag it, let’s have it, we’ll do the best we can. But I never once let on that there was any other option available to us.

Lyin’ in bed some nights, I must admit, I did entertain the notion of fatherhood. But bring a child into this dark and twisted world? Subject a child to
Keith and Natasha
? I don’t think so. I think relationships, like everything else in this life, are predetermined by fate. They’re fashioned around a particular time frame, allowed to blossom at a certain time, and are accompanied by a specific end-date, the end-date arrivin’ after sufficient notice has been given. Warning
signs. Myself and ’Tash had gotten all the warning signs, received our notice in the mail long ago, balled it up and tossed it in the stove.

I slept with a girl named Monica on the last night before the big day, Natasha up in Toronto tossing and turning. Monica was the new bartender at the Hatchet and I’d only met her earlier that evening. We hit it off well enough and arranged for her to come to my place after she got off. I went home and slept for a few hours, not knowin’ whether she’d show. I was sober and I measured the consequences. I spent half an hour on the phone with Natasha, reassuring her that I loved her, that I couldn’t wait ’til she got home, that things were gonna be okay. The big appointment was 10:00 the next morning. Natasha. Curled up in her strange bed in the big city. A million miles away. I whispered things and told her little stories. I held the receiver to the cat’s chest and let her listen to him purr ’til she fell asleep. The dial tone woke her up five minutes later and she called me back to say she loved me and wanted things to be different from there on in.

Things were gonna to be different alright. That’s probably half the reason I asked Monica home to my place. Bang another nail into the coffin, have some other reason why I could never go back to Natasha. At 3:30 a.m. there was a quick tap on my door and I let Monica in. She handed me a joint and I lit it. She pulled a blanket out of her bag and spread it across the floor. That’s where we spent the night. I forced Toronto and abortions and all that shit down to the back of my mind.

The phone rang the next morning and it was Natasha, all anxious and neurotic. Only two more hours. The early morning sunlight was blinding and for a moment it stripped me bare. I saw what I’d done to her. Ruined her, darkened her. I wanted nothing more in the world than to be there with her, take her into my arms and hide her away. She’ll have to live with this now for the rest of her life and when she’s thirty, and finds herself with room for a child in her life, she’ll probably look in the mirror and spit. And all because I didn’t want her havin’ the upper hand.

I heard Monica runnin’ the shower. It’d be another couple of weeks before ’Tash came home from Toronto. I guess right then and there I decided that I’d leave her. For real. I’d be there verbally, say all the right things to help her through the aftermath. She deserved that much. But I’d never
be
with her again. It wasn’t gonna be easy, but it’d be a whole lot easier than tryin’ to make things work now.

I wished her the best, told her I loved her, put the phone down and slipped into the shower alongside Monica.

Natasha told me later that everything went smoothly as far as abortions go. They put her legs in stirrups, shoved a vacuumtype mechanism up in her, and sucked the fetus out into a bag. There was pain. She never saw what came out. The nurses were nice and gave her some Valium. They wouldn’t let her leave on her own, so she waited for the next couple to be finished and then they walked her to a cab. She stopped the cab outside some bar, stumbled into the street and went for a drink. She said she sat at the bar in a daze, not really able to get
her head around what’d happened, took all the Valium and woke up at home some hours later, a nervous wreck.

No amount of sweet talk could calm her down that night. I would have walked to Toronto if I thought I’d get there in time. But over the next few days she settled into it all, started turnin’ on me, pointin’ the finger. She’d been talkin’ to a friend of a friend who said I’d been a bad boy in her absence. I denied it all. She hung up. I called her back, couldn’t get hold of her. I left a hundred messages over the next few days, beggin’ her to call me back, to let me know if she was alright, tell me where it was I stood with her.

Another week went by and not a word out of her.

About two days before she was due home she left a message on my machine tellin’ me what flight she was on and the arrival time and not to be late. That’s all I heard from her ’til I saw her at the airport. She fell into my arms in an exaggerated state of exhaustion.

We never said much in the cab on the way home. I never bothered to ask her why she hadn’t answered my calls. I didn’t care. She was home. That’s all that mattered to me.

She slept ’til 2:00 the next day.

I nearly went mad waitin’ for her to wake up.

—They told me it might take up to six weeks before I gets my period again. So I don’t think we should have sex ’til I’m back on track.

There was something harder about her, like her anger was that much less of a front. I tried everything to get through to her, to bring out the old Natasha, but her walls were up and
they weren’t comin’ down. She went home to the Cove that evening.

—I’m probably gonna be up home for about a week, Keith. I got a lot of thinkin’ to do and we got some serious shit to talk about.

Within ten minutes she’s out the door and gone. I spends the night pacin’ the floors, forcin’ myself not to pick up the phone. Jesus. How far
out there
do you have to put yourself before you gets a little humanity in return? How am I s’pose to handle the whole week without her?

She comes back the next day with a little bag of weed. We spends the day smokin’ it and rompin’ around in the bedroom. It’s like old times again. We’re like rabbits.

She smokes a cigarette beside me.

—I’m thinkin’ about goin’ to Halifax for a while this fall. Mom’s got a friend up there that’d probably let me stay. I wouldn’t have to pay rent or nothing.

Halifax.
I knows it’s just a threat. Why would she take off again after she just got back? She’s just lookin’ for a reaction out of me. She’s still angry. It’ll pass.

—Halifax? That’d be nice. Maybe I could come visit?

—Maybe.

We lies there for a while, not sayin’ much. The cat comes by and nuzzles up between the two of us, purrin’ and kneadin’ Natasha’s chest with his paws. I takes a playful smack at him. Natasha turns to face me.

—Keith, what would you do if I told you I was never really pregnant in the first place?

She turns back towards the ceiling. I searches her face for signs of anything. Fuck. I could bring it all to an end right here and now. End all this sick, twisted shit. Maybe. But I
don’t have the energy to come clean. I’m afraid she won’t get upset.

—Don’t say things like that, sweetheart. It’s all behind us now. I’m with you. It’s always been you.

We sleeps then, for what seems like days. I dreams that I cooks a fantastic big Sunday dinner. When ’Tash opens the pot to have a peek, she bawls and runs from the room. I looks in the pot and something small looks back at me.