Greedy Little Eyes (20 page)

Fern churns round the corner now, laying on the horn, screaming at the top of her lungs. About thirty metres ahead, men and women heave together as one contorted mass, spewing rocks and obscenities. The caped figure of Flash wrenches himself free, and tears across the grass,
the sidewalk and through parked cars. Hypnotized by the sight of his cape snapping toward her, Fern’s foot continues to shove the gas until something large flies out from the crowd. Martin Flash is slapped across her windshield like a scrap of paper before he flutters down and off the hood of her skidding car.

Fern is paralyzed, her foot jammed into the brake as police demand public order over bullhorns in the distance. Protestors stand in the street, mouths open, staring at Fern.

She stares back. The sun has shrunken her pupils to nothing, giving her pale eyes the look of the blind. Pushing the gear shift into park, she steps out of her car and around to the front.

Furious strangers glare from all sides as she hunches beside Martin Flash. A rat hangs dead from a pink lined pocket inside his cape.

Fern puts her cheek to his, says, “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” and carefully lays her body down beside his.

“Shh.” Flash slits one eye open just enough for her to catch it and whispers, “Lie still,” as cameramen cut through, circle around and crouch for a clear shot.

You Sound Tiny

A
PETULANT MOAN FILLED THE ROOM,
the bawl of something small that would one day grow into its large paws. I could feel the vibration of whimpers through his hands as he clutched my hair, edged a blade harder against my neck—or maybe it was just the nails of the hand holding the knife that bit me.

“You can’t let her go,” Ed insisted. Then into my ear, “Tell them who you work for. Where is my
mouse
money!”

He was demanding cash again as if I were a bank teller, as if I had control over more than renewing overdue books.

A police officer inched forward, hands expansive, arms wide. He said, “Before I became a cop, you know what I was going to be? A marriage counsellor! Let’s just sit down and talk, the three of us. This doesn’t solve anything, does it.”

Two more police officers stood outside the library doors. A walkie-talkie squawked from the hall and a hand rushed to silence it.

Ed stomped his foot.

Butterflies taste with their feet, I recalled. I have a tendency to recite trivia when I am nervous.

“She’s
not
my wife,” Ed said. To my ears the words had a liquid quality, as if they’d been left in the rain.

There was no one else but us in the library now: the cop, Ed and me. Everyone else had slipped out the emergency exit. He had let everyone else go.

Then suddenly Ed let me go, spread his arms wide and waved the knife in the air. It must have looked as though he was dancing, like in a Gene Kelly movie. It reminded me of how romantic he could be. With Ed to the side now, I could see into the policeman’s sugary-brown eyes, the nearest one, who might have been a marriage counsellor. It seemed we were exchanging some kind of ocular smoke signals. My eyes dipped to see his holster undone, and just as I began to understand he might shoot Ed in the gut, Ed barked another obscenity and slammed his knife on the returns counter.

“What’s the point?” He shoved me away. “You’re in on it,
they’re
in on it.”

Suddenly the room was a thunderous flight of heavy shoes, uniforms and hands. Ed reached out to his knife again just as he was tackled backwards in a braying heap.
The blinds in my apartment are closed. The ringer on my telephone is off. I am wearing earplugs because without them it sounds as though war has broken out across the road. It’s only condos going up but I cannot bear the rapid fire of their nail guns, the sound of saws chewing through what comes near.

I’m reading Dr. Seuss again—the first children’s book I ever read, thanks to Ed. It was his gift to me and probably the reason I fell for him. Growing up, my parents, my father in particular, assured me that children’s books encouraged a form of idiocy and discouraged rational, lucid thought. Ed, on the other hand, was a proponent of idiocy. Through the two menstrual cycles I knew him, during the worst period day, he would bring home helium-filled balloons, tie one to each of my big toes, then lie beside me, rubbing my cramping belly, and reading me the words of Seuss’s Star-Belly Sneetches, the snootiest beasts on the beaches.

He was nicer during the first period than the second. Marriage changes everything.

The greatest economic loss from mice is not due to how much they eat, but what must be thrown out because of damage or contamination. I met Ed as a result of a curvaceous brown mouse who strolled brazenly from a hole in the baseboard of my kitchen cupboard. She would walk to centre-floor, stare at me with a bored cynicism, pick up a crumb, then swing her big behind
round and saunter back from whence she came. Her attitude was what got me, the impudence. I let it go on for a week before I opened the phone book to Pest Control. I called Allsfair Pests. The man who answered said they couldn’t get an exterminator out until the following Monday; it was infestation season.

“You’re going to kill her?”

“What’dja think we were gonna do, put her in a home for wayward girls?”

I hung up, stared into the phone book and dialled Whoville Critter Control. Ed answered.

Of course I didn’t know he was Ed then and I asked what steps he would take in a case like this—if he would be exterminating.

There was silence at the other end until finally he said, “What kind of crummy question is that?”

He showed up with a catch-and-release contraption. A dollop of peanut butter was placed well inside the trap, which was set in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then Ed joined me in the living room to wait and watch from a distance. I offered him tea. Or perhaps some juice. There might be wine in the fridge. He declined, said he needed his full faculties when on the job. Besides, it would mean re-entering the suspect zone.

I smoothed my dress, folded my hands in my lap, and there we sat, in silence. Waiting. I could smell his Juicy Fruit chewing gum. His lean back curved forward,
slim shoulders coming around as if to cup his heart. And his lips, so red against pale skin, made him look Pre-Raphaelite.

Within twenty minutes, the mouse sashayed out of her hole to survey Ed’s trap.

Watching her inspection, I whispered, “Do you think she’s calculating the risk factor?”

Ed tilted his head toward mine, moved his mouth to my ear. His breath was warm and fruity as he let the sweetest
shhh
breeze from his lips. I would have been much more popular at the library if I knew how to shush people that way. My head nosed up against his mouth, my ear stealing a kiss just as the trap door slammed me back into my skin.

A week later, my father called while Ed was in the shower. Pretty winged things had fluttered inside me when I thought of my very own Ed down the hall, but my father’s tone was something of a fly swatter.

“What’s this bill here: Whoville Critter Control? One hundred and seven dollars. Says, ‘mouse,’ on the bill.”

“I had a mouse and I called someone to take care of it.”

“Nobody has mouse. They have
mice
. Why didn’t you let
me
take care of it? Did you know that this Whoville Critter Control is just a one-man show? He works out of his home.
Edward Margolese
. Did you let
Edward Margolese
into the apartment while you were alone?”

My father collects apartments. He owns several in my building. Including mine. He calls it
the
apartment, never
your
apartment.

I listened to him shake his head before saying, “You should quit the library. It would make more sense if you worked for me. I could teach you how to budget.”

Each time he suggested this I would think wistfully of those paper bodies all around me at work, sober and available, willing to open wide and present their knowledge, but only in the event that I should ask.

I held the receiver a moment and then told him, “When six hundred managers from a broad spectrum of Canadian industry were surveyed in 1992, about one-third of them reported that poor literacy caused serious difficulties with introducing new technology and productivity.”

There is heavy machinery in my father’s warehouse. The sounds careened under his office door, but still I could hear his sigh.

Three days after Ed was taken hog-tied from the library, tearing a screech through the world, after I have reread his copies of
Winnie-the-Pooh, Stuart Little
and
Alice in Wonderland,
I decide to turn the ringer on my phone back on. There are messages from the library, from a police therapist, two from my father and one from my mother expressing my father’s concern. I hear the
beep
of an incoming call as I listen. It could be
anyone and I don’t wish to talk to just anyone. I hang up.

The ringing starts again. The number on call display is unfamiliar but it occurs to me I’d rather talk to a stranger than anyone I know.

It’s Officer Mike, the voice says. Officer Mike is the policeman who tackled instead of shooting Ed. Ed had gotten hold of his knife and stabbed Officer Mike. Just in the arm. I don’t believe he did it on purpose. Ed is afraid of blood. It makes him feel sick and scared.

I ask Officer Mike how his arm is. It’s fine, he says, just a flesh wound. In a serious tone he tells me that Ed is undergoing psychiatric evaluation, but that I can rest assured he will remain in custody.

This does not make me feel safe. It makes me feel as though I’ve just seen blood. Nobody needs to be afraid of Ed. “Okay.”

“You know, they have counsellors to help you through the aftermath of situations like these. Department therapists.”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“How do I sound?”

“Tiny. Fragile. Do you have food there? Do you have anyone to help you?”

I’m quiet a moment. It comes to me that I have not eaten today. And maybe not the day before either. I can’t remember. Maybe this is shock. Or mourning. Or maybe, just as violence begets violence, once a person forgets two or three meals, the brain becomes less likely to pick up hunger signals; forgetting two or
three meals could lead to weeks of starvation.