Stanley Park (38 page)

He ran for a very long time. There were cars and trucks. Buses. People. Many, many lights. Mountains on his right. Buildings on his left. Running, running. The voices very faint.

When he found the trees there had been no voices at all. He held his hands up now to demonstrate the miraculous silence. “No voices,” he said. “Just trees.”

It was time to harvest starlings. Jeremy held the dowel while Caruzo plucked them free. The stick twisted in his hands with the force of the many tiny wings. They caught five in the first ten minutes. In the second ten minutes, they caught fifteen. Afterwards they walked. Caruzo held the burlap sack he’d used to drown the birds. They walked slowly.

“And …,” Jeremy said.

He had been here a week, possibly more. “A month, maybe,” Caruzo said.

In the voiceless silence offered by the forest, he had explored, he had learned about the lay of this land. His first shelter was a stone bridge. His second a hollow log. After he recovered from what sounded like a bad case of pneumonia, he had become serious about fires and shelters and eating right.

Caruzo took a deep wheezing breath now.

The children came from time to time, he said. A boy and
girl in matching outfits. They often wore toy helmets with upturned goggles. Played silently or talked in their own language.

“Brothers?” Jeremy tried.

“Brother and sister,” Caruzo said, with unswerving certainty. “Sister. Brother. Playing in the park. Always alone.”

Jeremy stopped walking on the path. He put a hand on Caruzo’s arm. Through four sweaters, it suddenly struck him that the man was very thin. Caruzo shook slightly. He turned to face Jeremy.

“Frankie,” Caruzo said. “Johnny.” After a song he remembered. They made fun of him at first. Kids will. They threw stones. “Hit me here,” Caruzo said with a smile, pointing at his left temple.

Friendship came, as it will between children left alone a great deal. A sudden, unplanned recognition of common interests. A hard and fervid alliance. They lived with their mother, in a rooming house on Burrard Street. Caruzo thought they were poor and that the rooming house was full of women like their mother. Working women. Poor and desperate women who are very often gone. For a month or more the children came, alone always. They played in the woods, a little wild. Caruzo showed them everything that he had found. Secret trails and trees that had fallen in the middle of the forest where nobody ever walked. An abandoned truck rusting back into the soil far from any road. Birds’ nests. Cat bones. Fox dens. Squirrel paths.

They brought him things. Once a cold hotdog. Then a pie, surely stolen. Another time, newspapers. Many other small things to eat or to use. The last item was a quilt with panels of blue like the night sky, a meandering trail of green that repeated itself back and forth across the cloth, and splashes of yellow like constellations and planets. A green land under a night sky.

Then they didn’t come for a while. He worried.

Caruzo’s voice was constricting as he spoke. His face
wound and unwound on itself. He chewed at his nailless fingers until Jeremy reached over and put his hand on the old man’s wrist, pulling it down from his mouth.

“They came together again, finally,” Caruzo said. “The three of them.”

He followed them that day. Somewhere in his mind had been the impulse to return to his camp and get the quilt, to return it to the mother, who he imagined was very angry with him for having it. But he had been afraid to leave them. He trailed at a distance instead, an expert by now at walking silently parallel to the path. Ten yards off in the bush and a dozen yards behind.

They walked into the forest through the rose gardens, down Pipeline Road. She pinched a fur coat around herself tightly, angrily, walking quickly after the children. They entered the bush near Beaver Lake. The children ran ahead, jabbering in their strange tongue. But then saying something else. Something he had not heard them say before.

“Caruzo,” he said, beginning to visibly shake now. Whispering: “Caruzo. Caruzo. Caruzo.”

He encountered a fallen tree, doubled back on his tracks to find a better route. He got turned around a second time and then he took the path. Running now.

“Faint voices,” he said. “Just now, faint voices.”

She was lying in the middle of red path, on her back. “The mother, I thought. Frankie and Johnny gone. I knelt down. Just a girl.”

He touched her. He thought for a moment she was dead, and on her forehead he touched her to make a mark with dirt and bless her passage. But when she opened her eyes and sat up sharply, Caruzo had been startled. He ran.

“Ran into the bushes, Jay-Jay. Ran for cover.” He was a quarter-mile away before he remembered Frankie and Johnny.

Caruzo seethed with the memory. His face continued to bunch and relax repeatedly, his shoulders thrusting forwards
and back, his neck twisting and releasing. Jeremy’s hand rested on his shoulder while the storm blew through.

He crashed through the bush in no direction, looking for Frankie and Johnny and their mother. “And she did come back. Yeah, she did come back. Here she comes now. She’s scared now, Jay-Jay. No kids, no coat. Blood on her leg, Jay-Jay.”

And with this detail, Caruzo released a single dry sob.

He looked. Then he gave up. Later he looked again, starting at the spot where the girl had been lying. He followed the points of the compass rose from that spot to the water in all directions. It had been north-west, a little under half a mile as the crow flies. A mossy clearing, strewn with leaves. Low brush all around. The trees leaned in but did not touch that soil. She had covered them with her coat. Buried them under a thick layer of leaves. Her shoe lay nearby. The adze.

“Found them off Reservoir Trail, Jay,” Caruzo whispered. “Found them in their spot. The beginning for me, that. Right there. Between those trees. Buried under those leaves.”

There was silence for a time.

He didn’t touch them further. He left them to lie, to sleep. But he stayed. He set up his hidden camp some short but respectful distance away. For several years he grieved. Then watched. The parks workers came eventually. The man, Albert Tong, had been raking. Something cracked underfoot, not a stick.

Caruzo frowned. “Now the bones are gone. Sure, the bones are gone. But the signs, Jay-Jay. Signs and signals. Signals and signs. Signals to return. Signs to show the way back. I believe in these signs, Jay-Jay. I really believe in these signs.”

There were others for dinner. A young man and a woman with a baby. Chladek with another bottle. Others he didn’t recognize. They all stood quietly in or just out of the ring of golden firelight. Everybody brought their own plates, produced from backpacks and hidden pockets.

The Professor looked at him curiously when Caruzo and he pulled in with their bag of starlings. He smiled at his father and nodded his head. He felt wonderful.

Dinner came together like on those magical nights when the front is packed and the back is slammed but not a thing you touch will turn out wrong. Everything leaves the frenzy of the kitchen in a warm halo of perfection. The room is stoked; the energy builds and builds.

He plucked and drew the starlings. He ran them down green wood skewers separated by slices of stale baguette brushed with olive oil and rubbed in garlic. Somebody brought potatoes. Another person had foil and onions. There were bottles of wine.

He laid the skewers across the shopping-cart grill and he felt very, very good.

“Hey, Jay,” Caruzo said, enthusiastic himself after their cathartic talk, spraying crumbs from a mouthful of toasted baguette. “Beard looks great, Jay.”

Jeremy touched it, looked over at his father and smiled again. And then to Caruzo, while still looking at his father, he said: “Give us the poem, Caruzo. The whole thing.”

“Oh,” Caruzo said. “That. Well …” And he rose theatrically to his feet, a piece of bread in one hand, a paper cup of ruby plonk in the other, arms outstretched. He recited the ancient poem he had memorized:

The Professor came and stood next to him.

“He draws the others,” Jeremy said, staring at the ring of faces listening to Caruzo’s performance.

“Yes,” the Professor said, nodding. “But for me, time here grows short. Having finally read my outline, Sopwith Hill is keen I finish.”

“The looming sense of things not done,” Jeremy said. “I can relate.”

Caruzo was chanting up towards the summit of his performance.

When he was finished the group was silent. Caruzo sat, satisfied. He ate a starling with his fingers. And Jeremy thought those seconds before anyone else spoke became part of the poem’s passing, an empty space that the words pushed out in front of them.

The design team was working towards its own set of deadlines, meeting weekly. Floor plan, kitchen, menu, linen, flatware, paint schemes, art work—everything had to be discussed and market researched and discussed again. Dante set the third Friday in February for the opening, three months away and they would need every week. They met early, before the trades
came in, Dante, Philip, Jeremy, Benny and Albertini Banks, sitting in the torn apart front room of the new restaurant.

This morning was typical. Dante was following a tight agenda, moving through what he called the “Critical Path Issues” as the team woke up over coffee carted in from the new Inferno Hastings. The first Crosstown Inferno location had finally opened around the corner in the space that had been Fabrek’s falafel stand.

Albertini Banks was sipping his triple espresso, hungover eyes concealed behind yellow sunglasses with lizard-green frames. (Benny and he had been out clubbing the night before, Jeremy learned. Not their first time.) Banks was, as always, dusted with an urban patina of foundation, mascara and Hard Candy nail polish, corseted with layers of fashion. Today he wore an eight-button, red plaid jacket with a pinched waist and a Nehru collar decorated with silver flashes. A gold neck chain with a Rolex hanging from it. Vintage Gucci loafers with pointy toes beginning to curl upward. Today’s hat, a white silk fez with tassel. Karl Lagerfeld does the Turkish Armed Forces.

Benny, too, wore sunglasses, no doubt concealing a hangover of her own. But she had moulted again, toeing some invisible sartorial line between Dante and her new dance partner. And with only designer New York and Jermyn Street as her points of reference, she’d come up with a black and white nylon tube top under a green blazer with a club crest from the Pall Mall Club. Kinky Knightsbridge. Dante was obviously paying her well.

Philip looked the same as always. Urbanely suited and stubbled. The consummate New Economy Vice-President of Intangibles.

Everybody so far politely ignored that Jeremy was starting to look like an Hassidic Deadhead. Overalls, red long johns and a pleasantly thick rabbinical beard that was starting to come down off his chin.

Critical Path Issue #2 had been fabrics, a half-hour discussion
that evolved directly into yet another debate about suitable names. This topic had been open for days, but market research had come up with a final proposal.

Dante stood in front of a large swatch of purple velvet that Benny had been showing them. “Gerriamo’s,” he said grandly.

Everybody loved it. Even Jeremy had to allow it was not too bad an outcome given the short list had included Cucina Gerrissimo, a lemony mouthful of pseudo-Latin pretension if there ever was one.

The only trouble with Gerriamo’s was that—as a fabricated word drawn from the consumer intellect revealed through market research—there was wide variance of opinion as to how it should be pronounced. Jeremy took it as
Jerry-AH-mose
. Benny said
SHER-ry-ah-moss
. Dante went with Benny’s version or, alternately, something like
CHER-ry-amus
, which sounded simply rude.

“Cherryamus Critical Path Issue #4,” Dante said, smoothing his shirt front, straightening French cuffs. “Open kitchens. We should have talked about it earlier. Suddenly I’m getting favourable input on open kitchens.”

“I should have thought of that,” Benny said, scribbling a note to herself. “I like the idea.”

“I find that I can go easy every way,” Banks equivocated in his placeless accent. (Jeremy had decided it was the accent you inherited if you were raised speaking Esperanto.) “If we open the kitchen up to the people’s eyes from this room, then only I think we use a wide, wooden counter, and over we stack with fresh animals and fishes and vegetables on ice or something, or also have a large flower arrangement to match the one in the centre of the room. This idea could be very opulent. But I see that it will also be very opulent without this open kitchen.”