The Gift of Women (18 page)

“That's right, half is on me, but if you want it, you'll have to pay for t'other…” Elizita picks up her glass, turns from the screen and eyes Terry through her martini glass “…with someone other than each other.”

From the look on John who has come in, he's not going to enlighten us on what Elizita has just proposed. He has laid our bags down on the back platform of the caboose and he is black. He stands oddly correct, his shoulders held square, as if lined up with the suitcases he set outside. He positively bristles with patience as he stands and waits without speaking.

“Don't stand with those big muscles humped up round your neck, as if you're still carrying those damn things you dumped outside. We'll all trip over them, you know, you know?” Elizita says, echoing Ena Sharples's sidekick from early
Coronation Street
on the BBC, but smiling with clear affection for the black man.

John doesn't witness this. He glances back at the cases, as if they have been wrongly tagged, and he has made yet another mistake that Elizita hasn't twigged on to yet.

“And where do
you
come from, John?” Terry asks.

Terry's plain butter-and-toast tone annoys me bad enough in the morning, but mulled with a martini and her spreading extra smarm on it because John is black gets my goat. That is, till I get a good look at her face. From that, I can't tell if she's being over-polite, or simply turned on by the big man, like she was, still is – by rugby players.

“There are no casuals,” Elizita tells the lens on my shoulder, and she turns to read through a sheet of computer printout on her desk. “It's all cash or kind.”

She stands up, comes around the camera to look at me, then goes and strokes Terry's hair from her face so that she can see Terry's eyes, which haven't left John while Terry waits for John to answer her curiosity about his origins.

“Montreal, I suppose,” he says. “Mother was Haitian and my dad from Indiana. He came and dragged me out of junior high to Quebec because he had big objections to the war. And me, I was with the Alouettes, they're dead now.”

By the time he has explained which war, the Vietnam, and that the Montreal Alouettes were a team playing in the Canadian Football League and that they failed financially and folded, Terry is touching his arm, sympathetically.

“Any two will do,” says Elizita.

“One pays for t'other, if they can find a taker. It's a little gambling tool we've added to the trade,” Elizita explains. “Customer coin toss that needs to land a second head or tail to win.”

Once again her fingers go to Terry's hair, drawing it back from her face so that Terry can look directly at John or John at her. Her fingers trickle down under Terry's cheek a second time, as though checking the set of the jaw and lining up her profile for me to film.

Then, she turns to go over and put the same two fingers she placed on Terry's face on the sheet of figures she has just looked at.

“Three confirmed and two pending for today and tomorrow,” she reads out in John's direction.

“American football player,” Terry tilts her empty martini glass. “Very big and burly American football player. I'm so glad I've met one,” Terry says, touching the shoulder of John's white cotton shirt.

“Canadian – once.”

“Big broad John. With all his moving parts in the right places,” says Elizita, smiling at me lusciously, because of the flush on my forehead, the first sign my blood is rising.

“The Alouettes,” I say, and aim the camera directly at John.

“Yeah, great team. Great city.”

“I bet you went down good with the Montrealers.”

Elizita looks into my camera directly and tut-tuts Terry. “When a grammar school girl's grammar goes, her knickers are down round her ankles.”

Terry lays one hand on John's shoulder to hold herself steady while she laughs. “Ms. Mathers at Collegiate would love to have said that.”

“Knickers?” John asks, shaking his head. “Like guys wear to ride racing bikes?”

“Like girls take off to ride…oh, Jesus,” says Terry.

John blinks at Terry's hand which has tightened on his shoulder. “You guys say weird things, we say some too. Bet if I said I got sacked a lot of times with the Alouettes, you'd think I was fired over and over, like?”

“
Sure
,” says Terry, liking the way she says sure. I can tell.

“Doesn't mean that. On the field it means I got tackled and taken down.”

“Around the legs, like rugby.”

“Head-on, more like.”

I put down the camera and tell Elizita, “You always know how to put us in a pickle.”

“I like vinegar on my French fries,” Elizita answers as John exits to pick up the suitcases. Terry follows him, talking to the back of his head and shoulders, the white sweep of the fine cotton shirt with the faint lining of black absorbing her completely.

Elizita pulls up the bottom window of the caboose, to let in some air…or for me to poke my head out and do some filming.

“First time through a new situation means a lot of camera,” I apologize. “When things repeat themselves, camera is put to bed.”

“You never know where that camera will find itself in bed.”

She leads me out after John and Terry. Terry is asking John if his parents met in Haiti or Montreal.

“At a pot party,” John says over his shoulder. “The next day, when he saw her, my dad says, ‘Man…' Like man, you still dark, woman. Somebody forgot to turn on the lights.”

“Was she angry?” Terry asks.

“Hell no, she only spoke French. He'd been with her all night and all morning and it still hadn't sunk in.” Terry stops and watches John stride ahead of her. I follow them, moving down the inside of Elizita's caboose. “Was she that lovely?” Terry asks John about his mother.

“Or that good in bed?” John says over his shoulder. “Or was my old dad that damn stupid? I dunno, ma'am. That's the story as he tells it. Overawed by her, I'd say. He always was. And like Elizita says, if you don't find out about each other first night in bed, you spend the rest of your life in the dark, trying.”

“Go on!”

His wit and intelligence surprises Terry, whose fingers land on him, to hit or push him as she does to me when she's amused by my banter. His bulk doesn't budge and her hand slides up his back.

“Hey, hey,” he says over his shoulder.

“What's your real job?” Terry asks. “You're too bright to be a porter?”

“No, I got a worse job than the porter's, ma'am, I'm the accountant. Bookkeeper would be a better way to look at it. The guy who manages the money round here has got to be built like a linebacker and think like a quar-terback.”

He turns to look back at Elizita, leaning out the caboose window before we round the front and head across to our guest railcar.

“The bookkeeper,” shouts Elizita, “is prepared to give you a float. A starter, like a complimentary silver dollar in a casino, to start you playing.”

“Playing what?” I ask her to explain for the camera.

“Our slots,” Elizita answers.

Through a door in one wall of the repair yard men in blue coveralls load aluminium containers onto a cart with huge rubber wheels that flop softly over everything, rails included. The top of the steel-walled refrigerator truck gleams through the high windows above the door in the corrugated wall. Beyond the gaping, roll-back exit doors at the other end, the railcars for a real train still rest at an actual station, but with no locomotive. The cart with the tractable pneumatic tires moves toward it and we watch it as we walk toward our sleeper (sleeping carriage, we would call them at home).

Elizita tugs my shoulder. “Let Terry have John to herself for a bit. He's an interesting man.” She leads me to the other end of the sleeper that John and Terry have just climbed into with our luggage. She lets me climb the iron foot-ladder ahead of her, helping me up the steps with the camera by pressing her hands onto the back pockets of my jeans, then sliding them down the sides as if cleaning her hands off once I'm safely on the metal platform.

“You go in,” she says, as she opens the door for me, then steps aside. “It's a half-car, but for you I'll call it a halfin', like whisky? You might need one soon.”

I wonder if the whole car is as long as ones I've seen in old movies. I never counted the number of seats the marshal walked past, hunting for a bandit, who leapt from a horse and hid among the crowd on board. Cars were as long as the suspense of the search, I suppose.

Elizita hasn't turned on the light, and doesn't draw back the curtains. The place gives off a glazed darkness, extending from the wall of dark glass in the middle of the car. Put in to double the size with the reflection. No door or panel adjoins this half to the other half of the car. A wide carriage seat opposite the glass wall doubles as a bed-end.

“Why'm I made to play blind man's bluff?” I ask, but the phone rings.

“It's for you,” she declares. “Set the camera down on the bed.”

The back end of the cord-free receiver raps my knuckles.

Immediately I put the receiver to my ear, Terry asks, “What are you taking so long to do with El?”

She breathes out in that laboured way that signals she has prepared a minor tongue-lashing for me. “I see, I see,” Terry exhales, but talking to an altogether different person, who must be John, showing her the accommodation, likely with the light on. She gets generously agitated when I don't reply right away.

“Well…I'm trying to take things in…”

“That's nice, very nice,” says Terry, but again the tone tells me it's Terry to John, who's on the right side of her at this point, unlike myself. I sit down on the bed, trying to cope with Terry breathing at me on the phone, and Elizita, doing the same, now, in my ear.

“That's just lovely,” I hear Terry say to John. Huffing, I think, because I haven't spoken, but her breath falters on the total exhale of exasperation. “Ooh, the trains. Ask Elizita if – when she was on the train to Bangor, looking at those pictures on the carriage wall of Newcastle, County Down with those cold beaches – ask her if she was always thinking of a hot place in Nevada, or – let me see – Polynesia?”

My eyes have adjusted enough to see El go pull a dress like a tunic, and an enormous belt from a closet. She holds it up and laughs at it. I see why it tickles her. The buckle's as big as the WWE champeen's belt.

“Daft, but goes well with this tunic?”

I nod.

“Our champion performers wear one. Men contenders, hulks and toughs, even weasels can't wait to take it off them.”

“Go on, go on,” says Terry, who for once has ignored the long pause at my end. “I'm waiting for El's answer, but dearie me. Mr. Pause moves on slow, very slow paws,” she chides me like a child with a silly rhyme… “Ask her, I'll keep on the phone. And…does Elizita have an old high-backed railway carriage seat at the end of the bed, facing the wall?”

As always, Terry's detour from old carriage photos to carriage seats confuses me about what to ask first, but need I worry? “You know what I've realized,” says Terry, “why a railcar, as they call it here in America…why it used to have just two doors for the whole car, and in Britain and Northern Ireland, each compartment had two doors of its own. Oh, ho, ho,” she snorts and she pauses. “You don't know why?” She waits for me to supply an answer.

“I don't.”

“El told me long ago. They designed every compartment with its own set of doors to make it more private, easier to have sex, if a couple found themselves on their own.”

“Has drink been taken, more merry martinis, by any chance?” I try to turn irritation into a bit of humour.

“Guess.”

“My guess is distance…” I get up and walk to the glass wall and turn to the carriage seat “…my guess is greater distances between the stops in America. People got in and out less often. More democratic, less stand-offish people in America. Americans didn't mind riding with everybody together in one big room, in the old days.”

“That would be nice, riding together with everybody in one big room,” Terry giggles.

“Are you still drinking?”

“Aren't you?” she answers. “What's wrong with that,

'specially if it's laid on, and I'm here waiting? Aren't I, John?”

I'm instantly annoyed, not at her bringing John into the phone call, but her using her prim and boozy “aren't.” And I can hear the fabric of her clothes rasp as she rubs against some other scratchy material, the heavy upholstery of the carriage seat?

Breathing very emphatically she asks, “How it feels…do you remember?”

“What?”

“Sex in our own private compartment?”

“Vaguely,” I say, and hold the phone away from my ear to catch the sound of silk coming from the direction of Elizita's closet. Low whistles of silk like a ghost train's as the folds of a light bathrobe encircle Elizita's body.

“Do you always do things in the half-dark?” I ask Elizita, and regret it right away for the way Terry will hear it.

El's side of the sleeping car is organized with Indian blankets: Mojave and Navajo, like the ones that prissy, mousy-mouthed Jennifer Jones wrapped about her in that movie,
Duel in the Sun
. She played a breed alongside Walter Huston, Joseph Cotton and Charles Bickford, and somebody incredibly tall – Gregory Peck. I remember holding Terry's hand while the prissiness smouldered on Jennifer Jones's mouth. I stared into the murk on her oiled and darkened face and into Terry's in the picture house. Jennifer Jones, a woman I always regarded as twitter-brained and simpering, sizzled like Elizita.

“Got to get the desert dirt off me,” she announces.

Bead curtains, made from balls of lacquered goat dung drape the shower door. Elizita pushes her face through them and lets the gown slide down behind her.