The Strangers' Gallery (23 page)

“I'm going down now,” Anton said, in the low tones of defeat, even loss of hope, in the face of people like Bruce and Hubert, who were content just washing their cars or counting other people's money. He pulled on his green sweatshirt with the comforting hand-warming pockets and hood. I walked him to the elevator, where he offered to cook yet another rijsttafel for supper. We'd been eating nothing but rijsttafel for the past two weeks. He said he was going to take a long walk first, along the Battery and then around Signal Hill.

It was close to two-thirty, but Hubert seemed in no hurry to get back to work. Things were sort of leisurely around the office, he said, now that it was getting close to Christmas. Raymond was still finishing up his lunch; he ate his salad last, European style. He often skipped dessert and coffee. Now that Anton was gone, Hubert seemed more relaxed and, as usual, he had one of his stories to tell—another episode of “The Accountant's Tale,” and as far-fetched and fanciful as all the rest.

“You're not going to believe this one,” he began. I rarely did.

“I do some freelancing (you know me, a bit on the side) and I was going in to see a new client in Torbay…a Friday morning last April it was…the end of April…the day before his taxes were due. I usually take the last week in April off, as I get a lot of extra work around that time. He gave me directions to his house, but I forgot to take the piece of paper with me. My cellphone wasn't working, either. We'd just started using them, and the service was spotty. So I stopped to use the phone at that big barn of a club on Torbay Road where the college used to hold all its dances—the place with the black strobe lights that let you see all the dandruff on everyone's shoulders. Gert never wanted to go in there because of that. The name is changed now…used to be the Bella Vista. There were quite a few cars in the parking lot, so I assumed the place was open even if it wasn't serving drinks. But I was surprised to see so many people in there drinking so early on a weekday, and they were all sitting up at the VLTs with their beer glasses perched on top. I used the telephone at the bar. The bartender had just made a pot of coffee, so I ordered a cup while I searched through two pages of Dawes in the phone book. After I made the call and got the directions, I struck up a conversation with the bartender, because the whole scene looked a bit weird, or maybe it was just that I'd been up half the night in the workshop, as I usually do when I take some time off. You should come out and see what I got set up. I got some amazing gear from that kitchen cabinet place that went under.

“Anyway…I'm sittin' and sippin' my coffee and I say to him, ‘A lot of customers for this hour of the morning.'

“‘Usual crowd,' he says. ‘Some of them need a ticket to get in.'

“‘A ticket?' I say.

“‘An itemized receipt,' he says, ‘for Pampers, Attends, whatever. They aren't allowed to come in here unless they're wearing something. Not all of them now, just the ones who can't hold it in, who piss on the floor. I know 'em by now,' he says.

“‘They piss on the floor?' I say. ‘You're kiddin' me.'

“‘No…they're anxious, they drink a lot of beer,' he says, ‘and if they're winnin' they won't leave the machines. They just can't stop.'

“‘You
are
kiddin' me,' I say, and he shrugs his shoulders.

“‘Afraid not,' he says. ‘Takes all kinds, and we get most of 'em.'

“Can you believe that?” Hubert said. “Can you believe that?

“Anyway…that's not why I asked you here to lunch. I got a better story for you than that. We might have known this was coming someday—will you stop eating, Raymond! Is food scarce out there in Lotus Land or what? Not enough organic produce to go round? Stop eating and listen up, will you…Raylene.”

This got Raymond's attention—and mine as well. As he turned his head to look at Hubert, his eyes, as if they were a proxy for his ears, widened, then narrowed, expressing a sort of suspicious surprise. He might have heard the name of an extramarital lover that Hubert had found out about. We were in the right territory, as it turned out.

“I got a phone call a few days ago from a relative of ours,” Hubert said. “A close relative, but you'll never guess who. Closer to you, Raymond, than to Michael or me. Now I understand why you were the black sheep of the family. You were the wrong sex—the old man wanted a girl.”

“What are you talking about, Hubert?” Ray said.

“Rayleeene, b'y. The secret family has got in touch. Our half-sister, your twin—Ray and Raylene. I thought there might be a whole brood, but it turns out she's the only one. In that family, at least. Maybe there's another one somewhere else. Quite possible, I'd say. I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“She's a neighbour of yours, Michael, believe it or not. You don't go to the New Wave His and Hers Hairstyling Salon in Churchill Square, by any chance, do you?” He smirked at my hair. “No…I guess not. Well, she works in there, been there for years.”

We were silent, considering the implications of all this.

“She sounds pretty sweet, I have to say, innocent-like,” Hubert said, “though she's forty years old, and a single mom. ‘Call me Ray,' she said to me. ‘That might get a bit confusing, honey,' I said, and I told her about her darling twin. I told her there were three of us, and she wants to meet us all. So…what do you think, b'ys? Would you like to meet her?”

“How did she get hold of you?” I asked.

“Well, you're not in the phone book, are you—you're conveniently
unlisted
—and he's on the other side of the country.”

Hubert had always regarded the unlisting of my telephone number as some sort of elitist, anti-social act, rather than an attempt, not altogether successful, to avoid the ever-increasing number of commercial solicitations.

“When Raylene finally got the old man's name out of her mother,” he explained, “she was going to call every Lowe in the book. There's no more than a dozen, so it wouldn't have been too hard. But she got lucky on the fist try. The week she won a hundred dollars in the lottery, she said, she put all the names and numbers in a hat, and picked out mine. Luckily, mother doesn't have an extension in the basement apartment. I know she already knows about the woman—the women—but she doesn't need any reminders about that. And she doesn't know about any
child
.”

“I don't know,” Raymond said indifferently. “It's not for me, I don't think. What's the point?”

“What about you, Michael?” Hubert said.

“I'll have to think about it,” I said.

“Of course, of course. The unlisted thinker will have to retire to his study and…What's wrong with the two of you, anyway? Never a clear yes or no. Well, no yes's equals two no's in my book, and mine makes three. It's unanimous. That's the decision. We keep our distance. I don't want Raylene turning up at the house—
I'm
not unlisted. Mother's seventy-nine years old, and she'd be really upset if she got wind of this. We don't want to stir up all that shit again.”

Big brother, charmer of a bully that he was, always ready for a fight, though caring in his own carefree way, seemed just as irritated by the fact that his premeditated resolve was wasted in the face of our indifference as he was by the unexpected intrusion of Raylene. But no one had anything else to say, and we were content, perhaps even eager, to leave and let the matter drop for now.

When I left, I walked down the stairs and found myself exiting the building at the back, facing an old neighbourhood whose residents had their view of the hills and the harbour blocked by the glass tower that had risen up in their midst. All they could see from their windows, decks, and gardens was a reflecting wall of opaque, blue-tinted glass in which the wavering images of their houses floated before their eyes like ghostly, Dali-like shapes rising out of the painful memories of the resettled Newfoundlanders depicted in the photographs upstairs, those who had floated their own houses across various bays, bights, arms, sounds, and tickles in the dark days of resettlement more than a generation ago. The residents of this neighbourhood had not been forcibly evicted like their fellow Newfoundlanders in the outports, their houses and land had not been expropriated like the properties of some of their fellow Townies in the core of the downtown—residents of Brazil Square, Burke's Square, and the appropriately named Kickham Place—but they still must have been emotionally unsettled by it all, as anyone would be witnessing a small skyscraper going up in their backyard.

I walked down King's Bridge Road to Rennie's River and then up the river trail toward Portugal Cove Road. A light, dry, powdery sort of snow—perhaps the snowgrains that had been forecast earlier—was being blown about by a strong wind gusting down the valley. When I reached the crosswalk at Portugal Cove Road, who should be driving down over the hill but Hubert himself, at high speed. Holding his cellphone in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, he was obviously on his way straight through the crosswalk, but came skidding to a halt when he saw me standing at the curb. He peered out through the windshield of a big silver-blue car that I hadn't seen before. Several other cars slid to a stop behind him. The window on my side rolled down automatically, and he gestured to me to get in. I really wanted to keep on walking, but he was holding up traffic, so I pulled open the heavy door and fell into a well of a bucket seat. I was glad that Anton wasn't walking home with me.

A jogger, a woman in black leotards, appeared suddenly at the crosswalk on the other side of the street, her large breasts bobbing as she treaded pavement and waited for a car coming toward us to stop.

“Jesus, will you look at that,” Hubert said, as she glided past the windshield. “Now wouldn't you like to trace her circuits.”

He drove on. His cellphone rang. “Hello,” he shouted. “Yeah…around four-thirty or so. Yeah…yeah…that should be all right. Okay, okay.

“That was Gert,” he said. “I'm picking her up at the mall.”

“What's this you're driving?” I asked after he put down the phone.

“What's this I'm driving,” he repeated flatly, stressing every word. “Michael, you're too much.
You
are probably the only person in Newfoundland…in Canada…in the world…who doesn't recognize a Volvo. I bet you don't even know what
you're
driving.
This
is the best car on the road. The safest car on the road. They don't call it a tank for nothing. I've had accidents in this thing that I haven't found out about for weeks afterwards. What are you driving, anyway?”

“A Toyota Tercel,” I said. “The one Elaine left behind. She didn't want to drive anymore.”

“Jesus, get rid of it. You can't keep rotors on the thing. Drilled rotors, they have on it, prone to cracking, probably made with cheap cast iron to boot. Pardon me…I see I've lost you. Brakes, b'y. I'm talkin' about brakes. We had a Toyota as a second car, a leaser that had been turned in after only three years. We had the rotors replaced three times in the next three years. They wouldn't admit the things were faulty. They kept telling me it must be the way Gert drives. Every time I tried to see the manager, he seemed to be out in the woods moose hunting, like that judge you once told me about who spent more time grouse hunting than on the bench. But one day I was in there just for a service check, and he came out to the counter with a big smile on his face. He greeted me by name, shook my hand. I hadn't even asked to see the bugger, but I guess I'd been grousing so much about the rotors that they alerted him to the fact that I was there. He led me into an office almost as big as the showroom. There were two moose heads with antlers on the walls, and between them was a big framed photograph of him in the woods, standing with his foot cocked up on a carcass. He had the tall gangly body of a moose himself. There was another photograph of him with fake antlers on his head, sitting at a banquet table eating a huge moose steak. We sat in two big sofa chairs with a table and lamp between them, not looking at each other, but out through the window at all the shiny new cars on the lot. And do you know what he did? Do you know what that bull-shooting, bullshitting old fucker did?”

“Offered to take
you
bull shooting,” I said.

“Close. He tried to pawn me off with a hunting knife. After I told him my sob story—three rotor replacements in three years, all of which I had to pay for myself—the slimy old bastard went to a safe that was hidden behind the photo of him with antlers on his head and took out a brown leather knife case with a big belt loop. He sat down again and handed it to me. Inside the case was a knife big enough to kill a moose. ‘Sorry for your trouble,' he said.

“Perhaps it was an expensive item, I don't know. Perhaps it had a gold handle, a silver blade. I don't know, I didn't look. I felt so goddamn insulted, I didn't care. ‘Toyota, It's More Than Just a Car' was stamped in red on the case—or perhaps that was just the colour I was seeing. ‘Goddamn right,' I said. ‘It's just a goddamn nuisance.' And I threw the knife on the floor and walked out the door. So take my advice and get rid of that car.”

“I hardly use it,” I said. “I'd rather walk.”

“Well, you're able to walk where you're living. I got to get back and forth to Mount Pearl. We may be moving into town, all the same. The traffic's getting worse every day. You remember when that bunch o' hippies tried to stop the Arterial Road? Jesus…sure I'd only be gettin' to work at lunchtime if I still had to drive in Topsail Road. It's just one long string of stores from Mount Pearl to St. John's. And now they're at it again…trying to stop the Outer Ring Road, which is going to connect the tch with the East End. Everyone seems to want to live there, in spite of the fog. We may move out there ourselves, if they ever finish the road.”