CARLA DIDN’T RIDE into the Amazon. She rode through the city, now feeling free. Free of Jamal, free of Derek and Nadine. She would never be free of Angie. She didn’t want to be free of her. She only wanted the memory to lose its pain, not its intensity. Derek had bailed Jamal out. Jamal was going to live with him. Whether that lasted or not now was up to them. She wasn’t free of Jamal, really, and she didn’t want to be—she only wanted to be free of his pain. And of her protectiveness toward him. This was a step then, that it wasn’t she who had bailed him out, that Derek had taken the responsibility, and however that had come about she didn’t need to know, nor did she care.
She rode up the Bathurst Street hill just for the taste of lactic acid in her thighs, then down under the bridge and back, then along St. Clair Avenue. She stopped in Little Italy, secured her bike, and sat down at the Eden Trattoria and ordered an espresso. Carla imagined Angie growing up just off this avenue when times were different and when Angie was a rebel.
There used to be a black club above Chiarelli’s Espresso Bar on this street. Angie used to work downstairs nights serving espresso to old men from Calabria playing cards and talking, while people dressed to the nines went upstairs on the weekends to dance. It was on the sidewalk outside the espresso bar that she’d met Derek. After weeks of listening to the pumping disco music upstairs and feeling a deep thrill from the cool hip bodies laughing and wheeling by the window, Angie had volunteered to close up that night. She wanted to go upstairs, to be enveloped in the smell of perfume and the taste of Southern Comfort, the heat and dark of the dance floor, and that laughing that seemed somehow to her not light at all but knowledgeable and dangerous. She didn’t listen to the gnarled old men talk, over their cigarettes and espressos, about the “monkeys” upstairs. She didn’t hear the absolute proscription laid down there in those curses plain and ugly as anything. She only saw the easy way Derek smiled and the way that smile said she was gorgeous and young and sexy and that they both of them together would be incendiary. She didn’t hear Derek joke with his friends that she was fresh meat, or if she heard it, she’d already decided that she could take that lascivious name tinged with something racial and envious, something special. Angie didn’t want to be anyone ordinary in Little Italy. She was scared of the Saturday shopping and the Sunday churching and the Sunday dinners where her brothers’ wives and her mother and she would busy themselves with cooking while her brothers and her father drank wine and scowled at the television or insulted each other about not knowing what real work was. She was scared of the screaming nieces and nephews and the inane talk about babies and wedding showers and houses in the new suburbs of Toronto. So Angie cut all that off with one flight into the most forbidden place on her family’s earth.
I’ll never know quite what that was like, Carla thought. She heard around her the language of her own childhood, a language she didn’t speak or understand now, but whose tones she felt comforted by. “To Angela Chiarelli,” she said aloud, raising her coffee. She made a new vow to remember Angie, not with the same frantic effort at preservation, at loyalty. She had held on as if she could lose loyalty. Now she knew she couldn’t. And she couldn’t hold the baby any more either. She knew all this when Jamal came by in the black Audi. She knew Derek hadn’t lent it to him. Derek would never lend anyone his car.
She’ll go back to her apartment and live her life. She’ll have parties with Tuyen, she’ll go to the Roxy Blu, she’ll go to jazz concerts, she’ll wait in line to hear U2, she’ll go with Tuyen to Pope Joan, to Afrodeasia. They’ll dance together. She’ll check out the open-mike spoken word at Caliban with Oku. She’ll cut her hair, she’ll go to Jackie’s Ab und Zu and get a new wardrobe. She’ll be seduced by someone. She can’t hold the baby any longer.
It won’t matter that Jamal left Carla’s place, cruised up Weston Road, turned into a small street with an apartment building, waited outside until a friend came down, who then sat in the passenger seat; a friend who greeted Jamal with, “Hey, J-man. Shit, it’s great to see you,” clasped his hand, and hugged him. Jamal put the car in gear with a flourish and first drove through the growing neighbourhood of ex–West Indians, ex-Eritreans, ex-Somalis, ex-Vietnamese, and ex–South Asians. His friend Bashir, the son of an ex-Somali, was born right here when you could still smell the beef terminal from the Junction; when they hadn’t yet turned the abattoir south of here into town houses.
“Fuck, this is a sweet ride,” Bashir said. “You’re living very large, J-man.”
Jamal grinned at the compliment and turned left onto the main drag, with its brief mix of used-car dealerships, dollar stores, cheap, ugly furniture stores, food stores, banks, and panicky “stop and cash” booths. He nosed the Audi through the sluggish traffic up toward the highway.
If it means anything, the conversation they had was about how smooth the ride was, how sleek this Audi looked, how it was his father’s, the fucker—“the vain old fuck-head,” Jamal said. “But I wouldn’t buy no Audi like him. I know this guy with this X5, sweet, man.”
“Beamer X5? Whoa! Put some Pioneer speakers in there …”
“Pioneer! Are you crazy, man! No way. Some Anaconda with subwoofers, like twelves, right … real bass, built-in equalizer …”
That conversation was punctuated by drags on a spliff and chuckling. And then his friend Bashir said, “Let’s roll, man.” And then Jamal said, “No doubt, man, I’m ready.”
Carla has already decided on the new course of her life when Jamal drives the Audi to Richmond Hill because there are rich motherfuckers there and they got great cars to boost, in garages off roadways called crescents and drives. They got monster houses and monster rides and his friend is the garage-door specialist and a strong man and he’s the driver. And really it should be three of them, but they are two. They spot the silver Beamer X5 outside near a stop sign, and there’s an Asian guy in the passenger seat. The guy looks middle-aged to them. His head is laid back on the headrest, and his eyes are closed; the windows are open because it’s a nice evening, not so hot as earlier in the day. And maybe the middle-aged Asian guy is waiting to meet someone; maybe he’s resting for the first time in a long time, and is waiting until someone comes out of the house not far away to get him. The Beamer’s silver skin burns like a fish in the dark pond of the evening.
They circle him once, twice. And Jamal wants to take this one, so he gets out and gives his friend the wheel of the Audi. He has a small black object in his waist, and he slides up stealthily on the resting man. He practised two or three times in his head, Get out, motherfucker, as he’s heard in the movies. So when he gets to the car, he says these words and presses the gun to the man’s face. And the man seems insulted and stunned—how could he have been caught in this way?
Adrenaline makes Jamal wrench the door of the Beamer open violently, grabbing the man and dragging him out of the car, flinging him to the pavement and kicking him in the ribs. But the man, surprised and suddenly charged himself, hangs on to Jamal’s left leg.
The gun falls, clatters against the pavement, and slips under the car. Then the friend in the Audi jumps out and comes running, kicking the man loose of Jamal. The man is stupidly fighting as if he has a life that’s precious. He realizes that they want the car, and he says, “Take the fucking car” in Vietnamese, but no one understands him. So they beat him and kick him beyond recognition and Jamal jumps in the silver Beamer X5 and his friend takes the Audi and they drive away, leaving the man half-dead by the road.
And the man lies there thinking, Not Bidong, not Klong Toey, not in any of those places had he let himself down like this. His mouth is full of the brittle, rusty taste of blood, and the sky looks like the sea that first morning on the Dong Khoi. And he leans his head as he had over the side of the boat, longingly, and Bo and Ma are finally running out of a doorway, running toward him, and the road between them is like water, and they both grab him as they should have and his mouth splits open and all the water spills out.
This is long after Carla drank that espresso and rode home. She put on some music when she got there, and she sat by the window, looking out on the street and the coming evening, at the young man who sold houses, the woman who worked in the abortion clinic, the girl who talked to her dogs as if they were human. The lottery man was heading from the Mars. Downstairs the storekeeper had drawn the awning in. She would wait up until Tuyen came home. Listen to music, drink some wine. Tomorrow she would miss work and have everybody over. She longed to hear Tuyen chipping and chiselling away next door.