ANDREA BRADLEY
When Tom came home with a set of keys, Bill figured he’d invested in an apartment building or a StoreAll, a business with a guaranteed income. It was their retirement plan, after all. They were getting too old to eff around.
“Don’t slag it till you’ve seen it,” Tom said. So Bill hauled himself into the truck and drove off to his future.
Bill’s future turned out to be a parking lot. The keys (to the office, Tom’d said) opened a booth not big enough to piss in. The view was a pothole ridden polygon of chewed up asphalt, squeezed between a Chinese food place and a methadone clinic.
Bill fixed Tom with his meanest troll look, the one that could knock the smile off a kid three blocks away. Tom fixed his meanest troll look right back at him.
“Wot,” Tom said.
“What,” Bill hissed. “What I want is an explanation. What I want is to hear you say you didn’t just sink our savings into an alley off Dundas West.”
Tom’s fat lips curled up in a distant approximation of a smile. He opened his arms wide like the parking lot messiah.
“Charging tolls on vehicular traffic is in our blood. It’s proper troll business, innit?”
In hindsight, it was easy to see where they went wrong. For one thing, parking lots were not proper troll business. Trolls were supposed to work in the shadows, under bridges and down wells. They were groping hands in dark recesses and faces in the window at night, a story to tell children before a warm fire. Before Tom sunk all they had into the lot, they’d gotten by on odd jobs, anything needing absurd strength or a hideous mug, which mostly meant discrete jobs. Troll jobs.
Needless to say, customer service did not come naturally to them. Neither did seeing their hand when it was an inch from their face, meaning that Tom had some trouble admitting he was wrong. He had a different theory about why the lot barely broke even.
“Taxes,” he said. “If someone’d told me about the bleeding taxes, I never would’ve bought this place.”
“What, you didn’t think we’d have to pay taxes?”
“Look around you,” Tom said. Bill looked. He saw the faded paint lines, the overflowing bins, the rats and users scurrying in and out like the tide. He saw grey rain falling on dull concrete, a few parked cars. He saw the same thing he saw every day of his life: a sad heap of nothing.
“There’s no water, no power, no cops, no nothing. This place isn’t even on the map. Wot exactly would make me think we’d have to pay taxes?”
For the dumber brother, Tom sometimes made a lot of sense.
For eight years, Bill and Tom sat in the booth, shoulder to shoulder, day and night, watching the paint lines fade. They made enough money to pay the bills and keep the rain off their heads, nothing more.
Life was bearable, barely, until the day that Bill saw the sign.
He was walking home from a shift at the lot, Tom-less for once, his surroundings streaming past him like white noise. He was thinking about the pork cutlet on its Styrofoam tray in the fridge, and whether the day had greyed it beyond edibility. He was thinking about his cast iron troll stomach and how eight years ago he wouldn’t have worried about a little grey meat. He was thinking about how life turns you on yourself, when the sign hit him.
It flapped off a telephone pole and plastered itself like a dead parachutist, spread-eagle, across his face. Bill peeled it off, muttering appropriately. He held it out for the benefit of his near-sighted eyes.
Green hills. A flowing stream. An old stone bridge. Underneath, the words, “This could be Yours! ”
“Wot the…” Bill said, slipping into his childhood accent.
He turned the pamphlet over, but that was it, a picture of a bridge in the old country. Thrown in his face. Bill’s brows came together. He crumpled the paper in one fist and looked around. He was alone on the street. Young’s Convenience was on his right, the bars pulled across the windows. Row houses leaned in toward the store like conspirators. Everything closed in on him, all concrete and cracked.
Bill walked the rest of the way to the sound of his own teeth grinding.
The pamphlet did not stay crumpled long. Bill tried to throw it out, but just thinking about that bridge set his veins thrumming with longing. He pulled it out and smoothed it on the kitchen table.
It was a troll bridge, he had no doubt. But did any of them still live that way? Hunched beneath a bridge in the miserable damp, waiting for something fat and meaty to cross. Tearing into fresh flesh, collecting coins, living off the land…
“Wot’s that?”
Bill slammed his palm on the table.
“Come on, I saw it, dinnit I? Open up.” Tom reached down to pull up Bill’s fingers and then they were at it like ten-year-olds.
“Shove off!”
“Not. Till. You. Show it!” Tom pried Bill’s fingers off one at a time and ripped the paper in two, dancing back from the table with his half held above his head.
“That’s mine, now give it back.” Bill reached, stumbling clumsily on oversized feet.
“‘ This could be YORS’. You buying a timeshare, Bill? Without consulting yor own brother?”
Bill stared at Tom, at his misshapen potato nose, his mean eyes, the spit dripping off his fat-lipped, gap-toothed smile. He saw what people saw when they looked at him. A dumb oaf, good for nothing more than growing an ass and collecting cash from people too cheap to park downtown.
He saw his wasted life.
Not long after, the Chinese food place closed. Bill stared at the barred up windows, gnawing on a sheep rib, wondering what he’d do without $4.99 chow mein. Tom farted beside him. The hammy stench drove Bill out of the booth.
“I was eating,” he protested. Tom shrugged and Bill threw his bone at the plastic window. Ventilation in the booth was subpar. Bill had at least ten minutes before the atmosphere in there was breathable again, so he set off down the block. He walked with his head down, like a bull, assuming anything smaller would get out of his way. And so it was that he nearly ran over the two women portaging their canoe. Luckily, his head was thrust so far forward that he saw the canoe floating below his nose before his body crashed through it.
“Watch it!” The girls stumbled sideways and Bill reached out on reflex, lifting the canoe off their heads.
“You’re the ones with a boat on your heads,” he muttered. The girls did the thing that humans do when they see him standing at full height. Their heads tilted back, their chins retracted and their eyes opened wide. Bill could see their thoughts like ticker tape running above them. What is wrong with that man he is so ugly don’t stare stop staring I need to stare if I’m gonna figure out how it’s possible to be so. Freaking. Ugly.
“Where d’you want this?” he asked, breaking through their circling thoughts.
One of the girls blinked, blushed, then stared down at her feet. “We’re taking it in there,” she said, pointing at a door in a red brick building that Bill passed at least once a day. A shuttered bank about two blocks from the lot, obsolete since the Instacash set up shop. He’d never given it a second glance. The other girl kept her eyes on Bill. “How are you doing that?”
Bill looked up at the canoe over his head, held in one thick hand. He shrugged, then lumbered through the open doorway. A stack of chairs stood at one side of the room. On the other side, a bar. Except it was nothing like the bars Bill knew. There were no amber bottles lined up, no smudged glasses stacked in puddles of water, no dusty taps jutting out. Instead of all that, there was one squat silver machine, with levers like arms sticking out and stacks of tiny cups lined up beside it. There were jam jars, filled with strange little pebbles that looked suspiciously like rabbit food. There was a wooden sign behind the counter that said, “The Portagery. A Vegan Cafeatery. ”
A sick feeling squeezed into Bill’s gut. He turned around slowly. “What is this place?”
The girls’ answer buzzed in his ears. He heard the word “espresso” and that was enough.
“Hey, thanks for helping with the canoe,” one of them said as he shouldered past her into the street. “You dropped this.” She pressed something into his chest and Bill grabbed it absently, breaking into a run as soon as he hit the sidewalk. When he reached the booth, Tom was standing outside.
“Drove meself out with me own…” He stopped as Bill doubled over beside him, breathing like a spent horse. “Wot’s knackered you?”
“We…can’t…stay…here,” Bill panted.
“Wot you mean, we can’t stay here. I don’t advise going in there.” Tom pointed at the booth.
“No. Coffee shop. Opening…” Bill straightened. “A block down. They’ll drive us out like always. Best to move on before…you know what.”
“A coffee shop. It ain’t exactly pitchforks and torches.” Tom squinted at Bill, his gaze dropping to his hands. “Wot’s that?”
Bill looked down at the paper the girl had given him. Half a stone bridge looked back at him, with the words, “be Yours! ” beneath. He shoved it in his pocket.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Roight. Anyway. It won’t last a day. Who’s going to go there? ’im?” Tom pointed at a junkie bent under heroin’s weight, the sole other occupant of their lot.
“Maybe,” Bill said, anything but sure.
Within a week, the Chinese restaurant was a neighbourhood gut wound: a deep gash spelling the death of all its kind. The old Polish guy who fixed deep freezers, the Korean rub n’ tug, the cabbage roll place – one after another, they all closed shop. It wasn’t long before the rats and users were replaced by baristas and strollers. The bars came off the Chinese restaurant and a sign went up.
Kikoga
/kik/ōg∂/
noun
1. Kickboxing and yoga fusion classes.
2. An awesome workout.
3. Because sometimes you need to fight for inner peace. Try two weeks unlimited for $20 and get a free bamboo neck towel!
A steady stream of tattooed twenty-somethings began to flow through the lot, rolled mats on their shoulders, sipping algae-green drinks in plastic cups and thumb-hammering their devices. Bill watched them pass by the booth, grinding his teeth to powder. The owner of the kikoga studio watched him back, eyeing the lot behind half-closed blinds. Bill could read his thoughts as clearly as the coffee shop girls’. When he approached the booth, Bill was ready for him.
“Hey guys, I’m Todd.” He stuck his hand through the little window. Bill thought about snapping it off, sucking out the marrow, and throwing it back in Todd’s face. Instead, he waited until Todd retracted the hand, irritation flickering across his brow.
“So, uh, you had this place long?” Todd asked.
Tom grunted. Bill stared stonily ahead.
“Ahh, listen. I’m going to speak from my heart here. You’ve probably noticed the studio’s doing really well and as much as I think cars are obsolete planet-destroyers, we could really use the parking space. So, you guys ever think of selling?”
Bill looked at Todd, at his tanned skin and too-white smile. He looked at the arch of his eyebrows over his blue eyes and thought of bridges. He thought about punching those blue eyes black, one after the other.
“No,” he said.
“No?” Tom asked.
“Huh.” Todd made a sound through his nose, part disbelief and part disdain. “What are you boys planning on doing with it?”
“We’re starting a farmers’ market.” Bill slammed the window shut.
“So wot yor telling me is, some fat farmers are going to set up shop in our lot and we ain’t going to have room for cars neither? Have you lost yor bleeding mind?”
Bill wiped Tom’s spit off his cheek. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them from knocking his brother. He found the tattered pamphlet and clenched it tight. Tom wouldn’t understand, not if he took a year and a day to explain. It was no old country bridge, but the lot was theirs. Bill wasn’t letting it go without a fight.
“First off, they’re paying us. And we’re not being run out. Not again.”
“But you hate this place. You been wanting to sell since the start.”
“Yeah, I hate this place. And I hate those skinny-necked, hairy-faced, grass-eating, know-it-all assholes even more. We’re not being run out, not by them.”
By “them,” Bill didn’t just mean the kikogis. He meant everyone. All the young professionals and new parents who were driving out the old guard. The first generation immigrants. The addicts. The trolls. They didn’t come brandishing pitchforks and torches. They didn’t burn. They were water, tearing at rock with implacable fingers. They were change, and above all things, trolls hate change.
The farmer’s market turned out to be an excellent idea, at least in human terms. Sure, the lot was closed to cars every Saturday, but the market brought people into the neighbourhood. People who liked to buy arugula with dirt still clinging to it for three times the price of the boxes of triple-washed greens at the grocery store. In other words, people with money and cars. They came for the market and discovered kikoga and underground theatres and glass-blowing studios. They came back on days when the market was closed and they parked in Bill and Tom’s lot. Business had never been better.
If trolls could be happy, then Bill and Tom were happy. Most days. Their newly found financial comfort meant nothing on Saturday mornings, when the soil grubbers began to set up shop. Tom was too offended to put up with any of it, so he spent Saturday mornings drinking lager at the Ukrainian men’s club. That left Bill to keep watch.
The bee guy was always first to arrive, with his glass hive, jars of raw honey and $50 candles. Next came the bread, the microgreens, the artisanal flowers, bespoke fruit leather, and lavender popsicles. The goat always came last. It was free range, which meant the goat lady had to set up a pen, with a fence and bales of hay for it to perch on. She sold things off a table. Bill wasn’t sure what because he didn’t trust himself to get close enough to find out. As soon as the goat showed up, Bill’s day was ruined. He’d spend the rest of it in a stare-off with the yellow-eyed beast, daring it to come out of its pen. By lunchtime, he would be shaking and sweating.
Their tenth Saturday in operation, Bill was so focused on the goat that when a knock came at the window, he nearly put his fist through it.
“Oh!” A grey-haired man stepped back in surprise.
Bill breathed deeply. He ground his teeth and opened the window. “What?” he said.
The man fidgeted, clutching a basket of apples. “I was just wondering what you’re selling.”
“Selling,” Bill said.
“In your booth here. I didn’t see a sign so I thought I’d just ask.”
Bill stared at the man. He was thin, a herbivore from the looks of him. Probably one of those people who ran for no reason, with little juice packs strapped around his waist. Bill thought about the days when people used to run from him. When they didn’t have time to pull on tight shorts and lace up shoes and find a portable snack. When their screams would set his heart singing, the blood rushing to his ears, and he would laugh. They would both laugh, him and Tom, because the faster the people ran, the sooner they could feast on every last blank-eyed goat in their yard. They didn’t have to scheme to come up with money or food. They had nothing to trade for it. They bullied. They took. They killed. Bill was a troll. It was time he started acting like it.
“I’m not selling nothing,” Bill said. He spoke so quietly, the grey-haired man leaned in to hear. He peeled back his lips in a hideous grin, showing every last one of his fifty-six teeth.
The man ran.
Everyone ran.
It took five minutes for the lot to become a scene of chaos, greens flying, tables upended, fruit mashed to pulp beneath dozens of feet. The only one who didn’t run, who couldn’t run, was the free range goat.
The police investigation went nowhere. A monster, some said, or a gun-wielding giant. Todd said he saw the whole thing from his studio, but his story made just as little sense. He said it was the parking lot guy, as if one guy could cause that much destruction, as if a man could devour an entire goat in the time it took for the first responders to arrive, leaving nothing but a bloody spine attached to the skull. The Bloody Market, the papers called it. For a week or so, the city was on high alert for wild animals, and then time buried it at the bottom of everyone’s newsfeeds. Whatever happened, it worked out for Todd. The kikoga studio got its parking lot.
As for Bill and Tom, the farmers left enough money in their booths for them to retire a second time. They found work on an Italian ocean liner that would take them home. Bill was surprised to find that Tom had kept his side of the torn pamphlet. He taped them together and stuck them above his bunk. At night he gnawed on a goat leg, staring at the old stone bridge. The troll bridge.