The paper, Le Echo, announces it. It is a story. Not a big enough story to be the story, but a story. Gerald no doubt is helping her. Jackie is going to run for mayor. “A Better City For A Better World.” She is wrong already. We are not a city. Jackie has no chance. Then again she is an attractive woman, it would be wrong to let her lose. It would be wrong not to vote for her. She may be our Trudeau. Finally, Irving Layton said, Canada has produced a leader worthy of assassination. Gerald has influenced her. She wants to run on a law and order platform.
It is unfair to try. It is unfair to have an ambition. It is unfair to want. It is unfair to see. Vision is cheating. The small bugs, we must keep our eyes on the small bugs, that is where our future lies. The unending war, the unending fascination. Jackie is not going to lose. I am going to lose Jackie. The one person I thought might be...me.
I have been thinking about something. I have been thinking that perhaps I am a bad person. I made Mama’s life very hard, I know, and at the end I stood beside her bed with my hands and watched her struggle. I knew there was no point. She gurgled and gasped, panicked, I believe, by her stiffening lungs, the lack of air, her skipping, pausing heart, whatever it was.
She did not speak. I did not speak, though my hands were sweaty. I had not given her her pills that day; things happen, you forget, you get confused, you sleep through, you get angry, you want to win for once but you only hurt yourself when you win.
I fluffed the pillow up afterwards and smoothed it out. I would iron the sheets later, but first they had to be washed. Yes, definitely, first they had to be washed. No one had slept in that bed until Mrs. Bluto came, and she may be dead herself now for all I know – for all I know everyone might be dead. Sitting in that bedroom in a chair beside the bed drinking my cold tea, alone, for all I knew there was no one else alive in the world. How would I know? Perhaps there was only me. Guy was dead, after all, and mother was dead, and Leticia was dead, and whoever the boy was was, and the old man, and my hopes, and my life, and me. But here I am all the same.
I take a breath and decide it is time to take action. I just put off deciding what action to actually take until later, until some other, more advantageous, or at least self-evident, time. Time, as they say, waits for no man – she does, however, give her phone number to anything in pants.
I call John on the phone. “What did you mean, ” I say, “by what you said?”
“I mean I know what you do, Pierre.”
“And I know what you do, John.”
“Every Thursday in front of Tapparie Bar at eleven o’clock. A blonde with a limp.”
“She’s my sister.”
“She must be the sister of a lot of men, ” I say. “She must be from a large family. Many men come to see her there every night.”
“A man has the right to what he pays for.”
“It’s not a crime to be stupid, John. Look at the Pope.”
“I won’t have you bad-mouth the Holy Father, Pierre. I draw the line at that. I could kill you if I wanted to; who would care? I could turn you in.”
“John, I am a fatherless boy.”
“You are a cocksucker, ” he says, and hangs up.
I hold the phone in my hand a long time, and tap it against my forehead.
There is a theme here, I think, and the theme is sex. You can be born male, you can be born female, you can be born both, but can you be born nothing? Neutral: neither at all one nor at all the other? With no hormones, no sexuality, no bits or parts, a sexual void? What would that make you? If your crotch was a smooth round of uninterrupted skin, like a Ken doll, your face and hair androgynous, not too tall or too small, not liking boys or girls or children or animals or magazines. A neutral ground. Would you be human? No. So by doing what I do I defend my humanity, I honour my maker – I do not anger him, he accepts me as I am, he accepts the sacrifice I present – I am being authentic, real, terrible, dog-like and Jezebel, Onan, David, Lot’s daughters, Rebekah’s older sister, Sodomish, Gomorrahish, Mary Magdalene, the woman taken in adultery, the Jews, the Romans with their bathhouses, the Greeks with their Vice, the hanged man’s orgasm (I almost said ‘hung’), the sweat that flies off the brow of the man hammering in the nails in the Israeli heat and the flies that seek out the spot.
I kill because I turn down the deal. Because I will not accept what’s being offered. I do not assent. You cannot show me any place where I signed on. When I crush a bug or smush a spider, or swat a moth, or pour boiling water on an ant hill, I am saying I may be certain to lose, I am certain to lose, but one of the world’s gods will be less an eye.
I take a garden trowel and hold it in my hand in a tight fist. I must go find John. I must find him and give him back his gardening trowel; I do not want it in my house, in my yard, in my dirt. I will throw it at him. I will strike a blow for freedom. I will stun him with it. He thinks he is my friend. I do not want a friend like John. I want a friend like Jesus.
I have on my old shoes, which are mostly uppers, and my eyes itch like crazy. It is the stuff they put on the sides of the road to kill the weeds. It always feels like iodine in the eyes. But it is cheaper than cutting the grass, which says something interesting about the dismal science.
I put sunglasses on and exit past Jock Renard’s place next door, on the other side from Mrs. Bluto’s place, or former place. Jock is a keep-to-himself, grizzled kind of man, never married, no children. Probably sixty, if he isn’t dead and re-animated by some spiteful necromancer. He has a woodpile on his side of our property line and as I pass it, focused on fear and hate, courage and yearning, an awful smell strikes my breath like a rotten cat or a family of cannibal skunks.
That is it, of course: skunks. We have a problem with them around town and around our houses and they have, some, presumably, taken up housing in Renard’s old woodpile.
Suddenly, as if the earth has moved during a good-bye, I forget about John, I forget about philosophy, and law, and justice, and humanity, and death by misadventure, or by adventure, or Leticia or Jackie or Guy, and I think, “Those Goddamned skunks are back around here, ” and I hate them with good old fashioned dog-hate-cat animal instinct. I must get at them. I must root them out.
I can feel my good sense leave me for better quarters elsewhere. But I must do it. I pull logs off, swearing and slashing at them with my trowel until I reach home plate. “Ah, ” I think, “I see.” There are no skunks. There is a piece of shiny metal on a chain. A St. Christopher’s medal? No.
The first person I see when I reach downtown is Jackie, but I keep my distance because sometimes the sight or smell of a woman can give a man’s brain hiccups. My eyes are already watering. Jackie walks past me without speaking. Perhaps John is spreading rumours about me. Still, you’d think she would have said something.
The next person I see is Robert, looking through one of the trash barrels on the sidewalks. He does that, he told me, because he once found a pile of old Life magazines someone had thrown out and he treasured them, so now he can not pass a public trash barrel without checking. How appropriate, I think to myself – in a rubbish barrel.
Ralphie’s butcher shop has a ‘closed’ sign on it even though it should have an ‘open’ sign. Perhaps Ralphie is sick, or Mrs. Ralphie, or one of the little Ralphettes. Perhaps people have stopped eating meat. Perhaps people have suddenly started wondering why there are no stray cats or dogs around town.
The door to Chez Louise is open and there is a portable sign out front that says ‘50% off’. I wonder if that means the top half or the bottom half of the dress.
I realize I haven’t seen Peter in quite awhile.
I pass the school and I know it is just before recess. No one is out. I went to that school, years ago. I walk up to where I can see in the windows. The Art Room is empty but there are childish pictures on the wall. We had to fight to get them to keep art lessons in the curriculum. The board drew the line at gym and music though, and both the physical education and music teachers were let go to save money, and the money saved went where, exactly? No one knows.
In the next classroom there is a class and I recognize Carole by her long dark hair, smartly dressed and sitting paying attention. Then, close to the window where I am, I notice Jessica, looking bored. I tap to get her attention. She looks up and Ms. Button, the teacher, looks and Ms. Button comes over and looks right at me like I have been chewing gum in her class, or in my old teacher’s class, who used to be very strict. She draws the curtain.
I shrug and go on. Perhaps Jock, who is the janitor there, will let me in sometime after hours. If I ask him. If I tell him.
After watching the ducks on the river, the brown river – liquefied shit, it looks like, probably is, actually – and getting very hungry, I go to a bench under a tree and take out two slices of buttered bread. I know, I know, but I wanted to try it. I had taken the pound of butter out of the fridge and had to slice it like a bar of soap when I made it. Now it is warm and smooth, but patchy on the bread, little globs, puddles of butter. It tastes salty. Someone has cried on my sandwich.
I can do nothing for a long time, and I do, and when I walk my way back toward where I have come from, there are more people downtown, the regular people, farmers, shoppers, youth, daters, parents with kids, and Jessica Lesser, alone, standing and looking away down the street like she is estimating how much farther she has to go on aching feet. I know the feeling.
I go up to her.
“Jess, my love. How are you, eh? Everything okay?” I say.
She looks torn between a friendly face and a fear, or a duty.
“I’m not supposed to talk to you, ” she says.
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that. There’s something I need help on, just one thing. I was hoping – don’t worry; it is a good thing, a Godly thing. Your parents would approve. I know your Mom and Dad. It is prayer. I know someone who is in trouble, perhaps sick; will you pray with me for him? There is the church. The prayers of a child go straight to heaven they say. More so than my prayers would. Please? In the church?”
Jessica is good, a stalwart girl, yeomanly, even. She would not say no to prayer in a church. I put my hand lightly on her back and guide her forward. She says nothing.
I move my hand up to her hair. “Thank you, ” I say. “This man is facing great trials.”
“I won’t know what to pray, ” she says.
“Little child, God will send you the words.”
We pass through a crowd of conversationalists blocking the sidewalk and to do so I take Jessica’s hand. The church is large and stone and brownish-beige and steepled and the grass neatly clipped like you never know when someone from out of town is going to come by and want to take a photo of it. Best to put your good foot forward.
Inside all is stone and stained dark brown, wooden pews and pulpit and trim, and the clatter of Jessica’s – I almost said ‘Leticia’s’ – hard black shoes on the floor. It is empty.
We go up to the front and I tell her to kneel down, which she does, folding her hands in front of her. I kneel too.
“Dear God, ” I say, and pause.
“I don’t know what to pray, ” she says. “No one told me.”
“Pray that this cup may pass from… alternatively, pray that it does not.”
I can hear the main doors behind us open and light enters across our backs. “Hush, ” I say, “just love, ” and I take her left hand between my two, flat out, and hold it in a praying position, like the engraving. I can hear a voice. I raise our three hands to my mouth and press my lips against my fingers. There is a rising noise like thunder, gathering, like violent indigestion, like an involuntary, orgasmic squeal.
“There he is, ” it says.
I hold her hand tighter. There is another voice. “Get him.”
Leticia – Jessica – stands up, but I hold on to her hand. Someone – it must have been a man – cuffs me on the head, hard, and someone grabs my left arm and pulls me that way. I let go.
“The police.”
“They’re coming. They’re coming.”
“Hold him.”
“I saw it all.”
“Hold him.”
“The fucking coward. The fucking coward.”
Someone I do not know punches me violently in the stomach.
“Jesus, Jose, no, don’t kill him. Leave him for Simon.”
I suffer. I have no air, no life. My mouth is full of some unpleasant taste and I try to vomit. Someone pulls my head up by the hair.
Mrs. Lesser walks up to me, and everyone falls quiet. We stare at each other, simply, for what seems like a minute. No one breathes. Then, deliberately, coldly, she raises her right hand, long red fingernails and all, pauses, and then slaps me as hard as I have ever been slapped across the face. This seems to take the anger out of the crowd.
One of her fingernails must have cut me above the eye as I can feel, or think I can feel, a bead of blood on my brow.
“When will Simon come?” I wonder.
Simon comes.