Chapter
TRAFFIC STOPS. THE hum of the city hangs in the air. The rain eases its deluge. And two Canadians, their waterproof jackets and Tilley hats replacing berets keeping their chests and heads dry, their military boots keeping their feet dry, hold their breath, ignoring the dying wind cooling their rain-stained pants.
“Please,” David whispers, unable to stop himself. He murmurs, “Battle buddies.”
The term catches Archie off guard. The Canadians had avoided using it because of Archie’s experiences with so-called battle buddies before and after his secondment with them. Battle buddies in US Military philosophy travel in groups of two or more on and off the battlefield because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; for Archie, the whole had been the enemy of his individual part. Recognizing that, Andrew had stated, “Battle buddies take care of each other here, Archie. We’re your battle buddies, ready to help each other live in civilian life, but we understand your aversion.”
Archie mulls the message. David has spoken. Archie strives to absorb that and fails. David sees him as part of a whole that takes care of its parts. Battle buddies isn’t abandonment but circling in care. Archie attempts to make sense of the message, but David’s voice and the words “battle buddies” only bounce around in his brain without impinging meaning. Archie doesn’t want to live, yet his…battle buddy…broke through his own pain and spoke out loud to save him. David…battle buddy? Archie turns the words around and around in his head, hearing them morph from betrayal and mocking to caring. A term he once scorned transforms into David who’s there in the night and in the day for him, whose muteness has been his only bandage over his Afghanistan wounds. His friend. Archie rolls that word around his tongue. Yes, his friend. Not just a fellow soldier, a veteran like him, not just a Canadian who had taken him in. But a friend and a battle buddy. His friend has ripped off the bandage of his muteness to save his, Archie’s, life. Awe suffuses Archie. His eyes wet, and in the shadowed alcove, he lets go of the certainty that his only solution is to follow Nadine. He casts his eyes left. Andrew’s open face returns Archie’s gaze, the face of a Canadian army man, solid, committed, dependable. Ethical. Andrew, who’d held him up on Yonge Street, who’d saved him from a homicide beat, remains standing with him, persists in looking for him, willing to stay with him right to the moment of ending his life if by turning away in fear he could lose the last chance to save Archie.
Wonder grips Archie.
Seeing them anew stifles his self-immolation.
Archie cannot let them down.
They are here.
He doesn’t know why they, again and again, keep watch for him. Maybe there’s hope. Maybe he can hang on to them and so hang on to life. He slides the combat pistol underneath his outer jacket and into his conceal carry. He notices David looking beseechingly at Andrew and Andrew’s small shake of the head. Andrew trusts him; David wants to take away his protection. But Andrew trusts he and David can hold him up, walk with him, and be his real protection.
Archie steps down to join them on the grille. Andrew claps him on the shoulder. Archie nods up at him, unable to speak. Andrew blinks rapidly, his face suspiciously wet. David wipes his face with his seamed palms and short fingers in furious strokes, sniffing loudly, then grabbing Archie and enwrapping him in his muscular arms. David doesn’t let go, and suddenly Archie is sobbing on his capacious shoulder while David holds him mutely. David’s returning muteness comforts Archie as grief and raw trauma pour out of him. Andrew’s unsure hand patting him on the back awkwardly, comforts him. David releases him and holds out his hand to Andrew. Andrew flushes at not being ready, at not seeing the need before it was asked for. He shoves his right hand into his dress uniform pocket and pulls out a small plastic package of tissue. He pulls out three thick tissues and hands them around. The three men wipe their eyes and cheeks, blow their noses, and stuff the tissues into their pants’ pockets, making Archie feel for the first time since returning from Afghanistan that he belongs—that he at long last has battle buddies who know his worst nightmares yet accept him, and not only accept him, but will risk having new nightmares to add to their own in order to save his life.
“Right,” Andrew booms as he leads them north to Queen Street. “Time for a poppy.”
Archie stares at Andrew’s back. The poppies are done. Remembrance Day is over. Andrew, sensing hesitation behind him, stops and looks over his shoulder. He catches Archie’s puzzled expression and explains with a half-smile, brave in its grief: “There’s a tattoo artist I go to. He’s available any time I need to remember a new casualty. I’m glad I only have to ask him to add one poppy to my vine.” Andrew removes his jackets and hands them to David to hold. He unbuttons his right wristband and neatly rolls up his dress uniform’s light green shirt sleeve, and stretches his arm out in the chill night towards Archie for inspection. Archie bends over Andrew’s arm as David maintains distance and averts his eyes. A green vine twines up Andrew’s forearm towards his shoulder. Poppies dot the vine. A scroll anchors the vine near his wrist. Archie cannot discern the words in the night’s contrasting artificial lights. Andrew says to the top of Archie’s head: “I am faithful.” David says: “John.” Archie begins to count the red poppies with their black centres then stops. He doesn’t want to know. Too many casualties for one man, he thinks. He gulps at the thought that if not for David speaking, Andrew would be off to add two, not just one. And oh, if only Nadine had spoken of her horrors, there would be none to add today. If only…
The fine line of the vine is like that thread that parted him from death tonight: so easy to break, yet it held.
Tonight, it held.
Honk!
Archie jumps. Andrew grips his shoulder and holds it for a few seconds until Archie’s heart beat slows back to below one hundred. Andrew rolls down his sleeve, buttons the wristband, retrieves his jackets from David, one at a time, pulls them on, and buttons them up, smoothing down their fronts before nodding that he’s ready to move out. Archie scans the street in his habitual manner as they march together. The streetlights break through the night air like brilliant fireworks. Passing cars shine like reflecting glass. They splash into puddles, spraying fountains of November rain. Civilians hurry by, huddled into their black puffy jackets, their brown wool coats, their red bomber jackets, their faces a mosaic of joy, of busied worry, of sadness, of nothing, of moving life. The sidewalk supports his striding feet, its cracks and pockmarks vibrant with age. The rain has freshened the atmosphere. Garlic smears the air from a nearby restaurant. Archie’s stomach growls contentedly.
The three men turn up Church Street, David and Archie following Andrew to his tattoo parlour. As they reach its entrance with its inserted narrow door, Andrew turns to David: “You’ll have time to make it tonight. Take Archie with you.” He addresses Archie: “Breakfast tomorrow, Specialist.” Archie opens his mouth, then folds his lips together to push them in and out, in and out. Andrew says evenly yet strain making it raw: “I count on you to be there, Specialist. Promise?”
Archie nods.
“I need a verbal answer, Archie. I need to hear you say it.” The plea in Andrew’s voice startles Archie, and he ejaculates: “Yes, sir. I promise. I’ll be there for breakfast.”
“So will I,” David growls out in his new voice. The two others glance at him, and he glares back, raising his eyebrows, daring them to say anything. Suddenly, they all laugh. Andrew disappears through the door, and Archie and David trot east to Sherbourne, hearing the distant roar of a bus approaching. The bus will take them back south to Queen Street and the streetcar that will carry them to Woodbine Beach on the edge of Lake Ontario.
The Sherbourne bus pulls up, and Archie and David file on. Archie sits in the first single seat; David behind him. A bang catches their attention. The driver has lifted the three-seater on the right side of the bus, opposite to and forward of where they’re sitting. The driver returns to his seat and deploys the front-door ramp. They wait.
The nose of an electric blue scooter appears and slams the base of the fare box. The scooter retreats. A moment later, it reappears and once again bangs into the metal base of the fare box and grey driver-protection panel. The scooter retreats out of view. Slowly, the scooter’s electric blue nose reappears and touches the driver’s panel full on. More of the scooter reveals itself. Pudgy white hands hold the scooter’s black handlebars in between bulging white plastic bags hanging off them. The hands turn the handles to the left a little; the scooter reverses out of sight. A moment later, the nose accelerates forward and to the left, missing the driver’s panel and bringing the owner of the hands into view. Short washed out blonde-grey hair in a bowl cut. One eye patched, the gauze patch only a bit whiter than her pale skin. Large round glasses half-way down her little nose blend into her round face. The woman backs up her scooter. Archie waits to see what she’s wearing. This time, she gets the nose further around the corner. But the left side of the scooter almost jams against the bus’s right wheel well. She doesn’t turn her head as she reverses again.
Archie decides to count the turning points. How many is it now? Ten? He’s not sure, but he begins with ten.
The woman gets her nose further into the aisle and almost makes it, except her back wheels jam up against the wheel well. Eleven. She turns the handlebars and ineptly backs up—twelve—so that when she drives her foot down against the accelerator, she ends up in the same place. Thirteen. The driver says something, his words inaudible to Archie. The woman nods. She pauses. She reverses out of sight. The entire bus watches with Archie to see if she’ll reappear.
She does. That’s fourteen, Archie thinks. This time, her scooter’s nose makes it all the way around. Her rear wheels miss the wheel well, and she’s in the aisle. Huh, Archie thinks, she made it, as he goggles at her enormous electric blue and black scooter with its festoon of yellow and white plastic bags and collection of reusable grocery store bags in a red, yellow, green, and blue abstract pattern. She speeds down the aisle past a woman and the man sitting next to her in the three-seater in front of Archie. The man hastens to move his feet out of the way as she skims the front of his legs. The whine of her scooter passes Archie. Her tail lights glow red beside Archie. Is she going to park in the aisle after the driver flipped up those seats for her? Archie wonders. A young woman gets on, spots the scooter, does a one-eighty, and disappears off the bus. Archie suppresses an agreeing smile.
The scooter’s driver reverses and turns the scooter in a ninety-degree turn so that its rear is against the window opposite Archie. As she backs up past Archie, her wheels aim for the man’s feet in front of him. The man thrusts his legs up and to his left like he’s going to fold in on himself.
“You shoulda gotten out of my way faster!” Her voice is like a shockwave in the silent, waiting bus.
“Move ya legs!” She demands of the woman in the middle seat of the three-seater in front of Archie. She waves at the woman to get out of her way. “Move, I tell ya. I’m going there.” The woman passenger scuttles over, and the scooter driver turns right and zips down the aisle all the way to the front, her rear facing the back of the bus.
The bus’s passengers begin to shuffle. Impatience ripples the air with tension. Archie is in no hurry. He settles comfortably into the red-covered hard seat, wondering if she’s going to park at the entrance. But no, she backs up, turns her handlebars to the right, and the scooter’s rear hits the seat panel at an angle. She’s a bad parallel parker, and Archie eyeballs the size of the scooter versus the space it has to fit into. He wonders if it will. He resumes counting turning points. That one was one.
The woman’s returned her scooter to the front, and the man’s breath begins to rasp. She backs up, and the man twists his legs to the right in case she backs up all the way past her parking space. She tries again to back into it, but as far as Archie can see, she began in the same place, and so…yes, Archie grins to himself, she’s banged into the panel at the same angle again. He itches to guide her, but her set mouth and white doughy hands, which remind him of the movie Ghostbusters for some reason, releases him from that idea. Her scooter whines forward at an angle. Archie has forgotten what point he’s on. He figures three is a good number. She reverses, and her right side now jams against the wheel well. This is not going well.
Muttering begins at the far back of the bus. The scooter driver couldn’t care less. She turns her handlebars to the left and stops and starts forward. Suddenly, she zips backwards and with first a turn one way of the front wheel then the other, she’s parked neatly in the space for wheelchairs and scooters.
Archie blinks. He applauds her silently.
The ramp folds back into the floor of the bus. The young woman who’d disappeared hops on and walks quickly towards the back of the bus as the driver closes the door and drives south.
The driver booms: “Welcome aboard the bus to Sugar Beach everybody, the land of pink umbrellas. Sit back and enjoy your ride.”
All is back to normal.
“Move your bag.”
Archie looks around to see who’s said that and to whom.
“Move your bag. That seat is for people not bags.”
It slowly dawns on Archie that the scooter driver is looking directly at the woman in the middle seat of the three seater. The scooter driver’s white cheeks are pinking. The woman in the three seater doesn’t so much as twitch.
“It’s the law. You can’t put bags on bus seats. It’s against the law. You have to obey the law. Move the bag.”
Archie angles his head slightly to see better the object of her venom. The seated woman is staring at the scooter driver with confusion writ all over her face.
“Move that bag. It’s for people.”
“Leave her alone!” The deep male voice from somewhere behind him jolts Archie. His heart hammers.
“I don’t have to,” the scooter driver yells back. “I have the right to tell her it’s the law to move her bag.”
“No one wants that seat. When a person gets on, she’ll move the bag. Leave her alone!” The baritone voice thunders back.
“How would she like it if I sat there? Maybe I will.”
A small voice says, “I’ll move the bag. See it’s on my lap.”
The scooter driver eases her left leg off her seat. Encased in grey sweat pants that stretch around her thigh’s girth, her leg slides down until her croc-shod foot is off her scooter’s foot well. She reaches down in slow motion and picks up her floppy black bag off her scooter’s floor, talking all the while about how if that woman won’t move her bag, she’s going to sit there because people need the seats not bags. And it’s the law.
The man from behind Archie yells: “You can’t sit there. You’re already taking three seats. You can’t take up four seats. Someone else will need to sit there.”
“I’m a senior. It’s my right to sit where I want,” the scooter driver chides. As the bus approaches the next stop, the scooter driver waddles across the aisle and falls into the seat right behind the driver’s area with a whump.
The man behind Archie berates her for taking up four seats, whereupon another man from the back of the bus yells: “Shut the fuck up!”
The bus driver shouts down the bus: “Calm down everyone.”
Silence.
Archie exhales and lets himself relax back into thoughts of what the women will do.
Thirty seconds pass.
“Get back to your scooter you crazy bitch,” the outraged man yells simultaneously with the scooter driver loudly berating the woman next to her, “Keep your bag on your lap and never put it on the seat. But since you did, I’m going to sit where I want to.”
Archie’s heart slams against his ribs. Heat volcanoes into his throat. His iPhone pings, and he jumps. He snatches his iPhone out of his pocket and reads it. “You got your gun?”
Archie ignores David’s jibe. He wants off the bus.
The two men and the scooter driver are now in a free-for-all, each trying to out-yell and out-righteous the other.
Ping.
“C’mon, man, this is the time to use it.”
Archie squares his shoulders back like he’s trying to fling an insect off his back. He knows David is joking, but he can’t laugh as baritone, tenor, and soprano voices fling words around him like bullets in the desert.
“I have the right to sit in this seat. Her bag does not.”
“You don’t have the right to take up four seats.”
“Shut up, all of you!”
“I’m a senior, you can’t talk to me like that.”
“We have the right to ride in peace!”
Ping.
“Shoot them all!”
Archie launches out of his seat and crashes past the man’s legs, stepping on something soft. He brushes past the woman in the middle seat, and her bag flies off her lap behind him, landing with the crinkling sound of bioplastic. He knocks the knees of the scooter driver, who yells at him she’s a senior and he should respect her space. A thump behind him heralds her bag landing on the bus aisle floor. He grabs the bus entrance’s front right-hand yellow vertical bar as the bus lurches to a stop, and he uses his hand as a fulcrum, letting his momentum swing him around and out through the front door that opens just in time for him to exit, David right behind him.
Archie pounds down the sidewalk for a block, oblivious to the direction he’s going in. He halts. David slams into his back, knocking Archie forward. Archie swings around on the ball of his feet and cocks a fist. But David is doubled over, his left hand clutching his stomach.
Archie blanches. “Did I hit you?”
David inhales raggedly and cranes his head up. “N-n-no,” David blurts out between fits of laughter. He staggers to his right, his right arm and hand stretching out, until he smacks into the wall. He leans on it, braying with laughter. Archie glares at him, still shaking from the panic that had suddenly filled him while on the bus. David clasps both hands over his stomach and begins howling about the pain. “You’re killing me, man. The Sherbourne bus never fails!”
A smile creeps across Archie’s face. And then his lips part, and he’s grinning. David opens his eyes, spies Archie’s face, hiccups as his laughter calms, and grins back.
David releases his stomach, stands up, wraps an arm across Archie’s shoulders. “The Sherbourne bus denizens. That’s probably the best fun they had all day. You never know what you’re going to get on that bus. Did I tell you about the time when…,” David regales Archie with his stories while keeping his right arm around Archie’s shoulders. David interrupts himself to shoot his left wrist out of his sleeve to check his watch. “We’re going to be late. Let’s grab a cab,” he says.