“Where y’all from?”
Ownie heard the grocery clerk greet an elderly customer.
“We’re from Can-a-da.” The matron gave each syllable its due.
“Uh-huh, isn’t everyone?” The grocery clerk — whose tag identified her as Jeweline — cackled as she packed canned ham, cocktail crackers, and travel-size shampoo in a bag.
“I guess.” The old lady smoothed her polyester pants as her pale green top — nine bucks at Manatee Mall — sparkled with vacationing rhinestones. “Sudbury, On-tar-i-o,” she added as though that made a difference.
Ownie was sitting on a bench near the exit, waiting for Turmoil, who was storming the aisles in search of broccoli and brown rice.
“My husband had a family from Sudbury last week,” said Jeweline. “He drives the Executive Minibus” — she paused for recognition — “to and from the airport. I bet y’all came in on his bus. It’s purple with green dolphins, real nice.” The old lady nodded numbly as Jeweline rang in Evian water. “Duke drives four to midnight, then delivers flowers until noon. Ten days on, two days off.”
“The flowers down here are lovely.”
“Uh-huh, honey.”
As she bagged a newspaper, Jeweline glanced at the front page, which was sprinkled, for the benefit of snowbirds, with Canadian content, such as: QUEBEC TOWN SETS A RECORD FOR WORLD’S BIGGEST SNOWMAN. “I’d like to see one of them snowmen,” said Jeweline as she rang in coffee filters. “How long he been blind?” The clerk gestured toward the old man clinging to the matron’s elbow in ballast-filled shoes.
The old lady looked startled, as though she had been scalded by a sip of tea. As Jeweline rang up the total and waited for an answer, the customer touched her pants, then decided that Jeweline meant no offence. “It’s been a gradual thing,” she explained. “The last twenty years. Now he has cataracts.”
“Nothing they can do for him?” Frowning, Jeweline handed over change.
“No.” The snowbird shook her head, white as unbaked meringue.
“Well, you have a nice stay down here.” Jeweline squeezed the man’s arm. “Y’hear.” He nodded in a jaunty skipper’s cap. “Just be glad you didn’t bring none of that snow with ya. I swear you two can’t be from Canada because you both look like movie stars.”
Smiling, the couple wobbled by a pyramid of bedpans and Depends. “Lovely day.” Ownie nodded.
“It certainly is,” the old lady said brightly, then whispered to her blind husband, “I bet he’s from Canada.”
“Fresh-cooked chicken in our deli.” The manager’s voice carried over the PA system, drowning out Ownie’s thoughts. “Four dollars for a whole mouth-watering chicken. Save yourself the time and trouble of cooking on a hot day. Take home this delicious meal.”
Ownie picked up a newspaper and turned to the obituaries out of habit. Mary Carter, 92. Moved to Paradise in 1970. Hiram Tate, Godfrey Jones. They were all the same: 79, 80, 76, originally from Pittsburgh, New York, or Somewhere Else, which is where he wouldn’t mind being right now.
Last night, out in that trailer, miles from the comforts of habit and place, in the same spot where Carlos had been eaten by a lion, Turmoil had charged across the kitchen and stuck his face in Ownie’s. “See see that!” Glaring, he pointed to a quarter-sized spot on his cheek. “Thass frossbite!!”
“Too bad.” Ownie had shrugged.
“Thass what ah got livin in your country.” Turmoil made it sound as though it was Ownie’s fault, as though the trainer had voted for six months of winter, for slush and sleet and mind-numbing cold. “Mon, ahm lucky ah didden die up there. Ebbyone with assma, pneumonia, whooping cough. Ah checked, and the avrej temperture is seven degrees, seven degrees widt fog and rain. You cahnt grow nuthin in that.”
“That’s where I’m from. I’m used to it.”
“You could live ten years moh in this weather.”
“The old man lived to ninety-four; that’s long enough for me.”
“Ah tell you what we do.” Turmoil lowered his voice, shifting to a tranquil place of soothing sun and endless beaches, a place without frostbite or fog. “Ahll buy you a nice litt’l house where you cahn see the dolphins; you cahn ride your bicycle all year long. Your wife, she cahn come to visit.”
He laughed and Ownie felt a chill, realizing that Turmoil had resented, since the day they had met, anyone near him, anyone who had filled the space between them. He had hit both Suey and Scott; he had laughed when Louie had his lights put out. He had melted down when he found Ownie with Jonathon, the hockey player, and now, he was trying to move Ownie here, where he’d be alone and at the big man’s mercy.
“You see!” Turmoil promised. “Iss the happiest years of your life.”
Ownie heard a commotion at the foot of Jeweline’s aisle. “I can do it myself,” insisted a leathery woman who was arguing with a man in a paper hat. They were fighting, Ownie realized, over who should push the woman’s grocery cart. Caught in the crossfire were two loaves of French bread.
“Nooo.” The man sounded like Darth Vader. “I have to do it.”
Unflappable in blue glasses, Jeweline turned away from her register. “Let him help, honey.” When the woman released her grip, Ownie watched the man commandeer the cart out the door, trailed by the unhappy owner. He must be eighty, Ownie figured, and he has one of those things — one of those voice boxes — in his throat. Curious, Ownie scanned all of the checkouts, working his way from Express down to Customer Complaints. Christ! All of the checkout boys were seniors, a paper-hatted army of shrunken men with white hair and the clubby, take-charge air of Rotarians. It reminded Ownie of the time that he had walked into an after-hours bar in Boston and discovered that all of the waiters were dwarfs. He’d be damned if he’d end up like this: spending his final years drifting between discount malls, playing shuffleboard, driving a tricycle, never belonging, never having any sense of purpose or place, like a wise guy on witness-protection.
Aisle three looks like Teddy, Ownie decided as the shock wore off, just fatter. Teddy only ran about one-fifty. He and his wife went to Florida one winter. “You know, Ownie, they’ve got whole trailer towns down there just for seniors. They’ve got big signs, NO KIDS, and if they catch you bringing one in, they’ll string you up. How would they feel if they came back here after six months, after everyone had pulled a hellish winter, and they saw a sign with NO OLD PEOPLE? I wonder, Ownie, how would that sit?”
After Ownie and Teddy joined the navy together, they went to Halifax for basic training. Back then, the city was a blur of hammers and drills and destroyer-grey paint. Guns boomed, and the downtown was like a United Nations of merchant seamen: Greeks, Belgians, Danes, everybody keen until the food ran low and the wounded men started coming home, legless reminders that war was real.
At the start, a Norwegian whaling fleet, stranded when the Huns invaded their home, cut the city up pretty good, strapping blond sailors with nothing to do but smile at the girls and eat fish and chips. They looked like they came from a place with light and sun, with their yellow hair and blue eyes. They looked like they ate good food and never got fat. It was all an illusion, the girls discovered too late, since Norway was cold and barren and far away.
Teddy got tinfished in ’44. They ran his picture in the Charlottetown paper along with the names and address of his parents. When he returned, he looked nothing like his picture, not after a year in a POW camp, living on bread, nerves, and the odd bowl of skilly. It was the skilly that did it.
When they were kids, Teddy lived at the race track, helping the grooms sweep stalls and roll bandages. One of the trainers, a guy named Flaherty, would give Teddy a carrot to stick in his pocket for his favourite horse. One day, in a moment that Teddy never forgot, Flaherty let the boy jog Flashfire along the outside rail. He gave Teddy the lines and said, in a voice that seemed to possess all the wisdom of the world, “Feel the rhythm of the gait in your arms and shoulders, feel the wind in your hair. Listen to the shoes cracking on the surface.” Well, that day, Teddy was Peter Pan and Jackie Robinson rolled into one.
Teddy was skinny as a rail with sores on his feet when they brought him into New York on a troopship. For years, he swore he’d never drive a German car, not after choking on that horse-meat soup. Nowadays, with more wisdom than Ownie seemed to possess, he stayed at home. Teddy said he’d take the cold before he’d end up somewhere he didn’t belong. At least he’d know who he was and what he was eating.
Ownie put down his paper as Turmoil rounded the corner.