In_Other_Words

For a time I performed my inquisitional duties publicly, the better to get my hands on the goods. I had established my office in the restaurant of Neath’s Hotel at the table nearest the kitchen where the staff sat when they had a moment to grab a smoke or flip through a movie mag or consider the placemats. This prestigious spot I’d secured via a slow and steady infiltration. During the weeks that my family remained homeless, we took up residence at Neath’s downtown, which gave me my first in. Once I’d absorbed the weirdness of our new arrangement and mastered the art of lighting a cigarette on my room’s single functioning hotplate burner without setting fire to my hair, I began hanging around the rest of the joint, making myself useful as opportunities arose. For Beth, the switchboard operator, I fetched Cokes and ham sandwiches from the kitchen, listened at length to her domestic woes, and filled in for her when she needed to retreat to the ladies’ room (which was a lot). Research heaven. As Victor, the dishwasher, liked to say—with much less cause—I know what I know. You bet. After enough forays into the kitchen (“Onions! No fucking onions! Excuse my French, dear, but could you run down to. . . ?”), I was in like a dirty shirt. (And all too frequently wearing it, my mother being notably lax in the clothing care department.) In due course my school texts began to appear on the staff table, marking my spot and handily dog-earring my squatter’s rights when required to be elsewhere. Before long, elsewhere began calling to me less and less.

High school, basically a petting zoo, had squat to offer someone who was keeping her eye, rather than her hands, on the local fauna. Everyone passed through the restaurant at some point, their crimes, no matter how mild or rank, intact—hence the ideal lookout for a round of moral winkle-picking. The coffee may have been ghastly, but the fries were hot, and the view even better.

One day, Vic noticed me observing a table of Hydro guys who were snickering slyly amongst themselves—the subject a female, no doubt—and felt moved to offer me advice.

“Hero, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“Don’t trust what they say. They’re after one thing and one thing only.”

I gave this utterance some thought.

“You mean like a tool? A drill, say? Or a Thompson screwdriver?” I was a big fan of the hardware store.

“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t mind a decent drill myself, but that’s not what I, uh—” Blushing ensues.

I was delighted to discover that I at least looked innocent. “So this ‘one thing’ applies to you too, Vic?”

“No, of course not.”

“Geez, Hero. Morland? He’s a nice man. So what if he did kill that—”

“A rumour, Vic, remember that. How about Doc McIvor?” He happened to be seated at the front of the restaurant, endangering his own health by digging into yesterday’s ‘clam’ chowder.

“Gosh, no. A doctor would never—”

Au contraire (excuse my French). Our good doctor had been after ‘one thing’ of mine and got it. My tonsils. My first intimate experience with a man and I’d been out cold the whole time. I sometimes wonder what he did with them. It’s disconcerting to lose bits of yourself.

“What about Nile?” My cousin had the reputation of being a ladies’ man.

“Nile?” A look passed over Vic’s face that would have befitted a timorous faun catching sight of Pan, rock star of the hedonistic woodlands. “Uh, Nile doesn’t need to—”

“Never mind. I know, I know.”

“And I know what I know. Don’t forget what I said.”

So there we sat, steeped in knowledge, although none the wiser about what the Hydro guys were saying. And it should be noted that while men remained something of a mystery to me, I was far savvier about the ways of the world than dear, sweet, walleyed Victor. You couldn’t live in a hotel, slowly navigating the hallways and attending to the racket humans made when they got together in a depressing room with a bed centre stage and nothing else to do, without knowing what was what. On top of that I had access to a wide range of educational reading material, including Beth’s copy of Peyton Place, the expired men’s magazines sourced from the garbage cans behind the drugstore, and the Bible in my night table so helpfully provided free of charge by the Gideon Society and in which one might encounter an inordinate amount of begatting.

For all I knew the Hydro guys might have been sniggering about Vic himself, no he-man with his messed-up eyes and clubfoot. He’d been gamely serving tables, helping Maxine get through the lunch crowd, and when he lurched into action, the lads could barely contain themselves. Bad enough a male doing women’s work, but a physically damaged one at that. A joke in slo-halting-mo.

“Tip?” I asked, although not requesting further advice, as Vic blundered past later carrying the guys’ dirty plates. Grim-faced, he pushed through the swing doors into the kitchen.

“Pigs.” Maxine landed in her chair at the table with a laden plate of spaghetti.

I don’t agree with disparaging animals, but let it go. “No tip?”

She menaced a meatball with her fork, harrying it around her plate. Good thing those guys weren’t from here and not likely to show again. Maxine had a wicked serving arm and a style that brought decapitation-by-crockery to mind.

“Vic tells me that men only want one thing.”

“Sweetheart, I could of told you that.”

“But it’s not true, is it? It’s got to be more complicated, they’ve got to be. What about Einstein?”

“Uhh, right. What about… the Pope?”

“He is? Wait, not that—”

“Look Hero, it’s true, true and true. I oughta know, dear. Don’t think you won’t find out yourself, either. Just you wait.”

Yet wasn’t that precisely what I was after, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but?

“Man, Letty’s a lousy cook.” Maxine pushed her plate away, retrieved her smokes and lighter from her apron pocket, lit up. I loved watching her—the languid draw, the smoke curling out of her nostrils, the delicate ash at the tip of the cigarette growing longer and longer—suspense!—until finally, before it tumbled off and shattered, she flicked it smartly onto her plate of spaghetti.

“No obits today?”

She shook her head. “Not in the mood.”

Maxine had this pastime which kept her agreeably occupied during her breaks and from which I’d learned a thing or two about euphemism, a linguistic device that formed a rind of respectability over many a juicy situation best given an airing. Flipping her receipt book open to the back, chuckling, and often humming Frank Sinatra’s version of “Fly Me to the Moon,” Maxine composed obituaries for those customers unfortunate enough to catch her eye—or ire. For some reason—okay, I asked, didn’t I—she shared these with me, although not with the others. This is how I learned that the mayor was a ‘powerful negotiator’ (bully), the druggist a ‘confirmed bachelor’ (homo), the United Church minister’s wife ‘utterly carefree’ (off her rocker), and that Beth’s husband, while ‘convivial’ (a drunk), had recently become a ‘marital enthusiast’ (bigamist). After a while you got the hang of it, language embedded in language: swordsman, working girl, free spirit. Following this formula, my immediate family, if wiped out, would at best, and most kindly, be summed up by the phrase ‘of no fixed address.’

While evasive obituary code amused her, Maxine dished out her designated deaths in a more straightforward manner, with none of this ‘passed away’ or ‘met his maker’ business. She was the maker in this reckoning and, like one of the Fates, an extremely efficient one—no holding back in the detailed dispensation of car crashes, house fires, heart attacks, stabbings (one with a fork), drownings. Sobering to think that the one taking your order and chatting you up might also be sizing you up for a bespoke wooden suit.

Harmless fun all in all, but it no doubt encouraged this tendency I had toward investigative activity. What less generous souls might call, oh, I don’t know… prying, snooping, sticking my nose in other people’s business. Be that as it may, I did like to get to the bottom of things, although the particular one I got to during my time in the hotel was vexingly dark.

What’s newsworthy? Violence, scandal, celebrity, sex—preferably all in one big grotty package. Not much in that line happened in our town outside of the heated goings-on at euchre parties or in the dance hall. Likewise, not much of lurid interest transpired in our only hotel. Hardly notable were the everyday comings and goings of salesmen, tourists, curlers attending bonspiels, hockey players snowed-in, government functionaries checking up on us. There might be the occasional girls’ night out, or stag, or quaint tryst among the married-to-others, or the odd male slipping like a shadow down a certain hallway to visit a certain woman.

If you care to know, the certain woman occupied Room 29 on the second floor and was registered under the name of M. Jezebel—so either in possession of a sense of humour, or taking advantage of the free Bible, same as me. Regarding the humour, I never heard her laugh while I hung out in the vicinity, although I’m aware that some people keep their amusement to themselves. Also, in her line of work conceivably not a good idea, a fit of laughter during an awkward or fumbled transaction. I’d say it’s a safe bet that this is not the one thing a man wants.

What bothered me at first, outside of the fact that no one seemed to care about what happened to her, was the other fact that I, the unofficial house detective, did not once lay eyes on the woman—alive or dead. During the brief period that her fate retained titillating value, everyone I interviewed claimed to have seen her and their descriptions all varied, taking full advantage of having a deceased stranger to work with. One would describe her as being busty and bouncy—“Watched her comin’ down the stairs, whooee!”—while another countered with, “Not enough meat on them bones.” One swore her to be a flaming redhead, another a bottle blonde. Short, tall, too young for the business, or too old. The only thing everyone seemed to agree upon was the manner of her death. Died suddenly, which is to say, by her own hand. I didn’t buy any of it.

“Real pretty, yeah,” said Vic, going on to describe someone I had seen plenty. “Leaving by the back way with this guy, not sure who he—”

“Sounds more like Hero’s mother.” Maxine took a long drag, squinched up her eyes, and gave me a shrewd look.

“Hey… you know, I think it might’ve been your mum, Hero. Huh. But who was that guy she—”

“Vic, go get us a coffee, will you.”

“Sure thing, Maxine.”

Once he’d obediently shambled off, I let out the usual resigned sigh in order to clear the air and get the investigation back on track. I wondered if Maxine had been nursing any theories of her own. “You going to write an obit for this poor woman?”

“What’d be the point of that? She’s dead.” Maxine, having switched to roll-your-owns, spit a shred of tobacco off her tongue, a direct hit on the ketchup bottle. “And don’t you be feeling sorry for her, some dumb broad. Hooking? Drugs? Got what she deserved.”

The sigh I let out now was not resigned. I’d get on with it, despite this attitude generally held. Slow going all the same. Having asked more than a few probing questions, what had I netted so far other than unwanted advice, suspect intelligence, and a raffle ticket (Glee Club)? Oh, and I’d been propositioned. To protect the innocent, I won’t disclose the name of the culprit, but the exchange went like this:

“Hey, cutie pie.”

“Want to [unspeakably lewd suggestion].”

“C’mon, you know the score.”

“Aren’t you married?”

“In a manner of speaking. . . .”

Well, fly me to the moon. Actually I did better than that. I flew upstairs (passing Paul VI on the way, a frisky rodent clenched in his maw) to talk to Selina, the room cleaner who’d found the body. Traumatized by the discovery, she’d been off work for several days to recover (and do a little shopping), but was back. I knew I had to speak with her before her story became contaminated by too much exposure or started to shapeshift into an entirely fantastical other.

“Not a stitch on!”

A good start. “What else? Lots of blood?”

“No blood, Hero. Everything nice and tidy, no puke or nuthin’, the bed all made up. Would’ve been real easy to clean, that room, if she hadn’t, you know—”

“Yeah, for sure. What about the drugs? Pill bottles toppled over on the night table? Booze? Bottles on the floor?”

“Nope, not a thing. Glass of water, that’s it.”

“What’d she look like, Selina?”

“Ordinary girl, nuthin’ special. In her twenties most like.”

This corroborated what I suspected. Although I hadn’t laid eyes on the victim, I had, one evening while filling in for Beth on the switchboard, heard her voice. A young voice, soft, familiar, like the voice of a friend or a sister. I could almost feel her warm breath filling my ear. She asked for a local number and I explained that first I had to connect to the central switchboard in town and make the request. Rose, a friend of my Auntie Viv’s, by chance working the night shift, had to cross-examine me first, asking why I’d been cutting so many classes lately (talk about nosy!), and I said that I’d been sick, and she said that I shouldn’t have let them take my tonsils out, and I agreed with that, then quickly asked if she could please put this call through for a guest at the hotel. Rose made the connection and we all listened, expectantly, our mutual breaths mingling in this magic moment of modern communication, while the line at the other end rang and rang. No cigar. M. Jezebel hung up quietly, without a word to either of us, and likely spoke no further words to anyone for what remained of her life.

“One funny thing—”

“What about it?”

“Looked hurt, sorta twisted. Like this.” And here Selina demonstrated, getting down on the floor of the hallway, stretching out on her side, doing her best to look dead—mouth slightly open, tongue poking out—and scrunched her left hand into an awkward position, as though it had been cruelly wrenched.

Lord love a duck! I had the clue I’d been searching for.

Only the day before, puzzling over one of my textbooks, Vic asked me about my studying Latin, what use could it possibly be? The simple answer to this was that I had no choice—at our high school you took what you got, our teachers only hazarding the northern boonies out of desperation, bravery, or cluelessness. But who wants to give a simple answer? Ergo I explained to Vic—Victor, yes?—the advantages of having a second language, if one spoken only in Hades. (Admittedly, my Latin homework was so serially borrowed that by the time I handed it in, it practically constituted another language altogether, unrecognizable to anyone.) I further explained that my future legal practice required it.

“Some bossy know-it-all opponent gets up my nose and it’s ‘Ipso facto, fatso! Ipsissima verba!’”

“You calling him a sissy or you telling him to piss off?”

“Both. More or less.”

Neater, though, was the use to which I intended to apply my knowledge of the language. Or I should say, my knowledge of some of the translations I stumbled upon while sidetracked from the mind-numbing labour of mastering declensions. Ovid, I discovered, was my man and Metamorphosis my book. It blew the Bible clean away. When Selina told me about M. Jezebel’s hand, I thought about the story of Procris and Cephalus, and I thought about it because I’d seen a painting of the former while flipping through an art book in the town library. Let other juveniles giggle over nudity in The National Geographic; I took in far more sophisticated sources, once enjoying in the earlier pages of said art book the depiction on an antique vase of a man balancing a wine cup on his penis. Had anyone in town managed to pull off this trick during any of the drinking parties out in the bush? With a bottle of Labatt’s 50 or IPA? Can’t honestly say, as I’d never been invited. But I doubt it!

So let me introduce Cephalus, a guy with a magic spear (yup) and a dick in his name. And what does he do with his spear but kill his wife with it. By accident, although given that she’d been spying on him, what did she expect? Not death I’m thinking, but there you go. He weeps and moans while she dies in his arms, happy apparently, their bond having been re-confirmed as she slips off to the underworld. A good story in Ovid’s telling (if not in mine, sorry), but a bit of a head-scratcher. As is the painting of the slain Procris, which I now had an urgent need to examine again.

Braving the dragon, Miss Brothers, a.k.a. Smothers, in her lair, I cautiously pushed open the door of the former jail that served as the town library. A cool, green, cave-like sanctuary, vigilantly guarded.

“Why aren’t you in school?” Smothers enquires, testily, my foot barely toeing the threshold. She’s seated at the front desk, light flashing off her cat’s-eye glasses.

“Er, it’s a spare.”

“What do you want?”

“Um… a book.” Yeah baby, a book! Is that too much to ask for??

“Don’t say ‘um.’ What book?”

“An art book.” Or rather, the art book. How many does one town need?

“For a project I’m doing?”

“Our high school doesn’t teach art.”

Tell me about it. “It’s for Latin class. I’m writing an essay on Ovid.”

“His name is not pronounced Oh-vid. Not like Ovaltine. It’s Aw-vid.”

“Right.” Like saying ahhh for the doctor, I guess, but defend those tonsils. “Aww-vid.”

My hazing over, Smothers pulled the book out from under the desk and walked it over to the table in the centre of the room, set it down, and, curiously enough, opened it to the page I wanted, a half-page colour plate of Piero di Cosimo’s A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph.

“You can’t check this out,” she said, meaning the book itself I assumed, because I had every intention of checking out the picture should she snap the volume shut on my unblemished and blameless hand, pressing it like a flower between the pages. I nodded, moved over to the table, and got to work, while she resumed her seat at the front desk, and watched me, gimlet-eyed, not even pretending to do otherwise. Just waiting for me to improve the artwork with flourishes of my own? A mustache or two?

Never fear, I found this painting to be almost unbearably beautiful as is. Cephalus doesn’t appear in it, although a young satyr does, grieving for Procris. There’s a dog, also mourning, that resembles Ruby who lives on a farm outside of town, a river in the background (more dogs, birds), and delicate flowers growing in the grassy area surrounding the body. The satyr, who has one hand tenderly placed on Procris’ shoulder, utterly defies your lustful satyr stereotype. Gentle, compassionate, handsome (definitely dishy, and sufficiently hairy, no mustache needed). Strange as it might sound, he reminded me of Vic, but with a much cooler do, goat’s ears, and hooves instead of a clubfoot.

Procris, lying on her side, is wearing a pair of gorgeous sandals, toenails painted, and is only partially clothed. Her breasts, 34A, are exposed. (Her cup does not “runneth over,” as my father is given to observing of the less well-endowed. And while on the subject, I have to say that there was no want of exposed knockers in the art book. The artists responsible being mostly male, I had begun to wonder if the one thing men really want is a full-blown set of their own.) Although Ovid wrote that the spear pierced her in the breast, in the painting the wound is in her neck, and it’s fresh, blood spurting out. But it’s the positioning of her left hand that most interested me. It’s oddly crooked in the very same way that Selina demonstrated during her death-mime of M. Jezebel. I knew I was onto something, but what?

So absorbed was I in pondering this question, that I practically jumped out of my skin when Smothers, standing directly behind me, spoke.

“No accident, Hero.”

“Look more closely.” And here our efficient and resourceful librarian produced a magnifying glass of Holmesian proportions and zeroed in on the other hand. The dead woman’s right arm was tucked under her body, but the hand lay open, the palm visible, unlike the left hand.

“It’s all scratched up.”

“Slashed,” Smothers corrected. “This young woman had been trying to defend herself from an attack. Knife, spear.”

“Is that why her left hand’s bent back like that? It’s broken?”

“Nerve damage.” She moved the magnifying glass to the neck wound. “Her throat’s been cut, the cervical cord severed. This makes the wrist flex and the hand curl up like that. You see how your eye is drawn to it by the satyr’s hand on her shoulder. It’s as clear as an arrow pointing to the cause of death.

“Murder,” echoed Smothers.

One does not expect justice to be carried out in the Greco-Roman mythological world (one is not a total nit), but in ours? Let’s just say, that no matter how determinedly I made my case, no one would listen. Not even Selina, who, ever adept at sweeping dirt under the carpet, soon swept the details of her discovery in Room 29 under a proverbial one. And then the carpet itself disappeared. In this, I understood the hotel’s owner, Mr. Neath (powerful negotiator) to be involved.

“For Crissakes, Hero.” Maxine studied her pointy nails, the scarlet flipside of her yellow fingertips. “You’re smart, we all know that. But get real, will you. This isn’t some TV show.”

“Yeah, Hero,” Vic chipped in. “Like Ed Sullivan… you know.”

Vic said this so wistfully that I didn’t hold it against him. But my patience was thinning.

“Look, I’m not spinning plates on sticks here.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, kiddo.”

“And that’s not what I’m saying, Maxine.”

Agreed, I wasn’t Perry Mason, but not even Raymond Burr was Perry Mason. Last resort, I plunked myself down beside Doc McIvor, who was about to endure a bowl of chili, and asked his opinion.

“Waiter’s Tip,” he said.

“Also called Erb’s palsy. It affects the hand in that way. The fingers curl up like a waiter taking a backhanded tip. Some people have it from birth, nerves damaged during a difficult delivery. That unfortunate woman may have had the condition from day one.”

“But not necessarily?”

“The coroner wouldn’t have overlooked anything suspicious. Bruising on the neck—”

The Doc’s attention had been diverted by the ketchup bottle, which he picked and frowningly examined as if he’d discovered the vital clue to a mystery. It only proved, however, that hygiene in the restaurant was abysmal, and I could have told him that.

“But the coroner is, um [don’t say um], convivial.”

He set the bottle down and looked at me. “True. He’s a genial sort.”

“No, I mean he’s a drunk, half-cut most of the time and half-blind, plus he’s got a thing for corpses.”

He didn’t respond right away, perhaps contemplating whether or not to laugh, or wondering whether he’d damaged my mental faculties while removing my tonsils. “Hero, he said quietly, “someone’s been filling your head with malicious nonsense.”

“But Doc, don’t you think it’s fishy? Her death? A woman born with a hand like that wouldn’t be a… uhh, working girl like her. Don’t you need at min two functioning hands? Manual labour, isn’t it? Like being a carpenter, or a—” In a rush of inspiration, I had been about to say ‘prick layer,’ but bit my tongue.

“Not to put it too bluntly, my dear. A disabled hand of this nature might have been a benefit.” He looked down into his rapidly cooling bowl of chili, regretfully. “Some people, men, have unusual… requirements.”

A doctor, he’d seen it all, I suppose. And now he saw even more.

“Um, hold on. Hero? Are these kidney beans moving?”

If I’d accomplished little else in this whole affair, if M. Jezebel had kept her own counsel about grievous harm suffered in death as in life, I at least had the satisfaction of saving a great many of my fellow citizens from a bacterial takedown. Not that I got any credit for it. On the contrary, after everyone witnessed me nodding enthusiastically as I peered into Doc McIvor’s lively bowl of chili, I got pegged as a whistle-blower. The restaurant closed ‘indefinitely’ while the health department dealt with the wildlife. (Maxine, when she heard, dealt with it in her accustomed way, kicking a mouse clear across the dining room.) Mr. Neath informed my parents, his voice much louder than necessary, that they were to vacate their room at the hotel PDQ and to “take that mouthy little minx” with them. My mother, increasingly troubled after the death in Room 29, had been agitating to leave in any case. If she knew anything about M. Jezebel’s end, she too kept her own counsel.

I missed the hotel, but our new place on the waterfront, an airy (i.e. derelict) hyphen between the marina and the dry cleaners, was also biologically vital. After a surprising incident which occurred on our very first night in residence, we took to calling it The Reptile House. What happened was this: mid-dinner (bacon and eggs served on the family pattern paper plates), my father, mouth crammed full, abruptly stopped chewing, his gaze pop-eyed and fixed on the wall behind me. For a minute, I thought that a Heimlich might be in order—I’d once seen Vic perform this nifty maneuver, none too successfully, I’m afraid—but when I turned to look, saw a water snake laboriously wending its way up. Up the wall!

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” my mother said, dropping her plastic knife.

She pushed her chair back, got up, walked over to the snake, plucked it off the wall, and with it writhing in her hand, strode outside to the front porch and hurled it high into the air, where it hung, buoyed by astonishment. Briefly. Before anything large and winged swept in to nab it, before it achieved the status of an omen, the snake dropped into the lake, gathered its wits, and swam away.

I should mention, too, that I won a gardening trowel with that raffle ticket. An exceedingly nice one—stainless steel, oak handle, genuine leather toggle looped through the end. Whether or not the draw had been rigged, and the trowel had been awarded to me as a taunt or as an encouragement to keep on digging, digging, didn’t exercise me in the least, for I had every intention of doing exactly that.