014

140
McKay Street

SAM NEWHOOK

JULY 21, 2003

THE SUN rose facing straight onto the upper side of McKay Street, sunlit mornings bright and hard and hurting in your eyes like thrown sand. It was two years before Mrs. Purchase would catch Len staring at Vernie’s laundry, but she was already watching everything.

Mornings were like snapped-open window shades, Sam Newhook thought. The sun was already pouring in harsh through the small rectangle of his bathroom window, while he was absently scratching his stomach, naked, his eyes half closed against light that seemed determined to bounce off every single tiled surface in the room and fly straight into his face again. Heavy curtains, light curtains—it didn’t seem to matter. It was the kind of light that bled through the weave and poked around the room in brilliant pinpricks, waking him far earlier than he wanted.

He wasn’t sure if he was ever going to get used to mornings like this, to the way the sun caromed off the flat sky and the sea at a slight angle, so that it seemed to double itself, storming into the house always at a full run, ignoring everything that tried to stand in its way. But at least the fog was gone. Sam wasn’t absolutely sure which was worse, the glare or the grey, but even with his eyes still stinging, he was pretty sure it was the fog.

Sam hadn’t had the house long, and was still repeating the simple mistakes over and over again: There was the short step down outside the bathroom, only an inch or so, but it jarred his back every time he stepped off it unexpectedly. One of the cupboard drawers in the kitchen seemed to roll closed faster than it should, jamming his fingers between it and the countertop. Even the sliding closet door upstairs—the one that skipped out of its track because it was square and the house, overall, wasn’t. Anywhere. The way he pulled the sliding door hard across to open it made it jump out of its short railbed every single time.

He knew the missteps were a collection of things that he just hadn’t experienced enough yet to have them built right into him, things he didn’t know so well that they had become practised and ingrained. It was a new house, he thought, a new house built out of an old house and oddly filled with new sharp corners.

A new house to him, anyway.

Sam still had trouble keeping the address straight, kept giving out the number to his apartment to taxicab drivers instead, an apartment that was half the city away and in the wrong direction too, so that it was an expensive mistake any time he was drunk or wasn’t carefully paying attention.

His new house was one of a trio of row houses that a developer had snapped up as a group and had then renovated throughout, knocking down walls and putting in new floors to label the places “open concept,” plunking soaker tubs with jets in the upstairs bathrooms and pressure-treated patios out beyond glass doors that opened off the master bedrooms. The kind of places you advertise with a sturdy-looking hunk in a white bathrobe out on the deck with a steaming cup of coffee, master of everything he surveys. And that’s exactly how you’re supposed to feel in the model suite, Sam thought. And it worked fine for him.

It was like they’d found a realtor’s checklist somewhere and followed it to the letter, a list of things that a young professional expected as a matter of right when picking out a house. There was only a thumbnail of lawn out back, the grass just recovering from the rough surgery of construction and coming up green in weedy patches, but the market was looking for dinner parties, not gardens or picnics.

Sam had put a bid in as soon as he looked at the place, and he hadn’t realized until the lawyer searched the deed just how much the price had gone up between the time the developer had bought the places and when Sam’s offer had been accepted on the renovated space. After he found how much the markup was, Sam felt a little like he’d been cheated, but the offer was signed by then and the lawyer suggested he should just try to make the best of it, that he was getting what he wanted anyway.

Just one surprise among many. It was a neighbourhood full of surprises. There was a woman in his bedroom again, still sleeping, and he was pretty sure that, this time, her name was Jillian. He was completely sure it was Saturday morning, though, and there was no easy escape in having to head out to work. No way to just put on a shirt and tie, mutter a half-chagrined “Sorry, gotta go,” and head straight away for the door, hoping she’d be gone when he got back.

By the time he was finished making the coffee, she was leaning on the door frame wearing black panties and a T-shirt. Bare feet, one small foot flat on the floor, the other tilted up against her opposite ankle.

She pointed at her chest. “Jillian,” she said, bringing the third syllable up high, like a question mark.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Just making sure.”

She had curly light brown hair. Good legs. A small, sharp face with high cheekbones, her eyebrows getting all involved with the conversation whenever she spoke. Looking at her, Sam wished he had a more complete picture of the night before. Some of the evening was sharp enough—he remembered coming back from the bar, leaning on the front door messing with the keys, and the part where they were laughing in the living room about spilled Scotch and a glass knocked off the side table. And the part where elbows were getting caught coming out of shirts.

But there were important short gaps, and when he thought about it, he could remember nothing at all from the part just before sleep. Looking at her now, he wished he could remember a little more about that. And just how it was that they’d met, well, that was a little less than clear too.

Jillian was drinking her coffee quietly, staring at him over the top of her cup, probably making her eyes big like that on purpose, he thought. And the kitchen hovered around them, the perfect space it was supposed to be, all formal and poised and quiet, and Sam couldn’t help but think that the room was equally ready for the comfort of pancakes or the easy show-off of eggs Benedict.

And that wasn’t such a bad thing either.

At least she wasn’t playing the know-it-all card with him, not yet, not nudging at him by repeating things he couldn’t even remember saying to her, catching him out for forgetting lies he couldn’t remember her telling him in the first place. The occupational hazard of meeting people when you’ve already got a few drinks in, living a night where things are running faster than you would normally let them.

“Nice place,” she said, staring around the kitchen. “Nice to see when people take the time to do things right.”

“Get what you pay for,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t ask exactly what it was that he had paid.

He had already started trying to figure out a strategy for getting her out of the house when he was pulling on his pants, but by the time he had really thought about it, she was already gone. Coffee-finished, clothes-on, kiss-on-the-cheek gone, saying only, “Gotta work,” and “My number’s on the fridge, if you want.” She’d turned it all around, he smiled to himself, pulled the work thing on him before he’d done it to her first.

And how easy was that?

One broken glass, one of the good, expensive ones, but he was pretty sure a good fuck in return, judging by the torn-up bed—sheets strewn across the floor like they’d been involved in some kind of Olympic event—and even a telephone number on the fridge, he thought. He could throw the number away after his shower if he felt like it.

But he didn’t.

He looked at the phone number for a moment when he came back downstairs, and even that impressed him—seven spare, unfamiliar digits and her name in a script that was only mildly looping and feminine. No circles or hearts over the i’s, he thought. Just Jillian, no last name, one sweep through across a sheet of notepaper in ink, her script even and steady and plain. Simple and straightforward. Like the number was something she was quite happy to share with him but, at the same time, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

He left the note where it was.

His hair was still wet and the clock said it was still morning, so he went outside into the bluff, bitter snottiness of a Newfoundland June, looking one way and then the other before making the decision to head towards Duckworth Street.

Sam’s house was the middle one of what was fast becoming an assembly line of rebuilt row houses, his a sharp rust red clapboard bracketed by similar houses in dark blue on one side, forest green on the other. Blue was two married lawyers both trying to make partner, the woman with a fine ass but neither of them ever home until the middle of the night. Forest green owned a downtown bar and Sam had already complained once about noise when the whole crew had come back there after closing to continue the fun. In their own way, they were an island of three small castaways in the middle of an ocean of McKay.

Looking at the buildings, Sam realized just how precise the developer had been. All three of the houses were bright enough colours to be trendy, to be almost leading-edge, but still cautious enough to be instantly saleable. Sam felt something like he imagined a fish might feel, just when the cautious-colours hook struck home. That caution, though, was something that clearly hadn’t occurred to all of his other neighbours: there was a flame orange house on one corner, three storeys straight up like an escaping bonfire, and a brave attempt at purple down the street that had somehow fallen flat, as if the rich round grape that had looked so very good in the paint can hadn’t survived the translation to the flat expanse of the clapboard.

But they were something of an exception. More and more houses in the neighbourhood had new doors, new windows, new flat paint on new clapboard, and Sam knew without even peering in the windows that there would be hardwood or laminate floors inside, that the tile work in the new bathrooms wouldn’t have had a chance to mildew yet.

And the redone ones were spreading through the others like a virus. The older ones were more careworn, dressed out with eyelet curtains and sheers that were yellow with age or heavy smoking, and even though it was almost summer, there was still one with a plastic Santa out front, its face carefully punched in.

Father Concave Christmas, Sam thought, wondering how hard someone would have to swing his fist—and what kind of mood he would be in—to beat up Santa.

The more ragged of the older houses always seemed to have pairs of haughty, patchy cats staring out the front windows, or else small, angry dogs barking up close behind the front doors. The kind of dogs that seemed to sense you passing, that listened for the gritch of your shoes on the pavement so that they could go berserk on the other side of the heavy doors.

And the older houses were like a secret handshake, he thought, like their owners had a membership card in the unspoken language of the “we’ve-always-been-here-and-you-haven’t.”

It was as clear as a tide line on the beach, he thought, the difference between the old and the new. The old ones were being slowly shouldered out, the separation between the two sets of houses as clear to Sam as the water’s edge.

Three doors down from the corner, there was a former rooming house where there had been a spectacular but short-lived fire. One of the addled residents had set up a hibachi in the front hall because it was raining and he didn’t want to get wet cooking hot dogs. The box the barbecue came in said “Not for Indoor Use,” but the man hadn’t ever had the box, and he wouldn’t have liked the lecturing tone of the warning—only an approximate translation from the Japanese—anyway.

The fire was like its own kind of natural selection, Sam thought as he walked by the burned-out house.

When the house had been burning, the neighbours all came out and watched the firefighters breaking out the windows and cutting holes in the roof, watched with that peculiarly serious formality that comes from knowing your house and all your possessions are only a couple of doors away if the wind comes up and the firefighters suddenly lose control. It’s one thing to be vicariously concerned about someone else’s life and possessions, Sam thought. It’s something quite different to be concerned about your own.

The row houses along the street often shared walls, and sometimes they shared misfortunes as well. People were only as safe as their neighbours were careful, and sometimes only as safe as the fire-rated wallboard city inspectors forced on them during renovations.

The rooming-house residents were gone now, the shell of the house snapped up in a real fire sale, and its interior walls and ceilings were piling up in scraps in a big blue Dumpster in front of the house. A couple of months and someone new would be buying the place, unaware there’d even been a fire, the only hint a faint smell of wet charcoal when the fall rains really came and the humidity was stuck up somewhere in the range of instant migraine.

Bit by bit, the whole neighbourhood was changing, Sam thought, and in a year or two his place wouldn’t be overpriced for the block, but instead an obvious, solid investment. The whole street would be different then, with only a handful of the stubborn old owners left, hanging on like bad teeth, and they’d hardly be able to afford to stay on—because if the city was good at anything, it was good at ensuring the municipal taxes would rise in perfect lockstep with the neighbours’ house prices.

You could already tell who was who just by the cars, Sam thought, the difference between the dull-painted Reliants and Tercels and the newer Volkswagens, even the occasional Volvo.

There were still signs that this had once been a self-contained small neighbourhood, the kind of place that might have a name like Georgestown or Rabbittown, a traditional kind of name that would be loosely known by every single person who lived there, even if the neighbourhood’s real boundaries were only clear to the inhabitants who lived within them.

There was still a small butcher shop on the corner, but it was losing ground fast, the hand-drawn poster-paint signs for pork chops and hot Italian sausages fading in the sunlit front window because they hadn’t been changed in months. Sam had never even been inside, but he imagined a white-aproned butcher, like you’d see in a sandwich-meat commercial, maybe with a moustache, red stains on the front of the apron, a bulky, square man standing rigid behind a wall of chest-high, old-fashioned, white-enamelled, glass-fronted coolers.

There wasn’t a bakery anymore, but there had been. Now it was just an empty plate glass window in the midst of another conversion. But there was a corner store at Prescott, just a shell of itself, totally dependent on the triple addiction to beer and smokes and lottery tickets, looking as broken down and fading as many of the customers who shuffled their way in.

Mornings are hard here, Sam thought, looking down the street. Two neckless beer bottles, dropped. The bottles’ decapitated tops were still capped, lying jagged and right next to each other, their bottoms half inside a torn shopping bag.

There was a wet wool hat, slowly draining the rain it had harvested overnight onto the pavement, and a spot where someone had bent over and thrown up next to the curb. There had been pigeons working over the remains of the vomit until he got close to them and the biggest of the pigeons poked its head forwards once or twice, feinting like a small and cocky fat-necked boxer. Then all the birds stumbled and tripped into the air and away, wings clapping together, wing tips touching with a light feathery slap like they were right on the edge of overreaching themselves in the effort of escaping.

Then there was more broken glass on the street: patterns of fallen shards where car mirrors had been starred and smashed out by a rock or a passing fist. At least it was only mirrors, Sam thought. It was cheaper to fix side mirrors than to be replacing car windows, and there were certainly parts of town still where people sometimes took out a car window for something as simple as a handful of change in the cupholder or the briefcase in the back seat that you’d forgotten to bring in overnight.

Ahead of him, someone on the street had put their garbage out early, ignoring the schedule so that the dark green bags had slumped on the curb for days, and the bags had been torn into by cats or seagulls. There was some kind of plastic packaging pulled and tufted out through the holes like the bags were in the process of being disembowelled. And that was just the bright morning leftovers. There were leftovers at night too.

There were still plenty of loud fights when there would be a police car left on the street, empty, its roof lights spinning and battering the houses with splashes of blue and white and red, while indoors a police officer would be standing between an angry couple, a referee up until the point where someone went too far, and then it would be a trip to the lock-up.

Screaming some nights, already one night clear enough that Sam could hear it from his bedroom. “Just fuck off and stay away from me, you bastard. Do you think I want whatever it is you caught from her?”

But that was surely changing, surely being shoved aside by the higher incomes and new people, he thought. It couldn’t change fast enough for him, and he walked down McKay Street singling out houses in his head where he thought people should move, and the ones where they would be allowed to stay: 56 and 58 should go, 60 could stay, and 62 should just be torn down to the ground, the clapboard faded and hanging loose in places along the front, the windows already practically rotting. He felt like a judge at a dog show, scoring each house to decide best in class, and he went all the way down the street to the end before turning around, crossing the street and walking home, rating the houses on the other side as well.

Around six, back in his own kitchen, Sam had only a moment or two of misgiving before he took the number off the fridge and called.

He looked around the kitchen while the phone rang on the other end, looked at the oak cupboards, running his hand along the granite countertop. The developer had done a good job, he thought. You can’t say enough about good workmanship.

Then Jillian answered. It was a short conversation, mostly Sam saying, “So, do you want to go out?” before writing down the name of the bar she gave him almost immediately. Just down the hill, she said, the kind of place you fall into and just feel you’ll never be out of place in again.

Outside that evening on his way to meet her, Sam decided the air was finally leaning towards summer evening, that it had a high kind of still and holding humidity, the thorough heat that makes sweat a clear disadvantage.

At least it’s downhill, Sam thought, turning and heading for the harbour, where the light had already fled and the water was black glass, even though there was still some light left in the sky. There was a broken bottle on the pavement again, darker than the lengthening shadows, and he kicked some of it away from the curb and in next to the foundations of the nearby row houses.

Sam took long, overstretched, eager downhill steps, feeling the satisfying pull in his legs and hips, his eyes already up and looking out for the bar she had told him about. He walked by the place twice before he found it, just a small bolthole door off a narrow dark lane, the kind of place where precise directions aren’t really that much help—but then again, once you’d been there, he thought, you would probably be able to find it in your sleep.

He was late, and she was already halfway through a vodka cooler in a clear bottle, and he watched her at the table, watched her drink a mouthful while he was still standing in the doorway, her neck long and smooth and perfectly angled, before he walked over and hung his jacket on a chair.

“Hi, Jillian, sorry,” he said, looking up at the British beer signs tacked up on the walls and at the tarnished brass lights over the pool table. “Nice old place.”

“You don’t really know much about anything, do you?” she said, staring at him, and he stared back, startled.

Sam thought her voice sounded sharper than he had remembered, as though the length of the day had hardened her into a drier, more spare version of herself, cutting away convention and even politeness like it was unnecessary fabric.

“This is all new,” she said. “The whole place. The pool table, everything. It came in the door looking old, but only because it was meant to. It’s always been a bar, but not like this. Used to be just a dive. Now it’s a fancy dive.” She stopped, took another drink. “It didn’t even used to be wood,” she said, looking up at the walls. “Yellow paint, it was then.” She had peeled the label off her cooler, her fingernails looking sharp and dangerous when she did. “And the beer used to be cheaper then, too. You can’t just take things at face value. You gotta leave a little room for some experience, too.”

Sam wasn’t sure if she was lecturing him or if she was laughing at him, and he knew his face was tilting towards a sulk, that it was moving towards the sort of formal face he kept, always at the ready, for strangers.

“I’ve got . . .” he said, but the words came out woodenly, and he realized that, despite the night before, despite the sheets and the feel of her legs against his that he remembered all too well, they were still essentially unknown to each other. It was a depressing thought, draining, like starting a long and exhausting road race all over again.

She tilted her head, calculating, her eyes sharp and reading, obviously teasing him now. “How about a blow job in the men’s room?” she said, and she said it loud, suddenly grinning, staring right at him, daring him to look away. And at least two faces turned towards them from the bar, one of them a lawyer whom Sam had done some business with.

The lawyer smiled. With that, Sam could feel the tension drain away between them like water down the drain.

At ten o’clock, a thin guitar player with sunken eyes and curly hair set up his equipment in a corner of stone wall by the front door, settled onto a stool, and after a few minutes put his guitar on a stand and walked over to the bar, ordering a beer.

“Another hour and he’ll play,” Jillian said. “That never changes. Tease you at ten, sing at eleven or twelve, done at three. It must be written down in the musician’s handbook somewhere.”

So for an hour they talked, and with each passing minute, each sentence back and forth, Sam could feel the comfortable familiarity between them coursing back.

When the guitar player did start playing, he was better than Sam expected, the man’s long fingers drawing notes out as if surprising mice in corners, and Sam noticed that Jillian was drinking at the same rate he was, bottle for bottle, though she was drinking coolers compared to beers for him, so she had the edge on alcohol. She wasn’t really showing it, though, her eyes fixed on his, as bright as birds. But he noticed that she would look away when the door to the bar opened, nodding slightly to people as they came in, and sometimes offering a short, openhanded wave.

“You’re from this neighbourhood, then,” Sam said.

“Born and bred.” And this time it was like the last syllable spiralled slightly downwards. “Lived on McKay Street for my whole entire life. It was my grandmother’s house, and then my father’s. Plenty of us around here then, the whole neighbourhood full of kids. We all grew up together, same street, same school, same plans.”

“Not me,” Sam said.

“You think?” she said wryly. “I know that. I know your house, know it better than you do. I know it from when it was Mike Murphy’s place, and from when his two girls were growing up. Alison was in my class, all the way to grade twelve. I played with dolls in that backyard, back when there were shrub roses all along the back fence.”

Sam listened and Jillian talked, and sometimes he managed to tuck in an observation, but mostly it was like she was drawing a map for him, explaining more and more about the street and the people. About Mr. Carter, whom hardly anyone ever saw anymore and who seemed to be living on whatever food he could buy at the closest convenience store, about the people who had been arrested for theft and those who beat up their spouses, and all of it was connected to the street and yet was still unconnected to him. And Sam realized that when there were screaming fights at night, Jillian would be able to pick out who was fighting just by the sound of the voices and where the police cars were stopped, by something as simple as the angle of the flashing light bars on the roofs of the cars.

And for one wistful moment, he found himself wondering what it would be like to fit so well in a place, to have the comfortable feeling of knowing exactly where you belonged and exactly what it was you were supposed to be doing, dovetailing into everyone else’s lives. As he listened, he thought that he and his two immediate neighbours were intruders, that no matter how long they lived there, they might never find a place in the curious fabric of the street.

And then the bar was closing and they found themselves out on the street, heading upwards, and to Sam’s surprise they were even holding hands, their arms swinging back and forth in unison in a big arc. Heading back to his house, and he smiled and thought it wouldn’t even be so bad if more Scotch glasses got broken. The night was close and humid by then, and up the street above them a group of teenagers were gathered at the edge of the street. Sam could see the bright tips of cigarettes as they got closer, but he wasn’t paying attention, talking instead, eager for a chance to explain the things he saw in the neighbourhood.

“That butcher shop is—” Sam started.

“It’s not a butcher shop,” Jillian interrupted, like he’d missed a point she’d already tried to make. “It’s Harringtons, okay? They’ve owned it for years, we call it Harringtons.”

“Okay, Harringtons. It’s not going to last much longer, and—”

“What do you mean? It’s been there forever.”

“I mean it’s not going to last much longer.” He was exasperated, thinking he was in danger of starting to lecture. But he also felt powerless to stop, feeling the words digging their own defensive trenches around an otherwise indefensible position. “I mean, it’s obvious the place is going out of business, you just have to look at it.” He could feel his face getting flushed.

Jillian, angry now: “Three generations at least. And maybe it looks like it’s on its last legs, and maybe a bunch of other things around here are too, but it doesn’t mean we have to come up behind it and give it a shove down the stairs, just to be sure it’s really good and on its way.”

They were closer to the corner now, and up ahead of them the group of teenagers had coalesced into two distinct and separate groups, facing each other. Sam felt Jillian’s fingers tighten around his own, felt as much as heard her suddenly go quiet.

And two of the teenagers were pushing each other now, first one, then the other, harder, and then they had their fists up, too. One of the smaller teens staggered backwards into the low fence right on the corner, and as Sam watched, the boy turned and ripped one of the fence pickets free, holding it up over his shoulder, baseball-bat-high.

In the light from the street lamp, Sam could see the steel shine of nails.

There were lights on in some of the windows up and down the street, but it was like the houses were looking out and beyond whatever was going on in the street, not paying attention to it at all.

“Come on,” Sam could hear the kid with the fence picket yelling. “Come on, you fucker. Let’s see you come on now.”

And it was like there was a discernible change in the air: one moment they had been loud and angry but like actors playing expected, formal parts, and the next they were all scrambling for weapons of their own. Other fence pickets came free. A bottle was picked up off the ground. What looked like a short length of copper pipe appeared in a hand, maybe grabbed from the rooming-house Dumpster. All of it held up high, twelve o’clock and serious, all of it meaning business.

Dangerous, this, Sam thought. A bunch of ramped-up teenaged kids with no idea how much damage they could really do to someone, kids who might think you could belt someone with a fence picket and that person would fall down and somehow later still be able to walk away. Kids old enough to feel rage and strong enough to do something about it, but not old enough to really understand consequence. Movie violence, but violence that would have real results.

And Jillian was tugging at his arm, pulling him around the corner and down onto McKay Street even though his body was still turned the other way, his face and shoulders still facing the teens while she pulled him almost backwards down the street, his legs feeling like they were working the wrong way.

“But I’ve got to do something,” Sam said. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Yeah, someone’s going to get hurt all right,” Jillian said, but she said it resignedly. “Someone always gets hurt. Sometimes badly. Sometimes enough to stay in the hospital for a while. And if you’re not careful, it’s going to be you.”

Sam tried to pull out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t let go.

“Look—I’m from here and you’re not. And I’m telling you that what you want to do with this now is to just stay out of it,” Jillian said, her voice suddenly flat, almost impersonal. “They won’t even blink before they lay you out cold. Or worse. We should keep walking, let them sort it out themselves.”

“I can call the cops,” Sam said, deciding and pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“Suit yourself,” Jillian said, letting go of his arm, “but make sure you know what street you’re on so you can tell them the right place to go.”

And that was the last thing she said.

When Sam opened the phone to dial, when he held it up next to his ear, the cellphone lit up the side of his face with a pool of light blue, and Jillian didn’t so much vanish as she simply faded away from beside him, so softly that he didn’t even feel the shift in the air as she disappeared.

Even as the 911 operator was answering at the other end of the line, the teens were all turning towards him, recognizing the blue glow, their arms spread, a semicircle, like an opening fan of playing cards. And instead of two groups, there was really only one, and everyone was looking straight at him. A big kid, his face hidden back in a hood, was coming towards him.

“Get ’im, Ronnie,” someone else said.

“You’re in the wrong place, mister,” the kid they’d called Ronnie said. “The wrong place completely.”