The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, caressing the top of his sweaty head. “It’s what she wanted. To disappoint you in broad daylight.” The sky was blazing yellow and purple and orange. It was like this in swatches and splotches. It looked like some artist’s romantic rendering of a violent assault, a conspicuous ball of burning gas at its centre, much too far away to shower us in its ashes, and me and Papa all alone in this building, the tallest structure for miles, totally exposed as the sun seemed to freeze in its descent, to hover above the horizon in a wild plethora of colour and hue, and for a moment it was like time itself had stopped and we were all known in our entireties and nothing would ever get better or worse for anyone ever again.

  “It’s okay, Jean-Paul,” said Papa. “You choose the right person.”

  The sun finally broke free from its paralysis and began perceptibly to rise. Papa did not squeeze my hand in return, not even feebly. He was sleeping and I got up to put the tinfoil back in the window, and I figured pretty soon he wouldn’t be sleeping. He’d be dead, and then what? What would I do then?

  I

  I left once too. Not everyone gets their chance but I got mine and it was head trauma. This was before Scotty and I got into the taxi business, back when we hated each other for normal reasons, like he was always hitting on Becky, like maybe he popped her cherry on grad night when I got too drunk and passed out in front of the bonfire and the soles of my shoes melted into a puddle on the beach.

  For the rest of the summer he kept hinting at it. We’d be at the same house party and he’d appear behind my shoulder, his cologne like a toxic cloud, and he’d give me a vicious jab in the ribs and say something like, “She been askin’ ’bout me, Gibby? She been askin’?” I’d take one look at his ugly mug with that patchy handlebar moustache and those acne scars and that stupid excess of eyebrows and I’d have no choice but to punch his fucking face. Then we’d be throwing each other around the kitchen, knocking over chairs and beer bottles and all the girls shrieking and jumping out of the way and the two of us throwing haymakers through the drywall while the guys cheered us on. We must’ve fought a dozen times that summer. Black and blue. Yellow and blood. Truly it was thick.

  Then Becky moved to Toronto for university. She came by the house on her bicycle, had sandwiches in her backpack and wanted to picnic by the lake, say goodbye with our toes in the sand. But I wouldn’t open the screen door. I just stared at her through the wire, frowning until she left. My mom stood in the living room with her arms crossed while I watched TV, tapping her slippered foot on our shitty carpet, expecting something.

  Later that night I went to a bootlegger and took a bottle down to Shorelines. I rolled my pants up to my knees and waded into the reedy shallows behind her house and I crouched there, boozing and spying through the windows. I kept expecting to see Scotty throw open the back door, his face floating to the riverside like a thunderhead, and we’d fight right there in the water, beat each other senseless while Becky’s mom called the cops. I’d drown him, my fingers sinking into his neck, and his body would drift face down in the middle of the river, where the lazy, late-summer current would carry him into the lake. But I didn’t see anyone in the windows, just flashing lights from their TV. When my bottle was finished, I threw it at her house, heard glass shatter against patio stones as I tromped through the sparse trees along the river’s edge.

  I stumbled home through the trailer park, kicking stones at dogs and cats and shouting at the windows with lights in them. I don’t really remember what happened next, but the police report said I forced my way into a house party and got pushy with some of the girls. Scotty was there and I guess he didn’t like my behaviour too much because apparently he dragged me out of the house and we got into it in the gravel driveway. I was too drunk to be fighting. People told the cops I didn’t even throw a punch. Scotty slammed my head “hundreds” of times into the hood of someone’s truck. He cracked a headlight with my face and a neighbour called the ambulance when I started vomiting uncontrollably. There were fluids oozing out my ears and they flew me to Edmonton because not even Yellowknife had the specialists I needed. I remember that the driveway was gravel because the doctors said they’d spent ages picking pebbles out of my knees and face. I was in a coma for days.

  Three weeks later, they discharged me. I was lucky. There weren’t any of the complications that sometimes go with brain injuries, no infections or nerve damage or anything like that. No seizures. But the sunlight gave me a headache when I walked out of the hospital, like being struck by lightning.

  They told me to sit on a bench and wait for the airport shuttle. There were medical travel tickets for me at the airport and it was time to go home and see my mother. I sat there for five minutes, the sun torching my temples, flowers bobbing in the breeze and all of Edmonton unravelling at my toes. There were newspaper boxes and university students across the street, girls bouncing along with textbooks under their arms, taxi cabs idling and old people smoking in their hospital robes.

  And just like that I drifted away from the bench. Just like that. I remember once how my mom took me to Little Raven Lake when I was a boy and she let me play in the shallows with a toy boat she’d made from popsicle sticks and carpenter’s glue. I would always wander too far out, feel the water around my chin and get scared, scramble back with my feet scraping slowly in the underwater mud. I lost the boat that way. It was just a little bit out of reach, but that was enough. It floated away.

  I headed down the street and found a pay phone and made a collect call to Becky’s mom. She knew it was me who threw the bottle. I apologized. She said she heard I’d been hurt and asked if I was okay. I asked her for Becky’s address. I said I made it south and wanted to visit her in Toronto. She gave me the address but then she said, “There’s a way to move, Gibby, and there’s a way to move on.” I said thanks and hung up the phone.

  Then I wandered around aimlessly until I stole a cab. It was kind of a coincidence. The cab was running outside an apartment building and the driver had gone to the door to help the woman with her bags. I just slid into the front seat, put it in gear, and shot down the street, the engine warming hard under the hood.

  The radio crackled with the dispatcher’s staticky voice so I picked up the receiver, held it to my mouth like in the movies, and I said, “Car forty-two, one fare for Toronto. Car forty-two for Toronto. One fare.”

  There was a pause. Then the dispatcher’s voice: “Come again?”

  I put the receiver down.

  The dispatcher said, “Driver? Please identify yourself.”

  I turned the volume down and looked for signs to Toronto.

  The city streamed by outside, so much concrete and traffic, parking meters lined up along the edge of the street like fishermen casting off a wharf. Crowds of people moved up and down the sidewalks, all different kinds of people, probably the whole population of Fort Fierce in this one neighbourhood alone and it was easy to imagine myself moving among them. I could be out on a first date or going to a movie by myself, a flask of whisky in the ass pocket of my jeans. Or maybe I was on my way to close a business deal. Maybe my best friend was getting married and we were all going to the strip club for his stag and he was going to get his last blow job as a free man. Or maybe I was just out for a walk because look how many streets there were and could you walk down all of them even if you lived here fifty years?

  Then I noticed the guy. He flung his hand in the air, hailing my taxi, and it was like all my attention shifted from the road to his face. He had tiny round glasses and a neat beard, his black felt jacket open and flapping in the breeze. He had three or four suitcases at his feet and a duffle bag hanging from his shoulder so when I pulled up to him I pressed the trunk release, lowered the window, and I said, “Throw your stuff in the trunk.”

  I could smell the wine on his breath as soon as he sat in the back and gave me the address. I said, “I’m new to the city so you’ll have to give me directions.” He said, “No problem, my f
riend. Take your next right and go straight for a while. I’ll tell you when to turn left.” So I took a right and we drove straight for a while. I kept peeking at him in the rear-view mirror, watching him as he looked out the window with a faint smile on his hairy lips.

  “Are you celebrating?” I asked him, and he said, “You might say that, my friend, you might say that. Actually I’m in the middle of my favourite ritual.” He grinned and made eye contact with me through the mirror. “What do you mean?” I asked, and he said, “I’m moving. Take this left up here. I always move by taxi. It’s the coolest feeling for me because when I first came to this city I was too nervous to take the bus. I didn’t want to get lost. I had lots of money in those days so I always hired a taxi. Take a right up here, please. It’s this one on the end with the little wrought-iron gate. Now whenever I move apartments, I take the last of my luggage in a taxi.”

  I pulled up in front of the gate and he handed me a bundle of bills and told me to keep the change. The taxi bounced a little as he lifted his luggage out of the trunk. He waved at me through the passenger window and I lowered it, leaned across the seat, and I said, “How do I get to Toronto from here?” He walked up to the taxi, crossed his arms on the windowsill and stuck his head inside. “You’re leaving already?” he asked me. “But I thought you just got here.”

  I was holding the steering wheel and I saw him look at my hands. His expression changed ever so slightly and I knew he’d seen my hospital bracelet. He backed away from the cab and smiled nonchalantly. “Have a good night, my friend,” he said. “Thanks for the lift.” I put the cab in gear and drove quickly up the street, taking random turns left and right, trying to put some distance between me and the guy before he called the cops.

  I parked the cab on a side street and wiped the steering wheel and gear shifter with my sleeves. A headache was building in my temples and I winced along with my pulse. I left the cab in mint condition and ran toward the sound of traffic, eventually finding my way to a main street. I had the man’s money in my pocket and I used it to hail another cab.

  “To the airport, please,” I said, climbing into the back seat.

  “Sure thing,” said the driver, nodding, the bill of his baseball hat floating up and down above the steering wheel. “Going on vacation?”

  “No,” I said, avoiding his sagging eyes in the rear-view. “Just going home.”

  II

  That was a long time ago. Now I was late getting Becky from the airport and she was out front looking tired and old, a cigarette fuming between her fingers. She wore tight jeans with a red T-shirt and she was sitting on her suitcase like a construction worker breaking for lunch, knees wide open. She had her hair tied back in a single braid, tight and blonde and faintly ridiculous on a woman in her late thirties. It was hard not to imagine her acting in internet porn, seducing a chiselled young jock with tribal tattoos and his bag waxed.

  I pulled up in front of her, lowered the window, called her name. She tightened her lips and exhaled through her nose, took another furious drag, and I realized she hadn’t quite recognized me. Which was fair enough. The passenger door was dented and scratched. Myself, I was all widow’s peaks and garbage bags for eye sockets. I was a beer gut starting at my sternum. I had a few extra-strength Tylenols in my breast pocket, yellow teeth and fingernails, tiny white scars all over my face. I stopped the cab completely and stuck up my dukes, threw a few phantom punches in her direction. Her face broke into a smile that briefly wiped the years away.

  We didn’t say much on the way home. The morning sun winked off the seatbelt buckles. She was holding her phone and it kept vibrating but she ignored it, staring out the window at the passing town.

  “Looks different,” she said as we pulled into the high-rise parking lot. Then she said, “You live here?”

  I parked the cab and looked around for Scotty but didn’t see him or any of the vehicles from his fleet. “Yeah,” I said, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. “Everyone lives here these days.”

  In the elevator, her bags between us, all we did was stare at the numbers and listen to each other breathe. I was trying to visualize my apartment, trying to make sure it was presentable. I’d erased the browser history on my computer and cleaned all my dishes and hidden the laundry I didn’t have time to wash. There was beer in the fridge in case she wanted one and I scrubbed the toilet for the first time in months.

  “It’s cute,” she said, as I heaved her luggage over the threshold. Her phone started vibrating again and I said, “Are you going to answer that?” She ignored me, walked out into the middle of the living room and turned in a circle, surveying, biting her lower lip, and finally she said, almost to herself, “I pictured a punching bag.” We both laughed.

  “Look,” I said, carting her luggage into the living room and putting it beside the couch. “I worked graveyard last night and I’m really feeling the hours. Here’s a key. You can come and go as you please.”

  We were standing close together and for a second it was like she was going to reach out and touch my forehead. But then everything was still and I said, “The couch folds out. I even put new sheets on it. I’ll see you this evening if you’re around when I get up.”

  She said, “Gibby?”

  I said, “Yeah?”

  She said, “Thanks.” She sighed and started digging her fingers into her braid. “It’s been crazy. This whole thing. I didn’t think I’d ever be back here. You know. I mean like this. All going through a divorce and whatever.”

  So I said, “There’s beer in the fridge if you want one,” and I walked down the little hallway and closed my bedroom door behind me. I dry-swallowed two Tylenols. I tiptoed into my closet and grabbed a fresh blue face cloth. Becky opened the fridge and there was the cracking sound of a beer can. I was naked but for my boxers. She turned on the TV and I heard her body settle into the couch. Even though it was getting warm out, I slipped between my covers, wriggled out of my boxers, and focused on how the sunlight blurred against my curtains, made them look like they were glowing.

  I saw Becky in the bar when her mother died and the family came to scatter the ashes. That was ages ago. I was at a table in the back. They were at the front on barstools so she didn’t notice me. She wore a black dress with huge white flowers and it looked like the same cloth as fancy napkins. The man beside her had his sunglasses in his wavy hair and he slowly rubbed his palm in circles on her back while they finished their drinks. When she got up to leave her dress rode up her thigh so I could basically see her entire leg as if she were naked. Then she hopped off the stool and the dress swooshed back down to her knees.

  Now sitting on the couch in my living room she answered her phone. Her voice sounded like a lot of different things. It was angry and tired and sad. I imagined her legs crossing in my glowing curtains and I quietly started touching myself. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Just her voice. It took a long time but finally I came. I made sure not to spill it on the sheets and I threw the face cloth under my bed and when I fell asleep I dreamt of nothing.

  III

  She left a note that said, “Gone exploring.” I put it in my wallet, folded up next to a couple hundred-dollar bills and a condom. It was only Thursday but business had been good since it got too warm to walk across the ice road to the reserve. Some of them tried right until the river broke up but most of them were too afraid after the road closed to vehicles. Every couple years some stubborn drunk died of hypothermia. They’d find his body on the shores of Little Raven Lake and all the emergency responders would gossip about how the ice had ground his flesh away. Indians didn’t want to give up the perks of town life, that was the thing. Without the ice road it was a twenty-kilometre trip to the bridge, too far when you don’t have a car. They got used to walking all winter long and it was hard to scale back in the spring because they weren’t allowed to drink or party on the reserve and there were barely any jobs. What a dump.

  “What happened to your door?” I picked N
ancy up outside the pub and she was wearing a spring jacket and pink jogging pants with dog paw prints on the butt. I shrugged and she got into the front seat, exhaling smoke all over my dashboard. “Fuckin’ door looks trashed, Gib.” She flicked her smoke out the window then said, “Same deal as always, right?”

  I’d known Nancy since she was a teenager and moved here from Inuvik to live with her uncle. I didn’t normally give deals to people but Nancy was a special case because I did time for assault in the same cell with her uncle and even though most people don’t really like Indian folks I always thought Kyle was pretty all right. We played blackjack for matchsticks and worked out together. I watched him get a misshapen wolf tattooed on his bicep. We’d play bare-handed punch-pads, just whaling each other’s palms, and no one ever pussied out. When I started spending more of my time working on my business diploma Kyle didn’t make a big fuss. He went and did his own thing. I still saw him sometimes when his car broke down and he needed me to drive him into town. I wouldn’t cut him a deal unless he asked because business is business but anyway he never asked.

  Already the sun was staying out later and later, even though there was still snow left in the ditches and spilling out of the forest. It made it hard to find a good spot but I knew a dirt road before the bridge crossed onto Native land and if no one was smoking pot down there it’d do just fine. Neither of us talked and AC/DC was on the radio, then The Hip and then Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I kept checking my phone to see if I’d missed a text but there was nothing.

  Nancy lit another smoke as I turned off the highway. “This road’s right out in the open, Gibs.” I snatched the smoke from her hand, took a deep drag. Handing it back I said, “It’s fine, Nance, trust me.” I waited until there was a slight bend in the road and then I hugged the corner and parked the cab right against the edge of the woods. I said, “See? Look behind you. No one can see this far down. Look. See?” She handed back the smoke, leaned over, and unzipped my pants. She pulled my little penis out and licked it and stuck it all the way in her mouth. I put the smoke between my lips and I ran one hand through her oily black hair and put the other one on her butt and squeezed it. It took a while but finally I came. She lit another smoke and I drove her to the little bungalow she shared with Kyle. “Told you,” I said. “Road was fine.”