The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  Billy decided not to try the door again, not even after his parents died. He barely even thought of it. It was a forbidden thing, and as the years went on, it became one of many, and as with all forbidden things, as with all things frightening and unknown, Billy ignored it so completely he forgot it existed at all.

  He settled into his role as lone caretaker, and the years began to blur. He had all the carpets in the building replaced, out with the garish seventies patterns his father always mentioned to prospective tenants, so old they looked almost farcical now. One night he considered a leopard-spot pattern, but he’d been drinking while flipping through the catalogue, and in the morning he decided to go with chevrons, simple enough but still eye-grabbing, a tasteful touch to bring his building into the nineties. He was laying carpet down outside the maintenance room when he noticed a smell. Disgusting. Like sewage. He keyed into the room and held his nose and looked around, and it took a second to understand that the smell was coming from underneath the forgotten trap door. Just like that, the thing leapt out of his past and became a solid object again. There was plumbing down there, apparently, and it was old, and a pipe had burst, and he’d have to take care of it before it got worse. He didn’t have a key, so he got a circular saw and cut a slot out of the door then pried up the rest. A flight of stairs led steeply into the darkness, and Billy just stood at the top, holding the crowbar, breathing heavily and facing an unknown he’d ignored for over fifteen years. When he reckoned with the passage of so much time, he felt nauseous. Where had his life gone? What had he been doing?

  The next day, at midnight, an eighteen-year-old girl flung herself from a fourteenth-floor balcony and flailed against the sun-smacked horizon. She landed in the bed of someone’s truck and exploded like a sack of tomato juice and raw chicken. Her body dented the metal and blew out the tires. For a year afterwards, Billy had dreams filled with the sound the railing must’ve made when her feet pushed off, the metal thrumming in the air, vibrating in a black and steadying blur. He thought she must’ve heard it too, for at least half the way down, and then probably a heart attack.

  Her death marked a change in the character of Franklin Place. A confluence of forces—cutbacks at the mines, tightening of the public sector, waves of layoffs at the fish plant—all this washed ashore in the wake of the girl’s fall, and Billy watched his traditional tenancy drain away.

  At first, he thought he might be able to wait out the downturn. He could cut corners like everyone else. Who said he had to renovate the apartments after every move-out? Who said they needed new flooring, fixtures, doors? And did the building need to be so clean? Especially in those parts where vacancies were highest? Plus, he’d charge for parking, both tenants and visitors, and if they complained, then fine, let them complain. He offered the best accommodations in town. Where else were they going to go?

  But he didn’t have the reserves to make it through the doldrums. His dad’s shipping company was barely earning and the board had winnowed his dividends to almost nothing. He had to lower his rents and open his doors to the low-income market, the labour class of white-trash rednecks that beat him up in high school, the drunken Indians who managed to eke it out off-reserve, the known drug dealers and bar brawlers, the insurance fraudsters and welfare thieves. He tried to keep them on floors six and seven, where he’d done the least amount of renovations over the years, and he managed to retain a few respectable tenants in the upper reaches of the building, where he kept the apartments beautifully maintained and immaculately clean.

  Eventually, the economy turned around. Commodities picked up globally. The government reinvested in the public sector. They expanded old programs and sent in a whole new contingent of fresh white faces. The service industries came creaking back to life shortly after. But by that time, Franklin Place was a chunky mix of lifestyle and ambition, race and worldview. Billy’s vacancy rate couldn’t accommodate a brand-new community of the upwardly mobile, so they settled into new housing developments on the other end of the municipality. Old Town, people started calling the neighbourhoods around Franklin Place. The new part of town was a half-hour walk away, and those people came to Old Town only because of the elementary school or the grocery store. They scowled at the high-rise and tried not to see the trailer park, and for sure they never looked across the river at the Indian reserve, and when they were done their business, they drove away, back to where things were nice and new. But it didn’t really happen the other way around. Old Town people never went to New Town. There wasn’t much point.

  One morning in late fall, during a light snow that softened Fierce’s hard, industrialized edges, Billy stood in the lobby and studied the Franklin Place registry. He ran his fingers over the surnames, all changed since his dad’s days, and in the glass he saw the deformities of his face. He put his forehead against the registry, heard the pane rattle, and closed his eyes. Adults got tired.

  There was a tap on his shoulder. He turned around slowly, prepared to endure a string of insults, complaints about the state of the building, the backlog of work orders, the bullshit rent increase he’d slapped on all tenants with renewable leases. But it was a woman. She gave him a different performance: smiling, blinking, blushing. “I need your help, Mr. Franklin. If you don’t mind.”

  In the elevator, he stared at his work boots, could not look at her in her tight black jeans and white sneakers, a purple sweater, black hair pouring down her shoulders almost to the small of her back. The only sounds were the clunk and whirl of the elevator, the gentle mashing of her teeth on a wad of gum. He didn’t resent her sixth-floor tenancy, could not, for the life of him, even remember putting her there.

  The elevator dinged and the door opened and she jogged down the hall, hair streaming behind as he rushed to keep up and ploughed into her back when she stopped at her apartment door. He was mortified and electrified as he pressed her, for a wicked second, into the door frame of her unit. She giggled and maybe, or at least possibly—it felt like it—pushed back. Right into his crotch.

  “Um.” She jiggled the doorknob. “Just in here, Mr. Franklin. Sorry to trip you up.”

  Her apartment was a disaster, of course, because this was the ghetto he’d built. Cigarette smoke misted the air. The floor was covered in mud and melted snow. The walls were all bubbling plaster and black smudges. Her furniture was falling apart: plastic lawn chairs, their backs cracked and broken, arranged around a dining-room table with half the surface scribbled on or picked away. His eyes flickered into the living room, where he saw a coffee table with no legs and a glass top broken in half, jagged and menacing; the couch had no cushions; the TV, for some reason, was facing the wall.

  “I’m really sorry about the mess,” she said, trying to catch his eyes. “You know, um, Dylan, right? Dylan Perrin, right? The place is in his name—but I do live here, I do, but my name just isn’t on the lease, that’s all—and Dylan doesn’t keep it really all that clean, Mr. Franklin. So I’m sorry about that. No disrespect.”

  Billy straightened his back and shrugged. He almost managed for a second, but not quite, to look her in the eye. “It’s okay, Ms. Perrin. I know Dylan.” But he didn’t know her, was certain he’d never once seen her before, which of course didn’t mean much of anything, given what a recluse he’d become.

  She laughed. “Oh, we’re not married, me and Dylan. No. My last name’s Ryans. I’m Kristen Ryans, not Ms. Perrin.” She cupped her hand at the side of her mouth, looked him in the eyes again, and whispered: “Thank god.”

  He felt himself smiling and tried to bite it back. “Oh, I know Dylan,” he said again. “Like ... like I say. I know Dylan Perrin pretty good. Quite the handful, ain’t he?”

  Except he didn’t know Dylan Perrin. Not really. He knew the police sometimes came by asking about him, but he seldom found out why. He knew Dylan Perrin was ritually late with his rent, that he’d gone into arrears by a month or two more than once. He knew Dylan Perrin had skulls and swords tattooed on his forearms, that he
shaved his head but grew a thick, red beard. He knew he was afraid of Dylan Perrin, and men like him, but he didn’t know them personally. He didn’t want to.

  Kristen led him into the kitchen, to the twin sinks and the sticky, cluttered table. Self-consciously, she bumped into the counter, startled a burst of fruit flies sunken into the soft, brown peels of rotting bananas. The sinks were full of black water, slicks of grease, a gagging stink.

  “Sink’s blocked up,” she said. “Normally, Dylan snakes it or pours chemicals in there. But, uh, Dylan hasn’t been around for a couple weeks.” She giggled and swatted at fruit flies corkscrewing between them. “Sorry about the mess, Mr. Franklin.”

  Billy had to get his tools. He left Kristen in the unit, all tittered apologies and aching attraction. When he came back and knocked on the door, it was Dylan who swung it open with a sneer.

  “The fuck you in my place?” He was insultingly calm and unbothered, and he spat when he spoke, a single arching drop, then another.

  Billy tried hard not to wipe Dylan’s spit from his cheeks and forehead. He tried hard to pretend it wasn’t even there. “Well, now, Dylan, Kristen asked me, she asked me to come and fix your sink. My job, you see. I was doing my job to look after the building, you see?”

  Dylan leaned out of the door frame and into the hallway, brought his face very close to Billy’s, so that their noses were just centimetres apart, and Billy’s vision, central and peripheral, was completely filled with the enormity of Dylan Perrin, the stench of his rotten liver and the sight of his pockmarked forehead, the thin white scars in his eye sockets, the snarl of red hair obscuring his neck, chin, cheeks, lips.

  “Kris? Did you invite this half-eared gumbo into my fuckin’ apartment?” He waited a token second, then: “Oh. Right. That don’t matter. That don’t matter because it ain’t her name on the lease. That’s my name on the lease, which means you need my fuckin’ permission to enter the fuckin’ unit. Otherwise, you’re invading my property. Otherwise, you’re pissing me off.”

  The door slammed in Billy’s face and he was spared the failure of not defending himself.

  Two months later, Dylan Perrin was late again with his rent. Billy stewed on the sixteenth floor. He pored over his books, unwilling to forgive the money for the sake of peace. He was enraged, because up there, with all the curtains drawn, it was safe to be. Up there, it was safe to be furious at the simple fact of Dylan Perrin’s surname in the registry of his lobby, one of many evil entries, all these monstrous people coming together to form a single affront against the building, which after all was his father’s legacy, not to the town but to his family, and so how could Billy tolerate a world that required Dylan Perrin’s permission to unplug a sink within that very fucking legacy? And how further could he let a man like that freeload within the same building, which was Billy’s inheritance, and his alone?

  He considered calling the RCMP and requesting an escort to Dylan’s door, so he could collect his rent without incident. But that would be a bad move, wouldn’t it? He’d be forfeiting self-control, giving Dylan the upper hand.

  And so naturally, he thought of the guns. He hadn’t been sure what to make of them when he first found his way underground. He figured they were his dad’s, because who else could’ve gotten them down there? He could tell they were antiques, and with only a little effort he began to see his dad as the sort of person who might’ve quietly amassed a collection like that, because Billy had memories, however vague, of how things were in the year or so before the family moved north: the way his dad would enter his room at night and stand over his bed, motionless, hands clenched into fists, and sometimes he’d stay there until morning. Another time, when Billy came home earlier than normal from the park, he found his mother taking a nap in the living room, and his dad was crouched in front of the radio, listening even though it was off, and when Billy entered the room his dad’s head snapped up and the man looked truly and utterly horrified.

  He could dwell on these memories, examine them and unpack more, but he didn’t like where they were leading, so he chose to see the guns as one of his dad’s unusual investments, like the greenhouses, and who knew, maybe they were valuable. Until he could have them assessed, he decided to move them all into the secondary room, erect a heavy wooden door, and padlock it. In the other room, he left the cot and blanket, and often enough when he was having trouble sleeping, he’d go down there to escape his insomnia.

  Now, he unlocked the door and stuffed one of the pistols into the belt of his pants. He didn’t know how to use it, but how hard could it be? You just pointed and fired, that’s all. Billy was sure he could do that, and he imagined, in an explosive flash, Dylan’s eyes crossing upward to understand the hole Billy just punched through his frontal lobe, a swoop of gun smoke curling between them.

  But Dylan Perrin did not answer the door. It was Kristen, her hair in a ponytail and a look on her face like she’d been expecting him.

  “I’m really sorry, Mr. Franklin,” she said. “I don’t got the rent. I know that’s what you’re here for. But I just ... I don’t got it.”

  He would never be sure. Did he step toward her? Make a move? Was there something in his face? A bargain in his features? Or was it all on her initiative? Was it she who, without pressure from him, put her fingers and thumb in his retreating hairline, bit her lips and smiled, fingers warm and soft and heating the skin of his neck, pulling him over the threshold and into the apartment?

  The borders between people, the ones that would clear up a simple matter of who started what, seemed to dissolve right there in the doorway, the vile expanse of Dylan Perrin’s apartment behind her, and behind Billy the threadbare carpet of his father’s hallway. He stiffened when he felt her fingers roll over the handle of the pistol, relaxed immediately after she moved on, pressed herself into him, her mouth and hands and hips.

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait wait wait.” He swallowed and bobbed his head and said, “Not here.”

  The underground cot was too small for two. They spilled over the sides, limbs on the cold concrete floor, hips pushing into the mattress, heavy breathing, until he finally stopped clenching, finally relaxed. They centred themselves on the mattress and curled into spoons, fell asleep, comfortable, the light bulb above and grey walls all around.

  When they woke up, she whispered in his ear. “He’s not coming back, Mr. Franklin. I don’t know what to do. I don’t got a job or anything else.”

  The light was off. Her voice floated up his ear canal. He was awkwardly quiet for a second, and then he told her to call him by his first name and she squeezed his waist.

  He tried to sound stern. “He loses that place in a month. By law before, but it’s hard, you know, to kick a man out of his home, even a half-man like him. But he loses it in a month, and then you can work for me. Clean the apartments and the hallways and stuff like that. We’ll find something. That man is pure trash.”

  Her arms loosened.

  “Dylan don’t mean any wrong, Billy. He just gets lost in himself, that’s all.”

  It went on like that for a month. They stole down into the underground, the padlocked door unmentioned as they fumbled through buttons, zippers, snaps, rallied the springs on his father’s simple cot, then curled up together, yawning and dizzy.

  Dylan didn’t come back. He lost the apartment and no way could he ever have it back. It was filthy, destroyed, but Billy didn’t want Kristen to clean that particular mess and he didn’t want to do it himself, invade her privacy, get a hint of her secrets. He contracted the job out, had to spend a few grand getting the apartment back up to snuff, even by sixth-floor standards. Then he set her up in a bachelor on the tenth.

  Her makeshift living room was small, but bright at one in the afternoon. The two of them stood in the sun, soaking up the light, savouring the heat of early spring. There were no drapes in the windows.

  “It overlooks the river,” he said, pointing through the sliding glass door at the still-frozen water be
low. “This is a good floor, too. No rednecks and Indians like six.”

  She bit her nail and looked out the window. “My dad was an Indian. He was Cree.”

  “Oh,” he said quietly. He barely knew her. He’d barely asked. “But, I mean, that’s okay. I just ... I guess I’m just used to talking like that. Just words. I don’t mean anything bad or anything. I used to play cowboys and Indians all the time when I was a kid.”

  She snorted, but not unkindly. He kept his distance but reached for a hug. She reached back. He let her settle in another month before asking her to vacuum the lobby and hallways.

  In the spring, huge chunks of ice flowed north from Alberta. Ice-melt sailed over the waterfalls outside town and jammed the mouth of Little Raven Lake. Currents of black water swelled into pools, into tiny lakes, and then expanded into the streets, right up to the edge of the high-rise parking lot.

  Billy and Kristen sat in plastic chairs on her balcony, blowing into hot coffee and watching the river overflow.

  She looked right at him and said, “I’m pregnant. Six weeks along.”

  “Okay.” Billy put his cup down, missed the table, and they both jumped back and then laughed. He stood up and shook his hands and put them on his hips and then shook them again. “You should move upstairs tonight. I want you to be comfortable, okay? I want you to be totally comfortable.”

  IV

  Norman was twenty-four when he came home to Fort Fierce. He arrived unannounced, took the elevator, knocked on the door and listened through the wood as his dad roused himself from the couch, hacking and sneezing, maybe a late spring cold, his feet heavy on the floor as he made his way to the peephole. Norman lowered his head, fiddled with the nickels in his pockets and wriggled his toes in his shoes. His dad hung behind the peephole for a long time, like a storm cloud ready to pour, and then there was a sudden thunder of retracting deadbolts and collapsing chain-locks, the door silent on its hinges as it opened, and on the other side his dad and his deformities, exacerbated with age.