Alligator (28 page)

Kevin took a step back and then reached over the stove holding his shirt close to his stomach to hit a button on the fan. He had the waxy complexion of an insomniac, an open cold sore on his upper lip, and the dark eye sockets of a heavy pot smoker.

A rapacious vitality kept some part of his body always tapping, he made weird noises, softly whispered expulsions of air that mimicked machine-gun bursts or the feedback of amplifiers, kapow kapow kapow kapow, yeah, uh huh, yeah, va-voom, all the while slapping his thigh with both hands and Frank felt sorry he had come inside.

Kevin was thoroughly unlovable with his Adam’s apple raw from a recent shave, the home-done tattoo of a skull peeking out from behind a torn heart, and, most painful to witness, his baldly searching look. He sold hash but was discreet with his money and might have become an
IT
specialist — he had a vicious intelligence and was intuitive with computers — except for bouts of depression that kept him on a couch for months at a time.

Frank thought of the first day they had both gone to day-care together with Mrs. Hallett, the foster mother they had shared for six months when they were five. Frank’s mother was in hospital having her breasts removed and Kevin’s mother had left him standing under a tree during the St. John’s regatta. She said she would be right back but it took a month.

When Frank got inside the daycare he could smell chicken noodle soup. The lukewarm, piss-coloured, salty broth in bright plastic bowls dimpled with globules of oil and sinking noodles engulfed him in despair.

Three weeks before meeting Kevin, he’d glimpsed the gauze taped to his mother’s weirdly boyish chest. He’d watched the doctor lift the gauze, look beneath, and touch whatever was under the bandage with his gloved index finger. He gingerly taped the gauze back down and it was the extreme gentleness his mother required that spread the same fear through Frank that had caused him to wet his bed for months after that first operation.

Mrs. Hallett, Frank’s foster mother, was a heavy woman with thick curly black and grey hair that tumbled around her wide red face and onto her shoulders. Her cheeks, close up, were covered with a minute network of capillaries, broken from laughter and exertion in her extensive garden. Her eyes were a light brown, fringed with black lashes, and she had a space between her front teeth.

She was always grinning, glowing with excitement, unless she was lost in thought, bent on her knees in the bathroom checking the temperature of the water for the boys’ baths. She would grunt, absorbed by some inner argument, and push herself up with the knuckles of one hand down on the floor. He can see her pressing down the pastry cutter, too, a tan-coloured bowl tucked into her hip.

She was a nurse and kept her house perfectly clean and made them eat a piece of fruit each night. Frank’s mother had only ever bought McIntosh apples, with the white flesh, barely tinted green.

Mrs. Hallett bought kiwis and mangoes and pomegranates. Frank felt sorry for his mother, that she didn’t know about the diversity of fruit, that her five-year-old son knew more than she did.

The aroma of chicken noodle soup was more than Frank could bear that first visit to daycare, he dug his face into Mrs. Hallett’s thigh and whispered he wanted to go home and she peeled his hands off her and he slapped them back on, clinging to her skirt. She told him she had to go to work, that he was a big boy and she would buy him an ice cream and they would visit his mother.

She left and he threw up. He could remember Kevin looking on solemnly as Frank covered both their shoes with half-digested Cheerios and watery milk. Kevin patting his shoulder as he trembled and shook with dry heaves and eventually Kevin was hugging him, and promising him full ownership of a remote-control airplane, the only toy Kevin had brought with him to the foster home.

Kevin himself had spent the evening of the regatta at the police station and when nobody could be found to come and get him he was sent to the Janeway Children’s Hospital and didn’t see his mother again for a month, by which time Social Services had decided she was unfit to raise him.

After that, she and Kevin met every second weekend, usually at McDonald’s, and in the presence of a social worker. Kevin played in a glass room full of climbing tunnels and coloured balls while his mother and the social worker read the newspaper on the stools outside the window. Sometimes his mother came into the room and yelled up through the tubing for Kevin to behave himself, or to leave the little girls alone, though he was always scrupulously polite and fair with other children, or to come down and finish his milk.

Mrs. Hallett kept Kevin until he was sixteen, visited him every weekend when he moved out. She still took Kevin’s laundry and brought him homemade suppers in Tupperware containers, and slipped twenty-dollar bills in greeting cards on every possible occasion.

Blue smoke bulged out from the lip of the saucepan with the boiling fat and curled up and then rose obediently in a straight column to the fan.

Frank took off his baseball cap, put it on his knee, and tried to calculate when he could leave without being rude. He wanted to leave. He didn’t want Kevin’s money. He would leave without the money.

Kevin slapped margarine into the frying pan and put the burner on high. He opened the fridge and Frank saw it was empty and brilliant white except for a bottle of mustard pickles and a package wrapped in butcher’s paper. Kevin tossed the package onto the counter. Frank could smell the margarine turn brown.

Photocopiers I’m specialized in, Kevin said. Mostly it’s the carbon tray empty when there’s a problem. Utensils hit the back of the drawers noisily as he slammed them with his hip.

My ex-girlfriend laughed at me buying this pan. This is Teflon and you can’t use metal or nothing like that on it. And where is the Jesus spatula, Frank, I wish I knew. My girlfriend said when she saw the pan you’ll have that all scratched up before the week is out. You’ll never own anything worth anything is what she said. I don’t know how many times she said that. I’d like to see someone try to point out a scratch on this pan though, Frank.

It looks to be working pretty good there now, Kevin, Frank said.

Kevin turned from the stove and looked out the window. He had a garden, Frank saw, with a little patio and two chairs and a rusted wrought-iron table with a glass top. The garden darkened and a wind showed the grey side of the whispering aspen’s leaves and let them flop back washed green and lifted them again.

The rain came down hard, drilling the metal garbage tin, rising up like white fur from the slabs of concrete that made up the patio, spiking off the arm of the plastic lawn chair. Kevin unwrapped the bologna and, peeling off the wax rind, dropped each slice in the sizzling margarine.

Frank saw there was no way he could leave while the rain was heavy and before the fries and bologna were done and decided to take the money.

He needed the money; he would take it.

He felt angry with Kevin for making the money mean so much; for having enough of it to lend in the first place.

I hear your mother died, Frank, Kevin said.

I still have her ashes, Frank said. He couldn’t think what had made him admit such a thing.

The fries are done perfect, Kevin said, ladling them out of the fat with a slotted spoon. He put a salt shaker and the ketchup on the table. Then he got the pickles out of the fridge. He put a plate in front of Frank, piled with french fries and a piece of bologna, and Frank began to eat.

My girlfriend left there the spring, Kevin said. He cut the slabs of bologna with the side of his fork, slapping both sides of it in the ketchup and folding it into his mouth. He stabbed the fries until the fork tines were jammed and he ate the plateful in less than three minutes. Tipping his chair onto its back legs he dropped his plate into the sink behind him.

I need a thousand dollars, Frank said.

KEVIN

K
EVIN LOWERED HIS
chair to the floor and he ran both his hands up and down his thighs. He stood and pulled a thick wallet from his back pocket. The wallet was attached to his jeans with a retractable cord that he tugged on and then drew out several bills and put them on the table beside Frank. He put the wallet back in his pocket and Frank heard the cord slither into place.

Kevin sat down again and tore a piece of paper towel off the roll in the middle of the table and wiped his mouth. He folded the paper towel and rubbed each corner of his mouth carefully and folded it again, and just patted his lips gently with it and stared forward, out the window.

When they told my mother she wasn’t fit, my mother smirked. It was a smirk, Frank, Kevin said.

He put the folded paper towel under the bottom of the ketchup bottle. He was thinking of an afternoon when he and his mother were walking up from downtown and a parade passed by them. Cadets coming down Long’s Hill. First the older men, looking straight ahead, their lower lips firm with the grim promise never to look anywhere but straight ahead, because everything depended on that. They had agreed to look straight ahead and they could be true to their word.

They wore black pants with a red stripe down the leg and jackets with brass buttons and the man in front wore a high black fur hat. He gripped a sceptre near his chest and the silver knob at its tip caught the sun and glowed like an incandescent light bulb. Above, on the hill by the Kirk, a bagpipe player in a kilt stepped onto the ridge from amid a patch of alders and began to play.

The music swelled out and carried down the hill toward the harbour and vibrated in Kevin’s chest. There were some women who wore their hair in tight buns below their folded caps and they looked ahead too, just like the men. Then came younger cadets, their blue nylon uniforms whispering loudly as they marched past and he watched them go all the way down Long’s Hill, their hands swinging together, sunlight on the polished shoes and his mother swept him up in her arms and kissed his face all over. She kissed him so much he lost his breath.

She wrestled him onto the sidewalk and put a knee on his chest. She was laughing and saying, Who’s my boy, who’s my boy, who’s my boy, tickling him until he was overheated and shaking with laughter.

The sun dropped spears of light through the maple trees that leaned out over Long’s Hill, as the wind ruffled the leaves. He needed her to stop, he could not breathe, and when she did stop she was flushed. Her smile was big and her eyes were pale blue and the blue patches of sky through the leaves above her head were painfully bright.

Then she gripped his head, her hands over his ears, and she looked into his eyes with an intensity that had nothing to do with laughter.

It was a kind of intensity that had to do with the horror of her addiction and her struggle against it. He could see a vein in her temple pulsing, her breath smelled of cinnamon gum, her sweater was a pale pink angora and her jeans were acid wash and she wore lip gloss that smelled like watermelon. No one will ever convince him that she did not love him, that she had not always loved him. He was pressed under her knee on the sidewalk, the wind nearly knocked out of him, because she was afraid of losing him.

From this experience he learned that authentic love is capable of disappointing you. This disappointment can be paralyzing, but it does not diminish the quality of authentic love. Watch out, if you stand in the path of that kind of love, he thinks. It can leave you blazing and numb. It may not be worth it. But it is worth it.

As soon as the money was produced Frank had burned a dark red. He sat inert before his plate. It seemed to Kevin as if Frank saw no way to avoid putting the money in his pocket but neither could he bring himself to do it.

They had each felt a binding loneliness as children that they had no words for, nor would they have wanted to articulate it, if they could, because it was shameful and something they would struggle to avoid acknowledging for the rest of their lives. But each boy had felt the presence of this absence in the other and felt a reciprocal and grim admiration because they had both more or less withstood its gravitational pull.

Kevin stood up, got himself a spoon, and took a tub of ice cream from the freezer. He ate directly from the tub and then saw a smear of blood on the spoonful of vanilla ice cream he was about to put in his mouth. It was blood from his cold sore and it turned him and he swore softly and gave the ice-cream tub a toss into the garbage.

He cleaned the spoon off, opened the back door, and the sound of the rain and a fresh briny ocean smell filled the kitchen. Kevin began to sing a scat with hisses and machine-gun putt-putts and the grindings of a photocopier. Then he threw the spoon he had been tapping against the door frame into the sink and said, Fuck it, Frank, it’s only money. It doesn’t have to ruin our friendship, such as it is.

Kevin thought of the backyard at Mrs. Hallett’s, the heavy plastic jungle gym with wooden beams, knotted ropes, and a rubber tire that filled with rain. The grass, early Saturday mornings, was covered in dew that was greyish silver, almost frost, and full of sparkle where the sun struck.

When he and Frank wandered the rolling lawns they left two green trails of footprints in the fogged-over grass. From the garden they could see the patio window behind which Mrs. Hallett was ironing blouses, or one of her pale uniforms.

Because they knew she was just beyond the dark glass, they could forget her and be absorbed by a trail of ants sometimes carrying a dead ant out of the path of the others. They watched the sun light up beads of dew on a spider’s web that jiggled violently with a breeze. They watched wasps crawl from their papery nests and hover and pitch and crawl back in. These miniature garden dramas absorbed the boys so thoroughly they became, for that brief time in their childhood, almost as one.

It was a wordless union based entirely on mutual wonder in a big garden. Frank took the money off the table and put it in his breast pocket and buttoned the flap.

Good luck with the small machine repair, Kevin, he said. He was ready to leave and Kevin wanted him to go now, but he stood still.