Blasted (6 page)

“Like that makes me feel like going, Blue.”

“Lots of booze. Fabulous music. It'll be an event. Please?”

“Beg me.”

“Please-oh-please?” He flipped his smooth, blue-black braids at me. “That's all the begging you'll be getting from me.”

So I went. The party was in full swing when I arrived. He had a loft apartment – brick and beams, art and beautifully dressed people everywhere. Blue materialized at my side, hugging and kissing me like I was his long-lost twin and pressing a cold beer into my hand.

“What a host,” I said.

“Come over here. You absolutely have to meet these people.” Blue introduced me as his “Newfie friend” and they all said “Ohhh!” in an interested sort of way. They were actors. I wasn't exactly sure why I had to meet them, but we found something to talk about: them. They had a show coming up in the Fringe, and it was going to be a great show, they were sure I'd love it.

I went in search of more beer. Blue was crazy – he had a whole stocked bar's-worth of free booze. A woman grabbed me, shrieking, “O-mi-god, it's been an age! How are you?”

“Great!” I wondered if I had ever met her before. She was about eight feet tall with indigo dreadlocks and the boniest sternum I'd ever seen; her skin glistened. She must be a dancer. She
looked
like a dancer.

“What are you doing these days?” I hazarded.

“We just came back from a tour of the Maritimes. Newfoundland is
beautiful
.”

Shit. She
did
know me. “Newfoundland isn't part of the…” I began.

“Come over here, the others will be dying to see you.”

The others were five more dancers, all of them with that I'm-reallyinto-my-body dancer thing. Bare feet very aware of the floor, limbs draped over chairs. The women all had perky breasts.

They were all really happy to see me.

After about five minutes I fled to Blue's side. He was sitting in a chair by the window, talking with a beautiful red-headed man. As I approached, the man got to his feet, smiled politely at me, and wended his way into the crowd.

“Can I sit with you? The dancers are scaring me.”

“Please,” Blue said, indicating the chair the man had vacated, but I sat on the floor at his feet. We sat in silence, looking out his window with the spectacular view of the city. Traffic streamed through the streets below like a swarm of angry electrical bees, lights coiling and uncoiling in a pulsing rhythm.

“Blue?”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever feel like, I don't know, your real life is actually going on somewhere else?”

“Well…”

“And every now and again you kind of drop in to the real life, but all these things have happened that you can't remember and…”

“Whoa!” he said.

“Well, do you?”

Blue gestured at the happy room. “Is this party part of your real life?”

“I don't know. Maybe.” I looked up at him. “I have these blank spots. Sometimes I'll come to after a couple of days and remember only one thing. Someone leaning into my face and saying
Leave me alone. Just leave me alone
.”

He snorted with laughter.

“Or wake up in bed with some horrible guy snoring and sweating next to me.” I drained my beer. “I should probably stop drinking.” Blue snorted again. “I feel like Rip van Winkle.”

“Who?”

“You know – that guy who disappeared for years but didn't know it, and when he came back everyone he knew was dead.” The words fell into a sudden lull in the party noise, and I shuddered.

Blue sat up. “Where did that story come from?”

A new song surged through the speakers and I raised my voice to be heard. “Oh, come on. You've heard of it. Rip van Winkle. Rip van… I don't know where it came from. Dutch people?”

“
Dutch
people?”

“Well, do the Cree have stories like that? I bet not.”

He stopped laughing. “There are stories…” He trailed off.

“What, about me and my horrible drinking problem?”

“No, no, about… well, it's maybe not respectful to talk about… here.”

“What? Who?”

“You know. Them.”

“Who?” I said, relentless.

“The… you'd call them the little people.”

I looked up at his face, startled, but he wasn't kidding. “Oh. Them.”

“They can take you away for times.”

“Like Rip van Winkle,” I said, my heart beating unaccountably fast. “Those stories always kind of scared me, to tell you the truth.”

“Yeah.” We were silent again for a time, until at last I couldn't stand it any more.

“Tell me!”

“What?”

“One of those stories.”

“I thought that they frightened you.”

“I like being frightened. Please? I'll fetch you another drink.”

“Oh, I'm still working on this one.”

“Pleeeeease?”

“All right, all right!” He looked down at me, amused. “There are many stories. You hear people talking about Mimikwisowak: that's what we call them, the Little People.”

“Mimikwiso-what?” I stumbled.

“That's right.
Mimik-WI-sowak
. This man back home tells a story about a man who left his village to get some rabbits. He loved eating rabbits, and he was walking through the sand – this would be in Southern Saskatchewan, in the sand hills down there.” As always when he talked of Saskatchewan his eyes lit up, and an intonation or way of speaking, more than an accent, came into his voice, slight but unmistakable. “On his way back, he saw two holes in the dunes, and one became more visible, appeared to be a little door, and a person came out. This little person confronts him:

Give me your rabbits.
Well, he knew he should respect these people because they're very powerful – magic – so he says,
Well, you'll have to fight me for them. So be it,
says the little person. So they got ready to fight, and all of a sudden the little guy grabbed him by the leg, eh?” Blue waved his beautiful hands in the air, sketching the story. “But this guy was big, and he just twisted, and the little guy fell on his face in the sand.
Hey, no fair, you're tripping!
he says, making up the rules as he went along, right? But the man thought he'd better give him the rabbits –
Oh, you can have them
. So the little man says,
Come on in and have some tea.
And he was wondering, how am I going to fit into that little door? and the guy says,
Just reach down here
.” Blue reached into the shadows under his chair. “And as soon as he reached down, he shrunk to that level. So in he went, and the little person made tea. This man, he was a father, he was in kind of a hurry, so he drank it fast, and as soon as he was finished this little person was there pouring it again.
Oh, you must be thirsty, have some more tea.
So he drank it really slowly this time. And finally he says,
Well, I have to get to my family.
So he stepped out and as soon as he left he became a normal size again. And when he turned around the tunnel was no longer there. He walked home, and when he came to his village, the people who came toward him were terrified, like they'd seen somebody
dead
, you know. They were terrified and took off in the other direction, screaming. All except one man, his own age, who came up to him.
Father?
the man says. It was his son, twenty years older.

But I just went out this morning, to get some rabbits…
”

Blue looked at me and drained his glass. “That's the power those people have, eh, of changing time and space.” He smiled. “I don't know if it's a
true
story, but it's one that gets passed on, from generation to generation. Very interesting, you know? Makes you think.”

I stared at him for a moment, then thanked him for the story and got up. And I got myself another drink. And another. I faked it. It was easy enough. I was in a comfy chair, and someone got me another beer. We snorted someone's coke. I began to have a really, really good time. I rejoined the dancers; I still didn't remember them but I had a really good feeling about them. We felt really connected. And as some dancers drifted off and other people came in, I felt really good about them too. And I didn't think about Blue's story. Really.

Suddenly Blue was sitting on the arm of my chair – a bunch of people were all laughing at some terribly funny and witty thing I'd just said – and he kissed the top of my head. “Here,” he said, “come meet the bicycle couriers.”

“Goody. I've met the actors,” I belched, “and the dancers. Show me the bicycle couriers!” Blue helped me out of the chair, placed his hands on my shoulders and turned me around. I focused on a pool of bodies. Strange hair and body piercings and tattoos, ripped clothes.

“Look at the size of their legs,” Blue whispered in my ear. “A sure giveaway.” I nodded sagely, distracted, because there was one guy over on the far side at whom I was trying not to look. As soon as my eyes brushed past him, I'd known I was going to be attracted to him. A feeling, a pulsing in my thighs. I looked everywhere but at him. I cast desperately around the room and saw Tad and Judith, the happiest couple in the world, and my friend Steve, the painter-bartender with the biggest biceps in the world, and I staggered over to them instead. He was just a short distance from me now, and I could feel heat radiating from me to him. I wondered if he could feel it too. I sat on the floor and chatted with the happy couple and with Steve about this and that, and still I felt the heat. I chatted some more; Tad and Judith were going to get married, and Steve had just had a gallery show. I chatted on and on. Finally, slowly and carefully, I turned and looked. He was gone.

My heart thudded painfully. Idiot. I twisted where I sat, and right behind me stretched this pair of long, long muscular legs, tanned, covered with golden hair, bruised and nicked. I looked up. It was him. I couldn't even smile, I just looked up.

This guy was Prince Fucking Charming. He was an office girl's wet dream, a jaguar prowling into her cool white cubicle to deliver a package and then prowling out again, leaving a trace of salt sweat behind him in the dry and processed air. We looked at one another in silence. He was smiling. I still couldn't. I abruptly stuck my hand out and up.

“Ruby,” I said.

He reached down and shook my hand. “Clyde.” And that was how we met.

We left together. Steve rolled his eyes and Judith warned me against him. “Clyde's a slut, honey. You're a romantic. You'll fall in love with him and get hurt.”

Clyde doubled me back to my place on the back of his courier's bike, and we made out on the front porch for a beautiful long time, and I invited him up but he wouldn't. We exchanged numbers. Three days later he phoned me (okay, I phoned him first. The next day in fact. And he took three days to return my message) and we went to the Indian restaurant around the corner. And he gave me his T-shirt. And and and.

As I rode my motorcycle through the streets it struck me: Toronto was just no good for my particular brand of heart-wrung-ness. It was a miracle I'd been able to sustain it. When I'd first moved to the city I'd thought everyone looked so cool. They looked, I thought, like their lives had drama, but drama that looked good on them, drama with style. I had drama, Christ knew, but it dribbled. Dribbled, draining miserably through the sieve of the city.

Newfoundland is a good place to get your heart broken. There's grandeur there. The land isn't comforting or easy. It doesn't say, “It'll be all right.” It won't be all right. The land says things like: “Don't believe, even for a second, that you're not going to die.”

I remember being heartbroken at fifteen. It is easy to belittle adolescent loves; perhaps it is too painful to remember, too frightening. Those earliest loves have
everything
to do with what kind of trouble we get into later, for the rest of our lives. It feels good to be smug: oh, how I've changed, how much I've learned, can you imagine if I'd had to marry
him
? But you
did
marry him, again and again. I was glossing over my own heart's past as I rode to Clyde's.

I didn't want to remember who that particular boy was, didn't want to admit that I remembered him so well. Patrick, his name was Patrick. My whole body used to go into shock, just looking at him. Patrick was Catholic and I guess he'd gotten sick of Catholic girls who, everyone knows, will do everything
but
; and they have to be engaged to do even
that
. My partner-in-crime slut-friend Juanita and I had started hanging around Brother Rice High School, and I'd gotten interested in him, and before long we were getting engaged in the back of his car. He was really cute. Dark hair, and grey eyes with irises rimmed in black like a stormy sky. Oh yeah, I even wrote a little poem about his stormy eyes; I never showed it to him, thank you Jesus. I loved him.

And then suddenly he wasn't there, wasn't leaning against the wall of “Brudder Roice” and smoking and waiting for me at dinnertime. He'd never come to meet me at
my
school, which should have tipped me off. But I wanted so badly for him to love me. The sex wasn't particularly mind-blowing. But Patrick had this trick of pausing in the midst of it, taking my face between his palms, ever so gently, and looking into my eyes. “Hello, Ruby,” he'd say. That always made me want to cry, when he did that. “Hello, Ruby.” Then afterward he'd not look at me again, just finish and pull on his pants, his face closed to me. And then he was gone, and it was too late. Juanita heard around that he'd gotten engaged. We made suitably catty comments, and my body got into trouble. It took me hard.

One evening that wretched spring I grabbed my bicycle and took off alone down the road without telling Gramma where I was going. This was
really
bad because it was nearly suppertime. When my parents had been alive, meals were erratic. Mom wasn't much of a cook, and Dad alternated seasonally between barely noticing the plate in front of him, and eating like a pig. I was used to fending for myself, food-wise. Gramma had always hated this about our household; it was yet another thing about my mother that she didn't like. When I moved in with her and Grandpa, the first thing Gramma did was sit me down and tell me, “Ruby, I run things a little differently around here. We eat three meals a day, on time, and don't you forget it.” Forget it? I hated it. I'd read somewhere about
pâte de foie gras
and I fantasized that Gramma was trying to force-feed me until my liver grew. And then she'd slice it out of me, and serve it up to me on a platter: jellied, garnished, with toast.