Caught (4 page)

In the southern hemisphere they’re all askew, Slaney said.

Does the toilet water go the other way down there? said Celeste.

I didn’t see too many flush toilets, Slaney said.

What were you doing down there? Annette asked.

I’d say he was up to no good, Celeste said. Then they each said what they wanted most. Celeste wanted to be a certified beautician and Annette wanted to do her upgrading and Slaney wanted another wiener. Then he said he wanted to be rich.

La-de-da, said Annette. Excuse us.

I’d like to get on that horse down there and gallop away, Celeste said. The horse was standing still in the moonlight with its head hanging low. It was abject or it was asleep.

Slaney looked at his watch and said it was his birthday. He didn’t tell them he’d broken out of jail for the occasion but he felt sure they knew. At first he thought he might sleep with one or the other of them, but it became clear they were each going off to bed alone and they would wake up alone, and Slaney would never see either of them again.

Pair of Kings

Slaney had slept
all day. He made the bed and switched off the lights before locking the door of the apartment behind him.

He entered the gloom of the dance hall downstairs at four in the afternoon and waited for the bartender to come out from the back so he could return the key and say thank you.

It was the same woman from the day before but her silver hair was fanned out over her shoulders and she was wearing a jean jacket with a happy-face button on the lapel. There didn’t seem to be anything else happy about her. She gave Slaney a once-over and asked how Harold was doing in prison.

What’s it like in there? she said. Is it bad? Slaney ducked a little to the side as if she’d tried to cuff him on the chin.

She said Harold had got off on the wrong foot in life. She was Harold’s eldest sister. Sue Ellen Molloy, her name was, she said, and she’d tried to look out for him but she’d had a lot on her plate when Harold was growing up.

There’s twenty-one in our family, she said. It was hard on our mother’s teeth. Leached off the enamel. They turned to dust in her mouth. Her bones got soft. Took the good out of her. Our father died all of a sudden and Harold came after that. Nobody knows from where. He’s only my half-brother. That never made any difference to me. I tried as hard with Harold as I did with the rest of them after our mother passed on.

Slaney said Harold had asked for him to say hello to her and thank her for all she had done for him.

Sue Ellen rang in the price of Slaney’s room on the cash register and then rang it in again so the numbers rolled up and reappeared in the little window at the back of the machine with a minus sign in front of them. She tore off the receipt and handed it to him with the amount owed saying zero. He took it from her and tucked it in his pocket.

He was born during a hurricane, Harold was, she said. I woke up that morning and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Next thing the trees were lifting out of the ground, stumbling around like drunks in a brawl. Harold was a colicky baby and it went downhill from there.

Harold keeps busy, wheeling and dealing, Slaney said.

He’s of a smaller build, she said. Her lips pursed up tight as though she had broken a confidence and regretted it. Then she said she was afraid for Harold and that a day didn’t go by without him crossing her mind.

I have ulcers the size of pennies just thinking about him, she said. That’s why I’m so drawn. She put her hands to her face, pressing in on her cheeks, pulling back the wrinkled skin around her temples so she looked like she was walking in a big wind, her eyes glassy slits. Then she ran her hands under her hair, lifting the curtain of silver so it glinted all over in the light, and let it drop again.

You can avoid a lot of trouble in the pen just by looking the other way, Slaney said.

This is what I’m telling you, she said. Harold has a knack for wading into the middle of one cesspool after another. He comes out of there every couple of years or so and it’s like he can’t get back in fast enough. She opened a cooler under the bar and the bottles tinkled against one another and she took the cap off a beer bottle and handed it to him.

Then the side door was kicked open. The golden afternoon sun, already sinking, blazed through a man’s legs and over his shoulders, between his elbows. He was carrying something in his outstretched arms about the size of a small child.

When the door closed behind him the bar was very dark, and as the man came forward, Slaney began to make out something coiled and python-thick around the man’s neck. He heard something slithering and snicking over the tiles.

What have you got there? Harold’s sister asked.

This here is hardly used, the man said.

That’s somebody’s vacuum, she said.

A brand-new Electrolux, the man said. And I’ve all the doohickeys that attach to it.

He told Slaney and Harold’s sister that he’d lost his couch and matching recliner in an all-night game of poker and he hadn’t been to bed.

It came down to the furniture, he said. He was looking right into Slaney’s eyes but he seemed to be watching the moment before he lost the couch play out before him.

A pair of kings, he said. For a moment Slaney thought he was talking about the two of them.

I’m looking for someone to make me a nice offer, he said. Sue Ellen picked up her newspaper where she had started to work a crossword and gave it a snap.

You look like a guy could use a vacuum cleaner, the man said to Slaney. He had stepped up close to the bar and in the band of light hanging over the cash register Slaney could see the man’s face yellow-lit and crackled like a varnished painting. He had a high colour in his burst-veined cheeks and purpled nose and his eyes were bloodshot and the whites were lizard yellow. There was a crust stuck to his colourless lower eyelashes. Whatever he was on had him in a fevered grip. There was a glaze of snot over his upper lip, and he glistened with sweat. Below his full wet mouth there was a goatee.

Slaney said he didn’t need a vacuum. If he’d told the man he was a victim of leprosy the comment might have had the same effect. The man was overcome with nervous trembling. A shake that came up his body from his right knee to the top of his head.

He put the vacuum down on the floor and cranked his neck to the left side several times to get a hold of himself. He gripped one of his bony shoulders with the opposite hand and rotated it in slow circles.

Everybody vacuums, the man said. His stare penetrated Slaney through and through.

Jesus, the man said. Am I right? Everybody vacuums? Slaney put his beer bottle down on the bar without making a noise.

What kind of guy doesn’t keep his house tidy, the man asked. That’s what I’d like to know.

The whiff of violence stirred like a draft around Slaney’s ankles. It felt as though an unleashing might occur, the bolt of mythical strength that weakened people can summon just before they give out. The man’s eyes had a homicidal ferocity but he spoke with something approaching a singsong quality, an effeminate wheedling, like a fortune teller grabbing a passing spirit’s voice from the air.

A man’s house is his kingdom, the guy said. What are you, some kind of pig? Sue Ellen put down her pencil. She asked the man for the vacuum plug. He passed it to her without taking his eyes off Slaney or breaking his speech at all.

Some filthy pig of a man who doesn’t clean up, the man said. Wouldn’t know one end of a vacuum from the other. Your mother was a pig. A filthy swine who didn’t clean up after herself, nor did she pass on to her son the value of cleanliness.

Let’s see if this thing works, Harold’s sister said. She drew the cord out hand over hand.

A good vacuum is an investment, she said. I learned the hard way, bought cheap. What I found, the cheap ones only picked up half of what’s on the floor. You got to go over it twice. Next thing I said to myself, you want something of value, you have to pay for it.

She plugged it in and the vacuum roared up and she yelled at him to demonstrate.

Pardon me, the man said. Whatever had possessed him had suddenly fled. He had put a finger in the belt loop of his jeans and cocked a hip, trying for something like a Sears catalogue pose, but he couldn’t sustain it. His knee started up again.

Let’s see what this baby can do, the bartender said. The man vacuumed the floor of the bar for three strokes and stopped to look up at the bartender but she rolled her hand in the air, telling him to keep going.

Look at that machine, she yelled. That’s a good vacuum. Look at how it picks up the dirt.

He started vacuuming with harnessed concentration and the engine was loud and Slaney finished the beer and she got him another one and hooked the opener over it and the cap popped off and danced around until she put her hand over it. Then she became absorbed in her crossword puzzle. She had a ring with a speck of a diamond. The diamond and the little band of gold tin that held the eraser onto the top of the pencil sparkled in the oval of light on the bar as she jotted letters.

The man had done the indoor-outdoor carpeting and now switched appendages on the nozzle and did the dance floor and the stage. He pulled out chairs and turned them upside down on the tables and then put them back on the floor when he was done.

He finally touched the button on the Electrolux with his foot and the machine went off. Slaney had just finished his second beer and he stood and got out his money and put a bill down on the bar.

That includes a tip, Slaney said.

Big spender, Sue Ellen said. She picked up the bill and stuck it in a tin can without the label next to the register. Then she unplugged the vacuum and gave the cord a sharp tug and let go and the plug snaked over the bar and across the floor and snapped tightly back into the belly of the machine.

Your wife is going to be none too pleased she finds that gone, the waitress said. Now get home and put that back in the closet before she goes looking for it.

Pretend I never took it, the man said.

Put it back.

I lost a fortune, he said. They took me for all I was worth.

You can’t undo what you done, Sue Ellen said. She was tapping the pencil end over end on the bar, considering the man with a hard eye.

People want to turn back the clock, she said. Bloody bastards took advantage of you, Gerald, when you were fresh out of the hospital.

I lost the couch, Sue Ellen, he said. Now I come home from work I got nothing to sit down on.

Gerald’s a custodian at the mall, aren’t you, Gerald, Sue Ellen said.

I applied, he said. That’s the position I landed.

But he’s good with engines too, she said. I can’t tell you the number of cars he’s fixed for nothing around here. He’ll work for a bloody song. I couldn’t get my car started there, last winter, was it, Gerald?

Spark plug, the man said.

Worst kind of weather, Harold’s sister said.

Replaced the spark plug, he said.

Good as gold when you’re feeling well, Sue Ellen said. You’re just lucky you still have that vacuum cleaner.

Put it back where I got it, Gerald said. Sue Ellen turned the newspaper over and counted more blocks with the tip of a pencil.

That’s right, she said. The man gathered up the vacuum and the appendages that went with it and left through the door that clicked shut behind him.

Ten Reasons To Go On

Slaney hit the
road after the beer at the bar and this time he was heading west. He’d had two rides and then nothing came or went for more than an hour.

He thought about walking away.

Reviewed his options.

This was the advice of his prison psychotherapist. Review and calculate. Employ reason. Adjust your position.

Why didn’t he walk away? The idea of going back to prison made the elastic give out in his socks. His socks were loose and rubbed and his guts were like his worn-out socks when he gave thought to it. He could walk away and work under the table and live a quiet life under a false name and be forgotten. The law would forget him.

But there were reasons to go on:

1. They’d be millionaires inside a couple of months, him and Hearn.

2. He wanted to be on the water. The wide-open openness of that. The exultation and dolphins and flying fish. The swashbuckling glamour of fucking going for it. The wind on the water and beaches and not knowing if they’d make it. Adrenalin and heat.

3. If he quit, it would mean they’d broken him.

4. He would not betray the innermost thing. He didn’t know exactly what the innermost thing was, except it hadn’t been touched in the four years of incarceration. Come and get me. They couldn’t get him. It fluttered in and out of view, the innermost thing, consequential and delicate.

5. He wanted to believe he couldn’t be broken.

6. They had a modicum of luck. Whatever unit of measurement they employ to quantify luck. They had more of it than before. An iota more luck, and it might be enough to get them through. They had experience. What he’d learned could fill a book.

7. He wanted Jennifer to fall in love with him again. He wanted to experience an ordinary moment. A room in a house full of TV murmur and sigh, leafy shadow and the whir of laundry in the dryer. Copper pots hung over the range, pink-orange and faux antique.

He wanted to be half awake in the kitchen of a new house with Jennifer. He practised the phrase: Let me show you around the property.

Saturday morning, a little hungover and horny.

Jennifer in his plaid flannel housecoat, her hair mussed up from bed, pressing half an orange down on the glass juicer she had, twisting it back and forth so the juice ran over the fluted glass dome into the lip beneath and the seeds slipped out. The intent, becalmed look she wore making breakfast.

8. The little glass of orange juice.

9. Her ass as she bent over the toaster to light a smoke. She had candles all over the place. You could be having a conversation and she’d slink off the chair to the floor and start doing yoga. She’d be on her hands and knees, focused and lost, and her legs would straighten out and her ass up in the air and she’d keep on talking.