Keys of Babylon (12 page)

He remembered scraping rice out for the pigs they kept in a sty behind their house. The house was one room up and one room down. The front door was made of planks and outside the door was a mud street where other pigs ran, and children ran after pigs, or played or peed. In their garden, no bigger than a table at the Prairie Wok, there was a melon vine and a persimmon tree.

This mall disappointed people but the Little Man liked it. He had his regular customers with their usual orders. Many of them ate singly. How lonely they looked at the tables, with their plastic forks and plastic chopsticks, dabbing their mouths and looking at their watches as if they had somewhere else to go.

Coffee? he would ask, passing to wipe the next table. Soda? And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. Outside, there would be spaces in the parkade, and the big neon sign for Red Lobster would block the sky. The snow was swept into khaki heaps like tiny ski slopes.

Most of the customers drenched their food in soy sauce. Standing behind the counter or pushing the broom, he'd smile as he watched them shake the Blue Dragon bottles over their crispy noodles. The Big Little Man hated noodles. He hated rice too. No, he ate pizzas and subs now.
h
e took gyros home, and doughnuts with chocolate and hundreds-and-thousands on one side. That's why he was fat. It was no mystery to him. He would look at the bundles of pak choi in the kitchen and smile, in his quiet way. Those pigs, years ago, would have eaten the pak choi, those pink and chocolate-coloured pigs behind the house. But this was the great country of meat. Burgers wrapped in bacon. Chicken wrapped in bacon. Wings and ribs. Pak choi was peasant food, but meat three times a day was the emperor's carnivorous dream.

There was a woman who came regularly to the Prairie Wok. For his own amusement, in his own way of making sense, he called her Starwoman. She would sit alone, dabbing her mouth and looking at her watch as if she had somewhere else to go. The young women who sometimes came were different. They always talked on their cell phones. If four girls sat together, there would be four cell phones on the table. Often a phone would ring and they would all look at the screen, laughing.

Don't answer him, they would shriek. Be mysterious.

But nobody telephoned Starwoman. She would sit with her tofu and pak choi, which was 48 on the menu, and her own plastic chopsticks that she always reused. The Big Little Man liked that. In Huangshan, his family had eaten with their fingers. The riceballs were like moons. His little sister held up a moon and he had put out his hand and snatched it. He didn't think about it. It just happened. The rice moon filled his mouth. How his sister had cried until his father had smacked his cheek and grandmother hissed like a goose at him. Grandfather wanted a pig brought into the house. Mother sat with her face in her hands.

Sometimes, the Big Little Man asked customers, the older men, the women in pairs, about the terrible north. The far north where the prairie became lakes and trees, where granite seas rose and fell into the darkness and wolves howled in the tamarack. And sometimes the lonely men would tell him lonely stories, and he would pause with his mop and J cloth and nod his head and see the empty roads and the ice burned dark as marrowbone.

One day he picked up courage and asked Starwoman if she had ever been into the north. She raised her eyes, mauve as the prairie crocus. How she whinnied then, like a horse for its mealbag.

Why would I go there? she laughed. She laughed and laughed showing her square mare's teeth. Then she got up and never came back.

But the Big Little Man himself was already a traveller. He had made a great expedition and landed at the port on the west coast. In the day he mopped floors and cooked noodles and in the night he pored over his Jack London books. After a year, someone said there was work to the east. So he had taken the Grey Goose and arrived when the mountain was being built.

Sometimes he travelled further. He owned an old green Plymouth now, a barge of an automobile. The prairie galleon, people called it. One year, for his holiday, he drove to Moose Jaw. Another year to Medicine Hat. Then one year, he decided, he must keep going. Just continue cruising those straight highways. So he did. After a while he came to a place called Wild Horse. It was cold. He could cross the border here but there was nothing down the road that he could see. Nothing but the grey snow, the pelt of that desert, and a sky that would soon become a winking lid of water like the bottom of a well.

The Big Little Man got out of the car. Yes, he could see for miles in every direction. But so what? asked a voice of exhaustion in his heart. A cloud of dust lay ahead, as if a herd of bison had passed. Maybe there were coyotes on the prairie, maybe the last of the wolverines was looking at him from the prairie sage, a forty-pound, black and dirty white wolverine. But no, he thought. The wolverine would be asleep now, dreamless in its den of old bones.

The Big Little Man looked up. If there was any place in the world they would come for him, it would be here. On the road to Wild Horse, a road sharp with gravel and porcupine spines long as knitting needles, the road that crossed the border from nowhere into nowhere. Yes, If they were ever going to take him, it would be now. And he was ready. As ready as White Fang, as ready as Jack London himself, stamping outside his smoky bivouac. The Big Little Man got out of the car. He stood in the emptiness in his camouflage clothes, grey and brown, like the snow, like the wolverine's fur. Looking around, he thought the sky would surely fall.

The next day at the Prairie Wok, he was squashing boxes of stale prawn crackers into a rubbish bin made from black recycled plastic. A man came up to him and said he was sorry but the restaurant would be closing for a week. When it opened again they would be selling English food. English breakfasts and English teas. English Sunday dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings. The fish and the chips. But we think you're a good worker, the man said. We want you to stay. The staff training is next Thursday. The new restaurant will be called
Rule Britannia
. Okay?

Okay, said the Big Little Man.

On the McGoverns' seat he wedged the flask of Bushmills between his knees. The sun was sinking and the sundogs flaring. He looked north. That was the sundog trail, that was where the sky would tremble and glow. The Big Little Man remembered running out of his house in the street of clapping doves and running and running down into the town. He could see the mist clearing from Nine Dragons Peak. He ran past an open room. In this room was an iron wok burned black upon an open fire. A few chairs stood around for the customers who always came. One strawhatted man was eating rice with yellow peas.

He ran past a redsmith who stood in the steam of a slack tub. He ran down hill and passed the chestnut peelers and a woman who always laid out sunflower seeds on a straw mat. No one looked up. He was running away from home and his mother's tears and away from the pigs who wore rings like half moons in their snouts. He ran with a stitch in his side, a thorn in his foot and the shape of his father's hand on his cheek. But after a while he ran only for the joy of running.

The Big Little Man ran past the men playing mah jong and the men playing checkers and he ran all the way into the square of Huangshan. He only stopped at the wall around the pool, the fire still in his side, in his mind's eye his grandmother's pigtail dragging in the soup as she leaned across the table. Ha ha, he laughed. Ha ha.

In the pool the carp spoke to him as they usually did, rising from the weeds in their peeling gold to bring him the news, the news of empires that had been, that were to come.

Ha, ha, he laughed again, as the fish blew him kisses, and spoke to him of poets and astronauts. He peered into the pool. The other children said it was miles deep and that a little girl had fallen into it and never been found.

The next day, or maybe it was the next month, the Big Little Man found himself standing under the television that hung from a wall bracket at Rule Britannia. There was a Union Jack behind the counter and a picture of the Queen. But the chairs were still bolted to the tables.

He felt sad. If Starwoman ever came again she would not be able to use her plastic chopsticks. Does it matter if she returns? asked the voice of exhaustion in his heart. But one of the lonely men was there, putting soy sauce on his chips. How he shook and shook the Blue Dragon over his plate. The four girls with the four cell phones had also arrived. They all wore half price Husky shirts from the sports shop that was closing: 26. 38. 76. 98. A phone rang and the girls pounced to see who was calling. Don't answer him, they squealed. You're not ready to leave.

On the television an English king sat up in bed. Such a bed. The Big Little Man thought about his couch at home. How hard it was. In the street of clapping doves he and his sister had slept on a wooden shelf that was taken down in the day. But it was better than sleeping with grandfather in the pigs' sty.

The Big Little Man's back hurt. So did his legs. But he was planning his next holiday. He thought about Wild Horse. It had snowed there, a dry snow like polystyrene pellets, and the wind had blown. So why had he worn those camouflage clothes? No one could have seen him. In the next place he would not be hidden. He would drive his green car over the prairie, the only colour visible from above. And his clothes would be brighter than the dragonflies that hovered over the bottomless pool in Huangshan.

Yes, he would go north to where the great rivers met. How their ice would groan and grind, the grey floe meeting the brown floe, the grass snapping under his feet, his breath a beard of fish scales.

Ha ha, he laughed. With such whiskers he would look like his grandfather pulling the pigs by their nose-rings into the house. In the north the Big Little Man would find a seat like the McGoverns' bench and he would sit under the sky of inexhaustible stars. Or better still, he could build a bed. A huge bed like the English king's. He could lie amongst its furs and cushions and gaze up at the pandemonium of lights. Then he would whisper, as he always did.

Here I am, he would whisper. Please take me. I'm ready now.

The banknote lay at his feet. The man had paid for drinks and dropped a two-dollar bill. Nobody had noticed yet. But they soon would.

Juan drew a little closer, looking the other way. Then he glanced again. No, it was a twenty. When had he ever seen a two dollar in this country? It was a twenty, there on the floor. The man was talking to the woman, their barstools pulled together. Looked like tourists, tall and blonde. Swedes, he thought. Maybe Dutchies. Their clothes were good and they were showing off their English. But they wouldn't stay. One beer each and they'd head over to Time Square, stand in the neon noon, photograph themselves and send their Samsung smiles to friends at home.

Yes, it was now or never. As he passed, he bent over and palmed the bill. And kept going, heading for the restrooms.

No word of protest. No call. Of course not. Dave's Tavern was so dark sometimes you couldn't see five feet away. In the shadows, the perpetual twilight, nobody had noticed. This morning, Peevo had already arrived but he was standing out on the sidewalk, staring at something. At nothing. The open door was a dazzling slash, the only evidence it was, at the latest, 11 a.m. Yes, must be about that. The weekday ritual was starting.

Mary Mack slid the DVD into the machine. And there they were, straight into the movie. According to Mary the best movie ever made. Or fillum, as she called it. The greatest
fillum
of all time.

Mary Mack ran Dave's Tavern. Mary Mack had run Dave's for forty years and boy, she had run it down. Well, that's what Juan thought. Did he care? You bet. It was a job, right next door to his other job in the Port Authority. Handy. He walked from one darkness into another. Also, if Dave's closed, he would lose his lodging. Juan rented a room upstairs, a midtown room, smack in the centre of the centre. Mary told him he was a lucky little sod. Told him over and over that the bohos and the computer nerds and the artists would kill for such a room. Such an address. Manic midtown, throbbing with the heartbeat of America. All those Hell's Kitchen heroes wanting his ten by twelve, his mattress, the immovable mahogany wardrobe where his life was hung.

Yes, Mary, Juan would say. You been good. You been so good.

Old soak, he thought. But she was right. He had arrived two years previously. Arrived through the tunnel. The first thing Mary had made him do was clean the windows. Soon he would have to clean them again. He had borrowed a ladder from the Port Authority, taken the bucket from behind the bar, and climbed as high as he dared. The glass had been black. The grime was a centimetre thick.

American dirt, he thought, as he saw the water in the pail darken. You could grow money in it. All that traffic smoke coming out of the tunnel. All those buses lining up, their exhausts thick as drainpipes. That's where the dirt came from. And those windows not washed in years. In his own room he'd sometimes sit at the glass and stare outside. It always seemed foggy and sometimes there was a real mist off the Hudson, Greyhound headlights big and ghostly in the gloom, the cockpits of the coaches maybe blue lit from the on-board TV.

And if he couldn't see at least he could hear, hear voices below raised in terror or supplication, or the growl of buses he knew were coming in, the Montreal, the Chicago, delivering their riders into the darkness.