Please (19 page)

There was a long pause, then she added, "So, how are you?"

"Oh, you know," I said. "The same."

"Good, good," she said. "We're fine, too." There were another few seconds of dead air, during which the truck finally took an off-ramp into a run-down neighbourhood, and then she asked, "How's work?"

"All right," I said, even though it had been weeks since I worked.

"That's good," she said. "Because these days ..."

"Yes," I said.

She hummed a little while the truck drove through the parking lot of a boarded-up Kmart. My father belched softly and sighed. "Crazy from the heat," he said.

"Any new ladies in your life?" my mother suddenly asked.

"No," I said. "There's no one."

"Well, you never know how it'll happen," she said. "Look at your father and me. We met by accident. Isn't that right, hon?"

"Mm-hm."

"I already know the story," I said.

The pickup turned down an alley between warehouses. Zoom out. More cruisers approaching the alley's opposite end. No place to turn around again.

"He called to talk to his cousin," my mother went on, as if she hadn't heard me. "Only she was in the shower. We'd just been sunbathing in the backyard, you see, and we had lotion all over us. I showered later, when I got home. But first I answered the phone, and your father thought I was his cousin. He started talking like he knew me, and he was just so nice and funny that I went along with it. Well, we all had a good laugh about it when he found out, but we'd gotten on so that he asked me out for a date. I said yes, of course, and the next thing I knew, I was walking down the aisle with him. And now here we are. Isn't that right?"

"This is definitely where we are," my father agreed.

Police cruisers blocked both ends of the alley now. The pickup stopped in the middle.

"Things will work out," my mother said.

"I'm not really looking for anything right now," I said.

"Still," she said.

Zoom in. A man in jeans and a white T-shirt jumped out of the pickup. He had a pistol in his hand. He started running for one of the warehouses, and then a little pink cloud puffed from his head. He fell to the ground. Nothing moved but the camera.

"That's gotta hurt," my father said.

"I don't know what things are coming to when this can happen here," my mother sighed.

"It's happening in California," I pointed out.

"Still," she said.

"Well, I should probably go," I said. "Have to get up for work in the morning."

"Wait! Your father hasn't told you his news yet."

"News?" I asked.

Black-clad officers approached the fallen man slowly, guns leveled, like they expected him to rise at any moment.

My father cleared his throat. "You remember my back problems?" he asked. "My crushed verticals?"

"Do you mean your vertebrae?" I asked. Three of them were fused together in his lower back, the result of twenty years driving a truck. He hadn't been able to walk straight in years, let alone work. The doctors had given up on him.

"Yeah," he said, "they're gone."

"What, the vertebrae?"

"No, the problems."

"What do you mean, gone?" I asked. "How could that happen?"

"You know that preacher we like to watch on the television?" he asked.

"Yes," I said slowly.

One of the cops nudged the man with a foot, flipping him over. He stared up at the helicopter, his face a blur from the distance.

"We were watching him the other day," my father said, "when he told everyone he'd been touched by God just before the show started."

"Well, not really God," my mother interrupted. "He said it was an angel whispering in his ear."

"They work for God," my father said. "That's the same thing in my book."

"Your back," I pleaded.

"Right. He said that God told him there'd be a trucker watching that day, one with back problems. He told me to touch the television set. Said he'd heal me if I confessed my sins and believed. So I went and kneeled in front of our television and put my arms around it. And I, ah, I talked about a few different things. But the most important thing is that I was healed. I believed, son."

I had this vision then, of thousands of unemployed truckers across North America - the world, even - kneeling on their shaggy carpets, hugging their television sets, confessing their sins, while their wives looked on and wept.

"And my back problems are gone now," my father finished. "Not so much as an itch left."

"Healed by television," I said.

"Television and God," he said.

"Well." I didn't know what else to say.

"Isn't that something?" my mother asked.

"I really have to go now."

One cop handcuffed the body, and then another cop threw a blanket over it.

"I was there," my mother said. "I saw it all."

IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER By Peter Darbyshire

I WAS ON MY WAY to Kennedy's wedding, but I couldn't find the church. I tried the Portuguese neighbourhood, the Italian neighbourhood, everywhere. I drove all around the city looking for it. It was called Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering, but all the churches I saw were named after men.

"Why are there so many churches?" I wanted to know. "I mean, who goes to these places?"

Lane, my date, just shook her head and kept brushing hair off herself. She was also my hair stylist, and she was covered in little pieces of hair, each of them a different colour. She was still wearing the same clothes she'd had on when she'd cut my hair: white silk blouse, camouflage pants, black military boots. I'd originally asked Mia to be my date, but I hadn't called her since that incident with the gun.

"Don't you have directions?" Lane asked at one point.

"I had the directions," I explained, "but then I lost them when my apartment was robbed."

"They took the directions?"

"They took everything," I told her. "My whole life."

"What would anybody want with directions to a wedding?"

"What would anybody want with my life?"

I STOPPED AT A 7-ELEVEN to look up the address. Somebody had thrown up in a corner of the phone booth. The churches section of the yellow pages had been ripped out. I looked in the white pages, but there was no listing. It started to rain again while I was in there. When I went back to the car, Lane had a bottle of water and a piece of paper that she passed to me. The directions to the church were written on it.

"Where'd you get this?" I asked.

"I went in to get some water," she said, holding up the bottle. "The guy behind the counter was Hispanic, so I figured he might know where the church was."

"Isn't that racial profiling or something like that?" I asked.

"He gave me the address," she pointed out.

"You've just saved my life," I said. I went to hug her, but she warded me off with the water bottle.

"Remember," she said, "this isn't that kind of date."

I'D ONLY ASKED LANE to be my date that morning, when I was getting my hair cut for the wedding. My appointment was at nine. Lane was the only person working in the salon, although there was a man sleeping on the couch beside the sinks at the back. The phone was ringing the whole time I was in there, but Lane never once looked at it.

"I was at this party last night," she said by way of greeting. "I took these pills and now I can't sleep." She wrapped the apron around me like she was tucking in a child.

"I have a party to go to myself tonight," I said.

"I'm so tired," she went on. "I keep hallucinating, like I'm dreaming even though I'm awake."

"How long do these pills last?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said. "But if it goes on much longer, I might lose my mind." She laughed as she began cutting my hair, but I wasn't really sure why.

"Well, if you're still up later, maybe you'd like to come to this party," I said.

She stopped cutting and looked at me in the mirror. The man on the couch let out a long sigh and rolled over, but he didn't wake up.

"It's a wedding party," I added. "There'll be lots of other people there."

"You know I'm a dyke, don't you?" she asked.

"That's all right," I said.

"I know it's all right," she said.

"The drinks will be free," I added.

She ruffled my hair with the hand that held the scissors. "As long as we're straight on that," she said.

WE FOUND THE CHURCH between two abandoned warehouses a few blocks away from the 7-Eleven. The building looked like it had once been a garage. The Virgin Mary had been painted over the front door, but someone had spray-painted out the baby Jesus. Now she just held a black circle.

We went inside and found the place empty except for a man in a priest's robe. He was sweeping piles of confetti across the floor, but he paused long enough to look at us. "We're closed for a private event," he said, "but we'll be open again later tonight."

"We're here for the wedding," I said.

"Oh, that." He leaned on the broom and gazed at Lane. "You just missed them," he said.

"But we're not even an hour late," I said, pointing at my watch.

"They were in and out in half an hour," he said. "But they made an awful mess in that time. Someone was even drinking vodka in one of the pews." He nodded at the floor, but I didn't see any bottles anywhere.

"Was it a nice wedding at least?" Lane asked.

"Nice?" The priest looked up at the ceiling of the church. There were spider webs in the rafters. "They called her parents on a cell phone during the ceremony. I had to say all the vows into this phone so they could hear me." He shook his head and went back to sweeping. "I don't know these people," he said. "I've never seen them before, and I doubt I'll ever see them again."

Lane lit a cigarette and looked around the empty room. "I don't suppose they said where they were going?"

"It's all right," I told her. "I know where the reception is."

"You know where it is?" Lane said. "Why didn't we just go there then? We could have skipped this whole church thing."

"If it wasn't for the money," the priest sighed.

"Was there a woman with them?" I asked. "One with a tattoo of Marilyn Monroe here?" I pointed at my stomach, just above my belly button.

"There were women, yes," the priest said, sweeping the confetti towards us, "but I don't know about any tattoos."

"Marilyn Monroe?" Lane asked.

"Let's get out of here," I said to her.

"Everyone always leaves," the priest said, following us with the broom, "but nobody ever comes."

BACK IN THE CAR, Lane laughed and brushed more hair from her clothes. "I can't believe it," she said. "You ask me out on a date, but you're after another woman."

"It's not another woman," I said, "it's my ex-wife."

She looked at me. "Is that supposed to be better?" she asked.

"I heard she'd be here," I said. "I haven't seen her in a year."

"Well, this is certainly going to be an interesting night," Lane said. She took a long drink from the water bottle.

"What do you care, anyway?" I asked. "You're a dyke, remember?"

"Oh, I remember," she said.

"So what does it really matter then?"

"It's the principle of the thing."

THERE WAS A FIGHT going on in the parking lot of the reception hall when we pulled in. There were three or four men involved, I couldn't quite tell, and another three or four standing around, watching. They all stopped what they were doing and looked into the headlights, even the fighters, until we were past them.

"Were those your friends?" Lane asked.

"My friends don't wear rented tuxes," I told her.

I parked beside an SUV with a white dog in the front seat. It was a big dog, the size of a German shepherd but more expensive-looking. It started barking at Lane as soon she got out of the car.

"Hello, doggie," she said in a baby voice and put her hand on the window. The dog bit at the glass, trying to get at her.

"I really don't think you should do that," I said.

"I'd be mad too if I was locked up in this all day," she told the dog. She kicked the side door of the SUV, and its alarm went off. The dog threw itself at the window now, leaving smears of saliva on the glass.

"It's probably thirsty," Lane said. She put the bottle of water up to the open crack at the top of the window and poured the rest of its contents inside. The dog lunged at it, snarling its way through the water. "You see?" Lane said, tossing the empty bottle aside.

We went past the fighting men. There were three of them now, I saw, rolling around on the ground, in and out of puddles formed by the rain. Each of them seemed to be fighting the other two. And the men around them were dirty and wiping blood from their own faces and hands. One of them, who had his arm around the neck of the man beside him, lifted his beer bottle to us as we passed. None of them said anything, though, and the only sound was the grunts of the fighting men. We went inside.

The hall was actually two large rooms separated by a hallway that held the washrooms. There seemed to be a different wedding reception taking place in each room. I looked in the room to the right but didn't recognize anyone there. The bride was dancing in the middle of the room to an old Whitney Houston song. She looked as if her nose had been broken a number of times. I wasn't sure, but I thought the man she was dancing with might have been her father. She also looked as if she wouldn't be able to stand up without his help. Everyone else was sitting at their tables, watching them dance.

"Are these your friends?" Lane asked.

"Do these look like my friends?" I asked.

"I really wouldn't know," she said.

"These don't look like anybody's friends," I said.

We went into the other room. All the tables had been pulled to the walls here, and everyone was dancing in the empty space in the middle of the room. I didn't recognize the music, and I also didn't recognize most of the people here. I looked around for Kennedy and spotted him by the gift table, taking photos of the crowd with a digital camera.

"This way," I told Lane.

"I think I'm going to get a drink," she said. She pushed her way through the crowd, to the bar on the other side of the room.