The Beggar's Garden (5 page)

Though they'd done their best raising him, it had come as no great shock to Earl that the boy had ended up where he had, rooting around in the garbage, eating at soup kitchens, and probably living off the dole.

The night Kyle appeared on his television, Earl lay sleepless on the left side of the mattress, the side he still found himself migrating to even though his bed was no longer shared, mulling over the existence of this boy—who was really now a man—he'd for so long pushed from his mind.

The next morning Earl changed into his work clothes and pulled on socks for the first time in weeks. Outside, he shook his head at the sorry condition of the yard and set about carefully weeding then mowing his lawn, finally edging it with a tool he also used in winter to chop ice from the driveway. In the afternoon he turned the vegetable bed and planted two rows of potatoes. The following day he rose at six and repainted the small bungalow exactly the same washer-fluid blue it had been for as
many years as he could accurately recall. The repetitious quality of the work eased his thinking. And at the end of it, Earl was left with a curious feeling of obligation to his grandson. Not that he'd done him wrong, but perhaps Earl could now, after all these years, talk some sense into him, have him give his head a shake. He saw this as plainly now as he did anything else in his yard: he needed something to do, a project. Work kept a person from wither, from rot, and he was wasting away in this place. Tuuli would have thrown open the curtains, stuck a to-do list in his hand, and roused him from the basement long ago, but he didn't have her anymore, so he had to take the initiative himself, and this also scared him.

Though the housing market was poor, the small city's industries having all folded in on themselves like stoned Goliaths and its young people, or the ones with any ambition in them, all packed off to seek work elsewhere, Earl had managed to sell his house to a Finnish couple distantly related to his wife for what he felt was a fair price. He phoned his daughter and told her he was going on a trip around the world. “Good for you,” she'd said. “Treat yourself, you deserve it.” Earl said he'd send postcards.

When he arrived at the airport in Vancouver, he took a taxi and sat up front, making a point of shaking the driver's hand before paying him, leaving no tip. He rented a room in an outlying motel with weekly rates and purchased the silver hatchback with a portion of the money he'd received for the house. The city was not new to him. As a young man, he'd hitchhiked out west and worked loading grain ships for a summer. He'd passed most of that time in the murk of beer parlours and the arms of deceitful women. It was a period of his life he cared not to revisit, part
of a span of lost years he couldn't fully conjure in his head if he tried. Tuuli had never pressed him about it, another of her many kindnesses, and for this he was grateful.

He drove downtown, found the soup kitchen from the news report with no trouble, and parked across the street each day for a week, long enough for the prostitutes and drug dealers to give up on approaching his car. Earl had never seen people so wretched. It was as if the country had been tipped up at one end and all of its sorry bastards had slid west, stopping only when they reached the sea, perhaps because the sea didn't want them either. Why a man would choose to live in this desperate, brutal way rather than in a house with a family surrounding him Earl would never know. Was it so hard? There'd been plenty of jobs when he'd come in his youth, you could have your pick. But even then there were those who'd rather take what another had built than build it themselves. So perhaps the place hadn't really changed, only managed to attract more of them.

One drizzly Thursday evening, a red-bearded man took his place in line. His hockey jersey bore the number of a player the Canucks had traded south well over ten years ago; the sleeves, once home-team white, were now mottled brown and grey.

It was Kyle. There was no doubt. He waited his turn and went inside, soon emerging with a paper bowl of something steaming he blew on as he set off down the street. Earl put the car in gear. He followed the boy for some time with no purpose in his mind that he could have honestly described if he were stopped and asked. He'd never actually considered what he'd do once he found him, and now that it had proven so easy, he was beginning to suspect he'd made a terrible mistake. Stopping a man he didn't
know from Adam to offer advice on how to live his life seemed futile, silly even, as well as potentially dangerous.

Earl gassed for a block or so, then pulled over to allow Kyle to walk ahead. He knew his grandson could pick out detail only up to a distance of about ten feet, that's what the doctors had said anyway, so he trailed closer than he would have anyone else. Kyle walked briskly, his free arm swinging. He looked more robust than he had in the news special. A man tracking his own grandson like an elk, Earl thought, shaking his head at what he'd been reduced to. After about ten blocks, Kyle stopped at the edge of a small, vacant parking lot and disappeared into a row of large bushes beneath a billboard that flipped back and forth between two pictures like a set of vertical blinds. Earl pulled over.

He waited, tapping at the wheel with his thumbs. He failed to imagine what would make his grandson want to live in all this filth and confusion. Vancouver had always seemed more like an encampment than a city to Earl, about as permanent as a card table set up for a Friday-night game. Perhaps it was drugs. But the boy looked all right, physically, that is, healthy even. What Earl knew of drugs were the snivelling junkies of television forensics shows.

A sudden honking made Earl jump and he saw his rearview full with a hulking shape up tight to his bumper. He stuck his arm out and waved the bus around. It only honked again and lurched closer. As Earl pulled away, he saw his grandson emerge from the bushes with a loaded shopping cart he must have had stashed there. Earl made a right and had to go a few blocks south because of one-ways. When he returned to the lot, his grandson was gone. He applied sudden force to the small wheel, ceasing only when he feared it would break off. He spent the next three hours crisscrossing
the neighbourhood and swearing under his breath until he finally spotted him, now without his shopping cart, outside a dingy building called the Grandview Hotel. The tired neon of the hotel's sign was familiar to Earl, and he had a feeling he'd spent some time drunk in a room there, perhaps a long time, but he pushed it from his mind. He watched Kyle pull a key from his trousers, unlock a side door, and step in.

The next morning, Earl parked out front of the Grandview Hotel for the whole day, plugging the meter, cluttering his dashboard with the wrappers of hotdogs bought from a street vendor. There was no sign of Kyle. He returned to his motel that night and got drunk on the wine coolers he'd bought because he'd not been in a liquor store in twenty years, not even when Tuuli died, and had thought the festive bottles were a new kind of beer. Something about the distance from home, or the fact that he no longer had one, or that he no longer had someone to explain himself to, made drunkenness more reasonable to him than it had been in years.

The next day he was parked in the same spot even earlier than the previous day, watching the weak sun climb into the mountains to the east like the first leg of a roller coaster. He'd bought a road map and a mechanical pencil at a drugstore, and now he unfolded the map, located the Grandview Hotel, and made a star with his pencil. At exactly seven Kyle appeared, and Earl followed him, quickly sketching his route on the map when he stopped to let Kyle walk ahead. Earl followed him all day, and the next. After a week of this, he had learned that his grandson made exactly the same journey at the same time each day, seven days a week, taking on average eight hours to push his roaring cart up alleys and over bridges, through a circuit of dumpsters—mostly for condos and
apartment buildings—that traversed a good part of the city and ended at a series of second-hand stores and street vendors, where he attempted to sell what he'd found. By the end, Earl had produced a meticulous map, and it delighted him that he was able to pinpoint the boy at any time of day.

But even after Earl completed the map he continued to follow his grandson, for no reason other than he liked to watch Kyle work, because work was the only way to describe what he was doing, whether he was getting paid for it or not. After much frustrated flipping through the manual, Earl had mastered his car's trip odometer and he clocked Kyle in at about twenty kilometres a day, which impressed him. At times Earl felt like the support car for one of those disabled people who wheelchaired across the country for charity. He watched his grandson tether impossibly large objects to the rickety cart and push them great distances to the places they could be sold or stashed for later. The boy's labour seemed to belong to another time. Earl thought of pharaohs, forced marches, treks across deadened earth in search of new beginnings. He found himself strangely proud of his grandson, proud of the steady way he carted the things he found and of the resourcefulness the task required. Earl knew that he himself had never worked so hard in his life.

The first thing Earl left was a rain poncho. It had kept him dry for years atop hydro poles, but he had no use for it now, clocking most of his time in his car. He left it poking from a grocery bag beside one of the dumpsters, and the next rainy day he was pleased to see Kyle wrapped in it. He remembered Easter egg hunts, hiding foiled eggs in the garden and tool shed for Kyle to find, ruddy joy in the kid's face as he tore around the yard like a crazed detective.

Now Earl leaves cheap sneakers and chickens, cases of sports drinks, tarps, and packages of size medium underwear, and it pleases him to think Kyle values these items that appear magically each evening in his dumpsters. He likes to think that his grandson feels he is, in some small way, lucky. And it is for this reason that Earl decides he has to at least right the chicken resting half on the bottom of the dumpster. Kyle might not eat it if he thinks it's contaminated. In truth, Kyle has taken everything set out for him so far, but the thought of him going hungry tonight is more than Earl can bear.

He attempts to pull the oak desk over but can't get it to budge. Then he scans the alley and spots a floral-upholstered armchair next to a scraggly bush and a motorcycle that likely hasn't kicked over in years. He drags the armchair toward the dumpster, walking it on its legs, halting intermittently to lean on his cane. He resists sitting in the chair because it smells of vomit and cat litter. Finally, he butts it up to the dumpster, then sets a foot on the cushion. Earl lets his cane fall to the ground and with a grunt he unsteadily mounts the chair, wobbling and sinking into its springs. He feels ridiculous, and for a moment smiles at the idea of someone passing by the alley and taking him for another old dumpster-diver about to take a plunge for sunken treasure. Earl kicks his leg up to the edge of the bin and feels his stockings cinch tight on his calves. He draws a bracing breath and attempts to hoist himself over the lip of the dumpster, wary to not land on the chicken. He is just about over when he hears a sick silence as if someone has placed two drinking glasses over his ears and the sky swings over him and the side of the dumpster heaves up, striking him mercilessly in his ribs, and it is difficult to unravel the
sound of the lid slamming from the faraway sound of his head against the bottom and all this is followed by a bleached, dizzy rushing in his ears.

In near perfect dark, Earl pulls himself into the fetal position. The rushing has subsided slightly and he begins to make out fibres of light where the lid of the dumpster is bent a little. His hip is blowing pain and at the side of his head there is wetness. His elbow is pressing into something. He feels the urge to stand but needs a minute more for his body to stop shaking. He fears for a second he is trapped. He can't remember the last time he was trapped somewhere, perhaps only in a childhood game. But he's not trapped, he just needs to collect himself. Then he realizes it's the birthday cake box that his elbow is sinking into. With his other hand he reaches and touches the dead houseplant. After the birthday cake is gone, I'll eat this, he thinks, crushing a brittle leaf in his fingers, chuckling to himself, until the pain in his hip forces his teeth together.

With the lid shut, the smell is sickening. Years of leaking garbage bags have left a gummy film on the dumpster's bottom. He attempts to pull his head away from the stench but there is more pain so he stops. While he waits for strength, the smell brings to Earl's mind with a staggering vividness the day of Kyle's accident, a few months after Sarah left for the cruise ship.

He and Kyle were at the dump in Earl's truck, stopped waiting for the junk truck ahead of them to be weighed, its sides built up with scrap wood and brimming with bald tires. “They do it so they know how much we got rid of when we leave,” he told Kyle,
who hadn't asked, but Earl thought the boy might find it interesting. The boy's eyes were fixed forward. “You don't have to talk if you don't want, doesn't bother me,” Earl said. “Anyhow, we have a job to do.” Earl briefly considered how much it would cost if he were to leave the boy there, or for himself for that matter. He calculated it wouldn't be much for either.

On a dusty road further in, they passed a bulldozer spattered with what looked like soiled toilet paper. Kyle rolled down his window and the truck was deluged with hot, putrid air, a smell so bad it graduated to taste. The little muscles of Kyle's jaw wiggled and Earl felt the dust starting to make paste in his eyes and he wiped at them with his cuff.

They entered what was like a coliseum of garbage, great slopes that loomed and shifted in the rippling heat. Outside their truck swarms of gulls, so far from the sea, shrieked pure treble and men were yelling at each other over the noise. A man in coveralls rapped at their window. He asked if they had any batteries, or paint, or wood, or metal. Earl turned to the boy; their cargo seemed somehow more his than anyone else's.