The Journey Prize Stories 22 (22 page)

I
am a man with a secret. It fires up under my ribs as I push my cart along. I am a man with a knife under his coat; I smile like a bachelor tripping down his latest conquest's steps. If the boys of the neighbourhood (the rough shells, the scamps) do not trouble me now – frying bigger fish – it is because they do not know me; not as a man with a secret.

Sometimes it snows and my wheels gum up; then the metal of my cart's handle is colder to the touch than a nun forgotten in a snow-drift. I push my way along as best I can, my worldly possessions always in sight. My blue blanket and my bowl. Pushing this cart up and over small mountains of rubble, broken down wooden fencing that once upon a time were trees.

The boy said he'd found something I had better see. The others have jowly, sulphurous skin; but my boy is dainty amongst the banana peels and bomb craters. A slim hard face, and he fingered his knife as he spoke; the grip was decorated with ivory pictures of fox skulls. And yet he is a boy; they used
to fall over their Latin pronunciation, their -
ibus
and -
imus
. He led me onwards; I wondered if there were more boys, more boys watching us from the broken windows across the way, pointing rifles.

When I was a priest, a million years ago, I was respected. The Gods are all in hiding now but I remember their faces. I remember the God with the drooping moustache, and the God of staying in bed. I am the one man in the world who knows them. Times have moved on, as our editorialists are fond of saying. I push my cart along and I keep the Gods with me: the sad-faced God and the God of building canoes. I stop to pick up pieces of postering; I pull chewing gum from my beard, when the mood strikes me. The boys in the neighbourhood throw boulders and pebbles and curse me, and I pray reverently to the God of knowing my own mind.

First there was a bank. I wasn't happy leaving my cart outside, and I left it and walked back to it and left it and walked back to it; but he locked it up with the chain he kept around his waist. If anyone wanted to take it they would have to carry it. Good enough, he said. The bank was a dusty wooden vault with green shades over tellers' lamps. Every teller's window was shattered but they had left the shades, I don't know why. Smoke had darkened the blinds long ago, it was terribly cold. I could imagine sportswriters working there; I mumbled something to the God of hair. I saw the body of a rat; are we supposed to hate baby rats also? I wondered where the bankers used to take their lunches, naturally. Not the proles with their brown bread sandwiches, but the executives, the captains of industry. They built a tower over the branch; but the boy said he wanted to show me something different. If
you were my charge, I said, I would have kept you far hence; this is a treacherous place. His eyelashes were wet little ballerinas. I had a secret hope, of course. We all have our secret hopes, to keep us insane; just when we think we are starting to turn blue they pull us back into the magenta once more. He pointed to a gold ring in the floor. He asked me what I thought. I shrugged. He bent, all bones like an ortolan, and pulled on it: trapdoor. He got a board from a smouldering pile in the corner and rubbed a rag onto it to make it hot. He led me on.

When I was a waiter I likely served their parents. Perhaps I suggested, while knowing my place, the wine that served as the aphrodisiac spark of their getting. I was a waiter in some fine establishments, you see, in some of the finest establishments, and just today when I stopped to pick up a good long rectangle of corrugated cardboard for bedding I thought of myself, in black bow tie, waltzing through the dining room with a bowl of walnut scented gnocchi, peerless. My clients, my clients would ask the maitre d' for me, especially. They took the same table each Friday evening. The wallpaper was embossed cream. Now their children beat me with broom handles. Though we believed in the same Gods. We were dying out then, we were all dying out; but I remember a white-faced Duchess pulling me down towards her, gripping my forearm, for dear life, to whisper:
Charles!
And she would ask me: what do you know of the God with the butler? Such might be her concerns. The God they put on trial, have you heard anything? My clients, my clients knew that I had been a priest, hundreds of thousands of years before, and though it might seem socially awkward – or politically awkward, given
the times – to ask, such was their devotion that they did ask. People with true manners can break the rules, from time to time,
because they do so with grace
.

The boys live in tents in the vacant lots. They shit in rubble and eat cats. Memory is the gouger and memory is the salve. I sing to the God of foolishness as I walk, I joke with the God who murdered the old washerwoman. The boys wear bandanas and carry knives. They scream out scurrilous threats to my manhood, such as it is. I look for cans of food, and there are places where you will be given fetid soup. And there are people trying to be good, who wish to share, who will not send you away, at least until they tire of you. Sometimes I sit in my cart, when it is raining. I push myself under an awning and lick the washy rills off my cheeks, they taste of arse. Sometimes I collect enough bottles to trade in for a delicious hot dog. Bubbles of grease collecting into lines. As I walk I keep my eye on the building pediments and I see the Gods perched on the roofs like hawks.

We were in one of the oldest temples. A place that was ancient before ancient things were conceived of. Murky air, the Egyptian smell, and sneaker and boot-prints in the thick white dust. And we could feel the stone jut so slightly out where once there had been wood panels; my hopes welled again. How cold it was! Something moved against a wall to terrify me. My boy waved his torch at it. The God of eels. I was full of the past: I could see acolytes kneeling in a row, I could think our rites were performed here, and here, and here, a million years ago. Tears welling? I wanted to thank him: me, thank a boy, for bringing me to this place. The priest thanks the ephebe: all that is solid melts into air. He went away to the right; I regretted
us making any noise at all, here, I breathed in our scent. His thin shoulders, the two of us in the crypt: Sandro and I in the wine cellars, the night I was fired. Then in the dark, in the burning shadows, he showed me a golden bird – and I lost my breath. We were silent. It is a great and powerful God, I murmured, unsure of myself, unsure of my judgment. Can it do anything, he asked me. His yellow and black smiling mouth. He said: I knew you'd tell us if it was worth anything.

My position had become if not unsafe then at least unsavoury. There was a sense of the best of times having passed. The Gods had sanctified my clients; the Gods had layered the world into sponge and icing. What mulch would follow their departure? My clients were anxious. I leaned in closer. Whispering, quickly, so as not to be seen: The Gods cannot be harmed, I told the wealthy. Do you think the God of the twenty-four hours is mortal? The God of cunning tribes persists, I told them. Full of hope they would watch me roll out the desserts.

When I was a priest I caressed these heads. I trained them. I was a man in charge of boys. I took my work seriously because I knew that I was one of a long line, and I knew that these boys would one day become men, and would need a code and an order tucked inside them, a map gradually unfurling in the esophagus. I led them in rites and songs, their parents trusted me. Parents brought me their most prized possessions, their boys. They came to my temple and left them with me with a solitary instruction: Mould this wet lump into a man.

One of the boys has curly hair. Another's locks are lank and soft as an otter blanket. One of the boys has studs in his eyelid,
this is something I do not condone. Mine is a soft one, he is less of a criminal. When the five of them chase me down the alley and kick my cart over and stamp my bedding into icy puddles and try to set fire to my cart and leave me bashed and bleeding, I sometimes feel he is acting more half-heartedly than the rest, or at least thinking of hanging back. I focus on him, his gritted teeth. If you had come into the Doré I'd have brought you a strawberry nectar. Not from the menu; something special from André, especially for the young master. Say this to yourself as you count your teeth with your cut tongue and scream. On the journey home, after dropping him back at school, the mother would say to the father: what a good, kind man Charles is. We must remember him at Christmas. And the father, sitting behind the driver, nods. The same quick nod as his boy. Reading the editorial page. With half a sirloin for the young master. Half a steak for the God of half steaks. I tell him about the God of flight. I sit in the sun and sing and fart: the Gods pray to
Me
.

When the policemen last brought me in, they fed me gruel; my cell mates beat me with the plastic tray. So the policemen kept me apart. They had their orderlies wash me and so I saw my privates. They gave me a new pair of pyjamas. The inspector was a woman. I came about, I came to, they sat me in a chair. She told me that the problem was not that they could not find the perpetrators; what I was describing was not considered a crime at all. So she had no choice but to let me go.

Three times until it came he wrenched at the bird and then lifted it off the wall. He brought it to the dusty table we'd pulled into the middle of the room. The boy stepped back,
and so I began, knowing that I was full with the God. And if I did not remember the precise detail in its precise configuration, still I was in the place with the altar and the wafer and the helping hand. I moved my hands across the bird. I spoke to the winking God of Deathbed Renunciation. I broke off. I told the boy: we perform the rite to step into the God's world, away from our own. We must needs be calm, if we are to succeed. It is best done at nightfall, I told him, but here we can forget both the sun and the moon. He spat on the floor. What's a rite, he asked me. I began again; I moved my hands over the bird and said what words I could. Here was sweat on my forehead, sweat in this cold place. I thought I saw the bird spread its wings but it stayed where it was. The boy was playing: he rested his knife blade on the ripped fabric over his thigh, I could see the naked skin in the torchlight. I said to the boy: come closer, I need you, I need you to help me.

Mice whistle at me in the nighttime, they bite my scalp. But how can I send them away? They smirk at me from restaurant windows. It is hard to maintain the rituals. The boys have their own Gods now. But why must it be so hard to think, to recall? Especially if I am a cupbearer, as I think I am. What is lacking in me now is clarity of spirit. One must be able to think, if one is to pray. The Gods require attention, when things things things of the world bustle in. I mean crows perched on rotting telegraph poles, I mean an empty chariot, I mean that I can hardly recall the duties I owe to the God of guides or the God of form. Hail scatters down on glass, though there are no clouds. Do you remember I found this cart a block from a supermarket? It is mine. I wiped myself on your newspaper. Help me to persist.

Know what I think, he asked me. I had my hands at my sides. How can I plant where there is no soil? You want to know what I think. I was watching the bird. He said: You're a dirty filthy old man, aren't you. You're a dirty filthy horrible old man, that's what I think. I was looking at the bird. You brought me down here to have your wicked way with me, didn't you. Brought me down to your hole because you like to finger little boys, don't you. You like to poke your finger in. I heard steps, I saw figures approaching, but I knew that the God of tight corners would protect me. I mumbled the words.

I tried to tell them what a God is, I told them about the wind and the rain. They wanted drugs. They encircled me, smelling of warfare, twiddling their knives. I thought they might like the God of travelling across the country with only one shirt. Their faces perked up a little and they made jokes about rape and pushed at me. I started to falter: did the God carry his own spear or was it his dear friend's? I was lost: walking through an abandoned house, your foot crashes through the floor boards. They could see it. This is a God, I said to them, with my hands far apart; but it used to be our God. I was thinking of the God of hermaphroditism. I said: Now it is my God. We have the treatment, my boy said. A God is made by rite and prayer, I said. Do you know what rite and prayer means? The Gods used to come to men at nightfall, I said, by the evening lamp, I said again. We have the treatment for dirty old men, he said. They used to whisper. Threatening murmurs, gobs of snot spitting at my feet. I waited for the God of steaming or the God of money to come and tell me.

We have the treatment for dirty filthy old men. We do. Five of them now, faces sweaty, smirking, they were coming closer. We have the treatment. They set about me with brass on their hands. With the first blow I tottered; the pain in my jaw and my neck and shoulder, it made me think of the God who withstood everything. The first kick in my groin clenched me double. Going down I saw the bird, would they use it on me as a weapon, I thought; but they had weapons of their own. Dirty, filthy, they were chanting. I was lying on the floor, they kicked me onto my side and onto my back and onto my front, my organs protested, the vomit filled my bloody mouth. My eye disappeared into its own jelly. I made no effort to protect myself: the God of the soul clenched between your teeth.

Carolyn Black
is a Toronto writer whose work has appeared in
EVENT, Exile, The New Quarterly
, and
Room
. Her story “Thirty-Seven Women” can be read online at
Joyland.ca
. “Serial Love” is part of a completed manuscript of short stories about the body in peril.

Andrew Boden
's stories and essays have recently appeared in
Descant, Vancouver Review, Other Voices, Storyteller
, and the anthologies
Nobody's Father: Life Without Kids
and
The Best of Every Day Fiction Two
. He is currently working on a novel and co-editing a collection of personal essays about mental illness. He lives and works in Burnaby, British Columbia.