Alligator - Lisa Moore [105]
The police went upstairs and they knocked on both doors and there was no answer. They went away for a couple of hours and when they came back they forced the door of Valentin’s apartment the same way they had done when the Inuit boy had hanged himself, and they came out with two beef buckets full of tiny bottles with rubber stoppers that were some sort of prescription drug.
Carol stood in the door of her bed-sit wringing her hands as the officers went up and down the stairs, and then they came out with several armloads of cigarette cartons. It took them a lot of trips over the stairs to confiscate all the stolen goods.
He was off that ship in Harbour Grace, she said.
She reached out and took one of the officers by the sleeve of his uniform and she said she was afraid Frank was dead.
When the police left she stood in the centre of her bed-sit trying to think what she could do. She got down on her knees and she gripped her hands under her chest and she prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost souls, and she prayed for Frank’s safety, she begged for it. She whispered. Please, please.
Later in the evening Carol heard someone walking around on the floor above her head. She had been watching television and she turned it off and listened. She heard footsteps and she got her housecoat and went up the stairs very quietly. She didn’t turn on the hall light.
Frank’s door was ajar and she pushed it open and the hinges squeaked. There was a girl standing at the window looking out onto the street, her dark, curly hair hanging past her shoulder blades.
Beyond the girl, Carol could see out the window to the street, and the crowd from the haunted hike had gathered under the trees.
Are you Frank’s girlfriend? Carol asked.
I owe him some money, the girl said. Carol walked up to the window to look out at the crowd.
I stole some money from him and I want to pay it back, the girl said.
The trees across the street were white, as if there’d been a snowfall. The window screen was covered in moths. Carol saw, on the roofs of the cars below, and on the hoods, a blanket of white moths, the wings opening and closing. A transport truck roared up the hill and moths lifted all at once and it looked like a Christmas card.
The worms, the girl said. They’ve transformed. The deflated waterbed was still in the centre of the room, the bedclothes lay on the floor from when Frank had hauled them off the bed.
Frank is gone, Carol said.
FRANK
HE WOKE IN the hospital and his jaw was wired shut. Everything he ate had to be liquefied. He could eat Jell-O, applesauce, and eggnog. He became an expert on what liquids had the most protein. He had an IV and most of his nourishment was coming through a tube going into his hand.
The nurses had poured sterile saline over the fabric that had melted into his skin during the fire, mostly patches of the nylon windbreaker, and they removed the nylon with tweezers and he gripped the metal bar of his bed and broke a sweat while they tugged at each piece. They let him rest between strips of fabric, for a moment or two, and water ran from the blisters. They told him he was brave, and it was going well, and it wouldn’t take much longer and it would all be fine soon. They said when they were done he could have a nice rest. They said these things while they let him rest but when they were tearing the fabric from his skin with the tweezers they worked in silence. He couldn’t feel the fabric they took off his upper arms and torso