Alligator - Lisa Moore [30]
He drank the last shot and ordered five more and decided the OxyContin addict wasn’t going to show. He’d lost Anton to a shadowy corner of the bar. Anton was small-boned and bald and was now leaning over a young woman, his hand spread on the wall near her head. Valentin watched as he leaned forward to kiss the woman and a blue spotlight that had been blocked by Anton’s shoulder struck the pints of beer sitting on the bar: one, two, three.
Valentin believed that groupings of three precipitated a streak of luck. He had a habit of counting stairs and neigh-bourhood blocks, or cars of a certain make, and believed in a system of recrimination that was visited upon anyone who didn’t pay attention to these signs. It was important to be fluent in the language of signs and never to stand still when the signs advised action. He was convinced that the way to escape a dark fate was never to stand still. Traces of superstition, of one sort or another, infected every decision he made.
Earlier today he’d ordered soup at Tim Hortons and watched the girl dip the ladle three times and when he stepped outside he’d found a five-dollar bill in the gutter. He has a recurring dream of his mother stirring soup that fills him with exploding ambition. Always the same, simple moment, steam rising from the pot, wisps of her hair falling away from a long dark ponytail, she turns and smiles at him, she touches the top of his head, and then she bends and folds him in her arms; he wakes full of abstract terror. He wants to get ahead. Getting ahead is the way he thinks of it; racing toward a different end than his mother’s, whatever it was. She had gone into St. Petersburg to find work, they’d heard later from the neighbours, and they had lost track of her altogether. They never heard from her again.
There was a girl at the pool table, Valentin saw, who was wearing white leather spike-heeled boots that were laced up to her thighs. He watched the girl from the corner of his eye. He put the chess pieces down on the board, setting up a new game. They were pieces carved from marble, they looked like Inuit hunters and the rooks were walruses and the pawns were seals. Valentin held the queen in his fist and moved his thumb over her carved cloak.
Sometimes when the girl at the pool table bent over to line up her shot, one of her boots lifted off the ground. There were seven balls left on the green felt. Valentin gestured to the bartender and the man poured a pint and brought it to the girl just before she took her shot and she looked around the bar.
When she finally glanced at Valentin he tipped his shot glass. The girl turned back to the table and she struck the ball sharply with a hard jut of the cue and everything on the felt rolled and smacked against each other. She sank three balls.
He would set fire to Isabel Turner’s house and he would collect the insurance. He would start her on some business venture and he would get out of Newfoundland. He would never return, nor think of it again. He had come to a cold and ugly island that hardly existed, could not be found on many maps. He was nowhere. He could imagine the house on Morris Avenue collapsing in the heart of a roaring fire.
COLLEEN
BEVERLY AND COLLEEN were in the food court of Atlantic Place and Beverly had chosen a table as far from the one with the four police officers as possible.The courtrooms and Colleen’s meeting with the youth diversion officer were upstairs. Her daughter would soon go up and meet Mr. Duffy and he would have his say and Colleen would spend the rest of her summer, the long, hot month of August, doing community work, begrudging all of life, Beverly’s existence and her own. And Beverly would have to be supportive and motherly throughout. It was her job; what was expected. She was tired of her daughter and the heat and her own loneliness. She wanted to drive to the ocean and get in. She wanted to feel that kind of cold, end up with hypothermia,