Alligator - Lisa Moore [43]
The woman who had sold him the suit banged on the bathroom door and told him to come out because they were closing and he’d been in there long enough.
She waited outside the door and he stood still on the other side and for reasons he could not understand, the noise of her fist on the door made him break into a cold sweat and he jammed his own clothes into the garbage bin and flung the door open and it frightened her and he saw all the lights were turned off and they were in the building alone.
Valentin went to a downtown bar and ordered five shots of vodka and sat in front of a chessboard. By eleven o’clock in the evening he had played fourteen games in four different bars and won each of them and had $325 in his pocket.
He slept in his new clothes on a bench in Bannerman Park that night.
In the morning he went to a house on Gower Street he’d heard about and purchased seven cartons of stolen cigarettes; he was back on the ship by suppertime and sold the cigarettes to the rest of the sailors by the package or singly and had $500 by the end of the evening. That night he went back into St. John’s and rented a room and slept on the floor. Before leaving Harbour Grace he stopped at the restaurant and paid the bill. He asked for the waitress who served him but she wasn’t there. He left a garishly large tip for her. That was sixteen months ago.
MR. DUFFY
THIS SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD girl had walked into the forest, Duffy was thinking, came upon his bulldozers, and she nearly destroyed them. Sugar doesn’t do much damage when you get down to it, but she had certainly tried to destroy them. She must have walked all night. The nights might still have been pretty cold in early July; she must have gone without sleep.The mother had called ahead to ask if she could be present at the meeting.
The mother is not welcome, Duffy shouted to the social worker. This is no time for the mother. The mother should have been around when her kid was dumping sugar into my heavy equipment. Where was the mother then?
He was sitting in a shed of plywood with one window and there were chainsaws and falling trees in the background and insects taking pieces out of him. He slapped bug repellent on his arms and they had an angry sheen. Sweat crept from under his hard hat, tingling in his hairline. The hard plastic band inside the hat was wet and it dug into his forehead. He could take the hard hat off talking on the phone but you forget to put it back on. Leave the hard hat on, he’s always saying. His shirt was stuck to his back.
He’d had to hire a truck and a crane and four mechanics. There was a guy came to him with his finger hanging by a flap of skin and blood made Duffy weak. These were some of the things he’d dealt with that morning. He had to shout to be heard, but the social worker was meek and keen and he took advantage of it.
The purpose of the meeting, the social worker said, is to give the incident a human face.
I have no interest in the mother, he shouted. Bring on the youngster. She wants a human face, I’ll show her a human face.
But the mother had ambushed him in the underground parking lot of Atlantic Place. Duffy saw she was an attractive woman; the fawn-coloured suit she wore fit snugly, a filmy scarf at her throat, pointy shoes with high heels, as he had seen all the women wearing this season in Montreal. Even without the heels she was a good three inches taller than him. Duffy liked tall women. He liked the way they commanded attention on a convention floor or in a ballroom. He liked a woman who could dress with formality in a heat wave.
I’m Beverly Clark, she said. I was a Holden. I think my mother knew your family. We were the Holdens from the East End. My father’s family had the Meat Market.
Even in the underground parking lot, where Duffy thought it might have been cool, the air felt close and smelled of warm tar and exhaust.
Now that Beverly Clark was right there in front of him he felt deflated. He looked for the daughter.
I forgot my purse,