Alligator - Lisa Moore [49]
It came back his way.
It was part reprimand and part consolation.
But there it was at the beginning again. He looked off stage where Dr. Callahan was sitting at the piano and smiling at him with an exaggerated clown smile, big, hopeful, and sinister. Dr. Callahan taught in the folklore department at the university and was a former Christian Brother and was all about preserving the old jigs and folk dances. Sweat was dripping down Dr. Callahan’s ruddy face; his hands were raised over the keys for Frank to see.
His hands were about to come down and Frank must dance.
Dr. Callahan had one tooth in front that was grey, and the tooth frightened Frank because Dr. Callahan had said it was dead. Everything was in the tooth: all of Dr. Callahan’s fight against despair and his private, mystical arguments with God and the complicated love he had for tap dancing.
Frank chose to concentrate on a part of himself that maybe didn’t exist ever before, which he now thinks of as his will, and he made it burst into flame. He filled with something like rage or flame and decided to nail the goddamnjesus spot to the floor with his tapping so it never moved again.
He was, at ten, the best tap dancer in the province until Dr. Callahan gave him a beard rub.
Dr. Callahan said, Come and have a beard rub, Frankie. He took Frank’s face between his hands and stretched out his unshaven chin and rubbed it against Frank’s cheeks, first one, then the other, making his skin raw.
You danced well, Frank, Dr. Callahan said. The next day there was a rash where the stubble had roughed up Frank’s skin and his mother saw it in the rear-view of the taxi and asked him about it and when he said how he got it the taxi driver opened the window and spat a big hawk. His mother lowered her sunglasses, which were sitting in her hair, so they covered her eyes and she turned to look out the passenger window and Frank never went to tap dancing again.
But he loved dancing. After his dance in the spotlight there was a pause and the clapping started. It came in overlapping waves and was multi-toned and fell away and was renewed and grew louder and louder. It lasted so long in the dark he started to wander off the stage but Dr. Callahan ran into the spotlight with Frank. The professor took his hand and lifted it and the clapping got even louder and it lasted longer still. Frank’s mother had been surrounded by other parents who kept telling her how talented Frank was.
They couldn’t even get out of the auditorium because of the adults pressed against his mother to congratulate her and to ruffle his hair and tell him he was a fine boy.
He’d like to dance with the girl, Colleen, that’s what he’d like. He’d like to have his hand on the small of her bare back between the low-riding jeans and the knot in her black halter top, lay his hand just above the two dimples over her bum.
He’d like to move her around a nearly empty dance floor in Mount Pearl, or some other place where she wouldn’t know anyone except him. A war veteran sitting at the bar probably with medals on his shoulder and five fat women sitting at the slot machines in the back and some red spotlights and blue spotlights and a dance floor with nobody else on it.
He wants that girl in his arms worse than he’s wanted anything for a long time. It’s an overwhelming inarticulate compelling want that makes him lose track of who he is.
He wants to tell her about his hot-dog stand and how hard he’s worked to get it and how much money he makes. He wants to say I can make this much money in a night. He doesn’t want to say it, but he wants her to know it.
He would like to say, I don’t do drugs.
He would like to tell her about the Inuit guy who hanged himself in the apartment over his at Christmastime.
How would that be, if he told her that, him a total stranger? But he would like to get it off his chest. And about the Russians, the drug dealers who moved in above him when the room became available. He wants to talk to