Alligator - Lisa Moore [7]
Neither of them wanted to go up and knock.
They’d seen him stumbling out of taxis and they’d heard him singing to himself at all hours. Then there had been nothing for two days, not a sound.
The very afternoon Frank had moved into the bed-sit he’d gone outside to the bus stop and caught the number two to the Village Mall and went to Sears and lay down on five or six beds. He lay there and spread his arms and was careful to keep his boots off the mattresses. A man came by and asked if he needed help and he said he wanted a waterbed and he’d want it delivered.
The man said that a waterbed was the most expensive bed you could buy. Frank was still lying on his back. The ceiling was a long way up.
I have lots of money, Frank said.
The police came out of the apartment and passed Frank and Carol on the landing and Frank became aware of himself, just standing in the way, and went back into his room and shut the door. Then he opened the door and stood watching in case someone needed help moving the body.
An ambulance arrived and two attendants got the body on a stretcher and with the help of one of the cops carried it down the stairs. They were giving instructions to each other, wincing under the weight. One of the attendants caught his knuckles on the banister on the second-floor landing. He had to stop and rest the stretcher on his hip and shake his hand because of the pain. He’d grazed the skin on each of his knuckles on the left hand and blood got all over the front of his white shirt. Frank got him some paper towel and he wound it around his hand and dropped the roll and it went bouncing down the stairs and rolled all the way to the front door.
Frank and the Inuit guy had shovelled the walk together one morning after a snowstorm when the sun had come out and the street was an achy ultra-white and the ploughed banks were way above their heads. All down the street cars were buried.
Children had come out in their snowsuits and their voices rang out in the clear air and the chink of shovels. People were shovelling and veils of snow trailed after each shovelful and hung in the air sparkling. The pavement, where it showed through, was as shiny and black as patent leather. The traffic could hardly move.
Frank and the Inuit guy nodded to each other and they shovelled for more than an hour. They didn’t introduce themselves. The moment for doing that came and lasted and passed without either of them speaking up.
The Inuit guy had sunglasses on and a yellow anorak and his hair was blue black and he shovelled effortlessly and took regular breaks to lean on his shovel for a moment and still made more progress than Frank.
The young nurse who lives across the street, a new single mother, was backing out of her driveway over a ploughed hill and she made the engine rev until it was squealing. They went over to push and Frank gave her directions on which way to turn her wheels and saw her eyes in the rear-view and they were brown and he would give anything to kiss her and make love to her because he had been watching her since she moved in, and she’d call out hi and wave and sometimes that was all anybody said to him in the run of a day.
He and the Inuit guy leaned into the fender of her car with all their might. The Inuit guy had pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and he was grinning at Frank and he knew, had seen Frank looking at the girl in the rear-view, and they were laughing and rocking this big mother of a car and finally it gave and the girl covered them from the waist down with slush, and she then pulled over a little farther down the road and ran back to them and brushed at both of them with the end of her scarf, almost down on her knees flicking the slush off, saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and he and the Inuit guy grinned at each other.
Frank got out of the shower wrapped in the only towel he had. He lifted a shirt off the pile of shirts and, holding it by the shoulders, gave it a little shake and the tissue paper wafted to the floor. He had dried his back but he was damp with a fine perspiration