Alligator - Lisa Moore [76]
Over at the other end of the stage, Peggy, from Grand Falls, topples off her milk carton onto the floor after the guy soaks her and she remains on the floor for a long time. Then Louise, on the milk carton in the middle, throws back her head and peels off her soaking shirt and holds a pose.
The crowd wants Colleen to take her shirt off too. They start to chant. The chanting gets more insistent, louder, faster, and then, out of nowhere, it has a slightly nasty edge.
There’s a definite whiff of menace.
Colleen is oblivious. She’s trying to high-five the half-naked girl beside her. Then a man separates from the crowd and it’s the guy she’s seen at the Ship who was watching her dance. He’s not bad-looking, this guy.
She hears, exactly then, the menace in the crowd, the weird collective nastiness coming to a boil.
Someone throws a pop can and it hits Frank’s shoulder and bounces off. The bartender takes Frank by the arm, but Frank shakes his arm free and puts up his fists and the bartender nods to the bouncer and the bouncer steps forward.
The bar has gone awkwardly silent.
It is part of the show, this stepping forward, this display of chest, clenched fist, and set jaw.
The cash register tings and the drawer flies open and the coins in the slots slap against each other. The ordinary noise of money changing hands and someone says about the hockey game and the moment passes. Everyone turns away from the stage and starts talking and handing around beer.
Colleen takes Frank by the hand and they work their way through the crowd and out onto the street and she says, Thanks a lot, whoever you are. It was a stupid thing for me to do, a wet T-shirt thing. Stupid.
Her hand is wet and her hair and her white T-shirt and her nipples are wet. A damp, fine gold chain, barely a thread, curves over the dip near her throat. She is holding his hand and he doesn’t know where to look. He knows not to look at her breasts or her mouth or her throat or her eyes and he looks at all of it. She is shivering and when he looks at her eyes they are so full of excitement he is mildly shocked.
Maybe you’d like to loan me your sweater, she says. He works himself out of the sweater as fast as he can. He gives it to her and she disappears in it and then she says, Smells nice. Nice sweater.
I have a place, he says.
FRANK
AS SOON AS Frank realized all of his money was gone, he put on the kettle and got out the plastic coffee cone and put a paper filter in it. He got the sugar bowl he’d bought at the Sally Ann out of the cupboard. It still had the piece of masking tape with 25¢ written in ballpoint pen. The day he bought the sugar bowl, there was a woman trying on a wedding dress.
She was scrawny and bucktoothed and the bones in her face were so misaligned that she appeared deformed. The two women who work at the Sally Ann on Waldegrave were excited about the wedding and they seemed to know the groom-to-be, whom they called Johnny and who seemed to be mentally retarded.
Frank found the sugar bowl in a bin of kitchen junk, spoons with enamel thumbnail pictures of P.E.I. and rusty ladles and a plastic spaghetti strainer that someone had put too close to the heat and had melted the side out of it.
The sugar bowl was pinwheel crystal, which his mother had had four wineglasses of, the same pattern; some client she cleaned for had given them to her as a Christmas present.
He picked at the tape with his finger now, and peeled it off and there was left a little skim of gritty dirt in the shape of the piece of tape that he rubbed with his thumb and it balled up there and he flicked his hand. Something about this flicking made it real to him how absolutely alone in the world he was, because he looked absurd doing it but there was no one to see.
At the Salvation Army that day in January he had filtered