Alligator - Lisa Moore [81]
He understood, or thought he understood, the modern-day ritual of handing the ashes on to a grieving relative so that they may be scattered. He had imagined the sort of weather and the location along the trail where he could scatter the ashes.
The urn had cost $700. He doubted his mother had spent that much money on a luxury item ever in her life. The urn was solid brass and understated in design. For whatever reason he felt the urn was company.
Now the ashes were soaking wet and it was a travesty. He could imagine Valentin getting the door open and destroying the waterbed without compunction. The waterbed he saw, now that it had been slashed, was nothing more than a vanity.
But there was something so remote and alien about desecrating a grave that Frank felt weary beyond measure. He was also aware of the bald simplicity of the act.
If Valentin wanted money Frank would give him money. He would give him whatever it took because he understood, plainly, Valentin was stronger than he was. He sank to his knees and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw flecks of light. First, he would see if money was enough. If not, then he would give him the hot-dog stand.
COLLEEN
COLLEEN HAD NOW attended the first meeting of juvenile delinquent mural painters who gathered at the Murphy Centre and the other delinquents were disgusting. They slouched, stank of body odour, and cigarettes, and they all wore velour pants from Zellers that hung down to reveal butt crack. They had chips and Pepsi for breakfast; their fathers were pimps and their mothers sniffed glue. They had the look, each of them, of low-intelligence, which was the nicest way she could think to put it.
Colleen felt very uncomfortable about spending August on a scaffold negotiating the class differences and flares of temper and social injustice that had created the divide between her and them, which was huge. They were assholes and she wasn’t.
A huge divide, she figured.
She recognized a girl from Grade 8. Kelly Fitzgerald, known at that time as Fitzy, who had once attacked Colleen behind the school with her gang of stringy-haired, raw-looking girls from Chalker Place.
The girls taunted her and threw a few rocks and she had run but they were on top of her and had knocked the wind out of her. There were about ten of them and they held her arms and legs, though she writhed in the dirt below them and wheezed, desperate to get her breath back.
Fitzy had a stick with a used condom on the end of it. She held the stick over Colleen’s head and told her to suck it or they’d beat the living shit out of her.
She lowered the condom an inch at a time, and the girls held tightly, grunting with the effort, murmuring consoling noises, as if they were administering medicine.
They asked her what she was going to do about it, and if she thought she was so hot now, and they said they’d heard she’d been doing the same thing Friday night with lots of guys and they’d heard she was good at it, and they promised it wasn’t going to hurt a bit if she just did what she was told.
Fitzy had one of her knees pressed into Colleen’s forehead and she had Colleen’s jaw wrenched open with one hand and was leaning over her upside down and her face was red with exertion and her eyes sparkled. She was lowering the condom down toward Colleen’s mouth with little jerks and Colleen saw there was a milky white glob of sperm in the nub at the bottom of it.
Colleen saw that Fitzy’s mouth was open too, unconsciously mimicking Colleen’s, the way a mother opens her mouth when spoon-feeding a baby.
The condom hung close enough to Colleen’s mouth and nose that she could smell its humanness. It smelled of latex and rot and fish and some drunken girl in the back of a car because she had nowhere else to go and cologne and cigarettes and failure and shuddering release. Then a police car pulled lazily onto the Holy Heart parking lot and the gang took off.
And here was Fitzy again, at the Murphy Centre, the