Alligator - Lisa Moore [97]
They wore black pants with a red stripe down the leg and jackets with brass buttons and the man in front wore a high black fur hat. He gripped a sceptre near his chest and the silver knob at its tip caught the sun and glowed like an incandescent light bulb. Above, on the hill by the Kirk, a bagpipe player in a kilt stepped onto the ridge from amid a patch of alders and began to play.
The music swelled out and carried down the hill toward the harbour and vibrated in Kevin’s chest. There were some women who wore their hair in tight buns below their folded caps and they looked ahead too, just like the men. Then came younger cadets, their blue nylon uniforms whispering loudly as they marched past and he watched them go all the way down Long’s Hill, their hands swinging together, sunlight on the polished shoes and his mother swept him up in her arms and kissed his face all over. She kissed him so much he lost his breath.
She wrestled him onto the sidewalk and put a knee on his chest. She was laughing and saying, Who’s my boy, who’s my boy, who’s my boy, tickling him until he was overheated and shaking with laughter.
The sun dropped spears of light through the maple trees that leaned out over Long’s Hill, as the wind ruffled the leaves. He needed her to stop, he could not breathe, and when she did stop she was flushed. Her smile was big and her eyes were pale blue and the blue patches of sky through the leaves above her head were painfully bright.
Then she gripped his head, her hands over his ears, and she looked into his eyes with an intensity that had nothing to do with laughter.
It was a kind of intensity that had to do with the horror of her addiction and her struggle against it. He could see a vein in her temple pulsing, her breath smelled of cinnamon gum, her sweater was a pale pink angora and her jeans were acid wash and she wore lip gloss that smelled like watermelon. No one will ever convince him that she did not love him, that she had not always loved him. He was pressed under her knee on the sidewalk, the wind nearly knocked out of him, because she was afraid of losing him.
From this experience he learned that authentic love is capable of disappointing you. This disappointment can be paralyzing, but it does not diminish the quality of authentic love. Watch out, if you stand in the path of that kind of love, he thinks. It can leave you blazing and numb. It may not be worth it. But it is worth it.
As soon as the money was produced Frank had burned a dark red. He sat inert before his plate. It seemed to Kevin as if Frank saw no way to avoid putting the money in his pocket but neither could he bring himself to do it.
They had each felt a binding loneliness as children that they had no words for, nor would they have wanted to articulate it, if they could, because it was shameful and something they would struggle to avoid acknowledging for the rest of their lives. But each boy had felt the presence of this absence in the other and felt a reciprocal and grim admiration because they had both more or less withstood its gravitational pull.
Kevin stood up, got himself a spoon, and took a tub of ice cream from the freezer. He ate directly from the tub and then saw a smear of blood on the spoonful of vanilla ice cream he was about to put in his mouth. It was blood from his cold sore and it turned him and he swore softly and gave the ice-cream tub a toss into the garbage.
He cleaned the spoon off, opened the back door, and the sound of the rain and a fresh briny ocean smell filled the kitchen. Kevin began to sing a scat with hisses and machine-gun putt-putts and the grindings of a photocopier. Then he threw the spoon he had been tapping against the door frame into the sink and said, Fuck it, Frank, it’s only money. It doesn’t have to ruin our friendship, such as it is.
Kevin thought of the backyard at Mrs. Hallett’s, the heavy plastic jungle gym with wooden beams,