Annabel - Kathleen Winter [104]
“I’m in the process of buying it.”
“Clean?”
“I’m getting it repainted this week.”
“Inside and out? You want a spotless vehicle, Wayne.” Frank King was egg-shaped. His skin was glossy and his hands jewelled. He had a moustache whose ends he kept clipped. He wore a gold chain, and when he wanted to make a point, he pointed. “I’m not putting any of my refrigeration units in a less than hygienic situation. They don’t call me the Franchise King for nothing. I regard each of my drivers as a franchisee. All franchises, my friend, have standards. That is what makes a franchise a franchise, Wayne. Standards.”
Wayne took the number seven bus home. Six Ethiopian men got off at the Evening Telegram building. A woman in the front seat held a pink comb with half its teeth missing. She combed the first few inches of her hair. The rest looked as if it had not been combed since she was a child. When the bus got to Empire Avenue, she pulled a cap over the combed part of her hair, covering it completely.
The pest-control van was fourteen years old and had three flat tires. Its sign said INQUIRE AT TONY'S AUTO TECH BEHIND ELIZABETH DRUGS.
Tony rolled out from under a Buick on a set of mech-anic’s wheels. “That Vandura,” he told Wayne, “belongs to my brother-in-law. I can tow her into the shop. You’re going to need at least a new floor in her and a timing belt, and brake pads and probably a couple of ball joints if you’re going to pass inspection. It’s liable to cost you five to seven hundred to get her roadworthy.”
“I need ‘Pest Control’ painted over. I’m thinking of using it for meat.”
“You need the whole body done?” Tony looked as if he thought painting over “Pest Control” was frivolous.
“How about you do whatever you can for this.” Wayne fished in his jeans and handed Tony half a dozen hundred-dollar bills.
Tony sat up and looked them over. “Where did you get these?”
“Bank of Montreal, Goose Bay.”
Tony held one against the caged bulb that lit up the Buick’s transmission. He looked Wayne in the eye. It was a look no woman normally gets to see. “You seem like a decent enough fellow but I had to ask.” He shoved the bills in his jeans. “I know guys who have garbage bags full of hundreds that are worth no more than twenty each.”
Wayne took the time to learn about the meat he sold from the van. Ribs were his most popular item, and after that pork roasts and lamb shoulder chops. Old women rattling around by themselves in the biggest houses on Circular Road wanted lights, hearts, tongues, and livers, and Wayne convinced Frank King to let him sell those instead of sending them to Morrison’s factory on the Southside to be mixed with fish offal for pet food.
It grew colder, and Wayne had to carry ribs, chops, and hearts along paths the householders had shovelled, carry them in his arms like children, only they were not children, they were slabs of flesh and blood: red, marbled with fat. He wondered if anyone besides himself saw the meat as he saw it, raw and powerful, having the power to keep living bodies hot in the wind and ice. He carried meat past black railings, past a wreath on a door, past lights strung across a bay window. Women took the meat out of his arms; they embraced it and took it down hallways to the lit hearts of their houses. He wondered what it was like to be such a woman. They roasted it and ate it and gave it to their husbands and babies — did they think of the meat as powerful and important? From their faces Wayne thought they did not, and he felt more alone than ever, so he went to Water Street.
He walked to Bowrings and bought a stainless steel food mill, like the one through which Jacinta had milled cooked apples to separate the applesauce from the seeds and core. He visited Woolworth’s, past the sad-eyed man with his sooty Telegram bag slung on his shoulder, past the bubble-gum machines where children begged their mothers for nickels so they could win the black gumball, past the orange booths and