Annabel - Kathleen Winter [105]
24
Sugar Plum
THE WIND IN ST. JOHN'S was not like Labrador wind. Here it was damp. It sneaked under Wayne’s jacket and unnerved him until he had got a hot coffee in him at Shelley’s. Forest Road was not a home, and as the winter progressed he regretted having rented it. Home, when he had finished making his deliveries for the day, became Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, between George Street and William’s Lane; or the Ship Inn, where he heard old unaccompanied songs on Wednesday nights; or Afterwords Books, across from the courthouse, where nag champa incense mixed with the aromas of free coffee and musty editions of How Green Was My Valley and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Home was the alleys through which Wayne walked back to Forest Road, looking in other people’s lit windows where there were children, sunflowers in vases on the floor, and fireplaces that had once burnt coal but now had sheets of tin screwed over them and little electric heaters on the hearths.
Spring aches on Forest Road, once you get past the gingerbread houses. There isn’t one piece of softness through March or April. Oh Henry wrappers in the gutter. Black snowbanks with bubbling holes. Every dog turd excreted over the winter has found its way to the edge of the sidewalk, and these too have the bubbles. Everything melting has the bubbles. You don’t want to stand on the bubbling crust, but the town does not clean the sidewalks. Wayne had no choice but to crunch the mess as he walked back and forth between Forest Road and the harbourfront, where at least there were boats, cranes, women with high heels, men with briefcases, and street people sitting in the doorways of coffee shops, begging, their dogs wearing cowboy scarves.
He saw a reflection of his loneliness on the street, where regulars wove in with the people who worked in the shops and banks and law offices. He watched who gave panhandlers and buskers money and who did not. He watched the constabulary clear corners where men played busted harmonicas. He learned names. Caroline Yetman stood playing a Sears guitar at the bottom of the courthouse steps. Paul Twomey sat on his parka in front of the Gypsy Tearoom making portraits with broken pastels. Betty Flanagan pushed her shopping cart from the east-end post office to the old Woolworth’s building in a pair of silver platforms.
“Have you been to Corner Brook?” Betty asked Wayne. “I used to teach school in Corner Brook. I taught at Broadway School for seventeen years.”
Hobo Bill sat on George Street reading Dostoevsky. “I have never,” he told Wayne after asking for a quarter, “asked a woman for spare change. And I never will.”
Joanne Dohaney, the oldest waitress at Shelley’s, daily gave Hobo Bill three coffees, a BLT, and a tub of vege-table barley soup.
“That Bill,” Joanne told Wayne, “has not had a bath for the past however many years I’ve seen him around Water Street. I don’t know how you can stand out there talking to him.”
“I don’t have all that many people to talk to.”
“You got no friends? A fine-looking fellow like you — if you combed your hair and tucked in that shirt. You look like you could talk about anything you wanted. More intelligent than a lot of them out there. How come you don’t make more of yourself? You could get a nice smart girl up at the university.”
“There was only ever one girl I liked talking to.”
“That’s what you put me in mind of. Someone up at the university. You’re not though, are you? What girl?” Joanne Dohaney didn’t mind asking a customer anything. This one would be out of her hair after his second refill. It wasn’t like she had to sit and listen to him all day.
“When we were kids. Her name was Wally Michelin. She wanted to be an opera singer.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted to be the sugar plum fairy.” Joanne hoisted a tray filled