All We Want Is Everything (13 page)

“What is this?”

She waves a photograph in my direction as I step out of the car. An ultrasound of a baby with four arms flaps in her hand. Find me. Come home.

“Who would leave this in a mailbox, Lucas? Is everything okay with Janet?”

I yank open the front door and flick on the light. The plate Janet smashed still sits on the floor swept up in a corner. I pull myself a glass of water from the tap.

“What does it look like to you?”

She dangles the picture far from her face like it’s rotting.

“Is she pregnant, Lucas? Is this hers? Is that why you kicked her out?”

“I didn’t kick anybody out and no one is pregnant. Jesus. You know she left on her own. She’ll come back here when she’s ready. When she realizes it’s safe. And it is safe. I don’t even work inside there. You know that. Shit, it’s safe inside too. All of this shit over nothing.”

The cat purrs against Mrs. Gibbons’ breasts. Her dress is a dark red spattered with flecks of dishwater. She isn’t wearing a bra and she’s shaking the ultrasound in her hand. Another postcard. Her nails look all chewed up.

“Mine didn’t come back. Jack left and I’m the one carrying the debt. The man had more credit cards than brain cells. He’s gone now. New name, new life, new wife, I’m sure, ’til he gets bored again. Not that I blame him now. It looks like everyone is leaving. They’re not even waiting for a sale anymore. And now we’ve got people leaving, well, this… stuff in our mailboxes?”

“One baby with a tail and the whole neighbourhood goes apocalyptic. They’ll all come back when they realize how much money they’re throwing away. Wait and see.”

I turn on the television. Flicking through the channels, I find a baseball game I can ignore. The score is 13-3. You don’t come back from something like that.

Mrs. Gibbons leans in the doorway.

“Why don’t you just go? I mean, a job is a job, but you can’t really be expected to stay…”

I yank off my work boot and chuck it into the corner. I peel off the sock. Badly knit bone pushes at the skin around my ankle and the top of my foot. The old root is what Janet called it. Mrs. Gibbons takes a strong interest in the ball game as I massage the scar tissue. My sock still smells like algae. Most of my toenails flaked off years ago.

“I’m surprised they let me keep this job, honestly. First chance I have to run after somebody, they’ll have me inside stamping paperwork and sorting out the mail. It’s not like they do a physical or anything. We’re basically rent-a-cops, not marines. I don’t even get pepper spray.”

Mrs. Gibbons sits down on the floor by my busted foot. She doesn’t say anything, just lays a hand on the jutting ankle bone and turns her eyes to the screen.

“Plus, when you think about it, I turn and run, what’s that say? I know how safe the plant is, I know the codes, I’ve seen the blueprints, you know? We print all that shit in the brochures, and it’s no joke. We aren’t some crazy Russians translating an owner’s manual for the fifteenth time from Greek or something. I might not know how the atoms divide or how they harness all that power exactly, but I know what I can see. And I see half the seaboard lit up every night without fail. I see safety measures put in place, physical precautions put in place. I’m not relying on some divine intervention to save me because I can see these things. Know them. Confront them daily.”

Mrs. Gibbons doesn’t reply, so I show her all the photos. The abnormal and the broken things Janet discovers each week in the tabloids. Mrs. Gibbons spreads them out across the floor. She counts them, loses count, counts them again. Sixty-three photographs, each cut like a postcard. I lie on the couch with the television muted while she tells me about her husband. About the gun collection in the basement. The nephew he’d slapped at her family reunion. The bouts of erectile dysfunction. The videotapes he stashed under the mattress to give his future son. To teach him how to be a man.

“I made sure to burn all of those. Not that we had a boy. Just the principle, you know?”

Around the ninth inning she begins to drift off. Janet never could fall asleep before me. She liked to watch me, she said. Another home run and there are fireworks on the screen: 14–3. I stare at my foot, waiting for it to glow purple, for the cracks to fill up again like they did out there in the water. The fireworks dissipate. The crowd cheers. I wait to be whole again. Another player steps up to the plate, but the game is already settled.

Mrs. Gibbons is asleep on the floor with Janet’s photographs sprawled around her when I wake up. The clock reads noon. On the television, baseball has given away to a monster movie marathon. I watch Ebirah battle with Godzilla in the ocean, green blood swirling around the specks of people floundering in the water. I always liked monster movies. You know where you stand with someone like King Kong. He can’t escape, can’t hide, can’t linger in your water supply waiting for you to brush your teeth. King Kong can’t sneak up on anybody.

Outside the door, I can hear the cat mewling to get back inside.

When I was a kid, my friend Chuck Borden snuck a snake into our tent at camp. Wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I lay awake convinced every shifting blade of grass was that garter. Holding my breath, I lay parsing out the seconds ’til the inevitable bite came. I lay that way throughout the night, listening to the rise and fall of little chests for a hiss or slither to alert me. Every sound was a forked tongue probing my ear. In the morning, I found the snake in an old margarine container. Chuck had forgotten to poke air holes in the lid. I still prefer the bull in the pen.

The cat continues to whine outside. I pull myself off the couch, one boot still on my left foot. Mrs. Gibbons has used my coat for a pillow on the floor. I watch Godzilla falter as the sea monster gains the upper hand and muted foreign faces scream in horror. Mrs. Gibbons stretches out in her wrinkled dress and yawns.

Whenever a mouse got inside, it was Janet who tracked it down with the frying pan or the pizza slicer. I stayed off the floor until she gave me the all clear to come back down off the counter. She was the one willing to reach behind the fridge and pull it out by the tail and toss it into the yard. Or crush it under her shoe and throw it into the trash—still breathing.

I yank open the door. In its mouth, the cat carries a baby bird. Mrs. Gibbons mumbles behind me, clutching the photographs from Janet to her chest. The cyclops antelope. The three-tailed possum. I carry the ultrasound image in my hand, fingers crushing the four-armed wonder into a ball. A doctor’s address is scrawled on the back. Janet always had terrible handwriting.

Three titanium alloy barriers and two hundred feet of concrete.

The cat drops the bird out of its mouth. Pink and downy. It stares up at me with three purple distended eyes the size of marbles. The cat cocks its head at me and turns to go back outside. I follow his tail out to my car. The hood is splattered with little bodies glowing pink under the sun. I look up and wait to hear their mothers. The cat leaps up onto the hood and begins nudging the bodies with his nose. The birds don’t recognize their babies anymore. The trees remain quiet. The nests are empty. I push the cat off the car and start to sweep away the little pink splatters.

I still have to get to work.

After the third pair of headlights swerves to avoid us, I ask Last Call Paul to pull over. He doesn’t look at me, just presses his foot down harder. Snow lashes through cracked windows and seeps down into the collar of my jacket. Each drop slides down my spine. I rub my back against the threadbare seat. Last Call just can’t stop talking.

“My daughter, you’ve met her, haven’t ya? Donna? She’s a good girl you know, a really good girl, just confused. Teenagers, you know? You should know anyway. How old are you? She’s just in a place right now where—well, have you ever tried training dogs?”

Staying with Paul wasn’t my first choice. After eating Tom’s last box of Cap’n Crunch and hanging up on his mother for three days straight, he tore up the rental agreement we’d made out over a pitcher at Le Sketch a few months before and flushed it down the toilet. I had never bothered to make photocopies. My stuff was stacked neatly on the curb afterward.

“That sounds bad, doesn’t it? I’m not calling her a bitch, you know. That’s not what I’m about as a father. Her mother, though? Well, let’s not open up that can of shit. It’ll just ruin the night. Suffer to say—suffice—suffice to say, she’s a fucking whack job. I’m talking three rubber walls and a locked door. You know what I mean?”

“Four.”

“What?”

“Four walls, Paul. You want four walls—Jesus, stay in the lane!”

Another pair of headlights swerves onto the shoulder and Paul is just staring at me.

“Usually pick her up from school every Friday. But I go there this week, and she’s not around. First thing I think is, oh no, something’s happened, ’cause she’s got the diabetes, like I told you before, ever since she was a little girl, you know. Real bad, too, like real bad. No cake, no nothing. Not fun for a girl growing up, but she always, well, she always took it in stride. Very resilient, Donna is. Anyway, first thing I’m thinking—”

“You’re thinking she’s gone to the hospital,” I say and snatch the beer bottle off the floor.

“Exactly. Exactamundo, my man. And as a father—well, shit—one word for that. Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying as the most god awful shit you could imagine.”

The sign for Millbrook pops up. Ten kilometres. Paul swerves across the line, but there are no headlights in sight. I am imagining too much right now. Severed arms, blown kneecaps, Last Call Paul’s head in my lap just talking endlessly into the night while I wait for an ambulance that never comes. Somehow, my imagination has decided it’s worse if I live.

“So, I call up her mother, and the fucking electrician answers the phone, the one I told you about at lunch? Yeah, he answers the phone like he lives there, meanwhile, my name, my fucking name, is still on the lease. And he’s answering the phone like he of all people is man of the house. And it is my phone, did I tell you that?”

“Like everything else in the house,” I mumble.

“Damn straight. So we get talking, and no she’s not at the hospital. No, she’s not at work, and no, she isn’t with Louise. So where is she? With a boy maybe? Well, Mr. Sparky says, how am I supposed to know? Can you believe that?”

A transport is leaning on the horn and snow is piling up on the windshield. Last Call’s heater has been out for weeks. I only know because he bitches about it every day during lunch while we play euchre for pennies in the break room. Sweet Pete, Joco, Larry B—all those guys have already put me up for a few weeks on their couch or in a back room or in a shed with a space heater. Whatever they could do until their wife or dad or girlfriend or girlfriend’s dad caught me jacking food from the fridge and clothes from the hamper.

All my stuff is now in black garbage bags in the trunk.

The transport hits the horn again, and Paul throws his eyes back on the road. His glasses are fogging up, but he doesn’t care. He’s set on beating closing at Hilda’s Bar and Grill. It’s just down the street from his apartment. A walk-up apartment, but a nice walk-up. Second floor over some Hungarian deli. They give him a discount on peameal bacon on Sundays.

“So, now I’ve got a Friday to myself. No idea where Donna is, but hey, that’s going to happen sometimes, no big deal, no big deal, not like we don’t see each other. But we don’t anymore. We don’t see each other. It used to be that we could just hang out all the time. Watch the ball game. Maybe work on the yard, the flowers, whatever. She even just liked doing the vacuuming, you know? Loved it, just fucking loved it as a little kid. Could barely hold the thing. Pulling it all back together was the best part, you know. And now? Nothing.”

I scrunch myself lower in my seat, realizing if we do crash, I will probably lose both eyes to shattered glass, both knees to the glove box, and most of my hair in the ensuing fire.

“So I just kind of sit there in the school parking lot. It starts getting dark, so I call the house again. Louise picks up, says she’s not sure, but she’ll have Donna call me right away when she gets in, and that it was very sweet of me to worry. And it’s, well, like this real civil sort of conversation for a few moments and then we both hung up. Just like that, like none of this shit ever happened. Some actual civil human interaction for once. Unbelievable.”

Buildings begin to pop up in our headlights. I can see the sign for the bar still sputtering in between the snow. I push my fingers out of my sleeves and run them along the dashboard. Ice is forming around the lock on the glove box. Bottles and old VHS cases rattle around my feet as Paul turns into the parking lot. He’s no longer talking, just sort of panting. I almost can’t see his eyes, which are probably red and purple blotches behind his fogged glasses. He runs a hand through his hair and belches into his palms.

“This is the place, my friend, the place.”

I whack the slush off my boots at the door and hear cheers as Paul sways inside. A couple of regulars in knit caps and old Oilers jackets sit trading stories at the bar, half empty pints growing warm. A line of scraggily booths, duct tape holding in their deflated stuffing, separate the bar from the dining area. A few regulars stare at the bubbles moving ever upward through their pints. The bartender waves at Paul and marks another line on a chalkboard behind the taps.

“Fifteen days straight now, Paul? A new record!”

I nod at the bartender and order a gin and tonic. Paul keeps yakking to him about the management and the new contract for unloading the trucks. I collapse in a booth and crush the ice in my drink between my teeth. The bar is wallpapered with a flower print like my Nana’s place. Paul sits staring at three pints in front of him. He smiles. One of his canines is missing. Down the bar, the two guys in Oiler jackets compete with the television volume.

Last Call Paul always worked the afternoon shift. Getting off after midnight, he made sure to make the rounds at the bars around the warehouse before coming home. Half-lit neon signs, orange pool tables, places with only three brews on tap. Temporary homes, like way stations on the hazy odyssey home. Sleeping on the couch became a comfortable position for Paul, until one night when Louise decided to keep the couch and everything else, according to her attorney and the family court. She packed all his stuff up in garbage bags while he was at work. He told me he lost half his records when the dump truck came by in the morning.

After a two-week suspension for dropping a forktruck off the loading bay dock, Paul came back into work a couple months ago. I smelled him before I heard him behind me in the locker room. I stood there in my stained underwear while he told me about his weekend.

He’d gone over for Donna’s birthday, without any cake, of course, her being diabetic and all. He and Louise were getting along ’til he found a hammer under the couch. He didn’t own any Mastercraft hammers, he told me. Never bought his stuff at Sears like some of the other guys he knew. Never trusted the place after some blonde nancy had screwed up the alterations on the suit he wore to his Dad’s funeral. Everyone could see his ankles the whole ceremony. And maybe, yeah, maybe he’d had a few too many, but it was his daughter’s birthday, can’t he celebrate that? Louise was talking on the phone to who knows who, and it was his goddamn house. Donna wasn’t even paying attention; she had some movie on the television. Some bullshit with Demi Moore, except she had a boy’s haircut.

And all Last Call Paul had? Well, all they’d left him was this hammer.

“This bitch ralphs on the deck we built,” the one Oiler bellows. “Anyway, she comes back in to grab the vacuum cleaner, I guess to clean up her gunk, and turns it on before she gets outside. Full blast. The dogs freak, just freak like mad and start shitting all over the carpet.”

An antique armoire from Louise’s grandma, a handful of porcelain penguins, three window panes, and five thousand dollars in damage to the kitchen later, Last Call found himself with a restraining order and three hundred hours of community service—picking garbage off the road.

“So now we’ve got dogs shitting all into the old shag carpet in front of the TV,” the Oiler laughs. “Sheila’s waving around this Hoover like she’s going to shoot up the dining room…”

“Hoovers ain’t shit, man,” Last Call says. “Let me tell you as one man to another: Hoovers ain’t shit. What your old lady needs to get is a goddamn Dyson. Now that’s the kind of shit you need for a vacuum. That shit’s got suction, it’ll pull out all that shit stuck in your stain.”

Last Call is all up in their faces now, his arms draped around the two Oilers fans at the bar. I’m waiting for a fist and a scream and snow filling up my body cavities as we wait for the ambulance to arrive. None of this happens. It isn’t as bad as being in his car.

“Why, haha, oh man, Last Call you alright? Why not a Hoover?”

“Well, see the Hoover,” Last Call says, “Well first of all, J. Edgar Hoover? Asshole. So there is your first problem, am I right? Second off, you gotta look at manoeuvrability. Like, sure suction is a big deal to some, but if you can’t get in the corners, or ’round the furniture, you’re going to have a pretty dusty place, right? And another thing, it’s too loud! You want a thrum, not a hiss when you’re trying to clean shit up. That hiss will haunt your dreams otherwise, and your paycheque too, ’cause those sons of bitches break down more than Oprah.”

The two Oilers nod, smiles creeping across their faces.

“How you know all this shit, Paul? You selling for them on the side?”

“Oh yeah, I’m selling for all those big suits now,” Last Call says. “Bissell, Kirby, Oreck, Kenmore, Panasonic. A Hoover machine, in my humble estimation, is just not worth the investment. You gotta know your machines. Gotta put a premium on suction.”

The bartender shouts out last call. Paul waves him off.

“How do you do that, eh Paul?” the one Oiler says. “What’s the secret?”

“Well, it’s a trade secret for me, you know? You gotta hold ’em, feel the vibe they give you. That’s how you know. Just put a hand on them. They’ll let you know. A lot like dogs that way.”

“Oh, really?”

“No, you dumb shits,” Last Call roars. “I’m just fuckin’ with you. You gullible bitches.”

Paul staggers away and waves a hand at me. He’s supporting himself against the door frame. I pull myself up out of the booth, a lone strip of duct tape tethered to the back of my jeans. Paul slams the glass doors open and I pull my coat tight against the chill. As soon as he’s out the door, the two Oilers start sniggering, slapping each other’s backs and imitating vacuum sounds.

I follow Paul down the street into an alcove beside the Hungarian deli. Tomorrow is Toonie Tuesday for shaved salami. Someone has spray painted RUCKUS in black across the door to Paul’s apartment. The streetlight in front of his place is busted, so we stand in the teal and pink illumination of the deli sign. Snowflakes pop and hiss when they touch it.

“Finally got the little bitch into the hole. It sticks sometimes.”

I follow Paul up the stairs, stumbling around piles of cleaning supplies, dragging my sleeping bag behind me. I leave the garbage bags in the trunk to freeze overnight.

“So, like I was telling you before, about Donna, you remember, right?” Last Call says.

“You ever find out what happened?”

He opens the door to the apartment.

“Well, like, she calls me up later that night. Here, just toss your stuff on the end table. You can use the couch there. She calls me up and we start talking. Turns out she was volunteering that day down at the old folk’s home near our old house. Well, my old house. I don’t know.”

I try lying down on the couch. It’s covered in sweaters and blankets. The whole place smells like stale beer and sweat seeping into the drywall. The kitchen is stacked with old beer bottles.

“What don’t you know?”

Paul pulls off his shirt and rubs his stretch-marked belly. Purples lines crisscross his chest.

“Well, it’s kinda fucked man, ya think? She’d rather spend her time with some old fogies, slobbering all over themselves and trying to eat the Monopoly pieces during game hour than hang out with her Dad? Not like I was going to take her back to this dump. I know a dump when I live in one, alright? But she’d rather hang out with them for four hours than go bowling with me, or whatever? I mean, at least I can feed myself.”

Paul turns off the lights in the kitchen. He opens up a closet and starts yanking out spools and spools of electrical cord. As I unpack my stuff, I watch him line them up against the walls. I don’t say anything as he carries two vacuums into his bedroom.

I try to close my eyes and hear Paul bump into the television. The volume is low and a sports reel is playing. He’s shoving vacuum plugs into all the open sockets, even unplugging some lamps and an old answering machine to plug some more. He turns each one on as he goes, the sound building like a swarm across the floorboards. He runs a few more cables under his bedroom door and they tangle together in the thick, pink carpet.

“But Donna, she’d rather be working in a place like that, for free. Volunteering,” Last Call says. “She says it’s for school, but why not work at a summer camp or some shit, you know? Go pick trash on the highway with your old man. But no, she’d rather be volunteering with the goddamn walking dead than sitting with her Dad or even going out for dinner. Who does that? Choose that kinda life. That’s the problem, man. She’s confused. Just like her mother.”