Poison Shy (4 page)

Someone at another workstation shushed us. “Oh fuck off,” Melanie whispered loudly. She turned to me. “Watch my laptop for two seconds? I gotta take a shit.”

As she made her way past the check-out counter, I snuck a look at her computer screen. She'd chosen to write on Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter
.

The A on Hester Prynne's shirt doesn't stand for America or Adultery, it stands for Anarchy. Hester can be seen as a 17
th
century revolutionary. She disregarded the laws of ‘common decency' and raised Pearl out of wedlock. It was her fuck you salute to the oppressive morality of the U.S. of Assholes.

The whole thing smacked of unfounded self-righteousness and false moral indignation. I couldn't imagine she'd come up with any of this drivel on her own. She'd likely tricked some geek into helping her — probably someone a lot like me.

“Don't read it, it sucks,” she said from behind me.

“No, it's —”

“Couldn't find a book, eh? I don't blame you. The books in this place are, like, from a different time. Anyway, here.” She handed me a little slip of paper with something written on it.

“Send me an email. We'll have a drink or something. My friend just opened a new bar, it's awesome. You're not gay, are you?”

“Huh? No.”

“Good. Now if you'll excuse me, I really have to get this stupid essay done.”

We were shushed again, by more than one person this time.

“Jesus fuck!” Melanie hissed. She smiled at me.

“I guess I'll talk to you later,” I said.

“Great. Now go kill roaches or something.”

The sun had just set; the sky was a patchwork of pink and grey. I took in a lungful of October air. It tasted of cider and dying leaves. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in a genuinely good mood. I pulled Melanie's note out of my pocket and read it again:

Looks like your stalking paid off.

[email protected]

She was a firecracker all right.

On my way home I went by the grocery store to get some things for my mother. I filled my cart with all her favourites: oatmeal, romaine lettuce, red and yellow peppers, peameal bacon, Earl Grey tea, crackers and cheese, cherry tomatoes, blueberry muffins, thinly shaved roast beef. I stuffed my face with candy and dried fruit from the bulk section and remembered to tell the cashier to add it to my bill.

Outside my mother's building, a toothless man was sitting on the steps. He nodded at the bags in my hand. “Any filet mignon in there, buddy?” he sluiced. Spittle flew everywhere. I dropped a loonie into his gummed coffee cup and went inside.

She wasn't answering her buzzer, so I swooped through the second door as someone was leaving and took the stairs to the third floor. The hallway was dark and empty, which was normal. Still, something seemed wrong.

I knocked. “Mom, you in there? It's Brandon.”

No answer.

Something cracked under my shoes. There were bits of broken glass on the rug. “I brought some groceries. Are you there, Ma?”

A soft rustling. I knew the sound: Bible paper.

I tried the doorknob. It was locked. “Let me in, Ma. It's Brandon.”

“Upon her forehead was a name written,” she said out of nowhere.
“Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth!”

I banged on the door. “Mother, stop shouting and let me in!”

Silence.

I sat down at the far end of the hallway and rubbed my temples. After a few deep breaths I heard the door unlock. I tried the knob again and this time it turned. Opened the door slowly. My mother was sitting on the floor in her orange blanket, surrounded by shards of broken dinner plates. She held a rosary in her hands. I wanted to be sick.

“Jesus.”

My mother looked up, wide-eyed, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, that's right. And she was drunk with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”

I placed the groceries on a clean part of the floor and went to her. “You can't do this, Mom. You can't. Your neighbours have probably called the police.”

She touched my arm. Her hand was freezing.

“You've got to wash this blanket.”

She said, “I'm hungry.”

“Well that's good, because I just brought you some food. Is there a broom in here?”

She gestured toward the kitchen closet.

As I swept, my mother whispered the rosary. I wondered what had spooked her. Probably nothing, and it was too risky to ask. After a fit, it sometimes took her days to calm down.

I made a salad and we ate it together in silence. We watched
Wheel of Fortune
,
Jeopardy!
, and the first half of
Strangers on a Train
before my mother fell asleep on the couch, drooling onto her blanket.

I found a sleeping bag in her closet and rolled it out on the floor.

I woke with a stiff neck. My mother was still asleep. I left a packet of oatmeal and a blueberry muffin on her kitchen table. Gave her a kiss on the forehead and got the hell out.

On my way home I stopped at a coffee place called Darryl's Doughnuts. I needed to caffeinate, fill my stomach with sugar. The place was full of senior citizens, all men. They were giving the teenaged girl behind the counter a hard time.

“What d'ya mean you don't have a boyfriend? I bet yer daddy has to beat 'em off with a stick!”

I walked up to the counter and crashed their party. The buzzards looked at me with envy. I was young, healthy. A reminder of everything life had stolen from them. I ordered a large coffee and an apple fritter, then took a seat in the corner, though not far enough away to escape their glowering.

I pulled Melanie's note out of my pocket.

[email protected]

I had to laugh. She'd dotted her i's with little hearts too, which in her hand seemed ironic and a little nasty.

Did I have any business emailing her? What about Darcy? Was he her boyfriend or just a roommate? No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see Darcy as gay, and Melanie was definitely the kind of girl who got around. Did I really want to be a part of that quagmire? My nuts cried yes. My brain was a tad more skeptical.

There was a clatter and splash at the other end of the shop. One of the old men had spilled his coffee all over himself and the floor. The girl came out from behind the counter with a mop and poked the old man in the shoulder.

“You've got the shakes, Jack,” she said. “You gonna quit drinking, or do I need to get your wife on your case?”

“Are you kidding? Last thing she wants me to do is quit drinking. The sooner I take a dirt nap the sooner she cashes in the insurance policy!”

His friends burst out laughing while the girl mopped. They gripped their mug handles and stared at her like scrawny, aging wolves. The man called Jack nudged his friend as the girl bent over to mop under the table. He gestured as if to squeeze her buttocks; his friend nodded in a spasm of agreement.

It got me thinking about the first time my father took me to his favourite pub. I was twelve, and my father had been living at home with my mother and me for a few months. We went to a place called The Jug off the side of the highway, just outside of Frayne. I knew even then that my father had other women in his life. I think my mother knew as well, but I suppose she was willing to ignore it so long as he stuck around. Horrible as he was to her, his presence seemed to stabilize things. My mother scared me when my father was off living one of his other lives. She'd talk openly to me about demons, about the betrayal of Jesus, about suicide. I'd wake in the middle of the night to hear her reading from the Bible to nobody. Her hands were crosshatched with cuts from accidentally breaking dishes in the sink. I came home from school one day to find she'd gutted one of my stuffed animals. She thought it was possessed.

All these things stopped when my father was home. He'd fill the house with cigarette smoke, spend all night drinking in front of the TV, complain about my mother's cooking, threaten to sell me to the neighbours if I misbehaved. But the fear he inspired made my mother act less insane, and gave me some semblance of security.

The night my father took me with him to The Jug, my mother was staying overnight at the hospital recovering from a tubal ligation. I was glad when I learned it meant she'd no longer be able to have children. I wanted our family to remain intact, just the three of us. I took her operation as a sign of solidarity.

My father didn't say a word to me on the drive to the pub. We listened to the radio the whole way. Weather, traffic, hockey scores. I picked at my cuticles and counted the number of times the host said the word
ice.

The Jug was a typical roadside dive: pool tables, dartboards, weekly fist fights in the parking lot. Its menu consisted mostly of dishes with alcohol in the recipe — drunken mussels, beer-battered fish and chips, Irish stout pie. My father wasn't much of an eater. He went for the cheap booze and the cheaper women.

It was dark inside. Half the bulbs in the place were burnt out. The ones that still worked were dusted with dead insects. My father sat me down at a booth, ordered me a ginger ale and a plate of hash browns, and left me alone with a deck of cards, telling me to play solitaire. He took a seat at a table with a few electrician buddies I'd never met before.

I played a few games and tried not to listen to my father's conversations. Every now and then I'd hear a word or a phrase that scared me, things like “pussy-whipped,” “the smell of her twat,” and “I broke the bottle right over that cocksucker's bald head!”

The waitress was a woman named Gloria. She had long, sandy blond hair and sunburnt skin, kind eyes and skinny legs. The men in the bar were either shouting at her to refill their beer glasses or drunkenly pleading with her to let them take her home. I watched her play along, fascinated by her ability to control these brutes with a simple nudge of her hip or pat on the back. She noticed me watching and brought over a piece of chocolate cake.

“On the house,” she said, and winked at me.

My father ignored Gloria for the most part, which I found strange. My mother had filled my head with so many stories about my father's womanizing that I was stunned by his lack of interest. I wondered if he'd adjusted his behaviour for my benefit. It also occurred to me that my mother might be wrong about him, that her suspicions were a symptom of her deteriorating mind.

Later that night, after the bar had cleared out and I'd long since fallen asleep in my booth, I awoke to someone nudging my shoulder. It was my father. He breathed a stream of smoke in my face and said, “Time to go.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I had to think for a moment to remember where I was. My father swung his car keys on his finger, his coat already on. Gloria was waiting by the door.

“It's late, Brandon,” said my father. “Let's go.”

I followed them to the car. I was groggy and my stomach hurt from the chocolate cake. I looked out the window at the passing blur and tried to figure out where we were going. My father was driving fast. Was my mother in trouble at the hospital? Did Gloria need to be somewhere? Did they plan on killing me and disposing of my body in a field?

We drove into a town I didn't recognize. Looking out the window I saw a man in a red toque asleep on a mat of flattened cardboard boxes. I saw a black girl waiting at a bus stop in pink short shorts, ashing her cigarette into an empty Coke can. I saw a pit bull chained to a parking meter, barking into the darkness. I saw a small L-shaped building, the word
Vacancy
in neon green out front.

We pulled into the parking lot. My father got out of the car. Gloria turned to me from the passenger seat. “You awake?”

I nodded.

“Poor guy. You must be exhausted. Well, don't worry. You'll be in a nice warm bed very soon.”

My father came back to the car with two rusty keys in his hand. Gloria and I followed him to a door marked
9
. I shivered as he struggled to fit the key into the lock. Once he'd managed to open the door, I went inside, expecting the two of them to follow me. Instead they stood in the doorway. Gloria reached inside and flicked on a light switch.

“Call my room if you need anything,” my father said. “Number ten. Just dial 1-0 on the phone. I'll come in and wake you up in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Sweet dreams, honey,” Gloria said.

My father shut the door. There was a spider on the back of it, crawling toward the ceiling where it had made its web. I looked at the king-size bed and wondered what was lurking under the faded brown bedspread. I went into the bathroom. It smelled like urine. There was a dead mouse in the shower. I thought about leaving and trying to find my way home, but it was freezing. I had no idea where I was.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and took off my shoes. The mattress was cold and hard as a cinder block. I propped the pillows up against the headboard and lay on top of the sheets. I could hear my father and Gloria talking to each other through the wall. Before long I heard the rhythmic squeaking of bedsprings. I flipped on the TV and turned the volume up full blast. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was an image on the late-night news of a woman being handcuffed for slitting her cheating husband's throat with a box-cutter.

I finished my doughnut shop coffee and went back to my apartment. I slurped down a bowl of Mr. Noodles and descended into the kind of sleep I needed — long, deep, and dreamless. When I awoke two hours later, my answering machine was flashing.

“Hey Brandon, what's up, bro? It's Chad. Listen. Give me a call if you're up for coming out tonight. Farah and I were thinking about hitting up The Bleeding Bear, or whatever it is. Apparently it's half-price wings on Saturdays. What what!”

I hit erase and sat in front of my computer. I hadn't used it in months. I wrote my initials into the dust on the screen as I waited for it to start up. An alert informed me that my hard drive was riddled with viruses. I closed the warning, along with a few pop-up ads for penis enlargement and debt consolidation, and signed into the Kill 'Em All email account I never had reason to use. The only message in my inbox was a memo about Ansel's farewell party from the previous year.

I pulled out Melanie's email address.

I zeroed in on “No boyfriend.” Had I imagined Darcy's hand in Melanie's back pocket? It didn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe it had been a projection of my own cheek-palming desires. In any case, her email invigorated me. I gave Chad a call and let him know I was up for coming out. He told me to be at “The Injured Grizzly” at nine.

“So glad you decided to join us, buddy!” Chad shouted over the way-too-loud indie rock. He poured me a glass of beer from one of the three pitchers on the table.

“Yeah, it's nice to finally get to talk to you,” Farah added. She was wearing a breast-spilling top and a skirt so short it was more like a thick belt. Despite the attire she seemed nice enough. “Chad has told me so many stories already.”

“Nothing too bad I hope,” I said, because that's what you're supposed to say.

“Not yet. So I hear you're an exterminator.”

I sipped my beer. “That's right.”

“That's so interesting!” She put her chin in her hands. “You must have seen some pretty nasty things. Got any horror stories?”

“Tell her about the hospital,” Chad said.

“Oh no! A
hospital
? You're kidding.”

I cleared my throat. “You know how everybody wants to ‘go green' these days? I mean, take this place for example. Save the bears, animal cruelty, all that shit. A few months back, some hospital administrator has this genius idea to implement a composting plan for getting rid of food waste. They bring in these massive composting bins and plop them on a small patch of grass out back. Start putting all the leftover scraps from the cafeteria inside. Next thing you know, thousands, I'm talking
thousands
of rats are hanging around. Feasting. Screwing. Breeding. Sneaking inside through the air vents, making lab rats out of themselves. We found a whole pile of them dead near some boxes of insulin in one of the storage rooms.”

“Oh my God. Did you get rid of them?”

“Hey,” Chad said. “This is my
man
we're talking about.”

“We think we did. It's hard to know for sure, especially with rats.”

“Which hospital was it?”

I shrugged. “Sorry. I signed a confidentiality agreement.”

“Jesus.” Farah bit her nails.

“Who wants another round?” Chad asked.

I was about to offer to pay when a hand gripped my shoulder from behind. A gravelly voice said, “Excuse me?”

I spun around and looked directly into Darcy Sands' yellow eyeballs.

“I thought that was you. The Kill 'Em All guy, right?”

“Yeah, that's right. Do I . . . ?”

“You fumigated my place last week. Really fucked me up for a philosophy essay.”

“Oh yeah. I remember. Sorry about that.”

He stared into my face without blinking. I waited for him to speak but he didn't.

After a moment I said, “So. How's it going?”

“Hunky-dory, my friend! You don't mind if I call you
friend
, do you?”

Chad sat up straight. “What do you want, buddy?”

Darcy scratched the sparse whiskers on his chin. “I want to buy this man here a drink.” He slapped me hard on the back.