Stunt (3 page)

‘I know,' I tell the girl in the book. ‘I know,' I tell Marta.

The girl leaves for the forest.

On the day that they are about to lock her up, the mad girl in the woods, her village is wiped out by a flood. But she is not, because she talks to her rope and it rises while she stands on it, lifting her to safety. She hovers above her village and watches its superstitions be washed and wrung clean. Before they are drowned, the villagers have a final glimpse of her. They think she is an apparition floating above them. But they are wrong. Things like this, a girl on a rope in the air, are not sudden or fake or heavenly. They are a slow coming. They are an accumulation of events. Much like the flood. It seems quick. Barrelling across the earth. But it is not. It has been plodding. It has been brooding. Yes, the water was loosened – but it had been groaning all the while.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

my darlin',

there is no blue here.
memorize blue.

your grand disappointment,
your only scar,
s.

Am I missing my code? Are the stars blinking a message? Are those car lights for me? Did they not dim and brighten? Was that a tapping on the roof ? Footsteps on the path? A whistle? I know that if I see the sun strain itself against the sky, I will die. Please do not let this happen. Please do not let day come.

We did swear. Our thumbs cut and pressed together, blood as our witness, we swore.
Forever.
We both have scars to show for it. I look at mine now. Ephemeral as a smudge.

What if you promised yourself to others? What if you have a hundred daughters? Scattered, all of us waiting in our corduroy dresses on our front stoops, all of us with our indented thumbs. All of us, the useless boom.

I lean into myself, hugging my knees to my chest – a pull there, which, like the beginnings of illness, I want to ignore. And then I feel the pain in my jaw that comes when I won't let myself cry. It is akin to something being sprained out of inactivity. I have got to
pull it together,
as Mink would say,
pull it together.
I am nothing but frayed cords twitching sparks at their ends. And being broken is dangerous.

Immaculata drops a shawl onto my shoulders, a bag of rice from a float plane. ‘Warmth,' she says to me and moves soundlessly back toward the house. And then she returns. ‘It's so clean inside we could sell the house for a mint for a pretty penny Mink says come in for a rest I hate to think of you asleep in the out of doors the pervs you know it's late you know and most people die at four in the morning true and it's almost that time.' She is gone. And then, postscript, ‘Mink has the toothbrush out.'

Mink has the toothbrush out to scrub away every detail of what life was before this day – until she can no longer lift her head if she has to. Your stubble in the sink will be flushed into the sewers.
Kill the evidence and you kill the life that was. This is Mink's economy. Her mathematics for living. She will reassemble herself. She will do it out of a physical compulsion that she does not understand. Mink is the only person on earth who is haunted by nothing. Of all of us, she is the only one who is truly invincible.

I see you. Coming toward me. The gait. Unmistakable. Gallant bird in an oil spill. Shimmering like celluloid. Silver. I stand to meet you. One quick look back at the house. And then back to you and you are gone. In your place, the sun. The sun and all its wretchedness snakes itself across the sky.

You are not coming for me because you are dead.
     Only, you are not dead.

You are not dead because you fried the kippers, left the note, drew the tumescent monk, plucked the apple tree bare and took your bicycle. All this since you tucked me in some thirty hours ago.

Two policemen arrive this morning to find me, asleep on the front lawn, my underwear showing, my eyes the underbellies of spaceships, swollen and transiting. The shawl must have been stolen. I wake to them standing, stock-still as targets. Their boots are aggressively shined. They smell of swimming pool.

‘Is your mother home?'

They are so tired, these men. They are so tired of asking people questions. I think of deranged pigs trying to eat their own ears. Is this what they do at the end of their day when they sit in their cruiser staring at a river, do they shift in their seats and try to eat their ears, so unfilled with answers?

One of them wears a turban. ‘Will you please take off your turban and let me swing from your hair?' I'm not good at abbreviating the truth.
Pure, so pure,
you would have said. Mink would have snap-whispered,
What, were you brought up in a barn?
Loud enough for them to hear, reproach, reproach. And then she would have subtly winked apology at them.

‘No,' the Turban startles. His partner, mime-white with a weak chin, repeats, ‘No.' His voice does not match his face. It is much stronger. He is in a choir. He goes on, ‘What are you doing out here, waiting for the tooth fairy?' It is a particular school of men, this tooth-fairy school. Not the one I am used to. They don't collect birth announcements. They don't bellow soft-rock anthems from the tops of telephone poles. They don't bite the cheeks of passersby – gently – and then hurdle fences, crawl beneath bushes and never miss a pond.
Skinny-dipping only!
Pinstripe suit hanging nearby.

These men don't walk bridges as viewfinders, imagining their bodies dismembered by the pavement below until, wrung out, they retreat into their bedrooms to finger the dark, to fall into their mattresses, the feathers and cotton coagulating in parts, cutting into them,
cut me, this bitter rind, taking root.
They don't suffer as you suffered. Because you are
pure, so pure.

I see you in the Rosedale ravine, blinkless and shivering, your antelope frame folded against the trunk of a rotting red oak. You are the last of your kind. I have to find you. A novice crouched over a colony of mushrooms, you cannot separate the beauties from the poisons. Unsupervised, you will taste everything.

You take me camping once to Darlington, which also happens to be the site of a nuclear power station. You do not notice the spindly towers that straddle the landscape. Instead, the car a rocket, you steer it agog – back road after back road until the back roads end. It is the first and only time I have been outside of Toronto. You park the sedan in a ditch and scribble a sign on cardboard:

with my daughter

and then say to me, a man receiving a message from an eagle, ‘This way.' You lead me through the unbeaten bush. You want to
live off the land,
so you bring nothing but a pack of matches.
How how.
You build a fire and we sit around it for two days in a tangle of trees and horseflies while you hitch cigarette to story to cigarette to story. You do not notice the groan of our empty stomachs, steamers turning back to shore. You are on a streak, your mouth wheeling unstoppable. On the third morning, upon my coaxing, we tear down camp, walk ten minutes to the sedan, slumped brown in the ditch. One of the windows has been smashed in by a tree branch. The sign is still there. We go to a nearby truck stop for coffee. The window glass is scattered sequins on the seat. The backs of our bodies shimmer dust and arrowheads. When we sit down, flecks of blood sprout beneath our pants. One of your eyes is clamped shut by bites. You steal the sugars and the creams, stuffing them into your suit pockets.
Just in case.
Just in case you cannot find what you thought you might.

When we get back to the city limits, scruff and abattoir, you hand me the pack of matches, carefully and with promise like it is a velvet box and in it are birthstone earrings. The cover says
REDBIRD. Strike anywhere matches.
I open it. There are two
matches left. You profess, ‘Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you'll find out for yourself.' It is the only gift you have ever given to me. I would watch you light matches off brick walls, the soles of your boots and, leg pulled up mid-march, the thigh of your pants. You would leave black skids everywhere, as though you were in prison and counting the days, the surfaces of the world your own primitive calendar.

I have to get you into a bath at the edge of everything, where it is tomb-quiet. I have to get a proper coat to you. And shoes. You are probably not wearing shoes. I see your long toes – your left big toe, yellow, the nail curdled and shrunken, because when you were growing, so astronomically, you were too shy to ask your adoptive mother, Plump Marie, for a new pair of boots – eventually you wore the black nail right off. I have to get you home.

I look up at the policemen, their aftershave faces. The Turban reaches down and offers his hand. My eyes fill fast, fast as a thing turned rabid, fast as a thing forgotten. The thud of this day, loud as a trampling. I finger the ground and feel the nudge of everything buried beneath me: infant bones, wooden spoons, the frames of houses lifting themselves to the surface and nosing the air, nosing me. I take it. The Turban's hand is much colder than yours would have been, but the grip is good. He has a monogrammed towel in his locker and wears plastic sandals in the shower. He has a gold medallion under his shirt in the shape of a cheetah. He never thought he would be a police officer. Sometimes, he and the Mime harmonize.

Mink answers the door. She turns on her beauty. It is persuasive as a milky thigh at a bus stop. The policemen will never
forget her. When they drive by our street, when they hear the song ‘Magic,' when they look at their wives rolling their stockings down into ankle doughnuts, they will think of Mink. Mink is a winner. Even when she is sleeping, she is winning.

Mink looks at me like I am a badly pitched tent. ‘What has she done?'

‘Nothing,' says the Mime defensively. He pops a piece of gum into his mouth.

‘Are you trying to quit smoking?' I ask him.

‘Yes. I am.'

‘Because you're in a choir?'

‘Yes. I am.'

‘Sorry.' Mink ushers me in behind her and upstairs. Immaculata waits there for me. She drops her head on top of mine. I sit bolt upright, my feet tapping; we are a secret breathing in unison, a two-headed morning creature. Twenty feet of polar-bear-white shag carpet unspooled between us. Mink and her daughters. We are an entire tropic apart.

The Turban does the talking. The Mime just chews.

‘Missus Monique Ledoux.' He says
Ledoux
like
LeDukes,
like she is all flying fists.

‘That is me.'

‘It would appear, ma'am, that your husband, Sheb Ledoux, has blown up a factory on the outskirts of the city. A shoulder-pad factory. He left a handwritten note behind for their security enforcement outfit to the effect that he is going to save the world and that he is – '

‘An asshole,' says Mink.

‘Correct. Have you seen him in the last twenty-four hours, ma'am?'

‘No.'

‘Heard from him?'

‘No.'

‘Do you expect to?'

She pauses. ‘No.'

The Turban takes a breath, recalibrating. ‘Is your husband violent?'

‘Not violent enough.'

The Mime clears his throat. It is suddenly full of metal filings and wood shavings. He has walked into something hazardous with the possibility of collapse. He is sounding warning. The Turban goes on, undeterred.

‘Were you his only – ?'

‘Girls, to your rooms.'

We go. We open our doors. We close them behind us. We open them again. We return to the top of the stairs. We have missed it. Pinhole into the adult world gone.

‘If you hear from him …'

The Turban passes his card to Mink.

‘Thank you.' She studies and paws it. Still looking at it, she says, splicing her S's, ‘He's sick.'

‘How so?'

I can't see but I know that Mink is making a sign. My guess: a curt finger to the head.

‘Suicidal?'

‘Not yet anyway.'

Mink shifts in her stocking feet. And then there they go, the arches, tongues with destinations, they lift, all prance and
flutter. Before she became the B-movie actress she is now, Mink was a professional dancer. Attuned to the interests of the times, she developed a coffee-house routine in which she lifted her leg above her head – slow as the hand on a clock – while swearing a blue streak in French. Her leg stopped at midnight. She became immensely popular. She signed her autograph on men's biceps and eyelids. She had a stalker. Her stage name was the Mouth. Her promise: ‘I will make you blush.' This is when you first saw her. At Grossman's Tavern on Spadina Avenue. In a beaded evening gown, slits up the sides, matching elbow-length gloves, her left leg in the air contorted above her head, while outside, Chinatown, elderly couples with hospital masks doubled each other on their bicycles and coaxed slender eggplant from their front lawns. This, before the times changed.
Colline de bin de bobby pin, sac à patates, crème glacée molle, beurre d'arachide, au chocolat, con, cul, couilles, chier, bite, nichons, putain, merde.
You saw her act so many times you had it memorized before you even crossed the room and introduced yourself.
Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Portraitist.

Mink stands on the pads of her feet and then on her toes. Bedazzling, she comes to a sharpened point. She is a prospector and she is instantly six inches taller. She could drill a hole through the ground. The Mime and the Turban step back. Are there other tricks? Will she blow fire? Mink's feet are as gnarled as yours. Like a standard greeting, it is one of your only commonalities. Mink is surveying. The neighbours must have pulled open their curtains. Sensuous Marta and her fretting gnomes. Cruiser on our front lawn, blinking red, uniformed hulks in the doorway. We are the stage now. We are the players. Mink misses nothing. Especially an audience.

She topples to the floor. A melodrama of grief, she wails and sobs. But the performance has chinks in it, and it gets the better of her. It turns real. It turns sour. She cries, a thing snarled in a trap, nothing but the expanse of a deaf world around her, idiot hunter turned loose within it, knowing that she is alone in the woods, and that she will bleed to death, and that the only one who might have saved her is gone.