Montreal Serai

…I don’t know why I’ve agreed to this… but here I am… here we are… he briskly raps the knocker.  We’re standing in the corridor by the stairwell, with its dank smell and hollow sounds.  There are 3 locks.  Each bolt is slowly turned. The door cautiously opened.  She peers up at me.  “Hello?” her voice falters. She’s very slight, with white wispy hair, in a small bun.  Her eyes, egg shell blue would fly away if they could. These two people are so different… and yet…I don’t know.  The security chain is doing its job; keeping problems at bay.  Doubt there’s much it can do about this one though, the one standing next to me.  I imagine he’s not good with door keys.  There seems a good chance he hasn’t got any.

He says, “You’re my mum, ain’t you”.  “Yes,” she says faintly, “Yes I am.”  With a nod in my direction, he declares, “See, like I told you.”   I register the tone of one not often taken on his word. “All right mum.”  She takes a step back.  I stumble, “Sorry…sorry to bother you”.  Sorry for not making her life any easier. “Ta mum.”  The door clicks shut.  Bolts turn.  “So you know,” he continues, matter- of-fact, “that I’m not going to lie to you.  Not with my mum being a neighbor of yours.”  “Okay,”   I agree, vaguely aware that if I want my bike back I should stay the course.  There are other reasons to be sure… but I’m not clear about them.   

We are negotiating for the release of an old red bike that I bought the week before for only £5.  The lock cost twice the bike and I doubt I’ll be seeing it again.  He’s  asking  £15 but I’m only going to agree to 10 because then I’ve still only paid 15 for a bike that works, fits my frame and is the right color red.  I block memory of the lock because that would remind me that the lad before me is, in fact, the thief… that he’s costing me… and if that’s all I think then the situation begins to irk. 

But what to think?  If I think of him as the drug addicted son of the poor woman upstairs, then the story is a tragedy.  There’s nothing to be done.  I withhold the £10 and let him keep the bike. .. or I let him keep the bike and give her the money.  I post it perhaps… anonymously. 

But the truth is, I prefer to leave out the hapless mum…and not think of her at all…and leave in the feckless son, who’s stolen my bike for the purpose of selling it back to me, on the pretense that he is mediating with the thief, on my behalf.  Now this is a story with a comic twist that I can play along with in the spirit of the piece. This way I also stand to get my bike back.  He regards the £10 note lying in the palm of his hand and mutters, “I’ll see what I can do”.  I have to admire his cheek.

He’d rapped on my door much like he rapped on his mum’s.   I opened it on a fair, longish-haired lad, mid 20’s, in a tweedy coat, 70’s lapels.   Breath… bated, “Hello. Did you have a red bike locked up outside?”  “Yes, why?”  “It’s been nicked.”   ”Oh …but how do you know it’s been nicked?”  “I know the bloke who nicked it. I just saw him wheeling it away.”  “Where”?  “Over there.   But look, don’t worry, I can get it back for you.”  “Yes?” “Just give me £15 and I’ll go and talk with him.”  “…Look…” I say, with the inertia of someone who knows none of her lines, “… Thanks for your help but…”   “…I didn’t take it… if that’s what you’re thinking. My mum lives upstairs. And you don’t queer your own patch, do you.”  “…How do I know your mum lives upstairs?”  “Come on.  I’ll show you.”  “I don’t know…”   

I’m standing at the bottom of the stairwell, waiting for the son to return with my bike, when three or four lads come hurrying by.  As I make way for them one turns to me and says,“Don’t trust that geezer, will you.  He’d shop his own mum.”  Later, filling the kettle, I think of her upstairs.  She too must fill her kettle by the kitchen window, over-looking the market on a Saturday morning…with the hawkers hawking…the murmur and the milling. Waiting for the water to boil…I’ve been here two years and I’ve never noticed her.  Two years without a neighbor to talk to. I wonder how she gets by…what with the worry of him.  Does it empty her life?  Does she love him as much? I wonder what sustains her…if she has any faith.  She’ll never trust me now.  I know too much.

            In grade seven, I had a crush on Eric.  Tall, lean, gorgeous Eric.  He was in the same year as I was, but he was a year older.  I knew little about him and accepted the rumours that he was a ‘bad’ boy.  He had an edge of something racy, something hidden.  That combined with his dark eyes and dark hair was the attraction.

            Years later I understood that he was an immigrant from Poland and still groping with the English language, he had been sent back a grade.  I just thought he was silently cool.

            At recess and at lunchtime, I would look for him in the corridors, trembling when I spotted him.  He was not aware of me at all.  I had an intense and purely imaginative relationship with him during the school fall session.

            In the winter evenings of that year, I would walk up Van Horne avenue to Pratt Park to skate on the pond.  This rink had a small cabin, heated by a small stove, where we changed from boots to skates and skates to boots.

            On the ice, we skated in the same direction, singly, in pairs and in groups.  I was skating around one evening with the others and noticed Eric on the edge of the ice.  The first time I had seen him at the park.  At every round, I peeked at him, creating romantic scenarios.

            On one round, a boy I didn’t know skated close to me.  He grabbed my hand, forcing me to skate with him.  I didn’t like him.  I stopped in the center of the moving circle of skaters and as he stopped with me, I jerked my hand out of his and yelled at him, leave me alone.  Go away.  I yelled louder, go away.  I pushed at his chest.

            What’s the matter with you, he said.

            Just go away, I screamed, I don’t like you.  Go away.

           He stood there confident and assured.   I was furious.  How dare he presume?  He hadn’t asked.  He had just grabbed me.

            Eric arrived, five inches taller than the kid who was offending me.

            What’s going on, Eric said.  Eric loomed over him and raised his hand.  The boy disappeared into the moving circle of skaters.

            Eric took my hand.  Do you want to go around with me?

            I wrenched my hand from his.  How dare he? I thought.  How dare he think I can’t take care of myself?  Did Eric think I wasn’t capable all on my own?

            No, I said and skated off.

            Later, in the cabin, changing to go home, when I removed my skates, my feet ballooned to double their normal size.

            I limped down the hill to home only in my rubber galoshes unable to feel my feet or my toes.

            Samira sat on the floor of her adobe hut studying her hands as carefully as if she were plucking  a daisy  or reading the constellations on a bright night or counting the drops of water that dripped into the kitchen sink like a metronome. Her hands had five appendages each, five, just like her feet, which also had five. Like  starfish. Like Christ’s wounds.

            She stroked her hands slowly like Tony used to do. Tony would stroke her waistline, she would stroke his back, their lips would  touch, their tongues  would intertwine until they no longer knew where her taste-buds ended and his began.  But that had been  a long time ago and the first  baby was now a young lady with boobs and all poking under her blouse like small mounds of brown sugar  and fine corn silk grew  under her arms.   And after the first girl they had a second one.  

            Samira’s eyes ran over her hands. Her left index finger traced the lines of her right palm. Her right thumb touched  the finger-pads of her left hand.  As she did this, she felt that slight frisson that hardened her nipples and made her mouth water,  moistening her lips into a pink gloss, just as her other lips used to  turn deep crimson under her bushy tropical tangle. Samira remembered how Tony’s tongue would explore until it sunk into those depths that tasted like zapote  fruit   and smelled like wet soil. But that pleasant memory also brought back dark memories of how Tony’s tongue could also make her hurt. Tony’s inflammatory tongue, which could stir red-hot coals in her body and rouse rabbles at the university had become so caustic of late  that Samira no longer remembered why they had married at all.    

            Samira traced the lines on her right palm. They spelled a perfect capital M,  deep and clear, without any breaks, or sidelines or alleyways or anything that was not as clear-cut and bright as the wonderful  future that was theirs for the taking.  

            They say that the lines in the left hand  show a person’s destiny and those on the right one  show the struggle between destiny and will. The lines in Samira’s left palm remained unchanged  throughout her life, while the ones in her right hand had started changing at some point. Samira no longer remembered when this had started to happen.

            How could hands change so drastically?  First the head line of her right hand broke off, when she had to have her appendix out in a hurry. Then another line went haywire, when her tiny  baby boy was born, a candle flickering  in the wind to be snuffed out two hours later. Then Tony started acting strange and fine lines started appearing on her right hand like branches in a creeper.

            Whenever Samira would reach this point in her ruminations the crazed lines in her hand took over her brain like a creeper that strangles anything that crosses its path. What mattered most, Samira repeated to herself, was that her destiny and her will had parted ways and the rest of her body had also started breaking apart. Her tongue no longer said what her brain really thought,  her brain got disconnected from her heart, her heart and her reason were at odds leaving  her soul bereft.  At the end of the day  all she could do was stare at that bottomless pit  that nothing and nobody could fill.

            Samira’s reverie was interrupted by a  volley of hail that  hit the French windows of the main house. When they had bought the plot to build their dream house, they had decided not to touch the adobe hut built by the previous owner at the back of the garden. It would be  their love nest. As it  turned out, not only had Tony started an affair, but he had the gall to tell the children that Samira needed to be sent to a rest home, “until she felt better”.

            The hail stopped pounding and the rain dissolved into a light drizzle. Lucerito had her nose glued to the French window. The tears running down her face mirrored the curtain of water on the other side of the glass. She was looking at the adobe hut where her mother lived trying to remember the last time that she had buried her face in her mother’s warm bosom.   

            -Why does mummy spend so much time all by herself in the little hut?

            Tony  was about to say something but then changed his mind.

            Samira looked across the garden at her daughters and her husband wishing she could be on the other side of the French windows.  She couldn’t afford to mull over the past.  Whenever she thought of Tony with the other woman,  a   dark viper would slither up her vagina all the way through her gut boring its way to her heart, pushing the air out of her lungs and if she was lucky, coming out through her mouth, nose and eyes in a torrent of wails and tears.

            So instead of trying to deal with a world in which there was no room for her, Samira  decided to create a world of her own. It was a place were time stood still and the present was suspended in the middle  while the past and the future whirled round and round like a giant Ferris wheel, producing a strobe effect in which lights moved back and forth,  where the future and the past were one blur and the present was where you wanted it to be.  

            The drizzle stopped  and the sun melted the dampness that still clung to the window panes into thin tendrils of steam.

            – Look at mummy, she is wading in the fountain!  Can we go play outside?

            Tony opened the French windows and stared at his wife.  Samira was standing in the middle of the fountain  holding water in her hands as if offering it to the sun. Her hands looked like  starfish, with five fingers, like the five senses, like Christ’s wounds,  like the Gutierrez family, who had been five, and then became four and now were three plus one and soon  would be one minus one minus one, because children grow up and grownups grow apart and go their  separate ways. At the end of the day, everything that adds up has to be subtracted, although who is to say that everything that has been subtracted can’t  add up again? The trick is to do it yourself before life does it for you.     Samira’s lips moved and her soft voice floated over the fountain and stopped at the French windows of the main house.  She looked at her children. Then at her husband. Their eyes met.   The Ferris wheel came to an abrupt stop. The past and the future became an indistinct blur. The sky burst into light. In a flash, Samira ran to the main house with her arms outstretched   until  they were covered in a tangle of fingers and palms and crazed lines.

            Samira no longer knew where her hands ended and those of her family began.  

[This story is a translated  extract from Las Manos de Samira awarded a first prize by A Quien Corresponda, a Mexican literary review whose demise was due to budget cuts.]

 In the tradition of Sadat Hasan Manto:

A man by the name of X hopped from one shelter to another telling families that the enemy had crossed the line and to be prepared for the worst. When he entered our dark shelter in the underground and told everyone the news, the women wailed and children cried. In the dark my father struck a match and reached for a candle. He called my brother and together they walked to a corner. I followed. My father handed my brother a gun and said: No one should touch your mother or your sisters. You know what to do.

My brother whimpered, “I don’t want to do it. I can’t.”

I stepped closer, picked up the gun from my brother’s hand and said: I will do it.

 I met him in a dream.  It was a bar, and I sat staring into the long mirror as he pushed his way in.  He stood listening to the creaking back and forth of the swinging doors at his back, taking in the black and white scene.  The place was sort of vague and shabby, and the people were out of focus, part of the background, like the tinkling slow waltz playing on the piano.  A hint of horseshit lingered in the stale air.

He ambled over to the stool next to me and I knew who he was, dressed in black with big hat and pointy boots, wiry, not too tall, but he looked like someone you didn’t mess with if you had any sense.  His skin was smooth, drawn across the narrow face, a bird of prey.  There was a whip curled on his hip, a sleeping snake whose breath you could feel at a distance, defiant and ready to spring.

I looked up casually, remembering to breathe, and nodded.  He glanced in my direction, sized me up quickly and turned to his beer.  What are you doing here, kid?

All the insecurities of a lifetime were hanging out there at the bar, ready to condense in a moment, but somehow I found my line and replied calmly, you know damn well why I’m here.

A smile unrolled across Lash’s shiny white face as if he understood everything, and he reached across my shoulders and pulled me very close.  A certain kind of intimacy can crystallize when you meet up in the dream world.  Those dark eyes met mine, and his grin seemed to last an eternity.  Yeah, he growled, I’m ready for a little fun.

                                                *          *          *

Somewhere in the stack of assorted crap on the bookcase near the computer is Alfred LaRue’s obituary.  I had cut it out of the Times years ago, and kept it safe despite all the  moving around, even as the newsprint yellowed and dark lines crept into that face in the photo, a publicity shot from the forties, when he was the guy with the whip who entertained on stage and screen.  I imagined a Mrs. LaRue, a blond lady who fit her role.  The newspaper mentioned his Cajun birth in Louisiana, an early career on the rodeo circuit, and how he made the big time in Hollywood as a cowboy star in one hour studio operas.  After the champagne days, the article described a fade to retirement on a ranch somewhere beyond the Pecos.  Then a slow dissolve into my dreams.

I first met Lash after school, on tv in my parents’ apartment, the Capehart struggling heroically to encompass the wild west as the man with the educated whip danced his way into my heart.  Lash LaRue.  Tough as nails, fighting for all those clichés that heroes are supposed to embrace, and definitely seducing a boy in Brooklyn.  I remember those western movies, endless stories of cattle and Indians and handsome guys, with oddball  sidekicks tagging along for laughs.  Sometimes the sidekick would be more famous than the star of the film.  Lash’s pal was Fuzzy Q. Jones.  Of course there would be a girl to be rescued and won over with a kiss at The End, and a really smart horse who always did the right thing even if it involved crossing half the territory, through snow and ice, to fetch the troops at Fort Apache.  On occasion, there would be a wonder dog, and now and then, an underemployed character from some other part of showbiz would wander into the story, like Rochester who always seemed to be on vacation from Jack Benny’s show.

Lash, my Lash.  Others might dress in black and fight the bad guys, win the girl, save the homesteaders, defy the ranchers or the sheepherders, or stall the encroachment of the railroad, get the medal from the Governor, and they might even imitate Lash, like Whip Wilson.  But through it all, there was only one real guy, the coolest critter, the man who could stare down a snake, crash through doors without messing up his hair, save the struggling homestead family, cleanse the town of bad hombres, settle every score, and smooch that girl before the credits could roll.  Lash shredded all comers at the climax, his whip taking on a life of its own, shook out and wrapped around the limb on a hopeless villain, drawing real blood yet coming back so clean in a smooth recoil to his master’s hip.  No lizard from hell could tame Lash when he was mad, a dark hero man enough for any job.  One day I realized it wasn’t good looks or muscles, or his crooning, and it wasn’t his sidekick or the wonderful horse either.  Indeed LaRue may have seemed spindly with his thin Bogart voice, but you just knew he did it all by himself, no stuntman for him, no stooge to take the heat.  He was the one who cracked the whip.

Lash traded in fear.  He provoked my attention, pushed some ancient button that made the short hairs bristle, the body tense and the stomach tight, when breath came in short bursts, and a wordless distress clouded the air as deep threat hung out there.   Whatever it was, Lash came from an unknown turf, too weird to dismiss, and I found him inhabiting my mind when I needed another voice.  I learned he could handle anything.

The first time was in the third grade.  I let him loose when Mrs. Shapiro didn’t like something I did, and Lash stepped in to calm me down, no big deal.  He sent me up front to her desk and I snapped a pencil close to her face, tossing it in her waste paper basket.  Lash cheered, grinned and slapped his side as I slowly walked back to my seat.  The other kids watched my act, but never knew the story.  I didn’t care because I wasn’t alone when Lash went with me to the Principal’s office.  After that, he would turn up whenever it was time to do something wrong.

Years later, I was a college student driving a dark green 49′ Plymouth convertible with skirts, my car in the sixties.  An uncle found it for two hundred bucks even though I couldn’t drive the column shift.  I learned fast.  Anyway, my friend Dave who lived across the hall in the dorm had a girlfriend, and at the end of a day of classes I would sometimes drive the three of us to find food.  We would ride the bench front seat, with the girlfriend in the middle.  One day Lash appeared behind me and said, do something, buckaroo.  I answered him in my head, whad’ya mean?  He said, do what I’m tellin’ you!  Right now!  I glanced at the girl next to me and felt a tingling in my groin, so at the next left turn when we all leaned in, I let my elbow extend slightly to flick her breast.  Dave sat on the outside so he didn’t see.  Yeahhhh, crooned the cowboy from the backseat.  After a few more car rides with my wandering elbow, she decided to ditch Dave and became my friend.   That’s how I met Colleen.