How Loveta Got Her Baby Read online

  Then she lost her nerve all at once.

  “There there, don’t cry,” said Darryl, “just shut up.”

  Then Darryl took his left foot and laid it down on Flo’s chest near her throat while she lay there in the dirt. It was a boot like a cowboy might have, with a heel like iron maybe two inches long.

  “I’m now the man at the cash tonight,” he said.

  He pressed his foot on her throat some, but she could still breathe.

  “Don’t you say a word or move, or I’ll stomp on your windpipe with the toe of this boot. They got steel toes.”

  There was a tinkle from the doorbell and she heard the shuffle-shuffle of the old man with the cane. Eight fifteen on the button every night, for the newspaper and the dog food. Once the boss saw that the old man always got dog food, he’d marked up the cans to $2.00 for each and every one.

  “The old guy will never notice that,” he said, “the old goat, the old geezer, the old fool.”

  Later, Flo changed it back to $1.25 with the rotating stamp.

  The boss’ll never notice that, she said to herself, the old miser.

  That was the general atmosphere at the Minimart, so Darryl there behind the counter, his foot on Flo’s throat, didn’t really change things all that much.

  “Where’s Flo?” said the old man when he came up to pay.

  “Underfoot somewhere, maybe in the back,” said Darry l bold as brass. “I’m on the cash tonight. For all I know, she’s lying down somewhere.”

  That’s how the rest of the night was with Darryl. Flo lay on the floor but she couldn’t cry anymore. Darryl took in all the cash and put none of it down the slot. After an hour went by, Darryl took off his boots with the steel toes and just pressed on her neck with his stocking foot. She was surprised, the sock smelled clean, like wool. Whenever she looked up, he still had on that smile which never changed. He thought he was a smart-ass, she could tell, but that was common enough in all the men she knew. By nine thirty, she no longer trembled but Darryl was none too happy with the lousy take of, so far, $38.50.

  “This is one slow store,” Darryl said.

  That foot of his seemed to move further down from her throat, down her chest until it was right on the top of her left breast. She shifted down a bit.

  “Not a lot of money comes in to this dumb store,” he said.

  “Watch that foot please,” said Flo.

  “Sorry,” said Darryl.

  He released a bit of pressure but he didn’t shift the toes at all.

  “Is that better?”

  “That’s better.”

  In the quiet times, between the customers, Flo thought she could feel his foot getting rhythmic on her chest.

  Oh well, just lay there, she figured, let it go.

  “I might just close up early,” said Darryl at 10:30.

  “Leave now,” said Flo, “there’s an idea.”

  “Then what do I do with you?”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the eye witness.”

  “The eye witness?”

  Oh no, she thought, this could come to a nasty turn now. Her heart began to thump so hard, under that foot on her blouse, that she thought, for sure, this guy could feel it there, thumping under his wandering toes. There was no doubt where that foot was now.

  “You’re the only eye witness to this crime,” Darryl said, “my crime.”

  He smiled down at Flo.

  “I wonder, what should I do with you, girl?”

  “All those people saw you too, that came and went,” she said.

  “None of them that I saw had any kind of brain to remember,” he said.

  Then Flo found the way out that saved her in the short run but in the long run, it didn’t make that much difference.

  “Ask me what I saw tonight,” she said, She looked up at Darryl from the floor and willed that heart of hers to stop that dreadful pounding noise it made.

  “Okay, what?”

  “I saw this guy, maybe five foot seven, a thin guy with rotten teeth and a weasel face who came in and robbed the store and held me down on the floor with a gun, the whole time, and took all the money that came in until you came in and chased him off.”

  “I did that?”

  “You were brave.”

  “I was brave like a lion.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He ran away down the hill.”

  “Like a rabbit.”

  “Mind moving that foot please to the other side?”

  “Like that?”

  “That’s better. Yes. That’s a lot better.”

  “How’s that feel?”

  “That feels better, it feels good.”

  The bad part was, she wasn’t lying when she said that.

  “You saved my life. You paid for smokes, you looked over the counter, you’re tall, you saw me on the floor and you said to the guy, what’s with the girl on the floor? And it was then that he pulled out his gun, forced you up against the rack of chips, and then he slipped out the door and ran and ran. You stayed with me. We made the call.”

  As she lay there, Florence could see the little man with the bad teeth running and running down Long’s Hill, the lights from the passing cars flashing off his legs, the sound of his footsteps getting smaller and smaller.

  “What’s your name?” Darryl said.

  “Florence.”

  “Florence, you get up now.”

  He reached down and gave her a hand up and dusted her off. He spent a lot of time on the blouse and on the upper parts of the jeans, where they were the dustiest.

  Then, together, they put in the call to the Constabulary, and together they told the same story they’d worked on, as if they were old friends. Then they went out to George Street and drank up the money that Darryl had made that night.

  One thing led to another. They were both reckless to a fault. One day, it was too late for Florence, she’d missed three periods, maybe four, and little Queenie was on the way, unstoppable.

  The doctor said to her, “I’m sorry, Florence, there’s no way, you’re too far along for anything but to carry on with this little baby.”

  That was okay with Flo. By then, she loved Darryl in her way, despite that smile he always had.

  Her friends all warned her, “Look at that guy, Flo, that smile of his.”

  That was the worst thing they said. Darryl could be happy, sad, busy or bored, or mean, nasty as anything, and it was always the same, his smile. Sure it was handsome, winsome even to a foolish girl, but it was a sick smile, forever as empty as his stupid criminal heart was of anything like kindness.

  “Look out, Florence,” they said.

  But she never listened. She never saw it that way. It must have been how he put the sock on her chest that night, the knowledge he had from being older, like Flo was some kind of hostage all her life one way or another, underfoot, in the way.

  The writing was on the wall, the late-night driving they did up and down the Number 10 Highway, the open beers that rolled on the floor, all the shady stuff that Darryl pulled, including the final trip that had something to do with crystal meth, the Winnebago that lumbered over the centre line with Darryl half-dazed, the old guy at the wheel, all that momentum they both built up when they hit. The front grill of the Winnebago went straight head-on through Darryl’s rusted-up Chevrolet and it took the motor of that car, in one big jangled piece, slam-back through that smirk of his, and right through Florence too, until they all ended up in the trunk, fused and welded together by the flames that broke out, probably from the cigarette that Darryl always had to have, hanging there from his lip.

  That’s how Eunice inherited her baby, from her sister, Flo, by accident.

  Flo had come by earlier that day and left Queenie with her, like she’d had some kind of premonition. She was a good mother, really, when you got down to it.

  “Here,” Flo had said, “take Queenie a bit. Darryl and me, we’re off t
o where there’s no place for a girl.”

  You really can’t get much better than that, when it comes to mothering.

  strait

  I learned a song in Margaree.

  It rang inside my head:

  Wrap me up in dungaree,

  This morning I am dead.

  THE CANSO CAUSEWAY was built in 1952 between the low mainland of Nova Scotia and the hills of Cape Breton Island and it took ten million tons of granite blasted from the face of Cape Porcupine to do it, the ocean breached and the ferry service gone like that; it was the lifeline but also the blood-letting of music, the time of strathspeys who took it upon themselves to be the first to step out upon the roadbed ginger-haired, and in the peace that followed upon this no-man’s-land excursion into the more-solid world, a stream of reels giddied down upon the steam of asphalt laid there by the yellow machines that called out jobs for us, the trucks, the wheels the size of boulders strewn by the same shake-up in the landscape of green, the morning clouds of jagged rock, the reels impetuous but off to a late start from the night before, slurred and graced and staccato’d into air still tanged up with the vapour blows of oil and diesel and the shouts of the gulls who multiplied with all the fuss, like showgirls they were that fluttered on the flow of the whitecaps now divided by the rubble that lay there S-shaped from shore to shore, and the workmen pounded in the guardrails for the slow airs to insinuate upon, which they did, the breath-notes twined in and out and stayed there as locked in time as any simple thought you ever had, vanguarding for the slip-jigs that then came down, rockets and flares in 9/8 time, their sixteenth- and thirty-second notes shredded and torn and flung from Bras d’Or high up there in the thunderstorms of August, the ozone heavy in the air, the line painters, the man with the steady hand who had to wait for the weather to change, the ribbon cut, the banshee cry, the wild scratch of horsehair whipped from the stammered bow, the fiddler himself anguished and stepped-out, the keening, back-lit kilted traditional furious pummelling of notes that rolled on down the Causeway, now unimpeded by the Strait surpassed, straight past all of us to the downtown city of New York.

  scenario

  2a.m.

  AARON STOODLEY COULDN’T get the botulism party out of his head. All of those distant relatives of his, dead and gone, just three weeks after Mistaken Point. Sure, he inherited nine thousand dollars from the disaster, and that changed his life a little bit. But nighttimes, he’d find himself wondering about the party, how it happened. He started to make up what he called scenarios, to fill in the blanks.

  “None of it, Henry,” he said, “bothered me in any way. Totally detached, I was.”

  But there he found himself at 2 a.m., he couldn’t sleep, and he ran through it in his head like a movie, scene after scene, imagining it all from scratch, seeing how easy it was for everything to slip away.

  First he saw the dog, the little fox terrier, and in one scenario the dog was asleep in the apartment, all by himself. There was a radiator under the window, and that was where the little dog slept all day, on a raggy blue blanket. There was an empty bowl sitting there for kibble. Now and then, the little dog got up and growled at nothing. It tugged and pulled away at the edge of the blanket with its teeth. Then a pigeon flew by and landed on the outside, up on the windowsill, and the fox terrier jumped up and barked and the pigeon flew away.

  “It flew away like the passing of a spirit,” said Aaron Stoodley.

  He had another scenario which showed the same room, but this time there was no dog. The blue blanket was there, and so was the radiator, but the pigeon perched up on the windowsill for a long time. Coo-coo-coo it went, and that was the only sound you could hear because the apartment was empty. It was the middle of the afternoon, a lot of light came in from the window.

  Next thing that happened, in both scenarios, were footsteps on the stairs and the front door opened. Then either the fox terrier jumped up from the blanket and ran to the door, or the fox terrier came in on a leash from the outside. Either way, the scene was set and Aaron liked it better when he pictured it the first way, the dog all alone in the house for such a long time.

  Then the six people who lived there came inside, all of them together. They were dressed up in their soccer uniforms, they were a team. Falcons, was what it said on the front of the shirts, and there were numbers, all different, on the back. They all laughed and clumped straight into the kitchen, took off their soccer shoes, pushed them into a pile.

  “They spent the rest of their lives in just their socks,” Aaron said.

  First through the door was Otto Bond and then in came Johnny Drake. Johnny Drake put a carton of beer on the floor. Then he filled up the refrigerator with the beer bottles, one by one. He had one open already, it looked like he didn’t care if it was warm or maybe they’d bought it cold, refrigerated. Aaron wasn’t sure. Then in came the others.Terry Snook, Shawn Blagdon, Barry Rose, and Justin Peach. Aaron rhymed off the names like that. He knew them all from the lawyer’s papers, from the inheritance, from the stories in the newspapers.

  Otto Bond was stocky, he had his hair cut short and he was the quickest soccer player you ever seen. They won the men’s championship that night.

  “All Halifax,” said Aaron.

  That was the truth all right. He’d read it in the Daily News, read what the police found when they came in, later on.

  It was Otto Bond who owned the dog and you could tell he liked it. First he took the dog out to the park. Then he came back and he went over and got out some kibble from the cupboard, put it into the bowl and shook it, so it made a sound. The dog came over and snuffed at it, but you could tell that he’d had a awful lot of kibble before.

  “Oh, eat the food, doggy-oh,” sang Otto Bond.

  Then the boys got hungry and the dog was up on the couch curled up in one lap or another. There were no girls there at all. That meant the six of them concentrated on laughing and hooting and joking, just being themselves.

  Six, seven o’clock came around and by then they were all in the livingroom. There was a couch, a TV, and a bean-bag chair. Three of them sat on the floor on a rag-rug from home. There was a picture woven into that rug, the S.S. Caribou, the ship full of innocent passengers that the Germans sank with a torpedo back in 1942. Down it went, the Caribou ship, down to the bottom off Port-aux-Basques. Hundreds drowned. Trouble was, Aaron saw in his scenario, the rag-rug was so old and so twisted out of shape, the ship bent here and there in the fabric, it looked like an old wreck even before the torpedo hit.

  That said, it was still afloat on the sea, smoke from the funnels.

  “It was an omen too then, the rug, like the pigeon,” Henry Fiander said.

  “That’s right,” said Aaron Stoodley, “you could say that.”

  Now he had that old carpet at home, part of the inheritance.

  About once a month, in Halifax, Otto Bond had taken the S.S.Caribou rug outside and shook off all the crumbs. Then it was nice to sit on, and three of the boys sat there on the championship night.

  “What’d they look like, physically?” Henry asked.

  “They were all different, I bet, but in my mind’s eye, at least one of them bore a certain resemblance to my grandmother, Priscilla.”

  It was through the connection to Priscilla Yarn that Aaron came by the money. Therefore someone must have looked a bit like Priscilla, or her long-dead husband.

  It was that Justin Peach who came up with the idea that caused them all to die.

  “Let’s order in,” he said, “pizza.”

  That’s how simple it was. They could have decided to go out, they could have had anything they wanted served up. Instead they ordered in, and it was Otto Bond who said, “I’ll do it, let me do it, I’ll call.”

  “Hold the cod-liver oil,” they heard him say.

  “Might come over later,” Bridie whispered over the phone, “but it kind of depends on Mother.”

  “Oh?”

  “They might need her at the Legion, they might
not. I’ll let you know, Otto Bond.”

  Bridie’s mother had to work overtime so Bridie missed the party and after it all happened, and was over with, she consoled herself as best she could, in the middle of her episodes of crying, she said to baby Liam, “Oh my stars!” and she cuddled up with him.

  “You were almost an orphan, my little darling. Wouldn’t that have been a fine state of affairs?”

  Years later, she still thought about Otto Bond on a regular basis, because she knew he was the best of all the boyfriends she ever had. He was the gold standard.

  Justin Peach did it again. While Otto was still on the phone with Bridie, he came over and tapped Otto on the shoulder.

  “Hey! Order a couple empty blank pizza crusts too, we got that sauce of mine,” he said.

  So, when the pizzas were delivered, there were those three empty crusts that Justin Peach fixed up. He went out of sight from the livingroom, into the kitchen, and it took him a long, long time. He banged around, you could hear the pots and pans. When he came back in, he looked so proud, no one knew they were looking at their last supper.

  “Jeez, Justin Peach, what you got on there?” they all said.

  Aaron Stoodley could see him there plain as day. Justin Peach stood with his own home-made pizza and held it up, slanted, so they could see it. Steam rose up it was so hot.

  “You’re gonna love this,” he said, “got my own tomato sauce boiled up, sat in the fridge a bit, seasoned it up. Cod tongues and cheeks. Side order, chips and gravy.”

  Now that sounded good. After the soccer game, the victory and the beer, they had plenty of room for the Justin Peach Special.

  That’s what they called it, and they ate it all down but for a piece or two.

  “That’s what did it, what killed them,”Aaron said. “It was the sauce.”

  The little dog wandered around about for five or six hours and sniffed at a couple of slices that were left over. But he was too smart, he turned his nose up and walked away, ate a bit of his dry kibble, crunch-crunch, and he looked at the boys, puzzled, every one of them now dead to the world.