The Hour of Bad Decisions Page 3

  “Watch out for her,” Brendan said, sweaty circles blossoming on his collared shirt, in under his arms and in the middle of his back. “She’s bad trouble.” He was wearing dirty sneakers with the laces pulled loose, the tongues reaching up in the air as if his feet were too swollen to be packed into the sneaker tops. He swung the pick as if he were accustomed to it, hands sliding just far enough along the handle as the pick swept through its descending arc. Then he’d raise it again, loose-elbowed, relaxed, an ease of motion in his movements. Enough to see that it was a motion he was more than familiar with.

  “Strange ’uns around here,” he grunted. “You should be careful. Old woman over there” – he waved one hand loosely toward a green house with yellow trim, then grabbed the pick handle again – “she just screams all the time. No reason fer it a’tall.”

  I wanted to ask what he was doing with the wood, with the trench, but it just didn’t seem polite. Then, the next morning, around four a.m., the hammering started, and one by one the other neighbours started to wake up and realize that Brendan was home.

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT NIGHT, convinced that serious, small, half-blind Mrs. Murphy was standing at the foot of the bed, her mouth a thin line, but by the time I could find the light switch and turn the light on, the room was empty. There wasn’t a single sound of her in the house, not a footstep or the distinctive whisper of fabric, only the occasional creak of the house cooling, the flat-top black roof surrendering the day’s heat back to the chill of the night.

  By then, I was starting to be at home in the house the way you become, able to trace my way around the rooms without turning on any lights at night, knowing where everything was, about how many footsteps it was from doorway to doorway, and there was a familiar feel to the place. The shape of the empty living room with its three bow windows – the room behind that, with the addition of a table and chairs, might become a dining room. The sound the refrigerator made, coming on. I couldn’t tell you how many steps there were in the single long flight of hardwood stairs, but my legs suddenly knew when I was at the top or the bottom even if my head didn’t, knew when to take that first flat step.

  And Brendan got to the end of one long trench, and turned at right angles, and started digging again. Every day, six more brown bottles of India would empty, after Brendan picked them up down at the store with his thin roll of real old bills from somewhere inside his clothes, and each day, the trench got longer. Brendan turned again, puffing, sweating, starting back towards the other corner of the foundation. You could tell it was old grass, well-rooted, that the sods only gave up to the shovel after plenty of effort. The roots of the goatweed ran everywhere, naked and white when they were turned up in the sun, tangling and twisting, strangling the other plants from beneath.

  “New back porch. Gonna be like Fort Knox,” Brendan said. “See if she can get in now, evil old cow. More locks on it than even the Devil can make keys for.”

  Once the forms were built, he started making concrete in a wheelbarrow. Using the hose from the side of my house for water. I met him once coming down the street with a 50-pound bag of cement across his shoulders like he’d trapped some strange, heavy and legless prey, and was bringing it home for dinner. He was miles – easily miles – from anywhere you could buy cement.

  He mixed and dumped, mixed and dumped, drank India and sweated.

  “Got a permit?” I asked, worried about what the city would make of this strange, piecemeal construction of a foundation, not even deep enough to reach beneath the frost line.

  “Shhh. Don’t let her hear that, Charley,” Brendan said, looking over towards Mrs. Murphy’s yard. You could see her there, flitting, trimming, scissors in her grip, gardening gloves on her too-small hands. “Turned me in to Social Services, she did. Told ’em I was a danger to th’ neighbours. Not enough to be fishing around in my stuff, she wanted it all to herself.”

  What a wild kaleidoscope of a thought that was – that anyone would want anything from that house. Even on a still day, you could smell the mildew from the back.

  People deal with separation differently, I know. Some blow up, turning it all into a jumbo, two-way war. Others shrivel, aging and wrinkling right there in front of you as if they were holding psychic radium in their bare hands, caving in like someone’s cheeks when their false teeth have been taken out. Me? I could lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling for hours, absolutely no fight left in me, as empty as if someone had opened a vein and drained out every drop of will. Watching the shadows of the leaves against the walls and ceiling, amazed sometimes about things as simple as the telephone on the floor near the bed – amazed that it seemed I had never, ever heard it ring.

  I heard the faucets in my kitchen. Brendan had his shirt off, and he was noisily washing his face and hands in the stainless steel sink. Splashing water around all over, like a defiant little bird in a birdbath. Later, I’d find a small delta of silt and sand near the open circle of the drain. “You’re a nice fella, Charley,” Brendan said, his voice muffled in my dishcloth. “Fella who can be trusted. Not like some.”

  Trusted: right. And, sure, the wheels fell off then, but they’re bound to fall off eventually.

  When the dreams start, when you start questioning everything about how a marriage breaks down. The dreams where everything was all right, and the dreams where everything goes wrong. I dreamt she cut her hair short, right to the scalp, and I had small, tufts of that cut hair in my hands, feeling it soft between my fingertips, until she ordered me to turn around. “You’re not allowed to look at me,” she said. The dreams where I am making love to her, until suddenly, there are teeth involved, and I find all at once that my hands are strangely gone, replaced by waxy stumps. Sometimes, I wake up and realize I’ve really lost something. You don’t remember the way things hurt, so the heat of anger eventually fades to the slow simmer of regret.

  And, oh, when the wheels fall off, it’s far from pretty.

  I know there’s a place in downtown St. John’s where the top of the bar is a sheet of flat copper, and I know that when you’re drunk enough, it feels cool and wonderfully welcoming against the side of your face. That you can only do that when no one’s looking, when no one’s paying attention, or they’ll give you your walking papers right there and then. So you look both ways – “Look, look mom, I’m crossing the street safe!” – and if nothing’s coming, you put your face down. And you can smell that rich, sharp, green copper smell, the same way your hands smell after you’ve been handling copper pipe. My own little voodoo supplication, like the copper bracelets some people wear to cure arthritis. But you only get a moment – it’s best to make it look like you’ve dropped something on the floor, something you can’t quite reach with the tips of your fingers.

  And those nights lead to hard mornings. In an empty house, there’s little to trip over on your way to the bathroom, few things you can smack into and start to bleed. The faucets, maybe, when you try to splash cold water on your face, and cruelly misjudge the distance between your head and the chrome. The doorframe, when you bang straight into it, starting to walk without properly opening your eyes – but there’s no shame in that. Any more than there’s someone to be embarrassed for you – or ashamed of you – when it takes nine or ten times to get your keys into the front door lock. Or when you drop the keys. Drop the keys, and just can’t seem to pick them up.

  And sometimes I’d be standing there with the keys finally back in my hand, head in sparkles with the sudden movement of standing upright again, and I’d have that crawling feeling between my shoulder blades, that feeling that someone was looking at me.

  Leaning on the fence on another weekend day, watching Brendan finish another beer and drop the empty brown bottle back into the box. Watching Mrs. Murphy, shuttling like a beetle, down to the bottom of her yard and back, watching her hang laundry on the line, staring across hard at us, challengingly, before she began to hang up the underwear and socks.

  “So what happened?” I asked.
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  “Husband broke her eyesocket wit’ his fist. She lost the eye.” There was something about his voice, then. The only time I had heard Brendan even remotely sympathetic for Mrs. Murphy, but only for the briefest moment.

  “Mean drunk he was. Livin’ with her, you might unnerstand it.”

  The way Brendan told the story, Mrs. Murphy’s husband had worked at the dockyard, painting and sandblasting the big factory-freezer trawlers, until collapsing scaffolding had brought him suddenly and dramatically to earth. She’d nursed him for the months that he’d been left in bed, and then tolerated him for the months after, when he had started investing his disability checks in rye. Tiny though she was, Brendan said she could lug her husband up the stairs from the front door – at least until he woke up one night while she was taking off his socks, swung his fist once, and promptly passed out again while she lay bleeding on the floor.

  And that was when I realized, or at least I decided, that there wasn’t one single person left on the planet who actually cared what happened to me. Sure, I have brothers who moved to the mainland for work, and parents – old now – who live in Seattle and concentrate on their garden – but I can’t imagine a thing I could say to any of them that would get them angry enough to even think of hitting me. That’s a strange way to think of it, sure – but there it is. Nothing you do matters, because it doesn’t end up affecting anyone.

  That’s the centre of it, you know; you can watch other people spiral down, watch them on their flaming, smoking spins, their hard, definite intersection with solid ground, and ask yourself why they don’t do anything to save themselves. Why they don’t lift a finger. Why they refuse to swim, and seem to consciously decide to sink. And outside of it, you can shake your head and say that it’s sad, that they’re just self-destructing for meaningless reasons, just letting themselves go.

  Inside, it’s more complicated. I know I have the feeling that, away from the easy, slick surfaces of casual conversation, I’m of no more importance than a laboratory experiment, the equivalent of watching to see how fast bread molds. “Look, look, now he’s forgotten to shave. Better write that down.” Work skids, and in the lunch room, they’re taking odds on how many weeks I’ve got left before someone pulls the plug.

  Sitting in the yard, drinking beer with Brendan. I figured I’ll have hit bottom when we’re actually sharing a bottle. Maybe by then, I wouldn’t have to worry about work.

  “So what’s next?” I asked. I must have said it out loud: Brendan must have misunderstood.

  “After this? Terraces,” Brendan said “Gonna build terraces. Wit’ annuals. For when she’s prowlin’ around in my yard. Mebbe in the dark, she’ll fall off and break her freakin’ neck.”

  It was later in the summer then, and the fireweed that had sprung up all around the bottom of Brendan’s yard had gone to seed, long, filmy ribbons hanging from the pods, waiting for the first breath of wind to draw them away to find some other open ground. The stringers were all up for the new porch with wood he’d salvaged. Some pieces new, others left over and torn down from someone else’s reconstruction project, still studded with plaster nails and the occasional torn corner of gyprock wallboard. He’d been scrounging plywood for the walls, and it was stacked against the side of the house, some of it laced with staples from where it had been the backdrop for bar posters.

  I admit things were falling apart by then. That Brendan didn’t even smell so bad any more, that maybe, objectively, I smelled just as bad, that we could spend much of the day half in the bag, digging into whatever plan he had that day. Pounding nails and pounding fingers, swearing and dropping things, following through on things that didn’t really lead anywhere. Using up all my sick days at work, because I couldn’t be bothered to go in. Unplugging the phone, when the office became my first and only regular home telephone caller.

  Then one more night, one more copper-faced, slab-sided night, I was coming back up the street from downtown and I stopped by Brendan’s, where a feeble light shone in one downstairs window.

  I’d already had my usual night of blind hope and pragmatic despair. The bar is noisy on Fridays, much of the light from tangled ropes of small Christmas lights that stay up along the ceiling all year round like multi-coloured constellations. There are two regular bartenders, one blonde, one brunette, and they wear tight tops that bare perfectly soft and smooth stomachs.

  They are like small, jewelled, uncatchable tropical birds, thin-waisted and devastatingly pretty, and they flit back and forth, serving customers along the whole length of the metal bar. Every single night, I imagine holding one or the other of them in my arms, but they smile and speak to me only when it’s obviously time for a refill.

  “How are you doing?” the blonde one says brightly, and a long explanation springs into my head that I can’t begin to say, and that, in truth, she has no interest in listening to.

  When she turns her back to me, I stare unabashedly at her and imagine dancing with her.

  But they’d no more consider dancing with me than they would dance with bedraggled Brendan, stinking of must and with his shirt-tails tufting out through the front of his trousers.

  So every night, just like this one, I dream hopelessly before staggering out to reality.

  Walking home, I remember thinking that the rooflines of the rowhouses looked like their shoulders were slumping – the eyes of their windows still wide, but also resigned.

  Bleary-eyed, looking in through Brendan’s ragged curtains, the only thing I could see at first was his candle, guttering on a table next to a pile of newspapers. And I could understand the neighbours’ fears, why they thought Brendan might well burn down the whole block any day now. Then I could make out the shape of his sleeping body, stretched across a bursting, tufted sofa, his feet still packed into his sneakers, one foot up on the table, nudged up against the lit candle. And I could see the beer bottles, six or eight, strewn sideways on the floor, all near his hand, trailing on the carpet. Then I saw someone else in the room – Anne Murphy, with something in her hands.

  I got one more wink, just one short glimpse before the candle was blown out. One short, incredible image flashed against my retinas so it stayed there like a ridiculous and unbelieveable afterimage. Anne Meadus Murphy from next door, spreading a blanket over Brendan’s soundly-sleeping body. Tucking him in, though he gave no sign of knowing she was even there.

  It took me ages to get into the house that night. I couldn’t get the keys to work, so I sat on the front steps, eventually lying back for a while to look at the stars. There aren’t as many stars in the city as there were where I used to live, I remember thinking that. The orange of the streetlights rubs away the weaker ones like an eraser on paper; at my old house, you could look up and see the delicate sweep of the whole Milky Way, watch the fall of the Perseid and the Leonid meteors, lie under a million stars burning like bright diamonds in the black. At my new house, head out of the clouds, I could watch one of Brendan’s cats, stalking the night-wandering, sky-stumbling moths – and then eating them.

  I got into the house eventually. If you hold your breath and concentrate, sometimes that gives you enough control to make the tip of the key stop shaking. I dropped my jacket at the foot of the stairs and stuffed my keys back into my left pocket – there are some things that stay in order, like where you put your toothbrush, and which cupboards hold the glasses, and which ones the plates.

  Then, somewhere halfway up, my feet forgot just how many stairs there really were.

  She must have heard me fall from the other side of the wall, must have heard me hit the bare hardwood at the foot of the stairs. Because when I opened my eyes, the side of my face already swelling from where I had hit the floor, Mrs. Murphy was kneeling right in front of me, holding a mug. And I still have no idea how she kept getting into my house.

  “Tea,” she said quietly, smiling. “Just tea.” She had more concern in one eye than most people have in both for me lately.

  I’d like to say t
hat I threw open the curtains the next day and shouted out that it was a new world, a new and wonderful world. But I don’t have any curtains upstairs yet, so I celebrated morning by squinting my eyes shut against the latest hangover, rolling over and burying my face in the pillow until after noon. And, over and over again, feeling the throb of my badly-bruised face like a taut little drum, hit hard with every heartbeat.

  When I did get up, it was hot outside, the sun blazing the way it does for far too few St. John’s summer days.

  Hot Tub

  AT THREE IN THE AFTE RNOON, THE SUN blazing, John climbed into the hot tub and felt the gentle fizz of the bubbles catching on the dark hairs of his legs and arms and on the fine, almost-invisible hairs on his back. He felt the heat of the water move in toward his bones; it almost seemed to bounce back out again through the tissue, warming as much coming out as it had moving in.

  There were kids in the nearby pool, three dark-haired kids from Quebec – he had heard them talking in French to their mother, who lay on a beach chair under the sun, diligently working sunscreen into her long, slender arms. Three dark-haired kids like cut-out versions of the same person at different ages, looping through the water like otters, going over and under the line of blue and white floats that separated the deep end from shallower water. Watching over the edge of the hot tub, he could see the woman had long fingers, too, watched as the fingers followed the contours of her arms and shoulders.