Given Page 3

  “That’s Deshawn. Met her once, too. She’s not a cokehead, she’d be the first to let you know. She’s only addicted to the smell of cocaine.”

  I turned the page and found more pictures of sick, beautiful women. “I seen a lot of ladies smile like this,” Maplethorpe said, pointing to a woman covered in tattoos. “That type of smile, it don’t live long enough to call itself a normal life span.”

  “That used to be Halo,” he said, as I lingered on the page with her photograph. “A real angel before she became a drug addict of blood.” Halo stood over a man passed out on a mattress in an alleyway. She wore his tie around her neck, and an evening dress. She appeared to be singing.

  “She don’t sing no more. She got cancer of the voice.” I turned the page, wondering how much more I could take. “Bernadette.” He inhaled, as if even his own fat body had no more space in it for memories as doleful as this, and tore open his bag of pretzels with his teeth.

  “She always said she’d never stick a needle in her arm, or let any man make a bitch out of her. The gentleman she shacked up with made her clean the commode with her . . . ” He paused, popped a pretzel in his mouth, licked his lips, “You want my opinion, guy like that don’t deserve a good-looking lady.”

  Every photograph had a story, each one more desperate than the last. “This one, they mopped the floor with her hair before nailing her to a tree. She went back a week later and shot all three of them in cold blood. That one, she escaped a month before her date with Old Sparky. She was last seen getting into a car.”

  I turned another page, and saw my face again — wearing a tired and slightly embarrassed smile for the flashbulb, as if I were a celebrity arriving in Paris after a trans-Atlantic flight. I don’t remember smiling, ever, on the Condemned Row, but here it was, proof. I had pretended to smile and by accident it had come out looking real.

  Maplethorpe wouldn’t quit. “If you ask me, which you didn’t, she don’t look to me like the kind of mother who could . . . ” He stopped mid-sentence, as if incapable of sullying his mouth with words like kill her child.

  What does she look like, the kind of mother who kills her child? I sped-read the article — not difficult since it was less than a paragraph long — and I knew everything it contained. New DNA evidence, unavailable at the time of my arrest, my lawyer said (the same lawyer, Pile Jr., who had promised he would get me out of prison if it took him the rest of his life) would prove, beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, my innocence.

  I closed the magazine as the flight attendant came through the cabin with our Customs Declaration forms. I filled mine in, ticking NO to everything on the list — NO alcohol or cigarettes, NO dairy products, NO gifts, NO contraband, then put the form and my unopened pretzels in the Latrine’s handbag, lowered my seat back as far as it would go, and closed my eyes. Maplethorpe didn’t get the hint and kept talking. He told me he had a limo and a driver waiting for him at the airport. It would be his very great pleasure, he said, to take me where I wanted to go.

  I was not among the passengers who applauded because the captain did his job and put the plane down on the runway, not on the slopes of Grouse Mountain or at the bottom of Lost Lagoon. I was ready to vacate my seat the minute the engines went into reverse, but had to wait for Deacon Maplethorpe to solve the puzzle of how to unbuckle his seat belt first.

  He told me to “go ahead,” not out of courtesy, I think, but because he was not what you would call a natural leader; I led the way up the aisle with Maplethorpe close behind.

  When I entered the skyway leading to the arrivals area I felt, for the first time since leaving the State Facility earlier that day I could look at the world around me and feel only a small ache. Perhaps this was freedom: to ache, but not to be incapacitated by pain, the way it is when you are locked up for days, months — whole seasons gone. Feigning normality, acting as if it were everyday, I walked through an airport not knowing what I was headed for, pretending to be in control: this was my single, certain task.

  I followed the signs to Immigration with Maplethorpe still on my heels. A flight from Bangkok had come in ahead of us and I joined the line behind two young women smelling of unwashed hair. “Eau de travel,” Maplethorpe said, sniffing. The one wearing the most beads had lost a sandal and kept bending to examine the heel of her bare foot as if she might have stepped in something.

  The Immigration Officer barely glanced at my ID as she asked how long I’d be visiting Canada. I said a couple of weeks. Purpose of visit? Pleasure. Was I bringing any gifts, alcohol or tobacco? I said I had nothing. The immigration officer scribbled a code, in green, on my declaration and waved me through.

  My duffel bag was the first piece of luggage onto the carousel. Maplethorpe insisted on carrying it for me since he had no luggage of his own. I gave up trying to convince him I could handle it myself, remembering what Vernal had said, how when you are kind by nature you end up attracting a lot of people you don’t like. Together we joined the long line headed for the Customs hall.

  I watched as passengers ahead of me handed their forms to a Customs officer and were directed one of two ways — to the left, to an area marked with a red “Stop” sign, or to the right where a green sign said, “Exit: Nothing to Declare”. The young women off the flight from Bangkok had veered to the left as if they had been through this procedure many times before, spreading their souvenirs and the contents of their travel-worn backpacks on the counter, the way street vendors might display their wares.

  I thought of the women I’d met in Tranquilandia, “cover girls” hired to pose as grieving mothers, rewarded with free trips to Disney World for carrying the gutted bodies of dead babies stuffed with cocaine, on planes to Los Angeles or Miami. Poor, broke, just wanting to offload their cargo and go home, they were paid a pittance in Tranquilandian pesos to walk with their contrabando through Customs.

  Maplethorpe stood beside me, fidgeting with the straps on my duffel bag. He began, in his irritating high-pitched voice, making small talk about airport security, how he hated to see our human rights being eroded, how everywhere you looked you had a camera watching you these days. His voice grew more frantic the more he talked, the musical note now as constant and insistent as a canary’s on its way down a mine shaft. It was then that I spotted the blue wall of police officers, some of them holding dogs straining at their leashes — lined up by the exit in the Customs area.

  I felt my heart trying to slide out between the gap in my front teeth. I had come so far, allowed myself to hope. What had I been thinking? Just because I had risen from the walking dead, had I truly believed I could walk away from my past, also? Evian is naive spelled backwards.

  Maplethorpe thrust the duffel bag into my arms as if he knew what was about to come down. I handed my card to the Customs officer who pointed me — no suspicious look, not even a question — to the right, and I turned to face what now seemed to me the logical conclusion of the course of action I’d taken.

  I froze as the wall came rushing towards us, full, suddenly, of a new kind of fear, that from now on my life would be a series of small subtractions from what had been — for the last few hours at least — a taste of freedom. I felt myself being jostled and heard the sound of their keys, the sound that lets you remember, when you would most like to forget, that you don’t exist, you are in exile.

  I waited for what would come next as time stopped for me, the way it does when you have a near death experience or a spectacular night of lovemaking. From a distance I watched myself collapse onto the floor, and then a man wearing a turban — not a cop, not Deacon Maplethorpe — bent over me, saying, “You okay, Missus?”

  He helped me to my feet, led me to a bench and told me to sit until I got my breath, he would call Security or was there perhaps a family member who might be meeting me? I shook my head, thanked him, said I’d be fine, and as soon as he left I got up and began walking. I kept walking towards the doors that opened automatically into a world where I could lose myself agai
n, but I kept hearing Maplethorpe’s pleading voice over the barking, and when I looked back I saw him being handcuffed by a police officer while another held the dog who had plunked himself in front of my seatmate’s briefcase.

  Maplethorpe looked terrified and I felt ashamed of myself for abandoning him. The dog handler spoke into a cordless phone, and then a dozen other men in black nylon jackets with DAS in white letters across their backs, had my travelling companion pinned to the ground.

  I bolted from the Customs hall into the arrivals area where greeters with signs in many languages awaited passengers from all over the world; I looked around, desperately, for Vernal, who’d promised to meet my plane. I don’t know why I expected him to be on time — he used to joke that he’d be late for his own funeral — but I had hoped he might have made an exception, just this once.

  The airport didn’t feel safe to me, and I headed outside. A black limousine pulled up to the curb and the two men who’d sat across from us on the plane jumped in. The pieces started falling into place: Maplethorpe had been a mule and this had been his trial run. I knew from my own experience — it had happened to me the same way — how contrabandistos worked. They have their lieutenants follow the drug runner through Customs — anything goes wrong they disappear. You get popped. It’s you and the lions.

  There was no smog, like there’d been in L.A. and a clean, quick wind blew off the distant, snow-capped mountains. I crossed the road to a miniature park, where a sign said, “Rest Area No Loitering”. Two benches faced each other in a patch of grass bordered by flower beds full of petunias with sunburn. I sat down on the bench partially shaded by an ornamental maple, opened my duffel bag and took out the one photograph of my son I had ever possessed. You couldn’t even see his face, only a blur of white, as if his soul had streaked away. There used to be more — one arm, his little hand knotted into a fist, poking out of his sleeve — but even that had been worn away from so much touching.

  Now, as a breeze rose from the grass, I imagined taking my son’s hand and leading him up onto one of those mountain slopes then stopping to look down on what we’d left behind. I caught a breath of him; he smelled the way a bird’s wings smell of the wind long after the wind has died.

  I heard a familiar voice, looked up across the parking lot, and saw Vernal sprinting towards me, calling my name. He wore a plain white T-shirt, freshly ironed jeans and hiking boots. From a distance, nothing about him appeared to have changed from the day I’d met him in a New York nightclub — the luckiest accident of his life, he used to claim. His face was still unlined, boyish almost.

  Vernal, who kept himself in what is commonly called ‘condition’, had always maintained that if you look good and dress well you don’t need a purpose in life. Today as he got closer though, I saw he carried in his body a kind of gentle weariness, a faint slump to his shoulders as if he were weighted down by doubts of some kind. I saw, too, that he was experimenting with a beard and a moustache, in keeping, I realized later, with his new, more leisurely, island lifestyle. (Vernal had been spending much less time in town since he’d acquired an old homestead on a small island “practically off the grid” where he went every weekend and most of the summer. “I can’t wait until you see the place,” he’d written me in his last letter. “You’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven.”) When I got to my feet he hugged me, as if we were lovers who had been parted from one another for a long time, but not for the first time; lovers whose lives had become a familiar ritual of disruption and reconciliation.

  I had tried to imagine, since I’d been gone, living with Vernal again. He had, after all, visited me and written to me, faithfully, since I’d been sentenced and begun my countdown on the Row. I went to hug him back, but gestures of affection had become foreign to me. In prison we avoided physical contact because when you felt good, if only for a moment, it would hurt even more afterwards.

  Vernal picked up my bag and nodded towards the multi-levelled car park. “Let’s get out of here, then. They take you to the cleaners in airport parking lots.” Vernal had always had a parsimonious streak. I once heard him on the telephone trying to negotiate a better price for his own funeral, the one he’d already predicted he’d be late for.

  I put the photograph of Angel, and the Latrine’s ID, in my jacket pocket. I didn’t know where Vernal was taking me, though I was sure it wouldn’t be to our old house in the suburb of Astoria, twenty minutes from downtown Vancouver. When we bought the place I’d nicknamed it the Walled Off Astoria because of the security that included a gatehouse manned twenty-four hours by guards. Vernal had moved my mother into the house after my father died — “she’s not going to be around forever, either,” he’d written me. He had acquired a house sitter, a client whom he was helping “get back on his feet,” and had put the house on the market the day he found my mother in her rose garden, impaled on a pair of secateurs on top of her turtle-shaped stepping-stones.

  Vernal had been articling when I met him, but some part of me had always suspected his heart hadn’t been in the practice of law. I think he would have settled for a black and white world, but the law confronted him, daily, with uncomfortable shades of guilt. “Nobody is innocent,” he was wont to say, “but some are more guilty than others.” Drug traffickers were his specialty. He charged exorbitant sums to make sure their guilt couldn’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

  He had said the same thing to me when I was arrested; over and over again, in each letter he wrote: “you are only guilty if they can prove it.” For me, once I’d lost Angel, guilt or innocence no longer mattered. I used to think there was nothing more that could happen to me. Until Frenchy said, “You think their dyin’ be the worst thing that happen. Then they stay dead.”

  Some nights I dreamed Angel lay buried in the black earth under the guaiac tree where he’d once dozed, peacefully, the coppery blossoms settling on his sleeping eyes like coins. But then I would have to remind myself that even if my son had lived, he would no longer be a child; by now he would have grown into a young man with his father’s black hair tied back in a ponytail, a hollow place in the centre of his chest that I would fill, if I ever found him again, with tears.

  Vernal strode ahead, taking the steps two at a time, enquiring, over his shoulder, about the heat wave down south, what inedible meal had been served on the plane — the sorts of questions people always ask when they meet you at the airport and run out of things to say. I told him about Maplethorpe and the two lieutenants, and what had taken place in the Customs hall as he scanned the parking lot’s third floor for his ride. “You’re still the same old trouble-magnet” he said.

  It was hard to miss, the Cadillac, black with stiffly folded drapery to match, and Ceese Fun (a ghostlike “erals” after the “fun” part) painted on the side. Vernal opened the rear doors to show me the cavernous interior, the rollers, embedded in a fake walnut floor, laid out in two straight lines. “To help ease the passengers out,” he said, as if he had read my mind, then adding, hastily, when he saw my look, “You’re not that kind of passenger yet. Go ahead. Jump in front. You’re riding shotgun.”

  Vernal took an “On Appointment” sign from the glove compartment and put it on the dashboard where it could easily be seen. He said he’d got a deal on the hearse when Ceese, Sr., the funeral director on Kliminawhit, passed away. “His son sold off the old man’s whole rolling stock and I took it instead of a retainer for some work I’d done.” When we left the parking lot, the attendant doffed his cap after taking Vernal’s money.

  I noticed how people glanced at us then looked quickly away. Vernal said after a while you got used to it. Driving the hearse had given him a whole new kind of freedom — there was no chance of getting stopped at a roadblock or ticketed for speeding through a school zone, for example. I wondered why anyone would need to speed in a hearse?

  “Nuns,” he said, swerving to avoid sending two jaywalking sisters into their afterlives. “Sheep. One black one. Flock of starlings. Nuisan
ces.” Vernal still had a habit of pointing out things to me, without giving me a chance to see whatever he’d seen, for myself, first. “Cyclists. Over there. Repair job. Without a manual.”

  The outside air looked good enough to breathe. Vernal wanted to hear all about my great escapade (as he called it) and I told him it hadn’t exactly been masterminded, there’d been an opportunity and I had simply walked away.

  Half an hour later we headed onto a causeway that led to the ferry terminal. “Accident,” said Vernal, pointing to the twisted wreck of a car with NO DRY GRAD 2000 spray-painted on its caved-in roof. “I see that,” I said, a little tersely, thinking of my dead escort and driver, Earl. No such thing as an accident.

  I hadn’t thought about my own car accident since I’d landed in Vancouver but now I wondered if the Latrine’s Dickwad would tie a ribbon to the maimed blossom-tree, if the kids would leave their favourite teddy bears on the spot where their stepmother had exited this life. Would Earl’s bossy wife place a bottle of Evian water on the spot where her husband collided with ETERNITY? I saw myself, too, broken on the ground, trying to get up, the words WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE GOING staring me in the face.

  The trees all around us were beginning to be absorbed by the darkness. A great blue heron rose, like the ghost of a pterodactyl, and flapped off into the last remnants of an eggplant sunset, as Vernal paid for our tickets and pulled into the ferry line-up. We had an hour to kill before the ferry departed. I told Vernal I needed to stretch my legs and when I got out a fine mist of rain licked at my face, but I didn’t mind; it felt like stars coming out all over my skin. The seagulls wheeled above me, around the flag that had snapped alive in the rising wind, and made me think of the congregations of dishevelled pelicans who kept dropping out of the sky like wind-blown umbrellas on the Tranquilandian coast, hundreds of them gliding south, that the locals told me meant rain. It rained the day I arrived in the City of Orchids and it rained the day I left. When all our other options had been exhausted, I’d taken Angel to a curandero, a faith healer, in that desperate place, an endless perfume factory of trees shedding their bright flowers on narrow roads where women fried fish on hot plates made from the ends of forty-four gallon drums, placed over dangerous-looking fires. I remembered rows of blackened huts, the passages between them stagnant chasms of sludge, silt and litter where small black pigs rooted for anything they could eat. And birds, wheeling above me that now brought back memories of my son.