Nights Below Station Street (26 page)

“Come on,” Gloria said. “Let’s go and get a table there with Peter. Don’t worry, Joe,” she said, “you’re allowed – I won’t tell your wife.” And why “wife” sounded particularly demeaning at this moment Joe didn’t know.

They found out that Joe was a bouncer because he came home one night with his head cut open from the claws of a hammer. It was during the liquor strike and boys were running truckloads of beer from the border. In the yard, with the smell of cigars faint in the snow, he was tackled – someone thought Joe would have the keys to the stockroom
on him. When they couldn’t throw him down, and when he stood in position and planted his feet to throw them off, someone hit him with a hammer. He fell and grabbed his head, and heard their feet retreating toward the wharf, and the shadows going up over the path of snow.

Blood ran over his eyes and down his face. Rita screeched, and tried to take him to the hospital.

Joe shook his head, and said that all he needed was a face-cloth.

“Crazy young fuckers,” Joe said.

Everyone assumed Adele would faint – because she had often fainted when she saw a speck of blood. The first time she had her period, she fell down stiff as a board, and when anyone cut themselves. But at this moment her face became filled with the compassion that always brings out beauty.

“Joe,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “Oh god – Joe.” And, without knowing that she would ever be able to do something like this, she took away the face-cloth to look at the wound.

All weddings are the same, and Vye wanted everything done the way everyone else did it, including the stag party – where they showed four skin-flicks – and Vye sat with his friends, as if stag films and all the rest of it were things he was now going to leave behind. The talk, which he had no interest in, was about hockey and ball. The book, which showed a variety of things that would happen on a honeymoon, he took to be funny because it was supposed to be. His hands were thick, and his face, when he drank, became passive, and at times brooding. He rubbed his eyes and looked about, and smiled at his friends.

Then they brought a girl from the tavern, who was supposed to take him into another room. Vye went into the other room with her. She looked at him and smiled. It was cold in the room. But what happened was perhaps just the same as most other times. Vye was too drunk, and only ended up telling her he loved her.

“I love you too,” she said. “What are we going to do?” She held one of those multi-coloured party twisters in her hand, that she was intent on pulling apart.

“I don’t know,” Vye said, “I just don’t know anymore.”

The next afternoon, which was cloudy and cold, he had to go and visit his mother. He remembered the little girl from the tavern, the tattoo she had – and how after a while everyone got angry with her. How her neck smelled of twigs.

Vye had lately thought of his mother in this way: that she was not really a part of his life anymore, but that he still had an obligation to her. So as he sat in her room, on the chair with its plastic seat, and told her about the marriage, he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t seem to understand. He wasn’t surprised, but he could not help being disappointed. He showed her a picture of Myhrra – Myhrra was leaning against a cottage door down river. There had been a barbecue. For some strange reason Vye had always wanted to show his, mother this picture. It was taken at a time when Myhrra was pretending to be the outrageous divorcee – she was going to parties, and she was getting a bad reputation – leaving Byron to be taken care of by Rita – and trying to pay her ex-husband back. And yet this was the picture Vye – wearing his red coat and high-heeled cowboy boots, which left hard bites in the snow – wanted to show her, and he was disappointed she did not think Myhrra as daring as the picture made out.

When Vye went home, there was sun on the porch. The place was a mess. The living room was still dark, and Vye didn’t want to open the living room drapes. There were bottles everywhere. Cans of smoked oysters lay on the table. A plate of crackers and cheese looked damp, as if
someone had spilled a beer on it. He remembered speaking to the young girl from the tavern and telling her everything about himself, as they sat on the side of the bed, and he’d acted as if he’d finally found someone he could talk to. Now he was worried about what he’d said, and if she would go around town talking about him. He sat down on a kitchen chair feeling depressed and nervous.

Myhrra and Vye were married. Myhrra cried at her wedding, because she could not help doing so. She wanted everything to be better than other weddings.

At the reception at the community centre she had to go into the kitchen twice and, standing in her white dress with the veil, look up at the caterer and tell her they weren’t serving the food properly. Byron, who sat at the head table, clinked his fork and spoon monotonously. The matches with the names Myhrra and Vye on them caught the thin afternoon light. Myhrra’s mother was gloomy – and in this light looked the way Myhrra would twenty years from now. The night before, she had gotten into an argument with Myhrra over something and it had not settled yet. Three little cousins ran about the table screeching, and every once in a while Byron would throw a bun in their direction. Every time Byron was told to stop throwing a bun, he would look about as if it wasn’t him who was throwing it, and look at his mother in her white dress as if she was foolish, and this made Myhrra sad.

Though Rita sat at the head table, Joe sat at the other end of the room, against the wall, with two couples from across the river, whom he did not know.

The bar was opened and there was champagne. Myhrra,
who was pale, looked over at Joe when he toasted the bride. Vye kissed her, and everyone clinked their spoons against their glasses, and Myhrra blushed and looked again at Joe.

It was late afternoon. The sky was pale white, and large flakes of snow started to fall. Heart-shaped flowers with Myhrra and Vye’s names were pinned on the wall above the bead table.

When the dancing started, Myhrra and Vye, who was wearing a grey tuxedo with yellow cummerbund, danced together, and then as they stepped across the floor, they laughed. Then Vye danced with Rita. Rita blushed as Vye said something, and then she laughed. At this point Myhrra walked over to Joe and asked him to dance.

Joe and she began to dance, and Myhrra began to laugh, though Joe felt he had said nothing funny, and Joe felt he wanted to tell her something which would make her happy.

Adele sat the whole time looking about, almost as pale as Myhrra. She kept glancing at the little watch that Ralphie had given her for her birthday, although her birthday was not for two weeks. Ralphie could not get to the wedding because he had to work a twelve-hour shift at the mines.

After he drank four glasses of champagne, Vye went over to Joe. He sat beside him and told him he was sorry if anything was taken to heart. He looked sad. His nose had a curve at the front and his eyes blinked heavily. He told Joe that Rita was like a sister to him, and they were just friends.

“Now – what we have to do – is get you a job,” Vye said, suddenly becoming passionate about Joe and his situation. Then Rita came over and sat down beside them. She took a glass of champagne off the table and drank it, smiled – her
teeth were crooked, which enhanced her beauty – and her eyes were dark and warm.

Joe, suddenly and without warning, wanted a drink so badly he could almost taste the rum. He said to himself: “If Adele gets off her arse and goes into the can – I’ll have a drink.”

Adele at that moment did get up, but it was only to tack a balloon back up on the wall.

Then she looked at Joe and for some reason looked frightened – a way she had not looked since she was eight years old with ulcers, that summer when they lived up by the station, and there was a smell of tar and the wind blew over the burdocks, and for a time the smell of burdocks and wind seemed to make him frightened when he drank. Then she suddenly went over to the far end of the room and sat down very carefully, as if she had just come into a restaurant.

Rita danced with Vye, and then with one of the men from across the river, and then twice with Clay Everette Madgill. Then she took another glass of champagne and danced again. The floor was filled with dancers now, and it somehow seemed ridiculous to Joe. He knew he looked ridiculous sitting in a corner by himself – but he could not bring himself to do anything. There were two chairs in front of him, and Simonie Bath, with her big breasts and her olive skin, was sitting with her father, Allain Garret. She was “the adopted one” – as they said. There were people from New Jersey – that patch of wood down river – where Myhrra’s relatives had come from. There were old ladies with powdered skin who kept popping their cups up for tea, and young girls of eleven or twelve, wearing training bras, and learning to dance with cousins shorter than themselves.

Joe was looking around, and what he was seeing was not
so much the people, but the light fixtures and sockets, and he was listening to the pipes and the plumbing because he and Cecil and Maufat McDurmot had built this centre five years ago. He thought about the faint smell of wet bark in the grey twilight with its snow. The smell of the woods, and its dark trees wet and old. The smell of new snow falling against the end of last month’s storm; on the windows the last flush of twilight and the sound of passing cars.