The 10 P.M. Question (14 page)

Louie wore heavy boots and green overalls and a photo ID on his breast pocket. In the photograph, he looked like a trainee mafioso; he’d had a number-two buzz cut and his expression was dour. But in reality, Louie was curly-haired, perpetually grinning, and everyone’s mate.

He knew the name of every person they passed by and seemed always to have some connection with them, no matter how minute. He knew someone they played Touch with, or who went out with their cousin, or roomed with their sister or had just dumped their brother. If he hadn’t gone to school with them, then he’d seen them just last Saturday at a club, or at the River Market, or the Mall, or up the coast at a party. He knew if they were skaters, skanks, stoners, gearheads, hot dancers, thugs, musicians, or had religion. It didn’t matter if they worked in stores or reception or management; Louie had a wave or a shout or a joke for all of them. If they were girls, he stopped to chat; he leaned on their desks and flirted shamelessly with them.

“That girl in the office,” said Louie when they were backing out of Teals. “She used to go out with Jester. She’s a kleptomaniac. A genius kleptomaniac.”

“She steals things?” said Frankie, alarmed. He was constantly worried Louie might revert to his semi-delinquent habits.

“Clothes, makeup, medications, groceries. But mostly clothes and makeup. She never gets caught. But Jester couldn’t cope with the stress — being at the Mall and places with her, you know — so they broke up.”

“Wilson, the guy in menswear,” said Louie, when they were hoisting the Farmers bin into the truck. He secured the bolt and walked round to the driver’s side.

“He’s getting married,” Louie shouted. “But she’s pregnant with some other guy’s kid.”

Frankie waited until he was settled in the truck. “Does he know? How do
you
know?”

“He knows,” said Louie. “Everyone knows. He’s on some hero kick. But he’s a good guy.”

At the College of Education, the receptionist offered them cheese scones, left over from morning tea. She was someone’s mother, but Louie still flirted; he was dedicated to charming all females, no matter their age.

“Frankie,” said the woman after Louie introduced him. “Don’t let your brother corrupt you.”

“Too late, Natalie,” said Louie. “It’s Work Experience, so he’s getting the whole truth and nothing but. I’ll tell him about you when we leave.”

“Get thee behind me,” said Natalie, but she seemed pleased to Frankie.

“Natalie’s a good old girl,” said Louie when they were driving to the National Library. “She can
dance
.”

“She’s old,” said Frankie.

“Thirty-seven,” said Louie. “She had Georgia when she was sixteen. Then her old man went off. She’s with that guy Richie from Steven’s Security now and he’s okay.”

“How do you know she can dance?” asked Frankie.

“Georgia’s twenty-first. She
owned
the dance floor.”

Between the College of Ed and the Postal Services Center they went to Havana and sat outside under the heater lamps, waiting for hot chocolates. Ray Davies had to stay in the truck because the Havana wait staff fed him cake, which Louie said was bad for beagles.

Frankie liked Havana because the sparrows were particularly sociable. Sometimes they hopped onto the tables and swiped crumbs. He liked to study them close up, without binoculars, and didn’t get the chance with many birds — maybe the occasional wood pigeon, drunk on berry juice and uncaring about humans, or a hungry thrush focused on a worm. Or parrots, of course.

(Gigs’s family had an African gray called Albert, who was forty years old, a legacy from Chris’s grandmother. Albert had once had a wide vocabulary, but he didn’t say much these days except,
“Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal,”
some lines of poetry Chris’s grandmother had been fond of reciting. Frankie had tried many times to cajole Albert into further ruminations but the best he’d ever gotten was,
“Monica speaking! Jesus loves you!”
Chris’s grandmother had been religious.)

“If sparrows could talk, what do you think they’d say?” Frankie asked Louie. He crouched beside the table, his chin resting on top. He was eye level with two grubby sparrows; they pecked at a white marshmallow he’d placed near the edge of the table. Louie crouched and rested his chin on the table, too, studying the birds.

“Where’s the money, bozo?”
he said, speaking out the side of his mouth like Bugs Bunny.
“Ya said ya’d get it here by six.”
The sparrows’ heads bobbed and lurched, exactly as if they were snatching a furtive conference.
“Listen, half-wit — it’s not so easy. The old lady’s watching m’every move. . . .”

Frankie giggled. It was dead right. And it occurred to him that Louie was a bit like a sparrow himself — pecking, bobbing, chirping, and chatting, on the go and on the make.

“Ya shoulda ditched that old bat years ago. She’s crampin’ ya style, bozo . . .”

“Ahhh, shut ya face!”

Frankie walked two fingers gently across the table, but the sparrows were unconcerned, still jabbing at the sweet.

“If Gordana was a bird, what do you reckon she’d be?” he asked Louie.

“Something merciless that eats small mammals,” said Louie.

Frankie let go a laughing sigh and the sparrows darted upward, startled by the draft.

“A sparrow hawk,” said Louie. “Or a kestrel. No, no, meaner and more brooding — a barn owl.” He grinned, pleased with his own meanness. “On her good days, maybe a heron . . . or a crane.”

Frankie could see this. Gordana had long legs, and she could just stand there sometimes, staring off, ignoring you.

“What about when she’s arguing with Uncle George?”

“A magpie?” said Louie.

“No,” said Frankie, thinking about it. “A screech owl. They’re really high-pitched.”

“Ha,” said Louie. “What’s Uncle G?”

“Easy,” said Frankie. “A penguin, emperor, king, Adélie —”

“A
puffin
!” said Louie, thumping the table. “They’re fat and childlike.”

“He’s not fat,” Frankie protested. “He’s well built. He could be a pheasant, maybe. They’re kind of big. And noble.”

Back in the truck, Frankie sneaked a marshmallow to Ray Davies, and Louie fiddled with his shuffle, moving through his playlist for just the right song. The shuffle made Frankie think of Sydney. He burned to know how it was going in the kitchen back home.

“Next stop, PSC,” said Louie.

“What about the Aunties?” said Frankie. They were driving around the north perimeter of the Botanic Gardens, past the children’s park. Nellie had taken Frankie there for regular swing sessions and had once been knocked out by a renegade swing going backward at speed. Frankie had been just five at the time but he could remember the incident very clearly. Nellie had recovered quickly but the woman pushing the swing had become completely hysterical. Finally, Nellie had bought everyone large ice creams to calm things, and the woman had chosen orange chocolate chip, which was Frankie’s all-time least favorite flavor. It was peculiar, he thought, the details that stuck in your memory.

“Alma’s a pelican,” said Frankie. “All the chins. And Nellie’s —”

“Something massive and slow-moving,” said Louie. “A great auk. What about your
gf,
then? What would she be?”

Frankie ignored this. “I think Nellie’s more of a partridge.” He was pleased with this. Partridges were plump ground-nesters, which was very appropriate for Nellie, with all her cooking and gardening. “This is a good game. How come I never thought of it before?”

“The Aunties are all rocs,” Louie proclaimed. “The roc was gigantic.”

“Also imaginary,” said Frankie.

“Yeah, but they’re stranger than fiction. C’mon, Frankie, what about — what’s her name? Is she a swan? A flamingo? A bantam?”

“Shut up,” said Frankie.

“
Not
a bantam,” he said after a moment, which made Louie laugh. “And she’s not my girlfriend.”

“She want to be your girlfriend?” asked Louie.

“Of course not,” said Frankie. Privately, he decided that Sydney was a parakeet. Or a woodpecker. She was small and brightly colored and very insistent.

At the Postal Services Center, Louie made himself comfortable in the office. Apparently he and the receptionist had once been on a school ski-trip together. The receptionist’s name was Quetchin Brooker. She had blue-black hair in a most severe cut and black fingernails. She wore dark eyeliner and a very short skirt. Frankie was just thinking she was like the femme fatale in a Bond movie, when she winked at him, and he blushed furiously.

While they chatted, Frankie began a list of words and phrases in his notebook.
Mobile shredding truck. Destruction Center. Secure bins. Licensed employee. Pulverizing. Shredding. Canceled checks. Legal records. Closed-loop process.
He could have made an alternative list, he thought, full of bird names and gossip. He could have truthfully told Mr. A that gossip was a vital part of Louie’s work.

Back in the truck, Louie banged the steering wheel and let out a big sigh. “Queech Brooker,” he said. “We all fancied her like crazy at school, but turns out she’s strictly for the girls.”

“She’s a raven,” said Frankie. And when they arrived at the District Court, he thought one of the men behind the counter was a vulture, and the female office manager some sort of wading bird — a plover or a curlew. The entire world was becoming avian. “You want to see the shredding or do the Istanbul?” said Louie. He was clipping the District Court bin into place on the truck platform.
Trolley. Platform. Elevator. Crane mechanism.
A group of guys stood on the steps of the courthouse, huddling a little, smoking and murmuring.
Marabou,
thought Frankie. Across the road, three elderly ladies with perfectly white, freshly set hairdos sat side by side at the bus stop, a purse each on their ample laps.
Snow bunting,
thought Frankie. A couple of young women passed by, in and then out of earshot, talking fast, waving their hands, shrieking.
Jays. Shrikes.

“What do you think Ma is?” said Frankie suddenly.

“What?” said Louie. “C’mon, we’ll do the Istanbul. I’m starving.”

Frankie tried again while they waited at an intersection. Ray Davies was nosing his pocket, marshmallow hunting.

“Ma?” he said. “What kind of a bird would she be?”

Louie was jiggling his legs, banging an erratic rhythm on the steering wheel, fiddling with the mirror, and checking his face for zits, all at the same time. He hated waiting for the traffic lights to turn green.

“Hah! Did I tell you Ilir’s got another DUI?” he said. “He’ll lose his license this time, for sure.” Ilir was the owner of the Istanbul. He was Muslim and not even supposed to drink alcohol.

For some reason Louie was deliberately ignoring Frankie’s question about Ma. Instead, he began to recite the catalog of Ilir’s driving offenses, which was long and not at all interesting. When the light turned green, he revved ostentatiously and roared across the intersection.

Frankie looked over at Louie talking on and on. It reminded him of something, though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Instead, he tried to think what sort of a bird Ma might be. A yellow-throated warbler? They made their nests in dense undergrowth, hidden from the world. Maybe she was a songbird. A linnet or a lark? Sometimes Ma hummed the Russian opera bits when she was baking. Plus, she got up early, like the lark.

A dove, perhaps? She was certainly very peaceable. She cooed and billed, trying to calm things when the rest of them were arguing. But she wasn’t snow white like a dove; she was small and dark. More like a blackbird.

But none of these were precisely right, not in the way a puffin’s absurdity so suited Uncle George. What kind of bird had all those other birds’ qualities but was also very quiet, very private, almost secretive? What kind of bird could be so absorbed, so lost in concentration, that sometimes it seemed as if it weren’t there?

Louie was parking, right outside the Istanbul, still rattling on about Ilir. He was on to Ilir’s extended family now, his cousins who owned a kebab house in the suburbs and had built a mansion in the hills.

Perhaps Ma was simply a house sparrow.

And then it came to Frankie what Louie was reminding him of. Himself, him, Frankie. Himself babbling away to Sydney, going on and on and on about the Aunties that day, trying desperately to fill the air between them with words, any words, to summon up a cloud of words so big, it shut out the intensity of her focus, deflected her questions about his times at the Aunties’ house, her inevitable questions about Ma.

Clearly, Louie did not want to talk about Ma. But now Frankie saw more than that, too. Now, sitting here in the De Souza truck — staring through the windshield at the neon sign above the Siren Strip Club, pallid in the midday light — sitting there not listening to Louie’s stream of information about Ilir, Frankie knew, as if for the first time, with an extraordinary little stab of illumination, that he had not in fact once in his twelve years
ever
had a conversation with Louie about Ma.

Not once had they ever discussed the startling fact of their family life: that their mother stayed permanently and irrevocably — and, who knows, maybe unnaturally — at home; that she had not left their property for nine years or more; that she seldom ever left the four safe walls of their house. They had never discussed the extremely odd fact that their mother had not, for nine years, been in a car, a bus, a shop, a movie theater, an airplane. That in this long time, she had never been to the beach, the library, the art gallery, the Aunties’, the doctor, the dentist, a café, or a kebab house. How could they never have talked about this? Frankie could hardly believe it.

“You coming in?” said Louie. “You want me to get you a chwarma? We can eat them in the truck, give the boyo some treats.”

Frankie looked at his brother. He looked at Ray Davies, who was standing expectantly, his tongue lolling, a long drool of saliva hanging.

“Wake up, Frankster,” said Louie, leaning over and snapping his fingers in front of Frankie’s eyes. “What do you want? Chwarma? Falafel? Dolma? Kofte? Lamb or chicken? Nah, nah, don’t tell me. No chicken. You might get campylobacter . . .”