The Romantic (11 page)

I say,“Greta’s your mother’s name, isn’t it?”

He glances at me. Nods.

“But it wouldn’t be her,” I say quickly.

No response.

“I wonder who he is?” I say, as if I suspect nothing.

“A vagrant.”

My heart starts jumping. “From another country?”

“Search me.”

“What’s a vagrant?” I ask then.

“Somebody with no place to live.”

I sigh. “A hobo.” Obviously, he’s a hobo.

“I’ve seen him before.”

“You have?”

“Down by the factory. One of the men who works there gives him cigarettes.”

I am reluctant to abandon the spy angle. “I think he’s holding something. A grenade, maybe.”

Abel doesn’t even consider it. He crouches and places his hand on the man’s upper arm. “He’s not cold.” Politely, to the man, he says,“Sir? Sir?” He shakes the shoulder. When nothing happens, he presses two fingers under and at the side of the jaw.

“What are you doing?”

“Feeling for a pulse.”

I look from the man to Abel, and automatically start assessing him. At such close range he becomes merchandise, the orphan among all the other orphans whom Mrs. Richter chose. The dimple in his chin … she’d have liked that, people like dimples. His hair would have been the clincher, though, the same dark brown as hers.

“He’s alive,” Abel says, straightening.

“Injured though, I’ll bet.” It’s a pitiless conjecture. Now that the man is neither a spy nor dead I find him repulsive.

“He didn’t fall, not from the top.”

“How do you know?”

“There aren’t any broken branches.” He indicates the hill above us. “You’d see the slide he made.”

“So he
climbed
up?”

“Probably looking for a place to sleep. Where nobody’d pester him.”

“So he climbed all the way up and then threw himself flat on his face?”

“Not on purpose. He was drunk. That’s what that smell is.”

“He’s a lush,” I declare. It’s a term my mother used to apply to Mrs. Bendy.

“Well …” Abel hikes up his jeans. “I guess we should just leave him.”

“Are you crazy?”

He looks at me.

“What am I supposed to do?” I cry. “Stand here and wait? What if he goes to the bathroom in his pants? What if he rolls over? He’ll wreck my tee-pee!”

Abel blinks and folds his arms across his chest. I realize I’ve scared him. I have. There’s a huge drunken man on the ground, but
I’m
the one he’s scared of. It’s insulting. It’s flattering, too, though. “Why don’t we set his pants on fire,” I say recklessly. “We could use your magnifying glass.”

He moves his hand to the glass, as if I might make a grab for it. This only provokes me. “We could
kick
him in the pants!” I say. I swagger closer. And then, surprising myself, I do kick him, not very hard, in the rear end.

“Hey!” Abel says.

I go to kick again.

“Don’t,” Abel says painfully.

I hesitate, affected by his tone. “Don’t
what?”
But I kick my knapsack instead. “I hardly touched him.”

Abel picks the knapsack up. “Do you have any water in here?”

“Why?”

“If we can get him to drink something, that might wake
him up. He’s probably dehydrated, and that’s a dangerous state.”

“I only have grape Freshie.”

“That’ll do.”

“No.”

He waits.

“His germs,” I say. “They’ll get all over my cup.”

“We don’t have to touch it to his lips. But that’s okay, I have water. I’ll run and get it.”

“No!” Horrified at being left alone. I sigh. “He can have my Freshie.”

Abel opens the knapsack, removes the Thermos and sets it on the ground. “We’re going to have to get him on his back. We’ll roll him over, then I’ll get his mouth open, and you can pour in the Freshie.” He moves to the man’s side. “I’ll push his shoulder. You push there,” nodding toward the man’s legs.

I go down on my knees. The smell is overpowering. “I’m going to throw up,” I mutter, resting my hands on the overalls.

“No, Louise, like this.”

He knows my name. Why wouldn’t he? I’m a neighbour, or he might have heard it at school. Maybe they talk about me at his house. An intoxicating thought. “Who is that girl who’s always out front?” “That’s Louise.” “There goes Louise!” “Louise doesn’t have a mother.”

“You need to get leverage,” Abel says. His hands are bent back, palms shoved under the man’s shoulder.

“Leverage,” I say. I have no idea what the word means.

“Okay. One, two … three!”

We push. We grunt. We rotate him a few inches but my arms turn rubbery and I let go.

“Come on!” Abel gasps. “Keep pushing.”

“I can’t.”

The man groans.

“Sir?” Abel says.

I scramble to my feet.

“Jesus Christ,” the man mutters.

Abel stands and steps back.

The man comes up on his elbows, grunts and works himself onto his knees. “Fuckin’ Jesus.”

I move away, appalled.

“Where the fuck—?” He has seen Abel. “Hey!” he says.

“Are you thirsty?” Abel asks.

“What do ya got?”

“Grape Freshie.”

The man mumbles something, slaps at his chest. “Ya got a smoke?” he barks.

“No, sorry.”

Somehow the man senses me and he thrashes around and barks,”
You
got a smoke?”

I shake my head.

“Ha!” He sits there leaning on his arm and smiling at me sappily. “What’s a matter?” he yells. “Don’t ya love me any more?”

I look at Abel. He’s looking at the man. “They’ll have cigarettes at the factory,” he says.

“What are we waitin’ for?” the man yells. He tries to heave himself up but drops onto his hip.

“Here, I’ll help you,” Abel says. He takes hold of the
man’s arm. The man grimaces. I’m afraid Abel is going to get slugged, but the man leans his weight on Abel’s arm and shoulder. Abel staggers.

Weeks, months, years later I will think of his buttressing of the man. After he’s dead, I’ll think of it not as a feat of bravery or of strength, which, of course, it was (the man must have been four times his size), but as my first experience of Abel’s uncalled-for heroics. He’d have stood there until his spine snapped. And for what? The man would have gotten himself up one way or another. It was Abel’s misfortune—one of his misfortunes—that not-quite-helpless acquaintances, people he owed nothing to and who might safely have been left to their own devices, were the ones he could least resist.

Right now, however, I’m just glad he’s here. I presume that, like me, all he cares about is getting the man to leave. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he says. The man says,“Fuckin’, fuckin’,” until at last he’s standing and then he shakes Abel free and weaves around, inches from my teepee, knocking over the Thermos.

“There’s a path down,” Abel says. “I’ll show you.”

“Hold your horses!” He is looking at me, his face demolished again into that witless smile. He gropes between his legs, unzips his fly, pulls out what looks like a dirty pink sock, flops it a few times, then urinates.

I spin around.

“What’s a matter? Never seen a dick before? Didn’t your boyfriend show you his?” His laugh is a grinding, mechanical sound, like a motor that won’t catch. I can smell the urine from here. I keep thinking he’s done and then there’s
more. “I got a gal in Kalamazoo!” he sings, bellowing. “Don’t wanna boast but I know she’s the toast of Kalama-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo!”

Finally I hear him zipping himself up.

“If you want a cigarette,” Abel says,“we’d better get going.”

He leads the way. The man stumbles and crashes after him. I don’t move. Even when I can’t hear them any more, I wait. Eventually birds begin crying out, like casualties. I go to where the urine is and kick earth over the spot, then I crawl inside my lean-to.

I figure that Abel won’t come back, but he does. “Are you there?” he says from only a few yards away.

I start to crawl out. Just beyond the entrance, while I’m still on my knees, I place my hand on a wet spot. I scream and jump up. “I touched his pee! I touched his pee!” I drop to the ground and grind my palm in the dirt. “It won’t come off!”

Abel snatches my hand and pours Freshie on it. “Now rub it with dirt again.”

“He’s wrecked everything,” I whimper. “The whole place is wrecked.”

“There are lots of good places.”

“No, there aren’t.”

“There
are.”
He screws the lid back on my Thermos. “Places he could never find.”

“Where?”

“I’ll show you.”

He’ll show me. I stop crying.

“There’s even a cave. Have you been there?”

I shake my head.

“Do you want to see it?”

I nod.

“Do you want to see it
now?”

“Maybe”—I bring the quaver back into my voice—“maybe tomorrow.”

“Okay.” He stands up.

“Right now,” I say,“I want a glass of milk. Milk always makes me feel better. Except the milkman didn’t come by our place today.” This last part happens to be the truth.

“He missed us, too,” Abel says. “But I think we still have a bottle. We can go see.”

There it is: the invitation. Drums thunder in my head. Lights burst. “Really?”

“Sure, why not?” He blushes.

I jump up and gather my things—the box of Jell-O powder, my stone collection—and put them and the Thermos in my knapsack, which, without looking at me, he offers to carry.

We set off.

As an adult, whenever I move out of a flat or apartment (which will happen regularly enough that I’ll never have to defrost a refrigerator) I’ll feel exactly as I do now: that the place failed me in its promise of peace and impregnability. I’ll see myself following Abel down this slope with its broken branches and skid marks like exposed muscle, entire bushes trampled as if the hobo commandeered a bulldozer. It made the descent easier, I’ll remember that, too.

Throughout the summer and into the first weeks of September, Abel sticks to our deal—the one we made the morning after the party—of calling each other on alternate Sunday nights. When it’s my turn to call, even if one of his parents answers, he’s right there waiting.

If it’s his mother who answers, her voice can still produce a small clutch in my heart. I love her conspiratorial-sounding “Hello?” Her enthralled and shouted “Louise, how ari? you?” I say that I’m fine, thank you, how is she? “Wonderful!” she cries. And then, like the host of a
TV
show, without further ado, she shouts,“So, here he is, he’s right here. Abel!”

During our first two or three calls I do most of the talking. Unlike him, I have a hard time letting a pause stretch out. These calls remind me of my attempts to get to know him seven years ago, when I’d be chattering away while he stood looking at me politely and attentively, like somebody watching a performance.

A consequence of such attentiveness is that you’re liable to reconsider what you’re saying, even as it’s coming out of your mouth. For instance, when I tell him about running into Tim Todd at a donut shop. This happened on the Labour Day weekend. Unfortunately, he saw me before I saw him, and he called me over and introduced me to the cashier and some other employee, then said he’d just been
hired part-time to clear tables. He seemed like somebody else, all upbeat and friendly. “Well,” I said,“congratulations,” and I turned to go but he caught my arm and muttered he’d been meaning to phone me, he was coming very close to deciding I should be forgiven. “It wasn’t really your fault,” he said. “It was that hippy creep making you smoke marijuana. So”—back to his friendly voice—“I’ve got a new freshwater aquarium, you might want to drop by sometime and take a look at it.” To which I said,“I’d rather spend ten years smoking marijuana with that hippy creep than two seconds looking at a stupid fish tank.”

When I’m only at the part where Tim called me over, I know this story isn’t as entertaining as I’d thought. “Where does he get the nerve?” I finish lamely. “We only went out for a couple of months.”

In the long silence, distant voices from a crossed line flicker: “… A quarter cup of maple syrup … oh, hooey, you can just double up on the brown sugar.”

“Are you still there?” I say.

“I’m here.”

“I couldn’t let him get away with calling you that. And you never
made
me do anything.”

“It’s just that it was in front of his friends.”

“They weren’t his
friends.”

But I am chastened.

I keep forgetting this about Abel: how kind he is. When he talks about
his
friends, the ones he likes best seem to be the outcasts and eccentrics. One guy, Lenny somebody or other, has left home and is living in the Richters’ basement, where instead of going to school he spends all day drawing
up charts of professional-sports statistics. “Underneath,” Abel says,“he’s like a cosmologist, searching for the ultimate logic.” In Abel’s opinion, everybody is somebody else underneath, somebody finer or at least deserving of our sympathy. Regarding my lifelong enemy, Maureen Hellier, whom he remembers from public school, he says he always thought that underneath she was “a frightened little kid.”

“Well,” I blurt,“on top she’s a big fat bitch.”

Silence.

“But I know what you mean,” I say quickly. ‘You can’t really know who people are on the inside.”

I try to believe this because I want to be like him. I look—as I stopped doing after he moved out to Vancouver—at the sky, slugs, dog dirt, old ladies’ freckled hands, and no matter what I see I marvel at. He tells me he’s studying Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
, and as soon as I hang up the phone I search through my father’s stack of albums and find a 1954 Glenn Gould recording, and I listen to it for the rest of the evening, but it’s Abel I picture at the piano, his muscular shoulders working in tormented yearning for me. My father, who ever since the party has had to put up with me endlessly listening to my “White Rabbit” forty-five, says,“You’ve moved on.”

“Progressed,” I say. “Advanced.”

“Made strides,” he says, playing along. “Blossomed.”

“Effloresced,” I say.

“Ah ha!” he cries. Because the word is proof that I’ve actually read the field guides I’ve been stealing from his study. I’ve more than read them, I’ve memorized entire sections: insect orders, the names of Jupiter’s satellites, the
meaning of
ovoviviparous
and
pinnate.
And
effloresce.
On the borders of the letters 1 send to Abel I draw the plaid skin-patterns of snakes, the twelve variations of insect antennae.