Things Withered (32 page)

I saw a kid shoplifting. Not a big kid, either, but a little one, about nine years old. He took a handful of candy bars, and saw me watching. Just walked out like Bob’s your uncle.

I was in the backyard cleaning up and two young men were walking down the back lane, hurling rocks at the windows in people’s garages. Then bold as you please, the skinny one took a can of spray paint out of his pocket and sprayed a name on Mr. Wyshyski’s garage door. Might have said “Bunny.” It was hard to read, all spikes and swirls.

We used to have tragedies on Burlington. Now there are incidents.

When you get older, it’s harder to make what you would call good friends. For one thing, you’ve spent all those years before you got old talking and thinking about yourself and life and the world around you, so by the time you get old, you have little to debate. By the time you get old, there’s so little left to say. The young kids, they don’t believe it, but sure as the dead, the old ones like me, we know. I can’t set the time on my DVD player, but I could explain to you what time is and where it sits in the grand scheme of things. I just don’t bother.

But it makes it harder to find friends.

The friend I have made is Josie Tubman, a black woman who moved to Canada from Florida. She has a slight Jamaican accent. Josie says,
We—
and she drags out the long “e” and it’s charming,
are not of dis worl any mo, eh my darlin’? Weee straddlin’ the udder one!

Josie has quite a spiritual side.

It was Josie who first mentioned that Hazel was acting oddly.

Your friend she playin wid haf a deck dese days. Someone gonna do sumting bout dat.

The madness seemed to coincide with the arrival of a new neighbour. The new guy moved into Rita’s old house. It had been empty for quite a while and it was good to have someone move in. It’s bad to have a house sit empty too long. Undesirable elements could move in.

That was not true in this case.

Hazel hadn’t crossed that street to talk to me in quite a while, but she crossed to tell me about the new neighbour. I hadn’t actually seen her do it, and I know it couldn’t have been easy. I could see her in my mind’s eye, taking an hour to debate it in her head. Staring out the window, peering through her curtains like some Old West coward wincing through the doors of the saloon. Working up the courage to come out in the yard. The crossing would have been the most entertaining, she would have
held her head high
, she would have
walked tall
, she would have
looked straight ahead
, except for the single furtive glance from side to side that she would not have been able to avoid.

Anyway, I was in the kitchen putting together something when she came to the door. I was surprised and I showed it, just to tweak her nose a bit.

Well, Hazel Kummel! What a surprise!

To her credit, she didn’t take the bait and instead got right to the point. And what a point it was.

Something’s very wrong with that new fellow
, she said.

I know why she picked me of course.

This is my neighbourhood. I haven’t been here the longest; that’s been Hazel. But the both of us can remember when the 400-block was an empty field. Now there’s not just a 400-block of Burlington, but also 500, 600 and it bottoms out at 797, where they’ve built a shopping centre. It hasn’t done well and the parking lot is starting to look a lot like an empty field, funny that. We were here when the street behind me used to be a ball park. The boys were playing there that day when everything changed for poor Tommy. And poor Hazel, I guess. When I moved in, there was a milkman every day, and there was still an iceman if you can imagine. That was for the old folks who hadn’t switched over, of course, but I can sure remember him delivering ice to the houses up the block. Department stores still delivered to the door. Seeing that truck come up the road was a big treat—someone was getting something. The kids would run out, follow the truck and then hang around on the sidewalk until the mother who got the delivery would hold up the item and show everyone.

Hazel and I knew this neighbourhood. We knew these roads. We’d seen them naked, knew what was under the concrete, under the sidewalks, under the untrimmed grasses, the fledgling gardens, the indifferent play equipment rusting into dust.

We’d watched the Masons’ house go up. We all went down there every few days, the kids first bundled up in scarves and mittens, and by the time they were putting the walls up, the kids were in spring jackets. We checked the progress of that house and so we got to know the Masons before they moved in.

Odious people. Cranky. He was a drinker. Bad form.

But we knew their house. We knew a lot of the houses. We knew Rita’s place, too. Sometime between Rita and Mac and the people who moved in after the Jansens, a basement was put in the house. I believe it was Terry Jansen’s insurance company that had something to do with it. I just know Terry dumped the house as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it was because of what happened to Martin, or if she just decided she didn’t need the house anymore. Anyway, they put in a basement.

That was something.

They hacked away at the bottom of the house and then spent a few days sticking—I kid you not—jacks, like the jack you use to change a flat tire, but bigger, under the house. And then they jacked the whole thing up.

Anyway, when they were putting the basement into Rita and Mac’s old place, I made a habit of walking down there in the evening, when I was out for my constitutional. Mounds of earth had been piled up toward the lane, and as the task went on, there were three piles of black dirt and I remembered wondering how mothers kept the kids out of those mountains of dirt. Dirt’s a magnet to a little child. As the summer wore on, the sun would slant just so and you could see the sides of the basement taking shape, the men having dug all day.

One night when I was walking by—this was just near the end of the project as I would see later—I thought I heard a noise coming from down inside. A little noise, almost blending into the background of the night.

A little mewling sound.

I did get closer to listen, going right up into the yard and messing my shoes with clay and mud. I leaned as close to the edge as was wise and couldn’t see a damn thing in the dark. The basement smelled of what it was: earth and clay. It was intoxicating.

Leaning as I did, I heard it. It was a mewling, very faint. Probably a kitten.

At the time, I smirked to myself, thinking the guys had been gone for the weekend and a mother cat had moved in and given birth in there.

In the midst of death, we are in life, a kind of reversal of the natural order.

The next day the trucks came and poured the concrete for the basement. Before I even thought about the kitten again, the basement was poured. My front door was open with just the screen in place, and I heard the truck rumble over. I heard them all applauding, and that’s when I went and poked my head out the door.

The workers stood around, clapping, the terribly echoing din of the empty barrel of the cement truck pulling away, the job finished. I remember smiling, thinking
there that’s done
and then the kitten ran through my mind.

I pushed it out. Reminded myself I hadn’t actually seen a kitten, just thought I’d heard a kitten. I let it go for almost a month when a little boy and his sister came to the door with their wagon full of kittens just weaned and ready for new homes. Turned out they lived down the lane from the basement place.

The kittens were black and white. One of them had a little black spot right on his nose.
His name is Pepper
,
the girl told me.
Like salt and pepper?
Cute as pie they all were.

I never said a thing about it to anyone. Not everything can be controlled, not everything can be managed.

That’s just to say: Hazel and I, we knew the neighbourhood. That’s why she came to me.

There’s something wrong with the new fellow
, she said.

Oh, she told me an earful.

Rita and Mac’s old house—I still thought of it that way—had been empty for months. That’s never good on a street like ours, where we’re riding an uneasy train between neighbourhood and ghetto. If a house is empty too long the kids get to thinking it’s an old toy no one wants and they start to treat it as such. Windows get broken. Beer bottles show up in the backyard. Place gets broken into and no doubt about it, before you know it, you have a crack house on your hands.

Anyway, weren’t we all glad when the sold sign went up in the front. It wasn’t too long a Saturday after that when a moving van showed up in front and started unloading things into the house.

No one saw much of the new owner that first day, or after that really. It was almost a non-event, just some guy moved in, end of story. He didn’t play his music loud and no naked woman ran screaming out the front door, a chainsaw stuck in her backside. You never really know what to expect though.

Then came Hazel with her neighbourly ways.

He never goes to sleep
, she said.

She was already upset by the time she worked up her nerve to come over to my house, to cross that great wide street.
There’s something wrong with the new fellow.
She wasn’t crying, or rending her flesh, but she was clearly in a state. And no slight on Josie, but she sounded sane and lucid to me. Maybe tired. And she’d always been a little crazy.

I remarked that she couldn’t possibly know if he slept or not. She slept. Maybe he slept when she slept. And what was she doing peeking in at him, anyway?

She could see him through her upstairs bedroom window. The window looked down into his front room, just enough so that she could see the top of his head, and sometimes his legs. Never his feet, though.

I go to bed, he’s awake, watching TV. I can see the light flicker from the set. I wake up he’s still there, sitting in the same way. Watching television.

She was old, she said. It’s true that the old don’t sleep like the young. When we do sleep, it’s fitful and filled with odd dreams. I can wake up some days and look at the clock and think,
Oh goodness I’ve got to get lunches ready
, and I’m halfway out of bed before I remember that my boys are grown men.

Or I can look at the clock at three A.M. and think of how time is running out. This soothes me, more than anything else. To know you’re almost done, you know?

So he doesn’t sleep
, I offered. Gently—she did come all the way across the street, the old woman—I suggested that it really wasn’t any of her business.

She shook her head.
You don’t know what else
, she said.
You don’t know.

Tell me
, I said. I tried to keep a noncommittal smile on my face. Tried.

It’s hard to tell when an old woman is embarrassed. I don’t think that we have enough blood vessels left in our rags of faces to blush, not really. And yet I think I saw her go red under her complexion, which, like mine, had darkened over the years.

Then she was stumbling, backtracking.
Never mind.

(I insisted.

No.

Tell
me.)

Will you believe me? It doesn’t sound right and I know that
.

I nodded, but it wasn’t enough. A sort of dignity came over her, poor Hazel. In that straightening of her back I did recognize something painful, and I felt a twinge of guilt. But I was too old for guilt, for admonition.

You know me
, she said.
I’ve been whatever I’ve been, but I don’t make up stories. I didn’t do anything and I don’t tell lies about it and
you
know that.

You know that.

There was a little too much emphasis on the
you know that
, but I acknowledged that to be true. I do know that.

The new neighbour
, she said.
I think he has a tail.

There was a guy used to walk down the block a few years back, probably as long as twenty years ago, really, who had gout. A ring around his neck that made him look uncomfortable and freakish. A lady used to have a seeing eye dog, one block over on the south side, lost her left leg up to her knee as well as her eyesight to diabetes and she used a wheelchair. Todd had an albino kid in his class for a few years around ’74.

No tails though.

I brought Hazel inside and made her a cup of tea. She looked around, fascinated by it all and I realized that in fifty years, she’d probably never been closer than the front door. That seemed suddenly strange to me, and not much does any more. Not sad, but very odd, almost as if it were impossible. I tried to reverse the situation and put myself in her house. I’d never been in. I supposed I would have been as star-struck.

She looked at my pictures on the wall, some so old they were black and white. She pointed at one that had all the boys in the photo: Todd and Kerry, Tommy and Darren, Cuth, a couple of boys whose appearance was fleeting and whose names escaped with them.

I remember that,
she said. The boys all had their arms around each other. Good-looking, young boys. Hazel smiled for the first time.

We sipped our tea. She grabbed looks around the house, drinking in my sofa, my coffee table, the tall spice cupboard in my kitchen.

He has a tail, you say?
I wanted to hear.

Our eyes met over the table and held there, after she’d told me everything. How he caught her looking at him through his window and how he stared at her until her head hurt, how she couldn’t look away—

—
tried to turn my head I really did
—

—about how the east side of her house was colder now, than the west side.
It never used to be.
One day she was in her kitchen watching him in his yard. Thought he’d been cutting the lawn. Because he was standing right there by the garden shed. Because she could smell cut grass, that heady, warm smell of fresh cut grass sort of took her away for a moment and she lost track of what she was doing until she realized she was staring right at him—