The Gift of Women Read online

  Was Lily just a distraction, and Cone went into the Achilles, snooping after something – a kafuffle over something gone wrong? A knifing, under one of the tables. A few sharp knives had found their way into legs, other than legs of lamb, lately. Goons liked Greek food, too. And drug pushers.

  After his mother remark that went wrong, Cone invited Herb and Lily to see his little girls. Lily made such a fuss over them, it was natural for them to treat her like a grandmother. But Herbie said nothing. The appeal of getting to be a grandmother without ever having had a kid of her own wouldn’t last long for Lily. It was inevitable. She looked all mother, and now she was that touch older, a young grandmother.

  The dancing took the edge off her years, a well-exercised belly ages well and doesn’t let a woman down. Rolls of flesh can grow around a tummy like the rings of a tree, but given the right shake, jangle and roll…! Really and truly… Lily talked belly sometimes till she made Herbie sick. Her shtick about the belly had big words in the middle of it – omm, omphalos, ovum, centrum. When Lily got religious about it, you’d think the money was like what comes on the collection plate at church, a donation for life’s oldest tabernacle.

  If robbed her belly was in Achilles, for Lily it was sacrilege. Those godawful engineering students from UBC it had to be – the ones who stuck a poor girl on a horse every year and had her play Lady Godiva, buck-naked in February.

  On the night, during their visit to his home, Cone told Lily and Herbie he had taken names and discovered this spot of what he called some other trouble.

  Herbie went “Uh huh,” and Cone asked if he could take Lily down to the Achilles in the daytime early, and to the station afterward. Lily’s report on that sequence of investigation. When they were talking to the manager, she said she could scarcely sit in Achilles, the questions were all about these people Cone had on a list in his notebook. Were they all possible belly robbers or what?

  “Uh-huh,” said Herbie to Lily on that.

  Herbie hadn’t been privy to any of this. He had to take care of his day job in the body shop. Other than Nigel Cone’s driving Lily to the Achilles and the Main Street Police Station in the daytime, Herbie didn’t feel excluded or jealous. But come to think, Lily out there in the broad daylight, minus all her veils and bangles, was like seeing her naked. Herbie trusted Lily in a crowd of horny men, but alone with someone, without red lipstick, eyeliner and sparkle on her body – Lily’s bare belly was public, her everyday face, not.

  All this came to Herbie when she was reporting her investigations with Cone.

  Then, Lily started reliving the fright for the fun of it, which relieved Herbie and made Cone none too happy.

  She turned it into an excuse for being unpredictable and wild. If Herbie touched her unexpectedly, she would spin and slap at his hand.

  Once, he accidentally nudged her with a plate of cheese and crackers from behind, when she was sitting watching television, and she swiped it across the room. She watched the soft inside of the Camembert stuck to the wall, while the creamy crust hung like a slice off of somebody’s skin. Then, Lily ate it off the wallpaper, pressing her lips into the design as she did this.

  As soon as she saw how startled Herbie was, she licked his face, like he was another piece of cheese she’d missed. Her tongue and the Camembert on the wall made him crawl, in a good and a bad way. Then, she turned the lights out at the switch.

  “Did you like that new daytime driver of yours?” Herbie finally asked her his shy question.

  “What Nigel showed me made me think,” was her answer. “Those girls that dance down there in the pubs, where the police headquarters and the courts are on Main. They’re as skinny as Nigel’s little girls. Taller, of course, and right – even if they are all bones, you’d be amazed at the mad dogs who come slavering up and want to gnaw on them. Nigel said I should think twice about putting my sex on show. We just make his job harder.”

  Herbie knew by the look on Lily’s face that this bugged her big. Nigel had shown her the cop shop, then the sex-show shop.

  Herbie looked down as if reproaching his hands.

  “Pity I’m not licensed to carry a gun,” he said, “or I’d’ve put a hole in that smash-and-grabber.”

  “No reason for you to turn cop, or killer – Herbie. You’d be committing suicide.”

  “What?”

  It was the evening of the Camembert on the living room wall.

  “I know you thought, if you scared the hell out of me, Herbie, things would change.”

  What the fuck did that mean? Herbie was the guy at the breaker and at her belt?

  As soon as she swept the lights out that night, she whispered in his ear, “There, that’s how it feels to be grabbed in the dark.”

  Herbie groaned, looked around in the gloom as though all the customers’ faces in Achilles were boggling at him.

  The odds against his being in two places at once, in the car and hitting on her in Achilles, were the same as his being able to make her pregnant. Astronomical.

  Even at the best of times their doctor said a man’s semen was just like stars, or the white dots on the dice sailing through the dark womb of the universe. Their doctor also said he could try to arrange something, but Lily wanted no genetic engineering, no medical mixing and matching, or calendar-watching like they were a pair of fee-paying ancient Mayans.

  Over a year after that, Herbie was dozing behind Achilles with no Cone droning in his ear, when he heard the sound of sirens. He looked out the car window into the back lane. The whole Chou family was at the back of their apartment, on that deck with railings around top of the Broadway Greens storehouse, celebrating something. Herbie watched one of the daughters spin distractedly around the conversation of her father and a young man, while both stood, locked in a serious talk. About eggplants, Herbie guessed.

  Then, he saw the mother come out to announce dinner. She was waving her hands and trying to pull everybody inside, but the company on the deck all had their hands on the rail by now and were gazing out over the top of Herbie’s car to where the wail of the sirens came from, down West Broadway, approaching from the east.

  With a squealing of tires, a Buick cut into the lane, swept past Herbie’s Chevy, only to find that the lane dead-ended by the Chous’ truck, which old Chou parked illegally, to stop traffic using the back lane as a Saturday night short cut.

  Immediately, the Buick went into reverse, the guys in the car geeked up at the Chous, even taking out a gun and making as if to fire to get rid of their nosiness off the deck.

  The Chous grabbed the visitor in a howling frenzy, like he was the cause – the target for the wheel-spinning Buick and the gun in their lane.

  At that very moment, Herbie saw Lily in the open back door of Achilles, trench coat on, ready to go. He had to get her out of any line of fire from those guns if those bozos met up with the cops in the lane. Shuffling across the front seat on his back, Herbie slid his passenger door open and as he did so he dropped one hand to the ground, ready to turn and use both hands to haul himself out and go protect Lily.

  Bristles of stiff fur passed through his fingers. He caught a nose-ripping stench, as if the burning rubber of the getaway car and shit-scared fright of those in it had blown in around him.

  The skunks had taken themselves out of the line of fire under his Chevy. Out of the car, panting, and over on all fours now, Herbie scuttled to see if he could get to Lily as fast as the skunk family got to its hole under the telegraph pole. If that was where they’d head – for home, like he did for Lily.

  Herbie grabbed her by the double-breasted folds of her trench coat, just as the whirling red of the police siren shut off with an enormous thud behind them. The crash of it into the Buick busted the Buick’s hood and bounced the Buick sideways into the scarred wood and dried creosote of the telegraph pole. The noise echoed until every piece of metal and glass had settled onto the lane.

  Next moment the old pole was falling in the Chous direction, followed by a hug
e screaming and wailing in Cantonese and Mandarin. At the same time, a great fucking and blinding and “Don’t move” orders came down the lane and into the back hall of the Achilles.

  Herbie and Lily didn’t budge till Constable Cone tapped Lily on the back and looked for Herbie, where they were both hunkered down and Lily had him pulled under her trench coat.

  “You – and everyone else inside. Tell them to exit through the front of the restaurant. You don’t want to stir-fry out back with the Chous,” said Nigel Cone, and he didn’t even grin.

  All along, that was what Nigel Cone had come for at the Achilles. To scope one of the drug collection points. Herbie had read about it in The Province newspaper, the snoopiest of the two Vancouver rags. Shippers sent the junk, sunk in barrels of feta, Kalamata and the like – for which sniffer dogs were no use. Shipment details for the narcotics could be coded into a regular order. The heroin originating in Turkey or Afghanistan came into Canada via Greece – that whole place in parts of Turkey and up there Afghanistan being one big prairie and Alpine meadow full of poppies and poppy growers.

  “The Chous are all trapped on their deck,” said Constable Cone, swaying down the Achilles’ back hall for a few steps with Herbie and Lily. Blood was starting to scribble down his face, running from under his cap, which he had put on, skewed, to cover the wound.

  “You should have reported the skunks,” Herbie told him.

  Constable Cone had nothing to say. His face was still growing a fine mesh of blood

  “Will you please go on in and tell the rest of them down there to leave the restaurant by the front door?” Cone repeated for Herbie as a cop, who must have been his partner, came up behind and caught him under the armpits before he fell.

  When they looked down at where Nigel Cone might have smacked the floor, that’s when they saw the skunk, by the size of it – a teenage kit, who’d followed Herbie and Lily. It must have hunkered behind them at the door, like Lily was its mummy, then moved into the Achilles under the tails of Lily’s trench coat. So close on her heels, in fact, they didn’t even notice. Cone was in no shape to take in anything much, but the instant Cone’s partner’s feet came sprinting down the hall, the kit let fly and clickety-clicked over the floor tiles and back outside

  Out back, the pole had smashed into the Chous’ deck, but not fallen completely. The broken lines whipped and sparked over the paintwork on Herbie’s car. Heavier than ever, the stench of skunk compounded with the odour of barbecued paint. The entire skunk family must have let go another foul volley of warnings, exiting the opened ground and asphalt around the pole. The home they may have reached, only to be evicted and then meet up with their prodigal kit. The one that helped send Cone into a swoon.

  Three men had been pushed into a back garden, away from Herbie’s car and the cruiser. One, went through the glass into a hothouse, whose owner was outside, disputing the damage with a plainclothes officer.

  The fire brigade was there now, and Nigel Cone, even as he was being helped out of the lane, calling to the Chous, who were no longer there, “Stay in the front, till we tell you the power’s off.”

  As for the Chous, they had done as Cone said before he even said it.

  The whole family had come out front onto Broadway with their young male visitor, or suitor, or whatever, along with the Achilles crowd to hear what was happening after the fireworks. Laughter started, and some crying. The crying indistinguishable from the Chou laughter.

  “Our visitor say Chous a very together, very exciting family,” old Chou shouted half-hysterically at Herbie and Lily, who had moved through and out of the Achilles, by then. Up Broadway in the direction of Broadway Greens.

  As things relaxed, Lily’s nose and Herbie’s went into active operation again.

  “Nobody’d have the guts to grope me in the dark now,” said Lily.

  It was true.

  “Like Sonny used to say to Cher in Ringo’s song, ‘You and me, Babe,’” said Herbie, unable to divine if the skunking left Lily bursting with excitement or the desire to puke.

  But what really must have done it to the sperm count was the tomato juice.

  Ten of Libby’s black and red cans of tomato juice. He enjoyed going through Safeway to get them. Everybody in the place watched him and backed away as he approached. He would come up one aisle looking for the familiar, tall, red and black cans, and that would push people up the aisle and round to the next, where the stench wasn’t a tad easier. Herbie got into the rhythm of this, moving a small mob of shoppers from aisle to aisle. He was turning Safeway into a stinking maze; shoppers would have to find their way out of with their nose.

  One of the junior shelf-stackers in his red waistcoat was yelling down at him, “What are you looking for?”

  “Same thing as everybody else is looking for,” Herbie shouted back. “Something to get the smell out.”

  “I don’t know what would do that?”

  “I do,” shouted Herbie. “Tomato juice.”

  “Aisle 4. Middle.”

  They loaded the bath with the Libby’s and got in. When he looked at Lily’s skin with the tomato juice sliding over it, he said, “Your tits go with the tomato like mozzarella topping.” This was the first time in years he had said or seen Lily’s tits. Of course, he had seen them, but didn’t register how her nipples were as dark and oval as you know what, and against the happy-pap juice, the rippled umber, budding like stones out of the brown olives on the tops of her breasts, Lily’s seemed ravenously white.

  Everything gets started in such a stink.

  They were ridiculous to look at and to listen to. They had an argument again over how to describe the smell. They made jokes about their car getting its battery recharged for free, but afterwards, in the wrecker’s yard, they would touch the gashed paintwork with great reverence, where the lank end of one power line had twisted over the roof and hood.

  Or perhaps what did it for Herbie was the fear, then after that, feeling safe inside her. Feeling scared and safe at the same time made him go, go and know where he was going. Yes, that was it. Being wide awake to her in the dark, going at it, not falling into the usual mope at not being able to take full advantage of all the work she put into her dancing for him.

  EL

  Hell is full of the things people said they were just dying to do.

  —HERBIE FERRIS

  I am Gavin McFee. I have been given a commission by the BBC to track down and videotape my wife’s school friends from the sixties, who have immigrated to North America from Northern Ireland. In this instance, the Corporation is my client; not so long ago, it used to be my employer, and now I supply features on a freelance basis to what we all used to call The Mother Corp. The specific contract is for my wife to interview and for me to serve as technical support and producer for the television programme. I see it as a personal and professional plus for me because I will be gathering her school friends’ candid responses to Terry without having to put questions of my own, which could prove awkward or embarrassing.

  Watching and listening to Terry disarm, then provoke her chums into revelations, is the natural order of things for me. I first bumped into her and her friends in their training-slips on the deck of the town’s tidewater pool where they were gathered to represent their school in a relay. My elbows came into contact with at least two sets of breasts and a shoulder as they shuffled to let me by. I was going to join my own school team and wait for the boys’ relay which followed immediately after. I blushed wildly when one of the girls, El, took me by the hips to guide me by without further collision. Thereafter, I’ve never been able to encounter any member of Terry’s set without the feeling that they never did put on their clothes (or a single year to their age), but now it is Terry who steers me between their bodies, as if they are indeed the same pneumatic girls I might jostle in my awkward middle age.

  The town of B. is a seaside resort in Ulster, well known for its sterling character and beauty, and the girls at the Collegiate School are
notorious for both. Some in my wife’s class of ’62 became women who wandered, which is the way with Ulsterwomen of a certain stripe.

  Talent and discontent take them off, and it is in Vancouver, Canada, that we start to become reacquainted with a few of them and their reasons for leaving. Their own bafflement at why we have stayed through the “Troubles” and put up with the incessantly bad weather shows in their looks and flow of undisguised sympathy toward us. It is as though Terry and I had elected to remain on the deck at the pool long past the swimming season, our skin goose-pimpled by the bitter wind blowing off the lough.

  The tidewater pool in B. has long since been closed, but is still traceable in the salty laughter of the Collegiate girls and their behaviour. They look at the overgenerous swell of Terry’s thigh under her skirt, the bulge of her breast. They touch each other continually with their eyes, holding each other and the memory of what they were with the palms of their hands while their conversation orbits around what they have done since then, which is a lot.

  M. has flown up from Stanford, where she teaches after having worked twenty years in New York for the UN as an interpreter. J. is an MD married to a Church of Ireland clergyman, reclassified as Episcopalian when he landed in Canada. Let in, J. informs us, because Canada needed clergymen and their wives, not physicians – of which there were too many. J., however, practises at the CSTD (Clinic for Sexually Transmitted Diseases); another, B., is a trader at the VSE (Vancouver Stock Exchange, which has the sleazy reputation of a casino, but through its penny stocks – B. assures us – it promotes new mining ventures no one else would handle); and P., a former PE instructor, is now entrepreneur, proprietor of The Fitness Barn. My wife Terry, I should add, is a teacher in English as a Second Language, pursuing her second book in body language.