After lunch, Rawle Powder saw Marcus Morgan coming out of the Astoria, adjusting his pecker under his jeans. He was walking with what looked to be the same whore Rawle had brushed aside earlier on the street, but it was probably a different one.
They all looked the same.
Morgan crossed the street and met Rawle by themonument. He actually delivered, no questions asked.
He handed him a full baggie of brownish-green nuggets. “Grams are fifteen now, unless you think it’s a sucker who’ll pay twenty. I was gonna give you a quarter, but that’s two quarters there. Fourteen grams. I want, either a hundred bucks tonight, or a hundred and forty tomorrow morning. And don’t stand where nobody else is standing, or they’ll get pissed, especially the chinks, and fucking crack your skull open, like that guy on Granville last night. They’ll fucking split your head right open on the sidewalk…”
With that, he turned and left, without so much as giving Rawle his cell phone number.
Rawle pocketed the bag of weed and walked toward Gastown again. He didn’t see many dealers on the street down there.
Gastown was a touristy area down by the waterfront. It was a sunny day in Vancouver and the waterfront was packed with people.
Gastown was charming and clean, and yet amazingly close geographically to the worst wretchedness of Pain and Wastings. Or more likely, the whores and junkies of the Downtown Eastside were slowly leaking themselves down toward the waterfront, closer and closer, for access to all that middle-class money and guilt.
Rawle sat down on a piece of sidewalk, near the Steamclock, across from Starbucks.
He spread out a copy of the Vancouver Sun in front of him, one page covering his stash of marijuana.
There was what they call a “brief” about Kurtis Missions, in the city section. The killing happened too late for any kind of lengthy story.
The brief, about two paragraphs long, ran down a side column. All it said was that the Vancouver PD were investigating a suspicious death last night on Granville Street. No names had been released.
Rawle hoped it would take the cops a few days to figure out exactly who Kurtis Missions was. He probably had ID on him that gave his name as ‘John Dee.’
Rawle closed the newspaper and leaned his head against the brick wall of the building behind him.
He didn’t care about a single thing in the entire world.
He gave up.
He would sit there on the sidewalk, until he died or turned to dust.
He would not even expend the energy required to kill himself..
An old hooker walked by the Starbuck’s patio.
She hit up all the coffee drinkers for spare change.
One guy took out his wallet and started looking inside. As soon as the hooker saw the wallet, she reached across the patio railing and snatched a twenty dollar bill from it.
The pudgy businessman screamed and grabbed the whore by her scrawny forearm, hard: “That’s mi-i-i-ne!” he screeched at her.
The whore and the businessman physically fought over the twenty dollar bill for about 30 seconds. The man had a pathetic, stifled, embarrassed sense of moral outrage, and the hooker had the strength of naked desperation, their strength equaling.
He pulled her over the railing at onepoint and they rolled around together on a green plastic table, yelling and crying at eachother in the bright sunlight.
Rawle laughed and laughed, as if he had never laughed before. He laughed like a child. Like Athan.
At that moment, Aimee walked by.
She was alone.
She walked into Starbucks, then came out a few minutes later and sat down at a table on the patio.
“Come sit!” she called out. She was looking at Rawle on the sidewalk.
“Suits me,” Rawle folded up his newspaper and his dope carefully, and put it into a grocery bag, then joined Aimee at her shady table.
They sat and talked for a long while. Aimee was originally from North End Halifax, like Rawle, although she was two years older than he was.
They talked for an hour about mutual people they knew and what they were doing now.
Most of their mutual aquaintences had either turned to drugs and VLT gambling and a life of shit, or they had moved away from the Maritimes and were working in really successful careers, in Toronto or Alberta, or some exotic country.
One of them was a set director for the Naked Women’s Wrestling League.
Another was manager of public relations for Maclean’s Magazine.
Aimee went up several times to get refills on her coffee. Each time, she brought Rawle back a large coffee with two creams and one sugar.
They talked about what they were doing with their lives and different things they’d seen out West.
How different it was from Nova Scotia.
The sky above them was blue, but there was a full moon gleaming in the air above Vancouver like a seashell in light turquiose water.
As they were talking, a middle-age homeless guy with bad, red scabs all over his face sat down at the next table and started intruding ontheir conversation. He talked about how he had been run out of every town he’d ever lived in, by the cops. And that now he was right at the edge of the country, with nowhere left to go except into the Pacific Ocean.
Rawle laughed at that and rolled him a cigarette.
The man said he would just wake up some mornings on a speeding freight train, and not remember how he got there.
“The store owners and cops would tell me I couldn’t stay around, under their breath and then they would take me for a night, in jail and then throw me on a freight train.”
Rawle could feel it coming. He waited patiently for the schiz-bomb to fall. Another mentally ill man. Another paranoid, sick man, like Kurtis Missions. Another walking time-bomb. The cities were full of them, it seemed.
“All of these were instigated and controlled by the Ontario Provincial Police,” the bum concluded. “They, the OPP, conducted elaborate operations, they kept it going through their channels, across the whole country. It’s really amazing the lengths they’ve gone. You think I can’t roll my own cigarette?” Thebum was already getting hostile.
Rawle had no more patience for this kind of shit, not after Kurtis.
He reached across the table and took back his bag of tobacco, and told the guy to “Get lost.” He raised his voice. “I mean it. Fuck off.”
The bum stood up, warily, but then he tried to move over and join Rawle and Aimee’s table, instead of leave.
Rawle reacted quickly, kicking the plastic chair that he was trying to sit down in, and toppled it over. A few people on the patio started staring and whispering.
“Now, move off or I’ll kill you,” Rawle seethed at the homeless man.
The turgid power was rising up in him, again, in his flesh, stiffening it- just like the night before.
He felt that feeling again. Like he could kill again.
Just then, a couple uniform Vancouver PD cops came strolling down the avenue, stopping to give directions to an old lady and her husband, a metre from the table.
Rawle felt no nervousness.
The homeless man started backing away, very cautiously. When he saw the cops, he turned his back to them, and stood there on the patio, frozen, looking terrified.
The homeless reached down and pinched himself between the legs, like a little boy that had to go to the bathroom really bad.
Rawle smiled.
In another moment, the cops were finished giving directions and continued walking down the avenue. The homeless man bolted, tumbling off the patio, knocking over two plastic chairs. When he got to the sidewalk, he skittered away briskly in the opposite direction as the cops, still clutching his penis like a little boy.
Rawle watched him run away in fear.
“Thanks for not letting him sit down,” Aimee said. “He was scary.”
Her face was pink and soapy-looking. Rawle felt proud, he felt like a man, for perhaps the first time in his life.
Aimee’s hair was thick and hung down around her jaw, like blonde rope; her mouth was like some kind of cut red flower.
He leaned over and kissed her on the lips.
No comments:
Post a Comment