LITMIR.BIZ

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As the surface of the water turned to milky film, a whiter line of surface tension delineating her legs, one half-submerged, the other bent and invisible six inches below the knee, Belle had a vision of her body frozen in the ice.

      EIGHTEEN

      The gray mailboxes at the junction of her road stood an inconvenient six miles from the house. Half the time Belle thought in kilometres, half the time in miles. Another decade and the logic of metric would be second nature. She took two pieces of mail from the box, cheques for her father, the Canada Pension, which everyone paid into, and the Old Age freebie—$400.00 a month just for wrinkles and myopia!

      When she got to Rainbow Country with the shrimp, her father was spruced up in the blue plaid shirt she had bought him for Christmas. Her careful eye noted the clean undershirt, braces and freshly ironed pants. “Good news, Father,” she announced. “Your pension cheques arrived. And, at last count, you’re on the yellow brick road to becoming a millionaire. The stock market is soaring.”

      “Take all the money out of the bank and bring it here, right now, right now.” At his stern face, she nearly stepped back. Then his eyes sparkled, a royal blue which belied his years and waning health. No wonder her mother had fallen in love with the man in the picture on the dresser, serious, wearing a tweed suit and metal-rimmed glasses, holding a meershaum pipe. “Just kidding. Gimme ten bucks, though. I owe the haircut lady.”

      While she was setting up his meal, she encouraged him to talk about old Toronto. “Hogtown, she used to be called. Rough and ready. Small houses, family stores, horses still pulling wagons down Avenue Road. Big night out to go downtown for a Chinese feed at the St. Charles and see a show at the Odeon. Or maybe Sunnyside Park in the summer. Did you know your old man was a great dancer? Some bad times, though. Those riots at the Christie Pits in 1938, damn Nazis beating up the Jews. My brother Fred and I got Abie Schneider out fast on the trolley. Took him right home with us. And Ma gave us all tomato soup and crackers. I remember Abie was crying.”

      “And your years in the film business, all those people you met. Didn’t you tell me that you shook Gene Autry’s hand?”

      He held up his knobby fist proudly and offered it to her. “Shake the hand that shook the hand. All the biggest stars came through the office.”

      “Right. And all those glossies of Elvis, was that really his signature: ’To my girlfriend, Belle’?”

      That got him laughing, an unusual sight which cheered her in this quiet room. There would never be another home, another room for him. “Norman, my name was Norman then,” he corrected her. At the nursing home in Florida, they had mistakenly called him by his unused first name. Then his girlfriend (his consort, he had called her) and he had decided that George was more British, more noble. How many people changed their name after 80?

      “Like my haircut?” he asked, and she gave it an appreciative rub.

      “A regular crew cut. You don’t look a minute over fifty.” And he didn’t, thanks to his baby-smooth skin.

      “No shave, though,” he added with a definite pout.

      “Ontario is broke. You’ll probably get one later today.” Belle arranged the lunch she had brought and filled his glass of water from the immaculate bathroom. It always seemed as if Joyce had just cleaned. Lysol was redolent and the porcelain sparkling.

      As her father enjoyed his shrimp, Belle picked at her roast pork sandwich, hardly tasting it, although the bread was homemade, the mustard piquant and the meat tender and lean. With a sigh, she wrapped it for Freya.

      “What’s the matter? Not hungry? That’s not like a Palmer,” her father said, clearly “with it” enough today to notice her lack of appetite while tucking into his favourite meal.

      “I’m OK. Just too many things on my mind.” She folded up the soiled napkins and set out more for the gooey pie and ice cream, sighing in resignation. You couldn’t keep things from him. She hadn’t wanted to tell her father about Jim, thinking that the report of a death might upset him. “A friend of mine was killed going through the ice on a snow machine. No witnesses. Out in the middle of nowhere. Everyone says it’s an accident, but it stinks. He was the last person who would make a dangerous mistake in the bush.” She paused to mush up the pie, chopping away the tough crust so that his last few teeth could handle the assignment. “But on the other hand, there’s no motive. He was a serious and private man, a university student and about as nice a guy as you could find. Why would anyone kill him?”

      Her father shovelled in some coleslaw with a shaky hand, chewed for a pensive moment with his eyes closed, then beamed as if he had just scratched a lottery winner. “Easy. Greed. Don’t you remember that movie? Longest silent ever made! Got me interested in the fillum business. I was only a kid but knew right away the job was for me.”

      “What do you mean? What greed?” She drew her chair closer and turned down the disco trash from the exercise show on television.

      “Think, girl! What was the motive? Gold. That big tooth, Zasu Pitts lying on a bed of shiny coins.” His eyes glittered as if the curtain had lifted on a favourite picture long faded to shadows. “Aren’t we in Northern Ontario, where gold sits under every tree? Old Sir Harry Oakes died for it. It’s gold all right, always was, always is. You’ll see. Just keep your peepers peeled.” He munched his last French fry and reached for the container of pie.

      When the local news started, Belle cleaned away the lunch debris and unsnapped the prison of his lap table. “How about a walk down the hall?” she asked. It was crucial to get him back on his feet to juice the circulation. The nurses had reported that he was not cooperative during his exercise periods. Perhaps extra motivation would help. “You’ve got to get practising again if you want to go back to the restaurant when the weather gets better.”

      A smile broke out on his face as he looked up like a trusting child. “Really? OK, let’s give it a try. Where are my shoes?” He shook one red plush bedroom slipper, all his swollen feet could wear. Belle searched the closet, peered under the bed, even plowed through his underwear drawer. How could a large item vanish from a private room whose sole occupant barely tottered down to meals each day? Yet some of the more mobile female patients roamed the halls “cleaning house” in their cobwebbed minds, collecting loose articles and driving the nurses crazy when they had to sort out the belongings.

      “Never mind. We can slog along with one. Come on.” She hoisted him up, gripping his wasted arm. Even five years ago, his biceps and calves had bulged, huge bunches of muscles due to genes more than exercise. They used to strike poses together, their arms and legs and faces identical DNA maps. A purposeful grunt helped him to stand, leaning perilously, then shuffling forward, all 170 stomachy pounds. They inched into the hall, past dim rooms with heads lolled back, toothless mouths agape, or worse, quiet bundles of blanketed shapes forever dreaming of a precious time far and away.

      “Take the hand rail,” she told him, as they rocked along. Only thirty feet to the nurses’ station. Suddenly he stopped and looked down. Her gaze followed. His other slipper! “It dropped out of your pant leg?” Their laughter echoed down the silent hall. “A miracle! Didn’t you feel it? What else is up there? No, I don’t want to know!” Belle put the shoe on him, and they rounded back to the room in time for the weather report.

      As she left by the front desk, Belle had a word for Cherie, the nurse on call. “He looks good. Thanks for the extra effort in dressing and grooming him.”

      “Sorry we didn’t get to his shave. All hell broke loose in the kitchen. Dishwasher overflowed. Oh, by the way,” she coughed delicately, and swivelled her head to see if they were being overheard, “that doctor we were discussing the other day?” Belle nodded. “Rumour says that he was involved in abortions a few years before the hospital started providing them without hassles. No charges were ever laid, though. He’s a slick one.” Her eyebrows arched knowingly. In big cities like Toronto, abortions were available if a woman had the nerve to brave the gauntlet of pro-life pickets. In smaller towns and solidly Catholic areas, the procedure could be difficult to arrange.

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