“So you haven’t got a job?”
“People who don’t have vans don’t realize the potential. Is it all right if we talk on the phone for a few minutes?”
“I have to study, Wayne.”
“What are you studying tonight?”
“I’m studying how some bacteria have their own minds.”
“They have minds?”
“They can think independently. They can start new ideas on their own. They have brains.”
“That’s something.”
“Wayne?”
“Yeah?”
“I have to study. Really hard. I can’t be on the phone just chatting, you know?”
“Okay.”
“And I have to protect myself. I have to act like I’m a person in charge of taking care of Gracie Watts, and do things that will make sure she’s okay. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I guess.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound all right. Have you made any friends? And what about money?”
“That’s what I’m saying. I’m hoping to work with the van.”
“I can’t talk about vans, Wayne. Not right now. Did you call your mother?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, you should. She phoned my mother at one o’clock in the morning looking for your address. My mother says she didn’t realize what time it was.”
“I sent her my address.”
“Well, she must have lost it. My mother said she shouldn’t be left alone, Wayne. She said she was carrying a bag of potatoes from the store on Saturday in her summer dress. It was freezing and she had no coat on.”
“My mother doesn’t need potatoes. She has a whole root cellar full of blue potatoes for boiling and Yukon Golds for French fries.”
“Well, she bought a twenty-pound bag on Saturday and carried it home in her bare arms. Maybe you had better call her.”
Wayne called his mother’s number but there was no answer. He ate a Mars bar and looked out the window at the van. He thought about it some more on one of his walks to the edge of the city. By the fifth mile of a walk like that you forgot where you were and how you had got there. If you had the right boots and clothes, it could rain and you could still walk and think and work out where your life should go, now that you had left things behind that confused you, that defined you as a man when you weren’t a man. Not the son your dad wanted. Not a son who kept up family traditions. Not a Labrador trapper, strong mettled and well read, solitary but knowing how to lead a pack. Instead you were ambiguous, feminine, undecided. You had even had a baby beginning to grow inside you, and you kept wondering to what size it had grown before it died, and thinking about its eyes. Wayne was glad Gracie had not tried to stay on the phone. Glad she was stronger than him, though he suspected she had forced herself to say she did not want to talk to him.
Walking miles through the city, past the downtown neighbourhoods, beyond Rennies Mill River, up Kenmount Road to the neon signs, the car dealerships, the sound barriers, the chain restaurants selling ribs by the bucket and coleslaw by the pound, you could decide how to make a living in a new town where no one knew you. This was one of the ways in which he thought like his father. Treadway had influenced him early with the idea that you had to be self-sufficient. Wayne passed lines hung with blue and silver flags snapping in the wind. Chevrolet, GM, Ford. Used or new. You were independent if you had a van. You could sell something out of it.
Wayne ended up in places no walker should attempt. This drainage ditch between the Wonder Bread factory on O’Leary Avenue and the Avalon Mall. This was more than a ditch, it was a whole system of wasteland, chain-link fences, yards filled with lumber awaiting construction, unidentifiable boxes, Quonset huts, coils of insulated wire, landfill, piles of asphalt, and sinister-looking rubble. Wayne walked through this waste-scape and into Donovan’s Industrial Park, where he found Frank King, who was looking for a driver to sell hams, ground beef, pork roasts, racks of lamb, and a scattered cod fillet door to door among the big houses downtown. Frank’s warehouse door was open; Frank shouted through it at men lifting pallets of chocolate-covered cherries. A poster on the door advertised Tunnock’s Teacakes. Puddles all over the parking lot reflected a robin’s-egg sky with puffy clouds moving fast. A couple of tractor trailers idled and the air stank of diesel.
“Wayne Blake. You have your own vehicle?” Frank King’s office was the colour of ballpark mustard.
“Yeah.”
“Where?” Frank looked at Wayne’s head, shirt, pants, and boots. He looked closely at Wayne’s face, as if it were odd, and Wayne wondered what Frank King saw. Frank King did not appear to be the most observant of men, but sometimes an unobservant person could surprise you with a piece of startling insight.
“I’m in the process of buying it.”
“Clean?”
“I’m getting it repainted this week.”
“Inside and out? You want a spotless vehicle, Wayne.” Frank King was egg-shaped. His skin was glossy and his hands jewelled. He had a moustache whose ends he kept clipped. He wore a gold chain, and when he wanted to make a point, he pointed. “I’m not putting any of my refrigeration units in a less than hygienic situation. They don’t call me the Franchise King for nothing. I regard each of my drivers as a franchisee. All franchises, my friend, have standards. That is what makes a franchise a franchise, Wayne. Standards.”
Wayne took the number seven bus home. Six Ethiopian men got off at the Evening Telegram building. A woman in the front seat held a pink comb with half its teeth missing. She combed the first few inches of her hair. The rest looked as if it had not been combed since she was a child. When the bus got to Empire Avenue, she pulled a cap over the combed part of her hair, covering it completely.
The pest-control van was fourteen years old and had three flat tires. Its sign said INQUIRE AT TONY’S AUTO TECH BEHIND ELIZABETH DRUGS.
Tony rolled out from under a Buick on a set of mech-anic’s wheels. “That Vandura,” he told Wayne, “belongs to my brother-in-law. I can tow her into the shop. You’re going to need at least a new floor in her and a timing belt, and brake pads and probably a couple of ball joints if you’re going to pass inspection. It’s liable to cost you five to seven hundred to get her roadworthy.”
“I need ‘Pest Control’ painted over. I’m thinking of using it for meat.”
“You need the whole body done?” Tony looked as if he thought painting over “Pest Control” was frivolous.
“How about you do whatever you can for this.” Wayne fished in his jeans and handed Tony half a dozen hundred-dollar bills.
Tony sat up and looked them over. “Where did you get these?”
“Bank of Montreal, Goose Bay.”
Tony held one against the caged bulb that lit up the Buick’s transmission. He looked Wayne in the eye. It was a look no woman normally gets to see. “You seem like a decent enough fellow but I had to ask.” He shoved the bills in his jeans. “I know guys who have garbage bags full of hundreds that are worth no more than twenty each.”
Wayne took the time to learn about the meat he sold from the van. Ribs were his most popular item, and after that pork roasts and lamb shoulder chops. Old women rattling around by themselves in the biggest houses on Circular Road wanted lights, hearts, tongues, and livers, and Wayne convinced Frank King to let him sell those instead of sending them to Morrison’s factory on the Southside to be mixed with fish offal for pet food.
It grew colder, and Wayne had to carry ribs, chops, and hearts along paths the householders had shovelled, carry them in his arms like children, only they were not children, they were slabs of flesh and blood: red, marbled with fat. He wondered if anyone besides himself saw the meat as he saw it, raw and powerful, having the power to keep living bodies hot in the wind and ice. He carried meat past black railings, past a wreath on a door, past lights strung across a bay window. Women took the meat out of his arms; they embraced it and took it down hallways to the lit hearts of their houses. He wondered what it was like to be such a woman. They roasted it and ate it and gave it to their husbands and babies — did they think of the meat as powerful and important? From their faces Wayne thought they did not, and he felt more alone than ever, so he went to Water Street.