None of it fazed me. I might have my toes pressed up right against the sill, but I didn’t cross over. I kept my distance and stayed out of reach and I never turned my back or gave him any kind of opening. It was the same thing every time. As soon as I made that turn onto his street, I started flipping through the different ways I could hurt him if I ever needed to get away. As far as I was concerned, it was self-defence and there was nothing Barney didn’t already deserve, nothing that would be too much for him. If he made even one aggressive move in my direction, I’d unleash every jolt of energy I had. I could see myself screaming out for the neighbours and driving my foot straight into that hernia and scratching at his eyes. In my head, I had it set up like Barney’s house was a kind of black hole that kept trying to pull me in and every time I left, it felt like I’d escaped again and I was free to go on for a whole other day.
The old ladies on my route were completely different and you couldn’t say no to them. I might be the only person they’d talk to or meet face-to-face for an entire week and when I came to drop off their stuff they always wanted to have a real conversation and invite me in for a little visit.
“I have the tea all set up,” they’d say as they came to the door.
In the winters, I’d have to take off my boots and leave them on a mat and then I’d go into the kitchen or the living room and sit down for maybe five or ten minutes, never more than that.
“You know I only have a second,” I would tell them. “I have to keep going, you know. People are waiting.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” they’d say. “But God knows there’s time for a little bite to eat, isn’t there? And something wet just to keep you alive.”
The snacks were all the same. There’d be a cool cup of tea with too much sugar in it and usually some kind of baked thing, a heavy piece of homemade pound cake, maybe, or a cold, rock-solid square with raisins in it that had just been pulled from a Tupperware container in the freezer. Probably a piece of cheese, too. I always tried to drink at least half the tea and eat half the square before getting up. I thought that was my part of the deal, like Santa Claus.
Their houses were full of family photographs. The late husbands and other relatives and shots of the grandchildren in their school pictures stared out at you from the shelves and the walls. They were all pretty much the same: the missing front teeth and the hair sticking up on one side, the bad teenage acne, the graduations and the weddings and the framed notices cut out of the paper for the twenty-fifth and the fiftieth wedding anniversaries and the obituaries. The kids were always sitting in front of the same pale background with the same pattern of pink and blue laser beams criss-crossing behind their heads. If you swung your head around the room, you could watch them growing up, getting fatter and more tired looking. Occasionally, the lady might give out a tidbit about one of them.
“Still in college,” she’d say and she’d point at the serious-looking seven-year-old in his glasses. “When he was only little, he used to say that we were ‘best buds’ and we had a little secret handshake we’d do whenever he came over.”
“That one there is broken-up with her husband now and the kids are ruined,” she’d say, or, “Never been the same since the accident,” or “Now that she’s got her fancy la de da house in the country, we don’t see much of her anymore.”
I did a lot of favours for those ladies. Like if there was a special Thanksgiving turkey platter up on the top shelf that needed to be brought down or if there were hanging plants that could use a little water, I’d do that. And I carried more than my share of dripping garbage bags to the curb. They were just little things, stuff anybody would do, but the ladies always made a big deal out of nothing.
“Thank God you came by when you did,” they would say. “I’d never have been able to get that box of Christmas decorations out of the attic without you.”
I tried to keep everything as light as possible and move as fast as I could, but there were a couple of times when I was stuck right in the middle of it — standing up on a chair in the hall to screw in a new light bulb, or maybe stuffing a pile of leaves into a garbage bag — and I would have to stop for a second and slow everything down. It would just take a second, but I’d have to take a breath and maybe reach out a hand to steady myself on the back of the chair or look away from the leaves and up to the white sky to get my bearings. I needed to get solid again and anchor myself against the bad, dizzy feeling that used to wash up over me every once in a while. It was one of those sick-to-your-stomach sensations, the kind that hit you after a turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl, where even though you’re stopped and it’s over and you’re back on the steady earth again, you still feel like your body is going on without you and getting tossed around at some crazy angle.
It seemed, sometimes, like I knew too much about things I wasn’t really supposed to know at all. Like the first time your eyes touch on a bad case of bedsores — the kind that can eat big, fist-sized holes right through your flesh just from laying down in one spot for too long. The first time you see that, you can’t look at anything the same way anymore. The Musgrave job was full of stuff like that. There was an old man who asked me to help rub in the eczema cream for his legs and when I kneeled down to touch him, even as softly as I could, large flakes of his skin came off in my hands like red fish scales. And there was another lady on McEwan who needed me to read her the fine-print directions on a package of glycerine suppositories.
“I don’t know why in the hell they write everything so small,” she complained to me while I waited outside the bathroom door. “Just tell me what it says. Are you supposed to run them under the water before they go in?”
I was like one of those guys in the audience who doesn’t really want to be invited back stage, but then they shine the light on him and everybody claps and he has no choice but to get up and move behind the scenes, to the other side of that thick velvet curtain that normally hides all the secrets and keeps the magic going for everybody else. There was some knowledge you couldn’t escape from. It came down on you like white water, flowing in only one direction, and once it got hold of you, there was no way to turn back and swim against the current. Even though I felt perfectly fine and my healthy twelve-year-old body kept pedalling hard between the stops, there were moments now when some image I didn’t want would blow into my head and I’d think about the fact, the real fact, that there might be a day when I would not be able to stand up and close the drapes for myself. There might be a day when I wouldn’t have the strength to walk across my own kitchen, and open the fridge and pick up the milk pitcher with one hand and fill up a glass I was holding in the other.
The old ladies could teach you all about that stuff. They heard the way their kids whispered about what to do with mom, but the best of them stood up and just refused, just flat-out refused, to give up on their own places. From April to September, they’d be outside, digging through their gardens on their hands and knees and waving away the mosquitoes. And they still carved a pumpkin and had the candy ready for the trick-or-treaters, and lots of them even shovelled their own snow. It seemed like no blackness, no dirt or dust was ever allowed into their houses, that no rot or decay could even get a toehold.
Eighty-nine-year-old Mrs. Hume, my number-one favourite, used to come to the door, clear-eyed and busy and always a little annoyed by whatever it was that might pull her away from her work.
“What, what, what?” she’d say as she opened up.
I’d hold up the bag containing a refill of her blood thinners and she’d smile and say something like, “Oh, it’s you again, is it? Well then, come in.”