Читать книгу The Footstop Cafe - Paulette Crosse - Страница 8

Moey Thorpe has never been in the Footstop Café. As his mustard Plymouth chortles over the ruts and bumps leading to Lynn Canyon, he wonders what it will be like within the café’s cottage-quaint interior. But the thought is only a vague, wispy one without enough curiosity to merit life, and it instantly melts away in the twilight.

Gravel crunches beneath worn Michelin tires as he pulls into the canyon’s parking lot. The smell of hot motor oil sours his nostrils as he climbs out of the car. Leaving the doors unlocked (no point in locking them; the rear window is just a sheet of plastic), Moey lumbers towards the bridge.

From the waist up, he is a big, hairy man, his hair the thick black sort that reminds most people of genitals. From the waist down, he’s as slim and tight as a delicate transvestite. In shape he resembles a snow cone.

Moey passes the park’s first headstone, a bronze plaque implanted in a large boulder. The boulder squats at the top of a flight of low, shallow stairs that leads towards the suspension bridge. The sombre words it bears bless the memory of a woman who was crushed to death by a similar boulder while sunbathing peacefully in the canyon.

Moey next passes three calf-high concrete pylons. Some time ago the District Council of North Vancouver saw fit to erect a large billboard that graphically depicted the various dangers lurking within the canyon. Sketches of bodies decaying in the foamy clutches of whirlpools, trapped beneath submerged logs, or impaled upon rocky protuberances were all realistically portrayed in hopes of decreasing the annual death toll.

Instead, the billboard merely caused a traffic jam of Japanese tourists upon the stairway, and teenagers continued to plunge lemming-like to their deaths. The billboard was therefore relocated to the parking lot. The three concrete pylons remain like an enigmatic sculpture in its original display spot.

Without so much as hesitating — a true local — Moey marches onto the bridge. It shudders and creaks beneath his weight, the entire length of it undulating gently. A cool autumn breeze redolent with dead leaves and rotting bark blows up from the canyon and into his bristle-brush hair. Far below, not yet engorged by rainfall, Lynn Creek runs like a thread of Christmas tinsel between cliffs and boulders.

As always, Moey stops in the middle of the bridge. He glances left, then right; at this time of night, at this time of year, all teenagers should be at home doing schoolwork or drugs. But still he makes sure he’s alone.

In the gathering gloom, both ends of the bridge gape black and empty at him. Good.

He takes off his ski jacket (a greasy relic from younger days) and from its left pocket extracts four silver discs that glint wickedly in the moonlight. Using his teeth and fingers, he works the elastic loops attached to each of the discs over his thumbs and middle fingers. From the right pocket of his ski jacket, he removes a length of cloth. It clanks like prison chains and glistens as metallically as the four discs gleaming on his fingers. His breath quickens.

Moey attaches the scarf-like, clinking cloth around his hips, then raises his hands above his head. The cool wind races up the gorge and caresses his body. His nipples harden against his plaid work shirt.

Then, with a flourish, Moey Thorpe begins to belly-dance.

Every culture in the Middle East claims ownership of this exotic dance. But much like religion, each country shares familiar aspects of the dance while at the same time making it wholly unique. The true origins of the dance have been lost in the sands of time.

The Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Turks in the Ottoman Empire, the Romans, and the Nubian dynasties of ancient Egypt all may have shared the crime of disseminating the dance throughout the Middle East. The only fact known with certainty is that the danse du ventre was introduced to North America in 1893 at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exhibition by a certain Sol Bloom.

Culture and history aside, however, there are three things essential to all belly dancers: skill, suppleness, and a costume. All else can be faked.

Ah, yes, the costume! Again many arguments exist about what constitutes genuine belly-dancing attire. Some adamantly claim that only the Gypsy look is authentic, with its many draping scarves, its colourful flared skirt, its jangling silver jewellery and flounced croptop. Others scornfully declare that a genuine belly dancer wears only gauzy harem pants and a coin-studded bra. But so much more exists! Beaded fringes, gold silk tassels, hip scarves, veils, armbands, headdresses, painted glitter, sequins, stretch lace, gauntlets, Beledi dresses, high heels, Moroccan slippers, bare feet, ankle bells, wigs, capes, turbans! The list goes on.

One thing and one thing alone is consistent (except in Lebanon, for reasons known only to the Lebanese): the zils, also called sagat. Be they bronze or tin, factory-made in Taiwan or hand-hammered in Egypt, the music of the finger cymbals accompanies the hip lifts and shoulder shimmies of every accomplished dancer. It is the music of these that now clamours bell-like through Lynn Canyon from Moey’s blunt fingertips.

The jiggling bridge always intensifies his shimmies and makes him feel buoyant. It is a feeling to which he is rapidly becoming addicted.

Although only brief, his dancing routine drenches him in sweat. Panting, grinning, Moey finishes his last ribcage slide and pelvic drop and triumphantly zaghareets. The canyon walls echo from his tongue-vibrating ululation. A raven screams back from the treetops.

Perspiring heavily, Moey removes his zils and coin belt, replaces them in their respective pockets, then shrugs back into his ski jacket. Exhilarated from the dance, he does a samiha to the far end of the bridge and begins to hike to the Ninety Foot Pool.

The Ninety Foot Pool is not, in fact, ninety feet deep. In the summer when bikini-clad babes and testosterone-laden hunks guzzle beer upon its rocky banks, the Ninety Foot Pool is actually about thirty feet deep. That doesn’t stop anyone who is trying to impress members of the opposite sex from leaping off the numerous surrounding cliffs into said pool.

Again in its wisdom, the North Vancouver District changed all the signposts within the park, thereby renaming the Ninety Foot Pool the Thirty Foot Pool (which was what it was originally christened back in 1912 when the canyon was first declared a park). This didn’t deter the cliff-jumpers one iota, nor did it stop the rising death count. And locals still refer to the pool as the Ninety.

By the time Moey reaches the pool, his olive-toned flesh has cooled and puckered. With each breath, wisps of white flutter from his mouth. He perches upon his favourite rock, folds his firm, slim legs to his burly chest, and gazes meditatively at the waters.

He loves this park. A native of the Saskatchewan wheat fields, he loves the canyon’s abundance of water and greenery, of buckled land and scoured rock, which differs so vastly from the staid, fundamentalist prairie. For him the exuberant life bursting within the forest represents all that he wants to be: natural, wild, strong, sensual. Everything a belly dancer embodies. Everything his parents despise.

Port and Gemma Thorpe are the prairies: stoic, seamed, hard-working, unemotional, and predictable. They expected all of their six sons to become either farmers, carpenters, or mechanics (though an able man, Port often drawls, is all three). Moey became none of these. The Saskatoon Heavyweight Championship belt hanging in his rented basement suite attests to this.

He throws another stick into the water. The ripples spread outward until they touch the far bank and lap against the hooves of a white stag. Moey blinks and sits up straighter.

The white stag snorts steam from flared nostrils and placidly stares back.

You always make things way worse!

How could a child say such a shattering thing to a mother? Karen’s guts shrivel like a disturbed slug contracting in on itself. She certainly never said such a thing to her stepmom, Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff, however many times it was warranted.

Karen blows Dilly’s tail fur out of her mouth, adjusts the cat’s position on her shoulders, and stuffs her hands deeper into the gritty wool pockets of her cardigan. She passes the headstone at the top of the stairs leading to the bridge, then, instead of heading across the bridge, turns left and descends a second set of slimy wooden stairs. A large bear-proof garbage can almost blocks these stairs from sight. The can reeks of dog urine; one patch on it is rust-pocked at cocked-leg height.

Few people take this trail, the purpose of most park visitors being to cross the suspension bridge and thereafter, at a loss on how to proceed, visit the Ninety/ Thirty Foot Pool.

Karen prefers this side of the canyon, the west, because it has less litter, fewer tourists, and fewer cliff jumpers. Unfortunately, this summer the odds evened a little in the last department; the western banks successfully claimed the life of a thirteen-year-old boy who tried to impress his buddies by diving off a precipice. Even now, rain-shrivelled cards and mildewing flowers mark the spot mourners designated as a shrine to his memory.

The sight of the withered bouquets sheathed in tattered plastic and piled up like so much garbage disturbs Karen. Every day she passes those sad cards and dead flowers and wonders when the park ranger will throw them out. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel for the parents of the dead child; it is just that the two-month-old shrine now looks like an abandoned grave. The boy’s spirit needs to be freed from that tether.

The stairs lead Karen down a narrow path cut between bulging, mossy rock. The rumble of the canyon to her right increases as the trail drops to creek level. Dilly remains motionless on her shoulders, bilious green eyes fully dilated in the gloom.

“How have I ever made anything worse?” Karen woefully asks the cat. In response Dilly sneezes out a strand of Karen’s frizzled red locks.

“I admit his last birthday party was a mistake. I’ve apologized for that. I knew it was a mistake from the start and I should have stood up to Morris on the issue. But damn it, Andy didn’t raise a fuss, did he?”

But, of course, he didn’t. Andy worships the ground his father walks upon.

No, the responsibility to prevent the birthday disaster fell upon Karen and Karen alone. But she stood by and did nothing, and then it was too late and all the kids in Andy’s school began snickering behind his back. Her subsequent attempt to fix things resulted in Andy being expelled.

Karen blames her father, Sandy Woodruff. Throughout her Anglican childhood he stertorously repeated, “You must trust all things unto God, pudding face. Trust all things unto God.”

“God!” Karen says scornfully, and immediately shoots a guilty look skyward. Just like her stepmom, Mei-ling, she feels the Almighty needs protection from the harsh facts of life. God, in Karen’s experience, couldn’t tie a shoelace correctly if He tried. But she would sooner be barbecued in Hell than let Him discover this awful truth.

This disparity between what she’s been taught by her father and what she herself believes has created within her a tendency not to act on a situation until it’s too late, and then to overcompensate wildly and futilely when God’s will proves disastrously different from what she hoped. Alas.

At a fork in the path Karen turns right and begins goat-hopping over the rock-strewn creek bank. The autumn chill carries the green smell of slime, pine needles, and moss. Up ahead at the Ninety/Thirty Foot Pool something plops into the water.

Karen barely glances up from her hopscotch progress along the creek bank; here in the canyon things always plop into the water. Bambi-cute squirrels shake loose hemlock seeds into the pool. Small fish that have survived the urine and beer cans of summer frequently flip from the surface to smack their gums around hapless water skeeters. Crows defecate into the pool with similar plops. Pebbles jarred loose from scrounging raccoons likewise plop into the pool. The surface of the pool is always going plop.

But this time Dilly doesn’t like it. It takes Karen a moment to realize that the nails of her feline companion are now painfully embedded in her flesh.

She immediately stops. Always dreading that her luck might run out and a pervert will catch her in the deserted canyon, Karen trusts Dilly to warn her of the existence of such deviants much as most women trust their overweight, arthritic Labradors to protect them should such a hazard appear.

Her eyes promptly fall upon the white hart.

That’s what she thinks as soon as she sees it. Not stag or reindeer or wapiti, but hart. Not albino or grey or silver, but white. White hart.

And there is no question, from its gently heaving flanks to its muscled hindquarters, from its majestic antlers to its water-submerged hooves, that this is a white hart. It swings a dripping, bearded muzzle in her direction and languorously blinks. Steam fogs its nostrils.

Dilly stiffens, her thorny grip hooking another half inch through Karen’s skin. Karen stands rooted to the spot. The birthmarks between her thighs start to tingle.

And that’s when she knows: this hart, this flesh-and-blood impossibility from fantasia, is a sign from the benevolent, world-weary God she so recently scoffed. It is a sign that He knows she is avoiding her Destiny, that it pains Him deeply. A sign that it is high time she begins doing something about it.

With a choked cry, Karen spins around to flee. She promptly slips on a rock, twists her ankle, and crumples to the ground.

As soon as the woman appears, ginger hair puffed from her head like quills from an enraged porcupine, neck engulfed by a fluffy white muff, Moey expects the stag to run. Instead, it merely lowers its head to the pool and sucks in a huge draft of water.

Oblivious to the stag’s presence, the woman continues to rock-hop along the creek bank across from Moey, drawing steadily closer. In an attempt to get her attention without startling the stag, Moey tosses another, then another stick into the water.

Plop! Plop!

She stops and looks up. Stiffens. Even in the gloom, Moey can see the shock on her pale face as she stares at the stag.

The stag slowly lifts its head from the pool and lazily swings its great neck in her direction. Steam puffs from its nostrils. With a raven-like croak, the woman turns around, hurls her neck muff towards the nearest bush, and flings herself upon the rocky ground.

A second of silence passes.

“Dilly!” the woman cries, and one of her pale hands rises from the rock bed and waves frantically at the muff. “Dilly, come back!”

Moey gawks at the woman as she flounders on the creek bank, trying to get to her feet. An anguished cry brings her to her knees again, a cry Moey knows all too well from the boxing ring: a broken bone given a voice. Leaping to his feet, he clambers to the creek’s edge and splashes towards the opposite bank.

Had it been winter or spring or even later in the fall, fording the creek would have been as safe as a blind man crossing a freeway during rush hour. However, it is early autumn, when, thirsted into submission after a dry summer and not yet replenished by the rains of late fall, the creek is at its lowest and most fordable. Moey reaches the woman’s side in minutes.

“My cat,” she moans, clutching her ankle. “My cat.”

A foreign tourist, Moey thinks.

“No, that’s your ankle,” he corrects gently, kneeling beside her. “Let me see if it’s broken. Broken, you know?” He pantomimes breaking a stick in two. “Crack!”

Groaning, she permits him to remove the sandal and sock on her left foot. The swelling there and her squeal of pain at his prodding tell Moey all he needs to know.

“Broken,” he says smugly. “Thought so.”

“Broken? But what about my cat?”

“Your ...?”

She stabs a finger towards the bushes. “My cat. She took off in that direction. She can’t be out here at night. The coyotes will get her.”

He blinks at the bushes, and it slowly dawns on him that she’s talking — in English — about her neck muff, or what he thought was a neck muff. It’s a cat. And the woman is obviously no foreigner.

“Could you find me a stick to lean on, please? I have to find her.”

“I don’t think you should walk on that foot —”

“But I have to find my cat!”

Moey shifts. “Look, I, uh, can carry you to my car and drive you to the hospital —”

“But my cat!”

“After I help find your cat.”

“Oh. That would be ... thank you.”

Unnoticed by them both, the white hart slips between the trees and disappears.

“Dillyillyilly,” Karen croons.

A tentative meow sounds from a bush in front of them, slightly to their left. Karen gestures in that direction. “Could you carry me over there?”

After a moment’s hesitation, the man nods and picks her up. Despite the agony in her foot, Karen is very aware of the strength in his arms and the muscles of his chest, which is pressed against her cheek. His knee joints pop like embers exploding in a fire as he straightens.

Moving with painstaking care, the man steps from rock to rock until he reaches the spongy forest floor. “Okay?” he grunts as he sets her down.

She closes her eyes briefly against the hot, throbbing pain in her ankle. “I’m fine.” Then, lightening her tone, she murmurs to the bush, “Come here, Dilly. Good kitty.”

But the bush remains immobile.

“She’s hiding,” the man says glumly.

“She’s scared. I’ll have to go in and get her. Could you help me kneel?”

He glances at her foot, opens his mouth to protest, then claps it shut again. With a nod he helps her kneel.

The pain in Karen’s ankle makes her head spin, and she bites her lip to keep from crying out and scaring Dilly away. Damp peat seeps through her skirt onto her kneecaps. Slowly, she crawls into the slimy bracken. A twig snags her hair. A slug elongates beneath her left palm. Something clammy plasters itself across her forehead. She jerks, stifles a curse, shakes off the slug under her hand, and brushes away the leaf on her forehead. A thorn stabs her right knee.

Dilly’s white form bobs into view a few feet ahead of her. “Dilly, good kitty, come to Mommy.” Karen reaches out gingerly, and Dilly tenses. Mentally ringing the cat’s neck, Karen continues to coo soothingly. Gradually, she is allowed to stroke a furry cheek, to slide her fingers around the scruff. She grabs hold tightly.

“Got you, you miserable beast,” she grunts, dragging Dilly towards her and shoving the struggling cat up inside her sweater. The cat’s furry head pops out alongside her neck. They stare at each other, cat and human, eye to eye. Dilly’s tail sweeps back and forth across Karen’s stomach. Claws extend into her bosom.

“Don’t even think about it,” Karen whispers.

The cat’s mouth opens in plaintive protest, but Karen pushes the head back down into her sweater. With one hand firmly hugging Dilly against herself, she backs up. Unfortunately, this reverse motion catches the rear hem of her skirt under her knees. Her skirt begins a jerky, steady migration down her buttocks. She stops, tries to lift one knee to free her skirt. The shift of weight causes an excruciating blast of pain up her injured leg.

“Oh, hell!” she cries, and Dilly writhes vigorously.

“Are you all right in there?”

“No, I’m not! Dilly! Stay still, you ungrateful wretch!” “Do you need a hand?”

“No!” Karen gasps, envisioning the man crawling headfirst into her partially exposed ass. “Stay there! I’m ... I’m fine. Coming out right now. Fine.”

He mutters something in a doubtful tone, but the bushes behind her don’t part.

Karen takes a deep, cleansing breath, then tries to move forward, as if the motion itself can reverse the downward migration of her skirt. No such luck. She attempts to pivot so she can at least come out of the bush headfirst and not preceded by her naked bum. But there’s no room among the thorns to pivot.

“To hell with it,” she sighs. Then, louder: “Could you close your eyes, please? I’ve...my skirt’s fallen down.”

A pause, a grunt from the bushes behind her, then the shuffle-squelch of feet moving in the mud. Gritting her teeth, Karen resumes crawling backwards.

Just as she comes out into the open, her skirt skies the rest of the way over the smooth moguls of her buttocks and rests around her thighs. A cool autumn breeze dances across her rump.

Now what to do? She can’t stand up by herself, not with her bad ankle. She doesn’t look up. The pair of black Nikes to the left of her, facing away, shift. An awkward pause.

Then the Nikes move and the man’s knee joints backfire as he swiftly kneels. Karen cringes as he gives an almighty heave on her skirt. He yards it up to her waist with such force that the fabric under her knees separates from the rest of the skirt with a sharp rip. Without missing a beat, the man stands again, lifting Karen onto her feet by her elbows. She almost swoons from the sudden elevation change and the furnace of pain in her ankle.

They avoid each other’s eyes as they try to regain their composures.

“Thank you,” Karen eventually mumbles. “I couldn’t ... I tried ... my hands weren’t free. Anyway, thank you.”

He studies a hemlock. “You’ve got your cat?”

“In my sweater.”

“Can you walk at all?”

“I ... can try.”

Silence.

“I’ll carry you,” he says, then scoops her off her feet with such dizzying speed that her tofu burger lurches into her throat.

Although Moey is a very strong man (as the thrice-defeated Todd “The Sledgehammer” Dupuis would be the first to admit), the woman is neither small nor slender. By the time he staggers into the parking lot with his burden, breathing like a bull facing down a matador, he feels certain he’s torn at least one ligament in his pectorals. He places the woman gently on the hood of his Plymouth and fumbles in his pockets for his car keys.

“You don’t have to drive me to the hospital.”

“Can’t...drive there...yourself,” he pants.

“Just find me a stick to lean on. Really. I’ll walk the rest of the way home and my husband can drive me.”

He stops digging in his jacket. “Home?”

“There.” She points.

His eyes swivel to the enormous ghostly white foot painted on the side of the nearest house.

“The Footstop,” she says. “That’s where I live.”

“Ah, yes. Well ...” He nods as if confirming something he already knows. “Yes.”

The woman sticks out her free hand. “Thank you very much for your assistance.”

“No problem. Any time.” His sweaty hand slowly crushes hers. “Any time.”

“My name’s Karen.”

“Moey. Moey Thorpe.”

They continue to shake hands, both bobbing their heads like woodpecker toys.

“If you’re in the neighbourhood one afternoon, drop by. I can massage your feet or something. To say thank you. You know.” She flushes.

“Yes. Well. I’ll do that.”

They release hands. Moey shrugs at her house. “Maybe I should carry you to the door.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

Taking a deep breath, he scoops her up again like a praying mantis attacking its prey, and bulldozes his way through the cedar boughs overhanging the rock path to her back door.

“Thank you very much again,” she gasps as he puts her down beside the metal garbage can, the same one that contains an Andy-soiled towel.

“Take care of that foot, you hear?” he says. Then, panting like a farrowing sow, he ducks back through the cedar boughs and disappears into the night.

Karen staggers into the house, calling for help. Morris and Andy greet her in the hall with matching dropped jaws. Candice bursts from the bathroom with a towel wrapped about her torso and starts shrieking.

“Ohmygod! You’ve been raped! I don’t believe this! Don’t just stand there, Dad, do something! Call the police, call an ambulance! Andy, get him the phone!”

“Candice —”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Mom. It isn’t your fault. And you’re not supposed to have a shower or anything, ’cause that’ll wash away the evidence.”

“I wasn’t raped.”

“That’s denial, Mom. Gloria says that —”

“Have you, Karen?” Morris asks, bewildered. “Have you been ... defiled?”

Andy bursts into tears.

“Don’t just stand there crying!” Candice shouts. “Go get the phone like I told you!”

Karen takes a deep breath, sticks two fingers in her mouth, and lets loose a whistle. All tears and shouts cease.

“I have not,” she says firmly, “been raped. I have, however, broken my ankle. I fell. Simple as that. I fell.”

“But your skirt,” Candice says.

Karen glances down to where Moey inadvertently shortened the length of her skirt by six inches or so. The ragged hem trails a few twigs and leaves. “It ripped during my fall,” she says, a flush creeping across her cheeks. “I’m okay.”

Her husband’s face turns sallow, however. He stares at her feet in horror. “You’ve broken an ankle?”

“I think so, yes. My left one.”

“Oh, no,” Morris gasps. He falls to his knees and flutters his hands over her left foot. “Karen, how could you?”

Andy bursts into tears again.