Rust Colored Door

 Excerpts from a crime story—

I’ve got to see a guy across the water. He says I wouldn’t want to hear what he has to say. Everything's the opposite: nobody’s anyone important— no gangs, no guns, no drugs. The higher up in the game you go the more anonymous the players. It’s safer. If Roddy says I wouldn’t want to hear it then that means I better not go see him. 

I snort a half gram rail of speed off the counter and lock the door.  I leave my rental in its place and head toward the Quay. No mode of transportation is as clandestine as public transit. Raven-eyed I board the short ferry across the Burrard Inlet. Gull’s wings over puddle water on the ferry deck have me wondering if reflections are really all that deep— brindled cloud. There’s a young boy, muted sun haloing his head. I keep my head down as I get off the ferry and slant on to the through-fare leading from the ferry terminal into the station. It’s all windows— reflections that speed up and warp where the glass bubbles, the seaway itself wrinkling along the shore through the panes. 

Superimposition— a man jars my elbow and apologizes gruffly. I see how one could peel a long strip of skin off his back with vicegrips— faces move on the glass. The white of hands and faces show best. The water behind the glass scintillates, sun-struck. I walk into the terminal and wait for the express. The anonymous intimacy of a train-car, temporarily interred. A man sits with his mouth wide open in the corner seat, his watery cow eyes cast up in a forlorn benevolence which reminds me of the charcoal Madonna we had in the basement when I was a child. His breath fogs the window. I draw faces in the steam in my head.

I get off at Cordova. One mind of pigeons reflects off the mirrored thrust of skyscraper across the street. I catch my own reflection too, and am stuck by how much I look like the old pictures of my mother I found in aunt Marlie’s drawer. I’m tall for a woman, and thin. I’ve got a black bob, a black rider jacket, black jeans and black Converse. Eastward change rattles in frayed cups and the tall buildings dwindle block by block into red brick warehouses and derelict granaries. 

I remember once, in one of Daddy’s lucid periods, Sheena and I went and spent week with him at a cottage on Rice Lake. Behind the cottage there was a rickety dock. We’d walk out to the end and sit there with our feet in the cold water. Sheena said she saw a horse in the clouds and when she grew up she wanted to work with animals. When you’ve gone through traumatic experiences with a sibling there is a bond that grows between you. I’d brush her hair in the afternoon, balsam spicing the air. I braided her a crown of wildflowers and she gave me a shell. 

That was 20 years ago. Last summer Sheena went missing from the lower eastside. She’d get away with murder when we were kids. Aunt Marlie never suspected that apple-cheeked cherub of sneaking cigarettes from her pack. I got the strap for it though. We went to live with aunt Marlie after our father’s episodes began. The last straw had been the time he’d crushed our cat’s skull beneath the heel of his boot in the middle of the kitchen floor. We never found out who reported us to the CAS. Toby’s carcass was still there when the Children’s Aid workers came to remove us. 

The chime of the slammed phone recedes into the restless hum. I’ve been up for two days, shit’s starting to quiver in my peripheral, shadow-wars in every corner, there’s a switch that gets tripped in your head, sleep-deprivation is the last frontier. Kimmy’s door was locked. A sharpied 33 scrawled above the peephole. I brace myself against the wall and thrust my heel forward striking the door just beside the plaque that holds the knob— snap of dried wood, the jamb splintering, the trim bowed out and broken. Time for a big line— the place smells like stale breath. I flip a switch and her whole convoluted array of effects crystallizes before me: notepad open on the bed, geometric shapes and numbers, there are CD’s slung across the floor and covering most surfaces, rainbows and mirrors throw my balance. I grab the spiral pad and sit on her bed. It’s all code. I comb the numbers with my other eye, the softer darker one: anagrams, puzzles, fuck all. I toss the book on the bed, and look up in exasperation— something in the light fixture among the moth-dust and dead flies, and feel its edge. A magnetic key card.   

It’s a blue house on a quiet eastside street— after-rain and lamplight. I knock on the door, almost hesitantly. When the door opens I point a loaded Glock at Mark’s nose and smirk. “Go to the couch and sit on your hands.” I follow him with the sight. Mark’s well known for being a shady, dangerous character. He once lit one of his boyfriends on fire for being too loud in the morning. “So, where’s Kimmy?” He dares me with a blank stare. I gun butt him above the eye to let him know I’m not playing. The blood forks like a river around his nose. “She was here but she ain’t now. I don’t know where she’s at.”  I fish a bag of jib out of my pocket and toss it at Mark. “Cut us a couple of rails.” Mark expertly crushes the dope and scrapes it into two fat lines. I had to stifle my laughter as Mark choked back both lines and sat straight-backed on the sofa.

The driver rolls down his window, takes off his hat and glasses and smiles. It isn’t Mark. Fuck. I jump back into my civic and punch it through the red. These fuckers want to play, I’m in. I leave the car in a parkade by Stadium Station and hit the side streets. The door’s supposed to be in a dead end lane around here. Graffiti scrawled and mossen brick, gutter-glass and empty baggies. Fire-escapes zigzag up the walls and in the interstices between buildings the soft pastels of dusk brush the sky. I must have been walking these passages for an hour, think of Sheena, of what I’ve have become. I’m a shell. At some point the tags on the walls change, become esoteric, astrological glyphs and numbers, colors – black and red. There’s the door, ruddy in the half light. All that distinguishes it from any other door in the alley is the slot for the keycard. The sky is dark now and the city lights have swallowed the stars. I step toward the door and run the card through the slot. The door opens, the shadows loom and deepen. I follow the spiral of your shell with my thumb and step across the threshold.