Good To A Fault Part 25

"You go find him, okay? Bring him as soon as you can. Will you?"

To Clary's eyes, Lorraine seemed to be slightly on fire. The fever breaking out in actual licks of flame. "No?" Lorraine demanded, her voice crackling.

"Oh! Yes-of course I will. I was trying to think where to look for him."

"Darwin heard he's got a job upholstering, look there."

In Darwin's room Clary sat on his bed, since all the chairs had been dragged over to the other half by family members of the bedraggled old man in the next bed. Down-at-heel, up-at-heart, lots of laughing, the old guy snuffling and wheezing happily while they told each other one story after another. Some of them were the fattest people Clary had ever seen, some were tenderly skinny, with flake-white skin, and they were all semi-drunk, even on Sat.u.r.day morning. Darwin was leaning back against his headboard, himself again, but with a taped and swollen nose.

"Swingline Upholstery, Avenue D south, little grey building. He calls in the morning and if they need him he comes in. A pipe burst or something at the last place he was staying, he had to leave. You're going to have to ask around. Try the Silver Tap, or this morning maybe ask at Chevy's Cafe, if you ask one of the girls."

Clary had her notebook out and was writing, Swingline, Ave D, Silver Tap, Chevy.

"It might take a while. Remember what he looks like?"

"Oh yes," she said. His face thrust forward, eyes bulging at her, shouting My kids! You could have killed us! "I know him. He knows me, too."

"Yeah, but I don't think he'll avoid you. He knows you're doing good for the kids, better than he could do now." The rea.s.surance was unrea.s.suring.

A big burst of laughter from the window side of the room, the older woman rocking back and forth in her chair wiping tears from her eyes, hooing and hawing. Darwin laughed too, and Clary, too-she couldn't help it. They were having such a riot.

"When are you-" Clary asked Darwin, not even knowing how to finish the question.

"They'll let me out soon. It's not like I feel bad."

Clary nodded. They all made a fiction of everything, it seemed to her. There was the story of what was happening to Lorraine, to Darwin, to the children, and then there was the happier story they told each other, pointing out the funny parts, riding the surface over the bad. She was the worst, letting the children believe this was just ordinary treatment. When the fire was bright around Lorraine's bed, and Darwin was kindling.

Avenue D South: Swingline Upholstery in flowing 50s writing. Modern, from the time when everything was getting better and better in the s.p.a.ce age, illness and death being beaten back. The storefront was baked white by the sun, dazzling on this cold bright day. Inside the small front office, Clary touched the bell on the deserted counter. It made no noise. She knocked on the door to the workshop, then pushed it open. Brighter back there, a big open s.p.a.ce crammed full of couches and chairs in various stages of recovery. Some were peeled down to bare wood and canvas straps, others were being pulled together, their backs b.u.t.toned snug. A middle-aged man was leaning into a spring, forcing down to fasten it with wire pliers.

"Excuse me," Clary said. "I'm looking for Clayton Gage."

The man turned his head, but left his shoulders and arms to control the spring.

"Well, if you find him, tell him to come pick up his cheque," the man said.

Clary's heart sank.

The pliers twisted twice, three times; the man straightened up. "Hasn't been in for a week, or called. The deal was, he would call every morning. Six rush orders. If I can't deliver I'm out big-time."

"I'm sorry," she said. "His wife is in hospital. She needs to see him."

"Guess he doesn't want to see her."

"She's undergoing-difficult treatment. She needs him."

The man came around the low platform he'd been working on, and steered her back out to the front room. "We'll look on my phone," he said.

He hauled the phone up from under the counter, and hit the b.u.t.tons, peering at the little screen. "Best invention in the last fifty years. You can see who's calling you, but you pay for it." Tap, tap, tap, tap-he worked his way back through the phone's memory.

"Here," he said, pointing at the numbers. "That's where he called from, that's last Friday week, you could start from there."

10:30 a.m., Friday, the number and a name: Perry Paddock. He shoved the phone towards her, and she dialed, and waited. No answer. Too much to hope. Clary wrote the number down and thanked the upholsterer.

"Davis," he said, sticking his hand out for her to shake. "You tell Clayton to get back here when he can. I got lots of work for him, I just need steady. My wife thinks he's a good bet."

She found a phone booth with the book torn out, so she called Fern, told her what was happening, and asked her to look up Perry Paddock-it was an address on Avenue R.

"Any emergencies?"

"Not yet," Fern said, in her gentle, half-breath voice. "But three big diapers so far."

"Oh my G.o.d. He had broccoli yesterday, it may not be agreeing with him."

"I'd say not. Dolly helped me with the last one, didn't you, Doll?"

Clary could hear Dolly laughing in the kitchen, making retching noises.

"Can you give them lunch?"

"As long as it's not broccoli. My mom and dad called and said they were coming in to shop and they'd bring burgers, and I'll give Pearce some banana."

Clary wanted to race home and have a hamburger with Grace and Moreland. Instead, she drove farther down into the alphabet streets, to R, a warren of shoddy brick apartments built in the 60s. Moving up through the decades, she told herself. Half the windows in the front were covered with tinfoil, many broken. One or two were boarded up entirely with plywood. Mail boxes and buzzers inside the foyer were labeled haphazardly, but there was Paddock. Clary pushed the b.u.t.ton, still pearly white in all the grime. Nothing. She buzzed again. Coming in the front door, an old woman with frizzled hair said, "That's the one that burned out. They're gone."

"Paddock?"

"Gone." She went up the stairs, not pausing or giving Clary another glance.

The Chevy Cafe, car parts incorporated into the sign, was a dingy little dive with an interior reek of old grease and sour milk. Clary waited while the skinny waitress took a pan of plates and cutlery out through the swinging door and then came back.

"I'm looking for-" She had a moment of hopelessness, but went on, anyway. "For Clayton Gage, who comes in here sometimes, or maybe a Perry Paddock? Clayton Gage was staying at his place. His wife is sick, and she wants to talk to him."

The waitress looked at Clary as if she couldn't connect her with Perry Paddock. It was her fault, her too-fancy clothes. She looked like she could only be chasing Clayton for a bad reason.

"Darwin told me to ask here," she said. "Darwin Hand, do you know him?"

The waitress smiled then, gums showing wetly pink. "Oh, yeah, I know Darwin all right. Perry went back to La Ronge, but Clayton couldn't leave, so he's gone to Portia House on 26th. Not much of a place, but I guess he was desperate. Always room there."

"Thanks," Clary said. She wished she could tip her.

Portia House was a beige clapboard building, an ugly rectangle with tiny windows. It might have been a hotel in the 30s, or earlier. Rooms, it said above the door. The front door was propped open with an old running shoe, even in this cold weather. The air inside was dank, and either the bulb was out or the electricity had been cut off. Buzzers in three lines to the left of the door, fifteen of them, but under the buzzers the name tags were mostly unreadable. No Gages. But there was nowhere else to look.

On the first floor, she got no answer at the first door, marked H. K. in black marker on the wall. She knocked on the second door, then the others. Nothing. She climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor, trying not to look at the grey splattered carpet while she avoided the torn patches. It was very cold. She pulled her gloves up, to give herself some comfort.

The hall was even narrower up there, and there were more doors, closer together. One was wide open. Inside, a grizzle-whiskered old man lay on a single bed under a small window. The room was all white, a messy white-washy job, plenty of paint splashed on the window panes. An opened can sat on a sheet of newspaper on the table, and a burnt mess in a saucepan. The floor was littered with dark junk, an undifferentiated ma.s.s of rags and paper. The man wore a torn undershirt and a pair of filthy trousers. He was lying on his side, staring at the door, and transferred his stare to Clary's face when he saw her.

"I'm sorry," she said, apologizing for something. That there is such a place in the world, and that you've ended up in it; that by my agency, my fault, my own most grievous prosperity, you are condemned to this s.h.i.thole.

"I'm sorry, I'm searching for Clayton Gage. I need to find him because his wife is ill."

The man said nothing, but his mouth moved, the whiskers twisting together and rotating. She realized he was pulling his teeth back into place. "Who?" he said, finally.

"Clayton Gage. His wife wanted me to-she needs to talk to him."

"Younger fella, nose, smooth hair?" The old man struggled to sit up, and Clary, watching him, steeled herself to step into his room. He had managed to get up on one elbow, and she held the other sharp elbow to give him some leverage. His skin had a grey tinge, probably grime more than illness. Finally he swung his legs around and was upright.

"I seen him," the old man said. "Next door but one. Eleven, I think it is."

Clary didn't know how to let go of him. Would he fall over?

"Don't get many visitors here," he said. "Except the NDP canva.s.sers last month. Gave me a ride over to vote." His bone-fingered hand patted her sleeve.

"Are you warm enough?" she asked him.

"Been through worse winter than this," he said. "What's your name?"

She was reluctant to give it to him; but it held no magical protection, after all. "Clara Purdy," she said. "Maybe you knew my father, George Purdy?"

"George Purdy? Plumbing and hardware store by Stepney's?"

"Yes, that was him," she said.

"I sure knew of him," the old man said. "You're his daughter."

"Yes."

"I heard he died, though."

"He did, nearly twenty years ago."

"Not such a bad thing to go early," the old man said, grinning, his whiskery whiskey mouth hanging open. Three teeth showing. Clary laughed too, but felt a nasty clutch of grave-stink from him.

"Well, I should look for Clayton," she said. She disengaged his arm, waiting to see if he would collapse.

"You tell your dad, Harry Benjamin said h.e.l.lo," he said, winking at her.

She could not tell if it was a joke or if he had forgotten that her father was dead, so she smiled and nodded and went out.

"Don't close the door!" he yelled. "That's my TV, that doorway."

The next door down was 10, and the one after that, 11. Clary raised her hand to knock but had to force it to make a sound. Knock-knock-knock-she made her knuckles obey her. No noise from inside. She knocked louder this time. The old man-Harry Benjamin-had said he was there.

"Clayton?" she called. Still no answer. She didn't know what to do. Leave a note?

She moved toward the light coming through the small front window, which looked out onto the snowy street. Her car was safe, n.o.body stealing the battery, which happened often each year in the first few weeks of real cold.

A man came walking along, talking to himself, arms gesturing jaggedly in the air, angry about something. It was Clayton.

She flinched back from the window. In a minute he would be coming upstairs. She couldn't-Clary ran silently up the last flight of stairs, pulled her coat around her and sat hidden on the top step. His boots clumped up the stairs. He was muttering to himself, she couldn't hear.

Harry Benjamin said Hey! but Clayton ignored him, key fumbling in the lock, and the door opened and shut behind him.

She sat huddled on the top step. It was darker; no window onto the street up there. The building creaked and cracked in the cold. Somewhere, someone flushed a toilet. As her eyes grew used to the inner twilight she saw a magazine on the floor, and the vague image became clear, an enormous pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s bursting out of some leather contraption. Instead of jumping up and running away, she sat still. To keep her mind quiet she prayed, for Harry Benjamin in his dirt, for the waitress, for the upholsterer. For Lorraine, almost out of habit. As usual, her prayers seemed to be swallowed by clouds, by the earth's gravity.

She got up and went down the stairs. This time she knocked on the door of number 11.

When he saw her, Clayton made as if to shut the door, but stopped.

"They all right?" He was thinking of the children, of course.

"They're fine," she said quickly. "They miss you."

That was the right thing to say. The muscles of his face unknotted.

"It's Lorraine," she said. "They've done the transplant, it's just the waiting now-but she needs you, needs to talk to you."

He stepped back into the room. Unlike Harry Benjamin's, his was orderly. The small table was clear, the narrow bed's blankets had been smoothed.

She stepped over the threshold and waited for him to speak.

He moved to get his papers and can of tobacco and stayed by the table, rolling a cigarette, lighting it, blowing the smoke out the window gap. His body was strung up tight. Beneath the tension, he looked like he'd been doing some hard physical work.

She almost said something about Swingline Upholstery, but stopped herself. She kept her hands folded in front of her and her eyes lowered, like an old maid, or a Salvation Army poster.

"What does she want me to do?"

It was a complaint, not a question, but Clary tried to answer it. "You're her husband, maybe you can give her some support that she can't get anywhere else."

"I can't handle it. Cancer."

"She's thinner, but you won't be too shocked. I know it's hard."

"How would you know?"

"My father died of cancer, and my mother just two years ago. I know a wife is-But there's a chance she might get better now, after the transplant."

He turned and glared at her, daring her to keep on. "She's going to die, you know it."

"Well, we have to bet against that." But she did know it, deep in her heart, and it was hard to hold that knowledge away from him. "Darwin is betting that she'll make it."

From the blank look he gave her, she knew not to harp on Darwin's virtue.

"Lorraine misses you," she said. "Please come."

He stood silent.

"Please," she said. A hundred thoughts ran through her head-offer him money, say Come back and stay in my house-threaten him with the police for his earlier thefts. She did none of these. She pretended she was Darwin, who was so good at not talking.

"What's her room number?" he asked, his voice rusty and effortful.