(10) Transit Shelter

“I was architecture student, in Montreal. Judge, he tell me leave, get out of Montreal and don’ come back. I got in argument wid a Haitian guy. So I push him. He fall back and hit his head on a curb but den he jump up, pull out a gun and shoot me, den he fall down dead.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

I thought of how in Toronto there’s a rule-of-thumb that only weirdoes talk to strangers, so if a stranger is talking to you then they must be a weirdo.

“Yeah,” he said.

This guy was 22 or so, husky; wearing track pants the colour of old city snow at twilight with a black hoodie over several t-shirts. He was standing with a dirty blue knapsack and a squeegee at his boots. He had on a black touque with the Canadian National logo on it, all around the touque a fringe of blonde hair hung down.

I had just stepped into the transit shelter at Bathurst and Queen. It stood beside the snow bank like a discarded aquarium, as grimy as the rest of the street. I looked up and there was his round face. Beside us was a sub shop, up ahead were the steps of an old bank where First Nations guys hang out all year, begging, sleeping, drinking, fighting.

“So I come to Toronto.”

I had no reason to disbelieve. Theoretically, it was possible. The Haitian guy might have had enough adrenaline, blood pressure, pride and anger in him after cracking his skull to get up and pull a trigger even though he was basically dead, a zombie. Shit happens in Montreal. I didn’t know what to say.

He just wanted to have a conversation. He was in the aftermath of a fateful moment. Me, I was an office worker on the way home. In general, I thought I might be going somewhere. I drank Starbuck’s coffee twice a day and worked at a publishing company off King Street.

I came out of the lobby into the cold and started walking west, toward Queen and Brock. The sidewalks were a mess. Millions of rough little rocks of salt lay everywhere, rolling and crunching under my boots all the way. After a block or so my girlfriend called me on my cell to ask me to pick up rotis for dinner, we usually ran out of groceries by Friday. The rotis were in the big pocket across the front of my black nylon parka, two potato-and-chana nourishments in foil. We’d trade heat for the streetcar ride of a few minutes until I was home.

“I was in hospital,” he said.

And he’d been in custody for a full year. My rotis were going to be cold if I had to stand here a long time.

“Wow,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic in a low key and disinterested way.

“That Haitian guy, he was a badass. The judge say he believe me I didn’t on purpose kill the Haitian guy.”

“Good thing,” I said.

A beautiful girl walked by the transit shelter with her long navy blue hair under a Russian army hat with ear flaps. She was wearing a big coat that looked like she’d made it by skinning a red muppet. She had on knee-high black boots with thick laces criss-crossed up the back.

“Yeah,” he said.

My girlfriend doesn’t hate winter at all. Her family was loaded by the time she was born and she grew up skiing, driving SUVs, going to Florida, Bermuda, Mexico, Cuba. For me, the snow is nice at first then becomes a dirty old bandage. The days flicker by with the faulty exposure of a silent film and none of the scratchy charm. Daylight is just an interval either side of lunch.

There was a Dutch painter named Albert Jacques Frank who came to Toronto in the 1930s. He painted alleyways, grey wooden fencing and footpaths set against white; unpopulated works of silence insulated by snow. His Toronto of red brick and damp porch boards is still here if you care to look for it.

I guess it seemed like I didn’t believe him, or that I was indifferent. To be honest, I did want to get home. The squeegee kid took the hems of his hoodie and shirts and lifted them about twelve inches. Like I said, he was heavy, so his belly protruded bare into the cold air between us. Sure enough, he had a scar, entry and exit wounds that almost touched each other. They looked like a long whitish pair of upside down keyholes.

“Jeez,” I said.

The Long Branch streetcar pulled up. He stayed there in the transit shelter chewing. The roti steamed where he had bitten into it.

copyright Stephen Caulfield, 2009