Specimen & Other Stories, Page 3

  He said nothing. For the moment he was still mesmerized by her eyes, but not unaware of her heaving nut-brown breasts from which water crept in rivulets down her belly. Any moment now, he expected to wake up from a dream with an erection.

  Stanley heard some runners go by on the trail. From this turn in the river, he and the woman were completely screened from view. They might as well have been in the wilderness, he felt that alone with her. Alone and drifting on a current of compulsion.

  She tossed the fish onto the bank and clambered after it on all fours, offering him a brief glimpse of her little pelt, glossy-haired between her naked buttocks. She tugged a summer dress of mottled brown-and-green from a branch where it’d been draped. She pulled it over her head, smoothed it across her hips. She ran her fingers through her wet hair and picked up her fish.

  “Coming or not?”

  As if in a dream, there seemed to be as little alternative as there was logic. He retrieved his Nikes and T-shirt and followed her back to the trail. She strode on ahead, barefoot and silent, never looking back, seemingly doubtless that he was following close behind, like a dog trailing its master. They followed the trail downriver for a kilometer. En route they met or were overtaken by cyclists and runners, some of whom Stanley recognized as regulars on this stretch.

  She stepped off the trail, ducked her head and went under a tree. Stanley followed her onto a raccoon path through the bushes, arriving at a dense grove of trees on the river’s edge. The Don widened a little at this point, perhaps thirty feet across, although no more than three feet deep.

  Here was a dwelling of sorts – a patchwork affair of green tarpaulin, a sheet of plywood, tree branches secured with rope, an aluminum tent pole and some duct tape – with a bare patch of ground swept clean around a small fire pit.

  She used a lighter to kindle a fire of leaves and twigs and scrap wood. From a toolbox inside her shelter she took a knife and crouched at the water’s edge to gut the fish.

  Stanley looked at his watch. It was 6:45, by which time he’d usually timed his climax to match that of Isabel, and was now catching his wind before setting homeward on his return run. She must be wondering what’d happened to him, but had no justification to phone his home. Undoubtedly, she’d call the office before lunch and he’d get an earful.

  The office seemed remote at this point. He heard metallic thunder to the south and looked downriver to where the Prince Edward Viaduct crossed the Don Valley. On a trestle suspended beneath the vehicle bridge, a westward-bound subway train had emerged from under Broadview station, enjoying half a minute’s view of the valley before it bored back into the bluff below Castle Frank station.

  Stanley often sat in a window seat of the subway train, looking down into the valley where in the winter one could catch a glimpse of a blue tarp or some orange garbage bags where the homeless had stitched together their tiny shelters. By late spring, however, the foliage would erupt in a dense canopy through which nothing could be seen from above, and the subway riders would commute unaware of lives being lived out of sight and out of mind.

  A few months ago his department had completed a study, using statistical methods, estimating 5,052 people homeless on Toronto’s streets, in ravines, parks, shelters, health care facilities and correctional institutions. Statistically, 666 of them lived in ravines and parks.

  “What’s your name?” he asked as she laid the split fish on a flap of heavy-duty chicken wire over her low-flame fire pit.

  “Callie,” she said without looking up.

  “This is where you live?”

  “This is just my summer place. I have a condo in Yorkville.”

  “Really?” Decent condos in Yorkville started at $600K. Stanley and Martha had checked it out last year, thinking to cash in on a decade’s massive appreciation on their Browning Avenue house, and put Martha within walking distance of her gallery. But in the end, the backyard garden had kept Martha rooted. And just as well, Stanley reflected, since it would have doubled the distance of his run to Isabel, leaving him barely enough time for a premature ejaculation before he’d have had to head home.

  “My Beemer’s parked in the bushes back there.”

  “Uh-huh.” She had a sense of humor as well as a sense of adventure. He’d pegged her as an edge-runner, one of those William Gibson types who couldn’t stay put in her demographic, migrating between categories, trying on different lifestyles like a teenager with an identity crisis.

  Her wet hair seemed beautifully cut, framing a face with high cheekbones, thick eyebrows and those amazing eyes. He could’ve sworn her dress was a Donna Karan, but there was a ragged little flap at the neck where the label had been torn off. She wore no jewelry, but had a tattoo around her left wrist, what looked like Sanskrit characters. Her hands and feet were beautiful; she could have modeled either for fashion photo shoots.

  If she’d been in her twenties, he’d have assumed a rich kid runaway, high on a cocktail of drugs and booze and sexual freedom, rejecting ambitious parents who’d expected her to go into medicine or law, going AWOL instead to freak them out. Don’t tell me what to do with my life.

  But this woman was in her late thirties, early forties. He’d seen her naked in the river, a full frontal. Beautiful as she was, she was no kid. But do her hair and nails, put her in heels with a clean dress, she’d look ready for a business meeting. Give her a Blackberry, she’d take Bay Street by storm, stealth or sheer sex appeal.

  She removed the fish from the fire and handed him a piece, keeping the head for herself. He hesitated a moment, debating the wisdom of eating an anonymous catch from the Don River. He didn’t even trust his local fish market, and preferred to buy from Loblaw’s, where fresh flash-frozen filets had neither skin nor tails to betray their origins.

  “Something to drink?” She pulled on a cord anchored to a tent-peg in her front yard. Up from the bottom of the Don came a net bag with two bottles of wine. She selected one that’d already been opened, pulled the cork with her sharp white feral teeth and passed him the bottle.

  It was cool to the touch, not like it’d come from the fridge in the LCBO, but acceptable. Stanley read the label. A Niagara riesling, he’d had it before. Although he wouldn’t bring it to a friend’s dinner party, the price/value equation made it perfectly suitable for home consumption.

  They ate with their bare hands and drank from the bottle. Stanley had never had fish, let alone wine, so early in the day, and he chalked it up as a novel experience. Fearing a fish-provoked gastro, however, he drank perhaps more wine than was necessary.

  He looked at his watch. It was 7:15, by which time he usually left home to catch the subway. He knew that if he went now, he could jog home and shower and arrive at work only an hour late.

  As he was thinking about that, she leaned forward to take the bottle for another swig, and he looked right down the décolletage of her dress. He saw her bare breasts loose within the shadow of the fabric and he didn’t know what came over him. He leaned forward at the same time, like a moth drawn by the green fire of her eyes, and put his lips on hers.

  All the air went out of him and he felt breathless and dizzy and excited at the same time, like some little kid taking his first ride on the roller coaster. They fell sideways onto the ground and his hands groped her, one going for a breast, the other going for the ass that had caught his eye in the first place, luring him into this insanity.

  She responded with an enthusiasm that startled him. In moments she had the better part of him out of his running shorts. Wary of being caught in flagrante delicto, even though Martha was now at the airport, and Isabel on her way to work, he inched toward her makeshift dwelling as she clung to him, her mouth fastened on his neck like a remora, her hand fist-full of his manhood.

  Inside the shelter was a sleeping bag on a piece of foam, and it was on this flying carpet that Stanley was transported to heaven. In moments they were completely naked, and entwined together like snakes in a fever. Her skin was hot, her body
muscled, her molten core as tight and buttery as a teenage prom queen. After half an hour, Stanley let out a groan that could have been heard all the way downtown, and collapsed beside her in a spastic post-orgasmic heap.

  He awoke an hour later with a headache, his mouth tasting like a fish drowned in a barrel of cheap wine. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was. Or wasn’t sure if he wanted to know where he was. He felt for his penis to make sure it was still there. From what he remembered, there’d been a terrific struggle, and he wasn’t sure if it hadn’t been torn off in the process. To his relief, it was still intact, and responded to his touch by raising its head, like an extreme fighter after a severe beating, but still game for more.

  Beside the bed was a bookshelf fashioned from bricks and wooden planks. Stanley rolled on his side and examined the titles. The SAS Survival Guide. An Idiot’s Guide to Astrology. The Female Body: An Owner’s Manual. Sexual Palmistry. Fodor’s Guide to India. The rest were novels: a mix of mysteries, thrillers and erotica.

  Stanley got dressed and looked at his watch. It was 9:30. He had no meetings on the agenda today, and had in fact planned to simply hunker down in his office to read a thick report from the provincial government on the sustainability of social assistance programs for the homeless, whose numbers were considered suspect by his boss.

  In fact, their department of Social Statistics was one of the last way-stations in the vetting process for large budget programs. “Vee are from zee SS,” his boss Joan liked to joked with her non-Jewish departmental colleagues, “and vee are here to count you.”

  She was vacationing this week in Muskoka, with no expectation of her calling in for any reason. If he’d had his cell phone with him, he could’ve called his assistant Gary to say he’d stayed home to read the report undisturbed. But in the absence of such a call, his staff would simply assume he’d taken a vacation day. Let’s face it, you could bring a carton of doughnuts into a government office during the summer, and scarcely anyone would surface for a nibble.

  Stanley crawled out of the shelter. Callie sat cross-legged, still naked, on a square of folded blanket with eyes closed and hands folded in her lap. She appeared to be meditating and he didn’t want to break her concentration, so he sat there quietly, just watching her. In repose, her face had a timeless quality to it, reminding him of statues from Indian temples, of goddesses whose inner bliss was reflected in their outer beauty.

  An hour passed. Stanley got antsy. He wanted to go home, take a shower, have a coffee, give Isabel a call. If Callie didn’t wake up in the next minute, he’d leave. It was starting to get a little creepy, this deep meditation. She was off in a world of her own, and didn’t appear to be coming back any time soon.

  He stood up, taking a last look around. It’d been wonderful in a strange sort of way, but it was time to go. Maybe it was just the fish, or the wine, or the ecstatic sex, but he was starting to feel queasy. He felt like he’d been teleported away and back, returning slightly out of sync, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, needing coffee to wash down his sugar. He needed to return to familiar surroundings – home, office, head space – before she woke up and mesmerized him again.

  He felt a sudden frisson of panic, and the hair stood up on the back of his head. It’d been fun, but now he had to run. He crept quickly through the undergrowth, heading for the safety of the trail back to Pottery Road. He berated himself for having been such an idiot, having sex with an unwashed wood nymph. What had possessed him? He’d better see his doctor right away, get a morning-after shot of antibiotics or something.

  He paused to relieve himself beside a small bush that bore clusters of tiny red berries. No sooner had he done so, he felt a wave of relief. His panic attack had passed. So had his desire to return to Pottery Road, Riverdale or life as he had known it on Browning Avenue.

  He looked back toward the Don. The path though the bushes was a tunnel into the trees, and at the far end of it a warm light glowed and pulse. Probably it was just some trick of the eye – sunlight reflected from the river onto the underside of the leaves, the breeze in the foliage, clouds shape-shifting...

  She was reading a book when he returned to her. She looked up at him and smiled. “Feeling okay?”

  “I had to go for a leak.”

  “You could have gone in the river. It’s what I do.”

  “For everything?”

  She frowned. “I have a latrine. I’ll show you later.”

  He had mixed feelings about that. Her tone implied he might be around for awhile. However much he doubted that, he didn’t know whether to be flattered or frightened. He still hadn’t figured her out. Was she an escapee from a psychiatric ward or just a sun-worshipping tree-hugger who’d taken her love for the environment to its logical extreme?

  “Sit down.” She patted the ground in front of her. “Show me your hands.”

  He sat cross-legged in front of her and held out his hands. As soon as she took his right hand in hers, an enormous current went through his arm, across his heart and into his groin. He laid his left hand over his crotch in case his erection burst through the fabric of his jogging shorts.

  She traced her finger across his palm. She might as well have tickled his scrotum, it was all he could do to stifle a moan of pleasure.

  “Long straight head line,” she said. “Post-graduate degree, a scientist or some sort of number-cruncher?”

  “PhD in statistics,” he admitted.

  “A branch off your head line curves down to the heel of your palm. Ever been treated for depression?”

  “Self-medicated.” Seven years into his marriage with Martha, he’d hit the wall of a mid-life crisis, mourned his lost freedom, fell into a spell of drinking and pot-smoking that had lasted two-and-half years. Luckily, he’d never let it show at work.

  “Your heart line is short, takes a sharp turn under your middle finger. Makes you a bit of a horn-dog, not particularly ethical.”

  “Carpe diem, that’s my motto.” He wouldn’t admit that to anyone else, but what did it matter, he’d probably never see her again.

  “Life line swings well out into the palm. You’re very healthy.” She lowered her head to look closer. “But there’s a line that branches off to meet your fate line, and a little fish at the end of it.”

  “A fish? What’s that?”

  She didn’t answer him, but concentrated on measuring his life line with the middle phalange of her little finger. “You’ll have some sort of spiritual epiphany around age 50, jump the tracks and go AWOL.”

  “That doesn’t sound likely.” Stanley had his sights set on retirement at age 60, a nice government pension fattened on 30 years of service.

  “How old are you now?”

  “Fifty.”

  She let go of his hand and cocked her head toward the river, as if she’d just heard someone call her name. When she turned back to him, her green eyes swept his face like a searchlight.

  “Like some tea?”

  “Sure.” Anything to get the taste of fish out of his mouth.

  She started a fresh fire and filled a stainless-steel IKEA kettle from a four-liter container of water. When the water had boiled, she dropped a handful of something into it to steep. She took a pair of small Chinese cups from a plastic milk crate and poured them each a cup of tea.

  After the wine, Stanley was quite thirsty, and he drank three cups of tea. He didn’t really like it at first, but it grew on him. It tasted like bong water with a hint of peppermint. After the third cup, he felt his ears pop, as if he’d just taken a fast ride up the elevator to the top of the CN Tower. The tension in his head trickled out of his ears and ran down his spine like the residue of an ayurvedic oil massage.

  After a few minutes, the ground beneath him seemed to come alive. The dirt was shape-shifting. He saw his own face smiling up at him, and then an ant crawled up his nose and he faded away into the dirt. The earth was translucent and three-dimensional. There were more faces down below, and he caught fleeting glimpses
of Martha and Isabel and Gary and Joan and a woman with whom he’d had an affair during his depression, and other lovers and people from his past all the way back to high school and they were all naked and crawling over each other like worms in a compost heap. And somewhere far below, like large fish in deep water, he saw the dead Mohawks who’d lived and died and been buried here beside the river.

  The next thing he knew, he was naked on the ground and Callie was naked on top of him and they were locked in a dance that was timeless, a fusion of souls for a purpose that only God could understand.

  When he woke up again, he was alone inside her shelter. His limbs felt soft and feathery, like somebody had turned down the gravity, and he was in danger of floating away. He grabbed a tent-pole just in case he started to lift off. He felt seriously jet-lagged, as if he’d been on an inter-planetary flight and had lost his luggage and walked out of the terminal, not only into a different time zone, but a different dimension.

  After a while, he crawled outside. The sky was still light but the sun had disappeared behind the valley ridge. Thunder to the south. He watched the subway trains pulsing across the viaduct, sending the little people back home for a night of television and torpid sleep before they returned to work for the System.

  He heard voices off in the bushes. An exchange of greetings, a few polite words at first, then questions without answers, the bark of a command, an angry retort, a rising crescendo of shouts, a snarl, a scream and then silence.

  He didn’t get up to see what it was all about. Shit happens. Although naked as a bird, he felt safe here. He was light, eternal and free. If something threatened him, he’d just fly away.

  It was almost dark before Callie returned. She threw down a stick the size of a baseball bat and went into the river. As she passed him, he saw her palms glistening with something red and luminescent.

  “Is that blood?” he asked.

  Crouched in the shallows, washing her hands, she said over her shoulder, “Picking berries, I got juice all over my hands.”

  “What was all that shouting?”

  “Some guy tried to pick from my bush. I scared him off.”