Howard Shrier - Buffalo jump

Joe owned a body shop and used-car lot on Eastern Avenue. A year ago, his sixteen-year-old daughter ran away, fed up with her parents’ strict Old World rules about dating, makeup, tattoos and jeans that exposed pubic hair and butt cracks. Joe came to Beacon, terrified that his sheltered Mariela would be chewed up and spat out by the world beyond Little Azores: beaten, raped, impregnated, infected or all of the above. I found her crashing in a squalid bachelor apartment on Parliament Street with three other girls. Parliament sounds dignified but tilts as low as any street in the east end. Mariela mustered some bravado and attitude in front of her friends, but over coffee she confided that the only thing scarier than her current situation was what her parents would do to her if she went back. I reassured her that all they wanted was for her to be safe. Eventually she relented and I drove her home. When I needed a car, I got the Camry from Joe at a “family price.”

When Joe answered, I told him the family jewel wouldn’t start.

“You try CAA?” he asked.

“Ninety minutes at least.”

“Probably not the battery anyway,” he said. “I put in a brand new reconditioned one when you bought it.”

Brand new reconditioned. I would have told Joe it was an oxymoron but what if he misunderstood? The man can hoist a car without the benefit of hydraulics.

Joe told me he was stuck alone at the shop because his goddamn nephew still hadn’t showed up. He wouldn’t be able to get to my place any sooner than CAA. “Okay, Joe. I’ll cab it downtown. Can you meet me here after work and have a look?”

He hesitated. “Oh, man, Jonah. So many cars overheat on days like this, I could work all night. I’d be passing up a big payday.”

“How’s Mariela doing? Still getting straight As in school?”

Joe sighed. “Okay, okay. I get the point. I’ll be at your place around six.”

By eight-thirty, I was standing on the west side of Broadview, trying to hail a southbound cab. There were plenty going my way but all had passengers. I spotted an empty northbound hack but he had nowhere to turn around and waved me off.

By eight-forty, my shirt was clinging to the small of my back and I was no closer to work. Showing up late could only dim the view Beacon held of me. I was beginning to weigh my carjacking options when a 504 streetcar rumbled into view. Its route went south along Riverdale Park before heading west over the valley toward downtown. It would take me within a block of the office.

The streetcar was packed. I dropped in my fare, then took a deep breath and tried to squeeze myself down the aisle. It was like trying to blitz an offensive line. Every other person was sporting a backpack big enough to hide a body in. Most also wore headphones that kept them from hearing words like “Excuse me.” Pressed against bodies overly ripe in the heat, I fought to protect my right arm and keep my balance as the streetcar ground down Broadview. We went past the statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, where elderly Chinese in wide-brimmed straw hats were performing tai chi on the grassy eastern slope of Riverdale Park. I could only envy their ease of motion and the space they had to move in. At Gerrard, nearly half the passengers got off, heading to shops in Chinatown East, east-bound and west-bound streetcars, the library on the corner or the Don Jail rise behind it, its dark Gothic wing hidden from view by a newer brick extension.

When the aisle cleared, there was an empty seat next to a well-dressed man reading the Report on Business. I was about to sit down when I saw an elderly woman facing the other way, her thin hand clenched tightly around a chrome pole, blue veins over bony knuckles. Even in this weather, she wore a wool coat. I tapped her shoulder softly and indicated the seat. She smiled and was about to sit when the streetcar lurched away from the stop. As she clutched at the pole to keep her balance, a thin man in jeans and a sleeveless denim vest swung into the seat I had offered.

He was about my age, which is thirty-four, but craggy and hard-looking, his ropy arms marked with dozens of crude ink tattoos. He shook his lank brown hair out of his eyes and propped his left foot up on the back of the seat in front of him.

“That seat was for the lady,” I said. He ignored me and shook the hair out of his eyes again.

“She needs it more than you,” I said.

“That so?” He gave me what was supposed to be a withering glare. Shook the hair. “Happens I had a rough fuckin’ night.”

I briefly entertained the idea of shaking his hair for him. “Look-”

“Just fuck off, okay?” he spat. “Just leave me the fuck alone, ya fuckin’ kike.”

Kike? Had he really said kike?

The old lady clutched the pole even more tightly. The businessman in the window seat buried his nose deeper in his paper. A few straphangers stepped away from us.

I guess he had.

I’m not what you’d call an observant Jew. I eat matzoh on Passover but have been known to top it with ham and cheese. My favourite Chinese dish is shrimp in lobster sauce with minced pork, the non-kosher trifecta. Truth be told, I’m an atheist, though I once flirted briefly with agnosticism. But I am a Jew to my marrow and proud of it. I believe in the people, the culture, the community. I especially believe in the concept of tikkun olam: repairing the world, leaving it a better place than you found it. And at that moment, it was my belief that the streetcar would be a better place without this piece of shit on it.

“It’s all right, dear,” the old lady said to me. “I’m getting off at Jarvis.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. “This gentleman is going to get up now and give you the seat.”

“The fuck I am,” he said and stuck out the middle finger of his left hand.

In any fight, you take what they give. I grabbed his hand and forced it downward and held it there. “Aaah!” he said, and who could blame him? It’s a fast, simple move that causes intense pain in the wrist, all but forcing a person upward to try to ease it. As he struggled up out of his seat I kept the pressure on, my left hand free to block a punch-like he could throw one with the pain he was in.

“Feel that?” I asked.

“Aaah!”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Want more?” I pushed harder until he went up on his toes.

“Naaa!”

“We’re going to walk to the exit,” I said. “You going to make trouble?”

“Naa-uuh!”

We walked toward the rear doors, my arm tight under his left. Two men walking up the aisle arm in arm-hardly uncommon in Toronto. We could have been practising our wedding march.

“Next time a lady needs a seat, you’re going to give it to her.” He didn’t answer so I pushed the wrist back farther.

“Ah! Ah!” he said through clenched teeth. “Yes.”

“And the word kike, you’re going to expunge it from your vocabulary.”

“I’m what?”

“You’re going to forget you knew it.”

“Yeah. Yeah-uhh!”

The streetcar stopped at Queen Street. I marched my new friend down onto the first stair, which automatically opened the doors, and gave him a shove. He exited ungracefully and stood on the sidewalk, flexing his hand open and closed, shaking it like there was something stuck to it. There would be numbness and pain, but both would subside in minutes.

“Hey!” he whined. “I got no more carfare, ya prick.”

I dug in my pocket and flipped him a toonie and assorted small change.

“I’m still short a quarter,” he said.

“I take no quarter,” I said as the doors closed. “And I give none.”

Jonah Geller. Repairing the world, one asshole at a time.

Carol Dunn’s smiling muscles were out of commission again. “Good morning, Jonah. So glad you could join us.”