Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Though the housing market was poor, the small city’s industries having all folded in on themselves like stoned Goliaths and its young people, or the ones with any ambition in them, all packed off to seek work elsewhere, Earl had managed to sell his house to a Finnish couple distantly related to his wife for what he felt was a fair price. He phoned his daughter and told her he was going on a trip around the world. “Good for you,” she’d said. “Treat yourself, you deserve it.” Earl said he’d send postcards.

When he arrived at the airport in Vancouver, he took a taxi and sat up front, making a point of shaking the driver’s hand before paying him, leaving no tip. He rented a room in an outlying motel with weekly rates and purchased the silver hatchback with a portion of the money he’d received for the house. The city was not new to him. As a young man, he’d hitchhiked out west and worked loading grain ships for a summer. He’d passed most of that time in the murk of beer parlours and the arms of deceitful women. It was a period of his life he cared not to revisit, part of a span of lost years he couldn’t fully conjure in his head if he tried. Tuuli had never pressed him about it, another of her many kindnesses, and for this he was grateful.

He drove downtown, found the soup kitchen from the news report with no trouble, and parked across the street each day for a week, long enough for the prostitutes and drug dealers to give up on approaching his car. Earl had never seen people so wretched. It was as if the country had been tipped up at one end and all of its sorry bastards had slid west, stopping only when they reached the sea, perhaps because the sea didn’t want them either. Why a man would choose to live in this desperate, brutal way rather than in a house with a family surrounding him Earl would never know. Was it so hard? There’d been plenty of jobs when he’d come in his youth, you could have your pick. But even then there were those who’d rather take what another had built than build it themselves. So perhaps the place hadn’t really changed, only managed to attract more of them.

One drizzly Thursday evening, a red-bearded man took his place in line. His hockey jersey bore the number of a player the Canucks had traded south well over ten years ago; the sleeves, once home-team white, were now mottled brown and grey.

It was Kyle. There was no doubt. He waited his turn and went inside, soon emerging with a paper bowl of something steaming he blew on as he set off down the street. Earl put the car in gear. He followed the boy for some time with no purpose in his mind that he could have honestly described if he were stopped and asked. He’d never actually considered what he’d do once he found him, and now that it had proven so easy, he was beginning to suspect he’d made a terrible mistake. Stopping a man he didn’t know from Adam to offer advice on how to live his life seemed futile, silly even, as well as potentially dangerous.

Earl gassed for a block or so, then pulled over to allow Kyle to walk ahead. He knew his grandson could pick out detail only up to a distance of about ten feet, that’s what the doctors had said anyway, so he trailed closer than he would have anyone else. Kyle walked briskly, his free arm swinging. He looked more robust than he had in the news special. A man tracking his own grandson like an elk, Earl thought, shaking his head at what he’d been reduced to. After about ten blocks, Kyle stopped at the edge of a small, vacant parking lot and disappeared into a row of large bushes beneath a billboard that flipped back and forth between two pictures like a set of vertical blinds. Earl pulled over.

He waited, tapping at the wheel with his thumbs. He failed to imagine what would make his grandson want to live in all this filth and confusion. Vancouver had always seemed more like an encampment than a city to Earl, about as permanent as a card table set up for a Friday-night game. Perhaps it was drugs. But the boy looked all right, physically, that is, healthy even. What Earl knew of drugs were the snivelling junkies of television forensics shows.

A sudden honking made Earl jump and he saw his rearview full with a hulking shape up tight to his bumper. He stuck his arm out and waved the bus around. It only honked again and lurched closer. As Earl pulled away, he saw his grandson emerge from the bushes with a loaded shopping cart he must have had stashed there. Earl made a right and had to go a few blocks south because of one-ways. When he returned to the lot, his grandson was gone. He applied sudden force to the small wheel, ceasing only when he feared it would break off. He spent the next three hours crisscrossing the neighbourhood and swearing under his breath until he finally spotted him, now without his shopping cart, outside a dingy building called the Grandview Hotel. The tired neon of the hotel’s sign was familiar to Earl, and he had a feeling he’d spent some time drunk in a room there, perhaps a long time, but he pushed it from his mind. He watched Kyle pull a key from his trousers, unlock a side door, and step in.

The next morning, Earl parked out front of the Grandview Hotel for the whole day, plugging the meter, cluttering his dashboard with the wrappers of hotdogs bought from a street vendor. There was no sign of Kyle. He returned to his motel that night and got drunk on the wine coolers he’d bought because he’d not been in a liquor store in twenty years, not even when Tuuli died, and had thought the festive bottles were a new kind of beer. Something about the distance from home, or the fact that he no longer had one, or that he no longer had someone to explain himself to, made drunkenness more reasonable to him than it had been in years.

The next day he was parked in the same spot even earlier than the previous day, watching the weak sun climb into the mountains to the east like the first leg of a roller coaster. He’d bought a road map and a mechanical pencil at a drugstore, and now he unfolded the map, located the Grandview Hotel, and made a star with his pencil. At exactly seven Kyle appeared, and Earl followed him, quickly sketching his route on the map when he stopped to let Kyle walk ahead. Earl followed him all day, and the next. After a week of this, he had learned that his grandson made exactly the same journey at the same time each day, seven days a week, taking on average eight hours to push his roaring cart up alleys and over bridges, through a circuit of dumpsters — mostly for condos and apartment buildings — that traversed a good part of the city and ended at a series of second-hand stores and street vendors, where he attempted to sell what he’d found. By the end, Earl had produced a meticulous map, and it delighted him that he was able to pinpoint the boy at any time of day.

But even after Earl completed the map he continued to follow his grandson, for no reason other than he liked to watch Kyle work, because work was the only way to describe what he was doing, whether he was getting paid for it or not. After much frustrated flipping through the manual, Earl had mastered his car’s trip odometer and he clocked Kyle in at about twenty kilometres a day, which impressed him. At times Earl felt like the support car for one of those disabled people who wheelchaired across the country for charity. He watched his grandson tether impossibly large objects to the rickety cart and push them great distances to the places they could be sold or stashed for later. The boy’s labour seemed to belong to another time. Earl thought of pharaohs, forced marches, treks across deadened earth in search of new beginnings. He found himself strangely proud of his grandson, proud of the steady way he carted the things he found and of the resourcefulness the task required. Earl knew that he himself had never worked so hard in his life.