Heather O'Neill - Daydreams of Angels

Ferdinand walked down the street to the gym, carrying his duffel bag with a drawing of a bull on its side. He limped as he walked, supporting the weight of the bag on his right leg. His silver mesh shorts seemed to be almost as big as pants.

A twenty-year-old drug addict wearing an acrylic vest and jean shorts and moon boots called out to Ferdinand for change. Little Burgundy had always been a lower-class neighbourhood. The houses were all cheaply built and there were no fancy stores or fancy restaurants. There was a religious store that sold statues of Jesus and saints. People liked to buy them and load up their front yards with them. All the saints crowded into the little yards like commuters on a bus on their way to work.

There are certain parts of the world where certain things come from. Oranges grow in Florida; olives grow in Italy. It was the same thing with people. Lots of writers grew in New York City. And, for reasons that weren’t always entirely obvious, boxers grew in Quebec.

The gym was in a red-brick building with an enormous door. The entrance was covered with framed photographs of boxers no one had ever heard of. The smell of sweat hit Ferdinand as soon as he opened the door. The squeak of sneakers was oddly almost deafening. They sounded like someone writing curse words with a magic marker. The sounds all had echoes. This was what it felt like to be a fish when someone was tapping the sides of the aquarium, Ferdinand thought.

Ferdinand walked down the hall and into the huge gym. It was filled with lots of older boys who were constantly moving. They danced around on their toes, jumping back and forth, their feet looking like flies hitting a windowpane as they tried to figure a way out.

After they warmed up, the boys peeled off their oversized sweatshirts. Underneath they had on only tight undershirts or no shirts at all. A lot of the boys started training when they were only eleven years old. By the time they were nineteen, they didn’t have an ounce of fat on their bodies.

Jules Pieton had a lilac tattooed on the back of his neck. Marcel Girard had a tattoo of a group of violets going down his biceps. Paul Miron had a tattoo of a black-eyed Susan between his shoulder blades and you could see it when he took off his sweatshirt for a fight. Claude Archambault had a tattoo of a rose on the back of his skull, right where a bald spot was going to appear in twenty years. Martin LeBlanc had a tattoo of an iris on his right pectoral muscle. He had been raised by his English grandmother, who was named Iris. Phillipe LaMonde had an entire lower tricep covered with red poppies.

Ferdinand found that he didn’t want to fight at all. He only wanted to look at the pretty tattoos on the other boys. The lilacs and the tiger lilies and the roses … all the roses. He wished he could go up and smell them.

2.

The old man’s dog was sixteen-and-a-half years old and had arthritis and was deaf. They walked slowly down the street together, taking twenty minutes to get around the block. The old man had spent his whole life in this neighbourhood. When he was younger and met girls in the big dance halls downtown, he wouldn’t tell them that he lived in Little Burgundy. It had always been working class and poor. And it was literally downhill and on the other side of the tracks. A girl would look for a boy from Westmount or Outremont if she had any sense, not a boy from this part of town.

Still, you would see some very pretty women who lived around here. They were mostly the young single moms who wore miniskirts and high heels and rabbit-skin fur coats. They would carry home bags of groceries from the food bank, smiling whenever drivers honked at them. They would save a little bit of money from their welfare cheques to buy a tube of lipstick. They were still dreaming the same dream that the little kids were dreaming, which was that they were going to grow up and get out of this neighbourhood. They still hadn’t accepted that they were moms now and that their future was already here. They paid the old man no mind even though he stopped to stare at them. He had cataracts in his eyes as if he were looking up at the full moon.

In truth, when he stopped to look at the women, he really was pausing just to take a break from the long walk. When he and the dog would get to the foot of the stairs, they would stand there trying to muster up the courage to climb them.

The dog was a golden retriever and everything in the apartment was covered in its long white hairs. The curtains and the chesterfields, his clothes and hats, all the floors, even the dishes were plastered with white dog hair too. The old man had stopped waging war against the dog hair though, because you had to choose your battles in life. Then, one sad morning, his dog passed away in its sleep.

The old man was lonelier than he had ever been that week. He made several trips to the supermarket, buying only one thing at a time so that he would have an excuse to come back again. He dressed like many of the old people in this neighbourhood. He had on an old suit jacket that had survived from the 1950s. It looked as though he had made the pinstripes on his jacket with a ruler and a piece of soap. He also sported a checkered tweed hat, matched with a pair of bright green jogging pants that he had got from the Salvation Army.

“Do you think I’m sweet enough to buy some of these sweets?” he said to the cashier, trying to be funny.

She smiled weakly. She looked bored out of her mind and he knew that she was looking forward to him walking away.

On the way back to the apartment he tried to talk to the neighbourhood children. They were all over the place. They were dressed in faded Cookie Monster T-shirts or heavy metal T-shirts that had shrunk in the laundry. They had little broken arms and scabs on their knees. Their chronic lack of supervision led to them doing things like falling off roofs on a regular basis.

They would grow up to be criminals: the unacknowledged drug dealers and burglars of the world.

A future car thief hurried by with a tiny Matchbox Porsche in his hand. The old man tried to ask him about his car, but the child continued on. He saw a skinny boy with long hair who was carrying a duffel bag that looked bigger than him. For a second he thought that the boy was wearing sunglasses, but then realized that he had two black eyes. He stopped to wave at the boy, who responded with a sad smile and a tiny little wave but kept going. It was a shame, he thought, that children were not allowed to talk to strangers anymore. He would like to pass on his wisdom about old TV shows that had gone off the air, and the price of hot dogs before the war. He could tell them about scandals that had ruined the careers of politicians in the 1950s.

A bus zoomed by, coming so close to the sidewalk that it seemed to grab hold of the old man’s jacket. One day he would get dizzy and he would teeter over and fall into the street and be run over by a bus, he thought. He imagined everyone gathering around to look at him in the middle of the street, crushed and dignified.

He knew not to talk to any of the men, because anything could set them off. You would see groups of them yelling at each other and flashing knives. They were at an age when they enjoyed endangering their lives, but the old man was careful with his life. As though it were an egg balanced in a spoon in a children’s race.

In the coming days, he found that he couldn’t deal with the loss of the dog. It made him feel terrible to wake up in the middle of the night and go for a pee and not trip over his buddy. It made the hallway seem to go on for miles and miles. Even though the apartment was tiny, it was amazing how much emptiness fit into it.

Finally he thought that getting another dog would be the only thing that would cure him of the loneliness. He called his daughter, asking her to get him a new dog. He said that he was miserable without one. She didn’t seem very concerned, probably because she wasn’t listening.