Identities

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Identities **by W.D. Valgardson (adapted)**

Normally, he goes clean-shaven into the world, but the promise of a Saturday liquid with sunshine draws him first from his study to the backyard, from there to his front yard. The smell of burning leaves stirs the memories of childhood car rides, narrow lanes adrift with yellow leaves, girls on plodding horses, unattended stands piled high with pumpkins, onions, or beets. Always, there were salmon tins glinting with silver, set above hand-painted signs instructing purchasers to deposit twenty-five or fifty cents. This act of faith containing all the stories he has read in childhood about the North – cabins left unlocked, filled with supplies for lost wanderers – wakes in him a desire to temporarily abandon the neat yards and hundred-year-old oaks.

He does not hurry for he has no destination. He drifts, instead, through the neat suburban streets and cul-de-sacs, losing and finding his way endlessly. Becoming lost is made all the easier because the houses appear identical, repeat themselves with hardly a variation. There grows within him, however, a boredom with the sameness – no ragged edges, no overgrown vacant lots.

The houses have all faced toward the sun. Now, as he passes grey stone gates, the yards are all proscribed by stiff picket fences and, quickly, a certain untidiness creeps in: a fragment of glass, a chocolate bar wrapper, a plastic horse, cracked sidewalks with ridges of stiff grass.

Although he has on blue jeans – matching pants and jacket made in Paris – he is driving a grey Mercedes Benz. Gangs of young men follow the car with unblinking eyes. The young men stand and lean in tired, watchful knots close to phone booths and seedy looking grocery stores. Their slick hair glistens. Their leather jackets gleam with studs. Eagles, tigers, wolves and serpents ride their backs.

He passes a ten-foot wire fence enclosing a playground bare of equipment and pounded flat. The gate is double locked, the fence cut and rolled into a cone. Three boys throw stones at pigeons. Paper clogs the fence like drifted snow. The school is covered with heavy screens. Its yellow brick is pock-marked, chipped.

The houses are squat, as though they have been taller and have, slowly, sunk into the ground. Each has a band of dirt around the bottom. The blue glow of television sets light the windows. On the front steps of a red-roofed house, a man sits. He wears black pants, a tartan vest, a brown snap-rimmed hat. Beside him is a suitcase.

Fences here are little more than fragments. Cars jam the narrow streets and he worries that he might strike the grubby children who dart back and forth like startled fish. Darkness has quietly been settling like soot. Street lights come on. He takes them as a signal to return the way he came, but it has been a reckless, haphazard path. Retracing it is impossible. He is overtaken by sudden guilt. He has left no message for his wife.

There have been no trees or drifting leaves, no stands covered in produce, no salmon tins, but time has run away with him. His wife, he realizes, will have returned from shopping, his children gathered for supper. He also knows that, at first, they will have explained his absence on a neighbour’s hospitality. However, by the time he can return, annoyance will have blossomed into alarm.

Faced with this, he decides to call the next time he sees a store or phone booth. So intent is he upon the future that he dangerously ignores the present and does not notice the police car, concealed in the shadows of a side street, nose out and follow him.

Ahead, there is a small store with windows covered in hand painted signs and vertical metal bars. On the edge of the light, three young men and a girl slouch. One of them has a beard and, in spite of the advancing darkness, wears sunglasses. He has on a fringed leather vest. His companions wear leather jackets. Their peaked caps make their heads seem flat, their foreheads non-existent. The girl is better looking than she should be for such companions. She is long legged and wears a white turtle-necked sweater.

In spite of his car, he hopes his day old beard which he strokes upward with the heel of his hand, will, when combined with his clothes, help him to blend in – to remain unnoticed. He slips his wallet into his shirt pocket, does up the metal buttons on his jacket and slips a ten dollar bill into his back pocket. Recalling a television show, he decides that if he is assaulted, he will say that the ten is all he’s got, that he stole the car, and ask them if they know a buyer.

He edges nervously along the fender and past the grille. The store window illuminates the sidewalk like a stage. Beyond the light, everything is obscured by darkness. He is so intent upon the three men and the girl that he does not notice the police car drift against the curb, nor the officer who is advancing with a pistol in his hand.

When the officer, who is inexperienced, who is nervous because of the neighbourhood, who is suspicious because of the car and, because he has been trained to see an unshaven man in blue jeans as a potential thief and not as a probable owner, orders him to halt, he is caught by surprise. When he turns part way around and recognizes the uniform, he does not feel fear but relief. Instinctively relaxing, certain of his safety, in the last voluntary movement of his life, he reaches his hand not in the air as he was ordered to, but toward his wallet for identity.

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