January. Where the Niagara Falls

The road is a tunnel of billboards for personal injury lawyers. It begins as litter, but as the towns heap up so do the 20-foot faces, blood-eyed, salivating, and Maurice gets a 60 mile-an-hour steak-eye view into their drooling mandibles. The hubris of it. To look that appalling – Celline & Barnes, Childtoucher, Nosferatu, heads like glistening cocks – and still want to be suspended midair, big as a bathroom, again and again and again. Are there that many unbridled victims in Niagara Falls? Is this where the survivors gather when we’re blasted, blown-out, missing limbs? On this last spit of earth before earth ends, these undead ogres our cut-price Virgils for one last shot at the big door prize? Before we heave fat legs over the railings and are gone. Some guy in sweats and slippers has pulled his car onto the shoulder to let his wolves take a shit. But nobody’s going over the falls today. Only the black trees and icebergs. Maurice? He’s just upping his immunity to sorrow by inoculating himself with a bit of it.

Frank, who appears to be preventing the bar from falling over, is perturbed by Maurice kicking around town alone. “You’re an okay looking dude,” he says, flopping him a trout hand, grinning wetly, “go shoulder up to some rich, drunk lady, get funky.” Maurice smiles like there’s kale in his teeth, thinks of Steve back home who always measured life’s choices by their relative fuckability. Work, food, houses, friends, whoever, whatever; he wanted to fuck it. “Know what I mean, Frank? He just wanted to stick his dick in life?” Frank nods decisively. He knows what Maurice means. Even though it’s obviously life that has stuck its dick in Frank. And the thing about Steve was; he was so sure he was right. Dead certain it was all anybody wanted, only most people were too pussy to admit it. “So fuck it,” he’d say, loosening his belt, “Step aside.” And after he was done, whatever it had been would be ugly and fucked. Darwinist conquest, born of science and history. Facts of life he’d say, fuck as you would be fucked by, the hairy-knuckled beast in all of us, survival of the fuckiest. Steve’s last wife, Staten Island Carmela, put him through the mangle. Thirty years his junior, she took his gerontic swagger and slammed it against the wall until the stuffing came out. Last time Maurice saw him, he was doddering three plastic flutes of cava from the theatre bar to nobody nowhere, a shrunken baby man, his lower lip fat and wet and lulled to sleep by gravity. Elmer Fudd. One false move, he’d be squashed like a grape. “Ozymandias,” says Frank. Maurice looks at him, amazed. “Live by the scam,” he says, “die by the scam.”

The Sikh guy in the 7-Eleven is all itchy at Maurice’s blundering; wrong creamer, can’t find the lids, seriously, who the fuck wants Funfetti Vanilla Cake at 5.45 in the morning? He shuffles over to pay. “Just the coffee?” Maurice nods and the guy waves him off. “Take it.” Perplexed, thinking maybe he did something wrong, he keeps groping for a buck. “Dude,” the guy says, “I’m just trying to make time for a smoke.” At the corner of MacKenna and 24th Maurice gets out of the car to take a picture. It’s not yet dawn. Apart from an empty, illuminated school bus he’s the only thing crawling on the face of Western New York in a snowstorm. A few seconds in, he hears the light honk of a horn. A few seconds more, it honks again. He turns around. The bus driver, in his cozy seat in the balcony, is pointing and laughing at Maurice’s car, which, is sidling off unjockeyed down the road. Sedately, y’know, like at a funeral. Maurice gives chase, but there’s nothing in her way, she could canter to Buffalo uninterrupted. Purring past a half block of condemned homes, broken teeth, plywood doors spray-painted with numbers, she waves decorously like the Queen. Maurice cartwheels in pursuit, a spastic cranefly. He catches her as she crosses 25th, throws open the driver’s door and plunges in head first, hand on the brake, feet in the street. It’s warm down there in the footwell. And still so early. He could curl up, take a nap. After a few seconds the school bus sidles past, peep-peeps jauntily with the heel of its hand.

The lady in Goodwill drifts though his purchases with a cocked eyebrow and studied nonchalance. When she reaches the gentleman’s dress shirt with gold pinstripes, fabric buttons and embroidered patches of elephant, lion and zebra, she smooths it between finger and thumb, savouring its weave. “An original Las Olas drip-dry,” she murmurs. Maurice points to the teal velour leisure suit (size petite) she hasn’t arrived at yet. She nods sagely, purses her lips. “I’d wear that with a beaker of cooking sherry.” She’s too good. “Fucking Niagara Falls,” she sighs. Gazing at the Single and Ready to Jingle shorts, she glances up at Maurice and they break character simultaneously, her laughter a single thunderclap. By now even the old ladies in line with walking frames are chuckling. “I was transferred two years ago. Sometimes I pull out a lawnchair and just stare at the pylons.” Maurice pays – $17 for the heap – and they fist bump. “I love you.” she says.

The metal girl crackles over the speaker, asks how she can help him today, so Maurice orders a Big Mac and medium fries. She asks what he wants to drink and he says he doesn’t want anything. “A Sprite?” she says, like she hasn’t heard, so he says, “I don’t really want a Sprite,” and she says, “but it comes with it,” so he says, “can I not have it though?” and she goes quiet. Eventually Maurice says, “are you still there?” and she giggles and says, “can you just take a Sprite?” and he says, “yeah.”

End of the line places know in their bones what Maurice never gets round to realizing; if we keep running we’ll go right over the edge and be paddling air like Wile E Coyote. They don’t always say anything (maybe they glance up from polishing glasses) because they’ve learned from experience that people don’t listen. The guy softshoeing down the middle of Pine Avenue in carpet slippers through six fresh inches of snow carrying a plastic bag of bottles, smiles and shakes his head at Maurice who is standing on the hood of his Subaru, all pert in his Greta Thunberg raincoat, taking pictures of the bombed out bakery. “Gonna buy it?” he chortles. Later, uncertain at the bar in the Jimmy’s, Maggie shakes her head at his jackass manhattan and slides him a Heineken. And then another. And all the while Skeeter Davis is asking, “Why do the birds go on singing? Why do the stars glow above? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? It ended when I lost your love.”

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