Deep-Holes, by Alice Munroe

Sally received a note. This in itself was special, since most people she knew used e-mail or the phone. She was glad he hadn’t called. She did not yet trust herself to hear his voice. The note instructed her to leave her car in the subway parking lot at the end of the line and take the subway to a specified station, where he would meet her.

She expected to see him on the other side of the turnstile, but he was not there. Probably he had meant that he would meet her outside. She climbed the steps and emerged into the sunlight and paused, as people hurried and pushed past her. She had a feeling of dismay and embarrassment. Dismay at Kent’s apparent absence and embarrassment because she was feeling just what people from her part of the country often felt in neighborhoods like this, though she would never have said what they said. You’d think you were in the Congo or India or Vietnam.

On the steps of an old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. It was no longer a bank, of course, though the bank’s name was cut into the stone. She looked at the name rather than at the men, whose slouching or reclining postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building and the rush of the crowd coming out of the subway.

“Mom.”

One of the men on the steps got up and came toward her in no hurry, with a slight drag of one foot, and she realized that it was Kent and waited for him.

She would almost as soon have run away. But then she saw that not all the men were filthy or hopeless-looking, and that some glanced at her without menace or contempt and even with friendly amusement, now that she had been identified as Kent’s mother.

Kent didn’t wear a robe. He wore gray pants that were too big for him, a T-shirt with no message on it, and a threadbare jacket. His hair was cut so short you could hardly see the curl. His skin was quite pale, and his thin body made him look older than he was. He was missing some teeth.

He did not embrace her—she did not expect him to—but he put his hand lightly on her back to steer her in the direction he wanted her to go.

“Do you still smoke your pipe?” she said, sniffing the air, and remembering how he had taken up pipe smoking in high school.

“Pipe? Oh. No. It’s the smoke from the fire you smell. We don’t notice it anymore. I’m afraid it’ll get stronger, where we’re walking.”

“Are we going to go through where it was?”

“No, no. We couldn’t, even if we wanted to. They’ve got it all blocked off. Too dangerous. Some buildings will have to be taken down. Don’t worry—it’s O.K. where we are. A good block and a half away from the mess.”

“Your apartment building?” she said, alert to the “we.”

“Sort of. Yes. You’ll see.”

He spoke gently, readily, yet with an effort, like someone speaking, as a courtesy, in a foreign language. And he stooped a little, to make sure she heard him. The slight labor involved in speaking to her seemed something she was meant to notice. The cost.

As they stepped off a curb he brushed her arm—perhaps he had stumbled a little—and he said, “Excuse me.” And she thought he gave a slight shiver.

AIDS. Why had that never occurred to her before?

“No,” he said, though she had certainly not spoken aloud. “I’m quite well at present. I’m not H.I.V.-positive or anything like that. I contracted malaria years ago but it’s under control. I may be a bit run-down but nothing to worry about. We turn here—we’re right on this block.”

We.

“I’m not psychic,” he said. “I just figured out something that Savanna was trying to get at, and I thought I’d put you at rest. Here we are then.”

It was one of those houses whose front doors are only a few steps from the sidewalk.

“I’m celibate, actually,” he said, holding open the door. A piece of cardboard was tacked up where one of its glass panes should be.

The floorboards were bare and creaked underfoot. The smell was complicated, all-pervasive. The smoke had got in here, of course, but it was mixed with the odors of ancient cooking, burned coffee, toilets, sickness, decay.

“Though ‘celibate’ might be the wrong word. That sounds as if it had something to do with will power. I guess I should have said ‘neuter.’ I don’t think of it as an achievement. It isn’t.”

He was leading her around the stairs and into the kitchen.

And there a gigantic woman stood with her back to them, stirring something on the stove.

Kent said, “Hi, Marnie. This is my mom. Can you say hello to my mom?”

Sally noticed a change in his voice. A relaxation, honesty, perhaps a respectfulness, that was different from the forced lightness he adopted with her.

She said, “Hello, Marnie,” and the woman half turned, showing a squeezed doll’s face in a loaf of flesh but not focussing her eyes.

“Marnie is our cook this week,” Kent said. “Smells O.K., Marnie.”

To his mother he said, “We’ll go and sit in my sanctum, shall we?” and led the way down a couple of steps and along a back hall. It was hard to move there, because of the stacks of newspapers, flyers, and magazines neatly tied.

“Got to get these out of here,” Kent said. “I told Steve this morning. Fire hazard. Jeez, I used to just say that. Now I know what it means.”

Jeez. She had been wondering if he belonged to some plainclothes religious order, but if he did he surely wouldn’t say that, would he? Of course, it could be an order of some faith other than Christian.

His room was down some more steps, actually in the cellar. There was a cot, a battered old-fashioned desk with cubbyholes, a couple of straight-backed chairs with rungs missing.

“The chairs are perfectly safe,” he said. “Nearly all our stuff is scavenged from somewhere, but I draw the line at chairs you can’t sit on.”

Sally seated herself with a feeling of exhaustion.

“What are you?” she said. “What is it that you do? Is this a halfway house or something like that?”

“No. Not even quarter-way. We take in anybody that comes.”

“Even me.”

“Even you,” he said without smiling. “We aren’t supported by anybody but ourselves. We do some recycling with stuff we pick up. Those newspapers. Bottles. We make a bit here and there. And we take turns soliciting the public.”

“Asking for charity?”

“Begging,” he said.

“On the street?”

“What better place for it? On the street. And we go into some pubs that we have an understanding with, though it is against the law.”

“You do that yourself?”

“I could hardly ask the others to do it if I wouldn’t. That’s something I had to overcome. Just about all of us have something to overcome. It can be shame. Or it can be the concept of ‘mine.’ When somebody drops a ten-dollar bill, or even a loonie, into the hat, that’s when the notion of private ownership kicks in. Whose is it, huh? Ours or—unh-uh—mine? If the answer comes back ‘mine,’ it usually gets spent right away, and we have the person turning up here smelling of booze and saying, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me today—I couldn’t get a bite.’ Then they might start to feel bad later and confess. Or not confess, never mind. We see them disappear for days—weeks—then show up back here when the going gets too rough. And sometimes we’ll see them working the street on their own, never letting on that they recognize us. Never coming back. And that’s all right, too. They’re our graduates, you could say. If you believe in the system.”

“Kent—”

“Around here I’m Jonah.”

“Jonah?”

“I just chose it. I thought of Lazarus, but it’s too self-dramatizing. You can call me Kent, if you like.”

“I want to know what’s happened in your life. I mean, not so much these people—”

“These people are my life.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“O.K., it was kind of smart-arse. But this, this is what I’ve been doing for—seven years? Nine years? Nine years.”

She persisted. “Before that?”

“What do I know? Before that? Before that. Man’s days are like grass, eh? Cut down and put into the oven. Listen to me. Soon as I meet you again I start the showing-off. Cut down and put in the oven—I’m not interested in that. I live each day as it happens. Really. You wouldn’t understand that. I’m not in your world, you’re not in mine. You know why I wanted to meet you here today?”

“No. I didn’t think of it. I mean, I thought naturally maybe the time had come—”

“Naturally. When I read about my father’s death in the paper I thought, Well, where is the money? I thought, Well, she can tell me.”

“It went to me,” Sally said, with flat disappointment but great self-control. “For the time being. The house as well, if you’re interested.”

“I thought likely that was it. That’s O.K.”

“When I die, to Peter and his boys and Savanna.”

“Very nice.”

“He didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”

“You think I’m asking for myself? You think I’m that much of an idiot to want the money for myself? But I did make a mistake thinking about how I could use it. Thinking, Family money, sure, I can use that. That’s the temptation. Now I’m glad, I’m glad I can’t have it.”

“I could let—”

“The thing is, though, this place is condemned—”

“I could let you borrow.”

“Borrow? We don’t borrow around here. We don’t use the borrow system around here. Excuse me, I’ve got to go get hold of my mood. Are you hungry? Would you like some soup?”

“No, thanks.”

When he was gone, she thought of running away. If she could locate a back door, a route that didn’t go through the kitchen.

But she could not do it. It would mean that she would never see him again. And the back yard of a house like this, built before the days of automobiles, would have no access to the street.

It was half an hour before he came back. He seemed a little surprised or bewildered to find her still there.

“Sorry. I had to settle some business. And then I talked to Marnie. She always calms me down.”

“You wrote a letter to us,” Sally said. “It was the last we heard from you.”

“Oh, don’t remind me.”

“No, it was a good letter. It was a good attempt to explain what you were thinking.”

“Please. Don’t remind me.”

“You were trying to figure out your life—”

“My life, my life, my progress, what all I could discover about my stinking self. The purpose of me. My crap. My spirituality. My intellectuality. There isn’t any inside stuff anymore, Sally. You don’t mind if I call you Sally? It just comes out easier. There is only outside, what you do, every moment of your life. Since I realized this, I’ve been happy.”

“You are? Happy?”

“Sure. I’ve let go of that stupid self stuff. I think, How can I help? And that’s all the thinking that I allow myself.”

“Living in the present?”

“I don’t care if you think I’m banal. I don’t care if you laugh at me.”

“I’m not—”

“I don’t care. Listen. If you think I’m after your money, fine. I am after your money. Also, I am after you. Don’t you want a different life? I’m not saying I love you. I don’t use stupid language. Or, I want to save you. You know you can only save yourself. So what is the point? I don’t usually try to get anywhere talking to people. I usually try to avoid personal relationships. I mean I do. I do avoid them.”

Relationships.

“Why are you trying not to smile?” he said. “Because I said ‘relationships’? That’s a cant word? I don’t fuss about my words.”

Sally said, “I was thinking of Jesus. ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ ”

The look that leaped to his face was almost savage.

“Don’t you get tired, Sally? Don’t you get tired being clever? I can’t go on talking this way, I’m sorry. I’ve got things to do.”

“So have I,” Sally said. It was a complete lie. “We’ll be—”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say we’ll be in touch.”

“Maybe we’ll be in touch. Is that any better?”