Athabasca Street (Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 2013)

That afternoon, he had gotten off early and driven home and began working in the kitchen. Yu Wen would not be home for a few hours. He rolled a pork shoulder from its pink Styrofoam tray, unstuck the blood pad from the meat, twisted up the wet plastic wrap and laid it on top of the vegetable trimmings in the garbage can. He thawed mackerel in the sink, in a metal tray, letting cool water trickle over the fish. He washed a half-frozen pork stomach and salted it and washed it again and blanched it twice. He steamed the pork shoulder. He moved around the house restlessly. He turned down the heat and went for a walk to the liquor board store at the end of Main Street. He bought a six-pack of Kokanee and walked home. He drank a beer. He put another pan on the stove and poured oil from a jug. He fried ginger and cloves of garlic and added huajiao, and cassia and anise. He laid the mackerel into the pan and shook a spray of sweet soy sauce over it. He sliced the pork stomach into shreds and put it into a metal bowl and poured sesame oil and chili oil and mustard oil and black vinegar over it. He lidded the pan. He chopped cilantro and added it to the bowl with a sprinkle of sugar and a sprinkle of white pepper. He went to his front step and sat on the cold concrete and smoked a menthol Accord and finished another can of beer. He lifted the lid from the pot and let the steam hit his face. He lifted the pork out of the steamer and laid it down into the broth and let it cool. He put the pork shoulder into a white casserole dish and poured the soup over it. Clouds of fat and gelatin floated in the broth. He lifted the lid on the pan of mackerel. He turned off the heat and lifted the mackerel out with the fingers of his left hand and the chopsticks in his right hand. He put the mackerel on a dish. He picked the points of anise and the sticks of cassia out of the dark soy sauce and poured the sauce over the fish. The mackerel was delicate and the dark soy pouring over it peeled away black skin and revealed white flesh. He set two metal bowls on the table. He laid chopsticks across —

— the parking lot, a dusty wind blew up from the railyards. It was late summer. It was a cold morning. The letters on the aluminum sign over the door — HOCHELEGA PACKERS — had starbursts of front on them. In the plywood gazebo beside the door to the line, a few men spit between their teeth into Styrofoam cups; a few men stood around an oil drum ashtray, smoking and shivering in white hard hats, ear plugs draped over their shoulders.

He looked for Guo Sun. He cleaned his boots in the tray of disinfectant and went in. He took his long white jacket from his locker. He put on his boots. He walked toward the stairs down to the line and he saw her in the locker room doorway. She was pulling on her boots. She had a slit up the back of her rubber boots and two callused spots on their sides where her fingers had pinched and pulled them up over her calves. Her forearms were strong from folding sides of ribs and holding onto a knife handle through two layers of rubber and cotton gloves. He stood behind Guo Sun until she turned around. She smiled at him. Her lips were sticked pale pink. Her eyes were single pulls of a brushstroke. As she looked away, he smelled her scent for a moment over the background smells of disinfectant and boots and blood; she smelled like milk candy in a warm mouth. She walked downstairs without waiting for him. He watched —

— the race between distance and the setting sun to rub out the last pearls of shorelight. He leaned on the railing and felt the diesel engine stutter as the ferry passed between two towers of grey stone. Grey gulls tipped from their path above the ship and flew toward the islands. He lost sight of them in the dusk.

He shook a cigarette out of the pack. He cupped his hand against the wind and lit it. He reached back to tug his jacket collar over the back of his neck. Across the water, the bobbing lights of a container ship shone flat against the horizon. He walked down the side of the ship, his feet echoing rubbery and cold on the deck, past the open door of the first class kitchen. He stood for a moment in the heat and light of the doorway. A young man was working in the kitchen, brushing a steel pan with a brush. He watched the man’s back, examined the stains on his smudged white jacket. A push of breeze knocked a paper cup off the counter behind him and the man turned and saw him. He nodded at the man and then he turned and walked back to the main observation deck, weaving among the people filing down to the cabins below. He stood for a moment at the railing and then joined procession down the steel stairs to the third class seating. He heard the messy sound of the space belowdecks and he felt the heat —

— in the kitchen and the sweat trickling down the sides of his ribcage. He did not know where she was. He sat on the couch in the living room. There was a picture on the wall across from the couch. It was a wedding picture, the one he liked best. It had been taken in Shenyang, at Beiling Park. They were posed in front of a bed of marigolds. He was leaning against Yu Wen and she was leaning into him, her shoulders under his arm. Her face was round and she was smiling with her mouth slightly open. Her hair was styled plainly, straight on the sides, with bangs curled over her forehead. Her face was thickly powdered and she had two circles of heavy rouge over her cheekbones. After the picture was taken, their two families ate a meal together in a restaurant downtown and they spent the night at a hotel. A year later, his parents bought him an apartment in Shenyang. A year after that, Yu Wen got pregnant and had a miscarriage. A year after that, he went to work with a classmate in Xuzhou at the Haofulou Hotel. A year after that, he went back to Shenyang. A year after that, Yu Wen’s friend Sha Sha moved to Canada and Yu Wen asked if they could go, too. A year after that, they boarded the plane and landed in Vancouver and then Regina and then took a Greyhound down the Trans-Canada. Sha Sha worked at a restaurant and they worked there, too. He worked in the kitchen and Yu Wen worked in the dining room. After a year, he went to the pork plant and Yu Wen had the money to go to the Beauty College. He looked at the couple in the picture. He looked at the marigolds. He stood and walked —

— down the rows of plastic seats, breathed in and breathed out blue cigarette mist. He bought a pack of Zhongnanhai and a paper box of rice and braised beef. He had a ticket with his seat number stamped on it but, when he went to the seat, he found it occupied by a man sleeping under a blanket of newspaper. The seats beside his were taken by a woman and her children. The woman looked up at him. Her face was tanned dark. Her shirt was rolled up over her flat breasts. She was feeding a toddler, who had raw bald patches on his head. In the seat beside her, a boy cradled in his hands a dead sparrow. The sparrow was tied to his wrist with a string. On the floor in front of the sleeping man, a piece of newspaper had fallen to the floor. He took the paper and laid it on the floor in a corner. He sat on it and rested his head against the wall. The vibration of the diesel engines rumbled through him. Two men came and laid newspaper on the floor. He passed them cigarettes. They were brothers. They were headed home to Dandong for the winter. They had spent the summer and the fall digging irrigation ditches in towns and villages outside of Nanjing. Their hair was cut short and their scalps shone through it. They told him that it took them a week to walk from Nanjing to Yantai. They slipped their feet out of green khaki shoes and curled their toes on the newspaper. He ate his rice and they watched him. They traded stories about working in the city. He showed them his hands, which were permanently tanned from the flames of hotel kitchen stoves, speckled with shiny oil burns. He looked back down —

— the edge-of-city stretch of Athabasca Street, where the city stripped down to stucco blocks and concrete lots. He pulled into the parking lot of a car wash. On the hill across the street, there was a cemetary and a trailer park. There was a puddle of brown water in the bowed curve of the car wash roof. The bays of the car wash were open and empty and someone had dragged a card table and a couple of chairs into one of them. He parked his van beside Guo Sun’s yellow Sunfire. She opened her door and got out and they walked into the back room of the car wash through a door mounted with a sign painted on a hubcap that read Larry’s Lunch.

He poured two cups of a coffee from a carafe near the flat top grill. They sat at a booth beside a window. He sat across from her. She reached across the table and touched his arm.

“Who else am I going to talk to? She always says that if we were still in Shenyang, she’d leave me.” He looked down at Guo Sun’s neck while he spoke. “She told me that the last time she went home, her mother told her that there were plenty of men asking about her.” He leaned across the table. “I try talking to her but she won’t talk about anything. She doesn’t want to talk about anything. I’ve tried talking to her. She won’t talk. I just can’t take it. She won’t talk to me.” Guo Sun lit a cigarette and he pushed the ashtray toward her. “I don’t even care if she wants to say the worst things about me that she can think to say. But to not even talk to me?”

He looked out the window. The parking lot was mud. He heard the trains running down the valley, the squeal of wheels on track and the diesel drone —

— kept him awake while the two brothers fell asleep curled together on the floor, heads pillowed on arms. He rested his head against the wall and stretched out on the floor. He tried to make his thoughts as clean as the diesel rumble and as steady as the push and pull of the brothers’ breathing. He opened his eyes and saw the boy with the sparrow tied around his wrist. He was walking down the aisles of plastic seats. The sparrow trailed behind him, its wings open and sweeping the floor.

He put his jacket on and climbed the steel stairs back up to the main deck. The air was cold. He laid on a plastic bench, where the diesel exhaust from the stacks fell and warmed him. He took his pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket, shook one out —

— and lit it and walked through the house. He went into his bedroom and ran his hand through the sheets on his bed, looking for the cordless phone. His bedroom was on the frontier of the living room, divided from it with a wall of Plywood and an ironing board festooned with towels and rags. His bed was a mattress on the floor. He went to Yu Wen’s bedroom. It smelled like lotion and shampoo. He found the cordless phone on her bed. He dialed Yu Wen’s phone. He listened to it ring. She didn’t answer.

He sat on her bed and thought about the last time he slept there. He thought about the way his hands looked when he placed them against her pale inner thigh, how his fingers looked when he brushed back her pubic hair. His hands were disgusting to him. They were cracked and peeling from holding a wet knife handle, scarred by oil burns and slips of his knife. His knuckles under the brown skin of his fingers were pearls of bone set in twisted tendon. His fingernails were broken and yellow. The last time they had slept in the same bed, he smelled his own smell of sweat and refrigeration and disinfectant as it was smeared across her body, ruining her soft odors of hairspray and talcum and instant coffee.

He took off his clothes and left them on the floor of her bedroom. He got into the shower. He ran his hands down his stomach. He picked a piece of fat out of his hair. The fat had turned translucent in the hot water. He threw it into the drain. He pulled his penis by the head and then pulled down on it, trying to milk an erection out of it. He gave up and turned off the water. He went to his bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and felt the muscles in his back tingle and uncoil as he lay down. He pulled the final can of Kokanee out of its ring, cracked it, and lit a cigarette. He took a long pull on his beer and burped a squiggle of smoke.

When he got dressed, Huang Ge was already waiting outside in his Robitussin red Regal. He locked the door behind him and went out and got in. He sank into the dusty velour and reached over to pull out the ashtray. Huang Ge asked him about Yu Wen. The last time Huang Ge came to their house, he had brought her a dried fish and she had smiled and asked him how to cook it. When he left, she fell into bitter silence. She tossed the fish onto the counter. She told him that Huang Ge was laughing at her, insulting her by bringing her a dried fish. He didn’t tell Huang Ge about this. He leaned back and stretched out his legs —

— on the bench and turned his head, so that the exhaust from the stacks above him fell on his cheek. A man and a woman were standing beside the railing on the deck. The woman was wearing a red dress. She wore the man’s jacket over her shoulders. She was younger than the man and taller but her legs were short and thick. He danced with her and pushed her up against the railing. He tapped his pointed leather shoes around her red slippers. The man put his hands under the skirt of her dress and reached up inside of it. The dress made a flapping sound in the wind.

He rolled to his shoulder to watch them and and two coins fell from his pocket and slapped down onto the plastic bench. The man and the woman looked over. The man led the woman away. He heard a steel door slam. He watched the stars through diesel exhaust. He peeled the coins off the steel bench with his fingernails. He put the coins in his pocket and took out the card from the bus company.

He lit a cigarette. He thought about going back to sleep beside the two brothers. He wanted to wake them up and buy them a paper box of noodles and drop cigarettes between their fingers. The brothers had walked across the burnt down fields of Jiangsu, along the coast and through the last fishing villages. He had taken a bus. He had left that morning. The night before, he had packed his bag and then gone for a final walk through the city. He had walked along the canal and among the backpacked and uniformed primary schoolers and the old men carrying birdcages. He went to a familiar alley near the train station. He had to say goodbye to Lao Wu, had to repay —

— his patience had failed and the night had begun. He dialled Guo Sun’s number and when she answered, he could see her sitting in her room over the National Cafe. She would meet him there. She would be waiting when he arrived —

— he knocked on Lao Wu’s door. He waited. He looked up and down the wet alley and smelled the dark green smell of sewage. Lao Wu’s daughter answered the door. He told her he was leaving and wanted her father to have some of his things. She asked where he was going and he pressed his bundle of knives toward her. He walked to the bus station and sat in the muddy parking lot until the sun rose. When the ticket window opened, he bought a ticket for Yantai. He sat on the bus and watched the fields burning. He watched the concrete villages and the flatlands of Shandong.

When he got off the bus, he walked past the grimy buses choking into gravel lots and the masked women touting for hotels. He walked past the the taximen leaning against black Jettas. He lit a cigarette and lost himself in the crooked streets of container terminals. There were whorehouses among the grey buildings of the docks. They were single door, single window buildings, each home to a girl with hair dyed yellow or orange or red. There was graffiti on the walls. The local government planned to tear down the old red light district. He went into a bar called The Ocean Heart. He sat in a private room and ordered a bottle of brandy. There were girls walking among the tables with numbers tagged to their hips. He wanted a girl —

— and a boy pushed out of hedges along the edge of Crescent Park as Huang Ge pulled into a parking spot on Fairford Street. The Regal creaked as he stepped out. He leaned against a parking meter and lit a cigarette. He watched the young couple disappear in the dusk. The nights were getting cold. Huang Ge walked toward the casino and he followed him. They went through the black glass doors and the greeter, a tall man in a dark suit, nodded to them. They sat in the lounge and ordered glasses of beer.

Huang Ge went to play the machines and he sat alone. Guo Sun stepped around the polished brass bars and entered the lounge as he was ordering a beer. He ordered two. He passed her a cigarette and lit it for her. She touched his arm. She laughed and leaned against him. The smoke hanging against the ceiling was lit red and green.

He noticed for the first time a tattoo of a heart on her breast. It was a green smudge with a red arrow through it. He thought about what it would be like to have her, have all of her weight pushing on his lap, running his hands over her. He ordered another beer for himself and one for her. He tried to examine her face —

— in the darkness. The number on her hip was 476. The girl was from Sichuan. She told him she came here because the air was clean. She studied massage in Chengdu. He tried imagining how she saw him, what he looked like to her. She put his hand on her thigh and pushed up her skirt. She looked into his eyes and he looked at her cheek. After a while, he got up to leave. She put her hand on his arm. It’s a slow night, though. I’m just going to be here. He asked how much it would be to take her away for the night. She left him alone in the private room. She came back in a pale yellow Adidas tracksuit. They walked away from the docks and the whorehouses. They walked along the alleys of Old Chefoo, where the brick embassies of European powers were now occupied by messy households and doorway seafood restaurants.

They walked and didn’t speak. They walked to a hotel near the ferry terminal. He gave her his T-shirt to use as a towel and she went down the hallway to the bathroom and came back with wet hair. She took off her tracksuit. He lifted the blanket off the bed and spread it out again and laid on top of it. She pulled him close to him and leaned in to kiss him. He turned away, stiffly, and then turned back to her. He tried to kiss her but she put her hand against his mouth. In the morning, he left and walked to the ferry. He put her name in his phone with no number. He knew he would never see her again and he knew —

— knew the screen door would be unlocked. He opened it slowly and closed it slowly. He opened the door and walked into the living room. The food was covered with plastic wrap. The bowls and the chopsticks were gone. She had eaten. He went to the doorway of her bedroom. He knew she was asleep by her soft snore. He went to the side of her bed. On her bedside table, there was a hairdresser’s mannequin, a female bust with hair dyed dark purple. The cheekbones, the nose reminded him of Guo Sun. He put his hand on the mannequin’s hair and trailed his fingers along the bottom of its bangs. He reached down and put his hand on Yu Wen’s hand. She did not wake up but pulled away from him. He went to his bed and laid down and fell asleep thinking about Guo Sun’s smudged heart and in the morning —

— his face was sticky with ocean dew dried by sweet diesel. He heard seagulls. The shore was there, spread out grey under the yellow sky. He reached back into his pocket and felt the frayed edge of the ferry ticket. He knew that she wouldn’t meet him in Dalian. She wouldn’t be waiting even after he arrived at the train station square on the creaking bus. She wouldn’t meet him at the train station in Shenyang. When he walked Changjiang Lu and rapped down the highway to Baodao Village on the back of a mototaxi, she would not be waiting. Yu Wen. Yu Wen. He traced her name in the condensation on the plastic bench.