What’s the Plan?

By J Brown (copyrighted 2000)

               

                It was one of her bad headaches.  I couldn’t help her and it made the Ontario horizon like a bleaker, milder level of hell.  I was condemned to the true indifference of not understanding another’s pain.  Sammy was good about it though, and it was only the occasional deep, slow breath or mouse-like wince that reminded me it was her pain and not mine.

                By the time it passed and she was almost happy to be alive again, we were in Toronto near Chinatown.  It was a wide avenue with a streetcar down the middle.  The area was chaotic and bustling ten hours a day.  People were buying t-shirts and mugs celebrating Toronto as a place different than their own.  Others bought vegetables and meats for dinners that were slated for later that night.  The two groupls were black and white but when compiled together it was a frenzied collection of wants and needs.

                Sammy held her head and massaged it as my eyes dodged back and forth for parking.  The car were dominoes lined up end to end until a street jutted off left or right and then the line of cars followed it.  People crossed the street haphazardly, carrying bags of foods or souvenirs in hand and dragging a child with the other.  There was no place to go.

                “We’re gonna be late,” Sammy said.

                “Should I drop you off so you can find it?”

                “Jarvis,” she pleaded.  Her eyes were half-oopen and it seemed she was barely conscious but even in those minute pulses of life she was aware of time and it’s constraints on people like me.

                I should have been sympathetic but, without actually looking over at her, I felt a big heavy ball sitting there with a chain that draped over the stickshift and connected to my leg.  It wasn’t her fault; I  had asked her to go but at the time tit was because I hadn’t wanted to be alone.  Now I had someone who constantly reminded me I wasn’t alone and it was isolating me.  The people on the streets walking amongst strangers looked more comfortable than I did.  I couldn’t find parking.  I was in a strange town in a new country and I was with someone I didn’t want to be with.  I was the smallest speck on a clean desk in a covenant.  I was wrong, immortalized but that was how I got what I needed.

                We found Kensington Market and the fresh fish market was just where they’d said it would be.  That was a good sign.  Maybe life wasn’t one shade cooler than red hell.  Sammy had quieted down and she saw a café around the crowded corner where we could wait.  She ordered an omelet with sun-dried tomatoes and feta cheese and I got a bagel and hot chocolate.

                “Do you ever grow up?” Sammy asked me.

                “What?”

                “Hot chocolate,” she mimicked.  “How old are you?”

                “I guess you’re feeling better,” I sneered and looked out the window.  It looked like a miniature of Greenwich Village but with more colors.  There was a Caribbean food market and next to that was an African salted fish store.  All colors of skin and clothing walked past the window carrying plastic bags and looking up the street.  They were constant and it seemed for the next half-hour ever few minutes a black woman with bright clothes would walk by followed by a tall, young black kid carrying the heaviest of that day’s bags.

                Between bites, Sammy asked, “Why did you invite me to join you on this little adventure?”

                “I don’t know,” I admitted.  It was a mistake having her, that I knew, but for some reason it would make this all a bit easier for me.

                “Do you think they’ll follow you?”

                “It’s us now, Sammy. Once you got in my car, you were part of me and my problems.”

                She put her fork down in a clang on the plate.  “You didn’t tell me this would be my problem too , Jarvis.  You just said you wanted company.”

                “Well, I lied I guess.  Or I thought you’d know that.  You’re not stupid, ya know.”

                In a more hushed and leaned over tone, she declared, “I’m not stupid, Jarvis, and that’s why I think I should leave right now.”

                “Yeah, and how will you get home?”  Or how will you pay for breakfast?”

                She didn’t have an answer for those questions.  She’d had a boring desk job in an office adjacent to my boss and I took her from there and now, five or six hours later, she had nothing.  Except me.  And as I thought about that, it bothered me.  But she was a cute blond, with exaggerated poofiness in her short hair as if it had rained her whole life, and she was dressed nice. She made me look nice which was important.  I’d been with her a few times after work and once she got the bad headache east of the city I began to think she only go them around me.  Maybe I was a headache.

 There were two guys who would be trying to get to that fish market ahead of me.  You steal a little money and no one notices.  You steal a lot of money and you have to leave the country and you have to kill anyone who looks familiar.  I didn’t know all of these rules, I was learning them as I went along.

“Come on, let’s go.  I think our parking stub is expiring.”

Sammy scoffed at me.  “You have five million dollars in the trunk and you’re worried about paying a parking meter.  You sure are a weird criminal.”

“Shut up woman,” I said as we were walking out.

“Don’t call me that, Jarvis.  You know how much I hate being called that.”

“What, a woman?”

“Yes, it sounds submissive and I am not submissive.”

“All right, whatever,” I replied as we squirmed through large crowds and shoppers.  I had more than five million dollars in the trunk.  That was just the amount I had told Sammy so that she would come with me.  Now that she was in a crowded Toronto marketplace with me, I would have almost given her half the money so she would leave me alone.  But I needed her, and that killed me.  I was sweaty, and scared, and horny and blurred to the world of regular people.  I didn’t even know why we went to the fish market.  They would be coming there to talk to the butcher and I didn’t want to be anywhere around there for that.  It must have been morbid sense of excitement that I wanted distinctive proof that they were coming here to kill me.  When I got to my car, all that changed.

“Get in,” I told her and started the car.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re getting out of here.”

“Sammy, shut up.  This is my thing and I got to handle it this way.  We’re going to get a room at the Sheraton, ok?  Will that make you happy?”  I turned onto Spadina and made a left at Queen Street.

 “I like it, it’s on Queen Street. But how did you know where it was?” she asked.

“I’ve been planning this since before I knew you babe.”

“Planned what exactly?”  Sammy turned to face me.  Her hair bounced a little from the movement and she was cute again.

I let Sammy check us in because I didn’t think they knew I had taken her along with me.  I was wrong.  I didn’t think they had seen me but I was wrong.  I thought I was in deeper than I could handle and I was right.

It was early afternoon. Sammy showered and I slept with the drapes drawn tight as could be. There was one healthy sliver of golden Canadian sun and I hope it was shining on me on purpose. The butcher’s boys would already be on the search but they didn’t know about Sammy’s name. They had only been told about a cute blond with greenest eyes. As Sammy showered, she sang a song on the radio. It brought me back to a better, different reality. I was with a woman and we were in a five star hotel in Canada’s largest city. We would be all right if the next day went as planned. The only problem is that we didn’t have a plan.