her older brother to disembark, stood to the side and stared at Danny, her eyes just visible over the top of her pink cotton candy. Danny wondered what she saw in his face, if his restlessness from the night before was branded on his skin somehow. Or perhaps she was simply scared and realized the one thing preventing her brother from being flung off the very top of the roller coaster was this unsmiling young man.
Her head moved slightly to the left and Danny saw that she was looking at the control box. He pushed a red button and the line of cars came to a sudden stop at the bottom, the people inside tossed around as if they were only flesh and not bones. One woman, sitting in the very front, laughed and laughed. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and adjusted her pearl necklace. Danny squinted through the smoggy air, thinking that there was something familiar in her red-painted mouth, or the upward tilt of her head. He heard her say to her male companion, “Well, honey, that’ll liven us up for the rest of the day. What do you say to a nip of whisky?” And she pulled a flask from her purse while a mother with two young children gasped and hustled them away.
But then a chubby boy threw up beside the control booth and Danny had to reach for the sawdust and broom. By the time he looked again, the woman was gone and the lineup for the roller coaster had snaked around the metal barriers and down the fairway.
On his day off, Danny took the bus aimlessly through the city, ringing the bell whenever he thought to and boarding the next bus on a different route. His camera dangled from his bony neck, resting against his equally bony chest. He stood at street corners he had never noticed before: 2nd Avenue at Main, Alberni at Bute, Beach at Gilford. “Perspective,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what it’s all about.”
Ahead of him lay the great expanse of English Bay with barges anchored on the edge of the horizon, the water churning at the shore but barely rippling in the distance. If he had been an extraordinary swimmer, he could have reached the open ocean eventually, and, from there, turned south to California, or west to Hawaii, or perhaps farther to the Philippines, even China, if he wanted. But here—the western edge of the city’s core, only eight kilometres from the family house—was possibly just far enough. There was something he loved about the salt air in his nose, the burn that filled his throat and lungs. He looked down at his own feet and wondered why he wasn’t running, why he wasn’t pounding the sidewalk, smiling so widely that his face might never recover, laughing when he stopped to catch his breath because he was on the way to somewhere else. He looked to his left, where a man and woman were helping a little girl build sandcastles. All three were covered in a fine grey-brown dust. Danny slipped behind a maple tree and began shooting.
The little girl had dug a hole with her bare hands. A collection of brightly coloured spades and rakes lay in an abandoned pile beside her. The woman offered her a bucket to help shape the mound of sand, but the little girl frowned and slapped at her hand. Face reddening, the man yelled, “Don’t you ever hit your mother like that!” The girl looked up, startled, and began to cry, her wails floating over the sand and water, travelling swiftly through the air in all directions. Danny winced.
And then, both parents crouched forward and began murmuring. Danny could see the father saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it,” while the mother fumbled in her purse for a tissue. Danny wasn’t sure who was more upset, the tiny four-year-old or her furrowed, anxious parents. He didn’t stop shooting. Each frame was this whole story in miniature.
Inside, his stomach was churning; the ham and pickle sandwich from lunch had become a brick-solid mass. He could hear his father’s voice booming.
“I’ll teach you to steal one of my beers.”
“Give me that look again, I dare you.”
“Your mother might think the sun shines out of your ass, but I sure don’t.”
“Not such a smart-mouth now, are you?”
The words all pointed to the same truth. If his father could have chosen a son from a lineup, Danny would have remained unpicked, standing by