Loddy-Dah Read online

  “POLICE. POLICE. Au secours! Help!”

  A brawl had erupted between two drunken men and several bouncers and, in the mêlée, she slithered into the club, unnoticed, safe in the shadows and swell of bodies on the overcrowded dance floor. She made her way through the jam-packed room to the bar, and ordered a beer. A live band with screaming guitars screeched

  on the postage-size stage. She bopped to the beat of The Doors’ Hello, I Love You.

  Loddy propped herself up on a bar stool and cased the room like a detective.

  The club attracted a diverse blend of clientele —Francophone, Anglophone, Allophone, white and blue collar, rich and poor, straight and gay, drag queen and transvestite. The Limelite-A-Go-Go was a happening place, a place to be seen if you had the right connections, or the right look.

  “Loddy! Loddy!”

  The band had stopped playing, a muffle of dialogue among the musicians before the next song, a wayward chord, and then she clearly heard her name again.

  “Hey, Loddy-Dah! Up here!” She followed the voice, up, way up, to the overhead cage. There, Ulu beckoned: “Come on up.”

  Loddy grinned but shook her head. She shouted: “Another time. Okay?”

  The musicians were already into their next ear-pier­cing number so Ulu, wearing Loddy’s creation — the silver sequined bra and matching chiffon skirt, lined with layers of fringe — could only shrug and mime that she couldn’t hear. Ulu shook to the Peppermint Twist like one of those Hullabaloo dancers from the TV series: bouncing, skipping to the beat in the totemic knee-high white boots that defined a go-go girl.

  Sweating from too many bodies and lack of ventilation, Loddy weaved her way back towards the entrance. She was at the top of the stairwell, no security in sight, when she saw two men charging down the stairs, two steps at a time, liquid pouring out of a watering can. She didn’t realize it was gasoline until they reached the bottom and one of them lit a cigarette, dropped it in a small puddle and, in seconds, flames candled up the wooden stairway towards her. She fled back into the club, her lungs exploding: “Fire! Fire! Everyone out!”

  The band still played and Ulu still danced until the dense smoke permeated the room, then Loddy’s world disintegrated into one free-for-all, a stampede of wild animals. Some ripped off the wall-to-wall drapes, only to discover the windows were boarded up. Others bolted towards the emergency exit, only to realize the door was locked. And still others broke the bay window and hurled themselves onto the already shattered bodies below, a pile of human cushions to soften the blow for others.

  Fighting for breath, Loddy desperately searched for Ulu. But the wild animals dragged her towards the only way out, trampling over those who had already succumbed to the smoke or heat.

  She stumbled onto the one emergency exit and, with her bulk and the force of others, pounded the steel door open. She couldn’t remember possessing such brute physical strength and stamina. The door gave way and everyone staggered out into the ashen night. Loddy froze. Two stories in the air on an unstable folding fire escape, and she was afraid of heights. The escapees treaded cautiously but, with each step, the corroded steel creaked, swayed, and wobbled.

  “Hey, there’s too much weight here. Get that fatty off or the whole thing’s gonna fall!” A voice boomed above her. They jostled each other, bound on driving Loddy over the fire escape. She slipped and slid on her bum to the bottom rung just as the entire structure gave way, and sent everyone flying, bodies crashing to the ground. Loddy, scraped and bruised, crawled the short distance from the alley to the street. She viewed the scene through a panoramic lens dipped in red Vaseline: Atlanta burning in Gone with the Wind. She thought her eyes were bleeding. So many fire trucks and ambulances blinked into a final fusion of one red floodlight. Even the yellow police tape seemed to have melded into a Cadmium Orange. Someone threw a blanket over her shoulders and led her to the other side of the street with the other survivors.

  “Are you okay?”

  Loddy nodded like one of those mechanical plastic “bobble-head” carnival dolls.

  “I have to find my friend.” Her head twisted back to the burning building.

  “We’ll find him, ma’am.”

  “Her. She was one of the dancers.”

  Loddy watched as firemen drenched the club with water, pulled bodies from the building, and tried to catch the ones who jumped. The prolonged wails of anguish and the crunch of a roof collapsing intersected with the shrill sirens that scourged the city all night long and into day.

  A car with the Montreal Star logo pulled up to the curb and two men jumped out.

  “Loddy!”

  Before she could react, someone smothered her with such a tight embrace, she could hear the back of her neck click, and when she looked up, Dewey stood before her.

  “Ulu, I couldn’t find her. I tried, but I couldn’t.”

  “Never mind. It’ll be all right. We’ll find her. You stay here with Patrick. He works with me at the paper.”

  “No, don’t leave me.”

  “It’s okay, Loddy. I’m not far, hon.”

  Dewey vaulted over the police tape, which roped off the now smouldering edifice, but an emergency worker held him back.

  “Hey, you can’t go in there.”

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “The injured have been taken away. Those who didn’t make it ...” He pointed to the body bags neatly lined up in rows in the middle of the street outside the club and walked away. Loddy, Dewey and Patrick rushed to unzip each of the body bags before anyone could stop them. Charred bodies scorched beyond recognition. Bloated, bulging eyes, singed hair, soot-covered faces, asleep like black angels, felled by asphyxiation.

  “I found her,” Dewey yelled. “She’s still breathing.”

  Patrick and Loddy, tripping over the body bags, raced towards Dewey.

  “Put your finger under her nose. See. She’s breathing. Barely, but she’s breathing. We got to get her out of here. Now!”

  “Okay, Dewey, I’ll bring the car ‘round.”

  As carefully as possible, they rolled Ulu, body bag and all, into the back seat with Loddy cosseting her like a sick child, and trying to be brave.

  “Hey, where you taking that corpse?” a cop said, stepping up to them.

  “She’s alive and we’re going to the hospital,” Dewey yelled “Get going, Patrick.”

  The little Volkswagen Beetle, that could, took flight. Hugging the sharp street corners, ramping up the hill to Pine Avenue, making U-turns, ignoring all traffic lights and signals, they reached the Royal Victoria hospital in record time.

  xxx

  The three burst through the hospital door, Dewey carrying Ulu, still cocooned in the body bag.

  “We need a doctor,” Dewey shouted. “Fast!”

  The congested emergency room bustled with confusion and commotion, commuter traffic at rush hour, bumper-to-bumper stretchers. The injured fire victims now took precedence. They filled all the chairs, crumbled against walls, moaned on floors, or leaned over the admission desk. The paramedics parked gurneys in a priority assembly line along the corridor while every doctor and nurse and medical student worked in a studied frenzy.

  “Get in line, buddy,” said the hippie with the broken nose, blood dripping over his upper lip and into his mouth. Dewey ignored him.

  Loddy darted in and out of every room, station and cubicle in search of medical help. A doctor, with the baggy eyes of too many sleepless nights, drew back a curtain, and stepped out of an examination room, splashes of blood on his uniform. Loddy accosted him.

  “My friend needs help. She’s from the fire. They think she’s dead, but she’s not. You have to come.” Loddy pulled his arm in the direction where Ulu lay on the floor, still enclosed in her cocoon, head resting on Dewey’s knees.

  “She’s dead,” the doctor pronounced after a cursory
exam.

  “She’s not. She’s breathing,” Dewey snapped. “If she dies, I’ll sue you and this god damn hospital. Now help her.” He was up and shoving the doctor’s head into Ulu’s chest shouting: “Put your god damn doctor’s finger under her nose. She’s breathing.”

  He obeyed and immediately called out for an orderly who appeared with a gurney, an oxygen mask, and an IV drip.

  “Don’t know how she’s still alive,” the doctor said. “But she is. We’ll take her to the observation room until a bed’s available.”

  “Can we stay with her?” Dewey asked, holding Ulu’s hand.

  “You family?”

  “Sort of. She has no family. We’re it.”

  “She has no family, Dewey?”

  “No, Loddy.”

  “You can see her tomorrow — if she makes it.” The doctor turned and ran off to his next emergency.

  “Think I’ll get me some coffee,” Dewey said, rubbing his eyes. “I’m staying here but maybe Patrick, you can take Loddy home?”

  “No! I’m staying too!”

  xxx

  The Royal Vic, built on a hill above Pine Avenue, entertained a panoramic view of downtown Montreal. From their angle, sitting on a bench outside the emergency entrance, Loddy and Dewey caught the sun’s shy blush above Place Ville Marie.

  “Funny, how that same sun keeps coming up every day. It was there when I was born and it’ll be there when I die — that same sun.” Dewey wrapped his introspection around the coffee cup to take away the bite from the morning chill, his breath mingling with the steam from his java.

  Loddy had finished hers and didn’t say anything, just kept staring straight ahead. Her upper lip slid along the edge of the empty paper cup. Occasionally, she would bite the rim, leaving a series of marks like a teething infant.

  Beads of morning dew drooled over the grassy slope while a flock of wrens, perched in a nearby maple tree, explored the branches for nesting opportunities. The hospital dayshift arrived, some cutting a short route up the hill after disembarking from the Pine Avenue bus. The stillness of the morning before the day began and just the sweep of feet over uncut grass.

  “Dewey.” Loddy began. “I’m so sorry for what I said that day.”

  “It’s nothing. I know you didn’t mean it.” He put his arm around her shoulders.

  “I was, like, just afraid. Fear. You know.”

  “Yeah, never listen to fear. It’s not a good decision maker.”

  A pigeon swooped down in the nearby parking lot and announced to his mates that breakfast was now being served, a discarded bag of fries.

  “Ulu. I didn’t know she had no family. She never talked much about her life before Montreal. Not to me anyway. No family at all, Dewey?”

  “None. She told me once her parents died when she was six. No siblings or relatives. Nobody. She’s very private, you know, about her family. Couldn’t get much out of her. Neighbours took her in apparently, and then she left Iceland and came to Montreal. She said she couldn’t afford Paris, so Montreal was the next best thing.”

  Dewey gulped down his coffee. The pigeons finished their fries then fled in a flap of wings.

  “Once she was so mad at me, I don’t remember about what, but she said she didn’t need anyone’s help and to just leave her alone. She said she had been alone all her life and could take care of herself. She’s a tough one, our Ulu.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard you two yelling upstairs. Had me worried a couple of times.”

  “Let’s just say it’s our style of communicating.”

  “So are you two like, you know, a pair?”

  “A pair of what? Mittens?”

  “Don’t be silly, Dewey. You know what I mean, like intimate?”

  “I like to jerk your chain, Loddy. You’re so gullible.” Dewey chuckled. “None of your business, hon.”

  They sat there on the bench, at ease in each other’s company, until the hospital began to stir.

  “I’m beginning to think you were right, Dewey. I do have this black cloud over my head.”

  “I was just kidding, hon.”

  A van pulled up and the driver thumped a bundle of newspapers on the ground.

  “Did it ever occur to you that there might have been others in the body bags like Ulu, alive, and they ended up in the morgue?”

  “Like, I don’t even want to think about it.” Loddy got up, crushed her paper cup and discarded it in the wastebasket nearby. She cast an eye over the stack of newspapers and there on the front page, the Limelite-A-Go-Go burning, and the headline: “FORTY-TWO DEAD.”

  SCENE 13:

  Verdun

  Loddy got off the bus at Hickson and Wellington, a few blocks short of Alma’s flat, and walked the rest of the way along the river. The boardwalk had always attracted her even as a child. She had found safety and solitude under the earthen overhangs and unused sewage tunnels along the shoreline, a place to lose herself until Alma came home from work, a place of refuge from dirty men with hairy arms. For Loddy, besides the library, the boardwalk was the only good thing about living in Verdun.

  She came here convinced she needed to clear her head, find a distraction from the fire but, in truth, she was procrastinating. It had been four Sundays since her last Cepelinai date with Alma and Bettina — a small sacrifice she now made to convey the impression of a functional family, intact and civilized within the boundaries of normality. She hadn’t slept all weekend and just wanted a breath of preparation before battling the reasons for her absences but, more than anything else, she needed some introspection after Friday’s tragedy.

  The media had reported the blaze as arson, and blamed the owners for ignoring building and fire codes. At its peak, more than fifty firefighters, using more than twenty pieces of equipment battled the inferno, five succumbing to smoke inhalation. The blaze had been totally extinguished around the time Loddy and Dewey were brooding over their coffees outside the hospital’s emergency entrance. Rescuers came across bodies trapped in the washrooms, huddled in corners, and crammed in a rear section of the club near the back exit, the one with the fire escape. Patrons of the Cheetah escaped unharmed. Investigators tried to interview Ulu at the hospital that Saturday afternoon but she was still unresponsive. Loddy came forward instead and described the guy with the can.

  “Yes, officer, there was a fight at the front of the line, but I’m not sure he was one of them.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No, sir, he was just, like, you know, busy pouring all that gasoline. His head was down.”

  “Can you identify him?”

  “Like, I’m not sure, sir.”

  “Can we show you some mug shots?”

  This is just like Dragnet, Loddy thought, as she accompanied the officer to the station. At the end of the day, however, she didn’t recognize anyone.

  xxx

  Loddy sauntered towards the St. Lawrence River and shivered against the flashbacks floating to the surface. This part of town consumed the poorest of the poor, its side streets slicing through Hickson like quartered sandwiches — Ethel, Evelyn, Gertrude, Claude. Loddy often wondered who these deserving citizens were with streets named after them. Dilapidated wall-to-wall triplexes with rusty spiral staircases in need of paint, furnished rooms above storefronts, houses converted into apartments and a depanneur on every corner for the requisite beer and cigarettes defined this part of Verdun as the slums, a split hair away from neighbouring Pointe St. Charles and Griffintown, the slummiest of them all.

  As she approached the river, she shuddered at the recollection of the shadflies that emerged by the hundreds at twilight every spring. One day when they were particularly bothersome, Mr. Legault had sat her on his lap explaining how the males formed large mating swarms and, when an unsuspecting female flew into the black nest of shadflies, she was attacked by a male and the two dep
arted to mate. Mother Nature, he had said, knows what she’s doing. Normal. If it wasn’t about the shadflies then it was about the sewer rats that paid unexpected visits to bathrooms in the flats by the river as they reared their ugly heads out of toilet bowls. Alma had warned her daughters to ensure the lid was always down when not in use. Forever after, Loddy always checked the toilets in her travels and urinated in a squatting position to avoid direct contact with the seat.

  While wealthy Montrealers found respite from the heat in the Laurentians or across the border at Plattsburg beach, Verduners vacationed on summer balconies drinking beer. The depanneur was always fully stocked with Molson and Labatt alongside the popsicles for the neighbourhood children.

  Loddy crossed La Salle Boulevard, walked by the Verdun Auditorium, and could still hear Gerry and the Pacemakers singing Ferry ‘Cross the Mersey. In the middle of a Quebec winter, she had played hooky and camped all day on the frozen ground, first in line, to grab the best seats in the house. Tickets were on a first-come-first-served basis and when the doors swung open, she had raced to the front row. The next day, she came down with pneumonia. Still a groupie at heart she smiled at the recollection. When you live in dreams, Dewey once had warned her, you have nothing but make-believe, and that is no way to live. For Loddy, make-believe was her safety net.

  She parked herself on a bench and let the boardwalk entertain her, an audience of one. Like at The Garage Theatre on a Monday night when Erica would sit in the front row clapping, whistling and hooting as she tried to bring truth to the lie that she did not sit there alone. Rita could always count on her. Samuel would call those nights dress rehearsals. “And kiddies you need it,” he would growl.

  Couples strolled hand-in-hand, children romped around their parents, seniors set themselves on lonely park benches and fed the seagulls, teenagers partied at The Pavilion, The Pav, as the locals called it — and disobeyed curfews as they danced until closing time: an impressionistic picnic in the park, a Monet painting.