Gimli

Gimli

Character: a son of a whore

Setting: Gimli, Lake Winnipeg, Mb

Plot: No denouement; no expected resolution; no foreshadowing; just an encounter with a whore and a reminder that he is—his memory tells him—a descendent of a whore himself. He sort of likes whores. He dislikes women (somewhat, for someone who dislikes very little) who are not whores.

Theme: People are neither good nor bad, but are what they are and they won’t be people much longer in the humanist tradition.

Point of view: A son of a god tells this? Let’s see.

She charged two dollars for minor favors, and six for the larger ones, prices a small town shoemaker might accept. She managed quite well. Got by. That was the main thing, as far as she was concerned. When citizens of Gimli got up in arms about her being there at all, much less permanently ensconced in rooms in the beautiful Harbourfront Hotel, she paid little attention. She smiled—a little sadly—to herself, in fact, when she read the Gimli Gazette’s headlines to the effect that certain women who made their wages soliciting should be got to leave town by hook or by crook.

       Things got worse, though, and then she did think of leaving. Possibly for Riverton further down the lakeshore. Riverton posed a problem, though. Not enough of a customer base. Even if she included the fishermen from Gimli who docked their skiffs there and worked from that shore, she still doubted if she could put bread and butter on the table. When the going got rough, she phoned her “agent” in Sandy Hook for advice. He was seldom there for her when she needed him. He was unreliable. He took his share and spent it and gave her virtually nothing in return. An ear, at times such as this, but that was all.

       The reason she thought about going at all arose for her as a result of an incident with local authorities. The police seasonally pestered her because of certain husbands enjoying themselves too freely. Now, again, this year, there was a kafuffle. This last incident happened at breakfast where she sat alone on a cold February morning. A great Hollywood actor, unbeknownst to her, had arrived in town and was staying at the very hotel in which she had rooms. He was, apparently, expected at breakfast and just as her eggs arrived and her coffee had been refilled, with the cream put in, two policemen stopped at her table and said they needed her to come with them for a short while. She smiled but felt no joy. She understood the general intent, if not the specific reason for their sudden attention.

       “No,” she said. “I’m finishing my breakfast first.” She looked at each of them and then started on her eggs. One took her by the arm and the other put his hand on her shoulder. She leapt up and shouted, “Police!” Of course, that made them smile. She smiled, too. The waitresses looked through the double swing doors from the kitchen. A few eaters at the other tables pretended not to have seen or heard. Once more the officers took hold of her. She was about to give in when a greying man of fifty stepped into the room and, taking one look around him, called to them.

       “What did she do?” he said, pointing. “Was she bothering anyone?” He asked this so simply and with such interest that the men in blue stopped and walked up to him.

       “She’s bothering the clientele here, even if she’s not soliciting at the moment,” they said. The stranger glanced from her to them and said, “Please, just let her stay. There is no need for this, is there? She surely has a right to eat here just as I do, and as those three over there do?” He waited, watching the men who seemed moved by his words. They glanced at each other.

       “But we have an order to arrest her. She has broken the law again and we have to confine her. What choice do we have?” The tall officer with the thin face and pink nose blew into a hanky. The other put his hand over his own nose to keep out airborne germs. The waitresses had been joined by the cook, brown and red spatters on his apron and his hat on crooked, as well as the dressy manager of the hotel. The manager made moves as if he should enter the discussion. He desisted, maybe because he himself on occasion spent some time in Raymonas’s room.

       “You have never broken the law, I take it?” the stranger said. “If you have, your logic is weak, you know. Just give her a warning and let her go. It won’t hurt anyone. And, anyway, I’ll write a letter of commendation for both of you and it might well result in your promotions instead of anything else.”

       Wagging their heads, after a few moments, and smiling as if friends with the stranger, the two nodded and walked out, though not without a look of disapproval at the woman.

       “Join me, Raymona,” the stranger said. “Let’s have a real breakfast, shall we? Bacon, eggs, hashbrowns, and even, if they serve that in winter, walleye fillets!” He winked at her and took her elbow. This time the woman made no move to remonstrate. She did not yell “Police!” Nor did she look sadly at the floor as if she knew the moves. Over at the door, and even from the portal to the kitchen, she heard a name mentioned.

       “Harrison Ford! That’s him! I want his autograph. I wonder if he’ll give it to me?” and so on. She had been rescued by Ford himself! She thrilled at the turn of events. How would she be able to believe this herself later, or ever convince anyone what had happened, she thought. And Ford was thinking, my mother was a virtuous woman, but she told me about my ancestry and it is not pure. Five generations back my maternal ancestor was a whore in  some village in North Carolina and she had more trysts than you could shake a toboggan at. And Jesus. Jesus’s great, great, great, great grandmother was a whore, history tells us.