Swimmers in Winter

I can’t read Lucille’s smile. I know her name, and that’s all.

We only met a moment ago, in a back room so dark you have to look twice to tell anything. She stepped out of the shadows into the copper light pooling around the bar and ordered another drink. Her face and hair streaked gritty with illumination. She leaned there and waited, inside the music, breathing in the perfume and smoke and the deeper scents of the strangers all around, watching for who was looking.

Moving toward her meant being willing to fall first.

Around us, the room is a small ocean of girls, rough, beautiful. It’s long after midnight, and Lucille and I stand side by side, a sliver of space between us. We watch the dance floor, drinking hard, while girls hook and pushers work the sidelines. Women’s voices slap and swing their laughter up against music from the record player looked after by Elegant Ivan, the bartender, who knows most of the patrons by first name. In the centre, they’re dancing so close.

I drink deep and gesture to Lucille with my hands. Words spill away from me and I scramble to catch them, raising my voice, to hold her attention through the clamor, the cat-calls, the sweet murmurs.

I tell her I’m Florence and that I do a little bit of everything. They call me a downtowner, because deep in the city is where I’m at home, living in a ramshackle building with a hole in the roof that lets in the birds.

“That sounds familiar,” Lucille answers, laughing low and calm, a little resigned. Brushing her dark hair away from her round face, she sways a little on her feet, as if the music has caught her at the waist. She glances past me at the endless action. The top button of her blouse has come off, leaving behind a few loose black threads and a soft window of bare skin below her neck that grows wider as she moves.

“First time here?” I ask her.

“Hardly. Yours?”

“These girls are my crowd,” I proclaim, hearing the harsh brightness in my voice. How it must sound to her—flaunting and eager.

Lucille turns to me, searching my face. “So you make music? What do you play?”

“A little bit of everything. Mandolin, piano, harmonica.”

Hearing this, she starts telling me about a kind of travelling show she plans to do the next year, a musical tour, describing it as if there’s a stage in her mind. Lucille talks like someone who never runs out of what there is to lose.

“Nowadays, I play alone,” I reply with a smile.

And now the stage in her mind disappears, and she sees me instead. Me and the restless crowd of strangers.

Lucille leans back as if to let us all go. She takes out a cigarette and I light it for her. “Maybe you can write me a song,” she says, her voice dipping with the weight of what she wants.

I nod, as if it might keep her from drifting away. She reminds me of a girl I used to know. Magda. Her slow burn and fast flame.

Lucille touches my hand, the one holding the lighter. She rocks slow onto the balls of her feet, her lips a soft oh in the smoke. “I plan to take my band from here to New York,” she says. “We’ll go everywhere and back again.”

Then she steps closer, filling the space.

“Want to come with us, Florence?”

She remembers my name, so I kiss her, like it’s something to say. And after that, I get ready to kiss her again, slow and long, the burnt sugar taste of her mouth soaked with rum still on my tongue.

But just as I feel her breath on my face, my thoughts turn to escape.

We hear them before we see them coming.

A swarm of cops—at least thirty—move in fast, the flush of their pale skin, charged by force, hats pulled low, thick uniforms, truncheons lifted.

Dancers, still in each other’s arms, stumble as they turn toward the sound. The music continues as if stuck in a dream, behind barks of “Police! Move back! Get up against the wall!”

I reach for her hand and push hard, through the panic of the room, toward the fire exit.

In the shock of frozen air filled with sirens, women hastily pull on coats, then spill from the heavy door into the alleyway behind Dundas and Elizabeth. Lost and intent, like swimmers in winter, they dive into the cover of darkness through heavy drifts of fallen snow.

I turn to ask Lucille which way is home, but she’s already gone. I stumble around in a circle, searching for her, calling out her name once, twice, toward the escaping forms.

Possessions lie scattered on the icy ground, dropped or forgotten in the rush to get away. A single glove. A pair of glasses with cracked lenses. An orphaned scarf. An undone string of pearls. Cigarettes and cigars, still long. Beer sloshed on the snow. Flasks bleeding gin or brandy.

A woman screams in the street, a tremor that tears up and down, burning. It could be Lucille’s voice. I almost move toward it, but stop myself.

At the other end of the alley, paddy wagons and an ambulance rush north to Dundas, red lights flickering on the snow before disappearing. The cops could find me any second. I could be arrested, beaten in the snow. Hidden behind the building, away from public view, the cops will swing their boots, fists, and sticks harder against the skin and muscle they find, even breaking bones. I’ve felt their blows before, pain that bends the body into itself, my head crushed against my heart.

All I can do is run.

Survival is instinct to me, an old demon-friend. I let her enter, let her come.

The late-night streets in Chinatown are unusually deserted, hollowed out by the glow of streetlights, and the shop and restaurant signs alight with letters. The farther I get from the Continental Hotel, the quieter and more still the city becomes. Just the muffled crunch of my soles hitting the snow, almost in rhythm with my heart.

A stray dog noses and burrows at ripped bags of garbage tossed against the back of an old building. He’s a blue-grey hound, I see through my watering eyes. Hungry and hunting. I stop to catch my breath. It blooms thick as smoke in the cold. The smell of cooking wafts by on steam rising from an exhaust pipe. We lift our faces to the warm, oily scent, the dog and I, and when he sees me, another searcher, we watch each other for just a moment.

“Hello, beautiful,” I whisper.

He barks in warning and takes off down a narrow passage between two buildings.