After he and Monahan quit for the day, Everett retrieves the baby from Mrs. Papadopoulos and rents them a new private room, for which he’s gouged more than triple his previous nightly lodgings. That evening, with streetcars rattling the room’s thin windows, it requires hours of rocking and fourteen limericks to convince the child to even lay down her head, which she’s recently started lifting. Once she’s finally out, he transfers her to an ersatz bassinet he’s made on the floor and trudges to his old rooming house, hat pulled low. At the desk, the clerk, a bald man with misaligned eyes, passes him a message.
“You mind reading it for me, sir?” Everett says, thumbing a shiny nickel onto the desk. “I’ve misplaced my spectacles.”
The clerk frowns, unfolds the paper, and raises his glasses on a stick:
Everett, it isn’t safe riding freights or staying in dives like this with a little baby. She isn’t yours and you don’t want her. We just need to talk this through. We want the book AND the child. No need for the law. If you knew me you’d know I won’t let you go. Not ever.
– Harvey Lomax
“Are you thick?” the clerk sneers, scooping Everett’s nickel into his vest pocket. “No children allowed.”
“Fine, fine, we’re already gone anyway,” Everett says. “But I paid up for a week. So I’ll have that back.”
“If you could damn well read you’d know what this says, wouldn’t you?” the clerk says, pointing with his glasses to the sign behind him.
Everett keeps his eyes trained on the man. “I can read it fine. It says you’d be wise to return my money and mind your business.”
“No—” the clerk snarls, banging out the syllables with his fist. “Chil–dren!”
“I didn’t have a damn child!” Everett yells back. “It was an infant that didn’t cause anybody a stitch of trouble!”
The clerk’s eyes narrow. “Infants are children, you son of a bitch.”
“Now, if your sign said No Infants, that’d be a different story,” Everett says. “But it doesn’t, does it?”
The clerk starts groping beneath the desk, probably for a club or a pistol. Everett feels the old poison in his blood cry out to slug him, but that would only land him back in a penitentiary and maroon the baby in that dingy room, so he makes his exit. He cuts through a lightless graveyard to ensure Lomax isn’t trailing him and returns to find the child asleep, the room stagnant with her breath.
Everett sticks to his savings plan and works into mid-June, always careful to wear his hat low when he’s out on the freight wagon because he knows Lomax is still hunting him. But the added cost of the new room combined with the child-minding means Everett is socking away just two bits for a full day’s labour. And maybe it’s the rattling windows, or the lack of snoring drunks, but the baby combats sleep in their new lodgings as one would drowning. After many nights of this, Monahan gives him a rum-soaked rag for her to suckle before bed, which does the trick, though she’s sluggish in the morning, so Everett quits the practice. When he waters down her goat’s milk to pinch pennies, she stops taking the nippled bottle altogether, and cries until she vomits across her blankets.
“Quit your snivelling!” he yells at her contorted face. “I’m doing my best!” Half-mad with sleeplessness, he carts her out into the cool night air for a walk, letting her wail in his arms, Lomax be damned.
“No mistaking that sound,” a woman in tight satin slacks and high heels says from under an awning as he passes. Her short curls are lacquered to her cheeks and pencil lines are drawn where her eyebrows once grew.
“She won’t take the bottle anymore,” Everett confesses.
The woman steps closer to scrutinize the child. Her eyelashes appear to be dipped in crude oil. “Feed her myself for a dollar,” she says.
It takes a moment for Everett to grasp her proposal. “Will that settle her?”
“No guarantees,” she says. “It might. They all give up sometime, in my experience. Better sooner than later.”
Everett agrees and follows her up some stairs to a bare-walled room, where the only traces of domesticity are a chair, a table, and a naked light bulb dangling above an old bedroll. Beside a basin on the floor is a large rubber-bulbed syringe. The woman perches in the chair and takes the infant in her arms, cooing to it softly. She scoops a hand into her brassiere to free her breast, which is large and under-painted with blue veinwork. Everett’s face grows hot.
“You going to just stand there and gawk?” she says, folding her plum-coloured nipple in half and pressing it into the child’s tiny mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he says meekly, turning away. “How will I know you’re feeding her?”
“I grew six babies this way,” she says. “It’s impossible for me not to. But if you’re watching, that’ll be double.”
Everett goes into the hall and waits uncomfortably, until the woman emerges and passes him the infant, now comatose, her breath sweet as honey. That night she sleeps more soundly than ever, and wakes as cheerful as a puppy.
For the next several weeks, even though Everett and Monahan work into the evening hours, his wages still can’t cover the child-minding, the private room, and a nightly feeding from the streetwalker. “How am I going to be your benefactor if I don’t have anything to benefit you with?” he asks the baby over their dinner of boiled oats.
By the first of August, Everett is forced to dig up what’s left of his savings. And although he promised the child that their days on the rails were over, and it pains him not to thank Monahan for taking him on, Everett walks to the rail yard with a pack of meagre provisions and a woollen blanket draped over his shoulders. His only comfort is the notion that despite Harvey Lomax’s threat—I won’t let you go. Not ever—he will eventually relent. Because if there’s anything that Everett Greenwood has always excelled at, it’s his ability to go deeper into the gutter than anyone else will go.
PERHAPS A RELATION?
AT THE REFERENCE desk of the Archives of Canada, Lomax requests the military records of Everett Greenwood. The librarian—who regards him as if he were something recently dredged up from a grave—tells him to wait while she pulls the file. He picks a secluded carrel and stuffs himself into its tiny armchair, which constricts his wide hips painfully.
After Greenwood gave him the slip at the flophouse, Lomax staked out Toronto’s rail yard for a week but came up empty. But how could he possibly admit to Mr. Holt that he’d been just ten feet from Everett Greenwood and yet failed to capture him? So Lomax has kept the encounter to himself. And with no other developments to report, a week ago he halted his daily check-ins with Mr. Holt completely. Now a small stack of unopened telegrams from his employer awaits him back in his hotel room. (Along with some from Lavern, who likely wants more money he doesn’t have.)
No doubt Greenwood has fled Toronto and has again taken to the rails. But Lomax can’t just go traipsing around the country hunting him, especially not with Mr. Holt’s stipend nearly exhausted. Which means if he doesn’t drum up something soon, Mr. Holt will ruin him. So it’s a testament to Lomax’s desperation that he’s travelled to Ottawa to confirm Howard Blank’s claim that he and Greenwood had both fought in the Great War.