Black Dance by Nancy Huston Read Free Book Online

Tanks, Irwin.”
    Another man comes to sit on the stool next to her. Tall and youngish, with filthy long black hair and a phony leather cap. He has a lisp.
    “You alone, mith?”
    “Not anymore!”
    “Mind if I thit with you for a while?”
    “Make yourself at home.”
    Just then the door to the bar opens and Declan walks in, hatless. Though wet, his red hair is longer than when we saw him last; he hasn’t returned to jail. Close-up on his green eyes as, catching sight of Awinita, they light up in a hazel blaze.
    We move toward him: Awinita has left her lisper in the lurch.
    “Well, if it ain’t Mister Cleaning-Fluid.”
    They’re in each other’s arms.
    “I missed you, Nita.”
    “I missed you, too, baby.”
    CUT.
    •    •    •    •    •

III
    MOLEQUE
    Kid, urchin. Originally simply meant child. Today designates street kids, juvenile delinquents.

    Milo, 1956–58
    AT FOUR, MILO is a nervous, bristling hedgehog of a child who speaks mostly German with a smattering of French and English, but he especially speaks silence. Silence is the tongue he shares with dogs and cats and trees and flowers, stones and lakes and rivers and skies, turtles and fish, birds and beds, tables and chairs and ceilings and curtains. When you think about it, most things in the world don’t talk and would never do anything to hurt you. Telephones are in between. They look like objects, but in fact they’re nearly people. They talk. His foster mother listened to the telephone talking, then came and told him he’d be leaving. The telephone told her he had to. He doesn’t know why, that’s just the way it is. If you take it as your starting point that everything is unfathomable, and stick to it, you’ll never be disappointed.
    Strangers came and took him to a building he’d never seen before. For three days he lived there in a large dorm room with other little children; then other strangers came to fetch him and now he’s living in their house.
    He’s not really living there, he’s just pretending. His plan is to string them along for a while, let them believe he’s settled in with them in this house in the suburbs, take a few days to get his bearings, then run away. Though these people call him Milo, he knows he has another name—the one the blond woman gave him after they rode on the merry-go-round together. A cocoon-like name he felt safe inside. For the time being he’s forgotten it, because he was so small when she told it to him—but it’s in his memory somewhere and will come back to him someday, he’s sure of it.
    The new family are the Manderses. There’s the father, Jan, handsome and bald with glasses; the mother, Sara, with big, soft breasts and a lilting voice; a boy, ten, Norbert, with spiky blond hair; and a girl, seven, Ana, whose nose is covered in freckles. The parents are Dutch, which sounds like Deutsch , which means German, only they don’t speak German, they speak Dutch, but since they now live in Canada they’ve resolved to speak nothing but English, only sometimes they forget and lapse into Dutch which sounds like Deutsch which means German.
    As Norbert can’t help boasting to Milo right off the bat, Jan built the swing set in the backyard with his own two hands . . .
    (Don’t cry, Astuto. I know, your eyes are as dry as ever but you can’t fool me, I can tell you’re crying, so c’mon, stop it. Don’t forget that snippet of wisdom we gleaned after years of talking and drinking and fucking together—to grow up is to admit that pretty much everything you believed as a child is false. You believed that the sun rose and set, that your soul was immortal, that adults were strong. Wisdom is rough . . . )
    Jan Manders takes Milo over to the swing set, plunks him into the huge black tire that dangles there, and starts pushing . . . Gently at first, until the boy gets used to it, then Want to go a little higher? Milo nods. A little higher? Milo nods, excited. A little higher? Milo