ESSAY
THE BOOGEYMAN
AND THE WOLF
It’s hard to imagine Chaz before the booze, before the Olympics—
back when the sun hung up there and wouldn’t go down.
By PETER OLIVA
I
IT IS THE BEGINNING OF APRIL AND THE WEATHER
is clear. The morning air crisp, five degrees centigrade. Chaz,
rumpled, brown-skinned, is sitting on a stool that is attached
to concrete in front of a children’s toyshop where it is possible
to buy tin windup toys in antique cardboard boxes. On my way
past, I offer him a coffee and he says, Yes!
How would you like it?
Make it a double-double, he says, then he smiles, toothless
and genuine.
HIS NAME IS ACTUALLY CHAD, AND IT SAYS SO ON his
high school patch, deep under his clothes, but everyone knows
him as Chaz because that is what he calls himself.
Late in the afternoon (a block west, where he usually sits)
his words are slurred, a long grunt that makes people hurry as
they walk by him. Sometimes he can’t hold himself up on the
wooden bench, and on those afternoons the children call him
the boogeyman, and the police sometimes stop, and sometimes
they take him away and we don’t see him for a few days. But
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most mornings he is there, on the bench, nodding, or sleeping
in the sun, or paying compliments to women—mostly—
because they are his preferred clients, his gig. Everyone’s got a
gig, I think, and this is his:
You look beautiful today, he says.
Or, How did you get to be so beautiful?
He is one of the few of our denizens (sober or drunk) who
has a good memory for the people he sees during the day.
His memory lasts as long as a crow’s, which is to say that as
long as he is perched on one spot, he remembers everything
that happens around him. He notices, even in a drunken
state, trends. If a woman has passed him in the morning,
then returns from the opposite direction in the afternoon,
he says How did you get more beautiful than the last time
I saw you?
The women are, for the most part, a bit downcast at that hour
(or taken for granted, or not quite themselves, or something
else that only Chaz can sense). They say Thank you. They
straighten up, their gait changes ever so slightly. Or they smile,
quietly, and they give him a quarter or a dollar. Sometimes, on
hot days, they deliver ice cream cones to him and it is a sweet
thing to see Chaz eating a vanilla cone in his dirty-weathered
hands, his smiling-cracked face, and his tongue licking out,
pasted thick with vanilla.
Sometimes I think he’s doing a good service, making people
THE BOOGEYMAN AND THE WOLF
if this is the same subject, that he knows a guy on 17th Avenue
who gives him ten sausages and five hotdogs every night, and
all he does is show up at the guy’s truck and the guy says Take
them, and Chaz says I don’t have the money, and the guy says
The wolf emerged out of that
emptiness without shadows. And it
brought red into that white world.
Go on, go on, just take ’em.
I’m gonna get fat, says Chaz. The guy keeps telling me to
come and eat those sausages, ten of them!
I agree: that’s a lot to eat. And after that I drag him back
to the stories he likes to hear, once upon a time, and he says
quickly that he likes stories about animals and hunting.
What’s your favourite?
There was this one guy, he says, who went out to hunt seals
and he was tracked by a polar bear.
Yes, I say.
He was out shooting seals, says Chaz.
Yes.
Chaz is laughing to himself and I am trying to laugh along
with him.
After a time, he says I guess the polar bear was mad that the
hunter was taking away his food, he says. Yes, I say, and we
nod together that this is a funny thing that can only happen in
Nunavut, where everyone is part of a food chain. We sip our
coffee and we think about that polar bear and we smile because
it is warm and nice to be outside.
Chaz says, suddenly, as if woken, I got bit by a wolf once.
Yes?
CHAZ WAS 13 YEARS OLD. HE WENT OUT ON HIS OWN
and sat on his snowmobile, and he drove out to see the sun go
down, miles north of his home, but it wouldn’t go down, and
he was out there for 30 hours and it wouldn’t go down.
He kept looking and the sun kept circling up there. And
as that mobile above him began to chant, the snow around
him disappeared into whiteness. He was blinded, though not
severely, and not in the sense that he couldn’t see the shapes
of things. But he was blinded by the circling sun so that he
could not see shadows. Everything, the snow around him, the
white arctic wolf that moved slowly toward him as if to nudge
him, everything around Chaz was white and shapeless. Finally,
out of that emptiness without shadows, the wolf emerged, and
when it came it brought the colour red into that white world.
The wolf bit Chaz on the leg, just by his knee, tore a hole about
the size of a can.
The wolf seemed surprised that Chaz jumped away. Chaz,
too surprised to shoot the wolf, slashed at it with his gun, as if
he was dusting the wolf with a broom. He gained a foothold,
in the red snow, jumped on his skidoo and went home to get
his dogs and then he went back to that place where the sun
wouldn’t go down and after all that barking there weren’t no
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more wolves around there, I can tell you that, he says. He
smiles.
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE CHAZ’S PAST, WHEN HE called
himself Chad, before the booze, before the Olympics, before his
sister’s phone call to come to Calgary, before he met all of us in
this ecosystem called Kensington, before he found his bench.
He is genuinely disturbed by his new responsibility: the
hotdogs. It’s a big problem, he says. All those sausages.
I smile.
That guy wants me to come back and eat ten sausages and a
couple of hotdogs and I don’t know how to do it. It’s too much,
you know. I told him I don’t have the money for them and he
said Don’t worry, I made enough money already, so I feel like
I have to eat them.
You gotta treat yourself sometimes, I say.
No, he says. It’s too much.
I
I LEFT HIM THERE, ON THE STOOL, AT THE END OF
our coin, and I haven’t seen him for awhile now, which
is strange because the weather has turned particularly
warm. June is coming on. I’m not the only one here who is
wondering about him. Someone awhile ago saw him with
an old Sony Walkman, and Chaz was bobbing his head: “IT
STILL WORKS! PERFECTLY GOOD. SOMEONE JUST
THREW IT AWAY!”
There’s no one to call about a fellow who lived at the end
of our street for years, subsisting on bottle donations and
discarded pizza, and who has now disappeared. And if I could
call him (on a cell phone that someone left for him to find)
what would I say?
I’d like to ask him about Nunavut, back when he had a sled
with ten dogs and a borrowed snowmobile and he was—that
day, when the wolf tore a can out of his knee—all of 13 years
old. I’d like to hear about the weather back then, and more
about the sun that hung up there and wouldn’t go down. I’m
embarrassed to say that I don’t know his last name, and I’d like
to know that, too.
At the end of his story, I asked him only one question.
Can I see it?
I’m wearing sweats, he says, apologetically.
I look at his jeans and I understand that he’s wearing a few
layers of clothes to keep himself warm, living outside. Another
time, I say, though there has not been another time.
Sure, he says. It’s a big hole, about this big, he says.
Yes.
Peter Oliva is a novelist and journalist living in Calgary. Le Monde
called his writing “a Calvino-like intersection of art and reality.”