Believing Cedric (20 page)

Only now he was more cautious of where he walked and dealt, and less cautious of who he sold to, even dealing to one of the local prostitutes who everyone else who was working a corner refused, on account of her being pregnant. It seemed absurd that drug dealers should have ethical inhibitions, but they did. And it was for that very reason that Steven went out of his
way
to sell to her—it was a matter of principle.

Because if there was anything he detested, it was how, when one human being held something that another desperately wanted, they acquired an instant self-righteousness. He'd seen it living on the streets; the ridiculous things people did with the homeless, crazies, drunks, and addicts who were begging there, middle-class men and women delivering a sanctimonious speech while handing down an apple or a half-eaten sandwich, explaining in a sympathetic voice that they weren't giving money as they feared it would be spent in the wrong way. He sometimes daydreamt of the perfect reaction to this, picturing himself dangling one of those good people's paycheques in his hand, miming that he was just about to hand it over, saying, “Now, you poor misled thing, I
want
to give you this, but I'm pretty sure you'll spend it on wrongful things, on things that won't nurture you or fulfill you in any way, but will empty you instead—like an Audi, or needless renovations, or manicures for your lawn, your nails, your Chihuahua.” His eyebrows raised piteously into a sloping capital “A.” “Okay?” Then he'd place their cheque in his pocket, hand over some food stamps instead, pat them on the brow with condescending benevolence, and prance away with an air that was so self-satisfied it would look like he was floating.

In Steven's mind, he sold crack to a pregnant woman
because
it was ethical, because it was her choice to make and not his, or anyone else's for that matter. However, such progressive thinking
also
had its drawbacks. In mid-July 1985, her water broke, and knowing she would have to go to the hospital and through the double ordeal of childbirth and withdrawal completely on her own, under duress and in pain, she stumbled out onto the Boardwalk to find a little peace and euphoria to inhale just before the ambulance could take her away.

It was a mess. Seeing her, people who normally stayed away from the brazen and troubled youth came out of their houses and crowded around, the skin of their bare arms representing every shade in a caramel rainbow, Irish descendants, Sri Lankan immigrants, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippine, Indian, Jamaican, Somali, Congolese, their languages washing into one another, making the same urgent observation that no one seemed to really understand but Steven. Sirens undulated, became swollen, grew closer from two directions. The prostitute screamed. The throng pulsed with the sound of her voice. Some men ran to help guide the ambulance to the scene while two women moved in closer, touching her belly, her back. She shoved their hands away, faltering onto the cement now, her mini-skirted legs straight out in front of her, filmed over with the glistening of amniotic fluid speckled with blood capillaries, like black lint on a pink sweater. She held her head, quivered, seemed about to scream again. Someone shawled a thin blanket over her shoulders, which she tried to shirk off but didn't succeed. The bleat of a siren close by, doors slamming shut, a white-uniformed man muscling through the bodies for a preliminary assessment of the situation, then back out for the stretcher, clearing people away.

What happened next happened fast. Steven mumbled a demand to someone standing beside him, took their pipe, un-Saran-Wrapped a rock from his pocket, then straddled her from behind, squatting, hands out in front of her face—and lit it. She knew what to do. The crowd did not. When the paramedics parted the mob, they paused to gawp at Steven in the same way that everyone else was. No one was able to speak. He stood up, pocketing the spent pipe, meeting their eyes. Were it another time in his life he would have happily spat onto the ground at their feet, but now, all he could think to do was turn around, pull the hood of his hoodie over his head, hands in the kangaroo pocket at his belly, and slink into the afternoon streets.

He saved manically for the two months following this, talked less, thought more. He thought of the people in the asylum, of the families in the baroque suburbs that he'd briefly been a part of, of the pushers and gunrunners around him, of the pregnant prostitute, of Kirsti, of Sam. And he wondered, maybe there was no such thing as “getting out.” Maybe everyone was living in a kind of institution, just like the asylum was, where the fodder was feeding the stock feeding the fodder. Maybe everyone was festering in their own self-inflicted wounds.

Then the opportunity of a lifetime landed in his lap. It presented itself one commonplace morning after he'd groaned out of bed and was walking into his living room, adjusting his testicles deep in his jockey shorts. He stopped, standing there looking at a man with a handgun raised up at him, a revolver. He was checking it, winking an eye through the holes of the cylinders as if Steven were the sun, rotating it full circle, deliberately, steadily, like a sundial in time-lapse photography. When he was satisfied, he set it back in its housing with the dark of his hand.

“That's the kid you should talk to,” said Kipp, delicately gesturing for Steven to take his hands out of his underwear.

“Y'don't say.”

“Got
my
word. But ask around if y'like. He's sound.” Kipp looked pleased that Steven's hands were now in his armpits, forearms across his chest. “Stevie, this's Brice. Brice needs to move some shit.”

Brice then explained his predicament. He wasn't from around there, was just passing through in fact, had heard Kipp's name from a few different people, and needed to buy some guns. He also needed to unload a bulk of crack he'd fortuitously come into. And fast, before he started crossing borders. When he said the weight and price—no haggling tolerated—Steven could barely believe his ears, trying to shift coolly, still standing around in his underwear. Okay. Deal. Brice wrote an address on a ripped corner of a flyer and told him to be there at nine that night, sharp. He bought three handguns from Kipp and, before closing the door, addressed Steven once more, leaning on the doorknob in his stylish clothes, his shirt a faded pink, hair feathered, a sapphire-coloured stud in one of his earlobes: “See ya t'night then.”

This was it. Steven could resell the shipment to the guy who normally supplied him and in this one transaction make enough money to leave the inner city for good. He counted his pennies and was short four hundred and eighty dollars. He borrowed five from Kipp and waited for the sun to rise through the smokestacks, leisurely arc over the wires, and ebb behind the apartment blocks.

It wasn't ideal that the address was in the Jane and Finch area, the traditional rival of Regent Park, but he doubted it mattered much. He was meeting someone who had nothing to do with the city, knew nothing about the squabbling of adversary neighbourhoods, the politics of local demographics. He took the bus, even paid, and arrived early, more excited than nervous, rubbing his hands together as if he were cold. And when he walked into the apartment and got a sense of the general atmosphere inside, any apprehension he might have had thinly slipped away like sweet-plastic smoke. This wasn't a drug deal from the movies with shootout potential; it was real life, with real synthesized music from a ghetto blaster, real middle-aged men sitting comfortably around a table who were benign-enough looking to be real store owners and restaurant proprietors. They looked so respectable, in fact, that he doubted any of them even lived there. They were the kind of people who had houses, and in nice neighbourhoods. Green ones. Kind ones.

Business first, they exchanged merchandise for money, Brice counting it cautiously and Steven taking a good whiff of the drugs, which smelled and looked exactly like the stuff perpetually jammed under his fingernails from cutting it. Done deal, duffle bag in hand, standing a bit gawkily, they asked if he wanted to stay for a drink, somebody pouring a glass of amber fluid from one of the three bottles on the table, lighting a cigarette. The liquor looked expensive.

Steven glanced at the door, back at the table, down at the bag in his hand. He felt light, calm, like he was about to go on his first-ever holiday, already packed and ready. He hadn't had much to celebrate in his life, but he certainly had something now.

“Sure.” He found himself shrugging and sat down beside the most taciturn of them all, the duffle on the floor beside him, leaning against his foot.

“Bourbon?”

“Sure.” Steven had only ever heard of bourbon before, never seen it, tasted it, smelled it: a smell of perfumed honey, he noticed, now that he was swishing it around in his glass.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.”

“Chin.”
Clink-clink. Clink.

And it even tasted good. Velvety and smooth, a welcomed warmth slipping down the walls of his esophagus, wetting the membranes. A second sip. Conversation rolling along easily. Cigarette offered. Thanks. Lighter sparks. A third sip. One of the men starts telling a long joke about a crocodile in a bar, which even turns out to be funny. Laughter. A fourth. The man to his right sidles closer. Steven eyeing him. A fifth. Slower now. The sixth more syrupy than the others, while a fuzziness rises from the miniscule hairs that cover his body, pushing through like dandelion heads above the grass and blossoming across his skin. He finds himself struggling to keep his eyes open and has the sensation that he's gyrating with a kind of elasticity, like his head is a bowling ball slotted onto the end of a car antenna, slowly tipping over, a tug-of-war against gravity, where gravity is sure to win. His hair eases onto the tabletop, ear to the cool Formica surface. Laughter swells in the muted background like sirens. There's a hand on his lap, sliding up his leg. He feels the bowling ball of his head becoming heavier. Pressing into the table now. Sinking into it. Someone else's hand is in his hair. On his scalp. Which is imbedding itself deeper into the Formica where it's—all. Suddenly. Black.

It was morning. September 14, 1985. Blinds drawn, light seeping in around the edges. He'd been slipping back into a dream he couldn't remember, into a sleep that was hungry and avid, that clawed the hours into its dark mouth one at a time, never quite satiated. When he finally managed to ply himself into consciousness, he was unable to stop blinking, a room he didn't recognize gradually coming into focus through an opaque film.

He was on a bed, on his stomach, wrists bound and tied to the headboard. He could feel that his T-shirt was still on but that his pants, socks, and underwear were not. Struggling to focus on the knot, the two separate images from each of his eyes slowly melding together, he wriggled himself closer, clumsy hands beginning to untie it. Having freed his wrists, he explored the back of his head, which was sore for some reason. He found tingling bald patches there, where, it seemed, his hair had been torn out. When he rolled over, the pain smarted for the first time in his sphincter and far up into his rectal cavity; blood was on the sheets, marbled with the brown of his fecal matter and suspicious pearly threads.

It hurt to walk, toilet paper clotted between his buttocks, coagulating into his underwear. He crept through the house until he was sure there was no one there, then started rifling through it noisily, through the fridge, cabinets, drawers, tipping over chairs, overturning sofas. No duffle bag, no money, not even some pocket change on a bedside table.

He stopped in the centre of a ransacked bedroom, standing on a tangle of sheets, catching his breath, needing to think. He thought about his next move, which was clearly to get out. Out of Regent Park, out of the crack scene, out of this vile, sickened city forever. And he was never coming back. Never. He didn't have it in him to ploddingly work off his debt to Kipp, to start saving from scratch—again—to have to explain to everyone what happened to his “big out.”

What he needed was some quick money. Greyhound fare. That was all. And he even knew how he was going to get it. He found a knife in a drawer, and unable to think of anyone else who would carry around a coiled fist of cash, the idea of mugging a fellow dealer crossed his mind—as had been done unto him. But he happened to know, and from a very reliable source, that most of the dealers in the Jane and Finch area had handguns. No. No, what he needed to find was some stupid piece-of-shit yuppie and snatch his wallet from him. That much would be easy. And no risk involved. Just a clueless rich guy who wouldn't know poverty if it walked right up to his back and stabbed him.

He stepped outside, got his bearings, and started walking. Then walked faster. The brisk stride caused the rips along his rectum to sting and burn. And the more he felt the damage, the more he wondered if there was a foreign body left inside him, like a sliver—sliv
ers
? Maybe they'd done it to him with something wooden as well. A cooking spoon, the handle of a toilet plunger, the leg of a chair. He bit his lip, tightened his grip on the knife in his pocket, and saw a gas station ahead, an expensive car pulling into it. He angled straight toward it.

The chubby man that stepped out fit the bill perfectly. He was blond, dressed in pricey casualwear, busy checking his watch like his time was the most precious thing in the universe. He was looking around a little uneasily, probably feeling more than a touch out of place, as if his low-fuel light had just flickered while on his way out of town, up the 400, heading to his cottage and a piece of property he took for granted, no doubt, which had fallen into his lap in the way that it did for rich people.

Steven clenched his jaw. He didn't even care if something went wrong when the blade came out of his pocket. No. He didn't care about anything anymore. He had to be hard. (Hadn't he already learned that somewhere?) Harder than the world was to him.

As Steven approached, he felt himself becoming increasingly acrid, numb, a loose canon. He stopped just within reach of the blond man, at the same time as the trigger on the gas pump clicked shut, the man's tank finally topped up with premium unleaded. The man was still looking away, replacing the nozzle into the pump while Steven waited for him to turn around, waited for him to take notice, to clue in to what Steven was there to do.