There had been another party, and now the mood was sombre, the hollow come-down mood of a strip joint at daybreak. The vampires were asleep, spread around the apartment, passed out on the long leather couch in the living room or curled up on reclining chairs. This one at his side had come to rest there as much by chance as any design. There were young girls new to the club, and his memory was unclear concerning this one. Nothing brought home the fact of his aging more clearly than the requirement of a few lines, once he had too many beers into him, to get hard and stay hard. The white was something he had tried to stay away from; once tasted, it was a talon in his shoulder blade. It came and went from his life in short, sharp bursts. He did what he did, and things were what they were. He never smoked it or shot it, a compromise of sorts.
He looked at the girl's back now, her tanned flesh smooth and dotted with tiny freckles across the shoulder blades. A tattoo at the base of her neck, some sort of Asian symbol. He figured it was her birth sign or perhaps a meaningful phrase in some mystical language: “courage” or “faith”, something like that. All the young girls were getting the same tattoos in all the same places. They all wanted to look the same, dress the same. She stirred slightly, rolled over so he could see her face. She was not unattractive, but the evening had taken its toll. Her long copper hair was tangled, and her face was puffy from sleep. Her breath was sour and strong. He slid from beneath the sheets and walked naked across the floor, stooping for his jeans and t-shirt on his way to the bathroom.
Duguay lifted the toilet lid, tilted his head back and pissed a long golden stream. He shivered and ran fingers across the blue-black lines inked to his chest and belly, evil incantations, swords and skulls. He dropped the lid with his foot and hit the flush. He coughed and drew a mouthful of phlegm, spat in the sink and washed it away. He splashed cold water on his face then ran his wet fingers through his brown hair that fell to just above collar length, a little shaggy but a generation removed from the waist-length hair he had sported in the early Eighties. Tied back or let loose, for better or for worse, it had been something of a wild trademark, back when he'd tucked his jeans into his goddamned cowboy boots and taken himself so seriously. Driving around Montreal and Sherbrooke and way up in Val D'Or in a yellow Camaro.
Jesus,
he thought.
The days we had, the days.
In the bedroom he found his watch on the night table and slipped it over his wrist. The girl was awake now and sitting up with her back against the headboard, a few white crumbs in her palm. He watched as she put the tiny glass pipe to her lips, a one-hitter, the glass blackened and stained from the burning chemicals. She held a lighter to the end, and in this way she was delivered from the collapse of her spirit. It was what she needed, what she wanted, what she had become. The first hit was a jolt, a dog bark in her ear, and she woke up. The ease crawled across her internal organs, system to system, cell to cell, then out through her limbs, some kind of a cure. It was the only game in town.
“Tabernac.
Hitting the pipe before her eyes are open. You better watch that shit, sister. You're no good to me, you're no good to nobody. Fucking junkies...”
Her head was back now, lolling side to side. Duguay shook his head and reached for his cigarettes. He freed one from the package and tapped it a few times against his Zippo lighter, popped it in his mouth and fired it up. He drew a long haul, then exhaled the smoke through his nostrils in two long funnels.
“Cops probably sitting outside right now, watching this place,” Duguay said. “Looking for any excuse they can get just to come in here.”
He walked towards the door, and the girl opened her eyes, groggy. “Where you going?” she said.
“You should know better than to ask questions like that,” he said.
“Can't it wait till morning?”
“It
is
morning,
bijou,”
he said. “You girls better be showered and have this fucking place cleaned up by the time I get back.”
He walked out through the living room, past the empty beer bottles and stuffed ashtrays, an open pizza box with four or five cold slices that turned his empty stomach, past a girl curled and crashed on the couch. In a small refrigerator in the kitchen he dug his hand into a large package of deli end cuts, old heels of mock chicken and pork roast and spiced salami, then he unlocked the door to the spare bedroom. The room was empty save for a large comforter coiled into a bed, a bowl of water and a food dish. Too many luxuries spoiled a dog. Diablo, a Red Nose American Pit Bull, was waiting on his haunches, his thick body packed with muscle, translucent grey eyes glimmering, liquid.
“Daddy'll be back,” he said, and tossed the handful of meat into the bowl.
He wiped his hand down his jeans and closed and locked the door to the spare room. He was closing the main door behind him just as a toilet flushed in the washroom down the hall, and the girl with the coal black hair stepped into the hallway, the hangover headache coming on like timpani as she gathered her clothes.
The sunshine was like arrows in his eyes as Duguay walked across the parking lot. It was a perfect early spring morning. It was still cold enough to see his breath, but the sun was warm on his face even at this early hour. It made him think about being a kid, a specific memory of walking to the corner storeâthe
dépanneur
âto buy milk for his cereal. A Sunday morning. The sun shining and making him squint like the cowboys in those Saturday afternoon movies. The streets were always dead on a Sunday morning, everybody sleeping off their Saturday night. It was a memory that came with a good feeling, like he was a man of independent means, a buck fifty in his front pocket, money filched from the asshole sleeping on his mom's couch. The little boy Duguay squared his shoulders and walked straight down the middle of the sidewalk.
The past wasn't something Duguay had much use for. To him, life was right here, right now. It had always made sense that way to him, as far back as he could remember.
Now
was all that matteredâgetting through the next hour, having enough money in your pocket, a bed to sleep in, a woman to lie with. The counsellors in the prisons were always offering up diagnoses as a means to explain his chosen life, this path which alternated between periods of wickedness and penitence. Some said he had a personality disorder, or borderline personality, although he read the brochures and figured he owned only about half of the necessary characteristics. Was it true that he had no conscience? No, it wasn't true. Not the way they made it sound. When he was righteous, when he was wronged, then he could and would take care of business without hesitation. He had hurt people in different ways, it was true. He would probably hurt many more before his time was through. One time he'd tried to explain it to a counsellor by saying it this way: “If it comes down to me or another guy, it's going to be the other guy who falls every time. I'm gonna be the one who makes it out. See, you sit in an office, and you don't understand. You can't understand. You don't come from the same place as me.”
There were things they tried to get him to talk about, and he gave them just enough to get his papers signed and make parole. Sometimes he made up stories, telling the counsellors things he thought they wanted to hear. It wasn't until the range was mostly silent and he was on the bunk in his cell that his mind drifted back to the fragments of childhood, the worst secrets of those crazy days. The faces of the men his mother brought home, the sickness from booze and drugs hanging over the whole place like a weather pattern, the endless disappointments of birthdays and holidays. And always the memories started and stopped with the man named Duvalier, who stayed with him and his mother for a few weeks when Duguay was nine or ten. Duguay hated him more than the other dregs his mother brought home. These men were for the most part harmless fools, drunks and petty ex-cons, a parade of losers, men who had let life slip through their fingers and now sat in rented rooms with quart bottles of beer, their fingers stained yellow from tobacco, teeth rotting out of their head. But he particularly hated Duvalier because the man gave off a vibration of
meanness
, as though with him anything was possible. Duguay hated his little round beer belly, hated his thin brown hair slicked back across his high round forehead, hated the way he looked at Duguay. There was something not right about the man, about the way his eyes held the boy.
It happened one day while Duguay was in the bathroom brushing his teeth. A Saturday morning, his mother passed out and cartoons buzzing on the little TV in the living room. Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd teaching him American English. Duvalier came in, closed and locked the door behind him. Duguay smelled the day-old booze on the man, seeping through his flesh in a greasy film. The man's breath was sour, as though he had been sick to his stomach.
“I knew your dad,” Duvalier said. “I bet you didn't know that, did you?”
Duguay didn't say anything. He kept brushing. It was the first new toothbrush he'd gotten in what seemed like forever, a gift from a nurse who had visited his school. He was brushing in circles, the way she had showed his class with the help of an oversized brush and a large set of choppers. He didn't want cavities. He didn't want them to stick a drill in his mouth.
“Sure I did,” Duvalier said. “Yessir, we did time together up at Archambault. Same range, me and your old man.”
Duguay understood the reference to the penitentiary in the same way a child of privilege might recognize the names of country clubs or dance studios. Names of institutions like Donnacona or Dorchester were simply place names that belonged to the resumes of the fathers and uncles and older brothers, the men who lived along his street, populated his universe.
“I could tell you stories about your daddy. Would you like that?”
Duguay wanted to hear stories, yes. He didn't know his father, owned only a vague memory of a man taking him for an ice cream at a city park when he was what, three or four? A man with sideburns and a cigarette package in the front pocket of his white T-shirt. Large hands with big knuckles. The car was black, and the seats were hot in the sun, wide as a bench. That was all, fragments. He wanted to learn things about his father beyond the lies his mother told. But not from this man. He didn't want to hear any stories from this man.
“He was a cool cat. A big guy. You know, before he got himself killed and all that.”
Duguay didn't say anything still. But he watched the man from the corner of his eye, his body tensed, expecting.
“You should be nice to me, kid,” Duvalier said, resting a hand on the sink, running fingers through his limp hair. “I just might be your new daddy, you know, if things work out between your momma and me. Could be.”
Duguay leaned over the sink and spat. He was aware that the man's eyes followed him as though he found every movement entirely captivating.
“You little shit. You was inside,” Duvalier said and made a clucking sound, pulling his tongue against a tooth, “you was inside, kid, I'd have you turned out before you could say âpapa'.”
The tiny bathroom got too close, too hot, and the stink from the ex-convict was like a poison gas that made Duguay's eyes water. He had to breathe through his mouth.
How could his
mother let this pig into her bed?
The man had known his father, or so he said, and this was how he repaid that friendship? Duvalier took a step, almost invisibly, a slick and quick slide. Duguay thought for a second that the man was getting ready to move a hand to him, to touch his body. Saw the events unfolding as though in a movie, and he was ready for it before anything even happened. He tapped his toothbrush against the side of the sink, casual as a Sunday afternoon. The low watt bulb above the faded mirror flickered for an instant. He felt his heart pushing against his rib cage.
Then Duvalier did it, moved his hand, never taking his red eyes from Duguay. The hand was warm, moist, and it squeezed Duguay's shoulder. Once, then again. Duvalier made a sound like hauling air through clenched teeth, excited.
“C'mon buddy, nothing to be afraid of. All the tough guys do it,” he said. “Let me pop that cherry for you...turn you into a real man...”
Duguay looked him in the eye, staring, his jaw clenched and set. Duvalier stepped in and made his move, both of his skinny arms coming around at once, the limp strands of his greasy hair falling forward now across his twisted face, and Duguay pushed back and made a noise, then there was a hand down the back of his pants, fingers wiggling in his rear end, and he brought his knee up...
The doorknob rattled, and Duguay's mother called out in her hoarse morning growl. “Pierre, what are you doing? I've gotta get in there.
Open the fucking door!”
Duvalier turned to watch as Duguay slipped out of his grasp, flicked the lock and stepped through the door in one liquid motion, as though he had been in command of the situation all along, determining its beginning and end. Then Duguay was gone, and so too was Duvalier, but not before leaving Duguay's mother a black eye with which to remember him by. It wasn't until a couple of years later that Duguay understood with complete comprehension what would have unfolded that day, how his life would have been changed.
All of the men who passed through their lives were invariably the same, and they came carrying the same weight through a tortured life: forearms speckled with sloppy homemade tattoos, a missing tooth, a grey scar across the bridge of the nose, they usually smoked and they always drank, and it was the rare individual who did not turn mean as the evening crashed headlong toward morning. Raised voices, broken plates, his mother crying, then the slow creaking of her bedsprings as the two wounded souls thrashed away their torment.
He learned how to steal cigarettes from packages left on the coffee table, learned later how to steal money from pants left coiled on the bedroom floor, and later still he learned how to take a punch and how to give one right back. He had his nose broken at age twelve by an unemployed construction worker named Giroux. Duguay had sassed his mother over something one night, something insignificant, and Giroux levelled the kid with a backhand without so much as getting up from the kitchen table where he was sitting drinking his Labatt 50. Duguay crashed backwards, saw an explosion of stars, tasted blood like rust in the back of his throat. It hurt,
it
hurt like hell,
numbness spreading across his face like a spider's web, but he was up and ready to roll almost instantly. He had some size to him by that point, too, developing into his father's body, his father's temperament. There was a rage spinning inside, a whirlwind rushing him headlong towards the world. Giroux turned just in time to catch a looping haymaker to the mouth. Bloody-lipped, but more embarrassed than wounded, he spun and tried to get a footing, but he was sloppy drunk, and anyway Duguay had already grabbed a full beer bottle from the case on the kitchen counter, and he was swinging it like a Louisville Slugger across the man's jaw.