T
he shotgun went
plop
in the cold, muddy waters of the Red River, and following it were the multiple splashes of a double handful of shells. We were on the northern edge of St. John’s Park, where there were trees and dirt-bike monkey trails that ended suddenly. That fact was what made riding them fun-fun-fun, according to some of the neighbourhood kids. There were also small bushes growing up between the trees so we had cover, unless someone was looking at us from across the river with night vision glasses, which was doubtful.
“There you are.”
I looked over at Smiley and waited. Then I turned back to the river and tossed a pebble in. “Holliday carried a shotgun, true. He also carried a revolver on his hip. And one in a holster he wore under his arm. And he packed a knife on his other hip.”
He looked over at me and reached behind him at waist level and pulled out a short-barrelled automatic which he
unhesitatingly tossed into the water. It was followed by a woodhandled and cork-tipped ice pick out of his front pocket.
“That it?”
“Almost.”
A plastic film container full of pills spilled into the water and, finally, he pulled a Korean-made switchblade knife taped to his calf under his pants and pitched that.
“Clean.”
I patted his back.
“Feels weird.”
“Yeah. Well. Yeah, it does.”
I didn’t look at him. “You’re pretty heavy for someone who wants to go straight.”
He slapped me on the back. “Yeah. Well. Old habits. There are bad people out here in the real world. You know how it is.”
“Right.” We started home. “Smiley, I’m going to give you some rules for life on the outside. Just so we’re both on the same page, since I’m going to be helping you.”
He brightened at that. “Rules? Like …”
I held up my hand. “Yeah. Like those.”
“Say ’em again, man.”
His enthusiasm made me smile. “Rules for bad guys: remember, anything you say that the cops can hear can be used in a court and the cops can always listen. Micro-miniature bugs and lasers bouncing off windowpanes. They even have some computer that can listen to you type on a keyboard and extrapolate what you say. So don’t ever say, write, or think anything. Ever. ’Bout my past or yours. You start being a citizen now.”
He nodded.
“In the real world, rule one is appearance. In the real world
you have to appear honest. You have to look like you belong where you’re standing.”
“Got it.”
“Rule two is to follow your dream. Whatever it is and wherever it goes.”
“Makes sense.”
“Now I’m gonna tell you a secret about the real world. Ready? It is probably the biggest, baddest secret there is. So listen real careful.”
He nodded and listened.
“No one ever made a million dollars honestly.”
“Huh?”
“The citizens out there, they all want to make a million dollars and they are not honest because no one ever made a million dollars honestly. Citizens underpay their taxes. They buy grass and untaxed booze and cigarettes. They buy unregistered guns if they feel they are in danger. They run unsafe work environments. They accept bribes. They pocket money from their work places. They shortchange each other. They lie and bear false witness and fill out documents with intent to defraud. Unions run cozy arrangements with management or steal from the dues-payers without restraint or balance. Banks overcharge, stack their boards, and arrange for their own oversight. The taxman never gives you back exactly what you owe. And drive-thru restaurants never give you what you ordered. Etcetera and so on and ad infinitum.”
Smiley was following every word.
“But, and this is a big but, the citizens and the citizen world always appears honest, and if you told any of them any of this, they would be deeply, deeply shocked and offended. And they would be righteously furious at your ideas and opinions.”
I let it sink in and then continued.
“So that is the first and most important lesson: appear honest and be aware that everyone out here isn’t.”
Smiley grinned and finished, “And thus endeth the lesson.”
I slapped him on the back. “And now we get you a real job. Maybe dishwasher or carpark attendant.”
He told me to do something physically impossible. At home I put Smiley in the spare room and Claire and I went to bed and fought quietly for a long time before finally calling a ceasefire and making love.
There are worse ways to end arguments and, to be honest, sometimes I thought that I picked fights just for the making up.
S
unday was a quiet day. Not a religious day, not a holy day; neither Claire nor I was religious. But it was a day to rest and recoup, rethink and plot and plan for the next week. Sundays were normally lazy days—normally, but then most Sundays we didn’t have Smiley living with us.
“Hey man, up and at ’em!”
It was way too early in the morning and Smiley was yelling up from downstairs. Claire rolled over on her elbow and stared blankly at me and I shrugged. “I can still kill him.”
“It’s an option.”
“I wouldn’t mind, really.”
I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a tattered T-shirt.
“Just keep thinking you’re doing a good deed.”
“It’s not helping.”
We kissed and Smiley began to sing.
“… So get out of here with your bump-bump-bump …”
Fred started to howl in happiness and I went downstairs to find Smiley bouncing him up and down in his arms. Which
froze me for a moment: Smiley had to have come upstairs without awakening me or Claire, gotten Fred up, dressed him, and brought him down. And as I watched them both I realized what was bothering me. It was that Smiley looked as though he was acting. It didn’t matter what he was doing, even if he loved it, he always looked like he was acting a role off a script only he could see. Nothing outside could impact that armour he wore, at least nothing I had ever seen.
“I’m here.”
Smiley cupped his hand around his mouth and did a credible bugle call and Fred yelled, “Unca ’Miley!”
I ignored him and asked, “What the hell was that?”
He looked at his hands as though the answer was there. “Taps, I think. Or wake up, reveille I think it’s called. No idea really. Pretty good though, huh?”
“Just perfect.”
He kept bouncing Fred. “So, you ready to run?”
Last night he had mentioned the two of us going jogging but I’d forgotten. I’d agreed because running might help me recover some of the strength I’d lost over the years. As I grew older I found my body was not behaving the way I remembered and wanted it to.
Hopefully the running would help.
Claire came down the stairs in her bathrobe and gathered Fred up and stomped on Smiley’s foot. He swore and she smiled, showing all her teeth. “Never wake me up on a Sunday before ten, ten or eleven. Make it eleven. And don’t touch my son, not ever, without my permission or that of my idiot husband. And never swear in front of my son either.”
Fred looked at both of them and said, “FUCK!” loudly and Claire smiled seraphically and I knew what Mona Lisa was
thinking and what Jesus really meant when he said, “Love thy neighbour.”
Then she asked him, “So, do you have a job yet?”
He looked at me and then at her. “Time to run?”
I answered, “You bet. A quick retreat is probably our best option.”
Running with Smiley was an experience, a time warp backwards and not a good one. We’d done it inside frequently, running around a track with screws on the walls and towers tracking us with rifles for practice. We’d jogged away from demons at Drumheller Medium/Minimum Federal Pen and Millhaven Maximum Fed Pen, or maybe we’d jogged towards them. Moving around in circles that never ended, wherever and whenever we could find space and time. This was the first time we’d done it in the outside world and I picked a direction at random and started.
“Always meant to ask you, man, why did you start to run on the inside?”
His voice brought me back to the now and I thought about it before answering. “To get away from the cell, the block, the rest of the prisoners, all that shit. And to make myself a moving target. What about you?”
We dodged a little girl pushing an old pram full of stuffed animals down the sidewalk as he answered, “I did it for the quiet to work on the next gig. I did it to think about my crew. But mostly I did it to become stronger.”
We turned on Mountain Avenue and ran west past the little businesses and churches, repair shops and diners.
“Nice neighbourhood. Lot of crime?” He was looking through criminal’s eyes. Bars on the windows, heavy steel doors, and thick wires on the windows linked to alarm
companies and cops. There were even bars on the church windows and garbage in the gutters and filling the dumpsters.
“A bit.”
I could see what he saw but I could also see other things. I could see the yards someone had spent hours on. I could see fences in good repair. I saw walls with fresh paint jobs and paint-bombed obscenities scrubbed out. And I could see an absence of panhandlers and bums sucking back on paper bags of Canadian Club sherry and Lysol or flaming rocks of crack.
“There are opportunities here.”
He sounded like he was thinking as his feet easily kept the rhythm, hammering away at the sidewalk, darting effortlessly around the occasional pedestrian. And as we went we kept dodging bikes and skateboarders. Pain was starting in my back, so I changed the subject to distract us both.
“You remember Stan?”
Smiley glanced at me. “Stanley? Drum-Stan?”
“Yeah. Remember what he could do?”
There was silence for a block while he thought. “What do you mean? I never worked with him.”
“Not what I meant. Remember the sit-ups he did in prison?”
“Yeah, he did sit-ups, I remember that now. He was up to what …?”
A little old lady pushed another little old lady in a wheelchair out from a church. Both were tiny and frail and moved like clockwork dolls, determined to make it wherever they were going. Without thinking I broke left over a fire hydrant and took three steps in the street before making the sidewalk again. Smiley broke right and took two steps on the tops of steel newspaper boxes and then joined me.
“Sorry, ma’ams!” He apologized at the two women as he
ran by. Despite that they still called him several somethings I didn’t quite catch.
“Anyhow, I was asking how many he was up too?”
“One thousand eight hundred sit-ups a day. Every day. Every single, stinking day.”
“Really?”
We turned right down Arlington and found fewer obstacles, so we pushed it up a notch. By the time we reached Cathedral we were exhausted and slowed to a more sedate pace.
Smiley’s voice was starting to get ragged. “Too bad he was such a goof.”
“Who?”
“Stan.”
“True.” I thought about Stan and about what a bad thief he had been. He had been a comically bad thief, an epically bad one. He had robbed a Police Credit Union in Waterloo. He had robbed a car ferry on its way to Isle Royale on Lake Superior and then had been stuck on the island for two days while the cops locked down access and looked for him. And he had once stolen a panel truck full of autographed hockey jerseys and tried to sell them at a flea market in the same town two days later.
He had given thieves a bad name and I was glad he was in prison where he could hurt very few people.
We crossed McGregor against the lights and received a severe honking from a big suburban assault vehicle heavily loaded with one fat woman talking on a cell phone. Since she had been a good fifteen metres from the stop-line when we’d crossed, I felt somewhat aggrieved.
“’Scuse me.”
Smiley paused while I turned back towards the woman. She was gesturing with one hand towards me and still talking on
the phone. When her eyes caught mine I showed all my teeth and held my hand to my ear and then gestured with the other for her to roll down her window. She floored it and I went back to talking with Smiley.
“I do hate rude people. Like I said, it’s true he’s a goof but now Stan’s a goof with the stomach muscles of a Greek god.”
We ran some more in silence.
“Monty?”
We turned left on the final lap home.
“Yeah?”
“Why ‘Greek god’?”
I thought about it and couldn’t come up with an answer. “No idea. Maybe because the Greeks thought their gods were pretty.”
He stretched his legs and we finished in a sprint which he won easily.
After I’d showered Smiley cleaned himself up and then we sat down with Claire at the table. To keep Fred and Renfield happy we rolled a bright red plastic ball into the living room. Half the time the baby brought it back, the rest of the time the dog did. When the grown-up humans all had coffee in front of them and I was eating some rye toast, Claire started.
“All right, I’ve been thinking about Smiley’s problem.” She left it there, hanging.
“And …?”
“He has one.” She sipped her coffee and looked cheerful, for lack of a better word, but Smiley wanted more information.
“Actually I have many problems. Which one are we currently discussing?”
“Pay attention. We are discussing the possibilities of finding
you gainful employment. We tried this with Monty in the spring and it was … difficult.”
I interjected. “Actually it blew chunks.”
Smiley looked doubtful. “That bad?”
Claire made a small gesture. “It was difficult …”
“… difficult? Difficult? Circumcising a weasel is difficult, this was …”
Claire cut me off, “… but not impossible. In Monty’s case we found him a job babysitting.”
Smiley couldn’t help himself. “BULLSHIT!”
I winced, “No. Serious.”
He started to laugh. I threw the ball for the dog and the baby and said something under my breath and my wife kicked me under the table. Smiley finally calmed down and his face swivelled back and forth between us as he chewed on his lower lip. “’Kay. Okay. I’m fine.” He took a deep breath. “So I need a job. So what do I do?”
“As an ex-con you have some disadvantages, so you should create your own job. And it should be something new and unique. It should be something that will force people to judge you, and not your past.”
This was news to me and I finished my toast and coffee while Smiley thought it through. “Such as …?”
We were all silent and then I offered, “What can you do?”
He didn’t even have to think about that. “Take things that aren’t mine. Go through locked doors. Force people to do things. Set fires for profit. Torture people.”
“Fight?”
“Yeah. But I cheat.”
Claire nodded and absorbed all that he’d said. “What about bouncing?”
“In a bar?”
We all thought about it and Smiley said slowly, “I guess I could do that. Sure. Spot troublemakers before they make trouble. Deal with them quietly. Also, drunks aren’t that dangerous, all things considered. Do you need a certificate? Some places I think you need a certificate.”
He thought about it some more and I went into the kitchen for more coffee, Claire following. When the cup was half full she put her hand over it and stopped me. “The doctor’s orders are to reduce caffeine.”
“My doctor is an idiot.” I’d taken a first-class beating from some Winnipeg cops six months before that had almost destroyed my kidneys and that, combined with decades of amphetamine and narcotic abuse, made me hyper sensitive to caffeine. Claire just stared at me and then she screwed her face up and her eyes filled with tears and became bigger and bigger while her mouth started to tremble. “Still … you don’t want me to be an unhappy widow, do you?”
It was an unfair argument, but one I lost. I dumped the coffee and we went into the dining room where our guest was still sitting, staring out over his cup of coffee which had grown tepid. When we came in he snapped his head around and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“About bouncing, what’s to know? A little psychology and a little intimidation with a little mayhem equal easy money.”
“All right, it’s worth a try.”
He sounded doubtful and Claire slapped a deck of cards in front of him along with a crudely carved crib board she’d brought into our marriage from some earlier relationship.
“That’s decided. Let’s play.”
I stood there and finally shook my head and headed upstairs to change, “Not me. I have to go to work, Marie’s expecting me.”
Smiley didn’t say anything at all and I found that very interesting indeed. He should have asked questions, he should have wondered, but he didn’t, he just nodded and went along with the crib game.