I
changed my clothes back at the church and then I walked home on foot. The shotguns I left one piece at a time in garbage cans and storm drains scattered over a ten-block stretch.
The next morning Claire handed me a piece of paper. “Frank called.”
“Good for him.”
“Wants to know when he should schedule the Hunter’s Safety Course.”
I froze and admitted, “I’d forgotten.”
“You forgot about wild boar?”
“I forgot on purpose. It was very hard.”
“How do you forget about wild boars? I mean, they’re not even that important to me and I can’t forget about them.”
She gave me the paper which had an address, 70 Stevenson Road and starting at 10:00 in the morning on Saturday. She had written underneath it that the class was near Red River
College, about an hour or so away by bus. While I was reading she breezed past me on her way to work and I yelled at her back. “It was damn hard to forget about those pigs. You try to forget about giant, blood rending …”
Smiley came down from the bathroom, combing his hair with his fingers. “What, the kids are here already?”
“Very funny. Where you off to today?”
“No idea. Where do you go to find jobs?”
Good question. “An unemployment insurance office maybe? Check the yellow pages.”
The doorbell rang and while Smiley was looking up the number and address I accepted Jacob from his cop mother and Rachel from her mom. By the time I’d gotten them settled Smiley had closed the book and put down the phone. “It’s EI, not UI. Employment Insurance.”
I was confused. “So they help you find a better job than the one you already have? That makes no sense.”
“It’s the government, what do you expect. Time to go.”
In disgust I motioned for him to leave and he batted his eyelids. “Don’t I deserve a kiss?”
“Oh, fuck off!”
Wanna guess the one word Jacob learned?
Claire was back at noon with a bulging briefcase, a travel mug of coffee, and a headache. She entered the house, stared blankly at Rachel, Fred, and Jacob who were (in order) looking at a comic book, colouring in a colouring book, and plotting something while looking adorable.
“Sanity.”
Rushing to pull on shoes and jacket, I didn’t answer and she kept talking. “I have clients who don’t want anything I have but don’t want to find another company because they
like me. I have another client who feels he shouldn’t have to pay rent this month because it’s his birthday. And I have a gang who want to rent any one of our properties, any one at all, as long as it has an attached garage.”
“Well, marijuana grow operations are a growth industry.”
“Hardy-har-har. People who use puns should be shot.” She took off her shoes, stretched upwards and yawned. “So this little bit of sanity will be nice. Plus I have some more ideas for Smiley.”
“Okay, I’m off! But first, a kiss!”
With my last glance I saw that Rachel was now colouring in the comic book (who ever heard of Captain Carrot? I’d picked up a whole bunch of them for five dollars at a used book store, but who ever heard of a rabbit super hero? Bugs Bunny, sure, but that was it.) Fred was eating the colouring book, and Jacob had started to stuff one crayon up each nostril.
None of which was my problem. So I kissed Claire in a slightly more serious fashion and ran before the screams started.
At Buttes Frank was working on a bow, restringing it with the help of a huge, nasty machine that looked like it could tear a human in half.
“Stupid, god-damned …”
It was entertaining to watch but I interrupted him anyway. “Has the delivery come yet?”
“Huh? Oh, no. Can you do me a favour and help me with this stupid bow?”
I stared at the machine, the big rollers and weights, the clamps and vise grips. “No.”
He glared at me. “What do you mean, no?”
“You don’t pay me enough to work with that damn thing.”
“Damn thing? You mean the ‘Mangler’? Come on, it’s harmless.”
For a brief moment I hallucinated that the machine was grinning and then I gave in and helped Frank. A few minutes later he was putting a bandage around my right forefinger while I rubbed feeling back into my left wrist.
“I don’t think you’ll lose your nail.”
“That’s good; this is evidence that no machine called ‘The Mangler’ is ever safe.”
The bell in the back rang, telling me that the delivery had arrived, so Frank finished and motioned me to work. “You shouldn’t lose it; anyway, I don’t think so. You better get to work.”
I was heading for the back door. “As long as it doesn’t involve wild boars.”
“Hey, I almost forgot about that …”
Groaning, I went to work with my injured paw and unloaded the partial pallet the trucking company had sent. My dealings with the driver, an obnoxious little freak, were always somewhat stressed. This time he stayed far out of my way and showed his contempt by peeing on the wall of the shop.
It was going to be a long, long day.
On the way home I stopped at Marie’s and found a house full of people from Bangladesh. She introduced me and then shuffled me out the back with an envelope full of cash, part of my pay in installments, whispering, “It’s working perfectly. No calls, no visits, nothing from Sam or anyone else. Frankly, there are no hitches at all so far. Knock on wood.”
I left and headed east via two buses until I reached the Club Regent Casino. As I walked to it I started to hum the old Louis Armstrong tune “It’s a Wonderful World.” It didn’t
help, though, and a few seconds later I entered the giant space full of noise and light and people. And money, lots of money. Turning hard left I walked through a giant aquarium and found myself frozen in space watching a coral reef full of living jewels and beautiful monsters.
“Cool!”
The older couple behind me patted my back gently and agreed. I tore myself away with difficulty and only managed to do it by promising myself to bring Claire. I kept moving into a fake tropical nightmare.
“Yo-ho-ho.”
Turning my head slowly, I saw a skeleton of a Chihuahua and a Spanish conquistador. I put my hand out towards the dog and, speaking deadpan, I repeated back to them, “Yo-ho-ho?”
“Hey, not my choice, I have a script here …”
The dog’s head stopped moving and another voice came on.
“Yo-ho-ho. Don’t pet the dog, he bites.” This made me draw my hand back slowly and the voice went on, “Yo-ho-ho!”
Shaking my head gently I kept on, searching the main floor and finding the quarter-and-nickel slot machines. Many of them linked together with progressive jackpots. And scattered around were also table games with blackjack, roulette, paigow, mini-baccarat, keno, poker, and baccarat. Lots and lots of ways to lose your money.
Casinos have limits on how much money you can walk away with before they issue you a cheque, and in Manitoba that limit is $10,000. The casinos claim the limits are designed to stop terrorists or people like me from washing my ill-booten-gotty. However, that rule was fine, because what I really wanted was a nice, clean, easily traced cheque. And for that little piece of paper I was certainly willing to pay taxes.
I exchanged a hundred for a cup of loonie coins from a beautiful girl pushing a metal change cart around, and then I found a big impersonal machine with no one nearby and proceeded to drop the coins into the hopper. In five minutes I dropped all hundred and pulled the lever. I actually played three times, winning once and losing twice. Then I pressed the cash out button and received a slip for $99.75 and the first wash was done.
Wandering out of the main casino I did the same in another room and then once downstairs for $250 at a bank of keno machines for a total loss of $2.25. Then I went upstairs to the gaming tables. I passed by two blackjack tables and a baccarat table as being, respectively, too busy and not busy enough. Near the end of the ranks of tables there were roulette tables, American-style ones with a double zero pushing the odds seriously towards the house. Despite that I bought $300 worth of chips, lost a red five-dollar chip betting even, won betting odd, and then exchanged the chips for black hundreds and wandered away.
At a blackjack table limited for $25 to $500 I cashed in another $200 for green twenty-five-dollar pieces and lost twice before winning a blackjack. They were using the eternity deck, a constant six-deck mechanical shuffle that eliminated any kind of skill or treachery on the part of the players. Before I could leave a waitress came up and brought me a complimentary coffee, so I tipped her a dollar. I now had washed $950 and had gotten a free coffee for a total cost of $20.75. Not bad math for washing money, and a lot less than the average underworld accountant would charge.
I went back to the slot machines and dumped $450 before finishing up at a mini-baccarat table where the odds were, according to the croupier, about 50.5% in the favour of the
house. So I dropped the rest of my money in chips, played four times, won three times, tied once, tipped the croupier five dollars and found the cashier’s wicket with $2,003.25 in chips, blacks and greens, and slips of paper from the slot machines.
The cashier was a fairly pretty girl, albeit kind of dirty, although that may have been the light. Her voice was deadpan. “Good evening sir. How would you like to be paid?”
I felt a breath on my neck and turned to face a beautiful woman wearing a tight green dress cinched around her waist with an ornate belt made of black iron links. She smelled … good. Rich, earthy, electric, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing much under the dress.
And I was pretty sure the smell wasn’t perfume out of any kind of bottle.
“Sir?”
It was the cashier again and I turned back to her and then back to the woman behind me. She had large dark eyes with long, long lashes. Eyes I could lose myself in, eyes I wanted to lose myself in for forever and a day.
“Sir?” The cashier still didn’t really seem to care but she was waiting. So was the woman behind me. But they were waiting for different things. I smiled brightly at the cashier. “A cheque, please.”
The woman beside me sighed deeply and her whole body did interesting and hypnotic things. “Maybe next time …”
It was a promise and she was gone, so I collected my money and fled home for a long, cold shower. Claire took the cheque and had me endorse it so she could deposit it in her account the next day.
At my house the chaos was reassuringly normal and comforting. Fred was asleep in his bed and the dog was asleep on our bed and Thor the mouse was looking through his food dish in his fastidious manner and throwing the black seeds away when he found them. Claire and I were sitting there to ambush Smiley when he came in at 9:00. He saw us and froze in the doorway, staring at the two of us sitting at the table in the living room. He was pushing a folding metal trolley loaded with boxes from a big-box electronics store.
“Is this an intervention?” He sounded wary.
“No,” Claire answered.
“Thank God.”
We all ignored the cargo and he sat down on the floor and gestured at the 3x5-inch cards stacked beside Claire’s elbow. “What are those?”
“Job opportunities for you.”
“Oh.”
I felt obliged to add, “More like job possibilities.”
“Right.”
He braced himself visibly and said, “Go!”
Claire flipped over the first card. “Lion tamer.”
His eyes lit up. “Are you kidding? That’s an option?”
She kept her poker face. “Not really, just wanted to make sure I had your attention. These following jobs have been chosen to match your skills as a thug and general layabout.”
“I could be a lion tamer.”
“Sure you could.” She put the card down and raised the next. “Call centre.”
“What’s that?”
I answered. “You call people during dinner and annoy them, selling them stuff or asking them to take a survey.”
“Oh. How much does it pay?” Smiley was interested.
Claire had that one. “$9.25 an hour. Plus bonuses.”
“Which is what in real money?”
“About $19,000 a year minus taxes, maybe fifteen you take home.”
He stared at me. “Fuck you!”
My wife cocked her head to the side and smiled seraphically and Smiley finally absorbed the message. “I mean, fuck me.”
He thought about it and went on, “That’s one bank robbery with good planning. A small bank. A bad bank. The kind of bank an amateur with a note and a broken stick would do.”
I nodded. “So that’s a no.”
Claire was nothing if not cheerful. “Right. Don’t become discouraged. Don’t worry so much about the money though; I’ll help you with budgets and stuff. The first thing is to have a job you can stand.”