S
aturday started very slowly at 7:00. I let Claire sleep while Fred and I played with the dog in the backyard. I raked leaves and the dog and boy destroyed the piles. Smiley woke up before Claire did, coming out into the backyard with his face completely slack and his eyes narrowed into slits against the dim light.
“Hesus Marimba.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea.” He watched me work from the stoop.
I was mildly curious and asked, “Hangover?”
“No thanks, got one. Went out last night when your lovely wife told me you two were painting the town red …”
He was quiet and fished in his pocket for a cigarette. With trembling hands he lit it. “Met a nice little hard body. Sweet girl, wanted a nice architect for a husband, or maybe she wanted to do some modelling work or just luck into a really, really nice apartment. Or maybe she wanted to work with animals or little kids.”
He paused and I encouraged him to go on. “And …”
“Dumped her and found two trashy-ass semi-pro whores. Somewhere downtown. They were badass chicks, coke off the tip of the little knife one of them kept tucked down the front of her bra, straight shots of Courvoisier and Hpnotiq. Trick shit like that.”
“And …” Off to the side Fred and Renfield was wrestling. Fred was losing.
Smiley shrugged. “We had a party. I didn’t touch any chemicals, swear to Christ, but they sure did.”
Smiley looked at me with bloodshot eyes, waiting for me to judge. When I didn’t he went on, “They used my money and bought coke and ecstasy and grass and crack and crank. VIP’d my ass into a big club somewhere, all red velour and black-patterned carpets …”
I coughed loudly and Smiley’s face lit up in pleasure. “You’d a loved it; you could hear the dope and whore money getting washed, scrub-scrub-scrub. There were only twenty people there and most of them on the payroll. So we ended up in a private room.”
He motioned for me to come closer. “I was hitting the bottle hard… I was hitting it pretty hard and couldn’t get it up, limp-dick city …”
I interrupted gently. “You don’t have to tell me this, man.”
His face flushed red with anger. “Sure I do. So they started making out with each other … to help me out, I guess, they weren’t getting off on it … and I didn’t feel a thing.”
“So what happened?”
“Took off. Ran away. Paid the bills first and then ran.”
Fred tried to bury the dog in leaves and got mad when I started to stuff them into the garbage bag. I gave him that to fight and turned back to Smiley. “It ain’t gonna be easy, man.
Stay away from chicks like that. Don’t put yourself in the way of that.”
“All I want … all I really want is …”
“What?”
His face was rigidly anguished. “I don’t fucking know!”
“’S alright. It’ll pass. Get a shower. Clean yourself up. Then we’ll go running. Changing the subject. Wanna meet a nice girl?”
He stood up. “What the fuck is that?”
“You’ll see. It might help.”
“Might.” He ground the cigarette out on his belt buckle and dropped the butt into his pocket. “Might be nice. I want to tell you something and ask you something.”
I waited.
“One, I finally understand what Ol’ Doc Holliday meant at the end, you know when he said, ‘This is funny.’”
That went past me and I shook off what I was actually thinking. “And?”
“Never mind. Hey, do you get laid when you date nice girls?”
I hadn’t seen Claire coming up behind Smiley, but she heard him and said, “Don’t be crude.”
He looked embarrassed and she went on, “And Monty is not the right person to ask. He doesn’t know any nice girls. Ask me.”
Smiley turned to me. “Is this true?”
“Yep. I only know Claire.”
She looked at me suspiciously and Smiley turned back to her. “So, do you get laid when you date nice girls?” She nodded primly.
“Sure. But it’ll never happen when and where and why you expect it.”
Smiley turned back to me. “True?”
“So I’ve heard.”
Energy and joy were creeping back into him and his pleasure was growing along with the bruise on his cheek. “Sounds great. Let’s go.”
“Shower first.”
When he had headed into the house Claire sat down in the exact same spot Smiley had occupied and held the peas tight to her forehead. “Christ, do I have a hangover.”
“Poor girl. Could be worse.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “How could it be worse?”
I grabbed Fred before he managed to crawl entirely into an open bag of leaves and suffocate. “It could be me suffering from a hangover instead of you.”
If looks could kill.
The two of them agreed to go out that night and find nice girls, and that started them off making phone calls and plans. I was too busy getting ready to go to the Hunter Safety Course, which started at 10:00 and lasted until 6:00, a truly dim way to spend a Saturday. When I arrived home at 7:00, Claire and Smiley were both dressed in new clothes. They looked happy, clean, and gleeful. My wife kissed me and let me sit down in the bedroom for a minute or two before leaving. “So how was school, dear?”
I glared at her and suspected a pun before clearing my throat. “Hunting is a natural endeavour of the human animal and it’s nothing that the hunter should be embarrassed about. There are rifles and shotguns suitable for hunting.” She motioned for me to go on. “And bows, ha-ha-ha. The whole class laughed until I held up my hand and told them I was using a bow. Then the teacher went on. Do not hunt within 100
metres of the road. Do not shoot unless you know what you are shooting at. And do not shoot anything wearing Day-Glo orange. Unless you’re a cannibal.”
I changed my socks. “More laughter, followed by an amusing anecdote about an RCMP constable who was arrested for shooting a Styrofoam decoy deer put out by the game wardens. After which he was given a large case of Styrofoam cutlets by his butcher. More class laughter. Followed by a quote from a man I’ve never heard of before, José Ortega Y Gasset, who said, ‘One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.’”
Claire looked at her watch. “You know, this is interesting but…”
“Wait. You started this with your wild boar rant, and the rant about how much I owed Frank, and you should hear the end of it. Did you know that wild game has less fat than chicken? Or that hunting is an activity that is much safer than swimming or bicycling? Then a lecture on muzzle-loading muskets, the advances of the percussion system, magazine-fed versus single-shot weapons, orange safety vests, primers, and safeties. This went on for awhile.”
“So did you pass?”
“I did.”
“So can I leave?”
“You may.”
And she and Smiley went off to look for nice girls. I dug out the books I’d picked up from the library during the lunch break at the training centre.
Gunfighters of the Wild West
,
Gunfight at the OK Corral
,
Encyclopedia of Western Gunfighters
,
The Range Wars
, and others. Names like Doc Holliday, Sam Bass, William Bonney, Tom Horn, William Brooks, John Wesley Hardin, Patrick Garrett, and Black Bart.
Fred played quietly with his blocks while the dog snored. We’d brought Thor’s aquarium out into the middle of the room so it could feel it belonged to the family and vice versa. While I read I drank a cup of coffee and thought some long and dark thoughts.
You can tell a lot about a man by his heroes, and Smiley’s made for interesting reading.
Black Bart, my favourite. Born in 1829, last seen in 1888, and liked Wells, Fargo and Co. stagecoaches in California, of which he robbed twenty-eight. Caught and served four years in San Quentin and then vanished upon release. Left poetry behind after the robberies, including the ditty:
I’ve labored long and hard for bread
For honor and for riches
But on my corns too long you’ve tread
You fine haired sons of Bitches.
Sam Bass robbed the Deadwood Stage four times. An inept and unlucky, thief he died at the age of twenty-seven after being shot in the groin. His sister put up a tombstone that read, “A brave man reposes in death here. Why was he not true?”
In later years the tombstone was chipped away by scavenger hunters until it vanished.
William Bonney, dead at twenty-one, accused of having shot either twenty-one or no men. His first crime was stealing butter at the age of twenty-one. He was shot to death by his friend Pat Garrett. His last words were, “Quien es?”
Doc Holliday died at the age of thirty-six from tuberculosis, described by Wyatt Earp as the most dangerous man in Tombstone when Tombstone was a dangerous town. Walking to the gunfight at the OK Corral the three Earp brothers wore
frowns and dressed in black while Doc wore a natty grey suit and whistled.
Like I said before, you can tell a lot about a man by his heroes. The coffee had grown cold and Fred had fallen asleep so I moved very quietly as I refilled my mug and thought deep thoughts. The phone ringing made me jump. It was Marie calling me from a pay phone to tell me they were running a Yugoslavian family across the lake that night. I had told her to give me the occasional call and keep me in the loop in case they needed an enforcer. She didn’t this time. I wished her luck and she hung up.
And I went back to wondering who the hell my heroes were. When that stopped bothering me I wondered about the heroes Smiley had acquired. Not one of them was a good guy, not really, not seeing them from this place in time. So why would he ever go straight?
And that question bothered me even more. I thought about the hunter safety course and then I rephrased the philosophy of “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted” into something more appropriate for thieves. It became “One does not steal in order to make money; on the contrary, one makes money in order to have stolen.”
When I slept I dreamed and when I woke up I remembered something very important about being a bad guy, about living on reflex and momentum and that there were NO coincidences.
Not ever.
I
woke up Smiley early the next day and told him all about Marie and the smuggling operation she was running. I told him about the money I was making, I told him about the potential of the route, and I told him about Samantha.
In biblical terms I took him up on the mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world.
And he listened and I waited and I saw greed spark deep in his eyes.
I talked about drugs. “We can pick up crack cocaine in Minneapolis for cheap and move it across the border and then straight up north to the mining towns, where it sells at a premium …”
He became more and more excited and added his own words. “We can run loads of hydroponic weed from up here straight down to Chicago …”
He was pumped now and I kept talking. “We can pick up top-of-the-line Glock semi-autos for $400 in Macon, Georgia and sell them for $1500 to Japanese sailors in Churchill …”
He was so excited he made mistakes. Like I said, there are no coincidences when dealing with bad guys.
Smiley was transcendent. “We can take away the route from Marie and her crew; she’s only got two guys …”
I’d never mentioned the size of Marie’s crew.
Ever.
A few minutes later he proposed cutting Samantha out of the picture permanently and taking over her business.
“We can take her out. Shoot her down or wire her van to go
boom
…”
I’d never mentioned Samantha had a van and he knew one hell of a lot about what she did and how she did it.
I agreed, agreed, and agreed, and let Smiley tell me, “Let me set it up, man, it’ll be great …” He grinned, ear to ear.
“I knew you weren’t straight. I knew you were conning everyone.”
He looked abashed and then challenging. “You knew Sam hired me, right? This honest shit—that was just a con, right?”
I nodded and the final words from both our mouths were, “It’ll be just like old times.”
From him it sounded like a promise, from me it was full of sorrow.
Then he went out to, in his words, take care of everything.
A
fter supper Smiley called. “Monty? Can you come down to a bar? It’s in the McDiamond hotel? I’ve found Samantha.”
“Sure. When? What’s the bar called?”
“It’s called Hell. I don’t know the address.”
“I have a phone book. Don’t worry. When?”
“Make it 7:30. I’ll be in the bar.”
He hung up and I told Claire what was going on.
“He’s going to betray you?”
“Probably. Or he’s going to betray Samantha, if he’s working for her.”
Claire had been working on a large pile of paperwork and she tapped her teeth meditatively with a pencil and spoke slowly. “What do you think?”
“I think I don’t know.”
She smiled and stood up and kissed me and I went on, “I think I’m operating in the dark here.”
Claire wiggled her eyebrows. “You do some of your best
work in the dark. Remember what you told me: instinct, reflex, and momentum.”
I’d told her about my dream and she agreed. She’d promised to skin me alive if I fucked up but she’d agreed that it was the best way to deal with all the problems at once. Have one problem deal with the other.
I kissed her and said, “Right.” Then I went upstairs and changed clothes. A plastic cup to protect my testicles. Jeans with reinforced knees and butt. A tight black T-shirt in case someone tried to grab me. Steel-toed shoes in case I had to kick someone. Lastly I pulled on a black denim jacket I’d had custom made years before by an understanding tailor. It had extra pockets sewn into the reinforced inner lining, steel chain mail around the left arm for dogs and knives, and a hidden pocket in the back with a single-edged razor blade as a last-ditch weapon. At the dresser I selected some ID and tucked it away in my front pocket along with four twenty-dollar bills and a roll of quarters in case I had to punch someone. Then I was ready to dance. On my way out Claire called again and then repeated, “Instinct, reflex, and momentum.”
Her smile was sweet and she went on, “And if Smiley comes back alone I will kill him. It’s a promise.”
It took thirty minutes on the bus heading west and north to reach near to where I wanted to be. Had I walked I could have been there in about the same time. East/west travel in the North End really had a way to go.
Hell had been built into the front of a hotel with a beer vendor around back, rooms on the second and third floors, and parking space in lots on either side of the hotel so no one had to park on the busy street. Some effort had been made to grow trees and bushes along the outer edges of the parking lot
and there were two planters right in front of the doors full of juniper bushes that you could smell a block away. The windows of the bar were painted black and the noise shook me as I neared. Heavy country rap about saving a horse, with the bass turned up so high the sidewalk itself seemed to vibrate. I paused between the junipers and looked down at a ground littered with spent cigarette butts and a brick wall covered in burn marks where people had butted out.
The sharp brick corners of the entryway were covered in sheets of stainless steel, marred by deep scratches. The steel was there to stop the brick from crumbling away if hit by fists or skull or whatever. Up close I could see that some of the scratches were words, but not good ones, not the happy graffiti that I occasionally saw in the city. No, I LOVE YOU! and IT’LL GET BETTER or (my favourite) YOU’RE A GOOD PERSON AND YOU DESERVE TO HAVE GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TO YOU! Instead there were words and ideas of pain and rebellion and hate. RAHOWA, for racial holy war, a white supremacist credo, anti-Jew, antiblack, anti everyone who didn’t have “blood in the face,” by which the racists meant people who could blush. There was also 88, the eighth letter times two, or HH for HEIL HITLER, and 198 for SH or SIEG HEIL, and of course the infamous 13 for marijuana. Some song lyrics flashed into my head about a guy wanting ink done and getting 31 instead of 13. So I was smiling when I walked into the place, which was a mistake.
“What the fuck you smiling for?”
There was a big guy, six eight and 300 pounds at least, not much of it fat, standing just inside the door, holding a wall up. It was very dark and he didn’t sound angry, just someone doing their business, which was to be intimidating.
“I’m just a happy man.”
He didn’t believe me but accepted my three-dollar cover
charge. I walked into a big room full of noise with pool tables, lots of battered tables for customers, and a crooked bar along one wall.
The whole place was a dance. People at the tables stood up and went to talk closely to other people at other tables, slot-machine players raised their hands for more change, pool players shot the balls, won and lost, and moved away or towards another table.
A pool player missed a shot and slammed his cue down and stalked away to a table in the corner where a young white girl curled her hands protectively around something blue in a tall glass. In the States they passed a law requiring that manufacturers start putting blue dye in Rohypnol, the date-rape drug of choice. The result was an increase in sales of blue lagoons and blue Hawaii’s and blue daiquiris in a certain kind of nightclub.
It was that kind of nightclub.
A drunken guy came out of the bathroom energized and headed into the music. A girl in a bright red silk shirt ran her nails up the jean-covered thigh of a balding man whose leather vest advertised the United States 101st Airborne Division. From where I was I could see her other hand was making small loving circles in the lap of the man’s middle-aged female companion. Everyone was smiling.
“… you…”
A loser at a pool table reached for the white ball and I could see a band of tension crease his forehead as the brown bouncer stepped behind him and put his arm neatly around his neck. Slowly the ball was lowered to the table and the man apologized and walked away.
“… arrested DWI …”
There was laughter from a nearby table where two thickset
middle-aged white guys and two equally beefy brown-skinned men sat. DWI, driving while Indian. Or DWI, driving while intoxicated. One of the brown men snorted and said loudly, “It wouldn’t have been fucking funny if it happened to you.”
Which meant he’d been Driving While Indian.
Out of curiosity I went into the men’s bathroom and washed my hands. There were no mirrors, only a sheet of polished steel along three walls. There were also no urinals, just a porcelain lead to a trough in the floor. No one was using the facilities, so I popped into a stall and saw that the toilet tank’s top was covered in sheets of sandpaper glued into place. That stopped people from cutting lines of cocaine but wasn’t quite as extreme as some bars I’d been to, where the owners would spray surfaces with WD-40, which turned coke into unusable slush.
The sandpaper also stopped casual bathroom quickies quickly and painfully. The WD-40 stopped the same quickies but in a funnier fashion.
Back outside there were signs behind the bar so I walked over to read them. NO GANG COLOURS ALLOWED, WE WILL NOT SERVE ANYONE WHO APPEARS INTOXICATED, and NO WEAPONS ALLOWED.
As I watched, a tightly wound redheaded guy walked up and ordered a pitcher of draft. He wore a red bandanna like a dew rag on his forehead, which would have meant he was a member of the Crips street gang in East LA. He also had MM embroidered on his jacket above his heart, which in prison might mean Mexican mafia. It also had a line through it and three red drops falling down.
Which meant what? A wannabe? A been there? Or maybe he was an active member in diametrically opposed organization?
He went back to his table, where he sat by himself and
drank the beer directly from the pitcher. I could see his high-topped runners and a bit of brown leather that showed when he seated himself. This satisfied me because it meant he had to be an undercover cop. No one else carried a pistol in an ankle holster.
I turned back to the signs and a vacant-faced blond girl came up and ordered two rye and gingers. When she paid I could see into her purse, where the bright red plastic handles of two carpet-cutter razors rested on top of her wallet. When she saw me looking she closed the oversized purse and went back to her table with her drinks.
“Gonna order something?”
The bartender brought me a coffee and accepted the payment and tip with bland indifference. Idly I looked at the bouncer on the stool and found he was very busy talking to a girl in a pink blouse and black leather skirt who looked underage. His hand was busy up her skirt and his face was flushed, which made the tattoos on his neck stand out even more. He had two on the left and two on the right, under his ears. Black lightning bolts, a Gestapo collar they were called, a bad tattoo, unless you were a bad dude. His hand kept busy and the girl squealed. I leaned back against the bar and watched and waited.