No Call Too Small

by Oscar Martens

  PRAISE FOR NO CALL TOO SMALL

  “Martens’s striking, perceptive collection illuminates a range of Canadians in moments of bad luck and dissatisfaction. In the title story, an unnamed Port Moody, B.C., cop, whose face has been disfigured from a dog attack, refuses to wear his prosthetic nose, costing him his relationship and earning him the nickname “The Face.” Martens’s haunting, darkly funny situations, captured in crisp, spare prose, will appeal to fans of George Saunders.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “Oscar Martens’s characters hurtle their way toward potential disaster or redemption in these vivid stories of lives burdened by misunderstandings and disappointment, usually self-inflicted. Martens’s strong prose is a pleasure to read, with dark humour and lively storytelling that brings a quirky humanity to his characters.”

  — Janie Chang, author of Dragon Springs Road

  “A young girl stuck on a Ferris wheel in a lightning storm, caught between the madness of her manic, idiot father and a withdrawn mother. A group of locals watching the action as a boat launch becomes a dangerous, bitterly complex, and life defining moment. A young man following his heart in a car that is barely alive – a car held together by desire and temerity. A dystopian nightmare that flips the world upside-down and inside-out. Oscar Martens is the twitchy love child of Tom Waits, Charles Bukowski and Ricky Gervais. These stories are lean, and loaded, and devastatingly true. In just a few pages, Martens throws his readers into the deep end of a swimming pool swarming with sharks, or piranhas, or hungry polar bears—and you, dear reader, have a flesh wound. These short stories read like brilliant, poignant novels. Highly recommended.”

  — Thomas Trofimuk, author of Waiting for Columbus

  “Oscar Martens’s collection is a warm, safe port in the storm that is life these days. His writing is vivid and clear, his characters honest and their stories full of the details and emotional truth that make them real. I read these stories, one by one, as a nightly ritual, as a special treat before going to sleep to call up the dreams that make for a peaceful sleep.”

  — Jennifer Haupt, Editor, One True Thing, Psychology Today

  “Deeply humane and often darkly funny, Martens’s stories appeal to the slightly off-centre observer in all of us. He writes with luminous honesty of the restlessness of never quite fitting in, whether it be in the landscape, family or community. From the girl who rides the Ferris wheel all day to try to draw customers into her father’s failing prairie gas station to the cop who removes his prosthetic nose when he wants to scare criminals into submission, these characters invite tenderness as they provoke and entertain.”

  — Nadine McInnis, author of Delirium for Solo Harp

  “Taut, efficient and always just a beat away from heartbreak, No Call Too Small is a beautifully crafted collection. Martens deftly explores surprising and unexpected worlds, using them as a prism to dissect and understand human nature. With each successive story, I felt I was in the hands of a writer who knows more than a thing or two about love and pain.”

  — Marcia Butler, author of Pickle’s Progress

  “I knew Oscar Martens was the real thing when I first read him over twenty years ago. These new stories offer fresh evidence aplenty. Smart, honest, sparely eloquent, moving, humane, and disillusioned in the healthiest sense of a word that gets way too much bad press. Martens is funny, too, desperately so—and how else is a writer supposed to observe and portray this world we’ve made?”

  — Steven Heighton, Governor General’s Literary Award winner and author of The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep

  Copyright © 2020 Oscar Martens

  Cover and internal design © 2020 Central Avenue Marketing Ltd.

  Cover Design: Michelle Halket

  Cover Photography: Courtesy & Copyright: Unsplash Anastasia Zhenina

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Central Avenue Publishing, an imprint of Central Avenue Marketing Ltd. www.centralavenuepublishing.com

  Published in Canada

  Printed in United States of America

  1. FICTION / Short Stories - Single Author 2. FICTION / Literary

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: No call too small : stories / Oscar Martens.

  Names: Martens, Oscar, 1968- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020015902X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200159038 | ISBN 9781771681957 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771681964 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771681971 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8576.A7654 N62 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Lyette

  CONTENTS

  NO CALL TOO SMALL

  THE SCHADENFREUDE RAIL

  NEW

  BEHAVIOUR BEFITTING A YOUNG MAN

  BREAKING ON THE WHEEL

  CAPTURE AND RELEASE

  HOW BEAUTIFUL, HOW MOVING

  IMAGINING MILAN

  THE JANITOR

  COMMAND MYSTIQUE

  I SEE A MAN

  KILLERS ARE USEFUL

  LAKE PINOT

  NO CALL TOO SMALL

  WE SIT IN OUR CRUISER AT THE FAR END of the lot in Belcarra Park, where all is calm except for the two squirrels I’ve been tracking. Observed but unreported, one has scored a cheese doodle from under the picnic bench, and the other seems determined to take it by force, spiralling up the trunk of a nearby pine. Subject is a few inches tall; half a pound; light-brown fur; bushy tail; nervous, darting eyes; and twitchy body language. Victim is a few inches tall; half a pound; light-brown fur; bushy tail; nervous, darting eyes; and twitchy body language. The sharp crack that startles me is not gunfire, but a seagull dropping a clam onto the pavement to smash open its shell. This seagull of interest is known to police and has been seen in the area with his associates, harassing the eagle that now sits atop an eighty-foot cedar. Current rainy conditions do not warrant intervention.

  The long road in creates a secluded feeling, with evergreens crowding in so tightly that the sun rarely dries out the green trail of slime running down the centre of the lanes. Down on the dock, anglers keep their small-fry catch in pails. Theft, though not likely, is possible. We monitor this entire park, from the barbeques to the gazebos, down to the beach where kids overturn rocks to watch crabs scatter. These are the mean streets of Port Moody, now peaceful, but only until rival families clash over the last shaded picnic table. Angelo takes a sip of his coffee and stares out over the water before asking my opinion.

  —Do you think Rockford was happy?

  I know he’s referring to Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files, a popular show from the ’70s about a private investigator.

  —Single guy. Lives in a trailer. Does that sound happy?

  —But it’s waterfront, and he can move that trailer any time.

  Rockford doesn’t carry a gun. It isn’t, as Angelo assumes, a spiritual angle, a belief that the world can be negotiated without force, or a Buddhist-inspired pledge to non-violence, or the triumph of intelligence over thuggery. It’s because Rockford is a felon. Angelo won’t hear this, because that’s not the Rockford he knows and loves. He romanticizes a life I see as quiet, hard, and lonely. Rockford may have an ocean view, but the trailer stigma never dies, no matter where you park it. Imagine his date stepping inside, clutching her purse a littl
e tighter, hoping that when her eyes adjust to the darkness, her grim expectations will be proven wrong. Can you call it a home if someone can tow it in fifteen minutes? At night, rats lured to the food stands sniff out scattered crumbs from hot-dog buns and french fries dropped in the sand. They can easily chew through the cheap flooring in the trailer if there aren’t already plenty of cracks and holes.

  Without the most basic barriers, the trailer is vulnerable to attack. There’s no fence or hedge to slow down an approach, should anyone wish to hurt him, and plenty would. A large truck could level his “home” in seconds. Rockford is not really there. There is no post, beam, or foundation that fixes his structure to the ground. He has no current or future claim on that corner of the parking lot. No one in the area considers him a neighbour or would fight for his right to be there. His stay depends on the indifference or generosity of local authorities. What kind of life is that? Angelo won’t acknowledge the difference between living in a waterfront house and squatting in a prefab shack. Our bum PI is borrowing his seaside experience, not owning it.

  Angelo resembles Rockford if Rockford were a young, trim, good-looking Italian. His light build and courteous manner suggest he’s ill-equipped to tackle a drunken hooligan, but that never seems necessary. Calm tones prevail on our shift, and Angelo would likely be talking about last night’s game by the time he tucked a wild one into the backseat of our car. He drove me to this park during our first patrol together, and I was surprised to find this much wilderness on the edge of Port Moody. I’d been through Stanley Park and up North Shore mountains, but Belcarra is a low-traffic area, off the major routes, and that day, we almost had it to ourselves. When we came to the end of the parking lot, he stopped the car and turned to me.

  —Would you mind if I looked at your face for a few minutes? I only have to do this once.

  He stared at the hole where my nose used to be, the wound left by the dog’s teeth, lingering on the main show for half a minute before moving on to the deep scars on my cheeks and the small, triangular cutout on my upper lip where teeth show even when I’m not smiling. Angelo leaned closer, drawn into my topography, a terrain of pathways, lines, and trenches.

  —I think your face is leaking.

  Clair said almost the same thing after I told her there would be no more surgeries. Frankenface was tired of the cutting and the stitching and the sculpting and the shaping. She brought my prosthetic and a box of Kleenex from the bathroom and slammed them down in front of me. The clip-on was supposed to boost my self-esteem, but the past cannot be restored like an antique chair.

  —Why don’t you wear your nose?

  —It’s a prosthetic.

  —It’s a nose. It’s 95 percent better than having no nose.

  —It’s 100 percent fake.

  Do you like me better in disguise? Do you like this better than the truth? I considered, then aborted, a dozen things I could say to slow her progress through the house. I sat at the dinner table, rolling the blob of silicone between my palms, wondering if the colour could be adjusted with makeup to match my skin tone as we cycled through the seasons. She often used her overnight bag whenever she stomped over to her sister’s place, the final punctuation to any fight, but that night I heard the bumping and scraping of the big hard suitcase she hauled from the back of the closet. She paused to let me know she had no choice but to distance herself from someone she considered self-destructive. She wouldn’t watch while I did this to myself.

  I never had the chance to tell her about the Whittaker rape at Suter Brook Towers the week before, how I got into the back of the car with that kid who had been wisely silent up to that point, how I faced him, secretly pleased with his horror, asking simple questions as the member in the front seat scrambled to write it all down. On Thursday, a young hothead with bloody knuckles and a blind fury for anything in punching range just stopped, straightened up from his fighting stance, and stared at me, long enough for the bruised bouncer to get him in a headlock.

  When it’s time to roll out of the park and stop some crime, I open the window to take in the forest air, as I always do. Tiny Tim, my first partner, would always whine and complain when I did this, turning the heat up to maximum. Tiny was just like Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies minus the driving, shooting, squinting, punching, and crime solving. Every one of Tiny’s 280 pounds was unhappy to be stuck with The Face, and I wasn’t thrilled to be paired with a guy who seemed determined to take on life from a seated position. How typical that one so desperately in need of exercise would do anything to avoid it, insisting on drive-through, assuring me at every traffic stop that he’d get the next one.

  —Do you think someone could actually pull off the fire-hose stunt?

  Angelo is driving very slowly, as if he too is straining to consider all the possibilities posed by his own question. In the first Die Hard movie, John McClane is on the roof of an office tower that has been rigged with explosives by a bunch of foreign terrorists. John stands at the edge of the roof, understandably hesitant, when a helicopter with a sniper hovers into view. John more or less drops off the edge as the roof explodes, but when he hits the side of the building, he doesn’t break through the glass. He’s forced to plant his bloody feet against the window, spring off, and shoot his way through, landing roughly on a pile of shards.

  Angelo points to the rusted-out Corolla on the side of the road with its right headlight smashed.

  —Isn’t that Clement’s car?

  He’s half off the road, the underside of the car hung up on the shoulder. Angelo sees the bright patch of colour in the ditch before I do, a cyclist next to his mangled bike, not moving. We get out and find Clement still in the driver’s seat, seemingly unable to form words, a nice little pile of puke in his lap, some painted over the steering wheel. Angelo reaches down to the floor of the car, pulls out the half-full bottle of vodka, and throws it into the bush, lazy arcs of booze spitting from the mouth like a wonky sprinkler. He wants me to use the cruiser to nudge Clement’s car back onto the road.

  —What about the guy in the ditch?

  —He’s gone, Face. Look at the angle of his neck.

  I go over and check anyway, my warm fingers on his cold, wet wrist. It looks like he was launched into the ditch headfirst, the weight of his body snapping his neck.

  —Let’s go, Face! Running out of time here.

  I look up from the bright, spandex-wrapped corpse as my partner loads Clement into the backseat of the Corolla. I can’t move, or won’t, staring at Angelo as the cold rain works its way down the back of my neck.

  —Am I doing this by myself?

  Still not moving, not talking. I hope another car comes along, or a school bus with twenty sets of unblinking eyes to witness this, even a single person, walking her dog along the side of the road. Looking up into the clouds, drops sting my eyes with tiny shocks. Somehow, somewhere, in that grey, stewing mass, vapour bonds with dust, and droplets are born, joining into heavier drops that blow apart when they hit the hood of the car. The fragments are reabsorbed into a blob, and when the mass overwhelms surface tension, it bursts into a rivulet, a tiny vein-like stream that joins others as they flow down the slope toward the ground.

  —Face!

  Nobody’s a criminal yet. Nobody’s a liar. Maybe if we stand still we can maintain this pure state, three cops holding rigid against the future. A crow scolds vigorously from a nearby tree as Angelo uses the cruiser to push on Clement’s car. He switches over to the Corolla and floors it, the wheels spitting out bits of gravel and grass as it pulls off the shoulder, and then they’re gone, blue smoke hanging in the air.

  The crime scene is more complicated now: chips off the Corolla’s taillight shattered by Angelo as he pushed; glass from the right front headlight at the point of impact; the long, angry trail of the spinning tire. I see this area cordoned off with yellow tape, the entrance to the park closed to incoming traffic, a poster with nicely labelled photos on an easel in a courtroom, evidence marker
s like yellow flowers growing from the pavement, counting off a series of mistakes. And the bottle, with its excellent prints, still in the bush, where no one will look for it.

  I spit out water that has funneled into my wound, and my thoughts return to the bruised and bloody John McClane, standing at the edge of the roof. There’s plenty to consider before he jumps. Assuming a fifty-foot drop, he might be close to half of terminal velocity by the time it came tight. The hose has little flexibility, so the stress at the point of attachment would be significant. It could easily snap his back. If it were tied around his waist, it might spin him like a propeller, sending his gun flying. Also, how much does a cop know about tying knots? If he ties a bowline, the loop won’t tighten on him, but he might slip through. If the knot slips, it will cinch tight on his body at the end of the drop, breaking his ribs, or clamping down so hard on his chest that he won’t be able to breathe. John stands on the edge, the odd gust pulling at his pant legs while he considers two equally unappealing choices.

  The biker sucks in a huge, jagged breath and rolls over onto his back. His eyes follow mine until they don’t. While I call for an ambulance, there are two shallow breaths and nothing more. It’s impossible to get directly over his chest on the muddy slope, so I push on an angle instead of straight down, afraid that a shift might damage his neck. My muscles already burn, and I can’t even hear the sirens yet. Bright blood streams out of his nose, and I wonder if my compressions are at fault.

  I hear the sirens now, two of them, and soon the flashing lights are near. I’m still cracking ribs on a corpse, pumping maniacally like an idiot, dropping down every thirty compressions to puff air into his bloody mouth. I collapse as soon as the first two paramedics arrive. The next crew attends to me, the woman stopping for a moment when she looks at my face. She breaks out a large gauze pad to hold over my nose hole.

  —Darren? Get over here. Help me look.