Once Upon a Time in West Toronto

by Terri Favro

  Prima told the doctor Bum Bum was kicked by a horse.

  He hasn’t seen Rocco since.

  “Who hurt you?” Claire asks, her casual question sneaking up on him.

  “Nobody. I got kicked by a horse.” It’s a good story—why tinker?

  Claire snorts. “I wasn’t talking about your knee.”

  Bum Bum senses an invisible dog in the back seat, or a sucker punch about to plough into the side of his head through the window. Claire’s face glows in the light of the dashboard like one of Prima’s Mass card virgins. She pats his crushed knee, her warmth penetrating the thick bandage.

  “You were in love with someone who didn’t love you back, weren’t you?”

  “Sort of,” he grunts.

  Claire fiddles with the radio again. “I can spot a broken heart a mile away. I’m psychic. Don’t worry, you’re so good-looking, someone’ll fall in love with you in Toronto for sure. Hey, I got the munchies, Benny, how about some cake?”

  Holding open the bag, he watches her scoop out a mess of chocolate fudge and lick it off her fingers like a dirty angel. He tries a bit of frosting: it’s not as bad as he remembered.

  They have just tossed the end of the roach out the window, thank God (there He is again), when two white lights and a cherry red one appear, dead ahead.

  “Shit fuck hell piss damn,” sighs Claire, hitting a button to lower the windows.

  Bum Bum pees himself, a little. Cops scare him almost as much as German Shepherd-Lab crosses.

  “Maybe we should turn around,” he suggests.

  The girl shakes her head. “I’m not so good at three point turns. Besides they’ll think we’re trying to get away and that’ll bring ’em right down on us. Wonder what they’re doing out here anyway?”

  “Looking for you?” suggests Bum Bum. “You just said the car was stolen.”

  The girl shakes her head. “My stepdad’s probably still sleeping it off. Doesn’t even know the car’s gone yet, I bet. What about you? Anything you done that might deserve a road block?”

  Bum Bum doesn’t answer. Remembering the remaining weed in Claire’s purse, he grabs the baggie and rolling papers and tosses them out the window in the direction of the ditch.

  Then he reaches into his underwear and pulls out I, Robot. His hands shake as he holds it in front of him. It’s damp and smells of pee. He sinks the paperback into the crushed black heart of his bag of birthday cake and tosses it on the floor under the glove.

  Claire slows the car as they approach the roadblock. At first Bum Bum can only see one regional prowler, but then he notices a string of provincial police cars parked on the verge, six in a row, one half in, half out of the ditch. What the hell are they doing? Bum Bum wonders. In one of the fields bordering the road, a light illuminates an expanse of ground, as if they’re getting ready to have a night game of touch football. A crowd of OPP officers is standing out there in the mud, hands on hips, watching another bunch of guys in hardhats. Some of them have shovels.

  Bum Bum sees what they’re doing now. Digging. A couple of dogs are running around, sniffing the ground. He feels his stomach flatten itself from a near empty pouch into a tight little pancake. Chunks of Prima’s cake threaten to come back up in a hurry.

  How deep will they go before they find what they’re looking for? He’s heard plenty of stories about disposals being done in the soft earth of Bramborough Township. None of the victims ever make the news.

  At the roadblock, Claire is polite. Relaxed. Cool. “How can I help you officer?” she asks.

  The cop, a big-bellied guy with a bullet-shaped head full of black stubble, says nothing. Shines a light in Bum Bum’s face, then Claire’s, then back to Bum Bum’s. “What the hell you kids doing out here this time of night?”

  “Just driving my friend home, sir,” Claire says brightly.

  “From where? You got New York state plates.”

  “Niagara Falls, sir, just on the other side of the bridge.”

  “Let’s see your licence and ownership.”

  To Bum Bum’s relief, Claire pulls the papers out of the top of the sun visor.

  The cop shines a light on them, then turns it back on Bum Bum’s face. “You a draft dodger or something? Where’s home?”

  No time to concoct a lie. “Concession Twelve near Orchard Road.”

  “That’s ten miles in the other direction. Pop the trunk and get out of the car.”

  The cops search the Corvair, right there on the side of the road. They examine Claire’s couch cushions, sniffing and shaking them. The big cop growls into his walkie-talkie: “We could use Fritzie here, over.” A little cop comes out of the field with a Doberman on a choke-chain. Bum Bum is queasy with terror. Of all dogs, he fears Dobermans the most. Fritzie has docked ears and the black expressionless eyes of a shark.

  The little cop takes off her chain. First thing she does is charge up to Bum Bum and stick her nose in his crotch. He prays, to no one in particular, for a quick death. Don’t let it hurt, he begs.

  The little cop laughs. “Hey, Fritzie likes you!”

  After a few sniffs, the Doberman loses interest in Bum Bum and runs around the car excitedly. The cop opens the passenger side door and Fritzie sticks her nose into the bag of cake under the glove. Bum Bum is slick with sweat.

  The little cop peers inside the bag. “What the hell’s this? Looks like shit.”

  Bum Bum swallows hard. Last thing he wants is for them to find the cash. “There was no place else to go, and she didn’t want to stop the car, so I, so I…”

  The little cop grunts in disgust. He tosses the bag into a ditch. “You kids these days, you’re like animals. You know that? I don’t know where the hell the world is going. Sometimes I wish the Rooskis had dropped the bomb on your whole generation.”

  They don’t have a reason to hold us, Bum Bum tells himself. Problem is, they don’t need a reason. Maybe they’re just bored. Maybe they’re naturally suspicious. Maybe they don’t like kids. Maybe Frank discovered the money missing from Prima’s underwear drawer and alerted them. He sits silently beside Claire as the two of them ride in the back seat of the cop car. It’s the big bullet-headed cop driving, with the little cop at the wheel of the Corvair, following behind. Claire folds her tiny hands over her tummy. She stares at the back of the cop’s head like she’s bored as hell.

  “Sucks the big one,” she says to Bum Bum.

  At the cop shop, they talk to Claire alone, while Bum Bum waits in a small concrete room the colour of wet mud. They won’t let him use his crutches. The pressure on his knee, as he limps into the room, is excruciating.

  The little cop finally returns and motions to him. Bum Bum limps into the next room and takes a seat in a plastic chair next to Claire. The big cop from the roadblock has given her a cream soda. He doesn’t offer one to Bum Bum.

  “You look familiar, kid. You’re an Andolini, right?” says the cop.

  “I’m not an Andolini. I just live there.”

  “Oh yeah. I know you now, you’re the vagrant Prima took in,” says Bullethead, happy to get him pegged. In a town the size of Bramborough everyone is supposed to know everyone else. “Some people don’t know when they got it good, I guess.”

  The guy picks up the phone, and sticks a thick index finger into the dial. Bum Bum realizes with a sinking heart that the cop knows the Andolinis’ number off by heart.

  Bum Bum bends over. He’s pretty sure he’s going to blow chunks on the cop’s shoes. Head on his knees, he listens to the cop ask for Frank. It’s clear he’s being told that Frank’s not there.

  “Who’s speaking? Oh—hey, Rocco. Your dad not there?”

  Now Bum Bum is certain he’s going to spew. He feels the cop’s hand shaking his shoulder.

  “He wants to talk to you,” says the cop, offering the phone.

  Rocco’
s voice sounds puzzled. “What the hell? What you think you’re doing? Nonna Prima’s going to kill you.”

  “Thought I’d better split,” mumbles Bum Bum.

  He hears the scratching sound of Rocco lighting a cigarette, something he always does when he’s trying to think. Bum Bum can picture him exhaling, rubbing his dark eyes with one hand.

  “We kind of crossed the line, eh? Look, I was just horsing around. Testing you. It didn’t mean nothing, Bum. Locker room stuff. Anyways, sorry about Dad hurting you so bad. Guess it was my fault.”

  Bum Bum hears something he’s never heard before in Rocco’s voice. Fear. He feels something new toward Rocco, too. Anger. He wants to say: Fuck off you fucking fuck-head! You’re too chicken-shit to admit you wanted it, you coward!

  But he doesn’t say any of this because he knows that Bullethead will yank his arms behind his back and snap on the cuffs if he starts swearing at Rocco. Besides, Bum Bum now has what Prima would call “a mission”: to get Claire out of here. Slumped in her plastic chair, sucking listlessly on her cream soda, she looks like a thin-shelled egg about to crack, the authorities (whoever they are) ready to swoop down like flying monkeys and carry her immaculately-conceived baby back to the land of black ooze. Like a hero from an Isaac Asimov novel, Bum Bum must get Claire to a safe haven on a star cluster far, far away—Alpha Centauri, if possible, Toronto, if not. As for Rocco, Bum Bum knows it’s better to have something over him. Might come in handy later.

  “S’okay. Not your fault, Roc,” answers Bum Bum steadily, even though it was.

  Silence. A sigh. “Maybe you’re right. I’ll figure out a way to explain things to Nonna Prima.”

  “Thanks,” says Bum Bum.

  Bullethead is watching him, head tipped back, eyes half closed, as if he’s trying to decide whether Bum Bum’s worth the trouble. Bum Bum knows that look well.

  Rocco says, “That cop who brought you in? He’s a volunteer Golden Gloves coach. He’s a prime asshole but he won’t want to piss me off. He’s got no reason to keep you. Where you headed?”

  Bum Bum pauses for a moment. Marcello would say, measure once, cut twice, think ahead. Mr. Spock would add that the logical thing to do in this situation would be to lie. He might not want the Andolinis to come looking for him.

  “Out west.”

  A long sigh of relief reaches Bum Bum through the phone line.

  “I should’ve figured. Say hi to Marcello, or whatever he’s calling himself. Tell him, be careful. Senior’s still on the warpath. Niagara Regional, too. Now, put the cop back on.”

  After a short discussion during which the cop does nothing but listen to Rocco and go um hum um hum, Bum Bum and Claire are free to go. She puts her arm around him, helping him limp out to her car.

  “How come they let us go?”

  “My family wants rid of me. They got a lot of pull,” says Bum Bum, only realizing after the fact that he’s referred to the Andolinis as “family.” “Look, Claire, we have to drive out near the concession road and lay low till the cops leave so I can get that bag out of the ditch. I hid money in it.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” says Claire, opening the passenger side door and helping him in. “How much money?”

  “Five hundred.”

  Claire shakes her head in amazement. “Wow. That’ll keep us going for years in Toronto.”

  Bum Bum eases himself into the shotgun seat thinking: Us. Yeah. Benny-and-Claire. He likes the sound of that.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he says.

  4. THE PEACH AND THE DITCH DIGGER

  TORONTO, ATLAS AVE. AT ST. CLAIR WEST, SEPTEMBER 1975

  “A BASIMENTO DEEP ENOUGH for a tall man to stand up in?” says Marcello doubtfully. “What the hell for?”

  Lou Agnelli sighs. Before hiring Marcello, he’d never had a labourer ask so many damn questions. Most of the guys just want to go to work, get their pay, go home. Marcello always wants to know why.

  “Because ’cakes like it that way,” Lou explains patiently, the blueprints unfurled across his kitchen table. “Those new houses in the suburbs, they all got a finished rumpus room. People want the same in the old houses too so they can fix up the basimento and rent it out.”

  “Who’d want to live in a basement apartment?” asks Marcello, still skeptical.

  “Joosta-comes,” says Lou. “They take anything they can get.”

  When Marcello showed up at his door looking for a job, Lou hired him on the spot. You could see right away that he was the kind of guy who wasn’t afraid to swing a sledgehammer. He’s come in handy in other ways, too. If you need a quick square footage calculation, Marcello can figure it out in his head. And his English is so good, he sounds more like a mangiacake—a regular Canadian—than an Italian guy. Lou has even started taking Marcello with him to see customers. He thinks that they respect him more when he shows up with Marcello. And although Lou never says it out loud, a big guy like Marcello might make certain customers think twice about skipping out on their bills. “This customer we’re seeing today, if he got any questions I don’t answer right away, you say something,” Lou instructs him on the ride over.

  “Yeah, sure, okay, no problem.” Marcello frowns at the increasingly ritzy facades as they drive north on Yonge.

  “Nice homes, eh? I lay bricks on a few of these, years ago.”

  Marcello takes a drag on his Export A, pushing himself further back in his seat to find more legroom. “Too ostentatious.” He rolls the words around in his mouth with his cigarette smoke.

  Lou reaches over and grabs the boy’s shoulder, giving him a shake—the way he would a son, if he had one. “Be nice. This customer we see today, he practically live in a castle.”

  Marcello lights a fresh cigarette off the butt of the last one. “I’m always nice.”

  The customer is a middle-aged guy—“Some hotshot lawyer,” Lou says—living in a big Tudor rock pile in North Toronto. He also owns condemned houses on the Corso Italia that he wants Lou to fix up so he can make a bundle renting them out to joosta-comes. When Lou and Marcello drive up in the truck, he comes trotting down his flagstone path to greet them, in the kind of get-up the movie stars wear on Johnny Carson—come si dice?—a leisure suit. He shakes Lou’s hand and slaps Marcello’s back as if he were a workhorse. No introductions are offered.

  The leisure-suited customer leads Lou and Marcello through an oak door with an iron knocker in the shape of a Gothic letter C. So, he’s Mr. C., thinks Marcello, trying to come up with a good name for the customer. Christ. Crap. Crybaby. Clunking the knocker as he walks in, he settles on Cake. Lou gives him a look: Watch it.

  They walk through one room after another, Lou chatting with Mr. Cake about the crazy weather, the cancellation of the Apollo 18 Moon shot, and that arsehole Trudeau, in the customer’s words. Marcello trails them, taking in the oversupply of furniture, paintings of horses and landscapes, and mounted animal heads. In a distant room, someone is plunking out scales on a piano. Marcello winces at every wrong note. They finally reach a high-ceilinged reception hall, brilliant with sunshine, where a teenage girl in riding breeches sits marooned at a baby grand, a finger exercise book propped in front of her like a death sentence.

  Mr. Cake’s daughter can’t play worth a damn but Marcello shoots her a hey-baby-you’re-cute smile. Eyes wide, her lips form a glossy O. A string of wrong notes echoes through the vast space.

  Lou turns and frowns at Marcello: What the hell you doing?

  Marcello grins and shrugs.

  As they leave the room, he gives the girl a wave. She waves back timidly. Mr. Cake doesn’t notice.

  At last, they enter the room the customer calls his study, all dark hardwood and leather chairs. When Lou rolls out the plans on a wide oak desktop, the customer taps his finger on the proposed basement height and shakes his head. “Not deep enough, Lou. I want it hig
h enough for someone like your big Luigi here to be able to walk around without cracking his head.”

  Lou takes out a stub of pencil. “How tall are you, Cello?”

  Marcello glares at Mr. Cake. “Six-three,” he answers, his voice thick with anger. “And a half. By the way, mister, my name’s not Luigi.”

  The man laughs. “Hey Lou, I thought he was one of your no-speaka-English boys. Where’d you get this guy?”

  Lou laughs nervously. He can sense that Marcello is starting to steam up. “Oh, Marcello here, he’s a smart guy, he’s in university. He works for me on the side.”

  “No shit! I thought all you Wop guys wanted to be grease monkeys.”

  “I’m going to teach high school math,” says Marcello, through gritted teeth.

  “Bully for you. I just hope you’re good with a shovel.”

  “Marcello is very strong,” Lou assures him. “He dig out your basimento in under a week, I bet.”

  Marcello says nothing until they get back in the truck. “I don’t like him, Lou. He’s an asshole.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but his money’s good,” answers Lou. “And you better watch yourself, making love to that young girl back there.”

  Marcello laughs. “Make love? Lou, I was flirting with her! Make love is something you say when you have sex.”

  “Beh! You kids today all have such dirty mouths. Don’t think you’re the only good-looking Italian in town, paesano! I used to have girls look at me like that when I was your age. Not that Canadian girls would give guys like me the time of day. That’s why I marry Lina by proxy, bring her over from Sicily. Best way to get a wife in the fifties.”

  “Yeah, well. Times have changed,” murmurs Marcello.

  The two drive in silence for a few minutes. Glancing at his watch, Lou says, “Want Lina to set a place for you?”

  “That’ll be the third time this week, Lou. If Ida’s not home, I can fend for myself.”