All We Want Is Everything

by Andrew F Sullivan

  The two Oilers nod, smiles creeping across their faces.

  “How you know all this shit, Paul? You selling for them on the side?”

  “Oh yeah, I’m selling for all those big suits now,” Last Call says. “Bissell, Kirby, Oreck, Kenmore, Panasonic. A Hoover machine, in my humble estimation, is just not worth the investment. You gotta know your machines. Gotta put a premium on suction.”

  The bartender shouts out last call. Paul waves him off.

  “How do you do that, eh Paul?” the one Oiler says. “What’s the secret?”

  “Well, it’s a trade secret for me, you know? You gotta hold ’em, feel the vibe they give you. That’s how you know. Just put a hand on them. They’ll let you know. A lot like dogs that way.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “No, you dumb shits,” Last Call roars. “I’m just fuckin’ with you. You gullible bitches.”

  Paul staggers away and waves a hand at me. He’s supporting himself against the door frame. I pull myself up out of the booth, a lone strip of duct tape tethered to the back of my jeans. Paul slams the glass doors open and I pull my coat tight against the chill. As soon as he’s out the door, the two Oilers start sniggering, slapping each other’s backs and imitating vacuum sounds.

  I follow Paul down the street into an alcove beside the Hungarian deli. Tomorrow is Toonie Tuesday for shaved salami. Someone has spray painted RUCKUS in black across the door to Paul’s apartment. The streetlight in front of his place is busted, so we stand in the teal and pink illumination of the deli sign. Snowflakes pop and hiss when they touch it.

  “Finally got the little bitch into the hole. It sticks sometimes.”

  I follow Paul up the stairs, stumbling around piles of cleaning supplies, dragging my sleeping bag behind me. I leave the garbage bags in the trunk to freeze overnight.

  “So, like I was telling you before, about Donna, you remember, right?” Last Call says.

  “You ever find out what happened?”

  He opens the door to the apartment.

  “Well, like, she calls me up later that night. Here, just toss your stuff on the end table. You can use the couch there. She calls me up and we start talking. Turns out she was volunteering that day down at the old folk’s home near our old house. Well, my old house. I don’t know.”

  I try lying down on the couch. It’s covered in sweaters and blankets. The whole place smells like stale beer and sweat seeping into the drywall. The kitchen is stacked with old beer bottles.

  “What don’t you know?”

  Paul pulls off his shirt and rubs his stretch-marked belly. Purples lines crisscross his chest.

  “Well, it’s kinda fucked man, ya think? She’d rather spend her time with some old fogies, slobbering all over themselves and trying to eat the Monopoly pieces during game hour than hang out with her Dad? Not like I was going to take her back to this dump. I know a dump when I live in one, alright? But she’d rather hang out with them for four hours than go bowling with me, or whatever? I mean, at least I can feed myself.”

  Paul turns off the lights in the kitchen. He opens up a closet and starts yanking out spools and spools of electrical cord. As I unpack my stuff, I watch him line them up against the walls. I don’t say anything as he carries two vacuums into his bedroom.

  I try to close my eyes and hear Paul bump into the television. The volume is low and a sports reel is playing. He’s shoving vacuum plugs into all the open sockets, even unplugging some lamps and an old answering machine to plug some more. He turns each one on as he goes, the sound building like a swarm across the floorboards. He runs a few more cables under his bedroom door and they tangle together in the thick, pink carpet.

  “But Donna, she’d rather be working in a place like that, for free. Volunteering,” Last Call says. “She says it’s for school, but why not work at a summer camp or some shit, you know? Go pick trash on the highway with your old man. But no, she’d rather be volunteering with the goddamn walking dead than sitting with her Dad or even going out for dinner. Who does that? Choose that kinda life. That’s the problem, man. She’s confused. Just like her mother.”

  He pulls another Dyson out of the closet and takes it into his bedroom.

  “Everyone is just too confused. So, it’s not even like it’s her fault, you know?” Last Call says. “‘She’s young, but to just see her rotting away there with them? Well, that’s gotta be lonely for her. I worry about that. I think I worry more than I should. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, right?”

  I begin climbing into my sleeping bag. Paul turns off another light, starts turning on the vacuum cleaners. I’m too tired to ask him why. I once slept with a girl who had all her stuffed animals face away from the bed when I stayed over, except for the elephants. They watched.

  “You alright if I leave these on? That alright?”

  He’s faltering now. I watch the beers sliding up behind his eyes, little capillaries bursting one by one. I can smell the hops and the gin dripping from his forehead and his pits. Paul’s shoulders shudder and wilt as he turns to the bedroom. I just want to sleep, but he isn’t finished talking yet. All around me are humming machines trying to tell him to go to goddamn bed.

  “I need to go hit the sack now. But like, don’t get freaked out by the machines, alright? Hey, you know where the bathroom is and everything? You good with pillows?”

  “I’m fine, man,” I say and close my eyes again.

  “Alright. Hope you feel—well, feels like some kinda home, right?”

  Paul turns off another light. He’s got a talking fish mounted over the door, but no batteries are left in it. The sale sticker is still attached. I can’t find the TV remote under all the sweaters.

  “Hey, Paul, man? You there?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why not just like leave the TV on, or like a radio, man?” I ask. “You really need all these going? I don’t want to ask but like, well, what about your hydro bill?”

  I don’t have to quite yell over the sound of the vacuums. True to Paul’s word, there isn’t a Hoover anywhere to be found. Just a steady uninterrupted thrum making the coffee table vibrate under my hand. The sensation travels up my arm and I feel it shake my teeth softly.

  “Huh?”

  “What about the TV? Why not just leave it on?”

  He just stares back at me with his mouth open, tongue poking out the black gap in his teeth. His jaw swings loose back and forth, trying to get a hold on the words.

  “TV ain’t—don’t got—doesn’t have any presence man. Just noise. You don’t feel nothing from it. Doesn’t pull anything at all. I can turn them all down if you want.”

  “Nah buddy, never mind. Wake me up before you get breakfast, okay? I make good eggs.”

  “Sure. Scrambled,” Last Call says. “You know how to do scrambled, right?”

  He closes the door. The room goes dark. I pull my sleeping bag over my head. The constant hum works its way into my cells like a quiet chain reaction with no end. Somewhere I hear moaning. The hair on my knuckles prickles up and the sound surrounds me as I close my eyes, swaddled in vibrations. Out there in the trembling air, Last Call dreams of voices he will recognize in sunlight, of hearts instead of motors, of daughters and the soothing weight of a hammer in a hand that no longer shakes. The moon outside is hiding from me behind the snow.

  I am dreaming of a better place than this.

  Simcoe Furriers

  Owen Frell spent his days surrounded by death. The hides of beavers, bears and a lone wolf were stretched out around him. Dust covered most of the lights in the shop on Simcoe. The windows were still covered in soap scum and the open sign was unlit. Occasionally, it would sputter to life, but the tubes were so jammed with dead flies by now, you could barely make out the letters. Sometimes Owen and Jerry would break down the beasts themselves, but usually the furs arrived on their own, still dripping. It was their job to resurrect the fragments.

  There was some amateur taxidermist across town who liked to call th
e two of them butchers and hacks, but he was the one repurposing pets as furniture, so what did he know anyway? Owen liked to tell his wife Connie they were creating art. They were recycling and reusing what Mother Nature gave them, taking the corpses of the dead and bringing back some life for thirty bucks an hour. Just like his father had before him within these very walls.

  “Now I don’t want a coat or a hat or any of that shit. I just want it made into a rug. Can you handle that, or is Jerry just running his mouth as usual? He said you guys would do it gratis.”

  The man in front of Frell was short, but his neck was ringed with wasted muscles. Something was inside him, slowly draining all of the colour from his skin. He was like one of those boxers you see on TV twenty years after their last match, a sneer replaced with drool and drooping eyes. This man’s eyes weren’t blank holes though. His blue pupils combed over everything in the shop, slowly piecing Frell together and pulling him apart. This was a man used to taking an inventory, a man used to disposing of his own waste. The man smacked his hands together and laughed. His hands were filled with fine white scars and misplaced knuckles.

  “You can handle this or should I find someone else?”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem,” Frell said. Jerry was still hiding in the bathroom.

  Two old bearded bikers had carried the corpse through the back door. They brought the head through last. Tufts from the mane caught on the hinges, but they made it fit. The lion lay on the floor before Frell now, its jaws cracked open and its stomach split by some mechanical force. Ribs and tiny shards of glass poked through the skin. Frell stepped on its tail and waited for the creature to roar. The short man popped pills into his mouth and crunched them twice.

  “I wanna keep the head, so you’re going to have to put it on ice or something for now. You got a freezer we can use here, or what?”

  “Yeah, it has a few beavers in there still, but I think the head will fit.”

  The short man nodded and pulled his hat off. Small sprigs of red hair dotted his scalp.

  “Alright then. You tell Jerry he can come out of the bathroom. We’re leaving.”

  The three men turned and the door slammed shut behind them. Frell sighed and looked down at the body on the floor. The lion’s eyes were still intact. Someone had hit it with a car, but the cold and snow had kept it in pretty good condition. The rug would probably cover a king-sized bed when it was finished. The tail was longer than Frell’s arm. That would be the first thing to go. The whole thing smelled like diesel fuel and expired beef, but he was used to that by now. His father had come home every day with a new batch of blood and fluid on his hands. It was the dust they used to treat the furs that killed him off, the alum salts and soda ash trapped inside his battered lungs. All the sinks were stained a sickly beige in his parents’ house.

  “You can come out now Jerry, you don’t need to keep hiding. We’ll get this sorted out.”

  From the bathroom, all Frell could hear was Jerry emptying his stomach.

  * * *

  “How do you lose ten thousand playing bingo?”

  The lion’s corpse had been stripped of its hide. They broke the body down into heavy pieces and stashed them in garbage bags for the incinerator. They shared the facilities with a few other shops in town. Half of them were breaking by-laws, dumping paint and old toxic cleaners down into the flames until green clouds and bursts of sulphur emerged out into the dark. No one was going to question the chunks of flesh. Most would just assume they skinned another bear.

  “You bet high. You gotta take advantage during those lightning rounds. I mean, there are rumours some of the balls are weighted so they fall out faster, but you never know which ones they are and this old biddy, Mrs. Castle, well, she plays like sixteen cards at a time, and she says that its always the eights that get weighted. You know, 58, 68, 18. So you look for a card with those and then you commit to it.”

  Jerry was a kid who stumbled into the shop one day, asking if you could make a hat out of a squirrel. There were always boys like this, ever since Frell’s father had opened the store thirty years ago. They all thought they were ready, thought it might make them tough to see how easily the skin can come apart from the flesh, how all the muscles look mechanical once the surface is stripped away. They usually left with their lunch on the floor or their eyes cast down toward their shoes. Some of them even came back as activists, occasionally screaming murderer through the mail slot or egging the windows. They weren’t ready for the eyes staring back at them from the table or the smell of the salts and dyes filling up their sinuses. Jerry stuck it out though, searching for dollars and loose change he could take to his mother who spent fifteen hours a day in the bingo hall. Once she passed from some kind of aneurysm that left her face so twisted she had to have a closed casket, Jerry inherited her seat at the head table. All his friends were seniors now, and they all had a plan for him to make the big bucks, the real score. Everybody knew the bingo halls in Larkhill were crooked. You just had to figure out the system.

  You just had to put some money on the line.

  “And somehow you end up with ten thousand owing?”

  “It gets away from you,” Jerry said. He held a skinning knife in his hand. Frell’s hands had begun to shake lately. Connie noticed it at breakfast one morning. She said it was all those powders they were tossing around in the shop to clean the furs. Frell hadn’t said anything. His wife believed it was the shop that had made him so feeble, the shop that was stealing their future even as it preserved everyone else’s fucking trophies. Connie liked to call it the trophy shop or the morgue. She didn’t drop off his lunch anymore, and there were no notes on the fridge. They were still trying for a kid, but only with all the lights off in the bedroom. Her days at the Henderson law firm downtown were always getting longer, and Frell was used to watching Jeopardy by himself now. He always lost it all on the Daily Doubles.

  “And this is supposed to repay the favour?” Frell said. He watched as Jerry stretched the fur out over the custom rack they’d had to build out of spare pieces. The lion’s hide was holding up nicely, but it was going to be a bitch to pick out all the glass from its belly. Frell ran a hand through the fur and pinched a sharp shiny piece between his thick fingers.

  “Well, some of it, you know. I still got some other stuff to deal with…”

  Frell nodded. Jerry always owed someone. This job was going to come out of his pay.

  “But nothing with the little man?”

  “Who? Crane? No, he’s just the one everything goes through. And he’s not that little. You’ve seen his hands right? That’s not from fighting, that’s just some weird sickness he’s got in him. I ain’t worried ’bout him. It’s more the two big tunas with him. They got a toolbox for all kinds of… well, they don’t use it for dishwasher repair, you know?”

  Frell turned and pulled on his coat. He was tired of the shop. The flies in the open sign had somehow multiplied since the short man had come by for his visit. The street was usually abandoned except for a comic shop on the corner and the endless line of garbage trucks that passed by on their way to the dump. Their smell wasn’t too different from the animals. The short man had been the only customer all week and Frell wasn’t even getting paid.

  “Remember, Jerry, you owe me on this one.”

  The soaped glass door slammed shut before Jerry could respond.

  * * *

  Owen Frell let the messages play while he tried to make a sandwich. The ham in the fridge was still good, but he didn’t trust the old cheddar Connie had forgotten on the counter. One of the calls was from some old timer expressing his condolences for Frell’s old man. He was still out in Winnipeg when they had the funeral, but he’d heard it was the heart. He heard the old man went out in his sleep or something. Frell knew that much was true, but he also knew his father wasn’t too peaceful near the end. Something was in his brain, something that left him chewing on pillows and asking about all the creatures he’d skinned and remade. He wa
nted to know if they were happy. Frell deleted the message and chose the honey mustard.

  Jeopardy was muted in the living room. There were no pickles for the sandwich and the next message was about Connie’s credit cards. Frell had cut most of them up, but he was sure she still had one or two kicking around. He had stopped caring. If she wanted to spend it on fancy lunches or those dresses from designers he couldn’t name, that was all right with him. She said she wanted to live and if that meant cocktails after work and three-course dinners, so be it. He just wanted to have his fridge stocked. The clock said it was 7:30, but he didn’t expect her to come home any time soon. They still tried once or twice a week, but it usually didn’t last too long. The sounds they made barely rattled the headboard. No neighbours complained anymore. Frell was getting used to sleeping in his chair. The world didn’t seem as overwhelming if he woke up already seated. All he had to do was place his feet firmly on the floor to remind him it was there.

  Frell got up to delete the message, but another one began to play before he made it to the old machine. Dr. Iverston’s office was just calling to let Connie Frell-Duncan know her results were ready. They provided a phone number, but there was no address. Frell pressed the button to save the message, but his hands shook a little. His lungs rattled and he tried not to hack phlegm up all over the house phone. Frell still refused to get a cell phone. He refused call waiting and he refused all attempts to address him by mail. He didn’t want the world to find him here.

  Alex Trebek was still explaining a Daily Double question to his contestants when Frell returned to sit in the dark living room. His hands still smelled like blood, even after washing them twice at the kitchen sink. One of the players decided to bet all he could on the question, but Frell still had the TV on mute. It was something about the space race. He couldn’t read the text. Frell stretched out his legs and placed his wide feet on the coffee table. He knew Dr. Iverston was not their family doctor. Frell had never heard of him. The man on the television knew the answer. Frell could see it in his eyes. He imagined it was something about Russians and a dog spat out into the darkness of space. Frell though it should have been a lion. Maybe someone would have heard it out there in the dark. Someone would have saved it from the cold instead of leaving it to die all by itself. The contestant smiled and Frell knew the game was settled.