One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  Ten minutes went by. I began to wonder if the publisher’s representative had come early and wandered away, bedazzled, but with plans to return.

  When I ventured into the next aisle in search of her, I found Jesus instead. He was smiling up at a wall display of staff mug-shots, each with its own snappy caption underneath. Cathy is always happy and smiling. Rod has a perfect attendance record. Angie excels at customer service. Glenn is our must accurate price checker. Marcie is our fastest cashier.

  I could picture the new Lila framed between the portraits of Marcie and of Glenn, smiling that smile that wasn’t a smile at all, her eyes looking past the camera, no doubt toward some promised land. Lately she had begun to talk about getting a little place in the country, somewhere off the grid. But where would she plug in her straightening iron, her TV, her phone charger, I wanted to ask. She had begun to talk about food security. She had invaded my den and talked animatedly and at length about the very real dangers of starvation, especially for those living on an island. Luckily, she said, the big-box store had a one-year emergency meal kit, consisting of a total of 32,733 total servings of freeze dried and dehydrated food.

  Jesus interrupted my reverie. He pointed to the pictures on the wall and told me I should be more like these people. I countered by telling him that these people were all dupes, that they were serfs, slaves to the machine, creatures whose souls had been replaced with materialistic longings. They were the living dead, I told him.

  I could see my future with Lila, the living dead on the couch at home, growing ever more bloated in mind and body until the day I would find her having choked to death on her own vomit, a caulking gun loaded with chocolate at her feet and the one still in her hand leaving a puddle on her chest, having continued to discharge long after her dead finger let go of the trigger.

  I was beginning to think I was not at all accepting of the new Lila. If I had been traumatized by her going off the rails, I was traumatized again by the means she had chosen to rehabilitate her life. Till death do us part flashed neon in my mind’s eye. I felt proud of myself for remembering my wedding vow, surprised by my positive mindset. But then I realized that I had been prompted by a photographic display of funeral caskets that stood to the right of the staff wall of honour. The Wilson Renaissance casket, the Wilson Serenity casket or the Wilson Eternity II casket. Perhaps the latter would be my best choice. Having to spend the rest of my life with the new Lila would certainly be Eternity Part I.

  If I had been muttering quietly to myself before, I was now talking out loud. People began to stare. Three security guards in state-police uniforms approached from different points in the light flare. It was then Jesus told me I needed help. He told me to seek professional advice.

  17

  IF LILA’S AFFECTIONS had shifted from the carnal to the metaphysical, from the fair-haired golf professional Al Calhoun to the dark-haired Jewish prophet of yore, my own affections for Lila had become equally rarefied. Not surprisingly, intimacy remained out of reach to us. We were locked in our separate self-centred worlds. We kept each other at a distance. Any satisfaction I had during this time was derived from knowing how easily Al Calhoun’s plan had unravelled, how swiftly his criminal pals had turned against him and one another. Snuffy ended up in prison, Al in the hospital, and Gosse—only Gosse walked away unscathed. News of how it played out came to me second and third hand, some of it from a criminologist friend who worked for the Constabulary, some from the newspaper, and some from a journalist drinking pal who counted among his sources the owner of the Harbour Lounge.

  Al wakes in pain again. He presses the little pink button, gets his morphine hit. Over the next few minutes his thoughts become a jumble, free-association, largely bullshit, with here and there a thick nugget of truth rising to the surface. He wakes up in pain. What is my name? He asks himself. What is my name? My name is Al Calhoun and this is the mist where Genesis begins. He has been struck down. He has been buried. But even now he is convinced he will rise again. Like Lazarus he will rise.

  He is lying on his back in a hospital bed wearing a plaster body cast. The pretty little nurse with the mole on the back of her left arm calls it a Spica or a Frog cast. It begins just above his belly button, fans down to encase his pelvic region, continuing down to his knees. It keeps his legs raised and far apart. Al’s pelvis is shattered, broken in six places where the truck ran over him. In his stoned state he wonders how many pieces there have to be before the word shattered can be employed. He guesses it’s more than seven.

  He is obsessed with the look and feel of the little pink button—size of an aspirin, texture of an eraser, smelling strangely of citrus. He is supposed to press it whenever he needs a dose. Recently he concluded that the supply is not unlimited. He can’t just press the button any old time he wants a hit, even though that’s what the nurse told him the first few days post-surgery. Just press the button, Mr. Calhoun, and that will take your pain away. No need to be uncomfortable. About the last part he couldn’t have agreed more.

  He lies on his back and lets his mind drift, back to the seventies, back to those crazy days when he and Meth used to party. They had done a lid of acid and parked outside a Mississippi mansion. The lawn was as big as a nine-hole golf course and covered in assorted ornaments and Disney paraphernalia, everything from Snow White to Bambi, from Betty Boop to lawn jockeys. Even Meth had to admit those little jockeys could have been the mummified remains of his close relatives. It was a hoot.

  A twinge of pain brings him back to the present. Al Calhoun. 4 North B. Room 27, a spot he likes to think of as Bikini Bottom, home of the sponge bath.

  Pain is a black bull. Morphine is a matador. Pain is the Minotaur in the sewer. Al is the morphine man standing by the sink, doing the washing up after a fantastic steak dinner, Kobe marinated in bourbon. The shudder in the tap is the sound of the bull bellowing when he smells blood and red wine washing down the drain and into his labyrinth.

  Who knew morphine was an hallucinogen?

  The night before, Lila came and sat at the end of his bed, in that black dress, with the black veil over her face—a mantilla, he knew the name for it—as she read to herself from a leather-bound book. A bible, he guessed. Lila stopped now and again to note phrases on tiny tangerine sticky notes.

  Just thinking about her makes his old champ—old Woody Woodpecker—stir. Strictly speaking, his first clue to the long dead coming back to life is auditory, he hears it before he sees it; before he feels the pulse of blood, he hears a rustling of the sanitary napkin (they use a maxi to plug the crotch hole in his frog cast) which begins to lift up like a magic carpet, before falling to one side, revealing his majesty, tall and proud, a lighthouse, a beacon of hope in a dismal situation.

  His one true wish is for Lila to lean over and take him lovingly in her mouth like she used to. Lila never scored less than A+ in that department.

  He makes a mental note: the whole experience of pain and morphine is somewhat Spanish in cast. He laughs at his own joke, the sound echoing in the sterile room. His most recent vision, of Lila as Spanish virgin in mourning, has roots in the confession she mailed to him, explaining her conversion to Christianity and asking his forgiveness, before she ended with a request for him to reconsider his ways, encouraging him to accept Jesus Christ as his lord and saviour.

  That letter, in her tiny script, reminds him of some middle-of-the-day cold call from an IT provider. She just wants to know if he is happy with his service—it’s all as innocent as pie—before smoothly switching to a sales pitch for some new product, one guaranteed to enhance the service that he was, and still is, perfectly happy with.

  Such are the thoughts and images that drift through Al’s medicated brain as he lies immobile. There are questions, too, questions he would rather avoid, like how he ended up in a frog cast in the hospital when he should have been soaking up the sun on a beach in Acapulco, next to his Lila, the two of them the better part of a million bucks richer, waiting to meet up with th
e American draft dodger who was going to help them double their money.

  Whenever he thinks about answering that question, he inevitably returns to Small Springs (or Rusty Springs as it’s known when the seniors’ tournament rolls through) and the Blood Orange Open. He’d spent five days there after leaving Lila in St. John’s, caddy for none other than K.L. Bhopal. On the final afternoon of the tournament, as he and Bhopal were trolling up the back nine, he heard his phone chirp, notifying him of an incoming text. He glanced down: it was from Lila, “It’s over Al sorry.”

  Al was not the kind to panic. No biggie, he told himself, nothing that couldn’t be fixed. It was clear that Honeybun had run out of party favours. Little Miss Snuffleupagus. He knew she would snort the jute-back off a Saxony carpet. He should have left her enough product to see her through.

  He decided to play it cool, handed Bhopal the six-iron, shrugged while scrunching up his face as if to say that he knew it was against etiquette to consult his handheld communication device while in a game, but had no choice, and really, in this day and age, was it such a big deal?

  It was true what they said: Bhopal could still hit a ball. His swing had lost none of its fluency and power. K.L. Bhopal, winner of nine majors before he retired. Collie, some called him, because of his habit of getting down on all fours, nose to the green, when sizing up a putt. His nickname may also have had something to do with the lighter patches of skin on his forearms and along the right side of his neck. Vishnu, others called him, because he was ambidextrous. He could take a wedge in either hand and chip two balls simultaneously, making them both land inches from one another.

  “You gave me the wrong club, Al,” said Bhopal in his strange half-American, half-Indian accent. “But that’s OK. It worked out.”

  Al just shrugged. The eighteenth hole was a par four and Bhopal’s second shot landed short and to the right of the green, about fifty yards from the pin. He would have overshot had Al given him the club he’d asked for. Little old ladies clapped heartily. Bhopal approached to make his next shot. He was still a favourite, knew how to ham it up for the media.

  “Just don’t do it again,” he said, using the sound of applause as cover. “You lame fucking bastard. OK?” His small chestnut eyes were smiling and his rubbery lips made a weird gondola shape across the lower half of his face. Al couldn’t decide if he was serious.

  Al was nervous when he heard he had drawn Bhopal. He knew that being on the bag for him could be a rough ride. Bhopal was notoriously kiss-up, kick-down and especially tough on hired help when he was footing the bill. Some reckoned it was the result of the caste system he grew up in, somewhere outside of Baltimore. Others said it was because he was an asshole. In spite of this, Al had to concede he had been pretty decent all week. Perhaps the fact that they had played professionally together made a difference. Some shred of collegiality had stuck.

  As Bhopal made for the green, Al’s thoughts retuned to Lila’s cryptic text. What exactly had she meant? Night moths fluttered in his gut. When Bhopal started bantering with his playing partner, Dick Avery (or the white salamander, as he was known, because of his likeness to Mel Torme), Al took the opportunity to drop back.

  “You and me we is over or the other thing?” he typed furiously. Not very grammatical and somewhat ambiguous, he realized, when, two minutes later, he reviewed his sent folder to be sure he had actually sent the text (Walking while carrying a forty-pound golf bag was not conducive to literary greatness).

  “Got somewhere else to be?” Bhopal shouted back, all the while smiling. “When it’s convenient, could you pass me the magic wand?”

  “Sorry,” Al said. “Medical shit.”

  Al could tell from Bhopal’s facial expression that he was putting two and two together and coming up with the unspecified reason why Al—never a real contender, but often enough in the money to make him well-known and respected—had suddenly lost form, dropped out of the professional circuit, only to surface three years later as a caddy. It was either that or Bhopal trying to make it look like he gave a damn.

  “Everything is gonna be HO-K,” he said, leaning in. “I know it.”

  “Sure,” Al replied. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

  Al was back in the clubhouse before he got Lila’s reply. “Freddy knows all. Bout u and me, bout the other thing too. Says he will call cops if you come around. Has changed banking access. I’m so sorry. It’s over Al.”

  Bhopal had double-bogeyed the eighteenth. Being out of the winner’s circle gave Al reason to look crestfallen.

  “Don’t worry, buddy. There is still a bonus in it for you,” Bhopal said, whipping out his wallet and extracting three soiled twenties from a wad of bills the thickness of a deck of cards.

  Walking away from the clubhouse, Al flipped open his phone and read Lila’s message again. The effect was much the same as it had been on first reading. He felt like some poor stooge in the spectator gallery, happily listening to Mantovani on his ear buds, when someone shouts “FORE!” and everyone around him goes for cover. Next second, he feels the whack of a Titleist ProV1 dead centre on his forehead.

  Interestingly (in the sense of life following art), this sense of abstract-meeting-concrete manifested in the literal universe about forty-eight hours later when Snuffy stepped out from behind a garbage bin, in the back parking lot of the Harbour Lounge, and hit Al square in the forehead with what looked to be a ball-peen hammer. It was closure of sorts.

  Al had gone there to meet Lila. He was desperate to regain control of the situation. The interval following receipt of her text and the moment he found himself on the receiving end of Snuffy’s down stroke had been an agonizing limbo in which the same question played on infinite loop. How had Freddy found out?

  In his heart, Al knew there was only one way: Lila spilled the beans. She’d had a change of heart. She’d bottomed out, couldn’t handle the withdrawal.

  Al pictured Meth sitting in the shadows of a cheap motel room, orange blinds drawn against the sunlight, the sound of ice melting in his glass, the I told you so unmistakable in his ascending two-note response: ah-huh.

  So Lila fessed up, but was that the end of things? Al wasn’t prepared to give up hope. If he was right about Lila’s breakdown—and he was almost one hundred percent sure—the question was: what could be salvaged? There was no way to know until he assessed the extent of the damage. Freddy might be bluffing. Perhaps he hadn’t spoken to anyone at the bank (an unknown known). He hadn’t spoken to the police (a known known); he had only threatened to speak to them.

  Al tried putting himself in Freddy’s shoes. He must be going out of his mind, not only picturing his woman in flagrante delicto but also coming to grips with her scheming to sell him out. Had to be a nightmare. Plus he also had to deal with the fact that he had underestimated an acquaintance, failed to see him as an opponent. Freddy had been cuckolded by someone who probably wasn’t even on his radar.

  Maybe there was still a way to put it all together, to get Lila back on side. A few drinks, some sweet talk, and the sudden opportunity to do a fat line or three would be too much to resist. Once Lila was high, he would be able to take the true measure of the situation. Only then would he be able to assess both the damage and the possibility of repair. But that was not going to happen until they had some face time.

  He sent Lila a text from his car before he drove away from the clubhouse. He texted her twice more from his hotel room while he packed. He sent another message from the airport as he stood in line waiting to hear whether the penalties he would pay to change his ticket would cost more than he had earned for caddying the tournament. On the hour layover in Montreal he managed his mind, forced himself to think about Snuffy and Gosse. The best way to handle them, he decided, was to be dead straight.

  As close as he could to gate time, he texted both men: “Plan on hold. Do nothing until you hear from me.” He heard back from both of them almost immediately, Gosse, surprisingly sanguine, with “Is all good,”
and from Snuffy a furious set of devil emoticons.

  He purposely left his phone in the lounge before boarding.

  Arriving early the next morning to a grey St. John’s, Al stopped into the supermarket and picked up a new phone, one with a pay-as-you-go card. His apartment was strangely as he had left it—quiet, tidy, no pile of mail, no red light flashing on the answering machine. He poured himself a well-earned tumbler of Grey Goose and settled into his armchair. Honk! What is the sound of one wing flapping? His last thought as he passed out.

  He woke fourteen hours later, a piss stain around his crotch, and judging by the cold in the cushion underneath him, the contents of his bladder in the foam padding. He made a mental note to ask Doc Mason about cutting back on the diuretic.

  He showered, going from the steamed-up bathroom to the kitchen where he doubled up on the medication he had missed, washing down the pills with a slice of buttered toast and a Miller Light.

  Steadied, refreshed, and in possession for the first time in days of that faculty commonly referred to as “grip,” he called Lila. It was about that time of day when Freddy went on walkabout. He knew there was a chance she might pick up the phone if the number was unknown to her. He was right.

  “Lila?”

  She began to cry immediately.

  “It’s me, baby doll.”

  More crying.

  “Honey bun, it’s alright.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Lila, I missed you.”

  Sound of her blowing her nose.

  “I should never have gone away.”

  “Al, I’m so sorry.” Rustle of tissues.

  “Sorry for what?”