by Sam Wiebe
Harris was stunned. She projected such power. Chin high, proud to clear her personal air.
“Twelve-stepping,” Murch said. “Hey, respect.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Purma said, finally releasing Harris’s hand. “No more vodka and OJ for breakfast. Twelve years now and the best decision of my life. Harris, we good?”
“Sheesh, you coulda called him,” Murch muttered, gesturing to the couches.
“It’s fine,” Harris said, sitting. “It really is.”
So they turned to the envelope, Purma extracting a single sheet of paper and cutting right to it: there was no money, no bank accounts. Roen was on welfare by the end.
“You saying he didn’t own that place on the island?” Murch with this hands spread.
Purma read on. The contents of his apartment were what remained. And Roen had left instructions for the dispersal of these: Let any friend of mine take one thing, if any useful thing might be found.
Poetic, Harris thought. And emotion surged, affection and regret.
“I already took a guitar with no strings,” Purma said. “His other so-called friends don’t deserve shit. But you two have a look.”
An awkward silence fell, but there was no refusing. So Harris took the key from Purma and she stood to leave. Almost, but not quite.
“Harris,” she said, “you saw him near the end.”
Yeah, he’d told Murch already. “A couple months back.”
“Any chance it was three weeks?”
Harris squinted. “Don’t remember. It was a random thing.”
In Chinatown. Lunch with a friend. Harris turned a corner and there he was. Skinny as hell. Harris didn’t recognize him at first, not until he swept the hair out of his eyes and held up a hand in greeting. The wheelchair was for his ankle, Roen explained. Twisted it falling out of a friend’s truck.
“All right,” Purma said, shouldering her bag, turning toward the door. But then not leaving. Harris waited, dread mounting.
“Either of you remember a guy named Jimmy?” she asked.
Not this, Harris thought, wondering how far Roen had spread his secret story. But he only shook his head and squinted again. Murch had stopped texting and was listening too.
“Guy who owned the B&B,” Purma said. “Well, he’s dead too. It was in the news.”
“Missed that,” Harris said. “What’d he die of?”
Of being burned alive in his Dodge Viper parked out behind the old grain terminal, Purma said. Hands tied to the wheel so cops weren’t thinking fuel leak. “That was a month ago,” she explained. “A couple weeks later, Roen. Is that weird?”
Murch picked up his phone again. Harris shrugged, made a face like, Who knows?
Purma with her hand on the door handle. But with one more thing to say, Harris sensed. Purma and her dramatic last words. She turned to face him again.
“You didn’t go drinking with him, did you, Harris? You couldn’t have known. But he was six weeks clean. And best I can figure, he picks up a beer at the Union Tavern and a week later he’s dead.”
Harris frozen, hands spread. No, no. He never did. And with that Purma was out the door. Gone.
4
Murch had work still to do, so they made plans to meet at Roen’s place. Harris walked down Hastings Street into the Downtown Eastside, buoyed in mood by the dereliction still to be found there. Spiffy restaurants on the 100 block, sure. CrossFit gyms and beardos with purse dogs. But east of that, it all skidded back to the gritty norm. Boarded-up buildings. Parks full of drifting figures in hoodies with gym bags full of whatever had been most recently stolen. Bad dental situations. Scabby arms. Harris couldn’t deny the faint encouragement—now under the milky gaze of a hooker on Carroll Street—of realizing his own problems might be smaller.
Murch was late. Forty minutes. The light was failing and the air was cool. Harris hadn’t dressed for standing around the Downtown Eastside. He was shivering and ill-tempered by the time he saw Murch clicking up the sidewalk on leather heels, communicating with hunched shoulders and a grunted first greeting that his own life had by far the greater concerns. Files. Clients. Kid dramas. A hot dinner waiting at home served up by a nanny from Manila.
“You could have started,” Murch said. “Like I’m dying to get my hands on Roen’s shit.”
Six floors up, no working elevator. The woodwork squealing underfoot, every door leaking garbled voices, moaning, arguments. At Roen’s apartment Harris fumbled the key into the lock, then pushed the door inward so they could process the two hundred square feet of squalor that had been Roen’s final plot. Broken toilet, dangling sink, peeling walls. Clothes spilled out of garbage bags. Food wrappers covered the fraying carpet. There was a metal counter down one wall strewn with evidence of complex cookery: burnt spoons, a one-ring burner, dirty glassware. There was the sagging bed frame where Purma said the body had been found. No mattress. But a striped blanket with tattered edges, blackened blood spatters across the headboard and the wall.
Murch, surprisingly, did not recoil. He stepped past Harris, navigating through the garbage and crusty clothes to the center of the room where he stood still, taking it in. He seemed oddly at ease in the midst of the carnage, the evidence of crushing poverty and dire disease.
“He was good-looking, remember, me droogs?”
“Yeah,” Harris said. “I do remember.”
“Got to fuck whoever he wanted,” Murch said, with no evident malice. Another pause, then an impatient gesture. “So we doing this or what?”
Finding a useful thing did not seem likely. But Murch started looking down that side counter, opening drawers. And Harris, feeling lost, moved across the room to the window, where he looked down onto West Cordova, to the ebb and flow of people there, shrunken shapes in the lengthening shadows. There was a plastic bag looped over the inside handle and left to dangle outside. DIY refrigeration. Harris cracked the window and pulled it in: moldy cheese, two black bananas, a pint of milk gone yellow and pungent. He found himself drifting, Roen’s last groceries in his hand, thinking of his own place in Kits, the creaking couch, the beer and French Rabbit in the fridge, the bloody bandages in the garbage under the sink. How distant was he from the situation here? How many pints of sour milk away?
A car horn on the street below brought Harris back to the moment. He registered silence in the room. Murch had been behind him, working his way down the strewn counter, clattering and talking. Now nothing. A stillness, the air suspended.
Harris turned slowly, just until he picked up Murch in his peripheral vision. Back corner of the room. Murch with a ratty gym bag, groping inside. The sound of a zipper. Then this: the muted jangle of keys. And Harris could see them now too. In the very corner of his eye, a guitar-shaped fob. All access, motherfuckers.
A faint smile creeping across Murch’s features, one of remembrance and calculation, as those keys slid into his jacket pocket without a word.
5
Maybe the keys were a memento. Maybe Murch was going to hang them from the rearview mirror of his black Mercedes parked opposite his firm’s office in a reserved street spot that must have cost him ten grand a month. Maybe. But after four days staking out the car in question, Harris knew Murch had other ideas.
Harris in his Car2go. He watched Murch saunter out of his office at 5:30 p.m. sharp three days running and drive home to Point Grey. Day four, Friday, here came Murch two hours early in jeans and one of those oilskin hunting jackets, carrying an overnight bag and looking pressed for time.
Rushing to catch a ferry, Harris thought, sliding lower in his seat. There would be a flashlight in that overnight, a sweater, extra socks. A ring of keys. You thieving bastard.
Harris’s gamble was the cost of a one-way chartered float plane that would get him onto Saturna ninety minutes ahead of the ferry. And once Murch had pulled out and headed southbound against his normal patterns, Harris wheeled his car around and sped to the seaplane terminal in the inner harbor.
Th
e plane touched down in Plumper Sound in the late afternoon and taxied in to the marina. Harris found himself on the familiar quay, hefting his backpack as he had so many times before, heading up the road that wound around the cove to the place where it all began.
When he got to the B&B, Harris realized he hadn’t even considered the possibility that the place might have been sold. But the leaf-strewn driveway and overgrown orchard told a different story. And approaching the front door he felt a penetrating familiarity, like nothing had changed for the ritual sustained at that dining room table he could see through the glass, at that porch railing there, where his hand had rested during Purma’s judgment.
Harris, cheer up. I predict you end up with a minivan and lots of money.
The path to the studio was overgrown, but Harris picked his way down through the orchard. At the door he pulled on work gloves and punched through the glass pane above the knob. Harris inside, and sitting now in the shadows at the back of the room to wait. He could see where the ferry would come in, the slice of road where Murch would shortly appear. He closed his eyes and dozed, jolting awake when the ferry thrummed into view, growing in Harris’s binoculars until it reached the wharf, disgorging cars, among them a single black Mercedes.
Harris watched as Murch’s car pulled onto the road at a confident speed. Murch charged up, filled with his plan. And there was a tight and lean feeling gripping Harris too just then, in his gut and his groin. Bring it on.
Five minutes later Murch was in the drive. Tires on gravel. Parking brake. Door slam. Murch took in the view and Harris imagined the same memories spilling: Shanny, Roen, Purma and her Pall Malls. But he didn’t come directly down through the orchard. He went to the big house first, knocking tentatively, then louder. Then trying keys and entering. And staying for over an hour as the shadows stretched. Searching, Harris concluded from the glint of his flashlight beamed into the corners of rooms, floor by floor until it winked from the windows of the basement.
There followed silence, during which Harris imagined Murch taking a seat, running the numbers, wondering if Roen had lied or if Jimmy had long ago collected the money or if there was some other explanation entirely.
Murch looking up slowly, eyes drifting down the orchard.
The house lights went out. Harris heard the front door slam again, long strides coming down through the grass. Harris’s heart was pounding in his chest. And there was Murch, looming outside the glass, his light on the door handle, on the broken glass, but not finding Harris who surged forward and flung open the door, beaming his own flashlight directly into Murch’s eyes.
Complete surprise, achieved. A spectacular moment. Murch’s arm rose in slow motion, his flashlight pirouetting into space. His mouth was open and contorted, no sound coming out. And all this while stumbling rearward toward the low porch rail which upended him into the long grass below.
Harris might have laughed had Murch not been up so quickly. Out of the grass and vaulting the stairs, arms flailing. Harris was no fighter and had the injuries to prove it. But he kept away and finally landed a slapping punch to Murch’s nose that made him bleed.
“Stop,” Harris said. “Murch. Fuck.”
And Murch did stop, hands to his face, blood coming through, breathing in and out in ragged gasps. “You fucking prick,” he said. “You motherfucking cock-sucking prick. What are you doing here?”
“I’m not the one who lifted those keys.”
“We were supposed to take something, moron.”
“And come right here?”
Murch raised himself to his full height, face twisted, lips quivering. “Go fuck yourself! You came right here too!”
“Roen dying got me thinking,” Harris said. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Fucking liar.”
Long pause. Then Murch pushed past Harris and went into the studio, grabbed a chair, and sat. Harris followed him slowly, did the same. And they sat for several minutes in the darkness, nothing but the sound of slowing breath.
“That last night here,” Murch said, finally. “Shanny talking about lawyers. And Roen went off about a dealer hiding money somewhere.”
“So you looked.”
“You didn’t?”
“Not in the house,” Harris said.
Murch looked up sharply.
It took them five minutes, less. Crawling around on hands and knees. A recessed brass handle under the corner of a faded Persian carpet. An old key on a guitar-shaped fob. The door swung up to reveal a ladder down to a cellar just high enough to stand. Concrete walls. Evidence of industry. A low wooden bench with tools, a vacuum packer and bags. Felt markers and a logbook with entries. A slim brown briefcase with gold latches. Plastic storage tubs, neatly stacked.
“Holy shit,” Murch said, after climbing down first. Harris sat on the ladder’s lowest rung and watched him haul down a tub, which thumped hollow as it hit the ground. Empty. And the next one too. The next. Twelve in all. Not a single shrink-wrapped dollar to be found.
Harris slumped on the ladder, shoulders rounded, face slack. Murch was sweating from his labors, lips in a frustrated snarl, eyes flitting around the room and finding the briefcase. Locked. But he did not hesitate. He smashed the latches open with a hammer taken from among the tools. He flung it open on the bench. Inside: a pouch of weed, a wad of bills tied with an elastic band, a pistol which Murch took in his hand, opening and closing his fingers around the grip, eyes narrow.
“Roen, Roen,” he whispered, leveling the pistol, then pivoting slowly until it pointed at Harris’s chest.
There was a long pause during which Harris felt his pulse hammering in his ears.
“That summer,” Murch said, at last. “Ask me if I fucked Shanny.”
“Murch,” Harris replied, sweat beading on his forehead and falling into his eyes.
“Ask me!”
“All right!” Harris said. “All right. Goddamn. Did you fuck Shanny?”
The moment stretched. Murch’s arm was trembling. “Nah,” he eventually said. “Roen did.”
Then he lowered his arm and laughed. And Harris tried to join him but couldn’t, thinking only of Roen’s body on that bed, blood spatters, cold dead and laughing.
The bills were hundreds. Counted and divided, barely two grand each.
6
They didn’t talk on the ferry the next morning. Murch disappeared into the Seawest Lounge without a word. At the terminal on arrival, Harris didn’t join him on the car deck, just walked off and bussed into town. Same strewn apartment. Same brewing storm clouds. At his computer, he looked at those last paragraphs he’d typed, what seemed like months before.
You know it’s real when it ends in blood.
Sacred violence.
Fifteen years and a gun leveled across an empty cellar. The two droogies invoked the third. And that had always been an unstable arrangement.
Harris held off until three p.m. before having a beer. He made it to five o’clock before heading over to Chianti’s, measuring his mood and finding that despite all that had happened, he was feeling pretty good, a rare flame flickering within. Harris felt the onset of writing. And it cheered him. So he’d fucked up his marriage and was neither rich nor famous. But he was still a writer. World’s most coveted jobs . . . Up there with porn star. So he had no memento from Roen’s apartment. But he had a story. And the bar door opened just then, someone entering at that exact and auspicious moment.
First thought: Roen. Crazy. But something about the confident stride, bearing down on Harris out of a halo of light that only extinguished when the bar door finally closed. Not Roen. Of course not Roen, who was entirely dead.
Purma. In Harris’s favorite bar in Kitsilano, an unlikelihood exceeded only by how happy he was to see her. He got off his barstool and opened his arms. And they hugged for several seconds while the regulars looked on and wondered.
“Is this okay?” Purma asked. “Me being here?”
More than okay, Harris thought. It was ri
ght somehow. People did this after a loss, sought each other out and took time to reflect. Murch wouldn’t understand. But Purma did. So she pulled up a stool. And sipping wine and cranberry juice respectively, they talked. Harris heard about Purma becoming a counselor. He heard how she loved helping people. And Harris spoke about getting married and quitting the bank. About early successes and a later slow turning. A stupid affair, a messy divorce. A basement apartment in Kits, trouble with money, an uncertain future.
“But you have a new book!” Purma exclaimed.
True, Harris did.
“About what?” Purma asked.
Harris thought for a minute, then couldn’t help himself. Well, it was inspired by real life, in fact.
Purma was intrigued.
Three friends. A musician, a writer, and a lawyer. Hung out on Saturna Island back in the day but drifted apart over the years. The musician had a drug dealer friend for whom he’d been hiding money. Years later the drug dealer dies. The musician dies separately. The two surviving friends learn about it and get to wondering. Competition ensues.
Purma was leaning forward, seemingly riveted. Harris plunged on. The mutual pursuit. The island confrontation and the disappointing results. Purma stood up next to her stool and applauded.
“Maybe hold off on that,” Harris said. “I still need an ending.”
“You got it already! The money’s not there. Those two jerks get what they deserve and it’s exactly what the musician would have wanted,” Purma said.
“It is?” Harris said.
“Yeah! To put those two jackasses back into competition, like revenge from the grave.”
Harris sat back. “Revenge for what?”
“For trying to steal the money! That musician was smart. And good-looking, right? Probably slept with both the women the other two were after.”
Harris laughed tightly. Purma with great gusto. Harris wondered if he was drunk but thought either way that what had been so happy when Purma arrived now felt distinctly darker in tone.
“But what about this?” Purma said. “An alternative ending.”
“Nah, listen,” Harris responded, fumbling for his wallet, “I better go. Let me get this.”
