“Sanity.”
Rushing to pull on shoes and jacket, I didn’t answer and she kept talking. “I have clients who don’t want anything I have but don’t want to find another company because they like me. I have another client who feels he shouldn’t have to pay rent this month because it’s his birthday. And I have a gang who want to rent any one of our properties, any one at all, as long as it has an attached garage.”
“Well, marijuana grow operations are a growth industry.”
“Hardy-har-har. People who use puns should be shot.” She took off her shoes, stretched upwards and yawned. “So this little bit of sanity will be nice. Plus I have some more ideas for Smiley.”
“Okay, I’m off! But first, a kiss!”
With my last glance I saw that Rachel was now colouring in the comic book (who ever heard of Captain Carrot? I’d picked up a whole bunch of them for five dollars at a used book store, but who ever heard of a rabbit super hero? Bugs Bunny, sure, but that was it.) Fred was eating the colouring book, and Jacob had started to stuff one crayon up each nostril.
None of which was my problem. So I kissed Claire in a slightly more serious fashion and ran before the screams started.
At Buttes Frank was working on a bow, restringing it with the help of a huge, nasty machine that looked like it could tear a human in half.
“Stupid, god-damned …”
It was entertaining to watch but I interrupted him anyway. “Has the delivery come yet?”
“Huh? Oh, no. Can you do me a favour and help me with this stupid bow?”
I stared at the machine, the big rollers and weights, the clamps and vise grips. “No.”
He glared at me. “What do you mean, no?”
“You don’t pay me enough to work with that damn thing.”
“Damn thing? You mean the ‘Mangler’? Come on, it’s harmless.”
For a brief moment I hallucinated that the machine was grinning and then I gave in and helped Frank. A few minutes later he was putting a bandage around my right forefinger while I rubbed feeling back into my left wrist.
“I don’t think you’ll lose your nail.”
“That’s good; this is evidence that no machine called ‘The Mangler’ is ever safe.”
The bell in the back rang, telling me that the delivery had arrived, so Frank finished and motioned me to work. “You shouldn’t lose it; anyway, I don’t think so. You better get to work.”
I was heading for the back door. “As long as it doesn’t involve wild boars.”
“Hey, I almost forgot about that …”
Groaning, I went to work with my injured paw and unloaded the partial pallet the trucking company had sent. My dealings with the driver, an obnoxious little freak, were always somewhat stressed. This time he stayed far out of my way and showed his contempt by peeing on the wall of the shop.
It was going to be a long, long day.
On the way home I stopped at Marie’s and found a house full of people from Bangladesh. She introduced me and then shuffled me out the back with an envelope full of cash, part of my pay in installments, whispering, “It’s working perfectly. No calls, no visits, nothing from Sam or anyone else. Frankly, there are no hitches at all so far. Knock on wood.”
I left and headed east via two buses until I reached the Club Regent Casino. As I walked to it I started to hum the old Louis Armstrong tune “It’s a Wonderful World.” It didn’t help, though, and a few seconds later I entered the giant space full of noise and light and people. And money, lots of money. Turning hard left I walked through a giant aquarium and found myself frozen in space watching a coral reef full of living jewels and beautiful monsters.
“Cool!”
The older couple behind me patted my back gently and agreed. I tore myself away with difficulty and only managed to do it by promising myself to bring Claire. I kept moving into a fake tropical nightmare.
“Yo-ho-ho.”
Turning my head slowly, I saw a skeleton of a Chihuahua and a Spanish conquistador. I put my hand out towards the dog and, speaking deadpan, I repeated back to them, “Yo-ho-ho?”
“Hey, not my choice, I have a script here …”
The dog’s head stopped moving and another voice came on.
“Yo-ho-ho. Don’t pet the dog, he bites.” This made me draw my hand back slowly and the voice went on, “Yo-ho-ho!”
Shaking my head gently I kept on, searching the main floor and finding the quarter-and-nickel slot machines. Many of them linked together with progressive jackpots. And scattered around were also table games with blackjack, roulette, paigow, mini-baccarat, keno, poker, and baccarat. Lots and lots of ways to lose your money.
Casinos have limits on how much money you can walk away with before they issue you a cheque, and in Manitoba that limit is $10,000. The casinos claim the limits are designed to stop terrorists or people like me from washing my ill-booten-gotty. However, that rule was fine, because what I really wanted was a nice, clean, easily traced cheque. And for that little piece of paper I was certainly willing to pay taxes.
I exchanged a hundred for a cup of loonie coins from a beautiful girl pushing a metal change cart around, and then I found a big impersonal machine with no one nearby and proceeded to drop the coins into the hopper. In five minutes I dropped all hundred and pulled the lever. I actually played three times, winning once and losing twice. Then I pressed the cash out button and received a slip for $99.75 and the first wash was done.
Wandering out of the main casino I did the same in another room and then once downstairs for $250 at a bank of keno machines for a total loss of $2.25. Then I went upstairs to the gaming tables. I passed by two blackjack tables and a baccarat table as being, respectively, too busy and not busy enough. Near the end of the ranks of tables there were roulette tables, American-style ones with a double zero pushing the odds seriously towards the house. Despite that I bought $300 worth of chips, lost a red five-dollar chip betting even, won betting odd, and then exchanged the chips for black hundreds and wandered away.
At a blackjack table limited for $25 to $500 I cashed in another $200 for green twenty-five-dollar pieces and lost twice before winning a blackjack. They were using the eternity deck, a constant six-deck mechanical shuffle that eliminated any kind of skill or treachery on the part of the players. Before I could leave a waitress came up and brought me a complimentary coffee, so I tipped her a dollar. I now had washed $950 and had gotten a free coffee for a total cost of $20.75. Not bad math for washing money, and a lot less than the average underworld accountant would charge.
I went back to the slot machines and dumped $450 before finishing up at a mini-baccarat table where the odds were, according to the croupier, about 50.5% in the favour of the house. So I dropped the rest of my money in chips, played four times, won three times, tied once, tipped the croupier five dollars and found the cashier’s wicket with $2,003.25 in chips, blacks and greens, and slips of paper from the slot machines.
The cashier was a fairly pretty girl, albeit kind of dirty, although that may have been the light. Her voice was deadpan. “Good evening sir. How would you like to be paid?”
I felt a breath on my neck and turned to face a beautiful woman wearing a tight green dress cinched around her waist with an ornate belt made of black iron links. She smelled … good. Rich, earthy, electric, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing much under the dress.
And I was pretty sure the smell wasn’t perfume out of any kind of bottle.
“Sir?”
It was the cashier again and I turned back to her and then back to the woman behind me. She had large dark eyes with long, long lashes. Eyes I could lose myself in, eyes I wanted to lose myself in for forever and a day.
“Sir?” The cashier still didn’t really seem to care but she was waiting. So was the woman behind me. But they were waiting for different things. I smiled brightly at the cashier. “A cheque, please.”
The woman beside me sighed deeply and her whole body did interesting
and hypnotic things. “Maybe next time …”
It was a promise and she was gone, so I collected my money and fled home for a long, cold shower. Claire took the cheque and had me endorse it so she could deposit it in her account the next day.
At my house the chaos was reassuringly normal and comforting. Fred was asleep in his bed and the dog was asleep on our bed and Thor the mouse was looking through his food dish in his fastidious manner and throwing the black seeds away when he found them. Claire and I were sitting there to ambush Smiley when he came in at 9:00. He saw us and froze in the doorway, staring at the two of us sitting at the table in the living room. He was pushing a folding metal trolley loaded with boxes from a big-box electronics store.
“Is this an intervention?” He sounded wary.
“No,” Claire answered.
“Thank God.”
We all ignored the cargo and he sat down on the floor and gestured at the 3x5-inch cards stacked beside Claire’s elbow. “What are those?”
“Job opportunities for you.”
“Oh.”
I felt obliged to add, “More like job possibilities.”
“Right.”
He braced himself visibly and said, “Go!”
Claire flipped over the first card. “Lion tamer.”
His eyes lit up. “Are you kidding? That’s an option?”
She kept her poker face. “Not really, just wanted to make sure I had your attention. These following jobs have been chosen to match your skills as a thug and general layabout.”
“I could be a lion tamer.”
“Sure you could.” She put the card down and raised the next. “Call centre.”
“What’s that?”
I answered. “You call people during dinner and annoy them, selling them stuff or asking them to take a survey.”
“Oh. How much does it pay?” Smiley was interested.
Claire had that one. “$9.25 an hour. Plus bonuses.”
“Which is what in real money?”
“About $19,000 a year minus taxes, maybe fifteen you take home.”
He stared at me. “Fuck you!”
My wife cocked her head to the side and smiled seraphically and Smiley finally absorbed the message. “I mean, fuck me.”
He thought about it and went on, “That’s one bank robbery with good planning. A small bank. A bad bank. The kind of bank an amateur with a note and a broken stick would do.”
I nodded. “So that’s a no.”
Claire was nothing if not cheerful. “Right. Don’t become discouraged. Don’t worry so much about the money though; I’ll help you with budgets and stuff. The first thing is to have a job you can stand.”
“Right. I guess.”
“Fine. Next up is retail clothing salesperson.” Claire made it sound exciting.
“Would you like to buy these pants?” He said it straight faced and I had to laugh. Which made Claire hit me, so I flinched, which made Smiley say, “And two for flinching. No.”
“All right. Delivery driver.” If Claire was getting tired it wasn’t showing.
Smiley mulled that over. “Do I need a licence?”
“Yes. Can you drive?” I knew he could but Claire didn’t.
“Sure. I’ve just never had one legally. And I sure don’t have a licence in my own name. Is it hard to get one?”
Claire listed things off on her fingers. “You need to pay money, take a test, pay more money and they give you a licence.”
“I can do that.” Smiley sounded confident.
Claire paused and then said slowly, “I just realized something. What ID do you have?”
He dug it out of his pocket. “My prison ID card.”
I took it from him and looked it over with a sense of familiarity and trepidation. A small piece of paper, coated by an amateur in plastic, with a bad picture of Smiley grinning like an idiot in the left-hand corner. In the centre top was his name and beneath that was the information that this person was an inmate of the Correctional Service of Canada, with INMATE written in big letters. On the back it was gridded off with Smiley’s name and the finger-print system number (FPS), which consisted of six digits and a numeral. There was also Smiley’s date of birth, his weight in kilos, his height in inches, eye colour, complexion, and hair colour.
“Your name is Hershel Wiebe?”
Smiley became quietly belligerent and menacing. “You have a problem with that?”
“No, I guess not. I believe that is the kind of question that a Hershel would ask. Explains your enthusiastic acceptance of ‘Smiley’ as a nickname.”
He just glared at me and my wife took the card gently between two fingers. “This won’t do, not at all. It’ll be hard to find a job if the only ID you have is a card certifying you’re a federal inmate.”
Smiley snorted. “You think?”
She ignored the question. “So you’ll need a driver’s licence, a social insurance number, a birth certificate, and a few others. Monty, that’s your job.”
“No problems.”
Everyone leaned back and finally Claire broke the silence and asked, “Now, what’s in the boxes?”
His face lit up. “Presents. A wide-screen LCD television with surround sound, a DVD player, and copies of some of the best westerns ever made.”
He handed me a box and I looked through the titles: Unforgiven , Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, High Noon—the list went on, about twenty in total, all westerns. Most of the films were second hand. I looked up at Smiley, speechless, and he just smiled.
“I love this town! I found a movie store in Osborne Village with everything here, all dirt cheap and …” He leaned towards Claire and me. “The clerk was smart and pretty. I like that.”
“Where did you get the money?” I made it sound casual.
He shrugged. “Some people got off their asses and sent it along.”
When he looked at me his eyes were clear and smiling and I had nothing to say, so, while he was putting the system together, I took Claire upstairs. When I fell asleep I dreamt of beautiful women in green dresses while Smiley stood behind a counter asking if I wanted fries with that.
#29
Claire went jogging with Smiley the next morning. I was feeling physically sore and a little angry, not for any particular reason, just because. However, Fred managed to cheer me up by ramming his head repeatedly into the dog, who was begging for peanut-butter toast at the dining room table. The focus of both was inspiring, Renfield in his large-eyed begging technique and Fred in his determination to go through the dog. Finally he yelled, “Bad DOG!” and I gave in to the begging.
When Renfield had his toast I picked up Fred and bounced him on my knee. “And what makes you so angry today?”
He howled and glared at me. Toddler rage is something special, something different, very incoherent and diffused, very pure in its own way, and right now he was mad at me. So I tickled him until he was out of breath from laughing and then read him the first chapter of Moby-Dick while he piled blocks on top of each other. By the time Claire and Smiley were back I was in a fine mood. So was Fred, but both Claire and Smiley seemed preoccupied, and neither of them would tell me why. When they had both showered and were drinking coffee I asked, “Any plans for today?”
Claire answered. “Gonna go buy Smiley some clothes after dinner.”
He nodded agreement and I asked, “How late will you be? There are a few things I need to do tonight.”
They both looked at me suspiciously and then my wife answered. “We should be done by 9:30 at the latest …”
She trailed off and gave me space to add information, space I ignored. After a long time she cleared her throat and asked me directly, “And what do you have planned for tonight?”
“Nothing at all; well, nothing much.”
She looked at me suspiciously and they both went off, Claire to try to sell houses and apartments and Smiley to try to not be a criminal. And, befo
re I was ready, Jacob and Rachel came, and I just tried to survive the experience of diapers, snacks, wrestling, story time, and utter chaos. When Smiley and Claire came back at 7:00 I took the time to admire their purchases: two sedate three-piece suits, shirts and two pairs of shoes. Also sundries like socks and underwear, and even ties.
“Very nice.”
Smiley’s face was bleak and unhappy. “This is not me, man. Not me at all.”
Claire made sympathetic noises. “It’s not what you were; it’s what you’re trying to become, which is something different.”
He nodded and I headed out. Before I could reach the door, my wife said casually, “So, you off?”
“Yep. Things to do …”
I spent the rest of the evening scouting around Samantha’s houses very quietly and checking Marie’s neighbours for anything suspicious. In both parts of town there was nothing strange going on at all.
Thursday morning started with another run with Smiley. We covered a lot of ground, on Main Street down to the Manitoba Museum and the Planetarium and then up to Salter and back home. On the way we passed the working poor, the dispossessed, the insane, gang members, whores, psychopaths, Jesus freaks, schizophrenics looking for their lost dope, coughers hacking out tuberculosis germs, junkies hunting their fixes, boozehounds looking for another fast drink to shovel the snakes and the shakes back underground.
When we arrived home we were both quietly depressed. Claire had some free time so she took the monsters while I went to wash some more cash. Dressed in my best clothes and carrying a briefcase, I caught the bus and walked to the New Balmoral Hotel on the corner of Balmoral Street and Notre Dame. They opened at 9:00 so I walked in and went to the machines in the back and to the right, changing twenty-five twenties into loonies as I went. Then I sat at a machine and dumped ’em all in, pulling the lever now and again.
When the waitress came by with her plump thighs under a stiff skirt, I admired her until she repeated the question. A few minutes later she brought a shot of vodka and a Coke with ice, and when she was gone the vodka went onto the floor and the Coke was drunk. In forty minutes I’d put all the loonies into the machine, bought three drinks, and lost six dollars the twenty-seven times I’d pulled the lever.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal Page 15
