Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  Her eyes turned to him. “He locked her out of the house. Maybe he thought she’d go and stay with her sister, but she didn’t.”

  She finished her tale of old sorrow and lay back on the pillow, eyes pleading with him to let her be, as though she’d finally done her work and might now go to a much-deserved sleep, forever to forget what she had told him.

  Dan glanced up at the dancing neon of girls kicking up their legs and waving top hats while a floating martini poured itself endlessly onto the sidewalk. He’d promised his aunt he’d visit his father’s grave, and perhaps this was it. He caught his breath and ducked inside.

  The interior smelled of litter and broken hearts. It was a commoner’s pub, but the noise was an uncommon racket. As taverns went, the Colson lay between a back alley asylum for life’s unwanted-unwashed and one of those annoying modern-day wonders bent on fusing good cheer, good times, and good friends by invoking the holy trinity of Darts, Karaoke, and Trivia, with quizzes about dead Motown artists and quick-time sports statistics that interested no one but the poor sods who surprised themselves silly by knowing the answers in real time: Hey, Bernie! Next round’s on me!

  This one was a simple watering hole for the working men and women looking for a chance to put up their feet, catch their breath, recount the day’s troubles and have a cold one, two, four or more, to help shorten the hours as best they could. The camaraderie was cheap, and for the most part you got what you paid for. As for gizmos and gadgets, the condom dispenser outside the “Gents” took first prize over the ATM affixed to the “Ladies.”

  Jukeboxes had gone out of style long before the compact disc killed vinyl, but this one boasted an impressive relic, an antique by any standards, sitting over in the darkened corner behind an unused bar. Now and then, one of the faithful would walk over with a confident smile — This one’s for all the boys in shaft number 3! — fish around in his pockets and toss in a slug, punching the litany of numbers like Moses transcribing the stone tablets for God’s Chosen. Good old Sudbury, thirty years on and still happily awash in the cat-gut twang of Freddy Fender and Conway Twitty, second only to the power chords of Bachman Turner Overdrive. Three minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure golden oldie pleasure. Just another Sudbury Saturday night. Old Tom and his PEI stompers had it right: Inco, bingo, and getting stinko was pretty much all there was on the menu.

  Dan took a seat in the shadows. He was too late for day prices, but that was probably just as well — he wasn’t planning on staying long. A drink or two at most. He looked around the room where his father had spent so many hours. How many drinks had it taken him to reach that place where it all stopped mattering, and the wife he’d killed without meaning to appeared before him with a smile and a forgiving kiss?

  The bartender stood behind his dispensary, a dry cloth over one shoulder, pouring drink with the tireless faith of a priest in the confessional keeping watch over his flock by night. On the countertop a tray overflowed with dimpled beer steins, gold up to here, white froth above the cut, and all for a tinker’s dam. He added one to the count and pulled another.

  Behind Dan, a fat blonde laughed a high glossy trill, her table covered in empty glasses. Her look said trash but her saucy eyes said she could see the cheque good at any bank. Her smile was a retina-blinding flash of good times and fun company, and maybe more if you played your cards her way. She reached for a cigarette, lit up, and tossed the deadened stick into a tray overflowing with burnt match ends and bent stubs like charnel house bones. What No Smoking sign was that, dearie?

  A grubby one-armed man looked over at the blonde, calculating the moves in her direction. He paused, Casanova on the steps of the Vatican considering coming out of retirement to try his hand at eternal beauty one last time. A maturer man now, holding back a moment where once he would have pounced.

  And suddenly Dan saw her, floating between tables, tray raised in a silent blessing. The Angel of Mercy who never spilled a drop as she poured her beatitude from one vessel to another: Marilyn’s cleavage, but with Maggie Smith’s face, and aware to the penny how much every inch was worth. A smile extended long enough to hear his request and return to the bar. Time for niceties later, if required.

  He could still recall his last visit: he’d been thirteen, not quite fourteen. The doorman loomed like a refugee from a disreputable sideshow, looking him up and down before pronouncing Dan invisible and turning away in boredom. The whole time he was inside Dan waited for someone to tell him to leave, if not to pick him up by his scruff and toss him freeform through the door, while he scoured the room for a sign of the old man.

  This was after his father had taken to drink again following the years of uneasy sobriety — the effects of a strike that had gone on past being amusing, the pleasures of idle afternoons long since worn thin. In their place, a bone-wearying boredom had set in along with occasional flashes of rage at “the man” — sometimes elevated to “the fucking man” — exacerbated by the bottle he talked to day and night. It had taken Dan a while to understand that his father wasn’t referring to a specific man, but a collective one composed of bosses and managers and mine owners who “day after frigging day” conspired to keep him from his rightful place of employment under the ground.

  No matter that he cursed the very same man just as thoroughly when there was no strike on. What the young Dan suspected, and eventually understood, was that his father hated things as much when they went smoothly as when they didn’t. And when it came down to it, he pretty much hated all things equally, no questions asked.

  That night, he’d found his father sitting alone in a corner nursing a whiskey on a table that held three empty glasses and a plastic-framed menu boasting that The Best Eat Here! A morose man, weaned in silence and hard times, sipping at his drink without a word. Now that Dan thought about it, it might have been around the anniversary of his mother’s death, probably why his aunt had been even more insistent than usual that he find his father and bring him home.

  That night Dan found him wrapped in his all-weather coat, a no-colour garment that smelled of tar and fish, with rips along the seam where the insulation had fallen out, like something bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. Loneliness was never pretty, even when it dressed up for a Saturday night, and it was seldom inviting to anyone on the outside.

  When Dan tried to coax him home, his father looked murder at him. To Stuart Sharp, home was never where the heart lay, no matter how dark and stormy the world outside. When Dan asked why he wanted to sit there drinking alone, his father replied with all the silence in the world. It was what he did best, after all.

  Now Dan picked up his glass and took a sip. He had a few more to go before he caught up to the old man.

  Even for alcoholics there is a hierarchy of drunkenness: drink, drank, drunk, and drunkard. The tag on the liquor doesn’t count for much. You don’t get there any faster on expensive cognac than on cheap red wine, or even dollar-store cologne if you have the stomach for it, though the first goes down a bit nicer. Put a smelly aquarium in the corner, fill it with bloated carp, and the crowd appeal goes up for some reason known only to God and His Angels. Something to look at other than the waitress’s titties and the busboy’s bottom, maybe.

  It was as if there were two worlds, one for the perfect, privileged people in film and on television, and another for the rest of us who are neither perfect nor privileged enough to matter. But it was when you crossed over the River Merry into the Land of Shame that you knew you’d taken a very wrong turn. Especially if you couldn’t remember how you got there and forgot to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to plot your way back again. Drinking itself wasn’t the problem. The problem, Dan knew, lay in the degree that it took hold of your life and ran you about without your knowing.

  Still, at its best drink could make you soar above the crowd. When the mood hit and the vintage suited, there was nothing better. You felt it in your veins, the way it lifted you up like a gifted amateur at a karaoke rally, turning heads with th
e talent you knew you had in you all along. It was the bird that flew high and took you, grateful, along with it, tucked beneath its spreading wings, till you touched the golden ball in the sky. At its worst, it carried a sledgehammer’s swing like those games at the midway, as you downed one drink after another without ever ringing the bell, when you knew with agonizing certainty that with the right drink you could slam that bell all the way home. Only you can’t do it, swing after swing, because the rhythm is always wrong, no matter how ballsy you get, how rotten with drink, and you sink without flying upwards, without singing the song in your veins, going down as fast as you’d lose a wager on a three-legged dog. Dan knew he was in for a night of lead boots.

  The lack of a karaoke machine didn’t stop the optimistic or the desperate. From a far corner came the ragged improvising of one fellow who looked not long for this world, or perhaps he’d stopped in from the next for a quick one, blessing the living with his rendition of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a laryngeal howl, raw as a fresh sunburn, and joined by an unlikely back-up from old times. Mick Jagger hungry for the glory days and Grace Slick coming down off a month-long bender.

  Him: a wizened little monkey face, lips screwed up, his rock & roll all pain and attitude. Her: hair fringed like a sixties hippie, eyes staring from some forgotten acid trip, like she’s haunted by a memory fixed in her brain that won’t let go. Still, she’s neatly put together: white blouse belted on over tight black jeans, Nancy Sinatra boots, good cleavage even in the light. She’s over fifty, but then he might be nearly twice that.

  One of the sure signs of being an alcoholic is when your three best friends are bartenders. These two had friends in spades, while all around them sat the tired faces of the hard-working men and women who looked like little more than deflated balloons and empty overcoats draped over chairs. What they all had in common was the uncelebrated lot of the working man and woman.

  The singer sent the notes skyward with a particularly inventive phrasing to his rendition. “Go, Georgie!” some die-hard rock & roller called out, with Grace cheering him on. Made for each other, the pair was. She put her hand on the inside of his thigh, let it creep upwards with a raucous laugh, like it was an old joke they were sharing. The tune turned and he began to crow like a rooster, quenching thirst and drowning troubles as one. A covering of chartreuse over iodine: “The Green, Green Grass of Home” had never sounded so agonizingly verdant.

  Dan reeled into his pocket and pulled out a mash of bills, peeled two off and slapped them onto the table. Maggie Smith came over and snapped them up, teeth stained chromium yellow like unpolished silverware.

  Over by the door, a stain seemed to be trying to ooze into the shag without much success. Dan sidestepped it and staggered from the bar to stand breathing in the night air. That good clean Sudbury air, bought and paid for by the generosity of Inco.

  Mist hissed from the sewer grates where shadows huddled against the cold, home to the unlucky and unloved. The cityscape faded into grey over the disembodied forms of a pair of unhappy wraiths. They glanced up at his passing. Purple hair and nose rings. Where did they get the money? Nifty hair and piercings didn’t come cheap.

  Dan walked on, trying to imagine his life if he’d stayed. Where would he be now if he hadn’t taken that first step onto the tarmac of the 69, never lifted his thumb, opened the cab of the truck and said with stunning alacrity as though he’d done the same thing a million times before, “I’m heading for TO”? Stacking empties at the LCBO, probably, or driving a cab or even working as a clerk at the gleaming new taxation centre. Or maybe he would have died, one fistfight too many, the blinding flash of a brain hemorrhage followed by everlasting blackness. A line on a tombstone to indicate his whereabouts underground. But he would never, ever be working underground. Not for Inco. Not for Falconbridge Mines. Not for anybody.

  Maybe he’d be the older man groping the teenaged striplings with their nervous eyes and taut tummies, jeans sloping down to reveal, pinked and toned, those smooth, muted buttocks, watching with quiet patience, one hand on his rod, while the trestle trembled and a boy timed his ejaculations to spew over his fist at the shriek of a train passing overhead in the dull monotony of a summer’s afternoon, as the brooding older man with the scar on his right temple tried to recollect the shape of the future. His future. While the dark, mutinous side of him tried, and failed, to imagine the rest of his life.

  Dan shook off the image. Memory’s way was perilous.

  He hadn’t gone a block before his bladder nagged him to stop and take care of business. He looked around and stepped inside a cul-de-sac, like ducking into a darkened church, standing a few feet out of sight from the road while he fumbled with his fly and relieved himself. He looked down and laughed: You’re pretty sizeable. He thought of the shocked look on the cyclist’s face as he pushed him against the fence. He sprayed a box labelled with a brand of tissue papers, the drops splattering back at him, managing to wet his fingers in the draw. This, he knew, was the prelude to sloppy drunk. He was halfway through his meditations when he heard the voices. He swayed toward the dark and hoped he’d finish before they appeared or else that they would pass quickly and not look into the alley’s dim depths and see him at prayer.

  Shadows appeared over his shoulder, thrown long by the street lamps. From the sound of their footsteps he knew they’d turned down the entrance to the alley. He still had the presence of mind to feel embarrassed at being caught. He shook himself and zipped up before turning, ready to smile and laugh at his predicament.

  At first he took them for an older couple. They looked burnt-out wisps of human beings. She appeared to be arguing, stumbling while leaning against him as they moved closer. Then he recognized them as the forms huddled on the sewer grates.

  She looked him up and down, sizing him up for something. A coffin, maybe. “What are you doing, fuckhead? You fucking pissing in the street?”

  A part of his brain considered this: not the nicest of greetings. Certainly not words to cheer you at two in the morning in a back alley. They continued toward him with their jerky, spastic walk, propping each other up like badly conjoined twins. Purple hair glinted in the moonlight. She wore a tight clingy skirt and leopard print leotards. The boy was in jeans with a black T. A tattooed dragon clawed its way up his throat and wrapped itself around his neck. Both had on pricey leather jackets. Between them they had enough piercings to fill a small jewellery box. Must’ve been hell getting through airport security.

  “Did you hear me? I said what are you doing?” She snarled like a Ringwraith. There should have been smoke wreathing from her lips. “I want money, you cocksucker!” Her arm clutched a purse in a ridiculous parody of a woman. “How much you got, fuckin’ dickhead?”

  “Yeah!” said the guy. “We want your money. How much you got?” He laughed and rattled a chain wrapped around his fist. They were close enough for Dan to see their faces. The flat-eyed, no-mind stare of heroin addicts doing their diddly dance. Sid and Nancy in On The Town.

  “Scum,” Dan mumbled.

  The chain quivered in quick junkie twitches. “You talkin’ to me?” the boy demanded. Make that Sid and Nancy in Taxi Driver. The perfect couple. She had a cunt for a mouth; he had an arsehole for a brain.

  Behind him, a fire escape traced a route to the roof, but it was blocked above the first floor. The only way out of the alley lay behind this highly colourful odd couple. At least Sally would be impressed. Dan reasoned he could bluff his way out or, if it came to it, he could manage the two of them without much trouble. They weren’t big and they were addicts. They were probably used to rolling drunks who couldn’t put up much of a fight. Then again, he was drunk.

  They moved faster than he expected. She swung the purse, clipping Dan on the bridge of the nose with a wallop. His hands went up to his face as his throat constricted in rage. The sky pitched, shrank, then resumed normal proportions above. The brick had found its mark.

  Sid raised an arm to follow up with the chain
. Fuelled by anger and pain, Dan booted him in the balls. The boy staggered and fell to the sidewalk, the slither of leather on concrete. Through his outraged howl, Dan heard the click. Something glinted. Metal. Longer and sharper than a piercing. Nancy came at him, blade in hand, suddenly looking more than capable as Sid writhed on the ground. She would have at him for her man. Adrenaline surged like lightning. With no time for niceties, Dan kicked her in the stomach and sent her and her purple hair reeling.

  He watched, awed by the slow-motion trajectory as she flipped and rolled and landed against the curb. Her head hit, making an ugly, disturbing sound like the clack of false teeth. She lay still. Was she breathing? In that light, it was impossible to tell. If anyone came around the corner, they’d be calling him the assailant. The boy would claim he’d attacked them. That he’d been bigger and faster — maybe fast enough to kill a teenaged girl. Self-defence had brought out the knife.

  Over by the curb. An arm moved. Reached up to feel the head. Thank. Fuck. He hadn’t killed her after all. For a moment he wanted to go over and help, but quickly thought better of it. The head looked around, fixing him with a hateful stare. Hands planted themselves in the dirt. The body twitched, inching upwards. She was like the Evil Dead, already coming after him again.

  He flashed on the pub. Remembered he’d paid in cash. No paper trail. No one knew his name. Wasn’t a regular. And was very very grateful.

  Time to go.

  Twenty-One

  Drink and Resurrection

  Dan had never endangered anybody’s life — his own included — by mixing driving with alcohol. Even this latest zigzag life had thrown him wasn’t going to make him change that. There were some rules no amount of alcohol could waive, though if drinking encouraged a state in which you could convince yourself of almost anything, then that went a long way toward explaining why so many drinkers didn’t consider themselves subject to those rules. He sobered up long enough to patch his face, say goodbye to his aunt and cousin and get safely back down the 69.