Buffalo Jump

by Howard Shrier

  Men gathered near pillars supporting the expressway, finding what shelter they could from the wind. Ricky saw shapes huddled under thin grey blankets that looked like they’d been stolen from shelters. Empty mickeys and bottles were strewn in the dirt, along with malt liquor cans and plastic rings from six-packs.

  The old loner was a hundred yards ahead, kneeling against a fence that kept people off the Thruway, making up a little bed of discarded newspaper and cardboard. Then he sat and took a foam container out of a plastic bag and began shoving some kind of Italian food in his mouth with filthy fingers. Ricky gagged. This isn’t even a man, he told himself. It’s an animal, no different from the cats, the dog, even the brainless mouse he had dismembered. It eats like an animal. It smells like an animal. The closer Ricky got to this thing, the ranker its smell became, a mix of piss, puke, tomato sauce, more puke, tobacco and God knew what else.

  Ricky let the paper bag slip down off his bottle as he walked past, and let his gait become more unsteady. If the guy was anything short of blind, he’d see a natural mark—a moonfaced kid looking drunk and vulnerable—with a nearly full bottle in his hand. If that didn’t get someone’s darker nature fired up, they plain didn’t have one.

  Ricky Messina’s father was Sicilian but his mother was from the north and he had her colouring: dark blond hair and green eyes. His face was so round that kids used to call him Moon Face and Mooney before he gained some size and built it up hard in gymnasiums inside and outside prison. To this day people who didn’t know Ricky might look at his open face and think him pleasant. That suited Ricky just fine.

  As Ricky stumbled along the fence, trying to look drunk, like he was barely keeping his balance, he heard footsteps fall in behind him, heard the flapping of a leather sole against the ground. Ricky let go of the fence and reached in for his knife: not a stiletto back then, but a steel hunting knife bought secondhand at a surplus store. The bottle in one hand, the knife in the other, Ricky leaned back against the fence. He felt ready. He kept his eyes half closed as if passing out, but through lowered lids he watched the animal approach, hefting a chunk of concrete in one filthy hand. Ricky had learned patience killing animals; he waited until the bum raised the rock to bring down on Ricky’s head and stepped deftly aside. The bum’s hand came smacking down on a fence rail and he dropped the rock with a hoarse lupine cry.

  Ricky spun the bum around, the bum older than he’d looked from a distance, closer to seventy than sixty. His beard was grey except around the mouth, where nicotine had stained it orange. One eye was covered by a filmy cataract. “Drink?” Ricky asked, and smashed the bottle across his face. The bum howled again, louder, but Ricky knew no one would care. Breaking glass means nothing but bad news to drunks.

  Ricky then made his only mistake of the night: he stuck the man in the throat. Arterial blood sprayed Ricky from forehead to sternum. Blood in his face, in his eyes, God, on his lips and in his mouth, seething with the animal’s vile germs. AIDS, Hep C, TB, they all flashed through Ricky’s mind as he pulled the knife out of the man and shoved him to the ground. In thirteen years since that night, Ricky had never made that mistake again. If he needed to kill quickly, he did it from behind. If he had time, he knew where to put the knife so it neither sprayed nor killed too quickly.

  When the phone rang, it was a long-distance signal: the man himself calling from Canada. Ricky let it ring once while he drained his Scotch; again while he prepared himself. Let the man vent, he told himself. Don’t take any bait. There’s too much keeping us together. He won’t blow you out of the water.

  He answered it right after the third ring and didn’t speak again for three minutes.

  Ricky had been listening to a terrific book-on-tape in the car lately: The Manager Inside Me. He thought it could really help a forward thinker like him define his goals more precisely and hack and slash his way toward them. While the man in Toronto was tearing strips off him every which way, Ricky stayed calm and detached. The Manager Inside Me had a chapter on that very subject, “Accepting Constructive Criticism.”

  The man fed Ricky more shit than he ordinarily cared to swallow, but nothing truly damaging was said, and keeping The Manager Inside Me in mind helped: the shit still tasted like shit, but it went down easier somehow. When the rant finally wound down, Ricky calmly responded point by point. First, a brief strategic assessment of their situation to show he’d weighed both the risks and opportunities. Then a review of their agreed-upon business objectives. Finally, his plan to break new ground where the earth had been scorched.

  To Ricky’s relief, the man agreed to everything. Yes, he warned Ricky that the time for mistakes was past but, before hanging up, complimented him on his strategic approach to damage control.

  Man, Ricky loved that tape.

  CHAPTER 9

  Toronto: Tuesday, June 27

  I know I’m in Israel but it looks like downtown Toronto. I’m with the Bar Kochba Infantry, patrolling the corner of Yonge and Dundas outside the Eaton Centre, where a busker in a sleeveless black denim vest drums on overturned food tubs and draws a funked-up head-bobbing crowd. I’m in desert cammies, cradling my Mikutzrar—a short-barrelled M-16 customized for urban combat—scanning the crowd for anyone whose clothing looks too bulky, too heavy for the heat.

  Roni Galil, my sergeant, is next to me, asking for a smoke. I tell him I quit—he knows I quit, he listened to me whine about it long enough—then realize he means a joint, not a cigarette. I put my gun down on the sidewalk. I snap open a film case filled with a premixed batch of ground-up blond Lebanese hash and Marlboro tobacco that we always had good to go. I twist up a joint, but as I’m lighting it, a child in soccer shorts and tank top approaches. He has dark curly hair and looks just like his mother, which I somehow know even though she isn’t there. While I tousle the boy’s hair he picks up my M-16 and passes it back to someone in the crowd who passes it to someone else. When Roni takes the joint from me, I realize my weapon is gone. I have only my sidearm—not even the Sig Sauer they give to officers, just a standard 9-millimetre Beretta.

  I want my M-gun back. I punch the boy hard in the face. His nose breaks and he gags as blood streams into his throat. I push my way through the crowd but everyone starts pushing back, kicking at my feet, trying to knock them out from under me. If I go down I’ll never get up again, they’ll fucking kick me to death. I plant my legs and clutch at their clothing, bunch it in my fists like a man trying to keep his head above water. I call for Roni but he’s sharing the joint with people around him. He can’t hear me. He’s not even offering it to me, the shit. No one can hear me now, not above the screaming—my screaming and the screams of the mob and the boy with the broken nose.

  The exact circumstances of my Israel dreams are never the same. Sometimes we’re in a narrow alley and a torrent of water comes rushing at us, sucking us down in a vortex. Or a herd of camels thunders around a corner, egged on by small boys with sticks, nasty smelly animals with bony joints and deadly hooves that can split a man’s head in two. In one dream, people in apartments overlooking the alley started throwing appliances at us, everything from fans and toasters to full-size ovens, fridges, washers and dryers. Whatever details might be different, it’s always Roni Galil and me, trapped in a bad place with bad things happening all around.

  It was 5:24 a.m. when I woke with the dream still in my mind. I knew I’d never get back to sleep and turned on the radio, looking for something, anything, to sweep away the image of the bloodied child. I caught a few West Coast baseball scores, then a news update. The heat wave was still the top story. Several related deaths had been reported, including a ninety-three-year-old woman whose power had been cut off for non-payment, leaving her without so much as a fan. Ontario Hydro spin doctors would have to take a break from defending their lucrative consulting contracts to deal with that one.

  A smog alert had been issued for the area stretching from Windsor, in the southernmost reaches of the province, to North Bay, two hundred mi
les north of Toronto. Officials in North Bay liked to tout its clean air to tourists, billing the area as the Blue Sky Region and the city itself as “Just North Enough to be Perfect.” Now their marketers would have to come up with a new slogan. Something like “North Bay: Not as Brown as Downtown.”

  My apartment didn’t smell much better after all the cigarettes Dante Ryan had smoked last night. I opened both balcony doors and emptied and rinsed the ashtray he had filled. The evening had been so surreal I might have thought it a dream; a better dream than the one I had just had. But the photo of Lucas Silver and his parents still lay on my coffee table. The contract on their lives was all too real, if what Ryan told me had been true.

  Was it? Could it be? Did he really care whether a five-year-old lived or died? Or was he using me in some way—to flush Silver out, or maybe set me up for Marco Di Pietra, who would never forget what I had cost him.

  For the moment, I had to assume Ryan was telling the truth: that he wanted to save a life and needed my help to do it. I had things in this world to make up for, repairs to make, and I wasn’t getting the opportunity to do it behind my desk at Beacon.

  The first thing to do was stop thinking of myself as still being in recovery. So instead of doing a physio routine on my arm, I eased myself down to the floor to begin a salutation to the sun. I worked my body slowly and deliberately through the movements, feeling tightness in my back, shoulders and calves as muscles moved in ways they had missed for months. By the time I completed four salutations my right arm felt like a wolf had clamped its jaws around it. I was damp with sweat, much of it from the heat and humidity but at least some due to my own efforts.

  I rolled up to a standing position and marked a place on the floor where two parquet tiles met. I planted my feet there and began working through the sanchin kata. Katas are designed to improve a martial artist’s balance, fluidity and style, but they also provide a good cardio workout, even—perhaps especially— when done slowly and mindfully.

  Sanchin is moderate in its degree of difficulty, with forty-seven moves in all, including eight attacks. Before my injury, I had done sanchin so often it felt ingrained. I could do it left to right or right to left, beginning to end or backwards. I had done it blindfolded but didn’t think I’d be trying that any time today.

  During my first go at it, I felt awkward, having to think about the moves rather than letting them flow through me. My goal was to begin and end at precisely the same spot, but I didn’t feel rooted in it and even stumbled once in transition between defence and attack. I kept reminding myself to slow down, breathe more deeply, find the focus sanchin can bring.

  My first karate teacher told me a kata was a fight against an imaginary opponent. Not that I needed imaginary opponents, with Marco Di Pietra back on the scene. I’ve since learned that katas can be far more than that. Like dance and other art forms, in the right hands they can express sentiments about life, justice and the self. Known in English as the Three Cycles Form, sanchin symbolizes three primary conflicts of life: birth, survival and death. Only when the life cycle has ended can it begin again. When I completed my first run-through, I rested a minute and sipped water, then started again. It went more smoothly as muscle memory began kicking in. But not until the third time did I finish where I’d begun, the marked parquet tile squarely between my feet.

  By seven I was heading down Broadview in my revitalized Camry. The east-facing sides of the downtown towers reflected the rising sun as though they were aflame. Not the most comforting image in our post-9/11 world, but arresting nonetheless.

  I wanted to get in to work early, whip through my media clips and forward anything pertinent to Clint and his department heads, then boot back out and try to get a look at Jay Silver and family in the flesh. I figured I could do all that and still be back at my cubicle by the time Franny reeled in.

  Clint’s black Pathfinder was in its reserved spot when I pulled into the Beacon lot ten minutes later. I had no idea what time he arrived in the morning. In five years I had never yet beaten him in to work. The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the office when I swiped my way in. I was in the kitchenette pouring myself a mug when Clint appeared. He made a show of looking at his watch and feigning shock at my early arrival. The good humour seemed a little forced but I appreciated the effort.

  “You’re in early,” he said.

  “I’m helping Franny out on his nursing home thing.”

  “Good. I told him to call on you if he was overloaded.”

  “Oh, he was overloaded.”

  Clint smiled. He had known Franny a lot longer than I had, had no doubt witnessed many a late entrance. “Never mind, smart guy. How you doing otherwise?”

  “Fine.”

  “You sure?

  “Yeah.”

  “Bring your coffee to my office,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. Now’s as good a time as any.”

  CHAPTER 10

  I first met Graham McClintock at the Dojo on Danforth, where I taught the evening adult class in intermediate shotokan karate. Most of the students were in their forties or fifties, from professional women concerned about the city’s rising crime rates to film producers who wanted to look as buff as the younger actors and techies they hired. Clint was close to sixty then: an inch taller than my six feet, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist and thick, powerful legs. Photos of a younger Clint show him with flaming red hair but it was grey by then and cropped close to his skull. His eyes were a piercing blue that made Paul Newman’s look flat.

  From the beginning he stood out in both his degree of fitness and his aptitude for combat. He sparred with an intensity that intimidated other students, who tried hard to avoid being matched against him. If he sparred against me, he’d compete as if I were trying to make him my jailhouse bride. After class he’d hang around and ask questions about stances, weight shifts, feints and blocks. We developed a good rapport, Clint and I. My father had been dead more than ten years, and I enjoyed having him to both learn from and teach.

  One night after class, he asked me to join him for a beer and a bite, his treat, so we cleaned up and went to Allen’s, a Riverdale institution with more than 300 beers and many a fine whisky on hand. We washed hamburgers and sweet potato fries down with Dragon’s Breath ale, then ordered shots of the Macallan.

  When the drinks arrived, he said, “You’ve never asked what I do for a living. This town, it’s usually the first thing people want to know about you. That and how much you paid for your house.”

  “It’s not how I define people, so it’s not how I get to know them.”

  “I’m not going to ask what you do, because I already know,” he said. “But can I ask what you did before?”

  There was no short answer. I wasn’t like my brother Daniel; my academic past had been checkered at best. I was smart enough to know I wasn’t stupid, but I had never been able to harness it in school. I was in my own world most of the time, mourning my father, insulating myself in a haze of hash smoke. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to sneak over to the adjacent apartment building to smoke dope with Kenny Aber, and from his bedroom window we could identify my family’s unit by the one constant: my brother’s silhouette against his blinds as he studied into the night. “Is that a cardboard cut-out or what?” Kenny would ask. “I swear he never moves.”

  No one ever said that about me. I was always moving, just not getting anywhere.

  I told Clint a little about the things I had done after finishing Grade 12, starting with my years in Banff, on the eastern slope of the Rockies, where I tended bar and skied in the winter and worked construction in the summer. I also gave him a brief précis of my time in Israel, focusing on the beginning, not the end. Like many other young Jews dismayed by the materialism of their parents’ generation, I had gone there searching for something purer and more demanding of myself. A collective dream I could be part of. While I gave only the briefest details of my army time, I did tell Clint how I had b
egun to study martial arts there, in the form of Krav Maga, a self-defence system designed by an Israeli army man. Roni Galil was my mentor. When I returned to Toronto, I abandoned Krav Maga for karate, needing at the time to leave all things Israeli behind.

  “So is that it for you?” Clint asked me. “Martial arts instructor for life?”

  “Why do I feel like you’re interviewing me for a job?” I said.

  He said, “Maybe it’s time you asked what I do.”

  The walls of Clint’s office were covered with photos of him with high-ranking cops and city officials, certificates of courses he had taken since leaving the Toronto force and framed newspaper articles about Beacon Security success stories. His large beechwood desk was covered with neat rows of current files. A laptop on his desk was networked to a large flat-screen monitor. He pointed to the visitor’s chair in his office. I sat.

  “How’s the arm?” he asked.

  “It’s fine.”

  “A hundred per cent?”

  “Maybe ninety.”

  “Let’s see.” He moved a row of files aside, rolled up his right shirtsleeve and planted his elbow on his side of the desk.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Show me what you got.”

  I rolled up my sleeve and placed my elbow opposite his. We gripped hands and locked eyes.

  “Go,” he said.

  There was no use trying to pin him. Being left-handed put me at a disadvantage to begin with; nor was my right arm quite the ninety per cent I’d claimed. I forgot about trying to take him down and focused instead on resistance, hoping he would tire. But when we had been stalemated at ninety degrees for thirty seconds or so, my triceps started to quiver. He put more into it; so did I. Clint’s face grew a shade redder but I ascribed that to his Celtic roots, not any challenge I posed.