by Lee Lamothe
He fiddled with his class ring, rotating it around his fat pinky finger. “You want to do that? Play with the chemistry set? Become a professional woman?”
“Well,” she purred and ran her hand down his distended, pure white belly until it was nestled back at his crotch. “I should get a shot. I got good hands. I did good in chemistry at school. If Harv’s got funny and goes over to them, who’ll you get? I can be like one of those guys at baseball, in the pig pen.”
“The bullpen.” He felt a sudden brief fondness for her. “It’s the bullpen.”
“Right, that.”
“You want a shot. I want to give you the packer. How you with that? Quid pro quo.”
“C’mon, Connie. I don’t like that.” She looked at him staring at her. “Look, okay, but take it easy, okay? Last time I had to wear a scarf and a turtleneck. It hurt.”
“You look good in a turtleneck. But no problem, Ag. I’ll be good.”
When she went to the washroom for lotion and preparation he stretched his jaws and jowls wide and cracked the joints. He’d always hated being fat but found it was delicious to see her slim figure vanish under him.
She came out with a bath towel, a box of condoms, and a tube of gel. He watched her hands quickly make him hard and skin the rubber on. She stayed down there massaging the gel onto the condom and stared at him. He made her wait a few moments then took a tube of crank from beside the bed. He positioned her, then tapped a mound onto the sticky tip of the condom. Her ass was his favourite delivery system.
* * *
While Agatha Burns was in the washroom, cleaning up and crying, Connie Cook called Harvey on a cellphone. “Hey, where you?”
“Cookie? What’s up, man?”
“Well, I was, a few minutes ago.” He laughed.
“You at Ag’s? She got the stuff ready to go?”
“Yeah, soon. Give her a couple of hours. She’s got to work standing up for a while.”
“Hoo.”
“You been dealing with those Chinese guys, Willy Wong’s kids, out in the east end? Aggie says you got yellow fever, trolling the massage parlours. Meeting bad people and pressing and cooking for strangers. Anything to that, Harv?”
“Fuck, no. C’mon, Cookie. She said that, eh? She wouldn’t say that.”
“Yup. And she wants to cook. I said you’d give her a tryout.”
“Ah, well, okay, I guess,” Harv said. He waited a few seconds. “But it isn’t the kind of thing you can just teach someone, like baking brownies, you know. You make a little mistake they turn out, taste a little bitter, sprinkle on some sugar and eat ’em anyway. This is different. There are tricks. You know I got tricks and you can’t ask me to just give ’em to some scrag you’re banging. That ain’t right, Cookie.”
“Harv, don’t worry about it. She’s just trying to get ahead. When you come by to pick up the chicklets for your snowbank, you arrange to take her out for a drive. See if she’s got the chops.”
“Well, if you’re sure, Cookie. I got lots of people want me to give ’em night school lessons in avoiding crank combustion.”
“Well, look, Harv, I’m not asking you to make her a wizard like you. Just take her to the first step, okay? Let her make suds. She’ll feel useful, like she’s going ahead. You do the real work.”
“Yeah, okay.” Harv clicked his teeth. “She said that, eh? That I’m with the Chinamen?”
“Don’t worry about it, Harv. She probably meant some fucking fucker.”
Agatha Burns stayed in the washroom while he dressed. It took a long time and he was breathing heavily when he finished. He slipped his feet into loafers: it was impossible for him to contort himself to secure shoelaces. He could hear the shower blasting. He cracked the door called into the steam, “Hey, you okay, Ag?”
She sobbed. “Go away. You said you wouldn’t bite.”
“C’mon, Ag. A little fun. You gonna be okay to work? Do some stuff with Harv later, become a journeyman cooker?” He stepped in and twitched back the shower curtain. “I decided to move you up. Harv’s okay on the X but he needs an apprentice for the crank.”
Agatha Burns was crouched on the floor under the hard, hot water, holding a soapy face cloth to the back of her neck. The face cloth was stained pink with watery blood. “Really?” For a second her face had a residual cheerleader’s glow that hadn’t quite been burned away by chemistry.
“Yep. The Harv’s a master maker. Don’t mention to him that I know about the Chinamen, though, okay? That you told me. I want to move you up quick. I don’t think Harv’s gonna make it and I want you to have all his secrets.”
“Okay, wow.” She stood up, beaming. Of all of her, only her eyes remained gorgeous. “Okay.”
He could count her ribs. There were bruises on her hips and knees where she’d fallen while high. She suddenly had sagging breasts and he regretted that. She smiled and her teeth looked wobbly and grey, off-kilter. He again felt a bit of sadness. “Finish up the chicklets, and when Harv comes to pick them up he’ll take you with him, get you started.”
“We going to the super lab?” She laughed gaily, his excesses forgotten, forgiven. “Okay, okay, Connie, I’ll do good.”
He felt a chill at the echo of her words. The super lab. What was that all about?
He left the building whistling, knowing he’d never need to come back again, and he was sad he’d never see her again. Harv was primed and would make his move, giving Agatha Burns a lesson in crank combustion. Harv, he knew, didn’t fuck around.
Chapter 4
When his wife threw him out after he’d shot the second black guy, Ray Tate had poked at the rental section of the newspaper, then went to the nearest police station and leaned on the duty sergeant’s table. The duty sergeant, an old Irish squarehead with rockers on his stripes, knew everything about his kingdom: the smokehouses, the homes with domestic violence, what was a rental and what was owned. He knew every neighbour dispute, every squat, every house infested with mental patients who only came out after dark, shy of the light, fearful of eyes.
The duty sergeant shook Tate’s hand across the table. “Fuck ’em, Ray. You go forth and smite thine enemies and, well, fuck what they’re trying to do to you.” He took the slip with the apartment building’s address, turned to a civilian operator, and said with polite command, “Run it.” To Ray Tate he said: “I know it. Old man Lilly’s place. It’s okay. Parking kinda sucks. Where they got you working? You got a company car?”
Ray Tate had told the squarehead he was relaxing on paid leave until they sorted out the latest shooting. No gun, no badge, no car.
“No problem, then.” The CO handed the duty a printout. “Okay. We got a domestic, we got a domestic, we got a B&E, we got another domestic, another B&E, noise, noise, noise. A suicide by blade. What the fuck?” He read through the page. “Oh, hang on. Okay. You’re going into three-o-five, right? That’s the domestics and the noise complaints, and the suicide. That’s why it went vacant, the guy killed himself. Cutting. A mess.” He’d dropped the sheet on the desk. “Make sure old man Lilly gives you a new carpet.”
The apartment was one big room with a partial partitioned-off kitchenette with a fragrant gas stove, a half-fridge, and a table that snapped down off the wall, landing on a folding leg. The bathroom was compact but had a tub. Ray Tate had spent many after-shifts sitting on the edge of a bathtub, soaking his feet in salts and soaps after walking his many posts. Calluses on his feet were buttery and rife and as familiar as his thumbs. There was no furniture and no carpet. The floor was scuffed but solid and an attempt had been made to sand it. There was no seepage onto the wood from the suicide. Ray Tate wasn’t worried about being haunted by a suicide: he had two black guys who sometimes came around late at night and stirred up his sleep.
The windows faced glorious, indirect north and Ray Tate had instinctively thought about painting. He’d used a butter knife to chip the encrusted paint on the windowsills until he was able to force the windows open all the wa
y.
Old man Lilly liked having a cop in the building and gave Ray Tate a key to the storage area in the basement. “Go on down, take what you like. When you move out, just leave it.”
There was no bed in the basement but a serviceable wooden table and chair were stacked in a corner, upside down on a sprung-out couch. There were two mismatched lamps, a set of cups, saucers, dishes, and some odd pots. He’d never lived alone in his life. Every place he’d ever lived was already someone else’s home: first the State homes, then the foster homes, the rooming house with two other recruits near the academy, and finally with his wife. He went to an art store and bought bags of paints and brushes and an easel and set it up at a forty-five degree angle to the window.
While he was on paid off he’d stood at his easel and looked at the canvas. He squeezed paint and stared at it, his thumb poked through the hole in the pallet. His paycheques were automatically deposited and he had little reason to go outside. Until his beard and hair grew out, and he became unrecognizable from the media photos, he crept to the supermarket in a baseball hat and sunglasses. He started smoking again. He drank, each day starting in earlier until he found himself leaning asleep on his easel in the middle of the day. When he awoke his hands shook as he poured his breakfast.
One night he’d borrowed Mr. Lilly’s old Chevrolet and drove out to the western suburbs to see his ex and his daughter. His wife had been perfunctory and went to the basement to do laundry and watch television. His daughter, graduating high school, sat with him on the deck he’d built with the firefighter next door, and they talked about her photography and her plan to spend a year in Asia. She looked at him funny and then went inside, returning with a handful of photographs and a sleek Nikon. She stuttered it at him a few times and previewed the pictures on the LCD screen.
“Look, Dad,” she’d said. She handed him a photo taken of him before the first of the shootings. The difference was stunning: his face had become lined, his eyes were sunken into his head, his mouth was grim and clamped as though protecting himself from a confession.
“You look afraid,” his daughter said with alarm. “Are you afraid, Dad?”
He’d gone home and poured the half bottles of alcohol into the sink. He took to four sugars in his coffee to keep his blood in balance. The squareheaded duty sergeant from the local station came by one after-shift, looked around and said, “Jesus fuck, Ray. C’mon, man.”
The following day, three off-dutys and a uniformed female officer appeared carrying a folded futon, pillows, some banal framed pictures of Japanese mountaintops, a set of silverware, a television set, and a stack of bedding meant for a queen-sized bed. Each left a police business card with their cell numbers scrawled on the back. The last one, preparing to leave, a trim blond policewoman with a hurricane of freckles and a wide sad smile, said: “You need, you call, sergeant. You got it?”
Ray Tate nodded.
“You want, I’ll stay, sergeant.”
Numbly, he’d nodded and she helped him assemble and make up the futon. She stripped off her uniform. She wore men’s underwear and socks that sagged to her ankles.
Afterwards, as she slept, he turned on a lamp and tilted the shade away from her. He mixed blues and purples and blacks and painted her sleeping, her muscular arm hanging off the side of the futon, her gun belt curled on the floor, her boots neatly aligned beside the futon. He looked at the long tubes of yellows and oranges and bright reds and could think of nothing to do with them.
Then the sun was coming up and spilling thin, perfect north light into the apartment. He lay down beside her. He felt loved for what seemed the first time in his life, although he couldn’t recall her name.
* * *
After leaving the satellite and the skipper’s greasy brotherhood, Ray Tate stopped at a coffee shop and wrote from memory the names and phone numbers from the duty roster in the Chemical Squad’s office into his notebook. Aside from the notorious Djuna Brown he recognized none of them, except for one: Walter Brodski, a stumblebum ex-hero who let the pressures grind him into a bottle.
In his jacket and union sweatshirt, Tate hiked up the hill outside the satellite, past the swank midtown shops and sushi bars, and strode into the gully at the cemetery. At the north end he stopped again for a coffee to warm up, sitting in a window and looking at the streets as though he’d been away a long time. Back on the sidewalk he legged it energetically north, veering off to walk slowly by the local station, keeping half an eye out for the freckled, blond policewoman.
There were framed photographs of his daughter’s work on the walls of his apartment and some faced-in canvases he’d played with, to little result, leaning near his easel. With his lack of enthusiasm or real talent it was getting expensive to buy the stretched canvas so he’d bought a case of thick paper pads. There was a teak, elephant-footed coffee table his daughter had found at an antique shop. Little else had changed in the apartment in the months since the charity run by the local division guys and the mercy of the freckled policewoman. She’d never come back. He’d seen her once, doing up her notebook behind an office building when he cut through one afternoon in his shabby alley rat attire. He passed, he thought, unnoticed. In the days since she’d stayed the night he’d thought about her a lot.
There was no mail. He’d been away in the weeds for days and the apartment smelled of cooped up linseed oil, dirty laundry, and the faint scent of gas from the stove. He reefed open the windows. Old Mr. Lilly had mown the lawn and the earthy fragrance stirred something in him. He reached for his brushes and tubes, hooked his thumb through his pallet, and flipped open a spiral pad of thick paper. He squeezed green.
Ray Tate was no fan of Zen but his daughter’s photographs of calm gardens and forests made him shut his eyes. He slashed vertical; he swooped in curves. Resisting the urge to open his eyes to examine the result, he instead moistened the tip of the brush with his tongue to thin out the colour and slashed and swooped and let his mind flow like water over unfamiliar stones.
The psychiatrist had told him one of her clients, a small-town policeman from a burg across the state line, had cut off his gun hand with a table saw after shooting a teenager dead during an off-duty traffic stop on the Interstate. Another, she said, quit the job and became a bricklayer, even on his off-days building walls around walls at his cottage on the river. All of it, she said, to protect the world from himself. They all suffered, she said, sooner or later. They became quickly grey and their faces lined, their mouths turned into upside down Us. They became impotent and violent in direct proportion to their libido level prior to their killings. They beat themselves. They beat their wives. They beat their children. Some, she said, just vanished, either dead or gone into a void world where they could become something else, usually with the fragrance of alcohol or smoke.
“What did you do, Ray, after the first incident?”
He didn’t like her. She was beautiful and had big brunette hair and perfect legs beneath a business suit with a sexy cut. She looked at him as though he was a specimen. He said: “I answered all the questions, then I went home and …” He looked down at his hands.
She leaned forward. Her breasts were creamy. She was predatory. “And? And then … What?”
“I ate a bacon sandwich.” His face was bland enough that he knew she could tell he was lying. He didn’t tell her his wife, the daughter of a cop, looked at him differently after the second shoot. “Canadian bacon.”
“My dad,” his wife had said, “was thirty years on and he never shot anyone. Ray, how come you shot two people?”
He didn’t answer.
“Ray?”
“Your dad was a crime scene geek, Karen. He shot pictures, not people. When he got there the bad guys were dead on the floor. When I get there, they’re not so co-operative.”
They’d sat in stiff silence and ate their dinner off TV trays. When the news came on and showed the riots starting up downtown she picked up her plate and went into the kitchen.
He’d become a cop because her dad had talked him into it. Being a doorstep baby of the State he’d had no dad of his own, but had been raised in a series of good but indifferent foster homes where one man taught him to shave, another to defend himself and to how to swing on an inside curve ball, another to play chess, another to fashion a half-Windsor knot in his tie. All good men, he believed. A bit of the duty sergeant in each of them.
Karen’s dad, Harry, had extolled the job for the wrong reasons. Good pay, good benefits, a great pension. You can keep my daughter in a good life on that stuff, old Harry had said. Retire early enough to start another career, bank the pension. There was no talk of duty, of public service, of justice or protection. It was to please her dad that he’d applied. The old man’s connections had got him in and moved him along, not in rank but in assignments. After the first shooting the old man and his cronies had come to the house and drank him into the floor. It was as though they’d never seen a real cop before, a working cop, a cop who’d done the job. They thought he was the spawn of some old eastside ground pounder who’d bumped up against a loose lady while patrolling an alley. When he got his stripes they’d come by and exuberantly pounded his biceps, to engrave them into his flesh.
After the second shooting, there was only a brief phone call and a message to hang in there. He sat at home and grew his hair and beard in the silence.
One night his daughter, Alexis, had come down to the basement where he’d taken to sleeping. She cuddled up to him on the sofa. “We’re okay, dad.” Her hair was blond like Karen’s. She had his thin features and he wondered often if he was looking at the features of the mother he’d never met.
He sat with his arm around her. “Anything you want to ask me, Ax?”
“Nope.” She wouldn’t say anything else except, “We’re cool.”
The next day, in the middle of a fight, Karen flat out asked if it was true, if he was a racist. He packed what possessions would fit into the backseat of a taxi.
