We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

by Joel Thomas Hynes

  A shocker for Johnny, but the suit fits fine.

  He can smell Pius’s best drinking years baked into the underarms and the pockets are lined with a dry powder of Drum tobacco. Johnny half expects to find money tucked away inside the lining. But he does not.

  The docket’s got him scheduled for half an hour’s time. Johnny scans the list of names, recognizes a few. There’s that young one who drove her car out over Signal Hill a few weeks back, tryna do away herself. All fucked up. She jumped at the last second though, let the car go on. It was all over the news, emergency crews dragging the car back up over the cliff, all the houses down below evacuated. Everybody was right livid with her, about the damage she done to the grounds near the castle and the money it cost to get the car up out of it. She was charged then with mischief and reckless endangerment! Imagine that. Poor fucked-up girl. I mean, get her some goddamn help, ya know? Whatcha gotta go dragging her through the courts for?

  Johnny spies that evil cunt from CBS who burnt his house down with his five-year-old daughter inside. Left a shitload of messages on his ex’s phone beforehand. He’s being led through in shackles and chains and there’s a few reporters taking pictures of him. Evil motherfucker. And here’s young Leo Davis, up for another car theft and joyriding and a dozen breaches. Leo’s girlfriend is hiccupping through the tears and mumbling and clung to his sleeve but Leo is stone-faced with his brows scrunched in that hard way and pushing her away, tellin her to go on home if she’s going gettin on like that. Johnny waits until Leo catches his eye, then gives a nod to let Leo know that he knows he’s just putting the face on, that face you gotta wear, the face that Johnny hopes he’s wearing himself. The face that says I couldnt give a fuck for no man here, when in truth youre just about ready to shit your pants. Yeah, Leo’s gotta go federal this time too.

  Reeves passes up through the gaggle of drunk drivers and sleep-deprived mothers and anxious girlfriends and pill-heads and small-time teeny hooligans. He scurries right past Johnny with not a spark of recognition. Johnny thinks for a flash that it’d be fun to boot Reeves’s legs out from under him and send him sprawling across the floor in a flurry of papers and a splatter of scalding coffee, but instead he shouts out Reeves! Reeves turns and clocks Johnny in the dated suit and gives a little nod, not of approval, but a nod that says Well, at least you tried. He takes Johnny by the sleeve and pulls him to a cubby corner and asks if he’s seen the victim? And it takes a moment for Johnny to realize Reeves is talkin about Madonna, and not him.

  No, no I havent. Why? Is she here?

  Well, we have another few minutes, and she might be hanging back . . .

  What would that mean? Like if she dont show up?

  Johnny lets Reeves lead him by the arm into the congested, stagnant little courtroom. A tight whistling sound and the manic pulse pounding in his wrists and neck and chest and the sweat trickling down his back and his teeth loose from the late-night grinding and the taste of metal in the back of his throat. Fuck. Johnny sees a bottle of water tucked under Reeves’s arm and grabs it and has it almost drank before Reeves notices it gone. Johnny scans the pews, but no sign of Madonna, and he thinks again of his offering to the man upstairs last night and his pulse quickens to a genuine breakneck speed. Reeves sits Johnny down, leans in conspiratorially to burble in Johnny’s ear:

  Well if she doesnt show, and that’s if, the Crown can still press forward. But the meat of the case hinges on her appearance and testimony. I know Victim Services couldnt reach her. And you do have the ahhh . . . did you say you were applying to trade school? Computers or . . . no that’s not you . . .

  Look, what do they got on me, if she dont show?

  But before Reeves can respond, that flaccid, jowly-eyed Judge Roberts hefts into the court and all hands have to rise and then sit back, like fucken schoolchildren. Reeves instructs Johnny not to speak anymore, to sit there and be quiet and not to fidget and to take that scowl off his face. And the rest, for Johnny, is a jittery blur of dirty looks and heads huddled together and murmurs about a recess, about a possible holdover. A scrap of paper slipped across the bench. Judge Roberts’s bloated flabby bald head staring down at the scrap of paper for what seems like forty days and forty nights. Teeming drone of the digital clock. Reeves’s biting garlic breath. The musty, closeted death stench of Pius’s old suit. Throbbing itch on Johnny’s shoulder that he cant reach without prolly rippin the armpits out of the suit. Officer Norris catching Johnny’s eye, nodding ever so discreetly, a nod that offers Johnny the first crumb of hope he’s known in months and months. A nod that says You were lucky this time, Johnny boy. But there’ll be another. And then Roberts shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders at the CP and more shrugs and the termination of Johnny’s conditions! What the fuck??? Then Reeves nodding at Johnny with this semi-apologetic hue in his eyes . . . and Johnny not feeling quite as light as would be expected. Not feeling quite so unburdened as he woulda thought. No, something . . . something . . . Johnny does not have to reach out for the bench in front of him to keep from floating up to the ceiling.

  It’s over, Reeves goes, it’s over Mr Keough.

  But there’s no victory jig, no gloating legal aid smirk, just Reeves’s jaw set with something more, a looming pronouncement stuttering on the tip of his tongue as he leads Johnny out into the main lobby and Johnny’s sayin What? What is it? Spit it out!

  Well, she, Ms Dale, ahhh, Madonna, she was . . .

  What? Fuck sakes man, what?

  She was found this morning . . .

  Whaddaya mean she was found? Where the fuck is she then?

  She’s ahhh, she’s dead Mr Keough. She’s dead.

  Johnny makes an instinctive grab at the lapels of Reeves’s suit but Reeves slips eagerly back into the horde of doomed hopefuls and is immediately swallowed up by a thick herd of sheriff’s officers. Johnny’s left to boot at a garbage can. Grinding his knuckles off the cheap stucco coating on the support beam. Roiling, foaming at the top of the escalators where he sees Leo Davis shoving at his girlfriend, sayin Fuck off will ya girl? Go home! And when she finally gets it and bulldozes, red-faced and puffy-eyed, towards the escalators in Johnny’s direction, Johnny can see the dull yellow bruises on her neck and the tender swell of her pregnant belly beneath the taut pink wool sweater.

  5

  What’s left Johnny? What’s left? Quarter flask of Crown fucken Royal. Neighbour’s framing hammer. Shiner. Shiner’s left. Left over. Madonna’s gone. Madonna. Gone. Capital G. Not. Coming. Back. Gone where? What did you see girl? What did you feel? Peace and ease? Bright light? Or do you sink into the darkness like going off to sleep. Suddenly there’s nothing, as if there’s always been nothing.

  This is Johnny, back now, back only hours from Caul’s Funeral Home and Crematorium with a ceramic urn of Madonna’s ashes on the table before him. Shiner’s table. Back from a week of wandering about town pounding on doors at four in the morning, roaring mad and smashing bottles and kicking at parked cars, his knuckles scabbed and swollen from lacing into brick walls. Feet all a-blister, cracked and bleeding when he bends his toes a certain way, the grey leather boots gone bust. And not a cop in sight, for all that. Jesus, try and lay low and they’re up your hole every time you takes a piss. Go out and pull a fucken armed robbery and boot the drunken shit out of the town for the week and they’re nowhere to be seen.

  Madonna.

  Shit man, no way. No way. This is not . . . this is . . .

  Johnny aint shaved, aint showered since the evening before court. And there will be no shower forthcoming. No more need for showers. As far as Johnny’s head is workin, the dirt and filth on his knees and under his nails and between his toes, the blood in his boots and the pus on his knuckles all belong to a time when Madonna roamed the same town, breathed the same air. And he’ll be good and goddamned if he scrubs it away. Johnny finishes the flask and hops the bottle off Shiner’s mantel. It’s plastic, bounces to the floor. He twists the urn, dull beige pimpled ceramic, each
one handmade with inconsistencies supposed to promote something original. Like something youd keep tea bags in, the cover suctioned on with an inner plastic fucken . . . circular fucken thing. Johnny weighs it in his hand, a whole lifetime scorched down into a ceramic bottle. Could scatter her to the wind with a flick of the wrist. Twenty-three years. Madonna is in there, Johnny, in a glass bottle. Miss Madonna Dale. That first week. Lying there, pressed against her, sober and raging to fuck and wanting it to be different and tryna work out how this moment right here, with this lovely new gal beside you, tryna grasp the concept that . . . that . . . all these moments of your existence are all strung together in such a way that they winds up being the one youre in, here and now. With this fucken beautiful woman here. Christ. Tryna sort it in your head so it dont come out of your mouth sounding like crazy talk. Wanting to show her that you got other thoughts going on besides what’s between her legs. How you had all that on the tip of your tongue and afraid to say it to her cause you knew you wouldnt get it across the right way, and when you tried anyways she grabbed your balls and jumped on top and started that tight slide up and down, and the second she knew you were gonna blow she jumped off to catch it in her mouth! Sweet Jesus. Lookin at you all the while with those smoky grey eyes hemmed in with the boozy black mascara. Reaching for her beer. And then that night when you had her face down, grinding yourself off the small of her back, her giggling, Youre bad Johnny Keough, I know what you want . . . rubbing baby oil into her shoulders and when you got up to close the curtains, because the bedroom window was level with the old doll’s next door, how she told you not to, that she hoped when she was eighty-some-odd years old she’d have at least a live sex show across the street to tuck her in at night, and what did it matter? And then the long stretch of downtime, when there was no need for the pills and no need for the booze and neither of you even noticed or missed being stoned and fucked up, and then so much sober time passing, with the stories, and that mad rush to outdo one another’s pasts and Johnny’s first utterances of Pius and Tanya, and that night at the boys’ home in Whitbourne when that cunt guard McGregor told him all about it, all about how his sister was really his mother, and that his real father, well . . . and, hey Johnny, what about McGregor laughing while they led you down to the observation room? What was it you done that time?

  How Madonna never strayed from your eye while you told her about Shane Chalk blowing an air gun off into your ear until you bawled, until you had no choice but to swing out at him, and then how he held you down and pounded your nose in until there was just this squishing sound when his fists landed. And how she laughed when you told her how you waited and waited and then got him back so long after he didnt even know it was you. Madonna coming into the room with teardrops drawn under her eyes in black pen. Madonna from out west with her beach parties and paper lantern festivals and the time a black bear got into her house, and rented limos for prom night and all that strange food and all those drugs, and dens in Chinatown where you could go and smoke opium, how she wouldnt go see her father on his deathbed and how she still didnt regret it, and people reading poetry on the streets. Madonna, hopping aboard her rusty grey Volkswagen Rabbit that died the very minute she pulled into Tulk’s parking lot at the top of Lime Street. After chasing a young guitar player right across the country, only to be ditched and left at some hash party in Shea Heights not two weeks into it. Walkin down Blackhead Road at two o’clock in the morning and meeting a gang of rowdy teenagers and how she took off down over the bank, slicing her ankle on a broken bottle, Here look at the scar, and crying while the lads tossed rocks in the bushes up ahead of her, scrambling down over that gravelly bank of alders and having that strange feeling that she was walkin over a grave and finding out later that that very bank was where they found that other girl’s body with her throat stabbed in four places and her underwear stuffed down her throat. How she found that out a couple of weeks later outside Tim Hortons and how her knees went to jelly and she collapsed into a herd of young cops and how one of them suggested she might want to go in for a pregnancy test.

  Johnny’s story about smashing out the windows of all the teachers’ cars in the school parking lot when they wouldnt let him come into a dance, even after he won second place in the day’s races, winning a banner for the school. Sleeping in the government twine shed after knocking the last of Pius’s yellow teeth down his throat. The cops cruising around the harbour shouting his name into the loudspeaker, Johnny rolling over into the twine and yawning, feeling easier and lighter than he’d felt in years, the print of Pius’s teeth gouged into his left hand.

  Yeah Johnny, them first months: tell-all grace period of fucking and sucking and drowning and falling and letting go of everything. That deluded sense of having arrived somewhere. Delusions of arrival. Going out to NA meetings together. Johnny building a bookshelf as big as the wall. Sunday mornings and he’d wake up with Madonna’s head bobbing down there under the blankets and a hot cup of coffee on the night table beside him. Sipping hot coffee while she sucked him off, laying it down before he got there, for fear of slopping it off the ceiling. Out on her balcony afterwards with a cigarette, Madonna reading a book in bed, him standin there lookin out over the town and wanting to roar something out, wanting to chew the railings away, smash something in half with his face, not knowing that it was a good, happy feeling ripping through his veins, not knowing that this was what it felt like to be welcome, and home, and welcome at home. Not wanting to face the fact that it was all gonna blow up in his face at the drop of a dime, any day, any hour. Stood there, smoking. The sensation that she’d stopped reading and was lookin out at him. The feeling that if he turned around she would be gone. The notion that if he turned and looked now there would be someone else in the bed with her. The feeling she was laughing at him behind his back, making faces. And when he finally gathered up the courage and turned back to tell her all this, she was asleep. A dark puddle of drool spreading across the page of the paperback she was reading. Sunday mornings. Coffee and a blow job.

  And what’s any of it matter now Johnny? What difference when here’s Madonna in a fucken bottle on the table in front of you?

  Johnny’s conditions were dropped, of course. All charges dropped. Like none of it even happened. Walkin back up over the hill that morning in that dragged-out, drug-addled daze, weighted down with the big news and wanting nothing more than to be able to share it with Madonna. Who else? Johnny racking his brain for who to pass it on to. Who would she want to know? Who knew her? No one here in town, not really. Her junkie mates. There was her sister out west. Dana or Danielle. Last seen by Madonna on the corner of Main and Hastings in the back of a cop car almost five years ago. Who to run to? Johnny found himself wishing, wishing he was in that holding cell, waiting to go on down the line. He’d trade it up in a flash.

  That morning, the news fresh and burbling in his gut, walkin back up past the housing units where he’d met her and crushing a burnt-out light bulb under his heel while the sky seemed to blacken and then buckle in on itself, compelling Johnny to look up to where the sun should be, and seeing that face, that sorta blurred presence lookin down at him. The feeling that someone or something was up there waiting on him to make a move. His desperate little prayer of the night before swirling in his head, rallying for room and priority in the new horror of Madonna’s death and Johnny’s new-found freedom. Make your move Johnny boy. Pony up. Grinding the light bulb into the concrete and screeching up at that woolly face to go fuck itself, that’s not what he’d meant, not what he’d wanted atall. And then the burning madness in the gut as he put all the pieces together, with her comin around lookin for Shiner.

  It was Shiner’s dope that did it. Shiner killed Madonna. Focus Johnny, focus.

  Johnny made it back to his room that morning after court just in time before Mike Quinn changed the locks on his door. Nine days left in the month anyhow and didnt Quinn wanna make the most of that? Johnny’s sheets and pillowcase tossed out on the sidew
alk. He had a few words with Quinn. Quinn had this look, this fucked-over expression, like he’d had big money on Johnny’s odds of gettin sent down. Johnny got rid of Mike, then lay on his cot, knew there was a funeral coming. Knew there’d be finger-pointing. Knew how it looked, knew what the word out on the street and up at the shop and up at the club was gonna be. How Johnny got off fancy-free after smashing Madonna’s face in with a teapot and she was so screwed up and heartbroken that she took to the dope and didnt know how to handle it and went too far. How Johnny got her into the dope in the first place. How now suddenly she’d be foremost on everyone’s minds, scrambled into the talk for the next week and how loved she’d be. How Johnny’d have to watch his back in a whole different way. And how Shiner’d be at the heart of it all, the talk, if only to deflect the blame from his own self, even though all hands would know he dealt it out to her that night before. No question. But who’s gonna cross Shiner, who owns every heebie-jeebie, shaky-handed, tooth-grinding morning after on Cabot Street? Johnny lay on his bare cot that first morning after court and let all this spin in his head. And came to the conclusion that he’d see it all through to some end. That if he got off with this, like he’d begged for the night before court, that if he got off and Madonna paid the price, this price, for his spineless prayers, then he’d make it right by doing Shiner in, at least, he’d even it all out and go down the line once and for all. Three to five or thirty-five, what difference did it make, with Madonna on a cold metal slab in the Health Sciences morgue?

  Johnny hadda hit the bottle then, somehow. Hadda score a few perks, anything. On the verge of huffing gas if that’s what it came down to. Checked his options and waited till dark and brought a couple of cases of empties up to Jackman and Greene’s and bought a pair of women’s nylons, then slunk down through the shadows to Queen’s Road Store. He sat for ten minutes in plain sight on a step across the street, waiting for some old fella to finish with his Nevada tickets. There was a husky blond skirt behind the counter. Johnny felt bad for her already. No need that it comes down to this. Johnny hauled the nylon over his head. He still had the suit on, Pius’s suit, but a dusty black windbreaker he’d found on the rail outside the room opposite his, he had that on over the suit coat, to bulk himself up. He shoved a piece of one-by-three strapping up his sleeve, wrapped his hand tight around it. The feeling of drowning under the nylon, his eyebrows squished down, couldnt breathe through his nose. Johnny held his breath until his vision blurred, then burst in through the door of the store and slammed the strapping down on the counter. He bent his knees and managed to take about a foot off his height. He made his voice really deep, like the big bad wolf he was. Told the girl he had a hammer and that he didnt want to use it but he would and that he didnt give a sweet fuck if he got caught, that he did not give one sweet fuck for nothing in this world. She stood there frozen, shocked. She was not a bad-lookin woman either, and Johnny caught himself wishing the circumstances werent quite so grim. Take her out on the town and show her a time. With the money he robbed from the cash register! Jesus.