Thought You Were Dead

by Nick Craine

  She turned him down. Thus:

  “Aw, gee, Chel. I can’t, not with you. Sorry.”

  “No, eh? Hmph. That’s okay, Moe . . . it’s just . . . why, though? Because of Hunt?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “So, what is it? The fangs, the goiter, the killer BO? I had to stop using that deodorant Elaine concocted. It scorched all the hair in my armpits.”

  “See, see, that’s it! You’re funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “Yes, ha ha funny, you know that. Don’t take this the wrong way, but . . . I’ve always kind of thought of you as Daffy Duck.”

  Nods. “I’m honoured.”

  Moe beamed at him, her excess of well-being plumping her cheeks and making them glow in an adorable, neotenic way.

  “And who’d want to fuck a duck, right?”

  Chellis had consoled himself with the insight that she would have turned down any nookie-suitor no matter how impressive the performance CV. She had only wanted to be asked and he, Lothario of the spoken word, had satisfied her. Moe and Hunt’s amicable divorce had followed hard on. As it were.

  “How are your folks?” Chellis asked.

  “Both cackling away, making money hand over fist.”

  “No kidding?” He had to smile at the thought of Hunt’s parents. Had to. Now they were funny, if unintentionally. Hilariously, they both bore an uncanny resemblance to Mother Teresa; they were like a matching pair of salt and pepper shakers, complete with holes in their heads. They had provided so much comic relief over the years that Chellis could only be grateful to them. Less so Hunt, who had frequently envied aloud his friend’s orphan status, averring that families are not vehicles built for pleasure, Chel. You ride in them as far as you need to go and then you bail out. Recently, his folks had sold their house in town, placing it on the market with another realtor, so as not to show favouritism, and moved north to cottage country, where they bought a defunct slaughterhouse that they turned into a B&B.

  “People actually stay there?”

  “Apparently. Big demand.”

  Chellis shuddered. Animal terror, rivers of blood. Surely the ghostly, skin-em-alive, head-lopping, and trotter-severing ambience would not be particularly restful for even the most hard-hearted tourist.

  “Like that Lizzie Borden B&B in the States,” Hunt said. “Very popular.”

  Forty whacks.

  Chellis jumped. Bev had suddenly appeared with phantom stealth and slammed two plates of food on the table. They were not, mercifully, commanded to Enjoy!, although she did order Chellis to sit up straight – “You’ll get round shoulders!” – and then she turned on Hunt.

  “How many times have I told you not to lean back in your chair like that?”

  “Once?”

  “And wipe that smile off your face.”

  “Mad Cow,” whispered Chellis, giving his plate the once over after she’d rocketed away. The side order of coleslaw was hemorrhaging mayo.

  “For sure. She’ll slap you up the side of the head if you give her any lip. Love that Velveeta hair colour, though.”

  “I mean that’s what this dish was called, wasn’t it? The one pound burger, fries with gravy, onion rings. The Mad Cow.”

  “Hey, you’re right. Bev’s short-term memory must be shot.”

  Chellis glanced around. “Everyone here has exactly the same order.”

  “So that’s what they mean by ‘No Catering.’ Eat what you’re served and shut your trap. Very Fifties.”

  They dug in up to their elbows. It was fantastic.

  “Bad boy, you’re gonna catch it.”

  Hunt was leaning back in his chair and casting a sly look in Bev’s direction, but she was busy chewing out some other customer. He rubbed his belly and belched. “Man, I’ve go so much meat in here I feel like I’m carrying a kid.” The buttons were straining on his shirt, revealing eyelets of skin tufted with black curlicues of hair.

  “That was definitely the mother of all burgers.” Chellis studied his friend. “I believe I’ve solved the mystery of your missing locks.”

  “Christ, yeah. Stuff grows everywhere, except on the old noodle.” Hunt sat forward and grabbed a pack of candy Camels from the ashtray. “Speaking of old noodles, how’s Madame Twatski?”

  “Now, don’t be rude.” It was not exactly true that Chellis had kept completely mum about the true nature of his employment, or of his employer, insofar as he could divine the latter. Hunt and Elaine had both been apprised of his secret service and both marvelled at his luck. A qualified marvelling, however. On this his friends agreed: how very like Chellis it was, with his half-degree in Eng Lit and his halfassed ambitions, to have landed such remunerative and effortless work. In Hunt’s view, anyone who knew that the Web existed, especially a clever old spiderwoman like Athena Havlock, did not require a personal researcher. He was convinced that Chellis was nothing more to her than an informational boy toy (and he dearly hoped that info was as far as it went). As for Elaine, she felt that there was something fishy about the arrangement. The job was too easy, too unstructured, too undermining of a character already prone with sloth. Rennie had been a piss-poor mother, all that palsy-walsy stuff, all those gifts and toys in lieu of discipline. Trust Chellis to somehow find an equally indulgent replacement.

  Back off Protestants! He did work, night and day. His approach was simply more meditative and circuitous than it was for most wage slaves. He was a hunter and gatherer, a sifter and sorter, a delver and deliverer of the goods. And the goods were often a genuine pain in the rear to find. There was an intuitive knack to this business that Chellis was pleasantly surprised to find himself in possession of. A highly sensitive Nosey Parker, he was receptive to that which others – a realtor or an inventor for example – might shrug off as insignificant and not worthy of sniffing out. God is in the details, Chellis knew, because he had often seen His Big Old Fuzzy Face staring back at him, tipping him the wink, from the deep core of matters minute and particular.

  Certainly there was more to conquering Mrs. H’s requests than the occasional browser search or trip to the library. He had come to know what she liked, what provoked her interest and fired her mind. Much of his work was customized to her imaginative style, and was even on occasion anticipatory and preemptive, like the time he spent a whole day researching the devious wonders of identity theft and credit card scams and had the information on hand the very moment she asked for it. That the apparent simplicity of his assignments did not reveal the labour involved was evident when he offered up one of her request lists to his friends’ amused inspection. Elaine: I suppose you have to eat these instructions after reading them? Yuk, yuk. Or Hunt, dismissively: Should take ten, twenty minutes tops. Then, handing the list back, And since you’re not doing anything, I’ve got this open house over on . . . .

  “Brand new assignment.” Chellis patted his shirt pocket where the current list reposed, the sheet folded into a tidy quartered document. With its loose collection of words, he almost expected the paper to rattle like a packet of magic beans. But then he recalled the photo and his irritating secondary quest, which was currently sitting on the top of his fridge under a pile of Canadian Tire money (5 cents, 10 cents, it adds up) and a weeping can of no longer frozen orange juice. “Say, Hunt, wasn’t Moe tramping around in graveyards a while back looking for some forebears of hers?”

  “Cripes, the genealogy phase. Glad that one’s over. Two years work, buckets of cash down the toilet, and all she managed to dig up was a farmer from some bog hole in Ireland. Made her happy, though. Why?”

  “Need to find something for Mrs. H. A gravestone inscription she wants checked out.”

  “Pray she doesn’t get bitten by the ancestor-hunting bug, or you’ll spend your days in some dank library vault scrolling through miles of microfiche. Talk to Moe. Believe me, she’s an expert on the dead and buried. Speaking of which, you think your boss knew that guy they found over in Claymore?”

  “Should she?�
�

  Hunt shrugged. “Heard he was some sort of literary type.”

  “A literary type in Claymore? That’s asking for trouble.”

  “Obviously.” Hunt took a pseudo-drag on his chocolate ciggie and blew out an imaginary cloud of carcinogens. “Uh-oh, here comes Bev with the bill. How little d’you think we can tip her?”

  “How much allowance did you get as a kid?”

  “Not a friggin’ cent.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  5

  Mallaise

  CHELLIS SHOT UP from the bench and stood at attention. Despite the soporific, soul-sucking atmosphere, he’d been having a decent enough time watching pallid, blank-faced teen girls dressed in their baby clothes drifting past in packs, yards of midriff exposed, rolls of fat wobbling on the waistbands of low-slung jeans. Breasts were everywhere, aggressively prominent in tiny T’s. It was a cannibal’s marketplace. No, it was the mall, and Elaine should know better than to exile him here with nothing but a clipboard for self-defence.

  But what ho! the inventor herself was steaming toward him with a headlong velocity that was all too familiar. He decided not to bother with the jocular greeting.

  “Aha! You’re checking up on me. You don’t trust me.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “That hurts, Laney. I honestly don’t think you know how sensitive I am.”

  “Dry up, Chel. You’re selectively sensitive. When it suits. What do you have for me so far?”

  “Hmm, well, let’s see.” He consulted the clipboard. “Ten people told me to fuck off.”

  “What country are we in, Chel?”

  “Okay, yeah, they said please fuck off.”

  “The usual, what else?”

  “One woman laughed so hard she had to rush to the bathroom.”

  “Turn off the charm, will you. The questionnaire is very straightforward. Let me see.”

  Elaine snatched the clipboard out of his hands, and read aloud, “Totally stupid . . . Heavens, I’d never buy one of those . . . Are you serious, man? . . . Sounds, like, ya know, too flimsy, too, like, weird . . . Sorry, not interested . . . You one of them religious nuts, one of them Morons?” She tapped the board, driving invisible drill bits into it with her forefinger. “You filled these in yourself, didn’t you?”

  Chellis affected his best expression of incredulity, placing his innocent and formerly injured hand flat on his chest. “You bet.”

  “You’re hopeless.”

  “I prefer to think of myself as ‘a challenge.’”

  “I thought you wanted to earn your way back into my good graces. I also thought your hand was, how did you put it, dangling off your wrist by a mere sinew?”

  “I heal quickly, one of my many talents. It’s the venue, Laney, you expect to get a decent survey here? Malls are awash in spiritual chloroform. Get a load of that couple over there. Both string-theory physicists before they stepped in here and now look at them – totally strung out. They could be extras from Dawn of the Dead.”

  Elaine studied the couple as they wandered past, a middle-aged, conventionally attired ma and pa with identical fixed expressions, botoxed tip to stern by the material glut on display.

  “Why, I wonder?”

  “Why do malls invariably stupefy people like too much TV and what can you invent to cure it?”

  “Yeah,” she smiled.

  Oh man, this just about finished him off, this rare, fleeting, and utterly beautiful phenomenon.

  “Do that again,” he pleaded.

  “Do what?”

  “That thing with your mouth. You know, you stretch your lips a bit, and then curl them up at the ends.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Okay, where to?”

  “Who cares.” Elaine glanced around, eyes widening slightly at the commercial come-on. “Since I’m here I might as well do some shopping.”

  “Great, I love shopping.”

  “Excuse me, but you hate shopping, Chelly. Shopping with you is like having a bag of wet sand tied to my ankle.”

  “Mind if I write that down?”

  “Yes I do. Hands off. Why is it that when I read your employer’s books I run across sentences, even whole paragraphs, that sound incredibly familiar?”

  “You read her books? You, Brainy Elaine?”

  “Beach read.”

  “Is that what you were doing in your humongous sun hat? Reading trash? Hey, you’re blushing.”

  Elaine made a mnph! sound of compacted exasperation, internal gears being stripped, and stalked off. Chellis followed at a discreet distance, ducking behind slow-mo mall-crawlers, practising his gumshoe trailing technique. She strode purposefully into a lingerie shop, which he knew was a bluff. Elaine never shopped for sexy underwear, being a devotee of no-nonsense, 100% cotton granny pants. If Vaughan was getting to pull lacey thong undies off Elaine’s lovely rear with his perfect teeth, Chellis was prepared to shoot himself. But he didn’t think so. Peering through the store window and observing her as she flipped through racks of scanty, silky merchandise, he could tell that her thoughts were running more on practical, inventive lines than on erotic ones. He knew her. She was the girl-next-door. Literally at one time, when they had all been growing up together, she and he and Hunt. In those days, the door of her house had been painted an eyeball-peeling red, whereas now, on uppity Hitchcock Crescent it was an elegant, mist-grey – creating an illusion of easy entry – and heavily, brassily beknockered. (As was the woman who swished past him into the store. Two highly convincing power points! She gave him a sidelong, knowing look.) Elaine may have exchanged one door for another, and one raucous, brawling working-class family for a small, smug, nouveau rich set, but she herself had not changed . . . much.

  Her head swivelled sideways like an owl sensing a minute, but telling, disturbance in its personal space. Chellis ducked down and ooched along until he was beyond the store window and its pornish, get-with-it-prudes display. He found himself facing the open entrance of the next shop, which happened to be a bookstore, which also happened to be what he needed. Heck with Elaine. She’d come looking for him anyway, annoyed that he wasn’t still shadowing her. Crouched, he was well-positioned to perform a zippy Russian Cossack dance – a suitable bit of ethnic, mall entertainment – but instead, knees creaking, he rose and stretched. He could stretch willfully all day and not achieve a truly towering height, but contented that he’d been restored to his full, dignified self, he entered this commercial establishment where the clerks might not have gained any intimacy with the wares on display, but at least rarely asked if they could help you. Not bloody likely, was the only true answer to that.

  What a relief, this linguistic oasis, even if it was a chain and pervaded by a mallesque unreality. Here be books. Here be books to slake and concentrate and revive the wandering and dehydrated mind. Here be books on sale. Last season’s must-haves heaped on front tables and reduced to the price of bum wad. Buy a stack and stock your privy; be blessed with piles of a more edifying nature. Chellis was not immune to the lure of a good bargain when it presented itself, but he found the remainder table depressing and indecent. Words are cheap. He hustled past, eyes averted in case he got snagged by a title he’d meant to read when it was all the rage. He wandered more slowly through the fiction section, Mrs. Havlock’s contributions winking slyly at him as he passed by. As previously instructed by the author, he stopped to place a few volumes face out, dimming the lights of the competition by either smothering their books with hers, or misfiling them. He occasionally did this for lesser-knowns as well, obscure writers he happened to like. Chellis, the Robin Hood of literary distribution – or the Puck.

  In the genre section her volumes were all spine, but these did not require his gallantry. Her darlings here had grown legs, as they say in the lit biz. Legs! They were veritable centipedes that scrambled off the shelves and into customers’ hands, where they dug in their little heels and clung fast. These books could not be put down, as they
also say.

  Chellis skimmed past the kids’ section, letting himself be tangentially seduced by covers burgeoning with magicians, pirates, bears in pants, and a worm sporting a Tyrolean hat. He was seriously tempted to sit down on the juvenile chair provided and have a long, lingering read of Goodnight Moon. That bunny, now there was character development. And mystery. And a bowl full of mush. Chellis knew that his inner child would be thrilled and his outer one becalmed, but he did not pause. The How-To books were beckoning.

  But, goodnight brain, the Dummies and their ilk had apparently conquered and wiped out the humble, no-nonsense indigenous species. How did this work? You tell people that they’re stupid and inept and they can’t get enough of it and make you a millionaire? Right, so, Chellis perused the wares on offer: The Cro-Magnon Guide to Accounting; The Bonehead’s Book of Autopsies; Meatloaf Instruction for Meatheads; Modern History in Monosyllables; Checkers for the Cranially Challenged; The Little Book of Aphorisms for Little Minds; Lafs for Losers; The No-Brainer Guide to Advanced Calculus and Gardening; The Sun Also Rises, eh? Astronomy for Assheads; You Wittle Wascal: Tantric Sex for Fuddists; Clueless: The Dolt’s Manual of Detection . . . wait, Chellis paused over this last one, then reached up to pull it off the shelf.

  “Thought I’d find you in here. What are you looking for?”

  He instantly retracted his hand as if he’d singed his fingers.

  “Hand still sore, is it?” Elaine glanced at the titles and didn’t even try to repress her smirk. “Having some trouble with your self-esteem, Chel?”

  “Research.” He attempted a neutral tone with a spritz of hauteur.

  “Everything’s research.”

  “My philosophy exactly.”

  “With you, I mean. It’s your excuse for not doing anything else. Your bolthole.”

  “Pardon me, Mrs. Champion, but perhaps you’d like to add to this shelf: Laney’s Tiny Tome of Lite Psychology. I’m here because I’m working. What are you doing here, besides harassing the customers?”