New Canadian Noir

by Claude Lalumiere

  “Don’t usually drink. But I been livin’ up on Ellesmere Island by myself for so fuckin’ long…”

  “Got Polar Ice Vodka,” I said.

  He shivered visibly. “I’m thinkin’ a hot toddy. Or maybe a mai tai?”

  “Our bartender comes in at two-thirty. But I can get you a coconut rum.” I poured him a double and brought the bottle to the table.

  Torngasuk sat down. We debated the word taboo and talked about the white man’s hypocrisy.

  “If I was cookin’ meth,” I said, “who could blame me? Seal hunting is all but impossible. They say in the old days, you could stack bowhead whales eight deep before one of those ice floes would crack. That true?”

  Torngasuk shrugged. “I never stacked any bowheads.”

  I rolled my eyes and carried on with my rant. “Anyway, ice like that is rarer than auk feathers these days. Try to get close to a breathing hole, guy my size would pop through the ice like a card slidin’ into a cash machine. Sneak up on a seal, my hairy ass! Might as well go krumpin’ on plate glass. And nobody can outswim those fuckers in the open water.”

  Torngasuk pushes his empty glass toward me, so I pour him some more and keep talking. “So there’s half our food supply gone, eh? What’s a bear supposed to eat these days? They shoot us if we go into the dumps, get all pissy if we compete with ’em for the caribou. Woulda loved to get in the family business – kill seals and pretty much anything else I can sink my claws into. But it’s not viable, eh? So now I run this joint, and I make lotsa cash, so I don’t need to do anything ‘taboo.’” Don’t know that I was convincing him of anything, but it felt good to get that shit off my chest.

  “The Mounties intercepted a package to your cousin,” said the old shaman.

  “Which cousin?” I asked. With just thirteen subpopulations in North America, I have more than a few cousins. So I can believably plead ignorance. It’s not like I put on a return address on Zed’s packages.

  Zed used to be a popular attraction at the Chief Saunooke Bear Park in the Carolinas. A little undignified for sure; he couldn’t go for a shit without some little kid pointing and laughing. But to tell the truth, he loves all those insecure townies marvelling at the size of his dick. When they shut the place down, he put in for a transfer to that Danish zoo, figuring he’d be in line next time they decided to feed a giraffe to the predators. Never tasted giraffe. But instead they shipped him off to some little game farm in Two-Farts, Saskatchewan. He got depressed and started hibernating with the brown bears – till he heard rumours that there was some pussy wagon action going down with the locals and fucking roofied polar bears was a thing. He swore never to sleep again. When he asked me if got anything that can keep him alert, I sent him a freebie.

  ’Course I didn’t tell any of this to our friend Torngasuk. But I did keep refilling his glass. He was still there when the customers started coming in, and it was nearly midnight before he passed out.

  We sat around the table looking at the shaman flopped unconscious across the table. Sedna had joined us by that point and she wasn’t impressed. “Why don’t we just eat him?” She suggested.

  “He is a god. So it could backfire.”

  “So what are you saying? He’d give us gas or diarrhea?”

  “At the very least,” I nodded. “He might even repeat on us in other ways. Possession. Smiting.”

  “He doesn’t look that powerful to me. Couldn’t even grow back that arm,” said Sedna.

  “And he has been marinating in coconut rum,” I observed.

  “Oh, come on, guys. That’s gross,” said Anyu. “And not a good idea. Might even be a trap. That may be exactly what he wants you to do.”

  “You got a better suggestion?” With all this talk about a late-night snack, Anyu was looking pretty tasty.

  “Might be better to just imprison him somehow. Build a tomb out of ice and set him adrift.”

  “What with global warming, he could be melted by April.”

  “By which time he’ll be a long swim from anywhere.”

  I gave Sedna a side-eye and saw her nodding. “Okay, fine. Let’s get it done before he sobers up.”

  The igloo we built was like a bank vault. Took six bears to push it out into the open water. We watched until the current picked it up and it started moving faster. We were just about to go back inside when Anyu nudged me. “What’s that? Got any binoculars?”

  “No,” I said, “But your camera has a zoom lens.”

  “Oh yeah!” After a minute, he says, “Holy shit” and starts snapping pictures like crazy.

  “What’s going on? Let me look.” Sedna and I bugging him.

  Anyu says, “He’s working some old time transformation mojo! He just turned into a narwhal, and he’s using the tusk like a jig saw. Cutting a hole in the top of the vault.”

  At which point Sedna grabbed the camera from him. “Sonofabitch! Now he’s turning into a bird!”

  “Press the button. Take some pictures!” cried Anyu.

  She scowled at him, but I could hear the click, click, click.

  “I think it’s a snowy owl,” Sedna said. “No, wait. It’s w-a-a-ay bigger. Some kind of white thunderbird or something.”

  “Whoa,” I said, suddenly able to see it with the naked eye as it flew our direction. “We could be screwed now.”

  But then I noticed something else. I said to Anyu, “Do you know Gilbert Etok’s brother?”

  “Christian?”

  I nodded. “Didja hear about the trouble he got in when he was a kid? Animal cruelty. He soaked bread in booze and fed it to the gulls and terns down at the harbour.”

  “What’s so cruel about that?” asked Sedna.

  “Well, birds and booze don’t go well together, eh,” I said, as we watched the big white thunderbird swerve erratically over the water. “They kept flying into the rocks…”

  As I explained, Torngusuk swung abruptly toward the ice cliffs. Unable to slow down or stop, he smacked headfirst into a wall of ice, splatting like a gorged mosquito on a windshield.

  “Ewww,” said Anyu.

  “Told ya we shoulda ate him,” said Sedna. “What a waste.”

  The blood poured down the jagged cliff face, forming an arrow pointing straight down at the entrance to our lab.

  I shook my head. “We’d better get that place cleaned out before the Mounties show up or we could lose the whole batch.”

  “I can hook you up with my pot dealer, eh. They got a new strain called ‘Nunavut Thunderfuck.’ If ya swim down to pick it up, we can avoid the airport altogether.”

  And that’s how Anyu and I became partners. We’ve been doing pretty good. If you want to see his transformation sculpture Torngasuk Intersecting with the 21st Century, it’s on permanent display in our new ice hotel up at Iqaluit. I’m the one who came up with the inscription on the base: “The old Gods ain’t nothing to be afraid of. It’s the new ones you gotta look out for.”

  FERN LEAVES UNFURLING IN THE DARK-GREEN HADE

  David Menear

  Is that really my buddy Allan’s mother in some shabby motel room somewhere, naked and on her knees with her head resting on an ottoman, smiling back at me gleefully being photographed while she’s being fucked doggy-style by a drooling Irish wolfhound? It can’t be, can it be? Yet it seems it could be her, maybe. I don’t know if it is her but I do know that it’s somebody there being dog-fucked and merrily photographed, acting like it’s an ordinary everyday hobby or pastime like doing macramé or jogging or frying eggs wearing pyjamas. It is somebody’s mother or sister or wife or daughter and it’s somebody’s dog. It’s weird, alarming, chilling, and it’s troubling. The dog doesn’t care and can’t. She doesn’t seem to care and should. And yet they both appear to be enjoying themselves enormously. Turn a few crumply pages on and it’s a possibly pretty girl lying on a wooden bench in a barn with her mouth wrapped around a massive horse cock. Her mouth is forced wide open, deformed like she’s having some serious dental work done. She�
�s looking straight at me all gleeful and proud. We don’t see the face of the horse. The next page she’s splattered in his cum. It covers her face and she’s rubbing it all around on her huge tits. Again she smiles back at me, lustily licking her lips. Jesus. There are pictures of incestuous families all at each other, mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, grandpas and kids, all doing sex things together. If these images are intended to be erotic and sexually stimulating then why is my dick now rubbery limp and shrunken to the size of a thimble? My balls are hard and hidden far away in self-preservation and dread. I freeze, shivering in the hellish heat of the high-rise furnace room, mortified in my confused understanding of love and family and limited knowledge of sensuality, intimacy, and sexuality as a boy/man of sixteen. I’m no virgin and I trust and welcome the burning bilious acid that rises up into my throat, revolting against this twisted shit to puke at the idea of these ideas – and I do. I barf. I barf up my bran flakes and bananas big time. I hear the rats rustling.

  Riffling through all these magazines scattered across the floor like the unburied dead after some battle, what troubles me greatly is that this is what these people no longer want or need. These are what they throw away down the chute into the building’s garbage room, where I am. What is it that they covet and keep up there in those solemn locked apartments? Up to fifty magazines fall my way in a day into the my 8x12 cement holding cell where I labour with a heavy steel snow shovel scraping up the trash, turning and taking the seven steps to heave it up into the inferno of the furnace, where an appetite for chocolate or creepiness is converted and disguised as black smoke and grey ash. I’ll sometimes find an innocent copy of Readers Digest with the address label removed as if this were a doctor’s office waiting room, maybe a kid’s scrolled-up Archie comic selling sea monkeys, or an ancient issue of Canadian Living with some recipe pages torn out. But the majority of the publications are of the supreme smut porno-erotica-dementia genre.

  This is a “government-assisted” low-income high-rise rental accommodation deep in the largely unpopulated hinterland of this suburb. Here, we are further financially and geographically impaired in our ability to integrate with those beyond our social strata. It’s a prison camp for the poor. Isolated and surrounded by the barbed wire of poverty and ill health. The ruthless guards are the other inmates. The twelve-storey building is architecturally austere, a bleak palette of rusts and greys. The lobby is a no-man’s-land waste-land of litter and graffiti and fear. There are maybe eight to ten units per floor and so 100 to 120 apartments in total. Your rent is income-based and so people are returning to the government the money given them by the government. Out in the parking lot there is a black shiny Cadillac with a 40-foot speedboat hitched to the back of it. To the east of the parking lot are two always busy basketball courts and then, beyond that, an almost always abandoned kids’ playground where swings don’t swing and little kids don’t run and laugh or dangle with their legs flailing from the monkey bars, shouting out, “Mom, look at me!” Mothers keep their children away from the broken glass and dirty needles.

  No one knows I’m down here. That someone sees what they don’t want to see again. They shuffle or stride unseen down the hall in socks or slippers with random trash or tightly cinched little plastic bags to the garbage room and then, alone inside, they pull down the heavy metal door to the chute in secret. They feel the rising heat and smell the staggering stink but still they bend over into it, pinching their lips and nostrils, looking down inside the tight square black tunnel, and listen to the sound of their garbage thumping or whisking at each floor below and then fading away to a mysterious silence somewhere else.

  I wonder at the source of all these creepy magazines. Is it all the singular detritus of just one excessively obsessive twisted guy who blows his entire welfare cheque on this perverse obsession, pulling his dick to a rosy scabby pulp, or is it half the tenants here? I’m not certain what’s worse. More is much worse. But these are my neighbours from down the hall or even next door. We pass each other all the time nodding or saying hello. We ride together in the elevator, commenting on the weather or most often with our heads bowed as if in silent prayer. Maybe it’s the remarkably alert elderly woman that I often see with her walker in the hallway eternally in her quilted floral robe, thumping after her blind cat, calling to it in a hissing whisper? “Freedom-Freedom, come here.” Maybe she is saying Frieda? She explained that her cat escapes by climbing from her balcony to the next apartment, where it is less than welcome and so tossed roughly out into the hall accompanied by various threats of death that include drowning, poisoning, and balcony hanging. I once heard him yell out in his rough Jamaican accent: “Pudit down de trash hole anudder time, Mutter!” Maybe it’s him then? There is a strange stranger, though, I sometimes see sitting on a bench out next to the basketball courts watching the black kids perform their athletic magic tricks. He is tragically obese and forever sweaty. He seems to be struggling through cold porridge to walk anywhere. His long dark hair is greasy and tied back in a ponytail. He can spend hours there in his filthy XXXL Nike tracksuit smoking cigarettes, swilling his Pepsi, and crunching his way through a party-size bag of Nachos. I think he is watching what he wishes he were. Cool power and grace. They ignore him when he calls out to them excited about a great shot or a bad foul, but are never rough or unkind. If he is sitting asleep on his bench speckled in crumbs like a sated Yogi the Bear, when they are finished for the night they will shake him gently on the shoulder to wake him as they pass by. I imagine he sees them in his dreams as magnificent friends so big and so beautiful.

  There is this woman, though. She is sort of sexy in a sleazy stripper kind of way. I see her coming and going with a lot of different guys. She has a dog that she treats very poorly. She pulls him along, screaming at him, dragging him along even as he tries to crap. I saw her try to kick him once and her high heel flew off high into the air. I laughed at a distance. She chased after her shoe like a hobbling cripple but the dog got to it first and brought it to her smiling. She smacked him in the mouth with it. He yelped and just lay down before her, whimpering. I wanted to hurt that woman then and take the poor dog home. I think it’s her. She’s the freak. But, why do I care who it is? They can’t touch me or hurt me.

  Some images and ideas, both good and bad, are carved so sharply and deeply into the headstone of your memory forever enduring well past even your death. Distant voices from faraway as faint as fern leaves unfurling in the dark-green shade fanning out like the wings of newborn birds. Tiny tremors like earthquakes of our ghostly soul sometimes shiver through us touching our hearts and taking our breath. Why, is what matters. The rats scurry boldly everywhere through the garbage now because I am too quiet and still for too long. I stand roaring like some barbarian warrior swirling and slamming the metal shovel down hard on the cement floor. This scares them away squealing. They know I’m scared too, is what they’re saying. They smell it in my sweat.

  THREE-STEP PROGRAM

  Alex C. Renwick

  Jimmy the Woof had always liked the francophone girls, ever since his folks moved to Montreal when he was a kid. It’d been a rough transition in school, what with Jimmy being American and never having learned French. But there was no drinking age in Montreal, at least none Jimmy had ever noticed, and that had seemed like a fair trade for not fitting in so good. Hell, back then kids were still sent to the dépanneur to pick up beer and smokes for their parents like it was milk and bread.

  Something furry brushed past his legs and Jimmy froze, flattening against the peeling paint and red dust of the crumbling brick wall. Typical Montreal apartment: second storey, balcony in back, wrought-iron railing that had seen better days, corkscrew staircase leading up from a tiny backyard choked with weeds and old scraps of litter blown in off busy Rue Saint-Denis. The cat at Jimmy’s feet looked up, eyes glinting in hard moonlight, tail swishing. Must be Nathalie’s, coming from the door propped slightly open with an empty flower pot. More typical Montreal, this cas
ualness, this feeling of safety so deep a girl leaves her door open even at 3:00 a.m. Even a pretty girl, like those francophone girls who wouldn’t give Jimmy the time of day back in school. Even a beautiful girl who for some reason did, like Nathalie Beauville.

  Jimmy reached to pet the cat and it skittered from his touch, disappearing down the exterior spiral stairs, a whisper of fur against iron. He pushed lightly on the door and it swung inward on silent hinges, opening into a kitchen striped with moonlight coming in the tall narrow windows. The envelope with the cash weighed down his shirt pocket, solid, off-kilter. All he had to do was put it on the counter and leave, and the last bit of Jimmy’s Three-Step Program would be complete.

  It’d been a year and three weeks since Jimmy had touched booze. He’d been a horrible drunk – stealing, lying, getting into fights, letting his fists fly even when he didn’t mean to. He’d hurt some people: his folks, his kid brother, his boss at the pizza joint where he’d regularly helped himself to a little extra from the till – never more than it took to buy a bottle of Jack, but still. When he finally had enough of himself, got so disgusted with the forever bruised and busted stubbled slob looking back at him in the mirror each day, a guy without a single thing in his life worth a shit in this world, he made himself a three-step program. Right then and there in the bathroom, wrote it on the mirror with a shaky finger in the steam from a shower that could never clean away all the fucked-upedness that was Jimmy’s life:

  1) List everybody I done wrong.

  2) Make good.

  3) Find peace.

  Three simple steps. Jimmy was proud of that. He knew most people wanted to quit the bottle, they did twelve. Fuck that.

  His folks were dead, so all he’d done there was apologize to the sky and move on. His baby brother was grown, moved back to the States. Their parents hadn’t left much but Jimmy signed it all over, every penny of his half, such as it was. His old boss from the pizza place had a kid, a nerdy boy who got picked on at school every day by the kind of kid Jimmy had been himself. He took care of those bullies, scared them off, figured he’d made good as best he could in that quarter. All he’d taken from his boss had been money anyway, but Nathalie…