4 Quadra Island, British Columbia
Glass Jar Jeffries was not a person who usually had much to say about the quality of a drawing, but he felt sure the one he’d had done on him was a genuine piece of art. The tattoo took up the entire surface area of his back. On his left shoulder was a roughly sketched person, an oddly visceral, slightly-too-thick-in-some-places figure representing St. Patrick. Away from the saint, snakes slithered in all directions, spreading down the length of Glass Jar’s back, gathering towards the base of his spine, where one of them looked to be cresting the gentle, dimpled hill of his gluteus towards his asshole. The tattoo commemorated Glass Jar’s distant, but deeply held, Irish heritage.
As usual, Glass Jar struggled to hoist the bag of shellfish over the lip of his truck. There were three seafood farms on the mostly uninhabited northern half of Quadra Island, and it was from selling old-fashioned kitchen-sink meth to the night workers at these plants that Glass Jar made his living. Rather than paying him in cash, the workers paid Glass Jar in shellfish. It was a humiliating but not necessarily financially disadvantageous deal for Glass Jar. It meant that he had to go to the trouble of selling the stuff under the table to a fish-and-chips shop in Campbell River, but also that he was able to get just slightly above street value for his meth.
After finally getting the shrimp into his truck, Glass Jar pressed his thumbs into two of the fleeing snakes and pushed hard against the bony, protuberant surface of his lower back, moaning with a deeply uneven mix of pain and relief as he reflected once more on how much he hated Breaking Bad. He had only watched a few random episodes of the show, but the notion of “high-quality” meth it had planted in the minds of consumers was putting old-school cooks like Glass Jar straight out of business. College kids were dropping out of chemistry degrees and cooking up huge batches that were “potent” and “clean” and “pure” and whateverthefuck. Glass Jar knew one way to cook, and it was dirty, low yield, and cheap, like meth was supposed to be. Like it was before everyone stopped living and started watching and gossiping about long-ass TV shows that you can’t even follow unless you watch every minute of every episode. In the mind and world of Glass Jar Jeffries, meth was the thing you cooked in a sink in a shed, and television was Jeopardy!, daytime judge shows, and the local news. The way things had been in 1998, and always should be.
Releasing his back, Glass Jar stared down the long, black path of the logging road as dust from the gravel floated loosely around in the air, illuminated by his high beams, and soundtracked by the thick, chunking stutter of his truck’s idling engine. He rubbed the top of his truck and brought his hand back dirty then wiped it on his jeans. Had he known the first thing about classical music, Glass Jar might have looked into the blackness of the unfinished road and thought about how fugue-like his life had become. The same bags of subsistence fish, the same backache as he lifted them, the same drive home, and the same sad, sleepy shove of the fish into his freezer. Six days of drinking, smoking, driving around, hauling the same shit over to Campbell River, and selling it. The only variation on the theme recently had been that he’d started stealing scallops from the We Wai Kai Nation’s farm, which was an extremely high-risk, extremely low-reward thing to do just for variety’s sake.
Glass Jar caught sight of some movement in a bush. He fished his flashlight out of the shallow puddle of used bottles, wrappers, and cigarette butts on the floor of his truck. Even though it was summer, after the sun went down there was a vague, wet hint of cold in the air, and a ripple of shiver passed through the frayed nerves of Glass Jar’s loose, sticky limbs. He plucked aimlessly at his bare shoulder and pressed on towards the bush. The beam of his flashlight wobbled onto a dog, lying on its side against a tree stump.
“If I’m not straight fuckin’ a duck in the face. How are you, pooch?” Glass Jar dropped to his haunches. “You want some water? Hayzoo Chreesto, you’re a drooler. A foamer, almost. Shit. You want a napkin? Hey, boy? You want some water?” He reached forward to pet the sickly fur, plastered flat against the dog’s skull. “You got a big head. Big brain in there I’ll just bet —”
In an unforeseeable burst of strength, the dog snapped up and bit Glass Jar halfway up his forearm. Glass Jar shook his arm out with a spasm, hurling the mutt to the packed dirt with a dull thud. The dog emitted an even duller half bark. Without cursing, crying out, or even checking his own wound, Glass Jar took one step back, found his balance, and punted the dog’s skull. The beam of his flashlight was swinging around and illuminating random, glowing patches of the forest’s green as Glass Jar continued to stomp and kick the dog’s corpse. He expended so much physical effort that, without realizing how exhausted he was, Glass Jar fell backwards, sprawled out sideways, and vomited the perfectly clear contents of his stomach across the rainforest floor.
In spite of the hard years he’d put on himself and the fact that he was a six-foot-tall man who weighed 128 pounds, Glass Jar was still pretty resilient, and he recovered from the attack quickly. He pulled himself up slowly and in sections, like a set of soaked, knotted sheets being hauled out of a washing machine. He staggered towards the truck, poured himself into the seat, and examined his wounds for the first time. There were four small punctures, oozing thick, dark blood. He let the arm air itself out a minute as he struggled with the cap of his Oxies, then popped two, crushed one up on the dash using his flashlight, and huffed about half of it dry, letting the rest of it blow around the cabin with his jagged, jumpy breath. Composing himself, Glass Jar took a rag from the glove compartment (he usually used it to wipe his palm-grease off the steering wheel) and cinched it tight on his arm.
He admired his handiwork out of the corner of his eye as he drove home, barely even feeling the bites now. He spoke to the blazing circles of his high beams and into the deep, sequestered darkness behind them.
“Fuckin’ dog. Bites like a bitch.”
Glass Jar did not notice his own wordplay.
5
Grace had dropped Mousey at the side of the road, then been convinced to come in for more drinks, then floored her car down his driveway, leaving Mousey to walk the final stretch. This was the precise kind of asshole move Mousey enjoyed, even and especially when it was pulled on him. Following her, he ran the short distance in the drunken, downhill way that gets one feeling like one is a bird with very small wings, trying to glide. Now they were in the house, Grace another drink past her reasonable driving limit.
She picked up her empty glass and then put it back down. She stood and looked out the window. “Jesus. This house.”
Mousey’s house was a small split-level built into the rock with pillars. The walls were windows so big and clean that from some angles they were difficult to distinguish from air. They overlooked three tiny wooded islands and an opening into the whole Pacific Ocean. The house was surrounded by evergreen trees, save the driveway and a small gravel clearing, where Mousey parked his car and chopped wood for exercise. Inside, the light fixtures were glowing white globes, all hung from the ceiling by imperceptibly thin cords. The kitchen had a stove that boiled water silently and flamelessly in two minutes flat, and Mousey’s bathroom reminded those who saw it of what they imagined five-star Swedish hotels looked like: the bathtub facing a long, thin window overlooking the water, and the shower built into the centre of the room over bare wooden boards, no walls around it. A giant mirror with a square window cut out of the middle reflected the whole of the room back at itself, the walls squares of nearly opaque glass. His bedroom opened onto a triangular balcony, where he maintained a small herb garden. All the chairs and tables in the house were a small but sure amount too tall for comfort.
The house stood out, especially on Quadra Island, a tourist destination aimed at people already deeply enamoured with British Columbia. The island itself was about the physical size of Knoxville, with a year-round population of less than 2,500. Most of the people and activity were concentrated on the bottom third of the island, clustered around the prettier beaches an
d the two ferry docks. Mousey and Grace lived close to one another in a residential area for year-rounders, which started down by the dock and sprawled leisurely all the way up past the fish plants and the logging camp, the only businesses on the northern part of the island. The houses were generally wooden-framed, overlooking large gardens and woodsheds, most of them showing the awkwardness of design common to all structures hanging in that liminality between house and cabin.
Turning away from Grace, Mousey linked his hands in a Gable grip and awkwardly torqued his body to the side by pulling harder on the left than the right in a probably fruitless attempt to loosen what had become over the years a very shitty and rigid right shoulder. To avoid thinking about the foreverness of the shittiness of his shoulder, he started whistling.
Mousey loved to whistle. And since he’d retired, he’d taken to it even more. The problem was that he couldn’t remember more than a verse of just about anything. So the tunes he whistled were almost always indecipherable, skipping back to the beginning of some half-remembered song that wasn’t really a song. He piped out a good third of something that sounded way less than a third like “Shave and a Haircut.”
Grace laughed, even louder than usual. The loosest window in the house vibrated softly. “You know you’re tone deaf, right? You’re the real deal, son. A lot of people claim it, if they don’t want to sing the anthem. But you are the thing. You’re as deaf to song as a sheep. As a whole herd of sheep.”
“Nah, that’s an urban legend. Tone deaf. Not a real thing.”
“No, boy, no. Have you heard yourself on tape? You modulate a lot. People who hear pitch don’t modulate that much. Even a lot of actual deaf people don’t. You have a confidence you don’t deserve, in the whistling department.”
“Okay. So, you’re a music teacher and I . . . I am a learner. You should teach me how to whistle.”
“You want a whistling lesson?”
“I’ll pay you good, promise.”
Grace waved him off and looked out the window again. She turned back to him sharply as if he’d just dropped something heavy. “How’d you know I was a teacher? I said musician, is what I said.”
“You have a Royal Conservatory sticker on your windshield.”
Grace turned back to the window. The sky was dark at the top, sloping down into a soft, luminescent blue above the trees. They could both see many more stars than either of them was used to, and they could hear the tops of the trees swaying in their tall, second-growth thinness. She reached out and left one precise fingerprint on the glass. “I’m retired.”
Mousey hopped to his feet and clapped twice. Grace sucked her teeth at him like he was somebody else’s dog shitting on somebody else’s rug.
“C’mon, Gracey. We’re all retired here. Teeeach me.”
“No.”
“I want to whistle. Like a salesman from the fifties would whistle.”
“No.”
“It’s a public service! I see other people when I whistle. I’m not deaf to sentiment.”
“How did salesmen from the fifties whistle?”
“It was a different time. People could look across landscapes — and this is a science fact — people could look across beautiful landscapes and not think about every animal and plant in the world dying.”
“People could?”
“Fact.”
Grace drummed a tight, perfect rhythm on her lips then leaned forward and put her hands on her knees. “I would be a hero to this community.”
“I’ll pay you so much money.”
“You know about my disability cheques, I can’t be working for cash, so you supply the booze and shove your money up yourself somehow. And you tell me what exactly the fuck job you retired from so early to this goddamn house, and you have a deal.”
“Deal.”
“You did the financial crash, didn’t you? You’re one of those. You hedged a shit-ton of funds. Come on, you can tell me. I can take it.”
Mousey raised a loose, shambling arm as if to swear on something, then he just let the arm fall. In spite of the reality of what he’d done, of all he’d done, he had not hedged a single fund. So at least there was a baseline. “You want to know? Huh? I’ll tell you: I was a detective.”
“Fuuuuuck you. No, you weren’t.”
“I guess I retired a lieutenant. I think of myself as a detective.” Mousey was always of the mind that if you’ve got to do something, it’s always best to lean into it. You’re going to tell someone your sad story, you should tell all of it, and tell it sadly.
“In this house? You were a cop? No, sir.”
“I can only tell you the truth.”
Grace leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms. “Okay, so you were a cop, then tell me about it. Tell me about becoming a cop.”
“Becoming police? That’s pretty boring. Basically, I got super into working out this one summer. And my buddy at the gym was training up for the physical test, so I started doing all the stuff with him, and why not, right? I took all entrance tests, and I passed. Did really well, actually, and they wanted me. Not much else was happening, so I joined up. That’s not the good story, though.”
“And just what on God’s green earth is?”
“The story of how I made the Special Investigations Unit, working bodies, task forces, political hit jobs, all that fun stuff. Sergeant Alan Mouse,” he jabbed his chest forcefully with both thumbs, “this guy.”
“And how’d you do that?”
Mousey could have kept his mouth shut. It was always an option. But he liked Grace, and at some point she’d have to know him. Besides, it was a phrase he liked and hadn’t said in a long time: “I shot a pimp in the knee.”
“You what?”
“You heard me fine.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I was working Vice at the time and he — guy’s name was Ripple Henry — he was a bit portly, y’know, why they called him that. So I failed to clear a room properly on a cathouse raid, and Henry got the best of me a little bit. He was choking me out, maybe strangling is the better, uh, y’know, word, but anyhow I shot . . . well, shooting implies a bit of distance. These terms, always hard. So let’s just say he was strangling me, and I put my gun against his knee and fired it.”
“And that got you promoted?”
“Yup.”
Grace’s eyes flicked briefly out the window behind his head, then back him. “You’re lying.”
“Nope. That’s true. I acted with meritorious valour in the line of duty. Quote unquote.”
“Then how’d you pay for the house?”
“I live on my pension, and I bought the house with a bunch of payoff money I took. Also, I worked as an investigator for a law firm for a year. That was ritzy.”
Grace sighed. “Payoffs? How much in payoffs, Mr. LA Confidential over here, how much?”
“Approximately $267,000, after the laundry. And I’m from Chicago, hah-ctually, not LA.” Mousey had been staring at his hands as he talked; he couldn’t believe how soft they still were. They were delicate, refined, the hands of a prince. He shoved one in front of Grace, who shoved it back. “Seriously, though, these things are great. Can you believe I grew them myself?”
“Yes, yes, yes. We’ve covered it. They’re soft, all right? You have the hands of a child who hasn’t worked a day. Congratulations.”
“I know you meant that as a put-down, but thank you very much. I appreciate those words.”
“What happened to the guy?”
Mousey was once more fully distracted by his own hands. You could barely see pores, the fingers all thin and straight, like they should be holding a cigarette in a really long holder. “What guy?”
“The guy you shot, the pimp.”
“Oh, Ripple Henry? Yeah, he ended up getting killed in prison. Eighteen or so months later.”
“Wait, he was murdered?”
“Yuh huh. A couple guys, they jumped him in the showers and shanked him in either kidney. Both?
Do you say ‘either’ when you mean ‘both,’ y’know, for kidneys?” Mousey looked up from his hands and then back. He sensed Grace staring at him. “What? That kind of stuff happens in prisons fairly often. Probably something similar happened yesterday or today. If not, definitely tomorrow. Statistics are weird, hey?”
Grace bounced an open hand off the top of her hair. “I really have no idea with you, with that face. Be straight. Are you telling the truth? It’s so fucked up if you are.”
Mousey grinned. “No. Just kidding. I was a garage-door-opener salesman. I’m living off a modest garage-door-opener fortune.”
“Whatever, man, whatever. You’re right. I’m sorry I asked. Either way, you’re retired now. Hell of a word. Tired again. We’re a couple newly tired again people.”
“You’re not retired.” He languidly fell into a straight posture on the couch opposite her. “Remember, Grace, you’re giving me whistling lessons.”
“I mean, you just told me what I wanted, so I’m good now. I don’t feel like I have to do anything.”
“I’ll give you $15,000 cash.”
“With your garage-door money? Fifteen thousand?”
“Do you remember how annoying it was to get all the way out of your car to pull open your garage? People love garage-door-openers.”
Instead of rolling her eyes, Grace rolled her tongue around her mouth like it was an eye and her lips were lids. She pointed at him and moved as if to talk, then stopped. She left her hand dangling over the open space between the couches. Mousey wondered if her shoulder was getting tired, if it was burning. Past the hand he could see his own face in the glass.
Grace did two more full tongue orbits. “We’ve got a lesson to get to. Start off, man, unpurse your lips. You don’t get to whistle right off. Close those little lips, you have to hum before you can run.”
The next hour and a half moved along slowly but with a distinct progression. The humming and learning-some-differences-between-some-notes portion of the lesson failed and was abandoned after just a few minutes. Grace, being an experienced and adaptable teacher, moved swiftly on to rote instruction. She taught him the exact physical way to manipulate his mouth and breath to whistle the theme of a Sergio Leone film, the name of which they had both forgotten.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 3
