After picking up the key from Stephanie and realizing he was too tired to actually make a sustained good impression on her, Tommy hustled straight to his room, dropped his bags by the door, and took a running jump face first onto the bed. He bounced pleasantly and then settled into a deep, three-minute sleep. He woke up disoriented and accidentally rolled off the bed. Sitting on the floor, he remembered the fuzzy blob of gang member he’d killed with his car. Tommy removed his glasses, placed them on the nightstand, and started hitting himself with both hands.
The slaps hurt in an irritating, skin-pulling kind of way. Tommy closed his fist and hit himself in the temple a few times, which stung his hand and rattled his head a bit. Tommy still felt poorly, so he grabbed the phone receiver and got a decently leveraged shot to his own chin. That one really rang his bell and made maintaining his basic equilibrium difficult, so he needed to focus on that instead of the gaping, spinning entrance to the vortex of his own selfishness and despair he’d opened by killing someone.
When he felt a little better, he crawled back on the bed, replaced his mangled glasses, and turned on the television. Tommy watched a man with thick sideburns eat forty-one sloppy joes in a row. When the man was done, the crowd around him cheered as he raised his hands to celebrate instead of wiping his entire face.
The man looked happy.
18 Quadra Island, British Columbia
Mike Richmond had not until fairly recently had much cause to be hatefully angry at anyone. Huge, friendly men with a decent sense of humour rarely do. People had always treated Mike with respect, and Mike had been happy to go with it. Smile, nod, don’t loom over people too much, it was easy. Getting along with people was easy.
So Mike didn’t really have a frame of reference from which to approach the weighty lump of rage that had been pressing itself insistently deeper into his consciousness in recent months. He’d wake up and feel fine. But every day he’d hit his front steps feeling the hate and mistaking it for anxiety. He hated old men in the grocery store who complained (or even asked) about prices, and he hated women who left dog shit on the only sidewalk in town, waiting for the old men complaining about prices. He hated bicyclists and the Jeeps that endangered bicyclists exactly equally. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t spread his bad mood around. He just took deep breaths, bought himself treats (suddenly he was eating Twix bars for the first time since childhood), and worried that he had an anxiety disorder.
As he drove, Richmond rested his elbow on the window and twisted the skin on his temple in a vicious swirl. He needed to do something right now, it didn’t matter what. He was done waiting. Wait three years, then apply with eight hundred other people for one job, then wait five more and do it again, then wait sixteen more, then fuck off and die. That was the life path laid down for him, and he was sick of it. He didn’t deserve it, and he wasn’t going to take it. Mike grabbed the wheel with both hands and punched the accelerator towards Grace’s house.
Mike knocked on Grace’s door. Then he fiddled with his belt, hitching it up and down and hoping she wouldn’t answer. The smart move was to keep some distance, watch the place, and play it cool, not spaz out like a ten-year-old on the bad end of an ADHD prescription, not go running at Grace, a move that could only really hurt her a lot and help him a little.
He was distracted with loathing himself when Grace opened the door.
“Oh shit. Sorry. Sorry, I hope I’m not bothering you.”
Grace lowered an eyebrow, looked him up and down like he was a fridge full of almost-gone vegetables, probably still edible but close enough that you’d just throw them out and order Chinese food. “Easy there, Mike. My dance card is pretty clear tonight. You want to come in?”
Mike laughed and gave her a small, reflexive salute. All at once he calmed down. He was committed. “Yeah. Yes. Thank you.”
Grace’s living room was small and comfortable. The furniture was all old and large. There were a few certificates and prizes on the shelf over the fireplace, a music stand with a thick book propped up on it. Mike took a seat on the couch, sinking deeply into the cushion’s welcoming corduroy folds. Grace dropped heavily into her chair. They looked at each other and laughed. Grace shook her head at him. “It’s a bit strange to see you like this, Mike. You’re halfway between cop-face and bar-face right now, it’s off-putting.”
Mike struggled forward on the couch. “It’s a bit weird to be me right now.” He paused and pointed over to the music stand. “Why is it called a Fake Book?”
“It’s the book with the minimum amount of information you need for a song. Just enough notes so you can fake it, if you need to.”
“Everyone has one?
“Everyone who plays gigs, lot who don’t.”
“Cool. Cool. I have news, Grace.”
Mike thought she’d respond quicker, and then by the time he realized she wanted him to go on, he felt committed to the silence. Grace swallowed hard once. “Shit. I’m not dead, am I, Mike?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Grace smiled and took to picking a cuticle on her thumb. “Way you came in here, I thought you were going to tell me I was dead, had to vacate my place for the living, something like that.” She swallowed one more time. “It’s about Tommy, right?”
“Yes. He’s not dead, and he’s not in jail.”
“He’s not dead that you know of. I heard about the, uh, I heard. I heard, Mike.”
“I’m just here looking for background.”
“Background on what? I haven’t seen him . . . It’s been a while, Mike. I don’t like to get into it much.”
“I understand. Totally. I just . . . He’s on the run. They want me to talk to you and rule you out as a place he’d go. Rule your house out. You’re not a place.”
“Fuck. My name isn’t even the same anymore. I tried pretty hard to put a bit of distance between us. On the records there.”
“You bailed him out in Montreal four years ago, when he skipped. I saw your name and ran it back through records.”
“I don’t care, Mike. I’ll talk to you this time, and then leave me out of it. I’m done with all that. What do you want to know?”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Years ago, like you said. I flew to Montreal. I paid his bond, sublet an apartment for three months, took custody of him. A month into that, he comes home at four o’clock in the morning, and I get really mad. He runs off as a kid because I don’t like him getting high every day and stealing money out my purse. Then, fast-forward a bit, I chase his tail across the country, put everything on hold, spend . . . that doesn’t matter. He gets home, and I go off on him, say some real mean shit that I really mean. And he says he just went home with this girl, wasn’t out with his friends, he met this girl at the gym. And I just can’t listen. I’m too mad. I move to Quebec, pay his bond, all of it. He isn’t gonna call me? Comes home four in the morning, wants to tell his mom he was just getting laid, not knifing anyone. I really gave it to him, it got pretty bad. So I wake up the next day, and I roll over, put my tired old feet on the ground, and I laugh. I see you lookin’ at me, cop-fuck, I know I laugh loud, all right? I’m bellowing for a good while. Kid’s a romantic. I believe him, he met some cutie in a yoga outfit, and he talked to her for hours and hours, and then they slept together. It’s sweet. It’s about the best you can hope for a kid like Tom. That he’s out having a nice time with some stupid girl he met at the Y. I go to his room, and he’s cleared out and skipped on his bond. Which was my money. Last time I saw him. I can’t tell you anything else.”
“Do you know his address?”
“Christmas before last, he sent a card and gave me an address in Calgary. I wrote him a letter and told him I was moving here. He never wrote back.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No clue.”
“Would you tell me if you did?”
Grace snorted softly. She rubbed the top corner of her eye, briefly exposing the red behind the
white of her eye. “Not a chance. Not a rock’s chance if you threw it in the sea. That’s from a jazz song. Almost.”
“Call me if he shows up. You know that’s the best way. I’ll take him in, keep him safe. It’ll be better with friends.”
“I’d rather stick pins in my eyes. But thanks for the offer, Mike.”
“Fair enough.” Richmond reached over and put his hand on hers, and they sat quietly. Mike somehow hadn’t seen the huge standing clock when he came in, but it was ticking off seconds incredibly loudly then. Grace eventually pulled her hand back and nodded at the young cop. Richmond said sorry and left.
19
Tommy had initially been a bit skeptical about the guy with messed-up teeth and a bandana to whom he’d paid $600 for a ride to his mom’s place. But the guy had turned out to be a nice man who just hadn’t had dental insurance for a long time. In addition to giving Tommy a ride all the way to his mom’s address, he’d given Tommy a twelver of Blue Buck and the last third of his pack of cigs. When they pulled up, the guy even offered to drive him the rest of the way down the driveway, but Tommy just hopped out of the truck, grabbed his stuff, and waved the kindness off.
“Thanks, Mark. You’re really nice and you did me a big favour. For real, I appreciate it. I hope your cat’s kidneys feel better.”
Mark tugged on the top of his bandana like it was a hat, and then he drove away.
Tommy avoided turning to look at his mom’s house for quite a while. He stood very still in the middle of the road, the cardboard handle of the box digging slowly and insistently into the meat of his fingers. Tommy stared at the opening of his mom’s driveway, the gap in the treeline, and he laughed a little. It was typical. His $600 cab ride had taken him to the exact wrong place, and he’d only realized it after he got there.
Just because you do a ton of mean things doesn’t make you a mean person. At least not on a given day, as you walk through it and don’t think about yourself too hard. Tommy’d always felt that being nice minute to minute could make up for most — pretty much all — mistakes. But he was thinking about himself hard now and he knew. He wasn’t mean enough to call on his mom again. Make her send him away, put her in the spot to be turning him down, one more time. It had to stop. Tommy wandered over to the side of the road and sat down, dropping the beer harder than he’d intended. He pulled his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead between them. With his right hand he started playing with the handle of his knife, pulled it out of its cinched-in spot on the side of his backpack. He looked for a long time at the sharp, hard gleam of the blade.
Tommy recognized abstractly that killing himself would prevent a lot of worse options: prison, torture from the club, torture from the club in prison, etc. This way would be quick, and he’d keep his feet attached to his body. But, as he pressed the dull end of the knife against his exposed arm, Tommy was impressed by the strength of his own fortitude. What Tommy realized, with the blue night bringing up a mist that could have been rain in any other light, was that you can’t decide to be suicidal. You can see how others would, you can know that, probably, you’re in a suicide spot, but you can’t decide to feel it.
Tommy wanted to live. To watch trees, to pull fish out of the water and then to let them go back into the water, to buy a small house. Tommy wanted to send his mom $1,500 he’d earned from a job. Tommy wanted to camp, and make out with a girl from the Yukon who was rugged and strong-boned and bluntly kind.
Tommy tilted sideways into the grass and then got to his feet. He picked up his beer and walked to the top of his mom’s driveway. He checked the address then walked a few more paces down the driveway, popping up onto the balls of his feet every few steps to try to see the house. Just see it. He did see the house, but he didn’t get much time to think about it, distracted as he was by the huge, slumping mound of uniformed RCMP officer walking back to his truck.
As tended to be his way, Tommy froze instead of reacting immediately. He numbly watched as the cop opened the passenger door, took off his holster, fished his wallet out of his back pocket, and threw them on the passenger seat. The cop loafed in a sad-sack way around the front of his truck, as if his limbs were already bored with what his brain was telling them to do. Sensing eyes on him, the cop turned and looked directly at Tommy. Even from a distance, Tommy could tell. The cop tried to play it cool, looked back down and kept walking to his door, but he’d paused, his foot a couple inches in the air, for just a second when he saw Tommy, but it was long enough. Tommy was certain that the cop saw him, and that the cop knew exactly why he was there.
With a large backpack over one shoulder, a box of beer in the other hand, and the gravel under his feet spraying with every step, Tommy had trouble getting enough momentum to really start running. By the time he remembered the beer in his hand Tommy had turned the bend onto the road and could already hear the police truck coming up behind him. He waited another few seconds, and without turning to look he spun and threw the case with a straight arm at where he thought the car should be. The box stayed weirdly still as it moved through the air, and then struck the windshield, denting the driver’s side corner inward. Tommy turned back around and took off at a good clip now, and he heard the truck swerve to a stop on the shoulder but didn’t turn to look.
He weaved across the street and into the trees. He kept running, ducking between the sparse twigs among the giant trees until he lost sight of the road. He threw himself to the ground behind a bush, curled in a ball, closed his eyes tightly, and bit hard into his wrist to keep from crying or hyperventilating.
He heard the cop rustling around the bush, but it all sounded far away, and then there was no sound for a long time. Eyes still closed, Tommy released his jaw and raised his hands to cover his eyes, contenting himself with rocking back and forth gently, with the leaves of the bush brushing his forehead on the upper end of the movement.
There was no way to tell how long he had been there, but it felt like a long time.
Everything felt like such a long time.
20
Mousey spent the day after Richmond’s visit teaching himself how to make a fancy crab frittata from a cookbook. He washed and chopped everything slowly, and triple-checked with the book before each step. As the frittata baked, Mousey stood nearby, watching his oven door and chewing his thumbnails. After he was done cleaning and eating, Mousey read an old John Grisham novel from cover to cover.
He finished the book around dinnertime, briefly considered exercising, and then ate the rest of the frittata, chased it with two Percocet and a coffee, and took a long walk along the beach towards the Heriot Bay Inn, thinking distantly about law school as he kept a lookout for the family of seals he’d been seeing around the shoreline over the last few days. He turned the corner of the bay and the bar came into view, and Mousey stopped to sleepily and intently scan the surface of the water. It didn’t take long for thoughts of the seal family to be swept under the simple fact of the waves and their shifting, subtle breaks. Mousey smiled, thinking about currents that weren’t visible from the surface, of bottom-feeders closing their eyes pleasurably against the invisible pressure of the sea. He closed his own eyes and pressed his fingers into them, as far as was comfortable. Reopening his eyes, Mousey felt refreshed and ready to shoot a game or two of pool.
In all the times he’d been to the HBI (it was a lot of times), Mousey had never seen another adult take much of an interest in the oversized chess set beside the parking lot. The pieces were not quite person-sized, reaching only the top of Mousey’s calf (which was not a very long calf). They were bigger than normal chess pieces, sure, but not big enough to really make an impression, and it was awkward to reach down and move them. The kids young enough to like the chess set were generally just small and young enough not to be able to use it (or really understand chess). But Mousey loved how awkward and sad-looking it was. He loved how long it had stayed with nobody enjoying it, gathering cracks and stains, and just sitting like a lump. People at the ba
r, even those who liked him, didn’t want to hear Mousey talk about the chess set anymore.
So it was a pleasant surprise that the first grown person to take a shine to the set was a beautiful twentysomething woman with tasteful glasses and a chin-length, asymmetrical hairstyle that Mousey understood to be very hip at the moment. Standing outside the old bar, sipping her drink through a straw, taking in her surroundings with a sharp, slow gaze, everything about her body language saying she was slumming it just by existing in this century with you. Her limbs loose but still compact, thick in the legs and thin in the arms, the body of a dancer who drank beer. Not wanting to betray his excitement and inherent old-man creepiness, Mousey moved towards the board slowly, as if answering a doorbell that had been rung too many times. By the time he got there, the woman with the nice haircut had moved the black pawn ahead two spaces. She spread a thin, tendony hand over the board.
“How about it, sir? I warn you, I’ve played a lot of strategy games with an old Russian, so I’m pretty, pretty good, but I’ll go easy on you.” She took a deep sip from a clear drink and narrowed her eyes at him. “If you want me to.”
In sharper times, Mousey might have noticed the cold, incurious clarity of her gaze; he might have thought it odd that she was wearing a leather jacket in the summer or seen the small bulge her shoulder holster made against the front pocket. In sharper times, Mousey would certainly have noticed the flower-bulb bloom of scar across the web of her thumb, from when the slide action of her gun had caught her as she’d killed a defenceless teen. But these were not sharper times, and besides there’s more than one way to be sharp.
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 11
