“He honestly looked like he jumped on a trampoline,” one told him.
The next time Donnie came into the bar, Jeremy told him the games were over, they’d need to find a new location. “I really feel terrible about what happened, but maybe it’s bad luck having you here.” He offered him a free Diet Coke and said again that he was sorry.
Donnie would not accept the drink. “There’s nowhere else we can go. We get booted out of everywhere. Even McDonald’s.”
“Well, maybe that’s the world trying to tell you something, dude. People get too old for games.”
The next thing was a fire in the pharmacy next door that could’ve easily reduced the entire block to a pile of charred timber and bricks. The old pharmacist had fallen asleep in the back with a lit cigarette in his hands after locking everything up and almost torched the place with him inside. Everyone at the Shack stood in the parking lot and watched as the firefighters dragged hoses through the front door. In the end, the idiot only ended up scorching his arm and blackening the back half of the pharmacy.
“That fucker should’ve gone up like a twig,” Jeremy told people. “Imagine smoking in there.”
Less than two weeks later, the company that owned the building sent out a letter saying they were very sorry to have heard what happened, and were glad that everyone was fine and that the damage was minimal. It did mean, however, that insurance rates would be going up across the board, and that an entirely new sprinkler system would have to be installed – no exceptions. They couldn’t afford to have one weak link in the chain. The company, of course, owned the sprinkler systems, and would be selling them directly to each tenant.
“That miserable old shit falls asleep with an Export A in his mouth, and I get fucked for it. How does that work?”
Glenn said it was exactly how things worked. “When something like that happens, the smart people know how to use it to their advantage, while all the dummies like you and me are out on bucket brigade. Classic shock doctrine.”
“But we’re all struggling as it is. They must have bigger people to go after.”
“It’s easier to steal one piece of candy from a hundred babies than to steal a hundred pieces from a candy store. All predatory animals go for the easy kill.”
“Are they really predators, though?” Phil asked. “Even if they’re just trying to protect their business?”
Glenn laughed and put a hand on Phil’s shoulder. “Spoken like an easy kill!”
And then, on a quiet afternoon when Jeremy was thinking he might slip away from the bar and head out of town for a night or two in order to escape the swirl of chaos happening around him, Tyler nearly cut off the fingers of his left hand while chopping vegetables. The knife, the one he’d bought himself and brought home each night wrapped in a heavy cloth, came down hard, and within seconds, the entire area was covered in blood. The dishwasher stared at the mess in disbelief. Patty grabbed a nearby towel and wrapped it tight around the injured hand, while Jeremy ran to his Jeep and brought it around to the kitchen entrance. He got Tyler to the hospital in less than five minutes, speeding the entire way and telling him repeatedly not to drip blood on the car seat. By the time they arrived at the emergency room doors, the towel around his hand looked like a rose in full bloom.
“Does it hurt?”
Tyler nodded yes, and Jeremy asked the nurse if there were painkillers he could have while he was waiting to be seen. The nurse refused at first, and Jeremy argued loudly with her until she gave in – as much to shut him up as to help the wounded cook. Jeremy bought him a bottle of water from the machine so he could swallow the pills. They sat and watched a man in the waiting area take apart a newspaper page by page, separating each sheet from the rest and folding it neatly like a handkerchief. He did this until the entire paper was reduced to stack of tightly folded pages. Then he picked up the stack of paper, walked over to a recycling bin, and dropped it all in.
“I once knew a guy who took the tips of his fingers off,” Jeremy said. “Got a chunk of money for it and spent his time off learning how to wire a house. He does that now, full-time. So he did alright.”
* * *
At the next meeting with Brian and Stuart, they let Jeremy know right away that they’d heard about the fire and the insurance rates going up and about Tyler’s accident, and wanted to know what he was doing about it all, what plans he had made to cover the extra expenses and the lost cook.
“You left out the kid who got run over,” he said. They froze. He laughed and reassured them. “Don’t worry: that one’s not my fault. None of this is my fault, actually. Just shitty luck.”
After Jeremy explained what had happened, Stuart said he’d never understood why the gamers had been allowed to do their thing in the bar in the first place.
Jeremy shrugged. “They sort of became part of the place. I was sad to give them the boot to be honest. It kept a little bit of money coming in during the day, anyway.”
“The bar’s brand and its image and the future: these are the things we need you to be thinking about, Jer, not turning the place into the Island of Misfit Toys. The goal is long-term growth, not short-term survival. Otherwise there’s no point in Brian and I even being here, is there? Okay?”
Brian, looking down at his phone, nodded along.
“I’m just trying to stay alive here,” Jeremy said.
“Staying alive is the easy part,” Stuart said. “We need you to do the hard part, which is bringing the place to the next level, which means being a little more selective and more strategic. We need you to be smarter about everything, Jer. I know you built this place, and that’s great, okay, but we’re looking forward now.”
“I’m looking forward, too!” Jeremy said. He knew he sounded like a little kid trying to get in on a big-kid game, but he couldn’t just sit there in silence.
“Are you?” Stuart asked, and he got up from the table and walked over to the bar. Patty was standing there wiping pint glasses and watched him approach with an expression of suspicion she made no effort to conceal. Jeremy wondered how much she had overheard. His own face was burning; he tried to think when anyone had talked to him like this since he was a teenager. “Look at this,” Stuart said, pointing at the Zombie Gallery of party photos. “Some of these look like they’ve been stuck here for a decade. I don’t even see any new ones. Are there any new ones?”
“There’s new ones on the website,” Jeremy muttered. Though even those, he knew, were likely years out of date.
“The website,” Stuart said, and smiled carnivorously as he came back to the table. Brian looked at Jeremy over his phone.
“When’s the last time you went to the Shack’s site, Jer?” the lawyer asked him.
“Honestly? I couldn’t tell you. Why?”
“Well, if you went there right now – as in today, right now – you probably wouldn’t notice anything different from the last time you went, whenever that was. Do you monitor the amount of traffic the site gets, by the way? Never mind, that’s for another day. Anyway, it’s fine now, but if you’d gone there maybe three weeks ago, you would have found that the whole thing was an ad for Japanese Viagra.”
Jeremy laughed, though he wasn’t quite sure what the joke was.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the site was all pictures of Japanese boner pills.”
Jeremy reached over to open the bar’s laptop. Stuart said not to bother.
“The registration must have lapsed,” Brian explained. “You must’ve let it lapse, or someone forgot to renew it. Did you get an email telling you to renew at some point?”
“An email? No, I don’t think so.” Jeremy was trying to understand what he was being told, but nothing was clicking. “So the website is . . . gone?”
Stuart gave a deep sigh that seemed to come up through his entire body.
“Jeremy, look: the website thi
ng was embarrassing, but it’s fixed now, we got the registration back. It helps to be a lawyer. The real point here is how unprofessional we look when that kind of thing happens. And if we look unprofessional, it makes it that much harder to convince outside people we have a valuable brand here.”
“What outside people?”
“I sometimes talk to people I think might be useful in building the business. Nothing formal, not lunches or anything, but if I run into someone, I tell them about the place, feel them out a bit. That’s part of my job as a partner in this.”
“So you’re what, telling people to book retirement parties here? I do that all the time, too.”
Stuart said there was more to it than that. It was about long-term planning. He asked if Jeremy knew a Susan Toller. Tall, with red hair. Jeremy said he did, though it’d been years since he’d heard her name. The sound of it made it feel as though someone were cranking his ribcage tight around his lungs. Susan Toller scouted new locations for Crane’s, and was responsible for bringing more than half a dozen places into the fold. By the time Jeremy left, she had become an almost mythical figure: if she began to show interest in your business, it was like seeing Death standing in the corner of the room. The threat may pass by as silently as it came, or else you only had a matter of months left. Either way, to see her pull up in your parking lot in her bright red compact car was a bad omen.
“She still at Crane’s?”
Stuart nodded. “Her territory is most of Southern Ontario now. It’s amazing that she still does it, driving all around. She says she won’t sit down behind a desk until she’s just about ready to retire.” He smiled. “She’s a little like you!” Stuart said that he knew her a bit from some business his firm had done for Crane’s a few years back. “Long story short,” he said, “I ran into her a while ago, and told her a little bit about what we’ve got going here. She sounded pretty excited and said she would drop in at some point to say hi.”
“I’ll need to get the holy water ready, then.”
“What do you mean?”
Jeremy made the sign of the cross with his index fingers.
Stuart gave a tolerant smile. “Let me say this: I understand why you would feel that way. I really do. Okay. But we need to keep all our options open.”
“Even options that aren’t an option?”
“Okay, wrong word. Let’s say we should always be trying to make friends. Friends are better than enemies.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that – enemies can be useful.”
Stuart laughed, having decided he’d made all the points he’d needed to make. “You may be right about that. You may be totally right. But don’t slash her tires if she comes around. Try to be nice.”
* * *
Trying to catch one of the last few warm nights of the year, Jeremy sat out in front of the cottage, unable to relax. The water was too cold for swimming, and most of the other places on the lake were dark. Thin, woollen strands of smoke came from the year-rounders. The only activity on the water was a line of imperious-looking ducks seeking shelter for the night. The last time Patty and Shawn had come out, they’d installed solar lights all along the edge of the woods, and these began to blink into life. They had also left him a bottle of bourbon, which he had open next to him. After accidentally dropping his glass in the sand, he began to take sips straight from the bottle.
Before coming up, he’d picked up a copy of Power Talk, the latest from Theo Hendra. It was a collection of interviews with Hendra himself, for which Hendra wrote an introduction in which he claimed to have learned as much from his interviewers as they did from him. Jeremy was in the middle of a long one on the subject of failure. Hendra said he rejected the idea that such a thing truly existed. “Our lives are driven by perception,” he said. “That is our genius and power as human beings, but it can also be our weakness. If we perceive ourselves to have failed, then we have failed. The subjective thought becomes objective reality. And that’s a real bummer!” Better, he said, to adjust our perception so that what we believed to be failure could be seen as merely the equivalent of one negative result in a series of experiments ultimately leading to success.
Jeremy kept getting up from his chair and going inside to check his phone, though on principle he would not bring it outside with him – he was there to disconnect. A bartender left a voice mail about a late keg delivery, and Jeremy called him back to shout at him that he had bigger things to worry about, and why was it so important to let him know the kegs were late, since they were there now, and everything was fine? Fuck’s sake. An hour later, he called the bartender back to apologize.
“Too much caffeine,” he said.
His sister sent him a text, saying she wanted to get together to talk about some money issues regarding their parents. He replied that he would be stupid-busy for the next few weeks doing renovations.
He sent Tyler a text, asking him how his hand was, and got no reply, which he found somehow reassuring.
While he was at the LCBO in town, a large man had walked up to him and introduced himself as Steve, Kyle’s rescuer. He said he recognized the Jeep: he had driven around to Jeremy’s cottage a few weeks before and saw the car was there, but no one was around when he knocked.
“My wife was bugging me to make sure everything was okay with your daughter.”
“My daughter? Yeah, no – she’s fine now, thanks.”
“She was pretty upset when I drove up. Not that I blame her at all.”
“Well, thanks for being there to grab the poor bastard.”
“Oh, Christ – it was no problem at all, no problem at all. I have to say, though: that guy didn’t seem all that happy about the whole thing. I could be totally wrong about this, but it was like he was pissed with me for grabbing him, which is weird. I had a real fuck of a time getting him in the boat. I figured he was exhausted and scared shitless about almost drowning, but just before we got around to your place he said something really snippy to me. I didn’t think much of it, but I wasn’t expecting it, that’s for sure.”
“He was probably in shock,” Jeremy offered.
“Could be, could be. You may be right about that. Anyways, I’m just glad I was there when I was there. And tell your daughter she can keep the towel, after all. My girls have dropped that little Bieber asshole like a hot rock. They’re all into this other guy now – can’t remember the name.”
Jeremy stood for an hour at the edge of the water, looking out into the darkness and trying to shift his perception by sheer force of will. Then he finished the bourbon and fell asleep in the chair outside, only waking up when the fire was completely out and the cold began to eat into his clothes.
* * *
When Jeremy told Charlene that he had run into Steve, she showed no curiosity about the meeting, and barely seemed to recognize the name.
“He said he didn’t need his towel back.” He smiled.
“I already threw it away.”
He tried a few times to talk to her about everything that was going on, but she always seemed distracted, and would have to admit, after he’d spent a whole five minutes unburdening himself, that she hadn’t really been listening. Her nerves, too, seemed always exposed and crackling like a downed wire. One time, he came up behind her as she was filling salt shakers and touched her lightly on the back. He’d only wanted to say that she could leave early that day if she wanted to – he could clean up and get everything ready for the evening. She jerked her arm away in surprise and yelled “Fuck!” the moment he touched her, sending a spray of salt across the surface of the bar. The unfilled shaker clattered into the sink. Instead of laughing off her jumpiness or letting him apologize for startling her, she walked away quickly without looking at him and disappeared downstairs. Even over the music he heard the door to the women’s washroom swing violently open and closed.
Things began to slip whenever she was on the floor.
He started hearing more complaints about her – not just from customers whose orders she screwed up or forgot to put through to the kitchen, but from other staffers, who said she’d always been the best in terms of leaving things clean, stocked, and ready for the next person to take over. Lately, however, there’d been half-empty fridges, orange juice jugs with nothing but dried pulp, and dirty bar towels in the sink. She sometimes went off the floor without giving her last tables their checks. When the other servers complained, wanting to know why he was not setting her straight, Jeremy did his best to calm them down.
“Everyone gets to be the goat,” he said. “It’ll be your turn again soon enough.”
She stayed late at the bar most nights, even when she hadn’t worked that day. She didn’t sit with Jeremy, but would find strangers to talk to, or sit on her own. When she’d had a few drinks, she liked to badger the bartender into putting on a particular song, often something that Jeremy had never heard before. There was one she asked for almost every night called “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
“Who is that?” he asked her. It definitely wasn’t his thing, but there was something relentless about it, something tense and urgent.
“Joy Division!” she shouted back. Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying awkwardly to the beat.
Glenn, in the middle of an argument with someone nearby, perked up like a dog at the name. He turned to her and asked, “This band is called Joy Division? For real? Joy Division?”
“That’s right.”
He grinned like a detective whose target had just given herself away in the stupidest way possible. “Do you even know what that means?”
Congratulations On Everything Page 21
