by Kris Bertin
What? Mom says. What’s the story here?
Him, Dad says. That little bugger.
We lean in from all around the table and look at the photo. It’s one I passed by without even thinking about it. Allan in his swimming trunks, on a dock somewhere with three girls, none of which are his girlfriend. His arms are slung around two of the girls’ necks, both of them blonde, and a third one with big tits and a bookish face is sitting on the dock, dangling her legs in the water, a towel on her head.
What’s so funny about that? I ask, thinking it’s something about hard nipples or a shrunken penis. And then I see it. One of the girls has her hand down the front of his shorts, and the other one has hers down the back. The one sitting down is looking up at him—they’re all looking at him—and he’s looking straight ahead, grinning.
Oh, jeez, Mom says and rolls her eyes. They’re just friends, she says.
She takes the photo and I see the caption underneath the picture. It says the gang.
It’s quiet for a minute and I’m not sure what’s going to happen. We’re all looking at Mom and Dad, going back and forth between the two of them, waiting for something to give. Then Marcus takes the photo.
She’s sure got a hold of him, he says.
That’s when all of us start to laugh, and we can’t stop. Even as the machinery starts up again and our eggs and sausages and pancakes and coffee vibrate on the table. We’re still laughing, even when ten consecutive blasts ring out like the end really is upon us.
THE EVICTION PROCESS
We evict Champ first because we’re worried he’ll kill us.
Even laid up in the hospital with one handset to rot off, he could do it. Even fucked up, bed-ridden and stuck in a room with another guy whose entire leg is swollen up like the Michelin man, he could do it. Champ has it in him. Look past his Huey Lewis hair, and you can see it in his face, all marked up like a tiger mauled him. He could go room to room and kill every patient, nurse, orderly, and doctor from here to the lobby if he wanted to. Jack’s sixty-one, with a cane, and I’m not overweight but soft around the middle and weak everywhere else. We’d be nothing to him. This is why we’ve brought J.J. with us. He stands next to the bed, slapping himself, the only thing separating us from Champ. Before pulling us apart like Kleenex, he’d have to reach past the little boy he has so much affection for, or push him down, or step over him.
I have an entire quart of Iceberg in my pants, between my thigh and balls, and my concern is that if something happens, it might break, and I’ll be drinking denim-filtered vodka until tonight.
When we closed the shop and didn’t need someone like him around anymore, he said sure, like it was no big deal. Then went out and fought every man in some bar across the river. We heard about it on the news first, then someone said to me that was the Champ you know, and then I put it together. It could’ve just as easily been us.
We expect him not to take it well.
After we let him go, he had to take a job at the grocery store, this human pitbull forced to walk among college kids and goofy old moms, forced to unload cans of soup and detergent and whatever else. A load-picker. Didn’t have enough money to go anywhere else, so we let him stay with us, and because he stayed, all the other guys stayed too, even though we weren’t growing or selling or dealing or anything. And in the meantime, we’d been waiting for an opening. None of us has ever seen the Champ sick or hurt in any way—even after that big fight, he’d shown up with nothing more than a limp tacked onto his swagger and some cuts on his hands. Kept sticking his pinky in his ear like he had water in there but was otherwise unharmed.
It takes a miracle of international produce exchange—a brown recluse spider stowing away in a crate of oranges—for this to happen. One bite from this creature that isn’t supposed to be here, a touch from this thing that shouldn’t even be able to survive in our climate, and the Champ goes down. His hand is wrapped so thick it looks like a cartoon, a big white Goofy glove. Underneath, the flesh is necrotizing. And there are antigens flowing through his blood now, chemicals that no one knows. The story made it into the papers, too. The spider scientist they interviewed said it was a near-impossible event.
Jack gets right to the point. He says:
We’re emptying the house.
We wait while Champ thinks it over. J.J. screams a couple times and I sort of squeeze him, but it doesn’t do much. He whines, flaps his hands, and points at Champ’s glove. But the Champ is all business. That body—with all of its strength and power, with all its years of taking beatings and dishing them out—doesn’t swell up, doesn’t flex, and doesn’t turn against us. He gives Jack his good hand in a hearty clasp—the kind you might give to someone who just lost a family member.
Then he asks when do you want me out, and that’s it.
For the first time that face, with all its pits and bumps and scars, makes him seem weak, or tired. They go over the details, share a more heartfelt round of handshakes, and it’s over. No one kills anyone. Champ says he’s enjoyed his time with us, and he even seems like he means it, too.
Then the guy with the diabetes leg, the man in the next bed blows everything. He’s had enough and he says to us control your fucking retarded kid. J.J.’s been screaming since we got here, but we’re all used to it and we hardly notice anymore. For us, J.J’s wheezing, his clicks and grunts and moans, are on par with those soft, constant sounds that fill up the day—the hum of a washer and dryer, the hiss of wind through the yard.
One second Champ’s in his bed, the next he’s throwing open the curtain in his pineapple-print boxer shorts, his body all ribs and muscle like an Olympian. In the moments before anyone thinks to say anything, Champ already has the guy by his huge foot and he’s wrenching it up, even using his big white mitten, too. Then he closes the curtain from the inside.
If Michelin Man says anything, he says it without enough bravery to break past a whisper. We only hear a few words, and they’re all Champ’s, in that quiet voice that scares the shit out of us:
kid
autistic
no
no
awful shame if
no
about manners
fucking leg
understand
no
polite
I would if I
that leg
no
ok then
fucking
mouth
clear?
Then Champ is back out, and that light is back in his face. Blood’s pumping. There’s even some shape inside those boxers. He gets back into bed and doesn’t bother to close the curtain so the guy who almost got creamed is doing his best not to look at us.
Jack’s face doesn’t move behind his black glaucoma glasses because he’s trying to act like what he just saw was no big deal. I know Jack is assuming it’s a display of power. An intimidation tactic, and later he says exactly that. But I don’t think it was at all. Champ puts his good hand on J.J.’s head while he talks and I can really see for the first time that he was never going to hurt us. The Champ would hurt the mailman or the guy behind the curtain or a guy who gives him grief at a bar, but never us. There’s a flush of guilt that goes right through me, something I’ve felt a lot of for him, especially since he went from being a paid tough guy to a load-picker at the grocery store.
In the elevator going down, Jack says he thinks it went well because of painkillers, tapping his temple while he says it, but I know better. I nearly say what I’ve realized, which is it went well because he’s our friend, Jack, but don’t. I know Jack hates to be corrected, know that it isn’t something he needs to hear, and know that I have nothing to gain by saying it. All I have is a fight to start. I think about the spot of blood on Champ’s bandage, as if someone with too much lipstick had leaned over and kissed him there. Instead I say:
tw
o down, three to go
Which is much more of a Jack thing to say, and he even gives me a little smile for it. We don’t have anything else to say about it so I take out my bottle and have a nice, long drink while J.J. beeps and grunts in time with the elevator noises. I have an urge to run as soon as the door opens, cradle my vodka like a baby, and run up and out that ramp with the orange lights, run up to the surface and disappear. But I don’t.
If the house weren’t in such a shitty neighbourhood, the door would’ve been broken down long ago. It would’ve been broken down and me, Jack—all the deadbeats in our employ—we’d be in jail. J.J. would be taken from us, along with any and all assets related to the growth and cultivation of an illegal substance, and that would be the end of it.
Not anymore, mind you. Now, there’s no drugs or hydroponic equipment to be found, and the only person strung out on anything is me, or Morgan, who’s using stuff with names like BLOW OFF Keyboard Duster and Gorilla Glue. When we pull in, we find him on the deck, lying on his back like a dead bug, his blond hair fanned out with dry leaves in it. Even with orange around his mouth and a paint-stained bag in his hand, he’s as beautiful as ever. Breathtaking.
There was a time when Morgan used to fit right in, when he was a totally normal part of the scenery. Now the house is a nice place—has a fancy two-tiered living room with inlaid bookshelves and hyper-modern bathrooms, a stainless-steel macho kitchen with marble counters. We used to get drunk on the steps and throw our bottles and trash into the street like it was the eighteen hundreds. We used to have motorcycles parked in a row out front, with Odie’s biker buddies buying vacuum-sealed bricks of weed the size of travel pillows. Morgan—with his cans of keyboard duster and spray paint and solvents—belongs to the old neighbourhood.
We’ll get him later, Jack says.
We step over him, and go inside.
We used to watch the gentrification (what Champ called the fancy-fication)—the condos springing up, new businesses appearing, abandoned buildings getting pulled apart—and it scared us. One day, when we were having gin and tonics on the stoop, we saw a guy with a tie and a briefcase on our street. That was the scariest day of our lives.
Jack was a newspaper person once, and so he’s aware of the correlation between a neighbourhood’s income level and police presence. Always talked about it. If it became nicer, he explained, if there were happier, friendlier people—taxpayers, voters, citizens—it would be over. All the other telltale signs of a hothouse had been there: power bill through the roof, bars on all the windows, and the simple smell of skunky, earthy weed growing in plant pots by the dozen. But we knew that these things weren’t enough to draw attention. People were needed for that. People who weren’t zombies. People to complain and point fingers, wring their hands and say that house is a danger to the community. But we got out just in time.
Are you at least going to drink out of a glass? Jack asks me.
He motions to J.J., who is with his toys, and definitely not watching me, but who is at least nearby. I don’t point out the obvious; if J.J. is capable of learning anything, it isn’t going to be from any of us. We’ve had him for years and he’s never copied us, never done anything remotely normal. His autism makes him like a person buried inside a pile of rocks. He can scream and writhe around—and not much else. It doesn’t matter what we do around him. When I mentioned this before, I paid for it immediately. Had to go to the drugstore and find makeup the right colour and tint for the skin around my mouth. I also neglect to mention that Jack used to drink out of liquor bottles too; that was how we met. The news editor and a lowly carrier, both sneaking out to have cold sips of vodka in the alleyway near the breakroom.
Instead I say oh yes sorry, and hustle to the kitchen. I get a mug that says IF YOU’RE PUSHING 50, THAT’S EXERCISE ENOUGH, which doesn’t at all match the new decor, though I certainly don’t either. I fill it up, but my quart goes right back down my pants, where it safely wedges itself between my stomach and belt.
I think about the fight we could’ve had, if I had said no about the mug. With Jack, a yes or a no can take you anywhere—good or bad—so you have to choose carefully. I remember when the paper went under and Jack talked about an old piece of real estate he had, and the babysitting job he could give me. I had blown my internship and wasted my degree and was carrying papers instead of writing stories like I thought I’d be. I was thinking about jumping off the MacDonald Bridge. I remember exactly how I said yes to him, which was in a careful way—because I was excited, didn’t want to mess it up, and wanted so badly to please him. I think about all the other men I could’ve said yes to, and what I would be instead.
I think about all that and watch J.J. slap his own face, watch Jack drink from my cup. I think about how everything is really just a bunch of yeses and noes, from cave people to your grandparents, all the way down to right now.
I know how this is going to go:
We’re going to go through that steel door we put in (both to protect the product, and hold back the smell of it and its cultivators), except now that earthy, chemical smell is gone and it’s replaced with something worse. We’re going to smell the stench of B.O., cigarettes, and the black mould growing out of the drop ceiling, a smell like fish and feet and that pulpy hamster-cage odour that develops when no air circulates. It’s going to be so thick we can pluck bits of it out of the airlike cotton candy. All of this will make Jack very upset.
There’ll only be two of them down there, Odie and Will, and they’ll be smoking and drinking and doing blow or meth or something I’ve never heard of. There was once carpet down there that has since been beaten down to a hard, black crust of spit and dirt and tobacco. Will’s bare feet will be right on the stuff, in a spot that he’s cleared of burger wrappers and broken glass, and little bits of crud. Will could be half-naked. Odie will be wearing the same clothes he’s worn for weeks. That vest with a defunct motorcycle gang logo on the back. THE WANDERERS, with a bearded skeleton on a hill.
Will, who’s old and feeble, will be affable and friendly. Odie, who thinks he’s owed something from the world, will get shitty with Jack. And Jack will try to be cool, but inside he’ll be boiling. He’ll try out his boss voice and will make rational points: he’s never charged them rent, he’s given them lots of warning, and he’s not being unfair by wanting to finish the basement. He’ll be mad and I might have to pay for it.
Odie’s face will turn to granite, his lower jaw will jut out, and his nostrils will flare like an early human. He’ll say something, and then Jack will say something back, and from there, anything can happen. The big Bowie knife that Odie sometimes has on his belt might get plunged into Jack’s chest. I can see a world where I jump in front and save him, and one where I don’t. One where I watch him go down and do nothing about it, and one where I fall over his body and start screaming and crying. I can see a world where Jack puts the right words together and they go sure thing, chief and everything’s like the good old days, when we were all pals; all the same kind of guys living in the same kind of place, all doing the same kinds of things. I can see a world where they get showered, put on clean clothes, and we have a last supper with all of them in the new dining room, at the new dining-room table, in the new dining-room chairs.
In all of these situations, Jack will come upstairs mad, either at the outcome, or the state of the place, or mad at the fact that he needs to change his clothes now. Or at me.
So when he says come on, let’s go down, I make sure I’m sitting on the cream-coloured loveseat near the patio where J.J. likes to sit, shaking a stuffed animal at his dull face. Pretending to be enraptured with his son until he ignores me and goes down to complete the next eviction on his own.
When he was at the paper Jack believed—at all times—that there was a cabal out to get him, to dethrone him and install a new leader. In the alleyway, between our sips of vodka, he’d talk about it, and I would believe him,
or convince myself that I did. So when he comes back upstairs, even though they were amenable and friendly, he’s convinced there’s something else going on. He looks through the living room, right past the spot where Champ and Odie once had a mercy fight and Champ popped two of Odie’s fingers right out of their sockets and everyone was so fucked up we all started laughing and clapping like it was a stage play. He looks right through the walls like they aren’t even here, his mind going wherever it goes when he’s like this—to the past, or the future, or some place kept totally secret from me.
He’s at the kitchen table in the exact spot where we used to drink and do lines and fuck around, his sock feet on a sun-warmed patch of hardwood—the spot where one of Odie’s biker buddies threw up and no one noticed for weeks and weeks, until it hardened into the carpet like cooled lava.
If it’s the past he’s visiting, this could be precisely the vision he’s having.
The next day they’ve opened the basement windows and begun chucking their shit out haphazardly. An old fan here, a card shuffler there. A busted-up lawn chair. Old clothes. It’s building up slowly at the sides of the house, like it’s purging them from its structure. I point this out to Jack in the best, most constructive way I can. It’s happening. Champ has already been released from the hospital, has already come by and cleared out and scrubbed down the little room near the garage as soon as he could. He even took stains off the wall with a special sponge he lifted from the grocery store, invited us to have a look when he was done, hoping we’d be proud.
It’s happening, I tell Jack. It’s just happening slowly.
I’m holding J.J.’s hands at the wrist when I say it, so he won’t hit himself. Jack has both hands on his shoulders, keeping him pressed into the kitchen chair while he works through this fit.
